Charbonneau - Winfred Blevins
Page 30
Damn thing’s on him again. He zags toward some rocks. Hell, no choice. He turns for the edge of the rocks, shouts "Goddamn it!" when he sees it’s twenty feet to the ground below, and jumps.
When he begins to get his breath, the damn bear is on its hind legs up on the rocks roaring at him. "Get out of here!" he yells. "You’ve got bad breath." His damn shoulder hurts where he rolled on it. Spotted Deer comes up leading his horse, and nearly breaking in two with laughter. He gives her the evil eye, which only makes her laugh harder, and climbs on.
1862: No gifts had come to the Shoshones from the Great White Father for five years, despite many promises. Impatient with Washakie’s peaceableness and willingness to wait, the tribe was ready to fight. The long knives were not so many now, because most of them were gone to fight a war between the white men east of the Missouri River. Pash-e-co, who was warlike, won the hearts of most of the Shoshone and displaced Washakie as supreme chief In March he mounted a huge and devastating campaign against the whites. It ended, the next winter, when General Connor massacred Bear Hunter’s band on the Bear River.
Paump and his son Paump are walking by the edge of a marshy place. Out in the trees they can hear a sow squirrel chattering as she hops through the trees. Her litter is squalling for food, sending its little shrieks from the hole of a tree twenty feet out into the slough left by the heavy rains. The sow squirrel flies from branch to branch and from tree to tree, ranging wide in her mission, all the while calling back that food in on its way. The father points out to the son a black snake slithering into the water. It swims to the base of the slender tree and winds upward to the hole. The litter squawks a new signal--high, more piercing just before the snake’s head slides into the nest.
The boy gets rigid before his eyes pick up the sow, charging through the trees in huge bounds. In instants she is at the hole, her hand claws dug into the trunk and her head ready to strike. Once, twice, three times the sow’s head whacks at the snake. The third time it holds, then cocks again, its teeth sunk just behind the snake’s head. The sow shakes it violently, shakes it again, and then lets the snake drop into the water. She disappears into the hole for a moment; then she darts down the trunk head first; holding on with her hind legs, she dips her nose and paws twice into the water. The man and boy wade to the base of the tree and retrieve the dead snake. The man holds it against the trunk, slits it open, and shows the boy that there are no tiny squirrels inside.
1863: At the big treaty council at Fort Bridger in July, Washakie accepted the government’s terms for peace with the Shoshones: The Indians granted safe passage to emigrants, the right to settlements as way stations for them, the safety of the mail and the telegraph, and permission for the railroad to cross their lands. In return they got a ten-thousand-dollar annuity for twenty years, and their claim to the Wind River country was recognized.
1868: The Great White Father did not pay the dollars he promised to the Shoshones; the people were restless, and Washakie was on the verge of anger. At a great treaty council at Fort Bridger the Indians and whites made a new agreement: The Shoshones would give up their nomadic life, settle down in one place, and learn to till the soil. For this purpose they were given a reservation in the Wind River Mountains; the head of each Indian family would be entitled to 320 acres of land, which he would own as long as he continued to cultivate it. It would be a sea-change in Shoshone life.
Washakie, though, did not look back enviously on the old way. He said instead:
"I am laughing because I am happy. Because my heart is good. As I said two days ago, I like the . . . Wind River valley. Now I see my friends are around me, and it is pleasant to meet and shake hands with them. I always find friends along the roads in this country, about Bridger, that is why I come here. It is good to have the railroad through this country and I have come down to see it.
"When we want to grow something to eat and hunt, I want the Wind River country. In other Indian countries, there is danger, but here about Bridger, all is peaceful for whites and Indians and safe for all to travel. When the white men came into my country and cut the wood and made the roads, my heart was good, and I was satisfied. You have heard what I want. The Wind River country is the one for me.
"We may not for one, two, or three years be able to till the ground. The Sioux may trouble us. But when the Sioux are taken care of; we can do well. Will the whites be allowed to build houses on our reservation? I do not object to traders coming among us, and care nothing about the miners and mining country where they are getting out gold. I may by and by get some of that myself
"I want for my home the valley of the Wind River and lands on its tributaries as far east as the Popo--agie, and want the privilege of going over the mountains to hunt where I please."
Paump also hunted as he pleased. He had opted out of the momentous struggle of the Shoshone against the white man. With Spotted Deer he lived the balance of his life in the wild and inaccessible Salmon River Mountains, moving with the weather, hunting and trapping and fishing, watching the seasons change and then change back, making his music. Later, the Shoshones, when they told tales about him, said that nothing happened to him the rest of his life. He would have said that what mattered to him happened every day of his life.
AUGUST. 1876: The old man awoke in the pre-dawn light. He felt it, sometimes, like this; he could sense that in a few moments the sun, like a bubble of air that has risen from the bottom of a lake, would burst silently over the ridge to the east. He got up quietly from the buffalo robe, not disturbing the two squaws who slept nearby, and walked to the flap that always faced the rising sun and looked out at the eastern sky. His sense had been right, as it had been right on most mornings since he had come to live here in this wide grove beside the Salmon River. He looked at the distant ridge across the river where the sun would appear, this time of year, to the right of three juniper pines just below its flat top. The sky was not yellow or red--the sun had been above the earth’s horizon for more than an hour already. The sky was instead the crystalline, cornflower blue of mornings in the mountains. The spot where the sun was aiming turned a brilliant white, and then the first edge of the yellow globule flickered above the ridge.
The old man stood facing it, as he did every morning, naked in the cool air.
THE END
Table of Contents
Preface
Epilogue
Chapter I: Eighteen hundred four
Chapter II: Eighteen hundred fourteen
Chapter III: Eighteen hundred twenty-one
Chapter IV: Eighteen hundred twenty-three
Chapter V: Eighteen hundred twenty-nine
Chapter VI: Eighteen hundred thirty-one
Chapter VII: Eighteen hundred thirty-eight