The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection

by George MacDonald Fraser

  l Beautiful woman.

  m Attention!

  n Exclamation of amazement.

  o No!

  p Sioux.

  Chapter 16

  Naturally I did my best to wriggle out of it next day, since the artful baggage had taken such unfair advantage of me, first provoking my jealousy and then my ardour, stirring her rump before the mirror – did I think she was hopa, forsooth – and extracting a half-promise when she had me in extremis. And she called me designing! And all because she had taken a passion for that damned Sioux, what with his feral charm and her nursery dreams of noble savages, forgotten while she’d had the social circus of Boston to distract her butterfly brain. They had revived under his smouldering regard, and I guessed she was having delicious shivers at the thought of him sweeping her off at his saddlebow and having his wicked will of her by the shores of Gitchee-Gummee. She’d been just the same with that fat greaser Suleiman Usman, who had filled her head with twaddle about being his White Jungle Queen – well, I wasn’t risking that again. The trouble with Elspeth, you see, is that while I doubt if she really wants to be abducted and ravished by hairy primitives – well, not exactly – she’s such a congenital flirt that she sometimes gets more than she bargains for.

  So I wasn’t going to have her making a Western jaunt an excuse for renewing fond acquaintance with Master Spotted Tail, who’d have her in the bushes quicker than knife. But when I said that on reflection I’d decided that a trip West would be too taxing for her, there were tears and sobs of “But you promised …”, so in the end I gave way, secretly determining that whatever route we took would run well clear of his agency. Given that, I didn’t mind indulging her girlish fantasies with a brief tour of the wilds in a transcontinental Pullman; she could have her fill of Vast Plains and Brooding Forests from the window of a private hotel car, and never mind Chinga-chgook; we might stop off at some tame Indian village (one sniff of that would cure her notions), and perhaps a cattle-ranch or gold-mine. It could all be done in luxurious comfort and perfect safety.

  You see, it was all changed since my early days. The map was being filled in; the great wilderness had its railroads and stage lines now, its forts and town and ranches and mines. It was still wild, in parts – some of it even virtually unexplored – but there wasn’t a true frontier any more, in the sense of a north-south line dividing civilization from outer darkness.

  If you look at the map you’ll see what I mean. The train and the steamboat had forged the links across the continent and up and down, leaving only the spaces in between. The most important of these, for my story, was the great stretch of the High Plains in what is now Montana, Wyoming, and the Dacotahs; to east and north it was bounded by the Missouri river, along which the steamboats carried the Western traffic to the foot of the Rockies, and to the south by the railroad from Omaha to Cheyenne and the Great Salt Lake. These were the arteries of civilisation, along which you could travel as swiftly and safely (with luck, anyway) as from London to Aberdeen.

  It was the land they enclosed that was the trouble, for while the boats and trains might run round its limits, there wasn’t much going through it, not in a hurry. This was the last stamping-ground of the Sioux, the biggest and toughest Indian confederacy in North America, a greater thorn in Washington’s side than even my old friends the Apaches of the south-west. Fifty thousand Sioux, Sherman had reckoned, and their allies the Northern Cheyenne, first cousins to those stone-faced giants I’d met on the Arkansas. In those days the Sioux had been lords of the prairie from the Santa Fe Trail to the British border, from Kansas to the Rockies, tolerating the wagon-trains (give or take a raid now and then) and rubbing along quietly enough with the few troops that the Americans sent into the West.

  All that had changed. The ever-advancing settlements, the bypassing of their country by rail and river, had forced the Plains Tribes back from the limits of civilisation around them, into their heartland, bewildered and angry. They’d broken out in Minnesota in ’62, and been put down; when the government tried to put the Bozeman Road slap through their territory, Red Cloud had taken the war-path and fought them to a standstill; but although the road was given up and the forts abolished, their victory probably did the Sioux more harm than good, since it convinced the wilder spirits that the Yanks could be stopped by force. They didn’t see it was a struggle they must lose in the end, and so for twenty-five years the scrappy, unorganised warfare had smouldered on, with every now and then a real dust-up to stoke the growing hatred and mistrust on both sides. Crazy Horse had hammered Fetterman, Spotted Tail and Co. had lifted eighty cavalry scalps almost in Laramie’s backyard; on the American side the Cromwellian lunatic Chivington had butchered the Arapaho and Cheyenne at Sand Creek, and Custer on the Washita had descended on Black Kettle’s village with his flutes tootling Garryowen and left more than a hundred corpses in the snow. These were the solo pieces, so to speak, but always there was the accompaniment of burned settlements, derailed trains, and ambushed wagons, and punitive expeditions, dispossessions, and tribal evictions.

  Naturally, each side blamed the other for bad faith and treachery and refusal to see reason – the Indian version of Washita, for example, was that Custer wantonly attacked a peaceful village, but one of his troopers told me he’d seen freshly-taken white scalps in the Indian lodges. Choose who you will to believe.

  The wiser Sioux leaders, like Spotted Tail and Red Cloud, saw how it must end and made peace, but that solved nothing while the real Ishmaels like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse remained beyond the pale. And even the treaty Indians broke out from time to time, for the agents who were meant to supply them cheated them blind as often as not, Washington neglected them, and life on a reservation or agency was a poor thing compared to roaming their ancestral plains and robbing when they felt like it.

  By 1875, though, it looked as though the thing must peter out at last; hunters and sportsmen had swept the buffalo off the prairie at a rate of a million a year, until they were all but extinct – and the Indian without buffalo is worse off than the Irish without the potato, for it’s clothing and lodging to him as well as food. Plainly even the wildest hostiles would have to chuck it and settle down soon; the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, which would inevitably mean the loss to the tribes of yet another stretch of territory, must only hasten the process, for it would leave them little except the barely-explored fastness south of the Yellowstone called the Powder River country, and with game so scarce they would have to call it a day or starve. That was the general view, so far as I could gather, and with it went the opinion that I’d heard from Sheridan: however it ended, there wouldn’t be a war. An ugly incident or two here and there, perhaps – regrettable, but probably inevitable with such people – but no real trouble. No, sir.

  Which was most comforting to me, as I considered how to satisfy my darling’s hunger to see the Wild West; yes, the railroad would carry us well clear of the dangerous Sioux country – and Spotted Tail, incidentally. But before we set out, we must journey to Washington, for Elspeth’s social navvying in Boston had secured us an invitation to visit the capital – Washington in summer, God help me – and my lady was confident that we would be summoned to the White House, “for the President is your old comrade-in-arms, and it would be very curious if he were to overlook the presence of such a distinguished visitor as a Knight of the Bath”. I told her she didn’t know Sam Grant. As it turned out, her ignorance was nothing compared with mine.

  Washington, a dismal swamp at the best of times, was sweaty and feverish, and so were its inhabitants, with Grant’s presidency soon to enter its final year and the whole foul political crew in a ferment of caballing and mischief. Any gang of politicos is like the eighth circle of Hell, but the American breed is specially awful because they take it seriously and believe it matters; wherever you went, to dinner or an excursion or to pay a call, or even take a stroll, you were deafened with their infernal prosing – I daren’t go to the privy without making sure some
seedy heeler wasn’t lying in wait to get me to join a caucus. For being British didn’t help – they would just check an instant, beady eyes uncertain, and then demand to know what London would think of Hayes or Tilden, and how was the Turkish crisis going? (This at a time when Grace was making triple centuries in England, and I not there.)56

  We met Grant, though, and a portentous encounter it proved. It was at some dinner given by a Senator, and Burden, the military attaché from our Embassy, whom I knew slightly, was there. Grant was the same burly, surly bargee I remembered, more like a city storekeeper than the first-rate soldier he’d been and the disillusioned President he was. He looked dead tired, but the glances he shot from under those knit brows were still sharp; he gave a wary start at sight of me – it’s remarkable how many people do – and then asked guardedly how I did. I truckled in my manly way, while he watched me as though he thought I was there to pinch the silver.

  “You look pretty well,” says he grudgingly, and I told him so did he.

  “No I don’t,” he snapped. “No man could look well who has endured the Presidency.”

  I said something soothing about the cares of state. “Not a bit of it,” barks he. “It’s this infernal hand-shaking. Do you realise how frequently the office demands that the incumbent’s fingers shall be mauled and his arm jerked from its socket? No human constitution can stand it, I tell you! Pump-pump-pump, it’s all they damned well do. Ought to be abolished.” Still happy old Sam, I could see. He growled and asked cautiously if I was staying long, and when I told him of our projected trip across the Plains he chewed his beard moodily and said I was lucky, at least the damned Indians didn’t shake hands.57

  Our appetites sharpened by these brilliant exchanges, we went in to dinner, which was foul, what with their political gas and heavy food. Between them they must have numbed my brain, and by damnable chance it was before the ladies had withdrawn that a Senator of unusual stupidity and flatulence, called Allison, happened to mention his impending departure for the West, whither he was bound with a government commission to treat with the Indians about the Black Hills. I didn’t pay much heed, until a phrase he used touched a chord in my memory, and I made an unguarded remark – my only excuse is that I was trying to escape the egregious stream of chatter from the Congressional harpy seated next to me.

  “I make no doubt that our negotiations will have reached a fruitful conclusion by October, Mr President,” Allison was saying ponderously, “and that we shall be enabled to proceed to formal treaty no later than November – or, as I believe our Indian friends so picturesquely describe it, ‘The Moon When the Horns are Broken Off’.” He chuckled facetiously, and as my neighbour drew breath for another spate of drivel, I hastily addressed Allison without thinking.

  “That’s correct only if you’re talking to a Santee Sioux, Senator,” says I, and I swear for once I wasn’t trying to be smart. “If he happens to be a Teton Sioux, then ‘The Moon When the Horns are Broken Off’ is December.”

  One of those remarks, I agree, which will stop any conversation in its tracks. Allison stared, and a silence fell, broken by Grant’s rasping question. “What’s that, Flashman? Do you happen to be an authority on the Indian calendar?”

  Before I could turn the question, the prattling dunder-head I married was interposing brightly. “Oh, but Harry knows ever so much about Red Indians, Mr President! He travelled extensively among them in his youth, you know, and became thoroughly acquainted with many of their prominent men. Why, only lately, in Chicago, we met a most unusual person, a chief among the Stews, wasn’t he Harry? – anyway, a most imposing figure, although quite unpredictable, a Mr Spotted Tail, and what do you think? He and Harry proved to be old friends from the past, and it was the most amusing thing to hear them conversing at dinner in those outlandish sounds, and moving their hands in those graceful signs – oh, Harry, do show them!” How I’ve kept my hands from her throat for seventy years, God knows.

  “Spotted Tail?” says Allison. “Why, that’s a singular thing – of course, he recently returned from Washington. I take it to be the same man – the leader of the Brulé Siouxes? Well, he is to be a principal spokesman for the Indians at our conference.”

  “You speak Siouxan?” says Grant to me, quite sharp.

  “My husband speaks many languages,” says Elspeth proudly, smiling at me. “Don’t you, my love? Why, it can make me quite dizzy to hear him—”

  “I never knew you’d been out West,” says Grant, frowning. “How did you come to know Spotted Tail?”

  There was nothing for it but to tell him, as briefly as I could, and for once I didn’t make a modest-brag about it; I could have kicked Elspeth’s dainty backside, for I suspected no good would come of this. They were all attention – you don’t meet many dinner guests, I suppose, who’ve commanded a wagon-train and learned the lingo from Wootton and Carson, and they probably didn’t believe half of it.

  “Quite remarkable,” says Grant. “You don’t happen to know Spotted Tail’s nephew – Chief Crazy Horse?”

  Any damage had been done by now, so I couldn’t resist the temptation of saying that I’d put him on his first pony. (That I’m sure they disbelieved. Odd, ain’t it?) I added that since he’d been only six years old I could hardly claim to know him well. Grant only grunted, and no more was said until the women had taken themselves off and the cigars were going. Then:

  “You said you and Lady Flashman were going West, didn’t you?”

  “Purely for pleasure,” says I.

  “Uh-huh.” He chewed his cigar a moment. “I doubt if anyone on Senator Allison’s commission knows Spotted Tail all that well. I’ve met him a few times … shrewd fellow. Terry’s your military representative, isn’t he?” he asked Allison. “He doesn’t know Indians at close quarters, exactly – and I’m positive he doesn’t speak Siouxan.” He studied me in a damned disconcerting way. “You wouldn’t care to lend Allison your assistance, I suppose? It wouldn’t take you much out of your way.”

  “Mr President,” says I hurriedly, “I’m hardly an authority on the Indian question, and since I’m not an American citizen—”

  “I’m not suggesting you serve on the commission,” growls he. “But I know something about your gifts of persuasion and negotiation, don’t I? – and if Allison’s going to get anywhere in this infernal business, it’s going to take a power of informal and delicate dealing. He’ll need all the help he can get, and while he’ll have no lack of expert counsel, it can’t hurt to have the added assistance of a soldier of rank and diplomatic experience—” sardonic little bastard! “—who not only knows Indians, especially Spotted Tail himself, but can also understand what the other side is saying before the interpreters frazzle it up. You concur, Senator?”

  “Why, indeed, Mr President,” says Allison gravely. “I’m persuaded that Colonel Flashman’s ah … unusual qualifications would be … ah, invaluable.” I guessed he didn’t care much for it. “If he can be prevailed upon, that is, to assist informally …”

  “I’m sure he can,” says Grant firmly. “As to being a British citizen, it’s nothing to the point,” he went on to me. “It didn’t matter in the war, did it? Besides, I’m sure Burden here will agree,” and he nodded to our Embassy wallah, “that an Indian solution is almost as much in England’s interest as in ours. The Sioux could be a damned nuisance in Canada – they don’t respect national boundaries, those fellows – so I don’t doubt Her Majesty would be happy to lend us your friendly assistance.”

  Burden didn’t hesitate, rot him. “I think I can say that we should welcome the opportunity of having Sir Harry Flashman accompany the commission as an observer, Mr President,” says he carefully. “As you point out, our respective interests converge in this matter.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say so,” says Grant. “Well, Flashman?”

  That was Grant all over. It was a tiny thing; my presence could hardly weigh in the balance – but Sam as a commander had never neglected the least po
ssible advantage, and even one more voice in Spotted Tail’s ear might conceivably help. I didn’t know then, I confess, just how damned important Spotted Tail was. Grant was looking at me, lighting another cigar.

  “What d’you say? No Medal of Honour in it this time, I’m afraid, but I’d esteem it a personal favour.”

  I knew who else would, too – I could hear her in the distant drawing-room, regaling the other ladies with “Caller Herrin’” at the piano. Let me decline – and how the devil could I refuse Grant a personal favour? – and I’d never hear the end of it. What, deny her the chance to languish at “Mr Spotted Tail”? Well, perhaps when she saw him in his “natural surroundings” she’d be less enthusiastic for noble savages. Aye, perhaps. I’d watch the red bastard like a hawk.

  “Happy to be of service, Mr President,” says I.

  As it turned out, I wasn’t – of service, I mean – but I take no blame for that. Solomon himself couldn’t have saved the Camp Robinson discussions with the Sioux from being a fiasco, not unless he’d gagged Allison to begin with. There is some natural law that ensures that whenever civilisation talks to the heathen, it is through the person of the most obstinate, short-sighted, arrogant, tactless clown available. You recall McNaghten at Kabul, perhaps? Well, Allison could have been his prize pupil.

  To his blinkered eyes the problem looked simple enough. Despite General Crook’s efforts (and having heard him in Chicago I didn’t imagine they’d been too strenuous) white miners had continued to pour into the Black Hills that summer; gold camps like Custer City already had populations of thousands, and more arriving daily. The Sioux, rightly viewing this as a shameless violation of their treaty, were getting angrier and uglier by the minute. So, faced on one hand by a possible Sioux rising, and on the other by the fait accompli of the mining camps, Washington reached the conclusion you’d expect: treaty or no, the Sioux would have to give way. Allison’s task was to persuade them to surrender the hills in return for compensation, and that, to him, meant fixing a price and telling ’em to take it or leave it. He didn’t doubt they would take it; after all, he was a Senator, and they were a parcel of silly savages who couldn’t read and write; he would lecture them, and they would be astonished at his eloquence, pocket the cash without argument, and go away. It didn’t seem to weigh with him that to the Sioux the Black Hills were rather like Mecca to the Muslims, or that having no comprehension of land ownership, the idea of selling them was as ludicrous as selling the wind or the sky. Nor did he suspect that, even if their religious and philosophic scruples could be overcome, their notions of price and value had developed since the days of beads and looking-glasses.