Twice a year, chaperoned by old General “Bull” Plummer, the Indians swept through the streets of Wichita in their visiting regalia—feathers, beads, blankets, chains—a brilliant sight. Ahead of them and behind them was the reassuring blue of United States army uniforms worn by the Kansas regiment from Fort Riley. All Wichita, accustomed to them though it was, rushed out to gaze at them from store doorways and offices and kitchens. Bucks, braves, chiefs, squaws, papooses; teepees, poles, pots, dogs, ponies, the cavalcade swept through the quiet sunny streets of the midwestern town, a vivid frieze of color against the drab monotony of the prairies.
In late spring it was likely to be the Cheyennes going north from their reservation in the Indian Territory to visit their cousins the Sioux in Dakota. In the late autumn it was the Sioux riding south to return the visit of the Cheyennes. Both of these were horse Indians, and of the Plains tribes, great visitors among themselves, and as gossipy and highly gregarious as old women on a hotel veranda. Usually they called a halt in their journey to make camp for the night outside the town. Though watched over by martial eye, they usually managed to pilfer, in a friendly sort of way, anything they could lay hands on—chickens, wash unwisely left on the line, the very clothes off the scarecrows in the field.
Throughout the year there were always little groups of Indians to be seen on the streets of the town—Kaws, Osages, and Poncas. They came on ponies or in wagons from their reservations; bought bacon, calico, whisky if they could get it. You saw them squatting on their haunches in the dust of the sunny street, silent, sloe eyed, aloof. They seemed to be studying the townspeople passing to and fro. Only their eyes moved. Their dress was a mixture of savagery and civilization. The Osages, especially, clung to the blanket. Trousers, coat, and even hat might be in the conventional pattern of the whites. But over this the Osage wore his striped blanket of vivid orange and purple and red. It was as though he defied the whites to take from him that last insignia of race.
A cowed enough people they seemed by now; dirty, degraded. Since the Custer Massacre of ’76 they had been pretty thoroughly beaten into submission. Only occasionally there seemed to emanate from a band of them a sullen, enduring hate. It had no definite expression. It was not in their bearing; it could not be said to look out from the dead black Indian eye, nor was it anywhere about the immobile parchment face. Yet somewhere black implacable resentment smoldered in the heart of this dying race.
In one way or another, at school, in books and newspapers of the time, in her father’s talk with the men and women of his own generation, Sabra had picked up odds and ends of information about these silent, slothful, yet sinister figures. She had been surprised—even incredulous—at her husband’s partisanship of the redskins. It was one of his absurdities. He seemed actually to consider them as human beings.
Tears came to his own eyes when he spoke of that blot on southern civilization, the Trail of Tears, in which the Cherokees, a peaceful and home-loving Indian tribe, were torn from the land which a government had given them by sworn treaty, to be sent far away on a march which, from cold, hunger, exposure, and heartbreak, was marked by bleaching bones from Georgia to Oklahoma. Yancey and old Lewis Venable had a long-standing feud on the subject of Mississippi’s treatment of the Choctaws and Georgia’s cruelty to the Cherokees.
“Oh, treaties!” sneered Yancey’s father-in-law, outraged at some blistering editorial with which Yancey had enlivened the pages of the Wichita Wigwam. “One doesn’t make treaties with savages—and expect to keep them.”
“You call the Choctaws, the Creeks, the Chickasaws, the Cherokees and the Seminoles savages! They are the Five Civilized Tribes! They had their laws, they had their religion, they cultivated the land, they were peaceful, home-loving, wise. Would you call Chief Apushmataha a savage?”
“Certainly, sir! Most assuredly.”
“How about Sequoyah? John Ross? Stand Waitie? Quanah Parker? They were wise men. Great men.”
“Savages, with enough white blood in them to make them leaders of their dull-witted, full-blood brothers. The Creeks, sir” (he pronounced it “suh”), “intermarried with niggers. And so did the Choctaws; and the Seminoles down in Florida.”
Yancey smiled his winning smile. “I understand that while you Southerners didn’t exactly marry—”
“Marriage, sir, is one thing. Nature, sir, is another. Far from signing treaties with these creatures and giving them valuable American land to call their own—”
“Which was their own before we took it away from them.”
“—I would be in favor of extermination by some humane but effective process. They are a sore on the benign bosom of an otherwise healthy government.”
“It is now being done as effectively as even you could wish, though perhaps lacking a little something on the humane side.”
From her father and mother, too, Sabra had heard much of this sort of talk before Yancey had come into her life. She had heard of them at school, as well. Their savagery and trickiness had been emphasized; their tragedy had been glossed over or scarcely touched upon. Sabra, if she considered them at all, thought of them as dirty and useless two-footed animals. In her girlhood she had gone to a school conducted by the Sisters of Loretto, under the jurisdiction of the Jesuit Fathers. Early in the history of Kansas, long before Sabra’s day, it had started as a Mission school, and the indefatigable Jesuit priests had traveled the country on horseback, riding the weary and dangerous miles over the prairies to convert the Indians. Mother Bridget, a powerful, heavy woman of past sixty now, shrewd, dominating, yet strangely childlike, had come to the Mission when a girl just past her novitiate, in the wild and woolly days of Kansas. She had
