DEADVILLE
OTHER BOOKS BY ROBERT F. JONES
Blood Sport 1974
The Diamond Bogo 1977
Slade’s Glacier 1981
Blood Root 1982
Blood Tide 1990
The Fishing Doctor 1991
Jake 1992
Upland Passage 1992
African Twilight 1995
Tie My Bones to Her Back 1996
Dancers in the Sunset Sky 1996
ROBERT F. JONES
DEADVILLE
A NOVEL
Skyhorse Publishing
Copyright © 2013 by Louise Jones
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-62873-455-3
Printed in the United States of America
Once again, for Louise
Still, it is not so much the anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders that one listens for in this firelight as Othello’s other themes, antres vast and desarts idle, moving accidents by flood and field, hairbreadth ’scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach, and being taken by the insolent foe. . . . Murder, starvation, massacre, endurance, the will not to die.
—BERNARD DE VOTO
Across the Wide Missouri (1947)
EDITOR’S NOTE
THE THICK PACKET of manuscript known as the Griffith Papers was discovered in the storage rooms of the public library at Hidalgito, New Mexico, during an inventory of donated materials preparatory to that institution’s centennial in 1995. Ms. Wanda Chatsworth, who found the papers, recognized immediately that they held more than ordinary historical interest and called them to the attention of this editor, a professor of American studies at Rocky Mountain College.
Written late in life by Capt. Dillon Griffith (1815-1907), the papers are of historical interest in that they deal, among other things, with the middle and later years of the author’s longtime friend and business partner, James Pierson Beckwourth, a controversial figure in the early Rocky Mountain fur trade. Beckwourth (1798-1866), one of the rare “mountain men” of African-American descent, is often mentioned in early chronicles of the fur trade, usually—given the prejudices of the period—in less than kindly terms.
In The Oregon Trail (1849), Francis Parkman wrote: “Six years ago a fellow named Jim Beckwourth, a mongrel of French, American, and Negro blood, was trading for the Fur Company, in a large village of the Crows. Jim Beckwourth . . . is a ruffian of the worst stamp; bloody and treacherous, without honor or honesty; such at least is the character he bears upon the prairie. Yet in his case the standard rules of character fail, for though he will stab a man in his sleep, he will also perform the most desperate acts of daring. . . .” Beckwourth’s own autobiography, The Life & Adventures of James P. Beckwourth: Mountaineer, Scout, and Pioneer: And Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians (Boston, 1856), ghostwritten by one Thomas D. Bonner, was roundly condemned by two generations of American historians as bombastic, selfserving, and totally inaccurate. Beckwourth entered the literature as a “gaudy liar.”
He appears quite otherwise in these papers. Perhaps it is time for a reappraisal of Beckwourth’s career. This memoir provides a good starting place. I am presently at work on such a scholarly study.
THE PAPERS, HANDWRITTEN in India ink on high-grade vellum, had lain unread for more than sixty years in a calfskin trunk at the Hidalgito Public Library. They had been carefully wrapped in oilskin, tied with a red ribbon, now faded, and overlaid with a jumble of daguerreotypes and photographs; a brace of cap-and-ball Colt Walker pistols; an assortment of tomahawks, arrowheads, lance points; and half a dozen crisp, woolly items that proved to be Native American scalps. (An attempt is under way to return these latter items to the tribes from which they were wrongfully taken.) Existing records do not indicate who donated the trunk to the library. A label attached to its handle bears the date “May 26, 1934” and appears to be written in the hand of the late James Quiller Parkes, who served as Hidalgito’s public librarian from 1923 to 1946.
Ms. Chatsworth, knowing my keen interest in the history of the Rocky Mountain West, especially the fur trade, and having read my earlier studies of such figures as Josiah Pilcher, Samuel Tulloch, Zenas Leonard, Peter Skene Ogden, and the Patties, father and son, asked me to appraise the manuscript for authenticity. Such internal evidence as dates, handwriting comparisons, and analysis of both paper and ink was found to be consistent with the story’s purported provenance. At Ms. Chatsworth’s request, I have edited the papers for publication, all proceeds save my personal expenses and a modest fee to go to a fund that might save the library from impending extinction.
Beyond correcting some minor spelling errors and anachronistic punctuation, there has been little editing to do. The narrative falls logically into three parts, two written by the hand of Capt. Dillon Griffith, another by the hand of his older brother, Owen. These parts I have broken into chapters where it seemed the author’s intention. As to the story, I found it compelling, though the squeamish might be forewarned that the narrative is fraught with violence, not to mention attitudes and expressions regarding women and minorities offensive to enlightened contemporary sensibilities. That, though, might be said of all Western history “in the raw” and, indeed, of human history from the beginning of time.
—Dr. L. J. Kenton
Audie Murphy Professor of American Studies
Rocky Mountain College
Sixgun, Colorado
CONTENTS
OTHER BOOKS BY ROBERT F. JONES
DEADVILLE
Copyrights
Dedication
Author
EDITORS’S NOTE
PART I: BUENAVENTURA ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
PART II: OWEN’S STORY CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
PART III: WHITE HART HOLLOW CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
AFTERWORD
ONE
EIGHTY-FIVE YEARS have sped beneath my boot heels, and suddenly I find myself old. I can no longer walk, thanks to a bullet which nicked my spine half a century ago but only last winter crippled me for good. Yet I still remain capable of driving a carriage, and even of riding a horse, if someone will be so kind as to hoist me into the saddle. Each morning I go my rounds of the rancho, one way or the other. Herds of blood horses range the grasslands, intermixed with clusters of portly shorthorn bee
f cattle. The cattle feed on grama, that most nutritious of grasses; the horses snort, flirt their tails, stare at me with fiery eyes, then gallop away. Great golden eagles turn high in the cobalt skies; coyotes sing at night to the rising of the moon. Everywhere is the perfume of dust and flowers. Groves of oranges and lemons surround the house, watered from a crystalline stream that descends from the surrounding hills. All told, it is not a bad life.
Still, I had never thought to see the year 1900 turn up on the calendar, and it’s coming soon. What an odd and alien number it seems. As this century ends—my century—I cannot help but think back on the changes it has wrought. Changes in me, of course, and not only the ones inherent in aging, but changes to the people I’ve loved as well; changes to the very land that’s sustained us so long and so well.
Sitting here of a hot, lazy summer afternoon, at the cusp of this new age, on the veranda of my modest estancia, La Casa Pequeña, up in the dry cerillos just south of Santa Fe, I find myself looking out at the baldheaded mountains and the sere, yellow plains beyond. The images come ghosting back to me. So concrete are they, so urgent, almost palpable, that I feel I must record their histories before they pass from human remembrance. No one will ever read this memoir, so I can tell the truth about what happened.
The ghosts beg for truth.
I see the great buffalo herds, long gone now, careering over the plains from horizon to horizon beneath a boiling tan cloud of their own generation, and the great grizzly bears that descended like avalanches upon our caballadas to carry whole horses off between their jaws, while bullets bounced from their dirty white hides like so many puny snowballs. I see the heavy-jawed lobos lurching ungainly over the prairie, their yellow eyes set on destruction; the bighorn sheep bouncing from crag to crag in the high country; and antelope flashing their heliographs through a shimmering haze of prairie heat.
I see the tribes, Crow and Blackfoot and Apache, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, Ute, in all their painted fury, proud and fierce, fearsome in war yet deeply spiritual, and capable of tortures beyond even the imagination of old Torquemada. I hear their drums, their war cries.
I see my brother, tall and pale, his eyes deep-sunk in madness.
I see his haunted lover, doomed, maimed, murderous, lance in hand, death in her strong dark face.
I see my wife, as she was so long ago, a warm, cheerful, devil-may- care Indian maiden out for a jolly good time; then later as mate and mother, serious, loving, resourceful.
I see Spybuck, the embittered Shawnee who was my friend from the start, and I see red-whiskered, wild-eyed Lafcadio Dade, who became our mortal enemy.
I see my children, living and dead, and must look away for a moment.
IT’S A SAD thing outliving all that you loved.
BUT MOST CLEARLY I see Jim.
He it was who taught me the West.
Ah, Jim, how you’d laugh at all of this today. Steel rails, which had scarce reached the Mississippi when I first crossed that noble stream, now gird the continent; humming wires carry messages from coast to coast at the speed of light, where once only smoke signals blossomed. My granddaughter has had installed in the hallway of our home a device called a telephone, which allows her to speak with her friends in Santa Fe as if they were in the next room.
There are streetlights now in the dark calles not only of Santa Fe, but of San Francisco de Taos and Nuestra Señora de Socorro.
And just today I had a visitor arrive in a horseless carriage, the first I’d ever seen. A Duryea it was, I learned later, red as hellfire, puttering and backfiring its way up the mountain. To my amazement, it wheeled through the gate, belching smoke and clattering like a tinsmith’s shop in an earthquake, and exploded its way to a halt at my door.
“Captain Griffith, I presume?” said the driver, dismounting and lifting a pair of rubber-rimmed goggles. He wore a white duster over his city clothes, and a little checkered cap atop his blond, oiled hair. He had a little waxed mustache, too, which he smoothed back with a delicate finger. He had one of those unctuous southern voices, educated, elegant, smooth as Kentucky bourbon.
“Could be,” I told him. “Depends on who you are and just what you presume to do.”
“Wentworth Champion of the Santa Fe Republican,” he announced with a slight bow. “At your service, sir. I have driven all this way from the capital in my brand-new Duryea motorcar just to interview you for our Sunday edition.”
“What do you feed that thing to make it fart so loud?” I asked.
He was taken aback at first, then laughed a weak little waxy laugh. “It eats gazarene, Captain Griffith, a whole gallon to get it this far. But I fear the poor beast is suffering from indigestion at the moment. Perhaps some water in the feed line?”
“Give it a dose of castor oil,” I said. “That’ll do the trick.”
He removed his duster and the checkered cap, mopped his brow with a monogrammed handkerchief. It was hot in the sun, cool in the shade of the veranda. “May I join you?” he asked.
“Suit yourself.”
No sooner had he seated himself in a cane chair opposite me than my granddaughter Esperanza emerged from the shady kitchen with a platter. On it was balanced a pitcher of lemonade tinkling with ice, some glasses, and a plate of her crisp sugar cookies. ’Speranza is a pretty girl—I’d say a beautiful one—with lustrous black hair and a golden brown complexion. She has confided to me that she feels her nose is a bit too long, her eyes too black, too wide-set, too large and catlike—too much like those of an indio—but she looks just like her grandmother. I have assured her that her beauty is that of the angels of this land, but still she glances doubtfully at her image in the hallway mirror each time she passes.
She poured our lemonade and withdrew.
“Very well mannered,” said Champion. “And prompt, too. It’s so hard to get good servants these days. Most of these Indians and mestizos, I must say, they’re as bad as niggers … but then after all it is the Land of Poco Tiempo, is it not?”
“I guess so. Now what did you wish to ask me?”
“I’d like to know what it was like in the old days,” he said.
I pulled a jug of aguardiente—the old Taos Lightning—from beneath the Navajo blanket that covered my thin shanks and sweetened my glass of lemonade, two quick glugs’ worth. I offered the bottle to Champion. He pursed his lips, frowned, and said, “No, thank you,” then withdrew a notebook from the inside jacket pocket of his seersucker suit. He unscrewed a fountain pen, poised it over the page, and asked, “Is it true you were a mountain man?”
I laughed.
“I’m a man, sure enough, and if you misdoubt me I shall whip back this blanket, unbutton my fly and display the proper credentials, wrinkled though they be. And you know I live on a mountain, having driven your spiffy Door-yay up here to my door just this very afternoon. Not to put too fine a point on it, Mister Champion: yes, in that sense I was a mountain man, and indeed remain one to this very day.”
“No, no, sir. You miss my meaning. I have reference to the fur trade of the 1820s, et sequelae. The beaver trade, as it then was. I have heard talk from certain usually trustworthy sources in the capital that you played a part in that era of glory. The Opening of the West. The Taming of the Tribes. The Blazing of the Emigrant Trails. Forerunners to the pioneers. Et cetera. Were you that kind of a mountain man, Captain Griffith?”
“The term wasn’t used much in those days,” I said. “Easterners made it up. We were just trappers. Or fur traders if you want to play it elegant. As to the opening of the West, why, it was pretty much open when we got here. Those very tribes you say we tamed had trails all through the durned place. And we didn’t tame them so much as they wilded us.”
“But you did participate, I take it. When did you first come west?”
“ ‘Thirty-three.”
He made his first note, then said, “So you must have known some of the great ones. James Bridger, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Jedediah Strong Smith, William Sublette, the Be
nts?”
“Never met Smith. The Comanch’ rubbed him out in ’31,1 believe. Down on the Cimarron crossing. The others? Ayuh.”
“ ‘Ayuh?’? Is that an Apache word?”
“No, it’s Vermontish. Where I grew up before I came west. Means ‘yep.’ Your Indians mostly say, ‘Ugh.’ ” Well, they don’t, but I was sick of this fellow already.
“I’m told you once knew the notorious nigger scalp hunter, horse thief, and braggart Jim Beckwourth. I recently read his preposterous autobiography and wonder if you could corroborate a few points for me, or refute them preferably. Clear some things up?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry; what do you mean?”
“I mean I won’t corroborate or refute anything for you, nor clear up any matter save this: that you’re not welcome here. Esperanza Quemado, the young woman who served us our lemonade, is my granddaughter. She is one-quarter white, one-quarter Crow Indian, and half Mexican. Her father, Sergeant Victorio Quemado, served with me against Sibley’s Texans at Valverde and Apache Canyon, during the late unpleasantness known as the Civil War, and later married one of my ‘half-breed’ daughters. Captain James P. Beckwourth was not only a business partner of mine for many years, but my closest friend. He was no ‘nigger.’ I know your type, Mister Champion. If I’m not mistaken, there’s a touch of Dixie in your manner of speech. You’re contemptuous of Indians, Mexicans, Jews, ’breeds, and especially blacks. You also despise ‘squaw men,’ and of course I am one of them. No man with your attitude could begin to understand the West I knew and grew up in, and anything I might tell you of the truth of it you will doubtless warp to your own prejudices. Now if you’ve finished with your lemonade, I’ll thank you to remount your clattering steed and depart my estancia, pronto.”
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