So: the Second Cavalry would escort Northern Pacific surveyors from Bozeman to the Yellowstone River. Next summer, the Seventh Cavalry would escort a second survey party from Bismarck to the Yellowstone and the Northern Pacific route would be entirely surveyed.
Montana’s gold boom was petering out and many camps were ghost towns where only patient Chinese remained, picking through the tailings dumps. Bozeman merchants who’d become prosperous supplying the camps were concerned about their future and, it goes without saying, the future of Western Civilization.
Every far-seeing settler knew progress needed the Northern Pacific, which couldn’t come to Montana until the army moved the damned indians out of the way.
Duncan prompted, “Your remounts, Colonel . . .”
The Colonel blinked. “Grays? A troop of grays?”
A chill brushed Duncan’s spine. “Yes, sir. ‘Thirty-eight gray or dappled gray geldings, two or three years old, well broke and sound,’ ” he said, quoting Baker’s requisition word for word.
“Grays?” Jabbing his finger. “Suppose you tell me, Gatewood, what the hell difference it makes what color a cavalryman’s horse is.” Baker stared at his finger as if he couldn’t recall why he was pointing it. His hand dropped. “I captured a gray at Cedar Creek, but the damned beast foundered. Were you at Cedar Creek, Major? God, what a victory!”
“No, sir. I didn’t have that honor.”
Baker smiled knowingly. “Bet you’re glad you didn’t ‘have that honor.’ ”
Duncan managed to say, “Yes, sir.” Drawing a deep breath, he pictured his precious Sallie, Catesby, and little Abigail. Why, just yesterday Joe Lame Deer put Abby up on her first horse. “Your geldings are present for inspection, Colonel. As per your requisition, they’re every bit as fine as General Custer’s Gray Horse Troop. Maybe finer.”
“God Damned Custer.” Baker glowered. “Yellow Hair’! The ‘Boy General’! ‘Son of the Morning Star’! Christ almighty!”
He set his slouch hat at the correct angle and strode to the door. “Let’s have a look at them, Gatewood. Let’s see if they’re half as good as you say they are.”
The regimental farriers had already inspected every horse standing at the stable hitch rail. Joe Lame Deer leaned against the log wall chewing a straw. Arms folded, eyes closed in the pale October sun, Aunt Opal perched on a farrier’s three-legged stool. When their officer approached, the farriers snapped to attention. Joe shifted his straw to the other side of his mouth.
“The Gray Horse Troop, eh?” Hands clasped behind his back, Colonel Baker strolled the line of remounts. He stopped suddenly. “I won’t accept this one. He’s a biter. Look at his eyes. He’s a cribber and a biter.”
“Colonel . . .” Duncan had trained this horse. He was easy-gaited and calm.
“Don’t you argue with me, Gatewood. I don’t have to take guff from any damn horse dealer.”
Aunt Opal opened her eyes and blinked. She got up and pursed her lips. Duncan’s frown and cautionary head shake quelled her protest.
Duncan handed her the reins. “No use trying to fool you, is there, Colonel?” Duncan laughed the laugh he’d used bribing Mahone’s legislators. He had hoped he’d never hear it again.
“Can’t pull the wool over my eyes, eh, Gatewood?” Baker cackled. “That’s done, then. Captain Brisbin will prepare your draft.” Colonel Baker smiled. “Now, Gatewood. Is it late enough in the day for a Confederate officer to drink with a Union officer? Command is a lonely job—but it has some prerogatives.”
Duncan couldn’t think of anything he’d like less. “Always a pleasure doing business with you, Colonel. Sorry about that drink. Another time.”
Baker’s smile dropped off his face as Duncan laughed his corrupt laugh. “Some of us can’t hold our liquor like you, Colonel. Hell”—he smiled—“some of us have to ride home.”
When Duncan thumped up the headquarters’ steps and ducked under the low lintel, Captain Brisbin closed his letter book. “Colonel Baker sign off on your horses?”
“All but one. They’re good horses, George.”
Duncan knew the sharp-featured, sardonic captain from the low-stakes poker game at the Tivoli Garden Saloon.
“Thirty-seven fine remounts.” Duncan didn’t hide his satisfaction. “At one hundred and fifty dollars per.”
The captain dipped his pen, wrote and blotted a draft. He extended it to Duncan but mock snatched it back before letting Duncan have it. “Our commander was sober, I presume.”
“Sober as he ever is.”
“Sober enough for the cavalry, at any rate.” Captain Brisbin noted the transaction in his ledger and blotted that too. “The ‘Gray Horse Troop,’ dear, dear me . . . !” He threw back his head and roared with laughter. “Baker can’t forgive Custer for getting famous when he didn’t.”
“Maybe Baker was drunk when ‘famous’ was issued. See you Saturday night?”
“’Deed you will, Mr. Gatewood. I’ll be lookin’ to relieve you of your ill-got gains.”
The farriers were stabling horses while Aunt Opal comforted the rejected one. “Ain’t one darn thing wrong with you, Badger. You fine! Ain’t you, Badger boy?”
“We’ll sell him to somebody, Auntie.”
“That Baker, he a fool.”
“He surely is, Auntie. But five thousand five hundred yankee dollars will take us through this winter in style.”
Unimpressed, the old woman climbed onto the horse. “Come on, Badger. We leavin’ this den of fools. We goin’ home!”
Joe Lame Deer fell in beside Duncan outside the fort.
At first Joe’s laconic ways had made Duncan uneasy. Work with a man all day and not say two words? But in time Joe’s silence became natural; even comfortable.
Joe knew what needed to be done on a horse ranch without being asked. When Duncan had a change of plans—like these gelding purchases—he told Joe, and Joe quit what he had been doing and turned to the new tasks without comment. Every Friday, again without comment, he accepted his pay. Last year, once in July and again in August, he disappeared; the first time for a week, the second for ten days. He returned without explaining where he’d gone or why.
Very late in the fall two years ago, the Gatewoods’ family wagon train arrived in the Gallatin Valley. Of necessity, they’d wintered in a dirt-floored, leaky-roofed homesteader’s soddy. Sallie, Duncan, and the children slept under buffalo robes in the rear of what felt more like a cave than a house. Aunt Opal and Joe had pallets nearer the door. Aunt Opal complained she’d never been colder or more miserable in her life and if things didn’t get better, and she meant soon, she was goin’ back to Virginia.
Finally spring came and foals were born and Duncan was learning every byway in the valley and the honest and less-than-honest horse dealers in the Territory. Joe gave his son Catesby lessons in horseshoeing and together they foaled a breech birth. Although his father showed Catesby how to shoot, Joe taught him how to hunt. Joe taught Catesby sign language, the lingua franca that let Cherokee talk to Comanche and Lakota to Arapaho. At a cliff north of the ranch Joe and Catesby chipped arrowheads from the black glassy obsidian.
Duncan wanted to ask Joe: “Were you ever married?” “Where were you born?” “Do you like it here with us?”
But he knew questions would drive Joe Lame Deer away quicker than dangerous mavericks, bitter weather, and poor pay.
Now Joe grunted. “Good medicine.”
“You betcha,” Duncan said happily.
Just two years in the Territory with a draft for all that money. The paper simmered in his breast pocket. He wanted to take it out and make sure the figures were correct, but if he did the wind would grab it or a hawk would swoop down and bear his prize away. He patted his pocket. He whistled a few bars of “The Cavaliers of Dixie”—that jaunty tune. Joe Lame Deer grunted again. Joe thought whistling brought bad luck.
In the summer months, Bozeman’s streets were dusty or muddy. Once or twice every spring, it took an e
ight-horse hitch to pull some unfortunate immigrant’s wagon out of a mud hole. After three weeks of May rain, a wag posted a sign beside Main Street: “No Fishing!”
The cold weather had stiffened the streets. As they trotted along, Duncan nodded at friends he hadn’t known two years before. Acquaintances became friends quicker here than they had in Virginia.
The First National Bank was the largest of Bozeman’s three brick buildings.
Joe stayed with the horses while Duncan strolled into a small lobby fronted with gilded cashier’s cages. He’d removed his hat when he’d come in to ask Harris, the head teller, for enough cash to buy his gray horses. On that day, Duncan was shaved and wore a fresh shirt. Today his shirt was rumpled, he smelled of horse sweat and manure, and his hat stayed on his head.
Harris hummed as he credited Duncan’s account. “Has Colonel Baker set a date for his Yellowstone expedition? The railroad surveyors are anxious to get going.”
“Next week, he says.”
Harris stamped papers and handed Duncan a receipt. “Rather late in the year for such an undertaking,” he observed.
“You know the Colonel,” Duncan said vaguely.
Harris pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger and flashed a grin Duncan hadn’t known the man possessed. “Rather better than I’d wish to.”
Yes, it was late. Snow draped the Bitterroots down to the timberline. Duncan and Joe Lame Deer went next door to warm themselves at the Tivoli’s potbellied stove.
Joe took his stein into the corner while Duncan made himself a corned beef sandwich from the free lunch on the bar.
Willem Schmidt was bald as a cue ball and his eyebrows were so pale they were nearly invisible. He owned the Tivoli Garden Saloon and had an interest in the livery stable. Schmidt helped found Bozeman’s Masonic Lodge Number Six but quit it when most of its members were ex-Confederates. Now Schmidt was canvassing Union veterans for a second lodge.
Duncan asked him about the library fund.
“Mrs. Story kicked in twenty dollars, but Nelson says he won’t put in a dime so long as Professor Vernon is involved.”
“Vernon’s a good teacher.”
“Nelson thinks he’s a four-flusher.” Schmidt leaned over the bar confidentially. “Anor Rasmussen was in here whining about you last night.”
Duncan’s face hardened. “He knows where to find me.”
“Anor says you cheated him out of his homestead.”
“Willem, am I going to have to shoot that stupid son of a bitch?”
The saloon keeper chuckled. “I do not believe so. Anor is a blowhard, no more.”
Snow was in the air when they’d first come to the valley and Duncan bought the first halfway suitable homestead for sale: Anor Rasmussen’s. When Sallie walked into Rasmussen’s dirt-floored soddy with its leaking roof and smoky chimney she wept.
“Dear?” Duncan had said.
“Don’t ask,” she’d said.
They burned Rasmussen’s straw ticks and scrubbed everything with lye soap.
In December and January Duncan and Joe shoveled the horse barn’s too-low-pitched roof lest the snow buildup collapse it.
SunRise Ranch lay above the forks of the Madison River. Duncan filed homestead claims for himself, Sallie, Catesby, and Abigail on the dry grasslands above the river.
Charles Anceney’s Meadowbrook bordered them on the south. Anceney had trailed two hundred Percherons from Salt Lake City to become the biggest draft horse breeder in the Territory. Although they weren’t competitors and helped each other out as neighbors must, the Gatewoods and Anceneys were more polite than friendly.
Now Duncan told Willem, “If Anceney hadn’t told Anor how much he’d have paid for Anor’s place, Anor wouldn’t have his dander up. Lord knows what Charles actually would have paid. It’s easy to be a big spender when you don’t open your wallet. Life is a puzzle, Willem, don’t you think?”
“We are born, live a little while, and die.”
“Business slow, Willem? Belly acting up?”
“Some of us will ride into Lakota country next week. Good men. Well armed.”
Maybe fifty scrawny, sickly indians lived in tipis and shacks outside Bozeman. They hunted small game, picked through garbage, and begged. Come winter, one or two would get drunk and freeze to death in the street. Joe Lame Deer didn’t look right or left when he and Duncan rode through their shantytown.
Territorial governors beseeched Washington to protect settlers against indian depredations. There weren’t many depredations in Montana Territory and none at all in the Gallatin Valley, but vigilantes like Schmidt sallied forth every few months to take a few scalps, rape some squaws, shoot a few prime buffalo and lace their carcasses with wolf poison. The vigilantes were widely admired.
“Count me out, Willem. I didn’t come to this country to kill indians. I saw more than my share of killing in the War.”
At Burnett’s Mercantile, Duncan bought a mother-of-pearl comb for Sallie and stick candy for the kids. Joe went on home for the evening chores while Duncan stopped at Black’s Mill to see if his shingles were ready. The first summer they were in the Gallatin Valley, Joe and Duncan built a horse barn with a properly pitched roof and rooms (with stoves) for Joe Lame Deer and Aunt Opal, who wintered better than their boss and his family, shivering in Rasmussen’s soddy a second year.
Black had most of Duncan’s shingles and promised the rest Saturday. Two Scandinavian carpenters were building their ranch house. Sallie wanted a house like those she saw in Godey’s Ladies’ Magazine. Something with generous porches and elaborate trim. “A painted house,” Sallie called her dream.
The house wasn’t painted yet, but the carpenters promised—if the weather held—the family could move in by Thanksgiving.
A big western sunset was coloring the sky as Duncan rode toward his family’s new homeplace.
Duncan Gatewood had never been a praying man. Even during the war, those times he believed he was certain to die, he hadn’t prayed. It hadn’t seemed right to trouble the Lord on such short acquaintance.
A gust rattled the sagebrush. The temperature was plummeting so fast, Duncan could feel it sink through his bones.
After fording the Madison, Duncan circled onto the ridge behind his homestead. He sometimes came up here to see the ranch as a stranger might, some pilgrim fresh off the Bridger Trail, anxious to get settled before the first snow.
Duncan mouthed the names of the mountains walling this rich green and gold valley: the Bridgers, the Gallatins, the Crazy Woman Range.
That pilgrim might say: “Here’s a lucky man. He’s got stockpiled graze on the ridges where the wind’ll keep it clear all winter.”
That pilgrim might say: “Well watered too. The bottoms will grow all the corn, wheat, and timothy a man might want. Bet that river’s full of fish.”
An antelope burst out of a thicket and bounced over a ridge out of sight.
A pilgrim might admire the new barn and horse corrals.
The carpenters were working late. A mile from the figures on the roof, Duncan saw a carpenter’s arm rise and fall. A full second later, he heard the hammer’s bang.
The low soddy was in shadow. Its open door framed a warm rectangle of light.
In the pasture beside the river Duncan’s foals were frolicking, dashing toward the river only to brake, turn, and race back the way they’d come.
A pilgrim might go so far as to say: “It’s a lucky bastard has all this.”
Duncan Gatewood bowed his head and gave thanks.
CHAPTER 47
A TREASURE TROVE
That winter we camped on the Belle Fourche River. We moved slowly, slept long into the morning, and spoke no more than we had to. When my daughter Tazoo whimpered from hunger, I gave her a leather strap to chew. My brother’s wife, Fox Head, turned her face away and died. One by one we ate our ponies.
Though our hunters ventured far from the village, they came back empty-handed.
In the Moon
of Frost in the Tipi, Plenty Cuts and White Bull put on snowshoes to hunt deep in the mountains.
When they returned, their sled was heavy with meat. They’d discovered three blackhorn cows trapped in a snow-walled park the blackhorns had trampled. The animals had peeled and eaten tree bark as high as they could reach. The blackhorns didn’t run back and forth or bellow. They stood calmly while Plenty Cuts and White Bull shot them down. The two hunters butchered the youngest cow and dragged her tongue, hump, loins, and hams back to the village. It was a half moon and the snow sparkled and they walked all night without stopping.
When our village heard about this, they backtracked to the park, but there was no meat left—just skeletons the Real Dogs had picked clean on the trampled, bloody snow. The hunters brought bones back to be cracked for marrow.
Our wicans summoned blackhorns from under the earth, but the blackhorns did not come. The wicans said the blackhorns didn’t come because they hated the smell of Washitu.
As soon as the ice broke in the rivers and we were able to travel, Plenty Cuts and I came into the Agency for food. Inkpaduta had sent word there were blackhorns in the Grandmother’s land north of the Medicine Line and White Bull and his family went north. I kissed Rattling Blanket Woman and we wept.
THE SOD AGENCY stood on the Platte River a short ride from Fort Laramie. The lodgepole pine stockade surrounded its blockhouse, well, and storehouse. Traders and the indian agent slept in the stockade protected by cavalry under Colonel David S. Stanley.
The indians called Stanley “Black Face” to honor his temper.
Cheyenne, Lakota, and Arapaho villages clung to the Agency like nursing puppies. The farther from the Agency the better the graze, and shabby villages rotated around the Agency like a wagon wheel around its hub. However often they moved, they pitched their lodges in old lodge circles among old campfires and dried dog and pony excrement.
Blanket indians pitched their tipis nearer the stockade. Indians who had once been warriors didn’t own one pony. When they had no more buffalo hides to trade, they traded their burial moccasins for whiskey.