Deadville

by Robert F. Jones

  “Not in Vermont where I lived,” I must admit. “Nothing but muskrats left there, and some foxes and squirrels. And damn few of them anyway.”

  Says he, “Well then, when we get to good beaver country I will show you what to look for by way of sign, and how to make a foolproof set, and the skinning and stretching of the plews. But you must pay me for the lessons, like you would pay a teacher in a private school back east. How many traps do you have?”

  “Six,” I tell him. “Good Mackinaw traps, weighing five pounds each, say eight with the chains attached. We purchased them for eighteen dollars apiece at Cabanné’s post.”

  “Good traps, then. When I have taught you, you will be taking six beaver a day in your sets, so long as the animals last. The price of your lessons shall be one beaver a day for the season.”

  “And how long is that?”

  He purses his lips and says, “It is now early May. We can trap until freeze-up, probably the end of October or early November in the mountains, later on the plains.”

  I do some quick reckoning. “So that comes to, say, 180 plews or thereabouts, at three dollars apiece—540 dollars in sum? Why, that is steep, I must say for even a teacher of natural philosophy, back where I come from.”

  “Yes, perhaps,” he rejoins, “but everything costs more in the mountains. A man of my acquaintance, Mister Osborne Russell, figured it out once and estimates a 2,000 percent advance in the price of goods and services out here over what they bring in Saint Louis. Why, at the rendezvous on the Popo-asia three years ago I had to pay five dollars a pint for diluted rotgut whiskey that cost only fifteen cents a gallon back east. It is the added expense of the transportation, don’t you know? Or so say the goddamn traders.”

  It was then that I explained to Golightly our indebtedness to Captain Beckwourth in regard to the horses, and he laughed and told me how he had just taken his pony free of charge and ridden off on it.

  “Listen here,” he said. “This Beckwourth fellow is a notorious sharp trader. I know him of old. And he works for McKenzie, the sharpest trader of them all. Beckwourth is loved by the Crows for his leadership in their petty wars and the gifts of horses he brings them from his raids, but he will screw them gladly for their furs. He is a gaudy liar, too; he would lie to his mother on her deathbed if he could make a dollar from it. You should have walked back to the Missouri rather than sign that paper. He has you now in his power, and will keep you there.”

  I was saddened to hear this, and said, “Maybe when Owney is stronger we can just sneak off at night, taking our horses with us, and flee for the East.”

  “Never attempt it,” Golightly says. “White men do not steal horses from the Crows; they steal horses from you. He and his Wolves would track you down before you knew it, and they would hang your scalps to dry on their lodgepoles. Best stay here until you know the mountains better.” He looks at me kind of sorry-like and says, “Tell you what. I will not charge you a plew a day for my teaching lessons after all. I will only charge you a plew a week.”

  Taken aback, I know not what to say.

  Then finally I say it: “Bless you, Mister Spybuck,” and ride on back to Owney at the rear of the column.

  No, you never can figure an Indian.

  Had I known what I learned later that summer at Fort Gass, I should have realized that both Beckwourth and Spybuck were screwing us over financially, and quite royally at that. But that is the way of the mountains.

  TOWARD SUNDOWN CAPTAIN Beckwourth called a halt. We were on a hogback ridge overlooking a wide expanse of prairie, the Wind River mountains looming blue and ghostly to the west, and I rode up to where he sat his horse just under the backside lip of the ridge. Two of his minions were with him, his Wolves, as Spybuck calls them, toying with their long black hair and studying the grownd below.

  Beckwourth says, “Ah, young Griffith, we are planning to make some meat. Do you see them?”

  I follow his eyes and spot maybe a dozen buffalo feeding slowly along through the sagebrush down below. The bushy plants resemble a field of gray boulders from our vantage point.

  “I do.”

  “Then let us see how well you can shoot that fuke,” he says, nodding toward the Leman gun where it lay athwart my saddle bow.

  Now those buff’ were anyway two hundred yards distant from us; no way in hell my ball could reach them at that range. The most I could count on it for was sixty yards, and that with a following wind.

  I says, “I cannot hit them from here, not with a smoothbore gun.”

  Says Jim, “Why, my Indians can kill them, and they, too, have fusils!”

  I says, “Not without riding among them.”

  “Then ride amongst them, young sir, and kill me some meat!”

  And thus it was I ran my first buffalo.

  THE CROWS WERE stripping for the chase; off comes their blankets and shirts, off comes their foofaraw sacks, they open the cocks on their light Northwest trade guns, check the flints for sharpness, and tap in fresh priming powder. Their eyes are glittering black and bright as chunks of Lehigh anthracite.

  Oh, yes, their blood is up!

  I load my piece: a fresh charge of fine-ground musket powder from the horn, then a patch tamped down on top, and a nicely rounded ball along with a handful of buckshot, another patch atop all that, and stick a new percussion cap on the tit. Lastly I pull off my hat and hand it to Captain Beckwourth.

  I says, “Keep this for me if you will, kind sir, and in a minute I will trade you a buffalo liver for it.”

  He laughs. “Brave talk for a greenhorn!”

  With the Crows leading we wound our way slow and easy down the scarp, at an angle away from the buff’ so as not to spook them. Once in the flat we were pretty much hidden from them by the height of the sagebrush, also downwind from them so as not to alert them with our scent. Then we circled out so as to pin them against the scarp and ride toward them abreast of one another about twenty yards apart, riding slow and quiet, the Crows leaning low on their ponies’ necks to reduce the scary man profile, gradually picking up the pace; then when within a hundred yards of the buff’ the Crows suddenly kicked their ponies into a hell-for-leather gallop, and the buffalo wheeled on their tiny quick feet and ran for it. …

  Well, wasn’t it something? Quick as knife we are among them. Bang! goes the lead Crow’s gun, and a fat cow goes skidding headfirst into the dirt in a great cloud of dust, and Bang! goes the other Crow’s gun, and with a heart-wrenching bellow down goes another buff’, and I am bucketing along now beside a yearling, its buggy eyes rolling back in its black curly head, its shiny black horns hooking toward me like doom itself, and I drop the reins, guiding the chestnut with my knees alone, raise the fuke, and let the yearling have it right back of the skull. …

  Next thing I know I’m flying through the air smack into a jungle of sage, all tangled up with my horse’s legs, dust and the stink of sage in my nose holes. Whump! I hit the ground, no breath left in me, dazed, you can bet, from the spill. Then through the dust cloud I see that yearling charge, straight at me, coming fast as a freight train, near half a ton of angry muscle, blood streaming down its face, and those deathly damn black spikes leading the way.

  Oh, Christ, you’re for it now, Dillon!

  But no. From afar the providential shot rings out. The yearling drops in its tracks.

  Up on the hogback I see Beckwourth laughing, laughing so hard the tears streak down his face. He points an arm to the side, and I see Owney standing there, 200 yards off at least, with the Hawken still smoking in his hands.

  “Oh, yes, that is brotherly love at its finest!” yells Beckwourth. “Well shot indeed, Owen Griffith!”

  Then another great peal of mirth, and now all the Indians are laughing too, Bar-che-am-pe as well, hanging there on my brother’s arm. A jolly band indeed. There is naught for me to do but laugh along with them. Oh, I am banged up some from the spill, ribs sore, shoulder wrenched, patches of skin scraped off by the rough sage bark; my po
ny is limping a bit, but a quick check shows nothing broken. Ah, but my fusee is another story: barrel full of dirt, the stock split right at the wrist, even the hammer wobbly on its pinscrew.

  But I put a good face on it, walked over to the spikehom yearling who had near done for me, and with my butcher’s knife removed its liver as promised. Then, blood to the elbows, I carried it up to Jim Beckwourth—a heavy load, let me tell you. He accepted it with good grace, sliced off a chunk, raw, and popped it in his mouth.

  “Bring me the gallbladder,” he says when he has swallowed. “You have not ate liver lest you dip it first in the gall.”

  One of his minions fetches the desired organ; Jim cuts me a slice of liver, slathers it in the yellowy goo, and proffers it to me. I ate it down, and mighty good it was, too: spicy and pungent as mustard.

  “Don’t I deserve a bite?” says Owney, walking up to us with the Pine Leaf at his side.

  “More than a bite,” Captain Beckwourth says. “The whole damn animal, with that pretty shot you made.”

  “I want to thank you for that, Brother,” says I. “Forever in your debt. I guess you are recovered from your hatchet wound sure enough. Steady as a rock.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Owney replies. He pats the Pine Leaf on her shoulder and gives me a big wink.

  Beckwourth turns on his heel and strides off toward the main party, barking orders in Grow like a damn major general.

  THE INDIANS BUTCHERED out the three buffalo lickety-split, and soon we were all broiling fat hump rib over a fire of buffalo chips and sage. The sky to the west over the Winds was salmon pink by now, a mackerel sky that promised weather by the morrow.

  The Pine Leaf had Beckwourth’s goat by the horns all right, and womanly she knew it; kept flirting with Owney all through the time we were eating, feeding him choice bits of hump from her knife tip, but the captain said not a word, just stared grim at the fire. Except at the very end, when he gave her some sharp orders in Grow. She sassed back at him some, though it was weak I could tell, even not knowing the language; but then he threw her such a stern look that finally she gave in, grabbed her blanket, picked up her gun and her lance and her bow and quiver, and went off as he had told her, to stand watch over the horses.

  THAT NIGHT GOLIGHTLY Spybuck showed me how to repair my injured gun. He cut a hunk of rawhide to size, soaked it limp in a kettle of water, and sewed it tight with a moccasin awl over the split in the stock. When the buckskin dried it would shrink even tighter, he said, rock hard and unbreakable. He had a kit of gunsmithing tools in his war bag and found a new screw to replace the loose one holding the lock.

  “How much are you going to charge me for the repairs?” I asked him.

  “This one is on me,” said he. “If we’re going to be trapping together I want to be sure your gun is in working order. It could save my life someday.”

  FOUR

  SURE ENOUGH, NEXT morning it came on rain; then sleet; then a heavy wet snow commenced to fall, and it fell all day. It made for slow going. The Indians did not seem to mind the bad weather, just wrapped themselves tighter in their buffalo robes and rode through it, heads down, letting their ponies pick the way over the slippery trails. Owney and I and the captain pulled on our capotes, thick-hooded jackets sewn from the wool of four-point Mackinaw blankets; Spybuck carried a dark blue grego, or pea coat, in his blanket roll, which he now donned; but soon the snow had soaked us through and through, and each was as wet as the other. It eased up some by nightfall, when we reached the Wind River country, then Wind River itself, where we made a wet camp. It took awhile to get the fire started, but using pinecones and dried punk from the heart of dead birch stumps we finally had a good blaze going. I ground up some more of those coffee beans, and soon we had a big speckled pot of it boiling, buffalo meat sizzling on the ends of our ramrods, and buffalo tongues baking in the red-hot coals at the edge of the fire; the river roared into the night.

  Owney said, “How came you to live amongst the Grows, Captain?”

  “Funny you should ask,” says Beckwourth, “for it all started right about here. A bunch of us Ashley men were camped on Wind River back in ’28, alongside a big band of Crows. We’d had a desperate fight with the Blackfoot during rendezvous earlier that summer, and the Crows wanted to hear all about it, chapter and verse. They hate the Blackfoot, mortal enemies, those two tribes, and anyway, Indians love a good war story above all others. The only man among us at the time who could speak Crow was a trapper name of Caleb Greenwood, who had a Crow wife. Well, he got so damn sick and tired of telling the story, over and over again every night, that finally he latched onto me. I had taken five scalps in the Blackfoot fight.

  “Anyway, Greenwood told the Crows that years ago, back in the Way Back When, the Shi-ans had stole a Crow baby from the People: the infant son of a great Crow chief. Indian fashion they raised the boy as a Shi-an warrior; he become a great hero amongst them. But for all the honors heaped upon him, for all the horses he won in battle, for all the beautiful girls who begged to marry him, he nonetheless always felt as if he was not a true Shi-an, and one day went off to live among the white men, or the Spiders, as the Shi-ans call us. There, too, he distinguished himself for valor in the Spider wars. But then this boy, now a great man among two great peoples, grew lonesome for the prairies, and he came back west.

  “By now the Crows are all agog, their mouths hanging open, ears pricked. … ‘What next? What next?’

  “ ‘And that great man,’ Greenwood tells them, ‘is none other than the Five-Scalp Hero, the White-Handled Knife, who sits beside you now at this very fire: Jim Beckwourth!’ ”

  Captain Beckwourth smiles his bright smile, takes a pull at the coffeepot, and continues: “Of course the Crows will have it no other way but that the great White-Handled Knife come back to his true people. They even appointed an examining committee to make sure I was of their tribe. An old squaw whose son had been stolen by the Shi-ans said, ‘If he is my son, he will have a birthmark on his left eyelid.’ They pull down my lid thusly”—he winked at us there in the firelight—“and lo and behold!”

  By God, he did have a birthmark on that eye!

  After we had finished laughing at the story—and Captain Beckwourth could spin the yam far prettier than I recount it here—he told us that a short while later he had been trapping the country adjacent to Powder River, which is a fork of the Yellowstone, with the far-famed James Bridger. One day the two got separated and Captain Beckwourth suddenly found himself surrounded: “By an innumerable drove of horses, and I could plainly see they were not wild ones. Their Indian owners of course had discovered me long before I saw them—a gang of long-haired warriors, all bristling with lances and arrows. At first I reckoned I was finished for sure, surrounded on all sides, escape impossible. I resigned myself to my fate: if they were enemies they could kill me but once. I took the chance between death and mercy; I surrendered my gun and my traps. But never was I really frightened, for I had already recognized them as Sparrowhawk soldiers, and the Crows claim they have never killed a white man. I went to their encampment with them, where were some of the people who had talked to Greenwood a few weeks before. They welcomed me as a brother. During my stay among them I traded a pocketful of foofaraw for some of the best cured beaver plews I had ever seen. From that moment on, with the concurrence of my superiors in the American Fur Company, I have lived amongst them, trading and serving as one of their war chiefs. And that, sir”—he nods to Owney—“is the answer to your question. Now shall we turn in for the night? We’ve a long way to travel tomorrow.”

  WE FOUND THE main Crow village in the foothills of the Little Horn Mountains, where the Wind River becomes the Bighorn and spills its waters onto the plain. Great herds of horses grazed on the greening slopes, more horses than I had ever seen together in one place before. Bands of antelope flirted and fed in the highlands; hawks swung against the empyrian. It was a warm, sunny day, gentle spring in all her fairest ascendancy, with
flags in flower blue and white and yellow along the watercourses; as we splashed across a bubbling brook on our way into camp I saw many specklebacked trout, some as long as my leg, swirling away in panic from the ponies’ hooves. In Vermont the largest trout I ever caught was scarce a foot long. “Oh, yes, this Absaroka must surely prove a sportsmans paradise!” I exclaimed aloud.

  “There’s no country like Crow country,” Captain Beckwourth agreed. “Old Rotten Belly, one of their chiefs, says that the Great Spirit put it in just the right place. To the south of it is nothing but prickly pear and sagebrush prairie and the water is warm and bitter; to the north is the land of eternal winter, not enough grass to feed a horse herd, and the Indians there must pack their goods on the backs of dogs. To the west is Digger country, where the people are poor and go naked, and must eat fish and bitter roots to live. East of Crow country is the Big Muddy, what we call the Missouri, where the water is not fit to drink unless you let it die overnight to settle the dirt out of it. No, young Griffith, Crow country is best: if you leave it, you live poorly; if you stay all your life in it, you fare well.”

  CAPTAIN BECKWOURTH SENT his warriors charging ahead into the encampment, whooping and discharging their guns in the air, and leading the herd of recaptured horses. Bar-che-am-pe led the way, her handsome face daubed black with fire ash and tallow as a symbol of victory, and brandishing on high her war lance, from which swung the scalps she had taken on this raid. A mob of old men, wrinkled squaws, the young warriors who had remained behind to guard the village in the war party’s absence, toddling naked children, and last the young women who had tarried to don their finest outfits for this festive occasion—all came swarming from the tepees to greet their conquering heroes. Along with them come a great swarm of dogs, big ones and little ones, piebald and yellow and black and white and brown, all of them yapping and barking fit to be tied.