forever free. The Great Father at Washington pledged his honor, and
they were quite content. It was the same with every western tribe that
the United States was pledged by solemn treaty which the Indians kept,
and the white men always broke. Troops drove the settlers off, but went
away and the settlers came back. So young warriors broke loose from the
chiefs to scalp those settlers and burn their homes; and the army would
break vengeance. Such were the conditions when Schultz, a green New
England boy of nineteen, came by steamer up the Missouri to Fort Benton.
The truly respectable reader will be shocked to learn that this
misguided youth went into partnership with a half-breed trader,
selling water with a flavoring of whisky at very high prices to the
Indians. In other words, he earned his living at a very risky trade.
He married a Blackfoot girl, becoming a squaw-man, which, as everybody
knows, is beneath contempt. In other words, he was honest enough to
marry a most charming woman instead of betraying her to ruin. He went
on guilty expeditions to snatch scalps and steal horses. He shared the
national sports and so learned the inmost heart of a brave people.
When our own countrymen get too self-righteous, bigoted, priggish, smug
and generally beyond bearing, what a blessing it would be if we had a
few wild Indians to collect their scalps!
Schultz had a chum, a Blackfoot warrior called Wolverine, who taught
him the sign language and a deal of bush craft. At times this Wolverine
was unhappy, and once the white man asked him what was wrong. “There is
nothing troubling me,” answered the Indian, then after a long pause: “I
lied. I am in great trouble. I love Piks-ah’-ki, and she loves me, but
I can not have her; her father will not give her to me.”
The father, Bull’s Head, was a Gros Ventre, and hated Wolverine for
being a Blackfoot.
“I am going,” said Wolverine, “to steal the girl. Will you go with me?”
So one evening the pair stole away from the Blackfoot camp, rode
eastward across the plains, marching by night, hiding by day. Once, at
a river crossing they discovered the trails of a large war party of
Crees on the way to the Gros Ventre camp. “I knew,” said Wolverine,
laughing happily, “that my medicine would not desert me, and see, the
way is clear before us. We will ride boldly into camp, to the lodge of
the great chief, Three Bears. I will say that our chief sent me to warn
him of a war party working this way. I will say that we ourselves have
seen their tracks along the bars of the river. Then the Gros Ventres
will guard their horses; they will ambush the enemy; there will be a
big fight, big excitement. All the men will rush to the fight, and that
will be my time. I will call Piks-ah’-ki, we will mount our horses and
fly.” So riding hard, they came in sight of the Gros Ventre camp. “Ah!”
said Wolverine, “there is the camp. Now for the big lie.” Then more
seriously, “Pity me, great Sun! Pity me, you under water creatures of
my dream! Help me to obtain that which I seek here.”
So they came to the lodge of Three Bears, presented tobacco as a
present from the chief Big Lake and were welcomed with a special feast
of boiled dog, which had to be eaten, no matter how sick they felt.
Gros Ventres believed the enemy were coming and kept close watch on
their herd, but Bull’s Head sat in the chief’s lodge, sneering at the
visitors, “To-night,” he said, “I shall sit in my lodge and watch for
women stealers, and my gun will be loaded.”
So he got up, and flounced out of the lodge.
That night all happened as Wolverine had said, for the Cree war party
attempted to stampede the herd, and all the Gros Ventres, including
Bull’s Head, ran out of camp for the battle. Wolverine and Schultz
found Bull’s Head’s daughter ready but crying in her mother’s arms at
parting. They mounted, they rode, they thought they were clear of the
battle-field, when suddenly a gun exploded in front of Wolverine, and
down he went with his horse. Then the girl screamed, “They have killed
him! Help, white man, they have killed him!”
But Wolverine fired his gun at something that moved in the sage brush,
and a deep groan followed. Wolverine clubbed something three of four
times with his rifle. Then stooping, he picked up the gun which had
been fired at him. “I count a coup,” he laughed, and handed the enemy’s
weapon to Schultz.
At that moment Bull’s Head appeared, and in a frightful passion
seized his daughter’s horse by the head attempting to drag her from
the saddle. She shrieked, while Wolverine sprang at her father, threw
him, disarmed him and flung away his gun. Then the young lover leaped
lightly behind the girl upon her pony, and the father raged astern
while they fled.
Four days’ ride brought them home to the Blackfoot camp, but Bull’s
Head got there first, and whined about his poverty until Wolverine gave
him ten ponies, also the captured gun. It was not much to pay for a
beautiful woman who became a faithful and loving wife.
One day news reached the three main camps of the Blackfoot nation that
a white buffalo had been sighted in the herds. Midwinter as it was, the
hunters turned out, for the man who killed a white buffalo was held to
have the especial favor of the Sun, and not only he, but his tribe. The
head chief of a nation has been known to use the robe for a seat, but
it could never be sold, and at the next building of a temple to the Sun
it was offered up as a national sacrifice.
Great was the hunting through many days of bitter cold, until at last
the white buffalo was found by a lone horseman who brought it down with
his arrows “When we rode up,” says Schultz, “the hunter was standing
over it, hands raised, fervently praying, promising the Sun the robe
and tongue of the animal.... Medicine Weasel was so excited, he
trembled so that he could not use his knife ... and some of our party
took off the hide for him, and cut out the tongue, he standing over
them all the time and begging them to be careful, to make no gashes,
for they were doing the work for the Sun. None of the meat was taken.
It was considered a sacrilege to eat it; the tongue was to be dried and
given to the Sun with the robe.”
Only one more white buffalo was ever taken, in 1881, two years before
the last herds were destroyed.
Heavy Breast and Schultz were once out hunting, and the chief’s saddle
was newly loaded with mountain sheep meat, when the hunters met a
first-class grizzly bear. He sat up, fifty yards distant and wriggled
his nose as he sniffed the air. Both men fired and with a hair-lifting
roar old sticky mouth rolled over, biting and clawing his wound, then
sprang up and charged, open mouthed. The hunters rode hard, Schultz
firing backward a couple of shots while the bear with long bounds,
closed upon the Indian. “I fired again, and made another miss and just
then Heavy Breast, his saddle and his sheep meat parted company with
the fleeing pony. The cinch, an old worn rawhide band, had broken.
“‘Hai Ya, my friend,’ he cried pleadingly, as he soared up in the
air, still astride the saddle. Down they came with a loud thud not
two strides in front of the onrushing bear. And that animal, with a
dismayed and frightened ‘woof,’ turned sharply about and fled back
toward the timber, I after him. I kept firing and firing, and finally a
lucky shot broke his backbone.
“‘Do not laugh, my friend,’ said Heavy Breast; ‘surely the Sun listened
to my prayer. I promised to sacrifice to him, intending to hang up that
fine white blanket I have just bought. I will hang up the blanket and
my otter-skin cap.’”
There was no end of trouble about that bear, for Mrs. Schultz dared not
skin a sacred animal until she had sacrificed her best blue frock, also
one of her husband’s revolvers--the same being out of order. And when
the skin was dressed, nobody dared to visit the lodge until it had been
hidden.
I want to copy out the whole book, for every paragraph contains some
fresh delight, but these two or three stories must have shown something
at least of Blackfoot character. I knew, and loved these people.
It was in January, 1870, that Colonel Baker was sent with a force
of United States regular troops to chasten a band of Blackfeet who
had killed a trader. The band accused of the crime, belonged to the
Northern Blackfeet of Canada, whose camp at the time was on Belly
River, two hundred miles north of the boundary. The band found by Baker
belonged to the Piegans, a southern tribe camped on their own lands in
Montana. There were eighty families in camp, but the men were nearly
all away hunting buffalo when Baker’s force attacked at the break of
dawn. The chief, Bear’s Head, ran toward the white men, waving a
paper, a certificate of good character. He fell. Then the slaughter
began in cold blood: Fifteen fighting men, eighteen elder men, ninety
women, fifty-five little children, and when the last wounded mothers
and their babies had been put out of their misery, the soldiers piled
the corpses upon the wreckage before they burned the camp.
The whisky traders, like Schultz, have been blamed for the ruin of the
Blackfeet; but since they had to die, it seems to me that the liquor
gave them a certain amount of fun and excitement not so bad for them
as Baker, or smallpox, or their Indian agent, or the white robbers who
slaughtered their herds of buffalo, and stole their treaty lands. In
1874, Schultz was one of fifty-seven white men hunting or trading with
the Canadian or Northern Blackfeet. They had trading forts at Whoop-up,
Standoff, Slideout, the Leavings, all in Canada. But the Hudson’s
Bay Company and the Canadian wolfers made complaint against these
American rivals; and so the Canadian government raised the Northwest
Mounted Police. Three hundred men were sent across the plains to take
possession and run the American traders out of the country. But the
police were only tenderfeet in those days, eastern Canadians unused to
the western ways, who came hungry through the countless herds of the
bison. A band of hunters brought news to the Blackfeet. “Some men are
coming,” they said, “who wear red coats, and they are drawing a cannon.”
“Oh,” said the Blackfeet, “these must be Hudson’s Bay.” For in old
times the company’s officers are said to have worn red coats when they
administered justice, so that the color was a sign of honest dealing.
So the police were not attacked by the Blackfeet, and they were
welcomed by the American traders, who sold them food in abundance.
The liquor trade ceased altogether but the police and the traders
became fast friends, while the police and the Northern Blackfeet have
been loyal allies ever since. After the buffalo vanished, the tribes
were fed by the Canadian government and not lavishly, perhaps rather
stingily, helped to learn the important arts of ranching.
Meanwhile far away to the southward, the white men were slaughtering
buffalo for their hides, and in Kansas alone during ten years,
thirty-five million carcasses were left to rot on the plains. The bison
herds still seemed as large as ever, the country black with them as
far as the eye could reach. But men like Schultz who had brains, had
news that away from these last migrating herds, the plains were empty
for thousands of miles. I remember the northern plains like a vast
graveyard, reaching in all directions to the sky-line, bare save for
its tombstones, the bleached skulls of millions of bison. Afterward the
sugar refiners sent wagons and took them all away.
In 1880, the whole of the prairie nations surrounded the last herds,
and white men took a hundred thousand robes leaving the carcasses to
rot as usual. The Indians slaughtered also but sold the robes for
groceries, and dried the whole of the meat for winter food.
“We are near the end of it,” said Red Bird’s Tail. “I fear that this is
our last buffalo hunt. Are you sure,” he asked Schultz, “that the white
men have seen all the land between the two salt waters?”
“There is no place,” answered the trader, “where the white men have
not traveled, and none of them can find buffalo.”
“That being the case,” said the chief with a deep sigh, “misery and
death are at hand for me and mine.”
The Indians were compelled to strip the plains of every living
creature, the Blackfeet, despite their religion, to eat fish and birds.
Then came the winter; Schultz and his wife rode at dusk to the camp of
Lodge-Pole chief.
“Hurry,” he commanded his women, “cook a meal for our friends. They
must be hungry after their long ride.”
His wives brought out three small potatoes and two little trout, which
they boiled. “’Tis all we have,” said one of them, brushing the tears
from her eyes, and then the chief broke down.
“We have nothing,” he said haltingly. “There are no more buffalo. The
Great Father sends us but a little food, gone in a day. We are very
hungry. There are fish, to be sure, forbidden by the Gods, unclean. We
eat them, but they do not give us any strength, and I doubt not we will
be punished for eating them. It seems as if our gods had forsaken us.”
Mrs. Schultz went out and brought back a sack of food, and they made a
feast, merry as in the days of plenty, which were gone forever.
Schultz came from the starving camps to write a letter to a New York
paper, but it was never printed--a matter of politics. Then he advised
the Indians to kill their agent, but they remembered Colonel Baker’s
visit.
In his next annual report the agent wrote much about the Blackfeet,
whose “heathenish rites were most deplorable.” And then came the
Winter of Death, when a chief, Almost-a-dog, checked off daily the fate
of a starving people. Women crowded round the windows of the agent’s
office, holding out skinny children. “Go,” he would say; “go away! I
have nothing for you!”
The thirty thousand dollars provided for their food had all been
stolen, but there was plenty of corn to fatten fifty chickens, some
geese and ducks.
Wolf Head, once known as Wolverine, rode south to Schultz’s trading
post where he and his partner were feeding hosts of people, but when
they heard his story of death after death, one by one they stole away
out into the darkness, sitting upon the frozen ground where they wailed
for their dead.
That night Schultz wrote to a friend of his in New York, known to the
Indians as Fisher Cap. Then he rode hard and far to consult with Father
Prando, a Jesuit priest, who had also been writing letters. Thanks
to Fisher Cap, perhaps, or to Father Prando, the government sent an
inspector, and one day he drove into the agency. “Where is that chicken
house?” he yelled, and when he found the place, kicked it open. “Here
you!” he called to the Indians, and they did the rest.
Next, he kicked open the agent’s office. “You -------- ----,” said he.
Since then some agents have been honest, but the Piegan tribe has never
recovered from the Winter of Death, for in their weakness, they fell a
prey to disease, and only a remnant is left of that ruined people. But
for Schultz, the despised squaw-man, not one would be left alive.
XXIV
A. D. 1885
GORDON
During the Crimean war, when our men in the trenches before Sebastopol
crowded under their earthworks to escape the Russian fire, one of the
subalterns showed fear unbecoming an officer. The young chap meant
no harm, but as he had to be taught manners, a lieutenant slightly
his senior, invited him up upon the ramparts. There, arm in arm, the
two walked up and down, the senior making amusing remarks about the
weather, while the storm of lead swept round them, and the Tommies
watched horror-struck, expecting both to fall. That officer who gave
lessons in courage, was Charles George Gordon.
After eight years of varied service in many lands, Major Gordon came
to Shanghai, where the British officer commanding had need of such a
man. The Taiping rebels at war with the Chinese government numbered
one million five hundred thousand, holding impregnable cities, and
threatening the British merchants of Shanghai. These had raised a
force of four thousand Chinese with white officers, known as the Ever
Victorious Army because they were always thrashed, and Gordon took
over the command. He was helped by Li Hung Chang, commander-in-chief
of the Chinese armies, but no great impression had as yet been made
upon fifteen hundred thousand rebels, trenched in the impregnable rock
cities, which stood as islands over flat lands laced with canals.
Those channels made the land impassable for troops, but Gordon brought
steamers, and where a city fronted him with hundreds of guns and tier
upon tier of unscalable walls, he steamed round the canals, cut off the
line of communications, then dropped in, unexpected, in the rear. His
attack was always a most unpleasant surprise to the rebels, beginning
with gunnery that battered down the walls, until up a slope of ruins
the storming party charged. The Taipings, led by white adventurers,
defended the breach with desperation, and Gordon would weep because
of the slaughter, his gentle spirit shocked at the streams of blood.
“Two men,” he says, “of the Thirty-first Regiment were on the breach
at Fort San, as Taiping leaders for the defense. One was killed, the
other, struck by a shell splinter, was taken prisoner. ‘Mr. Gordon, Mr.
Gordon, you will not let me be killed!’
“‘Take him down to the river and shoot him!’ And aside: ‘Put him in my
boat, let the doctor attend him, and send him down to Shankhai.’”
Gordon not only saved the poor adventurers, but where he captured
garrisons of Taipings, he would arm his prisoners, drill them,
and lead them on to attack fresh cities in the march of the Ever
Victorious Army. The odds were slightly against him, three hundred and
seventy-five to one--an army against three hundred and seventy-five
armies--but his third siege reduced the rebel capital, which he starved
into surrender. The Taiping generals laid down their arms to Gordon
because he gave them their lives. Then Li Hung Chang jumped in and
murdered the whole gang of generals, and Gordon, sorely annoyed, for
the only time in his life carried a gun. For a whole day, revolver in
hand, he hunted the Chinese commander-in-chief through the streets of
Soo Chow, but Li was too sly for him, and hid under some matting in a
boat until Gordon’s rage cooled down.
This Scotchman who, with forty men in a steamer, destroyed a Taiping
army near Quin San, had only one weapon for his personal use--a little
bamboo swagger cane, such as Tommy carries in the street. It was
known to the Chinese as his Magic Wand of Victory, with which he had
overthrown an army seven times as big as that of Great Britain.
The Chinese emperor sent an imperial decree conferring four thousand
pounds and all sorts of honors. Gordon wrote on the back of the
parchment: “Regret that owing to the circumstances which occurred since
the capture of Soo Chow, I am unable to receive any mark of his majesty
the emperor’s recognition.” So he sent the thing back--a slap in the
face for China. The emperor sent a gold medal, but Gordon, scratching
out the inscription, gave it to a charity bazaar. The emperor made him
a prince of the Chinese empire, and with the uniform of that rank as a
curio in his trunk, he returned to England.
In China he was prince and conqueror; in Gravesend Major Gordon did
garrison duty and kept ducks, which he delighted to squirt with the
garden syringe.
He was a Sunday-school teacher, and reared slum boys to manhood, he was
lady bountiful in the parish, he was cranky as an old maid, full of
odd whims, a little man, with tender gray eyes, and a voice like a peal
of bells. For six years he rotted in Gravesend, then served a couple
of years as British commissioner on the Danube, and then in 1874 was
borrowed by Egypt to be viceroy of the equatorial provinces. There he
made history.
The Turkish empire got its supply of slaves from this big Soudan, a
tract the size of Europe, whose only trade was the sale of human flesh.
If Gordon stopped the selling of slaves, the savages ate them. But the
Egyptian government wanted money, so Gordon’s work was to stop the
slave trade, get the people prosperous, and tax them. To aid him he had
Egyptian officials, whose only interest in the job was the collecting
of bribes, plunder and slaves for their private use; also a staff of
Europeans, all of whom died of fever within the first few months.
Moreover, the whole native population was, more or less, at war with
the Egyptian government.
Gordon had a swift camel, and a reputation for sorcery, because leaving
his escort days astern in the desert, he would ride alone into the
midst of a hostile nation, dressed in a diplomatic uniform consisting
of gold lace and trousers, quite unarmed, but compelling everybody to
obey his orders. He was so tired that he wanted to die, and when the
tribes disobeyed he merely cut off their whole supply of water until
they learned to behave. So for five years, the only honest man in all
that region fought the Soudanese, the Egyptian government and the
British ministry, to put an end to slavery. He failed.
[Illustration: CHARLES GEORGE GORDON]
Long chapters would be required for the story of Gordon’s work in
Bessarabia, Armenia, India, South Africa, or the second period in China.
In 1884, England, having taken charge of Egypt, was responsible for
the peace of Soudan. But the Arabs, united for once, and led by their
prophet--the Mahdi--had declared a holy war against everybody, and
wiped out an Egyptian army. So England said, “This is very awkward; let
us pray”; and the government made up its mind to scuttle, to abandon
the whole Soudan. Of course the Egyptians in the Soudan, officials,
troops and people, would all get their throats cut, so our government
had a qualm of conscience. Instead of sending an army to their rescue,
they sent Gordon, with orders to bring the Egyptians to the coast. With
a view to further economies they then let the Arabs cut off Gordon’s
retreat to the coast. England folded her hands and left him to perish.
As soon as Gordon reached Khartoum, he began to send away the more
helpless of the Egyptian people, and before the siege closed down some
two thousand five hundred women, children and servants escaped from the
coming death. At the last moment he managed to send the Englishmen, the
Europeans and forty-five soldiers down the Nile. They were saved, and
he remained to die with his soldiers. “May our Lord,” he wrote, “not
visit us as a nation for our sins; but may His wrath fall on me.”
He could not believe in England’s cowardice, but walled his city with
ramp and bastion, planned mines and raids, kept discipline while his
troops were starving to death, and the Union Jack afloat above the
palace, praying for his country in abasement, waiting for the army
which had been sent too late. So for nine months the greatest of all
England’s engineers held at bay an army of seventy-five thousand
fighting Arabs. And when the city fell, rallying the last fifty men
of his garrison, he went to his death, glad that he was not doomed to
outlive England’s honor.
Year after year our army fought through the burning deserts, to win
back England’s honor, to make amends for the death of her hero-saint,
the knightliest of modern men, the very pattern of all chivalry. And
then his grave was found, a heap of bloodstained ashes, which once had
been Khartoum.
Now, in Trafalgar Square, men lay wreaths at the base of his statue,
where with his Magic Wand of Victory, that Prince of the Chinese
Empire and Viceroy of the African Equatorial Provinces, stands looking
sorrowfully on a people who were not worthy to be his countrymen. But
there is a greater monument to Gordon, a new Soudan, where men live at
peace under the Union Jack, and slavery is at an end forever.
XXV
A. D. 1896
THE OUTLAW
Dawn was breaking of a summer’s day in 1896, when
Green-Grass-growing-in-the-water, a red Indian scout, came trotting
into Fort MacLeod with a despatch from Standoff for Superintendent
Steele, of the Mounted Police. He brought news that the body of a Blood
warrior, Medicine-Pipe-Stem, shot through the skull, and three weeks
dead, had been found in an empty cabin.