Cottonwood (9 page)

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COTTONWOOD, KANSAS MARCH 1873 The Occasion of Sin

It had been scarcely three months since Marc Leval’s arrival in Cottonwood, followed shortly by that of the railroad and then the cattle town rumors, and already the town bore little resemblance to its once quiet and modest self. Marc now controlled the Citizens’ National Bank of Cottonwood at the end of Main Street and had evicted its president, Stanley Eaton, from his office in its rear; the office was full of supplicants of one kind or another from sunup to sundown, looking for funds to start up this new business or that, and often Marc didn’t even go home for lunch. Stanley now sat at a forlorn desk behind the teller cage, scornfully refusing to acknowledge any greetings through the bars, and at least once he flew into a rage when an impatient newcomer innocently asked Bernard Stanton, the skeletal teller, when they were going to put in a second cage for the other teller.

I would be hard-pressed to estimate the population of the town at that time, but it certainly approached a thousand people at its height, more than three quarters of them male. Men arrived every day on horseback and on foot and by wagon, and few left. One of the rare locals who didn’t stay was Katie Bender; she had been asked by her family to return to the farm and help out at the inn, which had apparently prospered with the increased traffic across the prairie. I was glad to see her go; to my surprise so was Maggie, who, according to Marc, had come to the depressing conclusion that her friend was a charlatan.

The men who came seeking employment generally found it. There was so much anticipatory building going on, and so much money being attracted from elsewhere and spent, that the casual observer would have thought the cattle pens were in place already, but in fact the profits were all in the future. When the railroad tracks had finally reached town a boxcar was taken off the track and set up for use as a depot, pending completion of a more permanent facility a few feet to the west. Every train that arrived brought lumber with it, and it wasn’t ever enough. Construction of a proper Methodist church was now under way, financed by a subscription hinging on the faith that new congregants would soon be flocking to Cottonwood alongside the day laborers and speculators who had materialized in Leval’s wake. Plans were afoot for its Baptist and Congregationalist equivalents, for which building societies had already been organized. The site of the Methodist church was across Main Street from the former general meeting house in which its services had once been held, demolished now to make way for the expansions of the saloon and the forge. Through Marc’s intercession Otis had managed a generous bank loan for the reconstruction of the latter, now complete and operational and doing boom business; he had been able to take on not one but two apprentices to replace the errant Perkey. New houses, not dissimilar in style or size to the one I’d built on the farm, were going up along newly laid out streets, and some were already occupied; our town’s only attorney and land agent was, like Marc, overburdened and frenzied from the moment he opened his doors in the morning until he closed them at night. He occupied a brand-new two-story wooden building, completed at the end of February; until then he had done business in a canvas tent at the corner of First and Seward Streets, nearly directly across from the Leval mansion. All the previously existing houses in the vicinity of Seward and Main were bought up and knocked down to make room for new commercial buildings, and both sides of First Street were now lined with new houses finished and unfinished. At the northeast corner of Seward and Main a competing saloon had gone up, as Marc had predicted, and to show that we were good sports and unafraid of their sort of competition we sold them the remaining fixtures from my old saloon. To the south of it a restaurant and a second barber shop had opened, the former offering meals at a variety of prices at all hours, and the latter handling the overflow from Lem Gibson’s parlor on Main.

The town had also become a haven for all the sorts of vice that follow any influx of men into such a place without the civilizing influence of women. A gambling hall opened at the corner of Main and Lincoln, and a second followed on its heels at First and Lincoln, each offering poker, faro, monte, roulette, and chucker-luck. Having stopped into both establishments I can report that none of the aforementioned games appeared to me to be honestly run; this naturally had no effect on the crowds lining up to play them, and as long as a down-on-his-luck player was allowed to win a respectable sum once in a while there were no complaints.

On the south side of town a French-style house began going up that rivaled in ornateness though not in square footage the Leval home, and the word about town was that it was to be the city’s first brothel. At that moment a number of prostitutes operated from a handful of modest private homes not far from the growing mansion, and a greater number did so outside the town limits in a small, insalubrious tent city. These women were obviously not of the upper ranks of their profession; such a trade would apparently have to wait for the completion of the brothel building. In the meantime the Barneses had just expelled two apparently wholesome and bourgeoise women who had taken a room together at the hotel, after the discovery that they were entertaining gentlemen in their rooms after hours for compensation. This was no surprise to me, since their room was just down the hall from the one I’d taken after the smithy fire, and they were indiscreet about noises. Their confederate was a new employee of the hotel, a young woman who had replaced Kate Bender in the dining room and who supplemented her waitressing income with a percentage of the receipts from the two ladies, plus the occasional direct commission when the overflow of clients called for reinforcements. Though their prices were high enough to restrict their clientele to the more refined sort—the building contractors and some of the local burghers—it was impossible to keep such an enterprise secret for long, and complaints from other guests soon alerted the Barneses to the illicit activity under their roof.

In my leisure hours, which were not many, I took to photographing the town’s growth, and Marc agreed to buy prints of all the stereo views I made for the city of Cottonwood. I had an idea that when the town reached its full size and grandeur there would be a national market for such views. I found, too, that I was enjoying the work, particularly now that I had in the person of Gleason an assistant to help in preparing my plates; my speed increased considerably and so did my output, and if I may say so the quality of the images improved as well. The work was mainly restricted to midday, before opening the saloon, but that was the perfect time to capture a view of a rising building, skeletal against an empty field behind it, or a group of laborers upon a scaffolding, or a prostitute before her canvas tent.

The new saloon was a monument to grandeur, with a front and backbar of solid oak manufactured in Pennsylvania and shipped to Cottonwood in pieces, and a footrail of real brass, with spittoons to match, and a stove twice as large as its predecessor that kept the whole building warm and comfortable. Young Gleason, whose biblical opposition to insobriety had evaporated with the realization that bartending paid better than farm work, labored alongside me every night, and showed himself to be skilled at handling crowds and accomplishing several unrelated tasks more or less at once, which made him a better bartender than I. He was tall, with a long face, jug ears, and a garrulousness that made up for my occasional bouts of unsociability. Soon, however, it became evident that a third man would be necessary at least part-time to handle the crowds, particularly on Saturday night.

Marc and I were making money faster than I had ever thought we would, and yet all the money the men were spending in the saloon was money Marc, or in some cases his Eastern associates, had paid them. For all the economic activity afoot in Cottonwood at that time, the flow of cash was almost completely outward, and would remain so until the cattle began arriving; some found it troubling that they had not arrived yet. Late one cold Thursday evening in March, Alf Cletus drunkenly questioned Marc Leval’s motives before a crowd of men who were earning a good living working for him.

Alf had been drinking since five in the afternoon, and it was now approaching nine o’clock. “Bond issue. Sure, we’ll do that, we all got gold eagles flying before our eyes, we don’t mind voting for the railroad coming. I just want to know one thing: where them two come from in the first place, and where’d they get that money they been tossing around here like birdseed?”

I was working fast, dispensing shots and making change for the constantly shifting, bustling mass of men at the bar. “That’s two things, Alf,” I said, trying to lighten things, but next to him at the bar was Herbert Braunschweig, a one-eyed carpenter who was working for Marc, and he tugged at Alf’s sleeve. They were fast friends, but Herbert had been drinking nearly as long as Alf had.

“Listen, you skin-pated piece of cowshit, you’re talking about a man’s putting this whole town to work and on the map.”

“I ain’t saying anything different. All’s I’m saying is: where’d all that dough come from?”

“He’s from Paris, France, is what I understand, Al,” a very inebriated, very loud stonemason said.

“He’s from around Chicago,” I said, though I wasn’t at all certain where I had got that impression. I knew he wasn’t French by birth, though, having heard him pronounce the names of the wines from Bordeaux and Champagne that he wanted me to stock alongside the corn and rye whiskies, bourbon, and gin that were my mainstays as they had been in the old place.

“I don’t give hind tit where he’s from,” said one-eyed Herbert. “He’s paying a good wage and turning this little town into a city, and I don’t like to hear him spoke about that way.”

Alf let out a long sigh and closed his eyes for a few moments, gathering what remained of his intellectual forces. When he spoke his tempo was slow and his tone pedantic. “Look, friend, I’m not saying anything bad about our friend Marc, who’s done us all the service of constructing this magnificent booze palace. I’m just curious, is all. If he wants to come and put Tiny Rector out of his job as mayor, that’s okay, too.

“All’s I’m saying,” Alf went on, “is why here?”

“Railroad’s here now,” the other man said.

“Railroad’s come through lots of other places.”

“And the new cattle trail, up from Oklahoma.”

Alf cleared his throat loudly and unloaded into the spittoon with a dramatic, wet gob that echoed superbly upon contact. “I seen no evidence of any trail coming up this way, nor can I think of any reason another trail would be needed this far east.”

“A shorter rail trip to Chicago,” I offered.

“Maybe. Though the length of the rail trip means less than the length of the driving trail.”

“You’re talking through your hat, you son of a bitch.” Herbert squinted his one eye and drew back as if to slug Alf, and I put my hand on the sap behind the bar just in case I needed to put him down; Alf, oblivious to the violent hostility he was arousing in his companion, once again shut his eyes to gather his wits.

“Let me start again,” he said with an exaggerated show of patience, and I was sure that whatever he said next would provoke a blow; at that moment, however, the door opened and in from the cold walked the subject at hand.

Alf looked up at Marc in the guilty manner of a schoolboy and ceased speaking. The rest of the saloon cried out to him as one, however, and swarmed about him as he made his way to the bar and took his place with almost clairvoyant precision between Herbert and Alf.

“Evening, Bill,” he said, extending his hand to me. “Looks as though business is booming.”

And it was; making the new saloon the first order of business upon his arrival had been a shrewd move on his part, for my old one couldn’t have accommodated the influx of laborers his construction projects had drawn. He spoke for a few minutes with Herbert about some construction materials for the pens, and latter’s sullen distemper evaporated; he seemed to have completely forgotten Alf’s existence.

Within twenty minutes, though, Alf started up again. He talked so loud that Marc could scarcely ignore him, and finally he turned to say hello.

“Say, there, Alf, didn’t mean to ignore you that way,” he said, shaking his hand. Alf hadn’t held it out and was too drunk to effectively pull it away before it had been well and truly shaken, but he scowled just the same.

“I’d just like you to tell me one thing straight. Where the hell’d you come from, and what the hell you doing here really?”

“That’s two things, Alf,” I said again.

“I’m from Chicago,” Marc said.

“I been to Chicago once,” said Herbert, his eye blinking rapidly.

He began to raise his voice. “As for what I’m doing here, I’m taking a little town and turning it into a city. I’m giving a whole bunch of men jobs where there were none before. I’m bringing the advantages of civilization to the prairie.” By the end his voice was ringing in the rafters like a Chatauqua speech, and then he brought it down low and put a friendly hand on Alf’s shoulder. “That’s what I’m doing here, Alf.”

“I thought you was French, Marc,” said the man who’d offered the same opinion earlier. “You talk a little of it, don’t you?”

“My father was. I scarcely knew him.”

The man from Independence pointed at Alf. “This jackass here’s been talking about you all night. Wonders what brought you here, trying to make it sound like it’s something not right.”

Marc reached out his hands and clasped the shoulder of each of his neighbors, as though entreating them to make peace. He took in a deep breath, preparing to speechify; he had at these times a way of sounding as though he were on the stump, projecting to the very back of the room and pausing for dramatic emphasis as he met briefly the eyes of each listener in his turn.