Boone's Lick (25 page)

Uncle Seth was right. Below us, across the valley, the Indians were going around, picking up rifles and pistols, pulling cartridge belts off soldiers, picking up arrows and hatchets, collecting their own dead. The ones who had taken all they could carry were already trailing away, into the woods.

In only a few minutes, every single Indian was gone; they melted right back into the forests that they had come racing out of.

“There may be a few wounded,” Uncle Seth said. “It would be unusual for every last man to be killed stone dead, in a fracas like this.”

“Let's go,” Ma said.

“Go where?” Uncle Seth asked.

“Go pick up the wounded,” Ma said. “You just said there might be some.”

“We might want to wait a few minutes, in case there are some young braves who aren't satisfied,” Pa suggested. “It wouldn't be wise to tempt them.”

“But the wounded might die,” Ma said. “These Indians just killed a whole army—I doubt they'd bother with a scrawny bunch like us.”

“Where's Marcy?” G.T. asked. “Where's my pup?”

“Left with wife number three—is that the right number, Dick?” Ma asked, giving him a look.

“Close enough,” Pa said. “Why don't you take the youngsters back to the fort—me and Seth can gather up the wounded, if any.”

“No, it might require two wagons,” Ma said. “Besides, Seth's so gimpy he's worthless, in this chill weather.”

“It's going to be a bad sight, Mary Margaret,” Pa said. “You don't have to see it.”

“I'm a woman who's buried four sons—by myself,” Ma said. “Bad sights don't affect me.”

Pa turned his wagon and said no more.

W
E
took our two wagons down into that valley of death, to search for the wounded among the dead, but there was not a single wounded man—not one. Though the fight had lasted only a half hour at most, the Indians had managed to do the same things to Colonel Fetterman's troop that they had done to the miners we had found back on the trail. Eyes were gouged out, guts spilled, privates cut off, legs split, faces smashed in. Some of the bodies were naked, some not.

Colonel Fetterman's body was leaning against one of the rocks, on the little outcropping. His throat had been cut and it looked as if he might have taken a few licks to the head, but he wasn't torn up as badly as some of his men.

If Ma remembered that she had once told Colonel Fetterman that if he had eighty men to put at risk he would probably lose every one of them, she never mentioned it—but it had turned out to be an accurate prophecy: eighty cavalrymen died that day, on the field beyond Lodgepole Ridge.

Pa and Uncle Seth checked every corpse, to be sure it
was
a corpse, but we didn't remove the bodies. We only had two wagons, and Pa was nervous besides.

“That many Indians could take this fort,” he said. “I have never seen that many Indians in one force, and Sam hasn't, either. I doubt there's bullets enough in the magazine to hold them off, if they come at us. A victory like this will surely pump them up.”

“I expect we better bunk in the fort tonight, then,” Uncle Seth said. “Colonel Fetterman won't be there to throw Mary out.”

Already, because of the chill, the dead cavalrymen had stiffened—all over the field we could see legs and arms sticking up. Of course, growing up during the Civil War I had heard many stories of the hundreds and thousands that died at Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, Vicksburg, and the other great battles. Eighty dead would have been the result of just a small skirmish, in that war.

But we had seen these eighty dead men ride over the ridge that morning, in the full glory of their lives, racing down on their foe like cavalrymen are supposed to—and now they were all dead and stiff, their limbs sticking out at crazy angles—I felt like
I was seeing all the dead, of all the wars, not just these few poor soldiers.

Pa and Uncle Seth shot four or five badly wounded horses—the Indians had taken most of the rest, though a few had run off in panic and made it back to the fort.

Ma got down and walked among the bodies for a while, satisfying herself that they were all beyond our help.

“I'd hate to have a fault like this on my conscience,” she said.

Not a man slept in Fort Phil Kearny that night—not unless it was Colonel Carrington, who we never glimpsed. Pa said this would ruin him, even if it had been Colonel Fetterman who led the reckless charge.

What interested
me
more was whether we would survive the night. Every man in the fort expected the Indians to attack, and the general view was that we lacked the ammunition to repel them.

Besides that, the fort Indians pointed out that tonight's moon would be a special moon—a power moon that the Sioux and the Cheyenne would want to take advantage of. They were right, at least about the power of the moon. The full moon that floated up into the sky that night was brighter than any lamp. A flare couldn't have lit the plains any brighter. Not a star was visible—the moon was too bright. It lit the prairies and shone into the forests where the Indians had hidden that day.

Every man in the fort stood in arms that night—only Neva, anxious for a dance, found the waiting boresome.

I don't know where all those Indians went, those hundreds of Sioux and Cheyenne; nobody knew, except themselves. But for whatever reason, they wasted the power moon, which shone all night with a brightness that I was never to experience again, not in my life.

Toward morning the wind rose, and it began to snow.

“Here comes that blizzard,” Uncle Seth said.

“It's a shame they didn't bring in those bodies,” Pa said. “Now we'll have to wait for a thaw.”

The soldiers had been too scared, that day, to secure the bodies.

Still the moon shone—through its light we could see the heavy snowflakes, drifting down.

Ma stood on the parapet most of the night, with Pa and Uncle Seth. Someone had given her a rifle—she meant to fight if the Indians came. I had my rifle too. G.T. kept his puppy inside his big gray coat. Marcy was still with wife number three, Sweetbreads, as Pa called her.

By morning it was very cold—the wind was swirling the snow. Yet the moon was still visible, still bright. It had just transferred itself from one side of the sky to the other.

“It's shining for the dead—gone to their peace,” Ma said.

We were invited into the mess hall for breakfast—the porridge with molasses sure tasted sweet.

N
EVA
turned out to be the one who stayed in the west. She fought Ma and Pa and Uncle Seth to a standstill and stayed right there at Fort Phil Kearny, with Pa and Sweetbreads, or wife number three, as Ma always called her.

For Neva it was the beginning of a brilliant career—in no time she learned the Sioux language so well that the chiefs and generals began to take notice. At the big peace powwow in 1868, when the army knuckled under to Red Cloud and agreed to remove the three forts they had foolishly thrown up along the Bozeman, Geneva Cecil was the only interpreter that General Sherman trusted.

Then, before you could blink, Red Cloud, shifty as ever, stole Neva from General Sherman and
hauled her all the way to New York City—she interpreted for him when he made his big speech at Cooper Union a year or two later. Her picture was in all the papers; I guess she did a crashing job.

Next thing we knew the great General Crook—Three Stars, or the Gray Fox to the red men—had enticed Neva away from Red Cloud; Crook kept her with him all the way to the Rosebud, where some intelligence she picked up from a Crow scout saved the testy general from a rout. All the military men said that if Custer had had her with him a week later she would have fought
him
to a standstill and helped him avoid his deadly blunder at the Little Bighorn.

We saw little of Neva in those years—she was always on the chase. Some say she left Crook to go marry her old admirer Wild Bill Hickok, but arrived too late to save him from drawing that famous dead man's hand, aces and eights, the hand he was studying when shot down by the coward McCall.

Then Buffalo Bill hired Neva for a while, to help pacify all the Indians who rode in his Wild West Show. I believe it was Neva who taught Sitting Bull to play Ping-Pong: there is even a picture of this.

From time to time Neva would marry: our count was three Indians, a gunfighter, two cowboys, and a trick roper—but she was bristly if we tried to get her to talk about her home life.

“What of it? Pa had more wives than I've had husbands,” she insisted, if questioned.

Every two or three years someone would arrive from the dock or the railroad station with a small child for us—just a child with a note in Neva's hand.

“Ma, this is Ben—do your best, Neva,” the note might say. Or, if the child happened to be a girl, the note would read: “Ma, this is Little Bat—good luck.”

Uncle Seth would grumble about this practice—he claimed to be past the age when he could tolerate small children, but Ma raised all of Neva's offspring, to the number of six, never losing a one. Fortunately, thanks to the Black Hills gold rush, Pa and Uncle Seth prospered so in their hauling business that they sold out to the famous Wells Fargo Company; after that Ma didn't have to shoot horses out from under sheriffs to get vittles for her grandkids.

When General Crook was sent to Arizona to root out Geronimo he tried his best to get Neva to come with him, but she declined, on the grounds that fluency in Sioux didn't equip her to speak Apache. By then a young newspaperman named Hearst had hired her to write for his newspaper in San Francisco. The very year that Geronimo and his eighteen warriors came in, Neva published her famous book
The Western Avernus
, a story of how grievously we whites had mistreated the red man. The book sold millions of copies—at last count it had been translated into one hundred and three languages.

To her credit Neva devoted a lot of her time and energy to keeping up with Pa's Indian wives and
his half-breed children. Her count, as to the children, was seventeen, spread among most of the tribes that had once held sway on the plains.

Pa never left the west—fortunately I was able to visit him often. G.T. took against him, on obscure grounds—it may have been that thrashing over the pocketknife—and never saw him again. The lumber business, which Pa went into after he and Uncle Seth sold out, proved to be Pa's doom, due to a freak accident in a sawmill he owned in Oregon. A big saw blade snapped, just at the wrong moment, and took Pa's head clean off. Neva buried him near The Dalles, a spot I have not visited—Neva assures me that his grave commands a glorious view of the Columbia River Gorge and the great country beyond it.

Ma and Uncle Seth were never parted. They quarreled their way through nearly fifty more years of life. A maiden aunt in Ohio left Uncle Seth a modest farm—before he could get around to selling it a handyman working on a fence punched a posthole a little too deep and struck oil. Uncle Seth was for selling the old place anyway, but Ma fought him like a tigress; she believed there was a future for oil, and she was right. So much oil flowed out of that posthole that Ma and Uncle Seth were able to build a substantial mansion on Lindell Avenue in St. Louis, where they finished raising Marcy, six children of Neva's, and two of Aunt Rosie's as well, the latter having died in childbirth after five years of marriage to a banker in Dubuque.

Marcy had a fine, lilting soprano voice—Ma sent
her to Europe to train it thoroughly, which she did. Marcy sings with the New York opera now, not a form of singing Uncle Seth could bring himself to enjoy.

“Reminds me too much of a Cheyenne scalping party,” he said.

G.T. claimed that the horrors of the Fetterman massacre stunted his growth, which didn't matter, since he was already as big as he needed to be. The puppy Sweetbreads gave him lived to be twenty-four years old. G.T. never married. He decided that what the world needed was a reliable supply of catfish, so he started the first catfish farm in Missouri, an enterprise that failed, due to being way ahead of its time. The bankruptcy that resulted made G.T. a bitter man—it turned him into a hellfire preacher. Then his reason slipped and he began to stand in the street and rant about hellfire to the passersby. He even stood right in the middle of Lindell Avenue and preached while visiting Ma—it was a great embarrassment to the children.

As we came east along the Platte after our fateful visit I happened to spot an old tattered law book that had dropped out of some wagon, a good thick digest of laws from all over the place. After I had pored over that old book for a few years I decided to become a lawyer—Ma borrowed the money and sent me to law school in Chicago, over Uncle Seth's loud objections. He was convinced I would become a judge and find against him in court.

“Does a chicken have loyalty?” he asked. “Does a lawyer?”

Lawyers weren't as thick on the ground then as they are now—I not only became a judge, I became the top judge in the whole Missouri judiciary. Luckily Uncle Seth was never in legal trouble, but several of Neva's children took trouble for a middle name. It was just luck that none of them showed up in my courtroom.

You don't have to be long on the bench to realize that family cases are the hardest to settle. Give me murderers and bank robbers any day, over a family that's got crosswise. It's deuced hard to know where a family story starts, and no cinch to figure out where one stops, either. If family cases started with a wedding and ended with a funeral, judges wouldn't dread them so much—but it's rarely that way.

Look at our family, the Cecils. You could argue that the main story started the day Ma shot Sheriff Baldy Stone's horse, under the mistaken impression that it was an elk—but that was just a point on the map of our life as a family.
Did
Ma always prefer Uncle Seth to Pa?
Did
Pa wander the west for years, hoping his brother would relieve him of his outspoken wife?
Did
Uncle Seth mean from the first to steal his brother's wife? Did they all three know what they were doing, or half know, or just blunder on?