“You are my children. I rode here to show you my heart, to see your hearts, to talk with you about your affairs.” He had said that, only days ago, to them. “The time has come when a man is judged by his sense, not his skin. In a few years more the treaty will be dead. Then you must be ready to take care of yourselves.”
That might be. For the present the Snakes must leave the lands they were roaming and follow him, down to the new place being prepared for them at Yainax, on Klamath land. ‘Ready to care for yourselves.’ Did he say that? He thought of the Snake women and doubted they ever could be. Their beautiful beadwork, their decorations, trinkets cut by themselves from bits of tin, glinting from deerskin robes.
Deerskin frocks. In 1869! Deerskin sleeves, fringes. Their needles nothing but pointed bones, their threads sinews of animals. Likewise their children, deer-skin clothes covering their copper-colored bodies. These Snake women pure, chaste, not having known white men. Not like others he had seen.
The squaws carried their entire outfits for housekeeping piled on their backs. While the men rode, or smoked, and talked.
They lived on roots, fish, and grass-hoppers.
They must get ready to live like white people. And they would. He would help them.
It had happened at Grand Ronde; he had seen the results. There was a reservation that worked! In less than twenty years they had been transformed -- from Darwin’s wild beasts almost to civilized manhood. Not two weeks ago when he and Senator Williams visited the mix of tribes that had been swept up together at Grand Ronde out of the rich Willamette Valley, he had witnessed the letter the Indians sent to the President. They wanted little: land surveyed so it could be held in severalty, so each would know what plot was his. Not to be sent an army officer as agent. Continuation for a few more years of workers to teach them the ways of the white man. Above all, not to be moved to another, larger, more remote reservation. “We feel very bad when we are told we will be moved from here and sent to a strange place to live with strangers. Many of our Fathers and Mothers, our brothers and sisters, are buried here; our little boys and girls have grown to be men and women here. We love this land and do not like to leave it. If you intend to move us around and we can have no land of our own, no place we can call home, we might as well be wild and roving through the mountains.”
Now it was the Snakes’ turn to come in and learn to be settled. Notwithstanding the croaking of men who constantly accused United States agents of all kinds of soulless misdemeanors and crimes. And the croaking on the other side, too, he reminded himself, of the shamans, not willing to leave their country. Here were Chief Ocheo and his people, converging with him on Yainax. Even Weahwewa, the war chief, after days of talking, had seemed nearly ready to give in. One day he would. But not them, not the shamans.
He shrugged free of the webs of complexities and tried to think instead of what lay before him that day.
He would tell these people what he intended: first, to settle the financial affairs of the agency.
He thought of the sick man he had seen dragged face downward through embers. Back and forth over the fire. Treatment.
The man had recovered.
… second, to issue such goods as he had provided to him.
And he thought of the seance. “You meet them by the split rock. I see there the tree broke in it. They wait you there where the dead tree throws no shadow. They greet you.”
… third, to greet them for his own chief back in Washington, Ely Parker.
And now, at noon, they had come to it, and he saw the Klamaths. He straightened himself, gave up his thinking, rehearsed instead one last time what he would say to greet them:
… All I have belongs to you. I am ready to hear any and all complaints, settle any and all difficulties, decide any and all varied questions, to tell you about the white people’s laws, customs, habits, religions, &c,
In a word, I propose to remove the barrier that a condition has held between the different stations in life: Civilization may be yours. Manhood is the American standard of worth. The course is clear and open for you, Indian people, and for the whole family of man.
#11
Forty men, at least, had managed to make the trip from the Klamath Agency headquarters to meet up with him and his charges. Many of them had come on foot. But not Captain Knapp; not Meacham’s new agent. Ivan Applegate had made it from the commissary with gifts for the Snakes, and so had this Klamath man, David Allen, a chief to welcome the Snake chiefs. They had settled with him into the Big Talk about Yainax, the new place on the agency that was being prepared for them, about how it was going to be there with the school and the houses and all. The welcoming party had come the distance to meet Meacham, but this Knapp had evidently felt no need to traverse it. Meacham thought about it with irritation now as he mounted the steps to the agent’s house and rapped on the door. He had needed him over at Yainax, and Knapp had not been there.
Now, as he rode into the Klamath agency, the spaciousness of the whole layout surprised him. He had prepared himself for just another scattering of cabins, but here regular streets led off to substantial, well-maintained buildings. Wagons and some pieces of machinery were pulled up trimly on the lee sides of the workshops. In the far distance, two-story structures that must be the dormitories stood white-washed and gleaming against the dark green of the pines. Forest litter had been recently gathered together in neat piles ready for burning. There was a gratifying appearance of order about the place.
He turned and knocked again, aware as he did so that the house had a closed and unused feel about it. He stepped over to peer through a partially opened shutter, half-expecting to discover Knapp coming forward to meet him. Not so, however. The signs of Knapp’s arrival weeks ago still lay about the unlighted room: wicker trunks, satchels, valises that had not yet been unstrapped. In the dim light, the place had the cluttered look of a railroad waiting-room before some long overdue train has pulled in. But the man had been at the agency since the first day of October, and here it was, the beginning of December.
Well, what he did inside his own residence was really none of Meacham’s business. It would be all right just so long as Knapp managed affairs better outside than he seemed to have done inside that living room. But it did seem odd, didn’t it? Where was he? Meacham cupped his hands around his eyes to see deeper into the room.
“Looking for me, I guess, Mr. Superintendent.”
Meacham wheeled to find his agent coming down the walk toward him, a pinched expression on his closed and narrow face. Meacham felt his own cheeks flush, not in chagrin at being caught peering in at a chink of window, but in deep irritation at having been forced to it by the man’s inattention to common hospitality. It was a poor performance after the agent’s failure to meet him, if not on the trail with David Allen and Ivan Applegate, then certainly at the very least at Yainax. It seemed he sent his subordinates as proxies to let Meacham know how things stood.
“You could have gone in,” Knapp said, reaching past him and swinging the door open into the room. “I don’t lock it.”
Meacham had sent word ahead that he expected to stop over with him for the duration of the Big Talk with the Klamaths, but the house showed no sign that Knapp anticipated a visitor, especially not the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the State of Oregon. There
