Black Hills (33 page)

During the last part of this harangue, just as the last of the ponies were killed and just before I cut her off so that we could mount up and ride, I could not help notice the beautiful girl—young woman of seventeen, actually—who for some strange reason had been holding my hand while Black Kettle’s wizened sister droned on.

“What is this old woman doing?” I irritably asked my interpreter.

The interpreter laughed. “Why, sir, she’s been marrying you to that squaw, named
Mo-nah-se-tah.
I think you’re duly and properly married by now.”

I immediately dropped the girl’s hand and gestured Black Kettle’s sister to silence.

I well remember that retreat out of the valley and upstream along the river, looking back in the early-afternoon winter light—the many hundreds of Indians along
the bluffs there now looking like so many black vertical pegs in the reflected sunlight, looking, from the distance, like heathen Druid monuments to some forgotten sun god—and the valley itself alive with flame and smoke (we had burned all the teepees) and the snow there not only trampled, but red, for several hundred yards, from the blood of the murdered ponies.

I was later criticized both from within the Army and from without for retreating when I had so many Indians virtually at our mercy (our wagon train was coming up, and there was enough buffalo and other meat in the captured village to feed my seven hundred troopers for months)—not to mention criticized even more harshly for not tarrying and searching for Major Elliott and his men—but you know the reason for my so-called retreat, Libbie, my darling. Of all the people on Earth, you are the only one to know the full reason.

But sometimes I wonder what those writers-of-editorials who called me coward or “squaw killer” would think if they knew the truth.

L
et us recall more pleasant (or at least amusing) things, my darling.

Mo-nah-se-tah.

How you used to tease me about her. She stayed with the Seventh after the Battle of Washita River and was either a guest in a tent near my tent, or was in my tent. It was a long, hard, cold winter. (You know that on the march—even those first November days in ’68 when we were striking south toward the Antelope Mountains and the Washita River before the attack on Black Kettle’s band—I often would not have my command tent erected when we paused, but would sleep the few, cold hours of the long, cold night outside, on a buffalo robe, with our two large dogs on either side of me. Later, when that endless winter campaign was over… no, wait, even during it, through our many letters, I remember now… you teased me unceasingly about my “Indian bride.”)

I remember one early missive I sent you from the snowy wastes, one in which I described first the comic “wedding ceremony” along the Washita and then described
Mo-nah-se-tah
herself to you in terms that no “ordinary” young wife would have found bearable, much less amusing:

That was in my letter for public consumption—and, perhaps, as I knew you would know, for later publication in the book of memoirs you and I had long planned to write together—but I knew how you would respond to it privately, and you did not disappoint me, my darling. I knew that you would tease me about the girl in a way that only a wife perfectly secure in her husband’s love and adoration could tease her lover.

No more than a week later, somewhere on our freezing march through the panhandle of Texas and around back into Oklahoma, your responding letter caught up to me:

I interrupt only to say that I remember when you first used “escutcheon” to describe what you are discussing here, my darling Libbie. It was in Monroe, when we were lying naked on our bed that summer evening after we’d bathed together and I was playing with the rich tangle of what I then called your maiden-hair and you asked me if your “escutcheon” was, as you whispered that warm afternoon, “too prolific?” I assured you then that it was not, that I loved the luxuriant growth of it, and then I ended any verbal argument by other means.

Your winter ’69 letter continued, and I think I remember each word correctly:

I wrote you back that I had seen the lady bathing and that although she seemed to have almost no escutcheon, her seventeen-year-old’s breasts were high and firm, but immediately assured you that they did not compare in attractiveness to your full, white bosoms. (I could have told you the truth, that Indian women’s busts were almost always sagging, wrinkled old dugs before they were out of their twenties, caused, I presume, by suckling far too many Indian children and perhaps by never being supported by any proper undergarment, but I thought perhaps you knew this already. You were always put off by the appearance of old, wrinkled, sagging Indian women.)

You wrote more:

I assured you in the next mail that
Mo-nah-se-tah’s
skin was indeed a golden, tawny color, unblemished except for an odd tattoo carved into her left shoulder. Her nipples, I explained, were a light brown and thus not nearly as attractive or exciting as your pink tips, my darling Libbie. You then abandoned all subtlety:

I laughed then and wrote you that the day before, the 14th of January, 1869
, Mo-nah-se-tah
had moaned softly for hours. It was the day her baby was born, and during most of the time I had glimpsed her briefly naked in my tent, the small girl was grossly pregnant with some brave’s child. I often wondered if we had killed the father of her child that morning of November 27 (odds are good we had), but I never asked
Mo-nah-se-tah,
and she never mentioned the warrior or his fate.

The girl was always cheerful and never a drag on the regiment. Indeed, it was due to her excellent guiding that on March 15 of 1869 we found Little Robe’s and Medicine Arrow’s village in north Texas, thus ending a chase that had preoccupied us all that long winter. Since they had some white captives with them (the memory of those two dead white women in the burned village along the Washita, their throats so cruelly cut, had stayed with me), I chose to parley rather than immediately attack the village, but when Medicine Arrow proved especially recalcitrant, I seized four of their men as hostages and promised the chiefs I would hang these men at sunrise the next morning if they did not immediately hand over their white captives. Still, the recalcitrant Cheyenne resisted, so we sent the captives—after grabbing a few more—away to Fort Hays with a second ultimatum that these hostages would be freed only after Medicine Arrow and Little Robe brought their bands to the reservation and released the white captives. Luckily for us, the guards at Fort Hays killed two of these Cheyenne hostages, and Medicine Arrow released the captives and led his people to a reservation.

Then I returned to Fort Hays and you, and we had two of the most pleasant years of our marriage there, with you teasing me about
Mo-nah-se-tah
at some of the most intimate moments of those two happy years. Why such conversation excited you, my dearest, I do not know, but your excitement always incited mine—and perhaps, to be totally truthful, the fantasy discussions of
Mo-nah-se-tah
did as well—so of all our little bedroom games, the
Mo-nah-se-tah
game may have been one of the most stimulating for both of us.

L
ibbie, my darling, even while thinking these thoughts to you, I am overcome by a strange and deep foreboding.

I am sure that I am merely dreaming, almost certainly in the arms of morphia, after being wounded at the Little Big Horn yesterday (or recently), but sometimes here in the darkness I feel insubstantial, no longer connected to my injured body or the world, in a word—untethered—except to you.

Even while I was reminiscing about the Washita victory and our ongoing
Mo-nah-se-tah
game, another memory chilled me.

Do you remember last winter in New York, when, weary of seeing
Julius Caesar
for free (more than two score times, until we could—and did—recite all the dialogue from memory), we were allowed by our friend the actor Lawrence Barrett (the very same friend who’d left all those complimentary tickets for us to
Julius Caesar
) to sit in on the dress rehearsals for
Henry IV Part I
and
Henry IV Part II
?

Neither of us knew the plays that well, but you were highly amused at the character of Henry Percy, the so-called Hotspur. When I failed to see the source of your amusement, you whispered, “Oh, Autie… Hotspur is
you!”

I frowned at the martinet of a war leader strutting and fretting on the stage—the theater, I remember, being filled only with other actors and immediate family, was not heated, and we were shivering—and I whispered back, “I fail to see any resemblance.”

“Oh, Autie,” you whispered again, still giggling as softly as you could at the scene unfolding on the stage, “he loves his wife madly. Don’t you see? But the two of them are always teasing and threatening and playacting toward each other.”

At that very moment, the dialogue on stage was such:

HOTSPUR

LADY PERCY