Read Snowbound and Eclipse Online
Authors: Richard S. Wheeler
Then, with several men down, he chose to abdicate.
He collected those of us who had survived a day of stumbling along with our rifles and blankets and nothing more and announced his decision:
“You're on your own,” he said. “Some of us are stronger, some weaker, and I can't let the weaker delay the stronger. So, I'll take the stronger men with me and try to get relief. I can do no more.”
It made sense in a way, if you wish to excuse the days we
had spent sliding the colonel's stuff down the mountain. We devoured the last bits of tallow candles that night. The next morning Vincenthaler's chosen party sneaked away before the rest of us were even aware. He took with him the two California Indians, Joaquin and Gregorio, as well as Scott, Martin, Bacon, Hubbard, Ducatel, and Rohrer. There was hardly a man among those of us left behind who could lift a rifle to shoot a passing raven. There was Andrew Cathcart, skin and bones but doughty and alive; Micajah McGehee; Captain Charles Taplin; Joseph Stepperfeldt; Elijah Andrews; my brothers, and I. We were on our own, we who were so worn we could scarcely walk thirty paces to collect firewood. We vowed we would not leave one another, so long as there was breath in us, and so strengthened ourselves in our solidarity.
Still, we were not yet defeated. If we had no flesh on us, we still had heart. I surveyed the creek where ice did not cover it, looking for anything, water bugs, fish, aquatic plants, that might sustain us, but it was a feckless search. I did find some wild rose shrubs and collected some rose hips and shared these with the rest. They are known to allopathic medicine as being therapeutic. It behooved us to be off. The farther ahead the stronger party got, the worse would be our chances. If they might shoot a deer, they would send a fair portion of it back to us if we didn't lag too far, or so I believed. I should have known better.
All that day we proceeded along the river, sometimes a few steps at a time, but never failing to make headway. By dark we were spread out again, but some of us went back for the stragglers whilst the rest got a fire going and made some warmth. I was one of those stragglers and had fallen insensate only to have the rest get me to my feet, and by that means I staggered into the camp and the welcome warmth. There remained only Andrews not accounted for, and soon
we heard one hoarse cry and nothing more. We found him a hundred yards back and got him in, but he lay inert, in a stupor that awakened a dread in me. I have seen that sort of stupor all too often in my practice.
Then Rohrer came in, rising out of the dusk, much to our surprise.
“Couldn't keep up,” he muttered.
We welcomed him to our campfire, where he collapsed in a heap. Soon he was warming himself, but I eyed him sharply and didn't like what I saw.
We were much too famished to break camp the next morning and resolved to hunt whilst we had strength enough to shoulder a rifle. The whole lot of us were so snow-blind I couldn't imagine we would have much luck, but my friends persisted, and in time, they brought in two prairie hens. Oh, that was a fine moment, even if it meant only one bite apiece for the nine of us. We divided everything, including the entrails, and felt that single morsel slide into our gullets.
One of us, Taplin if memory serves me, found a dead wolf and dragged it in. It was mostly gone, gnawed away by raptors and other hungry creatures, but we got some well-boiled flesh out of it, boiled the hide for more, and ground up the bones and gulped them down, too. That barely sustained life, but in truth we could travel no more. We were worn out.
Elijah Andrews lingered in a stupor, and nothing I could do induced him to live, and so he perished quietly in the night. He was a Saint Louis man and had served long years in the navy, only to meet his Maker out in the middle of the continent. He had struggled to live but had weakened steadily. McGehee had saved him earlier in the mountains, but the span of his life was only a few days more. I wondered what little family in the city would soon be sorrowing.
We found a small gilded bible in his pocket and resolved that if any of us should live, we would deliver it to Andrews's
relatives in Saint Louis. It was a most sacred vow: that bible would be carried from one end of the continent to the other, if need be, but it would come home in Saint Louis. We laid Andrews out flat; the cold wasted no time permeating his flesh, and we covered him with brush, for that was all we could do.
My eye was on Henry Rohrer, who was mumbling and ranting and drifting to and from the fire. He was a millwright, making his way to California, where his skills would be greatly valued. I knew the madness as a prelude to what would come next, but I was helpless. I had no remedy but hot water, which I attempted to put into the man and thus warm his innards, but he would not drink it. I could not fathom what he was saying, but the flow of words told me he was off in his own memories, or his own world, and already lost to us. So our camp began another deathwatch, as we waited for the maddened man to quit life. It did not happen at once. By unspoken agreement, we planned to head downriver as soon as Rohrer left us. I don't suppose anyone wanted to remain in camp with two of the dead.
But ere long, his breath stopped. And so we had lost another. We stared at the bodies. That's when my brother Ned, one of Frémont's trusted lieutenants in the conquest, offered the proposition:
“It's a hard thing to say, but that meat's as good as any other,” he said.
I wasn't surprised. Or rather, I thought it might be Richard, the weakest among us, who would raise the prospect. Ned had his ways in the wilds and managed to pull bits of food from everything he passed. I once watched him dig up cattail root and mash and eat it. But now he had come to his Rubicon and was proposing that we all cross that river, even as Rohrer's body began its long and fateful cooling.
I had no objections. Men do what they have to do in extremis.
My own empty stomach groaned with need. Captain Taplin, who was the strongest among us and had stayed with us to hunt if he could, simply stared. The awful prospect hung among us.
“Do what you must, but out of my sight,” Taplin said roughly. “I will not see it.”
But McGehee, courageous lad from the Deep South, offered his own plea. “Let us wait. Relief is coming. It might be here tomorrow. We can endure. Give it three days, and then we shall do whatever we must do.”
That was a sensible and courageous suggestion. We nodded, feeling the hollowness of our bellies, our tongues and teeth and throats and stomachs rebelling against this great moral act Micajah had proposed. But for the moment, we subsided. I pulled a bit of canvas over Rohrer, the millwright who wanted to live out his life in a sunny, warm land. The canvas cast a veil over him and made a small, redoubtable barrier.
“Who's going to write them?” I asked, thinking of all the newly made widows and orphans, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters scattered across the country, but most commonly in Saint Louis and Missouri.
“Someone must,” McGehee said.
“The colonel, of course,” Taplin said. “It's his duty.”
It's odd how that thought dispirited me.
Hunger doesn't abate. It's there, down in the gut or under the ribs every waking moment and during sleep as well. It is not only a physical pain but an incompleteness. It feeds a gnawing worry; life isn't right. Now this hunger afflicted us all. The faces in these men, as I watched them in the flickering light, were almost unrecognizable. Something had scooped and shrunk their faces, like a lingering disease. I wondered how well I might read the sign of my own failure, and thought I could well enough.
I forced my mind to other things. Tomorrow, if I had any strength, I'd chop through the river ice and see about fishing. A morsel of fish would go a long way among us. I had nothing to fish with, but the dream of catching one fevered me.
Captain Taplin was a saint. He was hardier than the rest of us but chose to shepherd us and hunt for us instead of joining Vincenthaler's party ahead. If we survived, he would be the rock of our salvation. It was he who collected wood and fed the fire and drove away the misery of the icy night. It was he who helped me up when I fainted away and got me to this place.
My thoughts returned, as I knew they would, to those two departed men and the meat of their shoulders and arms and thighs that might support us for a few days more. Would it be so terrible? It's odd that I debated the moral ground for it, when all I wanted was flesh, any flesh, to eat. And yet my mind persisted in examining the issue, perhaps with a clarity that only a starving man can experience. I thought it would not be so bad; the dead might even have wanted it. And yet, somehow, I was grateful when McGehee suggested we wait for our rescuers. It came to me as a vast relief, a release from my own temptation.
That was a long night, filled with strange phantasms. I thought the Utes had fallen upon us, but that was not the case. By the cold light of dawn I surveyed our number and saw that the living lived; the dead lay just apart. It was plain that we were going no farther. We would either be rescued here or perish here. Most of the men did not bother to sit up but lay in their miserable blankets, staring at the white sky.
I urged upon them the last medical advice I had, which was to drink hot water, as scalding as they could endure, for in the heat was life, and it was cold that would steal in and murder them. Some did. We had a single kettle among
us, and Taplin kept it filled and close to the flames. I was worried about Cathcart, who didn't stir, and I managed to get some hot water to him. It was all I could do to get him to sit up and swallow it, but he seemed better for it after he had downed a good hot cup.
That day was the beginning of helplessness. There we were, sensate, aware of our world, and utterly helpless. Our bodies failed us. Taplin, the strongest, tried to hunt, and he managed to walk to a copse a hundred yards distant and sit on a log, awaiting whatever game might wander. Nothing came, and he made his way back to lie down beside the fire.
Helplessness is a strange sensation. I wanted to live, to walk, to eat, to sit up, and all I could manage was to lie close to the flickering fire, turn myself occasionally to warm the front or rear parts of me, and peer half-blindly off to the south, from whence our help must come, if it were to come at all.
The others were in the same case. I was too weak to attempt my plan to fish or find anything aquatic to eat. I could not wield our camp axe enough to breach the ice. And so the helpless day passed, followed by an even more helpless day, and then another, while we slowly wasted the last of our strength.
I had reached the point where I could barely raise my head to look after my brothers. I had tried to doctor them all along, but now I stared into the whiteness until my eyes blurred and smarted, and I waited for whatever fate would bring.
Of the two dead I knew nothing. Whether any among us chose to slice aside the men's shirts and britches and find some meat, I could not say. If it was done, it was done so furtively in the deeps of the night that I had no inkling of it. I supposed it would be someone's deep secret and unknown to me.
Then on the third day, or perhaps it was some other day, for I had lost count in my perpetual twilight, we heard a shout. I could no longer lift my head and don't know what it was about. But I managed to rise a little, by dint of determination, and saw men and horses approaching. Whether our relief party or Utes I did not know.
We reached the Red River settlement late of a winter's day, and no place looked more like heaven. Here, in an arid brown valley off the Rio del Norte, lay a northern outpost of the Mexicans, a scatter of low adobe homes surrounded by snow-ribbed grain fields and pumpkin patches. The usual adobe defense tower guarded these farming people from the sallies of the Utes and other tribes. White smoke drifted from their chimneys, but we saw no other sign of life.
We five stumbled in, guided by our Ute chief. His horses were so poor they barely moved, so it had taken us four more days from the time we encountered Williams and Breckenridge and Creutzfeldt to reach the settlement.
The Mexicans soon herded about us, warm and sympathetic, and swiftly brought us into a heated, if austere, oneroom jacal, where they hastened to feed us with a corn gruel and bread. Never did anything taste so elegant. The walls were festooned with strings of dried red peppers, a local delicacy. There, before the hearth fire that cast its thin heat into the adobe room, we found warmth and comfort. Bronzed, jet-haired neighbors wrapped in serapes crowded in, watching us silently as we wolfed our food. The children
were shooed away, and perhaps for good reason. We were a shocking sight. I am adequate in their tongue, and Godey spoke it passably, and we made our needs known: we had starving men upriver. We needed men, mules, bread, blankets, and livestock feed, and fast.
The villagers simply shook their heads. There were not food stores and blankets and mules and burros enough in the whole settlement to meet our needs. A man who introduced himself as the alcalde, Juan Solis, said he could spare but three burros, five mules, and a little cornmeal, but maybe more food might be found. A goat or two might be slaughtered. He and his villagers would do all they could. They would also prepare for the next arrivals. A little goat milk would help them.
At Taos, one long day's ride south, they told us, there would be everything a relief party would need, as well as a detachment of American soldiers who had been there since the conquest. The next dawn, well fed and greatly strengthened, I set off for Taos, along with Alexis Godey, my man Saunders, and Godey's nephew, Theodore. The Ute chief, having delivered us, retreated after receiving what remaining gifts we could manage, which were Saunders's and Theodore's rifles and powder flasks and shot. The Mexicans treated the old man kindly, offering him a bowl of the cornmeal, which he ate swiftly before he left. I watched the old chief wander off with his weary nags, two powder horns dangling about his neck and his new rifles slung from his saddles. Preuss, who was unwell, stayed on at the Red River settlement, to gather strength and deal with the survivors as they straggled in.