Climb the Wind: A Journey Into Another Past

by Pamela Sargent

  “Then you ain’t going,” Jane said.

  “No, I ain’t.” Virgil shook his head. “You jealous, Calamity? You worrying about Lemuel Rowland and that squaw now?”

  “Hell, no.” She forced herself to smile. “I ain’t thinking of Lem and Graceful Swan. I’m worrying about what’s going to happen to me.”

  Virgil stepped away from the horses. “If’n you got to stay in the territory, no reason you can’t come along with me.”

  She gaped at him. “You mean that?”

  “I don’t mean for anything like what you might be thinking. There’s a girl with the Blackfeet. I was courting her for a while, but she wouldn’t leave her camp and I wouldn’t go and live there. Ain’t that I mind their ways, or how they treated me, it’s just that I crave my time to myself.”

  Jane looked down and stared at the cracked leather of her boots for a while. “So if you like being by your lonesome so much, why’re you asking me to come along with you?”

  “I’ll still be alone,” he said. “Got a feeling there’ll be lots of days when we don’t got that much to say to each other, and when you won’t feel like talking to me. And I’m thinking it won’t hurt to have somebody near by who can shoot and ride and maybe be around to head out to the Blackfeet for help if’n something happens so’s I need the help.”

  Jane felt the beginnings of a smile forming on her face. “What makes you think the chief’ll let me leave?”

  “You’d be a lot farther away from other white folks at my place. You can’t ride out of there so easy, especially in winter. The cold and the snow’d be enough to kill you—even the Indians know to stay put in winter.” He paused. “But maybe you ain’t one to share a cabin with a black man, even if he got no designs on you.”

  She looked up. “I was out scouting with a black man when the Seventh was attacked. His name was Isaiah Dorman, and he was my friend, and a day don’t pass that I don’t think about him and feel sorry that he’s dead.”

  Virgil was silent.

  “He knew the Sioux,” she went on. “He lived with them, and he knew their ways, and maybe he was kind of sorry when he went back to being a scout for the army, but he did his duty once he picked his side, and he died fighting.”

  “Should I talk to the chief?” he asked.

  “Yeah. I’ll go with you, Virgil.”

  “I’ll talk to Rowland. He can tell me what I ought to say to Touch-the-Clouds.”

  “You do that. I’d be obliged.” She was still trying to keep a long way ahead of death, even if it mean staying in Indian territory, hiding out in the middle of nowhere, possibly never seeing a white face again. She wondered whether that meant she was a coward or just somebody who saw things the way they were and knew when to move on, the way she had With Bill Hickok and her daughter.

  Lemuel Rowland and his companions arrived in St. Joseph just as winter was setting in. They came there with greenbacks taken from the pockets of dead Blue Coats to spend on food and shelter and gold to trade with men whose names had been given to them by Rubalev’s companion Denis Laforte and who could be trusted not to say where they got it.

  The Chen brothers disappeared for a few days among the Chinese who had settled there, then showed up again early one morning. They had not found the kind of men that they had hoped to find in St. Joseph, only former railroad workers who owned laundries or eateries. They were looking for tougher men with different skills, and planned to go west on the Union Pacific, as far as San Francisco if necessary, returning east in the spring. Rubalev had promised to be in St. Joseph by then, and would see that Glorious Spirit and Victorious Spirit returned to the Black Hills.

  Lemuel saw no reason to object. If Touch-the-Clouds had not trusted the Chinese brothers, he would have kept the two men closer to his side. The gold he had given them was one of the bonds that held them, but there was another bond that was even stronger. He had seen that after spending more time with Glorious Spirit and Victorious Spirit and watching how they smiled and their eyes darted with excitement as they spoke of their beloved rocket-arrows. Among the Lakota, they could practice their arts of weapon-making and create even more powerful rocket-arrows. They would never have been allowed to do that among whites, or even in their own country.

  After the brothers left, he wrote short letters to Jeremiah Clarke and to Ely Parker and posted them. To Jeremiah, he wrote that he was in St. Joseph, telling him the name of his hotel; to Donehogawa, he said only that the territories of their friends on the Plains were safe for the next few seasons. Then he began finding out more about what had been going on while he was living among the Lakota. There had been an insurrection near Vicksburg in Mississippi, followed by an attack on a group of freedmen. Thirty Negroes had been killed before the revolt was put down by Union forces. There were Rebs hiding out in Florida’s Everglades, emerging to hit at Union soldiers before disappearing again into the swamps. The hoped-for railroad that would link New Orleans and Texas with California was still only a dream, and would only have been sabotaged or used by die-hard Confederates if it had been built. There was a rumor that Robert E. Lee himself, ailing and close to death, had been summoned to Washington, to meet in secret with President Colfax to find ways to put down the insurrectionists without starting another war.

  Lemuel wondered if Colfax, still mired in scandal, was up to the job of handling one possible war, let alone two conflicts. The newspapers were also full of reports of growing restiveness in Canada. There was talk of conscripting more troops.

  A month after Lemuel had come to St. Joseph, a letter reached him from Ely Parker. There had been a small draft riot in New York City, and it was feared that worse violence was coming. In the wake of more bank failures, the city’s poorest inhabitants, among them freedmen, recent immigrants, and other wretched folk, were competing with one another for whatever work they could find. The reformers among the Republicans had the unpalatable choice of turning a blind eye to the corruption in their party and among their elected officials in Washington, or of opposing the Republican president during a time when unity was more needed than ever. Much of this Lemuel had already gathered from the newspapers.

  The Union for which he had fought, the toll that he and his comrades had paid in blood and pain and death, might have been for nothing. Had he been able to believe that the Lakota and the other red peoples to the West would keep their lands and their ways, he might have felt more at peace, more willing to accept what might come. Chaos in the East would ensure the safety of the Lakota for a time, but now he saw that what was happening might only endanger the Plains more in the end. Desperate people in the cities with nothing to lose might be drawn west, regardless of the dangers they would face. Financiers losing money might look again to constructing more railroads and to the fees they could extort from people and towns that would grow ever more dependent on their rails. Standing by while the Wasichu tore at one another might not win Touch-the-Clouds the permanent peace that his people needed to preserve their buffalo herds and their lives.

  Touch-the-Clouds had to know that. If he had not come to this understanding by himself, surely Rubalev had seen it by now, and would already be advising the chief. Lemuel thought of when he had last spoken to Rubalev, outside Fort Fetterman, and felt his doubts biting at him again.

  Dreams were troubling Katia once more. Her face was drawn and tense in the mornings from lack of rest; Lemuel often heard her cries through the wall as he lay in his own bed.

  One morning, sitting across the small table in their sitting room, she finally spoke to him about her dreams.

  “I keep seeing fires,” she told him, “blazing from buildings, burning along the streets. I hear people screaming and calling for help. I’m running, trying to hide, and then I see soldiers in blue coats riding after me.”

  “You’ve been reading the newspapers,” he said. “That might be affecting your dreams.” There had been a story about Chicago a few days ago, about how the rebuilt city was thriving after the disastro
us fire of 1871. The story had only hinted at the heavy burden of debt that rebuilding Chicago had cost. “The Chicago fire, and the fighting in the Black Hills—you may be confusing all of that in your mind.”

  She gazed directly at him then. “No,” she said, “that is not what I’m dreaming about. These dreams have the power of my earlier visions for me—I can feel it. You know what I saw at Paha Sapa. You know what kind of vision came to me at the Greasy Grass. This dream of a fire is as real to me as those visions were.”

  He did not reply.

  “I was dreaming of another place, not Chicago,” she went on. “I was seeing what might come, not what is past. Much of what I saw wasn’t clear, but that much I know. And there is something else. I saw you in these dreams. You were calling out to me, and I kept trying to reach you, but I could not find my way back to you.”

  She stood up and left the room. Again, she had barely eaten, had only sipped at her coffee.

  She was staying here with him as Katia Rowland, and he had let the hotel’s proprietor believe that they were recently married. A pair of newlyweds, people of means, who were returning from a journey to the West by stagecoach and by rail; he had hinted at all of this. That he had been sleeping on the sitting room’s long couch ever since arriving here was not anything the proprietor had to know.

  He thought of how Katia had looked at him on the day they had left the camp of Touch-the-Clouds. There had been pain on her face, and shame. A few Lakota men had ridden with them as far as the Missouri, leaving them to make the rest of their journey by themselves by horse and then by steamboat.

  Katia had not spoken at all during their ride. As the Lakota men rode away, she had turned toward him and said, “I will never go back there, and I do not want to go back. I never want to go back. I can think of my people being free on the Plains and take some joy in any freedom they might win without having to live among them myself.’’

  “Katia—” he started to say.

  “I didn’t want to leave with you,’’ she said, and there was a bitterness in her voice that he had not heard before. “But even that is better than staying there, knowing that I will catch no more dreams on the Plains.”

  Her words had mystified him. “Why do you say that?”

  “I know it, I feel it. No more dreams will come to me in the places where my people camp. Whatever happens now, I will have to seek my visions in another place. The Lakota lands are no longer a place for them.”

  She had said no more than that. Without her dreams, she was useless to her people. She was probably already thinking of herself as useless to him, as a woman who could not care for him. She did not bar her door to him at night; if he went to her, he was certain that she would not resist him. The thought of going to her that way repelled him.

  Maybe it was better for her to believe that she could still have her visions, even if they were no more than bad dreams, to think that she still had some purpose. Maybe that was why she insisted that her dreams of fire were true visions.

  Jeremiah Clarke did not send a letter to Lemuel. A Chinese boy came to Lemuel’s room and handed him a note from the colonel saying that Clarke was in the saloon downstairs and wanted to speak to him.

  Jeremiah was waiting for him at the bar. His beard was grayer, and he had grown leaner except for a belly under his buckskin jacket. He looked as though he had been drinking for a while. He nodded at Lemuel and said in a low voice, “Damn long time without a word from you.”

  “There wasn’t any way for me to get a message out to you,” Lemuel replied.

  “When you didn’t come back, I figured that either you were dead or you’d found yourself a squaw.” Jeremiah picked up his glass and bottle and moved away from the bar to a table in one corner. Lemuel followed him. There had been enough time since writing his letter to think of what to say to Colonel Clarke.

  “Looks like the Sioux and their friends got themselves another treaty,” Jeremiah said as he sat down. “I don’t suppose you had anything to do with that.” His eyes peered at Lemuel from under the brim of his hat.

  “The Sioux chiefs make their decisions without consulting me,” Lemuel said.

  “And I don’t suppose you know anything about what happened to Custer. Oh, there are some who keep holding out hope that he’s just camped out somewhere, or securing the services of some more Indian scouts, or that he’s suddenly going to send out news about some monumental discovery he’s keeping secret for a while, or at worst that he might have been captured and his officers are trying to figure out how to rescue him.” Jeremiah poured some more whiskey from the bottle and drank it down quickly. “But if something like that was going on, that Barrows from the New York Tribune would have dispatched a story about it by now with a rider. Hell, Custer would have been sending out his own stories by now if he could.”

  “All I know,” Lemuel said carefully, “is that there were rumors of Army soldiers being seen near the Black Hills. Some of the young men in the camp where I was staying rode out to scout around. That was the last I heard before the Sioux and the Cheyenne were riding south to strike at Fort Fetterman.”

  “I’d think Custer was dead,” Clarke said, “excepting I don’t know how those Indians could have wiped out his whole command.”

  Lemuel thought of Jane Cannary, the last survivor. She had gone off with Virgil Warrick. Lemuel had not asked her why, although he doubted that Virgil had any amorous interest in the woman. It was just as well that she had gone with him. Rubalev, he was certain, would have killed her as soon as he had the chance.

  Jeremiah’s eyes were on Lemuel again. “What made you come back?”

  “With the new treaty, there was no more reason for me to stay among the Sioux. The Oglala chief called Touch-the-Clouds counts me as a friend of a kind, although I’m not sure how much he trusts me. There was no reason for me to stay, since I had found out as much as I could, and that was little enough. The Sioux didn’t stop me from leaving.”

  “As far as I can tell, you didn’t find out much of anything, even after being gone a while.” Jeremiah sighed. “Not that it matters now. We couldn’t fight any kind of Indian war with all that’s going on now. The army’s got other things to worry about. Crook’s around, but I don’t know what Sheridan thinks he can do.”

  Lemuel tensed. “General Crook’s here?”

  “Not here in St. Joseph, up in Omaha. They put him in command of the Department of the Platte. Nobody’s talking about that much—it isn’t exactly a secret, but nobody’s sending out a lot of reports about it, either. Crook might have been leading his troops in action against the Sioux by now if it weren’t for that treaty.”

  Lemuel considered that information. The Gray Wolf—that was what the Apache in the Southwest had called General George Crook when he was going after them some years back. He would be a formidable opponent if he was ordered into action. Crook had fought Indians in winter before; Lemuel doubted that he would have been ordered to Omaha unless his superiors were considering an attack. He did not like the idea of the Gray Wolf being so close to Lakota territory.

  The colonel poured himself another drink. Lemuel sat back, knowing that the liquor would make Jeremiah more talkative.

  “I’ll tell you this.” Jeremiah’s voice was low. “A lot of the men wouldn’t go Indian-fighting now even if they sent us plenty of cavalry and infantry along with wagon trains of Gatling guns and Winchesters, and Sheridan and Sherman came along as our field commanders. It’s one thing to be protecting miners and settlers and keeping them and the Indians apart. It’s another to be keeping the rails safe for some swells back East who think of nothing except filling their own pockets. I fought for the Union. They’re busy buying it up for themselves. If old Ulysses S. Grant was still around, he’d clean out that nest of vipers in Washington.”

  Lemuel was silent.

  “What are you going to do now?” Jeremiah asked.

  “Maybe go back to St. Louis,” Lemuel replied, “or even back to New York.
There ought to be some work for me in one place or the other.”

  Jeremiah leaned forward and rested his arms on the table. “Take my advice,” he said. “Go west to California if you want to stay out of any battles. I heard talk that they’re thinking about becoming a republic again. And Texas—” His voice trailed off.

  “It’s probably just talk,” Lemuel said.

  “Yeah, just talk. Just talk for now, anyway.”

  Lemuel sat back. Except for the news about General Crook, Jeremiah Clarke had told him little more than he had already gathered from newspapers and overheard conversations in this saloon, and he no longer seemed interested in any information Lemuel had about the Sioux. That in itself was good to know. It was more confirmation that the Plains were safe for now.

  She had known while riding away from the camp of Touch-the-Clouds that no more visions would come to her on the Plains. There would be no more dreams to tell Touch-the-Clouds how his battles would go or how they might have gone in some other world. Perhaps he had sensed that; maybe that was why he had sent her away with Lemuel Rowland.

  Then dreams had begun to come to Katia again in St. Joseph, frightening dreams of fires and people running through streets, of Blue Coats firing at Wasichu and Lakota alike. Other visions were of Blue Coats and Lakota riding through other streets, and still others showed her grassy hills black with herds of grazing buffalo. Soon the dreams were coming to her even when she was awake. At first, she would glimpse the burning buildings from the corner of her eye, or hear the cries of terrified people as if from a distance. Then they would be all around her, blotting out the walls of her room; the sounds of screams would grow louder until she could no longer hear the sounds of horses and wagons in the street below.

  The visions carried the force of those that had come to her before. That could mean they carried strong medicine and were showing her a world that was as real and as true as the one in which she lived, or else that they were signs of madness.