Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  The silence was palpable. I was determined to wrestle my way up that slope, but some of the men just wilted.

  “Where are the relief men now?” Frémont asked.

  “I’m not even sure they’re at the bottom of that canyon. They were crawling over deadfall and rock and wading the rapids.”

  “They were to reach the settlements today,” Frémont said.

  “They’re hardly on their way,” Godey said.

  “Did they find game?”

  Godey simply smiled and shook his head.

  They had a pack of macaroni to hold them. I calculated that they would take two weeks or more to reach the settlements, and food would run out long before, unless they made meat. Still, they had Williams with them. He might make meat. But why had he let them descend that morass? Did he know less about this country than he let on? It was a mystery.

  I eyed Ben Kern, who was feeling poor, and wondered if he could make it up that trail. I thought maybe the altitude was weakening him. Whatever the case, he was utterly unable to drag a heavy sledge uphill.

  “I’ll help ye, Ben,” I said.

  He simply shook his head and began to drag a sledge mounded with packs up the snowy grade. I watched, worried. His every step was labored. The air was still rarefied, and he had been struggling for breath.

  Round and about, the company was turning sledges around and starting the weary hike uphill, through heavy drifts. At least we had broken a trail, but if it snowed, we would be fighting our way up the mountain through massive drifts once again.

  No one spoke, but I knew the cheer that had pervaded the company only minutes before had fled it, and now we were all privately pondering the odds and wondering whether fate would visit us after all.

  The mild weather held, and that was a blessing. But this climb seemed longer and harder than any I had ever known in my life. Frémont strode ahead cheerfully, oblivious to the suffering behind him. What good was it to haul all this stuff? Most of it was mule tack, though scarcely a mule lived and the last of them would soon be food. He could have cached the tack, but didn’t. He plainly was determined to haul it up and down the mountain to save himself the purchase of replacements later. But now we were human mules, and the halters were over our own snouts, and no one objected.

  Ben Kern was so weak and gray that now and then I took hold of the cord he used to drag his sledge.

  “Take a breath, Ben, and I’ll keep us up,” I said.

  He didn’t object but sat in the middle of a snowbank, his lungs rising and falling, his bluish face haggard. Still, the doctor was game, and soon enough he caught up and relieved me of my double burden.

  Little by little we ascended that mountain, worn and melancholic and silent. There yet was hope. Down below, somewhere, four experienced men were working steadily toward the settlements. Frémont had entrusted King with some sum of money, the exact amount I did not know, with which to purchase whatever was needed. There would be gold to offer to the New Mexicans, and gold always spoke loudly.

  We arrived in Christmas Camp and surveyed the ruin mutely, pausing only to see whether there might be anything to salvage. But such carcasses that existed had vanished under several feet of fresh snow, and we could not cut another mule steak from any.

  We needed still to top the saddle to the next drainage, and we did, though I am not sure how any of us managed it. Sheer grit, I would say. Ben Kern was so gray I feared for his life. But we somehow descended to a suitable campsite and quit. We were falling behind the colonel’s party, but we could go no further. It was December 30, 1848.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Benjamin Kern, MD

  We were falling behind, and it was my failing. Colonel Frémont and the other messes had worked down the new drainage, finding the way easy. They were even riding their packs on the slopes and enjoying the sledding. I watched them vanish far below, around a bend where the forest projected into the creek bottoms, and then all was quiet.

  It was a grand, mild winter day, the sort when the sun warms not just the flesh but the heart and soul. The winds had died away, and only gentle zephyrs played with our coats and hats that last day of 1848. I had never seen a bluer sky. A vast sea of white stretched serenely in all directions, dotted only by what seemed to be scrub forest except that what we were seeing was the needled tips of fifty-foot pines which now lay buried.

  I ascribe that benevolent weather to my survival, for surely I would have perished had another storm raked us just then. My brothers, Ned and Richard, and Captain Cathcart had observed my distress. At the worst of it on the thirtieth, when we were struggling upslope and over the saddle, I gave out after a couple hundred yards and could do no more than crawl on hands and knees. They soon gathered around and lifted me up and took my packs, and slowly we worked our way up that awful incline and down. We had to go back once more to collect our rifles, but finally we were settled in a pleasant woods. The next day, the last of the year, was much better. The sun, while making only a brief appearance because of the towering cliffs to either side of us, warmed the air, and we walked and tumbled down the watercourse, enjoying ourselves. And yet Frémont’s main party continued to gain ground on us, and all we saw was the swath of disturbed snow marking the colonel’s passage.

  We were joined by two of the three California Indian boys Frémont was returning to their people, Manuel and Joaquin, whose cheerful countenances added to our levity. Ned and Richard were especially solicitous of me, asking often if I was doing well. In truth, I was feeling a bit better, and the lower altitude was helping me along. My heart was not so labored as it had been during the climb to the saddle.

  I am a worrier by nature, and the deepening distance between ourselves and Frémont troubled me. We knew of his passage only by what the snow told us. Still, I am a man of faith, and I assured myself that soon the colonel would send for news of us and make sure we were not in trouble.

  “I’m sorry I’m holding us back,” I said to Cathcart at one point while we were resting in afternoon sun, which playfully warmed my face.

  “We’re doing better than they are,” he said. “Gaining strength as we go.”

  We reached the colonel’s previous camp that New Year’s Eve and found that it offered exactly what we needed: ample firewood, level ground, shelter from the night wind offered by coppery cliffs, and the comfort of sun-warmed rock. Best of all, there were only two feet of snow. So we settled there, knowing the main party would now be several miles down the slope. I looked for messages for us, hoping for instruction from the colonel, but saw none. Perhaps it was a compliment. He was assuming we were fit and able and would find our way as well as we could. But any sort of message stuck in an obvious place would have comforted me.

  Ned and Richard were in a gay mood and soon built a warming fire and prepared a comfortable hutch out of limbs and tenting for me. We had rubber ground cloths to keep the wetness from creeping into our bedding at night, and these proved once again to be among the most valuable of Colonel Frémont’s provisions. When I examined Cathcart with a medical eye, I was certain he was sicker than I but concealing it. He was down to a skeleton. His face was so drawn that his eyes bulged. It was not just that we didn’t eat enough; it was not proper food for good health, and no matter how much mule meat we demolished, it didn’t renew us.

  We would have mule haunch that night. The colonel had seen to it that all the messes got the last of the meat, and we had received enough to feed us that festive evening and New Year’s Day as well. Ned minced the mule meat, which was by far the best way to cope with that stringy stuff, and added macaroni and baked some minced-meat pies for our celebration, which we consumed with gusto. It seemed a grand feast, and for once I was full up, warm, and content as the last light faded and we plunged into the night that would bring us to the new year.

  We explained to the Indian boys what all this was about, and they grinned back. I am not certain how much of it they mastered, but it mattered not. They were soon joining
us as we sang a few old favorites, and then we crawled into comfortable bedrolls content.

  New Year’s Day was much like the previous one, mild and quiet. We broke camp after eating the last of the mincedmule pies and dragged our packs down that long slope, which at times became precipitous. But we never lost control, and eventually we reached another of the colonel’s camps, this time at the confluence of a creek. This too had little snow. We had passed gulches where snow lay a hundred feet deep or more, burying tall pines. But now, well down the mountain, the snow was thin. We had made steady progress but were uncommonly tired, and I knew I needed rest. There were more worries to trouble me, the worst being that we were now at the very gates of starvation.

  “I wish I had a mousetrap. A few mice would look good to me now,” I remarked to Captain Cathcart.

  “We’re not far from the colonel and the rest,” he replied.

  “They may be worse off than we are.”

  “They have excellent hunters.”

  “You’re a fine hunter, Captain.”

  “There would be no game here, not after twenty men passed through. And we’re still miles from the San Juan Valley.”

  That was true. The whole descent from the mountaintop to the valley was eight miles, but in our enfeebled estate it seemed three times farther. This, too, was a pleasant camp, and Richard sketched it. He had somehow sketched through the entire journey, carefully placing each sketch, carefully labeled, in his portfolio.

  I was feeling cautiously optimistic in spite of the grave want of food. The relief party would be closing in on the Chama River settlement by now and would soon be back with provisions and pack animals. Still, I began wracking my head, wondering what we might eat from nature if we had to. We had descended to an area of brush, where there might be rose hips, and perhaps we could find trout in the stream or pine nuts, a famous staple of the local tribes. It might be that Manuel and Joaquin could help us with that. We had but a little macaroni, and our trusty rifles if we could shoot most anything that flew. And that was a real possibility. The lower we descended, the more crows and hawks we spotted. But my eyesight was poor now. Bad food and snow blindness had taken their toll, leaving me blurry eyed. I was hoping Cathcart, a fine shot, was in better condition.

  “Are your eyes good?” I asked him.

  “I can’t see a bloody thing,” he growled.

  Only Richard’s eyes were unaffected, and he could barely manage a rifle. It was a fix I had not anticipated.

  The second day of January we struggled once again down the drainage, but we were about done in. The packs were too heavy. Sadly, we went through our books and journals, saving only what was absolutely essential and burning the rest. I had ceased writing daily entries in my journal and couldn’t say why. Some of those evenings when we were high up the mountain, I lacked the strength even to put a few sentences down, but there was more to it. I had intended from the start to record only those things I would not hesitate to make public someday. Then the day came when every thought in my head was a private one, so I wrote nothing. I had been observing our leader for a long while and realized one day that I did not wish to record the true nature of my thoughts of Colonel Frémont’s character. And the worse our condition, the less I felt like writing. But both Edward and Richard pursued their journals, managing to take a moment each day, even now, no matter how exhausted they were. Their journals would be worth something someday; mine, poor dishonest thing, would not. But I didn’t discard it, and I included it in the bundle we were putting together to drag over snow to the next camp.

  I watched the pages of a botany text darken, curl, and burn.

  “There goes my only plant guide,” I said.

  The weakening of our bodies was insidious. We discovered we lacked the strength to carry all our truck in one trip, so we started down the broad valley, knowing we would have to come back. The day was warm and sunny, but I was dispirited, and so were the rest. We were all diminished by the constant hardship and miserable food. I couldn’t remember when last I had some greens. We kept our rifles at the ready, knowing what a folly that was, but the thought of game gave us a thin thread of hope.

  At the next campsite we found ample evidence that the colonel’s whole party had spent the night. A fire still smouldered. Not all the deadwood had been used up. It was a fine place, a level flat where two streams joined, with abundant wood and plenty of shelter and not enough snow to trouble us. But we were still behind the colonel’s party and feeling more and more isolated. We began unburdening ourselves of our packs, and Richard began constructing a shelter, because we had seen mare’s tails across the sky and knew another white fury would soon descend on us.

  He stayed in the new camp to build us a shelter and collect wood and tend the fire, while Captain Cathcart and I and the Indian lads struggled back to the old camp, which was at a much higher elevation. There were more packs to drag down, packs we could not abandon. But none of them contained food. The others were soon ahead of me, and I found myself giving out. I hadn’t gone but a quarter of a mile upslope when I lost the rest of my strength and toppled into the snow. I felt my heart labor, and my muscles quit me, and I lacked the strength to get up. I would have to retreat to the lower camp but didn’t know how. I rested until the chill of the snow had worked through my rags, and then began to crawl on hands and knees, a little at a time, grateful that I did not have to cope with a drift. The trail was well worn. I continued in that fashion, resting when I had to, until I reached the lower camp. Richard spotted me, helped me up, and dragged me into the pine-bough hut he was building. I was soon lying on the rubberized canvas, feeling my heart and lungs labor.

  “I wore out,” I said.

  He glanced sharply at me. “We’ll stay here,” he said.

  He was adding boughs, which formed a sort of thatch, and helped make the hut tight against the wind. There would be little snow filtering through all that. The wavering fire threw heat into it, and I lay comfortably, but too worn to go on. I thought maybe the mountains would claim me after all, but I would make a fight of it.

  “Richard, take my journal with you tomorrow. It’s all that’s left of me.”

  He turned. “Ben, don’t talk like that.”

  “I quit writing in it a few days ago.”

  “You and your journal are both coming along with us tomorrow,” he said.

  The next evening we were delighted to welcome Raphael Proue to our humble camp. Proue was the oldest of the Creoles with Frémont and was clearly worn to the bone backtracking from the main party to our camp.

  “I bring this,” he said, unloading a heavy burlap sack.

  We clustered around and found frozen haunches of meat, cornmeal, and coffee.

  “Dis here, it’s buffalo the Colonel saves and pork and buffalo fat and some meal, eh?”

  “His private stores. I didn’t know he had any,” Richard said.

  We were amazed. Where had this provender come from? I stared at the food as if it were gold. The very sight of it sent a wave of strength and energy through me.

  “You’re worn out, Raphael. Sit with us,” Ned said. He knew Proue from the time they both served together.

  “I do dat,” Proue said. “I got no strength left, not any.”

  He dropped heavily onto the rubberized tarpaulin before the fire.

  “It’s gonna snow,” he added. “You got some good hiding place here.”

  We soon were pumping Proue for news. Had the relief party returned? Were food and mules coming, as everyone hoped?

  “They aren’t far ahead of us. We can tell, maybe day or two. Dunno what slowed them down, but they aren’t doing good.”

  No relief in sight. That was discouraging.

  “The colonel, he’s got a place picked out to cache the stuff. Down from here five, six miles. He says we gonna cache everything we can, and then wait. He’s gonna take a bunch and head for the settlements himself and leave old Vincenthaler in charge, and after the cache we should maybe kee
p on going. Good hunting maybe.”

  I hardly knew Lorenzo Vincenthaler, but I knew he had been with Frémont’s California expedition and had served in the army during the Mexican War. He had been so quiet that I scarcely had visited with him, and the only impression I had of him was that he was a stickler for rules and wanted to do everything by the book. Well, I thought, that was an odd choice, but it would be alright.

  Proue stayed the night, and we fed him from the fresh provisions he had brought. He looked worn, but so did we all. I was a ghost of the man I had been only weeks before. Captain Cathcart was down to bones, and his clothing flapped on him. My brothers were a little better, but looking gaunt. And the Indian boys were down to ribs. But Proue alarmed me. When he started downriver the next morning, he staggered his way along the trail and staggered his way out of sight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Alexis Godey

  When we reached the foothills bordering the San Juan Valley, with the Rio Grande winding through it, Colonel Frémont summoned me.

  “We need to cache everything,” he said. “There’s a cave up La Garita Creek a bit; you probably noticed it. That’s where we’ll stow our goods.”

  He smiled amiably.

  “Everything, Colonel?”

  “Why, yes. My goods are scattered clear up the mountains, and now we’ll cache them while we await the relief party.”

  That was a, how to say it?—formidable—order. There were packs and gear scattered for miles over our downhill route, most of it mule tack and saddles. It made no sense to collect all this useless gear, and I eyed my leader sharply before I surrendered. “Oui, I’ll begin at once, Colonel.”

  “I knew you would,” he said. “We’ll set up camp under the cliffs there.”

  He had chosen a sheltered notch on the west edge of the Rio del Norte Valley, a place where there were trees and cliffs to supply some comfort. But to the east, there was nothing but arid plains. Not a tree to stop the wind or supply fuel.