“Stop dreaming!” Sabra said to him, often and often. “What are you dreaming about?”
She had grown to love the atmosphere of the newspaper office and resented the boy’s indifference to it. She loved the very smell of it—the mixed odor of hot metal, printer’s ink, dust, white paper, acid, corncob pipe, and cats.
“Stop dreaming!” Yancey hearing her thus admonishing Cim, whirled on her in one of his rare moments of utter rage. “God a’mighty, Sabra! That’s what Ann Hathaway said to Shakespeare. Don’t you women know that ‘Dreams grow holy put in action; work grows fair through starry dreaming’? Leave the boy alone! Let him dream! Let him dream!”
“One starry dreamer in a family is enough,” Sabra retorted, tartly.
Five years had gone by—six years since Yancey’s return. Yet, strangely enough, Sabra never had a feeling of security. She never forgot what he had said about Wichita. “Almost five years in one place. That’s the longest stretch I’ve ever done, honey.” Five years. And this was well into the sixth. He had plunged head first into the statehood fight, into the Indian Territory situation. The anti-Indian faction was bitterly opposed to the plan for combining the Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory under the single state of Oklahoma. Their slogan was “The White Man’s State for the White Man.”
“Who brought the Indian here to the Oklahoma country in the first place?” shouted Yancey in the editorial columns of the Wigwam. “White men. They hounded them from Missouri to Arkansas, from Arkansas to southern Kansas, then to northern Kansas, to northern Oklahoma, to southern Oklahoma. You white men sold them the piece of arid and barren land on which they now live in squalor and misery. It isn’t fit for a white man to live on, or the Indians wouldn’t be living on it now. Deprived of their tribal laws, deprived of their tribal rites, herded together in stockades like wild animals, robbed, cheated, kicked, hounded from place to place, give them the protection of the country that has taken their country away from them. Give them at least the right to become citizens of the state of Oklahoma.”
He was obsessed by it. He traveled to Washington in the hope of lobbying for it, and made quite a stir in that formal capital with his white sombrero, his Prince Albert, his Texas star boots, his great buffalo head, his charm, his grace, his manner. Roosevelt was characteristically cordial to his old campaign comrade. Washington ladies were captivated by the flowery speeches of this romantic this storybook swaggerer out of the Southwest.
It was rumored on good authority that he was to be appointed the next Governor of the Oklahoma Territory.
“Oh, Yancey,” Sabra said, “do be careful. Governor of the Territory! It would mean so much. It would help Cim in the future. Donna, too. Their father a governor.” She thought, “Perhaps everything will be all right now. Perhaps all that I’ve gone through in the last ten years will be worth it, now. Perhaps it was for this. He’ll settle down. … Mamma can’t say now … and all the Venables and the Vians and the Goforths and the Greenwoods. …” She had had to endure their pity, even from a distance, all these years.
The rumor took on substance. My husband, Yancey Cravat, Governor of the Territory of Oklahoma. And then, when statehood came, as it must in the next few years, perhaps Governor of the state of Oklahoma. Why not!
At which point Yancey blasted any possibility of his appointment to the governorship by hurling a red-hot editorial into the columns of the Wigwam. The gist of it was that the hundreds of thousands of Indians now living on reservations throughout the United States should be allowed to live where they pleased, at liberty. The whites of the Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory, with an Indian population of about one hundred and twenty thousand of various tribes—Poncas, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, Osages, Kiowas, Comanches, Kaws, Choctaws, Seminoles, and a score of others—read, emitted a roar of rage, and brandishing the paper ran screaming into the streets, cursing the name of Yancey Cravat.
Sabra had caught the editorial in the wet proof sheet. Her eye leaped down its lines.
“Herded like sheep in a corral—no, like wild animals in a cage—they are left to rot on their reservations by a government that has taken first their land, then their self-respect, then their liberty from them. The land of the free! When the very people who first dwelt on it are prisoners! Slaves, but slaves deprived of the solace of work. What hope have they, what ambition, what object in living! Their spirit is broken. Their pride is gone. Slothful, yes. Why not? Each month he receives his dole, his pittance. Look at the Osage Nation, now dwindled to a wretched two thousand souls. The men are still handsome, strong, vital; the women beautiful, dignified, often intelligent. Yet there they huddle in their miserable shanties like beaten animals eating the food that is thrown them by a great—a munificent—government. The government of these United States! Let them be free. Let the Red Man live a free man as the White Man lives. …”
Much that he wrote was true, perhaps. Yet the plight of the Indian was not as pitiable as Yancey painted it. He cast over them the glamour of his own romantic nature. The truth was that they themselves cared little—except a few of their tribal leaders, more intelligent than the rest. They hunted a little, fished, slept, visited from tribe to tribe, the Poncas visiting the Osages, the Osages the Poncas, gossiping, eating, holding powwows. The men were great poker players, having learned the game from the
