She Cooked One Meal at the Trading Post—By Week’s End, Every Cattleman Wanted Her Contract

PART 2:

And because a woman alone at a man’s camp would set the country talking, Wickham said they would be married before she went. It took 4 minutes. A circuit preacher in Forsythe did it at the counter between the coffee and the axe handles. Hollis Peak said out loud that it was a filthy piece of business. Ida heard herself say yes from a long way off.

She had expected Levi Stroud to look at her the way they all looked. She had braced for it, the way you brace for a step in the dark that is not there. He did not sneer. He looked at her hands, at the burn scars along the inside of her forearms from nine years of oven doors, and something moved across his face that she could not read.

Then he turned to Wickham and said four words. He said, “I will bring receipts.” Wickham’s mouth tightened, and Ida did not understand why for another two months. Her whole life went into a carpet bag and a flour sack. Bess Tilford, who did the washing under a contract of her own, walked out to the wagon and squeezed her wrist hard enough to hurt, and said nothing.

The road out of Antler Crossing climbs 11 miles through greasewood and heat shimmer. Ida sat with her hands in her lap and waited for him to speak. He did not speak. She decided he was ashamed to be seen driving her. Two miles up, he stopped the team. He climbed down, pulled a canvas fly from under the seat, and rigged it on two willow poles so the sun came off her head and shoulders.

Then he got back up and drove on. At the top of the grade, he handed her his canteen before he drank from it himself. She held it in both hands a long time before she understood he meant it, and it was not a trick. She waited all that first day for the look. It never came. Twice she caught him watching her from the corner of his eye, and both times he was watching her hands.

The country changed as they climbed. The greasewood gave out and the grass came in, then the timber. By evening, there were mountains in front of them she had only ever seen as a blue smudge from a kitchen door. They camped at a creek. He built the fire and cooked and would not let her near it. Afterward, he unrolled her bed in the wagon box and took his own blanket underneath the wagon and slept there.

Ida lay awake and listened to him breathing under the wheels. In 9 years, nobody had put anything between her and the weather on purpose. She could not decide whether she was being taken somewhere to work or somewhere to die. The second morning, they climbed again and the air came thin and cold and smelled like pitch.

He pointed once at a hawk and did not explain. Bell Creek Park opened in front of them at 4:00 in the afternoon. A green mountain meadow 8 miles long with a creek down the middle. She looked for the filthy hovel she had been promised and could not find it. The cabin sat under three big spruce with its logs squared and chinked tight and its yard swept bare.

There was a spring house, a pole corral, a shed with a plank floor. It was the cleanest place she had ever stood in. Inside, it was swept. The table was scrubbed white. Three iron pots hung by size. A coffee mill was screwed to the wall and everything in the room had a place it lived in. Against the north wall, there was a shelf of books.

 She counted them without meaning to. 19. A Bible, a veterinary book, seven volumes of somebody’s history of Rome and the corners all soft with handling. He carried her carpet bag in and set it on the bed. Then he took his own blanket off that bed, rolled it, and carried it out to the shed, and did not come back until she called him for supper.

He showed her the cellar and the meat house and where the flour was. He said, “Take what you need, and it is not for me to tell you how to do it.” Those were the most words he said in 11 days. She slept that first night with the door unbarred because there was no bar on the inside. And near morning, she understood that this was because he had never needed one.

The first week was silence. She cooked, and he ate, and he thanked her every time in exactly the same four words, and then went back out to the cattle. She made herself small in that cabin, which a large woman learns to do with her voice and her eyes, rather than her body. She did not sit down when he was in the room.

She waited for the cruelty because it always arrived. It did not arrive. He hung a curtain across the corner for her. He mended the step because it creaked under her, and he did it while she was at the spring so she would not have to know why. On the fourth day, she saw his right forearm properly, and it was a mass of old burn from wrist to elbow, shiny and puckered and pale.

He caught her looking, pulled his sleeve down, and went outside. On the ninth day, he ate a plate of her sourdough biscuits and said, “That is the best thing I have had in my mouth in 6 years.” Then he looked appalled at himself and split wood until dark. By the second week, she had counted his stores twice out of nine years of habit, and both times found them exactly, boringly, honest.

Nothing was hidden in that cabin. She did not know what to do with a man who hid nothing. At the bottom of the trunk Wickham had sent her things in, under the flour sack, there was a folded packet of papers with a string around it. It was her contract. Wickham had sent it up as a bill of charge, so Levi Stroud would know what he was holding and what it cost.

She sat down on the floor with it in the middle of the afternoon. She had never once read the whole thing. At 14, she had made her mark, and that had been that. Now she read it line by line with her finger, out loud, the way she had been taught in a schoolroom she attended two winters. Board at $6. Wages at four.

The difference charged monthly to the account with interest at 1% a month, which she worked three times on the hearth with a piece of charcoal before she believed it. She worked it forward. She worked it forward 20 years. The debt did not fall and could not fall. It rose every month for the rest of her natural life.

She had not been in service for nine years. She had been buried alive at 14 and had spent nine years politely oiling her own coffin hinges. There was worse at the bottom, in Wickham’s own hand as an endorsement of assignment. Assigned to L. Stroud, Bell Creek. And in the margin, in the same pen, run off three and a bad 40 miles and see what comes back.

Levi came in at dusk and found her on the floor with the papers in her lap. She heard him stop and read it over her shoulder without touching her. Then a sound came out of him she had never heard a man make. Low, like a tree going over. He said he would pay it. He said he would ride down in the morning with $311 in gold, put it on the counter, and bring the paper back.

Ida stood up and said, “No. The last man who bought her had made a mark on a paper, too, and she was done being a thing that changed hands.” Levi Stroud looked at her a long moment, and then he said, “All right. Then we count it.” After that, everything changed, and it changed the way weather changes in the mountains, which is all at once and without warning.

He taught her the country. He put her on a big, steady bay that could carry her all day and showed her where the elk came down. He taught her to shoot off a post. She was very bad for 2 weeks, and then, abruptly, she was not. She turned the cabin inside out. She built a proper smokehouse out of the old springhouse and cured 700 lb of meat.

She dug the cellar deeper, lined it with creek stone, and the milk stopped turning. He watched her carry a 100-lb sack of flour under each arm up from the wagon. He said out loud that whoever taught her to be ashamed of that had been a fool. He said, “Substance is what survives up here.

” He said it like a fact about weather. August came on and the heat came up even at 8,000 ft. The creek dropped. The grass went from green to the color of a lion. And Ida started a book of her own. She got a nickel tablet out of the store box and began writing down, day by day, what one working man eats. Two and a quarter pounds of flour, three quarters of a pound of meat, because she had remembered the boneyard.

Behind the Antler Crossing meat house, down the slope in the willows, there was a bone pit Wickam had thrown butchering waste into since before Ida came. Nobody had ever emptied it. Nobody had ever looked in it. Every outfit that trailed through signed beef over to Wickam for their crews under a mess contract, so many had it so much ahead.

Wickam fed the men and billed the outfits by the meal. Ida had cooked every one of those meals with her own two hands, she told Levi at the table with the tablet open. “He signed for young steers and served us worn-out cows,” she said. “He billed 9,000 meals, and I cooked 3,000, and the difference went on to somebody’s contract as board.

The bones are still in that pit.” He listened to all of it without once interrupting. Then he asked how they would prove an animal’s age off a bone. She told him because she had butchered 9 years. The ends of the long bones do not knit hard until an animal is old. That night she did a thing she had thought about for 11 days.

She took his right hand, turned the burned forearm over, and before he could pull it back, she put her mouth against the scar. Once, and let go. He stood absolutely still. She said, “That was a kiss. I will say so out loud, and I am not going to pretend it was an accident.” Levi Stroud put his good hand over his eyes and laughed until he had to sit down.

He told her about the burn afterward, a picket line fire in ’79 and a horse he had gone in after. He said he had never expected anybody to put their mouth on it. Ida said, “Then you have been keeping poor company.” And he agreed that he had. The dust came up the Bell Creek road on the last Thursday in August.

 Three riders, nobody bringing good news. Tate Hankins got down off a lathered horse in the yard. He was Wickham’s man, lean and red-headed, dark red flannel sweated black at the collar with a folded paper in his glove. “The contract of Ida Bowman,” he said, “had been sold on the 20th to the Peak outfit for $350.” Wickham had come as far as the divide to collect the property and complete the transfer.

He looked her up and down while he said, “Property.” And made a joke about the freight rate on her. And the two men behind him laughed. Levi Stroud did not move and did not speak. Na- And Hankins stopped laughing before the others did. Levi said she was not going. Hankins held up the paper and said the paper said otherwise.

And the paper was the whole of it. And did he care to argue with a court? Ida asked to see it. And Hankins was so surprised he handed it over. She read it through with her finger and found the price on the second page, $350 against a stated debt of 311. Which meant that after 9 years, Alonzo Wickham was selling her at a profit of $39.

Which meant the debt had never been the point of the debt. The debt was the fence and she was the stock inside it. She asked how many contracts Wickham held. Hankins told her because he was proud of it, and because it had never occurred to him the fat cook could do anything with a number. “41,” he said.

 “90 miles of trail, and nobody hired on it but through Antler Crossing.” There it was, laid out in a yard in the sun. Every outfit coming up the trail hired through Wickham because Wickham owned the people. All 41 owed a board account that grew faster than any wage could pay, and none had read their own paper. Ida had heard the word once in that two-winter schoolroom out of a newspaper the teacher read aloud.

Peonage. There had been a law against it in this country since 1867, and not a man on that trail knew it, including the one breaking it. Hankins said Wickham would have her by Thursday next, and if there was trouble, he would take her off the place with a rope on her like a heifer. Then they rode out. They had 6 days.

Ida sent a note down with a passing drover to Best Tilford, and it said nine words, and one of them was pit. Best sent back a scrap of butcher paper by a boy on a mule. The pit ran 40 ft, and 11 barrels would not empty it. The billing book showed 9,400 meals against the outfits, and at the bottom, in a shaky hand, two words, “Hurry, Ida.

” Thursday came in at 106° before noon, the hottest day anybody on that trail had ever written down. Hankins came early with a heavy freight wagon and four men. Ida understood the wagon before they were halfway up the meadow. They had not come only for her. They had come for the pit. Levi walked out to the gate to meet them with his hands empty and open.

And the second man from the left shot him through the left thigh from 30 ft without a word being said. He went down in the gateway. Ida was moving before he hit the ground. She got both hands under his arms and dragged 240 lb of him 20 yd across bare ground into the corner of the corral behind the water trough.

She put her own body between him and the yard while she got his belt around the leg. Then she stood up and there were four men and she was on her own. She went through the cabin door low and came out with the Winchester. Her first shot went through the freight wagon’s brake block 8 in from the nearest man’s hand.

He decided he was not being paid enough, went over the corral rails and kept going. Hankins backed the wagon to the meat house door to load the barrels and that was his mistake. Backing a four-horse hitch downhill puts every ounce of the load against the wheelers and nothing at all against the brake. Ida came around the meat house on the blind side while he hauled the doors.

She never touched him. She put her shoulder into the near wheeler’s hip, turned the whole team 90° in the traces, and kicked the chock out from the offside rear. 2,000 lb of empty freight wagon went backward down the slope. Hankins got his legs out of it and did not get his body out of it. The tailgate took him across the chest and put him down under the box against the meat house sill.

He was screaming. The wagon was going to kill him in about 4 minutes. Ida set her back against the box, got both hands under the standard, and lifted 2,000 lb high enough and long enough to drag him out from under it by the collar. She took his pistol and his knife and his water and tied him with his own reins in the shade of the wall because she had not come out there to kill anybody.

The other two were already up on their horses and going. Alonzo Wickham had come as far as the divide as promised and sat there on a good horse in a black broadcloth coat watching it through field glasses. When he saw the wagon turn, he put his heels in and ran. He ran the wrong way, which is what a town man does.

East off the divide into 11 miles of open baked country in 106° in black wool on a horse that had already come 40 miles that morning. There is exactly one water between the divide and the river. It is the spring at the head of Bell Creek and Ida Bowman had drawn her cooking water out of it all summer. She did not chase him.

 She dressed her husband’s leg and got him into shade. Then she took a plate and a tin cup and a bucket, walked up to the spring, sat down on a rock in the shade, and waited. He came in at half past six with his horse foundered and led by the reins. His coat gone, his tongue too big for his mouth. He did not see her until he was 15 ft away.

Ida stood up. She filled the cup, set it on the flat rock with a plate of bread beside it, then stepped back three paces and put her hands under her apron and waited the way she had waited in a kitchen doorway for 9 years. He drank four cups and ate the bread and cried while he did it. And he never once looked at her face.

When Hollis Peak and 11 of his men came up the draw, Wickham was still on the rock and nobody had to lay a hand on him. She was back at the cabin by full dark. She took the ball out of Levi’s leg by lamplight with a pair of forceps and a veterinary book open beside her. Packed it and sat by him all night. Near morning, he came up out of it and found her there.

 He looked at the ceiling a while, then he said, “They told me down there I was getting a cook.” He said, “I got a queen and I have been too much of a coward to say it out loud for a month.” Ida told him to go back to sleep. Then she went outside and stood in the dark yard with her hands over her face for about 4 minutes. Then she came back in and started the fire because there were men out there who had not eaten.

The case was tried in the federal court at Denver in November. The charge was holding persons in a condition of peonage, a crime in the United States since the 2nd of March, 1867, and one nobody in that courtroom had ever seen brought. On the 12th of November, a deputy marshal and nine hired men with shovels emptied the bone pit behind the Antler Crossing meat house.

It took 2 days. It filled 11 flower barrels and a wagon box. They laid it out on canvas in the courthouse yard on a Tuesday morning and the jury and the judge and 200 people came out and stood around it in the cold. Ida Bowman took a femur off the canvas, held it up, showed them the end knit hard and smooth as a river rock, and said this animal was over 6 years old.

Then, she did it again. Then, she did it 40 times, all the same. There was not one young animal in the pit, not one. And Alonzo Wickam had signed receipts over four seasons for 214 3-year-old steers delivered to him by the outfits to feed their own men. Against 9,400 meals billed, Ida testified a day and a half from a nickel tablet on what a working man eats.

 Four years of flour into that post could not have made half. The rest went on as board to people who could not read, Best Tilford testified. So did a wrangler with a 14-year account, and a teamster who had been 11 years old when he made his mark. The jury was out 55 minutes. Alonzo Wickam got 7 years at the federal prison at Leavenworth.

All 41 contracts were declared void from their first day, and 41 people walked out owing nothing, which several said was the same as being rich. And the decree carried a clause Ida asked for herself. Wickam was permanently enjoined from ever holding, buying, or selling a contract for the labor of another human being.

He came out at 54 and hired by the day at the Denver stockyards, signing a work slip every morning. Two years on, Bell Creek Park ran 900 head and had a proper barn. They found silver on the north end in 1886 and leased it, and never dug a foot themselves. By 1890, they were the wealthiest outfit in the county, still living in the same log cabin with 19 books on a shelf.

Eda bought the Antler Crossing buildings at the marshal’s sale for $210 and opened an eating house in them. There was a rule painted on the wall by the door. Anybody walking off a contract eats free and nobody asks you anything. They came for 11 years, teamsters, cooks, wranglers, a girl of 15 off a road ranch in Kansas who had walked 90 miles.

 Not one of them was ever asked to make a mark on anything. They called her the queen of the crossing from the Arkansas to the plat and said it the way you say a fact. Men who had eaten at her table would not hear a word about her size. Substance survives, they said, most of them not knowing they quoted anybody. On a Saturday in June of 1885 in front of 60 people at the shipping pens, Levi Stroud took his hat off, took his wife by both forearms and kissed her on the mouth without saying one word first.

Hollis Peak started the cheering. They could have gone anywhere after the silver came in. They went home up the 11 miles of grade under the canvas fly he still rigged for her out of pure habit and in the evenings they sat on the porch at Bell Creek Park with the meadow going gold in front of them, her hand on his burned forearm as the first time.

Two people counted worthless by a man with a pencil, each the only fortune the other needed.