him off to the Stockade.
Here is where I will end my tale of Wi-jun-jon in my book for his death shows the imprudence of actually telling all you know, but I will tell the tale to the end for you, W.O., so that I am relieved of its burden.
I was among the Minnetaree when I heard of the death of the “traveled Indian.” I set forth, at once, by canoe. I had grown fond of Wi-jun-jon during the trip from St. Louis. I had often thought of him in his newfangled duds whistling “Yankee Doodle” and the “Washington Grand March.” I arrived in his village three days after his corpse had been tightly wrapped and put on its platform—such is the Sioux tradition—corpses remain elevated until they have decomposed and are suitable for burial. There were many people and much silence and much looking at Wi-jun-jon’s platform. I sought an audience with his brother or his squaw to pay my respects, but their grief was too great to permit visitors. I resolved to spend the night there and perhaps present the family with my sketches on the morrow.
I ate with Baptiste Vian, a Métis fur trader. We sat quietly telling each other our exploits and other lies. The campfires were ill-fed, and for the most part the Indians sat silently. A rattling sound came from Wi-jun-jon’s sky grave and a medicine man walked from there to the center of the camp. He took a long draw on his pipe and exhaled a streamer of smoke in each of the cardinal directions, then to the zenith and the nadir. Someone else walked from the grave poles; although it was too dark to see his features. This person sat where the medicine man had stood, and for a long time there was total silence and a mood like those evoked in the volume of poetry recently published by Mr. Poe. Then the whisper began. A hoarse voice began to tell of the wonders of an Indian newspaper. I knew that the Cherokee Sequoyah had developed an alphabet for his people, and that four years ago there had indeed been a Cherokee newspaper. The voice continued, on how as he went down river to Mississippi the Talking Leaves was the only source of news. To learn of the world they had to learn Cherokee and that the paper was prospering under the editorship of Sequoyah’s son Tsu-sa-le-tah. The voice continued (as I continued to try and make out the speaker) on the wonder of a newspaper, how it unified and ordered the world by bringing away news from far places. At Vicksburg someone translated an issue for him. He heard how the Creek-American War had been ended by the treaty of Horseshoe Bend. Furthermore he had heard of the development of a calculating machine Babbage’s Analytical Engine, which promised to speed up and perhaps transform the calculating business.
The whole of the night we listened to such whispers. Then just before the light of false dawn, the whisper rose and walked toward the grave poles. By this time it was completely dark, for the voice had insisted the campfires should burn out, and the moon was new. The medicine man censed the air and everyone fell asleep on the ground where they lay.
I awakened about noon. I hoped to discover who had brought about this ghastly imposture. I nudged Baptiste.
“Ben morning, Monsieur Cataline. What a night, eh?”
“You know the voices of these people, Ba’tiste. Who perpetrated this hoax?”
“Why do you say hoax, Monsieur Cataline? Did you not hear the Pi-jonse-ec-head’s parle last night?”
“I heard the voice of someone pretending to be Pigeon’s Egg Head, but what he told were lies. I can’t imagine Menewa and Andrew Jackson sitting down for a treaty.”
“Of course it is lie, Monsieur Cataline. It is a wonderful lie—a bon motte—that a dead man should lie that he is alive is the most sacree lie of all.”
“But you don’t think—”
“I tell, Monsieur Cataline. My father’s people say they worship the God of truth and love so they lie and kill. My mother’s people don’t even have a word for lying. So I don’t think too much. If I think in French I have to lie. If I think in Crow I cannot even have heard what I heard. And if I think in English I think of teaching a great man to whistle ‘Yankee Doodle’.” Baptiste wagged his head in disgust.
Baptiste returned to sleep. I prowled about the village. There were some scraps of winding cloth on the grave poles, but this could be a tribute to the thoroughness of the hoaxters. I hoped the hoaxters were not agents of the American Fur Company.
And I thought about the lies. This hope was a bad thing. I abandoned hope. When I studied the law I had hope. I dreamed of a kind of Eden, which we could return to. Once we got the facts right in a case we could return things to their original state. With enough facts we could go back to the garden. Then I practiced law and my hopes diminished. I defended petty thieves accused by pettier merchants. I tore apart families by settling wills written by men grown cruel with their familiarity with death. I helped fat smelly bankers deny the possibility of homesteads to honest men. And the judges I argued before were stupid lecherous men whose tiny knowledge of the law was only slightly greater than their capacity for fairness, and both of these qualities required a hand lens to observe. At first I thought these cases were freaks, sports, accidents; but as I came to know my fellow man I saw that these ugly creatures would never find their way to any paradise—that their mere presence would end any paradise they walked into.
I began to sketch their greedy faces. I have never told you—and perhaps there is imprudence in making such an admission to my publisher—that I have never received a day’s instruction in art. I learned to sketch in the courtroom. From sketches to paintings and with these paintings of ugly venal men to the death of hope. I made a huge bonfire of the studies and I lit out for the prairies.
W.O., I do not think of the Red man as some sort of Nobel Savage. But they are of a different culture and that wall between us helps me from seeing their ugliness.
I wouldn’t let a hoaxter create such lies. These people would have their hopes crushed soon enough. Soon the whites would come and they would be in a world they couldn’t ever run from. I resolved to shoot the hoaxter so I traveled to the Fort to purchase a gun.
I have never needed a gun while traveling among these people. One night while staying with a Piegan chief I asked him if it was safe. And he said it was safe—there were no white men in two days ride.
Night came. Many were hungry for the village was overfull, but none were willing to miss out on the lying medicine. I shared out such supplies as I had brought with me and concealed my pistol beneath a blanket. The medicine created sacred space with six streamers of tobacco smoke. Then the shadowed one came. It was even darker this night for no campfires had been lit. I rested my hand on cold steel.
The voice began by telling of the submarine, a steel ship which could sink to the bottom of the sea, an invention of Mr. Fulton, the steamship man. It terrified many white men to see the depths with sparkling corals and fish big as tipis and underwater volcanoes—so Fulton had crewed his ship with Mohawks, who aren’t afraid of anything. The Navy now had several of these ships each with a Mohawk crew with a Mohawk medicine man as chaplain, wearing a blue coat such as he had worn on his return. He had ridden in one of these vessels from the Potomac to Plymouth in England. He had been very frightened. Some of the Mohawks had put on strange diving suits and ventured forth to collect many-armed fishes. They had invited him to accompany them on their hunt, but he had refused—saying that he had never eaten anything with more than four legs and he was sure such meat would frighten his stomach. The trip to Plymouth lasted four days and upon their arrival some of the Mohawk braves had wanted to go ashore to carve a rock showing that they had come and that this land was now theirs, but he counseled against this—pointing out that white men have no sense of humor. So they merely observed the wooden hulls of the British fleet and returned back to Washington to report. During the trip back to Washington, he became brave enough to taste the eight-legged fish, which he said tasted just like passenger pigeon. But he did not brave the deep.
During
