Thunder Mountain

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  “Yeah, they called this the Boise route,” Dawn said, “and you are right, many came in from the other side through the Middle Fork of the Salmon River and still others came around over Elk Summit from Warren and up Monumental Creek. What made this trail even used was the connection between Stibnite mining areas and Yellow Pine and the Dewey road to the summit here.”

  “Maybe what you found was an echo?” Duster asked.

  “Are you saying in our timeline no one built the hotel,” Madison asked, but in others it was built?”

  “Exactly,” Bonnie said. “We’re still trying to figure out how echoes of events in one timeline can be rumors in others, but this wouldn’t be the first time we’ve noticed that. We just don’t understand completely how it works mathematically.”

  “That sort of fits,” Dawn said. “Back in 1998 a group came up here with sounding equipment figuring the old hotel might be a cache of old bottles and buttons and treasures. They couldn’t find any evidence of the site at all, or that the ground had even been disturbed in a thousand years.”

  “Echo,” Duster said, nodding. “Someone built a hotel here in some timeline. Just not ours.”

  “It would be a beautiful place for a hotel,” Madison said, looking around through the trees and the piled up snow. “No customers in the winter, though.”

  “I can think that might be a good thing at times,” Dawn said, smiling at him with that wonderful smile that promised a night of fun ahead.

  “I’ll agree with that,” Madison said.

  All Bonnie and Duster could do was shake their heads and laugh.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE NEXT MORNING they headed slowly down the long, dangerous trail into the Monumental Valley. The narrow trail that cut across rockslides scared her to death. They all walked slowly on the sometimes loose shale, leading their horses.

  One slip and she would tumble a thousand feet to the valley floor.

  If her horse slipped, she had exact instructions from Duster to let it go, not try to save it, and not go over the edge with it. She hadn’t liked those instructions, but now that she was on the trail working her way to the valley floor, she certainly understood them.

  No wonder anyone still left in this valley when the snow started to fall was stuck for the winter. This trail was scary enough fairly dry. No way would she even try it in the rain, let alone snow.

  The morning had dawned very, very cold and breath from the horses and everyone seemed to just hold in the air. Even though Madison had put up his tent, he had brought his bag over after they had dinner and they had shared her tent, sleeping curled up together after making slow and quiet love.

  Knowing that noise carried long distances in the cold mountain air had kept them both very silent, which had the added benefit of ramping up the intensity of the lovemaking.

  Just before the sun colored the distant horizon, Madison left her, dressed quickly and went back to his tent. She hated that he had to do that, and hated when he left her.

  She was falling completely for him.

  So far, in a week of traveling together, she hadn’t seen one thing she didn’t like or that worried her about him even slightly. He was smart, gentle, and had a sense of humor that had her laughing more times than not.

  And he was as passionate about history as she was and learning as much as he could about it.

  They left early with only a light breakfast and while the air was bitterly cold. Even with her heavy gloves over her more fashionable ones, she couldn’t get her fingers or her toes warm.

  Duster wanted to leave that early to get ahead of any of the packtrains that might be headed in to Roosevelt. And he also wanted to get ahead of anyone coming up out of the valley. As he said, there just weren’t going to be many places to turn around or move out of the way on that trail.

  And now that she was on it, she understood that.

  Completely.

  She wanted to stop, stare at the fantastic view below them, but mostly the only thing she saw was the trail in front of her.

  From the time they broke camp until they finally reached the valley floor and Dawn thought she could breathe again, it had taken just under an hour.

  An hour full of sheer terror and fear combined with the excitement she felt about where they were.

  “That was fun,” Duster said, smiling at them as they moved out off the now wide wagon road that had been built up the valley to the bottom of the trail. He led them to what looked like a well-used camp in the trees and they tied up the horses to let them rest and feed.

  There was snow still under the trees, but a lot of it was melting fast. Dawn could still see her breath, but the fear on the trail had stopped her from thinking about being cold at all.

  “You have a very strange sense of fun,” Bonnie said to her husband, smiling and clearly looking relieved. “That has to be one of the scariest trails I’ve ever been over.”

  “Worse than that one in the goldfields of Alaska?” Duster asked.

  “That only had a raging river below it, not a thousand foot drop over rocks and snow.”

  Dawn just shook her head as she sat down on a log and took deep breaths of the crisp morning air to settle her nerves. In two thousand years, Bonnie and Duster had seen a lot of the west. Amazing they could remember half of it.

  “Actually,” Dawn said, “in history very few died on that trail. Not compared to the poor souls coming in over the trail from Warren and up the Salmon to Monumental Creek and then up.”

  “Seriously, one of the other trails in here is worse?” Madison asked.

  “Much,” Dawn said, nodding.

  “Let’s not go out that way when we leave,” Madison said.

  “Deal,” Dawn said.

  She sat and looked around as Duster and Bonnie and Madison walked down toward Monumental Creek to wash their faces. The stream was running strong from all the snow melt, yet just above where they were, on a bend in the rushing stream, she could see a man with his hands in the water, panning.

  She had tried to pan for gold just once, and gave up after about three minutes because she could no longer feel her hands. Working all day in that ice water had to almost be impossible. Yet the miners did it.

  She looked around. She just couldn’t believe she had made it back to this valley again. She loved it here, far more than she wanted to admit to anyone, including Madison.

  She looked up at the towering mountains above her. Right in front of her was Thunder Mountain, the peak that gave the entire region its name. At one point Monumental Creek had dug into the side of the mountain and actually gone underground for a distance, making the narrow valley sound like the mountain was rumbling from the water cascading down over the rocks in the cave.

  The first Native Americans in the area had called the mountain Thunder because of that rumbling and the name had stuck to the entire area. The water during the middle eighteen hundreds had been diverted out of the cave by a landslide and the mountain stopped rumbling, but kept its name.

  She shivered and stood, stomping her feet to get some feeling back into them.

  The sun had yet to come close to the valley floor, but she could tell it was going to be a nice day. They still had a good seven miles down the valley before they reached Roosevelt.

  She was so excited, she almost couldn’t contain herself.

  Just a short week ago she had driven into this valley, taken pictures of the ruins of Roosevelt down through the water, and sat beside the old cemetery.

  Now she actually got to see the place in its prime.

  She had to be dreaming.

  She glanced over as Madison walked back toward her, smiling, his face red from the extremely cold water.

  He was the most handsome man she had ever seen.

  She was in love. Plain and simple.

  In love with this valley.

  In love with that man.

  She was right. She had to be dreaming.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

 
THEY RODE FROM THE BOTTOM of the trail down the valley, walking the horses slowly, not in any hurry to really get anywhere. The morning remained bitterly cold, but the sun slowly working its way down the high mountains around them promised it would warm up some.

  They just seemed like four people out for a leisurely morning ride.

  The valley was surprisingly full of noise. Dawn had expected that, but not as much as was actually going on. They passed men chopping trees to build log cabins, and in one long area a crew of men were cutting down trees and stacking the lumber.

  In places there was nothing but stumps for hundreds of yards up the sides of the hills.

  The sounds echoed off the tall slopes that climbed sometimes straight up from the valley floor at times. In places, the valley seemed so narrow, she wondered how even a wagon road could get past the creek between the rock slopes, slopes far, far too steep to climb for anyone but a trained climber.

  The air was full of the smell of freshly-cut wood and spring grass. Along this area there was very little snow left on the valley floor, but it was still clear just a few hundred yards up the hills.

  In a few places, the valley floor widened out to a football-field wide, which seemed almost spacious.

  Around the very next bend in the valley, they came across a large three-story building being built to the left of the road up against a rock slope.

  “Stamp mill,” Madison said the moment he saw it. “Where’s the mine? And who does it belong to?”

  “This isn’t Dewey’s,” Dawn said as they stopped and watched five or six men work on the large wooden structure. “I can’t remember the name of it right off. The mine is back across the valley and a hundred yards up the hill.”

  She pointed to the hill across the field of tree stumps where a road had been cut into the side of the hill and there were signs of tailings.

  She felt shocked because two weeks before she had passed this site on this very road in her van. The old mill they were watching being built right now only had one wall left standing in 2014, towering into the air like a monument to a forgotten age. Everything else in and around the building was a pile of rotting lumber and rusted metal.

  She moved her horse up beside Madison while Duster and Bonnie brought their horses around so they could hear her as well.

  Making sure her voice didn’t carry, she said, “All this wood along here is being cut for the boilers for this mill, but they never bring the boilers in and get the mill started because the mine plays out before they can. When I was in here last week, I mean back in our time, all this lumber they are cutting is still stacked along here and all the trees have grown back up around the piles. It was creepy.”

  “That would be,” Bonnie said, nodding and looking around at all the lumber being stacked in perfect piles about shoulder high. Some of the piles ran for fifty or more paces.

  “So this place never even gets used?” Madison asked, staring at the big building.

  “Nope, never does,” Dawn said. “They got the stamp mill in here but not the boilers.”

  “Then where’s Dewey’s mine and mill?” Duster asked.

  “About two miles up Mule Creek above Roosevelt. It’s where the landslide started that buried the town, actually.”

  “Wow, this is really something,” Madison said, smiling at her with that wonderful dimple showing.

  For some reason she was really glad he thought so. She had been faintly worried he would find this time in history boring, since his main focus was the mining wars in Northern Idaho and Western Montana.

  Duster turned and headed down the road leading the two packhorses.

  “It really is amazing, isn’t it?” Dawn said, staring at the men working and then down the narrow valley framed in with high mountains on both sides.

  “That it is,” Bonnie said. “Can’t believe I have never been in here before.”

  From the big mill onward they started passing more and more people. Many of them were working on log cabins, some planting small gardens, others just on their way somewhere.

  Dawn had gotten her wish. She had wanted to see this valley alive and it clearly was on this beautiful spring day.

  They finally stopped for lunch in a wide area that Bonnie was pretty sure she and her friends had camped in the week before, but a hundred and some years in the future.

  A wide trail left the road and headed up a side creek at that point, while in 2014, that trail was a road leading up to a mine.

  Within a half mile, in 2014, was marshland where a hundred years of spring run-off had filled in the upper end of Roosevelt Lake for about a mile. It was going to be very interesting to see what the valley looked like now, before the lake.

  She had seen old pictures of it, but they were so few, and only focused on a small part of the town, she was convinced the pictures would not do the town justice.

  She was so excited, she could hardly eat. But she forced herself to drink water and choke down a sandwich while they sat and talked under two large trees tucked against the north side of the valley.

  Finally, about halfway through lunch, the sun hit the valley floor and suddenly the air got a lot warmer.

  ‘Wow, that’s amazing,” Bonnie said as she stood and pulled off her heavy coat and tucked it under a strap on her saddlebag.

  Dawn did the same thing, leaving on a dress jacket that matched her riding pants. She was still deathly afraid of any kind of contact with anyone from this time, but Bonnie said she perfectly looked the part of a lady.

  She might look the part, but could she act and speak the part, that was the key.

  “So,” Dawn said, glancing at Duster, “we might want to think about where to camp tonight. Not sure how much of this from here on is owned land.”

  “We have a place to stay,” Duster said, smiling.

  “We do?” Dawn said, very surprised.

  She glanced at Bonnie and Madison who both looked surprised, then back at Duster. “I don’t think there were any hotels that would be suited for us at this point in Roosevelt.”

  Duster laughed. “Just wait. You’ll see.”

  Bonnie frowned at her husband. “What did you do, dear?”

  Again he laughed. “Just wait. We’re almost to Roosevelt, aren’t we?”

  “We are,” Dawn said, feeling very puzzled. One of her worries for the last few days had been where they were going to set up camp while in the valley this summer. At this point in time, this valley was mostly owned either because Roosevelt had been divided into lots and sold or the land fell under placer claims along the creek.

  “Then let’s go take a look at this mythical mining town,” Duster said, taking a last drink from his canteen and putting it back on his horse.

  Dawn climbed on her horse and forced herself to take a deep breath. Her hands on the reins were shaking slightly and she wanted to turn and ride away, let the dream remain a dream.

  “It’s going to be amazing,” Madison said, smiling at her.

  She hoped so. Sometimes the story of a place was far more than the actual place, she knew that.

  But in the future, she had stood beside the lake, stared down into the crystal clear water of the lake at the foundations and remains of the buildings and wondered what the people who lived and worked in them were like.

  Now she would ride between those same buildings on a beautiful spring day.

  How fantastically strange was that?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE VALLEY GOT SLIGHTLY WIDER as they approached Roosevelt. The road was wider allowing wagons and other rides to pass them. Dawn smiled at the women, but kept her eyes forward for the men passing. If they tipped their hats to her, she nodded slightly. Bonnie had helped her with that ritual.

  Monumental Creek was running down the left side against a steep slope of loose rock, barely heard in the noise of the construction and the music from the saloons and dance halls ahead.

  There were more and more buildings scattered among the tall scrub and no signs
of trees at all. Even the stumps were chopped down to almost ground level, more than likely for firewood during the last winter. However, the trees still covered the steep slopes about a hundred yards up the hills on both sides.

  She could smell ham and eggs cooking and the smell of campfire smoke seemed to fill the air.

  The sound was what stunned Dawn more than anything. She actually could hear the pianos over the noise of hammering and sawing and some shouting. The music wasn’t distinct, and she couldn’t pick out a song because there were numbers of pianos fighting each other to fill the air between the steep rock slopes.

  What little that had been written about Roosevelt always talked about the music and how it filled the air in the valley all the time.

  “Pianos?” Duster asked, turning in his saddle to look at Dawn. He had a puzzled look on his face. “How did they get pianos in here?”

  “Mostly over that trail we came down,” Dawn said, smiling.

  Duster just shook his head.

  Behind her she heard Madison say, “Amazing.”

  That made her smile.

  Then suddenly, they came around a slight bend in the valley floor and there, ahead of them and slightly down a hill, spread out from side-to-side in the valley, was the mining town of Roosevelt.

  One main road ran right down the middle of it, now filled with wagons, horses, and people.

  Dawn was speechless, her heart racing. It was so much better than the old black and white images of the place. Those old pictures had been taken from up on the rocks. Where they were, they could see right down the main street of town.

  The buildings were mostly only a single story tall, with steeply slanted roofs. Wooden planks ran along both sides of the street for people to walk on over the mud, and the main street itself was so choked with horses and wagons, it was amazing anything moved. Many of the horses were tied up outside of saloons with open doors.