Free Reap the Whirlwind by Terry C. Johnston

South Pass, then turning north to Virginia City by a route that skirted the worst of Indian country. Slow as he might have been, Bob Cannary was quick enough to realize he wasn’t going to keep his wife Charlotte anchored to the land for the rest of her life. A woman of her nature desperately needed something more: fancy clothes and liquor, as well as music and dancing and horse races, and laughter above all. The finer things of a life he just might be able to provide if he staked himself out a good claim among the gold diggings in the Rocky Mountains.
    Right from the start Martha Jane had not been one to join the other teenaged girls who each long day lagged behind with their mamas near the wagons along their route west. Instead, Martha Jane took her gun and joined her father and the rest of the men of the party in hunting to fill supper kettles. At every town and fort, post and way stop along their journey, the young girl heard the talk comefrom the lips of those painted women who were so outnumbered on the frontier—talk that confirmed the truth in the old saw that at each trailhead, every end-of-line camp where men laid rails, every mining claim and soldier outpost, a woman could make her fortune simply for having a woman’s body.
    Strange talk to Martha Jane’s way of thinking. For her it was still far more fun being a boy, what with the travails of lowering wagons by rope over sharp ledges, crossing streams, and always being wary of bogs and quicksands that soon gave the girl an education in handling four- and six-hitched teams. Thirty-foot bullwhips cracking above the backs of snorting oxen and heaving horses, husky young men sweating beside their animals and turning the air blue with the profane glory of their profession.
    Lord, but it was this raw life of the male on the frontier that still appealed to the girl! Barely in her teens by the time the emigrant party reached the diggings at Alder Gulch, young Martha Jane Cannary was already considered an astounding shot and a fearless rider, two remarkable feats for a woman of any age on the frontier.
    What a grand place that bedlam of gold country had been! Row upon row of high mountain peaks had spilled twenty-some-thousand miners into a narrow river valley where practically every foot of the narrow meadows was covered by tent canvas or board shanty, where tarred torches smoked and yellow lanterns swung on the winds in front of precarious, hill-perched saloons, where dance halls and gambling houses both blared the same sour, off-key music of drunken laughter and too-loud talk, the shrieks of pain or pleasure or both at the same damned time. Where fistfights settled precious little in the mucky, bloody streets. Where long, wide blades flashed when two men laid claim to the same sluice, the same whore, or ill-happed to sing the battle song for the wrong side from that Civil War still raw in every man’s heart. Alder Gulch—where guns were drawn quickly and men died cheap.
    Alone now, Martha Jane heaved against the draft horse and got it and the other three moving away from the Fort Fetterman loading dock. Lord, but there was enough work for every man putting an army into the field. Then shelaughed right out loud. Enough work for every man? There was even enough work for her!
    With a loud and unmistakable squish, the far lead horse shat and dropped its fragrant apples onto the raindamped ground where the pile steamed until flattened under the hooves of the animal coming along behind it. The earthy odor struck Martha’s nostrils as something familiar and good, even wholesome, not anything like the smells she remembered emanating from those mining camps. Stale whiskey breath and rotting teeth, tobacco stains on shirts not washed since the last rain, rotting sluice timbers and fresh-turned earth dug for new privy holes, rank meat and bones left for the wolves and coyotes that would slink down from the hills once the shadows grew long enough of every evening. The stench