Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [25]
Isaac learned that the coach to San Angelo would not arrive until the next morning. He tried Abilene’s one hotel, but found it full. A railroad agent told him about a room for rent over a saloon.
At the entrance, Isaac encountered a porter mopping the wooden sidewalk. The water had a red tinge to it. Perhaps joking, Isaac said, “That looks like blood.”
“Yes sir,” the porter said casually, without breaking his rhythm. He explained that four cattlemen had gotten into a gun battle. These were not just ordinary cowboys, he said, but well-off ranchers with large herds. Now all four were dead.
Isaac stepped past. He checked in and climbed the stairs to his room.
“My head,” he wrote, “did not rest easy that night.”
IN THE MORNING, things looked better. The sun was bright, the air cool and scented with bacon, coffee, and sawdust, the fragrance of a brand-new country. The landscape was amber, pierced by long black pickets of shadow. Isaac was twenty-three years old in a new country in a world where anything was possible. He was in the thick of it when everyone else back home could only read about it in the newspapers and in Jules Verne and in the thousands of dime novels about Buffalo Bill Cody. Isaac was a pioneer in a new science, a prairie Dampier, at a time when an ordinary man with patience and a knack for observation could change forever the way the world saw itself. Far to the north in the Bad Lands of the Dakota Territory another young man, Teddy Roosevelt of New York, was busy “pioneering” along with other East Coast blue bloods like Frederic Remington and Owen Wister, later to write The Virginian, who hoped to experience the frontier life before it disappeared. Roosevelt called this way of living “the pleasantest, healthiest, and most exciting kind of life an American could live.”
The stage arrived clotted with mud, then set off again in a great jangle of energy, pulled by four horses and rocking on its springs like a bark in heavy swells. The coach was scheduled to cover the one hundred miles to San Angelo by late afternoon with a team change every thirty miles, but a rain-engorged stream halted the journey. The driver told Isaac and his fellow passengers they would have to spend the night alongside the creek until the next scheduled coach could arrive from the opposite direction. The driver would then ferry the group across the creek, using a boat kept at the crossing for just such emergencies. The fresh coach would return to San Angelo.
The sole female passenger slept in the coach; the men found places on the ground. About midnight, Isaac heard a rattlesnake. It terrified him, “in fact so much that I ran and jumped on top of the stage coach and scared the woman into hysterics.” She thought the wagon was being attacked by Indians. Isaac stayed on the roof the rest of the night.
The Abilene-bound coach arrived the next day, as expected, and soon Isaac found himself skimming over a sea of wildflowers. Cartographers of the day called this the Great American Desert, but to Isaac it seemed they had gotten it wrong, for here was “a carpet of flowers such as words will not describe. The flowers rolled in the wind like varicolored waves.” Flowers north, south, east, and west—“the most beautiful vision in nature my eyes have ever beheld.”
This did not last.
THE SKY TURNED cloudless and blue, the prairie brown. The flowers died. The Concho River went dry, although underground flows somehow kept portions of the bed flush with water and fish. The weather showed itself prone to fits of violence. A tornado followed him along a road. A “blue norther” caught him in the midst of a hunting trip and dropped temperatures from hot to freezing in minutes. He experienced heat like nothing he had known before. During a visit by the freak dragon winds that periodically blistered the Texas plains he recorded a temperature of 140 degrees Fahrenheit.
One evening in mid-August he was walking toward town along his usual route, crossing the footbridge over the riverbed, when he heard a roar from somewhere far upstream. Not