Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

“I’ll put the company to it. They’re as scattered as the packs.”

  He smiled, yawned, and walked away.

  I corralled various of my best men. “We’ll be caching the colonel’s equipment in that cave we passed. And that means we’ll be heading up the creek, maybe clear to Groundhog Creek, where the Kerns probably are.”

  They were game but not happy. Every one of them looked worn and ragged. While the colonel and his manservant set about making the new camp, my men and I began the long trek into the mountains again. Fortunately the drainage was wide and the way was easy. But we were trumped by the weather. The warm interlude between Christmas and New Year’s Day had passed, and now a bitter wind howled out of the north, weakening and dispiriting all of us. It stung our cheeks, as if our beards weren’t even there. Nonetheless, there was a task the colonel wanted done, so we set out to do it. I would do it, as required, but I wondered why. I could not fathom why Frémont had such a grip on me.

  We examined the shallow cave in the point of rocks and decided it would do. The colonel had a good eye. But that abandoned gear stretching miles up the trail darkened our mood. I heard no man complain. No one had ever complained about Colonel Frémont, at least in my presence. The question in my mind was whether to obey his command or not. Was the colonel mad? Did he have any grasp of how worn to nothing his men were? I did not give the order I ached to give, by which I would relieve these desperate men of this foolish mission. So we proceeded up the mountain once again.

  We hiked up the drainage, step by step. Whenever we found some of the seventy-pound packs, we sent a man or two back with them, while the rest of us continued up the valley. When Preuss and I reached the Kerns’ camp we discovered them lying mutely in their blankets, their fire dead. They were in a bad way. Wordlessly, the German and I started their fire going and got some deadwood together and revived their spirits.

  “We’re collecting the packs,” I said. “When you can, work your way down to the colonel’s camp. He’s on the near edge of the San Juan Valley at the foot of this drainage. Bring what you can.”

  Ned Kern had revived the most with the fire blazing. “We’ll be there. Have you any food?”

  I shook my head. What little I had of macaroni and sugar had to go to the men hauling the colonel’s instruments and tack and bedding. “You’re on your own,” I said. “But keep warm. It’s the cold that does a man in, not hunger.”

  Ned nodded. He was the one veteran among them and had been with the colonel in California, but I could see he was the most disheartened.

  “Ned, I’m appointing you to keep your brothers and Captain Cathcart warm, and the Indian boys, too. I’ll have Micah McGehee keep an eye on you.”

  The bright fire seemed to pump life into those wretches in Richard Kern’s hut, and that was the best I could do. I nodded to my men, and we plodded up again, through deepening snow as we retraced our steps to the mountaintop.

  That day we collected fifteen of the packs, but it wore my men to the bone. The north wind was our master, slicing through our frayed defenses and taking the strength straight out of us. We were spread out now, in half a dozen camps up and down the creeks. As January progressed, so did the cold. There was no more cloth or leather to repair boots or make moccasins or fashion into hats or waistcoats or leggins, and we were being frostbitten again—ears, noses, chins, fingers, toes, ankles, lips. Around our miserable fires, which did little to warm any of us because the wind sucked away the heat, we worked thong through our clothing and boots, sewing together what we could, making do with rags and scraps of leather.

  Some of my men resented the Kerns because they weren’t helping with the hard work of getting the colonel’s packs down to the cache. Indeed, they told me that they found Richard playing his flute by the fire one time. Just like some Philadelphians, they said. I was less judgmental, having seen them at death’s door. In fact, Ben looked ashen to me, gray of flesh despite weeks of outdoor living, and I knew he wasn’t far from his Maker. A man ought to play a flute when he could. A song, a melody, a flute could cleave the living from the dead.

  But the men didn’t like it, and they didn’t like my forbearance. I thought it was best to let well enough alone. On the sixth of January Hubbard shot a prairie goat, or antelope as they are called, and generously divided the precious meat up and down the line. Even the Kerns and Cathcart got a small meal of it, and all were heartened.

  We were far enough off the mountain to be among game again, and the very thought inspired every man who was dragging those parfleches and packs through the snow. I lost track of what the colonel was doing down below, but mostly he was simply waiting for relief. It never came. For my part, I camped at the point of rocks and oversaw the cache. The packs had to be dragged into that shallow cave, after we put down some brush and limb bedding to keep the packs dry, and then laid up, one on another, to make use of the small space. And once we finished with it, we would need to seal it and conceal it from the Utes, who roamed these mountains.

  The Kerns were boiling up pieces of hide now to make a gluey gruel, but there was some nourishment in it, and I didn’t worry much about them. We would soon have relief. By my calculation we were nearly at the end of the sixteen-day period we had allotted for King’s party to return with help.

  Then Proue died. The old Creole woodsman had shambled along day by day, getting by until the cold struck, and then he simply began to freeze up. He was dragging packs right to the end, when he tumbled into the snow and said he couldn’t go on. His legs were frozen below the knee. Someone wrapped his blanket around his legs, but no one had the strength to help the old man, and so he perished in the snow, the icy wind soon stopping his heart. We had no way to drag him anywhere, so he lay on the trail, frozen to the ice underneath, as man after man passed him by, dragging the colonel’s goods down to the cache. That happened on the ninth day of January, and at a time when the cold was the worst I could remember, making us numb and driving us deep into our rags.

  I stared at the old man, so cold and still, the snow filtering over his white face, caking his beard.

  “Raphael, mon ami, au revoir,” I said, watching the crystals collect in his eye sockets. “I’ll come for you when I can. I’ll let your people know.”

  If he had any living brothers or sisters, I did not know of them. But I would try to contact relatives in Saint Louis.

  Others of us stopped and stared, watching the whirling snow filter through his beard. No one said anything.

  That was the fourteenth day since King’s party had left the Christmas camp. We were expecting relief within sixteen days at the worst. Proue had missed help by two days. Or was it simply that he had died needlessly dragging the colonel’s packs? I refused to think in those terms and set the thought aside. But there was another thought worming through me: Proue’s death was the direct result of our effort to drag the useless gear down the mountain. It was a death that Colonel Frémont could have avoided.

  I worried about the men, the grunting, laboring men, numb with cold, so cold they could not feel their fingers, skidding the packs past the snow-lost body of Raphael Proue. What were they thinking? Who would be next?

  I could not rally them. They were spread out by twos and threes. The company was no longer a single unit but disintegrating before my eyes as men made their own choices and shifted away from their messes. I knew what that foretold and was helpless to stop it. The Frémont company was falling apart.

  I paused one last time at the hut the Kern brothers had built and found them huddled within. But the fire was going.

  “When you can, make your way down to the colonel’s camp,” I said. “This wind should quit pretty soon.”

  “We’re out of food,” Richard said.

  “The relief is due any moment. That’s all I can say. Starving won’t kill a man. It’s cold that kills a man, quick as a knife thrust. Starving men make it through.”

  “We’ll come soon. I’m some better,” Ben said.

  “Pu
t your packs in the cache at Point of Rocks. You won’t miss any of it. Some of the men are camped there. McGehee’s there. He’s from your mess. You men look after each other.”

  They nodded but said nothing.

  The heat from the fire was welcome. It had warmed my backside. But now I faced my own walk five or six miles down. I was as weary as the rest, but somehow, maybe through sheer willpower, I kept on going. I was dragging two packs, the last we could find. I’d stash them with the rest.

  The Kerns stared bleakly at me. They seemed better off than Cathcart, who was a walking scarecrow.

  “We’ll see you at the colonel’s camp,” I said. “Help’s coming.”

  I stepped into the murderous wind and felt it burrow through my leather tunic and coat and leggins. But I plucked up the draw-lines and began tugging two parfleches of mess ware behind me, feeling the packs skid, resist, bounce, and sometimes slide ahead of me when I hit a steep grade. I kept my own advice, and when I got too cold, I holed up. There were plenty of refuges from the wind: copses of pinetrees, jagged cliffs, river brush, wind-carved hollows. I set aside my hunger, knowing it would do me no good to cater to it.

  I stopped at the cache, where half a dozen men lingered, and stowed the last packs in the cave. These had been concealed with brush as best as my Creoles could manage it. It wouldn’t fool an Indian, but we would be back soon enough to recover the goods. The Utes didn’t roam far from their lodges in this sort of weather.

  Somehow the colonel had gotten us off the mountain. Retreats are chaotic. Retreats are when commands fall apart, and it’s every man for himself. But the colonel had held us together, sent for help, gotten most of his goods off the mountain, and so far, except for Raphael, he had kept his men alive. There was something admirable in it.

  When I reached the colonel’s camp, far below, I reported to Frémont.

  “Raphael Proue’s dead,” I said.

  Frémont stared, registering that. “How?” he asked.

  “Froze. Lay down and died, dragging a pack.”

  “What do the men think?”

  “He was the oldest of us.”

  Relief filtered into Frémont’s face. “I hoped no one would perish. It reflects badly.”

  “Sir, it’s no one’s fault. I’ll try to contact his people. I don’t know that he had any.”

  “Yes, do that,” he said, absently.

  “There’s men scattered far upstream; the Kerns are highest up. I’ve told them to work their way down here as soon as they can.”

  “Philadelphia people,” Frémont said.

  I knew what he meant. Yet they were all stouthearted. I thought they would make it.

  “Ned is the worst off,” I said.

  “That’s strange,” the colonel replied. “He was with us before.”

  “Ben and Richard seem stronger,” I said.

  The colonel seemed puzzled. Ben and Richard were the city fellows.

  The colonel seemed taut, and as soon as I had reported, he drifted to a place where he had a long view down the Rio del Norte Valley. An observer could see for miles across that barren landscape, where no tree grew and no rise or valley hid a party for long. The vista was so white we soon were squinting and leaking tears.

  I joined him. “They’re past due. We calculated sixteen days at the absolute worst.”

  The wind was cutting straight through me in that unprotected valley, and I was more than ready to retreat to the nearest fire.

  “They’re overdue. Williams misled them again,” he said.

  “Colonel, it took them four days just to get down that drainage. And they still had eighty miles after that, and they would be hunting, too. I think they’re running far behind what we had calculated up on the mountain.”

  “I never should have trusted him. Kit once told me to watch your back when Williams was around.”

  “We’ll see the relief any day now.”

  Frémont shook his head. “Something went wrong. They’d be here.”

  “It takes time to collect mules or burros and blankets and food and men,” I said.

  “They failed me.”

  I changed the subject. “Do you have hunters out?”

  “Certainly. There’s plenty of tracks, but no game in sight. And everyone’s so snow-blind that they can’t see much.”

  That was bad news, actually. “I was hoping to see some meat.”

  “It’s an improvement on shoe leather,” he replied. He squinted out on the valley once more, with watering, snow-blind eyes ruined by the merciless white everywhere.

  “My men are failing me. They’re giving up. They don’t have stout hearts,” he said.

  I hoped he would keep such sentiments to himself. They sounded a little like an accusation, but I believed Frémont was too grand a man to permit himself such thoughts.

  “I’ll warm up and hunt,” I said.

  “I’m taking a party out at dawn, if relief doesn’t come,” Frémont said. “I intend to go to Taos, and on to California, one way or another, with or without this company. Of course, you’ll come with me, Alex.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Tom Breckenridge

  Godey joined our relief party for a while when we started from the Christmas camp, but when it was plain that the main party could not descend the drainage we were following, he returned. The four of us, with King in command, and Old Bill Williams as our guide, fought our way down that narrow canyon, struggling every minute. It was choked with snow, for one thing, and we had little understanding where the creek flowed or where its banks were.

  We wrestled our way over or under fallen timber and fought through thickets, and once in a while the way was pinched off and there was no goddamn help for it but to doff our nether garments and wade the snowy creek and then put ourselves together on the far bank, numb and wet. The warm weather quit us, too, and the bitter cold bit our flesh, numbed our limbs, and ruined our handgrip so we couldn’t hold a thing in our fingers.

  When nights fell, we carved a cave out of snow and lit deadwood, which failed to warm us, so we shivered in the thin blankets. Because we were carrying everything on our backs, we had but one blanket apiece. We had three Hawken rifles, a fowling piece, and a pound of powder, enough to shoot game if we should be so lucky. As for food, we had very little: some mule meat, a pack of macaroni, and some sugar. And even the sugar was lost to us when the pack tipped and the white powder vanished.

  The distance down the slope to the valley was not great, perhaps eight miles, but we consumed four days fighting our way out, and in the process we ate the last of our food. We consoled ourselves that shortly we would reach the Rio Grande, would find plentiful game along its banks, and would soon stave off the hunger that was even then wrenching at our bellies. Fighting our way down a narrow defile choked with logs and rock and snow and brush made us hungry enough to eat bears and elephants. I’d of welcomed skunk stew.

  King was a steady man, a veteran of the California expedition, and had a level head on him. He was heading out there to make a home for himself and his bride and had strong reasons to push on and triumph. Old Bill Williams was a different son of a bitch and soon was grumbling.

  “This here gulch, it’s not right. I didn’t say for him to go this way. I know these hills and this isn’t a place to go down. He wouldn’t listen. He paid his guide no heed,” Williams was saying.

  “We’ll get out of this gulch and be on our way to the settlements, old man,” King replied quietly, while the four of us were roasting our bare feet at the fire, sitting around it like spokes on a wheel. “It’s downhill, and that counts.”

  “What’ll we eat, tell me that,” Williams said.

  “You’re the hunter,” King replied.

  I heard so much whining from the old man I wished he would just plain shut his damn trap while we got some blood moving through our frozen feet. Whining doesn’t do a lick of good when you’re out in the wilds and there’s not a thing you can do but keep on going. He was
the guide; the veteran of these mountains; the man who could find his way, turn almost anything into food, keep us warm and healthy. He had been silent the whole trip, clear from Hardscrabble, keeping his own counsel, but now he was belaboring poor King at every opportunity.

  Still, Williams was voicing the things that were tormenting us. Up at Christmas Camp, Frémont and Preuss and Williams himself had calculated that the relief party would reach the settlements a hundred miles distant in four or five days, organize help, and be back up the mountains with food and animals in a dozen days, sixteen at the outside. But we were not yet free of the mountains, which were clawing us every foot of the way. There was something dark in it, the horror of it unspoken as we pulled our thin blankets over and under us and shivered the long night away. The truth of it was that the settlements seemed impossibly far.

  Frémont had selected us for our strength. He had pulled me aside and said that he had a mission for me, that he was selecting only the strongest of his men, because the task ahead would test us to our utmost. I was the last bastard he approached, apparently, because he said that King, Creutzfeldt, and Old Bill had all accepted. He had come to realize that the company was in trouble and needed relief. That was the first mention of it to escape his lips, as far as I knew. I accepted at once. I wanted to get off that mountain; I was willing to walk barefoot through snow to get off those peaks.

  “I’ll go,” I had told him, which was stupid of me. And so the party prepared that afternoon, and the next dawn, even as day broke, we began our downward trek, with Godey keeping us company.

  I wondered whether we would do better in the next drainage, but so forbidding and high were the walls of the valley, and so thick with snow, that it was a foolish fancy. To add to our troubles, occasionally avalanches tumbled down those slopes, some of them beginning with a crack like a rifle shot and roaring their sinister way, raising a great cloud of powdery snow that choked the valley and stung our faces. It was a horror we spoke nothing of, knowing that any moment one of those snowslides could engulf us and end our worldly lives. And yet we escaped these random menaces and finally reached a point where the miserable creek poured into another branch, and the San Juan Valley stretched ahead, a silent white and naked land that looked like a graveyard.