waiting for Knapp, as he looked back, the whole experience had been more surprise than he had bargained for. He had thought about it endlessly as the train made its way all the way back across the continent. All the way to Council Bluffs, across the wide Missouri, then onto the brand new tracks where the east-west lines were getting linked.
He had allowed himself some sense of destiny on that train ride as he gazed out the windows at the scattering of the little towns, the thinning-out of the fields, the groves, the barns. The new tracks leading him through the grasslands. Sweeping westward. The train whistle and chuffing of the engine, the vibration. He had dreamed his way through all of that, scarcely taking it in because he was fixated on the picture the man in the tweed coat had painted for him of what needed to be done.
The army.
The civilians.
The cresting wave of people, filling up the land.
The corruption.
The corruption of the agencies. Agents selling off trade goods meant for the tribes.
The whisky.
The Indian agents colluding with traders; selling everything.
The selling of women. Indian women. Pregnant Indian women. Ostracized. Abandoned. Damaged goods.
The…outright scandal of the forts.
“I think you moved Indians,” Grant had said.
“I did, with my father,” Meacham had said. “Sacs and Foxes. In Iowa,”
Grant had nodded: “Quite a time past.”
“Yes. Thirty years ago. I wasn’t much more than a boy.”
Clearly, Grant had done some homework. “Well then, I meant it in my first inaugural when I said I would favor any course that would tend to their civilization and ultimate citizenship. This time I made the issue more prominent. Gave it several lines. A significant portion of the speech. An invitation, really. Because now something has to be done. What you don’t know, though you might have heard, is that there already has been action on the ‘Indian Problem.’
“Before you and I get down to work, Meacham, allow me to make this point. The immediacy of the matter stems from what has just happened: a war concluded; a restless populace out of gainful employment in this financial down-turn. We need new avenues, new ways of seeing and thinking.
“When are you leaving?” Grant had asked.
“Tomorrow,” Meacham had said.
Grant had muttered something Meacham couldn’t catch but then had added:
“You’ll be among the first, then. Tomorrow you’ll get on a train and, in spite of some delays as the job is finishing up, in a matter of mere days you’ll be all the way back in striking distance of Oregon. Here’s my point: By the time you get off that train in Reno or Sacramento, the wide-open country will just have shrunk. Finally. This month. When they drive that golden spike out in Utah, the continent will have been stitched together, hooked up by those bands of steel.
“I don’t have to tell you, the restlessness you’re looking at now is indeed small potatoes compared to what is coming. Those you ride with on that train won’t be military. They will be enterprising ‘go-ahead’ people. Shopkeepers and grocers and purveyors of goods: medicines, towels, sewing-machines. Professors. Lawyers. Tourists. East-coast hunters looking to bag a shaggy-maned buffalo in order to go home and brag about it. Shooting from the advantage of the train!
“There will be a mind-set riding that train with you. It will have been noticing the sections of the Congressional Land Grant that stretch ten miles wide along the rail line. Land that is just there for the taking. For sale, to suitable purchasers, for cash on the barrelhead or at 7% interest, a million railroad acres. Opened up by trains. Good-by to the Wild West.
“So. Let’s turn to the ‘brass-tacks’ part of this,” Grant had said. “Let me tell you a little story, and perhaps you can help me fill in some of the details. You may know much of it.” What Grant had described was one part brilliance, one part derring-do, or all of it was foolishness.
In January, three men, Quakers from Baltimore, had requested to meet with him. They had ‘thee’d and thou’d’ him for hours. Urged him to address ‘The Indian Question’ forthrightly during his second term. Take a stand for the aborigines. Allow them to be educated. Fed and clothed. Yes. But above all, Christianized. So their understanding could be opened. Their understanding of justice and of law be awakened. Replace their reliance on medicine men and their hocus-pocus. Let the medicine men be replaced by Christian men of good character, who would be teachers and models. Many Quakers would volunteer, commit to being the moral shepherds. They would undertake to bring truth and justice and charity -- and peace -- to the Indians. With simple brotherly love. That way, get the Indians ready for citizenship when the time was right…. In a few years, when the treaties had been allowed to lapse.
There was more the Quakers had laid before him, but none of it, they warned, would ever come to pass, given the present and continuing scandalizing of the Indian. The polygamy, the trafficking in women. The soldiers’ and agents’ wanton destruction of families. The drunkenness….
As they went on, eventually Grant had caught the Quakers’ fever, had relented in the face of their insistence that there had to be a cleaning-up, a re-dedication, a lifting-up, in love. He had succumbed: “Yes,” as president he at last had said, “You are right! Let us have peace!” They had gone away, rejoicing.
He had liked their notion. He had glimpsed in it the germ of an even bigger idea. About a re-birth -- and a consolidation. He had to think about it.
He had sent the Quaker delegation off with his blessing to begin compiling a list of brethren who could find in their hearts a calling, a vocation, to serve the Indians in the name of God and the United States.
“But the Quakers weren’t the only ones with ideas,” Grant had told him. Others were closing in on the problem, too. Congress was just commissioning a group of wealthy Christian men -- examples of ‘enlightened Christian manhood,’ he had called it -- to visit the Sioux, where it was the same story: drunkenness, debauchery, families torn apart. Suffering. Those commissioners would be reporting their findings by the end of the summer. And they were of non-Quaker denominations. Outspokenly non-Catholic, but otherwise mainstream -- Episcopalian, Lutheran, what have you.
The idea was growing in him, Grant had said. It was beginning to add up to something. Why not take the Quaker notion and encourage it to spread. Cast a wider net, across all the faiths, of Christian workers across the country.
He saw complications, but now he was entertaining the notion of each of the denominations agreeing to work in discrete areas -- in states, in territories, primarily -- where tradition had placed them, in places where they had already labored to Christianize the Indians. To even think of setting aside a new state in the edge of the country, across the Mississippi, where the Indians might congregate. But that would be off in the future. For now, the land would be apportioned to the denominations according to the missionary work that each of them had already attempted in efforts to civilize the Indians.
So that Pennsylvania and Kansas, for example, would go to the Quakers, for openers. The Lutherans might accept responsibility for, say, Minnesota. And so it would proceed.
Yes, Meacham had said, fighting off a fleeting image of cats being stuffed into a gunny-sack.
“I’m not sure of the details yet,” Grant had said. “But my thinking on the Indian Problem has been opened. I can see I have surprised you. You can object, Meacham, but set your cavils aside in order to see where this thought might lead. Follow me in this: One could envision persuading the religious groups to such a plan.
“Everything would be accounted for, with responsibilities assigned. But this is Washington. The cry that would go up from the military would be deafening. ‘Our territory!’ they will say.
“From