by Win Blevins
It was like being in a barrel rolling downhill. You didn’t know what was going to whack you or what direction you were going to bounce. A lot of the whacks came up the rope from Paladin, who was downstream of Sam and fighting the lead like hell.
Sam didn’t think they would make it. Not both of us anyway.
He thought of letting go of the lead. Maybe they’d both have a better chance if they weren’t tugging on each other.
He held on even tighter and swam harder. We live or die together.
The river charged into Sam’s mouth and up his nostrils. His spirits dipped. Before long his arms were so weak they flailed, limp. He put his mind in his legs, which had some strength left, and told them to kick like never before.
Sometimes his head was buried in water. He kept swimming. When air came, he snatched it. He swam and swam and swam—until he realized Paladin was walking.
He stood up, and fell over.
Paladin charged for higher ground. Sam let the lead go and followed her. Even crotch-deep water felt good. After fifty yards they were onto dry land.
“I’m going back for the raft,” said Diah.
Sam flopped onto the ground. How does Diah do it?
A tongue lapped his ear.
Coy! Sam had left Coy in Evans’s arms, but the pup had gotten loose and made the swim.
Sam laughed. Diah disappeared into the rushes. Sam was too tired to move.
Sam dreamed, maybe. Or maybe not. In seconds, it seemed, he heard an awful thrashing. The captain was fighting the river.
Sam ran through the thigh-deep water.
The raft had drifted about fifty yards downstream. Evans and Gobel pushed from behind. Jedediah swam in front, the rope in his mouth and, Sam saw, around his neck.
Sam dived flat and swam for the captain.
Halfway there he had to laugh at himself. Hell, his arms and legs could barely make it.
He floated up to Jedediah and grabbed the rope with both hands.
Jedediah let go with his teeth, wound his neck out of the rope, and grabbed with his hands. In only a dozen strokes they could stand up again.
Jedediah muttered and mumbled. Sam listened for a cuss word but didn’t hear any.
“Get the horses,” the captain told Sam.
That meant the single company horse that was left and the company mule. Sam splashed them through the rushes to the raft, and Jedediah, Sam, Gobel, and Evans hitched their belongings onto their mounts, except for their rifles, which they carried themselves. Sam was glad to have The Celt back in his hand.
Now, though, the horses were mired. They’d sunk almost to their bellies in the mud and couldn’t get out. No amount of tugging would budge them.
The four men waded to dry land, leaving the animals. They made a little fire, gnawed on the dried horse meat, which was almost gone, and went to sleep.
Overnight the river dropped. The horses were only knee-deep now, and desperate to get the hell onto land. Rested, the men heaved them out. Then they had to spend nearly half a day drying out their possibles.
All four were impatient. They were no more than four days, they figured, from rendezvous. More urgent, soon someone would get a shot at an animal, and they would have fresh meat.
Just before they camped that night, Diah shot at a bear, wounded him, but did not kill him. Across the fire they ate the last of their horse meat. They sat in moody silence and barely exchanged a word, because each man wanted only to complain, and complaining made things worse.
The next morning Diah went alone ahead of the party and got a shot at a buck. Jedediah saw the deer stagger, but it ran off, back toward the party.
Jedediah followed on the run. Seeing lots of blood, he told the men to wait. Sam came to help.
The blood led to a thicket, and there lay the buck.
Jedediah walked around and grabbed him by the antlers.
The buck jumped up and wrenched free of Jedediah’s grip. Sam dived for its hind legs. The buck ran off.
This time Sam did hear cuss words, and added plenty of his own.
They followed the blood, Coy trailing, and soon found the buck again.
Jedediah pounced on him and cut his ham strings.
“A fat, good-looking buck,” said Sam.
They built a fire on the spot and roasted meat.
Jedediah wrote later:
We then employed ourselves most pleasantly in eating for about two hours and for the time being forgot that we were not the happiest people in the world, or at least thought but of our feast. It was eaten with a relish unknown to a palace.
So much do we make our estimation of happiness by a contract with our situation that we were as much pleased and as well satisfied with our fat venison on the bank of the Salt Lake as we would have been in the possession of all the luxuries and enjoyments of civilized life in other circumstances.
These things may perhaps appear trifling to most readers, but let any one of them travel over the same plain as I did, and they will consider the killing of a buck a great achievement, and certainly a very useful one.
The next afternoon they fell in with a band of Shoshones on the way to rendezvous, and camped with them that night.
The day after that, which the captain said was the third of July, they walked into the big camp their fellow travelers had made on the shores of Bear Lake. They took their time coming down that last hill, still leading their horses. Sam felt like they were making a parade.
Bill Sublette was the first man to come running toward them.
“Diah,” he yelled. “Diah!”
He turned and hollered back to the camp.
“They’re alive! Captain Smith is alive!”
The travelers got flooded with friends at the edge of camp. One man after another clapped them on the back, until Sam thought he would fall down.
No one asked yet, Where’s the others? You started with two dozen. Or, Where’s the plews?
Jedediah saw on every man’s face, though, what the fear was. “The men are alive,” he said.
Men. Alive. Sam felt that split in his heart again, the one that would never heal.
“Time for that story later,” Diah went on.
They could see in the faces of their friends how woebegone they looked. Evans and Sam looked at each other and laughed. We made it.
“The news is better than we look,” said Diah.
“We gave you up for dead,” Sublette told the captain, looking happily into his eyes.
Dead. That split again. Sam would have to tell his story, and he didn’t see how he could.
“Before anything else,” said Sublette, “you look like you got about a month’s worth of eating to do.”
David Jackson had an idea. A small cannon had been brought out from St. Louis to rendezvous this year. All the men in camp stood at attention, and Jackson had it fired, as a salute.
They stumbled toward food, water, friends, campfires.
Rest, probably for all of July, thought Sam. Water, a whole lake full of it. Food, all I can eat. Grass, all Paladin wants. Rest. Talk. Friends. Comradeship.
Sam was happy.
He hobbled Paladin near the edge of the lake on some good grass. As he stood back up, a familiar voice said, “Yes, you are a hero.”
Sam whirled.
Hannibal McKye.
Sam bear-hugged him.
Part Five
RENDEZVOUS
Twenty
Friendship
“I’m in Sublette’s camp,” said Hannibal. “Let’s get you settled.” He did a double take on Sam’s face. “Your face isn’t so pretty now that you broke your nose,” he said, “but it’s more interesting.”
Four big camps spread out along the lakeshore, Utahs on one end, Shoshones on the other, and in the middle the trappers—David Jackson’s outfit and Bill Sublette’s, a big caravan of horses, mules, and men, many of them new to the mountains.
The camps were chaos. Tipis, tents, brush huts, cook fires, sweat lodges, may
be a couple of hundred trappers (who were white Americans, black Americans, Mexicans, Indians, French-Canadian half bloods, Irishmen, Englishmen, Frenchmen … ), and maybe twice that many Utahs and Shoshones.
Here and there along the lakeshore, in separate bands, grazed over a thousand horses and mules.
Hannibal led Sam, Coy, and Paladin through these camps as though through a series of alleys.
“Here,” he said at last, “this is our place.”
Sam saw the horse flesh first. Hobbled and rope-corraled on good grass among some cottonwoods was Ellie, the fine grulla stallion Hannibal rode. Her name was short for elephant, a reminder of circus days. He had another horse too, a good-looking black mare. “I’ll show her off for you later,” said Hannibal. They put Paladin in with the other mounts and hobbled her.
Sam’s friend had built a fine brush hut, of the supple limbs of willows and other trees. It gave Sam a pang. He hadn’t seen Hannibal since the rendezvous of 1825, when Sam went off to steal the horses that might get him a wife. He looked abruptly into his friend’s eyes.
“I wasn’t assuming you failed to win Meadowlark,” Hannibal said gently, “just making room in case.”
Sam said nothing. The story was far worse than “failed to win.”
He threw his blanket down and stretched out, just for a trial. He hadn’t had a shelter over his head since he left California. It seemed good. The leaves were fragrant and the shade delicious. If rain came up—what a glorious thought, rain!—they could throw a couple of blankets on top and stay dry.
Sam peered toward the westering sun through the back of the brush hut, but the leaves nearly filtered it out. “You can’t imagine how good green looks,” said Sam.
Hannibal crawled in, sat with legs crossed, lit up his white clay pipe, and handed it to Sam.
“Two years’ doings to tell,” said Hannibal with a big grin. “Get started.”
Sam’s throat swelled. He felt like he couldn’t talk. He took a long draw on the pipe and sent the smoke up to Father Sky. He decided what to say, but the first time he tried the words wouldn’t come out.
Finally he squeaked, “Let’s just smoke.”
Sam met Hannibal McKye on the pivot-point day of his life. On Christmas Eve, 1822, he made love to a woman for the first time, the family’s neighboring teenager, Katherine. The next day, at Christmas dinner and in front of both families, she announced her betrothal to his older brother, Owen.
Sam reeled out of that house, berserk with confusion, grief, anger—and ran into Hannibal. They took supper at a campfire on the riverbank, just the two of them. Across that fire Sam told his sad story to this man, an Indian and a near stranger.
Hannibal was the most unusual man Sam had ever met. He was the son of a Dartmouth professor of classics and a Delaware woman who had come to Dartmouth as a student. Hannibal had been raised speaking both English and Delaware; reading English, Latin, and Greek; and reading with equal ease the sign deer and bear left in the woods. He left home early—bored, he said—and joined the first American circus, which was then in Philadelphia. There he became a circus rider, performing tricks on the backs of liberty horses, mounts trained to respond to signals of voice and hand. On the night they met Sam didn’t know a smidgeon of that, and didn’t care.
The man-boy Sam spoke of was abandoned by Katherine, and was scorned for years by his own brother. He spoke of his love of wild places, his desire to wander where the world still felt like Eden. He spoke of his yearning to go west, to go to the Rocky Mountains. But all that, the boy-man admitted, was crazy.
Hannibal responded with the words Sam now carried in his medicine pouch. “Everything worthwhile is crazy, and everyone on the planet who’s not following his wild-hair, middle-of-the-night notions should lay down his burden, right now, in the middle of the row he’s hoeing, and follow the direction his wild hair points.”
Sam went west that night, and everything he had become, as a human being, came from following that wild hair. Everything good, he thought, and everything bad. Everything.
Now Sam looked at his friend across an aching gulf. In 1825 at the rendezvous on Henry’s Fork, above the Siskadee …
His memories were pictures. Hannibal trained Paladin and Sam in their first circus riders’ tricks, though Paladin was little more than a filly. Sam left rendezvous to steal horses to win Meadowlark. Instead, he got Blue Medicine Horse killed, his best friend and her brother. He gave a sun dance—he could hardly believe it yet—and in that sacrifice he saw something. He won Meadowlark, lost her, and got her again, forever. Now she was lost forever.
The memories of her, which washed over him now as warm waves fizz up a sand beach, these came in sensations, touches, breaths. If his mind resisted remembering, his fingers, mouth, eyes, the flesh of his chest—these recalled all too intimately. For a moment she was there with him, living inside him, breathing with him.
The two friends sat together for a long while like that. Hannibal refilled the pipe more than once. They drew on it and breathed out. The smoke wafted around them, real but insubstantial, like Sam’s memories. Finally, after more time than he could count, Sam said, “Later I’ll be able to talk. Later. Let’s go sit with the others.”
These others were friends, many of them.
A handclasp from Tom Fitzpatrick, the Irishman who made the same walk down the Platte River Sam did, seven hundred starving miles, arriving just a few days later. Tom was busy clerking right now, signing plews in and supplies out.
“It’s good to see your scalp on your head.” This drawled from James Clyman. No evening Sam remembered with this Virginian was finer than the one when James spun Sam the story of Romeo and Juliet, written by one Shakespeare, and reworded to a mountain man’s understanding.
A quick rassle from Jim Beckwourth, the big mulatto, and a promise to share some whiskey later. Beckwourth also rolled around for a moment with Coy. Beckwourth knew Coy well—the pup pranced and yipped softly.
“How you, coon?” from Jim Bridger. After being looked down on after the Hugh Glass episode, Bridger had risen amazingly in everyone’s estimation. The Blanket Chief, they called him now.
Hannibal and Sam wandered through the camp, greeting man after man, sitting a bit here, taking a swig there, and yonder settling in to listen to a story.
Dan Potts, a trapper Sam seemed to see only at rendezvous, had a tale of unbelievable country. He told it over and over at this rendezvous, and wrote it down and sent it back to civilization with the baggage train, where it got printed in a Philadelphia newspaper that fall. It seemed that, as a member of Bill Sublette’s outfit, he had seen an amazing lake:
On the south border of the lake is a number of hot and boiling springs, some of water and others of most beautiful fine clay, resembling a mush pot, and throwing particles to the immense height of from twenty to thirty feet. The clay is of a white, and of a pink color, and the water appears fathomless, as it appears to be entirely hollow underneath. There is also a number of places where pure sulphur is sent forth in abundance.
Certainly his Philadelphia readers were only the first to disbelieve outlandish tales of sulphurous springs and geysers in the Yellowstone country. Potts went on,
One of our men visited one of these whilst taking his recreation—there at an instant the earth began a tremendous trembling, and be with difficulty made his escape when an explosion took place resembling that of thunder. During our stay in that quarter I heard it every day.
The rest of Potts’s story was how he made his way to the Yellowstone country through a beautiful hole, Jackson’s Hole, they called it, and of being harassed by Blackfeet all the way up north and all the way back to the depot, the trappers’ usual wintering place.
Sam and Hannibal wandered on from fire to fire, taking meat and whiskey sociably, and listening to the tales of a year’s doings. Every trapper had a story, and many of them were spine-tingling or funny or beautiful or amazing.
Sam’s favorite story of that evening
was told by Black Harris, a veteran trapper Sam knew only by reputation, a very considerable reputation for desperate adventures and an inclination to tell them even bigger than they were. This one sounded like it had some fact about it, and was vouched for by Bill Sublette. Sam gnawed on hump ribs as he listened, and gave the bones to Coy, who was greedy.
In camp this past winter, according to Harris, as January 1 approached, Sublette began to talk of walking to St. Louis. It seemed that the company’s contract with General Ashley required the general to bring another year’s supplies to the mountains, but only if a messenger appeared in St. Louis no later than March 1. Since St. Louis was about fifteen hundred miles from the valley of the Great Salt Lake, it was time to get going.
He asked Black Harris to go with him.
“This child thought on it, fifteen hundred miles, just the two of us with thousands of Indians betwixt here and there, on foot, in winter weather. It was a hellacious idea, so naturally this beaver says, ‘Let’s give it a go.’”
Harris looked a likely enough candidate to Sam. He was lean as moccasin soles, with a face of leather and whip cord. Sam judged him to be violent in his feelings, whether the feelings were celestial or devilish.
“We started on snowshoes, with a pack dog to carry our possibles.”
Coy squealed, perhaps in protest of canine slavery.
“In our possible sacks we stuffed all the dried buffler meat we could carry, which was enough to stagger hosses, and we was only men.
“Over to the valley of the Siskadee we saw no sign of buffler. Saw plenty of sign of Blackfeet, howsomever, and it made this child uncomfortable—made his scalp itch, for a truth. Hightailed it on up South Pass—you know how ice-bit that place is, of a winter. Had to melt snow for water all the way.”
Sam had nearly frozen to death on South Pass with Sublette and Clyman in the winter of 1824, when they couldn’t keep a fire going. A nice contrast to dying in the desert, he thought.
Harris rolled on. “The Sweetwater, she was a sweet sight, and for a while we could carry them snowshoes. On the east side of the Rockies, the clouds shed a plenty of snow, but the winds sweep it right up and blow it on to the Missoura.
