Men in the Land

By J.P. Lucas

Men in the Land is a compilation of stories that deal with real men. Men and their immovable foundations, their women, facing difficult and deadly circumstances, who understand the foundational basis of morality and decency, love of family, friends, and country. These men must deal with immorality, greed, and danger decisively, and sometimes violently, while maintaining their own integrity. Each man, in real life, must face similar decisions for himself.

There are those who would destroy us. Men in the Land are the bulwark against destruction. Kender, Stepp, Openshaw, and Trapper White, their neighbors and friends, each, in their own way, are men who inspire us to fight, against all odds, for that which is rightfully ours. They irreversibly influence the world around them.

Men in the Land are monuments to positive values, hard won, and honest achievement. They stand for something. They are granite, bigger than life, strong, and immovable.

Our nation is today because there were Men in the Land.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Dec 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781490760469

J.P. Lucas

The author has a wide range of life experience: raised in a near nineteenth-century Appalachian mountain environment; an American history student and a revolutionary war descendant; a student of human characteristics and behavior, lifelong businessman, father, mountain horseman, hunter, pilot, machinist, heavy equipment operator, MSHA instructor, mine owner; and an inventor, writer, speaker, and musician.

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© Copyright 2015 J.P. Lucas.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-4907-6048-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-6047-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-6046-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015910546

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CONTENTS

DEDICATION

Preface

A True Montana Story

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

BECKY DIDN’T SLEEP MUCH

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

A night to remember

BOYD COBB

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter12

The Gem in Diamond’s Hand

DEDICATION

For many years I have written stories, poems, dissertations, and songs. Polly and I sang and played Gospel Music across the country for a lot of happy years.

As for writing, for a lot of years, I wrote simply because I liked doing it. Some things I wrote about my wife, some about my children and some about the goodness of God and His blessings, or just about life, history, and my experiences.

Now I get the chance to dedicate this book to the greatest of all my blessings, my children; Anna, Wesley, Tammy, Lance, Laine and my wonderful wife Polly.

My children have been an invaluable source of encouragement to me.

Polly has been my rock for 50 years. Her never ending support has been the thing that has allowed me to pursue so many projects, which have ranged from the insurance business, construction contracting, coal mining, aviation, design and development of various inventions.

She has made it possible for me to fly, ride, pack, and hunt the beautiful Rocky Mountain country from which I have gathered much to write about. She has wrapped my busted ribs and broken ankles, caused when horses and I have, for one reason or another, suddenly crossed paths or parted ways.

I have lost a couple of engines in flight, and had a wing partially disintegrate on a plane I was flying. I survived, and Polly was always there to pick me up, shake her head, and take me home.

She has prayed for me and nursed me back from the abyss a number of times, and encouraged me to take another stab at accomplishment, no matter what it was.

She has supported me morally and financially, which has given me the ability to experience much more in my lifetime than one man can reasonably expect.

She has encouraged me and given me the freedom to be involved in any venture I could find, from land development to politics. That has given me the ability to say, as I’ve grown older, I have lived. She has encouraged our children to really live life, become leaders, and stand for something good in our world. Because of her they have, and are doing that.

It is to this special group of people, I am privileged to know, my family, that I dedicate this effort, this work.

J.P.    

3/22/2012

J.P. Lucas

(Jerry Prouse)

December 20,1943-October 19,2015

PREFACE

The year was 1870. The War Between the States had ended a mere five years before. Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Custer would not meet until six years later on June 25, 1876. The years of the good life for the plains Indian were closing in the Yellowstone River country, and the abundant promise of the territory was beginning to make itself evident to the white man.

Horace Countryman was raising cattle and horses at the mouth of the Stillwater River where it meets the Yellowstone, and McGirl had started the Vermillion Ranch across the Yellowstone from the mouth of Pryor Creek.

Only a handful of years later, John Fake would watch in wonder as great numbers of Sioux warriors and their families trailed past his camp on the Bighorn River, between the present day towns of Hardin, and Custer, Montana, fresh from the destruction of Gen. George Armstrong Custer and his Seventh Cavalry.

Fake and his little wife were watching the last migration of any large band of victorious Indians ever to take place in America and the beginning of an era, when the only hope of freedom for any tribe was flight. Forever after this, in any battle, the Indian was fighting a rear guard action, only a defender of a cause already lost. An era that was forever ended at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the frigid, snow-blanketed winter morning of December 29, 1890. That day, Sioux Chief Big Foot and his Miniconjou, Hunkpapa, and Lakota Sioux people were destroyed, massacred, by the U.S. Cavalry. This ended the Indian wars on the open prairie and started an unprecedented explosion of white settlement on the high plains.

In the early years of settlement, life was risky in Montana’s Big Sky Country. This was a vast territory of seemingly endless prairie, wild rivers, and mountains. However, contrary to what many believe, it was not an empty land. It was then, as it is today, a land of abundance. Abundantly full. Full of the stuff of men’s dreams. It was a land of deer, elk, buffalo, bear, and millions of smaller animals. Antelope, wolves, coyote, mink, beaver. A place where fortunes could be made with a good buffalo gun and some traps. It was a land where domestic cattle were beginning to flourish and the foundations of beef-made fortunes were being laid. An exhilarating land made for real men and women. Some days were deadly. Some were filled with reward and spine-tingling excitement.

This was a land where the harried and crowded white man, fleeing the destitution and despotism of Europe and the destruction of the civil war in the east, saw his dreams and, sometimes, his nightmares come true. They rode west, from north and south on their army issue, hand-me-down, or custom handmade saddles, for these men and women came from families of vastly differing financial means.

Many a man and his wife, if he had one, walked alongside, or rode, a spine-jolting, wooden-wheeled, iron-tired wagon to reach their goal.

Some early travelers joined wagon trains such as the Fisk trains that allowed them to walk alongside the wagons of the train, in which their belongings were stored.

For a hundred dollars, James Fisk, working out of Minnesota, in the 1860s, would haul their goods west, in large wagon trains, providing them the safety of numbers on their journey to the gold fields of Western Montana. No matter how the task was done, the white man was determined to carve out a new life in the western country.

The red man, on the other hand, was forced to seek the remote and secluded places and watch his dreams die. He had become an unwanted refugee, in his own land, a land taken from him, sometimes bit by bit, but many times by millions of acres or thousands of square miles at a time.

For instance, in 1851 the Fort Laramie Treaty set aside 38.5 million acres of land for the Crow tribe of Montana and Wyoming. In 1868, a new Fort Laramie treaty reduced the Crow lands by approximately 79 percent, leaving them approximately 6 million acres. In 1904, they ceded another strip of land that left them with 3.8 million acres of land within their reservation of which only 1,575,000 was actually held in trust by the government exclusively for Crow use, now covering only parts of two counties in Montana. Whole territories, whole sections of the continent, were eternally lost to their ancient owners.

The destruction of the western Indians’ way of life took a lightning short time. More than half the real estate on the North American continent changed hands from the time of the discovery of gold in California in 1849 to the final destruction of the will and ability of the Indian to fight at Wounded Knee in 1890. Forty-one of the most momentous years in the history of the world.

During this time, states were formed, county boards elected, towns surveyed and established. At the same time, the owners, the aborigines, the former possessors, the Indians, were quietly swindled, by treaty or agreement, or violently driven from their land. A land where the only thing of substance left to its few remaining original inhabitants were their memories. Vivid memories, of a very recent, and poignant past. Memories of their herds of game that made the puny herds of the white man’s cattle and sheep look insignificant. They remembered herds of buffalo that had stretched for miles and filled the plains and valleys. Great herds of antelope, in tan and white waves of ceaseless energy, flowed endlessly over millions of square miles of the red man’s real estate. Deer, elk, bighorn sheep, the fearless grizzly, and his little black cousin, had only a few years before, crowded the river bottoms and rimrocks.

Those times were gone. For him who chose not, or could not choose, the reservation, life and memory were only a hollow echo of the past.

Luck, as long as it lasted, would allow him an occasional bottle of whiskey and a stolen, or broken down, horse. In the end, too many times, if he would not take the white man’s reservation hand out, he would be forced to swallow the white man’s disdain, fury, and finally his lead. Where he was buried—if he was buried—only a few remember and even fewer care.

It was into this open land of the dispossessed that there rode the extended family of those white men who had conquered the eastern wilderness to found a great nation.

As with their predecessors, most of these were a special breed of generally hardworking, decent, and caring people. People inspired with a mission. A mission that drove them to establish a better life for their offspring, according to their lights.

Some felt compassion for those they displaced. Most felt disdain for those who had not taken advantage of the land and developed it to their specifications. To its greatest and highest potential. But, by and large, they were driven by something that had never existed in the world prior to their time. They were driven by a sense of becoming more than any ordinary men had ever been. Possessors of property. Free, and safe, under the law, to develop their individual families and their personal wealth.

There was no larcenous king to force unreasonable tribute from the hands of the workman. The weak, as the white man’s history on this continent had proven, could not, and would not, survive.

In those days, unlike today, to insult a man’s wife, threaten harm to his family or his friends, or steal his possessions was to risk the loss of one’s most precious possession—his life. For in those days there were men in the land. It is with this in mind that I recount the following story.

A TRUE MONTANA STORY

F OR ONE REASON or another, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, some Indians refused to, or found it impossible, to leave the land of their birthplace and their memories, and thus the story told to me, as I rode through the foothills of the Little Belt Mountains, on Running Wolf Creek, in Montana one day in the summer of 1982.

The old man had inherited a mining claim in these mountains, from his dad, an early miner in the country in the late 1800s. He was born there in the mountains in 1900. He had become a very prosperous miner himself. In his lifetime he had been featured on a dead or alive poster, in the developing state of Montana, because of a placer mining dispute and, later in life, served on the president’s national advisory team. Now, he is a much-respected multimillionaire businessman, presently the active owner of mining properties in Montana and California.

He said it was around 1906, and the country in the Little Belts had for years been the scene of ranching, farming, hard-rock, and placer gold mining. Yet there were still a few blanket Indians, as the old man called them, hanging around the mountains, most of them reservation outcasts or fugitives wanted by the white man for various crimes.

The stage lines in the area, at the time, ran along the base of the mountains, in the Running Wolf Creek area, and one particular stage station was having a problem with some of the hideout, blanket Indians, from the surrounding country, stealing their horses. The station manager, horse wrangler, had over a period of a couple of months, managed to kill two of the thieves, and quietly bury them, with some help from the father of the old man relating the story to me, who owned a couple of valuable mining claims nearby.

From this time on, the station manager felt that he was being watched and the safety of himself, and his stock, were more in jeopardy than before.

After some time he decided to lay a trap for the remainder of the renegade horse thieves. On one particular night he made arrangements for it to appear that he had gone into Stanford, a town several miles away, for supplies, leaving his horses unguarded. Apparently he was correct, in assuming that he was being watched, as it turned out. So, on the appointed night, instead of leaving his station, he faked his trip by having my old friend’s dad ride away from the station dressed like him and riding his saddle horse, while he remained.

Late in the night, the suspected Indians sneaked into his corrals and were in the process of stealing the horses when he surprised them with a shotgun and killed the remaining four thieves. He, again with the help of his neighbor, buried them alongside their former companions and transplanted some birch and pine trees to the site of the grave to disguise the site.

Today, the only sign of their graves is a small grove of trees, on an otherwise barren hillside, near the remains of the old stage station.

Thus the undignified and anonymous passing of some of the former proud owners of millions of acres of the most beautiful and bountiful country on earth. Land that made millionaires of many of the white men, who were able to displace them, with their whiskey, shotguns, rifles, treaties, and persuasion.

CHAPTER 1

F ALSE DAWN HAD passed and the night, never one to surrender easily, had blackened this high land for a short time in its mighty effort to delay the daybreak.

Now, the sun, in his relentless conquering march over darkness, had broken the grip of the black one and had, in moments, pierced the disputed territory of the sky with innumerable, rending, blazing, multicolored swords of light. Golden streamers pierced through snow-white, cotton-candy clouds, with confederate grey bellies, and became translucent brushes in the master artist’s hand. Dipped in fantasy shades of red, orange, and yellow, they painted the mountains and buttes of this beautiful land in every imaginable color.

Darkness had fled and where there had been dark, impenetrable shadow only moments before upon the land, there lay a landscape of such incredible beauty that it had demanded awe-inspired worship from the original inhabitants. A canopy of blue in every hue from azure to cobalt now formed an unforgettable covering for this particular miracle of morning.

None of this was lost on the long, weather-beaten man who sat thoughtfully on his big sorrel horse at the top of a boulder-strewn, cedar-covered divide.

Dan Stepp had crisscrossed this fabulous land for the past ten years and had never ceased to marvel at the beauty that surrounded him. He had come to love the sights and sounds that permeated this, his adopted part of the country.

The bite of the invigorating morning air, the sharp smell of the cedars intermingled with the warm pine- and sage-scented eddies of an occasional breeze.

The ratchet hammering of a Flicker, clearing a dead snag of its wriggling guests. The sudden shrill whistle of a rock-chuck who was disturbed in his morning rounds by the discovery of this stranger sitting stock-still on a horse in his backyard.

It all had a profound effect on Stepp. He had seen too much of ugliness in his lifetime. Now these times of unspeakable beauty were an oasis to him. They refreshed and relieved his heart, mind, and soul. They gave him a deep inward renewal. They convinced him continually of the perfect order that was originally intended to be. He believed that the God that had created all this beauty and wonder must control even the most confusing and disastrous times. He had seen and experienced it. There was justice and order, he was convinced of it. He had to believe it.

He believed that he was a part of it and it had set his convictions in concrete. He