Heaven and Hell (47 page)

A rumble of thunder said the clouds would soon spill their moisture.

With a lurch and a squeal of rusty iron wheels, the locomotive jerked the car forward. Dense green undergrowth, the fecund forest of the Low Country, slid slowly past the open windows, into which butterflies and insects flew.

"Here, lean against this part of the wall," Cooper said to his daughter. "It's cleaner than the rest."

Marie-Louise thanked him with her dark eyes and started to change position. Just then a young man, a civilian with a boyish pale face, curling mustache, and the vivid blue eyes and light hair of a German or Scandinavian, vacated his seat. He gestured for the black woman to take it.

Over the squealing of the wheels Cooper heard other passengers mutter. The Negress shook her head. The young man smiled and gestured again, urging her. Clutching her bundle, the woman hesitantly approached the seat. The man sitting beside the window immediately vacated it. The timid black woman sat down.

The man who left gave the younger man a glare. Another passenger across the aisle reached for a knife in his belt. His stringy wife restrained his hand. The young civilian saluted the couple with a mocking tilt of his hat and walked to the front end of the car, crossing his wr

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arms and leaning there, showing no sign of regret over his act of courtesy.

As

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the young man settled himself, he noticed Marie-Louise at the other end of the car. Cooper saw color rush to his daughter's cheeks.

Then he saw the immediate interest on the face of the young civilian.

A thunderclap. Hard rain began to fall through the holes in the roof. "Here, stand closer," Cooper said, opening the umbrella he'd brought along for such an emergency.

With most of the passengers getting soaked, the train of the Charleston & Savannah line labored northward. Cooper stared at the back of the black woman's head. He was outraged. What next, then?

Mixed marriage? Sickles and the Radicals were intent on destroying Southern civilization.

He didn't forget the young civilian. Nor did Marie-Louise, though for entirely different reasons.

Sickles to be recalled. Perhaps it is a good thing. We have quite enough excuses for violence already.

. . . Since the treaty of '65 the Cheyennes

have made war against the people of the

United States, and having confederated

with them the Apaches and Arrapahoes

have in part become involved in the troubles

which resulted from this course.

Their annuities have been withheld,

and they were gradually sinking to their

former wild and barbarous ways when

they heard that a great Peace Commission

was on the way to their country to settle

all difficulties, and restore general harmony

...

"From Our Own Correspondent" The New York Times friday, Oct. 25, 1867

33

It was the season of changes. The prairie grass yellowed, and leaves of the elm and persimmon trees began to flame with color.

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There were changes in command. Johnson, through General Grant, ordered Generals Hancock and Sheridan to exchange places. Hancock was being disciplined for his adventure on the Pawnee Fork, Sheridan for his too-strict enforcement of Reconstruction in the Fifth Military District in New Orleans; he was a favorite of the Radicals, but of few others in Washington.

Sheridan came to the Plains for a swift inspection, though he was due for extended leave and wouldn't assume full command until sometime in late winter. Charles knew a few things about the Yankee, Academy class of '53. He was small, Irish, ceaselessly and inventively foul mouthed. He was accustomed to waging war and winning. Charles wondered how the command change would fit with this autumn's peace initiative, what many in the Army sneered at as "the Quaker Policy."

There were changes in the fates of great enterprises. It was clear that the Union Pacific in Nebraska would reach the one hundredth meridian first, probably in October. The U.P.E.D. had lost the contest, and Charles heard that as many as twelve hundred might be put out of work. This didn't include the gun-happy security men of J. O. Hartree, some of whom rode every passenger train. Charles also heard the line might change its name to something more individual. Kansas Pacific was mentioned.

There were fundamental changes in the proud but strife-torn Seventh Cavalry. Custer was remanded to Leavenworth, and was there facing court-martial on charges preferred by one of his disgruntled captains, Bob West, and his own commandant, A. J. Smith. The charges were numerous, but the serious ones were the abandonment of his command 300

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at Fort Wallace, the dash east to find Libbie, and shooting the deserters.

Charles heard that the Boy General was confident of the outcome and talked a lot about his deeply religious nature. Charles was cynical; when caught, scoundrels often mantled themselves in the flag or proclaimed their Christian conversion.

It was, most of all, a season fraught with the possibility of change for the Plains Army. They were held in confined patrol duty while the great Peace Commission, which had already failed to achieve even one successful meeting with the Northern Sioux, turned south through autumnal Kansas to try again with the Southern tribes.

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The sky was the color of blued metal the day the cavalcade left Harker. Drums and fifes played one hundred fifty troopers of the Seventh off the post to the melody of their signature march, "Garry Owen."

A detachment of infantry followed, then Battery B of the Fourth Artillery, hauling two of the new Gatling guns. Charles wondered if a Gatling really could fire one hundred fifty rounds a minute from its ten hopper-fed revolving barrels. Ike Barnes said Gatlings overheated quickly, and jammed. The Seventh had not tested a Gatling; Custer called them worthless toys, and A. J. Smith refused to authorize ammunition for test firing, afraid the War Department would dock his pay for it.

High-wheeled canvas-topped Army ambulances conveyed the Commissioners and their retinue of civilians. The commission numbered seven: Senator J. B. Henderson of Missouri who had sponsored the bill establishing it; Indian Affairs Commissioner N. G. Taylor; Colonel Sam Tappan, the first Army man to fight vigorously for a Sand Creek investigation; General John Sanborn, one of the authors of the Little Arkansas Treaty; fastidious General Alfred Terry, in command of the Department of the Dakotas; and General C. C. Augur, Department of the Platte, who had replaced Sherman after the latter made some intemperate criticisms of the commission and got yanked to Washington to answer to Grant. The man in charge was General William Harney, a massive white bearded soldier with a considerable reputation as an Indian fighter. Certainly 3 fine, martial lot to be responsible for damping fires on the Plains, Charles thought as he watched the caravan depart southward toward Fort Larned.

Governor Crawford was with the expedition, and Senator Ross as well. Eleven reporters and a photographer trailed along in the ambulances

and supply wagons, which numbered sixty-five. The wagons were loaded with crates of trade goods, including knives and glass beads, surplus Army dress uniforms, campaign hats, and boots, and thirty-four hundred old bugles--a brilliantly stupid inspiration of General Sanborn's.

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The wagons carried less pacific gifts as well: barrels of black powder; boxes of trade rifles, percussion caps, paper cartridges. Civilians and Army men were already at odds over distributing these presents.

Olive Branchers said they would only arm the tribes for more war. Others, notably General Terry, said no present was more meaningful or necessary to nomadic people who hunted their food. It was the classic debate, which Charles had heard before, and of which he was contemptuous.

The only sure instrument of peace was a gun in the hands of a U.S. soldier.

He watched the caravan disappear, wondering what kind of insolent Indians they would confront. Bands of Cheyenne military society men were still roaming Kansas, destroying the stage stations and attacking trains and work crews. Charles didn't doubt Scar and his friends
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were among them. Who would be left to lie to the Commissioners, saying that their few voices spoke for hundreds of others?

His name was Stone Dreamer. He was frail; eighty winters. All his teeth were gone, and his hair resembled a few thin strands of gray wool. Yet he had proud eyes, and his wits hadn't deserted him, as old men's wits so often did.

He was called Stone Dreamer because of his youthful vision-seeking.

When he went apart, fasting and praying to the One Who Made All Things, his eyes blurred briefly, and then the various-sized stones on the ground rose into the air, hovered before him, and spoke in turn about deep, important matters.

Stones, like so many natural objects, were holy to the Cheyennes.

Stones symbolized permanence, the unchanging verities of life, the everlasting earth, and the One who shaped it from nothing. Stone Dreamer's vision taught him that, compared to these things, the ambitions, loves, hatreds of a mortal were blades of grass tossed by a windstorm.

They were as nothing.

When he returned from the wilderness, he told the council of his vision. The elders were impressed. Here was a young man clearly meant for a special life. He was instructed to become a Bowstring, a member of the society of the brave, the pure, and the celibate, who could be equally comfortable slaying enemies in battle or philosophizing on issues of peace and tribal life.

So he joined and rose through the ranks. Bowstring, Bowstring Society leader, village chief when he grew too old for fighting, peace chief when he grew older still. In October of 1867, he put up his tipi with two hundred fifty others sheltering about fifteen hundred Cheyennes at the western end of the natural basin of the Medicine Lodge Valley. This was three days' ride from the sun-dance ground to be used Banditti 303

by the great caravan of white chiefs with guns who were moving down from the north to make peace with the five Southern tribes.

About three thousand Comanches, Kiowas, Kiowa-Apaches and Arapahoes encamped within twenty miles of the treaty site. They were eager for the gifts of soap and brass bells, tin cups and iron pans, blankets and calico, as well as the weapons described to them by Murphy, the Indian superintendent, who had ranged lower Kansas ahead of the great caravan, urging the tribes to come in. The Cheyennes would not go as close as the other tribes because they had certain memories uniquely
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their own. Chivington. Sand Creek. The Pawnee Fork.

The peace parley began at the site not far above the demarcation line between Kansas and the Indian Territory. A special emissary rode all the way to the Cheyenne encampment to ask that they, too, meet with the white chiefs. In due course, all the elders were consulted. "What do you think, Stone Dreamer?" he was asked.

"We should go," he said. "But not for the gifts. We should go because if is folly to wage a war that cannot be won. The white men are too many. We are too few. If we do not live in harmony with them, they will trample us to nothing."

He hated to say such bitter words, but he believed them. A renegade whiskey peddler, Glyn, had once showed Stone Dreamer a picture of a white man's town; it was an engraving of Fifth Avenue in New York, from Leslie's, though Stone Dreamer didn't know any of those specifics. He merely covered his mouth and popped his eyes at the inexpressible wonders he saw on the page.

He saw rows of solid structures he presumed were forts, lining both sides of a broad way. Along this way, scores of horse-drawn vehicles traveled in both directions, surrounded by hundreds of people on foot. This was but one tiny part of one white man's village, the trader said, and there were hundreds of such villages.

So Stone Dreamer, who wanted to pass his final winters sensibly, at peace, spoke for accommodation. Some others, among them his friend the peace chief Black Kettle, agreed. Other war chiefs including the unquestionably brave Roman Nose did not. Nor for the most part did the younger men, especially those rising to leadership in the soldier societies. When Stone Dreamer considered the headstrong behavior of this group, he sadly concluded that age no longer generated respect, and traditional tribal discipline was breaking down. One of the most feared and admired young men, also undeniably brave but needlessly cruel in Stone Dreamer's opinion, ranted and swore that he'd never submit to the white chiefs while he could draw breath.

These words of Man-Ready-for-War carried special weight, for it

^as almost certain that he would be chosen a Dog-String Wearer next 304 ' HEAVEN AND HELL

spring at the annual reorganization of his society. The Dog-String was a wide hide sash, about nine feet long and decorated with paint, quilis, and eagle feathers. Four Dog Society men were awarded the sash each year. Those so honored for bravery wore the sash in battle, slipping it over the head by means of a long center slit.

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The bottom of the Dog-String bore either a red-painted wood peg or a shorter slit to accommodate the point of a lance. If a battle went badly, it was the privilege of the Dog-Strings to peg or pin their sashes to the ground, signaling their intent to stand and give their lives, so the others might escape. A Dog-String Wearer's death was special, heroic, and was described in song and tale long after his bones went to dust and blew away.

Man-Ready-for-War and young men like him spoke more persuasively than old men like Stone Dreamer. So the Cheyennes remained apart in the valley of the Medicine Lodge, while other great Indian chiefs--frail Satank, who proudly wore a medal graven with the head of James Buchanan; bearlike Santana, another feared Kiowa, who favored a U.S. Artillery officer's coat--led their deputations to the conference ground, listened to the soothing words of the white chiefs, made their marks on a treaty paper that gave away still more of their tribal land, and then, rewarded, reveled in the distribution of the trade goods and guns.