The Old Mountain Man Tells Another Story
Remembering the days when settlements in Indian Territory were forbidden
The “Tales From Wyoming” are a collection of interconnected short stories of the Pioneers and the Old West. Each story combines some fiction with some legend with a liberal dose of real history. The stories are standalone adventures.
This story continues the saga of Wyoming’s first settlement and begins where The Old Mountain Man Laments left off. Check out the entire collection here:
In the 1880s, the Gold Rush in Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains was waning. Businesses in South Pass City were failing, and there was little else to do than talk about the Good Ole Days.
An hour before dawn, Sam Potter opened the bedroom door and shuffled out. His sixty-year-old joints resisted normal functionality so early in the morning. The cold weather made matters worse.
He struck a match and lit the kerosene lamp. Scooping a shovel of coal, he fed the stove. When he slammed the door shut, a groan and sudden movement startled him. His heart skipped a beat, and then he remembered Morgan Sandburg. The previous evening he had invited the young man to spend the night on the couch instead of riding back to Atlantic City in the throes of a snowstorm.
Picking up the lamp, Sam strode through the connecting door to the storefront portion of his abode. He hoped Morgan would go back to sleep. Sam was not in the mood for idle conversation.
Sam turned his attention to the crates of new merchandise which needed to be unpacked. In years gone by, his general merchandise store in South Pass City had been a going concern. He had made a nice living for his family. However, in 1884, the gold mines around the city had played out and he serviced a dying community. He knew the day was fast approaching when he would have to close the store. In some sense, he looked forward to the time when the decision would be made for him; he looked forward to moving to Cheyenne and enjoying his grandchildren.
“Good morning.”
Sam looked over his shoulder to see Morgan rubbing sleep from his eyes. He was dressed, but still in his stocking feet. The young man was Abigail Thorne’s fancy man. Abigail was his only employee at the store, but she was almost a daughter to him. He worried what would happen to her when he was forced to close. He hoped Morgan would marry her and take her to Atlantic City soon.
“Can I help you with anything?” Morgan added.
“No thanks, I’ve got it,” Sam replied, and then added, “If you could make some coffee that would be grand.” Sam did want some coffee and saw an opportunity to get some before his wife Shirley awoke.
“Sure, I can do that.” Morgan returned to the residential portion of the building and Sam returned to his work.
As Sam was finishing his morning routine, Morgan returned with a pot of coffee and two tin cups. He placed the cups atop a crate and half-filled them with coffee. One did not fill tin cups with hot liquid. The metal edge quickly absorbed the heat and burned the lips of the drinker.
Sam picked up his cup, gently blew over the steaming liquid, and sipped.
“Thanks,” he said to Morgan.
The two men continued to sip the coffee and Morgan added more to the cups.
“Mr. Potter, I was wondering how your story ends.” Morgan was referencing the story Sam had told the previous night about his days as a fur trapper and how he had met Shirley. “Your friend, Karl Kursk, you implied that you two reunited. Did he go to Oregon? Did you follow him there and then come back to Wyoming?”
Sam sighed as the memory of Karl returned. He sat on a crate and lit a cigar. Holding both the cigar and the tin cup in his right hand, he alternately sipped and puffed as he returned to his story of 39 years earlier.
“Karl did set off with the wagon train, but he didn’t go to Oregon…”
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Continue reading the adventures of Karl Kursk in A Settler.
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Sam Potter grounded the stump of his cigar into a wooden crate. He held his cup out for Morgan to refill with coffee.
“That was Bessemer,” Morgan said. “You are talking about how Bessemer was settled?”
“Yes, but it wasn’t called Bessemer until a lot of years later. It was simply the Mormon community in those days.”
“And so, you and Mrs. Potter moved there too?”
Sam chuckled. “It was a combination of coincidences. You see, six months after the founding of the community on the bank of the Platte River, one of Brigham Young’s followers had the misfortune to discover gold in a sluice he was digging for his sawmill in California.”
“Misfortune?”
“Indeed, this sparked the 1849 gold rush and John Sutter’s mill was soon surrounded by mines and the growing city of Sacramento, California. The war with Mexico had just ended and California now belonged to the United States. California became a state less than two years later and the Mormons were once again pushed out. Brigham Young halted his westward migration at the Great Salt Lake basin. Coincidentally, the US acquired the Utah Territory from Mexico.”
“So, are you and Mrs. Potter Mormons?”
“Ah, no. You see, after we were married in Council Bluffs, I returned to working on the riverboats. When the gold rush began, we got swept-up in the frenzy; however, not as future miners. Instead, we decided to go to Sacramento and open a store. We decided that selling merchandise to the miners would be more rewarding than mining. So, with most all the money I had, I bought three freight wagons full of supplies and joined a wagon train the next spring. After a couple of months, we arrived at the Mormon ferry across the Platte River, and there was my old friend Karl running the thing.
“To make a long story short, he and his wife talked me and Shirley into staying there. We set up our store and began selling supplies to the emigrants traveling to Oregon and California.” Sam shrugged. “After a time, when gold was discovered here in South Pass, we moved here.”
THE END
Copyright ©2023 by S. M. Revolinski All Rights Reserved
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