It was as well I did, too. I told them my real name, since it was one I hadn’t used in America (except among the ’Pash) and that I’d been on my way to Mexico when I’d fallen in with Gallantin and found myself in a scalp-hunting raid before I knew it; I made no bones about how Sonsee-array had protected me, or how I’d absconded at the first opportunity – Maxwell whistled and exclaimed as though he didn’t believe half of it, but when I’d done Carson nodded thoughtfully and says:
“Figures. Heard there was an English scalp-hunter wintering with the Mimbreno, married to Red Sleeves’ girl – thought it was just Injun talk till you rode up that valley with paint on your face. Then I knew you must be the man.” The mild eyes considered me. “You were right to make tracks. I wouldn’t care to have Mangas for my father-in-law.”
I cried amen to that, inwardly thanking God that I hadn’t strayed from the truth – plainly this little wiseacre had his finger on many unseen pulses. “But I hope, gentlemen,” says I, “that I’ve made it plain that I’m no scalp-hunter, nor ever have been.”
Maxwell laughed and shrugged it aside as of no consequence, but Carson thought for a moment (which was a great habit of his) and then said simply: “You must ha’ made it plain to Mangas Colorado,” as though that were the real point – which it was, when you came to think about it.
Still, says Maxwell judicially, I’d be best advised, the way things had fallen out, not to venture down the Del Norte again for a spell; if I was looking for a port of embarkation, why not San Francisco, and he’d give me any help he could along the way – d’you know, I suspect he absolutely felt he owed me something for having put him in the way of Apaches to slaughter, but I may have been underestimating his natural generosity. He was one of your self-made, cheery, open-handed sorts, and obviously a person of immense consequence in these parts, so when he talked of finding me a place on one of the Rocky Mountain caravans, or with a party of good Mountain Men travelling to California, I was all for it. Carson, who’d been sitting silent, spoke up again, diffident as always.
“I’ll be going north in a week or two. If you’re ready to travel then, you’re kindly welcome to ride along.”
“There you are!” cries Maxwell jovially. “That’s better than a railroad train to San Francisco, if there was such a thing!” I protested that Carson had done so much for me already that I didn’t like to trespass further on his favour; he said, on the contrary, he’d be obliged – which struck me as excessive politeness until he added, with one of his rare smiles (for he rarely grinned above a glimmer, and I never heard him laugh aloud): “Mangas Colorado’s a powerful big Injun, and I don’t know that much about him. I’d value your opinion.”
So that was how I came to ride north with Kit Carson in the spring of ’50, whereby I came safe to England eventually – and into such deadly peril, years later, as I’ve seldom faced in my life. But that was something I couldn’t foresee, thank God, when a week later we made the two-day ride north to Rayado, a pleasant little valley in the hills where Maxwell and Carson had made their homes. They were an oddly-assorted pair, those two – Maxwell, the jovial companion, frontier aristocrat, and shrewd speculator who saw where the real wealth of the west was to be found, and built his modest farm at Rayado into the largest private estate in the history of the whole wide world; and Carson, the little gentle whirlwind whose eyes were forever straying to the crest of the next hill, who loved the wild like a poet, and asked no greater possession than a few acres for his beasts and a modest house for his wife and son. Between ourselves, I didn’t care for him all that much; for one thing, he had greatness, in his way, and I don’t cotton to that; for another, although he was always amiable and considerate, I guessed he was leery of me. He knew a rogue when he saw one – and we rogues know when we’ve been seen.
For all that, he couldn’t have been more hospitable. We were two or three weeks at his house, which was like a tiny Bent’s Fort, completely walled in round a central garden and courtyard, but with pleasant rooms comfortably furnished with a great profusion of buffalo rugs and Spanish furniture. His wife, Josefa, was a remarkably handsome Mexican lady of family, and his baby son, Charlie, was a seasoned ruffian of twelve months who took to me at once, as children usually do, recognising in me a nature as unscrupulous as their own. I played “This is the way the farmer rides”, and “Roundabout mouse” with the little monster until we were both dizzy, knowing that this was the best way to win his parents’ good opinion, and Carson was obviously well pleased.
It was a wonderful restoration after all I’d been through, for the grub was the finest, the air was good, and Maxwell, who had a much larger house close by, with a large staff of servants, had us over frequently to dinner. He was a splendid host, with a fund of stories and good talk, in which Josefa and I joined, while Kit would sit quietly, listening with that faint smile, and only occasionally answering a question, always to the point. I doubt if that man ever said an unnecessary word.
He was sensitive, though, in ways you’d never have suspected. One night I remember he produced a tattered novelette and showed it to me – and if anyone tells you he was illiterate, it isn’t true. Whether he could write, I don’t know, but he read from that novel – and it was about himself, full of lurid adventures in which he triumphed over hordes of savages, killed grizzly bears with his Bowie, and had hairbreadth escapes from forest fires and blizzards and heaven knows what. I asked, was any of it true, and he said: “Bits of it, but just by accident. I never met the fellow who wrote it.”
I imagined his reading it was just a brag, to show how famous he was, but then he told me where he’d come by the book. The previous autumn, he’d been one of a rescue party chasing a band of Jicarillas who had wiped out a small caravan and carried off a Mrs White and her baby; Carson’s folk hadn’t been able to save her life, or the baby’s, although they’d hammered the redsticks handsomely, and afterwards, in the dead woman’s effects, he had come across the novelette. It troubled him.
“If she had read this book,” says he very seriously, “with all these tall tales about me, then when she was carried off and knew I was coming in pursuit, her hopes must have been high that I would perform some miracle and rescue her and her child. Would you think that?”
I said I supposed she might. What then?
“I failed her,” says he, and there were absolute tears in his eyes. “She trusted in me. How bitter her disappointment must have been. My heart is on the ground when I think of that poor lady and her little one, praying for a rescue that I was powerless to perform.”
That was the way he talked, I may say, when he was in what he thought of as educated company. Well, I supposed I was meant to console him, but damned if I knew what to say; I racked my brains trying to think what some true-blue hypocrite like Arnold would have coughed up, and was inspired.
“You didn’t write that book, Kit,” says ministering angel Flashy, “so t’wasn’t your fault if she had false hopes. And if she did – well, as one who’s been in mortal danger of popping his clogs before now, I can tell you it’s a sight better to hope you’re going to escape than to know you’re going to die.” Which is very true, by the way. “Why, a few years ago, my wife was kidnapped by beastly Borneo pirates, and she said later that she was kept alive by her belief that I would save her.”
“And you did?” says he, very attentive.
The temptation to make a brave tale of it was strong, but once again, with those gentle eyes on me, I found myself telling the truth – much more of this little bastard’s company and I’d finish up a Christian. “Ah … well, yes, in a manner of speaking. I got her out of it, all right … but to be fair, she saved us both, in the end.” I told him briefly how we’d hidden in that garden in Antananarivo, and Elspeth hadn’t so much as squeaked when a searcher’s boot had cracked her finger.e
He shook his head in admiration, and says: “Your wife’s a gallant lady. I’d admire to meet her.” There was a questioning look in his eyes which I t
hought odd, and slightly uncomfortable, so I changed the subject.
“Anyway, the point about Mrs White is that it’s better to die in hope than in despair, don’t you see?”
He considered this for about five minutes, and then said: “Perhaps so. It’s kind of you to say that. Thank you.” Another pause. “Is your wife back in England?”
I said she was, and he nodded and gave me that mild, direct look that I was beginning to find decidedly uncomfortable. “Then we must see you get safe back to her soon,” says he. “She will be grieving at your absence.”
I wasn’t so sure of that myself, but I was mighty glad when in the first week of May – on my twenty-eighth birthday, in fact – we fared north out of Rayado: Carson, a hunter named Goodwin, myself, and a few Mexican arrieros to manage the herd of mules that my companions were taking up to Fort Laramie to sell to the immigrant caravans; from there, Goodwin was heading for California, so I would be sure of a safe convoy to the coast.
That journey north took the best part of a month, for it’s all of five hundred miles to Laramie, even as Carson rode – which was almost as straight as the crow flies – up through the Sangre de Cristo by Pike’s Peak and the South Park, over the high plains to Fort St Vrain, and through the Wyoming Black Hills to Laramie on the North Platte. It was one of the most splendid trips I ever made, for the scenery is lovely beyond description: I think of that marvellous fastness they call the Eagle’s Nest, like a great bowl on the roof of the world, where the air is so clear and pure you want to drink it; the great silent forests, the towering white ramparts of the Rockies far away to the west, the prairie flowers in vast carpets of colour as far as the eye could see, the silver cascades in the deep woods – it was a wild and wondrous land then, untouched by civilisation, a splendid silent solitude that seemed to go on forever.
Best of all, it was safe – not because there weren’t savage tribes and dangerous beasts, but because of the small, stocky figure riding ahead in his faded yellow fringed shirt and fur cap, apparently drinking in the view, but in fact recognising every tuft and tree and mountain peak, sniffing the wind, noting each track and trace and sign; and at nightfall, strolling out of sight and circling the camp before returning, with a placid nod, to settle into his blanket. It occurred to me then that I’d sooner have Carson by himself in this country than the entire Household Brigade; he knew it all, you see, and even asleep he was a more alert sentry than you or I wide awake. I remember one night round the fire, he suddenly lifted his head and remarked that we’d see buffalo tomorrow; we did; and again, riding up a forest trail, he paused and observed that Caleb was up ahead – sure enough, a mile farther on, we spotted an enormous grizzly ambling off among the thickets. How he sensed these things he didn’t seem to know himself; he could foretell weather accurately for two days beforehand, and absolutely smell a human presence up to about fifty yards.47
You may ask if a month in the wilds with that great scout taught me much of woodcraft and mountain lore; I can reply with confidence that by the time we reached Fort Laramie, I could deduce by the sight of a broken twig that someone had stepped on it, and when I saw a great pile of dung on the prairie I knew at once that a buffalo had let drive. Beyond that, my ability to read sign was limited, but by talking with Carson and a Sans Arc guide who rode with us, I polished up my Siouxan and became quite fluent, and few of my languages have proved more vital than that one, for it was the lingua franca from Mexico to Canada, and from the Missouri to the Divide, and is so beautiful that I even continued to study it in England. And I guess he taught me a lot about the West without my realising it, for his knowledge was profound, although with remarkable areas of ignorance about the world outside: he had no idea where Japan was, and he’d never heard of Mohammed or geometry; on the other hand, he startled me by quoting at length a poem by some Scotch pessimist, part of which was absolutely in Latin;48 he’d learned it as a child. I guess that like Sherlock Holmes he knew what he needed to know; he fairly turned me inside out on Mangas Colorado and the Mimbreno, for although he already knew plenty about Apaches, he was avid for any scrap, however trivial, that might add to this store; he even sought my opinion on such minutiae as their consumption of mescal, and the possible meaning of the masks worn in the wedding dance; I had to repeat, three or four times, the conversation with Mangas which I’ve recorded earlier in this memoir, and he would smile and nod agreement.
“Smart Injun,” was his verdict. “Sees a long way, and clear. They’ll go, as the buffalo go, which it will, with all the new folks coming west. I won’t grieve too much for the ’Pash; they have bad hearts, and I wouldn’t trust a one of ’em. Or the Utes. But I can be right sorry for the Plains folk; the world will eat them up. Not in my time, though.”
I observed that the land was so vast, and the Indians so few, that even when it was settled there must surely be abundant space for the tribes; he smiled and shook his head, and said something which has stayed in my head ever since, for it was the plain truth years ahead of its time.
“An Injun needs a powerful heap of room to live in. More than a million white folks.”
In later years I heard many, soldiers mostly, say that Kit Carson was “soft” on Indians, and it’s true, although he probably killed more of them than the cholera, in self-defence or in retribution for raid and murder. The truth is that like most Mountain Men, he was soft on everyone, if dealing amiably and fairly can be called soft; he knew that even the Plains tribes were dishonest and cruel and perverse, just as children are, and so he regarded them, watchfully but with a good deal more affection than they deserved, for my money.
There was no question that they liked him, and those who didn’t still admired and respected him. We must have encountered a score of different bands on their spring hunts, and as we drew closer to Fort Laramie their villages and travelling camps became more frequent, for the fort was the very hub of the Plains and Rockies, as Bent’s had been farther south, a great station for the immigrant trains, and the market where the northern tribes brought their robes and pelts to trade for civilised goods and booze.
I thought I’d seen Plains Indians on the way out from Independence, but they were nothing to the numbers and variety we encountered now; I carry in my mind a series of brilliant pictures from that time – a band of Pawnee hunters, bare-chested and with long trouser-like leggings of blue or red, their skulls shaved bald save for the bristling fringe of scalp-lock like a cock’s comb; Crows in gaudy shirts with war-bonnets so long they trailed to their ponies’ flanks; an Arapaho medicine man, his hair woven in fantastic plaits that stuck out from his head like horns, his arms bleeding with self-inflicted wounds as he walked in a trance, followed by a group waving long beribboned sticks as they chanted an incantation; Black-feet warriors with lances strung with coloured feathers, little targes on their arms, skin caps on their heads, and as many as twenty strings of beads about their necks, for all the world like hawk-nosed dowagers sporting their pearls; Shoshoni, whom I remember for their ugly faces, and their great bearskin robes with the muzzles still attached as hoods; Foxes, with huge beaded earrings and weird designs painted on their backs and breasts; and everywhere, it seemed, swarms of Sioux in all their various clans, which Carson seemed to recognise at sight; one big band of them rode with us for the best part of a day, and a nervous business I found it, with as many as a hundred of the tall, copper-coloured brutes surrounding us, their faces streaked with paint beneath the short-feathered crowns, stripped to their breech-clouts in the sweltering summer sun, guns at their saddle-bows and lances at rest; they bore a name which was to become fearsome on the North Plains: Oglala. But best of all I have a memory of a long line of braves, wrapped in blankets, feathers slanting down from their long braided hair, riding slowly along a skyline at sunset, looking neither right nor left, dignified as grandees on their way to audience at the Escurial – my old acquaintances, the Cheyenne.
None of ’em offered us the slightest offence – though whether they’d ha
ve been as amiable if Carson hadn’t been along, I don’t care to think, for I gathered from him that there was a great discontent beginning to brew among them. They’d been trading about Laramie for years, peaceful enough, but after the cholera of the previous summer, which they blamed, rightly enough, on the immigrants, they were casting dark looks at the trains that came pouring westward in this summer of ’50. Before 1849 there had been wagons enough on the trails, but nothing to the multitude that now followed the gold strike. I’ve been told that more than 100,000 pioneers crossed the plains in ’50; from what I saw myself at Laramie and westward it was just a continuous procession – and I would say that was the year the Plains tribes realized for the first time that here was the rising of a white tide that was going to engulf their land – and their life.
You see, before ’49, if you were a Crow or an Arapaho or a Cheyenne, you might sit on a ridge and watch the schooners crawl across the empty prairie, one at a time, perhaps only a solitary train in a week. You might trade with it, or take a slap at it for devilment, to run off a few horses, but mostly you’d leave it alone, since it was doing no harm, apart from reducing the grazing along the North Platte or the Arkansas, and thinning the game a little. But the Indian just had to turn his back and ride a few miles to be in clear country which the caravans never touched, the bison herds ran free, and game abounded. There was still plenty for everyone.
It was different after ’49. A hundred thousand folk need a power of meat and wood and fodder; they must forage wide on either side of the trail, in what to them is virgin country, and wreak havoc among the buffalo and smaller game; they must strip the grazing to its roots – and it ain’t in human nature for them to think, in all that vastness, what it may mean for those few figures sitting on the ridge over yonder (who are thieving, dangerous rascals anyway). But if you are those figures, Crow or Arapaho or Cheyenne, watching the torrent that was once a trickle, seeing it despoil the Plains on which you depend for life, and guess that it’s going to get bigger by the year, and that what was once a novelty is now a menace – what d’you do? Precisely what the squire in his Leicestershire acres, or his New England meadow, would do if crowds of noisy, selfish foreigners began to trek through ruining the place. Remonstrate – and when that don’t work, because the intruders can’t see what damage they’re doing, and don’t care anyway – what d’you do then? I’ll tell you; Leicestershire squire, New England farmer, Cheyenne Dog-Soldier or Kiowa Horse-Cap, you see that there’s only one thing for it: you put your paint on.
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