by Lou Cameron
It was too late to back out, not that I wanted to, not after what I had read. Besides, I was weary of the ill health that had plagued me for so long. The desert air would restore me, I felt, if only long enough to meet another bullet, a fatal one. I am less impetuous now, so many years later; in those days I yearned for glory if only as a newspaper scribbler. But what would I say to Rockwell when I met him? And if I did think of the right words, if such existed, would he believe me? Finding no answers to any of this, I returned the books and the file to my uncle, who had my money ready in gold and greenbacks. We shook hands and then I went home to pack and to find out how to get to Salt Lake City.
I had no idea that it would be more than two years before I saw New York again.
Chapter Two
I went as far as I could by train, which wasn’t far because railroad building had been held up by the war. In Kansas I joined a party of emigrants going west on the old Oregon Trail. They were mostly Germans and no one in the wagon train spoke a word of English except for the guide, a Pennsylvanian named Hawkes, who had been showing people the way west for fifteen years. He had been to Utah a number of times and didn’t like the Mormons. I asked him what he knew about Rockwell and he informed me that he was a “whoreson and a drunken murderer.”
“Then you’ve seen him?” I remarked.
Hawkes, in turn, asked me why I wanted to know.
I said I’d been sent by the New York Sun to write about him. “Is he as bad as they say?”
“Worse,” Hawkes answered. “They couldn’t say anything bad enough. He walks the streets of Salt Lake like he owns the town, and in a way he does. Why shouldn’t he? He’s Brigham Young’s trained bulldog. Now and then Young throws him a bone to keep him happy. I don’t know if he’s smart or dumb, but he sure is bad. You want some free advice? Keep away from him. If he takes a dislike to you he might shoot you dead on the spot. I won’t lie and say I seen such killings, but I heard about them.”
“Then I’ll have to be careful,” I said.
“That may not be enough, my friend,” Hawkes said.
In Nebraska I paid my way on another train taking the more direct Overland Trail to Utah. The trail went to Fort Bridger in Wyoming, and then turned south into the Land of the Saints. It was baking hot on the Plains, but the injury to my chest seemed to be getting better and I wasn’t coughing so much.
There was little Indian trouble that year—all that was to come later—and we crossed the mountains without incident. There was the Great Salt Basin in front of us, the sun-blasted land the Mormons had come so far to settle. I hoped it wouldn’t be the death of me.
The city seemed to glitter in the harsh, white sunlight. This was simply an illusion, yet still it glitters in my memory. It was much bigger than I had expected; it stretched away into the distance, neat and geometric. Beyond it was the Great Salt Lake in which it was said that even the most determined suicide could not drown. Salt was crusted on its shores and far out in the water were small bare islands. There was a long pier with boats tied up to it. A long way off, guarding the entrance to Brigham Young’s estate, an immense gate topped by a Roman eagle stood out from everything else. There could be no mistaking the baronial splendor in which the Mormon prophet lived; Hawkes had described it to me as one of the greatest land holdings in the West. In describing the prophet Hawkes said he was a “greedy whoring son of a bitch.” I was to learn that much of what Hawkes had said about Brigham Young was true. What he said about Rockwell was much less true; some of it was just lies passed from mouth to mouth and added to on the way.
There was a choice of hotels, all new-looking and clean, and I picked the best one; I was spending Mr. Greeley’s money, after all. On the way there I passed many raucous saloons, which was a surprise to me, for I had been told that the sale of alcohol was forbidden by order of the Mormon bishops. Well, I had been misinformed about that, as I had been about so many things. Far from being a quiet city dominated by a religious sect, Salt Lake was disorderly and loud. Women leaned out of windows; they could not have been taken for other than what they were. In the center of the city great stone buildings were going up, and some of them would not be completed in the lifetimes of the many men working on them. It seemed as if the Mormons meant to stay.
There were a few Union soldiers in the streets, but they walked without the usual military swagger. Here they were outnumbered and they knew it. The whores screamed at them as they passed a bordello without entering to sample its wares.
My room was in the Salt Lake Hotel and after I put my bags away and washed up I went out to get a glass of beer. Never much of a drinker, then or now, I had been thinking of cold beer for the last few miles of the trail. The first saloon I came to was called McSorley’s and I went in because it reminded me of New York. Behind the bar was a stubby man who looked like Irish bartenders everywhere. After weeks of traveling with glum Germans and morose Ohio emigrants, I was glad to see him. He pumped up the beer and cut off the head with a wooden paddle. I gulped it down and asked for another.
He looked at the dust that had escaped my clothes brush. “Just got in, hah?”
“A few minutes ago,” I replied.
“I would have guessed, the way you drank that beer. You don’t look like a lush so I knew it wasn’t to kill a hangover. You get to know these things in my trade.”
I turned to look at the crowded saloon. “This certainly is a bustling town. You the McSorley of the sign outside?”
“That’s right. Business is booming, but I don’t know if I like this country. Came out here for my health—lung trouble—and opened a place of my own. I’m making money hand over fist, but I’d just as soon be back in New York.”
He pronounced it “Noo Yawk.”
I said, “I just got here from New York. Well, I can’t really say that. It’s taken me weeks to get here.”
“You a traveling man?” McSorley asked, a little suspiciously.
“A newspaper reporter. The New York Sun. I was wounded in the war and they sent me out here for a change of climate. I’m a lung case like you.”
If he had any patriotic feeling I hoped what I said would do something to dispel his increasing uneasiness about me.
“Oh sure, my lung,” he said.
“I’m looking for Porter Rockwell,” I said.
“Oh, was you now? I never seen him, never heard of him. He won’t like it if he hears you was asking questions about him. Now you want another beer? This place is for drinking, not talking.”
“I just want to talk to him.”
“Are you deaf, mister? Didn’t I just tell you he don’t want to talk to you?”
I knew now that McSorley’s was one of Rockwell’s drinking places. It was in the bartender’s eyes. “Can’t you get word to him?” I asked, putting ten dollars on the bar.
“I can if I like,” McSorley grunted, scooping up the money. His truculent expression was to show that I wasn’t going to get it back. “Let me tell you a few things about Port Rockwell. That’s what his friends call him if he says they can. He’s a quiet sort of a man and won’t be breathing fire and brimstone if you do get to meet him. But get him mad and you’ll be sorry for it. Don’t offer him money or he’ll spit in your face. If you want to offer him a compensation, offer him whiskey. If he decides to accept, it’ll cost you at least a quart of Mountain Fog. It ain’t the best or the worst, it’s what Port Rockwell drinks. Like I said, Port may not want to talk to you. If he says no, that’s it.”
“All right. You think I should write him a note explaining that I only want to write the truth about him?”
McSorley regarded me with scorn. “Don’t be writing any notes to the man. Don’t you know nothing for such a smart-talking feller? Port Rockwell can’t read. Which don’t mean he’s not smart. Far from it, he’s smart as a whip. And while you’re talking about truth, I don’t think he knows himself. That’s what you’ll be facing. If you repeat any of this I’ll say you’re a goddamned liar.”
“Wait at that table against the wall, but don’t start staring when he comes in. If he’s in a black mood I’ll give you the nod, then get the hell out of here. That’s the best I can do for you, so don’t push it past that.”
I took my mug of beer to the table while McSorley whistled for a boy in the back of the building and sent him off. So he can’t read, I thought, puzzled that an illiterate could command so much fear and left-handed respect. But what is illiteracy after all? It is not knowing what you don’t need to know. Those are my thoughts now, but not on that faraway day in 1862. Then, I put too much store in books; attached too much importance to matters of no importance. I didn’t know that when a man functions well in the world of his choosing he is not illiterate. As I waited I began to picture the unlettered brute of my earliest imaginings. Would he lurch in with a whiskey bottle in one hand, a cocked pistol in the other? Yet it was the fact of his illiteracy that bothered me most. How was I going to express myself to a man who could not decipher the simplest newspaper headline, the crudest poster with letters two inches high?
This was stupid snobbishness, of course; the reaction of a young man with too little knowledge of the world. When Rockwell walked in my questions disappeared as fog blown away by the wind. The boy hadn’t come back with him; I recognized him from the drawings in New York. He could not have been more than five feet ten in height, but as I have written earlier, he looked much bigger. His chest was massive, his neck muscular and slightly short; the sort of neck you frequently see on men who have done much physical labor in their youth. The face was pleasant enough, though far from handsome. It was the eyes that held my attention: blue and clear and so light in color that I knew they would appear as white in photographs. There was about his eyes a strange mixture of deadliness and innocence, guile and simplicity. His long brown hair, now turning gray, was combed out and tied behind his head with some kind of comb or fastener, giving him the appearance of a sage or a mountain man. He wasn’t wearing a hat, which I thought strange, for at that time every man, and even boys, wore a hat. He wore clean canvas miners’ clothes, flat-heeled boots, and a gunless belt. Shortly I was to discover that he carried his shortened Colt .45 in a leather-lined pocket.
Everyone looked at him when he came in; strangers who didn’t know him asked others who knew. McSorley greeted him with a nod and they spoke with their heads close together. They must have talked for three or four minutes before Rockwell turned and looked directly at me. He didn’t nod, didn’t smile, didn’t do anything but take the bottle and two glasses the Irishman placed in front of him. The din of the saloon picked up again, but I knew some of the others were watching. Those who knew what Rockwell was didn’t look so hard.
His voice was surprising like the rest of him, slightly hoarse without being rough, the voice of a man who knows how to command without shouting obscenities. I took my hat off the table so that he could put down the bottle and the glasses. His gun pocket, as I came to call it in time, bumped against the edge of the table, reminding me of how dangerous he was. I didn’t smile at him because I didn’t think he’d like it.
“You want me to sit down?” he asked quietly.
“Of course, Mr. Rockwell,” I answered, wishing I had been formal enough to have asked him.
“Then say it.”
“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Rockwell?”
When he seated himself he said, “You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”
I told him my name and what I did for a living.
He poured whiskey for both of us and drank his off by throwing it against the back of his throat. Then he looked at me, waiting for me to drink.
I said, “I’m going to drink water with mine.”
Other “bad men” I’ve known were always contemptuous of men who didn’t take their whiskey straight. All Rockwell did was shrug. “Drink any way you like, Mr. Forbes. That’s your business. Now we’ve had our drink and you can talk as long as I want to listen. But you’d better know that I don’t love reporters. How do you see yourself as different from the others?”
“Because I’m going to tell the truth if you let me.”
“Telling the truth the wrong way can be as bad as a lie. Sometimes lies aren’t as bad because they sound like lies.”
“I’ll read anything—everything—to you before I send it back East. If you don’t like how it sounds you can tear it up.”
“You know I can’t read but you said it anyway. You’re going to put that in your writings—if you get to write them?”
I began to wonder if I had gone too far for our first meeting. Indeed, for any meeting. But I knew I would have to gain the complete confidence of this man, or coming all the way to Utah would have been a waste of time. So I decided to speak the truth as I saw it.
“I will write about you but never with a sneer,” I told him. “My publisher says you’re news, and that’s the reason I’m here.”
Rockwell had another drink and set down his glass. “Never mind what your publisher said or didn’t say. He isn’t here, you are. You seem better than the others, or maybe you’re just smarter. Trickier, anyway. You think you’re tricky, Mr. Forbes?”
I finished my first drink, one of the few I’ve really needed in my life. Behind the bar the Irishman had a worried look on his face. In a few minutes the saloon boy came in and Rockwell flipped him a silver dollar as he passed our table.
“You’re the gravy on the pork chops, Port,” the boy said, going out to roll empty barrels in the backyard.
“I think I’m pretty smart,” I went on. “But not tricky. How tricky are you, Mr. Rockwell?” That was my Dutch courage talking.
Rockwell’s smile didn’t reach his eyes; they remained motionless, unblinking, so there was no clue as to what he really thought. Above all he was a wary adversary, one I would have to watch every step of the way.
Rockwell had another drink. “I can be tricky enough when it comes to my enemies or people I don’t trust. I don’t see that there’s much difference, do you?”
It was like being in the witness box and facing a keen-minded lawyer with everything under control. Except that this advocate had a loaded .45 in his right-hand pocket.
“At least you came and asked me,” Rockwell said. “That’s more than most of the other bastards did. One man I talked to went back to the city and wrote worse filth than the others. I trusted that man, we drank together, he met my wife and daughters.”
It was hard to think of Rockwell as having a family, sitting down to supper and passing the beans and the candied yams. But why not? Jesse James, in his day, was a devoted family man. I wondered if his wife and daughters knew of his fearsome reputation. It didn’t seem likely that they did, for who would be demented enough to tell them?
“You have my word of honor,” I said.
“You can give it but I have to take it,” Rockwell said quietly. “But for now we talked enough about trust and things like that. Today we’ll finish the bottle and maybe start on another one. By the time the first bottle is empty I’ll know about you. How a man drinks isn’t a sure way to do it. Just the same, it’s pretty good.”
The day wore on and it got dark and some of the drinkers left to be replaced by others. A few of them nodded to Rockwell, but they kept away from our table, for which I was glad. My head was reeling; I was safe so long as I remained in my chair. As a talker Rockwell was fascinating, switching from one subject to another with ease, and finally it came out that his wife had been reading to him for years: history, biography, travel. There had been a time when she tried to interest him in the bulky novels of Walter Scott. This experiment failed because, as he told me, fiction was “made up and didn’t belong to the real world.”
He asked me about my wound and how I got it and when I told him he shook his head and said that was a dumb war. “The North wants to grab the South because of money,” he stated firmly. “It isn�
��t about the niggers at all. You think it is?”
“I doubt it.”
“Some of the Americans call us white niggers.”
“I know you don’t like black niggers,” I said drunkenly. “You don’t even let free niggers join your church.”
“Niggers are the sons of Ham,” Rockwell said, showing no signs of intoxication. “Let them join the churches in Boston. What church do you belong to, Mr. Forbes? Or don’t you believe in anything?”
“Not much of anything,” I said. “Call me William.”
“Not yet, Mr. Forbes. What I want to ask you is this. Why do you Americans want to destroy everything we’ve built up here? Isn’t the country big enough for you as it is? You stole half of Mexico. I’d say that was enough.”
I hiccupped. “Manifest Destiny, Mr. Rockwell. You can’t stop the march of progress.”
“It better not march here. This is as far as we go. In this place we’ll make a stand. We’ll call in men from every farm and village in the territory. Brigham Young has told me so himself, and he always tells the truth. Others would like to bow to the Americans, but Brigham will not bend when the great day comes.”
Throwing caution to the winds, I said that it didn’t sound like such a great day to me.
“That’s because you don’t believe in anything, Mr. Forbes.”
Suddenly I became patriotic in feeling, although the rhetoric of politics, the stated rights and wrongs, had little interest for me.
“I believe in my country,” I said fervently, somewhat aware that I was making a fool of myself.
“And I in mine,” Rockwell said with a quiet intensity. “This is my country, my only country— Utah. All my life I have worked for my church and for my people. We don’t want your citizenship or your protection. We have no quarrel with you in spite of the cruel treatment in the past.”
I stared at him, trying to clear my buzzing head. ‘I’ve read that you want to make the United States puke up their guts. Did you truly say that or is it just another lie?”
