The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West
Read The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West Online
Authors: Andrew R. Graybill
Tags: #History, #Native American, #United States, #19th Century
THE RED
and
THE WHITE
A Family Saga of the
American West
ANDREW R. GRAYBILL
L
IVERIGHT
P
UBLISHING
C
ORPORATION
A D
IVISION OF
W. W. N
ORTON
& C
OMPANY
New York London
For my wife, Jennifer,
and especially our children,
Fiona and Gavin
You will never know how much, unless and until …
“… you will mix with us by marriage,
your blood will run in our veins,
and will spread with us over this great island.”
—Thomas Jefferson to Indian correspondents, 1808
Contents
3.The Man Who Stands Alone with His Gun
T
his book is the fruit of what seemed at first a dispiriting afternoon in June 2006. I had spent several weeks that summer in Helena at the Montana Historical Society investigating the Cypress Hills Massacre, an obscure yet notorious 1873 event in which a mixed group of American and Canadian wolf hunters butchered nearly two dozen Assiniboine Indians in southern Alberta.
1
That slaughter, I believed, could help explain why the U.S.–Canada border became more rigid ever after.
Sometime around the middle of my stay in Montana, however, I grew bored with this story—never a good sign in the early going of a new project—and so one day I decided to step away from my research and see what other collections the MHS might hold. After all, I had long heard the society’s archives described in rapturous terms by colleagues who insisted that it was among the best repositories west of the Mississippi.
In choosing where to look first, I thought immediately of James Welch’s masterpiece,
Fools Crow
, a historical novel about a small band of Blackfeet Indians in Montana experiencing the invasion of their country by white newcomers during the late 1860s. I had just taught the book in a course on the North American West at the University of Nebraska, and my students had admired it greatly, just as I had when first reading it nearly a decade before. I still consider it the best tool for capturing the perspective of native peoples themselves during the so-called Indian Wars of the Reconstruction era.
One of the incidents upon which the novel hinges is the killing of a character named Malcolm Clarke, a white fur trader married to a Piegan Blackfeet woman; his sensational murder—at his ranch, as his family looked on—sets in motion a series of tragic events culminating in the Marias (or Baker) Massacre of 23 January 1870.
2
Though largely forgotten now, much like the brutal episode in the Cypress Hills, the slaughter was enormously controversial at the time, because of the high number of Indian deaths and the fact that many of the victims were suffering from smallpox, thus utterly defenseless against the bitter cold as well as the bullets of the Second U.S. Cavalry. Given these circumstances, the Marias Massacre easily belongs in any conversation about the worst atrocities committed by American military forces against native peoples, from Sand Creek in 1864 to Wounded Knee in 1890.
With memories of
Fools Crow
still resonant, I resolved to find out whether Malcolm Clarke had actually existed or whether Welch had invented him as a literary device to move the story along. A brief search of the library’s online catalog turned up a microfilm reel, and with help from an MHS staff member I soon located a vertical file as well, both containing tantalizing biographical information about Clarke.
Malcolm Clarke was indeed a real person, and his murder was precisely the watershed event Welch described.
*
But Clarke was even more important than
Fools Crow
led me to believe. As I quickly ascertained, Clarke was one of the earliest and most consequential white pioneers in Montana, having arrived on the Upper Missouri around 1840, just as the fur trade in Montana entered its heyday. His killing was so significant that I found an abundance of historical accounts that touched on the event, including newspaper articles that recalled the murder many decades later and described its lasting repercussions. Clarke’s descendants had also been quite prominent, and their stories and secrets were housed at the MHS, too. By the close of that summer day, I had abandoned my work on the Cypress Hills Massacre and have been preoccupied—maybe even a little obsessed—with the Clarkes ever since.
Still, the timing of my discovery was ironic. I had been looking for the Clarkes—or, rather, any racially blended family like them—for more than two years, but just a few months earlier had abandoned the investigation. Previously, I had become keenly interested in nineteenth-century North Americans of mixed ancestry while researching my first book, in which I encountered the Métis, individuals in the U.S.–Canada borderlands who were eventually recognized by the Canadian government as a separate indigenous group, neither red nor white but a distinct people in between.
Though similar people had, of course, lived in the United States, especially in places where the fur trade had flourished, they remained largely invisible in the archival record (and thus in the relevant secondary literature) because of the binary U.S racial formulation that classifies such persons as either white or Indian. Despite the paucity of historical documentation, I wondered how these mixed-race peoples had navigated their incorporation into the United States as the nation absorbed the trans-Mississippi West—their last redoubt—in the years following the Civil War. But in time I grew frustrated by the relative absence of source material and moved on to other book ideas. Then I found the Clarkes that afternoon in Helena.
3
Having discovered them, however, I was surprised that they did not conform to my expectations about peoples of mixed ancestry. This was perhaps because of my passing familiarity with the life of George Bent (1843–1918), one of the best-known mixed-blood individuals of the nineteenth century. Like the children born to Malcolm Clarke and his Blackfeet wife, Coth-co-co-na, Bent had a mother who was Indian (a Cheyenne named Owl Woman) and a father who was a prominent white trader (William Bent). George led a remarkable life, serving in the Confederate army and surviving the murderous work of the Colorado militia at Sand Creek, an event that left him embittered with white Americans. Although in later years he worked closely with Anglo scholars like George Bird Grinnell to record the history of his mother’s people, Bent felt like an alien, stranded uncomfortably between these two worlds—one red, one white—for the rest of his days, retreating into alcoholism before dying penniless in the Spanish influenza pandemic near the close of World War I.
4
Given the despairing arc of George Bent’s life, I imagined that the Clarkes—especially in their later generations—would have similarly tragic stories, and assumed that their lives would reveal the same social dislocations and pathologies that Bent and his kin struggled to overcome. To be sure, the Clarkes suffered their share of pain and calamity. And yet in the course of my research I found that race was not necessarily the intractable issue for the Clarkes that it had been for George Bent, or especially his younger brother Charles, who, following the Sand Creek Massacre, renounced his Anglo heritage and plundered whites with other Cheyennes until he was killed by Kaw government scouts in 1867, when he was just twenty-two.
5
While the tale of the Bents could have served as inspiration for one of the novelist Cormac McCarthy’s darker tales, this was not the case with the Clarkes. In fact, race was the very attribute that gained one family member a job with the U.S. Indian Service, and it was the source of creative inspiration that helped another achieve enduring artistic fame. Moreover, at different moments, other variables—gender, economic status, disability—proved much more important in shaping their personal choices and possibilities.
The Clarkes thus offer a rich historical lens through which to view the shifting grounds of race in the West and the wider nation during the mid-nineteenth century. They are also ideal in another sense: their individual stories are enormously compelling, for both the historian and the general reader. This book is built around five extraordinary members of the family, drawn from three generations.
6
The narrative begins with the wedding of Coth-co-co-na and Malcolm Clarke in 1844, explaining how a marriage that seems so unusual to us—between the teenaged daughter of a prominent Indian warrior and a white American nearly a decade her senior—was actually quite common on the Upper Missouri. This chapter is thus a story about the fur trade, in part, but also about the incorporation of the trans-Mississippi West into the political and economic fabric of the United States in the first decades of the nineteenth century.
Clarke, who like so many young men of the time had come west in search of adventure and wealth, is the subject of chapter 2. Through a combination of cunning, ability, and perseverance, he achieved levels of wealth and prominence that eluded all but the most successful fur traders, which—along with his personal courage—earned him lasting fame among white residents of the territory. And yet Clarke, who as a youth was expelled from West Point for fighting, never fully tamed his quick temper or his penchant for aggression. Bloodshed thus ran through his life like a crimson thread, from killings he committed to the violence that led to his own death at the age of fifty-two.
This multigenerational family story continues with Horace and Helen Clarke, two of the four children born to Malcolm and Coth-co-co-na. Both struggled to find their places in Montana after their father’s slaying and the Marias Massacre. Though nursing a deep antipathy to the Piegans because of his father’s murder, Horace lived among them in the years after 1870, marrying a full-blooded Indian woman named Margaret First Kill and establishing a homestead and small ranch in the northern Montana hamlet of Midvale, later renamed East Glacier Park. He moved fluidly between white and native society, defending reservation-bound Piegans against rapacious Indian agents and serving as an occasional intermediary on behalf of the federal government. In the early twentieth century Horace sold a sizable portion of his land to the Great Northern Railway, which then built the luxurious Glacier Park Lodge and golf resort, still in operation today.