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

  The relationship between Malcolm and Good Singing dated to at least the mid-1850s, as the first of the couple’s four surviving children, a boy named Isidoro, was born in 1856 or 1857. A daughter, Judith, came along in 1864; the birthdates of two others, Phoebe and Robert Carrol, are unknown. A fifth child was stillborn. How Coth-co-co-na felt about Malcolm’s taking a second wife is unknown, but given the frequency of plural marriage within Plains Indian societies, she likely accepted it as a standard family arrangement. The whole family lived together under a single roof.

  Despite—or perhaps because of—his bellicose nature as well as his sheer longevity on the Upper Missouri, Clarke came to be idolized during the 1860s as one of the area’s most esteemed “old time pioneers.” Along with eleven other leading men in the territory, probably all of whom had moved to the region after him, Clarke incorporated the Historical Society of Montana on 2 February 1865. In this role, he took on the responsibility of enshrining for future generations the very history that he and select others had actually lived, especially since the group listed “incidents of the fur trade” as one of its two key areas of interest (the discovery of the territory’s mines being the other).100 Though it had taken him three decades and an extended residence on the frontier, Clarke had finally attained a level of social prominence of which his father would have been proud.

  IN THAT SANGUINARY SPRING of 1865, as the Civil War ended with Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox, a fresh conflict erupted in Montana Territory. Unlike the contest between the North and the South, this new campaign did not set enormous standing armies against each other in pitched battles; rather, it was a guerrilla war, fought sporadically by small groups of armed men. And in contrast to the political disagreements that spawned the War of the Rebellion, Montana’s conflagration was effectively a race war, in which the Blackfeet, and especially the Piegans, struggled to preserve their land and lifeways from the onrushing tide of white settlers.

  Racial enmity, however, was only one factor contributing to the outbreak of hostilities in Montana. Surely many of the newcomers considered native peoples culturally and intellectually inferior, especially those emigrants hailing from the South who had imbibed the racist tenets of herrenvolk democracy, characterized by a dim view of those not belonging to the supposed “master race.”101 Even some of the federal emissaries sent to help the Blackfeet held them in low esteem, including Gad Upson, the Indian agent to the Piegans, who arrived in October 1863 and described his wards as “degraded savages” and insisted that they remained “free and untrammeled from the shackles of an enlightened conscience.”102 Still, it was their fury over native horse theft that drove some whites to commit unspeakable acts of violence.

  The American stampede into Blackfeet territory had a mixed effect on Indian horse raids. On one level, federal officials had sought to eradicate the practice, given its central role in promoting conflict between groups of Indian peoples, which destabilized the region and thus made it unsafe for intending settlers. Therefore U.S. commissioners often extracted promises from Indians to abandon raiding as a key component of the treaty-making process. At the same time, the advent of so many whites created a spike in the equine population, and raids on it proved too hard for the Blackfeet to resist. After all, the Americans’ promotion of intertribal accord had robbed young Indian men of the surest path to social advancement; after warfare, horse stealing was the next-best thing, and it mattered not to the Indians that the mounts they now stole belonged to whites and not their native enemies. It was just such an event that inaugurated the so-called Piegan War.

  On 23 April 1865 a party of Bloods descended upon Fort Benton and made off with about forty horses. White residents retaliated one month later by ambushing a small group of Bloods who had come to the town on a peaceful visit, killing four Indians. Two days afterward, on 25 May, Calf Shirt—the prominent Blood chief—and a large war party espied a group of about ten woodcutters felling timber a dozen miles above Fort Benton, where the Americans planned to build a new settlement called Ophir. Calf Shirt, who despite his antagonism toward whites had signed Lame Bull’s Treaty ten years earlier, allegedly signaled his benevolent intentions to the terrified lumbermen, who responded with gunfire. At that point the Indians fell upon the whites. Though the Americans fought desperately, using the bodies of their slaughtered oxen as breastworks, the Indians killed every last man, stripping the bodies, scalping one of them, and cutting the throat of another from ear to ear.103

  Bull train near Fort Benton, ca. 1860s. White Americans began pushing into the interior of Montana during and after the Civil War, searching for gold and establishing homesteads, all the while encroaching on Piegan lands. Courtesy of the Overholser Historical Research Center, Fort Benton, Montana.

  Such events received little attention in the East, where most residents were still sorting through the unsettling aftermath of the Civil War. In Montana, on the other hand, Acting Territorial Governor Meagher moved quickly to extinguish Indian title to native lands coveted by whites. To that end he convened treaty negotiations with the Blackfeet in November 1865, and in exchange for additional annuities he extracted an agreement from the Indians to relinquish all of their claims south of the Teton River. The Indians consented, in large part because they had ceased hunting in the ceded area some time before and thus saw little use in retaining their access to it.

  Malcolm Clarke hosted the American delegation at his ranch before joining them for the trip to Fort Benton.104 He was clearly valuable to the commissioners as an interpreter and a long-term acquaintance of the Blackfeet, but Clarke went also out of self-interest. For one thing, he believed that his wives and children were entitled to some of the annuities. More importantly, Clarke wanted to make sure that he, as a white man married into the tribe, would not lose his land (which, after all, was part of the proposed concession). He got his wish, for article 9 guaranteed such individuals, of whom there were very few, the right to 160 acres, “including so far as practicable their present homestead.” Moreover, Clarke was listed as one of five men who “on account of their long residence, liberality, and valuable faithful services” to the Blackfeet would receive an additional 640 acres granted in fee simple by the United States.105 It is difficult to discern whether this largesse was sincere or rather manipulated by Clarke. Yet in the end it meant little, as a new round of native-white violence led the commissioner of Indian affairs to decide against recommending the ratification of the treaty.

  Blackfeet misery intensified during the late 1860s, and it was the Piegans who suffered the most. In addition to frequent skirmishing with whites, their native enemies, chiefly the Crows and Gros Ventres, stepped up their own attacks and in one battle killed Many Horses, the wealthiest of all Piegan chiefs. The Piegans even turned on one another, when one night a group of young, drunken warriors killed and mutilated Little Dog, a headman believed by some Blackfeet to have become too conciliatory to the Americans. For their part, federal officials responded to the instability in Montana by establishing two army outposts in the area: Camp Cooke, built in 1866 near the mouth of the Judith River; and Fort Shaw, constructed the next year in the Sun River Valley and boasting an infantry regiment of some four hundred soldiers. The United States offered the carrot as well as the stick, attempting to treat for peace in 1868 on essentially the same terms proffered three years earlier (though again, events on the ground prevented approval in Washington), and moving the agency from Fort Benton to a more remote site on the Teton River in an attempt to reduce incidents with hostile whites.106

  Neither these friendly overtures nor even the threatening presence of the “seizers,” as the Blackfeet called the U.S. troops, could forestall the violence, which continued unabated throughout the decade and claimed dozens of lives on both sides of the conflict. For the besieged Piegans, the tragic nadir came in the summer of 1869 when two Indians—including the elderly brother of Mountain Chief, regarded as the leading warrior of the Piegans—were apprehended in Fort Be
nton by a group of whites, murdered, and then thrown barbarically into the Missouri River. The Piegan response was immediate and so furious that on 18 August General Alfred Sully, recently appointed superintendent for Indian affairs in Montana, reported to his superiors in Washington, “I fear we will have to consider the Blackfeet in a state of war.”107 As evidence Sully referred to an Indian attack just the day before on a ranch twenty-five miles north of Helena.

  WITH WARM WEATHER and ample sunshine, 17 August 1869 was a gorgeous day in the Prickly Pear Valley. But there was unease at Malcolm Clarke’s homestead. His cattle had been missing for several days, much longer than usual when they wandered off, and so he sent an Indian boy to search for them. Finally, around seven in the evening, Clarke heard the faint sound of tinkling bells and knew that his young herder had located the animals and steered them home. After a brief inspection of the cows, the heartened Clarke rejoined his family inside the house, where he challenged Helen (known as Nellie) to a game of backgammon.108

  Smokehouse on the Sieben Ranch, 2007. One of the outbuildings on Malcolm Clarke’s ranch in the Little Prickly Pear valley, north of Helena, still stands today, nearly 150 years after his murder. Photograph by the author.

  The two had played a round or two when they were startled by the barking of their dogs. By then it was nine o’clock, a late hour indeed for a visiting neighbor, given the distance between ranches in the area. Overcome with curiosity, Nellie quit the game and ran to the back of the house, where she was surprised to see a group of young Indian men speaking with her sisters and Coth-co-co-na. Helen recognized one of them instantly, a handsome warrior in his midtwenties named Ne-tus-che-o, whom the whites called Pete Owl Child. He was also her mother’s cousin. Nellie noted with great pleasure and not a little relief that Ne-tus-che-o “threw aside the stoicism of his race” and embraced Horace, giving him an affectionate kiss on the cheek. The men had not always gotten along so well.

  Two years earlier, Owl Child had paid a visit to the ranch with his wife and three other family members. During their weeklong stay, the Indians’ horses were stolen, along with several belonging to the Clarkes. An inspection of the trail quickly established that white men, and not Indians, were the thieves, a fact as embarrassing to Malcolm Clarke as it was infuriating to Owl Child. Though Clarke’s mounts were soon recovered, Ne-tus-che-o’s were not, and so a few nights later the Indian guests slipped away without saying goodbye to their hosts, taking with them some horses as well as Clarke’s treasured spyglass.

  Discovering the theft, Malcolm and Horace set out and soon tracked Owl Child to a nearby Piegan camp. Upon their arrival they spotted Ne-tus-che-o astride Horace’s favorite steed. This was too much for Horace to bear; in an instant he wrested the animal away from his cousin and lashed him across the face with a quirt, calling the Indian “a dog.” A crowd of warriors quickly surrounded the Clarkes, jeering and threatening father and son until some elders stepped forward and rebuked the young men for their poor treatment of Four Bears. Before leaving with his reclaimed property, Malcolm berated Owl Child, whom he insulted as “an old woman,” telling him that he could have forgiven the theft of his horses but not that of the telescope.

  The Piegans, however, have a different version of the falling-out between Owl Child and the Clarkes. According to the Indians, on that 1867 visit to the Prickly Pear Malcolm had raped Owl Child’s wife while the other men were away on a hunt, prompting Ne-tus-che-o to retaliate with the theft. According to this story, nine months later Owl Child’s wife delivered a fair-skinned baby boy with blue eyes and light colored hair, who was either stillborn or smothered in a badger hole by the woman’s horrified relatives. In support of this account, some Piegans note even today that, while Owl Child was renowned for his pride and vanity, anger over a mere horse theft—no matter how insulting—would not have precipitated the violence that ensued two years later. And yet in his defense, Malcolm Clarke held women in the highest regard, and throughout his life the targets of his wrath were exclusively men. It is not possible to square these divergent accounts.109

  Whatever the cause of the enmity between Ne-tus-che-o and the Clarkes, Owl Child’s embrace of Horace on that summer night in 1869 suggested that all ill feelings had passed. Nellie joked lightly, “Our horses are again stolen,” and Malcolm invited his guests inside for a hastily prepared supper. The young men accepted and filed indoors—Ne-tus-che-o, along with Bear Chief (whom Nellie called Richard the Third because of his resemblance to the fifteenth-century English king), Black Weasel (known also as Shanghai), his brother, and one of Mountain Chief’s sons.110 They said they had come to deliver some stolen horses and also to entice Clarke to come and trade with the Piegans later that year at one of their winter camps.

  Though Clarke was reassured by the Indians’ apparent good will, the mood at the dinner table was not only odd but even portentous. Nellie’s eight-year-old sister, Isabel, told Owl Child how hard her family had taken the news of the murder of Mountain Chief’s brother in Fort Benton, but Ne-tus-che-o hushed her, as if he did not want sympathy, even if offered by a little girl. Meanwhile, Black Weasel sat silently through the meal with his face buried in his hands and tears streaming out from between his fingers. When Owl Child explained away the bizarre sight by insisting that his friend’s eyes were merely sore, Isabel sent for some water to relieve the Indian’s discomfort. Strangest of all was the erratic behavior of Mountain Chief’s son, who paced about the house nervously, running his palms over the furniture, fingering the tablecloth, and talking incessantly in an animated voice.

  Horace must have sensed that something was amiss, because he searched for his pistol before accompanying Mountain Chief’s son to bring in the horses from a nearby pasture. Perplexed by her brother’s alarm, Nellie chided him gently: “What is the use of a fire-arm? You are with a friend.” Malcolm agreed, and so Horace and the Indian headed out into the darkness. They had traveled about a mile from the house when Horace was startled to hear his companion begin singing a Crow death song. He turned to face the Indian, who fired a pistol, the ball striking just below Horace’s nose, passing through his face, and exiting slightly in front of his left ear. Thrown from his saddle but ensnared in the lariat, Horace was dragged across the ground for some distance before his leg slipped loose of its hold, and then he lay still, bleeding uncontrollably from his wound. Two more Indians, who were not part of the group received at the house, emerged from a patch of nearby brush, and upon inspecting Horace guessed that he was dead. Because of Owl Child’s kinship ties to the victim, they did not desecrate the body by taking its scalp, and instead hurried back to the ranch.

  Though weakened from the loss of blood, Horace managed to drag himself to within a hundred yards of the house, where he collapsed and cried out, “Father! I am shot!” But he heard only the whinnying of horses and the shrieks of his mother and sisters. Moments before, Owl Child and Malcolm had stepped outside to talk, and when the two men appeared at the door yet another Indian—there may have been as many as thirty concealed at various spots on the ranch—bolted from the darkness and shot Clarke in the chest at point-blank range. As the rancher staggered backward, Owl Child delivered the deathblow, powerfully cleaving Clarke’s forehead with an ax. Ne-tus-che-o had planned the attack carefully, counting on Piegan rage over the recent atrocity in Fort Benton to shield him from any tribal punishment.

  The commotion was so fierce and the screams so feral that they spooked the Indians’ horses. In the confusion Nellie, her mother, and an elderly aunt named Black Bear were able to pull Malcolm’s body into one of the bedrooms without drawing the notice of the Indians.111 The women placed the corpse next to Horace, who had staggered inside moments earlier and whose wound Nellie packed with raw tobacco in a frantic effort to stanch the bleeding. While Nellie, Coth-co-co-na, and the rest of the family took shelter behind barred doors, Black Bear went out to confront the attackers. The old woman admonished the Indians, telling them, “The man murdered to-night was y
our best friend. You have committed a deed so dark, so terrible that the trees will whisper it.”112 Though Ne-tus-che-o insisted to the others that Horace was still alive, his companions were moved by Black Bear’s reproach, and so the raiders left, driving off the Clarkes’ cattle and destroying their stores of flour, sugar, and other goods.

  With the Indians’ departure an eerie calm settled upon the ranch. The women clung to each other in total darkness, afraid to light a candle lest any one of the Indians return and finish off the survivors. “A marvelous stillness” covered the house, broken only by the whimpering of the children and the discomfiting sound of Horace’s vomiting up the blood he had swallowed. All the while, Helen’s mind reeled at the thought that the Piegans—“our blood,” she called them—could be guilty of such a deed. At daybreak she and Isabel hurried off to seek help, and by late that afternoon several well-wishers had trickled in, including a physician who announced that, miraculously, Horace had suffered no broken bones and would likely make a full recovery. Nellie’s relief, however, was tempered by the arrival of her younger brother, Nathan, who had been away from the ranch for several days in search of some missing horses. Upon entering the house, he passed by the prostrate Horace without a word and approached his father’s corpse. Nathan, whom Nellie described as “hotheaded,” let out a deep groan, and his youthful face took on a dark and worrisome expression as he vowed retribution. He was just seventeen.113

  Word of Clarke’s murder sent shock waves throughout Montana, and in short order the news ricocheted well beyond the territory. Nathaniel Langford, a close friend and later the first superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, wrote, “The Indians loved him, and it was a common saying among the citizens of Helena where I lived that [Malcolm Clarke] was more a friend to the Indians than to the whites, and when the news that he was killed, reached us, it was thought that a general uprising would follow.”114 Within a few days Clarke’s sister, Charlotte, received a telegraph at her home in St. Paul. She carried the dispatch upstairs to her mother, who was visiting from Cincinnati. When she read it, the elderly woman broke down, sobbing, “[M]y bright-eyed little boy who loved his only mother, as he used to call me so tenderly.”115