by Bill Albert
“Yer one hard woman. May Hutton,” he said, looking like butter wouldn’t melt. “I’ll sure give ya that, I will.”
“You’re not giving me anything, Harry especially your smiling sweet talk.”
“Man comes all the way up here for a friendly visit, May. Don’t deserve . . .”
“Go on with you, Harry Orchard. You can charm them that don’t know you and even some that do, but not May Hutton you can’t. Al’s told you what you want to know, what you climbed them stairs for, and that’s about the end of it as far as I reckon.”
“OK, May. OK. I get yer drift,” he said, putting on his hat and going for the door. “But, the offer’s still open if ya change yer mind about them boys. Ya know where I’m at.”
“I do,” she said. “Good-bye, Harry.”
“S’long, May. Al.”
That was the first and last I saw of Harry Orchard until the day they blasted the Bunker Hill and Sullivan into a million splinters. There were lots of days in between and they were full ones for me, even if McParland doesn’t want to hear about them.
7
“She ain’t going to find out nothin, Mouse, nothin at all. Why should she?”
I signed that she would know about it and when she did she would tan his behind, old as he was.
“Shit no, Mouse! She don’t never go up the Canyon or down to Cedar Street. How’s she going to know? The way those boys tell it there ain’t no one can find out. A sure thing is what it is. Why, they showed me the ten dollars they got last Friday and Saturday. Ten whole dollars, Mouse! Silver ones too.”
We were out in front of the cabin busting up kindling. It was late October and there was a cold, stiff wind blowing. Below us were the lights of Wallace and coming up the hill with the wind was the noise of grinding and banging from the railroad yards.
Benny brought the axe down hard, the soft wood shattered, pieces flying every which way. It was my job to gather them up and put them in the kindling box by the stove.
“Ya’s only sore ‘cause they didn’t ask you to come,” he said leaning the axe on the stump. “That’s it, ain’t it, Mouse?”
I shook my head. I didn’t want anything to do with the O’Malleys or their push, even if they had asked me. What I did want was to see the dance halls and saloons up Canyon Creek, especially on a Friday night when the just-paid miners were drinking and fighting and carrying on. I’d heard from some of the older kids that it was the best free entertainment in the whole of the Coeur d’Alenes.
It wasn’t the entertainment that drew Benny to Canyon Creek, it was the money. If he couldn’t get it from a mine like he had thought to do, then he figured to get it from the miners. It was a whole lot quicker and easier.
“This way there ain’t no capital money to find,” he explained. “That’s how I sees it. Mouse. Remember all them troubles ol’ Buffalo Bill had about capital money? Ya told me yerself and I heard him too. Always goin on about it he were, him and that ol’ sour-faced Nat Salsbury. And listen to Aunt May, will ya! The way she goes on as to how those Eastern cap-it-al-ists uses their capital money to carry on robbin the miners, livin so high while the miners lives lower than miserable skunks, why then it stands to reason I ain’t doing nothin different than they is, am I? And they’s well respected, ain’t they? Ridin around up there behind matched pairs and eatin offa gold plates and everybody bowin and scrapin and tellin ‘em how they’s the tops.”
As usual, Benny was holding the stick in the middle and not seeing either end. But he was right about one thing. Aunt May was powerful hard on those mine companies.
“Bloodsuckers is what they are,” she snorted. “Nothing but damn, crawling, mangy, yellow-dog bloodsuckers. They get those poor boys to dig that ore for ‘em and pay ‘em nothing. Then they pull most of it back in the company store or that so-called hospital of theirs and what they don’t get goes to the saloons or those poor used-up crib girls. And that’s not the end of it, not by a long hop. They get ‘em to eat dust from them machine drills, freeze one minute, boil the next, and die quick and mean when their rotten timbers crack or an ore car runs wild, a cage cable busts or a fuse burns down too fast. There aren’t many rich miners and there aren’t many old miners. Use ‘em up, spit ‘em out and that’s the end of it. But the silver stays on forever and ever, long after those that dug it and smelted it are dead and back in the ground.”
“It was ‘92 that got her so terrible angry like she is,” Al told us one night when Aunt May was down in Wallace at a social function.
He lit his pipe and stared at the ceiling for so long I thought he had forgotten we were there.
“Ain’t much to tell when you think on it,” Al said finally. “No, ain’t much at all, it ain’t.”
He sure did savor his “ain’ts” when Aunt May wasn’t there, rolled them around on his tongue and let them out real slow so they’d last longer.
“I suppose there’s all kinds of stories jostlin around and waitin to be told about ‘92, but I only got the one I know for sure to tell ya.”
Al Hutton, whose mother had named him Levi, was, except for the occasional throat clucking, a quiet man, which was all for the best being married to Aunt May. You’d think that a railway engineer would tell a good full-blooded story that would roar right down the line and there might be ones that do, but not Al Hutton. Benny reckoned all those years with Aunt May had shriveled up and plumb derailed his talent for storytelling, although I think Al probably never had the talent to begin with and that’s one reason Aunt May married him. Whatever it was, Al couldn’t tell a decent story to save his life. He started in the wrong place, assumed you knew stuff you didn’t know, left out too much, and put too much in. None of that stopped him from trying though.
“Miners wanted one thing, mine owners another,” he said, jumping right into the middle of it. “Always was, always will be. Could have started with them bringin in those damn machine drills. Can’t say for sure. Lots of the old boys took it pretty hard when single and double jackin became nothin but a 4th of July show. Anyways, miners got the Union up the Canyon and the Knights over in Wardner, mine owners got themselves together in an association, shut the whole shebang down and hired a Pinkerton to spy on the Union. Siringo he was called. Course, we only found that out later on. Then he called himself Alison, I think, or Al Johnson maybe. Became an officer in the Gem Union, I think it were, or was it over to Burke? What I do remember is how they run him out. That was one hell of a night for sure. Heap of shootin goin on, fellas runnin this way and that. Hard to make any sense of it really, although a few men got themselves killed, which I guess didn’t make any sense to them. Association tried to bring in scabs to work the mines and the union boys got hot and drove ‘em out and then sent a package of dynamite down the penstock of the Frisco up there to Gem. Busted timber lyin everywheres. Couldn’t get the train up to Burke for days after that. A right mess they made, although with one thing and another they had good cause for it. Well, that really put the fox in the henhouse. Mine owners they squawked somethin terrible and the Governor sent in the troops, nigger boys from Missoula came in first, rounded everyone up they could find looked like a miner and put ‘em in stockades, one here in Wallace, the other in Kellogg. Military rode roughshod over everyone and everythin. Couldn’t get a drink, closed down the newspaper, took over the trains. Could smell that dam stink from those stockades all over town. Somethin terrible it were too, if you know what I mean. In the end some of the boys were tried and sent down to that big state prison in Boise.
“So,” he said, sitting forward and giving us a meaningful stare, “with all that happenin ain’t hard to see why May takes on so about those minin companies. Right, boys?”
He was wrong. I could hardly understand a thing he said, except that stuff about Siringo, who I’d come across in the Dimes. Not a low-down spy like Al had him painted, but a gun-quick lawman who caught dangerous train robbers,
bank robbers, kidnappers, mine salters, horse thieves, and other such outlaws. The man who singlehandedly chased after the murderous Wild Bunch—Kid Curry, the Tall Texan, Butch Cassidy, Cowboy Bill Carver, and the Sundance Kid. He had known Tom Horn, Big Foot Wallace, and Billy the Kid, had ridden with Pat Garrett and was even a friend of Buffalo Bill himself. If there was any one person alive who was the real West the way I hoped it to be, it was Charles A. Siringo, although after what I’d found going on with Buffalo Bill at the Wild West I was getting more than a touch skeptical about what I’d read. No matter, I wanted to hear more about Siringo, but every time I asked, Al would mutter something angry and spit into the fire.
What he had told us was only a mining tale and not a very clear one at that. But, Benny came away with the idea that it was all right to roll drunken miners, which only goes to show that you can get anything you want from a story if you want it bad enough.
8
Everyone should have a goal in life, a star to navigate by. Charlie Pinto Face told me that for the Lakota it was to achieve a oneness with the Great Spirit. Then there was something else Sunset Buffalo Dreamer said about a sacred hoop, but I never did understand that very well as he explained it to me in sign. But for us white people goals look a lot different than for Indians, more straight lines than hoops or circles. Always going somewhere new, that’s us. Buffalo Bill said that was called Progress.
“Can’t stop in one spot, Carl, no sir, you can’t never do that, especially if you’re a true, red-blooded American. It just ain’t in our nature. You look at what’s going on down there in Cuba and Porto Rico. Our destiny that is. Why, I reckon as how we’re just about the greatest country in the whole of God’s Universe, bar none.”
He was standing up with one hand clasped over his heart, looking for all the world like a great tragedian, which, of course, he was.
“Now’s our time, boy, most surely, and we shall be giving the world what-for just about everything there is to give from Cape Horn clear over to Smith’s Sound, and beyond, too. We’ll run the world whether the world likes it or not. And you know why? It’s because we got Progress on our side and, I reckon, we got God there too.”
Now, what Buffalo Bill was declaiming about was too big a goal for any one person to get hold of, even Buffalo Bill himself. I reckon you have to carve out your own piece of Progress. Benny December did, and his was simple and clear as crystal glass—getting rich quick and easy and becoming a swell. Me? I was too wringing wet behind the ears to think much about straight-line goals. I couldn’t get past trying to keep on the right side of Aunt May, avoiding the O’Malleys, and staying hidden safe in Wallace, far from the reach of the Pinkerton detectives. All of that was more than enough to keep me busy without thinking about Progress. There was more too, like that damn letter on its way from the Jews of Spokane. A slow arrow coming straight for me and all I could do was stand there, my feet stuck hard in the dirt, watching and waiting for it to hit dead center.
The problem was that Benny and his goal were threatening to bury all of my carefulness. The way he was sneaking around with the O’Malleys and going up the Canyon to Burke, Black Bear, Gem, and those other places had me shaking scared. I’d lie awake on our mattress behind the yellow calico curtain sure that he would get caught and not come back and sure that he would come back and get caught by Aunt May. What she would have done to him for robbing miners and to me for not telling her about it was beyond imagining, and that made the worrying about it real bad, especially with me being alone in the dark cabin with its crusty smells and Aunt May and Al snoring like a chorus of hogs in the next room.
Luckily, she never did catch on to what Benny was doing, leastways not until it didn’t make any difference to me anymore. If she had been a normal mother or a normal aunt or even just a normal woman maybe she would have figured it out, but there wasn’t much of the normal anything about Aunt May. I put a lot of that down to the fact that she was a woman with not one goal, but a whole parcel of goals, most of them running off in opposite directions from each other. She was more than big enough in spirit to hold them all but it didn’t always give her too close a focus on the common day-to-day things.
I guess you could say she wanted her piece of Progress as much as Buffalo Bill did. For one, she wanted to be rich and for that she had her hopes pinned on the Hercules, a silver mine, which like I said was nothing but an empty prospect hole in ‘98. She aimed to be a real mine owner, but she also hated mine owners with a passion that there was no holding, whereas you couldn’t breathe a word against miners or the unions without having her down on you like a snowslide. Then there was the polite society in Wallace which she desperately wanted to be part of and the people in it who she never tired of calling stuck-up and stand-offish. But her biggest and most passionate goal, the one which didn’t have another one pulling against it, was that of winning the vote for her sex. You see, Aunt May was one of those suffragette women, and a fiercer, more troublesome one you are never likely to find.
“What you smiling at so wide, Little Hy?” she bellowed. “And stop doing that terrible gaspy laugh right this very minute! Never heard of the Suffrage, is that it? Is that what’s got you all stupid like that?”
I jumped at the sudden anger in her voice and sucked back my laugh. Of course, I hadn’t heard of the Suffrage. I had overheard Aunt May telling Al something about her giving lectures with some woman from Portland, and my mind picture of her up on a stage wearing one of her long flouncy dresses and spouting off to a lot of people in her loud, gruff voice struck me as too funny to hold down.
“Now May, now May,” soothed Al, “Boy’s only a tiddler, can’t expect . . .”
“Nits make lice, Al! Boy starts off with that in his mind, what happens when he’s grown? Don’t want to be raising up ignorant men in my house, no matter how old they are, and that’s flat!”
“I’m just sayin how there ain’t no call . . . Ah, I mean to say, isn’t no call to take on so with the boy, that’s all, May.”
Aunt May huffed and fussed, started banging pots and pans over by the stove.
“Where’s that Benjamin Shorter?” she asked testily
He hadn’t come back from school with me and was probably hanging around down by Cedar Street with the O’Malleys. I wrote that I didn’t know. She snorted at me for my trouble.
“Look at this, Little Hy,” she said holding up a big smoking skillet. “See it? Is that what you reckon we women have been put here on God’s green earth for? To wear ourselves down looking after men and small children with nothing to say for ourselves but ‘supper’s ready?’ Is that what you think?”
I guess maybe I did, although I’d never really thought about it much as my mother had always had cooks and maids, but I shook my head no, which seemed a safer bet than nodding yes with her standing there with that hot skillet in her hand and a hotter look on her face.
“Well it is not. You can bet your young life on it. Women have as much to say as men do, maybe more, seeing as how they’ve been forced to be quiet for so long, bottling it all up inside. But that’s all going to change. Hell hath no fury, Little Hy, and damn me if we haven’t been scorned for too damn long. ‘Ninety-six might have been a bad year, what with Bryan and silver going down to defeat, but at least women finally got the vote in the state of Idaho and our sisters in other states will soon be getting their rights. Then you’ll see something damn fine, Little Hy, I mean DAMN FINE!”
Standing there holding that skillet with her chins stuck out firm and proud she reminded me of no one so much as Buffalo Bill in his private tent preaching at me about Progress. The picture of the two of them together blustering away to beat the band almost started up my gaspy laughing again. I had enough sense not to let it take hold of me though. I stared down at the floor, searching hard for whatever it was Al looked for there in the wood.
“Now May, now May, what does Little Hy want to know about such th
ings for?”
Aunt May wasn’t listening to Al. Her and the Cause filled up the cabin like a preacher with God Almighty sitting behind him. There was little enough room for Al in any case and when she started up he got pushed smaller and smaller till you almost couldn’t make him out in the corner of the cabin or even hear him sucking dry on his pipe.
She had put down the skillet and was now standing over me with a pair of enormous cutting shears, snipping them menacingly in front of my face.
“What use would these be with only one blade, Little Hy? Answer me that. That’s right, no damn use at all. Just like men without women, no damn use at all. We aren’t servants, we aren’t slaves, we aren’t children, we’re citizens of the United States of America, the greatest country that ever was! Isn’t that right, Al?”
More and more like Buffalo Bill, only a lot wider and a whole lot wilder.
“Course it is, May, but . . .”
“No ‘buts’ about it. Citizens, Little Hy, citizens like you learn about in that school down below. Like it says in the Constitution, ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ Well, women have those rights the same as men. Did they teach you in school about that Boston Tea Party? ‘Taxation without representation is tyranny.’ Remember that?”
Staring too close into those hungry shears all I could remember was “Don’t fire until you see the whites in their eyes,” but I nodded how I remembered “Taxation without representation.” It made no difference one way or the other right then.
“Pretty fair for an Easterner that was, I have to admit that,” she said thoughtfully. “Not that they’ve done much like it since. Anyway, that’s us, taxation without representation. And we aim to get it. Representation and Liberty.
“And talking of that, Little Hy, you ever seen the Statue of Liberty? Yes? A powerful symbol, the Angel of Liberty for the whole of these United States she is.”
