Okla Hannali

by R. A. Lafferty

Poor Peter Pitchlynn!

  2.

  In the old Indian manner on the second syllable. The White Eyes use words curiously. A sharp thing with galena and niter mixed in.

  The Innominee clan thrived once more. It would always do that. Hannali had money, not only in New Orleans of the bankrupt South, but also in St. Louis. He also had gold coin at home; he had but to dig up his caches. He had always known how to grow money as well as corn and cattle.

  There were a lot of the Innominee left, and after an interval there would be still more. They grew and prospered, and perhaps the Territory trick could be done again. If the Innominee could pull it off, why could not others?

  But there was one thing wrong, and for a long time Hannali could not put his mind or finger on it. Things were not as they had been; that could not be expected. But the new thing was stubbornly of a different nature from the old thing.

  “They are not Indian any more,” Hannali said one day as the realization came over him.

  “No, they are not Indian people,” said Natchez, “they are now come to be white-people people even the darkest of them. Maybeso we are the last of the Indians, Papa Hannali.”

  And there Natchez herself let it slip that she was no longer completely Indian. When she said “Papa Hannali” she intoned Hannali on the first syllable — as the white people and the new Indians and the children pronounced it. She had been the last one who accented the name in the old Indian manner on the second syllable, and now she had slipped.

  Should anyone ever wonder how the “Hannali” in the title of this study is pronounced, it is this: If you read it before the end of the Civil War (some hundred years before it is written) you accent it on the second syllable. If you read it at a later date, you accent on the first.

  Never mind, they were all splendid children — for all that they had become white-people children under their ruddy brown skins. There is nothing wrong with white people other than that they are not Indians, but how had it come about?

  It had come about by smashing the old civilization and by the accretion of new Indians of fifty tribes and remnants. But do you get white people if you mix enough Indians together? In this case, yes.

  There were new Indians from New York State, from Ohio, from Pennsylvania, from Indiana, from Michigan, from everywhere. Most of these had never heard a word of any Indian language spoken in their lives. They were white people except in their forgotten ancestry, and they had never thought of themselves as Indians until their land was stolen and they were removed to a strange country. The intent had been to settle the new Indians in groups, but the practice was different. There was no town or clan or neighborhood in the Territory that did not receive families of the new Indians.

  Few of the new Indians spoke anything but English. Almost all of the Territory Indians could get along in English as their second language. Now, from the necessity of communication, English became the tongue of all, and the old Indian languages were set aside. It was in the 1870s that the old tongues of the Five Tribes went out of common usage. There would always be old people who could speak them, there are old people who can speak them even today, but they were gone as common things. And with the English language supreme, there came English-language thought patterns.

  It was so with clothing, tools, housebuilding, even plowing the land. The old Territory Indians had built very good timber and stone buildings, and every one of them looks Indian in every line. The new houses looked just like those in Illinois and Missouri and Kentucky. Compare sets of Territory photographs taken ten years apart and you will see it.

  Even shirts. The old Choctaw calico shirts had been completely Indian. Never mind the material, they had had the shapes and lines of fitted deerskin. But now the Choctaw looms turned out whiteman-shaped shirts.

  The new schools were white-people schools in their instances and examples. The children learned the bits of history of the colonies and of New England, but no longer anything of their own past. What would the Choctaw or Creek past mean to Iroquois or Chippewa children or to children who had no idea from what tribe they derived?

  “What is Pale Face? What is Red Man?” grandson Thomas-Academy asked one day when he rode home from school. “History book has them. Why am I ignorant? Why have I never heard of them before?”

  Hannali tried to explain.

  “The White Eyes have the belief that sometime somewhere some Indian called them pale face which I disbelieve,” he said. “They also believe that sometime somewhere someone called the Indians Red Men which is likewise questionable.”

  “But why?” asked Thomas-Academy. “It is they who are ruddy red rosy people and not we. We are bark-brown people.”

  “The White Eyes use words curiously,” said Hannali.

  The mind itself changed — the way that ideas are put into words. The constitution and laws of the Choctaw Nation printed at Doaksville in 1852 was completely Indian. But the Permit Law of 1867, the Timber Law of 1871, the Coal Law of 1873 are white-man things in their thinking and wording.

  Indian art ceased for two decades. When it resumed it did have a remarkably vivid Indian strength to it again, but now it was nostalgic and reminiscent. It was no longer contemporary in feeling.

  It wasn't the little things; it was the whole world that had changed. The Territory Indians woke one afternoon and found that they had been turned into white men. The Indian thing was gone and nobody could find it again.

  Along about 1870, Hannali loaded the four smallest children into a spring wagon and took them up to the Osage country to be baptized. There had used to be a priest come through the Choctaw North every five years or so, but there had been none during the war years or for some time after. But sometimes one came to the Osage country, and then Indians of the various tribes journeyed there.

  It is not the same raising grandchildren as children. The grandchildren were better and prettier than the children had been. There had been too much of Hannali himself in the three great sons to allow them to be really handsome. Man, but those tall men had beaks on them! In their own way they were handsome, perhaps, but they were so sudden and strong as to overshadow it.

  Now there was also real strength and character in Famous-George and Charles-Chitoh and Peter-Barua, and it was beginning to appear in Thomas-Academy. But there was also a new gentleness, a readier wit, an adaptability, a softhearted foolishness that their fathers had lacked.

  And the granddaughters, though less beautiful, were much prettier than their mothers. Luvinia had been a beauty. Sally had been until she became somewhat empty-faced from her troubles. Nobody would deny that Hazel was still a great beauty. But there was something rather stark and sheer about their beauty and their talents. It was as though they had accomplished it all by a great surge of effort.

  The granddaughters carried their beauty more easily, and really (except for Anna-Hata) they had less of it. Martha-Child was droll and pleasant. She had a bubbling humor and plenty of salt in her, but it was refined store salt. The salt in her mother Luvinia had been compounded at the Territory salt seeps — a sharp thing with galena and niter mixed in.

  The children had been, in their abrupt moments, savage creatures. The grandchildren were not. It was with pride that Hannali said that these grandchildren hardly did a bad thing in their lives, but he did wonder sometimes how they had come from his nest — smooth-skin creatures with hardly any bark growing on them.

  “The world is getting worse but the people in it are getting better,” he said, “how do you figure that one out how can it be like that.”

  3.

  Powerful stuff up out of the cellar. When the towns moved to the railroads. A house at the top of the hard hill.

  One night long ago Hannali had played the fiddle for the pleasure of himself and his guests. Then Peter Pitchlynn who was staying at the house that week took the instrument up. And in his hands it became a violin, and no longer a fiddle.

  Now in his latter days when Hannali played in the eve
nings it was a violin he played. He didn't fiddle jump tunes — except sometimes at dances. He bowed old powerful stuff up out of the cellar. There was great depth and richness in his playing.

  Hannali had about given up reading. The Territory newspapers were now printed in English, and Hannali knew all the news before it came to them. He finished out a few corners of Plutarch and Leviticus that he had not read before; then he had it all in him. Whatever he had read carefully he had by heart for life.

  He went over very old French letters. He smiled when he found that his father-in-law had been named Alinton Duchesne, and not DuShane. Hannali had once had a wonderful wife who intrepidly taught them all to read and write when she could not even spell her own name. Hannali, as a matter of fact, had had a handful of wonderful wives.

  Say, but that country had changed! The new railroads did not go where the old towns had been. Every town in the Territory had been destroyed in the war years. They had hardly started building again when the railroads came down into the country and ignored those trivial old town sites. There was only one thing to do. The towns up and moved to the railroads, and forgot their names when they moved. Doaksville moved to Fort Towson, North Fork Town moved to Eufaula, Skullyville moved to Spiro, Boggy Depot moved to Atoka, Perryville moved to McAlester. The old continuity was broken, the old towns were buried in buffalo grass.

  Time moved more rapidly. Hannali said that he went out to shoot a turkey once, and five years slipped away from him like minutes. It wasn't that he was getting old. He was only sixty-three at the end of the Civil War, and the following decades did him no harm. He still had plenty of green branches growing out of him, he was made out of primordial stuff that was not subject to aging. Sometimes Hannali, trying to touch old things again, went out and lived for a few weeks with the blacks and mixed blacks. There was a twenty-year-time lag during which the Choctaw Indians spoke English, and the Negroes still spoke Choctaw.

  Anna-Hata had married. How could a little blue-eyed Indian-white girl be married almost the day after she was born? She had grown up in a moment when Hannali wasn't looking. She was the least Indian-appearing of the grandchildren and the closest to Hannali.

  What had that old bear Hannali come to look like in his afterlife? He was still of the pansfalaya, the long-haired people, though many of the Chocs had cropped their hair. Often he wore his hair loose and nearly waist length, and he was in all ways informal in his appearance.

  So then he was an old character when he went to town like that: flowing-haired and shirtless, sometimes barefoot, rosary around his neck, and him nine colors of brown and a little dirty by white man's standards? He was not! Hannali had too much character ever to become an Old Character. Long hair and deerskin pants and all, he was Senator Innominee when he went to town anywhere in the Choctaw, Creek, or Cherokee nations. White men who laughed at young pushing Indians did not laugh at Hannali. He was Senator Innominee when he went down and talked in the new brick Tuskahoma Council House in the shadow of Nanih Waiya, and he was also Senator Innominee when he shot pool in Eufaula. You did not know that he was a pool shark? He could clear a hundred dollars a week, now that monied white men had begun to come in who would bet against a sure thing.

  In 1874, Father Isidore Robot came to Atoka and built St. Patrick's Church. This was in the Choctaw South, but the families who had not seen a priest for more than a hundred years came in — knowing intuitively that this Bohemian Benedictine was of the same species as the French Jesuits known to their great-great-great-grandfathers. There had been a sustaining influence in the Choctaw North — French blood, some green-Irish blood, the Rileys and a few others, and priestly visitations once or twice a decade; but there had been no contact at all with the Choctaw South. But the people recognized and remembered.

  After this time Hannali used to ride down to old St. Patrick's several times a year. It was seventy-two miles at the beginning, and he was seventy-two years old. Thereafter the distance seemed to increase about a mile a year — keeping pace with his age — till finally it was rather a hard ride for him.

  At least once a year he led the whole caravan of Innominee down there, on horseback and in buggies and wagons. He never gave up the journeys. He made the last one in the year of his death.

  But it was a long time coming back to the Choctaws.

  It was all right after that. There would be a house at the top of the hard hill.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  1.

  The garish old light. The cloud of dust that lasted twenty years. Green Interlude. The sign in the sky it say one hundred and sixty acres no more and no less.

  Boomer! Boomer! Who remembers the Boomers? David L. Payne was king of the Boomers. And were not the Boomers those who sought to steal the Indians' land?

  But the funny part of it is that the Indians always liked Payne and his poor-man following, and hated the men who killed him.

  The Boomer movement was part of the farmer-fencer settling that ended the Old Wild West Days — the part peculiar to the Territory — and the men of that movement were hatched out of the Wild West background. And just what were the Old Wild West Days — (the lettering should be burned in billboard letters on shingle-wood with a branding iron) — that stand preeminent in song and story and melodrama?

  The Old Wild West Days were only twenty years long (from about 1867 to 1887) and not of really wide extent. The heart of the complex was the cattle drives from Texas up through the Territory to the Kansas railheads; and the cattle drives to stock the ranges being opened up in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Nebraska, and Colorado with the same Texas longhorn or mixed cattle; and western mining and prospecting added their condiment to the Old Wild West Days stew. The costuming of the thing was Spanish-Mexican, and it was already three hundred years established when it moved up into the states.

  There are two dates to be noted. The Homestead Act was passed in 1862. This sentenced the period to death five years before it was born, but there is a time lag in these things. And barbed wire, invented by J. F. Glidden of DeKalb, Illinois, was first marketed in 1874. It was barbed wire that killed the Old Wild West, and it took only thirteen years to do it.

  In coming to the episode of the Boomers and to the end of our account, we pass lightly over the Old Wild West Days. This period still catches the garish old light, but the thing was not really important in the Territory. It was only a cloud of dust that lasted twenty years. Nevertheless, the heart of the Wild West saga was the Texas trail drives up through the nations, the B.I.T., and we must list at least some of the dusty names that echo out of that cloud.

  The trail drivers usually referred to the Territory as the nations — it was driving up through the nations. But in their private slang it was “Up through the B.I.T.” The abbreviation of the Beautiful Indian Territory was used sometimes in derision, but often seriously. It was the beautiful country — the Green Interlude — between the raucousness of assembling the herds in Texas, and the pop-skull nightmares and viciousness of the Kansas railhead towns.

  The trails of the Old Wild West Days drives were the Great Western Trail, the New West Trail, the Jones and Plummer Trail, the Dodge Trail, the West Shawnee Trail, the East Shawnee Trail (mostly identical with the Texas Road that went through by Hannali's Landing), the Cox Trail, the Chisholm Trail.

  The great river crossings were at Spanish Fort, Doan's Store, Red River Station, Colbert's Ferry. The main Texas towns of the herd stagings were Preston, Denison, and Fort Worth, though many of the herds originated below San Antonio. The Kansas railhead towns were Abilene, Wichita, Dodge City, Caldwell, Baxter Springs, Ellsworth, Hays City, Newton.

  The railroads of the thing were the Hannibal and St. Joe; the Leavenworth, Pawnee & Western; the Kansas Pacific; the Missouri Pacific; the Santa Fe. The stage lines of the area and period were the Sawyer and Ficklin, and the Butterfield Overland Dispatch.

  Well-known promoters were Joseph McCoy, T. C. Henry, Charles Goo
dnight, Shanghai Pierce. The name hotels were Drovers' Cottage, Abilene House, Grand Central Hotel, the Occidental, the Texas House, the Douglas Avenue Hotel, the Southwestern Hotel.

  The raiding Indians of the period were the Apaches, Quahada Comanches, Cheyennes, Kiowas, and Arapahos. The battles and ambushes were at Adobe Walls, Pawnee Fork, Cimarron Crossing. The Army forts were Lyon, Dodge, Harker, Hays, Wallace, Sill, Reno. The Indian leaders of the Plains tribes were Dull Knife, Little Wolf, Quannah Parker.

  The vice areas were McCoy's Addition, Nauchville, Hide Park, Delano, and several Hells' Half Acres in different towns. The saloons ran from the Alamo and Joe Brennan's to the Keno House and Red Beard's Dance Hall, with a hundred of them to be found in the chronicles of Drago. Whether or not they were all alike, they have become identical in popular imagination; one stylized set serves for them all in dramatic representation.

  The name sheriffs and marshals were Pat Sughrue, Mysterious Dave Mather, Bill Tilghman (the best of them), Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp (whose deeds are more fiction than fact), Torn Smith, Wild Bill Hickok, Brooky Jack Norton, Billy Brooks, Mike Meagher, Charlie Brown.

  These are the dusty names that echo out of that cloud of dust that lasted for twenty years and is called the Old Wild West Days; and out of these names has been built an authentic American folklore.

  But the Innominee family, more than most Indian families in the Territory, had strong connections with the Wild West trail driver affair. It was a connection that began with Jemmy Buster and Famous Innominee when trail driving was only a shadow of what it later became, and which now continued in Alinton Innominee. The Indian Territory was becoming more than the Green Interlude in the drives north; many of the herds now originated in the Territory. In the spring of 1870, Alinton Innominee drove one thousand of his own cattle north to Baxter Springs, Kansas. On this drive Alinton was accompanied by his father Hannali; it was one of the pleasant and expansive events of Hannali's life. The following year Alinton made a second trail drive north to Kansas.