Black Hills

Chapter 13 Jackson Park, Illinois

ALL DURING HIS AFTERNOON ATTACK ON THE CABIN OF WHITE settlers, even after he is shot and killed by the arriving cavalry, Paha Sapa is nervous about the upcoming appointment with Rain de Plachette.

He also hates being killed. He hadn’t volunteered for it, but Mr. C pointed to him and said that he’d be the one to be shot off his horse, so that was that. Almost every night, Paha Sapa has to nurse bruises or strained muscles or a sore left knee that never gets a chance to improve. There’s an extra mound of soft dirt for him to fall onto, a heap that’s supposed to be renewed each afternoon and evening, but the other warriors—in their very real excitement—often forget to clear a space for him to get to the soft dirt, and he has to throw his arms in the air and fall off the tall pinto pony onto the hard-packed arena dirt. Then he has to lie there, dead, while the tail end of his marauding band of mixed-tribe Indians pounds over and past him, then, immediately thereafter, try again not to flinch as the arriving cavalry horses come pounding and leaping by. Three times now he’s been kicked by shod hooves and, being dead, he can never even react to it.

This getting killed every afternoon and evening is killing him. (At least he is allowed to survive the attack on the Deadwood mail coach.) His fallback plan is to get a smaller, lower, slower horse. That way he can live up to his name—the name the wasichus gave him seventeen years earlier—and if he must continue dying, he can at least guarantee that the fall will be as short as possible.

But this afternoon in July, in the four hours between the afternoon show and the longer evening program, it is the appointment with Miss de Plachette after the show that has Paha Sapa almost too nervous to think, much less die properly.

But, he reminds himself as he rushes to the men’s bathing tent shared by the soldiers and Indians, it’s not a date.

Paha Sapa just happened to be dropping something off in the outer office that morning when Mr. Cody and his friend the Reverend Henry de Plachette stepped out and continued their conversation. The Reverend de Plachette, whom Paha Sapa had met, was explaining that his daughter was here to watch the afternoon Wild West Show but wanted to go to the Fair proper afterward and needed an escort. He, the Reverend de Plachette, would be meeting her near the entrance to the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building at the Grand Basin at six p.m. but would be busy until then. Mr. Cody said that it would be no problem; he would escort the young lady over to the Fair. Then Cody remembered that he had an appointment in Chicago after the afternoon matinee.

—I would be honored to escort Miss de Plachette to the Court of Honor and wait until you arrive, Reverend de Plachette.

For the rest of his life, Paha Sapa will not believe that he actually said those words at that moment.

Mr. Cody and the Reverend Henry de Plachette turned slowly to look at the small, thin twenty-seven-year-old Sioux they knew as Billy Slow Horse. Cody, who was wearing an expensive tan suit and had just put on his wide-brimmed Western-style tan hat in preparation to step outside, cleared his throat.

—That’s generous of you, Billy. But I’m not sure you would have time between the matinee performance and the evening performance, and perhaps it would be better if…

—No, no, William. I’ve talked to Mr. Slow Horse a few times and he has met my daughter, as you know, and I believe it’s an excellent idea. I will, as I said, be meeting Rain no later than six o’clock, and that should give Mr. Slow Horse ample time to return and to get into his… ah… costume.

Paha Sapa’s costume consists of a breechclout, a bow and arrow, and a single white feather that he puts in his braided hair, his small way of honoring Crazy Horse’s memory. But it made him blush that afternoon as he rode around the arena, thinking of Miss de Plachette looking at him almost naked, visible bruises and all.

Cody continued to look doubtful that morning, but the minister (and father) had obviously made up his mind.

—Be so kind as to meet my daughter here as soon after your performance as possible, Mr. Slow Horse. I will inform her that you will escort her to the Fair. And I thank you again for your courtesy.

The Reverend de Plachette nodded rather than offering his hand. Paha Sapa knew at the time that the man had decided to allow him to escort his daughter the short walking distance to the World’s Fair out of a minister’s liberal (and almost certainly shallow) sense of equality-of-all-men-in-God’s-sight, but Paha Sapa did not care the least bit what the reason was.

After washing up as quickly as he can—all the while thanking the wasichus’ god and the actual Wakan Tanka (the All who seemed so much larger, so much more complex, and so infinitely much more present than the Fat Takers’ white-bearded deity) that he didn’t fall on any horse apples when he fell dead off his horse in that afternoon’s show—Paha Sapa rushes back to his tent and changes into the only formal clothes he brought on this trip east: a black, pinstriped, thick-wool, ill-fitting, and completely inappropriate-to-July suit coat and baggy trousers that he purchased in Rapid City.

He realizes, with some small shock, as he tries for the third time to knot the ribbon of the string tie, that his hands are shaking. Paha Sapa cannot remember any time when his hands shook, except when he was sick with fever as a boy.

While he is near a mirror, Paha Sapa tries on the straw boater he purchased during his second trip into Chicago proper the previous month. The little summer hat looks absurd with his black winter suit coat and his long black braids sticking out. He tosses the cheap hat onto his cot and returns to the washing tent to pomade the tips of his braids. Between every action, Paha Sapa nervously checks his pocket watch, kept in the pocket of his suit coat, since he has no waistcoat.

Finally it is time. His heart pounding in his ears, Paha Sapa walks to the main administration tent.

Miss de Plachette is waiting in the foyer and smiles in recognition as he approaches. Paha Sapa is sure that he has never seen any single sight so absolutely beautiful or so infinitely unobtainable. He also notices that he has already sweated through his shirt.

Miss de Plachette is wearing a silky tan blouse waist with the usual balloon sleeves, the blouse gathered at her waist, as almost all women’s fashions seem to be these days. Even Paha Sapa has noticed that. Her skirt, which reaches the floor, is also a relatively light, summer, silky weight (for so much fabric), with stripes that continue the expensive tan of the blouse, the tan stripes alternating with rich green stripes bordered in thin gold. She is wearing a narrow-brimmed straw hat that looks as perfect on her as Paha Sapa’s boater had looked absurd on him. She also is wearing thin tan gloves and is carrying a parasol.

Paha Sapa is glad to see the gloves. He has had fewer of the small-vision-forward-touching experiences as he has grown older, but those that have occurred, he knows, always happen when he touches bare skin. He is absolutely resolved not to touch Miss de Plachette’s bare skin in any way even though he is wearing his only pair of dress gloves. He is pleased to see that she is also wearing gloves. Now no accidental touch will…

—Mr. Slow Horse, it is a pleasure to see you again and I cannot thank you enough for escorting me to the Fair this afternoon so that I can meet my father. I apologize, but is it… Mr. Slow Horse? Or just Mr. Horse?

Her voice is as soft and modulated as he remembered from their brief meeting two days earlier, when she’d toured the Wild West Show with her father. Mr. Cody introduced Reverend de Plachette and his daughter, it seemed, to most, if not all, of the hundred former US Cavalry soldiers and ninety-seven full-time Sioux, Pawnee, Cheyenne, and Kiowa that had come east with Buffalo Bill.

Paha Sapa finds himself tongue-tied first thing out of the chute. He expected it sometime during his escorting of Miss de Plachette into the fairgrounds, but not upon first encounter. He finds, insanely, that he wants to explain to her that “Billy Slow Horse,” the name he’s been known as to whites for seventeen years now, was a foul, stupid, insulting name that the Seventh Cavalry gave to him when he was their captive… scout… prisoner, and that his real name is…

He shakes his head and manages…

—Billy, ma’am. Just Billy.

His face is burning, but Rain de Plachette smiles and slips her arm through his, causing Paha Sapa to jump slightly.

—Very well… Billy… then you must call me Rain. Shall we go?

THEY STEP OUT THROUGH the Wild West Show’s main gate into the heat and sun of high July. To the right of the gate a tall banner shows a full-color illustration of Christopher Columbus and proclaims PILOT OF THE OCEAN, THE FIRST PIONEER. The next-door World’s Fair is, after all, officially known as the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, even if it has missed the four hundredth anniversary of the Italian sailor’s landing by a full year.

The banner on the other side of the gate, with an even larger and more colorful illustration of Mr. Cody in full, fringed western regalia, announces PILOT OF THE PRAIRIE, THE LAST PIONEER. But it is an even larger sign above and to one side of the wide entrance gate that says it all—BUFFALO BILL’S WILD WEST AND CONGRESS OF ROUGH RIDERS OF THE WORLD.

Miss de Plachette pauses just outside the gate to extricate her arm for a second and open her parasol, then she slides her arm through Paha Sapa’s again and gazes back at the gate and long fence for a moment, the tiny holes in the parasol throwing Appaloosa speckles of light onto her pale face in the shade. Paha Sapa notices for the first time that there are also faint constellations of freckles across her small nose and flushed cheeks. How old is she? Twenty, perhaps. Certainly no older than twenty-one or twenty-two.

—It’s sad that Mr. Cody wasn’t able to set up his performing arena and other exhibits inside the fairgrounds proper. Father says that the Fair authorities rejected Mr. Cody’s application because the Wild West Show is—how did they put it?—“incongruous.” By which they mean, I presume, too vulgar?

Staring at Miss de Plachette’s hazel-colored eyes, Paha Sapa has a terrible second in which he realizes he has suddenly forgotten all of the English he has been speaking now for almost seventeen years. He finds his memory and voice only when they begin walking east together toward Sixty-third Street and the Fair entrance.

—Yes, too vulgar is what they meant, Miss de Plachette. They didn’t want to sully the Exposition with Mr. Cody’s entertainment, even though Mr. Cody had just returned from a very successful tour of Europe when he asked for the concession. But it’s all worked out for the best.

—How’s that?

He realizes that she is smiling, as if expectant of hearing something interesting, but it is hard to think in words because all of his attention at that moment is on the slight pressure of her right arm in the crook of his left arm (she kept her left hand free for the parasol).

—Well, Miss de Plachette…

He pauses in confusion as she stops and turns and nods her head in—he hopes—a pretense of impatience.

—I mean, Miss… ah… that is… when the Ways and Means Committee rejected the Wild West Show’s concession bid, Mr. Cody got the rights to these fifteen acres here just adjacent to the fairgrounds. Not being an official concession, Mr. Cody doesn’t have to share the profits with the Exposition and he can hold performances on Sunday—they’re wildly popular—while the Fair doesn’t allow shows then, and, of course, there’s just the fact of all this room, the full fifteen acres, I mean, Miss Oakley, Annie, has a whole garden around her tent and cougar skins on the couch and a beautiful carpet from England or somewhere, not to mention electric lights and real furniture from Italy and…

Paha Sapa realizes that after a lifetime of honorable, masculine taciturnity, he is babbling like a wasichu schoolboy. He shuts his mouth so quickly that the sound of his teeth clacking is audible to both of them.

Miss de Plachette twirls her parasol and looks at him expectantly, waiting. Is her small smile one of amusement or bemusement or mild contempt?

He gestures awkwardly with his free hand.

—Anyway, it’s worked out very well to Mr. Cody’s advantage. I believe we’re averaging about twelve thousand people per performance, which is far more profitable than any of the official concessions inside the Fair’s grounds. Almost everyone who comes to see the Fair also comes, sooner or later, to see our Wild West Show, and some take the elevated train down just to see it.

They walk in silence the half block from the Wild West Show’s huge area bordering 62nd Street to the closest Fair entrance at 63rd Street. Paha Sapa does not have enough experience being around women—especially white women—to have any idea whether this is a comfortable silence or one signaling tension or displeasure on the part of the lady. Overhead, passing over the boundary fence, runs the Elevated Railway—the so-called Alley L, called that, Paha Sapa has heard, because it threads its way through alleys to get out of the Chicago downtown area, since speculators bought up other rights-of-way—constructed to bring the millions of visitors from Chicago proper down here to Jackson Park. Some of those yellow-painted “cattle cars” are rumbling overhead now, and as they pass, Paha Sapa glances up to see eager fairgoers hanging out the open sides in a most precarious manner. Attendees have managed to kill themselves at the Exposition in many ingenious and terrible ways so far, Paha Sapa knows, but none yet, he thinks, from falling out of the Alley L.

Admission to the World’s Columbian Exposition is fifty cents, and those at the ticket counters like to tell grumpy fairgoers that if Mayor Harrison or Daniel Hudson Burnham, the man most responsible for the Fair, or President Cleveland presented himself at their gates, the gentleman would have to fork over fifty cents.

Paha Sapa pulls out a dollar, far too large a percentage of his monthly salary, but Miss de Plachette has freed her arm and is wrestling with a cloth purse hanging from her wrist by a string.

—No, no, Mr…. Billy… my father left me money to cover the price of both our admissions. After all, you would not be attending the Fair today were it not for your gallant offer to escort me.

Paha Sapa pauses, knowing that he hates the idea of her paying for the two of them, or even her paying for herself, but not knowing how to explain this important fact to her. While he dithers, the young woman pays, hands him one of the two tickets, and leads the way through the metal turnstiles. Paha Sapa grumbles, the dollar bill still dangling absurdly in his hand, but follows.

It is immediately after they enter the grounds and are passing a white towered building set near the western fence of the fairgrounds that something occurs that Paha Sapa is to think of many times in the coming years.

Suddenly Miss de Plachette whirls, looks at the windowless white building with its tall tower, and her demeanor changes completely. From being one of delighted, almost girlish animation, her expression has become one of alarm, almost horror.

—What is it, Miss de Plachette?

She hugs herself and, accidentally, hugs Paha Sapa’s arm closer, but it is no act of coquetry. He can feel her trembling through the layers of his wool coat and her silk sleeves.

—Do you feel that, sir? Do you hear that?

—Feel what, Miss de Plachette? Hear what?

He looks back at the nondescript white building just within the fairgrounds fence that they’ve just passed. The structure has a series of black blind arches near the top, short white towers on the eastern corners, and a higher tower with perhaps an observation deck on the far, western side.

She squeezes his arm more tightly and there is no melodrama in her terrified expression. The lady’s white teeth are chattering.

—That awful coldness flowing from the place? The awful screams? Can’t you feel the cold? Can’t you hear the terrible cries?

Paha Sapa laughs and pats her arm.

—That’s the Cold Storage Building, Miss de Plachette. I don’t feel the icy air to which you’re so sensitive, but it only makes sense it would be coming from the Exposition’s main repository for ice. And I do hear the cries—very faint—but they also have a benign cause. There’s an ice-skating rink inside, and I can just make out the happy cries of children or young couples on skates.

But Miss de Plachette’s expression does not change for a moment and she cannot seem to be able to take her eyes off the blocky white building. Then she turns away from it, but Paha Sapa can still feel the trembling of her body so close to his as they resume walking into the Fair.

—I apologize, Mr…. I apologize, Mr. Slow Horse. From time to time I get these odd, dark feelings. You must think me a terribly silly goose. Women are a strange species, Mr. Slow Horse, and I am one of the stranger members of that species. I have no idea where in this grand Exposition they would choose to exhibit so strange a non-fish, non-fowl, non-sensible specimen such as myself. Almost certainly in a jar of alcohol or formaldehyde on the Midway.

Paha speaks without thinking.

—No, in the Palace of Fine Arts, Miss de Plachette. Almost certainly there.

She smiles at him, knowing that she is being flattered (but not knowing his deep sincerity) but not seeming to mind. Her old gaiety flows back as they get farther from the Cold Storage Building, but Paha Sapa bites the inside of his lip until he tastes blood. He dislikes men who flatter women with compliments.

Four days later, on July 10, 1893, there will be a fire in the upper reaches of the tall tower at the rear of the Cold Storage Building. Firemen will arrive almost at once and rush up the wooden stairs to fight the fire blazing in the cupola atop that tower, but the fire will already have crept down the inside of the walls and beneath that stairway and will trap most of those firemen above. Two will survive by leaping to a rigid hose and sliding down it sixty feet to the ground. Thirteen other firemen, including the fire chief, will die horribly in the Cold Storage Building Fire, as will four workers.

But none of this is known to them at the time—at least not to Paha Sapa, for all his thought of being a sensitive wičasa wakan whose role will be to predict the future for his people—and it is a hot, sunny day where thoughts of fire and death have no place.

For a moment they do not talk as they walk northeast down the wide avenue that runs to the left of almost a dozen pairs of railroad lines that terminate in the Central Railroad Station. There are trains leaving and arriving, but most do so in that odd, steamless muting of usual train sounds that is a mark of these new electric trams.

In a sense, Paha Sapa and Miss de Plachette have come in through one of the “back doors” of the Fair; the designers specified the formal entrance to be at the opposite end of this west-east corridor, at the grand Peristyle that opens onto and from the Casino Pier that runs almost half a mile out into Lake Michigan. Arriving from a ship at the far end of the pier, one can, for the price of ten cents, take the Moving Sidewalk (complete with chairs) the full 2,500-foot length of the pier directly to the Peristyle. The World’s Columbian Exposition was always meant by its designers to be first seen and entered from the Lake Michigan side, through the Peristyle and into the Court of Honor.

Back here, Paha Sapa feels as if he’s in a stone canyon. To their left is the incredible mass of the Transportation Building (not the largest building in the world, that honor falls to the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building that dominates the eastern end of this grand concourse now visible ahead on their right, but larger than anything in Paha Sapa’s imagination, much less experience), and straight ahead is the white wall of the huge Mines and Mining Building. Miss de Plachette’s arm still linked in his, Paha Sapa guides them diagonally to the right so that they emerge into the dazzling afternoon brilliance of the broad Grand Court of Honor that runs straight past the impressive domed Administration Building and along either side of the Grand Basin all the way to the Peristyle. Arrayed on both sides of this Grand Court are the incredible buildings: the tall and endless Machinery Hall to their right, the gigantic Agriculture Building farther east, the roaring Electricity Building to their left beyond Mines and Mining, and beyond it the behemoth, the leviathan of all buildings on earth, the Manufactures and Liberal Arts hall.

Miss de Plachette pauses and tucks a strand of her copper-tinted brown hair under her straw boater. Paha Sapa is grateful for a breeze blowing down the long Grand Court from the lake that begins to dry his soaked shirtfront. The lady with him takes a step away, puts a gloved finger to her chin as if considering options, and turns to look in each direction of the compass. She closes her parasol and lets it dangle from her wrist by yet another hidden strap or string.

—Do you know what I think, Mr…. ah… I mean, Billy? Do you know what I think, Billy?

—What do you think, Miss de Plachette?

The young woman smiles, and it is almost a girl’s smile—unaffected, easy, seemingly prompted only by happiness.

—Well, first of all, I think that this informality I proposed shall never work out. You will never call me Rain, will you?

Paha Sapa does not actually shuffle his feet, but mentally he does.

—It is difficult for me to be so… ah… informal with so elegant a young lady, Miss de Plachette. It is simply outside my experience.

—Fair enough, then. I know that my brazen informality, while quite the thing in a Boston women’s college, takes people aback elsewhere. So I shall be Miss de Plachette and you shall be… I can’t remember. Did you tell me that it was Mr. Slow Horse or Mr. Horse?

—Actually, my name is Paha Sapa, which means Black Hills in Lakota.

Paha Sapa hears himself saying this to the woman but cannot believe he has said it.

Rain de Plachette stops all other motion and looks at him with great intensity. Paha Sapa notices that there is the slightest flaw of black in the hazel iris—it now looks green—of her beautiful left eye.

—I apologize for addressing you by the wrong name. When we were introduced… and Mr. Cody also referred to you as…

—No white person has ever known my real name, Miss de Plachette. And very few Lakota. I don’t know why I just told you. Somehow, it felt… wrong… for you not to know.

She smiles again, but it is a grown woman’s hesitant smile now, meant only for the two of them. She actually presses his scarred and calloused right hand with her gloved left hand, and he is glad for the gloves.

—I’m honored that you told me and I shall share the information with no one, Mr…. Paha Sapa. Did I pronounce it correctly? The first A has almost a long sound, does it not?

—It does.

—Well, you have honored me with your secret, Paha Sapa, so before our walk is over today, I shall tell a secret that very few people know about me… why my mother, who was also a Lakota, you know, decided to name me Rain.

—That would do me a great honor, Miss de Plachette.

He has heard rumors in the Indian tent that the Reverend de Plachette’s daughter is “half Indian.” Everyone has. But each of the four Indian nations represented in the Wild West Show has claimed her.

—But later. In the meantime, Paha Sapa, would you like to know what I have decided that we should do?

—Very much.

She clasps her hands together and for a second, in her smiling enthusiasm, looks like a very young girl indeed. The strand of copper-tinted-by-the-sun hair has escaped from her boater again.

—I believe we should walk over to the Midway Plaisance and take a ride on Mr. Ferris’s huge Wheel.

Paha Sapa makes a noncommittal noise and fumbles his cheap watch out of his pocket.

Miss de Plachette has already checked her watch—a tiny, round little thing, no larger than a cavalryman’s red sharpshooter badge, that hangs from her blouse by a gold ribbon—and she waves away his look of anxiety.

—Not to worry, Mr…. Paha Sapa, my friend. It’s not even quarter after four. Father will not be at the Grand Basin to meet me until six o’clock, and as much as Father demands punctuality from everyone else, he himself is almost always late. We have oodles and oodles of time. And I have been trying to work my nerve up to go on the Wheel for weeks now. Oh, please!

Oodles? thinks Paha Sapa. This is a wasichu word he has not encountered in his seventeen years of wrestling with the language.

—Very well, we shall go ride Mr. Ferris’s Wheel. But I insist on purchasing our tickets. It’s a long walk to the Midway, Miss de Plachette. Would you care to ride in one of those wheeled carriages that are pushed from behind?

—Not at all! I love walking. It is a short way to the Midway, and I have trod it a hundred times already in the three weeks that Father and I have been visiting our aunt in Evanston. Come, I will lead the way!

She sets a brisk pace, her arm still locked in Paha Sapa’s, as they walk quickly north past the looming Transportation Building and then around a slight curve and then north again past the endless Horticulture Building on their left, with its domes and arches and bright pennants. All this time to their right is the huge lagoon, quite separate from the Grand Basin on the Court of Honor, in which the sixteen-acre Wooded Island (with its tinier, satellite Hunter’s Camp Island to the south of it) holds center place.

Miss de Plachette is chattering away, although Paha Sapa does not hear it or think of it as chattering. He finds her voice melodic and delightful.

—Have you been on the Wooded Island? No? Oh, you must go there, Paha Sapa! It is best at night, with all of its fairy lanterns glowing. I love the maze of little paths—there are benches to sit on—a wonderful place to bring one’s lunch and sit in the shade and relax, especially near the south end, where the view of the grand dome of the Administration Building is truly inspiring. I admit that the landscaping is not quite up to the high standards they set for it—the exotic trees they planned, the irregular flower gardens, the mosses and other low plants appearing as if they had been there for centuries—but it is still far superior to the small, rigid plantings of the Paris Exposition four years ago. Did you go to that, by any chance? No. Well, I was only fortunate enough to attend that exposition because Father was invited to speak at a theological gathering in Paris, and although I was only sixteen, he happily saw fit to bring me along for those weeks and the tower that Mr. Eiffel built! Many thought it vulgar, but I thought it grand. They had planned to tear it down as soon as the exposition there was finished—they called it an eyesore—but I do not believe they have as yet and sincerely hope they do not. All that iron! But Mr. Eiffel’s Tower, as impressive as it is, does not move, and Mr. Ferris’s Wheel, which we shall reach in only a few minutes, most assuredly does move. Oh, I can smell the lilacs there on the northern plantings of the Wooded Island. Isn’t that breeze from the lake wonderful? And did I mention that Father knows Mr. Olmsted, who is the landscape architect responsible not only for the Wooded Island’s plantings but for the landscape design for most of the Fair? For this Fair, I mean, not for those rigidly planted and quite inferior little gardens at the Paris fair—such a disappointment!—as wonderful as Mr. Eiffel’s Tower was and, of course, the foods there. French food is always marvelous. Are you hungry by chance, Paha Sapa? It is late for lunch, of course, and rather early for dinner, but there are some wonderful lunch counters here in the Women’s Building, although some of them are set almost embarrassingly close to the large corset exhibit that… Why Paha Sapa! Are you blushing?

Paha Sapa is indeed blushing—furiously—but he smiles and shakes his head as they turn left past the Women’s Building. Miss de Plachette has not paused after her question but is informing him that the Women’s Building was designed by a female architect and that the dimensions of the Women’s Building are one hundred and ninety-nine by three hundred and eighty-eight feet, sixty feet or two stories high, and its cost was $138,000. One of the smaller buildings among the Exposition’s architectural behemoths, it is still a massive thing, with its many arches and columns and winged statuary bedecking the upper walls.

She squeezes his left arm now with her free hand.

—Have you seen the Fair at night, with all the thousands of electric lights illuminated and the dome of the Administration Building all outlined in lights and with the searchlights playing back and forth?

—No, I haven’t been here on the grounds at night, but I see the constant glow and the searchlights from the Wild West Show’s arena and tents.

—Oh, Paha Sapa, you must see the Exposition at night. That’s when the White City comes alive. It becomes the most beautiful place on earth. I’ve seen it from a ship out on Lake Michigan and from the Alley L coming down from the city, and I want to see it from the captive balloon here on the Midway, but it doesn’t make ascensions at night. The observation walkways atop the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, or atop the Transportation Building, are extraordinary viewpoints at night—the searchlights stab out and around from those very rooftops!—but the best place is on the Wooded Island, with all the soft-glowing electrical lanterns and the fairy lanterns and the clear view of the White City, especially the outlined domes to the south. But think how wonderful it must be to see all the blazing lights at night from high atop the Ferris Wheel!

—We need to ride it in the daytime first, Miss de Plachette. To see if one can survive at such altitudes.

Her laughter is quick and rich.

PAHA SAPA WONDERS if this young lady would—possibly could—understand why he has spent almost all of his time during eleven of his twelve visits to the Exposition standing or sitting rigidly in front of only two displays. He realizes that it would be folly to discuss it with her, and he watches his tongue more carefully than he has with her to this point.

The two hundred cavalry and Indians, not to mention Annie Oakley and her husband and the small army of workers for the Wild West Show, arrived here in Jackson Park in late March, and Mr. Cody staged his first show on April 3, long before most of the actual Exposition’s exhibits or Midway attractions were ready.

In May, President Clevelandand huge gaggles of more illustrious royal foreigners and local dignitaries officially declared the World’s Columbian Exposition open for business by closing a circuit that started up the gigantic Allis steam engine and its thirty subsidiary engines in the Machinery Building, thus sending electricity to everything at the Fair that ran on electricity. Not long after that, Mr. Cody paid the way for all of his more than 200 employees—Indian, cavalry, sharpshooters, and tent-raising roughnecks—who wanted to see the Fair.

That one day of general fairgoing was a blur in Paha Sapa’s memory: the taste of a new caramel-coated popcorn treat they were calling Cracker Jack; lightning leaping from Nikola Tesla’s head and hands; a glimpse of an optical telescope larger than most cannon; a longer, more lingering glimpse—the other Lakota and Cheyenne were appalled—of a real cannon, of the ultimate cannon, the largest cannon ever cast: the 127-ton, fifty-seven-foot-long (from breech to muzzle) Krupp’s Cannon, displayed in its own Krupp Gun Pavilion (which looked to Paha Sapa as foreboding as any real German castle, even though his experience with German castles was limited to picture books), a gun capable of throwing a shell larger and heavier than a bull buffalo some sixteen miles and penetrating eighteen inches of steel armor at the end of that screaming death arc.

But not even the giant Krupp’s gun most interested Paha Sapa after that first long, long day he and the others from the Wild West Show had spent at the Fair.

That first day he had ended up, alone, at the southern end inside the huge Machinery Hall. And there he stopped and gaped at forty-three steam engines, each producing 18,000 to 20,000 horsepower, that drove 127 dynamos that powered all of the buildings at the exposition. A sign told Paha Sapa that it required twelve of these engines just to power the Machinery Hall.

Paha Sapa had staggered to the closest chair and collapsed into it. There he sat for the next three hours, and to that chair he would return for almost all of his next eleven visits to the Fair.

It was not just the noise and motion and whiff of alien ozone in the air that so mesmerized Paha Sapa (and, evidently, so many other males, white and foreign and one Indian, of all ages who gathered in the Machinery Building to watch the pistons drive up and down and the rotary belts whirl and the great wheels turn). Most women couldn’t seem to stand most of the Machinery Hall, but especially not this southern end, where the coal-fed furnaces and steam engines and larger dynamos clustered—the so-called Boiler-house Extension area—and it was true that the noise in much of the hall was truly deafening. On his later visits, Paha Sapa solved the noise problem with two wads of wax that he kneaded until they were the proper softness and shape and then pressed into his ear canals. It was not the noise that drew him here.

This, Paha Sapa realized and knew in his heart, was the center and core of the wasichus’ power and secret soul.

Oh, not just the steam and electricity, which Paha Sapa knew were both relatively new to the wasichus’ culture and list of commandable technologies (although he’d seen the fifteen-foot-high statue of Benjamin Franklin holding his key and kite cord and umbrella at the entrance to the Electricity Building), but it was this demonstrated ability to harness the universe’s hidden energies and secret powers—like children playing with the forbidden toys of God—that made the Wasicun so successful and so dangerous, even to themselves.

Since his three years of education at the hands of Father Francisco Serra and the other Jesuit monks at their failed monastery-school near Deadwood, Paha Sapa had understood both how important religion could be to most wasichus and how the majority of them could set aside their religion for everyday life. But these furnaces, these howling engines, this Holy Ghost of steam, this ultimate Trinity of motor and magnet and armature of miles upon miles of coiled copper wire, this was where the real gods of the Wasicun race dwelt.

Signs around the giant iron Westinghouse engine and its smaller acolytes informed Paha Sapa that “power from these dynamos and generators runs the elevators in the tall Administration Building and elsewhere, furnishes thousands of Exposition exhibitors with motive force, sets in motion countless other machines here in the Machinery Hall, and, not of the least importance, drives the sewage of the Fair toward Lake Michigan.”

Paha Sapa had laughed at that last part… laughed until he wept. How perfect that the wasichus used the power of their secret gods, the secret powers of the Wasicun universe itself, to drive their sewage “toward” the lake a few hundred yards away. He wondered if and how the sewage made it the rest of the way, beyond the push of all these tens and hundreds of thousands of combined horsepower and volts and amperes of electromagnetism. And then Paha Sapa laughed again and found that he was weeping in earnest.

It was about this time that a blue-clad Fair guide of some sort, wearing a brimless little red cap, approached him and shouted at him.

—And these ain’t even the largest dynamos at the Exposition!

Paha Sapa found this hard to believe.

—No? Where would the largest be found?

—Not too far from here, in the Intramural Railroad Company Building. You readum signums, chief?

—Yessum, sir, I cannum.

The man squinted, not sure if he was being made fun of, but continued shouting.

—Well, just look for the sign that says IRC or Power Plant. It’s behind the Machinery Hall, back near the south fence of the whole Fair. Not many people find it or want to go there.

—Thank you.

Paha Sapa was most sincere.

The Power Plant was indeed tucked back close to the fence, beyond the Convent of LaRabida (which actually had something to do with Christopher Columbus) and beyond the totem poles and south of the Anthropology Building (in which Paha Sapa could have studied an exhibit of phrenology showing why American Indians were a less-developed race in Darwinian terms).

When he finally entered the IRC Power Plant building, which was all but empty except for a few bored attendants in coveralls and one old man with three children in tow, Paha Sapa had to find a chair quickly or collapse to the floor.

Here was the world’s largest and most powerful dynamo. A yellowed placard announced—“When it is considered that this railroad is six and a half miles long, has sixteen trains of cars in constant movement and this aggregate of sixty-four cars [is] frequently crowded with passengers, some idea may be formed of the energy sent forth by this revolving giant.”

And revolving giant it was, its largest wheel half-buried in its cement trough but the top of that wheel almost touching the rafters beneath the ceiling. The whir and roar here were deafening, the smell of ozone constant. The few hairs on Paha Sapa’s arms stood on end and stayed on end. Rather than moving sewage toward the lake, this single dynamo moved every electric-powered train and car on the intramural railway that shuttled visitors around the perimeter of the Fair and from one end to the other. But, Paha Sapa knew, the purpose to which this invisible energy was being put mattered little; it was the ability to harness and direct it that changed the universe.

So each time Paha Sapa returned to the Fair after this, he would explore new sights for a while, spend a few minutes in the Electricity Building, spend hours standing near the roaring engines and dynamos of the Machinery Hall, and celebrate his last hour or two by sitting here in the remote IRC Power Plant building, watching and feeling this single dynamo. This last was like a forgotten cathedral, and the workers and attendants there soon came to know Paha Sapa and to tip their hats to him.

There was also another man there whom Paha Sapa saw several times during his visits—an older man in rumpled, expensive clothes and with a neatly trimmed beard and a bald head (which Paha Sapa saw gleaming in the light of the naked overhead bulbs when the gentleman removed his boater to mop at his pink scalp with an embroidered handkerchief). Even the man’s walking stick looked expensive. Most of the time there were only the dynamo’s attendants, as silent as acolytes serving a High Mass, and Paha Sapa standing or sitting in his chair, and the bearded gentleman standing or sitting in his chair some five yards away.

The third time the two saw each other there that May, the older gentleman came over, leaned on his walking stick, and cleared his throat.

—I beg your pardon. I do not mean to disturb you and I realize that my question must be presumptuous, if not actively offensive, but are you, by any chance, an American Indian?

Paha Sapa looked up at the man (who wore a soft, rumpled linen jacket on this exceptionally warm May day, while Paha Sapa sweated in his black suit). He could see the intelligence behind the older man’s eyes.

—Yes, I am. I belong to the tribe we call Lakota and which others call the Sioux.

—Marvelous! But I’ve compounded my presumptuousness by forgetting my manners. My name is Henry Adams.

The man held out his small, finely formed hand. It was as pink as his scalp and cheeks above his beard.

Paha Sapa got to his feet, returned the handshake, and gave his false name of Billy Slow Horse. The bearded man nodded and said how delightful it was to meet a member of the Sioux Nation here, in a World’s Fair dynamo room of all places. Suddenly Paha Sapa was filled with a great sense of old sorrow—not his own—but thankfully no other memories or impressions came through the contact of hands. With Custer babbling through his nights and the memories of Crazy Horse confusing him during the days, Paha Sapa did not think his sanity could survive another set of memories.

Little did he know what awaited him in years to come.

They both turned to look at the roaring dynamo again. Without steam engines, it was much quieter in the Power Plant than in the Machinery Building, but the noise from this machine, while lower, went deeper. It made Paha Sapa’s bones and teeth vibrate and seemed to create a subtle but very real sexual stirring in him. He wondered if the older man felt it.

The gentleman’s voice was very smooth, modulated—Paha Sapa guessed—by decades of polite but informed conversation, but also moderated by an almost but not quite audible sense of humor, an unexpressed chuckle that came through despite the sadness that Paha Sapa still felt flowing from the man.

—When my friends the Camerons insisted that I come with them on this flying visit to the Fair—all the way from Washington, DC, mind you!—I was quite certain that it would be a waste of time. How could Chicago—I proclaimed in all my insular arrogance—how could Chicago do anything but fling its brash, new-earned millions in our faces and show us something far less than art, far less than business, even, but some demonstration less than either.

Paha Sapa listened hard over and under the dynamo hum. If most men he knew were to craft sentences like that, Paha Sapa would have laughed or left or both. But somehow Mr. Adams interested him deeply.

The older man gestured at the dynamo and showed a broad smile.

—But this! This, Mr. Slow Horse, the ancient Greeks would have delighted to see and the Venetians, at their height, would have envied. Chicago has turned on us with a sort of wonderful, defiant contempt and shown us something far more powerful even than art, infinitely more important than business. This is, alas or hurrah, the future, Mr. Slow Horse! Yours and mine both, I fear… and yet hope at the same time. I can revel and write postcards about the fakes and frauds of the Midway Plaisance, but each evening I return to the Machinery Hall and to this very chamber to stare like an owl at the dynamo of the future.

Paha Sapa had nodded and glanced at the little gentleman. Embarrassed, Adams removed his straw hat again and mopped at his scalp.

—I must apologize again, sir. I babble on as if you were an audience rather than an interlocutor. What do you think of this dynamo and of the wonders of the Machinery Hall, where I’ve seen you staring even as I do, Mr. Slow Horse?

—It’s the real religion of your race, Mr. Adams.

Henry Adams had blinked at that. Then he put his hat back on and blinked some more, obviously lost in thought. Then he smiled.

—Sir, you have just answered a question I have been posing to myself for some years. I have long been interested—in my distant, unbeliever’s vague and insolent way—in the role the Virgin Mary played in the long, slow dreams that were the construction of such masterpieces as Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. I believe you have given me my answer. The Virgin Mary was to the men of the thirteenth century what this dynamo and its brothers shall be to…

At that moment another man entered, and Adams interrupted himself to welcome him. They had obviously arranged to meet there at that time. This other gentleman was very tall, with a sharp beak of a nose, pomaded dark hair slicked back, and with eyes so piercing they reminded Paha Sapa not of an owl but of an eagle. The man was dressed all in black and gray with a brilliantly white shirt, which reinforced Paha Sapa’s impression of being in the presence of a predator, vigilant eagle in human form.

Mr. Adams seemed flustered.

—Mr. Slow Horse, may I present my companion at the Fair today, the eminent Sher… that is… the eminent Norwegian explorer Mr. Jan Sigerson.

The tall man did not offer his hand but bowed and quietly clicked his heels together in an almost Germanic fashion. Paha Sapa smiled and nodded in return. Something about the tall man made Paha Sapa afraid to touch his bare hand and risk learning about his life.

Sigerson’s voice was soft but sharp edged and sounded more English than Norwegian to Paha Sapa’s untrained ear.

—It is a true pleasure to meet you, Mr. Slow Horse. We Europeans rarely get the opportunity to meet a practicing wičasa wakan from the Natural Free Human Beings.

Sigerson turned to Adams.

—I apologize, Henry, but Lizzie and the senator are waiting at Franklin’s steam launch at the North Pier and inform me that we are all running late for Mayor Harrison’s dinner.

Sigerson bowed toward Paha Sapa again and he was smiling slightly this time.

—It has been a sincere pleasure meeting you, Mr. Slow Horse, and I can only hope that some day the wasichu wanagi will no longer be a problem.

Wasichu wanagi. The white man’s ghost. Paha Sapa could only stare after the two men as they left, Mr. Adams speaking but not being heard by the young Indian.

He never saw the man named Henry Adams or his Norwegian friend again.

MISS DE PLACHETTE LEADS THE WAY onto the Midway Plaisance—a mile-long strip of attractions, private shows, and rides that extends away from the lake from Jackson Park to the edge of Washington Park, as straight as a broad arrow fired into the back of the Columbian Exposition from the west.

Ahead are scatterings of exotic structures on either side of the low, broad, dusty Midway boulevard: Old Vienna medieval homes and a Biergarten; Algerian mosques and Tunisian minarets from which alien music blares and voices screech; a Cairo street where Paha Sapa and his friends have seen the overrated belly dancer; glimpses of Laplanders and Samoans and two-humped camels and a small herd of reindoor being hurried across the boulevard by men in shaggy fur despite the heat; the long water-propelled sliding railway; the Bernese Alps theater; a glimpse of the captive balloon far, far down the strip and to the right.

And in the middle of the boulevard and seemingly growing taller every minute, the 264-foot-tall Ferris Wheel, which, according to Miss de Plachette, boasts thirty-six contained cars or cabins (each larger than many log cabins Paha Sapa has known), with each car or cabin capable of carrying up to sixty people.

Paha Sapa feels a growing, if unfocused, anxiety. He is not afraid of the Wheel or of heights, but something suddenly seems perilous to him, as if he and this young lady he barely knows are approaching some point of no return.

—Are you sure you want to do this, Miss de Plachette?

—Call me Rain, please.

—Are you sure you want to do this, Rain?

—We must do this, Paha Sapa. It is our destiny.