Far as the Eye Can See Read Free Page B

on a damn train. Got to St. Louis riding in a coach. Then bought a big red mare—I named her Cricket—and a fairly new .44 Colt Dragoon sidearm. I bought a army pup tent, some blankets, and a few cooking utensils. I bought ten pounds of coffee, some dried beans, smoked ham, and five pounds each of sugar and salt. Sugar was near a dollar a pound back then, so I spent most all I had. I also got some sowbelly and molasses; stocked up with whiskey and two canteens of water. I figured I’d fill those canteens whenever I needed to. But the best investment I made was the Evans repeater. It’s right difficult to load and takes a bit of time, but once you got all thirty-four of them shells in there, you can fight a long time. I picked up a hundred rounds of ammunition for the pistol and a box of two hundred for the carbine.
    I was ready to strike out on my own, but of course I wouldn’t head into this country by myself. Everybody said it was the place to be—with free land and open skies. Well, I’ll tell you: it’s beautiful. As pretty as anything you can find in your head, dreaming or awake. There ain’t nothing more beautiful. What folks don’t mention is the dry heat in summer, the long, cold, empty winters with snow falling and blowing sometimes for days at a stretch, and the ferocious storms all year-round. They don’t mention the clouds of locusts or the work you’ll do. Or who you’ll do it with.
    Anyway, it was in March of 1869 I followed a small wagon train, led by a man named Theo, north out of St. Louis, and rode along with them for about three or four hundred miles or so. He had a Crow Indian named Big Tree as his wagon master on the train, and one look at that fellow and you known where he got his name. He was more than six and a half feet tall and solid as stone. His face was smooth as a butcher block, with dark eyes hiding in the lee of his great forehead. Big Tree almost never smiled, but every now and then he would let out a loud sort of harrumph that was clearly the first notes in a pretty qualified laugh.
    I wasn’t with the train in no real sense, but I camped right in sight and helped hunt along the way sometimes. The women on the train cooked up what we killed and I shared in it when they invited me.
    I was alone, but it wasn’t something I wanted for myself. I mean, I didn’t come all the way out here to be by myself. I thought I’d make it, though; maybe I’d have women and respect and land. Lots of land. I wanted a place I could name and it would be what I’d leave on the earth when I died. To tell the truth, I didn’t never know what I wanted, but I was sure that I was a man of destiny.
    During the War of the Rebellion I joined the Union army seven times. I’d collect the bonus, then when I could I’d slip away, go back to some Northern city and change my name, spend the bonus, then enlist again. But eventually I ended up in a few battles. One or two is a lot of battles, to tell the truth, but you only need to see one to know you don’t want no part of no other.
    The truth is, I lived through some of the worst fighting near the end of the war: I felt the heat of bullets slicing air and snapping right by my face. I seen men dropping next to me in rows like something cut down by a thresher in a wheat field. And I stood there a facing it.
    I was a soldier off and on for almost three years. And when the war ended, I figured my future was going to be out in the open country where land was there for any fellow with the nerve to stake it out and call it his. That’s what I thought I was going to do. In such a big country, what could stop me? The government passed a law that said if I could stake it out, I was entitled to one hundred and sixty acres of free land.
    I had no kin to speak of. Just a aunt who was already in her late fifties and too old to even think about travel and change. She lived in Philadelphia and that’s where she thought I would return after the war. My mother died of