Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  I am not very good at hiding what lies within me, but I put a good face on it and welcomed him. There is no man alive who is more obsessed with the opinion of others. Frémont looks into the eyes of others not to see what others are about but to see what is mirrored back to him. And so it was with me. We met there, at the hour of my council, and he was not so much interested in me or the tribesmen but in my view of him. I had not seen him in the intervening years, and he was eager to fathom my perception of him. I fear I did not conceal my private thoughts adequately.

  If I was a bit chilly, I don’t doubt that he registered it instantly.

  However the case, I reluctantly agreed to see him at Bent’s Fort as soon as I was done with the Indians. If he was still unsure about my approbation, he would not be unsure when we had finished there. I concluded my business with the Kiowas and Arapahos and started to the fort with my hired boy, Tito, and the empty wagon, from which I had distributed a goodly number of muskets, blankets, knives, awls, and trinkets, along with peace medallions.

  The unsettled weather turned into yet another snow that evening, and we rode the wagon through six or seven inches of fresh white powder. That was an uncommon thing so early in the season on the southern plains. But maybe it could be used to promote some prudence in the Pathfinder. I would try, both for his sake and mine—or rather, for the sake of those men he was about to put in harm’s way. Even as the tribes dispersed, going off to hunt buffalo and settle into wooded river bottoms for the winter, so did we ride wearily west along the sage-carpeted valley, well bundled against bitter winds. It was my hope that these very winds might impress themselves on the explorer, but I somehow knew they would do just the opposite. The promise of adversity was the siren song in John Charles Frémont’s bosom, and that was how it would play out.

  Two miles east of the fort and south of the river, I spotted their camp, located in the shelter of trees. Three campfires glowed. Frémont had chosen a good place, and judging from the messes he was keeping nearly all of his men there to guard the mules and supplies, which was wise. In the early twilight, the orange fires wavered through the spidery screen of brush, under a cast-iron sky. The adobe fort with its generous fireplaces would be a good place to stay this wintry night, and I welcomed it.

  We raised the post as we rounded a low shoulder. The tan adobe rectangle on the north bank welcomed me with its promise of warmth and safety. That’s what civilization was about. There were never-used bastions and a portcullis leading into a yard surrounded by warehouse and living quarters. Since the twenties, it had served as a great entrepôt on the Santa Fe route as well as the depot where southern tribes traded thousands of robes and tongues for blankets and pots and arrowheads and knives and sweets. As lavender twilight engulfed us, we could see that the post was worn and ill kempt. It had seen its day but still was the great comfort of the southern plains. Where else was there so much as a roof? or safety?

  Frémont was waiting for us, standing alone in the yard. Whatever passed between us would be unknown to his company, I supposed. That was fine. Tito looked to the four mules and harness, and I stepped down to the clay yard wearily. I was not so young as I used to be, and a life outdoors had settled rheumatism in my bones. Still, I was far from the grave, or so I supposed.

  The place seemed oddly empty; the post was ill manned now, almost as if the Bents had lost interest in it. And that pretty well summed it up. Charles Bent, governor of New Mexico, was murdered in a Taos uprising in early 1847; his brother, William, didn’t much care about his great post anymore and had let it deteriorate. Maybe it was only age filtering through William, just as it had filtered through me.

  The Pathfinder greeted me cordially, and I motioned him to the billiard room upstairs, a sort of observatory that once was filled with good company but now stood silent and gloomy. The place was William’s stroke of genius. He had a billiard table hauled clear out the Santa Fe trail and put in there, and then added plenty of Taos Lightning and some imported beer, and for a few bright years that upstairs billiard room and its crowds of rowdies and drifters and mountaineers and hunters and tradesmen were the center of the whole universe.

  We ascended creaking wooden stairs, trekked around the fort’s perimeter, and then entered the chill room, protected from the wind by tight shutters. The billiard table was gone but some chairs, remnants of more hospitable times, remained.

  “I’ve been wanting to talk to you, Tom,” he said while I laid a piñon fire and lit it with a lucifer. The kindling caught, and small yellow flames began to lick to sticks of wood. The room would warm soon. “This is my good fortune. You’re the one man here who knows this country. I tell you, Tom, out there’s the future of the country, the road to Cathay.”

  “Well, I have in mind some talking,” I replied. “Let me show you something.”

  I threw open the shutters on the west side, exposing a twilight panorama that embraced vast distances. Off to the west, lit by a blue band over the horizon, the remnant of the day’s light, rose the Rocky Mountain front, a stern white wall as far north and south as the eye could see.

  “That’s where you’re going?” I asked.

  “Straight west, as close to this latitude as I can manage.”

  “You see any notch or gap ahead?”

  “Well, those Wet Mountains are no great obstacle. It’s the ones beyond that might give me some trouble. We’ll be hunting for a good pass. All I need from you is some direction. You’ve been through there. Where can you take wagons? If I can find a wagon road, I can find a road for steam cars.”

  “There might be a wagon road. I don’t know the country as well as Uncle Dick Wootton. He’s a hunter here, and, if anyone can steer you across those mountains, he can. But that’s not what I want to talk to you about.”

  Frémont had already guessed my mission, and his wry amusement was a dismissal even before I plunged in. But I would anyway. I would because lives were at stake. I had been with this man through a January crossing of the Sierra. One small change in weather would have destroyed Frémont, his topographic corps, Kit Carson, and me.

  “Worst snow in memory,” I said. “No one here’s seen anything to match it.”

  “All the better. If I can negotiate a route through the roughest winter known, then there’ll be no argument about it back east.”

  “Is that what they say back there?”

  “Well, not exactly. They say that we need a practicable route. I’ll give them one.”

  “You plan to find coal or timber this time of year? Steam engines need fuel and water.”

  “I’ll find the route, grades that steam locomotives can handle, and worry about that some other time.”

  “You want to locate a route that might be under twenty feet of snow now? Where you can’t see the true bottom or whether it’s rock or marsh or talus?”

  His wry amusement was all the answer I would get. But I pursued it.

  “What can you report? That you’ve found passage to the Pacific but haven’t seen the terrain itself because it’s under drifts?”

  “I’m not concerned about that. We can use poles to measure snowpack and terrain.”

  “And you expect to find coal seams in the dead of winter?”

  “I’m not concerned about fuel in the mountains.”

  “Well, what do you expect to report?”

  “That there is, or there isn’t, a way west on the thirty-eighth parallel.”

  “So you’re going to look just where the Rockies are highest and widest?”

  “All the better, wouldn’t you say, Tom?”

  “And the most lethal?”

  “There’s not a man on earth who would attempt what I am attempting.”

  There it was, and it didn’t surprise me. This wasn’t about finding a rail route.

  “There’s a way around the Sangre de Cristos below Santa Fe,” I said. “There’s South Pass on the Oregon Trail. Neither of them would cost much compared with laying rail over trestles and gulches an
d rivers and canyons out there.” I waved a hand westward.

  “I told my backers I would do it.”

  The billiard room had heated well now and recovered some of the cheer it possessed back when Bent’s Fort was a great oasis and men from all over the West collected right there in that room to share a cup, tell yarns, exchange vital information, and plot out great enterprises. The great stone and adobe hearth threw light and cheer into this haven, and with every degree of additional warmth Frémont’s determination expanded. He wanted to achieve the unheard of.

  “It’s not the railroad, it’s the challenge, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean, Tom?”

  “I mean that even if you succeed in getting over the top, three tops actually, in snows and weather like this, you still won’t give them a rail route along the thirty-eighth parallel.”

  He shrugged. “I’m on my way to California. Jessie’s probably headed for Panama now. We’re going to meet in Yerba Buena on the big bay out there. I’ve got some property to look at, and this is the way to get there.”

  “What’s beyond the San Juans?” I asked.

  “I imagine we’ll find out,” he said.

  “Well, let’s see now, Colonel. You make it to the valley of the Rio del Norte after scaling two ranges in winter, and the first thing you’ll hit is sand dunes, dunes everywhere. And if you continue, you’ll cross miles of barren land without a tree for firewood. There’ll be snow. And when you cross that, assuming you still have your company, you’ll face maybe the roughest country in the region, and all of it under the worst snow in memory. It’s no place for a railroad. I don’t think a transcontinental railroad will ever be built there.”

  “You know it well enough to say that?”

  I hesitated. “Not well enough. But there’s a man who does, and he’s around here. That’s Richens Wootton. He’s run wagons up in there. He told me once there’s a place he calls Cochetopa Pass that takes a man across a northern corner of the San Juans. You have to know where to turn off from the Rio del Norte, some stream called the Saguache, a tributary of the Rio. You find that, maybe you have a route in summer. In summer, John.”

  “And winter,” Frémont said.

  “You won’t find it without a guide. I’ve been in those mountains, and I can pretty well tell you, one creek looks like any other, and one peak like another, and that’s in the summer. It’ll be worse when everything is white.”

  “But Wootton knows?”

  “I don’t know of any other. He’s hunting meat for Bent, but he pretty much steers his own course.”

  “I want to talk to him.”

  “The kitchen, I suppose,” I said.

  “You lead the way,” he said.

  “I wish I weren’t,” I replied.

  CHAPTER NINE

  John Charles Frémont

  We made our way down the stairs, the treads hollow under our boots, and into the vacant yard. Bent’s Fort had an eerie silence about it. The great doors had not been shut for the night, and I wondered whether they would be.

  “Where’s Bent?” I asked Major Fitzpatrick.

  “Who knows? Probably with the Cheyenne.”

  “Who’s running the post?”

  “No one is. There’s a dozen engagés here—Mexicans, Creoles mostly.”

  “Wootton?”

  “I wish I knew, Colonel. He’s a meat hunter and a trader here, and that’s all I know. Bent’s not the same. Charles was murdered, and then George died. He’s buried just outside the walls. William’s Cheyenne wife died in childbirth. Cholera’s cut the Cheyennes in half.”

  “Someone must be running this place.”

  “Unofficially, I am.”

  I wondered why the major was so reluctant to say it.

  We crossed the somber yard toward the sole source of light, which bled from a small window on the south side. Within, several men in buckskins and rough wool sat around a plank table. There were Anglos and Mexicans and breeds, all so weathered a man couldn’t tell them apart. Some had bowls of stew before them. Most were done eating and were smoking pipes. The change in mood was palpable. Here was fire and cheer and comfort. William Bent’s melancholia had not reached this corner of his great fortress.

  “Major,” said one, eyeing me.

  “Colonel Frémont here,” Fitzpatrick said.

  They looked me over, their gazes neither friendly nor hostile. No one was introducing himself, but they were curious about me. I took them to be laborers mostly and wondered whether there was a trader around. It was plain that none recognized the Pathfinder.

  “I’m looking for Richens Wootton,” I said.

  “Wootton here,” one replied. He was a big fellow, with a pulpy nose and an unkempt look. “Stew in the pot. Not much to eat around here except buffalo.”

  “I’ll have some,” I said. I hunted for a clean bowl, found none, and finally realized one served one’s self here. I espied a kettle of water, found a dirty bowl, scrubbed it clean, and then ladled stew from the iron pot suspended by rods over the fire at the hearth. I repeated the process with a metal spoon. Fitzpatrick pursued the same agenda, and we settled at the table with the rest.

  The stew proved to be corn gruel with some unknown meat in it, probably boiled bull.

  “Not much to eat here,” Wootton said. “I haven’t shot a buff for three days and we’re down to old bull.”

  “You’re the man I want to talk to,” I said between bites. “You know the country west of here?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say that. A man could spend a lifetime out there and not know it.”

  “But you’ve cut through a few times.”

  He shrugged. “Pretty rough. I go through there to get to the Utes and trade for pelts.”

  “You know the passes.”

  “What passes?”

  “Through the San Juan Mountains.”

  Wootton looked faintly amused. “Twelve thousand foot peaks and a few saddles is all. I wouldn’t call them passes.”

  “Streams flow from there. Water goes downhill.”

  “Through canyons. I hear you’re looking for a railroad route. Forget it.”

  “I’ll find a way.”

  Wootton turned silent on me, so I ate quietly and assessed the rest. There wasn’t a man among them I would want with me. They were mostly inscrutable, their faces masks. They struck me as a little slow. I wished I could follow their thoughts, if they had any.

  “This is the worst place on the continent to run a railroad,” Wootton said. “Three ranges of mountains and where are you? A land of canyons, and then more mountains, and then desert—and all that before you hit the Sierra Nevada. You run rails up grades and over trestles, and then down the other side over more trestles, and you hit canyon lands, trenches so deep and wide you can’t bridge ’em. It makes no sense. Anyone could tell you that.”

  “Do you know the entire country?”

  “Not by half,” he replied.

  I smiled. His response was answer enough. But he wasn’t through. Wootton was a stubborn cuss.

  “Suppose you find some sort of pass. Does it make sense? What about all those trestles and bridges and tunnels and grades, eh? You could run a rail line to the coast south or north of here for what it’d cost to do these mountains.”

  “I welcome skeptics,” I said.

  “And why do it in winter?”

  I started to give him my stock answer, but he rudely interrupted.

  “You can’t get through. Don’t even try. The Indians, they’re saying this is the worst. Snow’s higher than a man in those ravines.”

  “I don’t base my decisions on faulty memories and superstition.”

  Wootton seemed aroused, as if some anger were simmering just below the surface. “You want a guide? You got one. I’ll go take a look. If I don’t like what I see, I’ll quit and walk out. Maybe I can help, maybe not. You can pay me in advance. If you get trapped up there I’ll never get a dime.”

  The offer was so st
artling after all his truculence that I barely could digest it. I didn’t agree to it, though he was the only man around, apparently, who had even been in the San Juan Mountains. But he looked like trouble. The sort who wouldn’t take direction. I marveled that he didn’t see opportunity and public esteem when it was placed before him. The less ambitious weed themselves out of the race.

  “I’ll consider it,” I replied.

  “What are you paying?” he asked.

  “I haven’t said I would pay you anything.”

  He laughed suddenly, his truculence a thing of the past. “I’ll go to Pueblo de San Carlos with you and see what they’re saying. Believe me, they’ll know. Maybe I’ll hire on, maybe I won’t.”

  “You won’t persuade me to stop,” I said. “I don’t stop.”

  Wootton simply chuckled and stretched.

  That was how I acquired a guide, or so I believed. Fitzpatrick had remained as silent as the rest of Bent’s crew. The whole lot seemed to be unmanned. My very presence had plunged them into wariness. Wootton seemed to be a boor, but I didn’t doubt I could reduce him once we were underway.

  I turned to other matters. “We’ve some worn-out stock to trade, three saddle horses and two lame mules. We’re also looking for provisions.”

  I waited, wondering who was in charge, who might be the post trader, and it turned out to be Wootton. “We’ve some small Mexican mules in good flesh. Left behind by the last company through, eight, ten days ago, and pastured a few days. I’ll trade three for your five. But provisions, we’ve got none. We’re scarce on fodder here. And the buff, they’ve hightailed out. We’re about reduced to eating pack rats.”

  “Anything else for sale or trade?” I asked.

  Wootton smiled. “Cupboard’s empty, but have a look if you want. You want some trade beads? How about Green River knives?”

  “I’m well equipped, but for some staples.”

  “You’ll be eating mule meat,” Wootton said.