to stay put, that everything was all right, then turned once more to Black Jim.
“Tell Jack he needs to talk to Meacham. He’s your friend. Let him set things right.”
“You talk to him on paper, Jack says.”
“Maybe I will,” Jesse said, “if Jack’s good for ten days. I’ll look and see, if he’ll promise that.”
Then it was Black Jim, talking for himself: “Captain Jack just did what he did for Compotwas Doctor killing one of his family children. He only supposed be on reservation cause Old Schonchin made that new treaty. Then he took all the good from it for his own people, and the Klamaths -- you know how they done us. They got everything from the agent for their selves. That was your family, wasn’t it? Then they shamed us.”
The Indian, who had seemed truly embarrassed at their mistaking Jesse for some newcomer, had started out by wheedling. But now, as he rehearsed the wrongs done to them, his anger suddenly surfaced and his face and voice hardened.
“Right now we got no homes, no country. The settlers pushing aside our wikiups. Building the white man’s houses where the wikiups was. And now here come the brass buttons to chase us into the mountains. There ain’t no roots there, no fish like here or at Lost River. Our hungry women hiding out and all the time, afraid from the soldiers. And we men go this way and that. We don’t know when them soldiers going to jump us. No good like this.
He paused and thought about what he had just said.
“We got no reason not to die, Mr. Applegate!”
Jesse watched as Jim turned to tell Captain Jack what he had said. The chief nodded his agreement, then looked directly at the white man.
“Meacham,” Jack said for himself. “Meacham. You write. Him. Paper. Meacham come see Jack.”
“I said I’ll write him. That’s a promise. Tell Jack I give my word. Long as he promises, too: ten days, be good. I’ll watch. But Meacham already is your friend, so you should mind him.”
The look that spread across Jack’s face was full of disdainful remembering. Jesse, seeing it, rushed on to prove he was right: “Tell Jack that Meacham talked to me about it. He wants to get you people a reservation, there where you been living. It wouldn’t be a big one, like the Klamath’s, but he’s asking for it already. He already got me to draw up a picture of it on a paper, so he could send it to the Great Father in Washington to decide. For the Modocs.”
As Black Jim translated, Jack took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He sat there astride his pony, expressionless, listening. When he spoke, it was hard to hear him.
“He say,” Jim repeated, “that’s what he wants. A little reservation there by lake and river, where we always been. He say the Bostons can have all the rest. He says our boys could work for settlers and herd up their animals. They could buy shirts then and blankets. Our old men and women could sit then in their own places in peace.”
As Black Jim finished, Jack spoke to him again.
“He says he want Meacham and one other to see about this. He wants you to do this with Meacham. You two the only ones. He wants to honor you old man around here, like chief.”
#74
The ten days well past, when he got back to Ashland Mills, Jesse sat down with the ink bottle and paper. What had seemed so easy on the trail over to the ranch the other day, in the simple sunlight above Clear Lake, when it was just him face to face with some other men, with none of the complications -- that easy thing now looked too simple. But he had given his word, and so he wrote to Meacham. He hewed as closely as he could to the facts of that meeting: the mistaken encounter, Jack’s embarrassment, Black Jim’s angry eloquence. The joy he knew Jack felt when he heard about the reservation. Jesse had promised to write, and he did.
But he remembered, too, another thing, and that stopped him. Carr. The day of the map-making. Carr had winded him with his audacious vision of land possession. Jesse Applegate had tried, to no avail, to tell him the land Carr wanted by Tule Lake was now taken by settlers, much of it; more every day. But he had also told him about Meacham’s plans for a Lost River reservation for Jack.
“That shouldn’t interfere with your plans,” Jesse Applegate had hurried to say. “Even if you did take everything in up to Lost River, you still wouldn’t touch his camp. He’s over on the other bank. Besides, they won’t give you any trouble.”
Jesse Carr had stared at him as if he had lost hold of his senses.
“Of course they will!” Jesse Carr had snapped. “They’re a nuisance. Besides, didn’t you tell me they range clear on east of this ranch?”
“I did. They summer over there by Cottonwood Creek. And they go just north of us to fish.”
“Well, I don’t want them doing it. You don’t understand these things, Applegate. If you’re going to develop land, you have to be sure it’s attractive. It’s value depends entirely on that. No Indians. Once we start moving on this, I want them out of the way. Locked in where they can’t bother us. That or permanently disposed of.”
He had thought Jesse Carr was wrong-headed, but he couldn’t argue with him about everything. Jesse Applegate had swallowed hard and allowed himself to be instructed. After all, Carr had the money; he didn’t.
That was before this killing business. And before the other day’s encounter. He hated to admit it, but maybe Jesse Carr was right. There was an arrogance in that bunch of Indians, and it spelled trouble. One thing was certain: Carr wouldn’t have changed his mind about them.
He turned back to the letter, looking for the arguments Carr would make, adding his own ideas to them.
The reservation Jack wanted and Meacham proposed would never satisfy the whites. They “required absolute removal or strict confinement in particular limits,” he wrote. That would never work for a small reservation close to white settlements. Other Indians from other reservations would defect and come there. It would be too expensive to pay another agent. The place would “become the resort and refuge of every vicious and vagabond Indian.” It would be nothing but a nuisance to the settlers…. a critical situation… . prompt attention. … There were the horrors of war to consider, however, if an unsuccessful military operation were launched. They should fear, too, some imprudent settler’s action setting it off “before even so small a band as that of Captain Jack is brought into subjection or exterminated.”
Jesse sat staring at what he had written, justifying to himself what he had put down. He had kept his word to Jack, hadn’t he? He had written, as he said he would, about the meeting, and what he wrote about it was the truth. It just wasn’t all he had to say in the letter. What he had to say in the second part, about the dangers of going forward with Jack’s Lost River home, was as true as what he reported in the first. Times were changing now: that was only truth worth remembering any more. And with them so must change his positions. It was not disingenuousness on his part; he was just keeping abreast of the times.
He had to close, and let the letter do what it would. He finished hastily, not wanting to think further about how the two truths should play out, one against the other. He had family interests to consider. And he
