The Powder River Read Online Free Page A

repugnant. For white people were inferior to Cheyennes in many ways: they often killed one another, which Cheyennes did not tolerate. They admired men who acquired wealth—Cheyennes admired those who gave it away. They had a religion of doctrines which affected their lives but little—Cheyennes had a half-spoken but powerful sense of the sacred that pervaded their daily lives and directed their steps almost without their being aware of it.
    Smith was eager to get home and graft his learning onto the tree of the Cheyenne way.
    But when it was time to go home, Dr. Adam Smith Maclean got a sharp disappointment. The Cheyennes were not in Powder River country, where he had grown up, and where the family trading post now was, moved by his mothers from up the Yellowstone. The Cheyennes had been moved by force to Indian territory, fifteen hundred miles to the south. His mother Lisette was there, his father’s second wife, where she had followed her new husband, Jim Sykes. His biological mother, Annemarie, ran the trading post in the north country. Some of his relatives were still in the north. All the rivers and mountains and prairies he remembered and loved from his childhood and youth were there. That was where he belonged, where the Cheyenne people belonged.
    Nevertheless, he went to Kansas City by rail and to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency on the North Fork of the Canadian River in Indian territory by stage and horseback. He went because one of his mothers and his grandmother were there, and because the Indian Bureau told him to go. On the way he mourned. His family divided, his people uprooted, the land he was attached to lost—it was the fate the white man had brought to the Cheyennes.
    And there, in a country he disliked, which had only slow, muddy rivers, where the water and the air were making his people sick and despair was killing them, he had the great good luck of his life—he met Elaine Cummings.
    Not for the first time. He had come across her two or three times in Cambridge and Boston, at proper social events, and admired her, and heard her spoken of admiringly as a poetess. But he had not gotten to know her. With the quirkiness of life that he always noticed and delighted in, she was now the teacher at his people’s agency, the person who would bring knowledge to the Cheyenne and Arapaho children. She had even created the job. Since knowledge was what Smith believed his people needed, he thought her the most important person at the agency.
    Therefore he believed in Elaine Cummings. After two months’ acquaintance, he discovered that he was also in love with her ass-over-tea-kettle.
    During those two months, he saw that his people’s circumstances at the Canadian River agency were desperate. They were dying of dysentery, for they were not accustomed to the water. They were dying of malaria, and he had no quinine to give them. They were suffering from the heat. They were starving.
    So Smith went to the agent, Miles, a reasonable man, and since he was a Quaker an honest man, and had a talk. Smith didn’t trust those damned councils anyway. Half the interpreters mistranslated what the Indians said, and the other half converted it into a kind of phony biblical poetry, and there was nothing poetic about starvation, malaria, and diarrhea. Smith told Miles bluntly what had to be done. The people had to get out of the hot southern climate, and they had to get back to water their innards were used to. The agent agreed with Smith: It was essential.
    That talk was why Smith did not expect the scratch on his door in the dark hours on his wedding night. Now Miles brandished his troops. And Smith sat his horse here in the predawn darkness, with his new wife, both of them fugitives.
    Three hours ago they had been making love for the first time. Now they were running pell-mell through the dark across a prairie, headed home. Angry words tumbled wildly in Smith’s mind, words about starving the hungry, words about marching