Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  I sat mutely as the sun rose and set somewhere above the gray blanket of clouds, too stupefied to write a thing. I’m not sure my numb fingers would have enabled me to write. I didn’t have anything to say. Richard managed a few words. I saw him laboriously scribbling some little thing in his bound ledger, probably thinking what I was thinking: those who found us in the distant future would at least have an account of our last hours.

  I confess I gave little thought to what transpired elsewhere, in the other messes. We were all wrapped in our misery. But some distance away—it seemed miles away but it was only a few dozen yards, Colonel Frémont was making his own plans. His object, I was soon to learn, was to move our camp from this exposed north shoulder of the bald mountain to the southern side, where we might escape the wind, find forage and a shred of warmth. It was not a bad plan except that without capable mules, we would need to drag our worldly goods to the new locale by brute force, mostly along a snow path of our devising. He sent some of our stronger men to break a trail, and soon we found ourselves slowly dragging panniers and tack over the powdery snow, pausing every little way for breath in the thin air, hoping the ongoing storm would not close in and blind us or strand us. This wretched task consumed two days, and even after that we would need to return to Camp Dismal for the last of the packs. I can’t remember a worse time, when I felt so faint and dizzy that I thought I would topple at any time and vanish in a drift.

  And yet we succeeded and found ourselves in better circumstances, out of the icy blast and able to collect a goodly supply of deadwood to feed our fires. Such mules as were still standing were scattered behind us, unable to walk the three miles, and we ended up with none at our new refuge. I knew, with heavy heart, that we were now afoot.

  In all this I saw Frémont consulting with our guide, Williams, over and over, but the colonel never made me a party to his decisions, preferring to consult only with those veterans of his California expedition. He avoided those of us who were newcomers to his cadre. So I didn’t know what was being discussed so ardently, and the others were too weary or breathless at that altitude to inform me. But it was mostly about topography. When we finally settled on the southwesterly slope, we were in a new drainage, which I took to be another tributary of the Rio del Norte, but one more precipitous than what we had traversed to reach this upland of the San Juans.

  The brutal cold lessened, and some fragments of a coy sun caught us up, and we heartened at the better prospect. But I soon learned through the camp grapevine that the divide, which might take us to the waters of the Colorado River, still lay many miles west. It was apparently beginning to sink into the colonel that he was nowhere near Pacific waters and his company was now stranded in high country and had only enough food to last a week or so more. We set out to consolidate the new camp and drag the last of our packs over the ridge, a task so exhausting we could manage only a little at a time. But at last we left the north-slope Camp Dismal behind.

  We were more comfortable out of the wind, which lifted our spirits enough so that we could begin talking to one another again. I began to make diary entries. But despite the slight improvement, we were feeling hard used, caught on a mountain top and subject to an ambitious man’s whim. Our very lives depended on Colonel Frémont’s decisions. Those in my mess knew nothing of his plans.

  My artist brother, Richard, wondered aloud one night while the three of us huddled in the cold under a canvas hut, whether there would be any good in escaping the company and making our way to the Mexican settlements down the Rio Grande. He seemed reluctant even to bring it up, lest it seem an act of betrayal and cowardice.

  “Maybe we could gather a party and leave,” he said. “Take some frozen mule meat and head down this drainage. It will take us to the river, to whatever game is along it, and to firewood and warmth.”

  “How would the colonel take it?” I asked.

  “We don’t need to give him any choice.”

  “We signed on,” Ned said. “We gave our word.”

  That’s what was bothering us all. We had bonded ourselves to Frémont and could not simply pull away from the company.

  “None of us can hunt,” Ned said.

  That was one of the most telling arguments.

  “We could enlist a few, maybe Micah McGehee,” Richard said.

  “We lack equipment. This tenting; the axes and mess ware; rifles, shot, and powder—it’s all his, not ours,” Ned said.

  In truth, if we started off on our own, we could take only our personal gear, which didn’t come to much and wouldn’t help us sustain life for the long trek off the mountain and down the river. We were honorable men; whatever we did had to be done in a proper fashion.

  But the speculation came to nothing. We knew we wouldn’t. Frémont had some sort of hold on us I could not fathom, a hold on all of his men. It was as if the slightest resistance to his command would be betrayal and leaving the company would be treason. I could not endure it.

  “We’re at his beck and call,” I said. “Our fate is his.”

  The recognition of our bondage to the colonel did not lift my spirits a bit. Those bitter hours left me feeling trapped and helpless, as if there was not a thing I could do, out of my own free will, to mitigate or avoid the impending disaster. I was yet a greenhorn and ought not to be forming judgments, but I could not help but feel that something in Frémont’s nature was leading us straight toward our own doom, and he was not quite right.

  “I don’t trust him,” Richard said.

  “I do. I was with him in California, and he was splendid,” Edward said.

  “All his veterans think so,” I said.

  Through all this misery I had not heard a word, not a hint, of antagonism or even skepticism about Frémont in the company. It had become a phenomenon that caught my attention. How could a commander, and a civilian one at that, win such total devotion and obedience? I had never seen the like. I had never been in a company so devoid of grumbling. I had never been in a schoolyard or in a town meeting or at a party without some sharp-tongued criticism of some leader or politician or magistrate. The more I studied on it, the more puzzled I became. Something about Frémont was either miraculous or horrifying. The only clue I had was a sense that he was really indifferent to all of us, and if he had no great affection for us, it didn’t matter a bit to him what we thought. His perpetual calm was not the mark of a quiet nature, but it reflected his utter indifference to all but himself. Was that the source of his strange power over us?

  I knew I wasn’t alone in my brooding. But there was little time for it. We were trapped on a mountaintop, Christmas was nigh, we did not know from hour to hour what our fate might be, and our food supply was swiftly diminishing. I heard that we still had some packs of macaroni, some sugar, a little cornmeal, salt, and a few odds and ends. And I had heard rumors that Frémont had put aside some frozen elk meat, which he intended to give us at Christmas.

  And there was still mule meat, at least if we were willing to dig through several feet of snow, dig out the carcass, and hack at the frozen animal. During this entire pre-Christmas sojourn on the mountaintop, I had seen no more living mules. Now they were all ghostly remains, white lumps swiftly vanishing in the almost daily snow showers, and it would not be long before we would find no carcasses at all because there would be six or ten or twenty feet of snow over them. If any lived, it would be a miracle.

  I found Bill Williams and remembered his peculiar brag that he could see animal spirits.

  “Are all the mules gone?” I asked.

  “Ever’ blessed one,” he replied. “I watched them go. I watched them hover above each of them mules, and then slide away.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Why, Kern, I did sure enough see their spirits fly up into the sky, fly with one sad look back, and vanish up yonder, into the mysterious.”

  “How can you be sure, Mister Williams?”

  “Mister Williams, is it? That’s a doctor for you. I’m Old Bill
, a renegade preacher that went Indian, and anyone calls me mister’s no friend of mine.”

  I retreated a little, but I did want to know what he saw.

  “What do animal spirits look like?”

  “How can I tell you that? Like nothing you’d ever see.”

  “Human spirits, too?”

  He clammed up fast. “Ain’t saying,” he said.

  “Are any of our spirits hovering above us?”

  “Listen here, you go back to your powders, and I’ll just git some firewood, understand?”

  Rebuffed, I did. I continued on my way. I also sensed that his occult gifts had somehow given him a foreknowledge of what our fates might be, and his sudden silence about that filled me with unspeakable dread.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Captain Andrew Cathcart

  They called this place Camp Hope because Frémont had announced that he would send a relief party to the Mexican settlements. We had dragged most of the packs over the saddle to the southerly drainage in two days, but even on Christmas Day a few men were trailing the three miles between camps. Ben and Richard Kern were among them and reported seeing two or three surviving mules at Camp Dismal, miserably awaiting their fate.

  So much for Williams’s claims about seeing spirits, I thought.

  Alexis Godey became chef de cuisine on Christmas Day, preparing a wondrous feast, given the paucity of our stores. We did enjoy the elk that the colonel had set aside, along with minced mule pies that reminded me of haggis. Godey spread remarkable cheer through the camp, wandering from one mess to another. These were located in snow holes so deep we could not see the neighboring messes or the men at them.

  But the good cheer was a damnable fraud. There was not a man among us who did not wonder whether this would be his last Christmas or whether we would ever get off that mountain. The cheer was an artifice, a sweet jam spread over the stark reality of our circumstances. The truth was that this company of scarecrows sat on a mountaintop a hundred miles from the nearest settlement and was running out of food. Its men were weakened by altitude, cold, and poor diet, for none of us could eat enough to replace what was burned away in our labors. We were shod in decrepit boots that shipped snow with every step. Such mules as might still be alive at Camp Dismal were useless.

  I kept my thoughts to myself, not wanting to be unseemly. I also didn’t want to spoil such miserable pleasures as the men might find on that Christmas Day. What troubled me most was that we were Frémont’s prisoners. He held our fates in his hand. And now, having decided to send for relief, he turned to Blackstone’s commentaries, once again choosing to impress his eerie calm on us by this means, rather than take an active hand in overcoming the crisis. I was not impressed. I could see that his regulars, those veterans of the previous expeditions, were awed. There Frémont was, reading a law book, while the rest of us wondered whether on the morrow or the next day or the day after that, we might perish.

  I both admired and loathed the man, and I itched to make my feelings known but chose instead to honor the birth of the Prince of Peace. I wanted to find the good in the man, but I could not bring myself to it. I wanted to seek peace on earth that Christmas and give Frémont my peace, but it was beyond me. At least I could bury my private thoughts behind a wall of holiday cheer. I had always kept my feelings to myself. I kept to myself in the Queen’s hussars, and I would in this place and among these Yankees, no matter how I might seethe inside. Let other men whine; Captain Cathcart would not. By God, I was a Queen’s man and I would act like it.

  It was a cheery camp, with ample deadwood to feed our fires and good elk steaks to fill our bellies, cut from a frozen haunch the colonel had kept for this moment. It seemed luxurious after the hardships we had endured. But I could only think of those dead mules, whose ghosts would celebrate no Christmas ever. This was an odd sentiment in a born hunter, but it gripped me as I stood there, studying our distant and bland leader who was poring over his law texts in the most theatrical manner he could manage.

  He deigned to join us when Godey had the elk roast well seared and sliced for us, and I watched him slowly put the ribbon betwixt the pages and close his leathern volume, smile benevolently at his underlings, and drift toward the nearest mess, Godey’s own, where Frémont’s manservant, Jackson Saunders, and Godey’s young nephew, Theodore McNabb, made their home. With a soft wave of his bare hand, he summoned us. We gradually collected there, around that snow pit where Godey and his nephew were cooking meat.

  Frémont stood at the far edge, smiling, scarcely bothering to bundle up. His veins ran ice water, and one rarely saw him smothered in leather and fur and wool.

  “We’ll take a little detour from the thirty-eighth parallel,” he said.

  The very idea of it startled me. Was this man still thinking of a rail line over the 38th parallel? And not about his weakened men, his dwindling food, his lost mules, his perilous camp?

  “We’re not far, actually, from whatever help we may need. Our friend Bill Williams tells me help is available down the Rio Grande, not more than a hundred miles distant, and most of that downslope and over flat river bottoms, which should be full of game. We’ll need to reach lower altitudes where we may find game, and tomorrow we’ll begin. I’m sending a relief party to the Mexicans at Abiquiu on the Chama River, and the relief party can also continue to Taos on the Rio Grande if more help is needed. I’ll appoint Henry King its commander, and he will be accompanied by Frederick Creutzfeldt, Tom Breckenridge, and our guide, Bill Williams. I’m also sending Godey partway, to find a way down the mountain for us. While this takes place, we will begin moving downslope by stages. In short, we’ll be moving toward the relief party that will be coming for us.”

  So the obsessed colonel had finally decided to do something. It seemed sensible enough.

  This was indeed a Christmas gift. I looked at the colonel benignly and thought maybe even a testy old Cathcart could endure the man.

  They debated how long it would take for the relief party to reach the settlements and return with mules and supplies. It seemed no great trip, and Old Bill Williams supposed it might take four days, and then the relief could be back in a dozen days, sixteen at the outside, given that the company would steadily be descending this drainage and heading into the Rio Grande Valley. It heartened the men, and they plunged into their Christmas repast with relish.

  The next morning, after we had scraped away the usual six or eight inches of fresh snow with our mess plates, we prepared to break camp. But before that, we helped ready King’s relief party. Frémont gave them four days of rations, enough to see them to the settlements, or so everyone thought. These consisted of a pack of macaroni and some sugar and some mule meat. There was nothing else to offer. Godey supplied himself and made sure his rifle was in good condition. He was a born hunter, and these men would descend to the river bottoms, where game might be found.

  Four days, twenty-five miles a day. We watched them slide and skid down this drainage, along a nameless creek that tumbled through a steep and difficult gorge.

  “All right, we’ll build sledges,” the colonel said, and we set about doing that, using axes to shape runners and fashion crossbars, which we lashed in place with rawhide. The progress was slowed by snow. It was no easy task to hack down limbs and shape the runners into anything we could use, but we were inspired by the knowledge that the relief had left, and we would soon follow toward safety.

  I was optimistic. We would load the packs and drag them downhill without great difficulty, benefitting from the tug of gravity. Little did I know. But we toiled at that sledge-building project for days, watching our macaroni and mule meat diminish to the point that I wondered where our next meals would be coming from. Then, amazingly, the Creoles managed to drive three live mules over the saddle from Camp Dismal, and we all were heartened. The wretched mules were no good for packing, but we would have meat on the hoof.

  On December 27 we set out, dragging the sledges down the creek bottom. The day
was mild and we were in high spirits. But the canyon ahead was narrowing and forested right to the banks of the rushing creek. Still we kept on, believing that the relief party ahead of us was making faster time and was now probably out of the mountains and onto the great plain marking the Rio del Norte. What fools we were.

  The mild weather held, and we proceeded down the drainage with little difficulty and amazing good cheer. The brooding sensation that we were at the margin left us. We were alive, had food enough, and would soon be in the Rio Grande Valley with its game. I even found myself revising my opinion of Frémont a little; not that I admired his judgment, but at least he had not plunged us over the brink, and it seemed likely that we would soon be enjoying the comforts of the New Mexicans. We made a cheerful camp that evening.

  Then we encountered Godey, slogging his way up the drainage. We collected around him, eager for news. But what he imparted was entirely dismaying.

  “We can’t get through down there,” he said. “It’s a narrow canyon, choked with downed timber and boulders. You have to cross the creek a dozen times an hour. There’s no other way except through this choked-up maze.”

  “You’re saying we can’t use the sledges?” Frémont asked.

  “No. It’s too steep, jammed with boulders, and the only passage is the creek itself in places. Sledges are worthless. And the creek drops so fast, with rapids, there would be no hanging on to packs.”

  We stared at one another. We were three days down a steep-sided canyon with no way out. What Godey was saying, though no one wanted to put it into words, was that we would have to retrace our steps, drag the sledges back to the top of the mountain, and find another way down—that or leave our equipment behind.

  The Creoles responded first. Without a word they turned the sledges and began the weary climb that would take them toward the Christmas camp, and then over the first saddle into the next drainage.