Rose had never seen a man die before and she was deeply shaken. She was a strong swimmer, having spent many childhood hours racing—and defeating—her brothers across the lake on their grandfather’s farm, and she thought she could have saved him. It would have meant stripping down to her chemise, however, and she didn’t do it though she thought she should have. The drowned man was buried that evening in an old gun box he had pulled from a refuse pile that morning saying, “This would make someone a good coffin.”
They spent the first night on the river’s north shore, still in sight of Fort Sedgwick. After dinner Rose settled into a camp chair, her portable desk on her knees, to write to her Uncle Randolph and her brother in St. Louis.
The country is flat and so brown the eye aches for a spot of color but I’m told that the scenery will improve as we go north. Carrington’s guide (the famous Jim Bridger!) says that once we cross the Powder River we will enter a beautiful land of rolling green hills and lush valleys watered by icy streams of snowmelt from the Bighorn Mountains. There will be fields of tall grasses, wildflowers and natural grains, berries of all sorts growing along the streams, and plenty of game—or so he tells us and I believe him.
I wish you all could see our little camp now, as I write these words. It is so pretty in the red twilight, the wagons with their white canvas tops and freshly painted blue beds and the men’s A tents glowing like Japanese lanterns in neat rows.
Here she paused. Her brothers would like Mark even less if they knew he had left her at Sedgwick.
Mark sends his regards.
In all we are a party of thirty-one souls led by Lieutenant Frank Anderson who travels with his wife and infant son. Poor Anderson! His wife is a tyrant who outweighs him by at least twenty pounds though he seems quite devoted to her. Also with us is paymaster Major Ranald Henry, carrying wages for Carrington’s troops and the men at Fort Reno, Henry’s four-man escort, and a contract surgeon named Daniel Dixon.
Again she stopped writing. She had learned very little about him. He was from Kentucky—he told her that much—and had attended medical school in Cincinnati at the distinguished Medical College of Ohio. Most army physicians had no such credentials. So what was he doing here, when he could earn a more comfortable living back East? Was he running from something or someone? Did he have dark past he wished to escape? No one seemed to know much about him.
Our little company also includes a number of so-called “Galvanized Yankees”—that is, former Confederate war prisoners who gained their freedom by agreeing to fight for Uncle Sam on the western frontier. There are many of these types out here and they are, to a man, a glum and dispirited lot. We’ve got seven Mexican teamsters driving our wagons (mine is a piratical fellow with a black eye patch) and our guide is a Missourian named Jack Gregory.
When it grew too dark to write Rose folded her desk and climbed into the ambulance, where Jerusha was already asleep. She changed into a white cotton nightdress, fell into her bed, and was asleep within seconds.
Reveille sounded at four and the general one hour later, starting the wagons. Rose tied the rear door open so she could watch the sun rise in the eastern sky like a giant fireball. The morning air was cool and smelled of sage. A gentle breeze played with her newly cropped hair. That breeze was refreshing now but later in the day it would become an enemy wind that carried an alkaline dust, fine and choking as talc, which burned the eyes, coated the teeth, and, if she was not careful, ruined a woman’s complexion.
The road was sandy but well graded and the wagons made good time. The mules were sleek and fully fleshed, with tails that were shaven except for a rectangular tuft at the end for swatting flies. The team pulling Rose’s ambulance was especially well kept with coyote tails dangling from their bridles. Ignacio must be softer than he looks, Rose thought.
Her ambulance home was surprisingly comfortable. Spicer had removed one bench to make room for her favorite chair and she rode there in the mornings, reading or sewing when the rocking motion allowed it. In the evenings she lowered the leather back of the remaining bench and this, when covered with a thin mattress and soft cotton quilts, made a fine bed. Spicer also made two canvas pockets that he hung on hooks on either side of the door. One held Rose’s travel box and shawl, the other her needlework and books. One of these was a tedious biography of Benjamin Franklin but the other was a wonderful new English novel about a young governess and her mysterious but compelling employer, a character who reminded Rose of Daniel Dixon. Titled Jane Eyre, it was a loan from Margaret Carrington and Rose liked it so much she allowed herself only ten pages a day to prolong the joy of reading it. The value of a good book was the only meaningful lesson she had learned during a long, lonely year at the Female Baptist Academy in Columbia, where she was sent as a girl to escape one of the cholera epidemics that swept St. Louis. Novels—David Copperfield, The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Scarlet Letter—were her only source of joy that terrible, sad year, the year her parents died.
Mornings were pleasant, but by noon the ambulance was an oven. Clouds of buffalo gnats and flies tortured man and beast with stinging bites. Clara Anderson’s baby, Rollo, wailed constantly, and his piercing cries carried the length of the column. Clara stretched a piece of cheesecloth over his bed—a champagne basket padded with cotton blankets—but even so the insects found a way to get at him, raising welts on his plump, pink body.
To protect themselves the women wore gloves and veiled hats, despite the heat, and the men tied handkerchiefs over their faces. Ignacio waved a cottonwood switch over the mules’ sweating backs to discourage the droning flies that hovered in clouds above them. Still, some managed to settle, biting till the blood flowed.
They would travel till sundown, when the strong evening winds came. Although these complicated the business of setting up tents and starting dinner fires, Rose welcomed them because they blew away the insects. After one particularly long day they camped along Lodge Pole Creek, a fast-moving stream that teemed with fish. As she unpacked the mess chest, Rose heard the men laughing and splashing each other in the cold, clear water and she wished she could shed her clothes and do the same as she and her brothers did when they were children. They spent many happy summer months on their grandfather’s Boone County farm swimming in the lake, racing horses, and exploring the overgrown vestiges of a pioneer trace that marked the southern edge of his property. The road, forged by the Boone brothers, Nathan and Daniel M., sons of the famous frontiersman, at a time when Missouri west of St. Louis was still a brushy wilderness, was a gold mine of archeological treasures and relics of bygone days. They found bent spoons, skillets, and unidentifiable bits of rusting metal, a homemade doll with a rotting calico dress, gold-rimmed spectacles with lenses intact, thimbles, scissors, and a pair of boots big enough to fit a giant.
Her eyes fell on Dixon, buttoning his shirt as he returned from his swim. He was an attractive man, she thought. Any woman would think so. Not as handsome as Mark, certainly, but still . . .
Spicer joined the men with hooks and lines in the water and before long dozens of fish lay shining on the creek bank like bars of silver. Jerusha made a fine supper of Spicer’s catch, dredging the firm, white fillets in salt and cornmeal, then frying them in a skillet of hot olive oil. The meat was sweet and delicious, a welcome change from the menu of beef, salt bacon, beans, and hard bread that sustained them along the way.
During the night the air was cool and a light rain pattered on the canvas roof of the ambulance. Rose woke to reveille feeling strong and refreshed. The rain settled the dust and the air smelled of cottonwood smoke and boiling coffee. She dressed quickly, grateful for her cropped hair and the freedom it gave her. Gone were the days when she would spend half an hour every morning brushing, braiding, coiling, and pinning. Now she could be out the door in ten minutes and without even lighting a candle.
They breakfasted on bacon, skillet bread warmed over from the night before, canned peaches, and coffee with sugar and condensed milk. As al
ways, Spicer ate as if he had not seen food for a week. Jerusha scolded him, saying there would be nothing left for the midday meal, but Rose shushed her.
“Let him eat,” she said. “We have plenty.”
Just before the column started, Spicer came to her with a bundle wrapped in red cloth. She opened it to find a leather-covered canteen with her name expertly embroidered across its face in yellow saddler’s silk.
“Cover it with a piece of wet blanket and hang it from the roof of the wagon,” he said. “Be sure to leave the cork out, thataway it’ll catch the air and the water will stay nice and cool all through the day.”
Rose was touched by the gift and the amount of time he spent working on it. She had not imagined the Kentucky boy’s thick, sausage-like fingers capable of such fine stitching.
“Thank you, Royal,” she said. “It’s beautiful. Who taught you to do this?”
Blushing, Spicer looked down at the curled toes of his Jefferson boots. His face was nearly as red as the cloth that wrapped the canteen. “Tera, my brother, back home in Bardstown, he taught me. He was going to be a saddle maker like Pa but he died in the war. Measles.”
“I lost a brother too,” she said. “In Missouri, at Wilson’s Creek. His name was Tim.” In all their hours together, this was the first confidence they had exchanged.
The bugle sounded, starting the first wagons. The Mexican teamsters cracked their blacksnake whips and urged the mules forward.
“Mula! Mula! Vamos, mula!”
As Spicer walked to his horse Rose noticed the sleeve had begun to separate from the body of his jacket. He had spent long hours on his gift for her when his own clothes were falling apart. She resolved to mend it for him when they reached Laramie.
Chapter Four
Of all the officers in his father’s command, Mark Reynolds was Harry Carrington’s favorite. He was the best horseman, the best shot, the one all the women looked at when they thought no one was watching. He usually won at cards. But one thing about Reynolds troubled Harry. How could he leave his wife alone at a place like Fort Sedgwick? Especially a wife like that? Harry thought Rose Reynolds was beautiful, especially her eyes. Not just because they were clear and blue, but because the delicate skin below them was faintly blue also, or maybe faintly silver, and moist-looking or dewy. Harry wondered if this was natural, and even considered asking his mother if Rose used something, some kind of emollient, to achieve that. Whatever, the effect was stirring. Lieutenant Reynolds must be supremely devoted to duty, Harry thought, to leave eyes like that.
Some days they rode together alongside the column, with Reynolds on his big bay and Harry on Calico, a spotted Indian pony Quartermaster Fred Brown had given to him and his brother, Jimmy, back in Nebraska. Harry loved the prairie, loved the endless blue skies, the tiny yellow flowers that bobbed in the wind, the giant herds of grazing buffalo. Some people complained of feeling lost and reduced to nothing by the vastness of it all, but Harry experienced just the opposite. He was at home with the emptiness. He felt a new and exhilarating sense of health and power, as if his own twelve-year-old body were an essential, growing thing. Maybe soon the rest of him would be equal to his size-thirteen feet. They were so big, Bill Kellogg and the other boys had given him the nickname “Foot.”
Each day was exciting and new. He especially liked the dark and sunless ones when the wind blew from the west, chilled by its journey over the far purple mountains. On these magical days, the towering sandstone formations of the North Platte valley became medieval castles and he and his friend Bill Kellogg were D’Artagnan and Aramis, racing their horses over the plains on a secret mission for the king of France. On a whim they decided to find out how many steps it took to encircle Chimney Rock at its base. The answer: 10,040. This important discovery was wasted on his father. When Harry shared the information at dinner that evening, he had frowned and said, “My God, son, have you boys nothing better to do?”
By early June the column was nearing Fort Laramie, famed way station for trappers, traders, missionaries, Pony Express riders, California-bound gold hunters, and grim Mormons seeking Zion. Laramie—in Harry’s mind the very name bespoke romance and danger, no place for weaklings or fools. As testament to the latter, Laramie was the last home of the infamous Lieutenant John Grattan, a blustering shavetail who had picked a fight with the Sioux in 1854 and got himself and twenty-nine soldiers killed for his trouble. Every schoolboy in America knew of Grattan.
Though the morning had been cool and pleasant, by noon it was oppressively hot. At two o’clock Harry noticed a distant line of clouds the color of a ripening bruise. Soon the wind kicked up, the temperature plunged, and a wall of solid gray appeared in the west, moving toward them with a roar that grew in intensity till it was like that of a waterfall.
Carrington stopped the column and corralled the wagons around the livestock.
“You might want to tie them wagons down, Colonel,” Jim Bridger said, scanning the sky with faded gray eyes. “We’re in for a blow.”
Harry turned Calico toward the rear, where his mother’s ambulance was pulling into the circle. The pony broke into a run as the howl of the storm grew louder. They flew by soldiers and teamsters driving tent stakes into the ground to anchor the wagons. The air tasted of copper pennies.
Margaret waved to Harry from the door, fighting to keep it open against the wind. Calico covered the remaining ground in an instant. Harry slid to the ground, tied the reins to the wheel of a heavy supply wagon, and dove through the door just as the sky unleashed a fusillade of hailstones the size of hens’ eggs.
The wind blew with the strength of a hurricane, rocking the ambulance on its wheels like a toy in the hands of an enraged child. The noise was like nothing Harry had heard before, like a locomotive steaming through crashing surf. Flashes of lightning lit the canvas walls and air that was hot and suffocating just an hour before was now icy cold. Though only mid-afternoon, it was dark as Egypt. Jimmy huddled in a corner with his hands over his ears and Black George, Carrington’s orderly, squatted beside him, eyes wide with fear.
Fierce though it was, the storm was short-lived. An eerie quiet replaced the cannonade. When Harry opened the door he found a landscape of winter white dotted with countless bits of brown. These proved to be the carcasses of prairie dogs, flooded from their holes and pummeled to death by hailstones. Men caught out in the open were bloodied, three wagons were overturned, and terrified horses ran wild, dragging their picket pins. To Harry’s relief, Calico was still tied to the supply wagon.
The few remaining hours of sunlight were spent righting the wagons and capturing escaped horses. Margaret was dismayed to discover the rain had penetrated the canvas to soak their bedding. She thrust empty feed sacks at Harry and Jimmy and told them to collect buffalo chips for a fire. Usually the undignified job was six-year-old Jimmy’s, but Harry knew better than to argue with his mother when she was angry.
Before following his brother onto the prairie, Harry stopped at the rope line to check Calico for injuries. As he knelt to examine a foreleg he heard a group of officers talking.
“What a Tweedledum business that was!” Harry recognized Fred Brown’s honking voice. Despite the gift of Calico, Harry had never liked the blustering, bald-headed quartermaster. “Carrington couldn’t manage a flea circus. I told him we should stop the column a good twenty minutes before the storm hit. We’re lucky we didn’t lose the beef herd.”
“Why didn’t Sherman give the command to someone who knows what he’s doing?” This was Lieutenant William Bisbee. “I can’t understand it—Carrington has no experience in the field. Where was he during the war? I’ll tell you where—the recruiting department, the logistics department, the transportation department—anywhere but the bullet department.”
Harry’s face burned as the men laughed.
“He got the command because of his political friends,” Brown said, “but don’t worry, he won’t last. It won’t take Bill Sherman long to figure out what Carring
ton’s made of.”
Harry remained hidden until they moved on, then went on about his dung-collection business, sick with shame. It was true, his father had never seen combat, never felt the wind from an enemy bullet or artillery shell. This was true, even though the Eighteenth Infantry suffered more casualties than any other regular army unit during four years of war. Until now, Harry had never wondered about his father’s ability to command these battle-hardened veterans but suddenly everything changed. Would they recognize his authority? Could he control them?
When he arrived back at camp Margaret was hanging wet sheets and quilts on bushes to dry. “These might be ready by bedtime,” she said. “If they aren’t, Sallie Horton has things we can use.”
Black George knelt on the ground struggling to get a fire going. The buffalo dung was wet and produced an acrid smoke. Harry breathed in the stink of it thinking life had lost its luster. He was no longer D’Artagnan, French adventurer. Instead he was Foot, the second-rate son of a second-rate father.
“Harry?” Margaret said. “What’s wrong?”
He felt her keen eyes on him.
“Harry?”
He saw she would not let it go. “Is it true Father got this command because he has important friends? Because Governor Dennison was his law partner back in Ohio?”
Margaret frowned. “Who said that? Has someone been talking against him?”
Harry shook his head. Brown and Bisbee were asses but Harry was no tattlepig.
Margaret sighed and sat in a camp chair, motioning him to sit beside her. “Harry, your father is a brilliant man who built the Eighteenth Infantry from nothing when the war started. Yes, he has influential friends, but he got this command because he earned it—not on the battlefield maybe but in other ways. I’m proud of him, very proud, and so should you be. Don’t let anyone make you feel otherwise.”
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