Particularly Witherspoon Sadler. If the widow Rachel was anywhere within view, his eyes were on her. If she glanced his way he gave her a smile, and on a couple of particularly daring occasions, a wink. Rachel usually pretended not to notice. Her own attention was perpetually focused on Jedd Colter. It was obvious to any who cared to observe it that the main reason Rachel McCall insisted on riding on a horse rather than a wagon was that it made it easy for her to be near the horseman Jedd. Where Jedd rode, Rachel rode not far away.
Also not far away was, usually, Witherspoon. By keeping near Jedd he kept near Rachel McCall. The rotund fellow’s obvious attraction to a woman far too beautiful for him was an ongoing point of humor among the other travelers. Witherspoon was oblivious of the fact that he was being laughed at on all sides. He’d made no declarations of his affections to her, nor had any meaningful conversations at all with Rachel, so as far as Witherspoon could see it, his feelings were fully hidden to all but himself. In reality he might as well have written them across his broad forehead.
Witherspoon was riding near Jedd when the overland portion of the group neared St. Louis. By now the group had traveled so far that they all felt seasoned as travelers. Having at last reached the Mississippi River country, there was a welcome sense of having passed an important milestone. The longest part of the journey remained ahead, but even so, they would soon be at Independence, the town generally perceived as the gateway point for overland passage to California.
“How does it go from here?” Witherspoon asked his brother and Jedd as they stood together looking across the band of travelers and the broad river beyond. “Men, freight, and dray horses by water to Independence, right?”
“That was the plan. It’s changed,” Wilberforce replied.
Jedd said, “The general?”
“Of course. He’s heard stories of cholera, that the riverboats are rife with it.”
Jedd frowned. “Is it true?”
Wilberforce shrugged. “He is afraid to take the chance and find out. Which, I must admit, makes a certain degree of sense, given that it is possible for us to reach Independence by land.”
“Yes…but once again, we’re hopelessly slowed. We’re falling further behind every day, and it’s already too late to make it up later. Our pledge of speed-of-crossing has already been kicked to the ground, and now the general is proceeding to stomp it flat. We may set a record as the slowest passage.”
“I know, Jedd. I know. But here we are.”
“I find myself astonished,” wrote Crozier Bellingham a few days later in a June entry in his journal.
After days of delay owing to General Lloyd’s fear of cholera on riverboats, it seems now it does not matter because he had decided we will not go to Independence at all. Cholera fears again. The general has heard the disease is in that town. No verification, only rumors. Even so, General Lloyd has changed our destination to St. Joseph.
Jedd Colter and the Sadlers are obviously frustrated but, showing the deference proper to leadership, are keeping their thoughts to themselves. I have been instructed by Wilberforce Sadler to present the change in plans in my newspaper reports as routine and unimportant. I am doing so, but like much else they seek to suppress, even yet the truth will find its way out through my pen when I begin the writing that they know nothing of, and which will be seen by many more eyes than my meager and localized little half-truth newspaper reports.
Days dragged on with General Lloyd insisting upon handling the arrangements for all alterations of plans. No one expected him to achieve any changes quickly, and he did not frustrate that anticipation. But even the most pessimistic about the general’s lethargy were surprised when it was early August before the wagon train departed St. Joseph.
They were near Fort Leavenworth when General Lloyd, striding across the camp one evening with a jovial smile on his face and an atypical happy greeting for everyone he met, staggered suddenly to his right and fell, grunting as his head struck hard against a wagon wheel. He crumpled down like a body without bones as drool flooded out of his mouth and his head lolled to one side.
Several people saw him fall, but the first to approach his limp form was a man who had kept himself nearly invisible to most in the band of emigrants. Zebulon McSwain knelt at Lloyd’s side and spoke softly to him, calling his name and feeling about on his flopping wrist.
“Is he dead?” asked a girl of about twelve, the youngest traveler in the group.
McSwain shook his head. “Not dead. He’s got a pulse yet. But I’m thinking his heart has gone bad on him. Needs a doctor, no question about it.” He looked at the little girl, started to ask a question, then paused and asked the question of a nearby man instead. “Is there a physician among us, sir?”
“Who are you?” the man asked. “I ain’t seen you before, I don’t think.”
“I keep to myself. Stay in my wagon most of the time. Can you answer my question about a physician?”
The man knelt beside McSwain and studied the pallid face of General Lloyd, who was unconscious. “We do have a doctor. But he’s not much good. Too much of this.” He extended the thumb and little finger of his right hand and tilted the thumb toward his mouth in imitation of a tipped bottle.
“Well, if he’s the best we have, we must fetch him,” said McSwain. “I’m pessimistic regarding the chances of General Lloyd surviving a wagon ride into town and a search for a physician there.”
The man rose and darted off into the camp. McSwain could only hope he was going to fetch the doctor he’d referenced.
“Do you know that man who just left?” McSwain asked the little girl, who still stood by, staring at the pathetic and unmoving General Lloyd.
“His name is Gibbons,” she said. “Charlie Gibbons. He’s my uncle. I’m Lorene Gibbons.”
“Can I rely on him to bring that doctor back, miss? Because General Lloyd needs one.”
“No,” the girl said sorrowfully. “Never rely on Uncle Charlie. Likely he won’t be back. My papa says that Uncle Charlie is ‘sorry stuff.’ Even though he’s his brother.”
But Uncle Charlie did come back, minutes later, dragging along a middle-aged man who was trying to stuff a slender metal flask back into a pocket but failing because Uncle Charlie was repeatedly yanking him by that same arm. As the pair reached General Lloyd’s side, the flask thumped to the ground, clattering on a stone. Charlie Gibbons scooped it up and pocketed it, telling the doctor he’d give it back to him later.
“This the patient?” the supposed physician asked.
“Yes, Doctor,” said McSwain. “This is General Lloyd, the commander of our expedition. He has been stricken and has passed out.”
“I ain’t far from the same situation,” the supposed doctor said. “He been drinking?”
“I don’t think so, sir. I can tell that you have, though. Are you in any shape to evaluate this man?”
“I’m finer than a baby boy’s chin whiskers,” the doctor said as he lowered himself, with effort, to his knees, upon which he swayed a little as he scooted toward General Lloyd. “I already know what’s wrong with him. He’s passed out.”
What a dolt, McSwain thought. “But why?”
“Probably his heart. He’s old. His face and mouth ain’t drooping, so I figure it probably ain’t a stroke. You sure he ain’t been tippling, though?”
“If he was I knew nothing of it. Not that I’ve been sitting around watching him. But he’s a man of strong religion and not a drinker at all, or so I’ve heard.”
“Well, all I can do for him right now is sit with him a bit and see how he does. We might have to take him into town for more help later if he appears to need it. Charlie, let me have my flask now, if you would.”
“Can’t do it, Doc. You need a clear head if you’re going to keep a sharp enough eye on the general there.”
“That’s why I need my flask. To keep my head clear.”
“Can’t help you on that, Doctor. You’re drunk enough already.”
&nb
sp; “Drunk? I ain’t drunk.”
Charlie said, “Yeah, and I got nary a hair on my hind end.”
McSwain, a man with a strong sense of propriety, winced at Charlie Gibbons’s crudity.
“I want my flask. It’s a good one…real silver,” said the doctor.
“Ain’t got it, even if I wanted to give it to you. A fellow come by a minute ago and slipped it right out of my hand.” In fact he’d given the flask to the man just to be rid of it, seeing the doctor had imbibed more than he should have already.
“You’re lying!”
“I ain’t.”
A hundred feet away, seated on his haunches while watching a woman cooking stew in a kettle over one of the many cook fires burning around the camp, Ben Scarlett took a swig from his new flask and blessed his good luck. He’d been aching for a drink for hours, and considering a trip into the heart of town in search of a saloon, but this unexpected turn of fortune would make that unnecessary. There was enough liquor in the slender flask to do him. He drained off another swallow and said a quick prayer that this kind of luck would continue for him when finally he reached California and began looking for gold.
If ever they made it. It had seemed a very long trail so far from Knoxville, and by far the longest and hardest part of the journey hadn’t even commenced.
For one man, though, the journey was finished. The next morning, Wilberforce Sadler stood on a cask before his assembled travelers and announced that General Gordon Lloyd, after a life of service to his nation and his fellow citizens, had quietly passed away in the night after suffering an apparent failure of the heart. He would be buried for the time being beside a nearby brook; his relatives would be sent word of his passing and the location of his grave so they could disinter his remains for burial in their family cemetery in Kentucky.
“We have lost a friend but can take comfort in the fact that he is now in heaven,” Wilberforce intoned.
“Nah,” said a man in the crowd. “No way he’s there yet. He’s somewhere dragging his feet. Somebody probably told him there was cholera there. Give him a few months, he might make it within view of the pearly gates.”
FROM THE JOURNAL OF CROZIER BELLINGHAM
SEPTEMBER 8, 1849
The death of General Lloyd some days back brought grief to our band, despite his admittedly annoying slowness, because of the great respect in which he was held because of his military achievements. Yet it also brought hope that we would see a speeding of our progress. It is now clear that we are hopelessly behind and will not likely make up much of our lost time.
I believe the one most disturbed by this is Wilberforce Sadler, being a man of great pride who was most vocal in the early stages in declaring our passage to be assured of record speed and the “advantages” of having General Lloyd at our head. He has spoken to me many times in recent days about how to present, in my reports, “clarifying reasons” for our obvious failure to achieve the speed of travel we claimed would mark our progress. I am making no argument with his ongoing censorship and distortion of my reports. They are for his own newspaper, after all, and the writing that I am truly interested in is work over which he can exercise no control: my novel of the gold fields. I have told only Jedd Colter and Zebulon McSwain of my planned work of fiction.
Zebulon McSwain is a man of mystery and oddity. Seemingly disgraced, driven out of his distinguished and lauded position in Knoxville higher education…and apparently hiding from some threat, some danger, that he declines to explain. I wonder if the man has at some level lost his mind. He keeps himself almost entirely apart from his fellow travelers, hiding away most of the time in a wagon, to be hauled along therein like a piece of luggage, rather than taking a turn at driving, or sometimes opting to ride or walk, as most others do in order to make their activities diverse and more interesting. Strangest of all to me is that, at most times, he keeps clutched in his arms the stuffed remains of a cat, apparently a much-loved former pet that has now gone on to whatever glory awaits felines, if any. What causes such odd behavior in an educated and long-respected man? And what sin did he commit to cause his ignoble removal from the now-defunct Bledsoe College? I hope to learn answers to these questions over time, for the benefit of characterizations within my future novel of the “Gold Rush,” as some have taken to calling our national phenomenon.
That is as good and accurate a descriptor, I suppose, as any other one might conceive. Though our slow-as-a-tortoise pace, thanks mostly to the late general, certainly does not cohere with the notion of a “rush.” At the pace we are keeping, and sometimes losing, California may be no more than a myth of the ancients, like Plato’s Atlantis, by the time we reach it.
It is late now, and I put away my pencil to take to my blankets. We are at Council Grove—so far, so very far, still to go.
California, where are you? And why are the miles west of the Mississippi so long?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Repair problems with some of the wagons brought the familiar specter of delay to call upon the California Enterprise Company of East Tennessee again even without General Lloyd to cause it, leaving them essentially stranded and “thumb-twiddling,” as Witherspoon Sadler enjoyed saying to all around him. He seemed to find great humor in the phrase, unoriginal as it was, and declared himself the “second-place best thumb twiddler” in the camp, giving the first-place title to Zeb McSwain, who contributed very little to the overall migration. McSwain, who remained so perpetually hidden that some in the party had yet to lay eyes on him, was perceived by most who did know him as a classic example of a starry-eyed academic, out of touch with the “real” world around him that grittier and earthy folk had to live in. He was a freeloader and a tagalong, and the fact that Wilberforce Sadler was open in his disdain for the man did nothing to help the way McSwain was perceived.
Jedd was troubled by McSwain on several levels. He was ever mindful of McSwain’s support for him in the matter of the beloved-but-lost Emma, and pitied him for the loss of status he had suffered. But such was life. If McSwain had suffered loss, it was only because, in an earlier day, he had lived on the other side of the fence as a man who gained much through his life and work. McSwain, at least, had had something of value to lose. Some went through life never possessing anything worth having, like old Ben Scarlett, who seemed to be trying to be the first man to cross the nation in a state of endless intoxication.
By the time the wagon train truly got on the move again, a few things had changed besides the death of General Lloyd. With the support of the Sadler brothers, Jedd had begun obtaining mules to take the place of several dray horses, knowing that mules would endure better once the mountains were reached. The mountains seemed far away to most. The plains were endless, flat yet with a vague upward pitch that made the travelers feel they were moving up a shallow, eternal rampway leading to nowhere. It was a tricky adjustment for those accustomed to hillier terrain. Nothing to do but endure it and go on.
“Don’t fret,” Jedd counseled his charges. “Before we’re done you’ll wish it was all this easy.”
As progress continued, some matters improved. Game became more available, and Jedd, Treemont, and a few other hunters kept busy supplying the camp with meat, wild turkeys for the most part, but later, buffalo and other bigger game. On evenings when the atmosphere in the camp was rich with the heady scent of sizzling buffalo steaks, spirits were high.
The process of meal delivery had changed. O’Keefe, the former restaurant chef, had decided that life as a camp cook was not for him, and had abandoned the enterprise, much to Wilberforce Sadler’s disgust (Wilberforce ordered Bellingham to report O’Keefe’s desertion in the sternest terms possible, so that his name would be sullied among those he knew back in Knoxville). Had he known of it, O’Keefe would hardly have cared. He was now the new head chef in one of the best eateries in St. Joseph. Without a single main cook, the travelers were divided into “mess groups”—groups who cooked and shared meals together, each group tending to its own n
eeds and making sure supplies were sufficient. Ferkus Varney, because of his clerking talents and organizational skills, was given oversight and told to look for problems, conflicts, shortages, and the like, in the area of food supply, preparation, and sharing. Rachel McCall, who still admired Jedd Colter while Witherspoon Sadler hopelessly admired her, was assigned to help Varney in the food supply area. It was a sensible assignment, Rachel having joined Jedd’s party of hunters who kept the camp in meat. Jedd had figured she had volunteered her services as a way of getting close to him, but she surprised him by proving to be the most able hunter, besides Jedd himself, in the group. She could outshoot Treemont on his finest day, and had been the first hunter from the wagon train to bring down a buffalo. And she proved a capable liaison between the hunters and the cooks of the camp.
Jedd was actually beginning to think he might be able to like the rugged Rachel after all. But liking her was a far cry from loving her. His love was still attached to another, the faraway, married, and out-of-reach Emma.
When Jedd discovered accidentally that three of his scouts and hunters were unable to read, a notion came to his mind that wound up being at least the partial salvation of Zeb McSwain. He talked to McSwain about it while the man sat in the back of his wagon, scratching his dead, stuffed cat behind the ears as he had done while it was still alive.
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