Out of the darkness, the wolves attacked. They weren’t wolves anything like the ones I had confronted back in Cascade. These wolves meant business.
Suddenly, there was vicious barking and snarling. The horses screamed and reared. I grabbed the rifle.
The horses reared. The wolves barked and growled, and the growling was coming from more than one angle at the same time. The wolves were swarming, attacking with exposed teeth.
I got off a shot into the air. The commotion threw the front wheels of the wagon airborne. I held on to my rifle. The wagon wheels crashed to the ground. The weight of the freight shifted.
I fired a second wild shot. The blast cracked across the open prairie. I was careful not to aim downward. I didn’t dare aim at the pack of wolves nipping at the panicked horses. I didn’t want to risk hitting the horses.
With the second gunshot, the horses reared straight up in the air. This time the team objected in earnest. The horses thrashed wildly at the air with their front hooves while balancing on their hind legs. They were standing straight up in the air. Their heads and front legs were easily twelve feet above the attack on the ground. If the horses clipped one another with those sharp hooves, they would have cut each other wide open.
The wild white of the horses’ eyes flashed in terror. Their front legs flailed. One of the wolves must have sent sharp teeth into the slender canon bones of at least one of the horses. I heard the pain and terror in the screams.
I triggered another shot. The report echoed. The horses whinnied and screamed.
The wolves didn’t abandon the attack.
The gunshot did little, if anything, to dissuade the pack.
The pack was driven by the brutality of raw hunger. There was no fear. There could be no fear. It was Montana in winter. Fear counted for nothing. The only thing between the wolves and death was the pork onboard the wagon.
The desperate dogs bit, snarled, and circled. The horses stomped and panicked. There was desperation everywhere. The dogs were desperate for pork. I was desperate to escape. The horses were desperate to free themselves of the chaos.
The horses would have bolted if it wasn’t for the harnesses, leather straps, and reins tethering them to the wagon. One of the horses started to buck. Who could blame it? The wolves were after our precious freight.
The horses reared yet again, lifting the front wheels of the wagon into the air. Both horses began bucking wildly, hoping to land the might of sharp hooves on wolf flesh.
I broke off a round straight up into the air. I still couldn’t risk shooting the horses, but I had to reply. I had to repel the attack.
I triggered the rifle again and again with the barrel pointed skyward.
In the burst of adrenalin, it felt like I got off fifty shots. The reality is I was holding a Winchester. It was a sleek enough repeating rifle, but the magazine didn’t have the capacity to hold fifty cartridges.
I recalled loading exactly ten cartridges when I rode out of Helena. I was liquored up at the time I did the loading, but the fog of alcohol didn’t throw me off that much. In a split second, I counted seven cartridges left in the magazine.
The horses reared again. This time the front wagon wheels were thrown into the air. The horses thrashed and twisted to free themselves of the harnesses and leather straps. This sent the wagon into an odd motion.
The wagon wheels and wagon bed kicked sideways. I was thrown off the wagon. The wagon overturned. The supplies spilled onto the ground. The wolves tore into the supplies. This started a feeding frenzy.
This may have been a blessing. It gave me a clear shot at the pack. I fired. The pack scattered.
One of the wolves must have snagged a ham butt in its teeth, because the pack began to attack a single wolf. I could hear the wolves fighting among themselves in the darkness. The horrible sound of screaming and snarling and growling was hideous. With the spoils of the attack in its midst, the pack dashed away across the prairie. The attack was over.
I reloaded. I cocked the shotgun under one armpit, placed my right index finger along the trigger guard, and steadied the horses with my free hand. I didn’t bother struggling to right the overturned wagon. That would come later.
I readjusted the bridles, careful to keep my shotgun at the ready. I inspected the mouths of the horses for cuts, keeping an eye on the darkness for signs of the pack. There were no cuts. I worked my hands over the canon bones, checking for indications of injuries. Miraculously, there were none.
With the team accounted for, I turned to the supplies. I stacked the bags of coffee and flour. They were still dry. The rest of the freight was in order. Aside from the ham butt, the only loss was one keg of molasses. It cracked when the wagon was overturned. Otherwise, we were surprisingly unscathed. It was indeed a miracle.
I decided I needed light to fix the wagon. Daybreak was only an hour or so away. However, I knew the pack would return. It had to return. Its survival depended on it. The freight would make for a meal too enticing to resist.
I decided to crack open the bottle of whiskey and stand guard. I lit a gas lantern and stood it on the ground. I shouldered the shotgun and waited.
After a while, I thought I saw a lone wolf. I didn’t want to discharge the weapon and traumatize the horses. So, I decided to get close to the ground and watch.
“You sonofabitch think you are getting near this wagon, well, you got another think coming. I’ll be bringing your pelt back to the Mission as a trophy, every last one of you pups. Hey! Hey! Get!”
There was no barking or yelping, so there was no need to trigger the rifle. There was only darkness. I waited. I lit a cigar and waited.
I fantasized that Sister Amadeus would be impressed that I could survive a wolf attack and return the team, wagon, and supplies in one piece, unscathed. I so wanted to please her. I looked forward to receiving adulation upon my return to the Mission.
“You sonsabitches have met your match,” I said to the darkness. “This was one miraculous display of manhood, er, I mean, womanhood. You met your match. Now, you have your meal. Nothing is your meal. Eat nothing for your meal and like it.” Surprisingly, the pack did not return.
There would be no meal for the wolves that night. Instead, there was despair and the beaten hardness of the earth and the bitter cold of winter in Montana.
The sun was at the rim of the Cascades in the morning. I started to attend to the overturned wagon. I spun the wagon wheels that were in the air. There was no damage.
I checked the wagon wheels under the weight of the overturned wagon. There was no damage there, either.
I laid down the rifle and pushed and heaved and forced the wagon upright. Sure, I could have waited for a wagonful of men to come along and help right the load, but that would have entailed a wait of hours. I wanted to return the supplies to the Mission post haste. I was eager to tell the story and receive the adulation.
Upon my return to the Mission, the nuns and girls spilled out of the schoolhouse to meet me. Their day was well underway. They worried that I had been overtaken by bandits along the return trip from Helena. I proudly told the story of the wolf attack to a rapt audience. It was still another story that pushed my life and times to legendary status.
Sure, I received adulation from the Blackfoot girls and the nuns, but the bishop presented an entirely different take altogether. He had already become suspicious. A flurry of complaints had already crossed his desk. Each complaint involved my “crass behavior.” Liquor was the one constant in all of the complaints. He doubted the truth of my story about the wolf attack. He suspected intoxication was the real reason for the overturned wagon. Therefore, while I had displayed courage repelling the wolf attack, he displayed audacity by docking my pay for the one cracked keg of molasses I lost during the attack.
Sister Amadeus delivered news of the bishop’s decision to me. The bishop figured supposition was an adequate substitute for evidence. I may have been drunk. I was typically drunk. Why on earth would anyone hold th
at against me? What did drunkenness have to do with the wolves? Nothing. This didn’t stop the bishop from concluding otherwise and docking my pay.
The first thing I looked to do when I got news that my pay had been docked was go to the Silver Dollar and knock out the first rancher who owed me money. In other words, I was going to town looking to raise a little hell, to get even.
Chapter Ten
I promised myself I would make the first rancher I met in the saloon that day who owed me money and regaled me with a bogus story instead of simply settling his debt pay for what the bishop did to me.
I had been taking odd jobs outside of the Mission for quite some time prior to 1887, including earning extra money to go on supply runs, babysit, do laundry, help ranchers raise barns and houses, dig holes, fight Indians, really anything. It didn’t matter what they asked me to do. I could do it all.
I had a huge heart, so I was lenient where it came to collecting what people owed me. However, if leniency was mistaken for weakness, or if I got enough whiskey in me, an entirely different Mary Fields would emerge, and all of the locals knew it. That might have been the reason I earned my reputation for “crass behavior,” as they put it.
The Sioux called me White Crow for a reason. They said I acted like a white person in black skin. I wasn’t exactly sure what they meant, or why anyone would say a thing like that just because I insisted on folks respecting my rights. However, it was already clear that I was blazing a trail of sorts in the Montana Territory. If Mary Fields had the right to sit in a saloon, drink whiskey, curse, fight, and do whatever else she pleased, why shouldn’t other women be allowed to do the same?
In this respect, Mary Fields, all six feet and two hundred pounds of me, including skin that was as black as the “burnt prairie,” regardless of some of the unflattering nicknames I collected along the way, would eventually be hailed as a pioneer for women’s rights. In fairness, it wasn’t only that I looked like a man and packed a .38 that made me a pioneer of the Old West. Those weren’t the only things that stood out.
If you stopped to think about it—really think about it—my appeal also included time and the beaten hardness of the earth and the pull of how the prairie against the Cascades seems magnificent in the morning sunlight when the sky is high and deep and all around and how the Western expansion revealed the inherent glory of the land and the inherent dignity of human rights. The audacity to insist on respect, and equal treatment, was the thing that folks in Cascade admired most about me. The reason they admired this quality is because it allowed them to see a lot of themselves in me.
Generally speaking, audacity is what made the Old West tick, and audacity was the part of me that was akin to folks out in Montana and everywhere else actually. Audacity doesn’t need an introduction. Folks recognize it when they see it.
Looking back, audacity is what clicked with the folks of Cascade, and audacity pinpointed what made the nation great as a whole in the 1880s, made it evolve, made it feel confident to dream big and expand westward. Audacity is what the world admired about the Old West, the gunplay, the squatters, the ranchers, the farmers, the cattle rustlers, the bank and stagecoach robbers, the relentless will to brave cruel winters, the courage to just keep going west no matter the odds and no matter the obstacles, all of it boiled down to audacity. Audacity describes the spirit of the Old West better than all of the other words put together.
Audacity is the quality historians bump into when they are trying to make sense of it all. Audacity built the railroads. Audacity possessed Mr. Lincoln to insist upon change, and audacity possessed the South to resist. Audacity encouraged former slaves to rise up and confront their captors. Audacity rushed for gold. Mary Fields, and the Old West, had plenty of audacity.
However, the local citizens who believed audacity would have saved them if they owed me money and visited a certain saloon in Cascade, Montana on the day after the bishop docked my pay would have been dead wrong. I was beyond pissed.
Cascade was still an unincorporated town at the time. The Territorial Legislative Assembly still had not passed the act incorporating it, creating offices to be filled, and Harvey Hill still hadn’t been elected mayor. The rascal, who was obviously neither Republican nor of sound mind, hadn’t yet misused his authority as mayor to place a ban on women entering saloons, a slight aimed directly at my “crass behavior.” Later, my popularity became so overwhelming that not only was the ban reversed, but the locals would begin to celebrate my birthday each year. However, that is getting way ahead of the story.
Tom’s Saloon in Cascade was not much to brag about. It was little more than a spiffy log cabin on a dusky street. There was glass in its one window. There was a tattered canopy over the front door.
Inside, the saloon wasn’t much to talk about, either. There was a short bar, not one of the polished wooden bars that resembled fine furniture I admired in the Magnolia in Helena, but what you’d expect a poor excuse for a bar in a poor excuse for a town to look like. It was made of rough-hewn boards that hadn’t received the dignity of wood stain or lacquer. There were wooden chairs and tables scattered about at random.
The saloon’s patrons supposedly disarmed themselves at the door as a testament to the honor code that applied to saloons on the prairie. The rifles and shotguns that leaned against the wall was all the proof anyone seemed to need. The standup piano was rarely used. There was a map of the Pacific Northwest on one of the walls. There was always action, gambling, whiskey, prostitution, even though the prostitutes were usually the same ladies over and over.
You got the sense the earth was exposed just below the floorboards, because the boards sagged underfoot. I never let on what I really felt about the place. Nobody did. It was home, and I could throw back whiskey, strike up a conversation, and pass the time away there. What else was there to want out of life? Later, after I got good and liquored up, it would make sense to make some poor unsuspecting soul pay for the injustice the bishop visited on me.
There was a negro piano player wearing a bowler with a fancy satin hat band. You could hear the jumpy tune out in the street. I tied off my horse at the hitching rail and stepped inside.
“Hey, what’s the occasion?” I asked, referring to the music.
“Huh?” the bartender asked.
“What’s the occasion?” I screamed above the music.
“Got new girls coming in today from Helena,” said the bartender.
“New girls, well yippy damned do! Boy, I tell you, hot damn!” I laughed.
“Yes, indeed, hot damn,” the bartender agreed.
This wasn’t the bartender who greeted me on my first day in Cascade. That fellow was long gone, back East. This fellow was part of the new guard in town that respected the rights of Mary Fields. He set me up with a shot of whiskey.
“What time you expecting the girls?”
“Why do you want to know that, Mary? You want to get you one yourself?”
There was a blast of laughter.
“Might be able to do more with one of them gals if I got one myself then all of you boys put together, who knows?” I said, luring him into the trap of trading wits with me.
“No doubt,” said the bartender, declining the offer.
“Mary,” yelled one of the ranchers at the end of the bar, “you’re blacker than the prairie after it gets burnt out by a brush fire on a windy day. How exactly would you expect to get one of them gals anyway?”
There was laughter yet again.
“Same way you do, I suppose: Money,” I retorted.
There was triumphant laughter. I had held my own on rebuttal. I was one of the town’s favorite citizens.
“Well, what you figuring on getting them with, Mary?” the rancher persisted. “Which side do you keep it on anyway, the left side or the right side?”
“If by it, you mean the .38, don’t bother asking where I keep it unless you want to find out firsthand.”
The bartender set me up with another shot of whiskey.
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However, I didn’t have time to drink it. I spotted a hired man wearing a Stetson who hadn’t paid his laundry bill with me. He was passing the bar on the street. I saw him through the glass window. I ignored the whiskey. I set out of the bar after him.
“Hey, boy, where you going?” I screamed.
“Ain’t no boy here, Mary,” he replied.
“No sir, you are right. You ain’t no boy at all, but boy where is the money you owe me?” We were standing toe-to-toe.
“I got money, but I ain’t got no money for you, Mary.”
“What? Why not?”
“Because I’m saving it to get me one of them new gals they got coming in from Helena later.”
“You’re saving it for what?”
“I am saving it to get me one of those gals.”
“Saving the money? Is that what you say?” I looked off toward the Cascade Mountain Range.
“No problem.”
I started to walk away. I stopped. I had gotten several paces away from the hired hand before I thought about what he said.
Then, I walked back to face him. Suddenly, and without warning, I unloaded a left-hand cross. The punch dropped him.
I stood over him for a moment to inspect the damage. It would do. I calmly returned to the bar, sat down, and finished my drink.
“What was that all about, Mary?” asked the bartender.
“What?”
“What! You just knocked out a man! He’s still out cold on the street!”
“Oh, that. He refused to pay me what he owed me on his laundry bill. Now, look at him. His bill is paid in full.”
A knockout blow to the head of a debtor was a form of charity in Montana in those days. The encounter could have been worse. The sheer enormity of my hands flopped over a rifle made it difficult to trigger the weapon at times, but it was quite an intimidating sight. A gunshot was far worse than a punch.
Stagecoach Justice Page 7