Crack in the Sky

by Terry C. Johnston

  Jim asked, “Where you camped?”

  “Yonder,” he answered, pointing upstream. “You’ll find us there a ways—two, maybe three rifle shots.”

  “Camped just close enough to get in trouble with Billy Sublette’s whiskey!” Hatcher bellowed. “Far ’nough away for us to sleep it off when we do!”

  Although Sublette announced he would not be hammering in the bungs to those whiskey kegs until the following morning, there was no dearth of gaiety that evening as twilight broke across the valley of the Popo Agie. Whiskey would be pouring soon enough, they knew, but for now the booshways stored the potent grain alcohol in Campbell’s lodge, where a rotation of trusted guards would be stationed throughout the night.

  Meanwhile more of the newcomers were assigned the task of picketing the pack animals, some to erect the five large awnings under which Sublette would conduct his business from the shade. A pair of greenhorns assembled a large balance scale beneath the oiled sheeting that was to be Sublette’s headquarters, while a few trusted clerks began to unpack the trade goods, checking off every item as it emerged from those canvas and paper and blanket bundles wrapped up back in early spring, back in St. Louis, back in the far, far States of America.

  Fires roared and meat roasted, coffee boiled and men laughed, pulling uproarious pranks or puffing unbelievable windies for the newcomers fresh off the prairie who suddenly found themselves here now among these half-wild veterans of the wilderness, those hivernants who had wintered in the fastness of these terrible mountains inhabited by never-before-seen savages and unimaginable beasts. This first night always served as an initiation of sorts—a tradition none too kind but always applied in good humor to those greenhorns struck dumb to suddenly discover themselves in the company of these hard cases who had survived Blackfeet and blizzards, scorching deserts and dry scrapes, men who had outlasted loneliness and deprivation … yet were willing still to risk it all again for another roll with Lady Fate’s dice.

  Here and there in the bright, flickering flames, the few among them who could read each sat with a cluster of those who could not, reciting those undecipherable words written by mothers and fathers, sisters or brothers, or even more moving—soul-wrenching prose and promises written by sweethearts left behind when men abandoned hearth and homes, daring to challenge these mountains. Letters of yearning and words of caring scribbled on small sheets of foolscap, stories from home counties read from yellowed newsprint. Lockets of hair sent west many, many months before, sent beyond the wide Missouri with faith and a prayer that it would reach a beloved son, would make it to a beloved brother, by the hope of some aching heart that it might just find its way to a beau known to be somewhere out west beneath a wide and faraway sky.

  Stories and news of the east were dragged from the newcomers, tales of places and rivers and towns left far behind, a long time ago. Some men laughed at themselves and traded jokes on others, while more sat on downed logs and listened with red-rimmed eyes to what was read them of home another world away. Men who sat in abject silence, listening, men who sat remembering those dim-lit faces once more, remembering the black-earthed closeness of those gently rounded hills and hardwood forests, men who thought back to how long it had been, how far they had come since choosing to leave all that had been, since choosing to cast their lot with the few, with these bravest of the brave.

  Like men become so crazed, they dared not consider the odds against them. Men torn by not knowing if they ever would return to what was left behind … men not able to understand why they didn’t really care if they ever did go back.

  Night came down on that far valley, the sun hiding its face beyond the Wind River Mountains. Although he had no letters, although he had no loved ones who knew where to write him—Scratch felt that here he was among his chosen brotherhood. Families were no more than a matter of chance. Here he felt himself embraced in the bosom of those who were his family of choice. Men who expected no more from him than they were willing themselves to give in return.

  Songs of old leaped from those strings that Jack Hatcher pressed beneath his dancing fingers, tunes came wheezing and wailing from that squeezebox of a concertina that a weaving and bobbing Elbridge Gray clutched at the end of his outstretched arms.

  Into that wide circle of fires’ light, pairs of hardened men came. Turning to bow to one another, they readily clasped hands and danced with festive abandon: whirling recklessly—ofttimes spinning one another so robustly they landed in a heap at the very edge of the merry flames, where they guffawed at one another until bounding to their feet, stomping and shimmying some more. While some preferred to imitate the fancy steps learned long ago in polite white company back east, others stomped toe and heel round and round, swooping low and howling in their own earsplitting rendition of the scalp or buffalo or war dance.

  And at the border of that open-air dance floor stood those copper-skinned spectators who looked on in unabashed amazement at this unfettered celebration by men who had survived another year in the mountain trade, witnessing this raucous revelry of those who had journeyed west to join that small fraternity of white men come to challenge an unforgiving land. Shoshone males brought their women and children across the creek, here to watch impassively this annual gathering of the white man’s own noisy, strutting warrior bands.

  A few like Bass turned their gaze upon this young woman or that, wondering just what it would take in the way of foofaraw to talk one of those dark-skinned beauties into the willows, to convince her to join him back into the shadows where a few minutes of fevered coupling might ease this aching woman-hunger he suffered, might quench his parched thirst for a moistened coupling with a woman soft, a woman smooth, a woman as eager as he.

  Which of them might he convince that she simply could not live without a clutter of shiny beads in his palm, without a strand of red ribbon, without a tin cup filled with trader’s sugar?

  Which one of those cherry-eyed squaws would eagerly hike up her short leather dress and let him spend himself inside her before he grew one day older?

  The next morning Campbell’s trappers had first crack at the treasures excavated from Sublette’s packs.

  Company men were first when it came to trade goods brought west by the firm of Smith, Jackson, & Sublette.

  “The rest of you gonna have to wait till tomorrow,” Sublette warned the small knots of free men who had gathered by the trader’s awnings. “Might so have to wait long as the day after till we get our company business taken care of.”

  There weren’t all that many free trappers in yet, nowhere near as many men as the combined brigades—considering the number Campbell brought down from the Powder River country when coupled with the fifty-four hands Sublette brought out from St. Louis. Close to a hundred men already.

  And no more than two dozen free trappers on the Popo Agie.

  So all Bass could do was grumble. Sit in the shade and watch the company men come and go about their company business, come and go with their company kettles filled with Sublette’s whiskey.

  It was enough to make a saint cuss a blue streak, had there been a saint in that valley of the Popo Agie.

  “By damned, they better leave enough wet for our whistles and a good drunk or two outta this ronnyvoo!” Hatcher snarled.

  Caleb added, “That trader better leave us enough plunder to see this outfit through ’Nother winter.”

  “Likker!” Jack snapped at Wood. “The rest’ll take care of itself. Long as we get some likker.”

  Most of the other free trappers hung close by the trader’s awnings too—watching as Sublette’s greenhorn clerks sorted through each company man’s hides, graded them into three stacks, then lashed each stack into a bundle they hung from that huge wooden balance arm where another clerk carefully added weights until both sides swung evenly. That tally was entered in a tall leather-bound ledger—then Sublette informed that mountain employee what he had earned for the year. After the trapper had paid off what he owed from the last rendezvou
s, after he had settled up for any broken traps, lost tack, or busted saddles, after he had paid for a horse run off by the Crow … he would find out just how much, or how little, celebration he had in store for himself.

  Lowest of the three stations of company men were the camp keepers.

  “Mangeurs de lard,” Hatcher instructed Bass in the mountain man’s hierarchy.

  “Parley-voos?”

  “Damn right,” Jack growled with disdain. “Frenchy pork eaters. Most of ’em, leastwise.”

  Hatcher went on to explain that this bottom rung had received its name because those camp keepers who had accompanied the earliest expeditions forging up the Missouri River had been French laborers who ate salted sowbelly while the Americans dined on the lean red meat of game hunted on either shore. No better than slavery, Bass figured—forced to perform every dirty, menial task the booshway ordered.

  “Company trappers are up from there a big notch,” Jack continued. “It’s where a man with any pluck at all got him a chance to show he’s up to Green River,” referring to that company’s name engraved right at the guard of their knife blades, clearly meaning a trapper who made the supreme effort to plunge into any effort clear up to the hilt. “That man’s got him a chance to prove he’s got the makings of a mountain man.”

  While company trappers still had to do whatever task the booshway assigned, their reward nonetheless remained the coming season to show their brigade leaders that they could make a profit for the company as well as hanging on to their hair.

  And if a man survived, then someone like Campbell or Sublette or Jackson could promote that man to the top rung of “skin trapper.” Such a man signed on with the company but with no guarantee of wages. When he moved up from company to skin trapper, a man indebted himself for company equipment at the same time he swore to sell his furs only to the company at what price the company quoted. And if there was anything left over when his accounts were settled, then the skin trapper could more than satisfy his thirst for whiskey, or have enough in trade to buy himself a squaw for a night or two, perhaps enough to purchase himself a wife, who would accompany the brigade wherever it wandered in the coming seasons.

  But above all three ranks of company men stood the most coveted class of all: the free trappers.

  While they might be forced to wait until the trader dispensed with his hirelings, those free men had what Sublette desired most: the finest of plews brought to rendezvous by the “master trappers,” men who traversed the high country on their own hook, beholden to no booshway, in debt to no company.

  While the Smith, Jackson, & Sublette men still wore a frontiersman’s wool or leather breeches and some sort of linen or calico shirt, most free trappers gaily sported Indian leggings and war shirt, the twisted fringes of which were caparisoned with tiny brass hawk’s bells, steel sewing thimbles, or strewn with Indian scalplocks, leather garments decorated with wide bands of brightly colored porcupine quillwork. Beneath that outer layer of warrior’s clothing they wore a greasy, soiled, and sooted cloth shirt and woolen longhandles when the seasons turned cold.

  Many plaited their hair in two long braids, tied up in bright ribbons of red trade wool or wrapped with otter skin. They daubed purple vermilion down the center part in their hair, often smeared earth paint on their severely tanned faces, and trailed long fringes or small animal skins from the heels of their moccasins. Some ambled about camp wearing a colorfully striped blanket belted around their waist in the fashion of a tribal chief, while others brandished a wide wool sash finger-woven back in eastern woodlands, where they stuffed a brace of pistols, a tomahawk, and perhaps the long stem to their personal smoking pipe.

  How plain it was that this breed prided themselves on just how much like an Indian they appeared—but for the long, shaggy, ofttimes braided beards. Oh, how they seized this chance to swagger and strut before Sublette’s gaping greenhorns and mule-eyed pilgrims come fresh-as-dew to the far west.

  It was just as clear that such men would never again feel comfortable setting their feet down among civilized company. Doubtful was it that any of their breed would ever return east. Little, if anything, remained for them back there in what had been.

  As the long morning dragged on, Titus returned to wait out the hours in camp with Rufus, Elbridge, and the others. To kill some of the time, he brought both Hannah and his saddle horse into camp, securing them to a tree branch while he went to work fancying them up in the fashion of an Indian warrior. First he tied up their tails just as a man would do when about to ride off on the warpath. Then he braided their forelocks with narrow strips of varicolored Mexican ribbon he swapped from Caleb Wood for a single plew of beaver. Next Scratch braided the manes of both with more of that ribbon and looped in a half-dozen feathers from a golden eagle that Bird in Ground had killed during his first winter with the Crow. And finally he made a thick paste from the white clay he discovered in an alkali bed along the creek, using it to paint crude lightning bolts and hailstones, even pressing his own handprints along the neck and flank of both horse and Hannah.

  That task complete, Bass collapsed against a huge Cottonwood, where he dozed as the air warmed and the flies droned.

  Later that afternoon he meticulously honed his knife and camp ax on a stone and steel, then cleaned his weapons before he finally decided to run some balls for both pistol and rifle: melting bars of soft Galena lead in a small pot from which he dipped tiny ladles of the molten silver and poured the liquid into the round cavity of his bullet molds. Hot work this was at the edge of a fire in this midsummer heat, but that sweaty job was one task more that helped him pass the hours while the free trappers waited for their crack at Sublette’s treasures.

  After supper of elk tenderloin, buffalo tongue, and prairie oysters, he joined Hatcher, Fish, and Wood as they moseyed off for the company camp at twilight.

  “I would’ve figgered a bunch the size of Campbell’s outfit would’ve had ’em more beaver took in,” Jack appraised as they came to a halt near Sublette’s awnings, where a handful of men still clustered around the stacks of blankets and crates of goods, arguing this point or that with the trader’s clerks.

  “Maybeso that Powder ain’t so prime a country as it be back toward the mountains,” Bass observed.

  “Not for beaver, it ain’t,” Solomon added.

  “If’n a man wants to hunt him prime plew,” Caleb declared, “that nigger’s gotta stick his neck out some.”

  “I ain’t never been afraid to stick my neck out some,” Jack said. “Way I see it—to get us the best fur, we gotta trap the edge of Blackfoot country … but I don’t aim to lay a trap where I’ll get my hull damned head cut off!”

  Bass spread his fingers and ran them through the skins at the very top of three tall stacks of pelts under the wary eye of a Sublette clerk. “Our fur looks a damned sight better’n this here, fellas.”

  “It ought’n be better,” Solomon grumbled. “We damned near lost our hair to Bug’s Boys trapping that beaver!”

  “Bug’s Boys?” the greenhorn behind the beaver pelts repeated.

  Hatcher gazed at the man fresh out of the settlements. “Ye ever hear tell of Blackfoot, mister?”

  “Blackfoot? I heard tell of ’em, yeah. Sublette says the Englishers set them Blackfoot out to kill off Americans like his men.”

  “Damn them black-hearted bastards,” Solomon growled. “Too many good men gone under at their hands.”

  “Sublette says the Blackfoot is why Davy Jackson ain’t come in to Popo Agie yet.”

  Titus asked, “Trader figgers Jackson’s gone under?”

  The man’s head bobbed, his fleshy jowls quivering like the wattle at the neck of a tom turkey. “Maybe his whole outfit too. Just like Jed Smith—the other’n who’s a company partner. Word is he’s dead somewhere far west of here with all his men. Been two years now, and Smith ain’t showed up at rendezvous.”

  “So Sublette figgers Jackson’s been rubbed out too?” Solomon repeated.

&
nbsp; Leaning an elbow on a stack of pelts, the clerk said, “Jackson was up in Flathead country. And Sublette says that’s right near Blackfoot country. I suppose it ain’t hard to figure Jackson’s run into trouble and got himself killed too.”

  Caleb clucked, “Damn well might be a real stroke of luck, for that leaves Sublette the whole company, don’t it?”

  “Maybe, but Mr. Sublette figures to wait on here for a week or little more, then if Mr. Jackson doesn’t show, Mr. Sublette said he’s going to head on west to the Snake River with what he’s got in supplies to search for some sign of Jackson’s brigade before he turns back for the fall hunt.”

  “That Smith feller’s gone,” Hatcher observed flatly. “This long and ain’t none of his bunch showed … why, it’s for sartin he’s been rubbed out. But Jackson, now, that’s a savvy booshway. I reckon he could pull his fat out of just about any fire.”

  Caleb asked, “Sublette say if he figgered this was a good year for beaver?”

  “I saw him just twice today, when he come around my tent with Campbell.” The clerk wagged his head and rolled his eyes heavenward. “Mr. Sublette just shook his head each time he looked through them furs his men brought in over the last season.”

  “Don’t sound like he’s a happy man to me,” Bass observed.

  “Not when he don’t have near all the beaver he was counting on taking in,” the clerk stated.

  “And now he figgers he lost him his two partners,” Solomon added.

  “So tell me if Sublette’s gonna trade for our furs come tomorrow?” Titus asked.

  “He ain’t said nothing ’bout it, neither way,” the clerk admitted. “But from what I see, he’ll likely open up trade with all you fellers come morning. There ain’t any more company fur to take in. Leastways, not till he finds. Jackson’s brigade.”

  “If he finds ’em at all,” Hatcher declared.

  “What’s your tobaccy?” Scratch inquired of the hawk-nosed clerk who stood impassively writing down the value of the pelts another of Sublette’s employees was reciting from his weighing of Titus Bass’s plews.