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.
He says: “First I thought it was a big gun for the shooting of birds, but then I saw that it scared the birds away before they could fly over it. Next I thought it was a big kettle for cooking soup, but then I saw the white men eating in another place. Fighting Bear looked at this thing and believes it is for making whiskey, because all the white men are drunk every night.”
He stopped then and looked baffled, so I figured I would set him straight, but no sooner than I fixed to start in than he says: “Will you give me some tobacco?” I cut him off the end of a plug, which he took and then dug his heels into his scrubby pony and galloped off from where he had been standing three-four hours. Maybe that’s what he had in mind from the beginning.
Me and Caroline kept at regular work by hiring onto the different outfits that was grading the roadbed as the U.P. proceeded westwards. Local contractors would sign up to grade a mile or two and they was always ready to hire any wagon and team they could get, for they had to work ahead of the track-laying and that was going so speedily that you was always in danger of being run down by the oncoming steel. I never got over how fast they built that railroad along where me and my family had trudged with oxen only a dozen years before. It was frightening.
Me and Caroline had started out just as drivers, working for them who owned the teams, but at Lone Tree we acquired mules and a wagon of our own. We pooled what we had made so far, and Caroline had a few shekels in an old sock that she thought of as her dowry if a chance ever came for such, but the aggregate was not near enough for our purpose, so we had to take on a partner to make up the price. This fellow’s name was Frank Delight. I don’t know whether he was born with that handle, but it was appropriate enough for his present trade. He run two of them portable pleasure-tents what followed the railroad to service the track workers: one was a saloon where you could drink the poorest whiskey ever made-I had stopped indulging, but could gauge the quality of his goods by taking a deep breath as I walked outside-the other was a traveling whorehouse. Both establishments was extremely profitable owing to their convenience. You take a man who has laid steel all day, he ain’t in the mood at night to look far for his drink and sport.
The way we met Frank was that Caroline had some friends among his women, who she had met washing clothes down at the river. These harlots believed it a great shame that a girl should have to work so hard driving mules and was always after my sister to join their profession, which is practiced laying down. On her side, Caroline developed an enormous zeal to straighten out them whores, and since she didn’t have no success at it, Frank didn’t mind her none. In fact, she got to where he found her right amusing, and would set up the drinks just to hear her denounce him for a procurer.
When he found we could use a hand in buying our team, Frank offered his in exchange for a percentage of our earnings, mostly as a favor to Caroline, I believe, though he never passed up a chance to make an extra dollar. I had been kind of sour on partners after Bolt and Ramirez, but Frank wasn’t a bad sort of fellow, and I handled the money.
So across Nebraska we proceeded during ’66, slowed some by the winter, but by April ’67, end-of-track lay at Paxton, which wasn’t but fifty mile from the northeast corner of Colorado, where the line would drop southwards to touch Julesburg in that Territory, and then back north to cross the rest of Nebraska and into Wyoming.
That was when, as the weather warmed, we begun to meet the Cheyenne and the Sioux. They stole our animals at night and harried the workers by day, coming always in small parties that hit and ran, and did a deal of damage but never really slowed the progress of them steel parallels. It must have been mighty disheartening, now that I think of it, for them to come back next day and find the railroad three miles further on, and three the next and the next until the continent was cut in two. Of course they never got everybody together at once for a full-scale assault that might have made some real effect. But then, had they so done, I guess it would only have meant that the U.S. Army would have got real serious about wiping them out and so brought on all at once the ruination they was this way falling into by degrees. They had lost Colorado, and now this strange machine come roaring and smoking across Nebraska, leaving a permanent trail of metal. I believe I have said earlier that the railroad cut the continental buffalo herd in half, for them beasts would not cross a track even while no train was on it, and the Indians knowed this by now.
As for me, I had figured the hostiles would show up once we got into their region, and that was exactly why I had taken my present line of work: it looked like the most effective means by which I could make contact with the Cheyenne and trace the whereabouts of my wife and child. I had studied that out back in Omaha during my time of convalescence.