Yellowstone Kelly

by Peter Bowen

  “Thank you,” he said. His voice had some bend to it now. That’s the time I saved Miles’s life, for sure.

  The drovers and sutlers and the cooks who had been fighting and all for days, was setting up tents and gathering wood. Half the troops at a time were rotated into details to set up their Sibley tents. (Look like those pavilions the knights used. Weighed a ton and were real bastards to set up and badly designed for smoke—soldiers was always being asphyxiated in those tents.) But bit by bit the command got dry and fed and some sleep. There was sentries posted all night, of course. I went to a place upwind to sleep—the camp smelled like a cross between a slaughterhouse lime pit and a tannery.

  I went to sleep, the rain pattering on my hat and the oilcloth blanket cover. There wasn’t a thing that I could do, and surely not the thing I would have liked doing most.

  9

  AT FIRST LIGHT INDIVIDUAL soldiers began firing at the rifle ports the Nez Perce had cut in their breastworks. It was steady, aimed fire, and a couple of times I saw a Nez Perce warrior jerk upright from the shock of the bullet. There were many more I couldn’t see, of course. The faulty tactics of the day before had been corrected.

  The artillery was firing at the breastworks, first a few rounds of solid shot, then some shrapnel which exploded on impact, sending lethal metal every which way. (Been invented by a German, wouldn’t you know.)

  One stupendously fortunate round of shrapnel silenced a whole trench. The battle was won, and the Indians must have known it, but there were no white flags.

  About eleven, there was another disturbance to our rear. Here came the dread Howard. Miles was all oil and smiles. Howard’s troopers had ridden well over fifteen hundred miles. If there was any of them longing for a fight, I didn’t see none. Fifteen hundred miles of hard trail on a belly which only got some jerky, hardtack, and bad water wears a man down. I heard one of the soldiers say that if the Montana dust wasn’t so nutritious they’d be shadows ridin’ after souls escaped from Hell.

  Miles waved me over—he didn’t want his senior aides anywhere near Howard whilst he was describing his heavy casualties and never mentioning how he come by seven-eighths of them.

  Miles gave a glowing report of me—knowing Whipple, the youngster Liver-Eating Johnson had scared so, could have found this batch of Indians and even the pitifully young Lieutenant would have had the goddamn mother-wit to do what was being done today.

  “Yeah, they sure had it done for them,” I says. “This bad chunk of terrain, caught us enfilade. Lucky to get off so lightly.” I nodded and walked away. There was some silence, and then I heard Howard ask a question which Miles laughingly endorsed. I’d tried to warn Howard, and if he was too dumb to see it, to hell with him. I was purely disgusted with just about everything in blue ’cept for Baldwin. The man was wounded and hadn’t slept in ninety hours, but there he was at his post.

  The Fifth Cavalry troopers were lined about, and soon the sheer volume of bullets and the cannons broke the Nez Perce defense. They waved a white flag, and Chief Joseph climbed out. All of the fire had stopped. Baldwin went to Miles, who broke off and waved gaily at Howard. Howard was a gentleman, and in his gentlemanly way he had adjudged Miles as the man who deserved to take the surrender.

  Miles was walking pompously down the hill, Baldwin and me ten feet behind the hero of the hour. We were maybe a hundred yards from Joseph when the footfalls behind us caught my ear. I started, and looked back. There were soldiers, a lot of soldiers, most of them following us.

  Joseph had the greatest presence of any man I have ever seen ’cept Crazy Horse, and the two were of different orders. Crazy Horse was a god-callen hero and victim for his people. Joseph was the man of justice, man of burden, and he radiated the good that was anyman and everyman since our most remote ancestors slimed out of the sea. He pulled us to him—not all but most. The young troopers and gravel-eating sergeants and the officers, we all walked down the hill toward him, and then he raised his right hand and said, “From where the sun now stands we will fight no more forever.” There were no dry eyes. We weren’t bawling, exactly, just lightly weeping.

  Joseph reached down deep into Miles and troubled something he had never known was there, and years later I was to witness Miles do an extraordinary thing—his soul took a long time—he was to help Joseph when he could, and get him back to his Valley of the Winding Waters.

  The Indians shuffled out, weary, heartbroken, and the troopers started them on their Long Sorrow Journey.

  Miles sent two dispatches to Terry, and whoever carried them must have earned himself a pretty reward from Colonel Nelson Miles. The one on top, which they both signed, said pretty much what had actually happened, with the usual lying, mismention and so forth. The military does not run on brains. They both signed the bottom of the second dispatch, too, a mere copy, Miles told Howard. It blamed the losses Miles incurred on Howard. The dispatch was given to the newspapers and the damage was done. The Army furtively held hearings and then, as it usually does, tried to hush it up. Material they got to work with, they get lots of practice.

  Howard was destroyed. He retired and soon died, cut to the quick that a brother officer to whom he had been not just fair, but gentlemanly, had done him so.

  I didn’t go to the hearings, but Baldwin sent me a long letter. I couldn’t have stood the hearings.

  I will never forget and it will be the thing in my mind the moment that I die, looking backward up the hill, and seeing eight hundred men standing haphazardly where they had wandered, weapons on the ground, a moment a few seconds long in which I can see each face of Everyman and Anyman there.

  10

  THE WOLF PELTS WOULDN’T be prime for another two months, and after my adventures with Colonel Miles I felt I didn’t need to be wandering around alone or with my cutthroat chum, Buffalo Horn, who agreed to meet me in mid-January (1878) at the mouth of the Big Horn River, which means actually that the first one there will leave some sign in our own personal code and the next will follow him to the real rendezvous. First rule of staying alive out here is, don’t leave at first light—any hostile kid knows by the time he’s eight how many lights-of-day it is from any fort in any direction. The second is, don’t read any of them fool books purports to tell you how do you get on. If they knew, they’d be out here making a thousand dollars a month, instead of busting pencils back where everybody is.

  I decided to go home, at a leisurely pace, spend maybe forty-eight hours or so, and get back to the rendezvous at a leisurely pace.

  I grew up near Oneida, New York, eldest son of a physician and a suffragette. Catholic, too. There were eight of us Kellys. Stand in line, we made a graph of when Ma and Pa joined forces, so to speak. Once a year, on or about the third of March, if you diddled with the arithmetic. I like ’em all well enough, but they’d all stayed there by Oneida and turned into lawyers and merchants and such. (In the Mexican Revolution when I was advising Pancho Villa, we happened to be in Sinaloa Province, and Pancho got a bit drunk, and Rodolfo Fierro said that he wanted to hang every lawyer in the Province. “So go hang them, my friend,” says Pancho, “I don’t like your face so long.” Fierro hanged over three hundred. I went along. I have had some satisfactory times.)

  So I rode back to Fort Buford, got on a steam packet with a load of hides. I spent three days leaning off the prow. I looked like a goddamn figurehead and had to have my neck crunched back down by a chiropract. God, them hides stank.

  Took the train to Chicago via Minneapolis—and in Minneapolis I found a book written about me by a feller named James Blair. I was still in my leather and leggins and moccasins and hat, and every time I’d hoot with laughter the folks in the coach would all turn round and stare. Fortunately, the picture on the engraved cover (I was at least nine feet tall, if you scale me with the grizzly bear I was beating the bejesus out of with my bare knuckles) didn’t resemble me in the slightest.

  It don’t take much to amuse me. I started picking my teeth with my Halsey drop
-point skinning knife and bellering fer whiskey at regular intervals all the way to Chicago. I took rooms in the Black Hawk, best in town, ordered new suits and a case of champagne, and piled my greasy, bloody duds on the cashmere rug and tried to use up all of the hot water in the tank. It had been two years since I had been doing what I was doing—soaking in hot water and feeling relaxed. Out there, it is best you don’t relax.

  I re-ragged and practiced looking dauntless in a suit and derby hat in the mirror. Shaved and all, I felt about twenty pounds lighter and not myself at all. The ride down in the elevator was nervous-making, and it dawned on me why as I stepped inside the lobby. First time in a long time I hadn’t at least one and usually more weapons on me. I asked directions to the nearest gun store and bought a double-barreled derringer. Looked like a kid’s toy to me, but with it in one of my waistcoat pockets I felt a mite safer.

  Chicago was busting with folks and the babble in the streets was only about half in English. Since the big fire they were building new buildings “fireproof” of brick and stone. The slaughterhouses were working round the clock, produce and such headed east, implements and such headed west. Cows escaped the yards and ran through the streets. I got back inside the hotel, and marveled at the quiet. I remembered the quiet on Roger’s Pass at sixty below zero. My heart sloshing was all I could hear that night, and a faint whine I don’t know the meaning of.

  I strode across the lobby toward the bar—I had in mind a strong drink. I never drink out in the Big Empty—for one, it spoils my eyes, for two, each time I start in I get a hell of an attack of gout in my right big toe. The thought of trying to escape from a Blackfeet war party whilst hopping on one foot don’t appeal to me worth a damn.

  The bar was hid behind two enormous gilt doors covered with brown leather. I thought I would have to heave hard, but they swung open easy as a garden gate. (A fact I tucked away should I happen to take on too much Old Tanglefoot and have to proceed to my room in a series of leaps and catches. Leaps of about six inches at forty-five degrees.)

  The bar must have been about fifty feet long. There were six bartenders, every one of them slinging grog like the sealing fleet was in port. Fortunes was being made in hogs and cattle, land and railroads, grains, spirits, and what have you. The little fish did most of their business in either this bar or the one up by the Stockyards named McRory’s. Some was to rise to wealth and prominence, and most was to end on their uppers and nothin’ but a list of lost chances to tell to a dwindling number of ears.

  The smell of the place was unwashed men, cheap cologne, cigar smoke, stale booze, and avarice. I’d been a few years away, you see, and an Indian lodge has a stink too (less the avarice), which I was more or less used to. This atmosphere rocked me back on my heels.

  The drinks was high-priced—a dime for most, the fancy imports as much as a quarter. There was a couple huge sideboards full of finger food—pickled buffalo tongues (some men were holding a whole tongue in the left hand and munching away like the damn thing was an oddball apple), cheese, crackers, pickles. You could get what you wanted for food and pile it on an enamel plate and head for the perimeter. I was headed there when I got a chewed end of pickled tongue in the eye from a gent who was guffawing. Tobacco-soaked, spit-covered, salty, vinegary, greasy buffalo tongue. It is nothing I would recommend to you for a poultice if you got a sore eye. Wounded, I staggered to the rail and asked for water.

  “Water?” says the barkeep, looking amazed.

  “For my eye,” I says, taking my hand off it. It caused him to start. He scuttled off and brung me a glass.

  “I’ll have an Irish,” I says, putting a gold five-dollar piece on the counter.

  He nodded and poured me a stiff one. My eye had gone from burning to just throbbing.

  I was taking the first sip from my Jameson’s when someone slapped me so hard in the back that the rest of the whiskey went down the front of my new suit.

  “Kelly, by god,” booms a voice could only belong to Texas Jack Omohundro. Still with his hair and lookin’ like a man new to the pimping trade. “God damn, man, it’s good to see you. Why, the papers is full of your heroic exploits in running down them renegade Nez Perce.”

  Something in my eyes stopped him. He nodded and said, “I suppose it was about like it usually is.”

  I nodded. He put up his big, square hand and squeezed my shoulder. “You want a drink,” says Texas Jack, “or do you want to just suck on your suit a while?”

  I laughed, and it was all right. Texas Jack had helped track down Quanah Parker and his Staked Plains Comanches, and Quanah such a close friend he fired an arrow into the soldiers’ camp for Jack, which said, “I understand, but even brothers must sometimes kill each other.” None of us—Cody, Jack, Tom Horn, Grouard, the others—liked it. We also knew that there was no help for it, and the only choice the Indians had was between capitulation and extermination.

  We bear-hugged each other. I really was glad to see him—he was one of the funniest men that ever I knew.

  There was a rabbity little man crouched in Jack’s considerable shadow, and he was looking from Jack’s face to mine and then at a foolscap notebook held in one tiny pink hand. Jack sort of choked and said, “This is Yellowstone Kelly here. Luther, this is George Hanks of the Hartford Roden ... I mean Courant.”

  I smiled and stuck out my hand. I like newspaper reporters about as well as I like bedbugs, but I couldn’t hardly be rude to him if Jack wasn’t.

  “You’re Yellowstone Kelly,” Hanks squeaks. “Our readers would like to know about your thoughts on the Nez Perce War.”

  “Let’s get a table,” says Jack. He got a couple bottles of Jameson’s and we looked about. Everything seemed to be taken.

  “Hold this,” says Jack, handing me one of the bottles. He slid his Bowie knife out, and tossed it underhanded, high in the seegar smoke above. There was a solid thunggggg. Jack walked toward the thung. There was four petrified gents staring at the Bowie, which was still quivering while being stuck three inches into the walnut table top.

  “Jesus Christ and all his children,” booms Jack. “Feller can’t leave his table five goddamn minutes ’fore some fools come along and take it. Damn.” Jack had by now produced a pistol with a bore like the tunnel John Henry must have died in. The seats were suddenly empty. Jack swept the glasses onto the floor and placed one bottle in the middle.

  “I’ll get some glasses!” squeaked the Hartford Rodent, scuttling through the crowd. Well, he’d had a lifetime of practice, sure enough.

  “Didn’t mean to ... ,” Jack began.

  I waved and shrugged. “You still wrangling the titled and untitled and just plain rich folks like we’d like to be around the Great American West?” I says.

  “Yup. Sight easier dollar than shootin’ buffalo. Sight easier dollar than wolfin’, too, and the pack’s big enough so the few little bands of Injuns left leave us alone. Some of them titled women don’t think the trip’s complete without havin’ the guide poke ’em till they scream. It ain’t all bad.”

  “Here,” said the Hartford Rodent, placing three tumblers on the table. He resumed his notebook and tried to straighten his pince-nez.

  “Now, Mr. Kelly, could we have some of your comments upon the recent desperate and gallant attempt by our Army, ably led by you and Colonel Miles, to capture these savage fugitives?”

  “Sure,” I says, filling his glass to the brim with Irish, “just as soon as you get that down.”

  The Rodent gulped air and then he gulped Jameson’s, and the five ounces went down as smooth as water.

  The Rodent coughed. “Well?”

  “Colonel Nelson Miles is a farina-faced glob of puke who would be better suited as a pickpocket or senator, both being about the same in the morals department.”

  “Sir?” said the Rodent.

  “Colonel Nelson Miles would make a fine senator,” I says again, filling him to the brim. “Drink that, and then the next question.”

  I had drug the
little two-shot derringer out of my waistcoat pocket and was sort of idly pointing it between Rodent’s eyes. The Rodent slid another five ounces of Irish down his wee throat. Sufficient unto the day.

  “Now about the last desperate battle,” said the Rodent, “in which so many of our gallant men lost their lives ... tell me, sir, what part did you play in it?”

  “I was atop a nearby bill. I saw Colonel Nelson Miles needlessly sacrifice twenty-two soldiers because he was afraid the glory he so wanted would be snatched away from him by General Howard or General Terry. Like I said, the farina-faced glob of puke would make a great senator.”

  The combination of the Irish whiskey and my venom done overcome the Rodent. He glanced at his notes, and then at me, and his eyes looked puzzled, and he slid beneath the table as easy as mud flows down a hill. He didn’t even make a teeny thud.

  Jack looked at me, twinkling.

  “C’mon, Luther,” he says. “A friend of yours asked if I should see you to bring you on over. There’s a great little old gooseberry farm a couple blocks from here. I don’t think poor Hanks will be noticed until they sweep the floor.”

  We left the foggy bar and rising voices and crossed the lobby, with the soft pile carpet—dark brown, so as not to show the tobacco stains of them that doesn’t care where or what they spit on.

  “What day is this?” I says. “Day of the week, I mean.”

  “Friday. Don’t make much difference out there, does it. How hot or how cold, dry, rain, or snow, how long’s the fur on the worthy peltries. But not the day of the week. I’m gonna miss it,” Jack said. He was beginning to weave a little—he was one of those men who can be holding a half bottle or four full ones and he goes right on doing whatever with nary a sign that he’s drunk. Sometimes he can’t remember what happened the night before—how he got them teeth-shaped cuts on his knuckles or what the name of the chippy he was sleepin’ with might be.

  We walked four or five blocks and made a couple turns and come up to a big five-story house looked like a wedding cake I once saw, only this was black and brown with a red tile roof. We walked up and Jack knocked on the door. There was gaslight ablaze in the porte-cochere and a little light come out from behind the curtains.