Chapter 32

(Some time on the Indian Reservation)

My decision to quit our attempts to establish residency in the Great Pacific Northwest had more to do with my frustration at finding a sense of peace in a strange time era. The majestic presence of the tall trees and the rugged almost virgin territory should have been soothing to my soul after the violence of the Civil War and the dangers from savages on the trek west to the Pacific Ocean.

I knew without deep thought that my search for the meaning of Manifest Destiny was not as well-planned as the expedition of Lewis and Clark, but I had expected some sort of closure in reaching my geographic goals with more success than I really thought possible.

I felt guilty under the spreading shade of those giant trees knowing from the viewpoint of basic science that every time I pulled the trigger on my Spencer or one of my bloodletting handguns or hopped into the sack with some delectable female creature from the shadows of the past, I was tempting fate with cosmic graffiti clumsily scattered by my itchy finger or my never satisfied man tool of creation.

All around me, memorable human beings were leaving their footprints on the pages of history and I was the joker in the pack unable to fit into any winning hand unless the rules were changed to allow my consideration. It made me feel less than human and more like some visitor from an alien planet using my own species for my pleasure and too dangerous for meaningful actions.

I was unable to share my fears with any of my followers or the females that shared my bed because it would taint their thinking about the universe and leave me open to suspicion of witchcraft or some sort of mental breakdown.

I had the sense that the Indians that came into contact with me knew I was not of this plane of existence. At least, they didn’t think I had some sort of white man agenda that included genocide or improvised deportation from their own country of origin.

I remember I had mixed feelings about the Custer massacre because my head was with the Seventh Cavalry and all those troopers with second-rate rifles and at the same time my gut was with the brave warriors saddened over the loss of their hunting grounds and the end of the waves of buffalo that roamed wild over the silent plain. I think the Indians knew my thoughts and sensed my empathy for their slow decline into obscurity. I did my best to talk a lot of them out of the notion of heading to Canada and the protection of the Queen. I knew that would not turn out well, but didn’t want to spoil history by relating any clues about what the future held for us.

Our wagon train was a lot smaller on the way down into the northern California flatlands. I knew enough to avoid the higher elevation until the last minute when we would have to cross some of them up into the Sierra Nevada’s and some of that isolated land that looked like one could expect on the far side of the moon.

A pack of failed gold miners attacked us when we were crossing a minor river in the lowlands and we made short work of them leaving their lifeless bodies to warn other thieves that our caravan was not one of the defenseless trains from back east that depended on the grace of God to see them through the rough patches.

Mistress Molly admonished me that my attitude was not very “Christian” and I did my best to hide my amusement because it was generous under the circumstances and I knew that all of female members would have been subjected to gross indignities if the thieves had gotten the upper hand and dictated terms to us for continued existence. I had even persuaded the Indians to resist the urge to lift the scalps of the fallen men in deference to the sensitivities of the female passengers and drivers.

We were in that short interlude between the end of winter and the beginning of spring and I wanted us to get down out of the high altitudes before the hardened crust on the roads turned to mushy mud that would bog us down calves in a deep arroyo with a mama nowhere in sight.

We traversed a strange circular area with a sort of glassy look to the terrain. It reminded me of a plate with a hard brittle surface. It was not yielding to the touch and I had the feeling it was the result of some long ago high heat that melted it all together into a consistency that refused to absorb any liquid and didn’t crack from the weight of either two footed or four footed creatures. In fact, our wagons passed over it with no sign of passage and that convinced me the oddity was either extra-terrestrial or some freak act of nature when the planet was still changing into the populated place it was after the advent of the Homo Sapiens and the Neanderthals in competition for supremacy.

The game was plentiful and we all had full bellies with meals prepared by our female contingent with skill and lively conversation. My only concern was that we were low on salt and I knew how important that was to survival in the void of the wilderness. Fortunately, we were not too far from some convenient salt flats that the Indians used to spice their food and keep their animals on an even keel even in times of trouble.

Molly and I had been getting on fairly well even if she was reticent about spreading her knees unless it was her idea alone and not the result of my imbibing too much whiskey or suffering an acute case of horniness that would not subside unless I got a shot of female TLC in the darkness of the midnight hours.

I was still pretty much a monogamous sort of guy and during that leg of our journey, my sweet stuff was the pretty Molly with her smile that lit up the darkest day and made me happy as a lark when she was in an accommodating mood. Her younger sister Kate was still a child although she was fast approaching that nubile period when females started casting glances at any male with an eye to looking for a mate with staying power.