Morgan Earp left them at Custer, and they went on without him. By midnight, they had passed Fourmile Ranch, and headed into Pleasant Valley. They passed Twelvemile Ranch, and Eighteenmile Ranch in the darkness.
Shortly before dawn, they reached the entrance to Red Canyon.
The Red Canyon coach station had been burned to the ground. All the horses had been stolen. Flies buzzed around a half dozen scalped bodies, evidence of Persimmons Bill’s depredations.
“Guess they didn’t hear about the new treaty,” Earp said laconically. “I reckon we won’t be eating here.”
They proceeded immediately through the canyon. It was a tense journey, slow because they had no fresh team, but they made it without incident. At the far end of the canyon they followed Hawk Creek toward Camp Collier, which marked the southern entrance to the Black Hills.
Now, in the morning light, they stopped for an hour to graze the horses, and to breathe a long sigh of relief. “Not long now, Mr. Johnson,” Earp said, “and you’ll be owing me half those bones.”
Johnson decided it was time to tell him the truth. “Mr. Earp,” he began.
“Yes?”
“I appreciate everything you have done to help me get out of Deadwood, naturally.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“But there’s something I have to tell you.”
Earp frowned. “You’re not backing out on your deal?”
“No, no.” Johnson shook his head. “But I have to tell you, the crates really are just fossil bones.”
“Uh-huh,” Wyatt Earp said.
“They are just bones.”
“I heard you.”
“They are of value only to scientists, to paleontologists.”
“That’s fine with me.”
Johnson smiled wanly. “I only hope you won’t be too disappointed.”
“I’ll try not to be,” Earp said, and winked, and punched him on the shoulder. “You just remember, boy. Half those bones are mine.”
“He had been a strong friend,” Johnson wrote, “and I suspected he would make a dangerous enemy. Thus it was with some trepidation that I resumed the journey to Fort Laramie, and the first civilization I had seen in many months.”
Fort Laramie
Fort Laramie was an army outpost that had grown into a frontier town, but the army garrison still set the mood, and its mood was now bitter. The army had fought the Indians for more than eight months, and had suffered serious losses, most especially the massacre of Custer’s column at the Little Bighorn. There had been other bloody engagements as well, at Powder River and Slim Buttes, and even when they were not fighting, the campaign had been harsh and arduous. But all the news from the East told them that Washington and the rest of the country did not support their efforts; numerous articles criticized the military conduct of the campaign against “the noble and defenseless red man.” For young men who had seen their comrades fall, who had returned to a battle scene to bury the scalped and mutilated bodies of friends, who had seen corpses with their genitals cut off and stuffed in their mouths—for these soldiers, the Eastern commentary made for difficult reading.
As far as the army was concerned, they had been ordered to undertake this war, without being asked their opinion of either its feasibility or its morality; they had followed orders as best they could, and with considerable success, and they were angry now to be unsupported, and to be fighting an unpopular war.
The fact that the politicians in Washington had underestimated both the difficulty of a campaign against “mere savages” and the outrage that it would cause among the liberal establishment of the Eastern cities—uninformed writers who had never set eyes on a real Indian, and who had only fantasies of what the Indians were like—was no fault of the army.
As one captain put it, “They want the Indians eliminated, and the lands opened up to white settlers, but they don’t want anybody to get hurt in the process. That just ain’t possible.”
Added to this was the ugly fact that the war had now entered a new phase. The army was engaged in a war of attrition with the Indians, in which they planned to kill all the buffalo and thus starve the Indians into submission. Even so, most military men expected the war to drag on for at least three more years, and to cost another $15 million—although nobody in Washington wanted to hear that.
The arguments, back and forth, raged in the coach station on the outskirts of town. Johnson had an unappetizing lunch of bacon and biscuits, then sat in the sun outside the station. From where he sat, he could see the iron bridge crossing the Platte.
For more than a decade, the Platte River valley had been trumpeted by Union Pacific brochures as “a flowery meadow of great fertility clothed in nutritious grasses, and watered by numerous streams.” In fact, it was harsh, god-awful country. Yet the settlers were coming.
From the earliest pioneer days, the Platte River itself was known as especially treacherous and difficult to cross, and this new iron bridge represented one small improvement in a series of changes that were opening the West to settlers, making it more accessible.
Johnson dozed off in the sun and awoke when a voice said, “Hell of a sight, ain’t it?”
He opened his eyes. A tall man was smoking a cigar and staring at the bridge.
“That it is,” he said.
“I remember last year, that bridge was just talk.” The tall man turned. He had a scar running down his cheek. The face was familiar, but the recognition came slowly.
Navy Joe Benedict.
Marsh’s right-hand man.
Johnson sat up quickly. He had only a moment to wonder what Navy Joe was doing here before a familiar heavyset figure emerged from the coach house and stood beside Benedict.
Professor Marsh glanced at Johnson and said in his formal way, “Good morning to you, sir.” He gave no sign of recognition and immediately turned to Benedict. “What’s the delay, Joe?”
“Just hitching up a new team, Professor. We’ll be ready to leave in the space of fifteen or twenty minutes.”
“See if you can quicken it,” Marsh said.
Navy Joe left, and Marsh turned to Johnson. He appeared not to recognize him, for Johnson looked very different from the last time Marsh had seen him. He was leaner and more muscled, with a full beard, and hair that had not seen scissors since leaving Philadelphia more than three months before. It hung down almost to his shoulders. His clothes were rough and dirty, caked in mud.
Marsh said, “Just passing through?”
“That’s right.”
“Which way you going?”
“To Cheyenne.”
“Come from the Hills?”
“Yeah.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Deadwood.”
“Mining gold?”
“Yeah,” Johnson said.
“Strike it rich?”
“Not exactly,” Johnson said. “What about you?”
“In point of fact, I myself am going north into the Hills.”
“Mining gold?” Johnson asked, to his private amusement.