by Earl Murray
Bom thought it strange that Edward didn’t take him along. He thinks it just as well, though, as he likes the fort life and is starting to relish a little freedom. He is relaxed and talks much more with me now, and also with Mr. Quincannon. Ever since Walter and Avis died, Edward kept him at a distance, not allowing him in his tent or to stand guard at any time.
I am also much more at ease. I’ve begun my artwork again and find more subjects than I can handle. Mr. Quincannon took a number of us to tour the fort. The owners were absent but we met a number of servants, including Dick and Andrew Green, and Dick’s wife, Charlotte, the cook. Charlotte and her best friend, a French–Indian woman named Rosalie, are both delightful and filled with stories. Bom and Jessie and the Rivets became fast friends with them and everyone now comes to me to volunteer for portraits.
Daisy has generated the most interest, though, and everyone has wanted to feed her and groom her and otherwise dote on the little buffalo. Mr. Quincannon had to forcibly discourage a buckskinner from taking her for steaks. Luckily, he’s one of the three who left on the hunt with Edward. Otherwise I know Mr. Quincannon would have had a serious altercation with him at one time or another.
This morning a small herd of buffalo passed nearby and a few wandered close to the fort walls. Everyone gathered to watch them, no one suggesting a hunt. Daisy galloped over to a lone cow and began suckling. It seemed the cow had recently lost her own calf because she happily took our little orphan on as her own.
I had been brushing her soft coat at the time and was desperate to have her return. I couldn’t bear to watch her cross the river by the cow’s side and become lost in the herd. Mr. Quincannon suggested that I resolve myself to the fact that Daisy has found a new mother. I cried on his shoulder for a good long time.
“It’s for the best,” he said. “Daisy needs to be with her own kind.”
I have to agree with him, but will never forget that little buffalo calf. If, even for a short time, caring for her took my mind off Walter and Avis, I will think of her always when I relive the trail to Bent’s Fort.
This afternoon I decided to portray the buffalo cow and Daisy at her side, with the fort behind. I chose a medium of watercolor on parchment paper. I intend to do a large work in oils once I get back home.
Mr. Quincannon came down to join me and shook his head in amazement.
“That is a picture befitting a king’s wall,” he said.
I thanked him and said that if he knew any kings with whom I might do business, I would be obliged.
“I’ve learned that a band of Arapaho Indians will be coming in to trade soon,” he said. “Their leader is Antelope, an old friend of mine.”
“At last I will have the chance at some portraits of warriors,” I said. Then I began to worry. “Will Kills It be among them?”
He said he thought Kills It would still be out hunting. I told him that if I got the chance to paint a portrait of his friend and possibly others, I would consider my work finished.
“You’re not going back to St. Louis, are you?” he asked.
“I believe it’s time for me to return home,” I said sadly.
“But there’s so much to see between here and Oregon.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Quincannon,” I replied, “but I think I’ve seen enough.”
Quincannon’s Journal
28 APRIL 1846, 1ST ENTRY
I believe it’s time to concentrate on my efforts to reach Oregon. Lamar is not at ease here and has taken to spending time by himself. I know him well enough to leave him alone.
I guess I feel the same way about Miss Hall. I don’t see any way of talking her into going on to Oregon. It would be foolish and a lie to tell her that the hardest part was over. She might be wise to go back, though I wish things would turn out so that she could come along.
It’s amazing to learn what this fort has gone through since I left the mountains. It has become a major trade center and landmark for travelers along the southern route. Brothers Charles and William Bent, and Ceran St. Vrain, are the owners. They have a good rapport with the regional tribes, especially the Cheyenne, as William Bent married a chief’s daughter.
I know them only slightly, and have never met the third partner, Ceran St. Vrain, who is presently with Charles looking into cattle ranching across the Mexican border. I learned that from William, who returned just this afternoon with his wife, after a short visit with her people.
He greeted me in a friendly manner and we shared a meal in the dining room. He spoke about the trade business and then turned the subject to the problems with Mexico.
“There will be fighting, of that I have no doubt,” he said. “Likely all-out war, but I have heard nothing official.”
“What about the Indians?” I asked.
“They are very restless, as you can well imagine,” he said. “Everything is changing very fast out here and they don’t like it.”
I told him about my encounter with Kills It and he said certain trouble would come from him.
“He’s a war leader now, and respected,” Bent told me. “It’s not like the old days when I could get everyone together for feasting and trading. They’re all ready to burn wagons now and I can’t stop them.”
“We’ll rest a few days and be on our way,” I said. “I just wanted to see Antelope before I left.”
“He should arrive in a couple of days,” Bent said. “Meanwhile, enjoy yourself. We’re having a fandango tonight.”
Quincannon’s Journal
28 APRIL 1846, 2ND ENTRY
A number of old trappers and traders have taken up residence and evidently pay their way by hunting for the fort. They relive the old days with Taos Lightning and card games. Some race horses but most are past those days and complain of stiff joints from setting traps in winter water.
There’s an order among these men that didn’t used to exist. When I first came into the mountains I saw a lot of drinking and gambling at the old rendezvous sites, resulting in a number of fights and a few deaths. That doesn’t happen here. If you don’t behave, you get chased away to fend for yourself alone.
An old trapper told me before I left the mountains that if the Good Lord hated your guts, you’d die out in the open. It wouldn’t be by cold, but slower—hunger and thirst. The wolves would just sit back and watch you linger. “They don’t come and tear into the two-leggeds like the settlement stories would have you believe,” he said. “If they know you’re a goner, they’ll wait till you’re down and pissed your pants for the last time.”
I had always wondered if he died peacefully or passed on naked and shoeless from eating the last scraps of his buckskin clothing while watching the grinning wolves circle him until it all got too blurry just before the end.
But it seems he hasn’t died. Not yet. I discovered him late this afternoon, after leaving Miss Hall. Samuel Brandt, buckskinner from the earliest days, arrived late last night on a white mule, just in time for a card game with some old friends. They told me he had ridden down from Fort Laramie, where the trail is clogged with wagons headed for Oregon. He had been gone a month and needed to finish some business at the graveyard.
He’s aged considerably. Most noticeable is his weight, which has easily fallen forty pounds. He never had the extra flesh to spare, and was called Bones by everyone who knew him. His face has gotten hollow and his hair thinned to nothing. Most noticeable, his smile is missing.
“Owen Quincannon?” he said when he saw me. “By all that’s damned! I heard you’d turned corn cracker.”
“I’m back,” I said. “Headed to Oregon.”
“There’s no milk and no honey there,” he said. “Sit a spell, if you’ve a mind.”
We sat cross-legged next to a grave under a cottonwood near the river. He was whittling a small wooden buffalo from a cutting of wild plum.
“Had to come back and give this to her,” he said. “She left me last spring. They wouldn’t let me put her in the tree, though, where she’d have prefer
red.”
“Is it Red Flower?” I asked.
“Consumption,” he said. “She’d been doing poorly for a spell. ’Spect she feels better now.”
I looked across the vast open toward the mountains, where Pike’s Peak rose toward the clouds. Somewhere across the mountains lay the Ute villages and Red Flower’s homeland. Some of the bands traveled to the fort to trade. I knew Bones wished he could have taken her back to her people.
“There’s nary but me left now,” he said.
“What about your sons?” I asked.
“One got drunk and drowned in the South Platte. The other got shot by a whiskey peddler. Wagh! It’s all cursed, by the way I see it. All of it.”
“So why don’t you head back to the settlements?”
“Like you did? You take me for a fool?”
“It’s no fool who wants a soft bed on freezing nights.”
“I can’t rest nohow among corn crackers.”
“Don’t live near the farms.”
“What else is back there?”
“You could settle along the river somewhere. Old Franklin, or such a place.”
“I told you before, I don’t cater to corn crackers, and you can’t go nowhere back there that they ain’t around. There’s a plenty of them rolling out this way in their broke-down wagons. They’re to blame for this ruination.”
“It was ruined before they heard of it,” I said.
“Like so much squat!”
“Samuel, we trapped all the beaver out,” I said.
Bones Brandt had always paid attention only to his own beliefs. Today was no exception.
“It’ll all come back in time,” he said. “The corn crackers won’t last out here and beaver will rise again and we can go back to the streams.”
“Beaver will never come back. Nobody wants a fur hat any longer.”
The old man’s eyes darkened. “Don’t you say that!”
“It’s true and you know it,” I said.
“I told you when you left that I figured you’d give up buffalo and go to soft hog. I see I’m right.”
“I’m headed to Oregon, but not to farm. I’ll trade with the farmers and the Indians there.”
“What, and be a Hudson’s Bay man?”
“The British are leaving Oregon.”
“Like so much hell. There’s talk that some of them will fight. Ragtags from the British army and Hudson’s Bay.”
“They can’t fight everybody.”
“They can make trouble for some, and I hear you’re headed into it.”
He told me that he had ridden past a Britisher and a bunch of no-accounts in red the day before, headed up the trail toward Fort Laramie. I told him about Sir Edward Garr and his ambitions.
“Did you talk to them?” I asked.
“I told them if they knowed what’s best for their health, they’ll steer clear of Fort Laramie. There’s a Frenchman named Latour putting a settlers’ army together. Says he’s going to Oregon and drive out Hudson’s Bay.”
“He was supposed to be traveling with me,” I said. “He won’t take orders.”
Bones laughed. “He’ll chew them Britishers a new hole, I’d say.”
He placed the carving into the soil at the top of the mound. At that moment a chickadee flew from the cottonwood and landed on the carving. It sang a little song, then flitted back up into the branches and sat looking down at Bones.
“She was always partial to them little birds,” he said.
“Come along to Oregon with me,” I said.
“I can’t leave Red Flower here alone.”
“She’s with her ancestors. You know that.”
“I’m for certain not far behind her,” he said. “But they won’t want me tagging along, and I’ve got no family no more.”
I pointed up to the chickadee. “She’ll come back for you, Samuel, when the time’s right.”
“She’s got no call to go to Oregon.”
“She’ll find you, Oregon or wherever.”
The chickadee flew off into the sunshine. Bones pointed over to where Miss Hall was working on the painting of the fort.
“She going along?” he asked. “If she is, I might consider it. You won her over yet?”
I couldn’t believe it. Since coming to the mountains, Bones Brandt had always believed an Indian woman to be the best a man could find. “Them white women got too much religion to loosen up in bed,” he always said. “An Injun woman wants you more than you do her. She’ll care for you day and night, if you’ll do the same for her.” He didn’t think that way about Miss Hall.
“What do you know about her?” I asked.
“While you were in the fort she came over here and painted my picture, slick as you please.” He rummaged in his pack and pulled out a small parchment.
The image was of Bones at a much younger age, standing with his horse, wearing buckskins and a large hat.
“I told her about my third spring in the mountains and I’ll be damned if she didn’t catch it how it was.”
“It looks good,” I said.
He pointed to the crotch. “She got that just right, too. Kinda puffed out, wouldn’t you say?”
I handed the painting back to him. “Yes, Bones, you’re puffed out. Take care of that painting. Don’t crumple it up.”
“I figure to place it between two slabs of wood,” he said. “I’ll keep it in good shape that way.” He held it tightly. “You think Red Flower will mind that I have it?”
“Why should she?”
He smiled. “Then it’s settled. Ah! Did I mention, I saw your pa this spring?” He saw the look on my face and added, “You’d do good to look him up, you know.”
“I didn’t see him all those years before,” I said. “Why should I now?”
“It’s only fitting. He’s near my age, you know, and living with the Utes.”
“How long?”
“A fair piece of time. He asked about you.”
“I’m headed straight through to Oregon,” I said.
“’Spect you are,” he said. “But someday you’ll wish you’d stopped to see him.”
Gabriella’s Journal
28 APRIL 1846, 2ND ENTRY
They call it a fandango. The Spanish women wear their finest perfumes and dress in white blouses called camisitas, with short, full skirts called enaguas. They adorn themselves with earrings and necklaces of gold and silver, and powder their faces. They line themselves along the wall and many of them roll short cigarillos for smoking.
Jessie has got to know Charlotte Green very well and has learned a lot about fort and frontier life. She told me that she wouldn’t mind staying at the fort, but that Bom thinks she’s too young.
She talked to me about it as the fandango got started. She encouraged me to join her and the other women as the festivities began, but I declined, as Mr. Quincannon was absent.
I watched with curiosity as the men formed a line across the center of the floor and began clapping to the music of two fiddles, a guitar, and a concertina. Three women accompanied them with little Mexican drums called tombes, and the crowd grew wild and festive.
I wore my blue dress for the first time in a very long while. A slim young lady with long black hair performed a Mexican hat dance to the loud whoops of everyone watching. Soon Charlotte Green and three other servant women were doing dances of their own.
I tired of watching and left the fort. I walked along the trail that led to the river, drawing the peaceful spring evening to my breast. The moon was full and the wind was soft over the plains. Some might say I was foolish for being alone, but I knew it wouldn’t be long until Mr. Quincannon found me.
I stood and watched the Arkansas flow through the vast open, the hills filled with shadows and the cries of night birds. He appeared a short way from me, a blanket folded over his arm.
“Are you getting chilled?” he said.
“Why weren’t you at the fandango?”
“It’s a little raucous
for me. At least tonight.”
Though the air was warm, I allowed him to wrap the blanket around me. He stood behind me and held me by the shoulders, his strong hands resting gently.
“Antelope and his band are arriving tomorrow,” he said. “It’s your chance to do some good paintings.”
I was excited to get the opportunity but dreaded going back to St. Louis.
“You are an amazing woman, Miss Hall. Might I call you Ella?”
I felt his fingers brush my hair away from my neck, and his warm lips touch me just below my ear. I welcomed it. He had never seemed a stranger to me, not even at our first meeting on the island in the Missouri River. At that time it had seemed as if he was supposed to be there, having arrived to take me away from my captors and deliver me unto my new life, where I belonged, with him beside me.
“I believe it’s good to dispense with formalities,” I said.
He made me want to forget about going home, about everything but the moment. His touch was very exciting.
He continued to kiss me softly, his lips trailing to my cheek. I turned and lifted my lips to his and felt his arms encircle me, drawing me close. I pulled him to me tightly and allowed myself the pleasure of absorbing him fully.
He took me by the hand and led me downriver to a small grove of cottonwoods where the grass grew lush and soft. He spread the blanket and we sat down.
“I’ve waited a long time to be alone with you,” he said. “I never thought it would happen.”
He slipped my dress down off my shoulders and kissed the tops of my breasts, gently unbuttoning the back until dress and undergarments slid free. I pulled his buckskin, shirt off and admired his chest and broad shoulders, caressing his strong muscles with both hands.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been with a woman,” he said.
He removed my dress completely and allowed me to run my hands along his hips and buttocks, sliding his trousers down. He was large and yearning for me and we lay beside each other, touching and poring over each other’s bodies. He explored my breasts and stomach and ran his fingers gently along my thighs. When he slid on top, I pulled him into me and sought his mouth with a sudden fierceness.
