The Canoe and the Saddle/Chapter X

by Theodore Winthrop

Treachery

People cloddish, stagnant, and mundane, such as most of us are, pretend to prefer sunset to sunrise, just as we fancy the past greater than the present, and repose nobler than action. Few are radical enough in thought to perceive the great equalities of beauty and goodness in phenomena of nature or conditions of life. Now I saw a sunrise after my night by the Nachchese, which, on the side of sunrise, it is my duty to mention.

Having therefore put in my fact, that on a morning of August, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, sunrise did its duty with splendor, I have also done my duty as an observer. The simple statement of a fact is enough for the imaginative, who will reproduce it for themselves, according to their experience; the docile unimaginative will buy alarm-clocks and study dawns. Yet I give a few coarse details as a work of supererogation.

If I had slept but faintly, the cobble-stones had purveyed me a substitute for sleep by hammering me senseless; so that when the chill before dawn smote me, and I became conscious, I felt that I needed consolation. Consolation came. I saw over against me, across the river, a hill blue as hope, and seemingly far away in the gray distance. Light flushed upward from the horizon, meeting no obstacles of cloud, to be kindled and burnt away into white ashiness. Light came up the valley over the dark, surging hills. Full in the teeth of the gale it came, strong in its delicacy, surely victorious, as a fine scymitar against a blundering bludgeon. Where light and wind met on the crest of an earth-billow, there the grass shook like glittering spray. Meanwhile the hill opposite was drawing nearer, and all the while taking a fuller blue. Blue passed into deep scintillating purple, rich as the gold-powdered robe of an Eastern queen. As daylight grew older, it was strong enough to paint detail without sacrificing effect; the hill took its place of neighborhood, upright and bold, a precipitous front of warm, brown basalt, with long cavities, freshly cleft, where prisms had fallen, striping the brown with yellow. First upon the summit of this cliff the sunbeams alighted. Thence they pounced upon the river, and were whirled along upon its breakers, carrying light down to flood the valley. In the vigorous atmosphere of so brilliant a daybreak I divined none of the difficulties that were before sunset to befall me.

By this we were in the saddle, following the sunlight rush of the stream. Stiffish, after passing the night hobbled, were the steeds, as bruised after boulder beds were the cavaliers. But Loolowcan, the unimpassioned, was now aroused. Here was the range of his nomad life. Anywhere hereabouts he might have had his first practice-lessons in horse-stealing. His foot was on his native bunch-grass. Those ridges far away to the northeast must be passed to reach Weenas. Beyond those heights, to the far south, is Atinam and “Le Play House,” the mission. Thus far time and place have made good the description of the eloquent Owhhigh.

Presently in a small plain appeared a horse, hobbled and lone as a loon on a lake. Have we acquired another masterless estray? Not so. Loolowcan uttered a peculiar trilobated yelp, and forth from an ambush, where he had dodged, crept the shabbiest man in the world. Shabby are old-clo’ men in the slums of Brummagem; shabbier yet are Mormons at the tail of an emigration. But among the seediest ragamuffins in the most unsavory corners I have known, I find no object that can compare with this root-digging Klickatat, as at Loolowcan’s signal-yelp he crept from his lair among the willows. His attire merits attention as the worst in the world.

The moccasins of Shabbiest had been long ago another’s, probably many another Klickatat’s. Many a cayote had appropriated them after they were thrown away as defunct, and, after gnawing them in selfish solitude, every cayote had turned away unsatisfied with their flavor. Then Shabbiest stepped forward, and claimed the treasure-trove. He must have had a decayed ingenuity; otherwise how with thongs, with willow twigs, with wisps of grass and persistent gripe of toe, did he compel those tattered footpads to remain among his adherents?

Breeches none had Shabbiest; leggins none; shirt equally none to speak of. But a coat he had, and one of many colors.

Days before, on the waters of Whulge, I had seen a sad coat on the back of that rusty and fuddled chieftain, the Duke of York. Nature gently tempers our experience to us as we are able to bear. The Duke’s coat was my most deplorable vision in coats until its epoch, but it had educated me to lower possibilities. Ages ago, when this coat was a new and lively snuff-color, Garrick was on the stage, Goldsmith was buying his ridiculous peach-blossom, in shape like this, if this were ever shapely. In the odors that exhaled from it there seemed an under stratum of London coffee-houses. Who knows but He of Bolt Court, slovenly He of the Dictionary, may not have been guilty of its primal grease-spot? And then how that habiliment became of a duller snuff-color; how grease-spots oozed each into its neighbor’s sphere of attraction; how one of its inheritors, after familiarizing it with the gutter, pawned it one foggy November day, when London was swallowing cold pea-soup instead of atmosphere; how, the pawner never coming to redeem, the pawnee sold it to an American prisoner of the Revolution, to carry home with him to Boston, his native village; how, a degraded scion of the family became the cook of Mr. Astor’s ill-fated ship, the Tonquin, and swopped it with a Chinook chief for four otterskins; and how from shabby Chinook to shabbier it had passed, until Shabbiest got it at last; — all these adventures, every eventful scene in this historic drama, was written in multiform inscription all over this, time-stained ruin, so that an expert observer might read the tale as a geologist reads eras of the globe in a slab of fossiliferous limestone.

Such was the attire of Shabbiest, and as such he began a powwow with Loolowcan. The compatriots talked emphatically, with the dull impulsiveness, the calm fury, of Indians. I saw that I, my motions, and my purposes were the subject of their discourse. Meanwhile I stood by, somewhat bored, and a little curious.

At last, he of the historical coat turned to me, and, raising his arms, one sleeveless, one, fringed with rags at the shoulder, delivered at me a harangue, in the most jerky and broken Chinook. Given in broken English, corresponding, its purport was as follows.

Shabbiest loquitur, in a naso-guttural choke: —

“What you white man want get ’em here? Why him no stay Boston country? Me stay my country; no ask you come here. Too much soldier man go all round everywhere. Too much make pop-gun. Him say kill bird, kill bear, — sometime him kill Indian. Soldier man too much shut eye, open eye at squaw. Squaw no like; s’pose squaw like, Indian man no like nohow. Me no understand white man. Plenty good thing him country; plenty blanket; plenty gun; plenty powder; plenty horse. Indian country plenty nothing. No good Weenas give you horse. No good Loolowcan go Dalles. Bad Indian there. Small-pox there. Very much all bad. Me no like white man nohow. S’pose go away, me like. Me think all same pretty fine good. You big chief, got plenty thing. Indian poor, no got nothing. Howdydo? Howdydo? Want swop coat? Want swop horse? S’pose give Indian plenty thing. Much good. Much very big good great chief white man!”

“Indignant sagamore,” replied I, in mollifying tones, “you do indeed misunderstand us blanketeers. We come hither as friends for peace. No war is in our hearts, but kindly civilizing influences. If you resist, you must be civilized out of the way. We should regret your removal from these prairies of Weenas, for we do not see where in the world you can go and abide, since we occupy the Pacific shore and barricade you from free drowning privileges. Succumb gracefully, therefore, to your fate, my representative redskin. Do not scowl when soldier men, searching for railroads, repose their seared and disappointed eyeballs by winking at your squaws. Do not long for pitfalls when their cavalry plod over your kamas swamps. Believe all same very much good. Howdydo? Howdydo? No swop! I cannot do you the injustice of swopping this buckskin shirt of mine, embroidered with porcupine-quills, for that distinguished garment of yours. Nor horse can I swop in fairness; mine are weary with travel, and accustomed for a few days to influences of mercy. But, as a memorial of this pleasant interview and a testimonial to your eloquent speech, I should be complimented if you would accept a couple of charges of powder.”

And, suiting act to word, I poured him out powder, which he received in a buckskin rag, and concealed in some shabby den of his historic coat. Shabbiest seemed actually grateful. Two charges of powder were like two soup-tickets to a starving man, — two dinners inevitably, and possibly, according to the size of his mark, many dinners, were in that black dust. He now asked to see my six-shooter, which Loolowcan had pointed at during their vernacular confidence. He examined it curiously, handling it with some apprehension, as a bachelor does a baby.

“Wake nika kumtun ocook tenas musket. Pose mika mamook po, ikta mika memloose; — I no understand that little musket. Suppose you make shoot, how many you kill?” he asked.

“Hin, pose moxt tahtilum; — Many, perhaps two tens, I said, with mild confidence.

This was evidently impressive. “Hyas tamanoüs; big magic,” said both. “Wake, cultus ocook; no trifler that!”

We parted, Shabbiest to his diggings, we to our trail. Hereupon Loolowcan’s tone changed more and more. His old terrors, real or pretended, awoke. He feared the Dalles. It was a long journey, and I was in such headlong haste. And how could he return from the Dalles, had we once arrived? Could the son of Owhhigh foot it? Never! Would I give him a horse?

Obviously, not at all would I give a horse to the new-fledged dignitary, I informed him, cooling my wrath at these bulbous indications of treachery, nurtured by the talk of Shabbiest, and ready to grow into a full-blown Judas-tree if encouraged. At last, by way of incitement to greater diligence in procuring fresh horses for me from the bands at Weenas, I promised to hire one for his return journey. But Loolowcan the Mistrusted, watching me with disloyal eyes from under his matted hair, became doubly doubted by me now.

We turned northward, clomb a long, rough ridge, and viewed beyond, a valley bare and broad. A strip of cotton-wood and shrubs in the middle announced a river, Weenas. This was the expected locale; would the personnel be as stationary? Rivers, as it pleases nature, may run away forever without escaping. Camps of nomad Klickatats, are more evasive. The people of Owhhigh, driving the horses of Owhhigh, might have decamped. What then, Loolowcan, son of a horse-thief? Can your talents aid me in substituting a fresher for Gubbins drooping for thy maltreatment.

Far away down the valley, where I could see them only as one sees lost Pleiads with telescopic vision, were a few white specks. Surely the tents of Boston soldier tilicum, winkers at squaws and thorns in the side of Shabbiest, — a refuge if need be there, thought I. Loolowcan turned away to the left, leading me into the upper valley.

We soon discovered the fact, whatever its future worth might be, that horses were feeding below. Presently a couple of lodges defined themselves rustily against the thickets of Weenas. A hundred horses, roans, calicos, sorrels, iron-grays, blacks and whites, were nipping bunch-grass on the plain. My weary trio, wearier this hot morning for the traverse of the burnt and shaggy ridge above Weenas, were enlivened at sight of their fellows, and sped toward them companionably. But the wild calvacade, tossing disdainful heads and neighing loudly, dashed off in a rattling stampede; then paused curiously till we came near, and then were off again, the lubberly huddling along far in the rear of the front caracolers.

We dismounted, and tethered our wayfarers each to a bush, where he might feed, but not fly away to saddleless freedom with the wild prairie band. We entered the nearer and larger of the two lodges.

Worldlings, whether in palaces of Cosmopolis or lodges of the siwashes, do not burn incense before the absolute stranger. He must first establish his claims to attention. No one came forth from the lodges to greet us. No one showed any sign of curiosity or welcome as we entered. Squalid were these huts of squalid tenancy. Architecture does not prevail as yet on the American continent, and perhaps less among the older races of the western regions than among the newer comers Bostonward. These habitations were structures of roughly split boards, leaning upon a ridge-pole.

Five foul copper heads and bodies of men lurked among the plunder of that noisome spot. Several squaws were searching for gray hairs in the heads of several children. One infant, evidently malecontent, was being flat-headed. This fashionable martyr was papoosed in a tightswathing wicker-work case. A broad pad of buckskin compressed its facile skull and brain beneath. If there is any reason why the Northwest Indians should adopt the configuration of idiots, none such is known to me. A roundhead Klickatat woman would be a pariah. The ruder sex are not quite so elaborately beautified, or possibly their brains assert themselves more actively in later life against the distortion of childhood. The Weenas papoose, victim of aboriginal ideas in the plastic art, was hung up in a corner of the lodge, and but for the blinking of its beady black eyes, almost crowded out of its head by the tight pad, and now and then a feeble howl of distress, I should have thought it a laughable image, the pet fetish of these shabby devotees. Sundry, mats, blankets, skins, and dirty miscellanies furnished this populous abode.

Loolowcan was evidently at home among these compatriots, frowzier even than he. He squatted among them, sans gêne, and lighted his pipe. One of the ladies did the honors, and motioned me to a seat upon a rusty bear-skin. It instantly began biting me virulently through my corduroys; whereat I exchanged it for a mat, soon equally carnivorous. Odors very villanous had made their settlement in this congenial spot. An equine fragrance such as no essence could have overcome, pervaded the masculine group. From the gynæceum came a perfume, hard to decipher, until I bethought me how Governor Ogden, at Fort Vancouver of the Hudson’s Bay Company, with a cruelly waggish wink to me, had persuaded the commissary of the railroad party to buy twelve dozen quarts of Macassar, as presents for the Indians.

“Fair and softly” is the motto of a siwash negotiation. Why should they, in their monotonous lives, sacrifice a new sensation by hurry? The five copper-skins “first eyed me over” with lazy thoroughness. They noted my arms and equipment. When they had thus taken my measure by the eye, they appealed to my guide for historical facts; they would know my whence, my whither, my wherefore, and his share in my past and my future.

Loolowcan droned a sluggish tale, to whose points of interest they grunted applause between puffs of smoke. Then there was silence and a tendency toward slumber declared itself among them; their minds needed repose after so unusual a feast of ideas. Here I protested. I expressed my emphatic surprise to Loolowcan, that he was not urgent in fulfilling the injunctions of my friend the mighty, Owhhigh, and his own agreement to procure horses. The quadrupods were idle, and I was good pay. A profitable bargain was possible.

The spokesman of the party, and apparently owner of the lodge and horses, was an olyman siwash, an old savage, totally unwashed from boyhood up, and dressed in dirty buckskin. Loolowcan, in response to my injunctions, appealed to him. Olyman declined expediting me. He would not lend, nor swop, nor sell horses. There was no mode for the imparting of horses, temporarily or permanently, that pleased him. His sentiments on the subject of Boston visitors were like those of Shabbiest. All my persuasions he qualified as “Cultus wah wah; idle talk.” Not very polite are thy phrases, Olyman head man of Stenchville on Weenas. At the same time he and the four in chorus proposed to Loolowcan to abandon me. Olyman alone talked Chinook jargon; the other four sat, involved in their dirty cotton shirts, waiting for interpretation, and purred assent or dissent, yea, to all the insolence of Olyman; nay, to every suggestion of mine. Toward me and my plans the meeting was evidently sulky and inclement.

Loolowcan, however, did not yet desert his colors, He made the supplementary proposition that Olyman should hire us a sumpter horse, on which he the luxurious Loolowcan, disdainer of pedestrians, might prance back from the faraway Dalles. I was very willing on any conditions to add another quadrupod to my trio. They all flagged after the yesterday’s work, and Gubbins seemed ready to fail.

While this new question was pending, a lady came to my aid. The prettiest and wisest of the squaws paused in her researches, and came forward to join the council. This beauty of the Klickatats thought hiring the horse an admirable scheme. “Loolowcan,” said she, “can take the consideration-money, and buy me ‘ikta,’ what not, at the Dalles.” This suggestion of the Light of the Harem touched Olyman. He rose, and commanded the assistance of the shirt-clad quartette. They loungingly surrounded the band of horses, and with whoops and throwing of stones drove them into a corral, near the lodges. Olyman then produced a hide lasso, and tossed its loop over the head of a roan, the stereoscopic counterpart of Gubbins.

Meantime Loolowcan had driven up my horses. I ordered him to tie Antipodes and Gubbins together by the head, with my long hide lariat. The manner of all the Indians was so intolerably insolent, that I still expected trouble. My cavalry, I resolved, should be well in hand. I flung the bight of the lariat with a double turn over the horn of my saddle and held Klale, my quiet friend, by his bridle. My three horses were thus under complete control.

The roan was brought forward. But again an evil genius among the Indians interfered, and growled a few poisonous words into the ear of Olyman. Olyman doubled his demand for his horse. I refused to be imposed upon, with an incautious expression of opinion on the subject. The Indians talked with ferocious animation for a moment, and then retired to the lodge. The women and children who had been spectators immediately in a body marched off, and disappeared in the thickets. Ladies do not leave the field when amicable entertainment is on the cards.

But why should I tarry after negotiation had failed? I ordered Loolowcan to mount and lead the way. He said nothing, but stood looking at me, as if I were another and not myself, his recent friend and comrade. There was a new cast of expression in his dusky eyes.

At this moment the Indians came forth from the lodge. They came along in a careless, lounging way, but every ragamuffin was armed. Three had long single-barrel guns of the Indian pattern. One bore a bow and arrows. The fifth carried a knife, half concealed, and, as he came near, slipped another furtively into the hand of Loolowcan.

What next? A fight? Or a second shamfight, like that of Whulge?

I stood with my back to a bush, with my gun leaning against my left arm, where my bridle hung; My bowie-knife was within convenient reach, and I amused myself during these instants of expectancy by abstractedly turning over the cylinder of my revolver. “Another adventure,” I thought, “where this compact machine will be available to prevent or punish.”

Loolowcan now stepped forward, and made me a brief, neat speech, full of facts. Meanwhile those five copper-heads watched me, as I have seen a coterie of wolves, squatted just out of reach, watch a wounded buffalo, who made front to them. There was not a word in Loolowcan’s speech about the Great Spirit, or his Great Father, or the ancient wrongs of the red man, or the hunting-grounds of the blest, or fire-water, or the pipe of peace. Nor was the manner of his oration lofty, proud, and chieftainly, as might befit the son of Owhhigh. Loolowcan spoke like an insolent varlet, ready to be worse than insolent, and this was the burden of his lay.

“Wake nika klatawah copa Dalles; I won’t go to Dalles. Nika mitlite Weenas; I stay Weenas. Alta mika payee nika chickamin pe ikta; now you pay me my money and things.”

This was the result then, — my plan shot dead, my confidence betrayed. This frowzy liar asking me payment for his treachery, and backing his demand with knives and guns!

Wrath mastered me. Prudence fled.

I made my brief rejoinder speech, thrusting into it all the billingsgate I knew. My philippic ran thus: —

“Kamooks, mika klimminwhet; dog, you have lied. Cultus siwash, wake Owhhigh tenas; paltry savage, no son of Owhhigh! Kallapooya; a Kallapooya Indian, a groveller. Skudzilai-moot; a nasty varmint. Tenas mika tum tum; cowardly is thy heart. Quash klatawah copa Dalles; afraid to go to Dalles. Nika mamook paper copa squally tyee pe spose mika chaco yaquah yaka skookoom, mamook stick; I shall write a paper to the master of Nisqually (if I ever get out of this), and suppose you go there, he will lustily apply the rod.”

Loolowcan winced at portions of this discourse. He seemed ready to pounce upon me with the knife he grasped.

And now as to pay, “Hyas pultin mika; a great fool art thou, to suppose that I can be bullied into paying thee for bringing me out of my way to desert me. No go, no pay.”

“Wake nika memloose; I no die for the lack of it,” said Loolowcan, with an air of unapproachable insolence.

Having uttered my farewell, I waited to see what these filthy braves would do, after their scowling looks and threatening gestures. If battle comes, thou, O Loolowcan, wilt surely go to some hunting-grounds in the other world, whether blest or curst. Thou at least never shalt ride Gubbins as master; never wallop Antipodes as brutal master; nor in murderous revelry devour the relics of my pork, my hard-tack, and my tongues. It will be hard if I, with eight shots and a slasher, cannot make sure of thee to dance before me, as guide, down the defiles of purgatory.

There was an awkward pause. All the apropos remarks had been made. The spokesmen of civilization and barbarism had each had their say. Action rather halted. No one was willing to take the initiative. Whether the Stenchvillians proposed to attack or not, they certainly would not do it while I was so thoroughly on my guard. Colonel Colt, quiet as he looked, represented to them an indefinite slaughter power.

I must myself make the move. I threw Klale’s bridle over his neck, and, grasping the horn, swung myself into the saddle, as well as I could with gun in one hand and pistol in the other.

The Klickatats closed in. One laid hold of Antipodes. The vicious-looking Mephistophiles with the knife leaped to Klale’s head and made a clutch at the rein. But Colonel Colt, with Cyclopean eyeball, was looking him full in the face. He dropped the bridle, and fell back a step. I dug both spurs into Klale with a yell. Antipodes whirled and lashed at his assailant with dangerous hoofs. Gubbins started. Klale reared and bolted forward.

We had scattered the attacking party, and were off.