A Good Man (52 page)

Facing the head of the wagon train is a line of scarlet tunics, spaced like fine stitching on the hem of the khaki landscape. In the watery autumn sunshine, the Police helmets gleam like alabaster. General Terry, all six feet and more of him, walks out to meet them, accompanied by his aides and staff.

Colonel Macleod, Commissioner of the
NWMP
, has come from headquarters on the Oldman River to welcome the Americans. His aquiline nose and luxurious mutton chop whiskers are as impressive as the American general’s towering height. The two of them shake hands before a backdrop of irreproachably spit-polished and pipe-clayed Police. Brass buttons and buckles flash, steel-pointed bamboo lances glint, pennants flicker their snake tongues in the wind. Sergeant Major Francis, chin tucked down on his neck, sits his horse plumb-line correct. There is a pugnacious look on his face that suggests he’d like nothing better than to charge these damn upstart Yankees the way he charged the Ivans at Sebastopol. Case knows many of the guard of honour, old barrack mates such as Constables Jolly, Atkinson, Foster, and Dewar, as well as others he once paraded and patrolled with. But they remain rock-solid still when he gives them a friendly wave. There is no sign of Walsh, which Case finds strange. The Major is not a man to miss a ceremony.

Notebooks poised, the journalists Diehl and Stillson wait to record some apposite, historically memorable exchange between Macleod and Terry. But after passing a few anodyne pleasantries, the two men separate to rejoin their commands. Wheeling smartly, the Police form a column of twos, and lead the caravan off towards the Cypress Hills.

At twilight, the wagons buck and bang their way up to the walls of Fort Walsh. Sioux warriors gather before their small travelling lodges to watch the Americans’ arrival from a wary distance and in a hostile silence. Soon the soldiers are putting up tents and firing portable cookstoves in the shadows of the palisades. Curious Police come drifting out of their barracks to mingle with the newcomers, to shake hands and strike up conversations. Seeing that, the Sioux withdraw inside their tipis as if the scene is something too shameful to be witnessed.

After a quick supper and a cursory wash, Case immediately goes looking for the Major, only to learn that Walsh is unavailable, that he and Colonel Macleod are hosting a dinner for Terry and his staff. When he asks if a message could be delivered to the Major while he dines, the duty officer cautiously allows that he thinks that is possible. Case writes a note that announces his arrival and asks if Walsh and he might meet. He waits a time for a reply, and soon his note is returned to him, the Major’s answer scrawled below his own request. “Here’s a surprise, the bad penny turns up! Eight o’clock tomorrow morning outside the gates of the fort. Macleod has given Terry my quarters for his stay. I am homeless. I have nowhere to entertain notable visitors such as yourself.”

The next morning, Case watches Walsh come striding energetically through the gates. The sun is making a slow ascent, shimmering on the frosted grass. A short way off, the Americans are clustered around their cookstoves, which send up a powerful aroma of brewing coffee, johnnycakes, and frying side pork.

The Major greets Case with a broad grin and brisk handshake. “I’ll be damned, Wesley. Last night at supper Terry had his chest puffed out like a pouter pigeon while he cooed about the distinguished journalists he was trailing in his wake. And then he names you as one of the ink-stained wretches. You could have bowled me over with a feather.”

Seeing nothing but complications in attempting to correct Walsh’s belief that he really is a bona fide reporter, Case merely says, ;Well, I tried my hand at the profession years ago. And temporarily resuming that occupation presented me with a chance to see you again.”

“And very glad you seized it. Here, let’s have a proper jaw. And a stroll as we do. I need a breath of fresh air after last night,” he says, his face suddenly darkening.

They set off across the parade ground. Case senses that something has lit the Major’s fuse and the spark is perilously near the black powder. It becomes clear he has taken a dislike to General Terry and soon begins to enumerate his faults – he was a lawyer before he became a soldier and he still acts like one. He keeps house with two spinster sisters in Chicago, probably crochets in the parlour with them of an evening – after he’s done the washing up.

The Major says, “Terry’s certainly not the man to handle Sitting Bull, the Sioux bear him a terrible grudge. They know full well that he was the commander who set Custer loose on them. They aren’t fools. I don’t know what the Americans were thinking, choosing him as their chief negotiator.”

Case says, “Perhaps they decided he was exactly the man for the job. That is, if this mission is merely a pro forma exercise, a charade.”

“Damn expensive charade. Think of the cost of it, the men involved. This expedition is not cheap.” The Major sounds as if he is trying to convince himself and not quite succeeding.

“It’s cheap enough if the Americans want to keep Bull exactly where he is – here in Canada.”

“Well, I would have no objections to Bull staying put,” says Walsh. “He’s better off where he is. Not that anybody has asked my opinion. The Yankees are in charge of this show. The rest of us are stage dressing.”

And with that, Walsh launches into a list of his most recent complaints and grievances. He speaks of how he had had to fortify himself, overcome a natural, proper disgust for what Macleod instructed him to do. Persuading Bull to meet with a man who had sought to have him and his people killed was not to the Major’s taste. But he had followed the Colonel’s orders, to the letter, and managed, against all odds, to eventually coax the Sioux chief to go to Fort Walsh. And had he received any praise or gratitude for his efforts? Not a bit. No one appreciated the difficulties he had had to surmount to bring the chief around. And what was most distasteful about the whole business was that Bull had been in mourning for a young son who had been kicked in the head by a horse and had died shortly before Walsh arrived in the Sioux camp. Pestering and plaguing a grieving father at a time like that – it wasn’t something he was proud of. And on top of that, while he was pleading with Sitting Bull to treat with the Americans, Colonel Miles was attacking Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce, just fifty miles from where the Sioux were camped at Pinto Horse Butte. Daily, Bull had been receiving messages from Chief Joseph begging him to throw the weight of his people into the Nez Perce’s battle with the Long Knives. And this wasn’t the only source of pressure coming to bear on the Sioux chief. All his young warriors, encouraged by their relatives, were asking to be unleashed on the hated Bear Coat and his men.

“All the oung bucks dancing, chanting their death songs,” Walsh says, “hanging their saddles with medicine bundles, painting themselves, dressing in their best so as to leave a pretty corpse if they met their death fighting Bear Coat Miles – it was a dicey proposition. A nod, one word from Bull, and they would have been off like a canister of grapeshot.”

It was a moment, according the Major, when everything hung in the balance, and it had fallen to him to put his finger in and tip that balance in the right direction. One night, as a fierce autumn blizzard shook the walls of Bull’s tipi, Walsh had sat with him, threatening, cajoling, haranguing, and entreating him not to go to war with the hated Bear Coat and his troopers. When dawn came, Bull was still wavering. Then, out of the storm, rode a gravely wounded Nez Perce messenger. He told the Sioux that Chief Joseph had laid down arms, but that White Bird, a war chief of the Nez Perce, had refused to comply with the terms of surrender. During the night, he had slipped a hundred warriors and a hundred women and children through Miles’s lines. They were now just short of the border, soldiers hard after them. All their ammunition was gone; they had no food or winter clothing; the women and children were perishing in the cold and snow. If the Sioux did not come now to help them, Bear Coat and his soldiers would overtake and slaughter them all.

When they heard this, Walsh says, Sitting Bull’s people shouted that they must go and rescue their strong-hearted Nez Perce friends. Just as the excitement reached its peak, scouts galloped into the village shouting a warning that a large body of white men was approaching. There was no stopping the Sioux then. Two hundred warriors sprang onto their ponies and heeled them out into the flying snow. Walsh had ridden with them. “I had no choice,” he says. “If I could not restrain the Sioux from confronting the Americans, it was my duty to play the part of intermediary, to attempt to prevent violence from breaking out, to try to convince Colonel Miles to turn back.”

But it wasn’t American soldiers they met on the snowy plain. The scouts had been mistaken. It was White Bird and a pitiful remnant of the Nez Perce who they saw stumbling towards them through the blizzard.

Walsh and Case reach the foot of the cemetery hill, which overlooks the fort. The Major halts and lifts his eyes to its crest, where a few spindly wooden crosses stand stark against the brightening sky. “I tell you,” the Major says softly, “hell is cold, not hot. I caught a glimpse of it that night. The snow coming down hard, blanketing those poor wretches, turning them white as ghosts. There were many badly wounded warriors, others so dog-tired they were listing in their saddles. The most of them, even the worst off, were leading ponies with a couple of youngsters clinging to their backs, little tots of two and three. There were children with broken arms and legs, who had taken tumbles getting out of the Bear Paw Mountains in the dark of night. The women were shot up as badly as the men, blood frozen on their robes. One young lass had taken a bullet to the breast. It had run up her chest and out the side of her head. She was still riding, riding with a newborn strapped to her back. If I live to be as old as Methuselah, I’ll never see a sight to equal that.”

Walsh’s jaw clenches as if he is afraid to continue, fears he will surrender to an unmanly display of emotion. Case suddenly senses the large soul of the man, something easily obscured when the Major has an outbreak of petulance or vanity. Befor can offer him a sympathetic word, Walsh abruptly swings around from the foot of the hill and starts back towards the fort. Silently the two men follow the footprints they have left in the frostbitten grass until, finally, Walsh resumes his story.

“The Sioux took the Nez Perce into their lodges, nursed the sick and injured, fed them their choicest bits of boss ribs, buffalo hump, and tongue. Handed out robes and blankets and warm clothing to people whose bone marrow had turned to ice. They paid honour to the dead left up in the Bear Paws, strangers they didn’t know. Sang mourning songs until their throats gave out. And here was I, supposed to tell Sitting Bull, with such sights fresh in his mind, to pack up directly, sit down and talk to an American commander, and General Terry at that. Well,” he says with barely contained fury, “my bosses ought to be proud of me because, by the living Christ, I did just that, did as I was told. And it wasn’t the easiest, sweetest thing I ever done. Bull was hopping mad. All the headmen were. ‘Look,’ they said to me, ‘look at what the Long Knives do. And you ask us to go to Fort Walsh and shake hands with them? To hear them say, You come back to the other side of the Medicine Line with us and we will be good to you, like fathers? We do not believe it. Bear Coat is a day’s ride away. What if our leaders and best fighters go to parley with One Star Terry and it is a trick? What if Bear Coat comes down on our villages in the night when the people are sleeping in their beds, kills the children, the women, the sick, the old, tramples down our lodges, shoots our horses as he has done to the Sioux before? What will we be then? Broken, snapped over Bear Coat’s knee like small, dry sticks. No, we will not go with you. We will not listen to the Americans make their promises. They promised us the Black Hills forever just like they promised the Oregon country to the Nez Perce forever. They talk of forever until they have a hunger for a piece of land, or the yellow stones they are so greedy for, and then forever trails out of their head like smoke. Then they shout, “Get out of here! Go instead to this place or that place.” And the places they try to push us to are always bad, worthless places.’ ”

Walsh pauses. “But I kept wheedling away at Bull. He was suspicious and wary, afraid that the Americans would seize him at the fort and take him back to Montana in chains, and if they didn’t do that, that they’d ambush and kill him on the way to the big parley. I swore to him on the head of my little daughter Cora that I would not let that happen. And in the end he agreed to come to Fort Walsh because he trusts me.
I
shook him out of the bedclothes and got him moving.
I
kept him and those other Sioux headmen on the straight and narrow for a hundred and fifty goddamn miles. They would go docile as lambs for a piece and then they’d have a fit of second thoughts, plunk down on the trail to smoke a pipe and speculate about what kind of trouble the Americans had in wait for them. No, they’d say, we are turning round, going back to Pinto Horse Butte. And I’d placate them. I’d persuade them. I’d chivvy them back up on their ponies. It was
me
who got them here well before Terry himself thought it safe to poke his cowardly nose out of Fort Benton. For what? So the Sioux can be humiliated by sitting down with General Terry?”

“You followed your orders and delivered Sitting Bull,” says Case. “Your part is over. It’s in the Americans’ hands now, as you yourself said. There’s nothing more for you to do.”

This does nothing to ease Walsh’s uneasiness. “You know what kept Bull on the move coming here?” he says. “I told him the Grandmother said he must speak to Terry.” Walsh hesitates. “I said if he did her this favour, surely she would do him one in return.” The Major shakes his head. “I believed it when I said it. But now I wonder if I wasn’t deluding myself because it was convenient to do so.” He moodily considers the horizon.

“No one can look at this business,” Case says, “without wondering the best way to navigate it. That is always a concern in matters like this, it comes with the territory. But you must remind yourself that Sitting Bull, in his turn, will always put the welfare of his people first. That is his primary concern and, by any reckoning, one cannot expect him to do anything else. He will do what he needs to do. Just as you have done.” Quietly Case says, “You cannot assume he came here purely out of trust in you. And you should be careful not to count on friendship as any kind of constant.”