Dan Simmons - Black Hills

The new town of Custer, set in a broad valley, was mostly saloons, blacksmith shops, liveries, and whorehouses (with crib doxies in their tents for the miners who had little money), but they camped on a high grassy hill outside of town and went in for food and a sarsaparilla at a soda fountain with a striped red-and-white awning.

The third day, they entered the heart of the Black Hills, their two patient Christian mules pulling the loaded buckboard up steep, rutted paths used by the mining companies and mule skinners. The route of the Denver–Deadwood stagecoach was to their west. Their own mules, slow and thoughtful as they were, learned to scamper the buckboard out of the way when a heavy freight wagon came barreling down the muddy track toward them.

In some of the broad, grassy valleys before they got into the higher country, Paha Sapa showed Rain the ruts and gouges from Custer’s “scientific expedition” into the previously unmapped Black Hills in 1874, two years before Long Hair’s death.

Rain was shocked.

— Those marks look like an army came through this valley last week! How many scientists did Custer take with him on this expedition?

Paha Sapa told her.

Ten companies of the Seventh Cavalry, two companies of infantry, two Gatling guns pulled by mules, a three-inch artillery piece, more than two dozen Indian scouts (none of whom were really familiar with the Black Hills), gangs of civilian teamsters—some of the bearded, wild-eyed men driving their freight wagons past them that day might have first come with Custer—as well as white guides (but not Buffalo Bill Cody this time), interpreters in half a dozen Indian languages, photographers, and a sixteen-piece all-German band that played Custer’s favorite tune, “Garry Owen,” from one end of the Hills to the other. In all, Custer’s 1874 “scientific expedition” had been composed of more than a thousand men—including President Grant’s son Fred, who was drunk most of the time and whom Custer ordered to be put under arrest once for disorderly conduct—all traveling in 110 six-mule-team Studebaker wagons of the sort still being used in Custer City and Deadwood.

As Rain stared, Paha Sapa added—

— Oh, yes… and some three hundred beef cattle, brought down from Fort Abraham Lincoln in North Dakota, so that the men could have their steaks every night.

— Were there any… scientists?

— A few. But it was the two miners they brought along—Ross and McKay I think their names were—who served the purpose of the so-called expedition. They were looking for gold. And they found it. The Fat Takers began pouring into the Black Hills as soon as word got out, and word was out before Custer’s expedition had left.

— But hadn’t the government given the Black Hills to your people—our people—just a few years before this? At Fort Laramie in eighteen sixty-eight? And signed a treaty to that effect? And promised to keep whites out of the Black Hills forever?

Paha Sapa smiled and slapped the reins against the mules’ backsides.

The narrow, new dirt road ran up through the beautiful Needles rock formations (which, more than twenty-five years later, would inspire historian-poet Doane Robinson to go looking for a sculptor) and then into narrower valleys filled with flowers and aspen and birch stretching between high, gray granite peaks. In the evening, Paha Sapa remembered a good camping spot near a stream and pulled the buckboard into the high grass and drove it half a mile from the road into an aspen grove where new green leaves were already quaking in the mild May breeze.

The dinners Rain cooked during their camping trip were excellent, better than any fare Paha Sapa had eaten around a campfire since he was a boy. And the camps were comfortable thanks to the Seventh Cavalry cots and camp chairs and folding tables.

The sun had set, the long May twilight was lingering, and the quarter moon had just risen above the high peak to their east when Rain set down her metal coffee cup.

— Is that music I hear?

It was. Paha Sapa slipped his camp knife into his belt, took Rain’s hand, and they walked through the aspen forest and moon shadows up a small saddle, then down through the pine trees on the other side. When they came out through the lodgepole pines and into a scattering of aspen again, both stopped. Rain put her hands to her cheeks.

— Good heavens!

Below them was a lovely lake—large for the Black Hills—that had not been there before. Paha Sapa had heard about this from other men on the ranch but hadn’t known exactly where it was located. In 1891, they’d dammed up the stream at the west end of this valley where needle-type vertical boulders rose shoulder to shoulder and named the new body of water Custer Lake. (Years later, it would be renamed Sylvan Lake.) Three years ago, in 1895, they’d built a hotel right next to the water and adjacent to the invisible dam, near the high boulders on the far west end of the lake.

Paha Sapa put his hand on Rain’s shoulder.

An orchestra was playing on the broad stone-and-wood patio next to the water. Parts of the path circling the lake had been covered in fine white gravel that now gleamed in the starlight and moonlight. Festooned along the porch of the hotel, the patio, and in the trees across the lake were countless glowing Chinese lanterns. Couples in formal dress danced to the orchestra’s lively beat. Others strolled on a wide lawn or up the gleaming white path or out onto the lantern-lit pier, from which canoes, paddleboats, and other little boats, many with white lanterns hanging from their sterns, held couples where the men were paddling and rowing and the women were lifting their wineglasses.

Paha Sapa felt as one does in certain dreams in which you visit your old home and find it totally different, changed, not the way it could possibly be in your world.

And even as he felt that, there came a stronger emotion, as strong as scalding water in his lungs.

Paha Sapa looked at the laughing, dancing, strolling wasichu couples, some of the men in tuxedos, the women in long, flowing dresses, the lamplight gleaming on their decolletages, looked at the hotel with its expensive rooms looking out over the moonlit lake and with its dining room where waiters glided like ghosts bringing fine meals to the well-dressed laughing men and women, the white husbands and wives, and he realized with a sick turning in his soul that this is what his beautiful wife, his beautiful young mostly white wife, daughter of a famed minister who had written four books on theology, experienced traveler to Europe and the great cities of America before she was twenty… this is what Rain de Plachette should have had, deserved to have had, would have had if only she had not…

— Stop it!

Rain’s hands were on his forearms. She physically jerked him around to face her. The orchestra paused and there was the distant sound of applause drifting across the new wasichu- made lake. Rain’s expression was fierce and her eyes burned into him.

She had read his mind. She often read his mind. He was certain of it.

— Just stop it, Paha Sapa, my love. My life. My husband. That out there…

She released his left forearm to swat away the image of the hotel, the orchestra, the dancers, the boats, the colored lanterns with a dismissive sweep of her right hand….

— That has nothing to do with me and what I want and what I need. Do you understand me, Paha Sapa? Do you?

He wanted to speak then but could not.

Rain put her hand back on his forearm and shook him with her strong, workingwoman’s hands. Her grip could bend steel, Paha Sapa realized. Her fierce hazel-eyed gaze could see into stone.