The report, when it reached the streets, evoked a blind fury, and Sergeant Kennedy had to warn General Wade that it would not be prudent for him to appear in public, for there was talk of hanging him, but the little soldier pushed his advisor aside and walked boldly to where his horses waited for the ride back to Leavenworth, reminding Kennedy in a loud voice that the men who might want to hang him were more accustomed to dealing with women and children than with a soldier who stood ready to put a bullet through them if they made a move.
Nevertheless, on the day following Wade’s departure, one of Skimmerhorn’s supporters ambushed young Jimmy Clark and shot him dead in full daylight at a main intersection.
Some sixty persons witnessed the murder, and saw clearly who had done it—a broken-down prospector who had been paid fifteen dollars for the job—but no one would testify against him. Under the circumstances, the murderer had to be released. He was slipped another fifteen dollars and was seen no more.
This doleful event received scant notice because a hurricane had begun to sweep the prairies. After the massacre at Rattlesnake Buttes, Chief Broken Thumb, who escaped death by refusing to enter the reservation, assumed command of the two tribes, with Jake Pasquinel as his first lieutenant, and the spirit of revenge that animated these men made disaster inevitable.
Major Mercy was dispatched from Denver to offer the tribes any reasonable concessions if only they would lay down their arms and accept a permanent peace guaranteed by Washington, and on a wintry day in a tipi north of the Platte he met with the crucial leaders for the last time. As at their first meeting, Jake Pasquinel sat in the middle, his face old and scarred and without even a flicker of hope. To his left sat Broken Thumb, lost in a bitter hatred. To Pasquinel’s right sat Lost Eagle, smaller now but still wearing his funny hat. How pitiful these men seemed, confused remnants of tribes that had once defined and protected an empire, how lost in time, how utterly beyond rescue.
“You’re brave to come here,” Jake conceded bitterly.
“I come with a final offer ... real peace.”
Broken Thumb and Jake laughed in his face, and the former snarled, “Get out.”
“I am ashamed,” Mercy began.
“Ashamed?” Pasquinel exploded. “Hundreds dead—old men and old women, children too—and you’re ashamed. Mercy, go before we kill you.”
“Get out!” Broken Thumb repeated.
“Lost Eagle,” Mercy said softly, “cannot we ...”
“He is not to speak,” Pasquinel shouted. “He betrayed us. Everything he said was lies.”
Mercy pushed Jake away and went to the old chief, but no words were spoken, for Lost Eagle had only tears—the time for words was lost.
“Can’t we talk reason?” Mercy pleaded, but Broken Thumb refused him the dignity of an answer.
It was Jake who spoke for the Indians now. “It will be war ... and murder ... and burning ... all along the Platte.”
“Oh, God!” Mercy cried, close to tears. “It mustn’t end this way.”
“Get out,” Broken Thumb said, and he called for braves to take the major away, but Mercy broke loose and came back to Jake and took him by the hands and said, “It should have ended differently,” and Jake stared at him impassively and said, “From the beginning it was bound to end this way,” and the braves dragged Mercy away.
The two tribes went on a rampage, looting and burning and belatedly earning for themselves the designation savages. With either Broken Thumb or Jake in the lead, they would sweep down on unprotected farms and slaughter everything that lived, even the chickens.
They destroyed the little settlement at Julesburg and overran the army fort farther west along the river. The South Platte became a region of terror, with fiery assaults day after day. The telegraph wires were cut, so that no news seeped in to Denver, and the overland stage stopped running, for on two different attempts it had been waylaid and its passengers killed.
A Denver photographer remembered a portrait he had taken of the Pasquinel brothers, and posters were distributed throughout the west, showing two scowling half-breeds in Indian dress—Jake with a livid scar down his face, Mike with an evil grin—and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, readers waited avidly for the latest news about the depredations of the “Half-Breed Monsters of the Plains.”
Finally the killing became so rampant that an army detachment was sent out from Omaha to track down the hostiles. The tribes divided into two groups. One, led by Lost Eagle, surrendered to the army at Fort Kearny; the other, led by Broken Thumb and the Pasquinels, sent a message to Omaha that they would fight to the death.
In a pitched battle, the soldiers closed in on Broken Thumb, and although he could have escaped along the Platte, he chose to stake himself out on ground he had long defended. With seven stubborn warriors he fought till bullets swept the area, then stood upright, and with arms uplifted, began his chant: “Only the mountains live forever, only the river runs for all the days.” He grabbed what rifles he could from the corpses about him and fired methodically until nine bullets ripped through his chest.
The Pasquinel brothers escaped this battle, and a cry rose from the whole nation set free from its preoccupation with the Civil War: “The monsters must be slain.” And now a bizarre situation developed. Colonel Skimmerhorn volunteered to conscript a militia of his former adherents. “We shall track down the miscreants if their path leads to hell itself!” he proclaimed, and men from all parts of the territory proved eager to march with him again. All Denver applauded when he announced, “Our punitive expedition sets out from Zendt’s Farm tomorrow!”
His opening strategy was draconian. Distributing teams along a three-hundred-mile stretch of the Platte, he waited for dry and windy days, then set fire to the prairie, producing a conflagration so extensive that it burned away all edible fodder from the Platte nearly to the Arkansas. A pall of smoke hung over the area and wildlife for thousands of square miles was threatened. It was one of the worst disasters ever to hit the west, and it accomplished nothing.
Conquered Indians were already on the reservation. The Pasquinel brothers and their renegades knew how to slip through the flames, so even while Skimmerhorn was setting fire to the prairies, they rampaged up and down the Platte, burning farms and scalping the inhabitants.
But finally Skimmerhorn tightened the noose, leaving the Pasquinels diminishing territory in which to maneuver, and one wintry morning along the Platte, about twenty miles east of Zendt’s Farm, a detachment of militia surprised Jake and pinioned his arms before he could shoot himself. Messengers were sent to the colonel with the stirring news: “Jake Pasquinel has been taken.”
Skimmerhorn reached the scene about two o’clock in the afternoon, and within ten minutes, convened a drumhead court-martial. “Guilty,” the men said unanimously, and no juster verdict was ever reached along the Platte. Two men threw a rope over a cottonwood branch, tied it around Jake Pasquinels neck and dragged him aloft. The knot had been poorly tied, and for an unbelievably long time he kicked and twisted, strangling slowly as the militia cheered.
That night word of the hanging reached Zendt’s Farm, and Levi got a shovel, saddled up a horse, kissed Lucinda goodbye and rode east to cut down the body and bury it. When word of this circulated through the region, it infuriated the Skimmerhorn people, who judged it a rebuke to their triumph, and they were so enraged that a squaw man should have done this thing, they stormed down to the stockade and set it afire.
Stolidly Zendt watched as the flames consumed his home, then had the bitter experience of being turned away by four different neighbors before he found one who would give him and his wife shelter for that night.
Only Mike Pasquinel now survived, a fattish half-breed, fifty-four years old and aware that there was no longer hope of any kind. By keeping to the low bushes that grew along the Platte, he made his way to where his sister had lived, and when he saw the ashes of the stockade, he supposed that she and her family were dead. But he remained hidden, an
d finally saw Levi Zendt and Lucinda come poking among the ruins to see what could be salvaged.
Cautiously he made himself known to them, and with equal caution they spoke. “In this village you’re bound to be captured,” they reasoned, ‘so give yourself up.”
“No!” Mike snarled. “Find me two guns. I’ll fight it out.”
“Mike,” his sister pleaded, “let’s put a stop to the killing.”
For one brief moment Mike seemed to waver. “Will they hang me?” he asked.
Lucinda was afraid to hazard a guess, so she turned to Levi, who said quietly, “I think so.”
“No!” Lucinda protested. “They didn’t hang those three who surrendered in Nebraska.”
“They weren’t Pasquinels,” Mike said, and with that, old bitterness took control. “I’ll hole up behind that wall. I’ll shoot ten before they shoot me.”
It was Levi who made the decision: “We’ll give you no guns, Mike. You’re going to surrender, now. Decent men live around here, and they’ll see you get a decent trial.”
So they made three white flags from Lucinda’s petticoat and held them aloft on sticks and walked slowly down the village’s only street, with Levi and Lucinda shouting, “Surrender! Surrender! We’re bringing in Mike Pasquinel.”
As they passed the offices of the Clarion a shot rang out and Pasquinel crumpled to the ground. He had been shot in the back by Colonel Frank Skimmerhorn, who had watched each step of the surrender from the Clarion window. The editor, having been on the scene, wrote this eyewitness story:
Vindicated! Colonel Frank Skimmerhorn, who in recent months has suffered contumely at the hands of the lily-livered segment of our population, was completely vindicated yesterday afternoon when he single-handedly shot the last of the Pasquinels as the half-breed was brazenly trying to commit further depredations in this town. Colonel Skimmerhorn can now hang up his guns.
Now that the threat represented by the Pasquinel brothers and Broken Thumb was eliminated, officials sought a true peace. Belatedly they awakened to the fact that in Major Mercy they had someone who understood Indians and who might possibly bring order to the chaos of recent months. Accordingly, they sent him north to deal with Lost Eagle and those few who were camped once more at that fatal spot near the buttes.
When Mercy saw the old man—bent, rejected by his people but still ready to patch up some kind of peace with the white man—he had to control himself severely lest he show his tears, for Lost Eagle appeared with a fragment of the flag Abraham Lincoln had given him and the Buchanan dangling from his neck.
“Was Mr. Lincoln really shot?” the old man asked.
“He was,” Mercy said.
“I am sorry for all good men who are murdered,” Lost Eagle said. At this point his wife appeared, miraculously recovered from her wounds but scarred about the head from being scalped. Unlike her husband, she was in good spirits. That day Man-Above watched me,” she said, and they both proceeded to outline new plans whereby the surviving Arapaho and Cheyenne would get food and blankets.
“We owe you much,” Mercy said, and in proof he ordered supply wagons to come in from Zendt’s Farm, and soldiers actually unloaded foodstuffs, and Lost Eagle told his council, “See! It really is a new day.”
Two days later, when Major Mercy returned to Denver, toughs from Colonel Skimmerhorn’s disbanded militia lay in wait and attacked him, calling him “Indian lover,” and they beat him so savagely that he lay in the street for several hours before he could summon up enough strength to crawl home.
Lisette heard him fumbling up the steps, and ran down to throw her arms about him and drag him into their house. She did not cry, nor did she panic. With delicate touch she cut away the torn skin and washed him. She helped him to their bed and made him broth, which he could not take through his badly damaged mouth, and after doing all she could with salves and ointments, she said defiantly, “Maxwell, we still did the right thing,” and with that assurance he fell asleep.
CAUTION TO US EDITORS: You are aware, since you sent her, that Carol Endermann spent the last weekend in Centennial advising me of your gratification that the work was going so well and of your disappointment that I was sending you too few scintillating quotes and summary generalizations. She cited three examples of the kind of thing you had hoped to get from me, passages which create the illusion of putting the reader at the heart of the problem:
The Indian succeeded in his occupancy of the great prairie because he was able to harmonize his limited inner psychological space, hemmed in by ignorance and superstition, with the unlimited outer physical space by which he was surrounded; whereas the white man failed in his attempt to subdue the prairie because he was unable to harmonize his unlimited inner psychological space, set free by the discoveries of science and the liberation of religion, with the limited outer physical space, which he had cut down to manageable size by the wheel, the wagon, the road, the train and the permanent fort.
If an undergraduate student in whom I had faith submitted that, I would write in the margin “High-falutin’, mebbe?” If a graduate student of promise did, I would write “Pretentious.” If an article in a learned journal, which I was called upon to review, contained it, I would write “Professor Bates offers us a sophisticated disjunction, each premise of which is false, and the conclusion empty.” And if a trusted colleague uttered it, I would tell him “Bullshit.”
The Indian was set free by his discovery of the horse, but because he had no basic philosophy to guide his use of this animal, he allowed it to carry him back into a servitude greater than the one he had known when his only machine was the dog-travois.
This is what we call iridescence without illumination. It was not misuse of the horse that dragged the Indian back to defeat; it was the arrival of the white man on a superior iron horse. But there I go, doing it myself, and it is just as fatuously iridescent when I do it as when another guy does.
The great mystery of Indian history is not his genesis, which becomes clearer every day, nor his supine submission to the white man, which constitutes his great shame, but the fact that he could not adjust while the black slave did. It is for this reason that we see today the former slave in a position of spiritual command, while the Indian has become the slave. The reason, I think, lies in point of origin. The Indian brought with him from Asia neither a culture nor a religion, whereas the black brought both from Africa—a poor culture and the wrong religion, but nevertheless some structure upon which he could build and a base from which he could relatively quickly learn to operate.
This is double-doming. It’s fun. Sometimes it generates a usable concept, and it is invaluable if you’re writing a daily syndicated column where you are obliged to appear smarter than your readers and the local editors. But it’s only a game; it rarely produces anything solid; and it is intellectually undignified. What’s worse, the example given is strict racism.
My strong aversion to this kind of writing stems from the period during which I served with the army in Korea. I was in charge of a billet used by newspaper, magazine and television correspondents, and each Friday the correspondent for a distinguished magazine would lug his typewriter into the bar and groan, “Well, it’s that time again, boys,” and he would type with bold beginning, “So at week’s end the free world could be sure of one thing ...”And then we would sit around and try to discover what mind-boggling truth the free world had come upon that week. Everybody would throw into the hopper his most glittering generality, and finally some central tendency would emerge and the correspondent would type it out, and it always sounded just dandy, and when it appeared in the magazine it created the impression that only the editors of this journal were in touch with the infinite.
But two weeks later, if one looked back upon the earthshaking discovery of the previous fortnight, one realized how empty it had been, how largely irrelevant and, usually, how wrong. History unfolds its revealing disclosures in a somewhat more stately pace and most often we do not recognize th
em as they occur.
I am sorry. I cannot write the way you want me to. I conceive of my job as placing the confused data of history in some kind of formal order, as interestingly as possible, and allowing the user to deduce for himself whatever misleading and glittering generalities he prefers. I would like to think that from my stuff illumination will begin to glow, slowly and without great conflagration, and I suppose that’s why they are now being quoted by scholars.
Would it not be better if you allow me to submit my material in my customary form and then turn it over to Carol, a damned brilliant girl, to inject the kind of flossy conclusions your readers have come to expect? She can do it and I can’t.
In the preceding excerpt there is no sarcasm. Because I realize that during the period I am writing about in this chapter, had the magazine I refer to been in existence, it might have published the following two paragraphs, and they would have been good predictions:
And so, as the year 1861 draws to its close with the discovery of rich deposits of gold at Blue Valley in the Colorado Rockies, all men concerned with the Indian problem know one thing: that the ore-rich lands ceded to the Indian in perpetuity by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 will have to be taken away from them, and the sooner this reclamation starts, the better it will be for the white man ... and for the Indian.