The Adventures Of The Brothers Dent (The Mountain Men Book 3) Read online

  “Hello,” said Gabe, as he and Josh lit down from their horses.

  “Hello yourself,” said the whiskered man as he hustled back to a beautiful black stallion from whence he had just taken the Mexican saddle and saddle blanket. Without looking back at the two men, he began currying down the horse. Then without looking up from his horse-currying chores, the man said, “What can I do fer you two fellas?”

  “We need a place to care and overwinter our stock and store our tack. Would you have any suggestions?” asked Josh.

  “Sure do, Young Fella,” replied the man. Standing up, he extended a grimy “mitt” and strongly shook the hands of Josh and Gabe saying, “I be Jensen Sutta, owner of this here place. If you want to overwinter your stock, there is a place out back in my horse corrals and room in my tack shed fer your particulars.” Then taking a really good look at Josh and Gabe, he said, “Damn, ‘Martha,’ you two be big-uns, that is fer sure.” Before Josh and Gabe could respond to the genial fellow and his comments, Jensen continued. “If you boys are lookin’ to overwinter your stock, that means you be here fer a while. Are either of you lookin’ fer work in the meantime? If so, I could use a couple of ‘horses’ like you in my drayage business. My last two ‘helpers,’ if you can call them that, skedaddled in ’07. They ran off with Manuel Lisa when he went upriver to open up a fur trade business and establish a trading post up north somewhere. If you be lookin’ fer work, I be interested in hiring the two of you fer the duration. I pay board and found, plus fifty cents per day for the each of you in Spanish silver coin if ye be interested. Then when the river freezes up, you can help me around here with the overwintering stock I board, some blacksmithin,’ wagon repairs, and ice cuttin’ and gatherin’ fer my two icehouses, if ye be willin’ that is.”

  Finally running down on the offers and questions, Jensen stopped talking and looked long and hard at Josh and Gabe through a pair of squinting eyes. Josh just grinned at the luck at hand. That was just what he and Gabe had in mind. A place to board their stock, store their gear, jobs to give them a source of income, and some “cover” as they looked around town for Bill Jenkins and his kin. If that also included grub and a place to lay their heads when the weather got nasty during the winter, that was all the better, he thought. Looking over at Gabe and getting a grin of affirmation from his younger brother, Josh turned to Jensen to respond.

  But before he could accept the proprietor’s offer, the bewhiskered little man started up once again. “I would throw in hay and grain fer your livestock, free horseshoeing, and no rent fer the storage of your tack if the two of you be willin’. Damn, the two of you ‘horses’ would be doing me a huge favor if you were more than willin’ to do some hard work fer fair return,” he continued with a hopeful grin under his grossly tobacco-stained whiskers.

  “Whoa, Old Timer, afore you talk a leg off of me and my brother. Rest easy there. You got yourself a deal. Me and my brother would be more than willing to work for you in the drayage end of things. Plus, we both be fair blacksmiths and damn good on the shoeing end of things when it comes to horses, mules or oxen in our own right,” replied Josh with a grin. With those words, Jensen stuck out his hand and the three men shook on the deal. “However, me and my brother plan on leaving in the spring to go up north and trap some beaver if things work out for us. Knowing that, if that short-term employment suits you, then it suits us as well. Now,” continued Josh, “we need to unload these tired pack animals. Also, where is there a safe and clean place for me and my brother to throw our bedding and personals?”

  “Your work offer suits me jest fine, Young Fella. Follow me, you two,” said Jensen with a grin, as he led them next door to a hotel alongside his livery. Over the doorway to the hotel was a small sign advertising, MA SUTTAS’ BOARDINGHOUSE AND EATERY. “This is the place my wife runs,” said Jensen as he swept through the front door of the establishment, closely followed by Josh and Gabe. “Ma, these two are my new helpers. See that they get a big room on the first floor because they are here fer the winter and they have a lot of gear to stow while they are here.”

  A large woman with a red apron who had been rolling out pie dough turned and faced the three men. She was a ruddyfaced woman and only had one eye, with the other represented by an empty, slightly draining socket! Josh and Gabe, surprised at what they were seeing, found it hard not to stare at the eyeless socket. (They later discovered Ma Sutta had her eye shot out with a slingshot by her cousin by mistake when she was a young girl.) Ignoring the staring two men, the woman said, “You boys had better be more of a man than those last two rascals my old man hired. If not, I will take a broom to you two and give you a damn good hiding, no matter how big you are,” she said in a motherly tone of voice. “And then, my old man will get more of the same if he has gone off and once again hired a couple of lazy bums,” she continued in a more serious tone of voice. When she did, she sharply squinted at Jensen with her one good eye as if to emphasize her “drubbing” threat when it came to hiring good quality help...

  Both boys just laughed and Gabe said, “Mrs. Sutta, me and my brother are not strangers to hard work. We will do a good job for you and your husband. Especially if there are some of those good-smelling pies thrown into the deal every now and then for good measure.”

  She just laughed and said, “Follow me, you two, and I will show you your room. My beds are not big enough for the two of you though. So, I will have my ‘nigra’ take the beds out and throw down a couple of thick straw mattresses and some heavy ticking for the two of you to sleep on. Besides, from the rough- hewn looks of the two of you, I would wager you would be happier on the floor instead of a squeaky ole bed that sags in the middle anyhows.”

  “That would be fine for the two of us, if you don’t mind,” said Josh with a grin, really taking a liking to Ma Sutta. In fact, her amiable ways tended to remind him of a time long past when his ma was still alive.

  With that, she led them to a large adjoining first floor bedroom where they threw down their personals. Then it was back outside to their horses and pack string. There they procured their hard- to-replace goods of value, such as firearms and saddlebags, from their pack animals. Those were brought into their bedroom and stored in a comer as well. Then the rest of their gear and tack was stowed in Jensen’s large storage room and covered with a heavy canvas tarp. Gabe and Jensen then took their horses and mules, led them out to the back of the livery, and turned them into a large set of corrals with his other customers’ livestock for safekeeping.

  Coming back into the main part of the livery and blacksmith shop, Jensen said, “You boys will be fed your meals in my wife’s hotel kitchen as part of the deal. Also, I expect to see the two of you here ready to go no later than seven each morning and we work until dark. I have a three span of matched bays (two horses to a span), which you boys will be using, and a double hitch of wagons (two wagons pulled one behind the other) as well. You will be going down to the docks every day, sometimes several times, and picking up goods from the keelboats and flatboats destined fer the town’s businesses.

  “The dock ‘nigras’ will load your wagons from the boats. (Steamboats did not arrive in the St. Louis area until around 1819. That was due to there only being primitive steam engines in use at the time. The engines that did not have the power or reliability to push heavy loads upriver in those days. The first steamboat to arrive in St. Louis was the Independence and only then during high water.) You will be expected to offload the goods yourselves at the different places of business as described on the bills of lading. Once done, return here fer your next set of orders. You two will continue doing this until the river freezes up and the boats can no longer deliver goods here from New Orleans or go back down. Then I expect fer the two of you to help me with the livery business, feeding and care of our boarded livestock. That will also include shoeing as required and helping in the blacksmith end of the business during the winter. When that work be done, I will show the two of you how to cut and load ice in my two i
cehouses. Drinking, hell-raising and whoring around must be kept to a minimum. Otherwise, my wife will take a broom to the three of us. No smoking in the hay barn but chewing is all right. Jest don’t spit where we have to work. Any questions?”

  Josh and Gabe just looked at each other with big grins. Talk about falling into a bucket of slop and coming out smelling like a rose! To their way of thinking, they had it made. A job made to order which would provide the necessary “cover” as they looked throughout St. Louis for Bill and his killing kin. Plus a place that provided board and room, care for their livestock, and paid some hard Spanish silver dollars for their efforts in the process. And in between, if they minded their “p’s and q’s,” maybe a homemade pie or two from Ma Sutta’s kitchen. Yes, they were set for what the winter had to offer.

  Additionally, this time would give them the opportunity to meet and mix with Mountain Men fresh back from trapping in the Trans-Mississippi West. Those meetings would provide the opportunity to question them as to what life was like on that frontier and what they needed in the way of supplies in order to survive as trappers. Lastly, that would provide information on what they should expect in their new life regarding the Indians and the business side of things once they became free trappers. These free independent trappers not allied with any fur company or beholden to the traders through debt were considered the elite in the fur trapping community.

  For the rest of the fall in ’08 and into early winter, the Dent brothers worked for Jensen in the drayage business. When freeze-up arrived and the flow of goods from places south on the Mississippi or from down the Missouri River dried up because of the thick ice, the brothers moved into the livery, shoeing, wagon building, ice procuring, and blacksmithing business.

  Additionally, Jensen was a part-time gunsmith as well among his many talents. He had built up a busy gun repair business and saw to it that Josh and Gabe learned the repair trade as well, a trade that would prove invaluable when the two of them were away from civilization in the Trans-Mississippi West backcoun- try in the days soon to come.

  However, during their free times, Josh and Gabe frequented every saloon, whorehouse, and eatery in St. Louis, quietly looking for signs of Black Bill Jenkins and his killing kin. After all, they still had an oath taken at their parents and kinfolk’s gravesites to fulfill. Those desires had not yet been addressed nor died when the trail had gone cold. But there were lots of places of business in St. Louis which Bill and his kin could frequent and Josh and Gabe made the rounds faithfully and continually in the hopes of ridding themselves of the demons they carried in their souls. Come the deep winter of ’08, the boys had not found hide nor hair of the Jenkins clan. Again, it was as if they had disappeared underground and not one whiff of their existence could be found in St. Louis.

  Then during one of their forays in February of ’09, the boys got a break. Visiting a saloon one evening near the docks of St. Louis, one frequented by rough-and-tumble riverboat men, they chanced upon a giant of a man and a keelboat business owner named Tom Warren. Tom was a mountain of a man, standing a good three inches taller than the brothers who were six-and-a- half feet themselves. And when Warren shook their hands, you could tell there was one hell of a man on the other end of it! Tom owned a large fleet of keelboats and when the boys bought him a drink and began asking about the trade he was in, Tom loosened up and told them one heck of a string of stories.

  It seemed he had been recently contracted by Manuel Lisa, a wealthy and shrewd St. Louis businessmen of Spanish descent. According to Tom, Lisa had talked to Lewis and Clark upon their return to St. Louis in ’06 after their great expedition to the Pacific Ocean. In that discussion, Lisa learned the rivers and small streams ran “brown” with a furred creature named the beaver. Many from the Corps of Discovery told tales of just walking up to the plentiful beaver and killing them with a stick! Realizing there was a huge profit to be made in the fur trapping business by any businessman willing to take a risk, Lisa had contracted with Tom for the use of two of his keelboats and crews come the spring of ’07—contracted, as Tom told them, for a long trip up the Mississippi to the Missouri, then north and west to the Yellowstone River. From the Yellowstone, Tom was to take his keelboats up to the mouth of the Bighorn River.

  Come the spring of ’07, after the ice had gone out, Tom had obliged Lisa. On that trip, Tom, with Lisa, took his heavily loaded keelboats full of trade goods and supplies up the rivers with about fifty men. A number of those men walked along the keelboats and the river with a herd of horses and mules for later use as transportation, wagon hauling, and packing, once they had arrived at their new fort’s destination.

  Once they had traveled up the Yellowstone to where it joined the mouth of the Bighorn River, Lisa built an outpost he called Fort Raymond. A fort which doubled as a place of protection for a contingent of his men and a place of trade for the surrounding friendly Indians, and a trading post for his soon-to-be Mountain Men trappers.

  Using his contingent of men, Lisa built the fort, set up a booming blacksmithing business, and began a brisk trade of white man’s goods for furs with the local tribes of Crow, Sioux, and Flatheads. Come the fall of’07, Lisa had half of his men outfitted and sent out into the countryside to trap the many beaver-laden streams, ponds, marshes, and rivers. Soon, furs and hides taken by the Indians in the winter of ’06 and spring of ’07 from muskrat, beaver, river otter, raccoons, deer, and buffalo were piling up back at the fort. In short order, Lisa had one of Toni’s keelboats loaded with his newfound riches. Releasing that keelboat in the late fall of ’07, Lisa had Tom bring it back to St. Louis so the furs could be sold through Lisa’s St. Louis Fur Company. The other keelboat overwintered in the Fort Raymond area and was to float back to St. Louis in the late fall of 1808 with ’07’s winter and ’08’s spring trappings. Shortly thereafter, Lisa planned on using a large number of Tom’s keelboats to haul even more supplies back up river to his fort in the late spring of ’09.

  Tom also indicated that while at the fort he discovered Lisa was a very shrewd, slightly crooked businessman. He reported that many times Lisa traded the surrounding Indians little or nothing for their high quality furs. That, plus trading them guns and drink for their furs, had led to much hard feeling among the various bands of Indians. This method of selective trading by Lisa with the Crow, Sioux, and Flatheads led to those tribes warring successfully against their ancestral enemies, the various bands of Blackfeet, because they were now better-armed. Lisa did not fully trust the Blackfeet and thereby withheld firearms, powder, flints, and lead from them. By so doing, he felt he reduced the chances of having such firearms used against him, his traders and the friendly bands of Indians.

  This created bitter hatred among the Blackfoot Nation—North Piegans, South Piegans, Blood, and Siksika Blackfoot—against the white traders due to those selective trading methods. That, in turn, led to the Blackfeet warring incessantly against the white trappers and traders throughout the area. This, and interference by the Hudson’s Bay Fur Company supporting and trading with the Blackfoot Nation, led to the incessant warfare among most Mountain Men in the northern Rockies, associated friendly tribes, and fur traders in the fur trapping era until the late 1840s. However, by the late 1870s, the buffalo, the Blackfoot Nation tribes’ principal source of meat, were gone. That and white man’s diseases had drastically reduced the Blackfoot Nation’s numbers in the United States to around 5,000 by the late 1800s. With that, the Blackfoot Nation’s peoples in the United States—tribal members are also found in Canada—were forced onto the reservations, where many more eventually starved.

  Then Tom provided information that quickened the boys’ hearts. Lisa’s earlier fifty-man contingent had more than their share of bad apples. One group of men in particular Tom remembered very clearly. It was comprised of four white men, whose leader was a large man with long flowing black hair and a like-colored beard! This group had proven quite quarrelsome with all the other men throughout the trip, especially after s
ome of their drinking and card playing sessions. Finally, when they arrived at the site of the new fort, Lisa had outfitted this group of particularly troublesome four men and hurried them off to trap by themselves in the wilds surrounding the Bighorn River. According to Tom, Lisa did so in order to get rid of the problems created between them and the other traders and trappers. That was the last he saw of them, as Tom could remember. But he distinctly remembered the big black-haired one called by the others by his first name of “Bill!”

  Furthermore, Tom advised he expected to be contacted by Lisa in early spring of that coming year once the ice went out to again resupply his fort. Once that happened, Tom was planning on loading thirteen keelboats with blankets, food stores, blacksmithing supplies, powder, rifles, whiskey, lead pigs, and such for the ’09 return trip. Tom also felt at that time Lisa would be recruiting once again for about 150 men to go north and trap in order to supply the fort with a continuing supply of furs and fur trappers, considering that twenty-five percent of Mountain Men disappeared every year due to accidents, horse wrecks, drownings, weather, or being killed by Indians or the hard-to- kill grizzly bear during the trappers’ short heyday.

  The three large-sized and affable men, fast becoming friends, spent the rest of the evening drinking and eating. As they did, they discussed the particulars relative to the fur trapping business in the upper reaches of the Trans-Mississippi West. However, Josh and Gabe had fixed in their minds the words Tom had spoken earlier. Especially those words relating to the large, disagreeable man named Bill with the black beard and three kin-like cohorts in Lisa’s party...