Manifest Destiny

Brian Garfield

For Jane and Thomas

in memory of John

A Note

“All the historical books which contain no lies are extremely tedious.”

—Anatole France

“Some events do not occur at the right time, and others do not occur at all. It is the proper function of the historian to correct these faults.”

—Herodotus

Let me take you into my confidence.

This book is a novel about real people and real events. It relates a true story—by Herodotus’s rules.

All the characters lived; virtually all the significant events took place. The tale is based largely on the recollections and writings of actual participants. But in the attempt to put history in tidier order, I have oversimplified and rearranged.

Every person who is named in the book was real, except for a hotel guest whose stolen watch is a fictitious invention; a few characters, however, are composites of more than one real person—and several people who played important roles in reality have been left out altogether. I beg the forgiveness of their partisans. For similar reasons of economy the book fails to mention various places and institutions (including one of Theodore Roosevelt’s two Dakota ranches).

Some of the dialogue derives from actual words spoken or written by these people; much of it, naturally, is fictitious but most speeches and items from newspapers are abridged from real ones (with occasional revisions designed to fit the narrative) and much of the trial testimony and vituperation are quoted directly from the records. The letter from the Marquis De Morès, challenging Theodore Roosevelt to a duel, is genuine, as are Roosevelt’s reply and choice of weapons.

The novel compresses an actual five-year span into a fictitious two years. Some incidents are not related in the sequence in which they actually occurred, but as a general rule all the events, confrontations and adventures of consequence actually took place, although the knowledgeable reader will see that some have been repopulated and reorganized for dramatic purposes.

If an incident or character in the novel seems particularly outlandish, it probably existed in reality. (E.g., the menacing two-gun man who disrupted Roosevelt’s 1903 speaking tour of the West, and the curious character called “The Lunatic,” are not my creations; they are described in Theodore Roosevelt’s Autobiography.)

With a cheerful sort of recklessness I have tried to impose dramatic coherence on an assortment of events that took place a century ago in ragged haphazard fashion. I have also been merrily willing to accept versions of a few events from sources of dubious veracity when their accounts seemed both entertaining and at least plausibly conceivable.

In sum, I have no ambition to mislead: this novel aims to be a dramatized homage to history rather than an unblemished factual record. If it goads the reader’s curiosity, facts that are uncorrupted by my imagination can be found by consulting nonfiction sources such as the works listed in the bibliography at the end of the book.

—Brian Garfield

Los Angeles, 1989

Prologue

June 1903

Apprehensive, Arthur Packard stepped off the Northern Pacific Flyer onto the platform. He carried his valise through dwindling coal-ash smoke to the near corner of the weathered wood depot and peered past it at the town below the weedy embankment.

No one stirred in the twilight. Empty buildings sprawled like a hand of cards dealt hastily. Heat contraction brought echoes from broad rusting metal rooftops beneath the spire of the old abattoir’s great brick smokestack that loomed against Bad Lands bluffs and the broad darkening Dakota sky. A little dust devil turned a dainty pirouette along a street the name of which he could not remember.

He was startled by the voice of the porter who spoke from the train behind him: “Sir, I don’t see nobody. You sure you wants to get off here?”

Arthur Packard fluttered a hand at hip level to waive the porter’s concerns and absolve the railroad. He heard a train door slam—chuff of steam, jostle of couplings and wheels; he set his valise down on the platform and caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the unbroken half of a window—tall, bearded, Lincolnesque—and heard the train clatter across the bridge. He made a face at his reflection and looked back across the river in time to see the caboose disappear around the long bend in deep silver shadows at the foot of Graveyard Butte.

The wind was a gentle ruffle against his ear. Otherwise there was no sound. No life. His stare lifted to the terrace alongside the butte—to the big house that loomed southwest of him, overlooking the river valley and the town.

Château De Morès. It stirred uneasy memories. Against the fading evening sky there was some sort of trick of reflection, for it appeared as if there were a light in one of the downstairs windows.

He put his back to that, picked up the valise and stepped off the platform and walked down off the embankment, kicking up little misty whorls that tickled his nostrils with a scent that invoked remembrance.

Irritated by the weakness of such sentimentality he looked down and saw, with a sort of gratification, that the powder dust had instantly obscured the polish on his boots. So much for remembered charms.

The embankment did not seem different; no more weeds than ever. It ran straight across the flats from one set of bluffs to the other like a military earthwork, interrupted midway by the flatiron bridge that spanned the fitful surges of the Little Missouri River. Pack walked down the flats on the northerly side of the embankment amid false fronts and weathered boardwalks: except for a fading of paint the ghost town appeared eerily unchanged from its glory days. Evidently there had been no fires since the blaze that had destroyed his newspaper nearly two decades ago. He walked slowly, memories stirred by the little brick church that the beautiful Madame la Marquise had built, the sagging shops his friends had occupied, the saloons that had seen as much commotion as conviviality, the great mass of the abattoir with its towering brick smokestack, the open field where they had chased baseballs in those days long before it had become the national game, the jail shack they had called the Bastille: with an audible grunt of quiet laughter he remembered the time a dozen drunken cowboys, determined to bust a friend out, had tied lassos around the building, hitched it to an unsuspecting train, and watched aghast as the departing train towed the entire sturdy little structure all the way down to the river’s edge before the ropes had snapped—and all of it without a scratch of visible damage to the Bastille. Pack remembered the horror with which he had put the key in the padlock and dragged open the heavy door (it, like the rest of the Bastille, was constructed of railroad ties) only to find the occupant unharmed if you didn’t count his inebriated bewilderment: “My God, boys, wasn’t that one hell of a earthquake!”