Centennial

by James A. Michener

  To the fort at Laramie came the most reassuring messenger of all, a major in the United States Army serving as Indian agent with specific powers to set the vast operation in motion. He arrived one July morning, accompanied by seven cavalrymen and a charming woman in her thirties, all of whom had ridden hard from St. Joseph.

  “Great news!” the major called before dismounting at the entrance to the fort. “A treaty to be signed!” When he got off his horse the soldiers at the fort saw that he limped noticeably in his left leg and they judged that this was not the result of some temporary soreness but a permanent thing.

  Captain Ketchum came out to greet the arrivals, but before amenities could be concluded, the major cried, “It’s done, Captain! The treaty’s to be signed here.”

  “What’s this about a treaty?” Ketchum asked.

  “Supreme Court says the Indian tribes are nations. With nations you have treaties.”

  Ketchum frowned and asked, “How many extra soldiers will they send me?”

  “Cheer up! There’s talk of a thousand new men. Twenty-seven wagons of gifts for the tribes. Two commissioners and God knows how many interpreters.”

  “How many Indians are we to expect?”

  “Depends on what luck Father De Smet has. Could go as high as six hundred.”

  “We’ll need more than a thousand extra soldiers,” Ketchum began. Then, realizing how rude he was being, he said, “I haven’t welcomed this charming lady to our fort.”

  “My wife, Lisette Mercy.”

  Before the captain could reply, Lisette had dismounted and grasped him by the hand. “Think nothing of ignoring me.” She laughed. “Maxwell’s always that way.” And she moved graciously onto the porch of the new building. “Shall we be staying here?” she asked.

  “Yes,” the captain stammered. “We’ll ...”

  “Good!” And with that she returned to her horse and started unpacking her gear.

  “Give the lady a hand,” Ketchum called, but before any of his men could reach her, she had her small bags unfastened and on the ground.

  “I shall love it here,” she said enthusiastically. “I can see the Indians, now, hundreds of them ... on all those hills.”

  This was a most unfortunate image and Captain Ketchum winced. He did not relish the touchy prospect of having six hundred Indian braves on those hills when he might have only two companies of dragoons and one of infantry to defend the place, protect the incoming caravans and serve the commissioners. As soon as he and Mercy sat in his quarters he said, “I need assurances, Mercy. Will there be at least a thousand new men?”

  “Unquestionably!” Mercy replied.

  “And there will be twenty-seven wagonloads of gifts? We have practically none left, and Indians will not accept any agreement unless it’s solemnized with gifts.”

  “I saw the wagons at Kansas City. Knives, guns, food, everything.” He broke into laughter. “And an amazing special gift for the chiefs. Every time I think Washington is filled with imbeciles someone there comes up with an idea that dazzles me.”

  “What is it?” Ketchum asked suspiciously.

  “You’ll be astounded,” Mercy said. He then turned to more serious matters. “We’ve sent word to all the tribes. Canada to Texas. We want to build one treaty that will encompass everything.”

  “Will they all send representatives?” Ketchum asked.

  “That’s what I’m to find out. Where are the Arapaho and Cheyenne camping?”

  Captain Ketchum sent for Strunk and asked, “Where are the tribes right now?”

  “Last we heard, Oglala Sioux west of the fork. Shoshone far to the west of Laramie Peak. Cheyenne down at Horse Creek, the Arapaho at Scott’s Bluffs ...” He was prepared to list six or seven more locations, but Mercy had heard enough.

  “Could Strunk and I ride down to the Cheyenne ... right now?”

  “Of course,” Ketchum agreed, and a party of nine was organized.

  “You can show Lisette where to put our things,” Mercy said as he transferred his saddle to a fresh horse.

  “Where’d you get the limp?” Ketchum asked professionally.

  “Chapultepec,” Mercy said without emotion. “With General Scott.”

  “Was it bad ... down there?”

  “Oh, you’d go for days with no action—never see a Mexican—then they’d dig in at some spot of their own choosing, and it would be lively hell.”

  “They fight well?”

  “Everyone seems to fight well on his own terrain.”

  “Doctors can’t do anything for the leg?”

  “The hip. No, I’ll be a major the rest of my life. Crippled ... and damned fortunate to be alive.” With this he leaped into his saddle as easily as if his hip were sound, and set out for Horse Creek.

  The party rode east along the Platte for thirty miles to where Horse Creek began to join the larger stream, and some miles to the south they found the tall, neat tipis of the Cheyenne, arranged, as always, in circles. It was a beautiful, orderly community, with the side flaps of the tipis raised to facilitate the circulation of summer air, and it bespoke the solidity of this tribe.

  “Where’s Broken Thumb?” Strunk asked in Cheyenne.

  “That tipi,” a boy replied, and the men rode there.

  Only Strunk and Mercy dismounted; the seven soldiers remained on guard, their rifles at the ready across their saddles.

  When Major Mercy stopped to enter the tipi he could not immediately adjust his eyes to the darkness, but after a few moments he saw confronting him five Indians informally dressed, and out of the shadows loomed the faces of the men who would determine Indian activity in this region for the next fourteen years.

  In the middle sat a man Mercy already knew—a man with a dark scar down his right cheek and the tip of his left little finger missing. It was his own brother-in-law, Jake Pasquinel, now forty-two years old and tense with the disappointment which comes at the age when a man realizes he has made too many wrong choices. Instead of staying with the Arapaho, among whom he might have achieved real leadership, he had drifted from tribe to tribe, learning many languages badly, fit only to serve as interpreter to men who were far less capable than he. Like all half-breeds he stood with one foot in the Indian world, one in the white man’s, and at ease in neither. He was trusted by no-one, and suspicion was so constant that he had grown to doubt himself.

  To his left, and in the seat of prominence, sat Chief Broken Thumb, twisting the ends of his braids with thumb and finger as if preparing to confront the white man with his string of grievances. Even sitting, he was a tall, impressive man, thirty-five years old and a proved warrior of many coups. Mercy, seeing him for the first time, said to himself, He’s like one of those volcanoes in Mexico. You see the ice in the eyes and can be sure the fire smolders below.

  The man on Pasquinel’s right looked quite different—shorter, much less aggressive and apparently more introspective. He had a most handsome face, lean and hawk-like, with prominent nose, exaggerated cheekbones and deep lines cutting vertically down both cheeks. His eyes were deeply recessed and very dark, and his whole appearance was given a somewhat grotesque touch by the fact that he wore a white man’s type of hat with moderate brim and very tall crown. It made him look unbalanced, as if both it and the head that wore it were too large for the body that supported them. He did not wear his hair in braids, like the others, but cut straggling-short about his shoulders. The conversation would be far advanced before this reticent chief, then in his forties, would speak, and when he did, it would not be in Cheyenne.

  Now Broken Thumb prepared a calumet, keeping it on his knees while he mixed tobacco and kinnikinnick in prescribed amounts. When the pipe was filled and lit, he held it extended at arm’s length to the four compass points, then placed his right hand, palm up, at the extreme end of the bowl, drawing his fingers slowly back along the three feet of stem till they reached his throat. There, with a motion parallel to the earth, he brought his hand across his throat, sign
ifying that what he was about to say was sacred and true. This was the oath of the Indian, the solemn promise of the pipe.

  As the calumet passed to the other chiefs, Broken Thumb indicated that Mercy was free to speak, and the captain asked, “Have the messengers come from the Great White Father?”

  “They came,” Broken Thumb replied cautiously, pinching his braids.

  “And they told you that we can now have peace ... forever?”

  “They told us.”

  “And will you send chiefs to our meeting?”

  This was the difficult question, the one on which so much depended, and the three other chiefs sat silent, waiting for Broken Thumb to voice their thinking. Reaching for the calumet, he puffed slowly, then held it in his lap, cradled in both hands. Slowly, but with increasing fervor, he gave the Indian’s answer to the white man’s overture. It was a long speech and was interpreted by Strunk into English, and then by Pasquinel into an Indian language for the benefit of the silent chief to his right.

  The White Father wants peace, so that he can send his traders safely through our lands. Of course he wants peace, so that thousands of wagons can cut trails. He wants peace so that his people can kill the buffalo and trap the beaver. But does he want peace strongly enough to deal with us honestly on the matters that divide us?

  Here Major Mercy interrupted, intending to ask what the complaints were, but Broken Thumb silenced him imperiously, and spoke with heightened intensity, outlining their grievances. “Long time ago the white men who came across our land were good people. They wanted to build homes. They had their children with them. There was some fighting, but never much, and there was respect. But in the last two years, a different kind of men. Ketchum says ninety thousand came, and all they wanted was gold. Mean, hungry men with no women, no children. They shoot our people for no reason, the way they shoot antelope. They burn our villages for no reason, the way you burn the nests of hornets. They are ugly men, who have only war in their hearts, and we shall give them war.”

  He referred this matter to the other chiefs and two of them supported him enthusiastically, with cries of “War! War!” Mercy noticed that the chief in the hat remained quietly brooding in the shadows.

  “When the Great White Father determined on war with Mexico,” Broken Thumb continued, “he sent his soldiers across our land, and when they found no Mexicans along the southern river, they wanted to fight us and they killed many of our people. It was not we who started war, Mercy, it was you. We know that you were with the soldiers, because our braves saw you, and now you come here to talk with us of peace. We talk of war!”

  Again the two Cheyenne chiefs echoed the defiance, and Mercy sat silent, staring at the floor in humbleness of spirit, because what Broken Thumb said was true. He had marched with his men from Independence along the Arkansas River and down into Texas and Mexico, and in their boredom the men had started shooting down Indians as if they had been turkeys, and villages were burned and squaws violated, and only the iron resistance of men like Mercy had prevented the affair from becoming a total massacre. He suspected that if the Indians knew he had been along, they also knew that it was he who was primarily responsible for halting the disgrace.

  “And you must stop selling whiskey to our people,” Broken Thumb continued. “Mercy, what you are doing is contemptible.” In this sentence Broken Thumb used an Indian word Strunk did not know, and there was much discussion as to its translation. It was Mercy who suggested contemptible and when this was translated as without honor, the chiefs agreed. “Because at Fort Laramie the other day I stole a bottle of the real whiskey you drink among yourselves, and it was good to taste. These chiefs have tasted it,” and to Mercy’s astonishment he produced a half-filled bottle of whiskey imported from Scotland, which he asked Mercy and Strunk to taste, and it was the best. “But for us you sell this!” And he produced another bottle, filled with Taos Lightning, and he asked the white men to taste it, and when they refused, well aware of what it was, he thundered in English, “You drink! Goddamn, you drink!” Mercy took a small taste, and it would have been revolting even had he not known its components.

  “Contemptible,” Broken Thumb said with deep bitterness. “For a small drink of this,” he said with scorn, “you charge two buffalo robes. With this you take away our squaws and make our children poor. Mercy, are you proud that when your soldiers with their rifles cannot defeat us in battle, you bring this among us to destroy us?”

  He put away the bottles, being careful to cork the Scotch, and came to his final point. “Mercy, you must do something about the sickness, the one you call cholera. It has been so terrible among us. At the Mandan villages they were twelve hundred last year, and this year they are less than forty. White Antelope here has lost six members of his family. Tall Mountain has lost four. My wife and two children are dead. You have brought a terrible illness among us, Mercy, and we must have help.”

  “It has killed us too,” Mercy said quietly, and he asked Strunk to inform the chiefs of the tragedies of recent years, of whole families of emigrants wiped out in an afternoon—a man would be driving his oxen, would feel nausea and would cry, “The fever!” and even his wife would shun him, and within four hours he would die, with the knowledge that four hours later his wife and children would be dead too. When Strunk finished his narration, Mercy said, “I have ridden this summer from the Missouri River to Fort Laramie and never was I out of sight of some grave. It has been as hard on us as on you.”

  “Where did you bring it from, Mercy, you white people?”

  “From out there,” he said, pointing to the west, “from across the great water.”

  “Will it go on and on and on?”

  “It will end,” he assured them. It had to end. It could not continue like this forever or the world would be wiped away. A man required assurance that when he rose in the morning he would retire at night, barring some fearful accident against which there could be no reasonable defense. But to rise with the daily expectation that fever would strike, and that a few hours later he would be dead, was too much. “It will end,” he repeated, “for you and for us.”

  “Will you send medicine?”

  “At the forts there will be doctors.”

  “Forts?” Jake Pasquinel interrupted.

  “Yes, when we have the treaty, the Great Father will need five or six forts ... here and there ... you know ...”

  “I do know,” Broken Thumb said coldly. “You will have many forts, and they will require many soldiers, and the soldiers will need many women, and there will be many bottles of whiskey, and while we are drunk in our tipis you will kill the buffalo.” Here he passed into a kind of trance, and he spoke as if he were seeing a tormenting vision of the future: “And when the buffalo are gone, we shall starve, and when we are starving, you will take away our lands, the tipis will be in flames and the rifles will fire and we will be no more. The great lands we have wandered over we will see no more.”

  “No more,” White Antelope repeated, and the words seemed to inflame Broken Thumb, and he became a man of iron.

  “No!” he shouted. “We want no powwow ... no peace ... no surrender. It will be war, Mercy. I have prayed to the sacred medicine arrows and I know this to be true. I shall kill you and you shall kill me.”

  He passed from reason into a frenzy, throwing himself about the tipi and waving his mangled hand in Mercy’s face, and with a wild gesture he grabbed the calumet and shattered it against a tipi pole. “It is war!” he shouted, his broad face dark and distorted, his braids shaking like snakes.

  It was now that the chief in the hat began to speak. From the shadows he reached out a hand and pulled Broken Thumb down beside him, quietening him and saying in Arapaho, “No, it will not be war. If the Great Father wants to talk with us one more time, and if he sends a messenger like Mercy to assure us that this time the talk is serious, then we will meet with him. We will come to Fort Laramie and we will listen and try to fathom what he has in his heart. Like m
y friend Broken Thumb, I know that the treaty will be made and then broken. I have no hope that the white man can ever say something and mean it, because we never deal with the same white man. One makes the treaty, and he goes. Another comes, but he never heard of the treaty. With us it is different. When the calumet passes, every Arapaho now and to be born is bound.”

  When this was interpreted, the chiefs assented, and the speaker continued: “Still we must try. So to you, Broken Thumb, I say, ‘The Cheyenne will go to Fort Laramie,’ and to you, Mercy, I say, ‘Tell the Great Father that Our People are willing to talk with him one more time, because we truly desire peace.’ ”