Centennial by James A. Michener

IN SPRING OF THE YEAR 1851 AN EXCITING RUMOR SPREAD across the western plains. Comparing partial information, men convinced themselves that portentous things were afoot.

The rumor started in Washington and moved swiftly out to St. Louis, where it was further augmented. By the time it reached St. Joseph it was raging like a prairie fire, and the farther westward it went, the more alluring it became.

"Yessir," a mountain man affirmed at the Pawnee village, "the U. S. gov'mint is finally gonna grasp the bull by the horns."

"And do what? " a suspicious trapper from Minnesota asked.

"We're gonna have a great meeting. all the tribes on the plains. and we're gonna settle once and for all who owns what."

A chief of the Pawnee, hearing this heady talk, asked, "Great White Father, he come? Make peace?"

"He wouldn't come hisself," the mountain man explained, "but he would sure send his commissioners and Indian agents. It's gonna be peace."

The news sped along the Platte as fast as men could ride, and nowhere did it create more commotion than at Fort Laramie, where a small detachment of one hundred and sixty soldiers under tall, prim Captain William Ketchum, accepted responsibility for the safety of an empire. A trader bringing in six wagons of goods for Mr. Tutt, who ran the sutler's store, reported, "I heard for sure it's gonna happen. Mebbe two hundred, three hundred Indians brought to this fort-right here-for one great powwow."

"We couldn't handle three hundred Indians," Ketchum protested. "Look at us! " He pointed to one of America's most curious military establishments: within a curving sweep made by the Laramie River stood an old adobe fort long used by fur traders and emigrants. Since it was obviously inadequate and probably indefensible, new buildings were being erected along the sides of an impressive parade ground, but at this moment only two were in operation-the sutler's store at the far end and the residential building, a two-storied plantation affair that looked as though it belonged in Virginia. Ultimately, plans called for a palisade to enclose the area, with two tall towers at the diagonal, but it certainly did not exist now, a fact of which Captain Ketchum was painfully aware. Pointing once more to the empty, unprotected space, he complained, "We could not defend ourselves. It would be a massacre."

"Well," the trader said enthusiastically, "here's where they meet. Three hundred of 'em. Gonna settle all territorial claims. Peace for all time is what Washington wants. " And with this he led his wagons to the sutler's, where the long-needed goods were unloaded.

Captain Ketchum was worried. Sending his orderly to fetch Joe Strunk, long-time mountain man serving as guide and interpreter, the captain said with some bitterness, "Word from St. Louis is that three hundred Indians will be convening here. peace treaty of some kind. " Obviously he did not relish the idea.

"They'd overrun us," Strunk protested. When he had first heard that the United States was building a fort at Laramie he was pleased. It would help police the various trails that were beginning to crisscross the west. But if the government wanted a real fort in this territory, with no support for six hundred miles, it ought to be a protected fort, not a large open space.

"If the redskins got started, it could be a massacre," he said dolefully.

"My very words! " Ketchum said.

"They been talkin' peace for the last ten years," Strunk observed, "and we got more war across the prairies now than ever before."

This was not correct. In the middle years of the nineteenth century more than 350,000 emigrants moved along the Platte River from the Missouri to the Pacific, and the bulk passed through Indian lands without encountering difficulty. Something less than one-tenth of one percent of the travelers were slain by Indians-fewer than three hundred-whereas many times that number were killed by their own rifles, or the rifles of friends fired accidentally, or the gunplay of criminals who had joined the procession.

There have been few mass migrations in history so peaceful, and no previous instance in which people of one race passed through lands held by another with such trivial inconvenience. For this good record the Indian was mostly responsible, for it was his willingness to abide the white man that allowed the two groups to coexist in such harmony.

"What we got," Strunk explained, "is petty warfare. Crow against Sioux. Shoshone against Cheyenne."

"And we also have Broken Thumb," Ketchum said with some distaste as he pointed to a tall, rangy Cheyenne in his mid-thirties who lounged insolently outside the gates of the old fort. "Broken Thumb! " he called. "Come over here."

Slowly the chief detached himself from the Indians with whom he had been talking and very slowly walked the considerable distance from the adobe fort to the new white building. He moved as if he were coming to a fight, a scowl marking his broad, dark face, a gun cradled in his arms. Among the tribes he was a disrupting influence, for he was burdened with a bitter knowledge: he understood what was happening to his people in an age of change.