Centennial (53 page)

On July 12 the three wagons were heading westward in desultory fashion when two Pawnee braves rode up along the north bank of the Platte, and as soon as they came. in range Sam Purchas grabbed his Hawken, took aim and put a bullet through the head of one of the young men. His horse reared, his hands fell limp, blood spurted from his forehead and he fell to the ground. Whereupon Purchas grabbed for a second gun and would have shot down the other brave except that Captain Mercy knocked the barrel away, allowing the Pawnee to gallop off.

“You let him get away!” Purchas bellowed.

“You son-of-a-bitch!” Mercy cried, wresting the gun from him.

“Don’t nobody call me a son-of-a-bitch,” Purchas snarled, grabbing for one of his knives.

“I’m sorry,” Mercy said quickly. “I apologize.”

“You better.” Then Purchas appealed to Levi. “Indians ain’t human. They ain’t real people, like you and me.” He looked at Seccombe, whose English mannerisms seemed prissy, and added grudgingly, “Or even him.”

“You killed a man who’d done you no harm,” Seccombe protested.

“He was an Indian,” Purchas said, and rolling back his left sleeve, he showed them the scars on his forearm. “I been fightin’ Indians all my life ... and they’re no damned good. That one the captain let get away will go back and make trouble for us.” He spat tobacco and stalked away, and as he disappeared, Captain Mercy said, “I’m beginning to wonder if he ever was a mountain man. They have more sense.”

By some miracle the enraged Pawnee did not attack. But the next day they killed a defenseless husband and wife, traveling alone, some miles farther west, so that when the Purchas column reached that spot, they found a boy of six and a girl of four sitting dull-eyed by a burned-out wagon with their scalped parents bloating in the dust.

“We can’t take no kids with us,” Purchas warned.

“What the hell do you think we’ll do with them?” Sergeant Lykes stormed.

“Leave ’em here. Somebody else’ll find ’em,” Purphas said.

“I’ll take the children,” Elly said quietly, forcing her way between the two men.

“There will be no children picked up,” Purchas shouted. He took out his revolver and said, “I am runnin’ this wagon train, and we can’t be held back by brats.”

Before he could speak further, a rough hand reached from behind, grabbed his revolver arm and threw him to the ground. As Purchas reached for his knife, Levi leaped upon him, tore it away and smashed him across the face with a heavy right fist. “I’m takin’ the kids,” he said. At this point Captain Mercy, who had been outriding, rode up and could only guess at what had happened.

“Mr. Purchas, what goes on here?”

“Them fools want to take aboard two kids.”

“What children?”

“The Pawnee, sir,” Lykes explained. “They scalped the parents.”

Quietly Captain Mercy looked down, and quietly he said, “Mr. Frazier and Mr. Zendt, will you please bury the bodies? Mr. Seccombe, will you find some stones for a marker?” When the graves were dug and the bodies placed within them, he directed the two children to stand beside him as he read the soldier’s benediction from Romans:

“
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?

“
As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.

“
Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.

“
For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor thi
ngs present, nor things to come.

“
Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
”

Closing the Bible, he took a shovel and handed it to the little boy, saying as he did, “Son, bury your father, who fought the good fight and who died for the sins of others. Bury your mother, who loved you and who turned you over to us for protection. Remember this spot, these hills, for here your new life starts.” He helped the child to toss in the earth, then passed the shovel to the girl. Then he turned the job over to the other men and told the children, “We are your parents now. God sent us to rescue you,” and he delivered them to Elly, who took them into the Conestoga so that they could not look back upon the graves. That night she wrote:

July 13, Saturday ... We have brought the children into our wagon, and they shall be our children from this time on. When they grow up in Oregon and become who knows what, perhaps a doctor and the wife of a minister, what a story they will be able to tell of how they got there, abandoned on the desert and near death only to be saved by God
’s
infinite pity. This is no ordinary trip, for we move within a great dimension ...

Each of the travelers west carried with him misconceptions of the gravest order, errors which would persist and do great damage., Captain Mercy shared Elly Zendt’s impression that what they were traveling through was a desert; he could see no possible use for it in the years ahead and his reports to Washington would be widely circulated throughout the United States and Europe, giving credence to the term “The Great American Desert”:

The land beyond the Missouri River is barren, windswept, without cover for man or animal and without any possible kind of future promise. Our government should maintain forts at scattered intervals throughout the area and subsequent reports of mine will recommend where and at what distances. But these are merely for the control of Indians and for the protection of emigrants on their way to greener fields in Oregon and perhaps California. No civilized man could live in either Nebraska or Kansas and as for the lands more westerly, perhaps a few Mexicans can survive in Santa Fe, but none other. This is desert, untillable, unprofitable, and unneeded.

Sam Purchas and Oliver Seccombe divided -between them most of the existing theories about Indians, and very contradictory they were. Sam was sure the Indians had come originally from Egypt, where they had served the Pharaoh who had persecuted Moses. “They was sent here as punishment,” he explained, “and it’s our duty to punish ’em ... every chance we get. God intends it that way.” He proposed executing Indians as long as his rifle fired: “This land won’t be fit for white people till they’re all dead.”

Seccombe, like many intellectuals of his day, believed that the Indians were really the cream of Welsh society which at an early period in history had emigrated to America in search of a more natural existence, and he was convinced that somewhere just beyond the visible horizon he would come upon the noble Welshman-Indian he sought. He had acquired this faith when a student at Oxford studying the poetry of John Dryden:

I am as
free as nature first made man,

Ere th
e base laws of servitude began,

When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

This noble savage had not resided among the Pawnee, for the ones he saw were beggars living in low, mean huts, but he felt that this was not their fault. They had been contaminated by French traders, but he felt sure that a little farther west, among the Cheyenne, he would find the type he was seeking. He had high hopes for the Cheyenne, having been told that they were tall and straight and possessed of a superior social organization.

Levi Zendt had begun to acquire his misconception, the strangest of all, that rainy afternoon in St. Louis when he first saw the monstrous elephant of the west; it had haunted him for several nights. Tonight, after he finished helping Elly put the two orphaned children to bed, he volunteered for the early watch, and as he studied the prairie he began to see in the heavens a vast form taking shape among the clouds, and the old sense of terror and mystery took possession of him.

“Sergeant Lykes!” he called. “What’s that?”

“Just the elephant ... flicking its tail.”

And as soon as the words were spoken, Levi could see the gigantic animal consuming the heavens, and as from a distance he could hear the ghostly voice of Sergeant Lykes telling of the beast that stalked the prairie, striking terror in the hearts of emigrants: “It’s not like them elephants you see in the circus, no sir. It’s immense. Taller’n most trees, with tusks that curve back like Turkish swords. It has a trunk that switches like a hurricane and a tail that can flick a wagon off’n the trail. Its disposition is mean—my, is it mean—and when he comes at you, you best run, because he has only one thing in mind, to crush you flat.”

Seccombe, hearing voices in the dark, came up to them, and when he heard what they were talking about, contributed his lore: “There’s about forty of the real big ones between here and the mountains. There was one hiding at the Big Blue, threatening us as we tried to cross. And there’s a real monster hiding north of the Pawnee village. But it’s farther west, beyond Fort John, where they congregate.” He allowed his voice to drop, conveying apprehension.

The digging up of mastodon bones, like the ones Dr. Koch had exhibited in St. Louis, had given rise to the mythology of an enormous elephant who roamed the plains, and scores of documents of that period testified to the existence of the beast

Last night, as we prepared to make camp after a long day, a storm came up worse than any we had seen before. Water so thick you couldn
’t
look through it like to wash us away, and
I heard Mr. Stevens say, Well, that time we caught a flick of the elephant
’s
tail.
”
And two women told him they would be quite content to complete the journey without seeing any more elephants.

When Levi came back to the fire after his guard duty, Purchas sought him out to mend the rift that had come between them over the children. As he poured a cup of coffee for Levi, he said, “You ever seen the elephant, Dutchman?”

“Yep.”

“Where?”

Levi hesitated, not wishing to share any confidences with Purchas, but in the end he said softly, “I saw him.”

“Where? Come on, where?”

“You know ...”

Purchas scratched his head, trying to decipher what Levi was saying, and something in the Dutchman’s grave manner betrayed the fact that he was thinking of the Big Blue. “Oh, you mean ...” and by tipping his right hand toward the flame, Purchas indicated a wagon upsetting in the river. He said, “Yes, by God, you really did see the elephant.”

And once again Levi felt the despair that had overtaken him at the Blue, when it looked as though Elly would be swept away, and he helpless with the oxen. At that moment he had cried, “She’s gone,” and he had known then how desperately he loved her. Other men, braver than he, had leaped into the flood to rescue her, and in the darkened sky he had seen the brooding elephant that sapped men’s courage.

He went to the Conestoga and looked inside. There Elly slept with her arms about the orphaned children; she seemed the summation of all that men love on earth, and in the darkness he bent down to kiss her, but she was so exhausted from that day’s decisions, she did not waken.

On July 14 the emigrants took upon themselves a new burden, for on this day they reached the point at which the South Platte flowed into the North. There was much argument as to where this happened, for the waterway was so studded with islands and sand bars that any clear definition of either river was impossible; all that could be said was that somewhere in the vicinity two considerable bodies of water joined.

The junction was like no other in North America; for nearly forty miles of two rivers ran side by side, with only a shallow peninsula separating them. After the travelers had marveled at the phenomenon they became aware that in following the South Platte, they were heading in a southwesterly direction, which took them well away from Oregon.

“We’re off course,” Sergeant Lykes finally protested.

“It’s the South Platte,” Purchas agreed. “Heads south to the mountains.”

“We better cross over,” Lykes said. “Follow the North Platte.”

“You pick the spot, sonny,” Purchas suggested, but wherever the emigrants looked for a possible spot to ford the South Platte, they found only steep banks and quicksand.

“What shall we do?” Captain Mercy asked.

“We’ll wander off our course for some days,” Purchas said, “and pray that we find a good place to ford.”

So now as they drove the oxen, the men kept one eye on the Platte. It was a mean, surly river, offering no invitation to cross, and it was luring them farther and farther from their destination.

On July 15 they met strangers who had seen the elephant. No Oregon for them. They were turnarounds, emigrants who had persevered as far west as their courage would allow, but the elephant had flicked its tail, and they were scurrying back to St. Joseph and civilization-six wagonloads, with only nine oxen surviving.

Levi, the member of Captain Mercy’s group who could best appreciate their terror, took one look at the stricken women and said, “I’ll give you my two spare oxen.”

“You’ll hell!” Purchas cried, and he enlisted Captain Mercy’s support to forestall such stupidity. “We’ll need our oxen,” he warned. “Mebbe for food.”

“They’ll perish,” Levi argued, as the defeated ones listened to the debate which might mean their lives.

“Then they’ll perish,” Purchas said coldly. “They have no right to come into this prairie unprovisioned.”