by Peter Bowen
They give me a muzzle-loading musket with a long bayonet on it, called a “lunger,” and put me to marching twelve hours a day up and down the fence. Since I hadn’t got my real growth yet the gun was taller than I was, and them Confederates found me very amusing and commented all the time on whether or not I had a stool to use when I cleaned the thing and if they’d mowed down every Yankee all the way to the sprouts and pips maybe it was time to quit since they’d won anyway.
The Rebs wasn’t much interested in escaping—the war was over as soon as Grant caught up with Lee. Ulysses chasing, Robert E. running, and half a million dead scattered round—mostly killed by the doctors, to be sure, but they wouldn’t be coming home.
I spent the first half of March walking up and down on frozen earth and the last half staggering through mud damn near up to my money belt. The winds got raw and blustery and sleety rain come down by the lakeful. It turned the whole camp into a bog festering with shit and even some Reb corpses come up, buried hastily so the survivors would go on getting their rations.
The great cheer when the war ended was given up by the Rebs, who could now go home. I marched along in the mud wondering what the hoorah was and when it hit home I wondered what I’d do now. My manner of leaving Oneida wasn’t so stuffed with thinkin’ time that I had made any plans, long or short.
Though a lot of the healthier Rebs just run off, the others was waiting on news of someway they could get home. Many died in that week right after the war, almost as though they’d stayed alive just for that.
Then the news come that President Lincoln had been shot at Ford’s Theater by John Wilkes Booth.
The soldiers of the 33rd went clean crazy—they weren’t soldiers at all, just boys like me who they’d give a gun to. One company loaded up their muskets and marched over to the Reb pen, they was just going to pour fire into the prisoners. John Wilkes Booth wasn’t in there, I was sure of that.
Then the one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged captain came riding a big sorrel horse, holding his saber with his left hand, and he bellered that he’d kill the damned cowardly lot of them if they didn’t form up and march back and leave their damned guns where they stood. Some of the mulier fellers thought they’d see if he meant it and he charged them, cracking a couple on the head with the flat of his sword—saber, I guess, I thought it was a sword then—and he run all of them off like so many clipped sheep.
Then the captain rode over to the wire pen and he looked at the Rebs until they was quiet. Then he said they was his countrymen and that he would not see them humiliated. Any of them that wanted to could go; the sick would have to wait until transportation could be arranged. So while he stood there beside that sorrel horse maybe two or three hundred men come by to shake his hand and thank him, and he said God Bless You to every one who did. I thought it pretty good for a feller about half-trimmed up by Reb guns.
The captain struggled up on his horse and rode away, and the men left in the camp gave him a cheer, and I joined it.
I was awful young but I’d read enough books to know wars aren’t all that glorious to those who fight them. They was a dirty, bad business stupidly thought out and done by fools and ignorant amateurs, blood and stink and nothing for the soldiers at the end, lessen you’re someone like a general and you want to go on to Congress or the White House. A wooden leg, an empty sleeve, a furrow cross your skull where your eyes was, and, like the Brits say, the thanks of a grateful nation.
Next day rumors flew around the camp like drunken bats. Booth was headin’ south, headin’ north, headin’ west, on the moon, or in the basement of the White House eatin’ shepherd’s pie with Mary Todd Lincoln, who was crazy and supposed to be chained there.
A couple of companies of the 33rd was detailed to sweep the countryside for Booth. We went back and forth, not finding him and having to buy all our food from the sutlers who followed us like stink on a skunk until the word came that Booth had been shot down in a burning barn. Booth being an actor I thought that the barn was a nice theatrical touch. (I was righter than I knew, or was to know later.)
We marched back to the prison camp and found it empty except for a couple men dying of brain fever. A good half of the 33rd had deserted—no one was going after them and they knew it—there wasn’t enough jails in all the country to hold the men streaming away. The real soldiers was so fed up with war and everything about it they was hurriedly let go before they shot their way out. After a feller has a few years of good, hot war and he eats the garbage they call food and lives with death every minute, what that feller wants most is a good meal and a soft bed and a big jar of good whiskey. A lot of the men took their muskets home with them and year by year they watched the rust eat them and they nodded and smiled.
As you may well imagine, I did not wish to return home right away, where I would be strung up for rape and many other crimes.
So I nosed around a bit, telling anything with stripes or gold on it that I liked soldiering. They mostly looked at me like I was simple and smelled bad to boot.
The country still had a lot of need of soldiers, so while the 33rd melted away the peacetime army was looking for recruits. Out where the Indians was the North had had to make do with paroled Confederate soldiers—galvanized Yankees—all of whom left about three minutes after the news of Appomattox got to them.
The army is a mysterious thing. A sergeant come for me, took me and my kit to a train, shoved me on it, and said I should report to Fort Semple, way out in Minnesota, wherever that was. There was trouble with the Sioux, whoever they were. I had long thought I’d go to sea, but fighting Indians didn’t sound so bad. Christ, I was as green as spring grass.
I got a lot of gossip from the folks on the train—civilians, and many of them immigrants who didn’t speak English. Seemed that there was this Sioux chief, Red Cloud, who had whipped the army so much and so often that they had to abandon the Bozeman Trail. (Red Cloud called it the Thieves’ Road. He was to tell me so himself.) Red Cloud was now raising hell worse than Nathan Bedford Forrest ever did. The Sioux ate their captives after torturing them to death.
There had been hundreds of settlers killed, scalped, and eaten. (Actually three, and none of them were eaten.)
I changed trains in Chicago and on I went seeing new country and listening to the same gossip. The train got to Minnesota and then the cars began to fall away until there was just two flatcars with iron rails on them and we come to the end of the railroad—easy to spot, the crews was building it right there. I asked where Fort Semple was and the foreman pointed a finger off to the northwest and I took off. The fort wasn’t more than five miles from the end of the track, a palisaded business with raw log walls and the same tents up on wooden puncheons. It was starting on real spring there, and flights of Canada geese were going overhead all day and all night.
I found a lieutenant with the red sash of Officer of the Day on, and I handed him the crumpled orders I had been given back in Washington. And that was the first time I laid eyes on Lt. Gustavus Cheney Doane, USA. If I’d have known what he was going to do to me over and over I’d have shot him there and banked on my age.
“Son,” said Gus, “would you mind telling me how old you are?”
“Eighteen,” I said, standing at what I thought was attention.
“Port arms,” he barked. I blinked and looked at him, having no idea what he meant.
“Jesus,” said Gus.
He called over a sergeant who took me to a barracks and gave me a bunk. The place was low-ceilinged and stank of sweat and tobacco. I dropped my kit on my bunk and my shoulders slumped.
The sergeant barked at me to hurry and get out for drill and since I hadn’t ever had any I was curious. I was utterly hopeless. I caused anarchy in the movements of Company “C” and my stage fright wasn’t helped by that goddamned Doane laughing like a madman every time I fell over or took somebody’s head near off with my musket butt. The sergeant ran me back to the barracks steps just before he would have died of a stroke.<
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Gus sauntered over, a big smile on his face.
“Eighteen, huh?” says Gus. “What’s your name?”
“Private Pabst, sir,” I stammered. I was trying to stand at attention but I don’t guess I was doing very well.
“Private ... Pabst,” said Gus. “How old are you really. Just tell me. I am trying to help you out.”
“Fourteen, sir,” I said.
“Jaysus Kayrist,” said Gus. “Infants and idiots. The perfect soldiers.”
“My uncle always said so,” I said, stammering some.
“Do you hunt, Private Pabst?” said Doane.
“Yes, sir,” I said. It was true. I was a good hunter and I had fed my family a lot of venison, ducks, and geese.
“Our post hunter died of typhoid last week,” said Gus, “and you are our new hunter. Report to me tomorrow at dawn. I’ll talk with your sergeant.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, saluting. I’d been doing it every fifteen seconds or so since the conversation started.
“Quit waving your damn hand around like you was killing gnats or something. DISMISSED. THAT MEANS GO AWAY,” Gus roared. I was already going as fast as I could squelch through the mud of the parade ground. Then I remembered I’d got up off the steps of my barracks. I went back through the mud, wishing I was a goose far above, headed north.
I sat there and watched Company “C” march and drill around until it was time for them to quit. We had cooked food for supper, and the stew was just awful, a mess of old spuds and beets and gristle. There was a good-sized swamp not a quarter mile from the gates of the stockade. So I asked around until I found Gus and threw a salute that knocked the glass he’d carried outside off into the quagmire along with the whiskey in it.
“Jaysus Kay-rist, Pabst,” said Gus, rubbing his eyes and coughing to keep from laughing in my face.
So I told him that as idle as the troops was, if they went to work pulling up cattails and I got some decent meat maybe they wouldn’t look so starved and peckish and watery.
“Cattails?” said Gus.
I nodded.
Early the next morning I give a demonstration of how to cut the good out of a cattail stalk, and then I started out in the meat hunter business.
3
WHAT WITH THE WAR ending, everything was even more chaotic than normal and pay and rations sometimes were lost for months. Replacements for the men whose enlistments had run out were a long time coming. A few deserted each week, and they were let go and godspeed.
We was clear out in the far west end of Minnesota, and the Sioux was farther out yet. Game was thick in the bottomlands—whitetailed deer and moose—and I shot only as much as the cooks could use. I only saw the fort about once a week. Two privates with a freight wagon would follow the route I’d leave for that week. I’d hang the game I shot in the cottonwoods and leave a strip of cloth fluttering from a branch.
The settlers had long since fled, since Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and sundry other bloodthirsty savages lurked just beyond the horizon. Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and the rest of the bloodthirsty savages would have been content to stay out there, beyond the horizon, but we kept moving the horizon in on them and they got mad over it. They’d been treatied out of Minnesota and weren’t likely to negotiate again.
The soldiers ate about a dressed ton of meat a week, so I had to shoot four moose or twenty deer or a combination of the two. I really wanted to shoot a buffalo, but they didn’t spend any time in the bottoms and I was a little chary of heading out onto them plains. That sea of grass is damned big, even from the shore of the forest, and the sky above is bigger yet. The wind would make swells and ripples in the six-foot-high buffalo grass, and it hypnotized me when I stared at it too long.
The stew meat despatched, I would wander the breaks with Doane’s shotgun and knock down prairie hens for the officers, and I kept buckshot handy because there were a lot of wild hogs. Once I killed a sow and found twelve piglets in a burrow nearby, they wasn’t above two weeks old. I stuffed them in a sack and took them right back to Doane.
Gus was in some sort of quarrel with the captain, and when he saw my high sign he come and listened to the high-noted squeals and he waved to the captain to come listen and he did and they left off the argument. Like all military camps there wasn’t a lot to do.
Doane cooked the suckling pigs himself and the officers went and invited me to dinner; I noticed my table manners was better than most.
The officers broached a small barrel of whiskey and gave me some and while they drank and told jokes I puked my suckling pig dinner up and all over the outside wall of the officers’ mess, on account of I had to lean on something. I staggered off to lie down and when I felt better I saddled up and left to lick my wounds in my own private thicket.
Having that bounty money, I had been gradually replacing my military gear with better clothes and truck. I bought good high oiled leather boots and thick moleskin pants and heavy flannel shirts, and a patented raincoat. I had also begun to stock up on things a feller might need if he were meat hunting one day and got kicked in the head by a moose and woke up a few months later so far into the Rocky Mountains they had to ditch in the daylight. There was sutlers like crows behind a plow. No idea how I got there, of course, and if anybody asked I could roll my eyes and be simple all over their boots.
Doane knew perfectly well what I was thinking—he’d been a schoolteacher for a couple of years and knew my kind right off—and just the very day I was leaving and not coming back he come up to me and said Tibet was that way, too, which sort of tore the hump out of my sail.
“Uh ... Luke,” said Gus, he was a kind man, “I think that the army and you ain’t suited. Now if you go right on to Oregon no one will be lookin’ for you, because you ain’t even old enough to hang, much less enlist. So have a good journey and watch your hair.”
I looked puzzled and I flushed of embarrassment.
“I have been transferred to the Department of Texas,” Gus went on, “and no telling what my replacement will be like.”
“Well, I’ll be seeing you then,” I says.
“No doubt,” says Gus. “Though I hope not in Texas. I wouldn’t wish that festering pesthole on anyone.”
I went off with my two packhorses and my pinto saddle pony and rode as fast as I could to the cache of goods I’d hid on an island in a nearby river. In that cache there was a big Monarch of the Plains Stetson, creamy white, like the scouts in the illustrated dime novels wore.
When the ponies was all loaded I let out a yell and a whoop, clapped on that ridiculous hat, and climbed up into the saddle. I tugged the leadrope and we forded the river and we was off to the high Rockies and the gold and silver and Indians, grizzly bears, buffalo, and hidden cities of houses with silver roofs and doorknobs of rubies and sapphires.
I didn’t even look back.
It was about the early fall, the wind was crisp, and there was a line of black thunderheads on the far horizon. The wind was suddenly sweet with rain and the world was washed new. I was free and found and going where I did not know, but would when I got there.
Well, the I-did-not-know part was right. First off the storm approaching was a hailstorm such as are common in the High Plains, and chunks of ice weighing five pounds and up come down like Grant on Vicksburg, at fatal velocities. I run my stock up under a cutbank and we made it just fine till the hail knocked the cutbank down on us. The storm was passed by then and I was able to struggle free of the sand and grass roots and got my saddle horse and one packhorse free but the other one smothered. This meant I had to leave some of my traps and truck.
Well, I got rid of the folding rubber bathtub and the leather cases of canned anchovies, sardines, tomatoes, corned beef, and tongue, and the folding grille and the wicker hamper with the tea service and cheese planes and silverware in it. Never a feller to know when a nice wheel of Stilton might come poking up out of the prairie like some mushroom, and refined ladies to go with it.
I set three
bottles of port down on a stump for some lucky soul. I abandoned the hammock—good thing, too, the next suitable tree was seven hundred miles straight ahead—and the mosquito netting and patented snake stick for the murtheration of cobras and anacondas. I kept all the guidebooks, which I found out later was written mostly by failed poets in opium trances who never got more’n a day’s travel from the Atlantic Ocean. I tossed the mandolin in the bushes with heavy heart.
Well, the storm had passed and the sun was down and the stars was out. I took a fix through the patented prismatic engineer’s compass I had bought and went west.
It didn’t feel like due west, though, so I got mad and figured the compass was broke and pitched it off in the buffalo grass. I found a trail and I rode along under the starlight, my big white hat a good four feet above the grass. The wind was sweet and the stars was bright and I was happy as only ignorant fools can be. Anybody who cared to could see me easy five miles at night and at twenty miles during the day. I rode all night.
The sun come blazin’ up behind me and I knew I was headed west. I come on my own horse tracks but thought it was another party on the way west and when the trail forked I went left where the other folks went right. I didn’t want to crowd them, you see. I followed the sun.
Just about two hours before it went down I come to a little river all hung over with willows. The clear water wound slow among lilies and cattails and I sang a few verses of a dirty song I knew and then I off-saddled and unpacked the goods I had kept and I fed a little grain to both horses and hobbled them and gathered firewood and started a fire to boil water for to make the imported Turkish coffee I customarily drank. My boots was a little tight—I was stiff, been in the saddle for more than twenty-four hours—and so I pulled them off using the brass and mother-of-pearl bootjack with my initials on it and then I set down with my back against a stump and went to sleep. Had my hot feet dandled in the cool river water, it was just like the dime novels said.