Absaroka Ambush

by William W. Johnstone

  The ladies scampered back to their wagons and Preacher hopped down and came face to face with Lieutenant Worthington.

  “I was trying to get your attention ...”

  “I seen you out there hoppin’ up and down like a bee-stung bear,” Preacher said. “I figured you had to pee, ’way you was actin’.”

  “Now see here, Preacher. I represent the United States Army. I ...”

  “I got to go, boy. I got wagons to inspect. You go sharpen your saber or something. We’ll talk ’fore we stretch ’em out. I can’t see no way to avoid it.”

  Preacher left him standing with his mouth open, momentarily speechless. Which for Lt. Rupert Worthington, of the Virginia Worthingtons, was a very distressing experience.

  “They look pretty good to me,” Blackjack said.

  It was the evening before the wagons would roll out from the last large pocket of civilization for hundreds of miles. The men were lounging around a fire, drinking coffee and talking. All the men were there, including Lieutenant Worthington and his small troop. Of the civilians hired to accompany the wagons, there was Nick, Sam, Jake, Dan, Frank, Barnaby, Teale, Gabe, Hugh, and Upton. They ranged in age from about forty to fifty. Preacher had wanted no young studs along; not with this many females. There would have sure been trouble with young men along.

  “Yeah, they do,” Upton said, then smiled. “Twenty-five men and a hundred and fifty odd women, settin’ out to do something that ain’t never been done ’fore. You think the history books will write about this a hundred years from now?”

  “What difference will it make to us then?” Charlie asked lazily, his head on his saddle. “We won’t be nothin’ but dust in the ground. Providin’ we’re lucky enough to get a proper buryin’ that is.”

  “You do have a point,” Preacher said. “Rupert, what do you think?”

  The question startled Rupert; he was so accustomed to Preacher ignoring him. “Why . . . yes, I do believe history will record this journey. After all, we do have Miss Crump along. And I’m fair bursting with excitement myself at just the thought of it. It’s going to be quite the grand adventure indeed.”

  The mountain men had decided to try to be as nice to the young lieutenant as possible, so they hid their smiles and did not look at one another after his remark.

  “Well, Rupert,” Preacher said as civilly as possible. “You damn sure right about that.”

  It was going to be an adventure all right. With mosquitoes in some places as big as bats, rattlesnakes and scorpions, swollen rivers, hostile Indians, gangs of thugs and murderers, heat and dust and boredom, mud and rockslides, and the seemingly never-ending western horizon that they all had seen drive some men into raving lunatics. Not to mention driving rains that would slow them down to a crawl, or sometimes to a complete halt. For the next three or four hundred miles, Pawnee, considered to be the best horse thieves in the world, would be slipping around trying to steal their livestock. There would be guns going off accidentally, blowing holes in people. Axes slipping and causing hideous wounds. People with twisted ankles, fevers, busted fingers and toes, tempers flaring as the trail got longer.

  Oh, yeah. It was going to be quite the grand adventure.

  Rupert got up to go check on something or the other. He was always checking on something and writing things down in a book, and his men left with him. Ring cut his eyes to Preacher.

  “A grand adventure, Preach?”

  Preacher tossed the dregs of his coffee onto the ground. “Yeah,” he said with a sigh. “Ain’t that what they all say startin’ out?”

  Five

  In the years to come, the methods of pushing wagons west would change, little of it for the better. Wagon masters would have sentries firing guns at four in the morning to awaken the sleeping pioneers—a rather stupid practice in Indian country when in the very next minute, every grain of powder and lead might be needed in a fight for life. They would have bugles blowing to form the line and many wagon trains would stretch out for several miles.

  But Preacher and those few other mountain men who would agree to lead wagons west would have none of that nonsense. In the years ahead, the danger of Indian attacks would lessen to near zero, but for those first few movers West—about which little has been written until now—Indian attacks were the norm, rather than the exception.

  Preacher had gone over the supplies; not just the list of what every wagon should contain, but personally checking over each wagon’s contents. On foodstuffs he checked everything from eggs and molasses to sugar and hardtack. He made certain the wagons contained extra augers, shovels, oxbows, linchpins, and gimlets. He ordered the man from Washington to provide additional wagons and drivers, the extra wagons containing barrels of axle grease, spare ox-yokes, tents and blankets, powder and shot, hammers and nails, and rope and trading goods to placate the Indians. Oscar, Sid, and Felix were the new drivers, all seasoned hands with reins. Preacher put some of the older kids in charge of the spare mounts, mules, and cattle . . . but always with adult supervision.

  The day before they pulled out, starting well before dawn, Preacher rousted out the sleepy-eyed women and went through each wagon with a fast but unrelenting vengeance, ordering heavy chest of-drawers, iron stoves, and huge grandfather clocks to be left behind. That move didn’t endear him to the hearts of some of the women, but he told the ladies to either get rid of the crap or stay behind.

  They all got rid of it.

  The wagons were all new and well-made of hardwoods, each wagon four feet wide by twelve feet long. Each wagon carried spare canvas and spare parts such as iron tires, spokes, and tongues.

  If there was anything Preacher missed, he didn’t know what it was.

  On the morning of the pullout, Lieutenant Worthington rode about the camp singing, “Oh my darlin’, to the West we go,” to the melody from My Darling Clementine, until Preacher told him if he sang it one more time he’d jerk him off his horse and stuff a rag in his mouth.

  A bit crestfallen, Rupert shut up.

  At 5:00 A.M., after breakfast and after everything was packed up, Preacher rode up to the lead wagon—which he had personally chosen—being driven by Eudora Hempstead and Cornelia Biggers—the third person, in the bed of the wagon, was a woman named Anne—and spoke to them.

  “We have a fair wind blowing, Eudora?” he asked the woman with a smile.

  “She’ll puff the mainsails and move us right along, Captain,” the tall and handsome woman replied, also with a smile on her lips in the predawn hours.

  “Be you excited, Eudora?”

  “I’d be telling a big whacker if I said no.”

  “I’ll set an easy pace for the next two days. That’ll work the kinks out and settle everybody in. I don’t figure to make more than twenty miles ’fore we stop for some rifle and pistol practice. That close to the fort I don’t expect any Injun trouble. But you just never know.” He rode on, pausing every now and then to stop and talk to the ladies on the wagon seats.

  Faith Crump was riding with Gayle Hawkins and a lady named Wallis.

  “It’s a barbaric hour,” Faith complained. “Why, the sun isn’t even up.”

  “It’ll rise,” Preacher told her. “It always does.” He smiled at Gayle and rode on.

  Over the past few days Preacher had learned from the president’s man that Faith came from a very wealthy family—her father owned ships, railroads, newspapers, banks, and the like—and that Faith was known as a very headstrong, opinionated, and outspoken young lady (Preacher had already known that), and that her father had agreed to her coming on this trip just to get her out of the house and give him some relief. Faith had started her own monthly magazine back East and was very strong in the women’s right to vote movement. She and many of her friends and coworkers had been arrested several times for bellying up to the bar and demanding service in various saloons in Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia. Faith had also been arrested once for telling the mayor of New York City to “Go suck an egg!”
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br />   “Lash that canvas down tighter on the left side and secure it, Maude,” Preacher told a lady. “They’s winds out on the plains that you just won’t believe.”

  “You can’t drive oxen sittin’ on the damn wagon seat, Orabella,” he told another lady. “Get out here and walk. You know better.”

  As the first faint rays of light began streaking the eastern skies, Preacher rode back to the head of the column. “Scouts out?” he asked Charlie.

  “Snake and Blackjack left an hour ago, Preach. The local gospel shouter is here to say a prayer for us.”

  “Good. We need all the help we can get.”

  A minister intoned a short prayer for their safety and then stepped aside.

  Preacher nodded his head. “I guess we got it to do,” he muttered. He twisted in the saddle and shouted, “Stretch ’em out, ladies. Let’s go!”

  Preacher sat his saddle on the south side of the train and watched it slowly rumble past. Because of the mixture of oxen and mules, he figured on any good day of doing no more than twelve miles. Mules could do twenty, but oxen averaged fifteen. So he split the difference. When conditions worsened, either on the trail or because of bad weather, they’d be lucky to do eight in a day. It was a nearly two thousand mile, five and a half month trip any way you wanted to cut it.

  These wagons were called prairie schooners—they were not Conestoga. The Conestogas—which weighed one and a half tons, empty, were developed by Germans in Pennsylvania and used primarily on developed Eastern roads, which could be graded from time to time, taking six to eight mules to pull the loaded wagons. They were far too heavy for the early roadless west.

  When the last wagon had passed and the livestock had been driven by where Preacher sat, the lights of the town on the Missouri border could no longer be seen by Eudora in the lead wagon.

  “Get up there, now. Haw!” Eudora hollered to her team of mules, then muttered, “We have done it now, ladies. May God smile on this venture.”

  For two days the wagons rolled, from first light to one hour before the sun set. Preacher set an easy pace, and at the end of the second day, figured they had covered about twenty-five miles. They had seen no other human beings except their companions on the wagon train. He let the women sleep late the next morning, until 7:00 A.M., and then Preacher rolled them out.

  After breakfast, he pointed to a wagon he’d had pulled in close. “Men’s britches, men’s shirts, and men’s hats,” he told them. “From this point on, half of you are gonna be dressed like men.”

  “Hot damn!” Eudora shouted. “We’re throwing convention to the wind and to hell with what other people think.”

  “That’s for me!” Faith said.

  Preacher had expected a tremendous hue and cry of outrage from the ladies. He got none.

  “Well, I’ll just be damned,” Preacher said to Snake. “How do a man ever figure a woman?”

  “You don’t,” Charlie told him. “Don’t ever try to second-guess no female person. It can’t be done. My daddy tole me that right before I left home, and he shore was right.”

  Eudora took charge and began assigning clothes to the ladies. None of them argued with her, and Preacher knew he’d made a wise choice in naming her wagon boss.

  “Captain,” Eudora called to Preacher; she would call him nothing else, for the moment. After a few months on the trail, they all would be calling him many things, usually under their breath.

  “Wagon boss,” Preacher said, walking up to her.

  “We can’t have the make-believe men having long curls. How about we whack them off? It’ll all grow back time we get to the blue waters.”

  “Good idea. But save the curls and tie them to the barrels of your rifles so’s the Injuns will think it’s scalps.”

  “I do like the way you think, Captain,” Eudora said with a smile. “If I wasn’t bespoken for, you’d be in trouble.”

  “You right sure that feller a-waitin’ for you is man enough to handle you?”

  “If he isn’t, you better keep a sharp eye out on the seas behind you, Captain.”

  The women all roared at that and Preacher laughed and walked away.

  It got deadly serious in a few hours, when Preacher lined them all up for weapons’ practice. It turned out that about half of the women had come from towns and cities and had no idea how to handle any type of weapon.

  “I think we’re gonna be here longer than we furst thought,” Blackjack opined. “Some of them gals don’t even know which end the ball comes out of.”

  “But ain’t they attractive in them men’s britches?” Ned said.

  “Well, we brung more than ample shot and powder,” Preacher replied. “Let’s get to it. But for God’s sake, let’s don’t have no one blowin’ somebody else’s head off accidental.”

  The wagon train stayed where it was for three days, the rolling, seemingly empty, and constantly windblown sea of grass reverberating with the roaring and cracking sounds of gunfire. Some of the ladies took to the guns like they was born to it, others, even after three days of practice, couldn’t hit a barn if they was standin’ inside it.

  Preacher and the other men decided that just about a third of the women would handle the guns, the rest would reload and stand by to put out fires caused by fire-arrows and tend to the kids, livestock, and in case of Indian attack, the wounded, which the mountain men knew was going to happen somewhere up the line. Eudora, to no one’s surprise, turned out to be a crack shot. Faith couldn’t hit a bull in the ass with a bass fiddle.

  “There ain’t no point in wastin’ no more shot and powder,” Preacher said. “We pull out in the mornin’.” A dozen or so women had gathered around him, and Preacher squatted down and brushed a grassless area clean with his hand. With a stick, he started a rough map. “Lookie here, ladies. A couple more days on the trail, and we head northwest. We’ll cross the Kansas and keep headin’ north by northwest until wereach the Platte. We’ll follow that, on the south side of it, until we reach the South Platte. We’ll cross that, and follow the North Platte until we reach this tradin’ post here,” he jabbed at the earth, “that some has taken to callin’ Fort Laramie. From there, we follow the Sweetwater to South Pass, then south to another tradin’ post. From there, we cross the Tetons up to a Hudson’s Bay Company post on the Snake. Next stop is a tradin’ post up here on the Boise—providin’ the Injuns ain’t killed everybody and burned the damn place down. Which they had done more than once. Then we head north through the Blues up to the Whitman Mission. Then west followin’ the Columbia over to the Dalles. Past that, we’re home free and y’all can hitch up with your men and live happy ever after.” He smiled up at them. “Looks easy, don’t it?”

  The women, including Eudora and Faith, did not return his smile. Even after only twenty or so miles, most of the women had discovered that this journey was going to be rough.

  They had no idea how rough.

  The women got their first taste of river crossing at the Kansas. It was running slightly high due to spring rains, and the crossing was rough and for a few, very wet. Some of the women fell off the wagons and into the drink.

  “What the hell are you doin’, Preacher?” Steals Pony asked, riding up. “There is fine crossing only a few miles south of here.”

  “I know it,” Preacher replied. “But I want any quitters to start hollerin’ now. Whilst they can give it up and still get back to Missouri.”

  “But we’ll have to cross the Soldier and the Vermillion on this route,” Snake said.

  “Damn sure will,” Preacher’s tone was firm. “I want to shake down this train right off. If they all can stick it out over the next few days, we’ll know what we’ve got.”

  “You’re a hard man, Preacher,” one of the locals he had hired back in Missouri said. “But I see why you’re doin’ this. I better get over there and help with the ropes.”

  “No, you won’t,” Preacher stopped him. “This crossin’ ain’t nothin’. The water ain’t even hub deep. Let the w
omen handle it. We showed ’em how. Now it’s up to them. I want their muscles hardened up whilst we’re still in more or less friendly country. You local boys ain’t never seen no mountains like we’re gonna have to cross. I want these women tough ’fore we hit ’em.”

  The women began to toughen up, and many of them also got mad. They stood on the bank and watched the men sit in their saddles, staring at them, not lifting a finger to help. Those women who had been raised on farms, or in Eudora’s case, on the coast, and were used to hard work, chuckled at the other ladies, smiled at each other, and simply went to work.

  Many of the women would not cook for the men that evening, much less speak to them. But other women held no hard feelings, so the men got fed. Eudora smiled across the fire at Preacher as he ladled out stew into his pan.

  “You didn’t win any popularity contests this day, Captain,” she said.

  “I didn’t plan on winnin’ no prizes. What I plan on doin’ is gettin’ you ladies through to the coast. We ain’t hit nothin’ yet, Eudora. It’s been a cakewalk so far. But these gals will be a hell of a lot tougher when we get there than when we left. Bet on that.”