Douglas Preston - White Fire

“Four days ago. But I’ve been lying low, didn’t want to cause a ruckus.”

“Four days. The day before the first fire?”

“I guess it must have been. I heard about it the following morning.”

“I hope you enjoy our little town. It’s a fun place — if you’re rich.” He laughed, winked, and, to Corrie’s relief, went back to his desk. Was she jealous? She didn’t have a lock on him — she’d even declined his offer to see his apartment.

They divided up the searching by date, Corrie taking the first three months while Stacy took the next three. Silence descended, broken only by the soft rapping of keys.

And then Stacy whistled softly. “Listen to this.”

THEY WANTED THE SAME GIRL

And They Fought a Duel by Lantern Light on Her Account

BOTH MEN LITERALLY CUT TO RIBBONS

Two Ohio swains meet at midnight and, by the aid of a lantern, proceed to hack each other with swords and pocket knives until both are unconscious. One of the rivals, rousing himself, runs his adversary through with his sword, causing a fatal injury. The lady, Miss Williams, is prostrate with grief over the terrible affray.

“That’s pretty bizarre,” said Corrie, hoping that Stacy wasn’t going to read aloud every silly story she came across. It was only with a degree of soul searching that she’d accepted Stacy’s offer of assistance.

“I like that. Prostrate with grief. I’ll bet she just soaked her bloomers over the affray .”

The crudity of the comment shocked Corrie. But maybe that was the way women talked in the military.

As Corrie paged through the headlines, she realized Ted was right: Roaring Fork, at least in the summer of 1876, was a bloody town. There was practically a murder a week, along with daily stabbings and shootings. There were stagecoach robberies on Independence Pass, mining claim disputes, the frequent murder of prostitutes, stealing of horses, and vigilante hangings. The town was overrun with card sharps, shysters, thieves, and murderers. There was also a huge economic divide. Some few struck it rich and built palatial mansions on Main Street, while most lived in teeming boardinghouses, four or five to a room, and tent encampments overrun with filth, rats, and mosquitoes. A casual and pervasive racism infected everything. One end of town, called “China Camp,” was populated with so-called coolies who were horribly discriminated against. There was also a “Negro Town.” And the newspaper noted a squalid camp in a nearby canyon that was occupied by “assorted drunken, miserable specimens of the Red Race, the sad remnants of the Utes of yore.”

In 1876, law had barely come to Roaring Fork. Most “justice” was administered by shadowy vigilantes. If a drunken shooting or knifing occurred in a saloon the night before, the perpetrator would often be found the next morning hanging from a large cottonwood tree at the far end of town. The corpses were left up for days to greet newcomers. In a busy week there might be two, three, or even four bodies hanging on the tree, with “the maggots dropping out of them,” as one reporter wrote with relish. The papers were full of colorful and outrageous stories: of a feud between two families that ended with the complete extermination of all but one man; of an obese horse thief whose weight was such that his hanging decapitated him; of a man who went berserk from what the newspaper called a “Brain Storm,” thought he was Jesus, barricaded himself in a whorehouse, and proceeded to kill most of the ladies in order to rid the town of sin.

Work in the mines was dreadful, the miners descending before daybreak and coming up after sunset, six days a week, only seeing the light of day on Sundays. Accidents, cave-ins, and explosions were common. But it was even worse in the stamp mills and the smelter. There, in a large industrial operation, the silver ore was pulverized by gigantic metal “stamps” weighing many tons. These literally smashed the ore, pounding day and night, producing a ceaseless din that shook the entire town. The resulting grit was dumped into immense iron tanks with mechanical agitators and grinding plates to further reduce it to a mush-like paste; then mercury, salt, and copper sulfate were added. The resulting witches’ brew was cooked and stirred for days, heated by enormous coal-fired boilers that belched smoke. Because the town was in a valley surrounded by mountains, the coal smoke created a choking, London-style fog that blocked the sun for days on end. Those who worked in the mill and smelter had it worse than the miners, as they were often scalded to death by burst steam pipes and boilers, suffocated by noxious fumes, or horribly maimed by heavy equipment. There were no safety laws, no regulation of hours or pay, and no unions. If a man was crippled by machinery, he was immediately dismissed without even an extra day’s wage, cast off to fend for himself. The worst and most dangerous jobs were given to the Chinese “coolies,” whose frequent deaths were reported in the back of the paper in the same offhand tone one might use to describe the death of a dog.

Corrie found herself becoming increasingly indignant as she read about the injustice, the exploitation, and the casual cruelty in pursuit of profit perpetrated by the mining companies. What surprised her most, however, was to learn that it was the Staffords — one of the most respected philanthropist families in New York City, famous for the Stafford Museum of Art and the wealthy Stafford Fund — who had initially established their fortune during the Colorado silver boom as the financiers behind the mill and smelter in Roaring Fork. The Stafford family, she knew, had done a lot of good with their money over the years — which made the unsavory origin of their fortune all the more surprising.

“What a place,” said Stacy, interrupting Corrie’s train of thought. “I had no idea Roaring Fork was such a hellhole. And now look at it: the richest town in America!”

Corrie shook her head. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

“So much violence and misery.”

“True,” said Corrie, adding in a low voice: “though I’m not finding anything that might point to a gang of cannibalistic serial killers.”

“Me neither.”

“But the clues are there, somewhere. They have to be. We just have to find them.”

Stacy shrugged. “You think it might be those Ute Indians up in the canyon? They had a good motive: their land was stolen by the miners.”

Corrie considered this. Around that time, she’d read, the White River and Uncompahgre Utes had been fighting back against the whites who were pushing them westward through the Rocky Mountains. The conflict culminated in the White River War of 1879, when the Utes were finally expelled from Colorado. It was possible that some Indians in the conflict had worked their way southward and taken revenge on the miners of Roaring Fork.

“I thought of that,” she said at length. “But the miners weren’t scalped — scalping leaves distinctive markings. And I learned that the Utes had a huge taboo against cannibalism.”

“So did whites. And maybe they didn’t scalp them so as to conceal their identity.”

“Possible. But the killings were high-quality. What I mean is,” Corrie hastily added, “they were not sloppy and disorganized. It can’t be easy to ambush a wily, hardened Colorado miner guarding his claim. I don’t think a sad camp of Utes could have perpetrated these killings.”

“What about the Chinese? I can’t believe how terribly they were treated — it was as if they were considered subhuman.”

“I thought about that, too. But if the motive was revenge, why eat them?”

“Maybe they just faked the eating thing, to make it look like a bear.”