Centennial (68 page)

On March 26, 1864, a band of Indians from the tribe to which the two murdered braves belonged swept down upon a defenseless farm along the South Platte and killed two white men, lifting their scalps and taking three white women captive. This incident, which had long been feared by settlers along the Platte, threw the white community from Omaha to Denver into consternation, and men talked of forming a militia to control the savages.

On April 3, 1864, another farmer along the Platte found one of his good horses missing and signs that Indians might have been operating in the vicinity. Other farmers said they thought the horse might have been the one they saw grazing on the north bank of the Platte, but Lieutenant Abel Tanner with his group of forty cavalrymen from Denver inspected the site and concluded that it must have been Indians. They therefore authorized a punitive expedition, an abhorrent agency much used in the west, where the phrase meant “we have no idea who committed the offense, so we shall gun down any Indian we meet.” When Tanner and his men came upon a group of Arapaho whose tipis were pitched a few miles from the established reservation, they surrounded it and executed forty-three men, women and children. When the last tipi was burned, the soldiers divided among themselves the horses and booty that remained. Of this action a Denver paper wrote:

Forty-three dead Indians for one missing horse might seem excessive to our weak sisters in Vermont and Pennsylvania, the ones who are always telling us how to handle our Indians, but to those of us who have to live with Lo at close quarters, it is clear that only the most stem reprisals will keep him from slaughtering all white men along the Platte. To Lieutenant Tanner, who shows signs of becoming the best Indian fighter in the west, well done! To his brave cohorts, well done, lads, and keep up the good work.

The use of Lo as a description for the Indian was universal in the west and came about because the English poet, Alexander Pope, in his rhymed
Essay on Man
, introduced these thoughtful lines:

Hope sprin
gs eternal in the human breast;

Man never
is, but always to be blest ...

Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind

Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind ...

Many newspapers, such as the
Zendt’s Farm
Clarion
, recently launched by settlers who had built their homes within the shadow of the stockade, used the whole phrase, Lo, the poor Indian, but more sophisticated papers preferred the simpler Lo.

On June 18, 1864, a band of Indians swept down upon the South Platte road, killed four wagoners, scalped them and stole the provisions they were carrying. For six weeks no traffic passed along the road, no news from the east reached Denver. With merchandise blocked by the Indians, prices soared throughout Colorado, with flour rising from nine dollars a barrel to sixteen dollars to twenty-four in a three-week period. As omens of the evil days ahead, a plague of locusts devoured crops along the Platte and the river rose in flood, submerging a good portion of Denver.

A fearful quiet settled over the region, with white men afraid to venture far from their homes and with streets in the city barricaded against possible invasion. When rumors of a beginning assault flashed through the city, citizens broke into the army ordnance warehouse and commandeered rifles, then patrolled the streets. This was not childish apprehension but an understandable fear that Indians might soon be invading the city. After all, Colorado had fewer than three hundred soldiers to protect the whole territory, and if the Indians wanted to pick off isolated farms, they could do so almost at will.

On July 26, 1864, a rancher living east of the village of Zendt’s Farm saw Indians making off with two of his cows, which they slaughtered four miles from his home. This time there was no uncertainty as to what had happened or who the culprits were, so once more Lieutenant Tanner and his riders scoured the prairie and once more they encountered a community of tipis pitched where they should not have been. It was hardly likely that the cow-stealers were lodged in this particular place, but Tanner and his men surrounded it and with a howitzer gunned down forty-seven Indians.

On August 13, 1864, a small band of unidentified Indians overran a peaceful farm some miles east of Denver and slaughtered one of the most attractive white families in the region, Clifford and Belle Barley and their two children. All were brutally killed, their bodies abused and then scalped. Their corpses were hauled in to Denver and put on display under the hand-lettered sign:

THIS IS WHAT AWAITS ALL OF US

UNLESS WE DO SOMETHING

The bodies of the children, dreadfully mutilated, caused men and women alike to burst into tears, and families from remote areas were brought for safekeeping into Denver, where they further inflamed public opinion with their own rumors of Indian horrors. The fear which had lain over the city for some months now crystallized into terror, and men began to talk in whispers of the only alternative they saw before them: “We may have to exterminate the Indians ... wipe them out.”

Such whispers reached Lisette Mercy, and she was filled with consternation, for during these bad times she had formed the habit of taking food and clothing to the Arapaho one mile east of Denver. For generations the Indians had camped at this site, near where Cherry Creek ran into the South Platte, and they saw no reason to alter their habits now. Chief Lost Eagle, along with several hundred of his people, pitched their tipis there frequently and met with Denver businessmen who wanted to discuss the future of the area. After all, he had visited President Fillmore following Fort Laramie, and with President Lincoln after the Treaty of 1861. Photographers had taken his portrait with each President, and the one with Lincoln showed two deeply worried men; it was difficult to guess which bore the greater burden: Lincoln, whose nation was being torn apart, or Lost Eagle, whose people were being exterminated.

Lisette Mercy liked Lost Eagle. She found him a compassionate man who desperately wanted to do the right thing but whose ventures seemed always to go astray. He was fifty-four years old now and his influence among his people was greatly diminished; they were listening to Broken Thumb and the young firebrands. The situation had become so desperate that skirmishes were occurring between the followers of the two leaders.

When the Barley massacre occurred Lost Eagle wanted to hurry in to Denver to explain that it was an irresponsible act, one that decent Indians could not condone, but he was met at the edge of the city by armed militiamen who warned him, “We don’t want no Indians in here, not even you,” and he was turned away from land that he had once owned.

Lisette got to him in his tipi, bringing with her a clipping from the
Zendt
’s
Farm
Clarion
:

The die is cast. By the horrible killings of the Barley family the Indians throw down the gauntlet and challenge us to war. Let us have war, and let us have it now. Nothing less than a few months of punitive raids against the red devils will bring peace. Let us show Lo, the poor Indian once and for all who these prairies belong to. Fight, we say. And fight we would except for the vacuum of leadership in Denver.

“My husband tries his best to make the people see the truth,” Lisette told the old chieftain, “but we have no leadership, so nothing is done.” They both felt a sense of deepening despair, Lost Eagle because he could no longer direct his people in conciliatory paths, Lisette Mercy because she saw how ineffective her husband was in trying to provide leadership at a time when only a vacuum existed.

In politics, as in nature, a vacuum cannot long be tolerated; and two men were headed for Denver who would fill the void in startling manner. The first was the soft-spoken fifty-five-year-old one-armed general from Vermont, Laban Asher, who had led his volunteers with prudence and gallantry during some of the worst battles of the Civil War. At Vicksburg, the previous year, he had lost his right arm; his associates said that if he had charged more resolutely, he would have been far from where the bullet struck and would have taken one of the heights as well, but in his plodding way, with his arm dangling and blood spurting from beneath the tourniquet, he got his men to the ridge on time, and with far less loss of life than would have been incurred under some of the more heroic generals.

His job was now to bring some kind of order to Colorado Territory while defending it against possible incursions by Confederate adventurers who roamed the west. He was in Denver only two weeks when word reached him that Desperado Jim Reynolds, a Confederate renegade, was storming through the Arkansas River valley, threatening communications and trying to raise levies for an attack on Denver.

“Let there be no misunderstanding,” General Asher said firmly. “My first duty is to keep this territory in Union hands.” Without hesitation he dispatched what few troops he had to the south, where Reynolds and four of his men were captured and executed.

Belatedly General Asher turned his attention to the Indian problem, with the newspapers and the business leaders supporting Lieutenant Tanner in calling for war and only Major Mercy counseling a more cautious approach.

Intuitively Asher sided with Mercy. He liked him, perhaps because he, too, had been wounded in the service of his country, so that his patriotism could not be challenged; or it might have been Mercy’s calm cast of mind that Asher admired. The two men worked well together and began to devise a strategy for moving the Indians away from major trails and providing them with access to water. “We’ve also got to feed them,” Asher said one day, “now and for as far into the future as we can see. They won’t become farmers overnight. It’ll require two decades to teach them, and if they’re to learn, they’ll need better land. So feed them we must.”

When news of this proposal leaked out, the Colorado newspapers exploded. The
Clarion
led the way with a savage article:

Now the dreamer from Vermont tells us,
“
You must feed Lo, and be kind to him, and forget that he has slaughtered your fellow farmers like the savage he is.
”
He tells us this when our food prices have soared because Lo has cut off our freight and mail services. Well, we say to General Laban Asher,
“
Go back to Vermont with your one arm and blind eyes and leave the settlement of the Indian problem to real men who understand the issues, men like Lieutenant Abel Tanner, who knows how to shoot them up till they behave. We say,
“
Give Tanner a hundred trusted men on good horses and he will settle the Indian problem in two weeks. And he won
’t
do it by feeding them at public expense.

“What can I do against such tactics?” Asher asked in his soft voice. He was a New England gentleman who refused to dirty himself with public brawling; he was an army officer who did not know how to respond when newspapers kept calling for the promotion of an inept subordinate like Tanner.

“First off,” Mercy advised, ‘send Tanner back east ... tonight. They’re calling for fighters there. Let him fight.”

“No,” Asher said cautiously, “if I do that, the newspapers will crucify me.” He paced back and forth, and for the first time Mercy noticed that the loss of the arm threw the concerned little man somewhat off balance. He had not yet learned to compensate for the missing limb, and in some strange way this made him insecure. Mercy’s limp had made him more daring, as if his spared life had to be used constructively, and now he said, “General Asher, you have all the right ideas. You must act upon them forcefully.”

But Asher drew back. “Instinct tells me to play for time. Already some of the Indians are asking for tools for farming. A little more time and this public anxiety will subside. Then we can act.”

There would be no time. In January 1864 there was a man on his way to Denver who possessed a clear vision of how the west was to be and the determination to shape it to that definition.

He was a tall man, six-feet-two, forty-eight years old, broad of shoulder and piercing of eye. He was clean-shaven, and stood so erect that he seemed even taller than he was. He was heavy, from good eating, and he had a strong voice with a peculiar penetrating quality which made it carry over a hundred lesser voices, even if all were talking. He did not speak overmuch, and when he did, it was with a Jovian kind of finality, as if he had long considered lesser alternatives and dismissed them.

He was Frank Skimmerhorn, from some old family of Schermerhorns, no doubt, and he came from Minnesota. There, in the years 1861-62 he “had become acquainted at first hand with Indian problems, for the Sioux, irritated by some minor alteration in procedures, had run wild and killed his parents, his wife and his daughter. A farm which had been worth twenty thousand dollars had been left desolated, and he had moved homeless from one Minnesota town to the next, hearing the terrible stories of damage done by the Sioux—a hundred ranches burned, two hundred people scalped, a whole section of the nation in disarray, and all because of a few fractious Indians.

He left Minnesota with his son, satisfied never to return. Rights to his farmland he had sold for fifteen hundred dollars, and with this he had returned to his childhood home in Nauvoo, Illinois, where he tried to piece together for himself an explanation of what he had seen during the Indian uprising, and one night after a church meeting it had all been made clear.

A farmer who had lived in Nauvoo all his life said, “I never cared for the Mormons. Now understand, I didn’t go to war against them the way some of my neighbors did, and I never put fire to their barns. But as a people they don’t please me, and their idea of one man having fifty-three wives, which they did. Yes, they did ...” He lost his thread and leaned against his carriage. “What was my point, Skimmerhorn?”