Laramie

It was morning when Eli Jumper, Cutter and Cole arrived at Fort Laramie on the horses they purchased with the massacred pilgrims’ money. By noon they were drunk, and by midafternoon Cutter and Cole were incarcerated in the old fur trader's adobe guardhouse next to the Laramie River, accused by a drunken soldier of using holdout cards in a poker game at the post sutler’s store. They were saved from a severe flogging by the cirrhotic lifestyle of their accuser; the soldier collapsed and died the following day from complications of heatstroke.

The fur trader’s bastion was crumbling in disrepair; the adobe walls of the original stockade had been allowed to decay since the army purchased the fort in 1849, and the recently transferred garrison, consisting of one company of mounted infantry and one company of regular infantry, was charged with the responsibility of constructing a new post around a large parade ground.

Following their release Cutter and Cole contracted with the fort adjutant to haul timber from the Laramie Mountains 30 miles west. Cutter used the contract to negotiate the purchase of a team and freight wagon, and for the next month the two outlaws spent their days cutting and hauling and watching for Indians along the trail. At night they caroused with trail scouts and freighters in the trader’s small store, playing cards and exchanging gossip around cooking fires, and occasionally cheating drunken soldiers with slight-of-hand card tricks.

Eli Jumper used his hunting skills to supply meat for the fort’s cooking pots; game was scarce in the vicinity and the emigrants, freighters, traders and soldiers were willing to pay exorbitant prices to avoid the work and risk of ranging too far from the cannon muzzles to secure a taste of steak or tongue. Watching the Osage depart the fort one morning, Cole shook his head. Injun on horseback's got more lives than a cat, he muttered.

The discovery of the massacred train had sent shock waves up and down the trail; road ranches and trading posts from the Wind River country to Nebraska City hummed with rumors of mass attacks, scalping and torture. Casualty numbers swelled to the hundreds, and stolen livestock totals were inflated to the point that one trail-hardened scout proclaimed Sioux ownership of cattle, mules and horses greater than all the estancias in Texas.
Wonder what brand they’ll use, he mused.

At Laramie trail traffic slowed as summer wore on and the stories piled high. Only the experienced frontiersmen knew that the hostiles had long since departed the region for the buffalo-darkened country of the Powder River, and the relative safety of the Paha Sapa, as the Lakota called the Black Hills. Bearded, long-haired wilderness veterans sat alone in the corners of the fort’s drinking rooms and at the edges of the night fires, staring into their whiskey, listening to the greenhorn panic, confirming with silence the disesteem that drove them from civilization – too much talking, not enough knowing.

Cutter’s mind was busy too, not with thoughts of Indians, but money. As far back as he could remember he had been able to sense the easiest access to whatever wealth was around him. Skin games, robbery, bunko, forgery; he knew how to move the boodle. He called this talent his sugar nose, and from the moment he and Cole and Eli arrived at Laramie he had been sniffing out the possibilities, weighing the prospects, figuring ways to avoid punishment. He knew the risks: no penitentiaries meant hanging for almost any crime, or murder on the prairie by Indians, or even death from starvation or exposure if escape was not carefully planned. But Henry Cutter was not a man to fret consequence. He believed he was smarter than his marks, whatever the color of their skin. Superior intelligence would help him formulate the strategy he needed to succeed.

Unfortunately, neither Cutter nor Cole was well-acquainted with day-to-day requirements of life on the frontier. The dugout in Kansas had been merely a hideout; most of their time was spent prowling Missouri River towns, stealing whatever they found unguarded among the largely peaceable farmers and merchants. In contrast, the frontier along the Platte River emigrant trails was in a state of perpetual alarm due to deteriorating relations with the Indians. Everyone was armed.

But Henry’s sugar nose smelled a situation ripe with opportunity. Scarcity of goods was common. By the time emigrant trains reached Laramie the pilgrims were in need of almost everything – draft animals, wagon parts, whiskey, flour, sugar, coffee, clothing. The threat of Indian raids had reduced the flow of supplies: the post trader’s stores were nearly depleted and the army, too, had its supply problems. The soldiers, mostly poor, illiterate emigrants themselves, would spend every cent they had on food that wasn’t wormy or molding, warm socks, cheap whiskey, and dollar whores. Most appealing to Cutter was the fact that competition was all but nonexistent; prices could be set according to the dictates of conscience.

The first week in August brought a small supply train consisting of twenty ox-drawn wagons carrying goods consigned to the sutler at Fort Bridger - blankets, medicine, lanterns, hard goods, lead, and powder. The odd crate of bibles. And whiskey, barrels of whiskey. All cargo to be sold or bartered over the winter.
With the train came twenty-three men.

One of them was named Edwin Tabonneau, a Lakota half-breed known for his skill with bow and rifle. The son of a French trapper and a woman from the Oglala Bad Face clan, he occasionally hired on with trains as a scout and translator. But in the company of whites he could be surly, silent for days at a time, and few teamsters trusted his behavior, which became openly insolent as tensions mounted between his mother’s people and the whites.

On the night they arrived at Laramie Tabonneau and a bullwhacker got into a fight in the trader’s store, the cause of which no witnesses could later recall.
The whacker was stout and thick-necked, with hairy, club-shaped forearms he spread wide in an attempt to grapple with the half-breed. His intent was to break bones, but every time he closed with his opponent Tabonneau’s knife snickered through the air, biting the whacker’s arms, face, and torso. By the time the fight was over the teamster’s blood dotted the faces and shirts of the onlookers.

In the end the loser sat heavily in a chair, bright crimson rivulets streaming down his face and arms, soaking his shirt and trousers, dripping steadily into pools on the dusty plank floor. He refused all aid, wiping himself with a bar rag until the cloth was wet and dripping. Finally he sighed deeply, let the rag drop to the floor and spoke his last words:
Shut the window. I’ve taken a chill.

Cutter had a wagon and team; what he needed was a means to forecast the ebb and flow of weather, Indians and emigrant passage. He watched the teamster bleed to death and recognized the solution.

The next morning Cutter came upon the half-breed seated on a keg in the shade of the eves outside the trader’s store, eyes bloodshot, fingers trembling in the onslaught of a hangover as he attempted to light a short clay pipe. The teamster’s blood still streaked his shirtfront in dark brown waterfall shapes, crusty and stinking. Flies, chilled with dew, buzzed lazily around him, landing to crawl up and down the greasy locks of dark hair that spilled across his back and shoulders.
Hullo there, Cutter said.
Tabonneau turned his face toward Cutter, then away from him.
Helluva ruckus ye had last night.
Tabonneau spit.
Ye be a handy fellow.
Cutter moved closer to stand in front of the half breed.
I might could offer ye a job.
Tabonneau fixed Henry with a red-eyed stare.
Ain’t lookin’.
Well, sir, it’s more of a partnership really. Equal shares.
You didn’t hear me.
Tabonneau dropped the pipe and stood up, kicked the keg behind him. Cutter took a step back.
Now, now friend. No harm intended.
Go away from me. Or suffer.
The half-breed advanced a step. Cutter held up his index finger.
Fair warning. I am the wrong man. Come at me and ye won’t walk away.
Tabonneau stopped. He recognized a metallic sound, and looked down at the muzzle of the cocked pistol Cutter held at his hip.

The next day Tabonneau quit the supply train. A month later he, Cutter, Cole and Eli Jumper opened a road ranch at a site he selected near the Horse Creek Treaty grounds thirty-five miles from Laramie. East of the fort, the half-breed explained, provided first pickings of the emigrant trains and a thirsty ride for the soldiers. The sod and log building was a 12 by 20 foot trading room flanked by two small lean-to supply rooms. A dug-out stable and corral completed the structure, which opened for business in mid-October, low on trail supplies but well-stocked with kegs of whiskey and two fat whores fetched from Dobytown near Fort Kearny. Cutter fashioned two hide-covered hay pallets and a blanket partition in one of the lean-tos, and the Laramie soldiers sustained a lively trade on two-dollar pokes through the end of November, when a heavy snow blanketed the fort road.

Just before snowfall a young soldier rode to the ranch, claiming the Grand Bounce from the drudgery of military life at Laramie. He sat on a crate in the trading room all afternoon, drinking cup after cup of whiskey. I come here from Ohio to dust savages, he said, not muck stalls nor dig shitholes for goddamn officers. I’m a fightin’ man. He spit tobacco from between rotting brown teeth and dug a wad of cash from his trousers. Now fetch me another portion. I believe I’ll have anothern before I ride them gals.
For three hours Cutter, Cole and Tabonneau listened to him. When he passed out they dragged him by the ankles behind the building and cut his throat.

They rifled his pockets and saddlebags and buried him and his saddle in a washout three miles north of the ranch. His horse was turned out in the corral - a stray they intended to return to the fort, if anyone asked.
Then they burned his clothes. Cole kept his boots.

That evening after supper a smiling Cutter held up the soldier’s sparkling silver watch and chain in the firelight as he read the inscription on the case:
The time of life is short. Will Shakespeare.
He closed the case and pocketed the watch.
Winter’s comin boys, he said. Better stock up.

Desertions among Laramie’s enlisted troops ran close to 30 percent that winter. Few were caught and punished; none whose path crossed the Horse Creek road ranch.