Читать книгу The Overland Trail онлайн

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Telescope your memory back to old General Leavenworth so human, yet a great army man. He is described as a veteran of the 1812 War, but he couldn’t have been much of a veteran in years, for he came down in the prime of his powers from Ft. Snelling, St. Paul, to build Leavenworth—on the west bank of the Missouri in 1827-28. He passed Omaha, site of the grave of the famous Black Bird chief buried astride his war horse “to watch the French traders” passing up and down the river. It was Catlin the artist, in the 1830’s, who found the skeleton of Indian horse and chief. In his first trip west, Catlin had seen nothing in Indian life—except the tortures in the dances of the Mandan Lodges near modern Bismarck—to condemn. In his next trip, his clean sheet for Indian life had dimmed. He wasn’t quite sure the old chief hadn’t been “a murderous brute” in spite of courage. The courage of using poison on enemy chiefs and calling it “mystic medicine” wasn’t a brand of cunning liked by white men.

Leavenworth had been built as a sort of breakwater line between the Indian raiders—Cherokees, Shawnees, Tuskaroras, Delawares, south; and Omahas, Pawnees, Crows, Sioux, Blackfeet, north. Six or seven companies had been sent away up the Arkansas Southwest to arrange pow-wows of peace. Fifteen ladies dwelt at Leavenworth. Horseback riding was the great racing sport. Fires in the high dry grass of autumn were the awful danger. The Indians called those sweeps of livid flames “the Spirit of Fire” to create new pasture. The Kansas tribes now numbered about 1560, the Pawnees twelve thousand warriors, the Omahas fifteen hundred.