Climb the Wind: A Journey Into Another Past

by Pamela Sargent

  “Retreat! We have to go back!” a warrior behind him shouted. But there was no place where they could run. Crazy Horse gazed at the field of bloodied men and horses below and listened to the cries of those who still lived. He heard no war cries, no songs of defiant braves cursing their enemy even as they lay dying, only the screams of agonized men.

  From the Virginia hills, the Chen brothers, Glorious Spirit and Victorious Spirit, sent their rocket-arrows toward Washington. Some of the rocket-arrows, the ones called Flowering Trees or Blooming Flowers, burst harmlessly above the city in a shower of sparks, in order to frighten those below with their noise and panic the enemy. Others, the Five Eagles Sent to Catch Rabbits or the Mountain Lions Leaping Upon Their Prey, fell toward earth and made craters in the streets and holes in marble walls. Still other rocket-arrows exploded to spread noxious gases through the streets. But it was the Flying Crows with Magic Fire, the rocket-arrows that flew out from the bodies of other rockets, that did the most damage. No one could tell in advance where they would fall after the rockets carrying them burned out. That, for the Chen brothers and their comrades, the Chinese and Scottish engineers who had helped to build them, was the beauty of the Flying Crows; no effective defense could be mounted against them.

  The rocket-arrows could also be used against some of the ships that were fleeing down the Potomac. Some of the larger steamships, those flying white banners and the flags of other nations, were allowed to pass. Others became targets of the rocket-arrows and were transformed into blossoms of flame, fiery lilies floating on the river’s surface. The rocket-arrows aimed at boats found few of their targets, but the sight of the burning vessels and the sound of the exploding rockets was enough to send other boats toward the Virginia shore waving white flags, ready to surrender.

  Glorious Spirit, watching the bombardment with his brother from their pavilion on a hill overlooking the river, thought, These people do not want to fight us. These people have no heart for this battle. They were ready to surrender their city even before we sent our rocket-arrows against them.

  But it was good to have a chance to test the arrows in a major battle. The Flying Crows, the arrows that landed where they would after leaving the bodies of their parent-arrows, were especially delightful. For many in the city who believed themselves protected, the sight of a Flying Crow suddenly dropping from the sky would be the last thing they saw, and others would be dead or dying before they could even know that a Crow had found its prey.

  “July 14, 1879, to the Chicago Times: I am writing this dispatch in Virginia, not far from Arlington, from a hill overlooking the road leading down to the Long Bridge. Below me, General George Crook and a party of officers, trailed by several companies of infantry and cavalry, are crossing the Long Bridge to accept the unconditional surrender of the Council of the United States. At the rear of the last company of cavalry, a party of Sioux, led by Chief Touch- the-Clouds, will follow Crook’s men into the city.

  “We reached Arlington seven days ago, one day before Colonel Nelson Miles and his troops set out from Baltimore and two days before General Alfred Terry had control of Alexandria to the south. We learned from our scouts that two ships had been sunk on the Anacostia River to the east of Washington, presumably by saboteurs, since these vessels were already sinking by the time Miles and his men reached Baltimore. By blocking the passage of other ships along the Anacostia, the sunken vessels saved the Army of the West from naval bombardment.

  “By the time Crook’s forces were in control of the Virginia hills, several ships carrying refugees from Washington were fleeing the city. Crook and Terry had decided not to fire upon any vessels that were flying the flags of other nations. Some nations, France among them, will hail our victory over the tyranny, even if they did little to aid us. As for neutral nations such as Germany, better perhaps to preserve their neutrality than to make enemies of them. England, of course, recalled its ambassador immediately after the Council seized power, so Crook did not have to fear provoking the Lion’s roar. The British will undoubtedly be content for us now to remain the loose confederation of autonomous republics and states that it appears we are likely to be for the foreseeable future. That is enough to make me hope that the phoenix of the Union will be able to rise from the ashes once again, when representative government is restored and more time has passed.

  “It may seem that this battle, one of relatively short duration, was easily fought. It is true that many in the ranks feared that we might have to lay siege to the city, or to attempt to storm it from the Maryland side, an effort that would have cost the Army of the West dearly in blood. It is also safe to say that the sight of Indian campfires ringing the city and the sound of Indian drums and songs in the night might have demoralized even the bravest of men. Certainly the rockets brought here by the Orientals and Scotsmen, whom the Sioux had invited into their territories to build those hideous weapons, did their share of damage. The Smithsonian Institution is heavily damaged, and whether it will be repaired as it was after the fire of 1865 remains to be seen. According to one report, two rockets struck the Willard Hotel, killing many of those who had sought shelter within its walls. The White House, the Capitol, and the General Post Office have all sustained damage, and many houses in Georgetown were consumed in a conflagration apparently caused by exploding rockets. I am told by an officer who served in the Army of the Potomac during the War Between the States that parts of Washington now look much as they did during that conflict. Soldiers are again encamped on the grounds below the Washington Monument, and the Patent Office has once more been transformed into a hospital.

  “Yet surely the battle for Washington would have been far more costly had it not been for the ties binding the city’s defenders to their brothers in blue besieging Washington. At night, when the Indians troubled to cease their barbaric wailings, I could hear the sounds of ballads being sung by young soldiers, and of bugles being played, and it seemed to me then that all of the soldiers on both sides already longed for the fighting to be over. To fight for the Union, as I once did, is one thing; to give one’s life or to take another’s in order to maintain the Council in power is quite another.

  “Whether or not the bonds of brotherhood helped to bring a quick end to the siege, it is clear that the Indians played their part. The sight of the savages and the sound of their war cries must have terrified Washington’s defenders, even if it is now clear in retrospect that the Sioux and their allies were in no danger of entering the city to collect Eastern scalps. The Gatling guns of the city’s protectors claimed the lives of, I am told, some seven hundred Indians at last count, and at least two hundred more were felled by cannon fire. I imagine that the sight of pale-faced soldiers must have come as a relief to those defenders of Washington who so quickly dispatched so many of our red allies.

  “It is true that the Indians fought bravely, if rashly charging a battalion of artillery that has Gatling guns and cannon with no more weaponry than bows, spears, and rifles can be said to constitute bravery. Certainly the Indians have paid dearly for the right to keep the lands promised to them by treaty, and perhaps will win a few other concessions as well. Even so, one can hear the officers and men of the Army of the West surreptitiously whispering that perhaps it is just as well that there will be fewer Plains Indians to celebrate their victory.”

  “Harsh words, perhaps, to those of our readers inclined to sympathize with the noble savages of the West. I hasten to add that I am not saying that the Sioux and their allies do not deserve to have their treaty honored. Indeed, it is my earnest hope, after some time spent in close proximity to the Indians, that they return to their own lands as quickly as possible. In the case of the Sioux, it is much easier to maintain kind feelings towards the breed when one does not have to endure their presence for too long a time.

  “That said, it is unclear what the intentions of Touch-the-Clouds are at the moment.

  “Your correspondent, John F. Finerty.”

  The first telegraph me
ssage about the war’s outcome came to the talking wire tepee when Dancing Girl was there to listen to the telegraph. There were few left in her father’s camp who understood the signals, and all of them had been taking a turn at the talking wire tent. Yellow Bird was sleeping and Dancing Girl was sewing beads on a deerskin shirt when the telegraph key began tapping out a message.

  She listened long enough to hear that the message had been picked up in Bismarck and was being relayed to them, then motioned to Yellow Bird to go and summon everyone in the camp to the talking wire tepee. By the time they were all gathered outside, Dancing Girl had tapped out signals saying that the message had been received.

  She came through the tepee’s opening, holding the message in her mind. “This is the first message from the wire warrior Gray Horse,” she recited in Lakota. “Three Star Crook and the other war chiefs of the Blue Coats have won their battle, and Touch-the-Clouds and his war chiefs have fought bravely to win ours. When the warriors of Washington saw the bands of men who had come there to fight, they became afraid. When they saw that the Lakota and many Wasichu and Wasichu Sapa had ridden against them, the people of Washington knew that there would be no victory for the false Great Father McClellan. Now Washington is ours.”

  Dancing Girl paused. “Is that all?” Goose Beak asked.

  “It is only the first message,” Dancing Girl replied.

  “And isn’t it enough?” Young Spring Grass said. “The war is won. Touch-the-Clouds will be a chief among both the Wasichu and our people. And our men will come home.”

  The talking wire was tapping out another message. Dancing Girl ducked inside and hurried to the telegraph. Others followed her into the tepee.

  “This is the second message from Gray Horse,” the talking wire was saying now. Yellow Bird crept closer to the telegraph, cocking his head to listen. “We have our victory, but have lost many men. Our warriors showed courage, and the Oglalas of Crazy Horse showed the bravest hearts of all, but courage and even the strongest war medicine cannot protect a man from the spitting firesticks of the Wasichu. We have gone to gather our comrades who fell in battle, but it will take all of us to carry them to their last resting place. End of message.”

  Dancing Girl repeated the message in words. The people in the tepee and outside the open flap were quiet for a while, and then Grass Rope, one of the old men, began to sing a war song.

  “The white man rode into our lands,” he sang, “and tried to steal them from us. Now we have ridden east to take his lands. The white man called us lice, lice on a dog to be killed before more sprang up. But the white men are now vermin crushed underneath the hooves of our galloping horses.”

  “There were white men who fought with us,” Young Spring Grass reminded old Grass Rope.

  “And there are too many of them to be crushed like vermin,” Goose Beak added. “I have been to Bismarck, and know how many are there, and the Wasichu to the east of us are greater in number than the ants of an anthill the size of a mountain.”

  But the old man did not seem to hear them. “They wanted our land,” Grass Rope sang, “they wanted to take it from us and from our uncle the buffalo, and now the buffalo will graze on their lands.”

  Dancing Girl was remembering that Crazy Horse and his warriors had gone with Bear Coat Miles to war. She thought of how Bear Coat had sent his men against her father’s camp. His men would have killed them all. She wondered how many of Bear Coat’s men had died in the battle.

  They were all in the Cabinet Room, seated around the table, Three Star Crook and One Star Terry and Bear Coat Miles, who would soon wear stars himself. Rubalev, who had turned up in Washington just after the Council’s surrender, was there, in a white suit, and Touch-the-Clouds in his war bonnet and leather shirt with fringes of hair. Denis Laforte, who had been Miles’s rear guard with his company of buffalo soldiers, was present, along with the famed orator Frederick Douglass, who had survived a strike by a rocket-arrow, although his house on Northeast A Street had not. Young Theodore Roosevelt sat at the far end of the table, decked out in his campaign buckskins, peering around at everyone through his thick glasses. Roosevelt kept talking of preserving the Western lands and of opening them to more development, although it was hard to see how both of those ends could be accomplished. Laforte had become, in the aftermath of battle, such a partisan of his own colored people’s rights above all others, even those of the Indians, that he and Rubalev were no longer speaking. There were more men that Lemuel did not know, officers and civilians, men who had, managed to convince General Crook that they belonged there to work out terms.

  Terms for what? Lemuel wondered. A new republic? Another Union? A loose confederation of autonomous states? Another ruling cabal? Nobody in the room seemed certain of what sort of government they were forming, or exactly what states and territories it would govern.

  A vision had come to Lemuel last night. He was walking the White House grounds, near where the Lakota and Cheyenne had pitched their tepees. The sudden disorientation had come upon him as he came to the gate leading to Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Outside the gate, a procession was passing, of chiefs in war bonnets and Blue Coats in dress uniforms. A horse-drawn wagon bore McClellan, Burnside, and Pope, the three members of the Council, also in uniform, along with Edwin Stanton, who looked stooped and wizened in his black justice’s robe. Lemuel walked through the gate and followed the procession, past the rows of people who lined Pennsylvania Avenue. No one looked at him as he passed; their eyes were on the men sitting in the wagon.

  Below the steps leading up to the Capitol, a gallows with four nooses had been erected. He realized that the four men in the wagon were on their way to their execution, and it seemed that much of Washington had lined Pennsylvania Avenue to watch this procession.

  But Stanton was dead; he could not be here. He had been found dead at his home less than a day after Crook’s Army of the West had entered Washington. At that thought, Lemuel had found himself back in his own world at the White House gate, gazing out at a quiet, empty street.

  Rubalev was speaking again. Lemuel came to himself as he turned toward the Alaskan. “I do not care what you call it,” Rubalev said, “the United States or the Provisional Federal Government or something else entirely. I simply want to ensure that all treaties with the Lakota and Cheyenne and Kiowa and any other red peoples will now be kept.”

  “I have already said that they would be,” Crook replied.

  “You gave your word as our provisional governor,” Rubalev said, “but that does not necessarily bind any government that follows this temporary one.”

  Lemuel glanced around the table. Deciding on the fate of Generals McClellan, Pope, and Burnside, the men who had made up the Council, had taken the better part of three days. What had seemed so obvious to Crook and his fellow officers as they were rushing toward Washington to do battle, namely that McClellan, Stanton, and the others were guilty of treason and deserved execution, had become much less obvious in the moments after victory. The generals had acted quickly during a crisis, after President Blaine’s assassination, in an attempt to restore order. Their treatment of the South had as its purpose preserving what remained of the Union, and—this was Frederick Douglass’s argument—protecting the rights of free Negroes living within the borders of the former Confederacy. Their actions in the West had been misguided attempts to resolve an ongoing financial crisis in the East by opening up more lands to settlement in the West, even if that meant violating treaties. It was also doubtful that some of the worst acts—the massacre at Elysium, Kansas, for example—had been ordered or even known about in advance by the Council’s generals. General Sheridan’s imprisonment and death, and the somewhat murky circumstances of General Sherman’s earlier demise, were probably the handiwork of Stanton, according to one of Crook’s aides, who had briefly perused one of the chief justice’s diaries before turning all of Stanton’s papers over to Crook.

  That the worst offenses of the cabal could be attr
ibuted to a dead man had left the way open for more mercy toward the living, men who for all their faults had believed that they were acting in their people’s best interests. There would have to be some sort of trial, but there was no reason for harsh sentences that would do little to heal America’s wounds. Even Jefferson Davis had been treated with forbearance in the wake of the War Between the States, and allowed to go into exile in England; surely McClellan, Burnside, and Pope deserved the same kind of consideration.

  Lemuel strongly doubted that Stanton’s diaries, whatever they contained, would ever see the light of day. He also wondered if many of the men here would have been speaking of mercy for the Council members had they and their troops, rather than Crazy Horse’s Oglalas, taken the brunt of the casualties during the skirmish that was already being called the Battle of Washington.

  “I want assurances,” Rubalev went on, “that the treaties will be kept by any government that follows your provisional one, General Crook. Allow me to put it this way—we want representation for all Indians west of the Mississippi in Washington, someone among them who will be their voice here.” He glanced at Touch-the-Clouds. “There are more Americans now who have come to sympathize with these people and who would look more favorably on any government that grants them rights, that honors their treaties, that even treats them as fellow Americans.”

  Miles scowled. “There’s not much the Indians can do about it if we refuse to do what you want.”

  Lemuel, his anger roused, was about to speak when Touch-the-Clouds got to his feet. He had not spoken before, at any of the meetings. The others watched him, waiting to hear what he would say.

  “This was my war,” he said in his low voice. Two of the officers sitting near General Terry looked toward him apprehensively. “It was I who saw what I would have to do to preserve the lands of my people and those of our red brothers. I said we would have to fight, and Three Star Crook made himself my comrade. We came here on the Iron Horse trail and it is good that we saw friends along that trail. It is good that we did not have to fight a long time. It is good that we sit here now, in the Great Father’s White House.”