Those were fighting words. I turned away from the bartender. I raised my voice to address the entire saloon.
“Okay, I see what this is. Now, listen up. You got the nerve to have laws even in a place like this,” I said in a loud and clear voice. “Tell you what I’m going to do. You got your laws alright, men only laws. I’ll bet any man in here five bucks and a shot of whisky I can knock him out with just one punch. One punch! Any takers?”
A roar went up. The prospect of a contest could always be counted on to capture the imagination.
The bartender resumed rubbing the bar. The men laughed and prodded and gossiped and planned and pointed. The fancy ladies urged men to take the bet.
Suddenly, the rancher I insulted stepped away from the bar. “You got to show the money first, lady. I ain’t fighting no lady for nothing. I need a stakeholder.”
“Lady? I guess I just got a promotion! Look at that! Thank you, sir. Now, as for the rest of it. You don’t need no stakeholder to be first,” I said. “You need heart though. You first?”
He tried to trick me. He walked sideways like he was refusing the bet. Suddenly, he wheeled and threw up his hands.
Then, he walked straight into an uppercut. The punch moved his nose ever so slightly in the wrong direction. There was a lot of blood.
He grabbed at his nose, stumbled backward, and blended into the crowd at the bar, beaten. The men at the bar roared mockingly at the sight of a woman punching a man.
“Bartender, that’s one shot of whiskey on him, okay? Alright, who is next?” I demanded. I took the roar as a sign of disrespect, so I persisted. “Who is next? Let’s go!”
At first, nobody was next.
Then, the next man mustered at least a little courage. He came forward, meekly. There was an audience. I didn’t think he was much of a man. I was at least a head taller and several inches broader across the shoulders than this next man up.
“You boys remind me of those poor excuses for horses on the team that pulled my fancy red coach out here. They looked like rats, not horses, like y’all are closer to rats than men. I’ll bet you miserable bastards didn’t know that,” I barely got the insult out before the rancher charged.
He put his head down as he ran. The brim of his Stetson made it impossible for him to see where he was going. It was cocked comically over his eyebrows. I couldn’t see his eyes through the hat, and he couldn’t see mine.
This didn’t stop the charge. He was running at full gallop. Fortunately, I timed the run.
I spun. He missed. Instead of tackling me, he slid across the floor. The audience roared derisively.
“Get up, you silly sonofabitch!” a rancher shouted above the laughter.
Humiliated, the fallen rancher gathered his wits, rose, cursed, tossed off his Stetson, and charged yet again. I turned deftly, like a matador turns to escape the charge of a bull, and then I floored him with a check hook. There was no laughter. There were gasps. Then, there was silence.
“Bartender, make that two shots of whiskey and ten bucks. Seems like there is plenty of work in this saloon after all, ain’t there? And it pays quite well, too.”
It was customary for patrons to disarm themselves upon entering a saloon in the territories. They voluntarily complied with the custom and leaned their shotguns against the walls inside the saloon before proceeding to the bar to commence acting like fools. So, I didn’t fear gunplay. Besides, although I gave up my shotgun at the door, I still had my .38 strapped to my leg. Like always, it was concealed.
This time, two men charged at once. I didn’t think that made for a fair fight. It didn’t matter what I thought. It was going to be a fight anyway, a two on one affair.
There were no fair fights anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, for there were no rules. There were only fights. Nevertheless, I wasn’t tempted to draw the .38. The threat really wasn’t that serious.
This wasn’t the first time I fought two men at the same time either, and it probably would not be the last time. Timing and patience were everything against those odds. I waited. I figured the two of them would swing wildly. They didn’t disappoint.
They made the mistake of alternating runs. The men didn’t give me the respect of attacking at the same time. That would have presented a greater danger. That was an error in calculation.
The first one swung so wildly he toppled himself to the floor. This ignited a blast of laughter. There was gossiping and finger pointing among the ladies. Of course, I didn’t care, and I didn’t give the fellow the luxury of allowing him to climb to his feet. I knocked him out cold right then and there.
He spilled over backward. That was the end of the first one.
“Hell, don’t you boys practice fighting out here?” I taunted.
There wasn’t time for repartee. The second of the pair was on his way. He, too, caught only air with his wild swing. However, he didn’t end up on the floor. He kept his balance. He bounced around on his toes. He wanted more.
He threw several combinations. None of them landed. I could tell this one had some training as a boxer, probably a man transplanted out here from one of the big cities of the North. He was slick.
He wasn’t likely to fold after one blow, and the bet was that I could knock him out with one punch. Sensing someone might raise a technicality and deprive me of my five bucks if I didn’t knock him out with a single clean shot, I waited. I didn’t swing. I ducked, bobbed, circled, and moved instead, careful to stay out of range.
He made the mistake of stepping inside my wingspan. I hammered him. The punch sent him to floor. Like the others, once on the floor, he showed no courage. The contest was over. And with this incident, I had earned my first pay day in Montana, twenty bucks and four shots of whiskey.
The music played again. The ladies laughed and worked the room. The card games and conversations resumed. I made my way to the bar to collect the debt.
“Lady, you can collect your winnings now, fair is fair,” the bartender said. “However, the law is the law, and you are not allowed inside the saloon, ever. There is an ordinance against it.”
“Ain’t that surprising! The law made it all the way out here to a place like this and bothered to stop! Well, you, sir, you can tell the law that I aim to drink wherever and whenever I like, and by the way, whenever I like is generally every day, and wherever I like is right here. Where’s my money?”
The bartender served the whiskey, four shot glasses at the same time. He slid the twenty bucks, Union currency, across the bar, “I was only being a gentleman to tell you the rules, lady. I don’t know where you’re from, but this is Montana. Things are different here.”
“I can see that. Y’all can’t fight a lick here. How do you survive against the Indians?” I threw back the shots one by one.
“Guns,” he said.
“Good answer,” I laughed.
“That was one fancy red coach you rode into town with, lady. How did you get the chance to ride one of them? Did you rob it?”
“I paid the fare is how. I rode into Miles City on the Pacific Northern, and I sat on an upholstered seat, too.”
“Paid the fare.”
“Yup, ain’t that how you ride one of them trains, pay the fare?”
“And another thing, I may not know exactly what you paid to get out here, but I do know exactly what you are,” the bartender declared.
“What might that be?”
“You are a nigger.”
“A what?”
“You heard me right, a nigger.”
“You got no right to talk to me like that.”
“I do.”
“You do?”
“It is called the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the freedom of speech.”
“You got the freedom of speech to call me a nigger?”
“Yup.”
“If the Constitution ain’t rigged, the Supreme Court must be, if that’s what it says. That word ain’t no part of speech. That’s part of fighting words. It ai
n’t nothing to protect, let alone something for our beautiful Constitution to protect. It is beneath the dignity of the land out here. It is beneath the dignity of the Constitution. It is pure hate speech. It shouldn’t take a judge to figure that out. I know a whole lot more about them judges in Washington than you think.
“First up, they ain’t called judges. They’re called justices.
“Second up, hate speech ain’t even speech at all. Hate speech is like a punch when there ain’t no agreement to fight, like a crime. It don’t qualify as speech under the Constitution, unless you rig the Constitution, so the Constitution shouldn’t even apply. You got the right to carry a gun, but you ain’t got no right to murder nobody with it. You got the right to speak, but you ain’t got no right to call nobody a nigger.
“Now, turn that around backwards. If the Constitution gave you freedom of speech, and that freedom gave you the right to call out somebody as a nigger and use that freedom to say whatever you see fit—including using a word that stings like nigger—and you extended that logic to the right to carry a gun, the right to carry a gun would also give you the right to use it any way you see fit, including murder. That’s backward logic, and it’s absurd.
“You don’t have to go to school a day to figure it out, either. The country cannot heal the open wounds of the Civil War when the Supreme Court signals that hate is still alive and well. The word is a thing of hate. The Constitution is a thing of beauty. The Constitution shouldn’t be made to protect ugly, --and a word like nigger is one ugly word—or any of the other ugly words on the list of ugly words, any more than it should be made to protect a punch, or a gunshot, or a rape. Those are crimes, and calling me a nigger is a crime.
“Now, call me nigger again, boy, and you’ll get what them ranchers on the floor over there got and worse, hear?”
I took my time lighting a black homemade cigar. I blew the smoke anywhere I pleased. The smell of cigar smoke was sweet. It covered the smell of armpits and crotches.
“Nobody buys that idea. You were just a slave, said so yourself. The Supreme Court ain’t used to the idea of protecting the likes of you.” The bartender seemed unwilling to give up the point.
“Maybe somebody will do something with the idea sooner or later,” I countered.
“I’d like to get sworn in to Congress one day, too, sooner or later; but the problem is, you have to win an election…and sooner or later never comes,” the bartender said, watching the bar he was rubbing.
This ended the debate, but not the controversy. I knew the bartender was more correct than he realized. Judge Dunne served on that Court in Washington, and he owned slaves. I knew it. I was one of them.
Judicial temperament aside, Judge Dunne wasn’t likely to cast a vote against his own interests. The freedom to use hate speech was at the root of the ideology that made slavery possible, chapter and verse. The things done to negroes across the land were not wounds. They were deep holes of hypocrisy threatening to swallow the whole society. Somehow, the local law prohibiting women from drinking whiskey in a saloon was strangely related. I knew you really couldn’t trust the law, unless you wrote it yourself. That’s exactly what I planned to do, rewrite the law.
Chapter Three
Mississippi River, June 1870
The paddle-wheels were silent, but the gangplank leading to the main deck of the magnificent steamboat was crowded with men loading luggage and supplies, passengers scurrying about, and smartly dressed officers, porters, and crew tending to their duties.
The steamboat, the Robert E. Lee, was parked at a levee preparing to launch on a trip up the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. Louis. It was the summer of 1870—June 30th to be exact. I saw her standing there bobbing stately in the brown water. This was long before I paid Montana any mind.
I had no way of knowing at the time that by satisfying my urge to walk the gangplank of that magnificent boat, blend in with the workers, and stowaway, I would join the most famous steamboat race in American history, the race up the Mississippi from New Orleans to St. Louis between the Robert E. Lee and the Natchez VII. The Natchez owned the speed record having once completing the 1,278 miles in three days, twenty-one hours, and fifty-eight minutes.
The first thing I wanted to do after the Emancipation was flee the South, like a bad dream. I imagined the sheer power of that steamboat’s paddle-wheels beating away at the brown face of the Mississippi River would carry me to the glory and promise of the North and closer to the ideal of freedom. This was at a time in my life before I knew anything about Sister Amadeus’s plight to build the Mission for Blackfoot girls in the wilds of Montana. However, without the daring and courage it took to climb the gangplank of the Robert E. Lee, our lives probably would not have intersected later at the Mission.
Nerves tore at my guts as I walked the gangplank. I didn’t have the money for the fare. I didn’t even have the money to buy a newspaper.
My only chance was to stow away, tricky as that sounded, given the criminal penalties imposed for the arrest of stowaways in Louisiana. I still remembered slavery, so the last thing I wanted to do was find my way into chains. I was too nervous to notice any outward sign the boat was preparing for a race through history that would guarantee the victor a place in immortality. It was crucial that I study the bustle around the loading process to spot an opening to get on the boat without detection.
The early morning summer sky over downtown New Orleans was still cloudless. The massive sidewheels of the boat were still silent. The Mississippi was silent, too.
The Robert E. Lee symbolized speed, power, and progress. She was 285 and 1/2 feet long from stern to bow, forty-six feet across on her main deck, cost nearly a quarter of a million dollars to build, and sparkled in the sun. The very name Robert E. Lee painted in elegant block letters on the wheel-houses announced class, confidence, and prestige. To me, she symbolized hope.
If I could just successfully climb her gangplank and stowaway, the Robert E. Lee would offer a way out of my troubles in the South. In the North, I expected to find the glory and freedom that Mr. Lincoln promised.
Simply put, the “Monarch of the Mississippi,” as she was called, was an indomitable boat on an indomitable river in an indomitable nation during an indomitable era. She was touted as the most powerful and luxurious steamboat of her generation. Built in New Albany, Indiana during the Civil War, her accommodations were marked by splendor and excess.
There were sixty-one staterooms in her main cabin, a nursery, and twenty-four extra rooms in the Texas for passengers and officers. The elegant furniture in the main cabin was made of rosewood. There was a velvet carpet nearly eighteen feet wide and 225 feet long rolled over the main cabin’s marble floor. The seat cushions on the chairs set around the boat’s twenty dining tables were made of crimson satin. There were skylights of stained glass, arched ceilings, dazzling chandeliers, rosewood doors, and fancy inlaid gold scrollwork everywhere. The palatial accommodations represented only a fraction of the boat’s prowess. The engineering below the main deck was her real story. It was pure genius.
The shafts were made of iron, weighed nearly 20,000 pounds, and were each twenty-three feet long. The cranks alone weighed 6,000 pounds. Above the deck, a complex system of rigging and canvas sheaves announced the boat’s superiority to all who saw her. Her stacks, mast, and sidewheels were gigantic. Below the deck, she reportedly possessed the largest twin high-pressure steam engines on the Mississippi.
The engines were built for audacious displays of speed and power. They were designed to push the sidewheels to speeds that tested the laws of physics. The eight boilers that fed massive volumes of water to the engines were absolute infernos with insatiable appetites for coal and other fuel. In case of fire, explosion, or other mishap, three pumping fire engines and hoses stood at the ready. In every respect, this boat was a flawless gem, a testament to American ingenuity. But, was she faster than her rival boat, the Natchez? That was the question.
There was
action everywhere on the main deck. There were boys wearing floppy newsboy hats who hawked week old newspapers for six cents a copy, men with bushy Civil War-era goatees, wing beards and burnsides wearing navy blue and black tailored three piece suits with wide lapels, women who wore bright colored satin dresses layered like wedding cakes and elaborate broad brimmed hats adorned with flowers and netting atop their heads, and the crew scurrying about, unpacking luggage and supplies at horse-drawn coaches, hauling the cargo onboard, and attending to other small matters of the boat’s invited guests. In the commotion, I managed to slip on board.
I spotted a colored man huddled with a group of Creole girls. He was fat and laughed a lot. Sometimes, he threw back his head and laughed with his mouth wide open, exposing his entire dental plate which included a gold tooth. When he wasn’t laughing, he was peppering the girls with questions about what was expected of them as chamber maids.
I wanted to find work on the boat, too, but I seriously doubted that at my height and weight I was cut out for the work of a chamber maid. The Creole girls, on the other hand, were absolutely perfect. They were stunningly beautiful. Few, if any, women could compete with their caramel skin, flowing tresses, and perfect waistlines.
I decided not to bother to try to compete with them for the job of chambermaid. I figured it might get me kicked off the boat if I tried. Instead, I tried to steal past the gathering without detection.
“Y-y-you. Hey, you,” the colored man said, stuttering. The words came out like he had two tongues, and one of them was used to getting in the way of the other.
I looked away and pretended not to hear.
Stagecoach Justice Page 2