The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana)

by Robert Lewis Taylor

  As we stood there a second, maybe too stunned to move, the woman arched up with her back, quivered a little at the top, and sank slowly down; she had died. Then I heard rather than saw Coulter’s heavy fist meet McBride’s face with a thwack, and his cry of, “You crazy damned murdering fool!”

  Not much damaged, McBride scuttled around on the ground like a crawfish, to a crouching position, and made a motion to draw one of his guns.

  “Go ahead,” said Coulter. “Pull it out. Get it two inches out of the holster and you’ll eat it, bullets and all.”

  “You’re not my father,” the boy screamed. “What business you got telling me what to do?”

  Coulter reached down with both hands on McBride’s coat and jerked him up so far he had to let him back down to stand. “You loud-mouthed tinhorn, are you trying to get this train masacreed?”

  “Nobody hits me and gets away with it.”

  Sick as I was, I enjoyed seeing Coulter yank away his guns, then kick him about ten feet in the direction of his horse, saying, “Ride back to the wagon—get inside and stay there.” Picking up his hat, which had fallen off, he added, “Move off that wagon seat, I’ll stake you out and rawhide you in front of the whole camp.”

  By this time, more of the men had got up, including Mr. Kennedy and some others I knew, and they dismounted, looking grave.

  “This is a fine business, Mr. Coulter.”

  Coulter was down on his knees beside the woman and made no direct answer. “Traveling Pawnees,” he said finally, “and pretty far south.” He stood up. “What’s done’s done, but we may see trouble before we’re through. Pawnees aren’t Pottawattomies of Shawnees. They’ve been chewed up some by the Sioux to the north and the Comanches south, but they can still raise a fight. They ain’t apt to swallow this lightly.”

  “What do you recommend?” asked Mr. Kennedy.

  “Get a burial detail started and keep the train moving. Maybe we won’t be blamed, but I’ve got an idee we’re under watch right this minute.”

  They dug one long grave and laid out that poor woman and the young ones in blankets, side by side, and left the toy deer in the boy’s hand. Then Coulter made them smooth over the grass with leaves and twigs, as if nothing had happened, and carry the extra dirt off and throw it away. Some of the men protested, saying it was downright un-Christian to give them unmarked graves, but Coulter shut them up sharp.

  When the train caught up, I got off Cream and told my father and the others what happened, and Mrs. Kissel and Jennie snuffled a little; they said what a pity, and how they’d like to get their hands on McBride.

  Well, not long after that, somebody noticed he was missing. Coulter searched in his wagon and had others look around, too, but the boy wasn’t to be found. His horse was gone, also, but his hat was still inside the wagon. There was nothing to be done except go on, so we plodded ahead slowly, over the faint ruts visible through the weeds. The sun sailed up high—it was hot today—and making it worse we spent an hour climbing one of those swells, like young mountains almost. From the summit was spread out a sight I’m not ever apt to forget. Indians were massed across a valley as far as the eye could see, waiting. They were mostly braves, but I could spot women and children, too. Coulter waved down the train, and we stopped.

  Our menfolk made their way forward to get instructions. “I don’t think it’s an attack,” said Coulter, standing by his pony, watching.

  As he got the words out, there came a scream from the other hill that brought goose-pimples out on my arms. It was followed by one after another, rising and falling. Then I saw that the Indians in front had washed away, sort of, to show what went on in the center. To a long pole stuck in the ground, McBride, stark-naked, stood trussed by thongs that passed under his chin then around his wrists and ankles. We could just make it out from that distance. But he wasn’t quite all there. Two braves with knives that flashed sun glints were busy beside him, and I could see large raw patches that were red where he should have been white.

  “They’re skinning him alive,” said Coulter.

  I stopped my ears to shut out the screams; I couldn’t stand any more. Two or three men in our group uncovered their heads, and I could see one’s lips moving. Another went back to make the women stay in the wagons. And after that, we just waited, standing in the sun, with the prairie and its flowers all around, beautiful and wild, and no movement anywhere except the work going forward across the hill. They said McBride’s screaming died down to crying and begging before they finished, and for a while almost to nothing—long silences and between them short cries that rose up into wails and sent the birds flying.

  When it was over, and the Pawnees had retreated from the dripping body that was still alive on the stake, Coulter and a few of our group with strong stomachs, including my father, who hadn’t one, followed up the hill as the tribe vanished into the waving grass.

  It seemed impossible, but McBride recognized Coulter out of what face he had left and began crying, “Kill me, kill me!”

  “Anything to be done, doc?” asked Coulter.

  “Not a thing,” said my father. “Thirty or forty minutes at the most.”

  Coulter unholstered his long-barreled .45 and shot McBride through the head with no more expression than if he’d been finishing off a deer. Except to say, “We’ll double the herd guard every night till we’re over the Platte,” he never mentioned this Indian meeting again. But I judged he felt sore and miserable for falling down so bad on his old friend’s child. Even so, it was concern wasted, as I saw it. Nobody short of a saint could have reformed that snarling pest, and I heard several of the men say the same. He was born for trouble, as a good many are. If we could only see it in advance, the kindest thing would be to kill them in the cradle.

  Chapter XIV

  After this, all members of the company stuck close to camp. Nobody “straggled,” as Coulter called it. He said again there wasn’t any real danger of an attack along here but the skulkers would murder anybody lagging behind. He also counseled us to keep an eye peeled for Indians trying to sneak their way in at night. “They ain’t so much aiming to kill, but they’ll come thieving,” he said. “And they’re powerful slick at inching along unseen—more like a snake than a man.”

  Jennie quit shooting way out from the train; what’s more, she never went alone. Sometimes she took me, me toting two of my father’s pistols—that is, if Brice was busy with other duties. It was plain to see she had set her cap for that poor fellow; he hadn’t any more chance than a rabbit surrounded by snares. But the funny thing was, he didn’t seem to take notice of her at all, except to be polite, and grateful, and to thank her when she rammed a piece of pork down his throat when he was daydreaming instead of eating. Things like that.

  Hunting, she and I would ride to the front, doubled up on Cream, not far from Coulter, so as to get a chance at game before the train stirred it. But it really didn’t make much difference. The birds, plover and such, were so thick you could have brought home a mess with a butterfly net.

  Seeing us, as he walked his pinto ahead, Coulter was always entertained, and generally called over three or four sarcasticy things like, “Watch out you don’t flush a bobcat now,” or, “I’ll bet the bears are skedaddling out of here,” or maybe a kind of half compliment: “If I had those pretty black locks, I’d figure to hang onto them.”

  Jennie couldn’t stand him. She said he made her sick, and she tossed her head whenever he tried to be sporty. Thinking it over, I figured he was too outright a man for her; what she wanted was a puny thing she could nurse, and Coulter was about as likely a candidate as a buffalo. And what her peeve was centered on, maybe the most noticeable mark of his roughness, was his hairy chest. “Why doesn’t that fractious critter button his shirt?” she would say. “It’s indecent.”

  There wasn’t any problem of that kind with Brice. He hadn’t any more hair on his chest than a catfish and his head would be in the same boat, give a couple of years. No, if you were
speaking of hair, Brice was as decent as they come, though for my part I didn’t think he looked any better than Coulter, and he probably wasn’t anywhere near as warm in the winter.

  We went up hunting, Jennie and I, and I trailed along behind, with Coulter over fifty yards or so breaking trail and watching us out of the tail of his eye. It was pleasant. A breeze was in our faces, so we couldn’t hear any sound of wagons, and nothing else disturbed the scene. Now and then a grasshopper got up and went winding on a few feet, the way they do, and faint bird cries, complaining about us being there, came down from where they soared high overhead. Plovers in clouds kept getting up, and Jennie peppered away, swinging the double gun from side to side smartly, like a man, and she never got any single birds, either—she was a crack shot.

  But today she wanted to pry about Brice, so I had an enjoyable time, getting even for her bossiness.

  Says she: “Your father’s mentioned his wife, I reckon?”

  “Some.”

  “I understand she was a skinny little thing, peaked and drawn out.”

  “Not the way I heard it.”

  She looked back at me, sort of mean, and said, “What did you hear?”

  “She had red hair and was plump and handsome. There wasn’t anything skinny about Mrs. Brice, rest her soul.”

  “They say she had a mournful disposition and fretted him like all get out.”

  “On the contrary, she was as gay as a cricket. She was about the sweetest thing in skirts. Everybody says so. Always obliging, never arguing. You couldn’t got her to bawl out a man to save her.”

  “Still and all, I’ve heard it told, she wasn’t much of a hand to work.”

  “Work! She wore her fingers down to the joints, almost. Scrubbing, polishing, picking up. And when that was done, she’d go down and pitch in at the sawmill. As far as work goes, you’ve seized on a champion in Mrs. Brice. She didn’t hardly do anything else.”

  “You act like you knew her. You didn’t know her a whit better’n me, and I didn’t know her at all.”

  “I feel I’d known her,” I replied. “She was that kind. Some people just naturally are so good and loving and unheadstrong that their memory goes right on. I don’t imagine anything could take its place, ever.”

  She was so mad she blasted away at a bunch of birds and missed both barrels, clean. I knew better than to say a word, then, for the back of her neck was as red as a turkey’s and to tell the truth, I’d said too much already. But she was the bossiest human I’d ever seen, and my father indicated the same, but following his style in such matters, he couldn’t say so direct but referred her case to a play by a man named Shakespeare, saying she needed taming. And then he dwelt for a while on the wife of a man called Socrates, who he didn’t bother to place, though I judged he had something to do with the mule train, as there was a fair number of foreigners amongst them.

  Anyhow, I was sorry I’d put her out so, because I liked her, down underneath, and she truly was handsome, with her shiny black hair, her Tose-petal mouth and her face with its high color. So I made up a lie and said, “Jennie, Mr. Brice was asking how old you were the other day. He seemed mighty interested.”

  “Oh, hush up,” she said, so I figured she saw right through me. She was pretty smart, for a girl.

  But I didn’t worry long. Knowing Jennie, I was certain she’d get him, if he didn’t choose to cut and run, and take a chance on living with the Indians instead. But if I’d looked ahead and seen the truth, I probably wouldn’t have believed it.

  You might say that the trouble with McBride turned the corner of our luck. Up to then, everything had been smooth, except for miscalculations that weren’t anybody’s fault in particular. Since the very first day, near about, we’d found that things didn’t altogether jibe with Ware’s book. Where he said was grass there often wasn’t grass at all, and in a lesser way the same was true of water. The blame wasn’t really his, but the men cussed and took on and said what they’d do to Ware if they ever caught him out in the gold fields.

  My father had been one of the loudest in his praise of the Guide: now he joined the rest and worked out a gaudy piece of sarcasm, telling it all around that the book was fiction. “One of the greatest fiction writers of our generation,” he said. “The man’s deep, so deep the publishers swallowed it hook, line and sinker, and put the Guide out as fact. No, the one I’m sorry for is Ware himself. He’s produced a little masterwork, which would have taken its place beside Robinson Crusoe and Tom Jones, if understood, and he’s being abused for writing an erroneous book of fact.”

  Well, as often in my father’s case, he carried this idea so far that people more or less lost the meaning of it, but he had a good time anyway. He finally had it that Ware was a New Yorker and had never been farther west than New Jersey, so he pretended to be more interested in the book than ever, and would read a passage like, “It has been the practice of most immigrants to drive cows along with them for their milk,” and would exclaim admiringly, “Capital! First-rate! What an imagination!”

  In case I forget it later (for a person’s apt to leave out of a book important bits that he meant to work in toward the end). I might say that Ware met up with a sorry fate. In a way, he was killed by his Guide. On the trail with a company (I disremember going which direction) he fell sick near Fort Laramie and was abandoned by his friends. They left him to lie for two days by the roadside without water, provisions, covering, or medicine, as a payment for not being accurate in his book. That is, they didn’t feel at all grateful for the hundred good things he told them, but punished him for the hundred and first. He crawled on his hands and knees two miles to a pond and was found by another company, burned black by the sun, but he died before they could help him. A young man not yet past his thirties.

  It’s likely our group would have served him the same, because they didn’t fancy his statements at all. But what really happened was this: Grass had been there when Ware wrote his book, but trains coming afterward had destroyed it, and various water holes he told about had dried up or been polluted. I remember on our first day, after a long dry pull, we reached one of Ware’s landmarks and people jumped out of their wagons to run ahead, with the oxen and mules taking on, too, and when we got to the pond, we threw ourselves down to see a dead ox in the middle, blown up with gas to twice his size, and the flies and the vultures just having a picnic.

  From that first day, too, we found nearly all the wagons to be overloaded. In deep mud the oxen pulled till their cords stood out, causing no more than a gucking noise of the wheels. So the families began throwing away things they could spare—bedsteads, springs, heavy kettles, and so on. And we saw right off that others had made the same mistakes. Within five miles of Independence we commenced to run across a regular warehouse of furnishings, and I suppose that’s what attracted the Indians. I noticed extra wheel tires, axletrees, wagon irons, a sheet-iron stove, two ploughs, and, for some reason, a coat and pair of gray broadcloth pants.

  We passed our first grave three days out—a pile of stones from a dried-up creek bed, a rough wooden cross, and a board saying, “Master Richard Wiggins, Lebanon, Ky. Died May 7, 1849.” Around it were scattered a lot of baby clothes, so we judged the party was already concerned about getting rid of the excess, for I imagine that mother would have hung onto those things forever, if she could.

  Well, we’d been seeing this condition all along, but now it was getting worse. In swampy places our wheels bogged down deeper and deeper from the loads, as the oxen got tireder, and finally we stopped for a confab. Within the last hour, we’d passed three more graves, including one that said, “Ben Robbins, a Colored Man,” and the trail was strewn over with coffeepots, ironware, candlesticks, a perfectly good Collins ax, buckets, and, at last, food. There were piles of beans, a side or two of bacon, one or two sacks of flour, and such like, and you take it all in all, it scared our womenfolk. To make it worse, Brice was ailing. My father tested his temperature, looked at his tongue, and asked him s
ome questions, then made him ride on the wagon seat beside Mrs. Kissel, because he said he was suffering from a suspended action of the liver and if he didn’t watch out he would have a case of dry shucking.

  We pulled up for council, and after the men had coopered a wagon tongue that had split going uphill, Coulter said, “We’ve got to lighten, else we’re going to bog down on this prairie and stay, and there ain’t enough gold here to stick in your eye.”

  He was back in his old sneery ways again, and he said, “I happen to know one wagon is almost full up with bricks. Now it would ease me to learn what they’re for—do we eat them or use them to play beanbag with?”

  This Mr. Kennedy, who was a slender, gentle-looking soul to be sure, but would have spoken up, I think, with spunk enough to spite the devil, said, “The bricks are mine, Mr. Coulter, I thank you for your interest. When my wife joins me later, she’d like a fireplace of good Missouri clay.”

  “That’s very sentimental of her, I’m sure, but your wagon’s the first down every day—we’ve been delayed all I’ve a mind to.”

  Mr. Kennedy swallowed bravely and said, “I’ll make whatever adjustments are necessary for the general weal, of course.”

  “Then dump them out—there might be a Pawnee family here abouts that would favor a chimneystack on their wickiup. And that brings me to this frippery Englishman, the dude in the undertaker’s gloves. Is he here—Moe, or Crake, or whatever it is?”

  The mule train that was supposed to catch us, so Coe and his group could hook on and leave, had never showed up, so we’d more or less adopted Coe as our own. He was tolerably digestible, though odd.