Deadville

by Robert F. Jones

  “Spanish, it looks like,” he said. “And from eighty years ago. In my reading up on the Spaniards and their mining of gold and silver in Mexico I found many references to secret mines owned and run by priests, Jesuits mostly. There were many laws passed by the Spanish king against this, one in 1592, another in 1621, again in 1703, but the priests persisted. I'll bet you anything that this was one of their mines. They probably followed the map made by those Dominican padres Captain Beckwourth mentioned. Escalante and the other one.”

  “Pretty far north for getting their treasure back to Mexico,” I said.

  “They might have taken it out by boat, going down the Missouri, then north up the Mississippi and the Illinois River, through the Great Lakes into French Canada, or straight down the Mississippi to New Orleans. Plenty of Jesuits both places. But whatever they did, they died right here.” He picked up one of the burnt skulls and shook his head solemnly. “I wish this bugger could talk. I know there is a gold mine around here somewhere.”

  So nothing would do of course but we must find it. I went back to fetch the pry bars, and we started moving rocks from the face of the bluff. Later in the day Spybuck came looking for us. When we told him and showed him the skulls, he said, “Los Padres Perdidos.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When I was down in Santa Fe a few years ago, I heard tales of a lost Jesuit mine far to the north in the Shining Mountains, near the headwaters of the so-called Buenaventura River. The Mine of the Doomed Fathers. The whole shebang was wiped out by Blackfeet. That was supposed to have happened about forty-five years ago. One man, a peon serving as a muleteer, escaped, made it back to Santa Fe, and before he died told of the massacre. The Indians burnt the black robes in their chapel and sealed up the mine with big stones. The other peons, about twenty of them, they carried away to their camp so the rest of the band could share in the torture.”

  “Well, I’m going to reopen this mine no matter what,” Owney said. “I don’t think that’s wise,” said Spybuck. “We’d best finish up here right quick now and get out of this country. Winter’s coming on fast, and I cannot understand how the Grovans haven’t yet found us. We have plenty of gold already from the river—enough for me, at any rate, and for Dillon as well if I’m not mistaken. It’s only you who wishes to stay and risk our lives further.”

  “I will have my gold!” Owney says, reddening now and his eyes losing focus. “I will have it if I must remain here alone to get it!” “You wouldn’t want to do that,” says Spy. “But how long do you think it will take to get those rocks cleared away and have a look at the old mine?”

  “Two days at most,” Owney says.

  “Then let’s give it another two or three days, no more. To speed things up, Pine Leaf can stand guard by herself and I’ll help you move stones.”

  “Agreed,” Owen said.

  WE UNCOVERED THE mine entrance in only a day and a half. Owney said he knew right where it was behind that rubble, and he did. The Blackfeet had jammed big boulders into the mouth of the shaft, but we rolled them out easily with the pry bars. Inside, the shoring looked sound enough except for a few rotten timbers near the mouth of the mine, which we shored up with fresh logs. Then, about noon on the second day of work, Owney went inside with a pickax and a torch. He came out half an hour later with a lump of pure gold in his hand. It was the size of a baby’s head.

  “It’s ungodly rich in there,” he said. “They must have just reached the deep vein when the Blackfoot struck. The tunnel goes in about two hundred feet; at least I counted seventy paces coming out, slanting downwards all the way at a pretty steep angle. There are side tunnels leading off of it, but I didn’t follow them. Then the main tunnel stops. All across the dead-end wall was this streak of gold, wide as a man’s foot, running on and on, out of the bedrock and then back into it again. Now we must make a decision which way to dig next, to the left or the right. Or maybe both ways?”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “We agreed to get out of here as soon as you found the mine and had a chance to assay it. You have just done so, and now you start babbling about digging some more? We can always come back later with a larger party, Captain Beckwourth’s Crow warriors, or even some engages from the fort.” “But we cannot let anyone else know about this find. They’ll steal it from us; mark my words. This is a real treasure here. Forget about that 12,000 dollars’ worth of dust and nuggets we sluiced from the river. Chicken feed. This chunk of oro alone must weigh ten pounds, full twenty times the size of Da’s far-famed Newfane lump; that’s twenty-five hundred dollars’ worth just by itself If we work merely the exposed part of the vein, where I got this, we will have anyway 100,000 dollars. Maybe more. Go in and take a look for yourself.”

  “No thank you,” I said. “I have no love for dark, tight spaces. Maybe Spy will go in with you …”

  But he had no chance. At that moment I caught a sharp flash of sunlight smack in the eyes. We had equipped Pine Leaf with one of the looking glasses, telling her to signal us with it if she saw any intruders from her vantage point high on the rimrock. This was her signal.

  But it was not Grovan she had seen. It was worse by far: Lafe Dade and his band of free trappers.

  THEY RODE INTO camp late that afternoon as the sun was slanting down over the Gravvelys to the southwest. Before they arrived, at Spybuck’s urging we had built a hasty fort of sawlogs and boulders back of our campsite, well stocked with powder and ball, water and meat, in case there was trouble.

  There were a dozen of them in the party, as mean a crew as ever forked saddle leather. Eight whites, including Dade, and four dark, hard-eyed Indians dressed in trappers’ clothes that Spy said were Dade’s Delawares. I had counted fifteen men in the band when they appeared in the Grow camp earlier that summer. Five of these current arrivals were sore wounded, fresh wrappings around their heads or arms or legs, in some cases with the blood still seeping through.

  “Damn your eyes, you greenhorns, you must be the ones that put the Grovans on the prod!” yells Dade as he rides up. “You are the boys I met back at the nigger Beckwourth’s camp, ain’t you? Did I not tell you at that time to stay out of my country, that I enjoyed a special relationship with the Grovans? Well, I do not have it any longer, thank you. They shot us up good and proper, rubbed out three of my best men, and wounded a lot more. Now explain yourselves, if you can! Or, by God, I will kill you right here and now.”

  “Cool off some and stand down from your horses,” says Spy. He has his fuke over his elbow, hammer cocked, finger on the trigger guard, and the muzzle pointing straight at Dade’s belly. “We do not know what you’re talking about. What Grovans?”

  One of the Delawares knees his horse up alongside Dade and mutters something into his ear. I notice the Delaware looking at Spy.

  “Spybuck is it?” Dade yells. His eyes are crossed more than usual, his face beet red behind the carroty beard. He looks at Owney. “I will talk to a white man if I may. And do not deny that you killed four of the Grovans who preceded you up the Gallatin last month. Your Crow bitch left her arrow in one of them, which they fished his body out of the river where you dumped it. The Grovan know this Bar-che-am-pe of old. But they mistook my new Shoshone bride for her, and before we could explain things they was shooting. Then, by God, they cut my woman’s throat!”

  “Yes,” Owney says, “we did indeed kill those Blackfeet, as you say. But only after they attacked us; it was in the heat of battle”—a black lie, which was unlike my brother—“and we could not but protect ourselves from their onslaught. We’re terribly sorry about the loss of your wife. Now stand down from your horses and join us at the campfire for some fresh-brewed coffee. We have some lovely plums as well.”

  Well, the soft word turneth away wrath, as they say, and in this case that word was coffee. They climbed down and for the moment, at least, the crisis seemed past.

  TEN

  IN ANTICIPATION OF our departure, Spy and I had pulled our traps and bundled the
beaver plews we had taken into two full packs, which we placed in the big leather tent where we all slept. It was not long before a Delaware named Thomas poked his big nose in there and saw them. He immediately informed Dade. Owney had told the booshway that we were here collecting garnets, hence the sluices; and, indeed, to prove so he produced a big burlap bag full of those semiprecious stones. These were the stones my girls had collected, of course.

  “I have got no use for garnets,” says Dade, “so you are free to take them with you when you clear out of my country—within the hour, I might add. … But my man Thomas tells me you have also been collecting beaver for me. Two full packs of prime plews. Very considerate of you, and I thank you kindly.”

  “Those are our own plews,” I say. “This is not your country, either. It belongs to the United States of America and all the citizens thereof. No one man can stake out any part of it for his own exclusive purposes.”

  “Like hell,” says he. “Sonny, you do not know the rules of the mountain trade yet. First man into a new beaver country, it’s his to trap until he chooses to move on or grows too weak to defend it from those who’d supplant him. Mister J. J. Astor of New York City learned that to his dismay over to the Oregon country when he tried to muscle in on the Britishers. The North West Company and the HBC drove him out of business. By the same token, my partner Mr. Johnston Gardner found a big party of Limejuicers under Peter Ogden trapping the Snake; that was not six or seven years back. Ogden’s boys was bent on killing every beaver in that drainage, creating thereby a fur desert to force us Americans back east of the divide. Well, Johnston Gardner rode right into Ogden’s camp and declared he would buy every beaver pelt on the premises for three dollars a pound. The HBC was paying its trappers less than a dollar a plew! More than a hundred free trappers changed loyalties that day. By God they did!”

  “Well,” said I, “then we will be glad to accept three dollars a pound from you for our peltry.”

  “But I am not paying, sonny. I am taking. For you are in my country

  Now Owney called me and Spybuck over to where he sat, for a secret palaver.

  “Let ’em have the dratted plews and maybe they will clear out of here,” he whispered. “They don’t yet suspect we’ve found gold. If they get wind of it, they’ll just build a big bonfire and throw us all in, like they did those Rees. And nobody back in civilization will be any the wiser. As you so rightly pointed out the other day, there is no law west of Missouri.”

  “Where do you have the gold hid?” Spy asked.

  “In the tent, under my bedroll.”

  “Well, that infernal Delaware is heading over for another look-see right now.”

  And indeed he was. Owney yelled, “Hey, keep the hell out of our tent, you red devil!”

  “I am only looking for to bring out the beaver,” Thomas said. But he put his hand on the butt of one of the horseman’s pistols he carried stuck through his scarlet sash.

  Sitting off to one side during this whole sequence of events, Pine Leaf had been quiet. Now I noticed that she had nocked an arrow to her bow.

  “The business of the beaver is not yet decided,” Owney said.

  “The hell it ain’t,” said Thomas. He drew his pistol.

  Pine Leaf shot him through the throat. With a great cry of rage and joy, Spy leaped to where Thomas stood reeling, the arrow through his neck, and with his knife ripped open the Delaware’s chest to cut out his still-pounding heart. …

  And where are we then, my lovelies? It is all a great rattling bellow of blue smoke and rifle balls, a horrid blend of sounds and sights momentarily glimpsed disappearing and emerging again sharp and clear through the gun smoke. Dade grabs for his rifle, but another arrow sends him ducking low behind the fire; others in the party run to the shelter of the sluice. Spybuck’s fusil bangs buckshot, and three of Dade’s trappers yowl, stagger; one of them drops but crawls to safety.

  Out of the sudden pall of smoke a Delaware came at me with a hatchet; I swung the barrel of my fuke and knocked him sprawling into the fire.

  “Run to the fort!” Owney yelled.

  Spy grabbed the pistols from Thomas’s belt sash. We scrambled for cover, but I paused to look back for the Daughters. One of my girls was down. It was the Calf. The back of her head was blown off.

  I yelled, “Goddamn you all!”

  Running back to the creek, I flopped down on my belly and fired the fuke under the trestles of the sluice. A big load of buckshot ripped into the boards: two men dropped out of the shadows, gutshot, and fell thrashing and cursing into the spillway. One trapper raised up in the open and aimed his rifle at me. Bloom of bright smoke from the muzzle! The bullet threw dirt in my eyes. I got up and ran and dived over the log parapet into the fort. Not till I was crouched safe behind the wall did I notice that two of my fingers were missing, shot off by that last close bullet. The whole of the little one on my left hand was gone, clear back to the knuckle, along with the top two joints of my left ring finger. I was bleeding some. Plover ripped a chunk of moss from the logs and wrapped it tight around them.

  “Reload fast,” Spy says. “We must always keep at least two guns charged in case they try to take us by storm.”

  Oh, damn those swine for killing my Calf!

  HERE WAS OUR situation then: The sawlog fort stood about ten rods back from the sluice in Garnet Greek where Dade’s gang was hidden. The Buenaventura flowed deep and swift at their backs, about another eight or ten rods away. As the afternoon wore on, the sky had grown overcast, and now a thickening fog was rolling in from the river. Our position was slightly higher than theirs, so we could fire down into them whenever one or another man showed himself to shoot at us. Thus we had them pinned down. But this would no longer be possible when night or the fog obscured them. Plover had grabbed up one of the Delaware’s rifles before she ran for the fort. She did not know how to shoot it, but the Pine Leaf, though she preferred bow or lance, was a fair shot with a rifle, as she proved on her first squeeze of the trigger, provoking an angry yowl from one of Dade’s men.

  Spybuck had taken our animals back into the hills before Dade showed up, but Dade’s horses still stood hobbled or tethered off to one side, out of the line of fire, yet well within our range. We debated whether or not we should kill their horses, finally deciding to spare them in hopes a truce could be worked out and Dade induced to decamp.

  “We have killed at least one of them, the Delaware Thomas, for which I thank you, Pine Leaf,” Spy said, “and wounded perhaps five more, some gravely. But that still leaves us even up with them in number of warriors, though we have fewer guns.”

  “We cannot let them come out from behind the sluice,” Owney said. “They’ll find the gold in the tent, then follow our trail through the alders and discover the mine itself.”

  “Worse things than that may happen,” Spy said. “Let’s keep our perspective. If only one of them gets above and behind us with a rifle, up onto the rimrock, he’ll be able to pick us off singly from afar, like so many roosting turkeys, or at least drive us out into a crossfire.”

  “Perhaps one of us should sneak around behind the ditch and kill them off one by one,” says Pine Leaf. “Or perhaps, better yet, we might charge upon them direct, leap over that sluice, and fight them man to man. That’s what the Bloody Arm did to those damn Blackfeet holed up in the Rock Fort one time.”

  “No, it was Five Scalps who did that,” Spy says. “Mister Edward Rose.”

  “You are wrong,” Pine Leaf says sharp. “J was there! It was the Bloody Arm, the Enemy of Horses, who did it: Captain Beckwourth himself. …”

  “Oh, stop this damn yapping about which Negro did what to whoever,” Owney pipes up. “We must figure us a strategy to get out of this pickle and retrieve the gold.”

  “Quiet!” I said. “They’re moving around down there now; something’s up.”

  One of the sluice boxes had been pulled down, I noticed, and withdrawn behind the remaining ones. Now we heard the chopping sound
of hatchets and the hammering in of nails.

  “They’re building shields,” Spy said. “Get ready.”

  We saw to our weapons.

  Suddenly what seemed like the whole damn Dade gang came swarming out from under the sluice, firing their guns and charging up toward us behind man-sized walls of thick pine boards, all shrouded ghostlike in a pall of their own gun smoke.

  “Shoot low, for their legs!” Spy said.

  We fired, reloaded, fired again . . . and through the smoke I saw a couple men fall. The rest seemed to hesitate a moment. Then one of the downed men crawled aside, into our tent, to get out of our direct fire.

  Owney saw him wriggling and pegged a quick shot but missed.

  “Goddammit, he will find that gold!” he yells. He takes up the pistols, checks the locks to ensure they are capped.

  “So what?” I say.

  “So what? So what you say? The gold is everything! It’s my whole damned life! If I don’t come back, make sure you hide the entrance to the mine. We must not let Dade find it.”

  “Don’t go down there, Owney,” I plead. …

  Then he is over the parapet, charging down the slope toward the sluices. Pine Leaf leaps after him, battle-ax in hand. They disappear into the swirling cloud of fog and gun smoke. Pistols bang; someone screams; then silence.

  As we waited for a renewal of the charge, Plover slapped Owney’s rifle into my empty hand. She’d reloaded it. I looked down at her crouched there behind the sawlogs. Her jaw trembled, but her eyes were as dark brown, as calm, as those of the kit beaver that day we first met. I wanted to fire down into the fog of battle but reconsidered when it occurred to me that the ball might strike my brother or Pine Leaf. I stayed my hand and saved the last bullet for Plover. She was brave enough, I guess.

  By the time the smoke cleared, they were back behind the shield of the sluices, taking their wounded with them. They had torn down our tent and dragged it back to cover with them. Owney and the Pine Leaf were nowhere in sight. Then someone raised a tattered strip of white cloth on a stick and Dade yelled up to us, “A truce to talk things over?”