The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana)

by Robert Lewis Taylor

  The men threatened me with tomahawks and made a number of references to burning, that I had come to recognize in Pawnee, but otherwise did me no mischief. I judged they had been given orders about the horse trading, and had decided not to damage a valuable piece of merchandise, which would be the same as damaging the horses themselves.

  Back at camp, it was easy to see some kind of preparations were afoot. They were getting ready for a feast. The braves had put on new paint, and some of the women were spruced up, even having washed their hands and feet in the stream. Scarcely anybody paid me any attention. I didn’t see Afraid of His Horse anywhere, and Sick from Blackberries, when I walked up to our lodge, only grunted and looked the other direction. That didn’t bother me any; I didn’t like him, either.

  All over camp there was the kind of holiday air you get at a church social, where everybody brings a basket full of good things to eat and they set up long tables end to end on the lawn in the summer and the congregation goes at it together, diving into each other’s contributions—fried chicken and devil’s food cake and potato salad and watermelon and lemonade in an open-end keg with smooth cakes of ice, maybe twenty-five or fifty pounds, floating inside, and the women making compliments about each other’s cooking, but running down their own, you know, while you can hardly stand up for the children whooping across the lawn and crawling under tables. It made me sick to think about.

  Well, these Indians were getting ready for a basket dinner, too, but it wasn’t the same kind. Toward noon there was a hullabaloo of people running and pointing, and sure enough, over the hill here came another such bunch as I was with, and in the front right behind the chief were two white men, and they were John and Shep.

  I almost sank through the ground. It was all up with me now, because if the Indians didn’t tomahawk me, Shep would be certain to shoot me, to settle old scores. But they rode on into camp, and when they saw me, Shep sang out:

  “Well, as I live and breathe! If it ain’t our old friend that we owe so much.”

  “You’ve come to a pretty pass, boy,” said John, looking down from his horse, thoughtful and grave, and to prove it he added a scriptural verse that was aimed to cover the case: “ ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is an ungrateful child.’ ”

  “How do you do, you’re keeping well, I hope,” I said, as fresh as I was able, what with my heart going the way it was. To tell you the truth, I was so tired of trouble and downcast from Pretty Walker’s treachery, I’d as soon they got it over; I was that reduced.

  “We’ll tend to your case later,” said Shep.

  They turned away with some of the leading men, and it was then I saw the reason for all this hilarity. On the end of some ropes, behind horses, they had three other captives, all Indians, and they were scalped. The raw, red, dripping tops of their heads was more than a body could stomach, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off them, somehow. These men were Crows, I found out later, the worst enemies the Pawnees had, and the fiercest fighters of any western tribe. How these mangy dogs of mine managed to capture them I don’t know—took them asleep while apart from the tribe, I reckoned. Anyhow, all three were conscious and seemed perfectly resigned to what was going to happen.

  The capture was such a big event to the Pawnees that two or three branches of the thieving tribe had gathered to make merry. They had an entertainment arranged in two parts, but I didn’t find out the second part till evening.

  I should say that I was now shackled hand and foot and couldn’t have run off if they’d pointed out the direction and given me a going-away present. As soon as I was safely trussed up, Particular as to the Time of Day and the ones I had fooled came up and spent a while slapping me and pushing me over. Then they turned to the principal show, which was being arranged by the men.

  First off, three stakes were set up in the center of our clearing, and dry brush, but not very much, was placed around each. Then the prisoners were gagged and bound and withes fastened around their waists and under their arms. In that way, they were tied to the stakes.

  When everything was ready, the squaws rushed up with torches of dug-up fat wood and lit the twigs. I wondered why there was such a scarce amount of brush, but they had a good and typical reason. These poor devils weren’t going to be killed right out but would be roasted to death slowly, so as to cook the flesh for eating and save the muscles for bows.

  I can see that scene now, when the troubles of our journey are behind us. The captives weren’t able to scream because of the gags, but low moans could be heard, piteous and eerie, and they strained against the withes until their veins stood out like cords. It was heart-rending, but I still couldn’t seem to look away. I put a cloth to my nose, but it didn’t work; that stink of burning flesh was everywhere—I smelled it later that night on my clothes when I went to bed, cooked into the cloth, like something oily and rotten.

  How could anybody that called himself a human watch a scene like that with enjoyment? But as the smoke rose up, and the moans and threshing around increased, the braves undertook a jerky dance, with war whoops and brandishing of weapons, and there began such a general uproar that it echoed over the prairie like the Judgment Day. I never heard anything like it for pure outright lunacy. And the children joined in, too. It was one of the happiest games they’d ever played; they laughed and shouted every time a particularly pitiful moan stood out above the others.

  I thought to myself, I’ll bet that girl draws the line at this kind of thing. Even if she turned me in, she was good fun when we ran away, and her smiling in the rain was something I liked to think about. I looked all around, then saw her sitting cross-legged on the ground not far from the stakes, leaning forward, with her mouth slightly ajar. When my eye caught her, she wetted her lips with her tongue, and her eyes got a little glaze to them, very strange. She seemed in a trance, almost; with her arms hugged close around her breast and the upper part of her swaying back and forth like a snake that’s raised its head to watch something in the bush.

  I closed my eyes, sick all over again. When I opened them up Shep had slouched away from the circle of dancers, bending low to kneel down beside her. He whispered something in her ear. She came out of her trance with a shake and grabbed his arm suddenly, as if she had seen him before and was glad to find him there. He whispered something, and they got up together, then walked very quickly to her wigwam and disappeared through the flap.

  I thought about snatching a brand from the fire, then running over and flinging it inside, but the dance stopped and everybody rushed forward to the stakes—the poor wretches twisting in the bonds had finally died.

  I didn’t join in the feast that followed. Unnoticed, I crept into Sick’s wigwam and after a long time fell into a shallow doze. But the shrieks, and the stamping, and the cries of the happy children outside kept sifting through; I didn’t sleep much, but woke up, wet all over with sweat, three or four times.

  That night they had the main entertainment, and they made me come out to watch. The festivities got started sometime before dark and lasted two or three hours. There had been a strong tribe of Indians called the Mandans ten or fifteen years before, as I learned a long time afterward, but they’d been weakened and nearly wiped out in fights with the Crows, Cheyenne, Sioux and Blackfeet. Along the way, though, they had developed some very fine customs, everybody said so, even their enemies, and these Pawnees had picked up a few. What we had now was one of the meanest, the “ordeal of manhood,” as they said, known as O-Kee-Wah.

  The tribe took seats on the ground before a long, stout log they had slung across two crotched upright poles about eight feet high. Shep and John were there, on either side of the chiefs, and the doctors, or medicine men, were dressed up with wolf heads and jewels and feathers and things to rattle in their hands, and seemed prosperous, as if they’d established a very good practice, with customers that paid up on schedule. They were fussing around, making signs in the air, hissing, and going through a lot of ridiculous contortions, and pretty so
on the braves led out two boys of our tribe, fourteen or so years old. I knew one of them well enough—his name was Buffalo Horn. Along with some others, he had offered me a drink at a water hole once but it turned out to be alkali and near about burned my mouth out. The second one I’d seen around but didn’t know well, thanks to goodness.

  Right now these fellows didn’t seem so brash; it appeared to me they weren’t looking forward to O-Kee-Wah of the Mandans. Well, once the boys reached the center, the braves took up a kind of chant, while the medicine men hopped around and yowled with about the poorest bedside manner ever developed, then, when the noise died down, the chiefs got immediately to business. They stripped those poor youngsters clear naked and laid them on the ground, after which the medicine men knelt down with sharp knives and cut long deep incisions in the upper chest muscles on the right side, down far enough to expose the tendons.

  Nothing was done to kill the pain or make it easier—no whiskey, no powders, nothing. One of the boys started to whimper but there was such a grumble from several braves that he stopped. They both looked like death all the same. Their bodies turned rigid, their eyes rolled up, and their fingers clenched the grass.

  Bad as this was, it was only the beginning. You might have thought they had showed manhood enough for a few years, but the real test hadn’t come yet. In a few minutes, after recovering a little, they were given something to drink out of a gourd and then propped upright, bleeding like pigs, and supported by braves on either side.

  When the next part came, I closed my eyes tight and tried to remember something pleasant to blot it out. Mumbling, making signs in the air, and twisting around, the medicine men came forward and, holding some thongs, probed deep down inside the wounds, pulled up a big tendon on each, and tied them to thongs. A noisy shout went up as the boys were hauled up and suspended from the log, dangling, you see, from their own chest muscles. Both were still conscious but they appeared to be dying; their tongues, black and swoll-up, stuck out to the side like somebody that’s been hung. But the medicine men daubed powder from a long-handled brush on the wounds, and where blood was gushing a minute before, everything now dried up and stopped. It was uncanny.

  Those boys weren’t out of the woods yet, though. One of them cried out, then bit it off quick at the chorus of growls. The other, Buffalo Horn, fainted in a minute or so, his nose began to bleed, and they cut him down. His partner hung on a few moments longer; he was the winner, then. Both had showed manhood, the braves said, but Buffalo Horn, fainting first, hadn’t shown quite as much as the other fellow.

  By the way the medicine men pranced around, as the boys lay unconscious, I judged the demonstration had been a success. Anyway, the tribe was so set up and warmed by this butchery that they were kind of taken out of themselves. I won’t tell all that happened during this nonsense, but it wasn’t nice to see; it even lacked considerable of being decent. Shep and John had got out some whiskey, which frisked things up more, and while Shep was putting in most of his time with the girls, John sat silent and glum in the edge of the firelight, lost in broody thought, just as before. Well, he had come down a peg since the days when he was Murrel, the pirate, and wore fine clothes. As far as I was concerned, these animals were the lowest note in the scale. If you wanted to make a joke about anything so ornery, you might say they had finished last in the human race. I never saw any others like them, before or since, for outright calculated cruelty.

  Well, things were so noisy and rambunctious that everybody got thirsty for more amusement—half killing the boys hadn’t been enough—so a couple of drunken braves spied me trying to crawl aside and dragged me forward to run between two lines. This was one of their favorite ordeals; Indians are always cooking up a bone-crusher of a test for somebody else.

  They formed two rows, including the squaws and children, and after taking off my foot bonds made me ape it through them, one end to the other. While I did so, they hit me over the head and shoulders with whips and sticks. It was painful; I was all over bruises. This might have gone on till they killed me—they were that fired up—but a lucky accident ended it: a visiting chief, that they called Standing Bear, was goggle-eyed-drunk by now and was doing a kind of solo dance off to one side, twirling his rifle to show what a dangerous fellow he was when aroused, and sure enough he proved it by gyrating so fast and dangerous he whacked his gun against his knee and it went off and shot him through the side, the bullet making a clean hole front and rear.

  This broke up the party. When the Indians saw they might get shot themselves, they more or less lost interest. There was a big racket made about the punctured chief, too. You might have thought he was the King of England the way they took on. Squaws enjoy wailing anyhow; they’ve got so many stored-up grievances they go all to pieces when something official happens; it’s like an overloaded dam giving way.

  They carried this Standing Bear, who wasn’t any longer able to stand, onto a blanket by the fire and the medicine men got ready to save him. If their prancing and face-twisting had seemed odd before, they let go with everything now, on this emergency case. One threw some root dust into the air and yelled “Goo-Wah!”; then he bent over and looked at the wound, but it must have been the wrong diagnosis, because the blood kept right on seeping out the back. Another took two gourds with dried peas inside and shook them, very hard, in the injured man’s face, but all he got was a pretty brisk cussing, because this chief was a tough old nut and had troubles enough without any folderol of that sort.

  I stuck around, curious. I was relieved to be shut of the gauntlet, and hoped it wouldn’t start up again. In a couple of hours all the bleeding had stopped, and the chief looked sweaty and feverish. I knew these signs from having been around my father on cases. And by midnight it was perfectly plain that the old scoundrel was dying. He was breathing very hard, with wheezing noises, and seemed puffed up. I knew what had to be done—I’d sat in once at the shantyboats when my father treated just such an accident.

  It went against my grain to do a service for these monsters but I didn’t think it could hurt any to help a chief. So I hunted up Afraid of His Horse, who was trying to wheedle a drink from a visitor, and told him I had strong medicine to draw devils out of Standing Bear’s wound. Being drunk, I thought for a minute he had decided to hit me, just for practice. When it finally soaked through what I said, he left and told what braves were sober enough to listen, and they called me over.

  We talked through Afraid, first the leaders, with the doctors, asking questions and then me answering. I said my father had been the biggest medicine man in Louisville, and had cured up much worse cases than this, and had once fixed a man that had been shot through the stomach with a cannon ball. This was a lie, of course, but I couldn’t see anything wrong with stretching things, and anyhow it was a pretty good lie, and cheered me up. So they held a meeting with Afraid, who turned to me and said:

  “Medicine men ask what father wear on head?”

  This Afraid of His Horse was such a confirmed jackass that I couldn’t be serious with him very long, even when I knew he was apt to whack me. So I said, “For house calls he wears a derby made of rooster feathers but for the Marine Hospital he favors an opera hat with a goat’s head on top.”

  They went into this, not understanding, praise the saints, and then Afraid turned back.

  “Medicine men no believe—say how father fix coughing broth?”

  “It’s a professional secret—I can’t let it out, but I’ll say this—it’s got something to do with tree frogs.”

  Another confab, and back again.

  “Medicine men say any spiders mixed in?”

  “Not any more—they’ve gone out in Louisville. It’s against the law to use medical spiders in Kentucky now.”

  Then I sort of overdid things, because I had got too cocky, being as I was having so much fun, and said, looking stern, “If you want to know something, those quacks of yours couldn’t pass the examinations in Louisville. They’d be arrested for prac
ticing medicine without a license. Why—”

  I knew it. You could fool Afraid part of the time but you couldn’t do it forever. He fetched me a clout that sent me sprawling.

  Well, the leaders of the tribes put their heads together for a few minutes, then they beckoned me over, and didn’t those medicine men look sour! But your general run of Indians, though stupid, comes a long shot from having complete faith in humbugs of that kind; they recognize a lot of it for just what it is—low-down trickery and superstition. Anyhow, the average medicine man, or shaman, isn’t anything more than a general practitioner, of no account in specialized cases, and everybody in the tribe knows it. Still and all, these medicine men aren’t always wrong. For instance, a few hours later I checked up on the incisions they made in those boys and you could scarcely see them. Some of the Indian medicines were sound; there wasn’t the least doubt about that.

  I asked for a thin willow twig two feet long; then I borrowed an India silk handkerchief from a girl I’d seen wearing one, and boiled some water. It took a few minutes to strip the bark off the willow, leaving the yellow wood slippery and bare, and after this I pared down the joints. For a minute, I thought the chief had died, for he gave several astonishing gasps that raised his chest up and down, and when I bent over to look he seemed purplish in the face. I was scared, because if this old polecat skipped out before I began work, they would blame me sure. So I hurried up and wrapped the India kerchief around the wand and dipped it in boiling water, waving it around to cool off a little, then worked the willow in and down, having to force it because the hole had closed back and clotted the blood. As far gone as he was, the old man felt that plunge, for he raised his shoulders clean off the ground and gave out a howl to rouse his ancestors. I never heard such a shriek. And only a few hours before, he had been one of the mainstays against letting those boys make any sound at all.