Chapter 1: Before the Beginning

While Grampa Becker was from Bavaria, Pa’s mother had been Seneca, and Pa wanted us -- my two brothers, two sisters and me -- to be proud of our native heritage.

The Seneca called themselves Onodowa’ga, the “people of the hills.” Their traditional home had been in the uplands south of Lake Ontario, among the Finger Lakes, in what is now northern New York State. The Seneca were one of the original five member tribes of the Iroquois League which, by the time of the American Revolution, held sway over a territory extending from southern Canada to northern Kentucky.

Still, Pa didn’t mean for us to be proud in a boastful way. Besides, hardly anybody that carried Indian blood was boastful about it, as most folks thought Indians were savage animals and anyone with even partial Indian parentage was judged a no-class mongrel. What Pa meant was that we should appreciate the long history of being part of America and all that it meant to us, the combining of two races from two continents, Europe and North America. Still, I was content with my Seneca blood and never apologized for it, to the cost of a bloody lip or two when I was a youngster.

Pa grew up on a farm near the village of Conesus, in western upstate New York. That’s where he met Ma. She was the daughter of another farmer, a man who had emigrated from Saxony, which bordered Bavaria.

Pa was the third of four brothers. He knew that his oldest brother would inherit the Conesus farm, a farm that could really only support one family in any event. So Ma and Pa, after they were married, set out west, eventually settling in the valley of the Maumee River in northwestern Ohio.

We never knew Gramma Becker, our Seneca grandmother; she’d died the year after my oldest brother, Amos, was born. But we did know her youngest brother, Pa’s uncle, Samuel Cayuga, who we called Uncle Sammie. He lived according to the old ways, in the forest between Oneida Lake and the headwaters of the Mohawk River in northwestern New York State.

I was thinking about Uncle Sammie, and fishing with him in the Mohawk River, as I wiggled a fair-sized bug over a boulder-shadowed hole on the Cimarron River, where it churned down the eastern slope of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northeast New Mexico Territory.

The insect was a greenish-hued flier that I’d scooped out of the air near the river. I always carried a coil of braided horsehair line and some sharp, barbed hooks in my saddlebags. I’d cut a long sapling to use as a pole and slipped a short piece of a hollow grass stem under the bug’s wings to help keep it afloat. My fly fishing equipment was too awkward to carry on a working trip, but that didn’t quell my appetite for some fried trout.

The big old trout, which I suspected was waiting there, could resist for only a few seconds. Soon enough there was a dull flash from the depths and a quick scoop of bug and hook into the cutthroat’s gullet -- and hence the trout made his way into my gullet, via my fry pan, with enough left over for breakfast.

Now, if only I could be as lucky with Hector Guerrero.