Nathan Gould- Gunfighter from Green Mountain

by Bruce Graham

  NATHAN GOULD GUNFIGHTER

  FROM GREEN MOUNTAIN

  BRUCE GRAHAM

  Copyright 2018 by Bruce Graham

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

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  Cover Design by Outlaws Publishing LLC

  Published by Outlaws Publishing LLC

  March 2018 First Edition

  10987654321

  FOREWORD

  The building known as the Perkins Home, on Union Street in Reno, Nevada, was built in the 1850s, and served as a storehouse, bank, courthouse, city hall, office building and finally a settlement for the elderly and infirm from 1915 until 1962. The structure then stood vacant and decaying until 1991, when it was demolished and replaced with a parking lot. In the process of its obliteration boxes and bales of material were removed to the Storey County Archive Center, where they lay ignored for a quarter century until that structure became a target for the wrecking ball. The accumulated contents were auctioned off and the apparently useless leftover detritus was earmarked for incineration.

  As a historian I decided to give the apparent junk a once over which yielded nothing of interest, except some notebooks and barely interesting bric-a-brac. The one item that stood out was a loose-leaf binder, containing amazingly well-preserved pages of handwritten notes in the fine script so common in the nineteenth century.

  The clarity of the writing led me to publish the material exactly as discovered. The wide vocabulary and fine grammar of the work reminded me of what I had heard many years earlier, that the average nineteenth century Vermonter’s command of the English language rivaled that of a Harvard College professor. Of peculiar interest is the writer's connection to a community in Vermont which achieved notoriety in 2013, when national television and the internet media captured Hurricane Irene carrying away an 1870 covered bridge.

  Arthur Willoughby

  Reno, Nevada

  January, 2018

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  The Perkins Home records identify the author as Nathan Gould, arriving at the Home on November 8, 1919, no home address, born July 22, 1843, at Rockingham, Vermont. He listed no parents or siblings, but stated that he had nephews and/or nieces or their descendants in Vermont, as he had a younger sister, and that she had married in about 1867. He apparently served in the Vermont 7th Regiment of Volunteers during the Civil War, according to a worn discharge certificate dated June 4, 1866.

  The man's resources consisted of $428 in gold certificates, a railroad conductor's watch and two yellowed IOUs of $300 each, from Quincy's Saloon in Hays City, Kansas, dated 1891 that the man identified as compensation for his temporary operation of a faro game. The man carried clothes and personal items, including a well worn gun belt and model 1873 Colt Peacemaker revolver, that were disposed of by the man at the demand of the Home’s manager.

  At the request of the Home the man contacted a lawyer in Hays City about collecting on the IOUs. He refused to become involved, because Quincy's had closed at least 15 years earlier and no one knew of anyone connected with the place.

  The man was a peaceful and reclusive denizen of Perkins Home until he died on January 29, 1924. He was listed as buried in the paupers' section of the cemetery associated with the old Nevada State Hospital in Sparks.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Bartonsville, Vermont? Where's that? I can't find it on any map, since the flood of '69. Once it was a flourishing community, a hotel, a telegraph office, mills, a store, a furniture factory, a brick kiln, homes. Most of it’s gone now.

  You're probably wondering why I know so much about this tiny settlement. Or perhaps you don't care, which is all right. After all, the doings in the now almost invisible Bartonsville, or the rambling recollections of this elderly and obscure specimen could hardly be of interest to most of the world. But the people in this old folks' home suggest that I cope with what they call my fading memory by reconstructing my role in the past many years and setting it to paper.

  So here goes.

  I was born in Bartonsville. Well, my parents lived there when I was born. I really saw the light of day in the nearby settlement, not quite as big, of Rockingham. That was where the midwife lived that my folks had delivered me. As my father told it, my mother was due and they went to the midwife's home, where mom stayed until I arrived. My folks were married only a year and didn't have any family nearby and Dad could afford to have my mother board with the midwife until I was born. I think her name was Burt.

  All I know about my mother is from a painting of her and Dad done by a man in Bellows Falls for their wedding. She wasn't pretty, but had a fine smile. Dad didn't speak much of her even when I got old enough to pay attention. I was a little over a year old when she died while giving birth to my sister, Judith. My Dad said that Mom's time came during a November ice storm and by the time he brought the midwife it was too late.

  For Judith and me he was devoted, as if we were a special gift of God. When we attended Sunday services he often reached out and held our hands or draped his arm around our shoulders, while he prayed.

  When the fuss of Mom's burial was over Dad arranged for Mom's sister, Mary, to live with us. Dad took a newer house, about a furlong from the cluster of mills, the hotel, the store and post office where he did most of his work. The house had plenty of room, one for Mary, one for my sister and me, and one for Dad. For as long as I can remember there was Mary and Dad, and I was in school before I realized that Mary wasn't my mother, and stopped wondering why she and Dad slept in different rooms. When I was almost finished with grade school Mary brought her new husband Ezra to live with her. He was a burly, rough, man who worked on the town road crew and wasn't very nice to Mary. After a few months they moved out, leaving Judith and me alone with Dad.

  "You kids are okay without Mary to look after you," said Dad over dinner the next night. “It was time she and Ezra moved on to their own diggings.”

  I wasn't sure, since that meal's vittles weren't up to Mary's standards.

  "Judith, you can look after the laundry and house cleaning, I'll do the cooking."

  "Yes, Pa," Judith said. She didn't sound happy.

  "And you, Nathan, look after splitting and stacking the wood and feeding the stoves and hitching up the buggy."

  I nodded.

  Dad was the village jack-of-all-trades. For several decades before I was born, the area a half mile to the west toward the village of Chester had been the focal point for this northwest corner of the town of Rockingham. In Vermont the ‘town’ is a legal and political entity.

  Villages are incorporated units with collective improvements. Hamlets, like
Bartonsville and Rockingham, are simply gatherings of people and businesses. The town farm, where old and infirm folks went to pass their final months or years, together with an inn, a store and a shop or two made up the nearby settlement of what was still in my day called La Grange or the Upper Village. But they had no water power. That was centered on the Williams River that went through what was called the Lower Village. When industry looked to set up, they went to the Lower Village. A saw mill and grist mill began there, and they were followed by a carriage factory. The main highway between Bellows Falls and Chester made a sharp turn near the river, and a store, hotel and post office were built there. The District School had been for many years just below where the road to La Grange took off up the hill right before a farm whose fields ran off toward the village center. By the time I was out of the village school, La Grange had withered to a few homes, one inn and the town farm.

  The railroad came through when I was starting school. The tracks bypassed La Grange, and went along the Williams River, across the road to Chester, through what we called the Marble farm field, across the main road and again along the river toward Rockingham and Bellows Falls. The depot was built a little way west of the Lower Village on the Chester road. The line was built so as not to go through the village, but was convenient for people and the businesses using the railroad.

  I was just barely old enough to understand such things when we heard about the amazing thing that happened to a man working to build the railroad, Phineas Gage. He was setting a powder charge up toward Cavendish to clear out a ledge and the charge went off early and blew an iron bar clean through his head. The doctors pulled the bar out, and he lived and returned to work and kept working for a few years. The talk was that his thinking wasn’t as clear as it had been, he couldn’t be trusted with figuring or precise work.

  The death knell for La Grange was the running of the telegraph wire, bypassing the Upper Village, along the railroad line and into the store at the corner in the Lower Village that since was known as Bartonsville. That was in 1851. I heard that the first telegraph operators needed to know two kinds of code, for the first few years, and that a boy only a few years older than I, was the first one to do it in Bellows Falls.

  I never asked how Dad became so well off doing what he did. He wasn’t employed by only one of the settlements’ businesses, but did odd jobs for anyone in both villages that needed help with problems. He would leave the house early in the morning and go up the street to the carriage factory and pick up any messages left there by home owners nearby. He’d do what needed to be done, including at the factory, then walk down to the center of the hamlet and stop at the businesses there and hear from the postmaster if anyone in the homes needed help. In the afternoon he would be home to see how things were with Mary. If the school needed Dad’s help we would bring home a note.

  Dad was good with carpentry and plumbing and was an expert with an auger and at gauging angles. The idea of running water was just getting going, and the local people were using pipes to carry water from springs to their homes and businesses. The old pipes were often tree branches or limbs, bored out and hitched together until they made a long pipe. He did a lot of replacing the old wooden pipes with pipes from the Grafton soap stone quarries. Dad would dig out the spring, dig the trench and lay the pipe and even survey the line in case it needed work and the property owner could find it. He helped to run the telegraph line in the village. The businesses and people in the village were glad to have a handy man available, without having to either keep somebody on the payroll or trust to the questionable skills of regular employees or the owner or manager.

  As I approached and went through adolescence, I helped Dad in his work, for which he paid me, just as if I was a hired man. In this way I learned much about woodworking and plumbing, as well as used to the hard work that went with the fine points of the trades. I studied his methods and thoughtful approaches to problems that seemed to help him in his work. From this I learned, on the one hand, skills that served me well many years later when I filled in the time between my regular jobs, and on the other hand, a distaste for the tedious and hard work that was so much a part of his life.

  Dad knew everyone in the area and I became well acquainted through him. Judith and I walked about a mile to the stone school house beyond the railroad. The school was two rooms, because there were so many scholars from the village and the farms thereabouts. I don't remember much about my teacher for the first few years, but a man was our teacher for the rest of my schooling. He was gray haired and scrawny, and kept us on our toes. One of the subjects we covered was Latin, and I still recall some of the grammar and a lot of the vocabulary. He would write sentences on the board, and then read the meaning in English, with a pointer that hit the board with a crack on the corresponding words. For a long time I found it strange that the pointer would bounce back and forth because in Latin the words didn't follow the same pattern as in English. English is simple, first the subject, then the verb, then the object, with modifiers as needed: "I went to the store quickly." But in Latin the order was a lot disorganized. The teacher's way of jumping around from word to word eventually taught us the word order and the consistency between the word forms.

  The fact that Latin used different forms of the words for how they did their job was confusing, and I still don't get it very well. The teacher referred to Latin being an "inflected" language, and said that Old English that died out in England centuries before the English settled North America, was like that. I was glad that I didn't need to learn all of it. He didn't admit to it, but I guessed he was satisfied with us if we knew what the Latin words meant in English and if we could kind of make sentences.

  One of my more learned older classmates had a good laugh at one of my translations. "The Emperor Augustus would have a good time with what you wrote out."

  "What's wrong with it?"

  "You said it meant 'My legions give me various things.' What he really said was after the defeat of the Romans in Germany was 'Varus, give me back my legions.' Varus was the general who bungled the campaign.”

  My face was red, but all I could think to say was "Well, if his name hadn't been in the middle of the sentence I would have known it was a name. Latin is stupid for making the sentences with the words switched around."

  My classmate laughed all the louder. "Nate, the world works the way it wants, not how we want it to. It's up to us to fit into it, not try to get it to be our way.

  The teacher was named Wiklow, and he boarded with a farm family just outside of the village, that had three children in the school. He was there for four years, and the farmer's children seemed to all get the best grades. After a time I wondered if he was tutoring them at home for his room and board, or whether their grades were enhanced as payment for his room and board. I don’t know if others in the class suspected this.

  I became devoted to the English language early. A part of this was surely due to my father’s influence. In his work he dealt with the owners and managers of the mills and factories. He needed to know the proper use of the Queen’s, or as we knew it, the President’s, English. My father knew little or nothing about mathematics, relying upon charts and that he wrote out and carried in his pocket. One of the mills was managed by a man named Fletcher, who I met many times when visiting my father. Once I happened to be helping my father stack rocks to repair a foundation, and again when I was holding a tape while my father measured for something in the mill. Each time the old man---looking back, I suppose he was in his fifties, and my father was in his thirties---was curt and blunt but not unfriendly. Another time, while I was struggling with a large stone Mr. Fletcher chided my father to pay me a fair wage.

  My father was slender, almost to the point of being cadaverous and even when bundled up against the winter blasts gave the appearance of being ill, although he rarely came down with any serious sickness. He would sometimes walk with my sister and me toward school, across the bridge over the Williams River and bid us good-b
ye, while we trudged down the road, across the railroad tracks and to the Fieldstone school house.

  CHAPTER TWO

  When the weather was particularly harsh during my time in District School my sister and I and other scholars would pause in our walk home at the store and post office at the center of the village. The post office part was no more than a bunch of small cubbyholes, locked by a key in the possession of the customer. The wife of the proprietor couple would go behind a counter and hand the mail to anybody who had forgotten the key. By mid-afternoon the chairs and barrel tops around the warm potbellied stove would be occupied by older men of the village, one or two of whom would be holding forth on some local event that they found of interest. We were glad enough for what little heat was in the part of the store distant from the stove and didn’t care to risk the displeasure of the old men by pushing close to the stove, and certainly not by claiming a seat. My classmate John Adams once perched on the edge of a box with his feet toward the heat and was brusquely warned by one of the men “You’re not invited to this chat. Get your heat at home.” John leapt up with a start and led us out into the cold.

  If we managed to keep quiet and away from the stove we could pick up some serious discussion, when we were old enough to understand. We Yankees, of course, were inculcated from all sides to dislike slavery and wanted it done away with, somehow. The men around the stove and everybody else we encountered had few good words about the Southerners who would profit on the unpaid labor of human beings. This wasn’t a party issue, I heard nothing about party politics until before a presidential election one of my classmates took up the cry of “Free Soil, Free Men, Fremont.” I asked my father what that was about at supper.

  “It’s the Republican Party slogan,” he murmured.

  “What party are we?” I asked.