Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “Easy trip, eh?” I said to Doctor Kern, who was unloading his truck from a mule.

  “No worse for wear,” he replied. “I must say, Frémont has a way about him.”

  That was the very thing that had struck me through the entire day. I had never seen a commander less conspicuous or more effective. I wondered what his secret was. Whatever it was, he induced men to see to their appointed tasks without ever addressing them. It was as if he had a secret finger signal for every whim.

  I chose not to raise a shelter, it being mild and with little sign of rain, and settled into my Hudson Bay blankets at some distance from the fire. I did vaguely remember that well into the night a horseman left camp in some hurry, the rapid gait conveying some urgency to me just as I drifted into sleep. I gave it no further thought until morning, when Frémont appeared out of the east, on a worn horse.

  He had, it seemed, decided to spend one last hour with Jessie and had returned to Major Cummins’s agency well beyond Boone Creek, awakening her and her servant in the small hours. She had welcomed him happily, he said, and had set Kitty to making some tea, and there the lovers whiled away an hour before he saw fit to return to his company.

  It had been a cruel night for her, apparently. Cummins had found a wolf den nearby and knocked the pups in the head. When the wolf bitch returned and found her pups gone, she began the most pathetic howling and mewling and whimpering and coaxing the dead to return to her bosom. This dirge did not cease. The forlorn wolf did not surrender her hope but continued through the deeps of the night to lure her pups back to her breast. All of which stirred the most dire melancholy in Mrs. Frémont, who was aware that the major had destroyed the wolf pups. She felt the wolf’s suffering within her own bosom, as only a mother who has recently lost a child can do, and so passed a night of torment and sadness, broken by the startling arrival of Frémont.

  All of this he told us in his usual offhand way, while we listened silently. His veterans thought all the more of him for his romantic journey back to see his wife and to comfort her in her moment of sadness. My own instincts were otherwise. I wondered why he was telling us about this night passage. Frémont’s trip was an attempt to salve his neglect of his wife, and the man was a bastard.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Henry King

  We started west with great ease. The company’s outfitting was so perfect that we had no difficulties and proceeded steadily along the Kansas River, making twenty-five or more miles each day across frost-nipped grassland. The whole company was at ease and in the finest of spirits. I could not have been happier myself. Just being with Frémont once again was enough to fill my days with delight. No man ever led a happier band.

  Our mules were in good flesh and carried us easily as we progressed across the plains, rarely encountering any serious climb or descent. There was yellowed grass waiting for them at the end of each day, and our skilled muleteers put the mules out on it. We maintained a light but ready guard against thieving Indians but didn’t expect trouble.

  The timing of this expedition worked out perfectly. I was afraid that Frémont might leave a fortnight earlier, which would have been awkward for me because it would have interrupted or postponed my wedding. But it was all just fine. We married, Beth and I, and I enjoyed a few days in the bosom of hearth and home before I set off for Westport Landing, even as the restlessness in my heart was growing unbearable. I could not, under any circumstances, avoid this trip, which I had fastened on ever since I heard that Colonel Frémont was planning it. I was with him in the California Battalion, rising to captain in an irregular armed force that was composed of the army’s topographic corps and civilian Yanks in Mexican California.

  There were several veterans of that campaign with us now, the memory of our easy conquest of California glowing in our bosoms. Without half trying, the colonel had welded together the most powerful armed force on the Pacific Coast, drawing on a motley crowd, whether regular soldiers or Bear Flag rebels or settlers. Most of us were irregulars, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t only that we took California with ease; it was that we had such a good time doing it and achieved it without much cost in blood. We were a terror, bearded men in buckskins, and I never forgot it.

  I was eager to renew an old friendship. Charles Taplin had been with Frémont during the conquest, rising to captain in the colonel’s irregular army. We had been through the whole campaign together. I spurred my mule forward to catch up with him. Fortunately, our mules were gaited much the same. It is next to impossible to conduct a conversation when two beasts have different gaits and one or another rider must always rein in or spur forward.

  “Ah, Henry, I was hoping you might join me,” Taplin said.

  “This brings back the old days for sure,” I replied.

  He smiled wryly at me. “And you abandoned a wife for it?”

  “She can wait,” I said.

  “I don’t know that I would abandon a wife after just a fortnight.”

  “She’s the picture of domesticity,” I returned, enjoying his needling. “She’s especially skilled at mending my socks. But her cooking is still wanting.”

  “Probably an improvement on the cooking around our campfires,” he replied.

  “No, sir. I don’t think any woman can achieve the perfection of good cow buffalo hump, nicely blackened on the outside, or buffalo tongue, well roasted on the outside and pink within.”

  “I take it you’re not done with adventure, Henry. I’m done with it. I’m going to settle in California. I was greatly smitten by the climate. It’s like living in perpetual springtime. When I resigned my commission, I had in mind heading west. This seemed the way to do it.” He touched heels to the mule, evoking a slight spurt before the sullen animal settled back to its indolent walk. “I should like to find a Californio lady. It strikes me that a diet of chili peppers yields a hot nature in them.” He eyed me again. “But of course, that doesn’t interest you.”

  I laughed. I was not going to let Captain Taplin make me the butt of this company’s humor the entire trip. A bridegroom was considered exotic in this crowd.

  “I love this country,” I said earnestly. It stretched ahead to a distant brown horizon lost in fall haze, mile upon mile, with naught but wind and sun and cured yellow grasses. This time we would climb over the roof of the continent and make our way to the far coast again. It was that ridgepole part of it that excited me. The colonel could inspire his men to achieve anything, summer or winter, desert or mountain.

  “An improvement over the fair sex,” Taplin agreed.

  He was not going to let go of it, so I simply grinned at him. Silence was the best reply I could offer. I knew then and there that I was going to hear about this the entire journey, and the day we topped the Sierra Nevada and beheld California, they would still be asking whether this was an improvement on Beth. The joke was going to be on Captain Taplin, once he discovered that those chili peppers he yearned for were volcanic in more ways than one.

  Even as we rode, I saw Frémont’s veterans taking their ease, enjoying the trip while the greenhorns were struggling, sore in their saddles and worn out by the middle of the day. I supposed they would harden eventually, and then life would become easier for them. I didn’t know what a botanist was doing on a railroad survey, but maybe the colonel wanted to achieve the very thing he accomplished the previous times as an army officer, making a major contribution to science. He always had his eye on the public, like a man planning to run for president. A few more laurels wouldn’t hurt. Still, since this was an underfinanced commercial expedition, I didn’t quite fathom it. Every businessman I’m acquainted with wants to cut unnecessary expense, and here we had an odd German named Cruetzfeldt with us whose task was to pluck flowers. I supposed he didn’t leave a new wife behind. That sort of man never marries.

  I could understand Preuss. He was along on the previous trips, doing his mapmaking and reading the instruments and furiously writing notes, pretending not to enjoy himself. The man wo
uldn’t smile. It always ended up a sneer or a grimace. I always wondered what he put in his diaries. If you’re going to run a railroad, you need a map and some topographic knowledge, what kind of grades you’ll be facing, things like that, and that’s what he supplied. And I could understand Ned Kern, too. He was with us in California. He could sketch, and a railroad needs to have drawings of the terrain if it’s going to run a line through it. I supposed I could even understand Kern’s brother Benjamin. A doctor is handy to set a bone or fix a mule, but he’ll not be doctoring the veterans. Only the newcomers will get snake bit or fall off cliffs or get kicked by a mule.

  Some of us weren’t getting paid, and I didn’t know if that’s because the colonel was laying out fancy salaries for these newcomers. Some things about this trip didn’t make much sense, and one of them was the whole idea of a railroad to the coast. Who needed it? It would be a lot of rail to nowhere. Where were the customers? This railroad would pierce through two thousand miles of wilderness, buffalo, Indians, and mountains, with scarcely a settlement along the way. I thought the colonel was doing this trip at the behest of his father-in-law, who had the power and money and also a dream about a railroad. It would have made more sense to push it south or north of here, but I have never underestimated the power of politics. Old Senator Benton called it the middle route and believed it made more sense than one farther north or south. Actually, it was simply a ploy to bring trade to Saint Louis.

  Four days out we ran into a prairie fire, a wall of smoke rising from a lick of orange flame from south to north, and managed to get through, our keg of powder and all, without getting ourselves blown up or scorched. The grass was high, which didn’t help. It was odd, because we’d had some rain off and on. But that day we made twenty-five miles and camped in a little valley with good grass. The next day we made twenty-eight miles and stopped at the Potawatomi Mission. We got some butter from the agent, a bloodsucker named Major Monday, and spent the rest of the evening looking over the Pott Indians, just as they looked us over. We put an extra guard on, but these Indians were tame enough.

  We were getting into buffalo country by then, and we would see how the greenhorns could shoot. When you have buffalo, you also have wild Indians; the two are wedded together so tight that if one vanishes, the other will too. We were going to have plenty to eat, good hump meat or tongue at the messes. But I expected all that to disappear when we hit the mountains. There would be deer and elk up there, not the big shaggies.

  The colonel said he’d follow the Smoky Hill branch and then cut down to the Arkansas River and stop at Bent’s Fort, where he hoped we could improve our livestock. We had a few laggards and one or two half-lame, and maybe we could trade them off, along with the horses, which are no good in high country because they panic.

  There was one thing I was noticing and that was the cold. The wind was tough on some of us, and we weren’t seeing much sun, either. The pools froze up at night. No one was complaining. The cold was better than summer heat and horseflies. I didn’t mind the cold so much, but the wind got mean and there was nothing here to slow it. There was hardly a tree between here and the British possessions.

  I heard some shots, and pretty soon Godey came back to us. He had been ahead, hunting, and shot some buffalo bulls. I didn’t look forward to the meat. Bulls are tough and sometimes stringy and not good for much except some stewing if you’ve got the time to boil the meat senseless. But at least we were getting into buffalo country, and we’d have us a cow or two now. Still, it would be entertaining to see how the greenhorns dealt with some bull meat, so I decided to join their mess.

  That was morning, and it was up to each mess to hack meat for supper, so I kept one eye on the greenhorns. It was a sight, alright. Chopping meat out of an old bull was about like sawing the trunk off an elephant. Ned Kern knew enough, but his brothers didn’t, and the rest had never seen one and hardly knew where to begin. But Ned began slicing into the hump, and it took a deal of work even to open up a hole. Not even the surgeon was doing much good. Of course the rest of the messes had gone for the tongues; not much else worth putting into a cook pot. By the time the greenhorns got enough meat for supper, they had put hatchets and an axe to the task and were plumb worn out. I could hardly wait for supper, when they would get another lesson.

  That eve we camped in the shelter of a clay cliff beside Smoky Hill, and a few of Frémont’s veterans lent a hand to the greenhorns, getting a big fire going and getting that sawed-up meat on green sticks to broil on the lee side of the flames. I think the doctor, Ben Kern, figured it out long before they began to chomp on those slabs of shoe leather they were about to down for dinner. When the moment came, he tackled one or two bites of the brown ruin on his tin plate, sighed, and gave up.

  He never complained; I’ll give him credit, but McGehee was whining.

  “Fat cow’s what we want,” I said to the doctor.

  “The other messes have tongue. I think I’ll remember that.”

  “Say, whiles I’m here, do you have powders for anyone bound up?”

  “Salts, yes, purgatives. I have ample.”

  “That’s good. I get bound up on buffalo. Sometimes we go a week without seeing a green, and then it’s misery.”

  “See me, Mister King.”

  “I guess a doctor’s worth something after all,” I said.

  A faint smile spread across his face. “I have my instruments. If you break a leg, I can amputate. A saw cuts right through bone, and I imagine your leg would be a good bit more tender than this old bull.” He was smiling blandly, obviously enjoying himself.

  “I’m a young bull, alright.”

  “Watch your tongue,” he retorted.

  I had to admire the doc; he had some wit.

  It was getting colder than I wanted. The wind smelled like December. It had a whiff of the Arctic in it. But the chill was nothing compared with the sheer pleasure in being hundreds of miles from the nearest shelter. That was the plains for you. A norther could blow out of the north and there was nothing to slow it down, and sometimes it plowed clear into Mexico.

  We set off the next day in cold weather, a mean wind adding to our misery. I thought that pretty soon we’d hear some whining, but the greenhorns didn’t emit a peep, and we made our grim way west through an increasingly arid country, broken now by gullies and slopes but utterly treeless. Ere long we’d be using buffalo chips for fuel.

  The colonel seemed oblivious to the lancing wind and everything else and simply led us along a route that he did not share with us, content to let nature supply us. And it did. Godey shot a cow, and we feasted on good hump meat, plenty fat, and this time the greenhorns got a taste of prime buffalo meat. It made an impression on them, for sure. The whole trip, Frémont had scarcely given a command, and the slightest suggestion was all it took to remedy or achieve anything he wished. I didn’t know, and probably will never know, what the man’s hold was on others.

  The Delawares left us the next morning. They had agreed to accompany us a way but didn’t want to tangle with some of the tribes we were facing ahead. The colonel continued up the Smoky Hill fork for the next days. These were exposed stretches, with a howling wind that burrowed into a man’s clothing and chilled him fast. The temperatures were mostly in the twenties and thirties, but it felt worse. There wasn’t a tree in sight most of the time, nothing to break the gale that whipped through our straggling party. Despite good cured shortgrass, some of the mules were weakening, and I wondered whether the colonel was aware of it. He wasn’t stopping to let them recruit. Sometimes one day on good grass is all they need. But the colonel plunged on, through increasingly barren country, in weather that did nothing to lift the mood of the company. If the greenhorns needed hardening, they were getting it sooner than expected.

  At least there were buffalo. For some reason, our hunters continued to drop bulls instead of good cows, but we made do with tongues and boiled bull stew, at least when we could find enough deadwood to build fires. There w
ere places where the plains stretched to infinity and not one tree was visible. The messes were fed with some antelope and even some coon meat the hunters felled here and there, but the staple was bull meat, boiled until it surrendered.

  Then one day Frémont turned us south, and we headed over a tableland that divided the drainages of the Missouri and Arkansas and plunged into a lonely sea of shortgrass that probably would take us to the Arkansas some hard distance away. But the winds never quit, and now they brought bursts of pellet snow, which settled whitely on the ground and on the packs, shoulders, and caps of our men. It was early and wouldn’t last, but it was snow and it brought on chill winds that never quit and drove me half-mad. I just wanted to find a hollow somewhere, an overhang, a cozy place where that fingering wind didn’t probe and poke and madden me. For the first time, I began to wonder about this trip. It made no sense at all to travel this time of year.

  The colonel didn’t seem to notice the cold or the wind. He rode without gloves and didn’t hunch down in his saddle the way most of the men were hunched, trying to rebuff the cruel wind. I wondered what sort of god-man Frémont was, riding like that, as if he was unaware of the suffering around him, unaware that others were numb and miserable. But he didn’t choose to see what I was seeing. He had no eyes for the hunched-up mules that stopped eating and put their butts to the wind and hung their heads low. We sheltered where we could, sometimes under a cutbank, other times in a gulch, but it didn’t help much. The wind always found us. The wind found everyone except Colonel Frémont. I swear, the wind quit dead when it came to him; I swear he rode in an envelope of calm warm air, never knowing what other men, mules, and horses were going through.

  CHAPTER SEVEN