“I’ve been sent to warn you that this state will not be allowed to hold any kind of centennial celebration unless La Raza has a dominant say in what’s done. After all, this state belongs to us ... historically.”
“Your request makes a great deal of sense,” Garrett conceded. “Have you been told that the first thing I did upon being appointed was to visit Cortez? And invite two Chicanos onto the committee?”
Young Marquez ignored this attempt at conciliation. “We demand that your reactionary committee issue a press re lease admitting that the principles of Aztlán will govern the entire celebration.”
“What are the principles of Aztlán?”
“I have them here.” Paul reached for the paper, but the young revolutionary pulled it back, for he wanted to read it aloud: “ ‘Those who have stolen from La Raza the land of Aztlán—the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Colorado—confess their crime and admit that the brown people of the continent own these states and by rights must govern them.
“ ‘False owners who came from nations like Russia, England, Italy and Japan to, steal these lands from La Raza confess their crime and submit to just demands for indemnity. If La Raza decides that these thieves may continue in Aztlán, they must surrender all political control to La Raza and live here as immigrants, bound by the laws of Aztlán.’ ”
The young man read on and on, inflamed by the beauty of his words and the simplicity of the solutions they outlined. When he was finished, Garrett asked, “I can see how your plan might have appeal in Arizona and New Mexico, but do you really think the Anglos in Texas are going to move away and give the state to you?”
“They’ll be allowed to remain,” Ricardo said. “But only if they submit themselves to our laws.”
“Will you be able to supply a group who can write the laws?”
“We have the inspiration,” Marquez replied.
“Sit down,” Garrett said.
“I prefer to stand.”
“Then excuse me while I sit. Ricardo, don’t you think it strange that your people have missed chance after chance at self-education?”
“Anglo education is not relevant.”
“I was making a comparison the other day. No, listen. You may find this interesting. The Takemoto family came here about the same time as the Marquez family. The five Takemotos of this generation have had ninety-seven years of free education. That’s almost twenty years for each one. As a result, they’re doctors and legislators and dentists. The Marquez family also has five in this generation, and all of you together have had thirty-eight years of education. And it’s been waiting there, free.”
“The Takemotos are slaves to the establishment,” the young man said contemptuously. “We Chicanos don’t want to be servile dentists and all that crap.”
“Then become lawyers,” Garrett said, “so that you can fight for your people.”
“The whole court system is crap,” Marquez shouted.
“Lower your voice, Ricardo. What I’d like to do is pay for your university education. I’m interested ...”
“You’re trying to buy me off. Subvert the revolution. I know how my grandfather slaved in your fields ...”
It seemed more than strange to Garrett that a young man whose sister had just married an Anglo should be abusing that very Anglo as an enemy of the race. It showed distorted thinking, but in the back of his mind Garrett suspected that if he were in Ricardo’s place, he would be tempted to behave much like him. He felt a real empathy with his brother-in-law.
“Learn their system, Ricardo. Beat them over the head with it. I’m on your side, you know.”
“You’re the enemy,” Marquez said. “And I’m warning you now. We’re going to destroy your celebration if you try to organize it without us.”
“You weren’t listening. I said I’d already brought two Chicanos onto the committee.”
“Ah! Them! The faithful old biscuits.”
“What do you mean—biscuits?”
“Brown on the outside. White on the inside. Traitors to La Raza.”
“Whom can I appoint? That you would accept?”
“The leaders of the revolution, that’s who.”
“Would they serve?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Have them see me on December first and I’ll appoint them.”
“But we shall insist on gaining control of Texas.”
“Ricardo, my dear brother in blood, that will be a long time off. The problem is, what can we do now, you and your sister and I? Because Flor and I want you to live with us.
“You can’t buy me off, Garrett.” And he left the house, gunning his old Ford down the lane.
On Tuesday Garrett was awakened by a cry which always made him feel good: “Jenny’s headin’ north.” It came from the yard below his window and signified that once more he would have to take down his shotgun with the rubber pellets.
“Come on, Flor. Jenny’s heading north.”
They dressed hurriedly, laughing as they did, and as they ran out through the kitchen, each of them grabbed a shotgun and a handful of special bullets. It took a fairly determined stand to turn Jenny around, and one shotgun blast never did the trick.
In 1960 Garrett had purchased sixty buffalo from breeders in Canada and had trucked them onto his spread. Jenny, a female weighing more than half a ton, had kicked out the sides of three trucks before the Canadians got her tranquilized for the trip south, and when she was released onto the Venneford acres she tried to revenge herself, knocking two men flat.
She seemed to have a built-in radar beamed to her old home in Canada, because each year when the time came that buffalo traditionally migrated, she would stand in the middle of the prairie, sniff in various directions, then start to walk north, ignoring fences, roads, railroad tracks and state boundaries. The only way she could be turned about was to take a position about twenty-five feet ahead of her and fire a blast of rubber pellets smack in her face.
The first shot accomplished nothing. She merely blinked, lowered her head and kept coming. It was the second and third shots, which looked as if they might blast her head off, that finally delivered the message. She would stop, shake her head as if flies were bothering her, turn around and come home.
“She’s still headin’ north,” one of the cowboys said as the Garretts reached the pasture, and there stood the shattered fences through which Jenny had walked with her accustomed insolence.
“We can head her off north of the road,” the cowboy suggested, and he drove the jeep at a good speed in the direction of the errant buffalo. After twenty minutes they saw her, head down, plodding away in response to some ancient impulse. They watched her for a few minutes, laughing at her determination. When she came to a fence she barely paused, applying her great bulk and pushing it flat.
“We’ll have to go up to the other road,” Garrett cried, so they went farther north and took their stand directly in front of the lumbering old cow. She must have seen them, but on she came.
Paul fired right at her face, but she merely swept her head from side to side. “Fire, dammit!” he yelled to his wife, and Flor banged away with a second shot. Jenny hesitated, so the cowboy sent a blast right at her. She shook her head, looked about, then turned resignedly and started back to the Crown Vee pastures, where the other buffalo were grazing peacefully.
Tim Grebe kept his promise, He arranged a deal for the sale of Garrett’s bulls to a bologna factory, but when the butcher phoned to complete the details, Garrett lost heart and said, “Sorry, I’ve changed my mind. I couldn’t possibly sell you the bulls.” He then summoned his foreman and said, “There’s got to be some smaller ranch around here that could use thirty good bulls. Sell them for whatever you can get. Give them away, if you have to.” He’d be damned if he’s sell prime Herefords to be ground up for sandwich meat.
When the foreman left, Garrett stormed about the castle in a state of anxiety. He had made a major decision and already it was haunting h
im. Once he grabbed me by the arm, saying earnestly, “You can see my position, can’t you, Vernor? I can’t run this ranch as a hobby. And if the Simmentals will bring in, more money, I’ve got to consider them.” I nodded.
Then he snapped his fingers and shouted to Flor, “It’s time I visited the family. I’ve had some of my best ideas when I’ve been up there,” and within fifteen minutes he and Flor had packed and we were speeding north to the reservation in western Wyoming where the remnants of the Arapaho tribe were sequestered.
Each year, from the time he was a small boy, Garrett had visited his Indian relatives, taking them presents. Most of his friends in Colorado overlooked the fact that he was part Indian, five thirty-seconds, if you traced it out on the chart in the breed book.
“I’ve never been a professional Indian apologist,” he told me as we sped along the great empty roads of Wyoming, “and I’ve always refrained from trying to capitalize on that heritage for political effect, but I do sometimes feel like a true Indian. At least I’m sympathetic to their problems, and if I were twenty years younger, I suppose I’d be one of the gun-toting activists.”
As we neared the reservation he became moody, and I could see that he was now regretting his impulse. On his previous visit he had found his various aunts and uncles caught in despondency, and now as we drove onto the Indian lands he said prayerfully, “God, I hope they’re in better shape this time.”
They weren’t. Aunt Augusta, bitter and ancient, launched her mournful litany the moment we arrived: “Government says we can have a recreation hall, but the damned Shoshone want it on their land and we want it on ours, and we may have to go to war against them.” The Arapaho-Ute antagonism was as venomous as it had been in 1750. The Shoshone were an offshoot of the Ute and nurtured the animosity that had always existed between the two tribes, made permanent by that unfortunate mistake in 1873 when President Arthur gave permission for the remnant of the Arapaho to share the reservation formerly occupied only by the Shoshone. There was enough land for two tribes, more than enough, but not when those tribes were mortal enemies.
In spite of her complaining, Garrett had always enjoyed Aunt Augusta, and now she demonstrated why: “Our whole trouble stems from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Did you know the agent is so terrified of us that he won’t sleep on the reservation? He sleeps in town.” She narrated several outrageous stories about the bureau, then said, “It all began when General Custer was head of Indian Affairs.”
I assumed that her mind must be wandering, for so far as I knew, it had been Custer’s job to fight Indians, not govern them, but then the sly old lady winked and said, “In 1876 General Custer left his office on the way to Little Big Horn and said, ‘Don’t do anything till I get back.’ ” There was a long pause, and then Flor comprehended what the old woman was saying, and burst into laughter. “That’s right!” the old woman said. “He never came back, and they’ve not done a damned thing since.”
Then she resumed her lament. “Did you hear, Paul, what happened to Sam Loper’s boy?”
On our way to Loper’s shack Paul explained, “He’s my cousin, some way or other. His real name is White Antelope, but the government said it was silly for a grown man to be named after an animal, so he cut it down to Lope and added an r. Same way with Harry Grasshoppper. Had to change his to Harry Hopper.”
Sam Loper was an older man, and his son, like so many Indian youths, had taken to heavy drinking. A week before, as he staggered home from an all-night party, he had fallen into a small ditch, not two feet deep, and drowned.
Now his father sat in his jumbled kitchen, swilling coffee and beer. And Flor wanted to weep as she listened to his narrative: “The boy left a wife and three children, but she drinks heavy. Ain’t sober days at a time. The kids—where in hell are they?”
We stopped by the Mission of Christ and asked the young director, “Can’t anything be done for the Loper family?” and he shrugged his shoulders.
“The awful problem is that no girls in America, and I mean none, are better brought up than these Indian girls. At nineteen they must make God smile in satisfaction at His handiwork. They study here at the mission and they’re clean, devout, abstemious—filled with the excitement of life. Then they marry. And who do they marry? The tall, good-looking young men on the reservation ...”
“Do Arapaho ever marry Shoshone?”
“Unthinkable. And what happens to these promising young men who play basketball so well when they’re nineteen? They drift. They lose interest. They have no future, no hope. So they start drinking, and often after the first baby comes, the utter chaos of their lives becomes unbearable. They start beating up their young wives. Yes, the girls come to me with horrible bruises and broken teeth. So the only contact the wife is able to maintain with her husband is to join him in drinking, and whole families stay drunk week after week.”
“I know,” Garrett said impatiently, for he had heard this dismal story too often. “But what can we do about the Loper widow?”
“Nothing,” the missionary said. “She’s a lost alcoholic and I cannot even approach her.”
“The children?”
“The boy will become like his father. The two girls, if I remember them, will be as beautiful as their mother, and at age twenty-eight they’ll be hopeless alcoholics.”
As always on his trips to the reservation, Garrett spent his last moments in the small cemetery where Sacajawea was buried, and this time the visit would be doubly meaningful, for he wanted Flor to see the grave of the Indian woman most revered in American history, the tall and beautiful Shoshone who had led Lewis and Clark to Oregon. But he was not prepared for the emotional punishment he himself was to undergo, for while Flor studied the monument he wandered to another part of the cemetery, and there he saw a new gravestone, that of Hugh Bonatsie, who had died in the spring. Across the stone was engraved the message: “To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die.” The words were banal, perhaps, but the carving that accompanied them was not. There on the face of the stone, chosen for its redness, were etched the things Bonatsie had loved most in life: a white-faced Hereford bull and two cows.
On the way south from the reservation Garrett drove slowly, for he was assailed by an anguish so complex that he wanted me to preserve it accurately:
The way we react to the Indian will always remain this nation’s unique moral headache. It may seem a smaller problem than our Negro one, and less important, but many other sections of the world have had to grapple with slavery and its consequences.
There’s no parallel for our treatment of the Indian. In Tasmania the English settlers solved the matter neatly by killing off every single Tasmanian, bagging the last one as late as 1910. Australia had tried to keep its aborigines permanently debased—much crueler than anything we did with our Indians. Brazil, about the same. Only in America did we show total confusion. One day we treated Indians as sovereign nations. Did you know that my relative Lost Eagle and Lincoln were photographed together as two heads of state? The next year we treated him as an uncivilized brute to be exterminated. And this dreadful dichotomy continues.
Looking at that reservation as it exists now ... what in hell can a man say? It seems clear the Indian never intended to accommodate himself to white man’s ways, so that our grandiose plans of “fitting him into white society” were doomed. He formed an indigestible mass in the belly of progress and had to be regurgitated. Like Jonah, he came out about as well as he went in. It seems inevitable that his land had to be taken from him. The white man was in motion, the Indian wasn’t. The whole thrust of our national life placed us in opposition to his requirements, and even though we signed the land treaties with the best intentions in the world, the wisest of the white men knew, at the very moment of signing, that the papers weren’t worth a damn. Before the ink was dry, the Indian was dispossessed.
We drove in silence for some time, crossing the great prairies once controlled by Paul’s ancestors, and finally Flor pointed out
that when her husband spoke of the Indian problem, especially when he became intellectually excited, he always referred to himself as part of the white establishment which had committed these crimes against the Indian part of his inheritance:
No! When I come to Wyoming and lose myself in these empty prairies ... I think this part, right here, is the most beautiful section of America. Look! Not a house, not a fence, not a road except the one we’re on. When I’m here I’m an Arapaho. And I’ll tell you this. I’m immensely impressed with the cultural persistence of my people. We may find, and very soon, too, that if the white man wants to survive on the prairie, he’ll have to go back to the permanent values of the Indian. Respect for the land. Attention to animals. Living in harmony with the seasons. Some kind of basic relationship with the soil. An awful lot of the white man’s progress will come to grief when the next dry spell comes along.
Again we drove in silence, with Flor vainly trying to imagine what her life would have been like in those days. She probably had in her veins a much larger proportion of Indian blood than he, yet their tradition was totally alien to her, while Paul could easily become an Indian once more. Her reverie was broken when he lifted both hands off the wheel and slammed them down on the horn-rim, sending wild surges of sound across the prairie: