The Dying Grass, page 4
PLENTY OF INDIANS ALL OVER THE COUNTRY (CONTINUED)
1876–2009
Now that we have won the Nez Perce War (history has come to Oregon through Hellgate Toll), I can put by my dread throughout these hot summer Oregon river-days, and my woman rides with me between summerhouses along the river, showing me greenish-brown water, cattails, crows passing over the water; I show her ringnecked ducks; our days resemble white water from the necks of swans. There was plenty of Indians all over the Country, says Blurick, as indeed I would have expected, as 76 was the Year of the Custer Massacre—ten years now since the Comanches lassooed our soldiers and dragged them off to be hacked to death; four years since we drove out the Modocs (General Canby having explained: Listen to me, you Indians have got to come under the white man’s laws); one year remaining for our Nez Perces.— Indian peacetime, Indian summer! My heart is very good. Nez Perces, date unknown, location Oregon. Indian territory has narrowed into a long needle of broken paper like a hair of yellow grass; the railroad’s reached past Cheyenne. But Tom will keep the negatives safe. Richard Dietrich preserves himself in a freezer, even as the Nez Perce War fades forever:
Oregon State Archives.
Records of military departments, accession number 89A-12 (1847–1968),
each Indian zone contracting, more or less as the wilting leaves of buffaloberries draw down against the stalk,
fewer Dreamer women in their basket hats
and another dark-and-tan cavalcade creaks up toward the Rockies, dreaming wearily, bravely, avidly or desperately about Oregon:
The bold dragoon he has no care
As he rides along with his uncombed hair.
A flattish deep blue disk all rich with white clouds; that’s Oregon, the Garden of the West. Colorado may be the newest but Oregon remains the most glamorous of our thirty-eight states: farthest from hideous old war-dreams. Blurick, well recollecting how the Union Pacific Railroad tried to sell him on the thriving fruit orchards of eastern Nebraska, has steeled himself against the persuasions of subsequent well-wishers; to his fellow citizens he remains a nullity, which is to say that he’s dreamed his own Seven Dreams, thank you very much, and so he’ll pick out his own d——d eighty acres. Oregon’s clouds are so white, and they move so fast! Some clouds resemble the snowy mountains whose edges cut through them. Two thousand miles runs our Oregon Trail, with plenty of Indians all over the country. Thanks to the Silver Panic, Congress can’t underwrite but half an Army nowadays, so every traveller must now perform his own Indian service. Doc says once we get to Farewell Bend we ought to be all right. Texas Pete nags the whole bunch to stay on the qui vive, but our celebrated Captain Travis, long may he ride, declines to lose time on another Indian scare. It’s plain that the reds are withering; another generation and Progress will be safe. Over Blurick steals that gentle tipsiness of hope which animates even the canniest of our emigrants. One finds it, for instance, in those Northern schoolmarms who roll up their sleeves and head South in dark bell skirts, meaning to uplift new-freed negro children. Emigrants will do most anything to save their dreams. If you have ever observed the way that desperately thirsty horses will slide down a bluff on their haunches in order to reach water, you may achieve some comprehension of our American need for success, which certainly beats settling for the broken-down ordinariness between wars.
Of all the Americans in this book, Blurick remains the most opaque. Few remember him; none think him horrible. Good-natured almost to General Howard’s extent, dull (if never to himself), inoffensively avoiding intimacy with other travellers, for fear they might seek to talk him out of his course; no borrower, but an occasional watchful lender, he inhales the incense of splendor, which to more hardened souls manifests itself as the Big Dust. His war-dreams rarely return, and when they do, he consoles himself with Oregon. Custer’s fall—the occupational hazard of detached columns—did buy us a troop increase, even if not right here, not to-day; and the buffalo industry is still booming almost as phosphorescently as the Presidential campaign of Rutherford B. Hayes. You can get a dollar fifteen for a fine-tanned bullskin, guaranteed Texas price. Blurick, who prior to now, in spite of dissatisfactions both invented and bequeathed and either way spreading as inevitably as cholera, never felt able to pass West or scarcely even to step out through his front door although he was getting older and older (his secret friend Mrs. Mack called him a born storekeeper), did study that industry and once halfway thought to become a hide man—but gave it up, on account of the murderous Indians. (One thing he learned in the war is giving things up.— Is there another?) As for prospecting, McLaughlin and his bunch have now struck it rich on the Empire State, while Kean and Hall keep their hydraulic claim in full blast over on Gold Hill; but how many shining-eyed miners clear five cents a day and less in honor of their delusions—and what about claim-jumpers? The future of even a half-spent fellow such as Blurick appears (at least to Blurick) as wide open as the faro table at the Bella Union down in Cheyenne—although Blurick has never enjoyed gambling. One might ask just why in that case he bound himself to Captain Travis’s bunch. The answer: He’s not enjoying it. Anyhow, inability to feel pleasure is no excuse for not taking chances. California, for instance, remains a placer miner’s favorite risk. But that miner won’t have fun, except maybe by burning down a Chinese laundry. Blurick, even when he gets to feeling near as hopeful as all those emigrants bound for the Black Hills now that Sitting Bull has been driven off, won’t have fun either. If family still defined him, he’d be one of those unemployed factory men with hungry children; they don’t care about gold; they’ll settle for a good ranch. The railroads have cut wages by another ten cents, and likewise the collieries, so let’s ride West! Preferring modest returns to the likelihood of getting infringed on, several sad speculators more or less of Blurick’s stripe have begun trolling the soda lakes round about Laramie, for what they will not say, trying to buy on credit, railing against Tildenopathy; these men pray for the Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes. Young men with broad shoulders contemplate the silver mines of Nevada, no matter that they’ll be toiling for others. As for Blurick, he buys a roll of flannel at the outfitting shop. What’s he about? The short answer: Nothing but getting away from the fevers of Missouri. Every last lounger condescends to advise him where to go and whom to vote for. Since widowerhood and Secession, all he wishes—setting aside his desire to farm easy, or else succeed at business—is to smoke cigars and play cards (never for money) with his one-legged comrades. But presently he (who by DIVINE peculiarity preserved all his limbs) determines not to drag useless through life, unlike his younger brother Jesse, who actually appears a good five years older, having never been himself since Chancellorsville, and who, the last person on whom GOD should have called to deliver them, rode up on his bay mare one Tuesday morning in ’74, with the tidings that their speculator Daddy’s heart had failed deep in a boarded-up ribcage in a locked and darkened stateroom of the steamer for New Orleans, thereby producing an intestate condition, as so frequently occurs—for how many children even in this wicked generation grow up so monstrous as to nag faltering parents to sign their wills? That was miserable enough. Within the year, Jesse, whose most tenderly hoarded memento was the following lavender ticket:
had become haunted by a monomania about the latest Presidential comedy, which you and I know better than to get exercised about
(Charles Nordhoff to Rutherford B. Hayes: The darkies you’ll have any how; the white Whigs are what you want to capture),
but Jesse, a Tilden man, could not relinquish the stolen election; he barely realized that he had lost his “dash” although the looking-glass should have informed him that he now resembled exactly what he was: a panting, used-up old officer with his sackcloth jacket cinched too tight; in ’75 he’d thought to enrich himself by becoming an Indian Agent, but he never even learned not to write the Office of Indian Affairs upon a sheet of foolscap, and certainly not to use pale ink; so the primary issue over which his affectionate elder sibling had to worry was how to guard him safe before he broke to pieces, which was why he received the whole farm, two years and thirty-one days short of the happy morning when both brothers could have burned the mortgage papers—a morning put off, I am afraid, by Jesse’s failure to take note of falling sorghum prices, as a result of which the stronger heir, Wittfield, who was nearly as charitable as he imagined but who closed his eyes to the other reason why he yearned to divest himself—the very impulse against which General Sherman had warned them all when the Army disbanded—soldiered on, so to speak, in the house built so long ago on his late mother-in-law’s property, but now commenced to dream that Progress called him out West into the dreamy garden-lands of Oregon; he had to make sure of himself or else; and so it came to pass, although he appeared to have been careful all his years, especially in his marriage, that like LORD knows how many thousand others, finding himself obliged to walk away from a
SHERIFF’S SALE. By virtue and authority of a special execution, issued from the office of the Clerk and of the Circuit Court of Saint Louis county, and to me directed, in favor of John R. Cunningham, and against Wittfield Blurick, I have levied upon and seized the following described real estate, to wit: Lots (3) and (4) of Indian Hill, and I will on WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5th, 1876, between the hours of nine o’clock in the forenoon and five o’clock in the afternoon, at the East front of the Court-house, sell at public auction, for cash, to the highest bidder,
he wandered, bitter and grieved, to be sure—in part because neither Jesse nor Jesse’s children had troubled to appear—but also excited, past D. Crawford & Co. as if perhaps to purchase for Mrs. Mack, who would now either cut him off or demand an elopement, the best of their ladies’ Siberian squirrel sets, reduced from eight dollars to four dollars fifty; and if in truth he might have been progressing toward the barroom, it was less to get drunk than to admire the chromos of Chinamen, Indians, Mexicans, negroes and other natives who posed so picturesquely all the way along the wall; when out from the doorway of the new “American Imperial” hotel strolled one of those bright new business men, probably en route to the barber shop to get shaved, who said to Blurick: Out of my way, d——d tramp!
Blurick had never been called a tramp before. Thanks to this greeting (although he had received worse at the courthouse), he recommenced to consider CHEAP LANDS, first in the Great Southwest, which is to say, Little Rock, Arkansas, guaranteed no grasshoppers—but what if there were grasshoppers all the same?
Jesse, as usual, purposed that he wait, this time on the grounds that within a couple of years one might be able to ride all the way West by railroad. Jesse’s sons and daughters meanwhile moved away.
Some bankrupts go North where sleety winds drive down prices, and fools go East into the spent lands where nothing happens, while adventurers with “sand” in them dare to become business men; as for Blurick, he for his part calculated that because it costs five hundred dollars to build a workingman’s cottage in Chicago, or three dollars to make a dugout in Nebraska (half of that going for the window), the frugal man proceeds to Oregon, saving the price of the window (which might easily shatter on the trail).
So he voted for Oregon:
And though they may be poor, not a man shall be a slave,
Shouting the battle-cry of freedom,
and with slow deliberation (in time Doc would chaff him that he couldn’t even pack near as good as a squaw) assembled his outfit—boxes of bran-packed bacon, coffee beans of course, the molasses jug filled right to the cork, flour in hundred-pound double-sacks, Gail Borden’s evaporated milk, a single India rubber sack of sugar, just in case he ever received company—skimping on mules and buying four oxen instead, figuring that he could always eat one if need be. Captain Travis explained that at Grande Ronde the Nez Perces would trade fresh horses for our jaded animals—at no loss to themselves, you may be sure. Blurick preferred to stick to his oxen. I admit that he did carry (well pampered by straw in a wooden crate) a glass jug of acqua-regia, just in case he found occasion to try gold nuggets, but somehow he knew that he’d never be rich. Therein as I believe lay his strength; he never dreamed too far ahead. For armament he strapped on a bright new Colt pistol, of course, and Jesse, wishing to have done more, presented him with Daddy’s Sharps 1859, the one with the all-brass furniture. After that he never saw Jesse again. There remained the handful of gold dollars in his secret sack, never mind how much they came to; had he not engaged himself in that Western dream, in order to find out what he truly expected of himself, he might have gone on believing, as do so many broken down citizens, that the history of America is the tallying of what we all once had in cash.
He proceeded to Kansas City, then
to the river and the grass,
where Captain Travis, slow moving, high-collared, slender, bald and bearded, with shiny sad little eyes, teaches us how to caulk our wagon boxes with pitch and axle grease until they’re as good as boats for the Platte crossing—which goes so easy that even Mrs. Graves’s flour keeps dry,
and we come up the other side into Indian country, and roll on,
our ragged triple column of Bain wagons (all thirty-two of them) waxing five-wide, then waning to single file just like the tides
with the Big Dust behind us, O my LORD,
Americans on the move, seizing a peace which resembles war,
and the calves bawling, half-dragged behind the wagons, our children quarrelling, playing Indian, reciting their lessons for Mother, following Doc whenever he allows them, gathering twigs or buffalo chips for to-night’s fire; mountains unseen ahead, eleven more miles until camp, GOD willing; Brown and Baker, who sure didn’t serve in the cavalry, for they can’t ride with any “dash,” reliving yesterday’s round of whist; as our cavalcade swings rightward across the golden grass at Captain Travis’s signal, the Ridge family falling out to save a wheel from working off their wagon,
Doc to the right of me, galloping for fun, singing so proud—sunny sidewhiskered man!
Ten more miles—
We ought to have a commissary wagon, just like the Army.
Yeah? Who’d pay for it?
And if you look at my map to-night you’ll see it, due west of the West Fork of the Wallowa River . . .
Why should gold be right there? Ain’t no gold there.
Well, Doc says . . .
Even some of the oldest wells have been assayed at five to twelve hundred dollars a ton.
Don’t jawbone me, Travis.
I’m not kidding you; we can get out of this.
Forever?
—Mrs. Johnson near about the size of a church, in her eighth month I should reckon, and her other young ones wearing her down:
Jennie, Adaline, Oroville, George and Inka
(I had that influenza near about three weeks ago and I just can’t get rid of the headache right here, even after a teaspoon of calomel. But I feel fine. It’s just that blessed headache, and when my little angels keep screeching—)
and our fan-shaped advance guard of scouts lost somewhere ahead in their own dust,
Brown and Baker recalling the amusements attendant to making officers give duplicate receipts during the Secession War,
and the way we used to march by night with General Crook and take Pi-Utes by surprise, killing whomever we liked,
the two Texes meanwhile discounting, although not utterly, the riches supposed to sleep in dull yellow crystals beneath the Black Hills,
Doc cantering back to tease the cornhaired widow again,
Blurick pulling his hat lower down his sunburned forehead,
thinking on maybe to-morrow greasing his front wheels with pine tar
and grateful that Captain Travis has not confined our ox-wagons to the rear
(for it gets tedious to eat the neighbors’ dust),
and the ladies already praying hard over Mrs. Graves.
Now this Blurick, so I discovered in the archives, keeps a barrel of whiskey in his wagon, and he’s wise enough to keep it a more exclusive secret than the true mercy of GOD the Fountainhead. That’s why Texas Red and Texas Pete (who may best be distinguished by the fact that Red is or was, depending on whether the Silver Panic will ever end, a master mechanic, while Pete, like Doc, is everything) both act like bellboys circling round a rich gent’s valise. Could that barrel likewise pertain to the fact that our cornhaired widow, yes, the young, young widow from Missouri, will not meet his eye? Although temperance was not exactly unyielding in the late Mrs. Blurick, her bereaved spouse stands willing to wed a lady who leaves a man’s booze alone. But must she leave him alone? This evening as she kneels in the golden grass, nourishing the fire beneath her bullet-shaped kettle hanging from its tripod, he walks over, just to stretch his legs and pass the time (better than playing “Pedro” for eggs with Pete), but the back of her neck flushes, and she gazes down into the fire, and now her mother-in-law returns from the creek with a fresh-rinsed piss bucket, so it’s time to make tracks. Never mind those temperance hags anyhow; better to be friends with men who sure can shoot! Of these, Doc looks out for him most of all. Doc’s a wise one, with the sunken eyes, matted hair and flowing beard of a Secession War graduate. He’s already near to being a prominent citizen. Oregon’s his meat; any day he’s going to remove there and farm until he dies. Blurick, who believes in freedom without having seen it, considers investing a pinch of faith in Doc, who sure can shoot, knows the country, sings sweeter than a cricket and could tell any white man a thing or two about horses.— Now, a fine Appaloosa that’s broke in, Mr. Blurick, like one of them Nez Perce ponies, that’s a treat to ride. And you know what? I’m a-tellin’ you this because I’ve took a shine to you. What you got to know about an Appaloosa is . . . —Blurick, a pretty fair horseman himself, at least formerly, not that he ever galloped much, patiently attends, because it can’t hurt to listen to any d——d thing no matter how much it cloys him. And to enter another traveller’s protection, however rhetorical, is another kind of treat. Doc’s got him a real Sharps buffalo rifle with double set triggers, whereas poor Blurick, what’s he got but that old box-lock of his Daddy’s? Long have they pass’d. Blurick needs education. Fortunately, Doc will teach him the easy way to skin a buffalo, if they ever find one. Even now it’s not too late to become a hide man! The great herds linger out here in Indian country; even nowadays one may still gather buffalo bones for souvenirs just beyond the railroad platforms of Nebraska; there must be live critters in Montana at least. Furthermore, Doc now promises to show him the greatest d——d homestead in the State of Oregon. In fact Blurick has already been dreaming of a piece of Hood River, inaugurating orchards of pear, apple and peach, cheering himself with sunflowers, tall corn and maybe even a vineyard, not that he can afford all that, but beyond the pines and aspens he can nearly see Mount Hood’s blue-grey pyramid shining with irregular polygons of snow to refresh him—O, if he had only done with this stinking desert! The drinking water’s gone foul in every cask, and the river tastes of silt and sulphur. Mrs. Graves is septic, most likely dying and won’t stop groaning. And at night out here, O GOD! But Captain Travis invites him for Prussian whist with the two Texes at a penny a point. Here’s Brown and no Baker. The whole bunch sit by the fire, with other fellows looking on (each man’s dream as heavy as the cartridge of a buffalo rifle), and there’s Baker after all, balling up his fist against his hip, like a boy playing at Army heroes. Blurick loses and loses. Brown’s for Tildenopathy, while Baker canvasses their hearts for Rutherford B. Hayes. Brown’s against letting more foreigners in; how terrible it’s getting with those German-language signs in Omaha! As for Baker, who’s more middle of the road, he likes Germans all right, but not Irishmen, who steal away our jobs just like niggers. He used to work in a sugar refinery at Saint Louis; the wages descended until Americans couldn’t afford to stay on; then they brought in the Germans. Hearing that, Blurick withdraws from politics, smiling shyly at the ground. Preserving himself from reciprocity’s awful rule, he declines a tipple of Blackfoot rum under the young stars. Doc’s shot an antelope, which sure relishes pretty good over the fire, not that it goes far for so many hungry souls. Baker offers to cut Blurick in on a section of the Umatilla country, at which Blurick gazes patiently at Brown. Captain Travis (no relation to the Travis at the Alamo) lets fly that the Trail’s a cakewalk now—nothing like twentythirty years ago when you passed folks burying their friends near about every day. Blurick agrees it’s not bad. In his wagon, Doc presently counter-explains that Travis was never anything more than a runaway squaw man from Hogeye, Texas, and the worst of it is the d——d sonofabitch left his three little half-breeds behind!—O my word, says Blurick.— Then comes morning, and another tedious stretch of the Trail, Mrs. Graves fixing to pass on anytime now, poor lady; when will she kindly shut up and die? Captain Travis calls a halt. Now the sun turns as red as a Sioux blanket. Declining the pleasures of accordion-singing around the campfire,
