Centennial (159 page)

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:

This trip
’s
been worthwhile, Vernor. I may not know what I think about Nixon or Agnew or Watergate, but at last I know what I think about the American Indian. Every reservation in this nation should be closed down. The land should be distributed among the Indians, and if some of them wish to continue living communally, they should be encouraged, like the Pueblos in New Mexico. The rest should enter the dominant culture, to sink or swim as their talents determine. The way my family had to. The way Flor
’s
did in Old Mexico. Many good things will be lost, but the best will persist
—
in legend, in remembered ways of doing things, in our attitude toward the land. I can no longer support a system which keeps the Indians apart, like freaks of nature. They aren
’t
whooping cranes, to be preserved till the last one dies out. They
’re
part of the mainstream, and
that
’s
where they belong.

At dusk on November 28 we took motel rooms in Douglas, home of the fabled jackalope, half-jackrabbit, half-antelope. Local taxidermists were so skilled at grafting small deer horns onto the heads of stuffed jackrabbits that many visitors, including Flor Garrett, believed the mutant existed. A huge statue in the town square confirmed her belief, and when she asked where a live jackalope could be seen, Paul broke into laughter.

“You’re precious,” he told her. “A typical tourist. What the United States ought to do right now is take the money we’re spending in Southeast Asia and on space shots and build a barbed-wire fence around the whole state of Wyoming. Declare it a national treasure and allow only five hundred thousand visitors a year. When you come through the gate, the officer ties a little broadcasting radio around your neck, the way Floyd Calendar did with his bears, and they’d keep track of you, and after seven days a message would go out, ‘Paul Garrett, driving a gray Buick with a beautiful Chicano girl. He’s been inside a week. Kick him to hell out.’ ”

Flor pointed out that whereas he had wanted to dissolve a small Indian reservation, he now wanted to initiate a huge Wyoming reservation, and she thought this contradictory, but he said, “Not at all. Human beings cannot be kept in a state of preservation, but irreplaceable natural resources can. I say, ‘Declare Wyoming a national park and treat it as such.’ ” After dinner he bought her a small jackalope, and as he presented it to her formally, he announced to the diners in the restaurant that she was now protector of this rare creature.

On Thursday, November 29, we drove to the spot which Garrett loved most in America, the one he visited at least twice each year. It was of little consequence, really, and even though it had at one point played a specific role in American history, it had not been a major one; few Americans could ever have heard of it. But the site had been preserved with such intelligence that it stood as an example of almost flawless restoration.

It was Fort Laramie, still standing in silence at the spot where the swift dark Laramie River emptied into the North Platte. Wild turkeys still roamed the fields where the Indians had camped during the Treaty of 1851, and elk could sometimes be seen on the range where the Oglala Sioux had hunted. In the soft limestone west of the fort the deep ruts of wagon wheels could still be seen, where straining forty-niners had dragged their covered wagons.

The old buildings had been preserved if their walls were sound, or reconstructed if only their foundations remained, and not a false note had been struck. There were no mighty cannon or ramparts filled with dummy soldiers firing at nonexistent Indians. Only the materials available in the 1860s and 1870s had been used, and the sutler’s store where the emigrants had bought their last food before heading west for Oregon still offered Arbuckle’s coffee and those handsome white blankets of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Not many visitors came to Fort Laramie, for it was in no way spectacular, but scores of men and women who loved the west made pilgrimages to its clean, well-ordered acres to recapture the reality of American settlement:

Down there is where Pasquinel and McKeag had their winter headquarters. Lame Beaver and his Arapaho spent one winter over there. Levi Zendt and that remarkable girl, Elly Zendt
...
she
’s
the one whose diaries you read. The wagons came down that hill and camped on the other side of the Laramie. The great convocation you read about
...
1851 when all the Indians came here. The Crow came in from the northwest over there. It must have been a tremendous sight, the whole Crow nation on horseback. And this building over here is where McKeag and Clay Basket had their store. That
’s
where my great-great-grandfather Maxwell Mercy, first met them. This other fine building
...
Old Bedlam it
’s
still called. That
’s
where my ancestor Pasquinel Mercy served before he went to Little Big Horn with General C
u
ster.

Our visit ended on a bitter note, because as Garrett was about to leave the fort, be saw on the bulletin board an announcement that any letters mailed there would be posted with the handsome three-cent stamp honoring Francis Parkman, and if there was one man in American letters Garrett despised, it was Parkman:

Honoring a man like that! He debased the Oregon Tr
ail with one of the feeblest his
torica
l
books ever written. He had no comprehension of what the trail signified, no compassion for the Indians who roamed it and no generosity for the emigrants using it. He could turn a phrase rather well, but in human understanding he was pitifully deficient. He made fun of Mexicans, ridiculed Indians, heaped abuse on hardworking farmers from the midwest, lacked any comprehension of Catholic culture and, worst of all, failed to understand the
prairie. He judged all life by the meanest Boston yardstick, and almost every generalization he made about the west was wrong.