the ink. “You do that. I’ll start a list. What else shall I add to it?”
“Well,” said Oliver, “there is the matter of the Klamath women.”
“Meaning what?” Jesse asked.
“Meaning they’ve been going to Fort Klamath, to the army commissary there to get things.”
“How? With what money? And even if they had some, the fort’s commissary’s not open to them. It’s for the military,” Jesse said.
“I leave that to your imagination, dear Uncle. Let’s just say that the enlisted men are a very long way from home.”
“That’s outrageous, Oliver!” Lindsay said.
“But surely, Papa, as agent you are aware of it.”
His father fixed him with a cold look then asked him, “Well, what exactly was it you expected to hear me say about it?”
Chapter 3: Meacham’s Coming
#10
Albert B. Meacham stood up in his stirrups. After you had ridden for six months, you came to regard your destination as something you deserved. Had you not deserved it, you would not have arrived there. Your arrival had been permitted, and for two reasons: first, because you had prayed over it. Second, because you were a part of the Scheme of Things. Awareness of that participation gave you a certain assurance that you found you needed every day. Without it, you would probably, in your loss of heart, join the line of quitters drifting the other way, back in the direction everyone had come from: East.
That was how Albert Meacham looked at it. He was careful to separate this explanation from any predestinarian thought, although he knew it tended dangerously in that direction. So far as he could see, however, his first principle -- that he got because he asked -- was based on a step taken freely by him to initiate the whole process. It was the freedom of that praying that saved him from the predestinarianism implicit in his second principle, the one about the Scheme of Things.
He couldn’t quite get the words to hold still long enough to explain all of this loftiness to himself, at least not in a form readily accessible to others, but he knew what he meant. He meant that he belonged where he was because he had been allowed to come there. No. That smacked of the very predestinarianism he was determined to avoid.
“Phew!” he said. For days now he had been meaning to write this down, so that he could analyze it. But somehow he never found time when he got his feet on the ground. There was too much to do then.
As his horse followed southward toward his first rendezvous with the Klamaths, he let the hours slide past, rehearsing to himself the answers to questions no one ever seemed to ask: What was he doing here? By what right did he allow himself to be appointed to his position? Why should he, instead of some other man, be Superintendent?
He regretted that he had not been schooled in thinking about these things, at least not formally. But he had studied on his own ever since he had been a lad in Iowa. In those days, he would try to ponder such matters as he followed his oxen back and forth across the land, tearing at Time Immemorial’s mat that underlay the waist-high grass. He would read at night and then, practicing his newly enlarged vocabulary and attempting a commanding tone, would declaim during the day to the still-empty prairie and the backsides of his trudging oxen. The oxen would turn their ears toward him as his voice grew louder and more assured. Then, satisfied that what he said did not concern them, they would once again angle their ears forward and plod on.
He knew, as he hauled on the traces to pull the team round, turned his breaker and once again set the long, low moldboard, that he did not want to be a minister. “Hah!” he told the animals, shaking them slack. He must find his rightful place in some other work. For the time being, until he discovered it, he was content to plow on, always preparing not just the soil but himself -- for the eventuality that he felt must come.
Had his parents not followed their consciences north before the war, his father would not have been caught in the financial collapse. Had he not been caught in the collapse, he would have had the cash to send his sons for formal study, perhaps even to university. Had he not been caught in the collapse, he would not have needed the money Albert could raise by hiring out with his oxen. Had Albert been able to go to the university, he would have been instructed in speaking before the public; he would have learned how to reason formally about matters of right and wrong and then present his determinations.
Would have learned, too, about the subtle relationship between man’s intentions and God’s permissions….
The sun was unseasonably hot for an October morning. It sat yellow in the water-clear east Oregon sky. Heated the dust, burned its way through his black clothing. He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket, poured some water from the canteen onto it, and wiped his eyes and brow.
… although he knew a too-narrow reasoning and abandonment of the dictates of the heart were not for him, either, any more than predestinarianism. They belonged to the papists, not to the more homespun -- even wholesome -- Methodism he had been reared up in.
These, and others like them, were the thoughts that followed him.
For several years Albert plowed his way back and forth across Iowa prairie, paying his father’s mortgage. That done, he and Harvey set forth, before it was too late. That was 1850. Still driving the oxen before them, the brothers fell in line with the others, day by day setting their feet in the mud or the dust, as the case might be, of the wide trail that headed west.
Fort Kearny, Scott’s Bluff, Fort Laramie, Register Cliffs, Fort Caspar, Independence Rock….
Eventually they mounted the broad, gentle slope of South Pass. Then onward, again, everything now flowing West. Nine hundred miles behind them. Nine hundred more ahead before they could watch the sun sink into the Pacific.
Now, as he thought back over those names, he figured his entitlement, if he had any, came by way of that litany of places passed -- and because of his not turning back. It was a natural enough thought, one shared by many. No one had gotten to Oregon the easy way. Unless you excepted the Indians.
The Superintendent lifted his hat and combed at his thinning hair, raking it with his fingers across the balding top of his head, working his way around the crown to be sure it was spread as well as could be. He adjusted his six-foot-three frame in the saddle, looking for some position he had not already exhausted. His life now, for the past few weeks, had consisted of just this: mounting Big Dan in the morning, moving him into line behind whoever was guide for the next leg of his journey, then lapsing into his dreams and recollections as the patient horses shuffled down the trail, reins slack, headed for the next reservation. At noon they would stop briefly, then move on toward the lowering sun, the line silent except for the occasional word from the Indian in the lead, the occasional click and stumble when a hoof caught against a rock. It was a time for dreaming -- or philosophizing -- or drifting.
How could he have guessed it was for them, the Indians, that he had harangued his oxen. At the time, he thought it was preparation to speak in the councils of white men. A legislature perhaps. A town meeting. That had happened -- in its way, but now he realized he had really been practicing for this: Big Talks. Telling his Indians what was meant. Not interpreting the ways of God in his heaven to men, but of the Big Tyee in Washington to tribes like
