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.