The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (20 page)

Well, when all the wagers were down, Coulter got up leisurely, still wearing his derisive smile, as if he had dismissed a class of idiot children, and walked over to his wagon. I could not help but admire his tread; physically he is unusually graceful for a man of
his height and breadth of shoulder. He steps along as silent and wary as any Indian, but to offset what might appear to be a compliment, I’ll add that he has a disposition to match that of the surliest Indian alive.

So we followed along at some distance, curious about his preparations. What was our surprise when he emerged from his wagon carrying his rifle, an ax, and a large piece of bright red flannel. He proceeded to cut a sharpened sapling six feet high; then, with a sardonic wave, he pushed forward up the trail.

It was two days before we learned all the details of this abominable rogue’s “hunt.” For the outrageous truth is that Coulter came back at dusk dragging two sizable buck on a pair of poles interlaced with thongs—what the Indians of some parts call a “travois.” Yes, he had slain the animals and won upwards of a hundred dollars. And at collection time he declined to say how the job was done. But inevitably with a man of that stamp, he had to confide it afterward, amid triumphant guffaws, to one of the men, a drover with a pronounced “gallows complexion.”

Employing an old plains trick, our rascally Coulter merely set up shop on a likely knoll two miles distant, thrust his sapling into the ground with the flannel tied to the free end, concealed himself in the bush, and awaited developments. They were not long forthcoming. Several deer that were attracted by the waving rags crept forward timorously to explore, and two of their number were dispatched for their pains.

What on earth can you do with a fellow of that moral stature? Quite clearly he stooped to a low form of subterfuge, and you might have thought the least he could do would be to refuse the money won. But no, not Mr. Coulter. He pocketed every last farthing, and with the pithy observation that, “Lessons ain’t learned easy on the trail,” followed by the equally noxious statement, “Thrift is a virtuous quality, you gentlemen ought to cultivate it,” he retired to his meal and couch. There, in microcosm, you have the species of leader to whom our fortunes are committed.

Notwithstanding, all is potentially well. These trivial distractions will soon be resolved; of that I am certain.

Your
devoted
(
if peripatetic
)
husband
,
S
ARDIUS
M
C
P
HEETERS
(M.D., Univ. Edinburgh)

I lay with my eyes half open, staring at the top of the tent where the sky showed through in the smoky gray of first dawn. It was puzzling; I couldn’t figure it out. Then I thought, this isn’t Sunday—why aren’t we up and moving? It was still dark inside and I had an itch to spread the good news about how lucky everybody was to get me back. But that hole worried me; I didn’t know why. It was along about here that I became aware of a real lively stink, like a barn where a skunk had taken up residence and later moved by general request. It was fragrant but unsudden.

I raised up, and the minute I did, a flap was thrown back and an Indian woman, not young, and not pretty, either—she looked like a dried persimmon—stuck her head in. Beyond her I could see other women getting a fire going. When she spied me she dropped the flap quick and grunted, and as soon as she did, I out with my knife and jumped across in the dark and ripped a four-foot slit down the tent wall. But it was no use. I felt hands like iron on my ankles; I was caught.

They dragged me out in the open and looked me over. And at the same time, scared as I was, I had a look at them. Since that morning, I’ve read a lot of books about the noble red man, how keen his eye is in the woods, how silent he slinks along, how brave in the face of danger. Well, the specimens I had here looked mighty run-down and seedy. If there was anything noble about them, I didn’t notice it. Most of the men, when they crawled out, scratching, draped over with store blankets against the bitter cold, were potbellied—from not getting any exercise, I reckon; the women did
all the work. What’s more, their presence was so powerful, from rubbing rancid fat on to stave off the bugs, that a person had to stay upwind if he wanted to be comfortable.

The women weren’t much better. When the fellow that had grabbed me hauled me out, the women all rushed up and commenced to spit on me. To relieve the monotony, a few hit me with sticks, but they were kindling twigs for the fire and didn’t hurt. I disliked being spit on, though—the practice hadn’t been common in Louisville—and I spit back at one old squaw that had several teeth missing. It turned out to be the wrong thing to do. She dipped a calabash gourd into a kettle of boiling water and threw it on my leg. If I hadn’t been wearing a pair of stout denim trousers, I’d have been laid up with bad scalds.

The next thing those spiteful old witches did was take off my clothes, which they passed around, grunting and cackling. This left me as naked as a jay, and I wasn’t at all easy. There were several girls of about my own age or a little older there, and they seemed to titter more than when I was covered. I was cold, too. The men had crow-black hair parted evenly in the center, with braids hanging down on either side and a gaudy single feather stuck up from the crown of a few. Red and blue grease paint badly smeared showed on a couple of faces, and some had strings of beads or other decorations. One, that seemed to be a chief, had a silver medallion of President Jefferson, maybe presented to his grandfather or somebody, and another wore a necklace of bear’s teeth and claws. I didn’t see any more animal decorations, though, and if you came right down to it, I imagine there were more bears walking around the woods wearing strings of Pawnee teeth than the other way around. These fellows
might
have been great hunters; if so, they disguised it by their looks.

By and by they quit tormenting me, and everybody sat down around kettles to have breakfast. There must have been two hundred members to the tribe altogether. It was interesting to watch them. The way they worked it, each one had a knife and they dived in and speared a hunk of meat; then, holding it between their
teeth, they sawed it off at the lips. It was a wonder they didn’t get cut.

Sitting there, I got so hungry I couldn’t stand it, so I grabbed the elbow of the man that had nabbed me and made motions toward the kettle. At first I thought he was going to haul out his tomahawk—he didn’t change expression any more than a halloween mask—but suddenly he dipped into the pot and hauled out a leg bone. What it was a leg off of I have no idea. Nor do I have to this day; some kind of grouse, or hen, likely. He gave me a rickety knife with the handle knocked off one side, and I fell to work.

Well, the pot didn’t
look
inviting, being all a-bubble with various pieces of meat—wildfowl, venison, woodchuck, dog, and the like—but I took a bite hoping I wouldn’t throw up. To my surprise it was as flavorsome a dish as ever I ate back home, and our old Clara was the best cook anywhere around. It was sweet meat, so tender it was falling off, and the soup was rich and full of strength.

I finished the leg, then figured I would forage on my own; the meat had been tasty but scant. I stuck my knife in to fish for the thigh, but this time the crazy old fool cracked me over the head with the handle of a dog whip. My ears rang like church bells; for a second my vision was crossed like a cockeyed person’s. There wasn’t any figuring these Indians out. One minute they invited you to dine, and the next they hit you on the head for enjoying yourself. The blow kind of took the edge off my appetite. I started to get up, but they pushed me back down again.

When breakfast was over, they gave me a pair of worn-out buckskin pants and made me help the women clean up, along with some other children. They were taking down wigwams and packing, ready to move, and I had a chance to study them, now that the sun was up and warming my bones. These people were dressed mainly in hides—deer hides, buffalo robes worn as capes, and such—but there was a good deal of store cloth, too: calico, cotton and denim. I wasn’t long finding out where this came from. Neither the men nor the women wore any of the headdresses that always appeared on Indian pictures back in Louisville. Mostly the squaws had a
kind of buckskin bodice, not very tight, and attached to this was a skirt of the same material that hung to the knees. Some of the younger women were pretty, and wore leathern hose embroidered on the side with beads. These were laced to moccasins made out of the tougher parts of the skins. A few girls had on eardrops, and others wore rings stacked up in piles on their fingers. Before sunrise, both the men and the women had been wrapped around with snow-white blankets of wool.

Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t help much with camp-breaking. Right after breakfast, the old man tied rawhide thongs between my ankles that gave me walking room but would have been as much help running as carrying a cannonball in your hip pocket. They cut in, too. I never saw such an unsociable fellow. Although I’d got over my fright a little—I was pretty sure they planned to burn me when the women started cooking—I still wasn’t entirely peaceful in my mind. Nobody seemed friendly, not even the children. There had been a couple of dozen campfires for the two hundred people, and back almost out of each firelight was a circle of skulking, patchy-furred dogs. And if somebody sawing off meat ran into a piece of bone, or a saddle horn or a belt buckle or something, and then threw it over their shoulder, didn’t those dogs pounce on it in a fury! But nobody paid them any attention.

In an hour we were ready to travel. I wondered if they intended to leave me behind, but no, they brought over a foolish-looking man of about forty with a slack jaw and a nose that was mashed kind of flat and twisted to one side, like a rudder.

“Anglish,” they said, and pointed to him with pride. He grinned and said, “Am spoke Anglish once prisoner for catch stealing. Many beatings.” Then he introduced himself by name, which was a number of sounds, very bothersome, that ended with oo-sah. He said the English of this was Afraid of His Horse, which appeared to me to give him a poor sort of reputation, but I didn’t say so.

“What name to she?” he said, and after a second I figured he meant me.

“Jaimie.”

He made a ripping noise, together with some coughs and gurgles, and I learned afterwards it was his way of laughing.

“If you don’t like it, you know what you can do,” I said, being fairly sure he couldn’t understand, whereupon he became fierce and pulled out a tomahawk which he laid against the middle of my forehead, the blade pressing into the skin.

“How much peoples in wigwams with wheels?”

It was plain enough he meant the wagon train, so I said, “Ten thousand,” hoping to discourage them.

He struck me such a blow with the flat side of the tomahawk that I fell to the ground, stunned. When I got up he’d worked out figures in the dust that were amazingly close to our number. I made up my mind that a joky and carefree manner with these monsters was about the silliest thing a person could do. And I got a further idea of how free they were of ordinary feelings a few minutes later when we started to go.

A wrinkled old woman commenced to howl and strike herself on the head and breast when the tribe took up a single-file away from camp, so I pumped Afraid of His Horse about her trouble. After some fits and starts, he got across the statement that she was “too much older,” and was being left behind. Later on, I found that nearly all these Indian tribes—Sioux, Crow, Bannock and Cheyenne included—disposed of their old folks when they got to be eighty. The unloading was done in various ways, none of them appetizing. The usual Pawnee system was to take the old person and set her, or him, in the center of a circle, and, covering her over with blankets, shoot arrows into her from all around the ring. After this the body was burned and the ashes strewn in the wind, which they called giving their soul back to the Great Spirit. But this particular bunch of loafers, being short of arrows, were too lazy to shoot them up on tomfoolery. I inquired why they couldn’t pull the arrows back out again, but they said this might be offensive to the spirits.

So they bound her feet and hands and left her behind. “Much wolves get fat,” said Afraid, grinning, as if he’d like to view the festivities. I swore to myself I’d serve him the same if I ever got a
chance; anyhow, the poor old lady could have done worse. Some of the tribes, bored for lack of amusement, dug holes for the elderly people and buried them alive, making jokes and having a good time as the dirt was thrown in.

When we first took up the trail, I had hopes of hooking a knife and cutting my foot bonds, but they knocked this out in a hurry. These Indians had gone to seed, all right, but they were tricky, too, possibly because of early training. Right off, when we started, they cut a limb three feet long and placed it across my shoulders; then they tied my hands. Afterwards they unloosed my foot straps. That is, I was free to come and go as I pleased, but I didn’t feel encouraged to strike out across the prairie trussed up like a goose on a spit.

I shuffled along, first with one group and another, looking them over for further reference. A man they said was a chief, though I couldn’t pronounce his name, neither did it seem to have any English equal, walked in front carrying a bundle of what I took to be sticks with wampum wrapped around. This was his sacred bundle of chieftainship, which made him the keeper of the people, as I understood it. After him came the “braves,” so to speak, and then the squaws driving horses pulling travois, some with papooses on their backs; then the children romping along. At the tail end were the dogs and the other livestock. A few braves were mounted, but most made their way on foot. All in all, it was about as ratty a procession as you’d see in a lifetime.

Well, it wasn’t long before I figured out where they were heading. These people made their living by scavenging in the wake of wagon trains, picking up things thrown away. Taken all around, it was a low kind of calling, but it was rewarding, too. As my father stated in a letter, the emigrants all started off with more than they could haul, and the process of shucking down to weight commenced a short way out of Independence.