De Nederlander

A horrible end awaited three Cavalrymen who followed the trail of a dead man laden with bags of gold in "Waiting For Ants", written in April of 2018. It was one of two stories I had planned inspired by local lore, and by local, I mean lore rich in the history of Arizona. Seriously, if you're a writer from or in Arizona who plays in the old-timey cowboy day, you are going to be tempted to base a story off of the famous Lost Dutchman mine and legend of the Peralta Massacre. The problem that exists for writers of most "western" work is that their home is on the fabled range or the barrooms of cattle towns. They have no reason to go digging in the dirt. That is not really respectable Cowboy behavior. Instead, that is the labor of the supporting cast lucky to have the iron-jawed hero ride past on a horse whose name alone brings quivers of fear into the hearts of neer-do-wells. There are better things for a respectable Cowboy to do than chase lost mines.

Well, um, I have no qualms about digging in the dirt, have done so my whole life much to my laundry's disdain. I descend from those who dug in the dirt and before me on the wall are those family members who did that labor (just to note, it is their photos on the wall). As well, the bulk of my stories are Westerns, taking place in that brief period romanticized in images of the guitar strumming cowboy lonely on the range. My Westerns don't take place out on the range though, nor do they feature as a lead a tough-talking, morally ambiguous ex-preacher/lawman/judge needing to settle old scores or clean up a town. They take place where the real West was won... in the crowded, stinking mining towns that gave reason for residence. Here is where I diverge though for while I do write about a place representative of the bulk of cities started out here, my town is a little weird. I am in the speculative field, after all, or at least one cosmically horrifying rill.

"Waiting For Ants" was part of a two-story event I had planned, a pair of Tales playing off certain elements found in the histories and legends associated with the Lost Dutchman Mine. "Waiting For Ants" was focused primarily on a single detail of a body found in the desert between Wickenburg and the southern Bradshaw Mountains in the early 1870s. Transferred in conceptual time to 1858, that Tale gave me a body of a man in the deserts so described and one of a horse in the rocks in the region of the foothills. "The Dutchman" is the other half of that pairing, the rest of those legends repurposed for the Bajazid.

Seriously, quite a bit of research went into this story. Tracking paths through land I know well in modern display through lost desert trails in a time when the Territory was new in its ancient majesty was only part of the journey. A lot of this research had been gathered over my lifetime of living with these legends in local lore, hometown geek stuff. The prior knowledge that Jacob Waltz, the actual "Dutchman" of history, had some early claims in the Bradshaws (then known as the Silvers) was the impetus of these two tales in the first place. An awful lot, particularly relating to the lie Aert Swygert tells the eager audience at the trading post about, was new to me. That example hinted there, references to the myths of those mountains now called the Superstitions, are from the Diné people, commonly known as Apache... known through the history of the name the Spanish gave those mountains.

What happens up there on that mountain I am not going to say, nor will I mention how Aert came at last to the desert below or how his horse suffered. I will also not speak of his two partners nor the short straw Aert drew requiring his trip for supplies. I will say that I have since discovered that Aert was not as careful as he thought in concealing his departure from that cantina not far from the regional Cavalry post. He watched his whole journey for signs of smoke or dust or the glow of a campfire distant and saw nothing. I noticed nothing as well but I was suspicious.

"The Dutchman" comes in at 4,977 words and was completed the 8th of February, 2018. Outside of geography, there is nothing to connect these two stories, "The Dutchman" and "Waiting For Ants", at the time of this writing to any of the other stories. The only other story I had written at this point taking place prior to the discovery of gold by the Mortenson Party aside from these two was "Kachina", but these two Tales were connected in no way to that. I had suspicions though, ones which began haunting as soon as this Tale left my pen. Four and a half months later, I would know the answer to this in a story titled "I Met a Man as I Lay in My Grave", available upcoming from Soteira Press.