by Judd Cole
“Good thing they don’t palaver much English,” said Munro, “or they’d have opened your throat by now.”
“Them lubbers?” Jackson hawked up a wad of phlegm and spat it overboard. “They wouldn’t say boo to a goose, the white-livered cowards. You seen what a pack of wimmen they was when the Mandan hit us. Why, even that old codger we hired on at Bighorn Falls has got better oysters on him!”
At the booming roar of the cannon, the riotous camp had fallen silent. The Indians were more curious than afraid. Since the Fort Laramie accord seven winters ago, in the year the whites called 1851, keelboats had become a common sight in the Wyoming Territory. That crucial 1851 council had guaranteed the Cheyenne and Arapaho a broad tract of land that stretched from western Kansas to the toes of the Colorado Rockies. But it had also granted to the palefaces unrestricted transit rights across the territory.
Touch the Sky was among the first braves to reach the water. He noticed the two white men on deck, the drunken Creoles scattered along the banks, the horses and mules clustered in their shallow pen.
Then his eyes met those of a bearded old man standing amongst the animals. He was dressed in buckskin shirt and trousers with a slouch beaver hat.
A shock of recognition made Touch the Sky smile wide: It was his friend Old Knobby, the hostler from Bighorn Falls! Touch the Sky had been his friend back in the days when the Cheyenne youth was called Matthew Hanchon and lived among the whites.
“Knobby!” he called out, racing closer to the river.
Then he drew up short, confused and troubled.
Old Knobby had clearly recognized him. But now he made a quick, desperate gesture toward the other two white men, warning the youth with his eyes to stay quiet and pretend they were strangers to each other.
Then Old Knobby deliberately turned his back on his former friend, and Touch the Sky realized that trouble was in the wind.
Chapter Two
Old Knobby watched, hidden amongst the horses in his charge, as Hays Jackson barked out orders to the crew, mixing English with bad French. Crates were ripped open and merchandise heaped on the deck: gaudy military-surplus medals, bright beads, blankets, mirrors, sugar, coffee, tobacco, powder and ball and gun patches.
Knobby had been as surprised as the Cheyenne youth when he recognized his young friend Matthew Hanchon—Touch the Sky, the former mountain man remembered now. For Matthew’s friend Corey Robinson had told him the youth’s new Cheyenne name. But Knobby had seen enough, since beginning this ill-fated journey, to realize that Wes Munro and Hays Jackson spelled serious trouble to the red nations—and to anyone else who tried to block their trail.
After what Knobby had already seen, he sensed it was a dangerous business to let these ruthless hardcases know that Touch the Sky knew him—or that the youth understood English. The best way to survive around men like this was by not calling attention to yourself.
Knobby had recently closed down his feed stable in Bighorn Falls and hired on as hostler at the mustang spread of John and Sarah Hanchon, Touch the Sky’s adoptive white parents. The Hanchon spread was thriving now that their Cheyenne boy had whipped the gunmen Hiram Steele had hired to drive them out.
When Munro and Jackson had sailed into the Wyoming Territory, offering top dollar for good horseflesh for their journey, all had seemed well. Munro had presented credentials identifying him as an official with the United States Indian Department. This was a “goodwill” voyage, Munro had explained, to pour oil on the troubled waters of white man-red man relations.
Munro had offered Knobby a handsome salary to accompany them temporarily as hostler, and John Hanchon had readily agreed—Munro seemed friendly enough, and Hanchon welcomed any attempt to improve life for the Indians, especially now that his adopted son lived among them. Despite the fact that he had been forced to kill several of them in his younger days, Knobby too respected much about the red man and had learned many of their ways.
But then the Sioux Princess had anchored at the friendly Arapaho village of Chief Smoke Rising. And Knobby had soon learned that he was working for ruthless murderers who had a secret agenda of their own.
Munro had welcomed Smoke Rising aboard the keelboat and showered him with gifts. But Knobby, ignored and unobserved, had also seen Munro trying to convince the old chief to sign some kind of document. Smoke Rising, who spoke some English, had remained friendly enough. But he’d stubbornly refused to sign the “talking paper.”
Munro had not pressured the chief. But at a high sign from his boss, Hays Jackson had accompanied Smoke Rising ashore. Knobby had followed them and watched, in the moonlit darkness, as Jackson easily overpowered the ailing chief and smothered him to death with his own blanket. Munro had later concluded his mysterious deal with a rebellious sub chief named Red Robe, who affixed his mark to the document.
Now, as old Knobby watched the braves crowd together along the shoreline, he realized the Cheyenne tribe was in trouble too. All the Plains Indians were. Somehow, despite the risk, he had to meet with Touch the Sky and warn him.
~*~
“I bring friendly greetings from the Great White Council in Washington,” said Wes Munro. “These gifts are to show that the red man is brother to the white.”
Munro spoke in the informal mixture of Cheyenne and Sioux tongues which was understood by most Plains Indians tribes. He and Chief Gray Thunder, surrounded by Arrow Keeper and the clan headmen, stood before the same hide-covered lodge where the chief-renewal had recently taken place. Gray Thunder had folded his arms over his bone breastplate to show the white man he was received in peace.
Touch the Sky, still deeply troubled by Old Knobby’s strange behavior, watched from a distance. He had expected to be called forward to translate. Then he realized this neatly dressed white man spoke the Indian tongue with passable skill.
“Your gifts I welcome on behalf of my tribe. But these are indeed strange words,” responded Gray Thunder. “The white man brother to the red? Then is it the white man’s way to kill his brothers? To slaughter unarmed women and children in their sleep? To place a bounty on his brothers’ scalps? And when the paleface hiders destroy our buffalo herds—is this too brotherly love? I would need to live another lifetime to understand such a cruel and murderous love.”
The headmen murmured their approval of these words. Gray Thunder was still a powerful, vigorous warrior, though well past his fortieth winter. Even now, when the clan fires were lit and the clay pipes filled, the young warriors spoke with awe of his exploits against the Crow and Pawnee and Ute.
Nor could Touch the Sky in fairness resent Gray Thunder’s coldness toward him. A good chief represented the collective will of his tribe, not his own feelings. Many in the tribe simply did not accept Touch the Sky, though few denied his skill and courage in battle.
“These sad things you speak of,” said Munro, “are true enough. But they are the work of only a few whites. Do you stop eating all berries on the bush because a few are rotten? Are there not evil Indians who kill their own and steal from their people? The Great White Council wants peace throughout the land.”
“Peace?” said Gray Thunder. “To the hair-faces this is only a word, a thing of smoke! The red nation was once at peace with the white. But peace was not good enough. Those Indians who choose the path of peace are told to stop hunting, to grow gardens like women. They are herded away to barren lands no white man wants. They are forced to dress like whites and pray to the white man’s God. Peace is not worth such a price!”
Again the headmen murmured their approval.
“Seven winters ago, in 1851,” said Munro, “your great Chief Yellow Bear”—here Munro made the cut-off sign for speaking of the dead, which impressed all the Cheyenne observers—“and many other chiefs signed the talking paper with the Bluecoats at the soldier house called Fort Laramie. That paper promised a vast and permanent territory for your people, a rich and beautiful land. Has the Great White Council east of the river called Great Waters ever tried to
steal that land back?”
“No,” said Gray Thunder, “certainly not all of it at one blow. But we are like birds who are told, ‘You may have this limb, and this limb, for your nest. Only, we will cut down limbs and strip bark all around you’. The paleface hiders destroy our herds, and the Bluecoat pony soldiers build their soldier towns in the midst of our best hunting grounds.”
Munro had already decided this was a bad time to carry out the main part of his scheme. Clearly some huge ceremony was taking place, judging from the finery of the braves and the vast numbers of Indians congregated. Many chiefs could be bribed, but not when they were surrounded by their headmen. He would have to try again later—one way or the other, he would succeed.
Munro was a former “long hunter” from the Cumberland Gap. He could speak smatterings of many Indian tongues, and was familiar with Indian customs. Thus he had proved instrumental in the tricky negotiations which eventually had wrested a veritable nation from the Southeastern tribes.
After helping to swindle the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creeks out of their homelands, he had proved his worth to friends in high political places—including Missouri Senator Leigh Hammond, a stump-screamer whose considerable capital was behind this illegal expedition. Now, as Gray Thunder said, the once-proud tribes back East were farming and wearing shoes and answering roll calls like prisoners. And white land speculators had grown wealthy.
So now Munro was following the advice of a popular sentiment of the day: The sun travels west, and so does opportunity.
“I have listened carefully to your words,” he told Gray Thunder. “I will speak the things you say before the Great White Council in Washington. I respect the red man. And I respect you, Chief Gray Thunder. I have counted the eagle tail feathers in your bonnet.”
Gray Thunder’s war bonnet trailed nearly to the ground, one feather for each time he had counted coup or slain an enemy.
“Perhaps you do truly respect the red man,” Gray Thunder said. “You have troubled yourself to learn our tongue. Few whites do this. Though I fear it can do no good, I am grateful that you will speak for us at the white council. I do not deny that there are some good men among the palefaces. But there are never enough good men to stop the bad.
“Again, on behalf of my people, I thank you for these fine gifts.”
Munro had given much away on this trip. But he knew the Indians had given much more. It had been the same almost everywhere he sailed. On the Missouri, the Platte, the North Platte, the Sweetwater, the Yellowstone, the Powder, the chiefs, or sometimes any brave calling himself a war leader, had affixed their marks to contracts which gave up the Indian homelands, millions of acres, for an annual payment amounting to a few wagonloads of trinkets.
Munro had felt it coming back in the 1840s. That was when the expansionists began to argue that it was absurd for the geographical unity of the U.S. to be broken up by groups of wild Indians. At the very least, they argued, the transportation routes must be cleared—an argument that especially pleased the railroad promoters.
And an argument, Munro knew, which was indeed true. Travel in the West was hard and dangerous. Places were god-awful far apart, with water often scarce. Sand wore out wooden axles, and green lumber shrank in the dry air. The sympathetic public back East was in an uproar over the terrible sufferings of the “handcart Mormons” and the immigrants who’d died by the hundreds in the massacre at the grassy swale called Mountain Meadows.
Now public sentiment called for a transcontinental wagon road first, to be followed by a railroad if the wagon road proved itself. And Senator Hammond already knew the proposed route, thanks to insiders on the key Congressional committee. It would follow the Platte Valley-South Pass-Humboldt River route, right through the heart of Plains Indian homelands.
And even if the railway plan failed, Senator Hammond was behind the not-yet-passed Homestead Act. This would grant a hundred and sixty acres of Western land to settlers at a dollar-twenty-five per acre—and Munro planned to own many of the best land parcels, Indians be damned.
“Gray Thunder,” he said, “I have one request. Several sleeps ago, while my crew was freeing our boat from a sandbar on the Platte, we were raided by Mandan renegades. Three of my men were killed. I need replacements to man the poles and oars, the towing ropes.
“If you will loan me three of your strong young bucks to complete our journey, I will pay your tribe handsomely in new guns and ammunition. They will be gone perhaps for the duration of two or three moons. Then they will return to your tribe when my boat sails back to the St. Louis settlements.”
Gray Thunder listened in silence, his face impassive. “I have no authority to grant or deny your request until I have spoken of this matter at council. I will speak with my headmen at the Council of Forty. However, I do not think they will approve such a plan. It is not the Shaiyena way to leave one’s tribe. Still, I will give voice to your request. I will also tell the headmen you appear to speak one way to the red man, not with a double tongue.”
Munro nodded. “Ha-ho, ha-ho,” he said in Cheyenne. “I thank you. I will wait aboard my boat for your decision. And I leave an offering to this place.”
Munro opened his possibles bag and scattered rich brown tobacco on the ground. These Cheyenne words and gestures further impressed Touch the Sky and the other observers.
But even as Touch the Sky watched Munro return toward the river, a pebble bounced off the Cheyenne’s back. Startled, he glanced toward his left.
Old Knobby peered out from behind a gnarled cottonwood, his grizzle-bearded face troubled. He gestured toward Munro, then bent his hand in Indian sign talk for the crooked arrow: the symbol of the liar.
Then Knobby cocked his head back toward a cedar copse behind him. Touch the Sky nodded once, slipping away to meet his old friend.
Chapter Three
“Well, cuss my coup if it ain’t young Matthew!” exclaimed the old mountain man when the youth joined him. “Only, I best call you by your Cheyenne moniker now, Touch the Sky. I reckon this child never figgered on seein’ you agin. You got some growth on you, tadpole, since I last seed you. Collected some battle scars too, by beaver!”
This was a reference to the gnarled mass of burn scar covering Touch the Sky’s stomach—a legacy of his long night of torture in the camp of the whiskey trader Henri Lagace. There was also a jagged knife scar high on his chest. This had been inflicted by a white sentry after Wolf Who Hunts Smiling had deliberately alerted him in hopes of seeing Touch the Sky killed.
“I heerd Munro spilling all that chin music jist now about respect for the red man,” said Knobby. “Respect. Pah! This hoss’ll be ear-marked and hog-tied iffen that murdering devil and his partner Hay Jackson ain’t lower than snakeshit!”
Quickly, Old Knobby explained everything: that he now worked for John Hanchon and had hired on temporarily to accompany the keelboat crew on their “goodwill” voyage.
“Right from the get-go,” said Knobby, “it made this hoss plain uneasy to see them two palaverin’ in secret with sub chiefs and givin’ weapons to raggedy-assed renegade braves. I wanted to pack my possibles and git the hell out. But I figgered they might track me down and do for me. Then I seed with my own eyes when Jackson kilt Chief Smoke Rising pure as gumption. I doan know ’zacly what them two got on the spit. But it means bad cess for the red man.”
Touch the Sky had listened with eager joy to the news that his adoptive parents’ mustang ranch was now thriving. But the rest of Knobby’s report left him full of cold apprehension.
Touch the Sky spoke in English. The words felt odd and stiff on his tongue after all this time without practicing them.
“My only friend among the elders,” he said, “is Arrow Keeper, the tribe shaman who protects the Medicine Arrows. I’m his helper now, and we have to be present soon at the Sun Dance ceremony. But I’ll go to him now and tell him what you’ve told me.”
Knobby approved this with a nod, removing his slouched beaver hat for a
moment to mop the sweat from his forehead. A patch of hideless bone at the top of his skull marked the spot where a Cheyenne warrior had almost raised the mountain man’s scalp.
“You do that, sprout. This child best git back afore he’s missed. But jist you mind. That-air Munro and his queer-blinkin’ pard Jackson will kill a man as casual as you or me’ll let daylight into a prairie chicken. Doan go lookin’ for your own grave!”
Touch the Sky nodded. While Knobby threaded his way through the trees toward the river, the youth sought out old Arrow Keeper at his tipi. The shaman was painting and dressing for the upcoming ceremony. He had donned his crow-feather war bonnet and his magic panther skin that was said to make Bluecoat bullets go wide. It was decorated with porcupine quills, feathers, leather fringes, and hair from enemy scalps.
The shaman frowned when he saw that Touch the Sky was not yet painted or dressed.
“Little brother, have you eaten strong mushrooms? The Sun Dance begins soon and you still wear your clout and leggings. You are one of the Dance Priests.”
“I know, Father. But I would speak with you first before I dress.”
“I have ears for your words. Speak them.”
Touch the Sky repeated everything Old Knobby had told him. While he spoke, the cracked-leather seams in Arrow Keeper’s face deepened.
“A word-bringer recently arrived from Smoke Rising’s camp with word of his death,” said Arrow Keeper. “There was no sign of violence, and his tribe assumed the old man had simply tired of life and given up his spirit to Maiyun. If, as your paleface friend claims, he was smothered, this could have been done without marks. Now their acting chief is Red Robe.”
Arrow Keeper was deeply troubled by Touch the Sky’s report. There would be no reason for the white who spoke these things to be lying, and Red Robe was a notorious hothead who ruled by intimidation more than respect. It all made sense.
For a moment his eyes cut to the coyote-fur pouch resting atop his buffalo robes, as if drawing strength from it. Touch the Sky followed his glance. He knew that pouch held the four sacred Medicine Arrows. For these was Arrow Keeper named, in honor of his important mission to protect the four arrows with his very life, to keep them forever sweet and clean. The fate of the Medicine Arrows was the fate of the entire tribe. If the Arrows were sullied, the tribe was sullied; if they were lost, the tribe was lost.
