Best Wishes...

For a happy, safe, peaceful Fourth of July.

Prologue

July 1904
Cheyenne, Wyoming

The old man opened the heavy front door of the Historical Society with great effort. Inside, the air pressure created by oscillating electric fans throughout the long hallways pulled the door handle from his hand as he entered and the door slammed shut with a thunderous clap, rattling its thick plate glass core.

Angled sunlight pooled brightly on the creaking hardwood floor, dimming the large entry foyer’s distant corners and walls. He shuffled forward, leaning on his cane as his eyes adjusted to the uneven light. The humid air carried a musty attic odor of trunks and old clothing.

The old man paused to remove his frayed straw hat. The skin of his face and neck was deeply tanned, the color of walnuts, loose and wattled at the throat and gullied throughout like a rain-pounded hillside. Above his bushy eyebrows his square, pale forehead gave way to close-cropped silver hair, thinned to wisps on the crown of his head, revealing a pale scalp, faintly traversed by blue veins.

He wiped his brow with a bandana. Thick fingers and the forward slope of his shoulders suggested a life shaped by hard work – his work shirt, faded jeans and bowed legs said cowhand, but his worn brogans cast him as a laborer, perhaps a gandy dancer. A silver watch chain curved from his belt to his right pants pocket.

He shuffled across the empty foyer to a display case and pulled wire-rimmed spectacles from his shirt pocket to examine the objects in an exhibit, tilting his head to focus the lenses as well as age and the light would allow. The case held a collection of Indian artifacts. Next to each a neatly handwritten card proclaimed the item, tribe, year collected, and location. Donors were mostly local ranchers and former soldiers.

The old man squinted. One piece, a beaded medicine pouch, held his attention. The small buckskin sack was identified as belonging to the Hidatsa tribe. It was the color of an old saddle, smudged and sweat-stained. A long sinew drawstring wove through the open end and looped to be worn around the neck.

It was the type carried by many Plains tribes, designed to hold objects vested with a warrior’s personal power – a stone, a feather, roots, herbs – objects from which the owner might draw the ability to overcome hardship, endure suffering and gain advantage over his enemies. The physical manifestation of his spiritual thew, he would wear it all the days of his life.

The old man bent to examine the pouch. It was decorated with dyed porcupine quills, faded blue, yellow and red, surrounding a circle of blue glass trade beads. He could see some of the beads and quills were missing and the pouch was empty. The contents lay next to it, each identified by small, curling slips of paper pinned to the shelf. Uhh, he muttered.

The museum’s young curator approached. He was tall and thin-shouldered, clad in a wrinkled linen suit and bow tie, which he straightened with narrow fingers as he cleared his throat.

Sir, excuse me, he said. We are preparing to close for the day. Perhaps you’d care to come back tomorrow. We have quite a good collection of Indian artifacts.

The old man looked up. The curator’s horn-rimmed glasses had slipped down his nose, emphasizing his bookish appearance. Perspiration sparkled against the pale skin of the young man’s forehead and upper lip.

Uhhh?

Perhaps you’d care to come back tomorrow, sir. We’re closing for the day.

The old man returned his attention to the display case. He tapped the glass with his cane.

How’d ye come by this medsin bag?

Pardon me?

He tapped the glass again.
This one. Where’d ye git it?

The Hidatsa pouch?

Ain’t Hidatsee.

Pardon me?

Medsin bag. Ain’t Hidatsee. Looks like it, but it ain’t.

The curator looked at the pouch, then at the old man, then the pouch again.
Well, uh…

The old man interrupted him.
The girl fashioned this bag favored Hidatsee beadwork. But she belonged to the Sioux.

I’m sorry sir. Perhaps you could come back tomorrow. We could discuss the bag.

The old man hooked the cane over his arm. He leaned toward the display case and placed his knotty right hand on the glass next to the bag, as if to touch it.

Been a long while since I seen it.

You knew the woman who made the pouch?

Girl. She was a girl.

And you say she was a member of the Sioux tribe?

Never said so. Said she belonged to the Sioux.

The old man turned away from the case and began to make his way to the door. The curator accompanied him across the lobby and opened the front door. Heat blasted through the opening as the old man stepped into the sunlight and put on his hat. The curator shaded his eyes against the glare.

He said, And do you know the Indian who owned the pouch?

The old man stopped, hooked the cane over his arm, pulled a hand-rolled cigarette and box of matches from his shirt. Years of habit cupped his hands against any breeze as he lit the cigarette, and he squinted hard while he drew a long pull and the smoke exploded from his mouth and nostrils. Casually the old man picked a piece of tobacco from his tongue. He turned his head and pointed north.

Forty mile thataway. I kilt him.

He looked back at the curator, tossed the match and walked away.

Cutter's Business

Among the hard cases of Rocky Ridge the takeover of Tipton's conferred positions of prominence on Henry Cutter and Theodore Cole. Within days all had taken note of Cutter's ruthless efficiency: Here was a man to be watched. Feared. More astounding was the outlaw's ability to manage his affairs in the Ridge without the effusion of blood, although his alliance with the Dennisons conveyed no doubt as to inclination. Lethality perfused Henry Cutter; it was an augury revealed in the eyes of all Ridge malefactors as they watched him pass.

Teddy took over the faro operation, while Henry worked on expanding the facility to include a bathhouse, a new latrine and an enlarged gaming area and bar. The Dennison brothers served briefly as spotters and evening bouncers, but Cutter saw other opportunities for their talents and as soon as circumstance permitted he met privately with them in his lean-to office.

Raised in an Irish tenement on the lower west side of the island of Manhattan, Donál and Cormac Dennison had learned the blade and cudgel trade in the alleys and thoroughfares of the notorious Five Points slum. By the time they reached adolescence the boys had affiliated themselves with a couple of local gangs - the Daybreak Boys and the Slaughterhousers -which preyed upon pilgrims who wandered accidentally into the Points.

It was not these commonplace citizen assaults, but the murder of a sixth ward policeman that forced the boys’ hasty, permanent departure from the boroughs. The officer had pushed his skim of the thieves’ purse too far; his headless corpse was found hanging like a slaughtered hog from an Orange Street lamppost, his skull spiked on top. Too heinous for even the Tammany purlieu, the butchery shook the city and the resulting shakedown drove many sandbaggers and rowdies from the Points. So the Dennisons drifted west, taking their time on the Memphis wharves and in St. Louis, where, before hiring on as freighters, they polished their bloody craft, stalking unsuspecting emigrants in saloons and riverfront brothels, like wolves among the herds.

We’ve no limits here for them’s got the sand to earn, said Cutter as he poured cups of whiskey for the brothers.

He sat back on a creaking wooden chair, raised his cup and drained it. Question is, he said, how ready are ye to jump?

The brothers looked at each other. Donál was the first to speak.

Ain’t our first dance.

Me brother and me, we’re high steppers, said Cormac.

Cutter poured another round and leaned forward to rest his elbows on a worn table, looking at each of the brothers.
Well then, he whispered, here’s the way I see it…

They talked for an hour or more, and when the meeting finished the Dennison brothers left by the back door, walked to their camp and packed their belongings. That night they slept on the floor at Tipton’s and in the early morning hours they rose and pulled the loads from their weapons and recharged them. Then they saddled two unshod ponies, laded a pack mule and rode west out of Rocky Ridge into a driving rain that obscured their silhouettes before they reached the edge of the settlement.

It was a month before the Dennisons returned, driving several head of oxen and mules. The brothers would open a stock station next to Tipton’s, where emigrants could replace footsore teams. The trading resulted in the growth of their herd, with trail-worn animals fed and watered until they returned to good condition and could be traded again for spent animals and cash, at whatever prices the traffic would bear. A very profitable business along the Overland Trail.

Every so often the brothers would leave the Ridge to travel west again, always returning with more stock. Sometimes a wagonload of goods as well, sold or bartered through Tipton’s.

Their comings and goings seemed random, but they were not. In the cool evenings during their absences Cutter would emerge from the smoky bar to seat himself on an old ladderback chair in front of the shop. He'd lean against the log wall, clay pipe in hand, his legs stretched out, boots resting upon a small rock. On his lap would lay a Walker Colt, and behind his right ear nestled the stub of a pencil, which he would remove periodically to jot notes on a scrap of paper he kept in the pocket of his waistcoat.

From his vantage point Henry observed trail traffic as it wound its way up into the Ridge. Daytime travelers aside, he saw a good percentage of the small trains, would-be prospectors and tyro pilgrims arriving for much needed rest and refit. Occasional stagecoaches too, on the run from Julesburg to Salt Lake.

The paper in his pocket bore descriptions of some of these: the cripple, the tenderfoot, the solitary, the weak. Arrivals and departures. Every few days the notes were couriered to the Dennisons at some secret camp by a young, dark-skinned vaquero, or one of two Utes retained for that purpose.

Large, well-armed freighting outfits were never rostered; sent instead were details of the hapless and vulnerable - chronicles of the lost in a hostile country.

Rocky Ridge

Cutter and Cole remained in the burned-out building for several days until the warming weather brought two trappers to the ranch. The unfortunate visitors were welcomed with tales of marauding redskins and large portions of salvaged whiskey, which they consumed free of charge, believing in their own good fortune and the promise that the next sunrise would see fresh supplies and whores delivered to the beleaguered outpost. It did not, nor did the trappers live to apprehend the lie.

The following day the outlaws rode the trappers’ horses west, bypassing Ft. Laramie, crossing the Laramie Range to the Great Divide Basin, pushing on to the Antelope Hills and South Pass, finally reaching a wild section of the Overland Trail known as Rocky Ridge. The journey was 250 miles, a fortnight’s hard ride through cold nights and deep-drift ridges and coulees, a punishing trail even in fair weather, and the outlaws arrived hollow-eyed and gaunt on destroyed horses, with barely a swallow of food between them.

Ever since the first forty-niners scratched their way across the continent Rocky Ridge had served as a gathering point for hawkers and traders. The scattered, rude log dwellings they built served as hostels, blacksmiths and groggeries, targeting the overlanders bound for Salt Lake, the Sierras and the goldfields beyond. Here the pilgrims rested, recruited their stock and refitted their transport, always under the vulturine gaze of men whose livelihood depended upon the exploitation of travelers.
Predictably, the argonauts found themselves frequently at odds with these “toll men” and their excessive tariffs, which led inevitably to confrontations. At the ranch Cutter had heard tales of the Ridge’s lawless ethos, and he decided that was where he and Theodore Cole would next establish themselves, comfortably at home among a peerage of cutthroats.

Upon arrival they took up with a Kentucky native by the name Curley Bill Graves, a blackleg whose renown focused on his dexterity with a deck of cards, allegedly acquired during incarceration at a young age, and perfected on Mississippi riverboats plying the wharves between Memphis and New Orleans. Squat, bull-necked, with stoically dark eyes, Curley Bill claimed to be the nephew of William Graves, a Congressman known chiefly for killing a colleague in a duel in ’42.

The two newcomers hired on as Curley Bill’s spotters, assigned to stalk the wagon camps, pass the jug at the freighters’ cookfires and bang the drum for Bill’s faro table in a side room lean-to attached to Mike Tipton’s dram shop. Their efforts earned them meals and flea-ridden hide pallets in a small storage space next to Tipton’s back door, where as the weather warmed the smell of the jakes penetrated the walls and spiked the blankets and the barrels of flour and the sacks of beans and coffee and milled grain and everything else until even the outlaws' clothes reeked.

It took three weeks for Cutter to reconnoiter the Ridge. Before the end of their first month he and Cole teamed up with two former freighters, a pair of Irish brothers, brickbats who said their family name was Dennison.

The four of them were waiting in the lean-to one morning when Curley Bill arrived with a bottle of Monongahela under one arm and a cup of hot coffee in his right hand, his gun hand. Instinctively Curley Bill knew what the proposition was, but he smiled and set the bottle on the covered faro table and transferred the coffee to his left hand. He said Mornin’ boys, and dropped his right hand to his waist before he noticed that Cole and the two Dennisons bore pistols drawn and cocked. Henry was seated behind the faro table.

Hullo Bill, said Cutter. Beautiful day, ain't it?
Henry. I'd say that all depends.
Yes, Bill, I believe you're right.

Within one hour Curley Bill Graves was saddled up and on his way to Salt Lake. Livin’ with the goddamn Saints tops gettin’ shot to pieces by gentiles, he was heard to say.

A month after Bill departed Cutter and his clique approached Mike Tipton with a similar offer. Tipton was a more complicated personality than Curley Bill; he dropped behind his plank-and-barrel bar and brought forth a short, double-barreled shotgun loaded with broken glass and nails, declaring himself ready to shake hands with Lucifer and perfectly willing to take a companion or two along for the interview.

Negotiations were brief. In the end Cutter’s gang acquired controlling interest in Tipton’s operation; in exchange Tipton would run the drinking establishment under Cutter’s close supervision, and would likewise continue to draw breath under the protection of Henry and Cole and the Dennison brothers, nor would he suffer further extortions from men of a similar nature.

Tabonneau Takes A Wife

The half-breed rode all the way to the Paha Sapa, where he joined an Oglala band led by an uncle named Eagle Bull. The string of stolen wasichú horses caused great talk among Tabonneau’s relatives, who held a welcoming feast despite their dwindling food stores. And though his mother was long dead he was treated as a prodigal son, honored, given every courtesy and consideration. In return, he gave his uncle two horses, and spent most of his time in the old man’s lodge, entertaining cousins and visitors with stories about living among the wasichú.

Experience had taught him that the wasichú were like shifting sands, he told the listeners; in motion, restless, united only by the greed that drove them to seek the yellow metal, they strove to own everything, and to destroy all that stood in their way. His mother’s people were wild and reckless, even cruel, but like the fingers of a strong hand they were bound to one another in ways the wasichú could never understand, sharing strength and blood and purpose.

That winter Edwin Tabonneau severed all ties with the wasichú, a society in which he had never been particularly welcome despite his father’s reputation as a first-rate trapper and frontiersman. In truth, the son’s Stygian heart had always hewn to the ways of his dark-skinned relatives, whose night fires and stories of war comprised his earliest memories. Yes, that winter Edwin Tabonneau would rejoin the Lakota for good, to speak his mother’s tongue, and even assume his boyhood name, Ptehincala, the Buffalo Calf, or Jincala, Newborn Calf, said with a grin, because he was reborn to the people.

---

Winter passed. As soon as the grass began to freshen the 20 lodges of Eagle Bull’s tiyoŝpaye moved south and west toward Laramie. They camped at Pankeska Wakpa, the Platte River, for four days, and were joined by another band, a mix of related Brulé and Oglala lodges led by another old man chief named the White Crow.

The young men of White Crow’s band had done some raiding the previous summer, so there was wasichú plunder in camp to be traded and gifted. And there was also the girl.

Tabonneau saw her the day after White Crow’s tipis went up, her pale features like a beacon amid the Lakota. He was riding in with a hunting party when he noticed her; like a pack mule she tagged after a group of women gathering fuel along the river’s edge, stooped from the burden of limbs piled on her back. He reined up to watch her. The older women took note of the warrior’s bold stare and pushed the captive girl along, scolding him for his brazen behavior - which he ignored, until one old crone began tossing stones at him.

Sarah was living in one of the lodges owned by her captor, a warrior named the Magpie. She did not have the status of a wife and was treated as a female prisoner… to be used by Magpie whenever it suited him, or given on a temporary basis to any warrior with whom he wished to curry favor. Most of the time she was ordered around like a servant, charged with menial chores, subjected to the fluctuating moods and complaints of Magpie’s wives.

She was called Wówinyeyawin, the Tool Woman, or Used-As-A-Tool, and sometimes also Wiocan, Mute Woman, because she seldom spoke. She attracted a great deal of attention from the people, who seldom saw white women. She was prodded and petted, grabbed and sometimes cuffed or clubbed, but the slightest protestation drew a severe beating, and the result was that she withdrew into herself. In time her retreat from the daily circumstance of her life became whole, and she neither reacted to abuse nor did she seek escape. Long before White Crow’s tiyoŝpaye joined Eagle Bull at the Platte the person that was Sarah Miles had ceased to exist.

A week after he saw the girl Tabonneau appeared at Magpie’s lodge leading a string of five horses stolen from the road ranch. Negotiations took place in accordance with tribal protocol – a long leisurely smoke followed by a small meal. The purpose of the visit, though known, remained unspoken until, perfunctory etiquette completed, Magpie and Tabonneau came out of the lodge to sit cross-legged on a robe. Magpie leaned forward to cast a critical eye on the horses. In the meantime most of the members of his household, including relatives and friends living nearby, assembled in front of the tipi.

Tabonneau extolled the animals’ conformation, speed and quiet demeanor, giving special emphasis to the fact that the fastest two were mares, whose colts would add great value to Magpie’s herd. Magpie’s herd – the words carried a teasing redolence. Everyone knew that most of Magpie’s horses had been stolen by Crow warriors just before his band broke winter camp. Two travois ponies and a buffalo runner were the only remaining animals of a herd that had once totaled more than a score in number.

If the warrior had any reaction to the remark it failed to register on his face. He lit another pipe and sat in silence for a long period. The offer of the horses was too good to refuse, but Magpie’s dignity demanded that he not appear overly eager, so Tabonneau waited patiently. After a respectable amount of time the half-breed brought forth a bundle of red cloth and opened it. He laid out a small hand mirror, an ivory comb and several hair ribbons he had taken from the slain prostitutes.

When Magpie motioned for one of his wives to pick up the bundle the bargain was sealed.

End of The Road Ranch

On the day Eli Jumper died an early chinook softened the crusted snow. By sunrise the eves of the ranch buildings began to drip, and the warming air raised vapor from the backs of the horses in the corral. Sunlight on the snow reflected with a blinding intensity, affecting horses, cattle, even the coyotes, whose prowls were frequently interrupted by paws drawn across sore eyes. The world gleamed.

In his gimcrack hide shelter Jumper drew charcoal stripes across his cheekbones as he readied himself for the day’s hunt; he dried his bowstring, loaded the quiver and sharpened his skinning knife before taking a few bites of jerked antelope. He would ride east, hoping to cut the trail of elk, buffalo or antelope driven toward the Platte in recent snowstorms.

He had heard the drunken cheers and laughter in the main ranch building late last night… so much for Cutter’s drinking embargo. What Jumper did not hear was Tabonneau’s silent rise from his blankets in the predawn hours to gather jerky and biscuits, or his stealthy advance into the storeroom to slit the throats of the sleeping prostitutes.

Nor as he stepped out of the stable into the sunlight did Jumper see the half-breed waiting for him just outside.

The Osage did not hear the bowstring release, but the arrow struck him between the shoulder blades, and he went to his hands and knees in the snow and saw his blood, bright and frothy from the lungs, blossoming red in the whiteness beneath him. A loud ringing surged in his head and a shadow passed over him, arms raised.

Down came the axe.

Minutes later Tabonneau saddled his horse and tethered the others together to be led out of the corral. Then he went back to the main building, quietly opened the window of the whores’ room and lit a fire on the bloody blankets covering their bodies. He returned to the corral, mounting his horse like a man with nothing better to do. He led the string of horses out of the corral and rode north to join his mother’s people.

The wet conditions inside the sod building slowed the fire’s progress; it took a few minutes before the smoke roused Cutter. He put on his boots, a shirt, trousers, and a buffalo coat, then took up two pistols before he shouted at Cole.

Open yer eyes, son of a bitch.
Huh?
Ye’ll cook in another minute.

Cutter kicked open the door and stepped into the sunlight, smoke trailing him out the door. Shielding his eyes, he turned and backed away from the building, watching more smoke roll out of the whores’ window.

Cole stumbled out of the doorway, coughing, a blanket around his shoulders, his left hand holding his unbelted trousers. His right held a shirt over his nose and mouth.

He coughed hard.
What about the whores? he said.

The wind shifted, bringing the smoke toward them. With it came the smell of burning flesh.
Don’t guess we have to worry about them, said Cutter.
Cole coughed again. What about Tabonneau?
Cutter shrugged.
And Jumper… where’s the damn Indian?

Cutter turned his head, saw the empty corral and recognized the answer: There, tied by its hair to the top of one of the gateposts, was Jumper’s head.
Cole followed his gaze.
Aw hell.
Well now, said Cutter, let that be a lesson…
What? What lesson?

Just then the snow-covered section of roof over the whores’ room collapsed, raising a large plume of steam as wet snow came down on the burning contents. Cutter shoved his pistols into the waistband of his trousers and looked at Cole.
Whoremaster is no longer our line, he said.

A Hard Winter

Life slowed for the Lakota.
A cold wave descended upon the plains, and many bands moved to winter camps sheltered in the leeward corners and valleys of the Black Hills. Snow began to drift against the lodges, and the ponies’ coats grew shaggy. Under the frigid temperatures their breath condensed to form blankets of ice pearls on their backs as they pawed crusted snow in search of forage.

The boy spent most days huddled in his wikiup, wrapped in hides, his eyes stinging from small, smoky fires. Hurried walks to the cooking pot and to answer nature’s call, and occasional, brief rabbit hunts constituted the only intervals spent outside his small shelter.

His appearance deteriorated; despite the low temperatures lice infiltrated his robes and small sores erupted on his unwashed body, face and scalp. Nor was the damage confined to his physical mien: The cold and insuperable isolation began to affect his mind. The fragile connections that defined his identity as a being among other beings were dissolving, and in the absence of other communication he began to hold conversations with himself, at times in anger, sometimes laughing until tears came.
His world was shrinking, but the Lakota paid small attention; madness, especially when induced by seasonal hardship, was not uncommon and was considered intensely personal - mystical, perhaps visionary, always solitary. Unless he became violent, there would be no intervention.

Then came the time called the Hardship moon, Tehi wi, and the boy’s misfortunes multiplied as the cold deepened its hold on the land. Frigid darkness seemed to swallow everything, and daylight snuck upon the camp like an enemy, the color of ashes, concealing the line between earth and sky. Freezing gales flogged every living thing. Women and children stripped bundles of willow and cottonwood bark for the ponies, yet many died in the drifts, the boy’s gray among them.
---
Winter confinement brought trouble to the outlaws’ road ranch as well. Quarrels erupted. Cole and the two whores were the first to become prickly, the cause being Cole’s unceasing pursuit of sexual favors sans compensation. Their spats grew combative under the influence of whiskey, until finally Cutter drew a pistol and declared a moratorium on the consumption of spirits without his personal say-so.

And no more free rides, Teddy, he added, or I’ll nip off your pizzle and feed it to the roosters.

But Cutter’s difficulties were far from over: Unknown to him, ancient enmities presaged the finish of his Laramie scheme.
Eli Jumper’s tribe, the Osage, the Wah-Zha-Zhe, were a plains people, and by the 1850’s their relations with the I’n-Shta-Heh, the heavy eyebrows, as they called the whites, led many warriors like Jumper to scout for army expeditions against enemy tribes – the Kiowa, the Cheyenne, and, when the opportunity presented itself, the Lakota.

Edwin Tabonneau had been raised among the Oglala, and from the moment he saw the murdered woman’s shell ornament on Jumper’s ear, he knew how the Osage had acquired it. Worse yet, subtle details told him it had likely been fashioned by a woman of the Bad Face clan, his mother’s family.
Not a word had passed between Tabonneau and Eli since Ft. Laramie, but Jumper knew the risks his presence in Lakota country imposed.

Unfortunately the snow that curtailed visits of soldiers and emigrants to the ranch also forestalled the extended hunting trips that kept distance between the two men. Now, instead of supplying meat for the ranch, Jumper tended the stock, keeping himself separate from the others, even sleeping in a special hide shelter in the dugout stable. He prepared his own meals and seldom entered the main building, yet his presence was marked.
Tabonneau had for some time committed himself to the murder of Eli Jumper; furthermore, he reasoned that Jumper’s wasichú collaborators should suffer as well.

The fact that Tabonneau himself had joined with these men to kill and rob carried no favor; he was, after all, a Lakota - never truly partnered with his mother’s enemies.