“The telegram says it. Better to save some of us than none of us. Our job now is to hold on to what’s left.”
Ivan was listening closely, and he swung in his chair now to look up at his younger brother. “What are you thinking, then?”
“For one thing, there’s the non-existent saw-mill, even though it was promised in the treaty. We’d better figure out either how to build it with no funds or how to explain why we never got around to it. The Klamaths have been cutting logs for months now, waiting to use it. Sure, the money went on operating expenses. But one of these days someone beside an Indian’s going to come along looking for a mill. Better get our ducks in a row on that one.
“And then there are the missing Indians. Most of the Snakes we managed to bring in have drifted away off north of the reservation. They’re not going to complain as long as we lay off of them. But when someone tries to go get them, they’ll have their old gripes about being driven off by agents -- that’s us, friends. They’re going to say they’re hungry -- because we supposedly didn’t give them enough to eat. So what if we were trying to teach them independence?” He scratched at the whiskers under his chin.
“And of course there’s the small matter of Captain Jack.”
“I tried to talk him back three years ago,” Lindsay defended himself. “He’s not interested. Won’t submit to Old Schonchin again, first off. Also won’t take orders from the Klamaths. Won’t this. Won’t that. Refuses to abide the Snakes.”
“None of which really surprised us, as I recall. Still, now it seems a little more urgent. Maybe you didn’t talk hard enough, Papa,” Oliver said. “Somebody better go get him and the rest of his Modocs.”
“Let’s see you do it,” challenged Ivan.
“What about the army?” Oliver asked. “Let them finally do something useful.”
“This army?” Ivan laughed at the preposterousness of the notion. “The army might be glad enough to take over the reservation; run it their way. But the Fort Klamath military just bring in the Modocs as a service to us? Not likely!”
“There’s reason to demand it,” Lucien said. “Jack’s breaking the treaty, and besides, he’s an outlaw. He sold ammunition to the Snakes, and we can prove it. David Allen can, at any rate. He traced it. Jack knows it. He probably expects the army to come after him any time. We need to push on that, move it along; at least start it going before this Knapp gets here.”
“So far no one’s said anything new. How, exactly are we supposed to move them if you can’t come up with anything better than that?” said Lindsay.
“I’m not sure yet,” Oliver said to his father. “I got to considering, maybe we need to think a little deeper about the settlers.”
“The settlers aren’t going after any Modocs!” put in Lucien. “They grouse enough that there’s a bunch of marauding savages wandering around. But they don’t do anything much about it -- except complain to us.”
“That’s true. But they’re not real pleased with any high-falutin’ ideas about our ‘Red Brethren’ either. Maybe the settlers of southern Oregon would look different to us if we thought of them as a lever.” Oliver broke off: “I don’t know. It’s something to turn our minds to.”
For a moment no one moved; then Ivan reached for one of the discarded paper scraps, examined it, and turned it over.
“All right,” he said, dipping his pen into the ink. “You do that. I’ll start a list. What else shall I add to it?”
“Well,” said Oliver, “there is the matter of the Klamath women.”
“Meaning what?” Jesse asked.
“Meaning they’ve been going to Fort Klamath, to the army commissary there to get things.”
“How? With what money? And even if they had some, the fort’s commissary’s not open to them. It’s for the military,” Jesse said.
“I leave that to your imagination, dear Uncle. Let’s just say that the enlisted men are a very long way from home.”
“That’s outrageous, Oliver!” Lindsay said.
“But surely, Papa, as agent you are aware of it.”
His father fixed him with a cold look then asked him, “Well, what exactly was it you expected to hear me say about it?”
Chapter 3: Meacham’s Coming
#10
Albert B. Meacham stood up in his stirrups. After you had ridden for six months, you came to regard your destination as something you deserved. Had you not deserved it, you would not have arrived there. Your arrival had been permitted, and for two reasons: first, because you had prayed over it. Second, because you were a part of the Scheme of Things. Awareness of that participation gave you a certain assurance that you found you needed every day. Without it, you would probably, in your loss of heart, join the line of quitters drifting the other way, back in the direction everyone had come from: East.
That was how Albert Meacham looked at it. He was careful to separate this explanation from any predestinarian thought, although he knew it tended dangerously in that direction. So far as he could see, however, his first principle -- that he got because he asked -- was based on a step taken freely by him to initiate the whole process. It was the freedom of that praying that saved him from the predestinarianism implicit in his second principle, the one about the Scheme of Things.
He couldn’t quite get the words to hold still long enough to explain all of this loftiness to himself, at least not in a form readily accessible to others, but he knew what he meant. He meant that he belonged where he was because he had been allowed to come there. No. That smacked of the very predestinarianism he was determined to avoid.
“Phew!” he said. For days now he had been meaning to write this down, so that he could analyze it. But somehow he never found time when he got his feet on the ground. There was too much to do then.
As his horse followed southward toward his first rendezvous with the Klamaths, he let the hours slide past, rehearsing to himself the answers to questions no one ever seemed to ask: What was he doing here? By what right did he allow himself to be appointed to his position? Why should he, instead of some other man, be Superintendent?
He regretted that he had not been schooled in thinking about these things, at least not formally. But he had studied on his own ever since he had been a lad in Iowa. In those days, he would try to ponder such matters as he followed his oxen back and forth across the land, tearing at Time Immemorial’s mat that underlay the waist-high grass. He would read at night and then, practicing his newly enlarged vocabulary and attempting a commanding tone, would declaim during the day to the still-empty prairie and the backsides of his trudging oxen. The oxen would turn their ears toward him as his voice grew louder and more assured. Then, satisfied that what he said did not concern them, they would once again angle their ears forward and plod on.
He knew, as he hauled on the traces to pull the team round, turned his breaker and once again set the long, low moldboard, that he did not want to be a minister. “Hah!” he told the animals, shaking them slack. He must find his rightful place in some other work. For the time being, until he discovered it, he was content to plow on, always preparing not just the soil but himself -- for the eventuality that he felt must come.
Had his parents not followed their consciences north before the war, his father would not have been caught in the financial collapse. Had he not been caught in the collapse, he would have had the cash to send his sons for formal study, perhaps even to university. Had he not been caught in the collapse, he would not have needed the money Albert could raise by hiring out with his oxen. Had Albert been able to