by Win Blevins
The horses fought the lead ropes. The party was nearing breakdown.
From ahead and to the right, a rifle shot.
Sam veered that way. Slowly, hope dawned in everyone—all the men hobbled that way.
Sam topped a rise and saw Jim Clyman and his horse, both standing withers deep in a water hole.
Sam’s horse tore the lead rope out of his hand, galloped for the water, and made a tidal wave jumping in. Sam did the same.
Every horse broke free and outran his human being. Most men jumped in whooping. Tall Sublette walked up to the water and fell in stiff as a plank. Tom Eddie found the energy to take several quick steps and do a somersault into the water. Fitzpatrick stepped in quietly, with dignity. Every man, as soon as his throat was lubricated, shouted for joy.
They counted up. Actually, four of their number were missing. Mathews was presumably somewhere ahead, maybe at the river. Diah and two others—who knows?
Soon Diah struggled over the rise, alone. He baptized himself and said the two others had collapsed. He’d buried them in sand up to their necks, to keep the wind from parching them completely, and promised to carry water back if he found any.
Every man was thinking, I’ve had all I can take. I wouldn’t go back, at least not today. Before long Diah took a horse and some water and rode back. After dark he came in with the two men.
Sam thought, He’s odd about religion, but I’d follow him anywhere.
Waiting for them at the river, Mathews acted faintly amused at what they’d gone through.
Here the whitish, sticky water had turned into a bright, clear stream on a gravel bed among pine-tufted hills. Better yet, they soon came on an encampment of Sioux, a subtribe the Kentucks called Bob Rulys. That made Gideon sniff, and he explained to Sam that they were the Bois Brulés, or Burnt Wood Sioux.
Sam was fascinated by the camp. Though they’d seen villages on the way up the river, he hadn’t had a chance almost to live in one, as he did now. Diah Smith wanted to take time to exchange trade goods for a lot of horses. Sam filled his eyes and ears and mind with the way Indians were, not what he’d heard all his life, and not what they were as a broken people.
First the village held a council in a big tipi and gave the white men an opportunity to say why they’d come to the country of the Lakotas. Diah explained that they were hunting furs, especially beaver hides, that they wanted to be friends with the Bois Brulés. We have some presents for you, he told them, and we want to trade for some horses. Mathews handed the man who seemed to be the chief the gifts of tobacco and beads and other small items, and he seemed to accept them with courtesy. Diah went on, Mathews converting all this into sign language. The Indians listened politely, without interrupting even once, or asking any questions.
First Sam noticed that these Indians weren’t a bit pathetic or bedraggled-looking, unlike most of the Indians he saw in towns back East. They were handsomely dressed in a barbaric sort of way, their clothes ornamented beautifully and suitably. In fact, Sam felt like he was in rags compared to them, the plains and the hard work having been hard on the little clothing he owned. The women were attractive, and particularly modest, the young ones not meeting the eyes of the older women, or of any men, certainly not the strangers. They didn’t act a bit whorish, which is what the men back home often said when their women weren’t listening.
When the Indians began to speak, any man in the main circle was apparently allowed to put in his opinion. They did it in a mannerly way, everyone waiting for others to finish speaking, never disputing with anyone. Sam had a sense of particular respect for the elders. Young men, women, didn’t offer opinions.
Sam felt a longing to understand their language and really know what was going on. He thought Mathews was a ruffian who probably didn’t understand much about any people.
At the end the man who sat directly behind the fire and acted like the leader seemed to sum up what had been said, balance some of it out with other points, answer some questions and objections, and finally to welcome the whites to the Bois Brulé country. The meeting adjourned, and the mountain men made their camp near the village.
While Diah made his bargains for horses over the next several days, Sam wandered the village and observed. He looked for their ways of doing things before they had trade goods. He watched squaws drop hot rocks into buffalo stomachs to heat stew. He saw them soften and dye porcupine quills, then apply them to hide—an older form of decoration than beadwork, and they certainly did love beads. They scraped the fat off elk and buffalo hides and started the hard work of tanning and softening the hides. They sewed shirts, breechclouts, and dresses with buffalo sinew as thread, and sewed elk teeth onto their dresses in beautiful patterns. They made buffalo hoofs into rattles for small children, and fashioned dolls out of pieces of hide. They folded rawhide into big envelopes for storing things, and painted them with geometrical shapes. Sam thought their life had a primitive beauty.
The children were curious about Sam, and followed him everywhere. The women, though, mostly ignored him, or talked to him gently with their eyes cast down. Maybe some Indian women were wantons, but not these Sioux.
Among the men Sam really saw bows and arrows work for the first time. A warrior could get half a dozen arrows in the air before the first one landed, and they teased Sam about the time he needed to reload his rifle, which was about a minute. Their accuracy was remarkable. Yet every one of them, Sam knew, would have traded high for a rifle like his.
They had remarkable knives of their own making, with handles fashioned from the jaws of bears, antlers, or antelope horns, and blades of flint or obsidian. Still, they liked the metal butcher knives they traded for.
Sam thought their dress was practical—mostly they wore nothing but breechclouts and moccasins. But he thought his companions would tease him if he gave up his pants and boots for this light gear.
The Tennessean Stone got a little testy over Sam and Gideon “gawking” at how the Bob Rulys did things. “I learned all I need to know about Indians on the beach at the Ree villages,” Stone said.
Clyman walked up at that moment. Sam couldn’t help thinking of Captain Stuart, Ten, and Eleven. “I’ve known Indians that were more honorable than the white folks they were with,” he told Stone.
Stone just spat tobacco between his feet and walked off.
Sam said quietly, “I saw it the other way at the Ree villages.”
Gideon, the half-Indian, said, “What do you think, Clyman?”
Clyman said in his measured way, “It’s easy to make a savage of a civilized man, but impossible to make a civilized man of a savage in one generation.”
After Clyman walked on, Sam thought of his retort. “I don’t know how you can tell the difference sometimes.”
Gideon laughed long and hearty.
“I gotta admit it confuses me too,” said Sam. “I don’t know whether they’re good people or rotten.”
“Why waste a fine evening on such a question?” Gideon insisted they sit by the river and smoke their white clay pipes.
In the end Diah Smith was ready to move before Sam was. Diah sent Mathews back to Fort Kiowa with the borrowed horses, and gave every man of the brigade one animal to ride and another to carry equipment. Edward Rose would guide the brigade on west to Crow country.
“Good riddance,” Fitzpatrick said at Mathews’s back.
“Amen, brother,” said Sublette.
Before long they rode into the Badlands and found out what travelers learned to their grief before and since. They were repelled by the steepness of the country, the unbroken barrenness of the gray soil, and the way gullies cut this way and that and every way, with never a foot of level ground to ride on. Then it rained, and the gray soil (“remarkably adhesive,” Clyman would later write dryly in his memoir) clumped on the horses’ feet and made them clumsy. “The whole of this region” Clyman would record, “is moving to the Missouri River as fast as rain and thawing snow can carry it.”
Beyond the Badlands rose the Black Hills. Pine-covered mountains, big, grassy meadows, cool, refreshing air, even hazelnuts and plums, a paradise for man and beast. They felt like staying for weeks, but Crow country and the beaver hunt called.
The country west of the Hills was rugged, full of cedar and prickly pear instead of grass. Maybe a little desperate, Diah sent Rose ahead to find the Crow Indians, get fresh horses, and come back.
Five days later they were riding through a brushy bottom, walking single file, leading their horses. Smith was in front. Suddenly, about halfway down their line, a big grizzly rambled out of the brush.
Men went for their rifles, but getting powder into the pan, aiming, and firing took precious seconds.
Running back, Diah Smith charged out of the thicket and right into the bear’s face.
Griz grabbed Diah in a hug. Both of them went sprawling onto the ground. The bear took a swipe at Diah’s middle. Luckily, the big, sharp claws hit his shot pouch.
Griz took Diah’s head in his mouth. Diah jerked it out, but the head emerged bloody.
Men wanted to shoot, but all were afraid of hitting Diah.
Somehow, beneath the bear, Diah got off a pistol shot.
Arthur Black ran close, knelt, and shot upward into the flurry of motion that was the bear.
Suddenly, Griz stopped and looked at Black, as though asking, ‘What the hell are you doing?’
As suddenly as it came, the bear bolted into the shrubbery. Men fired, but none could say he hit.
The men ran to Diah’s bloody body. “What are we going to do?” someone said. They looked at each other. Not a man knew anything about medicine, or mending wounds, not even Fitzpatrick.
“Do something.”
“Stop that bleeding!” someone put in.
“Why don’t you?” said someone else.
Clyman knelt down by Smith. “What’s best?” he asked his captain.
“Send one or two men for water,” answered Smith steadily. “Meanwhile sew up the wounds around my head.” He told Clyman where in his pack were the needle, thread, and scissors. Sam brought them. And then Sam saw, really saw. The head was a bloody, bloody mess. How could the captain be talking? How could he be alive? How could he be clear and sensible when everyone else was useless?
Clyman checked Smith’s chest. Though the bear claws had scratched his hunting pouch instead of ripping him open, some ribs were broken.
Big scrapes of tooth marks slashed from his left eye to the crown of the head, and from the right ear to the crown. The ear was torn from the head to the outer edge. White bone gleamed where the teeth had raked.
Clyman cut Smith’s hair off with the scissors. He sewed the raw edges of scalp together. Smith lay silent.
Finally, Clyman said, “There’s nothing I can do about the ear.”
“Oh,” Smith said, “you must. Stitch it together some way, however you can.”
The amount of blood on Smith’s head and face, on his shirt, on Clyman, and on the ground made Sam sick.
Clyman held the two parts of the ear with one hand and laced them together with the other. It was crude. Clyman considered and said, “Best I can do.”
Smith got up on his horse and the brigade rode down to the creek, about a mile away. There they erected their only tent and put him in it.
That night men sat around the same fire but apart from each other, each one in his own thoughts. Which were bloody. Which were less about the captain than what would happen to them without him.
In a crisis he had acted like a man. Most of them were half in awe of him. And they weren’t happy about how they behaved.
While the captain recuperated, the men explored the country. It seemed safe enough, now that they were far from the Rees and close to the Crows. Sam, Gideon, and Clyman rode through what looked like a fine quarry of slate. Clyman commented, “Here or at some place like it Moses must have visited, and got the stones the Ten Commandments was inscribed on.”
Further west Rose and Sam rode into a grove of trees whose wood seemed to have turned to something very hard. Sam dismounted and picked some up. “What is it?” he asked Rose.
“Strike your steel to it,” said Rose, meaning the D-shaped piece of steel he struck against his flints to make spark.
The wood actually sparked.
“Stone. It’s stone.” He held it high. It took the shape of a little limb.
Rose got down beside him, picked some up, inspected it, dropped it, and picked some other pieces up. “I seen a whole forest of it once, a putrefied forest.”
“A what?”
“A putrefied forest. Sure as my rifle’s got hind sights, and she shoots center. I was up in the Yellowstone country, and if it wasn’t cold about that time I wouldn’t say so. The snow was about fifty foot deep, and the buffler lay dead on the ground like bees after a beein’. Not whar we was, though, for there was no buffler, nor any meat, and me and my band had been livin’ on our moccasins for six weeks. One day we crossed a canyon and over a divide and got into a prairie that was green grass, and green trees, and green leaves on the trees, and birds singing in the green leaves, and all this in February, wagh! Our animals was like to die when they seen the green grass, and we all sung out, ‘Hurrah for summer doin’s.’
“‘Here goes for meat,’ says I, and jest ups old Ginger at one of them singing birds, and down come the critter elegant. Its damn head comes spinning away from the body, but never stops singing, and when I takes up the meat, I finds it stone!
“‘Here’s damp powder and no fire to dry it,’ I says quite scared.
“‘Fire be dogged,’ says old Rube, ‘here’s a hoss as’ll make firewood.’ Schr-u-k goes the axe agin’ the tree, and out comes a bit of the blade as big as my hand. We looks at the animals, and there they stood shaking over the grass, which I’m doggone if it wasn’t stone, too. Young Anderson comes, up, and he’d been clerkin’, so he knowed something. He looks and looks and scrapes the tree with his butcher knife and snaps the grass like pipe stems, and breaks the leaves a-popping like Californy shells.
“‘What’s all this, boy?’ I asks.
“‘Putrefactions,’ says he, ‘putrefactions or I’m a nigger.’”
“‘Putrefactions’?” says Sam. “Why, did the leaves and the trees and the grass stink?”
“Stink, Sam, would a skunk stink if he was froze to stone? No, I didn’t know what putrefactions was, and young Anderson’s version didn’t shine, not in my eyes, so I chips a piece out of a tree and puts it in my trap sack and carries it safe to Atkinson. Well, a doctor fella comes along the next spring. I shows him the piece I chipped out of the tree, and he called it a putrefaction too. And so, Sam, if that wasn’t a putrefied prairie, what was it? For this hoss doesn’t know, and he knows fat cow from poor bull, anyhow.”
In ten days or two weeks the captain was healed up and the brigade ready to ride. (No longer tuned to the ways of the settlements, the men didn’t count the days.) They rode west, into the country of the Powder River, with the Big Horn Mountains high on the sunset horizon. They were sliding from Sioux and Cheyenne country into Crow country, and it was a region of the most plentiful game any of them had ever seen.
Though the season was getting late, sometimes they stopped to trap the swift, cold mountain streams coming down from the Big Horns. Sam learned how to set his traps in this kind of water. You spotted beaver sign, chewed trees, slides, dams, or lodges. You slipped into the creek well away from where you wanted to set the trap to keep the man smell away and waded to the place you’d picked out. You set the trap on the bottom, and anchored the ring on its chain with a limb several feet away. You attached a float stick, so that if the critter dragged your trap off you could find it, and him. Between the jaws of the trap you stuck a slender wand, its end first dipped into your “beaver medicine,” castoreum, a glandular secretion of the beaver. That would bring the curious beaver to find out what stranger was invading its territory. When it stood up to smell the medicine, SNAP
!
He loved the work. He and Gideon worked as a pair, riding up the creek to set a dozen traps, returning to take their beaver and skin them. They got comfortable with each other. Each man knew what the other would do, and usually what he would say. Each knew the other would protect his back, fight Indians for him if need be. They shared their catch half and half. Sam said to himself that Gideon was a real, true friend, a partner. Then he had to chuckle. A French-Jew-Indian partner. A year ago he hadn’t known any of those three.
In camp they cleaned the hides and stretched them on hoops made of willow limbs. When these dried, they were collected into packs, borne by the horses.
The many streams, good water to drink, deer and elk a-plenty, good companions, no enemies—it felt like an idyllic wilderness life to Sam.
That was why he could not have been more surprised, late one afternoon, to see an outfit of white men riding toward camp. Captain Smith welcomed them—that was your obligation with white men, even competitors. One leaned down from his mount, said, “Hello, little fella,” and gave a twisty smile.
Sam looked up into the big, lumpy face of Micajah.
“Glad to see you,” said the giant. The big face didn’t match the words.
“Sorry I can’t say the same,” Sam answered.
Sam went straight to Captain Smith, but had to stand by quietly while Diah, Fitzpatrick, and Sublette greeted the two leaders of the Missouri Fur expedition, Charlie Keemle and Bill Gordon. The captain introduced them to Sam with, “They fought against the Rees with us.”
From what Sam had heard, that was no recommendation.
In the end Sam had to speak up in front of Fitzpatrick and Sublette. “One of their men robs women, and is damn near a murderer.”
Diah said, “Tell us the whole story.”
Gideon heard that and walked over, his grave expression saying he wanted to hear too.
Sam told it as dry and straight as he could, Abby, Grumble, and him, the call out of the darkness, the weapons, the threats and intimidation, Abby’s trick that killed Elijah, how they fought off and outwitted Micajah and Ned. He left out Grumble’s near-death act afterward, but said firmly he thought Micajah would try to take revenge for his brother’s death.
