Beneath the Burning Timber: The Wanted Outlaw Who Died to Save His Blood

The rhythmic, musical thump-thump of their broadaxes and the sweet, resinous tang of pine sawdust filled the warm air. The new house was built two stories high, of massive, squared ponderosa pine logs with dovetailed corners, resting upon a deep foundation of river granite that no fire could ever touch. Along the front ran a wide, covered veranda, positioned to catch the cool evening drafts that blew down from the snowfields.

Mae Jensen sat on an upturned nail keg near the well-sweep, nursing a tin cup of coffee with a big hound resting its head across her knees.

"They're framing the bedrooms, girl," Mae called out, a toothless grin splitting her wrinkled face. "Gave the twins the south windows. They'll have the sun from dawn until supper."

Tom walked with Eleanor to the edge of the east pasture, where the coal seam cropped out along the creek bank in great, glossy shelves of pure anthracite.

"The Northern Pacific sent another representative to my office yesterday, Eleanor," Tom said, resting his arms on the newly split cedar fence rail. "They offered sixty thousand dollars for the mineral rights. Cash in the bank at Omaha."

Eleanor looked out over the emerald meadow, where Bess, the old plow mare, was grazing peacefully alongside two fresh roan mules.

"What did you tell them, Tom?"

"I told them the coal stays in the dirt," Tom smiled, turning his gray eyes toward hers. "I told them that when Noah and Emma are grown, if they want to dig the earth, they can dig it themselves. But until then, this valley will grow grass, cattle, and honest men."

Eleanor smiled—a deep, peaceful smile that reached the corners of her eyes for the first time since Daniel fell ill.

"That is exactly what Daniel would have said," she whispered.

Three miles north of the homestead, far above the highest line fence and beyond the dense stands of lodgepole pine, the mountain rose into a wild, windswept wilderness of broken gray shale, dwarf juniper, and ancient granite boulders.

Here, at an elevation of eight thousand feet, perched upon a narrow, rocky bench that overlooked the entire Sweetwater basin, was the place the local Shoshone called The Eagle’s Eye.

To the south, the wide valley unfolded like an emerald carpet, traversed by the glittering, serpentine ribbon of the river. To the east, the pencil-straight line of the railroad cut stretched toward the hazy, blue horizons of the Nebraska plains. And behind, towering like an impenetrable wall of blue ice, the monstrous peaks of the Wind River Range scraped against the pale azure sky.

In the center of this lonely bench of stone stood a massive cairn.

It was seven feet long, four feet wide, and four feet high, constructed of heavy, round river boulders that Tom and Eleanor had hauled up the mountain on a horse-drawn travois through three weeks of hard labor.

There was no wooden cross. Elias had belonged to no denomination, and no ordained preacher had spoken words over his clay.

Instead, mortared into the center of the south-facing stones, was a flat slab of white limestone brought from the canyon wall. Into its hard face, young Tom had cut five lines with an iron cold-chisel and a stone-mason’s mallet:

ELIAS VALE

1840 – 1876

SOLDIER — BROTHER — DEFENDER

HE LAID HIS BODY ACROSS THE THRESHOLD

FORGIVEN

Eleanor stood beside the cairn. She was alone.

She had ridden up the steep game trails that morning aboard the roan mare, leaving the children with Mae Jensen and Tom at the new ranch house. In her canvas saddlebag, she carried a stone crock of sweet wild chokecherry preserves, a round loaf of fresh sourdough bread, and a small twist of mountain tobacco.

She laid the tobacco upon the top stone of the cairn.

"The sheep are in the lower meadow, Elias," she said, speaking aloud into the vast, thin silence of the upper air. Her voice was carried away instantly by the steady, cold wind that swept down from the snowfields, but she knew the mountain heard her.

"The roof is tight," she continued softly. "Tom split the cedar shakes himself. He used the three-inch iron nails that Daniel traded for before the war. The drafts can't find the cradles now."

She knelt on the shale, her fingers resting against the cold, hand-carved letters of the limestone slab.

She closed her eyes, and in the darkness of her memory, she saw him again. She saw the vast, monstrous silhouette stepping out of the midnight rain, carrying the scent of pine pitch and the burden of a hunted wolf. She saw his massive, scarred hands—hands that could crush an iron gun-barrel—delicately carving the tiny mane of the pine horse so that two fatherless babes might have a toy to hold when the cold came through the walls.