Cattle Kate (21 page)

And they don't even know about John and Ralph yet!

John is fourteen and strapping and is as natural on a ranch as a gopher. He showed up at the roadhouse a couple months ago, looking like he hadn't had a decent meal since Thanksgiving. He offered his labor for whatever was needed. I remember what a gentleman he was, standing there in shoes too tight and jeans too short and hands too dirty, but that didn't hinder his presentation.

“My name is John DeCorey, ma'am and I'm sixteen.” He'd later admit he added a couple years to improve his circumstance.

“I'm the handiest boy you'll ever find. I can do anything and I'm strong as an ox, and in good trim and I hope you have need of me.”

I liked him immediately because he gave his entire speech while his stomach was growling like a grizzly. First I fed him, and I thought he was going to eat the table cover, he was so hungry. In the short time it took me to fill up a plate for him, he'd already eaten all the Crosse & Blackwell Chow Chow I had on the table. Just ate that relish like it was the best thing he'd ever tasted. I agree it's real good—one cowboy joked that if I ever stopped putting bottles of chow chow on my tables, he'd have to find another place to have his supper. But Lordy, to just eat it like that?

After he finished his meal, I hired him to work at my place, and I'm sure glad I did because he's keepin' it up real nice. John doesn't have much book-learning, but he's smart and has a good memory. He's honest as the day is long. He's especially good for Gene.

And then Ralph arrived in April, and he's a wonderful story all on his own. Ralph Cole is Jimmy's sister's boy from Wisconsin. He's around twenty and he is one talker. Fales has named him “Windy Ralph,” and that's really tumbling to his talents.

I'll have to start with when I first met him.

“Watson?” he asked, like it was a name he was hauling up from the well. “Are you related to the Watsons in Oklahoma?”

I hooted and said I didn't think so, that my people were the Kansas Watsons. Pa will get a kick out of that bit of fluff. Windy Ralph just kept right on because when he has something to tell, he says it all before he stops.

“They're saying it was a Watson who shot Belle Starr in the back. Shot her right on the road going to her ranch, and don't you think it's a scoundrel who'd shoot a woman in the back, even one like Belle Starr?”

I nodded, pretending I knew who Belle Starr was. Fales later told me what a tough character she was. They called her the Bandit Queen. We all agreed it wasn't much of a man who'd shoot a woman in the back. I hope he's no kin to me.

Ralph came out to work with his uncle. He's real dear to Jimmy, being his sister Sarah's first boy. Sarah and Able pretty much raised Jimmy, and gave him his first leg up and now he's returning the favor in giving the boy training. That boy is one hard worker, although all his talents live inside the roadhouse. He can sort mail and do books and keep inventory, and he made some changes that really spruced the place up.

But by the wildest stretch of the imagination, Nature never intended him for a ranch hand. His hands are too soft and he has no natural feeling for it, but that's alright. The other two boys are just the opposite and they can handle a ranch with their eyes closed.

Ralph already treats the boys like his little brothers, and they're always horsing around, trying to outdo one another. And that's what happened the day Gene thought he saw Buffalo Bill.

I'm gonna have to tell Ma and Pa this story because it's so funny. Gene came running into the roadhouse kitchen, one of his overall straps hanging down his back, and he was so out of wind that he couldn't talk. Then he got the hiccups and I had to hold his nose and force him to drink water, and when he finally came back to normal he almost screamed, “I just saw Buffalo Bill!”

“Did not,” John yelled from the storeroom, where he was stacking cans for me.

“Did too,” Gene yipped.

“Come on now,” Ralph scolded, like the boy was fibbing through his socks.

“Did too,” Gene shouted all the louder.

I shushed everyone and told Gene to tell what he had to tell—thinking like the boys that his eyes were deceiving him.

“I was on the road to Casper and these men came along on horseback. And there he was. He was in buckskins and had that white mustache and beard like on his poster, and when I yelled up, ‘Hello, Buffalo Bill', he called back, ‘Hello, young man', and they kept on goin' and I ran here as fast as I could.”

“Did not,” John said with disgust.

“Did too,” Gene sneered in defiance.

“Did not, did not, did not.”

“Did too, did too, did too.”

Jimmy came in from outside and wanted to know what all the ruckus was. When Gene quickly repeated the entire story, Jimmy shocked us all by saying, “Could have been.”

Gene puffed up as Jimmy explained, “He's friends with Tom Sun. They were Indian scouts together. I met him once at Fort Steele. He's in these parts now and then, when he isn't traveling around the world.”

Gene was as happy as a coyote. “See,” he spat at John. “See, see,” he bragged to Ralph. And you could tell John and Ralph felt cheated that they hadn't seen the famous Buffalo Bill themselves. Then all three of them looked at Jimmy with new respect that he'd actually met the famous showman.

***

“Thursday, July 11. Hi again. Well, we went on our picnic to Independence Rock and you would have had a good time because my Jimmy was as good a storyteller that day as any of those men who write books. I'm sure it helped that his audience was listening like a hawk. He starts telling boys about the Indian Wars and how he almost was at the Little Bighorn. He tells how he served under General Crook—THE General Crook who went after Geronimo. I tell you, those boys could have listened to stories like that forever

“Of course, our hired man couldn't help himself, so he got into telling his own stories, trying to one-up Jimmy. It was a battle of the stories. You would have laughed and cheered just like we did, and it was a very fun day.”

I don't think I've ever had such a fine birthday in my entire life. First off, the weather was just beautiful, warm but not too hot, a little breeze. I'd cooked up chickens ahead of time and made biscuits fresh that morning so we could take off first thing and spend the entire day. I made molasses cookies to share and we didn't bring a crumb home. We saw so many of our neighbors, and everyone was in a grand mood. A man brought his fiddle and we sang campfire songs. A man in his Civil War uniform sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and we all enjoyed that.

I wish my folks could see Independence Rock, and they'd understand why it is so precious. It stands by itself, like it was dropped on a flat piece of prairie by the Lord Himself. And it kind of resembles an old-fashioned haystack. It sits right along the Sweetwater River and from up there you can really see how the river meanders across the land. The rock's sides are gentle enough that you can climb all over, and that's what everyone does because the rewards are so great.

The boys went scrambling up the rock as soon as the buggy slowed down, and you could hear them shouting with the other kids who were exploring. We climbed up, too, because I hadn't done my own investigating yet. When I came upon the first name, I thought my heart stopped a second. Scratched into the rock was “Hiram Meck, July, 50.”

“Jimmy,” I whispered, “who do you suppose he was and what do you think happened to him?”

Jimmy said all we knew was that he'd gotten this far by 1850, and had celebrated the Fourth like we were doing. Then he smiled and encouraged me to look for more, and I found so many names, I couldn't even count them all.

As Jimmy later told the boys while we ate our chicken, the Conestogas and prairie schooners that brought so many people west on the Oregon Trail had to get to this rock by the Fourth of July so they could get through the mountains before the snows came. Getting here was a triumph all its own. And it meant they were about a third of the way to the West Coast.

Those pioneers named it Independence Rock, and then started carving or painting their names on it, like people do when they're pleased with themselves. Jimmy said sometimes people coming later would find the names of their kin and would rejoice knowing at least they got this far and it gave them hope to carry on.

“It took them months to get here, and remember, most of them were walking,” he said. “The wagons were full of everything they owned, and there wasn't room left for passengers. So I'm betting their feet were pretty sore when they stepped on this rock. You can imagine how happy they had to be. And how strange all this had to look to them—they came from back East and to them, the West was St. Louis and Omaha. They were used to towns and cultivated fields and trees and none of that was here. Here you can see for miles, and mainly what you see is dirt. They were going where few people had ever gone before, and they knew there were hostiles waiting for them, but they came anyway.” Jimmy paused.

“You know, when we moved here, we arrived in just a few days on a train,” he said. “Well, it took them months to get here. But just like them, we're immigrants, too. And just like these folks, who risked everything to settle in a new land, that's just what we're doing. It's a lot more comfortable and safe now than in the old days, but the idea is still the same.”

And I had to admit, I'd never thought of it like that before.

Gene begged Jimmy to tell about the buffalo because, of course, the boy had never seen one.

“The herds used to be so big, when they went by, it would take hours if not days for them all to pass,” Jimmy began. “Do you know how the Indians found them when they wanted to go on a hunt? They'd get up real early and look over the horizon for a little cloud, and that's how they'd know where the buffalo were—their breath was creating a vapor cloud. That's how many there were! And the Indians used everything from that animal to survive. Meat, hides, horns, hoofs. They didn't waste anything.”

“And they're all gone?” Ralph said like it couldn't possibly be true.

“Almost. It didn't take long either, to slaughter millions. Many of them rotted where they fell. Some people thought if they killed off the buffalo, they'd get rid of the Indians, too.”

“Did you ever kill one, Uncle Jimmy?” Ralph asked, and I saw Fales give a little smile because he knew Jim never had. But Jim fudged and said he'd been on a couple hunts in his early days in the Army, and it was a tough thing to kill a buffalo because even your horse was scared of them.

“The Shoshones blinded the right eyes of their horses so they couldn't see when they got up close,” he said. Then quickly added, “But Chief Washakie wouldn't do that—he loved his horse too much to blind him. At least, that's what he told me.”

If you want to see admiration in the eyes of boys, tell them you know an Indian chief.

All three boys looked at Jim like he walked on water because he knew an Indian and survived. “There were good Indians and there were bad Indians, and I was lucky to know one of the good ones,” Jim explained, and he started in telling his Indian stories.

“Chief Washakie was the main chief of the Shoshones here in W.T. and he didn't fight the white man like so many did. He wanted peace. You know, they named the fort after him because they so appreciated that he fought with them, not against them. I met him when I was serving with General Crook. He saved Crook at the Battle of Rosebud, you know—saved him from a fate just like the Little Bighorn. That's just what the Indians had planned for Crook out here in Wyoming—they were going to lure the soldiers into a ravine where they couldn't get out and then slaughter them. But Washakie knew their ways—Shoshones hate the Sioux—and he didn't let Crook get ambushed like Custer did in Montana. If Washakie had been with Custer, those men would still be getting their rations every day instead of dying at Little Bighorn.”

From their reactions, I figured this was the first “good Indian” story these boys had ever heard.

“And you know what?” Jimmy went on. “Chief Washakie looks just like George Washington.”

Well, the boys thought that was impossible, and Jimmy bet them each a nickel that when they met him they'd think he looked like our first president.

“We're gonna meet him?” John asked with astonishment, and Jimmy promised that one day he'd take us all over to the reservation and we could meet the old chief himself. That was a day I didn't want to miss.

I didn't see any reason to mention that I knew some Indians, too, because mine weren't chiefs. Boys don't care if you just know a girl and her grandma. So I stayed quiet.

All this time, good old Fales was sitting there ready to hop in with his own stories. He wasn't about to be outdone when it came to storytelling.

“That ain't nothin',” he finally cut in. “When I was just a little older than you boys, I met General Tom Thumb.”

Well, I learned right then that nothing trumps an Indian chief like a world-famous midget.

The boys shifted their attention immediately, as Fales told them a story from the days when he was twelve years old.

“I was in school in Laramie and they were coming through town with P.T. Barnum's show,” Fales began. “It was General Tom himself, Mrs. Tom Thumb, Commodore Nut, and Minnie Warren, so we had all the famous midgets the world had ever known. We got to skip school because Laramie declared a holiday, they were so happy the show was stopping there.”

Fales puffed up his chest and shouted like he was a ringmaster: “P.T. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan and Hippodrome—that's what they called it. I don't think I was ever more excited than waiting for them to come to town. Of course we knew they'd be staying at the Union Pacific Railway Hotel, and us boys all lined up outside in case we'd catch a glimpse of them. Up comes a tiny carriage pulled by Shetland ponies that weren't as big as my friend Richie's hound. We couldn't believe our eyes. The ponies had gold harnesses and the carriage was silver—I tell you, I'd never seen anything like it in my life and haven't seen anything like it since. They say Queen Victoria herself gave them the carriage when they performed in London, and it looked like something a queen would have. Well, the little people came out—they were dressed so fancy. Their clothes were silk and velvet. They climbed in that little carriage and went all around our town, and us boys ran after them for awhile.