Watching Eagles Soar (35 page)

Or take the variety of people—characters, many of them—who had come West, settled in the new town of Denver, and left their personalities forever stamped on the city. The cowboys who drove their cattle down Denver's dirt streets to graze in pastures in the middle of town, the gunslingers like Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp who happened through town, the gamblers and flimflam artists like Soapy Smith who ran the games of chance on Larimer Street, which is now a restored historical district of boutiques and restaurants. People like Molly Brown, whose husband, J.J., had struck gold in Leadville, confounding all the experts who said that Leadville was a silver city, which it was, and would remain a silver city, which it didn't. The stone lions still grace the mansion that J.J. purchased for Molly on Pennsylvania Street.

Or Henry C. Brown, no relation to Molly. Henry and his wife had traveled by wagon on the overland trail from the Midwest and stopped off in Denver, intending to rest awhile before crossing the mountains and continuing on to the California goldfields, their real destination. But when Mrs. Brown awoke on her first morning in Denver under a sky as big as the outdoors and the clearest blue she could imagine, she said to Henry: “You may proceed to California, Mr. Brown, if such be your wish. I shall remain here.” Henry decided that he would also remain. He would go on to build the Brown Palace Hotel, a still-elegant visitor from the past that has stayed on.

Such visitors can be found everywhere in Denver. The white-bricked Tivoli building, for example, with its blue-tiled roofs, built by German immigrants more than a century ago, still looming like a Bavarian castle over today's Auraria campus near downtown; or the spire of the Daniels and Fisher Tower, nineteen stories high, soaring high above the city in 1911, the highest building then on the Great Plains, and a re-creation of the Campanile in Venice, proving to the world that Denver was a city of culture, not just a cow town. The golden dome of the State Capitol shines at the other end of Sixteenth Street, the dome paved with real gold, the exterior built of granite, the interior decorated with red and white marble, all spewed out of Colorado's mountains. Such a grand capitol building would symbolize the best of Colorado—state officials overseeing construction in the 1890s actually expressed such sentiments—a gift from the nineteenth century to future generations. It took almost two decades to finish the capitol, with every penny accounted for and no hint of corruption or scandal—an astonishing accomplishment for government officials in the Gilded Age. Indeed, in any age.

Out of the parade of such westerners—builders, gold seekers, traders, cowboys and Indians, characters with personalities larger than life, the Molly Browns and Henry Browns, the English-speaking diplomats who happened to be Indian chiefs—the myth of the West grew up, helped to maturity by the writers of pulp novels and the movies of John Ford. It has always seemed to me the myth of the West was about freedom. Where else could people be free enough to test their own mettle, to prove the stuff they were made of without the social constraints of propriety, the accepted wisdom that life should be lived in prescribed ways? In the wide-open spaces of the West, waiting to be conquered, developed, and stamped with your personality, you could figure out your own way to live. Where else could Custer have been free enough to plunge headlong into his last battle? Or railroad magnates push the tracks of a transcontinental railroad through the wilderness one mile each day, no matter the weather and damn any other obstacle? Or J. J. Brown and H. A. W. Tabor, the silver king, and hundreds of other poor men get rich quick?

Where else could women vote in the nineteenth century, except Wyoming and Colorado? Where else could women acquire their own land, except by homesteading what was usually the hardest-scrabble land available after men had fenced off the best sections? But it was land women could own outright, their piece of independence. Where else could women herd cattle, rope calves, and become dead-eye shots, outshooting all the men, as Annie Oakley did? For that matter, where else could women mount a horse and ride alone into the plains and mountains, as the St. Louis–bred Susan Magoffin had spent her days at Bent's Fort in 1848, leaving behind a journal that bursts with the exhilaration of being free for the first time in her young lady's life. Free. Free. Free.

But the myth of the Old West—aren't we endlessly reminded by revisionist historians?—failed to take into account some uncomfortable facts, such as the decimation and near extinction of the Native Americans, the rape and destruction of the landscape, the pollution of the streams and rivers, the near destruction of entire species of animals, including the buffalo and wolf. All true no doubt, and yet that myth of freedom, born out of the larger-than-life characters who settled the Old West and proved that people could be free, refuses to die. Perhaps the reason is that those larger-than-life characters were real.

We knew them. That is, my family carts around an enormous bag of stories that we pass from generation to generation about a lot of western characters. Most of my ancestors had trickled into Colorado in the 1860s and 1870s, when bands of Indians could still be seen riding across places like the South Park, which, not long before, had resembled a brown ocean of buffalo. My father's family had moved from Pennsylvania as far west as a rock-strewn farm in Missouri—the kind of Missouri farm that had led Ulysses S. Grant to rethink a career in the Army—so that, in 1883, my paternal grandfather became the last of my ancestors to reach Colorado. So the miners and railroaders and cowboys, the independent women—these were the people among whom my family had lived, worked, and prospered. In fact, these were the people that they were. Larger-than-life, real westerners.

Back in Missouri, my great-grandfather had hoisted a rifle on the front porch of the farmhouse and ordered Cole Younger and his gang off the land. That was prior to 1876 when Younger's attempt to rob a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, landed him in prison for the next twenty-five years. One great-aunt was a longtime friend of Molly Brown's. I have a photograph of my mother's father as a young man, posing with three other young men, all dapper and well-scrubbed and cocky-looking, staring into a bright future. Three of them would hit it rich in the gold mines and establish families whose names are still found in Denver's social register, but my grandfather wasn't one of them. I remember the tobacco-spitting, leather-faced cowboys at the stock shows and the rodeos we went to—all friends of the family—and the old-timer who had worked with my father's father on the narrow-gauge railroads, then spent years tearing up the rails after the mines closed and the railroads went bust. I remember the tales of the mountain lions and bears he'd fought off to bring the iron rails out of the mountains.

In one way or another, the ghosts of these western characters trail through the different kinds of stories that I've written over the last twenty-five years. I started my career as a journalist, chronicling the accomplishments and peccadilloes of modern characters for a weekly newspaper in a Denver suburb, then began contributing articles on the West to national newspapers and magazines, such as the
New York Times
,
Christian Science Monitor
, and
American Heritage of Invention and Technology
. In everything that I wrote, I was drawn to the past. I wanted to evoke the past that had formed my own imagination, not a country of dead people that the rest of us can hurry by, but a country that seemed alive and still mattered. I wanted to write about how our past has shaped who we are in the West, why the past matters.

I have always followed the old maxim preached to every aspiring writer: write what you know. I write about a West that I know in my bones, that I've been breathing in since I drew my first breath, a West of stories intertwined with the stories of my own family. Yet I was drawn to writing about the Plains Indians, whom I knew very little about. But they seemed so attuned to the past. After all, it is the Cheyenne and Arapaho elders who see the women and children still fleeing the soldiers at Sand Creek. So I decided to follow a contradictory maxim: write what you don't know, because then you will have the pleasure of finding out.

I wanted to find out about the Plains Indians. The more I learned about the tribes that had moved through Colorado—Cheyenne, Sioux, Kiowa, Apache, Pawnee, Arapaho—the more interested I became in the Arapaho. I liked the way they raised their children: “the easiest way,” they called their method, which meant talking to them, explaining how the world worked, why it was good to do one thing and not another. I liked the mixture of practicality—the business part of their makeup—and the deep spirituality that saw all creatures, including the two-leggeds, the four-leggeds, and the wingeds, as relatives, connected to one another. I liked the ideal of living in beauty. Even the simplest tools or items of clothing should be beautiful, the women said, since they were seen every day. I liked the way they taught their children to live in harmony with one another and the earth. Did Arapahos always live those ideals? Of course not. They're people, not saints. They stumbled and fell like everybody else, but what was important, it seemed to me, was that they never gave up their ideals.

Everything I read about the Arapahos in the mid–1800s, at the time of the gold rush, mentioned one of their leaders, a man named Left Hand, a man fluent in English. Fluent in English? I'd learned enough by then to know that only a handful of Plains Indians ever became fluent in English. They didn't have to learn English or any language other than their own. They used the sign language to communicate with other tribes and with the traders and the other Americans coming onto the plains. Yet Left Hand not only spoke English, I learned later; he also spoke Cheyenne and Sioux. I set out to find out about a man who was interested enough in other people to learn their languages. What kind of man was he? Where were his villages? Which battles did he fight? How did he learn English? What became of him?

It was the finding out, the learning what I hadn't known, that resulted in
Chief Left Hand
and launched me into an adventure that continues today. I wrote other nonfiction books on the history of Colorado, with the ghosts of the gold seekers, railroaders, and builders all making their presences felt, but I kept returning to the Arapahos, where the lines between past and present seemed blurred, one melting into the other. When Arapahos from the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming head south to visit relatives in Oklahoma, they go by way of Sand Creek to pray for the people who died there. The Sand Creek Massacre took place one hundred and fifty years ago—eons ago, in the view of most people speeding along I-25—but to the Arapahos, it still matters.

Some years ago, I happened to hear Tony Hillerman speak about writing mystery novels set among the Navajos. I remember sitting in the middle of a large conference room surrounded by other writers, all of us wondering what we might write next, and thinking that I might write a mystery novel set among the Arapahos. It would be a contemporary novel, I remember thinking—laying my plans there in the conference room—but it would also be about the past. It would be both sides of the same coin.

This seemed like a good idea. I had no idea of how to go about writing fiction, but I liked reading mystery novels. They were fun to take to the beach or to curl up with in the evenings. How tough could one be to write? I was going to find out, but not before I figured out what I would write about. For inspiration, I began digging into my research for
Chief Left Hand
and came upon something that had taken place when the Arapahos and Cheyennes were moved to reservations. I had only mentioned it in
Chief Left Hand
,
but I remembered being stunned by the information, and angry. I knew that someday I would write more about it, thinking that I would write an article or include it in another book, neither of which happened. Instead, it became the basis of the plot for
The Eagle Catcher.

What I'd uncovered was this: Soon after the treaties that sent the tribes to reservations were signed—the Arapaho and Cheyenne chiefs making their X's on the word of government translators who assured the chiefs that they were signing what they thought they were signing—the government sent out agents to “make the reservations ready for the Indians.” The agents carried out the assignment by carving off the lands with water and timber for their own ranches and leaving the less desirable lands for the tribes. This at a time when the Plains Indians had just been defeated in a war, huge numbers of their warriors dead, the buffalo dispersed and slaughtered, the children crying with hunger. This was the remnant that struggled onto the reservations: the wounded and demoralized, the old and sick and hungry. “We were a pitiful lot,” is the way that Virginia Sutter, an Arapaho friend, described the nine hundred Arapahos who came to the Wind River Reservation in 1878.

The story I set out to tell in
The Eagle Catcher
was not just the history of how sections of reservation lands were stolen, but the way in which crimes of fraud and deceit that occurred more than a hundred years ago echo through the present. My novels since have reflected the same theme: the ghosts of the past that hover around us. When I'm looking for a plot of a new novel, I look into the bitter period between the time when the Arapahos roamed the plains—when, as they put it, they were free—and the early years on the reservation.

One of my novels,
The Story Teller
, is about the ledger books that the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Crow, and Sioux
wrote.
They wrote in pictographs, intricate and detailed, that filled the pages of ledger books they had obtained in trade with traders, homesteaders, and Army officers. They used crayons and pencils to tell the stories of battles and heroic exploits and the intimate accounts of village life. Two thousand Plains Indian ledger books, scholars say, once existed on the plains. Today there are fewer than three dozen, mostly in museums, some in private collections. A complete ledger book can be worth a million dollars. Pages razored out of ledger books are also in museums, but they turn up from time to time in galleries in places like Santa Fe and Aspen. At least three pages are known to exist from a ledger book account of the Sand Creek Massacre.