And Casey would make sure of it, especially after their wedding, which would take place as soon as Scanlon was on his feet again.
Madsen and Thomas swung down from their saddles and looped their reins around the hitch rail in front of the marshal's office.
"I reckon you'll tell us all about it?" Thomas said.
"Sure, if you want to hear the story. The hotel dining room is still open, even though their best waitress is playing nursemaid right now, and they make a good cup of coffee."
Tilghman started across the street, and Thomas and Madsen fell in alongside him.
Three guardians of the law, ready for whatever challenges the wild Oklahoma Territory might have for them.
Author's Note
Although the events in this novel are fictional, they're loosely based on several incidents that occurred in the career of William Tilghman, who really did have an illustrious history as an Old West lawman, serving as deputy sheriff, sheriff, city marshal, chief of police, and deputy U.S. marshal. He wore a lawman's badge, off and on, for more than forty years, and his adventurous life stretched all the way from his days as a buffalo hunter to a stint as writer and director of early silent motion pictures. For more information about this veteran frontiersman, see the excellent, highly readable biography BILL TILGHMAN: MARSHAL OF THE LAST FRONTIER by Floyd Miller.
About the Author
A lifelong Texan, James Reasoner has been a professional writer for more than thirty years. In that time, he has authored several hundred novels and short stories in numerous genres. James is best known for his Westerns, historical novels, and war novels, he is also the author of two mystery novels that have achieved cult classic status, TEXAS WIND and DUST DEVILS. Writing under his own name and various pseudonyms, his novels have garnered praise from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as appearing on the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists. His website is www.jamesreasoner.com
Western Fictioneers Presents
West of the Big River
The Avenging Angel
A Novel Based on the
Life of Orrin Porter Rockwell
Michael Newton
Chapter 1
Utah Territory: March 1, 1858
Facing a bitter wind, his wide-brimmed hat pulled low and tied beneath his chin, long hair whipping away behind, the rider offered up a silent prayer of thanks as Salt Lake City rose before him from the trackless desert. He was cold and weary, feeling every one of his forty-four years and nine months, craving nothing so much as a hot meal and deep tub of water to match. His buckskin garb and heavy fleece-lined coat helped with the wind, but only to a point. His Appaloosa gelding bore the brunt of it without complaint, trailing a dead man draped across the saddle of a roan.
At least it wasn't snowing yet, and while the sharp wind off the Wasatch Mountains stung the rider's face, it kept the man he'd killed from going ripe too soon.
The dead man—Heber Skousen—could have chosen to surrender, but the end result would still have been the same. He'd been accused of murder, three eyewitnesses prepared to testify against him, and conviction meant an act of blood atonement for his soul's sake. Skousen hadn't cared to face a court and firing squad, preferred to try his luck with pistols, only to discover that he had none left.
It still surprised the rider that his quarry had not recognized him, walking into camp at sundown with the fire's light on his bearded face. He was a well-known figure in the territory, and particularly in the capital at Salt Lake City: three full inches over six feet tall, with dark hair pulled back from a high forehead and falling past his shoulder blades. It wasn't vanity that made him think the fugitive should know his face by sight, just common sense.
Few other members of the church and state that served it had achieved the fame—some said, the notoriety—of Orrin Porter Rockwell.
Still, there'd been no hint of recognition in the killer's eyes when he had welcomed Rockwell to his fireside. Skousen had given a false name—Jack Sloan—then froze as Rockwell spoke his own, drawing aside his coat's lapel to bare the U.S. marshal's badge he wore pinned to his buckskin shirt. The same move cleared one of his Colt Navy revolvers, situated for a cross-hand draw, its seven-inch barrel tucked under his gun belt.
Skousen's pistol wasn't showing, but he tried to reach it anyhow, cursing and fumbling underneath his jacket. Rockwell sat and watched him struggle, likely could have reached across the fire and clubbed him senseless with the Colt, but what would be the point? Dead here, or dead in Salt Lake City ten days hence. What difference did it make?
He'd waited until Skousen had the pistol in his hand—the Colt Dragoon he'd used to kill a shopkeeper in Bountiful—then drew and drilled his forehead with a shot at point-blank range. The Colt Navy's slug was relatively small, only .36 caliber to the Dragoon's .44, but more than large enough to do its job. Skousen was dead before his shoulders hit the cold, hard ground, and he had barely twitched thereafter.
Rockwell did feel sorry for the killer's roan mare, forced to haul his carcass back some eighty-odd miles through the Wasatch range and desert, over ground it had already covered heading eastward. Not the horse's fault. Its owner should have known that there was no escaping from the vengeance of the Lord, in this world or the next.
When he was close enough to smell the city, Rockwell let his thoughts range on ahead of him, plotting what he should do once he'd delivered Skousen's body to the chief of police. Rockwell had no family to deal with at the moment, having left his first wife and their three children in Missouri, twelve years earlier. Luana Beebe Rockwell had quickly found another husband and was sealed to him within a week of Rockwell's lighting out, which put his mind at ease and let him deal with business more pragmatically. He might decide to marry sometime in the future, yet again, but would not be encumbered with a gang of thirty-odd like Prophet Joseph Smith, much less the forty-nine who trailed around behind the governor.
What he required this evening was, first, a bath, and then a good hot meal, perchance at Burtis Cloward's restaurant. Beyond that, he looked forward to a night's sleep in his own bed, without smelling horses or the dead man he'd been hauling for the past five days.
* * *
Rockwell entered Salt Lake City from the eastern end of Temple Street, feeling the change from dirt to cobble stones under his horse's hooves. The street was wide and lined with tall, well-tended trees—no minor undertaking in the middle of a desert, where the nearest lake was saltier than any ocean on the globe.
The heart of town was Temple Square, picked out by Brigham Young himself upon arrival of the Saints, eleven years ago. A wall had been erected to surround it soon thereafter, the beginning of a tabernacle, followed shortly by construction of a Council House in 1852, for governance of Deseret—now Utah Territory—and in 1855 the city's first true public building, the Endowment House, used for administering temple rituals until the mammoth tabernacle was completed, sometime in the future. Its plot had not been dedicated until February 1853, with the corner stone laid two months later.
Some might have asked what took so long, but they'd be unfamiliar with the troubled history of Rockwell's faith. He had been a child of seven years, and ignorant, when Prophet Joseph Smith received his First Vision in 1820, only seventeen when he was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at Canandaigua, New York. The Gentile persecution had begun that same year, 1830, driving the Saints first into Ohio, then to Jackson County, Missouri, where Rockwell had married Luana Beebe at the Big Blue settlement, in February 1832. By October of the next year, vigilante forces had expelled the Saints from the community they'd dubbed New Zion, with the bulk of them retreating to Kirtland, Ohio.
They'd built a temple there, with some degree of opulence, but schism in the ranks drove the majority to try Missouri once again, in 1837, hoping Gentile attitudes had changed. They hadn't, even though the Saints had tried their luck in Caldwell County that time, with a settlement they called Far West.
Harassment had continued, and Rockwell had enlisted with the Danites—Prophet Smith's "avenging angels"—when their order was founded in June of 1838. A month later, he'd been ordained as an LDS deacon. Tension had turned to shooting during August, escalating through October, until Governor Lilburn Boggs had issued Executive Order No. 44, declaring that "the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace." After the Haun's Mill Massacre, Major General Samuel Lucas of the state militia had laid siege to Far West, compelling the Saints to surrender on November 1.
Prophet Smith and sixty other leaders of the church had been convicted of treason that same day, General Lucas scheduling their mass execution for the next morning, but General Alexander Doniphan defied that order, threatening mutiny if it was carried out. Embarrassed, Lucas had surrendered his prisoners for trial in civil court, with the list of defendants shortened to Smith and four others. Convicted once again, the five had managed to escape on April 15, 1839, with the connivance of their guards, while being transferred from Clay County's jail to state prison. Investigators later claimed the sheriff and his deputies were drunk on duty, but the truth was that the break had been permitted to relieve Missouri's governor from federal reprisals for his now-notorious extermination order.
After their getaway, Smith and the others joined the Saints who'd fled Missouri in the nearby town of Commerce, Illinois. Rockwell was there to greet them, joining the celebration, and remaining when they bought the town in April 1840, changing its name to Nauvoo. Taken from Hebrew, in the fifty-second chapter of Isaiah, that translated as "How beautiful upon the mountains." Four years after their arrival, there were some twelve thousand Saints in town, with Nauvoo rivaling Chicago on Lake Michigan, for size. Its residents were hopeful that their faith might find a more humane reception from its neighbors.
Wrong again.
As the LDS population increased, non-Mormons in the nearby towns of Carthage and Warsaw began agitating against them, convinced that the church was a threat to their power within Hancock County. They may have been right, in political terms, since the Saints voted more or less in lock-step—or they had, until the early part of 1844. That January, William Law had fallen out with Prophet Smith over the principle of plural marriage, drawing off some like-minded dissenters into a splinter sect they called the True Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Law's newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor, published a single issue blasting Smith, before the city council voted it a public nuisance and empowered Smith to have the press destroyed. Rockwell had been among those who performed that duty, on June 10, and thereby struck a spark that had disastrous results.
Smith was arrested with his brother, Hyrum, and the other city council members on June 25, confined at Carthage pending trial on charges of riot and treason, but they never had their day in court. On June 27, two hundred Gentiles with blackened faces stormed the Carthage jail and shot both brothers in their cell, then tried to take the Prophet's head for bounty. Rockwell couldn't vouch for claims that lightning drove the lynchers off, since he had missed the whole event and still regretted failing to arrive and intervene.
Or die in the attempt.
What followed was another in the string of so-called "Mormon wars," this one in Illinois, where legislators had revoked the Nauvoo charter in January 1845. The town survived a while in spite of that, and Rockwell was ordained there, as a high priest of the church, on January 5, 1846. Ex-wife Luana was sealed to second husband Alpheus Cutler nine days later, with no hard feelings voiced on either side. By then, Rockwell was standing guard for Brigham Young, President of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, and when the church moved west en masse, Rockwell had been a member of the Vanguard Company that broke the Mormon Trail.
A long and bitter thirteen hundred miles that was, from Winter Quarters north of Omaha to Salt Lake Valley, then in territory claimed by Mexico. It took the better part of three months to deliver 444 Saints and three black servants, losing none along the way despite a rash of mountain fever borne by fat, blood-sucking ticks. The exodus from Nauvoo had begun in earnest then, bringing two thousand Saints to Salt Lake City by year's end.
The rest was history.
* * *
Police Chief Jeremiah Fordyce was a stocky man, mid-forties, with a sour attitude and face to match, as if the troubles he witnessed daily were too much for him to swallow and they'd started festering inside him. Coming out at sight of Rockwell through his office window, he was putting on his black hat, polishing his chief's badge with his fingers.
"Marshal Rockwell."
"Chief Fordyce."
"That be Heber Skousen underneath the tarpaulin?"
"The very same."
"No point in asking whether he surrendered."
"He did not."
"Hmm."
"I'll leave him in your hands, then, and await my just reward."
"Reward?"
"A hundred dollars, I recall, was offered by the victim's kinfolk."
"Hmm."
"You said that."
"What?"
"Shall I collect from you, or talk to them in Bountiful?"
"I'll see you get what's coming to you, Marshal," Fordyce said.
And why not? Rockwell thought. His pay was meager, and deputies couldn't collect rewards offered by the federal government, on grounds that they drew salaries for tracking fugitives. On the other hand, rewards posted by private parties—individuals, some business, or a town—were all fair game.
Rockwell was turning from the chief, leading his horse, when Fordyce called out to his back, or maybe to the Appaloosa's rump, "The governor sent word he wants to see you."
"Fine," Rockwell replied, not slowing down. "I'll get washed up, something to eat."
"I got the sense he didn't want to wait. His messenger said urgent. Said it twice, in fact."
Rockwell stopped then and faced Fordyce. "What's it about?" he asked.
"Man didn't say," Fordyce replied, with something like a half smile. "Just said urgent. Twice."
Chapter 2
Going to see the governor could turn out good or bad. The urgent bit suggested that whatever Brigham Young might have in mind for Rockwell, it would not be pleasant. Then again, when was he ever called, except when there was trouble in the wind?
It wouldn't be the Utes. They'd been accepting of the Saints to start with, in the first six years or so of Deseret, then started pushing back at fresh incursions on their hunting grounds and slaughtered a Pacific Railroad survey party back in 1853, sparking what most whites called the Walker War because the Ute Chief, Colorow Walkara, also sometimes went by "Wakara" or "Walker." The six-month struggle wasn't much, as wars went, some two dozen killed on either side, and it had ended with the chief and his survivors being baptized in the church, summer of 1854. Baptism likely didn't take, in Rockwell's view, since when Walkara died in 1855, his wives, children, and fifteen horses got the hatchet and were buried with him, so he wouldn't have to roam around the Happy Hunting Ground alone.
If there was urgent trouble, Rockwell thought, it likely stemmed from Washington, where high and mighty Gentiles had their noses out of joint, trying to lord it over Utah territory and the Saints. Things had been peaceful in the State of Deseret until the Compromise of 1850 had established Utah Territory in its place, the residents allowed to vote on slavery despite their living well above the northern boundary for slave states Congress had established twenty years before. Of course, the federals reserved the right to name leading officials in the territory, from the governor on down. President Fillmore got it right, appointing Brigham Young as governor, but the supreme court of the territory had two Gentile judges stacked against one Saint, and other offices were filled with carpetbaggers whose disdain for Mormon culture and the principle of plural marriage was notorious. By autumn 1851, three of the worst—two judges and Territorial Secretary Broughton Harris—had fled for home, claiming fear of assassination. They'd also stolen the terr
itorial seal and $24,000 earmarked for public improvements, but Governor Young had declined Rockwell's offer to follow them and bring the money back, bloodstained or otherwise.
Matters had gone downhill from there, until James Buchanan took office as president in March 1857. He'd waited barely three months to mobilize troops under Colonel Edmund Alexander, marching to suppress a supposed rebellion in Utah Territory. Governor Young retaliated with a vow that Danite guerrillas would "bite the heels" of any federal troops who misbehaved within his jurisdiction, while Buchanan named a Gentile, Alfred Cumming, to replace Young as governor. Young considered secession, declared martial law, and revived the dormant Nauvoo Legion to repulse invaders. In the midst of all that, on September 15, longtime Mormon John Doyle Lee had led militiamen in slaughtering the Baker-Fancher wagon train at Mountain Meadows, killing some 120 emigrants in all. Reporting back to Young, Lee blamed Ute renegades for the attack, then spread the word that he had killed the travelers—"reluctantly," he claimed—on secret orders from the governor.
A lie that that Rockwell hoped to punish, soon as he was given leave to act.
The fumbling "Utah War" had stalled at that point, winter coming on, while the negotiators tried to work things out. Without an enemy to take the field against, Rockwell was left to do his duty as a U.S. marshal, tracking fugitives and bringing them to book, dead or alive.
Until now, when the governor demanded his attention.
Urgently.
* * *
The Council House was square, two stories tall, its sloping roof surmounted by a widow's walk of sorts, sprouting a cupola on top, complete with flagpole. A white picket fence, six feet tall, surrounded the property, its gate aligned with the building's entrance and guarded, these days, by members of the Nauvoo Legion.
West of the Big River: Boxed Set of Eight Western Novels Page 10