ringed on what there was of a parade at Platte Bridge Station.
“Damned fool—always has been, that Custard,” growled Anderson. “He’s been a pain in my ass ever since we came out to this godforsaken land. He’ll be wolf bait by sunup … if he ain’t already.”
5
“GONNA BE SUNUP soon, Jonah.”
In the chill of predawn, Jonah Hook turned at the dry rustle of the old scout’s whispered words. “What you figure the Injuns will do—try to run us over?”
Shad Sweete shook his head. “They don’t fight that way. Not like what you was used to back east.”
“Drive a man crazy—this waiting.”
“You get any sleep, son?”
“None I can own up to.”
The old scout gazed over the walls at the graying along the east. “Don’t matter how long you’re out here in this country. Man never does get used to this.”
Sweete settled against the wall, his back to it as unconcerned as if he were waiting for one of the hot-tin louse races to begin back at Sweetwater Station. How Jonah admired the scout for it now, wishing he could be as unconcerned as Sweete.
Over the past few weeks of working along the Emigrant Road that climbed toward South Pass, Jonah had spent more and more stolen minutes with Shadrach Sweete. Not that there was any lack of things needing doing, but there were long gaps of boring idleness interspersed with moments of frantic activity or bone-grinding labor. Everything that made the young Confederate look forward more and more to those times spent with the old scout and his tales of a glorious bygone day.
Back in the early 1850s, Sweete spent some months off and on working for an old friend, Jim Bridger. Shad’s old friend was at that moment helping the Plains Department Commander, General Patrick E. Connor, ready his troops and supplies for a major push into the Powder River country coming later in the summer. Sweete and Bridger went back to their younger, piss-and-vinegar days. And both were now much mellowed by their forty-some years in the far west.
Shad had been working for his old friend at Fort Bridger in southwestern Wyoming twelve years before when Mormon prophet Brigham Young had up and decided the mountains weren’t big enough for both him and the venerable mountain man. Young dispatched his Salt Lake City sheriff and 150 Avenging Angels to arrest Jim Bridger and to confiscate all the property in his fort and trading store.
“Never met no Mormons,” Hook had said when first told the story. “Don’t know if I’d know one if he walked up to me. Didn’t have much cause to know such things back in Missouri—or where I grew up in Virginia.”
“Pray you don’t ever have cause to run onto these henchmen Brigham Young sends out to do his dirty work. You’ll ne’er forget their passing, son.”
As Sweete had told it, a matter of hours before the Mormon posse came riding in, Jim and Shad got word the Angels were on a mission from their Prophet, and coming on hard. Together the pair escaped northeast into the mountains, hoping things would cool off.
But Young’s Angels burned half of Bridger’s fort and rustled off all his stock the old mountain man had acquired over the years of trade with emigrants along the road west. Then the Angels pushed on east to the well- known ford of the Green River. It was there the Mormons killed Bridger’s employees and Shad’s co-workers before burning the ferry buildings to the ground. Their work complete, the Angels turned about and rode back home to Brigham Young’s Deseret.
Late that fall of fifty-three, when the Prophet ordered his Angels back to the half-burned Fort Bridger, intending to occupy it and to intermarry with the neighboring bands of Shoshoni, Jim and Shad were ready. They had gathered ten other former trappers and frontiersmen, hard cases all, and though they were outnumbered more than twelve to one, the hardy plainsmen cowed Brigham Young’s Saints and sent them fleeing through the snow.
As the decade of the fifties grew old, Shad Sweete watched the white man rub more and more against the plains tribes. If it wasn’t emigrants moving west along the Holy Road, it was miners punching into the Colorado Rockies for the new gold strikes. The new decade of the sixties thundered open with war in the East, while tensions increased in the mountain West.
“By last summer,” Shad told Jonah, “I knew enough to read the sign, plain as paint.”
“Writing was on the wall, eh?”
“Manner of speaking. What with the way the Territorial government in Colorado was going at things. They ordered a fella named Chivington to raise a volunteer army to quell what all the loudmouthed white settlers and businessmen was calling the Indian problem.”
“Was there a problem?”
“Damn right there was. But neither me nor the old chiefs could convince the young hotbloods to stay at home in their camps—or go off and hunt what few buffalo was left instead of going on the war path.”
“The young bucks left—and raised hell, didn’t they? Like they’re doing now. The reason we soldiers’re here.”
“Them warriors really let the wolf out last year—off stealing, raping, killing, and looting … only to ride back to their villages where the old ones, the women and children could be caught sleeping by the white man and his army.”
“That the way you’re supposed to fight the Indian—catch him in his villages?”
“Some think so, Jonah. But not for me. Early last winter, I left family with Black Kettle’s village down south in Colorado Territory. I come north to Denver to find work with General Connor. Learned he’d moved his headquarters—was up at Laramie, so I rode north a ways farther. When I got to Laramie, Connor told me it was up to Jim Bridger to hire me or not. So while I waited for Bridger to come in last winter, I got word that some Colorado volunteers had nearly wiped out Black Kettle’s camp on the Little Dried River.” He hung his head as he told it, snorting back the sour taste in his throat.
“I rode south fast as my mare could carry me, Jonah. Found what was left of Black Kettle’s band camped on Cherry Creek—along with a bunch of Arapaho and Sioux. They was all itchy for making war, even on me. But that old man Black Kettle come up, with Toote at his side. Wasn’t a happier man than I was right then. Once Black Kettle decided not to have a hand in the fighting the other bands wanted to do, and started off for the south to the Territories with my family along—I turned back to skedaddle north to Laramie. A week later I was passing through Denver City and stopped at a opera house in the town. Hate towns, I do, Jonah. And in that opera house, I watched the crowd cheer some of the proud heroes of that Sand Creek fight as they showed off their battle trophies.”
“Cheyenne scalps.”
“No. Hair cut from the privates of the squaws they had raped and butchered.”
“From what we been told—the Cheyenne and Sioux been doing their share of raping and butchering as well.”
“That’s the shame of it. There damned well ain’t no end to it once the wolf is let out to howl.”
“We gonna put an end to it this summer, ain’t we, Shad?”
“No, Jonah. What’s set fire to this country out here is gonna take many, many a winter to put out.”
There came some renewed activity among the soldiers as gray light spread across the small open compound of Platte Bridge Station, enough noise to yank Hook from his brooding reverie.
“Lieutenant Collins!” a voice called out across the way.
“Here. Who wants me?”
“Major Anderson, Lieutenant.”
The slightly built young officer strode into the dark shadows of the station commander’s office, lit only by smudges of yellow lamplight.
For the first time since arriving in darkness at two A.M., Jonah could look about and see the makeup of this Platte Bridge Station with the coming of dawn’s light. The telegraph station itself stood flanked by warehouses on
