by Gary Paulsen
“Yes!” Lottie shouted.
Francis nodded. “Lost me. They lost me.”
“Ahhh.” The old man nodded. “Then they must be the ones.”
“Where arc they? Where? Where?” Lottie could stand it no longer.
The old man looked at her, then at Francis. “Pushy little bit, ain't she?”
“Please, sir,” Francis said, “where arc the Tuckets?”
“The Tuckets!” Billy roared.
The old man pointed to the twin rut road that ran west from the lean-to. “Four miles that way, then one mile off the road. They have a sign with their name on it. You can't miss it.”
But the three of them were already gone.
FRANCIS STOPPED HIS HORSE and sat quietly on her for a moment, watching the man in the field, letting the sight of him fill his heart. The man was plowing, working a team of horses, and he had his back to the three of them. Francis clucked to his horse and tightened his heels and the pony moved forward, walking softly but slightly faster than the plowhorses, until she was just four feet in back of the man working the plow. Lottie and Billy followed him, Billy smiling but Lottie oddly serious, with a worried look.
The man stopped and straightened his back and wiped sweat from his forehead and turned and saw what at first he took to be three Indians and a packhorsc following him.
They were all dressed in buckskins, seasoned by hundreds of camp fires and rain, their faces weather-bias ted and burned and blackened. Francis wore his hair tied back in a club with a rawhide thong and he held a rifle that had become part of him, an extension of his arm.
“What … ? Who … ?”
Francis let him wonder for another beat. Then he slid off the horse and stood, taller than his father now, leaner, and he said, “Hello, Pa. How arc you?”
For a second, then two, there was nothing. Then a look, a swift flash in the man's eyes.
“Francis?” A smile, from deep inside, and a bellow: “Francis!” And he reached over and jerked Francis away from the horse and was holding him and crying and hugging all at once.
And Francis was home.
After Francis returned, his family was, of course, ecstatic. At first his mother almost could not accept it, and many times, months after he was home, she would come to his bed while he was sleeping and push his hair back from his head, kiss him on the forehead, touch his cheek. At first it bothered him. At first many things bothered him. Sleeping in the cabin his father had made was hard, since he was accustomed to sleeping outside, and having people around him all the time was hard too, and the noise of the farm. “But after a time he came to like the closeness, the hard work, the wonderful food made of so many things besides meat. The wonderful food made by his mother and Rebecca.
He liked farming, working alongside his father, the way his father said “son.” He liked going for walks with Rebecca, and how she made him laugh. He liked the way Rebecca, Lottie and “Hilly became good friends.
Lottie and Billy stayed briefly with the Tuckets, then were taken in by another family who had lost their children to cholera on the way across. They lived just over a hill and saw the Tuckets nearly every day.
After they all got settled, there was the question of the Spanish treasure. Francis and Lottie and Billy were almost staggeringly rich, for they had seventy-five pounds of gold and sixty pounds of silver among the three of them. The gold alone was so valuable that the same amount would have made them multimillionaires in modern times.
It's hard to get exact ratios, but it must be remembered that the main reason the Oregon Trail existed, and that such a huge percentage of the population went west (the largest mass migration in American history) was that hundreds of banks were failing and the country was in a severe depression. People had lost farms, houses, land. Nearly everybody was dirt poor—literally.
And this poverty was most extreme in the new West. Everything was done by barter or trade. Money, in the form of currency, hardly existed, and anybody who had money, or gold and silver, was in a very good position to make more.
At the tender age of eleven Lottie became something of a banker. And Francis was glad to leave her in charge. Billy was too. Once he'd bought and eaten his fill of rock candy, the money didn't interest Billy. So Lottie loaned the money at interest, investing and reinvesting, so that in three short years she had nearly doubled the amount they'd found in the Spanish grave. Through defaults in loans she acquired two farms and a sawmill, which she leased back to the previous owners and continued to earn money on.
Meanwhile, Francis worked with his father on the farm. For a time he was content with the work and life as it was.
Then there came a day when he went to see Lottie about something financial and he wasn't sure why, but on the way he stopped and picked some wildflowers and handed them to her when he arrived. And she nodded and smiled in a soft new way and put them in a jar with water.
The next day he brought flowers again. She smiled. And so, gradually, Francis and Lottie changed the way they thought about each other.
Almost one year later to the day, they wed. The day after the marriage, Billy ran off to sea.
“I want to see more of the world,” he said. “I'll be back.”
And he did come back. But in the meantime Francis and Lottie set up housekeeping on a farm down the road. Four years later Billy returned. The three of them now owned many farms, several large herds of brood mares and horses, a wagon factory, four sawmills, three small hotels. Billy took some of his money and bought a square-rigged sailing ship and started a shipping line. Within five years he had three more ships and was hauling wood, cut by his own sawmills, to China to trade for tea and porcelain, which he shipped east to Europe, and then brought people back from Europe to the East Coast before starting the circle again.
When he could, Billy returned home. He also married and had children, and Lottie and Francis had children, who in turn married and had children, and much of the states of Oregon and Washington are owned by their children and their children's children and their children.
Francis lived to be an old man and died in 1923. Lottie lived seven years longer. They never traveled again. They lived their lives in a small frame house just over the hill from the original Tucket homestead, amassing one of the great American fortunes. Each evening, after supper, Francis would take his rifle and go sit among the trees as the sun went down and think of prairies and storms and Indians and mountain men and herds of buffalo and grizzlies and horizons—oh yes, horizons—and every night the last thought before he went back to the house to drink a cup of warm tea and to sleep, every night he'd think the same thought of a one-armed mountain man leaning back against a tree, dead.
Every night his last thought was of Jason Grimes.
When we think of the American West, most of us think in images and ideas that come from the time of the cowboys. Countless books (some of them, mine), plays, songs, radio programs, television shows and movies have been devoted to it. Actually that period lasted only thirty years or so, from the end of the Civil War in 1865 until about 1895. Yet it often seems that more energy has been devoted to this brief time than to all the history preceding it.
Of course, what we know as the American West is a place that existed long before human beings appeared on Earth. The mountains we sec today have been relatively unchanged for millions of years. In prehistoric times, the Western states were a swampy jungle filled with enormous reptiles, dinosaurs and other creatures now long extinct. At another time huge stretches of the West were ocean bottom, a place where sharks as big as buses hunted and killed.
Most of the period since humans first appeared in the “West (approximately 28,000 B.C.) is unrecorded. Archaeological discoveries show that people have lived in “Western canyons, deserts and mountains perhaps more than twenty thousand years. While much is made of how “new” America is compared to Europe, Native American culture predates much of European culture. Early inhabitants are still a powerful presence in the West today. I
n my own travels, I've come across thousands of pictographs—ancient paintings and drawings on rock walls—that were created centuries before Christopher Columbus began his voyage to the New World from Spain in 1492. I've seen pictographs that are personal narratives showing people gutting animals after a hunt, or a figure shooting arrows at other figures to frighten them away from his crops—stories of achievement and also, perhaps, a warning to enemies.
Long before the explorers Lewis and Clark made their great expedition from St. Louis to the Pacific between 1804 and 1806, and still longer before Francis Tucket made his journey, the West was not wild but largely civilized and tamed. Native Americans had lived there successfully for thousands of years. After the Spanish conquest in the 1540s, Spanish soldiers began to explore The West, and Catholic missionaries started to establish a system of missions and churches, many of which arc still in use today. The Spanish founded Santa Fe about 1610, San Antonio in 1718, San Diego in 1769 and Los Angeles in 1781. San Francisco was founded in 1776, the year the thirteen colonies declared America's independence from England.
In that same year men left to map a trade route from Santa Fe in New Mexico to Monterey in California to make it easier to transport goods to the coast. A traveler going south from Santa Fe into Mexico would find small inns, forerunners of our motels, at intervals where he could rest his horses and pack mules. These inns were known as fcrndas, a word still in use today.
But to the north there were still vast tracts of wilderness inhabited by Native Americans and a very few mountain men and French trappers. This is where I brought Francis, because I wanted to write about an area and a time largely neglected in history books and ignored by movies and television.
It was a time of great adventure, when you could ride through herds of buffalo for days and when mountain ranges bounded on forever, when everything was new and raw and savage and when Francis was limited only by himself— and by nature.
Some readers have commented on the violence and hardship of Francis's life, the amount of fighting and death and difficulty. Nothing in these books about Francis Tucket is completely fictional—every act of violence, every difficulty is based on reality and actually happened to some person who existed then. This includes the attacks by the Comancheros, the skirmishes following the Mexican “War and the scavengers who deserted from the army and roamed and pillaged. The hardships that people faced trying to go west by wagon, on foot or on horseback were staggering. Several people died for every mile covered on the so-called Oregon Trail. They died from cholera, typhus, typhoid fever, gun accidents, simple flu, ear infections, rabies, infections from small cuts, blood poisoning, scurvy and other malnutritional diseases; they died from attacks by bands of robbers, from being run over by wagons, from drowning, from botulism and other food poisoning and from simple childhood diseases like measles and chicken pox.
They did not, however, die in attacks by Native Americans, which is the way Hollywood tells it. In the time of the Oregon Trail the Native Americans were helpful, often providing food and guidance, and there was rarely, very rarely, an attack on a wagon train, and never a time when the settlers had to “circle the wagons” and fight. That happened only in the movies. All the difficulty with Native Americans came later, after they were invaded by the military and their lands were stolen. This happened after I860, by which time there was a railroad across the continent and the Oregon Trail was a thing of the past.
Published by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children's Books a division of Random House, Inc., New York
Mr. Tucket copyright © 1994 by Gary Paulsen
Call Me Francis Tucket copyright © 1995 by Gary Paulsen
Tucket's Ride copyright © 1997 by Gary Paulsen
Tucket's Gold copyright © 1999 by Gary Paulsen
Tucket's Home copyright © 2000 by Gary Paulsen
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