“I fuck them all,” said Foxglove.
“Who took his scolp off?” Jozip said.
No one spoke.
Jozip studied them.
He told Small Horse he could stay. He told Windy Voice to watch himself or he would be in grave trouble. He told Foxglove he was expelled from the tribe.
Foxglove spat on the ground. “Does he know what he’s doing?” he asked Indian Head.
“He knows.”
“I am doing what Chief Joseph also would tell me to do.”
“Don’t look at me with those bad-luck eyes,” said Foxglove. “I don’t want your bad luck on my head.”
“My luck is good,” said Jozip. “I asked the Great Spirit what I must do and He told me to do what was right. The medicine man said it would be wrong to exile Foxglove alone, but when I look in your eyes I see who murdered the settler. And I have to send you out of the tribe.”
“I will leave with hatred for you,” Foxglove said to Jozip.
Jozip did not reply.
Foxglove went for his horse and left the tribe without clearing his lodge.
Within ten minutes Colonel Gunther came galloping up to Jozip’s tepee accompanied by fifty armed cavalry men.
“Hear me,” he commanded, as he tried to control his pawing horse. “I have come to tell you that the U. S. government has already informed you that your tribe must leave this land in three weeks of time. Those words are out of the mouth of the Great White Father, U. S. Grant, President of these United States of America.”
Jozip, thinking what he must look like to this man, and ashamed of his broken-faced appearance before his tribe, said slowly, “Mr. Cohnel, you said last time that we had a month to leave this valley.”
“That was before you began to murder our settlers,” said the colonel.
“But where will we go, where?” Jozip said. “How can you take away overnight where we live and also our property? We are human beings, not animals.”
“I intend to refer this matter for additional adjudication by the proper authorities in the War Department. They will inform you where your tribe will have to go. I will telegraph Washington and at the same time put this tribe on strict notice that it must prepare itself for a major move of departure out of this valley forever.”
“This is a long time,” Jozip sighed.
The colonel wheeled his horse and with his fifty troops galloped over a hill and disappeared beyond it.
When We Go Where Shall We Go?
MANY SCHEMES tempted Jozip but nothing could he seriously propose. Where could a whole tribe of Indians go? Flight, if it came to that, had to be prepared for. It was impossible without a strategy, a way of holding together, renewed commitment to their way of life.
It is my responsibility, Jozip thought, but without a careful plan, a hasty move—the wrong move—might mean the end of the People. This thought frightened the new chief.
Jozip then called a tribal council, reluctantly seeing himself addressing his tribe in a tongue he was still trying to master. Was there a word for chutzpah in their language?
Jozip, after whitening his black eyes with paint, opened the council of sub-chiefs in his tepee. The council of ten men sat in a circle on the ground with the medicine man, Last Days, and around them sat many other braves. Some smoked pipes whose odor all but nauseated their chief. If he remained with the tribe he must introduce the cultivation of a mild tobacco; buffalo manure was too much for his nerves.
At last he spoke some reluctant words, squirming at all he had to say in a new tongue, but going on with greater ease as the words came to him.
“My brothers,” Jozip said, “you know the contempt the whites
have for us, as if they were the firstborn of the Everlasting Power. Our reservation in this valley is one in which our tribe has lived for fifteen years, and it was promised to us to live in forever. Chief Joseph told me this before he left us to walk in the Everlasting Fields. He spoke these words in the presence of One Blossom, who still mourns for the father who is not now with us. Now the paleskins want us to give up our land and go somewhere to a place that they have not yet told us the name, and which we do not want to go to, though we are not cowards. Nobody asked us where we would like to go or whether we are willing to live somewhere else. Also, nobody gave us a date of departure, though they must know it in their own minds. We were told three weeks from now but first we were told four. They count in bad numbers. They warn us of our fate but they do not ask if we will accept it. They will let it fall on our heads like rotten fruit.
“Now is the time to speak from my heart,” he said. “I will call on our sub-chiefs and ask Wilderness Man, Split Jug, Fast Turtle, One-Leg-Is-Bad, and Indian Head to speak good words to us which course of action we ought to take. What shall we do now? I am your chosen chief. Give me your best words so I can weigh them before we act.”
Wilderness Man wore his hair long and tightly braided. His voice was deep and his speech unhurried. He spoke, saying that each treaty they had signed in the recent past until they gave up signing treaties had deceived them as to its true intent, until they realized that the intent always was to expel them from the valley they thought they had been given to live in forever. The word of the white man was never more than the yapping of dogs. “We should have nothing more to do with them. They are men of broken words. They break them with their teeth and spit them on the ground.” Wilderness Man spat on the ground. The Indians of the inner circle grunted in approval.
Then Split Jug, a lanky man with a black feather in his headband, struck his chest and spoke. He was a congenial bent-nosed man, who liked to challenge Jozip in games of arm wrestling. Jozip had won a handful of wampum from him in two trials.
“My brothers,” said Split Jug in a high voice, “let us fool our
childish enemies who are born with ghostly faces and stupid thoughts. Seven days ago I saw a miner on our land fouling our fresh water as he stood in a stream tapping his hammer on a dirty rock he held in his hand; and when the rock crumbled and fell apart, the glow of the metal lit his face. If his companion had not grabbed him by the seat of his pants he would have drowned in a foot of water.
“I say let us get rid of enemies by seeking out an unknown private place in this great land, where we will be able to go without asking permission or pardon from the whiteskins. When in our long history have our people needed men of bleached skin to tell us where and how to live? In some corner of this vast territory there must be at least some hidden valley full of elk and buffalo, and where the salmon leap out of the streams to greet our fishermen. Let us now depart this valley they have spoiled for us by taking away our sacred rights, and seek new hunting grounds where the whites won’t be able to find us.” Split Jug grunted as he resumed smoking his pipe. His brothers also grunted.
Now Fast Turtle spoke swiftly and vehemently. “My brothers, we have bows and arrows and many lances. But we have not enough deadly weapons to destroy these men if the pony soldiers should attack us with all their forces. I want to fight and annihilate them, but I will not in my conscience try to persuade my brothers to begin a war against our enemies under such odds, although this thought pleases me. Since this is so I will forbear to give advice to our good Chief Joseph.”
“Jozip,” said Jozip.
“His name is Jozip,” said Indian Head.
“Jozip,” Fast Turtle agreed.
Then One-Leg-Is-Bad spoke angrily: “I would want to draw the whites into battle and destroy them as Custer of the Golden Curls was destroyed by Sitting Bull.” He turned to Jozip for a nod of approval but the chief did not want the words to inflame the braves, so he looked away. One-Leg-Is-Bad shrugged and puffed on his smelly pipe.
Last Days, the medicine man, said he would talk.
The medicine man of the purple headdress said he would speak
plainly. He said he would prepare a formula only he knew. He would make of certain weeds tobacco with an aroma the white settlers would be unable to resist. “We will give them bad medicine weeds to smoke, and afflict them with a spicy smell they will never in their lives escape from. When they smoke this magic tobacco weed, one after another they will forget they want to force us to leave our peaceful valley. Their minds will waver and go lame.”
Indian Head then spoke: “How will you get the settlers to smoke your magic weed? Won’t they distrust it if we give it to them and urge them to smoke the bad weed?”
“Wherever the aroma is they will forget their purpose.”
“But won’t we have to smoke it first to produce an aroma?”
“We will smoke for a minute and they will forget forever.”
The medicine man laughed, but Indian Head said he didn’t think it would work.
Last Days disagreed with him. “Still, if you don’t trust my magic weed I can think up other things to try. It won’t take me long to think of a better plan.”
Indian Head, speaking from where he sat, said to Jozip, “Is there nothing we can do to persuade the whites to change their minds and let us go on living where we have lived so many moons?”
Jozip, still speaking slowly in the tribal tongue, said these words: “I often think of our old chief, One Blossom’s father. He was an enlightened man who taught himself new things every day. One reason I don’t want to leave this valley is that his grave lies here.
“Now, if you ask me what I think we ought to do I must say, in truth, that I do not believe in any act that will lead to war with the whites, no matter how they trouble the Indians and make our lives very difficult. If they offer us nothing we will take nothing, yet defeat them in quiet ways. I do not mean by fighting a war against them. What we must do is outwit them. Let me tell you how.”
“Yah,” said the Indians sitting in Jozip’s lodge.
“We could surprise them by starting an action that will trick them and overturn them if the Great Spirit helps us. Do you want to know what this action might be?”
“Yah,” said the Indians.
“We know that the white man has betrayed us many times and will betray us until the skies turn purple in order to take away our land. So I think we must leave this country as soon as we can and move into Canada, which is moons away, but is still a friendly country where we will not have to face the American pony soldiers anymore. I give you this thought for your consideration.”
Indian Head then said, “Canada is our grandmother’s country. Maybe it will welcome our people.”
Split Jug spoke in his deep voice: “My brothers, I do not think that the Americans will let us just pack our goods, take our cattle and our horses, and walk out of this land. I don’t think we will be allowed to leave without engaging in an act of war. I think they will try to keep us from entering Canada. And what good is this long trek northward if we have no promise from the Canadians that we could stay there? We have heard that Sitting Bull is in Canada now, but all he is allowed to do is sit.”
“I will tell you what I have done,” said Jozip. “I have sent messengers to Canada. The Canadians have already agreed to accept us because they know our reputation for peace through a long correspondence they had with our Great Chief Joseph. As for the American pony soldiers, they may try to make it hard for us to leave but that is a chance we will have to take. Otherwise there is no future for us here. They offer us nothing, not even charity if we ask for it. I did not know this until I thought it out, but now I am secure in my thoughts. If the Americans are as civilized as they say they are, they will step aside at our approach. We must depart from here, my brothers, before we find ourselves prisoners in some smelly reservation much unlike this that they are forcing us to leave. We can’t trust them. Shouldn’t we attempt to escape from those people who still think of us as animals? If we succeed in outwitting them the whole world will laugh.”
“Yah, yah,” the Indians laughed.
Two nights later six youths of the tribe shed their clothes to the breech clout and painted their bodies with red and yellow stripes.
On the warpath they killed two settlers, an old man and his wife of eighty, but refrained from scalping them.
Chief Jozip, formerly a pacifist, cursed his luck for having been made a fool of by Foxglove and a half dozen irresponsible youths.
“This shows me that a first-class chief I am not,” Jozip muttered to himself in Yiddish. “Otherwise I would have warned these young Indians never to murder another human being. If you murder somebody, first of all you murder yourself.”
The Long North Trek
ONE MORNING the herald spoke these words in the People’s tongue:
“This is the second day of our long trek to Canada, our grandmother’s country. We hastened our packing, we worked ourselves sick, in order to make a departure sooner than the whites could guess. However, we moved slowly and thought broken thoughts. After weeks of much labor we left in the dark before the black moon ascended. We had stationed two braves close to the American fort; they told us they could see no military activity and they rejoined us. We were 212 men and 438 women and children, each, whenever possible, mounted on a horse. Chief Jozip ordered me to make this count. We drove before us a thousand horses with remounts of a thousand more. We chose our animals with care, abandoning those that were lame or too wild to run free. Those we left behind will crop the grass of the greening earth until the white men discover and perhaps destroy them. They hate anything of Indian origin.
“Chief Jozip has marked out our route to Canada over the Buffalo Mountains. We will then move west and northward on that trail along which we often hunted buffalo. Most of you know these mountains and will welcome the sight of them. Once we cross them, we shall be that much closer to our freedom. Also, we counted the children and apportioned them among our women. Each child will remain with his mother as long as there is no peril. If any mother of a child should leave us for whatever reason, her
mother or sister will care for the child, and see to it, every night, that it has a place to sleep.
“I have more to say. We left late at night, moving in silence in the dark. At the river the water was in full flood. The crossings were difficult. We had made tight rafts from buffalo hides and the horsemen towed us across, ferrying helpless old people and their duffels. Men and women fended for themselves, yet no lives were lost. Then the range horses, hundreds of them, as they passed their old grounds, unexpectedly stampeded; we never recovered more than half of them. Yet we counted no lives lost and considered we had made a good beginning of our planned escape.
“After we cross the mountains that lie before us, we will hunt buffalo as we move east, before we turn north. At night ten braves will guard our camp. We will hide our fires until we are three to five days ahead of those who will come to seek us.
“The palefaces are an accomplished people who have invented wires that sing. One day they will sing out where we are, but Chief Jozip has told the sub-chiefs that he hopes he will trick and delay them by contriving false leads to keep them off our trail, and by traveling at night as often as we can while the pony soldiers are asleep in their blankets. Our chief says that he hopes our people will be out of the United States before another full moon appears, if we can keep our present pace. Tonight is the moon of late spring, our time for planting. But we can’t plant while we run. Chief Jozip has asked me to report to you each day so that you will know our daily purpose. He said this to me before we had left our valley.”
Jozip muttered to Indian Head, “He makes it sound like a story, but without the madness of a tribe that is being forced out of its homeland.” He was mounted on Bessie, Indian Head on a gray Appaloosa. They rode together. Indian Head had collected horses and many wagons for the very small children.
“If we can stay three days ahead of the soldiers on horses, maybe we could hold the same speed the rest of the way,” Jozip said. “Do you think this is possible?”
“You’re the chief,” said Indian Head.
“What else could we do?” Jozip asked uneasily. “Would you go to that reservation in the Western states which finally they say
they will offer us, where nobody from our tribe has lived there before and the land bakes hot in the summertime? Is this where we should go, so far away from our home in the valley, to live like animals?”
“Why do you ask me? We are of one mind about the decision to leave,” said Indian Head.
“Denks for your good words,” Jozip said as their horses trotted on together.
Indian Head then asked Jozip if he was religiously inclined. “You speak easily of the sky and in my presence you have often named the Great Spirit, but we have not exchanged thoughts about our beliefs. How much do you believe? Do you think of yourself as a religious man?”
“I have not made up my mind on this subject,” Jozip confessed. “But I feel comfortable to believe in the Great Spirit. Who, otherwise, can explain the heavens and the light of the stars?”
“You speak good words,” said Indian Head. “Why is it I make up my mind yes on some days and no on others, when the weather of my mood is the same each day?”
“Now we tulk like friends,” Jozip said. “We will be friends—no?”
Indian Head nodded, then fell back with his steed, and before long One Blossom rode forward on her bay.
“The women and children are very tired,” she said. “How much longer do you expect us to go on today?”
Jozip removed a bulky cloth map from the leather pouch he kept in his saddlebag. He pointed a stubby finger at the mountain range they were approaching in the near distance, then pointed to the foothills that lay before them. “This is where we turn off into Montana. You must speak to the women and tell them we will stop before the sun goes down. Tell them that the men expect to eat hot food. There is plenty of jerked beef and pemmican.”
One Blossom lowered her head a moment. But when she raised her eyes toward him, Jozip faced her sternly and she put on a stern face. “I am sad to be leaving the land of my father’s grave,” said One Blossom. “I don’t know when I shall ever see it again.” She went on, “The whites have stolen our land from us. They say they
go by democracy, but to me it seems that none of them knows what it truly is. If they had respected our rights and property we would still be living in the valley of the snaking river we love, and there would be no thought of a new reservation, or of fleeing into Canada.”
“A reservation will be a miserable place to live if it feels like a prison roof on our heads. This must not hoppen,” Jozip said.
One Blossom spoke in a low tone: “Jozip, I trust your judgment.”
“Denks,” said Jozip. Then, as if he had just invented the thought, he told her that Indian Head was his first true friend.
He said this while her eyes refused to leave his.
One Blossom turned back to carry the chief’s message to the women.
When she had gone Jozip reflected on himself as the leader of the tribe. He had many doubts about his performance. Yet the Indians chose me, he thought. Chief Joseph himself picked me to be chief in his place. Otherwise why did they kidnop me in the middle of the street?
Jozip turned on his horse and signaled his people. He waved them toward the wood he wanted them to enter.
The tribe ate in silence.
Indian Head was one of those on guard that night. He said to Jozip, “The braves have been drinking firewater. They speak of their disgust that we don’t stand and fight.”
“Who will they fight?” Jozip asked. “Maybe I should go with you when you speak to them? Maybe we should spill their firewater into the fire.”
Indian Head said he thought he could handle it alone. He had told One Blossom that she had better get some rest. They had miles to go before dawn broke.
“I will rest,” she said. “I wanted first to tell Jozip what my father said to me.” She looked at Jozip.
“Tell me too,” said Indian Head.
“I will tell you,” she said. “Once my father said that if it ever
became necessary for his children to leave our valley he would be present to guide us on our way.”
“Do you believe that?” Indian Head asked her.
“I do,” she said. “I believe his word.”
“I would enjoy to have his good advice,” Jozip said.
He thought he ought to get a few hours of sleep if he could.
Indian Head then asked One Blossom why she looked as if she had been crying.
“I haven’t been,” she said. She glanced at Jozip but he wouldn’t look at her. One Blossom went off into the deep grass to the wagon where some of the young women slept.
Jozip, in his tent, pulled off his buckskin pants, untied his leggings, then found he was too wide awake to sleep.
The next morning, after the tribe was moving, One Blossom rode forward to talk to Jozip and confessed her fear of dying young.
In the morning the herald spoke to the People:
“The ascent of the mountains was tedious. It had begun to rain hard. The muddy, slippery trails were impossible to ride or walk along. They were crowded with huge rocks and fallen trees. We made our descent, slipping, crawling, scrambling over wet rocks and thick underbrush. At last we found an opening in the forest and stopped to feed and rest our animals. Last Days thanked the Great Spirit for stopping the cold rain.
“We had come ten miles since daybreak, and Chief Jozip told the People we would have to go faster. The trails we followed over the Buffalo Mountains were obstructed by fallen trees, uprooted by winds, and matted together in troublesome ways. We abandoned two of the wagons for children, and divided them among the women. Then we found animals with torn bodies stretched along the trail where others had been, who Indian Head said were buffalo hunters from another tribe.
“Our march this day was to be sixteen miles. We climbed ridge after ridge in the wilderness; sometimes the only possible passage was filled with fallen trees, crossed and uncrossed. We traveled more miles and camped on the slope of another mountain. Now
the grazing was poor. We had lost one wagon full of hay, and all we had left for the poor horses was wild lupine and wire grass. We made camp in the late afternoon. Two of the children had fevers.
“We had come ten miles since daybreak, but Chief Jozip said we ought to do another three before the day ended. We went another four. In the morning a messenger caught up with us and gave us bad news. He said that the soldiers under Colonel Gunther had discovered our early departure from the Long Valley and had begun to pursue us. Some of the braves were eager to stand and fight, but no one urged our chief to change the course of our flight. Chief Jozip said he thought he could see Canada when he looked into the deepest distance. I looked too but I could not see it.”
Long Wind, a brave with a sharp tongue, came to talk with Jozip as he sat alone at his campfire. Long Wind said he must talk to Chief Jozip and they sat together. They spoke to each other as best they could.
“What will you do when the soldiers catch up with us and begin to shoot their rifles?” the brave asked. “They are only two days behind us.”
“If they shoot at us we will shoot back,” Jozip said in the language of the People, “but I will not shoot at them if they ask for a powwow and say they have come in peace and wish to live in peace with us. If they say that, I will tell them once more that we will not go to a new reservation. The only reservation where we will live is our own in the Long Valley. If they say that it is not our reservation anymore, then I will ask them to let us go on without delaying us.
“I will say that we are on our way to Canada and bear them no ill will. I will say that Canada is our mother now. I can see her in my heart.
“Do you feel sad at leaving America? Our people have lived on this land since they arrived on earth.”
“But suppose they don’t let us go where we want to go and instead interfere with the People?” said Long Wind.
“Then I will break off the meeting with the colonel and announce that we must move on again.”
“Suppose the whites shoot at us?”
“We will take care of that when it comes to that.”
“Without arms?”
“We are not without arms,” Chief Jozip said. “We don’t want to use our arms if we don’t have to.”
“You will get nothing from the white faces but scorn and lies.”
“We will see.”
“By the time you begin to see,” said the young Indian in a tight rage, “half our people will be dead.”
“We will say we want peace, that peace leads to peace.”
“They will say, ‘Peace leads to war when two nations collide,’ although you don’t seem to understand that.”
“Don’t speak to me with murder in your heart, Long Wind.”
“That is what I have in my heart,” said Long Wind bitterly. He walked away, leaving Jozip sitting alone by his fire.
Now One Blossom came forth from the dark to speak to Jozip. Jozip did not tell her what Long Wind had said to him.
One Blossom spoke angrily: “Don’t you take any pleasure in being with me?”
“Of cuss,” the chief said, “but how much pleasure can I take if you belong to Indian Head?”
“Indian Head belongs to Indian Head,” One Blossom said. “He is my friend, but I have never said I will be his squaw. I am Chief Joseph’s daughter, and will tell my man when I have chosen him. My father never gave me to anyone. I will love who I please. That is my message to Jozip the chief.”