by Don Bendell
“That stove heats the place nicely, but there is a fireplace over there as you can see, if it gets too cold. There are two bedrooms and you can pick and choose your room. We will talk in the morning. You both need sleep now. Sammy, do you want to sleep in the other room or the main house?”
He said, “I’ll bunk here, Brenna. Obliged. I’ll see you in the morning and explain everything.”
Strongheart fell asleep when his head hit the pillow and awakened the next morning totally refreshed. He really did feel safe here. It was a natural feeling, not something artificial. He also could not wait to see Brenna in the morning light. He found the outhouse and then explored the tiny island, emerging on a small path to the pond apparently made by occasional deer who would swim to the island and back.
Since he was on the side opposite from the house and outbuildings, he slipped off all his clothes and dove into the cold water. He swam for a few minutes, and rubbed his body down with his hands. Emerging from the water, he shook himself off like a dog and squeegeed his body with the edge of his hands. He stood there by the pond shivering but exhilarated and let the warming morning sun dry him a little. He pulled his clothes back on, promising himself to wash them after breakfast. There were flowers all over the little island, and he picked some, making a bouquet for Brenna, hoping she was single. He had not seen a ring the night before. Sammy was already gone, presumably to the big house.
He went in shaved, brushed, dressed, and found a lantern and made his way under the pond back to the big house. He walked in and found Sammy, Brenna, Buck, and another woman, presumably a maid, all sitting at the large dining table in the dining room. There was a big spread of food on the table with eggs, pancakes, ham, fruits.
Brenna got up and walked over to him, saying, “Good morning, Joshua. I trust you slept well.”
He smiled and handed her the flowers. She blushed and smelled them.
“Just thought you might like these, ma’am,” he said.
She replied, “Thank you so much. I love all of these types of flowers. Let me put them in a vase, and I’ll be right back.”
Joshua shook with Sammy and sat down to breakfast.
Sammy said, “Morning, pardnuh. I tole Brenna all about ya and what yer up against.”
Brenna returned with the flowers in a nice vase and placed them on the table. She smiled at Joshua and marveled at how good-looking and strong he was.
“Joshua, thank you so much for the flowers. That was very thoughtful and kind,” she said. “Please enjoy the breakfast, and if you don’t mind, we will talk about your situation while we eat.”
The group ate and talked, and then Strongheart walked outside with Brenna. She showed him her flower garden and vegetable garden as well.
He said, “You live here alone?”
She smiled demurely, saying, “No, the help lives here with me.”
He said, “I am sorry. I am being forward but should have simply asked you if you are married or not.”
She grinned, “No, Joshua, I have not married yet. Are you?”
“No,” he replied. “I was engaged and very much in love, but she was murdered some time back. It took me a while to come to terms with her death, but I have.”
She responded, “I am so sorry. Did they catch the assailant?”
Tight-lipped and looking off at the trees, he said, “No, I did.”
She said, “And . . . what happened?”
“He saw the error of his ways.”
“You killed him?” she asked.
“Yes,” Strongheart answered.
He waited for her response. He was not used to Easterners and wondered if he would get a lecture about not seeking revenge.
She smiled and said, “Good for you. I would hope that someday a man would love me enough to want to avenge my death if I came to a violent end. I would love to know some man would hunt down and punish my killer.”
“I personally believe a man in love should,” Joshua responded. “If he is capable of doing so.”
“You are indeed an unusual man, Joshua,” she said. “Most men are afraid to even utter the word love, yet you are not afraid to speak freely of it.”
Joshua replied, “William Shakespeare said, ‘Who could refrain that had a heart to love and in that heart courage to make love known?’ To me, Brenna, if you’re going to be a man, you often have to prove yourself. You have to conquer fear and do what is right. To me, that includes being courageous enough to speak thoughts that most keep hidden in their hearts.”
Brenna felt her heart beating in her ears and thumping in her chest. She was flustered.
“My, Joshua, you even quote Shakespeare,” she said, red-faced. “You seem quite the poet yourself, but you seem so, so . . . Well what I mean . . . On the other hand, you strike me as a man who could indeed kill any murderer that you choose to hunt down. What a combination!”
Strongheart said, “I am simply a man trying to do what is right. Tell me, Brenna, how did you come to live here?”
She said, “My father made a tremendous amount of money, a fortune, actually, shipping goods on the Great Lakes. He left it to me, the only child. My mother died when I was very small, and he left me to go home about ten years ago. He also worked very hard on the Underground Railroad before, and after, the Civil War.”
Strongheart said, “I am very sorry for your loss. It sounds like you and your father were very close.”
She said, “Yes, we were. My father spoke out very fervently and passionately against slavery and racial discrimination. He also told me if God blesses you with a lot, you must give to others, or God may take away your blessings. That was why he got so involved in the Underground Railroad, and I am of the same mindset.”
“I always thought the Underground Railroad was a great thing,” Strongheart said. “But until yesterday I had no idea that it still existed.”
Brenna answered, “It must exist. There are so many fools in this world. Some are very narrow-minded. I grew up almost believing that annual death threats are a way of life for a person.”
They walked along and Strongheart seemed to be thinking long and hard on something. They stopped, and she sat on a stump surrounded by beautiful greens and a few wild flowers.
Joshua said, “You reminded me of something that occurred in my childhood. I was a young boy, and we had a very tough schoolmarm, plus my mother made me study and read all the time. I tried to be nice to everybody in school and out.”
He grinned, adding, “If I didn’t treat everybody nice, my pa would have tanned my hide.”
The Pinkerton went on, “I was at school, and we got to go outside and eat lunch on warm sunny days. There was this little girl named Rebecca, with red hair and lots of freckles, and I sure was sweet on her. So were most of the boys in the school. I picked some daisies one day and handed them to her, while she sat on a bench with three other girls. She got a mean, nasty look on her face, and slapped the bouquet out of my hand. I was shocked and hurt, I guess. Then, she said, ‘I don’t want no flowers from no red-skinned blanket nigger. My pa said yer a smelly half-breed.”
Brenna shook her head.
Joshua continued, “That was the first time I ever heard words like that I had never seen such hatred. I mean this cute little girl seemed to turn into a demon with her demeanor. It sure made me smell the coffee for the first time. When I got home, I was doing chores and slamming things down and just letting off steam. My father was town marshal and was at home recuperating because he had been shot in the lower leg during a gunfight. I didn’t know it, but he was watching me out the window the whole time and knew I was upset. I had just finished stacking fire wood, and he came out the door using a cane. He walked up to me and said to join him.
“We sat down on the bank of the creek near my house, and he asked what was wrong, and I told him.”
Brenna said, “Wha
t did he say? And, I must ask. You clearly are half white and half red and said your father was town marshal, so was your mother an Indian?”
He grinned, “No, sorry. She was white and a very successful merchant starting at the age of fifteen, when she had me. My father was a Lakota Indian. You folks call them the Sioux. His name was Claw Marks, and he was a member of the Strongheart Society, a group of the very best warriors. That is how I got my last name. He never married my ma, because he knew what you were talking about: Many people are narrow-minded and ignorant. He told her he knew that I would be a boy when I was born, and asked her to give me my last name, and he left me this knife and sheath, and he told her to take me to Lakota villages, his village, and let me learn the ways of his people, as well as of the white world. The man I called my pa was a lawman named Dan Trooper, who left me this pistol and fancy holster.”
She saw the miniature lawman’s star on the side and also admired the intricate beadwork and fringe.
Strongheart went on, “He was actually my stepfather, but he was like a real father to me. Very strict.”
She said, “Fascinating. Very fascinating life, Joshua.”
“Getting back to what my pa said,” Joshua continued. “He asked what happened, and I told him. Then, he said, ‘Son, I am not a Bible-thumper but one verse I learned and liked when you were a toddler because of comments I had to deal with about you was Romans chapter 12, verse 21: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” I always say that the very best revenge in the world is success.’ I tell you, Brenna, those words have never left me.”
He then said, “Brenna, I really need to check on Eagle, my horse. I need to feed him, and—”
Brenna laughed and interrupted, “Come with me. I think you will be surprised.”
They walked to the large barn and entered. Joshua had never seen such a well-appointed stable. There was a large pump handle at the end of the building and piping that ran downhill on an angle from that, with spouts at each individual stall over the stone watering troughs for each horse. It had an upstairs hayloft and the stalls were impeccably clean with fresh bedding straw and Strongheart saw that each stall had what looked like rich green hay in the corner feeders. The horses, all handsome, were very well groomed. At the very far end, a large wooden door was closed and locked shut with a pair of lawman’s handcuffs. There was a sign on the door, which read, KEEP SHUT, FRESH FEED.
They got to the door, and Brenna, yelled, “Buck!”
He emerged from the far end stall and ran down to her and unlocked the cuffs, sliding the door back. Strongheart followed her and saw there was no feed at all. There were two larger stalls, presumably for stallions, with tall rock walls for the runs instead of fencing like all the other stalls. This apparently was to keep studs calmed and not see other horses and get excited. There stood Eagle eating hay in one stall, and he gave out a low whinny when he saw Joshua.
Strongheart went into the stall and fussed over him a little, while Brenna watched on, smiling. Eagle had been cleaned, groomed, combed out, and someone had worked on his hooves, which looked great. He had a run, privacy, and nobody coming into that barn would know he was there unless they heard him whinny.
“Oh my gosh,” Joshua said. “Brenna, this is too much. You are too kind. How can I thank you?”
She said, “Do not get killed or caught and finish your job.”
He smiled.
They left the barn and Strongheart was very amazed at the wonderful care Eagle was being given and how well hidden he was. He was also amazed at the beauty and grace of this woman beside him. He felt stirrings that he had not felt since Belle was murdered.
At first, Joshua resisted the feelings, but he remembered the talk his cousin Beautiful Woman had given him. He was a survivor, and he knew that as much as he loved Belle, he would dishonor her memory by curling up in a fetal position like a dandy and just giving up on life. That was not him. He was a warrior, a man, and he was indeed a romantic. He could not help himself, probably because he was the love child of an adventurous fifteen-year-old girl making her way west, having had both parents killed on the way yet forging ahead, and a handsome Lakota warrior who saved her life from a grizzly, almost dying himself in the process. How could Joshua not have become a survivor and a romantic?
He also knew that this refuge was wonderful, but he had to get to Washington, D.C., and try to end the horrible antics of the Indian Ring, and he had to eliminate Robert Hartwell and his henchmen. However, he had to make sure they did not eliminate him first, and he did not know that a local had seen Sammy Davis with him and where they were riding to.
15
TOP OF THE DIRT PILE
William W. Belknap was born in 1829 in Newburgh, New York. Having graduated from Princeton, he got his law degree at Georgetown University. He passed the bar exam in 1851, and then practiced in Iowa, before running for and winning a seat in the state legislature.
During the Civil War, William Belknap fought in the Fifteenth Iowa Infantry and saw action at both Shiloh and Vicksburg. By the end of the war, he had been promoted to brigadier general and become close with General William Tecumseh Sherman.
After the Civil War, Belknap became the head tax collector for Iowa until 1869, when President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him secretary of war. Almost immediately, in what became known as the Trader Post Scandal, Belknap started taking kickback payments every three months from a crooked Fort Sill tradership contract between Caleb P. Marsh and sutler John S. Evans.
At the very beginning of the Civil War, Union soldiers began purchasing supplies from private vendors known as sutlers. These sutlers set up trading posts inside U.S. Army forts and were at that time chosen by regimental officers to do business. That policy changed completely in 1870, when Belknap lobbied and got Congress to pass a law in July to grant him the sole authority in the War Department to license and choose each and every sutler at Western military forts. Both U.S. Army soldiers, civilian workers, such as scouts, and Indians, shopped and bought most of their supplies at these trading posts. Controlled by Secretary Belknap, the trading posts became very lucrative monopolies, and he attracted people like Robert Hartwell, who was an empire builder in his own right. As secretary of war, Belknap not only appointed handpicked sutlers, but made sure that soldiers stationed at forts could only buy supplies from the trading posts. Soldiers in the West, who were forced to buy supplies at higher than market prices, were left destitute.
Behind this scam was William Belknap’s second wife, Carita, who initially got her husband to appoint a Caleb P. Marsh to the trading post at Fort Sill located in the Indian territory. John S. Evans, however, had already been appointed to that position previously, so to settle the question of ownership regarding the trading post, Belknap had an illicit partnership contract drawn up and then authorized by him. The contract allowed Evans to keep the trading post at Fort Sill, provided that he pay $12,000 out of his annual profits to Marsh. Evans would keep the remaining profit. Then Belknap had Marsh pay half of his money from the contract or $6,000 per year to Carita so it could not be traced to him. She only lived to receive one payment, dying from tuberculosis during childbirth. So Belknap then had Marsh continue to pay Belknap Carita’s share directly, with the secretary claiming he would save it for their child, but the infant child died one year later, so Belknap pocketed the money and had Marsh keep paying him directly. Then in less than a year, Secretary William Belknap remarried, but this time it was Carita’s sister, Amanda, and she gladly accepted Carita’s portion of the quarterly payments from Marsh so they could not be tied directly to Belknap as easily.
This was the birth of the Indian Ring.
National attention was drawn to the plight of the American Indians two years earlier in 1874 when world-famous paleontologist Othniel Marsh revealed that the Lakota had “frayed blankets, rotten beef, and concrete-hard flour.” Secretary of Interior Columbus Dela
no, responsible for Indian Bureau policy, resigned the next year. Following that, the New York Herald, a Democratic newspaper, reported the rumors that Secretary Belknap was receiving kickback money from various trading post sutlers.
Prior to this, Allan Pinkerton had personally conducted some very quiet investigations along with some of his Washington-based agents into the Indian Ring, on behalf of private requests from various politicians. On February 29, 1876, during the Great Sioux War and a presidential election year, Democratic U.S. Representative Hiester Clymer headed an investigation into the corruption under Belknap in the War Department. The Democratic Party had recently obtained a majority in the House of Representatives and had immediately begun a series of queries into corruption charges throughout the Grant Administration. Clymer’s committee barely began investigating when they learned about Belknap and both his wives receiving the quarterly bribes from the Fort Sill trading post contract. However, Washington, D.C., has always been loaded with deal-makers, cronies, and politicos and Congressman Clymer was among them. Even though he was investigating him, he advised Belknap to resign his office to keep him from going to prison. Belknap hired an attorney, Montgomery Blair. Secretary Belknap defended himself by admitting that the payments took place. However, he proclaimed his innocence, stating that the financial arrangements were instigated by his two wives, both sisters, used to high society living standards and opulence. Clymer, however, had Caleb Marsh, who exposed the Fort Sill ring under Congressional testimony. And to save his own hide, Marsh testified under oath that he had directly made payments to Secretary Belknap and that Secretary Belknap even gave Marsh receipts for these payments.
