The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection

by George MacDonald Fraser

  33. But not for long. Gallantin (also known as Glanton) had driven a thriving trade in scalps sold to the Chihuahua authorities, who were much puzzled that in spite of all his efforts, Apache raids seemed to be increasing, with Mexicans and friendly Indians being scalped in large numbers. Eventually it dawned on them that Gallantin himself was responsible, and was selling these “innocent” scalps as well as Apache ones. Gallantin was forced to flee in 1851, taking about two thousand stolen sheep with him through the Gila River country; here he was met by Yuma Indians whose chief Naked Horse protested friendship and, at the first opportunity, wiped out Gallantin and his entire party. (See Dunn, Cremony, Bancroft.)

  34. The Copper Mines of Santa Rita, once the stronghold of Mangas Colorado and the Mimbreno Apache, and scene of the infamous Johnson massacre, would not be recognised by Flashman today. The triangular presidio and buildings of the Mexican occupation have gone, and in their place is a man-made excavation almost a mile across, showing strata of remarkably varied colours, for the copper which the Spaniards first sought centuries ago is still being mined by modern commercial methods.

  35. Among the Apache it was customary for young men to accompany four war-parties in subordinate positions, as look-outs and auxiliaries, before they were considered fully fledged warriors. (See Note 45.)

  36. The reference to King Solomon’s Mines is obvious; Captain Good’s monocle and the prediction of the eclipse are justly famous. But long before Rider Haggard wrote his story, Captain Cremony (See Note 40) had described how a similar prediction was used to impose on the Apaches. While it is a device that could well occur to an imaginative writer, the possibility remains that Haggard had read Cremony, and borrowed a factual incident for fiction.

  37. The ta-a-chi or sweatbath of the Apaches was normally a great tent of blankets, in which heated rocks were placed; the bathers then packed inside in large numbers, and when they were near suffocation, emerged for a cold plunge. (See J. G. Bourke, An Apache Campaign in the Sierra Madre, 1886.)

  38. Obviously Mangas Colorado had heard of the brass badges given by the British to friendly chiefs in the colonial days – a practice carried on in many parts of the world under the Empire. It is said that Sitting Bull himself possessed a badge of King George III, possibly inherited from an ancestor, and that when the Sioux sought refuge in Canada after Little Bighorn, he displayed it to Inspector Walsh of the North-west Mounted Police, exclaiming: “We are British Indians! Why did you give the country to the Americans?”

  39. Mangas (or Mangus) Colorado (1803?-1863), leader of the Santa Rita Copper Mines band of the Mimbreno Apaches, was one of the great Indian chiefs, certainly the most gifted of his nation, although less famous than his successors. Originally named Dasodaha (He-Only-Sits-There), he is supposed to have won the title of Red Sleeves by stealing a red shirt from a party of Americans; only Flashman suggests that it was in reference to his duel with his brothers-in-law – an encounter mentioned by Cremony. Although he was unusually large and powerful, there is some uncertainty as to how tall he was; some sources suggest as much as six feet six or seven, but Cremony, who knew him well a year or two after Flashman, settles for six feet, and John C. Reid, another eye-witness, simply says “Very large, powerful mould, villainous face” (Reid’s Tramp, by John C. Reid, 1858). What is not in dispute is Mangas’s intelligence and political ability; Cremony, although he despised his character and noted that he was not remarkable for personal bravery, thought him brilliant, statesmanlike, and influential beyond any other Indian of his time. As leader of the Mimbreno, Mangas showed great skill in unifying the Apache people, partly through marriage alliances; three of his daughters by the beautiful Mexican lady became wives of the Coyotero, Chiricahua, and White Mountains clans; one of his sons-in-law was the celebrated Cochise. Of the fourth daughter, Sonsee-array (the Morning Star), there is no historical trace; since she did not marry an Apache chief, like her sisters, she presumably had no political importance.

  While Mangas’s character may well have been as deplorable as Cremony suggests, in justice to the chief he appears to have been initially well-disposed to the Americans, at least until the Johnson massacre of 1837. For this he took a swift and terrible revenge, killing various bands of American trappers, ambushing convoys to Santa Rita, and finally wiping out almost all the Copper Mines settlers when they tried to escape to Mexico. Thereafter he established himself at Santa Rita, offered help to General Kearny in the Mexican War (see W. H. Emory, Notes of a Military Reconnaissance, 1848), and had friendly relations with Commissioner Bartlett of the U.S. Boundary Commission, although they had occasional disputes over the status of Mexican captives in Apache hands. At this time (less than two years after Flashman met him) Mangas suffered an indignity which turned him bitterly against the white intruders – he was set upon and brutally flogged by a party of American miners, whether on suspicion of treachery or out of malice is not clear. Thereafter he waged occasional war against Americans and Mexicans alike, until 1863, when he was taken prisoner by treachery, provoked into resistance, and like many another Indian leader, “shot while trying to escape”. (See also Bartlett, J. R., Personal Narrative of Explorations, 1854.)

  40. John Carey Cremony (1815–79) is worth a note to himself, not only because he was the first and most-quoted authority on the Apaches, but as one of those splendid Victorian extroverts who did so much to enliven the 19th century; in many ways, he was a man after Flashman’s own heart, possessed of a bizarre sense of humour, and the hero of adventures so remarkable that they are quite probably true – confronting Cuchillo Negro pistol in hand, baffling the Apaches with his eclipse prediction, pursued across the Jornada with Indian arrows thudding into his serape, perhaps best of all fighting hand to hand with an Apache warrior—“my erratic and useless life passed in review before me … to be killed like a pig by an Apache seemed pre-eminently dreadful and contumelious.” As a former journalist on the Boston Globe, he knew how to make the best of his stories, but as a scholar and observer of the Apaches during his two years an interpreter to the Bartlett Commission (1849–51) he deserves the highest respect. No one knew the Apaches better, as friend and enemy, and whoever studies or writes about them will go first, and last, to Captain Cremony.

  41. The Apache nation consisted of several tribes spread across New Mexico, Northern Mexico, Texas and Arizona, the most prominent being the Mescaleros, Jicarillas, Chiricahuas, Gilenos, Mimbrenos, Mogollones, and Coyoteros, as well as the related Kiowas. Their numbers have always been something of a mystery; Cremony put it as high as 25,000, which seems unlikely; William Bent, builder of the Fort and a sound judge on Indian affairs, was probably closer to the mark when he estimated a grand total of five to six thousand. (See Cremony, Schoolcraft, and Hodge.) See also Notes 44 and 45.

  42. It is not remarkable that Flashman should have known Geronimo (1830?–1909), since at this time the great Apache, the grandson of a chief from another tribe, had settled among the Mimbreno following his marriage to Alopay. Known originally as Goyathlay (The-One-Who-Yawns), Geronimo was among the bitterest opponents of Mexico and the United States; his family had been killed by Mexicans, and he waged intermittent warfare in the south-west until Apache resistance was finally overcome by campaigns in the 1880s, conducted by Generals Crook and Nelson Miles. Geronimo was sent to Florida, but was allowed to spend his last days at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he became something of a tourist attraction. Since he was one of the most photographed of all Indians (once being snapped at the wheel of a car), there is ample confirmation of Flashman’s description. (See Geronimo’s Autobiography, edited by S. M. Barret, 1906; Bourke’s Apache Campaign and On the Border with Crook, 1891; Dunn.)

  43. Cremony for one; he was shown the trick by Quick Killer, the brave whom Flashman mentions as a friend of the Yawner’s.

  44. What Flashman has to say of the Apaches – their culture, habits, characters, their ceremonies relating to courtship, marriage, honeymoon, burial, and war – is borne out by ot
her contemporary authorities, especially Cremony. (See also Bourke, The Medicine-Men of the Apache, 9th Annual Report, U.S. Bureau of Ethnology, 1892), and his other works; Bartlett; Lockwood; Bancroft; Hodge; Schoolcraft; J. Ross Browne’s Adventures in the Apache Country, 1863, and Robert Frazier’s The Apaches of the White Mountain Reservation, 1885.

  45. The pollen which the medicine men threw was hoddentin, to invoke the sun’s blessing on the enterprise. It was much prized by Apache braves, who invariably carried it on the warpath with their cords and the talisman bags which contained such relics as twigs riven by lightning – a great medicine this, and not only among the Apaches: Scott refers to it in The Lady of the Lake, canto 3, stanza 4. The medicine cords, sometimes decorated with feathers and with a circlet to be laid on any wound or injury, were worn on the hip. The “scratching-tubes” were the most curious piece of war-party equipment; they were carried by the youngest men who had not yet made four warpaths, and who were forbidden either to scratch themselves with their fingers or let water touch their lips during the campaign. So they scratched themselves with a stick or with the tubes, which they also used for drinking. One thing which Flashman does not mention is the plucking of eyebrows and eyelashes, and one wonders how he managed for several months among people who practised depilation; presumably they tolerated his shaving. (See Bourke, Medicine Men; Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough, 1922.)

  46. This was undoubtably the City of Rocks, now a tourist attraction some way off the road between Silver City and Deming; from a distance the great mass of rocks looks remarkably like a town of modern buildings, but they are entirely a work of nature, although it is easy to understand Flashman’s conclusion that they were man-made.

  47. Christopher “Kit” Carson (1809–68), guide, scout, Mountain Man and soldier, is one of the great Americans, and by all accounts, even when revisionists have combed his history for faults, seems to have been every bit as likeable as Flashman makes him sound. Only one or two points need to be made here, in relation to Flashman’s account: 1) Carson pursued Apache horse-thieves south from Rayado in March, 1850, with a party of friends and dragoons, recaptured the horses, and killed five Indians. This fits precisely with Flashman’s story, and only one question arises: either Carson’s party went 200 miles south in their pursuit (which is unlikely, but not impossible), or else Flashman has misjudged time and distance again, and was chased farther north by Iron Eyes’ band than his account suggests. The nature of the ground where Iron Eyes ran him to earth and Carson rescued him suggests the latter; his flight north may have taken a day longer than he says it did. 2) His description of Carson is accurate: the great scout was 40 at this time, clean-shaven, small and compact in build, soft-spoken, and with twinkling grey eyes, according to others who knew him. That he was illiterate seems doubtful; one biographer states flatly that he owned more than a hundred books and wrote a good clear hand; he certainly spoke French, Spanish, and several Indian dialects fluently, and does not appear to have spoken like an uneducated man. 3) Flashman says Charles Carson was a year old in the spring of 1850; historians give varying dates for the birth of the child, between 1849 and 1850. 4) Flashman’s memory is playing him false about the name of the hunter who went with them to Laramie; he is variously described as Goodall and Goodel, but not Goodwin. For the rest, the account of the journey and its purpose fits with Carson’s movements at this time; the story on pp.260 ff. is true, as is the story of Mrs White and the novelette on p.263. 5) Carson was nick-named, among other things, the “Nestor of the Plains”, and it is likely that Maxwell was using the name in jest. 6) Lucien Maxwell (1818–1875), a former Mountain Man and hunter, was a close friend of Carson’s, but of much greater ambition and worldly ability; he seems to have been a charming rascal and an intrepid frontiersman, but although he did control one of the largest private empires ever known (the Maxwell Land Grant), he died comparatively poor. (The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, by Dewitt C. Peters, 1859; Kit Carson, by Noel B. Gerson, 1965; Dear Old Kit, by H. L. Carter; Kit Carson, by Stanley Vestal; Inman, Lavender, Bancroft.)

  48. The poem is clearly William Dunbar’s Timor mortis conturbat me, and one must assume that Carson, who like many frontiersmen, including Bridger and Davy Crockett, was of Scottish descent, had learned it from his father, Lindsey Carson, or possibly from his grandparents; they were William Carson, a Scot who emigrated from Ulster, probably in the 1740s, and Eleanor McDuff of North Carolina.

  49. It is not clear exactly which fort Flashman means. The first Laramie fort, a wooden stockade called Fort William (and the subject of a well-known painting by A. J. Miller) was established in 1834 on the Laramie river; six or seven years later the adobe Fort Platte was built close by on the Platte river; then came Fort John, commonly called Fort Laramie, and replacing the original Fort William; it also was adobe-walled. The army took it over shortly after Flashman’s visit, and additional buildings were added. So he is probably referring to Fort John. Today Fort Laramie is a beautiful spot, with the army buildings in excellent repair, but of the original forts of the Mountain Men and hunters there is no trace, and even their sites are uncertain. Visitors should note that the historic site of Fort Laramie is not to be confused with the modern village called Fort Laramie on the north bank of the Platte, and still less with the large town of Laramie farther south and nearer Cheyenne. (See Fort Laramie, by David L. Hieb, National Park Service Handbook Series, 1954.)

  50. The marriage of Philip Sheridan (1831–88), the famous Civil War general, to Irene Rucker, took place in Chicago, on June 3, 1875. General Sherman, head of the US Army, was a guest, as were Generals Crook and Pope. (See General George Crook, his Autobiography, edited by M. F. Schmitt, 1946.)

  51. For the Indian Office figures, and the state of official opinion on the Indian question at this time, see The Sioux Wars, by C. E. De Land, S. Dakota Historical Collections, vol. xv. Figures for arms shipments up the Missouri may be found in Bourke’s Wild Life on the Plains (1891), an expanded version of General Custer’s My Life on the Plains (see below).

  52. The Siouxan words are given here as Flashman has written them in his manuscript, and are to be found in S. R. Rigg’s Dakota-English Dictionary, 1890. Authorities seem to differ on certain words; for example, one finds both Isanhanska and Millahanska for “Long Knives”, meaning cavalry; there are also different words for “white men”, and I have had to assume that when Flashman writes Isantanka and Washechuska, he means American and English respectively. One or two words I have not troubled to footnote because their meanings are well known – for example the How! of greeting, and the Wah! of agreement. (See also P. W. Grant’s Sioux Dictionary and W. A. Burman’s The Sioux Language.)

  53. This description of the Sioux’s behaviour in a civilized environment heightens one’s regard for Flashman as a scrupulous reporter, for it accords exactly with the account given by D. C. Poole, who spent eighteen months among the Sioux as agent at the Whetstone agency in 1870. Poole accompanied Spotted Tail and other Brulés to Washington and New York, where the chief was especially taken with the young ladies working in the Mint, and with the performance of a theatrical conjurer. Poole, an excellent raconteur, has some good stories: his description of the earnest clergyman who believed the Indians were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, and lectured them on the subject without realising that they spoke no English, is well worth reading. (D. C. Poole, Among the Sioux of Dakota, 1881.)

  54. Crazy Horse, war chief of the Sioux, was bom in or slightly before 1844, the son of an Oglala medicine man (also called Crazy Horse) and Spotted Tail’s sister. A shy, reserved child, known as Curly or the Fair-Haired Boy because of his light colouring – which led some observers to suppose he was part-white – he seems to have been unusually visionary, even by Indian standards: he dreamed of himself on horseback with a red hawk feather in his hair and a pebble behind his ear, and great things were prophesied for him, which were fulfilled. As one of the leaders at Little Bighorn and the Rosebud, he achieved a repu
tation unequalled by any other fighting Indian. He surrendered to the army in 1877, and like Mangas Colorado, was killed while trying to escape. (See F. J. Dockstader, Great North American Indians and other works on the Sioux cited in these Notes.)

  55. This seems to represent Spotted Tail’s philosophy very fairly. A remarkable man, the Brulé chief was considered the Sioux nation’s foremost warrior in the 1840s and 50s; he was credited early in his career with counting 26 coups, and by the end of his life had more than a hundred scalps on his war-shirt. Following the wipe-out of Lt Grattan and his troops by the Brulé under their chief Bear-that-Scatters in 1854, Spotted Tail and four other braves agreed to “give their lives for the good of the tribe”, and surrendered, singing their death-songs. Spotted Tail was imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth, where he is said to have learned some English, and where his observations seem to have convinced him that it was futile to attempt resistance to the white man. Later, as chief of the Brulés, he was a resolute champion of peace and reconciliation and, says his biographer Hyde, obtained advantages for the Sioux by persuasion which their militant leaders failed to win by war: “He was probably the greatest Sioux chief of his period … (and) played his part better than any of the other Sioux leaders.”

  Spotted Tail was highly intelligent, good-natured, and strikingly handsome; the painting by H. Ulke, done in 1877, shows a bold, humorous face which might well have given Flashman cause for jealousy. Bishop Whipple called him “a picture of manly beauty, with piercing eyes”. The chief was also something of a dry wit: dining at the White House, he remarked that the whites had fine tipis, and was assured by President Grant that if he settled down to agriculture, the Government would give him an excellent tipi; Spotted Tail’s response was that if it was a tipi like the White House, he would think about farming. In 1877, it was partly through his efforts that Crazy Horse was persuaded to surrender, and possibly because of this and his “non-hostile” policy in general Spotted Tail was murdered four years later by Crow Dog. (See Hyde, Spotted Tail; Dunn; Poole.)