Susan Johnson (58 page)

But Daisy was also darkly exotic, beautiful. And intelligent. He’d never met a female attorney.

Of course, she was immune to his charm.

A challenge, he thought.

A challenge to bed.

It turned into more. It turned into a dark and forbidden passion.

1.
Chinese women were brought to America, taken through customs with forged papers representing them as wives of Chinese men in the States, and then sold at auction. Chinese men, too, often sold themselves to American companies contracting for labor. The price for strong young men was between $400 and $1,000; they could, however, buy out their papers much like an indentured servant over many years. Women sold for higher sums ($2,000-$10,000), but their sales were permanent—into prostitution or slavery. The biography of a young girl named Lalu, sold at age 17 at an auction in San Francisco to a Chinese saloon owner in Idaho, is typical. Eventually her life had a happier ending than most of her peers. She was won in a high-stakes poker game by a gambler who cared for her and married her. She died at age 80 in 1933.

2.
It was not uncommon for young girls to be sold by poor families in China in order for the rest of the family to survive.

Women were trained to accept this (at least in theory); one of the four virtues of a woman was that she must reconcile herself to her fate. During a famine, Lalu, the woman cited in Note 1, was traded to a bandit chief for two small bags of soybeans. He in turn sold her to a madame in Shanghai who operated a profitable business of supplying American buyers.

3.
An excerpt from reporter Martin Hutchens’s biography best explains the etiquette apropos of names. He had arrived in Helena, Montana, in November 1889, and, on his first day in town, found himself living quarters in a redbrick boarding-house and then dropped in at one of Helena’s finest saloons, where the chandeliers shone on reasonably good copies of Renaissance masters. As he entered the saloon an intoxicated drinker was arguing violently with the bartender. The customer, angry at being invited to leave, pulled out a Colt six-gun, aimed it unsteadily at the bartender, and fired. He missed. The bartender wrenched the gun away from him, turned it on its owner, and shot him, considerately, in the shoulder. The young reporter glanced around the room. Not another person on his side of the bar, except the wounded man, was in sight. The people who had been lining the bar were on the floor or under the tables. A distinguished-looking man in a well-tailored suit dusted himself off and observed amiably to the young man, “You come from places where these things don’t happen, or you would have taken cover like everyone else.”

Martin Hutchens agreed this was true. They fell to talking, and presently Martin was asking what he deemed a perfectly acceptable question: “And what part of the country do you come from, sir?”

The distinguished-looking man’s affability vanished behind a chilly stare. “No questions west of the Red River, young man.
No questions
.”

Martin Hutchens concluded, “I learned two extremely important lessons about the West before the end of my first day.”

Walter Cameron, in his recollections of his early years in
Montana helping to build the Northern Pacific railroad, describes this phenomenon in a little different way:

My first day in Miles City, I began looking for a job and a man told me there was a railroad outfit camped in a cottonwood grove at the head of Main Street that he thought wanted teamsters. I went down to this camp and inquired of the man in charge (whom none of us ever knew by any name other than “Tex”), I suppose he hailed from Texas. It was customary in those days to inquire of a man, “What shall I call you?” rather than to inquire, “What is your name?” Later on I got acquainted with many men, who for reasons best known to themselves, were sailing under aliases not wanting their true identity disclosed.

4.
History suggests the almost universal bad faith of Indian agents toward the Indians. The practice of defrauding them out of the annuities and presents granted them by law was widespread. The agents, mostly political appointees from the East, were supposed to be responsible for the Indians, but Martin Maginnis, longtime congressional delegate from Montana, describes the majority of agents he was familiar with:

They will take a barrel of sugar to an Indian tribe and get a receipt for ten barrels. For a sack of flour the Indians sign a receipt for fifty sacks. The agent will march three hundred head of cattle four times through a corral, get a receipt for twelve hundred head, give a part of them to the Indians, sell a part to the white man, and steal as many back as possible.

The Indians were well aware of the fact that they were being cheated, and their agent, a representative of the great government with which they had signed a treaty, was a thief. However, their options were limited.

In Montana’s climate, winters were particularly hard, and
every year many Indians froze and starved to death on the reservations. The buffalo were gone, the ranges overcrowded, and below-zero weather brought disaster. “The Starvation Winter of the Pikuni,” depicted by J. K. Howard, is only one instance of many.

A day or two after Christmas, 1883, a luminous and glittering mist formed over the northern and eastern Rockies slope—where Glacier Park is today. Frantically the Pikuni-Blackfeet prayed to Aisoyimstan, the Cold Maker, not to persecute their people; pleadingly they sought of their Indian agent a few extra rations. But rations were low: the agent had reported (seeking to make a record for himself) that the Blackfeet were now nearly self-supporting.

The mercury dropped to 40, 50 below zero, and stayed there for sun upon sun. All travel ceased and the hungry Blackfeet huddled in their lodges. Every day was as the day that had gone before; the sun was a faint light in a colorless void, and it set far to the south. There would come slightly warmer days, and it would snow, hour after hour.

Now the hunters would go forth to seek game afoot, for their horses had long since died or been killed for food; and when there was no more game, they brought back the inner bark of the fir and pine trees, or tissue scraped from buffalo skulls, or the hooves of cattle, left by the wolves—or even rats hunted out of their homes in the rocks.

They were deserted by their agent, who was being replaced; his successor arrived in the midst of the worst suffering and did his best. Word of their plight reached Montana towns and rescue expeditions were organized. George Bird Grinnell, famous naturalist and friend of the Blackfeet, stirred the government to action. Cursing freighters fought their way over drifted trails to the reservation with wagon loads of food. They found some of the survivors mad with hunger and grief among the bodies of their kin; they found coyotes and wolves fighting in the lodges of the unburied dead; they found six hundred Indians—one quarter of the tribe—starved to death.

* * *

The next winter was nearly as severe, and the
Mineral Argus
remarked casually in January 1885: “Many of the Pikuni Indians are reported frozen to death.” That was the extent of the story.

5.
The Gilded Age was marked by corruption, crass materialism, and close links between business and politics. Montana was no different from other states and territories. For instance, a violent fight erupted over the placement of the capital, and in the struggle between Helena and Anaconda (owned body and soul by Daly’s Copper Company), Helena won. Daly’s rival, Clark, supported Helena. Later Clark admitted before the Committee on Privileges and Elections of the United States Senate that he had spent $100,000 in the capital fight. John R. Toole, Marcus Daly’s political lieutenant, testified before the Helena grand jury, which pretended to investigate Clark’s briberies, to an expenditure of $500,000. But former Governor Hauser, in his testimony before the senatorial committee in Washington, gave the Daly figure as over $1 million. Taking into consideration the vast sums of money Daly afterward gave away in the form of mining leases to his supporters, he must have spent, in round figures, over $2.5 million in the contest. Clark and his friends must have spent over $400,000. The vote of the state did not exceed 50,000 people in the capital election. The cost of each vote was, therefore, approximately $38.

Another interesting case of the power of money in Montana politics concerns Clark’s bid for a senate seat. Before the election, Clark’s son, his political manager, was reported to have said, “We’ll send the old man either to the Senate or the poorhouse.” C. P. Connolly says that as a result of this resolve, there began in Helena a series of such astounding briberies that they almost managed, by the commonness of their occurrence and the openness with which they were offered, to change the public mores. If a legislator had a weakness in his nature or his circumstances, Clark’s lieutenants found it. Forty-seven votes were bought in 18 days, for a total of $431,000, the individual price ranging from $5,000 to $25,000. Thirteen senators refused bribes that totaled $200,000. Clark, a Democrat, was able to buy all but 4 of the
15 Republican votes in the Senate. Tracing the course of bank accounts opened or increased, mortgages paid, debts suddenly resolved, new businesses and land purchased is a fascinating paper trail.

6.
Until 1888, everything to the north of the Missouri River was Indian reservation, as was much of the area south of the Yellowstone, and opening of the Indian lands was a common, relentless theme in government. Charles Broadwater, Samuel Hauser, William Clark, and Marc Daly, the “Big Four” of Montana Democrats, were influential in territorial politics. Martin Maginnis, Territorial Delegate to Washington for twelve years, was widely regarded as a Broadwater-Hauser man, and neither of them was shy about making demands on him. Broadwater informed Maginnis in 1881 of reservation boundary changes he desired, going so far as to send Maginnis a map, redrawing to his own satisfaction the boundaries of Indian lands and indicating which should be thrown open for white settlement. “I must have it,” he wrote, “or damned if I don’t go back on you next election.”

Governor Hauser in his message to the 15th legislature (1886) insisted that Montana’s Indians were better off in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) in a climate more conducive to agriculture. “If the Indians are to subsist by agriculture and become civilized and self-sustaining, a country further south, and with more natural rainfall, would suit them better.” His magnanimity is apparent.

The greatest single reduction occurred on May 1, 1888, when Congress passed an act that provided for diminishing the northern reservation, followed in December 1890, by reductions in the southern Crow reservation. Nearly 20 million acres were added to the public domain.

As late as 1909, Indian reserves continued to be encroached on if powerful interests would benefit. J. K. Howard relates an instance having to do with James J. Hill’s son, Louis. In a special train, Louis was taking delegates to the Dry Farming Congress in Billings. En route the party stopped off in Culbertson and took a trip over some lands that had been set aside for an Indian tribe. They then telegraphed Secretary of the Interior Ballinger, urging that he open these lands to homestead entry.
He obliged within three months. What the Indians thought of the deal is not on record.

7.
Many of the cattlemen enclosed large areas between barbed-wire fences, even when all or part of the range belonged to the public domain. To combat this illegal practice, in April 1884, the Commissioner of the General Land Office issued a circular giving notice that “the fencing of large bodies of public land beyond that allowed by law is illegal.” This rather weak measure was supplemented, in 1885, by an act of Congress that declared, “all inclosures of public lands” to which the incloser has no “claim or color of title” are illegal. By 1887, enclosures of over 200,000 acres of public grazing land in Montana had been reported. Some of the most prominent cattle companies in Montana were involved in these illegalities. There were constant battles over grazing land and water rights, and only a portion of the contests ever came to court.

An interesting account in
Montana
magazine details an incident occurring in 1894 that never reached court. It was handled privately. The story is written by B. D. Phillips’s son, so may be influenced by consanguinity.

In 1894 B. D. Phillips found a large natural hay bottom between Malta and North Central Montana’s Little Rocky Mountains. Although some settlers were already there, Father liked the idea of so much open range. He thought it would remain open indefinitely since it wasn’t fit for farming. He had had to move twice before, mainly because of losing range to farmers and he didn’t want it to happen again.

Settlers on the land gradually sold out to him.

One man, who had been roughing up other settlers in the area, finally tangled with B. D. Father was irrigating when this rancher rode up and demanded that B. D. open his diversion dam and let the water go down the creek for his use. Father told him, “I have the first water rights, but I’ll turn the water down the creek just as soon as I’ve finished with it.”