Okla Hannali

by R. A. Lafferty

  The thousands of miles of eastern and middle rivers had all run through forested and tangled country where one would have to hack his way for wagon or even pack animal. But here was a good level road, one thousand miles wide, going west. It was ten times as easy to get out and walk as to pole a boat up that river. The Canadian River was not practical.

  Well, they gave away all their boats but one small one. They got a little, but not much, for their merchandise. They continued west by river for adventure.

  Alinton had a map that his father Hannali had drawn him. He also had a map of the United States Government, and it was plain that one of the maps was in error. The reason that the government map was wrong was that the mappers themselves had not visited that country, and that they had been misled by a confusion of names.

  There is the Red River that flows into the Mississippi in the Louisiana country, and which farther upstream is the border between Texas and the Indian Territory, and it comes from the vague west. And in Spanish New Mexico there is a fine little river starting out and flowing east, and it is named the Red River. And the map makers had assumed that they were the same. They weren't.

  The Red River itself comes apart into the Cache Creek Branch and the Prairie Dog Town Creek Branch, and the Elk Creek and the North Fork and the Salt Fork and the Deep Red Run, and it really doesn't go very far west. But the Canadian continued west three hundred miles farther than the government map showed it. There was another thing that misled them: The Upper Canadian River does look like the Red River farther down — flowing through treeless rolling or flat country; it does not look anything like the Canadian River farther down — flowing through its woodland.

  Nevertheless, it pleased Alinton Innominee to take a trade boat over three hundred miles of dry land according to the government map.

  The boys and young men of Alinton's party several times believed themselves to be in mortal danger. There is one aspect of all Indians, civilized or wild or gone feral, that is seldom emphasized: All the Indians are born kidders. The tough Plains hunters loved to spook and frighten such a bunch of boys and would never pass up an opportunity for it. What sometimes seems unsufferable arrogance, incredible boorishness, intolerable menace of the Indians is most often nothing but this rough kidding. They were initiations, hazings, things to be done. Sometimes visitors died from such kidding, but not often.

  In New Mexico, the boys pushed their last boat almost to the top of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Those flatboats would float on a mirage or a heavy dew. They made packs of their last cargo, and undertook the portage to Santa Fe. Hannali had said that the Canadian River could be navigated to within one day's portage of Santa Fe, for he himself had done it. It could be, but it was a hard twenty-hour-long day portage.

  To Santa Fe, the end of the line. No. No. They hardly stopped in Santa Fe. It was early in the year 1848. The word had not got back east yet, but it had reached Santa Fe.

  The boys bought wagons and more mules. They took the California Road to find gold.

  This was Alinton Innominee's wandering year — extending more than a year. We do not go into it in detail, for it is his property and not ours. A wandering year was to be part of a man's stock in trade. It was the mother lode from which he could mine stories and lies for the rest of his life, and it was not supposed to stand up to the close examination by an outsider.

  2.

  Tow-headed Choctaw. A Durham bull and a wife named Helen. Barnful of children.

  Jemmy Buster was a young cattle drover who came up the Texas Road. He was a tow-headed Texan who was part Choctaw. He first rode to Hannali House in 1848. He was a white boy on the outside, and Hannali moved to meet him and give him a short welcome. There had been disreputable white men in the neighborhood and some of them had stolen livestock — “drifted” them along with their own herds.

  Jemmy Buster had heard of the cantankerous big Choc and of the deep hospitality that he gave — if he accepted one. Jemmy was sick, his herd in bad shape, and he needed that hospitality. He didn't know how to begin. He stammered and stuttered, but he stuttered in Choctaw and Hannali practically adopted him on the spot. Jemmy Buster would be the first of the several additions to the Innominee in their time of expansion.

  He had started up through the Territory with three hundred steers, one scatter-witted white youth for helper, and only two extra horses. Fifty of Jemmy's cattle had been seized by Indians. Every family through whose land he passed took one steer for passage payment. “One steer is too much,” he protested to the first of them. “Ah well, give me half a steer then,” said the Indian. “I am interested to see how you will drive the other half of the steer along the trail.” Jemmy would have been plundered deeper if he hadn't been able to talk Choc, but he'd have gotten through free if he'd looked like one. Now he had lost confidence in himself, and was afraid to continue farther north where the Indians were not even Choctaw.

  He stayed at Hannali House for a week. His herd recovered on the good grass along the Canadian River, and he himself was cured of his sickness. In that week he acquired another sickness, but a more pleasant one.

  Jemmy's problem about traveling through the northern Territory was solved by Famous Innominee, the Territory dude. For several months Famous had been somewhat jealous of his brother Alinton who had gone on a journey. Now it was agreed that Famous should accompany Jemmy north. The two had become close friends. Famous was a Cherokee as well as a Choctaw, and he said that they need give no steers to the Cherokees. They went up the road that had been the Osage Trace, that had been the East Shawnee Trail, that was now the Texas Road.

  They drove deep into the Kansas country, selling steers to feeders as they went. They followed down the Little Osage River into the Missouri country, and sold the last of their steers there. They had finished their business. Well, why didn't they come back home then? They lingered there for three weeks, in spite of the urging of Jemmy Buster that they should be gone back south.

  When they came back, Famous Innominee did not come empty-handed. He brought back an amazing Durham bull that must have been worth a thousand dollars American. He also brought a wife named Helen Miller, and her value was incalculable.

  “It isn't quite a hundred pigs shoats hogs weanlings but you have done well,” Hannali told his son with humor, but this was one of the few times that Famous didn't understand him.

  The ring had been broken. The Innominee had entered on the period of their increase. It would be the time of the great harvest.

  Here we must compress. These were the great years, and we must press them down to a small space, squeeze them till the juice runs out of them by the bucketful. The periods of plenty are never given fair space in history, and we will not go against the proportion of history here. We row upstream too often against her accepted current as it is.

  Events had come in clusters. Jemmy Buster held pledge wedding with Hazel Innominee, and Jemmy and Famous went into the cattle business in a large way. In 1850, Travis Innominee took Rachel Perry of the Creek Indians for his pledge wife. In the same year, Luvinia Innominee was joined to Forbis Agent, an itinerant preacher and bookman. The first impediment of the man was removed by the stern instruction of Marie DuShane; the second remained, but it was not regarded as a serious drawback. Forbis could work, as much as was needed, for other members of the family; and he could still be a bookman. It isn't necessary that all should create prosperity; there was enough of it to go around.

  Sally Innominee had become indrawn during those years. Whiteman Falaya had visited her again, but she said that he came as a ghost or devil and not as a man.

  Alinton Innominee finally returned from his very long wandering year in Santa Fe and California and other places. He had a wife, Marie Calles. And he had returned rich.

  Even his father Hannali would never be able to determine whether Alinton was really rich or only Choctaw rich. He did have a sudden spread of money and he did make a great splash with it. But he was too good a
boy to keep that up long. There were sometimes the sound such as a pocket makes just before the bottom is reached; but Alinton never came to that bottom, and it may be that the warning sound was only imaginary.

  Alinton bought into a store in North Fork Town. He talked Hannali into closing his own store. It had been set up to aid the destitute Indians who were no longer destitute, it had lately been operated at a loss and had to be supported by the farming, and Hannali's heart had never really been in it.

  Alinton also took over the landing and maintained what freight boating was still worthwhile. He put money into the farming enterprises of his brother Travis and the stock raising of his brother Famous. He helped his brother-in-law Forbis Agent build his house, and it is suspected that he aided in Forbis' support always. They were close; Alinton was something of a bookman himself.

  From an old account book we have the names of the grandchildren of Hannali Innominee born in this time of prosperity.

  To Jemmy Buster and Hazel Innominee: James, Marie-Therese, Henry-Pushmataha, Bartholome, and Philip-Nitakechi.

  To Famous Innominee and Helen Miller: John-Durham, Famous-George, Francis-Mingo, and Strange-Joseph.

  To Travis Innominee and Rachel Perry: Louis-Hannali, Peter-Barua, Jude, and Matthew-Moshulatubbee.

  To Forbis Agent and Luvinia Innominee: Mary-Luvinia, Martha-Child, Gregory-Pitchlynn, and Anne-Chapponia.

  To Alinton Innominee and Marie Calles: Charles-Mexico, Pablo-Nieto, and Helena.

  Whom have we forgotten? Hannali had twenty-one grandchildren when the time of troubles began, and one is missing from the list. Hannali would never have failed in the listing, but we have missed one in the copying from the old account book. Which of the children have we forgotten?

  The only cloud over the Innominee family was the shoved-back, always suppressed nightmare of the ghost-crazy Whiteman Falaya and his visitations.

  But what if one thousand men of such serpents' seed should appear? Who could measure the desolation that they would bring to the Territory? How if the sick lions should be turned loose on the people?

  It happened. They came — the ghost-crazy killers, the sick lions, the devil-men of the weird seed. And even now who can measure the desolation that they wrought?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1.

  Moth-eaten Moses. The sick lion. The man who lost his magic.

  Contemporary and entangled with the Civil War in the United States there occurred the murder of the Five Tribes of the Territory. We will give some of that stark thing here. But this is not of the Civil War — not of the one you are minded of.

  In the ruination of the Territory, three men played large parts:

  General Albert Pike, a white man.

  General Stand Watie, three-quarters Indian by blood, but all white by inclination.

  Chief Peter Pitchlynn of the Choctaws.

  Here are three men of elemental sorts. Each suffered tragic changes and became less than he was; each died broken in his way and leaving the unanswered question “Why did you do it?”

  We see an empty pompous man taken over by a secret evil. We watch a surly man turn weird and ravening. We see an excellent man (“Peter, will you also go away?”) become no more than an ordinary man. We take them up, the least of them, Pike, first.

  There are certain men who are sacrosanct in history; you touch on the truth of them at your peril. These are such men as Socrates and Plato, Pericles and Alexander, Caesar and Augustus, Marcus Aurelius and Trajan, Martel and Charlemagne, Edward the Confessor and William of Falaise, St. Louis and Richard and Tancred, Erasmus and Bacon, Galileo and Newton, Voltaire and Rousseau, Harvey and Darwin, Nelson and Wellington. In America, Penn and Franklin, Jefferson and Jackson and Lee.

  There are men better than these who are not sacrosanct, who may be challenged freely. But these men may not be.

  Albert Pike has been elevated to this sacrosanct company, though of course to a minor rank. To challenge his rank is to be overwhelmed by a torrent of abuse, and we challenge him completely.

  Looks are important to these elevated. Albert Pike looked like Michelangelo's Moses in contrived frontier costume. Who could distrust that big man with the great beard and flowing hair and godly glance?

  If you dislike the man and the type, then he was pompous, empty, provincial and temporal, dishonest, and murderous. But if you like the man and the type, then he was impressive, untrammeled, a man of the right place and moment, flexible or sophisticated, and firm. These are the two sides of the same handful of coins.

  He stole (diverted) Indian funds and used them to bribe doubtful Indian leaders. He ordered massacres of women and children (exemplary punitive operations). He lied like a trooper (he was a trooper). He effected assassinations (removal of semi-military obstructions). He forged names to treaties (astute frontier polities). He part of a weird plot by men of both the North and South to extinguish the Indians whoever should win the war (devotion to the ideal of national growth). He personally arranged twelve separate civil wars among the Indians (the removal of the unfit) . After all, those were war years; and he did look like Moses, and perhaps he sounded like him.

  Stand Watie of the Cherokees. He was really a white man who happened to be an Indian chief. There remains divided opinion about him. Was he the sick lion? A diabolical sadist? A pathological killer? Or was he only a very good fighting man, taciturn and determined, and stubbornly following out a brutal war policy?

  Was he the greatest military genius ever produced by the American Indians? Very likely he was. He repeatedly led charges against seasoned Indian and white forces five times the numbers of his own men, and often carried the field. He was a man where Pike was only a mannequin. Had he not taken his peculiar stand, the Territory Indians would not have been ruined at that time or in that manner. He was a turning point.

  Peter Pitchlynn of the Choctaws. We are back with our friend Peter, the man who once had magic — and lost it. He was the last of the Choctaw magic men who could visit his people in dreams and who could summon by dreams. How can the magic flake off a man who once had it?

  Peter Pitchlynn had a long interview with Abraham Lincoln shortly after the inauguration. It was on March 12 or 13 of the year 1861 that they met. Here were two men, both flaked with the aleika, the magic, though neither of them wore a full mantle of it.

  At this meeting, Peter Pitchlynn told Lincoln truly that he believed in the Union. He said that he would endeavor to hold the Choctaws and other Territory Indians to the Union, and that he believed he could do it.

  But while Pitchlynn was in Washington, his policy was undercut at home. He soon came to accept and join that undercutting. Why did he do it?

  Peter Pitchlynn owned one hundred slaves. And thereby he changed.

  Naturally he was kind to his slaves, and naturally he employed stewards who were not notoriously cruel. But this was a business to Peter Pitchlynn, and there is no such thing as benevolent slavery.

  It had been necessary that Peter put himself on a sound money basis. He maintained himself in Washington at his own expense, once for more than two years, several times for more than a year at a time. He was an unpaid lobbyist for justice for the Indians, and he had to meet the highest capital society on its own level. A white man, if he had real ability, might go shabby and still enter that society; he would be no worse than an eccentric. But an Indian must be elegant, or so Peter believed.

  Peter had a sharp and direct intelligence and real ability in any field he chose to enter. He had acquired the common fund of knowledge and civilization almost intuitively. When he put himself to acquire the wealth that he believed the necessary basis for his mission, he acquired it quickly and directly. There was only one way to do this in the Territory — to join the big men of Falaya in the giant slave-grown cotton speculation.

  But Peter Pitchlynn owned one hundred slaves. He had given hostages to fortune. He had acquired a vested interest in a thing that went against the grain of his soul. />
  2.

  The Freedom Indians. Forbis Agent and the broadsheets. The snake we cannot kill.

  Some of the Indians, as outsiders able to view it objectively, had seen the Civil War as inevitable before most white men had. And the opinion of most Indians was: Stay completely out of it! Chief John Ross of the Cherokees put it clearly: “Do nothing, keep quiet, comply with treaties.” This sounded uninspired, but actually it was an impossibly heroic position to maintain.

  The Indians loved a war nearly as much as did white men. It was intolerable to stand on the sidelines when there was a good fight brewing. One jibe of Albert Pike's — that the Indians were afraid to face white men in real battle — always brought howling results.

  But in the immediate family here there were several men strong enough to hold out against involvement and to face all the defamation and pressure that a neutral position would draw. Hannali Innominee always proclaimed himself a Freedom Indian, and by this he meant freedom from the creeping involvement. Strange Choate, Hannali's Cherokee father-in-law, had been a blood-spilling warrior in his youth; now he rose to greater heroism in holding against the thing. Famous Innominee — the son of Hannali, the grandson of Strange — was an impassioned fighter for complete neutrality. Forbis Agent — the husband of Luvinia Innominee, the son-in-law of Hannali — tried mightily to convey this Freedom Indian thesis (to which he himself had contributed much) to the Territory Indians. Four men! Enough for a nucleus.

  Forbis Agent was a slight man. He did not know who he was, and we cannot know. He looked white, but look again and he was an Indian. He was a Territory orphan raised by a white missionary. He was the bookman who had a good but informal frontier education. For his work now, he had broadsheets printed up on the press at Baptist Mission. Then the southern sympathizers had him cut off there. For a while he inserted reasoned articles in both the Choctaw Intelligencer and the Choctaw Telegraph (these were the only two Choctaw newspapers there were); then Robert Jones, who owned a piece of everything, put a stop to the Forbis Agent articles. Jones would allow no neutralist sentiment where he could reach, and he had long arms.