Butchery of the Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone

  Smoke heard a rattling of the doorknob. He had locked the door but whoever was on the other side either had a key, or was very good at picking locks, because in less than a minute, the door opened, and an increasing wedge of light spilled into the room.

  Was it John?

  He didn’t think so. John wouldn’t have let himself into the room that way. He would have knocked.

  Smoke watched as a hand stuck in through the opening. The hand was clutching a pistol, and the pistol was aimed toward the bed, exactly where Smoke had been but several seconds earlier.

  Smoke watched the thumb pull the hammer back, but just before the intruder pulled the trigger, Smoke stuck a pencil just in front of the hammer so that when it fell, it made only a slight clicking sound.

  “What the hell?” the intruder asked in surprise.

  Smoke grabbed the gun arm and pulled the intruder on into the room. The intruder called out in surprise, and Smoke jerked his arm around behind his back, then twisted the arm up behind the intruder’s back.

  “Who are you?” Smoke hissed.

  “Emile Colby,” the intruder replied.

  “What are you doing here, Colby?”

  “I come to avenge my brother.”

  “Yeah? Well, it isn’t goin’ to work out like that, is it?”

  Smoke grabbed Emile Colby by the scruff of his neck and the seat of his pants, then rushed him out into the hallway.

  “Hey! Leggo of me! Leggo of me!” Colby started shouting. His shouts and the loud disturbance caused half a dozen other doors to open onto the hall.

  “Here, what’s goin’ on here?” someone shouted. “Nothing much,” Smoke replied. “I’m just taking out the trash.”

  “You’ve got no right to . . .”

  “To what?” Smoke said.

  By now everyone was laughing at Colby.

  When they reached the head of the stairs, Colby had pretty much quit his shouting, and was now quiet, the silence brought on by fear.

  “What are you going to do?” Colby asked. “Where are you taking me?”

  “You don’t understand,” Smoke replied. “I’m not taking you anywhere. This is as far as you go.”

  Smoke bent Colby over, then gave him a kick in the rear. Colby tumbled down the stairs, screaming all the way.

  [In presenting to the public this story of Kirby Jensen and John “Liver-Eating” Jackson’s life and adventures, I was cautioned against embellishing any particular incident too highly, and to leave out of the book any element of fiction.

  “I have observed,” Smoke Jensen said, “in reading much of work written about me and my contemporaries, that the tendency has been to exaggerate nearly everything. The effect of this has been to give the public a wrong idea of the character of the men who found their way into the young West in search of wealth and adventure. Please tell the story so that those who read it may draw from it correct conclusions as to the kind of lives we really lived, and avoid such coloring of the truth as might lead them to think I am boasting of my own prowess, or exaggerating my own importance.”

  There have been many books written about Smoke Jensen, and as he is generally considered to be a true treasure of Colorado, there will be many more. And, no doubt, many of these books, especially those that make no pretense of being anything more than a novel, will attempt to build upon a basis of truth, a degree of fact and fiction ingeniously combined.

  I am attempting in this endeavor to present the stories of Smoke Jensen and John Jackson’s life as truthfully as I can. But the plain fact, perhaps not understood by those of us in the twentieth century, is that men like Jensen and Jackson lived the kind of lives that are written about by such men as Owen Wister and Zane Grey, or portrayed by Tom Mix and William S. Hart. Such men are passing from the scene, but they will never pass from our history.—ED.]

  Montana—late September 1869

  The trapping didn’t really start until the cold came because, as Smoke explained, it wasn’t until then that the beaver and marten would have their full coats.

  “All right, this looks like a good place,” Smoke said.

  “The old man, Preacher, has he been out here long?” John asked, as the two men started unloading their traps.

  “He came out here soon after the War of 1812,” Smoke said. “And he was taken in by a couple of old-timers who had been here since the late seventeen hundreds.”

  “Late seventeen hundreds? That was before Lewis and Clark.”

  “Which Preacher’s friends described as nice young men, who were wet behind the ears.”

  “Ha! It would have been interesting to meet them. But then, Preacher is an interesting man too.”

  “More than interesting. He is one of the finest, if not the finest man I have ever met. Let’s get some traps out. La langue n’attrape pas le castor.”

  “What did you just say? I know that it is French, but I must confess that I learned very little while I was in the Foreign Legion.”

  Smoke laughed. “It’s a saying that Preacher learned from his friend, Pierre Garneau. It means ‘the tongue does not catch the beaver.’”

  John laughed as well. “La langue n’attrape pas le castor. Very good, I shall have to remember that.”

  After trapping for several weeks, and skinning and cleaning the beaver pelts, several buffalo came by.

  “John, have you ever eaten buffalo?” Smoke asked.

  “I can’t say as I have.”

  “Your Sharps fires a heavy enough bullet to take one down. I’ll give you the honor. Come with me.”

  The two men approached the buffalo . . . not part of a large herd, there were no more than six in the group.

  “Do you think you can hit one from here?”

  “Yes.”

  “That one,” Smoke said, pointing one of them out.

  John slipped a .50 caliber bullet into the chamber, closed the block, and took aim, and fired.

  A puff of dust flew up from the buffalo’s coat, its front legs buckled, then straightened as the animal fought to stay on its feet, then it went down. The sound of the gunshot rolled back in repeating echoes.

  “Great shot, John!” Smoke said.

  “They didn’t run,” John said, puzzled.

  “That’s because you shot the leader. Since he didn’t run, none of the others did either. Now, shoot that one, and we’ll both have a robe for the winter.”

  John shot the second buffalo, and this time the remaining four did run. Smoke and John hurried out to the downed buffalo and discovered that both were dead by the time they got there.

  [Less than twenty years after the experience described above, the buffalo were very nearly extinct. Dr. William T. Hornaday of the National Museum directed public attention to the impending extinction of the buffalo. In 1889, he conducted a census which disclosed only 1,091 living buffaloes in the entire world. Another census taken in 1903 turned up only 969, in forty-one herds in the United States, and an additional 675 in Canada, for a world total of 1,644.

  It is easy to point to the cause. Some might say that they were hunted out during the westward expansion of the railroad, and to a degree that is true. But it is also true that the survival of the buffalo did not have a very high degree of importance among the western settlers, whose economy was incompatible with the continued existence of the buffalo. Today the cattle on a thousand hills provide a far greater economic resource than the buffalo, if left to thrive in their primitive paradise, could possibly supply.—ED.]

  “We’ve got some work to do,” Smoke said, pointing to the two dead animals.

  After skinning the two buffalo, their hides had to be fleshed and thinned. Smoke started at the edges, and began removing the meat and the fat, using a very sharp knife, and working his way toward the center.

  The buffalo had already been butchered into chunks of meat that weren’t too heavy to carry, and those chunks were hanging from the limbs of a tree to keep the wolves away.

  “We’ll have meat all winter,”
Smoke said. “The cold will keep the meat fresh.”

  “I have got to get me a better knife than this,” John said as he tried to emulate Smoke’s work on the hides. “This damn thing is as worthless as tits on a boar hog.”

  “You need a Bowie knife,” Smoke said, showing his.

  “Well, since I’m not helping much with the cleaning of the skin, suppose I get a fire started and we carve off some of that buffalo for supper.”

  “Sounds like a good idea to me,” Smoke said, without looking up.

  Smoke continued to work on the buffalo skin while John began gathering wood for the fire.

  “Smoke?” John said a moment later. There was quiet urgency in his voice.

  “What?”

  “We’ve got company coming.”

  “Trouble?” Smoke asked.

  John shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so, though, because there are women with them.”

  Smoke dipped his hands in the icy cold water to wash off the blood and tissue that had been collected from the inside of the buffalo skin. When his hands were clean, he stood up to watch the Indians approach. There were seven of them, three men and four women. One of the men and one of the women were very old.

  Smoke held his hand up, palm out as the Indians approached.

  “I am Ketano,” the oldest of the men said.

  “I am Smoke.”

  The Indian looked confused, and he made the symbol of smoke with his hand twirling around and lifting.

  “Smoke?” he asked, not sure he understood the name.

  “Yes, Smoke,” Smoke said, repeating the hand sign, then pointing to himself.

  The old Indian smiled. “It is a good name,” he said, then he repeated to the others, saying the name both in English and his own language.

  “What kind of Indians are these?” John asked.

  “Mandan, I expect,” Smoke said. “More than likely if they were Crow, they would be after our scalps.”

  “Trade?” Ketano asked, again backing up his English with sign language.

  “Yes, we will trade,” Smoke said. “What do we have that you want?”

  “Buffalo meat,” Ketano said, pointing to the hanging chunks.

  Smoke walked over to the meat and put his hand on one of the two humps. “This you cannot have,” he said. He pointed to the rest of the meat. “You may take some of the remaining meat.”

  Again Ketano spoke to the others. They laughed, and one of them said something.

  “He says you know what part of buffalo is good,” Ketano said.

  “What have you got to trade?” Smoke asked.

  The Indians had honey, corn, dried berries, and wild greens. They also had a beaded knife sheath that John wanted.

  Before they left, Ketano gave Smoke and John a warning.

  “The Crow do not like the white men trapping here,” he said. “I think if they can, they will kill you.”

  “But we aren’t on Crow land. This is public land,” Smoke said.

  “The Crow believe that any land they want is their land,” Ketano said.

  With other signs of friendship, the Indians left, carrying bundles of buffalo meat with them.

  On the Missouri River—December 1869

  A bright sun, reflected back by the mantle of snow, made it necessary for both John and Smoke to keep their eyes at a squint. The river whispered slowly on its never-ending journey to St. Louis where, joining the Mississippi, it would flow all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.

  “Smoke, you do know we’re being trailed, don’t you?” John asked.

  “Good for you, John, you’re picking it up fast,” Smoke said. “Yes, I know. I just wanted to give you the chance to mention it first. How many do you make?”

  “Four, I think. Crow?”

  “More than likely,” Smoke said. “You remember, Ketano told us they were trying to keep white trappers out.”

  “Do we confront them? Or try and elude them?” John asked.

  “We may as well face them down,” Smoke said. “We won’t have any peace, otherwise.”

  “Look, just ahead,” John said. “See how that rock juts out toward the edge of the water? It will give us cover and concealment. And it’s big enough for both of us.”

  “Yeah,” Smoke said. “Let’s get up there quickly enough to get our horses out of the way.”

  Smoke and John urged their horses into a gallop, and the pack mules came along without much urging. They rode around behind the big rock John had pointed out, secured their animals, then climbed up onto the rock.

  The rock was absolutely perfect for their purposes. It was in two steps, one step that allowed them to get into a kneeling position behind the second step, which was high enough to conceal them.

  The four Indians were very skillful in their approach. Not one word was spoken, and they were handling their animals so adroitly that their unshod hooves could not be heard.

  “When they get to about fifty yards from us, we’ll challenge them,” Smoke said. “Use my Henry. You can get your shots off faster that way.”

  “What will you use?”

  “If we wait until they are within fifty yards, I’ll use my pistol,” Smoke said.

  The two men waited until the four Indians came around the bend. Then, suddenly, Smoke stood up. And seeing him stand, John did so as well.

  “Stop there!” Smoke cautioned.

  “Ayiee!” one of the Indians shouted. He was armed with a bow and arrow, and he raised the bow and loosed an arrow.

  The arrow flashed by so close that Smoke could hear the wind of the arrow passing.

  “You take the two on the right, now!” Smoke said, firing even as he said the word “now.”

  John didn’t need a second invitation; he fired almost as quickly as Smoke, and jacking another round into the chamber he fired a second time as Smoke was also firing. In less than the time it took to tell about it, all four Indians had been knocked from their horses.

  “Looks like at least two of them had repeating rifles,” Smoke said. “I see no sense in letting them go to waste, do you?”

  John chuckled. “I see no sense at all,” he said.

  Keeping wary, because Smoke knew that sometimes an Indian would fake death to get an advantage over his adversary, the two men approached the four Indians.

  Extreme caution wasn’t necessary. All four were dead.

  John picked up the two Henry repeating rifles, and examined them very carefully.

  “Well now,” John said with a broad smile spreading across his face. “These are superb weapons. Absolutely superb. I’ll be quite happy to keep these.”

  “Good,” Smoke said. “Let’s go find a place to get our traps in the water.”

  Although there had been periodic snowstorms beginning in late fall, they were hit by a blizzard in the middle of December. They had no wagons to use in the construction of a shelter, but Smoke showed John a time-proven trick of survival he had learned from Preacher. They each carried a buffalo robe with them, and they wrapped the robes around themselves and dug in under a protecting bank. With the rifle set up, and the breech open, the barrel acted as an air vent. That way, they could let the snow drift and pile over them. The snow helped insulate them from the cold and, under the buffalo robes, their natural body heat, trapped by the insulated shelters, managed to keep them warm. They had a third rifle running between them, the barrel pointed toward John, and the open breech under Smoke’s robe. That way they could talk to each other, the rifle barrel carrying the sound between them.

  “Can you hear me, John?” Smoke asked, speaking into the open breech.

  “Yes, I can hear you,” John’s voice replied.

  “Good, that means we can talk to each other while we’re waiting out the storm. But if you notice, the breech is on my side. So I would advise you not to say anything to piss me off.”

  John laughed, then he stopped. “Uh . . . I assume you are joking.”

  Smoke laughed. “All I’m saying
is, watch your p’s and q’s.”

  “Oh, I will. Believe me, I will.”

  Old Main Building

  “I take it you got through the blizzard with no difficulty.”

  “Yes. We came through it fine.”

  “How did the trapping go that winter?” Professor Armbruster asked.

  “It went exceptionally well. I was used to trapping down in Colorado, and as I had told John, the rivers and streams there had been just about trapped out. But when we got to Montana, it was all virgin territory. First of all, you have to understand that the population of the entire state . . .” Smoke paused, then corrected himself. “Well, it wasn’t a state then. But the population of the entire territory of Montana at that time, wasn’t much over five thousand people. Not counting Indians, that is.”

  Smoke chuckled. “Just for the fun of it, John and I figured out what the population density was then. It worked out to about one person for every thirty square miles.”

  “Yes, I can see how that would have given you a lot of elbow room,” Professor Armbruster said. “Shall we walk over to the cafeteria for lunch?”

  “Sounds like a good idea,” Smoke said.

  Outside the Old Main building, several students had gathered, and they were singing:

  “Glory, Glory, Colorado

  Glory, Glory, Colorado

  Glory, Glory, Colorado

  Hurrah for the Silver and Gold!”

  After the song, a cheer went up.

  “Co lo ra dah

  Sis boom bah

  Rah rah rah!

  Co lo ra dah”

  “We are playing a football game against Denver tomorrow,” Professor Armbruster said. “It’s our fourth game, and the aggregate score of the first three games has been 152 to zero. So you can perhaps understand the excitement.”