Quicksilver Passion (214 page)

Silver’s heart sang.
And pies and food. I can cook, believe it or not!”

Cherokee smiled.
Somewhere in this territory, there’s got to be a preacher who doesn’t mind performing a morning wedding.”

Good!” Waanibe piped up.
And I get to dress up!”

Keso looked over his shoulder at her.
Hush, kid! Clothes ain’t what’s important to a wedding.”

Silver laughed and shrugged at Cherokee.
I think we’ve got our work cut out for us with this pair!”

We can handle it,” Cherokee said. He reached across and took her hand, squeezing it.
We can handle anything as long as we have each other, Silver. I love you.”

I love you, too, my dearest.”

In the pale pink of the coming dawn, the little family turned their horses and rode out of town together.

No one ever knew what really happened to Silver Heels, so in Colorado today, they still tell the tale with a sad ending. According to the legend, after catching smallpox, Silver Heels ran away to hide because of her scarred face, only returning now and then to put flowers on the graves at Buckskin Joe. They say her weeping ghost, clad in mourning and wearing a heavy veil, sometimes appears in the Buckskin Joe cemetery. Unlike you, they don’t know she and her lover were finally reunited.

Perhaps the half-breed miner and his sweetheart do live eternally in the wilderness of the Rockies. Sometimes late at night, locals say you can see the reflection of her silver shoes as she dances on the peak that bears her name. Only cynics insist it must be a star or the moonlight shining on abandoned ore piled by a played-out mine.

But those same cynics hear the tinkle of rushing creeks and never recognize it as her laughter, or smell the scent of her perfume and mistake it for wildflowers.

Maybe Silver Heels and Cherokee live forever because, while beauty fades, true love like theirs can never really die. If you believe that, too, I invite you to walk the streets of the deserted Colorado ghost towns late at night as I have done. When the moon is full, you might see the sparkle of her shoes and hear the tap of her dancing feet.

And the other sound? Perhaps you will think at first it’s the breeze sighing through the abandoned buildings, but listen—listen with your heart. Very faintly, the wind will carry the echo of that old saloon piano and Silver’s high, sweet voice singing to her love.

Yes, there really is a Mt. Silver Heels in the state of Colorado. The mountain was originally called Mt. Morton, and is located approximately eight miles northwest of the town of Fairplay. That’s near the ski towns of Vail and Breckenridge. The tale of the dance hall girl by that name is also told in other gold and silver mining states, but only Colorado boasts the named mountain, so it is likely the legend began there.

There is nothing left of the gold camp of Buckskin Joe except its cemetery. Although it is still in use, many old markings have been lost, and big trees have grown up through some graves. Local tales say that Silver Heels’ ghost walks that graveyard at night, dressed in mourning gray, weeping for those who died in the smallpox epidemic. I got an eerie feeling standing in that cemetery just before sundown and decided I did not want to stay to see if it was true.

Smallpox was a terrible scourge that the Spanish brought with them to the New World. It wiped out more than half the Indians in Central and South America, enabling the invaders to conquer the people. Later it was one of the first diseases used in
germ warfare” by the British who gave infected blankets to northern Indians. It gets its name because it was feared second only to the
great pox,” syphilis. The last death in the United States from smallpox occured in 1949. The last smallpox deaths anywhere in the world occurred in 1977. Today the disease has been wiped off the face of the earth—except for samples contained in two test tubes: one in Moscow, and the other in the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia.

By the way, I talked to a neurosurgeon about Cherokee’s sight while I was reasearching this book. He told me a person could suffer an injury to the base of the skull and have nerve damage that would only temporarily blind the victim if the wound wasn’t too severe. In this case, Cherokee would gradually regain his sight.

Is there still gold to be found in Colorado? Yes, it’s still mined commercially in Mosquito Gulch, and now and then, someone pans a little from the streams. If you’d like to try it, you can buy equipment in many shops and get instructions. Just remember not to trespass on private land. A word of caution: don’t try the road up Mosquito Pass unless you own a good four-wheel-drive vehicle.

The biggest gold nugget ever found in America was found at Carson Hill, California, in 1854 and weight 195 troy ounces (162 pounds). The biggest ever discovered in the world was the
Welcome Stranger” nugget, found in Australia in 1869, weighing 2,248 troy ounces. You figure out how many pounds that is!

While Buckskin Joe is gone, the town of Fairplay still exists, but as only a shadow of its rowdy, boomtown days. Fairplay may be the only town in the world with a burro buried under an elaborate gravestone on its main street. Prunes, a little pack burro who worked the mines of the area, lived to be sixty-three years old. Buried with him are the ashes of his last owner.

Fairplay has also moved Haw Tabor’s old original store into town as part of a tourist attraction. Some of you may recognize Haw Tabor as the man who became one of the richest men in Colorado, then a U.S. Senator. He finally left his wife, Augusta, for a young beauty known as Baby Doe. But that story is too long and tragic to tell here. Even the President of the United States attended the wedding. Baby Doe’s wedding dress cost $7,000 when the average working man didn’t earn half that in a year. The dress is on display at the Historical Museum in downtown Denver, the same museum that displays the Cheyenne sketch book mentioned in my Zebra hologram that came out in January 1990,
Cheyenne Caress,
#2864-4. This book is still available from Zebra.

If you get to Denver, be sure and see the state capitol building, the only one with a 24-carat-gold-covered dome. The gold came from Colorado’s own mines.

Gold and other metals are not the only things of value to be found in that state’s mountains. The biggest block of marble ever quarried in the world weighed 100 tons and came from west central Colorado. Today that piece of marble marks the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery.

Colorado is a fascinating place to visit and I highly recommend it to you. Its nickname is the Centennial State because it came into the Union during 1876, the year our country turned one hundred years old. It holds the honor of being the second state to give women the right to vote in 1873. As I told you in an earlier book, Wyoming was the first.

The U.S. government did indeed recruit Southern volunteers from Yankee prison camps during the Civil War to go West and fight Indians. The execution of William Dowdy, the red-haired blacksmith from Tennessee who was aboard the
Effie Deans
, actually occurred on September 9, 1864. A twenty-three-year-old Yankee colonel, Charles Dimon, determined in advance that he would execute a Galvanized Yankee on the trip to maintain discipline and show his authority. Illegal in the manner in which it was done, the poor unfortunate Dowdy was given a hasty trial, found guilty, taken off the boat just above Omaha, shot, and buried on the bank of the Missouri River.

If you have any interest in Native Americans, you are surely familiar with the Cherokees’ tragedy. The first gold strike in American was in Georgia in the 1830s, making whites clamor for possession of the land. The party that discovered gold in Colorado was made up of Cherokees. In Georgia, with Cherokee land and most possessions confiscated, the government started them on a long death march in the autumn of 1838. Some hid out in the hills, refusing to go, and their descendants are in the South yet. Almost one-fourth of the Cherokees in the march died before they reached Arkansas and Indian Territory. At the moment of this writing, they are discussing adding a new emblem to their tribal flag to represent this Indian holocaust. A memorial was recently dedicated in Faulkner County, Arkansas.

Approximately 43,000 Cherokees still live around Tahlequah, their tribal headquartes in northeastern Oklahoma. They put on a wonderful outdoor pageant, Tsa-La-Gi, every summer.

A nearby museum that might interest you is the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, Oklahoma. If you time your visit in the early spring, the flowering azaleas of nearby Honor Heights park are magnificent.

The Cherokees are the largest tribe in Oklahoma and, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the largest in the country. However, the Cherokees themselves say their own more accurate tribal records list less than half the number the census claims and that the Navajos are still the biggest tribe.

I’ve had a surprising number of letters from readers who have reason to believe they are part Cherokee and wonder how to investigate. The chances of attaining official tribal membership now are slim. To do so, you’ll have to produce birth and death certificates, etc., proving your ancestor was one of those listed when the Dawes Commission made up the roll of all the members of the tribe back at the turn of the century.

As far as the Sand Creek Massacre, it has been written about so much, that I won’t go into great detail here. Of course, I have already been up there to walk the site and interview the present owner. There’s not much to see, but if you want to go there, please remember that it is on private land and respect that rancher’s rights. The site is in southeastern Colorado, not far from the Kansas border. Look for the nearby town of Chivington on the map. One of the best books on the subject has been written by a friend of mine, another Edmond resident, Dr. Stan Hoig.

Before some of you write and ask about the safety of Iron Knife’s family, I’ll tell you that they escaped at Sand Creek. Many of the others weren’t so lucky. The little boy, Bear Cub, was wounded but lived to play a major part in
Cheyenne Caress
.

If you read my second Zebra Heartfire,
Cheyenne Princess
, about Iron Knife’s missing sister, you already know about the Great Outbreak of 1864. The Plains tribes realized that many of the white men had gone off to fight each other during the Civil War. They saw this as a golden opportunity to try to take back their land. Through the whole spring and summer of that year, the Cheyenne and their allies were on the war path.

Whether the Confederates actually caused much of this trouble or only took advantage of it to further their own aims has been a subject for speculation and debate. Denver itself was cut off and placed under martial law. Its people suffered severe shortages of food and supplies. Because of the Civil War, there weren’t enough troops to protect the settlers. That was why the Union was desperate enough to use former Confederate soldiers along the frontier. But the attack at Sand Creek only caused more Indian trouble.

If some of the characters in the book you just read seem familiar to you, it’s because they came originally from earlier books. Big ’Un and Pettigrew came from
Bandit’s Embrace
, but Iron Knife, Summer Sky, Gray Dove, Jake Dallinger, and even Sergeant Baker were characters in my first novel,
Cheyenne Captive,
the Zebra Heartfire that launched both that line and my career in 1987.
Captive
made the Waldenbooks Best Seller List, placed in the
Affaire de Coeur
Reader’s Poll of the Ten Best Historical Romances of 1987, and won the
Romantic Times
Award that same year as Best Indian Romance by a new Author.

The novel you hold in your hands is number seven. Besides the books previously mentioned, there have been three other Zebra Holograms. I wrote about Chief Quanah Parker and half-breen Maverick Durango in September 1988,
Comanche Cowboy
.
Comanche
placed in the
Affaire de Coeur
Reader’s Poll of the Ten Best Historical Romances of 1988, and sold out.

In March 1989 came
Bandit’s Embrace
, ISBN #2596-3, about Colonel MacKinzie’s covert raid against the Kickapoo and Mescalero Apache down in Mexico.
Bandit
was named to the
Affaire de Coeur
Best American Historical Romance list of 1989. It is still available from Zebra.

Then in July 1989, I told you about the Pony Express and the Paiute Indian wars in
Nevada Nights,
ISBN #2701-X.
Nevada
was a finalist for the 1988-1989
Romantic Times
Reviewer’s Choice for Best Western Romance award. It is still available from Zebra,

No, I don’t have any extra copies of any of my seven books, but you can order the ones still available at this moment,
Bandit’s Embrace
,
Nevada Nights
,
Cheyenne Caress,
and
Quicksilver
Passion, from your favorite bookstore or directly from Zebra. See details about mail orders on the advertising pages of this book. Send the cover price plus 50¢ each postage. My early Holograms are $3.95. Beginning with the January 1990 titles, the rising costs of paper pushed the price up to $4.50. You’ll need title, author, and ISBN# to order by mail. If the romance editor gets enough letters asking about my first three books, I think they will finally be reprinted for those who want a complete set of this long series which I call:
Panorama of the Old West.”