Deadville

by Robert F. Jones

  Then one day while we were hunting Norway rats over near the marble quarry, Thump lost her balance and fell down an abandoned lead-mine shaft. That whole countryside was riddled with shafts, like a worm-eaten apple. She survived the tumble, though, and we could hear her frantic barking, echoing up to us from far below. The shoring in the adit was rotten, and even Owney, who usually had no fear of the terrors beneath the earth, was afraid to try a descent. All our efforts to coax her out failed, and we returned home that night despondent.

  For the next two days we returned to the shaft, dropping food to her and hoping she might find her way back up. But we could not drop water, of course, and her yipping grew weaker and weaker. After much soul-searching we decided that to prevent a slow, agonizing death by thirst we had best blow her up. At the general store in Factory Point, Owney purchased a one-pound cannister of gunpowder for seven cents along with a foot of slow fuse for a penny more—all the money we could muster. With tears in our eyes we returned to the mine shaft. Thump was whining from the depths. Without a word, Owney lit the fuse and dropped the can down the hole. We could hear it clattering downward, down, down, down … then a blast, and the earth shook beneath our feet.

  Her cries were heard no more.

  Soon after we got home, though—sadder than we ever had been in our short sorry lives—imagine our surprise when we heard a familiar scratching at the back door. We raced to open it and, yes, there was Thump! Thinner and dirtier than ever, to be sure, but at least alive. The explosion must have blown loose an escape route, and she was able to dig through what rubble was left. Though she emerged in a totally different area from the one where she had fallen in, she nonetheless found her way home in no time. That little terrier had an uncanny bump of direction, and all the heart in the world.

  And then when Da lost his quarryman’s job—he had inhaled marble dust enough for a emperor’s tombstone and could no longer wield a chisel well enough to channel the stone—we moved to Swartsburg in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, where Da found work in the colcarreg again. Colcarreg is Welsh for coal, the infernal stuff. By now Owney was big enough to join him in the pits. I was good with ciphering and wrote a fair hand, so took a job as an apprentice clerk in the coal company office. As a beginning miner, Owney worked the graveyard shift: alongside Da. That was the end of the sunlight for both of them. Our sisters married, moved away, and Mam kept house till the day the mine collapsed on Da’s night shift. Owney was home with the pleurisy that night. The whole town shuddered, screaming ponies and a hundred and thirty men dead—I would rather not remember it—and Owney and I could not bear our mother any longer, and knowing that coal would only kill a man sooner rather than later, as it had Da and so many others, and having pooled our meager earnings, we struck off west, even farther toward the sunset than Da had tried to reach, to seek the riches of the Great West.

  So far, though, all we had met with was Rees, and now Captain Beckwourth.

  JlM RUBBED SOME balm on Owney’s cut scalp, bound the wound with a dirty strip of cloth ripped from a dead trapper’s shirt, and we built a little wickiup to keep Owney out of the sun. The Crows had found a bag of coffee beans in the wreck of the wagon, so Spybuck and I built up the fire and ground some down fine and boiled a big pot of it to share out among the Sparrowhawk warriors. By God that coffee smelled good.

  “Indians love coffee only a little less than they love whiskey,” Jim said. He picked up the pot and drank it straight and steaming right from the spout. Then he passed it to his warriors. When it came around to me I poured me a dose into the pewter cup I’d pulled from my possibles sack, blew on it to cool it, and drank some. “I will not trade my Indians’ whiskey for their peltry,” said Jim. “Not like some others I could name. It ruins the red man for trapping. They would rather sit around the lodge getting drunk than go out wading the beaver streams.”

  Spybuck is standing off to one side in earshot; he chuckled. He, too, loves the bottle.

  “So you trade with them?” I says right smart.

  “Oh, yes, for Mister McKenzie of the American Fur Company down to Fort Cass, where the Bighorn enters the Yellowstone. But latterly I have been so preoccupied with this chieftainship business that I have no time to trade. These incessant wars are very prejudicial to the company’s interests I admit. All the time Blackfeet and Shi-ans and Rees attacking the Crows, stealing horses and women, killing Crow soldiers from ambuscade, so of course the Sparrowhawks must strike back in reprisal. I cannot keep them from it. These very Rees we rubbed out here”—he kicks a dead one with his moccasin—“had just stolen about forty head of horses from us, and we must get them back, along with some scalps, if our honor is to be assuaged. You saw how well my men fought. I reckoned that if I could make the Crows the best warriors on the plains, a terror to their neighbors, perhaps I could, as they say, conquer a peace. Blackfoot and Shi-an would have to sue for mercy, beat their tomahawks into beaver traps, their lances into plowshares.” He shakes his head. “But making good troops out of red men, well, it takes time, and Mister McKenzie he no like.”

  Right about then some of the Crows who had gone haring off after the defeated Rees come trotting back into view. They have a string of ponies with them, pintos and chestnuts and even some plowhorses, the mounts the enemy had stolen. At the head of this war party is a woman. A handsome one, too. Strong neck, square shoulders, flashing eyes. Her long, shiny black hair spills down her back to below her rump; her firm little breasts are heaving.

  “Bar-che-am-pe! The Pine Leaf returns triumphant!” yells Jim with a welcoming smile. He shouts something in Crow to her, and she nods her head haughtily, lifts her bloody lance, and shows him two fresh reeking scalps.

  “Best soldier I’ve got,” he tells me. “Braver than any two men, runs fast as a prongbuck, shoot the eyes out of a gnat at a hundred paces, arrow or rifleball, either, ’fraid of nothin’. When she was just a girl, maybe twelve years old, the Blackfeet killed her brother and she vowed then to avenge him with the scalps of one hundred enemies. I reckon she is up to about eighty by now. I plan to marry her when she makes her limit.”

  “All the more reason to stay on the warpath,” says I.

  “You have the right of it there, bub,” says Jim with a laugh.

  By now it was getting on toward dark and the Crows prepared to make camp for the night. Some of them busied themselves butchering out a mule killed in the fight while others busted up more of the wagon for to fuel a cookfire. There was no wild wood in that country, not a stick of it. I went over to where Owney lay in his wickiup. “How are you feeling now?” I ask him.

  “Some better,” he says. “What is happening? Are we prisoners still?”

  “No, praise God, we are rescued!” I say. “By a kindly trader to the Crow Indian nation name of Captain Jim Beckwourth.”

  Owney props himself up on an elbow, looks around. Jim is over by the fire giving orders to the night guard.

  “What?” Owney says. “The Negro?”

  “Do not say that word,” I say. “He claims to be white and he like to burned me on the wheel for mistaking him for another gentleman of the black persuasion. Just play along with him for now.”

  Then the girl named Pine Leaf came over to us and stood there looking down at Owney. She said something in Crow. We looked at her blank-like. She leaned over with those breasts in her shirt and felt of Owney’s head where the ax bit him. She started cooing some Indian words to Owney, caressing his sore head. She took some herbs from a leather pouch she carried and offered a handful of the stuff to Owney, making like he should eat it; it will make him better.

  I see Beckwourth looking at the scene, and his face is like stone.

  The Pine Leaf glances back at him and gives a sassy little grin. Then she pats Owney on the head and stands up and goes away to where her ponies are hobbled.

  Owney eats the herbs.

  “Who is she?” he asks. “She is awful nice, I must say.”

  “She is a warri
or like the others, name of Bar-che-am-pe, or the Pine Leaf, but Captain Beckwourth is sweet on her,” I tell him. “Looks like she wants to make him jealous; I would be careful with her, Brother.”

  “Well, whatever it is she gave me to eat, my headache is going away now,” says he. “She is a mighty fine nurse no matter what her game might be.”

  Supper that night was half-cooked slabs of mule meat and a potful of mashed-up roots of some kind that the Indians carried in their possible sacks and boiled on the fire in a brass kettle. I had gone over the battleground earlier and collected my and Owney’s gear where it had been scattered when the wagon crashed. Blankets, a couple of heavy wool capotes, Owney’s .53-caliber Hawken rifle that he paid forty dollars for back in Saint Louis, and my own .69 H. E. Leman smoothbore fusee, along with powder and ball and small shot enough. I also retrieved our heavy leather bag with half a dozen two-spring Mackinaw beaver traps in it, folded up flat with their chains wrapped around them, and of course spare moccasins for both of us. I stacked all this in a pile over by Owney’s wickiup.

  “We will be on our way back to the Absorkee come first light,” Captain B. says, picking stringy bits of mule meat from between his big, square teeth. “Where do you fellows plan on going?”

  “Back to Cabanné’s, I guess,” says Owney. “I have had enough of the jolly trapper’s life.”

  Beckwourth laughs.

  “Not I,” says Golightly Spybuck. “I came here for beaver, and beaver I shall get. Even if I have to go it alone.”

  “A man alone would not last long in this country,” says Beckwourth. “What about you, Dillon Griffith?”

  “I would have liked to make a try at trapping,” I said finally, “but blood being thicker than creek water, I reckon I must stay with my brother if he wants to go back … to the coal mines of Pennsylvania.”

  Owney flushed some in the firelight. The Captain laughed again.

  “One for to go, one for to stay, and one tore plumb down the middle,” he says. “Might be I have a solution to your impasse. Come along with us to Fort Cass up on the Yellowstone; we will protect you that far. You can buy passage there on a keelboat, or maybe even a steamboat, that will bring you back safe and sound to the States. And, say, if grubbing in the earth is your desire, you need not travel all the way back to the coalfields of the Alleghenies; you can do as I once did and dig for galena up on Fever River in the Illinois country. Indians there are Sacs and Foxes, not near so murderous as the Shi-ans or the Sioux, nor even the shave-headed Pawnees for that matter.’’

  “I am for the fort,” Spybuck says.

  “Sounds good to me,” says I. “What say you, Brother?”

  Owney frowns into the fire, silent. Then the Pine Leaf gets up from the flickery shadows and pours a cup of coffee and brings it over to my brother. She hands it to him, then feels again of his head; smiles brightly in his eyes as he looks up.

  “Well, I guess I am outvoted then,” Owney says. “Fort Cass it is.”

  IN THE MORNING when I went over the frosty ground to where the remuda was grazing, I found a big ugly Crow in charge of our horses. Owney had a little buckskin he bought off the suttler at Cabanné’s with the U.S. brand on its flank, and I had a sprightly chestnut mare, ditto. I made to unhobble the horses.

  “No,” says the Indian. “My ponies, you no take.”

  The horses stood there, smoke blowing blue from their nose holes.

  “Give me them horses,” I said.

  “I give you this,” the Indian said. He whipped out a toadstabber long as my forearm.

  I had left my fusee back by the bed, elst I would have shot him sure, but was about to tackle the red devil barehanded when Captain Beckwourth came up.

  “What’s this?” he says.

  “This here thief has stolen our horses!” says I.

  “They are not your horses,” he says. “They are Grow horses now, by right of war. They ceased being your horses yesterday when the Rees took ’em from you and we took ’em from the Rees.”

  “Well, damn me for a sucker,” I says. “So that is how the law works out here on the prairie. Then how do we get to Fort Cass, pray tell—afoot?”

  “Rest easy; I will sell them back to you,” Beckwourth says. “You can owe me for them until you have trapped, say, two packs of beaver.”

  “How many beaver to a pack?” I asked.

  “One hundred pounds,” says he. “Say sixty-five or seventy plews.”

  “How much a plew?”

  “Three dollars at the fort,” says he.

  “Why, that is four hundred dollars apiece for these ponies, and we only paid eighty in toto for them on the Missouri!”

  “Prices are high in the mountains,” Beckwourth says. “You have got to figure in the cost of transportation.” He pulls a piece of paper from his shirtfront and hands it to me with a sharpened stub of pencil. It is a contract. “Just make your mark here by the X.”

  “But we transported the ponies ourselves!”

  “All right,” says Jim, grabbing back the paper and pencil and walking back toward the breakfast fire. “Then go it shank’s mare to Fort Cass, if it suits you. I don’t give a damn.”

  Well, he had us by the short and curlies all right.

  I signed.

  THREE

  LATER I LEARNED that Golightly Spybuck had got his horse back with no trouble at all, just walked into the remuda and roped it easy as pie. I didn’t tell my brother about the price we would have to pay for the ponies; he was still feeling poorly that morning as we rode north toward the Absaroka. His face all ashy white; took him three hops to get up on his horse even after I had saddled it for him. The Pine Leaf rode beside him, steadying him when he reeled now and then over the rockier ground.

  It was a nice spring morning, though, with bands of antelope flashing their white rumps at us like so many mirrors in the slow-rising sun, off in the distance a few black clumps of buffalo grazing their way north with the season. Of the Rees there was no sign, God be praised.

  Still many worries ran through my mind as we trotted north, chief among them, How do you trap a beaver?

  Owney had had it in mind to search the mountains of the Great West for precious metals; he was a whiz at sniffing out anything hidden underground. Back in Vermont he had demonstrated his prowess time and again. Once we were driving a borrowed rig over the Green Mountains to Brattleboro, where Da had heard he might find work in a new mill there, and Owney suddenly raised his head, sniffing the breeze like a hound dog. “There’s iron up there,” he said, pointing to a peak that loomed overhead.

  “Bosh,” said I. “I cannot see any rust streaks even.”

  “I can smell it,” Owney replied.

  I laughed aloud.

  “No, do not laugh,” Da said, pulling the mules to a halt. “My own daddy could sniff out iron deep in the ground. Also coal, lead, copper, antimony, and silver. He could smell a gold watch through a rich man’s vest pocket.”

  We hiked up the mountain until Owney said, “Stop.” Then he dug through the rocky rubble with pick and shovel until he came up with a big black chunk of smooth stone. “This is it,” he said, “but it does not come from underground; it comes from the sky.”

  Later Da took it to the professor at Sheldon’s Mineralogical Academy in Brattleboro who pronounced it a “meteorite.” He even paid Da a sum of money, a dollar I believe, for to keep it in a glass case at the academy.

  After that Owney began studying on every book he could locate about the search for precious metals. He even took a course on natural philosophy at the academy, bringing home books on that subject and many more. Gold had been found in 1799 down in North Carolina, he told me, and later elsewhere in the Appalachian Mountains of the East, but only in small amounts. Worse still, all the land was owned by someone or other, which left us poor boys out. Gravel bars in certain creeks had been “salted” with small amounts of gold by unscrupulous land agents to drive the price of mineral rights even higher.


  But land in the Great West was free for the taking; the Rocky Mountains were high and vast, cut through with rivers and creeks in which free gold might be found, washed down from the crumbling mountains themselves.

  So I knew Owney could find gold in the Great West, if indeed the metal was there to be found.

  But we also knew we would need more money than we had to get the necessary tools for our mining effort. I suggested spending the summer trapping beaver at the then—going price of five dollars a plew in Saint Louis, and had reckoned on learning the craft from one of the seasoned trappers in our party, but all of them had gone under yesterday. Worse still, we had seen little beaver sign on the Ghugwater or the other rivers and creeks we crossed on our way to the Black Hills, and I had heard grim talk that all the easy streams were pretty well trapped out by now. Yet I knew that even if there was beaver in plenitude in the streams of Absaroka, I sure would not know how to take them.

  Finally I swallowed my pride, chucked up my horse, and rode ahead to where Golightly Spybuck was riding near the head of the column.

  “Golightly, old friend,” says I with a smile, “have you ever trapped beaver before?,,

  He gives me a stare. “Gould be I have,” he replies.

  “Is it hard?”

  “Not if you know what you’re looking for,” he says.

  “What do you look for?”

  “Depends,” says he.

  “On what?”

  He laughs. “On whether you’re talking prairie beaver or mountain beaver, pond beaver or river beaver. Say, have you ever even seen a beaver?”