Spy looked at me and the Plover. We nodded.
“Go ahead then!” Spy yells back to him.
“We have Owen Griffith and the Grow bitch,” Dade says. “We also have your peltry, your traps, your horses, and those bags of what I presume is gold, both dust and nuggets. You have, quite unprovoked, killed three of my men and sore wounded half a dozen more. I call that even up, a fair exchange. What I propose is this: You shall allow us to get to our horses and clear out of here. We will take Owen Griffith and the bitch with us, hostages, until we are safe away from this place, then leave them unharmed on the trail.”
“What about the gold and the furs?” I yell.
“They shall serve as reparations for the injuries you have done us.”
“But you killed my woman, the Yellow Calf!”
“And the Grovans killed my woman, thanks to what you-all did to them over on the Gallatin!”
“Goddammit. …”
Spy grabbed me and slapped me across the face. I was too weak from pain and the loss of blood to protest much. “It’s a standoff,” he hissed. “Don’t be a fool! You can always get another Indian girl.”
AND SO IT was done. We watched them mount and ride back up the river, my brother sagging in the saddle with a rough bandage wrapped around his neck and Pine Leaf bound head-down over the back of a mule, but alive and kicking nonetheless. Our packs of peltry and the bags of gold jounced along on a third mule. They trailed off out of sight into the high country to the south.
But Owney never came back to our camp there in White Hart Hollow, by Garnet Greek; nor did the Pine Leaf After recovering from our wounds and burying our dead, we followed up Dade’s trail for three days, hoping to discover some clue to the fates of our comrades. At last we found it: the remains of a huge bonfire, in the ashes of which lay the charred remains of two corpses, one male, one female. The lipless skulls grinned up at us out of the dead coals. To the leg bones of the man adhered the charred remains of a white man’s boots. I examined one more carefully. Sure enough, tacked into the heel were my brother’s initials: OG. He had studded them that way for identification on the trip up the Platte.
“Christ!” I said. “He burned them alive, just like he and Gardner did those Rees!”
But Spy had doubts. “Mebbe not,” he said, poking at the bones with the haft of his hatchet. “These skulls both look Injun to me— long-headed, like Shoshones. Mebbe he caught a couple and burned ’em to put us off his trail, hoping we’d think it was Owen and Pine Leaf and thus give up the chase. He could have stuck your brother’s boots on the man to make it look more convincing. Or mebbe your brother and the woman escaped but were later caught by Grovans— or, hell, even those damned Rees we fought with—and the Injuns burned ’em for sport. We don’t rightly know who done this here”— he spit in the ashes—“and following up this trail any farther will probably just get us killed.”
“What’s your damned point?” I said, hot at him for his lawyerly ways. “Whoever done it, and whoever s dead here, we must follow Dade—to the ends of the earth, if necessary—and exact revenge from him. He’s the bastard that caused all this woe.”
“Spy’s right,” Plover said. “We’re too weak to exact any vengeance on anyone right now. Too few guns, too few horses, for a long chase. Better we head back to Grow country. Dade will show up sooner or later, and then we can settle matters with him—from a position of strength, not mere rage.”
“Well,” I said, “you two can go back to the Grows, but I’m going on after Dade. I must avenge my brother.”
But that night it snowed—the first of the onrushing winter: eight, ten inches of the stuff. In the morning Dade’s trail was totally obscured. He had nearly a week’s start on me, and I didn’t know the country ahead.
So there we left it and returned to Grow country and the hospitality of Captain Beckwourth.
1
THREE DAYS DOWN the trail to the south, Dade’s Delawares captured a pair of Digger Indians, man and woman. They were the sorriest-looking redskins I’d ever seen: dirt poor, dressed in ratty skins, they’d been surviving on bugs and aspen bark and were making their way over the mountains to the Humboldt Sink, where the balance of their people lived. Dade had the Delawares build a huge fire of pine logs. When it was at full blaze, he came over to where I was tied against a lodgepole and pulled off my boots.
“What are you up to?” I asked him.
“Sharing the wealth,” he said. “That poor Digger over there’s got no boots. His moccasins are made of bark. He’s got a long way to go ’fore he gets back to his people. We’re going to help him on his way.”
He went over to the Digger and pulled off the ragged moccasins, threw them in the fire. They flared into smoke and ash in an instant. He drew my boots on the Indian’s splayed, horny feet.
Then the Delawares grabbed the Diggers and tossed them into the maw of the fire. They rolled the flaming logs atop.
“Bon voyage,” Dade said.
“Christ!” I screamed. “You heartless devil!”
He smiled down at me. “Not heartless at all. I’m thinking of your brother and his friends. They’ll come after you, of course. They’ll find the remains of this fire and also those of our late wayfaring acquaintances. They’ll find what’s left of your boots as well and give up the chase. Or so I hope. That way I won’t have to kill them when they catch up with us. I should think you’d be grateful to me for my foresightedness in sparing their lives.”
LAFCADIO DADE, AS I might have suspected, had no intention, on leaving the hollow, of releasing either Bar-che-am-pe or myself. Instead he carried us with his party to Nuevo Méjico, there to sell my warrior-woman into slavery at the hands of the Apaches. I was delivered over to the Spanish authorities and falsely convicted of trapping in Mexico without a proper license.
My sentence: life imprisonment in the copper mines of that province.
The cozy little mining town of Santa Rita del Gobre lies in a valley of the Mimbres Mountains west of the Río Bravo del Norte and not far from the headwaters of the Gila River, about three days’ hard journey by horseback to the south of Albuquerque. Indians of the region—Navajos, Pueblos, Zuñis, Apaches—had known the area to be rich in copper long before the Spaniards first came, late in the sixteenth century, to what they would name Nuevo Méjico.
The native copper of Santa Rita, for which the town is famous, can be found in the form of small lumps scattered through a matrix of tough granodiorite, a crystallized form of granite that lies just inches beneath the topsoil; but more commonly, at least in those early days, the soft red metal occurred in flakes, leaves, and tabular masses, some of these latter of great size. The native metal emerged from the earth in large outcroppings, called bufas, and it is said that masses of copper weighing up to a ton were found there in the first few years of Santa Rita’s exploitation by the Spaniards. These they cut up into manageable loads, which were wrapped in thick felt blankets, loaded on pack animals, and sent off in long conductas, or mule trains, to Chihuahua, 300 arduous miles to the south.
In their day, the Indians had hammered this “free” copper into crude ornaments and bowls, but the metal was too soft for the manufacture of tools or weaponry, so they held it in low esteem compared with flint. The Spanish, however, knew its true value: beginning in 1804, when Don Francisco Manuel Elguea, an enterprising merchant of Chihuahua, acquired the mine from his friend Col. José Carrasco, who had had it in turn from a drunken Indian, Santa Rita provided the government of New Spain with most of the copper employed in its petty coinage. The common copper coin of Mexico was the tlaco, which was an eighth of a reál, itself the eighth part of a peso.
I spent four years digging and hauling this metal from the earth, four years of dawn-to-dusk labor with pick and shovel, ore basket and wheelbarrow, down in the airless dark shafts of Santa Rita, or else up in the whip-cruel sun of a dust-filled world. In the winter it was cold as Christ’s tomb down there in the criadero de cobre, with a foot
of snow and more covering the scarred soil of that once-verdant valley floor, and the wind whistling day and night down from the sawtooth crest of the Mimbres Mountains, a forbidding parapet that served our Spanish keepers far better than a prison wall.
Not a day went by during my captivity that I did not contemplate escape, not a night without dreams of it. But flight was impossible. Our guards, armed with rusty flintlock escopetas, were a lackadaisical lot for the most part, country boys like the prisoners themselves, only too glad to gossip with us during their long dull watch tours and always willing, for a small “bite” of bribery, which they called la mordida, to smuggle in delicacies from town if we could afford them. They would be no problem to a man determined to escape. The question was what to do after leaving Santa Rita. Except for a few well-guarded trails, the Black Mountains and the Mimbres range barred passage to north or east, and even were one to evade pursuit in crossing those mountains, he would only find himself in a more heavily populated part of New Mexico, where recapture, and subsequent torture in punishment for the attempt, would at best be but a matter of days. Worse still, the country beyond the Río Bravo belonged to the Mescaleros, cruelest and most warlike of a dozen or more Apache bands. A classic frying pan-to-fire situation, I am sure you will agree.
Southwest and northwest of Santa Rita lay more mountains, the arid Hatchet range and the awesome Mogollóns. But my only hope of escape lay to the west, through the valley of the Gila River, whose fierce rapids ran down through gorges walled, it was said, in half-mile-high cliffs of granite and cactus. The Gila emptied eventually into the Río Colorado, and thus to the Sea of Cortés, but wild Apaches ranged all the intervening country, only too eager to flay alive any white man they captured, or broil him head-down over a slow fire until first his eyeballs, then his skull itself burst open and his brains dripped sizzling onto the coals.
When not working the mines, we were kept chained under close watch in the donjon of a tricornered castillo, or fort, which had been built of sturdy adobes by Don Francisco Manuel Elguea in the early years of the century. The walls were full fifteen feet high and topped with shards of broken glass that gleamed like the fangs of a rattlesnake when the morning sun illumined them. Martello towers, manned day and night by sentries with blunderbusses and swivel guns, guarded all three corners of the castillo.
My fellow mineros were mostly Indians and mestizos from Mexico City or the provincial capitals, illiterate brutes convicted of petty theft, mayhem or apostasy, et cetera. Yet it was from them that I learned the modicum of Spanish which I now possess. They were for the most part simple men, who had been lured to the big cities of Mexico by dreams of wealth, only to be exploited or disdained by the Puros, the pure-blooded Spaniards, who ruled that society at all levels. Unable to return to their tribes or rural villages, as much due to pride as to fear of the contumely they would face from their neighbors when they crept back home in defeat, they had turned to crime merely to put food in their bellies. One mestizo, a cutpurse named Jorge Guaymas, became a particular friend of mine. He came from a small fishing village on the Sea of Cortés, near the town that gave him his surname, and told me wonderful tales of his life there: of days at sea on the rolling blue waves, with dulcet breezes stiffening the sail; of whales and great shoals of tunny and gigantic fishes with swords on their snouts, leaping high in the sun at the bite of a hook; of palm trees and lobsters and juicy pitahayas; and of nubile young indio girls who would gladly spread their legs for a tlaco. …
Yes, the common daydreams of a prisoner, I will grant you, fed thin on a year-round diet of sour tripe stew and the gritty commeal porridge they call socorro, with only his fist for a bedtime companion, but they kept me thinking of Bar-che-am-pe and swearing vengeance on Lafcadio Dade.
She had weathered the long trip south quite well, I thought, given her wild, warlike nature. Only once did she try to escape, but when the surviving Delawares caught her after a half hour’s chase through the midnight sagebrush along the South Platte River and she felt the bite of the bullwhip for the first time in her life she seemed to lose heart. I had taken a pistol ball low in the neck in our fight on Garnet Greek, so was hors de combat at the time of her abortive escape. Yet she seemed to resent my failure to assist her.
During the first few days of our captivity, I had harbored hopes that my brother and his friends might somehow, miraculously, come to our rescue. I dreamed of them swooping down at night on the sleeping camp, perhaps, shooting arrows and bullets and swinging their tomahawks, and thus effecting our escape. With the help of the kindly Captain Beckwourth and his Sparrowhawk braves, I dared hope, we might yet throw a cordón militaire around the White Hart gold mine and extract from it a suitable treasure. But how much treasure would I find suitable? I realized then that I had fallen victim to what is referred to in the literature as “Gold Fever.” We had clearly overstayed our welcome in the White Hart country. Had we but left when Dillon and Spybuck urged, I thought, we might now be safely back at the Crow camp, preparing for our return to the East and delights of civilization.
And yet. . . and yet I could not but hope that Dillon had heeded my last request, closed up the mine and hidden it well, before clearing out of that vile country. For Dade, having found the alluvial gold, would surely return to the spot later and build his own sluice, then scour the sands of Garnet Creek for more of it. But if Dill and the others had sealed the mine shaft well, leaving it as we found it, Dade might never find the true treasure. Perhaps he would leave the country entirely, content with what wealth he secured from the creekbed, and establish himself in trade with the capital gained at my expense. Then when I managed to make my way back north . . .
Ah yes, I see now that the Gold Fever still had me in its grip.
I WAS NOT allowed within the walls of Bent’s Fort but kept incommunicado under guard in Dade’s camp half a day’s ride to the west, under the guard of the Delawares. From the Arkansas we proceeded through low mountains, fording the Río de las Animas, or Purgatoire River (which Dade called the Picketwire), then the Río Ganadiano; and then southwest through some heartless stretches of desert which the Mejicanos call jornadas de los muertos, or Journeys of the Dead, to the village of Socorro, where we recruited our livestock. In that somnolent, fly-plagued town the men amused themselves with strong drink and inexpensive women, both of which seemed plentiful. I of course remained in chains. We turned south again. After an arduous trek through malpais and mountains we arrived at the camp of the Mimbreño Apaches, hard by the mines of Santa Rita del Cobre on the Mimbres River.
Because they are a nomadic people, delighting in murderous hit-and-run raids on their neighbors, the Apaches live simply: their dwellings, called jacales, often consist of no more than a blanket or a buffalo robe thrown over a cluster of bushes. We had been spotted long before we were close enough to the camp to make it out as such. As we rode up, an imposing figure emerged from one of these rude tents to greet Dade: an Apache who must have been six and a half feet tall, with shoulders nearly half that broad, a head that would fill a wash basket, and the cruelest, most intelligent face I have ever seen on any man, savage or European (though perhaps that is an unnecessary distinction) .
This was the Indian known to the Spanish as Las Mangas Coloradas, or the Red Sleeves. You may have wondered how he came by that florid name. Like your common Mexican peons, Apache men often wear a loose cotton shirt, or camisa, with long sleeves; Mangas Goloradas was said to have killed so many Mejicanos and steeped his hands in such quantities of their hearts’ blood that the cuffs of his shirts were permanently stained with it. I saw no evidence of this during our brief meeting.
Mangas was only too happy to purchase Bar-che-am-pe from Dade. She would serve as a slave to his many other wives. Dade’s price for her was 100 pesos, which Mangas paid from a large clay olla standing outside his jacal. When last I saw her, Pine Leaf’s wrists were bound with rawhide; she was being led away by half a dozen shrill harpies, all wives of Mangas, who took great d
elight in beating her with cudgels every step of the way. Yet even as they thrashed her she turned back to look at me, her face impassive. Then she raised her bound hands to her breast and with her fingers, to my utter surprise, flashed me a quick message in the Plains sign language: “Keep strong heart; I come to you when I can.”
With gleeful cries the harridans forced her to stoop low and clubbed her into the fetid jacal which would be her home from then on.
I was delighted at the message.
Bar-che-am-pe had merely been shamming in her shows of docility. Waiting a chance to make another break for freedom, taking me with her this time. Perhaps she would eventually escape from the Apaches, find me, and together we could return to the north. That faint hope sustained me for many months through the next few years until finally it faded entirely, leaving me in despair.
Dade’s pretext for selling me into captivity at the mines was that he had caught me trapping on Mexican territory sin guía y sin permiso—without guide or license. This was a mortal sin in the eyes of the authorities. Mining operations at Santa Rita were, at this time, leased to an absentee American named Robert McKnight, who apparently spent all his time hobnobbing with the rich hidalgos in Santa Fe; the prison’s colonel-commandant, a dapper Puro named Gaspar Luis Ortega, was only too happy to take me off Dade’s hands. He even paid that scoundrel a reward for my “capture”—five tlacos in Santa Rita copper!
“Your true value,” said Dade, his mouth twisted in what was meant to be a wry smile. “Now, Griffith, I bid you farewell. Perhaps this will teach you not to trespass on the lands of Don Lafcadio Dade. I am sure you will profit from the experience of the coming years. After all, you are a man in love with the bowels of the earth, and the riches to be found within them. Vaya con dios, compadre.” With that he slapped me across the face, turned on his heel, and walked out the door, scattering the reward money to the urchins who waited without.
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