Riding Shotgun

Previously:

The traveler stays for a while with the Comanche. Running Horse is shamed for choosing Sarah to be his wife and leaves the tribe. 

Chapter 11

I took my leave of the Comanche tribe and rode west. As I left, I remembered the way Comanches treated travelers caught outside the tribe and rode fast until I put a safe distance between me and the Indians. If they had come across me out here, the same Indians that I broke bread with the day before would kill me.

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I was hired to ride for the Pony Express. The man who hired me said I was too big, but he needed riders so he gave me a job. They gave me an outfit to wear with patches on it saying that I was a rider for them, but before I delivered my first piece of mail, the company was shut down. The express only lasted eighteen months.

It was said that the railroad and stagecoaches were responsible. A boxcar or a coach carried a lot more mail than an express rider’s pouch. I think the telegraph had more to do with shutting it down. No rider could travel as fast as a telegraph message.

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Since that job was gone, I decided to ride shotgun for the stage line. I did that for seven months. That's where I learned to sleep sitting up.

The line I rode for used Abbot coaches. The coaches built by the Abbott company were suspended on leather straps. They swung back and forth as you moved along and tended to rock you to sleep.

Coaches built by other companies had stiff metal springs and jostled you around. You could feel every rock and rut in the trail. Drivers didn't last long with these contraptions.

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Wells Fargo discouraged drinking, but if you did drink, you were expected to share it with the passengers. I guess they wanted everybody sober or drunk. They didn't care which.

Mostly, we carried city folks back and forth. Once a month, we carried a box of gold coins for the railroad payroll. That made coaches a tempting target for highwaymen. Why would anyone in their right mind rob a bank when the sheriff's office was usually next door?

Stagecoaches traveled on isolated trails and were easy pickings compared to a bank. That's why Jesse James and his gang were famous. They robbed banks when nobody else was crazy enough to do it.

Jesse James tried to rob the Northfield Minnesota bank. The cashier refused to open the vault and a gunfight ensued. As the gang walked out of the bank, the whole town began shooting at them. They didn't take kindly to having their life savings stolen.

Almost the entire gang was either killed or wounded. A picture was taken of the dead outlaws and thousands of copies were sold. It served as a reminder to others that robbing banks wasn't a good idea, but Jesse put together a new gang and went right back to it. Some people never learn. I heard that later on, Jesse was killed by one of his own men. Some said he was a hero. To me, he was just a not very smart bank robber.

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Some coaches were robbed, but I never saw a bandit. If I had seen a robber, I would have handed over the payroll and probably asked if I could join up with him. That's as close to getting rich as I was ever going to be.

Riding shotgun was boring. We just traveled along at a steady pace, eating a lot of dirt, and getting burned up by the desert sun. The sun scorched me so red that some of the passengers took me for an Indian.

If the sun had fried my brain anymore, I probably would have started thinking like an Indian. I could feel the civilization melting right out of me. I realized that if I rode shotgun for the rest of my life, I still wouldn't have enough money to fill up a box with gold so I moved on.

To be continued: