“When are they going to stop calling it skirmishes and start calling it a war?” another man said.
“Maybe when British warships show up in our harbors. From what I heard, that could happen almost any time.”
Lemuel led Katia to a table, listening for some word about Grouard’s body and its disposition, but the talk was of battles and the threat of war and General Crook’s new orders. Not all of the soldiers here were being sent; some would remain in Omaha. But there would be no scouting of the Plains, no forays into Indian territory.
Katia leaned toward him. “You don’t have to stay here now,” she said. He could barely hear her over the sound of the men at the bar.
He said, “I know.”
“What will we do, then?”
“I was going to send you to New York. We’ll go there together.” He touched her hand lightly and listened as the men in the saloon spoke of the uprising in Arkansas and the fighting that was likely to come.
SIXTEEN
John Finerty descended the wide staircase to the hotel’s lobby. Evening was coming on, time for a libation and perhaps some company, depending on who was in the bar at this hour. Finerty had arrived in Cincinnati only that morning, but already he was growing restless, ready to move on.
He had left the city immediately after the end of the Republican convention, hot on the trail of a rumored skirmish between rebel forces and Ohio farmers farther down the Ohio River. By the time he arrived on the scene, the rebel gunboat that was supposedly firing upon the Ohio side of the river had turned out to be no more than a party of steamboat passengers having some drunken fun with firearms.
Still, Finerty told himself, it could easily have been otherwise. That so many had panicked and been so quick to assume that war might be breaking out along the Ohio showed how edgy and worried people were. No sooner had one rebellion been put down than another seemed to break out elsewhere. Negroes had been lynched or burned out of their homes in at least four states of the former Confederacy, and among the soldiers sent in to protect the blacks were recent immigrants who deeply resented having to protect the freedmen who would now be competing with them for work.
Finerty could understand such hard feelings, reprehensible as they undoubtedly were; life had become harder here for many of his countrymen. He had left Ireland himself to come to this country twelve years earlier. As a youth of eighteen, he had been full of optimism then, ready to begin a new life. That the United States were still at war with the Confederacy had not deterred him; he had willingly joined up with the Ninety-fourth New York Regiment. Since war’s end, he had been considerably more fortunate than many of his Irish brethren in the United States, rising to become one of the better-paid correspondents for the Chicago Times, and yet his fulfilled dreams could still taste sour in his mouth.
He had traveled back East that May to cover the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia just after its opening, which had featured appearances by President Colfax and the emperor of Brazil. Among the displays were Alexander Graham Bell’s improved telephone, a writing machine with keys called a typewriter, and a contraption built by a fellow named Edison that was called a mimeograph. To Finerty’s eyes, the exhibition of such wonders had seemed a presentation of technological promises likely never to be fulfilled.
Thomas Edison, with whom he had conducted a brief interview, had agreed with him. “Lost my job not long ago,” Edison had told him; the shabbily-dressed man had been working for the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company in New York until it was taken over by Western Union. “Did a lot to improve their machines, but they aren’t going to need ‘em until things get a lot better than they are. Been trying to sell my inventions to raise some money for my own laboratory, but I can’t find any buyers.” Finerty had pitied the unfortunate man who seemed to have the talent of a Daedalus for creating new wonders, but who lacked the backing needed to bring his inventions into existence.
Now the Union Finerty had fought to preserve and that the Centennial Exposition was meant to celebrate was again endangered, and the homeland he had been forced to flee was still in the grip of the British. The bloody British, he thought bitterly. If the damned British started making more trouble on the Canadian border, he might even consider enlisting in the army again, just to fight them.
The Gibson House, although even more stifling in July than it had been in June, was a somewhat more congenial establishment in the absence of politicians. Finerty, who had arrived there only this morning, preferred to await word of his next assignment for the Times in some comfort. Maybe he would be sent west, now that George Crook was going back to Nebraska, although his editor Clinton Snowden was hinting that he might decide to send Finerty to Washington instead.
Finerty had been in Omaha a year ago, to cover General Crook’s activities there, just before the outbreak of hostilities along the Missouri-Arkansas border. He had gone expecting and hoping to see more of the Plains, possibly in the company of some of Crook’s scouts. A scout named Frank Grouard had hinted that Crook was only waiting for a pretext to send scouts into Sioux territory. Grouard claimed to be a friend of Touch-the-Clouds, an adopted son of Sitting Bull, and a blood brother to Crazy Horse, but such stories might be as fantastic as Grouard’s claim that his mother had been a native princess in the South Seas. Still, the fact that Grouard had been willing to join up with Crook against his old friends was a sign that the power of the Sioux might be waning. Others might follow his example.
Others would have to, Finerty reminded himself, if Crook were to acquire any more scouts like Grouard, men who were intimately familiar with the ways of the red men of the Plains. Grouard had died suddenly, and rather mysteriously, just before Crook had received his orders to muster his men and head south. Most thought the scout had been drinking and afterwards had gotten into a fight in the alley where his body was found; Grouard could not hold his liquor and had been in fights before. Several blows to the head had killed him, and apparently his antagonist had dragged the body behind some barrels, perhaps hoping that Grouard was not too badly hurt and would sleep it off, perhaps knowing that the man was close to death.
There had been no chance for Finerty to investigate the whole business—a story about the scout’s earlier, perhaps apocryphal, adventures and his untimely end might have been of interest to readers of the Chicago Times—because he had followed Crook to southern Missouri, to observe the army’s summer campaign against Arkansan guerrillas. Little had been accomplished in that campaign, except for drawing the commander of the Department of the Platte and most of his forces south. The rebels, as Crook had put it, possessed the talent of the Apaches for disappearing. The general had even wondered if a few of the Apaches’ Kiowa brethren might have sneaked eastward to aid the rebels, a possibility that would have sounded farfetched coming from another man, but Crook had dealt with Apaches and Kiowas before.
For Finerty, the campaign in northern Arkansas had yielded little more than stories about the frustrations of Crook in dealing with the guerrillas and the boredom of the men under his command. Resentment among Crook’s men had thickened the air with rebellious talk. Let the rebels have their damned second Confederacy; let the niggers move to the small towns and farms springing up along the borders of Indian territory where at least they would not be taking work away from honest white men; let Texas and California call themselves autonomous republics and make whatever agreements they wanted with Mexico to keep Díaz’s troops out of their lands; discharge the soldiers and let them get on with their lives in the Eastern cities, in California, or anywhere else they might want to go.
Finerty had heard a good deal of such talk. Lately, he was beginning to have more sympathy for such sentiments himself.
He came into the saloon and surveyed the large room. Few people were there at this hour, but a glance toward a table near the bar revealed two potential sources of both interviews and a diverting evening, should those two illustrious parties be amenable to granting him an audience. William C
ody, whom Finerty had last seen treading the boards in a touring production of a stage epic entitled “Scouts of the Prairie,” was one of the two men sitting at the table, looking quite splendid in a white Stetson and fringed buckskin, with his hair flowing over his shoulders. The thick bushy hair and mustache of the man in the white suit sitting with him were instantly recognizable.
As Finerty walked toward them, Cody caught sight of him, stood up, and beckoned to him with one arm. “Irish John!” Cody bellowed. “Come on over here, you ink-stained wretch. I’m already two drinks ahead of you.”
If that was the case, Buffalo Bill Cody was being more abstemious than usual. “Ink-stained wretch, eh,” the other man said as Finerty came to the table. “I used to be one such slave of the press myself, out in Nevada and later for the San Francisco Morning Call.”
Finerty held out his hand as the man in the white suit got to his feet. “John F. Finerty, of the Chicago Times, and I am most grateful for the pleasure of finally meeting you, Mr. Clemens.”
Samuel L. Clemens shook his hand vigorously. “The Times, eh? Then you have a far better berth than I did in my former position at the Morning Call. I was the only reporter there when I started, with no one to share my shame. Had I been more lofty and heroic, I would have thrown up my position and starved, like any other hero, but I lacked experience with heroism and didn’t know how to go about being so principled.”
The three men sat down. Clemens tapped some more tobacco into his pipe and lit it. Finerty had last seen the man who wrote under the name of Mark Twain at a lecture in Chicago. There had not been an empty seat in the house; the writer was doing well for himself.
“What the hell are you doing in Cincinnati, Irish John?” Bill Cody asked.
“I just got back this morning. There were reports of a Confederate gunboat firing on Union territory farther down the Ohio. Turned out to be some drunken patriots on a steamship shooting at their own soil.” Finerty leaned back in his chair. “Before that little adventure, I was here to cover the Republican convention.”
“Perhaps I should have appreciated my position at the Morning Call more,” Clemens muttered, “since one of my more amenable duties was to show up at the police court and report on the disposition of squabbles and assaults among feuding Chinamen. You, on the other hand, had to report on some of our foremost grafters.”
“That may be the truth about most of the delegates and their candidates, Mr. Clemens,” Finerty said, “but there were a few notable exceptions. The upright Mr. Roosevelt of New York gave a fine speech attacking Senator Conkling from a balcony of this very establishment.”
“Senator Conkling.” Clemens snorted. “To quote Congressman Blaine, that particular senator presents a most excellent example of manhood, especially with his grandiloquent swell, his majestic, super-eminent, overpowering, turkey-gobbler strut.” Clemens took a puff from his pipe. “Those have to be both the wittiest and most accurate words our next president ever spoke on the House floor.”
Finerty did not contest Clemens’s prediction. That James G. Blaine, Speaker of the House, would be elected president had been almost a foregone conclusion ever since the Republican delegates had left Cincinnati. President Colfax, with his pockets full of bribes in the form of Union Pacific stock, could not run again and have a prayer of winning, while Blaine was popular, congenial, and had engaged in a minimum of larceny. Were his Democratic opponent, the reform-minded Governor Samuel Tilden of New York, to be victorious in the elections, Finerty might hold out some hope for the Republic, but Tilden would need the votes of Democrats in the South to win, men who had already lost the vote for revealing themselves to be unreconstructed rebels, or else because they resided in counties now occupied once more by Federal troops.
“I will say this,” Finerty said. “Blaine as president is surely preferable to having that rooster Conkling occupy that high office.”
“Or that windbag Colfax,” Cody said. “I suppose, now that his Union Pacific stock is nearly worthless, he’ll be forced to make an honest living.”
“Or a dishonest one,” Clemens said. “The president could do quite well on the lecture circuit, I think, being the windbag that he is, especially now that the house-emptiers so greatly outnumber the house-fillers.”
President Colfax had not been much in evidence at the convention either physically or inspirationally. No one there had mentioned his name, or had even offered a eulogy to the late vice president, Henry Wilson, who had passed away last autumn. Indeed, Finerty reflected, an uninformed observer listening to the speeches at Exposition Hall might not even have known that Colfax had been the Republican president during the past few years. The dominating presence at the convention had been the ghost of President Grant. Soldier, commander of the Union forces, general, statesman—many seemed to have forgotten that several of those in Grant’s administration had begun to grease their palms while Grant was still alive. Many preferred to believe that Grant, had he not fallen victim to an accident, if he had been given more time, would have become the Hercules who would sweep the Augean stables of Washington clean.
Clemens signaled to a waiter. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I am going to order the most worthwhile of the gifts the politicians have bestowed upon us in recent years. It’s a libation called the mint julep, and I last enjoyed one at the Willard Hotel in Washington.”
Finerty grinned. “I’m familiar with the drink. It’s said that it was invented for the pleasure of the lobbyists who come there to importune our elected representatives, and the bartender here knows how to make one.”
A waiter came and took their order; soon three juleps crowned with sprigs of mint leaves sat on the table. Bill Cody was talking about his reasons for coming to Cincinnati; he had heard stories about a young sharpshooter in the region, and had already seen her demonstrate her skills. “Annie Oakley Moses is her name,” he said. “Just a slip of a girl, but the stories about her weren’t tall tales. That little gal might make an interesting attraction in my next show.”
“A new production?” Finerty asked.
“Oh, I could have gone on increasing my store of filthy lucre with ‘Scouts of the Prairie,’ but I’m planning to move beyond the stage and theaters,” Buffalo Bill replied. “I’m putting together something more like a circus, a truly spectacular wonder, a show that no one will want to miss.” He looked around the table, obviously waiting for Clemens or Finerty to prompt him with a question.
“And what is this wonder to be?” Clemens asked.
Cody’s chest swelled. “A kind of Wild West show.” He signaled to the waiter for another drink, then leaned forward and said, “Custer among the Indians.”
“What was that again?” Finerty said.
“That is the title of the production I am planning to mount,’’ Cody said. ‘“Custer Among the Indians.’“ In a lower voice, he continued, “I’m going to stage it outdoors, with the audience seated around a wide open space in a big circle. Custer and the Seventh ride into the circle. Suddenly they’re surrounded by Sioux. A tremendous battle ensues—looks like Custer and his men are finished. But then—”
The waiter arrived with Cody’s drink. He gulped down half of the julep, then leaned back. “The Injuns suddenly raise a white flag. Seems they want to talk. They parley, smoke the peace pipe, and then they tell Custer how much they admire his courage. They admire it so much that they offer to make him a blood brother, and a most thrilling and authentic demonstration of Injun ceremonies and wild dances follows in the next scene.”
Clemens’s mustache twitched. Finerty repressed a smile. “No one knows if that’s what really happened to that rather impetuous cavalry officer,” Clemens said.
“Exactly,” Cody said, “but it could have happened. Probably didn’t, but it’s the kind of thing people would like to believe. We see Custer and the Injuns ride off together to hunt buffalo. I’ll have some real buffalo for that scene, of course. And then—”
Finerty waited.
“A
n attack,” Cody said in portentous tones, “by some old Injun enemies of the Sioux. And Custer and his red brothers whip ‘em together. The spectacle ends with a victory dance by the Sioux and the Seventh before they all mount their horses and ride into the sunset.”
“An edifying ending,” Clemens said. “Why, I don’t think even the bereft and still grief-stricken Mrs. Elizabeth Custer could take offense at that.”
“Especially since you are apparently going to avoid any mention of Custer’s rumored dalliance with a Cheyenne squaw,’’ Finerty added.
“Oh, I considered touching on that subject,” Cody said, “but that would slow down the action somewhat, and I’ve got other ideas for a love story.”
“Such as?” Finerty said.
“Well, you know that Calamity Jane Cannary rode out with the Seventh when they disappeared,” Cody said. “I’m thinking that if this little sharpshooter Annie Oakley Moses has real potential as a performer, I might cast her in the part of Calamity. I could try her out in ‘Custer Among the Indians’ first, see how she works out. If she’s good enough in a small part there, I might write the love story around her.” Buffalo Bill downed the rest of his julep and beckoned to the waiter again.
“And what is the title of this love story to be?” Finerty asked.
Cody brought his hands together and looked solemn. ‘“Calamity Jane, Squaw Woman,’“ he said. “She’s captured by the Sioux, along with Custer and the Seventh. There she is, the lone white woman among all those redskins, and then a handsome young redskin Lochinvar appears. He’s fallen in love with Calamity at first sight—he wants to marry her. He enters on horseback, doing some trick riding, showing off his prowess at shooting and buffalo hunting in his effort to win her affections. Maybe he and Calamity have some shooting contests, and do some trick riding together during the courtship. And then—”
Climb the Wind: A Journey Into Another Past Page 30