Deadville

by Robert F. Jones

  “Lenny will be with us.”

  “Yes, but so will Spy. He’d be only too delighted to arrange a fatal mishap for our traveling companion.”

  I must have looked dubious, because he continued more reassuringly: “And after all, who knows whether we’ll ever find Owen? If your brother’s learned to evade Apaches, he’ll probably give us the slip without half-trying.”

  AND SO IT was agreed. Spy returned that evening from Sandía. He had the horses, thirty of them, but not the thieves.

  “They fell off a mountain,” he told me. “No survivors.”

  “All three of them?”

  “They were Apaches,” he said. “Jicarillas. You know how clumsy they can be when they have to walk. I couldn’t let them ride, even in chains, for fear they might escape a-horseback.”

  Spy had returned to the West from Kansas in ’46, as a scout for Kearny’s Missouri boys. His wife still wouldn’t have him back, he said. Things hadn’t worked out on the new Shawnee reservation, either. All the old warriors had either died or turned into businessmen. The young ones were farming, just like proper Americans. He told me all this after I happened upon him one night in Taos, after the suppression of the Indian rebellion which had cost Charles Bent his life. Bent had succeeded Armijo as governor and spent most of his time in the Palacio at Santa Fe, while his shy Mexican wife and children stayed at home in Taos. He was taking a short vacation there when the uprising began. One of the house guests during that holiday season was Josepha Jaramillo Carson, the seventeen-year-old wife of the well-known scout Kit Carson, who lived in Taos when he wasn’t out killing Indians. These Indians knocked on Bent’s door at six in the morning, came in, shot him with guns and arrows, scalped him while he was still alive, cut off his head, then, oddly enough, sat down and cried. Bent had been a popular governor. Still, he was an Anglo, and for that he died. Near two dozen other Americans, men, women, and children, also perished in the uprising, which left the Pueblo Indians and their Mexican allies in control of the town.

  This was on January 19 of 1847. By February 2, Col. Sterling Price with 350 men and four howitzers had marched up from Santa Fe. Jim and I were with them. The Indians holed up in the mission church, whose thick adobe walls they hoped would save them. Not so. We started shooting at dawn, and by midafternoon the howitzers had battered gaping holes in the mud bricks. The artillerymen wheeled a twelve-pounder loaded with cannister up to the door and fired it straight into the iglesia. The Missourians fixed their bayonets, spit on their scalp knives, took another swig of aguardiente, and quickly stormed the church. Only seven gringos died in the assault. Later we counted 150 dead Indians sprawled in the smoke-wreathed rubble.

  The leaders of the revolt were duly tried in a court of law, and hanged.

  I found Spy lying drunk and half-naked that very night, in a gutter outside Estis’s cantina in San Fernández de Taos, singing old keelboat songs in the stagy accents of, well, a drunken Indian. That’s how I recognized him. When I picked him up and slung him on my horse, he opened his red eyes. “Paleface brother heap kind to no-good redskin,” he slurred with a horrid smile. “Here, have a scalp.” He fumbled the grisly thing out of his shirtfront, then vomited all over himself. I got him to our camp on the outskirts of town, where Jim had a good fire going, coffee bubbling, and hump ribs popping hot and fat on the flames; we sobered him up by morning. He’d been sober ever since, and more murderous than ever. Though he will kill another Indian without blinking an eye, it preys on his soul to see them perish at the white man’s hand. A contradictory fellow indeed.

  “You’ve got to be more circumspect in your disposal of prisoners,” I told him now. “Anglo law is a lot stricter than the Mexican variety. One of these days some sheriff or lawyer is going to wonder why so many of the men you capture never make it back to town.”

  “I didn’t kill those Apaches,” Spy said. “We were coming along a narrow trail through the mountains, the prisoners chained at the ankles in single file. I followed with the horses behind me. A boulder fell from the cliff above, knocked two of the Indians over the precipice, and of course the rest followed. I think the rock was pushed down on them by the Tats-ah-das-ay-go.”

  “What was that name?”

  “You’ve heard it before,” he said. “Remember, I told you about it last time I was down there, in the fall of last year. The Mexicans say it’s a hobgoblin or ogre or wicked witch of some sort who preys upon the Apaches. Been at it for the last ten years at least. Sort of a bogeyman, or woman actually, for some say the Tats-ah-das- ay-go is of the feminine gland. I always figured it for a spook story, you know, the kind mothers frighten their children with. ‘Be good or Tats-ah-das- ay-go will get you!’ That sort of thing. Now I’m not so sure but she’s real.”

  “Yeah, I remember now. But I feel I’ve heard or seen it somewhere else recently. What does the name mean in English?”

  “Quick Killer.”

  “Damn! But it can’t be. He says he saw her die. … Plover, show Spy my brother’s letter if you’re done with it.”

  She took off her spectacles and handed Owney’s pages to the Shawnee. We were seated in the study of the big, ruined old casa de campo that Plover and I share with Captain Beckwourth and Spybuck up in the hills above Santa Fe, rent free, of course, courtesy of Don Lafcadio. When we’d returned from California with that big herd of horses, back in ’46, Jim found that the fair Luisa Sandoval had flown the coop, run off with a Missourian named John Brown, and remarried. He was mopey for a while—usually he left them, not vice versa—but now seemed resigned to the rejection. On this particular evening, all was snug and happy in our new abode. Logs blazed in the big fireplace, the children were finally asleep, and Jim was out at the stable watering the horses. While Spy read the letter, I topped off our coffee mugs. He sipped his absently from time to time, turning the pages swiftly. He looked up at us after coming the part about Pine Leaf s name change, raised his eyebrows, then continued.

  “It could be her,” he said when he’d finished. “I thought I saw a figure darting away from the clifftop just as the boulder toppled. Of course it might have been another Indian—Pueblo or Comanche or Tonkawa, all of them sworn enemies of the Apaches.”

  “Did it look like her?” Plover asked.

  “Everything happened so quickly, I didn’t see more than a flash. Couldn’t tell if was a man or a woman, or a bear for that matter. Later, after picketing the horses, I went up there and checked for footprints. Found some. Human all right, and they were the right size to have come from a tall woman. Bar-che-am-pe was big enough to fit them.”

  “It sounds like Pine Leaf,” Plover said. “At first I was certain, after reading Owen’s story, that the Apaches had caught her and killed her, or else she would have returned to Crow country. But now I can see I was wrong. She’d be much more likely to stay on at the fringes of Apacheria to count more coups, take more scalps, make life hell for her enemies. She was never like other women. Vengeance is her life.”

  “Did you track her out?” I asked Spy.

  “The footprints disappeared once they reached bare rock. It would have taken a while for me to find where the trail resumed. Night was falling and I wanted to get clear of those cliffs before making camp, so I wouldn’t suffer a fate similar to that of my late captives. Next morning I headed for Santa Fe. But if it hasn’t rained or snowed up there since I left, we could go back and find them, if you think it worthwhile. Tracks last forever in this dry country.”

  “Let’s see what we find at the mine tomorrow,” I said, getting up from my saddle-frame-and-steerhide easy chair. “I’ll go out to the stable and tell Jim about this ‘Quick Killer’ business.”

  WE LEFT BEFORE dawn for Dade’s estancia. I didn’t know how long we’d be out, so we brought two remounts apiece, a canvas Sibley tent, sleeping robes, a few long ropes of dried beef (they dry their jerky by the yard out here), plenty of cornmeal masa, chilis, and frijóles, a big can of lard, and appropriate pots and pans. P
lover had to stay home with the children and to keep the office open, but Spy was a splendid chef in many languages. He had taken to Mexican cooking and loved to experiment with the chilis, the hotter the better, which made for great meals but frequent stops along the trail afterward. His menudo norteno could wake up the dead.

  We were, as usual, armed to the teeth. You never knew what you’d meet on the trail in those days: it could be bandidos or Apaches or maybe a rampaging grizzly. I still preferred my brother’s old .54-caliber Hawken, which I’d learned to shoot with some long-range skill after I inherited it, but now also packed along a pistol, in this case a brand- new Walker Colt. This was a ponderous beast, weighing nearly five pounds. Its nine-inch-long half-octagon barrel threw slugs accurately out to near fifty yards, six of them in a cylinder load, and when it was empty you could always use it as an admirable shillelagh at close quarters. Jim, in addition to his heavy Colt Dragoon six-shooter, carried an improved Colt’s ring-lever rifle, like the pistol a repeater, equipped with the same newfangled revolving cylinder, but containing eight loads in the rifle rather then the six available to the handgun. The Colt’s browned octagon barrel was only thirty-two inches long, which made it stubby-looking compared to the Hawken, but the rifle made up in firepower what it lacked in range. Curious, when you think about it, that Jim, the old-timer, carried the most modern weapons. Spy still preferred his venerable smoothbore fuke, though he, too, had added a brace of handguns to his armory, in his case a pair of Whitneyville Colts, a couple of inches shorter in barrel length than the Walker but very fast out of the holster. His pistols were also in .44 caliber, so we could replenish each other’s pouches at will. When we ran bullets at night, one man could run the same size for all.

  Lenny was waiting for us at the gate to the estancia. So, too, was Dade, though it was barely past dawn and of late he had become a late riser, as befit a man of his standing, I suppose.

  “I decided to come with you,” Don Lafcadio stated as we came up. “My business can wait, and this is far too urgent a matter to trust to underlings.”

  “Well then, boys,” Jim said, turning to Spy and me, “why don’t we just reverse course then and ride back home? The hunt seems to be in good hands, what with the master of hounds in the saddle and his best pooch trotting along with him.”

  “Don’t get sassy, Beckwourth,” Lafe said. “I knew you way back when.”

  Spy and the Delaware eyed one another. As we rode on toward the diggings, I noticed that each took every opportunity to lag a step or two behind the other. Soon they were trailing the rest of us by nearly a hundred yards. Of course neither Indian wanted the other behind him, in position for a back shot, but this was ridiculous. Finally I reined in and rode back to them.

  “What are you fellows up to?” I said, fixing Spy with a stem glance. “Is this some kind of a woodland redskin backwards race? Pretty soon you’ll both have lagged your asses clear down to Santa Fe if you don’t start moving forward. Why don’t you both ride ahead of the rest of us? That way you wouldn’t have to worry about backshooters. Don Lafcadio will watch Lenny’s and I’ll watch yours. Now let’s make some tracks.”

  It would be a long trip, I feared.

  CHAPTER III

  THE MlNERĺA DE Hidalgito consisted in those days of three major diggings. What Dade called Shaft Number One had been discovered and begun by a vagabond Mexican minero up from Durango in 1829, who sold his claim to Governor Armijo soon afterward for the less than munificent payment of 3,000 pesos. Digging had immediately intensified, thanks to the governor’s unlimited access to free labor in the shape of prisoneros and peons, and the first shaft was now some 1,400 feet deep. Of the 2,500 men employed at the mine, fully half worked this tunnel.

  Shaft Number Two was on the far side of the mountain, about half a vertical mile distant from Number One and directly opposite it. This adit, Dade said, had been blasted out of the bedrock with gunpowder poured into holes driven by steel screws, which in turn were hammered by men swinging ten-pound sledges. The shaft now penetrated horizontally into the hard rock some eight hundred feet, where the tunnel hit the ore-bearing ledge and then followed it—or was in the process of following it—out to the left, or south. Dade had built a tramway up the far face of the mountain and down the Shaft Number One side to facilitate the movement of ore to the stamping ground, which was located near the main shaft. The patio of this Hacienda de Beneficios, as it is politely termed by the Mexicans (“The Estate of Profits”), measures some thirty-two thousand square yards in area. Through a portion of it, more than two thousand mules march in circles day and night, sometimes shoulder-deep, through a huge, thick mud puddle consisting of crushed ore, copper, and salt. Water from a leaky wooden aqueduct leading down from the surrounding peaks kept this paste at the right consistency, and from it, through some arcane porphyritic process I haven’t the science to explain, much less comprehend, the gold is extracted: some hundreds of thousands of dollars worth to date, or so Dade told us.

  The whole place was mutt ugly. Mules staggered blind through their endless circles caked in corrosive muck, their hides worn bloody by their harness. The men who worked the hoists bringing baskets of ore up from the pit each wore the hollow mask of defeat. A shift was changing when we arrived, and I watched the miners emerge from the entrada, skinny, naked save for loincloths, their dark, flat Indian faces smeared with blood from the shards of rock that rebounded from their picks. Guards armed with shotguns watched them line up to await the refastening of the chains which fettered them together. All of the supervisory personnel, I noticed, were Americans, border ruffians from Missouri to judge by their twanging voices. I followed the ongoing workers into the tunnel, past a great clanging steam engine which sucked water from the mine in a continuous gray-green gusher, and watched them descend the rickety ladders into the depths. It was black as the proverbial Pit down there, save for the golden glints of occasional lanterns. Now and then a hollow roar was followed by a blast of hot air rising from the shaft, a weak, subterranean fart whose fetor was compounded of blown gunpowder, man sweat, the perfume of shit and piss, and the stench of stale water. One of the prisoners looked up at me from the dark as he climbed down the ladder. Was his visage writ in despair or merely Indian stoicism? For a moment I had an image of my brother descending into this pit, or one very like it. Four years on the ladder. ... If he was the man who had blown up part of this mine, at the cost of so many lives, perhaps he was doing a good deed after all. Putting men like these out of their misery. ... I certainly would prefer death to such a life.

  Perhaps the racket of the engine had addled me, but for a moment I had a clear vision: If this is what wealth meant, this gutting of the bowels of the earth, this rendering of men into mere shit so as to replace the shit that was extracted with silks and crystal and carriages and foofaraw; if getting rich meant putting men to this kind of labor, forcing mules to walk these endless miles through a foul-smelling slurry, their hides rotted through with salt and chemicals; if it meant having your ears assailed day and night with the ceaseless yammer of steam engines, the clang of heavy hammers on steel spikes, of picks in rock, then I wanted none of it.

  “Where did the blast take place?” I asked Dade when I came back out.

  “Shaft Number Three,” he said. “We’ll go over there now, but I wanted you to see what I have at stake here. And in other places as well.”

  SHAFT NUMBER THREE lay half a mile west of the Estancia de Beneficios, on a barren slope composed of scree and cactus. Another steam pump stood at the entrada, cold and dead for now like the men entombed in the mine. A guard tower had been erected to cover the entrance to the shaft, with a platform atop it which could support half a dozen armed lookouts. Apache or Navajo raids were always a possibility in these mountains, and even the normally docile Pueblos were capable of skulduggery in the wake of the Taos suppression, Dade said, but the watchtower was mainly manned to prevent any prisoners from escaping. The guards had strict orders to turn away an
y unauthorized visitors.

  “What was the weather like up here the night of the explosion?” Jim asked. Dade turned to a short, stocky Missourian who had joined us at the shaft. This was Ephraim Ings, the night supervisor, a fellow Welshman judging by the shag of his eyebrows.

  “Overcast,” he said. “Chilly. Raining a bit, as it sometimes does at this time of year. Just a thin mist of a rain, with fog rising from the creekbeds. Black as the pit of a jakes, it was. I remember thinking, I hope no Indians show up tonight, for the guards might find it hard to keep their powder dry. ”

  Spybuck was checking the ground around the entrance for unusual footprints. Now he came over to where we sat our horses.

  “The barefoot tracks are those of the prisoners/’ he said. “I notice your boot prints there in the mud, Mr. Ings. How were the night guards shod?”

  “In boots as well,” Ings said. “They are all of them Americans, horsemen born and bred, and do not favor city shoes, nor yet heathen moccasins … er, beggin’ your pardon, Mr. Spybuck.”

  “Did anyone here that night have a dog with him? A small dog, maybe fifteen pounds in weight, with long toenails?”

  “Not that I recollect,” Ings said, scratching his stubbly chin in thought. “Do you see such tracks down there? Might they not perhaps have been left by a coyote?”

  “Too small,” Spy told him. “But a dog was up here that night.”

  “What the hell is this?” Dade broke in. “I want a man, not a dog, unless it was some trick circus mutt that knows how to set off a keg of gunpowder.”

  “Dogs stick with their owners,” said the Shawnee. “There are also a set of tracks made by moccasins. A Indian’s tracks, toed inward. He’s heavyset, I’d say, about 180 to 200 pounds.”