Cattle Kate

by Jana Bommersbach

  Christmas that year was another cold, stormy, ugly day, and even though I tried to bring some cheer—cooking up a jerky stew and using the last of my sugar for a pie with apples I had canned, it was pretty meager compared to the Christmas I wanted. Jimmy loved his new shirt—he didn’t know Ma would have done a better job—and he thought the quilt was right handsome. He laughed when I told him the story of how I got the material.

  He gave me a book of poetry printed years ago in England—it even has a royal seal, which looks very important. Jim is always trying to advance my learnin’, and I thought this was the most handsome book I ever owned. He said he’d found it in Chicago years ago when he was there and knew he wanted it for something very special and that special was me. It had a black, soft cover with red silk thread holding the pages together and the prettiest drawings to illustrate the poem. We read it out loud on Christmas night as we sat by the fire. I thought it was kind of spooky and scary, but Jimmy just laughed and said he bet it was a poem people would read forever. It was written by a man named Edgar Allan Poe and is called “The Raven.” I kept it on a shelf by the fireplace for all to see.

  That Christmas night Jimmy took me in his arms and promised we’d have lots of wonderful Christmases in the years ahead—some with our own children under a decorated tree—and I believed with all my heart that he was right again.

  The only thing that came close to what I’d imagined our first holidays to be was when I insisted we follow my Pa’s tradition and sing “Auld Lang Syne” for New Year’s. And even that didn’t turn out. Jimmy was all for it, because, of course, his own Scottish people had done the same thing and we talked about it in bed at night and decided this would be one of our cherished traditions, too. In a good year, we’d invite our neighbors for a nice New Year’s Eve supper and we’d all join hands in a circle and sing the song and it would be a fine way to honor our people and bring in the new year.

  This year we were just going to do it ourselves, but Fales came by that day and we saw a chance to make a little party and so I made a nice dinner at noon—he’d have to get back to his Ma before it got dark—and after we ate, we told him we had a tradition and we’d like him to join in.

  “We’re going to hold hands and sing ‘Auld Lang Syne,’” I announced, with a smile on my face, and Fales instantly began to laugh like a hyena.

  “That’s a good one,” he finally got out through his cackling. “Sure, I’ll sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ with you. Just like the regimental band in Arizona Territory played it to Geronimo when they put him and his dirty Apaches on the train to Florida. That’s a good one, Miss Ella. That’s a real good one.”

  He only stopped when he saw the smile had disappeared from my face. “Did I say something wrong?” Fales searched our eyes, trying to figure out what was the matter.

  “No Fales, that’s alright,” Jimmy said. “The song just means something different to us.”

  I never did understand why the United States Army would decide to make a joke of such an important song like that, and I hoped my Pa never heard they’d mocked Geronimo with a song he cherished.

  My only consolation that winter was that when you’re snowed in so long, you got lots of handwork done. I knitted twelve pair of warm socks and fifteen scarves. I even crocheted a shawl I later sent to Ma. Busy hands are one way to keep them warm when the house is so cold, and to keep your heart warm when it wants to weep.

  But December wasn’t even the worst of it. A new howling storm came in January, and then there was a terrible February storm. One snowstorm came on top of the last, and we’d later figure we had fifty-four days of constant storms. And it wasn’t just snow, but ice, too. Jim figured the stage route to Rawlins was four feet of snow covering two feet of ice. Cowboys showed up on horses whose hoofs were bleeding from breaking through a layer of ice.

  The stories they told were just as bloody. They said the cows on the open range—that’s where all the cows were, of course—had worn off the hair and hide on their legs from trying to walk through this mess. “They’re out there dyin’,” the cowboys kept saying, and you could feel the hurt in their voices. These weren’t their cows, but you can’t be a cowman of any kind in W.T.—even a hired hand—and not hurt when you know those critters are dying like flies. Those poor cowboys weren’t doin’ much better themselves, out there in the storms trying to save the cows that couldn’t be saved. I saw that they needed the socks and scarves I’d made and by the time the snow stopped falling, I’d given them all away.

  You couldn’t live through the winter of 1886-87 without knowin’ it was bad, but we had no idea just how horrible it truly was until the spring came and the entire valley stunk of dead cattle. It was a stench you couldn’t escape. You didn’t need a breeze to bring the smell of rotting flesh to your nostrils, but any breeze from any direction just made it worse. Even inside a cabin with the door and window shut, the smell still invaded and left you with a constantly churning stomach. And if the smell wasn’t enough, the taste made you want to puke. I never knew before then that a smell could be so powerful it made you taste it whenever you breathed through your mouth, but that’s how it was that awful spring when I thought I might never want to put another piece of steak in my mouth for the rest of my life.

  Jim came back from Casper one day after getting supplies and looked like somebody had hit him with a sledgehammer. “They’re thinking the die-off is at least fifty percent and maybe as high as eighty,” he said in a somber, frightened voice. “The rivers are full of carcasses, and wherever you find a fence, you find a pile of bodies. They’re saying there hasn’t been this kind of slaughter since the buffalo.”

  He went over to his house and stayed there awhile, like he was in mourning, and I guess everybody in W.T. was feeling the same way. We were seeing the end of something, when spring is usually a time to see the beginning.

  Cattlemen had made fortunes for years on cattle that roamed the open land and ate the grass and got fat for slaughter and had calves that replenished the herd, and now all that was rotting out there. Some cowboys told me the saddest thing of all was finding a dead mother cow with her calf still inside her. A cowboy poet came through the roadhouse one night in the late spring and entertained us with poems for his supper, and he had one I’ll never forget:

  I may not see a hundred

  Before I cross the Styx,

  But coal of ember, I’ll remember

  Eighteen eighty-six.

  The stiff heaps in the coulee,

  The dead eyes in the camp,

  And the wind about, blowing fortunes out,

  As a woman blows out a lamp.

  Roundups the summer of ’87, if you can even call them that, were pitiful. The hungry East that had made the cattle “lords” into millionaires, decided they didn’t want what little beef was offered from W.T. Prices fell down near to nothin’ and there wasn’t work for half the cowboys who needed work. When all those cattle died, they took so many living souls along with ’em.

  By the end of ’87, most of those giant cattle companies were gone. The Englishmen and Scotsmen and Irishmen went home or off to greener pastures somewhere else. I for one wasn’t sad to see their likes go. I’d heard too many stories about what snobs they were to care much for them. They were men who’d never learned you had to earn respect—it didn’t come with birth. They thought because of who they were and who their daddies were that they were high and mighty and everyone should just do as they say. They never understood they came to a new country that wanted to get away from all that. They were men who did little and looked down their noses at the cowboys who helped make them rich—they thought the cowboy so lowly they got downright mean with ’em.

  Like Jimmy told me one night, it had been a rule since the first cowboy rode the range, that a hungry guy would be fed by any ranch wagon he came upon. During the off-season, when there was no work, he could survive on this generos
ity they called “riding the grub line.”

  But these high and mighty men from other countries decided that was too generous and cut it off, demanding their cooks not feed traveling cowboys. It liked to kill some cooks who couldn’t stand turning away hungry men, and some risked their jobs to defy the new rule. Maybe that kind of cruelty was all right in England or Scotland, but it wasn’t all right in the territories of this new nation—places that one day just knew they’d be states themselves. A man that can’t respect a working man isn’t much of a man at all. And to think those men were here, in a country not even their own, getting rich on land they didn’t own but sucking off the federal land. It makes you downright mad that they were ever here. No, I’m not alone in knowing Wyoming was not sorry to see them go.

  That didn’t mean there still weren’t big cattlemen in W.T., including some who wanted to put on the same airs. And of course, the almighty Wyoming Stock Growers Association was just as powerful as ever—soon to be even more powerful, we’d sadly discover—but the day of easy riches was a day in the past.

  Jim kept saying after that horrible winter, “Things will never be the same. An era has passed. There’s just a bunch of cattlemen who don’t understand that yet.” And some of those men were our neighbors.

  But I could see the day when there’d be more little guys like us than big guys like them. And that day came racing faster when some cowboys realized there wasn’t much work left and settled down to raise their own herds. I saw for myself that stories Fales told were true: Some of those cowhands just took a few cows from the men they used to wrangle for. I know that’s rustlin’, but it wasn’t like they took one hundred or two hundred, they took a couple. Most took the unbranded mavericks that should have been shared in the first place, but the point is they took just enough to get started. Considering how long they’d worked for poor wages, that never seemed like a big sin to me.

  I never pretended to see the big picture about what was happening in our territory or the country we wanted to join, but I did understand what Jimmy was saying. I didn’t belong to the old era that was passing. I was part of the new W.T. I had a piece of land that would someday legally belong to me because I put my sweat and heart into it. I was building a corral because one day I wanted a little herd—I’d never be a big cattleman, but I didn’t need to be a big cattleman to earn a living off cows. I would fence my land and keep my cattle nearby, and I’d feed them during the winter, and if we had another winter like ’86, my cows wouldn’t die alone and abandoned like all those this year. My cows would get hay and they’d calf in the spring, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

  I held on to that thought as we thawed out from winter. We finally had spring. I planted a new garden and bought new chickens, and then I met the Indians.

  It turned out so well that I can laugh about it now, but I have to admit, I was hearing my heart in my ears when I first came upon them, even though it was just a girl and an old lady. I’d never been this close to an Indian before, and after all the stories I’d heard, well, you just never know.

  I was down at the creek, picking berries that were plump on the spring bushes and thinking about how good they’d be in my first jam of the year, and all of a sudden, there were these two dark-skinned people looking at me like they were scared of being this close to a white person. We both stopped in our tracks and eyed one another for a minute or two. The old woman put her arm out to guide the girl behind her, as though I would hurt the girl, and I felt a twinge of sadness thinking she’d think that of me, but then, I realized I’d had the same thought about her.

  “Berries,” I said, as though that were a proper greeting. “Are you picking berries, too?”

  They just looked at me, and I realized they probably didn’t understand English, so I took a berry from my bucket and put it in my mouth and licked my lips like it was real good. That brought a smile to the girl’s face, but the old woman—she’d turn out to be the grandmother—kept staring. I took another berry and repeated my hand signals and smacked my lips real hard this time like these were really, really good. And that’s when the girl laughed and the old woman finally showed a kindness in her eyes.

  The girl reached around her grandmother and took one of their berries to eat, and then Grandma followed, and we all stood there, eating berries together, and as I’d later write my Ma, that was a pretty unusual way to meet your first Indian.

  We nodded to each other and then went back to our picking, and when I had enough, I turned to go back to the house and they were already gone. I wondered what they were going to do with their berries—I was making jam, but that certainly didn’t seem like something that would happen in an Indian camp.

  “I don’t even know if Indians like jam,” I said to myself out loud.

  Well, I was right. The berries made the most beautiful and delicious jam, and I had four pints sitting out cooling the next day when there was a knock on my cabin door, and I found the Indian girl standing outside. She smiled at me shyly, and then held out her hand. In it was a piece of cloth, dyed red, and I realized this was what they did with their berries—they made colored cloth. She shoved the piece toward me and I understood it was a gift, and I thought, won’t this look nice on my table.

  I took the cloth and smiled at her and waved my arm to ask her inside, but she shook her head and started to leave.

  “Wait,” I yelled, and it made her stop, even if she didn’t know the word. “Here, I hope you like jam.” I handed her one of my pints. And the smile on her face convinced me that Indians like jam as much as we do.

  “Ella,” I patted my chest. “My name is Ella.”

  She looked at me a moment and then mimicked my motion, her hand patting her chest. “Shashas.”

  As she walked away, I knew this wasn’t the last time I’d see her, and it struck me as queer that one of the first friends I made out here was an Indian girl.

  When I told Jimmy about it, he reminded me that he’d told me a Shoshone band came through by the creek now and then, but I’d forgotten all about it. I wouldn’t forget it again. Twice a year I’d find them there, and pretty cloth wasn’t all they had to offer. The beadwork Shashas did—it was magnificent. Her grandma taught her and I saw the pride in the old woman’s eyes when I admired Shashas’ work.

  The welcome spring of ’87 went on and you know how life is, life goes on.

  One of those life-goes-on things in W.T. those days was fighting the cattlemen for your claim. Jimmy was right—they have filed hundreds of claims on land they never touch, just to tie it up.

  “Two or three men would control the entire Sweetwater Valley if we didn’t stop them,” he swore. My Jimmy was determined to stop them.

  If you made a pecking list, Bothwell was at the top. Jimmy said he not only was greedy, but he was mean. He already owned miles along the Sweetwater River, and he kept trying to get more. Another hunk of river land was owned by John Durbin, who would be second on Jimmy’s list, although some days he moved to the top. I never was clear exactly what had happened between Jim and Durbin, but whatever it was, it was nasty, and Durbin shared the disdain for my man. And just for good measure, Jimmy was fighting with a guy named Conner over a hayfield near Horse Creek. To be honest, I didn’t know a big rancher in the valley that my Jimmy wasn’t battling any way he could.

  If you wanted one word to explain all this turmoil, it was water.

  Water meant everything here in W.T. and controlling it was a full-time job. Some say a man values his water rights over the value of his children. I thought that was stretching it until I saw what men would do to get water.

  Without a reliable source of plentiful water—or as plentiful as water got in these parts—your land was worthless. It couldn’t be planted for crops. It couldn’t grow hay. It couldn’t feed a calf. It couldn’t keep a family alive. So everybody tried to get land with water.

  That’s why Jimmy’s
and my claims were so valuable—we controlled a big hunk of Horse Creek. Now don’t go thinking this was like controlling a big hunk of the Sweetwater River. That was a real river, with water all year round. Our creek had water most of the year, but it was a skinny little thing that shouldn’t matter so much. But it did.

  Jimmy sucker-punched Bothwell and all the others with our claims—before they knew it, we were all snug and secure and controlled a mile of Horse Creek. You should have seen Bothwell when he realized he no longer had access to the little creek that watered one of his hayfields! I thought the man was going to shoot Jimmy on sight the day he stormed up to the roadhouse and screamed that Jimmy was a low-down thief.

  He yelled, “That water has been mine for years,” and said Jimmy had no right to block him. Oh, he went on and on and Fales, who usually was quick with a laugh on any situation, certainly wasn’t laughing that day.

  The only one who didn’t seem upset was Jimmy, who stood there looking smug. He told Bothwell he could certainly have water from the creek—if he bought an easement from the claims of James Averell and Ella Watson.

  “An easement??” Bothwell screamed, as though he’d been sentenced to hell. “You expect me to buy a fucking easement for water from Horse Creek? Are you fucking nuts?”

  “No,” Jimmy said, real slow, “and watch your language around the lady. We aren’t nuts. We’re just the rightful owners of the land that fronts the creek, and if you want water from there, you must buy an easement from us. I suggest all you need is one about fifteen feet wide and about 3,300 feet long.” Jimmy said all this with a perfectly straight face, as though he were telling A.J. that a good bottle of whiskey was only two bucks.