by John Legg
“We are. But friends have to part, too. I’ve got business to tend to in other places.”
“You’ll write to me?” Randy asked. He seemed subdued, and Coffin did not know whether it was because he was leaving or from the reaction to being shot.
“Occasionally.” Coffin delivered the boy to his father at the livery. Harry Carstairs was not happy about his son being shot, but he accepted it, especially after Coffin told Carstairs that he was leaving as soon as he could pack his few things.
“You want your horse saddled?” Carstairs asked after he had sent his son heading toward home.
“Yep. I’ll be back soon.”
Forty-three minutes later, Coffin was riding his chestnut out of Crooked Creek, heading north toward the Missouri River. From there he turned west. He had no idea of where he was going, but going generally west was a logical choice for him. He realized the next day that it seemed he was being pulled west, and he felt a strange longing for the mountains.
That felt odd to him for a few days, but he finally puzzled it out. He had been born and raised in the Sierra Nevada. For fourteen years the Sierra Nevada had been his home. He felt now that it—or even the Rocky Mountains—would do. As long as there were towering peaks, and trees, game animals and rushing, tumbling, frigid mountain streams.
Once he had figured that out, he set his sights somewhat southwest. There he could find Independence and St. Joe—and the wagon trains of settlers heading for Oregon and California. If they were still running them. They had before, and Coffin figured they still were.
With at least a partial destiny in mind, he moved with a little more determination and speed. He was stopped one day by a hellacious late spring storm, but he had managed to wait it out in a barn on some farm. Two weeks after having left Crooked Creek, he hit St. Joseph, Missouri.
The first thing he did was find a hotel that had an open room, which was surprising considering how many people were in the city waiting to head west.
Then he hit several saloons, trying to see if he could hook on with one of the wagon trains heading west. In the fourth saloon he tried, a man told him that he had heard that Roy Denham, who had been elected a captain of a large wagon train, might be hiring.
It took a little while to track down Denham, but he finally found him in a saloon. Coffin bought a bottle of whiskey and got a glass. He went to Denham’s table, pulled up a chair and sat across the table from the emigrants’ captain. He poured himself a drink and did the same for Denham. “I hear you’re hirin’,” Coffin said.
“Might be. What do you propose to do?” Denham asked. He was a man of medium height with a big chest and stomach. A thick mustache covered both his lips, and Coffin thought Denham looked like a flapping caterpillar when he spoke.
“Whatever needs doin’, long as it don’t take no special skills other than handlin’ a gun.”
“You a good shot with a long gun?”
“I’m better with a pistol, but I can hold my own against most others with a long gun.”
“You know how to butcher?”
“Worked in meat houses for a spell.”
“Though we got a big train, we can’t pay much.” He was not embarrassed to say so.
“I got enough for my needs.”
“Good,” Denham said. “We’ve got a bunch of other hunters. That bother you?”
“I work best alone, but I can work with others. Long as they don’t pester me too much.”
“You fight in the late war?” Denham asked.
“Yes,” Coffin said tightly. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
Denham ignored the question. “You’re mighty young for having fought,” he said.
“I was fourteen when I joined a volunteer company.”
“What rank did you attain?”
“Corporal.”
“Then you’ve led men before?”
“Yessir. It’s not a job I enjoy much, but I can do it if the need arises.”
“You’re hired, Mr. Coffin. We leave a week from tomorrow. Meet us in the big meadow on the north edge of town.”
Coffin nodded and left. He went back to his hotel room and paid for a week’s lodging. Then he went out on a drinking binge that lasted five days. It helped him forget much of what happened in Crooked Creek, but only because he was either drunk or severely hung over. As soon as he sobered up again, the hurtful emotions brought on by his stay in Crooked Creek flooded back over him, seemingly with even more pain.
It took two full days for him to clean the poisons out of his system after the binge, and as he rode out toward the jumping off place, he felt better physically. He was not sure he could say the same about mentally, though.
Coffin counted thirty-two wagons, plus a dozen or so men traveling on their own. Two of those were guides for the wagon train; and five more, including Coffin, were hunters.
Coffin stopped by to tell Denham that he was in camp and ready to leave the next day. Denham, busy with many duties and distractions, simply nodded and turned to shout more orders at someone. Coffin smiled a little, glad he had not been so blessed as to be in charge of this chaos.
Chapter Eighteen
The trip was about what Coffin expected—slow, tedious, and as uneventful as one could expect with such an undertaking. They saw Indians a few times, but the warriors seemed to know that attacking a wagon train of this size was foolish if not suicidal.
The Indians did catch four men and kill them. They were killed in two separate instances when two men went out to hunt and then butcher the meat. The four men had been shot repeatedly with arrows, scalped and mutilated. Each time, the wagon train stopped long enough to dig graves and say a few prayers over the dead.
It seemed that the men of the wagon train dug a lot of graves. Sickness and accidents were rampant in any wagon train of emigrants, and this one was no exception.
Coffin managed to stay mostly aloof from all that. He simply went about his job of hunting, riding out with a boy he had met. Thirteen-year-old Rolf Schottenheimer reminded Coffin a lot of Randy Carstairs. Both were about Coffin’s height and filled with a boy’s sense of wonder and eagerness. Coffin had been unable to find one of the men to help him with the butchering-it seemed very few of the men wanted anything to do with him. Coffin had helped Schottenheimer’s father, Wilhelm, the first day out fix a small problem with the Schottenheimers’ wagon. Schottenheimer invited Coffin to eat at his fire that night, and Coffin had agreed.
From that time, Coffin ate with the Schottenheimers. Then, when he mentioned to Wilhelm that he could not find someone to help him with the butchering, Schottenheimer had offered the use of his son Rolf.
“He know how to butcher?” Coffin asked.
“Yah. I am a butcher by trade,” the father said in his thick German accent. “And so I show the boy how.”
Coffin nodded.
He and Rolf found the first hunter and helper who had been killed by Indians three weeks out from St. Joseph. Coffin and Rolf had three of their four pack mules loaded with antelope meat. They used the fourth to cart the two bodies back to the wagon train.
“Didn’t you go after ’em?” Denham asked.
“After who?” Coffin countered.
“The Indians, dammit.”
“It ain’t my job to go chasin’ Indians. Besides, I don’t know anything about them. Certainly not enough to track ’em down.”
The men were not happy with Coffin after that, at least until the second hunter and helper were found by other hunters. Denham asked the same of them and received basically the same response. This time, though, it was accepted as making sense, and they backed off their criticism of Coffin.
Not that Coffin cared all that much what the others thought anyway. Still, it would make the journey a little easier if the travelers were not at each others’ throats. There were enough problems without that.
Death was an almost everyday occurrence. People died in wagon accidents; from disease, especially cholera; accident
al shootings; snakebite, drinking poisoned water, even heat stroke. Some just plain gave up on life and faded away.
Coffin was not fond of funerals and buryings at the best of times. Seeing them with his own group, as well as the fresh graves dug by other wagon trains, was more than he could take. He had seen more than his share of graves during the war. He didn’t need to see them now. The worst ones, though, were the ones for the children. The Schottenheimers lost a girl, 18-month-old Marta. When her grave was dug, Coffin saddled his horse and rode out with three pack animals in tow. He went alone, not wanting the company of even an exuberant young man like Rolf Schottenheimer.
It took a few days for Coffin to get over that one, but he did. It had, for a time, kept his mind off Edna Yarnell. Not much else did, though he realized a little while out that with each passing mile he could look back on his time in Crooked Creek somewhat objectively. The pain also lessened a little with each passing day.
Not all the days were filled with sorrow and death. Denham got dances up every once in a while, to let the tired people kick up their heels with some fun. There were Sunday services led by Parson Elijah Morrow, a feast now and then when the hunters had been especially lucky.
In general, though, the trek was hard physically and mentally. Coffin had it better than most, since he was not chained to one of the wagons. He often wondered how people like Wilhelm Schottenheimer and his family could bear the drudgery of each day. The tasks were endless. During the day they walked, mile after mile. Schottenheimer cracked the whip over the mules pulling the wagon that would be his family’s whole world for five months or so. Everyone else walked, too, except the very young ones and the very old ones. Occasionally one of the travelers would hop on the lazy board on the side of the wagon for a short ride.
By the time they hit the Sweetwater River, Coffin was sick of it all. He was not really one of the travelers, and did not have the same destiny, hopes or dreams. He was tired of the endless miles of nothingness that lay before them still. He was tired of crossing rivers with shifting, quicksand bottoms, of ducking Indian war or hunting parties. He was tired of the constant bickering and jockeying for position or prestige, such as it was out here, especially since that meant a chance to move out five minutes before the next wagon, and stop that night five minutes earlier. No matter where one rode in the long wagon train one had to eat dust.
Coffin was also sick of the heat and the disease, the bad water and the monotony, the heavy rains and lightning—sparked prairie fires, the death and despair.
He sat at the Schottenheimers’ fire one night and tried to analyze his situation. He had no yen to stick with the wagons all the way to California, and Schottenheimer’s family was planning to go to Oregon, where Coffin had no desire to go. When he had first started his journey, he had done so urged on by some primitive yearning to go “home”—as in the mountains where he had spent his childhood. He was no longer concrete about that, though he still felt an uneasiness that was strange to him.
It finally came to him that he simply wanted to be in the mountains. It didn’t have to be the Sierra Nevada of his childhood. Just tall, majestic mountains, with bubbly, running creeks, brash, powerful rivers and gold. The last surprised him. He had never been bitten by the gold bug. But for some odd reason panning for gold in some lonesome mountain canyon held some appeal at the moment. He supposed that was more the idea of being isolated from people rather than some heretofore secret desire for gold that had prompted the thoughts. He did not want anyone counting on him, not for a while anyway. There had been far too much of that for his taste lately.
The next night, as he was puffing an after-dinner cigarette and sipping at some coffee, he mentioned it to Schottenheimer.
“But where will you go?” Schottenheimer asked, surprised. He was a family man, had been for a number of years. He could not understand that a man would want to move about unfettered, roaming wherever the wind pushed him.
Coffin shrugged. “Ain’t sure. I hear there’s plenty of gold up north of here. Montana Territory. Idaho Territory, too.”
“You have the gold fever?”
Coffin shook his head, unsure. “I don’t think so. But where there’s gold, there’s...I don’t know. Not so much that there’s people. Minin’ camps just seem to have somethin’ goin’ all the time.”
“Ach,” Schottenheimer said with a knowing nod. “Beer and whiskey, cards and fancy women, gambling and gunfire.”
“It’s got all that for sure, Wilhelm,” Coffin said with a small laugh.
“How will you get to this place, Joe? Answer for me this.”
“I don’t know,” Coffin said honestly.
“It is not safe riding out here by one’s self,” Schottenheimer said firmly.
“That’s a problem,” Coffin admitted. He grinned a little. “I’m gettin’ itchy feet, Wilhelm,” he said. “But there are some drawbacks to adventurin’ on my own.” He paused. “Reckon I’ll have to think on it a spell.”
Coffin began paying more attention to the people with the wagon train, and within a few days had heard some grumblings from other young men. Finally one night he gathered them all around and told them of Idaho Territory and Montana Territory.
“What’s that got to do with all of us?” one named Billy Poindexter asked.
“I hear you been spoutin’ off about wantin’ to leave this wagon train and go adventurin’.”
“Yeah, so?”
“I’m of a mind to head north.”
“What’s that got to do with us?” Frank Bishop asked.
“Why don’t we go up the trail together?” Coffin said.
“What in hell for?” Poindexter snapped. He was a dim-witted young man, not given overly much to actually thinking.
“Well,” Coffin said, trying to keep his temper in check, “it ain’t safe for any of us to go off on our own. But with the six, seven of us here, we should be safe enough from Indians and such.”
“Where’re you plannin’ to go?” Bishop asked. He seemed interested.
“Ain’t sure. Soon’s we get to some of the minin’ areas, I’ll figure out what I’m gonna do. You boys’ll be on your own there. I ain’t proposin’ we form some minin’ company or anything. All I’m sayin’ is we ride together for safety till we get someplace that’s got folks. Then we all go our own ways.”
“I’m in,” Bishop said. “I’ve had too damn much of these goddamn crawlin’ along wagons and squallin’ babies and burials. It’s time I was on my own hook.”
“Any of you others?”
Six hands went up.
“When do we leave?” Poindexter asked.
Coffin shrugged. “Tomorrow? Or maybe you boys’d rather have a day to get your folks used to your plans?”
“Day after sounds good enough to me,” Bishop said. The others agreed.
The eight young men rode slowly out of camp just after dawn. Each had his riding horse and a mule for what small supplies he had gotten from family or friends. This was no communal enterprise, so each man had to provide his own meat, coffee, guns, blankets, shot, powder and other food and personal supplies. Not that they were averse to sharing when one of them brought down an elk or a buffalo. It was just made clear to all that they were on their own unless they faced an attack. In preparation for that possibility, the men had elected Coffin as their “war captain,” who would give the orders. The others had promised to obey him in such a case.
He had to assume that “office” three times. Two of those times ended up with no trouble. Once the Indians did not see them as they hid in thick brush along some creek; another time, the eight nervous white men had a small parley with six equally anxious Shoshones. Fighting was averted with the exchange of some small gifts.
The third time, though, the eight men hunkered down behind brush and fallen logs as they battled twenty angry-looking Crows. When the gunsmoke had finally cleared, Delbert Hardesty was killed, and Bishop and Coffin were wounded, neither badly. They had killed two Indi
ans.
Poindexter spoke kind words over Hardesty’s grave, and then the unfortunate young man was covered over with dirt, and his companions rode off, a little more quiet and subdued than they had been the day before. Still, with the resilience of youth, by the next day they were their normal old selves again. Hardesty’s death would sit with them for a while, but they had to go on living.
They had ridden northwest since leaving the wagons, moving along the bottom of the Wind River Range. They soon began heading into mountains, ones still thick with snow on their caps above the timberline. They were hushed and awed as they moved through a land of bubbling mod and sulfurous emanations, and they were relieved when they got out of that piece of hell on earth.
In mid-afternoon one day three weeks after they had left the wagons, Coffin pulled to a stop, looking at a poor excuse for a sign. “Reckon this’s where I turn off, boys.”
“Where’re you headin’?” Bishop asked.
Coffin pointed to the sign. “Virginia City.”
“Why?”
Coffin shrugged. “Just seems right is all. Any of you other boys aim to come along?”
They all shook their heads. “We’ll mosey on up a-ways, I expect,” Bishop said. “Good luck to ya, Joe.” He pulled on his reins and moved off.
Coffin watched for a few moments. They had not been all that bad a bunch of men, and Coffin was a little sorry to see them go. He turned west, and by nightfall he was in Virginia City.
The city was total bedlam from all he could see. He could not believe it. It was as if somebody had taken all the worst from St. Louis, Cincinnati and Crooked Creek and rendered it down and stuck it here. He was awe-struck by the wildness of the place.
Coffin managed to find somebody willing to rent him a storeroom to pass as a bedroom. He put his horse up in the livery, ate and then headed to a saloon.
By morning he had decided Virginia City was not for him. He had nothing against some excitement, but total chaos seemed pastoral when compared with Virginia City.
After only a moment’s hesitation, he continued west. Several hours later, he found himself in Madison. The town looked rambunctious enough for him, but it also had a more permanent look to it, as if people had come here to stay and grow. Women—wives and daughters rather than just fallen angels—walked the streets, and there were some stone and brick buildings. He nodded. He might not want to live the rest of his life here, but it would be a good enough place for the time being.