“I … I … Well, sir, I nevah …” He stood and I swear it looked to me as if he were groping for a gauntlet with which to slap my face and call me out for a duel at dawn under the moss-draped live oaks. Or perhaps he was reaching for a derringer to assuage his honor right there.
“Never is the right word,” I said. “Not in a million years.”
From beneath the Navajo blanket I withdrew a revolver, my old .44-caliber Colt Walker. It is an awesome weapon, and had its desired effect.
Wentworth Champion skedaddled.
What would you make of all this?
Ah, Jim.. …
IN HIS DAY he was the Bloody Arm of the Sparrowhawk People, who inflicted traumatic baldness on a thousand thousand enemies. He was the Big Bowl, the Bull’s Robe, the Antelope. He was the White-Handled Knife. He was the Morning Star, the Medicine Calf. He was Is-ko-chu-e-chu-re, the Enemy of Horses, the greatest thief of riding stock ever known among a tribe of excellent horse thieves. Best in the West, he always said.
To hear him tell it, he stood seven feet tall in his moccasins with shoulders a yard wide. He had more Indian names than wives, for a fact, and he had a full dozen of the latter—ten with the Grows alone and anyway two among the Blackfoot.
His smile was bright as the Ghost Trail that splits the sky of a cold clear prairie midnight. His scowl could set the Rocky Mountains themselves to trembling from the Río Bravo del Norte clear up to the Milk. His scalp yell diverted whole rivers. Oh, yes, it did.
He had by his own testimony—and who so brave as to doubt him aloud?—run ninety-five miles in a single day, dawn to dark, pursued by half the howling Blackfoot nation. It took him three whole days just to rest up from that escapade.
He was my friend James Pierson Beckwourth, trapper, trader, explorer, poet, war chief, and no man dared call him nigger.
OLD JIM HE was a wonder, sure. Lived among the savages all those years; I only really got to know him later, and he could spin a yarn some, but most of it sounded like the truth. Some newspaperman in California named Bonner wrote a whole book about him, most of which was bosh, but as Jim said, he wrote an elegant prose. Still, it was too damned slick for me. I read it some years ago. To hell with it. Read this account instead if you want Jim straight.
That winter in Absaroka we lived in a buffalo skin lodge all black near the top from wood smoke and the smoke from dry buffalo dung up in the foothills on a south-facing slope. Lots of snow to the height of five feet on the ground but plenty of sun. Plenty buffalo down in the flats.
The first name the red men gave him was the White-Handled Knife. The white-handled knife Jim always had with him. He used it on beaver and buff’ and the heads of the slain, though he never cut any wood with it. It was your customary butcher’s blade with the haft wrapped in a long strip of white silk Jim had taken from a Blackfoot war chief he had killed on Hams Fork some years earlier. He always washed the silk clean when it got too dark from the blood of his enemies. I saw him wash it three times that winter while I was with him on the Absaroka. He boiled water over a special medicine fire he built of white osier. He got that name from the Sho-sho-nees he came up with when he was with Gen. William Ashley in 1823 or ’24. They call them the Snakes by sign. Good people, but they, too, will kill you if they take a mind to it.
“I next met up with the Blackfoot,” he told me. “And I married one. You can just bet it was nice to be with a woman after all that time with mountaineers. They called her Plume in Blackfoot. She was very pretty but had a sassy mouth.”
One time the Blackfeet brought three scalps into camp. They were white scalps, and Jim said he got mighty sore. Would not dance the scalp dance that night and told Plume she could not dance either. That was the hair of his friends and partners, he said. But she went out and danced anyway. A white trapper named Dick Gant was living in Jim’s lodge at the time and looked out and says, “Your lady is a mighty fine dancer, Jim; look at her go.” Jim looks out the lodge and sees her whooping it up out there and waxes wroth. He grabs his battle-ax and goes out and walks right through the dancers and whacks his wife alongside the head.
She drops like a brainshot elk.
Well, the Blackfoot grabbed him, angry as you might imagine, and wanted to take his hair right then. But Plume’s father, Old Lodgepole, stopped them. He said, “She was too sassy; her ears were blocked. You kill your wives if they do not obey you. Why shouldn’t he?”
So they saw the wisdom in that.
And Lodgepole said, “Here, Knife, I give you my second daughter for a bride to replace the sassy one. She’s prettier anyway and very obedient.” Jim took the younger sister, whose name was Painted Turtle, and went back to his tepee. He was under the robes with her that night and just dozing off when he heard something whimpering outside the tent. “That damn dog,” he said, and pulled open the flap. In crawled Plume, her hair all stiff with blood. He hadn’t killed her after all. “Now my ears are unblocked,” she said, “and I will not be sassy anymore.” So Jim had two Blackfoot wives now to keep him warm on a winter’s night, one to each side of him under the buffalo robes.
THE WAY I met old Jim, I had come up the Platte River from Cabanné’s trading post near where the city of Omaha now stands in the spring of 1833 with my brother, Owen Griffith, and a small party of fur traders bound for the Rocky Mountains. We headed up the North Fork of the Platte River, past Scott’s Bluff, crossed the Ghugwater and Laramie rivers in early May, and then in the Black Hills of the Medicine Bow range while running buffalo were jumped by a band of Arikara Indians. The very sky rained arrows. None of those boys could shoot with any accuracy. They were green and scared. Not that I was any braver. The Rees rubbed out most of the party, took their scalps, cut off their private parts, tied some of the boys upside down to a tall wagon wheel, and burnt them on a slow fire. They screamed some, all but Captain Wofford, the leader of our expedition. He did not have time to yell. The first arrow to fall took him right through the brainpan.
The wagon had lost one of its wheels in the chase and lay lopsided. When the Rees saw that they could spin the opposite wheel freely over the fire, they took turns at it with a man tied to the rim, so that he cooked even slower than he would hanging head-down over the flames.
They laughed at that one you can bet.
When the whooping stopped only my brother Owen and I were left alive, along with a Shawnee scout named Golightly Spybuck. The three of us were trussed up like hogs for the killing.
“Oh, these bastards!” said Owney.
Then a couple of Rees grabbed me, slapped me around some, and cut at my face with their quirts. They began to tie me to the wheel.
Well, I am ashamed to say I wet my pants about then.
“Be brave, Dill!” yelled Owney. “Don’t yell; don’t give them the satisfaction!”
I heard the Shawnee Spybuck chuckle at that.
The Rees were saving him for last.
THEN A BIG war party of Sparrowhawks came swooping in to save us, and a big Negro was their leader.
Well, the lead and arrows flew thick as the good red devils drove the bad ones off. Fusees banged, bows twanging. The ugly wet sound of hatchets slicing meat. I saw a flint-tipped lance shatter on the skull of an old Ree, and his battle-ax come around to chop the Grow who’d speared him, blood everywhere. The toughest of the Grows—we could tell they were of that tribe from the length of their hair, some with coiffures nearly as long as the warriors themselves were tall—was a dark stocky fellow riding a speckle-rumped Nez Percé pony; he swung his ax fast as a dragonfly’s wings, took down at least five of the Rees by himself in that quick, loud little fight. Then he reined in and trotted his pony over to where I lay tied to the wheel. And he cut me down.
Seeing that he was a Negro, or at least part a one, I immediately thought of a man I had heard about, Edward Rose, part African, part white, part Cherokee Indian, who was said to be a good friend of the Grows, some say a chief among them.
“Mister Rose,” I said, �
�oh, bless you for saving us!”
It was like I’d shot him. His face, black enough to begin with, now went even darker. He said something in Grow to his warriors. Two of them jumped down from their ponies and grabbed me upside down and tied me that way again to the wagon wheel. There was tinder and pieces of dry, fast-burning sagebrush piled up in the fire heap, with broken floorboards from the wagon bed on top of it, and these boys grabbed out their fire steels and pieces of flint and started to strike sparks. They were grinning all the while like it was only a Sunday school picnic.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What are you doing? Are you going to bum me anyway?”
The black chief had turned his back on me, but now he spun round again.
“I am not Mister Edward Rose,” said he. “Mister Rose was a Negro and a very bad man, a thief, a damned liar, and a disgrace to everything America stands for. And anyway, he was rubbed out last winter up on the Yellowstone, along with old Hugh Glass, by these same damn river pirates, the Ankara. I am a white man, born in the Old Dominion, though I live amongst these ignorant but innocent Sparrowhawk Indians and am honored to be one of their war chiefs. My name is Captain James P. Beckwourth, and I am surprised you do not know of me,”
I tried to swallow there, upside down on the wheel, and had a hard time. You try it once. Then I said, “Well, Captain Beckwourth, I am sorry I mistook you for Mister Rose. Please forgive the error. It must be that the sun has darkened your skin so, living out here on the prairie as you do, but now I can see you are white all right, whiter even than I.”
He smiled then, and yes, his smile was bright all right, and very welcome to me at that moment, I can assure you. He jumped down off his pony and strode over to cut me down from the wheel. He pulled me to my feet and slapped me on the shoulder.
“I knew you would see reason,” said he.
Just about that time one of the sparks the Crow warriors had struck took fire in the tinder and the sage began popping. Flames as tall as a man started climbing the wheel.
And I looked over at the black, blistered faces of the others in our party, dead now with their teeth shining through snarling crisp lips. The Rees had burnt them on the wheel all right, and I can tell you I was mighty relieved to be free of it.
WELL, CAPTAIN BECKWOURTH was no seven feet tall. He was about my size, a handspan or two more than five and a half. Average height. But he was plenty strong and thick-muscled, and for all his denying it he was indeed a Negro or, anyway, half a one. From a distance you might have mistaken him for a Spaniard, I guess, but the wide nose, full lips, and curly hair, his skin the color of a black walnut gunstock, those traits gave him away.
“Now,” says he, “who are you and these others with you, my friend?”
“We are the Griffith brothers of Vermont and Pennsylvania,” I says, “headed west for beaver. I am Dillon Griffith and that’s my brother Owen there with the cut on his forehead, and the other fellow is a Shawnee hunter name of Golightly Spybuck who scouts for us.” Jim frowns. “Looks like your Indian did not scout so good, did he? My Sparrowhawks don’t like the Shawnees much,” he says. “They are a sneaky lot, being woodland Indians from east of the Mississippi originally, not noble buffalo Indians like these of the prairies, and I am not sure I can vouch for my men’s good behavior in regard to this Indian.”
Golightly now comes stepping up to us, picking his way through the dead bodies, and looks Beckwourth in the eye. He is a tough coot all right: a tall Indian, with a long, thin scarred-up face and his hair all knotted in a bun atop his head, usually contained in a green-and-yellow bandanna which resembles a pirate’s turban, but now it has come loose a bit, hair straggling out, and his eyes are flaming.
“I can take care of myself, Captain Beckwourth,” says he. His hand is on the haft of a pipe tomahawk he picked up off a dead Ree. “Give me back my fusil and my powder and ball and I will leave here now afoot and not raise any temptations amongst your people.”
I cannot help saying, “Hurrah for you, Mister Spybuck!”
“No need of that,” Beckwourth tells Spybuck, smiling now. “I admire your spunk and will now guarantee their good behavior. But keep that ax handy anyway.”
I saw right then, and never forgot it, that old Jim valued courage and forthrightness in a man; whether red or white or black, it mattered not. So long as he said what he believed, Jim would treat him fair and square. Though I later grew to distrust him for his sly deviations from that credo.
TWO
JIM BECKWOURTH NOW walks over to my brother Owen sitting dazed there in the dirt, blood streaking his face from where a battleax had clipped him atop the head. Owney is twenty-three years old, five years older than I. A powerful built man, my brother, wide shoulders, long arms, big blocky fists, a clever boxer either bareknuckle or with the gloves. Years of hard work in the coalfields of Pennsylvania had given him the muscles of a lion.
Our Da, bless his memory, had taught us both to box.
Owney mumbles some words: “Cactus and schist, I care not.” His eyes are glassy, his head swaying weak on his neck.
For all the years of his grown-up life he had risen in the dark, gone down to the dark, emerged again in the dark, his world black and white. Imagine how he marvels now at color! Stunned by it. Wildflowers blue and red and yellow as butter, songbirds so bright, coinage fresh from the mint; the electric blue of darning needles and skeeterhawks, red buttes aglow in the distance beyond the acid green rivers, blue-black peaks topped in sprawls and skids of spring snow off to the north and west—the Rocky Mountain Front.
“Prickly pear,” says Owney.
Prickly pair indeed. I know where his mind is wandering; he’s dreaming of Mam and Da.
“Vicious bitch,” Owney says, mumbling still as Beckwourth stares down at him, “but Da no winner neither, look’ye Dill. A rum lot the two of ’em, should never been hitched to begin with.”
She was a little wee woman, scarce five foot tall, Mam, maybe five-two or -three, hair cut long and brushed over sideways to hide her baldness. Pursed little mouth like a arsehole, flinty eyes, a tongue like the tail of a hornet.
Owney spots a black cactus, gone dead, dark and shiny with spilt blood drying on it, and it throws him into a dream of old Da coming home with the “pillows.”
Those big, fat old pillows and Da telling us about how you had to hit left and right, right and left, high and low, mix 'em up, and throw your punches so they could not be seen. And then hit him hard, take him down, kill the bastard …
And I remember. Da kneeling on the floor to lessen his height, thus his advantage. His old face blue-gray still with the Welsh coal dust that would never wash out, the random blue scars on his balding head, tattoos of coal dust where the dark had cut him underground, back in the old country, in Wales.
Old Da’s elbows close to his sides, patting at Owney with the fat black shiny pillows, patting himself.
His old eyes twinkling, colcarreg black in the light of a lamp.
The fat black pillows weaving the air.
Old Da, suddenly younger, patting Owney in the belly and on the chin, saying, “Hit me now, Owney; c’mon, ya can hit me sure enough; look’ye now rather; now hit me, left hook!”
And he hit old Da in the gut and old Da coughed. He coughed and he coughed, and finally he coughed up a great thick wad of coughup, a great sloppy black wad of smelly black tar that ran down his chin like the hot macadam they laid on the hunchback road from Ffaldau to Blaengarw, and Owney must have felt like the worst little shit in the world, and he crept back to his comer and rolled himself into the sour sheets next to me, his little wee brother there in the dark, and listened to Mam and Da wrangle high and low, screechy growly, to the end of the night and the break of another day.
Later, much later, we went with the folks and our two sisters on across the sea and lodged next in a place called Dorset in the frown of the wet green hills of Vermont. Da said it was a land of riches, with iron and copper, lead and silver and gold lying
in wait beneath the earth to enrich the first man to reach them with pick and shovel. And marble? Enough to erect the Heavenly City itself. But when we arrived Vermont looked much like Wales, all up and down, all cold and hard and very poor. The state was still all abuzz with talk of the Newfane Lump, a nugget of pure gold that weighed more than half a pound, found up in the Green Mountains. But try as he might, plying his pick on the hillsides, Da could find neither gold nor silver, nor yet enough copper to shape a farthing, and finally had to settle for a job as a quarryman. He plied a chisel-tipped drill half the length of a man, hammering it home full twelve hours a day, six days a week, carving channels in cold, hard marble, and earning at best $1.40 a day for his labors. The company where Da cut marble till his breath got too short let us rent a rickety wood-sided house, and Mam was almost happy for once then with a yard all her own and a garden plot wherein to grow her Swedes and cabbages and leeks as long and thick as a strong boy’s leg. We had chickens as well, a tall red-and-black rooster and his hareem, Mam called them, of dumpy, fat hens. Fresh eggs of a morning for breakfast.
Ah yes, Owney and his brother Dillon were happy, too. We had a little wee dog now, a wicked quick ratter called Thump. After school we would grab a spade from the garden shed and whistle Thump up and run with her down to the dump, there to hunt rats until suppertime. Thump-in-the-Dump, we called it. Weekends we prowled the marble-studded green hills back of town and down along the loud brown Mettowee River after rabbits and groundhogs and muskrats—Thump was a great leaper, too, who on at least three occasions managed to grab a partridge from the air when it flushed beneath her nose—and, now and then when we were especially lucky, a fox. Thump dug like a little wee coal miner when the prey went to ground. Fought it out in the dens and runs below, growls and yips and horrendous yowls funneling up from the bowels of the earth, Thump emerging always a-grin, dirty and splattered with blood, some of it her own, but she did not care, did not feel it even, so hard she was, and we dug down to extract the meat. Mam would cook up the rabbits and groundhogs that weren’t too badly chewed, Da skinned the muskrats and the rare foxes, stretched their pelts on stiff, circular wire frames, fleshed them, showed us how to rub them down with salt and tanbark and sheep’s brains, and we sold them cured to the hideman over in Rupert—two shillings apiece for the rats if not too sorely torn by Thump’s long fangs, a whole solid Yankee dollar for a prime fox plew, whether red or gray.
Deadville Page 2
