Sweet Thunder

by Ivan Doig

  “Oh, but Mr. Morgan, you’re much too modest!” Rab stuck her pretty nose in. “At Marias Coulee, you had to ride horseback to go anywhere, remember? We schoolgirls thought you had a very nice seat.” She giggled, all too innocently. “Of the horsemanship kind.”

  “Necessity is not the same as aptitude, Rab,” I tried to evade that ambush.

  Armbrister was not hearing anything but the gallop of story in his head. “It’ll be a peach of a feature. I’ll have Sammy set up his camera across from the Hennessy Building, so he gets a terrific shot of you riding right past Anaconda’s doorstep. Let Cutlass try to top that.”

  “Jake, no, really, I—” My protest was drowned out by his shout for the photographer.

  “Jared?” I was running out of names to plead to.

  “I’m infantry, remember?” Poker-faced, he tugged at his short ear. “I leave the cavalry up to you, Professor.” Wasn’t that just like a politician, my aggrieved look told him, and words to that effect would have followed had not Armbrister got me by the arm and dragged me off to hatch his plan with the photographer. The two of them plotted his assignment out on the wall map of downtown Butte while I tried to blink out of my daze.

  “Easy one. See you at the Hennessy corner, Morgie,” the cameraman said, and went back to his poker game, as Armbrister impatiently overrode my last-ditch protests against becoming the Thunder’s mounted correspondent. “You’re buddy-buddy with Sandison, he’ll be right in the thick of the mounted bunch, that makes you the natural one to tag along with him and do the story. What the hell, all you have to do is get up on a horse—”

  18

  —AND RIDE THROUGH THE DOWNTOWN streets lined by a whooping crowd, with bands blaring and Fords backfiring and boys on bicycles wild as Cossacks, while simultaneously keeping track of Samuel Sandison and interviewing his Rough Rider cohorts, all of it without falling out of the saddle and killing myself, my hunch-playing editor might just as well have added to his instructions.

  The Fourth of July began with the usual bangs, firecrackers going off in fusillades that added to my jumpy nerves. As parade time drew nearer, things got under way at the manse, with Sandison clomping around in his best cowboy boots, digging out his old leather chaps that shined from use and a pair of sharp-roweled spurs, and topping it all off with the Rough Rider hat. Thus assembled, he cocked a look to where I stood waiting on one foot and then the other, back and forth between dreading my horseback assignment and wanting to get it over with. “Am I seeing right? Are you going looking like an undertaker?”

  Miffed, I protested that my blue serge suit, sober tie, and dove-gray vest marked me as a member of the press. “Besides, I bought a Stetson.”

  “Bonnet on a rooster,” he wrote off my new hat, meanwhile lumbering to his library lair for what he said was the one last thing he needed.

  He came out strapping on a gun belt with a six-shooter, the large old kind called a hog leg, in the holster.

  I stared. “Where did that come from?”

  “The Colt Firearms Company in Hartford, Connecticut, where do you think?”

  “I meant—is that a good idea? With Anaconda’s armed goons on hand? Isn’t carrying a gun possibly giving them an excuse to—”

  “Morgan”—he rolled his eyes toward the bullet holes in the ceiling—“I am the one who got shot merely for hanging around with you, remember? I don’t want that to happen again. Nor,” this came with a full serving of growl and scowl, “do I necessarily want it to happen to you for hanging around with me, if some idiot with an old grudge decides to take it out on me and my riders. Anaconda or anyone else, this is to give them second thoughts.” The gun belt circling his girth like the equator, he rested his hand on the prominent handle of the Colt .45 as if it was a natural fit. “I have a reputation to uphold in this damn town,” he said, with all the austere dignity expected of the Butte public librarian. Then came the gleam of the Earl of Hell, reflected from his vigilante days. “More than one.”

  • • •

  Inasmuch as a good many of the Rough Riders shipped their own mounts in by boxcar, their encampment was down by the stockyards, where Sandison and I duly delivered ourselves by taxi before parade time. “You can just about bet most of them slept in a feather bed somewhere uptown,” he shrewdly guessed as we approached the camp, “then scuttled down here for a breakfast of beans around a campfire.” The cluster of weather-beaten tents carried the tang of both a military bivouac and a cattle roundup, as did the Rough Riders themselves, actually. Hip-sprung men of a certain type stood around fire circles talking in slow cadences and, likely as not, spitting tobacco juice onto the sizzling embers. I was itching to pull out my notepad and jot down just how their slouch hats and loosely knotted neckerchiefs—bandannas, I mentally corrected myself—and blue flannel uniform shirts made them look like exhibits from an earlier age. “A Frederic Remington museum diorama come to life,” was the phrase that suggested itself. But given the squints and odd looks aimed at Sandison and me as we passed through, him in his ranching getup of forty years ago and I in my city clothes and clean Stetson, I kept my reportorial materiel in my pocket.

  There was a similar gang of blue-shirted figures ahead at the stockyards, some fence-sitting, some peering between corral poles to where horses were being wrangled with considerable commotion and dust. Lanky and akimbo and in some drawling world of their own, these hardened military cowhands or cowboy-soldiers did not look any friendlier than the set at the tents, so I felt compelled to ask Sandison a little tentatively, “Who will be our, ah, riding companions?”

  “Who do you think,” he grunted in answer, stepping up his stride, his chaps flapping, as we neared the corral. “The James brothers.”

  “Very funny, Sandy. I suppose Butch Cassidy and the Hole in the Wall Gang will be joining us later?”

  “What’s funny about it?” Sandison huffed, giving me a look. “Leonard James and his kid brother, Claude, both rode for me on the ranch from the time they were green saddle punks. Had to teach the young scamps every blasted thing about cowboying.” He shook his head reminiscently. “Same with Tinsley, another pea in that pod.”

  “Related to them, is he?” I took the implication to be.

  “For crying out loud, Morgan, where do you get these ideas? He’s colored.”

  I surrendered to the situation, whatever it was going to be, and simply stuck as close as possible while Sandison surveyed the dusty scene in the corral. He was grumbling, “I got carried away with that silly little war. Should never have let the three of them off the ranch to go fight Spaniards. Lost the whole batch to that old humbug, Buffalo Bill, afterward.”

  My expression must have told him I was not keeping up with these particulars.

  “The Wild West Show, dolt. After the charge up San Juan Hill and the tripe written by your colleague Cartwright”—he looked hard at me—“Bill Cody turned that cactus circus of his into Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.”

  Ducking behind a corral post, I busily scribbled this down while Sandison went back to scanning the swirl of lasso-swinging wranglers and dodgy mounts.

  “Heh.” The tone of that made me look up, right into those eyes the blue of glacier ice. “I don’t know about you,” although it hardly took a guess in this regard, “but I haven’t been on a horse since”—he gave me a complicit look—“that time with you.”

  I swallowed hard. That excursion, in my first Butte chapter of life, had been an unforgettable one, in the valley to the west where his ranch once stretched from horizon to horizon. Not knowing what his intentions were, I had ridden in a sweat of fear as he led me to the hanging tree where his reputation as the Strangler had been earned. Where rustlers were strung up, vigilante style, by him and doubtless the same ranch hands we were to meet with today. His anguished words echoed in me yet. “What gets into a man, Morgan, to set himself up as an executi
oner?” I am no stranger to redemption myself—possibly even a periodic visitor—but I had never witnessed a person turning his soul inside out as Samuel Sandison did that day. It all flooded back, overwhelming me again. And with that, my assignment, my presence, seemed out of place in his world of cowhands and cattle and horses and lasting consequences of decisions taken decades ago.

  “Sandy,” I breathed out, “this is beyond me. I really don’t have any business intruding into your reunion with your riders, and I’ll just go back uptown and watch the parade from some convenient—”

  Sandison held up a stopping hand. Casting his eyes to the heavens, he intoned, “God of fools, here is a newspaperman with an opportunity to ride with the men who made Theodore Roosevelt president of the United States, and he’s scared of a little thing like climbing on a horse. Take him now, his work on earth is done.”

  Wounded, I muttered, “You don’t have to be like that about it. I’ll stay.”

  “That’s better. I knew you had it in you, somewhere.” Scanning the horse-wrangling again, Sandison grunted with satisfaction. “Aha. Here come our cowboys.”

  Indeed, out the corral gate and toward us came three riders, the ones on the outside of the triptych each leading a saddled horse, which, I realized with a tightening in the seat of my pants, must be the mounts for Sandison and myself.

  “Good to see you again, boys,” drawled Sandison as they rode up to us.

  “Sam,” the James brother introduced as Leonard acknowledged him, nodding an inch. The one called Claude, saving energy along with words, merely nodded half an inch. It was left to Tinsley, his smile a burst of enamel and gold in the dark face, to come out with, “How you been doing, boss?”

  “Surviving,” the answer came as a heavy sigh, together with a weighty glance at me.

  “Packing a Peacemaker these days?” Tinsley expressed the curiosity showing on all three Rough Riders, at Sandison’s prominent firearm. “Butte that tough a place?”

  “You might be surprised,” Sandison responded in the same weary tone before indicating me again. “Morgan writes for the newspaper. He’s going to ride along with us and talk to you boys about your heroic exploits, heh, heh.”

  Studying me for what seemed long moments, Leonard and Tinsley at last nodded; Claude did not make the effort. “Got horses for you,” Leonard said as though we might not have noticed the large animals standing practically atop us. “Prince and Blaze, from the show string. One of the boys in camp was gonna take whichever one you didn’t choose, Sam, but he’ll have to bum one somewhere else, looks like.”

  “Pick a mount, Morgan.” Sandison’s booming generosity was no help. Other than the camels Grace and I posed on at the Sphinx to have our picture taken, I had not been astraddle an animal in recent times and would gladly have continued that way. In this situation, however, I was stuck with the fact that horsemanship of some degree was required. All I thought I knew about horses was ears. If the ears stood straight up, I reasoned, the equine was probably spirited. Prince was a well-named sorrel, high-headed and regal, with erect ears that twitched as though batting away flies. Spirited I did not want. That left Blaze, a bay-colored steed that appeared sleepily disinterested in us and our doings. Since the animal did not appear to be any ball of fire—more as if its flame had gone out—I was at the point of foolishly asking about its name when some fortunate tic of memory suggested that the splotch of white from the horse’s nostrils up to its languid ears was the sort called blaze face. “I’ll try this one,” I took the plunge.

  “Let’s go, buckaroos,” said Sandison, swinging onto the sorrel with a painful groan before my foot even found the stirrup. Climbing as much as mounting, I scrambled into the saddle atop Blaze with the James brothers and Tinsley watching impassively, and we joined the ranks of blue-shirted Rough Riders prancing to where the parade was forming up at the west edge of the business district.

  Half of Butte seemed to be there, milling into place to march down Broadway, the other half of the populace already lining the blocks ahead in joyous anticipation. The American Legionnaires at the very front in their doughboy outfits and earlier uniforms looked a bit staggered at the long, long line of marchers filling in behind them. American flags were everywhere, the air undulating with red, white, and blue. Right in with the unit of children in Uncle Sam and Miss Liberty costumes, I spotted Rab in command of our roughneck newsboys from the detention school; their newspaper bags were innocently turned inside out so the Thunder logotype could not be seen, and at their front, holding high the banner YOU SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE, were Russian Famine on one end, giving his restlessness something to do, and on the other the angelic urchin Punky, doubtless to keep his hands out of people’s pockets.

  Since horseback troupes best brought up the rear of the parade—“the manure matter,” Sandison gave all the explanation needed—we rode past innumerable contingents on the way to our position, the Daughters of the American Revolution in dowager ranks and the Grand Army of the Republic veterans lame but game beneath battle flags from Gettysburg and Antietam and other hallowed fields of conflict, and then the Hill began to make its showing, the Miners Band glorious in the green of its uniforms and the gold and silver of its instruments, the blocks-long files of miners who had served their country headed by Jared, more leaderly than ever in his Army uniform, giving me a wink of confidence as Blaze and I passed, succeeded shortly by ear-to-ear grins from Griff and Hoop in the Welsh honor guard.

  But then a sight I could have done without, as we passed the Irish and Cornish and kilted Scots and approached the Italian segment of miners. The flag-bearer of their red, white, and green alongside the Stars and Stripes was none other than the damnable dynamiter, Giorgio Mazzini, doubtless chosen for height, might, and proud bearing. Why oh why couldn’t Grace’s current boarder have been some ordinary Mustache Pete instead of a Roman god?

  Fortunately or not, I had little time to brood on that. “Fall in!” came the call from the gray-bearded captain of the Rough Riders, and we accordingly turned our horses and waited for the Miners Band to strike up first “The Star-Spangled Banner” and then the union anthem. Impelled by a certain kind of frown from Sandison, I managed to squeeze Blaze and me between the Jameses’ mounts, the better to interview the brothers—or at least the one capable of speech—while we rode. At last came the first stirring notes of “The Song of the Hill,” the long line of marchers accordioned into motion, and we were under way.

  It took me a block or so to figure out how best to handle reins, pencil, and notepad all at the same time, but finally I felt ready and, turning to Leonard, casually asked over the clop-clop of our horses’ hooves: “How is Buffalo Bill these days?”

  “Still dead.”

  I mentally kicked myself; the name of P. T. Barnum, long deceased, was on a circus apparently for eternity, wasn’t it. “His, ah, showmanship cannot be interred with him, of course,” I hastily accorded promotional immortality to William F. Cody as well. “I meant, how is the Wild West Show and—” I peeked at my earlier notation “—Congress of Rough Riders of the World faring?”

  About the same as practically forever, Leonard allowed as how. “Can’t print tickets fast enough.” As I listened to this slow testimonial, it dawned on me how veteran he and the other two were, in all senses of the word. Up close, the seamed faces of Sandison’s “young scamps” were a reminder that more than two decades had passed since Teddy Roosevelt rallied men like these in the conquest of Cuba. Surreptitiously I wrote down crow’s-feet around the eyes while trying to think what a mounted correspondent ought to ask next. “Mmm, what is the most memorable place you’ve ever been with the Buffalo Bill show?”

  Leonard considered the matter for so long I wondered if he had forgotten he was expected to answer. At last, though, he drawled, “St. Pete was a humdinger. Wouldn’t you say, Claude?” The other James brother inclined his head a fraction. />
  “St. Petersburg? What a coincidence! I remember it fondly myself.” My confidence as a roving reporter went up a peg, with my interview subject and me in concord about that burgeoning but oh so pleasant Florida city, where during our travel year Grace first dipped a toe into an ocean, the tropical breeze through the palms like a murmur of benediction on newlyweds. My sigh holding volumes about those balmy days and nights, I put the next question: “In the winter, I hope?”

  “As wintry as it gets in St. Pete,” came the taciturn response. “Right, Claude?”

  “Isn’t that climate something.” Thinking of the proximity to Cuba and the heroics of the Rough Riders in the so-called splendid little war, I asked, “Did performing there have a different feel to you, with that sort of audience?”

  “You said a mouthful. People about went crazy,” the talker of the James brothers rationed out. “The big cheese hisself was there, gave ol’ Bill a toad-stabber of some kind to welcome us to town.”

  Before I could ask the exact nature of the ceremonial sword, presumably presented by the mayor, the tale picked up speed.

  “We put on the show like we usually done, riding and whooping and shooting in the air and making that San Juan Hill charge. Do that right at the audience, hell for leather, and it gets their attention, for sure. But those St. Peterkins, as we called ’em, was standing on their seats and yelling their heads off at every little thing we did. Never saw nothing like it, hey, Claude?”

  “It must have been quite an experience,” I furnished as encouragement to keep him talking and his silent sibling nodding, meanwhile writing furiously on my pad and somehow manipulating the reins enough to remind drowsy Blaze that I still was a passenger, and also trying to keep a concerned eye on Sandison where he rode, favoring his wounded side by leaning so sharply in the saddle, it looked like his horse was tipping over. When he wasn’t wincing with pain, he seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself, patting his gun butt meaningfully whenever some old-timer in the crowd yelped out, “String ’em up, Sam!” or some other tribute. And the Rough Riders proved to be a popular feature as well, met by the chant that first greeted their 1898 military triumph, “The boys in blue always come through!” as we progressed. Somewhere in back of us, a Rough Rider regularly sounded the blood-stirring bugle call that echoed the famous charge up San Juan Hill. The role of mounted correspondent beginning to fit me, I brightly posed a next question to my interviewee: “So, was there anything else particularly memorable about St. Petersburg?”