Read Snowbound and Eclipse Online
Authors: Richard S. Wheeler
Now Godey was a man to inspire confidence. I pegged him as the more sensible of the two leaders, and I knew I wouldn't start worrying until I saw Godey worry. The veterans of Frémont's previous trips didn't share my views. For them, Frémont was a man of uncanny destiny. I can't say why I distrusted Frémont's judgment, but I did. As long as Godey thought things were alright, I would, too. I supposed my views were colored by the court-martial and conviction. I had followed the case closely.
It had turned cooler, and soon we were trudging up the canyon, still on foot, past giant red boulders topped with
snow, following a twisting path ever higher. We had the drill down now, even without the colonel's orders. A few of us would break trail until we wearied and then fall back, and a few more of us would pick up the lead, and so on, as we rotated the hard work and spared the mules as much as we could. The mules had enough to worry about on slippery ground with a heavy load on their backs.
The only peculiar thing about all this was that this wasn't a route for a railroad. There was evidence of a crude wagon road out of Hardscrabble, but it forded the creek constantly, and I suspected that during certain spring months the whole canyon bottom would be flooded.
I spurred my mule, Betsy as I called her, up to Ben Kern.
“Do you think a railroad could run thisaway?” I inquired.
“I'm a doctor, not an engineer,” he replied. “But it's a mystery, isn't it?”
“It's the thirty-eighth parallel, that's what it is. Frémont's going to stick with it. What's so sacred about it, do you know?”
“You know what it is?” he replied. “It's a golden highway across gentle grades with tropical weather to either side, coal seams every hundred miles, ample water, and easy connections. I hear it runs straight to California, without any detours. Once we're on it, friend Micah, we'll just race right along. You just ask the colonel, and he'll tell you.”
That's what they called me. Micah McGee is how they shortened it. I was used to that; it had started about when I was old enough to notice. Doc Kern was smiling.
But what we were getting into was no tropical highway. The creek had swung west and was tumbling out of the Wet Mountains now, splashing over boulders, and we were breaking through two feet of snow. We were climbing through gloomy pine and aspen woods. Word came back to
us that we should dismount, save the mules, which were burdened with all that corn. I slid down into the snow, hoping I had used enough neatsfoot oil to keep my boots tight against leaks. Up ahead, I saw Frémont shifting leads. He would put one group of men and mules up front for a while, and then another, thereby spreading the hard work of making a trail among as many men and animals as he could. I supposed he would call on me soon, though so far he was using only his veteran men.
The man was the least like an army colonel as I could imagine. Did he bark orders, demand instant obedience, dress down fools and knaves? No, he never raised his voice, never even seemed impatient, and somehow won the allegiance of his men. Not least, he broke trail himself for a spell, off his mule, kicking open the snow. Old Bill, I noticed, did no such thing, but hung back in the middle, staring amiably at the rest of us and hawking up great gobs of yellow spit now and then. For that he was earning a wage.
I'd come to admire Frémont, in a tentative way. So far as I could tell, he was a gifted man in the field and a natural leader whose very presence seemed to make this journey easier and more secure. And yet something nagged at me and wouldn't let up. Maybe, someday when I knew Doctor Kern better, I'd ask him why I kept pushing aside doubts that swarmed like horseflies in my head.
The men ahead of me showed signs of wearing down. But we continued, one step at a time, and because most of the party was ahead of me I was less worn than most. Still, I had to admit that we were making progress. Snow or not, we were snaking through the Wet Mountains, a lengthy line of men and animals.
All in all, we made good time that day, maybe nine miles, and darkness caught us near the summit. I suppose one could call it a pass. But I just kept wondering how you'd get
twenty tons of iron horse up there, especially if that horse was drawing a dozen steam cars.
The next day we started downslope, which was harder because the snow was heavier on the western side of the mountains. Men kept stepping into the unknown and taking a tumble. We were wet and cold ere long. The canyon narrowed until its walls vaulted up on either side of us and we were caught in a creek, fighting through pines and white oak. Giant red rocks hemmed us, and I thought that a railroad company would be detonating tons of powder to break through all that. We made only a few miles through deep snow and finally retreated up a side canyon and camped away from the gorge we were descending. We fed the mules more corn, since there wasn't a blade of grass in sight.
Colonel Frémont seemed perfectly relaxed, as if all this were the most ordinary passage in the world. And somehow the men seemed just as relaxed. He had a way of pacifying our worries. We boiled up some beans, having trouble keeping heat under the kettles because the wood was so wet and we were so high up. The mules were restless; a quart of corn a day didn't appease their hungers a bit, and they were primed to cut and run toward anything that looked like fodder. It was hard to drive them through an aspen grove, because they had a hankering for the smooth bark of the younger trees and could peel it off with their teeth.
Frémont's veterans taught me something one night when the wind had died. They built pole racks next to their campfires; stripped out of their soaked and cold duds, right to the buff; and then hung their wet, water-stained clothing next to the roaring fire to dry out. They wrapped their blankets around themselves for the hour or two they were drying their duds. Most of them had woolen undershirts and drawers, and these absorbed campfire heat and some smoke too. But they dried. When I tried it, the first in my mess to
do so, the Kerns eyed me askance, but they saw the merit of it. After a couple of hours beside the cook fire, my duds were bone dry and felt good when I clambered back into them. I marveled. The dry clothing lifted my spirits. It took the Kerns a few more nights to attempt it, but Captain Cathcart saw the merit and soon was drying his clothing whenever he could.
I did notice one thing. Frémont himself never toasted his underwear. In fact, he stayed buttoned up in that blue overcoat he wore constantly, a military coat without any insignia on it. His conduct was entirely private. He had his own tent, and inside that canvas, shielded from our eyes, he did his toilet, arranged his clothing, slept, ate, trimmed his beard, read his law books, and hid from us. I gradually realized he was a true loner, and this nightly retreat from us was a need in him, just as staying buttoned up to the chin was a need in him. He didn't want us to see anything of him but his dressed-up self, even in the worst weather. Dry clothing was so valuable to me I marveled that Frémont didn't dry his. But his manservant, Saunders, never brought any duds out of that tent to dry by the fire, so either the colonel's clothing never got wet or he chose to wear wet clothing. It sure set him apart from his veterans and also from those of us traveling with him for the first time.
The weather was mild enough, and little wind caught at us that night, so I didn't hear much complaining. Indeed, Frémont and his vision of a new path west seemed to have infected us all, and we could only think of the magical railroad that would be constructed in our wake. The only worrisome thing was that Godey and the hunters weren't finding any game, not even a track in the snow. The deer and elk had retreated to bottomland for this hard winter, and we were working through a silent country without so much as a crow above us. I thought little of it, because we
were heading down the canyon and at its foot we would find game, and the thirty-three men in the company would enjoy some elk or venison.
We could not see what lay below the snow and kept stumbling over hidden logs and rocks and obstacles we could not fathom. The burdened mules were lamed by sudden plunges into the snow, when there was no footing. Sometimes we had to dig one out. Mules virtually vanished, plunging into snow so deep that it was all we could do to keep their heads clear so they could breathe. Then the company would halt while the few with shovels dug around the trapped mule until we could drag the wretched, overburdened beast out of its snow prison. Thus our progress came nearly to a halt, and we lost precious time.
But then we reached the western foothills. The canyon widened out, the snow lessened, and the worst was over, or so it seemed. Ahead lay an arid anonymous valley, and beyond its broad reaches, another white wall, which we understood to be the Sangre de Cristos, which stretched from this general area deep into New Mexico. We gathered on a plateau for a rest, having utterly exhausted ourselves and our mules in that miserable canyon, and our mood was not lightened by what we beheld. Those brooding peaks presented a wall much higher than the range we had just traversed, and we understood that beyond these lay yet another range, wider and higher and more rugged than the one that was evoking such dread in our hearts.
We had managed one range, fed out half our corn, and there was not a blade of grass anywhere to be seen. Colonel Frémont seemed to think nothing of it. After a brief rest, he set us on our course once again, and we descended the rest of the way to the intermountain valley without great difficulty.
The weather turned warm, and we were heartened by an
occasional bare patch covered with sagebrush. Never had bare earth looked so friendly. We were further heartened when Godey's hunters shot a deer; we would have meat for supper, which somehow gave rise to our hopes. This wasn't so bad; the colonel's calm was entirely justified. The Pathfinder knew exactly what he was about. The valleys were full of game; we would stock up, find grass, recruit our mules between assaults on the slopes, and so pass through the difficult country.
By the time we had reached the valley floor, an icy wind was billowing out of the northwest, and that stung us to hasten along. Old Bill Williams had taken command here, and he steered us south.
“Why do you suppose he's doing that? Just to keep his back to the wind?” I asked Doc Kern.
“He knows of a pass, easy as a hot knife through butter. Robidoux's Pass is what they're calling it. And we'll slide across this range as if it hardly existed.”
I stared at Kern, wondering whether he believed this monstrous proposition, and caught a wry turn of his lips.
“That's what they're saying up ahead,” he added.
The Sangre de Cristos did not look very hospitable.
“You see any railroad prospects here?” I asked.
“Here, there, everywhere,” Kern retorted.
We camped in a wind-sheltered spot in the valley. Godey's hunters fanned out, but I knew beforehand they would come back empty-handed. There wasn't an animal track to be seen. The next day was arctic, and between the bitter wind and the low temperatures, I wondered how I would endure. The valley had snow up to four feet in some places, bare ground in others, and no feed for our mules. What looked like grass here and there proved to be the tips of sagebrush. They couldn't find a thing to eat except a little cottonwood bark where we camped. It was odd, watching them gnaw at
green limbs of the younger cottonwoods, peeling off the tender bark with their big buck teeth. The mules had thinned badly; they had no flesh left to burn off and nothing to fill their empty bellies.
I wondered whether they would survive the next mountain range. The only people enjoying any of this were the colonel and Bill Williams. The guide meandered through the camp, pausing at the various messes, saying nothing. I had the distinct feeling he was enjoying our anxiety, and maybe even plotting ways to make the trip as miserable as he could manage it.
I dismissed the notion as the sort of thing that didn't deserve serious consideration, but the notion kept burrowing into my head, until it lodged there. Old Bill scared me.
I was much intrigued by our guide, Williams. He affected a rusticity that was belied by his command of English when he chose to display it. I learned that he had intended to become a preacher but had long since digressed from that goal. Still, he was a man who had mastered the scriptures and sometimes resorted to them. I learned also that he had taken up Indian religion, though I could not discover which beliefs, since each American tribe seemed to possess its own theology. I gathered, from campfire talk, that Williams believed he would be incarnated as a bull elk with white chevrons on his flanks and had cautioned all and sundry never to shoot such an animal, lest they shoot him.
But if there were remnants of a high calling in the man, they had largely vanished as a result of a quarter of a century
as bloody border riffraff, trapping, roaming, somehow avoiding the worst of the perils that afflict those who venture far beyond the safety of civilization. Here was the man in whom this company was placing its trust. He had proclaimed his knowledge of the country and told us that he knew every pass and river on sight. We could blindfold him and he could take us west.
So of course I was interested in this odd ruffian who dressed in layers of gamey cottons and wools and in an even gamier leather tunic and britches that held his ensemble together. He was subject to both silences and voluble moments when one could scarcely stop the flow of words issuing from him. But on this trip he remained silent, never doing any work he could avoid, and making the passage as easy on himself as possible. Unlike the rest of us, who dismounted and walked our burdened mules through the worst drifts to spare them, Williams rode steadily, his long frame dwarfing the mule that bore him, so that his moccasined feet sometimes dragged in the snow. He sat hunched, incapable of straightening the bends of his body, but I did not make the mistake of thinking that his bad posture signaled an oafish man. He took in everything, with a keen eye. One of the things I noticed from the beginning was his fascination with the company's equipment. Preuss's instruments absorbed him. Frémont's field equipment, including surveying instruments, intrigued him. But Williams never asked a question about any of it; he simply meandered through the camps, observing, and vanished as silently as he appeared.