The Fable of the Southern Writer

Epilogue: A Personal Fable: Living with Indians

Epilogue A Personal Fable: Living with Indians Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake. —Robert Penn Warren n old-fashioned Hollywood Indian would say that I speak with a forked tongue. My actual personal experience with Indians, at least with plainly identifiable ones, has been mostly incidental to travels in the western states, Alaska, and the Yukon. I recall a conversation one night on an airplane between Kansas City and Omaha with a darkly handsome, well-dressed young insurance salesman from Oklahoma (Itook him to be a Comanche) who had plainly made a successful entrance into the mainstream. I recollect more vividly a brief talk in the fabled seat of the Yukon gold strike, Dawson City, with a middle-aged Indian (I did not learn his tribal identity) who, after being hospitalized with a stomach ulcer, was returning to the wilderness to work a promising claim he had staked out before his illness. I recall more vividly still a frozen moment on the main street of a small Wyoming town when a young brave (Cheyenne, I think), a complete stranger, fixed his deep black eyes on me in a stare of utter contempt, if not sheer hatred. At least I think I interpreted his glance correctly. If my reaction to the chance meeting of our eyes was overly sensitive, this may be owing to the fact that in my imagination I have lived a good deal with Indians and, in my imagination at least, know something about how in spite of defeat, dispossession, and poverty they have tried to hold onto a sense of a determinate past; and in doing so, being the only native Americans—the only A 209 A Personal Fable Americans who ever truly belonged to the land, possessed by it but never its possessors—have been a constant reproach to the alien presence of their imperial conquerors. I have also, for a reason that will become apparent, lived a good deal in my imagination with Indians who lost their identity through mixing their blood with that of the conquerors. I think I first had a certain awareness of the deeply ironic cultural situation of the native Americans when as a kid I attended the county fairs held in my hometown, a small community in northwest Texas named Jacksboro. The seat ofJack County, Jacksboro is located west of Fort Worth on the route that leads northward for a hundred miles or so to the Red River and Oklahoma and westward to Wichita Falls and Breckenridge and on out to the high plains of far west Texas. When I was born in 1916, the town was more than sixty years old, but it was not yet quite beyond the frontier stage. Self-conscious celebrations of the movement from pioneer primitivism to civilization , the fairs were held yearly on the old parade ground of Fort Richardson. Situated on the southern edge of town, this abandoned federal military post had for a few years after its establishment in 1868 been the largest army installation in post-Civil War America. Garrisoned by units of the army that had recently been the enemy of the citizens of Jack County—at first by the Sixth Cavalry, U.S.A., later by various other units, including the Tenth Cavalry, which was composed predominantly of black troopers and white officers—"the sentinel of the southern plains" (asits best historian, Allen Lee Hamilton , calls Fort Richardson) was decommissioned at the end of the Red River War in 1876. By then the sentinel of the southern plains had fulfilled the purpose for which it had been built. This was to put a stop to the Kiowa, Comanche, and Kiowa-Apache warriors, who, violating their confinement to the reservation lands in Oklahoma, nearly every "Comanche moon" (as the settlers fearfully called the period of the full moon) crossed the Red River and made bloody incursions into the sparsely settled northwestern areas of Texas. The refusal of these dispossessed "Overlords of the Southern Plains" to stay complaisantly on the land assigned to them was of considerable concern not only to Texas but to Washington, D.C. The effective termination of the "Indian depredations," however, was not the result of military action 210 The Fable of the S o u t...