West of Washoe

by Tim Champlin

  Without further incident, the stage rolled into Strawberry Valley station at dusk. The four bodies and the bullet-riddled stage caused a stir among even the hardened teamsters and miners who’d stopped to lodge at the three-story inn. The stationkeeper, John Barry, ordered the dead hauled to a storage room at the rear. He announced the remains would be shipped back to Virginia City on the next eastbound freight wagon, or stage, at Wells, Fargo expense.

  After a short supper and a change of teams, the driver, new shotgun guard, two outriders, and most of the passengers, running more than an hour behind schedule, would continue on to Placerville. During supper, the dining room was abuzz with conversation about the attempted robbery.

  Both women passengers and one of the men decided they’d had enough for one trip and elected to remain at the Strawberry Valley station overnight. Since the lodge was nearly full, Barry gave the last available room to the women—a cubbyhole under the eaves on the third floor, while Ross and the other male passenger would be relegated to the floor of a storage room off the dining hall.

  Still feeling queasy, Ross avoided the noisy company at the dining tables and went into the barroom for a beer to settle his nerves and stomach. Other men filtered into the bar and Ross overheard snatches of conversation about the hold-up. It was mostly garbled facts they’d culled on the fly from those who’d gone on with the stage.

  Two red-shirted men leaned on the polished mahogany a few feet away.

  “Say, mister, your name Ross?” the younger of the two asked.

  Ross cringed inwardly. “That’s right.”

  “Hear tell you blasted hell outta them road agents,” the taller man said.

  “Who said that?” Ross was startled out of his lethargy.

  The taller man yanked a thumb over his shoulder. “Those two women passengers and that chubby gent with them. Said it hadn’t been for you, those robbers would’ve killed more of you and gotten away with the treasure boxes, too.”

  Ross twisted to look over his shoulder at the man and the two women. “Well, it wasn’t quite like that.”

  He hoped these two would get discouraged and leave. He was in no mood to be sociable.

  “We got the blow by blow of what happened, and they say you’re a hero,” the younger man insisted. “Saved their lives when you shot that fella inside the stage.”

  “I was just trying to save myself,” Ross said.

  “I’d be proud to buy you a drink, Mister Ross.”

  “The name is Gil.”

  “Barkeep, another of whatever Gil is drinking.”

  A foaming pint was slid down the bar.

  “Gents, I appreciate this, sure enough,” Ross said, “but I’m no hero. I was just fighting like the driver and guards. Those five robbers had us cold, from front and back and inside the coach. And the road was blocked with a tree. If anybody deserves credit, it was those two outriders who came up, shooting.” Ross didn’t know what the passengers had told these men, but he might as well tell the facts of what happened from his own perspective. “Once the outriders opened fire and killed one of the robbers, the others were distracted. The two masked men up front jumped for cover in the trees to avoid rifle fire from the rear. Then the two guards, the driver, and I saw our chance to put up a fight.”

  “One of those ladies said you stuck your gun in the coach window and shot the man who’d been holding them at gunpoint. Then she fainted and didn’t know nothing else until she come to after the fight was over. She said that was the most courageous thing she’d ever seen, what with that robber trying to shoot through the roof and all.”

  Ross glanced toward the three at a table just inside the door. The younger, more attractive of the two women, smiled at him. He turned back to the bar. Now wasn’t the time. “Look, gents, I’ll give a report on all this to Wells, Fargo, but right now I’m really tired and I want to go clean up and get this ear tended to.”

  “Yeah, you got bloodied up some,” the taller man said admiringly. “Are you a company guard, too?”

  “No. Just a passenger.” He started to urge them to split the untouched beer in front of him, but then thought better of it. In this country, some men who bought drinks took it as a deadly insult if a stranger refused their hospitality. And he wanted no more conflict just now. He finished his first beer and started on the second.

  “Tell us how it happened, Gil. Give us the details,” the younger man urged.

  Since he was drinking on them, Ross thought he’d better oblige. He didn’t want to go over it again, but he’d been replaying the details in his mind ever since it had happened anyway.

  “All right, just this once. Then I have to go.” He started at the beginning of the trip and gave them a somewhat abbreviated summary of the attempted hold-up, downplaying his own role. “And that’s about it, gents.” He drained his glass. “No more to tell. Now I’ve got to go. Thanks for the beer.” He slid away from the bar feeling full and gaseous after two pints on an empty stomach. He wondered if he should have gone on to Placerville where he could have easily found a hotel room for the night. But he felt a need to get back to Virginia City as soon as possible.

  He found John Barry, who was overseeing the kitchen help, and inquired about some soap and water.

  “You need more than that,” Barry said, glancing at the dried blood on his head and coat. “Set you down over there, and I’ll fetch my wife, Edith. She’ll fix you right up.”

  And Edith did fix him up. She gently washed his head with warm water and, using linen thread and a small needle, took two stitches to close the wound in Ross’s earlobe. “You’ll be a might shorter on that side now,” she said, putting away her sewing kit.

  “Nothing about me is symmetrical, anyhow.” He smiled.

  “You’ll want to snip those threads and pull them out in a few days,” she added, as if her duties as hostess had included sewing up more wounds than hems or buttons on shirts.

  He thanked her profusely. Then he borrowed a blanket. After a trip to the outhouse, he returned to fashion a nest for himself in a corner of the storeroom behind buckets and brooms where he wouldn’t be stepped on.

  The next morning his upset stomach was gone and his appetite was back, making the soft May morning even more lovely. He was among the first to belly up to the dining table. A half hour later, he came away pleasantly stuffed with flapjacks, maple syrup, and sausages washed down with three cups of coffee.

  John Barry, who functioned as a Wells, Fargo agent on an as-needed basis, cashed in the unused portion of his ticket.

  The first eastbound stage rolled in on schedule at 8:20 a.m. With only four passengers inside, it was not as heavily loaded and had room on top for the four stiffened corpses. No spare wood was available for coffins, so the bodies were tightly wrapped in canvas and bound to the top of the coach. The driver was a stranger to Ross, but wore the usual Wells, Fargo white linen duster. A small, taciturn man, he looked a bit sour when told he’d be carrying four dead passengers the rest of the way to Virginia City.

  The trip back to Virginia City was uneventful, and the stage rolled to a stop in front of the Wells, Fargo agency at 3:30 that afternoon. Ross stepped down, wincing at the pain in his bruised heel.

  He headed straight for The Territorial Enterprise, two doors away, and found Martin Scrivener just starting his workday.

  “You back already? Wasn’t expecting you until at least tomorrow night.” He glanced sharply at Ross’s damaged ear and spots of dried blood on his coat. “Looks as if Angeline’s report was right about a hold-up.”

  “You might say so.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Ross hooked up a chair with his foot and sat down by the editor’s desk. “The driver of the stage I just came in on is hauling four bodies and has the tale second-hand. But if you want a first-hand account, get out your pencil.”

  Ross told Scrivener the entire story. The editor asked a couple of questions to clarify some minor points, then sat for a long, thoughtful mome
nt. “Anybody else come back on that stage with you who was there when it happened?”

  “No.”

  “Then we got an exclusive. The telegraph wire hasn’t been stretched to this town yet. This is almost worth getting out an extra edition.” He paused, rubbing his goatee. “No, I think not. We don’t want these robbers…Holladay, Tuttle, and Fossett included…to get the idea they’re important enough to warrant an extra. Our early morning headline will still be an exclusive. I’ll have room if I bump out that two week-old war news.”

  Ross rose. “Reckon I’ll go soak in a hot tub at the bathhouse, and then get some sleep. If you need me, I’ll be at our boarding house.”

  On his way down the street, Ross hardly noticed the normal daily uproar in the saloons he passed. He’d become inured to the loud talk, the hoarse swearing, crashing glass, hurdy-gurdy music, blasts of gunfire, along with the cheerful musical wheeze of the organgrinder’s box, and the monotonous rumble of the stamp mills in the distance. Grimly he reflected he now fit in with all these worst dregs of humanity because “he’d killed his man.” Often that expression had fallen on his ears since his arrival here, spoken as if it were a badge of honor, a pass into hell’s membership club. He was one of them now. The realization made him feel queasy all over again, and somehow dirty, as if he’d committed some unpardonable sin, which forever separated him from decent human society.

  With an effort, he thrust the thought aside. What was done was done. The men were dead and couldn’t be brought back. Besides, he himself might be the one lying in the undertaker’s parlor if that bandit’s shots through the coach roof had been accurate—or lucky. So much of life was determined by luck. Some didn’t consider it luck or happenstance at all. A few of his acquaintances believed everything that happened was foreordained. To Ross’s way of thinking, that denied the existence of free will, in which he was a firm believer. God, in His infinite knowledge, knew the future, Ross reasoned, so He was aware of what any man’s choices were going to be. Yet, for Ross, the Almighty compelled no one’s actions. If any man wanted to send himself to perdition, he had to work at getting there. He couldn’t count on divine help.

  Before he realized it, his ruminations and wayward feet had carried him past his favorite Chinese bathhouse.

  An hour later, wrinkled and clean, he went on to his boarding house, and began to write up his first-hand account of his experiences on the Washoe Express. Besides the dry report he was composing, he also kept a journal into which he poured all factual details, impressions, descriptions, and characters. By the time he left this place, he could, by selecting, rearranging, and polishing, have a book he felt would sell anywhere in the country. Easterners would be fascinated to read about the Wild West, even though he might have to tone down the reality of Washoe to make it credible to readers who hadn’t experienced it in person.

  A week rolled past rather quietly. Everyone, it seemed to Ross, was resting, gathering strength for the next crisis or onslaught, or whatever was to come in the drama in which he’d become a player. The Territorial Enterprise had run the story describing Ross’s harrowing ordeal in the Blue Hole Mine, and his finding of the ore salted with gold flecks. There was no apparent reaction to the piece. To the average citizen, corruption and fraud were a daily occurrence to be ignored as commonplace. The attempt on Ross’s life was likewise nothing to remark about, given the frequency of more direct methods of murder. The article relating the details of the foiled hold-up of the Washoe Express, except for the number of men killed, was also routine. It was considered a dull week if at least five or six hold-ups were not reported.

  Lacking identification in their pockets, the three dead robbers were placed in open wooden boxes and stood up in the window of a hardware store with a sign reading:

  DO YOU KNOW THESE MEN?

  In the two days the corpses faced C Street, no one came forward to identify them. The hardware owner and the local police began to assume the men were strangers in town. The police chief, Amos McClanahan, thought it very curious not one of the three carried a billfold, or any money, or a receipt of some kind. The fat man had a blue bandanna in his pocket, but that was all. It was almost as if the men were being purposely incognito, in the event they were killed or captured.

  In the warm weather, the odor of decomposing bodies began to offend customers of the hardware, so Chief McClanahan paid a photographer to record images of the deceased on wet-plate negatives. Then the city hired an undertaker to bury the three in paupers’ graves just outside the fenced city cemetery.

  The town council, more in the order of tying up loose ends and showing the outside world Virginia City was, indeed, a civilized place, offered a reward of $10 for each of the dead men who could be identified. This incentive worked. A day after the three were buried, two men who worked as swampers in the Knock-Em-Stiff Saloon hesitantly came forward to inspect the photographs in the police chief’s office. They agreed the names of the men were “Red” and Cyrus, and the fat man Ross had shot was a gambler and gunman known to the local outlaw element as “Bilious” Vance. The pair making the identification didn’t know two of the given names, but it was good enough to claim the reward, as the police weren’t particular and would now have something to carve into the wooden markers.

  The shotgun guard who’d been killed in defense of the stage was another story. Jim Sessions was known and loved by many in the town as a brave and honest man, as well as a good friend to all. Hats were passed in many saloons for donations to his widow. Several thousand dollars in silver and gold were collected to add to the Wells, Fargo award. Sessions’s body was carried to its resting place in a stylish black, glass-sided hearse pulled by four plumed horses. Hundreds joined the funeral procession that blocked traffic on C Street as it wound its way to the city cemetery where a graveside service was held.

  After Sessions’s funeral, Crawford, the young Wells, Fargo agent, sought out Ross and offered him $100 for his role in thwarting the hold-up. Embarrassed, and publicity-shy, Ross declined. “First of all, I don’t want to become a target for revenge by drawing attention to myself,” he told the agent. “But most important, as a government employee, I’m not allowed to accept gifts.” This was only partially true, but gave him an excuse for turning down the offer.

  Ross took advantage of the lull to catch up on his writing, and to soak his bruised heel in warm water every day to help it mend. His brief role as a gun guard for Martin Scrivener was certainly something in the past. He drove himself in a buggy to visit two of the larger, better-run mines for inspection tours. As a precaution, he carried matches and candles, a canteen of water, and his loaded .32 Moore in a shoulder holster. These inspection tours were routine and informative. With the figures of tons of ore mined, numbers of ounces of silver and gold milled, cast into bullion and shipped, Ross was able to form a good idea of the mineral wealth of the Comstock. That’s what he’d come here to do. As to the future potential of the region, no one knew. The ledges of metal-bearing ore could give out at any time, and some of the very deepest mines had already begun to experience flooding. To keep the mines dry and producing, more capital would have to be invested in the huge Cornish pumps.

  But, for now, in the early summer of 1864, Ross could write up a reasonably accurate report. He was also filling his daily journal with material as valuable to him as silver and gold.

  When going about the town, Ross was now more circumspect. He remained acutely aware of everyone around him on the street. Each evening he still met with Martin Scrivener for supper and they shared information like two old friends and confidants. Neither of them could account for the unexpected silence from both Fossett and Tuttle.

  “Could be your visit has Fossett cowed,” Scrivener said over supper in Barnum’s. “Your threat, combined with that arm wound.”

  “I doubt it,” Ross replied. “On the surface, perhaps. But my impression of the man was the same as yours…he’s sneaky and will look for ways to hurt you or me when we’re least e
xpecting it.”

  “I think Fossett is just a small player in this larger plot involving Tuttle and Holladay I’m wasting ink on him,” the editor said.

  “But you can’t go one step above and accuse a man like Holladay of criminal activity without at least some \ sort of proof,” Ross said. “With his connections, he could put the Enterprise out of business.”

  Scrivener nodded, sipping his coffee. “Yeah. We gotta be a bit more careful with him. He’s ruthless, I hear.”

  Just then a man in black coat and white shirt approached their table. “Mister Martin McNulty, also known as the Sierra Scrivener?”

  Scrivener looked up at this formal greeting. “Yes?”

  “My name is S.A. Hedder. I represent Mister Avery Tuttle. He’s asked me to deliver the following message to you…because you’ve printed gross insults and lies about him in your newspaper, he has taken the greatest personal affront and demands satisfaction.”

  Scrivener chuckled at the ridiculously formal manner. “I guess he wants me to print a retraction.”

  The man slapped Scrivener lightly across the face with a pair of calfskin gloves. “No, sir. You are hereby challenged to meet Mister Tuttle on the field of honor at a place and time to be decided by me and your second. In the Nevada Territory, Navy Colts are the customary weapons.”

  The color drained from the editor’s face. “What?”

  “You, sir, have been challenged to a duel. Mister Tuttle assumes you are a gentleman and will accept.”

  “Tell Tuttle he’s out of his mind. He can bring a lawsuit against the paper if he wants to, but dueling is illegal and has gone out of fashion everywhere except in the backward Southern states.”

  “Mister Tuttle is from South Carolina, sir. I’ll tell him you said that.”

  “Said what?” Sam Clemens had walked up just in time to overhear the last remark.

  Scrivener still seemed stunned. “Who…or what…are you, again?”