Centennial (73 page)

The young militiaman looked helplessly at the bank of officers and mumbled, “Well, like I said ...”

“No, you haven’t said.”

Clark appealed to the general. “I don’t know the words, sir. The proper words, that is.”

Wade left his judge’s seat and whispered with Clark for a few minutes, then returned to his chair. To the other members of the court he explained, “I was telling him the words we use.” To Clark he said, “Now tell us why you were sick.”

“Well, sir, there was this man with a very sharp knife, and he looked around until he found a dead Indian woman, and with his knife he cut away her private parts.

There was a deathly hush in the room, then General Wade’s quiet voice asking, “And what did he do with them?”

“Jammed them down over his saddle horn, sir.”

“How often did he do this?”

“He went to six different women.”

“And you saw this with your own eyes?”

“Yessir.”

Such testimony seemed so improbable that the members of the court were stunned. Finally a young colonel asked, “Private Clark, do you appreciate the significance of the oath you took at the beginning of your testimony?”

“I do. I’m a religious man.”

“General Wade, can I have this man sworn again?”

“He’s been sworn once.”

“I’d feel easier, under the circumstances.”

So Jimmy Clark was sworn again, and the young colonel asked, “Did you, yourself, in person, see Colonel Skimmerhorn ride up to soldiers who were holding an Indian girl and an Indian boy and command them to kill them?”

“No, sir. He gave no command.”

“In your previous testimony you said he did.”

“No, sir, if you’ll excuse me, sir. What I said was that he rode up to the men and said, ‘Nits grow into lice,’ and it was after that the men killed them.”

Jimmy Clark’s testimony created a sensation in Denver, but it was unsubstantiated, so General Wade summoned every man who had stood behind Captain Reed that day. The first thirty militiamen refused to testify, or testified in noncommittal ways, but then Wade got to a handful of regular army men, and with revulsion they not only verified what Clark had said but added hideous details of their own, and one man broke into tears, after which General Wade asked in a fatherly way, “Son, why didn’t you step forward like Private Clark and testify to these facts? Why did you make me drag you in here like a criminal and force the truth out of you?”

The man looked dumbly at the general, shrugged his shoulders in a confusion that was obviously painful and said in a whisper, “I thought it was all an awful mistake.”

The inquiry ended, and Captain Reed was sent back east to a cleaner war, carrying with him a letter of commendation for having behaved in accordance with the highest standards of his profession.

General Wade and the court did not have the power to punish Skimmerhorn, who was not responsible to the United States Army, but they could issue a bitter rebuke to the self-appointed hero:

Rarely in military history has there been a battle communiqué more mendacious and self-aggrandizing than the one issued by Colonel Skimmerhorn at Zendt
’
s
Farm on the day after his attack upon an undefended Indian village whose occupants were unarmed and eager to surrender. Each phrase in that communiqué merits individual analysis, but four will suffice to show the quality of the whole.
“
A heavy concentration of Indian warriors
”
turns out to be 403 men of fighting age and 1,080 women and children.
“
Engaged savages under heavy fire
”
means that Colonel Skimmerhorn
’s
men were free to hack at will, since the enemy had few guns. The
“
exceptional courage of Captain Abel Tanner
”
means that he allowed men under his command to commit the most heinous atrocities which this court has ever heard of.
“
Peace is assured in this Territory
”
means that the prairies are now aflame and war is everywhere, brought on by this man
’s
intemperate action. Special comment must be made about the last sentence of the communiqué, for it is both perfidious and imprecise. The nineteen white scalps used to justify the attack turn out to have been one scalp, very old and possibly not from a white man, and it is unclear whether the savages referred to were the Indians or Colonel Skimmerhorn
’s
own men.

The report, when it reached the streets, evoked a blind fury, and Sergeant Kennedy had to warn General Wade that it would not be prudent for him to appear in public, for there was talk of hanging him, but the little soldier pushed his advisor aside and walked boldly to where his horses waited for the ride back to Leavenworth, reminding Kennedy in a loud voice that the men who might want to hang him were more accustomed to dealing with women and children than with a soldier who stood ready to put a bullet through them if they made a move.

Nevertheless, on the day following Wade’s departure, one of Skimmerhorn’s supporters ambushed young Jimmy Clark and shot him dead in full daylight at a main intersection.

Some sixty persons witnessed the murder, and saw clearly who had done it—a broken-down prospector who had been paid fifteen dollars for the job—but no one would testify against him. Under the circumstances, the murderer had to be released. He was slipped another fifteen dollars and was seen no more.

This doleful event received scant notice because a hurricane had begun to sweep the prairies. After the massacre at Rattlesnake Buttes, Chief Broken Thumb, who escaped death by refusing to enter the reservation, assumed command of the two tribes, with Jake Pasquinel as his first lieutenant, and the spirit of revenge that animated these men made disaster inevitable.

Major Mercy was dispatched from Denver to offer the tribes any reasonable concessions if only they would lay down their arms and accept a permanent peace guaranteed by Washington, and on a wintry day in a tipi north of the Platte he met with the crucial leaders for the last time. As at their first meeting, Jake Pasquinel sat in the middle, his face old and scarred and without even a flicker of hope. To his left sat Broken Thumb, lost in a bitter hatred. To Pasquinel’s right sat Lost Eagle, smaller now but still wearing his funny hat. How pitiful these men seemed, confused remnants of tribes that had once defined and protected an empire, how lost in time, how utterly beyond rescue.

“You’re brave to come here,” Jake conceded bitterly.

“I come with a final offer ... real peace.”

Broken Thumb and Jake laughed in his face, and the former snarled, “Get out.”

“I am ashamed,” Mercy began.

“Ashamed?” Pasquinel exploded. “Hundreds dead—old men and old women, children too—and you’re ashamed. Mercy, go before we kill you.”

“Get out!” Broken Thumb repeated.

“Lost Eagle,” Mercy said softly, “cannot we ...”

“He is not to speak,” Pasquinel shouted. “He betrayed us. Everything he said was lies.”

Mercy pushed Jake away and went to the old chief, but no words were spoken, for Lost Eagle had only tears—the time for words was lost.

“Can’t we talk reason?” Mercy pleaded, but Broken Thumb refused him the dignity of an answer.

It was Jake who spoke for the Indians now. “It will be war ... and murder ... and burning ... all along the Platte.”

“Oh, God!” Mercy cried, close to tears. “It mustn’t end this way.”

“Get out,” Broken Thumb said, and he called for braves to take the major away, but Mercy broke loose and came back to Jake and took him by the hands and said, “It should have ended differently,” and Jake stared at him impassively and said, “From the beginning it was bound to end this way,” and the braves dragged Mercy away.

The two tribes went on a rampage, looting and burning and belatedly earning for themselves the designation
savages
. With either Broken Thumb or Jake in the lead, they would sweep down on unprotected farms and slaughter everything that lived, even the chickens.

They destroyed the little settlement at Julesburg and overran the army fort farther west along the river. The South Platte became a region of terror, with fiery assaults day after day. The telegraph wires were cut, so that no news seeped in to Denver, and the overland stage stopped running, for on two different attempts it had been waylaid and its passengers killed.

A Denver photographer remembered a portrait he had taken of the Pasquinel brothers, and posters were distributed throughout the west, showing two scowling half-breeds in Indian dress—Jake with a livid scar down his face, Mike with an evil grin—and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, readers waited avidly for the latest news about the depredations of the “Half-Breed Monsters of the Plains.”

Finally the killing became so rampant that an army detachment was sent out from Omaha to track down the hostiles. The tribes divided into two groups. One, led by Lost Eagle, surrendered to the army at Fort Kearny; the other, led by Broken Thumb and the Pasquinels, sent a message to Omaha that they would fight to the death.

In a pitched battle, the soldiers closed in on Broken Thumb, and although he could have escaped along the Platte, he chose to stake himself out on ground he had long defended. With seven stubborn warriors he fought till bullets swept the area, then stood upright, and with arms uplifted, began his chant: “Only the mountains live forever, only the river runs for all the days.” He grabbed what rifles he could from the corpses about him and fired methodically until nine bullets ripped through his chest.

The Pasquinel brothers escaped this battle, and a cry rose from the whole nation set free from its preoccupation with the Civil War: “The monsters must be slain.” And now a bizarre situation developed. Colonel Skimmerhorn volunteered to conscript a militia of his former adherents. “We shall track down the miscreants if their path leads to hell itself!” he proclaimed, and men from all parts of the territory proved eager to march with him again. All Denver applauded when he announced, “Our punitive expedition sets out from Zendt’s Farm tomorrow!”

His opening strategy was draconian. Distributing teams along a three-hundred-mile stretch of the Platte, he waited for dry and windy days, then set fire to the prairie, producing a conflagration so extensive that it burned away all edible fodder from the Platte nearly to the Arkansas. A pall of smoke hung over the area and wildlife for thousands of square miles was threatened. It was one of the worst disasters ever to hit the west, and it accomplished nothing.

Conquered Indians were already on the reservation. The Pasquinel brothers and their renegades knew how to slip through the flames, so even while Skimmerhorn was setting fire to the prairies, they rampaged up and down the Platte, burning farms and scalping the inhabitants.

But finally Skimmerhorn tightened the noose, leaving the Pasquinels diminishing territory in which to maneuver, and one wintry morning along the Platte, about twenty miles east of Zendt’s Farm, a detachment of militia surprised Jake and pinioned his arms before he could shoot himself. Messengers were sent to the colonel with the stirring news: “Jake Pasquinel has been taken.”

Skimmerhorn reached the scene about two o’clock in the afternoon, and within ten minutes, convened a drumhead court-martial. “Guilty,” the men said unanimously, and no juster verdict was ever reached along the Platte. Two men threw a rope over a cottonwood branch, tied it around Jake Pasquinels neck and dragged him aloft. The knot had been poorly tied, and for an unbelievably long time he kicked and twisted, strangling slowly as the militia cheered.

That night word of the hanging reached Zendt’s Farm, and Levi got a shovel, saddled up a horse, kissed Lucinda goodbye and rode east to cut down the body and bury it. When word of this circulated through the region, it infuriated the Skimmerhorn people, who judged it a rebuke to their triumph, and they were so enraged that a squaw man should have done this thing, they stormed down to the stockade and set it afire.

Stolidly Zendt watched as the flames consumed his home, then had the bitter experience of being turned away by four different neighbors before he found one who would give him and his wife shelter for that night.

Only Mike Pasquinel now survived, a fattish half-breed, fifty-four years old and aware that there was no longer hope of any kind. By keeping to the low bushes that grew along the Platte, he made his way to where his sister had lived, and when he saw the ashes of the stockade, he supposed that she and her family were dead. But he remained hidden, and finally saw Levi Zendt and Lucinda come poking among the ruins to see what could be salvaged.

Cautiously he made himself known to them, and with equal caution they spoke. “In this village you’re bound to be captured,” they reasoned, ‘so give yourself up.”

“No!” Mike snarled. “Find me two guns. I’ll fight it out.”

“Mike,” his sister pleaded, “let’s put a stop to the killing.”

For one brief moment Mike seemed to waver. “Will they hang me?” he asked.

Lucinda was afraid to hazard a guess, so she turned to Levi, who said quietly, “I think so.”

“No!” Lucinda protested. “They didn’t hang those three who surrendered in Nebraska.”

“They weren’t Pasquinels,” Mike said, and with that, old bitterness took control. “I’ll hole up behind that wall. I’ll shoot ten before they shoot me.”

It was Levi who made the decision: “We’ll give you no guns, Mike. You’re going to surrender, now. Decent men live around here, and they’ll see you get a decent trial.”