by Jon E. Lewis
The diary of Peter Koch, a Danish youth who cut wood at the mouth of the Musselshell River in 1869 and 1870, cogently reflects the lot of the woodhawk:
Oct. 4. Commenced chopping. Blistered my hands and broke an ax handle.
8. Twenty five years old and poor as a rat. Cut down a tree on the cabin.
20. Cutting while Joe is on guard. Snow tonight.
24. Killed my first buffalo. He took 7 Spencer and 6 pistol balls before he died. River full of ice.
Nov. 7. A Gale of wind. Those Arapahoes who camped abt. 10 days at Jim Wells woodyard have moved down the river after shooting into his stockade.
15. Chopped hard all day. B.M. says 3 cords. Fred came back all wet. He had started in a skiff with Dick Harris, both drunk, and upset at Squaw Creek.
25. Fred and Olsen started out wolfing. We stopped chopping on account of shooting and shouting in the hills. Joe and I found 4 wolves at our baits.
Dec. 10. Sick. No meat.
11. Sick yet. Bill, Joe and Mills went to Musselshell, said Indians had attacked and stolen 3 horses and mule but lost one man.
24. Christmas eve. No wolves.
Jan 16. Awful cold. Froze my ears.
17. Too cold to work. Went up to Musselshell. Froze my nose.
24 Thawing heavily. Mills drunk.
Mar. 22. Saw three geese. (Spring has come, gentle Annie.) Martin sick.
Apr. 24. Sixty Crows went up the river after Sioux to avenge the killing of 29 Crows. They were all looking dreadful, had their hair cut off, their fingers and faces cut, with the blood left on their faces.
May 9. One hundred and seventy cords on the bank. We put fire to the brush piles. The fire spread and burnt up 50 cords. We were played out before we got it checked. Nothing to eat.
13. Wind turned and started the fire again. About 20 cords burned.
22. The “Nick Wall” passed about two o’clock in the morning without stopping.
23. 40–50 Indians showed themselves at Musselshell the 20th. The crazy Frenchman started toward them and was badly beaten but when firing started they turned and ran.
24. Raining. The “Ida Reese” passed about daybreak without our knowing it.
28. Sold “Deerlodge” about 10 cords of wood.
June 13. The “Sallie” passed after midnight and took on 15 cords of wood.
16. The “Ida Stockdale” passed without stopping. We threw 6 cords back from the bank to keep it from falling into the river.
July 4. Indians firing at us from nearest cottonwood trees and all through the sage brush. The balls whistled pretty lively but we returned the fire and drove them from their shelter. We went out and found one young warrior killed by a shot through the upper thigh. We got his gun, bow and arrows and two butcher knives and threw his body in the river. Waring scalped him.
One woodhawker on the Musselshell found a desperate remedy to keep Native Americans at bay. John Johnson was a burly, matted-haired ex-mountain man who pursued a personal war against the Crow tribe after they murdered his pregnant Flathead wife. He began killing and scalping Crow warriors, and eating – or pretending to eat – their livers. This practice gave him a remarkable immunity from Crow attack; for good measure, “Liver-Eating” Johnson decorated his landing-stage with the skulls of dead braves.
“A Glorious Triumph for Civilization”
As the steamboat had replaced the keelboat, so it too would be replaced as the West’s most eminent form of travel. The steamboat had a drawback which sank it more surely than its safety record. The boats could only go where the water was, and the main liquid highway, the Mississippi, ran north to south. As the frontier moved further into the plains and mountains of trans-Mississippi America, so the steamboat became increasingly obsolete. Wagons, horses, and later the railroads, were the only way west for most freight and passengers.
It was the colonization of Oregon and the California Gold Rush which forced the roads and ribbons of steel across the land, tying coast to coast and region to region. Before the colonizing of the Pacific coast, pioneer communities had been sufficiently near settlement for their needs to be served. The Oregonians and the Californians were remote from civilization. The East feared for their spiritual welfare; the wants of the Far Westerners were more prosaic. They wanted mail and news from home, and sometimes a fast means of getting there.
As early as 1848, the federal government had been obliged to organize a mail service to the West Coast via Panama. The service, however, took 30 days, cost as much as 80 cents an ounce, and only stimulated California’s desire for an overland transcontinental service. When 75,000 Californians signed an overland petition in 1856, Congress agreed to act. Almost immediately, the matter ran into sectional strife. Northerners favoured a direct route from St Joseph, Missouri to San Francisco via South Pass. Southerners wanted a route from St Louis crossing Texas, passing through El Paso and Fort Yuma into southern California. It was, they conceded, much longer, but less likely to be affected by heavy snow in winter.
Unable to agree the route, Congress handed the matter over to the post-master, Aaron V. Brown. As Brown was an ardent Southerner from Memphis, it came as small surprise that he awarded the $600,000 contract to veteran Eastern stagecoach operator – and his friend – John Butterfield, who would ply the “Ox-Bow” southern route. The North was disgusted. The Chicago Tribune called the award of the contract “one of the greatest swindles ever perpetrated upon the country by the slave holders.” Many doubted that Butterfield could fulfil the terms of his agreement: Tipton, Missouri to San Francisco in 25 days.
Butterfield spent a million dollars preparing his 2,812-mile route west, building nearly 200 relay and home stations. The coaches he introduced transformed Western travel. Named after the town in New Hampshire where it was made by the firm of J. Stephens Abbott and Lewis Downing, the Concord had an iron-reinforced oval wooden body swung on 3½ inch oxhide thoroughbraces which absorbed some of the worst shocks. The coaches were often brightly coloured, with landscape pictures on the doors. Nine passengers could be accommodated inside, with another two on top behind the driver and conductor.
The first Butterfield Overland Mail coaches went into operation on 16 September 1858. That morning two coaches departed on a great journey, one westwards from Tipton, and one eastwards from San Francisco. For days they careered over dirt track, desert, and prairie – and both came in on time. President Buchanan was so pleased that he sent Butterfield a telegram which read: “I congratulate you on the result. It is a glorious triumph for civilisation and the Union.” For the next three years Butterfield’s coaches raced over the southern trail, two a week in each direction, through all weathers, with hardly a break in service. Marauding Apaches, Kiowas and Comanches were an occasional hazard, with one driver complaining to writer Mark Twain that “he became so leaky with bullet holes” that “he couldn’t hold his vittels.”
Since the southern route had effectively become the official overland road, it fell to private enterprise to develop a direct overland trail. In 1855 the firm of Russell, Majors and Waddell started a freight wagon service from the railhead at St Joseph to San Francisco. The enterprise grew with astonishing rapidity to become the unchallenged giant of western freighting; by 1858 it employed 4,000 men and operated 3,500 covered wagons.
A prime cause of the company’s success was the efficient method that partner Alexander Majors devised for moving their massive cargoes overland. Each caravan of wagons sent out by Russell, Majors and Waddell contained 25 covered wagons, each carrying three tons of goods and pulled by mules or oxen. Alongside each wagon walked a teamster or “bullwhacker”, who controlled the animals by use of a 12-foot long whip. Tipped with a rawhide popper, the bullwhip could crack the air with a pop-pop that could be heard two miles away. Most drivers were rough and tough frontier types, who signed and then conveniently ignored the company pledge the pious Majors made them sign, promising not to swear, “nor to get drunk, nor to gamble . . . and not to do anything incompatible w
ith the conduct of a gentleman.”
Unfortunately for Majors, his flamboyant New Englander associate William H. Russell was an inveterate financial gambler. When the company lost money in the so-called Mormon War, after the army reneged on payment, Russell hit on two fantastic ventures to refill the vaults. The first was a stagecoach line to Denver to cash in on the Pike’s Peak gold rush. Majors and Waddell, believing that such an enterprise was doomed without a government subsidy, refused to back it. Undeterred, Russell found a less cautious associate, John S. Jones, and began operating the Leavenworth & Pike’s Peak Express Company in April 1859. The L&PP was admirably efficient. It was also, as Majors and Waddell had foreseen, completely unviable. The expenses were over $1,000 a day. Concerned that Russell’s impending bankruptcy would bring the freight company down, his partners were obliged to take over the stagecoach venture. Reorganized as the Central Overland, California and Pike’s Peak Express, the new company was soon known by all as “Clean Out of Cash and Poor Pay”.
More desperate than ever, Russell dreamt up another fantastic money-making scheme: a relay of fast horsemen which would take the mail between Missouri and California in ten days. And so was born one of the West’s most celebrated services – the Pony Express.
A chain of 190 waystations was built at ten-mile intervals on the most direct route between St Joseph and San Francisco. Five hundred fast horses were bought, and a team of dare-devil boy horsemen hired. Lightweight saddles, stirrups and a special leather-pocketed mail bag, a “mochila”, slung over the horn and cantle of the saddle, were devised. At each relay station the rider would dismount, throw the mochila on a fresh pony, jump up and be away.
To cheering crowds, the first relay rider of the Pony Express streaked west out of St Joseph, 49 letters in his mochila, on 3 April 1860. Only 19 months later, the last rider delivered the mail in San Francisco and was looking for gainful employment. The Pony Express had been instantly rendered obsolete by technology. The Pacific Telegraph Company and the Overland Telegraph Company of Hiram Sibley completed its transcontinental line on 24 October 1861. The Express’s record time for the trip was for the delivery of Lincoln’s inaugural address in March 1861: an astounding seven days and 17 hours. Yet the telegraph took mere seconds to get a message from East to West and West to East.
If the Express was short-lived it was also glorious. Among those who rode for it was the 14-year-old Buffalo Bill Cody. When Cody later toured his Wild West show around the world, the Express regularly featured as one of the acts. There was much to dramatize. One Express rider, “Pony Bob” Haslam, was once attacked by Paiutes in Nevada, wounded in the face and arm, then escaped the attack to travel 120 miles in eight hours and 10 minutes, using 13 horses. Then he rested a few hours, and did the return trip.
The telegraph not only finished the Pony Express; it finally drove Russell, Majors and Waddell into bankruptcy. For some years, the firm had been taking infusions of capital from the stagecoach entrepreneur Ben Holladay. In 1862 he foreclosed and took over the assets of Russell, Majors and Waddell. Energetic and ruthless, Holladay then built a huge freight and coach operation out of the ruins, becoming the “stagecoach king” of the West and controlling 5,000 miles of stage routes. For “The Overland Stage Line”, Holladay bought new Concord coaches and fine animals. His staff were alternately bludgeoned and bribed (his general manager was paid an astonishing $10,000 per annum salary) into loyalty and efficiency. To travel on the Overland, however, was no more a pleasurable or comfortable experience than on any other line. The coaches were cramped, dusty, stiflingly hot in summer, bitterly cold in winter. Hold-ups became an increasing nuisance, with one company alone recording 313 robberies of its stages on the California line between 1870 and 1884, 27 of them by the notorious Black Bart. More irksome to passengers, however, were the poor meals they received at the waystations. The suffering traveller Mark Twain recorded the experience in Roughing It:
The station buildings were long, low huts, made of sun-dried, mud-colored bricks, laid up without mortar (adobes, the Spaniards call these bricks, and Americans shorten it to ’dobies). The roofs, which had no slant to them worth speaking of, were thatched and then sodded or covered with a thick layer of earth, and from this sprung a pretty rank growth of weeds and grass. It was the first time we had ever seen a man’s front yard on top of his house. The buildings consisted of barns, stable-room for twelve or fifteen horses, and a hut for an eating-room for passengers. This latter had bunks in it for the station-keeper and a hostler or two. You could rest your elbow on its eaves, and you had to bend in order to get in at the door. In place of a window there was a square hole about large enough for a man to crawl through, but this had no glass in it. There was no flooring, but the ground was packed hard. There was no stove, but the fireplace served all needful purposes. There were no shelves, no cupboards, no closets. In a corner stood an open sack of flour, and nestling against its base were a couple of black and venerable tin coffee-pots, a tin teapot, a little bag of salt, and a side of bacon.
By the door of the station-keeper’s den, outside, was a tin wash-basin, on the ground. Near it was a pail of water and a piece of yellow bar-soap, and from the eaves hung a hoary blue woolen shirt, significantly – but this latter was the station-keeper’s private towel, and only two persons in all the party might venture to use it – the stage-driver and the conductor. The latter would not, from a sense of decency; the former would not, because he did not choose to encourage the advances of a station-keeper. We had towels – in the valise; they might as well have been in Sodom and Gomorrah. We (and the conductor) used our handkerchiefs, and the driver his pantaloons and sleeves. By the door, inside, was fastened a small old-fashioned looking-glass frame, with two little fragments of the original mirror lodged down in one corner of it. This arrangement afforded a pleasant double-barreled portrait of you when you looked into it, with one half of your head set up a couple of inches above the other half. From the glass frame hung the half of a comb by a string – but if I had to describe that patriarch or die, I believe I would order some sample coffins. It had come down from Esau and Samson, and had been accumulating hair ever since – along with certain impurities. In one corner of the room stood three or four rifles and muskets, together with horns and pouches of ammunition. The station-men wore pantaloons of coarse, country-woven stuff, and into the seat and the inside of the legs were sewed ample additions of buckskin, to do duty in place of leggings, when the man rode horseback – so the pants were half dull blue and half yellow and unspeakably picturesque. The pants were stuffed into the tops of high boots, the heels whereof were armed with great Spanish spurs, whose little iron clogs and chains jingled with every step. The man wore a huge beard and mustachios, an old slouch hat, a blue woolen shirt, no suspenders, no vest, no coat – in a leathern sheath in his belt, a great long “navy” revolver (slung on right side, hammer to the front), and projecting from his boot a horn-handled bowie-knife. The furniture of the hut was neither gorgeous nor much in the way. The rocking-chairs and sofas were not present, and never had been, but they were represented by two three-legged stools, a pine-board bench four feet long, and two empty candle-boxes. The table was a greasy board on stilts, and the table-cloth and napkins had not come – and they were not looking for them, either. A battered tin platter, a knife and fork, and a tin pint cup, were at each man’s place, and the driver had a queens-ware saucer that had seen better days. Of course, this duke sat at the head of the table. There was one isolated piece of table furniture that bore about it a touching air of grandeur in misfortune. This was the caster. It was German silver, and crippled and rusty, but it was so preposterously out of place there that it was suggestive of a tattered exiled king among barbarians, and the majesty of its native position compelled respect even in its degradation. There was only one cruet left, and that was a stopperless, fly-specked, broken-necked thing, with two inches of vinegar in it, and a dozen preserved flies with their heels up and looking sorry they had inves
ted there.
The station-keeper up-ended a disk of last week’s bread, of the shape and size of an old-time cheese, and carved some slabs from it which were as good as Nicholson pavement, and tenderer.
He sliced off a piece of bacon for each man, but only the experienced old hands made out to eat it, for it was condemned army bacon which the United States would not feed to its soldiers in the forts, and the stage company had bought it cheap for the sustenance of their passengers and employees. We may have found this condemned army bacon further out on the Plains than the section I am locating it in, but we found it – there is no gainsaying that.
Then he poured for us a beverage which he called “Slumgullion,” and it is hard to think he was not inspired when he named it. It really pretended to be tea, but there was too much dish-rag, and sand, and old bacon-rind in it to deceive the intelligent traveler. He had no sugar and no milk – not even a spoon to stir the ingredients with.
We could not eat the bread or the meat, nor drink the “Slumgullion.” And when I looked at that melancholy vinegar-cruet, I thought of the anecdote (a very, very old one, even at that day) of the traveler who sat down to a table which had nothing on it but a mackerel and a pot of mustard. He asked the landlord if this was all. The landlord said:
“All! Why, thunder and lightning, I should think there was mackerel enough there for six.”
“But I don’t like mackerel.”
“Oh – then help yourself to the mustard.”
In other days I had considered it a good, a very good, anecdote, but there was a dismal plausibility about it, here, that took all the humor out of it.
Our breakfast was before us, but our teeth were idle.
I tasted and smelt, and said I would take coffee, I believed. The station-boss stopped dead still, and glared at me speechless. At last, when he came to, he turned away and said, as one who communes with himself upon a matter too vast to grasp:
