2023
We were soldiers stationed on the dying frontier. No longer did bands of hostile Indians descend on our fort, we had to ride out for miles to find them at all. The proud Lakota and Dakota peoples had been subdued a year ago, and the battlefields of this war were gathering dust as caravans of white settlers went west to the Washington Territory. Most days were spent poring over our old well-worn Bibles or short tracts of nonfiction in a languid stupor or drilling halfheartedly for a war that would never come.
A civilian lived among us, a sort of merchant who resided within the fort. His main official role was that of shopkeeper. He brought crates of shooting irons wrapped in butcher paper, bottles of Scotch whisky, fine tobacco. The weapons he provided to us were of the finest quality, manufactured in Whitneyville, Connecticut. But he was no representative of Colt’s manufacturing company but rather an ex-soldier, who had served in our American Civil War.
He looked like any other veteran of the Union, but he was an ethnic Slovene from the Austrian Empire. His name was unpronounceable but his speech bore only the slightest hint of an origin across the sea, let alone in the backwards provincial parts of Europe. He had left friends behind to die on the fields of Solferino and come over to this land in ‘59, and volunteered for service at some point after that. Beyond those details nobody knew anything about his past, it was shrouded in mystery. I will call him Brazamis, for that is what his name sounded like to our ears. I know not what his name truly was or how it was spelled, and I fear I will never find out.
Also among our company was an old veteran of the Mexican war, who had waited out the Civil War in California. He was an officer, a colonel named S.E. Johnson. His gray hair peeled back from his sunburned scalp. He was tall and broad, his dignified posture unbroken by time. His face was crossed with innumerable deep creases, his startlingly blue eyes hidden in their sunken orbits. Only Brazamis stood taller than him, and only Brazamis had a more refined air about him. The two men seemed to be diametrically opposed in all things, always sitting at the two farthest places whenever all the men of the fort sat down to mess or to games. Johnson, outranking all of us, would always take the head of the table. Despite his title, Johnson was nothing more than an advisor. He at times would take our captain aside and speak to him until the early morning hours, the pair finally retiring near sunrise. We would wake to a quiet fort and enjoy our relative peace, but the captain would always be in a foul mood after rising after one of his discussions with the colonel and would drill us horribly.
We were gambling at the table one night when Johnson, deep in his cups, blurted out something about “savage Indians”. Unopposed, he began to rant about the various peoples that were streaming into the United States and their inferiority to the Anglo-Saxon. He wore a flintlock on his hip, an old cavalry dragon that, unless it had ceased to work, would spit out a mess of hot lead and smoke if its ancient trigger was depressed. The colonel suddenly drew his sidearm and began to wave his old mark of officership around. This drew whispers from some of the young men I served alongside. The captain, Brazamis, and I sat mutely, too stunned by the old man’s vigor to react to his words or his audacity drawing his weapon on a group of soldiers.
Johnson, upon hearing the hushed voices of the soldiers of the fort questioning the way he swung his old dragon around, sprang to his feet.
“This land has been given to us by Providence. It is the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race to spread civilization across this vast continent, to tame the wicked Indian, and to bring order where there is none.”
He gesticulated with his pistol, its barrel subtly angling toward Brazamis.
“We fought for this land. Every square mile of plain we have here was won from the Indian and the Mexican. Paid for and watered with the blood of our own. My brother Samuel was scalped by the Apache not twenty years ago. American men, women, and children died for this land, died to advance the flag of our great nation.”
Nobody said anything. We all knew Johnson came from the South, and his family had supported the Confederacy. It was only because he was in California from ‘61-65 that he had retained his U.S. army rank, looking on like a coward from the safe shores of the Contra Costa.
Johnson stood tall among his fellow “Saxons”, his words pleading for collective ethnic consciousness.
“We are the founding stock of this country. We alone know the true meaning of republican governance. The worms groveling in the distant soils of European despotism, what do they know of our civilization?”
He shoved his dragon vaguely in the direction of Brazamis, his face reddening with passion.
“Brazamis and his ilk — they come to our shores in droves, begging for mercy. And we give it to them. Damned fools we are, we take them in. What do they know of the history of the frontier? Of Daniel Boone and the Cumberland? What do they know of our common-law traditions? What do they know of the savagery of the Indian? What do they know of the freedom we fought a war to bring about? We are facing an existential threat. This is not just about our land or our politics. This is about preserving the American soul. If we keep letting in these disparate peoples, this detritus of the European continent — one day we won’t be Americans anymore.”
With that, Johnson spat, and Brazamis rose.
“Colonel Johnson,” the European began. “Surely you have not failed to understand the tolerant history of this country. Recall the words of Crevecoeur, which like any educated American I have no doubt you have read. Almost a century ago, he observed that our American people was founded by individuals of all nations. The stock of this nation is not purely British but includes French, German, and Slavic components. One of the signatories to our great Declaration of Independence was a Finn. And that war we fought for freedom, to release from bondage the black citizens of our nation that you have conveniently ignored so far in your benighted screed? I fought in that war, Colonel. I bled to make men free. I know you were in California, but what happened to the other male members of the illustrious Johnson family during that war, Colonel?”
Johnson’s face was purple and his left eye spasmed. The captain’s mouth hung open in abject shock. My mouth was compressed to a thin line devoid of any readable emotion. Johnson’s youngest brother, Nathaniel, had been killed in action at the Second Battle of Bull Run, as a Confederate volunteer from Tennessee. Moments passed unbearably slowly. Then Johnson snarled and, in the old Southern fashion, challenged the other man to a duel. Brazamis stood there perplexed but did not back down.
“I have not had the misfortune of engaging in a ‘proper’ Southern-style duel before, Colonel Johnson. When I served in the Army of the Union, I usually fought the enemy instead of consorting with them.” He grinned a little at his own words. “I question the purpose of such bloodshed, as it achieves no useful aim. But do not think I will back down from your challenge. I accept it because I am fully assured that I can best you, Colonel, and because you desire to prove the supremacy of your ideology, and because I am no such coward as to back down from proving the primacy of my own.”
The colonel spat again, this time with fury, his tobacco-tinged phlegm almost landing on the European’s fine riding boots.
“Damn you, Brazamis.”
The younger and taller man just nodded with a stately smile and went away.
Among the enlisted men of our fort, the majority not only favored Brazamis in his odds for the duel but maintained he was the better man and deserved to win. The officers and the captain were divided in their opinions, acknowledging that Brazamis was a far superior combatant but questioning his affront to the American way of life and our respect for military authority. I myself respected only Brazamis, having no love for the drunken old sot who had at one point helped to conquer the land our fort stood on from Mexico.
The duel was set for daybreak, which came early in the season of late spring that we were enjoying. Everybody assembled in the courtyard but the captain, who could not prevent his men from witnessing the illegal exchange of gunfire but could hardly show his face at it himself. Even the non-commissioned officers and the lieutenant made an appearance, watching from afar. The morning was cold but not bitterly so. It was a perfect day to be shot dead in front of two hundred men.
Brazamis raised no objection at letting Johnson go first and so the older man laboriously drew up his dragon and fired. The damned old thing went off and roared its fury of molten metal and black powder.
But the old man’s aim was not true and the blast mainly just singed the tall European’s clothing. A few tiny pieces of shot embedded themselves in Brazamis’ right shoulder and the blast of hot gas burned his earlobe, but even he barely noticed. And so Brazamis made ready his weapon of choice, a brand-new double action revolver, Colt Model 1878, that had only been shot for testing purposes. Brazamis was known as a good shot and as a purveyor of weapons he had access to the best arms within the entire United States. The cutting edge of technological ingenuity versus the stubbornness of a dying generation. It hardly seemed fair. The younger man’s hands were steady and his aim was deadly, the sights of his gun wavering from the old man’s nose to his forehead. Johnson responded to facing down the barrel of his opponent’s weapon with a suppressed rage that belied the true gravity of his situation. He bared his decaying teeth in a grimace that was meant to show his scorn for death. His foul teeth then parted and he hissed reproachfully at Brazamis.
“Kill me, barbarian! Show our men, the fine American stock of this fort, the final triumph of savagery over Christian civilization! End my life and let the Mongol hordes trample over everything our great forefathers have built! Prove that you are nothing more than a violent sack-of-shit!”
Brazamis fired. Everybody jumped in surprise, most of all Johnson. Where the onlookers had expected to see a dead old man with a bullet hole between his eyes, they instead saw the old colonel still standing, his shoes a little scuffed but his entire person otherwise completely unmodified. The turf near Johnson’s feet had been marred by a shot, and witnessing this, he looked with bewilderment at Brazamis.
The veteran of the Union smiled and explained himself.
“Just as you missed my shoes with your vile spittle, I have decided to divert my aim from your head and shoot the ground instead. I daresay it was more worthy of the bullet than yourself, Colonel. It made a better opponent.”
Johnson had no retort to this or indeed anything to say at all. He was transfixed and it was clear he was glad he had gotten a second chance at life. Brazamis sighed, artfully twirled his pistol, and holstered it within his overcoat.
“I won’t give you this chance again, Johnson. If you choose to fight me again it’ll be your own fault you die. I hope you are aware of this. I personally am satisfied with this outcome. You are bested and there is one less pointless death in this world.”
With that Brazamis withdrew. He would only stay on for a few more weeks at the fort. I never got a chance to say a proper goodbye to him. Rather than travel to secure a contract with a supplier somewhere far away as we thought he did that fateful day, it turned out Brazamis left the mercantile trade to become a revolutionary.
Brazamis died in the Little War of Cuban Independence. He served under Calixto García, who he had met in New York, and was ultimately cut down in the Cuban revolutionaries’ last stand as they were pushed off the island.