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.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
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.
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.
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