Cimarron

by Edna Ferber

  “So I off my horse and down to the gully’s edge. There the animal lay, his eyes all whites, his poor legs doubled under him, his flanks black and sticky with sweat and dirt. He was done for, all right. I took out my six-shooter and aimed right between his eyes. He kicked once, sort of leaped—or tried to, and then lay still. I stood there a minute, to see if he had to have another. He was so game that, some way, I didn’t want to give him more than he needed.

  “Then something made me turn around. The girl had mounted my mustang. She was off toward the creek section. Before I had moved ten paces she had reached the very piece I had marked in my mind for my own. She leaped from the horse, ripped off her skirt, tied it to her riding whip that she still held tight in her hand, dug the whip butt into the soil of the prairie—planted her flag—and the land was hers by right of claim.”

  Yancey Cravat stopped talking. There was a moment of stricken silence. Sabra Cravat staring, staring at her husband with great round eyes. Lewis Venable, limp, yellow, tremulous. Felice Venable, upright and quivering. It was she who spoke first. And when she did she was every inch the thrifty descendant of French forbears; nothing of the Southern belle about her.

  “Yancey Cravat, do you mean that you let her have your quarter section on the creek that you had gone to the Indian Territory for! That you had been gone a month for! That you had left your wife and child for! That——”

  “Now, Mamma!” You saw that all the Venable in Sabra was summoned to keep the tears from her eyes, and that thus denied they had crowded themselves into her trembling voice. “Now, Mamma!”

  “Don’t you ‘now Mamma’ me! What of the land that you were to have had! It was bad enough to think of your going to that wilderness, but to——” She paused. Her voice took on a new and more sinister note. “I don’t believe a word of it.” She whirled on Yancey, her black eyes blazing. “Why did you let that trollop in the black tights have that land?”

  Yancey regarded this question with considerable judicial calm, but Felice, knowing him, might have been warned by the way his great head was lowered like that of a charging bull buffalo.

  “If it had been a man I could have shot him. A good many had to, to keep the land they’d run fairly for. But you can’t shoot a woman.”

  “Why not?” demanded the erstwhile Southern belle, sharply.

  The Venables, as one man, gave a little jump. A nervous sound, that was half gasp and half shocked titter, went round the Venable board. A startled “Felice!” was wrung from Lewis Venable. “Why, Mamma!” said Sabra.

  Yancey Cravat, enormously vital, felt rising within him the tide of irritability which this vitiated family always stirred in him. Something now about their shocked and staring faces, their lolling and graceful forms, roused in him an unreasoning rebellion. He suddenly hated them. He wanted to be free of them. He wanted to be free of them—of Wichita—of convention—of smooth custom—of—no, not of her. He now smiled his brilliant sweet smile which alone should have warned Felice Venable. But that intrepid matriarch was not one to let a tale go unpointed.

  “I’m mighty pleased, for one, that it turned out as it did. Do you suppose I’d have allowed a daughter of mine—a Venable—to go traipsing down into the wilderness to live among drunken one-legged plainsmen, and toothless scrags in calico, and trollops in tights! Never! It’s over now, and a mighty good thing, too. Perhaps now, Yancey, you’ll stop this ramping up and down and be content to run that newspaper of yours and conduct your law practice—such as it is—with no more talk of this Indian Territory. A daughter of mine in boots and calico and sunbonnet, if you please, a-pioneering among savages. Reared as she was! No, indeed.”

  Yancey was strangely silent. He was surveying his fine white hands critically, interestedly, as though seeing them in admiration for the first time—another sign that should have warned the brash Felice. When he spoke it was with utter gentleness.

  “I’m no farmer. I’m no rancher. I didn’t want a section of farm land, anyway. The town’s where I belong, and I should have made for the town sites. There were towns of ten thousand and over sprung up in a night during the Run. Wagallala—Sperry—Wawhuska—Osage. It’s the last frontier in America, that new country. There isn’t a newspaper in one of those towns—or wasn’t, when I left. I want to go back there and help build a state out of prairie and Indians and scrub oaks and red clay. For it’ll be a state some day—mark my words.”

  “That wilderness a state!” sneered Cousin Dabney Venable. “With an Osage buck or a Cherokee chief for governor, I suppose.”

  “Why not? What a revenge on a government that has cheated them and driven them like cattle from place to place and broken its treaties with them and robbed them of their land. Look at Georgia! Look at Mississippi! Remember the Trail of Tears!”

  “Ho hum,” yawned Cousin Jouett Goforth, and rose, fumblingly. “This has all been very interesting—odd, but interesting. But if you will excuse me now I shall have my little siesta. I am accustomed after dinner …”

  Lewis Venable, so long silent, now too reached for his cane and prepared to rise. He was not quick enough. Felice Venable’s hand, thin, febrile, darted out and clutched his coat sleeve—pressed him back so that he became at once prisoner and judge in his chair at the head of the table.

  “Lewis Venable, you heard him! Are you going to sit there? He says he’s going back. How about your daughter?” She turned blazing black eyes on her son-in-law. “Do you mean you’re going back to that Indian country? Do you?”

  “I’ll be back there in two weeks. And remember, it’s white man’s country now.”

  Sabra stood up, the boy Cim grasped about his middle in her arms, so that he began to whimper, dangling there. Her eyes were startled, enormous. “Yancey! Yancey, you’re not leaving me again!”

  “Leaving you, my beauty!” He strode over to her. “Not by a long shot. This time you’re going with me.”

  “And I say she’s not!” Felice Venable rapped it out. “And neither are you, my fine fellow. You were tricked out of your land by a trollop in tights, and that ends it. You’ll stay here with your wife and child.”

  He shook his great head gently. His voice was dulcet.

  “I’m going back to the Oklahoma country; and Sabra and Cim with me.”

  Felice whirled on her husband. “Lewis! You can sit there and see your daughter dragged off to be scalped among savages!”

  The sick man raised his fine white head. The faded blue eyes were turned on the girl. The child, sensing conflict, had buried his head in her shoulder. “You came with me, Felice, more than twenty years ago, and your mother thought you were going to the wilderness, too. You remember? She cried and made mourning for weeks.”

  “Sabra’s different. Sabra’s different.”

  The reedy voice of the sick man had the ghostly carrying quality of an echo. You heard it above the women’s shrill clamor. “No, she isn’t, Felice. She’s more like you this minute than you are yourself. She favors those pioneer women Yancey was telling about in the old days. Look at her.”

  The Venable eye, from one end of the table to the other, turned like a single orb in its socket toward the young woman facing them with defiance in her bearing. Not defiance, perhaps, so much as resolve. Seeing her, head up, standing there beside her husband, one arm about the child, you saw that what her father said was indeed true. She was her mother, the Felice Venable of two decades ago; she was the woman in sunbonnet and calico to whom Yancey had given his cup of water; she was the woman jolting endless miles in covered wagons, spinning in log cabins, cooking over crude fires; she was all women who have traveled American prairie and desert and mountain and plain. Here was that inner rectitude, that chastity of lip, that clearness of eye, that refinement of feature, that absence of allure that comes with cold white fire. The pioneer type, as Yancey had said. Potentially a more formidable woman than her mother.

  Seeing something of this Felice Venable said again, more loudly, as though to convince her
self, “She’s not to go.”

  Looking more than ever like her mother, Sabra met this stubbornly. “But I want to go, Mamma.”

  “I forbid it. You don’t know what you want. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I say you’ll stay here with your mother and father in decent civilization. I’ve heard enough. I hope this will serve a lesson to you, Yancey.”

  “I’m going back to the Nation,” said Yancey, quite pleasantly.

  Sabra stiffened. “I’m going with him.” In her new resolve she must have squeezed the hand of the child Cim, for he gave a little yelp. The combined Venables, nerves on edge, leaped in their chairs and then looked at each other with some hostility.

  “And I say you’re not.”

  “But I want to go.”

  “You don’t.”

  Perhaps Sabra had not realized until now how terribly she had counted on her husband’s return as marking the time when she would be free to leave the Venable board, to break away from the Venable clan; no more to be handled, talked over, peered at by the Venable eye—and most of all by the maternal Venable eye. Twenty-one, and the yoke of her mother’s dominance was beginning to gall her. Now, at her own inner rage and sickening disappointment, all the iron in her fused and hardened. It had gone less often to the fire than the older woman’s had. For the first time this quality in her met that of her mother, and the metal of the older woman bent.

  “I will go,” said Sabra Cravat.

  If anyone had been looking at Lewis Venable at that moment (which no one ever thought of doing) he could have seen a ghostly smile momentarily irradiating the transparent ivory face. But now it was Yancey Cravat who held their fascinated eye. With a cowboy yip he swung the defiant Sabra and the boy Cim high in the air in his great arms—tossed them up, so that Sabra screamed, and Cim squealed in mingled terror and delight. It was the kind of horseplay (her word) at which Felice Venable always shuddered. Altogether the three seemed suddenly an outrage in that seemly room with its mahogany and its decanters and its circle of staring highbred faces.

  “Week from to-morrow,” announced Yancey, in something like a shout, so exulting it seemed. “We’ll start on a Monday, fresh and fair. Two wagons. One with the printing outfit—you’ll drive that, Sabra—and one with the household goods and bedding and camp stuff and the rest. We ought to make it in nine days.… Wichita!” His glance went round the room, and in that glance you saw not only Wichita! but Venables! “I’ve had enough of it. Sabra, my girl, we’ll leave all the goddamned middle-class respectability of Wichita, Kansas, behind us. We’re going out, by God, to a brand-new, two-fisted, rip-snorting country, full of Injuns and rattlesnakes and two-gun toters and gyp water and desper-ah-dos! Whoop-ee!”

  It was too much for black Isaiah in his perilous perch high above the table. He had long ago ceased to wield his asparagus fan. He had been leaning farther and farther forward, the better to hear and see all of the scene that was spread beneath him. Now, at Yancey’s cowboy whoop, he started violently, his slight hold was loosed, and he fell like a great black grape from the vine directly into the midst of one of Felice Venable’s white and virgin frosted silver cakes.

  Shouts, screams, upleapings. Isaiah plucked, white-bottomed, out of the center of the vast pastry. The sudden grayish pallor of his face matched the silver tone of his pants’ seat. Felice Venable, nerves strained to breaking, lifted her hand to cuff him smartly. But the black boy was too quick for her. With the swiftness of a wild thing he scuttled across the table to where Yancey Cravat stood with his wife and child, leaped nimbly to the floor, crept between the man’s legs like a whimpering little dog, and lay there, locked in the safety of Yancey’s great knees.

  3

  Indians were no novelty to the townspeople of Wichita. Sabra had seen them all her life. At the age of three Cim was held up in his father’s arms to watch a great band of them go by on one of their annual pilgrimages. He played Indian, of course, patting his lips to simulate the Indian yodeling yell. He had a war bonnet made of chicken feathers sewed to the edge of a long strip of red calico.

  Twice a year, chaperoned by old General “Bull” Plummer, the Indians swept through the streets of Wichita in their visiting regalia—feathers, beads, blankets, chains—a brilliant sight. Ahead of them and behind them was the reassuring blue of United States army uniforms worn by the Kansas regiment from Fort Riley. All Wichita, accustomed to them though it was, rushed out to gaze at them from store doorways and offices and kitchens. Bucks, braves, chiefs, squaws, papooses; tepees, poles, pots, dogs, ponies, the cavalcade swept through the quiet sunny streets of the mid-western town, a vivid frieze of color against the drab monotony of the prairies.

  In late spring it was likely to be the Cheyennes going north from their reservation in the Indian Territory to visit their cousins the Sioux in Dakota. In the late autumn it was the Sioux riding south to return the visit of the Cheyennes. Both of these were horse Indians, and of the Plains tribes, great visitors among themselves, and as gossipy and highly gregarious as old women on a hotel veranda. Usually they called a halt in their journey to make camp for the night outside the town. Though watched over by martial eye, they usually managed to pilfer, in a friendly sort of way, anything they could lay hands on—chickens, wash unwisely left on the line, the very clothes off the scarecrows in the field.

  Throughout the year there were always little groups of Indians to be seen on the streets of the town—Kaws, Osages, and Poncas. They came on ponies or in wagons from their reservations; bought bacon, calico, whisky if they could get it. You saw them squatting on their haunches in the dust of the sunny street, silent, sloe eyed, aloof. They seemed to be studying the townspeople passing to and fro. Only their eyes moved. Their dress was a mixture of savagery and civilization. The Osages, especially, clung to the blanket. Trousers, coat, and even hat might be in the conventional pattern of the whites. But over this the Osage wore his striped blanket of vivid orange and purple and red. It was as though he defied the whites to take from him that last insignia of race.

  A cowed enough people they seemed by now; dirty, degraded. Since the Custer Massacre of ’76 they had been pretty thoroughly beaten into submission. Only occasionally there seemed to emanate from a band of them a sullen, enduring hate. It had no definite expression. It was not in their bearing; it could not be said to look out from the dead black Indian eye, nor was it anywhere about the immobile parchment face. Yet somewhere black implacable resentment smoldered in the heart of this dying race.

  In one way or another, at school, in books and newspapers of the time, in her father’s talk with the men and women of his own generation, Sabra had picked up odds and ends of information about these silent, slothful, yet sinister figures. She had been surprised—even incredulous—at her husband’s partisanship of the redskins. It was one of his absurdities. He seemed actually to consider them as human beings.

  Tears came to his own eyes when he spoke of that blot on southern civilization, the Trail of Tears, in which the Cherokees, a peaceful and home-loving Indian tribe, were torn from the land which a government had given them by sworn treaty, to be sent far away on a march which, from cold, hunger, exposure, and heartbreak, was marked by bleaching bones from Georgia to Oklahoma. Yancey and old Lewis Venable had a long-standing feud on the subject of Mississippi’s treatment of the Choctaws and Georgia’s cruelty to the Cherokees.

  “Oh, treaties!” sneered Yancey’s father-in-law, outraged at some blistering editorial with which Yancey had enlivened the pages of the Wichita Wigwam. “One doesn’t make treaties with savages—and expect to keep them.”

  “You call the Choctaws, the Creeks, the Chickasaws, the Cherokees and the Seminoles savages! They are the Five Civilized Tribes! They had their laws, they had their religion, they cultivated the land, they were peaceful, home-loving, wise. Would you call Chief Apushmataha a savage?”

  “Certainly, sir! Most assuredly.”

  “How about Sequoyah? John Ross? Stand Waitie? Quanah
Parker? They were wise men. Great men.”

  “Savages, with enough white blood in them to make them leaders of their dull-witted, full-blood brothers. The Creeks, sir” (he pronounced it “suh”), “intermarried with niggers. And so did the Choctaws; and the Seminoles down in Florida.”

  Yancey smiled his winning smile. “I understand that while you Southerners didn’t exactly marry——”

  “Marriage, sir, is one thing. Nature, sir, is another. Far from signing treaties with these creatures and giving them valuable American land to call their own——”

  “Which was their own before we took it away from them.”

  “—I would be in favor of extermination by some humane but effective process. They are a sore on the benign bosom of an otherwise healthy government.”

  “It is now being done as effectively as even you could wish, though perhaps lacking a little something on the humane side.”

  From her father and mother, too, Sabra had heard much of this sort of talk before Yancey had come into her life. She had heard of them at school, as well. Their savagery and trickiness had been emphasized; their tragedy had been glossed over or scarcely touched upon. Sabra, if she considered them at all, thought of them as dirty and useless two-footed animals. In her girlhood she had gone to a school conducted by the Sisters of Loretto, under the jurisdiction of the Jesuit Fathers. Early in the history of Kansas, long before Sabra’s day, it had started as a Mission school, and the indefatigable Jesuit priests had traveled the country on horseback, riding the weary and dangerous miles over the prairies to convert the Indians. Mother Bridget, a powerful, heavy woman of past sixty now, shrewd, dominating, yet strangely childlike, had come to the Mission when a girl just past her novitiate, in the wild and woolly days of Kansas. She had seen the oxen haul the native yellow limestone of which the building was made; she had known the fear of the scalping knife; with her own big, capable, curiously masculine hands she had planted the first young fruit trees, the vegetable and flower garden that now flourished in the encircling osage hedge; she had superintended the building of the great hedge itself, made of the tough yet supple wood that the exploring pioneer French had called bois d’arc, because in the early days the Indians had fashioned their bows of it. Then Kansans had corrupted the word until now the wood was known as “bodark.” The Mission had been an Indian school then, with a constantly fluctuating attendance. One day there would be forty pairs of curiously dead black Indian eyes intent on a primer of reading, writing, or arithmetic; the next there would none. The tribe had gone on a visit to a neighboring friendly tribe. Bucks and squaws, ponies and dogs and children, they were off on society bent, the Osages visiting the Kaws, or the Kaws the Quapaws. At other times their absence might mean something more sinister—an uprising in the brewing, or an attack on an enemy tribe. Mother Bridget had terrible tales to tell. She could even make grim jokes about those early days. “Hair-raising times they were,” she would tell you (it was her pet pun), “in more ways than one, as many a poor white settler could prove to you who’d had the scalp lifted off him by the knife.” She had taught the Indian girls to sew, to exchange wigwams for cabins, and to wear sunbonnets and to speak about their souls and their earthly troubles as well to a Great Father named God who was much more powerful than the Sun and the Rain and the Wind to whom they attributed such potency. These things they did with gratifying docility for weeks at a time, or even months, after which it was discovered that they buried their dead under the cabins, removing enough of the puncheon floor to enable them to dig a grave, laying the timbers back neatly, and then deserting the cabins to live outdoors again, going back to the blanket at the same time and holding elaborate placating ceremonies to various gods of the elements. Mother Bridget (Sister Bridget then, red cheeked in her wimple, her beads clicking a stubborn race against the treachery of the savages) and the other Sisters of Loretto had it all to do over again from the start.