The Dying Grass, page 8
GENERAL O. O. HOWARD TO COMMANDING OFFICER, FORT WALLA WALLA, FEBRUARY 5, 1877: The Department Commander purposes, as early in the coming spring as practicable, to send a suitable force into the valley for a summer encampment, to remain until Joseph and his band leave in the autumn.
Yes, sir.
HEADQUARTERS, DEPARTMENT OF THE COLUMBIA. PORTLAND, OREGON, MARCH 1, 1877. Please correct impression in Walla Walla newspapers that campaign against Joseph has been ordered. Indians so informed may begin to strike scattered families. General O. O. Howard.
Yes, sir.
I walked the empty sidewalk past a FOR SALE sign. On West North Street, the dingy collars and pipes of Wade Rain Sprinkler Irrigation were not made any more appealing by the yellow-lit window that exposed them. Crossed American flags and an orange declaration of VACANCY at the Wilderness Inn Motel persuaded me of the settled ownership of this place.— Multiple years of erasures, said Tom.
On South River Street, I peered in through the white blinds of Valley Barber, and saw the two barber chairs, two brooms in the corner, the long counter, the whisks and brushes, and the mirror.
Summary Report Blank 1962–1964
Community Improvement Program
Club name(s): . . . Wallowa County Junior Women’s Club.
Long years of neglect had left the Indian National Cemetery an unkempt area of tall grass and weeds. A landscaping of the area was undertaken by our club.
Inspired by these junior women, I too wish to landscape the Indian cemetery called Wallowa. So permit me, please, to reanimate General Howard, who is bearded, one-armed, sweaty-haired, sunken-eyed, a reliable Civil War man like Doc, almost pre-Raphaelite in appearance, a dreamer like me. Once time goes rightly he will become ever snowier of beard, face, hair and hand, with the right sleeve empty in his dark suit. In 1877 he is forty-nine. GOD bless you, general:
George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives, Bowdoin College Library.
O. O. Howard papers:
and your neat and almost childishly rounded script
(General Sherman’s resembles loops of wire)
and the graceful twirls of your capital letter P, which resembles a smallish capital “J” whose top intersects the innermost loop of a spiral figure:
Ever so many cubic feet
and then
Oregon State Archives.
General Orders, 1847–1959,
yellow now like autumn thistles.
Locator 2/21/09/04, five cubic feet.
Joseph’s already envaulted here, I see, and likewise Toohhoolhoolsote.
The land has always belonged to us, said Toohhoolhoolsote, who was renowned among the Dreamers
like the smell of water at dusk in Wallowa
and the golden grass
and the shadows of the grass
and his shadow lengthening on the rocks.
I will not be afraid of Toohhoolhoolsote’s shadow. He is dead and I am alive. He is dead. He is dead.
2
Come on and be a man, Mr. Blurick, says Doc. Take a chance on Wallowa.
But Blurick still dreams of the Hood River, and someday a vineyard; licking his forefinger clean, then wiping it on his shirt,
while Texas Pete winds a strip of rawhide around a mule’s cracked hoof
and the red sun oversees all our dark-skirted women kneeling down in the rushes to get water
(no, that was back before Terry’s nomination for major-general was confirmed. You forget that we’d already captured Fort Fisher.
—Quit fighting the war, Travis!)
and digging their cooking-trench two feet long,
as Blurick remembers how three weeks ago, when the level was higher in his whiskey barrel and he felt less weary of Doc,
who come to think of it resembles General Grant still more than Travis, doing up the hard, bearded look to perfection, although less sorrowfully than his model,
who never got arrested for trading on a reservation without a license
(neither did Doc, who rode out of Quapaw before the Modoc Agent served him any trouble),
he used to drink and drink with that man until they both loved each other, because Doc for all his faults is one to learn from and a fine defender of any true friend; hence:
Doc, where are you actually from?
Laramie, I done told you. Can’t you listen? A man don’t like to be asked that question twice. So I’m telling you again, Laramie, and I expect you to hear me. O my good LORD, the horse I used to have there, Blurick! His name was Star. Tears in my eyes. Yep, I was right there in Laramie when Red Cloud walked right out of the council, after all we’d done for him, and I said to that Commissioner Taylor, who was never nothin’ but a fawner, I said to him, mark my words, I said, you ain’t heard the last of them Sioux, I said—and before the year was out, that red-dyed villain staged the Fetterman Massacre, and what I said to Commissioner Taylor, I said it again to General William Tecumseh fucking Sherman in ’68, I said it straight to his face, because I’m telling you, Blurick, when Sherman and Terry rode into Laramie in ’68—
I guess you’ve had enough.
No. You gimme another drink right now.
If I don’t, what’ll you do about it?
You stay around me long enough and maybe you’ll find out—
and while the cornhaired widow darns up a rent in Travis’s spare shirt, that so-called Reverend Farris, whom for tolerance we call Preacher, prays in a shout, as he does each dawn and dusk, for the death of Sitting Bull, and the deliverance of our present and prospective United States from all SATANic reds,
Blurick passes Brown’s wagon, whose flap is open, and glimpsing the man bowed over something, hiding it and himself equally well beneath his slouch hat (what secret does he treasure there?), then forgetting Brown, leading his oxen round to the feed box in the back of the wagon, then picketing them to get what joy they can of dust and weeds, smiling vaguely round to remember his late wife Eliza Bell, whom he used to call Pet, and hopping onto his own spring seat, sipping his barefoot whiskey, his tongue as numbly metallic as if he has tasted an Oregon grape, wishes to reach some fort or tent city so that he can post off a two-center letter to his brother Jesse, who might be in trouble or dying; for Wittfield Blurick sure means to be good,
and just like a mule turning a well-windlass, he pulls full wearily within the apparatus of hope, drawing up his burden bit by bit, bracing his legs, knowing that once this bucket comes up, somebody will empty it and cast it back down the hole for him to draw up again, again; such is life, Mama used to say, and she was right, but every mule on the wild side of half-broken years thirsts to pull free from that sort of life, running, fornicating, chewing low-hanging fruit, you name it; such is our fallen nature, O my LORD. Why on earth this inoffensive grifter (who never even got to Wallowa) should now become a lifelong mania of Doc’s is a question comparable to the one I’d like to ask Colonel Perry, who hates his wife for no reason I ever saw, or Wood, who unaccountably tilts against the Army, Larry Ott, who just can’t abide leaving Nez Perces aboveground, or Theller’s vengeful widow—for he’s neither hating nor hateful, this oldish half-ruined man sometimes dreaming of women and always calculating money and costs
as he retraces his dreams upon Horn’s map all the way past Fort Walla Walla down the Columbia to The Dalles, where the Indians must now be smoking salmon, and then OREGON CITY, Portland and the coast (as if he were going home to Mrs. Mack); his aunt’s people will meet him in Oregon City, where the bosomy cornhaired young widow from Missouri evidently means to settle, not that it matters since she d——n never looks his way anymore! In Portland, Blurick might pick up something lucrative, in the buying and selling line; after all, Government dollars must be flowing there; it’s the headquarters of the District of Columbia! Then he’ll hotfoot it for Hood River. If Portland doesn’t work out, it’s Hood River for Blurick just the same, but maybe a smaller home without picture windows. Interrupting these projects, Doc, who knows the secret reason why Lincoln was killed (Wilkes Booth was a puppet of the niggers), now informs him gratis of the fashion in which certain loving Indian couples comb each other’s hair
and come early evening in Hood River, while I’m smoking a pipe on our front porch, she sets herself down so gentle in my lap, and I start combing her long blonde locks with an ivory comb while she’s running her sweet fingers through my hair,
D——d if I ain’t seen it, Blurick! The way they touch each other’s an abomination!
because Doc, loving him like a true comrade, means to hold him back here where the NEZ PERCES or SAPTINS occupy an indefinite white grandness above the Salmon River Mountains, east of WALLA WALLA and west of . Adventure through Range No. 46 east; now you’re coming into Wallowa. What in blazes do I care? Doc’s sure wearing on me. I’d rather get shut of that fellow and plant my vineyard
where Mount Hood crowns its blue-green forest ridge over the meadows, and below me my neighbors’ farms
(I’m not afraid of Doc),
wrapped in golden grass and cherry trees
and fronting the Hood River fast and dark:
The LORD your GOD is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing forth in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley,
so that Blurick, who now sits high, watching the other wagons roll on ahead of him, with Mrs. Graves’s various traps upheaped behind him like the jetsam of a wrecked ship, will walk up the trail eating pears, all the way to
the sweet tall purple lupines humming with bees all summer,
the crisp shadow of a spruce branch-tip with every needle in place projected on a bleached white stump,
and a cabin in sight of Mount Hood
and (to hell & blazes with that haughty widow!) an orphan girl now already pregnant,
blue mountains and green mountains below, where
Doc, how many more miles to Farewell Bend?
Doc?
Soon’s you get to Pendleton, Jerry Despain will board your horse on good hay and grain for fifty cents cash. Remember that name.
What are you, his brother-in-law?
Doc, why won’t you answer me?
He’s set on that Hood River. Even though I tole him and tole him that all the best sections have been claimed and growed up tight—
Let him alone, Doc.
Doc?
There’s a nigger in every woodpile. What’s your nigger’s name?
Cut it out, Doc. I ain’t scared of you. Blurick, if I was you I’d show him the business end of your Sharps—
Tell me what you got against Wallowa, Mr. Blurick. Tell me why you won’t take a chance. I got this here dip compass that can find copper and nickel, and I’ll teach you how to use it.
You keep it. I aim to raise an orchard.
Ain’t I told you about the gold up there? Wallowa gold, Blurick! That’s no lie. Richer than Alder Gulch. Wallowa’s got everything.
I s’pose it might.
And blood-red salmon in Wallowa Lake, so many you can kill ’em by the dozen with clubs.
Kill ’em yourself.
Might be more gold in Wallowa than they’ve took out of even the Black Hills. Just dig up your color and buy your farm—
On Horn’s map—
I already warned you against Horn’s map, but you won’t listen.
I’ll think on it.
No. Say your piece against Wallowa right now.
Plenty of Indians up that way. The map says NEZ PERCES. That’s what it says. So it ain’t easy till they get driven out. And you know mining is way down in north Idaho. Whenever Chinamen come in, it’s all over. And I ain’t seen no pictures of that country, neither, but I have seen a steel engraving, plain as the dickens, of a Hood River farm, and that’s what I aim to get. And I read in a reliable Christian newspaper published down in Bethany, Virginia, that this same Hood River country flows with milk and honey. That’s exactly the words they used and no mistake.
You hear that, Captain Travis? This man’s yellow. He’s no better than a coward.
Lay off him. CHRIST, why pick on an American when there’s more’n enough Indians to fight?
What’s Indians got to do with it? When we reach Farewell Bend we’ll need to—
Any man want to bet there ain’t good Indians?
You turning preacher in your old age?
Let’s not get off the track. Doc and Blurick are squaring up to fight, and there ain’t no other fun around here.
When we get to our nooning place—
Hell, Blurick won’t fight.
Then there won’t be no quarrel.
We’ll see. When Doc says something, he don’t never go back on it.
Your oxen are holding up pretty good, Blurick. I see you know how to pamper them animals.
Yeah.
Now, Blurick, be a man and stand up to Doc if you don’t want him pestering you.
Blurick, you watch out for him. One time I seen him brain a man with the edge of a tin plate.
Getting back on the subject of Indians—
Cut it out. We ain’t interested. Didn’t your Mama never tell you you’re simple?
The first time I saw an Indian out here—
First time you heard a horse piss you thought it was Niagara Falls.
But Tilden stands for keeping down canal tolls.
Well, but Hayes says right here—
But Baker says to Brown—
Good syrup and sugar at Walla-Walla.
Then he says to me, can’t you picture Blurick in his granny’s come-hither dress, riding sidesaddle like a girl?
And Tilden has come out against building palaces for the insane. He’ll keep Government out of our pockets.
Quit it now. Doc’s getting mean again.
He’s been mean ever since
. . . ever since the Oro Fino route got opened as a wagon road—
But they got all the gold out.
Not quite. Chief Joseph stands in the way.
Because this d——d Jew Government—
And there’s other rich strikes they tell about, between Florence and White Bird Creek.
Now, when you find you an Indian to canoe you across the Columbia, you got to set him straight. Whatever he wants, you offer half.
You told me. Now for Pete’s sake shut up.
Who’s playing to-night?
Not me. I seen you stock a bower and an ace.
No, it’s Doc that done that. I ain’t no cardsharp, honest Injun, and if you say anything different I’ll—
We’re not supposed to sell weapons or powder to Indians no more, I don’t care how kind they be—
What about knives?
Sure. You can sell anybody a knife, I guess.
Blurick, you’ll stand up to him?
I aim to mind my own business,
turning his back upon these croakers and idlers who don’t much care for his health. Last night when he was tallying his sacks of beans and cornmeal (some of which he might afford to sell in Hood River), Doc came in without asking. He’s not scared of Doc, not quite.
Blurick, if you don’t put your foot down, Doc’s gonna keep on teasin’ you every day a little more nasty and violent.
I’ll take care of myself.
What’s the hangup back there?
Mrs. Graves finally passed.
Just now? Poor lady. Who’s gonna bury her?
She’s no relation of mine.
Travis, I seen how your eyes wigwagged when them kids said typhoid.
Weren’t no typhoid.
Then let’s see you bury her.
In the first place—
Aw, hell.
It’s too hot right now. You could fry an egg on my wagon-rims.
Is Preacher in there?
Sure. He’s been prayin’ over her two days straight, so you think he’d miss this? This is his meat.
