American Meteor (19 page)

I am on the short side—you can see that plainly enough— but I resented being thought of as a worm.

“I’m Stephen Moran,” I said, this time without hesitation. “I’d appreciate the honor of accompanying you as expedition photographer. There’s nothing I’d rather do, sir.”

Of all the people I’ve known, Custer was the least bothered by modesty. He gave himself license to do or say anything that would enlarge his reputation, which he nourished with the care and single-mindedness of a horticulturist intent on producing a gaudier flower. Luckily for me, the general was not camera shy. During the war, he’d gotten himself photographed more often than anybody else in the United States, not excepting Lincoln and Grant. He stared at me awhile, ruminating over my proposition. To be always within range of a camera must have appealed to him.

“Have you ever taken pictures in the wilderness?” he asked. “Or are you one of those parlor snakes who take pictures of ladies and gentlemen posed grandly with a pot of ferns?”

I recounted my experiences at Bear River, in the Wasatch, and on the shore of Utah Lake. I omitted my pusillanimity.
They appeared to satisfy him, although he continued to assess my meager frame skeptically. It was then I shrugged the saddlebag from off my shoulder so that he could see my medal. I had decided to wear it in order to trump any objections the general might raise concerning my fitness.

“Come closer,” he said. “Where’d you get that? You didn’t steal it, did you?”

“No, sir. I got it for heroism at Five Forks.”

“Moran . . .” he said, shutting his eyes as if to find my history recorded in a dark corner of his mind. “Are you the bugle boy who rode to Springfield on the Lincoln Special?”

“I am, sir.”

He opened his eyes and their light fell on me like a royal pardon.

I’d have congratulated myself on my cunning had I not already discovered in my twenty-five years how easily a megalomaniac could be manipulated.

“Then you’re no parlor snake!” he shouted, slapping his thighs as though he meant to break into a gallop and, mounted on a four-legged stool, ride against all such perfidious men who might, if allowed to flourish, practice their oily seductions on his beloved and desirable wife, Libbie.

He twisted one end of his dandified mustache between his fingertips and broke into an uproarious laugh, which went on far longer than one would expect of a sane man.

I didn’t know whether to guffaw fraternally, applaud his impersonation of a philandering reptile, or look down at my boots in embarrassment. I decided on the last.

His suspicions must have reared again, because he spoke my name sharply: “Moran!”

“Yes, sir?” I said, snapping to attention. I offered him my abjection like a bribe.

“Why do you want to go with Custer into the Black Hills?”

His eyes glittered, and I saw the childish look of a naughty boy who plots the downfall of a burrow of gophers.

“To be at the center of the world.”

The wattage of his gaze increased, a signal that I was to continue.

“General Custer is the hinge and pivot of great events, and where the general is, I want to be also. For a photographer, there’s no better vantage from which to view the nation’s most important era.”

Growing expansive, Custer stretched his buckskin-clad legs, threw his head back, and shook out his golden curls.

“Moran, Custer prides himself on his knowledge of men and his judge of character. And he has made up his mind about you. And when Custer makes up his mind, nothing in heaven or on earth can change it. Do you know why that is?”

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“Because of his unswerving and unshakable belief in himself.”

“What’s in the general’s mind concerning me?” I asked.

“You are a man fitted by experience and temperament to photograph Custer when he seizes the Black Hills in the name of the United States of America.”

“I’m grateful to him—and to you, too, General.”

“Not at all.”

He waggled the fingers of his right hand at me like a king dismissing a retainer. I withdrew from his august presence.

Did I know at Fort Lincoln that I would kill Custer? It’s
hard to explain otherwise why I sought him out on the frontier and cajoled him with every ounce of guile my baffled heart could summon to take me with him into the last Indian stronghold on the continent. I wasn’t brave, and I had nothing to prove, either to him or to myself. True, I didn’t have what you would call prospects, but I wouldn’t have risked life and limb in the Black Hills to improve my situation— no, not even for photography, however much I was infatuated with the notion that the world could be subjugated by a wooden box fitted with a lens. Custer had become, for me— rightly or wrongly—a shiny emblem pinned over a national disease that had taken the Indian ponies and buffalo, as well as Little Will, Chen, Fire Briskly Burning, a soused, derelict Indian in Omaha—even my own mother. I suppose you think my mind was unbalanced, Jay; and maybe you’d be right. How could it have been otherwise?

The Black Hills Expedition, July 2–August 30, 1874

The following day, Custer and his 7th Cavalry, along with a hundred wagons, three Gatling guns, and a sixteen-piece band, left Fort Abraham Lincoln for the Black Hills, the holiest place on earth to the Lakota Sioux. They went in search of gold to ease the national crisis aggravated by drought, yellow fever, and a plague of locusts that could eat the clothes off a body and strip the fields of crops and the houses of their paint. The Black Hills belonged to the Lakota, given to them and their posterity by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. White men were forever barred from them. None cared so long as the darkly forested and stony hills were judged worthless for farming or grazing cattle. But treaty be damned! We had a right to the land by virtue
of our need. The panic had worsened, money had lost its value, businesses had failed, factories had shut their doors, and foreclosures were driving folks to the wall or—for those who could stake themselves to the means of emigration—to the West. Some of them had an inkling there were riches in Dakota’s Black Hills: minerals, timber, maybe gold. They hoped for gold.

Look, if your only escape from a grizzly bear is to jump into a canoe and push out onto the water, you don’t worry whose it is. And if the canoe’s rightful owner tries to stop you, you kill him. That’s what most people believe. More than likely, Jay, you do, too. And if I hadn’t wintered with the Ute, I’d probably believe the same.

Two weeks later, we crossed the border into Montana and turned south. The next day, we entered Wyoming Territory. We followed the Belle Fourche River into southwestern Dakota and then skirted the north side of the Black Hills. I remember summer meadows brilliant with wildflowers. The men decorated their horses’ bridles, laughing gaily like cavaliers on a picnic. Custer wore yellow monkey flowers in his long golden hair. At the Belle Fourche, I photographed him in his tent. He was writing accounts of the expedition for various newspapers and magazines and wanted a “thoughtful” picture to accompany his stories when he sent them east.

“Moran, we have discovered a rich and beautiful country,” he said, stabbing the inkwell with his pen—a gesture made to illustrate what he meant to do with the country’s inhabitants. (To tell Custer that the Black Hills had already been discovered by the Lakota would have been the same as a Roman slave’s insisting, “I’m sorry, Caesar, but you haven’t discovered Gaul; you’ve only stolen it.”)

I bit my tongue and waited. Was it for this that Spotswood had told me to wait? To kill Custer? I’d made up my mind to finish him off, before there was not a bison left anywhere in America, except for those that would be herded into cattle cars and sent east to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. To be honest—a nearly impossible virtue for human beings, no matter if they wear a sheriff’s star or a parson’s collar—the slaughter of the buffalo and the nine hundred Indian ponies on the bank of the Washita River infuriated me more than the reduction of the Indians. I suppose my sympathies are not uncommon even in the present age, when a brute will sometimes weep over a dead dog.

At the end of July, we stopped at French Creek, after a three-hundred-and-thirty-mile plod from Fort Lincoln, along what the Sioux called “Thieves’ Road”—after Custer, whom Red Cloud had named “the Thief.” On the first of August, the mining engineers found a gold band thirty miles wide that the general might give to posterity, like a wedding ring. The expedition would alchemize the once worthless Black Hills. Speculators and prospectors, store- and saloonkeepers, gamblers and whores, claim jumpers and road agents would pile in, insisting that the “Indian dogs in our manger” be swept aside.

The general wanted his discovery commemorated, and I obliged with a photograph of him handing a message to Charley Reynolds, his chief scout, who carried the news to Fort Laramie. From there, it lit out by telegraph to the states back east and to the papers. Custer would glory, bask, and wallow in his fame for the rest of his life, which was, thankfully, short.

By winter, fifteen thousand emigrants had already arrived
in the Black Hills—too many for the army to oust or for the Indians to kill. In the spring, Red Cloud and other of the Lakota’s most illustrious chiefs went to Washington to protest against the incursion into their most hallowed ground. They were feted by their Great White Father; they ate off china plates. They were shown the city—even treated to an artillery salute, intended, perhaps, as a demonstration of American military strength. Their entreaties were ignored. Red Cloud and the others returned to the Sioux Reservation, their hope of gaining the president’s sympathy now a forlorn one. Grant issued an executive order to clean out the Black Hills of “hostiles.” It would be open season on the last buffalo herds. After this piece of treachery, I didn’t much care for Grant. I considered sending him my medal once again, but something told me I’d have need of it.

“Moran, I want you to take a picture of me at the summit of Harney Peak.”

“A fine idea, General.”

“I want it to insinuate in the minds of all who see it that at Custer’s feet lie the immense riches of a new world. For that is what it is, Moran. A new and glorious world.”

“I can do that, sir. I’ll take it with the sun shining on the land, as if God Almighty Himself were sanctifying it for the United States!”

“So long as the light also shines on me.”

Increasingly in my presence, he would drop the affectation of referring to himself as “Custer”—most likely because he ceased to regard me as someone apart from himself. I was absorbed into the Custer persona; he expropriated me just as he intended to steal—by force of eminent domain—the
Black Hills from the Indians. Or maybe I was no more than a camera operated by his own inordinate egotism.

“Naturally, General.”

I’d also make a glass plate of the summit undefiled by Custer’s presence and would later send it to Walt Whitman.

William Jackson once said that photography makes ghosts of the world and that each picture shrinks the subject. He wasn’t talking about its representation—not entirely; he meant that the subject matter itself grew smaller each time it was photographed. A mountain was diminished by every exposure. After a while, it would have no more substance than cottonwood lint or ideas in the mind of somebody who didn’t much care to use it. If you took enough pictures of the West, the West would disappear. People would prefer to see life through their stereopticons. At the time, I didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about; but after having taken so many pictures for so many years, I’ve come to understand him. I regret having allowed myself, through funk and faintheartedness, to shrink before his eyes during that famishing winter when I spent nearly all my life’s allotment of love.

Known by the Lakota Sioux as Six Grandfathers (the place where Black Elk had his vision of the still point of the turning world), Harney Peak was named for General William S. Harney, hero of the Battle of Ash Hollow, waged against the Sioux, who called him “Woman Killer.” It was renamed Mount Rushmore to honor a New York City pettifogger during a pleasure excursion in 1885. By then, Crazy Horse had been killed, and Red Cloud was an old man living on a reservation, impoverished and forgotten. On Harney Peak, the gigantic likenesses of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt will one day be carved in
granite. The idea that the head of Red Cloud—the great Lakota war chief who signed the Treaty of 1868 to preserve the land and bison for his people—should be included among them will be rejected.

Red Cloud said, “God placed these hills here for my wealth.”

Custer said, “One day this land will be worth so much, you won’t be able to buy its dust.”

Sitting Bull said, “I won’t sell even so much of my land as the dust.”

Crazy Horse said, “One does not sell the land on which the people walk.”

Crazy Horse appeared to me many times during the year when I thought my head would break open like an egg and my addled brain slip out onto the pillow, damp from fever dreams. That was the year I was nearly driven insane by terrifying premonitions.

Black Elk said, “I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.”

Red Cloud said, “The white men made us many promises, more than I can remember. But they kept one: They promised to take our land, and they took it.”