by Dee Brown
“Like Bibbs we were all so shaken by the calamity that we lost our reason, the women grieving piteously, William, Jotham, and I determined to seek safety for them and ourselves, fearing some further retribution. All through the night we worked at loading three wagons saved from the fire, emptying the double cabin of its contents, and at sunrise we started eastward for the Arkansas line.
“Opothle had traveled that same way, we learned later from Bibbs, intending to seek temporary safety with his wife’s kinsman, Mr. Timothy Rogers at Cane Hill. He and Bibbs had ridden hard through the night until they crossed the line into Arkansas. It was late and Opothle decided to put up at one of those shabby Arkansas inns that existed mainly for the purpose of selling whiskey to Cherokees, strong drink being outlawed in the Nation.
“Next morning when they were approaching the stables for their horses, without warning several guns fired a fusillade into Opothle. Bibbs said the murderers must have been hidden behind the hayrack, because right after the firing a bunch of riders came dashing out, galloping their horses over Opothle’s bleeding body. He died there in the manure-covered straw.
“We never knew who did the killing and we never knew how the executioners of the Blood Law tracked Opothle to that inn. We questioned Bibbs about the other guests at the inn. He remembered seeing a Cherokee, a stranger to him when they first arrived, and soon afterward saw the man riding off fast toward the Nation.
“But these things we soon had to put out of our minds. Life was hard for all of us during those first months in Arkansas. Without the help of Mr. Rogers we would have come near to starvation. William told Bibbs he was free to go where he pleased, but the black man would not leave us, working harder than any of us at getting a log shelter built nearby the blacksmith shop. We hunted deer and bear and wild hogs in the Boston Mountains, and the women dried and salted the meat. Then William went up to Independence in Missouri, where his father had some kind of credit arrangement with a trader in dry goods and staple provisions. He brought back a small supply of trade goods and started peddling things around the nearby settlements.
“Another who helped us was that half-blood Osage woman, Saviah Manning, the herb doctor. Suna-lee and little Pleasant both fell desperately ill with disease of the lungs, and I think they might have died that first winter had not Saviah Manning dosed them with her medicines. She also brought us food, although we had no money to pay her or anything to give her. For some reason I was uneasy around her; maybe it was because she always wore men’s trousers. But she and Jotham were always joking back and forth, and I became jealous of him after he told me privately that he was sure he was going to get into bed with her some night. It was just a matter of time, he said, she was skittish like a mare that had never been rode.
“That winter Jotham and I worked at rebuilding wagons for Mr. Rogers. Hardly anybody in that part of the country had such a thing as money, and the only way he could pay us was to give each of us one of the wagons we rebuilt for him. We tried to sell them so we would have some way to get clothes and other things we all needed, but nobody wanted our wagons.
“From someone, probably William, we got the idea of taking the wagons to Independence. I remember William telling us about the long trains of wagons he saw leaving Independence, hauling goods to a place called Santa Fe. We thought that maybe we could get a good price for our wagons if we drove them to Independence.
“And so one morning in early spring, Jotham and I took four of our six horses and hitched them to the wagons. Frost was on the grass and Bibbs was there, wearing a strange-looking coat he had made of bearskin, helping with the trace chains and harness. Grandmother Mary and Jerusha brought out baskets full of dried meat and gahawisita, packing them carefully under our seats. Prissie and Suna-lee had made spare pairs of moccasins for us.
“Just before I got into the wagon, Grandmother Mary tried to put her arms around me. I gave her a hard squeeze and turned to climb up on the seat. Jerusha was already there, holding the lines, a teasing smile on her face.
“ ‘You can’t go,’ I said.
“ ‘I would not go if you begged me,’ she answered. ‘I wanted to hear what you would say.’
“ ‘I don’t understand you anymore,’ I said.
“ ‘Someday you will. I have a hard time understanding myself, Dane. But now I know who I am.’
“When I looked at her and saw the tears in her blue eyes, she shoved the leather lines into my hands and dropped down from the wagon. ‘Take care,’ she said almost in a whisper. Feeling ill at ease, I shouted the horses into motion and did not look back until I heard Jotham’s wagon following behind.
“After having crossed half of America, the seven-day wagon ride to Independence was nothing to us. But we had never seen anything like such a town. Independence had twice as many buildings as Hiwassee Garrison and a hundred times as many people, all crowding the streets, the blacksmith sheds, the grogshops, and the corrals of oxen, mules, horses, and wagons. Everywhere we looked were great heaps of boxes and barrels of clothing, glassware, grain, sugar, bacon, whiskey, and many other things being loaded into wagons.
“William had given us a letter to a Mr. Louis Tessier, the trader that he and Uncle Opothle dealt with, and so we sought out this man and asked him how much a good wagon was worth in Independence and where we would likely find a buyer. Mr. Tessier was a Frenchman and neither Jotham nor I could understand much of what he said to us, but he was a very kind man. He gave us a place to sleep in the back room of his store, and that evening after he closed his doors, he took us to a fine clapboard house at the end of one of the streets. And there we met a gentleman by the name of Mr. Samuel Lykins.”
Dane stopped talking, closing his eyes for a moment against a bright beam of sunlight that the setting sun poured through the west window. “Our lives are often touched by chance, are they not?” He turned and stared at me as though in wonder. “I call it magic, the crossing of our paths with the paths of others, how quickly, how completely, these magic meetings can turn us into directions we never dreamed of. So it was for me that evening in Independence when my path led me across the path of the Santa Fe trader, Samuel Lykins.
“He was not old, not young, he had a dreamer’s look in his eyes, this Lykins. He favored fine clothes, always wore a big wide bright-colored cravat tied in a bow, and a waistcoat, but he was no dandy and he would not tolerate laziness. A very energetic man, Mr. Samuel Lykins.
“Well, he went and looked at our wagons, and as he examined the wheels and peered under the running gear, I could tell he was a man who knew wagons. He named a price for them, and then without wasting time, he said to Jotham and me: ‘I need drivers more than I need wagons. Especially young men who can shoe horses and repair wagons. I’ll pay you top price for your wagons if you’ll drive them in my next train to Santa Fe.’
“These words changed everything for me, I can tell you, because I would not be here talking to you in the state of Montana had Mr. Lykins not said those words. ‘You young men may think on it,’ he said in that slow way he had of speaking. ‘I’ll come by in the morning with money for your wagons.’
“We did not sleep much that night, but by morning we’d made up our minds. One of us had to take the money and our horses back to Cane Hill, and Jotham finally said he would do it. He had it in his mind to marry Griffa McBee, anyway, and was afraid if he did not wed her soon, he would lose her to a rival. Oh, he wanted to go on that journey to Santa Fe, but not as badly as I did. Neither of us had the slightest notion how far or where Santa Fe was.
“Next morning, as Mr. Lykins promised, he came with the wagon money. He was riding a big red roan stallion, with a gray mule behind on a lead rope. When we told him what we had decided to do about his offer, he looked first from one to the other of us with those dreamer’s eyes of his. ‘In truth I was hoping for you, the lighter-skinned one,’ he said to Jotham. Then he looked at me. ‘You,’ he went on, ‘are as dark as a wild Pawnee, and although you speak my English ton
gue as well as I, my drivers do not take to Indians. I suppose I’ll have to dress you and pass you off as a Mexican.’ Just as he said that, the gray mule on the lead rope laid his head back and brayed. It was almost like an animal laugh. Haweeee! Haweeee! I can hear that mule now, laughing at me. Haweeee!”
Off in the distance then, as if in counterpoint, came the hoarse lonesome whistle of a steam locomotive, and through the west window I saw a passenger train no larger than a toy against the vast plain, black coal smoke streaming above it, slowing for the Dundee station.
“Is that my train?” I cried, rising quickly from the rocker.
“It is,” said Dane. “And it will be gone out of sight before you can take a dozen steps past my door.”
28
I BELIEVE DANE WAS secretly pleased that I missed my train. He told me there would be an eastbound passenger express sometime later in the night, but that train never stopped at Dundee. To calm my distress, he took me into a tiny room off the kitchen, his granddaughter Amayi’s room, and showed me a comfortable couch that she used when visiting overnight. He made it quite clear that I would be a welcome guest while awaiting the passage of another twenty-four hours, and so I became secretly pleased that I had missed the train. Before we went to bed he told me of the magic and wonder of the American West when he first came to it as a journeying Indian from the East.
“I soon found out that Mr. Samuel Lykins meant it when he said he was going to disguise me as a Mexican. On the day before his wagon train left Independence, he took me to his storehouse and gave me a pair of ridiculous pantaloons. The outer seams of the legs were split open and lined with buttons for fastening. With these I was to wear a fancy-colored shirt and vest, a tall peaked straw hat covered with oilcloth, and a serape. Eventually I grew fond of the serape, a Mexican blanket with a hole for putting one’s head through. It was made of wool so well woven and twisted that it shed water, and I have worn serapes ever since.
“Dressed in what then seemed to me an outlandish costume, I was ashamed to show myself to the other drivers until I noticed that four or five of them wore similar clothing. As a disguise for me, however, it was a failure. The real Mexicans quickly discovered that I knew no Spanish, and as soon as the white drivers heard me speak, they became suspicious. But by this time they had all accepted me as a fellow driver, and none of them gave me any trouble. Perhaps Mr. Lykins knew it would work out that way.
“Twenty wagons made up the train, most of them being considerably larger than the two that Jotham and I had sold to Mr. Lykins. Unlike some of the other Santa Fe traders, Lykins used no oxen, believing that mules were faster and more dependable, and as I was to find out, mules sold for a much greater profit than did oxen in Santa Fe. The wagon that I drove carried supplies for the journey—about fifty pounds of flour, fifty pounds of bacon, ten pounds of coffee, and twenty pounds of sugar for each man, as well as a few bags of grain for the mules. Each of us was also provided with a frying pan, kettle, coffeepot, tin cup, and butcher knife. We were supposed to do our own cooking at the night camps, and we gradually formed partnerships of two to four men, taking turns at preparing supper and breakfast. What fresh meat we had was furnished by Mr. Lykins, who rode about a mile ahead of the train, but never was out of sight of it. Every day or so he would bring in choice cuts of antelope or buffalo that he killed. In the supply wagon was a barrel of onions that we used to flavor the meat.
“After nine or ten days of traveling, we left woods and hills behind us and entered the treeless plains. Having spent all my life surrounded by forests and mountains, this was a strange experience for me. At first the grass was tall and green, always waving in the constant wind, the land rolling as I have been told the waves of the salt ocean roll. After a few more days, the grass became much shorter and finer, a sort of grayish green. Mr. Lykins called it buffalo grass, and the herds of that remarkable animal that we now saw on either side of us often darkened the horizon. Sometimes far off we sighted Indians hunting on horseback. One of the drivers said they were wild Cheyennes and Arapahos, and I wished them to come nearer the train so that I might see these distant kinsmen of mine, but they never approached us.
“Soon the land became perfectly level, not even a hillock, so that the wagons seemed to grow larger and larger against the flatness. Because of the long hard days, I slept every night without dreaming, but my waking hours became dreamlike. Nothing seemed real to me, the immensity of the sky, the encircling treeless earth that seemed to be spinning around us. It was magical, and I wondered if all life was not a dream, dreamed by some Great Spirit who had formed us and the limitless land we moved across.
“From the talk of my companions I learned that we were taking the long trail to Santa Fe, by Bent’s Fort, a route that was a hundred miles longer than by the Cimarron Trail. Mr. Lykins was to deliver a shipment of goods to the fort, which I soon discovered was the main trading place for tribes of the Southern Plains. I made no count of the days, but I think we must have traveled for about two moons before the fort came in view. Even at a distance, the place looked solid, unconquerable, its adobe walls six feet thick and three times as high as a tall man. Rising above the walls at opposite corners were two rounded towers called bastions.
“But not until many moons later was I to see the inside of Bent’s Fort. When our wagons approached to within about half a mile of the walls, a white man waiting beside the trail in front of a buffalo-skin tipi stopped Mr. Lykins and informed him of an outbreak of smallpox in the fort. The white man was William Bent himself, and he had brought his Cheyenne wife and young children outside the walls in hopes of escaping the disease raging inside his fort.
“Following Mr. Lykins’s directions, the drivers of the wagons containing the goods for Mr. Bent cut them out of the train while the rest of us formed our wagons into a circle nearby the trail. By the time we got our teams unharnessed, watered at the river, and fed with a little grain, it was dark. The drivers had been looking forward to a night or two of festivities inside the fort, and they tried to make up for the disappointment by playing cards by candlelight most of the night. Next morning when I awoke, I noticed three wagons about a hundred paces east of our circle. They had not been there when I went to sleep.
“Except for tending my mules, I had no duties that day. After Mr. Lykins oversaw the unloading of his Bent’s Fort wagons into a corral shed outside the fort, he rode off with William Bent, leaving the train in charge of one of the older drivers, a tall red-haired Kentuckian named George Gant. While we were drinking coffee, Gant remarked that Mr. Lykins had gone out to a nearby Arapaho camp, hoping to arrange a trade for buffalo hides so that he could fill the wagons emptied at the fort. ‘The goin’ price for buffaler hides here is three dollars,’ Gant said. ‘In Santa Fe they’ll bring six or more. And by tradin’ gunpowder and sugar and tobacco instead of coin, there’s still more profit to be made.’
“That afternoon, while I was lying in the shade under my wagon, I saw a streamer of dust far out on the plain. After a few minutes I knew they were mounted Indians, six of them, each with a led pony loaded down with what at first sight I thought to be deerskins. They were buffalo hides of course, and the Indians were heading straight for the three wagons that had arrived during the night.
“Being most curious, as I have said, to see my wild kinsmen close up, I wasted no time walking over to the other wagons, arriving only a minute or so after the Cheyennes—for that was their tribe. Instead of seeing a band of fierce-faced savages, as I had been led to believe, I saw six young men of about my age, laughing and chattering gaily in a tongue that I then did not understand. Some wore long red breechcloths, others buckskin trousers; some wore bright-colored cloth trade shirts, others nothing more than rawhide bands around their chests. They looked much healthier, more muscular and vigorous than my own half-starved people back in Indian Territory. Their skins were also darker because so much of their lives was spent under the sun.
“Their leader appeared to be no mo
re than a year or so older than I. He was the first to dismount, dropping easily off his spotted pony and approaching the nearest of the wagons, his handsome face thrown back, showing large white teeth in a wide smile. He wore two feathers in his curly unplaited hair and a shiny silver band around one arm. He pointed to the fort and then pecked at his face with the tip of a finger. The white man at the wagon said: ‘Smallpox, yes. Fort closed. Trade here.’
“ ‘Ese-von,’ the young Cheyenne said, making rapid signs toward the ponies loaded with buffalo hides. ‘Na-ox-to-va.’ Although I did not know it then, he had told the white man he wanted to trade buffalo skins for goods. For the first time I took a good look at the white trader, and I did not like what I saw. He was a giant in size, big-chested, big-paunched, scraggly-bearded, and balding with tufts of pinkish hair growing out above his ears. His eyes squinted to tiny points of light, greedy like the eyes of a thieving carrion animal. He had already slung a steelyard on a pole, and with his huge fat hands motioned the Cheyennes to bring up their buffalo skins.
“First he would count out ten skins for one of his drivers to load in a wagon, and then he would make a great pretense of weighing on the steelyard whatever goods were wanted in trade. I soon saw that he was giving the Cheyennes about a dollar value for skins worth three dollars and then cheating them on the weights of the sugar and flour and other trade goods. I remembered Grandmother Mary’s bitter anger over the way her people had been tricked by traders for deerskins, and right in front of my eyes the same thing was happening to the Cheyennes for their buffalo skins. Well, I could not stand there and watch the young men being swindled without doing something about it. But what was I to do, not knowing a word of their language?
“I simply walked over to the young Cheyenne, pointed to the cheating trader, and held up one finger. Then I pointed across the way to our wagon circle and held up three fingers. He did not understand at first. His constant smile turned to a frown. He pointed his finger at me. ‘Mex-i-can?’ he asked. I shook my head. ‘Tsalagi, Cherokee,’ I said. ‘Ya!’ he cried, turning to his companions. ‘Sanaki.’ That’s the Cheyenne word for Cherokee, I learned later. I was making progress, so I held up one finger again, pointing to the big trader, whose mean little eyes were now fixed on me. ‘No-ka,’ the Cheyenne said, holding up one of his fingers. Again I indicated our wagons and held up three fingers, motioning to the buffalo skins that had not yet been traded. ‘Na-a,’ he said, showing three fingers. He nodded. Now he understood, and his smile quickly returned. He spoke rapidly to his companions as he mounted his spotted pony.
