Frontier

by Salzer, S. K.

  “Excuse me, Harry,” she said. “I see a friend. I must say hello.”

  “Oh, sure.” Harry tried to hide his disappointment. “Thanks for the book.” He watched as the fourth rider on the bay horse dismounted and walked forward to meet her. Harry did not know him but the tall man and Rose were in a hurry to reach each other, almost running. For one shocking moment Harry thought the stranger would pick her up and kiss her. But he didn’t. Instead he took off his hat and gave her his hand. As Harry turned to go back to his tent, he noticed someone else watching them. For the second time, he thought Mark Reynolds could be a dangerous man.

  By mid-August the main stockade was finished, with eight-foot walls of solid pine and an additional three feet buried in a gravel-filled trench. Each log was shaved to a point and there was a notch at every fifth joint for small-arms fire. A banquette, or sentry walk, circled the perimeter, with five open platforms a foot above to give the sentries a clear view. There were lookout towers on the north and south corners and blockhouses for the artillery under construction in the east and west. A third blockhouse would be built in the quartermaster’s yard.

  Three sides of the stockade had massive double gates, two planks in thickness, with sally wickets so pedestrians could come and go when the gates were closed. The fourth wall, behind officers’ row, had a small sally port that only the officers and their families could use.

  Cheered by the stockade’s completion, Colonel Carrington suggested the officers and their families celebrate with a picnic in the mountains. Margaret questioned the wisdom of this, but Jim Bridger said it would be all right.

  “The Injuns are busy huntin’ now,” he said, “stockin’ up for winter. That’s why we ain’t seen none lately. And if you’re wantin’ a day trip, best do it while the weather obliges. That’ll change in a few weeks.”

  The day they chose was sunny and crisp, with a clear blue sky. They rode away from the post at mid-morning with Bridger in the lead. Five armed men leading two pack mules brought up the rear. Carl’s groomer, Private Pat Smith, had the old horse in top form, his coat brushed and gleaming. No longer a candidate for the dead herd, he trotted along with eyes bright as a three-year-old’s.

  Bridger led them single file south along Little Piney Creek till they came to an old Indian trail twisting through meadows of wild wheat and oats. From there the trail entered a dark fragrant forest of pine, balsam, and hemlock. When they emerged again into the daylight Rose was surprised to see they were already halfway up the mountain. After the cool of the forest, Rose felt the sun’s bite on her neck, despite her wide-brimmed hat. She was grateful when Dixon offered a red handkerchief, which she tied around her throat.

  They had to stop several times to rest the laboring horses but when at last they reached the summit the view was magnificent. The Pineys looked like ropes of blue diamonds sparkling on a fabric of rich green velvet and the fort tiny as a child’s plaything.

  On the far side of the ridge Bridger took them to the ruins of an ancient Indian fort, its crumbling stone walls hidden by stunted, wind-blasted trees. In the middle were the remains of a recent campfire.

  “I didn’t see that when I was up here t’other day,” Bridger said with a frown.

  “What does that mean?” Sallie Horton said, her voice rising. “Maybe we should go back?”

  “We’re not going back,” Carrington said. “We’ve come all this way for a picnic and that’s what we’re going to do. Thompson, start the fire.”

  He ordered other enlisted men to set up the canopy and tend to the horses. Rose sat on a sun-warmed boulder, feeling ghostly eyes upon her. Who built this fort and why? Was it a holy site, a place to thank the Everywhere Spirit for the gifts of nature, or did the Indians come here to watch the white soldiers and plan ways to kill them?

  Mark sat down beside her and rolled a smoke. Even though he apologized for what he’d said in the tent—“I didn’t mean those things, Rose darling. Please forgive me”—there was still tension between them.

  “This is insane,” he said, lighting his cigarette. “Usually Carrington’s timid as my maiden aunt, now he insists on a garden party in Red Cloud’s front yard. I’m surprised he didn’t bring the band along.”

  He exhaled a blue cloud of smoke. She noticed he smoked more than he used to.

  “Major Bridger doesn’t seem worried,” she said. “Anyhow, it’s nice to get away from the post.”

  “Bridger. That old goat makes ten dollars a day. Did you know that?”

  “Well, the colonel values his opinion.”

  Mark’s eyes went to the kerchief at her neck. “What’s this?” He touched it with his cigarette hand, bringing the glowing ember close to her face.

  “My neck was getting sunburned. Dr. Dixon gave it to me.”

  Mark gave a short laugh. “Of course—the good doctor. He’s very attentive, isn’t he? That poacher. Stay away from him, Rose. That’s the last thing I need, gossip about my wife and some washed-up sawbones. Take it off.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said.

  “I said take it off.”

  She started to loosen the knot but before she finished Mark yanked it free, burning her skin.

  “Ow, that hurt!” she said, rubbing her neck. “What’s the matter with you?” She felt her face grow warm. “And if you’re worried about ugly gossip, you might want to talk to your friend Fred Brown!”

  Mark’s eyes cut to the other picnickers. If they heard their argument they were too polite to show it. “Has Brown said something to you?” he said quietly.

  “Ask him yourself.”

  Mark ground his cigarette into the dirt. Then, to her surprise, he took her hands and smiled in the old way, the way that once made her heart flip in her chest. “You’re right. I am being stupid. I’m sorry, Rose.” He reached up to touch her cheek. “I don’t want to hurt you. I’m just not myself lately, I know that. I think it’s the strangeness of this place, the remoteness of it, knowing the Sioux and the Cheyenne are out there day and night, invisible, watching and waiting. Plus all the double duty we’re pulling, and that’s only going to get worse when Kinney and Burrowes go north in a few days.”

  Rose softened. “It has been hard,” she said, “harder than we thought it would be. But reinforcements are coming. Things will be better then.”

  Mark shook his head. “Even if those cavalry companies show up—which I doubt—we’re still in trouble. The real problem is Carrington. Just look at him.” The colonel stood at the fire instructing the man on how to grill the elk steaks. “He’s going to fall on his face,” Mark said, “and every officer in the command will be tarnished by his failure. I’ve come too far, worked too hard to be ruined by the likes of him.”

  For the first time it occurred to Rose that maybe Mark, not Bisbee, was sending those poisonous letters to General Cooke. It was a bad thought, one she wanted to put out of her head. She was relieved when Margaret announced dinner.

  The new sutler, clearly attempting to impress Carrington and his officers, had provided the lavish banquet now spread on blankets before them. In addition to the elk steaks, still hot from the sage-scented fire, there were jars of jellies chosen to complement elk’s distinctive flavor, canned lobster, cove oysters, pineapples, tomatoes, sweet corn, fresh puddings, gingerbread, plum and jelly cakes and, to finish, three magnums of Madame Clicquot.

  “I feel like I’m back in St. Louis at the Planter’s House,” Mark said, “only the view is better.” This started a discussion of famous restaurants the officers had visited.

  “How about you, Dixon?” Mark said. “Have you a favorite?”

  The surgeon smiled. “The only meals I remember were home-cooked.”

  “Is that so?” Mark raised his eyebrows. “I’m surprised you’re not married then.” The two men looked at each other and Rose could see the dislike between them. She wondered if others saw it too.

  “I was married,” Dixon said, “but my wife and baby died. It was during the war.�
�� It was clear he did not want to say more.

  Rose broke the silence by asking about Simon Trover. “I’ve been wondering about him,” she said. “I think of him often.”

  Dixon nodded. “He should be on his way home to Mississippi by now. There’s one story with a happy ending. I hope so anyway.”

  The sutler, John Fitch, was telling them about his years in Utah and the term he’d served in Congress when dark clouds appeared in the west and the wind developed an edge. They packed in a hurry and started for home. Halfway down the mountain, they found the skeletal remains of a man. Clumps of black hair clung to the crushed skull and the bones wore the remnants of jeans and a red shirt. Two arrows were buried half the length of their shafts in the corpse’s chest, as if shot with superhuman strength.

  “Should we bury him?” Sallie Horton said.

  “No,” Carrington said, looking up the mountain into the dark woods. “We will proceed.”

  The storm broke when they were a half mile from the fort. They rode through the gates soaked through and, in Rose’s case, shaking with cold.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Carrington finally gave Kirkendall’s 110-wagon train permission to move on. After breakfast, Rose and Jimmy Carrington walked down to the emigrant camp to say good-bye to Charley and William Thomas.

  “I’m counting on you to come see us, Rose, just as you promised,” William said. “You too, Jimmy. It’s not far, only two hundred and fifty miles or thereabouts. George has a flour mill on the river, next to the ferry. Like I said, he shouldn’t be hard to find.” He paused, then looked directly into her eyes. “Mrs. Reynolds, you do remember that other thing we talked about, don’t you?”

  Rose nodded, a stone growing in her throat. Partings seemed final in this country, not like in the States. “Take care of yourselves,” she said, bending to kiss Charley on the cheek. She was about to wish them good luck but stopped because she did not want to suggest luck was needed.

  The wagons started north at two o’clock under a lowering sky, escorted by a detail under Lieutenant George Templeton, still recovering from the wounds he’d received the day Napoleon Daniels was killed. Charley rode in the arc-shaped opening in the rear of the clumsy prairie schooner, waving, his brilliant red hair shining, until it disappeared over the crest of a hill. Rose and Jimmy walked back to the post in low spirits and Rose sank even lower when she found Mark in their tent, lying on their bed. Though the sun was fully up the tent’s interior was dark and cool. “Come here,” he said, raising himself on one elbow. “I’ve got the morning free.”

  Rose looked at him, remembering the wild abandon of their early days together and the thrill she had felt at their lovemaking. She wished she could feel those things again but now she realized she did not. Something had changed within her. “I can’t,” she said. “Margaret and Sallie Horton are expecting me. We’re going to play croquet.”

  He came to her, putting his hands on her shoulders. “The hens will wait.”

  He bent to kiss her but she turned her head. “I don’t like it when you call them hens,” she said. “It’s patronizing.”

  He walked to his shaving stand. Their eyes met in the mirror. “Rose, is it my imagination, or am I losing you?”

  She said nothing.

  “I see,” he said. His face darkened and he turned to face her. “Just remember this. You’re my wife, Rose. That’s what you are and that’s all you are. That’s the only reason you’re here. Things may be rough right now but I’m going places. So don’t do anything to interfere with that. If you do, you’ll regret it. You know what I mean.” He left the tent leaving her to wonder if the man she once loved was now someone to fear.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Captains Nathaniel Kinney and Thomas Burrowes went north on the third of August, taking two companies and Bridger and Beckwourth as guides. Carrington ordered Bridger to return as soon as Kinney chose a site for the new post, to be called Fort C. F. Smith in honor of the Mexican War hero. Beckwourth was to find his friends the Mountain Crows and learn what he could about Red Cloud’s Sioux, reportedly camped along the Tongue River.

  Their departure left Carrington with only 381 men and a handful of civilian employees to defend Fort Phil Kearny. Their stores were running low, with flour, lard, and sugar in especially short supply. Hunters would venture out for game but were rarely successful. People were hungry. One night Rose dreamed of her grandmother’s Christmas cake, heavy with butter and cream, molasses, walnuts, spices, plump and floured raisins, and covered with a crusty, sugary glaze that crunched when she bit into a slice still warm from the oven.

  The day Kinney and Burrowes left, Indians attacked the wood train returning from the Pinery. The gunfire was heard within the fort. As Carrington formed a rescue detail a civilian teamster rode through the gates on a lathered draft mule, still in harness, and went straight to the quartermaster to resign. He did not apologize for abandoning his comrades or for the dark stain on the front of his trousers.

  “They sprang up out of nowhere, all painted and howling like banshees!” he told the men crowded around him. “Like nothing you ever saw! I tell you, I’m going back to Reno with the next mail detail and anyone with any sense will do the same. Stay here and you’ll all be dead by Christmas—mark my words!”

  The Indians quit the attack before rescuers arrived, and all the men returned safely. Still, the teamster’s fear was infectious. The words “dead by Christmas” echoed throughout the post. That night, for the first time, Rose thought she heard wolves sharpening their claws against the stockade walls.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  From that day on Indians appeared daily on the hills, flashing mirrors and waving flags as if mocking the sentries’ signals. No one could leave the stockade without permission, and women and children could not leave at all. There would be no more picnics on Fort Ridge or horseback rides through the valleys and meadows. Morale, already low, declined even further. Some officers began to complain openly about Carrington’s leadership.

  “Bisbee calls him coward,” Mark said one gray morning as he dressed. He and Rose had settled into a kind of uneasy truce. “He’s the only one who has the balls to say it but we all know it’s true. Carrington always comes up with some reason not to move against the Indians. If we don’t strike soon the season will be over and we’ll have nothing to show for it. Nothing. Only Ten Eyck defends him.”

  The tent was very cold, even with the little heat stove going full blast.

  “What do you say?” Rose asked, shivering under the blankets.

  “I keep my mouth shut. A man never knows when his words will come back to bite him.”

  If Carrington was unaware of the rising tide of resentment, his wife was not. Although officers’ wives usually avoided political talk during their afternoon sewing circles and card games, Rose sensed Margaret’s anxiety. The storm could break any moment, and Margaret Carrington was too keen not to know it.

  The fort’s inhabitants were afraid, and their fear grew day by day. No one expected an attack on the fort for it was well-known Indians never went after a well-defended, entrenched opponent. Still, the sight of painted warriors sitting on their ponies on top of the hills kept everyone on edge. Mark was anxious and irritable. The smallest incident—coffee not to his liking, or an undarned sock—set him off. Their lovemaking, which he insisted on, had become something Rose dreaded. She felt like his prisoner.

  She saw Daniel Dixon only on those infrequent evenings when the weather was warm enough for a concert under the stars. The entire garrison turned out with blankets and folding chairs to listen as Sam Curry’s musicians filled the valley with the sweet sounds of brass and flute, strings and drums. The music seemed magical in this place, even more so on those nights when bands of multicolored light waved across the sky, rippling and billowing like a celestial stage curtain. These were the famous northern lights, a phenomenon Rose had heard others speak of but never seen herself.

  At the end of
August, Colonel William B. Hazen arrived with a train of government and emigrant wagons. As acting inspector general for the Department of the Platte, Hazen was touring the Western posts and compiling a report for Cooke. His party included a topographical engineer named Ambrose Bierce, a small man with a limp and glittering black eyes, who found at Fort Phil Kearny a wartime friend. This was Ridgway Glover, a photographer and special correspondent for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, who had arrived with Templeton’s group in late July. A pale, thin aristocrat from Philadelphia, Glover roamed about with his Roettger camera and a wheelbarrow full of developing chemicals, always working to capture views of the frontier landscape and its natives. The soldiers made fun of him but Harry had made friends with Glover and liked working with him in the darkness of his “development” room, bathing and rinsing negative plates and watching the images magically appear.

  In the evenings Bierce, Glover, and a few others played poker in Bierce’s tent. The winner took a pot of wooden matches since Glover’s Quaker beliefs would not allow him to gamble for coin. Afterward, sitting by the fire, Bierce would tell stories to anyone who wanted to listen. His audience often included Harry. Bierce’s tales were of medical dissecting rooms, morgues, lonely cemeteries, and ghosts, and he appeared to make them up as he went along. His dark eyes glittered in the red firelight as a devilish new plot twist came to him. Harry’s favorite was about a condemned soldier’s miraculous escape from the noose and his long journey home to a wife who loved him. Just as they found each other, just at the blissful moment of their reunion, the soldier plunged to his death. The escape and journey had been only the dying man’s last beautiful dream.

  Hazen spent three days inspecting Fort Phil Kearny and the two logging camps that supplied it. Though he admired the post’s design and construction, he questioned the need for the elaborate stockade.