Rabble in Arms, page 48
“My sons, you have now nothing to fear: we are now under the same obligations to love, support and defend you that we are to love and defend one another. Therefore you are to consider yourselves as a part of the Sac people.”
Neither Doc nor I believed what Pahokuk said—neither as to the white blood being washed out of us, nor as to being supported and defended. Yet from that day they made no distinction between us and themselves. If they had plenty of food and clothing, we had plenty. If there was a scarcity, we all shared one fate.
… It is easy enough to be an Indian in the summer, if one can be a warrior and travel to the eastward, unburdened by women, children, old men and innumerable dogs; sleeping comfortably beneath an overturned canoe; taking fish and shooting game whenever the need arises.
But we three captives became Indians in the winter; and in the winter it is hard work being an Indian—harder than building ships, or sailing them, or trading, or any other calling I know.
The house, in which one end of its single long room had been given to us for our own, was seldom free of smoke, either by night or by day. When we tried to sleep, the place seemed alive with dogs, all determined to lie heavily against a human. Thus we were continually waking to cuff a dog that refused to be discouraged, only to have him pillow himself against us when we were once more quiet. Moreover Doc’s admirers and patients freely came in at all hours to sit silently against the wall of the house and stare at him.
Doc’s prestige, among the Indians who remained in the town, was enormous. He cured their simple ailments by putting them to bed and refusing to let them eat—a sure remedy, he privately assured us, for every human ill—and with his dowsing rod he discovered a lead mine half a mile from the village. The only lead mines in that western country belonged to the Sacs and Foxes; and the nearest, until Doc used his dowsing rod, was fifteen miles away. When, therefore, Doc unearthed another close at hand, the Sacs were grateful. The shamans permitted him to take the first degree of the Midewiwin, which made him an assistant shaman and gave him the right to wear a headdress made out of buffalo horns, eagles’ feathers, strips of red flannel and braided rattlesnake skins.
Indians, we found, own all their property in common, even to making equal division of the food they kill and raise. Thus some are worse than lazy, knowing they will be fed by the harder workers. Some, too, are unfortunate, forever hooking fish that get away, knocking over deer that somehow escape, and felling bear trees from which the bear has decamped. Others are helpless or incapable. Thus the competents, among Indians, are forever doomed to see the fruits of their labor gobbled up by gluttons and incompetents. Unfortunately for ourselves, Verrieul, Doc and I were competents. We worked for that Indian tribe like slaves, helping to get food for the entire town, and enough to make pemmican for future use—pemmican that necessitated the drying of elk and deer meat over frames, pounding it to bits on rocks, and packing it in deerskin containers with bear fat—that necessitated, too, cutting wood for the fires, making deerskin kettles, frying bear fat into grease. Between times we turned our hands to fight chores such as collecting birch and elm bark for utensils, keeping moccasins and snow-shoes in repair, making cartridges, tending and feeding horses, and cutting down trees to get at bears and raccoons.
January was on us and gone in a never-ending round of labor. In February we made utensils and weapons in preparation for sugar making and the spring migration of buffaloes. In March we made sugar, carrying sap buckets from trees to kettles until it seemed to each one of us that we had walked a million miles.
By the time the sugar was finished, the rivers were open; April had come, and with it the buffaloes, as well as wild ducks and geese in such quantities that the noise of their passing was as the noise of many waters. In April, too, the dancing began—the Buffalo dance, the Corn-planting dance, the Religion dance. There were ducks and geese to be shot and their breasts dried; eight hundred acres of ground to be prepared for the annual crop of beans, melons, pumpkins and corn; canoes to be built and mended; buffaloes to be hunted down, killed and made into pemmican, their hides cured and the rest of them saved; for these Indians, whom some call lazy and good-for-nothing, utilized every scrap of the many buffaloes we killed, even to the hoofs, intestines, horns and bones.
Most of the Indians hunted far afield; but we three white men were kept always near the village; and in spite of our supposed equality as brethren of the tribe, the three of us were not allowed to go out together in the same hunting party. And so it happened that when a party with whom I had been spearing buffaloes returned to the village one June afternoon, I had a singular surprise.
Outside our long house sat an old Indian who looked strange to me. His head was shaved, except for a patch of hair in the center of his skull; a patch about four inches across. There was a bone ornament fastened to the patch of hair, and up from the ornament rose a flaming crest made of deer s tails. He was a gay old thing to look at, for the crest was bright scarlet, while his face and his shaved skull were painted with bright colors, mostly yellow and blue stripes.
This old gentleman made a howking noise; then addressed me in the familiar quavering voice of Doc Means. “There’s some paint behind the door. Get yourself covered up with it, and try to make yourself as handsome as what I am. We got visitors. If I ain’t mistaken, one of the visitors is a Britisher; and another is your old friend Joseph Phipps.”
… The Britisher, Doc told me while I painted my face, was Charles Gautier de Verville, nephew of Charles Louis de Langlade, and he was only British in that he wore a British coat and commanded Indians in the British army. In reality he was the grandson of a Frenchman who married an Ottawa squaw. He himself, when not leading Indians to the wars, was a trader, and a successful one; but seemingly there was more money to be made out of leading Indians than out of trading with them, which is one of the surest roads to riches.
He made a specialty of helping Langlade to bring western Indians all the way to the east. In his younger days he and Langlade had brought them to fight for the French against the English. Now the two of them brought Indians to fight for the English against the Americans; for when in need of Indians, the English paid well for them. He, like Langlade, must have been both brave and able, for Indians never follow an incompetent or a poltroon. He was, however, like all other Indian leaders, unable to control the tribesmen when they were drunk or in a passion—or to speak more properly, he knew enough not to try. He and Langlade, men said, had been in command of the Indians who massacred Braddock’s troops on the Monongahela: he, too, had helped to command the western red men who had slaughtered the women, the children and the unarmed soldiers at Fort William Henry.
“This Gautier,” Doc said, “he’s been around to look at me. I don’t like him and he thinks the same of me.”
“Why?”
Doc eyed me innocently. “Well, I told him us three was really English sympathizers—Tories; but we’d got pressed into the American service: kind of dragged along with Arnold against our will, because if we hadn’t, our American neighbors was fixing to take us out and hang us, so we had to. I told him first chance we had after we got ashore after fighting on the lake, we sneaked off by ourselves, meaning to join the British troops in that neighborhood, or get to Canada; so when Sponge-belly and them six others come out of the woods, we went with ’em peaceful and glad. What’s more, I said, he could ask Sponge-belly or any of the others if we ever made any resistance—we come right along with ’em and joined the tribe.”
“What did he say?”
“Didn’t say much. Kind of glared at me out of the corner of his eye like a bad colt: said he’d inquire of Sponge-belly and the others, and if they corberated what I’d been telling him, he might up and take and believe it,—maybe.”
“What else?”
“Well, I said I was a Tory, but also a practicin’ doctor, so I’d like to get with the British troops so’s to see how they treat a feller that gets hit with a cannon ball.”
“And what did he say to that?”
“He said a French word. I don’t understand no French, but I got the drift of it. It meant he didn’t reckon on making it easy for me to go.”
“Then that’s the end of us,” I said.
“No,” Doc said. “I don’t believe it. I don’t care nothing about this Gautier, nor no other Frenchman. I don’t like ’em. They got a mean streak in ’em when it comes to fighting. They’re suspicious of everybody, and they act dirty to everybody, whether they need to or not. It wouldn’t do this Gautier any harm to let us go back, but he’s made up his mind he’s going to fix us so we can’t. Well, I ain’t going to let him do it. I can fix him first. Fact is, I got him fixed already.”
“Fixed? How have you got him fixed?”
Doc’s reply was placid. “You remember that old idea of mine—that idea about how these red vermins maybe might turn us loose if I made ’em a present of the Talking Book and the lancet and all the rest of my medical supplies?”
I said I did.
“Well,” Doc said, “I called a meeting of the Grand Medical Society right away; and me and Verrieul, we talked to the shamans. We talked to ’em as pretty as they ever got talked to. I asked ’em how they liked my magic, and they said they liked it. I said, Well, they’d done well by me, and I wanted to do well by them, and the best way to do it, as I saw it, was to divide my magic among ’em. The trouble was, I says, that I didn’t have but just enough magic to go around, and if I divided it, there wouldn’t be nothing left for me. Therefore, I says, what I’d ought to do was to go east with the boys that are going to do their spring fighting and try to pick up some new magic, and meanwhile leave the Talking Book and all the rest of it with them, so to make sure I’d come back.”
They didn’t believe that, did they?” I asked.
Doc coughed. “Well, it sounds different when Verrieul tells it to ’em in Indian. I can’t tell it the way Verrieul does. You ought to hear Verrieul tell it!”
“But don’t they know they could have all your magic, just by taking it away from you?”
“How could they?” Doc asked. “They can’t roll dice the way I can. Everything they own, pretty near, I won from ’em and then gave it back; and they ain’t never won nothing from me. They can’t use my dowsing rod, can they? That’s what I told ’em: they can’t learn how to use any of my magic till I show ’em how, and I ain’t going to show ’em how till we start east with Sponge-belly—all three of us.”
… When the drums summoned us to the council house that night, we looked as much like Indians as any of the Sacs. Verrieul’s face was bright green; his eyes two discs of white. My chin and hps were blue against a background of vermilion. We even smelled like Indians, for our buckskins were black with grease and smoke, and our pouches stuffed with summer killikinnick—tobacco mixed with powdered win-tergreen leaves—which has a sweetish smell.
Among the hundreds of Indians gathered in that long house—some flat on their backs, with their knees crossed, some hunkered down, some sprawled on their bellies, or disposed in any way that suited their convenience—my eager eye at once discovered Joseph Phipps and Gautier de Verville. I was impatient to see Joseph and speak with him, but I was even more anxious about Gautier; for it was he who would assist Langlade in leading such Sacs as elected to make war on the side of the English: he might, even, hold in his hands the power of life and death over Verrieul, Doc and myself—for if he prevented us from returning to the eastward, our existence among the Indians would be a living death forever.
Gautier, like most half-breeds, had a muddy complexion and a hard black eye; and he used that eye on Doc and Verrieul and me from the moment we entered. He wore a scarlet British coat and a brass gorget the size of half a pie, and a gold-laced hat. He was short and bandy-legged, but the Indians clearly held him in high esteem. This, Verrieul learned, was because he was almost as great a fighter as Langlade, and had fought like a lion for the French against the English on the day Montcalm was defeated at Quebec.
As for Joseph Phipps, he looked more impressive than on that distant night when he had guided me around the limestone mountain in Skenesboro to see his sister. He wore a buckskin coat, with the head of a moose painted on its back and front; and: on his blackened face white moose-horns had been drawn so that they seemed to sprout from his nostrils. His wampum necklaces and headband were blue, his leggins and moccasins stiff with porcupine quills. Whether or not Joseph recognized me, I couldn’t be sure. From time to time his gaze passed lightly over me, only to return admiringly to Gautier. I feared his feelings toward us were bound to be colored by those of Gautier; and Gautier’s certainly were hostile. My heart was low and the outlook far from promising.
When Gautier rose to speak, he followed Indian custom by placing before him, as a gift to the Sac people, a broad band of glass beads, as large as a bell-pull. Verrieul told us what he said.
“Brothers,” Gautier began, “I come to you with a message from your brother Langlade. The white chief in Quebec has sent a messenger to Langlade to ask the help of his red children in the west. This messenger”—he pointed to Joseph Phipps—”is here. He has brought the belt which I give you. Already we have visited the Ottawas, Sioux, Pottawat-tamies, Menominees, Chippeways, Winnebagoes. Now we come to ask the help of the bravest of the western nations, the Sacs and Foxes.
“Brothers, the white chief in Quebec asks that many braves be sent to fight for the English against the Americans. It would be a terrible thing for the Sac people, brothers, if the English should not win the war against the Americans, for the Americans are bad. They he to Indians, break their promises to Indians, steal from Indians whenever they have a chance.
“Brothers, the Chippeways, Ottawas, Pottawattamies, Sioux and Winnebagoes have agreed to go to the assistance of the English. They are already assembling at Green Bay. The Sacs and Foxes I have saved for the last not only because they are most important, but because I wish the honor of leading them. It is Langlade’s desire that we set out tomorrow for Green Bay. It is his desire that as many warriors as possible from the great Sac people fight in this war; for if the war is lost, the Americans will steal Sac lands, kill Sac women and children, drive buffalo and elk from Sac hunting grounds and empty every lake and river of its fish. They will make slaves of the Sac people and leave them with nothing—without land, food, canoes, guns, or places to lay their heads.”
Gautier’s eyes stabbed at Doc and Verrieul and me, but we returned his gaze stolidly.
Pahokuk took up the belt Gautier had offered, and gave him a kind reply.
“My friend and brother,” he said, “the Sac people are not united concerning the need of helping white men settle their difficulties. They have too many difficulties, anyway.
“Many of us, brother, believe it will be all the same for the Sac nation, no matter who wins this war, since we see no difference between the English and the Americans. Those who come to trade with us are all alike. Not one of them has ever done us a kindness unless he hoped to get something of much greater value in return. Probably, brother, they will never change. Therefore there seems to be no reason why we should fight for either side in preference to the other. Nor does it seem necessary, brother, for us to travel far to the eastward, looking for trouble, when the Sioux and Pawnees are close at hand, trespassing on our hunting grounds. There is always plenty of trouble near at hand, brother, without going beyond the far horizon to seek it.
“Therefore, brother, we have decided to do no more than we did last year. Shabonock is a great war chief. It pleased him, last year, to travel to the eastward with some of our young men who wished to learn more about the white man’s way of making war, and although their numbers were small, their deeds were great. This year Shabonock has again decided to go, and we are happy because of it, since it will show the white father in England that we are his children still. With Shabonock will go one of our shamans, a shaman whose medicine is strong and powerful, so that those who go will have the assistance of a great manitou, and will do wonderful things.”
In spite of the chorus of approval that greeted Pahokuk’s speech, Gautier made an immediate protest, though he was careful about it, for fear of irritating the Sacs, who, like all Indians, are quick to take offense when their decisions are questioned.
“My brothers,” Gautier said. “There are three among you who were not, at this time last year, members of your nation. Today, although they are members of your nation, two are not yet familiar with your speech. In a manner of speaking, the three are strangers. I have learned that they wish to go to the eastward with your fighting men. Oftentimes, brothers, it is a mistake to transplant a tree too soon. Therefore I say to my brothers that it would be better if these three were kept among you until they are more familiar with your language and customs.”
Doc spoke up quickly in an aggrieved voice, and Verrieul translated. “Ain’t every drop of white blood been washed out of my veins? Ain’t I flesh of their flesh and bone of their bone, the way we was promised? Ain’t I got a right to do what I want to do, the way all the rest of the Sacs do? They ain’t going back on their word, are they?”
Gautier ignored him. “Brothers, you are sensible men; and I hope that I, too, am a sensible man. I have questioned the oldest of the three strangers, and learned from him how the three came among you, and why they wish to return to the eastward. Brothers, I am not impressed by their story. It is the sort of story that might be told by men who wished to escape, and could escape in no other way.”
