Centennial

by James A. Michener

  If the Arapaho and the Cheyenne are thus defrauded of their rightful lands, word will spread to all tribes throughout the west, and you must expect the Sioux and the Crow to rise in rebellion, for they will read the signal that their lands, too, will soon be taken from them.

  If our present agreement with the Indians is now broken, as you propose, the settlers will later feel themselves entitled to take whatever lands we give the Indians this time. The rape will continue endlessly and within a dozen years no Indian will remain in this territory.

  Since 1851 the Indians have steadfastly fulfilled all obligations, doing nothing to violate the spirit or regulations of the agreement. For us to break the agreement, as you now propose, is morally wrong and a crime against the principle of treaties whereby civilized nations co-exist. That the agreement should be broken by the civilized partner while being honored by the uncivilized is offensive and the consequences should be weighed.

  In reply, Major Mercy received the blunt direction: “Proceed as ordered.”

  In anguish he turned to the one man who shared his views; he saddled his horse and rode up the Platte to Zendt’s Farm, placing the wicked proposal before Levi. “It means war!” Levi said. Lucinda, when she heard of what was afoot, said apprehensively, “This plays right into the hands of Jake and Broken Thumb,” and Levi posed the most difficult problem of all: “How are you going to explain this to Lost Eagle? And men like him who staked their reputations on the honest intentions of the white man?”

  Major Mercy was too distraught to devise any stratagem for handling Lost Eagle, so Lucinda volunteered to ride out to where the Arapaho were camping and to invite the chiefs to the farm.

  When they convened Major Mercy started to explain what lay ahead, but his confusion and embarrassment were apparent to the chiefs. He finally sat down and left the job to Levi Zendt, who fumbled along, not hiding his disgust: “In Washington the Great White Father, not the one you met, Lost Eagle, but the other one who won’t be there much longer. His name is Buchanan and he comes from the town I lived in, but he isn’t a very strong man and you can’t depend upon him.”

  The chiefs looked at each, other and were relieved when Lucinda took over.

  “Once more they want to change the treaty,” she said. “They want you to give up all your lands along the Platte, all your lands along the Arkansas, and keep this little corner of land around Rattlesnake Buttes.”

  This astonishing statement was greeted by silence. At any time such a brutal proposal would be difficult to absorb, but to hear it coming from three people whom the chiefs could trust was too painful. One chief, Shave Head, rose and stalked from the room.

  Finally Lost Eagle asked in a weak voice, “Is this a message from Major Mercy?”

  “It is,” the major said sorrowfully.

  “What reason can the Great Father possibly have ...” There was to be no answer to this question, for there was a commotion at the door and into the meeting burst the Pasquinel brothers, followed by Shave Head, who had taken them the news.

  “Why?” Jake screamed as he rushed up to Mercy. Without waiting for an answer, he turned upon Lost Eagle, shouting dreadful accusations at him.

  “Traitor! Old fool who believes everything he’s told! Would-be man without balls!” He was so infuriated with the consequences of Lost Eagle’s leadership that he spit on him, then whipped about, drew out his knife and gashed himself in the left arm.

  Flinging the arm about, he splattered blood on all those attending, even his sister Lucinda, after which he screamed in a fury he could not control, “It’s war. It’s death. The terrible day we cannot escape is here.” With that he sped from the room, dashed through the stockade and leaped on his horse, racing to share with the Cheyenne the shameful news.

  An ignominious explanation of why the old treaty had to be broken and a new one signed was attempted at a later meeting held at the farm. Agent Boone described in honeyed words the impasse that had arisen. Using the canny type of persuasion practiced by his grandfather, he slowly pointed out that many white men were coming into the area, that they required land too, that the agreement of Fort Laramie had been overgenerous in its gifts because those who wrote it had not comprehended the value of the land—here he paused to stare at Major Mercy, stamping him as a fool—and it was only reasonable that the Great White Father in Washington should ask the Cheyenne and the Arapaho to share the prairie with the white man.

  “He wants it all!” Shave Head protested.

  Agent Boone ignored this unjust accusation and continued in his bland, conciliatory way. The Great White Father was by no means—not at all—unmindful of his responsibility to his red brothers, and in exchange for their land he was offering them many wonderful gifts: money, each man to get forty acres of new land containing timber and water, farm implements so that they would no longer have to hunt buffalo, seeds and other allurements. His voice fell to a deep religious timbre as he concluded, The land belongs not to you but to God. He allows you to have it only so long as you cultivate it. He does not want you to roam over it carelessly. He wants you to settle down and farm it, each man with his own fields.”

  “How much is forty acres?” Broken Thumb asked, and the whole party stepped out into the open, but when the dimensions were indicated, the Indians began to laugh. “Forty acres at Rattlesnake Buttes!” Broken Thumb cried. “That won’t be enough to feed one buffalo calf.”

  Agent Boone returned to his deep religious voice, assuring the Indians that to the east, in states like Ohio and Illinois, many American farmers built a good life on forty acres.

  “Have they water?” Broken Thumb asked. “Trees? Good earth?”

  “An honest farmer uses what land he has,” Boone replied. “Where will we find our water?” Broken Thumb demanded.

  Boone replied that wherever there was a stream, and wherever timber could be found, the Indians would receive their portion, to which Broken Thumb properly replied, “But you and I know there are no trees, there are no streams,” and Boone answered, “But if there were, they would be yours.”

  Chief Shave Head asked, “Will our lands touch the great Platte River?” and Boone replied, “The Great White Father thinks it best that the Indian lands not reach down to the river, because the white men prefer to travel along the river and trouble might develop.”

  “Then where do we get our water?” a third chief asked, and Boone replied, “I am sure some will be found somewhere.”

  It was a pitiful meeting, one of the most shameful the government of the United States had ever engaged in. The only plausible excuse was that the nation was preoccupied with its fratricidal war, but the fact remains that this abominable document was crammed down the throats of two of the finest tribes that roamed the west.

  It was accepted only because Lost Eagle pleaded with his people to make one last try to live in peace with the white man. So eloquent was his speech that Agent Boone, in gratitude, handed him a bronze medal containing a bas-relief of President Buchanan, while clever soldiers passed among the other Indians, giving them leftover campaign buttons from the 1856 presidential campaign, each with a grimfaced portrait of the Great White Father, James Buchanan. In subsequent years braves would trade two horses for one of these Buchanans.

  Broken Thumb and the Pasquinel brothers encouraged a good half of the Arapaho and Cheyenne to reject the treaty, so they received no buttons and treated with scorn those who had accepted them.

  Now came the bad years. The followers of Lost Eagle found themselves crammed onto a reservation one-sixteenth as large as the area they had previously occupied, with no timber and no access to water. “But,” as government officials liked to point out, “in times past your people inhabited the lands around Rattlesnake Buttes.” To this, Lost Beaver replied, “True, but in those days only a few camped here at a time, and the herds of buffalo were so great they could not be counted.”

  Today there were few buffalo. In some seasons none wandered into the camp area and real h
unger prevailed. It perplexed the Indians to see white men, their bellies filled with food brought from St. Louis, slaughtering what buffalo did remain for only the hides and tallow, leaving the meat to rot in the sun. Indians needed the meat if they were to survive.

  The year 1863 was marked by actual starvation; the Indians would remember it as “the year of hunger.” The buffalo did not appear, and even the most extensive forays to the north failed to find them. The chains of pemmican were gone by early February and the other meager supplies had to be severely rationed. On the streets of Denver half-starved Arapaho children hung about livery stables, fighting for the grains of corn that dribbled from the horses’ mouths.

  The farm tools which had been promised if the Indians signed the treaty never materialized. Swindling agents stole them, sold them to their friends, and then directed the Indians where to buy them, with “annuity” money they had never received. Ammunition promised for the hunt was withheld on the logical ground that if the starvation became worse, the Indians might shoot at white settlements in their search for food. Once-proud Arapaho were forced to beg for food from any white they saw, and they would often appear at the side of a wagon train, terrifying the occupants, who expected to be scalped. But this was not the Indians’ intent, and during this terrible year they took only such food as they could find. Malnutrition made them highly susceptible to disease, with diarrhea and whooping cough killing off many of the children. Fortunately, some of the older Arapaho died of sheer starvation—those over fifty—and the food they would have consumed enabled the younger warriors to survive.

  It was also a year of incipient revolt, for Chief Broken Thumb, now a mature forty-seven and a responsible leader, grew increasingly bitter about the lack of food. In frustration he traveled from one group to the next, trying to determine what the tribes ought to do. Wherever he went he found the younger warriors preparing for war.

  “We will not die in silence,” they told him, and he replied, “If things are not better by next summer, we will have to fight.” At one meeting he said, “Our first blow will be to kill everyone at Fort Laramie and take the stores.” One young brave warned, “Not Fort Laramie, it’s too strong.” But Broken Thumb called upon Jake Pasquinel to describe developments along the Platte, and Jake said, “They are moving all soldiers east to fight in the other war. There’s practically no one left at the fort.” Another young brave asked, “Why not take Zendt’s Farm too! There’s food there,” but Jake forestalled such talk: “They’ve been good to us. We’ll leave them alone.”

  So the talk always came back to an assault on Fort Laramie, and Jake found that the young braves no longer thought of the cannon as demons that roared when they were wakened. They knew that they were four-inch weapons which required three bags of black powder and much tamping, and when they fired they could wipe out a whole band of Indians, but this was starving time and the cannon would have to be faced. Jake assured them, “There are ways to silence cannon.”

  At his office for Indian affairs in Denver, Major Mercy followed the growing agitation with real fear. In vain he endeavored to alert his superiors at Fort Leavenworth to the true state of affairs, but found that they had no time for trivial matters like minor Indian uprisings. Indeed, their concern was how they might siphon off still more troops for the Richmond front, where Union forces were suffering one defeat after another, with enormous casualties. But even when confronted by this indifference Mercy felt obligated to place the facts on record, and he reported:

  I have known these tribes since before the Mexican War, and I assure you that never have they been in more sorry condition. Their buffalo are gone, so they starve. The robes from the buffalo have been sent to St. Louis, so they shiver. Promise after promise of food to eat and guns for shooting smaller game have been made by our government, and broken. I am not disturbed by what I am reporting. I am terrified. If remedial steps are not taken immediately, there has got to be insurrection across the prairie next summer, and all communication will be broken. Such forts as we have will not be able to hold out more than a week.

  Let me cite but one instance, which will be more eloquent than my guessing as to possibilities. The other day I happened to be riding on the left bank of the Platte and I came to a tree in which a platform had been built such as the children of a great Indian warrior build for his burial, and it was obvious to me from the adornments that some notable chief had died, but as I passed I saw the legs of the corpse move, and upon inspection I found that it was my old friend from 1851, Chief Lean Bear of the Cheyenne, a good friend of the United States. There being no food in his camp, he had taken himself away, and had buried himself so that the younger could eat.

  Sir, the Indians are starving to death, and we must do something.

  Maxwell Mercy, Major, USA

  4 November 1863

  A deadly escalation now began, and it would be fruitless to recite each incident that accelerated it. More white people kept crowding into Colorado, and they demanded more land. When a farmer took his land he insisted that Indians and buffalo be kept off. And when the Indians were constantly restricted, without food and sometimes even without water, intolerable things simply had to happen.

  On December 19, 1863, two would-be prospectors headed west over the bleak central route from Kansas City direct to Denver. They ran out of water and food and were starving. Two more days and they would be dead. They were men from the Mississippi River region of Missouri who from their youth had both feared and hated Indians, so when in their extremity they saw five Indians riding past, apparently well fed, they had no compunction in gunning down two of them and wounding one of the others as they fled. Their tactic was successful, for on the dead Indians they found some pemmican, which kept them alive. When they reached Denver and recited their adventures, a newspaper reported the affair as one more example of superior American ingenuity:

  Sam Hazel and Virgil Tompkins of Missouri gave an example of quick thinking two weeks ago as they were about to perish at the Kansas-Colorado border. They spotted five Indians about to attack them, and before the redskins could launch their screaming, bloodcurdling charge, Sam and Virgil neatly dropped two of them, and found on their dead bodies enough pemmican to keep going. Nice work, Sam and Virgil. You are the kind of stalwart men this great Territory needs, and let the nervous sisters back east bother about their own problems. We’ll take care of the Indians.

  On March 26, 1864, a band of Indians from the tribe to which the two murdered braves belonged swept down upon a defenseless farm along the South Platte and killed two white men, lifting their scalps and taking three white women captive. This incident, which had long been feared by settlers along the Platte, threw the white community from Omaha to Denver into consternation, and men talked of forming a militia to control the savages.

  On April 3, 1864, another farmer along the Platte found one of his good horses missing and signs that Indians might have been operating in the vicinity. Other farmers said they thought the horse might have been the one they saw grazing on the north bank of the Platte, but Lieutenant Abel Tanner with his group of forty cavalrymen from Denver inspected the site and concluded that it must have been Indians. They therefore authorized a punitive expedition, an abhorrent agency much used in the west, where the phrase meant “we have no idea who committed the offense, so we shall gun down any Indian we meet.” When Tanner and his men came upon a group of Arapaho whose tipis were pitched a few miles from the established reservation, they surrounded it and executed forty-three men, women and children. When the last tipi was burned, the soldiers divided among themselves the horses and booty that remained. Of this action a Denver paper wrote:

  Forty-three dead Indians for one missing horse might seem excessive to our weak sisters in Vermont and Pennsylvania, the ones who are always telling us how to handle our Indians, but to those of us who have to live with Lo at close quarters, it is clear that only the most stem reprisals will keep him from slaughtering all white men along the Platte.
To Lieutenant Tanner, who shows signs of becoming the best Indian fighter in the west, well done! To his brave cohorts, well done, lads, and keep up the good work.

  The use of Lo as a description for the Indian was universal in the west and came about because the English poet, Alexander Pope, in his rhymed Essay on Man, introduced these thoughtful lines:

  Hope springs eternal in the human breast;

  Man never is, but always to be blest ...

  Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind

  Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind ...

  Many newspapers, such as the Zendt’s Farm Clarion, recently launched by settlers who had built their homes within the shadow of the stockade, used the whole phrase, Lo, the poor Indian, but more sophisticated papers preferred the simpler Lo.

  On June 18, 1864, a band of Indians swept down upon the South Platte road, killed four wagoners, scalped them and stole the provisions they were carrying. For six weeks no traffic passed along the road, no news from the east reached Denver. With merchandise blocked by the Indians, prices soared throughout Colorado, with flour rising from nine dollars a barrel to sixteen dollars to twenty-four in a three-week period. As omens of the evil days ahead, a plague of locusts devoured crops along the Platte and the river rose in flood, submerging a good portion of Denver.