could tell. Still, none of that changed things.
“Tell him he speaks truth, and I know it,” Meacham said. “Tell him I do not come to say you Modocs are wrong, but to make you an offer instead. I will give to you if you will give me something,” he said to the scar-faced man. “Ask him if he will hear me. And will he say the others, Mr. Knapp and Doctor McKay and Ivan Applegate, can come in to this council? They are like me. They come because they are friends. Bringing peace.”
When the words were translated for him, Keintpoos reached inside his shirt and pulled up a pouch that hung around his neck. He opened it and took out some worn papers. He unfolded one and held it so the light could fall on it, then passed them all over.
“He wants you read these.”
Meacham leaned so that he could make out the writing.
“Read them so all can hear it. He likes what them papers tell.”
“‘Yreka. August 2, 1869,’” Meacham read aloud.
To Superintendent Indian Affairs for Modoc Indians or Whom It May Concern: The bearer, Captain Jack of Modocs, I have known well for many years. He is well disposed towards our citizens, and has been since he has come into power. Is trusty and faithful. He prefers not to sell his land and be forced upon a Reservation as he has seen too much of the workings of those institutions in the past.
It is signed ‘Elijah Steele.’”
Meacham nodded and looked at him. Then he read the others, that all said the same kind of thing. He nodded again then refolded the papers carefully and handed them back.
“Yes,” he said. “‘Trusty and faithful’: I have heard this is true. These men see you right. That is how I see Keintpoos, too.”
The Indian eyed Meacham a moment, measuring him. When he spoke next, it was as if the big wind had gone out of him, replaced by a fatigue too strong to measure.
“He says tomorrow we will see what it is this one has to tell us. Whether what you bring can be new. He says tell you he brings his cousin Toby and her man Frank Riddle here to speak between us. He tells these Modoc women here, ‘Give these people some fish. They are hungry.’ He says, ‘Set them up a place so they sleep.’”
When he understood what had been offered, Meacham held out the tobacco again. No one took it, not Jack, not the others. But when he stretched forth his hand, the Modoc at last grasped it. Provisionally, Meacham could feel, but grasped it nonetheless.
In the morning, he waited in Jack’s house for the Riddles, long past the time they should have been there. Jack, unreadable, also waited. And so did his people. They crowded together into the big room dug into the earth, faces vaguely lit by the smoldering fire and the little light that came in the apex of the conical roof that was both smokehole and entrance. No look of Jack’s said he was impatient. He sat with his men as if someone but he was the cause of this, as if he would not rush into this business they were met to transact that day. Meacham knew these people who were coming at Jack’s bidding. They were among those few whose facility with languages was a saleable item here when the races had to meet. They had worked for him up at Yainax and Klamath. Frank Riddle, Meacham reasoned, was a man by nature given to weakness, but he was a useful translator in negotiations with the Indians. Toby -- Mrs. Riddle, he corrected himself -- Jack’s cousin. She brought something special: She was trusted by the Indians. Meacham recalled the first day he had met her, along the trail on Yainax Butte. They had gone to meet with some others. Ramrod straight, square-shouldered, she was. She had never, by the slightest gesture, indicated fatigue or regret as she worked with him that day to make his explanations. She straddled her horse like a man, her long braids neatly nipped up with ribbons, the woven Modoc basket hat set straight on her head. She did not resemble his Orpha, but she put him in mind of her. His thinner, less stalwart wife might look frailer, but he knew her to be as solid as this Toby woman. Their spirits were the same. They endured. At least he thought so, though he would have had trouble explaining to Orpha just what he saw that paired them. On the one hand, there was his Christian wife, the mother of his children, pure to the heart of her, never one to set tongues wagging or to cause him a moment’s shame. On the other, here was this Toby, full Modoc, with unabashed, snapping eyes that looked straight at the world, purchased by the man who rode next to her.
Her husband, the ‘squaw-man.’ Wasn’t he one of Meacham’s first proofs that the reservations could be redeemed, even become forces for the good? This Frank Riddle was like a lot of other white men who had wandered west, beyond the circle of white women, and taken the easy road. Made rough by the frontier, if they had ever been anything different, they bought or bartered for the comfort they had not managed to attract in Chicago or New York. It had been twelve year old Toby, where Riddle was concerned. These two had been living together six years when Meacham met them, had borne a son, a ‘shame-child,’ some would have it, since Toby was just the man’s property. The bright-eyed, pesky Toby. Traded off for two horses, sold by her Modoc father.
When Meacham declared there were no longer to be unmarried white men and Indian women living together on any reservation under his jurisdiction, he had tried to present it in something other than an Old Testament, Bible-thumping fashion, even though he thought that way was right. He had tried, too, to come down from the administrative heights of the Superintendency to explain it, even though he could simply decree it and be finished. He had put it, instead, in terms of the times. He said buying women, for a little while or a lifetime, was nothing but slavery. It mattered nothing when they called it ‘bride price.’ It could not be tolerated since the Constitution had been amended to disallow owning another person, could not be borne in a country so dedicated to freedom that citizens had just fought a war about it. Frank Riddle had not been persuaded by those arguments, nor had his comrades who were similarly of the Confederate persuasion. But the rule was holding, and the marriages were abounding, to Meacham’s great satisfaction. Here was progress he could count!
Ever since his proclamation, Toby had kept an eye out for Meacham. He had made things right by her, by her boy Jeff. When Meacham showed up at the Klamath Agency and she met him, she thanked him, said she would do it in her heart every time Frank started up in English to call her his ‘woman’ and instead ended up calling her his ‘wife.’
She was powerful with her people, and Meacham admired her. Still, he couldn’t let Jack use her lateness for an excuse to dawdle and thereby defuse things. Meacham needed to seize the moment.
“I came here yesterday to talk to these people,” he said, rising to his feet before those assembled to listen in Jack’s house. “I put it off till today for fear of misunderstanding. Captain Jack promised to furnish an interpreter. I can not and will not wait on his movements. I am here now, ready to talk to these people and tell them what I come for. My heart is good and my mission is peace. I learn by the papers in my office that Captain Jack and his people made a treaty about five years ago.”
As he had last night, the scar-faced fellow struggled with the translation. It was going to be slow going.
“When I read that paper I found that the head men of this nation sold all their lands to the United States and agreed to obey the laws of the Government.”
#20
He knew that would be what this Boston tyee was thinking about. He knew it before it was out of his mouth. But a commotion up at the roof-hole stopped the Meacham and told Keintpoos that his cousin was coming. He heard her standing on the top of the ladder,
