“H-h-hey, y-y-you, I say!”
I kept walking.
“Come h-h-here r-r-r, right-t-t-t… now,” he insisted.
I complied.
“Y-y-y-you looking f-f-for w-w-work, here?” he gasped.
“Y-y-yes,” I said, mockingly.
The Creole girls laughed.
The sight of a six-foot tall woman weighing 200 pounds who slipped onto the boat without permission and possessed the audacity to mock the speech impediment of the one man on the boat who could save her hide from arrest and far worse was indeed comical. How does a 200-pound woman hide on a boat?
“Y-y-y-y-you have ex-ex-ex-experience as a chamber maid?”
“No, but I think I can catch on fast. Are you sure I am chamber maid material?”
“Not, not, not, not at all s-sure about you,” he said, closing his eyes as he spoke. “But, but, but you got a strong back and can probably do more work on the boat than a man and for half the pay, so you’re hired.”
I didn’t like the sound of “half the pay.” It didn’t matter. I had no options. The fat man showed me the dining room, the kitchen, the cabins, and the laundry. That’s where I would spend the next three or four days. I felt so fortunate to find work on the boat. I was even given my own cabin.
Back on the main deck, I spotted a white man who looked as though he was in charge of the entire operation, not just the chamber maids. He was ordering crew members around. He was dressed in a black suit. He wore leather shoes without a single scuff mark. His white hair was slick and combed toward the back of his head. His bushy white goatee and burnsides matched the hair on top of his head.
“Get up there, and take her all down,” he demanded, pointing skyward at the mast.
The crew member shimmied up the pole, unscrewed the mast in sections, and took it down. Other men worked at disassembling canvas sheaths and rods and whatever loose rigging they could get their hands on. Several crew members had scaled poles to bring down flags and banners that had once been proudly unfurled.
“Who is he?” I asked my boss.
“He’s Captain J.W. Cannon.” The boss didn’t stutter for the first time. He pronounced the captain’s name as though it was magical or even Biblical.
“But why are they taking down all of the rigging?” I asked, as a crowd began to form to watch the work.
“The captain is a master strategist, is why,” one of the passengers interjected, pointing at the mast. “He’s taking down all of the rigging so there isn’t any rigging to catch the wind and slow down the boat when we head up the Mississippi. He is stripping the boat clean of all unnecessary parts. He already limited the weight the boat is carrying to only a few invited guests, no excess baggage or supplies, and so on. This isn’t an ordinary trip to St. Louis. It is a race against a rival boat, the Natchez, and the captain aims to not just beat the Natchez in this race, but also to break the speed record set by the Natchez back in June, too. The distance between New Orleans and St. Louis is 1,287 miles, and the Natchez did it in three days, twenty-one hours, and fifty-eight minutes back in June.”
“Y-y-yup,” said the boss of the chamber maids.
“The boats are comparable. Sure, we have powerful twin engines, and our boat is slightly over 285 feet long and their boat is slightly over 300 feet long. Both boats have the same number of boilers, eight. The Natchez has a reputation for owning a capacity to carry more weight, true, but at the end of the day the boats are of comparable capacity, what a match race, what a spectacle! I am betting the difference is strategy, brain power. Our boat is commanded by a tactical genius, Captain J.W. Cannon. The Natchez is commanded by Captain Leathers. Everybody around the civilized world knows about this race all the way to Europe. They got men stationed at intervals along the banks to report the time and progress of the race and cable the news to all parts of the States and Europe. And think of the money wagered. It has got to be one million bucks if it is a penny. The difference isn’t the capacity of the boats. That is comparable. The difference is the capacity of the brains of the men who command the boats. That is the secret unknown to the betting public. That is where the real contest lies.” The passenger lit a cigar. Cigar smoke began to fill the air.
I overcame the urge to ask the passenger for a drag off his cigar. I left for the kitchen. I began work with the other servants there.
I worked hard to help prepare the evening’s massive dinner. Nevertheless, I felt the boat pull away from the levee. There were rumors that we set off five minutes ahead of the Natchez, so we were the lead boat. Some of the men in the kitchen felt this was poor strategy.
By pulling off on the lead, the Natchez could stalk our boat. From this vantage point, their captain could time the winning move. Plus, the Natchez wouldn’t waste fuel if the headwinds were strong.
The problem with steamboats was they required constant raging fires in the boilers to convert water into pressurized steam in order to keep the side-wheels turning. The boats only carried a limited amount of coal below the deck. The boats were only designed to carry a limited amount of weight. That coal was literally devoured by the infernos in the boat’s eight boilers. The boats needed to refuel with coal deliveries to the boat about every 100 miles or so at the banks of the river. These stops cost the boats precious time.
Later, one of the servants showed me the boilers below the deck. Men were stripped to the waste shoveling coal nonstop into the raging infernos. The flames inside the boilers were white and blue and yellow. They seemed to leap at the coal and yearn for more.
It was mercilessly hot there. Sweat poured off the men, but they didn’t stop shoveling coal. They couldn’t stop. If they stopped, the boat would stop, too.
That night, I retired to my cabin. I wasn’t there five minutes before there was a knock on the door. It was the boss.
“H-h-hey, l-l-lady,” he said, stammering as usual.
“Yes,” I answered, purposely leaving open the cabin door.
“I-I-I w-w-want to s-s-s-see what you got under that pretty dress, lady.” He had his eyes closed. He wouldn’t have been able to see what was under my dress at that moment, even if I agreed to oblige and lift it.
“What!”
“You heard. Y-y-you think I give away j-j-j-jobs on the b-boat for f-f-f-f-free?”
The boss reached for the hem of my dress. I pushed him away.
“Here, boss. You want to see what’s under this dress so bad, do you?”
I pulled the door closed to give him a closer look. I pushed him onto the bed. He smiled broadly and began unfastening his clothes. His gold tooth sparkled. I reached under my dress. Instead of bloomers, I pulled out the .38 and trained it on the boss’s forehead.
Suddenly, the boss was no longer amorous. He didn’t talk. He closed his mouth. The gold tooth that once flashed was now concealed. If he had two tongues, neither one was of service to him at this moment.
“Now, you fasten up your clothes,” I said slowly, careful to hold the .38 steady. “And you…get. Otherwise, this pistol’ll give you more of a good time than you can handle, a blast in fact.”
He nervously tried to both fastened his clothes and escape at the same time. I held the cabin door shut with my toe.
“Hold it, and one more thing,” I said. “That half pay you offered for me doing the same work as a man, you can double it now, and we have a deal. I don’t think the captain would appreciate hearing what is going on in his boat. Let’s just call double the pay payment in full for a secret. I like the sound of equal pay for equal work, don’t you?” I heard the slogan somewhere before, but couldn’t remember where. It didn’t matter. I used it anyway.
The boss waved his hand dismissively and left. I strapped the pistol to my leg. I walked out into the open air on the main deck.
Our boat was pulling alongside a barge.
“What’s going on?” I asked one of the crew members.
“We are getting coal off that barge to refuel,” the crew member said. “Notice
, we ain’t stopping, and our engines still have steam. We are only slowing to refuel while the Natchez has come to a dead stop on the banks about ten minutes back. Their captain gets coal deliveries on the banks at designated stops along the river. This means they have to stop their boat. Captain Cannon has an entire network of floating barges up the river to deliver coal to the Robert E. Lee on the fly. There will be no stopping for us. There will be little, if any, loss of time.”
The boat ahead of the battling boats reported the shift in tactics by telegraph to the newspapers and indeed the entire civilized world. The Robert E. Lee was already in the lead by over ten minutes, and we had only recently met nightfall on the first day of the race.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but after I fell asleep that night, the Robert E. Lee blew a steam pipe. This let the Natchez close in on us. She was within only a few minutes of us before we got the pipe repaired, got going again, and pulled away.
This was turning out to not only be a contest of sheer speed and power, but a contest that ultimately would depend on tactics and endurance. Victory doesn’t always belong to the swiftest or the smartest or the most powerful. So, the question, as it turned out, wasn’t who had the faster boat. The question was, which boat would arrive at the finish line first. The thousands of spectators along the banks of the Mississippi, and the many more fanatics witnessing the event over telegraph wire elsewhere, learned the very same lesson: Victory is a wise and unforgiving judge. She belongs only to the competitor who hits the finish line first.
As the race wore on, the pattern of meeting a barge every 100 miles for coal, while the Natchez stopped at the banks, began to cost the Natchez time. There were false reports that Captain Leathers had taken on a full load of cargo and passengers while Captain Cannon hadn’t accepted his regular load, accepting only seventy-five invited guests, and this shift in the weights had become the deciding factor in the race. But the shift in the weights wasn’t the real story.
The real story was that Captain Leathers had to stop his boat every 100 miles to get coal. This meant his boat’s engines stopped, too. It took approximately ten minutes to rebuild steam in the engines. His strategy was to drop off cargo at each stop to lighten his load. It represented a serious miscalculation. He had underestimated the ingenuity of his adversary. Conversely, Captain Cannon made no such error in judgment. He saw the stops as opportunities to gain a tactical advantage.
On each bend of the sinuous Mississippi, in every place where there was human habitation, we saw hundreds, if not thousands, of people cheering the spectacle. On the second day, our boat passed Natchez, the town on the Mississippi that served as the namesake of our rival boat. I was doing the work of ten men in the kitchen, dining room, the nursery, or wherever I could pitch in to help the effort.
The Mississippi River bends sharply to the east and back again to the west at Vicksburg. At this point of the race, we were able to spot the smoke from the stacks of the Natchez off in the distance. Captain Cannon’s strategy aside, there was only about one mile separating the boats at this juncture of the race.
Sensing the possibility of defeat, the captain ordered the men to work nonstop at the boilers. The steam didn’t stop hissing. The engines didn’t stop turning. The paddle-wheels didn’t stop spinning. The work didn’t stop. It couldn’t.
This went on from dawn to dusk and back to dawn again without failure or delay. At Memphis, it looked as though our fortunes had changed, and the Robert E. Lee had a lock on victory. The reason is we had a system of barges ahead to refuel and plenty of time and distance already separating us from our rival, and the Natchez enjoyed no such advantage. The Natchez headed to the banks at various points of the race to get more coal. The idea to drop off cargo to lighten the load was not a stroke of genius. It was a failed strategy.
On the banks and wharfs at Memphis, there were thousands of people waving and cheering us on, and as we cleared Memphis, heavy fog began to descend over the Mississippi. It was visible in the distance from our stern, but the going ahead was crystal clear. This meant the Natchez was heading for the dangers of the fog, and we were just in the clear of it as we proceeded upriver.
The prospect of a low water level and thick fog meant Captain Leathers would cut his engines. He couldn’t risk catastrophe and the lives of his passengers. Meanwhile, we didn’t experience any such hazard. It was full speed ahead. The message wired over the cable was that the fog delay had cost the Natchez six hours. Thusly, we had achieved an insurmountable lead. Victory was within reach.
We went about our chores confidently. We believed the only contest was whether we would break the Natchez’s record. The challenge of the Natchez was moot. We were already gloating. We were wrong.
We were wrong due to mathematical error. The last barge in the network was at a greater distance than 100 miles out of St. Louis. It wasn’t Captain Cannon’s error. It was the error of the barge’s pilot. He was supposed to meet us north of Cape Girardeau. Instead, he met us south of that destination. That meant we could conceivably run out of fuel before we reached St. Louis. If our boat ran out of coal and stopped, we would lose, even if we were many hours ahead of the Natchez. Eventually, the Natchez would pass a stopped boat. The race, and the record, everything, would be lost.
This fate began to befall us north of Chester. The men at the boilers screamed. They were nearly out of coal. This would cause the engines to lose steam and fail. The paddle-wheels would cease turning. We would suffer the ignominy of surrendering a huge lead due to folly, a majestic boat, a powerful boat, dead in the water and bobbing helplessly.
The captain grew frantic. He pled with the fire men at the boilers to shovel coal even faster. They complied, until there was no coal left to shovel.
At the captain’s command, the servants and crew began breaking up furniture. They hustled the wood below deck. The fires roared yet again. The twin engines hissed. The paddle-wheels thrashed at the water. We were moving.
We were north of Chester, only a stone’s throw from St. Louis. However, tragedy visited us yet again. We were out of furniture. The fires were virtually out. The paddle-wheels no longer aggressively attacked the river. The boat listed to the left. The captain was out of ideas. I wasn’t.
I went to the kitchen and wrapped up as much pork as I could get my hands on. I packed hundreds of pounds of ham butts and bacon strips with plenty of white, greasy fat, and I sent the kitchen help to the boilers with the bundles. The instant that pork grease was cast into the boilers through the open boiler doors, the flames leapt with approval, and the paddle-wheels began to grind once again. We were moving. A cheer went up!
I kept sending pork below the deck, and the paddle-wheels kept turning. We sped along the river in the sunshine to thousands of adoring fans as we pulled up to the docks in St. Louis. We arrived! We were victorious! We were a full six hours ahead of Captain Leather’s boat!
The Natchez was still laboring. We had beaten the rival boat! Nevertheless, one issue remained. Had we set the speed record?
The people of St. Louis turned out in record numbers to watch us arrive. It was July 4, 1870, at approximately 6:00 p.m. The thousands of people on the docks reminded me of the crowds that gather to witness the spectacle of a thoroughbred horse race, a prize fight, or a hanging. The boat timing the event and sending telegraphs updating the events surrounding the contest by cable around the world clocked us in at three days, eighteen hours, and fourteen minutes. The mighty Robert E. Lee, armed with its amazing captain and capable crew, had indeed broken the record with the help of broken furniture and plenty of lard.
Chapter Four
Cascade, Montana, May 1913
While I was waiting in the news room of the Cascade Courier, I had a chance to look back on it all: the time I hopped out of the red Concord Overland stagecoach on my first day in Montana and went straight to the saloon, where I announced my arrival by delivering a knockout punch to the first rancher who looked at me sideways; the time I went to th
e saloon later that same day not to apologize, but to offer a bet of five bucks and a shot of whiskey to any man bold enough to take me on; and the time I stoked the boiler fires below the main deck of the Robert E. Lee with pork.
I was ready to explain to the reporter who was writing my life story that these things were only a small part of my life, only a small part of the reason the mayor of Cascade was preparing a ceremony to announce that I was a pioneer for women’s rights—really, human rights—and why he was so sure my life was part of the legend of the Old West. I wanted to get it all off my chest to the reporter, like the interview was a confession of sorts. I was eighty-one years old. I guess you could say I was running out of time.
The year was 1913. The mayor of Cascade was planning to unveil a formal photograph of me that was on file at the Ursuline Convent offices. I was wearing a fancy dress with an adoring dog at my feet in the photograph. And, of course, I was holding a shotgun. It was a formal pose. However, it wasn’t at all symbolic of what I had really gone through during my life in Montana.
The mayor was preparing to announce at the unveiling ceremony that the town would celebrate my birthday each year on March 15th, so folks could remember the old days of the Western frontier and how rapidly our society evolved. However, the truth was I didn’t know my real birth day, so they couldn’t possibly know what day to celebrate any more than I did, but I liked the idea.
Conversely, I didn’t like the bigotry that was left over from slavery, and there were more than a few bigots in Montana. The bigots held sway for most of my life, except I had a temper and a way about me that was more than a match for bigotry.
Looking back, I learned how to master my surroundings, the wolves, the bitter winters, the blazing hot summers, the bandits, the horses, the stagecoach runs—and later, the Star Route runs to deliver mail for the U.S. Postal Service, the hard labor at the Mission—and, above all, the people who didn’t believe a colored woman, or any woman for that matter, had any say in nothing.
Stagecoach Justice Page 3