Education Of a Wandering Man (1990) (6 page)

At once they began to shoot, while some struggled to haul boxes from the stage. From high on the cliffside he could see it all, bright in the sunlight.

There were seven men. He counted them. They had rifles and pistols, and the boxes must contain ammunition. They fell into position and began shooting. The Apaches went to cover, leaving several of their number dead upon the rocks.

The watching boy moved into the shade of a rock. There was no shade for the fighting men on the knoll, and the sun was blistering. They ranged themselves around the rocks to cover all approaches. It was not a good position, for many parts of the knoll were exposed, but the stage itself helped. It was no protection against bullets but it did protect against the iron-tipped arrows.

One of the white men was down. He must be dead, as there was no effort to pull him closer, although another man did take his rifle and ammunition belt.

The Apaches did not know it then, and the Peterson boy, if that was his name, only learned it long after, but the Free Thompson Party, the men in that stagecoach, had thousands of rounds of ammunition. What they did not have was food. Even more important, they had no water, and there was no water hole nearer than Stein's Peak, several miles away.

From where the boy watched, he could see it all, but the distance was too great for a rifle to fire with accuracy.

The rocks were hot to his touch--blistering, in fact. It must be pure Hell down in that oven of a canyon where no wind blew and no air stirred. All day the fighting went on, and the canyon walls echoed with gunfire. When night fell, the guns were silent, but the Apaches--who did not like to fight at night because, they were reported to believe, if one was killed in the dark, his spirit must forever wander in darkness--still gathered close around. Peterson knew there was no chance for the white men to escape, and they knew it as well.

Down there among the scattered rocks and the wreck of the stagecoach, men would be smoking, chewing tobacco, watching, and resting.

They had no hope of escape. No cavalry would be coming to their rescue, for the pony soldiers had gone east to fight in the War Between the States. They would be bandaging wounds down there, holding pebbles in their mouths to alleviate thirst, and piling rocks to make their position more secure.

Beside the smoky cow-chip fire, the old man told the story of that desperate fight so long ago, the first one he had witnessed. He told of the coming of light which showed how well the white men had worked during the night, gathering rocks to fill spaces between boulders, making their position more secure. The bloating bodies of the dead horses were a protection, too, but there were only five men moving about now, and hundreds of Indians.

The boy did not know how many Apaches there were, for both Cochise and Mangas Colorado had brought warriors, while his group had come from Nana's band.

There was only sporadic fighting now, for the Apaches had suffered. Bodies lay stretched on the sand and hanging over rocks to indicate the accuracy of the white-eye's shooting. A half hour might go by without a shot, and then some ill-advised Indian would show himself and die for his carelessness.

Searching fire from Apache rifles sought hidden targets, chancing shots into the stagecoach in hopes some man might be using it for shelter, but the thin walls and floor of the stage were no protection against .44 caliber bullets, which could penetrate several inches of pine.

Occasionally a group of Apaches would attempt an attack and there would be a burst of firing.

The boys watching from the ridge could see little movement now. were more men dead? Or were they guarding their strength? Boards had been pulled from the splintered stage in an effort to make some sort of a shield from the sun. Again the day passed, and again night came with no shooting, and only a waiting time until the morrow.

There is no way I can tell that story as it was told to me beside the smoky fire on the plains of the Panhandle, told to me by the old man who remembered it so well, a white man who had become completely an Apache, and was in his heart and mind an Apache still.

The third day dawned, a third day of terrible thirst and gnawing hunger, a third day of desperation. How many were left? The boys watching from the crest could not tell, but whenever an Apache moved, a rifle spoke from the rocky knoll.

At last, midway in the third afternoon, the shooting ended, and after a long time Apaches began to expose themselves. When there was no more firing they went down, one after another, until hundreds of them were gathered.

The ammunition was all gone. One of the last men had broken the extra rifles so they would not be available for use by the Apaches.

Apaches carried their dead away and rarely admitted their losses, but the reports were that between 130 and 150 Apaches died in that three-day fight. All seven of the defenders died, the last one, or perhaps two, dying by his own hand with his last bullet, rather than suffer the torture that awaited him if taken alive.

Long after, in Chihuahua, Cochise was said to have told of the battle and declared they were the bravest men he ever knew.

If that was true, I do not know. I only know the story that was told to me that night by the dim light from a smoky fire.

It was the first of many stories told over fires, tales of swift attacks and long pursuits by the pony soldiers and the tactics the Indians used. Years later, some of it was to appear in Hondo, some in Shalako and in The Lonely Men. But at the time I had no idea of ever writing about what I was experiencing then, or of what I was hearing.

Yet there was no better time to learn about what the West had actually been. Many of those who lived it were still alive, and as the years of their future grew fewer, they were more willing to talk of what had been. Old feuds were largely forgotten, and time had given the past an aura.

The old cowboy might appear to be as dry as dust, he might scoff at some of the stories, but he was a figure of romance in his own mind (although he would never have admitted it) or he would not have become a cowboy in the first place. As the years slipped away, he began to want to tell his stories, and I was often there, a willing listener, knowing enough to sift the truth from the romance.

In every town there was at least on former outlaw or gunfighter, an old Indian scout or a wagon master, and each with many stories ready to tell.

One story engendered another, and sitting on a bench in front of a store I'd tell of something I knew or had heard and would often get a story in return, sometimes a correction.

The men and women who lived the pioneer life did not suddenly disappear; they drifted down the years, a rugged, proud people who had met adversity and survived. Once, many years later, I was asked in a televission interview what was the one quality that distinguished them, and I did not come up with the answer I wanted. Later, when I was in the hotel alone, it came to me.

Dignity.

They all had dignity, a certain serenity and pride that was theirs completely. They might be poor, they might be eking out at the last a precarious living, but they had dignity.

They knew where they had been and what they had seen and done, and were content. Something was theirs, something within themselves that neither time passing nor man nor hard times could take from them.

I have worked beside them, eaten at their tables, sat beside them in sunlight and moonlight and firelight. I never knew one of the old breed who did not have it.

It was hard work skinning those dead cattle, brutal, messy work, and I did not like it, but a job was a job, and I needed a road stake to go on to wherever it was I was going. Often at night, after the old man had turned in, I stirred the fire, adding hoarded mesquite roots, and read by the firelight.

The book was Gil Blas, a copy I had found abandoned in the laundry room of a tourist court in Plainview, Texas.

Whether it was left by intent or accident, I could not know, but it was my good fortune. I'd known of the book for years but had never happened upon it before, so I read it, not once but twice, on the plains of West Texas.

What someone else in my position might have done I am not sure. Very likely, when they paid off such a job as I had, they might have gone on a three-day drunk. What I did was get a room in a small hotel and take three showers a day, finding my way, in between times, to the library, where I began reading John Motley's The Rise of the Dutch Republic, and when I finished that, I went west.

Which brings me back to Tucson, where this digression began. All the above took place months before I was put off the freight train at Stein's Pass, but is an example of the stories that lurk everywhere, awaiting the lucky finder. The story of Doubtful Canyon and the fight is well known in the area and by many historians of the Apache wars, but I heard it from a spectator. Thirty years later I could have thought of a thousand questions to ask. Then, I merely listened and remembered, and that was the story I told Jeff Milton in the restaurant in Bowie.

Tired of hitching rides, and expecting no luck on the busy highway to Phoenix, I bought a ticket on a bus. A week later I was digging holes to plant a citrus grove near Phoenix. (unhappily, a few years later, the trees were all removed to make way for a housing development in what is now one of the plushier areas of the city.) That job ended all too quickly, and with no local prospects, I started north.

On the Black Canyon Road my ride stopped to fix a tire. Another car stopped near us and the driver came over. He needed a man to be caretaker at a mine. He studied me. "Could I stand to be alone?" I could.

"The last man who said that lasted almost two weeks. This is really alone," he warned.

My nearest neighbor lived in a mine tunnel about a mile away, was an Indian, and crazy. Anybody who came close he suspected of trying to steal his mine. The old Indian carried a pistol and was a dead shot.

"Stay away from him. He'll kill you as soon as look at you," the man added.

When asked, he volunteered that there was plenty of reading material. I was to live on the place, see that no trespassers carried away any tools, feed the dogs and chickens, and do the assessment work.

I took the job.

The mine lay in a basin at the end of thirty-odd miles of winding one-lane dirt road. A very rocky road, I might add, most of it built by use. There was a mine shaft down about one hundred and seventy feet, a half mile of drifts [Horizontal passageways in underground mining] (which I never saw, as the mine was filled with water up to about forty feet from the surface), and there was a hoisting-engine and a compressor, both in excellent shape.

A bit away from the mine there was a boarding house, a concrete bunkhouse with ten rooms that slept two men each. There were two dogs and about sixty white Leghorn chickens.

All around were rocky bluffs and hills scattered with sparse semi-desert growth. A dry wash came out of the hills and swung around the mine area, dropping off into a narrow, rocky gulch about a half mile in length.

My new boss left me off, turned around, and drove away. I was alone.

From what I gathered in the drive out to the mine, there had been several others who attempted the caretaking job, the last being a schoolteacher who had come with two projects: to do a lot of serious study and to become a fine rifle and pistol shot. He had moved out there with a thousand rounds of ammo, two dozen excellent books, several blank notebooks, a number of sharp pencils, and a lot of ambition. What kind of teacher he was I never learned, nor who he was. To be alone was what he wanted.

The difficulty was that few people know what it means to be absolutely alone. Even fewer know what silence is. Our lives are filled with the coming and going of people and vehicles, so much so that our senses scarcely notice the sounds. They have become a background to all our living, all our thinking, absorbed subconsciously.

Suddenly, here, the man was alone. There was no sound. Occasionally, during the day, a hen might cackle, a loosened pebble might rattle down the rocks. Otherwise, nothing.

The mine was at the end of a road down which nobody drove. Whoever the young man was, he had not bargained for this. No doubt he had told himself how wonderful it would be simply to study without fear of interruption, to be alone in the hills. No doubt it sounded poetic as well.

It was not Walden Pond. There was no water here except what came from a well. There were no forests. There wasn't a tree within miles.

The only birds he saw were magpies who teased the dogs, and the blue quail running through the low brush. Occasionally there was a hawk or golden eagle at which the dogs barked to keep them from the chickens.

His investment must have been at least $300 in books, ammunition, and guns. Perhaps it was more, though prices were reasonable then. Except for that investment, he might have left sooner, but I suspect that by the third day the silence was beginning to bother him. At first he would have brushed it off, telling himself he would get used to it. By the fifth day he would not have been as sure.

Some of what had gone on I found in rolled-up wads of note paper where he had begun to write, but he rarely got past the middle of the page before discarding it.

Then the pages had only a line or two--I gathered he was trying to do something on Shakespeare--and after that, often blank pages were discarded.