At Cedar Rapids, the train stopped for two hours, and Johnson decided to stretch his legs. Rounding the corner of the tiny station, which stood at the edge of wheat fields, he saw Marsh talking quietly to the scarred man—Cope’s man, Navy Joe Benedict. Their manner seemed familiar. After a time, Marsh reached in his pocket and handed something to Benedict; Johnson saw a flash of gold in the sunlight. He ducked behind the corner before being spotted and hurried back to the train.
When the train resumed, Johnson’s perplexity increased as Marsh immediately came to sit beside him.
“I wonder where Cope will go this summer?” Marsh said, as if thinking aloud.
Johnson said nothing.
“I wonder where Cope will go?” Marsh said again.
“Very good question,” Johnson said.
“I doubt that he, like us, is going to Colorado.”
“I wouldn’t know.” Johnson was beginning to tire of this game, and allowed himself to stare directly into Marsh’s eyes, holding his gaze.
“Of course not,” Marsh said quickly. “Of course not.”
They crossed the Missouri in early evening at Council Bluffs, the terminus for the Chicago and North Western Railway. Across the bridge, on the Omaha side, the Union Pacific Railroad took over and continued all the way to San Francisco. The Union Pacific depot was a great open shed, and it was packed with travelers of the rudest sort. Here were rugged men, painted women, border ruffians, pickpockets, soldiers, crying children, food vendors, barking dogs, thieves, grandparents, gunfighters—a great confused mass of humanity, all fairly glowing with the fever of speculation.
“Black Hillers,” Marsh explained. “They outfit here before they go to Cheyenne and Fort Laramie, and from there travel northward to the Black Hills in search for gold.”
The students, impatient for a taste of the “real West,” were delighted, and imagined that they, too, had become more real themselves.
But despite the fevered excitement, Johnson found the sight sad. In his journal he recorded, “The hopes of humanity for wealth and fame, or at least for creature comfort, can delude them so easily! For surely only a handful of the people here will find what they are seeking. And the rest will meet with disappointment, hardship, sickness, and perhaps death from starvation, Indians, or marauding robbers who prey on the hopeful, questing pioneers.”
And he added the ironic note: “I am most heartily glad that I am not going to the dangerous and uncertain Black Hills.”
The West
Beyond Omaha the real West began, and aboard the train, everyone felt renewed excitement, tempered by the advice of older travelers. No, they would not see buffalo—in the seven years since the transcontinental rail lines opened, the buffalo had disappeared from view along the rail side, and indeed the legendary great herds of animals were fast disappearing altogether.
But then came the electrifying cry: “Indians!”
They ran to the opposite side of the car, pressed their faces to the glass. They saw three teepees in the distance, surrounded by a half dozen ponies and dark silhouetted figures, standing and watching the train go by. Then the Indians were gone, vanished behind a hill.
“What tribe are those?” Johnson asked. He was sitting next to Marsh’s assistant Gall.
“Pawnee, probably,” Gall said indifferently.
“Are they hostile?”
“Can be.”
Johnson thought of his mother. “Will we see more Indians?”
“Oh yes,” Gall said. “Lots of ’em where we’re going.”
“Really?”
“Yes, and probably riled up, too. There’s going to be a full-on Sioux War over the Black Hills.”
The federal government had signed a treaty with the Sioux in 1868, and as part of that treaty, the Dakota Sioux retained exclusive rights to the Black Hills, a landscape sacred to them. “That treaty was unnecessarily favorable to the Sioux,” Gall said. “The government even agreed to remove all forts and army outposts in the region.”
And it was a huge region, for in 1868, the Wyoming, Montana, and Dakota Territories still seemed distant and unapproachable wilderness. No one in Washington had understood how quickly the West would open up. Yet one year after the treaty had been signed, the transcontinental railroads began service, providing access in days to land that could previously be reached only by weeks of difficult overland travel.
Even so, the Sioux lands might have been respected had not Custer discovered gold during a routine survey in the Black Hills in 1874. News of gold fields, coming in the midst of a nationwide recession, was irresistible.
“Even in the best times, there’s no way to keep men from gold,” Gall said. “And that’s a plain fact.”
Although forbidden by the government, prospectors sneaked into the sacred Black Hills. The army mounted expeditions in ’74 and ’75 to chase them out, and the Sioux killed them whenever they found them. But still the prospectors came, in ever increasing numbers.
Believing the treaty had been broken, the Sioux went on the warpath. In May of 1876, the government ordered the army to quell the Sioux uprising.
“Then the Indians are in the right?” Johnson asked.
Gall shrugged. “You can’t stop progress, and that’s a plain fact.”
“We will be near the Black Hills?”
Gall nodded. “Near enough.”
Johnson’s understanding of geography, always vague, allowed his imagination free rein. He stared out at the wide-stretching plains, which seemed suddenly more desolate and unappealing.
“How often do Indians attack white people?”
“Well, they’re unpredictable,” Gall said. “Like wild animals, you never know what they’ll do, because they’re savages.”
West of Omaha the train climbed steadily and imperceptibly as it entered the high plains leading to the Rocky Mountains. They saw more animals now—prairie dogs, the occasional antelope, and coyotes loping in the distance near sunset. The towns became smaller, more desolate: Fremont, Kearney Junction, Alkali, Ogallala, Julesburg, and finally the notorious Sidney, where the conductor warned the students not to get off “if they valued their lives.”
Of course they all got off to look.
What they saw was a line of wooden storefronts, a town composed, wrote Johnson, “almost entirely of outfitters, stables, and saloons, and doing a brisk commerce in all three. Sidney was the town nearest to the Black Hills, and it was filled with emigrants, most of whom found prices outrageously high. The town’s reputation for murder and cut-throat life was not demonstrated to us, but then we had only stopped an hour.”
But they were not long disappointed, because the Union Pacific train was now speeding them westward to a still more notorious locus of vice and crime: Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory.
Travelers loaded their six-shooters coming into Cheyenne. And the conductor took Marsh aside to recommend that his party hire a guard, to see them safely through the town.
“Such preliminaries,” wrote Johnson, “gave us a most pleasurable nervous anticipation, for we imagined a lawless wild place which proved to be just that—a figment of our imaginations.”
Cheyenne turned out to be a rather orderly and settled place, with many brick buildings among those of wood-frame construction, but it was not entirely peaceful. Cheyenne boasted one schoolhouse, two theaters, five churches, and twenty gambling saloons. A contemporary observer wrote that “gambling in Cheyenne, far from being merely an amusement or recreation, rises to the dignity of a legitimate occupation—the pursuit of nine-tenths of the population, both permanent and transient.”
Gambling halls were open around the clock, and provided the major source of revenue to the town. Some indication of the business they did can be judged from the fact that the proprietors paid the city a license of $600 per year for each table, and each saloon had six to twelve green baize tables going at once.
The enthusiasm for gambling was not lost on the students, as they checked into the Inter-Ocean
Hotel in Cheyenne, where Marsh had previously arranged a special rate. Although the best hotel in town, it was, noted Johnson, “a cockroach-infested dump, where the rats scurry up and down the walls, squeaking at all hours.” Nevertheless, each student was given a private room, and after soaking in hot baths, they were ready for a night on the town.
A Night in Cheyenne
Timid, they set forth as a group—twelve earnest young down-Easters, still wearing their high collars and bowler hats, strolling from saloon to saloon with as much nonchalance as they could muster. For the town, which had appeared disappointingly tame by day, assumed a positively sinister aspect at night.
In the yellow light of the saloon windows, the boardwalk crowd of cowboys, gunmen, gamblers, and cutthroats looked at them with amusement. “These varmints’d kill you as soon as smile at you,” said one student melodramatically. Feeling the unfamiliar weight of their new Smith & Wesson revolvers dragging at their hips, the students tugged at their guns, adjusting their weight.
One man stopped them. “You look like nice fellers,” he told the group. “Take some friendly advice. In Cheyenne, don’t touch your guns ’less you mean to use ’em. Round here, people don’t look at your face, they look at your hands, and a great deal of drinking is done in these precincts at night.”
There were not only gunfighters on the boardwalk. They passed several nymphs du pave, heavily painted, calling out teasingly to them from dark doorways. Altogether they found it exotic and thrilling, their first experience of the real West, the dangerous West they had been waiting for. They entered several saloons, sampled the harsh liquor, played hands of keno and 21. One student pulled out a pocket watch. “Nearly ten, and we haven’t seen a shooting yet,” he said, with a tinge of disappointment.
Within minutes, they saw a shooting.
“It happened astonishingly fast,” Johnson noted.
One moment, angry shouts and curses; the next moment, chairs scraped back and men ducking away while the two principals snarled at each other, though they were just a few feet apart. They were both gamblers of the roughest sort. “Make your move, then,” one said, and as the other went for his pistol, the first drew his gun and shot him right in his abdomen. There was a great cloud of black powder and the shot man was thrown back across the room by the impact, his clothes burning from the close shooting. He bled heavily, moaned indecipherably, twitched for a minute, then lay quite dead. Some of the others hustled the shooter out. The town marshal was summoned, but by the time he arrived, most of the gamblers had returned to their tables, to the games that had been so recently interrupted.
It was a cold-blooded display, and the students—no doubt in shock—were relieved when they heard the sound of music from the theater next door. When several gamblers left the tables to see the show, they followed hurriedly along to see this next attraction.
And here, unexpectedly, William Johnson fell in love.
The Pride De Paree Theater was a two-story triangular affair with the stage at the wide end, tables on the floor, and balconies mounted high on the walls at both sides. Balcony seats were the most expensive and desirable, though they were farthest from the stage, and so they bought those.
The show, observed Johnson, consisted of “singing, dancing, and petticoat flouncing, the rudest sort of entertainment, but the assembled patrons greeted it with such enthusiastic cheers that their pleasure infected our more discriminating tastes.”
Soon enough they learned the value of balcony seats, for overhead were trapeze bars, on which swung comely young women in scanty costumes and mesh tights. As they arced back and forth, the men in the balconies reached out to tuck dollar bills into the folds of their costumes. The girls appeared to know many of the customers, and there was a deal of good-natured banter high in the air, the girls crying, “Watch them hands, Fred,” and “Mighty big cigar you got there, Clem,” and other endearments.
One student sniffed, “They are no better than prostitutes,” but the others enjoyed the spectacle, shouting and tucking dollar bills with the rest, and the girls, seeing new faces and distinctive Eastern clothes, maneuvered their swings to come close to their balcony again and again.
It was all good fun, and then the girls overhead changed to a new set, and the swinging began again, and one of them came close to their balcony. Laughing, Johnson reached for another dollar bill, and then his eyes met those of the new girl, and the raucous sound of the theater faded away, and time seemed to stop, and he was aware of nothing but the dark intensity of her gaze and the pounding of his own heart.
Her name was Lucienne—“It’s French,” she explained, wiping the light sheen of perspiration from her shoulders.
They were downstairs, sitting at one of the floor tables, where the girls were allowed to have a drink with customers between shows. The other students had gone back to the hotel, but Johnson stayed, hoping Lucienne would come out, and she had. She had sashayed right to his table. “Buy me a drink?”
“Anything you want,” Johnson said. She ordered whiskey, and he had one, too. And then he asked her name, and she told him.
“Lucienne,” he repeated. “Lucienne. A lovely name.”
“Lots of girls in Paris are named Lucienne,” she announced, still wiping the perspiration. “What’s yours?”
“William,” he said. “William Johnson.” Her skin glowed pink; her hair was jet-black, her eyes dark and dancing. He was entranced.
“You look a gent,” she said, smiling. She had a way of smiling with her mouth closed, not revealing her teeth. It made her seem mysterious and self-contained. “Where’re you from?”
“New Haven,” he said. “Well, I grew up in Philadelphia.”
“Back East? I thought you were different. I could tell from your clothes.”
He worried that this might not find favor with her, and suddenly didn’t know what to say.
“Do you have a sweetheart back East?” she asked innocently, helping the conversation along.
“I—” He stopped, then thought it best to tell her the truth. “I was awfully fond of a girl in Philadelphia a few years ago, but she didn’t feel the same way about me.” He looked into her eyes. “But that was—that was a long time ago.”
She looked down and smiled softly and he told himself that he must think of something to say.
“Where are you from?” he asked. “You don’t have a French accent.” Perhaps she had come from France as a child.
“I’m from St. Louis. Lucienne’s only my name de stage, see,” she said cheerfully. “Mr. Barlow—the manager—Mr. Barlow wants everyone in the show to have a French name, because the theater is the Pride de Paree Theater, see. He’s very nice, Mr. Barlow.”
“Have you been in Cheyenne long?”
“Oh no,” she said. “Before, I was in the theater in Virginia City, where we did proper plays by English writers and such, but that closed with the typhoid last winter. I was going home to see my mother, see, but I only had money to get here.”
She laughed, and he saw one of her front teeth was chipped. This little imperfection only made him love her more. She was obviously an independent young woman, making her own way in life.
“And you?” she asked. “You are going to the Black Hills? Looking for gold?”
He smiled. “No, I am with a group of scientists who are digging for fossils.” Her face clouded. “Fossils. Old bones,” he explained.
“Is there a good livelihood in that?”
“No, no. It’s for science,” he explained.
She placed a warm hand on his arm, and the touch electrified him. “I know you gold diggers have secrets,” she said. “I won’t tell.”
“Really, I am searching for fossils.”
She smiled again, content to drop the matter. “And how long are you in Cheyenne?”
“Alas, I am here for only one night. Tomorrow I leave to go farther west.”
This thought already filled him with a delicious pain, but she did not seem to care one way
or another. In her straightforward way, she said, “I must do another show in an hour, and stay with the customers another hour after that, but then I am free.”
“I’ll wait,” he said. “I’ll wait all night if you wish it.”
She leaned over and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Until then.” And she swept away, across the crowded room, where other men awaited her company.
The rest of the evening passed as lightly as a dream. Johnson felt no fatigue, and he was happy to sit until she was finished with her performances. They met outside the theater. She had changed to a demure dress of dark cotton. She took his arm.
A man passed them on the sidewalk. In the darkness: “See you later, Lucy?”
“Not tonight, Ben,” she laughed. Johnson turned to glare at the man, but she explained, “It’s just my uncle. He looks after me. Where are you staying?”
“The Inter-Ocean Hotel.”
“We can’t go there,” she said. “They’re very strict about the rooms.”
“I’ll walk you home,” Johnson said.
She gave him a funny look, and then smiled. “All right. That would be nice.”
As they walked, she rested her head on his shoulder.
“Tired?”
“Some.”
The night was warm, the air pleasant. Johnson felt a wonderful peace descend over him.
“I’m going to miss you,” he said.
“Oh, me, too.”
“I’ll be back, though.”
“When?”
“Late August or so.”
“August,” she repeated softly. “August.”
“I know it’s a long time away—”
“Not so long—”
“But I’ll have more time to spend then. I’ll leave the party and stay with you, how does that sound?”
She relaxed against his shoulder. “That would be nice.” They walked in silence. “You’re nice, William. You’re a nice boy.”