That day, I made two plates; the first a lengthy exposure. I wanted to capture the light on the bones, but not so that they were flooded by it. I was after that peculiar radiance Jackson called the “fat light.” The second plate, I exposed twice as long to give the weakened rays of the cloud-dampened sun time to burn themselves onto the negative.
“We’ll sleep here tonight,” said Osler. “Too risky to travel the pass without a full moon.”
I nodded and decided not to pack up the camera just yet. I thought I’d leave the lens uncovered to see how the remains would photograph under a sliver of moon and the gravel of stars. Of course, it didn’t turn out: The wet plate dried during the exposure. Later, when I showed it to Jackson, expecting to be lambasted for my stupidity, he said he was pleased. He reminded me that life and pictures can happen by accident. He looked at the empty plate and declared it “beautiful.” I don’t believe in accidents — not anymore.
Osler took the mule and rode off toward the trees to gather wood. A June night can be cold a mile above sea level. We’d also need a fire to heat up our hash and coffee. Besides, I didn’t care for the idea of sleeping among so many dead creatures. I didn’t believe in what the eye couldn’t see and the hand couldn’t choke. Still, it’s easy to see ghosts when you sleep in a graveyard. I wanted a fire to ward them off.
“I saw something even worse in the Platte River Valley,” said Osler, arranging sticks of wood with the fastidiousness of a haberdasher. “A two-hundred-mile stretch of bones— bare and bleached like these here.” He shook his shaggy head in wonder, as anyone might who happened on a thing so unspeakable that it defied understanding. “A man can kill eighty buffalo in a day, if he puts his mind to it.”
In three years, white hunters and soldiers killed eight million American bison — not to eat, but for their hides, or for the pleasure they took in subjugating something remarkable, or for military strategy in the total war against native peoples, which were “fated to pass away” from the earth so that the Caucasian race could inherit it.
That night, Osler continued in a talkative vein. Maybe he, too, was scared. Maybe he was awed by the presence of death or the absence of life (they’re not exactly the same thing). Maybe he knew that, after tomorrow, he’d never see me again. He could tell me his thoughts and admit feelings he never would to the other miners. Men seem cruelest when they are in one another’s company for any length of time. He said that he and Frank had come west the year before and gotten off the train at Omaha. They hadn’t been in town long when Frank got stabbed coming out of a saloon.
“By an Indian wearing a Union blue coat.”
“With sergeant’s stripes?” I asked. If I’d been a rabbit, my ears would have tensed in alarm.
“Yes. Know him?”
“I saw him around.”
The most inconsequential thing can forge a chain of fatality: Whitman, Grant, Lincoln, Durant, Jackson, George Osler, Frank, a dispossessed, demoralized, and rum-soaked Indian — all connected by a sack coat. And that field of bones. is it connected to the firmament of stars? Whitman knew the truth: Everything is pitched to a mystic chord. Though not always sweetly. Such are the thoughts that come to a man in the night.
“What happened to the Indian who stabbed your brother?”
“I put a bullet in him,” Osler replied.
I lay in my bedroll and watched the moon climb up a corner of the sky and start down the other side. The stars composed their ancient stories, told each night to an earth that suffers under our dominion. The bones of nine hundred Indian ponies shone under this same sliver of a moon, near the Washita River in Indian Territory, after having suffered natural processes to turn them into a ruin interesting to photographers. In November, Custer had ordered the ponies shot after his 7th Cavalry killed the Cheyenne while they slept beneath white flags raised above their tents.
Custer. He would fester in me, like a dirty splinter.
The wind had lain down with Osler and me. Now and again it rose to hymn the night, which is, as anyone knows who’s slept outside in it, holier than the common day woven of distractions. If one turned out, I decided to send a print of the killing field to Grant to remind him of what death looked like, stripped of glamour and rhetoric. Sitting in his White House, he might have forgotten “the stark forms of existence.”
I know what you’re thinking, Jay. Your disapproval is written all over your face. Bear with me awhile longer, and then you can have your say.
Omaha, Nebraska, June — September 1870
Now that the Union Pacific was finished, Durant had no more need of the old Lincoln parlor car or its steward. I burned my white uniform and became William Jackson’s full-time assistant. I let my hair grow long and wore a beard like his, and I didn’t give a damn whether my fingernails were clean or not. We lived on board the “photographic car,” fitted out with berths, a trestle table, and upholstered chairs abandoned when a tent town erected along the right-of-way went bust. There was also a darkroom. I became skilled at printing negatives, retouching albumen prints, and hand-coloring stereopticon cards of the Wild West. Ordered by a Boston firm, the cards gave voyeurs back east something to gape at. It was hack work and oftentimes despicable, but Jackson depended on its income to finance his excursions.
While he was off taking pictures of Indians, I worked on the Boston job and on an album of prints for Durant, commemorating the Omaha depot. When I finished it, he handed me the camera’s bill of sale. I was nearly twenty-two and considered myself disenthralled at last, as Lincoln would have said. I’ve often wondered whether he would have advocated extermination, like Custer and Phil Sheridan; salvation, like the missionaries; or starvation, like Sherman, as the final solution to the Indian problem. (It was by Lincoln’s order that the Northern Ute were driven out of the Provo Valley onto a reservation.) Frankly, I didn’t see how to pacify them. We couldn’t pack them off to Africa the way we wanted to do the blacks. The Indians might have had good reason to kill us, but we couldn’t just doff our hats and offer them our scalps.
In June 1870, Durant sent Jackson to Colorado Territory to photograph the linking of the Denver Pacific to the new transcontinental railroad. Afterward, Jackson traveled by stage-coach the hundred miles to Denver City, where he’d been commissioned to make portraits of the mining millionaires Tabor, Croke, Patterson, and Campbell. They paid him, as they paid for everything, ostentatiously.
“Each handed me a hundred-dollar gold piece,” Jackson told me later. “Then each one lit a cigar with a hundred-dollar bill. I don’t think they meant to humiliate me, only to prove to one another that they were too rich to consider such sums anything more than a trifle.”
The money, along with what the recent stereopticon order brought in, would be enough to restock our plates and chemicals and to allow us to live like lords through the coming winter. Or so I thought. Jackson went out and got himself bathed, shaved, and massaged, replenished his supply of dried apricots, and bought a brand-new wool union suit for each of us at Omaha Dry Goods. The town had grown prosperous, and Geissinger, the store’s squint-eyed owner, had hired a painter to add emporium in gold letters to his sign. I wondered what had possessed Jackson to buy me new underwear, but I said nothing, knowing how much he liked to appear mysterious. Jackson would have made an excellent shaman or a Moslem fakir, depending on the hemisphere.