Halfbreed

April 10, 2005

Half-Breed

There’s been talk in certain circles about how hurtful and pejorative the word “halfbreed” is (something like “squaw,” but it is the title of a excellent book about George Bent: “Halfbreed: The Remarkable True Story of George Bent, Caught between the Worlds of the Indian and White Man.” (David Fridtjof Halaas and Andrew E. Masich, @ 2004. DeCapo Press, Perseus Books Group. ISBN 0-306-81320-3) The Indian half was Cheyenne and the little time-line below will explain how a SW person gets into a Montana blog.

These dates are from another bio: “Charles M. Russell: The Life and Legend of America’s Cowboy Artist” by John Taliaferro. @ 1996. Little, Brown and Co. and then, I think, U of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 0-316-83190-5)

1638: John Bent arrives at the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1789: Silas Bent, his great grandson (a Minuteman in the Revolution and maybe a participant in the Boston Tea Party) sells his farm in Massachusetts and moves to Ohio.
1806: Silas, Jr. moves to West Virginia where he studies law and became the Surveyor General of the US. He was charged with platting the Louisiana Purchase and witnessed the return of L&C.
1813: Silas, Jr. became judge of the Supreme Court of the Missouri Territory and had eleven children. Remember three: Lucy, Charles and William.
1817: Charles Bent joined the Missouri Fur Co. and traveled as far as the Dakotas and the Yellowstone River.
1827: William Bent (18 years old, ten years younger than Charles) joined his brother.
1829: The Bent brothers were helping to open the Santa Fe Trail.
1833: William established Bent’s Fort at the confluence of the Arkansas and Purgatory rivers. In Taos, Charles married a Mexican woman. William took a Cheyenne wife, Owl Woman.
1846: The US seized NM and named Charles Bent as its first governor. In an uprising afterward, he was killed by a mob, mutilated, and his scalp tacked to a plank.
1849: Rather than give up Bent’s Fort to the US Army, William burned his fort to the ground. He had two sons: George and Charles. When the Civil War came, they enlisted on the Confederate side, but Charles (whose mother died giving birth to him) left the army and joined the Cheyenne, his mother’s people. George was captured by Union soldiers in Mississippi and imprisoned. When he was released, he joined Charles. For the next few years they lived as full-bloods.
1864: Charles and George fought as warriors at the Sand Creek Massacre on the Cheyenne side. Their brother, Robert, was a scout for Colonel John Chivington’s cavalry and watched from the other side.
1868: Charles, who became enough of a bloodthirsty renegade to be repudiated by his family, was wounded in a fight with Pawnee, caught malaria and died. George continued in the world wearing a Union officer’s jacket, a red breechcloth long enough to touch the ground, long black hair that flew in the wind, and an impressive metis mustache

Remember the sister of Charles and William -- Lucy? George Bent, who eventually settled into life as a “halfbreed,” and Charles the renegade were her nephews, right? She married James Russell when she was 21 and he was 41. She bore him four children: Julia, John, Charles Silas and Russella.
1850: James Russell died and Lucy took over the family business, a coal mine with a valuable clay mine underneath it, which they used to make ceramic tile and drain pipe. She called Charles Silas (her 18 year old son) back from college (maybe Yale) to help her.
1858: Charles Silas Russell married Mary Elizabeth Mead. Her father was a silversmith who made Indian trinkets for barter with tribes and also jewelry and watches for prosperous whites.
1864: Charles and Mary had a son, the third child, whom they named Charles Marion Russell. Yes, that one: the artist. With clay on one side of the family and metal casting on the other. George Bent, the “halfbreed,” would have been our Charlie’s cousin once-removed or second cousin -- however it goes. His grandmother’s nephew. They belonged to the same tribe. When Charles Bent died, Charlie Russell was four years old.

Taliaferro’s book is just simply terrific and draws generously from a book written by Charlie’s nephew, Austin Russell, a book which is hard to find but worth the effort. The above is a mere sketch compared to what Austin can tell you. (“CMR: Charles M. Russell, Cowboy Artist: A Biography” by Austin Russell. Twayne Publishers, NY. Copyright 1957. It ought to be reissued by someone.) It’s the story of a family that was almost a tribe, a crucial part of the development of the West.

We always think of Charlie as out there with his horse and his paintbrush, not as a kid in St. Louis with a dynamic businesswoman grandmother, much like Nancy Russell! It’s unclear how well Charlie knew George Bent, but surely the stories of battle and revenge were a part of his life from the very beginning. No wonder he was so sympathetic to Indians -- they were his cousins. It’s interesting to speculate on why he visited the Blackft but not the Cheyenne.

But being related to Indians was not good for business then. This material was not generally known until Taliaferro, an editor for Newsweek and other magazines, composed this book. There are other revelations. Charlie’s famous sash doubled as a truss for a hernia he was afraid to have surgically mended. His peculiar handwriting and spelling were the result of genuine dyslexia and disgraphia, a brain glitch that makes print nearly unintelligible to them. But how he could draw and how he could talk! He was like a blind man who develops incredible hearing as compensation for not seeing. The illusion that he was a simple man of the range with little education was a fine disguise.

George Bird Grinnell often used George Bent as an informant and so did George E. Hyde and James Mooney. George himself had a strong need to keep the record straight. He rode with Red Cloud, Tall Bull, and Roman Nose, and even knew the white heroes: Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, and George Custer. He died in 1918. (Bob Scriver and the Blackft elder, George Kicking Woman, were four years old.)