A Majority of Scountrels - Don Berry

by Don Berry

  Milton was stabbed in the fight; cut up badly enough that he seemed certain to die shortly. When Bridger and the rest of the party moved off, Milton had to be left behind; Joe Meek was to stay with him and bury him. It must have been an odd sensation for Bridger, remembering how he had been left with the grizzly—mauled Hugh Glass in the same circumstances; and what he had done.

  As Old Gabe moved off to tie up the spring hunt, he received another shock. Vanderburgh declined to be lost. He had of course, decamped immediately behind Bridger, and for the rest of the spring the Company brigade was a persist gent, unloseable nuisance. No sooner had Bridger begun to work an area than Vanderburgh appeared and happily dispersed his men.

  Worse, Vanderburgh had recently been supplied, and Bridger was in the thin times just before rendezvous. The Company booshway made efficient and annoying use of his little surplus of goods to buy up pelts from some of Bridger’s free trappers; and also to buy up a few of the free trappers themselves.

  By the time the almost-combined brigades reached rendezvous—this year in Pierre’s Hole—Bridger was no longer simply annoyed by Vanderburgh; he was worried. The Company men were sticking too close; they were up to beaver now, and something drastic had to be done in a hurry.

  Back at Bear River, Milton Sublette was being stubborn; he refused to die. Day after day he lay in camp, slowly regaining his health; the deep, slashing wounds closing up. Joe tended him carefully for forty days of isolation. "To him," says Mrs. Victor, "Joe Meek was everything,—hands, feet, physician, guard, caterer, hunter, cook, companion, friend."

  And at the end of forty days Milton was well enough to ride again. The two men broke camp and set out to find Bridger’s party or, failing that, to meet them at Pierre’s Hole for Rendezvous 1832. They had set out for the north and hadn’t gone far when they stumbled on a Snake encampment. Between them and the village, the bucks of the band were feeding their horses. Seeing the whites, an uproar broke out, and there was a dash for their mounts.

  Meek and Sublette realized there was little chance to outride the Snakes, particularly with Milton in his still weakened condition. They spurred ahead, straight past the band of mounting Indians, and headed full tilt into the encampment itself. They scrambled off their horses in the— middle of the village and made a dash for the chief’s lodge, identifiable by its gaudy trappings. Once inside they were officially under the hospitality of the chief.

  They made it, and stood panting inside the lodge while the angry Snakes began to converge on them. Soon the braves began to file in, and within half an hour the lodge was full. The Snakes didn‘t speak to either of the whites. They went into a sort of official conference at which the life or death of the two was discussed. This conference was probably endless; most Indian councils were. (They operated on a perfectly democratic principle; anyone who had anything to say was given his chance, even if the outcome was a foregone conclusion. As was customary with Indian oratory, the speeches were very long; very diffuse, and generally wandered off into a discussion of the feats and achievements of the speaker himself.) This one lasted the rest of the day.

  'I`he verdict was, of course, unfavorable. According to Mrs. Victor, a long argument for the defense was conducted by a chief she calls "the good Gotia". If this is in fact the Snake chief Mauvais Gauche, he was more frequently known by less complimentary sobriquets; most printable of which was Bad Gocha. (We last met him as he massacred Etienne Provost’s party. The present incident is the only thing to his credit in the annals of the trade.)

  "Gotia" was the last to leave the tent—everyone else having gone to prepare the ceremonials—and he motioned to Milton and Joe to remain quiet while he was gone. (Not that there was a great deal of choice, but I’m paraphrasing Mrs. Victor here.)

  About dusk there was a great noise, and confusion, and clouds of dust, in the south end of the village. Something was going wrong among the Indian horses. Immediately all the village ran to the scene of the disorder, and at the same moment Gotia, the good, appeared at the door of the Medicine Lodge, beckoning the prisoners to follow him. With alacrity they sprang up and after him, and were led across the stream, to a thicket on the opposite side, where their horses stood, ready to mount, in the charge of a young Indian girl.

  According to the tradition, this was the first time either Joe or Milton saw the Mountain Lamb: Umentucken Tukutsey Undewatsey, as Joe renders it. This was the most beautiful woman in the mountains (also according to tradition and Meek), and the next year Milton brought his brigade down this way and married her. (When he left a couple of years later, Milton bequeathed her to Joe; and there began one of the great romantic stories of the trade, lasting until she was killed by a Bannock arrow.)

  But for now she was a holder-of-horses. Joe and Milton hastily departed the Snake camp, rode all night and the next day. Once out of danger, they slowed, and made the rest of the way to Rendezvous 1832 without incident.

  Bridger was there before them, and probably also Fraeb and Gervais, though their activities on the Spring '32 hunt are unknown. Fitzpatrick was back in St. Louis with Bill Sublette, making arrangements for the supply caravan.

  Camped cozily beside the RMF brigade in Pierre’s Hole was Henry Vanderburgh. He, too, was waiting for supplies; Fontenelle was bringing up a caravan from St. louis, and there was also some expectation that Etienne Provost—now a Company man—would be coming with something from Fort Union. (Provost, however, joined Fontenelle somewhere along the line.) This was interesting, the first time two caravans had come to rendezvous. The free trappers were going to have a choice of buyers, perhaps. But as it shaped up, it began to look as though the first supplier to arrive was going to pick up the greater share of the business.

  The RMF partners settled down for a hasty consultation. What could be done about the Company? This was the big question of the day, and the answer they came to must have seemed a reasonable one at the time.

  CHAPTER 17

  "Then began the usual gay carousal?

  THERE were roughly a hundred men at Rendezvous 1832 .who were directly connected with RMF, by wage or other agreement. The Company brigade under Drips numbered about ninety. The institution of rendezvous was well known in the moimtains by now, and always attracted large numbers of Indians who dropped in to see the fun. There were 120 lodges of Nez Perces and 80 lodges of Flatheads camped in Pierre’s Hole, far outnumbering the whites.

  The number of unattached men—the free trappers—isn’t exactly known. But this numbered group would be the hub around which the rendezvous would spin. And spin is the appropriate word.

  Both the major forces, RMF and the Company brigade, had these free trappers very much in mind. The opposing companies were nearly matched in size. The balance would be swung by the free trappers and where they chose to dispose of their furs. That, in turn, depended on which supply train reached Pierre’s Hole first, the one Bill Sublette was bringing up for RMF or Fontenelle’s Company caravan.

  On July 8 the supply train pulled in, and it looked as though RMF had won this round; Sublette was first. But after the shouting had died down, the partners received a shock. They had been under the impression that Tom Fitzpatrick would be with Sublette’s caravan. He was not. Sublette had been hoping to find him at rendezvous.

  ***

  Fitz was, in effect, RMF‘s brain, and this was a serious situation. From what Sublette told them, the chances were good they had lost him to the Indians.

  Remember that Fitzpatrick had not remained in the mountains the previous year. After his long—and almost disastrous—detour by way of Santa Fe he had met his partner Henry Fraeb in the summer of 1831. Turning over the year's supplies to Fraeb, Fitzpatrick immediately turned back down the Platte for St. Louis. He was to arrange supplies for Rendezvous 1832 and recruit new men.

  By early May a supply party had been outfitted by Bill Sublette, and Fitzpatrick had this new recruits. The two parties, though semiautonomous, were to travel in company to rendezvous. Sublette’
s party had been swelled by the addition of Nathaniel Wyeth, New England iceman turned explorer, and his company. He was bound for the Oregon country, meaning to investigate the possibilities of colonization there. (Wyeth’s activities- are of suflicient mportance to be treated more fully than I am able to do here. See appendix B.)

  The combined Wyeth-Sublette-Fitzpatrick caravan numbered 86 men and nearly 300 head of pack animals. Under Sublette’s leadership they got 0E from Independence on May 3.

  Around the middle of June, somewhere past the Laramie, Fitzpatrick separated from the main party. Taking one of the fastest horses, he set off ahead, the intention being to "discover the disposition of the various Indian tribes through whose dominions we were to travel." He was to meet the rest of the caravan "at a designated point on the head of the Columbia River." (To the trappers "Columbia" meant any of the Columbia waters, and in particular the present Snake.)

  When the party arrived at the meeting point on July 2, Fitzpatrick wasn’t there. This was an ill omen, indeed. Zenas Leonard was with the caravan, and his journal calls it a "melancholy circumstance . . . (and) perplexing? (Leonard had joined Fitzpatrick's group of recruits after his own employers went bankrupt.) "The most natural conclusion at which to arrive," Leonard continues, "was, that the dull and cloudy weather had caused him to lose his course, and that he had become bewildered."

  This may have been the natural conclusion for Leonard, still a relative novice; it would not have been so for Bill Sublette. Men with the experience and mountain technique of Tom Fitzpatrick simply did not become bewildered and lose their course, however "dulI" the weather. The number of times mountain men were actually lost—particularly on familiar ground—were vanishingly few. To Bill Sublette, Fitzpatrick’s absence would have meant trouble, and the most hopeful view would have been that he had gone on to Pierre’s Hole .... Bill decided to move on.

  Fitzpatrick had been engaging »in one of the adventures that became a classic story of the trade: Broken Hand’s Escape From the Blackfeet. Very brieily, and without going into alternative versions of the story:

  For three or four days after leaving Sublette’s caravan, Fitz had made good progress. (He was attacked by a grizzly, thrown off his horse, and "in a fit of desperation" rushed straight at the bear and scared him off; but this is the uneventful part of the trip.) A day or so later, coming down a narrow defile, he blundered directly into a village of Gros Ventres. (This same village shows up several times this spring and summer. It was a band returning from a several-year visit to their cousins, the Arapahoes.)

  Nothing for it then but a cross-country chase. No longer able to aiford the luxury of a trail, Fitzpatrick set out directly up the side of the mountain through the brush, over the deadfalls, rocks and ditches, with the howling bucks of the village hot after him on foot. It doesn't take much of this ( kind of activity to exhaust a horse, and Fitz had to abandon the animal halfway up and continue on foot.

  As he scrambled up the hillside, he heard behind him the delighted whoops of the Big Bellies as they captured the abandoned horse. The horse was only half the game, however; a free white scalp was the other half, and before long the Gros Ventres began to gain on him. Seeing this, Fitzpatrick gave up the attempt to outrun them, and tucked himself into a hole in the rocks, covering the entrance with leaves and sticks.

  For the rest of the day the Indians prowled around his general vicinity, beating the bushes with general good humor and malice. Several times they passed close to his little cave, but somehow missed him. Toward sunset they returned to the valley disappointed, with only the horse to show for their exertion.

  Fitz waited until well into the night before he crawled out. He figured the direction least likely to bring him into contact with the Gros Ventres again, and set out. Soon he walked into the outskirts of their sleeping camp; decided it was just not his night and went back to his hole in the hill.

  The next morning the hunt was resumed, and the Gros Ventres combed the hillside again; and again without finding the white man. This kind of nonsense was as boring to the Big Bellies as it was frightening to Fitz, and they finally abandoned the search in disgust. The rest of the day they spent giving their new acquisition a tryout; racing Fitzpatrick’s horse against the best of the Indian, while the white man watched from up on his hill.

  The second night Fitzpatrick sneaked out again, and made his way down to the creek some distance below the Gros Ventre village. He followed this until daylight, and then found another hole to hide in. Several small groups passed him during the day, but were apparently hunters, rather than search teams. He saw his horse under a man he took to be a chief; the animal had done well in the races.

  The next night Fitz decided to cross the river, hoping there would be fewer indians on the other side. (The geography of this escapade is somewhat uncertain; this may or may not be the Snake.) He made a raft, loaded self and goods aboard, and started across. The current broke up the raft, depositing its cargo in the water. Fitz had now been without food for a couple of days, and working hard to boot. He barely made it to shore, and was then without gun, Hint, steel, or any of the necessaries except a butcher knife.

  There followed a starvation trek, in which he lived on such buds, weeds, and roots as he could scrabble up. It wasn’t much. By the time he reached rendezvous—the same afternoon as Sublette, the 8th of July,—he was incoherent from starvation and exhaustion, and barely recognizable. Since the loss of his gun and possibles, he’d been tramping for better than a week. Of the last stages, Leonard has Fitzpatrick say: "I thought of preparing myself for death, and committed my soul to the Almighty. I have no recollection of any thing that occurred after this, until I found myself in the hands of my deliverers."

  (The tradition is that his hairs turned white overnight, thus giving him his second Indian sobriquet, White Head [Broken Hand being the first]. But these stories tended to pick up little details like this around the winter camp, and none of the immediate, reports mentions anything of the kind.)

  But he had gotten through, thanks to a mountain-tempered constitution, and that was all that was important.

  II

  And so Rendezvous 1832 got off to a roaring start with the customary Indian trouble... `

  Sublette unpacked his alcohol kegs, watered the stuff down, and maybe threw in a handful of tobacco for color and flavor. (In a different context we find one formula for "Injun trading whiskey," which was what the trappers got. One gallon raw alcohol to three gallons water. A pound of tea or rank black tobacco, some ginger, and a handful of red peppers. Indians mindful of HBC’s very fine rum at the northern posts were consoled by the addition of a quart of black molasses.) Camp kettles—the mountain goblet—were passed around cheerily, emptied, and refilled with amazing regularity.

  The trappers lied and bragged, challenged each other to horse races, foot races, drinking bouts, card games, shooting contests, or fights; whatever happened to enter their minds first. Every man, to hear him tell it, was the greatest anything-you-want-to-name in the mountains and stood ready to prove it on request. Frequently no request was necessary—in fact; the very presence of newcomers in the mountains was quite enough to fire up the athletic, alcoholic, and amatory pride of the veteran mountain men, and they proceeded to demonstrate their skills on beast, bottle, and brown-skin beauty to the enormous wonderment of the mangeurs de lard.

  As Mrs. Victor has it, rather conservatively,

  then began the usual gay carousal; and the "fast young men" of the mountains outvied each other in all manner of mad pranks. In the beginning of their spree many feats of horsemanship and personal strength were exhibited, which were regarded admiring wonder by the sober and inexperienced New Englanders under Mr. Wyeth’s command. And as nothing stimulated the vanity of the mountain-men like an audience of this sort, the feats they performed were apt to astonish themselves. In exhibitions of the kind, the free trappers took the lead . . . [but] the manlier sports soon degenerated into, . . a "crazy drunk" cond
ition.

  I During which time the humor was apt to become a bit rough, no matter how good-natured; Of another rendezvous, Mrs. Victor reported:

  one of their number seized a kettle of alcohol, and poured it over the head of a tall, glank, red-headed fellow, repeating as he did so the baptismal ceremony. No soonerhad he concluded, than another man with a lighted stick, touched him with the blaze, when in an instant he was enveloped in flames . . . some of the company . . . began beating him with pack-saddles to put out the blaze. But between the burning and the beating, the unhappy wretch nearly lost his life, and never recovered from the effects of his baptism by fire.

  About the only thing doubtful in the story is that the prankster knew the baptismal ceremony, and even that is quite possible (Old Bill Williams, for example, one of the meanest and most cantankerous of them all, had once been a preacher.)

  The bucks of the various tribes would be wandering around from group to group with wives, sisters, or daughters in tow, haranguing the interested mountain men with their amatory excellences. When the price was agreed on—it always went to the man in charge, never the woman involved—the trapper either bundled his squaw off into the bushes or laid her down where she was.

  More independent squaws would be parading around camp on horseback, dressed in their finest white doeskin robes, looking for something more permanent in the way of liaison with the whites; a mountain marriage, with the prestige and comparative wealth and ease it brought a squaw.

  And the beaver disappeared magically into Sublette’s packs, very much faster than it had come out of the bitter cold streams, and the alcohol got a little weaker as perceptions dulled, and the shooting and shouting got a little wilder. The social event of the year, this week, and everybody who was anybody was there with bells on.