The Travelers 1

by Lee Hunnicutt

  “That’s not fair, Beth.” Even though they had been only speaking Cheyenne for the last year, when they were alone, they addressed each other by their given names.

  “By taking time and going out of his way to find us, Mr. Johnson has probably saved our friends and family from death and destruction.

  You are not the only one hurt here, Beth. All of us are hurt. Do not make it any harder on us by riding alone. Please.”

  She looked at him and saw the pain and sorrow in his eyes. She sighed a ragged sigh, nodded and softy said, “I will ride with you today.”

  “Also, be polite to Mr. Johnson. He is not the bad news. All he did was bring us bad news.

  At least talk to him.”

  “I will try.”

  “That is all I am asking.” he said with a weak smile.

  That winter the tribe had camped on the Yellowstone. It was over two hundred and fifty miles to Fort Laramie and Johnson figured it would take them a little over two weeks to get there.

  After another two days of traveling, the children were still morose but things had loosened up between them and Johnson.

  Just as the kids had heard of Liver Eatin Johnson, he had heard of the three white children living with the Cheyenne. He had also heard of their exploits. It was amazing how quickly news traveled between the tribes and from the tribes on to the Mountain Men. The American Indian was a great storyteller and when a great story was to be told, they told it.

  Mountain Men had a close relationship with the Indians. Sometime this relationship was as an enemy of a particular tribe and other times they were adopted into a tribe. Many Mountain Men married Indian women and lived with the tribes and were made members of the tribe.

  Johnson had married a Flathead woman called Swan in the Spring of 1847. By the winter of 1847 the then pregnant Swan had been scalped and killed by the Crow.

  When Johnson buried his wife, he swore a dreadful oath against the Crow. From that time on, whenever Johnson met a Crow warrior or Crow warriors, the Crow warriors died. When Johnson would kill a Crow warrior, he would carve the warrior open and eat his liver. He ate the livers not out of hunger but to humiliate and to enrage the Crow and it worked.

  The killing of Crow warriors by Johnson became so bad that the Crow Nation chose twenty of their best warriors to find and kill Johnson. These warriors, like Johnson, swore an oath. Their oath was a terrible oath of death, loneliness and of personal denial. The oath they swore was that they would not return to their tribe and families nor would they have any contact with their own kind until Johnson was dead.

  Many years later, Johnson killed the last of the twenty Crow warriors. Johnson later reflected how terribly lonely it must have been for these dedicated men. Johnson may have hated the Crow but he never lost respect for them.

  The children found Johnson to be affable and likable. At first, he was as reticent as the children had been but Sonny was never one to be quiet for any length of time and he was never bashful about asking personal questions.

  Sonny had an easy nosiness about him that put people at ease and for some reason people didn’t take offense at his nosiness. He could ask a person the most penetrating of questions and they would almost eagerly respond to him.

  In no time, Sonny had Johnson talking about himself and telling them the legendary tales of the Mountain Men. He told them of men like Old John Hatcher, Del Gue, Hatchet Jack Ireland, Mad Mose, Big Anton Sepulveda and White Eye Anderson. Men who would disappear alone into the wilderness for months at a time in search of furs. Men who were self dependent and who could survive in a hostile environment.

  Turnabout was fair play for Johnson. He asked them about their exploits.

  Johnson looked at Jack and said, “I heard you was the one who killed Dirty Earl Mullins and then tied up Curly Bob Randle and Slim Barker. How’d that come about.”

  Jack told part of the story and then Beth would add something and then Sonny.

  When they had finished, Johnson said seriously, “You shoulda killed ‘em all, especially that Curly Bob. Dirty Earl was just a low down murderer but Curly Bob’s mean and nasty. He enjoys doin’ people harm. Slim’s no angel but he ain’t smart enough to be mean.”

  Johnson gave a wicked laugh and said, “Them two never could walk straight after what you done to ‘em.”

  He then became serious, “You know if you ever run into ‘em again, you’re gonna hafta kill ‘em.”

  Jack’s face was impassive, his eyes like slate. His voice was toneless as he said, “I know.”

  He remembered Curly Bob like it was yesterday and the thought filled him with hate. In his young life he had never hated anyone but he hated Curly Bob and he knew that Johnson was right. He should have killed him. He wouldn’t make that mistake twice.

  Johnson saw a grim change come over the children when he had mentioned Curly Bob. It was like they were all thinking the same thing, thought Johnson and they were. Both Beth’s and Sonny’s thoughts were running along the same lines as Jack’s.

  Johnson looked at the three. They were tall for their age. They were all about the same height and build, about five feet nine inches. The twins had blond hair and blue eyes. Jack had brown hair and gray eyes. All three kids wore their hair in braids. Beth’s hair when unbraided would have fallen to midway down her back and the boy’s hair would have been shoulder length. They were more wiry than skinny. Johnson thought that they were handsome young’uns, and when they get older they’ll fill out.

  Johnson tried to change the mood.

  “You know ole’ Plenty Coups has been after my hair for about twenty years now. Him and his sidekick Red Wing would like nothing more than to have my hair hanging from their lodge pole.”

  He then laughed, looked at the three teenagers and said, “I ‘spect they’d like to have yourn’s hair next to mine on them poles too.”

  Beth looked at Johnson. In the last couple of days, she had come to like him. She looked at him now and thought “He’s probably one of the most dangerous men on the North American Continent and here he is talking to me, a girl, as if I’m an equal.”

  She gave Johnson a smile and began, as she had done many times in the last year and a half, her story about her first vision quest and about her run down the mountain.

  When she finished, it was Johnson’s turn to smile. He said, “Hatchet Jack Ireland told that story when I was runnin’ traps down in Colorady but I just couldn’t believe that a girl coulda kilt two Crow warriors in close combat.”

  “Well, believe it Mr. Johnson. It happened just like she told you. We” he pointed to Sonny, “were there.”

  Johnson shook his head in amazement and laughed.

  He then pointed to Beth’s belt and said, “Is that their hair?”

  Beth had a beautiful belt of quill and bead work. The quills and beads were connected by interwoven black fibers.

  An explosive puff of air escaped her lips and she smiled. “Nothing gets by you Mr. Johnson. Yes, sir,” she fingered the belt “this is their hair.”

  “Dang!” he laughed “I ain’t never seen hair done that way. It’s downright purdy.”

  Jack thought “If anyone two years ago would have told me that we would have killed anyone, much less that we would be joking about the people we killed, I would have said they were nuts.

  But here we are, doing just that and the terrible thing is, I don’t feel any remorse.”

  He just shook his head in disbelief and looked off toward the horizon.

  In the last few days Johnson had acquired a real affection for the three children.

  He said, “I want you to stop calling me Mr. Johnson. Call me by my first name, John or what my friends call me, Liver Eater.”

  Sonny summed it up best for the other two when he said softly “Wow.”

  The next few days pasted quickly. Johnson was a wealth of stories and kept them entertained. They were sorry that their journey was coming to an end.

  When they were a day out of Fort La
ramie, Johnson asked them, “When we get to Fort Laramie what do you plan to do? I looked at your furs. I figure you can get one thousand five hundred to two thousand for ‘em depending on the price. So you’ll have a grub stake.”

  The three looked at each other. Beth said, “I don’t know. We haven’t given it much thought.”

  Jack said, “I haven’t asked the others but I thought we could go to Colorado and maybe do some prospecting. What do you think?” he asked the other two.

  Both Sonny and Beth got that look like a light bulb just went off over their heads and Sonny said, “Yeah, prospecting, that sounds good. What do you think Beth?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  ………………………………………………

  The Spring that Frank had taken them up into the mountains of Colorado, he had told them how his father, Jack’s great grandfather, had found a place untouched by the great gold rush of the nineteenth century. He was a mining engineer and in 1905 had found an area that he had thought was probably one of the richest valleys in the Americas. He was all prepared to stake his claim when his friend, John Stevens, chief engineer for the Panama Canal project, persuaded him to join him in the digging of the Panama Canal.

  To Frank’s father, the challenge was too great to pass up, he could always dig gold later but the Panama Canal wouldn’t wait. He never looked back.

  Years later he told Frank about his gold find and gave him a map.

  Frank told the kids that he had never used the map and now that they were in Colorado, what better time than now to go looking for his father’s lost mine. The kids had jumped at the chance.

  After they had spent three weeks in the high Sierras learning how to survive in a cold climate and how to build a log cabin, Frank took them down into the high valleys to the ghost town of Hard Luck.

  “Can we go to this mine?” Beth said excitedly.

  “Yeah, Frank can we?” the boys piped in.

  “Well it’s not a mine yet. It’s just a location where he thought gold might be. I’ll take you near there and then we’ll have to head back.”

  “Don’t take us near there. Take us to it,” said Sonny. He was all excited.

  Frank told them what all adults tell kids to shut them up. He said, “We’ll see. Tomorrow we’ll be going to a ghost town”

  “A ghost town!” Beth said.

  “Wow!” said Jack.

  “What’s the name of it?” asked Sonny.

  “Hard Luck.”

  “Hard Luck? What kinda name is that?” said Beth.

  “It’s an old mining town that never did very well. When they first struck gold there, it was thought that it was going to be one of the biggest strikes ever but it just didn’t pan out. In the early days, the town boomed but the gold ran out in about a year and most of the people left. There were a couple of marginal mines but nothing ever came of them. The town lasted about eight years and then died out when the mines shut down.

  The only way into Hard Luck is by foot or by horseback. Not many people come to Hard Luck now days. It’s just too difficult to get to.”

  The next day, in the early afternoon, they came down out of the mountains to a river. They crossed the river and rode into Hard Luck. There were six saloons, three hotels two general stores and various other buildings.

  Frank explained that after the gold ran out, most the businesses closed down and only one saloon, a boarding house and one general store remained open. The two marginal mines had houses for their mine managers and bunk houses for the miners but for the most part all of the buildings were simply abandoned and when the mines closed for good, they were all abandoned.

  They tied their horses up at an old hitching post in front of one of the saloons. They walked through the doors of the saloon and looked around. On the right was the bar. Behind the bar the mirror was still intact. On the floor in the middle of the bar was a huge chandelier shaped like a wagon wheel. The kids looked up above the chandelier and saw that the large pulley for raising and lowering the chandelier was still in place. There was a stair way going from the bar floor to a second floor. A balcony on the second floor ran the width of the bar and there were rooms behind the balcony.

  Frank cautioned them not to climb the stairs. They were over a hundred years old and might not carry the weight of a person.

  Frank moved to the back of the saloon and took out his knife and started digging at the back wall. The kids crowded around him. He soon pulled out what he was looking for. It was a 44 slug. The kids began to examine the wall and saw three more such bullet gouges in the wall.

  Frank told them that gun fights were common in Hard Luck. It was a pretty rough place.

  The kids thought that they were in heaven. A ghost town, slugs from a gun fight, did life get any better than this?

  That night they camped inside the old saloon and Frank told them stories of the old west and of the mining days in Colorado of the 1800s.

  The next day they took off down river. Two days later another river coming out of the mountains entered the river that they were following. They turned towards the mountains and followed the new river upstream.

  Three days later they could look up the river valley as it rose to the mountains. They could see that the stream was a raging torrent pouring out of a narrow opening in the mountains. The mountains rose sheer on either side of the river. There appeared that there was no way that they could follow the river any further.

  Frank looked at the kids and could see that they were thinking that this was the end of the line.

  He said, “It looks like we can’t go any further. Right?”

  They agreed.

  They were about a half mile from the cataract. There were few trees and the ground was rocky.

  “Well there is a way around this. Look over to the left at the cliff’s walls. See that bulge.”

  They said they could see it. It looked as if the cliff facing bulged out for about fifty or sixty feet and ran along the cliff for about a hundred and fifty yards.

  “Well that really isn’t a bulge. It just looks like a bulge. It is really a monolith that rises very close to the cliff facing and as high as the cliff so that it looks like a bulge. If you ride to the far left of the monolith you will find an opening that is wide enough to get a wagon through. Behind the monolith is a narrow opening that runs about four hundred yards through the mountains into the river valley. As far as I know it’s the only way in.

  In that river valley, behind that cliff, is where my father thought there was a large gold deposit.”

  All excited, the kids wanted to go there but Frank said no. They were due back and he had to deliver them to their parents in California.

  They were disappointed but still very excited. They had a million questions, which they asked all at once.

  Frank turned his horse around and they all started back the way they had come.

  In the following days, Frank answered as best he could all of their questions.

  Frank’s father was a mining engineer and had come to Colorado near the turn of the century. He believed all along that there was a large gold deposit near Hard Luck but the first miners to come there had looked in the wrong place.

  After looking for two years, he found the hidden valley. The river showed promise for placer mining and further upstream in the valley he thought that an even larger deposit was to be found in the rock itself. The placer mine would be very rich. The gold trapped in the rock was even richer but you would have to dig it out of the rock.

  Well as things would have it, he went to Panama and never came back. Such is life.

  ……………………………………….

  As they rode toward Fort Laramie, prospecting never looked so good.

  Johnson then paid the kids a real compliment by saying, “You are welcome to come with me to St. Louis. Git better prices fer your furs there.”

  “Thanks, John,” said Jack, “but we have to move on.”

  Johnson
nodded. He could understand that.

  “If you have some time, we could use your help,” said Sonny.

  “We’ll need to sell our furs and we will need to buy a wagon and rig for four horses. We don’t know anything about selling furs, buying a wagon, harnessing horses or driving a rig.

  We could really use your help.”

  “Sure,” said Johnson. “be glad to help you. I gotta meet Hatchet Jack, Mad Mose and Del Gue at Fort Laramie and them fellers are always late.”

  The next day they rode into Fort Laramie. It was a major stopping point and supply center along the Oregon Trail.

  As they approached the fort, they could see that many Indians were camped outside of the fort. There were Ute, Cheyenne, Pawnee, Crow and Sioux.

  Johnson pointed to them, “Most of ‘em are here for whiskey.”

  As they rode on, an Indian wearing a top hat, a black vest and silk pajama bottoms rode by. He was leading three packhorses loaded with furs, a couple of war lances, bows, arrows and various other odds and ends. Following him, on a horse pulling a travois with a folded teepee, was a squaw. Behind her were three more squaws on foot. One of the squaws on foot was leading four horses by their reins.

  As the Indian in the top hat rode by the other Indian encampments all of the warriors who weren’t too drunk to stand came to watch him ride by. The looks they gave him were less than friendly.

  As they passed the Crow camp, one of the walking squaws bowed her head and gave a muffled sob.

  When Johnson and the three kids passed this cheery little entourage, the Indian in the top hat looked straight ahead as if he didn’t see them.

  Johnson spat in front of the Indian’s horse. The Indian startled, drew rein, tried to regain his composure and rode on.

  Johnson gave a wicked laugh.

  Johnson said in a loud voice to Sonny, Beth and Jack, “That thar’s the Pawnee, Joe Many Hands. He don’t come here to drink. He comes to gamble. He wins two ways. He sells the Indians liquor and when they are too drunk to stand, he gambles with ‘em.