Gold and Custer had begun the opening of the Black Hills in ’74, and nothing could stop the oncoming tide of the white man. Of them all, Spotted Tail was the first to understand and to act upon his knowledge. He saw clearly that the red man had reached the end of the trail and all that remained was to ease the defeat of his people and to find some way of working with the whites instead of fighting them.
Red Cloud too, understood, but for awhile longer he resisted and hated the knowing. He had won his victories. He had driven the white man off the Bozeman Trail, made him abandon his forts, but now he had come to the realization that to win a battle was not to win a war, for the white man kept coming. Now they were here. Men pushed along the dusty streets of Deadwood, the town named for the burnt-off timber along the mountain side. They were shouldering through crowds of their fellows, they were pushing up to bars, buying, selling, talking, robbing, gypping their neighbours. They streamed into the hills with picks and shovels, then days later they streamed back to buy supplies over the counters of hastily built stores or from tents, paying for their purchases in gold dust washed from the hills and creeks.
They sank shafts down to bed rock and dug the gold from the cracks and crevices where it had been accumulating for ages, and then they washed it out and sacked it up. It was gold to pay for the search for more gold, gold to make them wealthy, gold to buy women or liquor, and gold to free them from drudgery.
The moving torrent of men awakened restlessness with Matt Bardoul, and he felt the old urge to get into the drive, to join the crowd, to fight for what gold he could find and come out with wealth if he was lucky or strong. Yet as he watched the pushing and shoving in the street, as he saw their hard, bearded faces, he saw that here there was much that was grand and fine, but underneath it there was something relentless and ugly, too.
For the first time, men had found a continent lying open under their hands, untouched, undefiled. Here, for the first time, men had the opportunity to build a great future, to make a new world of their own, to build on all this natural wealth a world of democracy and freedom.
A few came with the vision, but then the others began to come and they swarmed over the land like locusts, ripping its treasures from the earth, defiling its streams with silt, tearing down the forests and then moving on to desolate new land. All of it in a wild, desperate driving greed, the urge to get while the getting was good.
Courage there was in plenty, and strength. There was rough-handed good fellowship, sympathy for the underdog, the quick, impulsive, quixotic sympathy of the man who will fight another man for a dollar or an idea and then give the dollar to the first man who passes with a hard luck story.
In the short view there was much good in this westward trek, but in the long view it was a mad rush of greed and rapine, the lust of men who ripped the wealth from the land and then deserted it. And it was a time not soon to pass, for as the first comers moved on the more patient thieves followed them, the fat and the weak who would be content with piling up pennies rather then grabbing the dollars.
Every desire to conserve, to repair the damage to forests or grazing land, or to halt the blind looting of natural wealth would be fought bitterly as an attack upon human rights. It was an epic of strength, of heroism, and of greed.
The first comers skimmed the surface cream, then hurried on to get the cream elsewhere, and behind them came the coyotes and the buzzards to take the scraps from the bones. These slower ones took more years but left greater desolation, and neither the first comers nor the later ones had any thought for the generations that were to come that would be hungry for timber, hungry for minerals, and starving for top soil.
Matt Bardoul was a part of it. Destiny, luck, or call it as you will, decreed that he would be hurled into the seething maelstrom of a new land aborning. And he was one of the few who could see what was happening, who could look upon the scene with some bit of historical perspective.
Like a young man who inherits a fortune the people of the country were spending their birthright in a wild orgy of finance and greed, heedless of the years to come. They were spending their capital without thinking that someday there had to be an end.
Turning on his heel, Matt shoved through the doors of the IXL, and wormed his way through the sweating, laughing, cursing crowd to the bar. He had no more than won his place and called his order to the harried bartender when a bellow broke out behind him.
“Matt! Matt Bardoul! By all that’s holy!”
He forced his shoulder around, recognizing the voice, and a grin broke over his sun browned face. A huge, bearded man with almost as much hair on his chest as in his beard was plunging through the crowd.
“Buffalo Murphy! What the hell are you doing in Deadwood? I’d think this was too civilized for you! Last time we were together was up on the Humboldt, and you were headed for the Snake!”
“It’s been a long time! Hell, Man! Drink up an’ we’ll have another!” His shoulder length hair was as impressive as his beard. “I came down from the Yellowstone with Portugee Phillips.”
“What’s going on around? Anything interesting?” Matt tasted his rye. It was as strong and bitter as Indian whiskey and might have come from the same barrel as the last drink he had in Julesburg, “I’m on the loose,” he added, “had an idea I’d ride up to Virginia City or Bannack.”
Murphy leaned closer, glancing left and right. “Stick around, boy,” he whispered confidentially, “there’s something good in the wind. Some of the big men around camp are getting together a wagon train for the Big Horns.”
“What is it?”
“Gold.” Murphy downed his drink. “Gold from the grass roots down, and lots of it. Creek bottoms covered with it, or so the story goes. I never saw any gold in the Big Horns myself, but then I wasn’t huntin’ gold, I was after beaver. Father DeSmet always claimed there was more gold there than in Californy.”
“Who’s back of this? Who found the gold?”
“Man named Tate Lyon. He was prospectin’ back in the Big Horns. He found gold, but his partner was killed an’ he had to get out, quickest an’ best way he could.”
“Know him?”
“No, I don’t. He’s a stranger to me. I’d never seen him before, but Brian Coyle an’ Herman Reutz set a lot of store by him, an’ they are smart enough.”
“How about the Sioux?”
“Quiet since the Custer fight. Terry an’ Gibbon hunted them down an’ knocked most of the fight out of them. Of course, the Sioux bein’ what they are, a body better keep his shootin’ iron handy when he rides into the Big Horns.”
He grabbed the bottle and filled their glasses. “It ain’t the Sioux that’s so bad, it’s some of these ornery thieves of white men. Lots of killin’ goin’ on in this camp, an’ there’s a lot of poison loose here.” He looked around at Matt. “Logan Deane’s in town.”
“Deane?” Matt Bardoul’s eyes narrowed at the thought. “The Colorado gunman? I see.”
“Thought you’d better know after what happened at Julesburg.” Murphy stared into his glass. “Bat Hammer’s here, too, an’ you’ll remember him. An’ you may have heard of Spinner Johns? He’s a sort of crazy mean killer who came up from the cow camps.”
If Logan Deane was in Deadwood it would mean trouble sooner or later. Plenty of trouble. Deane was a brother-in-law to Lefty King, a bad man who had come out on the bad end of a gunfight with Bardoul in Julesburg.
“What’s the plan behind this wagon train?”
“This here Tate Lyon went to Herman Reutz with his story and Reutz liked the sound of it. He called in Brian Coyle.
“Coyle was interested, an’ he’s one of the biggest men in camp. He come in here with a fine outfit an’ he’s got the money to make more. It seems he’d been discussin’ the chances of there bein’ gold in the Big Horns with Clive Massey and a former Army officer, Colonel Orvis Pearson.”
“I’ve heard of him.”
“Well, the four of them got their heads together an’ the plan is to head out to the Big Horns with a party of picked men, nothing but the best in wagons, stock, an’ goods. They will trail into the Big Horns, set up their own town, an’ file on all the best claims along those creeks.”