Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) (8 page)

Major Robert Neighbors, cataloguing Indians in ’47, and General Cooper three or four years later, had liked the peace
ful Ionies and Wichitas and Kichais and Caddoes and the others in their villages along the Brazos, and had dreamed of little Utopias for them. The first settlers, tough but knowledgeable Texans for the most part, had tolerated them well enough, swapping horses and food with them and letting them hang around the log barns to beg milk. An Anadarko chief named José María used to take white children for wild rides on his pony, and his squaws made moccasins for them, and other pleasant tales have come down from those brief friendly years. Nobody liked the Comanches and Kiowas, but nobody ever had, and they were little in evidence except when they came, on the full moon, to steal and hoot in the nights.…

Less knowledgeable whites came cramming in soon, though, and wanted the Indian farmland in the bends and the valleys, and got it. Major Neighbors, trapped by his sympathies into taking charge, herded the farming tribes up to their reservation (God knows they must have been pessimists by then, some of them having been driven from as far away as the Mississippi in one generation) and taught them by his own example that good white men existed, which was about the least useful thing he could have taught them at that point in history. It seems now much like those ladies who train titmice and chickadees to eat from their hands, that the next brat who comes wandering down the alley may have a sitting target for his air rifle.… They loved Neighbors, and the stories that have filtered down of how they labored to make the Brazos Reserve a model of agronomic efficiency have a pathos, in the light of what was to follow, that twists in you like a knife.

Neighbors had sorrier luck with the Penateka Comanches on the Clear Fork, but one wonders if he expected much of
them. Maybe so. It would have taken more than his pure kind of humanitarianism, though, to make plowmen out of The People. They ate up the seed corn and the brood stock that were furnished them, converted their tools to arrowheads and battle axes, and on horseback drifted in and out of their reservation pretty much at will. The great Comanche Trail, ancestral route of thievery and rapine, lay near. In the fifties buffalo, the big southern herd, still teemed on the plains to the west. Two centuries of sweet wild tradition urged the Comanche to follow them, to ride and hunt and fight. Hand mirrors and hoes and occasional begged whisky and strings of colored beads and the stink of a mule’s behind were not a fair trade for that.…

The newer frontiersmen didn’t distinguish much among the different kinds of Indians. Likely they didn’t want to. They were the cutting edge of a people whetted sharp to go places, to wear things out and move on, to take over and to use and to discard. It is doubtful that any of the people in history whetted in that way, from Alexander to a Russian lieutenant-colonel of tanks in Budapest, have wanted to dwell much in their minds on the humanity of the people in their path, on abstract justice. If they had, they wouldn’t have been able to go where they went. You do not, for instance, conquer an Aztec empire with 400 men and a set of developed humanistic impulses.

Drunken, shiftless Choctaw Tom was no Aztec, but he shared with them a fate. His Hernán Cortez was a man named Peter Garland—Captain Garland, they called him; the frontier seems to have bred titular soldiers like maggots. He lived forty or fifty miles south of the Reserve, but he had been losing stock to Indians, and one day in 1858 he gathered up a crowd of bravos with similar grievances, or maybe just
with a wish for friction, and headed for the Palo Pinto country with blood in his eye.

Choctaw Tom’s motley little party had left the Reserve to graze their stock, with army permission. He had no reason to think of trouble; he was known and liked and joked at by the white men of that neighborhood.

“Hey, Tom!” maybe a young one would shout at him along the road. “Gotty purty gal? Wanty whisky?”

“Whisky, yes, God damn,” he’d yell back, the old black eyes with their yellow whites sparkling. “No gal. Pony?”

A clot of his own people followed him around usually; he had status among them. With some other old men and some women and children he was encamped at the Indian Hole, unluckily accessible, when Garland reached the area. Maybe what Garland did shows a sense of abstract justice after all. Of abstraction, anyhow. Certainly it had no concrete connection with Choctaw Tom’s outfit. Garland and his volunteers hit them at dawn while they slept, loping through the lane between the lodges and shooting right and left, turning and loping back through.… When they rode out, presumably well satisfied (“Indians” had stolen stock; “Indians” had been dealt with), seven men and women and children were dead and the rest pretty thoroughly shot up.

Afterward, in Palo Pinto town, the captain with pride told someone: “We have opened the ball, and others can dance to the music.”

Others did, though Garland was probably overestimating his own role in history. It is unlikely that his little ugliness lighted the fuse to the main powder keg, because the main powder keg was labeled “Comanche,” and he hadn’t ventured to touch them. But he set a pattern for other settlers like him, and it seems that more were like him than were
like, say, Robert Neighbors. Many more … In Jacksboro some blood howlers started a newspaper,
The Whiteman
, dedicated to those propositions implied by its name. And The People themselves were getting restive, resentful of the white encroachment on so much good land and grass and water, covetous of the big, fast, American riding stock. That was the year they massacred the Cambren and Mason families in Jack County just to the north, the first real bloodiness of its kind in the area. Companies of white Rangers, official and otherwise, were organized and began vengefully to track war parties and stolen stock across the wild prairies.

Things were shaping up. Old Sam Houston the Raven, ally of all Indians by tepee marriage and temperament, hurled objections from the southern seat of government but got nowhere. “I agreed,” Austrian George Erath wrote in his memoirs—he knew the Brazos country—

   I agreed, but I said that no man would dare tell them so unless he wanted to be hanged, and that if he, Houston, went up there preaching peace they would hang him.

   Houston was the one who sadly, somewhere along the line, said there was no solution. He said that if he could build a wall across Texas which would keep all the Indians securely to the west, the God-damned Texans would crawl over it from their side.… He was right. The Brazos whites finally organized a full-scale attack on the Lower Reserve, the peaceful Indians. Because of the firmness of the army commander there, and the unexpected backbone of the Indians themselves, it came to nothing; but in 1859 Robert Neighbors had to lead an official removal of all Indians from Texas, farmers and fighters alike, up across the Red and
into the Territory. After he had them there, he sent Washington a bitter message:

   I have this day crossed all Indians out of the heathen land of Texas and am now out of the land of the Philistines. If you want to have a full description of our exodus, see the Bible where the children of Israel crossed the Red Sea. We have had the same show only our enemies did not follow us to Red River.

   When he returned south, one of the truly decent men of his time and place, he was immediately shotgunned down by a drunken Indian-baiting Irishman, whom he had never before seen, in the street at Fort Belknap up the Brazos. It had something to do with his having spoken out against the murder of some Reserve Indians, or, some say, with his having accused the Irishman’s brother-in-law of stealing horses and letting the Indians take the blame. There was a lot of that, then and later.…

The heterogeneous little collection of farming tribes stayed in the Territory, those who survived their new proximity to The People—and many did not survive it. Their racial will to endure seems to have ebbed; disease ate at them, and their women munched abortifacient weeds to avoid letting the long-continued nonsense go any further.

The Comanches and the Kiowas, on the other hand, simply had a new base from which to continue that fighting their ethos impelled them to. From that time onward, it was illegal for them even to hunt buffalo in Texas. But the old gap between law and enforcement was wider than usual in the wild western country. They ran as they had always run, and had a good clear focus for hatred now—the frontier’s téjanos—and for another fifteen years or so, helped by the
confusion of the War and Reconstruction, they raked that frontier and, indeed, practically froze it on one line for a good while.

A
LL SUCH ANTIQUE VIOLENCE
, though, seemed to have less than it might to do with a drifting, sparkling, sunlit afternoon between the mountains, and the solid feeling that we deserved it, the passenger and I.… Little Keechi, the Harris Bend, and down the slick fast water into Post Oak where redbirds sang from both shores and big rocks glided past beneath the keel, the ones the little man at Possum Kingdom had warned me of …

The Brazos belonged to me that afternoon, all of it. It really did. The autumn-blue sky (fair skies in Texas at other times of year tend to be white, bleached), the yellow-white air, the cedars and oaks green and gold and red, the rocks the size of buildings, the sun on my back, the steady, comfortable stroke of the paddling, mohair goats kowf!-ing at me from the shore when they caught my scent … Belonged to me and the whistling birds and the unseen animals (deer and coon tracks overlaid each other in the shore’s silt) and to the big suckers that leaped and splashed … People’s sounds and a consciousness of them touched me from time to time—an ax’s chock up in the cedar, a cow call, a tractor sputtering in the flatland of a bend, a jet’s scar across the high blue and its blowtorch blare and the crack of its sudden liberation from its own sound—but it was fall, and they weren’t on the river. It was mine.

Savoring its possession, I ran too late in the bright evening and had to camp hastily among sandburs on a Bermuda-grass flat. They stuck to so many parts of the passenger that
he went into the tent and sulked, picking them off onto our bedding.

Bacon for supper, and lumpy biscuit bread baked by the fire … It occurred to me that I’d been making a less than maximum effort toward hunting and fishing, toward living off the land. It was somehow, at that point, a rather guilty realization. Though I had kept a rod rigged and the shotgun by my hand, I had hardly used them. Little had shown up to use them on, but when we were young, we had poked and probed and poached and had ended up always with the meat we needed, albeit often of strange textures—robins, snapping turtles, frogs, armadillos.…

Sport was not a main purpose of this trip, but if, during most of your life, your given reason for going out of doors has been to hunt and to fish, then even after you know that the real reason is different, a faint compulsion toward those things remains like a consciousness of sin. I thought of the sour old Midwestern-Scowegian outsider, Veblen, and what he said about it. Despite his hydrochloric wit, to me he is abstract and not very quotable, and all I could remember was a phrase: “the risk of disrepute and consequent lesion to one’s self-respect.” It was what he said happened to the member of the leisure class who sallied afield for purposes other than slaughter.

But one gets many lesions as he goes along, anyhow, whether or not he is classified leisurely. The hard thing in the long run consists not in loss of self-respect but in deciding how much of yourself is sportsman and how much not, and how much you want to exercise the one or the other part at any given time. Saint Henry David Thoreau, incisive moral anthropomorphist that he was, implied that blood
sports were for juveniles, not men, and was conceivably right. Prince Ernest Hemingway implies the opposite.… One’s nature, if he owns more than a single mood, implies both views at one time or another and sometimes in cramping conjunction. It knifes through you, for instance, after waiting through a long golden evening for doves beside a stock tank in someone’s pasture, watching your first bird coming in high and swift on the north wind, laying down knowing before you fire that you are on him, watching him contract raggedly and fall in a long parabola to baked hard earth and then going to pick him up—it knifes to feel suddenly in his warmth against your palm, in the silk touch of the feathers at his throat, all the pity of that perished gentle wildness.… No fiercely nature-loving female could ever have felt it stronger than I have, at times, and those people I care about hunting with feel it too. It goes away if you keep shooting and is replaced by a stone-hard exultation that is just as real, just as far down inside you, and before long you’re twisting off the heads of the broken-winged ones without even full awareness of what your hands do, your eyes searching up for another bird, another shot.

It was there, nonetheless.

But even Saint Henry had impulses to gobble woodchucks raw. Eating does get into it. Leave sports and ethics out of consideration and you still like meat in your belly.…

There was time. There was river below, lots of it. After that bright afternoon, I knew they were going to let me have at least a little autumn.