Bendigo Shafter (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures)

by Louis L'Amour

  When I had scrambled up the slope for a few yards, I called out. “Ethan? Stacy?”

  There was a moment of silence, then Ethan’s voice called out, “Ben? Is that you? Come on in!”

  Short Bull was down. He was badly hit, I could see that. Uruwishi was tending him, soaking some dried herbs he carried with him to pack on the wound. Ethan had a bullet scratch along his jaw, and Stacy had a bloody bandage on his left arm.

  “We was in a good spot,” Stacy was saying, “an’ Ben here gave us warnin’.”

  “Somebody shot from camp,” I said, “somebody fired almost as soon as I did.”

  Stacy pointed with his pipe stem at Uruwishi. “It was him. He was on one knee a-shootin’ when I come awake.”

  “They’d rolled in snow,” I said, “and some of them wore fur…wolf skins, maybe. They were so white I could scarcely make them out.”

  “You get any?” Stacy asked.

  “One for sure,” I said, after a minute, “and maybe three, but probably not. I know I scratched a couple or came close enough to worry them.”

  “I nailed one,” Stacy said. “He run right at me. I had nothin’ to do but squeeze ’er off.”

  “How bad is Short Bull?”

  Ethan shrugged. “The Old One is some kind of a medicine man and he’s fixin’ him up. In this here cold he’s apt not to get infection, an’ he’s a tough youngster.”

  We built up the fire and shaped around to eat. I drank some coffee and felt a little better. We had seen no dead Indians…except for me, that is, and the Shoshone down the slope.

  They carried off their dead when they could, but of course we might not have killed any. It is easy to believe you are doing better shooting than you are.

  We cut poles for a travois for Short Bull, and when we rigged it we mounted up. Even at the slow pace we must now take we would be at the Medicine Wheel by noon.

  “Ain’t human!” Stacy growled. “After all you done for him!”

  “What is human, Stacy?” I asked mildly. “What we call human is what we believe to be right and sane, for in our world we have been brought up to believe certain things. We are apt to believe those things are human nature…whatever that is.

  “Look at it from his standpoint. He took prisoners, and from the beginning of time as far as he is concerned the captor has the right to dispose of his prisoners, to kill them or enslave them.

  “Our ancestors in Europe or Africa were doing the same thing for centuries. While he is arguing his case with the old men we come in, take his prisoners, then knock him out with a six-shooter in front of the very old men he is belittling.

  “We disgraced him, dishonored him, and he must have revenge. We find him wounded. We bring him in, care for him, return him to his people.

  “This to him was a triumph, for he believed his medicine was too strong for us or we would have killed him as he intended to kill me.

  “To him our gifts were a cheap way to bribe him because we were afraid, and what we call gratitude had no place in his scheme of things. Nobody ever taught him to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

  We were riding out on a western spur of Medicine Mountain overlooking a vast sweep of the Big Horn Basin. The sun was warm, the sky clear, and before us was the Wheel.

  It was almost round and seemed to be made of chunks of white limestone. At least seventy-five feet across and better than two hundred and fifty feet around. The stones were two to three feet above the thin grass of the ridge. In the center was a cairn of rocks perhaps a dozen feet across with an opening in one side, and from it radiated twenty-eight spokes, although there were scattered rocks that might once have been another spoke. Some of the rocks had been disarranged by frost or whatever.

  It was high, barren, and the spur itself was cracked deeply in places, some of the cracks being all of four feet wide and a hundred feet deep.

  We all drew up and sat our horses in silence. The wind touched our faces and stirred the hair hanging by Uruwishi’s cheek.

  We were white men, and we did not think with his thoughts, our blood did not run as his, nor did our memories stir with ancient secrets. These things were deep within him, deep in the flesh and bone of him, and yet as we sat with him I liked to think that we felt a little as he did.

  Uruwishi did not stand alone upon this place. He stood with the spirits of all who had gone before.

  “Many times!” he spoke suddenly. “Many times this place was shaped! Many times the wind, the snow, the ice…they have changed this place, they have made the stones move, but each time the stones have come back to their seats.

  “There are places where a man can stand and be one with the Great Spirit, and this is such a place.

  “This is a place to dream, a place to smoke, and a place to die!

  “I am here! I, Uruwishi, have come!”

  Slowly, weakly, the old man’s arms lifted to the sky. In a quavering voice he sang once more his death song, and then he said, “I go now to join my fathers, I go where age cannot come, where flowers do not wither, where fish leap like silver in the streams. I go where the buffalo go, where the warriors, my brothers, have gone before me!

  “Do not think that I mourn! I have come to this place with men! I have shed the skin of the old chief and ridden again with the young braves!

  “I am here! I have come to this place! I am Uruwishi!”

  Slowly, his arms lowered, and he bent far forward. We ran to him, all of us, and eased his body to the ground. His tired hand gripped my arm. His eyes held mine. “You said ‘come ride with me,’ and I came. You saw not an old man, tired and weak. You saw beneath my skin, which the years have wrinkled and withered, you saw the young warrior that lives in my heart! You saw Uruwishi!”

  He died there, under the blue sky, near to the place where the men who had no iron had built their shrine, but he did not die alone or unmourned.

  CHAPTER 47

  * * *

  WE LEFT HIM upon the mountain under the wide sky, but we did not leave him as he had fallen, although he might have wished it to be.

  We did not know how the Umatilla would have buried him, and Short Bull was unconscious and unable to tell us. The day had not many hours to go, and our way was hard. The Bull lay upon his travois, and we must take him to a place beside a stream where his wound could be treated and where he could rest, this young Indian who was our friend.

  So we buried Uruwishi as a Plains Indian might be buried, and if all was not perfect, at least it was done with respectful hands.

  We cut four poles in the forest below the rim, and we stood them up in the ground and set them solidly there; then we built a platform of boughs and on it we placed the body of Uruwishi, his rifle beside him, with his ammunition belt and his medicine bag, and we covered him with his blanket and weighted the edges with stones.

  He had brought his best clothes, knowing his time was near, and it was not until we stripped him to dress him in his best that we found the bullet wound, low down on his left side. He had bled much, but he had stopped the wound with moss and said nothing.

  We could have let him lie where he fell, as men who die in battle are sometimes left, but our respect was too great, so we lifted him up, covered him over, and then Stacy, who had lived among Indians, sang a song of the dead warriors.

  When he had done we rode away, but once, before I went over the rim of the mountain and out of sight, I looked back.

  The frame was stark against the sky, and I thought I saw the old man’s hair blow in the wind, and I turned away, feeling I had left behind another father, one I had known a brief time only where the streams ran cold and clear and the stars stood bright in the sky.

  Tonight he would ride the Milky Way, which the Cree call the Chief’s Road, and I would go back to our town and after a while back to Ninon and the life that lay before me.

  WHAT IS LOUIS L’AMOUR’S LOST TREASURES?

  * * *

  Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures is a project
created to release some of the author’s more unconventional manuscripts from the family archives.

  Currently included in the project are Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1 and Volume 2, which will be published in the fall of 2017 and 2019 respectively. These books contain both finished and unfinished short stories, unfinished novels, literary and motion picture treatments, notes, and outlines. They are a wide selection of the many works Louis was not able to publish during his lifetime.

  In 2018 we will release No Traveller Returns, L’Amour’s never-before-seen first novel, which was written between 1938 and 1942. In the future, there may be a selection of even more L’Amour titles.

  Additionally, many notes and alternate drafts to Louis’s well-known and previously published novels and short stories will now be included as “bonus feature” postscripts within the books that they relate to. For example, the Lost Treasures postscript to Last of the Breed will contain early notes on the story, the short story that was discovered to be a missing piece of the novel, the history of the novel’s inspiration and creation, and information about unproduced motion picture and comic book versions.

  An even more complete description of the Lost Treasures project, along with a number of examples of what is in the books, can be found at louislamourslosttreasures.com. The website also contains a good deal of exclusive material, such as even more pieces of unknown stories, personal photos, scans of original documents, and notes.

  All of the works that contain Lost Treasures project materials will display the Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures banner and logo.

  POSTSCRIPT

  * * *

  By Beau L’Amour

  The novel Bendigo Shafter grew out of a short story that had been published by The Saturday Evening Post more than twenty years earlier. Though Louis had submitted it as “Home Is Where We Are Going,” the editors of the Post retitled it “War Party,” and it now functions as a bit of a prequel to Bendigo, covering the events that occur just before the wagon train decides to stop in the South Pass area.

  In the short story Ruth and Bud have the last name “Miles” instead of “Macken,” and Ethan Sackett is named “Tryon Burt.” Other than that, the two versions are remarkably consistent. Even the Shafter family is mentioned ever so slightly.

  Before I go on to share Louis’s notes for this novel, I’ll include a copy of the short story “War Party.” More than anything else, it contains the seed that Bendigo Shafter grew from.

  War Party

  We buried Pa on a sidehill out west of camp, buried him high up so his ghost could look down the trail he’d planned to travel.

  We piled the grave high with rocks because of the coyotes, and we dug the grave deep, and some of it I dug myself, and Mr. Sampson helped, and some others.

  Folks in the wagon train figured Ma would turn back, but they hadn’t known Ma so long as I had. Once she set her mind to something she wasn’t about to quit.

  She was a young woman and pretty, but there was strength in her. She was a lone woman with two children, but she was of no mind to turn back. She’d come through the Little Crow massacre in Minnesota and she knew what trouble was. Yet it was like her that she put it up to me.

  “Bud,” she said, when we were alone, “we can turn back, but we’ve nobody there who cares about us, and it’s of you and Jeanie that I’m thinking. If we go west you will have to be the man of the house, and you’ll have to work hard to make up for Pa.”

  “We’ll go west,” I said. A boy those days took it for granted that he had work to do and that the men couldn’t do it all. No boy ever thought of himself as only twelve or thirteen or whatever he was, being anxious to prove himself a man, and take a man’s place and responsibilities.

  Ryerson and his wife were going back. She was a complaining woman and he was a man who was always ailing when there was work to be done. Four or five wagons were turning back, folks with their tails betwixt their legs running for the shelter of towns where their own littleness wouldn’t stand out so plain.

  When a body crossed the Mississippi and left the settlements behind, something happened to him. The world seemed to bust wide open, and suddenly the horizons spread out and a man wasn’t cramped anymore. The pinched-up villages and the narrowness of towns, all that was gone. The horizons simply exploded and rolled back into enormous distance, with nothing around but prairie and sky.

  Some folks couldn’t stand it. They’d cringe into themselves and start hunting excuses to go back where they came from. This was a big country needing big men and women to live in it, and there was no place out here for the frightened or the mean.

  The prairie and sky had a way of trimming folks down to size, or changing them to giants to whom nothing seemed impossible. Men who had cut a wide swath back in the States found themselves nothing out here. They were folks who were used to doing a lot of talking who suddenly found that no one was listening anymore, and things that seemed mighty important back home, like family and money, they amounted to nothing alongside character and courage.

  There was John Sampson from our town. He was a man used to being told to do things, used to looking up to wealth and power, but when he crossed the Mississippi he began to lift his head and look around. He squared his shoulders, put more crack to his whip, and began to make his own tracks in the land.

  Pa was always strong, an independent man given to reading at night from one of the four or five books we had, to speaking up on matters of principle, and to straight shooting with a rifle. Pa had fought the Comanche and lived with the Sioux, but he wasn’t strong enough to last more than two days with a Kiowa arrow through his lung. Still, he died knowing Ma had stood by the rear wheel and shot the Kiowa whose arrow it was.

  Right then I knew that neither Indians nor country was going to get the better of Ma. Shooting that Kiowa was the first time Ma had shot anything but some chicken-killing varmint, which she’d done time to time when Pa was away from home.

  Only Ma wouldn’t let Jeanie and me call it home. “We came here from Illinois,” she said, “but we’re going home now.”

  “But, Ma,” I protested, “I thought home was where we came from?”

  “Home is where we’re going now,” Ma said, “and we’ll know it when we find it. Now that Pa is gone we’ll have to build that home ourselves.”

  She had a way of saying “home” so it sounded like a rare and wonderful place and kept Jeanie and me looking always at the horizon, just knowing it was over there, waiting for us to see it. She had given us the dream, and even Jeanie, who was only six, she had it too.

  She might tell us that home was where we were going, but I knew home was where Ma was, a warm and friendly place with biscuits on the table and fresh-made butter. We wouldn’t have a real home until Ma was there and we had a fire going. Only I’d build the fire.

  Mr. Buchanan, who was captain of the wagon train, came to us with Tryon Burt, who was our guide. “We’ll help you,” Mr. Buchanan said. “I know you’ll be wanting to go back, and—”

  “But we are not going back.” Ma smiled at them. “And don’t be afraid we’ll be a burden. I know you have troubles of your own, and we will manage very well.”

  Mr. Buchanan looked uncomfortable, like he was trying to think of the right thing to say. “Now, see here,” he protested, “we started this trip with a rule. There has to be a man with every wagon.”

  Ma put her hand on my shoulder. “I have my man. Bud is almost thirteen and accepts responsibility. I could ask for no better man.”

  Ryerson came up. He was thin, stooped in the shoulder, and whenever he looked at Ma there was a greasy look to his eyes that I didn’t like. He was a man who looked dirty even when he’d just washed in the creek. “You come along with me, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll take good care of you.”

  “Mr. Ryerson”—Ma looked him right in the eye—“you have a wife who can use better care than she’s getting, and I have my son.”

  “He’s nothin’ but a boy
.”

  “You are turning back, are you not? My son is going on. I believe that should indicate who is more the man. It is neither size nor age that makes a man, Mr. Ryerson, but something he has inside. My son has it.”

  Ryerson might have said something unpleasant, only Tryon Burt was standing there wishing he would, so he just looked ugly and hustled off.

  “I’d like to say you could come,” Mr. Buchanan said, “but the boy couldn’t stand up to a man’s work.”

  Ma smiled at him, chin lifted, the way she had. “I do not believe in gambling, Mr. Buchanan, but I’ll wager a good Ballard rifle there isn’t a man in camp who could follow a child all day, running when it runs, squatting when it squats, bending when it bends, and wrestling when it wrestles, and not be played out long before the child is.”

  “You may be right, ma’am, but a rule is a rule.”

  “We are in Indian country, Mr. Buchanan. If you are killed a week from now, I suppose your wife must return to the States?”

  “That’s different! Nobody could turn back from there!”

  “Then,” Ma said sweetly, “it seems a rule is only a rule within certain limits, and if I recall correctly no such limit was designated in the articles of travel. Whatever limits there were, Mr. Buchanan, must have been passed sometime before the Indian attack that killed my husband.”

  “I can drive the wagon, and so can Ma,” I said. “For the past two days I’ve been driving, and nobody said anything until Pa died.”

  Mr. Buchanan didn’t know what to say, but a body could see he didn’t like it. Nor did he like a woman who talked up to him the way Ma did.