The Fourth Perspective

by Robert Greer

  The vaulted, open room that greeted him was musty but well lit. Three gigantic Tiffany chandeliers hung from the ceiling, and claw-footed antique oak tables filled with books, ephemera, and artifacts encircled at least half of the fifty-by-fifty-foot room. Two glass-fronted cases containing plaques, photographs, tapestries, and a dozen or so old fur trappers hats sat at the room’s center. The walls were adorned with photographs of women riding horseback, hunting, driving race cars, holding test tubes, and standing at lecterns.

  A half-open door with an off-kilter overhead transom occupied the center of the back wall. A set of keys hung from the door lock. “Be with you in a minute,” a woman’s voice called authoritatively from the back of the room. It took Billy a moment to realize the greeting had come from a tiny, stoop-shouldered woman who was sitting almost out of sight just in front of a five-foot-high chest of drawers to the left of the door with the keys. When the woman, her head barely even with the top of the chest, moved to greet him, Billy saw that on her right foot she was wearing a shiny black orthopedic shoe with a three-inch-high built-up heel and sole. She looked to be in her mid- to late forties, and she walked with the barest hint of a limp.

  “How can I help you?” she said, stopping a few paces away.

  “I’m just having a look around,” Billy said noncommittally. “Interesting place.”

  “I’d like to think so, and please do—look, that is. I’m Loretta Sheets. I curate the museum,” she added proudly.

  “Pleasure.” Without announcing his own name, Billy reached out and shook the dark-haired bifocaled woman’s hand, wondering why his bartender friend had described the seemingly pleasant woman in such demonic terms.

  “How long has the museum been here?” Billy asked, releasing his grip on her exceptionally warm hand.

  Eyeing Billy intently, as if trying her best to place him, she said, “Eleven years in this location. I was over on Lincolnway three years before that. Are you from around here?”

  “Nope. Baggs.”

  Loretta Sheets’s eyes lit up. “Butch Cassidy and the Great Train Robbery country. Believe it or not, as long as I’ve lived in this state, I’ve only been to Baggs once. But I’m aware that it’s a place filled with lots of history.” She cleared her throat as if preparing to begin a lecture. “Were you aware that when Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid pulled off the Belle Fourche robbery in the Black Hills in 1897, they had help from a woman? And she wasn’t that pretty little schoolmarm that Hollywood depicted in that terrible movie. Her name was Lucinda Frewen, a cousin to the famous Frewen brothers of the Powder River Cattle Company.”

  “The ones with the 76 cattle brand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Never knew that.”

  “There’s a lot of people don’t know about women,” said Sheets, now eyeing Billy as if she knew him but couldn’t place his name. She stepped to her right, picked up a clear plastic folder filled with postcards and photographs of Little America, a Cheyenne-based I-80 gas station, truck stop, and motel that was arguably the largest gas station in the world, and handed it to Billy. “Little America, for instance. It was started by a woman.”

  “Didn’t know that.” Billy eyed the folder’s contents, handed it back to Sheets, and waited for the punch line.

  “Sure was. The brainchild of the wife of the original owner. He was just a gas jockey. She was the one with vision.” Sheets grinned. “Vision enough to parlay what started out as just a little truck stop into a twenty-million-dollar business.”

  “No argument here,” said Billy. Realizing that if he didn’t quickly cut to the chase, he’d have Loretta Sheets lecturing him on the untouted deeds of women for the rest of the morning, Billy said in a downhill rush of words, “Got any daguerreotypes around? Amanda Hunter said I should drop in and have a look, and that while I was at it, I should get an expert’s lowdown on the value of her Uncle Jake’s collection.”

  “Oh, did she?” Sheets eyed Billy with a clear hint of recognition. “Got any proof as to who you are, Mr. DeLong?”

  Startled that he’d been made, Billy said, “Just my driver’s license.”

  Sheets smiled. “That’s okay. I’ve got something that’ll suffice. Why don’t you follow me?”

  Billy trailed the tiny woman to a card table stacked high with clear plastic Tupperware containers that were filled with pamphlets. Sheets picked up a container that was labeled in bold black letters, 1980–1985, popped the top, eyed Billy, and said, “Wyoming Cattleman’s Association newsletters. They go back more than twenty years. It’s here somewhere,” she said, flipping through the newsletters. “Yes, here it is.” She slipped an insert out of one of the newsletters and handed it to Billy.

  Billy broke into a smile as he thumbed through the pamphlet’s familiar pages. “Price of cattle’s gone way up since they printed this thing.” He stopped at page twelve, where there was a full-page photograph of him standing next to his now deceased quarter horse, Smokey. A banner headline above the photograph read, “Wyoming Cattleman’s Association’s Cattleman of the Year—Billy DeLong.”

  “Knew I’d seen you somewhere before,” said Sheets. “Just needed a little time for things inside my head to click. Heck of a story in there about you,” she said, eyeing the pamphlet. “Some of it sounds a little—if I can say this without offending—well, Hollywood.” Sheets smiled, primed to deliver her punch line. “But I’m told by the woman who edited that story, a woman who still edits the newsletter, by the way, that the Cattleman’s Association bulletin deals only in fact.”

  Realizing now why a story about a man had found its way into the Equal Rights Western Heritage Museum, Billy said, “Appreciate the history lesson. So now that my credentials are in order, do you think I could get a rundown on those daguerreotypes and Covington?”

  “Sure thing.” Sheets glanced toward the museum’s entrance, where a tubby man and a young girl stood. “Let me take care of them, and I’ll be right back.”

  Billy thumbed through the pamphlet, recalling his often turbulent but rewarding days as a top-rung ranch foreman. He remained the only black man in the history of Wyoming to be named Cattleman of the Year and only the second man in the state’s history to receive that honor not as a cattle owner and producer but as a foreman. He’d been at the top of his game back then—back when he could gauge the weight of a first-calf heifer or a rambunctious yearling within a couple of pounds while on horseback from a good thirty yards away. Back when he still had twenty-twenty vision and both of his eyes—back before insulin shots and wounds that hadn’t healed quite right had become his penance for consuming too much Johnnie Walker Black for too many years. He eyed the pamphlet nostalgically one last time before setting it aside.

  Loretta Sheets was back, two $20 bills clutched in her right hand, before Billy knew it. “The young girl collects old-time pulp novels with women protagonists. I find them and sell them to her.”

  “Looks like her daddy’s hanging right in there with her,” said Billy as he watched the girl and the man walk out of the museum hand in hand.

  “The man with her is her grandfather,” said Sheets. “Her father’s in jail for beating her mother to death last month.”

  Billy simply shook his head.

  “My sentiments exactly. Men. Sometimes I wonder if they’re really human beings,” Sheets said matter-of-factly. She slipped the $20 bills into a jeans pocket and dusted off her hands dismissively. “Now, back to those Covington daguerreotypes. How can I help?”

  “Amanda says that you once put a value on the stash of her uncle’s daguerreotypes she’s got out at the Triangle Bar.”

  “Sure did. A year or so ago. Somewhere around a hundred thousand.”

  “Did you know somebody tried to break into her place about six months back? She thinks they were probably after the photos,” said Billy.

  “Sure did. But I think Amanda’s wrong about what they were after, and I’ve told her that. Whoever tried to break in out there wasn’t after bunche
s of photos, Mr. DeLong. They were more than likely after a single photo, and an impeccable, irreplaceable piece of American history, if in fact the photo exists.”

  “Go on,” said Billy, deciding not to let Sheets in on the fact just yet that he was the Wyoming arm of a team that was investigating a murder.

  “There’s been speculation in academia and in the railroad collectibles community for years that Jacob Covington was present at the 1869 joining-of-the-rails ceremony at Utah’s Promontory Summit, when the Golden Spike commemorating the completion of the transcontinental railroad was driven. And that he was not only there, but there with his camera. Guess you weren’t expecting that,” said Sheets, drinking in the surprised look on Billy’s face. “Now, let me top things off with a cherry and put it all into historical perspective for you. The ceremony that day marked the completion of the last set of ties and spikes set by construction crews from the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads. The whole affair was disorganized at best, and the crowd that gathered pressed so close to the two train engines that were parked head to head on the final length of rails, the Union Pacific’s Number 119 and the Central Pacific’s Jupiter, that reporters could barely see or hear what was actually said.”

  “I see,” said Billy. “In other words, there’s lots of different versions of what actually happened that day besides what’s in the history books.”

  “Exactly. But some things remain indisputable. The two train engines were lined up facing one another on the tracks, separated by the width of only one rail. And at twelve-forty-seven p.m., the actual last spike, an ordinary iron spike, not a golden one, was driven into a railroad tie. Now, that’s where Jacob Covington and the other photographs of the event come in,” said Sheets, watching the anticipatory look on Billy’s face broaden.

  “Three important photographs—photographs that are now world famous—arose out of the Golden Spike ceremony. One by Alfred Hart, a photographer hired by Leland Stanford, president of the Central Pacific Railroad, to make a record in still film of the construction of the entire transcontinental railroad process. A second by Colonel C. R. Savage, most notable for his documentation of Mormon involvement, or the absence of it, in the transcontinental railway process, and the third and most famous by Andrew Russell, primary photographer for the Union Pacific Railroad. The photographs all show essentially the same thing: the Jupiter and Number 119 sitting nose to nose with one another, pilots touching, as the two competing railroad crews form a wedge radiating out toward the camera from the two engines’ point of contact. Men atop each engine, clinging to the smokestacks, can be seen hoisting bottles of champagne high in the air as down on the tracks the two chief project engineers, Samuel Montague of the Central Pacific and General Grenville Dodge of the Union Pacific, clasp hands across the very last tie at their feet.”

  Billy nodded, capturing the scene in his mind’s eye. He paused as if memorizing a phone number, then said, “So if all three photographers shot pretty much the same picture, what’s so special about Jacob Covington’s photo? If it even exists?”

  “That, Mr. DeLong, is the grand and glorious rub. If there is a Covington photograph, and if it still exists, it would undeniably be a daguerreotype. A daguerreotype of one of the most significant events in American history. A photograph done in a dying art form, not a wet plate, as were the photos of Hart, Savage, and Russell. And a photo shot by someone recognized today as having a significant body of very impressive but underappreciated work. In other words, the photograph would represent that needle-in-a-haystack kind of confluence of circumstances that historians and serious collectors are always looking for.”

  “What makes you think there really is a missin’ Covington daguerreotype of the Golden Spike ceremony?”

  “What else, Mr. DeLong? A woman. Like most of the photographers of that time, Jacob Covington didn’t operate alone. He couldn’t have. He required an assistant. Regardless of the process you were using at that time—wet print, the precursor of the modern photo we know today, with its all-important negative, or daguerreotyping—the process of producing an image was time consuming. Under the circumstances, producing a Golden Spike ceremony daguerreotype would have been exceptionally difficult. Daguerreotype cameras were awkward and cumbersome. Simply preparing the photo plate to accept an image could take twenty minutes or more. The exposures that were required were at least two to eight minutes, and the developing, fixing, and gilding of the daguerreotype itself was a five- to ten-minute chemically dependent process. Finally, the hand-coloring of the image and the all-important step of protecting and preserving the finished product demanded a final tedious five minutes.” Loretta Sheets smiled. “In order to get it just right, one almost certainly had to rely on the skills of a helper, an assistant or a companion. And in Jacob Covington’s case, that person was a woman.”

  “I get the drift,” said Billy. “Who was she?”

  “No one knows for sure, and I haven’t been able to pin it down exactly in over twenty years of researching the subject, but the closest anyone has come to determining who Covington’s assistant was, appeared in an early-1980s scholarly article out of the University of Montana. According to the paper’s author, the assistant was a full-blooded Sioux Indian and a direct descendant of the famous Sioux Chief Red Cloud. The only written record of who she might have been comes from a post-Golden Spike ceremony letter of Covington’s that was found in the floorboards of a hotel that burned to the ground in Helena, Montana, in the 1880s. In that letter Covington stated that a Sioux Indian woman named Sweet Owl, who, and I’m quoting pretty closely here, was skilled in the mixing of chemicals and gifted with a panoramic eye equal to that of a camera, assisted him with his photography until she disappeared after helping him at the Promontory Summit ceremony.”

  “And there’s no mention of her anywhere else?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Billy pondered the new information and wondered why Amanda Hunter hadn’t mentioned any of this to him. “Does Amanda know any of this?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Hmmm. How’d you stumble onto it?”

  “I didn’t, Mr. DeLong.” Loretta Sheets’s tone became indignant. “Before I was a museum curator, I was a history professor over in Laramie at the University of Wyoming. I have a Ph.D. in American history, and my oft-cited dissertation, ‘Women in Nineteenth-Century American Transportation,’ is considered a seminal work.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No problem,” said Sheets. “Look at how difficult it was for me to peg you as a famous cowman.”

  “Touché,” said Billy with a wink. “But photography’s a pretty good stretch from transportation, don’t you think?”

  “Not when you’re dealing with the intricacies of a dissertation involving the entire history of American transportation. There’s no way that photography couldn’t be a part of that discussion.”

  “Where’d you do your studies?”

  “The University of Colorado.”

  “Got your dissertation handy?” asked Billy.

  “Yes. But only if you answer a question for me before I dig it up.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Explain to me why a break-in at the Triangle Bar Ranch would garner so much attention and send you here to the museum on what can only be described as some kind of investigation when, according to Amanda Hunter, the would-be robbers left empty-handed.”

  “Fair enough,” said Billy. “If you’ll tell me what that needle-in-a-haystack missin’ daguerreotype, if it exists, might be worth.”

  “It would be invaluable.”

  “Put a number on it for me,” Billy insisted.

  “Let’s see. An 1869 wet-plate photo done at the actual laying-of-the-rails ceremony by Russell, the priciest of the whole known triumvirate, would go for about two hundred thousand. And believe it or not, there’re still some of them around. Bottom line, however, is that unlike a daguerreotype, the photo still wouldn’t be one of a kind.”
/>   “What about a negative of the event? Wouldn’t one of them be worth a pretty penny?”

  Sheets shook her head. “No. In the world of photography, it’s the original authenticated work from 1869 that has value, not the negative. Heck, they make prints of the Golden Spike ceremony today from readily available negatives that sell on the Internet for twelve ninety-five. The key to the photo’s value is whether the print was actually done in 1869.”

  “Still need a bottom line on that price,” said Billy.

  Sheets paused. She looked skyward, deep in thought, and said, “A million—a million and a half. Even more if someone can validate the role that Sweet Owl played in the photo’s production.”

  Billy let out a lengthy whistle. “Serious money.”

  “And then some. Let me get my dissertation for you,” Sheets said proudly, walking away and limping much more noticeably than when Billy had first entered the museum.

  Billy picked up a book, African American Women in Twentieth-Century Medicine, from a nearby table and began thumbing through it. Loretta Sheets returned, dissertation in hand, before he could finish reading the three-page introduction.

  “Here you are,” she said, handing Billy her bound 180-page dissertation. “Read it and weep. Now, since you still haven’t told me what all the fuss is about, besides a phantom photograph and a minor break-in, mind setting the record straight?”

  “Murder,” said Billy, his eyes locked on hers.

  Sheets took a half step backward. “What?”

  “You wanted the facts,” Billy said with a shrug. “A few days ago a kid named Luis Del Mora was murdered down in Denver.” Billy studied Sheets’s face carefully, trying to judge whether the look of shock on her face was genuine. “Del Mora was more than likely killed because he was carryin’ around a book that had that high-dollar, needle-in-a-haystack daguerreotype you’ve been talkin’ about strapped to the back cover.”