Agnes Canon's War

by Deborah Lincoln

He stood and walked to the window, his back to her. “I don’t trust the people here, Agnes, I haven’t for months. You know that. Someone named me, and there’s no telling when they’ll do so again. Billy will protect you and Harrie, but not while I’m here.” He turned back to her and smiled that rakish, come-what-may smile that she had loved from the beginning, probably from the moment she’d seen him in the book stall in Cincinnati, certainly from when he’d seized her by the waist and pulled her back from that mule. “So I’ll just head off to the gold fields and relieve a few sick and injured prospectors of their poke.”

  He would, of course. He would doctor them and heal them, and they would pay him well for it, as they had in California, because they valued a skilled medical man above most others in a brand new land. And Agnes and Harrie would wait and worry the winter through without him.

  

  He left three days later, riding Jupiter and leading two good Missouri mules loaded with woolen blankets, changes of clothes, two pairs of sturdy boots, his rubber coat and his heavy coat, the muffler, cap and gloves Agnes had made for him, camping equipment, oats for the animals and food for himself. And his weapons. And of course he took his medical cases and a supply of medicines. He crossed the Missouri River at Forest City, heading for the Platte River road, and Agnes heard nothing of him or from him for two months.

  42

  October 1864

  Jabez stood on a high mountain pass where the Yellowstone River cut through a gap north of the Absaroka Mountain Range. The vista was breathtaking, remote, and primitive. To his right loomed towering sharp peaks, covered in crystalline snow brilliant in the noon sun. To his left, the Big Horn Basin disappeared south into murky blue, patches of pearly grey mist clinging to western slopes betraying a local storm of sleet or snow miles away. He’d spent thirty days on the trail that followed the Big Horn River up the valley, a new road dubbed the Bridger Cutoff after the man who led his party.

  He hadn’t intended to come that way, hadn’t even known about it, when he reached Fort Laramie on the North Platte. The talk there was all about the gold strikes at Last Chance Gulch and the new road John Bozeman had marked out along the east side of the Big Horns, through Sioux hunting territory. It cut four hundred miles off the trip to the mines but that didn’t do a man much good if his scalp was hanging on some warrior’s lance. On the other hand, Jim Bridger was taking trains up the west side of the Big Horns, well away from Sioux country, but the grades were steep, the forage was sparse, the water bad. Jabez wasn’t much interested in tangling with the natives—he shuddered to think what Agnes would say if she knew he’d considered it—and besides, no trains were leaving up the Bozeman road that late in the year. But he did encounter a gentleman by name of Major Owen, returning from the east to his home in the Bitterroot Valley with three freight wagons, who had determined to hook up with Bridger and trail up to the Yellowstone with the old mountain man, building the new road as he went.

  So Jabez had joined his party. They left the Red Buttes area in the middle of September and headed up to Muddy Creek, which lived up to its name. The prospect was not auspicious, as there were dead oxen along the way and the grass had been eaten to stubble by the trains that had passed earlier in the summer. But once they entered the Big Horn drainage, the grass improved, the water was sweeter and they made some time; then the No Wood joined the Big Horn and they were into badlands again. Two of the wagons overturned and had to be abandoned. They laid up to grade road, and they spent hours and days hauling wagons up and down impossible slopes, they chased loose oxen, they rationed flour. They crossed the Wind River and the Grey Bull and the Stinking Water, and by the time they reached the Pryor, Jabez and two other men, all traveling on horseback, were impatient with building roads and muscling wagons, so they bid the others Godspeed and headed for the Yellowstone more rapidly.

  Now he stood on what felt like the rim of the world. Before him spread a valley, broad and rolling, stretching far to the gleam of sun-lit water where a river wound its way through boggy meadows among wavy lines of cottonwood. The deciduous trees glowed yellow, the firs and pines were a deep green blanket. The prairie was covered in ragged patches of snow from an early storm, but the sun was brilliant and warm now, at noon, and promised melt. He reached into his coat pocket for the darkened spectacles he’d carried from home, and mentally patted himself on the back for remembering to protect his eyes.

  His companions had left him two days before to ride ahead, while Jabez rested on the banks of Rock Creek where the Bridger Road met the Bozeman Trail. He was thin, he’d been cold and hungry and thirsty. He missed Agnes and Harrie terribly. Jupiter was scrawny, and the mules were battered and cranky. But as he looked to the mountains, across the valley to the river, up to the immense and searing blue of the sky, an eagle floated lazily on the breeze, and his spirits lifted as they had not for many years. This was what it meant to be alive, every sense alert, every nerve honed. It was what he remembered from his California days, from the months he spent roaming the deserts and high barren mountains of the southwest, what he’d wanted so desperately these last difficult years to know again. He wished Agnes was by his side to see it, to feel it. Soon, he thought. He nudged Jupiter’s protruding ribs, yanked on the mules’ lead rope, and moved onto the downhill trail.

  ***

  Bozeman was three months old when Jabez rode in the third week in October of 1864, but it already consisted of a hotel, two general stores, a saloon and a half-dozen cabins. All were log; some even boasted a floor. The biggest had two rooms. The hotel was a substantial story-and-a-half, and Jabez checked in for his first night under a roof in nearly three months. He had a bath and a whiskey and a hot meal of rare beef, potatoes and onions, and Jupiter and the mules had hay in addition to the last of the oats they’d carried halfway across the continent. There were cheap cigars to be had at Fitz’s store and Jabez lit up, leaned back against the rough interior of the hotel’s common room, and stretched his boots toward the fire. The two men he’d traveled with were dead broke and had gone off to camp on the prairie, and as it turned out he never saw them again, but it was no matter. Companions came and went in that country and rare it was to form lasting friendships, even if you had trusted your life to them just weeks before.

  The men who gathered around the fire for conversation and companionship in the early dark of an autumn night appeared to be locals; not many travelers passed through that time of the year. Jabez sat in his corner and watched the townfolk gather, listened to their talk, recognized the age-old tribal tendency to form hierarchy, to band together in community, to sniff about a stranger with caution. Jabez smiled around his cigar, the outsider looking in, the insiders unaware of how predictable they were.

  But he was enjoying himself and enjoying the conversation. Mostly these men sounded reasonable, some of them educated, all of them practical. There was talk of Bozeman the town and Bozeman the man, the latter apparently a local hero, though there were reservations. The man with intense eyes, high forehead, soft Georgian drawl, was a supporter and promoter of both man and town; the man named Burtsch was not but kept his comments low key and passive. The innkeeper was young, clean shaven and jittery, kept glasses filled and tapped his foot restlessly any time he chanced to come to a standstill. There was a Mexican named Merraville playing chess with a gnomish fellow with a Scots burr; and a gentle-eyed man with a ready smile, a potato farmer, who engaged him right away in a discussion on ranching in the Gallatin Valley.

  That led the conversation around to farming and the opportunities to be made supplying the mining camps with potatoes and vegetables, flour, beef and butter. The winters are hard, the farmer said, the camps isolated when passes filled with snow and the steep grades iced up. Merraville allowed as how flour and forage and fresh vegetables would be scarce and dear well before spring opened up the freighting roads again, and if the Montana Territory were to survive it needed to be self-sufficient.

 
Jabez spent four days in Bozeman, fattening his animals, learning what he could about the ranching land and homesteading opportunities. He discovered there was a doctor in town who’d bought into one of the general stores and didn’t much like the practice of medicine, and that his own skills would be welcomed. As it happened, he was called upon on his second day there to stitch up a gash on the instep of Caleb Fitz’s boy. It would be a good place to sink roots, to raise his son, a good place for Agnes. They could learn together how to farm this country, take what they both knew and adjust it to the needs of the virgin prairie, be a part of a new-born community with the chance for a fresh start, and then to grow old here in the shadow of these magnificent mountains.

  But first he needed to make some money, so on the fifth day he saddled up a rejuvenated Jupiter, packed his mules and headed for the sick and injured prospectors of Virginia City.

  43

  1865

  November rolled in with its rimy winds before Agnes next heard from Jabez, a letter mailed from a place called Bozeman, informing her he had arrived. Then nothing. He haunted the corners of her mind throughout those long winter nights. She lay in bed, wakeful, the drum of rain against the window or the eerie wash of starlight reflected from waves of snow brightening the dark, and wondered whether he slept, if he dreamed of her—if he still lived. News reports mentioned that winter snows descended thick on the plains and in the mountains. Mail to and from the mining camps took months to wend its way along the trails, and she never knew if hers reached him, but she wrote nevertheless, a letter every week. It comforted her to tell him how Harrie grew, when he first smiled, rolled over, lifted his head. When he first hefted himself to hands and knees, made scooting noises, rocked his little body back and forth, wanting to roam, to explore.

  Agnes wrote to him about the big and small happenings in town, how Billy was building a good business selling horses and mules to the army, that Doctor Norman’s son presented him with a grandchild, that Jonas Watson died fighting the federals in Tennessee.

  She wrote to him at great length about her ideas on Lincoln’s reelection, on the emancipation situation, on the political atmosphere of the county and what the newspapers said. She didn’t describe her fears for him, or the doubts she struggled with, whether she should take their small child and embark on a dangerous and lonely journey with the very real prospect that he wouldn’t be waiting for them at the end.

  But finally, the third week of a frigid February, a packet arrived from Virginia City with three letters together with a draft on the bank in Kansas City for three hundred dollars. Agnes read and re-read those letters until the paper wore thin at the creases and she’d memorized every word. He told her about the gold mines, and she was reminded of the letters he’d sent Eliza from California so many years ago. He wrote with vigor and excitement and energy, and she imagined his eyes flashing and his quick grin lighting up his face, the vitality in his step and the assurance in the set of his shoulders. The country captivated him, the variety of humanity fascinated him, and he thrilled at the thought of birthing a new society the way he delivered a new child.

  Agnes, he wrote, you cannot begin to imagine the clarity of the air here, how light and clean it is, the quality of sunlight on rapid rivers, the expanse of prairie and majesty of mountains. He described feasting on antelope and buffalo, fishing for grayling and trout in wide rivers with deep pools so clear the ripples of sand etched along the beds cast shadows. He mentioned the characters he met, the prospects for a civil community where ideas blended and courteous discourse ruled. He referred to the stories of road agents and vigilante justice that filled the eastern papers and assured me the territory was now made decent for families and farmers.

  He was prosperous. I demand payment from miners who I know have a sizeable poke before I provide a medical service, he wrote, and I have come into a goodly share of the treasure that’s being extracted from the gulch. At the same time, he wrote about a family of parentless children whom he had treated for colds and sore throats and the pouch of gold dust he’d slipped to the eldest.

  He filled the longest passages with plans for their family, with his ideas for ranching in the valley of the Gallatin River, raising wheat and vegetables and beef for sale to the mining camps. He sent lists of items to pack along, tools and seeds, household goods, clothing and boots and pans for butter-making and milking, but instructed her not to bring furniture, as the freightage cost more than its worth. He mentioned several ladies in Virginia City had carried sewing machines across the plains and since they proved to be practical, suggested she buy one.

  She bought the sewing machine, a Wheeler and Wilson for which she paid sixty dollars as well as a new butter churn and a plow, disassembled and crated. She gathered barrels of nails and hand tools, a trunk filled with bolts of calico and muslin and wool. She packed her clothes and Harrie’s and the things Jabez left behind, lamps with extra chimneys, paper, pens, pencils, ink. Their precious books, and the contents of his surgery. She made up a box of kitchen utensils, pots and pans and kettles, tucked her precious china in barrels of sawdust and rolled up the parlor rug and wrapped it in canvas.

  She packed Harrie’s clothes and his few toys and worried about how she would keep him safe on the long journey. She was haunted by visions of his tumbling off the deck of the boat or falling from a moving stage or being snatched by the Natives that she’d heard collected at way stations for handouts. But Rose, ever calm, assured her they would both be on guard. “That boy come to no harm, Missus, I promise that,” she said, and Agnes was comforted.

  She sold Juno, Nelly, and the buggy to Billy, along with the house, which he wanted for Rachel. What she didn’t sell, she gave away, and by the first week in March they were ready to leave.

  

  The twelfth of March, eighteen hundred and sixty-five, was Agnes’s last evening in Lick Creek. Elizabeth and Billy left her at dusk at the foot of the trail into the cemetery. She wanted to be alone for this last ceremony. She watched them disappear around the corner in the direction of Nancy’s house, heads inclined toward one another in conversation. The three were brother and sisters, bonded much closer than mere cousins, and her heart wrenched to see them off.

  She climbed the hill, her cloak wrapped against the March chill, and settled on the ground next to Eliza’s grave, where her monument stood watch over Agnes’s children. She pulled from her pocket a letter she had received from Jabez’s father, William, still alive and lonely in Maine, and read aloud. Her voice was quiet, and it seemed even the wind paused its rustling through the trees to listen.

  I hope you will do me the kindness to follow up our correspondence as long as I live, for Jabez is so much engrossed in business that he has not written to me near as often as I think he ought to—

  The old fellow must be nearing eighty. At last count, he’d lost seven children. I’ve lost two, she thought, and wondered if the pain multiplies with each new death.

  He is the only son I have left that I ever expect to hear from. I was much surprised to learn by your letter that Jabez had gone into that country with the intention of settling there where he can promise himself nor his family anything but the roughest kind of a rough life the remainder of his days, and I do hope and pray for his sake and yours, if he lives to return, that he will forever abandon the thought. We are all born to suffer as well as to enjoy, but there is no fatal necessity of our running into trouble with our eyes wide open, and as for escaping trouble by shifting our situation, it is vain, and for you and him to move into that country will be to deprive you both of what little comfort is to be enjoyed in this life.

  “Father William,” she said to Eliza. “I’ve never met him, did you? He’s probably an ornery old soul, maybe a complainer, but I think I’d like him.”

  … if Jabez returns, please say to him that I think he owes me one more visit since it has pleased God to spare my life to such an advanced age, and I shall look
for it.

  “How I wish we might oblige him. But here we are, running into trouble with our eyes wide open. I leave you behind, Eliza, to watch over them for me. Charlie and Sarah Belle. I leave Jabez’s children in your care.”

  44

  They took passage at St. Joseph aboard the Deer Lodge on the fourteenth of March, a gloomy day, the wind sharp out of the northeast. Leafless branches overhung the river, a skim of ice nestled in the shadows along the banks. Agnes watched Dick supervise the stowing of their freight on the lower deck, and she struggled with memories of her trip up the Missouri many years before, with their children and chickens, their baggage and their dreams.

  Now the same river would carry her on the next leg of her journey, and as the sleek sternwheeler swung into the middle of the river and left St. Joseph behind, the throb of the engines matched the throb of the blood in her veins. When they passed Forest City later that afternoon and bid good-bye to Holt County, she had no regrets.

  They stopped in Omaha and Yankton for supplies and struck the first sand bar just above Randall where they stalled for a full day and a half. The captain tried sparring off, a strange operation in which poles are pushed into the river bed and the boat is expected to leap ahead like a one-legged man on crutches, but the project failed, and they simply waited for the river to rise. Which it did, thankfully, when the next evening’s rainfall set the boat afloat once again. The captain informed her that it promised to be an unusually low-water year for the river, and he cheerfully advised her to expect the trip to last an extra month while they negotiated sandbars and the ever-changing channel, dodged snags usually lodged well below the surface, cordelled over rapids normally drowned.