“You figger we can hide them plews somewhere’s till morning?” Titus inquired. “When we can get ’em traded off to Ashley?”
“I s’pose—”
“Ain’t no s’posin’ about it, Bud,” Titus interrupted. “We gotta do it first thing come morning—or Ashley ain’t gonna have him no more powder and lead, no coffee and blankets left to trade.”
“And we need flints bad.”
“See? Just like I told you. Now, I want you get back to camp while them two is off knocking the dew off their lilies and drag the last of them packs off into the bushes somewhere outta camp where they can’t find ’em—drunk or sober.”
“M-me? Ain’t you—”
“Awright, I’ll damn well come and help you.”
Turtle seemed much relieved to have an accomplice in their crime.
“Hell, don’t worry none, Bud,” Titus explained. “If them two ever come back to camp tonight, I don’t figger they’ll be thinking none about plews till long after sunup anyways.”
Bud chuckled. “I do believe you’re likely right, Scratch. They’ll have daubin’ on their minds.”
“C’mon.”
By the time they had dragged what they had left in the way of those heavy packs out of their camp, away from their blanket and canvas bowers and into the nearby bushes, the half-moon was on its rise. It, along with the glittery stars overhead, was enough to cast some faint shadows as Bass and Tuttle made their way back through the raucous camp toward Fitzpatrick’s fire, where the concertina player was taking himself a rest and many of the others were settling back, their cups filled with Ashley’s liquor, jawing and swapping exaggerated tales of their experiences and exploits.
“How ’bout them two, Bridger?” someone called out as Tuttle and Bass came into the fire’s light. “They hear your tale of the Salt Sea?”
As some of the bunch chuckled and jabbed elbows into one another’s ribs, the young Bridger turned to gaze over his shoulder at the two free trappers. “Don’t believe they have.”
“Then tell ’em!”
Nonplussed, Jim turned around on his stump and asked the returning pair, “Since we run onto your outfit north of here, I ever tell you fellas about the time I floated down to the Great Salt Sea?”
“Y-you been all the way out there to the west?” Tuttle asked, turning slowly in disbelief to look at Bass.
Bud’s question brought howls of laughter from a few of that bunch gathered round the fire.
“Don’t pay these dunderheads no mind,” Bridger confided.
“What they laughing at us for?” Titus asked, feeling sheepish—as if some joke were about to be played on them.
Bridger offered up a cup of liquor, handing it to Bass as he said, “Don’t fret none, now: some of these here coons ain’t got the brains God give a buffler gnat.”
One of the scoffers cried out, “Just ’cause we don’t believe you floated where you said you floated, don’t mean we got us gnat-brains!”
“Sit yourselves down, fellas,” young Bridger said, “an’ I’ll tell you ’bout that leetle trip I had me through hell’s canyon in a bull boat—”
“All the way to the Salt Sea!” bellowed one of the doubters, accompanied by roars of laughter from the rest.
Wagging his head as if he was used to the good-natured ribbing, Jim exclaimed with mock seriousness, “I’ll swear. There be times a mountain man is a most consarned critter, boys. Now, you go take a look at them niggers laughin’ their bellies sore over there on their logs, and you’ll see just what I mean. Some of these here beaver trappers are the most uncertainest fellers ever—cuz they’ll argeefie about near anything. And that even includes argeein’ about argeein’!”
*On the Cub River near present-day Cove, Utah
13
“There t’weren’t a bit of blamed sense in argeein’ about it,” Bridger declared, back to being solemn-faced now that he was warming to his tale. “But these here other yahoos good for that.”
Many of the rest pounded their knees and back-slapped one another in unbridled mirth, guffawing lustily as the liquor and the camaraderie warmed them all that summer night as stars shown like diamonds and the moon hung like a slice of translucent mother-of-pearl right over their heads.
“What they don’t got in good sense,” Fitzpatrick declared, “these fellers make up for with big grins!”
“Last year it were!” one of the laughers roared out, anxious to get on with the tale. “G’won, Jim—tell ’em!”
“I will,” Bridger snorted, and turned back to Bass and Tuttle with a wink, “just as soon as you yabberin’ yahoos shut your fly-traps!”
“Shut up! Shut up!” commanded one of the laughers, who stood, weaving a bit in his drunkenness, waving his arms at the others for quiet. When they all fell silent behind hands, he declared, “Go right on ahead, young Jim. We’s a’waiting on your windy story.”
Just then another unruly trapper cried out, “Best tell us only the true of it, boy!”
That sent the entire bunch into fits of laughter that did not end until Bridger had gone to the kettle with his tin cup, dipped some of the heady grain liquor from it, and resettled back on the trunk of a downed Cottonwood. Casually he took himself a swig and looked round at those gathered there as things quieted once again.
He asked them, “You ’bout done with your pokin’ fun at me?”
“G’won head, Jim,” Fitzpatrick said gravely as he bent forward to select a stout cottonwood limb from the stack of wood near the fire. “I’ll damn well thrash the next son of a bitch what interrupts young Bridger’s story with his silly gaping!”
“Thankee, Fitz,” Bridger replied, and took himself another sip of the liquor before he set the cup on the ground between his worn moccasins. “Like that big-nosed yahoo over there told you, it were some two winters back.”
“A year and a half ago?” Tuttle asked.
Nodding his head, Bridger replied, “Near ’bouts. Late fall it were.”
“Hell, it could’ve been early winter too, Jim,” declared Fitzpatrick. “Nobody was keeping track nohow.”
“Leastwise—the first snows had come to this here country,” Bridger continued. “Most of us was settling in for the winter not far on down this here same valley, it were.” He pointed south with a wag of his arm. “Seemed that not all the trapping outfits was in yet—but most was already here.”
Ashley’s men were settling in real good, too, Jim explained. They had cut down strong saplings and lashed them together into eastern-style wickiups over which they interlaced branches to turn the dry snows of that high prairieland. Here in what they had come to call Willow Valley the previous year, the trappers had a good source of water, plenty of grass to last their animals for the winter, and plenty of protection from the harshest of the season’s winds. Firewood lay within easy reach along the creeks and streams that tumbled out of the surrounding hills. Day by day they shot buffalo, laying in more and more of the hides they fleshed and draped over the wickiups for insulation, slicing and drying thin strips of the lean red meat over smoky fires … knowing the hard days of bitter cold and deep snows were not long in coming.
Just beyond that range of hills to the west of them lay the valley of the Bear—a river that would soon become the irritating source of contention between the Ashley men.
Earlier that July of 1824 more than fifty of them had followed Jedediah Smith and John Weber across the deceivingly low South Pass and on to the country of the Green River. By late August that year they had reached the crest of an unexplored mountain range and peered off to the west, down into the valley of a new river they would soon find had already been visited and named by the John Bull trappers for the Hudson’s Bay Company.
From the heights Smith’s men could see how the Bear flowed north out of a lake they would come to name for the sweet taste of its water. But upon following this new river the trappers discovered the river precipitously reversed itself in some forbidding lava beds. Steadfastly f
ollowing the Bear upstream, the trappers continued their march south. Eventually that autumn they reached the Willow Valley, and there they decided to winter. Just to the southwest of their encampment the trappers could climb to high bluffs and stare down at the Bear River as it appeared to twist back to the north in the distance once more—but this time it flowed through a narrow canyon filled with thunderous white water.
Just as it is the way with any men who find too much time on their hands, the trappers turned their discussions of that unpredictable Bear River into an argument—with nearly every soul taking a side—and then that argument boiled into a matter of wagers: did that river continue north, or curl itself back south still another time? Hell, just what did happen to that fitful, fickle river after it disappeared in that high-walled gorge?
“Until Fitz here reminded ever’ last nigger of us there weren’t no way to know who’d win them wagers,” Jim continued his story in the hush of that starry night, “because no man knowed for sure where that river went.”
Fitzpatrick said, “Hell—I didn’t figger there’d be a man among ’em what’d go to find out for his own self!”
“Didn’t count on young Jim here!” Daniel Potts cried out.
“He’s a struttin’ cock if ever there was one!” another man shouted as others added their admiration.
“Wasn’t like I jumped at the chance,” Bridger admitted. “But some of these here yahoos come to me with such straight, no-account faces and told me I was the coon they could trust to take on that there canyon—which’d put their argeement to rest, once’t and for all.”
One of the group crowed, “We figgered you was the only one we could talk into it!”
“See what I mean, fellers?” Bridger asked Tuttle and Bass. “Well, now—I didn’t know no better than to be proud they asked me.”
“Shit, it made sense!” someone called out. “You was the youngest, boy!”
“So we figgered you was the best’un to try that hellhole river run,” another added.
A new voice bellowed, “If’n you didn’t come back—weren’t no sad loss, you being the sprout of the brigade!”
With a shrug at all the abuse he was taking, Bridger continued, “Don’t make me no never-mind now that I didn’t know they figgered it to be a damn lark they was putting me up to … that trip sounded like it’d be just the chance to pull the tiger’s tail.”
One of the older, grizzle-bearded trappers declared, “Young’uns like Bridger allays wanna be first to pull on a tiger’s tail!”
“Better’n sitting in winter camp all day, ever’ day,” Jim continued. “So I told ’em I’d settle their li’l argeement.”
“Not one of these here gaping fools figgered Jim were serious,” Fitzpatrick added. “Till next morning when they rolled outta their bed-shucks and found Bridger building hisself a boat.”
“A b-boat?” Tuttle asked in surprise.
“T’weren’t no big shakes—nothing more’n some stout willow branches I chopped down, just the way I’d watched the Injun squaws do it.”
An apt and eager student, Bridger had relished this opportunity to try his own hand at building a bullboat. Driving the butt-ends of the willow into the ground around a four-to-five-foot circle, he bent the limbs over and tied all their narrow ends together to form something on the order of an upside-down basket.
“I tried to talk the fool out of it,” Fitzpatrick explained.
“And some of the rest of us too,” another claimed, “when we saw he’d got hisself serious ’bout going into that devil’s canyon.”
“You get that, boys? That morning while’st I was working on my boat, a handful of the ones what talked me into going come up to try talking me into not going,” Bridger explained. “ ‘What, you’re crazy as a March hare, young’un!’ said one of ’em to me. ‘Why, you don’t even know if’n you can find your way back here to us!’ said ’nother. ‘How ’bout waterfalls—likely you’ll drown like a rat!’ Then ’nother of ’em warned me, ‘How ’bout the Injuns? By God, you don’t know a damned thing about what Injuns is in that country!’ ”
Fitzpatrick added, “And I told Jim it didn’t matter a twit about which way the river goes anyhow.”
“Didn’t make me no never-mind,” Bridger said. “I kept my hands busy. Far better, I figgered, to be going somewhere. Not like the rest of them what were having their fun with me—all they was doing was sitting on their arses in camp.”
As the others laughed in agreement, Jim continued his story, telling how he had woven smaller willow limbs among the thicker ones, lashing each loop to make the framework as strong as he possibly could before he took a green buffalo hide and laid it over his small dome—hide to the inside. Then the detailed work began: sewing the buffalo skin to that willow framework, binding it all around the edge of that circular opening.
“By that next night I was ready to make her seaworthy,” Jim boasted proudly.
At a cookfire he heated up a large kettle of tallow rendered from a bear recently shot while he built himself a small fire over which he set the upside-down boat. When the hide grew hot to the touch, Bridger took a small wooden spoon and began to smear the melted tallow over every seam and stitch and hole in that buffalo hide. That done, it was time to let his craftsmanship cool and harden.
“At sunup the following morning, I cut me as long a pole as I could find,” Jim told the group. “Something to push along again’ the bottom with, or shove me away from the rocks in the canyon, if that need be.”
“I give him one last chance to stay back,” Fitzpatrick stated with a shrug. “But he was bound to go, no matter what. I figgered I’d seen the last of the lad.”
Bridger continued, “Got my rifle an’ pouch, strapped on tomahawk and knife, then throwed in a big sack of some dried buffler meat—an I pulled that boat on over to the river.”
Potts shook his head, saying, “We all thought we was seein’ the last of Jim Bridger.”
Finally in the river, he slipped away slowly at first. Jim waved to the men on the bank and settled into his boat, gripping his pole, pushing his way into the main current. The men on the bank waved and shouted their farewells, many taking off their hats and raising them into the air in salute to his courage. Then all too soon Bridger couldn’t see them any longer. And beyond the second bend in the narrowing canyon, the river seemed to crash in upon itself, the current picking up speed.
Breathlessly, Bridger told the silent group, “It were like nothing I ever done afore.”
The Bear picked up that tiny bullboat with its lone passenger and hurtled them along faster and faster between the rising walls of the river’s canyon as the serene water transformed into a frothing, crashing, boiling cauldron that whirled Bridger round and round, bouncing the boat first against one wall, then against the rocks on the other side of the narrow chute. Eventually the sound of water crashing against rock began to thunder about him, pounding on his ears so brutally that it drowned out his own thoughts.
“I been drunk an’ wild-headed afore,” Jim explained. “But my head ain’t never been that twisted round and round!”
It was a cold ride too. He had begun to shake—not just out of fear—but there in the early winter the river spray soaked him, the canyon wind chilled him … and before long he was shaking uncontrollably, frozen to the marrow. Yet somehow he maintained his death-grip on that long pole, struggling to push his boat this way, then that, doing his best to pitch through the center of the narrow gorge. And through it all he kept his rifle locked between his knees in the event he was pitched out by one of the many dizzying whirlpools, or by the series of frothy rapids he was flung over like driftwood, or hurled up against the boulders raising their heads in the middle of the channel—threatening to smash him and his tiny bullboat to splinters.
Then, despite his dulled reactions, Bridger realized the immense cold he was feeling was actually water. Looking down, he found his boat slowly filling with the dark, icy river. But try as he might in the n
ext frantic minutes, Jim realized he wasn’t going to shove the boat to either shore: there simply was no bank—only canyon wails. On and on he hurtled, slowly taking on more water with every mile.
“I figgered I was damn well going under,” Bridger exclaimed calmly as he raised his face to the sky dramatically. “Began to think back to my time as a young’un in Missoura—I’d heard me many a story of the ol’ salts who talked about rivers out here what disappear right underground on a man.”
“Under … underground?” Titus asked with a gulp. Just like the rest of them, he was caught up in the young man’s story now.
“Yup—that’s what some of them ol’ fellers tolt me. Them rivers go right down a hole in the ground. So I figgered it was just ’bout any time I’d be sucked right into some hole with that mighty river—an’ I’d never see daylight, or the Rocky Mountains, or my friends ever again.”
It was no wonder Bridger felt such dire fate awaited him.
By that time the late-autumn sky was beginning to cloud over and the sun was all but blotted out as he careened on down the canyon, its walls growing steadily steeper—the sky became nothing but a narrow and darkening strip far overhead. Now there were times when his bullboat was suddenly thrust against an outcropping of rocks, where it was suddenly wedged—with the full force of the water thundering against it—until Jim could free himself, using every last reserve in his young body … only to shove his boat back into the swirling madness of the gorge.
By then the boat was taking on more and more water, losing its natural buoyancy in the process as it slowly sank lower and lower in the freezing river. Then the strain of holding so much liquid began to tell on the bullboat’s crude, handcrafted framework. Creaking and groaning, the limbs began to shift with the weight of the water, and then some of Bridger’s sinew stitching began to unravel and loosen—the long strands of animal tendon becoming soaked to their limit.
“I figgered I was a goner an’ if I didn’t get sucked down under the ground with that river—then that river was bound to thrash me against the rocks,” Bridger told the group grown quiet as they were drawn further and further into the desperate story.
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