terrible things to that poor woman who happened to come visiting. Hibbard described their reign of terror in Twenty-Mile, and he told of the death of Mr. Delanny, owner of the hotel, and the lynching of a mixed-blood named Coots. The Reverend explained that after doing everything in his power to prevent the lynching but- alas-failing, he had volunteered to make the dangerous descent to alert Destiny of the dreadful events in Twenty-Mile. The reporter congratulated Reverend Hibbard for his courage and suggested that the mayor might want to demonstrate the community's gratitude in some more-material way, but the next morning Hibbard was not to be found, having withdrawn his savings from the Destiny Bank and Trust and taken the morning train west.
I was going through the Destiny Tribune's account of Hibbard's arrival, when it suddenly struck me: Why did it take three days for Hibbard to get down to Destiny? Descending the thirty or so miles of serpentine railroad line- even a very cautious descent-shouldn't have taken more than one full day. After all, the snow hadn't started yet; and two months earlier Matthew had climbed up in a little over twelve hours.
Then I realized that Hibbard couldn't have come down the tracks. The rock slide precipitated by the storm had already cut the line. What must have happened was this: after snatching up a few valuables from his depot, he must have started down the track in the storm, but when he came to the break in the line, he was obliged to return to Twenty-Mile, probably with the intention of slipping around the edge of town, crossing the donkey meadow, and working his way down the steep old access trail to Destiny, the same trail that was later used by the miners and townsfolk. If my calculations are roughly correct, he would have been hiding somewhere (perhaps in one of the abandoned buildings) when B. J., Matthew, and Frenchy were burying Coots.
I find it distasteful to think of Reverend Hibbard peering out from his hiding place, watching the burial of Coots.
It was from C. R. Harriman's interview with a'… redoubtable old soldier who, despite the loss of a leg in the service of his country, led the dangerous trek down to Destiny, guiding four others to safety,' that I gleaned details of the ore-bearers' descent. But many particulars were vague because (as Harriman obliquely put it) 'the fatigues of the colorful old soldier's journey did not prevent him from accepting bibulous congratulations proffered by gentlemen at the local oases.'
In a column headed 'Dramatic Incident at Twenty-Mile,' this soldier, who gave his name as Sergeant-Major Jefferson M. Calder, described the shoot-out between Matthew and the escaped madmen from the state prison. He told how the young boy had faced down the desperados, using tactics he'd learned from the old soldier himself. But the strain of this confrontation had'… pretty much gutted the kid. Made him go sort of simple. Shoot, he even started thinking he was the town marshal!'
My debt to C. R. Harriman does not end with his interviews in the Tribune. A few years ago a colleague sent me a book he thought might interest me. When I unwrapped the package, the name C. R. Harriman on the cover immediately ignited my curiosity. It was a privately published account of his early years in Wyoming, concentrating on what the title called: The End of Destiny. Three hundred numbered exemplars of the book were printed in 1928, and I suppose that copy No. 132, which sits on my desk at this moment, is the only one extant, though I should be delighted to hear otherwise from a reader.
After a lively anecdotal description of the birth and growth of Destiny, Harriman's book focuses on the six weeks between the arrival of the frozen, bone-weary miners who had threaded their way down the snow-clogged trail from Twenty-Mile, and the economic panic that led to Destiny's collapse.
As soon as the miners had rested up, they were out roving the streets, creating a hectic holiday atmosphere. After drawing their wages from the mine's agent in town, they applied themselves diligently to joy-seeking, sure that their respite would be short, and that they would be back slaving in the mine as soon as the Boston owners repaired the collapsed rail line.
Information concerning the broken line was indeed telegraphed back to Boston, and days of silence ensued while the company weighed the considerable investment necessary to repair the track against the return they could expect from the mine. Then instructions came to the company office: After detaching the Surprise Lode from its mother company so as to avoid further liability, the Boston owners declared it bankrupt, leaving the miners without jobs, and leaving Destiny's dozen or so small service enterprises with unpaid accounts. The town was staggered by the news, for this was before the legalized scam of 'chapter 11' bankruptcy, back when avoiding one's debts was considered dishonorable, and men driven to bankruptcy were expected to-and often did-commit suicide. Having assured the angry townsfolk that the Boston owners were entirely sensible of their responsibilities, the company agent quietly locked the door of his office and took the 2 A. M. eastbound to avoid the unpleasant distinction of being tarred and feathered.
Within weeks of the arrival of the miners and townsfolk from Twenty-Mile, the Destiny Bank and Trust had failed, and most of the merchants had sold out and departed, together with the doctor, the preacher, the lawyer, and the town's public girls; and what kind of a town is it where you can't get healed, saved, sued, or laid? Not long after, the undertaker left and the last bar nailed up its doors. And hey! If you can't even get drunk or buried…!
But this collapse was totally unthinkable when Frenchy and her girls first emerged, randomly shod, from the harrowing back trail into a town echoing with the miners' holiday zeal. While the girls were recuperating from their trek in the Destiny Regal Hotel's tin bathtubs, Frenchy made arrangements with the biggest saloon, and C. R. Harriman tells us that within two days her 'ladies of the evening' were lightening the hours of miners and townsmen alike. I shall quote from this reference to give you a sample of Harriman's sumptuous, if occasionally tangle-footed, frontier journalese: 'The trio of rough-hewn odalisques was managed by one 'Frenchy,' an enterprising woman of decidedly Nubian inclinations.* This 'Frenchy' did not offer herself for sale-or, more precisely, for rent-and considering a rather off-putting façade resulting from the application of a broken bottle to her left cheek, it is not likely that she would have found many customers among the refined townsfolk, although rough-and-ready miners would doubtless overlook such superficial cosmetic nuances, But her troika of girls provided a variety calculated to tempt every appetite (save for the fastidious). There was 'Queeny,' a fullblown, full-blooded, full-voiced woman no longer burdened by the coy inhibitions of youth (or indeed those of middle age); and there was 'Chinky,' a shy, retiring visitor from the Celestial Kingdom; and finally there was the clear favorite, 'Goldy,' a brawny Viking girl of more-than-averagely plain features, but crowned with the luxuriant golden locks that inspired her sobriquet.'
* The reader is reminded that Mr. Harriman wrote long before political correctness became more important than Freedom of Speech.
In an appendix to his book, Harriman recounts how he crossed the trail of one of Twenty-Mile's denizens through what he called 'one of those 'wondrous' coincidences so common in our Nation of Drifters that the real wonder is that we continue to be amazed by them.' A couple of years after he had left Destiny and found a post with a San Francisco daily, he was assigned to do a 'color piece' on a community of outcasts living in a makeshift village across the bay, in the hills behind Oakland. There he found Reverend Hibbard, who had become the spiritual leader of a small band of fanatics who were convinced that the apocalyptic Second Coming would coincide with the arrival of the Twentieth Century. When that ominous date came and went without cataclysmic incident, Hibbard reexamined the texts of John and Daniel, and lo! he discovered an error of twenty-one years in their calculations- twenty-one being exactly the Trinity times the Seven Seals. So it now became obvious that the apocalypse would come on New Year's Eve, 1921, when Hibbard's followers would be wafted up to heaven, while the fornicators, the scoffers, the meat-eaters, the Darwinians, the blasphemers, and all the rest of us rubbish would be hurled, twisting and screaming, into eternal fires. While awaiting this gratifying spectacle, Reverend Hibbard commanded his followers to live in prayer, poverty, chastity, and grateful obedience to their leader. By the time a diminished handful of sect members stood in white gowns on their hilltop in the drenching rain, only to see the first dawn of 1922 appear with no greater catastrophe than half a dozen head-colds (and much ridicule and nose-thumbing from local flappers and cake-eaters), Reverend Hibbard had already preceded them to their reward, leaving behind a child he had begot upon the body of the thirteen-year-old daughter of a devoted follower. But Hibbard was not the first sin-merchant to cash in on America's penchant for wrathful, anti-intellectual fundamentalism and the addiction of its Lost and its Damaged for the narcotic of cultism, nor, sadly, would he be the last.
We learn little about Matthew, Ruth Lillian, and B. J. Stone from the Destiny Tribune beyond a mention of them as the last arrivals from Twenty-Mile, and two passing references to the shoot-out between Matthew and the prison escapees. I suppose it is only natural that the closure of the mine should occupy most of the newspaper's attention, considering the devastating effect it had on the town's prosperity. Records from the Destiny Bank and Trust show that Gerald (Doc) Kerry drew his savings out of the bank as soon as he got down to Destiny. He had always doubted the willingness of the Boston owners to provide additional investment, should something happen to the mine (as he told Matthew that night while they gobbled peaches and syrup on baking-powder biscuits). It can
