Ride the Moon Down

by Terry C. Johnston

  Understandable that if the white man didn’t bring the women there to lie with the trappers at their summer gatherings, then the women would have to be wives. She had imagined a trader caravan chock-full of pale-skinned women, enough to provide one partner for every trapper. And some of those white women would likely have hair on their faces, just as the majority of white men she had seen in her life grew hair on their faces.

  Among the Crow, neither gender grew facial hair. In coming to view beards and mustaches as a characteristic of the white race, it seemed very natural to assume that many of the white man’s women would grow the same beards and mustaches on their faces.

  Still, her greatest concern about that long trader caravan bringing an untold crowd of white women the way it brought a dazzling and innumerable array of trade goods lay in her fear that the white men would abandon their Indian wives, forsake their Indian children, and return to their own kind. Waits-by-the-Water did not want to think of life without Ti-tuzz.

  “The women are here to marry white men?”

  He answered, “Naw, I figure they come with their husbands.”

  “Among your people, can one man steal the wife of another?”

  “Yes,” he answered, then suddenly looked down at her with some alarm. His eyes quickly softened as he must have read the hurt that had to show on her face. “But don’t you worry ’bout me and them white women. I had near all I could stand of their kind back east.” He embraced her fiercely. “No white woman ever gonna take me away from you.”

  She gripped him tight, pressing her cheek against his chest, feeling safe there, safe enough to tell him of an old fear.

  “When you left me behind with Rosa two winters ago, I was so afraid I would never see you again,” she confided as more shouts reverberated in the distance. “I feared you would be killed and I would be left to live among strangers in a land I did not know. But even more frightening, I was afraid you would stay in that country from where you came—you would find a white woman and forget about your Crow woman.”

  She felt him rub his chin on the top of her head.

  “You are the one I love,” he said to her in his halting Crow. “Maybe it’s only my poor luck, but every white woman I’ve knowed has been faithless to me, one way or another. For more winters than I can count, I’ve looked for one woman who would remain loyal to me, a woman who could show me that I was the most important person in her heart.”

  “You are all my life,” she told him.

  “You won’t be scared of no white women?”

  Gazing up at him, Waits replied, “No. You have given me your promise.”

  “How ’bout me taking you and Magpie to have yourselves a long look at them women?”

  A slow smile crossed her face, and Waits nodded. “Yes, let’s go now and see these women creatures with their pale skin and their hairy faces.”

  By the time they were saddled up, with Magpie riding behind her father, loping up to that flat mesa across the Green, more than half-a-hundred mounted trappers were racing for the head of the caravan in the middistance. Hundreds of mules and horses, along with many small two-wheeled objects her husband explained were called carts. As the trappers kicked their horses into a furious charge on the front of the pack train, Waits spotted a new sort of two-wheeled cart that appeared to be a small box sitting on its wheels, the front of the box laid open so two people could control the pair of horses attached to it.

  All those trapper guns erupted with smoke, and a heartbeat later she heard the distant weapons boom from the caravan in a ragged order. Then her husband was laughing, harder than he had laughed for some time.

  “Damn if them pilgrims don’t figger those boys are Injuns on the attack!” he roared, his eyes moist with tears. “Lookit ’em! Stopping that pack train and circling them carts right there to make a fight of it!”

  A handful of figures at the head of the march stopped, turned, and were yelling at the pack train.

  “I’ll wager the pilot for that outfit is telling ’em just what a bunch of softheaded idjits they are—being skairt of them white fellers come riding out, whooping and hawing!”

  That broad front of bare-chested trappers was continuing to race for the caravan, unslowed, shouting and shrieking just like warriors as half of their number swept down one side of the incoming train, the other half tearing like demons down the opposite side. Both ends of their charge circled the other and continued their gallop back up the line of march until they reached the head of the procession where they slowed to match the pilot’s pace.

  Then the ceremony began. The white man sure put a lot of importance in this matter of shaking hands and pounding one another on the back, she thought.

  “C’mon, woman,” Bass said with excitement. “Let’s go show Magpie how a white gal looks.”

  His pony was already bolting away, with Magpie clinging to her father’s back the way a small, chubby tick would grip the hide of an old bull as Waits nudged her horse into a gallop.

  In nearing the head of the march, she expected him to slow down to the crawl the caravan was taking, but instead her husband kept galloping right on past the leaders. At times he waved that hat he had torn from his head, but he did not ease the pace.

  In front of them some strange creatures bolted, starting to peel off to the right and scatter, lumbering with an ungainly gait as two young Indian boys started after the animals, yelling and whipping the air with long sticks. Then they were close enough that she recognized the scattering, bawling animals, those strange creatures the white man brought out to rendezvous every summer to pull his wagons or to give him warm milk. Strange that a race of people so prepared to fight and defend themselves like the whites would have so docile and tranquil an animal while her people grew up among the wild buffalo.

  Her husband was slowing as he neared that strange small box set on its four small wheels, his horse jogging sideways to a halt with Magpie laughing merrily at the exhilarating ride. Bass waved to her with his hat. As she came racing up to yank back on the reins, she thought the white man who rode a horse beside the box wagon looked familiar. The rider pushed his hat back from his face. She smiled, recognizing the holy man who had cut the arrowhead from Bridger’s back last summer.

  The holy man was smiling, waving her over, at the same time saying something to those in the shadow of the box wagon.

  As Waits slowed her pony to a walk beside her husband’s horse, she felt her eyes grow big, and her chin drop. On one side of the box wagon sat a thin, sour-faced, bony creature who peered out at her with suspicion and alarm from beneath the brim of a black hat that nearly wrapped itself around the woman’s face. Dark circles hung like ugly pendants below her glaring, accusing eyes. Waits wondered if this person had ever smiled in her life, much less laughed.

  Was this a white woman? No wonder the white man had such an incurable hunger for Indian women!

  But the creature seated next to the hard-eyed one caused Waits to gasp. The holy man and her husband were talking at once, shaking hands while Bass dipped his head and introduced their daughter … but Waits could not take her eyes off the radiance of the fair-skinned beauty who sat alongside the mousy-haired, mean-eyed, dried-up pucker of a creature.

  To her surprise this second white woman pulled her hat from her head, revealing hair the color of which Waits had seen on some white men—but never in such tight curls and ringlets. She reached up and touched one of her own black braids wrapped with strands of blue and red ribbon, bewildered to discover she almost coveted hair like this white woman’s—

  “Waits-by-the-Water …”

  Upon hearing her name, she turned to her husband.

  “You remember Dr. Whitman?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she answered in English, and dropped her eyes, adding in Crow, “he is the holy man.”

  Bass translated her comment to Whitman in English, then continued in Crow for her. “This woman closest to us is the holy man’s wife. Both of them are wives of holy men.
”

  “Not whores?”

  “No,” and Titus shook his head with a wry grin that put Waits at ease with her questioning. “This is Whitman’s wife. Her name is Narcissa. Nar-Sis-Sa.”

  “Nar-Sis-Sa.”

  The moment the Crow woman repeated it, Narcissa Whitman smiled at her and wiped her brow with a large red bandanna, cheerfully saying, “Hello. What is your name?”

  Slowly Waits repeated what her husband had taught her of the white man sounds to her name, “Waits-by-the-Water.”

  Twisting halfway around on the back of his horse, Bass had managed to loop an arm about his daughter, and she was crawling over his hip to sit in front of him on the pony’s bare back.

  “This here’s my daughter, Magpie,” he announced. “Tell these good folks you’re pleased to meet ’em, Magpie.”

  “Pleased mee’cha.”

  At the child’s tinkling reply both Marcus and Narcissa laughed, but neither the sour-faced woman nor her dull-eyed husband showed anything more than indifference bordering on contempt. Ahead of them the column was already resuming its march.

  “This year we push on for the Nez Perce country,” Whitman explained to Titus as they all set off once more, continuing their descent to the river bottom. “Has Reverend Parker come in to meet us?”

  With a shrug Scratch replied, “I ain’t see’d him. But I can’t say for sure, Doctor. Likely wouldn’t know him less’n someone said that’s who he was.”

  “I pray he has returned,” the physician added. “He vowed he would—so to lead us back to where we are to establish our mission.”

  “We will make our way through the wilderness without him if we must,” said the woman with the happy eyes.

  Waits-by-the-Water found she liked the light-haired one more and more as they pressed on to the rendezvous. But the other woman’s glare made her feel self-conscious, as if that dour woman did her best to hold herself above all others by the way she peered down her nose with such haughty disdain.

  When they reached the campground chosen for the supply train, the two women were helped down from their wagon while trappers scurried to provide a place to sit in the shade where the women were brought water to drink. Nearby others began to erect a large conical tent. It struck Waits as more and more white men came to gawk at the new arrivals, how those trappers fell over one another to keep the white women from having to lift a hand to help themselves.

  Perhaps it was best that these two white women were hurrying on through this mountain west, she decided, best they were bound for the land of the Nez Perce far, far away. Waits-by-the-Water believed it had to be a good omen that the women did not belong to trappers, better instead that they belonged to those who were only passing through. It was plain enough that neither of the white women belonged out there—even Nar-sis-sa, despite her open friendliness. Both of them looked … soft. Not hardy enough to withstand much trial or hardship. And that was pretty much all life held in store in this brutal land.

  The white men who had come to this Indian country to catch the beaver had either toughened themselves enough to survive, or they had died. Her husband explained how some of his kind had turned around and fled back to the land of the whites. Waits doubted these soft women raised inside their immobile lodges could endure a nomadic life lived outdoors through all seasons.

  For now these two clearly seemed relieved to have reached this raucous white man’s gathering. Neither of them appeared to have any children, and it was pretty apparent that neither Narcissa nor the glowering one would have to raise a hand to do much of anything in caring for themselves. In fact, their hands weren’t soiled at all. Not the way dirt and soot permanently etched every knuckle and scored every wrinkle on Waits’s hands. No doubt these women didn’t know the first thing about graining a hide, chopping wood, or removing the organs of an antelope without pricking the bladder or rupturing a bowel. These white women had men who leaped right in to do everything for them. With all those trappers fluttering around like hummingbirds at a vine of sweet blossoms, it was no wonder these women didn’t know the first thing about taking care of themselves.

  They didn’t have to.

  The more Waits-by-the-Water watched the comings and goings in that camp, the more she decided it was a very, very good thing these women weren’t staying. Almost laughable, she thought, how these hardy, coarse men became such different creatures around their white women. Waits contented herself that the women were only passing through.

  And she hoped the white men would bring no more of these soft creatures to this land.

  For the first time since Bass could recollect, there were nearly as many free men come to rendezvous as there were company trappers. And a damned sight fewer of both camped this year near the mouth of Horse Creek.

  Slightly more than a hundred Americans had come in with the Bridger and Drips brigades, along with no more than fifty Frenchmen between them. With the supply caravan, Tom Fitzpatrick brought in another seventy hands to wrangle more than four hundred horses and pack mules, but the lion’s share of those men would be turning right around for the States once the beaver was all bought up.

  At Fort Laramie, Fitzpatrick had abandoned the long train of wagons, packing everything they couldn’t fit into nineteen two-wheeled carts onto the backs of their mules for that last leg of the journey over the Southern Pass and on to Green River. Milton Sublette, courageously recovering from the recent amputation of his leg, bounced all the way into rendezvous in one of those carts. Before he slid to the ground, Milt strapped on the cork leg purchased for him in Philadelphia by Hugh Campbell, Robert’s brother.

  It brought some hot moisture to Bass’s eyes to watch that man, an unvarnished hero four years before at the Battle of Pierre’s Hole, now wobble and waver on that one good leg as old friends rushed up to hug and shake his hand as if it were a pump handle on a long-ago dried-up well. Especially the tall, slab-shouldered Joe Meek and his Shoshone wife.

  Titus remembered the story fondly told of this woman and the two inseparable friends. Seasons ago Umentucken, the Mountain Lamb, had married Milton Sublette, known as the “Thunderbolt of the Rockies.” Back in thirty-two she and their young child had been with Milt’s brigade that summer morning in Pierre’s Hole when they chanced to bump into a large band of Blackfoot.

  Eventually Sublette’s leg refused to heal from an arrow wound his friends claimed was poisoned. Reluctantly deciding to return east to have the infection cared for, not knowing if he would ever return to the mountains, Milt gave his wife over to his best friend, Joe Meek. For the last few years Joe had cared for this beautiful woman, raising Milt’s child as he did his own.

  Shyly now, the Lamb stepped out from behind her new husband and inched up to embrace Sublette.

  Not one man there mentioned the tears they saw well in Milt’s eyes, or the way he bravely snorted and swiped at his nose as the crowd pounded on his back and gawked at his new cork leg.

  “By damn!” Scratch roared. “You ever think you’d have one’a your legs make it to hell afore you!”

  “Shit! Don’t matter I got only one good leg,” Sublette chortled, “I can still outrun the devil hisself!”

  “That’s right, Scratch!” Bridger agreed. “With you and Meek galloping to keep ahead of the devil, Milt don’t have to worry none about running the fastest … he only, gotta be fast ’nough to stay ahead of you!”

  “You figger I’m so slow, the devil gonna get his claws in me, eh?”

  “Damn right he will, Bass!” Milton bawled with laughter.

  “One of these days, mayhaps,” Scratch confessed with a grin. “But not till I’m so old and stove-up I can’t outrun him no more … and all you niggers are already there to greet me!”

  By the following day Fitzpatrick’s hands had fixed up the largest of a handful of squat log structures first erected a short distance from the Green by Captain Bonneville’s fur brigade back in the spring of 1832. Rather than hacking any windows in the crude eighteen-by
-eighteen-foot square, the builders settled for what light streamed between the unchinked timbers or through the only entrance: a six-foot-wide, two-foot-high rectangle laid on its side some four feet off the ground. It was through this lone opening that furs were passed in and trade goods handed out, the better to protect against pilfering. For a roof Fitzpatrick’s Frenchmen had stretched some oiled sheeting across the timbers they laid overhead in an attempt to protect the valuable goods from those fickle summer storms known to visit this high valley.

  All told, more than thirteen hundred Indians were in the valley to greet the incoming train. The Shoshone and Bannock had camped along Horse Creek, while up the Green near Bonneville’s Fort both the Flathead and Nez Perce had raised their lodges.

  Moseying over to have himself a good look at the trade goods Fitzpatrick had packed out from St. Louis, Titus watched the man in fancy buckskins dismount from his showy white mule and walk up to shake hands with Bridger and Drips. Together the three of them ambled toward the awning where Milt Sublette sat in the shade.

  “Who’s that in them foofaraw booshway clothes with all the red wool and blue beads?” Scratch asked of a familiar face who had turned from Bridger’s side and was walking his way.

  “Name’s Joshua Pilcher,” the tall man said when he stopped beside Bass. “I hear he was on the upper Missouri with Lisa afore Ashley ever come west. When the Spaniard died, Pilcher took over Lisa’s company, and they did well till Immel and Jones got butchered by the Blackfoot in twenty-three. Drips and Fontenelle, even one of them Bent brothers, they all worked for Pilcher one time or other. Some time back I heard talk he offered the English up north he’d trap this side of the mountains for the Hudson’s Bay.”

  Glaring at Pilcher, Bass grumbled, “On American territory? That’d make him a traitor to his own country and his own kind!”