I came here from Wyoming, like Fremont, in moccasins. And like Fremont I met some Native Americans along the way.
I remember one laconic old warrior in particular. He gave me a ride on his white Dodge pony from somewhere north of Crescent City to Arcata. He was on a family errand to trade abalone shells for woodpecker heads. His nephew needed seven woodpecker heads to purchase his bride from her father. The woodpecker heads in question were relics of considerable antiquity and veneration. The nephew and his uncle couldn't just go out and shoot the birds and collect the trophies. He had to seek out the various elders who had obtained them in similar fashion from the previous generations and pay what these old men in their wisdom would stipulate. In this instance a truckload of abalone shells for two of the talismans. The prospective groom was thereby required to demonstrate his enterprise and resourcefulness to get his bride.
As we rode south, my new acquaintance gave me an overview of his people's history since the arrival of the white settlers who followed Fremont into Northern California. It was a pretty dismal narrative. He pointed out, for instance, that there was still a law on the books that paid a bounty for shooting a Native American dead. Having had all the land claimed by the settlers, the natives were displaced in a most onerous manner. Short of going to the reservation (read concentration camp) they were left to beg, steal or starve on the streets of the new town. They were neither encouraged nor tolerated to frequent storefronts, barrooms or social events. Like the homeless today, hanging around the Mateel Community Center on the evening of a gala opening, everybody wished they would just go away.
Native Americans were treated far more harshly than the homeless are today. However, there are some similarities and, I fear, some latent nostalgia for “the good old days.” I've heard more than a few locals use the same libels, originally coined to spurn the character of Native Americans, against the homeless today. Things like, They like being dirty; They're too lazy to work; and my favorite, They have money, they just want to hoard it. They're labeled as alcoholics and drug addicts because they can't drink and use drugs in the privacy of their own homes like the rest of us who can sober up before we go out in public and pretend we are better.
As an avid history buff I was eager to hear this Native perspective. I have since ridden with other Native Americans and heard similar narratives. They were not didactic or even sentimental. They were delivered with detachment and good humor in a tone peculiar to Native Americans.
John Charles Fremont, according to his biographer, David Nevin, was keen to learn from the Native Americans he encountered. He and the mountain man he traveled with dressed in buckskins and moccasins like the natives and eschewed the impractical fashions of the settlers. Fremont ran for president, the first Republican candidate, in full buckskins. They called him the Pathfinder, a moniker he repudiated vociferously, declaiming he was merely a mapmaker. But Fremont The Cartographer didn't have the same ring and his campaign manager insisted on Fremont The Pathfinder.
Fremont, like many others in those days, found gold in California and for a while he was quite well off. When the Civil War broke out he sided with the union and as a Lieutenant General he had a great deal of responsibility. During these trying times he hired managers for his affairs, the same MBA types who have so recently and spectacularly wrecked our economy.
These good fellows squandered and embezzled his fortune. Fremont found himself in desperate straits after the war. He lost his fine house and lived in a seedy rental. His wife, Jessie Benton Fremont, took the field notes from his days mapping the Oregon Trail and his many efforts to bring California into the Union and infuse these cold, stiff military reports with verve. These vivid adventures she sold to popular magazines to pay the bills.
Baron von Humboldt was still alive at the time, moldering in his Teutonic lair, and he read the stories and tendered his respects and admiration to the Fremonts in a letter the Old Pathfinder cherished to his dying day.
Eventually the stories ran out and the Fremonts returned in penury and cheap shoes to California. Here he and his wife were homeless and subject to the contempt and malice of the settlers he had guided through his maps thither.
Fremont spent most of his life camping on the trails he was mapping. He probably didn't suffer the hardship of homelessness, but his wife was the daughter of “Old Bullion” Benton, senior senator from Missouri, and although she bore the contrast with dignity she must have felt they deserved better. I would be the first to agree with her.
Eventually, some kind soul found a way to persuade the proud old campaigner to take a little money for a cheap motel room where the story ends.
From my small readings in North American anthropology I cannot imagine this kind of treatment for the elderly in a Native American community. After all, some old campaigner like that might happen to have a few woodpeckers laying around just when you need them.
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