One Thousand White Women (33 page)

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Authors: Jim Fergus

BOOK: One Thousand White Women
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The breaking of camp proceeded somewhat slower yesterday with the cold weather, and it was midmorning before we were finally under way. By then the wind had come up out of the north, and directly into this we rode all day.
Thankfully, all who wanted them had horses for the return trip, for we traveled unencumbered by the several hundred hides with which we arrived here, and the trade goods we bartered for took up somewhat less packing space.
I rode most of the day alongside my friend Helen Flight. Our strange new spiritual advisor, Brother Anthony, trailed behind us on his little burro, the fellow’s long legs dangling, his feet very nearly reaching the ground, the poor donkey breaking periodically into a rough-gaited trot to keep from falling too far behind.
With the Kellys’ canny representation, Helen had managed, after all, to procure some new painting supplies from the “horrid little frog” as she refers to Big Nose. It seems that some of the garrison wives also enjoy dabbling in the arts as a means of passing the endless days when their husbands are off on expeditions, and so the Frenchman stocks a few such supplies. She has replenished her store of charcoal and sketch paper, and has even obtained a precious roll of painter’s canvas. The dear thing also purchased two new notebooks, which she presented to me as a gift. I was terribly grateful to her for I am filling these pages at an alarming rate, and may soon have to stop writing altogether for they are becoming rather cumbersome to transport.
Helen kept a pipe clenched determinedly between her teeth as we rode into the frigid wind; it poked out through her scarf, but she had little success keeping it lit. We both were well covered, I in an extra layer of fur-lined moccasins and leggings and a kind of muff affair, made out of silky beaver fur, to keep my hands warm, and she with a new pair of gloves and men’s boots for which she had traded at the store, and also wearing native fur and hide leggings. We both wore heavy coats of buffalo hair which we were particularly grateful to have had made for us during the summer by our camp seamstress Jeanette Parker. On our heads we each wore cossacklike hats of beaver fur pulled low over our ears; these last, an Indian fashion and very snug. Both of us also wore woolen scarves over our faces. In these confining outfits conversation would have been difficult in the best of circumstances—all but impossible with the wind blowing directly into our faces so that the words seemed to be pushed back down our throats before they had time to escape. We would try to holler back and forth and then would look at each other helplessly to see if we had been understood. Finally we gave a kind of mutual shrug and contented ourselves to ride in silence, with nothing but our thoughts for company, hunkered low on our horses, trying vainly to make our profiles as small as possible against the ceaseless wind.
How strange to recall that six months ago we departed Fort Laramie as anxious white women entering the wilderness for the first time; and now, perhaps equally anxious, we leave as squaws returning home. I realized anew as we rode into the cold wind on this morning that my own commitment had been sealed forever by the heart that beats in my belly; that I could not have remained even if I so wished.
Nor can I make room on this page or in my own heart for further thoughts of John Bourke. I push him from my mind. This is no act of easy omission on my part; I do not consign him casually to a forgotten past. It is rather an act of will—a kind of self-performed surgery on my soul … the bloodiest of mutilations. Having seen him again, having been held in his arms for that brief moment, having felt again his strong tender hand upon my stomach, the cutting away of him is even more painful this time … for in our parting I sense a new finality …
I write these few lines from our first night’s camp out of Fort Laramie. It did not seem as though we made much progress today, as if the wind itself restrained us. In spite of the fact that I was warmly attired, I felt frozen to the bone by the end of the day—the prairie wind cuts like a razor through any clothing—and the warmth of our lodge this evening seems especially luxurious.
Little Wolf killed an antelope today on the trail and tonight we dine on the fresh backstrap—the most tender and delicious in my opinion of all wild meats. I invited Helen and her husband, Mr. Hog, as well as our new monk Anthony to join us for dinner—which remark as I read it back sounds somewhat more elegant and formal than the occasion warrants.
The guests scratched on the lodge covering at roughly the appointed hour, and were seated in the place of honor by the fire. After Little Wolf had blessed the meat by raising a piece to the four directions, and to the heavens and the earth, and then set it on a little platter off to the side of the fire for
He’amaveho’e
—the Great Medicine himself—to dine upon (although, of course, it is quickly consumed by one of the dogs, which act everyone pretends not to notice), we all fell to eating with hearty appetites. The savages take their meals in a rather serious spirit—perhaps as a matter of life and death—and there is very little conversation around the dining circle.
But Helen and I tend to flout that particular convention (among others, to be sure!), and thus we chattered away, trying to make our new guest feel as much at home as possible in his strange new surroundings.
“Do tell us, Brother Anthony,” Helen asked, “are you interested in Nature?”
“It is my life,” answered the young Benedictine, with soft reverence in his tone. “I am blessed by all of God’s creations.”
“Splendid!” said Helen. “That is to say, an appreciation of Nature is nearly a requisite to spiritual survival in the wilderness.
“I don’t suppose, if I may be so bold to ask,” Helen asked, “that you’re a sporting man?”
“A sporting man?” asked the monk.
“No, of course you’re not,” Helen said, “it’s just that this time of year—although at the moment I must say it feels quite like the dead of winter—that is to say, it is the autumn that gets my blood to coursing with thoughts of the hunt—stalking the uplands, the thunderous flush of wings, the crack of guns!
“Indeed, I should like to invite you all very soon over to Mr. Hog and my lodge for a game bird dinner. Do you like to cook, Brother Anthony?”
“I am a baker,” Anthony answered softly. I was rather warming to our monk, whose manner is one of great simplicity and quiet attentiveness. I think that he shall do well among these people, that he may be useful in reminding us all that God’s work on earth is best accomplished in such a spirit of humility.
“A baker! Splendid!” said Helen, her eyebrows popping up. “That is to say, to my mind there’s nothing more useful than a man who can bake. Yes, indeed, fresh-baked bread will be a wonderful addition to our menus,” she went on. “You know the natives have gone wild for the stuff—no pun intended. And we are now well supplied with flour and baking powder. Yes, I dare say we’ll do a good bit of interesting cooking this fall, wouldn’t you agree, May?”
Thus we ate our antelope, chatting and listening to the wind howling outside. It remained snug inside our tent with the fire burning; the wind sliding around the tipi without entering—an advantage to its round design.
When all had finished eating, Little Wolf extracted his pipe and smoking pouch, while Helen, never timid about being unconventional, packed her own short-stemmed pipe with tobacco and lit it from a small stick held to the fire. Then all settled comfortably against their backrests, as Horse Boy and the old crone slipped off to curl up on their sleeping robes.
Even the usually gregarious Helen fell silent and contemplative. The only sounds inside the lodge came from the small cracklings of the fire, and the wind blowing outside. It was a moment of near perfect serenity, and I took the opportunity to study my fellow tentmates, Feather on Head holding her baby, and Quiet One, for once not cleaning or cooking or moving about, just sitting quietly next to her daughter Pretty Walker, both of them staring into the fire. Little Wolf, seated on the other side of them, puffed reverently on his pipe, which he would then hand over gently and with some ceremony to our contemplative guest Anthony, who in turn passed it along to Helen’s husband, Hog.
As I looked about, I tried to imagine what the others were thinking of on this night. Surely Helen, like me, had felt the tug of civilization in our short time at the fort, and I think we both wondered now if we would be able to get all the way back when the time came.
Perhaps our Indian families thought about the coming winter, or in Little Wolf’s case, about the uncertain future of the people with whose welfare he is forever charged. Perhaps they thought only of the next day’s journey, of the friends and family with whom they would soon be reunited.
Surely our new monk prayed to his God to show him the way in this strange new world; I smiled at him when I caught his eye so that he might know that he was among friends.
From his bed, Horse Boy stared into the fire, his bright gunmetal-colored eyes reflecting the flickering flames. Perhaps he thought only of his horses on this cold autumn night, for soon he would bundle himself up in a blanket and leave the tent to sit up with them, guarding against thieves and wolves, before being relieved by another boy just before dawn. Such a hardy race of people these are! God love them …
After a time Helen and Hog, who is himself a quiet and dignified fellow, and seems genuinely fond of his eccentric artist wife, rose to return to their own lodge. Although I offered to make a place for Anthony to sleep the night in our lodge, he declined, saying that he had a blanket with him and that he was quite accustomed to sleeping upon the bare ground. It was a part of his devotional labors, he said.
I went outside with the guests when they left, to do my business before bed. Especially with winter coming on I must teach the savages the utility of a chamber pot—a clever white man invention that has some real application to tent living!
Although I had wrapped myself iw a blanket, I felt the sting of wind on my cheeks as I exited the tipi. We were camped in the crook of a small creek surrounded only by high, treeless plains—uninteresting and lonely country, with nothing to break the wind, which comes whipping down off the ridges to assault our little grouping of tipis huddled here together, so small and defenseless. How tiny we are, exposed to the huge elements! No wonder these people are superstitious in the face of it. No wonder they try to curry favor with the gods of the four directions, with the gods of Earth and Heaven, with the spirits of wild animals and weather at whose mercy we live. And no wonder, by the same token, that the white man builds his forts and houses, his stores and churches—his flimsy fortifications against the vastness and emptiness of earth which he does not know to worship but tries instead to simply fill up.
Now I pull my dress to my waist and squat alongside a low-growing sagebrush, the only available protection from the wind, and a thin one at that. The most “uninteresting of vegetation,” Captain Bourke calls it, and I suppose it is, although at least it has a strong and to my nose not disagreeable scent, and there have been times when I have rubbed it on my body as a kind of hygienic measure—the savage version of French perfume, I should say.
There is no moon tonight and the wind has scoured the clouds from the sky and the heavens shine above me. As I squat to pee I look upward at the billions of stars and planets in the heavens and somehow my own insignificance no longer terrifies me as it once did, but comforts me, makes me feel a part, however tiny, of the whole complete and perfect universe … and when I die the wind will still blow and the stars still shine, for the place I occupy on earth is no more permanent than the water I now make, absorbed by the sandy soil, dried instantly by the constant prairie wind …
 
We take our time making our way back to the Powder River country, describing a circuitous route in the process. The Indians have a peculiar way of traveling that might seem to a white person unplanned and quite random. In this case, the scouts lead the way, the People follow—first north and then veering as if by sudden change of plan to the east and the pine-timbered hills around Camp Robinson, where this journey truly began all those months ago. But this time we skirt the camp itself, and avoid the few white settlements that are springing up around it. These are mostly a hastily contructed and seemingly haphazard grouping of shacks and lean-tos, with sod roofs and mud streets; there is nothing graceful about them and it is difficult to recognize in their shantytown appearance the refined hand of civilization—or for that matter any particular improvement upon the raw countryside itself.
There are cattlemen moving into the country around Camp Robinson, and one day as we were passing through some of our young men went out on a hunting party and killed and slaughtered several beeves. I tried to explain to my husband that the cattle belonged to the settlers and that by killing them we would only bring trouble down upon the People, but Little Wolf answered that the settlers had driven off the buffalo and killed out the game in this country and that the People must eat as they travel. In any case, he said, he could not control the young men who went out to hunt and found cows where once there had been buffalo. As is so often the case, I found it difficult to mount an effective argument against Little Wolf’s plain logic.
But at the feasts that followed this hunt, the diners made faces of disdain and much grunting of disapproval at the taste of the beef—and I admit that it is not so flavorful as the wild buffalo to which even I now confess a preference.
From the hills above Robinson we made a short visit to the nearby Red Cloud Agency, where Little Wolf powwowed with some of the Dakota leaders, including Red Cloud himself. They discussed the government commission, which was presently at the Army camp trying to negotiate the purchase of the Black Hills, and which included our former Reverend’s superior, Bishop Whipple. Little Wolf chose not to attend these meetings, as did many of the Sioux, for the simple reason that neither he, nor they, had any intention of “selling” the Black Hills, even if authorized to do so, which, of course, none are.
However, as usual, the Indians are very much divided on the question. Perhaps because he is already settled on his own agency, Red Cloud himself seems to be in favor of the sale—even though his people have been so poorly provided for by the Great White Father that they seem nearly destitute compared to ours. At the council, Red Cloud told Little Wolf that so many white miners had already invaded the Black Hills that it was no longer possible to stem the tide, that the tribes might as well receive something for the land, rather than nothing, for one way or another, it was being taken from them, in the same way that the whites took everything. After much, sometimes rather heated, discussion and smoking of pipes, no real consensus on the matter was reached. This division and inability to mount a united front is, as John Bourke suggested, one of the greatest disadvantages that the Indians face in their dealings with the United States government.
While camped briefly at Red Cloud, we were visited by the agent there, a smarmy, unctuous fellow named Carter, who came to our lodge in an effort to enroll Little Wolf’s band on the agency rolls. When I spoke to the man in English, he was quite taken aback, having paid me no mind as “just another squaw.” Evidently he had no knowledge of the Brides program, for he assumed at first that I must be a captive white woman, and even offered to rescue me! The man became ever more agitated when I explained to him that I was married to the Chief, and that there were others like me also living with the Cheyennes of our own free will. I quite enjoyed Agent Carter’s discomfort and did not feel it necessary to elaborate on the subject of the program which had brought us here.
“Ma’am, you’re awful pretty to be in such a terrible mess,” he said solicitously, assuming me to be among that unfortunate class of “fallen whores,” who in their descent from respectable whoredom had, as a last resort, attached themselves to the savages. And then he told me that he knew a woman who had recently opened a respectable “boardinghouse” in the little town of Crawford, which has sprung up near Robinson. Her establishment is frequented by soldiers at the camp, mail and freight carriers, muleskinners, miners, and the general riffraff that has attached itself to our western outposts—although to hear this fellow tell it, a far more genteel clientele than the savages whom we had been forced to service, and who, he assured me, were not allowed to so much as set foot in Mrs. Mallory’s place, let alone fraternize with her girls.
At this I took real umbrage; I explained to the man again that we were wives, not prostitutes—married in the eyes of the church and our own government—that we were here of our own free will, and that, indeed, such a demeaning institution as prostitution did not even exist among the Cheyennes. And I further suggested to him that if he didn’t leave our lodge at that very moment, I would inform my husband of his insults and he would very likely be skinned alive as punishment and possibly roasted over a hot fire for our heathen supper to boot! I am happy to report that a faster exit has never before been accomplished!

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