Colter's Journey

by William W. Johnstone

  Reno feinted a charge, stopped, and swung back. He was learning. The handful of sand that Malachi Murchison threw was caught by the wind and sailed harmlessly to Reno’s right.

  “Iffen you boys have a mind, why don’t we call this the first round. Get some water. Cool yourselves off a mite. Kill each other after me and these gents’ve concluded our business.” Jim Bridger sat in his rocking chair next to the empty cracker barrel, the wide-brimmed, low-crowned black hat pushed back on his head, tapping the corncob pipe on his boot heel.

  “I’ll finish it right now, Jim.” Murchison kicked out, trying to catch Reno’s injured side again.

  He missed, and Reno brought the knife down. He caught flesh and bone, and heard Murchison’s high-pitched wail. The man fell back, spraying blood over the ground. He went down, came up, and took off, making a beeline for the horses.

  Reno could never outrun a cat like Murchison. He started, thought better of it, and shifted the knife, then let it fly, arcing over and over, but missing when Murchison turned to his right. The knife landed on the ground, kicking up dust.

  Reno swore. He was unarmed. Murchison would have those pommel pistols or his long rifle.

  Reno looked around, trying to find something. He could run. That would be easy enough, dive into the trading post through the open door to Jim Bridger’s right, but Jed Reno wasn’t that type of man.

  It would be a cold day on the Platte River in the middle of August when he would run from a snake like Malachi Murchison. He straightened, put his hands on his hips, careful to avoid the deep cut in his side, and watched Malachi Murchison leap into the saddle.

  The rat’s moccasins beat the horse’s side, and he was galloping away. He did manage to fetch his rifle but never chanced a shot or a look in Reno’s direction. Dust rose thickly as the horse thundered out of the yard, onto the trail, and the rat rode east.

  Chest heaving, Jed Reno watched the coward flee. He wet his lips and gently pressed his right hand against his aching, bleeding side.

  “Nice fight, Jed,” Bridger said. “But mind tellin’ me what in blazes it were about?”

  Jed Reno didn’t answer. He dropped forward like a felled Ponderosa pine.

  CHAPTER 4

  For most of his life, Tim Colter had wanted to get away from Danville. Freezing in the water inside the beaver dam, he thought about the place. That was funny. Well, not funny. Nothing was funny anymore. It just seemed strange that he thought so longingly about Danville. His thoughts rambled as he grew colder and colder.

  Some old man named Montgomery and his boy founded Danville back in the 1700s. The place seemed ancient, but, it wasn’t that old a town. Pa always told me how William Montgomery had been thinking to the future. Why, Mr. Montgomery had the foresight to see how anthracite coal could be used to heat homes. He had used the coal to heat his own home, that old stone building on the corner of Mill Street and Bloom Road. Now, folks all around America and in the territories use anthracite coal during the winters.

  Actually, Daniel Montgomery had staked out the town’s plot. That’s why it’s named after him and not his pa. All William did was buy some land about the time the American Revolution had started and opened a trading post called Montgomery’s Landing. Before that, it was Iroquois land, but I never saw one Indian in Danville. Thanks to coal and canals the town grew. It’s the seat of Columbia County, although grownups keep talking about how Bloomsburg is set on taking the county seat away from Danville.

  I’ve never been to Bloomsburg. I never even set foot outside Danville . . . until we left it.

  Tim shivered.

  I never cared one whit about old man Montgomery or his boy Daniel. They’re both long dead. I don’t even care about coal. Or the Pennsylvania Canal System.

  Danville is famous for that, too.

  I think Daniel Montgomery was president of the Board of Canal Commissioners when he established the North Branch of the Pennsylvania Canal System. That was before I was born. Danville shipped a lot of wares down the canals, but what I remember most is the iron.

  Iron furnaces. Oh man. I could use some of that heat. Black smoke. The stink of business. The noise and smell of the foundries—the one John C. Thiel established before I was born, and of course, the Columbia Furnace, which also uses anthracite coal. Pa worked for the Grove boys, Michael and John, at that furnace on the eastern end of East Mahoning Street. He always bragged that Mike and Johnny were the state’s best furnacemen, maybe even the best furnacemen in America.

  Well, that went without saying. The coal country of Pennsylvania is known for furnaces. Maybe the Groves are the best in the whole world.

  Furnaces and mills and railroads and T-rails—whatever those are—and canals. It wasn’t much fun to be a kid in Danville. Oh, I thought it was pretty. Plenty of trees cover the ridges of the Appalachian Mountains, and the North Branch of the Susquehanna River flows on the south side of the city. Trees. That’s what I remember most. Trees. Nothing but trees and hills, and that omnipresent smoke from the mills and foundries, train locomotives and riverboats.

  I thought I’d be going to the Grove Furnace to work alongside Pa. That’s what boys do in Danville. That’s what everyone does in Danville.

  Tim moved slightly in the cold water, trying to warm himself. His thoughts turned from Danville to the events that had started his future in a different place.

  One evening about a year back, Pa burst into home, spun Ma around like a top, and announced that he had done it.

  “Done what?” Ma asked him.

  “We’re going to Oregon,” Pa said.

  Ma sniffed Pa’s breath, thinking that maybe he had decided it was still the Fourth of July and had found some Barbados rum or Appalachian corn liquor in one of the taverns.

  “I’m sober, Ma. Sober and straight. I signed us up to go to Oregon.”

  “Where’s Oregon?” my younger sister Margaret sang out.

  Pa gestured toward the kitchen wall. “West. Yonder ways.”

  Ma rolled her eyes. She wasn’t quite convinced that Pa wasn’t in his cups.

  “Why would we want to go to Oregon?” asked Nancy.

  Only two years older, she thinks she knows everything.

  “Because before long everybody’s going to be bound for Oregon. It’s the promised land.”

  “Don’t be sacrilegious,” Ma said.

  Nancy didn’t want to go to Oregon. I agreed.

  “The Scotts are going,” Pa said.

  That silenced everyone, especially me. The Scotts’ daughter Patricia has to be the prettiest girl not only in Danville, but in Columbia County, and maybe western Pennsylvania.

  Tim closed his eyes. Thinking about Patricia, her blond hair and blue eyes, kept him from thinking about being in the cold water. Kept him thinking he needed to get warm, needed to find her. He let his mind drift back to that first conversation about leaving Danville.

  “Doris going?” Ma asked.

  “She’s his wife, ain’t she?” Pa said, shaking his head. “The boys, Will, Ben, and Richard’ll likely be staying. They got jobs. Ben’s married. Richard’s engaged. Patricia will be going to Oregon. It’s a better country, Matilda.” Pa put a heavy arm over Ma’s shoulders. “No furnaces. No sweating. We could have our own farm, Matilda. Not breathe black smoke eight days a week.”

  Pa had been listening to some old fur trappers and traders who’d returned east by way of the canal system and had lighted in Danville for the taverns and inns. He said most bragged about California, but some also told wonderful stories about the Oregon Country.

  “You meet up in Sapling Grove. Then follow the trail to Fort Laramie. Then it’s on to Independence Rock. They say we need to be there by July Fourth—that’s how it got its name—to make sure we ain’t stuck in the mountains when the snows come. On to Fort Hall. Then down to the Willamette Valley. It’s a paradise. That’s what they say. Horses and cattle. Sheep and hogs. Bushels of wheat. Orchards. Anything grows in that country. You just toss out a s
eed, and it’s like Jack and the Beanstalk. Only no giants.”

  “But this is our home,” Ma said.

  “No, it ain’t. We rent this from the Thiels. We should call ’em thieves. We can own our land in Oregon. Grow our own food. And it’s our American duty.”

  “What do you mean by that, Pa?” Margaret asked.

  “That’s what Humpback Hallahan says.”

  “Who?”

  “The trapper we’ve been conversing with. Me and Aaron. You should see him, Matilda. Dressed in buckskins so greasy he’d go up like pitch pine if he came close to a match. Hair down to here”—Pa touched about an inch below his shoulders—“and a beard like you ain’t never seen.”

  “But why is it our American duty?” Ma asked.

  “Because. We got to take Oregon for our own. If we don’t, the British and the Canadians will outnumber us and then steal that veritable Garden of Eden for their own. It ain’t right for country that great to belong to the English. Remember, my grandpa fought against them in the Revolution, and my pa battled them with Andy Jackson. We got to make Oregon a part of America—not England. Not Canada.”

  “Where’s Sapling Grove?” Nancy asked.

  In spite of the cold, Tim smiled. He had been more interested in those two forts—Hall and Laramie—or maybe even that Independence Rock. With nothing else to do, he resumed thinking about that first conversation.

  “I’m not rightly sure,” Pa admitted. “First, we got to get to Missouri.”

  “Where’s that?” Margaret asked.

  Once again, Pa made a gesture toward the kitchen wall. “West.”

  “Is it far?” Ma asked.

  “Farther than Pittsburgh,” Pa said with a chuckle. “But Aaron and I have it all figured out. We’ll book passage on a steamboat down the Ohio River to the Mississippi. Then we’ll sail up the Missouri to the City of Kansas. There’s a settlement nearby they call Westport. Old Humpback Hallahan says he can meet us there and get us to Sapling Grove, but I doubt if he was that serious about hiring on with us. Guides are plentiful, though, he says.—Humpback I’m talking about—now that the beaver trade has gone bust. What do you think?”

  Remembering his reaction, Tim smiled again. “When shall we leave?” he’d asked.

  * * *

  Pa took his arm off Ma’s shoulder and slapped his thigh. “That’s my boy. Always got the spirit of adventure, and Tim’s not one to let Oregon fall into the hands of the British or the Canadians. Ain’t that right, son?”

  Tim nodded. He had already decided to go so he could be close to Patricia Scott.

  “Claude,” Ma said. “Steamboats cost money. Lots of money.”

  “That’s a certain fact, Matilda. So do Conestoga wagons. We’ll have need of one of those, too. One for us. One for Aaron, Doris, and Patricia.”

  The name Conestoga rang a bell in Tim’s head, bringing his thoughts back to what had happened and why he was freezing in the water of a beaver dam. Not wanting to go in that direction, he remembered hearing of the Conestoga Turnpike. Said to be the shortest way from Philadelphia to Harrisburg, it was a windy, hilly road that connected the Lancaster Pike and the Ridge Road.

  He’d traveled in the Conestoga that was a wagon—eighteen feet long from tongue to tail. Patricia had once paced off one that had been parked in front of Old Man Wessler’s blacksmith shop on Bloom Road. The floor had been curved upward.

  “Keeps the load from tipping or shifting,” Old Man Wessler had told hem.

  The wagons, pulled by some of the biggest draft horses that Tim had ever seen, got their name from a river over in Lancaster County. Made mostly by Germans. Mennonites, Old Man Wessler had said, but he had not explained to Tim or Patricia exactly what a Mennonite was.

  “Wagon like that,” Old Man Wessler had marveled, “can haul twelve thousand pounds.”

  Tim shook his head. He remembered thinking that maybe a wheelbarrow would have held anything his Ma, Pa, and sisters owned. With nothing else to do, he let his thoughts drift some more.

  “A wagon?” Ma asked.

  “Yep,” Pa said.

  “Steamboats?” Nancy asked.

  “Yep.”

  “That’ll cost us a lot of money,” Ma said.

  Pa seemed to sober up. “I know. But it’ll be worth it, once we have our own farm, our own cabin in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. I promise you.”

  “But . . .” Ma began, but her voice trailed off.

  “We shall save. We shall skimp. We shall do what we must because what you and I both want is for our children, for Nancy and Tim and Margaret, to have better lives, to be able to breathe clean air, and to be free. Whatever it takes, Matilda. The way I figure things, in a year, we should have saved enough money to pay our way to Oregon.”

  Tim almost laughed out loud at that. Actually, it had taken them two years.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Thar ya go.” Deftly, Jim Bridger pulled the stitch in a tight knot, and, holding the long bone needle in his fingers, clipped the thread with a pair of hand-forged scissors in his other hand.

  Jed Reno studied the old mountain man. His fingers were long, calloused, filthy, and now stained with blood, Reno’s blood.

  Not sure he wanted to look at his side, Reno focused on the needle and thread. “Is that horsehair?”

  Bridger dropped the suturing equipment into a wooden bowl and fetched a jug off the hard-packed earthen floor that served as a porch in front of the trading post. “Jed, a sorry cuss like you don’t warrant no horsehair. But I plucked the finest hair I could find from a good mule I traded fer a couple weeks back.”

  Raising both arms, Jed Reno let one of the Indian squaws hanging around the post wrap the knife cut with a clean sheet. Clean? Well, in that country, cleanliness seemed a relative term. He grimaced when the short, squat, silver-haired woman tightened the makeshift bandage. She picked up the scissors, cut the leftover strip of calico, and walked away, dragging the cotton behind her without another word.

  Bridger plucked the cork from the jug and took a heavy pull.

  Reno looked at his side, surprised to see no blood already staining the bandage, and took the jug Bridger offered him.

  “You do good doctoring, Jim.”

  Wiping his mouth, Bridger’s wild eyes flashed. “Ol’ Hoss, I’ve had me a passel of practicin’.”

  The liquor in the jug wasn’t the Taos Lightning—red-eye rotgut of maybe two hundred proof seasoned with gunpowder, black pepper, tobacco juice, and a snakehead or two–Reno had expected. It went down smooth and sweet as bourbon.

  “By Jupiter, that’s pure Kentucky.”

  “Pennsylvania”—Bridger looked up from putting his own blend of kinnikinnick, more bark and leaves than tobacco into his pipe and pointed the stem of the pipe at the Conestoga wagons that were pulling away from the post—“or so some wayfarer told me. Won’t blind you none, but I ain’t used to such whiskey. Or such people.” He found a match, stared at it dumbly, and then dropped it on the table, and fetched a branch from the fire at his side. He used that to light his pipe. After a puff or two, he again gestured toward the emigrants.

  “Country’s crowdin’ up. In a year or two, this place won’t be fit to live in.”

  Reno took another swallow of bourbon. It numbed the ache in his side. Since Malachi Murchison was long gone, he might as well rest his side, see if Bridger’s doctoring and the mule-hair stitches would hold. Rest up. Not get too drunk. Then he would hit the trail, track down Murchison, and even the score.

  He thought about what the rat had told him. “Jim, have you seen Louis Jackatars of late?”

  The old trapper’s eyes narrowed, and he slowly removed the blackened pipe stem from his mouth. “I patch you up, and you try to ruin my smoke?”

  Reno grinned. Bridger didn’t.

  “Half-breed Métis rapscallion.” Bridger spit into the fire. “Nah. Ain’t laid eyes or fists on his sorry hide since . . .” His voice trailed off as he leaned back, staring at the roof o
ver the porch, and seemed fascinated by the construction. “I recollect the times when I didn’t remember what a roof was,” he said wistfully.

  Reno looked up too. “We’d build cabins.” The roof did seem amazing, even if the lean-to over by the pens was probably better constructed.

  “In the winter . . . unless we was winterin’ with some red she-devil to keep us warm.” Suddenly, Bridger leaned forward and slapped his knee. “You recollect that time ol’ Broken Hand Fitzpatrick squared off ag’in’ . . . who was it?”

  Reno smiled at the memory. “It was Kit Carson.”

  “The hell you say.” Again, Bridger’s eyes flashed dangerously. “Carson wasn’t no bully. He an’ Broken Hand was good boys.”

  Reno slid the jug back toward Bridger, who lowered his pipe long enough to take a long pull. Pennsylvania bourbon could douse a fire before it got out of hand.

  “No, Jim. I meant it was Carson who tangled with Chouinard.” Reno thought back for the name. “Joseph. That’s it. Joseph Chouinard.”

  With a grin and a nod, Bridger pushed the jug back to Reno.

  “That’s right. Chouinard. The Great Bully of the Mountains. When was that?”

  Reno had to study on that. Years came and went, and Reno couldn’t remember the last time he had seen a real calendar. Even the Indians would paint memories on a hide, something their grandchildren’s grandchildren could use as a bit of history. Pictures like The Winter Three Foxes Killed The White Buffalo. The Year Of The Spotted Death. The Summer When The Fire Destroyed White Elk’s Village And Killed Three Hundred Ponies. Things like that. But mountain men? They had nothing to fall back on. No written accounts, except if one counted maybe the ledger books of the purveyors who had come to the Rendezvouses to trade possibles for plews.