Chapter 5

When we were having breakfast the next morning, Tia said, “I want make house bigger. Want more bedroom, and tub room like house on end. Want hand pump for water from big water and one from well like big house can do? Get water bowl for kitchen too?”

My wife didn’t ask for much, but it’s a lot when she does. The next thing out of her mouth was, “Need find siqua for smoke house. Deer almost gone and buffalo is mostly in town with your tribe.” I finally remembered the word siqua was pig. I told Tia, “Let’s go to town to find a carpenter to build our rooms, then we will stop in the Indian village on the way home to find out if they know where pigs are. I’ll take Benny and bring us back a couple.”

This made Tia excited because building the extra room would allow for the midwife to live with us before the baby came. The tub room would give us the opportunity to have a bath in a warm area.

We came upon a buggy with a carriage horse just standing there on the way to town. With no one in the buggy, I looked in it and found a valise that made the person appear to be a traveler. I looked around the edge of the road and finally found where the man had gone closer to the river. I found him. He was up against a tree with his pants down as if he was in the process of taking a dump. He was dead.

I pulled him over and pulled his pants up. The man had a very expensive suit but his body could barely be contained by his bulk. I looked through his pockets and didn’t find but pocket change. I felt around his middle and he had a bulky money belt. I took that off him and was amazed that he probably had five thousand dollars in gold.

I dragged the big man back to his buggy with the money belt over my shoulder. It took all my strength to get him into the buggy. I put a long lead rope on the carriage horse and Tia and I walked the buggy, horse, and dead man into town.

I parked next to the General Store and went in to find Grant. He was reading a letter and looked up. I said, “I think we have the money for the Marshal’s office, jail, and courtroom. There’s a man out in that buggy who died when he was backed up to a tree to do his duty. There is a large carpet bag in the buggy and I didn’t go through it. Here, take this money belt and put this toward the new offices and give Dad a small salary so he feels like he has value.”

Grant laughed, and said, “I hope we don’t really need him as a lawman. We haven’t had trouble and I don’t want any. Let’s go see who this man is.”

The carpet bag held all the answers. There was a letter introducing the man as a negotiator for people who homesteaded lands in Indian Territory. He was trying to buy up strips of land to build a future railroad. He was said to be apolitical, and not affiliated with either the Union or the Confederacy.

We took the bag inside and Grant showed me a letter that he had just received from one of the railroads. It said that someone would be riding through this area claiming to be buying land for railroads. The man wasn’t from the railroads, but from some of the Texas Confederacy movement in an attempt to own all the Indian lands they could buy.

I said, “Well, I guess this guy isn’t going to buy anything and has contributed to the coffers of our little community instead.”

Grant said, “Let’s pay the new undertaker to bury the man and you have a buggy if you want one. Your mom might like to have a buggy, but I don’t know what for. Everyone she visits is close enough to walk.”

Tia spoke up, “Find man build house.”

Grant said, “You’ve been told. The undertaker is across the street from the church. Go there and get rid of the corpse.”

I drove the buggy to the undertaker and had to help him get the body from the buggy to an oversized coffin. We were able to get the coffin in his wagon, and I told him that Grant had the money to pay him for the burial.

We went to where the new Marshal’s office was going to be and the man we were looking for was there. I told him, “I need a couple of rooms added to my house. Can you come out with me now or come later to find out what to do? I’d like to get this done soon, as it’s for Tia who’s going to give us a baby this fall.”

“I’ll come for supper if you’ll feed me. I don’t have a woman to cook for me, so I try to eat with whoever offers. It’s usually better than the café.”

Tia and I took the buggy to the town house and put the horse in the corral and the buggy in the barn. No one was home, so I wrote a short note and left it on the kitchen table. Tia wanted a slice of the bread that was still cooling on top of the stove. That was some good stuff.

I decided to get the odd looking piece of equipment down that was hung in the barn. It was very heavy and I couldn’t have hardly moved it if I didn’t have the big block and tackle. I studied the contraption when I had it on floor and kept looking at how there were two big iron wheels that you could turn with a hand crank. There was a hopper on top that you could feed something into it and then you would crush it when it was pressed between the wheels and against the iron platform under the wheels. There was a conveyor chain that took what was crushed and you could feed what was ground either out to some kind of container or back to the hopper to grind some more. There was a piece of metal with tiny holes that had to be where the finer ground stuff would drop through. This was some kind of homemade grist mill to grind flour or corn. I figured I’d try it but I would need help moving it around. I almost split a gut pulling this thing back in the air.

We rode out to the local Indian village so that Tia could talk to the woman who was going to midwife and I was going to talk to the braves about where the pigs were. The men in the village gave me directions to find the hogs, and sort of scoffed at me for wanting pig meat. They were going to go after some more buffalo and wanted to know if I wanted to go along. I said I would, but that Tia might not want to come with me.

It was too late for me to go hog hunting when we got home, so I would have to put that off until tomorrow. I told Tia about the braves going for buffalo, and she said that she would go with me. She also said we should take two mules and bring two buffalo back this time since we were going to have more people, and we now had two villages to support.

Tia became busy making bread and cooking up a big stew from some of the remaining buffalo meat, with potatoes, carrots, and spices. We could eat from it for almost a week when Tia made the big stew. I was sure the carpenter would put a dent into our stew supply. It was really good.

Morris Piney came to the house just before five in the evening. He said that we were closer to town than he thought. He put his horse in the corral with ours so that it could get water and have a bite or two of hay.

I walked him around the outside of the house and then took him to the big house to show him the kitchen there. He had seen hand pumps like this before and had installed both types in the house in town.

We went to our house and I showed him our kitchen and the area I thought the new bedroom and tub room could be built in. I got my paper, ink, and quill out, and we drew what we wanted. Because we were going to expand that side of the house, Morris thought that we should expand the kitchen to give us room for the sinks that we wanted. He said I would need to put drain pipes from the tub room and kitchen that would go all the way to the river. It wouldn’t hurt the river since the only thing that would get into the river was dirty water from the kitchen and tub room. That was a lot of digging, but it was necessary.

Morris said, “I have a lot of the materials, so I’ll order what else I’ll need and begin tomorrow. I have two helpers who are becoming decent carpenters, so I can do more in less time.”

I gave Morris a hundred dollars to get started and didn’t expect it to be much more than that, but it could be.

Tia was excited to have her home be the way she wanted it to be before the baby came. She finally told me that the midwife would be in our blankets with us if she didn’t have a room of her own, and she knew this woman enjoyed fooling with the new fathers. I laughed that the Indians had a wanton midwife who took some loving in trade from the new fathers. The women felt that it was inevitable since they were unable to take care of their husbands, so thought it was okay. Tia said, “I take care own husband. Don’t need help.”

I put the pack frame on Benny and tied the travois poles and ropes to the frame the next morning. It only took me a little over an hour to find the hogs. I watched them as they rooted along the riverbank. I’m not sure what they were digging up, but they were concentrating along the bank. I watched as a big boar came up from the river and flopped on the ground. I used the Henry and shot the hog in the head. He groaned and rolled to his side.

Several hogs looked at the dead one and went right back to rooting up whatever it was. Another big hog came up and was looking at the dead hog, was aware of me and watching in my direction. I leveled off and shot that one in the head too.

This was unusual as hogs will often charge you if they think you’re hunting them. These were so busy rooting around that they didn’t want to be bothered by anything.

I was thinking of shooting one more, but remembered how big those things really were and figured two on a travois would be about right. I took a rope and put it around the first hog I shot and had pulled it up using some trees with heavy lower branches. I used my trusty block and tackle to pull the hog up to gut him. I went back to the other hog and put the loop around that one’s head and pulled him over to hang him up the same way.

I assembled the travois to be safe, and connected it firmly to Benny’s pack frame. The next part was gory: I slit the hogs and emptied the insides. I never know whether or not to keep the heads, so I cut them off this time and lowered the carcasses onto the travois and tied them both. I mounted the roan and led Benny back home.

I took my heavy coat off again when I got home, and began skinning the first hog. The first thing I wanted to do is get the meat into the smoke house as fast as I can. I would work on the hides after I had the meat in the smoke house.

The smoke house was cooking because I had been killing a lot of rabbits and we were smoking fish from the river. The hogs didn’t fill the room, but they did take up about half the space. I soaked bags in salt water and wrapped the hams, ribs, and shoulders.

I began working on the hides and had them scraped on both sides and stretched. Tia came out to supervise the stretching. She said that she had something to do with the hooves this time, so I saved them by putting a string through them and hanging them in a tree.

Tia took my coat and handed me clean clothes. She said, “Go small house tub room. Already fire, house warm. Bring clothes, I wash.”

The bath felt good after being immersed in pig guts for a couple of hours. I put some clean buckskins on, and that always feels good. The outside temperatures were moderating, so I didn’t need the heavier pants or the long johns. I had good socks and put my heavy moccasins back on. I still had to take care of the animals, and Benny deserved some extra brushing.

Morris had made a lot of progress in one day. He had put some heavy blankets over the opening he had made to add the room and tub room. He was going to open the kitchen wall and build on to it in one day so that end would be closed up the same day. I was impressed that he could plan his building that way.

He and his helpers cut all their boards before they began tearing down a wall. They were able to create the new room, make the roof continuous, and get the new shingles on about as fast as anyone could expect.

I asked Tia if she wanted to go with me to see if the buffalo were still close to the other side of the Canadian River the next morning. I told her that we would only go there to look for the buffalo and come home, so we would be back home and wouldn’t need the pack horse and our heavy bedrolls. We ended up with a couple of heavy buffalo robes that would work for an emergency bedroll if we were to need it.

We left the house before first light and were checking our river crossing in the early dawn. We went across noting that the bottom was about the same depth as before. We walked out on the plain and saw scattered groups of buffalo, but not the massive herd we saw before.

I wanted to see how spooky they were, so we rode toward a small herd that was foraging for something to eat. There was some grass in the rocky areas that the buffalo were working on. Most of those we saw were healthy looking and didn’t look skinny from a hard winter. Several of the cows had calves and I’m sure there would be many more within the next few weeks. We walked up into easy range to get a kill.

Tia wanted to take one, but I had to tell her that we weren’t prepared with Benny or one of the other mules with a travois. She said, “Go home, get travois, have two buffalo for tribe, for family.”

We made it home before dark and made supper from what Tia had left on the warm stove to continue cooking. The delicious buffalo stew with potatoes and carrots was enough to convince me to go get more of the meat.

Morris said that he wanted to take a long time to build onto our house so he could continue to eat so well. I told him that we would leave him food to eat but we would be gone all day and probably not be back until late.

It was early April, so grass was beginning to grow, and mountain flowers were blooming. The river we crossed didn’t seem high for this time of year, so there mustn’t have been much snow this year.

We were where the buffalo were by the time daybreak was really happening. The animals were getting up and walking around. We wanted them to be used to us, so we got as close as we could with our four animals and then began putting the poles for the travois onto the pack frame. We both took our Henrys out and loaded them when the two rigs were ready. We watched over the backs of our animals until we saw the two younger males we wanted. We had to wait until they turned their torso to us so that we could make the shot. I told Tia to shoot for the head, and to shoot for the heart if she didn’t kill it with the first shot. Tia was a good shot and practiced at two hundred yards with the Henry. This shot wasn’t even a hundred yards, but we both wanted it to be accurate in case we created some stampeding among the animals.

I said to shoot when we were certain of our targets.

We shot almost simultaneously. Both bulls didn’t even wag their heads, just dropped to their knees, and then lay over. The other animals looked at them and at us, and moved off toward other groups.

Tia and I walked our four animals up to the dead ones. We worked together to gut each animal and pull the carcasses up on the travois. The sun wasn’t that high yet when we put our coats back on and began riding home. Tia said that we make a good pair for hunting. She had that right because we had just brought down enough food to feed our family for the spring and summer. We did have a steer that would be ready to butcher when the buffalo meat began running low.

We were home in time to make lunch for Morris and his two helpers. They couldn’t believe we had gone to the other side of the river, killed two buffalo, and were already back home. It was pretty startling that we could do that.

We spent the afternoon skinning the animals and cutting up their meat. I hung everything I could in the smoke house to let it age and slowly cook before we cut it up for various jerky sizes. The one good thing about winter was meat didn’t spoil right away and you didn’t have to make all your extra meat into jerky.

I was soon plowing again, and then using the harrow to smooth the soil. I spread the wheat seed evenly over the ten acres I planned. I planted corn on the ten acres I had planned for that as well. The last thing was the twenty acres of alfalfa that wouldn’t have to be reseeded for the next three years.

Dad told us at our Sunday dinner that he would like us to get the garden area plowed and harrowed so they could be planting their town garden now. It was almost too late, but we had our garden in early so they could share with us.

Mom said that her cousin and brother were on their way here. They were also bringing another cousin who had been attacked by soldiers and wanted to be as far away as possible. The good news was that this cousin was a teacher. The kids had heard the current teacher wanted to go farther west and would be leaving so it would work out.

Dad had a lot of bad news from back east. His older sister was killed in a raid that was meant for someone who wasn’t where she was. Her husband and their kids were killed too. Dad’s cousins that he had been close to had all been killed in war actions, but they had chosen sides and fought for who they believed to be right.

I was grateful that Dad had sent me away and grateful I had gone to get them out of there. We probably needed to be farther west, but the Indian Territory should be far enough, especially in that neither side had a government in place in the Indian Territory to draft anyone.

We found it wasn’t far enough early that summer. Bob came riding into our yard yelling for me to come to town to help. I didn’t understand, and then he explained that Dad was being held in jail while some men in Union uniforms were robbing people and had shot a couple of men who showed resistance.

I grabbed my pistol belt, checked my cylinders, made sure my Henry was fully loaded and I had plenty of spare ammunition. I was wearing some buckskins and my tall moccasins with a little heel. I slid my hat on and was about to take off. Tia was standing there with the bridle in her hand. She said, “You no go without me. I’m not that big yet, and I’m still your mate to protect you when I can. I put boots on. You saddle black horse.

I saddled her horse with the two scabbards and watched my pregnant wife come from the house with her pistol belt on. We three took off toward town at a rapid clip. I told Tia and Bob to circle around to make sure Mom was okay, and I would free Dad so that he could help. They were to stay with Mom and Rebecca to protect them.

Bob had said he thought the group was an even dozen, but there could have been some out of sight watching. I walked my roan up behind the jail and threw the reins over the rear hitching rail. I looked in the barred windows of the rear door and didn’t see anyone, but I really couldn’t see the desk. I took my big knife out and slowly opened the back door. The hinges were well oiled and didn’t make a sound. I slid my feet across the floor until I saw the man at the desk. He was sound asleep with a bottle of locally brewed hooch sitting on the desk.

I came up behind him and slit his throat. I dragged him out the back door so that he didn’t bleed all over the office. The key to the cell was on the desk, so I opened the cell and let the gunsmith, Grant Harper, the General Store owner, and Dad who was sporting a shiner, out.

Dad went to the wall rack with rifles and shotguns and pulled a double-barreled shotgun and pocketed about twenty paper shot cartridges that made loading the shotgun faster in addition to loading in the open barrels. He threw powder and shot pouches over his shoulder and looked at me.

I told the two other men to stay in the office with the guns that were available. I told them to shoot if they had a clear shot, but to not make a noise otherwise while I tried to whittle the odds down.

Dad said, “Listen and you can hear them in the saloon. They are drinking and taking advantage of the women who are there.”

I told Dad, “I’ll go up the outside back stairway and see if I can take out some who are up there fooling with the girls. You watch out here, and when any of them comes out to use the privy, kill them, and drag them off behind.”

This was foreign to Dad, but it was something that had to be done. These men would kill whoever they want, then burn us down when they decide to leave.

I was able to go up the stairs and go into the hallway. I figured out the rooms with the red cherry on the door meant that it was occupied by a customer, so I went into the first door with a cherry. A guy was grunting and groaning doing his thing with the girl. She was obviously in distress as she had tears streaming down her face.

I grabbed the man and pulled his head back and slit his throat. I continued to pull him off while the girl was kicking at him to get him away from her. She told me not to worry about the blood because she was going to throw him out the window.

The next room that had a cherry wasn’t nice, as the man was beating the woman because she couldn’t make him excited enough for him to do her. He jumped up and reached for his gun that was on the table next to the door when I walked in. I grabbed his head of hair to pull him back when he dove for it, but the woman he had been beating beat me to it. She immediately slit his throat and began dragging him toward the window. Three down, including the man at the jail.

There were two more cherries on doors, and those men were equally easy to get rid of. I followed the hallway around to the door that led out to the balcony over the street. Two troopers were standing holding and watching the horses of the others as they drank and had a good time.

They probably didn’t deserve this, but I went down the stairs on the side of the building and walked right up to them. They weren’t paying any attention, so I pulled the one back and slit his throat before I did the second one while he was trying to figure out what was going on. That was seven accounted for.

I could hear one of the loudmouths in there hollering that this place had better have some better booze or the burning would begin. He told one of his men to go up and get the men out of the rooms so they could leave. That was my cue, so I walked in smiling and told the man that he sure was being a nuisance to our town. The man couldn’t figure out what I was doing, so he said, “I don’t know why you want to die, but you’re dead.” I pulled my Colt, thumbed the hammer, and shot the man in the chest.

Another of the men began pulling his gun out, so I shot him in the head. A shotgun went off beside me, taking down a man pulling a pistol. One of the girls pushed a trooper off the balcony with blood spurting out of his throat. I kept looking around and I couldn’t find the last one. Dad came in the back door with his big knife in his hands. He said, “I got one before he went into the privy.”

I yelled, “Drag them all out to the street. We have to be sure we have all twelve. Take someone with you and go get the one from the jail office, Dad. There soon was twelve bodies lying in the street. I told all the people who were there. “Never speak of this. We’re not going to keep anything they have. You can have their money or pocket things, but no guns or knives. Take back all that was stolen from those here in town. Their horses and tack have to be done away with. Take the horses across the river and turn them loose. We’ll burn the tack in the big pit near the river crossing. Grab a shovel and begin digging graves farther south by the river so they won’t wash out. Remember, this never happened.”