Not that I felt the least desire to ply a pick and shovel down there half a mile under the ground, breathing coal dust in the dim-lit dark until, like Da, I was coughing up black phlegm day and night. The black lung would have killed him sure, and not long down the line, had the earth itself not fallen upon him first and put a merciful dot to his sorry sentence.
Yet who knows? Gold mining might be less of a hell than grubbing for colcarreg. Especially panning for the stuff. “The Spanish called it placer mining,’’ Owney told me, “which comes from the word for ‘pleasure’ in their lingo. You work on top of the earth, not tunneling through it like some blind mole. Me, I don’t mind it down there; the earth talks to me. In creaks and groans and mumbles, like, which tell me if I am hurting her too much so she wants to drop the roof on my head or, in hot little whispers, when I am digging in the right spot.”
I called it “bosh” again, as I had when he sniffed that meteorite way back when in Vermont, though I would never say so aloud to my only brother of course; Owney was always a wee bit queer about things underground. Still, from what he said, in panning or sluicing for ore you worked the mountain streams, out there in the sunlight and fresh air, just like trapping beaver; you shoveled the gravel into a pan or a rocker and ran more water over it and over it again, until the lighter dirt and gravel washed out and all that remained was the heavy gold itself.
“Then all you need do,” Owney said, “is put it in bags and tote it out to the nearest bank, where the least they will pay you is twelve dollars per ounce, hard money. Just think of it, Dill; that is like four full-blanket beaver plews, without the slippery, smelly mess of skinning or fleshing or drying the damn things. Twelve dollars an ounce—and there are sixteen ounces to a pound. Why, a mere pound of gold is worth near two hundred dollars, more by far than you earned in a whole year a-clerking!”
“How long do you reckon it will take us to dig out a pound of the stuff?”
“From what Beckwourth says, we should pan out a pound a week. More with a sluice box. We need only stay in that country for the rest of the summer, eight weeks at the most, to clear more than two thousand dollars.”
The most Da had ever got paid for a year of coal digging was four hundred. It was mighty tempting.
But then there was the question of the Daughters. It was nice to have the Plover and the Calf under the blankets with me every night; even in the quiet times, when they were not pestering me to demonstrate my affections yet again, we whiled away the evenings talking sign or Grow. I was learning new languages right smart, in many respects. And practical things as well. One day while hunting we came upon a family group of that hateful animal the black rattlesnake, which were all too numerous in that country. The Daughters walked right through them without a moment’s hesitation. The snakes wouldn’t bite them, they said, for they wore protective anklets of badger teeth. The rattlesnake, they told me, fears no animal but the badger. As soon as the badger sees a snake he dashes at it full tilt with a fearsome grunt. The snake flees, but too slow; when the badger catches up he pins the snake down with one foot; in a flash he bites off the rattle, which he spits out, then proceeds to devour the snake from the bitten end, not unlike an Indian with a length of buffalo gut. The snake writhes in agony, holding itself straight from the badger, not even knowing to turn upon its captor for revenge. When within about two or three inches of the snake’s head, which contains its poison, the badger wisely stops gobbling.
So great is the fear of the rattlesnake for the badger that a mere token of its presence on a person, such as these flimsy bands of teeth, will cause the snake to flee. The Daughters gave me such an anklet, which I have worn since that distant day, and never once in my long life have I been bit by a rattler, black or any other color.
“If I throw in with you on this venture,” I told Owen at last, “I will want to bring my girls along.”
“I can understand that,” he said. “I will have the Pine Leaf at my side as well. We have spoken of the matter already, and she is game. Perhaps I can dragoon her into bringing some warriors with us, for protection. Now what about Spybuck? We shall need his plews for to buy our outfit.”
I SPOKE WITH THE Shawnee next morning as we ran our trap lines; a hot day it was, now into July, with the prairies drying out and the buff well into their rut. We could hear the bulls roaring from sky to sky.
Spybuck looks up at me right thoughtful, then reaches down the trap chain into the water and draws up a drowned beaver, flops it up on the bank beside us.
“Look at that fur,” says he, pointing with his knife. “The muffoon is thinning fast now as we get into high summer.” He ruffled the long, glossy guard hairs to expose the finely grown lead-colored underfur, which trappers called the muffoon. Spy had told me that this undercoat is what made beaver so valuable. Each hair was minutely barbed, so that when the fur was chopped to make felt the barbs interlocked, and thus the resultant product held together much better than any other fur. “No,” he continued, “the spring hunt is finished, I fear. Oh, we could shift our operations higher up into the mountains and still get some worthwhile plews, but now is the time for a change. I am familiar with that Blackfoot country; it still holds plenty of beaver, and since it is of greater elevation than here we might could get some pretty good peltry out of it yet this summer. Yes, I will go with you, though it will be dangerous up there. Blackfoot country. They hate Americans. They don’t like other Indians much, either, as I’ve learned to my dismay. Yet I feel it’s time to move on despite the hazards. In return for the plews I’ve trapped already I’ll want a full third of what you boys take by way of gold from those White Hart streams; and I will not swing a pick or a shovel.’’
That is what I liked about Golightly Spybuck: he could size up a situation and make up his mind quick as a finger snap. Forty years in the wild will do that for a fellow. A moment’s hesitation at the crucial instant can result in a hungry belly for the hunter or a prematurely bald head for the victim of Indian attack.
“That’s fine with us,” I told him, and reached out my hand. He had a firm grip. Done and done.
THE CROW CAMP was abuzz when we returned that day. Visitors had just arrived from the Snake country west of the divide. They proved to be a brigade of free trappers and Delaware Indians led by Lafcadio Dade, a short, bossy, sour-looking man of about Captain Beckwourth’s age, perhaps a bit younger, yet gnarled as a cedar snag, with a shock of carroty red hair and a beard to match. Dade was the booshway, or leader, of the trappers.
“You remember when we met I told you about the deaths of Rose and old Hugh Glass early last spring?” Beckwourth said to me while the new arrivals were unsaddling their mounts. “They were killed just outside of Fort Gass by those same Rees as almost done for you fellows. I had just arrived at the fort with my Crows and their peltry from the fall and winter hunt, and was told that Johnston Gardner and Lafe Dade had been there just a few days before, coming upriver with a big load of trade goods from the settlements. Their camp was just up the Yellowstone about half a day’s ride. I wanted to trade with them, so three men from the fort headed upriver to fetch them back. Rose, Old Glass, and another fellow whose name I disremember. They did not get far. In the morning we saw their bodies lying on the ice. They had been cruelly butchered, and when we rode up their corpses were scarcely cold. But I will let Mister Dade tell you of the sequel.”
He did so that night after supper. Dade had brought his new Indian wife with him to the fire, a tall, lovely thing of about Plover’s age, whom he treated with great solicitude. “Oh, yes, them damn Rees,” he said, unslinging the spyglass he always carried with him in a leather case slung over his shoulder. His wife lit his clay pipe for him with an ember from the cookfire. “They rode up to our camp sassy as jaybirds. We could not make out their tribe, in the dusk light, but they was led by a half-breed from Fort Clark, down there by the Mandans on the Missouri: shifty fella name of Antwine Garro. He dismounts and comes over to the fire, all smiles. ‘Wha
t Indians are those with you?’ Gardner asks him. Says the half-breed, ‘Oh, they are good Indians; they will not hurt you.’ But I noticed the red devils lookin’ over our horses pretty fondly, and grew alarmed at what they might have in mind. ‘Garro,’ I said, ‘tell us right quick, what Indians are those?’ By now they are making off with our horses!
“ ‘They are Ree-ka-ras,’ says Garro. ‘But do not worry. They are only borrowing your horses; they will bring them back right quick.’ ” Dade pauses to spit in the fire, shakes his head at the recollected gall, then puffs blue smoke from his clay.
“ ‘Rees!’ Gardner yells. ‘To arms, men; seize them!’ But they all skedaddled too quick for us, even old Garro, and we only grabbed two of them. Garro stops just out of rifle range.
“ ‘Give me back my Indians!’ he yells.
“ ‘Not until you give us back our horses,’ Gardner tells him.
“ ‘Then we will have the tops of your heads/ the renegade says.
“ ‘Take them if you can/ Gardner says. And with that they rode off—and all our horses with them.
“Tell these boys what you did with the prisoners,” Captain Beckwourth says.
“Well, we had seized them up good with trap chains/’ Dade says, “and we had a tremendous fire blazing there, so we opened up the top logs, swung them two Rees into the flames, and rolled back the burning logs to cover them.”
“Did they scream much?” Owney asks, after a long pause.
“Not a peep,” Dade says, looking over at him as if to say, “How could you ask such a dumb fool question?” He had close-set blue eyes, slightly crossed or anyway out of kilter, sharp as icicles. “Writhed around some in there, but them Rees, they are a rum lot.”
Dade said Gardner was already across the divide, over on the Salmon River. Himself, he was heading in to Fort Cass to trade his peltry for a new outfit; then it was back to the mountains. “I found me some pretty good streams up near the Targhee, along with this prize, my new Shoshone wife,” he said, slapping the girl on her rump. “Good beaver, both.” We laughed. “The streams are just on the edge of the Blackfoot country, so no one has trapped them out as yet. And no one better try, neither. That is my country up there. I have a special relationship with the Grovan, and don’t you boys forget it.” He picked up his spyglass, wrapped an arm around his beauty wife, and decamped.
Lafe Dade was not a man to take lightly.
THE FOLLOWING NIGHT we told Captain Beckwourth of our plans. His face tightened some, and a look of calculation come into his eyes.
“You still owe me for those horses,” he said.
“We have the plews for you, two full packs and then some,” Owney said.
“Let me see them.”
Spy and I dragged the packs down from the cache we had built in a dead cottonwood and hauled them over to the fire. Captain B. went to inspecting the furs.
“Some of these are a bit sparse of hair,” he says, his face black and stony as that famous meteorite. “They will not bring full price at Saint Louis; I should have at least another pack, maybe more, to fulfill your end of the bargain.”
“We need the rest of the furs to buy our outfit at Fort Cass,” I says.
“If you are heading to the White Hart country you will require pack mules to haul your gear,” the captain says. “Mules are pricey. And you cannot have enough peltry in hand just yet to afford them, not at Fort Cass prices.” He smiles a cold, false smile. A smile of triumph. “Now why don’t you just stay here through the summer with us and make a fine fall hunt up in the Winds? Lots of beaver up there. Then you can winter over with us. We will have plenty of buffalo to eat, and in the spring I will sell you some good mules, cheap, to begin your venture into the Blackfoot country.”
“No, we are set to go right now,” says I. “You cannot keep us here with all your black trickery and wiles.”
“Easy,” Owney says.
But suddenly I was getting hot. This squaw man, after all, had stolen our horses, then insisted we pay him back an outrageous price for them. Now he had the gall to up the ante!
“We will go where we will go,” I snaps at Captain Beckwourth. “We are free men, not niggersl”
He hit me so hard and fast I never saw it coming. “Do not ever call me that,” he says, standing over me now, his big, hard fists clenched and his eyes spitting fire. “I am a white man, from the Old Dominion, born free, and I shall die free!’
I try to get up, but he nails me again, with a wide swinging punch that slams me back into the dirt … stars in my eyes.
“Leave the boy alone,” says Owney.
Beckwourth steps back and kicks me, hard, square on the chin… .
Then they are at it, hot and furious. Owney straightens Beckwourth up with a solid left jab, fakes a right cross, then hooks him hard with a left to the mouth. Beckwourth lowers his head and charges like a griz’, but Owney dances to his right and plants a solid shot on the captain’s ear hole. That staggers him, but the captain comes right back, boring in low and fast, planting short rapid punches into Owney’s gut. Big loops of blood are swinging from the captain’s split mouth; he is blowing bloody bubbles. Then he misses with a right uppercut and goes lurching into the fire. A great cloud of sparks.
By now the Indians are all gathered around, whooping and cheering, dogs barking, and I see Bar-che-am-pe looking on with a wide grin across her face. My girls are dancing up and down, clapping their hands and yipping along with the dogs.
Captain B. staggers out of the fire, his moccasins smoldering, his eyes blood red from smoke or fury, and stares around wild-like, looking in vain for Owney. But Owney is right behind him. He grabs Beckwourth’s shoulder with his left, spins him around, socks him flat on the chin with a wind-up right. The captain goes down to stay.
Then I notice some of the warriors have grabbed out their scalp knives and tomahawks. They are not amused. The big ugly fellow who had held my horses back there at the Ree fight is in the forefront. But just as they start to move in on me and Owney, Spybuck speaks up, somewhere back in the shadows. He says something fast and mean in Crow, and they stop to look over at him.
Now he steps into the firelight, and he has two cocked fusees—mine and his—aimed square on the mob of warriors, the muzzles at belly level, his fingers steady on the triggers. For a long moment all is silence; time stands still.
Then into the firelight steps Long Hair, the principal old man chief of this band, roused out of his tent by the fracas. He is an elderly man, face wrinkled like a old glove, once a great warrior but now leading from wisdom, and he is aptly named. He has the longest hair of any man in a tribe noted for the length and beauty of its warriors’ locks. Usually Long Hair wears his mane wrapped round with a wide strap of buffalo leather and folded up into a big square bundle which he carries under his arm; but now he has unfurled it, oiled it up nicely with bear grease, and it trails along behind him, longer by far than the chief is tall: like a great black gleaming bridal train.
“Put down them weapons!” he shouts, giving his hair a flirt. It writhes behind him, snakelike. “I will not have Crow blood spilled in my camp, nor any white man’s either. This was a fair fight: The Enemy of Horses got his ass whupped by the Gold Seeker, whom the All-God has clearly blessed with great art in the use of his fists. Now the Shawnee has the drop on you Crows, and Shawnees do not hesitate to kill their enemies. Begone to your lodges and your wives and horse herds; begone this instant or I shall call my Dog Soldiers with their pony quirts to disperse you!”
The warriors obeyed. I walked over to where Captain Beckwourth sat rubbing his chin and shaking his head sideways as if he had water in his ear. “Do not feel bad, Captain,” I said. “Owen Griffith was the best boxer in the Alleghenies. He has beat men twice your size.”
“Small comfort, that,” says the captain.
I offer my hand and pull him to his feet. He stands up slow and wobbly-kneed.
“Now he has made me look weak before my warriors; they are
hard enough to control at the best of times, but presently I do not know if I can check them should they take it in mind to lift your hair. Well, I desired you to stay with us and, yes, to continue trapping for me and the American Fur Company. But now you’d better be on your way, and quick.”
WE CLEARED OUT at moonrise, taking with us my girls and Pine Leaf on ponies of their own, but leaving behind two packs of prime beaver: a more than ample payment for the captain’s Christian charity.
SIX
FORT CASS WAS at this time the principal trading post of the American Fur Company on the Yellowstone River, providing foofaraw and arms and tools to the entire Sparrowhawk nation in return for prime Indian peltry, mainly beaver but also including otter skins, fox pelts, lynx furs, and buffalo robes. Old Manuel Lisa, the pioneer of the Rocky Mountain fur trade, had had a fort on or near this location in the first decade of the century: Fort Manuel, he called it. Much bigger than this one. It lasted until the Second Revolution broke out in 1812 and the British started raising hell in this region.
The place was small and hardly prepossessing, consisting as it did of an ill-lit log-built warehouse and trading parlor, the entire facility surrounded by a sixteen-foot-high stockade of upright popple logs, peeled and sharpened by ax at the tops. The stockade measured about sixty paces square. Termites and carpenter ants had already left holes and sawdust piles at the bases of the pilings. Slowly but surely the fort was being eaten away by the wildlife of these prairies, though it had only opened for business the year previous.
Some of these pests had red hides and walked on two legs, for already a sizable village of beggarly Indians had attached itself to the fort, their tents clustered near a grove of cottonwoods along the bank of the Bighorn; a scruffy, scraggly pony herd grazed on the yellowing summer grass of the hills all around. These Indians, the Plover told me with a hint of scorn, were the River Crows, a lesser breed of Sparrowhawks who lived along the lower Yellowstone and who were by nature lazy and dirty. “We know them as the Dung-on-the-Riverbanks Band,” she said. The Calf giggled and covered her mouth with her hand.
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