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Tue 13 May 2008 23:07
by Kevin McGehee
[Fiction]
Completed
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The preceding August, some cowboys who’d had trouble in the West Fork country sold off their stock and pulled out.
Apparently their involvement in the West Fork country wasn’t quite at an end.
(This is for continuity’s sake, to make it plausible that descendants of some of these guys might be in Clearwater more than a century later.)
W. Fork Rancher in Army Stockade
Correspondence from Fort Darrow
One of the leading land owners along the West Fork of the Clearwater River is lodged in the stockade at Fort Darrow by order of its Commandant, Maj. Edward Campbell. Your correspondent is told the Maj. has been provided with material evidence and sworn testimony placing Henry Magruder at the head of a conspiracy to corrupt the local Indians, with the intention of influencing their chiefs to give over control of their lands to him.
Though the soldiers at Fort Darrow have sought to establish and maintain good relations with the local bands and the land they occupy is generally considered to be reserved for them, there is as yet no formal Agency established to care for the Indians in the Territory, and Congress has not yet taken action to establish a lawful Reservation. Magruder and his co-conspirators stand accused of seeking to preempt the Congress by securing control of the lands in question directly from the tribal leaders, forcing the Government to re-settle the Indians elsewhere.
The charge against Magruder is that he has acted in defiance of an order by the Commandant of Fort Darrow prohibiting the sale of whisky to Indians within 100 miles of the fort, under the War Department’s authority to regulate commerce with Indians in the Territories. Indians under the influence of whisky have been known to get up to intolerable mischief, and the increasing settlement of Whites in the West Fork country made it paramount to minimize such mischief. Magruder’s actions have placed hundreds of innocent settlers at risk, in addition to potentially discomfiting the Government in dealings with a mostly peaceful tribe that has reason to believe its position in the West Fork secure.
Your correspondent has been told that Magruder’s arrest may be a case of past troubles returning to haunt the cattleman; it is being said locally that a group of rival cattlemen with whom Magruder had sanguinary dealings over water rights, has been instrumental in gathering the evidence by which Maj. Campbell ordered Magruder’s arrest. The men in question have not been seen in the area since last summer, but their names—Calhoun, Lee, Dart and Ironwood—have been heard in the Commandant’s office during discussions of this matter.
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