Colter's Journey

by William W. Johnstone

  Maybe he grew homesick. In Pennsylvania, he had always taken trees for granted. He never thought he would actually miss them, their leaves, their smell.

  Before long, he was given a sack and sent out of camp to find dried buffalo dung to use as fuel for their fires. He began to wonder if the beans Ma cooked up tasted like—He grinned at the word he did not say, but one Just Jenkins would use quite frequently when the women could not hear.

  At Blue Mound—a hill that shot from nothing but flat grasslands—Tim and Patricia had walked up to see what lay ahead.

  “What did you see?” Mr. Scott asked when they returned.

  “More of the same,” Patricia answered.

  Tim added, “A whole lot of nothing.”

  Later, they crossed the Kaw River, which some folks had started calling the Kansas, using the ferry Joseph and Louis Papin had build at the Topeka crossing. Lucky, Mr. Jenkins had said, that the Papins had settled there.

  “The river is raging from snowmelt,” Jenkins said. “You do not want to ford this stream when she’s mad.”

  Rivers, and even small creeks that did not look so dangerous, soon brought fear to the settlers, because there were no more ferries to be found.

  By the time they crossed the Red Vermillion, their grand adventure had turned into nothing short of drudgery. Up before dawn, a quick breakfast, oxen hitched, and by the time the sun was rising, they were rolling westward. Walking. Walking. Those prairie schooners had no room for passengers, just furniture, supplies, and water barrels. The sun baked. The wind blew. They ate sand.

  At one place along the Little Blue, Just Jenkins called out, “Last chance to turn back, folks! This here be the junction of the road back to Independence, or you can take that one to St. Joe.”

  To Tim’s surprise, and to the annoyance of Captain McConnell, two families had had enough. They went the way of St. Joseph, saying to hell with Oregon, they were going back to Scranton.

  By the time the train reached The Narrows of the Little Blue River, Tim sometimes wished they had joined those two deserters.

  Then, he saw the Platte River. It looked wider and certainly bluer than the Mississippi.

  “Mile wide,” Jenkins said, “and ’bout an inch deep.”

  “It’s big.” That’s about all Tim could find in his vocabulary.

  “We won’t cross her for a spell,” the guide said. “Just foller alongside the south bank.”

  That led Captain McConnell to his first disagreement with Mr. Jenkins at a place called Plum Creek, even if Tim and his sisters found nothing even resembling a plum.

  “We have to cross this river at some point,” Captain McConnell said. “Here is a likely place.”

  “Not here, Capt’n,” Jenkins said. “She’ll split a ways up the trail, and we’ll cross the South at the Upper Crossin’, then ford the North near Ash Hollow.”

  “That means we have to cross the river twice. I say we do it here.”

  Jenkins shook his head.

  “By thunder, sir, this is only an inch deep, as you say.”

  “And full of quicksand. The channels move like the dust that eternal wind’s always ablowin’. It’ll be dangersome even at the Upper Crossin’.”

  It was. The Fuller family broke a kingbolt, and the Scotts, the Colters, and even the Fullers watched as the Conestoga, stuck in the middle of the river, settled deeper and deeper into the sandy bottom. The water reached the axle, then the sides, and Tim could hardly breathe as he watched the water soon cover most of the canvas tarp.

  The Colters had crossed second, after the McConnell family, followed by a family from Buffalo, New York, and another from Lancaster. The Fullers tried next and failed.

  They had no wagon left, no supplies.

  “They’ll have to ride with one of you good folks,” Just Jenkins said. “Till we can leave them at Fort Laramie.”

  “We have not enough food,” Captain McConnell said, “to spare.”

  Tim’s pa stepped forward. “Are you saying we must leave these good folks behind?”

  “They knew the risks.”

  “It’s a long walk back to Independence,” the guide said.

  Captain McDonnell repeated himself. “They knew the risks.”

  Jenkins shook his head. “I don’t think so, Capt’n.”

  McDonnell frowned. “You can’t take them back. Would you rather have us caught in a snowstorm and freeze to death or not reach Oregon till next year?”

  “Never said I’d take ’em back. I said they ride along till Laramie. Maybe they can find another family in the next train through. Maybe that train will have enough food to spare.”

  “Or,” Mr. Colter put in, “have a captain with Christian charity.”

  McDonnell apologized, and the Fullers rode with a family from Lancaster.

  Just Jenkins figured out the new channels made by the ever-changing monster of a river and the rest of the train crossed the South Platte without incident, though it took an eternity. The wagon train moved on west.

  Two days later, they buried little Amanda Collins, who had been bitten by a rattlesnake.

  A week later, Mrs. Green just dropped dead, and they buried her, too.

  As he walked, Tim considered all that had happened. Sometimes, he wished they had never left Danville.

  CHAPTER 19

  Kneeling, Tim studied the trail the bandits had left. He brushed the sand coating his lips, and thought about sipping water, but decided that he was not thirsty. He had taken three swallows only two hours ago.

  He looked off to the north toward the mountains where he thought the trail was leading. What was it Just Jenkins had called that range? The Winds? No. Wind River. He remembered.

  The mountain man used to camp in the Popo Agie up at Sinks Canyon. “Mighty pretty country,” he bragged. “Beyond that, I can show you the grave of Sacajawea, who had been so good for Lewis and Clark and the boys.”

  “I’d like to see that,” Tim told him.

  “Well, when you gets tired of Oregon, you come back. Look me up. Ask Jim Bridger where to find me.”

  Tim grinned. “I just might do that,” though he knew he wouldn’t. He’d be farming in Oregon. But Patricia would be there to make him forget all about being a wild man like Just Jenkins.

  He shook off the thought of Patricia and looked at the tracks. The raiders had turned south and west, heading away from the Wind River Range and off toward the nothingness of what appeared to become nothing but desert.

  Figuring they must have known where they could find water, Tim gathered up his packs and trudged on ahead.

  He was used to walking.

  Since leaving Independence, that was practically all he had done. As he walked, he thought.

  When all the remaining wagons had forded the South Platte, Just Jenkins pointed at California Hill.

  “We have to climb that?” Pa asked.

  “It ain’t nothin’ compared to what you’ll be facin’ down this pike,” Jenkins said. “Ain’t big, but it is a grade. ’Bout two hundred fifty feet or so in a mile and a half. It’ll take a spell. Once we reach the plateau, it’s an easy jog to Ash Hollow.”

  Tim walked up that hill. He walked to Ash Hollow, where they found shade trees and plenty of wood, so the beans did not taste like dried buffalo dung. It was pretty, that part of the country, and he saw more sights that amazed him as they traveled along the south bank of the North Platte.

  Courthouse and Jail Rock. Ma said she could see it. Pa said he couldn’t. Mr. Scott said it was just a name.

  Captain McConnell said, “If I had my druthers, I’d make it a jail, and leave Just Jenkins chained to it.”

  Jenkins smirked. “I’d like to see you try.”

  Tempers were short by then, and they had a long way to go.

  Chimney Rock, everyone agreed, indeed resembled a chimney. When they camped underneath Scotts Bluff, they had traveled a third of the way to Oregon.

  Jenkins told them, “You have a hard road ahead.”


  Through Robidoux Pass, they went, and across rolling prairie, where the wind blew even harder and longer, and the sky got bigger.

  Finally, they came to Fort Laramie.

  It was a sprawling compound and a beehive of activity, but to Tim’s disappointment, he saw no soldiers.

  “They’ll be here, I suspect,” Jenkins told him. “Army comes everywhere eventually. When there’s white folks to save or land to steal.”

  Tim didn’t know what to make of that.

  “William Sublette founded the trading post along the Laramie River back in 1834 and named it after himself, Fort William, Jenkins told Tim. “Then the American Fur Company bought it from Sublette and renamed it Fort John but nobody calls it that anymore. Name changed a lot. Fort John at the Laramie River, then Fort John-Laramie, and finally they just started calling it Fort Laramie.”

  You could buy everything at the post, including a Conestoga wagon that some unfortunate emigrants had abandoned. The Fullers bought one and grub, but not enough to get them to Oregon.

  “I wonder if we’ll get to see our piano,” Mrs. Fuller said.

  Mr. Fuller put his hand on his wife’s shoulder.

  “Next year, Mother. Just you wait. Next year.”

  Those poor folks. They had paid a fortune to freight their grand piano around the Horn by clipper ship. The piano would have been too big, too heavy to haul by Conestoga.

  Sadly, Mr. and Mrs. Fuller rode out the next morning . . . east, back to Independence, hiring a half-breed Pawnee to lead them down the trail and into civilization.

  Tim wondered if they had made it back. Maybe the Pawnee half-breed had killed them. Maybe when they recrossed the North Platte, the quicksand had taken them and their new wagon. He wanted to think they were in Independence, where Mr. Fuller would work and Mrs. Fuller would have her baby. Tim grimaced. He did not even know she was in the family way until Patricia told him. The Fullers planned to join the Scotts and the Colters in the Willamette Valley the next year. Tim kept walking, remembering, and wondering if he would ever see them again.

  Just Jenkins bought a jug of what someone called Taos Lightning and got rip-roaring drunk.

  That angered Captain McConnell, who chastised the red-eyed, pale guide the next morning. “From now on, I’ll be giving the orders. You will say nothing more than yes, sir . . . if you want to receive payment.” Mr. McConnell abstained from alcohol and did not associate with men who imbibed far too frequently.

  Jenkins agreed. That’s how hungover he was.

  * * *

  Tim stopped walking. Fort Laramie, he decided. That was where it happened. At least, that’s how the riff between McConnell and Jenkins had started to happen. Tim wondered how maybe the Fullers had been fortunate. He wished vainly that the Scotts or his own family’s wagon had broken down, or gotten lost in quicksand in the South Platte River, and that they had returned home.

  They would be together.

  They would be alive.

  Instead, they left Fort Laramie and began a steady climb. He started walking again.

  Tim carved his and Patricia’s names in the soft sandstone at Register Cliff, and they walked around, reading names and dates, and wondering what had become of the people who had left their names there.

  They moved onto Warm Springs and a natural bridge, and crossed the North Platte with the Laramie Mountains looming off to the southeast.

  Just Jenkins took them through a gap, saying it would keep them away from the Red Buttes, and they forded the North Platte, stopping to camp and rest as he warned that the travel would be hard and dry until they reached the Sweetwater River.

  John Ferguson, just a year older than Tim, would never see the Sweetwater. He slipped while hitching the team of oxen to his father’s prairie schooner, and his neck landed on the wagon tongue. He did not die right away, but was gone in a week.

  Two days later, Mr. Ferguson was dead. No one said how, though, but Tim knew. He could see the grownups whispering and had heard the lone pistol shot and Mrs. Ferguson’s screams in the middle of the night.

  Yet all those tragedies, all those hardships, all the aches and pains, scratches and scars, all the buffalo dung and the insect bites, and the fear whenever anyone heard the whirl and clicking of a rattlesnake’s warning . . . it was all forgotten when they came to Independence Rock.

  They sang songs. They danced. Many climbed up the rock to carve their names alongside others. Tim took Patricia there, and they read names and dates—the earliest they found was 1829—but Tim said he did not want to carve his name. He had found some paint, and for some silly reason, he thought painting Tim Colter-Patricia Scott, 1845, would be more fitting, that it would last longer.

  Just Jenkins laughed and told him, “Your names will be gone come the next thunderstorm.”

  After resting an extra day at Independence Rock, the train moved west, through Devil’s Gate, a mesmerizing place that looked brutal yet beautiful. The Sweetwater River—which they would cross six times—had carved a gap in the high rocks. At the base, where the wagons rolled through, it stretched maybe thirty feet across, but up above, at the summit of the rocks some three or four hundred feet over them, the gap must have been ten times wider.

  The fifteen hundred feet they traveled through the Gate felt like fifteen hundred miles. Tim felt chilled as he walked, and he wasn’t sure if he could attribute that to the fact that the sun’s rays no longer burned his hands and neck.

  When they camped that night on the other side of the Gate, Mr. Longmont said, “Man back at Fort Laramie said this place was haunted. Says the Shoshones and some other injun tribe said a big giant beast with tusks—like an elephant, I guess—carved the path with its tusks after some injuns had cornered it and was trying to kill it. That’s how the big animal escaped. He says Indians don’t like this place.”

  Captain McDonnell said, “That is a silly superstition by a bunch of heathens.”

  “Maybe so,” Mr. Longmont said, “but I don’t like this place, either.”

  “It’s behind us now, Chester,” Mr. Scott said. “Don’t look back.”

  Don’t look back, Tim thought as he walked. He tried to take it to heart. Don’t look back. Look ahead. Think of what you have to do. Just keep walking. One foot. One step. One foot. One step.

  He stopped to drink water and eat the last bit of dried beef. And while he ate, he remembered.

  They had gone on, stopping only at Three Crossings to bury Mrs. Ballard, whose heart had given out, a day or so after they had passed Split Rock.

  The Granite Mountains were to the north, hills to the south, and beyond that, nothing but savage land.

  They walked. The oxen snorted. Even the Percheron grew tired and dropped his head.

  Mountains loomed ahead. Women prayed. A few cried. Tim wondered what folks were doing back in Danville.

  They slipped and stubbed toes, fell and tore gashes in hands and legs as they climbed seven hundred feet up a place Just Jenkins called Rocky Ridge where boulders lined the path.

  The oxen labored to pull the Conestogas up the trail. To lighten the load, Mr. Ballard tossed out his late wife’s trunk and even their bed. By the time they reached the crest of the ridge, Tim could see other emigrants had followed suit. The place was littered with items that once had seemed so precious, but had become nothing but trash.

  They passed another wagon, dried and burned by the sun, a reminder that not everyone who set out on the journey reached their destination.

  Their lips chapped. Dust and grime almost blinded them. They made four miles that day. It felt as if it had taken them four months.

  And they had not even crossed the ridge.

  It would take them another day to complete the twelve-mile stretch, the wheels of their Conestogas deepening the cuts across the hard rock floor that other wagons had created. Two high shelves they crossed, then forded a dry bed called Strawberry Creek—another place named by someone with a demented sense of humor—and camped again, w
orn out. Too tired to eat. Too exhausted to sleep.

  Tim did not think it could ever get any worse.

  Until they reached South Pass. Actually, compared to Devil’s Gate or Rocky Ridge or the crossing of the South Platte, it had been an easy trek.

  But the Scotts’ left wheel busted.

  Captain McConnell told them they would have to stay behind to repair it. “You can catch up with the train at Bridger’s Trading Post. Or wait to join another train.”

  Jenkins did not like that idea, but he was taking orders from Captain McConnell.

  * * *

  Tim had to stop to catch his breath. The wind was picking up, and he saw the clouds darkening in the west. Something caused him to blink, and he realized it had been a flash of lightning. A few seconds later, he heard the thunder.

  Fear seized him. Rain would bring him much-needed water, but it could also wipe out the tracks he had been following. He took a quick step, then stopped suddenly and stared. One of the sacks slipped from his fingers and dropped in the sand.

  Standing just off to the trail stood a man in buckskins. One hand held the hackamore to his horse. The other held a hatchet.

  The man laughed, but Tim Colter found nothing funny.

  CHAPTER 20

  He was a swarthy man, with eyes as dark as his beard. Slim, though, and not that much taller and heavier than Tim. He did not move, not even blink. The only movement came from the horse, a small, black mustang, which lowered its head to graze on a batch of grass sticking out of the sand and rocks.

  “Hello,” Tim said.

  The man did not answer.

  “Do you speak English?” Tim tried again. He thought back to Danville, and that tall man with the curly mustache who had stopped at the subscription school for a week and tried to teach them French.

  “Anglais?” It was the only word he remembered except for oui, which had made all of his classmates laugh whenever the Frenchman or anyone else said it.