The Beginning

The year was 1855. By April the boy had made his way to Westport on the banks of the Missouri River. The warm days found him thin and ill clad, wandering the warped plank sidewalks of the town’s brick and clapboard business district beneath signs hawking “Dry Goods,” “Harness,” and “Supplies.”

In the midst of the season’s immigrant flood he had assumed the life of an alley dog, feeding from restaurant slops and the stocks of inattentive grocers. During the first few days following his arrival he lived in a straw stack behind a livery, earning pennies a day mucking shit from the stalls. At night he roamed the narrow alleyways, sometimes drinking in the company of profane and ignorant drifters. Under the influence he could be sullen and withdrawn, and twice since he arrived he’d been cut in fights with men who spoke no English.

He was fourteen years old. He could neither read nor write his own name, nor had he any memory of his dead parents back in Tennessee. In infancy he had been given over to an uncle, a Memphis tannery owner, who drank to excess and often beat the boy because he believed that was what boys required, and because he liked the feel of the lash in his hand.

Ever since freight wagons stacked with flint buffalo hides began snaking east to leatherworks on the Mississippi the boy had heard stories of men and animals adventuring in a land beyond the sunset: tales of fortunes made and lost, of wild creatures that no man could begin to count and savage races that waged war naked on horseback. He heard these things, and his mind clung to them, as if the knowledge redeemed his brutal, unheeded existence. And so it was not strange that in the early hours of a spring day the boy rose quietly from his pallet and caved his uncle’s skull and stole himself from the stench of the tannery to wander west, nor that in a restless, searching world his life would unfold - true and violent and unconfined.