Now, Indian boys want to grow up into great warriors and some feel the call to be chiefs, but these is all
On the other hand, what I had been contemplating while leading that mule train back to Colorado was going into business for myself. I have said I had no head for commerce, but had got myself to believing you didn’t need none to become a rich man in a brand-new place like Denver. Already there was a move on to make Colorado a Territory. In a few years if I made enough money I might even go for governor: I could read and write, which was more than half the current population along Cherry Creek could claim.
But how could I give an Indian like Old Lodge Skins the faintest glimmering of it?
I was helped at that moment by the appearance of Younger Bear, who was riding towards us. He sat his pony backwards, of course, facing the tail—which, however, made his backward commands to it and his movements of the bridle come out all right. He’d indicate “left,” meaning “right,” and since he was facing the rump, the sense was switched again so far as the pony went, and it done the correct thing.
“Why,” I says, “did Younger Bear become a Contrary?”
As I relied upon the chief to do, he give the traditional reason: “Because he was afraid of the thunder and lightning.”
“That’s why I have to ride west with my mule wagons,” I says. And, you know, there was a certain truth to the statement.
The way that treaty finally turned out, I was proud to have played a part in sending my friends out of harm. Black Kettle, White Antelope, and the other Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho who touched the pen got a reservation along the Arkansas in southeastern Colorado, a piace of no game, little water, and arid soil. A few years later, while peacefully camped on Sand Creek in that region, they was massacred by the Third Colorado Volunteer Cavalry.
CHAPTER 14
THE MASSACRE AT SAND CREEK took place in ’64, late in the year. By then the Rebellion was finished out that way or it couldn’t have happened at all, for the troops would have been otherwise occupied.
Speaking for myself, I turned into an indoor type of person after that trip to and from Missouri with the mules. I had got this idea of becoming a big-shot businessman and maybe going into politics. I had also begun to be suspicious of my so-called partners Bolt and Ramirez, who was supposed to split even with me, but how could I check on that if I was always out on the trail? To confirm this, you should have heard their protests when I says I was going to stay around the store from now on.
Well, I didn’t understand much of account-keeping, so I never could prove what they had stole from me in the past, but my take increased noticeably from the time I stopped going on trips. And the next things I did was build me a house and get married!
I was about twenty at the time. The woman I married—girl, rather, she being eighteen—was a Swede, born in Sweden, come to this country a few years back with her folks and settled at Spirit Lake in Iowa, where her Ma and Pa was killed in the famous massacre carried out by an outlaw band of the Santee Sioux. That was five years before, so she was still small enough to hide in a potato cellar, which she did and survived. This girl was named Olga. At the time I married her, it would have took a larger cave to hide her: she was five nine if she stood an inch and had the weight to accompany it though not an ounce of fat. She was something larger than myself even when I wore my built-up boots.
Olga was real fair-complected, with hair so light and fine that even on a rainy day it looked like the sun was shining on her. She had come out to Denver with some folks who took her in after the trouble, in return for which they got an awful lot of work out of her: she cooked their meals, minded the children, did the cleaning, and chopped all the wood, while the woman laid around the cabin in a sour mood and the man was always trying to put his hand on Olga’s bottom.
