Read Far as the Eye Can See Online
Authors: Robert Bausch
This is a bad thing
Hinne xawiimmaatchaachik
Give me the hands and feet
Ischee lak ihchee lak bakaalah
Let me have his hands and feet
Ischee lak ihchee lak huhkaalah
I want this
Hinne beewiawaak
Now I must die
Hilaake kammaashbimmaachik
This is Chiischipaalia
Hinne chiischipaaliash kook
He is the leader of the River Crow
Biinneesappeele ishbacheettuua kook
We are your friends
Diilapaache biituuk
I make you a gift
Baamniawaawalakuk
I offer you a gift
Hinne baaniiummuak
I am grateful to you
Biiitchilaak (I spelled this phonetically in the book.)
The following are Sioux words and how they would be pronounced phonetically:
Bad
Sica (shee-chah)
Big
Tanka (dahn-kah)
Chief
Wicasa Yata Pi (wee-chah-shah yah-dah-pee)
White man’s world (in the)
Wasicula Eekta (wah-shee-chue-lah ay-kdah)
The following are Cheyenne words and how they would be pronounced phonetically:
Friend, usually only said by one female to another. (Ink gets this wrong.)
Navésé'e—Nahveesay-eh
Where did you come from?
Tósa’e nén
ė
xhé´óhtse—Tosunny cheost
What is your name?
Ni-don-sshi-vi—Nee don she eve
Horse
mo´éhno´ha—Mo ache noch
Where are you going?
Tósa´e nétao´s
ė
ts
ė
he´ohtse—Tosend aus tearth
Thank you (This term is used among many tribes.)
Hahóo—Tda-ho
I am grateful to Thomas McGuane for his friendship and his suggestion of several books to read before I began to write this novel. Several books provided the kind of information that allowed me to imagine myself with these characters—to inhabit them—where and when they lived. I knew from experience what it was like to ride a horse into good country and camp under a night sky. In my youth I owned a horse I called Cricket and took her on trails in and around Rantoul, Illinois, for two years. I learned and felt all the sounds, the smell, the warm touch, of a breathing animal walking with you in black pine forests. But I needed to be in that time, wandering in the broad, beautiful, savage expanse that was the Great Plains and the country in Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas.
I am also grateful to George Reed, a Crow Indian who helped me with the Indian languages, especially Crow. Although many of the words I used in this book were phonetically spelled, they are the Crow and Sioux spoken languages as closely as I could approximate it. I have provided a list of the actual spellings of these words at the end of the narrative.
Most of the books I read were written by contemporaries, by folks who lived through those times. The best were two books suggested by Tom McGuane:
Wooden Leg: A Warrior Who Fought Custer
, by Wooden Leg, as translated by Thomas B. Marquis,
and
Tough Trip Through Paradise, 1878–1879
,
by Andrew Garcia.
Both of these books are memoirs by people who lived and breathed in the northern plains of the late nineteenth century. Both books are still available in paperback.
Wooden Leg
is the story of a Cheyenne brave who was among those who attacked Custer’s command at the Little Bighorn. It is not only about that battle. It traces life on the plains, Indian family life and traditions, even some of the laws and the system of justice between couples and families. It tells the story of growing to young manhood among the Cheyenne, and methods of survival and war among the other Indians of the plains.
Tough Trip Through Paradise
is detailed, personal, and especially enlightening about the country between Bozeman and the Musselshell, as well as Idaho and Montana. The manuscript was discovered in 1942 in a box among the effects of Mr. Garcia after he died. It is a remarkable memoir and impossible to put down. Although it covers the years 1878 to 1879—three years after my story concludes—it was an invaluable source of information for custom, language, ways of travel, and so on. It was also especially informative about the tragedy that befell the Nez Perce in the last lost battle to preserve the culture and life of the American Indian in the territories of the northwest. It was the destruction of the Nez Perce that ended the European conquest of the Great Plains.
Memoirs of a White Crow Indian
by Thomas Laforge as told by Thomas B. Marquis gives a vivid picture of the daily lives of not only the Crow but many of the settlers when they were neighbors and pretty much allies in the ongoing, almost mischievous warfare with the Cheyenne and the Sioux.
Of the books I read that have been written in our time, Allen Wier’s great novel
Tehano
is perhaps the most stirring work of all of them. In some ways it alone inspired me to write this book. So much has been written about this period in American history, and much of it tends toward a kind of praise of conquest; there are good guys and bad guys. The good guys are pioneers or cowboys and the bad guys are almost always Indians. This is what I like to call the “
How the West Was Won
syndrome.” Other books romantically present this period with reverence for Native Americans and the tragedy of the loss of their land, their heritage, and their identity. They are the good guys. The bad guys are white interlopers carrying disease and industry and a lasting disrespect for all things natural and good.
Tehano
treats the subject only on the level of the persons in it: these events happened to people, and whatever “culture” or “race” attaches does so in the light of their human story. That is the only story I wanted to tell here.
Larry McMurtry’s little book
Crazy Horse
is a fine source of information about life among the Sioux around the time of this story. In McMurtry’s capable hands, in spite of a lack of real information on the life of Crazy Horse, that great Sioux warrior becomes a living man.
The Portable North American Indian Reader
,
edited by Frederick W. Turner, gave me the voices of the native Americans, their method of speech.
I read Nathaniel Philbrick’s great book on the Puritans,
Mayflower
, to get a clear idea of the mind-set of the earliest Europeans to “settle” this land.
Finally I am grateful for James Donovan’s recent book,
A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn, the Last Great Battle of the American West
,
which provided crucial information about Indian military strategy and methods of warfare.
Among the Indians there were battles, and men were killed, but many times the conflict between these tribes was almost playful; they strove to steal horses from each other, mostly, and counted it as a great victory if they could do so without killing anyone—without, in fact, even being detected. The Plains Indians, for all their skill on horseback and in battle, rarely sought out an enemy to kill him. It was considered a weakness among the Cheyenne to have to kill a man, and it was not a way to demonstrate courage or valor. Courage was better demonstrated in the way you died, not in how many or how often you killed. Many of the books I read commented on this one fact: the American Indians were mostly appalled at the ease with which Europeans killed, and how many they were pleased to kill all at once. The first Puritan settlers, during the savage and costly Pequot War, trapped an entire Indian encampment inside a long thatch lodge. They set it on fire and shot those who tried to escape—men, women, and children. All the rest died in the fire. The Indian allies of these men of God were horrified. One said, “You kill too many,” and they all walked away from it.
In the last analysis, what happened to the American Indian was a colossal tragedy that could not have been avoided. Even the most enlightened people of those times, Indian and European, were so completely different in their understanding of the world and man’s place in it, no other outcome was possible. This was a holocaust that was not governed so much by unified hatred as it was by expansionist, nationalistic fervor coming face-to-face with tribal freedom and independence. The clash between the Native American cultures and the Europeans was inescapable because of a deeply psychic difference between the two cultures. The Indians lived
in
nature; they accepted nature as it is and thanked it every day for what they took from it. Their lives depended on the weal and woe of natural circumstances, of the movement of herds, the weather, the hunt. Almost no Indian tribe could conceive of ownership of land—any more than we can today conceive of ownership of air or space or light or weather. But one should not romanticize the American Indian. To a large degree they were so different in their practices and religious beliefs that it is easy to see why Europeans would see them as savages. Some of their rituals
were
savage—the mutilation of the dead by the women comes to mind—but they were still human beings. They had all of the many human vices and crimes: adultery, theft, murder, cruelty, and so on. They also had all of the virtues: love, faithfulness, charity, compassion, and family loyalty. They did not understand the world any more than the Europeans did. Nor did the Indians and the Europeans understand each other.
The Europeans came from a long history of mostly Christian thought—the Augustinian idea that the earth is not finished and it is man’s duty to finish it. All of their literature and religion told them to “subdue” nature, to have “dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and everything that crawls upon the ground.” Their heroes lashed themselves to the mast in the midst of a stormy sea and strived
against
nature; the religious teaching exhorted men to strive against their
own
nature as well. These people had a “destiny.” They were going somewhere. Their one true object was continued “progress,” i.e., finishing creation. They believed God blessed them in their endeavors, and thus He approved of their actions in bringing about that progress. This meant “civilizing” and “saving” those who were not of the same beliefs, and eradicating those who could not accept it. So the struggle against the American Indian began as a struggle against
nature
. It was not a bald attempt to steal land. Stealing land was easy, since the Indians didn’t believe a person could own such a thing. Thus, to the European it wasn’t stealing at all. It was subduing nature, and the only way to do that was to get the Indian and all he believed, all he treasured and cherished, out of the way. Some have said the Indians never invented the wheel because they weren’t going anywhere. That is historical rubbish. They knew of the wheel—in fact, they used a kind of wheel to grind corn. The Indians didn’t
need
the wheel because it
was
true they weren’t going anywhere. Life was a holistic balancing act, not a linear progression to some destiny. The Europeans had a destiny from the start: from “sea to shining sea.” We are now living in that destiny, and to some degree we are engaged in the same kind of struggle. Only time—a lot of time—will tell if that earlier tragedy was an unrepeatable misunderstanding between two widely diverse cultures or a prelude to a lasting human disaster.
Robert Bausch
is the author of six novels and one collection of short stories. They include
Almighty Me
(optioned for film and eventually adapted as
Bruce Almighty
),
A Hole in the Earth
(a
New York Times
Notable and
Washington Post
Favorite Book of the Year), and
Out of Season
(also a
Washington Post
Favorite). He was born in Georgia and raised around Washington, D.C. Educated at George Mason University (B.A., M.A., M.F.A.), he has taught at the University of Virginia, American University, George Mason University, Johns Hopkins University, and currently at Northern Virgina Community College. In 2005, Bausch won the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ Hillsdale Award for Fiction for his body of work. In 2009, he was awarded the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, also for sustained achievement. He lives in Virginia.