All the Long Years, page 10
It shook me some when Curly told about it. Not because Bohannon was dead-too much time had passed for thatbut because of the circumstances of his death. He'd believed, and believed hard, that someday he'd pay for killing Greenbaugh. That there were too many markers in his life, and someday he'd die on account of one he owed. Well, he'd been wrong. And yet the strange thing, the pure crazy thing, was that he'd also been right.
The name of the 'puncher who'd shot him was Sam Marker.
The most admirable man I've ever known?
Gentlemen, that is a question that should require considerable thought and reflection. In my nearly seven decades of life 1 have traveled from one end of the country to the other, north and south of our borders and twice across the Atlantic Ocean. I have shaken hands with statesmen, been entertained by royalty, drunk brandy and smoked cigars with two sitting Presidents of these United States. 1 have known many celebrated and respected newspaper editors and publishers, among them my own father, the redoubtable William Satterlee. And 1 have spent hours in the company of famous authors, artists, philanthropists, and titans of commerce. The answer to your question should not roll easily off what one member of the fourth estate has seen fit to call "the golden tongue of Senator R.W.Satterlee." But the fact is, my answer requires not five seconds of brain cudgeling.
The most estimable and significant man of my acquaintance was a tramp printer named "Give-a-Damn" Jones.
No, no, I'm not pulling your legs. "Give-a-Damn" was the moniker bestowed upon him by his wandering brethren; his given name was Artemus. Artemus Jones. A tramp printer is what he was, in fact and in spirit, and proud of it.
Most of you are too young to recall the days when itinerant typesetters, a noble and misunderstood breed, were a vital element in the publishing of newspapers large and small. If you have read my resume, you know that 1 myself was one of that adventurous fraternity in my early youth. Yet the tale of why 1 chose such a vagabond's trade is not nearly as well known as it should be. Nor, 1 dare say, is Artemus Jones and the role he played in the destiny of the man who stands before you. 1 have been remiss in publicly according him the credit he deserves. But no more, gentlemen. No more.
Make yourselves comfortable and I'll tell you why 1 place a traveling printer above any other man in my life.
It was the summer of 1883, two years after my father purchased the Bear Paw Banner and moved our family to that eastern Montana town from Salt Lake City. Bear Paw was generally a peaceful place, but in the spring of that year trouble had sprung up between nearby cattle ranchers and a group of German and Scandinavian farmers who had come west from Wisconsin and settled in the region. The farmers weren't squatters, mind you. The land they claimed was theirs free and clear. The cattlemen, however, had used it for beef graze for a generation and more, and considered the farmers an invasion force bent on using up precious water and destroying prime grassland. Feelings ran high on both sides, with most of Bear Paw siding with the Cattlemen's Association and its leader, Colonel Elijah Greathouse, owner of the sprawling Square G.Fistfights, fence-cutting, arson, two shooting scrapes, and one near lynching came of the disagreement, and there was as much name-calling and fingerpointing that spring and summer as you'll find on the floor of the United States Senate in session.
1 was a mere lad of fifteen, but as interested as any fullgrown adult in these volatile goings-on. My father, a man of strong opinions and iron will, had taken up the cause of the immigrant farmers and penned several fiery editorials defending their rights and denouncing the injustices perpetrated against them by their Bear Paw neighbors. As a result, the Banner's plate-glass front window had been shattered by a rock one night, and the local job printer who had done our typesetting was intimidated by the cattlemen's interests into closing up shop and moving to Helena. William Satterlee had little choice but to set type himself, with my inexperienced help, except on those occasions when a tramp printer happened to stop off in our town.
In the three months before Artemus Jones arrived, an equal number of hand-peggers were hired. None lasted more than three days, and the only one who paid no attention to the uneasy climate was an old man of at least eighty years named Charlie Weems. He was completely toothless, though he chewed tobacco and could ring a spittoon at twenty yards with unerring accuracy; and he had but one eye, claiming to have lost the other in the explosion of a Queen Anne musket not long after the War of 1812. He drank forty-rod whisky from a seemingly bottomless flask, could recite the names and addresses of most houses of ill repute in the Western states and territories, cussed a blue streak while he worked, and set type faster than any man 1 have seen before or since. He boasted to me that he had never spent more than three days in any town, and he was true to his word where Bear Paw was concerned. There one day, gone the next, riding the rods or the blind baggage or tucked away in a boxcar on the Great Northern's east - or westbound night freight.
Another freight train, the tramp's favored form of transportation, brought Artemus Jones into our midst. 1 was alone in the Banner office when he walked in on a Tuesday morning. He was a lean, wiry man twice my age and a little more, with drooping, tobacco-stained mustaches and eyes a brighter blue than a Kansas cornflower. He wore a disreputable linen duster and carried a bindle wrapped in a bandanna handkerchief. Prepossessing? Not a bit. Yet despite an air of hard-bitten toughness, he was soft-spoken and polite and gave the impression of having more to him than met the eye. 1 sensed his profession even before he approached with the breed's standard opener: "How's work?" And after only a short while in his company, 1 sensed, too, that he was no ordinary man.
"Available," I said. "You'll be welcome. We go to press tomorrow night and circulate Thursday morning."
"Standard union wages?"
"Yes, sir. Twenty-five cents a thousand ems."
His blue eyes took my measure. "Young to be the owner of a territorial newspaper, aren't you?"
"William Satterlee is the owner. My father."
"William Satterlee, eh? 1 believe I've heard the name. And you'd be William, Junior?"
"No, sir. 1 go by R.W."
He barked a laugh. "You'll go places, then. Men with initials instead of given names always do. My name is Jones, Artemus Jones."
"`Give-a-Damn' Jones?"
"So I've been called. How do you know the name?"
"We had a printer several weeks ago named Charlie Weems. He mentioned you."
"Toothless Charlie's still above ground, is he? I'm glad to hear it, even if he is an unrepentant old liar and sinner."
"He didn't say how you came by the moniker, Mister Jones."
"Nor will 1." Short and sharp, as if he were embarrassed by the explanation. "1 prefer to be called Artemus. Your father on the premises?"
"Off hunting news. He'll be back before long."
"Well, let's have a look at your shop while we wait."
1 took him into the composing room and stood by while he eyed our cranky old hand press, stone table, type frame, and cases. He opened upper- and lower-case drawers and nodded approvingly at the selection of Revier, nonpareil, and agate. Another approving nod followed his examination of the previous week's issue from a leftover bundle.
"This is tolerable good for a jim-crow sheet," he saidjim-crow being printer's slang for small-town. "Your father's been in the game a while, 1 take it."
"Two years in Bear Paw. Before that five years in Salt Lake, and before that stints in Sacramento and San Francisco, where 1 was born."
"I like working for a man who knows his business," Jones said. "Heard of the `Perch of the Devil,' have you, R.W.?"
"Yes, sir!" 1 said. It was what Butte was called in those days. The copper mines there ran twenty-four hours, and the air was so poisonous thick with sulphur and arsenic fumes and smoke from roasting ores and smelter stacks that no vegetation was left anywhere in or near the town. This fact, plus its location on a steep hillside overlooking a bare butte, plus its reputation as the most wide-open camp in all of Montana had brought it the name. "is that where you last worked?"
"It is.,,
"I've heard that on windless days, the smoke is so heavy over Butte it blots the sky and lamps have to be lit at midday."
"True, and then some."
"Which paper were you on? The Miner or the InterMountain?"
"A.J.Davis's shop. Another man who knows his business."
I was impressed. A.J.Davis was editor and publisher of the Inter-Mountain, and reputed to be a stickler for hiring only the best among the typographers and reporters who applied. No "blacksmiths" for him!
"1 was there a month," Jones said. "Wages cut above scale, but that wasn't the reason."
"No. What was?"
"Free beer on tap."
He went on to explain that above the Inter-Mountain's offices was a saloon whose beer pipes happened to run through a corner of the composing room. One of the home-guard printers had devised a cleverly hidden plug for the pipe, all unknown to the saloonkeepers. Thus the printers had a constant supply of free suds whenever they felt thirsty.
Jones owned a storehouse of such anecdotes, and, when he was in a proper mood, he would regale me with one after another. He was also a fount of opinions, quotations, professional gossip, place descriptions, and capsule biographies of men and women he had known in his travels. He had been a roadster and gay cat, as young tramp printers were called in that era, since the age of fourteen and had crossed and recrossed the country half a dozen times. Yet he was reticent about his family background and personal life. He became rude and profane on the few occasions when 1 attempted to draw him out. And while it was plain that he shared his breed's liking for alcohol and ladies of easy virtue, he did no drinking on the job and was unfailingly courtly to women of every stripe.
He had worked for more than a few of the legends of newspapering, among them Joseph Pulitzer on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Edward Rosewater, the fighting editor of the Omaha Bee, and the beaver-hatted old firebrand, J.West Goodwin, of the Sedalia Bazoo. For a time he had traveled with "Hi-Ass" Hull, considered the king of the tramp printers for his union organizing work, whose nickname was derived from a Northwest Indian word meaning "tall man." For another period he'd run with the band of roaming typographers known as the Missouri River Pirates, who frequented the towns along the Missouri River between St. Louis and Sioux City. He had met Jesse James when the outlaw was living in St. Joseph under his Tom Howard alias, two days before the dirty little coward, Bob Ford, fired a .45 slug into Jesse's back. Others whose paths he'd crossed were Bat Masterson, Texas Jack Omahundro, the poet Walt Whitman, himself a tramp printer in New Orleans, and the acid-tongued San Francisco writer, Ambrose Bierce.
Artemus Jones had no formal education, but he was an erudite man. By his own estimate he had read two thousand books, the Bible more than once, and the entire works of Shakespeare. He could quote verbatim passages from the Book and the Bard two and three pages long. Poetry, too, everything from Lord Byron to bawdy limericks. And he conversed knowledgeably on politics, philosophy, art, music, what-have-you.
Now it may seem to you gentlemen that time has clouded my memory, led me to paint you a romanticized picture of this man Jones. You may even be thinking he was a blowhard, a dissembler, or both. 1 assure you, none of that is the case. My memory of Jones is as clear as spring water. He was exactly as I've described him, and within his province a wholly truthful and honorable man.
Well, then. My father put Jones to work, and an expert typographer he was. He handled planer, mallet, rule, and shooting stick as though he had been born with them in his hand, corrected misspellings without consulting a dictionary, plugged dutchmen in a pair of poorly spaced ads, and generally made the publication of that week's issue an easier task than usual. My father was pleased, and 1 confess I was in awe. 1 clung to Jones almost as tightly as his galluses, asking questions, begging more stories, listening with rapt attention to his every word.
William Satterlee's front-page editorial that week was particularly inflammatory-written, in Jones's considered opinion, with a pen dipped in snake venom. There had been another shooting shortly before Jones's arrival, of a farmer who had dared to stray onto Colonel Greathouse's land after a runaway horse. The horse had been shot dead and the settler severely wounded by two Square G fence riders. Sheriff Buckley ruled the shooting justifiable. My father damned Buckley, not for the first time, as an incompetent dullard in the moral, if not actual, pay of the Cattlemen's Association, and he demanded prosecution for murder not only of the two cowhands but of their employer, whom he called, among other things, a cowardly Napoleonic tyrant.
Now Elijah Greathouse was a proud man with a fearsome temper. He had been a brevet colonel with C Company of the Tenth Kansas Volunteers during the War Between the States, and, although he was rumored to have been roundly disliked as a bully by the soldiers under his command, he was boastful of his war record and his military background. The "cowardly Napoleonic tyrant" label infuriated him more than anything else my father had called him in print. The day after the issue appeared, he stormed into the Banner office with his foreman, a troublemaker and alleged gun artist named Kinch, and confronted William Satterlee.
"You retract that statement," he bellowed, "or by God you'll suffer the consequences."
My father was unruffled. "1 don't respond to threats, Colonel."
"You'd damn' well better respond to this one. I mean what 1 say, editor. Write one more vicious lie about me and you'll pay dear, in one type of coin or another."
"You've made yourself clear. Before witnesses, 1 might add." Both Jones and 1 were standing in the composing room doorway, where Greathouse and Kinch could plainly see us. Not that either of them seemed to take much notice. "Now I'll thank you and your cow nurse to get off my property."
Blood-rush turned Kinch's face the color of port wine. He stepped forward and poked my father in the chest with his forefinger. "Cow nurse, am 1? Call me that again, you son-ofa-bitch, and you'll find out what else 1 am."
"I know what else you are," William Satterlee said meaningfully. "Get out before 1 summon that buffoon of a sheriff and have you arrested for harassment and public profanity."
The two cattlemen left, glaring and grumbling. Jones said to my father: "You've made bad enemies in those two, Mister Satterlee. I've seen their stripe before. Push them too far and one or both will act on their threats."
But my father was a stubborn man, and he had put blinders on where Greathouse and his foreman were concerned. "Humbug," he said. "Knaves, fools, and blowhards, the pair. I've nothing to fear from the likes of them."
Artemus Jones said no more. 1 held my tongue as well, though 1 was more than a little worried. No one had ever won an argument with my father when his back was up. Whenever 1 or anyone else tried, it served only to strengthen his conviction that he was in the right.
The next week passed swiftly. To my considerable pleasure, Jones stayed on in Bear Paw. He had built a stake, he said, working for A.J.Davis in Butte, and after the copper camp's rough and rowdy ways he was content to linger a while in calmer surroundings before moving on. He took a room at Ma Stinson's Travelers' Rest, a combination hotel and boarding house near the Great Northern depot that catered to railroad men, drummers, and transients. When he wasn't working, he spent most of his time at the Free and Easy Saloon, which had the best free lunch in Bear Paw. 1 sus pect he also visited Tillie Johnson's parlor house, though I never dared to ask him.
In the composing room 1 watched his every move while he sat on the tall printer's stool, clad in his leather apron, and picked up the types and assembled them in the composing sticks. He showed great patience in answering the thousand and one questions 1 asked him about his trade and his travels. Prior to his coming, 1 had been uncertain of my future goals, though naturally 1 was tempted to follow my father's inkstained profession. Before that week was out, I had decided unequivocally that an itinerant printer was what 1 wanted to be.
Jones neither encouraged nor discouraged me. His was a world of new vistas and high adventure, true, but it was also a lonely life, and a sometimes perilous one. 1 would have to be willing to take the bad with the good, he said, the hardships along with the ease and freedom of the open road. 1 allowed as how 1 could and would, and urged him to take me along when wanderlust claimed him again. He refused. Since his days with the Missouri River Pirates, he had traveled alone and preferred it that way. Besides, neither he nor anyone else could teach me the tricks of his trade-a man learned for himself and by himself. Some weren't cut out for the life and quit sooner or later for tamer, settled pursuits. Why, he had done some reporting here and there and been told by editors that he showed promise, and one day he might just take up that line himself. But when 1 pressed him, he admitted it was much more likely he'd remain an itinerant typographer until he was too old and infirm to ride the rails. Chances were, he said with a shrug, he would die in a strange town and be buried without a marker in a potter's field grave.
Weil, this dissuaded me not at all. If anything, it strengthened my resolve to become a gay cat, to see and do the things and meet the people Jones had. By the end of the week 1 was making plans to leave Bear Paw on my sixteenth birthday. Plans that 1 may or may not have carried through, boyish as they were, if the events of that Saturday night had not taken place.
On Wednesday, fuel had been added to the strong feelings between cattlemen and farmers, in the form of a fire of dubious origin that claimed both the barn and house belonging to a homesteading family named Jansen. No one was seriously injured, though Jansen suffered burns in trying to save his livestock. It so happened the farmer's land bordered Colonel Greathouse's south pasture, and there had been a dispute between Jansen and Greathouse over water rights. My father took this to mean that the colonel was guilty of ordering the burnings. His front-page editorial was even more vitriolic than the previous week's, accusing the cattle baron outright and damning him as a savage oppressor who would commit any heinous crime to achieve his purposes.
