John Ermine of the Yellowstone (2 page)

Yet if this white middle-class urge toward the primitive was ultimately linked to a pervasive belief in an innate racial character, the other side of the nature-nurture coin was also making
strong inroads on social attitudes during this period. The early 1900s, after all, encompassed the Progressive reform era, when numerous initiatives were launched nationally to improve public
health, education, and living conditions. This growing appreciation of the shaping power of environment, both social and natural, was rooted in the evolutionary idea that organisms adapt and
respond to their environment. Its impact was manifested not just in reform efforts but throughout American culture. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner made one of the most famous applications of it
with his “frontier thesis,” which held that the individualistic and democratic traits defining America’s national character, and differentiating it from Europe, were the product
of western frontier conditions. Remington shared this view of history, and he was just as concerned as Turner about the closing of the frontier and what it boded for the nation’s future
character. His art celebrated the army soldiers and cowboys who were the instruments of this process, but Remington also strongly felt the poignancy of Native Americans and their lost world, which
he had attempted to depict in his earlier novel,
The Way of an Indian
. With
John Ermine
, he seemed to be trying to personify the end of the frontier as a tragedy for both races
involved. But to create this conflicted character, he must assert the predominance of Ermine’s Native American upbringing over his white race. He hedged on this point, clinging to the notion
of a primordial white racial core. “But Ermine is not an Indian,” the British hunter Harding asserts to the mixed-blood scout Wolf-Voice, who responds, “Na, but she all de same
Engun” “which was true so far as that worthy could see,” Remington comments. In any case, after the imprint that the frontier environment has left on him, Ermine cannot simply
segue into civilized society, all of his Nordic features and blond locks notwithstanding. “Goodbye, goodbye, white men, and goodbye, white woman,” he begins a soliloquy as he leaves
behind the army camp. The final chapter of the book is entitled “The End of All Things.”

Native Americans might have considered this intense nostalgia of Remington’s to be crocodile tears, yet it drove his art. There may have been a time when he was somewhat more sanguine
about the passing frontier. In one of his earliest articles, “Horses of the West” (1889), he had displayed much the same ambivalence about heredity versus environment as in
John
Ermine
, which he then applied to horse breeds. “To this day the pony of western America shows many points of the [ancestral] Barbary horse to the exclusion of all other breeding,”
he wrote. “He has borne the Moor, the Spanish conqueror, the red Indian, the mountain-man, and the vaquero through all the glories of their careers.” This “equine ideal” set
the standard of “worth and beauty and speed,” Remington believed, but he also admitted that over time the animal had undergone a “gradual adjustment to his environment” in
the West. With the frontier disappearing, Remington seemed to recognize that the horse must make the transition to civilization: “There are no more worlds for him to conquer; now he must till
the ground.”
²

Remington was less and less at peace with this conclusion as the years passed, culminating with the defiant gesture of
John Ermine
. Some scholars have suggested that this defiance was
linked to his discovery of sculpture, which reinforced his pursuit of the timeless ideal. They note that he took up sculpting for the first time while collaborating with Wister on “The
Evolution of the Cow-Puncher,” with its ageless archetype of the man on horseback. In letters to Wister and others, Remington proclaimed the imperishable qualities of bronze as opposed to
paint or print. His sculptures were often frozen moments of time, capturing an instant of rapid motion, as in his first work,
The Bronco Buster
(1895), or in
Coming Through the Rye
(1902), the sculpture that he was completing in the period when he wrote
John Ermine
. With bronze he might transcend history, change, and loss. At the very least, there was aesthetic
satisfaction to fill the painful void of nostalgia.
Coming Through the Rye
, with its racing horsemen firing pistols in the air, was one of Remington’s most exuberant sculptures, quite
in counterpoint to the tone of
John Ermine
. Remington also returned to painting in a serious way during his final years, experimenting with his technique and ultimately producing some of the
best work of his career. He still depicted the West, but many of his pictures were now night scenes. So was the conclusion to
John Ermine
, which opens with the words, “The time for
‘taps’ was drawing near. . . .”

Robert L. Dorman, Ph.D.,
is monographs librarian and associate professor at Oklahoma City University. He is the author of
Revolt of the Provinces: The
Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945
.

CHAPTER ONE

V
IRGINIA
C
ITY

O
NE FINE MORNING IN THE FALL OF
’64 A
LDER
Gulch rolled up its shirt sleeves and fell to the upheaving, sluicing, drifting,
and cradling of the gravel. It did not feel exactly like old-fashioned everyday work to the muddy, case-hardened diggers. Each man knew that by evening he would see the level of dust rise higher in
his long buck skin gold-bags. All this made for the day when he could retire to the green East and marry some beautiful girl—thereafter having nothing to do but eat pie and smoke fragrant
cigars in a basking sunshine of no-work. Pie up at Kustar’s bakeshop was now one dollar a pie, and a pipe full of molasses and slivers was the best to be had in the market. Life was hard at
Alder in those days—it was practical; and when its denizens became sentimental, it took these unlovely forms, sad to relate.

Notwithstanding the hundreds who toiled in the gulches, Virginia City itself held hurrying crowds—Mormon freighters, pack trains, ponies, dirty men off the trails, wan pilgrims, Indians,
Chinese, and almost everything else not angelic.

Into this bustle rode Rocky Dan, who, after dealing faro all night at the “Happy Days” shebang, had gone for a horseback ride through the hills to brighten his eyes and loosen his
nerves. Reining up before this place, he tied his pony where a horse-boy from the livery corral could find it. Striding into that unhallowed hall of Sheol, he sang out, “Say, fellers,
I’ve just seen a thing out in the hills which near knocked me off’en my horse. You couldn’t guess what it was nohow. I don’t believe half what I see and nothin’ what I
read, but it’s out thar in the hills, and you can go throw your eyes over it yourselves.”

“What? A new thing, Dan? No! No! Dan, you wouldn’t come here with anything good and blurt it out,” said the rude patrons of the “Happy Days” mahogany, vulturing
about Rocky Dan, keen for anything new in the way of gravel.

“I gamble it wa’n’t a murder—that wouldn’t knock you off’en your horse, jus’ to see one—hey, Dan?” ventured another.

“No, no,” vouched Dan, laboring under an excitement ill becoming a faro-dealer. Recovering himself, he told the bartender to “perform his function.” The “valley
tan” having been disposed of, Dan added:

“It was a boy!”

“Boy—boy—a boy?” sighed the crowd, setting back their “empties.” “A boy ain’t exactly new, Dan,” added one.

“No, that’s so,” he continued, in his unprofessional perplexity, “but this was a white boy.”

“Well, that don’t make him any newer,” vociferated the crowd.

“No, d——it, but this was a white boy out in that Crow Injun camp, with yeller hair braided down the sides of his head, all the same Injun, and he had a bow and arrer, all the
same Injun; and I said, ‘Hello, little feller,’ and he pulled his little bow on me, all the same Injun. D——the little cuss, he was about to let go on me. I was too near them
Injuns, anyhow, but I was on the best quarter horse in the country, as you know, and willin’ to take my chance. Boys, he was white as Sandy McCalmont there, only he didn’t have so many
freckles.” The company regarded the designated one, who promptly blushed, and they gathered the idea that the boy was a decided blonde.

“Well, what do you make of it, anyhow, Dan?”

“What do I make of it? Why, I make of it that them Injuns has lifted that kid from some outfit, and that we ought to go out and bring him in. He don’t belong there, nohow, and
that’s sure.”

“That’s so,” sang the crowd as it surged into the street; “let’s saddle up and go and get him. Saddle up! Saddle up!”

The story blew down the gulch on the seven winds. It appealed to the sympathies of all white men, and with double force to their hatred of the Indians. There was no man at Alder Gulch, even the
owners of squaws—and they were many—who had not been given cause for this resentment. Business was suspended. Wagoners cut out and mounted team-horses; desperadoes, hardened roughs,
trooped in with honest merchants and hardy miners as the strung-out cavalcade poured up the road to the plateau, where the band of Crows had pitched their tepees.

“Klat-a-way! Klat-a-way!” shouted the men as they whipped and spurred up the steeps. The road narrowed near the top, and here the surging horsemen were stopped by a few men who stood
in the middle waving and howling “Halt!” The crowd had no definite scheme of procedure at any time—it was simply impelled forward by the ancient war-shout of
A rescue! A
rescue!
The blood of the mob had mounted high, but it drew restive rein before a big man who had forced his pony up on the steep hillside and was speaking in a loud, measured, and authoritative
voice.

The riders felt the desire for council; the ancient spirit of the witenagemote came over them. The American town meeting, bred in their bones and burned into their brains, made them listen to
the big temporary chairman with the yellow lion’s mane blowing about his head in the breeze. His horse did not want to stand still on the perilous hillside, but he held him there and
opened.

“Gentlemen, if this yar outfit goes a-chargin’ into that bunch of Injuns, them Injuns aforesaid is sure goin’ to shoot at us, and we are naturally goin’ to shoot back at
them. Then, gentlemen, there will be a fight, they will get a bunch of us, and we will wipe them out. Now, our esteemed friend yer, Mr. Chick-chick, savvies Injuns, as you know, he bein’
somewhat their way hisself—allows that they will chill that poor little boy with a knife the first rattle out of
The Chairman
the box. So, gentlemen, what good does it all do? Now,
gentlemen, I allows if you all will keep down yer under the hill and back our play, Chick-chick and me will go into that camp and get the boy alive. If these Injuns rub us out, it’s your
move. All what agrees to this motion will signify it by gettin’ down off’en their horses.”