Boone's Lick

by Larry McMurtry

  Sam just nodded his head.

  “I’m feeling Indians,” Pa said. “I’m feeling lots of Indians! Damn, I regret not bringing my spyglass!”

  Just then we heard a bugle, though we could see no soldiers. There was a kind of ridge between us and the troops—it was called Lodgepole Ridge, though I didn’t know that until much later.

  As soon as they heard the bugle about half the Indians that had been circling us pulled off and went over to the little group that had just loped into the valley.

  The warrior with the sore-footed horse was all by himself, warming himself by his little fire.

  Then the cavalry began to pour over the little ridge, with a bugler and a flag and Colonel Fetterman in the lead—I recognized him by his white gloves.

  “The goddamn fool, don’t he see that it’s a trap!” Pa yelled.

  I thought he’d be happy that relief was finally coming, but he wasn’t happy. He began to jump up and down on the wagon, waving his arms and yelling for the soldiers to go back.

  Of course, they were a mile or two away—they couldn’t hear him. Even if they had, it’s not likely Colonel Fetterman would pay much attention to a woodcutter.

  The six or seven Indians who had just loped up the valley took fright when they saw the cavalry—they hit out across the valley for the nearest trees.

  Only the lone Indian with the sore-footed horse didn’t seem concerned. He scattered his little fire and hopped on his horse, watching the soldiers for a minute before he went trotting off.

  “Decoys! Decoys! That’s all they are,” Pa said, jumping off the wagon. “Hasn’t the damn fool been in the army long enough to learn about decoys?”

  “Hey, what’s the army doing?” G.T. asked. “They’re supposed to rescue us.”

  That had been my opinion too—and even the opinion of the Indians who were harassing us—the minute they saw the cavalry most of them began to peel off toward the woods.

  Maybe Colonel Fetterman had meant to rescue us, when he left the fort, but the sight of those decoy Indians swayed his judgment. The cavalrymen had been moving along at a slow gallop, but then the bugler blew the charge. I guess the colonel thought he could cut those few Indians off before they reached the woods.

  In a minute the cavalry was in full charge, headed for the Indian with the sore-footed horse—only his horse made a quick recovery and was soon outrunning the soldiers.

  “The oldest trick, the wounded bird,” Pa said.

  The cavalry was deep in the valley now, but they weren’t catching the Indians, who were on fine quick horses.

  “Look, Sam,” Pa said.

  “Oh, Lord,” Sam said.

  “Oh, dern,” G.T. said.

  The woods on every side began to boil with movement—I wasn’t sure what was happening, at first. There was so much snow kicked into the air that I thought it might mean some kind of avalanche, caused by a buffalo herd that had decided to pass through.

  But it was all Indians, hundreds of Indians, maybe thousands, and the war cries they screamed as they plunged into battle nearly scared my scalp off, and G.T.’s too. In nightmares I still hear those war cries today.

  In a minute the Indians had closed around the cavalrymen—the few cavalrymen who tried to retreat were quickly cut down. There were so many arrows in the air that they made a cloud. I even saw a crow fall—it had just been flying low over the valley and suddenly found itself stuck with arrows.

  “We better go, while they’re busy,” Pa said, crawling up on the wagon seat.

  “Oh, they don’t want us,” Sam said.

  That seemed to be true—the Indians who had been circling us pulled away to join the general battle; guns were popping all over the valley, arrows and lances skewered men on the run, while others got hacked down with hatchets.

  “No, they don’t want us, but the frenzy’s on them,” Pa said. “They might not be able to stop killing. Some of the young warriors might want a few more easy scalps.”

  Most of the woodchoppers were like frozen men, staring at what was happening in the valley below. The cavalry had long since been scattered into many groups, pockets of five or six men, all fighting for their lives and losing—falling.

  Even Sam seemed frozen by the spectacle.

  “I would never have expected Indians to hold an ambush this well,” he said.

  “Well, they’re learning,” Pa said. “Come on, boys—whip up! Now’s our chance, if we’ve got a chance.”

  The woodchoppers came unfrozen and we began a wild race for the fort. I suppose the Indians might have loped over and killed us, if they’d noticed: our mules weren’t capable of much speed. But there were some hardy soldiers in that troop of cavalry—a few of them forted up behind a little bump of rocks and put up stiff resistance. The Indians were ten deep around them, so it was hopeless, but while they were firing their last bullets or taking their last whacks with their sabers we flailed our team and rumbled back across that ridge, only to meet Ma and Uncle Seth, plunging along in the other direction.

  Pa pulled up and stopped them, while the other wood wagons raced on to the fort.

  “Stop, goddamnit! It’s a massacre—are you crazy?” Pa yelled.

  “No, but I’ve come for my boys, that you ought never to have taken off,” Ma said.

  “They’re my boys too—I guess I’m allowed one day with them, even if it is a perilous day,” Pa said.

  “Quiet down, you two!” Uncle Seth said sharply. “This is no time for a family quarrel—it looks like the massacre’s over.”

  Uncle Seth was right. Below us, across the valley, the Indians were going around, picking up rifles and pistols, pulling cartridge belts off soldiers, picking up arrows and hatchets, collecting their own dead. The ones who had taken all they could carry were already trailing away, into the woods.

  In only a few minutes, every single Indian was gone; they melted right back into the forests that they had come racing out of.

  “There may be a few wounded,” Uncle Seth said. “It would be unusual for every last man to be killed stone dead, in a fracas like this.”

  “Let’s go,” Ma said.

  “Go where?” Uncle Seth asked.

  “Go pick up the wounded,” Ma said. “You just said there might be some.”

  “We might want to wait a few minutes, in case there are some young braves who aren’t satisfied,” Pa suggested. “It wouldn’t be wise to tempt them.”

  “But the wounded might die,” Ma said. “These Indians just killed a whole army—I doubt they’d bother with a scrawny bunch like us.”

  “Where’s Marcy?” G.T. asked. “Where’s my pup?”

  “Left with wife number three—is that the right number, Dick?” Ma asked, giving him a look.

  “Close enough,” Pa said. “Why don’t you take the youngsters back to the fort—me and Seth can gather up the wounded, if any.”

  “No, it might require two wagons,” Ma said. “Besides, Seth’s so gimpy he’s worthless, in this chill weather.”

  “It’s going to be a bad sight, Mary Margaret,” Pa said. “You don’t have to see it.”

  “I’m a woman who’s buried four sons—by myself,” Ma said. “Bad sights don’t affect me.”

  Pa turned his wagon and said no more.

  12

  WE took our two wagons down into that valley of death, to search for the wounded among the dead, but there was not a single wounded man—not one. Though the fight had lasted only a half hour at most, the Indians had managed to do the same things to Colonel Fetterman’s troop that they had done to the miners we had found back on the trail. Eyes were gouged out, guts spilled, privates cut off, legs split, faces smashed in. Some of the bodies were naked, some not.

  Colonel Fetterman’s body was leaning against one of the rocks, on the little outcropping. His throat had been cut and it looked as if he might have taken a few licks to the head, but he wasn’t torn up as badly as some of his men.

  If Ma remembered that she h
ad once told Colonel Fetterman that if he had eighty men to put at risk he would probably lose every one of them, she never mentioned it—but it had turned out to be an accurate prophecy: eighty cavalrymen died that day, on the field beyond Lodgepole Ridge.

  Pa and Uncle Seth checked every corpse, to be sure it was a corpse, but we didn’t remove the bodies. We only had two wagons, and Pa was nervous besides.

  “That many Indians could take this fort,” he said. “I have never seen that many Indians in one force, and Sam hasn’t, either. I doubt there’s bullets enough in the magazine to hold them off, if they come at us. A victory like this will surely pump them up.”

  “I expect we better bunk in the fort tonight, then,” Uncle Seth said. “Colonel Fetterman won’t be there to throw Mary out.”

  Already, because of the chill, the dead cavalrymen had stiffened—all over the field we could see legs and arms sticking up. Of course, growing up during the Civil War I had heard many stories of the hundreds and thousands that died at Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, Vicksburg, and the other great battles. Eighty dead would have been the result of just a small skirmish, in that war.

  But we had seen these eighty dead men ride over the ridge that morning, in the full glory of their lives, racing down on their foe like cavalrymen are supposed to—and now they were all dead and stiff, their limbs sticking out at crazy angles—I felt like I was seeing all the dead, of all the wars, not just these few poor soldiers.

  Pa and Uncle Seth shot four or five badly wounded horses—the Indians had taken most of the rest, though a few had run off in panic and made it back to the fort.

  Ma got down and walked among the bodies for a while, satisfying herself that they were all beyond our help.

  “I’d hate to have a fault like this on my conscience,” she said.

  Not a man slept in Fort Phil Kearny that night—not unless it was Colonel Carrington, who we never glimpsed. Pa said this would ruin him, even if it had been Colonel Fetterman who led the reckless charge.

  What interested me more was whether we would survive the night. Every man in the fort expected the Indians to attack, and the general view was that we lacked the ammunition to repel them.

  Besides that, the fort Indians pointed out that tonight’s moon would be a special moon—a power moon that the Sioux and the Cheyenne would want to take advantage of. They were right, at least about the power of the moon. The full moon that floated up into the sky that night was brighter than any lamp. A flare couldn’t have lit the plains any brighter. Not a star was visible—the moon was too bright. It lit the prairies and shone into the forests where the Indians had hidden that day.

  Every man in the fort stood in arms that night—only Neva, anxious for a dance, found the waiting boresome.

  I don’t know where all those Indians went, those hundreds of Sioux and Cheyenne; nobody knew, except themselves. But for whatever reason, they wasted the power moon, which shone all night with a brightness that I was never to experience again, not in my life.

  Toward morning the wind rose, and it began to snow.

  “Here comes that blizzard,” Uncle Seth said.

  “It’s a shame they didn’t bring in those bodies,” Pa said. “Now we’ll have to wait for a thaw.”

  The soldiers had been too scared, that day, to secure the bodies.

  Still the moon shone—through its light we could see the heavy snowflakes, drifting down.

  Ma stood on the parapet most of the night, with Pa and Uncle Seth. Someone had given her a rifle—she meant to fight if the Indians came. I had my rifle too. G.T. kept his puppy inside his big gray coat. Marcy was still with wife number three, Sweetbreads, as Pa called her.

  By morning it was very cold—the wind was swirling the snow. Yet the moon was still visible, still bright. It had just transferred itself from one side of the sky to the other.

  “It’s shining for the dead—gone to their peace,” Ma said.

  We were invited into the mess hall for breakfast—the porridge with molasses sure tasted sweet.

  13

  NEVA turned out to be the one who stayed in the west. She fought Ma and Pa and Uncle Seth to a standstill and stayed right there at Fort Phil Kearny, with Pa and Sweetbreads, or wife number three, as Ma always called her.

  For Neva it was the beginning of a brilliant career—in no time she learned the Sioux language so well that the chiefs and generals began to take notice. At the big peace powwow in 1868, when the army knuckled under to Red Cloud and agreed to remove the three forts they had foolishly thrown up along the Bozeman, Geneva Cecil was the only interpreter that General Sherman trusted.

  Then, before you could blink, Red Cloud, shifty as ever, stole Neva from General Sherman and hauled her all the way to New York City—she interpreted for him when he made his big speech at Cooper Union a year or two later. Her picture was in all the papers; I guess she did a crashing job.

  Next thing we knew the great General Crook—Three Stars, or the Gray Fox to the red men—had enticed Neva away from Red Cloud; Crook kept her with him all the way to the Rosebud, where some intelligence she picked up from a Crow scout saved the testy general from a rout. All the military men said that if Custer had had her with him a week later she would have fought him to a standstill and helped him avoid his deadly blunder at the Little Bighorn.

  We saw little of Neva in those years—she was always on the chase. Some say she left Crook to go marry her old admirer Wild Bill Hickok, but arrived too late to save him from drawing that famous dead man’s hand, aces and eights, the hand he was studying when shot down by the coward McCall.

  Then Buffalo Bill hired Neva for a while, to help pacify all the Indians who rode in his Wild West Show. I believe it was Neva who taught Sitting Bull to play Ping-Pong: there is even a picture of this.

  From time to time Neva would marry: our count was three Indians, a gunfighter, two cowboys, and a trick roper—but she was bristly if we tried to get her to talk about her home life.

  “What of it? Pa had more wives than I’ve had husbands,” she insisted, if questioned.

  Every two or three years someone would arrive from the dock or the railroad station with a small child for us—just a child with a note in Neva’s hand.

  “Ma, this is Ben—do your best, Neva,” the note might say. Or, if the child happened to be a girl, the note would read: “Ma, this is Little Bat—good luck.”

  Uncle Seth would grumble about this practice—he claimed to be past the age when he could tolerate small children, but Ma raised all of Neva’s offspring, to the number of six, never losing a one. Fortunately, thanks to the Black Hills gold rush, Pa and Uncle Seth prospered so in their hauling business that they sold out to the famous Wells Fargo Company; after that Ma didn’t have to shoot horses out from under sheriffs to get vittles for her grandkids.

  When General Crook was sent to Arizona to root out Geronimo he tried his best to get Neva to come with him, but she declined, on the grounds that fluency in Sioux didn’t equip her to speak Apache. By then a young newspaperman named Hearst had hired her to write for his newspaper in San Francisco. The very year that Geronimo and his eighteen warriors came in, Neva published her famous book The Western Avernus, a story of how grievously we whites had mistreated the red man. The book sold millions of copies—at last count it had been translated into one hundred and three languages.

  To her credit Neva devoted a lot of her time and energy to keeping up with Pa’s Indian wives and his half-breed children. Her count, as to the children, was seventeen, spread among most of the tribes that had once held sway on the plains.

  Pa never left the west—fortunately I was able to visit him often. G.T. took against him, on obscure grounds—it may have been that thrashing over the pocketknife—and never saw him again. The lumber business, which Pa went into after he and Uncle Seth sold out, proved to be Pa’s doom, due to a freak accident in a sawmill he owned in Oregon. A big saw blade snapped, just at the wrong moment, and took Pa’s head clean off.
Neva buried him near The Dalles, a spot I have not visited—Neva assures me that his grave commands a glorious view of the Columbia River Gorge and the great country beyond it.

  Ma and Uncle Seth were never parted. They quarreled their way through nearly fifty more years of life. A maiden aunt in Ohio left Uncle Seth a modest farm—before he could get around to selling it a handyman working on a fence punched a posthole a little too deep and struck oil. Uncle Seth was for selling the old place anyway, but Ma fought him like a tigress; she believed there was a future for oil, and she was right. So much oil flowed out of that posthole that Ma and Uncle Seth were able to build a substantial mansion on Lindell Avenue in St. Louis, where they finished raising Marcy, six children of Neva’s, and two of Aunt Rosie’s as well, the latter having died in childbirth after five years of marriage to a banker in Dubuque.

  Marcy had a fine, lilting soprano voice—Ma sent her to Europe to train it thoroughly, which she did. Marcy sings with the New York opera now, not a form of singing Uncle Seth could bring himself to enjoy.

  “Reminds me too much of a Cheyenne scalping party,” he said.

  G.T. claimed that the horrors of the Fetterman massacre stunted his growth, which didn’t matter, since he was already as big as he needed to be. The puppy Sweetbreads gave him lived to be twenty-four years old. G.T. never married. He decided that what the world needed was a reliable supply of catfish, so he started the first catfish farm in Missouri, an enterprise that failed, due to being way ahead of its time. The bankruptcy that resulted made G.T. a bitter man—it turned him into a hellfire preacher. Then his reason slipped and he began to stand in the street and rant about hellfire to the passersby. He even stood right in the middle of Lindell Avenue and preached while visiting Ma—it was a great embarrassment to the children.

  As we came east along the Platte after our fateful visit I happened to spot an old tattered law book that had dropped out of some wagon, a good thick digest of laws from all over the place. After I had pored over that old book for a few years I decided to become a lawyer—Ma borrowed the money and sent me to law school in Chicago, over Uncle Seth’s loud objections. He was convinced I would become a judge and find against him in court.