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Seven months earlier he had been kept waiting like this. That time the doors had been mahogany, with brass fittings. Not like these rough, white-washed ones. There he had been overseen by portraits. Of presidents looking out from gilt frames. Here, on this wall, there was only an old calendar page from an almanac. But waiting was waiting, he thought. This morning he’d had enough of it.

What he wanted now was closure.

He looked out the window. Beyond it, he could see the camp taking shape: tents being raised; cooking fires being lit. Dogs. Horses. And beyond all that, on the trails converging on the agency, wherever he looked, there were people.

He let the muslin curtain drop. He pictured again that Washington morning when the usher had let him into the room, left him to face the man at the desk. Frowning. Looking down at some papers. Toying with his pursed lips. Reading.

That day, Meacham had started to say the words he had pictured -- about coming to pay his respects, about the Inaugural, about his own endorsement of Grant’s thought -- the thoughts he admired most: about… He had stumbled, but gone on… ‘a humane course, to bring the aborigines of the country under the benign influence of education…. and civilization.’

He wanted to second what Grant had said in his speech, about ‘The Indian Question:’ ‘Can not the Indian be made a useful and productive member of society by proper teaching and treatment?’ Meacham wanted to say about that.... But his words stopped, seemingly of their own volition.

What Meacham had been rehearsing as he waited in the hallway that Washington morning was not going to cut it. The president hadn’t been listening. Instead, he had gone on reading until at last he found what was had been looking for. Pinning the word to the page with his finger, Grant had looked up.

“Excuse me, Mr. Meacham,” Grant had said. “I don’t mean to cut you off. But I had to reassure myself of something. Verify for me, will you? What are you?”

Meacham had felt his brow shoot up. “Pardon me?”

“You know. Your religious affiliation? Tell me.”

“That? Why, Methodist.”

“Please be seated then,” Grant had said. “There are some things I need to tell you. And then I’ll need to ask you a further question.”

In this room, Meacham could still summon his surprise. In March, he had made that trip to Washington as a part of the Oregon delegation. Dutifully made the rounds of congressional offices. Their politicking business finished, the delegation had been headed for home. Over that last morning’s coffee he had read the text of Grant’s declaration. Decided it wouldn’t hurt to try again. Penned a note. Asked for a moment to pay the Oregon respects to the newly re-inaugurated president.

The alacrity of the response had surprised him. At his earliest convenience, it said, he was invited to meet with the president.

Something had changed all right in the White House. In ‘66, Johnson hadn’t had time to shake the hand of the then-aspiring-to-be superintendent Meacham. Wasn’t interested in seeing someone who ‘wasn’t a Johnson Man.’ Wrong party.

Now, waiting for Knapp, as he looked back, the whole experience had been more surprise than he had bargained for. He had thought about it endlessly as the train made its way all the way back across the continent. All the way to Council Bluffs, across the wide Missouri, then onto the brand new tracks where the east-west lines were getting linked.

He had allowed himself some sense of destiny on that train ride as he gazed out the windows at the scattering of the little towns, the thinning-out of the fields, the groves, the barns. The new tracks leading him through the grasslands. Sweeping westward. The train whistle and chuffing of the engine, the vibration. He had dreamed his way through all of that, scarcely taking it in because he was fixated on the picture the man in the tweed coat had painted for him of what needed to be done.

The army.

The civilians.

The cresting wave of people, filling up the land.

The corruption.

The corruption of the agencies. Agents selling off trade goods meant for the tribes.

The whisky.

The Indian agents colluding with traders; selling everything.

The selling of women. Indian women. Pregnant Indian women. Ostracized. Abandoned. Damaged goods.

The…outright scandal of the forts.

“I think you moved Indians,” Grant had said.

“I did, with my father,” Meacham had said. “Sacs and Foxes. In Iowa,”

Grant had nodded: “Quite a time past.”

“Yes. Thirty years ago. I wasn’t much more than a boy.”

Clearly, Grant had done some homework. “Well then, I meant it in my first inaugural when I said I would favor any course that would tend to their civilization and ultimate citizenship. This time I made the issue more prominent. Gave it several lines. A significant portion of the speech. An invitation, really. Because now something has to be done. What you don’t know, though you might have heard, is that there already has been action on the ‘Indian Problem.’

“Before you and I get down to work, Meacham, allow me to make this point. The immediacy of the matter stems from what has just happened: a war concluded; a restless populace out of gainful employment in this financial down-turn. We need new avenues, new ways of seeing and thinking.

“When are you leaving?” Grant had asked.

“Tomorrow,” Meacham had said.

Grant had muttered something Meacham couldn’t catch but then had added:

“You’ll be among the first, then. Tomorrow you’ll get on a train and, in spite of some delays as the job is finishing up, in a matter of mere days you’ll be all the way back in striking distance of Oregon. Here’s my point: By the time you get off that train in Reno or Sacramento, the wide-open country will just have shrunk. Finally. This month. When they drive that golden spike out in Utah, the continent will have been stitched together, hooked up by those bands of steel.

“I don’t have to tell you, the restlessness you’re looking at now is indeed small potatoes compared to what is coming. Those you ride with on that train won’t be military. They will be enterprising ‘go-ahead’ people. Shopkeepers and grocers and purveyors of goods: medicines, towels, sewing-machines. Professors. Lawyers. Tourists. East-coast hunters looking to bag a shaggy-maned buffalo in order to go home and brag about it. Shooting from the advantage of the train!

“There will be a mind-set riding that train with you. It will have been noticing the sections of the Congressional Land Grant that stretch ten miles wide along the rail line. Land that is just there for the taking. For sale, to suitable purchasers, for cash on the barrelhead or at 7% interest, a million railroad acres. Opened up by trains. Good-by to the Wild West.

“So. Let’s turn to the ‘brass-tacks’ part of this,” Grant had said. “Let me tell you a little story, and perhaps you can help me fill in some of the details. You may know much of it.” What Grant had described was one part brilliance, one part derring-do, or all of it was foolishness.

In January, three men, Quakers from Baltimore, had requested to meet with him. They had ‘thee’d and thou’d’ him for hours. Urged him to address ‘The Indian Question’ forthrightly during his second term. Take a stand for the aborigines. Allow them to be educated. Fed and clothed. Yes. But above all, Christianized. So their understanding could be opened. Their understanding of justice and of law be awakened. Replace their reliance on medicine men and their hocus-pocus. Let the medicine men be replaced by Christian men of good character, who would be teachers and models. Many Quakers would volunteer, commit to being the moral shepherds. They would undertake to bring truth and justice and charity -- and peace -- to the Indians. With simple brotherly love. That way, get the Indians ready for citizenship when the time was right…. In a few years, when the treaties had been allowed to lapse.

There was more the Quakers had laid before him, but none of it, they warned, would ever come to pass, given the present and continuing scandalizing of the Indian. The polygamy, the trafficking in women. The soldiers’ and agents’ wanton destruction of families. The drunkenness….

As they went on, eventually Grant had caught the Quakers’ fever, had relented in the face of their insistence that there had to be a cleaning-up, a re-dedication, a lifting-up, in love. He had succumbed: “Yes,” as president he at last had said, “You are right! Let us have peace!” They had gone away, rejoicing.

He had liked their notion. He had glimpsed in it the germ of an even bigger idea. About a re-birth -- and a consolidation. He had to think about it.

He had sent the Quaker delegation off with his blessing to begin compiling a list of brethren who could find in their hearts a calling, a vocation, to serve the Indians in the name of God and the United States.

“But the Quakers weren’t the only ones with ideas,” Grant had told him. Others were closing in on the problem, too. Congress was just commissioning a group of wealthy Christian men -- examples of ‘enlightened Christian manhood,’ he had called it -- to visit the Sioux, where it was the same story: drunkenness, debauchery, families torn apart. Suffering. Those commissioners would be reporting their findings by the end of the summer. And they were of non-Quaker denominations. Outspokenly non-Catholic, but otherwise mainstream -- Episcopalian, Lutheran, what have you.

The idea was growing in him, Grant had said. It was beginning to add up to something. Why not take the Quaker notion and encourage it to spread. Cast a wider net, across all the faiths, of Christian workers across the country.

He saw complications, but now he was entertaining the notion of each of the denominations agreeing to work in discrete areas -- in states, in territories, primarily -- where tradition had placed them, in places where they had already labored to Christianize the Indians. To even think of setting aside a new state in the edge of the country, across the Mississippi, where the Indians might congregate. But that would be off in the future. For now, the land would be apportioned to the denominations according to the missionary work that each of them had already attempted in efforts to civilize the Indians.

So that Pennsylvania and Kansas, for example, would go to the Quakers, for openers. The Lutherans might accept responsibility for, say, Minnesota. And so it would proceed.

Yes, Meacham had said, fighting off a fleeting image of cats being stuffed into a gunny-sack.

“I’m not sure of the details yet,” Grant had said. “But my thinking on the Indian Problem has been opened. I can see I have surprised you. You can object, Meacham, but set your cavils aside in order to see where this thought might lead. Follow me in this: One could envision persuading the religious groups to such a plan.

“Everything would be accounted for, with responsibilities assigned. But this is Washington. The cry that would go up from the military would be deafening. ‘Our territory!’ they will say.

“From the beginning, the army has had jurisdiction over the Indians, and has never come up with a new idea on the subject that goes beyond moving them here and there. Uprooting them to make way for what is coming -- or has already arrived. The army mostly adheres to the notion that the Indians at best must be kept out of the way. Make reservations. Tuck them aside where they are inconspicuous. Run the Indians down. Herd them onto the reservations. If the Indians get ideas -- to take the point of view of two of my most important senior officers, Sherman and Sheridan -- and become more troublesome, the army would be ready to use the ultimate solution. Simply exterminate them.

“We can do better than that. I think to myself: Why not let us experiment. Let the military keep its share of responsibility. Let it keep right on running those reservations not run by the religious groups. Let it downsize and modernize, put some of its energies to better oversight of the safety on roads and trails, maintenance of the forts, national boundaries, and looking for renegades.”

Grant acknowledged that part of the plan needed work. “Let it be sufficient for now to acknowledge that there is more to be done on that one. Make a renewed effort to identify who should be retained, who let go from the corps. Based on the individual ethics of the corps member. But to be fair, where the military are concerned, one has to acknowledge that Christianization of Indians was not what they signed up for.

“So there we have the religious denominations and the army accounted for.”

Grant had been studying the wall above Meacham’s head as if he had been reading something inscribed there. But then he tucked his chin down and raised his shoulders like a prize-fighter looking for an opening. The jab, when it came, had been tentative.

There had been this thought: There was this other entity that needed to be included because it had a legitimate stake in the running of things. The Civil Service, the providers of the army of reservation agents. And with them, the contractors. Entrenched interests with agendas inside agendas. Purveyors of stuff for the Indians and its transportation. Another problem to be faced. Lucrative. With insider jobs. Food, yes. Often rotten. Unhealthy. Meager, bug-infested. Clothing, yes. Shoddy. Threadworn. Tools and implements, yes. Substandard. Broken. Non-existent. And of course liquor, yes. Whisky, yes. As always, yes.

Civil-Service. The third arm. It would always need surveillance, recognizing it for what it is: a magnet of shady-dealing. But it, too, would be given its charge to be accountable and regulated.

And where the Indians were concerned, Grant had told Meacham, there was to be a change in the Civil Service. Within the month, in fact. Grant intended to appoint Ely Parker. An Indian. The first non-white officer in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. To be Secretary. Grant’s trusted aide -- wrote the transcript of the surrender of Lee at Appomattox.

“So things are moving, Mr. Meacham,” Grant had said. “I said I had a story to tell you, and that was it. About this three-pronged attack on this ‘Indian Problem.’ Mounted by the Christian denominations, the United States Army, and the Civil Service.”

Meacham finally was sure of the meaning of Grant’s invitation, the words he himself had fumbled for in his introduction to the president. Finally, he knew what they meant.

“Having told you all of that,” Grant had reminded him, “I said I had a question. Since you have heard me out, here it is: Will you take a position if I offer it to you?”

Thinking of it now, Meacham shoved the curtain aside to watch the snowy scene and its anticipatory bonfires. Three months of these Oregon Big Talks, and the job far from finished.

“In light of your Republican party affiliation, your Methodist Church membership, your experience in moving Indians, I would like to put your name forward to be Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the State Oregon. If you accept, you will replace Huntington. You will report to Ely Parker in the Bureau of Indian Affairs.”

How could he refuse what he already desired, especially when it was offered by the battlefield strategist par excellence? Of course, he had been ready with his response to all that he had just heard, so eager that he had stopped listening. There was a bit more to the president’s invitation. A caveat.

“Excuse me, Sir,” Meacham had said, “I thought you had finished speaking.”

Grant had gestured as if to say it was nothing. “I was just going to add that I hope that it will not be dispiriting for you to feel the responsibility of leadership…. I’m sure you will find a way to lead the Indians without ostentation.”

This morning, he was less than sure what that meant.

The boxer metaphor describing Grant seemed inadequate. Meacham needed a sharper one as he watched the converging procession of Indians. Here, in this movement of all these responding people, he could see tangible proof of someone’s or something’s intention.

He had watched his commander in action, deploying his troops again, triangulating. Figuring his moves. Calculating in the face of enfilading fire his possible gains, probable losses. Meacham wondered what metaphor would cover that.


Shaman's Dream: The Modoc War

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