‘I was born,’ he said at length, ‘in the year 1852.’
She was not surprised. She knew there had been a problem. She wrapped her arms round him and held him to her bosom, stroking the back of his head.
She was a modern young woman, a girl of her time. She had read all about these things. Half the youth of the West was attracted by the East’s mystic philosophies. She knew all about the theory of reincarnation, or at any rate the belief in it. She had read of some people’s sense of déjà-vu, a conviction that they had existed before, long ago.
This was a problem, the phenomenon of delusion, that had been tackled, was even then being tackled, by the science of psychiatry. There was help, counselling, therapy.
‘It’s all right, Ben,’ she murmured as she rocked him like a child. ‘It’s all right. Everything’s going to be OK. If you believe that, it’s fine. Spend the summer with us here at the fort and we’ll live as they lived a hundred years ago. In the fall you can come back to Bozeman with me and I’ll find people to help. You’re going to be all right, Ben. Trust me.’
She took a cotton handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed his face, overcome by her sense of compassion for the troubled young man from the hills.
They walked back to the fort together. Satisfied that her underclothes were modern and there were modern medications to hand in the event of cuts, bruises or illness, secure in the knowledge that the Billings Memorial Hospital was only minutes away by helicopter, Charlie was beginning to enjoy the long cotton dress, the simple life and the routines of frontier-fort living. And now she knew that her doctoral thesis was a certainty.
‘Major’ Ingles’s lectures were obligatory for all. Due to the warm late-June weather, he held them on the parade ground, the students on rows of benches in front of him, his easel and pictorial material to hand. Once he was lecturing on the real history of the Old West he was in his element.
After ten days he reached the period of the War of the Plains. Behind him he had draped large-scale photographs of the principal Sioux leaders. Ben Craig found himself staring at a blow-up of a photograph of Sitting Bull, taken in his later years. The Hunkpapa medicine man had been to Canada for sanctuary but had returned to throw himself and the remainder of his people on the mercy of the US Army. The picture on the easel was taken just before he was murdered.
‘But one of the strangest of them all was the Oglala chief, Crazy Horse,’ said the professor. ‘For reasons of his own he never permitted himself to be photographed by the white man. He believed the camera would take his soul away. Thus he is the one man of whom there is no photograph. So we will never know what he looked like.’
Craig opened his mouth and shut it again.
In another lecture the professor described in detail the campaign that led to the fight at the Little Bighorn. It was the first time Craig learned what happened to Major Reno and his three companies, or that Captain Benteen had returned from the badlands to join them on the besieged hilltop. He was glad most of them had been rescued by General Terry.
In his final lecture the professor dealt with the round-up in 1877 of the scattered groups of Sioux and Cheyenne and their escort back to the reservations. When John Ingles called for questions Craig raised his hand.
‘Yes, Ben.’ The professor was pleased to take a question from his one pupil who had never crossed the threshold of a grade school.
‘Major, was there ever mention of a clan chief called Tall Elk, or of a brave named Walking Owl?’
The professor was flustered. He had reference books back at the faculty to fill a truck and most of their contents were in his own head. He had expected a simple question. He searched his memory.
‘No, I do believe no-one heard of them and no later witnesses among the Plains Indians mentioned them. Why do you ask?’
‘I have heard it said that Tall Elk split away from the main group, avoided Terry’s patrols and wintered right over there in the Pryor Range, sir.’
‘Well, I have never heard of such a thing. If he did, he and his people must have been found in the spring. You would have to ask at Lame Deer, now the centre of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Someone at the Dull Knife Memorial College might know.’
Ben Craig memorized the name. In the fall he would find his way to Lame Deer, wherever that was, and ask.
The first visitor parties came at the weekend. After that the parties came almost daily. They came by buses mainly, and some in private cars. Some were groups in the charge of their teachers, others private family parties. But they all parked in an area half a mile away and out of sight, and were brought to the main gates in the covered wagons. It was part of Professor Ingles’s ‘getting in the mood’ stratagem.
It worked. The children, and they were mainly children, were thrilled by the wagon ride, which was new to most of them, and in the last 200-yard approach to the gates could imagine they really were frontier settlers. They poured from the wagons in an excited throng.
Craig was detailed to work on his animal pelts, which were stretched on frames in the sun. He salted and scraped them, readying them for softening and tanning. The soldiers drilled, the smith pumped the bellows of his forge, the girls in their long cotton dresses washed clothes in big timber tubs and ‘Major’ Ingles conducted parties from activity to activity, explaining each function and why it was necessary in the life on the plains.
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There were two Native American students who posed as non-hostile Indians living in the fort as trackers and guides, in the event the soldiery would need to respond to the emergency of a settler party out on the plains being attacked by an off-reservation war party. They wore cotton pants, blue canvas shirts, waist sashes and long black wigs under stovepipe hats.
The favourite attractions seemed to be the blacksmith and Ben Craig working on his pelts.
‘Did you trap them yourself?’ asked one boy from a school in Helena.
‘Yep.’
‘Do you have a licence?’
‘A what?’