Stomp Bigfoot saves Dan Boone and robs trains with James
Juggling theater sasquatches. Outlaws quoting Shakespeare. Violence in the Cumberland Gap. Everyone needs their mother, right?
This story is about 7,200 words, or 22 minutes by a fire with a drink. You can access the first eight Stomp adventures in the Stomp Roams archive. This true tale was supported by a wealth of archival sources documenting the Wild West and colonial America, including Meateater’s American History: The Long Hunters narrated by Steven Rinella and Clay Newcomb, The Daviess County Historical Society, The Tennessee River Keepers, and even a lineage of town marshals from the Dodge City, Kansas governmental website.
Half of this story is told on lands once belonging to Shawnee and Cherokee American Indians. Before they fought for their homes, before trees had names, this land was occupied by creatures with claws and fangs and eyes that saw in the dark.
Some of them never left.
Thank you for coming along. Now, let’s go for a ride.
If you’d like to support the time and heart that goes into Stomp’s universe, you can subscribe, share, or buy the author a summer cottage.
Welcome.
Today, history buffs and mountain man enthusiasts will say that Daniel Boone blazed his trails because of an unquenchable thirst to explore, or more practically, because he was part of a select group of filthy, ambitious men who made their living from market-hunting the highly valued skins of whitetail deer. In 1769, Daniel Boone entered the land of Kentucky, and pushed the western boundaries of colonial America—yes, this is true. What historians don’t account for is why he continued to return to a land that had brutally killed members of his family and left him heartbroken time after time.
Some oral historians posit that there was a different reason he kept going back—there was a creature who saved his life in the spring of 1770, and he felt indebted to find this seven-foot theatrical beast, no matter where it took him.
One hundred and one years later, Jesse James and his gang killed three men at a train robbery in Winston, Missouri. A seven-foot creature in a white hood with a shotgun was present, and was said to have pulled the trigger on innocent bystanders himself, unprovoked.
The question today is this:
What changed him?
1770, Cumberland Gap, the intersection of Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee
The forest moss trembled.
A shiver ran through a puddle cupped in a fallen leaf. The gray bark of ancient pines shuddered until scabs of maple sap flaked and fell into a pine needle carpet. Tree branches cracked and parted. An owl, clutching a squirming baby mouse against a tree branch with its talons, stopped to watch the melee.
Sleigh bells and trumpets resounded. A drum thumped a Jumanji beat. Brown figures moved in the leaves. Grumbled voices and thunderous bellows blew through the underbrush. An ancient, white-bearded rabbit in farmer’s overalls harumphed and leapt into a den.
A flash of vibrant red and yellow fabric moved in the briar. Then the low growth moved and a sasquatch herd emerged from the thick. Exotic birds squawked and a pair of peacocks darted in and out of their feet. One, two, three, four…nine of them. Nine ‘squatch strong.
They wore jester’s clothes and striped, foolish tunics. One ‘squatch bomped a kettle drum. Another danced gaily and pirouetted through a downed trunk that burst into splinters. Another tooted a flute and four of them carried a tent caravan on posts. Inside, Ma Freedomfoot was dressed in overalls and Pa Freedomfoot wore a dress. They both wore long lashes and fire makeup, like they’d been splashed in the face with lava.
One ‘squatch was missing.
Woodland creatures popped their heads out and chattered and whistled. The ‘squatches fed on the attention. They twirled and bellowed and twerked against tree trunks with their bums waving like bushy pom poms. The owl covered the eyes of its little mouse prey.
A country-baby red squirrel peeped up at its mum. “What is that, Mee-maw?”
Mee-maw squirrel whistled:
Pheerrrrrr! Pheewwwwww-woooo-woooo!
She put her paws down. “They’re circus ‘squatch, baby. The funniest critter-goofs this side of heaven.”
Bucktoothed Pee-paw squirrel came out of their straw nest with teeth like walrus tusks and twirled his belly to the rhythm. “Look at ‘em, by golly doomdy-doo. Whoo whooot!” He laughed with his wife and little babe. “The damned dumbest mountain dinks I ever seent.”
All the forest clapped and cheered. The caravan moved through, with bright rainbow streamers trailing in the breeze.
PA POP! POP! POP!
Firecrackers spattered off in the underbrush. Two trunkmoles gasped at each other and bounded round and round in each other’s arms. Circus ‘squatch! What a treat. Then the caravan moved through. The din faded. Butterflies hovered in suspension. Caterpillars froze in mid-squiggle, awaiting an encore.
“Howdee-boy-dooby, I think that war all of it,” said Pee-paw squirrel. “What a hoom-dilly-hoot-poot-shilly-doo.”
“Oh, look babes.” Mee-maw squirrel pointed. “There’s one more dilmdy-doo.”
The foliage parted and a lanky juvenile ‘squatch, not yet full into his chin scruff with a cinnamon-red tinge, came through in a black silk costume smattered with yellow bits of stardust. He was in full makeup, black ash mingled with white chalk. He juggled six apples and a gangly vulture sat atop his shoulder. The ‘squatch was quiet and intent and flicked a second apple up off his footpaw and—
“DAWNT!” the creature bellowed.
The apples fell and scattered in the underbrush.
“Squawnk!” went the long-necked pet vulture.
The elderly farmer rabbit popped up from a patch of ferns and hefted one apple in its paw. “Hey there, freak!”
“Ruh?” The sasquatch turned.
The rabbit’s apple pelted him in the head.
“Owie!”
The squirrelfolk laughed. The rabbit laughed. The baby mouse, entrapped under the owl’s talons, waiting for its innards to be pecked out, pointed a little paw:
“Teee heee hee hee!”
The sasquatch rubbed his head and bent to pick up the apples. His silk costume ripped up the back and his rump popped out.
“DAWT!”
The wood was amok in revelry. Laughter. So much laughter.
The dumpy sasquatch hurried along and held his head down. “Come on, Gertrude. This is not a good crowd.”
“Squawnk!”
He stumbled and crashed through the brush. The troupe was out of range and fading.
“Mumma!” the sasquatch yelled. “Papa, wait!”
“Aw, look at ‘em.” The old rabbit sneered. “The stinkprowler misses its family.”
Bits of acorn and cabbages and pieces of baby mouse were thrown at the formidable sasquatch. He held his head down and ran, stumbling and crashing. The stardust on his silk tunic glittered at him, like it too, was laughing. The foliage above swayed with mirth. The white clouds in the blue sky trembled in their bellies with hilarity and shook loose a rainstorm.
The sasquatch plucked up a palm frond in the sudden downpour and held it over his head. The rain poured and he cried and he ran.
Damp heavy smoke hung gray in the night fog in a gnarled pine hollow. Red embers flickered up to the pulse of low deep voices. A bell jingled in the dark and a foot bumped against a drum. The air was rich with the scent of cinnamon and apples. A grate was over the fire and the heady crisp of wood-charred apple tart floated dreamily in the wood.
Out of the dark stumbled the bruised and drenched sasquatch.
“Mumma!” The ‘squatch stumbled forward and tripped into the fire and chunked embers burst out the other side.
Thumble smacked him on the head:
“Settle in, now—look what you’ve done, Brute.”
Trapeze chimed up: “Yeah, ladybug killer.”
Stomp Freedomfoot collapsed on the loam nestle and held his hands in his paws. His seven siblings sat like great apish beasts, cross-legged and lain sideways, statuesque monuments of fur and fang and faux jewels.
He cried again.
Thumper patted his back. “Come on, now, Brute. You’re alright, there.”
Ma and Pa Freedomfoot lay outside the fire, in the dark. Ma tossed spices in the fire. Pa held a soft cloth and polished a petrified piece of fire-hardened bark shaped like a horn.
Pa spoke: “you got heckled again, didn’t you?”
Stomp shook his head. “I almost got seven apples. I almost did.”
“You’re not meant to be perfect,” his father dictated. “They smelled your fear. You gave them the wrong reasons to laugh.”
“I don’t wanna make critters laugh!” He lashed out and flung a handful of embers into the forest. “I want to do poetry and great adventure. And tell stories like Robinson Crusoe.”
His father clucked at him and adjusted the straps on his tutu. “What stories?”
His mother gazed at him with eyes half-hooded in the firelight, a mystic vixen look like a woman who made stars blush. She had changed into a purple outfit, decorated with bits of glowworm and pixie dust. Her voice was deeper than Pa’s:
“Can’t you see what you are?”
It was silent around the fire. Only the deep husky breathing of the family sighed and came to rest over them as a heavy fog.
“Look at your face. Look at your clothes, Brute.” His mother hung on the words, like they were jewels she would place in a scented drawer. Stomp gazed down at his gaudy outfit.
“I didn’t dress me this way.”
“We are fantastical beings. Performative wanderers of the night. Theater heathens.”
Stomp put his face in his paws. “I want to do art. I want to make stories. All of you look at me but you never see me.” A great dangle of snot hung from Stomp’s nose and fell and hissed in the fire. “I love you, Mama. Why don’t you encourage me?”
“Squawnk!”
Stomp’s vulture settled on his shoulder and flapped its great ugly wings, with its bright black beady eyes and bulbous smelly red jowl flaps.
“Shh,” said Stomp, as he smothered a big paw down the bird’s head and beak. “Pretty bird. Yes, now, Gertrude, yes. My pretty bird.”
Stomp crawled over to his father hunched in the shadows that danced with flickers of firelight. He held the ornamental piece of bark with reverence.
“What is that?”
His father held the horn into the firelight and Stomp saw petroglyphs and an archaic patina that breathed into it something ancient. “It is a bark horn.”
Stomp snuggled against his father. “What is that?”
“It is an instrument for calling.” He pointed up at the quarter moon sliver that glowed behind drifting clouds. “A full moon unlocks the horn, and its pitch is so powerful and distinct that one of us may hear it thousands of miles away.”
He handed it to Stomp. “Ooh,” said Stomp. “It’s heavy.”
“It is priceless. Each of your siblings have one. For dark times.”
Stomp handed it back. “Will I have one?”
“Yes.”
Stomp reached out and his father slapped his paw away. “It’s not your time yet.” He polished the horn and gazed into the fire. “Technique, and mystique. One day you may yet be funny.”
“I don’t want to be funny.”
“Aw.” His mother shifted and her eyes sparkled in the dark. “Stomp, boy. You will never be anything but laughable.”
January 1874, 4:43 p.m., Gads Hill, Missouri
The Iron Mountain rail tracks running toward a St. Louis horizon were tinged with flecks of ice in the early steel Ozarks dusk. The wind blew bleakly crisp and swung the single lantern that hung from the Gads Hill train platform.
The village was three houses with a general store, post office, and pigpen. Conductors stopped here to trade mailbags and have a tinkle. In the wooden station platform office—not much more than a shed with mailbags—a clerk named Harrison spread jalapeno slices and butter on a pumpernickel bagel. He’d heard the bagels were the rage in New York City and ordered a brown burlap sack of them through his telegraph pal, Ronson, in Brooklyn. It was an expanding world now, but Harrison had to keep his bagels quiet. The Panic of 1873 had kicked in. A Great Depression was on. He would be ridiculed in this one-pig town for indulging treats.
Now, he was alone, and he delighted in the glisten of the butter, the individualism of the pockmarks in the bread, the texture like an eroded stone from a stream shore.
A tinny horse neigh breezed aloft through the window cracks. Hooves ricocheted in the frozen dirt. Harrison held the bagel between his teeth and slowly gazed up at the poster on the wall by the window. A caricature of a furred face with dark, devilish eyes and ruffled eyebrows was displayed above a statement:
Next to it was a smaller poster—of a blond-haired Confederate outlaw named Jesse James.
Harrison leapt to his feet and peeked out the window. Five riders with pistols and white hoods over their faces and under hats pulled low. They galloped along the tracks in slow motion, grim eyes with the posture of killers. A sixth figure loped along the tracks on foot, a jogging monstrosity at seven-foot-tall with a shoulder-slung shotgun.
Harrison stuffed the half bagel in his mouth and chewed furiously. He reached in his bagel sack and stuffed another in his mouth and terror-ate. The telegraph! He lunged toward the sounder on the table and began to tap a message. There was no click. Outside the window he saw the cut telegraph line, swaying from a pole in the breeze.
The door kicked in. A white-hooded figure strode forward three steps with a pistol on each hip. The room was hardly big enough for both.
“Get up.” Harrison stood up. “Sit down.”
Harrison sat down.
“Where’s the four o’clock?”
Harrison shivered and pee trinkled in his pants. “It—it’s late. State representative Farris is on the train. Ex—expected at 4:45.”
The man leaned out the door and waved. Three of the gang stepped across the rails and pulled timber pilings onto the track. Harrison smelled gasoline. The other three filed into the general store with guns drawn. Harrison knew it right off—Storekeeper Pritch Givens was getting robbed.
The huge gangly figure stood still on the tracks and faced the station platform. The creature wore doe-brown buckskin pants and no shirt, no shoes in the January freeze. Dark, downy fur ran from its belly up to a chin scruff beard, like the way a deer’s coat changes from summer to winter. The eyes peered back at Harrison through white hood slits, unblinking, full of black.
The leader ducked back in and pulled Harrison up by his collar. “Get up! Sit down!”
He threw him into the desk and cackled and walked out. The door slammed shut. Harrison flung open the drawers and papers swirled and floated around the room. He ran to one corner of the platform shack and to another like a stuck mouse. He had no weapons. He looked at the bagel bag.
The incoming Iron Mountain to St. Louis sounded in the distance:
CHOOOOoooooooooooo
Harrison looked out. The brute was gone.
One hooded man came out the general store with a new rifle. A second stuffed bills in a coffee bag. Smoke billowed up and the shack smelt of gas and damp wood. Harrison gagged and thanked God the platform wasn’t on fire—it was the pilings on the tracks.
No screams echoed in the muted January air and no cries of distress heard. Harrison watched the muted scene through a gritty window, as the brute pulled Ms. Crowder from her home and pushed her toward the tracks. Then came Mr. Crowder and then his boys and then Mrs. Chelsea, the widow next house over. The creature gave them instructions and they started to pull open the rail switches to direct the incoming four-car coach onto the sidetrack. Then they milled about like a picnic gathers to watch fireworks.
The black blunted nose of the Little Rock Express chugged into view. It pulled up short of the quick-flaming timber and coasted into the sidetrack. The great engine exhaled a sigh and came to rest. The fire blazed fifteen feet high now and sizzled the trackside prairie frost.
In the cab, Conductor Chauncey Alford saw a hooded man wave a red flag on the tracks. His cross-eyed coalman, Bridgers, leaned over his seat.
“A fire on the tracks, sir?”
Alford shook his head. “The devil’s come to rob.”
“Brute!”
Cole Younger shouted through his hood at Stomp Freedomfoot. Brute.
“Get up in that car and get to robbin’.”
Behind Younger, Frank James quoted Shakespeare:
“I am a man, more sinned against than sinning.”
Chauncey Alford burst out of his cab and ran toward the hooded men waving his arms.
“What is going on here, men?”
One of the Younger brothers grabbed him by the collar:
“Stand still or I’ll blow the top of your damned head off!”
Stomp stepped up into the silent cab. He looked left and he looked right. He held the shotgun loosely at his side, like a toy. He shrugged a burlap knapsack from his back. His head brushed against the ceiling. Passengers sat still in their seats, some with their heads down, and others gazed up at him with open mouths. He gestured to a white-haired woman with crinkly pug cheeks in fine dress. She held her purse tighter.
“My husband Berney already lost it all to the Yankees—our slaves and the money. I hain’t got nothin’ for you!”
Stomp grabbed her white hair with one fist and held her head back. Passengers gasped. He reached forward and gently tugged the purse from her grasp. He let her indignant slave-havin’ head drop forward and moved onto the next.
The wind gusted up through the car and Stomp’s nostril hairs were tickled with the scent of luxurious dense bread. He sniffed hard. Cake…no. Pumpernickel. Pumpernickel bagel. In Missouri.
Stomp dropped his satchel and walked out of the car.
Three outlaws rushed past him and each took one of the other three cars. Stomp went against the current toward the telegraph shack, sniffing along and shifting through the scent of gasoline and flame. He passed the fire and stopped at the platform entrance.
He knocked twice.
Bernk. Bernk.
No answer.
Stomp reared back a fist and punched the door.
BANGK.
The door creaked inward. Stomp stepped in. Clerk Harrison cowered against the corner of the desk. The men outside whooped like rebels in a bayonet fight—they’d finished. Stomp towered over the pee-pants man, who held a bagel out in defiance like a gun.
“Don’t come no closer, vagrant! I’ll shoot!”
Stomp turned his head to the side and breathed heavily into the fabric that obstructed his mouth. He sniffed once and lunged out a hand. He bent Harrison’s wrist back gentle-like and—
SNAP.
“Ah!” Harrison cried out.
He dropped the bagel and cradled his destroyed hand. Stomp put the bagel in his mouth and swallowed. He picked up the satchel of fresh, imported Brooklyn bagels and opened the string and inhaled.
“Oh,” he sighed.
“Those ain’t yours!” cried Harrison. “I paid for them, seven cents a piece!”
Stomp felt in his pockets and retrieved two $50 notes, with Ben Franklin pictured on the left and the feminine, defiant Justice on the right, as she wielded the sword and scales of American justice. Stomp dropped them.
“Here.”
The hooves thundered on the packed dirt along the train tracks. The James-Younger gang fled the town. Stomp leaned over the telegraph desk and picked up a quill pen that laid on a pad, and scribbled a note:
“ROBBD AT GADS HILL.”
He closed the door gently behind him. In the swirling bonfire smoke through the smeared window glass, Stomp turned his head once to see the young man, holding his wrist with tears brimmed like shivering puddles.
1770, Cumberland Gap
The ladybug wandered up his paw, over his cinnamon-brown forearm, and toward his open palm. The little critter smiled and Stomp could hear her squeak with delight. Stomp sat by a pulsing spring stream and fed the bug lady leaf crumbs.
“Yes, pretty ladybug. Yes, so beautiful, you are. Bee boom beemp boop.”
Stomp smiled his great innocent goof smile and inhaled the smell of rebirth, the fresh gushing waters of spring, with the scent of fish and mud alight on his tongue, and the feel of the damp cool, and the bursting lime green of new growth, and the sweet, overwhelming nectar of pollen, so much pollen, so, so much pollen, and—
AHCHOOO!
Stomp instinctively flexed his paw closed. He sniffled and opened it. Ladybug guts. So much ladybug guts.
“Poopy! Not another one.”
He knelt forward on all fours and peered into the gushing stream. He gazed at his big head, his growth of ‘squatch beard, the amiable creases in his eyes.
“What am I, Stream?”
Stomp mimicked the stream’s voice: “A handsome, kind, creative being full of talent and love.”
He remembered his mission and began to scrub around in the underbrush. If he did not return with what he was asked, his family would heckle him. He scrounged for the glossy-leafed madder plant and bloodroot that he would boil down into dyes. Mama always made him wear the gaudiest face paint. As a juggler squatch, he must be a picaresque and lovely piece of kinetic art, she said. What did she call him? A Juggalo.
A twig snapped in the brush. Stomp’s fur prickled. He was intoxicated with the musk of unwashed man. It arose across the gap of stream, the way one smells mud when the rain pummels it into dank heady scent. A patch of doe brown moved. Stomp sat on his haunches, still and patient, with his hands clutched to a pile of bloodroot.
BOOM.
Pheert!
Black powder thunder shook the ferns and the lead ball ricocheted past Stomp’s ear. Stomp shifted and gasped. A wildly bearded man in sewn-together deerskins knelt in the shrubs and aimed a Pennsylvania Long Rifle. The man unplugged a powder horn with his mouth, dumped some in the barrel, and spit. His hands were steady. The gun barrel was a black intrusion amongst ferns that swayed unhappily against a fine fog of smoke.
The man stood again, racked the stock to his shoulder, and aimed.
“Wait!” yelled Stomp.
He felt in the mud for the nearest stones. One, two, and he started juggling stream rocks. He added in another then another. Then two more. At six stones jumping through Stomp’s paws, a great toothless smile came over the backwoodsman’s face. His rifle drooped.
Stomp tried a seventh. The ferns began to shake around him. The man was transfixed. A great tremble was in the air, like a thunderous herd of apes were riding on the backs of elephants through underbrush that when trampled, cried out like apes and elephants.
Stomp lost balance and dropped the rocks—
ROH!
His grunt of displeasure was a monstrous bellow to a man. The hunter snapped out and raised his rifle, and shouted:
“Boone! Come quick!”
The ferns parted, and two of Stomp’s siblings—dressed in silken theater garb—emerged on either side of the hunter. They each grabbed a limb and pulled the man to pieces.
Thumper and Cannonball howled and beat the man with his own arms. More sasquatch tumbled into the stream gully, cascading and howling. Trapeze swung in from foliage above, hopping and skipping across limbs like a limber squirrel, 600 pounds maneuvered on twigs, and dropped straight onto the hunter’s head.
The man hit the ground dead.
Thumper and Trapeze and Cannonball and Boo Boo and Flip-Fop and Thumble and Dapperbutt stomped around in the grass like mad rhinos until the man was just shiny pulp goop.
Stomp looked at the red stain on the earth and—
“Why’d you do that?!”
Thumper dabbed a bit of blood on his forehead and gazed at his brother trembling in the mud. “You’re welcome.”
A war whoop resounded in the thick: “I’m coming, Henry!”
BOOM.
Blood erupted from Trapeze’s shoulderblade and they scattered—zero to 35 miles per hour through thick brush in three seconds. Like a grizzly bear charge in fast forward.
Another hunter—a handsome, gaunt man in backwoods furs—came into a clearing and jerked up his rifle as the last of the siblings disappeared. Stomp was the last to turn and look back. The man was not looking at him any longer. He knelt in the mud and scooped the remains of his friend into a flour sack.
Ma and Pa Freedomfoot cooked honeycomb stew this night, rich and steaming bee wafer over a smoldering fire. The hunters were out there, but that wouldn’t stop a good meal. Thumble pulled lead out of Trapeze’s shoulder. They spoke in low growls:
“They’ve got a squatter’s post—a little camp at the fork three miles on.”
Thumble nodded. “Might have sugar.”
Stomp lay nestled against his mother’s side, sucking his thumb.
“Why do they shoot, Mama?”
She was in her brooding state. Her eyes were hooded. She tossed herbs into the fire.
“Did you make the hunters laugh?”
“No, Mumma—they were shooting. I was getting more Juggaloo dye.”
Ma grunted. “If you couldn’t make the hunters laugh, could you expect them not to shoot at you?”
Stomp nestled his head down further. “No, Mama. Thank you for your wisdom, Mama.”
The air was still and silent in the damp hemlock glen. Rich honeycomb stew intoxicated the trees and the leaves. Stomp took his thumb out of his mouth and looked up:
“Mama?”
“Hm,” she hummed.
“The man who lived—the man we killed was his friend.”
“Oh, Brute.” She sighed. “They’re savages.”
July 1881 – Winston, Missouri
In a thick Missouri dusk, Stomp raised his shotgun to the window of the stopped coach full of humans. It was the smoking car. He tapped the barrel once then fired. Screams pierced the cab. Someone cried in pain.
The James-Younger gang, in white hoods, rushed out from the thick stone walls of the Dog Creek bridge where the tracks ran under. Stomp adjusted his mask. He slung the shotgun up on his shoulder and breathed in the faint film of light that illuminated tracks that went south to Kansas City and North to Chicago.
“Hands up!” they ordered.
“Hands up!”
Stomp hopped down from the steps. He strolled forward to the next coach and saw a running man with a lantern swinging urgently up the aisle.
“Conductor Westfall,” came a cry. “Please help!”
“I’m trying, madam—may the Lord keep us.”
Stomp hopped up the steps to the next cab, swung open the door, and aimed toward the lantern that was headed toward the upper end of the car. He fired again. More shouts and cries.
Someone was behind Stomp and he turned. Jesse James—in his crude eye-slit cloth mask—peeked around Stomp and gazed at the splayed dead conductor, blood on his back. His eyes showed surprise and hardened. He left the cab. A horse neighed and its fright echoed in the tunnel. In here in the dark, hanging above the train in the dark tunnel, Stomp heard the gossiping chitter of fruit bats.
Stomp removed a timepiece that hung from a crude belt loop in his buckskin pants. It was dim but he could see enough in the wash of light that shone out from the coaches. They’d be up at the safe by now, robbing the express messenger.
“Brute!” The voice of one of the Youngers. “Kill the engine block!”
Stomp walked forward three paces and leveled the barrel into the black guts of the engine car.
BOOM.
“Anyone in here a Pinkerton? Any Pinkerton agents?” came the demand. “How about Barnabys? Any Barnabys on this here train?”
The men came tumbling out of train cars with heavy satchels and pistols. They ran into the darkness, two hundred yards to the horses.
“Stop!” came a shout. “You cannot rob this train!”
The sharp report of pistol fire crackled in the night and lit up a section of track. A laborer—probably a man assigned to work the bridge—crumpled and lay still.
Stomp walked after the gang, his eyes aglow in the dark, and stepped over the crumpled man who lay on the tracks.
They ate an outlaw’s dinner of kings at Benjamin Matchett’s farm—steamed pork and buttered potatoes with greens. The men had their heads down by candlelight at a dining table. Ben Matchett ate quietly with them in overalls. Jesse James sat at the head and his pistol belt lay by the row of candles. Stomp sat at the far end and ate nothing.
Jesse James looked him up and down in the candlelight shadows:
“Damn, Brute.” He chewed potatoes. “You are a cold son of a bitch.”
1770, Cumberland Gap
A thunderous spring downpour battered the forest with a trembling mist, with the elder emerald hemlocks calm like parents next to the green youth of the slippery elm and sweet birch and the huskiness of the oak.
Neeley, a hunter and camp companion, knelt on his haunches under a lean-to and shoveled a biscuit in his mouth. Its bready scent mingled with the rain. In his buck leather possibles bag, he kept another smaller pouch, and he dipped a pinky in it and removed a dab of sugar and pressed it to his tongue.
“You shouldn’t do that.”
Daniel Boone’s brother, Squire, had a measure of scorn and fear on his features as he looked at the sprinkles of sugar that fell to the mud.
A 34-year-old Daniel Boone crouched under a lean-to packed with moss and dirt. Smoke hissed as raindrops splatted in the soil. He gnawed a piece of deer jerky. Camp was a flat area cleared in a thicket at the bank of a stream that gurgled as it fattened. Pack horses bundled with deer skins stood under low branches. He watched the rain eat campfire smoke.
His five children were back home, in the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina—Rebecca would care for them while he followed that great urge into the wild. Here, John Findley sat under a lean-to and honed his green river knife. The remaining two camp keepers—Squire and Neeley—sat elbow to elbow and gazed into the forest. They had buried the flour sack full of trampled Henry and planted him a crude tilted cross.
“I thought it’d be Shawnee,” said Squire. “Cherokee, maybe.”
Neeley rubbed his hands together. “I never seen a stinkprowler clan like that. Whole herd. Richer than God and bigger than buffalo.”
“Almost theatrical-like.” Squire was on edge, his eyes wide into the forest. “They wore people clothes. You think they talk?”
Neeley huffed his breath out. “They cain’t talk. Big stupid brutes. Especially the one by the river—Henry don’t usually miss.”
Squire exhaled a great breath of damp mist. “He paid for it. Imagine the price for one of them. Imagine just one.”
Boone stood up. His brother-in-law, John Stewart, had disappeared two months earlier. All that was left were the initials “JS” carved into a tree. They were low on supplies. Tattered.
“We’ll head back to the Yadkin.” Boone listened to the gush of tumbling water. “Re-provision, drop the furs. Come back.”
Neeley looked up: “We got rifle shot left. We kill one of them ‘prowlers, we might make up the pelt cost we lost to Shawnee, plus more. We might be set, Dan.”
Boone moved to the horses. “We’re not going to kill those creatures.”
“Well, why not?!”
Boone shuffled soil over the fire smolder with his foot. “It’s Sunday. Today, we will offer forgiveness.”
Neeley glanced at Squire and cussed low:
“This from a hunter who refuses to go to church.”
Boone was transfixed, frozen next to his horse. He stared at Neeley with his biscuit and crumbed mustache.
“Neeley, bury that biscuit in the dirt.”
“Say what now?”
Boone was loading his rifle. “Neeley, please—on our souls—bury that biscuit in the dirt.”
Trapeze’s regal billow of mature hair scruff stood out on ends under his chin. His eyes were closed and he clung to an oak limb forty feet above. His head was up in the air, nose to the rain. On the ground below, Thumble stood posed to the heavens like a Greek statue, eyes closed, and sniffled.
Two miles toward the river, Stomp had found a blueberry patch:
“The blueberries in my mouth go wah wah wah! The blueberries in my mouth go wah wah wah! The little blueberries cry out for their mothers but they all die—in—my—tummyyyyyyy!”
Stomp held his arm out and heaved. Nobody clapped for his opera. He was neck-thick in a bramble and had more camouflage than moss on a frog. He stuffed berries in his mouth and tucked them in secret berry pockets in his billowy juggling costume.
“Owie.” The thorns plucked at his fur, but he moved in deeper. “Owie again. Oh, hello, pretty ladybug.”
The red and black beauty alighted on his wrist from a leaf. Stomp watched it crawl over into his palm. The ladybug looked up and smiled and clapped its front paws. The spring dander went straight up his sinuses and—
AHCHOOEY!
Stomp slowly opened his palm and gazed at the ladybug guts. “Oh, poopy.”
A sudden agitation swarmed his nostrils and burned down through the back of his throat. Fire leapt up in his gut and consumed him. The intoxication of breadscent and refined sugar stormed his capillaries like heated bayonets. His pupils dilated wide open.
The thorns trembled and a shiver shook rain from trees. Stomp already knew.
His older brother Thumble crashed past him at sprint speed—still in a flowery ornamental silk kimono. He smashed logs and tumbled through saplings. Above, Trapeze ran from limb to limb, springing onto another before the branch cracked off and thrashed down. Then came the brawny gray-brown streaks of Ma and Pa Freedomfoot—ogrish hunchbacked theater ‘squatch in full-on Pastry Rage.
Stomp reared up and tore through the bramble. He veered right—his family would have to forge a stream that had swelled overnight to a river. He knew a log bridge.
“Hooh!” he grunted. “Hah!”
The prickers tore into his skin like incensed hornets. The downpour merged with his heat and his body threw steam. The thin curl of the expedition’s camp smoke rose into the understory. A hundred yards to Stomp’s left it sounded like a prairie full of stampeding buffalo had ventured into dense forest.
Boone cooly stood with his Pennsylvania Long Rifle pressed into his shoulder. Squire and Neeley and John Stuart stood behind trees in staggered guerrilla skirmish line. They too, held rifles to their shoulders.
Neeley’s hands trembled so hard that his rifle stock clacked against the tree trunk. He was frightfully transfixed on the freshly dug soil. A leather piece of his possibles bag still stuck up from the dirt.
The mist was clouded on the stream and Boone could not see through it. He scratched his beard scraggle. “Wait until they’re right on us.”
At the sound of a splitting tree trunk, Neeley turned with his rifle. “To hell.”
He ran full-bore into the forest with his precious rifle in both hands. Squire—Boone’s own brother—looked at Boone and fled. John Stuart—Boone’s brother-in-law—stood stock-still.
“Daniel, we could both run.”
Boone readjusted his stance against the tree. “Naw, John. You go on and get. I’ll guard these biscuits.”
The Freedomfoot clutch converged together at the stream bank and there was a great mass of 700-pound bodies with the passion of enraged grizzly bears and the agility of rabbits. They jumped the stream in one synchronized leap.
Then from the right there was another body—cinnamon brown and smaller but compact like a cannonball—and he bellowed:
“NAROOOGAAHHH!”
He tumbled and rolled and swiped Daniel Boone from the side just as Trapeze fell with his paws outstretched like a blurred brown comet out of the mist. Stomp’s weight knocked Boone’s rifle into the stream. His kin raged and tore lean-tos to pieces and the horses whinnied and bucked.
“Please don’t hurt him, Ma! Please don’t!”
Stomp blocked Boone with his entire body. The venerable Pa Freedomfoot fell to the dirt and pawed about like a ground squirrel. Nine sasquatches converged on a single leather pouch of hardtack sugar biscuits and fought like rabid howler monkeys. Stomp instinctively picked up a trio of river logs and closed his eyes tight. He began juggling.
Thumper and Trapeze and Cannonball and Boo Boo and Flip-Fop and Thumble and Dapperbutt munched and savored and tore at the earth. Then the Rage left them. Their shoulders heaved. Pa Freedomfoot bowed his head in humiliation. With his arms tucked about his hand, Daniel Boone cowered.
The children stood in a semicircle—eyes lowered in the comedown. Stomp kept juggling with his eyes closed. One by one, they turned and left over the log bridge that joined the riverbanks. Ma Freedomfoot stared for a long minute at Stomp. Her purple and black makeup was smeared under her eyes like a ghoulish psychic. Stomp opened one eye and let the logs tumble to the dirt.
“Oh, Brute,” she sighed. “Always laughable Brute.”
Then she waded into the surging river and laid back and let it carry her into the current.
Stomp trundled into camp with his head down. He could not pinpoint their disappointment. He had stood up for somebody. He had saved a man.
The firepit was black and grey ash and cold. The exotic colorful caravan that carried his parents was gone. His siblings were gone. The hemlock glen was silent.
“Mumma!” he shouted. “I’m sorry! What’d I do?”
Nothing replied. He wandered around the camp and overturned leaves and kicked up logs. He held the flat palm of his paw against the broad imprint of the flattened weeds and stalks of a ‘squatch bed. It was cold. He noticed a shimmer in the hollow of a log and reached his paw in. It was the barkhorn.
His father had finished polishing the heavy, fire-hardened piece of wood, carved with symbols that glimmered like a slug’s trail. Stomp held the horn in his paw and started to wander. He ramped up into a panicked trot. He tracked the broken twigs and stems through the wide swath of sign, ignoring the dangers of man.
At nightfall, his fur was matted with crusted sweat that smelled like heady yeast—the naturally occurring alcoholic sweat of his kind. At nightfall the next night, he was covered in mud and debris. At nightfall on the ninth day, he knelt to examine a swath of trampled ferns—with the horn in his grasp—and leapt up and yelled out into the dark:
“Pappa! Pappa, are you okay? Papa!”
The forest suddenly yawned open and he stood on the mudded shrub-lined banks of a coursing river. He could only see the shimmer in the dark and hear the soft whisper of moving water. A twig snapped in the brush. Stomp turned with his fist raised.
A mama skunk waddled along and carried a baby skunk on its back.
“Miss? Skunk miss?” Stomp crawled toward the skunk. “Skunk miss, may I ask your help, please?”
“Easy, big fella, I’ll pee on ya!”
The toddler skunk shook its little skunk fist and yelled:
“We’ll pee on ya!”
“Um…fine, as you wish. Please, can you tell me if a family of me passed here?”
The missus skunk stopped her waddle to look back at Stomp—soiled and bedraggled.
“I hain’t seen none of you and none ever like you.”
Stomp threw his hands up and tears splashed like summer raindrops. “Bu…why would they leave?”
The skunks ignored him and waddled on.
“Where am I?” Stomp called after.
“Wasioto,” shouted back the Mama. “River of the Shawnee.”
Stomp laid down in the mudded bank of what would later be called the Tennessee River. He had run 160 miles in nine days through forest and meadow. He put his muddy thumb in his mouth and slept in the grit with sadness and a growing burn in his chest, and a wish that he would not awaken.
Spring 1771, Rockcastle River, Cumberland Mountains, Kentucky
“Mumma.”
The drained voice echoed against the porous limestone cave walls. A sliver of sunlight illuminated Stomp’s rail-thin figure, curled with both paws pressed to his chest. His father’s barkhorn lay in front of him.
“Mumma.”
A shadow passed across the entrance. Stomp smelled man—adrenaline surged in his nostrils. A shuffling shadow moved shale and stone at the entrance and Stomp detected cloth scraped against the cave wall.
Daniel Boone’s head popped into the cavern.
Stomp remained still. Both men appraised each other. Stomp took his paws away from the block of hurt that lived in his chest and sat up. Boone nodded and pushed something forward on the cavern bedrock. A pair of soft, hand-sewn buckskin pants in Stomp’s size had been painstakingly pieced together with crude thread. They’d been hand-brushed to a doe-like sheen, a velvet-soft length of craftmanship imbued with a faint black hue of wood ash. Boone dropped an empty burlap flour sack on top of the pants.
“Took me long enough to find you.”
“Why would you want to find me, Explorer? They’ve all gone.”
“I have only ventured further into this Kentucke country for a year to find the creature that saved me and my camp.”
Stomp leaned forward and pulled the buckskin pants to him. He held them to his face and sniffed deeply:
SNERRRRKKK.
“Oh, that’s good. So pretty.”
Stomp stood in all his furry nakedness and pulled on the pants. “Fit so pretty on my dainty legs.”
Boone extended a hand for a handshake. Stomp sensed he was supposed to do something with it. He grasped Boone’s hand with two paws and petted Boone’s hand.
“I’m headed back to the Yadkin. North Carolina. My wife—my children. When I return, I could use a sturdy trailmaster. To be the first to blaze this wild country.”
Stomp looked at the trailblazer hard and extended one big paw. “It may be wild but you’ll never be the first.”
June 4, 1882, Dodge City, Kansas
The Atchison, Topeka, & Sante Fe locomotive slowed and let out a whistle as it chugged into Front Street in Dodge City, Kansas and billows of smoke poured from the engine car. A group of cowboys herded hundreds of cattle into jostling order to be loaded onto the cattle cars.
The streets stank of men and mud and cows and crime and drink and greed. Stomp Freedomfoot stood beyond the organized mooing chaos against the wall of the alley between a saloon and a general store. He stood directly across from the Bank of Dodge City. The ribbon-cutting was yesterday.
His eyes were cast down at a parchment poster in his hands:
He crumpled the newspaper and dropped it in the dirt. City Marshal Peter W. Beamer—Bat Masterson’s replacement—patrolled by in heavy boots with a thicket of long beard that reached to his timepiece. Stomp shrugged back against the alley wall. His gaze drifted to a couple of buildings down from the bank—a brick one-stage vaudeville theater. A drunk cowboy stumbled out and fell in the dirt and a pair of prostitutes strolled by arm in arm and laughed.
Stomp stepped forward and cut straight through the milling cattle. He strode with purpose toward the looming bank and suddenly turned right and entered the side door of the theater.
It was musty and dark. A sleeping man snored in a balcony seat with his feet propped on the rail and his hat over his eyes. Dust motes floated over the upholstery. A single spotlight shone on an empty stool on the stage.
“Hello?” Stomp bellowed out. “Proprietors? Enemies?” Stomp looked around. “Mumma?”
A white-mustached man limped from behind the curtain—an old man with a bad back. He surveyed Stomp and looked at a timepiece hung from his chest.
“You’re early for the freak show.”
Stomp scratched his belly scruff. “I came for the bank-robbin’.”
“Hm.” The old proprietor had seen too much. He pointed at a basket of props on stage. “Well, if you ain’t robbin’ nothin’ right now, you can help me set up for the freak show. I’ll pay ya a nickel.”
Stomp moved quietly to the stage front and peered into the basket. It was filled with costumes and bottles and a collection of wooden bowling pins from an 1830s nine-pin set.
“Ooh.”
Stomp jumped up on the stage. The floorboards bowed under his weight. He sat on the stool and felt the heat of the single spotlight. He started with two pins. He juggled them, felt the easy weight, and added two more pins. A flutter of small wings sounded in Stomp’s ears and a ladybug came down from the dusty curtains and landed on his shoulder.
“Hello, little unbroken one.”
Stomp added two more pins and he was at six, remembering the cruelty of the forest, and their laughs. He flicked up the seventh pin with his foot and the ladybug clapped its feet together, and Stomp smiled, and the splintery Dodge City stage felt firm under his feet, and he juggled for no audience but himself.
“I did it, Mumma.”
I’m so glad you came along for this Stomp origin tale. This was, of course, an entirely true and historically accurate story. If you’d like to support Stomp Roams, you can restack the story or tap that little “subscribe” button.
How deep into this world do you want to go? Read Stomp’s last adventure, Stomp Bigfoot Drives Plow and Solves Murder in a February Nor’easter, a blizzardly murder mystery set around a mysterious candy luring bakers to their deaths, called “Outrage.”