The First Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone

  “Sure they are. But we ain’t crossin’ the Deschutes there. We’re gonna cross further south.”

  “There ain’t no damn place further south!”

  “Yes, there is.” Dupre spoke the words softly. “You’re a damn fool, Preacher. You plannin’ on takin’ these greenhorns through pure virgin country. It ain’t never been done afore.”

  “That’s what makes it so interestin’,” Preacher told him with a wide smile.

  “Do you realize that we’re gonna have to build a damn road?” Beartooth asked. “The way you’re talkin’ about ain’t nothin’ but a game trail.”

  “Yep.”

  “These wagon’s ain’t never gonna stand the trip, Preacher.”

  “They’ll stand it.”

  “You’re a damn igit!”

  “You wanna quit?”

  “I didn’t say nothin’ about quittin’. Did you hear me say anything ’bout quittin’, Dupre?”

  “Nope.”

  “Fine,” Preacher told him. “I’m glad all that’s settled. Now you can quit you bitchin’. You know the way we’re goin’, so put your thinkin’ cap on and close your mouth. Start thinkin’ of ways to make it easier.”

  The mountain man shook his head in exasperation. “They ain’t no easy way!”

  “Then we’ll do it the hard way.” He smiled. “And we’ll be the first to do it.”

  * * *

  They crossed the Blues at its narrowest point and headed northwest. They camped at a spot that in the years to come would be called Emigrant Springs. Only a few miles north of the springs, Preacher turned the long line westward and headed for the Umatilla River.

  “Normally,” Preacher told Swift, “the Cayuse Injuns would be real friendly. I’ve stayed with ’em many times and et their food and slept in their tipis. Usually this country would be swarming with their horses. But as you can see, it’s deserted. That means they’ve pulled ’em close to their villages and gettin’ ready for war. That don’t necessary mean that they’ll attack us. I know the headman, and he likes me. So that’s a plus. Howsomever, there are a few minuses.”

  Dupre smiled hugely and nodded his head. “Shore are. Like a bunch of young bucks lookin’ to impress the gals with scalps, for one.”

  “I thought you men knew the chief?”

  “Oh, we do. They probably wouldn’t hurt us. But they might kill all of you.”

  “Comforting thought,” Swift muttered. “But someday the Oregon Trail will be safe for all.”

  “Big Medicine Trail,” Beartooth said. “That’s what the Injuns call it. Kinda hard for me to get used to callin’ it the Oregon Trail.”

  It turned cold and the winds began blowing. If the movers thought they’d seen winds on the empty prairies east of the mountains, this changed their minds. Anything that was not secured properly—“right and tight,” Preacher called it—was blown off and scattered all to hell and gone. So much canvas was ripped and torn that Preacher ordered it all taken off the ribs and stored until they were out of the wind.

  They lost half a day trying to round up the livestock that had drifted, trying to find comfort from the cold winds, and two very difficult days later, during which the wagon train managed to cover only a few miles each day, another birth was recorded on the trail.

  It was a very long and hard birthing, and the woman’s screaming was a nerve-wracking thing for all to hear. The mother had never been very strong, and shortly after the birthing, the woman died. The husband refused to accept the baby—a little girl—blaming the child for the mother’s death. She was given to the Ellsworth woman to care for. The mover flatly refused to go any further. No amount of coaxing would change his mind. He flung himself across the mound of earth that covered his young wife and wailed out his grief.

  “Rainin’ too damn hard to move anyways,” Preacher said. “We’ll just stay here and wait it out. Maybe that feller will get over his grief come a new dawnin’.”

  Just before a cold and rainy dawn would break, a single pistol shot brought the sleepers out of their blankets.

  “I bet I know what that was,” Preacher said.

  “Yeah,” Dupre said. “I shore wouldn’t bet agin you.”

  The young widower had stuck the barrel of a pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger, blowing out the back of his head. He lay sprawled across his wife’s grave.

  “Git some shovels,” Preacher said, disgust in his voice. “Be easier digging up this fresh grave and just layin’ him beside his wife. I figure that’s the way he’d want it.”

  “That’s sacrilege, sir!” Edmond objected.

  “Oh, shut up! Don’t get up in my face, Edmond. Not now. I’ll hurt you, boy,” Preacher told him, then turned his back and stalked off. “Any man who’d shoot hisself over a damn woman is a fool! Anybody who’d shoot theyselves over just about anything’s a damn fool. Life is for the livin’, ’cause when you dead, you dead a long time.”

  “I have never known a man that hard,” Richard said, rain water dripping off the wide brim of his hat.

  “Hard country, Bible-shouter,” Beartooth told him. “This country feeds on weaklin’s. I ’spect the day will come when this trail is lined with graves, from beginnin’ to end. Three months after they’re planted, won’t be no trace of them. You best get used to it.”

  He walked off to join Preacher.

  “Dig up the grave and bury Jacob beside his wife,” Swift ordered. He sighed, steam fogging his breath. “It probably won’t be the last one we’ll bury before we reach our destination.”

  “I’m beginning to wonder if it’s all worth it.” A mover spoke the words to no one in particular.

  No one responded to his words, the men just picked up shovels and began digging in the rain-soaked mound of earth.

  16

  The wagon train moved on, leaving behind them a lonely grave and the box of a wagon. The young couple’s meager possessions were given to those most in need, the wheels taken for spares, and the canvas given to a family who had lost theirs in the high winds. They averaged about eight miles a day, the men having to literally hack a road out of the narrow trail, using axes and pure sweat and muscle.

  When they reached the Umatilla River, two families announced they were leaving the train and heading northeast, toward the Walla Walla, to make their homes near the new Whitman Mission. They simply could not, or would not, endure the trail any longer. No one tried to dissuade them; most of the movers were just too damn tired to care.

  The wagon train rolled on, with not one hostile Indian being seen. Nighthawk had reported that Bum and Red Hand had spread their people out north of the Columbia, in the wilderness along the Klickitat River.

  “Just like I figured,” Preacher said. “Time they figure out that we didn’t cross the Columbia at the Dalles, we’ll be so far into the Southern Cascades they’ll never find us.”

  And as Preacher had predicted, when the train did meet up with some Cayuses, they were friendly. Preacher bartered for enough fresh salmon to give everyone on the train a good meal and learned that only a few of the tribe had taken to the warpath. Those that had were operating—for the most part—north of the Columbia.

  But the Cayuses shook their heads and made the sign of a crazy person when they learned that Preacher was going to take the wagons across the mountains south of the river.

  “It cannot be done,” a sub-chief told Swift. “That is impossible.”

  “It ain’t never been done,” Preacher corrected the wagonmaster. “But that don’t mean it can’t be done.” Preacher talked long with the sub-chief and the man inspected the gee-gaws in the trade wagon driven by Jim. After two hours of palavering, the men solemnly shook hands.

  “What was all that about?” Richard asked.

  “They’re goin’ to help us cross the Deschutes,” Preacher told him. “I gave him everything in the wagon, and the wagon. That’ll be one less we got to pull acrost the mountains, and it’ll give us an extra team.”

  “Bu
t that river is miles and days away!” Swift objected. “How do you know these savages will be there?”

  “’Cause they gave their word to me and we ain’t never lied to one another, that’s why. Move out, Swift.” He pointed. “The promised land is thataway.”

  Jim was grateful to be shut of the wagon and back in the saddle. But like the other mountain men, he had his doubts about getting a wagon train through the Cascades.

  “There ain’t much feed in there for the livestock, Preacher,” he reminded the man.

  “That’s true in spots.”

  “Mighty boggy in there, Ol’ Hoss,” Dupre added.

  “Yep. In spots.”

  “Ropes is gettin’ raggedy,” Beartooth said. “And we gonna have to shore use them for snubbin’ these wagons and lower-in’ down them mighty steep passageways.”

  “Once we get them built,” Preacher said.

  Nighthawk shook his head at that. “Ummm,” he said.

  * * *

  “Great God in Heaven!” Swift said, taking his first look at the Deschutes. “We’ll never get the wagons across that.”

  “We’ll get them across,” Preacher told him. “Get your people buildin’ rafts. This part’s the easy part. Once we get ’crost is when the fun starts.”

  The crossing was made, but it was not done without loss. Several head of livestock were drowned in the river, and several wagons were lost when the ropes on a raft parted and the raft came apart. Since possessions were rafted across separately, the movers’ goods were dispersed among other wagons and the pioneers could ride the mules. Preacher bartered with the Cayuses for saddles—he did not ask where they got them, although he had a pretty good idea—and one mover’s wife shocked the entire train by putting on a pair of her husband’s britches and riding the mule astride.

  “Disgraceful,” several of the women said. “How common can a person get?”

  “Seems like a pretty good idea to me,” was the opinion of most of the other women.

  “No woman of mine would ever wear britches,” a mover made the mistake of saying, and ten minutes later, his wife emerged from their wagon wearing a pair of his britches. “You got something to say about this?” she challenged him.

  “No, dear,” he said meekly.

  Melody and Penelope looked at one another and smiled. Moments later they had changed from their now somewhat less than elegant riding habits into britches.

  Dupre took a long look at the derrieres of the ladies, threw his hands up into the air, and proclaimed, “C’est bon! Magnifique!”

  Preacher had spent weeks looking at their derrieres. He had nothing to say.

  “Here, now!” Swift said, eyeballing the britches-clad ladies. “I’ll have none of this on my train. You women get back into proper clothing.”

  “Make us,” Melody threw down the challenge.

  Swift muttered under his breath and walked away.

  “I’m tellin’ you for a fact,” Preacher said, “I can see the day comin’ when women is gonna have the vote.”

  “Never!” Beartooth said. “Of course,” he added, scratching his woolly mane, “I ain’t never voted so I reckon it wouldn’t make no difference nohow.”

  On the morning the train was to pull out, Preacher told Swift, “We got to get over the mountains ’fore the snow flies, and she can ’fly early out here. This ain’t gonna be easy, I’m warnin’ you of that right now. But I said I’d get your through, and I’m gonna do just that. So toot on that bugle of yourn, Swift, and let’s tackle the last leg.”

  Swift smiled at him. “Tell you the truth, Preacher, I’m getting just about as sick of that damn bugle as you are.”

  The two men laughed, clasped each other on the shoulder, and walked off together, toward their horses. And while they had no way of knowing it, both of them were destined for the pages of a few history books. They would be the first to lead a wagon train over the rugged Cascades Mountains. But since that claim would always be in dispute, it would be taken out of the history books. Taken out long before the mass migration of the late ’40’s and early ’50’s.

  When Preacher was told of this, he wasn’t surprised, since he wasn’t aware it was even in any books. His reply was typical: “Hell, I don’t read about history, pilgrim. I make it!”

  Book Three

  1

  O beautiful for spacious skies,

  For amber waves of grain,

  For purple mountain majesties

  Above the fruited plain!

  America! America!

  God shed His grace on thee

  And crown thy good with brotherhood,

  From sea to shining sea!

  Katharine Lee Bates

  “We’re gonna have about two and a half days of fairly easy travel,” Preacher told Swift and a few others, after they broke for lunch. “Then you got to lighten the wagons. And I mean discard everything that ain’t absolutely necessary. The folks ain’t gonna like it, I know that, but it has to be. You think goin’ through the South Pass of the Rockies was bad, wait ’til you see Hood and what’s all around it.”

  Swift nodded. “I’ll tell them.”

  “Don’t just tell them. Stand right there until they do it. We’re a-fixin’ to go straight up and then straight down, half the time right into a bog, and we’ll be doin’ it over and over and over agin. Most beautifulest and gawd-awfulest country you ever will see. Start shakin’ down the movers, Swift.”

  On the second day after crossing the river, the train came to a series of hills, long steep hills. That night, the movers began throwing possessions away in earnest. There was a lot of crying and fussing over many things that were being dumped by the trail, but in the end, the wagons were lightened considerably.

  Preacher told them to stay in camp the next day and dump some more out of the wagons. “You just don’t know what you’re a-fixin’ to get into, folks. But I do. You’ll kill them oxen tryin’ to get all this crap over the trail. The mules will just not move once they figure out they can’t pull it. Dump more, people. Get busy. Lighten them wagons.”

  “Is it really this bad, Preacher?” Richard asked. “The people are very upset.”

  “I can’t make it sound as bad as it really is,” Preacher told him. “It don’t make me feel like no big man makin’ folks throw away things I know they toted what must seem like halfway around the world. But it’s either that, or they break down or their oxen dies in the middle of the Cascades and they walk out with nothin’. Think about that.”

  “All right, Preacher,” the missionary said, reluctance in his voice.

  “Richard, have the movers wash their wagons to get all the dried mud off. You’d be surprised how much weight is just ahangin’ on them wagons.”

  “Yes. You’re right. Of course.”

  Preacher found the lady who was keeping a journal of her adventures and asked her if she was still keepin’ her notes up. She assured him that she certainly was. “Well, ma’am, I hope you got lots of paper and ink and quills,” he told her. “’Cause you shore got a lot of scratchin’ and scribblin’ to do over the next month or so.”

  She smiled at him. “Would you like to see what I have written about you, Mister Preacher?”

  “No, ma’am!” Preacher’s reply was quick. “This trip’s been de-pressin’ enough without my doin’ that.”

  * * *

  The movers hit a dense forest of pine, fir, and redwood. Many of the redwood soared several hundred feet into the air. On the first day after entering the Cascades, the wagon train traveled only three miles. The movers fell into their blankets and went to sleep exhausted after a day of cutting and dragging trees out of the way. The trail they hacked out of the wilderness was a narrow one, just wide enough for a single wagon. Fallen trees had to be dragged out of the way, huge rocks and jutting roots had to be first hacked at and then dug out. The only graze for the livestock was swamp grass. Preacher warned them that only a few miles further they would encounter laurel, and that if the live
stock ate it, they would die.

  Lowering wagons down mountain sides by snubbing ropes to trees became commonplace for these pioneers, and they were all working harder than they ever had in their lives. They no longer asked themselves if it was worth it. They were afraid of what their answer might be.

  Mothers put ropes around the waists of their children and led them single file, to prevent a small child from running into the thick tangle of vegetation that grew all around them. Any child lost in there would more than likely stay lost—forever.

  They worked their way up hill more than a half a mile high, and then half a mile down the other side. That took a full day of brutally hard work, both for humans and animals. Slipping and sliding and cussing. Most went to their blankets without even eating the evening meal. They were too exhausted to eat.

  “By now,” Beartooth said, “I reckon Red Hand and Bum will know that we didn’t come crost the Columbia and they’ll be hard on followin’ the trial we’re blazin’.”

  Preacher nodded his head in agreement and accepted a cup of coffee from Nighthawk. “Won’t do ’em no good.” He smiled and winked at his old friend. “You know where we are, don’t you, Bear?”

  “Tell the truth, I ain’t rightly sure.”

  “Five more days and we’ll hit the valley.”

  Beartooth stared hard at his friend. Then the huge mountain man’s face brightened under his beard and his eyes twinkled. “By the Lord, we’ve done the impossible, Preacher.”

  “Looks that way, ol’ hoss.”

  “You goin’ to tell the movers?” Jim asked.

  “No. I do that, and they’ll get all anxious and in a hurry and somebody will get hurt in haste. We’ve made better time than I figured we would. I got to hand it to these folks. They got grit, I’ll give ’em that.”

  “I got me a hunch that when they cross the last ridge and stand lookin’ down into the valley, they’ll give up any plans of goin’ north crost the Columbia and just settle right there,” Dupre said. “I know a little somethin’ ’bout farmin’, and that’s good land for it. Damn shore rains enough,” he added.