Far as the Eye Can See Read Online Free

cholera and my father lit out in the same year. (You’d a thought he killed her.) I was nine years old. At the time we lived in Pittsburgh, but then I went to live with my aunt until the war broke out. She was a old maid that never married and I don’t think she liked men very much. She never once looked upon me with anything but impatience and disparagement. I don’t think she was sorry to see me go when the war took me away. I wrote her a few letters and got one or two back and that was that. When the war ended, I was stuck in Walter Peck’s brigade just outside Petersburg, Virginia.
    I turned in my uniform and bought a few linen shirts and a pair of denim pants, and I hung around Petersburg for a little while. Then I went with some fellows out to the ocean on the Virginia shore and swum for days in the salt water. It felt like I was washing the war right off of me. The dirty sweat of fear and uncertainty. I was going to live, by God. And that’s when I got to thinking about going out to the big West. I thought about it a long time. Year after year I thought about it.
    It was always something I planned to do, but I hung around Petersburg, working in a shop that made saddles and leather goods. I guess I did that kind of work for most of a year, then I spent some time working in the new ironworks in Richmond. I kept thinking about getting out, but I’d drink a lot of whiskey, work dawn to dark, have little of money in my pockets, and a warm place to sleep. Four years just went by with me living day by day. Then I got laid off at the ironworks. I didn’t even have much money saved, but I just said the hell with it, I’m a-going.
    Folks called it “the big West.”
    It’s big, all right, but what they forget is, once you get near it, you realize how small you are. Small and unimportant, like something squeaky in the hay of a big barn. You don’t know what might step on you.
    It’s how I felt anyway.
    You notice the sky out here. And land so far in front and next to you and behind you—as far as the eye can see. Hills and ravines, mountains and long empty prairies; forests that give way to long, deeply green fields of wild grass. Rivers that run down between draws and meet at the tip of great divides of land; rocks that seem to reach all the way to the sky.
    You can feel so alone, though. Even a little wisp of smoke in the distance can seem to have the glow of a big city, even though it might be a Indian fire. Indian fires have to be avoided because you never know. You might wander into a Piegan camp and they would greet you kindly and with true hospitality—then, when you’re on your way, follow you so they can catch you. Then they’d have just as much fun cutting off small parts of your body and feeding it to you as they would chasing buffalo or hunting game. And you can’t really trust a camp full of white men, neither, unless there’s women amongst them. I had a friend when I first come out here that got tied upside down to a tree by white men who run off with his horse and saddle and all his belongings. It was Indians that saved him.
    Towns and villages are scarce out here and nothing much to speak of when you find them. They’re really outposts.
    There ain’t nothing luxurious or enlightening about this part of our country, and I don’t know why folks get so rapturous about it. You’d think people out and about in a place as barren and hardscrabble as this would be more friendly, but they ain’t. They don’t much like folks in need. They see most kinds of needfulness as weakness. They’re so all fired proud of their independence and strength, their will and endurance, they ain’t got time to worry about how others are faring.
    Like those folks in Theo’s train that I traveled with when I first come out here. It was a small train—eight wagons. Twenty mules and nine horses. Seven families and two fellows, Joe Crane and Preston, with their own wagon. They said they was going to be men of destiny