This had all worked very well in the latter days of September, and there had been considerable rejoicing in local Democratic circles over the bright prospects for a sweeping majority.
It was not until the first of October that the opposition suddenly hurled a thunderbolt out of the blue sky of its seemingly serene inactivity. The Agent, holding his appointment under a Republican administration, announced at a weekly land payment that $100,000 of the considerable sum held in trust by the Government would be paid pro rata to the Omahas during the month. It was after this announcement that the local leaders of the Republican Party became active. They explained to their brothers how surpassingly good it was of them to bring about this payment. Would their brothers forget this at the November election? Of course not!
So it happened that the bull meat lost its power of persuasion and for several weeks there was not a brown Democrat on the reserve. Thus, at the opening of the big payment on a Monday morning two weeks before election, the Democratic candidate for Congress found himself staring Defeat in the face (which was brown) after having enjoyed several weeks of victory (which was premature).
The “big payment” has always been picturesque and is now fast becoming impossible. It may be defined as the spectacular bow of the Present to the Past, with which Civilisation lowers its proud plume and says to the Savage Age: “Sorry I swiped your land; take that and don’t feel sore!” Or words to that effect.
The opening days of the big payment were warm with the lazy warmth of the mellow, golden hours of late October. The untilled hills of the reservation thrust themselves up into the autumn glare, unashamed of their poverty of soil. The Agency building nestled forlornly in a creek valley surrounded by the yellow, wrinkled hills.
In the early morning a lazy string of vehicles began to pour into the Agency from the dozen or more roads that outraged the compass with their crazy windings, and seamed the bronze face of the prairie with ugly scars. Carts, buggies, waggons, carriages, some of glaring newness, weighted down to the axles with squaws, papooses and the inevitable mortgage; others in an epileptic stage of decay, with the weary air of having borne the weight of outlawed paper for many moons; ponies, long-haired, and emaciated with many unconsoling feeds of post and halter, carrying at once upon their sawlike backs their sweating, heavy masters, and (heavier than these) the seeming consciousness of long-dishonoured promissory notes; these constituted the grotesque Republican procession that streamed into Little Omaha, as the Agency is called, on that morning in October.
It was as a tribal exodus. The entire tribe of twelve hundred odd men, women, and children was leaving its shacks and tepees that morning, in search of the minted eagles of the Government, just as, of old, they moved in a hungry body upon the trail of the bison.
As the vanguard of this grand but dilapidated army of the primitive world closed in upon the Agency, it was met by the vanguard of the greater commercial army of civilisation, and a wordy skirmish ensued. These were the inevitable collectors who hang about an Indian payment like a crowd of crows scenting a carcass. One might have heard such a conversation as this above the tumult of the meeting races:
“Well, Big Bear, goin’ to pay that note to-day?”