The Edge of Violence Page 10

  “The army, from what I hear, is supposed to protect you from Indians,” Colter said. “But you figured to string up an Indian who was just watching you, curious to see what you were doing. If you’d hanged Red Prairie, you’re right, this whole country would be running red with blood. Starting an Indian war is a bad idea, boys.”

  “You sorry son of a . . . ,” the bearded man started.

  Colter stopped him by aiming the LeMat. “Don’t make me sorry I didn’t kill you. Because I could have. And I still can.”

  “We’ll see you in Violence, mister!” the man with the bullet in his thigh wailed.

  “If you do, it’ll be the last thing you ever see.”

  First, Colter gathered the Enfield and the Colt, which he heaved into the grasses as far as he could. Red Prairie was busy, too, getting his knife back from the sweaty man, and the bow and quiver of arrows back from the fattest of the bunch. Next, Colter moved to his horse, made sure Red Prairie was mounted and waiting, and swung into the saddle.

  “We’ll find you,” the sweaty man said, but he was bluffing.

  “Look me up in Violence, boys. I’ll be at the town marshal’s office.”

  Then he kicked the black into a lope, pulling the mule behind him, and followed Red Prairie over the closest ridge.

  CHAPTER 15

  “Twenty winters?” Red Prairie signed.

  “More,” Colter answered.

  They smoked Red Prairie’s pipe.

  Tim Colter had met the Cheyenne brave through, of course, Jed Reno. Reno had given Colter that quick lesson in sign language, and later, Red Prairie had taught Colter a little more. Other lessons had come during the Civil War, when Colter had been with the Oregon volunteers chasing Indians instead of Confederates.

  If Colter remembered correctly, Red Prairie had met up with Jed Reno when the trapper had first started chasing Malachi Murchison. It was the Cheyenne who had told Reno about the massacre of Colter’s parents and Mr. Scott. Then Red Prairie and some of his braves had joined Colter and Reno near Colter’s Hell. They had helped save Patricia Scott, Colter’s sisters, and Mrs. Scott from Jackatars and those fiends with him. Reno and Colter could not have saved those women, if not for the Cheyennes, and the Cheyennes would not have helped, had it not been for Red Prairie.

  He didn’t know what the Cheyenne thought, but Tim Colter figured that he owed Red Prairie plenty, and, despite what he had just done, probably would never be able to repay that debt.

  Colter signed a question about Plenty Medicine, but the warrior merely shook his head and signed back that many, many winters had passed since he had last seen the one-eyed trapper. The Cheyenne used fingers and hands and some throaty grunts to ask Colter if he had seen Plenty Medicine, but this time Colter shook his head. He wondered if he could tell him that he had heard from Jed Reno and that he probably would see him in the next couple of days. But that seemed beyond Colter’s knowledge of signing, not to mention the dexterity of his fingers and hands.

  Red Prairie then spoke and signed of the years that had passed since that day at Colter’s Hell, which had made Red Prairie quite the wealthy Indian back in his village. They had captured a lot of horses from the thieves and killers, not to mention a few scalps. But since then . . .

  * * *

  It had started several years back, long after Colter had made his way to Oregon, but he had heard the story. Everyone in the United States and her territories knew what had happened.

  Around 1854, an Indian brave—he was not Cheyenne, Red Prairie stressed, but a Sioux, a Miniconjou—had come across a stray cow that had wandered off from the wagon train, and the hungry Indian had killed the cow. The cow’s owner complained to the army at Fort Laramie. Some greenhorn lieutenant rode out to an Indian camp to find out what had happened.

  The Indians were at peace. The Sioux had never troubled the white men, and rarely if ever tormented any of the emigrants heading west in their wagon trains. They were living and abiding by the Treaty of 1851, camping near Fort Laramie as they were supposed to do.

  The camp was another branch of the Sioux, Brulé, and the chief was named Conquering Bear. The officer wanted the man who had killed the cow to be turned over to the army, so he could be arrested and tried. Conquering Bear tried to explain that he was Brulé, and had no authority over the Miniconjou. Talks went on, but Conquering Bear could not bend, so the army soldier went back to Fort Laramie.

  The officer of the post sent another officer back to Conquering Bear’s camp. His name was John Lawrence Grattan, a foot soldier with the 6th U.S. Infantry, Colter recalled, who had recently been graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Grattan seemed to be spoiling for a fight, and rode out with just about thirty men, including a half-breed interpreter named Auguste, who was pretty fortified with liquor, and two cannons.

  Auguste didn’t like the Sioux, and the Sioux did not care much for him. The half-breed called out, “Where are your warriors? I see only women.” And laughed. He said, “These bluecoats that ride with me have come to kill you all. We shall clean up this country by and by.” Not that anyone could understand what Auguste was saying. He spoke little Sioux, and the booze slurred his words. But Conquering Bear and the other Sioux did not need to understand but a few words. They could see what Auguste meant in his eyes, and in the face of the shavetail lieutenant leading his men.

  Grattan demanded the cow-killer.

  Conquering Bear, ever the diplomat, said he could not turn over the brave, but would give the lieutenant a horse, as a token, as a replacement for the dead cow.

  About this time, a trader named Bordeau came along to help ease the tension. Bordeau spoke fluent Sioux, and the Indians liked and respected him. Bordeau spoke some, but he could see the Indians and the soldiers and Auguste. Anything he said now, Bordeau later explained, would have done nothing. It was already too late. He rode back to his trading post, drew in the latchstring, closed and bolted the shutters, and loaded his gun. A fight, he said, was as certain as winter snow.

  Grattan yelled at Conquering Bear, saying that the U.S. Army knew how to deal with lawbreakers, and walked away. One of his men raised his rifle and fired at an Indian. Conquering Bear screamed for peace, but he was cut down. Even belligerent Lieutenant Grattan yelled at his men, trying to stop an ugly incident—or, more likely, trying to save his own life. But any hope of peace had disappeared.

  Grattan fell dead, his body pincushioned with arrows. Auguste was caught and chopped to pieces. Eleven soldiers fell beside the dead lieutenant. The others tried to run back to Fort Laramie, but a party of Sioux cut them off. All were killed except for one, and he would die a short time later back at Fort Laramie.

  Newspapers called it the “Grattan Massacre.”

  Red Prairie said it should have been called the “Place Where Conquering Bear—and Peace—All Died.”

  “You’re probably right,” Colter told him in English, but the Cheyenne did not understand.

  The U.S. Army retaliated, of course. That was the army’s way. A colonel named Harney took to the field. Colter remembered reading in a newspaper that Harney had said, “I am for battle. No peace.”

  Harney’s troops caught up with some Sioux at Blue-water Creek in Nebraska in 1855, and pretty much ended what the newspapers kept calling an uprising. The First Sioux War. But not the last.

  The Santee Sioux, starving and having not been paid or fed as prescribed by a treaty, rebelled in Minnesota and Dakota Territory in the early years of the Civil War. Colter couldn’t remember how many settlers had been killed, but he did know that several Indians had been hanged in Mankato, once the army had stopped that rebellion.

  Nor had the Cheyenne been spared.

  During the cold months in the later half of 1864, a Methodist minister named John Chivington, commissioned colonel of some Colorado militia, had attacked a peaceful camp of Black Kettle and cut down more than a hundred Indians, perhaps as many as two hundred. Most of those were women and children. And what
the white soldiers had done to the dead, and the living, was uglier than anything Tim Colter would have imagined.

  So the Cheyenne Indians joined the Sioux and other Plains Tribes. Julesburg, a white settlement on the South Platte River, was almost wiped out by a combined Indian force of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. Rock Creek Spring . . . Platte Bridge Station . . . Tongue River . . . Sawyers Fight . . . the Fetterman Massacre up at Fort Phil Kearny, where another glory-hunting soldier had led his command to death. Even as far west as Washington Territory at the Bear River Massacre, war had spread. Peace came in spurts, but rarely lasted. Usually, Colter had to concede, it was his people—not the Indians—who had started the wars. But, alas, likewise, it was his people—and not the Indians—who had the firepower and numbers and the temperament to finish those wars, too.

  Sometimes Colter found himself wondering. Louis Jackatars, that demented, violent half-breed, had dreamed of turning this territory into a sea of blood, a place where peace would never settle, a country that would be awash in violence for years and years to come.

  “This is Jackatars’s dream . . . fulfilled,” he said.

  Colter blinked. He wet his lips and nodded at Red Prairie.

  * * *

  The past twenty-plus years had been hard on the Cheyenne warrior. His eyes seemed ancient; his skin was cracked with deep crevices and scars. Most of the Indian’s teeth were gone, and those not were rotten. He did not smile. One earlobe was missing, and his bottom lip was deformed by what appeared to be a bullet wound. His right pinky was missing, as was the tip of his left pointer finger, and deeper scars had been carved into his forearms. Probably during a mourning period. Indians often cut themselves when they had lost a loved one. Wife? Sons? Colter could only guess, and he would never ask.

  Red Prairie pointed at the black smoke, still soiling the blue sky over one of the hills.

  “When the whites first came in their prairie schooners,” the Cheyenne signed, “we let them pass. Even though we knew that eventually they would not pass, but stay. Some, like Plenty Medicine, we welcomed. For they lived as we did. They knew and respected our ways. Our lives. Yet, more and more passed through, and the buffalo, the elk, the antelope, eventually even the rabbits, they left the country. They moved on. Often my people had to move away, too.

  “So now comes this new thing of you white people. This iron horse. We have been told that it will only pass through our country, too, but we have seen the tracks left by the prairie schooners years before. The tracks run deep, but it was our hope that, with time, maybe many, many winters, these ruts will be filled with sand and mud and the seeds that make grass. And the tracks will disappear. But these new tracks, these iron rails, these do not look like will ever go away. They will always be here. They are too heavy for even a good spring rain to wash away. And we see more of your villages along these iron tracks. More of your people come. Our buffalo—which we depend on to feed our women and babies and even ourselves—wander away, never to return. This makes it hard on our people. But this is our land. We will fight to keep our land. We will fight to stay alive. This . . . do you understand?”

  Colter nodded.

  “It is good.” Red Prairie rose, walked to his horse, and mounted. “For I would hate,” he signed, “to have to kill you.”

  CHAPTER 16

  For what had started as just a Hell on Wheels, Violence, aka Violet, had exploded since the passing of winter. A steam-powered saw whined as its blades cut down logs. Some fool might think this was forest country, Jed Reno thought, even though a man would be hard-pressed to find any trees except along the creeks and rivers. No, greenhorn fools kept hauling lumber from over in the Medicine Bow country. Hammers pounded on nails, handsaws scratched through the planks the lumber company provided—at outrageous prices—and people busied themselves making a town.

  Oh, most of the homes and businesses remained crude dugouts and soddies, or canvas tents that popped in the winds of late spring. What was that old saying he recalled back in Kentucky? March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. Whoever said that had never been in Idaho Territory, or whatever they were calling this country these days. Along Clear Creek, March blew in like a dragon and never stopped blowing. The dragon’s breath was the only thing that changed, hot or cold.

  Yet, frame buildings—with false fronts—kept sprouting up like ungodly wildflowers along Union Street. The Blarney Stone and Slade’s Saloon looked halfway respectable, and other buildings had joined them. The Railroaders Lounge. Jake’s Place, Licensed Gambler. The Cheyenne Saloon. Mattie’s Place. Keno House. Most of the new buildings were just raw pine, but some had been whitewashed, and one or two were painted the gaudy colors that would turn a sober man’s stomach. Even the Yost Hotel—renamed now that Marshal B.B. Cutter, once co-owner, was dead, buried, and forgotten—had grown up. Numbered side streets ran north-to-south from Union Street. Mostly south. Nothing had sprung up on the other side of the Union Pacific tracks except for what passed as a depot, some storage sheds, trash heaps, and a side track for the trains that ran through.

  Reno wasn’t sure what the founding fathers of this blight along Clear Creek had in mind; and since he had run away from civilization in Kentucky before the railroads had reached there—before, in fact, anyone really thought train transportation would amount to much—he couldn’t exactly guess how train towns should look.

  But the rails lay just north of town. Then, just south of the tracks, came Union Street, but the buildings on the north side of Union did not face the railroad. Nothing faced the railroad tracks except the sheds and what everyone called a depot, but it looked just like a boxcar without wheels and had railroad ties for a porch and boardwalk. Well, Reno guessed the buildings on the south side of Union Street might have looked across at the railroad tracks, but now had nothing but south-facing buildings on the north side of the track to stare at.

  All that cogitating made Jed Reno’s head hurt.

  And then there were those other streets, well, not that anyone who had ever seen Louisville would have called them streets. Roads, maybe. Ruts, perhaps. Winding trails over flattened grass. First Street through Sixth Street, moving westward. If the town kept growing, Jed Reno feared, it would eventually incorporate his trading post.

  “What do you think, Jed?”

  Turning on the heel of his moccasin, Reno saw Henry Yost leaning on the wooden column of his hotel, smoking a cigar, grinning like some greenhorn who had been out in the sun too long.

  A locomotive hissed, belched, and squeaked. Piano music rang out from one of the saloons or gambling joints. Prostitutes called down from the top two floors of Mattie’s Place at the railroaders, even the sodbusters who, for some crazy reason, thought they could turn this country into Iowa or Alabama, depending on what uniform they had donned in the late war.

  “I don’t think,” Reno answered. But, since Yost had withdrawn another cigar from his coat pocket and was holding it out, Reno did walk over to the hotel.

  “We’re growing, Jed,” the hotel man said. “I don’t think Cheyenne over to the east will survive. Nor that town they think they’ll build west of here. What are they calling it? Lamar? Lamar City. Larimer? Laramie? Laramie City. Something like that. Violet will be the gem of the Union Pacific in Idaho Territory. Mark my words.”

  A gunshot rang out.

  Reno had bit off the end of the cigar and spit into the street. Now he turned, dumbly holding the match Yost had given him, and looked toward Slade’s Saloon. Reno wasn’t exactly certain where the shot had come from, especially now that several other dens of iniquity lined Union Street, but it was a good guess. Especially seeing how many people were suddenly moving away from the saloon, even backing up tentatively as far as The Blarney Stone.

  The batwing doors pushed open, and a man stumbled out, clutching a revolver in his left hand. Even with only one eye that had seen more than seventy years of hard living, Reno could see that no smoke drifted from the 7½-inch barrel of the Colt. The b
atwing doors banged back and forth as the man fell against the hitching rail, dropping the unfired Colt into the mud. He held there for a moment, before he somehow managed to push himself up, and staggered backward against the wall of the saloon, to his right of the swinging doors.

  A thin, rawboned man in duck trousers, black stovepipe boots, red shirt, and a Union Army shell jacket with brass buttons. His hat, some shapeless mass of dun, had fallen off in front of the saloon’s entrance, and still lay there, crown down. Like many men in this country, the man sported a beard, unkempt and dirty, and hair that would give even the best tonsorial artist in the world plenty of fits.

  For some reason, the thin man bent over, trying to fetch his hat. Hat? Why not the Colt? Reno shook his head, struck the match against his thumbnail, and fired up the cigar. Another figure appeared in the doorway of the saloon, and stopped the pounding batwing doors, but this man was nothing but a silhouette, watching the spectacle of the man as he tried again for his hat.

  The coat fell open, and that’s when Reno realized he had been mistaken. The shirt wasn’t red. That was blood, spreading across the homespun shirt of dirty white. The thin man had taken a bullet in his belly. Gut shot. Reno removed the cigar and spit in the dirt. Awful way for a man to have to die.

  But the shot man kept trying to pick up the hat, until, finally, the man who was watching from behind the batwing doors made his way through and kicked the gut-shot thin man in his rear end, sending him sailing off the boardwalk and into the mud. He rolled over, his face now coated with the muck in the streets, and clutched his belly as he coughed, moaned, and spit out bloody phlegm.

  Reno looked at the man standing in front of the doors. He held a long-barreled Colt, too, in his right hand, but his weapon still smoked. His Prince Albert, the tails tucked behind the empty holster on his right hip, was black, as was his ribbon tie and flat-brimmed, low-crowned hat. Black boots kicked away the dying man’s hat. The man’s pants, however, were gray woolen with blue stripes along the outer seams. The pants of an old Johnny Reb soldier. The man in the street, unless his shell jacket betrayed him as a liar, had served with the Union.