by Bowen, Peter
I still had my gloves on and I scooped a handful of coals up and threw them in the Injun’s face. He’d gone to a crouch and started for me and he got one in the face and one down his collar. I made a quick slash for the hand he held his knife in and I made a grab for his topknot. I swear I was going to scalp him first and then kill him.
My knife hand stopped like a tight vise had shut on it. I looked and saw the beaded gauntlet and looked up at Bridger. I cussed him good and tried to jerk my arm free but I might as well have had a horse standing on it.
“Wul,” says Bridger, “I’m full of the congratulate fer you but I think that mebbe you best stop.”
“Why?” I screamed. “The son of a bitch was trying to kill me. Let go of my wrist, goddamn you.”
“Wul, no I won’t,” said Bridger. “They was just funning with you to see if you had sand. Last time you didn’t and they hoped for improvement. And there’s three hundred of ’em close enough to drown us if they all spit at once. Do your own figgering since you had such good schooling.”
Just about this time my feet told me they was awful hot, almost in flames, and I looked down and saw I had been standing in the cook fire all the time I had been arguing with Bridger.
I dropped the knife and commenced to hopping around and yelling and whooping and pulling at my boots. This got a whole round of laughter I did not much appreciate from a whole lot of folks I could not see but who could see me just fine, thank you.
(This ridiculous moment led to my being named for all time Stands-in-the-Fire-and-Argues. As you can see it had nothing to do with personal bravery or all them rude things I was to say to congressional committees and the like later.)
Once I had got rid of my smoldering boots and hopped a bit more my feet quit hurting. I stood there, fuming, trying to recall when I had been this happy.
“How come they ain’t killed us?” I says to Bridger.
“Wul,” he says, “if’n I’m alone but for a child or a couple friends they won’t bother to kill me. If I’m leading soldiers they’ll try real hard. They like me all right and I signed that you were a retarded nephew, to explain all of that vaudeville act you put on just now. They appreciated it and think you are worthy of a few more days of life.”
“Look here,” I yelled. “You crazy miserable balding old bastard fart I ain’t yer goddamned ...”
“I know I ain’t the quality folks yer used to fer parents but ’less you want to be slow roasted and fed yer balls and dick while yer dyin’ I think ye’d best go along with muh little joke for ...”
“All right, uncle,” I says. “I have been rude to you and I apologize to you, uncle ...”
“SHUT THE HELL UP YA LITTLE SHIT OR THE INJUNS ALL BE THE LEAST A YAR WORRIES ...” Bridger bellered, being even less fond of the idea of me for a nephew than I was of him for an uncle. “If it’s any consolation,” says Bridger, “it hurts me as much as it does you. Prolly more as I’m older and got better taste.”
Then Bridger set down and so did some of the two hundred Injuns and a lot of them went off somewheres silent as slow water. Spotted Tail’s moon face beamed at me suddenly from the right.
“Good evening,” I said, and remembered and nodded while my balls gave a little hop. Spotted Tail looked blank and stupid.
I had pretty good Sioux now—it’s the prettiest spoke language there is, and damn the Frogs—to follow what was being said, which was that the Injuns was prepared to kill all white men on the Thieves’ Road or anyplace else on their hunting grounds or anywhere near the Pa Sapa, the Sacred Black Hills.
The Bozeman Trail run right through their pantry, and they had been promised that this would never happen so long as grass should grow and rivers flow and the sun shone and they were concerned that the Great White Father (No Injun I ever knew called the occupant of the White House that. What they did call the President was oh, never mind.) anyway, maybe the Great White Father and his Sons had forgot that the grass was growing, rivers flowing, and why didn’t all these white sonsabitches go back where they came from and eat shit and die of the bellyache?
Bridger told them that white women bore four children at a time, and so the whites, who were beyond number now, would soon be thick as grasshoppers in a wet summer. (Unwittingly, Bridger condemned a lot of white women to abduction, the Injuns being as eager to have bigger litters as any Mormon, and the funny thing about it is that very few of them women wanted to go back if they stayed even a month with the tribe.)
Bridger explained that he was just up here trying to help his son (me) learn about the country and such, as I had got into trouble in town, a sad and sordid incident involving a goat and several other medium to small barnyard animals. Bridger went on in that vein till he glanced over my way to see what I was adding by way of sign language to his narrative. He nodded once at me and we quit the contest.
Then he started in in a dialect I couldn’t follow, and in order that the joke not be lost on me Spotted Tail came over and interpreted for me, describing my prowess with frogs and ducks. The audience was hooting happily. I took it all in good part, not wanting to be three days dying over hot coals and privately I was swearing that this pumpkin-throated old bastard was going to pay a very heavy price as soon as I figured up the bill and the coin.
There was one feller in a plain dark blue blanket sitting next to me, and he never moved or uttered a word at all. He was light-skinned and had light brown hair—common in the Plains tribes—and while everyone with him was painted and quilled to the last patch of skin he had no decorations at all but one eagle feather in his hair and a small medicine bundle behind his right ear.
The palaver ended and everybody got up, and the feller in the blue blanket flowed up off the ground like a cat after a butterfly.
He spoke then, sadly, that they must fight with much bravery to defeat the numerous whites, but that was the business of warriors and would be till the last of them rode up the Star Trail—the Indian heaven is at the end of the Milky Way, a place of mild weather and good water and game and war. It sounds a lot nicer than the whiteman’s heaven, which seems forlorn and vengeful and noisy, what with all them seraphim and cherubim bellering hosannas day and night. (Wild Bill Hickock said that the whiteman’s heaven had always sounded to him like a third-rate hotel at Saratoga Springs in the off season, with locks on all the doors. You couldn’t get in to any place you wanted to be, or out of the others.)
Our guests melted into the night, I heard the sound of unshod Injun ponies moving away.
“That feller spoke last was Crazy Horse,” said Bridger, who was wadding cheap trade tobacco into his pipe.
“He don’t look like an Injun,” I said.
“Spend some time with him,” said Bridger. “You won’t think that he’s even human.”
6
HAVING PASSED MY ENTRANCE examinations—failure would have meant my slow and painful extinction—Jim now commenced to throw his fifty years of experience at me like a man tossing hay with a damn big fork.
In order to stop me from daydreaming, which every youngster does practically all the time, he commenced into whacking me with a stick any time my mind wandered away. In order to make me wary of alkali bogs, for instance, he suddenly challenged me to a race to the ridge top. He swung wide round a boulder and seemed, to me, to be taking an uncommon long, dumb way to the top. I joyfully spurred my horse right on to one of them damn flat yellow-white patches and the horse sunk through and me right behind him, down into blue, thin, burning mud, sticky as glue. I jumped off the horse and tried to struggle to dry ground and was in above my waist in no time.
Bridger took an uncommon long time to even come to where me and the horse was sinking out of sight, and after he got there the son of a bitch set down on a handy flat rock and began asking me questions about some of the stars in the night sky, the various colors and patterns the warrior societies painted their arrows, how ducks fuck, and other such vital matters while me and the horse sank an inch or three.
“I cain’t stand to watch an animal suffer,” Bridger said. He tossed a loop over the horse and backed his big bay away and pulled my pinto out pretty easy. He took the saddle off him and patted his neck and checked his hooves good and hobbled him and the animal went on down to the river.
During this here rescue I had lost another couple inches of freeboard.
“What’s the poison hemlock look like?” says Bridger, back on his rock and whittling.
I called him a lot of names and I made a lot of threats, and I was shaking with so much rage I slid down in the bog another couple inches.
“Very good,” said Bridger. “You are getting handy at cussing, and I’m proud of how far you’ve come. Now how do you know it’s poison hemlock?”
“If the roots is joined at the base, otherwise it is cow parsnip,” I says. “Would you let me suffocate if I couldn’t recall what hemlock looks like?”
“Course I would,” says Bridger. “Cain’t learn quick and good you’d just die out here anyways. I got a responsibility here. What if you was ignorant and guiding troops?”
“To water hemlock?” I said.
Truth to tell, more pioneers died of water hemlock, death camas, and nightshade than died of any Injun arrow or bullet.
He’d about had enough fun—good thing, I was about neck deep and my neck wasn’t near as strong as a horse’s. I suppose he’d thought of that, too. Anyway he tossed a loop over me and I got it under my arms and the horse pulled me out. The blue mud made a loud sucking sound and I left both my boots in the bog.
“If’n you just lay down you can roll out a them easy,” said Bridger, as I lay there on firm earth wheezing. I got up after a bit and went down to the creek and washed as much of the blue mud off as I could. When I went back to the bog my boots was floating, sort of, on top of it. I rolled out and grabbed them and rolled back.
Bridger hadn’t stopped whittling or moved off his rock.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll pay closer attention.”
“Damn right you will,” he said. “Go wash up and I’ll make us up some grub.”
I hoped that things would sort of calm down. They didn’t. He still had that infernal stick, and I’d leave off paying attention to where the stick and him was and get a good whack across my shoulders or ass. I cordially wished gophers with dull teeth would chew on his piles and other dangling things through all eternity. He thanked me kind enough. The most maddening thing of all of it was his good humor and fine manners.
A couple days later it just stopped. Oh, the practical jokes we amused ourselves with went on as long as Bridger was alive, all of us back then enjoyed them, even if the victim was maimed for life, but the whackings with the stick and the bog lectures stopped. I wasn’t cocky enough to think they were over, but I could at least afford to hope.
“Wul,” says Bridger, “we’d best waste a little time. I knowed where the fort should go first off they asked me, but they’ll make their own decision. Just want me to make the decision so they’ll have something to fight over. I’d admire to see the Tetons anyways.”
So that’s where we went, backtracking a few days and up over Two Ocean Pass, coming to the Tetons by a seldom traveled trail. Two Ocean Pass is divided by a stream, one mouth of which goes to the Gulf of Mexico and the other to the Pacific. Streams have two mouths about as often as calves have two heads and live.
No one ever forgets the first time they see the Tetons rising blue in the distance. They ain’t got no foothills, they just start up and keep going. We wandered around them for a few days—it was cold and there was snow on our blankets of a morning—and then we headed back for Laramie, swinging far south of the wagon trail and then cutting north to go over Happy Jack Pass. It was named for a feller so full of glee he never stopped laughing, which made folks sort of avoid him. I never met him, he froze solid with a smile on his face in ’62, during one of them cold snaps so deep that when you spit it goes pop before it hits the ground.
Colonel Carrington was waiting at the gates for Bridger, and the two of them stood off a little ways talking, Carrington real earnest and gesturing with his hands, and Bridger yupping and noping and scratching himself.
Damned if we didn’t leave the very next morning up the trail, Carrington to pick one of the sites that Bridger recommended, and some three hundred soldiers and civilian contractors to build it.
The whole and usual and customary blend of incompetence, foolhardiness, just plain stupidity, and all other military virtues was constantly displayed from the morning we left the gates clear through all that followed after. The military idiocies I had seen heretofore was mild, on account of how the practitioners was mostly amateurs and they lacked the sheer professionalism necessary to true strategic and tactical imbecility. You have to go to West Point to get that. I wasn’t overfond of the military even then, and to this day after Big Piney Creek the sight of any uniform makes me want to laugh and run at the same time.
Carrington was all right, actually; he knew his business and he had a level head. But he had the worst subordinates I ever seen all piled together in one place.
This expedition had some cavalry, though not enough, some infantry and artillery, and three days behind us two hundred teamsters and contractors and the wives and children of a officers and men. That wagon train was two and a half miles long. They had one blacksmith where they could have done with ten—the ground was stony and hard on horseshoes and the iron rims of the wagon wheels. The wheelwright didn’t even have the tools to make the hallies with, and they left the spare ammunition for the whole detachment on the last two freight wagons because those wagons was heaviest loaded.
We even had six magazine correspondents and a couple photographers.
This sorry mob made, on a good day, six or eight miles. The Injuns, if they’d a mind, could have started at either end of the train and chewed the whole thing up like a string of sausages.
They didn’t recognize the opportunity, thank God. Injuns stole horses every night, but the sentries and wranglers never saw nor heard nothing. Bridger shrugged and said that was a sure sign of Crows.
’Bout a week up the trail we found what little was left of a small wagon train. The folks belonging to it had been trussed up like chickens, scalped, and tossed into the burning wagons.
“Musta been in a hurry,” says Bridger. “Wonder what over? It ain’t usual for them to work so fast and sloppy.”
Carrington’s infantry buried the bodies, breaking pickaxes on the stones and sweating to get graves two feet deep to hold the bodies. They piled big rocks over them.
On we went. The equipment that Carrington had gathered for his fort had necessaries like a forty-piece brass band, one whole wagon full of flagpoles—patent brass ones that screwed together—a sixteen-pipe organ for the chapel, hay rakes and mowers, huge cast-iron cookstoves, and a two-thousand-volume library. (Bridger remarked that him and the other trappers was saved by being so ignorant, if they’d knowed what they had to have to wander the Rockies they’d have been too heavy loaded down to leave St. Louis.)
“Oglala’d admire to have all that nice soft paper with winter comin’ on,” says Bridger. “How’d I ever manage to stay alive out here so long. Luck, I guess.” He was funning but there was an edge to it, no mistake. A military disaster has a smell about it, I was to see a lot of them. This one was my first and I could nose the high odor but I didn’t know what to call it.
Bridger had recommended a site way the hell and gone to the north, on the Tongue River, where there was ample water and wood, a good clear view for forty miles, a grand defensive position for the stockade, and plenty of fine grass for the stock. Colonel Carrington, with that eye they give you at West Point for good spots to make Last Stands in, chose a site that could only be improved by being in a narrow canyon with lots of big rocks up top for the savages to toss down.
He found a nice spot on a hill overlooking the Big Piney Creek Basin, with lots of higher hills around it so all the Injuns i
n North America could be crowded together out there and you’d a never knowed it, so it wouldn’t disturb your sleep. The wood and water was a good five miles away, and it was sixty miles in one direction and a hundred in the other to the spots where Injuns would likely attack wagons. Oh, it was a real good kind of defensive position, but in order for a real good defensive position to work it has to be someplace the enemy will have to or want to attack it.
By the time the troops Carrington sent out reached the spots of trouble even the maggots would have got wings and flown.
Every man jack in the expedition was put to work digging trenches or cutting and hauling logs for the palisades, except me and Bridger.
“My back hurts,” says Bridger. “We’ll go look around a little bit here. For weeks.” That last was muttered but I caught it. (That’s what he was paid for, and he was payin’ me, sort of, and you know Jim never went back. He said later he was afraid that when it happened he’d lose hisself and say something unkind that would haunt him of nights, as he hated to hurt folks’ feelings. Soon as we were away from the fort he started bellering “DUMBSHITS,” and he didn’t quit for a long time.)
While we was gone for the rest of the fall and into the winter an average of a man a day was either wounded or outright killed and scalped. A photographer died of having shards of his glass plates pounded down his throat. Two magazine writers was hung upside down over slow fires. Soldiers was gutted like sheep. The woodcutters refused to go into the timber until the artillery had shot canister into the trees. It went on and on.
The Injuns burnt up the hayrakes and mowers. Carrington’s poodle wandered outside and the skin was found nailed to the gates the next morning. Sentries was found dead with their eyes open and alert, dead of an arrow in the throat or head.
I wasn’t there but I got told later one November day close on to the end of the month a short, blustery little captain name of Fetterman showed up to his new post, and hadn’t taken his coat off before he started bellering that if he had eighty men he would ride through the whole Sioux nation.
