Michener, James A. (144 page)

guests with a flow of Southern charm, never mentioning her past in Georgia. She was now a Texas woman, had been since that November day in 1849 when she pulled up stakes in Social Circle and headed west. She was one of the most attractive and clever women Texas had produced, for this state had a saucy trick of borrowing able women from Tennessee and Alabama and Mississippi and making them just a little better than they would otherwise have been.

At the end of four months, every senator knew Mrs. Cobb; after five months, Cobb found himself on three major committees, in obedience to the principle stated so often by his wife in her arguments with his colleagues: 'You're goin' to have to admit us Southrons sooner or later. Why not give the good ones like my husband a head start?'

On the night before summer recess started, the Cobbs gave a small dinner to which the President and Senators Sherman and Logan were invited. When cigars were passed, Petty Prue excused herself shyly: i know you gentlemen have affairs to discuss which I'd not be able to follow,' and off she traipsed, but not before smiling at each of the national leaders as she passed his chair. When she was gone, Grant said: 'The South could not have sent to Washington a better representative than your wife, Cobb,' and dour Sherman observed: 'Damn shame she didn't bring a Republican with her.' Grant laughed and took Somerset by the arm and said: 'He's even better than a Republican. He's an American.' And in this way the wounds of that fratricidal war between the sections were finally healed.

Sometimes in the early morning when Emma Rusk looked across the plains she loved, she could not escape feeling that the West she had known was dying: Every move Earnshaw makes to improve his village condemns my wilderness. She had been sorely perplexed during these past weeks when a Mr. Simpson, who had served as sutler to the army when it occupied the fort, came to her husband and said: 'Mr. Rusk, I'd like to have that company barracks. Can't pay you anything now, but if the store I plan to open makes money, and I'm sure it will . . .'

Mr. Simpson had taken the building, put in a row of shelves and filled them with goods purchased in Jacksborough. He proved to be a congenial man who understood both groceries and housewives, and before that first week was out he had begun to collect customers from a distance, and by the end of the third week he was reordering supplies. Fort Garner had its first store.

But an event which moved Emma most deeply began on 21

June 1879, the longest day, and it caused her abiding grief. At about nine in the morning John Jaxifer galloped in: 'Comanche attacking from the north!'

Since Jaxifer had served in the 10th Cavalry, Emma and Earnshaw had to think that he knew what he was saying, and when they ran out to look, they saw that the warriors were once more on the warpath. In profound consternation Emma cried. 'Have they come for me?'

Rusk, who hated guns and had never learned to use one, felt that he must protect his community, so he ran to the kitchen, grabbed an old washbasin, and started beating it to attract his neighbors. Within a few minutes Frank Yeager arrived, with his wife appearing a few minutes later laden with three rifles. The other black cavalryman had been working on foot, and he ran in with his gun. If the Indians proposed to attack Fort Garner, they were going to face gunfire.

They did not seek war, and when they approached making signs of peace and calling out words of assurance, the Rusks, who knew their language, shouted: 'No firing.' In the pause the Fort Garner people saw that this war party consisted of one old chief attended by fourteen braves, not one of them as much as fourteen years old. Three could not yet be six. The old chief was Wading Bird, named seventy years before for an avocet who visited a pond near his mother's tepee, and when Emma recognized him she whispered his name to instruct her husband.

'Wading Bird!' Earnshaw cried in Comanche. 'What news?'

'To see Great Chief Rusk.' Earnshaw had instructed his Indians not to call him by this title, explaining to them that the true Great Chief was in Washington, but they had persisted in calling him so, because it reassured them that he could grant their petitions.

'What does thee seek?' Rusk asked, repeating the phrase he had used so often in his contacts with them, and as he said the familiar words a kind of joy possessed him: he was again the eager young man in command at Camp Hope and these were the wise chiefs and promising young braves he had been certain he could pacify; it was June again and there was hope both in the camp of that name and in his heart; but when he looked away from the old chief he saw that his wife was trembling, and the day returned to the present.

'What does thee seek?' he asked again, this time as a wary trader, not as a poet.

'A buffalo, Great Chief Rusk.'

'We have no buffalo.'

'Yes. Up where the stream ends,' and the old man pointed north toward the tank.

'Have we any buffalo?' Rusk asked, and Yeager said: 'An old one comes wandering in, now and then.'

'He's up there,' Wading Bird said.

'What does thee want with him?' Rusk asked, and the old man gave an anguished explanation which left both Earnshaw and his wife close to tears:

'Not many days are left, not many buffalo roam the plains. All is forgotten You and 1 grow older, Great Chief Rusk, and death creeps ever closer to us.

'The young ones of few summers, they have never known our old ways. The hunt. The chase. The look of the buffalo when you are close upon him. The pounding of the hoofs. The cries. The ecstasy. The hot blood on the hands.

'Great Chief Rusk, you have the buffalo. 1 have the young men who need to remember. Grant us permission to hunt your buffalo as we used to hunt. At Camp Hope you always tried to understand us. Understand us now.'

Rusk looked at the fourteen boys and asked them in Comanche: 'How many have seen a buffalo?' and less than half indicated that they had. He then consulted with Frank Yeager, who grudgingly conceded that with most of the ranch longhorns in the southern reaches, little trouble could ensue if the Indians hunted a buffalo up by the tank, so permission was granted, and the people in the stone houses watched as Chief Wading Bird arranged his braves for the chase.

He placed his two oldest boys in the lead, and he took position at the rear with the three youngest children, who bestrode their ponies with skill. When the formation was ready, he cried exhortations in Comanche, waved his arms, and pointed north toward the tank. With high-pitched cries the young braves set forth.

The two Rusks, Yeager and Jaxifer followed at a respectable distance, and after about an hour the cavalryman cried: 'They see it!' And there, at a lonely spot where the range tailed off toward the Red River, the Comanche came upon their ancient prey.

With a cry they had learned but had never before used, two boys in the lead urged their companions on, and the chase-was joined. Earnshaw, watching this strange performance, had the fleeting thought that perhaps the lone buffalo understood his role in this ancient ritual, understood that this was his last chase, too, for he

darted this way and that, over lands which had once contained millions of his fellows, throwing the unskilled riders into gullies from which their old chief had difficulty extricating them.

But at last their persistent nagging at his heels wore him down, and the great head lowered as if he were preparing to fight off the wolves he had resisted in his earlier days, and his feet grew heavy, and his breath came in painful gasps.

In these climactic moments of the last hunt, Emma felt a wild urge to spur her horse forward and drive the Indian boys away from the old monarch of her plains. 'Let him live!' she shouted to the wind, but no one heard, and she watched with pain as the little lads on their little ponies encircled the buffalo while the old man shouted encouragement from his post of guidance, and at midaf-ternoon on that hot June day the young Comanche killed the last buffalo in the vicinity of Fort Garner. They did it ceremoniously, as in the old days when no rations were issued at the Indian post, those old days when the Comanche lived and died with the buffalo, prospering when it prospered, starving when it retreated beyond their grasp.

By no means did that final hunt of 1879 end in solemn ritual, for after the great beast had been slain and his liver cut out for the lads to eat, Chief Wading Bird rode back to the fort, ostensibly to thank his former protector. But when he appeared, Emma suspected that his visit involved not Earnshaw but her, and she was right, because when the boys had tethered their horses he bade them run off, leaving him to talk alone with the Rusks.

'Great Chief, Little Woman who used to live with us, I seek words, important words.'

'Sit with us,' Rusk said, unaware that his wife was trembling.

She had cause, for when the three were seated on the porch of the house which had once been the Wetzels', Wading Bird said: 'I have brought your son.'

At first Earnshaw did not comprehend, but when Wading Bird repeated the words, pointing directly at Emma, he realized that the true purpose of this foray south was not only to hunt buffalo in the old manner, but also to deliver the son of Little Woman to his mother. His impulsive response, the one he could not have stifled had he wished, was one of generous acceptance: 'Wading Bird! He will be welcomed in our home. And he will have a little brother, who now sleeps inside.'

But Emma spoke otherwise: 'I do not want him. Those days are lost. It is all no more.'

The two men stared at her, a mother rejecting her own son. To

Wading Bird the experiences which Emma had suffered were an expected part of life, the treatment accorded all prisoners. He could think of a dozen captured women from his warrior days— Mexicans, Apache, many whites—and when, after initial punishments, they had borne children, they had loved them as mothers should and helped them to become honorable braves. It was the Comanche way of life, and now Little Woman was being offered her son, and she was refusing him. It passed comprehension.

Nor could her husband understand. He had seen her joy when she was pregnant with their son and daily witnessed her extraordinary love for young Floyd. Because of her own tormented childhood, she had lavished unusual care on Floyd and would presumably continue to do so. As for her Indian son, Earnshaw had often speculated on where the boy was and what he might be doing. Now he learned that the boy was here, at Fort Garner, on a horse, his lips rich with buffalo liver as in the old days, and he believed that if Emma could see him, she would want to keep him.

'Fetch the lad,' he told Wading Bird, but at this suggestion Emma gave a loud wail: 'No!'

Still believing that sight of the boy would melt her heart, he dispatched the eager chief, who summoned Emma's son. Blue Cloud was eight years old, a fine-looking fellow, somewhat tall for his age, eager, bright-eyed. 'Does he look like his father?' Earnshaw asked with the Quaker simplicity which stunned those around him.

Coldly, staring right at the boy, she said: 'His father could have been one of twenty.' Then she repeated: 'Those days are lost. Take him away.'

'Emma! For the love of God, this child is thy son.'

'It is ended,' she said.

When the two men tried to dissuade her, she pulled the hair away from her ears and ripped off her wooden nose. Thrusting her face close to her son's, she cried: 'Remember me as your people made me.' And she held her face close to his until he turned away.

Wading Bird took the boy by the hand and led him back to his companions. Sadly he mounted his horse, sadly he waved to the Rusks. Earnshaw, standing at the edge of the parade ground, nodded as the Comanche departed, the last he would ever see. With their broken promises they had broken his heart, and brought him to disgrace because of the love he held for them. He had hoped, during the interview with the boy, that this lad might be the agency through which he could regain contact with the Indians, but it was not to be, for when he sought Emma he found her in a corner, as in the days of her captivity, shivering. If there had been sunlit days on the plains which she wished to remember,

there were ugly, dark ones she must forget, and when memories of these came surging back, she felt thankful for the refuge her husband's village now provided.

Earnshaw's struggle to establish Fort Garner as a viable community still hinged upon that problem which assailed all the little Western settlements: 'How can we earn enough income to support a thousand people?' Normal farming was impossible; land even fifty yards back from a stream would be so arid that it could not be tilled. Lumbering was not feasible, for the grassland provided no trees. There were no minerals, and the village could not focus upon transportation, for there was none except for the rickety stage that ran spasmodically to Jacksborough. For the time being it seemed that only the ranging longhorns would provide any cash.

With some humility, Earnshaw confessed: it may be thy longhorns, Emma, which will save Larkin,' and once he conceded this, he began to take professional interest in the scientific breeding of his wife's ranch stock, even going so far as to purchase from England two good bulls of a different breed.

If numbers alone determined which facts in history would become legendary, the relatively few Texas cowboys who herded their cattle up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene, or up the Great Western to Dodge City, or along the Goodnight-Loving to Colorado, would not qualify. For if you totaled all the cattle these men tended in a decade, you would find that they had accounted for not much more than twenty or twenty-five percent of the cattle produced in America; the vast bulk was bred and marketed east of the Mississippi. But what Texas lacked in quantity it made up for in the dramatic quality of its longhorns and in men like R. J. Poteet who herded them.

Stay-at-homes like Earnshaw Rusk, who never rode a cattle trail, also shared responsibility for the Texas legend, because they saw that if Texas beef was to be competitive with the better beef being produced in the East, a more rewarding breed than the longhorn must be developed. But when these far-seeing men tried to introduce improved bulls onto their ranches, they were greeted with scorn. Even a rational man like Poteet warned: The only cattle that can stand those long drives north are Texas cattle, and that will always mean the longhorn.'