The Yellowstone (17 page)

They shut the door behind. There in the dark, next to one of his two half-breed wives, Mac reflected that the trick was in the way she said it. The English word for “father,” and the American way of being a daughter, combined with one of the Cheyenne spirits. Funny, the mix. Maybe mix-up.

Chapter 2

April, 1865, Fat moon

Mac had never seen anything like it.

A gulch. Tents everywhere, and in the center of the gulch, streets with buildings of green, raw-looking lumber. Lumpy, broken hills, stripped bare of grass and trees. The cottonwood trees had gone to make the buildings. The grass was tramped out, rutted out, gouged out. The earth itself had been cut away in huge hunks, Mac knew not how.

Virginia City was his idea of what the earth would look like after drought, flood, pestilence, and the plague of locusts. But all that had happened to it was ten thousand human beings.

Weird, open wooden boxes ran downhill on stilts, in every direction, like the appendages of daddy longlegs. Or like long, snaky caskets.

Mac made a small motion to Jim Sykes to take the wagons on down the hill. Mac and John Jacobs rode over to the head of one of the long boxes for a close look. In a minute Mac began to understand. The miners had built a dam and diverted a stream into one of the long boxes. Elsewhere, into a ditch. A gate let the water through.

Jacobs nodded downhill, where men were using the water. Mac trotted his horse along the box. It ran into a big pipe made of galvanized tin and into a huge nozzle. A man was manipulating the nozzle to direct the water against the gouged hillside. “Ka-boom, she hits it,” Jacobs said, his vowels melodiously Italian. The water then floated through a sluice box. Men were forking rocks out of the box and letting the dirt run. “Fluming, they call it,” explained Jacobs. “Very profitable.”

Mac had heard plenty about fluming, rocking, panning, sluicing, drifting, and other such techniques for the last couple of years. He didn’t care how they did it.

“You’d admire to see the way that water tears up a hillside in an hour or two,” Jacobs said ironically. Mac nodded. “You can move mother earth.”

There were other sorts of holes in the earth, too—drifts, timbered shafts dug into any promising soil. It was like a giant had come to rummage through the surface of the earth. The whole of Alder Gulch was going to get turned up one way or another and sifted through somebody’s box. And then dumped back, minus whatever glinted yellow.

Mac and Jacobs rode back over to the wagons, where Mac’s sons Smith and Thomas were plodding downhill with Jim and the mule skinners. Mac held an arm out to the blighted landscape and said, “Welcome to the capital of Montana Territory.” The skinners cracked their whips and the wagons rolled down the hill toward town a hint faster.

At least it will be profitable, thought Mac. It had been a rough trip.

He didn’t need to look at the letter again. It was folded away in a big leather wallet. It offered $20 a sack for 500 hundred-pound sacks of flour, and $15 for 50 sacks each of coffee, sugar, rice, and beans. Plus a bonus of $500 for getting it there by April fifteenth, then two weeks away. It was signed with an X above the name M. J. Hackett, Hackett Mercantile Co.

John Jacobs had brought the letter and half the money, in pokes. Six thousand five hundred dollars made about twenty-five pounds of gold dust, a fat poke. Jacobs was a red-bearded Italian who had been in the country long enough, as they said, to know what way the sticks floats. Mac liked him. Even though the son of a bitch showed Georgia John Bozeman where to lay what they called the Bozeman Trail.

“What does it all mean, Mac?” said Jacobs over a sociable whiskey in Mac’s office. It meant Hackett was willing to pay triple Mac’s cost of supplies at Fort Union, and thirty times what he was obliged to pay at St. Louis. It meant Mac would make more than half a year’s income on this single trip. It meant Mac would have the cash to send his sons back to that academy in St. Louis.

“Might be we oughta name those pork-eaters flour-eaters,” said Mac. Jacobs said the miners were having flour riots in Alder Gulch. Too many people and not enough supplies made it up the trail from Salt Lake before the snows flew. These people were eating nothing but game. They were in a rage for bread. Merchants usually sold flour for twenty-five dollars a sack—now they were asking one hundred dollars a sack.

One day the miners simply ganged up, Jacobs said. Nobody was going to starve them, they declared. They took the flour they wanted and left IOUs for twenty-five dollars a sack.

The Indians and mountain men who heard about this episode shook their heads. Starving because you couldn’t bake bread? Some of the old trappers hadn’t tasted bread in decades. The Indians didn’t want to taste it. The ignorant miners had rose hips growing wild all around them. Serviceberries, chokecherries, camas, cattails everywhere. And they said they were going hungry.

Except for wild game. And if you ate nothing but game, you were no better than a wild Indian, they said. The same Indians who did get enough to eat.

Mac said over and over to his family, “There are none so blind as those who will not see.” It had become his motto.

So this Hackett was looking for a quick profit—if Mac could get some wagonloads of supplies there fast enough.

The men and wagons had a hard trip for April. Along the Yellowstone to the big bend in six days, nothing to complain about. Then they tried Bozeman Pass, as the newcomers called it, named for the idiot who tried to force a trail through the center of Sioux country. Two spring snowstorms, a day apart, nearly put an end to the bonus. But the next day brought a warm wind and a quick melt. In three more days they were in Alder Gulch.

As they came down the rough track toward the streets—four streets already—men started running toward them. Every kind of man. Men in high-topped boots, heels worn to nothing, riveted canvas trousers, and undershirts. Men in waistcoats. Men in clean, pressed dress shirts. Men in loose shirts made of hide. Men in every kind of hat—Mac saw beavers, muleys, Quaker hats, wool caps, the slouch hat of the plainsman, the crudely sewn hide hat, the blanket hat of the
voyageur
, and the simple bandanna.

Mac knew what they wanted. Jacobs had warned him. He could sell his load right there, before he got to town. “No one would blame you,” Jacobs said. But his meaning was that the right thing to do would be to take it down the hill to Hackett.

Men were holding up pokes and hollering out prices for flour. Most of the figures were no more than Hackett was willing to pay wholesale. Mac smiled to himself. “There’ll be some more wailing about cost,” Mac told Jacobs.

The big Italian mountain man shrugged. “Hackett don’t mind being unpopular for pay.”

Jacob whoaed the wagons at the end of the main street—the crowd was thick now, yelling and milling, and maybe ugly. The mountain man said he’d get Hackett and some hands to move the goods.

Mac nodded. He and Jim and the boys faced their horses out to the crowd and glared at the clamoring miners. Neither Mac nor his crew put a hand on a weapon. Mac didn’t think these pork-eaters would stand up to the gaze of a real Montana man for long. Not even if two of them were boys. His boys.

Little men came running from the center of town. Mac glanced sideways at Smith and Thomas. They were smothering their laughter, too. The little men cried out and pushed through the crowd and surrounded the wagons, looking in. They wore blue smocks and funny tasseled caps without bills and they were Chinese.

Jacobs was parading up the street with a woman on his arm. She was plump as a Christmas goose. And yellow.

“Damn,” said Thomas, “a heathen Chinee.” Mac squelched his son with a look.

She was elaborately decked out. An emerald gown with a huge, salmon-pink sash. Hair piled high on top of her head. Gold on her fingers, on her wrists, and in her hair. She made an impression. From the look on Jacobs’s face, he had a proprietary interest.

The shouts turned to mutters, then to whispers. The woman barked in a tone of command—she had the voice of a bullwhacker—and the minders cleared a way. As she got close, Mac saw that she was alluring, plump or not. And she had an aura of power. She motioned to her workers, and they darted back, nimbly as skittering pigeons.

“Mac,” said Jacobs formally, “this is M. J. Hackett. Mae Jhong Hackett.” The Italian was grinning like a fool.

“Welcome to Virginia City, Mr. Maclean,” said Mae Jhong Hackett. Her speech was slow, stilted, melodious. “Life here is an adventure.”

“Her name is Hackett,” Jacobs explained across the rim of his teacup, “because she’s a widow. Crotchety old man Hackett that built this place and that everybody hated. Call her Mae Jhong.” Jacobs made the use of her first two names—Mac couldn’t think of them as Christian names—sound like a privilege.

Mae Jhong Hackett poured Mac more tea. It felt peculiar to have this woman, certainly an influential woman, making the artificial gesture of serving him.

“He built the Mercantile,” Jacob went on, “but she built everything else. Two saloons. Whores up above. Chinese and white and every other color. Laundry. Bathhouse. She owns a piece of the theater. The old man didn’t have enough hair of the bear in him to be a go-getter.”

Mae Jhong sat on a cushion at the low, black, lacquered table, between the men, apparently favoring neither. Mac supposed her English was such that she undersood the entire conversation. When she spoke, it was in that stately, melodious way, and only courtesies. She often reached beneath the lacquered table and brought out a piece of china the size of a soup bowl, but half-covered. Into it she delicately spat tobacco juice.

“Mae Jhong’s some girl, she is,” Jacobs went on. From her expressionless face Mac could tell nothing. She was probably forty or forty-five, but striking. Mac didn’t blame Jacobs a bit.

A wizened Chinaman brought Mac one of the hide boxes called parfleches. This one was beautifully painted in a complicated geometrical pattern, a handsome example. It was also heavy. Inside were several pokes of gold dust. The parfleche was just a touch of style.

Jacobs was grinning crookedly at Mac. “It’ll be right,” he said. Mac was sure she wouldn’t short him. “Including the bonus for being on time,” Jacobs went on.

“I am forever in your debt,” Mae Jhong said formally.

Jacobs winked. “She’s real pleased, Mac.”

Jacobs had had the boys and the crew taken care of—installed in a tent out back, fed, offered a beer. Mac wondered if the boys had tasted beer before. They’d drunk whiskey at Yellowstone House. They were near-enough men, Smith nineteen and Thomas nearly eighteen. Unfortunately, Thomas had the idea that vices were the way you got to be an all-the-way man.

“Let’s check things out outside,” said Jacobs. He understood. “Might better leave that with Mae Jhong,” he added, nodding at the parfleche, “to put in the safe.”

Mac asked, and Mae Jhong acquiesced. “You are my guest at any of my establishments,” she said. “And your sons as well.”

Jacobs led the way. With one hand on the door, Mac glanced back. Mae Jhong Hackett was looking at him boldly. Her face wasn’t demure now. It was the face of the general beholding the field of triumph.

The tent was in good shape, gear stowed, but it was empty except for a Chinaman standing guard. The boys and the crew must be looking around town, as Jacobs said, so he and Mac set out to do the same.

Bizarre town. Men thronged everywhere—most women and children evidently stayed in their tents and shacks on the outskirts, or by their claims. There was an ominous feel of urgency in the air. Men moved fast, impatiently, bumping and jostling.

Four streets already. A hundred new buildings a month. And Virginia City had a twin, Nevada City, just two miles down the gulch. Incredible.

“Mac,” said Jacobs, his voice raised over the crowd noise, “Mae Jhong asked me to warn you particularly to watch your back.”

Mac raised an eyebrow.

“We got us a thriving little den of iniquity in Alder Gulch. She figures we’ve had more’n two hundred murders just in the eighteen months she’s been here.” Jacobs seemed to find this fact amusing. “Some of them are just rambunctiousness. Some is grievances. A bunch of them is robberies. Man gets his hands on some dust, decides to head for civilization and enjoy his good fortune, and gets robbed on the way. Maybe killed. Much dust as you got makes a tempting target.”

“Thought you had a sheriff.”

Jacobs shrugged. “Last sheriff, Henry Plummer, give out a lot of advice. Which route is safe. How to outthink the robbers. The ones as took his advice got held up for sure. Hanged him a year back. And twenty-two of his cronies.”

Mac nodded. That fit his notion of government well enough.

“New sheriffs probably different. He’s an easy man to like. So was Plummer.”

A sign further on said
HOT BATHS, 25 CENTS—SATURDAY, 75 CENTS
, and in small letters,
Shaving and Hairdressing Saloon
. Mac had never given thought to having someone else cut his hair and shave him. He rubbed his light, reddish whiskers and wondered how it would feel.

Jacobs stopped and pointed to a poster advertising a theater. “Opens next week,” he said. “Montana Theater, they call it.” The playbill boasted of a concoction entitled
Faint Heart Never Won Fair Lady
, along with “comic and sentimental songs and a grand overture by the orchestra,” and concluding with a “roaring farce,
The Specter Bridegroom
.” Mac shook his head. As far from St. Louis as San Francisco, yet the town had a theater. Unbelievable.

“Mae Jhong keeps track of things. Lots of things, like the robberies,” Jacobs went on. They walked. “She has many ears. Hands, too. And knives and guns. She’s offering to help you get back to Bozeman Pass. That ought to be far enough.”

Mac nodded. “Thanks. I’ll think on it.”

Mac stopped to look at the front page of the current newspaper, the Montana Post, displayed in a glass case. He saw a column headed
NEWS FROM AMERICA
, an account of a prize fight between Virginia City and Bannack men, a notice of a reward for a lost nugget, and an advertisement for “Dr. H. N. Crepin, Physician and Surgeon, opposite the hay scales on Main St.” And there was a notice advertising a medicine for young men who had committed indiscretions or been involved in youthful follies.