THE HEROINE OF THE JULES-SLADE TRAGEDY
By Mrs. Harriet S. MacMurphy
Our two weeks' ride over Iowa prairies was ended and we had reached our new home in Nebraska. I sat in the buggy, a child of twelve, with my three-year-old brother beside me, on the eastern bank of the Missouri river, while father went down where the ferry boat lay, to make ready for our crossing.
In the doorway of a log cabin near by stood a young girl two or three years older than I. We gazed at each other shyly. She was bare-headed and bare-footed, her cheeks tanned, and her abundant black hair roughened with the wind, but her eyes were dark and her figure had the grace of untrammeled out door life. To my girl's standard she did not appeal, and I had not then the faintest conception of the romance and tragedy of which she was the heroine.
We gazed at each other until father gave the signal for me to drive down on the clumsy raft-like boat behind the covered half-wagon half-carriage that held the other members of our family, which I did in fear and trembling that did not cease until we had swung in and out as the boat strained at the rope to which it was attached, the waters of the "Old Muddy," the like of which I had never seen before, straining and drawing it down with the current, and a fresh spasm of fear was added as we reached the far shore and dropped off the boat with a thud down into the soft bank. We had reached Decatur, our future Nebraska home, adjoining the Indian reservation with its thousand Omahas.
For a long time I did not know anything further of the girl of the log cabin by the river side, only that they told us the family were named Keyou and the men were boatmen and fishermen and ran the ferry. This first chapter of my little story opened in the spring of 1863.
Six years later my girlhood's romance brought marriage with my home-coming soldier, who in his first days in the territory of Nebraska had passed through many of the romantic events that a life among the Indians would bring, among them clerking in a trading post with one "Billy" Becksted, now the husband of my maiden of the riverside log cabin. And Billy and John always continued the comradeship of the free, happy, prairie hunting life, riding the "buckskin" ponies with which they began life together, although they came together from very different walks of life.
And I learned of my husband that "Addie," as we had learned to call her, young as she was when first I saw her, had been the wife of a Frenchman named Jules, after whom the town of Julesburg (Colorado) is named, and his dreadful death at the hands of one Slade was one of the stock stories of the plains well known to every early settler.
Billy and Addie after a time drifted away from Decatur down the river and we lost sight of them.
We, too, left the home town and became residents of Plattsmouth.
One day my husband, returning from a trip in the country said, "I ran across Billy and Addie Becksted today and they were so glad to see me that Addie put her arms round me and kissed me, with tears in her eyes." Later we learned with sorrow that Billy was drinking and then that he had come down to Plattsmouth and tried to find my husband, who was out of town and had gone back home and when almost there had taken a dose of morphine, and they had found him unconscious and dying near their log cabin under the bluffs half a mile above the Bellevue station. And my husband really mourned that he had not been at home, perhaps to have kept good-hearted Billy from his woeful fate. After a time Addie married Elton, a brother of Billy's, and one Sunday I persuaded my husband to go down to them in their cabin under the bluffs.
"I have always wanted to get Addie to tell me her story of her life with Jules," I said.
"I don't believe you can get her to talk about it," said Mac, "she never speaks of it, Elton says."
We went, and they were delighted to see us, killed the fatted chicken and gathered for us some of the wild berries that grew in the bluffs, and then as we sat under the trees with the bluff towering above us, I asked her for the story of her girlhood's days out on the plains, when only a single house that sheltered three or four people was her home, and not another for many miles.
"I was just a child," she said, "and Jules was more like my father than my husband. But there were few women in the country in those days and Jules said to my parents that he would take good care of me, and so they gave me to him, and they went on to Denver. He had a man and his wife to take care of the place and do the work, and I just did whatever I wanted to. We were on the great trail to California and Pike's Peak and trains would come by and purchase supplies from us, so I did not get lonesome. Jules had had some trouble with a man named Slade a few years before and had shot Slade, but had taken him to Denver and put him in a hospital and paid to have him cared for and Slade and he had made it all up, my husband thought. Slade's ranch was further west and on the other side of his ranch Jules had another ranch with cattle on, and one day he started off with two or three men to bring some of the cattle back. He had been told that Slade had threatened to kill him but he did not believe it, although he went armed and with good men, he thought. This time he did not take me along as he had the cattle to drive. When he got near Slade's place Slade and his gang came down on Jules and his men, shouting and shooting, drove off Jules' men, took him and carried him to Slade's ranch. One of Jules' men followed them and saw them tie Jules up to a great box and then Slade stood a ways off with his rifle and shot at Jules, just missing his ear or his neck or his hand that was stretched out and tied; sometimes hitting him just enough to draw the blood. He kept this up all the rest of the day and then towards night he fired a shot that killed him. The boys who were with Jules came back to us and told us what had been done. We were so frightened we did not know what to do at first, for we expected every minute that Slade and his gang would come and kill us. They did come the next day and carried off a lot of the stuff we had in the trading post but did not do any harm to us. The man and his wife that were with us and the boys then got a team together and put enough stuff into the wagon to do us until we could get to Denver. All the rest and the cattle I guess Slade got. Jules had money in some bank in Denver, he had always said, but we never could find it. I found my folks and after a while we came back here where we had lived before we went to Denver."
She told her story in the simplest commonplace manner, but it did not need any addition of word or gesture to paint on my memory for all time the pathos beneath.
A girl of fourteen, happy and care-free under the protection of her father husband one day, putting him in the place of father, and mother, trusting to him, and suddenly standing beside the rude trading post way out on the treeless spaces of the trail that seemed to come from solitude and lead away to it again, and listening to the story of the frightened cowboy on his broncho whose almost unintelligible words finally made her understand that her protector, the kind man she had learned to love, had died a death so horrible it would make the strongest man shudder. And with only three or four frightened, irresponsible people to save her, perhaps from a similar or worse fate? But the women of the plains had but little childhood, and must act the part that came to them no matter what it might be.
Afterward she told me more of her strange life with Jules, of his fatherly, protecting care of her, of his good heart, of the trouble with Slade, which was Slade's fault in the first place, and it was plain to see the ideal that had always been cherished way down in her subconsciousness of the man who played such an eventful but brief part in her life. It was a wrong, perhaps, but natural feeling to have when I found by after reading of annals of the plains that Slade died the death that such a fiendish nature should have suffered.
Addie Becksted still lives in a little cabin down among the hills about Bellevue, her children and grandchildren about her, and still bears traces of the beauty that was hers as a girl. She is only about ten miles distant from Omaha but has not visited it for years.
When I go to see her, as I do occasionally, she puts her arms about me and kisses me on the cheek. And her still bright brown eyes look the affection of all the years and events that we have known together.
It is well worth while to have these humble friends who have lived through the pioneer days with us.