by Lou Cameron
“Did he tell you about his woman being kidnapped? Well sir, nobody knows what happened to her. We searched all over for her but didn’t find a trace. His claim that she was stolen is just bull-pucky. The only reason Davenport married her is her father left her money. So I decided it had to be she ran off or Davenport did away with her. I think she ran off.”
That sounded more reasonable than the kidnapping story. Thinking of Davenport, it was difficult to understand why any woman would want to marry him or, having done so, would want to stay. Rather than face the fact of his wife’s desertion, he might have preferred to believe the Mormons had carried her off. Drunkards love melodrama: the noble husband fighting alone against overwhelming odds. It could have been something like that.
Or I could be making excuses, refusing to face my own set of “facts.” All I had to go on was Rockwell’s word, and to someone else that might not have been as good as gold. Label me foolish if you like; even so, I was ready to believe him. He hadn’t denied Mormon responsibility for the massacre, he hadn’t denied that Davenport was on his list of traitors; but as an experienced police detective once told me: “A clever criminal always tells the truth in preparation for the lie he wants you to believe.” And so it could be with Rockwell.
I held up the envelope. “You want this?”
“Doesn’t mean anything. Why should I want it?”
I crumpled the papers and put a match to them and when they were burning strong I dropped everything in the china wash basin. We watched flame turn to ash.
Rockwell said, “You could have kept that. I didn’t know it existed.”
“Why do you think Lambert made that statement?”
“Because he was sick, dying, and needed the money. How could Lambert know what went on at Mountain Meadows? He joined the militia when he first came here. That didn’t last because he couldn’t hit the side of a barn at ten paces. One of those men that can’t learn to shoot.”
“Then he wasn’t a Danite?”
“You throw the word around like you know what it means. I’ll have to think about telling you what it means. But not yet. Lambert wasn’t anything after he quit the militia. He couldn’t have known about anything at Mountain Meadows. I’m not saying he didn’t hear stories.”
I couldn’t help saying, “I heard them even in the East.”
Rockwell said, “They like the bloody stories better than the good ones.” A strange look passed over his face, then it was gone. “Why do people have to make trouble? And I’m not just talking about Gentiles. Our own people do it too, even people we bring here, give them a start if they have nothing. Life could be good for everyone if they’d only obey the rules. The rules may be hard but they know in advance what they are. It’s not like they were brought here in chains and then told how they were expected to live. The way I see it, you have to give up some so-called freedom to be free. They call Brigham a dictator, as if you can compare a man like him to some general with a dirty neck and a chestful of medals. What have they got in those dictatorships but poverty and disease? Here we have schools and hospitals better than they have back in the States. When a Mormon gets too old to work, he or she isn’t stuck on some poor farm and fed on turnip soup. I guess you’re thinking of Joshua Lambert. You can forget him. That man didn’t have to die alone and friendless. His own choice, the way he died. We look after our own if they don’t break our laws.”
Everything he said made sense if you overlooked the fact that he was talking about human beings, men and women with all the peculiarities and contradictions this flesh is heir to. Adam and Eve were given what the businessmen call a “good deal,” the Garden of Eden that was at least as fruitful as the Great Salt Basin, and yet they broke the rules and were evicted. It was, I thought, the human dilemma of wanting more than the here and now. When the French Revolution ran away like a buggy horse stung by a wasp, the citizens of the faltering republic looked to Napoleon for a restoration of order, and he, in turn, attempted to bring order to the world at gunpoint, only to be defeated not really by Wellington but by himself. As Dr. O’Meara, the British Navy physician who attended him on Elba, said in his memoirs, “The little fellow made too much of a plan.”
I said none of this to Rockwell, knowing he wouldn’t understand it if I did. His next question surprised me. “You have a pistol?”
I nodded. “A Remington double action, .36 caliber.” I got it from my bag and handed it to him.
“Why don’t you carry it?”
“Never thought that much about it. You think I have a need to?”
“You may if you’re to be seen in my company. I’ve been shot at a few times. I’ll be shot at again. Plenty of men would like to see me dead. They might get the same idea about you.”
“Then I’ll carry it,” I said.
Rockwell gave me the pistol and I put it in my pocket. “You know how to shoot?”
“I’ve never shot anybody, if that’s what you mean. My uncle and I used to shoot targets at his place in New Jersey.”
“Always take your time when you shoot at a man,” Rockwell said. “Take your time even if it means letting the other fellow get off the first shot. Then shoot to kill and when he’s down you shoot him again. There can be no mercy when a man’s trying to put a bullet in you. By doing so he has forfeited the right to live. Look at it any other way and you will be dead.”
“I hope it won’t come to that,” I said. “I’m no gunfighter.”
“Nor am I,” Rockwell said. “Trick shooting is for circuses. I live by one simple rule. Never give a man a second chance. If you do he will try to kill you a second time and most likely will succeed.”
He paused, then said, “You want to see Davenport’s send-off ?”
This startled me, for my mind still wasn’t free of the suspicion that Rockwell had murdered him, not that he’d see it in the same light.
‘“You’re going to bury him?” I asked.
“I want to see who comes to his funeral,” Rockwell said. “Or if not to the burying ground, who comes close and watches. Our friends from Washington could be close by.”
“These agents you keep talking about?”
“Agents. Anybody. You had your breakfast yet?”
“A cup of coffee will do for me. Where is Davenport?”
“Still hanging from the tree in his backyard,” Rockwell said. “I thought you’d like to see him as he is.”
I didn’t ask Rockwell why he thought I should want to see one more dead man after all I had seen in the back alleys of New York, suicides or homicides, or those corpses produced by the war. We went out and the idea of breakfast was forgotten, at least for the moment.
Davenport’s little house was on the edge of town, a sawmill on one side, a warehouse on the other. Once there had been flower beds in front, but now there was nothing but weeds. The whole place had a neglected air, though it couldn’t have been more than ten years old. Two men with a wagon were behind the house; Davenport swayed at the end of a rope. A kitchen chair had been kicked over. It looked much like the other suicides I’d seen as a police reporter.
Davenport presented a ghastly sight on this pleasant summer morning; it was evident that he had strangled to death, for his face was mottled, the throat swollen, the eyes bulging from their sockets. A smell of dried urine came from the body.
“You seen enough?” Rockwell asked, not at all put off by the corpse’s appearance. The two men waited.
“All I want to see,” I answered.
At a nod from Rockwell, the two men, both Mormons, cut down the body and placed it in a cheap pine coffin in the wagon. The rope was imbedded in the throat and they left it where it was. It was far from a stylish funeral, but at least they weren’t burying him like a dog.
“Looks like nobody’s coming to the funeral,” I remarked as the wagon moved off. The men who had been watching from the front of the warehouse went back inside.
“Well, that was just an idea,” Rockwell answered. “If you’re th
inking why don’t I search the house, I’ve already done it. There was nothing to find, no letters or papers, and nothing at the newspaper office. If he had any dealings with government agents, it didn’t show up in either place.”
He seemed to have government spies on the brain, but I guessed they were real enough. As a rule, government agents were federal marshals or men drawn from the provost marshals department of the Army or they might be detectives supplied by the new Pinkerton agency in Chicago. I wondered how they got their information out. Whoever they were, whatever their number, I hoped they wouldn’t come to me asking questions about Rockwell, for I’d be placed in an awkward position if they did. No doubt they would wave the flag at me and tell me where my duty lay. There were newspaper men who worked as paid or unpaid agents for governments, but I was not one of them. So far as I was concerned, I was there as an observer, and nothing more. At the time I had no idea how severely this theory was to be tested. This was due to Rockwell, of course, for things had a way of happening when he was around.
Now I found him looking at me as we walked away from the house. “Are you going to write about Davenport?” he asked.
“I don’t see that there’s much to write,” I said. “A statement made by a dead man to another dead man. If you want to talk about it, I’ll write down what you say.”
“We’ll see, William,” Rockwell answered, and once again a curtain was drawn between us. But as happens so often in life, the events of the next fifteen minutes changed everything.
We were heading for the hotel and a late breakfast for me, when my attention was attracted by two burly men fighting close to the sidewalk. They appeared to be drunk, which was hardly a novelty in Salt Lake, and one had a short club, the other a length of hoop iron. They circled awkwardly, uttering ferocious oaths but doing no real damage. Rockwell walked up to them and said, “Do your fighting somewhere else or I’ll toss you in jail. Be off now.”
They gaped at the badge pinned to his coat and lowered their weapons, mumbling some sort of apology. “Be off,” Rockwell repeated, turning away. Just then the man with the club struck him a glancing blow on the back of the head which brought him to his knees. At the same time a third man stepped out from behind a pile of lumber and leveled a large pistol at Rockwell. He must have been very nervous, for the hand holding the revolver shook violently. The pistol jerked upward as he fired the first shot and missed even at that close distance. Before he could fire again I pulled out the pocket Remington and fired a bullet into his chest. He staggered back and the two fake drunkards began to run. Neither had a gun, or if he had, he was in too much of a panic to use it. I shot the would-be assassin three times before he fell down. But he was still breathing, still clutching the pistol, when I took careful aim and shot him in the head. The fifth bullet did what the others had failed to do-killed him instantly.
Rockwell had his huge Colt in his hand, but he looked too dazed to use it if any more shooting had to be done. Feeling the back of his head, he walked over to the dead man and inspected the face from several angles. Then he knelt beside the body and turned out the pockets. All he found was a watch and a small wad of money.
“You did a nice job of downing him,” Rockwell said, looking up at me. “If you had a bigger caliber pistol you wouldn’t have had to fire so many bullets. I’ll see what I can do for you in that line.” He prodded the dead man with the toe of his boot. “Now I wonder who this fellow was. Soon as I take a drink I’ll be going after the other two. Utah’s a big territory, but I know every inch of it. You want to come along? I would think you’d have an interest in their doings.”
We went into McSorley’s after Rockwell ordered some men to take the body to the jail. No one questioned his right to order people about any way he liked, and not a word had been said about saving his life. Maybe he still believed he couldn’t be killed. I was under no such impression, for I was well aware of how close I had come to death.
At the bar Rockwell drank a water glass of his favorite whiskey and fingered the back of his head. “No bleeding,” he said. “But there’s going to be a goose egg back there. Yes sir, that was a nice bit of shooting out there.” That, I think, was the closest he came to actually saying thanks. “I’d be interested to know who that dead man is, and maybe we’ll find out when we catch the other two. I can’t say it was all that smart a murder plan. Clever enough, I guess. It’s funny would-be assassins seldom figure out how they’re going to get away after they do the deed. I’ve seen it happen maybe a dozen times. Years back a man caught me with my back turned. His pistol was loaded, he had a clear shot at close range, but nothing happened when he pulled the trigger. He’d forgotten the percussion caps. But that man was no kind of hired murderer, just a horse rancher that got to brooding about a deal we had and claimed he was cheated.”
“These other men,” I said. “You’ve never seen them before?”
“Can’t say that I have,” Rockwell said. “I guess they knew what I looked like all right. Now everybody’s going to know what you look like. Have you thought about that, William?”
I looked up from my glass of soda water and from the suddenly averted eyes I knew half the men in the saloon had been staring at me. It was strange to be looked at in that way, and I would be a liar if I said I didn’t derive a certain satisfaction from it.
“It’ll give me something to write about, Port. Do I have to appear before a judge to tell what happened?”
“A dozen people saw how it happened. Justifiable homicide while assisting a law officer. You sure you want to go along for the ride?”
“You’ll be forming a posse?”
“Not this time. There’s only two of them and they can’t be such hard nuts. I mean the way they ran. Catching them won’t be so big a job.”
“What if they’re Mormons?”
Rockwell gave me a quick look before he knocked back another full glass of Mountain Fog. “What are you saying, William?”
“Back East there’s been talk that some Mormons in California and Illinois would like to take over the church. Take your pick of the reasons: power, money, what have you. They might figure to get rid of you before they made their move. What’s to stop them from sending killers from hundreds of miles away?”
“Or the man or men who hired them could be right here in Salt Lake.”
For some reason I thought of William Hickman, the other Danite chieftain described by Davenport. Could they be rivals? I felt it would be unwise to ask Rockwell directly; what I had to do was to talk to a few people who weren’t fanatics or drunken madmen. My information was that Rockwell was closer to Brigham Young, at least in the role of avenger and bodyguard, than anyone else. If this were so, then Hickman might have every reason to get rid of him. There was great wealth at stake here: the man or men who controlled the Mormon church controlled an empire. Utah was rich in gold and silver, nearly all the minerals, even coal; and every Mormon from farmer to bank president had to pay tribute to the church. And best of all, not a penny had to be accounted for once it passed into possession of the Saintly elders, for in a theocracy the powers that be rule by divine guidance, and in that exalted state bookkeeping isn’t necessary. Compared to the way the Mormon moguls handled their finances—that is, in absolute secrecy—a New York stockholder’s meeting was village democracy.
Both of us had been silent for a while; now Rockwell said, “How do you see your mission here, William?”
“As a way of explaining the Mormons to people in the States. Mr. Greeley’s newspaper is the most influential in the country.” I thought that sounded rather pompous, so I added, “I can’t agree with everything that goes on in the name of religion, but I think your people deserve a better hearing than they’ve been getting.”
“That’s fair enough and I think you mean it. The question is, will Greeley publish what you write? We all know it’s blood and thunder that sells newspapers.”
I said, “He’ll publish it because it’ll be different.”
&
nbsp; “It won’t make you popular, William,” Rockwell said.
“Mr. Greeley won’t worry about that, and neither will I. Everybody in New York and Washington reads the Sun, even the President. Lincoln isn’t like Buchanan and some of the men before him. He stood up for the Irish when the Know-Nothings were burning their convents and churches.”
Rockwell smiled. “A lot of Irish, a lot of votes, but no matter. I’ll take your word for Honest Abe’s good intentions. There’s only one thing I must have your promise on.”
“What’s that, Port?”
“That some of the things I tell you won’t be published till after I’m dead. You say you want to know the kind of life I’ve lived and why I lived it. The only way you can do that is to know the truth. Have I got your word?”
“You’ve got it,” I said.
Rockwell held out his hand. “Then we’re friends. If there are things I can’t tell you, it’s because I don’t have the right. Now let’s go capture a couple of killers.”
“They won’t stand trial, will they?” I asked.
“First they’ll talk, then I’ll kill them,” Rockwell said as if two lives were of no moment. “You’ll have to take me as I am, my friend. If you can’t do that, it’s best you back off, for if you stick with me, you’ll see things you won’t like. That’s the deal. You want to think about it some more?”
I had been thinking about it; if I joined forces with him, even as an observer, I might be leaving myself open to criminal prosecution sometime in the future. Right now the Mormons were riding high, secure in the knowledge that the federal government was engaged in a nationwide war. But what would happen when that war was over and diehards in Washington decided it was time to teach the Mormons a long-needed lesson, to strip them of their power, to crush their rebelliousness? I might then find myself standing on the gallows beside Rockwell and some of his associates. I didn’t think they’d ever hang Brigham Young; they seldom hang the great villains, just the lieutenants who carry out their orders. Santa Anna slaughtered the defenders of the Alamo and ended his life in comfortable retirement in Long Island. At the same time, I knew that here was an opportunity that would not come again, just as the West itself would vanish into dull respectability. I’m sure I wouldn’t make such a hasty decision today, nearly forty years later, but in 1861 I wanted to know all there was to know about the world and the strange creatures called humans, with all their incongruities of character, all their good and evil.
