Transcript
Henry Harkins (0:00)
This episode is sponsored by Mount Athos. Results Purity and sustainability in every bott Just plains on and on. West of the Mississippi, there's only planes for a life's eternity of wandering. Such a vast canvas of land didn't suit the Tennessee man all too well. He was used to trees, trees cloaked by and by. In the morning, with the mist characteristic of the Smokies, he didn't realize the comfort that came from all the COVID At times, as a boy, he would work himself into a fright when camping in the woods. He felt closed in by the forest. He thought himself claustrophobic then, and it would almost send him into a proper start. But as he crossed the blank white plains of seemingly nothing but dust and chaparral, he realized he'd only just discovered real claustrophobia. With nothing around him at all but slate ground and blue sky, he felt naked. He imagined it to be how Adam and Eve felt when they heard God walking along in the cool of the garden's day, searching for them. How could so much space make one feel so boxed in? It was only his more steeled manhood nerves that kept him from losing his mind with the overwhelming emptiness. Each river or creek crossing of his wagon train became the most exciting thing he'd ever experienced before. For most of the banks had grooves of trees that provided precious breaks in the prairie. The water was somehow a lesser concern to him. So it was that Henry Harkins made the slow trek across the arid or otherwise tall grassy plains of North America in 1863, eventually, just hoping the rumor of mountains somewhere west had not been a joke pulled on him, he finally concluded that he'd believe in the mountains only when he started to climb their foothills. He could no longer imagine how anything other than dust and grass could and short brush fauna could exist in that part of the world. Perched on a hill, he could look all around him and see for what seemed to him hundreds of miles in any direction, a herd of buffalo grazing far off to the north, a mirage of what looked like people digging steel into the earth and striking or removing the fire God had put there to the south and emptiness to the west. At least, though Hawkins didn't know it, he was distracted from the summer heat and hunger and thirst that everyone else in the train was suffering from. They seem to mind the emptiness and flatness nearly as much as he did, but that only made them mind more important things, really. Thus they were really miserable. By midway through the boundless chaparral on the east side of Colorado, the dryness of the scrub oak gave any unobservant woman a sincere scratch. Harkins was the last one talking with any kind of passion. Everyone else had grown surly in the difficulty and fearful in the face of the Indian threat, but Harkins was still perfectly content to loudly complain night and day about the nothingness all around them. Everyone else thought it ironic that a man had so much to say about something he described himself as nothing. But there they were, listening to the grizzled and dried out Sawyer carry on about it day after day with increasingly worn out ears. All that fussing made Harkins less agreeable as well. He wasn't stoic or surly like the other folks, and he wasn't whiny about the children, but when a man talks only negatively about that one thing in life he doesn't like, it tends to make him less cheerful about everything else. And yet this didn't stop Harkins from letting out the first genuinely happy hollers that he had loosed since they crossed into Arkansas. Upon seeing the snow capped peaks of the Rockies far ahead of him like a rim of salt on the world's horizon. He wondered then that they probably were real and he wouldn't be forced to live out his days in misery at the hands of a cruel joke from the traveled folk back home. The growing glory of the mountains with each step of the horses made the final days of his emigration from Appalachia go by quickly. As if waking up from a lonely dream. He rose one morning from his tent to see the clear precipices reaching far up into the cold and dark outside of Denver where he had stayed the night. The time had finally come for his long anticipated split from the rest of the group. He had no wife or kids of his own, but he'd grown fond of some of the children in their train over the course of their journey and made sure to hand out some hard candies to them before unceremoniously saddling his sorrel and riding with his own small wagon off into the morning towards the south. He reasoned that since the intel he'd received about the mountains had been good, the additional intel about the less settled but rich areas just south of Denver must be good as well. As such, he made the lonely journey down to Colorado Springs in just over a day, pressed on after a long rest around the stockade of the newly erected Fort Carson, and finally decided to stop and set up shop in an arbitrary place outside of the tiny town of Rock Creek, which laid on the gently swelling eastern shoulders of The Blue Mountain. Here he wasted no time in acquainting himself with his neighbors and constructing his sawmill. Right away, Harkins felt good about his fortunes. He was not a particularly religious man, but he could hardly get the psalmist words, the lines have fallen for me in pleasant places out of his head. In those first days, though a little far away from the small main street, he found his neighbors to be very friendly and was able to doubtlessly confirm that the area was every bit as rich with timber and opportunity and as he had been promised it would be before the first chills of mid autumn arrived, he completed the basic framing and roofing of the sawmill and took in a dog he'd found in town that took a liking to him. By first snowfall, he was done with all the major construction and settled in for a cold but comfortable enough winter in his new home. In late winter the following year and further to the south in Cannon City, a man walked out of his cabin one fine March morning and began the ride up hardscrabble creek to his own sawmill. He had placed it so deep in the little canyon due to the fact that most of the townsfolk never expected to see old Bruce from morning until sunset had all but given way to the full dark of night, with the days slowly lengthening, though they could see the traces of him here and there. At dusk he'd be laughing in the saloon, playing cards with other sawyers at the table before going back to his cabin in preparation for an early morning. That evening, however, Bruce didn't join his friends at cards and never showed up to drink even a drop of whiskey. His mule and cart did show up, though apparently bereft of its master. The strong thing had rolled right on along toward town, a cart full of all the tools Bruce would normally have with him up at the mill. After a while of just sitting there, parked outside of the saloon, some of the men gawked at the mule perking up and turning around as if to make for the cabin. It all seemed somehow strange to them. They were each individually willing to chalk the strangeness up to the slight buzz they already had for the night that can sometimes trick a man into thinking small things or big things, vice versa. But then one of them voiced the odd sense they all felt. He was the youngest of them, fairly green as a professional miller, but one who'd been raised by a sawyer and knew the ropes better than most of the old men drifting in from the east to do the same thing. Though he was young, he was competent and therefore well thought of so the men hearkened to him and decided they ought to follow the mule to the cabin, just to check and make sure that Bruce was all right. When they arrived, they did not see so much as a single candle burning in the house. It would be odd for Bruce to be asleep already, unless he was ill. It would be odder still for him still to be at the sawmill so late. They spurred on and trotted carefully through the dark up the creek until they ran right into the threshold of Bruce's mill. Inside, without any warning at all, the half drunk men found the body of Francis Bruce dead from a gunshot wound to the chest. They'd later learn that he was killed by the infamous gang of fanatic Mexicans, the Bloody Espinosas. They were a threesome, two brothers and a cousin from a family that had grown jaded by what they perceived to be encroachment of the Americans into their own land. They'd moved out of the Mexican territory some years prior and into Colorado, but they behaved as though any white skinned neighbor was an alien worthy of capital punishment. As they herded sheep by the day, they terrorized the pioneers at night and soon gained a reputation for ruthless and bloodthirsty robbery. Francis Bruce was just one more in an already non negligible list of victims for the kin, but they weren't satisfied with him and struck out north to inflict more pain on the white man. Harkins and his dog had wintered well, though the early spring melt had showed him some patchwork that needed doing in his roof. He always hopped too as the water started dripping and was eventually satisfied that his roof was totally waterproofed in the full cold and blackness of the winter. While milling was more futile work that could always wait for the thaw. Harkins had accidentally earned a noble reputation for himself among the Rock Creek locals. In early January, a small wagon train of other settlers had made it to town during the evening. Harkins found himself purchasing some supplies that afternoon and had lingered for a drink at the town saloon, a place that somehow managed to stay stuffy and dusty all year long. He noticed the weary band of travelers and made their acquaintance right away. It was just one family, though they took up three full wagons, and that was with all the men excepting one small boy on horseback. He learned they weren't staying there, which Harkins took as a pity. They too were from Tennessee and had been the only people he'd really related to in the months that he'd lived in the territory. So far a piece of him rashly considered packing up and just following them wherever they'd land. But then he remembered tell of more dreaded plains to the north and south. Thought it best just to stay put. At any rate, he promised to join them for a camp breakfast the next morning morning before sending them off to whatever end. He rose early enough in the morning for the moon's brightness to shine a delicate blue off the snow. He knew it would somehow get darker before morning, though he never understood how. And so he saddled up his sorrel and whistled his dog along towards the settlers camp. He figured that they'd be up early and he was right. He loped into the smell of sourdough biscuits in a small cast iron Dutch oven. He thought he could see a jar of honey getting getting passed around too, and his mouth started watering. He could not remember the last time he'd tasted a southern biscuit, or any biscuit for that matter. He dismounted and strolled right into the camp to the warm greeting of folks he felt a close and quick kinship to. After breakfast, which was heavy and warm, he trotted along with the train so long as they went back towards his own mill. He rode behind the main wagon, speaking with the eldest patriarch of the family and in interrogating him as to where exactly he intended to go. But even as the man was speaking, Harkins noticed the wagon jolt hard from the left side, falling off a clay ledge formed by a dried up puddle on the road. He alone watched the little boy tumble headfirst out of the wagon. His head struck some sand hard, the only non frozen piece of ground that time of the morning, thank heavens, and he lay in a clear daze right under the wagon, all in a flash. Harkins watched the rear wheels continued to drive on directly towards the boy's head. The driver had not heard or seen anything fall from the wagon and had not cared to check on his cargo. After the bump Harkins yelled out a Whoa there stop. Just in time for the driver to pull rein and stop the wheel mere inches from the boy's temple. The older man dismounted and picked the boy up, looking back at Harkins with grateful eyes, before placing the boy, who had already started to snap out of his days, back into the wagon with his sisters. Thus it was that Harkins became more popular in town. Despite his biting southern wit that few others understood, the folks around him now felt more and more sure that they could trust him where he had felt welcomed before. That morning, Harkins came to feel like a prominent member of the community. Thereafter, he enjoyed it for a while, but all it really did was serve to make his doom all the more tragic. On March 19, 1863, Harkins woke up and went about his routine as he had done for weeks in the half thaw of late winter. The time for milling had finally come, and Harkins had been doing all he could to stay on top of the sun whenever it rose. As it turned out, he was doing quite well as a sawyer. Any doubts about the market being saturated proved false. In a place fresh with settlements and towns, lumber was in high demand. Harkins would do all he could to oblige the eager customers. He stretched and stoked the fire before walking over the already squeaking floors to feed his dog. Outside, the creek ran strong with freezing water ready to power the saw and churn out processed wood, but the creek would have to wait for the slow starting Southern gentleman to have his coffee and bacon first. He indulged in these things half dressed. His pants were pulled on, but his shirt was still unbuttoned to show forth long johns underneath. His suspenders hung from his trousers and loops that his dog occasionally swatted at. He pulled his boots on and finally stepped outside to greet the crisp western mountain air with a warm smile. He had still not tired of seeing the sun rise up over the eastern plains he had hated so much while traveling over them. It seemed to him that they didn't look so bad from where he sat nestled in the pines and aspens of Blue Mountain. But each morning, on further thought, he remembered how lifeless they were and decided to instead rejoice in what appeared to be the sun scorching them to hell where he felt they belonged. Into this morning routine there rode three men, each mounted right up to his front door. They were Mexicans, Harkins could tell, and he could also tell that they were not the friendly sort he'd encountered passing through his town. These were ragged men, oiled with grease that flowed out from their hair and into their collars and their thin shirts. They smiled at him, not in a friendly way, and showed rotting teeth through lips cracked by the sun's rays mixed with the dry winter wind beating against them constantly. Their chaps were filled with holes, their hat brims drooped low and floppy as if weighed down by too many snowstorms, and their horses looked like sickly corpses pulled up out of the ground somewhere not on this earth. It was a sight that Harkins knew right away to be troublesome. Thus the cool man sipped his coffee and waited for One of them to speak first. The tallest man let a thick wad of tobacco spit fly from his lips before tightening his eyes and saying, gringo pig. We're hungry. You have anything good to eat? Harkins took another sip and spoke in the smoothest trolley could muster. Well now, let's see. I got fritters frying on the stove with some beans and coffee too. It's all pretty good stuff, but none of it's fit for animals like the three of you.