And there was I, in the same situation. My wife and child had indeed been captured by the savages, and it was certainly possible they had been killed. But it never give me no excuse to throw over my manhood, and no matter how many misadventures you suffer, you ain’t a genuine and absolute failure until that occurs.
But I had lost my old free ways during them years of respectability in Denver, and it was the wildness of that experience on the Arkansas which had unmanned me.
“Oh, they mightn’t have
Funny how members of your own family, even when you haven’t been specially close to them, can drive the knife home with perfect accuracy. In this case, though, it was more complicated: if you recall, I always figured Caroline had been disappointed that the Indians had not offered her violence. Sight unseen, she was jealous of Olga on several counts: for being married, for having had a kid, for likely being raped; these in addition to the natural disapproval felt by a sister for the woman who has got her brother.
All of which produced a change in Caroline’s attitude. She stopped the reclamation procedure that had begun to straighten me out—baths, solid food, and so on—and brought in a jug of whiskey and encouraged me to drown my sorrows in it.
She found me more satisfying as a derelict, I expect. My sister really had the same type of taste as them men who was entertained by the spectacle of my degradation. The Cheyenne would have been depressed to see a fellow tribesman gone to rot; they would have believed it reflected discredit upon all Human Beings. On the contrary, an American just loves to see another who ain’t worth a damn. And my sister proved no exception.
Well, I get a grand pleasure out of disproving expectations. I reckon I would of died of drink had I not encountered my sister; and had she continued trying to reform me, it might have hastened the process. But from the time she took an active interest in assisting my ruin, with an eye I reckon to looking after me the rest of my life, fishing me out of saloons, beating up my tormentors, etc.—from that moment on, I never took another drink. At least not during that phase of my career.
I don’t mean I got up the next minute and become a normal person. It took a couple weeks before I could walk with any kind of vigor, and a month or so before I could resume a man’s work, for I ain’t kidding when I say I had hit bottom. For quite a spell my hand quavered when held tightly by the other, and there was hours at a time when my vision was like looking under water. On into the fall, I still thought I’d pass out from the effect of the midday sun.
The latter comes to mind because towards the end of summer I took me a job. Same as Caroline, driving a team of mules, though she tried hard to keep me from it, going so far as to tell the contractor what hired us that I was an irrepressible alcoholic, and therefore he watched me close and I had to do twice the work of anyone else.
The only reason I had the job at all was that they needed every man they could get for the building of the U.P., which had took such a while to start up that they was in a big hurry now. It was supposed to begin in ’63, but first steel wasn’t laid till the summer I’m talking about, ’65, and by October only ten miles had been completed. However, what happened during that winter was the effects of the War being over took hold and Government money was forthcoming, so that by the following April end-of-track lay at North Bend and by July, another eighty-ninety miles on, at Chapman.
For hard labor they used a lot of Irishmen who had emigrated to America, but there was also a number of War veterans who done this work, and they really hit a stride in ’66, laying two-three miles of steel a day, with big sweaty devils pounding spikes like carpet tacks, and others meanwhile setting ties in place further on and running up new rails. And right behind them an engine, puffing and roaring. Its sparks was setting fire now and again to what was left of the prairie grass after that human herd had trampled it, and the buffalo had long since took off for other parts.
At the end-of-track the honkytonkers set up shop in tents and moved right along with the railroad, offering drink, gambling, and harlots, and there was purveyors and traders, and even preachers, and soldiers and some Indians, friendlies, who would come up and trade an item or two or sell their womenfolk or just stare, and if you never seen an Indian stare you have missed a real phenomenon, for it might go on all day. I recall seeing a Pawnee study the locomotive smokestack for hours, and after a while I couldn’t forbear from asking him, in the signs, what he figured it was for.
