Devil's Backbone: The Modoc War, 1872-3

by Terry C. Johnston

  “He’ll know?”

  “Billy’s been here from the start, almost since water first come down this creek. He’s seen ’em come and seen ’em go—good times and the bad. He been here, Billy will know him.”

  The bartender did know of Sam Marr, as it turned out.

  That Missouri horse-breeder had pushed on north from Fort Phil Kearny in the late spring of 1868, not long before the army pulled all its troops and its tail out of the forts along the Bozeman Road. As Billy told it, Sam came to the area and staked a claim far enough away from the others that many laughed at his foolishness. But Marr ran across a little dust. Not a killing—but enough to keep a man at it.

  Then late this past spring Sam Marr had packed up and rode off north with itchy boots once more, heading for the gold camps up by Jefferson City and Helena.

  Seamus had to roar at that, bringing a look of consternation to the bartender’s face.

  “Ain’t that just like my luck?” Donegan snorted. “I’m a day late and more’n a dollar short following any of these trails—be it following Ian O’Roarke or Sam Marr!”

  But it didn’t deter him from the difficult task of composing two letters to Sam Marr—both of them worded the same, but addressed to different towns. One to Helena and the other posted to Jefferson City. And throughout that miserable winter among new friends in Nevada City, Seamus wrote letters to various towns in southern Ohio—never allowing himself to believe they wouldn’t reach her.

  One … if only one.

  Winter came in and descended on the land with a vengeance. But two or three days after each storm, the sun reappeared and the townspeople were back at it once more—digging out pathways between the shrinking cabins, making long, cavernous trails down the middle of the main street. Having caught up on the snowstorm gossip, each person went back to his or her chores, renewed by the enforced hibernation, no matter how short or long.

  One day, in late winter it was, when the Slavic shopkeeper who also acted as postal agent hailed Seamus over. Donegan slogged across the muddy street, each of his gummy boots weighing as much as a small sack of horseshoes.

  “You’ve a letter, Irishman.”

  “Ohio?”

  The man shook his head, confused by the question, his brow knitting. “No. Helena.”

  Though disappointed, he raised himself to cheer, “By damned, it must be Sam Marr!”

  He looked up from the envelope. “That’s the name on it. Here. Been here for a couple days—and it slipped my mind that it come for you.”

  Seamus was gone, reading and rereading every one of the long, folded pages right out in the winter sun at the edge of the snowdrifts hugging that narrow street where cold melt ran gurgling with a voice all its own, singing of spring come to the high country. It was worth a third read as well, when Donegan plodded off toward a watering hole to have a solitary drink there, sitting with the memory of the faraway Sam Marr.

  Less than a month later a second letter arrived from the old Missourian—coming the morning Seamus loaded the packhorse and rode south for California. Sam was doing well in Helena, operating a livery for a wealthy man, and was overjoyed to learn of the Irishman’s miraculous return to the northern plains after so many planning the end of Mother Donegan’s oldest boy.

  “From what you write me of your battle on Beecher’s Island (and what we here were told by word and print of that bloody siege)—you are blessed indeed, son. Like the rising of the mythic Phoenix from the ashes, you have risen from your grave more than once, Seamus Donegan.”

  He planned to write Sam all the way to California. That would mean a letter from the City of the Saints. Another from somewhere in Nevada, and still another he’d write in Sacramento, where the storekeeper said a man could begin his search for his oldest uncle. Perhaps even a letter from San Francisco, should he get that far west in his search for someone who would remember the name Ian O’Roarke.

  In Utah he paid in dust for a Central Pacific rail ticket that would take him to Sacramento, a ride on those singing iron rails for one long-haired plainsman clear across the great central basin, along with passage for both animals. A marvel it was to travel so quickly, so steadily up and down the mountains and across the great expanse without slowing, halting only infrequently for those line stops where the train took on fuel and water and where the passengers tromped on or off, some travelers taking the opportunity to stand in line to eat at dusty station diners.

  In the half a decade since he had fled the east, Seamus brooded, the east had done everything in its power to thrust itself west. And thrust itself fiercely it had.

  Sacramento was a teeming, throbbing mass of comings and goings, filled with the smell of coal oil and wood smoke, fresh-cut lumber and the earthy dung of draft animals mixed a’tumble with the fragrant sweat of human labor that summer of 1871. He was but two days in town before learning enough of the location of the old gold camps to know he had to work himself east and north again. But ever closer still. First to Placerville, then due north to Nevada City and Downieville in the mountains, where a man might expect to find himself some gold.

  But no answers did he dig out of those hills. Nor shred of a clue. Winter closed down on Donegan in Oroville hard beside the Feather River. He was six weeks stranded there. Already the new year of 1872 had the shine worn off it by the time he could bust his way out of winter’s lock and continue to work his way north. Word had it there were some profitable diggings for a man closer to the Oregon country.

  “If a fella was to ask around Yreka, Horse Creek or Hornbrook,” explained a blacksmith making Seamus an extra fore and back shoes for the long trip, “he just might dredge up something on this man named Ian O’Roarke.”

  “I’m beginning to fear it’s not likely,” the Irishman brooded at the corner of the shop.

  The blacksmith looked up from the hot work over his anvil. Salty sweat stung his blinking eyes. “You’ll not find what it is you’re looking for if you ever give up, mister. But then, I’ll admit—not many a man would go off crossing half the goddamned country looking for one man neither. My hat’s off to you. It takes a special breed of fella to spend so much of his life tailing after a ghost that may not even exist.”

  “He exists, all right,” Seamus protested, feeling nonetheless the blacksmith’s words were driven home with every stinging ring of that hammer colliding with fired steel glowing atop the anvil.

  “Is he alive?” asked the man as he immersed the shoe with a resounding hiss from the oak bucket.

  Donegan had only shaken his head and looked away into the late winter sunshine streaming into the central California valley that day he finally continued north. From gold camp to boomtown and on and on, he made the circuit, pointing his nose always north it seemed. Drawing closer and closer to the border that marked the end of California and the beginning of Oregon country.

  Early that summer the Irishman sat in a tonsorial parlor, wincing each time the local “physician” tugged on the household thread he was using to sew up the ugly laceration on Donegan’s brow where a miner had clubbed him with a broken chair leg in a saloon brawl.

  “What you looking at so close?” he asked the doctor, who, it seemed to Seamus, drew back and stared more at his face after every second or third stitch, more than he was inspecting his handicraft.

  The man shook his head. “I’d swear—but you look the spitting image of someone I knew years ago.”

  Seamus’s big eyebrows lifted as much as his hopes were raised. “Irishman?”

  He nodded and forced the needle through Donegan’s flesh again.

  It did not hurt near as bad now as that first puncture had. “You said years ago … when?”

  The man bit a lip for a moment, concentrating on tugging the two raw edges of the wound together. “’Sixty-five. Yes—going on eight years now. He had just come in from Montana.”

  “Anyone with him?”

  “No, he was traveling alone.”

  There came a sinking feeling—
Ian had family now.

  “Can’t be the man I’m looking for. He has a wife and two children.”

  The physician drew back. His brow knitted, then cleared like a prairie sky after a spring thunderstorm. “Yes. Why, yes! Two small children. Both of them caught their deaths of colds that winter of ’sixty-five … we just about lost the boy.”

  Seamus shoved the man’s hand from his hairline. “What was his name?”

  “Irish, of course. Seems it was O’something.”

  “O’Roarke?”

  “Could be. Sounds—”

  “Ian?”

  “Yes—as a matter of fact.” Now the man took a good, long, and appraising look. “You’re related, ain’t you?”

  “If it’s Ian O’Roarke, we are.” He fidgeted, ready to get out of the chair. “You finished on me yet?”

  “Two more … no, we’ll make this the last one. Sorry, I know that one pulled.”

  When he had snipped the ends of the thread and handed the scissors to his wife, the physician held the lamp up close to inspect his work.

  “Where can I find O’Roarke? He prospecting outside of town?”

  Seamus watched the way the man glanced at his wife. She hurriedly took her sewing kit and left the room.

  “Lord, he don’t work a claim no more,” the man answered quietly. “O’Roarke gave that up after them children got sick and nearly died. Him and the woman told us they were pulling out—going to make a change in things.”

  Donegan felt all the hope sink in him like the foam on a beer gone flat. “They’ve gone?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid.”

  “Not around here?”

  “Last I heard of O’Roarke—he was not far north. Up in Oregon. Not far over the line. Place called Linkville.”

  “What’s a man like O’Roarke doing there?”

  “He lives out from town some, south from Linkville.”

  “What’s he do?”

  “Raises a few cows, I understand. Grows some crops.”

  Seamus had to smile, remembering Eire. It was like the O’Roarkes, it was. They were farmers—connected to the soil as surely as a newborn is still connected to its mother by the umbilicus. The O’Roarkes, clinging to the rich, loamy land still.

  He stuffed a hand down in his pocket and pulled out a small pouch of dust. “How much I owe you.”

  “Ten dollars worth sound all right?” the physician replied, dragging up a small scale he used to weigh the gold dust paid for his myriad services. “You could use a hair-cut.”

  “You’ll leave this long hair alone today,” he replied, digging open the top of the pouch. “But you’ve done more than ten dollars worth to this ruddy head of mine, you have. Here, make that fifteen for your help.”

  “He’ll be glad to see you, Ian will?”

  The question stopped Seamus at the door, his hand on the brass knob. “I don’t know. The last time we laid eyes on each other, I was but a wee lad in Ireland. And he was setting sail for Amerikay.”

  The man pursed his lips, patting his vest pockets, in search of an old pipe. He cleared his throat nervously. “Then I wish you well … if you find this the end of your search for Ian O’Roarke.”

  * * *

  She was a troublesome cow, this one—but the big, brooding Irish farmer felt he understood her. If he could live these past dozen years with sweet, unpredictable Dimity—then Ian O’Roarke felt he could get along with anyone.

  Not that she was the first woman he had ever loved. Just that more than anything, he wanted Dimity to be the last.

  “Sweet-sweet. Sweet-sweet.”

  The homely man with the rugged, angular face coaxed and prodded the cow back into the stall where he could examine her. She didn’t like it any more than he did, this process of lifting her tail and easing nearly the length of his entire arm inside her. But there was no easy cure for the colic, and once a cow went down with it—likely she would never get back on her feet again. And he would have to put her down for good.

  Life had been like that for him—pure colicky—until he found something to hold onto. And that was back there a dozen years in Cripple Creek when he fell madly, passionately, no-two-ways-of-Sunday in love with Dimity. She was hardly a month over eighteen when he killed a man for her and left his brother behind.

  Just about the hardest thing Ian had ever done, besides saying farewell to the land of his birth and setting off for Amerikay with brother Liam. Seeing the look on the face of his sister and the other family all huddled at the landing as the big ship eased into the wind.

  No turning back.

  But there in that Cripple Creek street he had come to the decision to leave everything that was behind—and grab onto everything that could be.

  At least all that he hoped it would be with Dimity.

  Patience had been born in Colorado Territory that first year after fleeing Cripple Creek and turning his back on Liam. Little Seamus came along almost two years later during their first winter in the Montana diggings. Whereas Dimity had named their daughter, Ian claimed right to name his firstborn son—especially a lad who so looked like O’Roarke’s nephew.

  … Perhaps it had been his nephew Seamus after all, the one who was asking up to town after Ian O’Roarke, he thought to himself, his mind torn from the work at hand.

  Ian was all bone and sinew. Tall to be sure, but nowhere with the weight of his brother Liam. And the thought of his younger brother always weighed heavily on the dark-haired Ian O’Roarke.

  His neighbors in this part of the country had been up to Linkville over the past two days. Friends John Fairchild and Pressley Dorris had gone into town for supplies and any news on the growing concern with the nearby Modocs living off their reservation, squatting along their old tribal grounds of Lost River … when the two were introduced to a tall, big-boned fella who had been making himself a nuisance asking the whereabouts of Ian O’Roarke.

  “You catch his name?” Ian inquired of his neighbors when they came out to report the chance meeting in Linkville.

  “Donegan.”

  “Seamus, it is,” he replied, his eyes lighting up.

  “You know him then?” John Fairchild asked.

  “He’s my nephew. The lad was the namesake for my firstborn son.”

  Pressley Dorris nodded. “I figure he’ll be along in a few days. Not everyone going to keep as quiet about you as we did, Ian.”

  Ian had nodded. “Seamus got this far on my trail—he won’t be long coming these last few miles, I suspect.”

  “We weren’t so sure you’d want him—”

  “That’s all right, John. It’s time … time we talked, this nephew and me.”

  After Fairchild and Dorris pulled away without ever dropping from their saddles, continuing on down the road to their own ranches of tilled ground and cattle pasture, O’Roarke put on his oldest pair of patched britches, pulling on his worn boots before he tromped across the rich-smelling mud to the log barn where the cow was enduring her pain noisily. With a strong but gentle touch, he had set to work on the animal, thinking back to the tall, raw-boned youth with smooth cheeks he had last seen standing at the edge of the crowded pier—the boy’s arm clutched fiercely about Ian’s sister.

  It made him think once more of his brother Liam and the years they spent roaming this terrible and exciting new land of Amerikay. Together as more than brothers—wandering souls each day more like true friends … wandering happy until Cripple Creek and those terrible words spoken like spilled whiskey between them that neither one would swallow and take back.

  Brother Liam—would that he ever see him again, Ian prayed.

  Little Liam was born on the road to Oregon from Yreka after the awful, gray winter when they nearly lost Patience and Seamus. Then better than two years later in 1867 another daughter was born, named Charity. Finally, two years after her, the baby was born—Thomas, named after Dimity’s father.

  That never failed to raise some sort of dark chuckle in Ian, recalling how set-foot
ed Dimity was about naming the boy Thomas, after the man who had sold his own flesh and blood to a miner who had enough twenty-dollar gold pieces to buy her.

  But set-footed Dimity was about it. And Thomas their youngest was named. So long had it been since she had been sold by her father that perhaps she had forgotten the venal brutality of the man.

  “Just perhaps, Ian O’Roarke,” he said to himself as he stroked the cow’s flanks, her tail whipping hard against his ribs, “time is indeed the healer the priests and holy-ones say it is.”

  Five children across their first eight-odd years together. Traveling in search of the pot of gold the brothers O’Roarke had come west to find.

  In the end realizing his wealth did not come of shiny metal or hoarded riches.

  So it was each evening Ian O’Roarke spoke his own private prayer as his family gathered around its table for supper.

  It was in their eyes and smiles and the love that he felt from this new family that each day convinced the aging Irishman that he had truly found his fortune.

  So rich were his blessings that he realized this life was all he had ever wanted, and surely more than he figured he would ever deserve.

  Chapter 3

  November 28, 1872

  “More coffee?”

  Seamus looked up at the rose-cheeked woman, reminded of his mother’s ruddy face as she would kneel over some steaming pot hung from the trivet at the fireplace. He figured his mother must now be about the age of the woman who stood at his elbow.

  “One more cup of your coffee would do nicely, thank you.”

  She poured, then left him to himself at the tiny table where he sat in the gloomy, autumn afternoon light straining through the glass window that looked out on the muddy street of Linkville, Oregon.

  This unpretentious settlement of square storefronts surrounded by an ungainly assortment of rough-hewn cabins had arisen years ago on the east bank of the Link River, close by the southern tip of Lower Klamath Lake, to serve the commercial needs of a growing number of white settlers moving into what had once been Modoc tribal lands.

  Most of those who came to trade in town of late were now of one mind: raising enough ruckus with the government so that officials would forcibly remove the Modocs from their Lost River camps where they had been squatting for some years now. The time had come for action.