I've just about given up telling my tales to young folks particularly if they aren't from these parts. Many of them have never heard of Calamity Jane, nee Martha Jane Cannary, and they don't know that the real Virginia City is in Montana, not the Virginia City with the so-called Comstock Lode in Nevada. Poor old Comstock died poor, as did Calamity Jane, two years ago in Terry, S. Dakota from inflammation of the bowels, a euphemism, if I ever heard one.
Virginia City, Montana was full of Vigilantes and saw too much of Sheriff Henry Plummer, the leader of the worst band of murdering, thieving cut-throats (apart from the United States Congress who made them appear pikers, by comparison). Called the Innocents, ironically, but perceived as Imps of Darkness. Or so, the Vigilantes and their effete historian Thomas J. Dimsdale, would have us believe. Henry Plummer died at the end of a rope suspended from a scaffold of his own design, the barren denuded hills testimony to man's need to rape and pillage. Henry had the scaffold built for a horse thief, but one January night in 1864, he was astonished to find his own plump, elegant self suspended form it. It was a cold, snowy night, but no colder than Henry's heart, nor than his body was soon to be.
Calamity Jane and I, she then a young girl and I somewhat older, but still a boy, when I think about it now from this vista of sixty plus years, went out to the place where Henry hung to witness for ourselves that he was truly dead. We both had thought him too smart to kill, but we were wrong, for killed he was and dead he would long be. I was sad to see the elegant Henry hanging high. For reasons of her own that she had earned the hard way, Marthy was glad and she felt not the least bit saddened. The only moral I drew from Henry's necktie party was "Don't get caught" or "Don't be so greedy that you motivate folks to catch you."
Virginia City was a small town, soon to get smaller as the inevitable happened and gold fever moved the population to some other God-forsaken gulch thirty miles, or three hundred miles away.
One thing I have to address further is this much celebrated romance between Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok. Marthy and him were friends of mine. I knew them both and well, but never at the same time. Only the most romantic hack dime novelist could imagine them together. Anyone who ever met Calamity Jane would be hard put to imagine her long in the arms of any one man. I knew her when she was fifteen and sixteen years of age and if she'd been dipped in cinnamon cologne, I still would not have considered kissing her hand, let alone sought an intimate embrace. She was not a bit of fluff or a calico cat.
And Wild Bill liked them that way. Wild Bill didn't even know he was Wild Bill until he read it in a dime novel. And in fact he wasn't. After he read about it he then spent the rest of his life trying to catch up to the legend. Calamity Jane went the same rocky route. The only reason it never happened to me was my aversion to guns and horses and my retiring nature which some have called sneaky. I avoid center stage and the spotlight, while inside I have yearned for some small credit. I have always been riven by conflicting desires.
If Professor Dimsdale had included me as a dominant character in his little book, that nonsequential nightmare of misinformation, I would have been famous as he made Henry Plummer famous.
I'm not going to waste what little time I've got left correcting and refuting Professor Dimsdale's legendary tales of the Vigilantes and how they saved the West for civilized men and made it possible for good women and children to walk safely the streets of Virginia City and no longer hide barricaded in their drafty plank shacks. Occasionally you might have had to dodge a bullet while purchasing a can of peaches in a store but not all that often.
The good professor's book was written to justify the murdering the Vigilantes did in the name of law and order. He got most of the details wrong, but he probably did so deliberately to protect those who hanged those they thought needed hanging. Others felt it was those being hanged who should have hanged those doing the hanging. There's something to be said for both sides.
My story contains those details about Virginia City that Dimsdale and other chroniclers glossed over or left out entirely. I have the true worm's eye view. Of course, my main reason for being in Virginia City was to locate my cousin Katy or at least determine her fate. I always seemed to be nearby and invisible when momentous events were occurring or peering through a wall crack or window at just the right time to become a passive participant in yet another intimate yet historically important event. Hangings, murders, seductions, rapes, thievery, gunfights. I saw them all. I was even involved myself a time or two. It wasn't an accident that I was witness to these affairs. My adherence to the principles of crime detection as delineated by Vidocq mandated that I be where the criminals were. It is impossible to keep such company and not at least occasionally be sucked into a criminal vortex.
What I had plenty of chances to view were standard brothel fornications. A primitive low-class house (more a half converted stable) butted up against the back of Zeke's livery stable and when tired of shoveling shit, I would sometimes place a bloodshot eye to a convenient knothole and witness the miners' brief and nasty coupling with the half a dozen young ladies who populated the establishment. One was a Siwash Indian, who was the best looking of the lot, one was a skinny Chinese girl with little English and a tubercular cough that sometimes kept me awake late at night, next was a pregnant mulatto girl. I don't think the miners sought out the establishment for sexual variety because the customers were usually drunk and just in from distant claims. I doubt they were aware of any racial dissimilarity between the girls. It was dark and they were so drunk as to be nearly incapacitated or they wouldn't be there at all.
The three other girls: one was a blind girl who'd been found a few miles from town and did not know her own name, another was a woman about fifty and enormously fat, whose entire family had been massacred but she'd been left because the Indians were amused by her grotesque obesity, such a state being rare among the tribes. Their way of life does not lend itself to cultivating plumpness. The sixth girl had been a minister's wife. She alone of the bunch was reputed to do her work with gusto. What motivated her lust, I can only theorize. Whether it was vengeance on her minister husband who'd abandoned her and left town with a hurdy-gurdy girl or whether her intimate membranes itched and cried out for repeated scratching, who knows? She frequently tried to entice men from her five sisters and did not want her ground to long lie fallow.
Some complicated formula was followed which rewarded the demimondes for quantity. I seldom saw any of these six outside their work establishment. They seemed virtual prisoners. The blind girl never wanted to leave, she screamed when taken near the door. The fat one wouldn't have been able to get through the door. The Chinese girl was an actual slave, bought and paid for.
The Siwash had been left behind by a squaw man who'd ridden through Virginia City one night. He'd apparently tired of her and by getting her insensated with drink was able to escape her. The Chinese had come from San Francisco and before that from China.
The mulatto girl had shown up in town with a questionable Southern gentleman named Bill Smith who was rumored to be one of Henry Plummer's band of dubious band.
The brothel shared a roof with Zeke's and in fact had been part of one big open room originally, but a business partner had approached Zeke with an arrangement that Zeke eventually succumbed to, although the risks were great. His hidden partner for a while had been none other than that great pimp, Sheriff Henry Plummer who never darkened the doors of the brothel, but once in a great while stepped inside the front door of Zeke's and chatted privately with him. I was never privy to their conversation, nor did I wish to be.
This is the brothel that Martha Jane Cannary, Calamity Jane to be, worked in for a short while, subsequent to her parents' deaths. Some say they died when their tent burned down, others say that her mother died of cholera and her father just left. A few short years after being orphaned Marthy was providing intimate services to an entire railroad construction camp in Wyoming. She was inaugurated into this business in Virginia City.
One thing all these women had in common was that no man stood between them and the worst kind of adversity and they had nothing else to sell but themselves. Perhaps that knowledge on my part, an appreciation of the sadness of the situation, was at least as important in my infrequent availing myself of the peep hole to paradise, as was boredom with the simple repetitive acts which were performed there, with the exception of the minister's wife whose zeal and energy combined with an absence of disfiguring characteristics may have made her a pleasure to watch her perform intimate sexual acts. With that being the one exception, the rest were unfortunates from whom I would have averted my eyes back in Mayville. The Siwash squaw I would not have seen at all, for she would not have been back in the States.
To have intercourse with these women was to couple oneself to tragedy and despair. How could it fail to rub off? I admit, though, were it not for fear of disease, nay the certainty of the pox or worse, I would have paid my money for a try at the minister's wife. What does that prove? That I'm no better than the worst miner. The old Adam resides in my bosom (or lower), too. Certainly, my through-the-wall relationship with the whorehouse made for a perfect observatory for me to gather data concerning all the men of Virginia City. For all men, from Governor Meagher on down to the lowest criminal scum satisfied their basest desires on the bodies of the women on the other side of my stable wall. It wasn't the sort of place where much drawing room type of conversation took place, but much can be learned of men by observing them coupling with whores. Much more than could be learned by witnessing them discharge their marital duties with their legally betrothed.
The first time I laid eyes on Calamity Jane she was still Martha Jane Cannary and she was about 12 years old. It was a year or so before I dubbed her Calamity Jane. She was carrying her baby brother, who later died of fever, and her 10 year old sister was hanging on to Martha Jane's shirt which was the only garment she was wearing and not adequate for a winter in the streets of Virginia City, Montana.
Martha Jane and her brother and sister were going from door to door begging handouts and a pitiful sight they were, even for Virginia City, where you could always hear a million sad stories and witness a tragedy around every corner.
The three children were cold and hungry, their mother was lying frozen and dead at the edge of town in a brush wickiup scratched together for them by their father before he took off for Nevada to change his luck at gambling.
The three were farmed out separately to various families. The brother was taken by a fever that same winter and the family who got her sister left town for further West. Only Martha Jane stayed long in Virginia City, but it was there that her legend as Calamity Jane got its start only a year or so after she was wandering the street near naked. She was a skinny kid that winter, but by the next fall she had reached a growth which enabled her to earn her living a variety of ways, a couple of them semi-respectable.
By spring, I had enlisted Martha Jane in the little girl gold mining project I supervised for a while, not long after she became a profitable rider for Zeke's ponies in his racing enterprises, and then she was gone from Virginia City wandering the West becoming a legend when an anonymous soldier diarist noted in 1876 while serving under General George Crook that "Calamity Jane is here going up with the troops." He does not precisely describe what her capacity was. Whether it was as a drunken, camp following prostitute or as an Indian fighting army scout we'll never know for certain. I have my suspicions, but I do know for a fact that she could ride as well or better than any man and that she packed a punch, a punch which on at least one occasion laid out a full-grown man stone cold. She claimed to have learned from an old opium smoking Chinaman the ancient philosophies of physical encounter but I never witnessed her practicing these philosophies except possibly once and her practice seemed more a sucker punch than anything else.
Martha Jane begged to accompany me to witness John Condle Orem fight Hugh O'Neil. I was inclined to go along with her request because O'Neil's name was on Katy's list, if for no other reason. I might learn something of what kind of man he was by observing him fight Orem. An enormous amount of controversy preceded this fight, for which a new arena had been erected behind Leviathan Hall, which was on the North side of Jackson street. The controversy was of the phony kind invented by the promoters. Hugh O'Neil, a large, heavy drinking Irish miner was quoted in scathing ridicule of Con Orem, "That teetotling midget couldn't beat my baby sister." Con Orem was an important citizen of Virginia City and the legend has it that it was Con Orem's idea that Montana become a territory separate from Idaho and this time legend has got it right.
I was there when Con Orem brought the full force of his pugilistic oratory to bear on the territorial question. The infamous pugilist and saloon-keeper was said by some to be in a mellow mood that Sunday morning. Others said he was feeling no pain from the night before. His head was still reeling from the fight.
Anyhow a crowd gathered, as they always did when Con Orem held forth and he huzzahed them that Sunday morning at great length. Did I say it was a crowd? More of a mob. Typical of Virginia City and most mining camps hungry for escape from boredom.
Con Orem spoke eloquently on the need for the creation of a separate territory.
"Call it Montana. Don't that fit? What's Idaho to us?"
And Montana it was.
But back to my story. Martha Jane chose to dress not unlike a hurdy-gurdy girl for this special occasion for she was sick of being viewed as a kid by me and by men in general. She wanted to go where there was action and she knew that it was where the men were. As a brightly dressed soiled dove, she knew she'd fit right in. Hugh O'Neil seemed about twice Con Orem's size. He weighed 190 pounds and was two inches taller than Con's modest 5'6 1/2". O'Neil's flesh was not of the rock hard variety, as was Con's from almost constant training. Con also never touched alcohol or tobacco in any form.
Martha Jane, who already had a propensity for hard drinking, large, powerful appearing men, was much enamored of Hugh O'Neil and had me place a sizeable bet for her on O'Neil to win in 10 rounds. I tried to argue with her about such a bet but Martha Jane would never listen to the sweet voice of reason. It was her money, earned the hard way, riding a wining race on Quill against a challenger twice his size. You'd think she would have learned a lesson of the bigger they are the harder they fall variety but you'd be wrong.
Her comment on Con Orem, who was about her size, "Put a bonnet and dress on him and he'd make a prettier girl than I."
I couldn't resist replying to such an openended remark, but ignored a couple of responses which may have hurt Marthy's delicate sensibilities, merely remarking, "I wouldn't want to be the fellow entrusted with the task of so outfitting him, especially if he was of a mind to resist."
Marthy just looked at me with disgust and asked for the millionth time when the fight was going to commence. I explained again that the audience was largely Irish or honorary Irish and the point of the stall was to give these unarmed, but thirsty men a large chance to freely imbibe. Orem had a half share in the profits from the refreshments, so stood to win financially whether he won or lost the fight.
The fight was of course, bare-knuckled, and there was no time limit on rounds, those being determined by a participant's slipping or falling deliberately to the floor, or if hit or thrown down, but not immediately regaining his feet, the round was ended. His second assists him to a corner and returns him to the line in 30 seconds.
After we wetted our whistles for about two hours the fight began. As usual, I at first felt disgust at myself for attending such a savage event, an event which sometimes led to the blinding or even the death of one of the participants. My father back in Mayville, Wisconsin viewed such events (horse racing too, now that I reflected upon it) as direct evidence of the devil's seeking out and winning souls. I'm certain my attendance at such an event would in no way surprise my father.
In contrast to my guilty self-disgust, Marthy exhibited nothing but pure joy. Hopping up and down in her borrowed hurdy-gurdy dress, she was bordering on liberating the upper robust portion of her body completely from the inadequate confines of fragile cloth.
Her joy was infectious and I soon had thrown off my misgivings and was totally caught up in watching the battle between the mighty mite, Con Orem and the challenger Hugh O'Neil who'd fought in the ring only once before, but who was a native son of Ireland.
The fight was savage and bloody from the first round. Marthy and I were so close to the battling men that when Con struck a blow above O'Neil's right eye, the split skin shot blood in a great spurt onto the bare skin on Marthy's bosom above the near vicinity of her bodice which screamed its inadequacy as the match progressed. Marthy absently dabbled one finger in the blood and her eyes vacantly fixed on its source, sucked the claret from the end of her finger.
When O'Neil missed a punch in the 7th round and struck the ring post nearest Marthy and me, so powerful was the punch I feared for a moment that the post was to be knocked loose from its mounting and would land in our faces. That contact with the post left O'Neil's left hand virtually useless. It flopped around like a trout on dry land and I feared he may have broken his wrist. O'Neil continued fighting with his right hand, the damaged hand negating his more than 50 pound weight advantage over Orem. The two pugilists battled for 185 rounds and more than three hours and the audience screamed and hollered itself hoarse.
Marthy was nonplused that O'Neil failed to squash Con like a bug. In fact she shouted an encouraging phrase repeatedly, "Squash him like a bug, squash him like a bug." I gave her more than one disgusted look, but she was oblivious to my counsel. Marthy could not understand that Con's training made him as hard to hit as a mosquito in a wind storm. That although O'Neil was almost twice Con's size, O'Neil's lack of coordination and training and the fact that his flesh was not firm as was Con's, was resulting in two opponents who bled freely, were much bruised and lacerated, but that neither could be seen as a clear victor. This lack of clarity enraged Marthy, more at Con Orem for having failed her prejudgment, than at O'Neil, who she felt was not being allowed to fight a fight he'd easily win if Con would just stand still and trade punches like a man.
When they fell to the sand, more often than not the large O'Neil fell on top which must have taken its toll on Orem, but when the 120th round arrived Orem looked as full of piss and vinegar as ever, laughing and sticking out his tongue at O'Neil, which enraged both O'Neil, who attacked like a crazed grizzly, and Martha Jane who muttered again her remark about Con's girlish demeanor and how he should be wearing a bonnet and dress. O'Neil caught a vicious punch on the nose and fell backwards against the ropes. O'Neil took several revitalizing pulls on a Irish jug and also engaged in a couple of bear hugging cavorts which caused the audience to holler "foul" but Con Orem laughed it all off.
In round 147, Con fell to the sand and Hugh straddled him and struck repeatedly at his face. The crowd screamed foul and foul again, and so enraged was Orem that when he regained his feet he rushed at O'Neil in complete disregard of pugilistic science and struck wildly and ineffectively.
Hugh O'Neil continued to fight as a street brawler and Con regained some of his science, but had much run out of steam. Because of darkness, the fight was ended at round 185 and the referee was called upon to arrange all matters. Bets were off and the ring money divided. The referee announced that Con Orem would stand the house a round of drinks at his saloon.
Marthy Jane was hopping mad at this inadequate conclusion. She wanted a clear-cut victor. This was the first fight she'd attended and she wanted a winner and a loser, preferably out cold, bleeding out his life into the sand like the Roman gladiators of old.
Both Hugh O'Neil and Con Orem had to pass us on their way to cleaning up and changing. Marthy Jane ignored O'Neil as he passed, bleeding and sweating and held up by his seconds, but as Con Orem passed, Marthy called out his name in stentorian tones.
"John Condle Orem!" He turned to her, his bloody hands down at his sides, his slitted eyes looking her full in the face. "Try this on for size," she spoke and delivered to his jaw a punch which she brought up from near the floor.
John Condle Orem fell back as though he'd been shot. His seconds managed to hold him up and swiftly got him out of there. Only a very few witnessed the scene and they did not believe their eyes. There was such a rush to get out of the place and into the adjacent saloons and hurdy-gurdys that folks were not paying attention. Besides who'd believe a 14-year-old girl knocking out the Champ Con Orem?
I grabbed her by the arm and hustled her out of the place. "You went and did it this time, Martha Jane. You are a one woman calamity. This is the last public event to which I'll accompany you." I was furious.
When we got outside and got away from the crowd, we were both silent. Marthy was in a cold rage and just glared at me. Finally I asked, "What, what? Just get it off your chest."
She looked at me for a long time and finally spoke, "Put a bonnet and a dress on him . . . "
I interrupted her, "I don't want to hear that. Put a cork in it, Marthy."
She never mentioned this event again, but the success of her lucky punch left her permanently disenchanted with the supposed superiority of men. Nothing would ever convince her again. As for my thoughts about O'Neil & Katy, I didn't think he was likely to be the villain in Katy's life. I didn't know for certain, but for now I would trust the feeling in the pit of my stomach which led me to seek elsewhere for information about Katy.
Calamity Jane, traveling with a dime museum, passed through Helena in 1897 where I happened to be visiting at the time and I paid my dime to see her and quite a sight she was, too. All buckskin and fringe and colorful lies about the usual stuff of Western glory. According to her little speech to the small group of us who paid our dimes on that hot dusty day in July, she'd not only scouted for Generals Miles, Terry and Crook, but had narrowly missed dying with General Custer at the Battle of the Big Horn. Her tone when relating that event implied to us regret that she'd been indisposed that day with a broken ankle or she would have been able to relate that incident to us as well.
"Wouldn't you be dead, Miss?" I asked, my face as innocent as that of a new born babe.
"You have got a point, old-timer," she had the gall to comment. And in a trice she was back into her boiler plate "spontaneous" tales which by the sound of them she'd related syllable by syllable unchanged about 50,000 times.
"I pleaded with George," she went on, meaning General George Armstrong Custer, "I pleaded with George, 'it's only a broken ankle. Just place me on my steed and I'll ride unimpeded,' such was my skill on horseback."
Where did she get this awful stuff I asked myself, riveted in my seat by the rhetoric, and not oblivious to the effect her words were having on the little kids and grown folks, who should have known better. They were eating it up, swallowing it whole, loving it. I didn't head for the door either. I stuck around for the full course.
"If I'd been there that day, the day General Custer was foully murdered by those screaming savages, I am convinced that I could have saved him as I saved Captain Egan in the campaign of the fall of 1873. I would have galloped in on my horse, swooped down and lifted the General onto my horse and ridden to freedom just as I saved Captain Egan in Goose Creek, Wyoming, where the town of Sheridan is now, and for which I was christened Calamity Jane." She paused for the applause which was forthcoming, as she knew it would be.
I put up my hand to ask another question, like some kid in school. Her face showed impatience with me, she rather sharply asked, "Yes, old-timer. What is it now?"
"Miss Calamity, isn't it likely that if you'd been scouting for Custer that your great experience on the plains scouting with Generals Miles, Terry, Crook and god knows who else, would have enabled you to advise General Custer properly about the Sioux Indians and prevent the tragedy at Little Bighorn which cost the army General Custer and more than 200 dead soldiers?"
"Why, yes. I'm certain you could be right." Her face showed a flicker of something. Recognition? Irritation?
This was the end of the performance. The applause was hearty and the victims of another session in Western myth-making were filing out, satisfied they'd spent their dime well.
A few stopped to have Calamity Jane autograph her autobiography which was on sale at a table near the door. I picked one up and began to leaf through it. The Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane. How could she pack so many lies into seven pages including illustrations? I put the pamphlet down and started to leave. As I made my way to the door, I heard a voice. It was the manager, who I'd not noticed until he set up the table of books, pamphlets really.
"Wait a minute, old-timer, Miss Calamity wishes to speak with you -- after the rubes have departed." He said the last sotto voce for my ears only.
Soon the rubes were gone and I was alone with Miss Calamity. "S.B.B. Willson, you old SOB." She embraced me. She was as strong as an ox and built on those proportions as well. Her buckskin smelled smoky and reminded me of an squaw or two I'd embraced long ago.
"Those questions were doozies, Solomon. I wish we could make you part of the show. You are a born shill."
I chose to take that remark as a compliment. She was the star and I was, as always, no more than a flea on the dog that was the old West.
"I'm just a flea on the dog, Miss Calamity." I said with more than a little ironic edge and some self-pity. And the key to success in this racket is a colorful name on which to hang the promotions. P.T. Barnum was right. The American audiences love to be humbugged.
"I know I owe you, Sol. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of the name you gave me in Virginia City a thousand years ago. It has served me well. It's as good a name as any Westerner ever got. Wild Bill, Buffalo Bill, Billy the Kid--all those Bill names. But Calamity Jane! Nobody can top that one. And I've got as many stories about how I received it as there are beads on my buckskin." She gestured at her vast bosom contained by the well-tanned hide of a doe or two and covered with a multitude of beads arranged to depict the full tableau of Custer's last stand.
"A remarkable vision," I said gesturing at her bosom.
"Yes, and it always was, since my late girlhood. As you took full cognizance of, you, you despoiler of children." She gave my back a hearty whack which left me gasping for breath.
"You always had a way with words, Sol, and I have wished to repay you for christening me Calamity Jane. Why don't you come back to my room and we'll have some dinner sent up and talk about old times?"
She gave me an enormous lecherous wink to emphasize the direction of this invitation, a direction which was already crystal clear to me.
I begged off, "I'm sorry Miss Calamity, but I have to meet the little woman in about 15 minutes or she'll kill me." I mimed my death by ax at the hands of an absent Mrs. Willson who was actually at home with the children in Rimini.
"Well, give her my best, Solomon."
"By the by, Solomon, you have not mentioned your beloved Katy. The Katy who kept you from fully focussing on me or anyone else in those long gone Virginia City Days."
I was speechless at this intimate reference out of the blue. "But Bill Smith said..."
"Bill Smith would not tell the truth about what day of the week it was. Forget about Bill Smith."
"I saw her, talked with her and she was fine. That's all there is to it."
"Not quite."
"She came up to me after a show in Chicago, or was it Philadelphia, and we talked a long while."
"Which was it?"
"It must have been Philadelphia because it seemed so right when she mentioned being married to a lawyer. If it had been Chicago, her husband would have been a meat packer."
She winked again, enveloped me with her iron arms, crushed me to her bosom and was gone, out the back of the tent to her waiting manager, leaving me with the smoky smell of buckskin in my nostrils and my thoughts reeling back through the years to Virginia City in the 1860's.
Just because Bill Smith said Katy was dead and Governor Meagher was responsible didn't make it so. Smith was a notorious liar. I wanted to think that somehow Katy had slipped away from Virginia City undetected, made her way to San Francisco, Chicago or Philadelphia and had parlayed her looks and charm into something better than a shallow grave somewhere. Maybe she wasn't married to a millionaire, but I liked to think her restless soul had found happiness, if not peace of mind. As Katy often said, I had a well-established tendency to kid myself.
If I had gone back to her room what would have transpired? I'll never know now. The thought of physical conjunction some several dozen years too late to do anybody any good or harm left me chilled to the bone, but my real fear concerned the subject of Ezekiel Pompeii. No man was more important in my life than Zeke, but if Marthy Jane had asked me about him and the ends he had come to after she left Virginia City, what would I have said? What could I have told her?
I had taken off suddenly to Salt Lake City on a whim to see Brigham Young preach. I was present when Young said that he would live to see the day when he was with Christ in his Temple in Salt Lake City. I regret that I never witnessed that sacred event. I was gone almost six months on this Mormon adventure, as I was in no real hurry to get back to Virginia City due to women troubles which I hoped time would heal. When I arrived back home, Zeke was gone, his livery stable had burned to the ground and no person in the town had any idea what had transpired. Ezekiel Pompeii was a man who had been almost everywhere in God's earth, so it was easy for me to imagine him anywhere. Perhaps he was in Australia studying the physics of the boomerang or in Mexico City supervising a revolution. He would speak the language like a native and be kowtowed to by all and sundry.
I, however, was unable to imagine my being in Virginia City with him gone. It never was the same for me after Ezekiel Pompeii disappeared from the pages of the history of the old West without even a footnote. I was only a flea on the dog. But Marthy Jane Cannary? She was a legend who loomed large in the old West. If she'd set her mind to it, I thought, she could have been a scout for Generals Custer, Miles, Terry and Crook. She could have saved Custer. If she'd set her mind to it.
For those few moments before I left the tent, I believed the myth or at least wanted to believe it. So what if her statements are discredited by demonstrable mistakes about dates, routes of march and names of commanding officers. I'd been had by such nit-picking myself. There were those who had the audacity to say that I'd not been in on the capture of George Ives, been a Vigilante or even been in Virginia City, Montana at all during the Golden Days. And I'm mentioned by both Nathaniel Pitt Langford and Professor Dimsdale in their books. Although, I admit, they called me Jack and spelled the Willson with but one "l".
I've been ill served by history and Calamity has been perhaps served too well. So it all balances out. Life ain't fair!
I suddenly noticed how thirsty I was. I left the tent in search of a drink. And I did not intend to surprise my bowels with a glass of water. They deserved better.