places, working mines and abandoned claims, haunted saloons and taverns teeming with life. The West has changed in many ways, but if one looks—in the stories and in the places—the real American West remains and always will.
Northern Nevada, Autumn 2009
The Water Indian
Steve Hockensmith
Mr. William Brackwell
c/o The Sussex Land & Cattle Co.
Somerset House
London, England
Dear Mr. Brackwell:
I trust your journey back to Merry Old was a smooth one, and you met with fewer of the, shall we say, surprises that were so commonplace during your stay in Montana. (By “surprises,” of course, I mean dead folks.) I do hope you won’t let the carnage you witnessed at the Bar VR color your view of the American West. Such goings-on are hardly the norm, no matter what your experience (or the dime novels) might lead you to believe. I mean, here my brother and I are in Utah, and we haven’t witnessed a murder in minutes!
Not that our travels have been boring. Nope, that would hardly do it justice. Tedious—now that hits closer to the mark. Monotonous, wearying, and mind-numbing too.
Except for when it was bloodcurdlingly, hair-raisingly, pants-fillingly terrifying, that is. And for about twenty-four hours up in the Rocky Mountains, that’s exactly what it was.
When we parted ways a couple months back, you asked that I keep you apprised of whatever progress we might make toward my brother’s goal. But I didn’t bother writing before now, as there was no progress to report. And there’s still not. In lieu of news, though, let me present you with this: something you can trot out the next time you’re in need of a spook story to entertain your friends of a dark, stormy evening by the fire. You can tell them one of your American cowboy pals passed it on to you, and such men aren’t given to balderdash or exaggeration. Ever. Any of them. Why, the last time a drover was caught in a lie was 1876, and the scoundrel was immediately stripped of his spurs and sent east to become a banker.
Anyway—on to the yarn.
As you’ll recall, Old Red and I planned to hit the trail in search of jobs as Pinkertons. And we’ve succeeded! In hitting the trail in search of jobs as Pinkertons, that is. As for actually finding jobs as Pinks…there we’ve utterly failed. Believe it or not, when a couple dusty saddle-bums stumble into a Pinkerton office intent on joining the payroll, they are not received with open arms. (Though when one of said saddle-bums tries to explain that he’s actually a “top-rail deducifier” thanks to all the Sherlock Holmes stories he’s studied on, the pair is greeted warmly indeed—with gales of laughter.)
As if this wouldn’t be tiresome enough, it took us days and sometimes weeks to reach each fresh humiliation. Hailing from Kansas Grangers as we do, we were raised to view the Southern Pacific as Satan, the Union Pacific as Lucifer, and the Central Pacific as Beelzebub—different names for the same great evil—and my brother refused to bankroll the bastards with even a penny from our meager kitty.
Conscience rarely comes without a cost, though, and in this case it was paid mainly by our backsides. After leaving the Bar VR, we journeyed first west across Montana, then southeast through Idaho, all of it on horseback. By the time we were skirting around Bear Lake into Utah, my saddlewarmer was bruised black as an anvil.
Now, this wasn’t just Utah Territory we were riding into—it was Mormon territory. And given the clashes of years past, a couple drifting Gentiles like ourselves could hardly assume we’d be welcome…or even tolerated. So we kept to ourselves as we wound down through the Bear Lake Valley, steering clear of the main towns thereabouts.
I didn’t mind missing out on the saggy, smelly, lice-infested boardinghouse beds we’d have no doubt found in places like Pickleville and Fish Haven. Once you’ve been on a few cattle drives, camping out seems like a positive luxury when there’s no night herding to do and no belly cheater waking you at the crack of dawn banging a stew pot over your head. And the Bear Lake Valley made “roughing it” none-too-rough, what with its well-worn trails, ample trees for shade and tinder, and teeming cutthroat trout practically fighting each other for the honor of gracing your frying pan.
In short, the place was Eden without the serpent…or Eve. Or so it seemed.
Our first clue that all was not paradisical came as we rounded the southwestern corner of the lake. Just off the trail was a rotten, falling-down fence and, beyond it, what might have been a field of alfalfa before weeds and grass were allowed to overtake it. It wasn’t long before we spotted an abandoned farmhouse—and then another soon after with its own fields choked with wildflowers and thistle.
This was beautiful country, good for grazing cattle or raising crops either or, and it was a puzzlement to me that farming folk should ever give it up.
“There ain’t never been no Indian troubles up thisaway…have there?” I asked my brother, eyeing the tree line nervously.
Of course, the only “Indian troubles” these days are suffered by the Indians alone, and they run to starvation and disease rather than raiding and killing. Yet the bloodshed isn’t so far behind us that the thought of braves on the warpath can’t still chill the blood.
“Nothin’ but Shoshone and Ute ’round these parts…provided you could still find ’em. Friendly ones, they are.” Old Red leaned out from his saddle and spat. “Too friendly for their own good, I expect.”
“Well, then…where’d everybody go?”
“What you really mean is why’d they go. And you know what I say to that.”
I did indeed. I’d heard him say it often enough. “It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence”—my brother’s favorite quote from his hero, your famous countryman, Sherlock Holmes. Most drovers want to be Charles Goodnight or Buffalo Bill Cody if they have any ambition at all, but Old Red’s always been a contrarian (or just plain contrary, anyway). The Holmes of the Range—that’s what he’s set out to be.
We were to rendezvous with ol’ Holmes shortly, as it turned out…and be in need of his particular brand of wisdom, as well.
As we were passing our third deserted farm, the sun was sinking below the mountains behind us, and my brother made a most sensible (though not entirely welcome) decision. We would spend the night in the abandoned homestead visible just off the trail.
It felt a little like a violation, a desecration even, settling into someone else’s house. They hadn’t been gone long—no more than a couple years, Old Red judged by the cobwebs and dust and dry rot—and they’d left some of their furniture behind. A table and chairs hewn from local pine, a bed with a finely crafted headboard of mahogany, even a battered foot-pump organ. I half-expected the rightful occupants to barge in any minute, slack-jawed to find a couple presumptuous cowpokes lighting up kindling in their fireplace.
Yet I might actually have welcomed the intrusion, provided nobody felt the need to shoot us. Old Red’s far from the chattiest man around—very, very far—and whatever topics of conversation we had to chew over had been gnawed down to the bone weeks before. Fresh company would’ve been mightily appreciated. As it was, we had to rely on the old, dog-eared variety: my brother’s stack of Holmes stories.
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