Deadville

by Robert F. Jones

  It was true that Dade had set us up in this business of tracking stolen horses and indeed threw a lot of business our way simply because he was the wealthiest, and thus the most influential, man in Santa Fe.

  “You’re forgetting about Lenny here,” I said. “He was there; he knows about the Padres mine. Maybe …”

  The Delaware looked over at me and smirked.

  Dade said, “Lenny couldn’t have done this. He’s with me all day and sleeps outside my door at night. Nor could he have told anyone about the mine. He can’t write, and the poor fellow hasn’t uttered a word since the Yaquis cut out his tongue back in ’38.”

  “Look, Lafe,” I said. “I truly believe my brother is dead. Wouldn’t I have heard something from him otherwise? It’s nearly ten years since the massacre. All right, I’ll grant you there’s a slim chance that perhaps he isn’t dead after all, but this letter could be from anyone. There are enough boozers and losers around here these days who’d love to take credit for any noteworthy deed, whether good or evil. Anyway, what could I do about the matter even if the man who blew up your mine is my brother?”

  “Beckwourth and Spybuck are among the best trackers in the Southwest,” Dade said. “Get out there and track him down. Keep him from blowing up more of my properties. I’ll pay you plenty if you do—enough to buy you that rancho in California you’re always dreaming of.”

  He was right. There was an estancia near the mission in the Valle de San Fernando, north of the sleepy little Pueblo de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de Porciuncula, a town with more letters in its name than it had citizens, where Jim and I had once stolen some horses. The hacendado was a decent man, a tall, courtly Spaniard named Ventura who had entertained us most hospitably during our stay. He had a splendid wine cellar, stocked with vintages he had cultivated, pressed, and bottled himself. The main house was furnished with tables, chairs, bedsteads, and cabinets that the don had commissioned to be carved from black walnut and oak grown on his own property. Groves of oranges and lemons surrounded the house, watered from a crystalline stream that descended from the surrounding hills. Herds of blood horses ranged the grasslands, intermixed with long-horned kine. We killed two grizzly bears which had been raiding the don’s swine pens, and in gratitude he opened his casa to us. We reciprocated by stealing 200 of his best mounts. In the midst of many a mountain winter I have thought of that lovely rancho, so yearningly that I could smell the blossoms on the cool breezy patio while sipping a large glass of orange juice of a morning. …

  PERHAPS NOW IS the time to explain what had transpired since that day Dade and I went our separate ways at Garnet Greek. He had left us afoot, with only the guns we carried to see us safe back to the Crow country. We buried the Yellow Buffalo Calf in the manner of the Plains Indians, anointing her body with ocher and wrapping it in cured hides, they laying it faceup on a platform we built in a tall pine tree on the mountainside. It was a sad day. After finding what we thought were the charred skeletons of Owen and Pine Leaf in the ashes of the bonfire, we headed back down to Wind River. Spy and Plover managed to steal some horses from a band of unwary Shoshones, so we made good time. There was plenty of game en route. We found Beck- wourth’s people hunting buffalo on the flats near the Popo Agie. When I told him of our misfortune he shook his head.

  “If I had a buffalo robe for every similar tale I’ve heard,” he said, “I could retire to Saint Louis along with General Ashley. No, to New York with J. J. Astor. It’s catch as catch can in the mountains, and you got caught.”

  Hard words, but the truth nonetheless.

  Jim said that with luck Owen would effect an escape from Dade’s boys. He knew Lafe Dade and doubted the man would murder my brother in cold blood. Pine Leaf was another matter: to Dade, as to most white men in the West at that time, Indians were vermin who deserved rubbing out. I suspect Jim’s feigned indifference to Pine Leaf s fate stemmed from hurt feelings at being rebuffed by the woman.

  Spybuck left us that fall, heading back to the Kansas Territory, where he had heard his tribe had been relocated from their ancestral lands east of the Father of Waters. Plover and I wintered over with Jim, up in the Absarokas, and a fine winter it was. We had plenty of dried buffalo meat to eke out the fresh elk and deer we killed from time to time. The tepees were snug and warm, abundant wood for the fires, water and grass for the animals, and indeed we never had to resort to feeding the horse herd on cottonwood bark, as was the need of less fortunate tribes. Each night Jim regaled us with tales from his heroic past. Splendid stories: all blood and battles, loves and losses, “ ‘scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach.” Indeed, they were Shakespearean in their scintillating scope. For Jim was a mighty reader as well as a champion yarnspinner. He loaned me books from his “traveling library,” as he called the brass-bound trunk in which he kept them: the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Montaigne and Rabelais, along with more modern tales like Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels. He recommended a well-thumbed copy of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, but I never got into it, perhaps because the plot unfolded too slowly.

  In the spring we resumed the ageless cycle of Plains Indian life: hunting, raiding, stealing horses and women, making fur and babies, living and dying. This is how we survived for the next two years, which in retrospect seem the happiest of my life. Then in July of 1836, during a routine visit with Mr. McKenzie at Fort Clark down on the Yellowstone, Jim suddenly found himself out of work. The king of the Missouri said Jim was spending too much time stealing horses and fighting the Blackfeet, not enough collecting peltry. I was off hunting buffalo at the time. When I returned to the Crow camp Jim was gone.

  Plover, who’d remained with the band during the final months of her first pregnancy, after presenting me with a fine son whom we named James in honor of our benefactor, informed me that Captain Beckwourth had headed back to Saint Louis. There, I later learned, he had joined the Missouri Volunteers as an express rider, master teamster, and assistant wagon master, bound for the Seminole War in Florida. Such were the vagaries of mountain life in those days that I did not meet up with him again until the fall of 1842, at a trading post on the Arkansas River called El Pueblo.

  A bustling little town stands there now, but in November of that year El Pueblo consisted of a mud-walled fort some sixty yards square surrounded by the shacks of some fifteen or twenty trappers and their families. Jim ran the cantina and the subtier’s store, guided by principles he’d gleaned from Adam Smith’s book—which is to say at a considerable profit. Mexican traders up from New Mexico traded the raw whiskey called Taos Lightning for furs and buffalo robes, and I’d heard that the doings at El Pueblo could get rather rough. I rode into the scruffy little settlement from the Bayou Salado one blustery autumn evening just minutes ahead of a howling blue norther. After stabling my horse with the caballerizero, I went into the cantina to wet my whistle. It was a low-ceilinged room, lit by guttering oil lamps, the air thick with the pungent smoke of cigarros. The bar consisted of a rough- hewn slab of mountain mahogany perhaps twenty feet long with a shelf lined with many bottles of mescal, aguardiente, and red whiskey.

  Four men were playing cards at a table in the corner. One had his back to me, but from the width of those shoulders and the curly black hair that fell from beneath his fiat-crowned hat he seemed familiar. Across from him sat a figure I clearly recognized: Old Bill Williams, a legend in the mountains at the time. Skinny and tall, stooped and weathered tough as whang leather, he spoke in such a high, whiny, cracked, thin voice that you never could tell whether he was laughing or crying: “Do ’ee hyar now,” he was saying just then, “you danged crittur, ’ee can’t play cyards thataway, not by drawin’ from the bottom of the dang deck.”

  Williams, born in the Tarheel State, raised on the Missouri frontier, and a parson among the Osage Indians before he grew disillusioned with preaching and traded his Bible for beaver traps, never used bad language.

  His opponent answered him in words too low for me to follow.
But I noticed him shift himself on the rickety chair and elbow his unbuttoned capote clear of the haft of knife which was sheathed on his belt. The handle of the knife was wrapped in dirty white silk. …

  “Do ’ee hyar now?” Williams skreeked. “ ’Ee’re a low-down half- breed nigger Frenchman…

  Jim Beckwourth drew his white-handled knife and lunged across the table, but Williams skipped away from the blade and crashed a swift left hook to the other man’s jaw. The knife dropped to the packed dirt floor, and Jim soon followed.

  I went over and picked up the knife, then Jim himself. Led him over to the bar and ordered a Taos Lightning. He looked at me with woozy eyes.

  “I always was a sucker for a left hook,” he said. “How the hell are you, Dillon?”

  Later, after a couple of drinks, Jim took me to his quarters in the fort and introduced me to his new bride, “Miss Louise Sandeville,” a dark-hued beauty whose real name was Luisa Sandoval. She hailed from Taos, where Jim had had a trading emporium before setting up this “renegade” post in competition with Bent’s Fort, farther down the Arkansas. He invited me to work with him there at Pueblo. I went to Arroyo Hondo, a little town in the sheep country north of Taos, to fetch Plover and the children. There were two of them by this time, a bubbly, bright-eyed little daughter having joined our family the previous year. We named her Gwenivar, Gwennie for short. Over the next couple of years Jim and I trapped together, made a few horse-stealing raids into California, had some wicked fights with Utes and Digger Indians, visited the missions to refresh ourselves on the padres’ beef and brandy, joined Juan Alvarado’s army and fought against Governor Micheltorena’s forces at the Battle of Cahuenga in 1845, and generally had a high old time of it. When word came to us that the U.S. was about to go to war with Mexico, we stole 1,800 more horses and headed back over the mountains to join the fun.

  It was there that I met up with Lafe Dade again. I spotted him on the street in Taos one evening and my heart went cold, followed him into a cantina, determined to gun him down. He was standing at the bar drinking a shot of Taos Lightning. Must have felt my eyes boring into him and turned. He went white. My hand was on the butt of the revolver at my hip. God only knows what my face looked like.

  “You,” he said.

  “Goddamn right. Dillon Griffith. Finish your drink and say your prayers, Dade. You’re going to die right here and now.” I drew the Colt.

  “Why?” he blustered, trying at once to look guiltless and indignant. He was neither. He was just plain scared.

  “You killed my brother, you scum. You burned him in the fire.”

  “I never!” he bleated, his eyes wide and bright with fear. “I let your brother and his woman go, just like I promised. But there were Rees in the country; we’d seen their sign all over the place. Still, your brother insisted. So I honored my word—swear to God—even gave him his pistols back. Shortly after we separated, we heard gunfire behind us. I sent one of my men back and he saw the Rees. They had both Owen and the woman. He came back at a gallop to fetch us. But we were too late. The Rees had already tossed them both into the inferno, then decamped. It was awful.” He gulped down his drink. “I swear to you on my honor as a white man and a Christian, I didn’t kill your brother.”

  I hesitated. Around me I heard the low muttering of voices—the other drinkers in the saloon, all of them white men, all of them armed, many of them, I suddenly realized, Dade’s friends and associates.

  “Put the gun down, Dillon,” came Jim’s voice from behind me. “It wouldn’t do to kill him now. Too many folks have heard what he said. It’d be murder, partner. You’d hang.”

  He was right. I holstered the pistol, bellied up to the bar, and ordered a shot of Lightning. My hand was shaking.

  Dade and his pals cleared out in a hurry.

  I HAD NEVER gone back to White Hart Hollow after our flight in the fall of 1833. Plover had no desire to go there, for the place bore too many sad memories for her, what with her friend the Buffalo Calf s death, and I certainly agreed with my wife on that score. If nothing else, my missing fingers reminded me of that sorry business every day. Besides, the Blackfeet were still a great danger in those parts. It was not until 1837 that the tribe was reduced, by a mysterious smallpox plague, to a less aggressive state.

  But from reports by various Indians and mountain men over the years I knew Dade had brought a workforce of Mexican prisoners up to the Buenaventura to develop the mine. He’d even built a sturdy fort-cum-prison compound at the site and named it Dadeville. When he began throwing money around in Santa Fe, buying up mines and stamp mills in the name of Mexican “owners” who were merely front men, Jim and I knew very well where the money was coming from.

  “He’s probably lying,” Jim said as he stood beside me in the cantina that night. “But we can’t prove it, and now that we’re in what passes for civilization, we can’t just gun him down without paying for it by trying on a hemp necktie for size. Our best recourse is the law, either Spanish or American. What Dade’s doing up north is technically illegal. The country where the mine is located was first discovered and mapped by a couple of Spanish priests, Sylvestre de Escalante and Francisco Dominguez. Under Spanish law, any precious metals found in the course of such explorations had to be split fifty-fifty with the Grown, whose share, since the revolution, now rightly belongs to the Republic of Mexico.”

  “Let’s turn the bastard in before the U.S. Army arrives,” I said. Gen. Stephen Kearny’s Missouri Legion was still weeks away from Santa Fe, but already the governor of Nuevo Méjico, Manuel Armijo, was loading wagons with all he could steal in anticipation of a swift departure for Chihuahua. “Armijo will confiscate everything Dade owns and then throw him in the calabozo. Hell, he might even hang the skunk.”

  “No, he won’t,” Jim said. “He’ll just take a big mordida. I’ve got a better idea.”

  The next day, Jim bearded Dade in his lair, a big hacienda just out of town, and made a proposition. In return for a large interest-free “loan” to establish us in the stock detective business, along with a promise to send us as much business as he could in the future, we would not tell the governor of Dade’s transgression, nor would we breathe a word of it to the American authorities who would soon be in control of New Mexico, and who could be just as corrupt and greedy as any Mexican, while at the same time wrapping their peculations in an odor of blue-nosed sanctity. Since the “loan” was much less than Armijo’s mordida would have amounted to, Lafe Dade readily agreed.

  Thus was established the firm of Beckwourth, Spybuck & Griffith, Stock Detectives. Since the arrival of the Missouri Legion in New Mexico, an outfit that largely consisted of border ruffians, rustlers, horse thieves, cutpurses, and runaway murderers, you can bet there was plenty of work for us.

  CHAPTER II

  WELL,” I TOLD Dade on the morning after the mine blew up, “since I’m still convinced my brother is dead, I suppose we might take the case. However, I’ll have to consult with my partners.”

  “You’ve been reading too much goddamn law,” Dade said, thumping the tome that lay open on the desk before me. “By God, though, you’re getting windy enough to play the lawyer’s role; that’s for sure. All right then, if your partners agree to take on my ‘case,’ get your hinders on out to the mine as soon as you can and start sniffing. I’ll send Lenny along with you, to keep you out of trouble.”

  “Lenny can stay at home. Spybuck is due back any minute now from the Sandías, and he cannot abide a Delaware. I could not guarantee Lenny’s safety if those two tangle.”

  Lenny uttered a chortling gargle, made the uglier by the wobble of his tongue stump in that wide, reptilian mouth.

  “Lenny can take care of himself,” Lafe said. “Stop by the hacienda and pick him up on your way to Hidalgito.”

  With that they took their departure.

  No sooner had they gone than Jim appeared from the back office. “I saw them through the window from across the street,” he explained. “Di
dn’t know how it would play, so I came round the back way and listened at the door.” He stuck a .44-caliber Colt’s Dragoon back into his belt. “By the way, your brother is alive. And Dade’s right: Owen’s the one who blew up the mine.”

  With that he withdrew a thick packet from his coat pocket and placed it on the desk. It was addressed to me in Owen’s handwriting, care of General Delivery. There was also a small envelope containing a covering letter.

  “I read this note while I was eavesdropping at the door just now,” Jim said, “and got the drift of what Dade was telling you. Sorry.”

  “Dear Dillon,” it read. “The enclosed manuscript is an account of what became of me after we separated at Garnet Creek many years ago. I wrote it during a long stay in Mexico to explain to you, and to whomever else it may concern, why I must follow the course of action which I have just initiated. I’m dismayed to find you on friendly terms with Lafcadio Dade, and have thus hesitated making my presence known to you. Perhaps we will meet again somewhere down the trail. Owen.”

  I was flabbergasted, of course, and for a moment my head spun. He was alive!

  And he was a killer.

  It took Jim and me the rest of the morning to read Owen’s manuscript.

  “Jesus,” I said when we’d finished. “Well, clearly I can’t do what Dade wants. Bring in my own brother for the hangman’s noose?”

  “Who says we have to bring him in?” Jim said. “We’ve known Dade’s a rotter from the beginning. We’ve only been using him to keep a close eye on him. Now we can set it up so it looks like we found Owen and had to kill him.”