Chapter Eight
I was onmy way to see Mrs. P.
Not unannounced.
Even though she didn't drive, one did not presume that Mrs. P was at home and at your beck and call. One did not presume with Mrs. P at all.
So, I called as soon as I left the museum.
She said to come on up... or words to that effect.
Upbecause she lives north of Sherman. I took the highway that paralleled the Absaroka Range, passed the entrance road to Tom's Circle B — our ranch — and on to O'Hara Hill, the second-largest town in Cottonwood County.
I can never resist mentioning that because most people looking at the one primary street and a handful of cross-street nubs would not consider it a town at all.
Also up because Cottonwood County is popularly divided into the High Side toward the west and the Low Side toward the east, with Sherman in the middle.
I used to half-joke that in the neighborhood where I grew up in Illinois, a waterfall was the flow from a hose left on the curb that dropped onto the street. If Cottonwood County's Low Side suddenly added curbs for some unfathomable reason to its shades of winter dun, rust, and drab, the same would apply.
The High Side rose toward and into the mountains, imparting what counted as lushness around here, but didn't impress someone who'd wiggled childhood toes in the rich, black soil of Northern Illinois.
I left the highway, which continued to and past the Montana border not many miles away, and took a jog west, where O'Hara Hill's single main street ran through a valley.
Did I mention it's small?
On the other hand, it deserves renown for being home to two of the stronger personalities I've encountered in this county or elsewhere — Gisella Decker and Emmaline Parens.
Otherwise known as Mike's Aunt Gee, the sheriff's department senior dispatcher and in charge of the O'Hara Hill substation, and Mrs. P, retired teacher and principal.
You'd think there'd be some sort of disruption to the universe's power system with the two of them living next door to each other. Like the pull of their personalities in tandem could be seen from space.
I demonstrated the impact of those personalities by immediately checking Gee's driveway when I arrived, like a kid scoping out possible penalties for a rules infraction. In this case, not keeping my visits to them scrupulously even.
Empty. Which generally meant she was at work at the substation. She could have run the entire dispatch unit if she'd been willing to move to Sherman. Heck, she probably could have run the state if she'd been willing to move to Cheyenne.
Theoretically no vehicle being visible could mean it was in the garage, but she resorted to that only for major storms. Or it could mean she was shopping or doing other errands, but she almost always took along Mrs. P.
I wondered how the older woman would manage without Gee as transportation.
Then she opened her front door to me and I knew she would manage — somehow.
I caught an angled glimpse through an open doorway down the hall to the room I knew she used as an office. Two columns of file boxes rose, with one box open beside the desk chair. These must be the records Keefe had been delivering to her, then returning in far better order to Teague Ranch.
Mrs. Parens poured me hot tea without asking if I wanted any and offered store-bought shortbread cookies in the front room that combined a classroom and museum library. We sat on hard chairs in the middle of the room.
"You've heard about Keefer Dobey?" I asked.
On the phone I'd merely said I wanted to come talk to her about a Cottonwood County matter.
She rarely gave anything away beyond her carefully chosen words. What scraps did get by could only be picked up in person. No chance on the phone. As for texting, it was the scourge of nuance and implicit meanings. I didn't know if Emmaline Parens texted or not and didn't want to — I had no hope of plumbing her depths via text.
On the other hand, I'd happily texted Tom my plan to stop by the Circle B at dinnertime. He didn't always have connection where ranch work took him and he seldom had free hands for phone or texts, so I didn't wonder when I didn't hear back.
"I have. Any loss of life is felt, however his death is particularly difficult to fathom because of his nature." She blinked, recognizing in that moment, I thought, the trigger for her next words. "He preferred nature to human company and was acutely attuned to it."
"But not acutely attuned to humans?"
"I believe it would be safe to apply that statement to a large portion of the population, while a substantial percentage of that portion would not consider that the description applied to them."
Mrs. P tapdancing. Interesting.
"Had he been a student of yours?"
"He was not in any of the classes that I taught."
That left plenty of room. He'd been a school-aged kid while she'd taught. She'd surely been aware of him, which meant she'd observed him, which meant she'd learned a lot about him.
All of which she'd keep locked up inside no matter how adroit my questions unless she decided I really, really needed to know.
Her bar and my bar for what I really, really needed to know dwelt in different realms. Hers would top Frans Peak, which I'd recently learned was the highest in the Absaroka Range at about fourteen thousand feet. My bar was somewhere below sea level.
I decided to take it as given that she'd known Keefer Dobey from a young age and push on.
"He was helping the museum by delivering boxes of Teague's hoard for you to sort and put into order, wasn't he?"
"I would not claim to put them in order. Merely to make it more possible for Clara to achieve that goal without starting from a deficit of confusion and dirt. However, in answer to your query about Keefer Dobey's participation, he provided immeasurable help in facilitating the delivery and dispatch of boxes in an orderly manner."
"Did he talk to you while doing this facilitating?"
"It was not achieved in absolute silence." Her primness did not hide a hint of amusement. "In that sense, yes, we did converse."
"About more than the boxes. Perhaps what was in some of them? I'm interested in his interest in outlaws in this area — Wyoming more generally, and Cottonwood County — in the decade either side of the turn of the century from the nineteenth to the twentieth."
She declined her head in acknowledgment of my words, then spoke.
"The history of communication across our state, including, specifically, the history of the Pony Express Company, should be quite familiar to those affected now by the shifts and changes in technology."
I fought back a blink.
Not of confusion. I knew exactly what she was saying. She wasn't going to tell me.
Certainly not right away, maybe never.
I knew better than to point out the Pony Express operated a good forty years earlier than I'd ask about or — worse — to ask what the heck this had to do with what I'd asked. Not if I wanted answers at any point in the near future to what I wanted answers to.
But my eyebrows missed the memo, because one shot up — the traitor — and she spotted it immediately.
"The current generations believe theirs are the only ones who have responded to challenges from radical innovations, when logic dictates that previous generations have been at a minimum equally adept at such measures or we would all be residing in caves to the present time. One of the benefits of studying history is the humility it instills in us at the recognition of what previous generations have accomplished to allow us to progress to where we are now."
I kept my other eyebrow under control, but now my mouth acted up. "Have we progressed so much? Hatreds based on where you're from or how you worship or what you look like?"
She tipped her head at me. With her short stature, she reminded me of a bird. A bird about to peck at me with a very sharp beak.
"You are far too intelligent, Elizabeth, not to recognize that the very fact that you — and others — find such behavior unacceptable represents monumental progress from times past."
The fact that I agreed with her put me at a huge disadvantage.
I sidestepped by asking, "What about the Pony Express?"
Okay, okay. Not a sidestep. A full-out giving way to what she clearly wanted to talk about. But only because I knew she meant to talk about what she wanted to talk about before there was any hope of getting to what I wanted to talk about.
However, I didn't surrender completely.
I waved my little flag of knowledge by saying, "Wilson, Wyoming, was named after a Pony Express rider."
No need to admit how recently I'd acquired that particular flag of knowledge.
She lowered, then raised her head in succinct acknowledgement of my factoid.
Then she got down to business, just not the business I was pursuing.
"The Pony Express was not merely a romantic enterprise of young men dashing across the landscape on relays of fast horses—" That sounded fairly appealing to me, though even more appealing to my brothers. I recalled considerable running around our Illinois back yard that was labeled Pony Express riding. "—but was, rather, an innovative response to a pressing need."
"To get mail across the country." I hoped filling in gaps might hurry along this process.
"Indeed. It required three to four weeks to send mail overland, a method subject to poor weather conditions as well as attacks from Native Americans, or months by ship from the East Coast, either around the tip of South America or to a point from which it could be conveyed across land, most commonly in Panama, then re-boarded onto a ship, with further dangers of weather and shipwrecks for those methods. By the beginning of the 1860s, with the political tensions pointing toward the Civil War, finding a more rapid method to connect the West Coast with the rest of the country became a vital challenge.
"The Pony Express was created in mere months to begin operation in April 1860, continuing for only eighteen months before announcing cessation of operations two days after the final link of the transcontinental telegraph was connected."
"Telegraph killed it, huh?"
"It could be viewed in current terms as a startup technology that lost out quickly to a more efficient technology."
"Which then happened to the telegraph, too."
"The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 did not eradicate the telegram. However, its new technology and capacity did narrow the telegraph's importance, as we see happen with once-innovative technologies in our times, as well. The telegraph's usefulness was further eroded by the telephone. Though if one considers the need for written confirmation, one could view the fax as more detrimental."
"And now faxes are a niche market. Point taken. But I didn't realize the Pony Express only lasted eighteen months. All the movies, the TV shows, the books... It seemed like it was an institution. It's certainly embedded in our cultural memory."
"One might attribute that to the fact that the Pony Express filled a need." Her wording indicated she had reservations about joining the one who might attribute its cultural prominence to that. "Perhaps it could be said that by securing and accelerating communication between the rest of the country and what is now termed the West Coast, the Pony Express played a vital role in the continuation of the United States spreading from sea to shining sea."
"An east-west split was threatened?"
"The north-south split is undoubtedly more recognized, not the least because it occurred. However, the western region could have split away while the rest of the country was embroiled in the Civil War. That, however, is speculation and not, I believe, why movies are made and books written about the Pony Express.
"Its image captured the popular imagination at the time as well as later. Its prominence in the public's imagination was not a result of happenstance. It was stirred and tended to with great acumen by William Cody, who said he had ridden for the Pony Express, as part of his selling of the West and its history wrapped in romanticism. He did, in fact, deliver messages as a boy for a precursor of the Pony Express. However, his purported heroics with the Pony Express owed far more to his and others' adroit polishing of his exploits than accuracy. Although there were heroics displayed by a number of the riders, in addition to the endurance and skill required of their basic job."
"Buffalo Bill Cody didn't ride for the Pony Express, yet he's part of the reason we remember it now?"
She declined her head in acknowledgement of my recap, though it clearly pained her to give him even that credit when he'd perpetuated inaccuracies. I empathized. Accurate is accurate.
I also saw an opening.
"You know, it's sort of about who is remembered and who is forgotten that I wanted to talk to you about." A great segue, if I say so myself. "I was talking to Clara at the museum and she was talking about how little is known about the women connected to the men in the famous outlaw groups of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Why is that?"
From that question, I could see a path to get to Oscar and Pearl Virtanen — especially Pearl — and thus to Keefer Dobey.
Mrs. P took the bait... or she was ready to talk about this now anyway.
"Beyond the broad societal bias compounded by the academic bias toward the belief that women did nothing interesting, there were two additional, practical causes for the oversight. The first stemmed partly from the broad societal bias influencing the accounts relayed in newspapers of that period and conveying that only men participated. Indeed, they rarely stated that, as such, because it was assumed it was so, while later information showed women did participate. At times as distractions or to misdirect pursuers, but also as active participants, as detailed to some extent in the case of Laura Bullion."
I should have stuck with my path to Oscar and Pearl, but my unanswered questions about Laura Bullion lured me into the detour like someone waving a chocolate bar under my nose.
"Laura Bullion... She was connected with Ben Kilpatrick, right?"
Another newly minted factoid. But Mrs. P didn't need to know that. Especially not if my knowing impressed her.
It did not.
She dismissed it. "She was romantically linked to him, as well as others at various times."
When Mrs. P continued, I realized a faint whiff of distaste I'd picked up from her was not associated with Laura Bullion.
"The Pinkerton National Detective Agency monitored the activities, including the romantic associations, of Laura and other women associated with members of the loosely affiliated gangs of Western outlaws of that period. Much of the material we have now came from the files of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, as well as contemporary newspaper accounts, with much of that also coming from the Pinkertons, in addition to other law enforcement sources."
We were of the same mind here. "Incestuous sources are never good. Echo chambers. Seems like what Person 1 said is being reinforced by a second source — Person 2 — when it's really Person 2 repeating what Person 1 said."
Another single nod of acknowledgment. "The result in this case is a narrowed view of those women, as well as limited information on them, with even their names shrouded or lost amid multiple aliases and, I fear, inattention.
"One could say that the agents operated under a handicap in recording the names, especially the nicknames and aliases of those they sought. The outlaws did use a notable number of aliases."
"Goes with being an outlaw," I observed.
"There also was a culture in this region of not asking someone his or her name, not expecting it to be accurate if it was offered, and accepting that any number of people were known as Buckskin or Curly or Kid or for a location, such as Tex or Arkansas or Deadwood.
"However, the Pinkertons also contributed to the profusion and confusion of names. For instance, it is debated whether fellow outlaws called Ben Kilpatrick the Tall Texan or if he was, in fact, exceedingly tall, with prison records indicating he was not. Some surmised he was tall based on a famous photo, not taking into account that he sat on a straight chair between two companions occupying lower chairs. But the Tall Texan was what the Pinkertons called him — in that case likely based on a description from a single witness at one scene — and that sobriquet endured.
"Strict adherence to substantiated fact appears to be disregarded even more frequently concerning the identities of women. As an example, Laura Bullion was not deemed as important to catch as the men, despite evidence she might well have participated directly in holdups, dressed in male attire, as well as monetizing stolen goods, and acquiring necessary supplies for the gang or gangs."
Making Bullion an apt last name, I thought and didn't say. I'd already interrupted too much.
"It is certain she held proceeds from a train robbery when she was arrested shortly after Kilpatrick was in Tennessee. Multiple sources state that Laura's father was incarcerated for bank robbery and that he was responsible for introducing her as a girl to a cowboy named Will Carver. That cowboy married her aunt, who died shortly after."
I was starting to feel Laura Bullion was a new version of the Pony Express. Mrs. P was telling me what she wanted to tell me.
"Will Carver, known as News Carver, became affiliated with several gangs. He might have introduced Laura Bullion into the gangs. After he moved on, she became associated with Ben Kilpatrick.
"It is only by accessing as many sources as possible that a theme arises of Laura Bullion being called variations on Rose, including the Thorny Rose, which was on her gravestone. Some sources say members of the Wild Bunch called her that. Also Della Rose, which resembled the name of the girlfriend of another member, though whether Della was that girlfriend's real name or among the aliases she used is not certain."
Was anything about this certain?
"Another example is the woman most popularly known in current times as Etta Place."
Now, here we entered more familiar territory for me — she'd been the school teacher in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, romantically linked to the Sundance Kid, but out for a bike ride with Butch Cassidy.
With disapproval, Mrs. P said, "There are scant reliable facts to tell us what her real name or occupation might have been. It is worth noting that Place was the last name of the mother of the man who was known as the Sundance Kid and that Place was a name he used among many aliases. Is it not reasonable that she joined him in that practice? One school of thought is that her first name was Ethel or Edith, with Etta either an approximation of the Spanish pronunciation of her name or a mistaken note by the Pinkerton operatives. In other words — Oh, my, is that the time?"
Since she hadn't looked at a clock, watch, or phone, I could only assume she intuited the time.
Or decided she was done for now.
"Mrs. Parens, what about Oscar and Pearl?"
"We must continue this discussion of that particular history another time."