The West from a car window

by Richard Harding Davis

ONE OF WILLIAMSON’S STAGES

Anadarko is a town of six stores, three or four frame houses, the Indian agent’s store and office, and the City Hotel. Seven houses in the West make a city. I said I thought this was the worst hotel in the Indian Territory, but the officers at Fort Sill, who have travelled more than I, think it is the worst in the United States. It is possible that they are right. There are bluffs and bunches of timber around Anadarko, but the prairie stretches towards the west, and on it is the pen from which the cattle are issued. The tepees and camp-fires sprang up overnight, and when we came out the next morning the prairie was crowded with them, and more Indians were driving in every minute, with the family in the wagon and the dogs under it, as the country people in the East flock into town for the circus. The men galloped off to the cattle-pen, and the women gathered in a long line in front of the agent’s store to wait their turn for the rations. It was a curious line, with very young girls in it, very proud of the little babies in beaded knapsacks on their backs—dirty, bright-eyed babies that looked like mummies suddenly come to life again at the period of their first childhood—and wrinkled, bent old squaws, even more like mummies, with coarse white hair, and hands worn almost out of shape with work. Each of these had a tag, such as those that the express companies use, on which was printed the number in each family, and the amount of grain, flour, baking-powder, and soap to which the family was entitled. They passed in at one door and in front of a long counter, and out at another. They crowded and pushed a great deal, almost as much as their fairer sisters do in front of the box-office at a Patti matinée, and the babies blinked stoically at the sun, and seemed to wish they could get their arms out of the wrappings and rub away the tears. A man in a sombrero would look at the tag and call out, “One of flour, two of sugar, one soap, and one baking-powder,” and his Indian assistants delved into the barrels behind the line of the counter, and emptied the rations into the squaw’s open apron. She sorted them when she reached the outside. By ten o’clock the distribution was over, and the women followed the men to the cattle-pen on the prairie. There were not over three hundred Indians there, although they represented several thousand others, who remained in the different camps scattered over the reservation, wherever water and timber, and bluffs to shield them best from the wind, were to be found in common. Each steer is calculated to supply twenty-five Indians with beef for two weeks, or from one and a half to two pounds of beef a day; this is on the supposition that the steers average from one thousand to one thousand and two hundred pounds. The steers that I saw issued weighed about five hundred pounds, and when they tried to run, stumbled with the weakness of starvation. They were nothing but hide and ribs and two horns. They were driven four at a time through a long chute, and halted at the gate at the end of it until their owner’s names were marked off the list. The Indians were gathered in front of the gate in long rows, or in groups of ten or twelve, sitting easily in their saddles, and riding off leisurely in bunches of four as their names were called out, and as their cattle were started off with a parting kick into the open prairie.

The Apaches, Comanches, Delawares, and Towacomies drove their share off towards their camps; the Caddoes and the Kiowas, who live near the agency, and who were served last, killed theirs, if they chose to do so, as soon as they left the pen. A man in charge of the issue held a long paper in his hand, and called out, “Eck-hoos-cho, Pe-an-voon-it, Hoos-cho, and Cho-noo-chy,” which meant that Red-Bird, Large-Looking-Glass, The Bird, and Deer-Head were to have the next four steers. His assistant, an Indian policeman, with “God helps them who help themselves” engraved on his brass buttons, with the figure of an Indian toiling at a plough in the centre, repeated these names aloud, and designated which steer was to go to which Indian.

THE BEEF ISSUE AT ANADARKO

A beef issue is not a pretty thing to watch. Why the Government does not serve its meat with the throats cut, as any reputable butcher would do, it is not possible to determine. It seems to prefer, on the contrary, that the Indian should exhibit his disregard for the suffering of animals and his bad marksmanship at the same time. When the representatives of the more distant tribes had ridden off, chasing their beef before them, the Caddoes and Kiowas gathered close around the gate of the pen, with the boys in front. They were handsome, mischievous boys, with leather leggings, colored green and blue and with silver buttons down the side, and beaded buckskin shirts. They sat two on each pony, and each held his bow and arrows, and as the steers came stumbling blindly out into the open, they let the arrows drive from a distance of ten feet into the animal’s flank and neck, where they stuck quivering. Then the Indian boys would yell, and their fathers, who had hunted buffaloes with arrows, smiled approvingly. The arrows were not big enough to kill, they merely hurt, and the steer would rush off into a clumsy gallop for fifty yards, when its owner would raise his Winchester, and make the dust spurt up around it until one bullet would reach a leg, and the steer would stop for an instant, with a desperate toss of its head, and stagger forward again on three. The dogs to the number of twenty or more were around it by this time in a snarling, leaping pack, and the owner would try again, and wound it perhaps in the flank, and it would lurch over heavily like a drunken man, shaking its head from side to side and tossing its horns at the dogs, who bit at the place where the blood ran, and snapped at its legs. Sometimes it would lie there for an hour, until it bled to death, or, again, it would scramble to its feet, and the dogs would start off in a panic of fear after a more helpless victim.

The field grew thick with these miniature butcheries, the Winchesters cracking, and the spurts of smoke rising and drifting away, the dogs yelping, and the Indians wheeling in quick circles around the steer, shooting as they rode, and hitting the mark once in every half-dozen shots. It was the most unsportsmanlike and wantonly cruel exhibition I have ever seen. A bull in a ring has a fighting chance and takes it, but these animals, who were too weak to stand, and too frightened to run, staggered about until the Indians had finished torturing them, and then, with eyes rolling and blood spurting from their mouths, would pitch forward and die. And they had to be quick about it, before the squaws began cutting off the hide while the flanks were still heaving.

This is the view of a beef issue which the friend of the Indian does not like to take. He prefers calling your attention to the condition of the cattle served the Indian, and in showing how outrageously he is treated in this respect. The Government either purchases steers for the Indians a few weeks before an issue, or three or four months previous to it, feeding them meanwhile on the Government reservation. The latter practice is much more satisfactory to the contractor, as it saves him the cost and care of these cattle during the winter, and the inevitable loss which must ensue in that time through illness and starvation. Those I saw had been purchased in October, and had been weighed and branded at that time with the Government brand. They were then allowed to roam over the Government reservation until the spring, when they had fallen off in weight from one-half to one-third. They were then issued at their original weight. That is, a steer which in October was found to weigh eleven hundred pounds, and which would supply twenty or more people with meat, was supposed to have kept this weight throughout the entire winter, and was issued at eleven hundred although it had not three hundred pounds of flesh on its bones. The agent is not to blame for this. This is the fault of the Government, and it is quite fair to suppose that some one besides the contractor benefits by the arrangement. When the beef is issued two weeks after the contract has been made, it can and frequently is rejected by the army officer in charge of the issue if he thinks it is unfit. But the officers present at the issue that I saw were as helpless as they were indignant, for the beef had weighed the weight credited to it once when it was paid for, and the contractor had saved the expense of keeping it, and the Indian received just one-fourth of the meat due him, and for which he had paid in land.

Fort Sill, which is a day’s journey in a stage from Anadarko, is an eight-company post situated on the table-land of a hill, with other hills around it, and is, though somewhat inaccessible, as interesting and beautiful a spot to visit as many others which we cross the ocean to see. I will be able to tell why this is so when I write something later about the army posts. There are any number of Indians here, and they add to the post a delightfully picturesque and foreign element. L Troop of the Seventh cavalry, which is an Indian troop, is the nucleus around which the other Indians gather. The troop is encamped at the foot of the hill on which the post stands. It shows the Indian civilized by uniform, and his Indian brother uncivilized in his blanket and war-paint; and although I should not like to hurt the feelings of the patient, enthusiastic officers who have enlisted the Indians for these different troops for which the Government calls, I think the blanket Indian is a much more warlike-looking and interesting individual. But you mustn’t say so, as George the Third advised. The soldier Indians live in regulation tents staked out in rows, and with the ground around so cleanly kept that one could play tennis on it, and immediately back of these are the conical tepees of their wives, brothers, and grandmothers; and what Lieutenant Scott is going to do with all these pretty young squaws and beautiful children and withered old witches, and their two or three hundred wolf-dogs, when he marches forth to war with his Indian troop, is one of the questions his brother officers find much entertainment in asking.