Deadville

by Robert F. Jones

  “Then why did you do it?”

  “It was the only way the Indians would trade their robes. I was ambitious. I don’t do it anymore.”

  From Mo-he-nes-to we learned that the Oglalas were raiding along the Oregon Trail and had last been sighted between the headwaters of Lodgepole Greek, which lay not far to our north, and the Laramie River. “Go west from here, through the Medicine Bow Mountains,” he said. “You have no wagons to slow your progress; your horses look strong. This way you will not encounter the Sioux. Traveling fast, you can make Green River in five days easily. Fort Bridger is not far beyond.”

  We wanted to stop at the fort to recruit both ourselves and our riding stock, as well as ask its lord and master, the Blanket Chief himself, about conditions to the north. Who knows? Owen may have stopped at Fort Bridger for the same reasons, en route to his destination.

  THAT EVENING WE all took advantage of Crow Creek for much- needed baths. Plover and the girls went separately, for modesty’s sake: my wife had picked up this fear of nakedness in the course of living with civilized people. When they returned, Plover was clearly shaken. “I saw her,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Bar-che-am-pe. She appeared suddenly out of the willows across from the pool where we were bathing. She stood there in the shadows, still as a deer, watching us. I could not make her out at first, and eased my way back to the bank where I’d left the pistol. But the setting sun broke clear of the willows across the way and struck her face, and then I knew her. It was awful.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her face is ruined.”

  “How?”

  “Her nose has been split, by Mangas probably. They must have caught her and tortured her. I hear that it’s the custom of the Apaches to slice the noses of wives who’ve been unfaithful. There are other things as well. … No, I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  “Tell me,” I said. She was shivering now, huddled beside me at the fire. I put my arm around her and held her close. “I must know. Anything we can discover about her may tell us if we must fear her, or if we might recruit her for an ally. Tell me, Plove.”

  “I think Mangas cut off her breasts. She lifted her shirt. Just scars. …”

  I sat there for a while, holding her until the shaking stopped.

  “She was my hero when I was a girl,” Plover said. “All of us loved her; we admired her courage and her scorn for death. She was better than a man at war. Stronger than the Medicine Calf, braver than Long Hair even, the deadliest soldier of our tribe. And she was beautiful. All the men wanted her, especially the Medicine Calf But now, no more. No man could love her.” She shuddered under my arm. “Those eyes … The eyes that stared at me there from the riverbank were those of an animal.”

  “Easy now,” I said. “Did you try to talk to her?”

  “I didn’t have the wit to try. By the time I recovered my senses she’d faded into the shadows again. She was gone. Like a ghost. Like smoke on the wind.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  FORT BRIDGER IS located on Black’s Fork of Green River, with the snowy Uintah Mountains rising far to the south. A simple trading post with a blacksmith’s shop and an ample supply of foofaraw to serve the needs of the many wagons that pause on the way to Oregon, it is not much to look at: just a square of peeled poles daubed with mud, surrounding a few slant-roofed log cabins and sheds, and surrounded by about twenty-five scruffy lodges full of trappers, their Indian wives, their families, and their fleas. But to us, after a rough crossing of the Medicine Bows and the arid mesas beyond them, it looked like Eden. Tall cottonwoods, willows, green grass, watered by the braided crystal cold water of the Black, made the area an oasis in the midst of a prickly pear desert. All the horses needed new shoes, the girls needed rest, and I wanted to learn the news of the country.

  Jim Bridger is a tall hombre, lanky, with the stooped slouch of mountain man or an Indian. He looks far older than his years, which in this year numbered only forty-four, four fewer than the Medicine Calf s. Usually full of horseplay and tall stories, Bridger was unwontedly somber during our stay. His daughter Mary Ann had been murdered the previous November by Cayuse Indians at the Oregon mission Waiilatpu, on the Walla Walla River, in what has come to be known as the Whitman Massacre.

  The Whitmans, man and wife, were missionaries to the Gayuse. Marcus Whitman was a doctor as well as a preacher, and the Gayuse figured him for a brujo, a witchman, especially after their children and many of the grown-ups as well started dying from measles and dysentery, imported from the East by emigrants along the Oregon Trail. On November 29, 1847, after Whitman had conducted a burial service for three children of a Gayuse chief, the Indians followed him back to the mission. There, without warning, they tomahawked him. When his gentle wife, Narcissa, she of the golden-red hair, rushed to his aid, they shot her. Mary Ann Bridger and little Helen Mar, the daughter of Joe Meek, another mountain man, died along with nine others in the slaughter that ensued. It was a sorry day.

  Bridger had known Whitman from the beginning. On his way west the first time in 1836, the doctor had removed a Blackfoot arrowhead from Gabe’s back. It had been wandering around in there since the fight at Pierre’s Hole in 1832, and a great knot of gristle had formed around it. When the good doctor expressed amazement at how Bridger could have survived this wound without a fatal gangrene setting in, Gabe told him, “Meat don’t spoil in the mountains.”

  Would that it were true.

  The two Jims, Beckwourth and Bridger, had been friends since the mid-1820s, trapped many a stream together, fought the Blackfeet side by side.

  “Where you headed, Medicine Calf?”

  “You know that gold mine Lafe Dade has up in White Hart Hollow?”

  “Yep. Dadeville, they called it.”

  “We’re headed up there for a look-see.”

  “Won’t find much when you get there.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Grovan.”

  “Wiped it out?”

  “Last spring. Lock, stock, and barrel. A bunch of my trappers was through there last month.”

  “Nobody left?”

  “Ghosts,” Bridger said. “The boys got another name for the place now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Deadville.”

  BRIDGER HAD SEEN no one resembling Owen or Jaime passing through the country on their way north, nor in any direction, but said that a Ute named Walking Bear might have. Walking Bear was still at the fort. We found him in the trader’s store, swapping buffalo robes for white man clothes, iron pots, and arrowheads.

  Yes, he told us, a few days ago on his way into the fort from the west he had seen two whites, a man with long white hair and a beard and a boy. Three pack mules, heavy-laden.

  “Was the boy riding a gray with a steeply arched neck?”

  “Yes, a fine pony.”

  “Did they have a dog with them, a little one that barked a lot?” “A very fierce little dog. Yes.”

  “Gould you tell what they were packing on the mules?”

  “Kegs,” the Ute said. “Like the small barrels that contain gunpowder. Two to a mule.”

  At 50 pounds a keg, that made 300 pounds of powder, enough to blow the padres’ mine to perdition.

  “Where were they headed.”

  “North, toward the Buenaventura it looked like.”

  “Didn’t you speak with them?”

  “I wanted to. Perhaps I could have bought that gray pony from them, or at least the fierce little dog. It would have made good eating at a feast. Whoever ate of it, he, too, would have grown strong for war. I wanted to trade, I had plenty of robes right then. But the white beard had strange eyes. I feared he was a sorcerer, and rode on.”

  “When was this?”

  “Two suns ago. In the morning.”

  I thanked him and bought him a new three-point blanket to express my gratitude.

  “So they’re ahead of us,” Jim said.

  “I’d
wanted to rest the horses here a couple of days, but I guess we can’t. The girls need some rest, too.”

  “Maybe you should leave Plover and the girls here,” Spy said. “We could borrow fresh mounts from Gabe and ride on, top speed. The three of us should be able to overtake them before they get to White Hart Hollow.”

  “Plover won’t agree to it.”

  “ ‘Agree’ be damned!” Jim said. “Who wears the pants in your family? Order her to stay, and if she gives you sass, give her your fist.” “I couldn’t do that. My father used to whup my mam when I was a little boy. It turned her into a mean, sour woman with no love in her soul, not even for her children.”

  “Well then, ask Gabe for the loan of fresh horses, anyway. And if it don’t shine, Spy and I can chip in and we’ll buy some. They’re only asking twenty-five to fifty dollars a pony here. Times have changed in the mountains. That beats Saint Louis prices in the old days.”

  Bridger was reluctant to lend us the horses, but he had plenty for sale. “You fellows are heading into a fight,” he said. “I can smell it on you. I don’t know who you’re gunnin’ for and don’t rightly want to know, but if you leave your hair up there in the hollow, I won’t get my ponies back.”

  “What kind of a price can you give us if we buy?” I asked.

  “Let’s go out to the lot and tap some hooves, look at some teeth,” he said. “You tell me what you want, and I’ll give you a fair bargain.” We bought a dozen fresh horses from him, and indeed he gave us a good price: $325. But it about cleaned us out.

  “Don’t worry,” Bridger said. “If you survive this journey, I’ll buy them back from you at a decent price. If you don’t, it will mean nothing anyway. That’s how it is in the mountains, always has been. Always will be, too, I reckon. You pays your money and you takes your chance.”

  We packed our gear, saddled and loaded the horses, and prepared to move out. It was still two hours to sunset.

  “By the way,” Jim said to Bridger after he’d mounted his horse, “if Old Smoke should show up asking about us, tell him we headed toward Salt Lake.”

  “Smoke?” Bridger said. “Hell, that old varmint and his boys was here just before y’all arrived. Bought some gunpowder, bar lead, and a keg of whiskey. Said he was off on a wife hunt.”

  “Which way did he go?” I asked.

  Bridger scratched his long lopsided chin. “Hell, I don’t know.” His arm described a circuit of the west. “Out yonder, I guess.”

  JUST BEFORE LAST light we saw Pine Leaf shadowing us, standing her horse on a ridge to the east, allowing us again to see her. Jim spotted her first.

  “She wants to talk,” he said. “I know it in my bones.”

  “Let’s go up there,” I said. He nodded. I told Spy and Plover to proceed onward to a creek we had marked in the near distance and there pitch camp. Jim and I rode up to where we had seen Pine Leaf. She wasn’t there anymore. Jim saw horse tracks, though.

  “She’s asking us to follow her,” he said.

  “Playing games?”

  “I don’t think she’s that devious, not now. No. As I said the other day, she’s become like a horse or a dog that’s gone back to the wild. It can scarce remember its time with men, but if it was treated well, maybe it would want to go back. Still, its wild instinct tells it to flee at man’s approach. Let me tell you a story. When I first went west with General Ashley, I had every reason to leave Saint Louis. I’d thrashed the blacksmith I was indentured to, who’d forbidden me to chase girls during my time off. I was very reluctant to return to the city. Perhaps there was a reward outstanding for my capture. But more than that, I took pride in my ability to survive in the wilderness. I didn’t want to leave it.”

  “Well, whatever the case,” I said, “we have to confront her. And damn quick, too. With Old Smoke out here on the prowl, I don’t want to leave Plover and the girls hanging out there with only Spy to guard them.”

  “Let’s do it,” Jim said.

  By now the light was almost gone from the sky. Darkness descended fast. Jim never tracked surer or better than on that evening, and we rode down Pine Leaf s trail at a hard gallop. We found her on another ridge, maybe a mile east of where we’d first seen her. In fact, we almost collided with her there in the dim dark blue of early night.

  She was halted just under the lip of the ridge, looking downhill into the draw beyond. She raised her hand as we came up, not looking back. Then she pointed below.

  I dropped off my horse and crawled to the top. There was a small fire burning down in the draw. Figures moved around in its faint, flickering glow. Indians. Cheyennes. Old Smoke and his boys, a dozen of them at least. I crawled back down and mounted my pony.

  “They’re following you,” Pine Leaf said in the Sparrowhawk tongue. Her voice sounded cracked and rusty from disuse. I noticed streaks of white in her hair, which she had chopped back to the length of a white man’s. Then she turned to look at us. The scar on her face glowed faintly even in the dark. Her eyes glinted.

  “Let’s kill them,” she said.

  “No, not yet,” Jim said. I hadn’t heard that harsh, authoritative tone in a long while, it was his war chief s voice. “Too dark to shoot straight. Better we steal their ponies.”

  Pine Leaf almost smiled. “Is-ko-chu-e-chu-re,” she said. “The Enemy of Horses.”

  In my old days with the Grow I’d known Jim to crawl right up to a Blackfoot chieftain’s tepee and cut his favorite war pony free of its tether, then sneak out of camp lying flat on its back, with no one the wiser. This wouldn’t be quite that difficult, I hoped. Still, it would be much more dangerous than our California expeditions. There we merely rounded up unguarded horses grazing the empty grasslands near the ranchos and missions and drove them away. Here armed and murderous men were camped only a hundred yards from the herd.

  We picketed our ponies so they wouldn’t wander off, then stripped down to loincloths and moccasins. I saw the scars on Pine Leaf s chest which Plover had mentioned. They weren’t all that ugly. She looked no worse than many an Indian brave I’d seen after a session or two of the Sun Dance torture, hanging with hooks through his chest from the top of a lodgepole, or dragging a buffalo skull attached in a similar manner until the muscles tore out. Combined with her short hair, though, it was odd: you would no longer take her for a woman.

  The Cheyenne pony herd was grazing in the grassy bottom of the draw, beyond the campfire. A single guard watched the herd. He looked like a boy. Carrying only our knives and a six-shooter apiece, we dropped to our bellies and slithered like snakes into the sage. More easily said than done, what with the prickly pears that covered the ground. Snakes have armored plates on their bellies. Men don’t. In the dark you only knew you’d encountered a prickly pear when it stuck you. The spines often broke off in your bare flesh, then dug in deeper as you crawled on. But you couldn’t afford the sound of a gasp or the time it would take to remove them. The horse guard was alert. We saw him circling among the ponies, walking slow and quiet, pausing at odd moments to listen for sounds that might indicate approaching danger.

  “We might have to kill him,” Jim whispered to me. “Can you do it?”

  I thought about that for a moment. The young Cheyenne looked to be about Jaime’s age. I’d have to kill him with the knife so that a yell wouldn’t alert the other outlaws. If I didn’t agree to the job, Jim would have Pine Leaf do it. I had no doubt but that she’d do a quiet, efficient piece of work. The kid would be dead before he knew his throat had been cut. Again I thought of Jaime. …

  “Yes,” I answered.

  I worked my way into the cluster of ponies nearest him. I hummed a low, quiet Horse Song I’d learned years ago among the Crow on similar raids. The horses stared down at me. The horse guard was also singing a Horse Song, to keep the herd calm. He couldn’t hear me. One by one I cut the picket ropes holding the horses, without frightening them. Jim and Pine Leaf were doing the same. Then one of the horses nickered. The kid stopped singing. He
walked over in my direction. I flattened myself to the ground, trying to make myself thin as a tortilla. I was lying square on top of a prickly pear, and the flatter I made myself, the deeper its spines sank into my chest.

  Jim must have seen what was happening, because when the Cheyenne was only a step away from me I heard a clink come from the darkness. Like a knife tapping a pistol barrel. The Cheyenne turned toward it, raised his fusee. As he cocked the hammer, I rose behind him, knife in hand, and rapped him hard on the base of the skull with the haft. I caught him as he dropped. He’d be out for a while.

  All the horses were free to run. I mounted a pony bareback and began to crowd the others away from camp. Jim and Pine Leaf followed suit. We kept the ponies to a slow, quiet walk. Jim went ahead to lead the herd. They were Indian ponies, unshod, and if a hoof hit a stone it would make only a dull thwock. The more distance we could put between the herd and the outlaws in the next few minutes, the better. Indians on foot are loath to move fast, even when pursuing their own horses. Particularly at night. There’s too much chance of ambush.

  Tonight it took a little longer than I remembered. We reached the break in the draw, where the ridge tailed off. Our horses looked up from where they’d been grazing. One of them nickered. The Cheyenne ponies moved toward them. Pine Leaf came up next to me out of the dark, riding a pinto and leading three other horses. I’d been herding the remaining six or seven ponies. Jim’s teeth flashed in the dark, a happy grin. I slipped off the pony I was riding and mounted my own horse. We drove the herd slowly to the west, staying to bare, rocky ground where we could find it. For half an hour we continued at a walk; then Jim signed us to gallop.