by Lou Cameron
We assembled in the square behind the armory and rode through the city at a trot, watched by all and cheered by some. It was a blazing hot afternoon; the city was serene in the sun. Everywhere in Salt Lake there was water, a plenitude of water, and green grass and flowers, and once again I thought what a waste, what an abomination, is war.
The Great Salt Basin was ringed by mountains; we were going out through the gap which led to the desert; beyond the desert was more desert— Nevada. Somewhere out there was Connor’s army.
We left the great lake behind. I turned to look at it: Americas Dead Sea. In later years I was to visit Palestine, the Holy Land, and there wasn’t a day when it didn’t remind me of Utah. On that hot afternoon so long ago, I thought: The Mormons are the Israelites of the modern world. I thought of Connor as the Roman general Silva marching on the Jewish fortress of Masada. Silva had his tower and his battering ram, Connor had his cannon. Eight hundred Jews killed themselves at Masada; mass suicide as a last gesture of defiance.
Rockwell’s modern Israelites were armed with carbines and percussion revolvers. No excess baggage was carried; nothing but food, weapons, water. Out of deference for Rockwell’s rank I dropped back into the body of the column even before we left the city, and I was lost in thought when Cynthia Mason rode up alongside me and wanted to talk, something that didn’t please me much.
“You’re not being very friendly,” she said.
“I don’t like to be followed about,” I answered. “You are your Man Friday didn’t get away fast enough after the fight. Or did you want me to see you?”
The column was kicking up dust and her face was streaked with it, as was mine. “I didn’t care what you saw,” she said. “That was a terrible beating Rockwell gave that man, yet he looked like a prizefighter. Was he?”
“Where did you learn to ride?” I asked. “Where did Fitz learn to ride?”
“You were holding Rockwell’s pistol but you look worried,” she said. “You make a strange pair, Forbes. You’re like the fellow who took the thorn out of the lion’s foot. Rockwell and Forbes. Forbes and Rockwell. Comic songs, eccentric dances. Did you ask him about the wooden Indian he assassinated?”
“The redskin committed suicide. Rockwell is innocent. I’ve asked you before. Why are you so interested in Rockwell? I would have thought the Prophet would be more your meat.”
She laughed. “The holy man doesn’t go out much. Rockwell does. He drinks, shoots up the town, and concludes the festivities by going to a whorehouse. That makes him a colorful character. But that’s not the only reason I’m interested.”
The gap in the mountains lay not too far ahead; the sun was like a hammer beating on an anvil. There wasn’t a breath of air. “What’s the other reason you’re interested, Mason?”
“You and Rockwell together. Are you playing him for a fool? You may have taken the thorn out of his foot, but he’ll eat you alive if he discovers you’re playing a sneaky game.”
I looked at her, trying to figure out what her own game was. “Thanks for the warning,” I said. “I don’t need it.”
“Everyone needs a friend, Forbes.”
“I have lots of friends. I’m very popular.”
“I hear you’re not popular with Hickman. Have you ever thought that he looks like the Devil?”
My smile was as crafty as hers. “Some modern theologians think the Devil could have been a woman.”
“You just made that up, Forbes. The Devil was an angel before he got to be a devil. Everybody knows there are no female angels. That doesn’t seem quite fair, but the Bible tells us so.”
“How did you get on with the Prophet?” I asked. “Did you tell him the joke about the two sports on Broadway? Those were no ladies, those were my wives?’ “
The sky was pitiless blue and the dust was thick and I thought of the cold beer at McSorley’s. Where we were going there was nothing but sun and sand and lukewarm water tasting of the metal of the canteens.
“I don’t think the Prophet likes jokes,” Cynthia Mason said. “But we got along fine. He looked me over as one might look over a horse.”
“Did he like what he saw? Was he ready to buy?”
“You may have gone to Princeton but you’re vulgar, Forbes. Never mind. Yes, I think he liked what he saw. Did you like what you saw?”
I smiled. “Very much,” I replied. “Do you think the holy man is going to wage a holy war? Drive the infidels into the sea and so forth?”
“I’m sure he thinks he could do it.”
“The sea is eight hundred miles away. Perhaps he thinks he can expect help from the seagulls. One miracle, why not another? Mason, you have to get it through your head that I won’t talk about Rockwell. Are you glaring at me, or squinting? Is it the sun or do you need glasses?”
“You’re as funny as an amputation,” she snapped, then turned her horse and rode back to join Fitz.
It took hours to make our way through the great cleft in the mountains. Then we traveled south as the sun moved west. As the sky turned red with the approach of evening, so did the mountains. Now and then I took a sip of water to cut the dust from my throat. The desert wind blew up hard and hot, but it was better than the stillness that had gone before. The red sun seemed to swirl in the sky as it made its descent toward the distant horizon. Before long it would be dark and the wind would cool as the earth gave up its heat. Unconcerned by heat, or cold, or anything, Rockwell’s mounted riflemen rode with impassive faces; there was little talk except among the very young men. The last light was thick with dust, and when darkness came quickly, as it does on the desert, we rode on with Rockwell leading the column, all purpose now—he seemed a different man.
That was what he was like: when there was serious work to be done, he became serious, too. He was not by nature a disciplined man, hardly that, yet he had awesome powers of concentration; all but his work was cast aside. He was the best man in the Mormon army and I think he knew it. Vain he might be when it came to singing that ridiculous ballad; in matters of work he was simple and direct. His men knew he thought himself no better than themselves, and I am sure they would have followed him to hell.
Darkness slowed down our pace, and at first there was no moon, and that slowed us down even more. Still new to this trackless country, I lost all sense of direction. The column moved on.
My time sense was lost along with my sense of direction, I had to look at my watch when Rockwell finally called a halt for the night. It was midnight and we had been riding for more than eight hours. There was a moon and it was cold.
We made camp along the banks of a creek with only a trickle of water in it. The water wasn’t moving and soon it would be dry. Cottonwoods grew along its banks, their branches stirred by the cold night wind. We dismounted in silence and led our horses to drink in the creek; the muddy water didn’t taste as good as the water in my canteen.
Sentries were posted and fires made in the creek bed and there was the smell of woodsmoke and horses. Soon there was the smell of food, though not of frying meat. On my way to join Rockwell I came across Cynthia Mason and Fitz getting set up for the night. The coffee pot was bubbling and Fitz was dropping in handfuls of beans; a slab of bacon lay on a rock in its greasy wrapping. My colleague from Montreal sat on another rock with an edgy, irritated look on her face.
“It’s not Delmonico’s,” I said in passing, which was safe since she didn’t have the coffee pot in her hand. Fitz didn’t even look up.
The Mormons cooked at communal fires; Rockwell had his own. “Rest your bones, William,” he said, busy at the fire. “We’ll have something to eat in a minute. We made fair time today and we’ll make better time tomorrow. How’s the tricky lady holding up?”
“She’s tricky but she’s tough,” I said.
“You fancy her?” Rockwell set the coffee pot on a bed of raked coals.
“Yes and no, Port. I’d hate to be her husband or anything permanent.”
Rockwell nodded agreement. “So wo
uld I. She wants to be a woman and a man at the same time. That’s hard on a person, I would think. Pioneer women are different. They’re tough and they work hard but they’re still women.” He smiled. “Of course, some of them look like men.”
I sat with my back against a rock, glad to let him do the cooking, glad to stretch my legs. It was quiet except for the snapping of the fires, the horses stirring in the rope corrals rigged up under the trees.
“How long will it take to catch sight of Connor?” I asked. “How long do you think?”
Rockwell shrugged. “Maybe a week, maybe sooner. Old Dan’s word is he’s coming in a hurry. Why I can’t say. Maybe I can, come to think of it. It’s to toughen them up. I guess he’s a tough man himself. I wish I could get drunk with him, then I’d have a better idea of what he’s like.”
Now that he was in sight of his vegetarian irregulars, Rockwell refused to eat any of the bacon he cooked for me. It was the same with the coffee—he drank water with his bannock cakes and beans. I ate like the trooper I was not. The Mormons hunched over their food, serious about eating as they were serious about everything, and there was none of the rowdiness one always associates with camp life. Done with eating, those not on guard rolled themselves in their blankets and fell asleep. I wondered what Mormons dreamt about.
I helped Rockwell to scour the plates and utensils with sand from the creek. Then we washed them in the muddy water and put them away. In the creek, smoke from the fires hung over the water. The fires burned low.
Rockwell poked the embers with a twig before he looked at me. “I have the highest regard for my wife,” he said.
“What?” I had been nodding.
“I think the world of her,” Rockwell went on. “But there are times when a man has to cut loose or he goes crazy. I’m talking about that whorehouse, William. I don’t like to lie with my own woman when I’m feeling bad, so I go to whores.”
“For God’s sake, Port, there’s no need for any of this. What man hasn’t gone to a whorehouse?”
Rockwell regarded me with solemn eyes. “You don’t want to listen, is that it?”
I stared back at him crouched on the other side of the fire. He was a humorous man in some ways. Was he having me on, as the British say? “Of course I’ll listen. You’re my friend.”
“You are, aren’t you, William? I know hundreds of people, but I have no friends. I started talking about the whorehouse, not to explain it, mind you. Sometimes I get to feeling so wild it’s like I’m two people; good old Port Rockwell who likes a drink and a laugh but does his work and always can be depended on. Something goes wrong, they call for Port Rockwell to fix it, whether it be a murderer like that crack-brain boy I shot or some farmer’s kid’s fallen down a well and they can’t figure how to get him out. Brigham calls on me, they all do— and that’s fine because I know how to fix things the right way. That’s one side of me, and then there’s the other. That’s the wild side and I can be dangerous when I’m like that. I get a wild craving to cut loose from everything, go places and do what I want to do.”
That made me smile. This man had very recently shot up Salt Lake City, hammered a professional prizefighter into submission with his fists, threatened to run out a madam who had the backing of certain city fathers—and here he was complaining about not being able to do what he wanted to do.
“You do what you like, Port,” I reminded him. “I’ve seen you do it.”
Rockwell had been poking the fire with a stick. Now it was burning and he tossed it into the flames. “That’s not what I meant, William. I mean there’s a wild side to my nature that all the years of being in the church, of being married, haven’t been able to tame. Lord knows I’ve been a happy man in my work, and yet the other thing is always there nagging at me. I feel guilty when that feeling comes over me too strong.”
There were no words with which to comfort him. The man was a saint, albeit a murderous one; he wanted to be perfect, forever the unselfish churchly warrior, the loving husband, the dutiful father. But who among us is ever satisfied? I tried to explain that to him and he rewarded my efforts with a shake of his head.
“We have to do the best we can,” I finished lamely.
Another shake of his head. “A man should be able to mold his nature to what he wants it to be. Thanks for listening to me, William. It’s time you got your rest.”
I took refuge in sleep.
~*~
No brassy bugle awakened me; I opened my eyes to the bustle of the camp. During the night it had been bitter cold, but now it was morning and the sun was coming up. At first the sun glowed red as if the door of some huge, distant blast furnace had been opened for an instant. Then the light came up white and blinding; the door of the furnace was open all the way. There was no wind and the air was motionless in the first harsh glare of morning, and the desert was washed in colors of many hues: red and gray and purple and brown. The passing of the dark lightened my spirits as nothing else could. Rockwell had built up the fire and there was bacon and bannocks and coffee for me. Thirty minutes later we rode out.
Four days passed and there was no sign of Connor and his army; no dust in the sky, nothing that disturbed the silence of the desert.
Another day passed.
On the morning of the sixth day, watching with Rockwell from the top of a great rock, I saw their dust for the first time. The dust cloud was miles away. We were many miles inside Nevada at the time: ourselves invaders, if you will. Rockwell handed me the telescope he had been using and I adjusted it and brought the soldiers of my country into focus. They did not present a brave sight; marching infantrymen seldom do except at parades. The main column of infantry, broken into companies well spaced apart, was flanked by cavalry; outriders flanked everything. Between the marching companies came the artillery—the much feared artillery. I looked for General Patrick Edward Connor and it took me a while to find him, and even then I had to guess. A group of officers rode in the van of the army. I discarded an officer who looked too much like a colonel because he rode slightly to the rear of a big man in dusty blue who slouched in his saddle, not tired but determined to be as comfortable as he could. He looked to be in his early forties and he had a fair or white mustache. More than anything else he was big. As time went on some newspapers invariably referred to Patrick Connor as a giant of a man. As a reference to his character this was accurate enough; physically he was no giant, just a very large man.
Rockwell had the enormous Sharps buffalo rifle in his hand. “You make him out yet?” he asked me. The big Sharps had a peep sight and by now the distance wasn’t so great. Rockwell knew that I knew that he could kill Connor when he got within a quarter of a mile range. A very long shot to be sure but Rockwell could do it.
He smiled at me. “It would be so easy,” he said. “Don’t look so worried, William. Brigham says no killing.”
The rest of Rockwell’s irregulars were stretched out in a narrow defile that snaked back for nearly a mile. Cynthia Mason and Fitz waited with them.
“Will you look at all the big guns he has,” Rockwell said with no special animosity. Down in the defile the horses stirred and whickered in the heat, but they couldn’t be heard from so far away. We were up on a slope and we dropped behind the rock when outriders, with the careless grace of cavalrymen, took their horses high up to see what lay ahead. I don’t know what would have happened if they had found us. There would have been shooting, I’m sure, for in that situation the Prophet s orders would not have meant much. But the long column of men and horses and cannon passed and before long we were observing them from the rear. Rockwell counted everything as it went by. Watching the soldiers of the United States go by, I felt like a spy and almost a traitor, and I knew for the first time how hard my impersonal observers role was going to be.
“A peculiar thing,” Rockwell remarked. “Connor seems to be missing about a hundred men from his original thousand. Abraham said a thousand volunteers. My rough count shows about nine hundred.”
>
“Men get sick, desert, even die on a long march.”
“Yes William, but a hundred is too many.”
“He may have left them behind in the Mormon settlements. To watch his back, to watch the Mormons.”
Making our way down to the irregulars, Rockwell said, “That could be it except that Old Dan’s report said Connor was relying on threats to keep the Nevada settlements in line. That sounds more like it. We’ll just have to search out those invisible bluebellies.”
Rockwell’s second in command was a taciturn Englishman with one eye and three pistols. To me he looked like one of the fierce English pirates of the old Spanish Main. If Frederick Remington had been around in that year, he would have had a field day with this Mormon brigand. As it turned out, he was a schoolteacher and had lost his eye to some boy’s slingshot. His name was Philips.
Quickly, Rockwell explained about the missing hundred. Philips’ eyelid had been sewn shut, giving him a permanent and ghastly wink. I don’t know why they thought it better than a picturesque eye patch.
“I’ll take fifty men,” Rockwell said. “You take the rest and keep an eye on Connor. If I don’t find what I’m looking for, I’ll join up with you. Keep a firm hold on your men, Mr. Philips. If any man fires a shot, even by accident, shoot him on the spot. No firing squad. Do it yourself. That’ll make them afraid of you.”
All Philips did was nod; not a word did he say.
Rockwell picked the men he wanted and we rode back the way Connor’s army had come. Dust still clouded the sky; the sun was blurred. After the dust settled there were flamingo clouds in the sky until the wind blew them away. The desert danced and shimmered in the terrible heat. We found a dead horse about ten miles from where we started. The buzzards flapped away and returned to gorge as soon as we passed. In the distance were mountains, shabby looking, not at all majestic.
“Connor could have sent those men north on the other side of those mountains,” Rockwell said. “That wouldn’t be a bad thing to do. Send them north and come east from a different direction. What do you think, William?”
