Cap and I rode through some of the wildest and most beautiful country under the sun, following the Rio Grande up higher and still higher into the mountains. It was hard to believe this was the same river along which I'd fought Comanches and outlaws in Texas--that we camped of a night beside water that would run into the Gulf one day.
Night after night our smoke lifted to the stars from country where we found no tracks. Still, cold, and aloof, the snow-capped peaks lifted above us. Cap, he was a changed man, gentler, somehow, and of a night he talked like he'd never done down below. And sometimes I opened up my Blackstone and read, smelling the smoke of aspen and cedar, smelling the pines, feeling the cold wind off the high snow.
It was like that until we came down Bear Creek into the canyon of the Vallecitos.
West of us rose up the high peaks of the Grenadier and Needle Mountains of the San Juan range. We pulled up by a stream that ran cold and swift from the mountains. Looking up at the peaks I wondered again: what was it up there that got the meat I left hanging in that tree?
Cap, he taken a pan and went down to the creek. In the late evening he washed it out and came back to the fire.
There were flecks of gold in the pan . . . we'd found color. Here we would stake our claim.
Chapter VII
We forted up for trouble.
Men most likely had been following us. Sooner or later they would find us, and we could not be sure of their intentions. Moreover, the temper of the Utes was never too certain a thing.
Riding up there, I'd had time for thinking. Where gold was found, men would come.
There would be trouble--we expected that--but there would be business too. The more I thought, the more it seemed to me that the man who had something to sell would be better off than a man who searched for gold.
We had made camp alongside a spring not far from the plunging stream that came down the mountainside and emptied into the Vallecitos. I was sure this was the stream I had followed into the high valley where my gold was. Our camp was on a long bench above the Vallecitos, with the mountainside rising steeply behind it and to the east. We were in a clump of scattered ponderosa pine and Douglas fir.
First, we shook out our loops and snaked some deadfall logs into spaces between the trees. Next we made a corral by cutting some lodgepole pine --the lodgepole pine grew mostly, it seemed, in areas that had been burned over--and laying the ends of the poles in tree forks or lashing them to trees with rawhide. It was hard work, but we both knew what needed to be done and there was little talk and no waste effort.
Short of sundown I walked out of the trees and along the bench. Looking north, we faced the widest spot we had so far seen in the canyon of the Vallecitos. It was a good mile north of our camp.
"That's where we'll build the town," I told Cap. He took his pipe out of his mouth. "Town?" "Where there's gold, there'll be folks. Where folks are, there's wanting. I figure we can set up store and supply those wants. Whether they find gold or not, they will be eating and needing tools, powder, blankets--all that sort of thing. It seems to be the surest way, Cap, if a man wants to make him a living. Gold is found and is mined, but the miners eat."
"You won't find me tending store," Cap said. "Me, neither. But we'll lay out the town site, you and me. Well stake the lots, and we'll watch for a good man. Believe me, he'll come along. Then we'll set him up in business."
"You Sacketts," Cap said, "sure play hell once you get out of the mountains. Only thing puzzles me is, what kept you there so long?"
The next few days we worked sunrise to sundown. We paced off a street maybe four hundred yards long, we laid out lots, and planned the town. We figured on a general store, a livery stable, a hotel and boarding house, and two saloons. We spotted a place for a blacksmith shop, and for an assayer.
We cut logs and dragged some of them down to the site for the store, and we put up signs indicating that any folks who came along were to see us about the lots.
Meantime, we worked a little on the claim-- rarely more than a pan or two a day because we had much else to do. But we found color--not a lot, but some.
We also improved our fort. Not that it looked much like one, and we didn't want it to, but we were set up to fight off an attack if it came.
Neither one of us had much trust in the peaceful qualities of our fellowmen. Seems to me most of the folks doing all the talk about peace and giving the other fellow the benefit of the doubt were folks setting back to home in cushy chairs with plenty of grub around and the police nearby to protect them. Back there, men would set down safe of an evening and write about how cruel the poor Indian was being treated out west They never come upon the body of a friend who had been staked out on an ant hill or had a fire built on his stomach, nor had they stood off a charge of Indians.
Personally, I found Indians people to respect. Their ways weren't our ways, and a lot of virtues they were given credit for by white men were only ideas in a white man's head, and no Indian would have considered them virtues. Mercy rarely had any part in the make-up of an Indian.
Folks talk about human nature, but what they mean is not human nature, but the way they are brought up. It seems to me that folks who are brought up to Christian ways of thought don't believe in the taking of life, but the Indian had no such conception. If you were a stranger you were an enemy. If you gave him gifts it was usually because you were afraid of him ... or that's how he thought.
Indians were fighting men. Fighting was their greatest sport and occupation. Our people look up to atheltes of one kind or another, but the Indian saved all his respect for fighting men. And an Indian would count the scalp of a woman or a child as well as a man's.
This was wrong to our way of thinking, but his thinking was altogether different.
The Indian, before the white man took up the West, was physically cleaner than the white man. He bathed often, and it wasn't until white man's liquor and poverty caught up with him that he lost the old ways. But the Indian warrior would have been ashamed of all the milk-sop talk about the poor Indian. He was strong, he was proud, and he was able to handle his own problems.
It was Sunday before trouble showed. Sunday was a quiet time for us. Cap was busy scraping and tanning some elk and deer hides, and after cleaning my weapons and catching a bait of trout, I settled down to study Blackstone.
It was a warm, lazy day, with sunlight sparkling on the creek waters, and scarce a breeze stirring the pines overhead. Time to time my thoughts would drift from my study to that high valley. If I wanted to go up and get some of that gold I would have to find another way into that valley before snow fell and closed it off.
"Tell..."
Cap spoke softly, and I got up and walked over to him. He was looking off through the trees, and we could see four riders over by the town site. They turned toward us, and I got out my field glass. There was nothing familiar about any of them. While I watched they started in our direction, and the last man in line checked his pistol.
Down the bench, maybe fifty yards or so, they slowed to a stop, seeing the corral with the horses in it, and the smoke from our fire. Then they came on up.
Me, I was wearing an old U.S. Army hat, a wore-out blue army shirt and jeans, and I had me a belt gun on. When I sighted them coming I taken up my Winchester, and Cap and me stood out to greet them.
" 'Light," I said. "Ain't often we have visitors."
"Looks of that town site, you must be expectin' plenty," one of them said. "What would a man want with a town here?"
"Well, sir," I said, "we took a notion. Cap Roun-tree an' me, we like to go to town of an evening when the chores are done. There ain't no town close up, so we decided to build our own. We laid her out and started cuttin' timber. Then we held an election."