Absaroka Ambush

by William W. Johnstone

  Preacher sat his horse off to one side and watched the wagons roll by. Blackjack had taken the point, Snake and Rupert the flanks, and Steals Pony was far out in front, scouting. Preacher wanted to hang back aways, just to see who might be trying to sneak up or following from a distance.

  By mid-afternoon, he was fairly certain those they had set free were not following, and he’d bet that Bedell and his mangy crew had gone on west to link up with his other men.

  Preacher knew that he’d meet up with Bedell again. And he also knew that these women would never allow themselves to be taken alive. He had had more than one tell him they never really knew what the phrase ’shoot first and ask questions later’ meant. They did now. And any band of Indians who felt this train would be an easy mark were going to be in for a very brutal, and for many, a very fatal surprise.

  In a few days, the trail was going to get leaner and meaner and in many spots, the going would be slowed.

  Preacher sat his saddle for several minutes, just content to look at the land that rose and fell all around him. A feeling, sort of a sadness, came over him that after this journey, it would never be the same. Oh, the land would be here for thousands of years after his bones had turned to dust, he knew that. But ... in a strange way, it would not. With the coming of the white man, it would all change. Already it was changing. Although Preacher did not know it, he was already fast becoming an anachronism. As was Steals Pony, Snake, and Blackjack. Their time had come, and it had gone.

  Preacher took off his hat and ran his fingers through his thick shock of hair. He wondered what this country would be like fifty years down the trail. Houses, farms, fences, probably. The buffalo would be gone, and so would the free-roaming Indians. Back east, they’d already been put in reservations and left to rot.

  “Wait ’til the Army tries to do that with the Plains’ Injuns,” he muttered. “They’ll find that’s easier to say than do.”

  He turned his horse and headed back to the wagons, reaching them just as they had finished circling for the night’s camp and were seeing to the mules, horses, and oxen.

  Blackjack and the other mountain men, Rupert included, had them a little fire going off to one side and the coffee was near to boilin’. Steals Pony had killed a buffalo that afternoon and they would have fresh steaks and the tongue for their evening meal. Since the kill had been made close to the wagons, he had been able to salvage all parts of the buffalo and had even given the hide to a lady to scrape.

  She had promptly given it right back.

  “Behaved as though it insulted her,” Steals Pony groused. “It’s a fine skin and would make a wonderful robe. I thought I was doing her a favor. I have discovered that white women are very strange.”

  “Where’s the skin?” Preacher asked, a twinkle in his eyes.

  “Right over there,” Steals Pony pointed.

  Blackjack looked at him. “What are you gonna do, Preacher? You got a funny twink in your eyes.”

  “Have me some fun.”

  Preacher got the dullest knife he had out of his pack and then shouldered the heavy skin and located Faith, sitting with Eudora and Wallis. He plopped the skin down beside her and she immediately wrinkled her pretty little nose.

  “Get that disgusting thing away from me!”

  “Scrape it,” Preacher told her.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said scrape it for me. Make me a fine robe. It’ll be cold time we get to the mountains. You might want to snuggle up in there with me.”

  “What!” she shrieked.

  “You heard me.” He tossed the knife on the ground beside her. “Use that an’ be careful. Don’t punch through the hide.”

  Eudora had to turn her head away to hide her laughter. She knew there was something building between Faith and Preacher. She’d seen that way back in Missouri.

  “Scrape all the scraps of meat and fat offen that and then I’ll be back and show you what to do next. It’ll take you about a week, I ’magine.”

  “This thing still has fleas on it!” Faith yelled, kicking at the robe.

  “They’ll leave. They just ain’t realized their home is dead. Get to work, woman.”

  “I most certainly will not! Scrape your own damn buffalo hide.”

  “I thought you liked me.” Preacher did his best to look hurt.

  Faith picked up the knife and slowly rose to her feet. She advanced menacingly toward Preacher. He beat a hasty retreat, calling over his shoulder, “I’ll be back for my robe in about a week, dear.”

  “Dear!” Faith shrieked. She threw the knife at him and just missed a laughing Steals Pony. Faith took a step backward and her foot snagged on the buffalo hide. She sat down right in the middle of the hide and did a fairly respectable job of cussing.

  Back at their fire, Steals Pony speared himself a hunk of buffalo steak and said, “I say again, white women are very, very strange.”

  “Somebody help me drag this stinking damn thing off and burn it!” the voice of Faith could be clearly heard throughout the circled wagons.

  The wagons rolled on, now taking a northwesterly route, and still following the Platte. Indians were spotted several times, but they made no hostile moves and the westward movers did the same.

  “Dakota,” Blackjack said to the women driving the wagon beside which he was riding. “Sioux to you. All kinds of Sioux.”

  “I’ve read they are fierce,” Maude said.

  “You read right. The Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Blackfoot, the Arapaho ... they can be right hostile if they take a mind to it.”

  “Why don’t they attack?”

  “That’s a question that only an Injun could answer. They’s been times when I rid right past an Injun village and they didn’t do nothin’ ’cept look at me. Other times they’ve chased me for miles, hollerin’ and yellin’ and shootin’ arrows at me. They’s a notional bunch for a fact. Them over yonder might be lookin’ for Crow. They don’t like each other much.”

  “Why?”

  “Damned if I know. Probably goes back five hundred years. I’ve heared a dozen different reasons for the feud.

  “If the white would only treat them with respect, they could reason with and live with these Plains Injuns. But the white man won’t treat an Injun as equal. White man is arrogant. To a white man, if it’s different, it’s wrong. And that’s why all the trouble. It’s got to be the white man’s way, or no way.”

  Blackjack rode on ahead and Steals Pony rode up. “Is it difficult being a part of two cultures, Steals Pony?” Agnes asked the Delaware.

  “Not for me,” the Indian replied. “I just take the best of both worlds and reject what’s left.”

  “But you’re educated. That makes a difference.”

  “True. In many cases. But you would be surprised at the number of whites who don’t even know me, but resent, fear, and reject me just because I am Indian.”

  “Well, you will have to admit, there aren’t that many Indians living in Boston or New York.”

  Steals Pony smiled and cut his eyes to her. “You would be surprised how many are there, lady. They just cut their hair and adopt the language, dress, and customs of the white man. It is a white man’s world. It doesn’t make a bit of difference if, as in this situation, where you are few and the Indian is many, it is still a white man’s world and it always will be. Whether you be a red man or a black man or a yellow man, if you wish to get along, you must adopt the white man’s ways, or there will always be trouble. That is something the Indian must accept, or the whites will destroy him.”

  “You don’t sound at all bitter about that.”

  “Oh, I’m not. Often amused, but never bitter. One changes with the whims of the white man. That is the way it shall be. Resist that, and one becomes an outsider and is shunned.”

  “Will the savages ever learn that?” Maude asked.

  The Delaware smiled at the term ’savages,’ but knew she meant no disrespect toward him. “No.” He frowned. “Well, doubtf
ul, at best. And in an ever-changing climate, to cling to old ways that are suspicious, out-of-step, or seemingly hostile to those in power is a very stupid thing to do. One must constantly adapt. There will be much blood spilled before the white man settles the west.”

  “The blood of both the Indians and the whites,” Agnes said.

  “Yes. But much more red blood than white blood. One of the reasons so many tribes hate the Crow is because the Crow learned very quickly that to fight the white man was foolish. The Crow decided to work with the white man. A very smart move on their part. But you wait and see. The white man will still stick the Crow on reservations. They will not allow them to become a part of their society. My words will be truth. You wait and see.”

  “There is talk back east of freeing the slaves held in the south.”

  “They will be freed. Someday. Slavery is wrong. No man has the right to own another human being. But unless the black people adopt the white man’s ways, they will be like the Indians, free to a point. But never totally free, never totally accepted.”

  “You are quite the philosopher, Steals Pony,” Agnes said.

  “I am a realist, lady. I do not stand in a meadow and shout at the lightning or curse at the wind and the rain. If I chose to live back east, I would cut my hair, dress in a suit, speak the white man’s language, and be polite to those around me. I would be accepted. I have done so before. That does not mean I would lose my heritage. That would be impossible. A red man is a red man and a black man is a black man and a white man is ... well, who knows what a white man is? The whites don’t even know who they are. But they know what they are. They make the laws and they rule. They always will.”

  The Delaware smiled. “I know how to sit properly and balance a teacup on my knee without spilling a drop and eat little cakes and cookies and wipe my mouth with a napkin. I also know how to stalk and kill a man, take scalps, skin a deer or a buffalo, and survive out here. I have not lost my heritage. I shall never lose my heritage. How can you lose what you are born to be? But I shall always adapt and therefore I shall always be accepted by those whose opinions matter.”

  “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”

  “Exactly,” Steals Pony said. “The alternative—as the Indians and any other racial group who chooses to violently confront the whites will discover—is being fed to the lions.”

  Five

  The wagons rolled sixty miles over the next four days with not a single mishap. When they bedded down for the night, many of the women were complaining of nausea, restlessness, and aching in their bones.

  “Do you suppose? ...” Rupert trailed that off.

  “No,” Preacher said. “Some of the women who were not touched by the trash are sick, too. I don’t know what it is. But I got a bad feeling about this.”

  Steals Pony walked up. “Linda Parsons and Katie what’s-her-name are burning up with fever.” He squatted down and poured a cup of coffee. “And both women have spots on their upper body.”

  “Oh, damn!” Blackjack said.

  “I don’t think it’s typhoid,” the Delaware said. “The spots are larger and look different.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what it is. The whites have many diseases that are unknown to the Indian.”

  The men looked at one another and then without a word, quickly stripped down to the waist. Rupert could not help but notice that Preacher was a ruggedly built man, lean-hipped and with tremendous power in his arms and shoulders. They inspected each other. No spots.

  “Whatever it is,” Snake opined. “I’ll bet you a gold eagle we’ll be right here for a week or better.”

  “I won’t argue that bet,” Preacher said.

  The next morning, most of the women were so sick they had trouble raising their heads.

  Eudora, Faith, April, Lisette, and a few others were not affected by the malady, and they gathered with the men in the coolness of dawn.

  “Any of you women got any notion what this is?” Preacher asked.

  They shook their heads. Eudora said, “It looks like typhoid. And has many of the same symptoms, but I’m sure it isn’t that.”

  “How, Miss Hempstead?” Rupert asked.

  “There are no signs of diarrhea, coughing, nosebleeds, or constipation. Some women have fever, some don’t. This is not typhoid.”

  “But we have some awfully sick women on our hands,” Faith said.

  “We have one that isn’t sick anymore,” Claire Goodfellow said, walking up.

  They all looked up at her.

  “Tessie Malone just died.”

  Preacher took charge immediately. “Strip her and burn her clothing and blankets. Wrap her in canvas and bury her away from this camp. Get movin’, damnit! We got a plague on our hands.”

  Four more women died within the hour. Preacher ordered every kettle hung over a fire and to get a lot of water boiling. Every stitch of clothing in the wagons was boiled. Every blanket, every cloth was sanitized in the boiling water. Preacher ordered the canvas taken down from every wagon and boiled. Every wagon was emptied of its cargo and the beds scrubbed down. The mules and oxen were bathed with strong soap. They all seemed to enjoy the new attention.

  The men didn’t like doing it, but there were so few women still able to stand, that they had to strip many a woman that day, bathe her, and wash her hair. Most of them soon found that they could detach themselves from their task and just get it done without undue embarrassment.

  “If you get tired, stop and rest,” Preacher told everybody. “Don’t let your body get run-down.”

  Preacher sent the Delaware out for herbs to crush, combine, and make into a syrup that could be drunk. He didn’t know if that would do any good, but it damn sure couldn’t hurt nothing.

  “This has to be the cleanest bunch of trailsme ... ah, trails-peoples I ever seen,” Blackjack observed much later on that day when the men were stretched out wearily on the ground, eating supper and drinking coffee. “I know I’m damn shore cleaner than the day I was birthed.”

  All the men were cleaner than they’d been since the trip began. They had scrubbed with strong soap, cut their hair and beards, and washed good, and then had boiled their clothing. They had discarded their buckskins and were now dressed in homespun. At least somebody spun it, Preacher reckoned.

  Faith came up and joined them, sitting down on the ground beside Preacher with a tired sigh.

  “You get anything to eat?” he asked.

  “I’m too tired.”

  “No, you ain’t. You got to eat. Go without vittles at a time like this and your body gets weak and then you’ll get sick like them others over yonder.” He dished up a tin plate of stew, tore off a hunk of frying pan bread and handed it to her. “Now, eat. Steals Pony made up an Injun puddin’ that’s tasty. But eat this stew first.”

  She took the plate and soon found that to her surprise, she was famished. She ate another plateful and a goodly portion of Steals Pony’s puddin’. “This is delicious. What’s in it?”

  “Don’t ask,” Steals Pony urged her.

  She took the warning to heart and didn’t. But she ate all the puddin’.

  Twelve women died over the next several days. Then those who had made it through the worst began to slowly recover. They asked what had made them sick? What disease had befallen them?

  No one could tell them anything because no one knew. Just be glad you made it and get well.

  “Be a lot more graves ’fore the west gets settled,” Preacher said, resting on his shovel for a moment in the graveyard beside the trail.

  “Amen, brother,” Blackjack said. “Amen.”

  Preacher was right in his dire prediction. Years later, when the great movement west had abated, experts began theorizing that there had been one grave dug every eighty to one hundred yards between Missouri and the Willamette valley. And many times whole families, six or seven people, were buried in the same shallow pit. So there is really no way to judge how many people died on the Oregon, Mormon, and California trail
s. Hundreds, certainly. Thousands, probably.

  At the wagons, Preacher and the others could only guess as to why none of the men and some of the women were not at all affected by the strange disease, while others were incapacitated for days, and still others succumbed to it. And it was just as baffling as to why once the malady had run its course, the women, just hours past were so sick they could not raise their heads, were now getting to their feet so quickly.

  “It’s a miracle,” one woman exclaimed. “God’s work surely.”

  Preacher didn’t know about that. He was just glad it was all over. He lifted his eyes Heavenward. “Thank you,” he muttered. “Stay with us, won’t You?”

  “Who you talkin’ to, Preach?” Snake asked.

  “God.”

  “He reply?”

  “We’re alive, ain’t we?”

  “You do have a point.”

  Steals Pony then said, “I think the women will be fully recovered and ready to travel in another two days.”

  Preacher nodded his head in agreement. “We haven’t lost much time. Even when the women was kidnapped, the wagons still kept on west. But we damn well better be over them mountains ’fore the snow flies.”

  “Where do we take them across the Platte?” Blackjack asked.

  “I give that some thought. It’s been fairly dry this year. River ought to be low enough to make crossin’ pretty easy. We’ll stay south ’til we get up to the Buttes. Then we got to cut south and cross the Sweetwater. We’ll stay north of the basin and head for the Green. We’ll see how the cutoff looks when we get there.” He smiled. “I figure ten days to two weeks and we’ll hit the Laramies. Then these ladies will really see what they got themselves into.”

  “And so will we,” Steals Pony said solemnly.

  “Chimney Rock, ladies,” Preacher said, swinging down from the saddle and using his hat to slap the dust from his clothing.

  Dry. Awful dry. But to Preacher’s way of thinking, that was better than mud and slow going.