Snowbound and Eclipse (11 page)

“My bones hurt just thinking on it,” he said. “I'm too tired.”

“I need you. A dollar a day would fatten your purse.”

“What good would that do? All I'd do is leave my frozen carcass up there.”

“A dollar a day and a ten-dollar bonus when we got past the Rocky Mountains.”

He stared morosely into his cup.

“You're the devil is what,” he said. “I'm glad I didn't go get myself froze and shot on your last one.”

“It's snowy, sure. But with good mules and good men beating a trail, we'll be over the top in a week or two.”

He grinned malevolently. “You wouldn't know that pass from a piss ant's jaw.”

“That's right, but we'll find a way no matter what, and you can earn some good money or not.”

He grinned, wiped his mouth, and said nothing. I am a close observer of men, and I knew he would soon come
around. Even now, he was looking past me and at the opened door, where Alexis Godey and several others waited.

“Not me, no way, you don't even know what cold is. How are you going to feed all them mules up there? You think there's one stick of grass? You think there's one cottonwood they can chew on? It's under fifty feet of snow.”

“We'll be looking for grain here.”

Williams sipped, coughed, and cackled.

“Go on, get away,” he said. “I'm warm and I'm not about to freeze my butt, not for some … old railroad.”

He turned his back to me, his dismissal.

I fired my parting shot. “We're going to bed down here. We'll raise camp here before sunup. You'll join us or not. Try God. He'll tell you to join up.”

He presented me with his full back, which wasn't much wider than a fence post.

I signaled I was done, and the rest flooded in. If they could buy some brandy here, they would. They wouldn't be seeing spirits for a long time.

Godey pulled me aside. “Did you hire him?”

“He'll come around. I told him we're leaving before dawn, with or without him.”

“He didn't like the snow, oui?”

“He says grass will be fifty feet under it.”

Godey laughed, but uneasily. “He's right, Colonel. You'll find out soon enough. The trick is to turn around and get out when the moment comes.”

I didn't reply.

I had things to do. I wanted fodder of any sort. Grain, corn, whatever I could get for my mules. If I couldn't get Old Williams, then I wanted Wootton to draw me some charts and tell me where to turn off. I was headed for Cochetopa Pass, but I'd heard that there was another pass, slightly higher but with better railroad grades, called Leroux
Pass—or Williams Pass. Maybe Wootton could pencil it in for me.

The whole mob was rushing in now, abandoning the little adobe I'd rented for the night to house us. An old gaptoothed mountaineer was pouring from a small cask behind his plank counter and raking in whatever he could. I watched coin, bills, a knife, a blanket, and a box of precast bullets cross the counter. I wanted to stop this but thought better of it. Let them enjoy a sip. It would put them in good spirits for the struggles ahead. They lit up pipes, and soon a blue haze hung over the place, disturbed by gusts of icy air pumping in from the open door.

I made inquiry about fodder and discovered that the denizens of this pueblo were an improvident and lazy lot, barely staying alive with household gardens and constant hunting. It was probably too much to ask of an old mountaineer to work his land and make it bear fruit. And even at that, it was the Mexicans who were providing for themselves. I retreated into the icy night to peruse the area, letting a quarter moon be my lantern. But a considerable walk on snowy ground revealed little agriculture here. I spotted no corncribs, but I did see some haystacks. Hay would be of little service to me.

I would need to do what I did in the Sierra Nevada: find open southern slopes to graze the mules. These slopes caught the sun, melted off the snow, and exposed grass. If the tactic worked in the Sierra Nevada, so would it work in the southern Rockies. By the end of my foray, I noted that my company had already retired to their bedrolls, with which they filled the little adobe house. A rank odor marked their presence. I chose to bed at the store, where I was welcomed cordially.

“Would you know of any place we can obtain feed for my mules?” I asked the keep, a grizzled veteran named Whipple.

“You shouldn't be crossing them hills without it,” he replied. “They've got some corn in cribs up to Hardscrabble.”

That was promising.

I awakened my company well before dawn that November day, and they lazily made themselves some corn gruel in a fireplace pot and packed their blankets. It was another blustery day, the sort that would pump cold down a collar or up a sleeve or up a pant leg no matter what. I didn't mind. I had discovered that I am made of tougher stuff than most men, an accident of birth.

Williams was nowhere to be found, and I imagined we would vault the Rockies without a guide. I had maps and counsel enough. I had the old Mexican charts. Carson knew the country and had shared all he knew with me. This was the plan he proposed: find the Saguache River, a tributary of the Rio del Norte, head up it to Cochetopa Pass, and descend into the Colorado River drainage. I didn't need a guide for that. Godey hastened my men through their morning rituals and into the icy predawn darkness. There were, after a few trades, one hundred thirty sound and healthy mules to load.

We raised camp about nine, and only then did Williams show up.

“You can't top those peaks without a guide,” he said.

I was in no mood to haggle and ignored him. He peered at me slack-jawed. I steered clear, if only to avoid getting louses.

“Day wage. You pay me every night,” he said, “and you got a guide.”

“So you can run when the going is tough?”

“You put your digit right on her. You is going to leave your bones up there, frozen up solid until it all melts come June, and I'm not gonna leave mine there. One dollar each night.”

I shook my head. No deal.

“Why're you going up there now? It's a head scratcher,” he said.

“We will do what no one else has ever dared to do.”

He cocked his head. “That all, is it?” He yawned. “If I go, I go. If I quit, I quit. If I come back here, I come back here.”

I had him. “You lead the way,” I said. “We'll follow.”

He grinned, never said yes, but hightailed to a grimy bedroll and a scabrous old rifle he had stacked nearby.

“Can't let you go freeze your arses,” he said.

I didn't trust him and intended to correct his progress if he steered too far away from the route. Just by staying with the Arkansas River we could put ourselves on the west slope of the Rockies without difficulty, climbing some benches to avoid a gorge. That would put us on a grassy valley leading to an easy pass to the Colorado River drainage. It had been traversed by Stephen Long and Zebulon Pike, so I wasn't interested in it. We wouldn't go that way. Why follow others' footsteps? And we were already too far north.

We reached Hardscrabble without difficulty and found plenty of dried corn in a crib. It took little to persuade its owner, a Mormon named Hamel, to part with it. The only trouble was that it was dried ears and the man didn't have a sheller. But I put the men to the task, which they undertook eagerly, knowing that corn would feed man and beast alike in the high country. They set to work with their skinning knives, and ere long we harvested a hundred thirty bushels of good feed, ample to keep the mules in good condition during our week or ten-day crossing of the three chains of the Rockies. All this golden treasure was carefully loaded into panniers, and I made sure each pannier was tied shut and the loads were balanced.

Hardscrabble was as miserable as the pueblo farther downriver, a shantytown full of lazy mountaineers plus a
few hardworking Mormons. It was also hard against the flanks of the Wet Mountains, the first range we had to negotiate, and stood at the confluence of the river and Hardscrabble Creek. It was here that I made my first decision. Once again I rented an adobe house and once again my men slept warm. It would be the last time they would see walls and a roof for some while. The next morning, we loaded early. I was itching to be off.

“We're going up Hardscrabble Creek,” I told Old Bill. “And then over. There's a pass there.”

Williams blinked at me so long I thought maybe he was slow witted.

“Huerfano Road. Mosca Pass,” I said.

“Oh, is that what you call it,” he said, slouching so much he was actually staring up at me, even though he had six inches of height on me. “You wanting to make a railroad there?”

“It's closer to the thirty-eighth parallel.”

“Why this parallel, eh? You bought this parallel from Uncle Sam? There's a lot of them parallels.”

“It's where we're going.”

“Why don't you run your railroad where it's halfway level, eh? Follow a buffalo trail. The buffalo got it all worked out.”

I smiled and turned away. I'd heard enough of that.

On the afternoon of November 25, we finished with the corn, broke camp, and Old Bill led us up the creek, through a deepening snow-packed canyon. We were now headed straight south, in the direction of the pass I had heard much about. But we were also running into snow. Half a foot at first, no trouble.

Then we were pushing through a foot of it, even as we gained altitude. Williams rode a mule we had given to him, his old rifle across his arms, his body slouched so deep in
his saddle he looked bent in the middle. He wore an odd cap made of skins, with earflaps he could pull down if needed, but the temperature was mild.

Some of the men thought the cap made him look like he had fox ears. The rest of his ensemble was just as odd, but I decided not to worry about him. He'd spent a life in the mountains, and he would see us through. I wondered why I didn't really believe it.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Micajah McGehee

We abandoned the Arkansas River valley the afternoon of November 25, having loaded the mules with shelled corn. We had all enjoyed pumpkin and chicken and sheltered beds that night, a luxury we would be dreaming about the rest of the trip.

Colonel Frémont was taking us south, up Hardscrabble Creek, to some pass he and the new guide, Old Bill, knew about. I didn't know the route and was a simple foot soldier on this trip. Back in Saint Louis I discovered that the colonel was recruiting for a California expedition, and I thought to join it. I was footloose and California intrigued me. I have that itch. He said there would be no pay, although his father-in-law would introduce legislation to subsidize the trip. A rail line at midcontinent would satisfy both the North and the South, Frémont said, and Congress might come through. It sounded plausible enough.

Most of the recruits thought that the government would eventually pay them, but I never took it that way. The way I calculated it, I should be shelling out a few coins to the
colonel for a guided trip west. This would be my ticket to California, and that's as much as I needed. So I had signed on. I found myself enjoying the company of the three Kerns, Andrew Cathcart, and Frederick Creutzfeldt, all well-educated men like myself, and so we made something of a party to ourselves.

Hardscrabble Creek soon plunged into a gloomy canyon lined with white oak and pine as well as cactus aplenty, and as we veered westward toward the Wet Mountains the snow increased. Still, it wasn't bad, and I saw that once a trail was broken through the pillows of soft snow by the leaders, the rest of our heavily laden mules followed easily enough on the packed snow. If this was winter, I would have no trouble with it, even though I had been reared in Mississippi. We were all in fine spirits. The corn did it. That golden wealth stuffed into sacks and panniers was, for us, more assuring than metallic gold.

There were storms aplenty just before. En route to Hardscrabble, an overcast sawed off the mountains, and we no longer could see the snowy reaches of Pike's Peak. That and the brutal wind made that leg of the trip worrisome and hard. There's no way to fight the wind. No matter what a man wears, the wind finds its way through, shooting icy fingers down your neck, pushing up your trousers, bullying in at the waist, and nipping at ears and noses and chins. The men made rawhide throatlatches to keep their slouch hats from flying away and eventually made their own leather caps with earflaps. We hunted for momentary relief any way we could, pausing under cutbanks, stopping in a copse of trees, hunkering low behind a rock.

Darkness caught us only three miles from Hardscrabble, but it was a start. We made a good camp under a cliff, out of the wind, where there was plenty of dead pine to fuel our
fires. We could find no grass, but put the feedbags on the mules and gave them all a quart of shelled corn, something we had to do in shifts because we had only twenty bags. One quart went down those mule throats in a hurry, and they looked just as hungry when the bag came off as before. But there wasn't a blade of grass in sight. Frémont introduced us to his rubberized sheets, big tan waterproof affairs that let us settle into our bedrolls on top of muck or snow without getting soaked. The colonel divided up the watch, two guards, two hours apiece, and so we settled down. The night was mild enough, though I could never sleep outside in a bedroll as well as I could on a good stuffed-cotton mattress in a house. In that I was lacking, for Frémont's veterans were soon sawing wood, their hulks quiet near the several wavering watch fires.

Before dawn Godey was rousing us, and we shook the sleep out of ourselves, packed our kits, huddled around the breakfast mess fires to down some gruel, and began harnessing the mules. I yearned for some golden johnnycakes fried from cornmeal, but those weren't on the menu. The flour was already gone, and we would be surviving entirely on game soon. We were low on grains.