Blaze (67 page)

"I didn't think I could love anyone as much as I love you, bia-cara, but in a different way I do. He's you and me and also specially himself, and I want to give him everything. Unrealistic… but a father's dream."

Bending his head, he slowly rubbed his chin against her hair, fraught suddenly with a rush of random doubts.

"And a mother's dream," Blaze whispered back, twisting around in his arms so she was facing him. "We can give him a life in these mountains. A life of freedom and worth. We can."

Hazard smiled a little. "My determined angel." He kissed her lightly on the forehead. "But we'll try." And he vowed to himself to protect them always.

"When do we go back to the mine?" Blaze asked.

"You say a very assured 'we.' "

"Why not? Yancy's gone, so we're safe again."

"As safe as we'll ever be," he ambiguously answered.

"So don't even think of going back there alone. We're coming with." And she glowered at him as only she could, until, knowing that she'd won, her wonderful smile took over.

Hazard's arms tightened around her and they both felt the peace. He returned her smile slowly and leisurely. "Are you telling me you're going to be in my pocket the rest of my life?"

"The rest of your life, Jon Hazard Black, so what do you think of that?" Love welled up between them, incomprehensible, uncontrollable, but like a quiet victory in a world tarnished with madness… theirs alone.

His smile warmed his eyes. "I think," he said, very, very gently, "I'm a remarkably"—and he tenderly emphasized the word, giving just the proper inflection to the American slang—"a remarkably lucky man."

Out there, beyond the lodge wall, beyond the village boundaries, lay the future.

BY 1872, ONLY nine years after the first major gold strike in Montana Territory, the Absarokee, who had roamed their land in freedom for a millennium, were on reservations. With one exception.

Jon Hazard Black's gold purchased security for his small clan in the form of thousands of acres of mountain land. Blaze's inheritance, restored by a brief and uncon-tested judgment of the Boston courts, bought additional acreage, both parcels carefully deeded in her name. Furthermore, sufficient wealth came from the mine so that Hazard's clan prospered. The Absarokee always had been the best horse breeders, dealers, racers: avocations acceptable in the state which grew up around them. The process of assimilation had begun with Hazard's father, Hazard and Blaze made it happen, and Trey inherited a frontier world of rapid change and altered circumstances with a privileged ease and panache.

"Do you think, bia," Hazard would protest occasion-ally as the boy grew to manhood, "he's being given too much?"

"Nonsense," his doting mother would reply. "No more than you and I had."

But born of such parents, both more audacious and bold than average, Trey Braddock-Black was truly their child—spoiled and reckless and, some said, handled with too light a rein. But he was also warm and gentle and imbued with a charm that dazzled like meteor fire. And when he came of age in the raw, turbulent early days of Montana statehood, he cut a swath a mile wide, supported by his parents' wealth and a semiprivate army at his back, an army of Absarokee warriors he referred to as "family."

Montana politics at the time was a confusion of interminable squabbling, focusing power for varying lengths of time in the hands of men who didn't know how to use it, misused it, or abused it. Hazard's private army assured his clan a modicum of influence in his corner of the state and protected his son against interests unsympathetic to the notion of a live male heir to Hazard's vast holdings.

With Trey's reentry into local society after the years away at school, gossip flew and tongues clucked in disbelief at his rash and reckless ways. Fathers fingered their guns in nervous readiness when Trey showed their daughters too much of his careless, indiscreet attention, while deb mothers prayed Jon Hazard Black's starkly handsome and wealthy son would settle down at last.

NOTES

p. 2 1. For simplicity's sake the name Montana is used, although in 1861 there was no "Montana." The northern reaches of Unorganized Indian Country had been made a part of Nebraska Territory in 1854; then the area was placed in Dakota Territory, carved out of Nebraska in 1861. After the mining frontier moved into the northern Rockies, Idaho Territory was formed in early 1863 from parts of Washington Territory and Dakota Territory, encompassing present Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. Montana Territory came into existence May 1,1864, with Bannack as temporary capital.

p. 2 2. The Absarokee were a secessionist group from the Hidatsa and moved farther westward anywhere, depending on the source, from five hundred years ago to as recently as 1776. After the move, they came to call themselves Absarokee or Children of the Large-Beaked Bird, a species no longer seen in their country.

In Hidatsa, "Absa" refers to a large, crafty bird. From this came the French translation, gens de corbeaux, hence Crow. They never called themselves Crow even though this was the name used by all their neighbors. And in sign language, the sign for Crow Indian is made by extending the arms forward at shoulder height and imitating the flapping of a bird's wings.

p. 61 3. Granville Stuart, one of the earliest pioneers in Montana, who later became one of the influential settlers and state historians, prosaically relates a story about the hanging of some horse thieves. After the men were captured, notice of their arrest was sent to Fort Magin-nis and Samuel Fischel, deputy U.S. Marshal, started at once to get the prisoners and take them to White Sulphur Springs. At the mouth of the Musselshell a posse met Fischel and took the prisoners from him. They hanged them from a log placed between two log cabins, burned the cabins, and cremated the bodies. He calmly mentions that several of the men hanged belonged to wealthy and influential families, and there arose a great "hue and cry in certain localities" over what was termed the arrogance of the cattle kings. The cattlemen were accused of hiring gunmen to murder these men. He then goes on to declare, "There was not a grain of truth in this talk." And that took care of that as far as he was concerned.

p. 61 4. If a claimant fixed his surface boundaries on a claim in such a way as to embrace the apex (that is, the top) of the vein, he might follow the vein through the limits of his claim. In practice this meant that millions of dollars could depend on the geological whimsy of whether the apex of a vein was within a claim. In other words, Hazard could follow a rich vein that began on his claim across to other claims. Much court litigation involved the mutually contradictory testimony of what consti-tuted a single deposit, a lode, and a replacement deposit.

p. 66 5. Francois Larocque, a fur trader with the Northwest Company, traveled with the Ab-sarokee in 1805 and left an account of their life. In trying to discover whether the term leggings was meant literally, as in leggings and breechcloth, or used as "trousers," Larocque solved the mystery. He left a description of how they dressed before the white men came. He noted that the men usually wore tight leggings rather than a breechcloth, and that the tops of these were tucked under a belt or girdle.

p. 93 6. In the spring of 1851, Congress appropriated $100,000 for the holding of a great council of "the wild tribes of the prairie." Assisted by agent Tom Fitzpatrick and the celebrated missionary-explorer Father Pierre de Smet, Supt. D. D. Mitchell managed to gather, on September 1, eight to twelve thousand souls. The Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Snakes, and several Sioux branches arrived en masse, while the Crows, Arikaras, Gros Ventres, and As-siniboines were represented by delegations. The Comanches declined for fear of losing horses to the Crow and Sioux. During the eighteen-day encampment, Mitchell wrote: "The different tribes, though hereditary enemies, interchanged daily visits, both in their sectional and individual capacities; smoked and feasted together, exchanged presents; adopted each other's children."

The document signed there established federal right to build roads and military posts in Indian country, fixed tribal boundaries, and provided for the annual payment of $50,000 in goods for a fifty-year period. Then the Senate chopped this to ten years and only the Crows refused to sign; thus, the treaty was never ratified.

p. 94 7. There's no need to go over the government's treachery in its history of treating with the In-dians, nor to detail the thousands of corrupt and malevolent men sent out as Indian agents. The following passage perhaps says it all. Keep in mind that this statement was made in 1864, before the territory had an Indian policy or even a legislature. The newly arrived agent for the Blackfeet, who lived just north of the Absarokee in what is now northern Montana and southern Canada, in 1864 called his charges "the most impudent and insulting Indians" he had ever met, and remarked that were it not that their treaty expired the next year, he would recommend that their next annuity be paid "in powder and ball from the mouth of a six-pounder."

p. 148 8. The Absarokee were unusually indulgent to their children. Fur traders detested their undisciplined children. One clerk at Fort Union noted that "young Crows are as wild and unrestrained as wolves," and another trader observed that "the greatest nuisance in Creation is Crow children, boys from the ages of 9 to 14." On occasion, crying babies were even allowed to disrupt the solemn proceedings of treaty commissions. And one particularly tender story describes an Absarokee father with his young son at an early Fourth of July celebration in Helena. The young child already had an ice-cream cone in each hand and saw some candy he must have. His father bought it for him without comment, and kindly held one cone while his son tried the new candy.

p. 238 9. Present-day Pryor Gap received its Absarokee name of Hits with the Arrow from the legend about a boy who had been befriended by dwarfs dwelling there. Absarokee passing through these mountains were instructed to make offerings to these dwarfs by shooting arrows into a certain crevice. Hence the gap was called Hits with the Arrow, Pryor Creek was named Arrow Creek, and the Pryor Moun-tains were known as the Arrowhead Mountains.

p. 251 10. About two days after a child's birth, its mother pierced its ears with a heated awl and then stuck a greased stick through the perforations. When the sores cured, earrings were put in. The ceremonial piercing of ears was not an Absarokee custom.

p. 251 11. Crow warriors risked their lives to perform defined deeds on a raid. Most praiseworthy was the striking of an enemy with a gun, bow, or riding quirt; then came the cutting of an enemy's horse from a tepee door; next, the recovery of an enemy's weapon in battle; and finally, the riding-down of an enemy. The winner of all four could decorate his deerskin war shirt with four beaded or porcupine-quill strips, one running from shoulder to wrist on each sleeve and one over each shoulder from front to back.

p. 256 12. The native word for clan is ac-ambare axi a, "lodge where there is driftwood," the idea apparently being that clansfolk cling together like driftwood lodged at a particular spot.

p. 256 13. Denig, the trader in charge of Fort Union, the principal trading post on the Missouri, estimates the Crow nation at 460 lodges in 1855-56, separated into several bands, each governed by a chief.

p. 257 14. Denig notes: about one half of the Crow nation have a plurality of wives, the rest only one each. The property of husband and wife is separate. Each has a share of horses, merchandise, and ornaments. Not being accustomed to depend much on each other's fidelity (Denig found their love lives scandalous), they wisely prepare for immediate separation in the event of any great domestic quarrel. When from certain causes they decide on parting, the husband takes charge of all male children unless they are too small to leave the mother; the female part go with the wife. Guns, bows, ammunition, and all implements of war and the chase belong to the man, while kettles, pans, hides, and other baggage fall to the woman's share. The lodge is hers, and the horses and other property having been divided years before in an anticipation of this event, each has no difficulty in selecting his or her own. Denig's entire account is the disapproving white man's point of view of a culture different from his own. However, when one ignores the disapprobation, details are gleaned from his journal. As a trader, the Absarokee failed to find favor with him, for he wrote: "The trade with the Crows was never very profitable. They buy only the very finest and highest priced goods." (In fact, they traded the least of any of the tribes with the white man.) Another prominent trader further noted that they were wise enough to refuse to be debauched and swindled by the use of alcohol—the most profitable item in a trader's stock. They called whiskey "white man's fool water" and left it alone until after they settled on the reservations.