by Don Webb
He disembarked among his people and began to tell them of the wonders he had seen, while I began taking in wonders of the grizzly bear and the geyser. I will have to rely on my Assiniboine informants for the first part of my tale; although I was there at the end.
The Assiniboine listened with great interest until the tally stick was thrown in the Missouri. The rest was clearly fiction. The whites are great liars, he had caught their sickness. Despite growing disbelief, Wi-jun-jon continued his tale—flying like a bird over Philadelphia. The chiefs after three nights began to shun him. He lost his political eminence, but the gossiping members of the tribe were open to him. Each night the campfire circle and wigwam fireside audience grew.
He divided his bounty among his relatives. His laced frock was converted into a much-admired pair of leggings for his wife (which were topped by silver lace garters courtesy of the beaver hat!). His white linen shirt somehow found its way to a young woman, who had listened to his stories with an extreme wide-eyed interest. His pantaloons, blue and white with gold lace trim, were the next to go—razored into leggings for another “catch crumb.” The umbrella alone remained after this disassemblage (the fan having been spirited away by a jealous wind).
Despite his grave demonstrations with the umbrella his stories continued to be disbelieved. He seemed however content to lecture and had an inexhaustible source. He had visited seventy-four gun ships, seen the great council house of the white men (Congress), he had seen the patent office with its wondrous and curious machines and this he averred to be the greatest medicine place on earth.
However his audience grew and not only Assiniboine. Nearby Mandans and Cree came. Translators whispered in the echoes of his whispers. Sometimes gifts were left.
In some his tales induced an excitement. Their lives had lost some of their sheen. Particularly the young boys about to become braves and the middle-aged men and women, who were finding themselves “in the midst of the forest dark” as Dante says. Many enjoyed working to the accompaniment—braves would dehair buffalo for their par flèche shields, oil their rifles, fletch their arrows.
As the crowds grew so did talk among the chiefs. The only similar phenomena was the Bull Dance of the Mandans. And after the dance did not the elusive herds come near the Mandan villages? Perhaps Wi-jun-jon’s tale would draw these wonders. They had never seen a steam boat until Wi-jun-jon brought one. Perhaps his lies were creating these things. After much consultation the chiefs decided to honor him as a medicine man.
The chiefs so hailed him. Now his tales were no longer mere amusements, but medicine. Some openly hailed him as the greatest of medicine for the wonderful alacrity with which he created his lies. That he should be the greatest of medicine, and that for lying, merely, rendered him a prodigy in mysteries that commanded not only respect, but at length (when he was more maturely heard and listened to) admiration, awe, and at last dread and terror; which altogether must needs conspire to rid the world of a monster, whose more than human talents must be cut down to less than human measurement.
That Wi-jun-jon should be killed was decided in a secret council, but the method of killing a man so full of medicine required divine inspiration. An ordinary bullet would not kill such a great liar.
One of the braves obtained his dream and set off for the Fort at the mouth of the Yellowstone. There he obtained, by stealth (according to the injunction of his dream), the handle of an iron pot. He went into the woods and spent a whole day straightening and filing it to fit into the barrel of his gun. Then he returned to the Fort concealing the gun in his robes. He came behind Wi-jun-jon, while the latter was speaking to the Trader. He put the rifle to the back of Wi-jun-jon’s head and pulled the trigger. Troops rushed in and seized the wizard-killer—carting him off to the Stockade.
Here is where I will end my tale of Wi-jun-jon in my book for his death shows the imprudence of actually telling all you know, but I will tell the tale to the end for you, W.O., so that I am relieved of its burden.
I was among the Minnetaree when I heard of the death of the “traveled Indian.” I set forth, at once, by canoe. I had grown fond of Wi-jun-jon during the trip from St. Louis. I had often thought of him in his newfangled duds whistling “Yankee Doodle” and the “Washington Grand March.” I arrived in his village three days after his corpse had been tightly wrapped and put on its platform—such is the Sioux tradition—corpses remain elevated until they have decomposed and are suitable for burial. There were many people and much silence and much looking at Wi-jun-jon’s platform. I sought an audience with his brother or his squaw to pay my respects, but their grief was too great to permit visitors. I resolved to spend the night there and perhaps present the family with my sketches on the morrow.
I ate with Baptiste Vian, a Métis fur trader. We sat quietly telling each other our exploits and other lies. The campfires were ill-fed, and for the most part the Indians sat silently. A rattling sound came from Wi-jun-jon’s sky grave and a medicine man walked from there to the center of the camp. He took a long draw on his pipe and exhaled a streamer of smoke in each of the cardinal directions, then to the zenith and the nadir. Someone else walked from the grave poles; although it was too dark to see his features. This person sat where the medicine man had stood, and for a long time there was total silence and a mood like those evoked in the volume of poetry recently published by Mr. Poe. Then the whisper began. A hoarse voice began to tell of the wonders of an Indian newspaper. I knew that the Cherokee Sequoyah had developed an alphabet for his people, and that four years ago there had indeed been a Cherokee newspaper. The voice continued, on how as he went down river to Mississippi the Talking Leaves was the only source of news. To learn of the world they had to learn Cherokee and that the paper was prospering under the editorship of Sequoyah’s son Tsu-sa-le-tah. The voice continued (as I continued to try and make out the speaker) on the wonder of a newspaper, how it unified and ordered the world by bringing away news from far places. At Vicksburg someone translated an issue for him. He heard how the Creek-American War had been ended by the treaty of Horseshoe Bend. Furthermore he had heard of the development of a calculating machine Babbage’s Analytical Engine, which promised to speed up and perhaps transform the calculating business.
The whole of the night we listened to such whispers. Then just before the light of false dawn, the whisper rose and walked toward the grave poles. By this time it was completely dark, for the voice had insisted the campfires should burn out, and the moon was new. The medicine man censed the air and everyone fell asleep on the ground where they lay.
I awakened about noon. I hoped to discover who had brought about this ghastly imposture. I nudged Baptiste.
“Ben morning, Monsieur Cataline. What a night, eh?”
“You know the voices of these people, Ba’tiste. Who perpetrated this hoax?”
“Why do you say hoax, Monsieur Cataline? Did you not hear the Pi-jonse-ec-head’s parle last night?”
“I heard the voice of someone pretending to be Pigeon’s Egg Head, but what he told were lies. I can’t imagine Menewa and Andrew Jackson sitting down for a treaty.”
“Of course it is lie, Monsieur Cataline. It is a wonderful lie—a bon motte—that a dead man should lie that he is alive is the most sacree lie of all.”
“But you don’t think—”
“I tell, Monsieur Cataline. My father’s people say they worship the God of truth and love so they lie and kill. My mother’s people don’t even have a word for lying. So I don’t think too much. If I think in French I have to lie. If I think in Crow I cannot even have heard what I heard. And if I think in English I think of teaching a great man to whistle ‘Yankee Doodle’.” Baptiste wagged his head in disgust.
Baptiste returned to sleep. I prowled about the village. There were some scraps of winding cloth on the grave poles, but this could be a tribute to the thoroughness of the hoaxters. I hoped the hoaxters were not agents of the American Fur Company.
And I thought about the lies. T
his hope was a bad thing. I abandoned hope. When I studied the law I had hope. I dreamed of a kind of Eden, which we could return to. Once we got the facts right in a case we could return things to their original state. With enough facts we could go back to the garden. Then I practiced law and my hopes diminished. I defended petty thieves accused by pettier merchants. I tore apart families by settling wills written by men grown cruel with their familiarity with death. I helped fat smelly bankers deny the possibility of homesteads to honest men. And the judges I argued before were stupid lecherous men whose tiny knowledge of the law was only slightly greater than their capacity for fairness, and both of these qualities required a hand lens to observe. At first I thought these cases were freaks, sports, accidents; but as I came to know my fellow man I saw that these ugly creatures would never find their way to any paradise—that their mere presence would end any paradise they walked into.
I began to sketch their greedy faces. I have never told you—and perhaps there is imprudence in making such an admission to my publisher—that I have never received a day’s instruction in art. I learned to sketch in the courtroom. From sketches to paintings and with these paintings of ugly venal men to the death of hope. I made a huge bonfire of the studies and I lit out for the prairies.
W.O., I do not think of the Red man as some sort of Nobel Savage. But they are of a different culture and that wall between us helps me from seeing their ugliness.
I wouldn’t let a hoaxter create such lies. These people would have their hopes crushed soon enough. Soon the whites would come and they would be in a world they couldn’t ever run from. I resolved to shoot the hoaxter so I traveled to the Fort to purchase a gun.
I have never needed a gun while traveling among these people. One night while staying with a Piegan chief I asked him if it was safe. And he said it was safe—there were no white men in two days ride.
Night came. Many were hungry for the village was overfull, but none were willing to miss out on the lying medicine. I shared out such supplies as I had brought with me and concealed my pistol beneath a blanket. The medicine created sacred space with six streamers of tobacco smoke. Then the shadowed one came. It was even darker this night for no campfires had been lit. I rested my hand on cold steel.
The voice began by telling of the submarine, a steel ship which could sink to the bottom of the sea, an invention of Mr. Fulton, the steamship man. It terrified many white men to see the depths with sparkling corals and fish big as tipis and underwater volcanoes—so Fulton had crewed his ship with Mohawks, who aren’t afraid of anything. The Navy now had several of these ships each with a Mohawk crew with a Mohawk medicine man as chaplain, wearing a blue coat such as he had worn on his return. He had ridden in one of these vessels from the Potomac to Plymouth in England. He had been very frightened. Some of the Mohawks had put on strange diving suits and ventured forth to collect many-armed fishes. They had invited him to accompany them on their hunt, but he had refused—saying that he had never eaten anything with more than four legs and he was sure such meat would frighten his stomach. The trip to Plymouth lasted four days and upon their arrival some of the Mohawk braves had wanted to go ashore to carve a rock showing that they had come and that this land was now theirs, but he counseled against this—pointing out that white men have no sense of humor. So they merely observed the wooden hulls of the British fleet and returned back to Washington to report. During the trip back to Washington, he became brave enough to taste the eight-legged fish, which he said tasted just like passenger pigeon. But he did not brave the deep.
During this tale, which was much longer than I have recorded it—for I was focusing on my stalking—I had managed to get quite close to the voice. I didn’t want to kill anyone save for the hoaxter, so I needed point-blank range. I knew the tribe would apprehend me, but Indian justice is not swift and when morning revealed the imposture I would be set free. I could see the audience by the starlight but the voice was elusive. I circled and circled coming closer to the center. I came to the point where I must have been five feet away from him and still he wasn’t clear to me. There was a cloud of uncertainty from which issued a voice. I very carefully took aim on what seemed to be the center of the cloud and a hunk of metal bashed down on my head. For a moment the pain sent comets of red white and yellow through the sky and I seemed to see a wrapped corpse before me, and then the ground came up.
When I came to everything was blurry. There was a gray blur like cloud and a brown blur roughly shaped like a man and a triangular blur light and dark. It smelled like mourning in a tipi.
“Eh bon Monsieur Cataline. You are not mort. I thought I hit you too hard.”
“Ba’tiste. Why have you done this? I would’ve exposed him.”
“We need this medicine, Monsr. Cataline. In the Beginning was the Lie. Think on this my frien’.”
Everything swirled and I slept. When I opened my eyes again I saw the tipi plainly. Baptiste had left some brandy and pemmican—both of which have great restorative powers. If you ever wish to grow rich in London you should sell them to over indulgers of all kinds.
Baptiste looked in to see about me. Unlike the crystal clarity with which I saw things, he remained blurry and indistinct.
“The chiefs want to know if you will be good or if they need to tie you to a tree. What do you say?”
“Tell them I will be good. I won’t draw a gun on their false prophet, but I would like to speak with them.”
“They will not hear you. They no longer want old talk. They are looking for a new way.”
“And what about you, Ba’tiste? Don’t you make old talk?”
“I will not after today, Monsieur Cataline. I think this other world is better.”
“You are a fool, Ba’tiste.”
“Mebbe so, Monsieur Cataline.”
I ventured from the tipi before nightfall. Many slept and those who moved about did so slowly, slowly. The peculiar effect, Baptiste’s blow had wrought, continued in that I could focus on tipis and grave platforms, but found people indistinct.
Night came and I smelled the tobacco of the medicine man, but I could not make him out. The Voice seemed far away or as if underwater in the fabulous ship. It began to describe a world of hope wherein White men and Red men lived together—taking the best of each. The Red men and White men would dance their dances not only here, but on other worlds as well. And as the Voice described things more and more beautiful I began to weep. And I was caught up in my weeping and it was some time before I discovered that I was alone. I thought perhaps the family nearest me had moved away—closer to the center to hear the still voice. But I walked and then I ran from place to place where the people had been. The earth was still warm with their presence and sometimes as I turned I could hear the whispering in the wind—a word, a syllable—nothing more. Then I only heard the wind. Dawn found me alone. Even Baptiste was gone.
I climbed the grave platform of Pigeon’s Egg Head. The corpse was there. So who or what had led the people away I do not know. My capacity for hope had become lame. Maybe the people are in the lying medicine world. Civilization took my hope away, but maybe they hadn’t had that experience.
The wind blows and I know what the lame boy of Hamlin felt.
Yr obt. serv’t.,
(signed) George Catlin
INNOCENTS ABROAD
Miss Daisy Henshawe was astonished at the hustle and bustle of San Francisco. And a great deal of San Francisco was astonished by Miss Daisy Henshawe. Despite the severe fashions of her day, despite her unpainted face, despite the way her mother had told her to walk and talk and hold herself, Daisy Henshawe was beautiful. Her mother hated her for this. Daisy had golden hair, brown eyes, and (if you were fortunate enough to be behind her on a windy day) beautifully turned ankles. It required little imagination to presume that the rest was beautifully turned as well.
Daisy was nineteen. She had never spoken without first being spoken to. Since the ending of her schooling at age twelve, she had never
been in public without her mother. And she had never, ever, been out of the city of Jamestown.
And now her father was sending her and her mother to Paris to see that wondrous new structure the Eiffel Tower.
You could hear the winds in the sails for miles. Daisy felt that she would grow faint from excitement as the carriage made its way to the docks. She had stopped pointing out sights to Mother. Mother had been to San Francisco before. And Father merely looked worried.
All of Mrs. Gloria Henshawe’s life she had wanted to go to Paris. Her father promised Paris if he could just find that claim. He always had a hunch. Just a little bit too late. Gloria never got out of California during her prime. Her father did, of course. Ran up to Alaska and died and Gloria married the first man who came along. An undertaker and coroner. Marriage seemed preferable to starvation. In te long years since she questioned her choice. Questioned her choice when he would come to her drunk and smelling of corpses, or when a hush would come over a crowd when she walked in. In the early days she had had to wash the dead while John built coffins. Thank God Daisy took over that job when she was done with schooling. John was prosperous now. He could’ve afforded help, but he stuck with Daisy. He’s only sending us to Paris as a gesture—to show everyone that he can rake in the money like any of the evil old men who run Jamestown. In any event, Gloria Henshawe was going to Paris without her youth or her beauty. What was the purpose of Paris without youth or beauty?
The hansom stopped and John Henshawe and the driver began hustling baggage to the tars. John wasn’t even going to go aboard with his wife and daughter. He might weaken in his reserve—call off the plan set in motion months before. This hurt in two vital areas: the pocket book and the heart. He hated to see his daughter go to Paris. He couldn’t imagine her returning innocent. He pecked his daughter and wife on the cheek. The cab began climbing away from San Francisco Bay.
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