Читать книгу Shaman's Dream: The Modoc War - Lu Boone's Mattson - Страница 26

Euchoaks arose from his place in the circle and climbed up the ladder, crossed over the bank away from the village. He gained the track and followed it up the little rise while he tried to choke back his anger. He pulled his jacket across his chest against the cold of the wind, who was blowing a cloud sky before him.

Oh! So that was what he had started feeling down there in his heart! The wagons were coming! He could hear them, could feel them just along the road there. Down from Linkville, drovers with them. He closed his eyes and saw. Many, all empty; one full.

Perhaps he had smelled them, he thought. For they did stink. The stench of surrender was in his nostrils. Surrender and betrayal. He had to leave the circle or puke on the black-coated man, this Meacham. And on Keintpoos, who should not even listen.

The Meacham could talk the Big Talk all right! He kept on saying things until the listeners couldn’t listen any more and drifted away in their own dreamings. He talked things for Keintpoos to see as he explained them, and Keintpoos kept listening. Keintpoos would be thinking that this Meacham was a different kind of man, even to his dress. He said he honored the Indian. And when he called him child of the same God as the white man, he said the white man was but a child, too. He said he had learned to honor the Indian as a youth in Iowa, helping find a good place for the Sacs and the Foxes where they would be safe. And no harm had come to them. He said the Big Tyee, this Grant, had told him to find the lost Indians. He said he knew why they had left the reservation, that it was bad for the Modocs. He would have left it, too, he said. He thought that Keintpoos was right for that. But he had changed some things already and he would change the rest until the place was safe and the Indians could be good. There would be no more reason to sell their women: supplies would come as they needed them. There would be no loss of Modoc wealth to the Klamaths: he would not let them rob the Modocs by cheating at gambling, for there would be no more of those games. There would be no kind of slavery, since the Son of God had died to free men and a great war had already been fought to stop the evil. There would be no false prophets and fake magicians in the shamans, for he would make them cease their hocus-pocus so Jesus could come into their hearts, as he had already come to other Indians. Sunday Doctors would bring Him, and with Him, civilization.

At each thing he named the muttering of the Modocs increased, until he reached the last and Curley Headed Doctor and the other shamans cried out not to listen to this thief.

“Stop him talking!” he shouted, grabbing for his knife. “Stop his mouth!” But some of the other people told him to be quiet. Now they wanted to hear the man out. So did Keintpoos, it seemed, though the kiuks was not sure why, unless it was this picture the man painted with his words of things made right his way.

This Meacham had said they were coming, and now he knew it was so, for he tasted them in the wind, coming to take them back. To what?

Old Schonchin had been in his thoughts all the morning, a warning of what all the Modocs would be if Jack trusted this Meacham. Old Schonchin, once a leader to be followed. But his will to be Modoc fell out of him like his teeth. He sat there on his reservation now, next to the Snakes and the Klamaths, nodding and watery-eyed, despised by everyone but the Bostons and the forty or so Modocs who stayed back with him at Sprague River. Showing his bare gums whenever some Boston asked him how he was living there on the reservation. The shaman would puke on Old Schonchin’s feet, too, if he were here. Even his own brother reviled him.

Keintpoos -- Captain Jack, if you wanted his name the way the Bostons would have it: He always had been a hard one to turn. Once set down a path, he went forward. Which had been right when he led them off the reservation and back here to Lost River. Born here. Raised here. But now Curley Headed Doctor could tell: he was turning like a pony in the rainstorm, putting his tail to the wind, lowering his head, hearing the thunder, waiting for the thunder to pass. The shaman could not believe Keintpoos would do it, but he had heard him with his own ears, heard Meacham force him into a corner with some paper -- and the threat of the brass buttons.

This paper: the Meacham had pulled it from his pouch and had smoothed it out before them. Keintpoos had pulled back, shaking his head grimly, motioning for Toby.

“It’s the treaty,” Meacham told her. “Made with Superintendent Huntington, five years ago. Remind him!”

“I never put my name to it!” Keintpoos exclaimed.

“You did,” Meacham said in a strong way. He held the paper for all to see and pointed to a place next to where the red seal had been. “That was your mark there, that ‘x.’ Next to your name there, ‘Keintpoos.’ Old Schonchin signed. But so did you, Keintpoos. For the Modocs.”

“I did not know anything about that paper. I did not know what was on it. The old man Schonchin, this John Schonchin’s brother, he is the one who did the talking. When he went over to the reservation, he did not know what was on the paper. He just went to be a-going. The old man made the treaty!”

“Toby, tell him he will not be imposed upon,” the Meacham said. “Say the treaty requires that no Indian shall impose upon another. I will guarantee that protection. Because of the difficulty between you and the Klamaths, I propose to put you at Yainax, near the Paiutes. You are to occupy the same farm and improvements. Ocheo is fixed on the east side of the spring, and you can reside on the west side.”

Euchoaks throat constricted as if to choke him. He could hear Jack going down; he could hear him accepting:

“I do not want to go where the Snake Indians are. I am not a bad Indian.”

“I know your friend Judge Steele went to Washington to defeat this treaty,” Meacham said. “But the tyees there told him it was good.”

He could hear Keintpoos collapsing, those words rushing him back to that certain place, that reservation. So Curley Headed Doctor had leaped to his feet, shouting at Keintpoos not to listen, not to agree; he had shouted ‘I -- a kiuks -- I am not going! I am telling these others they must not agree to go with you!’ And the others had risen, too, snatched by his words from the dreaming this Meacham was putting them into. It had almost been too late, but he had awakened himself and the others.

“Tell him I am a good man,” Keintpoos said then to Toby. “I have not done anything wrong. I don’t fight. I have not done anything to the white man, and I don’t want to go to Klamath.”

Then Euchoaks could breathe again. The bad spirit was passing, and Keintpoos was finding his tongue:

Scarfaced Charley said the words for him: “Only a short time ago I told my people they were to die here. My people are not to go away from here unless they go after game. You saw these papers from town. I do not talk much. There is my hands. You see there is no white man’s blood on them. They are clean. You do not know me…. Maybe you think I am a common man and no account and that is the reason why I want to stay here in my country. If you know I am guilty of any thing and will ask me to go, I will go. I want good men to live with me here. Why do you want to talk about that paper? That is a stolen paper from the Indians. Do you know how little Indians know about papers? I do not know anything about papers. That is the stolen paper. Maybe you did not understand about that paper -- that is, who made it. Perhaps that is the reason you talk so about that paper.”

Meacham shrugged and re-folded the treaty. He made a sign that it was there, speaking to him and whoever would listen.

Keintpoos talked then before the Meacham. He said about his man being killed at the agency, how the Modocs had liked him. Keintpoos said then how he wanted to die here on this small piece of land, not back on the reservation where he would be sick.

“I have but a small piece of land here,” Keintpoos told the Meacham. “The white men have taken the rest of it…. Maybe you feel sore because I don’t want to go.”

He promised too much, though, started wheedling again, let it look like he was asking when he should have stayed strong:

“This is a poor country. You don’t need it. It would not be of any account to you. The white men can come when they please and live close by us. I have but a few people and I want to look after them. This is a poor country -- all of this. Klamath is a good country.”

Then Meacham’s words were stern and out of patience:

My heart is not bad. I came here because I was told to come and give you advice. I come to represent a Government that will do just as it says. The reason I want to put you alongside the Snakes is to set an example to show them how to work. I have heard much of your people. They are like the white people …. I don’t care what part of the reservation you want to go on. I understood you to say you would go if you would be protected, and that is the reason I talked the way I did. The Government of the United States owns all the land from one end of the country to the other, and she gives portions of it to the Indians. She looks upon all the Indians as her children and tells them where to live. The Government says they must live on Reservations where they can be cared for. It is my duty, as you made a Treaty with the Government, to see you and ask you to go onto the Reservation. If you are ready to go with me I will take care of you, and if not I will turn you over to the Military.

There it was. Now everybody could hear it. This was what they knew, what they had always known since Fort Klamath and Fort Warner and Fort Bidwell got going and the brass buttons came to them to do their marching. The people did not know how to answer. They only knew Keintpoos should do it.

“I told you!” Euchoaks spit out the words.

Again Toby picked up Meacham’s words: “I told the Commander of Fort Klamath that Captain Knapp and myself would go first and see the Indians. The officer said, ‘All right, if they go with you, all right. And if not, the Soldiers will come after them.’ I am your friend. If the soldiers come after you, you will remember what I have said.”

And Meacham told them even the Yreka people had made a petition to have them removed. He pointed out George Nurse and Gus Horn and said: “They told me that if you go there, back to the reservation, and are there yourself they would come with you.”

Then he stood the red-whiskered man up with him and told them this was an army captain but acting as a citizen. And the red-whiskered man got up and said:

I am the Agent of Klamath. If you go with the Superintendent and myself, you shall be protected. The Government owns all the Country. You have agreed to abide by the law of the United States. If you go you will be protected. If you are turned over to the military, you will be forced to come.

And then it was the Meacham again: “…. I want you to say whether you will go peaceably or stay and let the Soldiers come after you as if you were coyotes. I have twelve soldiers coming. They may be here tomorrow or possibly tonight. If you want to go with me all right and if not the soldiers will force you.”

That was what he said.

Euchoaks stopped in the track and listened, certain now that he did hear the drovers and the wagons. At least that much of what Meacham said was true. Afraid that the rest might be, also, and that Keintpoos would listen, he turned and hurried back. They were coming to take them, and it felt to him as if it would be to an execution. This knife edge Keintpoos walked along even talking to these Bostons: he should not go near it.