Far as the Eye Can See (9 page)

There was never a shortage of water. We crossed many streams and small rivers, and moved for miles and miles across open meadows and fields that stretched before us, with the great, loyal, blue-and-white Rocky Mountains always in sight—either in front of us or to one side or the other. I never dreamed there could be such a country.

Every now and then we’d come upon a village. Twenty or thirty lodges with good fires and children running and dogs barking, and women tanning skins or washing clothes, and the braves would come out and greet us. They’d sign to us if they didn’t speak Crow or English. We come upon Arapahos, Northern Cheyenne, Arikaras, Blackfeet, and Sioux. They was always pretty friendly, even the Sioux. We didn’t have one scrape. The worst thing that happened was that we almost killed two fellows that turned out to be scouts for the U.S. Army.

This was after the army from Fort Riley had left us. We had just crossed the Republican River and was still in Nebraska, but not far from Fort Sedgwick, when two men wearing leather leggings, buckskin vests, and not much else, rode up over the horizon in front of the lead wagon and stopped. They seemed shocked to see us, then turned around and skedaddled. Big Tree and me rode after them a-ways, but they disappeared. We stopped—I thought to wait for the train to catch up—but then Big Tree moved off the trail a bit and I followed him. He never got off his horse. He pulled the animal around to face the trail. He carried a Sharps rifle with feathers dangling off the front of it, and he kept it at the ready while he watched. He said nothing. I held my carbine across the front of my saddle and waited with him. Then, before the wagon come up over the rise, we heard them two fellows coming back. They rode along, crossing in front of us, slow and steady. They had another with them, a big man in blue cavalry pants, with a yellow stripe down the leg and a bright red shirt. He had long black hair that stuck out under a black hat. He wore a mustache that hung all the way down to the neck of his shirt. When they’d passed in front of us, Big Tree looked at me and then moved out in the trail behind them. I followed.

We all rode like that until the first wagon come into sight. I didn’t know if them fellows known we was behind them or not. When the train come into full view, Theo stopped it. He sat there for a spell, waiting. Then he give the reins to his wife and climbed down out of his wagon. Big Tree made his presence known by trotting out a little to my right so them three fellows could see him. His Sharps was pointed right at the big black-haired man. The two others didn’t seem to mind it much that they was staring down the barrel of Big Tree’s gun. I rode out a little to my left and held my carbine on them. I had all thirty-four rounds loaded in the thing and I was ready, too, I guess. Them two fellows we first seen looked like some kind of Indian but I couldn’t tell which ones. Without the army near, Theo took no chances. He had his own gun. He stood by the front wheel of his wagon. The horses in Theo’s team stomped some and made a bit of noise. It was like a low growl that come from deep inside each animal.

Theo signed a “Hello” to the three men, which was always just a hand raised high above the shoulder. The big black-haired fellow moved forward between the other two. “Hello,” he said. It was friendly enough. “Maybe you should tell us where you are going.”

“Fort Sedgwick,” Theo said.

“Well, I will tell you.” He leaned forward a little in the saddle, his elbows on the saddle horn. “You ain’t far from it.”

“No sir,” Theo said. “I expect we’ll be there before dark.”

“How many are you?” He looked around a little, like he was expecting company.

“You army?” Theo said.

“Fifth Cavalry. I am Major Eugene Carr. At your service.”

The two fellows behind him now made no sign. They was both sweating in the July heat. Each carried a long-barreled Enfield rifle. If they wasn’t Indians, they was former Confederate.

“We had a escort until the day before yesterday,” Theo said.

“How many are you?” the major asked again.

“We’re enough. Twenty-three wagons.”

“Well, there are some renegade Injuns around here.”

“Dog soldiers,” one of the other fellows said. “Tall Bull and many others.”

“Sioux?” Theo said.

“Cheyenne,” Major Carr said. “A big raiding party.” The two other men got down off their horses and walked toward us.

“We’ll camp at Fort Sedgwick,” Theo said. Then he moved away from his wagon and approached the two men, who had stopped walking toward him. Both of them was small in stature, with brown faces and dirty black hair. When Theo got close enough, one of them said, “We would like some water.” Theo must have sensed something, because he reached out and grabbed the weapon out of the fellow’s hand and pointed it at both of them. “We got plenty of water,” he said. The second one give some thought to running but then he put his gun down on the ground. I got down off of Cricket and picked up his weapon, then backed away a bit, still pointing my carbine.

Major Carr looked mighty surprised. “They are scouts, sir,” he said. “They are with me.”

“You don’t look like any major in the army I ever seen,” Theo said. “Get down off that horse.”

He sat there staring at Theo. “You are making a big mistake,” he said. Then he turned his horse and galloped off. Theo aimed his rifle at him but never fired.

Big Tree said, “I go after him?”

“We got these two,” Theo said. “Stick around.”

“What do we do now?” I said.

“These here are Pawnee,” Theo said. “The worst of the worst. And I’m thinking that ’ere major is a renegade.”

“We are not Pawnee,” one of the little fellows said. “My name is Mitch Boyer. This here is Tom.”

“You’d be white men,” Theo said.

“That’s right. We ride with the major.”

“You don’t look like white men. Why you dressed like that?”

“We scout for the major. We are not enlisted.”

Theo looked at me. “They’re Pawnee. Tie them to the wagon.”

He held the gun on them and I got some rope and with the help of Big Tree tied one to the front wheel and the other to the back wheel. First we tied their arms. Then we pulled their legs apart and tied them so each man was spread-eagled across the wheel, feet and arms sticking out beyond the rim. With their knees on the ground and their lower legs bent back under the wheel, and their arms tied at the elbow, they commenced to breathing really hard. I could see the breastbone on each of them, protruding in the sunlight. When we was done, Theo said, “We’re gonna find out some things and then maybe I’ll get on this wagon and take them for a little ride.”

I never seen it done, but there was always plenty of talk about it even when I was in the army. Tied to the wheels like that, if the wagon moved forward even one revolution, each man would break both arms and both legs. He could keep his head from getting crushed by holding his chin against his chest, but after that one revolution of the wheel, if the wagon kept moving, it would cause so much hurt, most men couldn’t even do that. It would kill them pretty horribly and pretty fast.

The fellow who claimed to be Mitch said with some desperation, “At least give us a chance to prove who we are.”

“What are Pawnee doing so far north?” Theo said.

“We scout for the army.”

“You’re stationed at Fort Sedgwick?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s your tribe?”

“I am half Sioux. My father is a white man,” the one called Mitch said.

The other fellow, Tom, said, “I ain’t no Indian at all. I am Italian.”

Theo laughed. They both looked at him without fear, but you could see that he had their attention. “How is it you look so much like a Indian then? I don’t know as I ever seen a Italian fellow out this way. I don’t even know what a Italian looks like.”

Both men looked at him as though he’d suddenly started singing a opera song.

“Why’d that other fellow run off?” Theo asked.

“Look,” Mitch said. “That was Major Carr. He probably went for help.”

“You think we . . .” Theo started to say, and then we heard a lot of horses coming down the trail. They was coming hard and they made pretty big cloud of dust. The horses on Theo’s wagon started to snort and titter, and the wagon moved a little bit.

“Jesus Christ,” Tom said. “Cut us loose.”

Theo stood in front of the team and calmed them, but it was a risky thing to do because Theo had his back to whoever was coming down that trail. Big Tree got down off his horse and stood next to it, holding his rifle over the saddle, aiming toward the approaching horses. I did the same. It could of been Indians come to kill us all, but it was Major Carr again, this time with half the Fifth Cavalry. They trotted over the hill and fanned out around us. We watched them get into place, then Major Carr come forward again, this time with his sword drawn and resting against his shoulder. The dust swirled around us, and Theo’s horses tried to pull back away from it. The wagon moved again, but only slightly.

“Cut those men loose,” Major Carr said to Big Tree.

Big Tree put his rifle in the scabbard on his horse, walked over to the wagon, and did what he was told. Mitch and Tom stood there rubbing their wrists. Then Tom walked over to Theo and looked up at him, stared into his eyes with this fierce expression on his face for a long time without saying nothing. Then he spit at Theo’s feet and walked past him. Theo looked properly scolded, but he didn’t have nothing to say, neither. I think he was right embarrassed. I was just glad I didn’t have to see them two broken to pieces by that wagon.

Major Carr announced who he was again. “I take it you can believe it this time.”

“Yessir,” Theo said.

“We are from Fort Sedgwick, and we will escort you there now.”

“We don’t need no escort,” Theo said.

“Just the same. There are dog soldiers in this area and we are at war with them at the moment.”

Dog soldiers was Cheyenne, as I was to learn later. The Cheyenne was among the most highly organized of all the Plains Indians. They had fighting teams of warriors each with its own name and leader: the Elk Warriors, or the Crazy Dog Soldiers, or the Red Bear Warriors, and so on. Each team had its own chief, and they took turns directing the entire tribe when they was all together. But a lot of the time they was independent of each other and traveled and hunted and raided by themselves. The chief of the dog soldiers was named Tall Bull. They had a huge camp west of Fort Sedgwick and they’d been threatening the fort and any travelers who might wander from there all summer. They had not killed nobody yet, but they’d raided a few trains, stolen some horses, and counted coups among the bands of soldiers who was sent out to keep the peace. They was, according to Major Carr, “a confounded nuisance.” He said he was going to have to get them to go back to Fort Laramie, about a hundred fifty miles west and north of Fort Sedgwick. We was going to be headed that way, so Theo volunteered to leave the train at Fort Sedgwick and accompany the major on his mission. He wanted me to go with him.

“We’ll get a look at the country between here and there,” he said, “before we have to lead the wagons across it.”

I hoped it would be a peace mission of some kind, or at least that we’d run them off without much of a fight. Theo said that happened a lot with the Indians because they was not too concerned with occupying a position, or land, or no place in particular. The Indians believed that land was like light, or air, or the weather: it belonged to everybody alike. They picked where they fought, and it was usually not so much a place as a good opportunity. It could be a decision any one or two of them might make.

“Tall Bull is probably a man with good medicine,” Theo said, “and a lot of Indians follow him, but he ain’t no ‘general’ in our sense of the word. There ain’t never been a people anywhere in the world as free as Indians. I mean absolutely free. The braves running with Tall Bull don’t belong to him, they ain’t in his ‘army.’ They’ll fight together, but Tall Bull won’t operate with a strategy or a plan of battle. No Indian really ever does. One might start a fight and the others’ll join in. Indians never want to defend something so fat or stupid as a fort.”

“What about a village?” I said.

“Sometimes, if the hunting is good, they’ll stake a place and defend it. But you’ll see. They don’t often bother to protect themselves even in the camps. They frequently don’t even post a guard. And if they don’t think it’s a good day to fight, or if they ain’t dressed for it, they won’t bother, even if they got you outnumbered by hundreds.”

“They don’t need a guard with all them dogs,” I said.

“Hell, a dog’ll bark at anything.”

“But
we
ain’t fighting, are we?”

“We’ll watch,” he said.

We was riding close behind Major Carr’s regiment. There was maybe three hundred of them in two columns in front of us. Sioux scouts—real Sioux, not just Mitch and Tom—fanned out to the left and right. There was twenty or twenty-five of them.

We left on a searing-hot Sunday afternoon while singing at Sunday service still rung out in the fort. The sky was white and empty. The sun felt like it was only a few feet above us.

We rode along in silence for what seemed like a hour or so, maybe more. We circled around the Indian camp, a long way around. I never seen even a wisp of smoke. But then we come to the village. It was at a place called Summit Springs. Up to that time I never seen so many lodges in one place. It seemed like hundreds of them spread out along the banks of the creek in a great, sprawling half circle. We come at it from the west, over a small rise of land that allowed us to survey the whole village. Indians always form their lodges in a big horseshoe with the opening facing east. The entrance of each lodge always faces east. So we was coming at them from behind. Major Carr raised his hand and we stopped. The air was absolutely still. We was only about fifty yards from the first lodge. I didn’t hear a dog bark. The inhabitants was all inside the lodges, out of the heat; most of them was taking a afternoon nap. Carr raised his white gloved hand, then give the signal to charge. The whole troop raced down the slope and charged into the sleeping village. They threw ropes over the lodgepoles and pulled down the tepees, dragging the skins away. I seen folks getting up and looking for weapons and running around, gathering children and helping old men and women. I don’t think the Indians got off very many shots, but the troops laid down a pretty withering fire as they rode back and forth through the village. Major Carr said he didn’t want to kill a lot of folks, he wanted to gather everybody up and herd them back to the fort without a lot of killing. Even so, Tall Bull was shot and killed. So was his son and wife. Two children was maimed by lunging horses. In all, more than fifty Cheyenne was killed, and maybe another hundred or so wounded. There was five hundred of them in all. Only one of Carr’s troops could be counted as a casualty. One of the officers sustained a pretty bad gash on his cheekbone—probably from a Indian lance, or maybe from his own sword. All four of the officers in the regiment rode into the village with their swords held high in front of them.