by Win Blevins
“Just more’n two weeks it took for us to get to Independence Rock and the Platte River. Some un you hosses knows them plains, and hungry ones they are.”
The plains of the Platte River were Coy’s birthplace. It was among Sam’s ambitions never to walk down them again. The first time he did that, he fainted from starvation, and was lucky to be found by Hannibal.
“Now and again we seed buffler at a long distance, and we got an antelope now and then, but it was starvin’ times. Worse, and you uns might not know this, was the snowdrifts. On them plains the snow piles so deep you can get lost in it. If’n a hoss ain’t careful, he comes out’n the drift headed back the way he headed in.
“Also, them plains don’t have hardly no wood. Some nights we had to walk straight on through to keep from freezin’ to death.
“Now along about Ash Hollow we come on Pawnee sign. Them Injuns, a coon as would trust ’em don’t know what way the stick floats. We swerved away from the river and didn’t swerve back for three days.
“Some’at further ’long we come on Omaha sign. Now them is good redskins, and we was starvin’ sure—we walked right into their camp. Trouble was, they was half starvin’ too, and couldn’t trade us meat. They did let us have one buffler tongue—Sublette, he had to give ’em his butchering knife for it—and we wolfed it down right in front of them. We was downright impolite.
“On we walked, getting slower every day. Even slower than us was that damn dog. It was gaunted up wors’n us, and weaker. It dragged fu’ther and fu’ther behind.”
Sam scratched Coy’s head sympathetically.
“One night we made camp in some elm trees. Bill rolled up in his blankets right off. I took time to get some branches and build a little fire. That dog was still out there in the night somewhere, straggling along.
“Finally in it comes, looks so pitiful …” Harris shook his head, remembering.
“That was too much for this coon. I says, ‘Bill, let’s make meat of that damn dog.’
“Sublette, he wouldn’t hear of it. Over and over he said no and dozed off again. But I kept after him until finally he give in.”
Coy yowled.
“I grabbed the ax and clubbed the dog in the head. Damned if the old thing didn’t get back up, though. I uz so weak from starvin’ I could hardly swing a second time, and when I did, I missed.
“One more blow—this had to be it. Wagh! What happens, but the blade flies off the ax handle, and the dog flies into the darkness, howling like a maniac.”
Coy perked up his head and quivered.
“I yelled at Sublette to help me, and finally we found the dog in the dark, whimpering. Bill, he holds it, and I sticks my butchering knife in, clear to the handle.
“Back to camp we went, and I threw the dog right onto the flames. Singe it, I’m thinking. But that damned old dog, it gives a big shake—don’t know whether it was alive or dead—and pops right out of the fire.
“Old Bill, he could stand no more. He grabbed the ax and bashed its skull in.”
Coy’s expression now was pure disdain.
“I stayed up and cooked her and et her, being keerful to leave Bill some. In the morning he et a little, but he didn’t seem none too happy about it. His taste don’t run to dog.
“Now we left the Platte angling toward the Kaw, you know the cutoff. Two days we tramped along. We was getting as weak as we was before, and the snow gave under our weight, making the going hard. We managed to shoot a rabbit, though, and that got us along till we come on the trail of a Kaw village. That trail they’d scraped, it was a big help, the snow was tramped down good. Afore long we shot four turkeys and guzzled that meat down, damn near et the feathers with it.
“It was on the Old Vermilion we finally come to the Kaw village, and they fed us. This hoss had twisted his ankle bad and couldn’t walk and wanted to rest, but Bill says we have to be in St. Louie real quick, so he trades his pistol for a horse for this coon to ride.
“It was March 4 when we got to St. Louie. Three days late, but a purt’n good job, says this ’un. And food, why you could get eatin’s anywhere, just for coins. Shinin’ times. This child don’t take to no cities, but a place with food set on tables anytime you want …”
The next morning Hannibal proposed they work with the horses. Sam knew his friend was backing off and giving him time. Where was Meadowlark? Where were Blue Medicine Horse, Flat Dog, and Gideon? Where was the brigade?
Everyone knew by now that Captain Smith had left the brigade in California and was headed back to get them. But that left out all the parts of the story that were Sam’s to tell.
Working with the horses, in Hannibal’s way of speaking, meant building that forty-two-foot ring and training both mounts and men. They worked with Paladin first.
Sam put her through her paces proudly. She responded nicely to his hand signals, trotting around the ring each way and then changing to a canter, rearing, and standing still. He got her to repeat all those exercises to whistles. Finally, he mounted, stood on her back, and rode her around the ring at both a walk and a canter.
When he jumped down, Sam was exhilarated. Horse and rider had been perfect.
“You made good use of the two years, for sure,” said Hannibal.
They watered Paladin and washed her down and put her back in the rope corral.
The work with Ellie was for Sam’s training, not the horse’s. Ellie could do anything, as far as Sam could figure. He’d seen Hannibal do forward somersaults from his hindquarter and back to his hindquarter as Ellie circled the ring. He’d never imagined people did such stunts with horses. Or without.
“Let’s try something new,” said Hannibal, and switched to the black mare, which was named Virginia.
He vaulted to a handstand on her back. Immediately, she started walking, and at his cluck went to a canter. Sam could hardly believe what he was seeing.
Now Hannibal began to turn slowly ’round and ’round on Virginia’s back as she ran.
Sam broke into applause.
Hannibal dropped to the ground. “Now you,” he said.
“Oh, no,” said Sam. He had decided he’d never be able to do somersaults from a horse’s back, and handstands were in the same category.
Hannibal put an arm around his shoulder and cajoled him to Virginia’s side. “Did you ever do handstands?”
Sam nodded. He and his brother Coy had done them as kids.
“No different,” said Hannibal, “except your hands aren’t side to side, they’re one behind the other.” He demonstrated.
Somehow Hannibal got Sam onto Virginia’s back, and into handstand position while being held. In no more than ten minutes the horse was walking around the ring while Sam stood on his hands on her back.
Half scared, half elated, he pushed up and off and took the long drop to the ground.
“In a couple of days you’ll be doing it at a canter,” said Hannibal, “and in a couple more you’ll be doing it on Paladin.”
Sam made a face. The maturing man wanted to say no, but the ten-year-old brother of Coy Morgan said yes.
Sam spent that evening doing what, in his eyes, rendezvous was all about. He sat by a campfire and listened to the doings of his friends, and some men he didn’t know, over the last year or two. A jug of whiskey circulated. A French-Canadian was making boudins for everyone, and no man knew better eating.
The Frenchy had several feet of well-washed buffalo gut laid out on a hide. This section of entrails had a soft, lacy fat on the outside. Next to the gut was a pile of chopped meat. The cook would roll a handful of the meat in dried seasonings. (Sam didn’t know what all the seasonings were, but he could see wild onion and could smell sage.) Then the Frenchy would stuff the meat into the gut, turning it inside out, so that the lacy fat would melt into the chopped flesh as it cooked. When he had a serving of boudin ready, he would hand it to any man around the fire, and that fellow would broil it on a stick.
Sam could think of no better way to rega
in the weight the desert had stripped from his body.
No man would let Coy have this food—it was too good. But the pup fed on small pieces of chopped meat the cook dropped.
Sam knew three of his companions around this fire better than well—Tom Fitzpatrick, one very smart Irishman; James Clyman, the droll and savvy Virginian, and Jim Beckwourth, the black full of bravado. These were Ashley men, trappers Sam had fought beside, had frozen or starved with, had known shining times with.
Mixed in with them close to the fire, cross-legged and broiling sticks in hand, were Antoine, the French-Canadian cook, two of his fellow mixed-bloods, and Antonio, a Spaniard up from Taos. (True, Mexico had broken free of Spain, but to the trappers Mexicans were still Spaniards.) Sam smiled inside at two men having the same name in different languages. Standing behind these eight men, stepping to and from the fire for boudins, were four or five Delawares, tribesmen who were always seen in clusters. Hannibal stood among them, talking quietly in his mother’s language, which he otherwise had little opportunity to speak.
Sam had heard the story of this tribe from Hannibal, a tale of loss that had made them into a kind of ghost band. Once they were a numerous vigorous people known as the Leni-Lenape. They lived in what was now the state of Delaware and parts of surrounding states. A couple of generations ago, the Iroquois had decided to stomp them into the ground, and did. (The Iroquois were like that, explained Hannibal, lording it over everybody and always hunting for a fight, just like the Blackfeet.) So thoroughly did the Iroquois humiliate the Delaware that they granted peace by laying down the biggest insult anyone could think of—“From now on, you are not allowed to call yourselves men.”
That weakened the tribe, and the incursion of white people finished the job. Parcel by parcel the Leni-Lenape got pushed out of Delaware and their corners of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. William Penn’s son swindled them out of a big piece of Pennsylvania land in a treaty known as the Walking Purchase. Forced to wander westward in search of a patch of earth to live on, the Leni-Lenape found themselves split into small, ragtag groups trying to hold on in Ohio and points west, land the Shawnees held and the whites were already encroaching on.
At length the Delawares parceled themselves out until they were no longer one people. They existed in bands of large families, no more, usually attached to another, larger tribe.
But in the last few years something remarkable had happened. Small bands of Leni-Lenape men had joined the fur trappers on the plains and in the mountains. No one knew why—maybe because of the adventure, or because they had something to prove. At any rate, they had earned their way to full membership in the roster of fur men, and were fully trusted. A Delaware, the trappers knew, would fight anywhere and anytime, with a courage that left you drop-mouthed. Any brigade in the mountains was more than glad to have a bunch of Delawares join them.
What struck Sam as funniest about that evening, as they devoured boudins and whiskey around the campfire, was the talk. The native languages among these men were English, Spanish, French, Cree, Ojibwa, and Delaware. The conversation, mainly, was in the single language they had in common, English.
However, since those raised with another language spoke primitive English, and the English speakers had picked up a little French or Spanish and bits of Indian tongues along the way, Hannibal labeled the language of the fireside conversation Mishmash. Sam was tickled that it sounded like an Indian name.
Antoine, for instance, grew up speaking French and Cree at home, married into the Blackfeet tribe, and now had a mate from Taos. The man sometimes studded one English sentence with words of four other languages.
Likewise the white Americans didn’t think of words like “plew,” “boudins,” and “malpais” as foreign—to these backwoodsmen those were just commonplace words.
In another few years, Hannibal had told Sam, no trapper of the Rocky Mountain beaver would be able to go home and be easily understood, no matter where he came from.
Lots of the talk was news about the places they’d been.
“Where Lewis’s Fork heads up there’s plews a-plenty, and the prettiest country you ever did see.”
“That Jackson’s Hole is a skeery place, mountains on all four sides and too many Blackfeet around. Best way to vamos is the Gros Ventre River, straight east from the hole.”
“Damned river’s even named for Blackfeet.”
“Old Jacques, he got bit by a rabid wolf and went under.”
Sam gave Coy a pat. If there were rabid wolves around, he’d have to keep the pup close and make sure he didn’t get bitten.
“Them Crows, you think you can trust ’em but you can’t.”
Sam threw a sharp look at this speaker, a coon he didn’t know.
“We was hardly out’n their village, two or mebbe three nights, and them damn young bucks run ever’ one of our horses off. Patrick, he had to talk hard at Rotten Belly to get ’em back, and make a lot of presents besides.”
“This beaver wintered at Taos and means to do the same next winter.”
Sam took note that more and more men were free trappers. Though they might travel with a brigade, they were independent and made their own decisions, including wintering in warmer weather.
One piece of news was big. Clyman said to Sam, “You know we paddled all the way around the Salt Lake?”
“What?”
“Circumnavigated it, as they say.” Clyman savored that first word on his tongue, because he could read and write and knew such words and amused himself by dropping them here.
“Well?”
The mountain men had wondered since its discovery where the outlet of the Salt Lake was. Despite considerable marching around, they hadn’t found it. Lots of them supposed the river that came out of the Salt Lake would provide the good route to Californy. In two crossings of those deserts, Sam hadn’t found anything close to a good route.
“Diah, come here.”
The captain was just a few steps away talking to Evans, and they both came quick.
Clyman looked at his old friend the captain. “Me and Black Harris and Vasquez and Fraeb, we paddled all the way around the Salt Lake.”
“And?”
“No outlet. Rivers flow into the lake, but none flows out.”
The men held smoke in their lungs and looked at each other. Such a lake was hardly heard of.
“Why don’t she overflow?” This came from a Delaware.
Diah could guess that one. “Evaporates. In the desert the heat just lifts the water up into the air. Or it sinks into the sands.”
Sam and all of Diah’s men had seen that out in the Mojave Desert.
Thus died the last glimmer of a dream.
Clyman gave a wry grin. “That Buenaventura was one pretty piece of imagining.”
“We’d already puzzled that much out,” said Diah.
Still, it was a blow.
“There’s something else about the lake,” said Clyman.
Everyone looked at him.
“You all know where this river goes into Salt Lake, and that big river comes in from Utah Lake in the southeast. But on the west side there are no rivers at all, nor creeks, nor fresh water of any kind. We damn near died out there.”
Sam looked at Evans, and they both laughed. No one had come nearer to thirsting to death than they did, buried in sand up to their necks. But that story would hold for another night or two.
The most ominous campfire tale that night was a tale of a big battle with the Blackfeet. It took place just a week ago and only five miles north along the lakeshore, where the Shoshones were camped on the way to rendezvous.
One man after another took up the story. The Blackfeet happened on a Shoshone man and his squaw and killed them.
The Shoshones sounded the alarm—rifle fire and hoofbeats.
The Utes, camped not far away, heard the ruckus and came running. Some trappers who happened to be in the camp rode with them.
“When I got there,” Beckwourth
said, “them Blackfeet was taken up against the mountain in some trees, a thick grove. Not a war party—squaws, kids, everything. The women was piling up whatever they could for breastworks. The ground all the way around was open, so it was hard to get at ’em.”
“Them Utes and Snakes, though,” said a man Sam didn’t know, “they was hot to fight.” Snakes was the common trapper name for the Shoshone.
“I was next to old Bill Sublette,” said Jim, “and he was hot too. We crept up within pistol range, and we made them come. An arrow ain’t a flea compared to flying lead, or I don’t know what way the stick floats.”
Now Sublette walked up.
“This man,” said Jim, nodding at Sublette, “run up on ’em to close range and shot two, one with pistol, one with rifle. Arrows flew all around him, but he come back untouched, like he had some big medicine. Cap’n Bill has got the hair of the bear in him.”
Sublette grinned. “We gave them Blackfeet a licking.”
Silence. Someone said, “So how’d it come out?”
“They had cover and we didn’t,” said Jim. “We shot at each other until it got dark. During the night they slipped away.”
“Casualties?” asked Jedediah.
“One trapper wounded,” said Sublette, “though I believe a couple of others thought they were about to go under. Three Snakes killed and three wounded. No Utahs killed at all.”
“And you should have seen them fight,” said Jim.
“What about the Blackfeet?” asked Diah.
“We found six bodies, and they carried off a good many others,” said Sublette. “Not bad, when you consider who had the cover.”
Sam was thinking, when Beckwourth’s an old man, he’ll recollect taking a hundred scalps that day.
When Sam and Hannibal stretched out in their blankets, Coy on the earth between them, Sam found that his tongue was loosened by whiskey, or his feelings were rattled, or something. He started with Gideon.
“I had to cut Gideon’s leg off,” he blurted out. He didn’t know why he started here.
Hannibal turned on his side and gave Sam that look he had, all his attention on you. The fire, down to coals, pulsed out a yellow glow.
