Yellowjacket Trestle

 

The day was warm, but aerated with cooling breezes. I parked my car downtown near the grain elevators on the river and jogged along the trail built atop the old railroad right-of-way.  When the Milwaukee Road abandoned its tracks, the city reclaimed the easement, pulled up the rails and cross-ties, and laid an asphalt path along the crest of the embankment.  The trail snaked through town, elevated as high as a house, and, on a weekend morning in nice weather, it was crowded: people walked their dogs and joggers loped along the top of the embankment and there were many bicyclists, some of them families with small helmeted children behind their parents peddling earnestly on bikes with trainer wheels.  But the crowd thinned at the outskirts of town where the trail curved among old warehouses and dusty-looking vacant lots full of broken-up concrete and salvage metal, and, then, the long, narrow grade climbed out of the river valley occupied by our city and ran above fields of corn superintended by small farms in the green hollows of the hills.  My plan was to run to the Yellowjacket Trestle, hydrate and rest for a half-hour, and, then, jog the four miles back to my car. 

The trestle cast a short shadow in the midday sun.  The air was resinous with pine-scent.  Under the trestle, muck glinted, a slop of shallow wetlands between low tufts of prairie grass.  In the jogging trail’s quarter century, a copse of small, wiry-looking trees had grown up on the steep slopes of the railroad bed at both ends of the trestle.  On the far side of the span, I knew there was a bench engraved with the name of a deceased sponsor whose generosity supported the maintenance of the trail.  An old man wearing a baseball cap was sitting on the bench with a small terrier sleeping between his feet.  When I sat down, the terrier startled a little, opened one eye to look at me, and, then, fell back asleep. 

I took out my water-bottle and drank.  The old man mentioned something about the fine weather.  He said that he often walked to this place from his acreage a half-mile away.  He asked me if I knew why the bridge over the swamp-land was called the “Yellowjacket Trestle”?  I didn’t know.  “When they put up the trestle, now 150 years ago, they used pine wood that wasn’t properly cured,” he said. “The sap in the wood was still sweet and bees and wasps and yellowjackets smelled it.  The wasps had nests under the bridge.  People said that you’d get stung if you walked on the trestle.  I don’t know if that was true – probably, it was just adults trying to keep kids from playing up here.”  

The old man said that the trestle had figured in a little bit of history still remembered out in the country.  He told me that he heard the story from his great-grandpa who learned it from his father.

“It was about eight days after the skirmish up at Northfield that survivors from Jesse James’ gang, all battered and bleeding, passed through these parts.  In 1876, the seventy miles between here and the bank at Northfield was what they called ‘Big Woods’ –that is, swamps and forests that had never been cut for timber, a thousand little lakes in the wetlands cupped in ridges of gravel left by the ancient glaciers.  There weren’t but a few trails passing through this wilderness and it was lonely out here, empty except for a few Indians run away from reservations, hermits and old trappers running fur-lines, a half-dozen sawmills scattered along creeks in the woods.  It had taken the outlaws a week or more to find their way west through the wilderness and some of them ended-up right here, camped under the Yellowjacket trestle.”

“The weather, folks recall, was wet and rainy, a dismal cold September.  When the mail train came along these tracks, someone noticed smoke sifting up between the sleepers on the trestle.  They looked down below and saw a campfire and some men huddled there, miserable in the drizzle, but with fine-looking ponies.  It was pretty clear that these were the desperadoes who had robbed the Northfield Bank and left people dead and dying in that town and, so, when the train reached the depot, the cry was sounded and everyone took up arms to hunt for the outlaws.”

“My great-grandpa Lars was just a kid then, about 15, but he loaded up a fowling gun with buckshot and went with his uncle Olaf out to one of the bridges a couple miles from town.  The bridge was on the old Madelia road where the way dipped down into a deep ravine and spanned a fast-flowing creek that had its headwaters in a slough up on the prairie.  Olaf had been deputized to guard the bridge and keep the outlaws from sneaking away on that road.”

“It was cold and rainy.  The two men had a mule and buckboard and they had pitched a canvas lean-to off the side of the wagon.  Nothing much happened.  Some swallows twittered in holes pecked in a mud cliff above the creek and a couple deer crossed the ruts of the road where there was a meadow  between the bluffs along the road.  Olaf had a jug and was drinking.  He sang a hymn that he said was stuck in his head.  Lars thought he was singing loudly to warn any brigands nearby that they should avoid the bridge in the ravine where they were posted.”

“Twilight was grey and misty.  Olaf said that the corn likker in the jug had twisted up his guts a little.  He told Lars that he had to unburden himself from a meat-pie that he had eaten earlier in the day.  ‘I’m going down there,’ he said, pointing to a willow garden on the bank of the creek.  Olaf asked if Lars had a handkerchief on him.  Lars said that he did: ‘But why do you want to take that?’  Olaf said that he didn’t want to wipe his ass with leaves and twigs.  ‘Just gimme the handkerchief,’ Olaf demanded.  ‘I’ll see to it that you get another.’” 

“My great-great grandpa reluctantly handed the linen to Olaf.  Olaf grinned at him and said that he should hold the fort and, then, he slipped away into the brush growing up on the bank below the bridge.”

“So, what do you think happened?  After a couple minutes, Lars heard a horse whinny up the road and, then, he saw two men appear on the lane, shadowy in the mist and gloaming.  The men were on foot, leading their ponies, and one of them was limping a little.  Lars shouted out: ‘Who goes there?’  He put a finger between his lips and whistled loudly.  But Olaf, hidden in the scrub-brush, didn’t answer.”

“The bandits sauntered up to Lars, greeting him with a cheerful ‘Good evening!’  They were big rough-looking fellows.  Their ponies seemed footsore and frightened.  Lars saw the whites of the horses’ eyes.  It was probably for the best that Lars didn’t have the presence of mind to reach for his old fowling piece.  The two men tapped the brim of their hats to salute him.  One of them said: ‘Now, sonny, you don’t want to be making trouble for us.’  Lars nodded his head.  ‘Just let us get down the road a couple miles or so,’ the other man said.  He had an accent like the old rebel soldiers that Lars had met in town a couple times.  ‘We’ll just get on down the road,’ the bandit said, “then, you can go back to town and tell everyone how you tried to stop us but we was just too ornery and mean.’  Lars didn’t have anything to say.  Olaf was nowhere to be seen.”

“The two men led their ponies across the bridge, then, walked to the top of the hill where they mounted and rode away.  A couple minutes later, Olaf stumbled up out of the brush.   ‘I feel much better,’ he told Lars.  His nephew said that he thought the outlaws had just crossed the bridge and were riding away down the Madelia road.  ‘Did you try to stop them?’  Lars said: ‘They come up upon me real stealthy and I didn’t have time to do anything.’   Lars pointed up the road.  ‘I shouted and whistled for you,’ Lars said.  ‘Didn’t hear nothing at all,’ Olaf replied.  ‘I should have tried to stop them,’ Lars said.  ‘Well, there was two of them,’ Olaf said.  ‘You were outnumbered.’  He shrugged his shoulders.”

“Olaf said that there was nothing they could do now and it would be best to take the wagon back into town and raise up a posse.  On the way back to town, they passed under a low-hanging branch and

Olaf’s hat was knocked off.  Wet leaves dowsed his forehead.  Olaf took a handkerchief out of his pant’s pocket and dabbed at his forehead.  Lars asked him if this was his handkerchief.  ‘Nope,’ Olaf said, ‘that got pretty much soiled down in the bushes.’ 

“Lars said: ‘I thought you told me you needed my handkerchief for your business.’  

“ ‘That’s right,’ Olaf said, ‘but I didn’t never tell you I didn’t have one of my own.’”

The old man nudged his terrier with his tennis shoe.  

“So that’s my story,” he said.  

I thanked him.  The angle of sun had changed slightly and I saw the stark skeletal shadow of the Yellowjacket trestle cast against peat-brown pools of water in the old swamp.