the street, out from under the tin overhang that protected the boardwalk, stood a couple of ragged Indians. Another one, a youngish woman, sat on the edge of the walkway, her feet in the street, her hand extended fawningly whenever someone came toward her. Her baby, evidently asleep, was strapped onto its cradle-board, the whole rig tilted to lean against her and aimed so any passerby would have to step carefully to get past it.
“They look worse now, don’t you think? Or is it just that I forgot what they looked like while they were gone?”
Worse, Steele thought. Skinny. Dirty. Clothes more patches than anything else. “I guess their little sojourn cost them. I thought that when I saw Jack yesterday.”
“Yesterday? Here? For what?”
“The usual thing. Same as before. Safe passage. He wanted the slip of paper so he could head home and move around the country some. Said they were going out to do some gathering. ‘I, Elijah Steele, Esquire, of Yreka, know this man to be a good Indian. He means no harm to white people. He is going back to his home near Lost River when he is finished.’ Etcetera. Tough for them when they can’t speak English if some one stops them.”
“I’m not sure what good the passes will do if the settlers he shows them to can’t read either.”
“He said he was worried about the new people who came in since he left. The ones who wouldn’t know him,” said Steele. “So what are you going to tell Ivan?”
The rancher sank back down in his chair. “What you said: that I don’t want to be caught in the middle. I’d pitch in for a peaceful removal from my land, I guess, if I had to. But if Applegate has his way and gets the army down here to try to round them up, I’m done for. I hear some people have been telling the Indians that me and Dorris and others -- I suppose that means you and Rosborough -- have been telling the officers at the fort to come on and round them up. That’s a plain lie. But if the army does come, with the Modocs thinking that, the whole affair could wreck me. I’m right up against their range. Hell, I’m in the middle of it.”
“Yes. I guess you could wish you were some other place. You wouldn’t be the only one.” Steele thought of the scattering of ranches, the new farms being scratched out on both sides of the border. Many of the new arrivals showed up at his door wanting legal work done to get their claims squared away. He knew how fragile their arrangements with solvency generally were. With no resources to fall back on except themselves, an uprising would be the end of them, too. They wouldn’t be able to start again.
Fairchild hitched forward to hand over a folded paper. “I want Ivan to be the one to make it plain to the Indians that they’re subject to the military. I want him to do the explaining that we can’t get permission for them to remain on their old homes.
“Here’s the letter I’m sending him. It pretty much says what I just told you. I talked to Pollack, and he said he’d write, too. He’s also of the opinion the Indians would go peaceably if the white portion of the treaty were guaranteed -- however you’d go about doing that. He’ll tell Ivan no one from Yreka advised the Modocs off the reservation. He thinks there’s someone else messing in this. Someone with ‘a pecuniary interest,’ as he puts it, in having more soldiers, cavalry especially, at Fort Klamath. He can’t complain to the army, because he thinks like I do: there aren’t any Indian threats to the whites. But Ivan wants the army believing the contrary.”
Steele liked John Fairchild. He was a straight man, all right. He was clearly miserable over this: Ivan scurrying around getting people all signed up against these Indians, the Indians believing in Ivan. John Fairchild had managed to settle with the Hot Creeks by paying them a little rent for his own land -- his own according to the government. John didn’t bother to quibble about whose his ranch over on Willow Creek was legally. Some things were older than law. Inside, he knew it was theirs -- no matter what the documents said. He had found a way to make things work ever since he got there in ‘62, but his arrangement would only hang together as long as the Indians trusted him.
“I’ll talk to Ivan, too,” Steele said. “But you know, John, it won’t necessarily help. I’m more or less persona non grata soon as you get north of the California state line. The folks in Oregon have always been after my skin: some of them won’t forgive that I’m a Union man. The rest are convinced I’m a horse thief; I’m always telling the Modocs how to get around them and their treaties, so they say. They’ll never forgive me for what I did after my one glorious year in office. Indian Superintendent for the northern district of California emeritus! You do realize, don’t you, that you’re coming to one of the sources of the problem when you come see me about this?”
He looked down into the street, reflecting on what had passed: Jack still came to see him because he had made a treaty with him in ‘64, before the big one that included the Klamaths and the Snakes. Steele had gone ahead and made it, even though he no longer had the authority. The Indians had come to find him. Things with the settlers and among the local tribes were set to blow sky high; the whole place was going to be hip-deep in every race’s blood. He had helped the local tribes to make pacts with one another. He had told the Modocs to go and take care of what they had from their fathers, told them they could do that so long as they kept the peace. And they had gone and done it. But his treaty had been bound to fail, he told himself: it was too simple. Along had come Huntington and the Oregon superintendents and a lot of other interested first families from up north of the border, and they had unwound it. They had fixed it good with their own idea of a treaty.
“They think I’m a meddler. Maybe I am,” he continued, turning back toward the room. “I even went on to Washington to represent the Modoc’s true wants and condition. Much good it did me -- or them! You can see what a big success I had with the proposition they should be left where they belong, at Lost River.” He stopped short and looked at his friend. “Sure. I’ll get word to Ivan, but it won’t solve the problem.” He looked over the rancher’s letter, then handed it back.
“I ever tell you a story about a padlock and an Indian? Happened when I first got here, twenty years ago by now, when I was off mining at Scott’s Bar? Indians over there used to wear ornaments in their noses: beads, feathers, all kinds of unbelievable stuff. One of the miners had this brass padlock, and, the Indians being friendly, he hooked it into a young buck’s nose. That fellow thought the miner had done something special for him, gave him just what he wanted. He went around all day displaying his fine decoration and praising his benefactor. Then it came time to take if off. Next morning, he came in with his nose all swollen, the padlock still hanging off his face. His fine friend wouldn’t do anything but laugh about it. Sounds sort of like a parable, doesn’t it? You could almost preach a sermon off of it. But it’s unvarnished truth.”
“What happened?”
“Well, I sort of forced the issue. Which had the effect of making me famous with the Indians. That and a few other things I got settled for them -- without anyone blowing any brains out or taking any scalps. From then on I was someone they’d turn to.
“But the point I was making wasn’t about me. It was about them trusting. You know it as well as I do. Trust holds their world together. It’s that makes them keep their word like they do.”
Fairchild frowned and said, “Older ones do, you mean.” He gestured toward the window and what they had seen from it. “But I have my doubts about the young ones who’ve hung around us enough to learn English. The language of evasion. ‘Deceit’: the worm in the apple of truth.” He shook the letter in Steele’s direction. “Bah! I’m not good at this stuff!”
The rancher unfolded himself from his chair and shoved his letter back into his pocket. “I gotta get going.”
“I always think… ,” Steele pressed on. “Maybe I think about this because I’m a lawyer. I always think they have to trust because they don’t have a written law and police to enforce it. If you promise something, you have to mean it, do it, produce it -- just because you said you would. Otherwise things wouldn’t work. There’s this strong trust that underlies all that. I’ve made a good living off of the fact