Climb the Wind: A Journey Into Another Past

by Pamela Sargent

  “—a band of enemy Injuns suddenly attacks,” Clemens murmured.

  “You have been reading my mind, Clemens. Hell, maybe I ought to hire you to write some of my Wild West shows.”

  Clemens lifted his eyebrows. “Sir, I doubt that my talents would be the equal of your imagination.”

  Cody smiled before continuing. “Calamity’s red suitor rescues her, and then we discover that he’s not really a redskin at all, but a white man captured by the Sioux as a boy—there’s no point in offending people’s sensibilities here. I mean, I did some scouting with Calamity, and she wasn’t exactly a respectable woman, but even she’d draw the line somewhere, and I wouldn’t want Wild Bill Hickok upset, even if he and Jane did part company.” Cody paused. “Might almost be worth it to cast him in the part of the brave, but he’s not much good at memorizing lines. Then again, I wouldn’t have to give him many lines for a part like that.” The waiter set down his next mint julep; Cody lifted the glass, as if about to make a toast. “And the whole show ends with a grand Injun wedding ceremony for Calamity Jane and her brave.”

  “Buffalo Bill,” Finerty said, “I think you’re on your way to making even more filthy lucre than you did with ‘Scouts of the Prairie.’“

  “I’ll be looking over that sharpshooter gal again tomorrow,” Cody said, “and after that, I’ve got to find myself some Indians to hire for the show. I want some real authenticity for this spectacle.”

  “You want to hire some Indians?” Clemens arched his brows. “Why, given the way your productions are likely to burnish their reputation, maybe Chief Touch-the-Clouds and Chief Sitting Bull ought to be paying you and providing some of their braves as performers for free.”

  “Lo, the poor Indian, the noble savage,” Finerty said. “Used to be a man only heard such sentiments in the East. The further the distance from them, the more noble the savages seem—or so it was once. Now you can hear a lot of sympathetic talk in the West. Even men who were fighting the redskins hand to hand a few years ago are admitting that the Indian might have some virtues.”

  Clemens leaned back in his chair. “True enough. Had I known how the red man’s virtues would grow in the public’s estimation, I might have made a few changes in my tale of Tom Sawyer. Obviously my imagination failed me there as to what the public would want. Perhaps Injun Joe should have been portrayed as one of the upstanding citizens of St. Petersburg, and gone to rescue Tom and Becky from the caverns.” His pipe had gone out; he tapped some more tobacco into it and fired the pipe up again.

  “Might be you should write about some of the Sioux chiefs, Irish John,” Cody said. “Might even get yourself an interview with Sitting Bull or Touch-the-Clouds—although you’d probably get better pay writing dime novels about them.” He sighed. “When I was hunting buffalo for the workers on the Kansas Pacific, I never thought I’d see the day when the Indians would pretty much decide where the railroads were going to go.”

  “The railroad magnates aren’t doing very well at whipping up terror of an Indian threat so as to wring some profit from their Western ventures,” Clemens said. “They badly need an excuse to send in the army to protect their interests, but the savages refuse to cooperate with them by behaving in an appropriately bloodthirsty manner.”

  “Given the behavior of some of our more prominent citizens in the East,” Cody said, “it wouldn’t take much for a redskin to look like a model of virtue by comparison.”

  The waiter returned with another round of mint juleps, the second drink for Finerty and for Clemens. Finerty had lost track of Buffalo Bill’s consumption, although the only obvious effect of the liquor on the showman was to make him sound more subdued.

  “I recently saw one such model of Indian virtue in New York,” Clemens said, “giving a lecture at the Cooper Union. The fellow has only been on the circuit for a few months, and already he’s drawing a good crowd with his tales of his adventures among the Sioux.”

  “He’s a Sioux?” Cody asked.

  “No, an Iroquois by the name of Rowland, but he knows the Sioux well and he lived among them for some time, and his wife is Sioux. She was sitting up in the front row during his lecture, looking appropriately attentive and as respectable as any swell New York matron. Perhaps I should have used someone like Rowland as a model for my character Injun Joe. He tells quite a tale, beginning with his days in the army as one of the officers on the staff of General Grant, serving with the general’s aide, Ely Parker.”

  Finerty lifted his brows. “The disgraced former commissioner of Indian Affairs?”

  “The commissioner who is now a most prosperous New York businessman,” Clemens replied. “Parker has worked hard to make up for the mistake his ancestors made in selling the island of Manhattan so cheaply. He’s bought up land there and then sold it at quite a handsome profit. He apparently arranged for the first lectures by his red colleague Rowland—perhaps as a favor to his friend, perhaps as a way of winning more public justification of his earlier policies as commissioner. Parker must have the touch of a Midas, because the lectures are bringing in more than anyone expected.”

  “Parker was right, I suppose,” Cody said. “He wanted peace with the Indians, and now we have it.”

  “Not because of anything Parker did while in office,” Finerty said, “only because the army is needed elsewhere, and the Indians are somehow managing to maintain their alliance and to keep from fighting among themselves. Otherwise, there would surely have been war on the Plains by now.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Cody muttered. “I’m surprised the Sioux haven’t gone looking for a fight with somebody by now, with the Crow or the Arikara if there’s nobody else to fight. It isn’t like them.”

  “Then perhaps our current peace is no more than a temporary truce,’’ Clemens said, “a brief interlude in the affairs of the nation until the new secessionists are forced back into the fold, the Indians revert to their customary savage ways, and the many apostates in the West have their faith in our manifest destiny rekindled.”

  Finerty was thinking of what Crook had told him. The general was hoping that war with the Sioux would not come, but he was prepared to fight if it did.

  “War will come,” Crook had said, and he had meant more than the skirmishes with rebel guerrillas. He had finished, “But I cannot tell who it is my men and I will be fighting.”

  A crowd had gathered on 77th Street, on the west side of Central Park and across from the stone walls that marked the still-unfinished Museum of Natural History. The speaker addressing the assemblage from a makeshift wooden platform was a compact man with a broad freckled face and an Irish brogue.

  “They’re drafting us to fight the bloody British here when we should be fighting them in our homeland!” The man waved his arms. “They’re drafting us to fight rebels in the South so the bloody free blacks can take work away from honest white working men!” He lifted one arm and pointed over the crowd at one wall of the hoped for and possibly never to be completed museum. “They’re sinking money into that building while our families starve! And I can tell you this, boyos—none of the rich will be doing the fighting, or sending their own sons to fight. They’ll buy their way out of it and send their substitutes to fight in their place, just like they did during the last war!”

  Lemuel Rowland stood on the edge of the crowd. What the speaker lacked in eloquence, he made up for in conviction. Several people near the speaker cheered; another group of men streamed from a side street toward the crowd.

  “From each man according to his abilities,” a man next to the platform shouted. ‘‘To each man according to his needs.” More people were joining the crowd, a few of them waving red flags.

  Lemuel saw that there was little chance now of finding a carriage and driver to take him downtown, back to Ely Parker’s house. This crowd would soon be a mob. There had been a riot in New York earlier that autumn, one that had gone on for two days and nearly turned into a revolt. By the end of the rioting, five black men wer
e hanging from lampposts, a block of tenements had been burned to the ground, and windows had been shattered all over Manhattan. There had never been a final and complete reckoning of the number of deaths and injuries suffered by the rioters, their victims, and the policemen who had eventually restored order to the city.

  Lemuel had thought that another riot might be brewing after the recent elections. Blaine and his running mate, Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio, had won a narrow victory, but there were many who believed that the election had been stolen from Tilden. Had the voters in the occupied states of the South been allowed to cast their ballots, Lemuel had little doubt that Tilden would have been inaugurated as president that coming March, but whether a President Tilden would have kept the peace on the Plains was open to question. Tilden might have restored peace to the South, and he would also not have been open to the charges of corruption that were already being leveled against Blaine in the wake of his victory. With peace restored to the South, Tilden might then have turned his attention to quelling the growing separatist sentiments in the West, a course that would have been urged upon him by Generals Sherman and Sheridan. Blaine of course would have his own reasons for looking westward now, for wanting to serve the interests of the financiers and railroad men who had helped him line his pockets.

  Lemuel looked around at the people near him. They were clearly not thinking of either Blaine or Tilden. Another man was speaking now.

  “I fought for the Union,” this speaker was saying. “I saw my best friend die when a minié ball shattered his face. What was I fighting for? The Union? There ain’t no Union now except in name.”

  The size of the crowd was increasing. The gray sky was growing darker. As Lemuel was about to slip away, he saw two policemen moving toward the fringes of the group. He watched them, wondering why only two had been sent, and then one of the policemen raised his arm.

  “We’re with you, boys!” the policeman called out. The crowd cheered. Lemuel felt a dizzying disorienting feeling that he had not felt for some time, the sense that the situation in which he now found himself was not quite real, that the mob would melt away.

  “Look!” someone else shouted in a high-pitched voice. “Saw him at the Cooper Union, going in to give a speech.” A newsboy in a ragged coat with a pile of newspapers under his arm was speaking. He lifted an arm and pointed at Lemuel. “Right over there.”

  Lemuel had a sudden impulse to flee. Had it been later in the day, he might have been able to lose himself in the park. Had it been darker, the sharp-eyed boy might not have recognized him.

  “Come out and talked to a few of us afterwards, he did,” the boy said. Lemuel had given several lectures at the Cooper Union that autumn, and had spent time after leaving the hall with some of those outside who could not afford the cost of a ticket, the newsboys and street vendors and others who were loitering outside. He had been the civilized red man willing to share his tales of the Indians of the West with even the poorest of the city’s inhabitants, as Ely Parker had advised him to be.

  Other people were turning to look at him. He swallowed his fear. “He’s an Indian,” the boy said, “from out West. Lived with a bunch of wild Indians there, he did.”

  This crowd could turn on him. The respectable and more prosperous citizens of New York might be sympathetic to his stories of honorable Sioux and noble Indians who wanted only to keep their land, Indians who were already making allies among many living in the regions bordering their territory, but the poor could be less understanding. Some of them had been among the audiences at his lectures, standing in the back of the hall. Often they asked more pointed and difficult questions of him than did the wealthier members of the assemblage: Why did the redskins need so much land for themselves? Wasn’t it true that the railroad owners were once willing to give a poor man some land as long as he was willing to go out West to claim it and farm it? Was it true that there was gold to be mined out there, gold that might have made a lot of poor men rich if they could only get to it to mine it? Might not the Indians make war on the settlers again?

  “Is that true?” a young man with a broad Slavic face asked. “You an Indian?”

  “Yes, but I am not a Sioux.”

  “Did you really live with those wild redskins?”

  “Yes,” Lemuel replied.

  “Thought I might go out there once,” the man said, “have my own spread, but there’s no chance of that now.”

  “The men who wanted more railroads crossing the Plains weren’t being honest with people like you,” Lemuel said, “when they spoke about free land. They didn’t tell you how hard much of the land out there is to farm. All they think about is moving people into those territories so that they can lay down more track to connect them, to bring the farmers’ grain and cattle to market. You would have been completely dependent on their trains and their tracks, and once you were there, they could have charged you whatever they wanted to in payment. You would have had no choice but to pay it. And they wouldn’t have done anything for any farmers who might be ruined, who might have been lured west by false promises and then failed.”

  It was the same sort of answer he had given to such questions before. He looked around at the faces near him, and his fear faded; they were listening to him for the moment.

  “But this doesn’t mean that there isn’t room in the West for you,” Lemuel continued, “and places for people like you. The towns near the Indian territories need skilled workers, there are even two ironworks being built along the Bozeman Trail where some of the army’s forts once stood. The Lakota—the Sioux and the Cheyenne and the others who live on the Plains—will welcome those who come to them in peace. All they ask is that their own hunting grounds be left to them and the buffalo, hunting grounds that would be useless to farmers. All they ask is that they be treated as friends, not as enemies, not as people to be herded into small plots of land while their territories are stolen from them.”

  The knots of people, even those farthest from him who probably could not hear him well, were silent and attentive. Lemuel had gone over his lectures with Ely Parker, writing them down, practicing his elocution and timing, deciding which stories would cast the Lakota in the best light, but it was not until he gave his first lecture to a small gathering that his gift had manifested itself. He had caught the attention of the listeners immediately, and held it, and had seen them moved by his words, and had not known afterward how it had happened. Practicing his speeches with Donehogawa, deciding on what to say, learning how to vary the tone and pitch of his voice—none of that by itself could have given him a power that seemed to come from outside himself. Sometimes he heard his own voice as if it were coming from someone else, as if someone or something else was using him to speak. The ghost of a Seneca sachem, perhaps, of a chief who had been able to move his people in council long ago—or perhaps it was simply a gift Lemuel had not known before that he possessed.

  “I heard,” a man shouted from the back, “that a black man’s as good as a white man out there, a red man the same as a white man—maybe even a little better. What kind of place is it where a man can’t live with his own and not have some nigger or redskin acting like—like—”

  “Would you rather be conscripted into the army,” Lemuel interrupted, “and forced to protect black men from white men, or white men from red men, at risk to your own lives?” There was a murmur from some in the crowd. “Would you rather have the wealthy and powerful protecting their own interests by using you to do their fighting for them? No one in the West is forced to live among people he finds disagreeable. That happens here, in the Eastern cities, in the tenements.”

  He was aware that if he had been delivering these lines in an auditorium, the speech would rank among his worst, yet these people were listening, were clearly willing to believe what he said. His words, and the gift he had for making others believe them, had silenced even the angriest of the crowd.

  The words he needed flowed into him. In the West, there would be no co
nscription, because the people, whatever their differences, were at peace. Men had fought and died for a Union that had become a multitude of bankers and magnates and their paid-for officials in Washington grasping for ever more wealth and power; it was no wonder others besides rebellious and unreconstructed Southerners dreamed of governing themselves. He had said it all many times, in different ways, in all of his lectures, and there was enough truth in what he said to sway those who listened.

  A roar went up from the crowd, a cry of rage. For an instant, Lemuel thought that he had lost them after all, and then saw what had provoked their anger. Blue-coated men were riding up 77th Street on horseback. It was the army, not the police, who would disperse this crowd.

  “Get them!” a man near Lemuel cried. He had lost them; Lemuel backed away, not knowing what to do now. Others were shouting; people turned away from him to look at the soldiers.

  Suddenly the crowd surged toward the mounted men. Lemuel watched as the uniformed men aimed their rifles, then threw himself to the ground. He heard the sound of rifle shots and then screams.

  He looked up and saw several men dragging one of the mounted men from his horse. More shots rang out. Lemuel struggled to his feet.

  “Let’s get out of here,” a voice said near him. He turned to see a small woman in a loose brown coat. She pulled at his sleeve. “Come on,” she said, “what are you waiting for? Do you want to get arrested for inciting to riot?”

  She let go of him and ran toward the park; he followed her.

  The riots had swept through the city for two days. Katia stood by one of the third-story windows, listening to the ringing of alarms, the tolling of bells and a faint shrieking that rose and fell, that might be either the wind or the cries of the dying. Streams of smoke and intermittent flashes of light were visible in the northwest. Parts of the city were burning.