It seems I'm always working on something. These are some books that I have "finished" but not yet found a publisher for. You can scroll through the whole mess if you want, or jump to the title of interest by clicking on it.
Under the Dawn Star: a California-Indian Family Chronicle, 1832-1973 Read a Sample
Squanto: a Docu-novel Read a sample
Drought, Blizzard, and Rising Hope, a novel, based on a true story Read a sample
Saving Sand: Stories of a Prairie Culture Read a sample
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A California-Indian Family Chronicle, 1832-1973
by Charles Brashear
What others are saying about Under the Dawn Star:
"a memorable narrative of cross cultural misunderstanding and contemporary searching for a reasonable means of living in an illogical modern world."-- Vine Deloria, Jr, Lakota author of Custer Died for Your Sins and several other best-selling books
".... pointed, funny, moving, and VERY real...."-- Paula Gunn Allen, noted Laguna Pueblo poet, storyteller, and Indian activist
"Well written and rich in historical detail, Under the Dawn Star is a touching account of the generational struggle of the American Indian between the culture and morals of their past and modern day society. One Man's poignant look into his heart through the influence of his Grandmother Doe-in-the-Dawn."-- Barbara Truax, president of California Writer's Club (founded in 1909 by Jack London)
ABOUT THE BOOK
This book is about half history and half fiction regarding the Koru (anglicized as Colusa) people of northern
California. It documents the history of the triblet from their first contact with whites (the Ewing Young party
of 1832) until about the end of the century. It then presents the (mostly fictional) mixed-blood descendants of
the tribe from about 1875 to 1973, dealing with the historical, economic, sociological, political, and personal
issues that Indians and mixed-bloods have had to deal with in American society. Because of this focus, the
book is a sort of history of a tribe, a synecdoche for the history of the Indian in America, and could well be
used as a supplementary text in schools.
Under the Dawn Star, a California Indian Family Chronicle is about several generations of whites and
Indians. Doe-in-the-Dawn, acculturated half-breed widow of a caucasian, is turned activist by the "Red
Power" invasion of Alcatraz in 1969. She gets her white-thinking grandson, Charlie, to take her to the
remnant of the Colus Rancheria, near Colusa, some sixty miles north of Sacramento, in hopes she can
awaken his Indian conscience. "It's hopeless," says Charlie, "all our relatives have been dead 60 years or
more." "We'll go anyway," says Granny, whose mother, Cia, lived there until her death. They meet suspicion,
reluctance, ignorance, poverty at the rancheria. In their attempts to gain justice, Granny and Charlie try arts
& crafts activities, "red power" meetings, suits in Federal Court to reclaim tribal land; they suffer rejection,
psychological anomie, police brutality. Charlie goes on an untraditional vision quest and a fund-raiser at the
edge of the Wounded Knee controversy in 1973. Because of its historical roots and contemporary issues, the
book should appeal both to the audiences of Alexander Thom's Panther in the Sky and Peter Matthiessen's In
the Spirit of Crazy Horse.
Samples of Under the Dawn Star:
Chapter 1. Dawn's Invasion of Alcatraz, 1970
Chapter 3. Scottsdale Arts and Crafts
1. Dawn's Invasion of Alcatraz, 1970
Grandmother Doe-in-the-Dawn is not in the house when I get home from the school where I teach. I don't think much of it, though I peek into the garage and see that her '53 Studebaker Champion is gone. I just smile. She's still pretty active-- in fact, hasn't slowed down at all, even though she is seventy-eight years old, weighs less than a hundred pounds, and is bird-like.
The phone rings. It's my Uncle George, Granny's oldest son, who will soon be sixty. "Charlie!? Where's Mother?" he demands.
"I don't know," I say. "I just got home. Her car's gone, so she's probably at the grocery store."
"Naw!" he almost shouts. "I've been by there. Her car ain't in the parking lot."
"Well, I wouldn't worry," I offer. "She can take care of herself in Colusa."
"That's just it," he barks. "I don't think she's in Colusa."
"Not in Colusa?" I ask weakly, knowing he thinks me a lame-brain.
"NO! God-dammit!" he shouts. "You know how silly she's been lately about that Alcatraz mess. I think she's going to try and get in on that crap. I think she's trying to run away from home!"
Instantly, I know he's right. When Secretary Hickel ordered the Interior Department to cut off the water and electricity to Alcatraz last week, we all began expecting a crisis, maybe even violence. Granny would think she has to be a part of that. That would horrify the rest of the family, so I temporize, thinking maybe I can throw Uncle George off the track. "Maybe she went up to the reservation at Stony Creek. She's been talking about seeing if she could find any of our relatives up there."
I don't know whether he believes me or not, but he says, "I'll check it out," and slams the phone down.
I run to the closet under the stairwell.
Her sleeping bag is gone. She's taken her old sleeping bag, the Coleman stove, and both the lanterns. She has gone to join the Red Power Movement.
I can picture her in her parti-colored Studebaker which was once Sea-mist Green, but has had doors and trunk lids and even fenders added from other cars. It looks more like a harlequin than a seventeen year old classic car. I can see her, chugging along the Embarcadero, looking for a place where she can see Alcatraz Island, looking for a way to get there. I smile in wonder and astonishment, but not real surprise. It's just like her to do something like this.
In my mind, she's leaning forward, almost touching her face to the steering wheel, as if she thought her body english could urge the machine forward.
She has run away from home to become an Indian activist!
-< * >-
Uncle George's words haven't faded from my ears before I know what I have to do. I have to go and help her-- because she is my grandmother and because I love her dearly. I'm no activist, but if she wants to be there so badly, I have to go and help her. I just wish I had some faster vehicle than my beat-up, old-fashioned VW camper, with the hinged doors on the side. If George knows where to go, he can drive there and return before I get half started
I run back to the phone and call the principal at the school. I explain that I need a couple of days of personal holiday and ask could she get a substitute.
She won't just let it go. Wheedles me till I say that Granny is in trouble.
"Mrs. Stonecrist?" she exclaims. "In trouble?"
"Well, not trouble," I try to explain. "She's gone down to San Francisco, and I have to go help her." I mentally kick myself. Uncle George and Uncle Ben will now be able to track me.
"Well-- It's so close to the end of the term-- " She lets her voice hang. "And you in your first year--"
"Get Mrs. Watson to fill in for me a few days," I order. "My tests and lesson plans are all prepared. They're in my desk drawer." She finally agrees.
As soon as I hang up, I dial Sara Ann's number in San Francisco. She's my girl friend from college days at Berkeley, but she used to be an old-fashioned, southern girl, from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. That's why the two names. She's now working part time and attending Hastings Law School.
Yes, she has heard from Granny. Doe-in-the-Dawn wants her to go out to Alcatraz with her. "She said you wouldn't help her."
"It's not that I won't help her," I say. "It's just that I don't know that her invading Alcatraz is going to do anyone any good."
"She thinks it will," says Sara Ann. "She thinks the Chronicle will put her picture in the paper and sway public opinion. Is there anything dumber than Walter Hickel, or his idea for a 'Bay Area National Park'? With Indian employees? The Indians think he wants them to be the janitors! He's cut off the water and electricity to the island and used the Coast Guard as a blockade. What does he think the Department of the Interior is? His private Kremlin?"
"Look," I say. "See if you can find her. I'm on my way down there. If you can locate her, meet me at 'The Old Fisherman,' that restaurant where we went last time. I'll see if I can hire her a motor boat."
"Good for you!" says Sara Ann. "That's the man I love."
"I love you, too," I say, and hang up.
<*>
Since last November, Grandmother Doe-in-the-Dawn has perched in front of the TV news, as if she is part of the invasion of Alcatraz. She is there with Richard Oakes when he claims the island by right of discovery, since it is unoccupied land. She giggles with glee when Oakes offers the U.S. government twenty four dollars in glass beads and red cloth for the island, suggesting that the price is a long-established precedent in American traditions.
When Wallace Mad Bear Anderson, holy man of the Tuscarora, speaks of greed, intolerance, acquisitiveness as the primary sicknesses of white society, she nods silently. And when she sees women there-- Grace Thorpe, LaNada Means, and others-- she begins trembling with energy, like a kettle about to boil.
Most of the invaders are clearly mixed-bloods, like herself: urban men and women who have obviously eluded the Reservation system and the BIA schools. Many have gone to college, all speak English well, and some of them fought in Korea or Viet Nam. The girls wear T-shirts with militant slogans and baggy, faded jeans; they are strong and liberated. The men say they want, not assimilation, but justice and fair play and what is theirs by birthright.
The rest of the news is tiresome to Granny.
The My Lai Massacre in Vietnam and Lt. Calley's trial-- no interest.
Vice President Agnew's absurdities--
Charles Manson's murderous madness--
Colonel Kadaffi's power grab in Libya-- nothing.
Apollo 12, with Pete Conrad and Alan Bean walking around on the moon for 31 hours-- switch channels.
She wants to see and hear the Indians of All Tribes' proposals for a Native American Culture Center on Alcatraz.
She wants to talk about an Institute for the Study of Indian Religion and Medicine, and a center for the study of the Indians' ecological view of nature.
She wants to help build a museum and a job-training center.
She leans toward the screen as young Indian men and women in braids and headbands and beaded vests complain of their soul's hunger; she bangs one thin hand into the other when they suggest in one, swift gesture that change is possible-- and maybe even justice.
She writhes in agony when Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel pontificates on the necessity of repressing the invasion. "There's the enemy, Charlie," she says, dragging me in to watch. "There's the enemy!"
She boos when Herb Caen writes in the Chronicle that the Indians are just a savage band from Lord of the Flies, and she cheers when the Chronicle's "Question Man" surveys his readers, who ask "Why not let them have the island?"
She is delighted when John Trudell is interviewed on TV: "The whites wouldn't have much trouble getting us off here. We're unarmed. Besides"-- he shrugs for the cameras-- "we believe it would be wise of us to make them look foolish."
"You hear that?" she asks in her slight Boston-Irish accent. "You hear that?"
"Yes," I say. "He wants a confrontation."
"Of course, he does. That's why they're there."
"You watch, Granny; it'll be the same old pattern. Negotiations will break down, the cavalry will attack, they'll force a treaty on the Indians, and then confine them to a reservation-- where they'll be considerably worse off than before they started. Unless, of course, they can manage a little massacre. Then there'll be this huge outpouring of sympathy for the corpses. That will surely do those corpses a lot of good, Granny. That'll sure do them a lot of good."
"You are impossible. I just don't know what I'm going to do with you." She turns back to the TV.
Watching her gazing at the cathode ray tube, I see the young Indians cease to speak to the world and start communicating to Granny-- to her, personally. Their words become sacred. The newspaper reports are holy writ which she doesn't even have to memorize, because her heart recognizes the truth of them from the first utterance.
It is like a vision quest-- except there is no long journey, no long waiting, no period of gestation, just a sudden blue flash of insight.
She had been lost-- and is now found.
She had been famished-- and is now fed.
She had been naked-- and is now clothed in a robe whose fringes are the standing rainbow.
She feels a personal and original relationship with the universe, and it calls her to her work. Sixty years of acculturation evaporate, and seventeen years of her youth suddenly appear again. It is a rebirth.
-< * >-
I have little trouble finding Doe-in-the-Dawn's multi-colored car at Fisherman's Wharf. I find Granny, clutching her purse and leaning over the metal rail to talk with a pudgy man in a white boat.
She wears one of her pale-blue shirtwaists, which is hardly adequate in San Francisco's wind, even if we are in the last days of May. Her cardigan sweater is fastened at her throat with her turquoise brooch, but the sweater is not enough. She is shivering.
I sometimes tease her about that brooch: our Koru tribe did not have turquoise. Turquoise is a southwest desert stone, never found in the alluvial drift of the Sacramento Valley. She usually ignores my teasing, then touches the stone with a thumb and two fingers.
When I come up to her, she smiles slightly and, with two fingers, wipes the hair out of my face, as if I were a little boy again and we were safe in some long-ago time and place. Then she demands, "Where's Sara Ann?"
I'm more than slightly taken aback. That was about the last question I expected from her. "Why, I guess she's at home. At her apartment."
"Well, call her. That girl knows how to stand up for herself."
"So you're on her side now, huh?"
"Just call her."
"Okay, okay. But first, give me your keys, and I'll go move your car. If I could find it so easily, George and Ben will find it, too. I'll see if I can find a parking garage to put it in. At least, that'll get it out of plain sight."
When I come back from parking Granny's car, Sara Ann is with Doe-in-the-Dawn. Dawn is bundled in Sara Ann's too-big, too-long parka, and Sara Ann looks gorgeous in a burgundy, long-sleeved turtleneck and tight jeans. Her dark hair is parted in the middle and pulled down over either ear to form braid-like pony tails. She's wearing the Zuni Thunderbird necklace I bought her last summer. So this Irish girl, Sara Ann Murphy, from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, looks more Indian than my Indian grandmother.
"They've stopped the ferry," she says, giving me a hug and a kiss, but continuing her report through it all. "The Coast Guard, or somebody. Something about insurance. And all the people with launches are holding back because of the trouble. These boats are all fishermen." She dismisses the marina at Fisherman's Wharf with a wave of her hand. "Either they're out to lunch, or they don't want anything to do with 'that mob' on Alcatraz. I'll tell you, honey: either these people have no principles at all, or they have no principles at all. I couldn't find a boat."
"Well, we've got to find one, or this safari is bust. Did you go to that marina down a ways, where all the private yachts are?"
She shakes her head. "Just up and down among these fishermen." She looks at Granny, and Granny nods. She's still freezing.
"Okay, here's the plan. You and Granny go into 'The Old Fisherman' to keep warm, and I'll run up there and see if I can find a water-taxi or something. I'll come back as soon as I can. In the meantime, you can call the Chronicle and the Examiner and all the TV stations. See if you can drum up any interest. Let's make this a media event."
They both nod and turn toward 'The Old Fisherman' restaurant. I watch their backs a moment-- these two women I love most in the world-- and marvel at what allies they have become.
I turn and jog toward the yacht harbor, hoping to find someone with a boat big enough to help us escape over the choppy waves to Alcatraz.
-< * >-
Doe-in-the-Dawn hasn't always been such a woman warrior. Though her features are thin and straight and her complexion the light olive of a fair Latina, she is a half-breed Koru Indian, granddaughter of an Indian chief. She was born on a sandbar of the Sacramento River-- which sandbar, which willow thicket, we don't quite know for certain. She grew up with the Koru tribe, rarely aware of the culture of the town of Colusa, which had replaced her grandfather's village.
At age seventeen, she knew hardly seventeen words of English, when she married George Stonecrist, my grandfather, and apprenticed herself to the 'civilizing' influences of his grandmother, Sarah Stonecrist. Over the years, she and George had six children, including my father.
Through it all, she has guided her children to white culture. Her oldest, George Abelhard Stonecrist, IV, took over great-great-grandmother Sarah Stonecrist's farm, where year after year he raises enough sugar beets and alfalfa to put him among the top farmers of the county.
Aunts Sarah and Elizabeth Jane both married highway engineers; one lives in Scotland, one in Saudi Arabia.
Uncle Ben Stonecrist is a creative carpenter in our town, Colusa, much in demand for his old world craftsmanship and industrious work habits.
Only Dad and Aunt Ruthie, the babies, are problems: Dad's a drunk, and Aunt Ruthie is still trying to live the fast life at forty-five-- thinks she'll someday strike it right and become a famous country singer.
For sixty years, Granny has cooked and sewed, nursed the ill, corrected the naughty, taught us all gardening and frugality.
For sixty years, she has pretended that her first seventeen years of life didn't exist.
For sixty years, she has given no indication that she ever lived in a different rhythm. And she might have gone gently to an afterlife beyond the rim of the western sky-- if the Indians of All Tribes had not invaded Alcatraz.
-< * >-
I am no more successful at finding a water taxi than Sara Ann had been. There are plenty of boats, and even a fair number of men who know how to run them. But they are out of gas, or the waves are too high, or they don't have the time. Only a few say honestly what is behind their refusal:
"I jist don' wanta get involved."
"I hear the Coast Guard's gonna ram boats."
"Last week, yes... maybe. This week, I don't wanta get in any trouble."
Last week, three ferries were running to Alcatraz on schedule, like tour busses on Market Street. This week, everybody is scared off by the possibility of property loss. How much more American can you get?
When I return to 'The Old Fisherman,' Uncle Ben is standing out front with Sara Ann. She glances at me contritely. In a moment, Granny and Uncle George come from behind some parked cars. Granny is walking fast, trying to escape from George.
She turns and scolds: "You leave me alone, George Stonecrist."
"Mother," he pleads, "be reasonable."
"There's nothing reasonable about what you want."
"Mother, Mother. Can't we talk this over?"
"No. My mind's made up."
"Well, Mother, you'll just have to unmake your mind. I'm going to take you back to Colusa."
"George Stonecrist! When did you ever talk to me that way? I'm your mother!" She moves slightly toward him. For a moment, he backs off, the way a 250-pound son will back off from his 98-pound mother. Then he gets control of himself and stops.
"I'm taking you back, Mother. Whether you like it or not, I'm taking you back."
"You can't talk to me like that!" she scolds.
"Yeah, I can," he says, apologetically, even rubbing his nose with the back of his hand. "I'm bigger and stronger than you are, Mother. I'm sorry to have to do this to you, but-- "
She moves toward him again. He is hesitant enough that, when she pushes her purse into his face, he loses his balance and plops backward onto his butt. Granny turns and runs, right toward us.
Before I can begin to move, Uncle Ben has grabbed a wad of my jacket front and slammed me up against the restaurant wall. He lifts me up. My feet are dangling, so I can do nothing.
Uncle George gets up and chases after Granny. He grabs her shoulders, rather gently, but firmly, right in front of us.
Sara Ann hesitates only a moment, then lunges, forcing her right shoulder into Uncle George's midriff, like any good left tackle. He huffs, loses hold of Granny, slings Sara Ann aside, and grabs Granny again, this time less gently.
Granny looks astonished: stopped and paralyzed by the fact that her oldest son is hurting her.
Sara Ann is up quickly and charges again. George sees her coming and swings out a big arm, enveloping her and Granny in one big bear-hug together. Sara Ann's momentum causes them to fall over, but George holds on. He rolls over, straddles and pins them both, like a wrestler. It's over, almost as quickly as it began. George isn't even breathing hard.
A crowd hasn't had time to form. A few people are standing, freeze-framed where they were when it began and gawking like owls that don't know which way to fly next.
"Now, you listen to me, both of you," says George, shaking Granny and Sara Ann by the collars, as if getting the attention of a pair of rag dolls. "This nonsense has got to stop. You understand?"
Granny says nothing. Just stares at him with those dark Indian eyes. Sara Ann is wide-eyed, like she can't believe what's happening.
"Now, this is the way it's going to be," says George to Granny. "I'm going to let you up, and you're going to behave, and I'm going to take you back to Colusa with me. We can't afford to let you run around just everywhere, Mother. You gotta understand: we got too much invested in the community. You gotta stay at home and behave. You understand?"
Still Granny says nothing.
"Dammit, Mother, this is the way it's gotta be. You've been crazy as a loon ever since all this crap started. Everybody says so. It wouldn't be hard at all to get you declared incompetent and put your estate in a conservatorship. You gotta quit acting so eccentric. We want you to act like a regular American."
Still Granny says nothing, but I can see in her eyes that she has given up. George has won.
George sees it, too. "Now, I'm going to let you up, and you're going to behave. Okay? Give me your word."
Granny nods.
"Word of honor?" demands George.
Granny hesitates, so George repeats: "Word of honor?"
"Word of honor," mumbles Grandmother Doe-in-the-Dawn.
George stands up and lifts both the girls to their feet in one huge motion. He starts to brush off their clothes, but now they're female again, and his mores won't let him touch them. Sara Ann's nostrils are flared from the adrenalin rush and her body is tight in her burgundy pull-over.
"You won't get away with this," says Granny. "We'll get you next time."
Uncle Ben lets me down gently and even straightens my jacket front. "You wanta give me the keys to her car and the parking stub? So I can drive the Studebaker back to Colusa?"
I nod and hand them over.
He smiles. "You know, your camper wasn't any harder to find than her car would've been." Uncle Ben doesn't even hate me. It's just a game we play, like touch football, and we just happen to be on opposite teams. He clasps me on the shoulder as he turns to go. He joins George and they walk away, each of them holding one of Granny's elbows firmly, like a couple of cops escorting their criminal away to jail.
I don't even have to think hard to imagine the stories they'll tell in the beer halls and other service stations of Colusa. They'll laugh and re-enact Granny's drive to San Francisco, step by step; then they'll brag about how they managed to figure out the puzzle and catch her before she made a splash in the TV and newspapers. I glance at Sara Ann. She's biting her lower lip.
She and I drive up to Telegraph Hill to look at the bay and watch the day die. The wind brings tears to our eyes, but I know it's not just the wind. I avoid looking at Alcatraz Island for a long time.
I repeat for Sara Ann some of the conversations I had at the marina. Repeatedly, upper middle class yachtsmen had professed support for the Indian cause, until I asked them to ferry us out to the island. Then they became stick-in-the-mud conservatives, talking about loss, insurance, arrests; they're not about to get involved in any civil rights demonstration.
"Granny said we'll get 'em next time," says Sara Ann, shivering. We forgot to get her parka back from Granny.
"Yeah? Well, I wonder what she'll try next."
Sara Ann unfastens my coat and rolls herself into it, laying her forehead against the crook of my neck, as if she's never had a liberated thought in her life. She wraps her arms around my body. "It's ironic, isn't it?" she says, muffled. "All those lip-service liberals are too cowardly to act on their beliefs. And you, you old cowardly stick in the mud, you're out acting on issues you don't even believe in."
Grandmother Doe-in-the-Dawn says, again: "I know you don't feel like an Indian, Charlie. All that education does that to you. All those books cut you off from your roots, from what you really are. But I'm going to make an Indian out of you yet."
"Look, Grandmother," I respond. "A bunch of kids went to an Indian sing over by Reno. An anthro lady says to one of them, 'Anyone can write songs like that. You just think up a line and repeat it.' So he wrote four 'songs' in Pomo while driving home in the car. Is that what you want me to do?"
She refuses to answer when I press her like that.
"How can we believe in Indian culture," I ask her, "when Indians themselves go around copying tourist versions written by and for Anglos? Is that the kind of Indian you want me to become, Granny?"
"You'll see some day," she says and turns away. "You know too much, not to see... some day."
I don't let her dodge so easily: "Why weren't you half this anxious to brain-wash me when I wanted you to?"
"Well, now it's time," she says.
She clamps her thin lips and totters back and forth in her rocking chair, stopping occasionally to stab at an embroidery the size of a sheet of plywood. She is putting the finishing touches on it in her sitting room. Behind her on the wall is a large embroidered silk panel, in which a mounted horseman in a red jacket gazes across a pond toward a manor house and proclaims "HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS." I think she believed that once.
In the wide upstairs hallway of our old Victorian house, near the triple French windows that open onto the balcony, Granny's quilting frame contains a nearly-finished embroidery the size of a bed spread. It depicts in detail the Koru People's first encounter with white men, when Ewing Young shot three Koru women in 1832.
For almost sixty years, she has obsessively embroidered useful things with daisies, loop-stitching and shade-stitching and French-knotting more dish towels and bed spreads and large, silk wall-hangings than a whole tribe of great-granddaughters will ever be able to use-- even if they didn't have electric dishwashers and K-Mart wall prints, and did have the inclination.
Nowadays, she concentrates on large tapestry-like panels portraying "The Renewal of the World," "The Emergence of The People from the Third World," and the like.
She is working now on a five- by eight-feet embroidered silk panel depicting an event in Koru mythology, "The Death and Transfiguration of the Spirits." With it and others she has made, she hopes to draw public notice to the Indian cause, maybe even sell some to a museum or a rich collector and raise money for the newly-formed American Indian Movement.
-< * >-
All through my childhood, I begged her to tell me everything she could about our Indian background, about her own life on the Reservation, about her mother, Cia, and about her grandfather, Sioc; but like the turtle who pulls in her head and legs at the first sound of distant thunder, she refused to volunteer anything.
I have lived here almost all my life, and my grandmother has been my surrogate mother and father, my sibling and playmate, as well as a friend and confidant. In 1950, when I was three and my parents decided to give up the pretense that they had a marriage, they left me here with Granny. Dad went off to Des Moines to become an insurance salesman, and Mother moved to Woodland to work for an optometrist.
Dad refused to have me in Des Moines with him. He is the only one of Granny's children with brick-red complexion and is often mistaken for a Sioux. He said he didn't want to subject any kid to that kind of prejudice. Besides, I would have gotten in the way of his serious drinking.
In 1955, my mother married a livestock auctioneer. He was a man on the move who didn't want any moss or children growing under his boots.
And so, the homeless stray was left with his Indian grandmother.
I found my roots at the University at Berkeley, in the Lowie Museum and those marvelous old records the anthropologists collected at the turn into the twentieth century. By study, I learned much of the tribe's history and folklore. I learned the rudiments of the Koru language from Professor Barrett's interlineal translations of texts and Professor Sapir's essays on neighboring languages. I even listened to Barrett's primitive recordings from 1906 to get the pronunciation right.
But I had to confront Granny with the stories in detail, before she would confirm or deny anything. I had to beg her to tell me the legends of her childhood.
It left me with an appetite to know, to understand, to try to live by humanistic principles. But I have no compulsion to storm the barricades. Even at Berkeley in 1964, I didn't feel the impulse to become an activist. All that effort of the Free Speech Movement seemed to me wasted.
"For principle," my friends said; but it seemed to me they were fighting to be fighting, not developing their minds, not coming any closer to the principles of an open society. And they condoned all that waste and destruction. There's not much respect for the earth or empathy for its people in that.
-< * >-
For weeks, Granny has been trying to get me involved. Because I am her grandson and read books, because I teach school and am not ashamed to argue with people in public places, because I have the exterior of an Anglo but an Indian heart (she insists I have an Indian heart), she is determined to make me a warrior of Red Power.
"You've got to know about it," she says. "You've got to feel it, the way it was. The way it is. Why aren't you at Alcatraz with the Indians of All Tribes?" She interrupts her embroidery to bang her thin fist into a bony hand.
"How many times do you suppose I've told you that?"
"Well, you never say the right things!"
"I don't want to wear beads and feathers. I've told you a dozen times. What attracts me to Indian culture is the idea that principles other than greed and envy and power can have their puppet strings on the human ego. Maybe even honesty and altruism and concern for the earth."
She refuses to answer. She reaches to turn on the TV. "Maybe they'll have some news about Alcatraz," she says.
"All this talk of buffaloes and blankets is retrogressive thinking. It's just another power play. You've heard those activists. Their main tune is 'We've got to preserve the old ways.' There's a whole lot of backward-looking and greed and envy in that. To gain their psychological identity, these warriors of Red Power have set their heads firmly on backward. That's no way to walk into the future."
She is not convinced. "A lot of good men and women are right now working to create a new day for the Indian," says Granny, pointing her needle at me, as if she could stitch me into the fabric of her designs. "And you're not even going to be up to watch the dawning."
"What do you want me to do, Granny? Scarify my cheeks with a raw flint and paint the wounds with vermillion dye? Would that make me a warrior? Would that enlarge the Sitting Bull in my personality? Or diminish the brutal and egomaniac Custer?"
I admit that I am baffled and confused. What should I feel? How can one have a coherent attitude toward whites, when they range from William Penn who was honest and supportive, to Helen Hunt Jackson who was honest but destructive, to General Sheridan who, in his kindness, once remarked that the only good Indians he had known were dead, to Colonel Chivington who came to believe, honestly, that the greatest kindness he could do the Indian was to exterminate him? By what twist of mind can one be coherent about both Squanto, the first sell-out, and Geronimo, one of the last hold-outs?
Just what can any present-day, rational, self-respecting, English-speaking, reasonably intelligent, twenty-two year old human being, including a descendant of patriotic and credulous Native Americans, believe and feel?
Granny has been good and loving to me: she has nursed me when I needed nursing; she fights fair, when we have to fight; and I would do almost anything in the world for her. Almost anything. Except become an Indian.
"There," says Grandmother Doe-in-the-Dawn, shaking out her sewing for me to see. "It's finished. We can go to Sacramento now."
On a Saturday morning, in the steel and glass modernity of the American Western Savings and Loan Association in Sacramento, the Scottsdale arts and crafts trader looks at Granny's embroidery, Transfiguration of the Spirits, cocks his head to one side, and says, "No go," with the assurance and finality of a pawn broker.
We say nothing. We're too shocked to say anything. Too shocked even to taste the frustration. We expected surely that anything sixty by ninety-five inches, and so remarkable, would be worth a serious look.
Even the savings and loan manager looks disappointed. He had hoped the trader would buy something and let him exhibit the purchase here in his branch. He gets a lot of publicity in the quality travel magazines by exhibiting some of the arts and crafts the traders buy and sell.
"You understand, it's not because it ain't a nice piece of work," the trader goes on to explain in our silence, stopping to suck on a tooth. "There's no market for it. Can't sell embroidery. It's not Indian." He looks at me and says, "Do me a sand painting on a sheet of plywood or particle board; okay. Do me an orlon weaving, or a clay pot, or a basket; okay. Even textile prints are okay nowadays, or a watercolor. But not oils-- oils are too expensive, they don't sell so well. And no embroidery. Embroidery ain't Indian. That's a pioneer art."
"But my tribe embroidered!" protests Granny, lifting her hands, as if she would beat him with the umbrella she does not have in her hands. I think she learned the gesture from watching "The Beverly Hillbillies." "My tribe embroidered," she repeats. "Ceremonial capes and headdresses. And baskets. We embroidered a lot of baskets with feathers."
"Yeah, I saw some of those baskets in a museum," says the trader; then he looks at me. "You get me some genuine old baskets with feathers, 'n I'll get you a really good price."
At that moment, the savings and loan manager suggests, "Maybe we could treat it as a pioneer arts exhibit."
"With all those Indian figures in it?" says the trader.
"Well, yeah. I guess you're right," says the manager. "It's just that it's so-- " He stops, searching for a word. "So-- heroic."
"Yes," admits the trader. "A real museum piece, but-- "
"But what?" says Grandmother Doe-in-the-Dawn, too loudly, too frantically. "What do you want?"
The trader continues explaining to the manager: "Y'see, these figures here-- they have some of the qualities of a Sioux robe painting. See? They're sort of stiff in outline, but at the same time they're full of activity. Only, they ought to be flat colored, not shaded 'n rounded the way these are. I've been getting some real nice stuff lately from Taiwan, stuff with heavy, black-line figures and flat paint. Looks more authentic."
"But this-- " begins the manager, then stops.
"I know what you're thinkin' and wishin'," says the trader. "But it just won't go. It's too Indian to be a pioneer piece. For a pioneer piece, you want a hunting scene with hounds, 'n men in red jackets, or a landscape with a lake and a castle in it."
The manager leans forward to finger a part of the silk panel. Granny watches him closely, as if she sees a kindred spirit. Her body english silently encourages him to look closer.
"I know how you feel," says the trader, "but take my word for it. It just ain't standard."
He leaves without wishing us luck, or saying goodbye or thank you.
-< * >-
Granny looks at the manager and quickly folds back the big embroidery to reveal another under it-- another sixty by ninety-five inch panel depicting the First Encounter of the Koru with Anglos:
In the foreground, several women in tule aprons are standing and squatting at the edge of the river, leaching acorn meal in little sand pits. In the middle distance is a line of canoes-- The Ewing Young trapping expedition of 1832. In the background is Onolai, the tribe's sacred mountain, partly obscured by the smoke that is rising from the white men's rifles, which they have just fired.
One of the women is crumpled in her own blood; another is falling, stiff, like a tree. A third has turned and is looking at the observer; she has an enigmatic smile on her face. The babies, who have been playing in the edge of the water, look up, amazed. To me, the whole picture screams with protest and a curious resignation.
The manager is taken by surprise. He steps backward, stammering, "Why, that's-- that's--"
"It's a historical event," says Grandmother. "Some of Young's party killed three Koru women, for the fun of it." She pauses, then adds, "or for the target practice."
"But-- That's mur-- You mean that really happened?" says the manager, pointing at the embroidery and sputtering. The shading and coloring are quite lifelike, and the perspective puts the viewer right in the picture with the women.
"Yes," admits Granny. "It was a murder. We can document it if you like. Would you like to hang it here, along with a story? My grandson, Charlie, has written one."
"Oh, no. No," says the manager, suddenly as smooth as a waiter at a posh restaurant. "We couldn't possibly-- Why, it would offend the customers." He doesn't have to add that it would offend him.
-< * >-
We take the river road back to Colusa. The banks are high, earthen levees nowadays, and cottonwood thickets crowd the flood bottoms, but here and there we can stop among trees and rest from our disappointments.
Granny's First Encounter keeps popping into my memory. I see in my mind, again and again, that enigmatic combination of protest and resignation in the women yet to be shot.
Normally, the Koru people feared death and were immensely superstitious about it, but these women are not smiling in fear. Nor are they happy. Their faces contain a bittersweet agony of expected transfiguration, which grew out of Koru cosmology.
Once upon a time, back in the days when all the people on the earth were deities or pure Spirits ("Saltu," insisted Grandmother Doe-in-the-Dawn, demanding that I relate to the concept in her first language, the language of The People, which I understand imperfectly), Katit the Red-tailed Hawk and Old Man Coyote made a fence of elder sticks on the sacred mountain, Onolai. They peeled the bark off ten of the sticks, and they left ten other sticks rough.
Katit and Coyote gave each other advice about how to build the fence, say the printed versions of the story. Coyote wanted to use only the rough sticks. Katit wanted to use only the smooth ones. They argued and quarreled a long time about how to build the fence, but neither of them could prevail upon the other. Finally, they built the fence of both smooth and rough elder sticks.
The next morning, the smooth sticks had become kind people, and the rough sticks had become mean people. Thus, Katit and Coyote created people on Onolai.
When Katit and Coyote heard voices behind the hedge, they knew their world had come to an end. Katit said, "We have made people. We will have to go away now. The time has come for the transformation of all the Saltu."
Katit called the Spirits all before him and changed them, one after the other.
Dahlam, he made into the large, spreading oak tree.
Pinole, he made into the seeds of the grass on the western plain.
Koto, who was very large and strong, he made into the big river.
Others he made into birds, deer, acorns, salmon.
All the things we see in this world were once pure Spirit.
Anus, the Mud Turtle, stood beside Katit, and, as Katit changed the Saltu, she told each of them what use that Spirit would be to the Koru people, who were approaching from the hedge.
Hlo and Ii, the long and short acorns, would be food for Koru. So would Pinole, the grass seeds of the western plain. Koto, the big river, would wash them, inside and out. Hur, the salmon, would swim in Koto and be food for Koru.
Old Man Coyote stood beside Katit and prescribed how the Koru should treat each thing. Coyote informed each of them how they would be prepared and cooked by the Koru people, who were approaching.
Then the Saltu went to the western rim of the world where the sky comes down to the ground. Katit lifted up the edge of the sky with a digging stick and all the Saltu, except Coyote, crept under. They wait there still. Just beyond the sky. They wait there still, for Koru. They will give Koru their next world.
Thus, it came into being.
Thus, the Saltu created this world for Koru.
Thus, the Saltu gave the ways of living to Koru.
Thus, it was transformed. It is finished. It is transformed.
-< * >-
The Koru knew the world had been expanded and remade three times, each time making way for a new people. And they anticipated a great cataclysm of fire and quake, which would destroy the fourth world, their world, when a new race of people appeared. As the women in Granny's picture gazed at the white men on the river, they must have believed their death and transfiguration had come.
There on the river was the new and strange race of people, squirting fire and quake from sticks. The women expected the sky to fold up and the earth to collapse.
What do you do when your world is being destroyed? What can you do when you have seen the new spirits of the fifth age?
You wail in ambiguous anticipation.
For yourself.
For your confused spirit.
You wail for your death and transfiguration.
But the world did not end in 1832. That was the greater confusion for the Koru. The rifles belched fire and shook the ground, but the string of boats passed on up the river, out of sight. The woodpecker, in flickering wave-motion flight, came back to renew his hammering attack on the oak snag. The cottontail stirred again in the fallen leaves. Insects buzzed in the trees. Life went on; nothing apparent happened.
But confusion fell quick upon confusion that year. First, the people fell sick. Red and yellow spots broke out on their skin, and they began dying.
The medicine men built fires in the sweat houses and danced to the destructive north, to the nurturing south, to the west where the dead and the Saltu are, to the east where creativity and the Saltu came from. He bit the red spots. He washed the evil with the waters of Koto. He applied yom poultices, which would cure an arrow wound or a grizzly bear's bite. He sweated the people in the dance house and bathed them in the river.
But the people died.
In October and November, it rained for twenty days and nights, and the great valley became a sea of soft, stinking mud, in which the Indian villages stuck up on slick knobs. Most of their stilt houses, where they stored dried fish and grain, were ruined or washed away, and the people went hungry. They had almost no fresh water to drink, for the river was muddy and filled with the smell of death and the dead.
And still the people were dying of spot-face rot.
Then, as if the heavens themselves were giving a final sign, hundreds of meteors flamed toward the earth and crashed on November 12, 1832, making that California's "Year the Stars Fell."
-< * >-
In Will Green's History of Colusa County, published in 1880, Colonel J. J. Warner, who was a member of the Ewing Young party when it passed through the Sacramento Valley in 1832 and returned in 1833, described the smallpox epidemic:
The banks of the Sacramento River, in its whole course through its valley, were studded with Indian villages, the houses of which, in the spring, during the day-time, were red with the salmon the aborigines were curing. At this time, there was not . . . within the valleys of the two rivers, any inhabitants but Indians. At the mouth of the Kings River, we encountered the first and only village of the stricken race that we had seen after entering the great valley. . . . We were encamped near the village one night only, and . . . the cries of the dying, mingled with the wails of the bereaved, made the night hideous, in that veritable valley of death.
On our return, late in the summer of 1833, we found the valleys depopulated. From the head of the Sacramento, to the great bend and slough of the San Joaquin, we did not see more than six or eight live Indians, while large numbers of their skulls and dead bodies were seen under almost every shade tree, near water, where the uninhabited and deserted villages had been converted into graveyards.
The new race of people had been seen, and they were spouting fire and quake.
Mad-Woman Water had come down from the North, fiercely transforming, and the world was empty.
The stars were falling out of a folded sky.
Surely, it was the end of the universe.
How in the world did Granny manage to embroider that on a bed spread?
A Docu-Novel
by Charles Brashear
1. Preface
2. Some Sources
4. Chapter 2. Out Duty to Catch the Others
5. Chapter 3. Beyond Monhegan Island, 1605
In April 1621, when Squanto walked into Plymouth Plantation and said "Hello, English," he had already lived several years in England. He had crossed the Atlantic at least four times, had been to Spain twice, and to Newfoundland probably four times. He had explored with Captains John Smith and Thomas Dermer almost every nook and cranny of the New England coast from the Penobscot River to Virginia. He had suffered kidnaping, imprisonment, and loss of his entire village to some mysterious plague. He had been exploited as a slave and a servant among foreigners, and, when he was finally set free, he had no home to go to. Little wonder that when he decided to stay with the Pilgrims and help them to survive, he was a psychological mess.
Almost everything the Pilgrims told us about Squanto was wrong, because it was deformed by the warp of their Calvinistic minds. Though he was slightly older than William Bradford (31 in 1621), they insisted upon referring to him as a boy (British attitude toward servants), which led to the spate of misleading children's books that we, our children, and our school curricula have been cursed with. The Pilgrims were so eager to see Squanto as an agent of God, sent providentially to teach them to plant corn, catch fish, and act as their interpreter and ambassador to the Indian tribes of present-day Massachusetts, that they never honestly saw the man, nor his complexity.
The Disney Corporation, too, was extremely misleading with Squanto: A Warrior's Tale. They used a few real names, fragments of a half dozen actual happenings (and a war that never happened), many, many inventions of personality which do not in the least agree with historical records, and stirred it all into a hodge-podge that (to me) wasn't even an engaging story. Why couldn't they have just stuck to the facts? They make an exciting enough story.
Several men besides the Pilgrims knew, befriended, and wrote about Tisquantum, who came to be called Squanto, in his lifetime--James Rosier, Capt. John Smith, Thomas Dermer, and above all, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who led the effort from 1602 onward to colonize New England, especially Maine. From their accounts (along with those of the Pilgrim leaders, William Bradford and Edward Winslow), I have pieced together the story of Squanto's life. I have quoted passages from these men's writings occasionally and in epigraphs, to lend the story a tone of a TV documentary in the Ken Burns style. Admittedly, I have borrowed tints from other accounts of the times to fill in the outlines the documents give us, but by and large this is the story of Squanto's life and the forces that shaped his mind.
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Adams, Charles Francis. Three Episodes of Massachusetts History. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co, 1892.
Arber, E. ed, Travels and Works of Captain John Smith. Edinburgh: J. Grant, 1910.
Baxter, James Phinney. Sir Ferdinando Gorges and his Province of Maine. (#131 Burt Franklin Research and Resource Works; #2 American Classics in History and Social Science) New York: Burt Franklin, 1890.
Bradford, William. Of Plimouth Plantation, 1620-1647, Originally published 1647; edition with notes and an intro by Samuel Eliot Morison, New York: Knopf, 1952.
Ceci, Lynn. "Squanto and the Pilgrims: On Planting Corn 'in the manner of the Indians.'" The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies, ed. James A. Clifton. New Brunswick & London: Transaction Publishers, 1990, pp.71-90.
Cowie, Leonard. The Pilgrim Fathers. (Documentary) New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1972.
Dean, J.W. ed. Captain John Mason. Boston: the Prince Society, 1887.
Gorges, Sir Ferdinando. "A Brief Narration of the Originall Undertaking of the Advancement of Plantation into the Parts of America" (1637) and "A Briefe Relation of the Discovery & Plantations of New England" (1672) repr. in James Phinney Baxter, Sir Ferdinando Gorges and His Province of Maine.
Morison, Samuel E. "Squanto," in Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1935.
Mourt G. A Relation or Journall of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Setled at Plimouth in New England. London, 1622. A recent edition: New York: Corinth Books, 1963, ed. D.B. Heath.
Purchas, Samuel. Purchas His Pilgrimes. London, 1625; reprint in 20 volumes: New York: AMS Publishing, 1965.
Preston, Richard Arthur. Gorges of Plymouth Fort; a Life of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Captain of Plymouth Fort, Governor of New England, and Lord of the Province of Maine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1953.
Rosier, James. "A True Relation of the Voyage of Captaine George Waymouth, 1605, In Early English and French Voyages, Chiefly from Hakluyt, 1534-1608, H.S. Burrage, ed. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932, pp.353-394.
Smith, John. "A Description of New England (1616)," Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 6 (Series 3; 1836) 95-140; also in Collected Works of Captain John Smith.
Speck, Frank G. Territorial Subdivisions and Boundaries of the Wampanoag, Massachusetts, and Nauset Indians. New York: Museum of the American Indian (Heye Foundation), 1928.
Stoneman, John. "The Voyage of M. Henry Challons, intended for the North Plantation of Virginia, 1606...." Purchas His Pilgrimes. ed. Samuel Purchas, Originally published, London, 1625; reprint in 20 volumes: New York: AMS Publishing, 1965, V.19, pp.284-297.
Weeks, Alvin G. Massasoit of the Wampanoags. [Fall River, Mass.]: Privately Printed [The Plimpton Press], 1919.
Winslow, Edward. Good News from New England: Or, a Relation of things remarkable in the Plantation, London, 1623. Repr: Purchas His Pilgrimes, ed. Samuel Purchas, originally published, London, 1625; reprint in 20 volumes: New York: AMS Publishing, 1965, V.19, pp.344-394.
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"They sent one canoe with three men, one of which [Grand Chief Pow-da-we], when they came near unto us spoke in his language very loudly and very boldly; seeming as though he would know why we were there, and by pointing with his oar toward the sea, we conjectured he meant we should be gone.
"But when we showed them knives and their use, by cutting sticks, and gave them other trifles, [such] as combs and [looking] glasses, they came close to the ship, as if desirous to entertain our friendship." -- James Rosier, "A True Relation of the Voyage of Captaine George Waymouth, 1605"
Six men in two Passamaquoddy canoes approached the English ship cautiously in the mid-morning sun. It was bigger than a longhouse on the water, bigger than three houses. In one of the canoes, Tisquantum, hardly more than a boy, though well-muscled, held his basket of berries chest high to show that he did not have any weapons. He called out "Strawberries! Strawberries! Straw-aw-berries!" Most of the tribes had learned a few words of English from the fishermen who visited the New England coastal waters regularly.
Suddenly, a shot boomed from the ship, causing the paddlers in both canoes to stop.
"See? They want to kill us!" cried one of the Indians. For protection, he put his hand to the magic lightning bars painted on his face. "My uncle told me their noise kills people."
Tisquantum sat down in the canoe, touched the good luck symbol on his doeskin shirt, and reached for his paddle, frightened. Then he noticed that the gunsmoke was drifting off the bow of the ship and toward the little rocky islands that ringed St. George's Bay. He tossed his shoulders to shrug off the threat and stood up. "That was not for us," he said. "See, it goes the other way. They are not trying to kill us."
Tahanedo, the sagamore of Pemaquid, sat calmly in the middle of the other canoe. He was dressed in a wildcat-skin cape that was both his emblem of office and his means of keeping warm. The other men wore only breech clouts, but their bodies were painted and heavily greased to insulate them against the chill wind. Tisquantum wore buckskin leggings and a fringed shirt, his traditional Wampanoag clothes, for he was a captive from south of the Massachusetts tribe.
At sixteen, Tisquantum looked very young: his skin was smooth, his features small and fine. Touching the protective shell amulet that hung in his right ear-lobe, he boldly encouraged his companions in their own language, Abenaki. "Come on! Pick up your paddles, my friends. Don't you want to see what the white men are like?"
But the others were less anxious to meet the "yang-kaysh," the English.
"I suspect we'll know soon enough," said the most cautious of the group. Bold, red lightning bars on his face made his eyes seem especially strong. "Maybe even sooner than we want to."
"I'll bet two pair of new moccasins that, long before we need to know anything, we will know too much for our own good," said the timid, shifty-eyed one. His face was painted white, to protect him from evil. "Their fire-sticks kill people."
"Let's go back, Tahanedo," muttered the one with lightning bars on his face, addressing their leader in the other canoe. "Pow-da-we told us to stay away from them. At least, let's go back to the shore and let them come to us."
"I think I'll go to the ship with Assaquamet," announced Tahanedo, using the Passamaquoddy name they had given Tisquantum. Tahanedo's forehead was painted red, and he wore a necklace of sea-shell totems and two eagle feathers in his scalp lock to denote his rank. The feathers stuck up in a big "V" toward the sky, indicating he had been successful in battle. His glance was firm and unwavering, his nose and nostrils noticeably large.
"They are dangerous," said Skettowaroes, a huge man whose courage was not questioned. He was body guard to Tahanedo. His big face was painted the same as Tahanedo's, but he wore no feathers or necklace. "It is best to keep unnecessary danger at a distance."
"They come from across the big water," said Tisquantum. "Don't you want to know how they live, what they eat, what their houses look like?"
"I think Assaquamet is right," said Tahanedo, adjusting his cape and touching a protective totem in his necklace. "The white men mean us no harm. I'd like to see them up close. Besides, they gave Pow-da-we a big-bladed knife; maybe they will give me a knife, too."
As the Indians neared the ship, they saw several of the sailors leaning over the rail. Tisquantum had heard that many of the English had hair on their faces, but he was not prepared for the variety in size and color of their beards. Some had golden hair on their chins; some red; others, dark hair. Some were neatly trimmed; some scraggly; and everything in between. Their baggy shirts were bleached white. Their skins were almost as pale. Those who were marine soldiers wore breast-plates of heavy leather, with pieces of metal riveted to them.
"Heya, Yang-kaysh," called Tisquantum. "Trade?" He held up the basket of berries again.
Two of the sailors lowered a rope ladder with wooden rungs and motioned for the Indians to come aboard. Tisquantum from one canoe and Tahanedo from the other climbed the ladder to the deck of the ship. Ed Welsh, the second mate, called three marine soldiers to the ready: "Trust in fate," he said, "but keep your lances in your hands. At least till we see what the beggars want."
"Peas? Peas?" asked Tisquantum. The Passamaquoddies who had been on other ships before thought stewed English peas were delicious.
Welsh smiled, to think the Indians were so simple. "I reckon we can cook up a batch of peas," he said. The English had been eating fresh salmon and cod in order to save their dried peas for a time when they had no fresh food. "Come aboard, and we'll stoke up the fire. Those look like nice enough berries." He held his nose close, in order to smell them above the usual, coastal scent of rotting fish and sea-weed. He held back his gray linsey cape, to keep it from sweeping into the berry basket.
Tisquantum and Tahanedo did not understand the words, but they followed the motions and went with the mate to the galley, where the cook hung a pot of peas on the hook over the open fire. Welsh invited the Indians to sit at the mess table while the peas were cooking. He moved to a position where the odors of the cooking fire would drift toward him, so that it would disguise the smell of his guests, without his offending them.
Welsh was amused by the Indians' interest and wonder in the iron pot over the fire-pit, as well as the pewter dishes, utensils, cups, everything. Tahanedo tried his few words of French which the tribe had learned from the fishermen at Acadia and along the Quebec coast, but Welsh did not understand.
***
Before the food was cooked, one of the ship's longboats returned from the shore. James Rosier, the ship's officer of marines, who doubled as recorder of the voyage, stood in the prow of the longboat, his fowling piece cocked, loaded with pea gravel, and held at the ready. In addition to a thick leather body-shield, he wore a metal helmet and a bright red cape fastened to straps on his shoulder shields. His neatly trimmed and waxed beard gleamed red in the sunlight.
On the starboard side of the ship, he found two, large, birch-bark canoes floating in the mildly choppy water. Each could carry six or eight people. Two brightly painted natives sat in each canoe, waiting, watching, paddling only enough to keep themselves from drifting more than a few yards away from the ship.
Even before The Archangel dropped anchor in St. George's Bay, James Rosier had been collecting an Abenaki vocabulary in his journal. He had already learned a couple hundred words. "Welcome, friends," he called out in Abenaki. "Welcome to our big-water-canoe."
The Indians gazed at him askance and did not respond.
Rosier climbed the rope ladder and discovered that two natives were already on board, sitting beside the fire in the galley, eating English peas. "Excellent," exclaimed Rosier, "but didn't you invite the others aboard?"
"Aye, we did, Sir," said Thomas Cam, the first mate, "but the savages are exceedingly wary and will not approach."
"Any signs of treachery?"
"None that I noticed."
The first several days, the Englishmen's contact with the American natives had been ideal: without opposition, the Englishmen had erected a six-foot cross of discovery and possession on the rocky shore above the thin, sandy beach, as if the cross held some great power. They called the inlet St. George's Bay, in honor of the mythical saint of England. They had traded knives and bracelets for beaver and otter furs. Rosier was learning the language rapidly, for the Passamaquoddies, when they learned that he could repeat their words after writing them in his journal, came readily with more words than Rosier could easily understand.
Rosier talked with Tahanedo and Tisquantum, asking (with what words he had and what motions he could invent) more about their land and customs. They, too, were very curious about the foreigners.
"We come from England," Rosier told them, but they looked baffled. "England is a big island beyond Monhegan," he explained.
"Oh?" With difficulty and many repetitions, Tahanedo conveyed his astonishment and much more to Rosier. "An island? Beyond Monhegan? I have lived here all my life and know of no such island. Is it large?"
"Oh, quite large," said Rosier. "With thousands upon thousands of people."
"It would be good to be friends with so many," admitted Tahanedo, touching a protective totem in his necklace.
"Excellent! Excellent!" exclaimed Rosier. "We wish to be your friends. Won't your other men come up and eat some peas and make friends with us?"
"They are afraid of you," said Tahanedo simply, letting his wildcat skin cape hang casually over a forearm.
"Pshaw! We are nothing to be afraid of," said Rosier, adjusting his leather body-shield and red cape to let some air in, for the armor got very hot. "We have only your best interests at heart. Come, Mr. Welsh, bring up a platter of peas. Offer our friends on the water a bite of our hospitality."
"Aye, Sir," said the second mate.
"And bring some bread," added Rosier.
When the platter of peas and the bread were offered, the natives in the canoes accepted them readily, but paddled rapidly to the forested shore to eat them.
***
Presently the ship's captain, George Waymouth, returned in the ship's other longboat, loaded with firewood. He was a thin man, with drawn features and hard, penetrating eyes that made others mistrust him. He wore thigh-shields, a breast-plate, a helmet of polished metal, and a wide, purple cape with gold piping. He held one edge of the cape in front of him, like a shield.
Captain Waymouth had sailed for the New England coast on Easter Sunday, March 31st, 1605, in the employ of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Commandant of the Fort at Plymouth, England. His assignment was to search for a northwest passage to China, and, that failing, to catch fish to pay expenses of the voyage, trade with the natives for such beaver and buckskins as they had, and come away with as much knowledge as he could of their geography. His crew had caught a great deal of Atlantic Salmon, which they smoked or dried, and almost enough cod to fill the barrels in which they salted the fish for transport to England. He and Rosier had made rough maps of the coast and inlets nearby. He was anxious to sail for England while the astrological signs were with them and the summer winds were fair.
When Waymouth climbed the rope-ladder, Mr. Rosier introduced him to the natives: "Here is Captain Tahanedo, sagamore of Pemaquid."
Hoping no one noticed his hesitation, Tahanedo took the skinny Waymouth by the hand, which was the Indian way of greeting. He shifted to get the wind in his own face, because the white man's odor was so strong.
"And this is his servant, Assaquamet," added Rosier.
"No. No Assaquamet," interjected the other native, smiling good-naturedly. "Name: Tisquantum."
"Assaquamet," insisted Tahanedo, pointing his big nose at the younger man's chest. "My slave," he added in Abenaki.
"Tisquantum," repeated the younger man. By making many signs of the sun passing and motioning toward the horizon, he communicated to the Englishmen that he came from a tribe several days' journey to the south, and he actually managed a rudimentary English sentence: "Tahanedo take Tisquantum," grabbing his own neck in pantomime and dragging himself away. Thus, he made the Englishmen understand that he was a prisoner of war, who had been pressed into bondage as Tahanedo's servant.
"Tisquantum go Yangland?" asked the boy, from which Captain Waymouth surmised that Tisquantum was eager to travel with the English, possibly to escape his bondage to Tahanedo.
"Tisquantum know rivers?" asked Waymouth, waving a wiry arm toward the coast.
"No," admitted Tisquantum. "Tahanedo know rivers."
"Yes," said Tahanedo. "All my life, I have lived here. I have visited most of the rivers and islands along our coast."
"Well," said Waymouth, smiling to himself and Mr. Rosier, "would you fellows like to travel with us to England and tell us where the rivers lie, what towns lie upon them, how many warriors there are, and who are their sagamores?" He removed his metal helmet and accepted the wide-brimmed black hat with an ostrich feather, which the cabin-boy offered.
Tisquantum nodded rapidly, but Tahanedo shook his head slowly in the negative, silently touching his necklace.
Chapter 2. Our Duty to Catch the Others
"... we determined, so soon as we could, to take some of them [captive], lest (being suspicious we had discovered their plots) they should absent themselves from us." -- James Rosier, "A True Relation of the Voyage of Captaine George Waymouth, 1605"
Directly, Skettowaroes returned from the shore with the empty platter. Waymouth and Rosier talked with him a while and found him "of ready capacity and wit." A tall, broad-faced man, he decided to stay aboard with the other two, because his job was as Tahanedo's body guard. Rosier thought it was because, "they were receiving exceedingly kind usage at our hands and were therefore much delighted in our company."
"What a fortunate accident this must be counted," exclaimed Captain Waymouth, beaming. "Why, they may even know the passage to China." He rocked on the balls of his feet in self-satisfaction. "But 'tis our duty to catch the others," he added in an even voice. "Be ready when they come to fetch these fellows, and we'll grab 'em."
All the mid-day, the ship's longboats plied back and forth, bringing good firewood, drinking water, as well as fresh-water fish and newly-killed venison to the ship, but the natives did not return.
***
Late in the afternoon, Waymouth sent Rosier to the shore in a longboat with seven men in leather armor. Rosier, cape flowing in the wind, stood in the bow, carrying a platter of peas. He had a box of merchandise at his feet, as was his routine when he went to trade with the natives. Before they landed, the native with lightning bars on his face withdrew into the woods ("being so suspiciously fearful of his own good," as Rosier wrote in his report). Two others met the Englishmen on the shore to receive the peas.
With great show, the Englishmen laid aside their oars and weapons, thinking the gesture would comfort the natives. They went up the beach to the Indians' fire and sat down with them.
Using his vocabulary list, Rosier talked with them and learned that the furtive, white-faced one was called Amoret, the smiling one with ochre spots that covered smallpox scars on his face was Maneddo. He introduced himself. The natives were most interested in eating the peas, though they were wary of the Englishman's power and magic.
"Your Captain, Tahanedo, and the other two have decided to sail with us to our island called England," Rosier announced.
The two natives had great difficulty understanding, but finally unraveled the curious ideas and the fractured Abenaki of the Englishman.
"You fellows"-- he pointed to Amoret and Maneddo-- "would be welcome to sail with us."
Again, the natives had difficulty understanding what the Englishman was saying. And when they understood, they balked, saying they had relatives that depended upon their ability to hunt through the summer. Amoret made motions to indicate the ocean waves, his own unsteady stomach, and vomiting. Maneddo agreed with signs that he had no great love for oceans and voyages.
"We shall have to take them by force," Rosier told his men, keeping his voice neutral. "Get ready and, when I give the sign, seize them."
One of the sailors went up the beach to urinate behind a bush and, when he came back, positioned himself behind the two natives.
"Any idea how we can fetch old 'Lightning Bars'?" Rosier asked his men, but no one said anything. Swinging his cape back, Rosier opened the merchandise box. Thinking his broad gestures would banish the fear of 'Lightning Bars' in the woods and entice him to return, he presented a polished brass chain to spot-faced Maneddo. To white-faced Amoret, Rosier gave a cut-glass bauble on a strong leather thong. Both of the natives hung these trinkets about their necks, apparently very pleased with themselves and their good fortune. Rosier held up his largest bauble, such as he thought fitting for a super sagamore, and a piece of bread, but the third man did not come back.
Rosier closed the box, gave his men the signal, and said, "Take 'em. But be careful."
Three men grabbed at Maneddo and four at Amoret. The natives were so slick from the grease with which they insulated their naked bodies that they slipped free. One sailor clutched at the brass chain around Maneddo's neck and pulled him off balance. Rosier seized the long hair on Amoret, it being about the only hold Rosier could take, and ruined his footing. The other men were able to pick up his feet.
As soon as the men had the natives partly subdued, Rosier pushed aside their war axes and bows and arrows, not wanting to harm the Indians or give them a chance to harm his men.
One sailor had the white-faced native by the throat strap and was choking him down. "Careful not to hurt him," Rosier cautioned. "He would be no good to us dead." The man guffawed and shoved the savage's head so hard Rosier thought Amoret's neck would pop, but the Indian only cried out in pain.
In a few moments, the men had tied the savages' ankles with short cords, brought for the purpose. Spot-faced Maneddo's hands were tied with the brass chain Rosier had given him. Panting with the effort, the Englishmen took the captives away to the longboat and to the ship, thanking the good spirits who were on their side.
Rosier and two others carried away what weapons the natives had. They towed the two birch-bark canoes containing the Indians' pottery, leather pouches, capes, paddles, and weapons, thinking the souvenirs might prove useful in some way no one had yet conceived.
"Excellent, Mr. Rosier," exclaimed the Captain. "Excellent! You did well. Your Virgo must be rising. I secluded the others in the Mates' compartment; otherwise this show of force must certainly have disquieted all of our guests." He rocked on his heels and held the edge of his cape. "I think we are as well provisioned as we could hope for. Wood, water, a respectable cargo. And our stars in their good phases." To his First Mate, Thomas Cam, he said: "Hoist anchor, Mr. Cam. Set sail, and pray for a fair wind to England."
***
On scant winds, The Archangel was slow in getting out of St. George's harbor. Many a sailor secretly held an amulet or silently prayed for fairies to puff up their cheeks and fill the sails. The sea was not especially choppy, but neither was it cooperative. After about four hours, Waymouth finally found the current, and the ship picked up speed. With the course set and a fair wind in the sails, the crew was able to relax a bit.
"Maybe we ought to give our guests a breath, Sir," said Rosier. "They've been in that hold several hours and there's no porthole down there. We don't want them to suffocate before we find if they're useful or not."
"Quite right, Mr. Rosier. Bring the savages up."
Tahanedo and the four others were brought on deck, their hands still tied in front of them. When Tahanedo saw the sails bulging with wind, he touched his necklace and cried out, "They have captured us. They have taken us prisoners and will make us their slaves." He seized a corner of his wildcat-skin cape to hold it in place and turned, swinging it in every direction as if he could sweep away the annoyance; the thin, forested rim of land was diminishing behind them.
Tisquantum asked, "Waymut take Tahanedo?" and he pantomimed grabbing the sagamore by the neck.
"Oh, no, no," said Waymouth, waving "no" with his skinny hands, using Rosier as his interpreter. "We are your friends. You are our guests."
"Where is our land? Where are you taking us?" cried Tahanedo, running up the stair-ladder to the poop deck. His wrists were still tied, but he used his hands as a clamp together.
Thomas Cam and the helmsman turned to face him and put their right hands on the handles of their weapons.
But Tahanedo only ran to the rail to look at the distant strip of land and the reasonably calm water. Coming back, he lifted one corner of his wildcat cape to show Waymouth the emblem of his rank. "Give us our canoes, and we will paddle to our home shores."
But Waymouth chose to ignore him, saying, through Rosier, "We are taking you to meet the head man of our town."
"Beyond Monhegan Island?" asked Tahanedo.
"Yes, beyond Monhegan. It's a place called Plymouth."
"I have no business in Plymouth," said Tahanedo, meeting Waymouth's gaze.
"Oh, but you do," said Waymouth, looking away and wrapping his purple cloak around his shoulders. "The 'sagamore' of our town wants very much to meet and talk with the sagamore of Pemaquid. Our two towns will be friends. We will trade.... Nice things ... for useful things."
Ed Welsh stepped toward the bow of the ship, letting his gray cape flap in the wind freely. He inhaled deeply and exclaimed, "Take a whiff of that! The smell of the open sea!"
"We go England!" said Tisquantum, his voice a mixture of delight and dread.
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Chapter 3. Beyond Monhegan Island, 1605
This accident must be acknowledged the means, under God, of putting on foot and giving life to all our plantations. God has indeed smiled upon our designs.-- Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Brief Narration of the Originall Undertaking of the Advancement of Plantation into the Parts of America. (1637)
Homeward bound on the North Atlantic current and prevailing winds, the ship made good progress. Each day, the Indians were brought up on deck for air and exercise. One at a time, they were untied, so they could move their arms. They had to be taught to use the chamber pot, sling the refuse overboard, and rinse the pot with sea-water.
In rougher seas, Amoret and Maneddo, seeing the tilting horizon, regularly grabbed their stomachs with both hands and soon vomited. The sailors pulled up buckets of sea-water to slosh off the spume. Tisquantum was seasick the first few days, then found his sea-legs. Secretly, he attributed his adjustment to the shell amulet he wore in his right ear-lobe. Skettowaroes and Tahanedo, having had more experience with canoes in rough water, seemed immune to the discomfort.
Each sunny and warm day, James Rosier set up a table on the main deck, opened his journal, and interviewed the Indians, one at a time. He began trying to teach them a few words of English. Tahanedo was defiant and imposing: "I am a king in my own land! If you want to speak to me, you can learn my language." And he pulled his wildcat cloak in closer.
Maneddo followed his example and refused to learn, folding his arms before him. Amoret was too sea-sick to learn. Skettowaroes jumped into the task with gusto. "I am body-guard to my sagamore," he explained. "It is my duty to speak for him with other tribes."
Tisquantum was the best pupil. He seemed to delight in saying English words. He began bringing to Rosier questions about things that did not exist in either Wampanoag or Abenaki. He would pick up a rope and ask, "Wat?" Later, he would point to the sails-- "Wat dis?" As he got better at the language, he would indicate, for example, the pen and ink-- "What these?"
Rosier soon discovered that Tisquantum was not a good informant for Abenaki, because, as the boy said, "Tisquantum no Abenaki; Tisquantum Wampanoag." So he tried to dismiss the inquisitive young man. But Tisquantum would not permit it. He came with question after question, and he often remembered the answers, not always with the right pronunciation.
Tisquantum was curious about everything on the ship, but most about the galley in that part of the forecastle nearest the main mast, where the cook, the carpenter, the cooper, and the sail-maker had their berths and shops. The cook's pot hung over an open fire, built on a bed of stones and was flanked on both sides and the back by stone walls to keep the fire from spilling out during rough seas. There he cooked the peas and porridge, the hash made from dried meat, the soups made of sea-water and fresh fish.
The crew had adapted to a steady diet of hard-tack, but it soon constipated the Indians. Amoret was even feverish. Rosier and the cook prepared a physic of sassafras leaves, mullwort, and other herbs, which soon gave the Indians diarrhea.
Again, buckets of sea-water sloshed them clean, more or less. But without their protective coating of grease, the Indians were soon paralyzed with chill. They had to be dressed in sailor's shirts and pants.
"There's no end to it, and no middle ground," complained Rosier to Tisquantum. "Everything we do seems to upset you fellows in one way or another."
"Hands in rope much much," said Tisquantum, holding up his bound wrists.
"Well, I'm tired of being nursemaid!"
***
After a month's passage, they arrived at Plymouth Fort on the lands-end coast of England. On the 15th of July, 1605, Waymouth delivered his cargo of fish and the five American natives to Sir Ferdinando Gorges.
The family of Ferdinando Gorges had been in England for four generations and had gained wealth and position. Ferdinando had done creditable military service for Queen Elizabeth in her wars in France, for which he was knighted and made commander of the Fort at Plymouth, near Lands End. He carried a white, perfumed handkerchief at all times, his protection against offensive odors.
Sir Ferdinando was pleased with the quality of the salmon. He called his chef and had him slice bits of the smoked salmon and some of the dried cod and put them on thin slices of bread. Stuffing his handkerchief into a waistcoat pocket, Gorges took up the little open-faced sandwiches with a forefinger and thumb and slid them into his mouth. "Delightful!" he said, with great conviction. "In London, this will pay for the voyage."
After reserving a share of the salmon for his own use, he sent the rest with Waymouth and The Archangel to London, for the benefit of his fellow investors, especially Sir John Popham, the Lord Chief Justice of England, and John Slaney, the Treasurer of The New England Company for Exploration and Trade.
He was even more happy with the five Indian captives, who were brought in from their locked room. He was so enthusiastic that he gave each man of the crew an extra crown as bonus. "Welcome, Welcome, Captain Taneedo," he exclaimed, his eyes gleaming, as he put one foot forward to show a stockinged calf, waved his handkerchief, and made an elaborate, receding bow, the usual English method of greeting a person of quality.
In his comfort, he had taken to wearing pastel suits of shiny satin-- pale green waistcoats and knee-length pants with mauve stockings, cummerbund, and collars; and white lace at the cuffs. He avoided pink and the colors of royalty, but used almost every other color.
Tahanedo took Gorges by the hand... and held on. He glanced to see that Rosier was there to translate. "Take Tahanedo to Pemaquid. Now." He had to hold his breath unobtrusively, so foul was the powder and perfume of the white man.
"But you've just arrived! I want to visit with you, learn about your home. You must stay the winter."
"I am a KING in my land," shouted Tahanedo, his wrists still tied. "Take me home!"
"Yes, yes. I understand," said Gorges. "Come and show me where you live." On a table, he rolled out the map which Waymouth and Rosier had drawn during the voyage.
Gorges dreamed of establishing a plantation or colony in Maine and fortifying it, in order to exploit the fishing off Maine and Newfoundland and prevent the French, Dutch, and Spanish from invading what he saw as his private fishing waters. He had put a good part of his personal fortune into the project and had helped in organizing the "New England Company for Exploration and Trade."
Tisquantum recognized the line of the coast. He pointed to a place off the edge of the map. "Pemaquid," he said. "Tahanedo house."
Tahanedo glanced at the map and did not contradict him. Using sticks, the Indians frequently drew maps on smooth sand for each other. He, too, recognized the contour of the coast.
"This fellow is not Abenaki," said Rosier, indicating Tisquantum. "He's from another tribe. We're not certain yet just which one."
"My slave," said Tahanedo. "Assaquamet." And he took Tisquantum by the neck to pantomime the capture.
"As-a-comet. Tah-nay-doe," said Gorges. "I'll never learn to pronounce their names right." He waved his handkerchief, as if his mistakes were no great matter.
When Sir Ferdinando learned that the five Indians were from different families, he cried out, "Excellent! Excellent! That means they will have knowledge of many places and can make maps for us." And, though his family had been openly Protestant for two generations, he made the sign of the cross.
Gorges turned, waving his handkerchief in all directions, indicating all his household and command at Plymouth Fort. "Use these savages kindly. Help them to learn good English and be content with civilization. Teach them to make maps and understand words on paper."
"This accident must be acknowledged the means, under God, of putting on foot and giving life to all our plantations. God has indeed smiled upon our designs."
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Drought, Blizzard, and Rising Hope
A novel, based on a true story
by Charles Brashear
Chapter 1. Forced to Move West
In 1916-1917, a severe drought devastated the prairies of west Texas. The crops failed, the grass dried up, the water tanks were completely depleted. The drought forced my grandfather, Jody Whitaker, to move his 102 cattle, 14 horses, and three span of mules west from his farm near Vincent, Texas to New Mexico, in search of grass and water.
No railroad was available, so my mother, twelve-year-old Sallie Whitaker, and her fourteen- and sixteen-year-old brothers, Fred and Ben, became drovers in a desperate trail drive. This story is based on what she, her sister, and my uncles told me about the experience, which lasted past the blizzard of 1918.
I followed the family story for the most part, even using some of the deeds, letters, poems, and other documents found in my grandfather's effects long after his death. I found his political tirades in long letters he wrote to family and friends in Tennessee.
But the book is fiction. Before some of my relatives start complaining that I got their part of the story all wrong, let me say here, up front, that I made up the details. If I slighted any of my uncles in any way, or puffed up my mother too much, I'm sorry. It was all done in innocence.
The Whitaker family near Vincent, Texas, is forced to move their 102 cattle, 14 horses, and three span of mules west, in search of water and grass. No railroad is available, so twelve-year-old Sallie Whitaker and her fourteen- and sixteen-year-old brothers, Fred and Ben, become drovers in a desperate trail drive.
The chuck wagon is driven by their father, Jody Whitaker, who is semi-invalid from a mule-training accident a few years back, which dislocated several vertebrae in his spine. He has to be helped in and out of the wagon. The women of the family are left at Vincent to take care of the milk cows and look after the farm.
At first they drive the cattle north-westerly, along the cap-rock rim of the High Plains, the Llano Estacado. Sallie and her brothers are called upon to act and work like grown men. In addition, Sallie is often called upon to make biscuits in their Dutch oven, prepare bacon, beans, and gravy for their most typical meal, and wash clothes when they come to a spring where the cattle can get water and the family can replenish their supply. The cattle soon get weary and thirsty. Sometimes, the Whitakers are forced to "hand-water" the herd--allowing each animal to drink a long quart of water from a hand-held bucket.
One day, the herd is left idle while Sallie, Fred, and Ben unsuccessfully fight a grass fire on the prairie. Another day, navigating by the sun across a barren featureless plain, they fail to find Buzzard Well, but do find the boggy draw below it where the cattle can drink from puddles. Crossing the sand dunes between Buzzard Draw and Mustang Draw, the cattle are stampeded by the sound of a flash flood caused by storms far to the west. Progress is delayed while Sallie and Fred hunt for lost cattle.
After some two weeks on the trail, the party comes to Seagraves, where they have relatives and where there is a railhead. It has rained a little recently in the west and new grass has sprouted. The Whitaker mules eat too much sand with the fresh grass and roots. Some of them get sand-colic and die.
After a short rest, the herd is shipped by rail to Taiban Junction in New Mexico, where Jody has found land on the western escarpment of the Llano Estacado, which various members of the family can file homestead claims on. The family has to live in a semi-dugout. Some of the women visit from Vincent from time to time in the family's 1914 Model-T touring car.
Cattle feed is short in New Mexico also. They have to buy feed from the Pecos Valley. Sallie has to collect prickly pear in baskets, sear off the spines in the cook stove, and feed the pads to the cattle. Though conditions are bad, most of the herd survives.
Then comes January 1918 and the worst blizzard on the plains since 1888-89. The Whitaker cattle bunch up at the fence rows and corners, where many of them freeze to death. Sallie and Fred go out in the blizzard with wire cutters to set the herd free to drift. Still, the Whitakers lose more than a third of their cattle.
But, with the blizzard, the drought is broken. The spring rains revive the pastures back at home in Vincent.
The older boys are able to plant crops of corn, cotton, maize, and Kaffir Corn, as well as a variety of kitchen
vegetables. By early summer, it is possible to ship the remnant of the herd back to Seagraves and to drive
them home. By autumn, conditions are back to near normal, and Sallie is permitted to be a child again and
go back to sixth grade at the grammar school in Vincent.
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Chapter 1. Forced to Move West
"Pa! Pa! Come quick!" I yelled, as I bolted into the dinner area, where Pa was playing his fiddle.
"Somebody's...." I was puffing and sweating. "Somebody's... somebody's cutting our fence... down by the water tank."
Pa stopped fiddling in the midst of "Haste to the Wedding." If it had been one of the boys, Pa would have cuffed his head, but I was the youngest daughter, twelve and slender. I hadn't yet filled out. Pa was always gentle with me.
"What?" Pa asked, not quite able to believe what he had heard.
"Yes, Sir," I said, out of breath. I felt my ears glowing, my face red with sweat and energy. "Somebody's snipping... the barbed wire ... and letting their cattle in to drink."
"Who is it?" asked Pa.
"I don't know... Some people on horses. I didn't recognize any of them."
He glared at me, then softened his frown. I think he was aware that he looked more irritated than he intended. "How many cattle?"
"A bunch," I said. "About as many as we got."
"Over a hundred," he muttered. Pa used the table as a cane to help him stand up, then lay his fiddle carefully in its case, loosened the hair in the bow, and put it away. I could see the worry in his face. Frank, my youngest brother, crowded up close; he was the only one of us children born here at this farm near Vincent, Texas.
"Frank," Pa said, "you go catch Meredith and hitch him to the buggy. I'll have to go down to the tank."
He looked up toward the kitchen where all of the women except me-- Ma, Aunt Mollie, Grandmother Mary-Adeline, my sister, Delphia-- had come to listen and watch. I could see they were all worried.
"Sallie," he said to me, "you go with Frank. He can't get the harness on all by himself."
I was barely big enough to harness a pony. Not tall enough, nor strong enough, to lift my saddle onto my own horse.
"Yes, Sir," I said, wiping my sweating palms on the flaps of my Jodhpurs, catching some of the tension in Pa's voice. Frank and I raced out to get the horse and buggy.
We owned a 1914 Model-T touring car, but Pa seldom used it, because he preferred the old ways-- the pony and buggy, or the buckboard.
While Frank caught Meredith and led him up to the barn door, I got out the buggy harness. The southwest wind was hot and dry; it kept blowing my hair into my face, because I had forgotten my hat. I had convinced Ma to cut my hair short, to be in style, the way the magazines showed, but it still blew in my face. Delphia said it made me look like a tomboy.
I had to do all the harnessing, because Frank really was too small to reach, but he did help by leading Meredith to the buggy and backing him into the shafts correctly.
By the time I had hooked up the shafts, Frank had climbed into the seat. I handed him the reins, glancing at his face. He looked worried and serious. Imitating Pa, he flicked the reins on Meredith's rump and clicked his tongue in the side of his mouth to make a chirking noise. Meredith started moving.
Taking a deep breath, I quickly mounted my horse, Dollie, who was still saddled from the morning's work. I had been riding through our herd, watching for sick animals, especially any that looked too weak to get to water by themselves.
Pa was shifting from one foot to the other by the back door when we brought up the horse and buggy. He was six feet tall, as straight as a wagon tongue, and lank in his bib overalls. He set his hat on his head, adjusted it for a stiff wind.
Pa had hurt his spine a few years back. A young team of mules he was training ran away, the wagon tongue rammed into a ditch, and catapulted him 60 feet ahead. He landed flat on his back, jarring loose several bones. He was now 57, half-crippled, and getting stiff the way old cowboys do.
Ma helped him get his boot up to the stirrup of the buggy. He lifted, while she pushed to get him into the seat. My second youngest brother, Hooks, jumped into the buggy and sat upright on the seat beside him.
Pa took the reins from Frank and chirked Meredith into motion. I rode "swing," beside and a little behind the buggy. The hot wind whipped sand up from our tracks.
* * *
When we got to the water tank, about a hundred cattle had drunk their fill and others were crowding forward. A woman, dressed in men's clothing, was letting her horse drink. She sat quietly in her saddle with a Winchester 94 resting casually across her lap and the pommel of her saddle.
"Elsa!" yelled Pa. "What's going on?"
"I'm watering my cattle," she yelled back. I realized then it was Elsa Marchbanks. I went to school with her daughter, Frieda. Elsa was as lank as Pa, but no more than average height.
"But that's my water!" Pa was standing up in the buggy now and gesturing with his hands.
"Water is water," she said, turning away to see how her cattle were doing. She had been a widow for several years; she rode, cussed, managed as well as any man.
"I don't hardly have enough for my own herd, Elsa," Pa yelled. "You can't just come in here and take my water. You're not our lying, thieving President, are you?"
"This is the only water within several miles," said Elsa. "And my cattle are ready to drop from thirst. I'm watering my herd here."
"Why don't you use your own water?" Awkwardly, Pa was trying to get down from the buggy, as if he could do more on the ground to stop the theft.
The last day of March and first day of April, 1916, it rained two days and nights and filled our tanks fourteen feet deep, but it had not rained in the sixteen months since. Our water supply had shrunk to a puddle, hardly three inches deep.
That first year of the drought, we gathered a pittance of the crops we expected. This year would be even leaner than the last, because there was nothing at all to harvest. Howard County had received less than half the normal rainfall, and some areas, like Vincent, had gotten none at all. Pa had borrowed money from Mr. Templeton, the banker in Big Spring, for us to live on until we could raise crops again.
"My tanks are all dry," Elsa said, reining her horse to approach Pa. "Windmills ain't pumping nothing but dust and wasp wings. We had a plague of grasshoppers over our way. They ate every stalk to the ground." She smiled at me, recognizing that I was a girl, out doing boy's work. Her hair was stuffed up into her hat. When she turned to look at Pa, a few sprigs of curly hair came out.
"Well, go rob somebody else," Pa went on. "The politicians and the banks have already robbed me! I don't have enough for my own use." He gave up trying to get out of the buggy without help and sat back heavily.
"That's the way it is all over the country, Jody. Nobody's got any water. I'm moving my herd out to the Pecos valley. I hear there's more water out there." Her cattle had pretty much finished drinking. Some of the cows were beginning to munch the tiny stubble of grass along the bank of the tank.
"Okay, boys," Elsa yelled, making a signal over her head with the rifle. "Head 'em up; move 'em out. Fix the fence behind you."
When her herd was back on the road and a couple of her cowboys had dismounted to put the fence back together, Elsa rode over to where Pa sat, powerless, in the buggy. She propped the butt of the Winchester 94 on her thigh, up near her pocket. The barrel was sticking up like a flagpole. The dry wind rippled her hat brim. A few sprigs of hair wrestled free.
"I'm sorry, Jody," she said, looking squarely at him. "This drought is making bad neighbors of us all. It hasn't rained a drop over my way in over seventeen months."
"Who ruined you, Elsa? You just ruined me."
"No, I didn't, Jody. One day's watering didn't break you." She made a vague gesture all around, taking in the wind, the blank sky, the empty horizon. "It was all these months and months without rain that ruined you. We'd better hope we don't get seven of these lean years."
"What 're we going to do, now, Elsa?"
"I don't know about you, but I'm moving my herd before they turn to dust and blow away. I figure I'll get to the rail junction at Coahoma on this watering, and there I'll buy these old cows a good feed and a watering. Then it's a train to Pecos. God! They'd better have water and grass out there!"
"I've heard it's better than here," Pa admitted.
She turned to go. Her herd was a hundred yards or so down the road. "I'm sorry, Jody. I'm sorry."
"Maybe I'll get a chance one of these days to return the favor," he yelled, as Elsa rode away, loping to catch up. "Maybe I'll get elected to public office and return the favor! Maybe I'll get elected to office and come collect your taxes!"
* * *
Pa sat and stared after Elsa Marchbanks until she and her herd were out of sight. Finally, Frank asked, "What 're we goin to do, Pa?"