7

WPA Slave Narrative Collection

Interview with Henrietta Lee

Sunday, September 6, 1936

Those first few days after the job, I made sure to let my displeasure with Garet be known. It wasn’t an act, either. Grace Trumbull couldn’t ride a damn horse, and she got a bad case of soroche. Mountain sickness. Everyone got it when they were new to the mountains. Headache, sick to your stomach, tired. Oh Lord, did it make you tired. That first night in camp, Grace fell asleep like that and slept like the dead. I threw pebbles at her, trying to wake her, and nothing doing. Garet chastised me, but she was smiling a bit, too. I could tell she regretted bringing the woman, but she never admitted it.

“I expected Grace to want to have a lie-in the next morning, but when we woke her at dawn, she made ready to leave without question or complaint. Surprised the hell out of me, but she didn’t complain once. In fact, she wasn’t much for complaining in general. I figured she was holding back because she knew she was on thin ice with me. I’d done my level best to frighten her when we met, and I think I did. But the more I got to know her, the more I realized she wasn’t the complaining kind. She was a lot like Garet, and me, in that way. She saw something that needed to be done and she did it. I liked her more than I ever thought I would, but that was at the end. Right here in this part of the story, I didn’t trust her. That was well founded, as it turned out.

“We made it back to the ranch with little trouble. You should have seen that Yankee get off her horse the last time. She could barely walk. I laughed and got a dirty look from Grace for my effort. I knew well enough what she thought of me and my kind by that time.

“Garet had this habit of going off in the mountains by herself after we did a job. She always took a green horse to train ’em in mountain riding and came back with a deer or elk or something across the back of her pack horse to hang in the smokehouse. Usually I didn’t mind, but this time it meant I had to babysit Grace Trumbull. Wasn’t a problem for the first few days, what with her being rump sore and the mountain sickness still had her, so she spent most of the first week in bed. You shoulda seen her face when she was told Garet was gone and we didn’t know when she’d be back. Partly cause I had other fish to fry, I decided to let Stella take charge of her. Mostly I wanted to see how tough Grace Trumbull of Chicago really was.

“I haven’t told you about Stella and Joan yet, have I? They were a couple of sisters from Nebraska. Jehu found them begging in Rock Springs, trying to get the money for a train to Frisco. Joan was about twelve, old enough that Jehu guessed some man would try to buy her, or not, which would be worse. Wouldn’t no man want to buy Stella. Oh, she wasn’t ugly—she was just a plain granger—but you could tell by the set of her mouth and the scar on her top lip that Stella wouldn’t be a compliant wife. She got that scar the first time her pa threw a leg over her. Didn’t lie down and take it like he expected. Stella was a fighter, and that’s a fact. Joan had some fight in her, too, especially at the end.

“That happened then, miners, farmers, businessmen buying wives to do the housework and spread their legs when demanded, squeeze out some children to put to work and make miserable by and by. Pioneering was a hard life for women. They gloss over it in the movies. Make the sodbuster some handsome, good-hearted fella. Make the cowboy honorable. Those types of men were thin on the ground in the West, let me tell you. Jehu? He was different. Everyone loved Jehu. Luke Rhodes was a good man, too. In the end. Ought-Not. Jack and Domino. Guess we had more good men around us than we realized at the time.

“But Jehu. He had the tenderest heart of anyone I’ve ever known. He couldn’t abide the idea of that little girl being sold off to some toothless, dirty miner. Course, he didn’t know Stella. Talk about a mama bear. Lawd, she would have slit anyone’s throat who suggested Joan for the skin trade.

“Well, thinking on it, she did, but I think she used an ax to the back of his head. She wasn’t ever real clear on events, you see, and knowing Stella like I did, there was no telling what she did. She killed her older brother and father when they switched their attention from her to Joan. Not out of jealousy, mind you. I think she’d been harboring murderous feelings since her mom had died and she’d had to fill in for her, in every way. That’s how the sisters ended up in Rock Springs, with Jehu, and at Garet and Thomas’s ranch, oh, about ’71 I guess. I’d been there for a good three, four years by then. Thomas was laid up in bed, and Garet and I ran the ranch. We were a good team, Garet and I.

“We weren’t the only vagrants Jehu brought home, but they’d all eventually go their own way until it was only the five of us—Garet, Jehu, Joan, Stella, and me. And then Margaret went and brought Grace Trumbull. Stella didn’t like her—Stella didn’t like anyone much—and I knew she wouldn’t give Grace any quarter. Grace was a tough old bitch, I’ll give her that, and a fast learner. Made Stella right angry, let me tell you. She expected that Yankee to fold in a day. Instead, by the time Garet blazed back into the ranch, Grace was on her way to becoming a good hand. I’d even started working with her on riding.

“I didn’t just give Grace over to Stella to torture her, though that was an enticement, but I knew that with Garet gone, Grace would need a shoulder, and I wanted to offer it. I still didn’t like her, and trusted her even less, but I wanted her to trust me, to confide in me. I knew I could never earn her trust on my own. She wasn’t going to warm to me unless she had no other ally. Stella, God bless her, played Grace right into my hands. I figured if Grace was against us, she’d eventually slip up.

“Why did I think she was against us? Well, I’ll tell you. Since we’d started outlawing I’d thought long and hard about what our enemies were doing. I didn’t believe for one second they were letting us get away with what we did. Oh, sure, they didn’t want the world knowing they were being bested by women. I imagined Connolly had a time of keeping it out of the papers. There’s nothing a newspaperman likes more than a sensational story he can make even grander with lies. And sure enough. Years later, when most people who were there were dead and gone, what did I discover but that a big chunk of the Connolly empire is newspapers? That mystery was solved when Dorcas sold to Hearst at the turn of the century. Oh, I’ll get to her. She’s a big part of the story later on. You better believe Connolly Industries is still around. Bought and sold and changed names, but the colonel’s legacy lives on.

“Anyways. I knew that they were after us, and that their plans and strategy would be just as cunning and devious and secret as our plans were. There weren’t no bounties on our head, none that were public anyways, so we weren’t being chased by those scoundrels. Which left the Pinkertons. But I thought, “What would I do to catch us?” A female gang wouldn’t trust a man who tried to get in with them, but they might a woman. And that was the first thing that ran through my mind when I saw Grace riding double with Garet.

“I eventually told Garet my suspicions, but I wanted some time to watch Grace, to win her trust. I knew Grace didn’t think of me as her equal, or that I was smarter than her. I might have let her believe it. Might’ve let her think I was all into voodoo, just to mess with her. Hell, if she was going to write a story about us, might as well make it more interesting than the truth, which was that Garet and I neither had much use for the Lord back then.

“Things were changing in the Hole. More people were coming in, strangers, all up to no good. Apparently word had gotten out about Timberline and how accommodating we were with bandits. There were strangers and threats everywhere. When Garet got back from her walkabout with news that Spooner and his gang were back in town, we were surrounded on all sides by enemies. By the time we realized it, it was too late.”