Killdeer mountain, p.4
Killdeer Mountain, page 4
“We’d hardly got started upriver again when we ran into low water. Henry can tell you about the vagaries of the upper Mississippi—a few days between snow melts, and the boats just sit below the sandbars, waiting it out for a rise.”
Allford wiped his chin with a white-starred blue bandanna. “I knew we’d never make it past Devil’s Shoals at the big bend below Fort Standish,” he began. “In low water the eddies there fill with every sort of clamjamfry and build the sand high and hard. Major Rawley came up to the pilothouse three or four times a day for a look at my charts. When the Effie Deans nosed in at the big bend, and I passed the word we’d have to wait for a rise, the major already knew what he was going to do. We were sixty miles by Missouri waters from Fort Standish, but across the Malpais the distance was about thirty. He’d drawn a map from my river charts, and estimated he could make a forced march to Fort Standish between daylight and dark. I warned him the country was mighty rough, and Enoch cautioned him about the hostile tribes. But nothing we could do. He handed out rifles and cartridges and marching gear to his ten men, and next dawn they started. Last I ever saw of any of them.” Allford turned his melancholy face toward the open door. A chattering chorus of feminine voices had suddenly filled the outer lounge. The women were returning from the ladies’ cabin.
“We must join them,” Captain Adams said, knocking the dead ashes from his pipe into his hand and dropping them into the cuspidor.
Kathleen Hardesty in her peppermint-stick dress was frisking across the waxed flooring, her green eyes shining in the glow of the wall lamps. Now that I knew she was a widow, I suppose I regarded her in a different light. She stopped beside the two women on the sofa—Nettie Steever and Towanjila—and began speaking in her animated way to the white woman.
The four of us at the table in the gentlemen’s cabin arose almost simultaneously, pushing our chairs back. “Storm’s passed, I think,” Allford said with an upward glance at the fanlight. “Enoch will be wanting the Roanoke’s paddle wheel in motion at first daylight, so it’s off to bed for me.” The smile that broke fleetingly across his gloomy features was an incongruity. “Enjoy your dancing, gentlemen.”
I followed Captain Adams out, but instead of joining the growing throng I turned toward the steps that led down to the main deck. Mrs. Hardesty was already testing the melodeon, and a fiddle player and banjoist were tuning up beside her. She must have caught the motion of my passing from the corner of her eye. Her head turned suddenly; she smiled provocatively and said something to me, but I could not hear the words above the rising gabble.
Before I reached the bottom step, fresh air enveloped me. I took several deep breaths to clear the fumes of the gentlemen’s cabin from my head and lungs. The deckhand at the gangplank was snoring beside his lantern. I turned in the opposite direction and was surprised to see stars in the western sky. I walked past the boilers, feeling the warmth of their banked fires, and went on beyond the roustabouts’ cabins to the big paddle wheel at the stern.
The increasing starlight, reflected on small waves racing across the surface of the river, made the night more luminous. I was standing with my hand gripping a chain, staring across the rippling water at the silent and forbidding Dakota landscape, when the lapping of waves against the boat grew suddenly louder. I looked straight down. Beside the paddle wheel something had surfaced. In a more southern clime I would have suspected an alligator, but the swimmer was a human being. The shadow of an arm rose grasping for a hold, the fingers sliding and slipping off the wet slimy wood that supported the paddle wheel. Whoever it was began to struggle, breathing hard—frustrated, angry, frightened. I kneeled, then lay flat on the deck’s edging, reaching down a hand. The swimmer caught my fingers quickly and I managed to pull him aboard. I had already guessed who he was—that hollow-voiced, hollow-eyed man who had told me earlier that evening of the presence of the Roanoke. I now saw the eyes in those hollows; they were somewhat glazed but fixed on me with a haunted intensity. He wore no poncho now; the drip-drip from his soaked clothing and his heavy breathing were the only sounds above the lapping of the waves.
“Why?” I asked him.
He drew in a deep draft of air. “I wanted to come aboard unseen.”
“You could’ve used the plank. The guard’s asleep.”
“I did not know that.” He shrugged. “So I failed.”
“What do you want? Free passage?”
He nodded.
“You’ll likely be caught by daylight, and thrown off,” I said.
“That’s my affair.”
He was beginning to shake from the cold.
“You’ll freeze in those wet clothes.”
He stood fully erect for the first time since I’d helped him aboard. “I’ll dry out by the boilers.”
“Suit yourself,” I said, turning my back and starting to walk away from him.
He called softly after me: “I don’t want—don’t want them to know I’m aboard. You won’t report me?”
I glanced back at him. He was trying to wring water from the sleeves of the clinging shirt. “No,” I told him. “Why should I?”
His responding thanks was unsubstantial, a fading echo of the night.
3
I DANCED WITH KATHLEEN Hardesty, two square dances in fact. A trio of loud-playing self-styled musicians from the steamboat’s crew—violin, guitar, and banjo—had replaced her and the softer-toned melodeon. She was a vigorous young woman and liked to dance in close engagement with her partners. If I had any illusion that she was favoring me with her subtle tactile communications, this was quickly dispelled when I watched her tripping later with Lieutenant Colonel Harris.
As our second dance ended, I was both relieved and regretful that she chose to sit out the next. She led me to one of the small tables pushed against the wall, and after I obtained mint drinks for us from a passing waiter, she began questioning me about my personal history.
For politeness’ sake I gave, her a basic fact or two, but then insisted that my profession required me to turn the tables and question her instead. “Back in the States it is not unusual for wives and other relatives to travel to battlefields and recover their dead,” I said. “But for you to come out here alone for that purpose—to the wildest of the western territories—you provoke my newspaperman’s instincts.”
“I loved Drew Hardesty,” she replied simply. “It is my duty to see that what remains of him should lie in Kentucky.”
“I would have judged you to be from north of the Ohio River,” I said. “Instead of Kentucky.”
She explained that she was Kentucky-born but that her family had moved to Cincinnati before the war. Her father had been a merchant there, later doing business as a supplier to the Union army. The contracts had brought him a small fortune. “Because of my marriage to Drew Hardesty,” she went on, “he left little of his fortune to me, the wife of a Confederate soldier.” She paused to sip from her julep glass. “If Papa had known before he died that Drew, after being taken prisoner, decided to become a Galvanized Yankee, swearing allegiance to the Union, and then was killed in a blue uniform—it might have made a difference. I don’t know.”
Her husband had been captured during the foolish raid that General John Morgan led across the Ohio River in ’63. “Drew’s folks in Kentucky think it’s awful that he forswore his loyalties to the South,” she said, “but Lieutenant Colonel Harris assures me there was nothing dishonorable about a Rebel becoming a Galvanized Yankee.”
Lieutenant Colonel Harris, showing his horse teeth in a wide grin, suddenly appeared beside her chair. “I believe I heard my name mentioned,” he said. “If so, Mrs. Hardesty, I hope you were granting me permission to dance with you.”
“In a minute,” she replied after turning to smile up at him. “Please join us, sir.”
With a brief nod to me, Harris took the chair between us. I resented his presence, not so much for his inane remarks but because he had broken off the conversation between Kathleen Hardesty and me. The more I learned about her, the more she interested me.
After Lieutenant Colonel Harris swept her off into the next dance, Captain Adams paused briefly beside the table. “As usual, Sam,” he said, “there’s a lamentable shortage of female partners for dancing. Might I introduce you to one or two who are sitting out this one?”
“I would like to meet Nettie Steever. I have not seen either her companion or herself on the dance floor.”
I followed him around the edge of the dancers to the divan where the lady hotelkeeper sat with the young Indian woman. Both seemed to be magnetized by the moving crowd and the music, and Captain Adams had to call Nettie Steever’s name more than once to gain her attention.
At first she seemed indifferent to my presence. Towanjila, the Blue Sky Woman, was so shy (and apparently lacking in English vocabulary) that I quickly gave up trying to convince her that she might enjoy dancing with me. With honest brusqueness Nettie Steever also refused me. “In my business,” she said in her heavy contralto, “dancing is work. I have nothing to gain by dancing on the Roanoke.”
“Then you never dance for pleasure, Miss—or is it Mrs. Steever?”
“Call me Nettie,” she said. “No, dancing gives me little pleasure. But if you were a guest in my hotel, I would dance with you.” Her dark glancing eyes fixed sharply upon me. “What line are you in, Mr. Morrison?”
I explained that I was a newspaper correspondent. “Perhaps you’ve seen copies of my paper, the Saint Louis Herald?”
“I never learned to read,” she answered. “The only use I have for newspapers is to wrap things in, and kindle fires.” She ended with a rather coarse laugh, as though she enjoyed putting down my pride.
I decided to take a different tack, which was really the reason I’d wanted to meet her. “Captain Adams was telling me about Major Rawley,” I began. “What was he like?”
“Who?” she asked, although I’m sure she understood the name. She crossed her legs, and before her full black skirt covered her feet again I noted that she was wearing men’s shoes, heavy brogues.
“Major Rawley,” I repeated. “Is not your past association with him the reason why you are journeying up to the fort for the commemoration?”
“The major? A decent sort, he was.”
“He rescued you from Canada, did he not?”
“Yes, he did that.” She was watching the dancers again.
“How long were you a captive of the Indians?”
Her dark brown eyes stared at me for a moment, and then she smiled with what appeared to be good humor as she replied: “I do not wish to talk of those times, or to remember those times.” At the moment I could think of nothing to say in reply, and the Indian girl took advantage of the lull in our conversation to lean close to Nettie Steever and speak softly to her in Lakota. The older woman nodded, then said to me: “Towanjila wishes to go. You will excuse us, Mr. Morrison.” They arose and turned toward the portieres that led into the ladies’ staterooms.
Across from me was the open door of the almost deserted gentlemen’s cabin. I could see the back of Dr. Lieber’s aristocratic head; he appeared to be dealing out cards. He was playing solitaire.
“Ah, Morrison,” he said when I came around him. “You’ve had enough of that frontier shuffle and gallop?”
“For the while. Surely your wife is not out there in the mob.”
“No, no. Emilie is not feeling her best, although I think she might’ve come out for something more sedate than this crowd prefers.”
“I’m sorry. Would you care for a brandy?”
He nodded. I got two brandies and sat watching his game until he finished the hand and laid the pack of cards aside. “You seem rather restless tonight, Sam Morrison. At loose ends.”
“I’ve decided to stay aboard and go upriver to the commemoration ceremonies. You and Captain Adams put this Major Rawley into my head,” I said, “and I can’t get him out.”
“Yes, Rawley has that effect. A strange and complex young man.” Lieber tasted the brandy. “Compassionate, too, I would say, yet hard and determined at times. Ready at one moment to cast everything away, then suddenly filled with iron resolution.”
“You and Captain Adams differ in your perceptions of him.”
“Yes, curiously. But we knew him at different times under different circumstances. Enoch has told me that Charles Rawley despised the Indians, considered them savages, worthy only of extinction. Yet I had many talks with Rawley about the different tribes. He’d read Parkman and Catlin and seemed to share their sympathetic outlooks.”
“You first saw him at Fort Standish?”
“Yes, when they brought him in. He was suffering a sort of delirium from a blow against the side of his head. Very nasty wound. Later he told me that a warrior had struck him with a lance. An inch difference would have finished him.”
“Just what happened out there on the Malpais?”
Dr. Lieber sighed. He had told the story often enough, perhaps was weary of it. He said that Colonel Herrick, in command at Fort Standish, conducted the investigation and wrote the report but that he had helped a bit with the medical terms. They were some days finding the bodies—the weather was hot and rainy—the corpses were in an advanced state of decomposition—and had been stripped of everything. Colonel Herrick ordered his men to dig a pit and cover the remains as speedily as possible. Then with Major Rawley’s help, the colonel and Lieber reconstructed the incident.
The Galvanized Yankees were less than a dozen miles from the fort when they were attacked without warning by a mounted party of fifty or more well-armed warriors. “One of the Sioux subtribes, I judged from the arrowheads,” Dr. Lieber said. “I collect them, you know. On foot, with no experience in prairie Indian warfare, Rawley and his men had no chance. That he survived, you might say was an oversight on the part of the Sioux.”
After he was brought to Fort Standish, Rawley’s physical recovery was quite rapid, but his mind evidently had suffered a severe shock. To Lieber he seemed disoriented. Several times he’d wander off on foot into the prairie round about the fort, as if challenging the Indians to return. Colonel Herrick expressed the opinion that Rawley might be inviting death because of some guilty feeling over losing all his men yet surviving himself. Two or three times the colonel had to send a sergeant out with a led horse to bring Rawley back in. When Dr. Lieber would suggest to Rawley that he be more cautious, he would always reply with some remark about the beauties of the grassy plain—the wild strawberries and high bush blueberries, the calls of the killdeer, the soaring eagles, the hovering kestrels. “And biting flies and myriads of mosquitoes,” Lieber would retort. “Not to mention the deadly Sioux. You are not yet a well man, Major Rawley.”
A sudden change came about in Rawley soon after the arrival of a company of Volunteers from Minnesota. Colonel Herrick had arranged with his political friends in Saint Paul to enlist this company of cavalry. A goodly number of the Volunteers were war dodgers who had come there from the East, but with the enforcement of the draft in Minnesota they evidently reasoned that chasing Indians in Dakota was safer than being shot at by rebels in the South. Few of them had any military experience, but they were well equipped and rode the best of government-issue horseflesh. When Herrick discovered that Major Rawley was an excellent horseman, he put him in command of the greenhorns from Saint Paul. “This seemed to make all the difference in the world in Rawley’s attitude,” Lieber said. “I think he actually enjoyed the horse drills he put the men through for hours every day.”
Late in June unexpected orders came from General La Prade. Herrick was to leave a skeleton force to garrison Fort Standish, and march both his infantry and cavalry companies to Burdache Creek for a rendezvous with La Prade’s main column. In addition to the escort troops guarding the wagon train to the Montana gold fields, La Prade was assembling a punitive expedition against the Sioux.
Colonel Herrick was delighted by the news. He was one of those “political” colonels created by the Civil War. When he accepted his commission he had expected to go East and win fame, glory, and promotions, but instead the War Department assigned him to the frontier. During three years of service Herrick had seen little action. He’d missed the Santee Sioux uprisings back in Minnesota and his name had appeared in no dispatches to the Saint Paul newspapers. Fearing the war would end before he could gain any military reputation to aid him in his political ambitions, Herrick had been trying for months to stir up the Teton Sioux. Undoubtedly one of the results was the massacre of Major Rawley’s little squad of inexperienced infantrymen.
Dr. Lieber and Rawley heard about the garrison’s new orders from Herrick, who informed both men that they were to march with him to Burdache Creek. “I was surprised by Rawley’s response,” Lieber said. “He appeared to be quite uncomfortable with the orders, and in that quiet manner of his asked Colonel Herrick for permission to command Fort Standish in the colonel’s absence. ‘Oh, don’t be foolish, major,’ Herrick replied. ‘This is a great opportunity for you. You are needed to command the cavalry troops in the field. Besides I should think you’d be spoiling for blood revenge, to even the score with those devils who slew your men out there on the Malpais. Your father, the Senator, considers the incident a blemish on your fine record.’ Rawley made no reply to that, but over the next few days as the garrison prepared for the march I observed that he was growing more uneasy.
“He actually came to me for a physical examination, evidently hoping that I might find something wrong with him.”
“Had he fully recovered?” I asked.
Dr. Lieber hesitated a moment. “I believed so. Although his eyes sometimes held a strange hollowness in them. I could detect no reason for this.”
I was startled by his remark. “And his voice?” I asked. “Was it sometimes hollow-sounding?”
