Chapter 4: Polly Wolly Doodle

What Rebecca had spotted in that magazine from back East was an illustrated article about quilting. She and her mother and sisters had done some before she ran off with Chet. And now she was determined to get back into it in a serious way.

These days Rebecca was working in the Bighorn Restaurant, waitressing for both lunch and dinner. Dinner was the big draw. She was a volunteer, wouldn’t take a dime from Mrs. Chambers.

Would the money have helped her husband with his debts to Ollie Chambers? Maybe a little, but she told me, “We’re so far behind...”

We.

Rebecca told Mrs. Chambers, “It’s a thank-you for all the help you give me.” Back when we took her in, saved her from a wife-beating. Chet had long since apologized to her and to me. I had returned his revolver and his knife even before he told her how sorry he was. It didn’t seem to me that he was a threat to Rebecca anymore. But she didn’t say anything about going back to him. Fine by me. Mostly.

Mrs. Chambers didn’t argue about paying Rebecca; she wouldn’t when it came to saving money. However, she insisted that her new volunteer keep the tips. When there were any.

I’d been giving Rebecca a dollar every once in a while, walking around money, but she saved most of that. Her business. She maybe could be planning on giving it to Chet and that would gnaw at me a little. But I wouldn’t say anything. Her money, her decision. Plus, when I thought about it, it would probably help Rosie, might make a little difference.

I guess quilting and seamstressing are related. But Rebecca told me it took different skills. “Sewing, mending especially, is one, two, three. Quilting is artistic.”

Could be, I never tried either one. But farming is different from ranching and fishing is different from hunting.

Back in Indianapolis there were plenty of bars. Saloons. But unlike in Little River, there were more churches than drinking establishments. And, back there, there were a lot of other outlets for ... social stuff, I guess.

Stores, large and small. Theaters and a library, a big one. Some people, mostly retired, went to watch the courthouse proceedings. There were speakers on different subjects in the public parks. Schools with auditoriums for plays in them.

With Little River it was mostly saloons — seven of them inside the town limits — and churches — three. There had been just two, Lutheran and Free Will Baptist, before Holy Redemption set up shop.

And it was there — churches and bars — where most of the town’s social life was centered.

In the saloons, it was mostly men, drinking and cards. And sometimes, arguing. But I’d quieted things down considerable on the rambunctious side.

It was a surprise to me, but I’d learned that music helped keep activities on the friendly side. It also caught me unawares, but maybe shouldn’t have, that hymns were popular.

Domino didn’t have that much skill when it came to piano playing, but she could carry a tune. Mrs. Chambers got in the habit of sending idle whores down to the Bighorn Saloon to sing along with Domino. And some of them danced pretty good too.

Mrs. Chambers smiled at me, “Free advertising.”

“Polly Wolly Doodle” was popular enough that some of the drunks even tried to sign along. Same with “Ring a Ring o’ Roses”.

But it was the hymns that surprised me. “Down in the Garden” sometimes brought tears to a couple of the sporting ladies. A drunk or two might get misty eyed, maybe remembering something from the past.

Another popular one, new, was “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms”.

I wondered if some of the men listened to a hymn, took a whore upstairs, and heard the same song the next day in church. Probably not. Most of the men who attended church were married.

The Grebels were the first family to lose their homestead to Ollie Chambers. I learned later that Mrs. Chambers had stopped him from foreclosing on the Robinsons. She and Rebecca were sort-of friends. And I did a good job keeping the whorehouse troublemakers tamped down.

This particular family had come down from Ontario with a stop in Colorado, then Wyoming. Old Colony Mennonites. Or had been. They had either broken off or been banned, but were still easy to identify. All of them were extremely pale with white-blonde hair. The woman wore a scarf with her faded dress.

Jakob and Martha Grebel, two sons, and one mule pulling the ratty old buckboard, rode up Market Street on their way to somewhere else. They were heading north, rather than back where they’d come from. Rebecca walked alongside for several blocks holding Martha’s hand. Both women had tears streaming down their faces. The children, around six or seven, were trying not to cry. Jakob looked mighty grim. And angry.

The boys, looking lost in their large hand-me-down shirts, bowed their heads,

“In Jesu schlaf ich ruhig ein, Gott, mein Gott will bei mir sien...”

And then the buckboard was past me, Rebecca still walking beside her friend.

Ollie muttered, “I’m not running a charity ward. They borrow money, they pay it back.”

He didn’t mention that Harlan Goodwin had paid ten cents a pound less than the previous year. Even though the demand for beef had gone up at Camp Métis. I hadn’t studied economics in Laramie, but it seemed peculiar that demand went up and the price went down.

Seeing the Grebels drift out of town with all their belongings in the back of that small buckboard was sad. Although I wouldn’t need that much room for all my stuff. Unless maybe I was taking Rebecca along.

But I’d seen far sadder sights. Burned-out farmhouses. Whole families — parents and children — slaughtered. Until we got the Indians pretty much settled down. Or driven away. Most of that was before my cavalry days, but I did join in a few skirmishes with the Lakota and Cheyenne. Once with a straggling band of Arapaho. To me, the fiercest warriors were the Kiowa.

Nope, a sad buckboard with a sad family didn’t much compare.

Rebecca and I traded histories, good and bad. Our dreams too.

She missed Kansas City some. “But Chet swept me off my feet. Daddy didn’t want me to marry him so of course that’s the first thing I did. Wasn’t even old enough to think for myself. Then I got pregnant. Then Chet sold his feed store and ... and here I am.”

“I’m glad, Mrs. Robinson.”

After a while she didn’t talk all that much about her life back in Kansas, so I stopped asking her about it. Although she did straighten me out on one point that seemed important to her, “Kansas City is in Missouri, not Kansas!”

She pronounced ‘Kansas’ like spitting out sour milk.

I said, “Okay, Missouri.”

“Mr. Murdock, do you miss the Army?”

That was a complicated question. “I like my life now. But, yeah, I made friends, had some good laughs. I reckon I miss that. Fort Laramie was ... I dunno, a kind of growing-up for me.”

“What about the Indians?”

“They were mostly tamed by then. A few skirmishes ... that would sure get your attention when you’re in the middle of one.”

“Scared?”

“Acourse. But we had a good company commander, Captain McIntyre. Roger McIntyre. Smart and fair. Went to West Point, soldiered some under General Grant. He’s a lifer, the Captain.”

“Why was he good?”

I smiled in the dark, “His main aim was to keep us alive. We didn’t lose a single man. A few old boys got wounded, a couple pretty severe, but nobody got killed under Captain McIntyre.”

Rebecca patted my chest, “Good.”

“He’d study the orders and ... he never really ignored something no matter how stupid it was. But he’d find a way not to lead us into ... a situation where we’d be outnumbered and at a bad tactical disadvantage.”

Which, now that I thought about it, was sort of my Little River plan. To one degree or another, I was the law here. Not officially, but in practical terms. The whores and a few other people relied on me. And I tried to operate in a non-shooting way whenever I could. So far, so good.

A couple of small businesses — a mercantile store and the barbershop — had sent a runner to find me. Just the usual drunk nonsense, but I kept things from doing what the Cavalry called escalating. The proprietors each paid Mrs. Chambers a dollar which she split with me. So, word got around; that became kind of the Little River procedure, so far as keeping the peace was concerned.

I shifted position in our bed and Rebecca slid her thigh over mine.

“Some nights Captain McIntyre would come talk to me. We’d take a hike around the fort and just talk. I guess because I’d had a year of college. Most of the boys hadn’t.”

Her hand drifted south. I was out of commission for the night. But maybe not, I’d been wrong about that one before.

“What did you do at Fort Laramie? When you weren’t out on patrol?”


“The Oregon Trail wagon trains on their way west still stopped by for supplies and repairs. Didn’t need much protection by then, the Indian Wars were about played out. Captain McIntyre said he’d seen the plains change over the years. The settlers, homesteaders. Open-range cattle industry.”

Thinking back ... it was still pretty busy, Fort Laramie. Started out as a fur-trading post before the Army took it over. Now there was The West Mountain Express, Western Union, Indian treaties. Maybe not as exciting, but still pretty busy.

And there were always hangers-on. Drifters, drunkards, an abandoned bottom squaw from some buck’s string. I remembered the haunting eyes of an old Apache woman in a black stove-collared dress. And a small, rootless band of Southern Comanches with their little medicine shields and beaded parfleche waist pouches. They moved their camp continually, but always within sight of the fort.

Rebecca said, “Chet and Rosie and I passed through there. On our way to all that land that the railroad was giving to homesteaders. Fort Laramie, that’s where we had to sell our oxen. Brought them all the way from home.” Her voice had a faraway sound, “It was hard traveling.”

Not as hard as it used to be. But I didn’t say that. She had bent down and was working some Rebecca Robinson magic on me.

In the short time I’d been in Little River, just a few months, it seemed like the pace was picking up. Of course change was the way of the West anyway.

Fur traders, buffalo hunters, prospectors. Then ranchers, farmers, settlers in general. Resistance from the various Indian tribes, but they were getting pushed further and further back.

Railroad expansion and the arrival of the telegraph speeded things up considerable.