Burial (35 page)

It wasn't long before Hilda Snow appeared. ‘Daddy wants you in his study, please,' she announced with consummate gloom.

We followed her into the world's most cluttered library. Every shelf was crammed with books and pamphlets and files and letters; and then with pictures and postcards and letters; and then with extraordinary shrivelled-looking Indian artifacts, Apache headpieces and Navaho rattles and medicine-bundles stuffed with eagles' claws and buffaloes' tails.

Dr Snow's desk was heaped with layer upon layer of books and papers, a surprisingly state-of-the-art Japanese typewriter and a carved wooden Sundance doll with a tiny, malevolent-looking head. Dr Snow himself was sitting in his wheelchair by the leaded French windows with three large books open on his knees. Through the windows I could see sloping lawns and hedges and pink flowers fluttering. There was a strong smell of new typewriter-ribbons and dust and sweet peas.

‘Ah,' said Dr Snow. ‘I believe that I've found your connection.'

‘Really?' said Amelia, circling round the room.

Dr Snow lifted his head and smiled at her. ‘Women are always so skeptical. I love it.'

Dr Snow tapped the books with his finger, as if he were admonishing them. ‘All of the places you mentioned — although of course they were known to the Indians by very different names — were the locations of noted killings, Indians slaughtered by whites.

‘The location on East 17th Street in New York City is the most obscure but one of the most interesting. In the winter of 1691 two British officers raped and killed a Manhattan Indian girl at a place which the Indians called Man of Rock. It was probably no more than a brownstone outcropping, and of course it would have been levelled as Manhattan moved steadily northward.

‘The only reason that this incident was recorded was that both officers were court-martialled not for killing the Indian girl but for stealing the brandy on which they got drunk that night.'

‘Do you know what the officers' names were?' I asked Dr Snow.

‘Of course. It's here, in the British colonial records. Captain William Stansmore Hope, of Derbyshire, and Lieutenant Andrew Danetry, of Norfolk.'

‘Hope and Danetree,' I repeated. ‘Those were the names of the men who were killed at the Belford.'

‘Well, naturally,' said Dr Snow, completely unsurprised.

‘What do you mean, “Naturally”?'

‘Let me just explain your connection,' Dr Snow asked me, a little testily. ‘In 1865, seven of Geronimo's braves were captured and tortured by white mercenaries at Apache Junction, Arizona — a place which the Indians called Under The Old One, because it lies just beneath the Superstition Mountain.

‘In the early fall of 1864 more than seventy-five Cheyenne Indians were massacred at Pritchard, Colorado, by
cavalrymen of the Third Regiment, the so-called “Bloodless Thirdsters.” This happened a full six weeks
before
the notorious massacre of one hundred and twenty-three of Black Kettle's Cheyenne people at Sand Creek, and if anything the scalpings and sexual mutilations were far worse. It was common practice for the cavalrymen to cut off the men's private parts to use as tobacco-pouches, and to cut out the women's privates, too, as souvenirs.

The new commander of the Colorado military district, Colonel J.M. Chivington, managed somehow to keep the Pritchard massacre under wraps. It was said that he threatened to shoot any man who talked to the newspapers or the politicians about it. And him a Methodist minister, too.

‘In February of 1865, at Maybelline, Colorado, a place which the Cheyenne called Buffalo-Gathering-Place, ninety Indians were slaughtered by white ranchers in retaliation for raids on several of their settlements — which themselves had been carried out in retaliation for Pritchard and Sand Creek.

‘In 1870, the Sioux chief Red Cloud was invited to visit Chicago with five of the greatest medicine-men. Red Cloud had already been to Washington DC — where the Commissioner of Indian Affairs had made sure that he visited the Navy yards and the US Arsenal, so that he could see for himself how powerful the white men were. The medicinemen however had refused to accept his account of the white men's weapons, and were still making warlike threats. So the Commissioner of Indian Affairs gave them a guided tour of the arsenal and the railroad yards and the docks, so that they could see for themselves just how futile it would be for them to carry on fighting.

‘Red Cloud was all for negotiating peace, but the medicine-men still believed that the white men were full of trickery and lies, which of course they were. One night when Red Cloud was giving a speech to the Philanthropic Institute of Chicago, there was a fire at the Palmer House, where
the medicine-men were staying, and all five of them burned to death. It caused a terrific sensation because the Palmer House had just opened, and it was one of the most luxurious hotels in America. The Chicago fire department said that the men had tried to light a camp-fire in their room; and the Chicago papers said that this was proof that Indians were not much more than savages, and that they weren't fit to live alongside white people, and never would be.

‘However that fire was kindled, it wiped out five of the most powerful and influential wonder-workers that the Indians had ever known. In a few minutes it weakened the Indian nations more dramatically than all the years of cholera and cavalry action put together.'

I leaned over his shoulder and looked at the books that he was holding on his lap. ‘So the connection between all of these incidents is that Indians were killed there?'

Dr Snow nodded. ‘Quite so. And the more Indians who were killed, the more devastating their revenge. A life for a life, so to speak. Except in Chicago, where they appear to be exacting a punishment for the loss of entire tribes.'

‘But how are they doing it?' asked Amelia. ‘They're dragging entire buildings right into the ground — people, too.'

‘Of course they are. They're pulling them down to the underworld, to the Great Outside. What our Western storytellers mistakenly call the Happy Hunting Ground.'

‘I don't understand,' I told him.

Dr Snow snapped his books shut and heaped them back on his desk. ‘It's very simple. Imagine if you can that the continental United States is a lake, and that we are capable of standing on its surface. Above the surface of the lake is what we like to think of as the real world. But — if we look down — if we look below the soles of our shoes — we can see ourselves standing upside-down in another world. A negative, mirror-image world.

‘This negative, reflected world is the world beyond
death, the Great Outside. It is the world where spirits live. It is the world where the Indians go when they die.

‘It is no more real than a reflection is real. But it is undeniably
there
, just as a reflection is
there
. It is the world of Indian understanding, Indian belief, Indian superstition, Indian fear, Indian happiness. It is what the Indians understand their natural world to be.

‘In 1869, in Nevada, a Paviotso Indian called Tavibo began to preach the doctrine that all white people would fall into holes in the ground and be swallowed up, while the dead Indians would return to earth. He said he could talk to the dead in trances, and he encouraged the Indians of the Great Basin to dance their traditional circle dance and sing songs which had been revealed to him by the dead.

‘The doctrine was called the Ghost Dance because it preached the return of the dead. It spread through California, Oregon, and other parts of Nevada. It only died out when Tavibo's prophesies failed to come to pass.

‘The Ghost Dance was preached again by another Paviotso messiah, Wovoka, who died as recently as 1932. Wovoka was stricken by a severe fever when he was thirty-three years old, and almost immediately there was an eclipse of the sun. During the eclipse he was taken by ghosts to the Great Outside and shown the world of the future.

‘The Plains Indians had recently suffered terrible defeats in battle, the destruction of the buffalo-herds, the introduction of new and often fatal diseases, and confinement on reservations. Wovoka promised that if they danced and chanted, the white men would vanish into the ground, the dead would come back to life, and the buffalo would return to their grasslands. You can see the attraction of such a doctrine to a people who were totally demoralized.

‘The Ghost Dance cult was eagerly adopted by the Sioux, the Comanche, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, the Assinboin and the Shoshoni. Only the Navajo refused to join in, because
the Navajo were afraid of ghosts.

‘There have been plenty of learned books about the Ghost Dance. Anthony Wallace interpreted it as a “revitalization movement,” that aimed to restore the vitality of a culture under attack. Weston LeBarre preferred to call it a “crisis cult,” and saw ghost dancing as an adaptive response to misery and despair.'

‘What about you, Dr Snow?' I asked him. ‘What do you think?'

Dr Snow jabbed his finger towards the floor. ‘Beneath our feet, Mr Erskine, there lies a continent of shadows — the Great Outside — in which the Indian notion of America still survives. A continent without highways, a continent without buildings or railroads or ships or automobiles. A continent teeming with game and bison and running with unpolluted rivers. America as she once was, before a single white man set foot on her. The Great Outside.'

‘You believe it actually
exists
?' I asked him.

‘Haven't you seen enough evidence of it yourself? Where do you think your unfortunate friend Miss Tandy is now? Where do you think the Sears Tower has disappeared to? The day prophesied by Tavibo and Wovoka has finally arrived. The Indians are killing, they're looting, and they're taking prisoners — and they're taking everything back to the Great Outside.

‘From what you say, I expect they're planning to leave it there. In fact — from what you say — I expect they're attempting to turn back the clock.'

‘What do you mean?' asked Amelia. She was twitchy, and I expected she was beginning to feel like a cigarette. ‘How can anybody turn back the clock?'

‘My dear, you're a very clever spiritualist, aren't you? You know that it's perfectly possible to send simple material things from the real world to the spirit world and vice versa. You can send a real hat, for instance, to the other side. You
can accidentally send a glove, or a pen, or a cufflink. That's how certain small items become irrevocably lost. Very frustrating indeed, sometimes, but that's where they've gone! They've dropped through the surface of our imaginary lake into the world of shadows beneath our feet.

‘In the same way, a skilful medium can draw shadows from the Great Outside into the real world. Some people call them “ectoplasm” but I personally prefer “shadows” or “reflections” because that's what they really are.'

‘I still don't see what you're driving at,' I said.

‘Oh, it's not
that
difficult to grasp! Your Indians appear to have developed enough supernatural power to be able to drag down very much larger objects — and very selectively, too.

‘Your Indians appear to be intent on purging America of everything that the white man ever brought here or built here. They are punishing the direct descendants of everybody who killed or hurt them. They are taking just revenge for acts of massacre and treachery. Lives for lives, lodges for lodges. And eventually, I suspect, they will leave nothing at all but prairies and mountains and deserts and swamps.'

‘Is that
possible
?' I asked him, in disbelief.

Dr Snow took off his spectacles. ‘Looking back at the environmental and mystical history of our planet, Mr Erskine, I would say that it isn't just possible but highly probable. The Indians want their lands back, just the way they were.'

He wheeled himself across the library and pointed to the top shelf. ‘Fetch me down that old black book, will you, the one that looks like a Bible?'

I reached up and tugged the book off the shelf. It smelled sour and musty and very old. Inside the black leather cover thick deckle-cut pages had been hand-sewn to make a new book altogether.

Dr Snow leafed through it slowly, and sneezed. ‘It must be thirty years since I looked at this. It was written in 1863, by Bishop Henry Whipple, the Episcopal Bishop of Minnesota. See —
An Account of the Recruitment by U.S. Military Forces Of Spiritualists & Mediums In Their Conflicts Against the Santee Indians 1862
.

‘It's quite fascinating,' he said. ‘The Commissioner of Indian Affairs was aware that the Indians had strong magic powers and took them extremely seriously. In fact, I'd say that the only reason the Indians were eventually defeated was not so much because the white men overwhelmed them but because they lost faith in their own supernatural skills.

‘In Minnesota, when he was leading troops and local militia against the Santee, Colonel Henry Sibley employed the services of a celebrated medium called William Hood.

‘There are several accounts of William Hood's career in the Old West, but regrettably no pictures of him. Some stories say that he was originally a Serbian vampire-hunter named Milan Protic, and that he had been shipped over to America by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in secret.

‘In O.L. Ward's
Gunslingers
, I discovered a verified report that William Hood lived for some time in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and that he was involved in several gunfights. They nicknamed him the Shadow Boy, because none of his opponents ever succeeded in hitting him.

‘He was called in to help Colonel Sibley after the Minnesota Massacre in August 1862, when Santee Indians killed four hundred and fifty white settlers. William Hood went to the scene of the very first killing — the cottage of a settler called Robinson Jones — and carried out days of “spiritual investigations”.