The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West Read online

  THE RED

  and

  THE WHITE

  A Family Saga of the

  American West

  ANDREW R. GRAYBILL

  LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

  A DIVISION OF W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  New York London

  Dedication

  For my wife, Jennifer,

  and especially our children,

  Fiona and Gavin

  You will never know how much, unless and until …

  Epigraph

  “… you will mix with us by marriage,

  your blood will run in our veins,

  and will spread with us over this great island.”

  —Thomas Jefferson to Indian correspondents, 1808

  Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  Prologue

  1.Cutting Off Head Woman

  2.Four Bears

  3.The Man Who Stands Alone with His Gun

  4.The Bird That Comes Home

  5.The Man Who Talks Not

  Epilogue

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  ALSO BY ANDREW R. GRAYBILL

  Prologue

  This book is the fruit of what seemed at first a dispiriting afternoon in June 2006. I had spent several weeks that summer in Helena at the Montana Historical Society investigating the Cypress Hills Massacre, an obscure yet notorious 1873 event in which a mixed group of American and Canadian wolf hunters butchered nearly two dozen Assiniboine Indians in southern Alberta.1 That slaughter, I believed, could help explain why the U.S.–Canada border became more rigid ever after.

  Sometime around the middle of my stay in Montana, however, I grew bored with this story—never a good sign in the early going of a new project—and so one day I decided to step away from my research and see what other collections the MHS might hold. After all, I had long heard the society’s archives described in rapturous terms by colleagues who insisted that it was among the best repositories west of the Mississippi.

  In choosing where to look first, I thought immediately of James Welch’s masterpiece, Fools Crow, a historical novel about a small band of Blackfeet Indians in Montana experiencing the invasion of their country by white newcomers during the late 1860s. I had just taught the book in a course on the North American West at the University of Nebraska, and my students had admired it greatly, just as I had when first reading it nearly a decade before. I still consider it the best tool for capturing the perspective of native peoples themselves during the so-called Indian Wars of the Reconstruction era.

  One of the incidents upon which the novel hinges is the killing of a character named Malcolm Clarke, a white fur trader married to a Piegan Blackfeet woman; his sensational murder—at his ranch, as his family looked on—sets in motion a series of tragic events culminating in the Marias (or Baker) Massacre of 23 January 1870.2 Though largely forgotten now, much like the brutal episode in the Cypress Hills, the slaughter was enormously controversial at the time, because of the high number of Indian deaths and the fact that many of the victims were suffering from smallpox, thus utterly defenseless against the bitter cold as well as the bullets of the Second U.S. Cavalry. Given these circumstances, the Marias Massacre easily belongs in any conversation about the worst atrocities committed by American military forces against native peoples, from Sand Creek in 1864 to Wounded Knee in 1890.

  With memories of Fools Crow still resonant, I resolved to find out whether Malcolm Clarke had actually existed or whether Welch had invented him as a literary device to move the story along. A brief search of the library’s online catalog turned up a microfilm reel, and with help from an MHS staff member I soon located a vertical file as well, both containing tantalizing biographical information about Clarke.

  Malcolm Clarke was indeed a real person, and his murder was precisely the watershed event Welch described.* But Clarke was even more important than Fools Crow led me to believe. As I quickly ascertained, Clarke was one of the earliest and most consequential white pioneers in Montana, having arrived on the Upper Missouri around 1840, just as the fur trade in Montana entered its heyday. His killing was so significant that I found an abundance of historical accounts that touched on the event, including newspaper articles that recalled the murder many decades later and described its lasting repercussions. Clarke’s descendants had also been quite prominent, and their stories and secrets were housed at the MHS, too. By the close of that summer day, I had abandoned my work on the Cypress Hills Massacre and have been preoccupied—maybe even a little obsessed—with the Clarkes ever since.

  Still, the timing of my discovery was ironic. I had been looking for the Clarkes—or, rather, any racially blended family like them—for more than two years, but just a few months earlier had abandoned the investigation. Previously, I had become keenly interested in nineteenth-century North Americans of mixed ancestry while researching my first book, in which I encountered the Métis, individuals in the U.S.–Canada borderlands who were eventually recognized by the Canadian government as a separate indigenous group, neither red nor white but a distinct people in between.

  Though similar people had, of course, lived in the United States, especially in places where the fur trade had flourished, they remained largely invisible in the archival record (and thus in the relevant secondary literature) because of the binary U.S racial formulation that classifies such persons as either white or Indian. Despite the paucity of historical documentation, I wondered how these mixed-race peoples had navigated their incorporation into the United States as the nation absorbed the trans-Mississippi West—their last redoubt—in the years following the Civil War. But in time I grew frustrated by the relative absence of source material and moved on to other book ideas. Then I found the Clarkes that afternoon in Helena.3

  Having discovered them, however, I was surprised that they did not conform to my expectations about peoples of mixed ancestry. This was perhaps because of my passing familiarity with the life of George Bent (1843–1918), one of the best-known mixed-blood individuals of the nineteenth century. Like the children born to Malcolm Clarke and his Blackfeet wife, Coth-co-co-na, Bent had a mother who was Indian (a Cheyenne named Owl Woman) and a father who was a prominent white trader (William Bent). George led a remarkable life, serving in the Confederate army and surviving the murderous work of the Colorado militia at Sand Creek, an event that left him embittered with white Americans. Although in later years he worked closely with Anglo scholars like George Bird Grinnell to record the history of his mother’s people, Bent felt like an alien, stranded uncomfortably between these two worlds—one red, one white—for the rest of his days, retreating into alcoholism before dying penniless in the Spanish influenza pandemic near the close of World War I.4

  Given the despairing arc of George Bent’s life, I imagined that the Clarkes—especially in their later generations—would have similarly tragic stories, and assumed that their lives would reveal the same social dislocations and pathologies that Bent and his kin struggled to overcome. To be sure, the Clarkes suffered their share of pain and calamity. And yet in the course of my research I found that race was not necessarily the intractable issue for the Clarkes that it had been for George Bent, or especially his younger brother Charles, who, following the Sand Creek Massacre, renounced his Anglo heritage and plundered whites with other Cheyennes until he was killed by Kaw government scouts in 1867, when he was just twenty-two.5
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br />   While the tale of the Bents could have served as inspiration for one of the novelist Cormac McCarthy’s darker tales, this was not the case with the Clarkes. In fact, race was the very attribute that gained one family member a job with the U.S. Indian Service, and it was the source of creative inspiration that helped another achieve enduring artistic fame. Moreover, at different moments, other variables—gender, economic status, disability—proved much more important in shaping their personal choices and possibilities.

  The Clarkes thus offer a rich historical lens through which to view the shifting grounds of race in the West and the wider nation during the mid-nineteenth century. They are also ideal in another sense: their individual stories are enormously compelling, for both the historian and the general reader. This book is built around five extraordinary members of the family, drawn from three generations.6

  The narrative begins with the wedding of Coth-co-co-na and Malcolm Clarke in 1844, explaining how a marriage that seems so unusual to us—between the teenaged daughter of a prominent Indian warrior and a white American nearly a decade her senior—was actually quite common on the Upper Missouri. This chapter is thus a story about the fur trade, in part, but also about the incorporation of the trans-Mississippi West into the political and economic fabric of the United States in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

  Clarke, who like so many young men of the time had come west in search of adventure and wealth, is the subject of chapter 2. Through a combination of cunning, ability, and perseverance, he achieved levels of wealth and prominence that eluded all but the most successful fur traders, which—along with his personal courage—earned him lasting fame among white residents of the territory. And yet Clarke, who as a youth was expelled from West Point for fighting, never fully tamed his quick temper or his penchant for aggression. Bloodshed thus ran through his life like a crimson thread, from killings he committed to the violence that led to his own death at the age of fifty-two.

  This multigenerational family story continues with Horace and Helen Clarke, two of the four children born to Malcolm and Coth-co-co-na. Both struggled to find their places in Montana after their father’s slaying and the Marias Massacre. Though nursing a deep antipathy to the Piegans because of his father’s murder, Horace lived among them in the years after 1870, marrying a full-blooded Indian woman named Margaret First Kill and establishing a homestead and small ranch in the northern Montana hamlet of Midvale, later renamed East Glacier Park. He moved fluidly between white and native society, defending reservation-bound Piegans against rapacious Indian agents and serving as an occasional intermediary on behalf of the federal government. In the early twentieth century Horace sold a sizable portion of his land to the Great Northern Railway, which then built the luxurious Glacier Park Lodge and golf resort, still in operation today.

  Helen’s journey proved far more arduous than that of her brother. After her father’s murder, she left Montana to join Malcolm’s family in the Midwest. She then enjoyed a brief but highly acclaimed stage career in New York and Europe, where she starred in several productions with the famous French actress Sarah Bernhardt. Drawn ineluctably back to her native land, Helen returned to Montana and served for eight years as the superintendent of schools for Lewis and Clark County; that made her the first woman to hold elective office in the history of the territory. In 1890 she assumed an even more unusual post for a woman, accepting a position as one of the nation’s first female allotment agents. In this capacity she moved to Indian Territory and participated in the breakup of the Ponca and the Otoe Reservations, among others. And yet in the end, despite having spent most of her adult life in the white world and assisting in the dispossession of indigenous peoples, Helen selected her own allotment on the Blackfeet Reservation, where she lived with her brother Horace until her death in 1923.

  The book concludes with the story of Horace’s son, John. Born in 1881, twelve years after the murder of a grandfather he never knew, John contracted scarlet fever as an infant and was rendered deaf and mute. In spite of his deafness, he became a renowned sculptor of western wildlife; he captured the attention of Montana luminaries like the famed cowboy artist Charlie Russell and attracted such deep-pocketed patrons as John D. Rockefeller Jr. Yet for all his acclaim and widespread acceptance by non-Indians, Clarke rarely left the reservation, choosing instead to live there with his wife and adopted daughter, both of whom were white. In 2003, more than three decades after his death, Clarke was inducted into the Gallery of Outstanding Montanans, a hall of fame celebrating notable residents of the Treasure State.

  In the end, I came to appreciate my great fortune in stumbling upon the history of the Clarke family, which offers keen insight into the lives of people who were both red and white, and thus contemptuously dismissed in their own time and often since as “half-breeds.” If their experiences were typical in many ways of mixed-blood families in the Rocky Mountain West of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their lives were nevertheless extraordinary, and the Clarkes are still well known throughout Big Sky Country, with their names literally etched into the geography of northern Montana. They are remembered, too, for their tragic association with the darkest day in Piegan history. This book, then, is the story of their journey through the complex landscape of race in America, with particular attention to what they gained—and what they lost, irretrievably—along the way.

  *The spelling of the family surname was wildly inconsistent throughout the nineteenth century, alternating between “Clark” and “Clarke” until the latter became the widely accepted version.

  1

  Cutting Off Head Woman

  Sometime in 1844 a young Piegan woman married a white trader employed by the American Fur Company (AFC). The bride was about nineteen, slightly beyond the typical age of first marriage for women of her tribe but nearly a decade younger than her new husband. Little else about the wedding is known for certain, and even the date is merely an educated guess handed down through generations.

  The couple probably wed at Fort McKenzie, a key AFC post in what is now north-central Montana. Located on the north bank of the Missouri River—the broad riparian thoroughfare that threads across the upper reaches of the Great Plains before tumbling into the Mississippi—the small stockade was dwarfed by steep bluffs that thrust upward from the south bank and ended at the water’s edge. If the scenery was dramatic, however, the ceremony was much less so, consisting perhaps of a simple exchange of horses between the groom and the bride’s family.

  The woman’s name was Coth-co-co-na, meaning “Cutting Off Head Woman,” a moniker conjuring up her indispensable role in dressing animal skins. At the time of her wedding, the fur trade was the dominant economic pursuit of her people, the Piegans, one of the three groups of the so-called Blackfoot Confederacy. Her father, Under Bull, was a reputable warrior, and it was he who selected her husband. He chose well, for Malcolm Clarke, though he had been on the Upper Missouri for only a short time, was already one of the AFC’s most successful traders, endowed with irresistible charm and ruthless business acumen. Clarke was also remarkably handsome: just shy of six feet, with brown eyes, soft auburn hair, and a dark beard.

  By most objective measures, their union appears unlikely, even extraordinary, given the vast chasm between husband and wife in terms of race, language, custom, and experience. After all, Coth-co-co-na had lived her entire life within the shadows cast by the Rocky Mountains, whereas Malcolm Clarke was born in Indiana and raised in Ohio, and he had spent two years at the U.S. Military Academy before coming west in his midtwenties. Moreover, the first meeting between their peoples four decades earlier had ended in a spasm of violence that left two Piegans dead and their tribesmen bearing a powerful grudge against the white invaders.

  And yet, despite the seeming improbability of a partnership like theirs, such marriages were in fact quite common throughout fur country and had occurred wherever the trade in animal skins flourished in North America, dating back as far as the seventeen
th century. Nearly all of Malcolm Clarke’s AFC associates had Indian wives, a circumstance that provoked condemnation from white Americans in the East both for the transgression of racial boundaries and for the sense that these nuptials—as the gift exchanges that accompanied them suggested—were, in effect, business transactions meant only to facilitate the fur trade, devoid of love and commitment and lacking religious consecration. Although the economic benefits were undeniable, especially for the groom and his in-laws, many of these unions were built upon genuine affection. So it was with Coth-co-co-na and Malcolm Clarke.

  In order to understand their marriage and the world they made, a world that, according to a family friend, “mingles the best of the white race and the red,” one must start with the broader history of the period, beginning on an unseasonably warm day in New Orleans some forty years before that humble wedding ceremony at Fort McKenzie.

  One Land, Two Worlds

  Though it was nearly Christmas, 20 December 1803 was a beautiful day in New Orleans, with ample sunshine and moderate temperatures more typical of late spring than the onset of winter. The pleasant weather, however, did not lift the spirits of Pierre Clément de Laussat, the French governor of Louisiana. His duty that morning was the sad one of transferring control of the colony to the United States, which had purchased Louisiana from France earlier that year. Laussat had held his office for only nine months.

  At ten-thirty the governor joined a small crowd that had assembled at his stately home near the east gate of the city, on the sprawling plantation owned by Marquis Bernard de Marigny. Among the group that morning were government officials, military officers, and French citizens, who accompanied Laussat on the half-mile walk to the Place d’Armes in the Vieux Carré. After meeting with the American commissioners and handing over the key to the city, Laussat and his companions retired to a balcony overlooking the great, crescent-shaped curve of the Mississippi River at its majestic terminus. There they watched solemnly as below them a French officer lowered the tricolore for the last time. As the governor recorded in his journal, “more than one tear was shed at the moment when the flag disappeared from that shore.”1