The crowd applauded as Calamity Jane was introduced by a Philadelphia suffragist. Jane approached the lectern; she wore a Stetson and one of her denim jackets, but had bowed to convention by donning a riding skirt instead of her usual trousers. Her speech was both colorful and brief, the gist of it being: I’ve scouted for Custer, headed up a mule train, ridden shotgun on a stagecoach, and know how to use a gun, and you can say the same for a lot of ladies out where I come from, so we ought to be able to vote. There were a few catcalls from the crowd, but no boos, and Lemuel suspected that Jane’s remarks might convince even more people of her cause’s rightness than would Susan B. Anthony’s eloquence and reason.
There was more applause at the end of her speech than there had been at its beginning. Jane looked relieved as she sat down again. The crowd had quieted down enough to listen to Miss Anthony. As she spoke, Lemuel gradually grew conscious of whispering on his right. Roosevelt was saying something to Touch-the-Clouds. Ely Parker leaned over to murmur in an undertone to the two other men.
They would have much to talk about, Lemuel thought, as they always did. Buffalo and cattle ranches, railroads, gold mines, rocket-arrow building and development, Edison’s laboratories—Bismarck was still the only town on the continent with electric lights—all of those enterprises would draw more people to the West. That the Lakota people and their allies had anything to say about such matters was the doing of Touch-the-Clouds, who was now almost as wealthy and influential as any Wall Street magnate.
And it was my doing as well, Lemuel reminded himself, again wondering what he had wrought and what the Lakota had actually won for themselves.
The boards under his feet shifted, and he found himself alone on the platform. The crowd of people gradually faded from view, and then the distant buildings, until all that was left was an empty meadowland of trees and grass and horses grazing in the distance. Perhaps that would come, that dream some Indians still held of a land without Wasichu, a land inhabited entirely by those who might have come from the other side of the world to this continent. Perhaps it even existed somewhere. Sometimes it eased the pain inside him to think that such a place did exist and that Katia might be still alive there.
The sound of applause banished the vision. Lemuel came to himself. Susan B. Anthony was returning to her seat. Lemuel felt Jane’s hand on his arm. He turned and saw the look of sorrow on her face.
“I know what you’re thinking, Lem,” she said softly without turning her head. “You’re thinking about what brought us here. You’re thinking about what it cost.”
Fighting for the Union, for the Lakota to keep their lands—he felt as though he had spent much of his life battling in the service of illusions. Sometimes, at the moment of waking or just before drifting off to sleep, he even remembered the world differently. President Grant was still alive; the South and the North had become separate nations; the West had never been settled; he had stayed in Tonawanda and lived out his life there. His mind would insist on the delusions; even later, he would sense the details of an earlier illusion forcing themselves back into his mind. Some shift of the shadow play before his scrutiny would take away one scheme and replace it with another.
Not one of the illusions had given him a Katia who was still living. Had he found her, he would have clung to that shadow world with everything in him, whatever horrors that world might contain.
The mayor of Philadelphia was introducing him now. Lemuel stood up and walked to the lectern. He offered a few brief remarks about his life just after the Civil War, the combination of disillusionment and curiosity that had taken him to the Plains; he had made the statements so often that he could now say them without hearing himself.
“Today I stood before your Liberty Bell,” he continued, “or perhaps I should say our Liberty Bell, with that crack in it that reminds us of how fragile our nation is. The conflict between the North and the South helped to fracture that bell, but did not break it. The discord between the East and the West fractured that bell, but did not destroy it. The red men of the Plains lifted their war clubs against that bell, yet now their chiefs come here in peace.”
Lemuel paused. “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.” He glanced toward the bleachers, then at the people standing below the platform. “Those words were spoken by President Abraham Lincoln, and as it happens we have spent the better part of the past twenty and four years exercising that revolutionary right. Now—”
His throat locked. He had suddenly lost the rest of his speech. Lemuel knew that he should feel embarrassment at least, shame, even panic as he looked into the expectant faces waiting to hear his next words.
Then the words he needed came into him. “What has changed in these past few years is this,’’ he went on. “Among the people who inhabit this country are the red men of the West. It can be said that, if they are deprived of the constitutional rights that some might argue should be theirs, they will necessarily be forced to exercise their revolutionary rights. That could mean refusing to acknowledge any authority Washington might have over their territories. That could mean barring settlers from their lands. That could even mean, if the crimes against them once again become as great as they have been in the past, that the nation of red men might finally acquire the means to ride against their enemies and set themselves up as the rulers of us all.”
His words, he realized even as he was speaking them, were nothing less than a threat. He gazed into the faces looking up at him, expecting to see shock, even anger, but already their eyes were shifting from him to the man seated behind him on his right. Lemuel turned toward him and saw Touch-the-Clouds nod at him in agreement. He would rule these people, one way or another.
He knew whom the crowd had come to see. Lemuel uttered a few words of introduction and then stepped back at the sound of hands clapping and people cheering. Touch-the-Clouds walked toward the lectern, holding his hands palms out and high above his head, and the cheering became a roar, rising toward the bright blue sky.
This was the worst of the shadow worlds, the one that kept coming to him, the one that he could not escape. The vision of this world had come to Crazy Horse in his dreams at first, disturbing his sleep, and now he saw it even when he was awake. It was a world of people moving in rows like ants toward a fort of stone that belched black soot from tall towers. It was a place where the Iron Horse trails crisscrossed the grazing grounds of Uncle Buffalo. It was a place where the endless plain of grass could not be found, only fences and fields of grain.
Crazy Horse had followed the Yellowstone River southwest, away from his camp. Alone, riding near the edge of the sandstone bluffs that banked the river, he had thought that he might hear the spirits once more. For two years now, he had kept far away from Bismarck, that place that was eating up the land with its houses and fields and long buildings, that place where the medicine man Edison and his comrades made their talking machines and burned glass torches that turned night into day and summoned spirits that could speak through wires with human voices. Near the sacred Black Hills, Deadwood had begun to sprawl like Bismarck, drawing men willing to dig out the yellow metal for the Lakota and other men who had come to help make rocket-arrows or to labor in the ironworks. Now White Eagle and his wire warriors were putting up their poles and stringing their talking wires from Bismarck west to the Yellowstone River.
The Lakota had won their victory. Touch-the-Clouds had told him that many times. They were free to live on the Plains and follow the buffalo, to live as they always had. But Touch-the-Clouds did not live that way any more. Touch-the-Clouds went east and spoke with the Great Father and other Wasichu chiefs and told his stories and returned with more Wasichu medicine men and more settlers.
“I do what I do,” Touch-the-Clouds had said to him, “so that you can live as you do.” Rem
embering those words brought pain, because Crazy Horse knew the truth of them. He had seen for himself how numerous the Wasichu were after following the Iron Horse trail to the East, how they lived crowded together, and he had known then that there would be many Wasichu who would dream of the empty lands in the West. If the Lakota did not trade with them, if they refused to travel even a short distance down the white man’s road, the Wasichu would come in swarms and take what they wanted. Crazy Horse knew that, too.
All along the horizon to the north and the south of him, he saw metal towers and bright shiny panes that reflected the sun. He watched as a great bird of metal rose and climbed to the sky, leaving a trail of pale smoke. In the distance, metal carts with wheels but no horses to pull them moved across long black trails. Crazy Horse had grown used to seeing such strange sights, to having them come upon him unbidden.
What would happen to the young men who had not yet tested themselves in raids and in battle? Who would they fight? In the shadow world, he had seen young men in the blue coats of the Wasichu, and had wondered if they were fighting their own battles or those of the white man. He thought of how Bear Coat Miles had sent so many Indian warriors before him, how quickly they had been cut down, and how few of Bear Coat’s men had died.
He reined in his horse, willing the shadow world to disappear, and at last the glittering towers and the metal carts crawling along black trails faded from view. A man was riding toward him from the west, the legs of his horse concealed by clouds of dust.
Another Lakota, Crazy Horse thought when he could make out the beaded patterns of the man’s shirt, a Minneconjou. The man rode up to him, greeted him, told him that his name was Kicking Bear, and was silent for a while after Crazy Horse spoke his own name.
“You fought in the Great Father’s city,” the young man said at last. Crazy Horse nodded; the other man would have been no more than a boy when that battle was fought. “I wish I could have fought there.”
“No, you don’t,’’ Crazy Horse replied.
“I was told that you shun the Wasichu.”
“I do,” Crazy Horse said, “and so does Sitting Bull.”
“I live as far away from the Wasichu as I can get,” Kicking Bear said, “and now I am on my way to the camp of Sitting Bull. I have much to tell him. I have been to the place where the Fish Eaters live, and I have seen the man that the Wasichu call the Christ in the camp of the Fish Eaters, and I have also seen the dancing ghosts.”
“If you are going to see Sitting Bull,” Crazy Horse said, “then I’ll ride with you.”
They began to follow the river east. Sitting Bull, he knew, was camped at the fork of the Yellowstone and Tongue Rivers. He did not speak, sensing that Kicking Bear was one who liked to talk and that he would tell Crazy Horse more about the vision of the Christ that he had seen among the Paiutes when he felt like it.
“There were others there,” Kicking Bear said at last, “Blackfeet and Crow and a few Cheyenne. There weren’t that many of us, but more will go to that place when they know what I saw among the Fish Eaters. We waited for three days, and then the Christ appeared to us, and he was a red man, not a white man as the Black Robes and the other Wasichu medicine men claim that he is. He showed us the wounds the Wasichu made in his hands when they nailed him up, and he taught us how to dance a dance that will bring back the dead, that will restore our fathers to us, that will make the earth as it was, without any Wasichu in it.”
Crazy Horse said nothing.
“If we dance this ghost dance,” Kicking Bear said, “the spring will come and the earth will heave and bury all the white men. Every red man who dances the ghost dance will be taken up into the air by a great wind and held there while the Wasichu are swept from the earth forever.”
Crazy Horse grunted. “You can climb such a wind just as easily,’’ he muttered, “as you can banish the Wasichu from this world.”
“The ghost dance will free us of the white man,” Kicking Bear said. “We will dance and another spring will come, and when the grass is green the white men will be gone. Then the buffalo will return everywhere, not only in the lands given to us by the treaty. All of the wild horses will come back. All of our ancestors will be resurrected to live among us again if we dance the ghost dance the Christ of the Fish Eaters taught to us.”
Crazy Horse thought about that. Maybe the ghost dance was a way to get into a shadow world he had not seen for some time, the world where the Wasichu had never come to this land. Maybe the ghost dance would finally rid him of the visions of that other shadow world of metal towers and black soot and scarred land empty of buffalo.
“I will teach you how to do the ghost dance,” Kicking Bear said, “and then I will go to tell Touch-the-Clouds of the Paiute Christ. For keeping the white man from stealing our lands, for riding east and punishing those who broke the treaty, he made himself the greatest of our chiefs. He will make himself an even greater one when he dances and makes the white men disappear.”
From the sides of his eyes, Crazy Horse saw a field of snow covered with the bodies of dead Lakota. He blinked, and the vision disappeared. Another shadow world, he thought, one that could not be his own, that could not be real.
“You will teach us the ghost dance,” Crazy Horse said, “but I wonder if Touch-the-Clouds will be willing to learn it.” He would do whatever he could to bring this ghost dance medicine to his old friend, but if Touch-the-Clouds had gone too far along the white man’s trail to learn it for himself, it did not matter. Crazy Horse would dance the ghost dance. He would dance to the limits of his strength, dance even if Touch-the-Clouds clung to his Wasichu ways and medicine and refused to dance. He would dance and would not stop dancing until he had climbed the wind and danced himself into the world the Paiute Christ had promised.
Afterword
“The United States,” historian David Herbert Donald writes in Liberty and Union, “was a historical impossibility. From Aristotle to Montesquieu, political theorists agreed that democracy was an unstable form of government, tending to disintegrate into anarchy, which in turn led to despotism.”
Pondering this statement makes one think that our actual history is one of the least likely of possibilities, that it may be a less likely alternative history that has branched off from a more plausible continuum.
To wrestle with alternative history is to contend with two ideas. One is the notion that a change in the fate of a particular individual, especially an important person, or a small change that alters the outcome of a certain event, can produce great subsequent changes. The other is the idea that there are fundamental events that cannot be altered, regardless of an individual’s actions. One of the pleasures in reading an alternate history is in considering how different one’s own history might have been. Another is in viewing how much that other world might still resemble our own, even with those differences.
A number of individuals contend with fundamental events in the pages of this novel. Because Climb the Wind is fiction, I have taken many liberties with the people and the events of this story. Of the characters, Lemuel Rowland, Katia Rubalev, Grigory Rubalev, Denis Laforte, Virgil Warrick, Jeremiah Clarke, Soaring Eagle, White Buffalo Woman, White Cow Sees, White Eagle, Caleb Tornor, Glorious Spirit, Victorious Spirit, and Dancing Girl are my own invention. A number of others are historical figures. In our world, the “shadow world” that constitutes our historical reality, here is what happened to some of these people:
Ely Samuel Parker was a Seneca who studied civil engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, collaborated with the pioneering American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan on his groundbreaking study The League of the Iroquois (published in 1851), served with Ulysses S. Grant during the Civil War, wrote out the terms for surrender at Appomattox, and became the first Native American Commissioner of Indian Affairs during President Grant’s first term. As commissioner, he worked to rid his bureau of fraud and corruption, making many enemies as a result. He resigned that post in 1871, after being
charged with misconduct in office and then subsequently exonerated of all charges by Congress, moved to New York City and became a prosperous businessman. He died in 1895.
Touch-the-Clouds was a comrade of Crazy Horse and a Lakota chief and warrior for whom I have imagined a much more significant historical role. As a young man, he apparently saved Crazy Horse from being killed by the jealous husband of Black Buffalo Woman, who had left her husband for Crazy Horse. In 1877, the Touch-the-Clouds of our history surrendered at the Spotted Tail agency in Nebraska and lived out his life as a reservation Indian.
Crazy Horse fought against the United States Army for most of his adult life, and was the chief Lakota tactician at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. After losses and setbacks for the Lakota in several subsequent battles, he went to the Red Cloud agency in Nebraska in 1877 with his wife, Black Shawl, who was dying from tuberculosis. His request for permission to take her to the Spotted Tail agency for medical treatment was refused. In desperation, he left Red Cloud and went to Spotted Tail, where he was arrested by Indian police employed by the U.S. Army and taken to Fort Robinson. At the sight of the jail cell awaiting him there, Crazy Horse panicked, was bayoneted by an infantry officer, and died on September 5, 1877, at the age of thirty-five. He is the only lifelong enemy of the United States to be honored on a U.S. postage stamp.
Climb the Wind: A Journey Into Another Past Page 46
