Education Of a Wandering Man (1990) (14 page)

Few of those who write so glibly about Custer have ever examined his career. His defeat of Jeb Stuart was without doubt one of the major reasons the North won the Battle of Gettysburg. Some may object to the term defeat, but without a doubt Custer prevented Stuart from obtaining his objective, and Stuart was a great cavalry officer.

Custer's troops often complained about some of his brutally long marches, but no matter how far he asked them to go, he was up there in front of them and in plain sight. The men called him old "Iron-Ass."

Often forgotten is the fact that the Seventh Cavalry, proud of its name and reputation, had an unusually large number of raw recruits when they left Fort Lincoln, which contributed to the great loss of life at the Little Bighorn.

There are so many things about Indians and their ways that were simply not known. For example: no Indian who was not present at the signing of a treaty felt bound by it. For this reason many Indians would deliberately absent themselves on such occasions.

In most cases, when a chief signed a treaty, he was signing for himself. He had no authority to force other Indians to abide by it.

This most white men never understood.

In most cases the only way for a young Indian to become a man and a warrior was to take a scalp or to count coup, which meant to strike a living, armed enemy. Until he had done so, he could not get a bride and he could not speak in council. He was literally a nobody. This is why Indians often said they could not live without war.

A strike against the Indian in dealing with white men was that to him, a battle was a war. The Indian never learned about campaigns, a series of extended battles. When the Indian battle was over, all the Indians went home. The white man kept coming.

Although Crazy Horse was but one of the chiefs present at the Little Bighorn, he is usually given credit for the tactical planning.

It is more likely that it grew out of a council.

The fact of the matter is, had the Indians a supply system of food and ammunition, they might have whipped General Alfred Terry (custer's commanding officer) and Gibbon as well.

That's a wild speculation, of course, but they had put Crook's command out of action and had whipped Custer and knew that Terry and Gibbon were approaching.

Personally, I do not believe that the sites of the battles were a matter of chance. I believe the Indians deliberately led the coming battle into terrain favorable to their way of fighting and where such traps as they often used were available.

Military tactics had interested me since my youth, and when I got older I read Sun-tzu, Marshal Saxe, Vegetius, Clausewitz, and dozens of others on the subject. Sun-tzu, who composed his work about 500 B. C., laid down the basic principles of military strategy and has rarely been improved upon. The American Indian used a variety of tactics but the favorite was always a variation of what Hannibal used to defeat the Romans at Cannae. It was also used by T. E.

Lawrence at the Battle of Tafila, in World War I. This was definitely what was prepared for Crook at the Rosebud but he failed to enter the trap. It also was used by the Sioux and Cheyenne at the Fetterman massacre in Wyoming, in 1866.

My mention of Vegetius, who wrote on the tactics and camps of the Roman legions, offers an opportunity to correct a mistaken impression that has long existed. When Jesus was suffering on the Cross, a Roman soldier offered him vinegar to drink, and this has been considered by many to have been an unkind act. As a matter of fact, vinegar was what the Roman legions drank, believing it a better thirst-quencher than plain water. We often put lemon in water for the same purpose. In any event, that Roman legionnaire was simply trying to share his own drink with Jesus.

Fortunately, we who write about America's frontier have no shortage of basic material. Soldiers of every rank have written of their experiences in one place or another, and the records in many areas are excellent. The only limitation on any writer is how much effort he or she is willing to put in to be accurate.

We cannot, of course, know all the story, but we do know much of it, and from what we know can easily surmise the rest. We who write fiction are not writing history, yet I do not believe anybody has a right to alter history for the sake of a story. If nothing else, it betrays a lack of creative ability. The actual history is amazing enough and I prefer to put my characters into what is actually happening and let it happen to them.

My reading in the library continued with Why We Behave Like Human Beings by George A. Dorsey, Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Will to Power by Nietzsche, a volume of essays by Schopenhauer, and another by William James.

In fiction I read The Case of Sergeant Grischa by Arnold Zweig, which I consider the best novel to come out of World War I, although Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front attracted more attention and was a good book also. I read The Master Mind of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, a continuation of the series I had read when I was twelve. Bitter Bierce by C. Hartley Grattan was a biography of one of my long-time favorites, Ambrose Bierce.

Becoming briefly interested in psychiatry, I read two books by Coriat, as well as the Psychology of Insanity by Bernard Hart, and The Mind at Mischief by William Sadler.

In the meanwhile, my brother Parker and I had been developing a small conspiracy.

My parents were living in Oregon at the time, near Klamath Falls. I was preparing to move on from Portland. When I did, they would be some distance from any of the family, and they were growing older.

Parker was Washington correspondent for the Oklahoman-Times, dividing his time between Oklahoma City and Washington, D. C. So we planned to find an excuse to get my parents to move to Oklahoma. Parker bought an acreage east of Oklahoma City near Choctaw and began telling Dad the difficulties he was having in getting anyone to plant trees, care for them, and generally protect the place.

The upshot of it was that Dad decided to drive down and see what he could do, and I was to make the trip with them.

We could not know then that Parker was soon to leave for a job with Scripps-Howard in Ohio, and would only occasionally visit in Oklahoma.

Using a name I had never used before and never used again, I entered an amateur boxing contest and fought but one fight, which I lost. Most of my fighting was done in small-town rings, with only here and there a venture into big city clubs. I never did well in the amateurs, largely because I was not eating as regularly as I should and because of conditions generally. As I had the idea I might someday turn to boxing seriously I did not want a blemish on what I hoped would be a good record.

I was working nights, dead tired, and they tied the gloves on us well before we were to enter the ring, as is often done in amateur bouts where many end quickly. I was so tired I fell asleep waiting to be called to the ring.

I fought a fairly good fight, with one flurry in the second round that won the round for me, but lost the decision to a good fighter.

In all I read 115 books and plays in 1930.

I do not believe that any writer has ever presented an account of his reading or education. Some of what I am writing here may seem dull stuff, but I have enjoyed digging into the reading habits of many great men and women and have tried where possible to get a list of the books in their libraries. I have in mind a book about the American Revolution which I am eager to write, though unhappily the time may not be allowed me, as I have so many projects on the fire and could not do them all in two lifetimes.

However, in researching this book, I had occasion to visit the estate of George Mason and there I collected a list of the books he had in his study and those he had read in preparing himself.

He was without a doubt one of the most influential men of his time, and the sources of his ideas were important to me. Still, a book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.

I hoped that by understanding the books these men and women read I might grasp at the basic sources of some of their ideas.

In several of my western novels I have had characters reading Plutarch. I believe more great men have read his Lives than any other book, except possibly the Bible. But, as many pagans read Plutarch, his work may still be the most widely read. In reviewing the reading histories or libraries of great men, I have come upon him again and again, and justly so. His is a sophisticated, urbane mind dealing with aspects of leadership.

Once more now, I was upon the road, this time with my parents, traveling through eastern Oregon, a section of Idaho, into Wyoming, and on to Oklahoma. Each night in some caf`e or other stopping place I sought out the people who knew about the area. It was always easy to get them started, and all that remained was to listen.

In each town there are collections of pamphlets about local history, but once you leave the town they are rarely available elsewhere. I had it in mind to build a library and gather them all together, from every state in the union, as a source for scholarly research.

I know that I have profited much from such accounts --often simply some old pioneer or soldier telling how it was. Many of these booklets are only a few pages, but each has value in itself. Our land is rich beyond belief in the memories of its pioneers but much of this material is being lost through sheer lack of awareness that it exists. Many of the best stories of our country are in such booklets, unavailable to scholars, and many of them can throw revealing light on the pages of history.

In talking with old-timers I learned very quickly that they read books, too, or heard stories from others who had. As I had read everything they were likely to know, I could recognize the stories as they appeared. I just let them talk, telling stories about Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok (his ancestors were once tenant farmers for William Shakespeare), or the O. K.

Corral. I had taken the precaution of learning the names of a couple of local characters, perhaps an old-time cowboy, a rancher, miner or whatever. After letting the old-timer have his period of talking of things of which he thought only he knew, I would bring up the local character and immediately be treated to a flood of stories and memories. Others listening would chime in with their viewpoints. When that happens, you get the real stories, not watered-down versions of what somebody believed happened.

Nowadays, when traveling in the West, I am often told about old-timers--who usually turn out to be younger than I am--who have stories to tell. Occasionally they are stories repeated from ones their fathers or mothers told, but too often they are partially digested, often-told stories that have been well written long before.

There are so many wonderful stories to be written, and so much material to be used. When I hear people talking of writer's block, I am amazed.

Start writing, no matter about what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on. You can sit and look at a page for a long time and nothing will happen. Start writing and it will.

Our trip to Oklahoma was taken at a leisurely pace. There was no reason for hurry, and we all liked to see the country.

Occasionally we turned off the highway to visit an old fort or a ranch. At night I was reading Theodor Mommsen's History of Rome, and Livy as well. Dipping into one and then the other, I found myself wishing I had Polybius. In the past I had read from him, and liked him better, I believe, than Livy.

I was by no means a scholar, simply an interested reader with nothing to do but live and learn, traveling through what a few years earlier had been Indian country. Driving beside trails still rutted by wagon trains, I was getting history from two aspects: that of ancient times and those just past. It was a means of putting things in perspective.

Each people is, I believe, inclined to believe it is the purpose of history, that all that has happened is leading to now, to this world, this country. Few of us see ourselves as fleeting phantoms on a much wider screen, or that our great cities may someday be dug from the ruins by archeologists of the future.

Surely, the citizens and the rulers of Babylon and Rome did not see themselves as a passing phase. Each in its time believed it was the end-all of the world's progression. I have no such feeling. Each age is a day that is dying, each one a dream that is fading.

Someday, men--or some other intelligent creatures--will stand on the sites of New York or Los Angeles and wonder if anyone ever lived there.

We know so little of the past, and what we have discovered is largely what lies above water.

Yet once, sea level was lower, and no doubt there are cities of which we know nothing that once existed there. If something were to happen now, nothing might remain of our world but the faces on Mount Rushmore or the figures on Stone Mountain, and perhaps the foundations of some of our freeways.

Of the hundreds of plays written by Euripides, Aristophanes, Sophocles, and others, we have but a few.

At least two hundred plays, whose titles we know, have vanished, and if so many plays, how many books on history, medicine, or other subjects, with probably fewer copies released at the time, are missing?

I have delved deeply into the literatures of the world, yet what is available is scarcely a dusting of what must have been. Great libraries have been destroyed, and books or manuscripts are vulnerable.