XIV

THE PONY EXPRESS AND THE TRAVELLERS’ TRAVAILS

August 21, 1860

Simpson’s Hollow

Wyoming Territory

We endure wasted mile after endless mile of wild sage in between pools of alkaline waters which are dangerous to both cattle and man. The last station was run by a hopeless family of Canadians who could provide little more than second-rate blacksmith services. We dined on a supper of cold and glutinous peas, and later, instead of salt, we sprinkled a little gunpowder on tough, overcooked mule stakes. These are mauvaises terres and may be likened to Tartarus in Virgil’s Aeneid. Dead cattle lie in different states of decomposition beside the trail along with the hastily prepared graves of would-be settlers who found premature and unhappy ends to their search for an earthly paradise. We are among dead men.

As predicted, this way west is now also littered with much of the superfluous trumpery which I saw being purchased in St. Jo. Things that seemed so needful in relatively settled Missouri are now merely roadside decorations here in Wyoming after being discarded to lighten overbearing loads. They have become nothing more than ominously out-of-place carcasses that have been picked apart by Indians. The red man must do this work at night and has managed to salvage every useable part down to the very last screw.

A notable break in the monotony came at midday when we were overtaken by a single rider who passed us at full gallop then unaccountably stopped just ahead and waited for us to catch up. Mahoney, who I suspect was still drunk from the night before, pulled our ambulance to the side of the trail and began fumbling under the seat for his “scatter gun.”

When we approached, we could see that the rider was a very young man, covered in road dust and in appearance did in no way seem threatening to us. He wore a boyish grin on his face and kept moving his hand up and down before his mouth. Mahoney was beside himself. He apparently couldn’t locate his shotgun and was now tugging on the handle of his side arm trying to free it from its holster. Now both hands were on the pistol grip, and with one last frantic heave he managed to pull himself completely off the buckboard and down headfirst into the rocky ground. His gun discharged immediately upon impact and blew the heel off his right boot.

The young man dismounted and rushed to Mahoney’s side. “Holy Saviour, mister, you damn near blowed your own foot off. I wuz just trying to ask for a drink of water, that’s all.” He began laughing and addressed the passengers in the coach. “Did ya see that everybody? The damn fool almost blowed his own foot off.”

Mahoney made some growling and groaning noises and began trying to untangle himself and get up from the ground.

“You smell like you dun took a bath in rye whiskey, mister. Yup, yezzsir, that’s what that smell is alright, rye whiskey.”

Lt. Dana stepped from the coach and offered the young man a drink from his canteen. He commented what an unusual thing it was to see a horseman riding so hard and alone in this forsaken part of the country. The young man took two swallows of water and spit out a third. “Well, that’s my job. Don’t tell me you ain’t never heard of the Pony Express? Poster on the stable over in St. Jo said they’s lookin’ for wiry young fellows not over eighteen who’s willin’ to risk death—an’ that they prefer orphans—an’ I say, well hell, that’s me! Father died of fever three years ago, an’ I took care of momma ‘till she passed last month. Nobody left now, so I took that job because they offered it to me.” He looked about at the rest of us and gave a genial nod. “And I took the twenty-five dollars a week too.” He took another swig on Lt. Dana’s canteen and thanked him very politely. As he walked back to his horse he patted the dazed Mahoney on the shoulder. “You take care old man, an’ don’t be drinkin’ so damn much. There’s wimmin a-ridin’ behind you that needs carrin’ for.”

He remounted, flashed a carefree smile and tugged his horse around. He waved his hat over his head and shouted out, “Missouri to California in ten days or less. U.S. Mail on the move!”

I noticed that the Danas were holding each other’s hand as they watched him ride off. It were as if they were looking together into the future and imagining a boy of their own who they had successfully brought to the brink of manhood, a good boy with a cheery grin and a whole world to look forward to. La Mash began hacking and spit something awful into the dirt. “Ten days to Californie? Naw, I can’t see it. Too much that can go wrong, you can believe that. Why, I knew a fella once that tried bringin’ a packet of letters from Denver City to Durango all by hisself. Said he wuz a Messican Var-quero or some damn such and that he could ride like the wind. Wal, he didn’t make it, got an arrow stuck right in the middle of his fid and froze to death while he was tryin’ to crawl away.”

Using himself as a model, La Mash rumbled over before Mrs. Dana and took the time to point to the exact place the arrow entered the man’s body. “Right here, squar on the fid, can ya believe that, Missy? What a shot that Injun must have been. They only found him by trackin’ the frozen blood in the snow. I’ll be in-tire rumfluxed if I know why they think some runny nose kid can git to Californie all by hisself, just don’t make no sense.”

He thought for a moment, threw his head back and roared a wild laugh. “If he would’ve lived one sure fire thing he wouldn’t have to worry about is gettin’ hit in that same spot with an arrow. Nope, that there was one shot in a million, you can believe that.” La Mash finished off the sentence by reaching deep into the front of his trousers and unabashedly scratching himself.

Mrs. Dana lost control. “Oh for John’s sake, Mr. La Mash, can’t you find a good word about anything? Every time you open your mouth all that comes out is some vile story about death or filth or suffering … or spit.” She brought her hand to her mouth and quickly turned back for the coach.

La Mash seemed positively astounded at her behaviour. “Now what do you suppose got into her?” he asked to no one in particular. “Damn wimmin’s as unpredictable as a dust storm. One minute they’s just fine, an’ another they’s at your throat.” He clapped Lt. Dana on the back. “Suspect you know all about that, the way they’ll turn on you with no warning. You can believe that can’t you, general?”

Lt. Dana glanced over at his wife and back at La Mash with a defeated and sick look on his face. This in turn prompted Lord Kill Ba’r into still more dialogue. “Man’s got a right to express hisself in this country ain’t that right, Capt. Burton? We ain’t got no king around here what says what a man can and can’t do, an’ that’s a fact.” La Mash looked out at the horizon and said, “Why I just live for the time a man’s gunna try an’ tell me to do somethin’ I don’t want to do.”

Mr. Mahoney took this opportunity to add his own appraisal of the Pony Express system. “The boys riding this route need to look out for Mormons more than Indians. The firm of Magraw and Hockaday been handlin’ the mail from Independence to Salt Lake City until just recently. Now it’s the Brigham Young Express and Carrying Company that’s gettin’ all the work—the YX is what they call it. You know why they’re carryin’ all the mail now don’t you?” No one spoke and Mahoney carried on. “Anybody think it might have somethin’ to do with ol’ Bill Hickman and Orrin Porter Rockwell? Who do you think killed Mr. Babbitt? That wasn’t no Indian—that was Port Rockwell disguised as an Indian is what it really wuz. And Captain Gunnison and those seven other Pacific Railroad surveyin’ boys? Weren’t no Pahvant braves. Was Port Rockwell again, ‘cept that time he didn’t bother with no disguise.”

I asked Mahoney if we were getting near Mr. Rockwell’s headquarters.

“Last I heared he opened a place called Murder’s Bar over at Buckeye Flat. He was usin’ the name James B. Brown ‘cause when he had that halfway house on the American River him and Boyd Dixie got into to a shootin’ match which occasioned the wildest whiskey fest ever seen in the gold fields. That there wuz an ugly mess if there ever wuz one. Troopers should’ve been called in to end it but they wuz nowhere to be seen.”

We re-boarded the coach and pressed on toward the next station. Mahoney called into the passenger section and said that we were running past schedule and would be driving into the night and hoping to reach Dry Sandy Creek by midnight. That afternoon seemed to drag on longer than usual and the passengers’ attitudes were noticeably affected. A completely bored La Mash twisted and turned about inside the coach, forever shifting his person and in the process sometimes coming dangerously close to Mrs. Dana. She in turn sucked at her teeth whenever he came near, put a hankie up to cover her mouth and nose and clutched her husband’s arm very tightly. Lt. Dana felt his wife was too confining sometimes and when he wished for more freedom by changing positions, she felt insulted and abandoned and threw herself into a dyspeptic fit.

Relief came at sunset when we came upon a caravan of wagons that had left from St. Jo almost one month earlier. We stopped briefly to rest the mules and allowed them to feed on the tolerable grass available near the campsite. This also provided a few hours’ rest for our human party, but I must say the mules were much luckier in terms of nourishment.

These particular pioneers were from Indiana and had placed their fate in the hands of a wagon master by the name of Johnny Cotton. I should have instantly recognized Mr. Cotton for the scoundrel I later discovered him to be, for he sported that distinctive look in the transverse diameter between the parietal bones where destructiveness and secretiveness are placed. An additional bad sign was that he and Mahoney appeared to be old friends.

These forbidding twin indicators were soon matched by a discourse which may have led one to believe that a band of Gypsy wagons had been encountered and that their chief swindler had stepped forth to see what could be gained from the unsuspecting visitors. The Danas left the carriage and repaired to a locale as far from La Mash as possible while the great Lord Kill B’ar promptly cornered the first group of settlers he could find and began worrying them with his stories of frontier hardships and atrocities.

This left Mahoney and I to be entertained by Mr. Cotton. Almost immediately he admitted that he had taught his charges to play two card games known as “Old Sledge” and “Chihuahua Red Dog” and commented with a sly grin that Indianans weren’t much when it came to gambling. He boasted that he had already bled several of them into bankruptcy and forced them to turn back before the wagon train hit Wildcat Creek. Johnny Cotton thought this positively hilarious, and I am afraid that even the physical telling of this terrible story also produced some equally dreadful and very disgusting results. You see, Johnny Cotton’s mouth seemed to produce an overabundance of saliva and when he got too excited the excess fluid would either have to be periodically gulped down or else sprayed in the direction of his unfortunate audience. When he mentioned to Mahoney that he had mulcted the hat from a tag-along Indian called Ben Acts-Like-He-Knows-You he exploded in a mocking laughter that threatened to soak the front of my shirt.

Mahoney confronted Cotton and said that the last time he saw him he was working as a tent pole setter for Herr Driesbach’s Travelling Circus and was curious to learn how Cotton had come to be a trusted scout in the Territories.

“Well, this is America, ain’t it? I just went ahead an’ started me a business after conferin’ with Texas Jack.”

Even Mahoney seemed startled at this. “Texas Jack! That snake’s never been west of Yip Hop’s laundry in his whole life, an’ I don’t think he’s even been outside of Crystal’s Saloon and seen the daylight in three years.”

Johnny Cotton’s eyes widened. “It ain’t like that, Mahoney. Jack’s a good businessman and that’s what it takes. He taught me everything I needed to know from right inside Crystals.”

As might be expected, Cotton’s charges were in terrible shape. The lucky ones had been swindled early at parlour games and had been forced back to St. Jo. Those unfortunate souls who managed to hang-on wore the haunted look of shipwrecked sailors who had been adrift for weeks in leaking rafts. They were dreadfully unprepared, low on supplies, and their prairie ships were nothing more than rolling wrecks. Families who had lost poorly outfitted wagons to the road were forced to double up with those whose wagons were still up and running. As a consequence, the remaining oxen were straining to pull twice-loaded carts while the wretched humans were left to trudge alongside.

Everyone in the party seemed racked with disease or despair, except a robust and exuberant tyke identified to me as “Little Boy Cotton.” This lad was seated on a pail behind a crate that was being used as a gaming board. On the other side were a group of bewildered Indians who were examining and conferring over what appeared to be a poker hand. Little Boy Cotton could not have reached his tenth year, yet he manipulated the cards with an eclat that might have impressed a hardened veteran aboard the Sultana. He was sitting among a pile of pelts, jerk meat, and other aboriginal goods that had recently been forfeited to his talents, and he squealed, clapped, and rubbed his hands together when the Indians threw down their cards and realized that he had triumphed over them once again.

We watched as the lad scooped up another set of pelts and threw them on his winning pile. “He is an unnatural child,” Mahoney said while shaking his head. “He was just like that back in the circus days an’ he wasn’t but seven years old at the time. Trained by his father I suspect, an’ maybe Texas Jack.”

The Indians began to grumble. Some spoke Hunkpapa and others used sign language, but by any means it was clear that they believed they had been cheated. Little Boy Cotton was completely unfazed by this, then tied one of the Indian’s forfeited bonnets around his head and began to prance around the crate in a mock war dance.

One young brave became completely outraged by this. He was not that much older than Little Boy Cotton but his physique looked as if it were chipped out of granite. The young brave stepped forward and made a very threatening gesture. Little Boy defiantly imitated this gesture right back at the young brave, stuck his tongue out at the group and intensified his awful taunting. I am sure it was only through the intercession of an elderly chief that bloodshed was avoided.

The unhappy Indians gathered up the playing cards and disappeared into the darkness. The brat brought his loot over to show Cotton, Sr., and it was an unholy sight to behold, father and son gloating over such things. They were taeter ex colei28 if ever any existed, but it was all made much worse when Johnny instructed his son to store the goods in with the other things in their supply wagon.

The little demon went to the only wagon in the group that was in a state of good repair and deposited his winnings in various trunks that held ample food supplies and a great number of personal possessions that were no doubt once owned by both the Indians and the Indianans.

Johnny smiled and shook his head from side to side in mock disbelief. “What a boy, I’ll tell you. He could charm a snake and make him pay for it. Can you believe his mother wanted to send him to a reform school back in St. Louis? Shows you how much she knows, that stupid bitch.” Then Johnny Cotton floated a tender note. “She hurt the little guy’s feelings too. Poor little guy naturally come to his daddy after that and now look how good it all turned out.”

I turned and saw Little Boy Cotton racing around the sick and dispirited pioneers with the oversized feather bonnet on his head. He paused to agitate an already rattled Mrs. Dana and then attempted to stir up a chase with some of the other children, but they were too weak to respond.

Mahoney asked if that little girl back in St. Jo ever fully recovered.

“You mean the one that was burned?” Johnny seemed a bit defensive. “Yeah, she’s OK. She’s fine, just fine. All the bandages came off before we even left town. She’s like new, brand new.”

He looked over at me and grinned. “Little Boy kind a got wild with a box of Lucifer Matches. His mother hid that sort of thing from him, an’ the poor little guy didn’t know what they wuz all about. Wasn’t none of his fault, and besides the stupid little bitch deserved bein’ lit-up. Nobody tells my boy he’s got a bad breath problem. Poor little guy, it hurt his feelings. Don’t they know it ain’t right to be hurtful like that?”

Mahoney thought that the mules had sufficient rest and food, so he said good-bye to Johnny Cotton and called for the rest of us to get back to the coach. For the first time since the trip began, I was able to assume a positive attitude towards our driver for I sensed that he despised Little Boy Cotton and his father as much as I did. Before we left, the Danas and I distributed some buffalo meat pemmican to the worst off of the Indianans and even La Mash parted with a few of his hardened corn dodgers to a group of hungry children who began to queue up in front of him.

The grizzled trapper almost couldn’t believe his eyes when Little Boy Cotton appeared in the line with his hand out. La Mash looked around to see where the child’s father was, and after confirming he was nowhere about, he took the hellion’s legs out from under him, knocked him to the ground and kicked some dirt into his face. Little Boy fell with a thud and almost began to cry—although I doubt if he has any of those fluids in him.

But instead, the diminutive tyrant got to his hands and knees, spat at La Mash and then administered a long and vicious bite to the side of his calf. It took two hard leg kicks to make the beast let go. Undaunted, he chased after our coach as we pulled away and hurled rocks at Mahoney. He finally caught up with us and pulled some Lucifer matches from his pocket with an eye on the mules. His father appeared and yelled after us, “What did you do to the poor little guy, Mahoney? I’ll square up with you later, you stupid son-of-a-bitch.”

It was near a full moon and we followed a silver ribbon of trail for an additional five hours on our way here to Simpson’s Hollow. The station keepers were already down for the night when we arrived, so the three other passengers and Mahoney sought shelter in the adjoining stable and fell asleep on a mat of wild sage.

I made a small fire and began to set all this down on paper before it was forgotten. I am exhausted and will not last another ten minutes, but I will go to sleep thinking that my laibon may vomit after learning of the Cotton family, and sometimes I wonder what the worth of their exposition may be.

28 From Latin one can only translate this as “a disgusting pair of testicles.” —Ed.