by Terry Grosz
The only troubling event that occurred during the three-day stop at the hot springs was that Harlan and company ran across the Northern Cheyenne sub-chief whom Big Eagle had bested in the shoot-off at the earlier rendezvous. The sub-chief instantly recognized Big Eagle, and the look on his face showed that he had not forgotten the embarrassment the young man, and a Crow at that, had caused him.
To avoid further problems, Harlan had his brood packed and on the road before daylight the next morning. Heading due north, Harlan pushed his little band until they arrived in the vicinity of present-day Greybull, Wyoming. They frequently ran across the trails of unshod ponies and travois from many Indian groups out hunting buffalo.
Worried about encountering the dangerous Lakota, Harlan headed his group due east into what is today the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area. Once into the timbered area, he relaxed because most Indian tribes would be out on the shortgrass prairies chasing the buffalo herds.
Climbing ever higher, they soon ran into numerous mountain streams loaded with beaver dams and the dam-building rodents. They all had to smile at the furred bounty before them. Gavin had been right—the country had not been touched except maybe by a few Indian fur trappers. (During the height of the days of the mountain men, the best records show only about one thousand of their kind trapping in the backcountry during any given year.
Of that number, roughly 25 percent never returned or disappeared before the trapping season ended for the year. As stated earlier, most trapped furs sold to white traders came from the many tribes of Native Americans.) And those Indian fur trappers, as far as Harlan could see, had made no real dent in the beaver population in this new area.
Harlan also smiled at the other possibilities in the fur-trapping arena. The area was full of coyotes, wolves, lynx, and river otter. Surprisingly, there were also a fair number of buffalo in the wooded areas they now trod. Not great herds but many instances of single animals enjoying the coolness, the excellent feed, the lack of biting insects, and the quiet isolation the forests offered.
Near present-day Burgess Junction, Harlan called a halt by a small creek adjacent to the edge of timber with a grassy meadow full of ducks, geese, and little brown cranes. It had been days since they had seen any fresh Indian sign, and the surrounding creeks were full of beaver ponds just waiting to be trapped. Looking over the area for its defensive characteristics and nearness to the trapping grounds, Harlan was satisfied with what he saw.
“This will be our new home for at least the summer, fall, and coming spring trapping season,” he declared.
In nothing flat, the pack string and riding horses were unloaded, hobbled, and let out to pasture. Then the work began in earnest. By late afternoon, a very strong livestock corral had been built in the trees out of casual view at the edge of the meadow.
After Autumn Flower had fed her baby, she and her sister built a central fire pit after discussing where to site their cabins with Harlan and the boys. Soon dinner was cooking and filling the air with pleasant smells. The men took their shovels, cleared a large area for the cabins, and built two large lean-tos next to the cleared areas.
Under those lean-tos went all their gear, tack, and sleeping furs to protect their belongings from the almost everyday occurrence of afternoon thunderstorms. With that completed, the crew fell to the chow. They all sat around on the logs by the fire and drank in the sights and sounds of what God had created just for them at their new home site. Those moments were accompanied by the melodious croaking of the cranes and the whistling wings of many waterfowl moving to and fro in the wet meadows.
Daylight the next morning rang with the sounds of chopping axes and horses hauling cabin logs. By the noon meal, a mound of lodge-pole pine logs had been cut, trimmed, and laid by the new cabin sites. Soon those logs were laid in position, notched, and stacked until a long and wide set of three adjoining cabins began to take place. By the third day, all the walls were up, doorways and windows were cut out, and numerous covering firing ports had been chiseled into the standing walls.
Two days later, the roofs were in place and the men were making the doors, shutters, firing plugs, sleeping platforms, benches, tables, and the like while the women chinked the cabins with mud and grasses from the meadow. By the end of that week, the three cabins were finished and all their gear had been moved inside the protection of the log walls. Then dry logs were cut from the surrounding forest and moved into a nearby, central place so the trappers could have a ready supply of wood no matter the depth of snows to come.
There was a serious need to make meat because autumn was coming quickly, so the killing began in earnest. Most of their meat came from moose, elk, and mule deer, with the addition of the occasional forest buffalo. They also took eight grizzly bear for the fat and ham meat they offered. Soon whatever wasn’t curing in brine was smoked or jerked and hanging inside the three large cabins, which collectively were twenty-six feet long, seventeen feet wide, and six feet high. Now the married couples and the two boys would each have a home of their own but would still be close in case of danger.
Harlan had to smile at the progress made when four men and two women put their minds toward their survival. Yes, I have the makings of a good family, he thought with a satisfied look.
While smoking their beaver traps to remove the human smell one morning, Harlan thought he saw a whisper of a glint of metal off in the timber below their meadow. He strained his eyes, but the glint was no more. He continued to look until his search caught the eyes of the boys, and they all stared at the same area but saw nothing.
Dismissing it as a will-o’-the-wisp, Harlan shrugged it off and continued the task at hand. By noon, the traps were finished, and he and the boys tended to all the other work that needed to be done before they could begin the trapping season. Big Eagle and Runs Fast opened a nearby dam and set four traps in order to collect the castor oil needed to lure beaver while Winter Hawk and Harlan spent the afternoon casting a small mountain of bullets for the ever-hungry Hawkens. They also refilled the powder horns and prepared bags of other needed items.
Tomorrow they would start their fall trapping season, and the men could hardly wait. They hadn’t seen the numbers of beaver they had in the Willow Lake area, but they knew the animals were there aplenty. With a lot of work, they would be able to fill their store with more than enough plews to trade at the next year’s rendezvous.
***
The next morning, the men stood around the outside campfire while the women cooked their breakfast. It was decided that Harlan and Winter Hawk would trap the waters to the east, and Big Eagle and Runs Fast would trap those to the west. Finishing breakfast, they packed their horses and mules and with a wave of the hand went their separate ways.
Harlan set his last eight traps as Winter Hawk sat on his horse and watched for danger. Easily swinging back into his saddle, Harlan said, “Your turn, Hawk, and I will stand guard.”
Winter Hawk dropped effortlessly from his saddle, withdrew a trap from the sack on the mule, and walked a short distance upstream until he found a fresh beaver run. Setting his trap at the end of the run in the water, he walked back and retrieved another trap from the sack. Continuing his exploration of the beaver pond, he walked forward about one hundred feet until he came to another likely run.
Harlan rode his horse and led Winter Hawk’s horse and the mule along behind the young trapper. Bending over, Winter Hawk again set his trap at the end of the run and made sure it was anchored well so the beaver, once in the trap, could not drag it away.
This routine continued until Winter Hawk approached a very large beaver dam at the foot of a huge pond with several beaver lodges located out in the middle of the water. Turning and grinning, he took another trap and set it below the top portion of the dam near a clump of willows, a place where a beaver was sure to investigate the smell of Winter Hawk’s castor oil, which had now been daubed on a twig over the water set.
“Yeh-yeh-yeh-yeh!” yelled an Indian as he ran from behin
d the cover of the willows toward Winter Hawk with an upraised tomahawk. Winter Hawk just had time to duck the swing and draw his pistol as the two collided. Pow went his pistol into the Indian’s midsection as the force of the collision carried the two of them over the bank and out of sight in a cloud of dust.
“Yeh-yeh-yeh-yeh!” yelled three more Indians, rushing from the cover of a fallen tree toward Harlan, who was still surprised by the explosive attack on Winter Hawk. Not having time to await the outcome of his son’s battle, Harlan sprang into action while his horse and mule crow-hopped wildly at the surprise onslaught.
Boom went the big Hawken, spewing the guts of the closest Indian all over his buddies. Pow went Harlan’s first pistol into the face of the next Indian in line, flinging him backward as he tried to tear Harlan off his horse.
Grabbing his tomahawk, Harlan just had time to swing it to block the tomahawk swung by the Indian now at his side. With a whack, the two handles snapped as they met with explosive force. Harlan stuck his fingers into the man’s eye sockets, and the two of them hit the ground as the terrified horse jumped to one side. Jerking out his knife, Harlan plunged it deeply into the Indian’s neck as his assailant tried to use his knife as well.
A gurgling as breath escaped through an opened windpipe was Harlan’s reward. Scrambling to his feet, he was bowled over by the impact of the fourth howling Indian smashing into him from behind at a dead run. Over the bank the two of them hurtled at a high rate of speed, landing in waist-deep cold water. The Indian landed on a sharpened willow stick from a previous beaver’s meal that was still anchored in the bottom of the pond! He died there, gurgling his life away with the stick deeply embedded between his ribs and into his lungs.
Scrambling back up the bank, Harlan was confronted by a fifth Indian drawing down on him with his rifle at a distance of less than ten feet! Boom went Winter Hawk’s Hawken. That man breathed his last as he spun around at the bullet’s impact, folding like a sack full of rocks.
Scrambling over to his mule and using it as a shield, Harlan removed the spare Hawken just as five shots were fired in his direction from the nearby trees. All five smashed into the side of the mule, killing it instantly.
Had Harlan been standing on the other side, his fate would have been the same. Harlan ran back to the creek bank and jumped below it for cover. Up the bank to his left, he could see Winter Hawk reloading his rifle and pistol. However, they were pinned down and in a very poor position to shoot back because the Indians held the higher ground in the timber.
“There are at least five more still up there in the timber,” yelled Harlan to Winter Hawk.
Winter Hawk just nodded, never taking his eyes off the tree line. No movement could be seen that would allow the sharp- shooting trappers a target. For the next hour, a standoff ensued. The Indians couldn’t flank the trappers because of the width of the beaver pond, and the trappers couldn’t address their problem of the Indians’ good offensive position in the timber.
Zip—thunk, zip—thunk went arrows into two of the five Indians lying behind logs confronting the trappers hiding below the creek bank. Rising to their feet to flee the attack coming from behind, the three Indians ran for their horses.
Winter Hawk and Harlan, seeing their chance, quickly picked off two of the escaping Indians with their rifles. The remaining Indian from the war party continued running toward the place where he and his friends had left their horses. For a fleeting second, Harlan thought he recognized the man, who was now being hotly pursued by Big Eagle and Runs Fast.
A blood-curdling screech soon came from the darkness of the timber, and then nothing. For the longest time, Winter Hawk and Harlan stood below the bank, waiting to see what had happened.
Big Eagle and Runs Fast returned, both terribly smeared with blood. Fearing the worst, Harlan ran to the two young men to ascertain the extent of their injuries. As it turned out, both were smeared with the blood of the last Indian from the war party. When Harlan looked into their eyes, both young men had the wildest killing look he had ever seen, nothing short of absolute blood lust.
Harlan had been right: the fleeing Indian he thought he had recognized had been none other than the Northern Cheyenne sub-chief from Thermopolis, the man Big Eagle had bested in the shooting match at the rendezvous. True to his promise to himself, Big Eagle had met the man on the field of battle, killed him, and smeared himself with the chief’s blood!
The blood on Runs Fast had come from pulling his frenzied brother off the butchered remains of the Indian chief. Apparently seeing Harlan’s group at the hot springs had made the chief’s blood begin to boil again, and he had put together the small war party in the hope of settling the score and capturing the trappers’ gear and horses as spoils.
Damn, thought Harlan, now we have another problem. All the chief’s kin will come looking for him and in the process locate our new camp. Those are not good odds, no matter how one figures it. Well, the damage is done, and we'd best make the most of it.
Returning to the mule and his horse, Harlan was surprised to find both of them dead from the Indians’ gunshots. But that gave him an idea of how to partially cover their trail.
“Winter Hawk,” he said, “bring your horse to me.”
Riding up to the dead Indians, Harlan threw a rope around them one at a time and dragged them to where the dead horse and mule lay. Seeing what he had in mind, Big Eagle, Winter Hawk, and Runs Fast stacked the other Indians’ bodies with their brethren. Out of deference to Big Eagle, the Northern Cheyenne chief was left in disgrace where he had fallen.
Big Eagle and Runs Fast returned to their horses and, along with Winter Hawk, located the Indians’ tied-off horses and brought them back to Harlan. In the meantime, Harlan had been backtracking their beaver sets, pulling their traps. When the boys found him, they helped pull the remainder of the traps. Then all of them returned to camp with Harlan proudly riding a big buckskin from the Indians’ remuda.
Harlan hoped his strategy would work to cover up the killings. The trick was to stack so much meat in one place that it would quickly attract a large number of hungry scavengers such as wolves, coyotes, and bear. They would make short work of the carcasses. Before the feeding frenzy was over, the men’s bones would be scattered far and wide to the four winds.
Harlan and the boys had removed the horse and mule shoes from their dead animals, not only because metal was valuable on the frontier but because if any Indians happened upon the scene, they would think the livestock had belonged to the Indians rather than the hated white man. In that case, they would figure their friends had run into some of the ever-present meat eaters and had lost the showdown. If they refrained from trapping in that area, then even if the bones were found, the trappers might not be blamed for the disaster...
When they arrived back in camp, the women knew something was wrong. The men had returned early without any beaver, and Big Eagle and Runs Fast were smeared with blood! Sitting down by the outside campfire, Harlan asked Birdsong for a jug of rum and four cups, which she promptly provided without question. Harlan then poured all the men a full cup, sat back, and asked Big Eagle and Runs Fast for their side of the story.
“Not much to tell,” said Big Eagle. “We heard the shooting and figured the two of you were under attack. Finally locating where you were, we dismounted and discovered the Cheyenne hiding behind those logs.
Saving our powder and shot, as you have often told us to do, we returned to our horses, retrieved our bows and arrows, and killed two of them. When the remaining three jumped up to run to their horses, you and Winter Hawk killed two of them. Runs Fast and I took off after the runner and killed him in a knife fight. That is all there is to say.” Big Eagle finished in a tone so flat that it was as if he had been asked how to dig wild onions.
Good old Big Eagle, thought Harlan, always long on words when it comes to complex, life-and-death explanations. Yes, my boys are now mountain men.
Harlan said, “We still have a problem. How do
we make sure we have really hidden the whereabouts of the raiding party and their chief? That is not the only thing we need to worry about. The raiding party more than likely left a clear trail clear to where we live.
That means the rest of the tribe is probably following their trail as we speak. Soon they will be here and in time will figure out what happened and come looking for us, especially if the critters haven’t had the time to eat all the meat and scatter the Indians’ bones. Looks like we might have to move, and fast. I doubt the rest of the tribe is more than a week behind the ones we killed.”
He went on in a disappointed tone, “Well, let’s not dwell on the matter. What is done is done, and that is that. We can pull up stakes tomorrow and ride far enough away and across enough other Indians’ tracks to lose them, and that is what we will do.”
The boys nodded in unison at his decision and then fell to the delicious dinner the women had prepared. Afterward, they sat around the campfire late into the evening, smoking their pipes and talking about the morrow. When a cold wind heavy with moisture came up from the north and began to rattle the treetops, they took it as a sign to go to bed.
The next morning Harlan left the sleeping furs early to go outside, take care of the call of nature, and bring in some firewood to warm his cabin. Stepping outside, he stumbled into a foot of fresh snow, and it was still falling heavily! They had been hit with an early winter storm in the high country, and a knowing, wide smile crossed his face.
“So much for the rest of the tribe tracking their kin to this place!” he exulted.
“Boys!” he yelled. “Get your butts out of bed. We have some trapping to do before this stuff gets any deeper than it is!”
Chapter Nineteen
Killing Their Own
