Enos

Enos belonged to the part of the West that does not survive in clean print. He was one of the packers, interpreters, and hired men who moved between armies and nations and got written down, when they were written down at all, under whatever name a clerk could manage that morning. In one life he answered to eleven of them — Eneas, E. Walker, E. Short, Botellier, and more — and trusted none. When a woman told him early on that he was useful, she said it as a warning. Useful, she meant, is worse than clever. Clever men get remembered. Useful men get spent.

He kept his origins to himself, and the novel keeps them there. Not Mexican, he would say, and not Indian either — something else, and that was his whole answer. His genius was with animals and languages; his sin was proximity. He was close enough to a dozen famous crimes to see exactly how they were done, and careful enough never to be entered in the book that would have made him part of them. His defining claim, "I held horses," is true about half the time. The novel is the ten years he spent refusing to look at which half.

In the spring of 1846 John C. Frémont led an armed "exploring" expedition through Mexican California and up toward the Oregon country, Kit Carson among his men and twelve Delaware scouts riding close. On the Sacramento River the expedition attacked a Wintu village. A Marine lieutenant named Gillespie chased Frémont north with secret dispatches and caught him near Klamath Lake, and three of Frémont's own men died in that camp. The official account blamed a night raid and gave it a name — Klamath — and on the strength of that name the company rode forty miles and destroyed a fishing village called Dokdokwas, drying racks and cooking fires and all.

That is where the record closes the matter, and where the novel reopens it. It does not hand you a verdict. It goes back into the camp and asks the questions a dispatch is built to bury: who decided the cause, who profited from the word Klamath, and how a tally on a board turned a village into "enemy dead." At San Rafael, when Carson asks aloud whether to take three unarmed Californians prisoner, Frémont waves his hand — "I have got no room for prisoners" — and Enos understands there was never a secret to any of it, only a method.

A report had no room for the full population of a fact. from The Renegade Enos

Enos was in the middle of all of it, close enough to see how the deciding was done without ever deciding anything himself. That vantage is the whole novel: the conquest of the West at the eye level of a man it used and discarded.

The conquest was fought, and then it was filed. This is the engine of the book: every atrocity in the field is paired with the scene of its laundering — the tally board, the dispatch, the fair copy, the Senate speech, the dime novel, the warrant. Two thousand miles from the smoke, in Washington parlors, the other war is fought with steel pens and clean paper, and its most gifted soldier is a woman.

Jessie Benton Frémont, daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton and wife of the Pathfinder, was the actual author of the reports that made her husband famous. She had no field of her own, no commission, no rank, and she discovered that correction is a kind of command. In the novel she reads a line about men "wanting proper tools to bury them" and strikes the word before it can reach the Senate. Her reason is exact, and it is the closest thing the book has to a confession of how history gets made:

That phrase will not do. It lets the reader see the shovel. Jessie Benton Frémont, in The Renegade Enos

Her father supplies the theory from the Senate floor — his documented 1846 speech that the white race alone received the divine command to subdue the continent. When Frémont is finally court-martialed in 1847, the charges are mutiny and disobedience, and Jessie sees the joke in them at once: it is the only crime in the whole conquest that does not require anyone to count the bodies. The novel's thesis is carried in its shape: the page is where the conquest gets finished, one clean sentence at a time.

By the 1850s Enos was riding the San Joaquin under new names, in a crew of horse drovers who all answered to "Joaquín" when a deputy read out a warrant. The warrant named five Joaquíns and described the sash on one man, the scar on another, a gray mare twelve miles behind — every Mexican rider in California, and none of them. In 1853 the legislature made it law and put a bounty on the name, and Harry Love's Rangers came back from Cantua Creek with a head in a jar of brandy and a three-fingered hand, a dollar a look in a Stockton tent.

Enos paid his dollar. He knew the head. It belonged to his oldest friend, a mustang-catcher named Jacinto, identifiable by a notched ear no affidavit bothered to mention. He said nothing, because the only name that would have let him testify was already on the legislature's list of the wanted. And riding in that same crew was a young writer called John, carrying a poem about Mount Shasta and the beginnings of a book that would turn the five Joaquíns into one immortal outlaw.

The warrant had found all of them and none of them. from The Renegade Enos

That young writer was John Rollin Ridge, the Cherokee author who signed himself Yellow Bird. He gets his own novel, and his own site: Yellow Bird: The Confession of John Rollin Ridge — the man who made the legend, told beside the man who saw the real bodies it erased.

The witness's road ended on the southern Oregon coast. In the winter of 1855–56, Enos watched the Indian agent Ben Wright beat a Native woman, Chetco Jennie, the length of the main street at Port Orford while sixty townspeople watched from their porches and not one of them moved. Enos carried her out of the mud and a hundred miles inland and nursed her through the winter, and when she could stand she told him what she wanted: for Wright to feel what he had done.

On Washington's Birthday, 1856, while Gold Beach held a dance, Enos led the warriors of the lower Rogue. He killed Ben Wright with his own hands. For the first time in thirty years nothing had been ordered and nothing was necessary, and no clerk would be able to write it down as something else. Every part of it was his. Captured months later, handed over under a surrender that excepted him by name, he became the subject of the novel's coldest chapter — a superintendent's real letters weighing one question that answered itself before it was asked.

The testimony of those witnesses would not have been received against a white man in any court in that territory. It would be received against this one. from The Renegade Enos

In April 1857, on a gallows above the sea-stack the Americans called Battle Rock, Enos tried to count his eleven names and could not finish. He refused the hood. The French he had always saved for trouble narrowed to two words, given plainly and not loudly, the way a man gives his name at a counter: Je te vois. I see you. The record could never enter that verdict, and it was the only one he had left to give.