The skipper exchanged glances with his purser and replied, "If you say so. When Indians want to talk to me, they'd best talk plain American if they know what's good for 'em. But I can see why Uncle Sam might send someone who speaks some Sioux to question old Wabasha Chambrun. Lord knows you don't get straight answers out of the shifty-eyed cuss in English!"
Longarm asked, "You mean you know Chambrun personal?"
The skipper shrugged. "We've delivered some heavy hardware to him now and again."
As if to back his word, a distant sunflower windmill flashed a suddenly turning metal blade at them above the tree tops along the shore, and the skipper pointed the cheroot Longarm had given him and observed, "There's the Chambrun spread now, off to the northwest on the far side of the county road. You can't see anything but the new windmill we delivered this spring from here."
Longarm took a drag on his own smoke and let it all out before he observed, "Well, the Land Office does expect a homesteader to make taxable improvements on his claim before it's his to have and to hold free and simple. But them patent windmills cost more than your average pony, don't they?"
The skipper nodded soberly. "They do indeed and I follow your drift, now that you've told me about Chambrun paying for that riding stock with a hundred-dollar treasury note. I fear I'm simply not able to say how Chambrun paid for that patent windmill and all the other fancy trimmings we delivered there this spring. It was sent prepaid from Chicago Town. We just ran it up from the railroad back where you just came aboard. Hardly worth putting in."
The purser volunteered, "Rocks. Chambrun staked his claim along one of the worst places to put in along this already rocky enough old river. Ain't that just like an Indian? Even the other breeds and freed darkies in these parts know enough to consider river traffic as well as that muddy wagon trace along the damn bank."
The skipper nodded. "Damned right. Even dumb Swedes who can't speak English consider the lay of the land before they file a homestead claim along a damned river. Land near a good landing site is sure to rise in value as this valley fills up over time."
The purser said, "Lord, I sure wish I'd had the sense to file a claim across from that new railroad town called Fairfax! For nobody expects a man to waste time and effort plowing land where railroad and river traffic meet and grain elevators sprout like mushrooms!"
They were already passing that distant windmill. As Longarm kept staring at it wistfully, considering how far back he'd have to track as this day grew ever shorter, the skipper said, "Chambrun and his brood of Lord knows how many little Indians will get to plow until they're old and gray back yonder. Some of the boys who helped them haul that windmill gear and bobwire rolls ashore say the land the fool breed has claimed isn't much less rocky as you get back from the river. They spotted more than one outcropping in the forty-odd acres cleared so far. So it's safe to say that when you see rocks poking up out of a field, the soil can't be all that deep anywhere else!"
The purser suggested, "Mayhaps they're planning on a mining operation instead of cattle or wheat?"
Longarm didn't feel the call to chew that bone. He knew the old Santee reserve had been surveyed for minerals of any value before the B.I.A. had offered it to them in exchange for their original woodlands closer to the Great Lakes. The most valuable thing this corner of Minnesota had to offer was dirt, rich prairie dirt that grew crops better where it lay deepest, and surely even an illiterate would be likely to look over any land he meant to file a homestead claim on before he ever signed his X. So what in thunder might have made the oddly prosperous Wabasha Chambrun feel he just had to homestead a quarter section with rocks sticking out of it and no decent boat landing on the nearby river?
When he voiced his puzzlement, the skipper just shrugged and told him, "You just said at least some Indians don't think the way we do. The Santee could have kept all the land you see off to the west if they'd only behaved halfway sensible. The B.I.A. had built trading posts and even schools and dispensaries for 'em, at two different agencies, so's they wouldn't have to travel too far. Old Little Crow and the other chiefs got to live in fine frame houses, just like us white folks, only better. They paid no rent and got their roofs fixed free when they leaked. So what did they do, just because they had to wait a little longer for their government handouts in wartime, in the middle of summer after a good spring hunt, for Gawd's sake?"
The purser explained, "We were working together on an earlier and slower steamboat called the Saint Anthony at the time. We were the ones hauling army supplies up to Fort Ridgely after Little Crow and his warriors tried in vain to take it, the poor ragged assholes!"
The skipper snorted, "Flowers in their hair, for Gawd's sake. Hit all along the river treacherous and dirty, with most of the first whites killed the poor fools who'd thought they were on good terms with the Indians."
The purser grumbled, "Trying to be on good terms, you mean. The two-faced redskins got the first white settlers they killed into a friendly shooting match, then attacked the poor simps once their guns were empty and it was the Santee's turn to shoot!"
The skipper growled, "They slaughtered four hundred whites the first day. More than half of 'em women and children. Fifty-odd whites near the downstream agency, who'd never trusted Sioux they knew better, got away to spread the alarm. Just in time. Scared settlers flocked in to Fort Ridgely on the far side of the river. Forty-eight of the soldiers had already been ambushed and scalped, leaving a garrison of thirty troopers to protect over two hundred scared-skinny civilians with no earthworks or even a stockade betwixt them and the so-called friendly Indians!"
Longarm could read, and had read some about the events that were so vivid to the older men after all those years. So he was the one who said, "By the time Little Crow worked up the nerve to attack Fort Ridgely, they'd been reinforced by another hundred or more real soldiers, along with some twenty-odd civilian volunteers who did have time to throw up some breastworks, and let's not forget the modest but ferocious field artillery pieces on hand. I read someplace the bursting shells killed lots of Santee."
The skipper grumbled, "You'll have read in other books how the only white killed three days later down by New Ulm was a young girl caught in the cross-fire too. But old-timers who were there make it thirty-six whites killed and most of New Ulm in ashes by the time the Sioux gave up. The whites gave up too, and stampeded down the river to Mankato, at the big bend, as soon as they dared break cover!"
The purser, who seemed to enjoy figuring numbers said, "Eight hundred or more whites killed outright, a hundred and seven whites captured, along with a hundred and sixty-odd breeds and friendlies who'd been treated just as rough by the time they were rescued. At least thirty thousand whites in all had been pushed off their homesteads, dead or alive, and they figure less than half the white gals raped ever owned up to it when they were taken back from the savage bastards!"
Longarm muttered he'd read there'd been some argument as to just how many of those hundreds of condemned ringleaders had deserved to hang or not. He knew what these old Minnesota white boys would have to say about the Episcopal missionary, Henry Whipple, who got Abe Lincoln to commute the sentences for all but the likes of a brave called Cut Nose, who bragged from the scaffold how he'd killed Wasichu men, women, and children until his arm got too tired to kill any more. Old Billy Vail hadn't sent him over this way to find out how folks felt about the long-gone Santee. Although he'd have to take that smoldering hatred into account as he tried to decide the guilt or innocence of an odd homesteader with what seemed at least a few Quill Indian in-laws.