by Peter Bowen
He nodded and plopped an enamelware coffeepot on the coals. I was still shivering, but the cold was lessening in me and my bones didn’t feel like they was made of ice any more.
We hunkered down for the next three days, playing dice and an Indian game of mumblety-peg, and when those diversions palled we mended gear or told lies.
The cold snap lifted gradually, warmer air from the west came and things began to move on the land again. When we heard the screech of a Canada jay we knew it was time to have a look about.
Buffalo Horn had left his ponies in a little dingle out of the wind, where there was good cured grass and some brush to hole up in. They was covered with rimes of ice and had long icicles hanging from their lips—their mouths were chapped and bloody, but they were alive.
It took the rest of the day for us to tend the horses and such—it was close on the longest darknesses of the year—and it was still chilly enough so I had no notions of going after the Crows in the dark.
“There were six of them and there are two of us, Kelly,” says Buffalo Horn, as we munched our pemmican that evening. “Do you think we can kill them?”
“They are already dead,” I says. “And I’ll bet not over three miles from here.”
Horn grunted and went back to his meal, and drank about a quart of boiling hot coffee, and went to sleep. If tomorrow was a battle, it was a good day to die in, and if not, a good day to live in. Like I said, I have always admired the Indians, and how they look at things.
The next day we circled wide and found some faint traces of the Crow trail. Didn’t need them, as it turned out; from the hillock behind our lean-to we could have seen the birds gathering—magpies and ravens and kites. We rode cautious-like toward the Crow camp. Two big loafer wolves was staggering around the camp, almost dead of the strychnine in the Indians.
I always carried a couple of bottles of trade whiskey laced with strychnine stuck innocent-like in my possible sacks, for occasions such as happened with the Crows a few days ago. The Crows had got a camp together and celebrated, passing the filthy mixture rapidly around. Only one of them was outside the lean-to—and not a pretty sight. The birds had mostly pecked his face off, and died of the meal, I might add. We gathered up my traps and threw the bird-pecked Crow in with the other five and piled brush on the lot and set fire to the whole mess. I didn’t feel any too good about what had happened and I damn sure didn’t want another Crow party puzzling out the story, as they have long memories and once annoyed are too damn single-minded for my taste.
Horn thought it all a great joke. He made up a long song recounting my splendid treacheries, to sing for his people when he returned, a wealthy and respected warrior and trader.
Buffalo Horn was a good friend, too, and I had saved his hair once or twice, so he expanded the story and made it just preposterous enough so that it wouldn’t be believed, if it should be sung, say, in the lodges of the Crows.
16
THE TRUTH OF THE matter is that wolfing just isn’t very interesting. We poisoned and skinned out nearly three thousand, and had about eighty Canada lynx (caught them with baited traps) and a few odds and ends of marten and sable. The wolves had multiplied something fierce with the slaughter of the buffalo, and since the hide hunters left them all of the meat it was a free lunch for old lobo. Buffalo Horn and me took the valuable peltries (everything but the wolves) down to Fort Buford, and left the baled wolf pelts for Reilly and Grogan to sledge out however they wanted to. I wouldn’t advance them any money, just gave them some modest credit at Salomonsen’s General Store in Fort Buford.
Buffalo Horn and me came away with about eight thousand dollars apiece for our winter’s work, less expenses, which came to about fifteen hundred dollars, including the salaries of our Irish friends.
I left the agreed sum with the factor for Hazleton and Moss, the St. Louis outfit which had purchased all of our furs, with instructions that not one cent was to be given over until every pelt was accounted for.
The factor was a pale young feller with a long nose and rimless spectacles.
“You’ve had dealings with those fair Hibernians before?” he asked, raising one pale eyebrow.
“No,” I says, “but I’ve known a lot like them.”
“If they get too firm in their requests, Zeke here will be glad to show them the door.”
He jerked his thumb at a mountainous gent who was casually leaning against a stack of baled hides. The factor’s office was a wood and glass cubicle in the front of a gigantic warehouse. With several millions’ worth of pelts and robes waiting on the spring breakup of the Missouri ice, I suppose they had a bunch of Zekes here and there at all times. This Zeke was wearing four pistols and carrying a sawed-off shotgun for sloppy close-range work.
The factor wrote me a draft on Hazleton and Moss to their St. Louis bank, and another to the branch in Fort Buford, so that Buffalo Horn could get his money in gold and head for home.
I took the heavy sack of gold the bank manager gave me out to Horn, who was leaning against the front of the only brick building in Fort Buford. Horn refuses to enter white men’s lodges, claiming that they stink so bad he gets dizzy.
“Well,” I says, “this is our last time. So I’ll wish you tall grass and deep water.”
Horn just grunted. I asked him if he wanted me to ride a ways with him. He made the sign for no. Then he grinned. “Stay away from buffalo robes, Kelly,” he says. He swung up on his Appaloosa and grabbed the towline on his two mules.
The ice was thick on the river. I watched him cross, over to the north bank of the Yellowstone, where the going is easier on account of the wind clearing most of the snow off the ridges—it gets pushed into the river bottom. I ain’t a sentimental feller, to put it mildly, but I did feel a twinge at seeing him go.
Spring on the high plains is just about the most miserable mix of weather you can imagine. Snow, sleet, warm days, freezing nights, ice jams and floods, and no traffic on the river at all. Fort Buford was out of whiskey, vegetables, newspapers, seegars, and decks of playing cards. Damn near everything else, too. The soldiers was bored and surly, and the guardhouse was standing room only. A bit after I got there a sixteen-year-old private was hanged for having struck an officer. Everybody in town but me turned out for the hanging, as it was the first real entertainment to be had in months.
When the packet boats could navigate again, and the first little sidewheeler pulled up to the near-wrecked dock, I lit out for the hills and spent three boring, wet, miserable weeks in a tent on Big Dry Creek. The new arrivals brought news and seegars and whiskey, and they also brought influenza. The influenza soon had caused a stack of coffins to pile up in a shed next to the cemetery. Crowds will flat kill you, take it from me.
There was a feller name of Jordan Phipps a couple of creeks down from me, who had gone around the ban on firewater—the packet boats was thoroughly searched by the army—by bringing up a still and then buying grain from the Gallatin Valley, upriver a bit over four hundred miles. The army tolerated him because they didn’t know he was there, or what it was he was doing, officially.
The place reeked of mash and there was a pathetic bunch of Sioux living in damp caves by the river. They had traded everything for firewater—pelts, guns, squaws. Hell, they would’ve traded their children if Phipps would’ve taken them. I had fought the Sioux and I had helped to hunt them down, but to see them reduced to this made me gag. I resolved to make mention of Phipps when next I was in Fort Buford. The Sioux used to bury their dead wrapped in buffalo robes with their war trophies and such, hung high in the river bottom cottonwoods or set upon biers open to the sky. Now they just dragged them out on the river ice.
I rode on back one fine warm April day, still a lot of snow on the ground where it was shady. The night before the ice had gone out with a great roar. There was a few cakes of pan ice floating by, and I imagined one hell of an ice jam downriver. The army’s sappers would blow the jam free, and I hoped that whatever diseases the first
arrivals brought would by now have run their course. The Lower Missouri ice always goes out about three weeks early, getting everybody excited, and when the Upper Missouri and the Yellowstone go out a bit later there is hell to pay downriver.
In the time that I had been gone, Reilly and Grogan had struggled in with the last of the pelts. The factor had paid them, obviously, for I had to step over Grogan, peacefully asleep in the mud, on my way to the Post Office. I had a letter.
It was from my old chum Texas Jack Omohundro. He formally offered me the job of guiding some bunch of nabobs from England, who wanted to see the Great American West and by the by wreak a great slaughter on whatever game was handy. For Victoria, and Empire, and to add a few more sets of horns to the walls of the family castle. Jack was a well-spoke feller, but his writing looked like he done it with the pencil held like a stabbing knife and his spelling was a wonder to see.
As an added treat, Buffalo Bill would be going with us.
I thought for about two minutes. I thought about the thousands of rotting buffalo carcasses, the Sioux camped by Phipps’s whiskey still, the Nez Perces ridden down to a handful, Crazy Horse killed while I was back east, and how different things was now than they was when I first came.
The next downriver packet left at six the next morning. I booked passage to St. Louis, where I would hook up with Jack.
Then I went to the army post, and asked to see the Officer of the Day.
I told him about Phipps. He thanked me and said that they would look into it.
17
IT TOOK TWELVE PLEASANT days to make the St. Louis docks. Coming down the Missouri, I was at first amazed by the spring green, and then it occurred to me that we had dropped thousands of feet in altitude.
Up in the Big Hole of Montana, I had once been trapped by a sudden blizzard which dropped three feet of wet and heavy snow in less than twenty-four hours. Two others in the party died of exposure, because they tried to struggle back to the camp. Me, I found a cutbank, threw my blankets and slicker on top of me, and curled them into a miniature teepee around the barrel of my rifle, which I held between my knees, and stayed in there, farting and cursing, until the snow stopped. Nothing unusual about the blizzard, except it was the twentieth of July.
We coasted through the junction of the Missouri and the Mississippi—the Big Muddy was the color of coffee with cream in it, while the Mississippi was darker and clearer. St. Louis was booming and bustling in April of 1878, trade coming from all directions. There seemed to be the same sort of activity going on that you see if you kick over an anthill.
Finding Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack (I knew them both when they was Bill and Jack, before fame up and struck) was real easy. They would be in the most expensive hotel, located near the most expensive whorehouses, where they would be eating the most expensive foods and not paying a dime for all of it. And they would have those folks who remind you of animals that can’t kill their own meat hanging on them like leeches, proud to pony up for the whatever. Yellowstone Kelly, I thinks, shit.
Bill and Jack was in the bar of the Ashley House, and Bill had got drunk enough to go up to his room and get Tall Bull’s scalp (some scalp, anyway) and he was re-enacting his own valiant deed in killing this most redoubtable warrior. Bill had had a lot of help with the “re-enactment” from a squint-eyed, bandylegged, teetotaling idiot name of Ned Buntline, who had published this pack of lies about Bill, most of which Bill now firmly believed.
“First scalp for Custer!” hollers Bill, waving Tall Bull’s (somebody’s, anyway) scalp. Not a dry eye in the house, except mine. I had come through the door just as Bill was throwing back his head and waving his golden locks. He gave a bit of a start when he saw me, but being a true showman he soaked up all of the applause and dashed to the bar to cool down.
See, I happened to be at the Yellow Buttes fight where Tall Bull was killed. Tall Bull was peacefully riding up the trail on the north side of the Buttes, and a fourteen-year-old kid named Obadiah Mertz got him right square in the earhole with a 25–20 peashooter. The kid hightailed back, scared as could be. His older brother, name of Increase Mertz, went back with Obadiah to get the scalp. Not having much experience in the scalping trade, first thing they did was saw off Tall Bull’s head. If you ever need to scalp somebody, leave the body attached, as it makes a most useful counterweight to your enterprise.
The brothers Mertz were forced to skin out old Bull’s noggin’, which they did like they was skinning a muskrat, at which they had some experience.
While the brothers Mertz were thus occupied, the rest of us were engaged in a hell of a fight on the south side of the Buttes. The Cheyennes finally broke off and ran, but we had too many wounded to give chase. On the way back to the supply wagons, Bill spotted Tall Bull’s horse, which he immediately appropriated (the horse was a magnificent one, seventeen hands, and the color of gunmetal), and when the brothers Mertz straggled in with Tall Bull’s topknot, Bill offered five dollars for it. The brothers Mertz went off satisfied, and Bill went off to clean up a few of the ragged edges (they’d left the ears on, see, which is a serious breach of etiquette) as he could never abide sloppy workmanship himself.
“That was a mighty fine performance, Bill,” I says. “I can’t remember when I’ve seen a better one.”
“Luther, old comrade,” says Bill, giving me a mighty slap on the back, “what’ll you have?”
“I was so dazzled by the performance I ain’t had time to think,” I says, coughing. “I guess I’ll have some Scotch whiskey.”
“Woog,” says Jack in my other ear, “goo to see you, Lusser.” Jack had been on a prod for some days, it seemed.
“Tell me about this bunch of nabobs,” I says, “and what and where are we going.” As if I didn’t know what I was going along for. The two celebrities would drink and preen, and I would get to run the show.
“The Duke of Ironheath, his lovely Lady, the Duchess Lydia, four lesser titled Englishmen and their ladies, and an assortment of servants.”
“How many all told?” I asks.
“Thirty, maybe thirty-five.”
“Fine,” I says. “I’ll have them fit out the Delta Queen (she was the most opulent riverboat working) with wheels and then cable P. T. Barnum and lease thirty or so elephants to pull the damn thing.”
“Kelly, you always were a joker,” says Bill, throwing back his head and bellering.
“I ain’t joking,” I says. “They can shoot buffalo from one of them howdy things that they put on the backs of elephants. Then the elephant can pick up the buffalo and carry it back to camp, which will save a lot of work, and any skulking Indians sees the elephants they will die from the wonderment of it all right on the spot. I think it’s a great idea.”
“Luther,” says Bill. There was a loud thud on my right. Jack had expired.
Bill and me each took a handy end and hauled Jack to the elevator, and carried him down the hall to his room. Jack wasn’t a big man, even adding the thirty or forty pounds of Panther Piss he had taken on. We dropped him on the bed and went back down to the bar.
“I was about to say,” says Bill, “that these folks are interested in investing in my Wild West Show. I met them in England last winter, when I was on the tour that Colonel Buntline had arranged for me.”
“Sure, Bill,” I says, “tell me how much I’m making and what I have to do to get it.”
“Five hundred dollars a month and a bonus at the end to make up for anything extraordinary you have to put up with.”
“What’s that mean?” I says, smelling trouble.
“Ah,” Bill paused, “... the titled English are sometimes odd.”
“Well, I suppose that it will have to do,” I says.
Bill and me went to dinner, finally, and about halfway through our meal Jack came wobbling in. He ordered plate after plate of oysters and glass after glass of white wine. This time Bill and me took him back upstairs in a laundry basket we bummed from the kitchen help.
As I was
falling asleep, I realized that I missed the sound of the river.
18
I HAD DEMANDED A room on a different floor from Bill and Jack—they had adjacent suites—and I further demanded that the desk not divulge the room number to anyone. Pranks was a big part of our life back then, I suppose because of the somber loneliness of the plains and mountains. Some of the pranks turned off all wrong, and the butt of the joke was maimed for life.
I also propped a chair against the doorknob and turned the gas jets all the way off. You will notice even in the fanciest places that the doors either have a bunch of patched holes around the vicinity of the lock, or the doors are new. Rubes come to town and blow out the gas jets, thinking that they are just like the kerosene lamps at home, and the gas kills them, or there will be a sudden loss of pressure, which snuffs the flame, and the pressure resumes and the poor fools asleep never wake up.
I got up about noon and had a bath, and then went down to the hotel barbershop for a shave and a haircut.
“Leave my moustache and my sideburns,” I says, just before the hot towels got slapped on,
St. Louis was so damn noisy I was still starting at unfamiliar sounds, my hand reaching for my revolver, which was stuck in my waistband.
The dining room was open, and there was an enormous sideboard of delicacies on ice. I took a table, and the waiter took my order for about forty dollars’ worth of ham and eggs. The ham was from some place in Germany called Westphalia, and the eggs was fresh. I hadn’t had fresh eggs for months, and at first they tasted strange and then mighty good.
I had polished off my breakfast and was having another pot of coffee when Bill come in, looking a little worn. I figured he’d spent the night down at one of the fancy sporting houses.
Bill gave a careless wave to his gaping public and pulled up a chair. The waiter came, and Bill ordered himself some steak, eggs and champagne. He diddled a little with the damask tablecloth, and looked around the room. The walls was red velvet, the trim was white and gold, and there was mirrors hung all around.