Читать книгу The Overland Trail онлайн

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The Overland Trail is not only the longest in history, but it is one of the oldest.

While Lewis and Clark camped first ten miles below the present cities to send their scouts out to call the tribal chiefs, the council under the tent awning was held a few miles above Omaha on the west bank. If you ask yourself why Lewis and Clark’s estimate of the tribes is so much lower in figures than Catlin’s, you had better umpire the difference with the estimate of General Grenville Dodge of Union Pacific fame, who knew these tribes better than any man except General Miles. He puts their fighting force in the 1860’s at twenty-five thousand, higher than Catlin or Lewis and Clark, and he gives the explanation. He would not touch the construction of the Union Pacific without an entirely free hand on the railroad in laying the tracks up the best roadbed—the Platte—and adequate protection from the Army. He had had his bitter experience of directing Western affairs from the East during the Civil War; and on this stand he had the full support of Lincoln and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan—who knew the West as he did. He knew the Pawnees were huge fellows, tough as whalebone and ferocious fighters, though they might squat and lounge round frontier towns in rags, acting as beggars and petty pilferers. Every Indian tribe they conquered they absorbed in their own numbers, so they might speak in a dozen dialects and as many distinct languages. This accounts for Lewis and Clark’s different names and totals. Dodge had fought them first, but later employed them in the Civil War. That didn’t exempt him from their raids. Not in the least. Every tribe from the Upper Missouri to the Kansas was by Dodge’s time leagued against the white man’s advance—first, because he now knew the white men were divided among themselves; second, because from Lewis and Clark’s day, each tribe had been increasing its use of white man firearms and knew its fighting ground as the white scout couldn’t. He had learned a lot, too, from the white man—scouting, spying, semaphoring, cutting off from base supplies, weakening first by running off enemy horses—then a pounce on the encircled enemy marooned on the ocean of prairie as completely as ever crew could be marooned by pirates. Where he couldn’t beat a white force, he maneuvered to split it and defeat first one end of it and then the other. That was Custer’s undoing. Once Custer and Dodge met in a great rail office in the East. Everybody had had a good dinner and was feeling pretty “heady.” Custer was boasting any well-trained white soldier finely mounted and armed could defeat six times as many Indians. “Custer,” said Dodge in his blunt way, “that may be brave but it is no longer true. It is rash madness. You talk like a fool. The Indian has learned a lot in a century.”