And, although Pickett’s playfulness and casual attitude earned him demerits, pushing his ranking down to dead bottom in his class by the time he graduated, it made the rigidity of the environment tolerable for fellows like Rufus Ingalls, who at that time looked upon military professionalism as a secure convenience rather than a calling.
Over time, he grew to admire Pickett’s ability to always balance levity and abandon with a sense of gentle propriety. And Pickett never seemed to lose that sense of playfulness.
In the ’46 Mexican War’s battle of Chapultepec, his regard for Pickett was forever solidified after witnessing Pickett rescue the U.S. flag from a wounded colleague, the young Captain James Longstreet, and, under fire from both Mexican Army regulars and desperate young men from the regional Mexican military academy, Ingalls saw Pickett climb a ladder up the bell tower of the fortress, tear down the enemy’s colors, and replace it with the Stars and Stripes.
That rallied the Americans and seemed to deflate the Mexicans. In the midst of the wicked fight, Pickett, still waving the flag furiously, had turned to Ingalls and winked, saying, “Some fight, eh, Rufus?”
Ingalls always remembered that.
He thought about just how serious everyone had been in Mexico, seeing this as the opportunity for combat honor, overrating Santa Anna and the Mexicans, and underestimating themselves and the resolve that came from their conscious participation in the expansion of the country’s borders, the destiny of a righteous nation.
He thought about the days in Mexico City, after they took Churubusco, all the young men in the cantinas; the happy Pickett, sporting his new bars from the field promotion he’d received from that flourish; the flush and swell of all the stories still running through their minds.
Ingalls had kept in touch with Pickett after that, and when he found himself appointed Quartermaster for General Harney in Astoria, Oregon, he sought out his friend who had been assigned to establish the distant Bellingham fort.
They sported together, Ingalls always enduring Pickett’s playful teasing, and had shared a few unsuccessful expeditions against the more hostile natives of the region.
Ingalls had been there when Pickett met his second wife, a pretty brown thing called Morning Mist.
On that occasion just two years ago, Pickett and Ingalls had accompanied a British foray into the eastern side of the lower Hecate Strait, to observe how the Brits conducted their military business with the aborigines of that region.
The British territorial governor, Douglas, had arranged treaties with several clans, but ultimately had abandoned any form of negotiation. Instead, he had employed the same tactic as had his British counterparts with the aborigines in New Zealand—expropriating large tracts of land as white settlers moved in.
Ingalls, appalled by this practice, had nevertheless been intrigued by the interactions between the British and the northwest natives because he had personally witnessed a distinct variation in the behaviors of the aboriginal natives and wondered how the Pacific Northwest natives might react to such scurrilous behavior.
Both he and Pickett shared the belief that such actions would only increase the resentment of the natives against the whites, possibly provoking more Northerner raids. The tactics reminded them of the worst diplomatic mistakes they had witnessed earlier in their careers.
So many broken treaties and misplaced trust in promises, he rued. The pattern hadn’t changed in years. The violent reactions of the aborigines to the expropriation of their homeland was almost always the same and predictable.
While stationed in Texas after the Mexican war, for example, both he and Pickett had encountered southwestern native ferocity in the Arapahoe, Comanche, and Kiowa and had chased them across dry plains in various actions after particularly terrible atrocities against the whites.
But this situation seemed to be different in so many ways.
Both he and Pickett shared the view that on the balance, in the Northwest at least, most of the abuse went from white to red, rather than the other way around. Ingalls had marveled at the difference between the scruffy, lean, and vicious Apache from the Northwest Coastal Indians, who were mostly fat and docile from the ready and rich food supplies that their fishing and foraging presented to them. It was as if the Northwest Indian’s placidity had made them easy marks.
Because of their past experience in the Southwest, it surprised neither Ingalls nor Pickett that at least a few bands of Northwest Coast Indians, the Haida and Kwakiutl especially, responded to the British and American incursion into their territory distinctly differently than that of aborigines from many other more peaceful Northwest tribes.
The destructive acts by the Northerners they had witnessed seemed consistent with their own understanding of what they, like most of the whites they knew, considered the primordial spirit of aborigines — violent, child-like and instinctive.
When he or Pickett confronted natives around Bellingham and Astoria with stories of raiding, rape, and savagery, which only served to provoke the whites into further harsh retribution, the docile ones, like the Lummi and Nooksak, always pointed northward, blaming Alaskan and Russian aboriginal “Northerner” outlaws for descending into the softer south for prey and plunder.
On that particular Vancouver expedition with the British, he and Pickett observed British negotiations with the peaceful tribes of the Tsimshian and Stikene. The tactics used by the Brits were particularly interesting and ultimately disturbing.
The Hudson’s Bay translator, a Metís half-French half-native, named Antoine Bill, whose Suquamish mother’s clan had no fondness for any of the northern coastal tribes, seemed to be telling the native “tyee” chieftains that their “X” marks on the treaty documents were simply a sign of friendliness to the Brits, who were there only to keep order and safety for all people.
Both Ingalls and Pickett spoke enough Chinook to know what was being said, however. Antoine Bill was omitting the fact that the tribes would have to move from their land. Did the aborigines understand what was happening, he wondered?
Yet neither he nor Pickett, guests of the Brits, had the authority to
