The Homesman (28 page)

He should never have splurged three dollars on high-button shoes for Tabitha Hutchinson.

He wished he had let Cuddy teach him to read. Maybe he should have cozied up to her and married her after all. She had been one hell of a woman.

He should have kept and sold the cameo.

Even without thinking, he'd decided to cross the river and return to the Territory. It was home to him now. He'd hitch on to an emigrant train and guide and hunt for his keep and a bedroll, then cut loose and make tracks for Wamego.

Once there, he might set himself up as a lightning-rod agent, which he'd heard was a slick play. You sold a set to some dumb sodbuster, took his money, gave him a receipt, and told him your partner and the wagon would be along the next day with his rods. All you needed was a set of rods to show, and you could make a pile in no time provided you kept moving.

Briggs drained the bottle and set it down beside him. He was splendidly drunk now. There was the headboard. Fourteen dollars. Walnut looked a lot nicer. Pulling it into his lap, he studied the letters of the inscription:

MARY B. CUDY

GOD LOVED HER AND

TOOK HER UNTO HIM

•   •   •

He thought it just right. Then it occurred to him he had wasted fourteen dollars. He could never spot that lone cottonwood, he could never in a thousand years find her grave. The damn board would be a hindrance to him, and pester him, and haunt him. He had an idea.

He put the board down, lay down himself, turned over, stuck his head over the side of the scow, and his new hat fell off and floated away.

“Son of a bitch,” he said.

He saw stars in the water. The river back-sucked, then boiled up from below, freed of the ferry.

“Christ!” he exclaimed, and withdrew his head like a turtle. The head of a great big green alligator had broken the surface, its eyes red, its gaping jaws terrible with teeth. Briggs closed his eyes and broke into a sweat. After a spell he dared look again, and the gator was gone.

With his left hand he found the headboard and lowered it to the water. With his right he grasped the bottle and stood it upright on the inscription, then let the marker go. Away they rafted, board and bottle and haunt, and he followed them with his gaze as they drifted downstream in the golden moonlight, followed them until they sank in shadow.

He pulled back then, and lying there on his belly beside his roan, cheek against the planking, closed his eyes again. It seemed to him he heard the grind and rattle of the frame wagon, and the women wailing. He tried, but couldn't recall their names right then.

He slept.

•   •   •

When he woke the moon was down, the stars were dying, and the night was late and dark.

Beside him, on sentry duty, stood his horse.

With a grunt he hauled himself by the rail to his feet, yawned, stretched, and spat over the side.

The river rolled, dredging and drowning and doing as it damn well pleased. In the stand of trees on the bank there were no fires now, no sounds.

A wind blew softly from the west, from the long plains. He sniffed. It had a clean, open smell, as though borne over lands where a man might still be his own master. In the dawn of the new day he would be the first across the river, the first to set foot again on free soil.

Briggs felt fine. The drunk had done him good. He began to hum “Weevily Wheat,” and presently, moving to the center of the ferry, started to dance a kind of jig, or hoedown, throwing himself into it like a bear into berries. His boots beat on the drum of the deck, he clapped hands, he flapped his arms as though they were wings, and soon he commenced to sing at the top of his voice:

Take her by her lily-white hand

And lead her like a pigeon,

Make her dance the weevily wheat

And scatter her religion.

Charley here and Charley there

And Charley over the ocean,

Charley, he'll come back some day

If he don't change his notion.

Suddenly he was brought up short by angry shouts from the trees, cursing him, and some dogs barked at him. He snaked the repeater from his belt, cocked it, and fired a shot into the trees. That muzzled 'em, by God, men and curs. Briggs was tickled. He liked to run a bluff. The truth was, he'd never shot anybody, but scared a-plenty, and he'd sure as hell learned how to make men sit up and take notice. He belted the pistol, wiped black burn off his gun hand on his new pants, and began to jig and sing again:

O Charley, he's a nice young man,

An' Charley he's a dandy,

Every time he goes to town

He brings the girls some candy.

The song ended, the night drowsed, but the homesman went on dancing. Dancing.

AFTERWORD

by Miles Swarthout

“Greg and Lucille's mother, Alice Dahners, used to tell me stories her mother had told her about the first homesteaders. When her mother was a little girl she had heard women screaming all night long in the jail after the first spring thaw. Their husbands had brought them into town in wagons from the sod huts where they had spent the terrible Dakota winter; they were on their way to the insane asylum in Jamestown.”

—Abigail McCarthy,
Private Faces, Public Places,
1972

My late father, Glendon Swarthout, got the idea for his
other
western masterpiece,
The Homesman
, from small scraps of information in his readings of the few good histories or frontier memoirs from the 1850s, one of the somewhat forgotten decades in American history.

History is always written by the Winners, in this case the largely white migration of Americans who journeyed west by horse and wagon with American military help, to subjugate the Indian tribes and cross the Rocky Mountains to the gold fields and fertile farmlands along the west coast. That Manifest Destiny story has been well-told, many times. But Glendon was more interested in the Losers, the settlers who headed back east once more in much smaller caravans, their health and spirits broken, their crops failed, destitute, their small herds starved or stolen. These pioneers had been denied their American Dream of wealth and happiness in the Golden West and were now paying an awful price, fighting their way back east again, back to the relative safety of life among their relatives and friends, where they once belonged in some semblance of civilized society.

But who told these sad tales of these defeated citizens who had lost their savings and quite often their minds trying to carve out a living on America's wildest frontier? Back in 1986 when my dad was researching what came to be called
The Homesman
, he wasn't able to find much history on this harsh frontier era, the 1850s. What happened when men went crazy back then? Well, they were most likely to die of disease or exposure. Others became hardcore alcoholics working for free drinks as “swampers,” cleaning out spittoons and mopping dirty floors in rough saloons. Still others, manifesting public displays of mental illness, were more likely to be shot down like mad dogs in out-of-the-way places, put out of their misery by rough customers afraid of them.

Even in a marginally civilized small town on the great plains of the Midwest, though, you couldn't just shoot women. Females howling all night in crude jails wouldn't be tolerated by frontier inhabitants for very long. So Glendon gradually figured out what must have been done with these insane women, transporting them in small groups back east, possibly in caged wagons, like prisoners already were being carted around to various jails. These madwomen had to be escorted back across the Big Muddy (Missouri River) and then shipped individually by train to relatives back east for looking after, or possibly referred to an insane asylum, if one was even available.

So there was Glendon's highly unusual western premise, and he slowly figured out its storyline, which he pondered and researched for eight long years. My mother, Kathryn, still living at ninety-five in their longtime hometown of Scottsdale, Arizona, didn't usually accompany Glendon on his research trips for his novels, but on this trip she was invaluable. They flew out of Scottsdale to Omaha, Nebraska, in May 1986, rented a car, and drove to Lincoln and the University of Nebraska's library for research. Glendon was also looking for a replica of a frontier sod home he could study up close, so the librarians directed them down interstate 80 west, then northwest to the North Platte Valley Museum in Gering, Nebraska, in the shadow of Scott's Bluff National Monument, twenty miles west of the famous Chimney Rock, which was a landmark for many immigrant wagon trains heading across the prairies. Outside this museum are constructed both a sod-type home and a small wooden cabin in late 1800s-style, which tourists can walk through and see a small kitchen and small bedroom/living room decorated from that frontier era.

My parents then drove back down to the interstate highway and east to Kearney, Nebraska, then home to Kearney State College (now the University of Nebraska–Kearney, as of 1991). Glendon was loaned a couple good frontier histories from that library's Nebraska state history archives and Kathryn found an old-time country songbook, from which she pulled the two song lyrics used in the novel—Mary Bee's haunting “Take Me This Token” and George Briggs' dancing finale, “Weevily Wheat.”

Many of the incidents written about in
The Homesman,
as well as scenes from the movie version, were based upon real-life events taken from a few histories of that early frontier era. For instance, in an old key book,
The Sod-House Frontier
by Dick Everett, Glendon learned how “claim jumpers” operated on that lawless frontier, taking over a homesteader's cabin while the owner had gone back east to visit relatives or to find a wife. This squatter then filed a claim on the property if the real owner had been unable to pay his land fees to file his homestead claim properly in a nearby town. This history book mentions one incident when friends of an absent homesteader ran a squatter out one cold winter's day by dumping sulfur powder down a working chimney from atop the roof and then adding a pound bag of gunpowder to the burning mix, resulting in a loud explosion, blowing the squatter out of his “borrowed” home. Other chapters in this same frontier history explained how “soddies” were built and what they looked like. Even more interesting was the description of how small-town banks were founded on the Great Plains, on shaky financial underpinnings and no state regulation whatsoever. These undercapitalized, tiny banks then began to print their own money to facilitate commerce in that region. George Briggs learns the hard way at the end of his long trek how worthless his “reward” has become, by trying to cash some of this “wildcat” money from a now defunct Nebraska bank.

The Sod-House Frontier
also mentions the deadly ice storms that occasionally roared across the Great Plains at up to forty miles per hour. The flying ice particles in them could freeze on a person or a mule or a cow, entombing them quickly in icy armor, which had to be cracked off with a club to allow the unfortunate person or animal to even breathe and be able to move around.

Further east on their journey, Briggs and the madwomen come across a phony hotel run by land speculators as the showplace of their “planned” town. The imaginary town of Curlew, in Cedar County, Nebraska, is mentioned as the most glaring and successful fraud of all the fifty town sites in the river counties of northern Nebraska. Ten thousand lots were laid out for Curlew and readily sold to naïve New Yorkers, but no house was ever built there. Those empty lots brought their real estate scammers $150,000, a fortune in the 1850s. Before Briggs and his frame wagon reach the Big Muddy, they also stop at a “shebang,” a very small country store selling minimal supplies out of a rudimentary shelter of tarps and poles. New York newspaper editor Horace Greeley (“Go West, young man”) also wrote about the bad food served at “road ranches” in his travel memoir,
An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859.

Elizabeth Coatsworth's
The Sod Home
amply describes the contagious diseases pioneers were prone to in that germy era, when many suffered from the shakes, or “ague,” which we know today to be dangerous malaria. Diptheria of the upper-respiratory tract was often contracted by young children on the prairie, and nineteen-year-old Arabella Sours is driven out of her mind by the slaughter of her three young innocents from the unsanitary conditions in her sod home, where this killer plague was easily passed among children sharing common water dippers, with little daily bathing.

Dick Shinn's ferry on the Platte River near Octavia, Nebraska, was described in an article by John F. Zeilinger. Sixty feet long and twenty feet wide, made from cottonwood logs, a ferry took three months to build. The iron cable was two inches wide and was used to pull the big raft across the river on windlasses attached to either end of the raft. The river channel on the Platte was quite deep and about 100 yards across. The boatmen used poles twelve feet long to assist in crossing sand bars in this narrow channel. Dick Shinn's Ferry operated from 1859–1872 and weighed 15 tons, with a draft of 12 inches. It was representative of the ferries used at 5 major “middle” crossings on the Missouri River as well, at Kansas City, Weston-Leavenworth, St. Joe, Nebraska City, and Council Bluffs-Omaha, which became the state capital. Ferries normally charged $4–5 per wagon and people could cross the river for $3 each. George Briggs has several crossings of the Missouri going into and coming from Hebron, Iowa, in the novel, and that last crossing ends his story.

The Homesman
won Glendon Swarthout both the Spur Award (long novel) from the Western Writers of America and the Western Heritage Association's Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, making it indisputably
the
best western novel of 1988. Two of Glendon's other novels were nominated by their publishers as Pulitzer Prize candidates in fiction in their respective years—
They Came To Cordura
(Random House, 1958) and
Bless the Beasts & Children
(Doubleday, 1970)—and both titles also became motion pictures:
Cordura
(Columbia Pictures, 1959) and
Bless the Beasts
(Paramount Pictures, 1972).

Several other novels of Glendon's
did
become hit films, however—such as
Where The Boys Are
(MGM, 1960) and
The Shootist
(Paramount, 1976).
The Shootist
also won a Spur Award as the Best Western Novel of 1975 and is best remembered as John Wayne's final film.

All of Glendon's novels and my parents' six books for younger readers are now available as eBooks on the Kindle, Nook, and iBooks stores. More information about the writing Swarthouts and their many novels, and the films made from them, can be found on their literary website,
www.glendonswarthout.com
.

—Miles Swarthout

September 2013