Dragons Teeth Crichton 2017 (WWT)

them. But still the prospectors came, in ever increasing numbers.
Believing the treaty had been broken, the Sioux went on the warpath. In May of 1876, the
government ordered the army to quell the Sioux uprising.
“Then the Indians are in the right?” Johnson asked.
Gall shrugged. “You can’t stop progress, and that’s a plain fact.”
“We will be near the Black Hills?”
Gall nodded. “Near enough.”
Johnson’s understanding of geography, always vague, allowed his imagination free rein. He stared
out at the wide-stretching plains, which seemed suddenly more desolate and unappealing.
“How often do Indians attack white people?”
“Well, they’re unpredictable,” Gall said. “Like wild animals, you never know what they’ll do,
because they’re savages.”
West of Omaha the train climbed steadily and imperceptibly as it entered the high plains leading to
the Rocky Mountains. They saw more animals now—prairie dogs, the occasional antelope, and
coyotes loping in the distance near sunset. The towns became smaller, more desolate: Fremont,
Kearney Junction, Alkali, Ogallala, Julesburg, and finally the notorious Sidney, where the conductor
warned the students not to get off “if they valued their lives.”
Of course they all got off to look.
What they saw was a line of wooden storefronts, a town composed, wrote Johnson, “almost
entirely of outfitters, stables, and saloons, and doing a brisk commerce in all three. Sidney was the
town nearest to the Black Hills, and it was filled with emigrants, most of whom found prices
outrageously high. The town’s reputation for murder and cut-throat life was not demonstrated to us,
but then we had only stopped an hour.”
But they were not long disappointed, because the Union Pacific train was now speeding them
westward to a still more notorious locus of vice and crime: Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory.
Travelers loaded their six-shooters coming into Cheyenne. And the conductor took Marsh aside to
recommend that his party hire a guard, to see them safely through the town.
“Such preliminaries,” wrote Johnson, “gave us a most pleasurable nervous anticipation, for we
imagined a lawless wild place which proved to be just that—a figment of our imaginations.”
Cheyenne turned out to be a rather orderly and settled place, with many brick buildings among
those of wood-frame construction, but it was not entirely peaceful. Cheyenne boasted one
schoolhouse, two theaters, five churches, and twenty gambling saloons. A contemporary observer
wrote that “gambling in Cheyenne, far from being merely an amusement or recreation, rises to the
dignity of a legitimate occupation—the pursuit of nine-tenths of the population, both permanent and
transient.”
Gambling halls were open around the clock, and provided the major source of revenue to the town.
Some indication of the business they did can be judged from the fact that the proprietors paid the city
a license of $600 per year for each table, and each saloon had six to twelve green baize tables going
at once.
The enthusiasm for gambling was not lost on the students, as they checked into the Inter-Ocean
Hotel in Cheyenne, where Marsh had previously arranged a special rate. Although the best hotel in