Chapter 3

My mother and father were gone. I, now Mick O’Dell the Third, looked at the note they had left for the longest time. I was born in Pennsylvania, but my father and mother raised me in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Like my father, I am a wheelwright. My mother insisted that I move farther West in order to begin to live up to my potential, but I didn’t want to leave home.

My choice was made moot when I had come home to find the note from my parents telling me that they had left and that I should move West. They included a bag of gold pieces worth $100. It took a while for me to realize that they were really not coming back. So, I followed my heart, signing on to work for an Army unit that was following the tracks left by Capt. Merriweather Lewis and Lt. William Clark. I traded my talents as wheelwright for passage.

Packing all of my tools and some of my parents’ things as mementos, I drove my own wagon pulled by a pair of good sturdy mules. I traveled West with the Army until we came to a spot that I just couldn’t leave. I sent a prayer up to my parents, telling them that I found a place where it looked like the mountains touched the sky. The spot where I took root was just south of the North Platte River.

I built a small cabin and a shop. I figure that if I came this way then in the future so would a lot of people and a lot of people meant a lot of wheels to fix. The land was crawling with buffalo and various branches of the Shoshone tribe. I became good friends with the Shoshone and often hunted, traded, and dined with them.

In early spring the news of gold being discovered in California brought many people passing through and my services were in high demand. The Shoshone were concerned, but they were traders and new people meant new customers for their hides and horses. Army patrols were now more common, mostly to stop the settlers from angering the Shoshone. I lived a busy, solitary, and quiet life until the late summer.

I was approached by an Army patrol. It seems that the son of a US Senator had gotten lost out in the Territory while on a buffalo hunt. Since I was very familiar with the land, and friendly with the Shoshone, they asked for my help. I agreed and guided the patrol to the place where the buffalo were normally herding during this part of the year. We searched for days. I had very little hope as the young man had been alone in the wilderness now for almost two weeks. Between the wolves, and bears preparing for the fall, he had to be dead by now.

During one of our morning sweeps to the South of the main herd, I saw a carcass off in the distance. The Shoshone don’t leave anything behind when they take a buffalo, they use all of the massive beasts, so I assumed that this was an animal killed by white men or perhaps a pack of wolves. A small pack would not be able to devour a beast this size.

I approached the carcass carefully and after dismounting to check if the carcass’ hide was usable for a trade, I was surprised by a discovery. Inside the buffalo’s body cavity, wrapped in a blanket and unconscious, I found the Senator’s son. I shook him to see if he was alive and he half-woke with a start. He was in terrible condition, needing water which I gave him, he drank quickly. I also gave him jerky, which he ate after almost turning up his nose at. As he drank and ate, he told me that he had taken off chasing after a large bull, thinking that his group would follow along. He wounded the animal before it ran and when he rode over a small hill his horse was startled by the body of the bull laying on the ground, dead.

His horse ran away after it threw him off and he broke his leg when he hit the ground. With no way of getting back to his camp, he managed to gut the bull and crawled inside the carcass, to try to keep warm and to hide from the Indians. The Shoshone were still friendly with white men at that time and would have helped him had they seen him, but what did he know, he was only a Senators son.

He kept alive by eating the dew-soaked grass around the carcass and eating the meat of the beast as it dried out in the sun, which explained his initial revulsion to my offered jerky.

I let him drink all of the water he could stomach, treated his broken leg the best I could, and got him to the local Shoshone settlement. The Shoshone have been hunting buffalo for a very long time and many a brave had been busted up by one of the massive animals. They gave him herbal medicine to stop any infections and the local medicine man almost started a war when he reset the broken leg, causing the young man to scream out in pain and threaten death to the whole tribe. When he calmed down, they braced his leg for the trip back.

When he was returned to civilization, I thought my job was done. But a few months later another Army patrol showed up with a man in a suit. Who in his right mind wore a suit out here? The answer to that question was that the man was from the government. He said that the Senator wanted to offer his thanks and wanted to know if there was anything he could offer in return for his son’s life.

After a few days to think about it, during which time I often laughed at the government man and his suit as he tried to deal with being in the savage wilderness. He actually offered me money to sleep in my bed instead of on the hard ground after the first night. That made me realize that money meant nothing out here. Asking the Senator for money would be foolish in the extreme, but the Senator’s influence and power were something I could use.

In the morning I found the government man grousing about the sleeping conditions again.

“Sir, I have decided that I will accept the Senators offer of a gift.”

“Wonderful, now I can go home and sleep in my own bed! What amount of money would you like?”

“I don’t want money; I want a parcel of 640 acres of land. I want the land I’m on with my cabin being at the center.”

“I think we can do that. When I get back home, I’ll find out and send you word.”

“Fair enough. I hope it goes through, I would hate for you to have to ride all the way out here to ask me again,” he gave me a look like I just shot his dog.

I saw the patrol off later that morning, before settling back into my normal life. Wagon trains rode through going to the gold fields and always needed wheels replaced. I had the idea to build and keep a stock of the most common wheel sizes so folks wouldn’t have to stop for three or four days while I built a new wheel or repaired their old one.

The quickness of the wheel replacement made me very popular because the gold hungry settlers could keep moving. I had some people that wanted to park at my place permanently. I told them that I owned the land and would prefer not to have neighbors. It didn’t make me a lot of friends, but it did make the night when we had that big storm more interesting.

It was a dark and stormy night and I saw the thing coming from miles away. The horizon disappeared as the heavy rain showers blocked the view of the far plains. There were no wagons around that I could see, so I locked down the shutters and built up the fire in the potbelly stove to keep the building nice and warm.

The thunder and lightning were building, and the rain was coming down so hard that I was afraid that it would wash away the mud holding together the rock walls of my house. I sat there listening to the storm building outside. The intensity built and built until it crescendoed with a simultaneous lightning strike and clap of thunder just outside my door. The force of the thunderclap was so powerful that it blew my door open, allowing the wind to drive the rain into my home.

I rushed to close the door and I could hear the horses panicking in the stable and prayed that they had not been struck or maybe worse, set free causing me to have to track them down on foot. I figured that I better go and make sure that they were tied down and locked in. I donned my hat and a canvas slicker and opened the door and began to make my way, against the force of the wind, to the stable.

After making sure all was secure and the animals safe, I was returning to the house, when I saw in the illumination of the lesser bolts of lightning, something that wasn’t supposed to be there. In a depression in the ground near my front door, there was something with smoke coming from it. I thought that maybe it was a coyote or a wolf that had been hit by lightning.

Approaching the form in the quickly reducing storm, I could make out the shape of a person. Did one of the Shoshone get hurt? I quickly approached until I could see that it was a naked female curled up in the slight depression in the ground. The female’s body was still smoldering, and I assumed that lightning had struck her. I stooped down, shook her shoulder and she groaned. Damn! She was alive! I picked up her slight body and took her inside.