Contention and Other Frontier Stories

by Hazel Rumney

Winding up the trail toward South Pass, the company, following Lott’s wagons, which were drawn by the few oxen he had left yoked to animals borrowed and bought from fellow travelers, plodded through meadows, sand dunes, rocky ridges, and sage-covered plains, and crossed, time and time and time again, the Sweetwater River. All along the way, the trail was littered with cast-off goods from earlier emigrants, with dead cattle ranging from bloated corpses to whitened bones, and with graves—a seemingly endless parade of graves lining the wagon road. Some were covered with heaps of stone to keep varmints at bay; some displayed headboards pulled from wagon boxes and crudely carved with a name and date; some marked only with sticks lashed together to form a cross. Others were unmarked, their presence made known only by disturbed earth; still other, older graves by a depression where the ground subsided as the corpse beneath moldered away.

  The presence of trailside graves was so common an occurrence by then that they went all but unnoticed; as ever-present as the dust and the wind. But the reality of it all came home to Mary one evening as she watched Jane Wilson perched upon a wagon tongue writing in her journal. This, too, was commonplace, but this evening it piqued Mary’s curiosity.

  She gathered her skirts and sat beside Jane on the tongue. “You are a staunch keeper of records, Miss Wilson.”

  Jane nodded, and closed the book, her place marked with her stub of a pencil.

  “I do not mean to pry, but what is it you write?”

  The woman blushed, and, head bowed, looked upward at Mary. “It is nothing,” she said. “Just a few notes. Numbers, mostly.”

  “Numbers?”

  Jane nodded. “I keep track of things. Keep count.”

  “May I see?”

  Jane’s flush increased as she handed the book to Mary. Mary paged backward through the entries. The notations were much the same.

  July 19—14 miles, passed 2 graves

  July 18—16 miles, 4 graves

  July 16—made 15 miles, 7 graves passed

  July 12—15 miles, 5 graves

  July 11—13 miles, 15 graves

  July 6—9 miles, passed 6 graves

  July 5—18 miles, 9 graves

  July 4—12 miles, passed 2 graves

  July 1—16 miles, 3 graves

  June 30—14 miles, 3 graves

  And so on, all the way back to the Elkhorn River.

  “You have a lovely hand, Miss Wilson.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But why keep such a dismal count?”

  Jane again bowed her head, and Mary waited for an answer.

  “If I . . . without someone . . . if no one takes note of those who died on this trail, I fear they will be forgotten. If their passing goes unnoticed by those who followed them, will they have died in vain?”

  Mary gently closed the book and handed it back to Jane.

  When the Oregon and California Trails diverged from the Mormon Trail at Fort Bridger, the Utah-bound emigrants knew they were on the home stretch of their thousand-mile trek from Winter Quarters to Great Salt Lake City. The wagons crossed the Bear River and creaked and crawled down Echo Canyon before facing their last obstacle before reaching home.

  Although Big Mountain was a barely noticeable ridge among the peaks of the Wasatch Mountains, climbing it put the train at its most elevated point on the entire trip. A scant twenty miles from their new home, the Salt Lake Valley was within sight from the summit. But getting down off the top of Big Mountain proved one of the toughest trials on the trail.

  Mary, John, and Joey unyoked the lead teams on their wagons and rough-locked the rear wheels by chaining them together. The wagons slipped and slid and skidded one at a time down the hill as John poked, prodded, geed, and hawed the wheelers around the stumps of cut trees frequenting the track. After getting the Smith wagons down safely, he did the same a dozen times more, helping other wagons in the train negotiate the steep course. At the bottom, with wheels unlocked and lead teams back under yoke, the wagons made it another mile or two along the road to make camp on the banks of Brown’s Creek.

  “A long day for you, John,” Mary said when the boy plopped down in the dusk on a log. Where his ragged clothing wasn’t sweat-stained it was saturated with dust. “And this your sixteenth birthday.”

  John shrugged. “Wagons all down safe,” he said between mouthfuls of boiled rice and raisins. “Should be out of these mountains by tomorrow.”

  “So they say. But the ridge we have yet to cross—Little Mountain, they call it—to reach the canyon down to the valley looks much the same as the one we crossed today. The climb is steep, and the descent as well, they tell us.” Mary dusted flour off her apron as she studied the fading sky. “I do not like the look of the weather. I fear there is a storm in the offing.”

  “Joey out with the critters?”

  “That he is. Off there in the woods somewhere,” Mary said, pointing with her chin in the direction the boy had taken, as she hefted an oven of biscuits from the fire and set it aside to cool. “I expect he will have them bedded and be back soon.”

  And so he was. The fire burned low and glowed to ashes as the Smith camp slept. With the ribbon of dawn barely discernible in the east, Mary shook the girls and women awake, and rousted out the boys to fetch the stock.

  But someone—Cornelius Lott, they expected, or someone under his orders—had been there before them. None of the Smith cattle were anywhere in sight. After reporting the loss, the boys set out to search farther afield.

  Mary stood forlorn beside her packed wagons. Lined up beside her like so many tenpins were Jane Wilson, Aunty Grinnels, Maggie Brysen, and the girls—Jerusha, Sarah, and Martha Ann.

  The wagon master did not bother to tell Mary the train would not be waiting for her. Lott merely looked back and smiled as his lead wagon, first in the caravan on this last day of the journey, rolled past.

  In keeping with Mary’s prediction, the sky had clouded up overnight. Rather than the morning brightening as it should, it dimmed as heavy black clouds rolled over the crest of the Wasatch, threatening to boil over. And they did. With wagons strung out along the steep trail up the ridge, oxen bearing down under the load and bullwhackers urging them on, the storm broke.

  Lightning flashed, the bolts raining down in overlapping arcs. Thunder cracked and rolled and boomed and echoed off the mountainsides. Rain fell in sheets, pouring onto the dusty road up the ridge and turning it into a quagmire. Panicked oxen thrashed and kicked and bucked and bolted, threatening to overturn wagons as the wheels slipped and slid and sank into the mud.

  Fetching logs and rocks in a near terror, men, women, and children chocked wheels so the wagons wouldn’t roll backward down the mountain. Drovers tugged and wrenched and jerked on draw chains and clevises and oxbows and yokes to free the panicked animals in an attempt to keep the wagons on their wheels, rather than toppled and tipped over. Once free, the uncontrollable cattle stampeded down the ridge and disappeared into the tempest.

  The storm passed, the clouds thinned, and rays of sunlight sliced through, illuminating the chaos on the ridge. Curses, wailing, and cries of despair tumbled down the hill to where Mary and her charges crawled out from under dripping wagon covers.

  They did not wait long before John and Joey, soaked and sodden, followed the Smith cattle and livestock out of the woods and into the campsite. Sheltered somewhat in groves of quaking aspen and patches of scrub oak, the animals had weathered the storm better than the hitched oxen exposed on the bare ridge.

  “The brindle milk cow and her calf are missing, Miz Mary,” John said, hat in hand. “And two of the sheep.”

  “That is as it may be. Once we reach the valley, we will come back to find them. Are these animals fit to work?” Mary said with a nod toward the cattle, ready to resume her duties as a bullwhacker on the emigrant trail.

  “Yes’m,” John said, and they set about the business of yoking the draft cattle to the wagons.

  The oxen, the young steers, and the unlikely cow, long since ac
customed to the yoke, huffed and grunted their way up Little Mountain, finding enough firm ground beside the rutted track to ease past the mired wagons.

  Reaching the head of the train and Cornelius Lott’s conveyances, disabled and helpless, Mary Smith did not return the wagon master’s loathsome stare. She marched on by with all the dignity an unfit widow woman could muster, leading her unsuitable wagons, useless animals, and hodgepodge of a family, her eyes fixed on the trail ahead, the end of which she would reach by nightfall.

  Rod Miller has won four Spur Awards from Western Writers of America, twice for short stories as well as for a novel (Rawhide Robinson Rides the Range, from Five Star) and a poem, and has also been a finalist in the same categories. His latest Five Star novels are Rawhide Robinson Rides a Dromedary and Father unto Many Sons.

  IH-TEDDA’S SON

  BY W. MICHAEL FARMER

  Geronimo rolled a cigarette in an oak leaf. He lit it with a splinter from the iron stove’s fire, smoked to the four directions, and then passed it to Ih-tedda. She smoked to the four directions, feeling the smoke bite the insides of her mouth and nose, but was pleased that her husband honored her this way. She handed the cigarette back, and waited with her hands folded across her belly, patient and ready to hear his serious business.

  He finished the cigarette and tossed the remains into the low yellow flames flickering just inside the stove’s open door. Outside, the winter wind swished through the tops of the tall pines, sounding like the surf at their last prison, Fort Pickens, on Santa Rosa Island. Here at Mount Vernon Barracks north of Mobile they at least had more privacy in their own cabins, but the air was still thick and wet like that at Fort Pickens and more and more of their friends and children were dying from mosquito bites and the worms the White Eyes called tuberculosis.

  Geronimo spoke in the thin whispery voice of a vigorous old man. “Ih-tedda, I have decided you and Lenna must go.” He waved a hand toward the door. “Leave me. Return to your mother and father in Mescalero.”

  Geronimo’s words made no sense and she felt as if he were beating her. Ih-Tedda glanced at the slits of the old man’s eyes, and the words from his thin, pitiless lips filled her mind with darkness. Only determination, the same unbending will that had carried him across many wars and the killing of many enemies, showed on his face. She stared at the dirt floor, her heart racing. She spoke slowly to keep her voice from wavering.

  “Why do you say this? I had no man before you. You stole me from my people. I hated you then but learned to love you. I have been a good wife for you. Our place is always clean. You never have to wait to eat. I submit to you in our blankets when it’s proper. Our daughter is a delight, whole and perfect and filled with laughter. Have mercy on us. I beg you not to send us away.”

  The pitiless lips said, “You must go. The Blue Coats may change their minds any time and kill us all. They plan to free the Mescaleros they took to Florida, but not the Chiricahuas and Mimbreños. You are Mescalero. I should be a Mescalero because I married you, but the White Eyes will never let me go. There is no reason for you to lose your life. I took you without courting you. Now you have a chance to be free. Take it! You are a fine wife. I never beat you much or hard. You nearly always please me. Our daughter, Lenna, is a good child, but if she stays in this bad air, this place of White Eye sickness, she will soon make the journey to the Happy Place and you will not be far behind her.”

  “Please, husband, I want to stay with you.”

  “Woman, you must go. That is all I have to say.”

  Ih-tedda hated the train. Black grit in its smoke made her dirty and its clank and rattle pounded against her ears all the way from Mobile to El Paso. The train arrived late and the wagons from Mescalero didn’t have much time for the return drive before the sun began disappearing in a brilliant golden haze.

  The light nearly gone, the little group parked the wagons in a circle and made a cooking fire near a water tank filled by a creaking windmill. Charlie Smith, the old Mescalero scout, who was their leader, said to eat and rest. It would be a long drive to Mescalero the next day.

  Ih-tedda’s mother brought dried slices of baked mescal, blue juniper berries, and mesquite flour bread for them to eat. The mescal, sweet and sticky after it was warmed over the fire, filled Ih-tedda’s memory with the good years she had at Mescalero. Perhaps things will be better even without Geronimo. Maybe I can find a good husband at Mescalero to take care of Lenna and me.

  Her father took a bite of the mescal, chewed, and sniffed before saying, “Daughter, it’s good my eyes see you again. Your husband has freed you from the Blue Coat prison. You come back to us without bride presents and have Lenna to care for because he stole you away. You must have a husband soon, one who can care for you. I think I know the man.”

  She frowned. “A husband so soon, Father? Can’t I wait a little while? Who is this you know?”

  A coyote yipped and was answered. Hearing the Trickster, source of many childhood stories, once more and smelling the burning piñon cedar made her happy, but her father’s words filled her with foreboding.

  Staring into the dark, her father glanced at her and looked away. “Yes, it must be soon, or a bad reputation comes quick. You have come back to us and are now a rejected woman with a child. Few men want such a woman. I’ll find you a good man when we reach Mescalero. You must accept him. I don’t think there’ll be others. That is all I have to say.”

  Coyote howled again, nearer and louder. In her despair, Ihtedda wanted to answer him, but dared not. It would not be proper.

  The wagons left their camp in the gray light of dawn. Gold poured on the mountain edges as the sun peeked above the horizon and then floated higher into the cold morning air. Ihtedda, holding Lenna, sat between her mother and father, neither saying much as their wagon bounced along the road ruts to Mescalero. Seeing the desert again in the bright sunlight, even seeing it at the end of the Ghost Face Season, when the creosotes were thin, the mesquite had few leaves, and the yucca stalks stood tall and dry and shaking in the wind, stirred Ihtedda to happiness. To again see the mountains in the gray distance and to smell the sage and dust after four years in the piney woods was a blessing from Ussen.

  Night had settled cold and black when they reached her mother’s tipi. After they unloaded the wagon, her father took the horse to rub down, feed, and water. Her mother built a little fire in the center of the tipi and began making them a meal.

  The smoky smell of the tipi’s interior, seeing the old blackened coffee pot and heavy iron stew kettle hanging over the little orange and red flickering fire, and touching the furs and tanned skins folded, stacked, and ready for use filled Ihtedda’s mind with a flood of memories from the good days in Mescalero when she was still her namesake, Young Girl.

  Since leaving the train, Ih-tedda had not been alone with her mother to speak heart-to-heart about private matters. Her mother said, “I cried out to Ussen when they told me you had been stolen. I thought I would never see you again. Now you are here and Ussen has blessed us with your child. I think soon you will have a new man. Did the man who took you treat you well? Did he break any bones when he beat you?”

  Lenna stirred in Ih-tedda’s arms, yawning and chewing at her fist, then went back to sleep. “No, he never really beat me. The first time he took me he was gentle. I liked my man. But, to his enemies he showed no mercy. I have seen him smile and never look back after killing Mexicans. He sent me away because he wanted us free before the Blue Coats changed their minds and killed us all.”

  Grease dripping in the fire made a pleasant sizzle and its smell made Ih-tedda’s mouth anxious for a piece of the beef her mother roasted. Of course, she and her mother couldn’t eat until her father returned and had his fill. She hoped he would come soon, but memory said he never hurried.

  “Why is Father so anxious to find me a man, any man, who will take me? I want to be free of a man for a while.”

  Her mother never lifted her eyes from her cooking. “Be quiet,
Daughter. You have returned to us without a man. You have no husband. Now you must do as your father says.”

  “But my moon time is late. What if I carry another child? No one will want me.”

  Her mother smiled as she turned the meat. “Then all the more reason to take a man sooner rather than later. He won’t know if the child is his or not as long as you are quiet.” Ihtedda opened her mouth to answer, but her mother shook her head. “Be quiet and do as I tell you.”

  The falling sun turned the rippling western clouds to purples, reds, and dark orange. Shafts of bright light flew through the tops of the tall pines to strike the far ridges in pools of yellow as a shadow appeared by the tipi door and a cough announced a visitor. Ih-tedda saw her father smile. So, the one man on the entire reservation who will take me comes.

  Her father said in a loud voice, “Come. Our fire is warm and we have food. Join us.”

  The blanket over the tipi door lifted. A head covered in long gray hair and a face shadowed with many deep wrinkles pushed into the tipi, nodded at the women, and moved to sit down in the place of honor to the left of Ih-tedda’s father. The man had crossed eyes, a broad nose, and thick smiling lips. Ih-tedda felt her stomach roll as though she had eaten bad meat. No, Father. Please, not Old Cross Eyes.

  Old Cross Eyes and Ih-tedda’s father smoked and made small talk about reservation politics and how hard the Ghost Face had been. At their first long pause in conversation, Ih-tedda, at her mother’s nod, said, “Does our guest have hunger? Will he eat now?”

  Old Cross Eyes grinned. “Hmmph. Woman, you have light behind your eyes. My belly is empty.”

  Ih-tedda filled a gourd with a big slice of meat, wild potatoes, chilies, slices of mescal, mesquite beans, and crunchy acorn bread and handed it to Old Cross Eyes. Her mother handed a gourd to her father. Ih-tedda rocked Lenna in her arms while she and her mother sat back to wait until the men finished.

  Old Cross Eyes emptied his gourd and handed it back to Ihtedda. “Will our guest have more? There is plenty.”