“We have to live in peace,” Black Eagle said, “and hope that the treaty is kept, because I know now that we can’t fight the white man if he ever decides to use all his power against us. I rode their Iron Horse trail and saw their cities, I saw with my own eyes how much the Wasichu have and how many of them there are. They have sent only a small part of their people and weapons against us so far. If they ever send even a few more against us—”
“You are saying that we are helpless as we are,” Touch-the-Clouds said.
Black Eagle was silent for a long time, afraid now that Touch-the-Clouds would grow enraged at any moment. The chief was like that, holding in his anger until it burst from him the way the smoke burst from the top of the Iron Horse.
“I happen to agree with you in part,” Touch-the-Clouds went on. “As we are, we are helpless. If we go on as we have, we can hope only that the treaties are kept. If they are not, we can hope that the Wasichu will find it too much trouble to fight us and leave us our lands.”
“If you believe that,” Black Eagle said, finally finding his courage, “then you should have agreed to go to Fort Laramie with the other chiefs, and agree to this treaty, because we lack the power and the medicine to fight the Wasichu.”
“We don’t have the power or the medicine to fight them as we are. But we can fight them in new ways. Long ago, we had no horses, only dogs—so the tales of our old men tell us. Not so long ago, we had no rifles, only bows and arrows and lances and knives.” Touch-the-Clouds lifted his head. “We cannot fight as the white man expects us to fight. There are ways to fight him that he will not expect us to use.”
“I hope we don’t have to fight at all,” the wife of Touch-the-Clouds murmured. Black Eagle glanced at her, surprised by the strength in her voice. “I am hoping that the treaty is kept.”
“I hope that it is kept for as long as possible,” Touch-the-Clouds said, “but it will be broken in the end. Let us hope that we have enough time to prepare ourselves for what must come.”
If there were more men like the Little Father Parker, Black Eagle thought, perhaps there would be peace. Then he saw a cold look pass over the face of Touch-the-Clouds, a look he had seen only once before, on a man afflicted by a spirit that had brought him to curse his mother and raise his hand against his father, a man so enraptured by what the evil spirit inside him was saying that he could not hear anything else.
The strange look on the face of the other chief passed, but Black Eagle felt himself grow cold. It came to him then that Touch-the-Clouds was hoping for war, for a war greater than any they had ever fought.
“It isn’t enough to win one victory, Black Eagle,” Touch-the-Clouds said. “There must be other victories.”
He no longer knew what Touch-the-Clouds wanted. Once, he had believed that the other chief wanted only to keep their lands, to follow their path, to live as they always had while the Wasichu left them alone. But Touch-the-Clouds was dreaming of more than that.
If we can keep our lands, Black Eagle thought, if the Wasichu will keep their treaties, what other victories must we have? What kind of battle would we have to fight? But he did not ask his questions aloud.
SEVEN
Lemuel Rowland picked up a letter from Ely Parker at the post office, just after his return to St. Louis. He recognized his old comrade Donehogawa’s clear, elegant writing on the envelope. News traveled more swiftly from east to west now, and he had overheard talk about recent events in Washington from other passengers boarding the riverboat at Cape Girardeau. He had some notion of what the letter from Donehogawa might say even before opening it.
He had traveled to New Orleans out of restlessness, having saved enough to make the journey and telling himself that he might find work there, that he was not simply indulging himself by visiting that city. He had not written to Donehogawa to tell him that he was leaving St. Louis temporarily, promising himself that he would send a letter to his old friend when he got back. He had posted his occasional letters in cipher to Donehogawa since settling in St. Louis, reporting on rumors he had heard about events on the Plains, but to write such insignificant and unenlightening correspondence in a kind of code seemed unnecessarily cautious.
He did not spend much time looking for work in New Orleans, seeing quickly that the men there were unlikely to hire an Indian when there were so many white men in search of work. He had too much pride to try to pass himself off as something other than what he was, and did not want to live in fear that an old acquaintance might expose him, however unlikely that possibility might be. The fleshpots of New Orleans held few attractions for him; his upbringing by the Rowlands and his own need to prove himself as upright as any respectable white man left him unable to indulge himself in vice any more, or even in the milder indulgences of a whiskey or a cigar.
His journey back up the Mississippi to St. Louis had also evoked somber thoughts that he was unable to dismiss. Gazing at the cliffs of Vicksburg had brought back the memory of the long bombardment and siege of the Union forces against that Confederate stronghold. He and his comrades had learned how to live on the land and take what they found around them, and doing so had been part of the battle, since it deprived the enemy of food. Vicksburg still looked as it had during the siege, with its battered buildings, earthworks, and trees downed or scarred by cannon. Lemuel, looking out from the deck of the steamboat, could almost imagine that Vicksburg’s citizens were still hiding in the caves in the clay precipices below the town. Grant’s men had turned the course of the war there, many claimed, cutting the Confederacy in two. The ruin of the South, the ravaged towns and impoverished farms, had been clearly visible along the Mississippi from his steamer. Lemuel, surprising himself, had felt pity swell up inside him for the people he had fought to defeat, and had wondered again at his desperate need to volunteer for that war.
He slipped Donehogawa’s letter into his pocket, deciding that he would read it in his room. He had been living in the same boardinghouse since coming to St. Louis over two years ago, telling himself from time to time that he would either look for larger quarters or move on to another part of the country. For a while, he had shared some of the restlessness of those around him, the men who passed through St. Louis by train, boat, coach, or on horseback, to head west and north along the Missouri, or north and south along the Mississippi.
But people seemed less restless these days, more willing to settle at last in one place; so it seemed to him. On his way back up the Mississippi, Lemuel had found himself looking forward to his cramped but comfortable room, his lessons with Virgil Warrick, and to dining on the widow Gerhardt’s beef and cabbage or her potato soup.
A miasma of smoke hung over the city, obscuring the sky; the air was thick with the odor of burning coal. Lemuel’s rooming house was one of a row of stone houses, their exteriors darkened and soiled by smoke, that overlooked the rail yards near the waterfront. As he climbed the steps to the entrance, Virgil Warrick suddenly opened the door.
“Suh,” the black man said, “din’ ‘spect to see you back so quick.”
“I arrived early this afternoon.”
Virgil reached for Lemuel’s bag.
“I can carry it upstairs myself,” Lemuel objected; the man was obviously leaving the house on an errand.
“Don’t mind totin’ it, suh.” Virgil took the bag from him. He had been one of the laborers at the levee when Lemuel first came here, and one of the hardest workers. Lemuel had quickly seen that the Negro was not the slow-witted man he had at first seemed to be, and had noticed how the other blacks among the laborers deferred to him.
Soon Lemuel was relying on Virgil to manage the other black workers. He might have been helpful in handling the white laborers, too, but too many of them already resented doing anything that resembled “niggers’ work,” so it had been better to leave the white men their signs of authority over the colored workers. St. Louis might have been held by Union forces during the war, and many of its people had been fervent in their su
pport of the Union during the conflict that had divided the people of Missouri, but that did not mean that most of them were ready to grant too much to the freedmen and former slaves among them. Still less were they likely to tolerate any affronts against the natural order by an Indian. Had the South won the war, Lemuel had often reflected, St. Louis’s once-flourishing slave trade might well have been revived.
One of Lemuel’s first observations here had been that the farther west one went, and the closer one was to the Plains, the more open hostility and hatred one found directed toward red men. “Those Easterners can say what they like about the Indian,” one man had told him during his first weeks in St. Louis, “but they’re too far away to know what’s out here. Savages, that’s what they are—wild men riding around half-naked, scalping people and attacking settlers and raising hell.” That man had been one of the exceptions, an articulate man who probably thought of himself as civilized and who had been careful not to include Lemuel in his general condemnation of the red man. Many others said far worse, and talked of extermination, but Lemuel was not often in the company of such people. His society in St. Louis was limited to the very few who could overlook his race and patronize him because he had mastered the ways of a white man, to the widow Gerhardt, who seemed not to care what color he was, and to Virgil Warrick.
The house was filled with the odor of stew. Lemuel could hear Hannah Gerhardt out in the kitchen, talking to her colored girl Laetitia, as he climbed the stairs behind Virgil. The two blacks were Mrs. Gerhardt’s only help, and Virgil was her servant because she could not have given him a place to live there without such an arrangement. To hire a colored man as a house servant was one thing; to let him a room in a house such as hers was something else altogether, and the widow Gerhardt would not let her kindliness overrule her good sense. Virgil still labored down at the waterfront, to supplement his meager servant’s wages, and did odd jobs for Mrs. Gerhardt when he was not needed at the levee to haul stone, load cargo, or unload baggage from an arriving paddleboat.
Virgil opened the door to Lemuel’s room, stepped inside, and set down the bag. “Enjoy the trip, suh?” he asked.
Lemuel nodded.
“Usta be more boats,” Virgil said. “Before the war, they was all over the river. Not so many now.” Lemuel, thinking of the steamers, boats, rafts, and small craft that he had seen from the deck, a veritable armada of river-going vessels, tried to imagine how any more could have crowded onto the river. But the trains, he knew, had affected the traffic on the Mississippi; the trains were, many now said, the future. The trains also threatened the Plains Indians, whose lands might have been largely left alone had those moving west been content to settle along the rivers. He wondered how much longer it would be before the railroad men finally had the means to build their long-postponed northern route through the lands of the Sioux.
The black man waited while Lemuel opened his bag and began to unpack. “You be needin’ anything, suh?”
“No, thank you,” Lemuel replied.
Virgil lingered, apparently wanting to say more. “Heard some talk, suh,” he continued, “jes’ after you left. This colored man showed up in St. Joseph, with some gold in his pockets and a story.” He lifted his brows.
“Go on,” Lemuel said.
“He say there’s a Sioux chief out West who don’t mind having colored folks out there, who treats ‘em same as his own kind.” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial tone. “Say a friend of this chief give him the gold and tole him to say the chief is lookin’ for black brothers. Say it might be wise to be a friend of this chief, ‘cause he hellfire on his enemies.” Virgil paused. “Heard it from a teamster, suh, and he only tole it to me ‘cause he knew I wouldn’t see him no more and wouldn’t get him in no trouble. Ain’t the kind of story to spread around, it ain’t. The teamster said that colored man only talked to a few coloreds in St. Joseph, ones he could trust, ‘fore he drop out of sight. Wouldn’ta tole that tale to no whites, that’s certain.”
“An interesting story,” Lemuel said, “and I won’t pass it on.” Virgil trusted him, partly because Lemuel had been teaching him to write. The colored man had learned the rudiments of reading in a school set up by the Freedmen’s Bureau, although the two had kept that accomplishment, along with the reading lessons, a secret from the widow Gerhardt. Knowing that her black servant was literate might test even the limits of her tolerance, an acceptance that seemed to Lemuel to depend at least partly on pity for those people she viewed as her inferiors.
“Dunno, suh,” Virgil said then, “but that I wouldn’t mind livin’ in a place where one man’s as good as another.” He laughed softly. “More chance of findin’ that inside the Pearly Gates than out on the Plains, and maybe even heaven’s got its Niggertowns. Wouldn’t be no heaven for the white man if they wasn’t.”
Lemuel shook his head and smiled. ‘‘Tell Mrs. Gerhardt that I want to rest now, but that I’ll be down for supper later.”
The black man left the room, closing the door behind him. Lemuel finished unpacking, lit a lamp to read by in the shadowy room, and sat down by the window, where there was still a little daylight, to read the letter from Ely Parker. Downstairs, he heard Virgil informing the widow Gerhardt that he had returned to St. Louis. He slipped the letter from his pocket and slit open the envelope.
The letter was in English. Donehogawa had not used their cipher this time. The date of the letter—30 August 1871—was neatly written at the top of the page. Donehogawa had always had excellent penmanship; it was one reason that General Grant had asked him to write down the terms for surrender at Appomattox.
“Our military chieftain is still head and front of the American people,’’ he had written, “but I am no longer at his side. Too many accusations have been leveled against me for me to be of any further use in Washington. I have been slandered until I can no longer discharge my duties. The only way that I can serve my chieftain now is to leave his service. I am going to New York City to live, where there are opportunities for me to secure a living in business. I shall write to you again when I am settled.”
None of this was a surprise, but Lemuel still felt angry and disheartened. Donehogawa had stood in the way of too many who wanted to make profits on Indian lands. Lemuel had read in the newspapers that winter about the attacks on the commissioner, the accusations that he had broken regulations trying to get food to reservation Indians who would otherwise have starved. Clearly Donehogawa had resigned as commissioner of Indian Affairs rather than let himself be forced out, or allow himself to be used against the president.
“A man who is but a remove from barbarism.” That had been one of the slanders directed at Donehogawa, perhaps the most wounding one. It came to Lemuel then that his old comrade had in fact had good reason to use a cipher in their communications; he had made enough enemies to feel threatened. Clearly his enemies had done their damage and could threaten him no more, since Donehogawa was now writing his letters in English.
He glanced at the bottom of the page and saw that the letter was unsigned.
“All that I want now,” the letter concluded, “is to live out my life in peace and quiet.” Lemuel peered at the letter more closely and saw, in the dim light of his candle, a faint mark after this sentence; Donehogawa had apparently begun to sign the letter but had stopped. Instead, in scratchier letters unlike his usual clear hand, he had scrawled, “Your former traveling companion has written to me from St. Joseph. If you should find yourself there, give him my regards.”
He had to mean Grigory Rubalev. Lemuel had not thought of the man in a while. Rubalev had stayed in St. Louis for only a few days, leaving for Kansas City with his ward Katia and servant Denis three days after Lemuel had let his room from Mrs. Gerhardt. In the company of Katia and Denis, Rubalev had not been as talkative; he had brooded during the journey from Louisville to St. Louis, leaving Lemuel more time to dwell on what the Russian might be. A man who sold guns to Indians, a trader looking for profit, a gambler,
a man dreaming of his lost Alaska and resenting those who had taken it from him—he might be any or all of those things. Lemuel might have tried to find out more about him had he stayed longer in St. Louis, but his curiosity had faded after Rubalev left the city.
He also did not want to think of Katia. Whatever Rubalev said, however respectably he had acted toward her, Lemuel was certain that the young woman was more to him than a ward. Being certain of that had bothered him more than he had wanted to admit at the time.
He had made a life for himself here, simple and largely solitary as it was, and his old comrade Parker was apparently welcoming his chance for peace and quiet. He could do nothing for Donehogawa now except to write back to him and extend his sympathy and good wishes. There was no reason for him to go to St. Joseph, to seek out Rubalev.
The odors of stew and baked bread had reached his room. Lemuel folded the letter, slipped it into his pocket, and went downstairs.
In Lemuel’s absence, Joe Wiegand had taken on more authority. By the end of his first day back at work, Lemuel had seen that the other man intended that he be little more than the boss of the Negroes shoring up the stone face of the levee, while Wiegand supervised the rest of the workers.
He did not dwell on the matter as he made his way home. He had grown used to working for men like Wiegand. Some of them came to respect him more in time, while others never would.
He was on the street leading to the widow Gerhardt’s rooming house when the door to another house opened. A woman emerged, glanced from side to side, then descended the steps toward him. She wore a plain blue dress, black bonnet, and short black cape; Lemuel caught a glimpse of her face before she looked away.
Katia, he thought. For a moment, he was certain that he had spoken her name aloud. He stood there, expecting her to look back and say something to him, but she was already crossing the street. Perhaps she did not recognize him. He was about to follow her when she glanced back at him, then hurried on, disappearing around a corner.
Climb the Wind: A Journey Into Another Past Page 8
