Читать книгу Bill Nye's Chestnuts Old and New - Nye Bill - Страница 11

Table of Contents

A Copper-complexioned Gentleman of Few Words—A Generous Offer of "Two Sleeps" that was Promptly Accepted—A Speech from Colorow that Proved Fatal to Ills Hapless Stenographer.

The recent ruction on the part of William H. Colorow, Duke of Rawhide Buttes and heir presumptive to the throne of Yellow Jacket Park, brings the Indian once more to our notice and teaches us that eternal vigilance is the price of government land on the frontier.

Sig. Colorow is of Indian parentage and his lineage, such as it is, is very long. His ancestors run back as far as the earliest dawn of the Christian era. They claimed the land extending in a southerly direction from the North Pole, and seemed to ignore the fact that it had been sold for taxes. The Indian has always been in favor of representation without taxation, and Colorow has believed in a community of grub, allowing the white man to retain a controlling interest in common, wet-browed toil. He has always been willing to divide his bread with the pale face. He has offered, time and again, to give the white man the bread that was sweetened with honest sweat, while he took his plain. He says that to prefer bread that tastes of perspiration shows a depraved taste.

Colorow has for years been a terror to the people of northwestern Colorado, eastern Utah and southern Wyoming. Every spring it used to be his custom to stroll into North Park and prospect for prospectors. Once he came to call on me. He had been there longer than I had and so, of course, it was nothing more than etiquette that he should call on me.

He seemed to enjoy his call very much. I could not think of anything to say, though generally I am of a bright and happy disposition. After I had asked him how his mother was, I could not think of anything else to interest him. Finally I thought of Capt. John Smith and how he amused a hostile band by showing them his compass and new suspenders. I had no compass, but I had a new watch which I carried in a buckskin watch-pocket, and I thought I would show him the sweep-second and fly-back and let him see the wheels go round.

When Colorow is captured, if the United States of America has no use for that watch, I would be glad to have it returned to me at No. 32, Park Row, New York.

Colorow is a man of few words. I will never forget what he said to me when he went away. He held up two fingers and said in a voice that did not seem to waver:

"Meboe so, two sleeps more, you get out."

I sometimes think that when a man says very little we are more apt to take an interest in what he says. It was so in his case. I got to thinking over his remark after he had gone and I decided to accept of his generous offer.

He had given me two sleeps; but I do not require much sleep anyway, and when I got to thinking about Colorow and his restless manner while he was my ghost I could not sleep so well as I had formerly, and so I have been doing the most of my sleeping since that in a more thickly settled country. I remember I was so restless that last night that I walked feverishly about. I walked feverishly about twenty-five miles, I judge, in a northerly direction.

I left a small but growing mine there at that time in charge of the Utes, and I hope they used it judiciously.

The Ute nation is divided into two sections—viz., the Southern Utes, who have been pretty generally friendly, and the Northern or White River Utes, who break out into fits of emotional insanity whenever their ponies got their bellies full of grass.

My policy—one which, I regret to say, has never been adopted by the government—is to hire a sufficient number of armed herders to take the entire grand remnant sale of Indian tribes out on the plains and watch them all summer, rounding them up and counting them every morning and evening to see that they are all there. Through the day they might be kept busy pulling up the "pizen-weed" which grows all over the grazing grounds of the West, and thus they would get plenty of fresh air and at the same time do good in a modest way. But this scheme for "Utelizing" the Utes is a hundred years ahead of the age, and so I do not expect that it will meet with the indorsement of a sluggish administration.

There are, however, two sides to the Indian question, viz., a right and a wrong side. That is why the Indian question wears so well.

One of the great wrongs incident to the matter is the great delay in officially reaching the War Department in such a way as to attract the eye of the speaker. By the time a courier can get in to a telegraph station and wire the governor of a state, who notifies the Adjutant-General to write a dictated letter with his trenchent typewriter, apprising the commander of the department, who is at Coney Island or Carlsbad, with no typewriter nearer than fifteen miles, who wires the governor to make active inquiries about the matter, and by the time the governor has sent a committee, who go to within fifty miles of the scene of hostilities, and return at the end of six weeks to report that they do not know whether there has been an outbreak or not, and then when a ranchman is really killed, and reputable eye-witnesses, who were personally acquainted with deceased, and will swear that they have no interest in the result of the outbreak, come in and make a written and grammatical request for troops, and the War Department gets thoroughly rested, the Indians have gone home, washed the gore off their hands, and resumed their quiet humdrum life. Like trying to treat a man in Liverpool for softening of the brain by applying the mind cure per cable from New York, the remedy is too remote from the disease.