Chapter 9

1883: The Porcupine’s children

Alamosa, Colorado was a brand new town, created by the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad as their hub in the San Luis Valley.

That valley, in the southern center of the state, was a wide, flat plain extending about a hundred miles, north to south, and about sixty miles in breadth, all at seventy-five hundred feet or higher. It was an arid climate of little rain or snow, but with plenty of water from the surrounding mountains. It was all-but-completely encircled by high mountains, some peaks extending above fourteen thousand feet, but the valley was open to the south, where it spilled into New Mexico Territory.

It was a land of stark contrasts, a wet, fertile desert that was even now being populated by Civil War veterans who had been awarded homesteads. They came to a land of abundant, year-round sunshine, but which was known for deep frozen winters and short, chill summers. There were, on the eastern edge, remarkable sand dunes and, north of them, equally remarkable hot springs. And the Rio Grande, itself, made its correspondingly grand entrance on the west side of the valley, adjusting itself to a more stately flow after flinging its waters hither and yon in the narrow defiles of its origins, thence to the wide canyons of the foothills, on its long journey to the Gulf of Mexico.

Or so I gleaned from the sales brochures in the waiting room of the railroad’s new, still-unpainted, office.

I had arrived in town at three in the morning and found lodging in a new, but well-built hotel. I asked to be awakened at six-thirty, and I fell into bed, fully clothed, at three-thirty. A moment later, someone was knocking at my door.

“It’s six-thirty, Marshal,” came the annoyingly chipper voice from outside the door.

I struggled to throw off the seeming hundred-pound blanket that was smothering my brains, then hoisted myself to a sitting position through the oddly resistant air. My stockinged feet encountered the very cold floor and I was summarily alerted to the fact that I was not only alive, but now fully awake.

After a quick breakfast, I went to the U.S. Deputy Marshal’s office, in another new building. It was on the second floor above a bakery, a shingle hung there with the legend “Deputy U.S. Marshal Maurice Didron.” The entry door was reached by way of an exterior stairway on the side of the building. The door was locked and no one answered my knock, so I left a note stuck in the door, advising him that I was in town to interview two railroad policeman about their witnessing a shooting in Agua Dulce and that I hoped to depart for New Mexico on the eleven-fifteen train that morning.

Then I went to the Rio Grande Railroad’s main office, where I was told the policemen in question were due to arrive at eight o’clock. So I read the Rio Grande Railroad’s brochures about land for sale in the San Luis Valley.

I had just finished a section describing the Great Sand Dunes when a voice came from over my shoulder, “But what they don’t tell you about is the swarms a’ skeeter, enough to carry you off and suck you dry while they do it.”

“He’s right about that, Deputy. The mosquitoes are a terror,” came a second voice, of a bit deeper timbre, and I turned around to find two uniformed policemen who could have passed for brothers, though some years apart., but still in their thirties, I’d hazard. Both were mid-sized, balding men who shared comparable, bearded countenances of remarkable similarity. At a guess, I’d say the similar beard trims were on purpose.

“No, we ain’t related. Not brothers, nor uncles, sons, or sisters,” said the younger man. “I’m officer Tandy Klaus, he’s Corporal Jennings Morrisey. He hates it when you call him ‘Jenny’.” He looked toward the other man, “Don’t you, Jenny?”

Ignoring the jibe, Morrisey said, “What can we do for you, Deputy?”

By this juncture I was on my feet and proceeding to shake hands. “I’m Judah Becker, from the federal district court in Santa Fe, though I work out of Taos. My assigned area includes the Jicarilla Apache reservation at Agua Dulce.”

Morrisey was nodding. “Is this about that dumb ass BIA constable that got himself shot the other day?”

“Poetic justice is what I say,” Klaus added.

“The BIA constables are saying that the Apache you had in custody, a man by the name of Dahszine, shot the constable with the constable’s shotgun.”

Morrisey shrugged. “That may have been the effect, but the buck only had hold of the butt stock.”

“Trying to keep from getting himself bashed in the face again,” Klaus said. “That constable -- Insley? -- must have had the gun cocked and his finger on the trigger.”

Morrisey nodded. “Had to have been.”

Klaus added, “Yeah. We figured that buck was about to get hisself shot trying to escape.”

“Hold on,” I said. “Are you saying that Constable Insley wanted the bu-- ah, Dahszine to flee, then to shoot him as he did so?”

“Sure,” Klaus replied. “Else why bash the buck in the face, then have us release his shackles, and then Insley reared back and got ready to stroke him again, bein’ all obvious about it, but with the gun cocked and his dumb-ass finger on the trigger, and the buck free of any restraint? Doesn’t take corporal’s stripes to see that set-up.”

Morrisey shrugged. “Maybe so. Wasn’t how they usually did things.”

“Yeah,” Klaus interjected, “what that boob Insley wasn’t ready for was the buck to just stand his ground and bat that butt stock away. Bad luck all around, even for the buck, ‘cause them other two constables was right there to club ‘im s’more.”

Morrisey nodded. “They were on the scene awful quick.”

Klaus’s face showed a dawning light. “You reckon they was waitin’ for the buck to run, too?”

Morrisey shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Had you dropped off other Indians there, before?”

“Not us,” Klaus said, “but Uncle Jack. He says the BIA constable usually chains ‘em up ‘fore he releases ‘em from our shackles. Then they leads ‘em off to their little clink for a week or ten days. Them Injuns hate bein’ locked up.”

“Uncle Jack?”

“Jack Ernst,” Morrisey replied. “He’s a crusty old sod, the D and RG Sergeant over in Durango. Everybody calls him Uncle Jack.”

I wrote Ernst’s name in the pocket notebook I carried. Then said, “That Apache, Dahszine, was looking for his seven year old daughter at the Fort Lewis school. Says she wasn’t at the school.” Fort Lewis was an army post on a bluff overlooking Durango, another D&RG-organized town.

“Is that what the ruckus at the school was about?” Klaus said.

Morrisey added, “Never been aboard when they was carryin’ Injun kids to Fort Lewis. Heard the Injuns hate it.”

Klaus said, “I was on a train, once, but those two Injun youngsters were bein’ put in that orphanage, down by Manassa.”

“Manassa? Where’s Manassa?”

Morrisey said, “It’s a Mormon settlement, couple-three miles east of our depot at Romeo. Romeo’s twenty-two miles south a’ here. But that orphanage isn’t at Manassa. It’s about midway ‘tween Romeo and Manassa.”

“You’ve been there?”

He was shaking his head. “Naw, but I walked past it comin’ and goin’ to Manassa where I had to collect an overdue bill a year or so ago.” Talk about mosquitoes.

Klaus added, “That was before he reached the exalted rank a’ corporal. Now he makes me do all the hoofin’.”

Morrisey shrugged.

“But it’s an orphanage?”

“That’s what we heard,” Klaus replied.

Morrisey elaborated. “It’s a big ol’ two story house, set back in some trees next to a little pond, ‘bout a quarter mile off the road.”

“Skeeters are hell, come summertime,” Klaus commented

“It does make the first hard frost of September something to look forward to,” Morrisey observed.

I went back by the U.S. Deputy Marshal’s office. My note was gone but the office was still locked. I knocked and waited and knocked again.

A woman’s voice came from below the landing. “Yoo-hoo. The Marshal is not in.”

I went down the stairs half way, then leaned out over the rail to find a young Chinese woman in a white apron, her hair wrapped under a white cloth. “Ma’am?” I said. “Do you know where I can find him?”

With barely an accent, she replied, “Sometimes at the sheriff’s office, sometimes the hotel dining room, sometimes shooting a fancy old rifle by the river, north of town. If you can hear gun shot every few minutes, that would be him.”

“When is he at his office?” I had continued down the stairs and now stood on the ground, some feet away from the foot-high platform on which she stood, a simple landing outside the ground-floor doorway from which emanated smells so delicious I felt the saliva flood my mouth.

“You his boss from Denver?” she asked, a slight frown on her face, her hands busy in the folds of a white towel.

“No, ma’am. I’m Judah Becker, a Deputy US Marshal from down in New Mexico Territory. I was just paying a courtesy visit, let Deputy Didron know I was in town.”

She nodded, a slight smile relieving the frown. “Maurice should be back soon. I have just finished the morning baking and banked my ovens. He says he would buy out my entire stock every morning if he had to sit through all the smells from the ovens.” Now her smile was more pronounced.

“Then I’ll come back in a little while. I should go and see the sheriff with the same courtesy. Thank you for the help.”

“You want a cookie? No charge?”

“Priming the pump, ma’am?”

She just smiled, gave a little shrug, then raised her eyebrows expectantly.

“Sure, ma’am, I’ll risk it.”

She held up a finger in a wait-a minute gesture, then disappeared inside. A moment later she reappeared with a thin wafer of a dark, golden-brown cookie on a dish. She said, “Try this,” and held the dish toward me.

I took the cookie and tried a bite. It was crispy but not brittle. The flavor was rich and sweet, a touch of molasses and a lushness that bespoke of butter, the barest hint of cinnamon, and ... oatmeal. A rich, crispy, thin oatmeal cookie, unlike any oatmeal cookie I’d had before.

“Ma’am” I said, “the oat grain has never been put to more honorable service. When I think of the countless tons of oats that have been wasted on horse feed, it brings me to despair.”

By this time she was quietly laughing. “Your eloquence has earned you another cookie, Deputy. Wait, please.”

The Alamosa County Courthouse, unlike the wooden structures of the commercial crossroads of Main Street and State Avenue, was constructed of adobe, three sides of a rectangle around a grassy courtyard, the grass now bent, frozen, though still green, the early frost having caught it still in full vigor. The ‘dobe structure was fronted by a covered verandah from which the various county office were entered. The sheriff’s office was the first door on the right-side end of the structure.

Inside, a man with a five-pointed star badge sat behind a desk, whittling what looked to become a whistle-flute.

He’d looked up as I came through the door. “Help you, Marshal?”

“Howdy. I’m Deputy US Marshal Judah Becker, out of Santa Fe, though I work northeastern New Mexico from my post in Taos. Are you the sheriff?”

“No, señor, I am Deputy Alberto Rincon, chief deputy in charge of office-minding and prisoner watching. The Sheriff has gone fishing -- some fish is running, he told me, though I could not say what it was. All fish look alike to me. Can I assist you in some way?” He spoke with a noticeable, but not unpleasant, Spanish burr.

I decided to let his fishing blasphemy pass without comment. “Well, Deputy Rincon, mostly I’m here just as a courtesy to let the Sheriff know I’m in town, My Marshal is pretty insistent on such observances. I came to question a couple Rio Grande Railroad policeman about a shooting down on the Jicarilla reservation at Agua Dulce. But I thought I might gain some related information from the Sheriff.”

“Si, we heard about that Indian Affairs constable being shot. One of our former deputies, hombre named Dedriksen, got a job down there, after the Sheriff fired him.”

I paused to consider that, then asked, “Would you know anything about an orphanage south of here, between Romeo and Manassa?”

He nodded. “I heard of it. I know that it has some well-toff patrons who apparently give a lot of dinero to its upkeep. The Sheriff meets with one or another of them from time to time. Some have private rail coaches. I imagine that orphanage must be a pretty good deal for those orphans, I mean, if you have to be an orphan.”

“Do you recall the name of any of those patrons?”

“No, Deputy. Those rich men all look as alike as the fish, with their silk hats and fancy overcoats. I have never seen one up close, in any case.”

“Never heard any names?”

“I am sure I have, but it was in one ear and out the other.” He was pointing to both of his ears.

“Ever hear anyone say anything bad or speak poorly of the place?”

“Like what? The oysters are not fresh? The lawn has not been trimmed the proper length for croquet?”

I chuckled. “No, something more along the lines of sinister doings.”

Rincon scoffed. “In the El Valle de San Luis?” he said the name in Spanish, likely to emphasize the Mexican origins of the Valley to me. “The only sinister doings around here involve white men stealing Mexican farms and water rights, or assuming control of Mexican irrigation ditches, or trampling all over the deeds to land grants that were to be honored under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. If it is more sinister than that, I have never heard of it.”

This time the federal deputy’s office door opened when I turned the knob and pushed.

A friendly-appearing young man behind a desk looked up at me grinning. Then he stood and came around the desk, saying, “And you would be Judah Becker, from Taos.” His upright stance revealed a bit of a pot belly on an otherwise lanky frame.