The Native American Experience

by Dee Brown

  “Many things happened very fast after that summer we moved south. I’ve always blamed Jotham for some of our troubles, although they would have come later anyway. At his trading post Jotham kept hearing rumors of gold being found in the mountains of what is now Colorado. A passing stranger once showed him a pouch of gold dust he said he’d found somewhere in those mountains. Jotham wrote about that in a letter to William, and William spread the story around among his friends, some of whom had prospected for gold at Dahlonega in Georgia before the Georgians drove them away.

  “A Cherokee—especially a half-blood Cherokee—can get gold fever as bad as a white man, and it wasn’t long before six or seven men from the Cherokee Nation showed up at Fort Carrothers, wanting Jotham to show them the way to a second Yellow Metal, or Dahlonega. Jotham had no more idea where the gold was than they did, but he caught a bad case of the fever and went with them into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. They spent most of the summer wandering from one creek to another, finding just enough traces of gold to keep them searching. Whenever Jotham found a little gold dust, he would pack it into a goose quill. After the Cherokees gave up prospecting and went home to the Indian Territory, Jotham brought several of those quills back to Fort Carrothers. There wasn’t enough gold in all of them to buy a used-up saddle.

  “I don’t say that Jotham started that whole Pike’s Peak or Bust madness that came near destroying us a year or so later, but he showed off his gold-dust quills to many a passing traveler, putting the thought of Rocky Mountain gold into their heads. And in time, so many prospectors went into the mountains that some of them made big strikes.

  “When he’d show off his quills, Jotham bragged about the big strike he was going to make the next time he went into the mountains, but he never went again. Griffa wouldn’t allow it. She said if he left her to run that trading post by herself for another summer she’d leave and go back to the Cherokee Nation. Jotham didn’t do any more prospecting, but it seemed like every white man and boy in the East all decided at the same time to cross the Plains and dig for gold in the Rocky Mountains.

  “On foot, on mules and horses, in wagons and stagecoaches, they were clogging up the Oregon Trail before we left the Timbers in the springtime to go down to the Smoking Land River again. And we’d hardly camped there before gold hunters were coming right up our valley, beating out trails in old wagons that weren’t fit to travel. All of them had signs lettered on the sides, pike’s peak or bust. Some days they were like a ragged army on horseback, slaughtering our buffalo by the hundreds to eat only the choicest parts, leaving the carcasses to rot on the ground. The skies soon filled with carrion birds, and then the buffalo deserted us, swinging south toward the Arkansas River.

  “Lean Bear was the first to turn his anger to action. He told Big Star he was going to take his Dog Soldiers down this new trail from the east and keep the crazy white men away from the Smoking Land Valley, frighten them back to the trails along the Platte, and then maybe our buffalo would return. Big Star cautioned him to beware of soldiers; he had heard of many forts being built to the east.

  “Pleasant wore his coat of mail the morning he rode out with the Dog Soldiers, and I wondered if I would ever see him or any of the other warriors again. For a few days, no white men appeared in any direction, but then they began to come again. Lean Bear told me that it was like trying to stop a river with bare hands. At first he tried not to kill any white men, only to frighten them, but then the whites would shoot at the Dog Soldiers and the Dog Soldiers would shoot back. Soon the Bluecoats from the forts were chasing them, and the Dog Soldiers had to move far off in some other direction. They went all the way to the Santa Fe Trail, and began raiding stage stations and ranch houses.

  “The Drying-Grass Moon came and went, but the Dog Soldiers did not return to the Smoking Land River, and Big Star said that without buffalo to hunt we could stay there no longer. We would return early to the Hinta Nagi. Perhaps the herds would come there with the snows.

  “When we first sighted the Ghost Timbers, we thought a whirling storm must have struck our old winter shelter while we were gone. But we soon discovered that white men wanting firewood had crossed the shallow Platte to kill our trees the way they killed our buffalo, chopping down our windbreaks and using only the limbs to burn. They had camped in many places in the Timbers, fouling the earth and water with their leavings. There, for the first time, we sensed that we were losing control of our lives. We were outcasts, doomed to flight or entrapment. We had no safe place to go. But we cleaned up what was left of the old Hinta Nagi, determined to spend one more winter there.

  “When I went over to Fort Carrothers to see Jotham, he showed me a newspaper from St. Louis with an account of Indian raids along the Kansas trails. The worst of these savages, the newspaper said, was a band of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers led by a half-breed in Spanish armor, who attacked helpless travelers without warning, shooting and hacking and torturing their victims without mercy. ‘The man in the armor is bound to be Pleasant,’ Jotham said. ‘We ought to go find him and stop him before it’s too late.’

  “Well, I thought the newspaper account was like most printed things about Indians, exaggerated lies, and besides we had no way of finding Pleasant. As it turned out, we did not have to go looking for him. He showed up one day at the Ghost Timbers, worn down to nothing but bone and muscle, his skin blackened by the sun, wearing his coat of mail and a dirty old rabbit-skin cap. He was carrying a lance to which were attached four scalps, none of them dark enough to be Indian. All he would say about the Dog Soldiers, who were still on the Plains, was that he had a quarrel with Lean Bear and he was tired of raiding and scalping. Red Bird Woman may have learned more than that from Pleasant, but if she did she never told me. Lean Bear came in with the Dog Soldiers a few weeks later, leading many captured horses loaded with plunder, but Pleasant was gone by that time and Lean Bear never said anything to me about a quarrel, so it probably didn’t amount to much.

  “Pleasant tried to settle down in Rising Fawn’s tipi, but he was like a burned-out spirit, too restless to loaf around the Ghost Timbers waiting for winter buffalo that never came. He kept going back and forth from the Timbers to Fort Carrothers, and he was there one day when a man arrived from Missouri to talk with Jotham about building a station for what he called the Pony Express. This man had a contract to carry mail by horseback from Leavenworth to California. When he asked if there was someone at the fort willing to be the station keeper, Jotham pointed to Pleasant. ‘He’s your man. Knows how to handle horses, a good blacksmith, and can read, write, and figure.’

  “ ‘I’ll hire you,’ the man said to Pleasant, ‘but not as a station keeper. You’re young, skinny, and wiry. I want you for one of my riders.’

  “And that’s how my son Pleasant McAlpin became a Pony Express rider on the section between Fort Carrothers and Fort Laramie. I believe those were the happiest days of the boy’s life, riding fast and free, dressed in a red shirt and blue trousers and high boots, and carrying that fancy saddlebag full of important mail. He was the envy of my second son, Swift Eagle, and of Jotham’s Young Opothle, both of whom were old enough to be riders. But Swift Eagle was too Indian to suit the Pony Express men, and Young Opothle was too heavy.

  “Young Opothle was so upset over being turned down that I persuaded Jotham to let him go off with us that summer to hunt for buffalo on the Little Fork of the Hotoa. Rising Fawn also went along. She had an even greater dislike for living at Fort Carrothers than did Sweet Medicine Woman.”

  37

  LATE IN THE SUMMER OF 1860, while Big Star’s Cheyennes were camped on the Hotoa, Dane was surprised to receive a short written message from Fort Carrothers. It was brought by a half-blood Arapaho who worked as a stock tender at the Pony Express station. I have been bad hurt in a fall, the message read. I need Young Opothle here, and you also, my good cousin, if you will come. Yr. obedient servant, Jotham Kingsley.

  Although the Cheyennes had found several small b
uffalo herds along the Hotoa, and Dane could have used more hides for winter trading, he decided to go at once to Fort Carrothers, taking his family with him. When he told Big Star of this, the chief said that he would not be bringing the Cheyennes to the Hinta Nagi that winter but would probably join Black Kettle’s people on Sand Creek.

  “If I can leave Fort Carrothers before the snows come,” Dane said, “my family and I will come to Sand Creek. Otherwise we’ll spend the winter at the fort.”

  “Take good care of my daughter,” Big Star warned him. “She dislikes the noise and restlessness of the Veheos around that trading post.”

  Dane was not surprised that Sweet Medicine Woman objected to this early visit to Fort Carrothers, but when she saw how eager her children were to go, she made only mild protests. He invited Rising Fawn to accompany them, but she refused, saying that if Pleasant wanted her as a wife he must abandon his Veheo ways and live with the Cheyennes.

  They traveled slowly with two travois, taking routes that kept them away from Bluecoat patrols and white travelers, and as soon as they arrived, Sweet Medicine Woman and the girls began pitching the tipi along the stream behind the trading post.

  Dane found Jotham lying in bed with his leg wrapped in strips of canvas. He had broken it while racing one of the mounts that he kept for the Pony Express. The animal had stumbled in an abandoned prairie-dog hole, its full weight falling upon Jotham’s leg. “The outlandishness of it,” Jotham said, “is that Pleasant has ridden that same pony hundreds of miles and never had an accident. I took it out for a mile run and broke a leg.”

  Pleasant came in from Fort Laramie the next evening, and Dane was delighted to see how well and contented he looked. “Riding for the Pony Express seems to satisfy you,” Dane said.

  “I like the excitement,” Pleasant replied. “But it won’t last much longer.” He pointed to a row of bark-stripped poles with crosspieces, which ran along the opposite side of the trail.

  “I hear the Veheos are coming to string wires along those poles,” Dane said. “Bibbs calls them talking wires.”

  “Telegraph. The wires are already at Fort Kearney and someday will reach the Western Ocean. When messages can be sent to California by the wires, there will be no more need for the Pony Express.”

  Dane shook his head. “I don’t understand how this can be done. The white men have too much magic these days.”

  Later that evening Dane was talking with Jotham about the poles and the talking wires. “Yes, the world that you and I grew up in, Dane, is vanishing,” Jotham said. “The life you have chosen to lead with the Cheyennes can’t last much longer.”

  “I don’t know. Big Star thinks we should violate the treaty and go back to the Power River country where the Northern Cheyennes still live without hindrance. After all, the American government is not enforcing its side of the treaty.”

  Jotham moved uneasily in his bed. Dane noticed that gray hair was beginning to show at his cousin’s temples. They were both growing older, the days flowing by. “You and your Cheyennes can run away for a time,” Jotham said. “But the white world will swallow you in the end. When the buffalo are gone, you will go.”

  “I have thought much on these things.”

  “And of your family?” Jotham sighed. “Since my accident I’ve thought about Young Opothle and the days to come. You turned him into a wild Indian this summer. I want him to have the learning you gave Pleasant. Meggi also when she is older.”

  “In the seminary at Tahlequah?”

  “Yes. If they are to survive in the world they must live in, they will need learning. Grandmother Amayi would agree with me, would she not?”

  Dane wondered, thinking of his own sons and daughters. In the north they would be happy following Cheyenne ways if white men did not encroach. But how long would they be free of invading forces—the soldiers, the wagon trains, the gold hunters, the settlers, the talking wires?

  “I’ve already exchanged letters with Mr. Ebenezer Keys,” Jotham continued. “He invites Young Opothle ‘to come and sip at the sweet waters of knowledge.’ But the boy must be there in September. I was planning to take him with me to Westport for supplies and then go on to the Nation, but this leg…Knowing your dislike for leaving your family, I hesitate to ask this, Dane, but will you take Young Opothle to the Nation?”

  When Dane’s sons, Swift Eagle and Little Cloud, learned that their father was taking Young Opothle to school in the Cherokee Nation, both immediately expressed strong desires to go also. They idolized Pleasant and were sure that they could become as dashing as their older half brother if only they could go away to the seminary as he had done. Swift Eagle was sixteen, but Little Cloud was a year younger, and Dane spent several restless nights trying to decide whether he should uproot either of them from their Cheyenne world. At dawn after a sleepless night he decided that together his sons could sustain each other in the Cherokee Nation. Alone, the strangeness of Cherokee ways might overcome Swift Eagle even with Young Opothle nearby. He would take both sons to Tahlequah.

  His hardest task was trying to convince Sweet Medicine Woman of the soundness of his decision. At first she thought he was temporarily deranged, that his madness would soon leave him. But when she realized that he was serious, she stormed out at him, shouting that he was trying to make her sons like the Veheos. She did not want her sons to be Veheos. She would not listen when he spoke of his grandmother who believed that when Indians became surrounded by white men they must learn some of their ways in order to survive. It was the first bitter quarrel of their life together.

  He doggedly went ahead with his plans. The night before departure the three boys dressed in their white man’s clothing, but Sweet Medicine Woman refused to look at them. To himself Dane admitted that his young sons with their hair cut short and slicked down with water—wearing collars, pantaloons, and stockings—looked unnatural, like false images of themselves. For a moment he felt like tearing the clothing from them.

  The next morning Sweet Medicine Woman would not leave her tipi. He had to take her sons to her to say good-bye. Trying not to look at them, she embraced them together, but her words choked in her throat. When they ran outside, Dane reached for her. She drew away, taking Creek Mary’s Danish coin from around her neck and holding it out to him. “Here is the sacred power you gave me,” she said. “I will wear it again when you bring my sons back to me.”

  38

  “DURING THE THREE OR four days I was in the Cherokee Nation,” Dane said, “getting the boys into Mr. Ebenezer Keys’s seminary, I kept hearing talk on all sides about a war between the northern and southern states of America. I could not understand why the Cherokees should be interested in this war. Indian Territory was not one of the states. But it was soon made clear to me that the fight was over the slavery of black people. The northerners wanted the southerners to free the black people, and the southerners wanted to keep their slaves.

  “As a good many of the half-bloods and treaty Cherokees still had black slaves they had brought from Georgia and Tennessee, and very few of the Ross followers owned any, the treaty people sided with the South and the full-bloods with the North. I could see that old wound which had almost healed since the time of Uncle Opothle’s death beginning to open up again.

  “Not long after I returned to Fort Carrothers, the War Between the States began in earnest. While spring came on the next year I was waiting to hear from Big Star about his hunting plans for the summer so that Sweet Medicine Woman and the girls and I could join the Cheyennes. But the Plains were suddenly filled with Bluecoat cavalry marching in all directions. Wagonloads of white men from the mines began moving east to join one or the other of the armies. It was no time for Indians to be on the move, and so we did not hear from the Cheyennes.

  “Pleasant brought us most of the news we heard about the war. He listened to all kinds of stories told by the Bluecoats at Fort Laramie, and every time he came back from there, he and Jotham argued for hours about the fighting in the
East. As far as I was concerned the Unegas could shoot away at each other forever. It was nothing for either Cherokees or Cheyennes to bother about.

  “Every letter that Jotham received from William told of the commotion in the Cherokee Nation. Old John Ross, who was still chief of the Cherokees, was strong for neutrality, but after the Confederate government declared Indian Territory to be a part of their new country, Ross had to give in and become an ally of the southerners. Soon after that Stand Watie was made a general in the Confederate army, and as he and William had long been friends, William’s letters soon showed that his sympathies had turned toward the South. William began urging Jotham to come home and help defend the Cherokee Nation from its enemies. It all seemed senseless to me.

  “Then suddenly one day Pleasant came in from Fort Laramie to tell us he had made his last ride for the Pony Express. The talking wires had reached California and all the mail would now go on the stagecoaches.

  “ ‘We can use you here at the trading post,’ Jotham spoke up. ‘Tending the stage horses or working with Bibbs in the smithy.’

  “Pleasant shook his head. ‘I signed papers for the army last night,’ he said proudly.

  “ ‘The army!’ Jotham cried. ‘Which army?’

  “ ‘Missouri cavalry,’ Pleasant replied. ‘The recruits are coming through here in stagecoaches in a day or so. I’ll join them here.’

  “ ‘Missouri Confederates or Missouri Union?’ Jotham wanted to know.

  “Pleasant grinned. ‘The recruiter was wearing a blue uniform.’

  “ ‘God damn you!’ Jotham cried, and began limping back and forth on his healing leg. ‘You’re a traitor to your people!’

  “ ‘What people?’ Pleasant tried to put on a defiant look. ‘Hell, I don’t have any people. If the Missouri Confederates had come for me first I might’ve signed their papers. I just want some excitement.’