They could buy shirts then and blankets. Our old men and women could sit then in their own places in peace.”
As Black Jim finished, Jack spoke to him again.
“He says he want Meacham and one other to see about this. He wants you to do this with Meacham. You two the only ones. He wants to honor you old man around here, like chief.”
#74
The ten days well past, when he got back to Ashland Mills, Jesse sat down with the ink bottle and paper. What had seemed so easy on the trail over to the ranch the other day, in the simple sunlight above Clear Lake, when it was just him face to face with some other men, with none of the complications -- that easy thing now looked too simple. But he had given his word, and so he wrote to Meacham. He hewed as closely as he could to the facts of that meeting: the mistaken encounter, Jack’s embarrassment, Black Jim’s angry eloquence. The joy he knew Jack felt when he heard about the reservation. Jesse had promised to write, and he did.
But he remembered, too, another thing, and that stopped him. Carr. The day of the map-making. Carr had winded him with his audacious vision of land possession. Jesse Applegate had tried, to no avail, to tell him the land Carr wanted by Tule Lake was now taken by settlers, much of it; more every day. But he had also told him about Meacham’s plans for a Lost River reservation for Jack.
“That shouldn’t interfere with your plans,” Jesse Applegate had hurried to say. “Even if you did take everything in up to Lost River, you still wouldn’t touch his camp. He’s over on the other bank. Besides, they won’t give you any trouble.”
Jesse Carr had stared at him as if he had lost hold of his senses.
“Of course they will!” Jesse Carr had snapped. “They’re a nuisance. Besides, didn’t you tell me they range clear on east of this ranch?”
“I did. They summer over there by Cottonwood Creek. And they go just north of us to fish.”
“Well, I don’t want them doing it. You don’t understand these things, Applegate. If you’re going to develop land, you have to be sure it’s attractive. It’s value depends entirely on that. No Indians. Once we start moving on this, I want them out of the way. Locked in where they can’t bother us. That or permanently disposed of.”
He had thought Jesse Carr was wrong-headed, but he couldn’t argue with him about everything. Jesse Applegate had swallowed hard and allowed himself to be instructed. After all, Carr had the money; he didn’t.
That was before this killing business. And before the other day’s encounter. He hated to admit it, but maybe Jesse Carr was right. There was an arrogance in that bunch of Indians, and it spelled trouble. One thing was certain: Carr wouldn’t have changed his mind about them.
He turned back to the letter, looking for the arguments Carr would make, adding his own ideas to them.
The reservation Jack wanted and Meacham proposed would never satisfy the whites. They “required absolute removal or strict confinement in particular limits,” he wrote. That would never work for a small reservation close to white settlements. Other Indians from other reservations would defect and come there. It would be too expensive to pay another agent. The place would “become the resort and refuge of every vicious and vagabond Indian.” It would be nothing but a nuisance to the settlers…. a critical situation… . prompt attention. … There were the horrors of war to consider, however, if an unsuccessful military operation were launched. They should fear, too, some imprudent settler’s action setting it off “before even so small a band as that of Captain Jack is brought into subjection or exterminated.”
Jesse sat staring at what he had written, justifying to himself what he had put down. He had kept his word to Jack, hadn’t he? He had written, as he said he would, about the meeting, and what he wrote about it was the truth. It just wasn’t all he had to say in the letter. What he had to say in the second part, about the dangers of going forward with Jack’s Lost River home, was as true as what he reported in the first. Times were changing now: that was only truth worth remembering any more. And with them so must change his positions. It was not disingenuousness on his part; he was just keeping abreast of the times.
He had to close, and let the letter do what it would. He finished hastily, not wanting to think further about how the two truths should play out, one against the other. He had family interests to consider. And he didn’t want the little they had to be squandered on the altar of indecision. If he didn’t do Carr’s bidding, there were others Carr could turn to who would see to it.
“Two of my sons and grandson in Lost River Country have all invested in a band of cattle for which they are cutting hay at Clear Lake. Duty requires my own return to that vicinity tomorrow, not however near enough to them to render any assistance if attacked.”
He would get Oliver to post the letter tomorrow.
#75
“I am on my way to the Umatillas,” Meacham said, dropping into the chair the adjutant had shown him to. Canby sat behind the polished desk, his papers mustered neatly before him, like so many squadrons awaiting his command. The desk backed to a window, the better to illumine the tasks to be dispatched. Backlit like that, Canby seemed without features, a silhouette general, his greying hair catching the light and outlining his head in silver. Meacham rested his elbow on the arm of the chair and rubbed his eyes, seeking to dispel the illusion.
“There is a Big Talk I must have there. I promised it months ago, and I mustn’t change it.”
“Why should you?” Canby asked.
Meacham waved his hand toward the letter that lay open atop the general’s first stack of work.
“This? Saying Jack wants to see you? I think this will keep,” Canby said. “Go see your Umatillas.”
“I must confess, I look forward to it. I need to see a place where things are working as they’re supposed to. Besides, I can finally trust in my agent down at Klamath. My brother can handle things as well as I can. Better, probably. And he has Ivan.
“There are rather a lot of Applegates around, aren’t there?” Canby asked, lifting Jesse’s letter, then letting it settle. “And now Meachams,” he said, gently jesting.
“Not too many of the latter, I hope! I’ll let John know how to proceed. That’s what I want to check on with you. Are we singing from the same page, so to speak?” Meacham gestured toward Jesse’s letter. “What’s your impression of that?”
“That the man’s conflicted. That at least. What do you read into it?”
“I don’t know what to make of it. He supported the reservation idea -- just recently. Now I don’t know where he stands.”
“Oh, that doesn’t seem like much of a mystery. He’ll stand with the Applegates. And they’ll stand with the settlers. It’s no surprise. After all, the old man went out of his way to invite them here some time back, didn’t he?
When Meacham gestured his dismay at that assessment, the general hurried on to reassure him.
“It’s really nothing new,” he said, evidently sensing Meacham’s disappointment. “You know, I learned my lesson on this kind of thing a long time ago. Before the war, when I was charged with settling matters with the Navajo. It was just like this. I started out with the notion that they should have what they needed by way of land to use as they always had. Of course, they were herders. Had tens of thousands of sheep, so it seemed. Hard to draw a very circumscribed line around that kind of a situation. So I let them roam their old ranges in the New Mexico territory to do their grazing, as they