Jubilee Trail

by Gwen Bristow

  “All right now?”

  “All right,” said Oliver.

  Garnet moved back into place on the seat. The wallows were an awful nuisance. She wondered why buffaloes always had to roll over in the same place. They were the stupidest animals on earth. She had seen them, in long lines that blackened the whole horizon, marching across the prairie to a waterhole. They swayed along sedately until some old brute at the head of the line took a notion to roll over on the ground to scratch his back. He rolled over, got up, and ambled on. But as though he had given an unquestionable command, the buffalo behind him immediately rolled over in the same spot. When the third buffalo reached that spot he rolled over too, and so did the fourth and fifth and sixth and every one of the rest, until by the time the thousandth buffalo had paused to wallow in the same spot they had worn a great big hole. Oliver tried to avoid the wallows, but he seldom could; by the time he saw one it was usually too late to turn aside.

  Oliver’s forehead was brown with dust. He had not shaved since they began the journey, and by now he had a big shaggy beard. The dust had settled on it so thickly that his beard looked as if it was covered with cobwebs. He had on an old hat, to protect his head from the sun, and the hat too was thick with dust. He wore a plaid shirt, the colors of which had long since faded to shadows, and heavy homespun trousers of no color at all. His sleeves were rolled back, and his arms were so sunburnt that the light brown hairs looked almost white. Oliver’s muscles were like ropes under his skin. The men on the trail did the hardest kind of work. No wonder Oliver had surprised her in New York with his great rough hands.

  Garnet glanced down to where a seam in the upper part of her sleeve was beginning to strain. Her clothes had fitted her in New York. But here on the trail she worked too. Her muscles were getting strong and unladylike.

  She felt the new hardness in her arm. “I hope,” she said to Oliver, “when we get to California, your brother won’t be disappointed if I don’t look like a delicate lady. I’m getting so tough and brown!”

  Oliver glanced at her sideways. “Charles isn’t expecting anything. He doesn’t know about you.”

  “Oh, of course he doesn’t. I keep forgetting that. Do you think he’ll like me?”

  “Don’t worry about Charles.” Oliver spoke so shortly that he surprised her.

  Garnet turned on the seat. “Why, what do you mean? Are you worried about him?”

  “He might be—a bit difficult at first,” said Oliver.

  “But why?”

  “He’ll be surprised to find I’m married, that’s all. Good Lord, Garnet, we won’t get to California for another four or five months. Don’t start worrying about Charles.”

  Garnet frowned, thinking. Oliver was looking straight ahead at the mules, guiding them carefully over the rough ground. A wave of dust blew into her face. She coughed, and Oliver smiled as he said,

  “Try not to cough. It makes your throat raw. Swallow.”

  Garnet swallowed. “I know. I’ll try to remember.”

  The dust had made the mules restless. Oliver was having a hard time with them. But though he could not turn his head, he spoke to her understandingly.

  “The going does get tough sometimes, doesn’t it? Ten thousand things to remember, and nothing to do tomorrow but remember them all over again.”

  Garnet held to the seat, admiring the expertness with which he handled the mules. But she wondered why he had said just now that she was not to worry about Charles. She had not thought of worrying about anything.

  Oliver had never talked to her much about Charles. He seemed not to want to talk about him.

  Well, she would ask him about it later. If there was anything she ought to know about Charles before she met him, Oliver would certainly tell her.

  She listened to the rumbling of the caravan. The wagon-wheels creaked as they turned. The oxen bellowed in wrath at the men who made them work in this dusty heat. The bullwhackers, walking beside the teams, yelled and swore at the oxen, and cracked their whips in the air as they strode along. Garnet listened to the noise, and though she was so tired that her bones ached, she smiled at it proudly. No matter how you felt, there was something about the Santa Fe train, this brave sweating challenge to the emptiness.

  The caravan was a mile long. It moved fifteen miles a day. There were a hundred merchandise wagons, besides the carriages and baggage-drays. The wagons moved in four lines, with the carriages among them, so each trader could keep in charge of his own crew. Ahead of the train rode the scouts, and behind the wagons plodded the extra mules and oxen. When they left Council Grove there had been only forty wagons in their company. By this time most of the traders had joined the big train, but here and there along the trail they could see the remains of campfires, showing that there were still more wagons ahead.

  They had come six hundred miles from Independence, and they had two hundred miles still to go before they reached Santa Fe. For six hundred miles they had not seen a single human dwelling. But across this empty space the traders were carrying a million dollars’ worth of goods. The men had packed the wagons so tight that when they got to Santa Fe the bolts of cloth would hardly be wrinkled, and it was a rare pot or pan that would have even a dent. It was a great job. Garnet was proud to be part of it.

  She could feel the sweat trickling down between her shoulder-blades.

  “Oliver,” she asked, “what comes after Rabbit Ear Creek?”

  “Round Mound.”

  “And after that?”

  “The rocks. Then the mountains.”

  Garnet looked back, at the dust hanging like a thundercloud on the sky. The sky itself was bright blue, with little fleecy clouds. It had been bright like this for days now, pouring down a pitiless heat. The country was baked dry. Nothing grew here but buffalo-grass, coarse hard tufts that even oxen hated to eat.

  In a day or two they would come into the land of the great rocks. But here there were no great rocks. Here, there was nothing. Nothing but dust and flatness.

  The ground did not feel flat under you. It was full of bumps and wallows. But out there it looked flat, smooth as a sheet of paper. Far, far ahead, Garnet could see the mountains. At this distance they looked like strips of gray muslin waving against the sky.

  The country was silent, empty, motionless. Even on the farthest horizon Garnet could not see a moving speck that might be a buffalo, nor a fixed dot that might be a tree. She could not see anything but the shimmering light and the buffalo-grass, and the white bones of buffaloes, and the distance. The caravan was a mile long, but when you looked out there it seemed no bigger than a worm, creeping through the great loneliness.

  When you looked out there, you forgot the creaking and shouting around you. You seemed to be living in the midst of a great silence. The silence rose over you. It threatened and scared you. It reminded you that this was a journey across eight hundred empty miles, and you were here in the midst of it. You could not go back. No matter what happened, you had to go on. If you were ill, if you were dying, the wagons could not stop to let you die in peace. They had to go on. Even if you died, they would pause only a few minutes to bury you, and then go on. They had to get to Santa Fe.

  “Garnet,” Oliver said suddenly.

  She started, and turned her head. “Yes? What is it? Do you want more water?”

  “No, I still have some. But Garnet, don’t look out there too much.”

  “Why not?” she asked in surprise. “What is there to look at?”

  “Nothing. That’s what I mean,” Oliver said. “It gets you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The silence,” said Oliver. “The loneliness. I can’t explain just what it does. But you know how you jumped when I spoke to you.”

  She nodded. “Yes, I did. I wasn’t thinking about you. I was thinking about the silence.”

  “Well, don’t think about it. Think about Santa Fe. We’re going to have a great time when we get there.” Oliver gave his attention to the mul
es for a moment, and then went on. “When we get into the rocks,” he said, “we’ll send runners ahead to Santa Fe to find out what new taxes Armijo has thought up to bedevil us, so we can figure out ways of getting around them. And Santa Fe’s going to be fun. By this time, every other building in town is turning into a saloon or a gambling house.”

  “Will you take me to those places?”

  “Of course, I’ll show you everything. We’re going to stay with a family named Silva. They’re fine people. I’ve had lodgings with them every year I’ve been there.”

  The going was fairly smooth now, and the mules were quiet. Garnet resolutely kept her eyes off the great loneliness. Oliver went on.

  “And pretty soon, the California traders will be coming in. They’re an odd lot, but I think you’ll enjoy them. John Ives, for instance—that’s my partner—he’d be at home in your mother’s parlor. But some of the others are backwoodsmen who think New York is a place where everybody has strawberries and champagne for breakfast, and the women all dress like Florinda.”

  As he mentioned Florinda, Garnet felt a stab of wistfulness. Oliver was not much concerned about Florinda. Garnet had told him about her mother and father, and about the scars on her hands. Oliver was interested, but not deeply so. He had met a lot of unusual people in the course of his Western adventures, and Florinda was only another one. So when he mentioned Florinda now, Garnet did not confess that she still felt sentimental about her. She only laughed at his description of New York as imagined by some of the traders, and Oliver added,

  “When you meet the men from Los Angeles, don’t ask them any questions and you’ll get along very well.”

  “You mean they’ve all got shady pasts?” she asked doubtfully.

  “Well, not all. But it’s an unwritten law that when you meet a man who prefers to stay west of Santa Fe, you don’t ask him why. If he wants you to know, he’ll tell you.”

  A horseman came riding back from the head of the train. He reined his horse as he reached their carriage. Oliver spoke to him.

  “Yes, Reynolds?”

  “How’re you, Mrs. Hale?” the horseman said cordially. “Rabbit Ear Creek,” he said to Oliver. “We’re about to corral.”

  “Good. Water in the creek?”

  “So-so. Brush. We’ll have to hack.”

  “Thanks, Reynolds,” said Oliver. Garnet sighed rapturously. Mr. Reynolds grinned at her.

  “Yes ma’am, I feel like that too. I could eat an ox.”

  He hurried on to tell the next man. The shouts began to go up from end to end of the train.

  “Rabbit Ear Creek! Corral!”

  Garnet scrambled over the back of the seat, into the body of the carriage. She began letting down the four canvas sides. This meant the nooning, three blessed hours for rest and food. Having closed the carriage for privacy, she took off her sunbonnet and shook down her hair, and got her wash-basin out of the chest. She waited for the carriage to stop before filling it. As long as the carriage was moving, water would splash out of the basin and be wasted. While the carriage jogged, she occupied the time by brushing her hair.

  She felt the carriage stop. Drawing the front curtain aside she spoke to Oliver.

  “All right, Oliver?”

  “All right. Save some water for me.”

  Garnet made her way through the dim body of the carriage to the back, where she dipped a bucket into the water-barrel. The men were rushing about and shouting as though they had never lined the wagons for a nooning before. Mr. Reynolds, riding past her, waved and called a greeting.

  She waved back at him. Lowering the curtain again, she took off her dress and did as much washing as she could with her ration of water. She pinned her hair in two tight braids across her head. Here on the trail it was foolish to leave any ringlets blowing to catch the dust. When she had buttoned her dress she rolled up the sides of the carriage and got out to empty the soiled water. Her elbow resting on a carriage-wheel, she watched the men make corral.

  The great wagons lumbered up in four lines, as they had been moving all day. When they came in sight of the creek, the heavy wagons waited until the light vehicles had drawn into a group, close together. Then the bullwhackers maneuvered the four lines of merchandise wagons so that they formed the four sides of a square around the drays and carriages. The men unhitched the oxen, and bound the wagons together with chains. This formed the corral. The big hollow square was like a fortress. Inside it the baggage, the men, and the animals were safe from attack.

  They had had no Indian trouble. When they sighted parties of Indians, scouts would go out from the caravan with presents in one hand and guns in the other, and when they had all glub-glubbed eternal friendship the scouts came back to the train.

  Garnet had found that Oliver was right about Indians. They did not often attack a Santa Fe caravan. They looked wistfully at the fine mules and horses, and would steal any of them that wandered from the line of march. But few Indians had guns. They were no match for the well-armed traders, and they knew it. She had not seen an Indian closer than a hundred yards off.

  The men had left the corral open at one corner, through which the bullwhackers were leading the animals outside to graze. The men whose turn it was for guard duty took up their posts around the corral. The cooks went outside too, and began digging holes for their fires.

  Garnet walked outside. Twenty men were hacking at the brush in the creek, to open a place where they could cross. As they hacked, other men laid the branches in the creek-bed, to make a road, so the wagons could get over without sticking in the mud. Still others were on their knees filling the water-barrels. The bullwhackers brought the oxen down to drink, shouting ear-scorching oaths while they herded the oxen downstream, so they would not wander up and pollute the water that was needed for human use. Garnet watched them all with admiration. The routine of the trail had a hard, strong beauty. Everybody knew what to do and how to do it. No wonder these men could laugh at fat Armijo’s tricks with the customs.

  As she watched, the fragrance of coffee came up to her nostrils. It reminded her that she had had nothing to eat since last night. She had brought her bowl and cup from the carriage, so now she looked around for Oliver’s cook.

  She saw him, squatting on the ground before a shallow hole in which he had made a fire of buffalo dung. There were no trees hereabouts, and therefore no wood. For weeks now, their only fuel had been buffalo chips. The brush of the creeks was no good. It blazed up quickly, but died down before it had done more than warm the outside of the pots. Buffalo chips did not blaze much, but they smoldered with a slow, steady heat, and the pile of them in the fire-hole looked like a heap of glowing coals.

  Oliver’s cook was a lean young fellow from Missouri, named Luke. Luke had set up two stout iron rods at either end of the fire, with a bar across them, from which hung a big pot of buffalo-meat and another of coffee. Besides the pots, Luke had set up several pairs of long thin sticks for cooking bread. The bread-sticks were stuck into the ground on either side of the fire-hole, and leaned against each other over the fire. Around the sticks Luke had wrapped long strips of dough, and he sat turning the sticks carefully so the dough would be baked on all sides.

  Half a dozen of Oliver’s men were already lined up before the fire, waiting to be fed. They grinned at Garnet as she approached. She smiled back at them, asking if Rabbit Ear Creek was going to be a hard crossing.

  No ma’am it wasn’t, they told her; they’d have been glad if it was harder, because that would have meant more water in the creek. It was tough giving the oxen enough to drink, when you had such a stingy little creek to do it with.

  While they talked they kept looking at her, as though she were the most beautiful object on earth. Before she left New York, Garnet had never dreamed that there were any circumstances in which men would show such frank consciousness of her sex. At first it had shocked and humiliated her. By this time she knew she had to put up with it, and her best defense was to ignore it. The men we
re not going to bother her, some of them because they were decent fellows and others because they knew Oliver would shoot them if they did. But though she had been very innocent about these things when she took the trail, it had not taken her long to find out that she could easily have been a disturbing element among them.

  She was the only American woman in the train. There were four Mexican women, wives of bullwhackers, who went back and forth every year to take care of their husbands. When Garnet passed their cooking-fire they always smiled politely and said, “Buenos días, señora.” But they made no attempt to be friendly, because their husbands were bullwhackers and her husband was a trader, and the lines of caste on the trail were strict.

  Garnet tried to meet all the men in a pleasant but impersonal manner. But not all of them met her like this. Some of the men avoided her; some of them never missed a chance to speak to her; others gave her an exaggerated courtesy. Only a few of them, like Mr. Reynolds, had enough self-possession to treat her in an ordinary friendly way. She had noticed that when they stopped for the night the other carriages always left a space around the carriage that she and Oliver occupied. The bullwhackers, who rolled up in their blankets and slept on the ground, never went to sleep close to her carriage. It was not as if the men had any particular delicacy of feeling. It was simply as if they wanted to keep away from something they would rather not be reminded of until they got to Santa Fe. Oliver had never said anything about this to her. She wondered if he thought she had not observed it.

  But not even Oliver, dear and adoring as he was, knew how much this journey was teaching her. In her six weeks on the trail Garnet had learned more than in all her years at school. Along with the hardening of her body had come a wise hardening of her mind. She was not sure she could have put it into words. Even if she could have done so, she had no other woman to talk to and she did not think any man would understand it.

  She did wish there was another American woman along. A woman friend would have eased the strain of so much new knowledge. They would probably have talked about it, but even if they had not, there was so much else they would have talked about. They could have told each other how hard it was to wash their long hair when they had to be so careful of water, and they could have wondered how the styles in clothes were changing while they were away. Things like that, woman-talk. Men did not understand woman-talk and they could not be expected to. But when women shared confidences about any of their own feminine concerns they had an understanding of the rest. She supposed it was the same way with men. Men probably had things in common that they could not share with even the wisest and most beloved women. Garnet wondered how Oliver would have liked spending weeks and weeks in a company of women without a single man to speak to. She had never thought about this before, the curious lonesomeness it gave you to be cut off from your own sex. As she stood among the men of Oliver’s crew, waiting for Luke to cook the buffalo-meat, Garnet reflected that she was really growing up.