The Trail To Fairplay

By Terrell Brown

Short Description The Trail To Fairplay

His parents gone, young Nate Boswell leaves post-Civil War Missouri in search of a livelihood. After a misadventure in the Arkansas Ozarks, he’s hired onto a Texas outfit driving cattle to Colorado. The trail to Fairplay, Colorado, initiates him into the violence of the frontier West and brings him to a discovery of the missing roots of his family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terrell Brown
• Release date: Nov 5, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463065310

Terrell Brown

Biographical Note: Terrell Brown has been published on-line, in newspapers and in Range and True West magazines. He was born and raised in the American Southwest and lives in the West, which he considers home. He has two sons and three daughters. Contact the author at [e-mail].

Book preview

The Trail To Fairplay

by Terrell Brown

Copyright 2018 Terrell Brown

This book remains the copyrighted property of the author and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

Cover Design Copyright 2018 Moriah Brown

Moriah.bethany@gmail com

Chapter 1

My father, Wade Boswell, came from a long line of restless men. He was Kentucky-born and his father was born in western Virginia, Russell County. His grandfather was born north and east of there in Augusta County, and his great-grandfather over the mountains on the Rappahannock River, which feeds into Chesapeake Bay. I've never been to any of those places, just heard of them. Once gone from, they were gone for good, leaving the roots of family behind. Wade married my mother, Emma, and promptly joined Colonel John Ralls’ militia that marched over the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico during the Mexican War. He claimed to be one of the men with Ralls when General Price sent Ralls to accept the sabers of the surrendering officers of Santa Cruz and occupy that place until the war was over. The war was actually over because a truce had been signed, but Price didn't know it.

Wade eventually returned from the war and I was born late in the year of 1849, an only child. Finding it hard to settle down and not being successful at either of his chosen occupations, farmer and clothier, Wade took up an old habit of drinking liquor. That sealed our fates. We moved from one Missouri town to another and back again ‘to get a new start’ as my mother was wont to say. Thus, I never lived for long in one place during the decade before the Civil War. This tended to make me a quiet child and a bad fit socially since I was always an outsider to the local folks. My mother insisted I attend local schools and get an education, and if there were no school available she taught me at home. Thus I became rather ‘bookish’, a trait that Wade often chastised me for as being of no practical use.

I helped him with the chores when we were farming or worked for folks around the various towns we lived in. Wade figured hard work was the one true course that would prepare me for the life ahead of me. In spite of their having only one child, highly unusual for the times, we lived in poverty because of Wade’s drinking.

Wade joined a Union militia in the War Between the States, having no particular sympathy for the Southern cause, and while he was gone, my mother took sick and died. I continued working for people around Harmony where we were living at the time in an old farmhouse at the edge of town. My father returned a few months after she passed away towards the end of the war, sick himself from a chronic diarrhea, a broken man, and he was soon gone as well. I abandoned the farmhouse, full of sad memories, and moved in with a Christian family that held my mother in high esteem.

Alone in the world and unsure what I should do, my mother's friends suggested that since I had a good education and liked reading books, why didn't I try school teaching? In fact, they'd heard through some friends in Arkansas of a small, one-room school down in the Ozark Mountains that had trouble keeping teachers and needed one now. I had nothing but hard times to look forward to in Harmony, so I struck out for the Ozarks. Other than the clothes on my back, all I owned were a few books I’d managed to hang onto over the years, a brand new suit of clothes tucked into saddle bags, a bedroll wrapped inside a length of canvas and our bay mare sporting Wade Boswell’s old saddle. I wore a brand-new Derby hat I’d spent half my savings on, hoping it gave me the look of a gentleman.

I arrived at my destination a few weeks later at night in a driving rainstorm, the country schoolhouse marked on a map my mother's Christian friends had drawn for me. However, my venture into school teaching was a short-lived enterprise. I should have listened to the freethinking essayist Henry David Thoreau who warned his readers to beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. Though the war was over, I figure the people in that country may have concluded I was a Union sympathizer since I’d come down from a northern county in Missouri.

The school was for pupils through the 8th grade, but few of the students even knew how to write their own name and nothing of numbers except how to tally livestock using sticks. There were sixteen students on a good day and five or six when the weather was stormy. They came down from shacks and cabins up in the hills and half of them lived on squirrels that they killed in flight with unerring accuracy using slingshots whittled out of a forked tree branch.

I started everybody with learning the alphabet. Fortunately, some benefactor had provided the school with a dozen small blackboards and chalk. Some of the youngest pupils had to share but, working together and being young to boot, they learned faster than the older boys whose attention it was hard to keep and who seemed to make no progress at all through the long winter months. That became the crux of my problem. I soon lost the older boys’ interest and, being only a youth myself and an unskilled teacher, lost their obedience as well. They began to cause great disorder in the classroom, led by a fellow who outweighed me by a good sixty pounds and answered to the name Curtis ‘Dog’ Hanson. Indeed, Hanson and his three mischievous companions seemed to show up simply for the purpose of disrupting the classroom. He soon became my full-time job at the expense of all other classroom activity.

The schoolhouse served as my living quarters. Once school was let out, I slept on a pallet I kept stuffed into a broom closet built into one corner of the room. I kept my horse in a small corral with an attached lean-to near the outhouse and a woodshed. The woodstove where I prepared my simple evening meals was warm close up, but otherwise the room was drafty forcing me to bundle up indoors. Once settled in a chair before the stove, I could hardly prepare my lessons or read from my books, not from the cold, but in thinking how to deal with the problem of Dog Hanson and his followers.

The issue came to a head one morning during the spring thaw while I was splitting kindling at the stump by the woodshed, my thought absorbed in just bringing the hatchet down on chunks of pine. The day before I had exploded at the Dog’s interruptions and thrown an eraser at him, which he deftly dodged but which hit Thomas Willow, who was daydreaming again, square in the face. Dog Hanson eyed his companions in mischief and, with an evil stare towards me, was quiet and caused no further trouble. Thus, as I worked at splitting firewood while the children played, my mind was relaxed and I forgot my surroundings.

Schoolmaster, a familiar voice spoke behind me, look at this here.

I turned about, absorbed in the quiet of my own mind. As I did so, the one called Connie gave me a hard shove on my chest and I tumbled head over heels over the stump, the hatchet flying from my grasp. I struggled onto my hands and knees.

Yeooh! cried Dog’s high-pitched voice above me. Here, lemme give yah ah hand, he said right into my ear while viciously grabbing my forearms and pulling them behind my back.

He pushed me face-first into a deep puddle of liquid horse manure and melting snow, holding me down with his knees as I struggled to breathe, my arms stretched up to their limits behind me. He let one arm fall down beside me, twisting the other far up between my shoulder blades and trapping it in place with a knee. He yanked my face up out of the muck by a full lock of my hair and stuck a bare forearm under my nose. There was a gash in the arm, the flesh spouting a fresh stream of red blood.

See what yah done ta me with yer hatchet, donkey brains! he said. Have fun in class with the rest ah the babies! With that, he gave me a final shove in the back with a knee and he and his friends walked away, laughing.

I lay there recovering, choking out the poisonous filth of the water and mud. When I turned over, the children were gathered around me in a silent circle, their faces stricken with horror at what had happened to their teacher. Shortly, most of them ran away home. A few stayed and took their seats on benches in the classroom. I must have looked a sight, though I tried to make myself as presentable as I could. I let them share their lunches and go home after that. School was out and I dreaded what would be the outcome of this adventure tomorrow, and for good cause.

When trouble comes, I had developed the practice early in life of arranging the particulars of my life as best I could in order to continue on. Though there were abrasions on my face and I was sore all over, I took care to shave, trim my hair and clean up thoroughly. The evening wasn't cold, but I built up the fire in the woodstove until the room was a warm glow and, over a cup of strong black coffee, I scrubbed the mud off my suit of clothes and arranged the clothing on chairs and benches about the stove to dry.

I was up early, having only a couple biscuits and coffee for breakfast, and set myself to prepare for whatever would befall me. I was feeling a little feverish though, after a fitful night's sleep. No children showed up. But Dog Hanson's father, the spokesman for the rural community and the man who hired me on as schoolmaster, showed up in the clearing in front of the school house accompanied by Connie's and Hollis’s fathers, both of whom were carrying muskets. I stepped out onto the porch. Hanson was a big, powerful looking man.

So, Waldo Hanson said, Hear tell ya got in ah row with my boy Curtis!

Yes sir, there was some trouble, I said, coming down off the stoop of the porch.

Trouble, I'd say, he said.

Yes, I said. He and Connie…"

Leave Connie out uh this, Connie's father said.

Looks like yah got the worst of it, Waldo Hanson said. Boy said he whupped yah an’ put yer tail between yer legs.

Well yes, he whupped me I said, but those boys…

You need ta keep shut and wait’ll it's yer time ta talk, Hollis’s father said.

Said you tossed ah hatchet at im an’ come Monday threw an eraser at im fer nothin’, which he was callin’ ya on come the break when ya threw the hatchet, Hanson continued, ignoring the interruption.

The eraser I kin forgive and thet cut on his arm ain't nothin’ an’ll heal soon enough, but I cain't cotton ta the hatchet throwin’, so I want ya outta here by mornin’, sunup. Hanson pointed a beefy forefinger at me.

Don't disappoint me on this, he finished, or I'll whup yah so yah know’d yah been whupped.

I stood up straight and looked my accusers in the eye but kept my peace, if peace you could call it.

The three men turned abruptly to leave. Waldo Hanson paused and fished into a pouch at his belt. He tossed a small roll of marked currency at my feet. I could see from where I stood that the bills were old Confederate States of America currency, worthless. All my other pay had been in coin.

I went into the schoolhouse feeling morose and began packing up my few belongings. I wasn't feeling well at all, and certainly not for traveling, but I cleaned up in the schoolhouse and the yard, far better than when I’d come on the place. Not that I'd get any credit for it for I knew already how folks could be. But my mother had impressed upon me that it was important in life to leave things better than I'd found them. That certainly wasn't true of my gamble to have a profession, to be a scholar and a gentleman.

I tended to my horse, brushing him down and saw to his feet and cleaned up in the corral. Then, sitting close to the woodstove, I had plenty of time, no appetite and a raging fever. When dark finally came, I built up the fire in the stove with lots of bright, glowing coals and stared at the books I'd put out when I’d come to the school in hopes of having a profession where I could take care of myself. The books would be extra weight for the horse. I got up and went over to the books and grabbed them up like a row of bricks and, turning, threw them with all the strength I could muster at the hearth before the woodstove. I staggered to the hearth, dizzy, and got down on my knees and opened the door of the stove. I grabbed up three or four of the nearest books and tossed them into the red burning coals. Into the fire went Hawthorne and Longfellow, James Fenimore Cooper, Richard Henry Dana. Into the fire went Melville, James Boswell, Thoreau, Shakespeare and Sophocles until they were all gone and being consumed by flames. I felt awful, like I had taken the life of an innocent, but I was mad and suffering with the fever. I realized that I must have swallowed some of the putrid water while Dog Hanson was holding me down. What good could books do me? I had nothing but trouble from reading them and nobody