The Native American Experience

by Dee Brown

  Although he had been able to excavate no deeper than the length of his hand, Dane was still digging when he heard the cavalry returning. Again commands echoed through the walls, followed by shouts and braying laughter. The sounds were more like those of a mob than an army, reminding him of the clamor of the Georgia Pony Guards when they were robbing the Cherokees at Okelogee. He waited, remembering the stoicism of Creek Mary when all control of action seemed lost, trying not to think of what might have happened at the Ghost Timbers.

  After the soldiers swarmed through the gate, the interior of the fort became a bedlam, the noise gradually fading as the men moved toward the farther end of the stockade where the mess tents were. A few minutes later Dane heard a slight click of metal, an almost furtive scratching. A crack of light showed in the doorway.

  “Anyone in here?” Dane recognized the low voice. He raised up, brushing his hands against his dusty jeans, and went to the door.

  “Come on out,” Major Easterwood said, holding up a lantern. “You and I are the only sober human beings in Fort Starke.”

  At the end of the corridor a sergeant lay sleeping in the shadows, his head lolling against the wall, his forage cap on the floor. Easterwood picked up the cap and put it on Dane’s head. “The gate guards won’t look twice at you in semidarkness,” he said.

  Easterwood held the lantern low while they passed between the two guards, both of whom saluted with their rifles, not even glancing at Dane. The air outside under the stars was sweet and clean after the long day in the fetid cell.

  “I don’t know where your horse is,” Easterwood said. “Found you a lively pony though, bearing U.S. brands.” He led the way into the corral. The pony was already saddled.

  “What happened at the Timbers?” Dane asked.

  “They made the swap. Then Colonel Belcourt ordered an attack, but it was more like a drunken brawl. Some of your people got hurt, more of ours.” Easterwood’s voice broke under his physical weariness. “I’ve been telling your people to go back to Sand Creek. Don’t go there. Go on north, wherever it is you’ll be out of reach of Belcourt and his kind. And go now. Belcourt sent a messenger to Fort Kearney to ask for a Nebraska regiment. Claims he was ambushed by a superior force of Cheyennes at the Ghost Timbers.”

  “I owe you my life,” Dane said, settling into the unfamiliar army saddle.

  “They would hang you in Denver and make a circus of it.” Easterwood’s voice turned bitter: “It’s ironic that I, the only real army officer at this post, am committing a court-martial offense, aiding a prisoner escape.” He offered his hand. “You’d better ride. Oh, one more thing. Belcourt is still out prowling with a troop of drunken men. Keep an eye out for them.”

  Dane pulled back on the reins. “What direction did they take?”

  “When we left, I heard them splashing across the Platte.”

  Dane started the pony moving. He felt a cold chill at the back of his skull, the same icy dread he’d felt that night in the Cherokee Nation when he realized the danger threatening his Uncle Opothle. As soon as he reached open ground, he lashed the pony into a gallop. The forage cap lifted from his head and sailed across the plain behind him. Instead of turning north toward the Ghost Timbers, he angled westward for the Fort Carrothers trading post.

  48

  “IT WAS THE MOON of Dry Dust Blowing,” Dane said. “When the sun first showed over the rim of the world it was the color of blood, and after full daylight the sky was yellow, clouds mixed with dust. Soon it will rain, I thought, and wash the sky until it is clean and blue. I remembered Grandmother Mary saying that.

  “Above me I heard a hawk scream. I had to force myself to look up, and my heart stopped when I saw that it was blue-feathered, circling, circling, lower and lower, screaming until it flapped its wings and with the speed of an arrow soared out of sight into the yellow clouds. Then I saw the shine of the Platte, and galloped the tired army pony across the sandy shallows until I could see the trading post. Above it floated not hawks but black carrion birds, still high up, watching whatever it was below.

  “Sweet Medicine Woman’s tipi was gone. Belcourt has burned it, I thought, as he threatened he would. But what has happened to Sweet Medicine Woman, to Amayi and Susa?

  “The pony rocked under me in its weariness. When we reached the creek behind the trading post, it wallowed in the water. I leaped into the stream and climbed the grassy bank expecting to see ashes and charred lodgepoles where the tipi had stood. Instead there was only a circle of bare earth ringed by stones, no sign of violence.

  “I sighed with relief, yet I knew the place was too quiet. Bibbs should be making noises in the smithy. Smoke should be drifting from the chimney above Griffa’s kitchen. Familiar voices should be sounding everywhere.

  “I walked around the solid log wall at the east end of the trading post, and as soon as I turned the corner I saw three Bluecoats lying motionless on the hard-packed earth around the entranceway, two on their backs, the nearest one facedown in a pool of drying blood. I turned the body over with my foot. The three faces all looked alike to me, waxen now, but marked with animal coarseness, bearers of the Caucasian savagery that is akin to madness.

  “The heavy door of the trading post stood ajar on one hinge, the wood battered by a pole that lay in front of it. A pair of boots, soles facing me, blocked the narrow opening. I shoved the door fully open and looked down on what remained of Bibbs’s face. His muscular body was clothed only in a pair of thin cotton pants and the black boots. In the trading room lay two more dead Bluecoats. The arm of one of them was flung across the naked body of Griffa, lying spread-eagled on the floor, her eyes open and glassy in her pain-twisted face.

  “Through the kitchen door I saw nothing but overturned furniture, and in only one bedroom did I find any signs of a struggle. In Meggi’s room a washbasin, a shattered mirror, and a blanket were on the floor. The rumpled covering on her bed was spotted with blood.

  “The connecting door to Bibbs’s and Wewoka’s quarters was wide open, and there I found two more dead, a Bluecoat with a Bowie knife driven in his armpit to the hilt, and Wewoka’s half-clothed body beneath his. I rolled the Bluecoat to one side, hoping to find life left in Wewoka, but she was dead, a cluster of purple marks on her olive throat where her attacker had crushed the breath of life from her. When I closed the lids over Wewoka’s violet eyes, I remembered her fears of the wild Plains Indians when she first came to the trading post. All her dread-filled visions of hostile savages had come true, but in her case the savages were white men, not Indians.

  “Five of my family and kin of Fort Carrothers were still missing, and I prayed that I would find them alive in the root cellar. I went to the kitchen, calling their names to reassure them with my voice. The heavy table that usually stood over the long entry boards lay on its side. I called again: Sweet Medicine, Amayi, Susa, Meggi, Young Opothle. I heard a whimpering then, like the soft wail of a lost kit cougar. I turned one of the boards, and there in a beam of light was Meggi’s face, streaked with tears and dirt, looking up at me. I lifted her through the opening. She was clothed only in a blanket, and clung tightly to me, sobbing. ‘Where are the others?’ I asked. She tried to tell me, but ‘gone away’ was all I could understand. Then I saw Young Opothle pulling himself out of the root cellar, a great bloody welt on the top of his head, his eyes blank from shock.

  “It was a while before I could make them tell me of the terrors they had lived through in that dark night. The Bluecoats had awakened them with shouts and curses and a loud banging at the entrance door. When the Bluecoats began pounding at the door with the pole, Griffa called Bibbs, and the two of them stood with their guns ready.

  “ ‘Were Sweet Medicine Woman and the girls with you?’ I asked.

  “ ‘No,’ Meggi said, ‘they were in the tipi. It was they who drove away the soldiers.’

  “When the door crashed in, Bibbs shot one of the Bluecoats, but the others killed Bibbs where he stood, and then placed the muzzles o
f their rifles in his face and blew it apart. They knocked Griffa to the floor, tore off her nightclothes, and raped her, several of them, while others raped Meggi in her sleeping room, and another met death when he went after Wewoka. Young Opothle tried to defend his mother, but was knocked senseless with the butt of a rifle.

  “ ‘Did you see Colonel Belcourt, the man who was here and threatened us?’ I asked.

  “Meggi shook her head. She was not sure. Through the wrecked entrance way she had seen the shadows of other soldiers on horses in the road. After Sweet Medicine Woman and Amayi and Susa began shooting at the soldiers in the road, the soldiers in the trading post ran out. ‘Amayi told me that Susa killed two of them in the yard,’ Meggi said, ‘and then all the soldiers rode away very fast. Susa was hurt, and Sweet Medicine Woman and Amayi brought her in here.’

  “ ‘Where was she hurt?’ I wanted to know.

  “ ‘All I remember is Sweet Medicine Woman saying Susa had a wound in her ribs. I was crying over my mother and Young Opothle. I thought he was dead, too. Amayi helped me and helped bring Young Opothle back to life, and then I remember hearing horses, many horses moving slow. We blew out the candles, and Sweet Medicine Woman went to look, and then she cried out that it was her people coming from the Ghost Timbers. The next I saw was Swift Eagle and Pleasant. Pleasant had a bloody rag around his head and was so weak Swift Eagle had to help him stand. They told us Little Cloud was dead and Pleasant’s wife Rising Fawn was dead and Big Star was dead. They were carrying all the bodies north with them because they knew if they put them on scaffolds in the Ghost Timbers the soldiers would come and steal the medicine bundles and other things belonging to the dead.’

  “Meggi also said Sweet Medicine Woman begged her and Young Opothle to go with the Cheyennes to the north, but they would not go. They promised her they would hide in the root cellar and wait for the stagecoach. Sweet Medicine Woman would not leave without her tipi and a travois to carry Susa. Amayi and Swift Eagle helped her dismantle the tipi and prepare two travois. She already had everything packed, and they all hurried away about the time the sun rose. As soon as they were gone, Meggi and Young Opothle hid themselves in the root cellar, where I found them.

  “I knew that the eastbound stagecoach would soon be coming by, so I told them to get dressed in their best clothes and collect whatever things they needed to take with them. Then I took blankets from the beds and covered the bodies in the trading post. After that I dragged the three dead soldiers inside so the stage driver would not see them lying in the yard and want me to explain why they were there.

  “I went in the kitchen and took a biscuit tin off a high shelf. Griffa kept the trading-post money in the tin box, and I was surprised at how much was there in greenbacks and gold and silver coins. I put aside enough to pay their stagecoach fares to Westport, and then stowed the rest in a leather pouch. As I was going where money was useless, I emptied my pockets of what coins I had and added them to the pouch. I gave the pouch to Meggi and told her not to turn loose of it until she could hand it over to her father.

  “By the time the stagecoach had arrived, Young Opothle was more in control of himself. He shook my hand, then put his arms around me and said he hoped we could all be together again after the war. Meggi fought to keep tears out of her eyes when she kissed me goodbye, but the stage driver was yelling at them to get aboard, and there was no time for tears. The last I saw of Meggi was her small hand waving at me from the coach window.

  “As soon as the coach rolled away, I went back into the trading post. For a long time, fifteen years I think, Fort Carrothers had been a kind of center, a home, a meeting place for the children of Creek Mary’s blood. Sweet Medicine Woman had always distrusted it, as a symbol of white man’s greed. ‘Maka-eta, money, it is bad,’ she would say, and she would not have stayed one day of her own will anywhere near Fort Carrothers. Although she never spoke much about it, I knew that she sorrowed for me because I was afflicted with the white man’s sickness for possessions. Sweet Medicine Woman wanted nothing more than happiness for me and her children, clothing and food, a shelter that was cool in summer and warm in winter, and she knew that from the buffalo she could have all these things. Why any living being would want more than that she could not comprehend. Goods were to be shared, not accumulated.

  “I stood there in the trading room thinking about her, grieving for her because wherever she was she grieved for Little Cloud, the son I had saved and then lost. I thought about my grandmother, Akusa Amayi, how she had fixed into her memory the words of the great Tecumseh, who tried and failed to unite all the tribes against the Unega invaders. Behold what the white men have done to your people! They seize your land, they corrupt your women, they trample on the graves of your dead. They must be driven back whence they came upon a trail of blood.

  “I went into a little room at the back of the trading post, the room where Pleasant always slept when he stayed at Fort Carrothers. He and I kept things there that we no longer used. His Spanish coat of mail, showing streaks of rust, lay on a shelf. I started to put it in my saddlepack, but left it, knowing he would have taken it if he’d wanted it. In a battered parfleche box I found my old red breechcloth and a rawhide shirt. Beneath them was the horse bell that Sweet Medicine Girl gave me when I first parted from her at the end of that happy summer on the Hotoa, when we were young and unscarred by time. I put it in my saddlepack. Among Pleasant’s things I found a buckskin bag containing tallow and red and black pigments. I stripped off every shred of my white man’s clothing and painted my face and arms and body for the first time since I’d gone on the horse raid against the Crows. Then I dressed in the breechcloth and rawhide shirt.

  “I went out to the smithy and brought Bibbs’s jug of coal oil inside and poured it over the blankets of the dead. I heaped my white man’s clothing underneath the thin wood of the trading counter, added straw and paper, soaked them with coal oil, and set them to blazing. Then I took my saddlepack and went outside and mounted the army pony and started following the marks left by Sweet Medicine Woman’s travois. They cut across the trail, heading north along with hundreds of hoofprints of Cheyenne ponies. At the top of the first rise in the land, I looked back. Smoke and flames lifted skyward from each end of Fort Carrothers, and for a long time after that whenever I turned my face to the south I could see a gray streamer of smoke against the yellow sky. To me that smoke was a purge, burning away my past, and I felt like I was one with the People again.

  “Not until the next day did I come to the burial place, a thicket of stunted trees high in the dry sandhills. In their flight the Cheyennes had not the time or means to build scaffolds or wrap wet buffalo skins around their dead. They hacked out enough space in the treetops for two poles and whatever coverings they had, blankets or robes lashed with rawhide strips, placed so the feet of each dead person pointed toward the rising sun. From the coverings and possessions left beneath I could name several of the dead who had been my friends and companions. Big Star was bound in his white buffalo robe, and beneath his tree was his lance and shield and his white horse, dead from arrow wounds.

  “No other horses had been slain there, but I saw then a wooden horse hanging from the limb of a small thorny tree below a short blanket-wrapped body. It was the red-and-yellow rocking horse that Bibbs and Wewoka had made for Susa as a birth present, and the blanket wrapped around the body was Susa’s, a red-striped Mackinaw that I’d brought her from Westport Landing. I wept then as I wept the day I first saw Grandmother Mary’s grave. Twelve summers Susa had lived and already gone to the Darkening Land. ‘Look for Akusa Amayi, your great-grandmother,’ I whispered to her. ‘Do not turn your face to this earth again.’

  “Little Cloud and Rising Fawn both had been placed in a nearby tree. But I had no more tears to shed. I could hear my grandmother’s voice speaking the words of Tecumseh: Behold what the white men have done to your people! They must be driven back whence they came upon a trail of blood.

  “Ah, those o
ld times not good,” John Bear-in-the-Water said. “We think we got it bad, fighting with words all time with Indian agent. You never told me about what happened to your sons and daughters, Dane.” He slid on his buttocks away from the rising heat of the fireplace.

  Red Bird Woman rocked forward and eased herself from the chair. She went over to Dane and put a hand on one of his shoulders. “That is enough looking at road behind us,” she said. “Come show me where you want to put tipi for road ahead.”

  Dane glanced at me, his closed lips crinkling in a smile. “See, she gives me no peace. Look, I have this good cabin. What do I want with a tipi?”

  She laughed. “A Sanaki stays always a Sanaki. Wants to stay inside wooden house that shuts out sun. Sweet Medicine Woman and me, we work all our lives to make Dane a good Cheyenne. Don’t you know tipi is easier to keep clean? Warmer in winter—”

  “And cooler in summer,” Dane interrupted mockingly. “And all fresh air and sunshine. God damn, I can almost hear Sweet Medicine Woman’s voice saying those words.”

  “Come on,” Red Bird Woman said, moving toward the door. “You, too, John Bear-in-the-Water. We find good place, maybe put up some lodgepoles today.”

  Still smiling his thin smile, Dane beckoned me to come with them. Red Bird Woman led the way, lifting her skirts and showing her white deerskin boot moccasins as she stepped nimbly from stone to stone across the stream behind the cabin and climbed the embankment to a level place. “Can see butte to north, Dundee to south, mountains to west, sky to east. Creek never flood this high up. Good place.” She frowned at John Bear-in-the-Water. “Where you put lodgepoles?”