The other soldiers treated me the same, and other than having to listen to a lot of their stupid talk, I never actually suffered. On a campaign like that was an easier way to break back into white life than any other. At least we was outdoors and slept on the ground, and though that Army grub, chiefly sowbelly and hardtack, was garbage, I shot some game now and again, for I had retained my bow and arrow and my Cheyenne pony, and the soldiers liked red meat too, so that made me quite popular with them though I never talked much, which they laid to my weak-mindedness owing to years of captivity.
You might have thought the colonel would be interested in my experiences of five years’ barbarism, but he wasn’t. I wasn’t long in discovering that it is a rare person in the white world who wants to hear what the other fellow says, all the more so when the other fellow really knows what he is talking about.
I’ll say this, my medicine failed when we got to Laramie. I had not had anything in mind when I went white at the Solomon battle, except to save my life while not retreating. I sure didn’t figure out what such a decision would entail in the long run. I was away from civilization so many years that I forgot how everything is organized there: you don’t just move into someone’s tepee and let it go at that.
For example, we hadn’t been long at Laramie, where I was still bunking with the soldiers, when the colonel sent for me.
“The records in this department are far from adequate,” says he. “The unfortunate incident in which the red fiends assaulted your father’s wagons has never been entered, so far as we can determine from our files. I’m afraid punishment of the particular malefactors will be rather difficult owing to the insufficient information you have so far provided as to their identity-this of course added to the problem of laying our hands on the Indians concerned were they even to be clearly identified.
“For as you know they are a wily lot. Eventually, I suppose, we will be forced to kill them all off-I can see no other possibility in the face of their savage obduracy against setting aside the life of the brute.
“So much for those unhappy memories. The important thing is the life that opens before you,” and so on, the upshot of which was he sent me east to Fort Leavenworth, the departmental headquarters, with a column that was going there the next day. Leavenworth was on the Missouri River, right near Westport, what was later named Kansas City, and Independence, where my Pa bought his wagon and team of ox. This was civilization, or what passed for it in them days, in the extreme.
I got a choking, sensation when I heard the news. There was already so many white men around Laramie you could hardly breathe, and I didn’t sleep well in them rectangular barracks, on account of having been trained by the Cheyenne to favor the circular dwelling. I think I have mentioned their feeling about circles, the circle of the earth and so on. They was set against the ninety-degree angle, which brought continuity to a dead stop. Old Lodge Skins used to say: “There’s no power in a square.”
Now I was going back to a whole world of sharp corners, while somewhere out on the prairie the Human Beings had collected again, and having keened for their dead, was eating roast hump and dreaming and telling stories by the buffalo-chip fire and stealing ponies from the Pawnee and getting theirs stole in return, and Nothing was there in her fringed dress of white antelope.
They knew about where I was, although they might not have been told, the way they knew about everything that concerned their people and nothing else. They wouldn’t have heard of or understood the slavery troubles, John Brown and all that was going on in white Kansas at the time.
But I never regretted leaving Laramie as such, which had grown into as ugly a place as you could find-that’s what I thought then before I seen many other white places. A lot of Indians pitched their tents thereabout, among them I’m sorry to say certain Human Beings, but they didn’t resemble the ones I had known, and the individual tribes was not so important as that they all belonged to a degraded type known as the Hang About the Forts. The free-roving bands didn’t think much of them. A good many of these gentry literally just sat around their stockade in their blankets, looking stupidly at what went on, for they was permitted to come and go at will, and if a soldier wanted the space they occupied he would roust them out of it, like shooing a dog. Some did a little trading in second-rate skins, and some prostituted their women, and all of them subsisted on Government handouts give to them for being “friendlies.” These last of course was usually less than half of what they was authorized by law, for the Indian agents withheld the rest and sold it to white emigrants or the Army seized it for their own use on account of the quartermaster’s stores was generally insufficient owing to crooked purveyors back East or thieving supply officers.
It was also against the law to sell liquor to the Indians, but the Hang Around the Forts was oftener drunk than not, for the troopers would sneak them whiskey in exchange for a roll with their wives and daughters, a sorry lot but presumably better than nothing-few white women was to be had thereabouts. Also the traders did quite a good business in firewater, fairly open, and I never heard they was arrested for it, probably because when drunk the fort Indians was even more harmless than when in possession of their faculties.
I mention this subject because while I was at Laramie I run into someone I knowed from the old days. I had wandered among the Indian camp out of nostalgia for my old life, but I was about to be driven back to the fort by dirty old squaws trying to sell me mangy buffalo robes and their whoremaster husbands, grinning and sniveling, when I saw a canvas tent pitched there out of which from time to time an Indian buck would stagger and then maybe fall flat before he reached his destination or puke all over the ground.
A number of braves was inside when I poked in, each singing a different song or orating hoarsely to nobody in particular. The smell was indescribable. At the back of the tent was an open barrel with a rusty dipper hanging on it, and alongside stood a white man dressed in filthy buckskins. He looked as if he had never washed his face from the day he was born; you could have peeled the dirt off it like a rind. He also never owned a razor.
“How’re ya, partner,” says he, showing his mossy teeth. One of the Indians lurched over then, and taking off his moccasins, handed them to this sowish fellow, who after examination of the articles shakes his head. So the Indian pulls off his shirt, which was a gray wool trade item, black with grease, and hands that over.
The white fellow puts up his first finger, with the top two joints folded down, and says: “Half, you brown-arsed son of a bitch. Half, you shit-eater.” And half-fills the rusty dipper, and the Indian takes it and pours it down his throat.
“Have one on me,” the white man invites yours truly.
I just look at him, and he says: “I don’t mean of this horse piss. I got a bottle of the real stuff here.” He fetches the same from a sack on the ground, while stuffing into it the shirt and moccasins he has just obtained.
“For that in the barrel I use a pint of whiskey per gallon, add gunpowder, tobacco, sulfur, tabasco, and black pepper, then water it up to level. These skunks don’t know the difference. But I swear that this here is the good. Drink up.” He pushes the bottle at me.
“No, thanks,” I says.
“Well, stay anyway. I don’t get much chance for conversation during the day, dealing with these.” He upends the bottle and lets it gurgle, and one of the Indians sees it and staggers towards him, but he kicks him in the groin and the Indian, who from his braids is a Cheyenne, falls to the ground and passes out. The others don’t pay no attention to this incident.