Heresy

by Melissa Lenhardt

  Monday, May 21, 1877

  Pueblo, Colorado

  Spent a sleepless night with a pounding headache, and decided to use the time to write a different journal, one that will show me to be what I claim, a travel writer. Will hide this one in the false bottom of my trunk.

  Tuesday, May 22, 1877

  Cañon City, Colorado

  I have visited the papers in Colorado Springs, Pueblo, and Cañon City, receiving the same answers as in Denver. Never heard of a female gang. Not in women’s nature. It’s little wonder these women have been so successful, as no one believes they exist.

  I admit to being fascinated by them. What drove them to steal? Are they hard, uneducated women? Or are they respectable women doing these things on a lark? What do they do with the money? Where do they hide? In plain sight? A schoolteacher? A widow? A group of whores? They cannot be married. I can’t imagine a husband who would willingly let his wife put herself in danger and provide for the family. Unless, of course, he had been severely wounded in a mining accident and otherwise they would starve.

  There I am, letting my imagination run away with me. But it is a game I have played since I was a child, imagining strangers’ lives. It was a quiet game I could play while looking out the window of our house. Quietness was critical to the peace of our house, critical to making sure I wasn’t on the receiving end of my mother’s ire, as were obedience and hard work. Curiosity about others is what led me to detective work. Some might call it being too nosy for my own good. Regardless, it has made me successful at my profession.

  The idea of being a travel writer was an in-the-moment inspiration, but the more I think on it, the more I like the idea. Why not tell the story of my time in Colorado, much as Isabella Bird did in 1871? I suspect this journal will become a little more florid as a result. It is a case report in name only.

  The stage ride from Pueblo was rather miserable. Six people jammed into a small space, three of whom hadn’t bathed in what smelled like quite a while. One man, named Benjamin Adamson, I soon discovered is the clerk Connolly sent to add extra protection to the payroll. I was taken aback that Connolly would think this nervous little man would offer any sort of security to so important a load. A little subtle prodding and questioning and I soon learned Adamson and Connolly had never met, that Adamson was traveling to his new post almost directly from Iowa. I didn’t doubt it; he had the look of a harried traveler too long on the road. Poor man looked ready to burst into tears at any moment.

  The stage for Gunnison, then on to Ouray, Silverton, and finally Columbia leaves at eight a.m. I do hope it isn’t as crowded as today’s. I hear that it is difficult going from here on out. I hope Adamson can hold himself together.

  Saturday, June 16, 1877

  Heresy Ranch

  Timberline, Colorado

  I’ve never been so happy to see a traveling trunk in my life as I was when mine was hauled into the ranch house. I didn’t have time to properly think of what it meant to have all my clothes and new gloves and this secreted journal back because I was so stunned to see Jehu, the stage driver, walk through the door. In all our weeks together, Garet and Hattie hadn’t mentioned him or his name once. A piece of the puzzle fell into place as to how these women who lived so remotely were able to target specific lucrative jobs. Jehu was their scout. Being a teamster, he traveled all over the state, hearing all sorts of gossip. Driving a stage, he would know better than anyone when valuable cargo would be on board. He’s a sweet man. I wonder if he realizes the danger he has put himself in.

  Since my last entry there is so much to relate, to put down, I hardly know where to start. I don’t feel entirely safe writing in this journal. Garet stole my fake journal and took it upon herself to read it. It was meant to be read; this one is not. My entries will have to be short, and I will go in chronological order, though it’s all I can do not to detail the events of last night at the Blue Diamond Saloon first.

  There are four members of the gang, five if you count Jehu. Margaret Parker is the leader, a British lady, of all things, though she rarely lets her British accent slip. She is of average height and beauty, with a rather long face and dark hair, but she has a certain charisma that draws people to her. She drew me in rather quickly—on the stage, in fact—and I have to watch myself to make sure I don’t fall further under her spell. I keep reminding myself she is a criminal, and apprehending her is the key to my future, my independence.

  Hattie LaCour, former slave and Buffalo Soldier, is the second in command (though they both claim they are equals, and Garet does show more deference to the Negress than I’ve ever seen from a white woman). She is quite beautiful, with smooth bronze skin that seems to darken and lighten depending on what she’s wearing. Dark freckles are scattered across her nose like tiny stars in the sky, and she has full lips. I’ve never thought of lips as beautiful before, but Hattie LaCour’s lips are beautiful, and quite mesmerizing as a result.

  Hattie takes on different personas depending on the situation; she robbed the stage as a cigar-smoking, ignorant former slave wearing men’s clothes, but her true self is a well-spoken, possibly educated, and cunning woman. She wears brightly colored turbans and moves with an enviable grace. Hattie doesn’t trust me one bit, and I don’t trust her, either, but I have to respect her love of her family, the protective streak that is what I believe fuels her distrust of me. Of course her skepticism is warranted, which means she has the gift of discernment. I’ll have to be careful around her.

  Two sisters, Stella and Joan Elbee, round out the group. Stella and Joan are uneducated and ignorant, though Joan is uncommonly pretty. Stella is a mean son of a bitch who wears a poncho and a sombrero and hates everyone but her makeshift family. All three older women have a tendency to pamper Joan, to treat the young woman as if she’s a child. She uses that against them, and, surprisingly, they don’t appear to realize, or if they do, to care. Joan is sly and used to getting what she wants.

  I met Margaret (who goes by Garet), Stella, and Joan as we waited for the stagecoach to leave Cañon City. They gave fake names, which means four of the five people in the stage were pretending to be someone else. Garet was a consumptive widow, Joan and Stella were sisters going to meet their father at a mining town, and I had kept my story of being a travel writer. They gave nothing away about who they were or what their purpose was. Even now, thinking back on our conversation in the stage, I can’t point to one thing they did or said that raised my suspicions. I assumed the outlaws would ride up somewhere along the route, not have planted three people inside the stage to increase their odds. If Hattie had been in the stage, I might have figured it out earlier. They are incredibly disciplined, and it was illustrated perfectly when they held the stage up.

  Garet feigned a coughing fit, and I was eager to help her. She had told me previously she had medicine in her trunk, but she’d hoped she wouldn’t have to use it. I had the driver stop and get her trunk down. She insisted on finding it herself, and I thought nothing of it. She played me brilliantly. She had befriended me on the journey, taking my side in an argument with Adamson about suffrage, sitting by the river with me at our extended stop for lunch, drawing me out without revealing anything of herself. If she weren’t an outlaw, she would make an excellent detective.

  When she pulled the gun on me I realized that this was the best possible outcome for me, having met and made a connection with Garet before the robbery, so I eagerly did everything she asked. There had always been a large hole in my plan, namely how to infiltrate the gang, or how at the very least to follow them and discover where they holed up. Especially since I had run into roadblocks everywhere I asked for information (except from Sally Dove, but I couldn’t rely on a man being killed in front of me to get me into the door of every whorehouse in the mountains). Garet befriended me to manipulate me, but she gave me the in to her gang I would have never had otherwise. When she started to ride off, I asked her to take me with her, so that I could write about them in my book. “No o
ne believes you’re real; I can change that.”

  It turns out Garet is more like male outlaws than she wants to admit. She wants to brag about her exploits, too. It’s just that no one wants to listen.

  Sunday, June 17, 1877 (sometime after midnight)

  Heresy Ranch

  Timberline, Colorado

  Jehu and Hattie are a couple. It’s highly unlikely they are married since she’s a Negress and he’s white, but that doesn’t stop them from loudly enjoying marital relations. There was yelling earlier, but I don’t think it was related to … well, you know. They seem a passionate couple.

  My bed is a pallet in the main room by the fire. It is the most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever slept on. Garet offered to share her bed, but I demurred. I wanted the opportunity to write late into the night and try to catch up with everything that’s happened. I won’t get a bit of sleep.

  When I asked Garet to take me with her from the stage, she took me with little hesitation. We rode up the mountains to a small cabin, where Stella, Joan, and Hattie were waiting for Garet with a change of horses. They were all surprised to see me. Hattie was livid. I’ve learned since that Stella doesn’t like anyone. It was easy to tell that of the other women, it was Hattie I had to win over, and I did it in a very unexpected way: by standing up to her.

  It took us a week to ride to their ranch at Timberline, and I was sick as a dog during the entire ride. It’s called mountain sickness, and I thought I was going to die. But I couldn’t show weakness, or slow them down any more than I already was. The threat of a posse being on our tail was ever present. Garet was accommodating, if not necessarily nurturing. I think she regretted bringing me along, which broke my heart a little. I admire her more than I should, since she is my adversary and my goal is to bring her to justice. As her story and Hattie, Stella, and Joan’s stories come out in dribs and drabs, I find myself marveling at their resilience, their determination to survive. I expected to find greed and arrogance at the root of their outlawing, but have found the opposite. They give away much of their money to the struggling residents of Timberline, and in return the town is their safe haven from the law. Garet’s desire for the world to know what they’ve done has less to do with arrogance than with the injustice that women are always overlooked, shoved into the margins of history, or erased altogether.

  I was so ill I slept most of the first few days back at the ranch. When I awoke I discovered Garet had gone to the mountains. It was her way, to disappear for a couple of weeks after a job, have time alone. Which meant I was left with Hattie, which would give me the perfect opportunity to befriend her, to glean as much information as possible. Hattie wasn’t having any of it; she put me to work and had Stella in charge of me.

  I have always been terrified of horses, a fear I had to quickly overcome on our seven-day ride to the ranch. I’d hoped to be done with riding when we arrived, so imagine my surprise when I discovered these women own a horse ranch in an area they call Brown’s Hole. They round up wild mustangs and train them. They trade and sell them to rustlers, cowboys (one and the same most times, it turns out), outlaws, miners and anyone else who happens to accidentally stumble into Brown’s Hole. Which means I’m surrounded by the beasts and can’t do anything but pretend to like them and try to get better at riding. I think they would forgive me anything but disliking horses.

  That is wishful thinking, of course. Hattie said she would kill me if I’m lying to them, which I’ll admit gave me pause. In the course of my investigations, it’s the first time I’ve been directly threatened. I have no doubt that Hattie means it or that she has killed before. It’s in her nature. There is something cold and unforgiving in her eyes, at least when they’re turned in my direction. She does smile and laugh, and when she does the sound is beautiful. Then she will notice me laughing with her and the humor will leave her face. I considered running away, but I am trapped here. I can’t ride out, and I don’t have the money to pay anyone to take me out. Not that anyone would. The gang is this town’s bread and butter.

  While Garet was gone, the only one who was forthcoming with information was Joan, and she swore me to secrecy. I told her that if I wanted to provide a full accounting of the gang I would have to include their background in the book. She agreed, but said the printed word didn’t matter since Stella couldn’t read. I couldn’t let on to anyone, especially Stella, that she’d told me how they came to be there. I agreed, and she told me a story so brutal that I almost didn’t believe her.

  She and Stella are from Nebraska, the daughters of a cruel sodbuster and a sickly, overworked mother. There were six children, but only an older brother and the two girls made it out of the cradle. Their mother died ten years ago, of overwork Joan said, when Stella was thirteen and Joan seven. Being the oldest, Stella took over their dead mom’s responsibilities. Joan helped where she could, but even at that age, Stella was protective of her sister.

  “I was too young to understand what my father was doing to my sister every night. On the days my father would leave the farm, my brother would do the same. The first baby lived for three weeks. The second for four. I didn’t realize what was happening until I saw Stella holding the third upside down in a barrel of water.”

  I clutched my throat, trying to massage the rising bile down so I could hear the rest of the story.

  “Stella went to the local midwife, and I don’t know what she gave her, but she didn’t get pregnant again. Papa didn’t like that. He needed children to help on the farm. Judah, our brother, had become a man and was itching to leave. Papa couldn’t run the farm on his own. Stella and I tried to keep my bleeding from them, and we did for a time. But we couldn’t hide my buds. Stella tried to keep me in her sight at all times, but she couldn’t. I couldn’t disobey my father, and when he told me to help him in the barn, we both knew what was going to happen. I followed, and Stella said, ‘Don’t worry.’

  “He’d unbuttoned his pants and was pulling out his thing when I saw Stella behind him. She raised the ax at her side and killed him with one stroke. He fell forward onto me, the ax sticking up out of his head. Blood was everywhere, and he was twitching like a dead snake. Stella dragged Papa off me by the ax handle, told me to look out for Judah, and dragged him to the back of the barn out of sight. I heard five or six more thumps before she returned, blood splattered all over her and dripping from the blade. She told me to change and go get Judah, to tell him there’d been a terrible accident. To run into the barn and get out of the way, quick. I was shaking from head to toe, knowing what she’d done and was she was going to do. She slapped some sense into me and said unless I wanted Judah to kill her, and to do to me what Papa had done to her, I needed to do exactly what she said. So I did.”

  Joan told me all of this in a calm voice while kneading a loaf of bread. I was … speechless. How do you respond to a story like that? I was horrified, though I know that I’m no better. I understand what it is like to be pushed past your limit.

  The sisters ran, of course. Stella had been putting back money for a while, knowing it would eventually come to this. They only had enough money to make it to Rock Springs, which is where Jehu found them begging for money to make it to San Francisco. He took them to Garet and Hattie at the Poudre River Ranch, their first ranch on the front range near Fort Collins, and they took them in.

  I asked if Garet’s husband was alive when they arrived, and she said yes, though he was a lunger and died that winter. Joan wasn’t clear on the year or specific date Thomas died, only that he spent most of his time in bed and Garet and Hattie spent most of their time nursing him.

  “They did that, taking people in, especially women. Somehow word got out that the Poudre River Ranch was a safe place for women and outlaws.” Joan’s eyes lit up at that. “Jed Spooner and his gang, a few others I never knew the name of. They’d come and trade horses, sometimes hole up in the cave in the foothills at the edge of the ranch; other times they’d stay out in the open as cowboys. They didn’t talk about thei
r exploits, at least not in front of me and Stella, so we could say with truthfulness that we only knew this one and that one as cowhands. They overpaid for the horses, so as to pay for the food that we’d feed them while they were there.”

  “You know a lot about the workings for a young girl.”

  She looked sly. “I was small and could hide easy to listen without being noticed.” She leaned close to me, though we were the only ones in the kitchen. “Garet and Jed took up together the very night they planted Thomas in the ground. Out behind the barn. Against the wall. Didn’t even …”

  “Stop. I don’t want to hear it.”

  Hattie walked in, so I didn’t have time to ponder the knowing look Joan gave me.

  When Garet returned to the ranch from her hunt she was in a high dudgeon, ranting and raving and damning men to hell. When she settled down, she told us that Jed Spooner was back in Timberline. I couldn’t believe my luck. My success would be assured if I could bring Jed Spooner and Margaret Parker in. While I was planning for my big moment, Hattie was quizzing Garet about how she knew, since she went in the opposite way of town when she left. She blushed and said Luke Rhodes told her. Then she started cursing again, this time about manipulative men, and I knew that she and Rhodes were romantically involved.

  I met Rhodes briefly when Stella and I went to the blacksmith to have her knife sharpened. He’s a short, bowlegged cowboy with a magnificent mustache and a craggy brown face. I suppose he’s handsome, if you like your men rough-hewn. He was polite, and his eyes were good-humored. He was a rustler in former days, until he broke his leg in a stampede and decided he’d never much liked cows anyways. He was elected sheriff because no one else was qualified and there wasn’t much sheriffing to do in a town as remote as Timberline. He mostly farms, but Hattie says he helps on the ranch when they drive a new herd of mustangs home every summer.

  There’s one law in Timberline: no killing. He doesn’t mind if outlaws use it for a safe haven, but if they’re running from a killing, Rhodes will mete out the justice himself. He’s only had to do it once, so the story goes. Garet’s gang doesn’t go in for violence, Stella pistol-whipping Benjamin Adamson notwithstanding. Adamson was staring at Joan in an inappropriate way. I was glad he got a little punishment for it.