Cimarron

by Edna Ferber

  Most astounding of all were the Indian items, for now the Oklahoma Wigwam and every other paper in the county regularly ran news about those incredible people who in one short year had leaped from the Neolithic Age to Broadway.

  The Osage Indians, a little more than two thousand in number, who but yesterday were a ragged, half-fed, and listless band, squatting wretchedly on the Reservation allotted them, waiting until time, sickness, and misery should blot them forever from the land, were now, by a miracle of nature, the richest nation in the world. The barren ground on which they had lived now yielded the most lavish oil flow in the state. Yancey Cravat’s news story and editorial had been copied and read all over the country. A stunned government tried to bring order out of a chaos of riches. The two thousand Osages were swept off the Reservation to make way for the flood of oil that was transmuted into a flood of gold. They were transported to a new section called Wazhazhe, which is the ancient Indian word for Osage.

  Agents appointed. Offices established. Millions of barrels of oil. Millions of dollars. Millions of dollars yearly to be divided somehow among two thousand Osage Indians, to whom a blanket, a bowl of Soffica, a mangy pony, a bit of tobacco, a disk of peyote had meant riches. And now every full-blood, half-blood, or quarter-blood Osage was put on the Indian Roll, and every name on the Indian Roll was entitled to a Head Right. Every head right meant a definite share in the millions. Five in a family—five head rights. Ten in a family—ten head rights. The Indian Agent’s office was full of typewriters, files, pads, ledgers, neat young clerks all occupied with papers and documents that read like some fantastic nightmare. The white man’s eye, traveling down the tidy list, with its storybook Indian names and its hard, cold, matter-of-fact figures, rejected what it read as being too absurd for the mind to grasp.

  Clint Tall Meat $523,000

  Benny Warrior $192,000

  Ho ki ah se $265,887

  Long Foot Magpie $387,942

  The government bought them farms with their own oil money, and built big red brick houses near the roadside and furnished them in plush and pianos and linoleum and gas ranges and phonographs. You saw their powerful motor cars, dust covered, whirling up and down the red clay Oklahoma roads—those roads still rutted, unpaved, hazardous, for Oklahoma had had no time to attend to such matters. Fifty years before, whole bands of Osages on their wiry little ponies had traveled south in the winter and north in the summer to visit their Indian cousins. Later, huddled miserably on their Reservation, they had issued forth on foot or in wretched wagons to pay their seasonal visits and to try to recapture, by talk and song and dance and ritual, some pale ghost of their departed happiness. A shabby enough procession, guarded, furtive, smoldering.

  But now you saw each Osage buck in his high-powered car, his inexpert hands grasping the wheel, his enormous sombrero—larger even than the white man’s hat—flapping in the breeze that he made by his speed. In the back you saw the brilliance of feathers and blankets worn by the beady-eyed children and the great placid squaw crouched in the bottom of the car. The white man driving the same road gave these Indian cars a wide berth, for he knew they stopped for no one, kept the middle of the road, flew over bridges, draws, and ditches like mad things.

  Grudgingly, for she still despised them, Sabra Cravat devoted a page of the Wigwam to news of the Osages, those moneyed, petted wards of a bewildered government. The page appeared under the title of Indian News, and its contents were more than tinged with the grotesque.

  Long Foot Magpie and wife were week-end visitors of Plenty Horses at Watonga recently.

  Grandma Standing Woman of near Hominy was a visitor at the home of Red Paint Woman.

  Mr. and Mrs. Sampson Lame Bull have returned from Osage after accompanying Mrs. Twin Woman, who is now a patient in the Osage Hospital.

  Albert Short Tooth and Robert White Eyes are batching it at the home of Mrs. Ghost Woman during her absence.

  Laura Bird Woman and Thelma Eagle Nest of near here motored to Grey Horse to visit Sore Head but he was not at home.

  Woodson Short Man and wife were shopping in Osage one day last week.

  Red Bird Scabby has left the Reservation for a visit to Colorado Springs and Manitou.

  Squaw Iki has returned recently after being a patient at the Concho Hospital for some time.

  Joe Stump Horn and his wife Mrs. Long Dead are visiting Red Nose Scabby for a few days.

  Sun Maker has given up the effort to find a first-class cook in Wazhazhe and is looking around in Osage.

  The Osages were Wigwam subscribers. They read the paper, or had it read to them if they were of the older and less literate generation. Sabra was accustomed to seeing the doorway suddenly darkened by a huge blanketed form or to look up, startled, to behold the brilliant striped figure standing beside her desk in the business office. If Yancey chanced to be in the occasion became very social.

  “How!”

  “How!”

  “Want um paper.”

  “All right, Short Tooth. Five dollars.”

  The blanketed figure would produce a wallet whose cheeks were plump to bursting with round silver dollars, for the Osage loved the sound and feel of the bright metal disks. Down on the desk they clinked.

  The huge Osage stood then, waiting. Yancey knew what was wanted, as did Sabra.

  “Me want see iron man. Make um name.”

  Whereupon Yancey or Sabra would conduct the visitor into the composing room. There were three linotype machines now, clanking and chattering away. Once Yancey had taken old Big Elk, Ruby’s father, back there to see how the linotype turned liquid lead into printed words. He had had Jesse Rickey, at the linotype’s keyboard, turn out old Big Elk’s name in the form of a neat metal bar, together with the paper slip of its imprint.

  There was no stopping it. The story of the iron monster that could talk and write and move spread like a prairie fire through Wazhazhe. Whole families subscribed separately for the Oklahoma Wigwam—bucks, squaws, girls, boys, papooses in arms. The iron monster had for them a fascination that was a mingling of admiration, awe, and fear. It was useless to explain that they need not take out a subscription in order to own one of these coveted metal bars. It had been done once. They always would do it that way. Sabra, if she happened to be in charge, always gave the five dollars to her pet charity, after trying in vain to refuse it when proffered. Yancey took it cheerfully and treated the boys at the new Sunny South Saloon, now a thing of splendor with its mahogany bar, its brass rail, its mirror, chandeliers, and flesh-tinted oil paintings.

  Up and down the dusty Oklahoma roads at terrific speed, up and down Pawhuska Avenue, went the blanketed figures in their Packard and Pierce Arrow cars. The merchants of Osage liked to see them in town. It meant money freely spent on luxuries. The Osage Indian men were broad shouldered, magnificent, the women tall, stately. Now they grew huge with sloth and overfeeding. They ate enormously and richly. They paced Pawhuska Avenue with slow measured tread; calm, complete, grandly content. The women walked bareheaded, their brilliant blankets, striped purple and orange and green and red, wrapped about their shoulders and enveloping them from neck to heels. But beneath this you saw dresses of silk, American in make and style. On their feet were slippers of pale fine kid, high-heeled, or of patent-leather, ornamented with buckles of cut steel, shining and costly. The men wore the blanket, too, but beneath it they liked a shirt of silk brocade in gorgeous colors—bright green or purple or cerise—its tail worn outside the trousers, and the trousers often as not trimmed with a pattern of beadwork at the side. On their heads they wore huge sombreros trimmed with bands of snakeskin ornamented with silver. They hired white chauffeurs to drive their big sedan cars and sat back grandly after ordering them to drive round and round and round the main business block. Jewelry shops began to display their glistening ware in Osage, not so much in the hope of winning the favor of the white oil millionaire as the red. Bracelets, watches, gaudy rings and pins and bangles and beads and combs and buckles.
Diamonds. These the Indians seemed instinctively to know about, and they bought them clear and blue-white and costly.

  The Levy Mercantile Company had added a fancy grocery and market department to its three-story brick store. It was situated on the street floor and enhanced with a great plate-glass window. In this window Sol displayed a mouth-watering assortment of foods. Juicy white stalks of asparagus in glass, as large around as a man’s two thumbs; great ripe olives, their purple-black cheeks glistening with oil; lobster, mushrooms, French peas, sardines, mountainous golden cheeses, tender broilers, peaches in syrup, pork roasts dressed in frills. Dozens of chickens, pounds of pork, baskets of delicacies were piled in the cars of homeward bound Osages. Often, when the food bills mounted too high, the Indian Agent at Wazhazhe threatened to let the bill go unpaid. He alone had the power to check the outpouring of Indian gold, and even he frequently was unable to cope with their mad extravagances.

  “It’s disgusting,” Sabra Cravat said, again and again. “What are they good for? What earthly good are they? Ignorant savages who do nothing but eat and sleep and drive around in their ridiculous huge automobiles.”

  “Keep money in circulation,” Sol Levy replied, for she often took him to task after seeing a line of Indian cars parked outside the Osage Mercantile Company’s store.

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  “Now, now, Sabra. Not so grand, please. I don’t do like dozens of other merchants here in town. Make out bills for goods they haven’t bought and give them the money. Or charge them double on the bill that the Indian Agent sees, and return them the overcharge. They come in my store, they buy, they pay what the article is marked, and they get what they pay for. Inez Bull comes in and gets a silk step-in, or Sun Maker he buys twelve pounds of chicken and ten pounds of pork. I should tell them they can’t have it! Let the President of the United States do it. The Big White Father.”

  Not only did Yancey agree with Sol, he seemed to find enormous satisfaction in the lavishness with which they spent their oil money; in the very absurdity of the things they bought.

  “The joke gets better and better. We took their land away from them and exterminated the buffalo, then expected them to squat on the Reservations weaving baskets and molding pottery that nobody wanted to buy. Well, at least the Osages never did that. They’re spending their money just as the white people do when they get a handful of it—chicken and plush and automobiles and phonographs and silk shirts and jewelry.”

  “Why don’t they do some good with it?” Sabra demanded.

  “What good’s Wyatt doing? Or Nisbett, or old Buckner, or Ike Hawes, or their wives! Blowing it on houses and travel and diamonds and high-priced cars.”

  “The Osages could help the other tribes—poor Indian tribes that haven’t struck oil.”

  “Maybe they will—when Bixby gives away his millions to down-and-out hotel keepers who are as poor as he was when he ran the Bixby House, back in the old days.”

  “Filthy savages!”

  “No, honey. Just blanket Indians—horse Indians—Plains Indians, with about twenty-five millions of dollars a year gushing up out of the earth and splattering all around them. The wonder to me is that they don’t die laughing and spoil their own good time.”

  Sometimes Sabra encountered old Big Elk and his vast squaw and Ruby Big Elk, together with others of the family—a large one for an Osage—driving through Pawhuska Avenue. With their assembled head rights the family was enormously rich—one of the wealthiest on the Wazhazhe Reservation. When the Big Elks drove through the town it was a parade. No one car could have contained the family, though they would have scorned such economy even if it had been possible.

  They made a brilliant Indian frieze in the modern manner. Old Big Elk and his wife, somewhat conservatively, lolled in a glittering Lincoln driven by a white chauffeur. Through the generous glass windows you saw the two fat bronze faces, the massive bodies, the brilliant colors of their blankets and chains and beads. One of the Big Elk boys drove a snow-white Pierce Arrow roadster that tore and shrieked like an avenging demon up and down the dusty road between Osage and Wazhazhe. Ruby herself, and a sister-in-law or so, and a brother, might follow in one of the Packards, while still another brother or sister preferred a Cadillac. If they walked at all it was to ascend with stately step the entrance to the Indian Agent’s Office. The boys wore American dress, with perhaps an occasional Indian incongruity—beaded pants, a five-gallon hat with an eagle feather in it, sometimes moccasins. Ruby and her sisters and her sister-in-law wore the fine and gaudy blanket over their American dresses, they were hatless, and their long bountiful hair was done Indian fashion. The dress of old Big Elk and his wife was a gorgeous mixture of Indian and American, with the Indian triumphantly predominating. About the whole party, as in the case of any of the Osage oil families, there was an air of quiet insolence, of deep rich triumph.

  Sabra always greeted them politely enough. “How do you do, Ruby,” she would say. “What a beautiful dress.” Ruby would say nothing. She would look at Sabra’s neat business dress of dark blue or gray, at Sabra’s plain little hat and sensible oxford ties. “Give my regards to your father and mother,” Sabra would continue, blandly, but inwardly furious to find herself feeling uncomfortable and awkward beneath this expressionless Indian gaze. She fancied that in it there was something menacing, something triumphant. She wondered if Ruby, the oft-married, had married yet again. Once she asked young Cim about her, making her tone casual. “Do you ever see that girl who used to work here—Ruby, wasn’t that it? Ruby Big Elk?”

  Cim’s tone was even more casual than hers. “Oh, yes. We were working out Wazhazhe way, you know, on the Choteau field. That’s near by.”

  “They’re terribly rich, aren’t they?”

  “Oh, rotten. A fleet of cars and a regular flock of houses.”

  “It’s a wonder that some miserable white squaw man hasn’t married that big greasy Ruby for her head right. Mrs. Conn Sanders told me that one of the Big Elk boys was actually playing golf out at the Westchester Apawamis Club last Saturday. It’s disgusting. He must know there’s a rule against Indians. Mrs. Sanders reported him to the house committee.”

  “There’s a rule, all right. But you ought to see the gallery when Standing Bear whams it out so straight and so far that he makes the pro look like a ping-pong player.”

  “How is he in a tomahawk contest?”

  “Oh, Mother, you talk like Grandma when she used to visit here.”

  “The Marcys and the Venables didn’t hobnob with dirty savages in blankets.”

  “Standing Bear doesn’t wear his blanket when he plays golf,” retorted Cim, coolly. “And he took a shower after he’d made the course in seven below par.”

  Donna came home from a bridge party one afternoon a week later, the creamy Venable pallor showing the Marcy tinge of ocherous rage. She burst in upon Sabra, home from the office.

  “Do you know that Cim spends his time at the Big Elks’ when we think he’s out in the oil fields?”

  Sabra met this as calmly as might be. “He’s working near there. He told me he had seen them.”

  “Seen them! That miserable Gazelle Slaughter said that he’s out there all the time. All the time, I tell you, and that he and Ruby drive around in her car, and he eats with them, he stays there, he——”

  “I’ll speak to your father. Cim’s coming home Saturday. Gazelle is angry at Cim, you know that, because he won’t notice her and she likes him.”

  She turned her clear appraising gaze upon this strange daughter of hers. She thought, suddenly, that Donna was like a cobra, with that sleek black head, that cold and slanting eye, that long creamy throat in which a pulse sometimes could be seen to beat and swell a little—the only sign of emotion in this baffling creature.

  “I’ll tell you what, Donna. If you’d pay a little less attention to your brother’s social lapses and a little more to your own vulgar conduct, perhaps it would be better.”

/>   Donna bestowed her rare and brilliant smile upon her forthright mother. “Now, now, darling! I suppose I say, ‘What do you mean?’ And you say, ‘You know very well what I mean.’ ”

  “You certainly do know what I mean. If you weren’t my own daughter I’d say your conduct with Tracy Wyatt was that of a—a——”

  “Harlot,” put in Donna, sweetly.

  “Donna! How can you talk like that? You are breaking my heart. Haven’t I had enough? I’ve never complained, have I? But now—you——”

  Donna came over to her and put her arms about her, as though she were the older woman protecting the younger. “It’s all right, Mamma darling. You just don’t understand. Life isn’t as simple as it was when you were a frontier gal. I know what I want and I’m going to get it.”

  Sabra shrugged away from her; faced her with scorn. “I’ve seen you. I’m ashamed for you. You press against him like a—like a——” Again she could not say it. Another generation. “And that horse you ride. You say he loans it to you. He gave it to you. It’s yours. What for?”

  She was weeping.

  “I tell you it’s all right, Mamma. He did give it to me. He wants to give me lots of things, but I won’t take them, yet. Tracy’s in love with me. He thinks I’m young and beautiful and stimulating and wonderful. He’s married to a dried-up, vinegary, bitter old hag who was just that when he married her, years ago. He’s never known what love is. She has never given him children. He’s insanely rich, and not too old, and rather sweet. We’re going to be married. Tracy will get his divorce. Money does anything. It has taken me a year and a half to do it. I’ve never worked so hard in all my life. But it’s going to be worth it. Don’t worry, darling. Tracy’s making an honest woman of your wayward daughter.”