‘If a cowboy spits in a corner, they’ll put up a statue of him.’
Ralph Grant
If the eastern road up the Bighorn had been a series of graded switchbacks, the descent down the western slopes would be a long drop. Robyn and I fell nine thousand feet, plummeting downward on a ten per cent grade, descending so fast past runaway truck ramps, we wouldn’t have caught one if we needed it. No parking. As if. The ravens were huge, possibly a result of previous consequence.
We drove by the one shop in Lovell. La De Da.
Byron billed itself as ‘A Great Place to Live.’ Robyn and I stopped to photograph its boneyard of wagon chassis. If cartwheels were worth a buffalo nickel, you would have had enough money to burn a wet mule. Garland boasted a talentless chainsaw carver, and a field of droopy sunflowers next door. Plantations of sugar beets took us beyond Heart Mountain, to the town that Buffalo Bill founded in 1895. We drove through Cody to its western edge, and turned off near the Psychic Readings sign. The single street of wooden buildings in Old Trail Town held historic treasures. Robyn and I ate the leftover Winchester steak out of its styrofoam box, and paid to reenter the past. The town had more than a hundred wagons of every description, and twenty-five original cabins with their square planked façades, some with high antlers and cow skulls on high dentate square projections, overlooking the sloped porch roofs held up by tall balustrades, overhanging the boardwalks.
Here was Butch Cassidy’s shack brought in from the Hole-in-the-Wall country, the Sundance Kid’s chantey hideout from the bank they robbed in Red Lodge, and the log cabin that belonged to Curley, General Custer’s surviving Crow scout. Cairns of elk antlers, a crowded livery, beaded Indian relics, and wagon wheel shadows on the walls of the Old West, half the spokes of the Bighorn Medicine Wheel, were in a herder’s hurry to get here in half the time. The saloon had authentic hanging chandeliers, a mirrored bar, a cash register ornate as a Chinese pagoda, and the mandatory painting of a naked reclining woman beside the heads of buffalo and bighorn sheep and deer, on the red velvet wallpapered walls. Outside was powder blue on tawny powder, dust and faded wood and sage, and the graves of the three most powerfully poignant mountain men of the American West. I know who you are; you're the same dumb pilgrim I've been hearin' for twenty days and smellin' for three. Every one of them would have been someone to ride the river with.
A bronze torso of the first mountain man, all buckskin and beard and mane, stood tall in the wind, under an old tattered American flag, blue and cotton sky and yellow hills in the backdrop. John Colter was born in Virginia in 1774. Before his thirtieth birthday, Meriwether Lewis offered him the rank of private and a pay of five dollars a month, to join his Corps of Discovery. Colter was court-martialled for threatening to shoot a sergeant he had disobeyed, while Lewis and Clark were somewhere else, but was reinstated after offering an apology and a promise to reform. One of the best hunters in the expedition, he was routinely sent out to scout for game, and to find Indians who could guide them further west. Colter was given an honourable discharge on the return to the Mandan villages in what is now North Dakota, to enable him to join Forest Hancock and Joseph Dickson, two frontiersmen headed into the upper Missouri River country in search of furs. It only lasted two months. After they reached Three Forks, and he helped establish Fort Raymond, Colter lit out for the larger wilderness. In the dead of the winter of 1807-08, he traveled hundreds of miles alone, much of the time unguided, in a region where nighttime temperatures in January are routinely −34 °C. He was the first European-American to enter and explore Jackson Hole below the Teton Range, and what is now Yellowstone National Park. John visited at least one geyser basin, near where Robyn and I were standing in what is now Cody, and probably saw the geothermal areas near Tower Fall as well. He found the Crow, and they found him.
He was treated at his reception, back at Fort Raymond in April of 1808, like he don’t got all what belongs to him. His report of a place of ‘fire and brimstone’ was ridiculed as imaginary, dismissed as delirium, and nicknamed ‘Colter's Hell.’
Later that year John was injured in a fight with the Blackfoot, after he had teamed up with John Potts near Three Forks, but it was what happened in 1809, that became immortalized as ‘Colter’s Run.’ While paddling their canoe up the Jefferson River, Potts and Colter encountered several Blackfoot who demanded they come ashore. John did, and was disarmed and stripped naked. When Potts refused to land he was shot. His return fire killed one of the warriors, and their fusillade from the riverbank riddled him to the great beyond. His body was brought in and hacked to pieces. Colter was motioned to leave, and encouraged to run. But he was running for his life, pursued by a large pack of young braves. After several miles John was exhausted, bleeding from his nose, with only one assailant still closely tagging him.
‘Again he turned his head, and saw the savage not twenty yards from
him. Determined if possible to avoid the expected blow, he suddenly
stopped, turned round, and spread out his arms. The Indian,
surprised by the suddenness of the action, and perhaps at the bloody
appearance of Colter, also attempted to stop; but exhausted with
running, he fell whilst endeavouring to throw his spear, which stuck
in the ground, and broke in his hand. Colter instantly snatched up the
pointed part, with which he pinned him to the earth, and then
continued his flight.’
Colter grabbed the dead Indian’s blanket, and continued his run with the pack still in pursuit, until he reached the Madison River, where he hid inside a beaver lodge, to escape capture. Emerging at night he climbed and walked for eleven days to the fort of a trader on the Little Big Horn.
In 1810 John Colter helped construct another fort at Three Forks, but after returning from a trapline, found his two partners mutilated by the Blackfoot. He left the wilderness for good, married a woman named Sallie, and bought a farm in Missouri. The map he gave William Clark, later that year, was the most comprehensive of the region produced for the next seventy-five years. Colter fought with Nathan Boone’s Rangers in the War of 1812, and died of jaundice in the same year.
The next statue over, was of a seated man, aiming a flintlock, elbow on his knee, cord wrapped around his boot, to steady his aim. Jim White was the greatest buffalo hunter in the world. Born in Missouri sixteen years after John Colter died, no one knew his original name. His deliberately lost that when he inadvertently lost his wife, to a rich Spaniard in Mexico, in 1868. Jim killed him and several others in the fracas and, with a large reward on his head, walked the seven hundred miles back into Texas. There are three uncertainties in life- woman, wind, and wealth. White got into buffalo hunting, and kept several skinners gainfully employed.
One day a group of ciboleros rode over a hill and scared away the small herd that White was firing on. Mad as a mule chewing bumblebees, he shot the horses out from under four of them. Jim earned a reputation for toughness, more guts than you could hang on a fence.
By the summer of 1878, all the Southern Plains buffalo were gone. Jim White was an autochthon, like the buffalo he hunted, with a very hard head, a very uncertain temper, and a very lonely future. He left for the northern buffalo range in Wyoming, and reached the Big Horn Mountains with two big span of mules, two wagons, 700 pounds of lead, five kegs of gunpowder, three 16 pound Sharp’s rifles, and an old buffalo skinner named Watson. Here he teamed up with Oliver Hanna, one of General Crook’s old scouts. Over the next two winters, the two men hunted, with a contract to furnish five thousand pounds of game meat to the army at Fort McKinney, near Buffalo, just as Buffalo Bill was building the Occidental Hotel. The 4,600 hides they had collected were freighted to the Yellowstone River by ox teams, and then hauled down the river by steamboats. In the fall of 1880, Hanna returned from a quick trip over the Big Horns. He found Jim White dead, shot in the head with his own 50 caliber buffalo rifle, by thieves who had stolen their horses, mules, wagons, guns, hides and furs, and future. Dying ain’t much of a living, boy.
It was a hard land, and it bred hard men to hard ways. The third statue was of a legendary iron man on a bronze horse, all beard and feathered hat and gun, on a stone pedestal. No more trails. He was born John Garrison in New Jersey in 1824, but he deliberately lost his name after striking an officer, after losing his age in order to enlist on a fighting ship in the Mexican-American War. John Johnson was swept away by and to the gold rush in Montana, where he became a ‘wood hawk,’ supplying cordwood to steamboats. At the age of 23, he took a Flathead Indian wife, and built a cabin on the Little Snake River in Wyoming. One day, returning from a trapline, he found his wife and unborn child dead and mutilated on the cabin floor, killed by Crow Indians.
Johnson began a personal war of revenge against the Crow, a vendetta that would last a quarter of a century. From his dead enemies, he would take a bite of their liver, a supreme insult because the Crow believed an intact organ was vital to arrive in the afterlife. Liver Eating Johnson made a fierce impression on his foes, and redefined the meaning of ‘Eating Crow.’
It was a time of tall boots and tall hats and tall tales. Like John Colter a hundred years before, Johnson was ambushed by a group of Blackfoot warriors in the dead of winter on a foray to sell whiskey to his Flathead kin, a trip of over five hundred miles The Blackfoot planned to sell him to the Crow. He was stripped to the waist, tied with leather thongs and put in a teepee with a guard. Johnson broke through the straps, knocked out the guard with a kick, scalped him with his own knife, and cut off one of his legs.
He escaped into the woods, surviving by eating the Blackfoot's leg, until he reached the cabin of his trapping partner, a journey of about two hundred miles.
In his old age he developed rheumatism, and treated his ailment at the DeMaris Hot Springs, near the river below us. Johnson died in 1900, in a veteran’s home in Santa Monica, but through the efforts of a seventh grader named Tri Robinson, and his class in Lancaster, California, was reinterred in Old Trail Town in 1974, near the mountains he loved. More than two thousand attended the funeral, ‘probably the largest burial service in the history of Wyoming.’
In his time, Liver Eating Johnson was a sailor, a United States Army scout and Indian fighter, a Union Civil War soldier wounded in battle, a gold-seeker, a hunter, a trapper, a whiskey and wood peddler, a guide, a Marshall, the first sheriff of Red Lodge, Montana, a log cabin builder, a seeker of any source of income-producing labor he could find, and the western film inspiration for Jeremiah Johnson. Grab what you can and let the loose ends drag.
“You've come far, Pilgrim.” He Said.
“Feels like far.” Said Johnson.
“Were it worth the trouble?” He asked.
“Eh.” Said Johnson.“What trouble?”
‘People are always asking me why they don't make Westerns like they
used to.’
Roy Rogers
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