The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (111 page)

And then another.

Gently he withdrew and gave her a rag to wipe herself, and went out to the brook to wash his hands.

In order to talk to her, he led her blinking into the harsh sunshine outside, and seated her on a stump with the cosseted child in her arms.

“You don’t have cancer.” He wished it could stop there. “You suffer from bladder-stone.”

“I shan’t die?”

He was held to truth. “With cancer you’d have little chance. With bladder-stone there’s decent chance.” He explained to her about the growth of mineral stones in the bladder, caused perhaps by unchanging diet and prolonged diarrhea.

“Yes. I had diarrhea for a long time after his birth. Is there a medicine?”

“No. No medicine to dissolve the stones. The little stones sometimes pass from your body with the urine, and often they have sharp edges that can tear tissue. I believe that’s why you’ve experienced bloody urine. But you have two large stones. Too large to pass.”

“Then will you cut me? For God’s sake …” she said unsteadily.

“No.” He hesitated, deciding how much she had to know. Part of the Hippocratic Oath he had taken said:
I will not cut a person who is suffering from a stone
. Some butchers ignored the oath and cut anyway, slicing deep into the perineum between the anus and the vulva or scrotum to open the bladder and get at the stones, leaving a few victims who eventually recovered, and many who died of peritonitis, and others who were maimed for life because an intestine or bladder muscle had been severed. “I’d go into the bladder
with a surgical instrument through the urethra, the narrow canal through which you pass water. The instrument is called a lithotrite. It has two little steel pincers, like jaws, with which to remove or crush the stones.”

“Would there be pain?”

“Yes, mostly when I inserted the lithotrite and removed it. But the pain would be less than what you now suffer. If the procedure should succeed, you could be totally cured.” It was difficult admitting the greatest danger was that his skill might prove inadequate. “If, in trying to grasp the stone in the jaws of the lithotrite, I were to pinch the bladder and break it, or if I should tear the peritoneum, likely you would die of infection.” Studying her drawn face, he saw flashes of a younger, prettier woman. “You must decide if I am to try.”

In her agitation she held the baby too tightly and the boy began to cry again. Because of that, it took Rob J. a moment to realize what the word was that she had whispered.

Please.

He knew he’d need help while he performed the lithocenosis. Remembering the rigidity of her body during examination, he felt instinctively that his assistant should be a woman, and when he left Sarah Bledsoe he rode straight to the nearby farmhouse and had a talk with Alma Schroeder.

“Oh, I cannot, no never!” Poor Alma blanched. Her consternation was made worse by her genuine feeling for Sarah.
“Gott im Himmel!
Oh, Dr. Cole, please, I cannot.”

When he saw it was so, he assured her it didn’t diminish her. Some just couldn’t stand to see surgery. “It’s all right, Alma. I’ll find someone else.”

Riding away, he tried to think of a female in the district who might assist him, but he rejected the few possibilities, one by one. He had had enough of weeping; what he required was an intelligent woman with strong arms, a woman with a spirit that would allow her to remain steadfast in the face of suffering.

Halfway home, he turned the horse and rode in the direction of the Indian village.

17

DAUGHTER OF THE
MIDE’WIWIN

When Makwa allowed herself to think on it, she remembered a time when only a few of the people had white man’s clothing, when a ragged shirt or a torn dress was strong medicine because everyone wore buckskin cured and worked and chewed soft, or animal furs. When she was a child in Sauk-e-nuk—she was called Nishwri Kekawi, Two Skies, then—at first there were too few white people,
mookamonik
, to affect their lives. There was an army garrison on the island, established after officials in St. Louis got some Mesquakies and Sauks drunk and coerced them into signing a paper whose contents they couldn’t read sober. Two Skies’ father was Ashtibugwa-gupichee, Green Buffalo. He told Two Skies and her older sister, Meci-ikwawa, Tall Woman, that when the army post was built, the Long Knives destroyed the People’s best berry bushes. Green Buffalo was of the Bear gens, a proper birth for leadership, but he had no desire to be a chief or a medicine man. Despite his sacred name (he was named after the
manitou
), he was a simple man, respected because he got good yields from his fields. When he was young he fought the Iowas and counted coup. He wasn’t like some, always boasting, but when her uncle Winnawa, Short Horn, died, Two Skies learned about her father. Short Horn was the first Sauk she knew who drank himself to death on the poison the
mookamon
called Ohio whiskey and the People called pepper water. Sauks buried their dead, unlike some tribes, who simply raised a body into the crotch of a tree. When they lowered Short Horn into the ground, her father had struck the grave’s edge with his
pucca-maw
, wielding the battle club savagely. “I have killed three men in war, and I give their spirits to my brother who lies here, to serve him as slaves in the other world,” he said, and that was how Two Skies learned her father was once a warrior.

Her father was mild, a worker. First he and her mother, Matapya, Union-of-Rivers, farmed two fields of corn, pumpkins, and squash, but when the Council saw he was a good farmer they gave him two more fields. The trouble began in Two Skies’ tenth year, when a
mookamon
named Hawkins came and built a cabin in the field next to one her father had in corn. The field Hawkins settled on had been abandoned after its farmer, Wegu-wa, Shawnee Dancer, had died, and the Council hadn’t gotten around to reassigning the land. Hawkins brought in horses and cows. The crop fields were
separated only by brush fences and hedgerows, and his horses got into Green Buffalo’s field and ate his corn. Green Buffalo caught the horses and brought them to Hawkins, but next morning the animals were back in his cornfield. He complained, but the Council didn’t know what to do, because five other white families had come and settled on Rock Island too, on land that had been farmed by Sauks for more than one hundred years.

Green Buffalo resorted to tethering Hawkins’ livestock on his own land instead of returning them, and at once he was visited by the Rock Island trader, a white named George Davenport. Davenport had been the first white to live among them, and the People trusted him. He told Green Buffalo to give the horses back to Hawkins or the Long Knives would imprison him, and Green Buffalo did as his friend Davenport advised.

That fall, the autumn of 1831, the Sauks went to their winter camp in Missouri, as they did each year. When they came back to Sauk-e-nuk in the spring, they found that additional white families had come and homesteaded on Sauk fields, breaking down fences and burning longhouses. Now the Council no longer could avoid action, and it consulted with Davenport and Felix St. Vrain, the Indian agent, and Major John Bliss, the leader of the soldiers in the fort. The meetings dragged on, and in the meantime the Council assigned other fields to the tribesmen whose land had been usurped.

A short, stocky Pennsylvania Dutchman named Joshua Vandruff had appropriated the field of a Sauk named Makataime-shekiakiak, Black Hawk. Vandruff began selling whiskey to the Indians from the
hedonoso-te
Black Hawk and his sons had built with their own hands. Black Hawk wasn’t a chief, but for most of his sixty-three years he’d fought against Osage, Cherokee, Chippewa, and Kaskaskia. When war between the whites had broken out in 1812, he’d gathered a force of fighting Sauks and offered their services to the Americans, only to be rebuffed. Insulted, he had extended the same offer to the English, who treated him with respect and gained his services throughout the war, giving him weapons, ammunition, medals, and the red coat that marked a soldier.

Now, as he neared old age, Black Hawk watched whiskey being sold from his home. Worse, he witnessed the corruption of his tribe by alcohol. Vandruff and his friend B. F. Pike got Indians drunk and cheated them out of furs, horses, guns, and traps. Black Hawk went to Vandruff and Pike and asked them to stop selling whiskey to Sauks. When he was ignored, he returned with half a dozen warriors who rolled all the casks from the long-house, staved them in, and poured the whiskey into the ground.

Vandruff at once packed his saddlebags with provisions for a long journey and rode to Bellville, home of John Reynolds, governor of Illinois. He swore in a deposition to the governor that the Sauk Indians were on a rampage that had resulted in a stabbing and much damage to white homesteads. He gave Governor Reynolds a second petition signed by B. F. Pike that said “the Indians pasture their horses in our wheatfields, shoot our cows and cattle, and threaten to burn our homes over our heads if we do not leave.”

Reynolds was newly elected and had promised the voters that Illinois was safe for settlers. A governor who was a successful Indian fighter might dream of the presidency. “By Jesus, sir,” he told Vandruff emotionally, “you’re asking the right man for justice.”

Seven hundred horse soldiers came and camped below Sauk-e-nuk, their presence causing excitement and unease. At the same time, a steamship belching smoke chugged up the Rocky River. The ship grounded on some of the rocks that gave the river its name, but the
mookamonik
freed it and soon it was anchored, its single cannon pointed directly at the village. The war chief of the whites, General Edmund P. Gaines, called a parley with the Sauks. Seated behind a table were the general, the Indian agent St. Vrain, and the trader Davenport, who interpreted. Perhaps twenty prominent Sauks came.

General Gaines said the treaty of 1803 that had set up the fort on Rock Island also had given the Great Father in Washington all the Sauk lands east of the Mississippi—fifty million acres. He told the stunned and puzzled Indians that they had received annuities, and now the Great Father in Washington wanted his children to leave Sauk-e-nuk and go to live on the other side of
Masesibowi
, the large river. Their Father in Washington would give them a gift of corn to see them through the winter.

Chief of the Sauks was Keokuk, who knew that the Americans were too many. When Davenport gave him the words of the white war chief, a great fist squeezed Keokuk’s heart. Though the others looked at him to answer, he was silent. But a man rose to his feet, who had learned enough language while fighting for the British, so he spoke for himself. “We never sold our country. We never received any annuities from our American Father. We will hold our village.”

General Gaines saw an Indian, almost old, without a chief’s headdress. In stained buckskins. Hollow-cheeked, with a high, bony forehead. More gray than black in the roached scalp lock that split his shaven skull. An
insulting beak of a big nose leaping out between wide-set eyes. A sullen mouth above a dimpled lover’s chin that didn’t belong in that ax of a face.

Gaines sighed, and looked questioningly at Davenport.

“Name of Black Hawk.”

“What is he?” the general asked Davenport, but Black Hawk answered.

“I am a Sauk. My fathers were Sauks, great men. I wish to remain where their bones are and be buried with them. Why should I leave their fields?”

He and the general gazed at one another, stone on steel.

“I came here not to beg nor to hire you to leave your village. My business is to remove you,” Gaines said mildly. “Peaceably, if I can. Forcibly, if I must. I now give you two days to remove. If you don’t cross the Mississippi by that time, I will force you away.”

The People talked together, staring at the ship’s cannon pointed at them. The soldiers who rode by in small groups, yipping and hollering, were well-fed and well-armed, with plenty of ammunition. The Sauks had old rifles, few bullets, no reserve of food.

Keokuk sent a runner to summon Wabokieshiek, White Cloud, a medicine man who lived among the Winnebago. White Cloud was the son of a Winnebago father and a Sauk mother. He was tall and fat, with long gray hair and, a rarity among Indians, a scraggly black mustache. He was a great shaman, tending to the spiritual and medical needs of the Winnebago, the Sauks, and the Mesquakies. All three tribes knew him as the Prophet, but White Cloud had no comforting prophecy to offer Keokuk. He said the militia was a superior force and Gaines wouldn’t listen to reason. Their friend Davenport the trader met with the chief and the shaman and urged them to do as they were ordered and abandon the land before the dispute became bloody trouble.

So on the second night of the two days the People had been granted, they left Sauk-e-nuk like animals that were driven away, and they went across
Masesibowi
into the land of their enemies, the Iowa.

That winter Two Skies lost her belief that the world was safe. The corn delivered by the Indian agent to the new village west of
Masesibowi
was of poor quality and not nearly enough to keep hunger away. The People couldn’t hunt or trap enough meat, for many had bartered their guns and traps for Vandruff’s whiskey. They mourned the loss of the crops left in their fields. The mealy corn. The rich, nourishing pumpkins, the huge sweet squashes.
One night five women recrossed the river and went to their old fields and picked some frozen ears of the corn they had planted themselves the previous spring. They were discovered by white homesteaders and severely beaten.