Far as the Eye Can See

by Robert Bausch

  “Well, there are some renegade Injuns around here.”

  “Dog soldiers,” one of the other fellows said. “Tall Bull and many others.”

  “Sioux?” Theo said.

  “Cheyenne,” Major Carr said. “A big raiding party.” The two other men got down off their horses and walked toward us.

  “We’ll camp at Fort Sedgwick,” Theo said. Then he moved away from his wagon and approached the two men, who had stopped walking toward him. Both of them was small in stature, with brown faces and dirty black hair. When Theo got close enough, one of them said, “We would like some water.” Theo must have sensed something, because he reached out and grabbed the weapon out of the fellow’s hand and pointed it at both of them. “We got plenty of water,” he said. The second one give some thought to running but then he put his gun down on the ground. I got down off of Cricket and picked up his weapon, then backed away a bit, still pointing my carbine.

  Major Carr looked mighty surprised. “They are scouts, sir,” he said. “They are with me.”

  “You don’t look like any major in the army I ever seen,” Theo said. “Get down off that horse.”

  He sat there staring at Theo. “You are making a big mistake,” he said. Then he turned his horse and galloped off. Theo aimed his rifle at him but never fired.

  Big Tree said, “I go after him?”

  “We got these two,” Theo said. “Stick around.”

  “What do we do now?” I said.

  “These here are Pawnee,” Theo said. “The worst of the worst. And I’m thinking that ’ere major is a renegade.”

  “We are not Pawnee,” one of the little fellows said. “My name is Mitch Boyer. This here is Tom.”

  “You’d be white men,” Theo said.

  “That’s right. We ride with the major.”

  “You don’t look like white men. Why you dressed like that?”

  “We scout for the major. We are not enlisted.”

  Theo looked at me. “They’re Pawnee. Tie them to the wagon.”

  He held the gun on them and I got some rope and with the help of Big Tree tied one to the front wheel and the other to the back wheel. First we tied their arms. Then we pulled their legs apart and tied them so each man was spread-eagled across the wheel, feet and arms sticking out beyond the rim. With their knees on the ground and their lower legs bent back under the wheel, and their arms tied at the elbow, they commenced to breathing really hard. I could see the breastbone on each of them, protruding in the sunlight. When we was done, Theo said, “We’re gonna find out some things and then maybe I’ll get on this wagon and take them for a little ride.”

  I never seen it done, but there was always plenty of talk about it even when I was in the army. Tied to the wheels like that, if the wagon moved forward even one revolution, each man would break both arms and both legs. He could keep his head from getting crushed by holding his chin against his chest, but after that one revolution of the wheel, if the wagon kept moving, it would cause so much hurt, most men couldn’t even do that. It would kill them pretty horribly and pretty fast.

  The fellow who claimed to be Mitch said with some desperation, “At least give us a chance to prove who we are.”

  “What are Pawnee doing so far north?” Theo said.

  “We scout for the army.”

  “You’re stationed at Fort Sedgwick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s your tribe?”

  “I am half Sioux. My father is a white man,” the one called Mitch said.

  The other fellow, Tom, said, “I ain’t no Indian at all. I am Italian.”

  Theo laughed. They both looked at him without fear, but you could see that he had their attention. “How is it you look so much like a Indian then? I don’t know as I ever seen a Italian fellow out this way. I don’t even know what a Italian looks like.”

  Both men looked at him as though he’d suddenly started singing a opera song.

  “Why’d that other fellow run off?” Theo asked.

  “Look,” Mitch said. “That was Major Carr. He probably went for help.”

  “You think we . . .” Theo started to say, and then we heard a lot of horses coming down the trail. They was coming hard and they made pretty big cloud of dust. The horses on Theo’s wagon started to snort and titter, and the wagon moved a little bit.

  “Jesus Christ,” Tom said. “Cut us loose.”

  Theo stood in front of the team and calmed them, but it was a risky thing to do because Theo had his back to whoever was coming down that trail. Big Tree got down off his horse and stood next to it, holding his rifle over the saddle, aiming toward the approaching horses. I did the same. It could of been Indians come to kill us all, but it was Major Carr again, this time with half the Fifth Cavalry. They trotted over the hill and fanned out around us. We watched them get into place, then Major Carr come forward again, this time with his sword drawn and resting against his shoulder. The dust swirled around us, and Theo’s horses tried to pull back away from it. The wagon moved again, but only slightly.

  “Cut those men loose,” Major Carr said to Big Tree.

  Big Tree put his rifle in the scabbard on his horse, walked over to the wagon, and did what he was told. Mitch and Tom stood there rubbing their wrists. Then Tom walked over to Theo and looked up at him, stared into his eyes with this fierce expression on his face for a long time without saying nothing. Then he spit at Theo’s feet and walked past him. Theo looked properly scolded, but he didn’t have nothing to say, neither. I think he was right embarrassed. I was just glad I didn’t have to see them two broken to pieces by that wagon.

  Major Carr announced who he was again. “I take it you can believe it this time.”

  “Yessir,” Theo said.

  “We are from Fort Sedgwick, and we will escort you there now.”

  “We don’t need no escort,” Theo said.

  “Just the same. There are dog soldiers in this area and we are at war with them at the moment.”

  Dog soldiers was Cheyenne, as I was to learn later. The Cheyenne was among the most highly organized of all the Plains Indians. They had fighting teams of warriors each with its own name and leader: the Elk Warriors, or the Crazy Dog Soldiers, or the Red Bear Warriors, and so on. Each team had its own chief, and they took turns directing the entire tribe when they was all together. But a lot of the time they was independent of each other and traveled and hunted and raided by themselves. The chief of the dog soldiers was named Tall Bull. They had a huge camp west of Fort Sedgwick and they’d been threatening the fort and any travelers who might wander from there all summer. They had not killed nobody yet, but they’d raided a few trains, stolen some horses, and counted coups among the bands of soldiers who was sent out to keep the peace. They was, according to Major Carr, “a confounded nuisance.” He said he was going to have to get them to go back to Fort Laramie, about a hundred fifty miles west and north of Fort Sedgwick. We was going to be headed that way, so Theo volunteered to leave the train at Fort Sedgwick and accompany the major on his mission. He wanted me to go with him.

  “We’ll get a look at the country between here and there,” he said, “before we have to lead the wagons across it.”

  I hoped it would be a peace mission of some kind, or at least that we’d run them off without much of a fight. Theo said that happened a lot with the Indians because they was not too concerned with occupying a position, or land, or no place in particular. The Indians believed that land was like light, or air, or the weather: it belonged to everybody alike. They picked where they fought, and it was usually not so much a place as a good opportunity. It could be a decision any one or two of them might make.

  “Tall Bull is probably a man with good medicine,” Theo said, “and a lot of Indians follow him, but he ain’t no ‘general’ in our sense of the word. There ain’t never been a people anywhere in the world as free as Indians. I mean absolutely free. The braves running with Tall Bull don’t belong to him, they ain’t in his ‘army.�
�� They’ll fight together, but Tall Bull won’t operate with a strategy or a plan of battle. No Indian really ever does. One might start a fight and the others’ll join in. Indians never want to defend something so fat or stupid as a fort.”

  “What about a village?” I said.

  “Sometimes, if the hunting is good, they’ll stake a place and defend it. But you’ll see. They don’t often bother to protect themselves even in the camps. They frequently don’t even post a guard. And if they don’t think it’s a good day to fight, or if they ain’t dressed for it, they won’t bother, even if they got you outnumbered by hundreds.”

  “They don’t need a guard with all them dogs,” I said.

  “Hell, a dog’ll bark at anything.”

  “But we ain’t fighting, are we?”

  “We’ll watch,” he said.

  We was riding close behind Major Carr’s regiment. There was maybe three hundred of them in two columns in front of us. Sioux scouts—real Sioux, not just Mitch and Tom—fanned out to the left and right. There was twenty or twenty-five of them.

  We left on a searing-hot Sunday afternoon while singing at Sunday service still rung out in the fort. The sky was white and empty. The sun felt like it was only a few feet above us.

  We rode along in silence for what seemed like a hour or so, maybe more. We circled around the Indian camp, a long way around. I never seen even a wisp of smoke. But then we come to the village. It was at a place called Summit Springs. Up to that time I never seen so many lodges in one place. It seemed like hundreds of them spread out along the banks of the creek in a great, sprawling half circle. We come at it from the west, over a small rise of land that allowed us to survey the whole village. Indians always form their lodges in a big horseshoe with the opening facing east. The entrance of each lodge always faces east. So we was coming at them from behind. Major Carr raised his hand and we stopped. The air was absolutely still. We was only about fifty yards from the first lodge. I didn’t hear a dog bark. The inhabitants was all inside the lodges, out of the heat; most of them was taking a afternoon nap. Carr raised his white gloved hand, then give the signal to charge. The whole troop raced down the slope and charged into the sleeping village. They threw ropes over the lodgepoles and pulled down the tepees, dragging the skins away. I seen folks getting up and looking for weapons and running around, gathering children and helping old men and women. I don’t think the Indians got off very many shots, but the troops laid down a pretty withering fire as they rode back and forth through the village. Major Carr said he didn’t want to kill a lot of folks, he wanted to gather everybody up and herd them back to the fort without a lot of killing. Even so, Tall Bull was shot and killed. So was his son and wife. Two children was maimed by lunging horses. In all, more than fifty Cheyenne was killed, and maybe another hundred or so wounded. There was five hundred of them in all. Only one of Carr’s troops could be counted as a casualty. One of the officers sustained a pretty bad gash on his cheekbone—probably from a Indian lance, or maybe from his own sword. All four of the officers in the regiment rode into the village with their swords held high in front of them.

  Theo and I never even moved from the top of the rise. We watched the whole thing without saying nothing. When it was over and the Indians was all lined up, and the women busy taking down the lodges and packing up their belongings and their dead and wounded, Theo said, “Back east they’ll call this ‘the Battle of Summit Springs.’ ”

  “Some battle,” I said. The whole thing lasted maybe fifteen minutes, but it took several hours to get the whole village rounded up. I could hear women wailing the whole time. It almost sounded like singing.

  A week after Summit Springs, we headed west with the wagons. I rode Cricket out in front of the first wagon with Big Tree. I had plenty of chance to study the landscape and learn about the country from what I could see, because Big Tree didn’t say much. For a hundred miles he scanned the horizon in front of us and scarcely let out a sound. He sneezed once, and it seemed to shock him. He looked at me and I smiled, but he said nothing. I said, “Bless you.”

  He frowned.

  “That means God should protect you from whatever spirits you just got shed of,” I said.

  He understood that, or seemed to. He nodded his head slightly. I think he believed it was a spirit he expelled, too, but I wouldn’t testify to it.

  Theo gradually depended more and more on me. We’d sit up at night and study where we was headed, what we’d face in the way of rivers, forests, mountains, and valleys. He taught me the country I couldn’t yet see. All that time, I never once understood that was happening: that he was teaching me. It just seemed like talk even when he unfolded maps and pointed things out.

  We led our train all the way to Bozeman. There was a little settlement there, and Fort Ellis and lots of people. Indians, Canadians, even some Mexicans. It was where everybody took off from on the trip to Oregon or northern California. I thought Theo would take the train the rest of the way, but once we got to Bozeman, he didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry.

  We camped outside the settlement for two days, and finally on the morning of the third day I walked over to his wagon. He was setting in front of a fire that his wife tended, smoking a stumpy pipe, watching his brood play in the dirt with a few of the Indian children. They was chasing after a jackrabbit leg that still had the fur on it. They each had a small lariat and the game seemed to be trying to catch the leg with the lariat and keep it from the others. They kicked the leg, and threw their ropes at it, but they couldn’t touch it with their hands. Theo’s wife looked up when she seen me and give a sort of half wave of her hand. “It’s Bobby,” she said.

  Theo didn’t even look my way. He patted the ground next to him as a way of telling me to sit down.

  I set there watching the children too. Theo’s wife offered me a cup of coffee and I took it. “Thank you kindly,” I said.

  She smiled at me and went back to tending the fire. Theo studied the bowl he was smoking, tamped the tobacco down with his forefinger, then put the pipe back in his mouth. It was cool and breezy, and white clouds bunched up in the east like a city you might see from the prow of a ship. The sky was deep blue against the white clouds.

  “I like this country,” he said finally. “These hills. It’s a good place to raise horses.”

  “What about the rest of these folks?”

  “It’s a good place to raise kids too.”

  “No, I mean the train.”

  “It’s already three weeks into August,” he said. “Too late in the year to head for California now. They’d never make it before winter, so they’ll stay here until spring. They got plenty of time to find somebody to take them.”

  I said nothing.

  After a long time he said, “I expect you might take them.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Of course you can. You are able.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “What will you do?” Theo said.

  “I don’t know. I guess I’ll stay here awhile.” I didn’t want to go to California no more. Leading that train out the rest of the way was the furthest thing from my mind. I didn’t say nothing to Theo about it, but there was no way in hell I’d try to do that. “I like it here too,” I said.

  He nodded, still puffing on his pipe.

  “You know,” I said, “maybe I’ll do some trapping.”

  “There’s lots of folks doing that south and east of here. In the Musselshell country. I think Big Tree’s going down there to trap a few beaver. You can catch on with him.”

  “Maybe I’ll just go by myself,” I said.

  “You could do that too.”

  “Even if I was with Big Tree, it’d feel like I was by myself.”

  “Well, he knows what he’s doing. He’ll be glad to have you along, I expect.”

  I didn’t want to go on with the train, but it was kind of upsetting to be suddenly cut loose from it. I had no idea what I wanted now that the whole futur
e was sort of thrust on me. I mean, Theo deciding to stay in Bozeman left me wondering what the hell I was doing all the way out there. When I set out from St. Louis, I had this foggy dream about destiny and finding good land and being somebody, but the last thing I wanted was to try and settle on a piece of ground in this place all by myself. I had nothing to buy land with anyway, and I could see Theo didn’t want me hanging around, depending on him none. He was done with me and I known it from that minute a-setting by the fire while he puffed on his pipe.

  Not long after that day I said my good-byes to Theo and his wife. It turned out that Big Tree was going to the Musselshell River country, south and east of Bozeman, to do some trapping. So I decided to throw in with him. I bought a bunch of traps and other things I’d need and made sure to thank Theo for all he taught me. The wife told me to take care of myself and it seemed as if she really meant it, although she never said a word to me the whole time I rode with them.

  I traded Preston’s wagon for two mules and fifty dollars. I bought twenty feet of trapline and a few pelt packs. I figured I made out pretty good even though the wagon was the biggest thing I ever owned and I known I’d miss it when it rained or snowed.

  Part Two

  Big Tree

  1870–75

  Chapter 5

  Around Bozeman there was a lot of Indians: Crow and Northern Cheyenne, Sioux, including Uncpapas, Miniconjous, Lakota, and Dakota. There was also Shoshone, and Piegan Blackfeet. Tribes like Pawnee and Nez Perce even showed up from time to time. Each had their own kinds of battle; they stole horses from each other regularly. The Crow especially fought a ongoing battle against the other tribes because they was outnumbered by all of them. They was always at trying to outwit the Sioux even though they had inner-marriages and families that crossed from one to the other tribe without much bitterness at all. They was hard to figure; they even worked together sometimes, hunting buffalo or fighting the Blackfeet. But they never forgot that they was always enemies. The Crow had to steal horses from the Sioux and Cheyenne just to ensure their own survival, and that’s also why they stayed pretty close to the settlement and white folks. To get at the Crow, sometimes a fairly large war party would raid near the settlement; and if it was more than the army could handle, it would be up to the militia to chase them off or even capture some of them if possible.