Watching Eagles Soar

by Margaret Coel

  What I had was a set of facts about two events with an obvious relationship. The Camp Weld Council precipitated the Sand Creek Massacre in that the tribes would not have been camped at Sand Creek if they had not been instructed to go there. But there were other facts, small and obscure—casual remarks in letters, reports of overheard conversations, veiled phrases in memoirs and journals—which depended upon imagination to make the connections that revealed the true depth of the relationship between these events, to see that all the time the white authorities were assuring the tribal leaders of their good will at Camp Weld, they were condemning them and their families to death at Sand Creek.

  Strange and inexplicable, the way imagination connects the facts that allow the truth to shine through. But it happens because authors live inside the story, with all of their antennae finely tuned, as alert to nuances and stolen glances—maybe even more alert—as in their own lives. Authors move through the worlds inhabited by story people, live in their houses and apartments, walk down their streets, experience their hopes and dreams, see through their eyes. While I wrote Chief Left Hand, I lived in my imagination on the plains with the Arapahos. I experienced the hope and the dejection, the fear and the anger, of a people watching their way of life begin to slip away. Story worlds are real and true, sometimes even more real and truer than the author’s own because there is no place for story people to hide, no room for denials and circumlocutions. Even when story people attempt to hide from the truth, the author’s imagination allows the reader to see through all the attempts at obfuscation to the truth of the matter. Nothing is hidden in the shadows.

  In the months that author Jane Barker spent researching the life of Mari Sandoz for the novel Mari, she kept running into a brick wall. None of the facts explained a period of time when Sandoz seemed to have stepped off the earth. Where had she gone? What had she done? Why had she wanted to disappear? But in writing the novel, Barker’s imagination saw the connections among the facts, and the connections exposed the truth. She knew how Mari Sandoz had spent the time when no one had any idea of where she was with as much certainty as she knew the details of her own life. And she wrote the story that she was certain was true.

  Just as the novel was published, a packet of letters written by Mari Sandoz came to a Nebraska library. Moldering in someone’s attic for decades, unknown and unread, the letters told about the period when Sandoz had needed to disappear. And they confirmed the truth that Jane Barker’s imagination had discovered.

  As fragile as air, stories, and yet necessary. Growing out of nothing but snippets of information or impressions that flitter through an author’s mind—a beautiful bronze girl with a baby on her back, a crazed-looking professor with flowing white hair, an old man who seems sad—accumulating details that fix them in the world and depending upon imagination to make the connections, stories tell the truth. And it is in this feat of truth telling, at looking at the world as it is, at exploring hopes and dreams and laying bare the human heart, that stories speak to us and help us to understand the stories of our own lives.

  The West of Ghosts

  On the wall of my study is a framed, bronze-toned illustration by Frank McCarthy, titled “Beneath the Cliff of the Spirits.” Six Shoshone warriors are riding across the lower half beneath stark cliffs emblazoned with petroglyphs. Both the warriors and the ponies are painted, and the warriors brandish spears partly wrapped in leather thongs tied to eagle feathers that wave overhead. Eagle feathers sprout from their headdresses, but the lead warrior wears the head of a gray wolf, signifying that he is the leader of the scouts, like the alpha wolf, scouting the prey or the enemy.

  The petroglyphs represent the spirits of the ancestors, and native people will tell you that petroglyphs are chiseled by the spirits that dwell in the rock. The spirits manifest their presence by making the petroglyphs visible when they choose and to whom they choose. If you have ever gone looking for petroglyphs among the remote cliffs and rock formations in the West, you know that sometimes they can be seen and other times, even when you are certain they are present, they remain invisible. What makes McCarthy’s illustration so powerful is that the spirits have obviously chosen to show themselves to the warriors. They ride alongside and float above, always staying nearby.

  The illustration captures my own sense of the West where I was born and have spent my entire life—the Rocky Mountains and the vast, still mostly empty plains of Colorado. My West is a place of ghosts, a place where the ancestors hover nearby. It is a multilayered place with the present rooted in the past and the past always working its way into the present. Past and present—two sides of the same old coin. It’s possible to look at only one side, say the present, which might seem a rational approach, but the past is still there, shaping the heft and size, the depth and overall configuration. This is the West that I try to bring to life in my novels and short stories, in nonfiction books and articles and essays, the West that McCarthy so eloquently brought to life in the illustration.

  That ghosts from the past inhabit the West seems obvious. The past is everywhere. It is part of the landscape from the high mountain valleys to the bluffs and arroyos that break up the plains. It is even part of the highways and roads. The multi-lane, congested I-25, on which a never-ending stream of cars, SUVs, and semis moves up and down the front range of the Rockies from the southern reaches of New Mexico to the northern part of Wyoming, follows an Indian trail. For two hundred years, Arapahos and Cheyennes rode the trail up and down the front range. They had made the trail, those people of long ago.

  There are other old Indian trails that have metamorphosed into highways and hundreds of two-lane roads that wind through the mountains and shoot across the plains, following the rivers, or what passes for a river in my part of the West but is often nothing more than a dry streambed. Out on the plains, the roads run past clusters of cottonwoods where Arapaho and Cheyenne villages once stood, and probably the camps of Sioux, Kiowa, Apache, and Pawnee hunting parties. It’s possible to imagine—at least I think so, each time I drive past a stand of cottonwoods close to a stream—the white tipis sheltering in the shade of the trees, the sound of babies crying, dogs yapping, and horses neighing in the corrals. Or to imagine the warriors riding across the horizon on their way back to the village after the hunt.

  There are stretches of ranchland across the plains, open, windblown places with a scattering of sagebrush and a few dried, gnarled trees—virgin land much of it, unplowed and untouched—that probably look the same as when the warriors rode out to fight the enemy or hunt the buffalo, or when the soldiers attacked a village. Such a place is the site of the Sand Creek Massacre in southeastern Colorado, where the Third Colorado Regiment attacked the Cheyenne and Arapaho village in the freezing dawn of November 29, 1864. When the attack ended, at least 160 Indians lay dead, mostly women and children. The elders say that you can still see the spirits of the women and children running through the thin stand of trees at the site, frantic to escape the soldiers bearing down on horseback.

  In November 2000, Congress passed a law designating the more than 12,000 acres on which the Sand Creek Massacre occurred—the massacre that ignited twenty years of war on the plains—as a national historic site. A place of the past will be preserved for the future. Eventually the National Park Service will build an interpretive center where people can learn about what happened there and why it mattered, where people can touch the past as they do at the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

  In my West, such places are everywhere. They number in the hundreds, and I have visited many of them. They are the places that inspire me in my writing, the places where I can feel the past. Take the confluence of the South Platte River and Beaver Creek, near the town of Brush in northeastern Colorado. Every summer, the Arapahos held a trading fair on the site. Tribes came from the north and south to barter and exchange goods—ponies and buffalo robes, tin pots, glass beads, Mexican silver or serapes, bolts of trade cl
oth, tobacco. And the visiting that went on back and forth among the tipis, the exchange of news and gossip, the kids romping together. A county fair, we would call such an event. There is something about the site today—the gurgling creek, the wind brushing the leaves of the cottonwoods, and the lone black bull that sometimes grazes the wild grass—that retains the exuberance of those gatherings, as if the crowd had just packed up the tipis and trading goods and ridden away. It’s the feel of a stadium after the crowd has departed.

  A couple of years ago, I set out with my husband, George, to locate the place where the Arapaho Chief Left Hand had died and was buried. My first book, Chief Left Hand, published in 1981, was both a biography of this English-speaking diplomat and a history of his turbulent times. Left Hand became prominent in the mid-1800s during the time of the Colorado Gold Rush, when nearly two hundred thousand Americans—mostly men, armed to the teeth—scrambled onto the empty plains and into the mountains expecting to scoop up gold nuggets scattered at their feet, wash chunks of glittering gold out of the streams, and head back East wealthy men. The reality turned out to be different. They soon discovered that the gold, silver, lead, tungsten, molybdenum, and other minerals that would eventually be mined in Colorado were embedded in hard rock deep inside the mountains and that more than pickaxes would be needed to dislodge the riches.

  The influx of gold seekers changed the lives of the Arapahos and Cheyennes on the plains and the Utes in the mountains in ways that the Indians could not have imagined. After the gold rush came homesteaders fencing off farms and ranches, wagons and animals of the “overlanders” clogging the trails, tent settlements and tar-paper and plank-board towns springing up literally overnight, Army troops riding out from newly built forts to protect the newcomers from the depredations of Indians whose lands they had taken, and iron rails flinging themselves across the plains and through the mountains, black smoke from the locomotives belching into the air. All of which squeezed the Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Utes into smaller and smaller areas until, finally, after all of the skirmishes, battles, and massacres, the survivors found themselves on reservations, the “reserved” portions of their once-vast lands. As one Arapaho put it at the time, the Indians thought that all the white people in the world had come to their lands.

  In the four years I spent researching Chief Left Hand, I was able to locate evidence never before published that Left Hand had been mortally wounded during the Sand Creek Massacre, but had made his way north, along with a handful of survivors, to a large Sioux camp on the Smoky Hill River where he had died. He was buried in the ground there, according to the Arapaho Way.

  By the time the book was published, I had visited most of the places where Left Hand had lived his life, but it was not until ten years later, on a ninety-degree day in August, that I found the place where he had died, which today is part of a ranch near the small town of Cheyenne Wells. After obtaining permission from the rancher to scout the site where the Sioux camp had stood, George and I bumped over dirt roads in our Blazer, raising clouds of dust, and when we ran out of road, we got out and started walking. It was about noon, the sun white-hot overhead. All around us, the glass-blue sky dipped over the empty, endless plains, with nothing to interrupt the horizon.

  As we trekked along, we realized that we were not alone. Flying with us, perching on the little sand hills and clumps of brush, watching from no more than twenty or thirty feet away, was a large, wide-eyed owl. Apart from an occasional prairie dog or the buzzing of a bee, there was no other sign of life. We veered in one direction, then in another, hoping to stumble onto the Smoky Hill, which we knew would be nothing more than a dry bed. No matter how many zigzags we took, the owl stayed with us. The afternoon wore on with no sign of the riverbed, but instead of feeling anxious, I felt only peace. The Arapahos say that the ancestors may choose to accompany you on your way, and if they do, they usually choose to come in the form of an owl. I had no doubt that somewhere in the glare of the sun and the sameness of the brown plains, we would stumble onto an indentation, like a scar running over the land, that would lead us to the site of the Sioux camp.

  We found the riverbed and followed it to the wide bend where the camp had been located. We knew from the old records that the river had bent around the camp, but we hadn’t known that the river bent around a bluff, and the camp had been on top. From a distance on the plains, the cuts and rises in the land meld into the vastness. We hadn’t seen the bluff until we’d bumped up against it. We started hiking up the sliding dirt slope, the owl already perched on the edge above. When we reached the top, we stood perfectly still, unable to speak, hardly able to breathe. Rising above the brown plains that ran as far as we could see in every direction was a field of wildflowers—yellows, purples, reds, oranges, blues, vermilions, and whites—that swayed against the blue sky. It was there that Left Hand had died, and there, somewhere among the wildflowers, his body lay buried.

  When we looked around, the owl was gone.

  Not all of the ghosts in my West are Arapahos, however, or other Indians who had lived on the plains and in the mountains of Colorado. There are the ghostly trails of the trappers, people like Jedediah Smith and Jim Beckwourth, who made a living of sorts trapping beaver in the streams, and the traders, like the entrepreneurial Bent Brothers—William and Charles—who, in 1830, built Bent’s Fort, an adobe structure on the Arkansas River and the first permanent structure in United States territory west of the Mississippi. Santa Fe, still part of Mexico then, was already two hundred years old, already filled with its own ghosts of the Spanish, Mexicans, and Indians who had settled the place and whose descendants moved up and down the Santa Fe Trail with wagon trains of trade goods, always stopping at Bent’s Fort.

  A few years ago, I spent an evening at the reconstructed Bent’s Fort, after the enormous gates had swung shut on the last tourist, leaving the fort to the imaginations of a group of western history buffs. We ate dinner in the courtyard, with campfires burning along the side and buffalo meat sizzling on a grill, Mexicans in sombreros strumming guitars, and the last of the summer sun flaring red on the adobe walls. It was easy to imagine—as I suspect everyone of us did—that the present and past had traded places, and that we were caught in the past, that in the rooms around us were the traders who’d come from Santa Fe or St. Louis or an Indian village, speaking a medley of languages—Spanish, French, English, Arapaho, Cheyenne—their horses grazing on hay in the corral, and William Bent himself upstairs in the corner room entertaining Kit Carson with a game of billiards at the only billiard table west of St. Louis.

  There are also the ghostly trails of the gold seekers who clambered through the mountains, cutting burro roads high above the timberline, up and over jaw-dropping-steep peaks. You can hike to the top of those peaks and look down over miles and miles of old roads still visible in the fragile tundra and imagine the burros straining at the head of wagons loaded with ore that might contain a little gold, or might not. You can see the century-old tailings still spilling from mines cut into the sides of rock-strewn mountains so formidable that you wonder how anyone had reached them. Yet the gold seekers had made the roads and sunk the mines in a feat of daring and endurance that can only be a tribute to the power of greed, or to the depth of the desperation that drove the gold seekers on.

  Traces of the old narrow-gauge railroads also cling to the mountains—roadbeds no wider than a wagon hung on the mountainsides, switching back and forth on themselves as they climb higher and higher before plunging down the other side. We’ve hiked and Jeeped many of those old railroad beds. We’ve even dropped down a rocky shaft with miner’s lamps on our heads to illuminate the blackness and walked the length of the Alpine Tunnel—as long as six football fields, burrowed beneath the continental divide—and as we walked and explored, we could imagine the Denver, South Park, and Pacific trains churning through the tunnel at five miles an hour, ferrying cars of gold, silver, and coal through the mountains.

 
Even the cities that I know best are shaped by the past. I’m a city girl, raised in Denver, a sprawling city of freeways and suburbs and skyscrapers that some might argue would be the same if it were transported to the deep south or set down somewhere in the Midwest or anywhere else, for that matter. I would argue that Denver would not be Denver without its ghosts. Take the spit of land at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the Platte River on the edge of downtown, crowded with trendy shops and blocks of warehouses turned into upscale lofts and condominiums where people like bankers, lawyers, and software engineers live. On that same spit of land stood an Arapaho village, within shouting distance of the tent and log cabin towns of Denver and Auraria, which eventually melded into Denver. They were traders, the Arapahos, the “businessmen of the plains,” the newcomers called them, and they wanted to live near their trading business, just as, I suspect, many of the people in today’s condominiums want to live near downtown.

  Or take the variety of people—characters, many of them—who had come West, settled in the new town of Denver, and left their personalities forever stamped on the city. The cowboys who drove their cattle down Denver’s dirt streets to graze in pastures in the middle of town, the gunslingers like Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp who happened through town, the gamblers and flimflam artists like Soapy Smith who ran the games of chance on Larimer Street, which is now a restored historical district of boutiques and restaurants. People like Molly Brown, whose husband, J.J., had struck gold in Leadville, confounding all the experts who said that Leadville was a silver city, which it was, and would remain a silver city, which it didn’t. The stone lions still grace the mansion that J.J. purchased for Molly on Pennsylvania Street.