Shortgrass Song (5 page)

There was plenty of excitement in the wilderness, what with wolves killing his calves, and Indians visiting his dugout, and rough characters malingering about from time to time. But what did he need with excitement? He had left plenty of that back in Pennsylvania, harboring the runaways the Underground Railroad sent north, hiding them from slave hunters, moving them on midnight runs to the freedom boats waiting on Lake Erie. Even that excitement was more of Ella's doing than his own.

Only once in his life had Ab truly sought adventure, and that was as a young fool who joined the army to fight in the Mexican war. He hadn't intended to go to war until he made a trip to Washington, D.C., and fell under the influence of Captain Samuel H. Walker, who was in the capital recruiting men for a new company of mounted riflemen.

Walker's name was legend. He had fought Seminole Indians in Florida before joining the Texas Rangers. The modifications he had suggested to arms manufacturer Sam Colt had led to the success of the Colt revolver. After serving with the Texas Rangers in the war with Mexico, he had won a commission in the regular army and had come to Washington for recruits.

Walker's company of dragoons would not serve ordinary duty. General Zachary Taylor had commissioned him expressly to combat the brutal Mexican guerrillas menacing U.S. troops between Vera Cruz and Mexico City. Only Texas Ranger tactics would work against the guerrillas, and Samuel H. Walker was the only Texan General Taylor could trust to behave with the honor and dignity befitting an officer in the U.S. Army.

Captain Walker recruited a hundred men in Washington, and young Ab Holcomb was one of them. He trained for a month in Kentucky, then sailed for Vera Cruz. He learned to ride and shoot like he never thought possible, and kill as he had never imagined. Walker transformed the sluggish dragoons into a light cavalry of thunderbolt ferocity. They did not merely fight Mexicans. They hunted them.

In October of 1847, Ab rode with Walker's company in an attack on the army of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna at the village of Huamantla. Walker was killed leading his men into the town plaza. Ab wept over his captain's body, but Sam Walker was the only Texan whose corpse Absalom Holcomb would ever weep over.

Ab had learned to fight like a Texas Ranger, but he hated Texans. The men in Walker's company were regular army—Americans, not Texans. They wore uniforms. They behaved with proper decorum away from the battlefield. Walker himself had never uttered an oath in front of his men. He never drank or used tobacco or chased Mexican women.

But there were other Texans in Mexico besides Sam Walker—rangers and civilian volunteers who engaged in such atrocities against the civilian population that Ab came to hate them, his allies, as much as he hated his enemies, the Mexican guerrillas.

A particular incident in Mexico City turned him against Texans forever. A Texas Ranger was found knifed to death in the streets of a rough neighborhood of the occupied city, and the bloody Texans, not knowing whom in particular to punish, came down on the entire neighborhood in a vengeful wave of death. In one day's time, more than eighty civilians were dragged into the streets and shot.

After the war, Ab returned to Pennsylvania with a hatred of Texans in his heart, and one of the new Walker Colts tinder his belt. He had seen enough of adventure. He bought a farm and resolved to apply himself forevermore to the peaceful pursuits of agriculture. But the war would not die easy for Ab.

He saw the guerrillas in his dreams. He thought he spotted them spying on him from the woodlot. It was as if they had come all the way from Mexico to hunt him down. He smelled the stench of a day-old battlefield. In the dirt on his hands he saw human gore. He began to wish the Mexicans had killed him. The dead were the lucky ones. He envied their escape. He thought one day of suicide, and the idea began to appeal to him.

Then he met Ella, and the guerrillas faded away. In their places, he saw images of her. He saw a vision of himself as her husband. He thought less of death, more of life. She led him back and gave him hope. He had planned to kill himself the day he met her, but he found in her his only reason to live.

Ella first became interested in Ab because of the stories she had heard about the exploits of Sam Walker's men. She put more stock in Ab's war record than she should have. She agreed to marry him largely because of his service under Captain Walker. She thought such service practically guaranteed chivalry as his one predominant virtue. She thought she could manipulate his courage to serve her many social causes, the most passionate of which was abolition. Shortly after their marriage, she broached the subject to him.

“Ab, honey. We have got to do something about this disgraceful situation of those poor slaves. We have got to do our part.”

“What slaves?” Ab asked, looking around his boundary fences as if he would find a slave on his property.

“What slaves? The ones down South! We could help them. This close to Lake Erie, we could help smuggle them to Canada.”

“That's none of our concern. Let them make their own laws down South. We'll just take care of what's ours right here.” After Mexico, Ab didn't care to see much of anything beyond the rails fencing his hundred acres.

It took Ella two months and a lot of questions about the war to figure out a way to convince Ab of the evils of slavery. “The Texans keep slaves,” she said one day. “The Texans keep as many slaves as anybody. And they boast about it, too.”

Ab hated Texans. He figured if they embraced slavery, the institution had to be destroyed. He began helping Ella in aiding the fugitives. He never really liked having the strange black people in his house, or even in his barn. He was appalled at the condition most of them were in when they arrived. They wore rags and ate as if starved half their lives. Few of them could read or write.

Once, in a fit of frustration, he asked Ella, “What are they ever going to do for us in return?”

“I suppose they'll vouch for us in the kingdom of heaven,” she said.

Ab was not an abolitionist in his heart. He helped the slaves because he hated Texans and loved his wife. He had learned that Ella's causes were her vitality. To make her happy, he had to help fugitive slaves. She never looked at him or touched him with more passion than when he was leaving in the dead of night to lead a party of escapees to their next contact north. Their children had all been conceived after such expeditions.

Matthew was the firstborn. A handsome, dark-haired child, he was somewhat spoiled by his mother. He enjoyed periods of good behavior but frequently went looking for trouble like an Indian on the warpath. Fistfighting was his specialty.

Pete was towheaded and smaller for his age than Matthew, but he was vigorous in health and seemingly immune to pain. Cuts, bruises, and scrapes fazed him no more than mosquito bites. Only Pete would stand up to Matthew. He got whipped every time, but he never backed down.

There were two girls born after Pete, but each died in infancy. The losses plunged Ella into fits of despair. Ab would find her weeping on the graves at night. He thought for some time after the second girl died that Ella had truly lost her mind. She left Ab to care for the fugitive slaves and spent all her time cultivating her flower garden so she could keep fresh-cut blossoms standing over the graves of her little girls.

Caleb rescued Ella from her grief. His birth gave her a last chance at erasing the vague guilt she felt for the deaths of her daughters. She told Ab that she would not let Caleb die. She simply would not allow it. But Caleb was sickly as a baby, and his health improved little as he got older. He became short of breath, and coughed miserably most of the time.

One night Ella woke Ab from a sound sleep. “Do you hear Caleb coughing?” she asked. “I'm going to save him. I won't lose another child. I'll go crazy. I'll do whatever it takes to nurse him back, Ab, so don't try to stop me.”

The next day she took Caleb to a doctor who said he suffered from asthma and possibly consumption. The boy's only chance was in the high, dry climate of the West.

“Woman, where in Hades is Cherry Creek?” Ab asked when she first came up with her idea of moving west. “What do you even know about it?”

“It's in the foothills of the Rockies. It has the most healthful climate on the continent. They've found gold there, and they need farmers to feed the miners. And all the land is free. It's a wilderness. You can have the pick of the land.”

“I like this land,” Ab said. “There are no wild Indians here.”

“The Indians are peaceful there.”

“Woman, now I know you've lost your mind. We can't just up and go west. What about those poor slaves of yours?”

“If you don't help me take Caleb to Cherry Creek,” she said, “I'll have to send him to live with my cousin in Texas.”

No son of Ab Holcomb's was going to live in Texas.

In Missouri he spoke to a busted prospector who advised him not to rely solely on farming for his livelihood at Cherry Creek. The rains were unreliable. He suggested raising cattle. “There's grass to graze a herd to feed the world,” the prospector said. Ab had heard Texans speak of ranching during the war. He figured if a Texan could raise cattle, he could do it better.

He bought fifty head of cattle—mostly worn-out oxen, plus a few good shorthorns—and joined an immigrant train headed west in covered wagons on the Platte River Road. The entire train helped herd the Holcombs's cattle. In return, Ab supplemented the party's diet of buffalo and antelope meat with beef.

To her despair, Ella found Cherry Creek wallowing in its own squalor. The most healthful climate on the continent reeked of disease and filth. The town at Cherry Creek, called Denver City, consisted of crude log buildings, tents, and Indian tepees. Streets were staked out but otherwise unidentifiable. Prairie dogs peopled the town lots. Mules, dogs, and pigs wandered about unattended. Garbage heaps lined the banks of the creek where the residents drew their water. A sickness of wide-ranging symptoms known as mountain fever plagued the town.

“I'll go ask about finding us a place to camp,” Ab said when the train pulled up.

“You'll do no such thing,” Ella insisted. “Caleb certainly can't stay here, not even one night. You'll ask about finding us a farm as far away from this stinking town as we can get.”

The High Plains truly seemed to have improved Caleb's constitution. He had gotten accustomed to walking some of the day, and his fits of coughing had diminished considerably. Ella saw no reason to jeopardize his recovery by camping him in Denver's filth.

As Ab asked the locals about finding farmland, Ella looked with disgust over the Cherry Creek settlement. The town had no churches, schools, hospitals, or libraries, yet it had enough saloons to corrupt a nation. The place was fetid with debris and the rotting flesh of slaughtered animals.

But when she looked over and beyond the town, Ella believed she had done right for Caleb. The plains her wagon had lumbered over met mountains higher than any she had ever imagined. They looked close enough to reach in an hour at a casual stroll, but the captain of the wagon train assured her they stood a half day away by horseback. The thin, dry air of the High Plains only lent them an aspect of nearness.

A storekeeper in town advised Ab to settle on Monument Creek, sixty miles or more south of Denver, just northeast of Pikes Peak. There, in the shadows of the Rampart Range, he would find timber to build with, grass to graze his stock, canyons to winter his cattle in, and virgin plains lusting for the plow.

On the way south, Ella saw two small groups of men on a knoll outside of Denver. “Ab, what are those men doing standing on the plains over there?”

“I don't know,” Ab said. But as their wagon rolled nearer, he realized that two of the men were squaring off to shoot at each other. “Why, they're going to fight a duel,” he said.

Ella immediately screamed for her boys to leave the herd of cattle. “Pete! Matthew! Get in the wagon! I don't care about the cows, do as I tell you this moment! Pete, bring Caleb.”

As the boys climbed in, Ella yanked the whip away from Ab and drove the oxen as fast as they would walk, running up and down the line of beasts like a crazy woman.

From the wagon, Matthew heard his mother screaming at the oxen. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his knife.

“What are you gonna do with that?” Pete said.

“Shut up.” Matthew poked the blade through canvas and cut a slit. He knew Pete would tell on him later, but he had to see that duel even if it meant taking a whipping for cutting the wagon sheet. Just as he peeked through, he saw the black smoke burst from the barrels of the pistols. One of the men fell as Matthew heard the double report.

“Wow;” he whispered to Pete. “One of 'em got killed.”

“You're gonna get in trouble,” Pete replied.

*   *   *

A well-traveled wagon trace called the Fort Bridger Road led south from Denver City. Ab was told it would lead him past Monument Creek. The plains stretched away to their left as they creaked down the road. To the right ran Cherry Creek, and beyond stood the Rocky Mountains.

The Holcombs paralleled the creek, passing high wooded hills, until they came to a solid-pine forest that spilled down from the mountains and onto the High Plains. It was called the Pinery. Somewhere in that aromatic forest, the road rolled over the divide separating the watersheds of the South Platte and the Arkansas rivers. The Holcombs began moving downhill, much to the gratification of the trail-worn oxen.

The boys lost several head of cattle in the Pinery, but Ella would not let them wander into the trees to look for them. “We're not far from our new home. We can come back and find them some other day when we're more familiar with our surroundings.”

The Fort Bridger Road snaked through the Pinery, until suddenly the forest yielded to the plains again. After a good fifty yards, Ab managed to get his oxen stopped. He climbed up to the wagon seat to look over the country with Ella.