The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West Page 15

  Aside from his obvious responsibility in leading the troops to Heavy Runner’s camp, there were other reasons why Kipp was an easy target for Piegan frustrations. For one thing, regardless of his two decades among the Blackfeet, Kipp, in the final analysis, was not one of them: his Indian heritage was Mandan. Moreover, after 1870 he developed a reputation as one of the most successful liquor traders in the Montana–Alberta borderlands, an unsavory vocation in a place ravaged by native alcoholism and its attendant social disorders.

  Joe Kipp, 1889. Born around 1850 to James Kipp, a prominent AFC trader, and a Mandan named Earth Woman, Kipp was one of two army scouts in Major Baker’s employ. He mistakenly led the Second U.S. Calvary to the camp of Heavy Runner, who had been guaranteed safe passage just three weeks earlier by Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Sully. Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society.

  In later years Kipp won over at least some of his detractors, aided no doubt by the intimate ties he developed with the Piegans. In one of the more poignant, if unusual, developments in the wake of the Marias Massacre, Kipp married Double Strike Woman (known also as Martha), one of Heavy Runner’s daughters, and then adopted several other of the slain chief’s offspring. According to a friend, Kipp doted on the children and strove to give them every advantage.95 Nonetheless, his betrayal was so indelible that even today some on the Blackfeet Reservation who carry his name have nothing but contempt for the man. One such individual said in 1995, “I’m not about to do an Honor Dance around Joe’s grave.”96

  HORACE CLARKE FARED much better, suffering little of the enmity that dogged Kipp. For instance, he explained to Plassmann that during the attack on Heavy Runner’s camp, one of his own uncles had fled into the river and then turned and shot at him. When Clarke explained that he had returned fire, Plassmann asked whether he had ever regretted it: “‘No,’ he replied. And I am convinced he meant what he said. Ties of blood are not considered in war time.”97 Furthermore, as Clarke insisted, once he realized that the troops had ambushed the wrong camp that morning he tried to protect the embattled Indians, “but one could do little with soldiers after they had tasted blood.”98

  For their part, most Piegans seemed to give Clarke a pass, thinking that his participation in the slaughter was somehow justified by a desire to avenge his father’s murder. And Clarke was reasonably insulated against native skepticism by his Piegan blood and particularly his elevated social status, which derived from his father’s prominence as well as from his own entrepreneurial ventures after 1870. Whereas Kipp became a whiskey runner, dodging the law and at least once killing an obstreperous Indian customer, Clarke took a more respectable path.99 In the mid-1870s, having sold his father’s ranch in the Prickly Pear, he moved to north-central Montana near the Highwood Mountains, where he raised cattle with his wife, Margaret, a Piegan woman known by her people as First Kill.100 Then, in 1889, he and his family moved to the small town of Midvale, later renamed East Glacier Park, just east of the Rocky Mountains, where he acquired a homestead after the allotment of the Blackfeet Reservation. With the establishment of Glacier National Park in 1910, Clarke sold a portion of his land to the Great Northern Railway, which then erected the magnificent Glacier Park Lodge, a soaring, chalet-style resort, on Clarke’s former property, though Clarke himself did not became wealthy from this transaction.101

  To be sure, Clarke knew his own share of heartache and tragedy. Of the eight children born to him and Margaret between 1876 and 1883, four died in infancy of scarlet fever and only two—John (1881–1970) and Agnes (1883–1973)—outlived their parents. Perhaps it was the agony caused by these untimely deaths that contributed to the marital strife between him and Margaret, leading to a lengthy separation followed by divorce. Margaret remarried in the 1890s, but he did not.102 Still, by the early years of the twentieth century, Clarke appeared to have weathered better than most mixed-bloods, and certainly all Blackfeet, the sweeping changes that had utterly transformed Montana since the buffalo days of his youth. With the influence of his sister Helen, the home they shared at East Glacier Park became a literary salon, of sorts, for those visiting the magnificent lodge next door. And it was there that the ghosts of 1870 at last caught up with him, conveyed to his doorstep, if indirectly, by Joe Kipp.

  ON 8 FEBRUARY 1913 Kipp, aged sixty-three and in deteriorating health, gave a statement about his role in the Baker Massacre to Arthur McFatridge, Indian agent to the Blackfeet. Kipp’s description of that fratricidal attack more than four decades earlier was concise and matter-of-fact, differing from the military’s accounts on only two main points: Kipp insisted that he himself had tallied 217 dead Indians at the Big Bend (and not the 173 reported by Baker), and that afterward the U.S. soldiers had rounded up an estimated 5,000 horses (as opposed to the army figure of 300), one-tenth of which belonged to Heavy Runner alone. Kipp added that he had been only fifty or sixty yards distant from the headman when he fell, and that upon discovering Heavy Runner’s note of safe passage, the troops hurriedly buried the chief in the ground (violating the Indian custom of placing the deceased in trees), presumably to conceal the evidence.103

  While Kipp’s testimony might have been an effort to clear his conscience before he died later that year, there was also a practical reason for his statement. Joe’s adopted son Richard (usually called Dick), along with two of Richard’s half siblings, Emma Miller and William Upham (born to one of Heavy Runner’s other wives), had enlisted McFatridge to assist them in winning compensation from the federal government for the chief’s murder and the theft of his horses. And it was no small sum the Indians were after: $75,000. Why the claimants decided to act at that particular moment is unclear; perhaps Joe’s accelerating decline gave them a sense of urgency, or maybe McFatridge was more sympathetic to their cause than previous agents had been. In any event, McFatridge forwarded their inquiry to the commissioner of Indian affairs the very same day that he took Kipp’s statement.104

  After almost a year had passed with no answer from Washington, McFatridge wrote again in January 1914, and then in a third letter sent two months later he threw his own weight behind the Indians’ petition: “There is no question but that this massacre took place as was described by Joseph Kipp … and it appears to me that these people do have a just claim against the government.” He added that Dick Kipp and William Upham were contemplating a trip to the East in order to present their case in person, which surely would have caused embarrassment on Capitol Hill.105

  Whether or not the threat of a visiting Indian delegation caught the attention of federal bureaucrats, a staffer at the Department of the Interior within three weeks of receiving McFatridge’s third letter asked the War Department for all available information on Baker’s campaign and any subsequent government investigation.106 Meanwhile, Heavy Runner’s heirs solicited and sent to Washington additional testimony from survivors of the massacre. In one deposition Bear Head described his capture by soldiers on the morning of the fight as he rounded up his horses.107 Kills-on-the-Edge, known by whites as Mary Monroe, remembered how she and her wounded mother had fled the Big Bend and taken shelter in another Piegan camp.108 And for good measure, the claimants also attached a statement by Alf Hamilton, a white trader, who testified to the number of Heavy Runner’s mounts in 1870, noting, “In those days an Indian would not be considered a chief unless he had several hundred head of horses.”109

  And yet it was not enough. Though the Indians won the backing of Senator Harry Lane of Oregon, who in February 1915 introduced a bill on their behalf, officials at the Interior Department refused to endorse the legislation.110 In justifying the decision, the office of Secretary Franklin K. Lane (no relation to the senator) explained, “It is impossible to reconcile the statements of Joseph Kipp with reports which the military authorities made shortly after the events transpired,” adding that the passage of time complicated the gathering of sufficient evidence to overturn the original government version of the incident.111 Senator Lane tried again in December with a new bill
, but received precisely the same reply from the Interior Department. The plaintiffs, however, were undeterred and attempted to strengthen their hand by interviewing other Piegan eyewitnesses to the slaughter.112 Dick Kipp even made a visit to the Big Bend in December 1916, recovering two six-shooters and posting a notice declaring that it was the site of the battle.113 But Secretary Lane remained steadfast in his opposition to their claim, withholding his support for similar bills proposed in 1917 and 1920.

  At this point the Indians approached Horace Clarke, although his appearance in the record at this time—seven years after Heavy Runner’s heirs had initiated their case—invites scrutiny. Presumably, Clarke’s testimony would have been invaluable from the start, considering his role in the slaughter and his status as a mixed-blood (which meant that his voice would carry more weight in Washington than that of deponents of pure Indian ancestry). And unlike Joe Kipp, Clarke could provide key information about the military perspective on the engagement unalloyed by any obvious conflict of interest. Given the dogged efforts of the plaintiffs in marshaling evidence to support their claim, perhaps Clarke both received and rebuffed prior requests for his involvement. At the very least, it seems that he did not volunteer any assistance before 1920.

  Whatever the circumstances behind its origin, Clarke’s brief statement—sworn before a notary public at East Glacier Park on 9 November 1920—was remarkable for its candor. Clarke began by acknowledging his participation in “the Baker fight,” as he called it, and moved quickly to stress the injustice of the killings that day, explaining, “[I] personally knew Heavy Runner, a good Indian and a friend of the white people.” If the numbers Clarke gave in his statement that day were unhelpful to the plaintiffs (he cited 150 dead Indians and only 1,300 confiscated horses), he nevertheless bolstered their allegation that the army’s attack upon their father’s camp was a tragic mistake. As proof, he stated for the record what had long been merely rumored: “It is an undeniable fact that Col. Baker was drunk and did not know what he was doing. The hostile camp was Mountain Chief’s, and it was the camp we intended to strike, but owing to too much excitement and confusion and misinformation the Heavy Runner camp was the sufferer and the victim of circumstances.”114

  The claimants undoubtedly thought their case stronger than ever. After all, with Clarke’s deposition they now had the support of a man who had stood on the bluffs at the Big Bend that awful morning and fired into the sleeping camp, a man who was not looking for absolution and who in fact had reason to despise the Piegans, even if their blood was his own and he had lived among them all his adult life. Armed with the new information, Senator Thomas J. Walsh of Montana, soon to become famous for leading the investigation into the Teapot Dome scandal, wasted no time in putting a bill before his chamber, introducing S. 287 just five months later, on 12 April 1921. Nevertheless, the result this time was worse than before: the proposed legislation was not even referred to the Interior Department for consideration.115 For those who had lost the most on the darkest day in Blackfeet history, there would be no restitution, no apology, not even an acknowledgment of their suffering.

  Horace Clarke et al. 1923. Taken in a Helena studio after their reenactment of a footrace from some fifty years before, this photograph shows Horace Clarke (seated at right) and David Hilger (standing at right), along with two other friends, a reminder that for Montana’s old-timers the boundaries of race were more elastic than for later white arrivals. Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society.

  FOR THE HEIRS of Heavy Runner, the unsuccessful claim against the government perhaps brought an official closure to the Baker Massacre, but the suit marked a new beginning of sorts for Horace Clarke. In the last decade of his life, he engaged with the slaughter’s aftermath, at least publicly, in a way he never had before. Of course, there was his lengthy interview with Martha Plassmann, but a more symbolic and touching moment came three years earlier.

  In September 1923 Clarke traveled from East Glacier Park to Helena in order to meet an old friend, David Hilger, who had recently moved back to the capital after an absence of four decades. The two were joined there by Andrew Fergus—who, like Hilger, was descended from a prominent white family with deep roots in the state—as well as William “Billy” Johns. During their reunion, the men reenacted a celebrated footrace they had run nearly fifty years before, although the youngest among them (Hilger) was now sixty-five. Afterward they took a photograph together in a local studio.116

  The highlight of the men’s gathering, however, was a side trip they made to the former Clarke ranch in the Prickly Pear Valley.117 It had been so long since Horace had last visited the place that the wooden fence surrounding his father’s burial site had long since decayed. Struck by the poor condition of the grave, Clarke—with the assistance of Hilger, newly appointed librarian for the Montana Historical Society—arranged for the construction of a sturdy, wrought iron enclosure the next year.118 As for a headstone, Clarke left it for the people of the state to erect a suitable monument commemorating, as he put it, “one of the greatest of Montana pioneers and a kind and good father.”119

  Marias Massacre commemoration, 2006. Each year, students and faculty from the Blackfeet Community College in Browning travel to the site of the Marias Massacre, where they remember those killed on 23 January 1870. Courtesy of Harry Palmer.

  The fence around the grave of Malcolm Clarke still stands today, even if worn and rusted, but the only memorial is a small stone tablet, suggesting perhaps that by the 1920s the citizens of Montana preferred to forget the brutal events that had preceded them by half a century. Likewise, there is no historical marker at the Big Bend, though for many years now a group of faculty and students from Blackfeet Community College have made the sixty-five-mile trek from Browning to the site of the massacre each 23 January. On one occasion they placed 217 stones in a circle to commemorate those who died at this now somnolent patch of land, where the dark waters of the Marias form a graceful horseshoe before running east again.120

  4

  The Bird That Comes Home

  On a midwinter day in 1911, Helen Clarke wrote a most unusual fan letter to Edwin Milton Royle, then a noted American playwright. At the time Royle was nearing the apex of his career. His most famous piece, The Squaw Man, had just concluded its third run on Broadway, and three years later it would be made into Hollywood’s first feature-length film, marking the directorial debut of a struggling former actor named Cecil B. DeMille.1

  Clarke, however, was not writing to lavish praise on The Squaw Man or even as a devotee of the theater (though she had once enjoyed a brief but acclaimed New York stage career herself). Rather, she sought out Royle to share her powerful reaction to the play’s sequel, a novel published in 1910 titled The Silent Call, which for her had captured so well the complexities of life on an Indian reservation. This feat was no accident. While Royle was a Princeton graduate and a longtime resident of the East Coast, he was, in his words, a “Western man,” raised near Kansas City, Missouri. To honor his roots, he even named his sprawling estate in Darien, Connecticut, the Wickiup (another word for wigwam). In short, Royle knew the West intimately.

  Helen P. Clarke, 1895. This studio portrait, taken in New York between her stints as an allotting agent in Indian Territory, gives a sense of Helen Clarke’s commanding presence, which fueled her brief but acclaimed stage career in the 1870s. Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society.

  From her own life experiences, Clarke recognized the characters and themes in The Silent Call: the corrupt Indian agent, the caring but naïve missionary, and particularly the simmering tensions between native peoples and their white neighbors who coveted the Indians’ natural resources. Especially poignant for Helen was the dilemma of the novel’s protagonist, Hal Calthorpe. Like Helen, Hal was the mixed-blood child of a noted white man and his Indian wife and, like Helen, had enjoyed a remarkable career for someone of such lineage. Most of all, just like Helen, Hal had felt the sharp sting of racial prejudice. Indeed, in one
of the novel’s most memorable scenes, Hal recoils when assaulted with the epithet “half-breed.”

  As Clarke explained in her letter to Royle, she hoped that his book might alert others to the plight faced by mixed-blood individuals. But she was doubtful, given the attitudes of “the poor white trash and the half civilized Westerners who believed that [an] Indian could be called good only when dead.” She marveled that such vitriol was matched by a toxic combination of ignorance and hypocrisy, which allowed “the so-called American, a mixture of so many breeds [and] nationalities [to] sit in the seat of the scornful and arrogate to himself a pureness of blood, a superiority, something of which he is so unworthy an exponent.”2

  In a prompt and generous reply, Royle likened racial prejudice to superstition, but acknowledged that “we are all more or less tainted with it,” noting ruefully that his own grandfather had been a slave owner. Still, he saw cause for optimism, insisting that the progress of the age—steam, electricity, the telephone—would bring people closer together and thus erode, however slowly, the fear and hatred stemming from perceived human difference. To boost her spirits, he even recommended a recent book by a French writer that attacked the notion of fixed racial inferiority.3

  Regardless of his mollifying words and thoughtful reading suggestions, Royle could not do for Clarke what he had for Hal Calthorpe: provide a happy ending. All turns out well for the hero of The Silent Call: Hal secures his father’s vast landholdings on the northern Plains, wins the affections of a beautiful Indian girl, and even earns the lasting respect of local whites. Clarke, on the other hand, could only dream of such a tidy resolution. For a mixed-blood woman, even one as arresting and accomplished as Helen Clarke, the racial, gender, and social politics at the turn of the twentieth century—an era she bitterly denounced as “the Age of Tribes”—produced far more ambiguous resolutions.