Centennial (24 page)

There was a moment of hesitation, which Lame Beaver broke by signaling without authorization, “Sixty horses,” and without a second’s pause Deep Water shouted and signaled, “Eighty horses,” and the trade was completed.

In this great battle, which stabilized the southern frontier for nearly forty years and was therefore the outstanding Indian battle of half a century, 113 Comanche and 67 Apache fought 92 Cheyenne and 39 Our People. The southern confederacy lost 28 men, including Never-Death; the northern 16, including Gray Wolf.

The victors returned home with the eighty horses from the Comanche, plus another nineteen captured from the Apache. Coups were counted for many nights, none so notable as the one Lame Beaver gained when he grappled barehanded with Never-Death and disclosed the secret of his powerful medicine.

In the year 1782, when Lame Beaver was thirty-five years old, a major imbalance developed on the plains, one which threatened Indian stability until it was corrected. The arrival of the horse was the only other phenomenon which approached it in importance.

That year the Pawnee acquired a substantial supply of guns and for a while dominated all tribes to the west. There had been guns before, isolated examples of some lucky Indian’s obtaining a rifle and three or four lead bullets with just enough powder to fire them; but after that explosive celebration, in which his own fingers were liable to be shot off, or his friend’s head, only the barren rifle remained. In the end it was used as a club.

But in 1782 the Pawnee got the rifle in earnest through trading with Saint Louis, and acquired the skill to use it. They set forth immediately to impose upon the Platte a Pax Pawnee, and for a while succeeded. Set free from the necessity of riding down their bison by brute strength and shooting them with bow and arrow, they could now stand well back and gun them down at leisure. A war party of six could roam from the Missouri to the Colorado mountains, and move in safety, assured that if trouble did develop with Our People or the Ute, their guns would defend them.

The more remote tribes, learning of the appalling advantage now enjoyed by the Pawnee, had only one desire—to get guns for themselves. But since they had not yet begun to trade with white men, they remained without modern arms. Their world was moving away from them and they were unable to catch up.

“I told you the Pawnee were the cleverest,” Jumping Snake repeated so often and so dolefully that the others wanted to silence him, but he was a senior chief with many coups and his lamentations continued.

Obviously, many councils were held and raids against the Pawnee were planned, but as Jumping Snake reiterated, “If we got the black-sticks-that-speak-death, we wouldn’t know what to do with them. What is their great medicine? Who can tell?”

A number of Our People were then encamped near Rattlesnake Buttes, and early one morning a boy of ten ran up to Jumping Snake and reported, “A Pawnee war party in the cottonwoods f The chiefs immediately dispatched scouts to see if this report was true, and they returned with ominous news: “Fifteen Pawnee. Good horses. Four black sticks.”

The council had to assume that the Pawnee intended trouble, and some advised that the camp be evacuated immediately and reestablished at some point on the other side of the North Platte, and this counsel prevailed. But Lame Beaver and seven of the middle group of warriors were given permission to stay behind to lure the Pawnee on, in hopes of somehow gaining possession of at least one of the rifles.

“We shall need some horses to use as bait,” Lame Beaver said, so they were given sixteen, which included their own mounts, and eight of these they allowed to roam as lures in the direction of the South Platte.

The Pawnee were not marching westward arrogantly, even though they had guns. They kept scouts properly posted, and in time one of them, on a reconnoiter to the north, spotted the horses. He was not so stupid as to imagine that the animals were unattended, and since no men were visible, he concluded that they must be a trap. Soon the other Pawnee were in position to study the situation. Obviously this was a trap, but there was a good chance that whoever had set it knew nothing of guns. This would be a good opportunity to make them permanently afraid of the Pawnee and to get some good mounts at the same time. They laid their plans to snare the horses and terrify their owners.

But as they were doing so, Lame Beaver and his men were constructing contrary plans, and it was obvious that the two must come into violent conflict. The battle started when the fifteen Pawnee fanned out to drive the grazing horses into the river. Lame Beaver allowed this maneuver to develop, because it diluted the force of the enemy, and when the spread was at its greatest, he and Cottonwood Knee made a determined charge at its apex.

They broke through, but now they were encircled by the enemy. This was not accidental; it was an act of special courage, for it distracted the attention of the Pawnee,” allowing the other warriors from Our People to attack the two flanks.

Confusion resulted. At first the Pawnee leader thought he might be able to dispose of the two intruders without using his guns, but Lame Beaver and Cottonwood Knee were so wild in their passage, and so disruptive, that ordinary tactics could not contain them and he signaled one of his men bearing a gun to fire.

There was a loud blast, much smoke, and Cottonwood Knee was blown off his horse, his chest shattered. Lame Beaver, seeing the destruction of his friend and knowing from the spurting blood that he must be dead, wheeled his horse and rode hard at the Pawnee who had fired, and that warrior was so preoccupied with his gun that he could not protect himself. Lame Beaver, leaning far out of his saddle, grabbed at the smoking gun with both hands and wrested it from its owner. His momentum carried him out of the semicircle and back toward his own men.

“I have it!” he shouted, waving the gun aloft.

At this Our People on the left flank rallied and started a concerted drive on the Pawnee, who retreated slowly, firing another gun and taking the eight horses and Cottonwood Knee’s mount across the Platte with them.

It was an inconclusive battle. Our People had lost nine good horses, which they could not afford, and Cottonwood Knee was dead, a courageous man with many coups to his credit. The Pawnee had been repulsed, leaving two of their men dead and surrendering one precious gun.

Lame Beaver sent a messenger across the North Platte to inform the chiefs that it was safe to return to Rattlesnake Buttes, and while they waited for the tribe to come back and pitch their tipis, they studied the gun. They had seen iron before, and some had knives of it, but they had never seen it in such quantity or so handsomely molded. They found pebbles to run down the interior of the barrel and deduced that these became the deadly missiles.

At this point they cut open Cottonwood Knee to find out what it was that had slain him, and the shape of the bullet confirmed their deductions. They could make nothing of the firing mechanism; its sophistication was quite beyond their understanding at the moment, but one brave did fit his finger against the trigger and conclude that this had something to do with the mystery. They had a gun. They didn’t know quite what to do with it, but they were no longer outside the pale.

In this battle fifteen Pawnee faced eight of Our People, and when it came time to counting coups it was agreed that Lame Beaver had gained one, because he had touched the Pawnee who held the gun, but that evening he lost whatever honor he had gained, for as he was helping Blue Leaf raise their tipi he heard an ominous rattle, close to his wife.

Looking frantically about, he saw to his horror a great rattlesnake, coiled and preparing to strike Blue Leaf. Acting instinctively, he leaped at the hideous thing and clubbed at it with the newly captured gun.

He knocked the venomous creature to one side, but saw that it was still capable of striking, so he clubbed it again and again until it lay stretched on the sand beside the tipi.

A crowd, hearing the fight against the snake, gathered, and a woman cried, “Lame Beaver has killed a great snake,” but a more observant boy said, “He’s broken the stick-that-speaks!”

Hushed warriors gathered in the sunset to stare at Lame Beaver, who stood holding the gun by the end of its barrel, the stock and firing mechanism shattered.

Our People, dependent upon the bison, had become like the bison. Just as those shaggy animals divided into two herds, one centering on the plains lying north of the North Platte, the other keeping pretty much to the plains south of the South Platte, so Our People were beginning to divide into two tribes, North and South, the former depending upon Flat-Pipe while the southern revered Sacred-Wheel.

Lame Beaver and his small group, now led by Jumping Snake, belonged to the southern group, and although they sometimes ranged far north toward the land of the Crow, they returned always to that congenial land between the two Plattes to pitch their camp near Rattlesnake Buttes. It must not, however, be thought that they lived there. They were nomads, hunters who went where the bison went, and it was of no concern to them what type of land they lived on. In some years they might not camp within a hundred miles of Rattlesnake Buttes; in others they might move far south to the Arkansas. They had no home. They did have a predominant group of bison which they followed, and from time to time, elements of that herd wandered up to the good grass between the two Plattes and Our People followed them.

This constant moving about, increased since obtaining the horse, had one unexpected consequence which caused Our People some trouble. The travois, that primitive but functional invention for hauling goods, was constructed always from two poles used otherwise to support the tipi, and as they dragged for mile after mile across rough terrain, the large ends were gradually abraded until the poles were no longer of sufficient length to use in making the tipi. The Pawnee might have used them, for they constructed low tipis, but Our People liked slim, towering ones, not too wide in circumference at the bottom and gracefully tapered at the top. Long poles were a necessity.

But where to get them? Often Our People would spend eighteen months in the heart of the prairie, where never a tree was seen, not one. And when they did come to a place like Rattlesnake Buttes, all they found was cottonwood, which produced neither long nor straight trunks.

They had to trade for their tipi poles. In the north there were Indians who would give a Pawnee nine short poles for one horse, but since Our People demanded longer poles and better, they received only seven for one horse. They considered this a fair trade, for to Our People the tipi was the center of life.

In the year 1788, when Lame Beaver was forty-one years old and one of the wisest men of the tribe, he noticed with some dismay that the three key-poles of his tipi were so ground down at the butt ends that they no longer permitted the tipi to assume its lofty and dignified form. He was unhappy. For many years now, in fact, ever since his decision not to seek a high station in the tribe, he had found exceptional pleasure in his tipi. It was the most satisfactory in the camp, not the loftiest nor the most garish—for there were others more copiously decorated—but the most congenial. In all its proportions it was correct.

At the end of a long trek he liked to lie back and watch his wife erect it, for she did this with skill and a certain grace, as if to do so were part of her religion. First she gathered the three key-poles and laid them on the ground where the tipi was to stand. Then she lashed the thin ends together with pliant antelope thongs, about three feet from the tips. Thus she had a tripod, which she set upright, the heavy ends of the three poles wedged into the ground, far enough apart to assure stability.

Next she took about a dozen lesser poles, shorter and not so straight, and these she also wedged into the ground, propping them against the point where the key-poles were lashed together. She now had the skeleton of her tipi, its base securely settled on the ground, its top rising far into the air. Her next task was to throw over it the tanned bison hides that would form the covering, and this she did by climbing partway up to the junction of the key-poles and binding a segment of the skin to it.

She allowed the skin to fall naturally, draping it evenly over the poles and making sure that the opening through which people would enter would face east. It was inconceivable that a tipi should be oriented in any other way.

The tipi was now erected save for one other important feature which made it habitable. Taking two extra-long poles, she adroitly fitted their tips into the corners of the bison covering which rested on the very top of the tipi, and these poles she did not fasten in the earth. By swinging them to different positions about the tipi and at different angles, she could determine how much ventilation would come in at the top, or how much would go out if the flap were left open, and in this way ensure both a warm house and a healthy one. The air in her tipi was never suffocating.

When she was finished, Lame Beaver would lift from the travois various parfleches, those boxlike carrying cases made of heavy partially tanned hide, closer to wood than to leather, and from them Blue Leaf would take the cots, her cooking gear And whatever mementos her husband had acquired in his hunting and fighting.

Lame Beaver took charge of building his own cot, for he was proud of it and spent much of his life on it. It had a low wooden frame upon which he placed a mat made of carefully selected and smoothed willow sticks, each one pierced at the ends so that antelope sinews could be passed through, keeping the willow firm and in place. Over this he placed two bison blankets carefully tanned and pliable, and on the tipi wall behind, a medium-sized bison robe which had been worked to the consistency of parchment. On it Blue Leaf, using stick ends for brushes and a variety of pigments for coloring, had drawn memorable scenes from her husband’s life; the yellow which predominated came from the bile sac of the bison. She was not an outstanding artist, but she could depict bison and Pawnee and Ute, and these were the things which preoccupied her husband.

The cot had this peculiarity: the willow-stick mat extended for several feet at each end, and these extensions were held in upright position by stout tripods, so as to form two backrests. The exposed wood was highly polished and some of the strands were colored, so that Lame Beaver’s cot constituted a kind of throne, with the painted skin behind it and the handsome backrests on either end.

Since no tribe could be at war constantly, or hunt bison when there were no bison, and since there were no books, nor alphabet to print them in if there were, and since no one from Our People could converse with anyone from another tribe, and since there was no need of constant council meetings, Lame Beaver had days and weeks on end of idle time, with no great thoughts to occupy him and no one to share them with if they had mysteriously arisen. He led a bleak, impoverished intellectual life, the highlight coming when younger warriors crowded into his tipi to hear him tell of his adventures in the past.

Then he would seat the most promising young man beside him, and they would lean back against the willow backrests and he would speak to him alone, allowing the others on the floor to listen, and he would relate how he had battled Never-Death and how he had captured the first gun and then destroyed it. He was meticulous in his narration, always giving more than just credit to Cottonwood Knee and Red Nose, the former dead, the latter a considerable chief. He counted no coups that he had not rightfully won, and no interrupter ever had occasion to halt his narrative to ask, “Who saw you gain that coup?” The coups he counted were part of tribal history and were preserved on the skin his wife had painted.

In the early summer of 1788 he counted one of the great coups of his life, not because of its inherent bravery but because of the extraordinary consequences which flowed from it, not in that year but seventy-three years later.

It started when he was resting one day, watching his wife build the tipi. “We need some new poles,” he said half out loud.

His wife stopped her work and said, “We should have traded for them when we were north. We could have got maybe seven poles for one horse.”

“Well, we’re not north,” Lame Beaver said, “but I think I know where there are some good poles, and we don’t have to give a horse for them, either.”

She assumed from this that he intended raiding the Paw nee again; he was always ready to test his wits against them, so she decided to stop that line of reasoning before it went further. “Pawnee poles are not long enough,” she said, resuming her work.

“I would not have a Pawnee pole,” he said. “Not if a village stood unprotected right over there.” He tossed a stone toward the spot at which some years before he had killed the rattlesnake, and he began laughing at the way he had smashed the first gun. “Remember that snake?” he called to his wife as she climbed the pole to fix the skin. He made a noise like a rattler, and it was so real that she looked back in old terror. “Me,” he said.

He had a plan for getting new poles. One of the younger braves, trying to trap beaver, had gone partly by accident, partly by design, well into the mountains and had found a steep valley, one of whose sides was covered with blue spruce, the other with tall, straight aspen. He had told Lame Beaver of this, and at the time the older man had said, “That might be a place to get some tipi poles,” and the younger had said, “The aspen were very straight,” but Lame Beaver had explained, “Aspen rot. You want pine or spruce. How were the spruce?” The young brave assured him they were straight.

Now Lame Beaver sought out the younger man, Antelope by name, and asked him if he would lead a party back to the valley to collect some key-poles. The young brave was eager to do so, but warned, “It’s Ute country,” and Lame Beaver said, “Everywhere on earth is somebody’s country. You just have to be careful,” and the young brave said, “But I saw signs of Ute in the valley,” and Lame Beaver said, “I’ve been seeing Ute signs all my life, and usually it means that there’s Ute about.”

They put together a war party of eleven men plus four packhorses and marched westward for one day toward the mountain where the stone beaver tried vainly to reach the summit. The next day they followed one of the small streams which in times past had carried torrential rains and melted ice down from that mountain. They proceeded up it for a while, conning to a fork which led to the south, and this brought them at last to Blue Valley. When they came to it, plains Indians seeing the interior majesty of the mountains for the first time, they stopped in admiration, aware that they were viewing one of the precious sights of their earth.

That day it was magnificent, the dark-blue spruce clustering together on the southern bank where there was no sun, the lighter aspen in many shades of dancing green shimmering on the north bank, and after some moments spent admiring the perfect valley, Lame Beaver dismounted, studied the terrain and said, “There have been Ute here. They were hunting beaver.” He therefore posted two outlooks and proceeded to the job of cutting key-poles among the spruce.

He had chopped down some two dozen, leaving the trimming of the upper branches to the younger men, when one of the scouts whistled like a bird and indicated that six Ute with horses and guns were coming down the valley from the opposite direction. Lame Beaver weighed this unwelcome information and decided to wait the situation out by simply halting all work and withdrawing into the protective shadows of the spruce. He did this, unaware of three unusual events that had recently taken place near where he hid.

First, in a spring freshet some years ago a boulder tumbling down the stream bed had knocked off the end of a major pipe and brought almost pure gold to the surface. The pipe, with its tip unsealed, had released several nuggets of the highest-quality gold, and these had scattered along the bottom of the stream, where later sediment had partially covered them.

Second, it had not been much later that the Ute in this district had got their first gun and with it a set of equipment for making bullets. They knew how to melt lead and pour it into the iron molds the Pawnee had traded them for beaver skins. Also, they understood powder and how to get a constant supply by trading bison skins south to the Mexicans at Santa Fe. The Ute were now an armed tribe.

Third, some time ago on an exploration down Blue Valley for beaver, a Ute brave responsible for pouring bullets in the mold had spotted the yellow nuggets in the stream bed and had idly picked them up to see if they could be molded into bullets. To his surprise, this could be done without melting, and he made two fine bullets out of pure gold. He had looked around for more of the metal, recognizing it as easier to use than lead, but he found none.

It was this brave, with the iron mold and the two gold bullets, who now came down the valley, carefully watching the stream for signs of beaver. He would have gone right past the hiding enemy had he not happened to see a white chip of wood. Thinking this to be the work of a beaver, he moved inland from the stream, turned a corner and came face to face with Lame Beaver, who knifed him in the throat and took his gun and the parfleche in which he carried his bullets.

When this was done, Our People leaped onto the trail, scaring the five remaining Ute warriors into flight. Seeing that their leader was dead and that they were outnumbered, they turned and fled back toward the head of the valley, where they hoped to find reinforcements.

This gave Lame Beaver and his companions time to load their key poles and head for lower ground, but before they did so the young brave who had discovered the valley and had led Lame Beaver to it asked him if he wanted the scalp of the dead Ute. Lame Beaver shook his head no, so the younger man neatly lifted the scalp to take back to camp as a souvenir of his first important encounter with the enemy.

Lame Beaver, like most of the serious warriors among the Cheyenne and Our People, never bothered with scalps. Collecting such grisly tokens was not a traditional part of Indian culture; it had been introduced a hundred years earlier by French and English military commanders who, before paying bounty, demanded proof from their Indian mercenaries that they had actually slain an enemy. The habit had become ingrained in the eastern tribes and had slowly spread westward, where some tribes like the Comanche made it a respected part of their ritual.