Centennial (26 page)

A tremor passed through his body, stifling his song. With a mighty effort he tried to pull the fatal spear entirely through his chest, but his strength flagged. He fell forward into the dust of battle, facing the corpse of Rude Water, but Lame Beaver did not see his foe. His last earthly vision was of the pinto galloping across the prairie.

This battle had been more bloody than usual, and the death of Lame Beaver infuriated Our People, though why it should have is a mystery, for he went into the fight determined to die. Our People sacked the village and took fifteen Pawnee girls captive; they offered to trade them for the girl destined for sacrifice, but she was long since dead, so they traded for horses—three girls for one horse.

Jumping Snake decreed that Lame Beaver be given a chieftain’s burial, and a high wooden platform was built in three cottonwood trees beside the Platte. There, well above ground, the shattered old body was laid to rest. The stake to which he had attached himself was placed beside him, with the thongs of honor drifting loose in the wind. He was covered with a blanket, and on one of the cottonwoods was hung the head of the horse Rude Water had been riding; on another, the tail. The Pawnee lance with which he had defended himself at the last was laid across his body, and young warriors wanted his rifle to be placed there, too, but Jumping Snake said he would keep the rifle. If he didn’t, the Pawnee would take it.

There, high above the plains he had loved and the river he had so often followed, Lame Beaver, the man of many coups, found his rest.

He died at the end of an epoch, the grandest the western Indians were to know. In his lifetime an impoverished band of northern Indians had wandered south, hunting the bison on foot and confined by necessity to narrow regions. In their new home they had found the horse and the gun and had developed a wild, sweeping pattern of life which held on to the good customs of the past while embracing the viable new ones, now possible.

Our People and the Cheyenne! How few in number, how powerful in essence! Never did they number as many as seven thousand combined, which meant that there could not have been much over three thousand males. Many of these would have been old and more would have been infants, so that there might have been at most one thousand warriors.

Has there ever been in America another group of a thousand men who left so deep an imprint upon the image of the nation? These few men, tall and bronzed, welded to their horses, daring in battle and just in peace, rode across the prairies and into the permanent record of this land. They dominated their period and their terrain. They defended their homes with valor and left their plain not in defeat but trailing glory. In their last days they staked themselves out and parried all lances coming at them.

Cheyenne and Arapaho—for that was the name the other tribes called Our People—were never the majority in any place they occupied; they were always pressed in upon by tribes at least as able: the Brule Sioux and the Oglala Sioux and the Cree and the Blackfoot and the dark Ute and the centaur Comanche, and the cruel Apache and the crafty Kiowa and the far-thinking Pawnee. But their customs were among the finest the Indians of America produced, and their physical bearing the most commanding.

When the Arapaho chieftains met to count coups in the battle against the Pawnee they formed a noble image: they wore the fringed leggings of winter, the vests decorated with quills and elk teeth, and above all, those resplendent headdresses of woven material set with colored stones and adorned with eagle feathers.

“He counted coup upon Rude Water,” a narrator related, “and upon the warrior who pierced his leg and upon the one who stabbed him through the arm. With his captured lance he counted coup on the Pawnee with the torn shirt and on the Pawnee with the brown horse. He tried to count coup on the warrior who stabbed him through the back, but in this he failed.”

The great chiefs nodded. Thanks to the heroism of Lame Beaver, their eastern flank was secured for a few more years. Not soon would the Pawnee want to invade Arapaho lands after such a defeat. They would be back, of course, in time. The Pawnee would think of some way to retaliate, but for the present the Arapaho could direct their attention to the coming winter. This year they would camp at Rattlesnake Buttes.

While the Arapaho chiefs were awarding Lame Beaver his final set of coups, a gathering destined to have more lasting consequences took place among the ashes of the desolated Pawnee village. In burying their great chief Rude Water, someone discovered that he had been killed by a golden bullet, and then it was found that the lesser chief, too, had been slain by a bullet of gold, and since the Pawnee, because of their trading with whites, knew the value of gold, the discovery caused a sensation.

The bullets were sent with two knowing white men down the Missouri River to the trading post at Saint Louis and there delivered to a dealer who was stunned by their purity and the apparent size of the nuggets from which they had been formed. The white men pestered the Pawnee with repeated questions, but all they could tell was, “Lame Beaver, big chief of the Arapaho, he fired the bullets.”

In this way the legend was launched that an Arapaho chief named Lame Beaver had discovered a deposit of pure gold from which he made bullets for shooting bison. “Search the bison bones and you may find his golden bullets. Better still find out where he had his gold mine and you’ll have wealth untold.” A thousand men would tramp the plains and probe the hills, searching for the lost mine of Lame Beaver the Indian who used gold bullets, and none would have believed the truth: that he shot those bullets without knowing what they were.

In the Arapaho camp a darker side of Indian custom was about to manifest itself, the hideous side that later apologists would want to forget or deny. Because Blue Leaf was no longer the wife of a warrior and co-head of a family, she had no right to a tipi of her own, and women from all parts of the camp now descended upon it to tear it apart for their own use. The two special poles which operated the upper vent through which the smoke escaped went first. They were grabbed by a woman whose husband had long envied them.

The three key-poles which Lame Beaver had cut in Blue Valley went next. They were ripped out of the ground and torn from their bison covering, which caused the rest of the tipi to collapse. The lesser poles went quickly, for it was known that Lame Beaver had the best in camp.

The bison skin was not a prize; it was old and would soon have to be replaced, but the parfleches that Lame Beaver had made were sturdy and much desired. Two women fell into a fight over the larger, and one suffered a cut hand, but the brawling did not stop for that. Quickly the clay basket vanished.

The bed on which Lame Beaver had spent so much of his life passed into the hands of a young wife who had long wanted its painted backrest for her warrior husband, and the beautiful bison rug, covered with paintings of Lame Beaver’s many coups, vanished. No one would remember where it went.

Slowly the tipi was ground into the dust of cruel indifference, and at the end of the day Blue Leaf was left with no possessions in the world save what she was wearing. Her daughter Clay Basket had little more, but she at least was assured of a place to sleep at the home of an uncle. Blue Leaf did not even have that for the law of the plains was clear and immutable: elderly widows who had no man to care for them had expended their usefulness, and the tribe would not allow itself to be impeded by them. For an older woman like Blue Leaf, with no son to protect her and no brother willing to invite her into his tipi, there was no home and there could be none.

That night the first heavy snow fell. Blue Leaf survived the snow by finding a place among the horses, the next day Clay Basket, seeing her pitiful condition, wanted to bring her into the tipi where she had found refuge, but her uncle, Blue Leaf’s brother, who had deprived Lame Beaver of the pinto, refused.

On the third night a blizzard struck, and Blue Leaf could find no shelter except among the shivering horses. She had not eaten that day and was extremely weak, but as she crept closer to the horses and they to her, she did not complain. Lame Beaver and she had anticipated that this must be the consequence of his suicide. This had been the fate of her mother and her aunts, and she had expected nothing better.

In the morning she was found frozen to death. In this practical manner the Arapaho living at Rattlesnake Buttes were freed from the encumbrance of an old woman who had outlived her usefulness.

CAUTION TO
US
EDITORS. You have three basic considerations to keep in mind when you introduce any material on Indians in Colorado.

First, although the plains Indians were the most spectacular tribes in American history, they were also the least interesting intrinsically. The Arapaho and Cheyenne arrived very late on the scene. They occupied land which wiser Indians like the Pawnee and more indigenous ones like the Ute had inspected for several centuries and found unproductive. More important, their previous wanderings from east of the Mississippi and north of the Missouri to the arid plains had deprived them of most of their cultural heritage, which they had been forced to leave behind as so much unnecessary baggage. They were cultural nomads whose quality was uplifted by the horse. They must not be depicted in either your illustrations or your text as typical American Indians. Almost any other of the major tribes would serve that purpose more appropriately.

Second, in preparing my notes I fought constantly, though perhaps unsuccessfully, against the temptation to attribute too many consequences to the Indian’s obtaining the horse. Everything I say is true, but I sometimes have doubts as to what it means. I think the best precaution is to keep in mind that the arrival of the horse within a tribe like the Arapaho changed not one degree the basic attitudes which the Arapaho had developed over the preceding two thousand years. They were already nomads; the horse merely increased their range. They already had the travois; the horse could merely lug a bigger load. They were already tied to the bison; the horse allowed them to get to him more swiftly and to kill him in a less wasteful way. They already had a society constructed around coup and war party; the horse merely encouraged them to engage in raids which covered more territory. (I am impressed by the fact that with the horse the Arapaho engaged in not one battle which took them into any area which they had not previously penetrated on foot!) The horse merely intensified customs already in existence. There was, however, one minor change which may have been effectuated by the horse: an improved status for women. The burdens they had to carry became smaller; they could accompany the tribe on its farthest excursions; and some women did get horses of their own, which they rode on migrations or to the bison butchering. If Indian men loved their horses, Indian women must have adored them.

Third, you must not depict the plains Indians as having been for any great length of time in the locations where the white men discovered them. I have our branch of the Arapaho arriving in the land between the two Plattes in 1756. Virginia Trenholm, a leading expert on the Arapaho, claims they didn’t get that far south until 1790, which is highly significant, because this would put them there somewhat
after
the first French and English fur trappers! I’ve looked at all the evidence and have concluded that they must have been there somewhat earlier than that; perhaps 1756 is premature, but I think not. If your own researches indicate a later date for their arrival, I do not object. But please do not fall into the error of writing about white men intruding onto areas which the Indians had held from time immemorial ... at least not on the Colorado plains. The Pawnee had lived in eastern Nebraska for centuries, but in the western areas where Lame Beaver operated they were latecomers. The Ute had lived in the Rockies but had never established any kind of firm foothold in the area around Centennial. In the period before they had horses, the Comanche were a miserably poor mountain tribe; they moved rather late into position along the Arkansas. The limited area you are dealing with appears to have been devoid of permanently settled human beings from about 6000 B.C. to about A.D. 1750. You are dealing with a very young area, culturally, and it was certainly not one which the Indians had occupied for very long.

Visual images
. In depicting the Indian background do not commit these traditional errors:

Do not show them on war parties in full regalia. I judge from what I have read that Indians in their everyday occupations looked pretty much like students at the Boulder campus of Colorado University today, except that the Indians may have been somewhat cleaner.

On the other hand, don’t overdo the cleanliness bit. When I was discussing the Arapaho tipi with an old expert, he listened to my favorable description, then grunted and said, “You’ve left out the one thing you could be sure of in an Arapaho tipi.” When I asked what this was, he said, “If you sat on the chief’s bed with that handsome backrest, the one thing you could be sure of catching was lice.”

In the pre-white-man war parties and set battles, few members were engaged and few deaths occurred. The massed charges of western paintings did not occur.

For the pre-white-man era, the paintings of George Catlin are still the best ones to rely on.

For the white-man era, I much prefer the paintings of Charles M. Russell. The Frederic Remington paintings are authentic as depictions of the white man at work on the prairies, but I do not find them sensitive to the Indian.

Don’t, for God’s sake, perpetuate either in word or illustration or map the legend that the Indians got their horses from the chance descendants of two horses, one stallion, one mare, which escaped from Coronado’s excursion and bred like crazy, producing hundreds of colts, all of whom bred just as single-mindedly. Sorry. Coronado had stallions, none of which escaped. The Indians got their mounts either while they were working for Spaniards, or in warfare, or by the time-honored process of after-dark theft, at which they were masters.