Michener, James A. (126 page)

Rusk gave the impression of being saintly, for he was tall, very thin, diffident in manner and rumpled in appearance, with the detached behavior of some minor Old Testament holy man. Even as a young boy he had seemed gawky and apart, his trousers ending eight inches above his shoetops, his sleeves, seven inches from his wrists. His piety evidenced itself before he was nineteen, when in Meeting he was constrained to lecture his elders about what was proper in human behavior; and at twenty he ventured behind Confederate lines in Virginia and North Carolina, seeking to arouse the slaves in those states to demand their freedom. His innocence had protected him, for he had bumbled into three or four really perilous situations, only to find miraculous rescue. Once, south of Richmond, a black family whose members thought him quite irresponsible had hidden him in a cotton gin when a posse came searching for him, and in North Carolina a woman who owned slaves lied to the searchers about to arrest him, then told him when they were gone: 'Go home, young man. You're making a fool of yourself.'

But in the summer of 1865, when everything he had preached had come to pass, he returned to those slaves who had saved his life and to the good woman in Carolina, bringing them food and money contributed by the Philadelphia Quakers, and he had prayed with both the blacks and the whites, assuring them that

God had ordained that they save him in 1862 so that he could return now to help them get started in a better life. The Carolina woman, whose farm had been burned by Sherman's rioting men, warned him once more that he was making a fool of himself, but after he had stayed with her for three weeks, helping to clear away the ruins and make space for a new home, she concluded: Rusk, you're a living saint, but you're not long for this world.'

The officials appointed by President Grant to receive nominations for the new posts were delighted to hear of a man who seemed to fill every requirement: 'He's vigorous. He has no wife to cause complications and expense. And he will love the Indians as he loved the slaves.'

There was a dissenting vote, for an older man who had made his living in Philadelphia commerce, a harsh testing ground, feared that anyone as naive as the recommendations showed Earnshaw Rusk to be was bound to have trouble translating his piety into positive action: 'I'm afraid that if we throw this young fellow into a place like Texas, they'll eat him alive.'

'He won't be going to Texas,' a member of the committee explained. 'He's ticketed for a location in the Indian Territory,' but the other man warned: 'That's pretty close to Texas.'

The committee, eager to announce its first appointment, overrode the businessman's objection and informed President Grant that 'Earnshaw Rusk, well-respected Quaker farmer of Buckingham, Pennsylvania, unmarried and in good health, is recommended for the position of United States Indian Agent at Camp Hope on the north bank of the Red River in the Indian Territory.' Grant, also quite eager to get his program started, accepted the recommendation: 'We've found the perfect man to tame the Comanche.'

Earnshaw was plowing his fields when a local newspaperman came running to him: 'Rusk! President Grant has appointed you to a major position in the government!' Unprepared for such news, Earnshaw asked to see verification, then stood, with the telegram in his left hand, reins in his right, and looked to heaven: 'Thee has chosen me for a noble task. Help me to discharge it according to Thy will.' But the reporter broke in: 'Says in the telegram that General Grant did the choosing.'

When confirmation reached Buckingham, Rusk felt inspired to address his final First Day Meeting:

'I must demonstrate to the army and to the nation as a whole that our policy of peace and understanding brotherhood is God's elected way for bringing the savage Indian into productive partnership. 1 deem it

my duty to work among the Indians as I worked among the slaves, and 1 am satisfied the results will be the same.

'If William Penn could bring peace to his Indians, I feel certain I can do the same with the Apache and the Comanche. I seek your prayers.'

A cynical Quaker businessman who had traveled in Texas whispered to the man next to him: 'William Penn would have lasted ten minutes with the Comanche.'

As Rusk spoke his hopeful words in eastern Pennsylvania, the rambling family of Joshua Larkin was preparing to establish rude quarters on a site Larkin had scouted about sixty miles west of the newly established town of Jacksborough, Texas. Army officials stationed at nearby Fort Richardson warned the Larkins as they arrived that they ran serious risks if they ventured so far west, and Captain George Reed, a gloomy man, was downright rude: 'Damnit, Larkin, if you stick your neck way out there, how can we protect you?'

'Six times in Texas we've moved west, always to better land. And six times we heard the same warning. The Waco will get you. The Kiowa will get you. And now you're sayin' "The Comanche'll get you." ' Larkin, whose lined face seemed a map of the frontier lands he had conquered, poked Reed in the arm: 'We ain't never been as afraid as the army.'

'And you ain't never battled the Indians, the way the army has,' Reed snapped, imitating Larkin's raspy whine.

'That's because we're smarter'n the Indians, and you ain't.'

'You're from Alabama, aren't you?'

'Sure am.'

i learned twenty years ago, you can never teach an Alabama man anything.'

'That's why we conquered the world.'

'Up to a point,' Reed said, indicating his blue military sleeve.

'You had the big factories, the railroads,' Larkin said without rancor as he prepared his wagons for the final push. 'Any time we start even, we'll whip you Yankees easy.'

'Why you so eager to move west?' an older officer asked, and Joshua replied: 'There's two kinds of Americans in this world. Them as looks east and them as looks west.'

'Meaning 7 '

'East men look for stores and banks and railroads. They have dollars in their eyes. Us west men look for untamed rivers, deep woods, open prairies. In our eyes we have the sunset. And we'll

keep goin' till we stand with our feet in the Pacific, lookin' at that sunset.'

'Aren't you afraid of Indians 7 ' the officer asked, and ! replied: 'We Larkms been fightin' redskins fifty years. No n to stop now.' But as soon as he had uttered this boast, he added 'As for me, I never killed an Indian, never propose to '

Next morning the sixteen pioneers departed: Joshua; his married brothers; the three wives; an unmarried brother, Absalom, and nine children of all ages. 'There they go!' a soldier shouted as the wheels began to turn. 'Israelites pouring into the Land of Canaan.'

They would head slightly northwest along almost unbroken trails until they intersected the Brazos River, the aorta of Texas, coming at them from the left. 'And when we go along it a bit we come to Bear Creek, joinin' from the north. Prettiest little creek you ever saw, and where they touch, that's where we'll call home."

It was a sixty-mile journey, and since experience enabled them to make fifteen miles a day, they planned to reach their new home at the end of the fourth day. Joshua kept his brother Absalom riding ahead as scout, and repeatedly the latter galloped back to assure the wagons that on the next rise they would see wonders, and they did, the great opening plains of West Texas, those endless, rimless horizons of waving grass and sky. Rarely did they see a tree, not too often a real hill, and never growing things on which to subsist.

Through various devices the Larkins had obtained title to about six thousand acres of this vast expanse, at a cost of four cents an acre, and they realized that it was no bargain, but it did have, as Joshua had reported after his scout, four advantages: 'Cattle unlimited, wild horses for the ropin', constant water, an open range for as far as a man can throw his eye.'

There was excitement when Absalom rode back to inform his relatives: 'Brazos River ahead! One more day's travel.' He was correct in his guess, and when the Larkins started their trip along its northern bank they felt as if they were once more safe When they reached the confluence with Bear Creek they stopped on a small rise and surveyed their promised land: 'Ain't nothin' here but what we're goin' to build. All ours.'

They had brought with them a few domesticated cattle, a string of good horses and six wagons containing a bewildering mixture of whatever goods they had been able to amass: cloth and medicines, nails and hammers plus the lumber on which to use them, spare axles and wheels, a few pots, a few forks and two Bibles.

The Larkins were Baptists, Democrats, veterans of the Confederate army, excellent shots and afraid of nothing. The three wives came from three different religions, Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, but all knew 'The Sacred Harp,' that twangy religious music of the South, and now as they prepared to pitch their tents for the first time at their new home, they united in song. Their nine children joined in, and when the lilting hymn ended, Joshua cried: 'Lord, we made it. The rest is in Your hands.'

To the three sod houses they were about to build they brought an arsenal of firearms: Sharps, Colts, Enfields, Hawkens, Spring-fields, and each child above the age of five was trained in their use. They did not anticipate trouble, since, as Joshua had boasted to Reed, they had edged their way five previous times into lands recently held by Indians and had invariably found ways to neutralize the savages, principally by trading with them, giving them a fair exchange. Of course, when Texas Indian policy had become expulsion or extermination, their bold forebears had helped in the former and applauded the latter. But this generation, probing into a more dangerous section of the state and up against a more dangerous type of Indian, hoped for peace.

They spent two days of hectic action gouging a large sod dugout in which all would sleep at first, and then Joshua turned to the second preoccupation of all Texans: The land is ours. The water we got to collect.' And he put all the men and boys, even the tiny lads, to the task of throwing across a gully a rude dam which would impound enough water to form what Alabamans called a pond but Texans a tank. 'With a good tank,' Joshua said, 'we can manage cattle and horses. But now we got to get ourselves some ready cash,' and he divided his work force into two groups: one to rope wild horses and bring in stray cattle that could be sold in Jacksborough, the other to go out onto the plains with their powerful Sharps rifles to kill buffalo. They would be skinned, with the aid of horses that pulled loose the hairy hides and dragged them back to where they could be baled for shipment to markets in the East. The carcasses, of course, they left to rot.

It was miserable work, and as the buffalo began to withdraw westward, travel to the killing grounds became more onerous, but always Joshua spurred his brothers: 'Get horses. Get cattle. Kill the buffalo.'

His strategy was not accidental, for if the Larkins could assemble horses and cattle, they would possess the basis for a prosperous ranch, and if they could exterminate the buffalo, they would make the plains uninhabitable for the Indians. The Larkin brothers did not want to kill off the Comanche; they wanted to ease them onto

reservations north of the Red River, leaving Texas as it was intended to be, freed of Indians

'Give ns three years of peace,' Joshua said at the end oi vigorous stretch, 'and bring soldiers fifty miles west to a new chain of forts, we'll have this land pacified.' He never said that Bear Creek would be their permanent home, for he and one of his brothers had already scouted more than two hundred miles west to where green canyons dug deep in the earth, with plenty of water and even some trees. Given time and persistence, the I .arkms were going to own those canyons.

The particular tribe of Comanche led by Chief Matark, a forty-year-old veteran of the plains wars, had for many genera tions occupied the rolling areas west of Bear Creek, and from this sanctuary, had ranged two hundred miles north into Oklahoma lands and five hundred miles south into Mexico They had ravaged competing tribes of Indians and plundered white settlements. including El Paso and Saltillo. Whole decades would pass without a major defeat, for under Matark's strategies the Comanche eluded pursuit by the army, avoided pitched battles, and struck whenever a position stood exposed. They were cruel and crafty enemies, well able to defend themselves and remorseless when an isolated ranch seemed unprotected.

In the autumn of 1868 the bold appearance of the Larkin clan at the confluence of Bear Creek and the Brazos troubled Chief Matark so much that he did an unusual thing: he convened a war council; it was unusual because customarily he made all military decisions himself.

'How many are they?'

'Four grown men, all good with the rifle. Three wives who can also shoot. Nine children, some old enough to use guns.' 'How do they dare move onto our land 7 ' 'They expect the fort they call Richardson to protect them.' 'How far are they from the fort 7 ' 'Their huts stand three days' walk to the west.' Three days!' the chief cried, in that tune we could wipe them out.' But then he grew cautious: 'Could they have an arrangement with the soldiers there? Detachments hiding in the gullies 7 Waiting for us to attack?'

'No soldier has visited the three sod huts Never.' 'But could there be a secret 7 Something we can't see 7 ' 'There is no secret. If we strike now, as we should, the army cannot reach us in two days.'

Matark, not wholly satisfied with the reports of his younger

braves, sought counsel from two old men who had seen many battles, and the older of the two, a man with no teeth who stayed alive by will power, said: it is not the army. It is not how many guns they have in the three sod houses. What will destroy us is the way they kill our buffalo.'

Said the second old man: 'With each moon the animals move farther away.'

'And fewer of them.'

if they stay at Bear Creek . . .'

'And if more come, as they always do . . .'

'What shall we do?'

'Now, there we face trouble,' the first old man said, if we could only pray that the fort at Jacksborough would be the last . . .'