“’E’s an’ officer of the Royal Navy,” snaps Susie, “an’ quite accustomed to command – aren’t you, my love?”
I agreed, but remarked that leading a caravan must be specialised work, and doubtless there were many better qualified than I … which was stark truth, apart from which I’d no wish to be badgering roughriders and arguing with drunk teamsters when I could be rolling in a hand-painted, watertight coach. Seeing my diffidence, she rounded on me, demanding if I was going to take orders from some grubby little carter? I said, well, ah … while the Colonel called loudly for cobblers and the boys looked tactfully at the ceiling, and just then a burly scarecrow came into the store – or rather, he seemed to drift in, silently, and the Colonel introduced him as Mr Wootton, our guide.
I heard Susie sniff in astonishment – well, he was grubby, no error, and hadn’t shaved in a while, and his clothes looked as though he’d taken them off a dead buckskin man and then slept in them for a year. He seemed diffident, too, fiddling with his hat and looking at the floor. When the Colonel told him about my commanding the caravan he thought for a bit, and then said in a gentle, husky voice:
“Gennelman bin wagon-captain afore?”
No, said the Colonel, and the boys looked askance and coughed. The clodpole scratched his head and asks:
“Gennelman bin in Injun country?”
No, they said, I hadn’t. He stood a full minute, still not looking up, and then says:
“Gennelman got no ’sperience?”
At this one of the boys laughed, and I sensed Susie ready to burst – and I was about fed up being ridiculed by these blasted chaw-bacons. God knows I didn’t want to command her caravan, but enough’s enough.
“I’ve had some experience, Mr Wootton,” says I. “I was once an army chief of staff—” Sergeant-General to the nigger rabble of Madagascar, but there you are “—and have known service in India, Afghanistan, and Borneo. But I’ve no special desire—”
At this Wootton lifted his unkempt head and looked at me, and I stopped dead. He was a ragged nobody – with eyes like clear blue lights, straight and steady. Then he glanced away – and I thought, don’t let this one go. It may be a picnic on the plains, but you’ll be none the worse with him along.
“My dear,” says I to Susie, “perhaps you and the Colonel will excuse Mr Wootton and myself.” I went out, and presently Wootton drifts on to the stoop, not looking at me.
“Mr Wootton,” says I, “my wife wants me to command the caravan, and what she wants she gets. Now, I’m not your Old Bill Williams, but I’m not a greenhorn, exactly. I don’t mind being called wagon-captain – but you’re the guide, and what you say goes. You can say it to me, quietly, and I’ll say it to everyone else, and you’ll get an extra hundred a month. What d’you say?”
It was her money, after all. He said nothing, so I went on:
“If you’re concerned that your friends’ll think poorly of you for serving under a tenderfoot …” At this he turned the blue eyes on me, and kept them there. Deuced uncomfortable. Still he was silent, but presently looked about, as though considering, and then says after a while:
“Gotta study, I reckon. Care to likker with me?”
I accepted, and he led the way to where a couple of mules were tethered, watching me sidelong as I mounted. Well, I’d forgotten more about backing a beast than he’d ever know, so I was all right there; we cantered down the street, and out through the tents and wagons towards Westport, and presently came to a big lodge with “Last Chance” painted in gold leaf on its signboard, which was doing a roaring trade. Richey got a jug, and we rode off towards some trees, and all the time he was deep in thought, occasionally glancing at me but not saying a word. I didn’t mind; it was a warm day, I was enjoying the ride, and there was plenty to see – over by the wood some hunters were popping their rifles at an invisible target; when we got closer I saw they were “driving the nail”, which is shooting from fifty paces or so at a broad-headed nail stuck in a tree, the aim being to drive it full into the wood, which with a ball the size of a small pea is fancy shooting anywhere.
Richey gave a grunt when he saw them, and we rode near to where a group of them were standing near the nail-tree, whooping and cat-calling at every shot. Richey dismounted.
“Kindly cyare to set a whiles?” says he, and indicated a tree-stump with all the grace of a Versailles courtier; he even put the jug down beside it. So I sat, and waited, and took a pull at the jug, which was first-run rum, and no mistake, while Richey went over and talked to the hunters – fellows in moccasins and fringed tunics, for the most part, burned brown and bearded all over. It was only when some of them turned to look at me; and chortled in their barbarous “plug-a-plew” dialect which is barely recognisable as English, that I realised the brute was absolutely consulting them – about me, if you please! Well, by God, I wasn’t having that, and I was on the point of storming off when the group came over, all a-grin – and by George, didn’t they stink, just! I was on my feet, ready to leave – and then I stopped, thunderstruck. For the first of them, a tall grizzled mountaineer, in a waterproof hat and leggings, was wearing an undoubted Life Guards tunic, threadbare but well-kept. I blinked: yes, it was Tin Belly gear, no error.
“Hooraw, hoss, howyar!” cries this apparition.
“Where the devil did you get that coat?” says I.
“You’re English,” says he, grinning. “Waal, I tell ye – this yar garmint wuz give me by one o’ your folks. Scotch feller – sure ’nuff baronite, which is kind of a lord, don’t ye know? Name o’ Stooart. Say, wasn’t he the prime coon, though? He could ha’ druv thet nail thar with his eyes shut.” He considered me, scratching his chin, and I found myself wishing my buckskin coat wasn’t so infernally new. “Richey hyar sez he’s onsartin if you’ll make a wagon-captain.”
“Is he, by God? Well, you can tell Richey—”
“Mister,” says he, “you know this?” And he held up a short stick of what looked like twisted leather.
“Certainly. It’s cured beef – biltong. Now what—”
“Don’t mind me, hoss,” says he, and winked like a ten-year-old as he stepped closer. “We’re a-humourin’ ole Richey thar. Now then – how long a hobble you put on a pony?”
I almost told him to go to the devil, but he winked again, and I’ll say it for him, he was a hard man to refuse. Besides, what was I to do? If I’d turned my back on that group of bearded grinning mountebanks they’d have split their sides laughing.
“That depends on the pony,” says I. “And the grazing, and how far you’ve ridden, and where you are, and how much sense you’ve got. Two feet, perhaps … three.”
He cackled with laughter and slapped his thigh, and the buckskin men haw-hawed and looked at Richey, who was standing head down, listening. My interrogator said:
“Hyar’s a catechism, sure ’nuff,” and he was so pleased with himself, and so plainly intent on making game of Richey that I decided to enter into the spirit of the thing. “Next question, please,” says I, and he clapped his hands.
“Now, let’s calkerlate. Haw, hyar’s a good ’un! Hyar’s a night camp; I’m a gyuard. What you spose I’m a-doin’?” He looked at a bush about twenty yards away, walked a few paces aside, and looked at it again, then came back to me. “Actin’ pee-koolyar, hoss – you reckon?”
“No such thing. You’re taking a sight on that bush. You’ll take a sight on all the bushes. After dark, if a bush isn’t where it should be, you’ll fire on it. Because it’ll be an Indian, won’t it?” We’d done the same thing in Afghanistan; any fool of a soldier knows the dodge.
“Wah!” shouts he, delighted, and thumped Richey on the back. “Thar, boyee! This chile hyar’ll tickle ye, see iffn he doan’t. Now, whut?”
Richey was watching me in silence, very thoughtful. Presently he nodded, slowly, while the buckskin men nudged each other and my questioner beamed his satisfaction. Then Richey tapped my pistol butt, and pulling a scrap of cloth from his po
cket, drifted over to the tree and began to snag it on the half-driven nail. My tall companion chuckled and shook his head; well, I saw what was wanted, and I thought to blazes with it. I’d taken as much examination from these clowns as I wanted, so I decided to put Master Richey in his place.
The tall chap had a knife in his waistband, and without by your leave I plucked it out. It was a Green River, which is the best knife in the world, and just the article to practise the trick that Ilderim Khan had taught me, with infinite patience, on the Kabul Road almost ten years before. As Richey adjusted his target, I threw the knife overhand; my eye was well out, for I was nowhere near the mark, but I damned near took his ear off. He looked at the blade quivering in the trunk beside his face, while the tall buffoon cackled with laughter, and the buckskin men doubled up and haw-hawed – if I’d put it through the back of his head, I daresay that would have been a real joke.
Richey pulled the knife free, while his pals rolled about, and drifted over to me. He looked at me for a moment with those steady blue eyes, glanced at the tall chap,6 and then said in that gentle husky voice:
“I’m Uncle Dick. An extra hunnerd, ye said – cap’n?”
The men hoorawed and shouted, “Good ole Virginny! How’s yer ha’r, Dick?” I nodded and said I would see him at sunrise, sharp, bade them a courteous good-day and rode back to Independence without more ado – I know when to play the man of few words myself, you see. But I didn’t delude myself that I had proved my fitness to be a wagon-captain, or any rot of that sort; all I had shown, through the eccentric good office of our friend in the Tin-Belly coat, was that I wasn’t a know-nothing, and Wootton could take service under me without losing face. They were an odd lot, those frontiersmen, simple and shrewd enough, and as easy – and as difficult – to impose upon as children are. But I was glad Wootton would be our guide; being a true-bred rascal and coward myself, I know a good man when I see one – and he was the best.7
We started west three days later, but I am not going to take up your time with wordy descriptions of the journey, which you can get from Parkman or Gregg if you want them – or from volume II of my own great work, Dawns and Departures of a Soldier’s Life, although it ain’t worth the price, in my opinion, and all the good scandal about D’Israeli and Lady Cardigan is in the third volume, anyway.
But what I shall try to do, looking back in a way that Parkman and the others didn’t, is to try to tell you what it meant to “go West” in the earlies8 – and that was something none of us understood at the time, or the chances are we’d never have gone. You look at a map of America nowadays, and there she is, civilised (give or take the population) from sea to sea; you can board a train in New York City and get off in Frisco without ever stepping outside, let alone get your feet wet; you can even do what I’ve done – look out from your Pullman on the Atchison Topeka as you cross Walnut Creek, and see the very ruts your wagon made fifty years before, and pass through great cities that were baldhead prairie the first time you went by, and vast wheatfields where you remember the buffalo herds two miles from wing to wing. Why, I had coffee on a verandah in a little town in Colorado just last year – fine place, church with a steeple, schoolhouse, grain warehouse, and even a motor car at the front gate. First time I saw that place it consisted of a burning wagon. Its population was a scalped family.
Now, you must look at the map of America. See the Mississippi River, and just left of it, Kansas City? West of that, in ’49, there was – nothing. And it was an unknown nothing, that’s the point. You can say now that ahead of the Forty-Niners stretched more than two thousand miles of empty prairie and forest and mountain and great rivers – but we didn’t know that, in so many words. Oh, everyone knew that the Rockies were a thousand miles off, and the general lie of the country – but take a look at what is now North Texas and Oklahoma. In ’49, it was believed that there was a vast range of mountains there, blocking the way west, when in fact the whole stretch is as flat as your hat. Somewhere around the same region, it was believed, was “the great American Desert” – which didn’t exist. Oh, there’s desert, plenty of it, farther west; nobody knew much about that either.
I say it was unknown; certainly, the mountain men and hunters had walked over plenty of it; that crazy bastard Fremont was exploring away in a great frenzy and getting thoroughly lost by all accounts. But when you consider, that in ’49 it was less than 60 years since some crazy Scotch trapper9 had crossed North America for the first time – well, you will understand that its geography was not entirely familiar, west of the Miss’.
Look at the map again – and remember that beyond Westport there was no such thing as a road. There were two trails, to all intents, and they were just wagon-tracks – the Santa Fe and the Oregon. You didn’t think of roads then; you thought of rivers, and passes. Arkansas, Cimarron, Del Norte, Platte, Picketwire, Colorado, Canadian – those were the magic river names; Glorieta, Raton, South Pass – those were the passes. There were no settlements worth a dam, even – Santa Fe was a town, sure enough, if you ever got there, and after that you had nothing until San Diego and Frisco and the rest of the cities of the west coast. But in between, the best you could hope for were a few scattered forts and trading posts: Bent’s, Taos, Laramie, Bridger, St Vrain, and a few more. Hell’s bells, I rode across Denver when the damned place wasn’t even there.
No, it was the unknown then, to us at least; millions of square miles of emptiness which would have been hard enough to cross even if it had truly been empty, what with dust-storms, drought, floods, fire, mountains, snow-drifts that could be seventy feet deep, cyclones, and the like. But it wasn’t empty, of course; there were several thousand well-established inhabitants – named Cheyenne, Kiowa, Ute, Sioux, Navajo, Pawnee, Shoshoni, Blackfeet, Cumanche … and Apache. Especially, Apache. But even they were hardly even names to us, and the belief – I give you only my own impression – in the East was that their nuisance had been greatly exaggerated.
So you see, we started in fairly blissful ignorance, but before we do, take one last look at the map before Professor Flashy endeth the lesson. See the Arkansas river and the Rockies? Until the 1840s, they had been virtually the western and south-western limits of the U.S.A.; then came the war with Mexico, and the Yankees won the whole shooting-match that they own today. So when we jumped off for California, we were heading into country three-quarters of which had been Mexican until a few months before, and still was in everything but name.10 Some of it was called Indian Territory, and that was no lie, either.
That was what lay ahead of us, gullible asses that we were, and if you think it was tough you should have seen the Comber caravan loading up in the meadow at Westport. I’ve squared away, and ridden herd upon, most kind of convoys in my time, but shipping a brothel was a new one on me. Visiting ’em in situ, you don’t realise how elaborately furnished they are; when I saw the pile of gear that had come ashore off the steamboat, I didn’t credit it; a stevedore would have taken to drink.
For one thing, the sluts all had their dressing-tables and mirrors and wardrobes, stuffed with silks and satins and gowns and underclothes and hats and stockings and shoes and garters and ribbons and jewellery and cosmetics and wigs and masks and gloves and God knows what beside – there were several enormous chests which Susie called “equipment”, and which, if they’d burst open in public, would have led to the intervention of the police. Gauzy trousers and silk whips were the least of it; there was even a red plush swing and an “electrical mattress”, so help me.
“Susie,” says I, “I ain’t old enough to take responsibility for this cargo. Dear God, Caligula wouldn’t know what to do with it! You’ve had some damned odd customers in Orleans, haven’t you?”
“We won’t be able to buy it in Sacramento,” says she.
“You couldn’t buy it in Babylon!” says I. “See here; two of the wagons must be given over to food – we need enough flour, tea, dried fruit, beans, corn, sugar, and all the rest of it to feed forty folk for three
months – at this rate we’ll finish up eating lace drawers and frilly corsets!” She told me not to be indelicate, and it would all have to go aboard; she wasn’t running an establishment that wasn’t altogether tip-top. So in went the fancy bed-linen and tasselled curtains and carpets and chairs and chaise-longues and hip-baths, and the piano with candlesticks and a case of music – oh, yes, and four chandeliers and crystal lampshades and incense and bath salts and perfumes and snuff and cigars and forty cases of burgundy (I told the demented bitch it wouldn’t travel) and oil paintings of an indecent nature in gilt frames and sealed boxes of cheese and rahat lakoum and soap and pomade, and to crown all, a box of opium – with Cleonie’s parrot in its cage to top everything off. In the end we had to hire two extra wagons.
“It’s worth it,” says Susie to my protests. “It’s all investment, darlin’, an’ we’ll reap the benefit, you’ll see.”
“Provided the goldfields are manned entirely by decadent Frog poets, we’ll make a bloody fortune,” says I. “Thank God we shan’t have to go through Customs.”
The whores were another anxiety, for while Susie had them thoroughly chastened, and kept them dressed like charity girls, they wouldn’t have fooled an infant. They were all coloured, and stunners, and they didn’t walk, or even sit, like nuns, exactly. You just had to look at the stately black Aphrodite, regarding herself in a hand-mirror while the pert creamy Claudia dressed her hair, or Josephine perched languidly on a box, contemplating her shapely little feet with satisfaction, or Medea and Cleonie sauntering among the wildflowers with their parasols, or the voluptuous Eugenie reclining in a wagon, sultry-eyed and toying with her fan – no, you could tell they weren’t choir-girls. I took one look at the score of drivers and guards that Owens had hired for us, and concluded that we’d have been a sight safer carrying gold bullion.
They were decent men enough, as hard cases go, half of them bearded buckskineers, a few in faded Army blues, and all well-mounted and armed to the teeth with revolving pistols and rifles. Their top spark was a rangy, well-knit Ulsterman with sandy whiskers and a soft-spoken honey-comb voice; his name, he informed me, was Grattan Nugent-Hare, “with the hyphen, sir – which is a bit of a pose, don’t ye know, but I’m attached to it.” There was a dark patch on his sleeve where chevrons had been; when he dismounted, it was like a seal sliding off a rock. Gentleman-ranker, thinks I, bog-Irish gentry, village school, seen inside Dublin Castle, no doubt, but no rhino for a commission. A very easy, likely lad, with a lazy smile and a long nose.
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