Читать книгу The Overland Trail - Agnes Christina Laut - Страница 8

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Is it worth while to run out and see Fort Leavenworth?

That depends on what you want to see.

If you want to see things as they are, the answer is that of the canny Scot—“mebee yes—mebee no.”

If you want to see the shell of the acorn from which the mighty oak grew—decidedly yes.

Leavenworth is directly on the road to Omaha about forty or fifty miles north according to the road you follow. It is not properly on the Overland Trail, for here again the snaky rivers loop in countless coils and the Overlanders bound for the Platte ultimately took a short cut northwest from the Kansas to the Platte. On the way out you will see how Uncle Sam’s Treasury—the Army branch of it—spends tax money.

When I visited Leavenworth I was amused at my taxi driver’s insistence that I should stop and see the Penitentiary. I didn’t want to see the Penitentiary. This reminded me too much of a joke on King George of England when he was visiting Canada. He was asked what was the funniest thing he saw in Canada. He answered, the word “Welcome” in gorgeous coloring across the gate to a penitentiary. But the Soldiers’ Home and Hospital are certainly worth seeing. The Home did not know I was taking a look at it; so I was not displayed the bright spots, while the dark spots were hidden behind an official screen of discretion.

What I first saw was the men—few faces from the old Civil War era if any; some—fewer and fewer each year—of the Indian War era down to the 1880’s; a greater number from the Cuban and Philippine War; and still more from the last War—an invalid class. The faces were happy and contented. The clothing was neat, spick and span, as if in army service. Where not crippled by war, the figures were agile. The grounds—trees, lawns, flowers—in one of the most backward seasons the West has ever known, were a glory of beauty, peace, restfulness, repose. I do not believe any man could live in those surroundings and retain a permanent grouch—the inferiority complex. Nearly all the men have pocket money from pensions or savings for the little comforts of tobacco, knick-knacks and what not. The spotless hospital beds, the recreation halls, the reading-rooms, the bed and board are better than many a hotel for which I have paid five dollars a day. They are far and away better than the majority of the men ever knew in their own private homes. I hate to call those soldiers “inmates.” They are not. They are retired veterans from service for the public good. Some sat on the benches spinning yarns of the old days. I wish I could have sat down with them for a week without their knowing I was a writer so they would cut loose. When you hear two old fellows scrapping over a point, you may not take sides but you get a mighty human slant on exactly what did happen and how at that point. Others wandering among the flower borders pointed out with their jaunty canes especially fine pansies or pinks or spiræa. Others I saw pointing crutches at various trees—imported trees like purple beeches, or California pines, or silver maples. They were interested in life and that is the main thing to keep going and well.

The highway out from Kansas City is as good as Riverside Drive, New York, or Chicago’s Boulevard. In the rush hours from 7 A.M. to 5 P.M., it is pretty heavily traveled—tourists, workmen building bungalows reaching out from the city, army trucks en route to and from the fort; but toward the west is the same ocean of green prairies as from the beginning, now in fields of alfalfa and clover scenting the air as did the old prairie roses.

We had just had such a plunging rain as used to leave this road, then of log corduroy and mud holes, a horror; and where the sticky adobé mud had splashed across the pavement, the swerve of our car to the grease of soil and gasoline, gave me a guess at what the swerve of army mule-drawn wagon must have been.

Fort Leavenworth, itself, is a sleepy little old city of retired and resident officers and citizens. It is the only sleepy thing in Kansas. As a fort, it is not liked by Army men. Since the ending of Indian Wars, chances for promotion are slim. Ambitious men are transferred elsewhere and the fort sleeps away its drowsy tranquil days. The Great War brought it again to life when as many as a hundred thousand men were at times encamped on the rolling hills and plains. You can see the abandoned buildings now for the most part occupied by colored families of troopers. The stables that used to roof and train hundreds and thousands of the finest army horses in America, are like the fort—sad relics of glories that have departed. The few horses yet there are beauties—perfect mounts; but how few! I was both sorry and glad. Sorry the day of the most beautiful creatures in the animal world had passed; glad these noble brutes would no longer be mangled to torture in war but had been replaced by machines that could not feel, however much the men driving the machine might suffer. The men have a vote on war. The horse hasn’t.

It is rather ridiculous to have to set down that among the soldiers and minor officers, not a man but one lone sentry and one prison convict could we find to give us information as to the wall of the ancient fort. Sherman and Grant—yes—monuments and streets named after them, but we chased our car round in the futile circles of a kitten after its tail hunting monuments and streets in memory of General Leavenworth and Kearny and Miles and Crooks and Custer, Sheridan, yes, and Colonel Cody—Buffalo Bill—and a dozen others without whom the West could never have developed. It would have been the Great American Desert to this day. Pacifists or militants, we may hate that statement or like it; but as a fact of history it has to stand. Uncivilized people—yes, and some civilized, too—have to fear first and love second; and the love usually comes as the growth of reverence for the justice behind the fear.

I paused in our circling to watch a bunch of convicts brought in from field work by a detail of troopers. I looked over the marching line of convicts—with the exception of a dozen, perhaps, deserters or insubordinates or sub-morons, who ought never to have been in the army at all, where they would have been useless in action, a danger to themselves and others. They would have collapsed or gone wild. Some were colored, the majority white, only a few, I should say, unsafe brutes in human form—as Parkman called some Indians—men but not yet with souls. Many were well born, but from some trick of ancestry or environment—weaklings mentally or ethically, not to be trusted in ordinary life, much less in the wild action of ruthless war.

Will old Leavenworth’s departed glories ever return? Indian Wars are forever past and I never want to see another war mobilizing a hundred thousand men here; nor do I believe another war could. The aeroplanes and submarine explain that.

All the same, Leavenworth is worth the run out. It explains why neither Kansas City nor Omaha could ever have been here. The Missouri Flats are too wide here—eight miles in flood tide. A rail bridge here was for all time an impossibility; but here from 1827 were concentrated eight hundred troopers—the majority mounted with a pack mule for each horseman—besides officers for every unit of one hundred and two hundred men. The flats gave inland expresses pasture and water to prepare to cross to the Platte. The army units were detailed to keep order amid a million warring raiding tribes much more hostile to one another than to the whites. Cholera and sunstroke across the thousand miles of pathless plains patrolled were, down to the 1870’s, much more deadly than raiders’ arrows. We know now that much of what was called cholera was nothing more than the terrible effects of alkali water with a meat diet and heat to broil one’s brains. No white could stand up against day sweats that drenched in a Turkish bath and night chills called “ague” and the constant drainage of reserve strength by enteric disease. Much less could he withstand the drain if he could not resist the temptation to hunt buffalo in the heat of midday, when the buffalo clustered in the shade of the poplars and cottonwoods along stream beds. Hunters’ blood up, the troopers gave chase. The herds stampeded for the hot unshaded sand and lava plains. The white rider followed and paid for his folly. Of one group of eight hundred troopers sent west in all the panoply of war to impress the plains Indians during the 1830’s, fewer than two hundred came back alive. The dead were buried on the plains where they fell to be devoured by wolves scraping up graves. Only a few were brought back to be interred in some fort.

Telescope your memory back to old General Leavenworth so human, yet a great army man. He is described as a veteran of the 1812 War, but he couldn’t have been much of a veteran in years, for he came down in the prime of his powers from Ft. Snelling, St. Paul, to build Leavenworth—on the west bank of the Missouri in 1827-28. He passed Omaha, site of the grave of the famous Black Bird chief buried astride his war horse “to watch the French traders” passing up and down the river. It was Catlin the artist, in the 1830’s, who found the skeleton of Indian horse and chief. In his first trip west, Catlin had seen nothing in Indian life—except the tortures in the dances of the Mandan Lodges near modern Bismarck—to condemn. In his next trip, his clean sheet for Indian life had dimmed. He wasn’t quite sure the old chief hadn’t been “a murderous brute” in spite of courage. The courage of using poison on enemy chiefs and calling it “mystic medicine” wasn’t a brand of cunning liked by white men.

Leavenworth had been built as a sort of breakwater line between the Indian raiders—Cherokees, Shawnees, Tuskaroras, Delawares, south; and Omahas, Pawnees, Crows, Sioux, Blackfeet, north. Six or seven companies had been sent away up the Arkansas Southwest to arrange pow-wows of peace. Fifteen ladies dwelt at Leavenworth. Horseback riding was the great racing sport. Fires in the high dry grass of autumn were the awful danger. The Indians called those sweeps of livid flames “the Spirit of Fire” to create new pasture. The Kansas tribes now numbered about 1560, the Pawnees twelve thousand warriors, the Omahas fifteen hundred.

“Catlin,” said Leavenworth, as they came riding back across a thousand miles of heat-scorched plains in August from the Arkansas, “we are getting too old to hunt buffalo—we—” Just then the rise to the crest of a hill showed a herd of the shaggy buffalo moving across the plains in search of water. Leavenworth’s horse was off like an arrow on the chase. Leavenworth wanted a nice young yearling calf whose fur was in good form and meat would be tender. That calf was no dunce. He had a rabbit trick or two. He would let Leavenworth come right up where the rifle hot to the touch could be aimed—then he would double back over his tracks and Leavenworth’s horse would be thrown on its haunches in the sudden stop. Leavenworth laughed. “I’ll have that fellow if I have to break my neck for it,” he yelled. Catlin himself had been tossed astride a small tree. Catlin saw Leavenworth’s horse down and the general on hands and knees over its head. “Hurt?” shouted Catlin running up. “No, but I might have been,” answered the veteran of Indian Wars; and he fainted. He died a few hours afterward while catching up with his troopers. In that summer, more than a third of the troopers on the trail from Fort Leavenworth died.

I listened to the whippoorwills’ plaintive ditty, to the quails’ querulous note, to the bob-o-links’ joyous call in the clover fields and thought of the days in the middle of 1830’s when Narcissa Whitman and the dauntless doctor came ferrying across the Missouri to the whitewashed barracks of Fort Leavenworth high on the ledge above the flats. The soldiers must have gasped to see a woman coming as missionary to the back of beyond in this perilous land, where the only white women, up to 1830, dwelt inside fort walls. And the missionary hopes were yet so high, their faith so undiminished by failure, their zeal so unselfish! Hadn’t the Indians asked for missionaries? Didn’t they pray for instruction in the Sacred Book? And the way so far by steamboat had been so easy, warnings as to perils ahead seemed devices of some coward devil. The officers of Leavenworth looked sad; but Narcissa Whitman sang her beautiful hymns and looked at the gorgeous sunsets and smiled. She was divinely happy.

To the everlasting credit of the Daughters of the Revolution be it said, they finally restored the old crenelated wall of the first fort with its slit eyes for rifles to cover and protect ferry and steamboat below. On the flats often a thousand people were in promiscuous encampment—traders, rum runners, missionaries, Overlanders.

Pioneers from the Middle West were very religious and sang “Old Hundred” round the camp fires blinking above the yellow flood of the Missouri. Indians lounged about, stoically observing each party. Voyageurs gambled and sang and fiddled and danced. “Eat—drink—be merry—tomorrow we die.” Mormons, when their day came, though their chief jumping-off place was Omaha, were a bit grimmer and more fanatical than the Middle West and New England colonists. The Mormons had been hounded with persecutions; and martyrdom always acts as cement. It hardens into adamant unity. There were always Mexicans to swap saddles and horses and silver jewelry to traders and voyageurs and colonists. A great many wagons had come to grief and the blacksmith’s anvil above the ridge rang day and night to mighty blows. There were no lazy men in the camp. The Overland was not a trail for lazy men. Housewives rinsed out clothing in the river or baked bread in tin reflectors banked opposite the fire. I think it was at Leavenworth, Narcissa Whitman’s white hands did the first family washing on the Trail! Poor delicate hands—they were to know rougher, harder duty for delicate hands within three years; and they never flinched, however deep her hopes sank. Matches were few and bottled for security against damp. Butter had been packed in the middle of cornmeal sacks. So had eggs and sometimes the jars of travel had mixed an omelet all ready for the bake tin. Ready money was carried in a box or belt but was very sparse. Wages were from twenty-five cents a day to four dollars for good guides or as much as five dollars by clever fellows for each passage across a ferry. These men had calked their wagon-boxes with tallow and tracts sent out by misguided missionary societies in far lands, when, “the hell fire” missive was apt to be mixed with tar and tallow and serve a more immediate use. Many an Oregon Pioneer from 1843 to 1848 learned his first A B C’s from these “hell fire” tracts and they sent him to bed with such fright, as a boy, sleeping in the cabin loft above the grown-ups below, that he would awaken howling with a nightmare complex of too much pudding and too much imaginary sulphur.

It was well on in the 1860’s before stages were general as far as Leavenworth and these were so cramped that knees sat interlocked with knees, and husky travelers preferred horseback. When you consider that even the fastest stage travel of the 1850’s seldom exceeded ninety miles a day and often averaged twenty miles with upsets and broken axles and delays in quicksand fords—the discomforts of such travel can be guessed.

Prices were staggering from Leavenworth to Laramie—$1.50 for a pound of tea or coffee; so settlers contented themselves with kin-i-kin-nick—willow leaves steeped as a tea, which were a good purgative for too heavy a meat diet. Sugar, brown, was twenty-five cents a pound; so the Pioneers had brought maple sugar. Flour was $1.50 a pound; so travelers came to depend more and more on berries and roots dried and pounded to a flour.

The place has come to deal with two very controversial topics as to the Overland Trail. The disputes rage chiefly with study-chair trail markers—not Pioneers, nor the descendants of Pioneers, nor people who, themselves, have followed wild trails.

Can the Overland Trail be set down definitely as running always from here to there, and from this point to that?

How many people were on the Trail each year?

Remember there was first the fur traders’ migration West. Then there was the Missionary-Pioneer-Oregon migration. Then there was the gold stampede to California.

Parallel with these was the Mormon movement. Also the Santa Fé wagon travel. Five distinct migrations paralleling and diverging en route as each traveled westward. Just to state that fact is to show the absurdity of the disputes.

In some years there were as many as twenty thousand wagons following a road so dusty the wagons behind could not see the wagons ahead and many wagons moved five and eight abreast and, as each platoon of wagons formed for each day, self-imposed regulations compelled the dust-free leaders of yesterday to fall to rear today. It is nonsense to imagine the same fords could always be used, or the same ferries were in service. Fords and ferries depended on flood tides and dry seasons; and these varied each week and each day as they do today. I have been over these routes—all of them—in years when rail tracks were washed out by a cloudburst and in the very same season in the next year when the rails would gladly have paid the loss of a washout to help the scorched crops to increase traffic. I have been out in the month of June when sixteen-foot snow banks stopped us in a motor and we had to diverge to a lower road; and I have been out in April when you would have paid an extra fare for a whiff of snow air to lower the temperature. It has always seemed to me such disputes are a bit futile. Enough to set down that if you draw a broad belt from Kansas City and Omaha westward up the Platte to South Pass, you are on the Overland Trail, the epic road of human history.

Leavenworth is not on the Oregon Trail; but you have to know its position relative to the Overlanders’ highway. Else you will not understand the hopeless impossibility of moving troops westward fast enough to avert the awful tragedies of the 1847-49 era. Beyond Leavenworth every Pioneer took his life and law in his own hands; and in each covered wagon were more women and children and babies. One does not know whether to tremble at the temerity or applaud the courage. Perhaps both.

How many people were on the Trail each year?

What matters it?

When one Pioneer tells you he was in a band of two hundred and seven people and another tells you he was in a group of forty to fifty, and another tells you he saw five thousand wagons pass Laramie in a day, can such figures be checked up by the census of California or Oregon, when the census was guesswork and no census existed west of the Missouri and these birds of passage in movement across the plains were as varied in numbers as the wild geese winging overhead? As a wise guide of mine once answered in the North, “We don’t travel here as the crows and geese travel in an air line. We travel as the sand bars and head winds compel us.” Yet who has ever attempted to check up a census of the wild geese awing for the North?

I say no more. The best one can do is tell the story of various groups on the Trail. Then if you don’t take your hat off in reverence to hero Pioneers, and feel the tears choke your throat over the lonely graves, or the blood rush to your head in fury at the brutality of some thugs, both red and white, it is because you have lost the zest of real living. These people lived and died to create the West.