ROBERT CARRIED HIS UNEASINESS INTO THE WINTER. He saw the woman looking for John Cozad in every youngish feminine figure that stepped off the train. Every bit of paper he saw passing among the men at the post office, the depot, or at a sale was a part of the secret petition until it turned out to be a letter, a sale bill, or perhaps a land patent handed around, proud proof of what seemed to be a man’s deepest hope of attainment–sole ownership of a piece of ground.
But what disturbed Robert Cozad most now was any report of a man shot to death somewhere, openly or left face down on the prairie, always aware that the bullet might have been for his father, that bullet or the next one.
News traveled very slowly this bad winter of 1880–81. The warm fall rains had fooled the grass into starting up fresh as spring, and the cattle went into the winter full of new and easy fat, their jaws soft as from the tender grasses of May. Old-timers were uneasy too, about the great herd of elk that came clear down to the Loup in early December. Usually they straggled southward from the Black Hills country and the breaks of Pine Ridge down across the Niobrara to winter in the protected long-grass region of the sandhills. This year they came in one vast herd that broke from the horizon in a dark line miles wide, thundering southward, many stringing clear down to the bluffs and canyons north of Cozad.
“We’re in for a killing winter,” an old French breed from the fur-trade days told John Cozad at the land office.
Almost at once the rain started again, and when every creature was soaked to the hide, the downpour turned to sleet and then to snow as the temperature slid far below zero. Blizzards swept Nebraska and Dakota regions until late March. Even the couple of days now and then when the sun cleared to shimmer on the Platte valley, the whiteness of it might not be broken by the puff and soot of even one train. The drifts deepened to twenty, thirty feet in rougher regions, and lay eighteen inches to two, three feet deep on the level, crusted hard from the thaws.
Every day Robert Cozad checked the thermometer outside the post-office door, running out early with frosting breath. Once for ten days the mercury didn’t rise to zero, night or day. With that much moisture crops would boom, and John Cozad worked up new excursion literature and started to Ohio. On the train and at Omaha he talked to cattlemen who had been out to their ranches and told stories of sore-legged stock plowing the crusted snow for grass as long as they could, grabbing a mouthful on any wind-whipped ridge, finally to be caught in the drifts, their noses reaching up until the running snow covered them too. After a while even the stronger started to go down anywhere, no more than piles of bones in gaunted and hair-worn hides that seemed hard as rusty sheet iron even before they were frozen.
In every storm some of the stronger cattle, shaggy, snow-caked, reached the Cozad region, their great horns crusted in ice until they struck a building, perhaps a settler’s shack or a telegraph pole along the railroad. They crowded in around any cut bank or wall out of the wind, pushing in windows, doors, even walls, crashing through the roofs of dugouts. One steer fell in on a woman sleeping with her newborn baby beside her, crippling her foot and frightening her so that all the husband could do was hitch up the first possible day and haul her out in a bobsled full of hay and bedding, never to return.
In Cozad the drifting cattle packed in close around the buildings, humped upon themselves, not moving for yells, whips, and even buckshot. They gnawed at the siding and the few young trees and shrubs in yards and gardens. They ate up the shed Robert Cozad had made for his Darby from rain-spoiled bales of hay; they chewed at the wagon beds, harness, saddles and ropes, the hitching posts, and the wooden doorsteps of Mrs. Gatewood’s store. They jammed the streets, Longhorns once wild enough to stampede at a man’s lusty yell or the flutter of a woman’s skirt in softer air now cowered morosely together out of the wind or chased anyone for a newspaper held in the mitten or the clothing on his back.
Some of the townspeople joked about having spare ribs for supper delivered to the door. “And mighty spare, them ribs.”
Every morning there were dozens of carcasses to be dragged away with frost-wreathed teams, the doubletrees lashed to the frozen necks or hooked to a hind leg, the hard snow complaining under the awkward load. The strip of brush left along the Platte was full of the dead and the dying, and many went through the frozen river seeking Out the water that had retreated deep Under the ice. When the wind whipped up the snow again, they started to drift southward out upon the river and more went through air holes or the open current, pushed down by the storm-blinded ones behind.
More and more cattle came to the Platte region, mostly the plder, stronger of the southern stock, until Traber Gatewood and the Schooleys estimated around ten thousand dead through the town and along the river nearby, most of them mature range or beef stock.
Every time the sun came out a little, settlers rode in to make a few dollars skinning the frozen carcasses, usually for the brand owner at twenty-five cents a head. Some cattlemen placed little warnings in the papers forbidding anyone to take a hide burned with their mark, to avoid theft of their stock– as though anybody could be caught butchering cattle that were perhaps fifty even a hundred miles from their accustomed range. And mighty thin stew they would make for those who were driven to eating slow elk–stolen beef. Usually he hides of those with forbidden brands were stripped off anyway and shipped, for how were the hide buyers a thousand miles away to know or bother to pick the forbidden from the hundreds of thousands.
“Sure to be a great stink around here, come the first thaw,” some of the skinners remarked at the Cozad stores, particularly the men far from town and perhaps envious.
There would be a stink everywhere come spring, with many cattlemen broke, particularly the new ones with no stock tied by familiarity to their range–only southern stuff up the trail the past summer and moving most willingly in the direction of their old home before the fury of such storms as they had never known. Some of the so-called American stock finally drifted too. The once deep-meated Durham cows and the heavy blooded bulls from Iowa or Indiana or Ohio, perhaps stall-bred, with shorter, heavier bones naturally well rounded, were just as gaunt and stumbling by mid-January and February as the poorest Longhorn that ever walked north from the Rio Grande.
By April some ranchers were estimating their losses at seventy and eighty per cent, perhaps cattle on which they were paying two and three per cent interest a month, much of it in advance. Often it was stock practically gold-plated that they were losing.
Such ranchers knew they were out of business when the storms really struck, but others didn’t realize their situation until the snow thawed and the roundups showed nothing left to gather.
The winter was even harder on sheep, and some who bought their start from the herd that Haskell, the special friend of Robert Cozad, had brought up from the south were cleaned out. By mid-January those with a little money ordered hay shipped in at great expense and started their sheep to the railroad to eat it. That meant scooping trails not only through the larger drifts of twenty feet or so but on the level through snow two, three feet deep.
“Sheep’s built too damn close to the ground,” an out-of-job cowboy complained, one of those so hard up for grub that he finally took work with a sheep outfit for his board, for his found.
But there were no bare spots on the way to the railroad, nothing at all that a sheep could reach, and even the stronger finally began to stumble, scarcely blatting any more, many almost naked where others had eaten the wool from them in their hunger. Behind them the trail was marked by an increasing line of what looked like rolls of dirty snow–sheep that had dropped and died on the way, the night bedding grounds scattered thick in the mornings.
In some ways the Winter was as bleak for the settler with no hoof or horn to his name. December had seen a major victory for violence, for the spearhead of the ranchers against the settlers. The man-burning Print Olive and his foreman were out of the pen–given a new trial on a technicality of sorts. By legislative oversight, the new county of Custer had not been attached to any judicial district when it was created years ago. So their trial, which ended in the verdict of guilty, had been held in the adjoining district but outside of Custer County, the scene of the crime. On this technicality the state supreme court ordered a new trial. Because, under their decision, no district judge had jurisdiction, the new trial of Print Olive was before the county judge of Custer. He was a cattleman too, and called court into session in a room packed with armed ranchers and their gunmen, a room not big enough to hold much more than the Olive outfit. There had been months of rumors about great rolls of bribe money carried around the region, with a choice of gold or lead. Anyway, not one witness came forward against the man-burners, not even the two who had turned state’s evidence against them in the first trial, and although the mob that burned Mitchell and Ketchum had been a big enough one. Besides nobody ever heard Print Olive reject the credit for the lynching. But he and his foreman were released, turned loose upon the country.
The papers of the state and the nation joined in a loud chorus of denunciation, but there seemed nothing to be done.
John Cozad got off the train on one of the few clear days of winter. He gave Robert his handsatchel at the depot without much greeting. He looked up along the frozen street leading northward across the town and knew from the carcasses not yet dragged away that he could have doubled his profit by holding all the hay he shipped west for this urgent time here. But he had something else on his mind. He had come back in a dark anger because the power of the lawless element around Plum Creek had not only been restored but strengthened by the release of the man the newspapers from New York to California called the worst criminal in the nation. Print Olive was back walking the streets of the county seat that governed the town of Cozad, back in what had been called Olive Town ever since the Texan hit there four years ago–only four years, with almost half of them spent in prison, and yet he had built up such power in the state and its supreme court.
But surely many Plum Creekers were as disgusted and shamed by Olive and the renewed arrogance of his cowboys as anyone. Once more the gang was shooting up store fronts and saloon mirrors, dropping bullets through the night windows of settlers, and particularly effective this discouraging winter. John Cozad had heard about all this on the train west and realized that the situation was worse than before Olive was convicted of murder because now there was fear on the faces of those who had once stood against him.
Yet there had been men daring enough to arrest Print Olive in his own town two years ago, men led by the brothers of the dead Ketchum. Perhaps they were planning to lead a mob against him now that they had failed to hold him by law, the mob that the deputized Lawrence Ketchum had refused to lead two years ago, when he even handed Print Olive a gun and told him to use it if anybody tried to lynch him.
As John Cozad anticipated, he was accosted by talk of this nature the evening he returned. Some usually quiet, orderly men were now willing to face the guns of the Olive outfit.
“Better than waiting for old Print to have us picked off one, two at a time,” some of Cozad’s friends argued. “You might be the first, locating settlers—–”
But the colonizer rose in anger against them. “I won’t hear of lynching!”
“Now, Mr. Cozad, you know they been bulldozing you too,” Sam Schooley said, “half a dozen of the Olive cowboys at a time. They ate out a lot of your hay land with the herds when they first moved in. Even bedded stock from over toward Ogallala down on your best hay bottom couple years ago. Print’s making his brags that he’s taking over everything to the river. I’m against lynching too but when the law fails—–”
“I won’t have lynch talk from anybody in Cozad. I forbid it under any circumstances!”
“You can’t forbid nobody anything,” Ed Winchell told him. “You don’t run this town any more.”
But John Cozad’s opposition was still enough to cool the urge to such unaccustomed violence. The more reasonable of the group did point out that this was a time for alertness. Perhaps releasing Olive might help them to take the county seat away from Plum Creek, help rid the county of the evil influence from outside, from the Custer County ranchers. Properly presented at election time, this might be made the winning issue.
“There’s no denying that Cozad is a much more orderly town, more law-abiding,” Gene Young said, to nods all around him.
“Yes,” one of Winchell’s friends agreed, “the town would be just about perfectly law-tbiding if it wasn’t for one John Cozad. If we wipe the blot of his name off the town we may get the county seat.”
After one stunned moment John Cozad drew himself up in the dignity of his frock coat, his diamonds. “Maybe you want to lynch me, like that poor half-wit Fly Speck Billy got when he went up to the Black Hills?” he demanded, his eyes very dark in the sudden whiteness of his face. “Or that outfit that came to plant counterfeit on my son! ”
The men stood silent before him and his lifted cane, grasped midway, the heavy golden knob a sturdy weapon, most of them aware of the loaded pistol waiting under the tail of his coat although perhaps only Robert, helpless behind his father, knew of the other gun.
As usual Traber Gatewood stepped forward as soother. “Now John J., don’t take everything so personal.”
“Silence!” the man roared upon his brother-in-law.
Traber shrugged his stout shoulders. “You can try to shout us all down but that just means you have fewer on your side.”
Robert heard more talk of this around town the next few days. He tried to occupy his spare time with his own work but his writing did not go well when his mind was uneasy. He designed a few greeting cards and painted them. He had been ordering chromos through advertisements in his mother’s magazines for several years and used to think he did pretty well selling them for a share of the money and some premiums, mainly because his grandmother let him display them in a wire rack on the wall that his relative, Alex McIntyre, had made. That was before that family went back East, convinced that grasshoppers were a regular cycle of the country, as Alex insisted to his wife’s relatives, the Gatewoods.
Robert had made some decorated signs for the rack of chromos, changing them from Thanksgiving to Christmas. By then he had received many suggestions that he make the cards himself, so he ordered a lot of good board stock of different colors and put in long evenings drawing little decorative designs that he could do rapidly, with the illuminated lettering he liked. Before long these were selling much better than the chromos and the money was all his.
“You know, you are quite an artist,” Mrs. Young told him. By now her husband was county school superintendent and the compliment made the youth’s face burn and sting as from an overclose shave. He tried to think she said this because they were old friends, from back when she first came as the gay young bride to the hotel, eating at the table with them all, or to run antelope, sitting her sidesaddle like a bird, back before her children came, except that one time when her horse stepped into a badger hole or something.
Robert knew that his embarrassment, and most of his joy too, over her compliment was the memory of the photographer who had come through with the black wagon and his talk of becoming an artist.
By now both of the Cozad boys were through everything that could be taught them in the town school. Johnny was studying Latin with some plan in his head, something too unsettled to discuss, it seemed, and saying little about it to anyone except Sally Ann back in Cincinnati, the sister of his best friend there. Robert suspected that his brother hadn’t found Denver too pleasant, perhaps because of their father’s trouble over the woman, something never explained to Robert and something he tried to think might vanish if he never let it settle in his mind.
Johnny spoke very little about Denver except that he liked the mountains and had taken some long trips up there with hay customers, even a pack-horse ride up above Leadville to the Divide, where the summer nights seemed to be as cold and stormy as mid-January in Cozad. Johnny had been mighty glad there once that he had learned a little about curing exposure and frostbite from the old freighters and hunters around the Platte, and from the talk after Elisha Clark froze at Powell Canyon. When the whole pack-horse party was lost in a sudden August blizzard up at the Divide, he recalled the first rule: keep dry, and the second: don’t wear yourself out. Better hole up and wait the storm through. He also knew that after exposure the patient must be warmed as soon as possible and the circulation worked back into any damaged appendages. He had heard this often around Cozad and even seen it done. True, gangrenous spots might break and remain festering a long time, as old Matthews said he discovered after he froze his feet, but if the deeper circulation could be saved the dead tissue might slough off and the holes refill, the flesh not so firm, perhaps, but there. Matthews once told about the ends of all his toes rotting off to the bone tips from frostbite, the nails horny as hoofs but he kept whittling at them with his hide ripper.
“Gosh, Johnny, I don’t remember him saying all that,” Robert exclaimed.
“You were right there when Mr. Matthews pulled his boots off to show us. You were probably staring in his face, like you do.”
The mother laughed over her Battenberg. “You do go in for the morbid, Johnny,” she said mildly, disapproving but unable to be stern. The boys had enough laid upon them, and more to come, she knew.
The spring brought one of the biggest settler booms of all time, and John Cozad was out almost every day with his two-seater rig, showing the land that was soaked to such rich blackness as the snow went off, the grass shooting up in sharp green spears, early and thick as never before. Not one settler, not even half a dozen women among them, seemed to mind the stink of the dead cattle.
With so much snow going out at once for hundreds of miles up the river, the Platte spread over the bottoms and endangered the bridge, particularly when river ice and bloating cattle choked the end gaps. The Cozad sons worked with prods and pry poles to break the jams, Johnny’s face so strained, working so. desperately to save the bridge, that suddenly Robert suspected that his brother knew some unhappy things, perhaps about the petition against their father.
The river kept on rising as the thaw spread farther into the western foothills and then the mountains. The ice was gone but the long softening process was making the bridge fills crumble. The boys worked to protect them, throwing bundles of brush on the upstream side and rolling rocks and sod upon them to weight them down. It would have been hard, backbreaking work even for grown laborers and very difficult for the young Cozads with their long, delicate hands. Then suddenly one steamy afternoon Johnny flung his picthfork down. “What’s the use;—–” he said, speaking out of long and angry resentment.
Robert nodded. There didn’t seem to be much. Afterward it looked almost like a premonition of some sort, for when they got back to town, Ed Winchell had tacked up a notice announcing that he was to be the new postmaster here and that the name of the post office had been changed by petition from Cozad to Gould.
“Gould?–why Gould?” an Eastern landseeker asked.
“I’m hoping that Jay Gould will be pleased enough to help the town get ahead more than all the Cozads put together been able. Might even use railroad influence to get the county seat moved to the town named for him.”
People came to look at the notice and walked silently away, even signers of the petition requesting the change. Everybody watched for John Cozad’s return from locating settlers, for his return to the town that had cost him so much in money, in thought and effort, in plain hard work and sorrow.
Theresa and her family were all out to meet him, the sons pretending to be busy with their own affairs, even wrangling a bit, as they never did under normal circumstances because their mother would not tolerate any of it.
Toward evening John Cozad pulled his shying, sweating team to a stop in front of the hotel, setting them back upon the doubletrees with his powerful jerk on the lines. Even before he got out, Robert was at the heads of the horses, trying to quiet them, but barely able to see the bridles foT the watering in his eyes, or his father climbing heavily from the seat.
“So! All out waiting like buzzards on the fence to see the old bull die!” John Cozad roared out, looking all around the family, his eyes smoky dark even upon his wife. “Well, the old bull has heard the news.”
None of the family dared look to each other and when not even Theresa could speak, Traber finally managed it. “Now, John J., be reasonable.”
“Reasonable? Get out of my sight before I– I—–”
But the man could not say it, and after a stiffening as from a vital shot that must not be admitted, he held himself firm. “You knew this was going on all fall and winter, and you did nothing. You didn’t even think enough of me to warn me. Now git!”
Theresa Cozad started to speak, but had to remember the watchers behind every curtain, at hitch rack and farther off, on and on. She held herself quiet and with herself the sons too and even her mother.
Finally Traber moved a little, reluctantly turned to go to his drugstore. “You have no right to order me or anybody around,” he said softly. “But you won’t be troubled with me much longer. I am going. Maybe you know I bought into the drugstore over at Plum Creek. I’ll be moving there soon.”
“To Plum Creek—” John Cozad said the words as though tasting a strangeness, his gaunt cheeks sucked in almost speculatively, without identifying the meaning or recognizing even the sounds. Then at last he seemed to grasp the sense. He stepped back, steadying himself against a wheel.
“To Plum Creek—” he repeated, and now not even Theresa could have dared go to him, not after the desertion had begun again as it did as Cozaddale and before, but this time by one so very close.
They still stood there, even the horses quiet, but in weariness, when the evening train whistled the approach. Without stepping through any door of the town named for him until today, and without a sign to any of them at all, John J. Cozad stalked gauntly, stiffly down the middle of the dusty street to the depot and was gone.
Now even Robert was seldom seen on the street, perhaps no more than for a swift striding to the stable for his horse and back late in the day. Then the morning came when he tried to put off stepping outside the door entirely but finally he had to go, knowing the longer he waited, the more people would be there to see it. Everything was as he had expected: a new sign over the post-office door, a new piece of pine board with black stove-polish lettering: GOULD P.O.
A solid row of men were leaning against the weathered wall, a few of them in town clothing but mostly in worn and patched blue denim overalls, with the burnt, stubbled faces of men working in the raw outdoors. There were some boys too, mostly from out of town, in blue jeans and ragged shirts, with shaggy drake tails at their necks. Today Robert’s barbered hair, his clean-shaven cheek, made him more than foreign in his own community, on his own block.
“Welcome to the city of Gould!” one of the men called to him, and all the rest standing around laughed.
The youth tried to hold himself to his usual gait, quick but not running, although his neck burned and grew even hotter when one of the Ertile boys called but, “Where’s your bull whip now, Mister Cozad?”
Robert wanted to turn on them, call them the cowards he considered them all. Then he remembered that his mother would have to pass these men and a fury that was like his father’s shook him. But he was helpless, helpless now. Yet his time would come–he was determined the time would come when he could show all these people that none of the Cozads was to be laughed at.
For the present he was grateful that his father had taken the train away immediately; was seen in Washington, a friend wrote Theresa, a friend perhaps not aware that there had been no word of him to anyone here. Of course John J. Cozad understood very well that there was little hope of changing the name of his town back to the original before the next presidential election, still more than three years away. Post offices were political plums and fell to those who managed to get a hand on the tree to shake it. Most of the Union veterans here were his enemies now, men like Handley, who had broken the colonizer’s arm in court; A1 Pearson,* whose cattle ate up the closer Cozad meadows, and had been working against him almost from the start, from the first disagreement over where and how the bridge should be built, and Pearson’s good friends too, the Buckleys and the rest.
Among the few old Union men still on Cozad’s side was the sandy-haired energetic Sam Atkinson, who had built the very first house in the new settlement, back during the winter of 1873–4, and was still a hustler for his community. He, with Sam Schooley, were the solid and true friends that Robert used as models for his new series of stories planned to ease him through this difficult time, to help him forget the still face that their mother turned upon them all.
In reality Mr. Schooley was studying law and giving his legal advice free to those of the town. He had worked for his board and room the first two years on the Hundredth Meridian when he could have made more elsewhere, but the paper needed a man, Dave Claypool had no money, and Sam was very grateful for the first good health he had ever known. He would have made a good postmaster, Robert thought, but then he was a Democrat—–
It seemed to young Robert that almost everyone was deserting his father the same moment: Traber going into the partnership at Plum Creek, where he knew his sister’s husband had been promised a bullet in the gut if he stepped within the city limits, a bullet for both his brother-in-law and his nephew. And the Claypools were dropping away too, Dave deserting his Uncle John J. although the two families went back four, five generations side by side, back to the early days in New Jersey. Now he was tying up with that fence-crawling, johnny-come-lately, Ed Winchell, the new postmaster of Gould, at the post office started by Traber Gatewood and named for the community builder.
Truly the town seemed to be going like a bridge fill-in when the floods once got a hole started. But would this matter to his father now? Robert wondered. Would John Jackson Cozad go on spending his money to build a town or a bridge for a community named Gould, even if he came back, ever returned here? Ever returned to any of them?
When Robert managed to get past the post office with the new sign, he had no real destination, not even his Darby horse. All he could do was keep walking. Prince, Grandpa Gatewood’s big shepherd dog, came trotting along from an alley, not looking toward Robert, perhaps sensing that the youth did not wish to be seen today, perhaps joining the deserters. Farther on, young Norsworthy, a friend of the croquet games last summer, which seemed a hundred years ago now, was taking General Grant, the big steel-gray stallion, to the shipping pens where he stood for the fanners bringing in their mares. Last year Robert would have hurried over for a pat at the fine powerful neck and a joshing word with the stallion’s keeper, and perhaps some plans for a swim or a game. Even a month ago, perhaps. Now Robert pretended not to see the youth or the big handsome horse bowing his neck, prancing heavily, graceful as a gray and exuberant boxcar, shaking the red satin riboon braided into his mane, sniffing the wind, snaking his neck out in the direction of the waiting mare, then bowing it up thick and magnificent as he dragged his keeper along.
To Robert Cozad it seemed that he was not here at all but walking through some strange town bordered all around by some darkness, like a town laid thin against a painter’s canvas, the sky and horizon almost black, the street deserted except for a figure that he could not recognize at firet. Then he saw it was a girl, one with thick braids yellow as summer wheat, her eyes indigo dark.
*Alfred Pearson, called both A1 and Alf in letters, newspapers, and documents, and by those who remembered him. Used here as in the sources.