Meeker and the Old Man
Ron Lewis
Meeker and the Old Man
A Tale from life of Sleeps-With-Bears, Joseph Nathan Meeker
Ron Lewis
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Copyright © 2017/24 Ron Lewis
This is a work of fiction and not intended to be historically accurate but merely a representation of the times. The names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any similarity to any person, living or dead, is merely coincidental and unintentional. Historical characters used are strictly for dramatic purposes. This story contains some violence.
Meeker and the Old Man
I remember the first time I laid eyes on Joseph Nathan Meeker. You’ve probably heard his Injun-name, Sleep-With-Bears. Well, he weren’t always called that. It was mid-June, in the Year of our Lord, eighteen hundred and thirty.
I was near to 80 years old at the time. Me and my partner, Froggy Guillaume Paternoster, was in Saint Louis buying supplies for the year. We had completed outfitting for the winter and trapping season. We were on the verge of leaving town for the long trek back to the Black Hills, our base of operations. It’d been nigh on to two months since we had sawed our squaws and was anxious to make tracks.
Well, sir, we get ready to pull up stakes and hit the trail, and what do we saw? A kid looked roundabout, 13 or 14-years-old. A scrawny boy what had a head full of shaggy, sandy brown hair, a pair of Kentucky pistols shoved in his belt, and a Brown Bess in his hand.
Behind the lad was a gray Morgan and some sort of big plow hoss with shaggy hair hanging down on his hoofs. The beast must’ve stood 18 or 19 hands high. In addition, the kid had his-self two mules loaded down with supplies and traps.
Yes, sirree, the tadpole had come plumb, loaded for bear. That notwithstanding, the kid was only a fresh weaned calf, somewhere twixt hay and grass. The wiles of the Black Hills or the Rocky Mountains was no place for a weanling on his own.
“By God,” Guillaume said in his thick French accent. He looked at me and continued. “This baby will get himself murdered by a redskin or trapper. We must prevent this from happening.”
I don’t know why, but right off, the two of us took a shine to that Yankee teen.
****
The morning fog hung thick near the river. The three riders moved slowly over the ground. Traveling to the northwest, the men talked between themselves. They had trekked for almost six days. Their pace was neither leisurely nor hurried. The old man spoke in a constant stream of tales about his long life.
The Frenchman endured the accounts, but God only knows how. For he’d listened to them many times before. However, with each telling, new shades of truth and exaggeration changed the complexion of the tale somewhat.
Stories of deeds done, battles fought, and his wives, along with the many adventures Conan McCallan had shared with Boone or Crocket. Both these two legends were dead by this point. Meeker, a lad of 14 years and a few days hailing from Maine, never suspected the narrative might be just a tad overblown.
“I knew Daniel Boone from the Revolution, fit together under Washington. When the war started for real, back in ‘76, I was a lad of 16. Boone took me under his wing. The first winter … Now then, I meet Davey Crocket in the War of 1812. I should say David Crocket because he only let close friends call him Davey. I was one of them friends, but out of respect, I should call him David to you fellers,” the old man stopped for a moment and continued.
“Yes, sir, the two of was thick as thieves for time. We fought with General Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. And fierce fighting it was … New Orleans, I say, but you should know the white American locals, they call it Norluns, all one word. Well, something like Norluns, southerners have a language all their own.”
He babbled on about the War of 1812 for some time. Told of the parting of the two men and how he’d missed the ‘hodown’ in Texas.