The Lynching of Louie Sam (3 page)

I listened some more.

“… got him in the back of the head …”

“… must have turned his back to go for something …”

“… or just caught unawares …”

Then, from Mr. Osterman, “You think the Indian could have done this?”

An Indian! The thought of an Indian murdering a white settler was enough to send a tremor through every one of us standing in that clearing. If the Indians thought they could get away with killing one of us, they were just as liable to get the notion of starting an all-out war, aimed at driving every man, woman and child out of our homes.

When we crossed the prairie by wagon train six years ago, the old-timers told us hair-raising tales about how the savages were known to attack the trains and wipe out whole families—innocent people who wanted nothing more than to create new homes for themselves out of the wilderness. Settlers have only been in these parts for barely longer than I've been alive, and the Indians outnumber us by a long shot. Before we arrived, all they did was fish and hunt. That left a lot of land unspoken for, and in the past twenty years lumbermen and miners and homesteaders have been pleased to claim that land as their own. Wouldn't you know that the Indians would then turn around and complain that the territory belongs to them and we've got no business being here, even though they weren't using the land for anything much to speak of.

It's put into folks' heads from the cradle that if a white man lets an Indian get the upper hand, the next thing you know your scalp is as likely as not to be hanging off of his belt. We settlers are ever mindful of the fact that barely eight years ago Crazy Horse and his warriors massacred General Custer and his men at the Little Big Horn River, due east of us in Montana. The worry that even the friendly Indians might turn against us is enough to make every homesteader bolt the door at night and sleep with his rifle and an ax beside his bed, including my father. If an Indian killed Mr. Bell, none of us could sleep easy.

John and Will arrived back, winded from running the whole distance. “What's going on?” John asked, annoyed that he was missing out on something.

“They think an Indian might have done it,” I told him.

“What Indian?”

“Just pay attention and maybe you'll find out.”

He was irking me, making me miss out on important details. The blanket was back over Mr. Bell's body now, and the men were standing to continue their discussion, making it easier to hear them.

“I put out the word that I was looking for somebody to fix poles for me, and this morning Louie Sam shows up,” Mr. Osterman was saying. “I could tell he was a bad type the minute I laid eyes on him, but I started walking the line with him down this way, pointing out what needed repairing. He was too slow-witted to catch on to what I was trying to get across to him. I'll tell you, he was hot-headed enough to send smoke signals through his ears when I told him I couldn't use him and sent him away.”

“And this was just this morning?”

“That's correct, Sheriff. He came by the telegraph office early for a Sunday, maybe nine o'clock.”

The sheriff checked his pocket watch.

“It's now a quarter past eleven.”

“The timing's right. I left him on the trail not far from here a little more than an hour ago. I kept on going down the line. I figured Louie Sam headed back into town. But maybe he didn't. Maybe he found Jim Bell's place.”

“I know Louie Sam.” It was Bill Moultray talking now. “He's a Sumas, from the Canadian side. And I know his old man, too. They call him Mesatche Jack Sam.”

“‘Mean,'” said Sheriff Leckie, translating from Chinook, the trade jargon used by the various Indian bands in this area to make themselves understood to each other, and to us whites.

“You got it. Mean Jack's in jail up in New Westminster for murder.”

This gave all three of them pause, until Mr. Osterman stated what we were all thinking: “The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.”

If the father was a murdering Indian, so was the son likely to be. We had ourselves a suspect in the murder of Mr. James Bell, and his name was Louie Sam.

Chapter Three

J
OHN AND
I
AGREED THAT
we should send Annie home with Will, and that the two of us should stay at Mr. Bell's place in case the sheriff had more questions for us. But the men seemed to forget we were there. They found long sticks and poked at the charred remains of the cabin, which were still too hot to touch. Mr. Osterman used the end of his stick to pick up a blackened jug from what was left of Mr. Bell's merchandise.

“My bet is Jim Bell caught that Indian helping himself to his goods,” he said.

“Hard to tell,” replied Sheriff Leckie, flipping through some tin cans that had exploded in the heat. “Who's to say what's missing?”

“I found something!” called Mr. Moultray from the kitchen end of the ruins.

We all turned to see Mr. Moultray using his thick boots to kick a fire-warped metal box out of the ashes. It sprang open, spilling a fortune in gold coins onto the grass! The sheriff let a whistle out between his teeth.

“It don't look like no robbery to me,” he said.

Mr. Osterman knelt down to count the coins, but the first one burned him when he tried to pick it up. “Goddamit!” he blasphemed, blowing on his fingers.

“There must be five hundred dollars there,” said the sheriff.

“Louie Sam missed out on the big prize,” remarked Mr. Moultray.

“But he might have taken Mr. Bell's horse,” I said.

The men turned to me and John. They seemed surprised to find us still there. The sheriff rubbed his chin.

“Nobody's seen his horse this morning?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I replied. “It was gone when we got here.”

“If that Indian's on horseback, he could be ten miles away by now,” said Mr. Moultray. “All the way to the border. Assuming he's heading for his tribe on the Canadian side.”

“So he's a horse thief as well as a murderer,” was all that Mr. Osterman had to add.

B
UT JUST AFTER NOON
, Robert Breckenridge, a neighbor from a couple of miles away, arrived leading a stray he said had turned up on his land and which he recognized as belonging to Mr. Bell. He had come by only meaning to return the horse, and was shocked by the sight of the cabin—shocked still further when the men told him what had befallen Mr. Bell. Mr. Breckenridge related how just the day before he had seen a lone Indian lurking around near his spread, carrying a rifle, who claimed when challenged that he was hunting game. The men agreed that it stood to reason that the Indian Mr. Breckenridge saw could well have been Louie Sam, and that the rifle he was carrying was very likely the murder weapon.

Next thing you know Father arrived on Mae, our mare, telling John and me to go home. He'd heard enough from Will and Annie to make him come fetch us. I think he mostly came out of curiosity, though, because a minute later he was caught up in the mystery as Sheriff Leckie and Mr. Moultray told the whole story all over again. On hearing it a second time—with Mr. Breckenridge's additions—it was plain as day that Louie Sam was the culprit, even if he could no longer be called a horse thief. Murdering an innocent white man in cold blood was just like something a bad Indian would do.

At that point, Mr. Osterman gave a holler. He had been checking around Mr. Bell's property and had found tracks leading into the swamp. Sheriff Leckie told us all to stand back while he took a look, but even at a distance I could make out some faint dents in the grass that could easily have been made by moccasins. At the place where the footprints reached the swamp there were trampled rushes—as though a body had burst through them at a run.

“Louie Sam must have escaped this way,” declared Mr. Osterman.

“Now hold on,” said Sheriff Leckie. “A deer could have made this track as well as an Indian.”

“But Sheriff,” I blurted, “that renegade could be getting away!”

Father turned toward me, reminded of my presence.

“I thought I told you to go home.”

“Don't be cross with the boy, Mr. Gillies,” said Mr. Osterman. “George has been a real help today.”

“So have I!” piped up John.

“Quiet, both of you,” said Father, “or I'll send you on your way right now.” Which John and I took to understand that we would be allowed to stay as long as we remembered our place.

Sheriff Leckie had been quietly thinking.

“That Indian has had a couple of hours to clear out of here. He'll be headed north. Once he's crossed the border, it's up to the Canadians what they do with him.”

That made Mr. Breckenridge, a small man who makes up with spitfire what he lacks in height and breadth, hot under the collar.

“Jim Bell is one of us!” he said. “He's a Nooksack Valley man, and that Indian ought to pay for what he done in the Nooksack Valley!”

“I won't argue that with you, Bob,” the sheriff replied, his words slow as molasses. “But we've got our laws and the Canadians have got theirs.”

“If we start north now, we can catch him before he leaves the Territory,” said Mr. Osterman. “If we let him get cross the border, there's no saying whether the Canadians will hand him over.”

Mr. Breckenridge agreed. “You got to stop that savage before he gets away, Sheriff.”

The sheriff pulled at his chin. “I suppose I best get started.”

“I'll come with you,” said Mr. Breckenridge. “You shouldn't face that red-skinned dog alone.”

It was agreed that Mr. Breckenridge would go with Sheriff Leckie. The rest of us stayed behind to find out where the trail into the swamp led, with Mr. Osterman in the lead. It was hard going, trying to find bits of solid ground to set our boots upon. After five minutes my feet were wet and cold, but I wasn't about to complain about it for fear of looking like I couldn't keep up with the men. I glanced behind me to John to try to make out whether he was in the same discomfort as me. His pig-headed look told me that he was.

It was clever of that Indian to escape through the swamp, which swallowed up his footprints the same way it tried to swallow our boots. But Mr. Osterman did a good job of reading what signs as there were, finding a broken branch here, and a handkerchief stuck to a bramble there. We came across some cans of beans and bully beef that must have come from Mr. Bell's store, as though Louie Sam in his haste had dropped them. Strangest of all was an old pair of suspenders we found caught in some brambles. As we plunged onward, the men began to talk about what was on everyone's mind.

“Once the Nooksack hear about this, there's bound to be more trouble,” said Mr. Moultray.

The Nooksack is the name of the local Indians on our side of the border, from which the river and our town took their names. On the Canadian side, it's the Sumas tribe. To hear the Indians tell it, they were all one big happy family until the International Border cut right through their hunting grounds twenty-five years ago, dividing them up. According to Mr. Breckenridge, who Father says considers himself to be an expert on just about everything, they still get together for wild heathen shindigs they call potlatches. Even though Louie Sam was a Sumas from the Canadian side, the worry was that he would go boasting to his cousins on the American side that he killed a white man. The Nooksack have been rumbling for years about this being their land. If they got the notion that getting rid of us settlers was as simple as shooting us like dogs, we could wind up with a full-scale uprising on our hands—just like what happened in Oregon and the Dakotas until the U.S. Army showed those Indians who was boss. The trouble was, the U.S. Army was nowhere in sight, the nearest outpost being three hundred miles south of us at Fort Walla Walla. The Indians of the Nooksack Valley knew we were pretty much defenseless, and that they had us outnumbered.

“We didn't have this kind of trouble when Bill Hampton was alive,” Father remarked.

Mr. Hampton was the ferryman at The Crossing before he drowned and my friend Pete's father, Dave Harkness, took over. “Bill had a knack for talking to the Nooksack. They listened to him.”

Mr. Osterman let out a hard laugh, obviously not sharing Father's good opinion of Mr. Hampton.

“That's because he was shacked up with one of their women and had himself a couple of Indian kids.” He was talking about Agnes, Mr. Hampton's Indian wife, who lives near us on Sumas Creek with her two half-breed sons. He added, “We got to make an example of Louie Sam before the Nooksack go getting ideas.”

“No question about that,” Father agreed.

“Let's see what the sheriff has to say when he gets back,” Mr. Moultray told them.

He was a natural leader, Mr. Moultray—cool and always thinking. He was the one leading the talk in our corner of the Washington Territory about pressing the Union to make us a full state with our own laws, and not just a territory ruled by the president from Washington, D.C.