Climb the Wind: A Journey Into Another Past

by Pamela Sargent

  “Everyone knows what happened in the Black Hills,” Dancing Girl said.

  “We know,” Young Spring Grass murmured, “and the Wasichu have their suspicions about what took place there.” She gazed at her light-haired son. “But it is better if we do not talk of it, especially while the Wasichu are at peace with us.”

  His wife, White Eagle thought, was wise about that. Many Wasichu knew, or had guessed, that Custer and his men had all died, one way or another, but by now, after over four years, many of the whites had come to believe that Long Hair must have brought his fate upon himself. Perhaps his Blue Coats had attacked a Lakota camp and been punished in return. Perhaps they had surrendered, and then decided to desert from the army. Perhaps Long Hair and his men were hiding in Texas or California, waiting for war to come again, so that they could rejoin the battle against the red man. The Wasichu could believe whatever they liked, as long as the treaty was kept.

  The sheer white cliffs and grassy valleys of the Badlands were behind him. Lemuel had ridden one day’s ride from the Easterner’s cabin on the Little Missouri with two of that young settler’s hands. Those two men had left him to camp by himself for the night, and the next day, after a slow ride, Lemuel had followed a trail to a small Arikara encampment. The Arikara chief there had known little Lakota and almost no English; Lemuel had not been able to ask what he and his people might have heard about the young man who had come to live along the Little Missouri.

  Lemuel had not told the young man that he had met his father, Theodore Roosevelt, in New York. He would have had to say then that he had last spoken to him during that dreadful November of 1876, when riots had convulsed the city, and he had sensed that young Roosevelt might not welcome any discussion of the evening that had marked such an abrupt change in his family’s fortunes.

  The young man bore his father’s name, Theodore, but his men called him Four Eyes behind his back. With his thick glasses and prominent teeth, he did not look much like his handsome and impressive father; his shrill high voice and pompous manner of speech were, Lemuel had noticed, another source of private amusement for Roosevelt’s hired hands. But the young man, only twenty years of age, had spirit. The life of wealth and privilege he had known in New York had vanished in the wake of the riots and more bank and business failures. He had left Harvard after his father’s death earlier that year to settle his family’s affairs and to see his mother and sisters off to England. They would be safer there, his mother had a brother in England, and so young Theodore felt it wiser to overlook the uneasy state of relations between England and the United States. As for himself, he had come West, he claimed, largely out of curiosity.

  Lemuel had his doubts about that. Young Roosevelt had clearly retained some of his considerable wealth to be able to afford his silver spurs, silver belt buckle, and his perfectly tailored buckskins. He still had connections among the wealthy families of New York, people who might be interested in profiting from the West in time. Roosevelt might be hoping to go in on some venture with them, if the peace endured and any opportunities presented themselves. In the meantime, judging by the bear and buffalo heads Roosevelt had already mounted on the inside walls of his unfinished cabin, he was keeping himself well occupied by hunting.

  “By Godfrey,’’ Roosevelt had told him, “the hunting’s good out here. A gentleman can live the way a gentleman should.” Lemuel had refrained from mentioning that few gentlemen could be found in these parts, and that the Indians would not take kindly to the extravagant slaughter of buffalo. The young man was intelligent; he would soon find that out for himself. He did not need to hear it from Lemuel; as a red man, whatever his accomplishments, he was definitely not a man whom Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., would think of as a gentleman.

  Lemuel rode away from the Arikara camp just after dawn, so impatient now to reach the ferry to Bismarck that he decided to skirt the camp of White Eagle instead of stopping there. Katia would be waiting for him in Bismarck, and Touch-the-Clouds would be expecting a report from him eventually on whatever wonders Edison might be concocting in his laboratory. Lately, the inventor was working on a new source of illumination, a lamp he called an incandescent light, although such a device was not likely to be of much use to the Lakota and their allies. Edison did not seem to care; he worked on whatever interested him and knew that Touch-the-Clouds valued him too much to object to that. The man reminded Lemuel of Crazy Horse in the way he seemed to live in a world of his own, apart from this one.

  Rubalev had brought Edison and several assistants out here. Edison wanted his laboratory, and whether he built it in the East or in Lakota territory had made no difference to him. He had come up the turbulent Missouri in a steamboat filled with equipment and supplies, and more shipments had continued to arrive afterward by train from Duluth to the outpost of Seward and from there by wagon to Bismarck. Rubalev had stayed long enough to get Edison and his wife settled, and then had left Bismarck.

  Lemuel did not want to know where the Alaskan had gone. To Washington, perhaps, to see that those diplomats whose governments preferred the present state of affairs in North America continued to remain neutral. Perhaps Rubalev was trying to interest the Russians in buying back Alaska and appointing him as its governor. That, to Lemuel, would be a welcome development. He found his insides eased at the thought of never seeing Rubalev again.

  “Listen carefully,” Mary Stilwell Edison said to the small group of women who had come to her husband’s laboratory. “Mr. Edison’s new machine is quite remarkable.”

  Katia had never seen the inside rooms of the laboratory before, but Thomas Edison was, according to his wife, so pleased with his new invention that he had allowed her to invite the wives of his assistants to come and look at it. Mrs. Edison had invited Katia as well. Lemuel was not one of Edison’s assistants, but was in the laboratory often enough almost to be considered one.

  The goodhearted Mrs. Edison had not invited Mrs. Miles, the wife of Fort Abraham Lincoln’s commanding officer, or any of the other officers’ wives, which was just as well. They probably would not have accepted the invitation anyway given that accepting it would have required being ferried across the treacherous waters of the Missouri. Except for occasional forays outside the fort on horseback, the military wives kept to their residences there and had little to do with the townsfolk upriver, and avoiding a crossing of the Missouri provided a good excuse. They, or their husbands, apparently did not want to grow too friendly with the citizens of Bismarck, perhaps because there were a few others like Katia who lived there, Lakota and other Indians who seemed to think themselves the equals of whites.

  Edison’s new invention sat on a table in front of them. John Kreusi, one of the inventor’s assistants, was fitting a shiny cylinder to the device, which had a handle at one end and a flywheel at the other. A gadget that held a needle was poised above the cylinder.

  Edison took hold of the handle and turned it; the cylinder rotated as the needle etched a grove. Edison leaned over the machine and shouted, “Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow.” A smile crossed his wide, pale unbearded face; he looked up at his wife. “Now you say something, Mary.”

  “Oh, dear.” Mary Edison giggled. “I wouldn’t know what to say.”

  Edison stopped turning the handle, moved the needle back to where it had started, and turned the handle again. He cupped an ear with his free hand. Katia had at first thought of him as a man with no interest in hearing what others had to say. In fact, she had soon learned, he was hard of hearing.

  “Mary had a little lamb,” the machine said in a faint voice, but one that Katia easily recognized as Edison’s. “Its fleece was white as snow.” Then, more faintly, “Now you say something, Mary.”

  “Oh, dear,” Mrs. Edison’s voice replied, “I wouldn’t know what to say.”

  “Land sakes,” Mary Edison said. The women fluttered around the device, marveling at it.

  “Been working on it a while,” Edison said. “Tried paper covere
d in wax. Tried some other things, but the foil’s what worked best. I call it a phonograph.”

  “Won’t be much use to the Injuns,” another assistant, a man named Polk, muttered, “and they and their friend Rubalev’s payin’ our bills.”

  “You are mistaken, Mr. Polk,” Katia said quickly. “To be able to hear the voice of a medicine man who is far away, to preserve our chants and sacred songs—our chiefs would be most grateful for such a machine.”

  The others smiled at her, with the friendly but wary expressions to which she had accustomed herself.

  The Wasichu inventor allowed them to admire the phonograph for a while before another assistant gently herded them out of the room and down the wooden stairs. Katia thanked Mrs. Edison for the tea and cakes that had been served to the ladies earlier, then went to her horse. The Wasichu women from the East had grown used to seeing her astride on horseback, although most of them preferred their landaus and wagons.

  The house she shared with her husband was a rented shack only two miles from Edison’s laboratory, on land with a small barn, chicken coop, and some grazing land and a corral for their few horses. Lemuel’s pinto was in the corral. She took the saddle off her horse, rubbed it down, then led all three of the horses into the barn.

  She had been happy here, and held that happiness as close to herself as the small medicine pouch of amulets that hung around her neck, but soon Anton Hobel, the owner, would be back with his new wife from Kansas City. Lemuel and she would have to leave this house then, but they could find rooms in Bismarck, perhaps in its renovated but still shabby hotel. She did not care where they went, as long as they were together.

  Katia left the barn and went inside to greet her husband.

  Katia had cooked a chicken for his supper. Lemuel ate the food with relish, but would have been as happy with beans or salt pork and bread. They went to bed early and again Katia showed him the joy she took with him.

  Once he had realized that she had come to care for him, he had hoped that there might at last be a child for them, but no child had come. Lemuel had gradually discovered that he did not care about that, either. How strange they both were, he thought, to be content that way; how different their world had become from that of the people around them.

  He held her for a while, knowing that she would not fall asleep right away. He would have to tell her what he planned to do.

  “I had a letter from Donehogawa today,” he said at last. “He is asking—he wants me to go to St. Joseph.”

  “Why?”

  “Because from there I can easily get to Fort Leavenworth and talk to Jeremiah Clarke.”

  She was not asking him why he had to see Jeremiah Clarke. She had probably guessed at the reason; Clarke’s most recent letters had revealed his growing disaffection with the army’s commanders in Washington. Lemuel would have to find out anything he could about what the army might be planning. He would not learn much from Colonel Nelson A. Miles, who was now in command at Fort Abraham Lincoln, on the other side of the Missouri from Bismarck, where the Fifth Infantry was now stationed with new recruits for the Seventh Cavalry. Miles was congenial, intelligent, and revealed nothing of what the officers above him might be thinking. There was no doubt that he had at least an inkling of any moves they might be planning.

  “My wife is the niece of General Sherman,” Nelson Miles had told the delegation from Bismarck that had welcomed him to the territory. His cold eyes had told Lemuel that he was not especially happy to see someone like White Eagle, in his feathered bonnet, among the delegation. “And another uncle is Senator John Sherman of Ohio.” Miles had wanted to make certain everyone knew about his connections at the outset, and it was rumored that he routinely ignored the chain of command and took his orders directly from Sherman.

  In the months since Miles had come to Fort Lincoln, relations between the soldiers and the Lakota and Arikara who camped below the bluffs that overlooked the fort during the winter had grown more uneasy. Miles could not violate the treaty and his orders, but he could delay deliveries of promised food to the Lakota and Arikara, food they had already paid for with hides, pelts, and small bags of gold. He could make it clear that he disapproved of whites who were overly friendly with the savages, and that he especially disliked any who, like Edison, did not seem to mind benefitting the red man in some way as long as they got what they wanted. Miles let other whites know where their true loyalties had to be in the end.

  It was, Lemuel supposed, almost a miracle, given the hostility of Miles, that the peace had not already been broken. If I were thinking of starting another war, he thought, Miles is just the sort of commander I would send out here.

  In the darkness, Katia murmured, “If you are going to St. Joseph, then I will go with you.”

  “You don’t have to come along, Katia. I’ll be back here by autumn, probably sooner.”

  “I want to come along,” she said. “I will miss you if I stay here.”

  It warmed him to hear her admit that. Perhaps she would also be safer away from Bismarck. Miles might take some kind of action, perhaps sending out a few scouts or a small expedition, that would strain the treaty without actually breaking it. He might even do something bolder, just to provoke the Lakota, to have some excuse to fight.

  “We’ll leave here together,” he said.

  “Good.” Her arms were around him once more.

  June had come, Congress was still in session and soon to adjourn for the summer, yet the lobby of the Willard Hotel was almost completely empty. John Finerty was immediately wary, wondering what was going on. Normally the lobby was filled with what could only be called a motley crowd of elected officials, office-seekers, correspondents, diplomats, representatives of the Autonomous Republics of Texas and California, and an assortment of ambiguous-looking men looking for favors of some sort. There were only a few men in the hotel lobby today, and all of them were standing by the entrance.

  Finerty crossed the lobby. There were two Negro men among the group in front of the door. One was Frederick Douglass, the noted lecturer and newspaper editor; the other was James Wormley, the owner of the Wormley Hotel on 15th and H Streets. Douglass was often here, importuning any officials who might be able to help with the growing number of colored refugees who had come to Washington from the South. A number of Negroes had been forced to flee the less frequent but still vicious violence directed against them there.

  Not that they were exactly welcomed here by the city’s white citizens, Finerty thought. The government of the United States might claim that the South, at last, was back in the Union fold, but it was kept there only by the forces of occupation. President Blaine, according to one of Fin- erty’s informants inside the White House, had been consulting in secret with Edwin Stanton, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, which might account for the increasingly harsh treatment being meted out to the South. The older Stanton got, Finerty mused, the more radical he became; he would see the South punished in the way he thought it should have been in the years following the Confederacy’s surrender. Stanton had won some sympathy even among the many Washington residents who had ties to the South; if the Negroes were better protected in the South by Federal troops, then they might stop migrating to Washington.

  “How do you do, Mr. Finerty,” Frederick Douglass said to him. The Negro was a small man with thick graying hair and a deep, resonant voice. “Mr. Wormley and I had an appointment to meet a Mr. Grigory Rubalev here, but apparently he has not yet arrived.”

  “Top of the morning to you both,” Finerty murmured. “Coincidentally, I was supposed to meet Mr. Rubalev here this morning myself.” He nodded at James Wormley, who was taller and lighter-skinned than Douglass. “I am a little bemused to see you here in a competitor’s lobby, Mr. Wormley.”

  The hotel proprietor looked solemn. “Our business with Mr. Rubalev is important enough for me to have agreed to meet him in Hades, had he wished to do so.”

  Finerty went to the door and looked outside. Now he saw w
hat had drawn the attention of the men standing near him. Soldiers were outside, setting up a barricade of wagons and Gatling guns across Pennsylvania Avenue. He stepped outside for a moment and peered up the avenue at the gate fronting the White House grounds. More soldiers were there, standing outside the gate. An officer with a colonel’s insignia on his shoulders glanced toward the Willard’s entrance.

  Finerty quickly retreated inside. “Saw them marching and riding out this morning,” one of the men inside muttered. “There were soldiers on Capitol Hill not long after dawn. I was on my way over here when I saw more of them going to the White House.”

  “What’s going on?” Finerty asked.

  “Damned if I know.”

  Douglass and Wormley had abandoned their station at the entrance for two chairs near one corner. Finerty walked toward them, wondering what the pair wanted with Grigory Rubalev. Residents of Washington from all walks of life seemed to be acquainted with Rubalev or to have some sort of business connection with him. Finerty had been in the city as the Washington correspondent for the Chicago Times for a little over a year now, arriving just after Blaine’s inauguration in March of 1877, and had begun to pick up bits of intelligence about the somewhat mysterious Grigory Rubalev not long after that. The man had been seen in Washington at intervals ever since the War Between the States. He numbered among his acquaintances some of President Grant’s former officials, various members of Washington’s most respectable families, and several foreign envoys, but he had also been seen with less reputable sorts. From time to time over the last decade and a half, Rubalev had closed up his house on 11th Street and disappeared—to see to certain interests he had in the West, although no one seemed to know exactly what those interests were. Lately, he seemed to be an unofficial ambassador of the Plains territories, bringing any complaints the Indians out there might have to the attention of the government. The officials at the Interior Department and the Bureau of Indian Affairs tolerated that particular thorn in their side mostly because there was no choice. Until more regiments of cavalry and infantry could be freed to serve in the West, the government would have to abide by their treaties with the Indians, and have the consolation of knowing that the people of the Western territories still regarded themselves as citizens of the United States. Indeed, to hear Rubalev tell it, they were almost more fervent in their support of the Republic and its institutions than many in the East.