Dinosaurs in the Attic

by Douglas Preston

  Nothing was done. The Cheyenne finally told the head of the agency, "We are sickly and dying here, and no one will speak our names when we are gone. We will go north at all hazards, and if we die in battle our names will be remembered and cherished by all our people."

  At dawn on September 9, 1878, the Cheyenne carried out their plan. Led by Dull Knife and Little Wolf, most of the band decamped from the reservation and started the eight-hundred-mile journey north. Thus began the famous Cheyenne march from Indian Territory to Wyoming Territory—and the events that Little Finger Nail recorded in his ledger.

  Little Wolf had been fighting white men since 1856, and he warned the younger warriors that they were not to start any battles with soldiers, or attack settlers or cowboys. Any provocative actions, he realized, would likely bring swift retribution. As the march north continued, they were attacked by soldiers again and again, the tribe fighting defensively and retreating whenever it could.

  When they neared Dodge City, however, the Cheyenne were again attacked, this time by soldiers and cowboys. Although the Cheyenne repulsed the attack, many of the young warriors, including Little Finger Nail, felt angry and wanted revenge. They needed horses and food, and were tired of restraint and retreat. The next day some of them raided a cow camp, killed four whites, and captured some horses and mules. As the band moved northward, the young men continued to raid settlements north of Dodge City, especially along Sappa and Beaver creeks. There, three years earlier, buffalo hunters and soldiers had massacred Cheyenne women and children. In retaliation, Little Finger Nail and his companions shot the same number of whites as the whites had killed of Indians. In a single raid they captured over two hundred horses.

  Little Finger Nail later recorded many of these incidents in his book. In one drawing we see a warrior galloping through a hail of bullets, a young man on a horse counting coup on a fallen settler, a camp of buffalo hunters, and a smiling warrior galloping off with stolen U.S. Cavalry horses. One scene depicts a major battle with government troops, probably one of several skirmishes outside Dodge City. Scattered among the battles and raids are scenes of courtship, since Little Finger Nail was apparently courting one or more of the young girls of the tribe.*48

  In the closing years of the Indian Wars, ledger-book Indian art became increasingly common. Earlier warrior art had usually been painted on buffalo hides and tipi covers, and represented important scenes in the life of a warrior. Some warriors painted their own scenes, but more often a warrior would ask an artist in the tribe to outline the figures in paint. He would recount to the artist the incidents he wanted depicted, giving specific details such as descriptions of horses, number of troops, and brands on captured horses and cattle. The figures would then be colored in by the warrior himself. To prepare black paint, the artist would mix ashes and buffalo blood; for various earth colors, he would blend different iron-bearing clays with the gluey residue of hide scrapings. When pencils, crayons, and watercolors became available, the Indians quickly adopted them, as they offered both convenience and a wider range of colors. The Indians also acquired ledger books in which to draw. From the Indians' point of view, these were superior to hides for several reasons: first, when U.S. soldiers raided Indian villages during the Indian wars, they often burned the tipis, thus destroying the buffalo hides and the artwork upon them. The ledger books, on the other hand, could be carried away to safety. More important, the Indians believed the drawings offered magical protection and—unlike hides—could be carried into battle.

  The Cheyenne continued north and finally crossed the South platte River on October 4, 1878. Here, Little Wolf and Dull Knife disagreed as to where the tribe should go. Little Wolf wanted to head farther north toward Canada, while Dull Knife wanted to go to the Red Cloud Agency, where he thought the Sioux were encamped. So the group split, and Little Finger Nail joined Dull Knife in heading toward Red Cloud.

  Winter came early, and before the Cheyenne reached their destination, U.S. soldiers surprised them during a blinding snowstorm and captured the entire group. While being escorted to Fort Robinson, Nebraska, the Indians secretly took apart their best firearms and hid the parts, with ammunition, among the clothing of the women and children.

  At Fort Robinson the Cheyenne were given a great deal of freedom as long as they stayed within the fort, while the fort's captain, Henry Wessels, waited for word from Washington about what to do with the Indians. It was here that Frank Hardie noticed Little Finger Nail making drawings in his ledger book.

  All went well until one of the Cheyenne disappeared. Wessels immediately imprisoned all the Cheyenne in their barracks, and kept them there even after the Indian returned several days later. Meanwhile, Wessels had also received orders from General Sheridan that the Cheyenne were to go south. When Wessels relayed this message to Dull Knife, the Chief gave his famous and eloquent reply:

  All we ask is to be allowed to live, and to live in peace. I seek no war with anyone. An old man, my fighting days are done. We bowed to the will of the Great Father and went far into the south where he told us to go. There we found a Cheyenne cannot live.... To stay there would mean all of us would die.... We thought it better to die fighting to regain our old homes than to perish of sickness. Then our march was begun. You know the rest.

  Tell the Great Father that Dull Knife and his people ask only to end their days here in the north where they were born. Tell him we want no more war.... Tell him if he tries to send us back we will butcher each other with our own knives. I have spoken.

  Wessels relayed Dull Knife's message to Washington and received the following reply from General Sheridan: "Unless they are sent back to where they came from, the whole reservation system will receive a shock which will endanger its stability."

  When Dull Knife was told of Sheridan's response, he said: "Great Grandfather sends us death in that letter. You will have to kill us and take our bodies back down that trail. We will not go."

  Wessels decided to force compliance by securely locking the Indians in one barracks and cutting off all their food, fuel, and water. What he didn't know about was the Indians' secret cache of weapons parts and ammunition. On January 8, 1879, the Indians covered the windows of the barracks with blankets, in preparation for reassembling the rifles and pistols. Thinking the Indians might be planning an escape, Wessels increased the guard on the barracks and hired a blacksmith to wrap chains across the locked doors. The Cheyenne ripped up the floorboards to make clubs, and were able to assemble twelve rifles and three pistols from the cache of parts. Then, on the evening of January 9, the Indians painted their faces and made ready for their escape.

  At 9:45 P.M., two Indians, one of whom was probably Little Finger Nail, knocked out two windows and killed the sentries at the southwestern and western ends of the barracks. Within seconds, the other Indians opened fire on the guards as the rest of the tribe began climbing through the broken windows.

  The soldiers were taken by surprise, but recovered quickly. As the Indians fled, the soldiers piled out of their quarters and began firing at the fleeing figures. The Indians made easy targets as they stumbled across a level snowfield in full moonlight. About half were shot down and killed almost immediately, including a large number of women and children. Wessels sent his soldiers in pursuit of the rest, who had scattered into small groups and become separated. Little Finger Nail and his group made it across White River, and fled southwest into a series of low bluffs behind the camp. They had no horses, little food, and poor clothing, and the weather was bitter cold. Despite these handicaps, they managed to evade the cavalry soldiers (who were on horseback) for almost two weeks.

  On the thirteenth day, however, they realized that escape was hopeless. They had only managed to put thirty-five miles between Fort Robinson and themselves, and were just across the border in Wyoming Territory. The soldiers were fast closing in. The Indians determined to make a last stand at a dry streambed along the edge of a bluff. Uncharacteristically, they chose a poor defensive position;
the soldiers had a clear line of fire, and the Cheyenne did little to conceal their presence other than piling up sod and digging a few shallow rifle pits in the frozen earth.

  The pursuing soldiers—Frank Hardie among them—quickly discovered the hideout. As Hardie mentions in his letter, he was close enough to identify Little Finger Nail before the battle.

  Wessels gave the order to fire, and the soldiers charged to the edge of the streambed, firing directly into the scattered shrubbery, rifle pits, and crude breastworks that hid the Cheyenne. They charged again and again, all the while saturating the streambed with fire. For an hour the greatly outnumbered Indians—a total of thirty-one men, women, and children—fought back with what little ammunition they had. The soldiers continued firing until return fire from the Indians had ceased. Wessels then ordered a cease-fire and approached the edge of the streambed. The Indians were scattered about and all appeared to be dead. Suddenly a warrior looked up and fired directly at Wessels with what must have been his last bullet, striking him in the head. The captain fell back, gravely wounded, and was carried off while the soldiers resumed peppering the hollow with fire for another quarter of an hour. Finally the soldiers paused and approached the streambed. Within moments, three bloody warriors leaped up, and, armed only with knives, charged at the troops. They were promptly shot down.

  Once more the nervous soldiers crept up to the side of the streambed. Only a few badly wounded women and children were alive; all the rest had perished. Many had been literally riddled with bullets.

  When the soldiers had hauled the last of the corpses out of the dry streambed, Hardie untied the ledger book from Little Finger Nail's body. During the saturation fire, a carbine ball had passed clean through it. The Museum received the ledger in 1912, and put it on display in 1934. We can still see it there today: a young Cheyenne man's remarkable account of the last days of his great people.

  FACES FROM THE PAST

  While looking at artifacts from the other side of a thick sheet of glass, it is hard for us to keep in mind the human beings that created them. There is, however, one collection in the Museum that, at least to me, suddenly brought home this fact. It is a collection where one comes literally face to face with the people who created these artifacts. We reach this particular collection, which is stored in an attic vault underneath a Museum rooftop, by climbing up a narrow flight of stairs from the Anthropology Department's fifth-floor offices. As we ascend the staircase, the incongruous sound of a mountain waterfall comes echoing down, created by water circulating in a sprinkler tank. At the top of the stairs is the tank itself, guarded by a grotesque wooden statue of a woman—carved by the Northwest Coast Indians a century ago—and a pile of silent, slit-log drums.

  The tower attic room to the right, illuminated by ancient skylights, contains the Museum's large collection of life casts.*49 Shelf after shelf is lined with the plaster busts of actual people who once lived—Indians, Siberians, Eskimos, Patagonians, even Museum presidents and trustees. They look out over the garret room with blank eyes. Each cast is identified when relevant by tribe, and sometimes by name as well. Here is the face of Mene Wallace as a small child, wrapped in protective plastic, staring out sightlessly. Next to Mene is his father, Kissug, who died of tuberculosis while in New York, and a cast of the Eskimo who returned to Greenland and told of what he saw, only to be nicknamed—as we've seen—"The Big Liar." Here we can also make out casts identified as Mrs. Lost Horse, Thomas Pretty Back, Ghost Face, and Maggie Old Eagle—all Oglala Sioux. On another shelf rests Lumbango, a Congo Bahumba; Annie McKay, a Tlingit Indian; Shenandoah, an Oneida Indian; Bonifacio, a Patagonian; and hundreds of others. In the far corner is a stack of cast arms and legs, looking like a broken heap of dolls. These were cast from life in various positions—flexed, extended, relaxed, gripping imaginary objects, and so forth.

  Most of these life casts were collected in the field around the turn of the century by various scientists and explorers, including Franz Boas, Waldemar Borgoras (on the Jesup North Pacific Expedition), and Casper Mayer.

  The life casts arrived at the Museum along with the other collections. During this period, the Museum cast copies of the busts for other institutions for twelve dollars each. The faces became useful not only for research, but for model-making and Museum exhibitions. In the Plains Indians Hall, for example, the creased and melancholy faces of once-living men and women gaze imperturbably out of glass cases. Other real faces can be seen in the Hall of Eastern Woodland Indians, the Hall of Eskimos, and the Hall of Asian Peoples.

  And, in what is perhaps the most comprehensive use of life casts in a Museum exhibition, the great Haida canoe at the 77th Street entrance to the Museum is propelled by figures whose faces are life casts of Northwest Coast Indians. The Norwegian-American sculptor Sigurd Neandross was commissioned by the Museum in 1908 to create the figures for this canoe. He not only took casts from some of the faces Franz Boas had collected along the Northwest Coast, but he also made body casts of willing volunteers.*50 Since the weight of plaster distorts soft parts of the body, Neandross began by covering a subject's entire body with paraffin to create a stiff base for the plaster, working from the feet to the head. But before applying the paraffin, he placed threads strategically along the body so that when the plaster had just begun to set on top of the paraffin, he could draw the strings and cut the mold into parts. To complete the illusion of reality, he even made casts of blankets, clothes, and other ceremonial objects for the canoe.

  These melancholy, peaceful faces will continue to remind us that real people created the artifacts on display, and that these people and many of the cultures they came from no longer exist. The Museum tried to preserve everything it could—even the faces of the people themselves. But what it could not save were the actual cultures—those intricate systems of belief, tradition, technology, morals, religion, and habit that make all of us human.

  MUMMIES

  We can't take leave of the Museum's vast anthropology collections without touching on that most fascinating section—the mummies. Recently, mummies have become a problem for the Museum, and at the present time none are on public exhibition. Most natural history museums around the country have faced strong protests from Native Americans and other groups of people who—with good reason—object to the displaying of the remains of their people. Thus, when the Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples opened in 1984, the Museum decided not to include the Maori shrunken heads.

  The Museum's Hall of South American Peoples, slated to open in the late 1980s, may be the only hall that will display human remains. The Museum's most famous mummy—the Copper Man—may be featured in the hall, along with Jivaro Indian shrunken heads and possibly an example of the Peruvian "mummy bundle," a burial in which the body was interred in a flexed position and wrapped in cloth.

  At present, we can find most of the mummies stored together in a single room, in large black metal boxes. These human remains include mummy bundles from the Americas, trophy heads wrapped in exquisite textiles, and several dozen Egyptian mummy heads loaned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art over half a century ago. Not everything is hidden away, however; resting in one glass case is the Copper Man, a striking sight indeed.

  It is not hard to see how he got his name. The mummy is dark green, and oozing fluids have created the illusion of a shiny metallic surface over parts of the body. Unlike other mummified corpses, which look shriveled, the Copper Man shows few signs of shrinkage and looks quite fresh indeed. You can actually see the details of his musculature and facial features. His hair is neatly braided, and he wears two strips of coarse cloth as a loin covering.

  The history of the Copper Man was pieced together some years ago by the late Junius Bird, a Museum curator. The story is long and quite involved, beginning almost a century ago at a small mineral claim at Chuquicamata, Chile, known as the Restaradora Mine. The body was discovered wedged in a collapsed shaft along with his tools—four coiled baskets, a stone hammer, and a stone shovel.
He was certainly a pre-Conquest Indian who had been removing copper ore from the shallow hole by hammering and prying out pieces of rock. Apparently the ceiling of the narrow crawlspace he was in suddenly shifted, pinning the poor miner down. His arms were still extended in a working position, and his hand clutched one of the coiled baskets, which he, was apparently filling with ore.

  The Museum's accession file for the mummy contains a most interesting letter giving much of the history of the Copper Man. Dated June 18, 1912, the letter is from a man named Edward Jackson—who for a time owned the mummy, much to his later regret—to a Mr. F. D. Aller. According to the letter, the discovery of the mummy started an argument between the American owner of the mine, William Matthews, and the Frenchman who was renting it, a Mr. Pidot. Both claimed ownership of the mummy. To bolster his claim, Pidot had a piece of the body assayed—and it turned out to be almost one percent copper. Pidot declared the mummy was his because it was copper ore; Matthews replied that he had rented the mine, but not the miners. Edward Jackson (the writer of the letter) happened to be in Chuquicamata when the mummy was unearthed and immediately offered $500 for it, but was turned down. About a year later, after Matthews and Pidot had worked out a deal for splitting the profits, Jackson was fmally able to buy the mummy for $1,000. He arranged for it to be shipped back to his house in Antofagasta, Chile. "When I received it in Antofagasta," Jackson reported in his letter, "it was already minus a toe which I think someone cut off in Chuquicamata for a keepsake." With characteristic Yankee enterprise, Jackson set up the mummy in his house and charged admission to sightseers. Later, one of Jackson's friends, Perez de Arce, offered to take the mummy on tour of several Chilean cities and split the profits with Jackson.