he added, thinking to name another son. “Don’t leave him out of this. Running for Congress and everything.”
“I don’t think you’ll raise much interest in that homily in Washington, Papa, with a new administration and a new Indian Bureau, and a battle royal going on about who’s going to run these places,” Ivan said.
“Well, that part at least seems settled, thank God!” Lucien said. “At least it won’t be turned over to the army, this agency. Neither will Siletz or Grand Ronde.”
“Not for the moment, you mean,” his uncle Jesse corrected him. “But that’s what I mean about the big broom. It missed Klamath this time….”
“… but maybe not with the next sweep,” Ivan finished for him.
“Missed whom?” Lindsay grumbled.
“Not you. I apologize, father,” Ivan said. But at least we can stay ‘civil service’ for the time. If we play our cards right.”
“If Grant can name Ely Parker -- an Indian -- to head the Bureau, it’s hard to imagine what he won’t do. An Indian who wants the army to take over! Figure that one!” Jesse said.
“To set his house in order,” Lindsay brooded. “So they replace me!”
“They’ll probably take the position that you’re no different from any of the other agents. That you’ve mainly exerted yourself to line your and your family’s pockets with money intended to lure the Indians onto the reservations. That’s what they’ll say if we don’t get down to work here,” Ivan urged.
“Then they’ll have to prove it! Where’s your brother?” Lindsay demanded. “He should have been here an hour ago.”
“He’ll be here, Papa. This meeting was his idea.” Ivan went back to the argument. “They’ll probably say, further, that you’ve allowed the deprivation of at least two tribes in your charge, the Modocs and the Snakes.”
“They’re already saying it. Don’t I know! And all those Indians had to do was conform to a few regulations, just like the Klamaths.”
“They’ll say you’re no better than the agents all up and down the western territory ‘who are withholding goods and services from subject people.’” Ivan looked at his father from under arched eyebrows, then relented. He shrugged. “They’ll probably ask to see your books.”
“Is that before or after they fire me?”
A dark silence settled over the group, each man thinking his own thoughts. Ivan roused himself from the chair at the end of the table and crossed to the window. He drew the curtains aside and stared out to the darkness of the late summer night. The road, still empty, disappeared into the forest beyond the few whitewashed buildings marking out the agency street.
“Maybe Uncle Jesse’s right: we’d better have a look at them -- and set our own house in order,” he said, letting the curtain drop.
“I beg your pardon, young man,” Lindsay responded. “Are you speaking to me as your father or as your superior? You are, I believe, only a Commissary.”
“Yes, and I acknowledge you’re the Agent. But if someone from Washington is going to be requisitioning the records, then maybe we should all look together first.” He turned and studied his father’s face, then added, “This is, I imagine, a scene going on in more than one place, but here it involves all of us.”
“Come along, now, Lindsay,” Jesse said to his brother. “Some say this reservation is a joint-stock company. It’s got ‘Applegate’ written on it from top to bottom. And I won’t have our name pulled through the mud. Wrongly or rightly. I don’t think we’ve got much to fear, but we should look at the records together. This evening. That’s what I came down here for. I don’t want to get keel-hauled over this one the way we were with the road.”
That, of course, settled it. When Jesse made up his mind to the ‘right way,’ nothing could deflect it. At fifty-eight, he was Lindsay’s junior by three years, but there never had been much question about who was the ‘senior partner.’ It had been the same twenty-five years earlier when the idea for the new trail bit him.
Weren’t they short on settlers here in Oregon?, he asked then. Didn’t the territory need them? Wasn’t the land there for the taking? What would set them all up was more commerce. Didn’t Lindsay see the beauty of the idea? With just a little persuasion, he said, the flow of settlers could be turned into Oregon across a new cut-off that would come right up their valley. No need to lose them all to California or wait for them to trickle down from the route up along the Columbia, their wagons abandoned at The Dalles. Where their kin could drown as easily as their two boys had before anyone could get to them.
Jesse had not rested until he had towed Lindsay and fourteen others eastward, out along the old Indian and trapper trails across the Modoc highlands to Goose Lake, over what they now called Fandango Pass and the Warner Mountains through Surprise Valley. Trusting scraps of map he got off of an old explorer, waterless, watching provisions disappear, Jesse captained them over the desolation of Black Rock Desert wilderness, to the place he calculated that season’s westward-headed settlers had to have reached.
With that strange urgency of his, he had hurried along, cajoling and trail-blazing, rushing to be in time to intercept the wagons before they took on the desolation of the Humboldt sink.
“New promised land!” he said waylaying them at last at Fort Hall, clear over in Idaho country. Worn down by the trail, their losses, the emigrants stopped and listened to this man with the pugnacious jaw and desert-crusted face, fearful of what was to come, aware that time was now shifting against them. Maybe his scheme made sense. It was true that you could feel the change in the air, they told each other. No doubt there was more heat coming in the days ahead, but still, something was different: the angle of the light, a new sharpness to the wind. It frightened them, reminded them that they had to hurry. Jaded as they were -- sick, beat, exhausted, tired to death of one another -- there was no time to waste here talking, except that these Applegate men were saying they had a new way, a shortcut. To Oregon. Easier. Quicker. Into new country they had settled that was just waiting to welcome new folks.
Here it was, August. Some of the wagons which had started off from the Missouri in April at the beginning of the season, maybe eighty or one-hundred of them, had already passed this point of intersection. But the rest could turn off here and get, in a shorter time, to a better place. That’s what these brothers, this what’s-his-name was saying.
Indians? Some, but that would be true no matter the direction. The Snakes, really Wahooskin Paiutes. Then there were Achumawi -- Pits, they were called -- there by the pass between Surprise Valley and Goose Lake. Then came the Modocs. Four, five days, a week at most would take the wagons through their country once they had passed Goose Lake, to the range of the Shastas, then up into the valley by the Rogue.
There was this odd eagerness about this ‘Jesse’ -- the way he rushed on -- as if he had thought of everything. They had only to do what he told them.
Adequate water stops almost all along the way, at least after the burnt desert part, the dry stretch. Send a crew of able-bodied men to widen the trail the Applegates had just blazed. Send a party two or three days ahead of the wagons to dig out reservoirs at the springs. Save the Antelope Springs and Rabbit Hole Springs water for the teams. Drive the loose animals on through to Black Rock, where there was hot water aplenty, twenty -- no, a hundred -- acres of green
