Snowbound and Eclipse (7 page)

Some of us weren't getting paid, and I didn't know if that's because the colonel was laying out fancy salaries for these newcomers. Some things about this trip didn't make much sense, and one of them was the whole idea of a railroad to the coast. Who needed it? It would be a lot of rail to nowhere. Where were the customers? This railroad would pierce through two thousand miles of wilderness, buffalo, Indians, and mountains, with scarcely a settlement along the way. I thought the colonel was doing this trip at the behest of his father-in-law, who had the power and money and also a dream about a railroad. It would have made more sense to push it south or north of here, but I have never underestimated the power of politics. Old Senator Benton called it the middle route and believed it made more sense than one farther north or south. Actually, it was simply a ploy to bring trade to Saint Louis.

Four days out we ran into a prairie fire, a wall of smoke rising from a lick of orange flame from south to north, and managed to get through, our keg of powder and all, without getting ourselves blown up or scorched. The grass was high, which didn't help. It was odd, because we'd had some rain off and on. But that day we made twenty-five miles and camped in a little valley with good grass. The next day we made twenty-eight miles and stopped at the Potawatomi Mission. We got some butter from the agent, a bloodsucker named Major Monday, and spent the rest of the evening looking over the Pott Indians, just as they looked us over. We put an extra guard on, but these Indians were tame enough.

We were getting into buffalo country by then, and we would see how the greenhorns could shoot. When you have
buffalo, you also have wild Indians; the two are wedded together so tight that if one vanishes, the other will too. We were going to have plenty to eat, good hump meat or tongue at the messes. But I expected all that to disappear when we hit the mountains. There would be deer and elk up there, not the big shaggies.

The colonel said he'd follow the Smoky Hill branch and then cut down to the Arkansas River and stop at Bent's Fort, where he hoped we could improve our livestock. We had a few laggards and one or two half-lame, and maybe we could trade them off, along with the horses, which are no good in high country because they panic.

There was one thing I was noticing and that was the cold. The wind was tough on some of us, and we weren't seeing much sun, either. The pools froze up at night. No one was complaining. The cold was better than summer heat and horseflies. I didn't mind the cold so much, but the wind got mean and there was nothing here to slow it. There was hardly a tree between here and the British possessions.

I heard some shots, and pretty soon Godey came back to us. He had been ahead, hunting, and shot some buffalo bulls. I didn't look forward to the meat. Bulls are tough and sometimes stringy and not good for much except some stewing if you've got the time to boil the meat senseless. But at least we were getting into buffalo country, and we'd have us a cow or two now. Still, it would be entertaining to see how the greenhorns dealt with some bull meat, so I decided to join their mess.

That was morning, and it was up to each mess to hack meat for supper, so I kept one eye on the greenhorns. It was a sight, alright. Chopping meat out of an old bull was about like sawing the trunk off an elephant. Ned Kern knew enough, but his brothers didn't, and the rest had never seen one and hardly knew where to begin. But Ned began slicing
into the hump, and it took a deal of work even to open up a hole. Not even the surgeon was doing much good. Of course the rest of the messes had gone for the tongues; not much else worth putting into a cook pot. By the time the greenhorns got enough meat for supper, they had put hatchets and an axe to the task and were plumb worn out. I could hardly wait for supper, when they would get another lesson.

That eve we camped in the shelter of a clay cliff beside Smoky Hill, and a few of Frémont's veterans lent a hand to the greenhorns, getting a big fire going and getting that sawed-up meat on green sticks to broil on the lee side of the flames. I think the doctor, Ben Kern, figured it out long before they began to chomp on those slabs of shoe leather they were about to down for dinner. When the moment came, he tackled one or two bites of the brown ruin on his tin plate, sighed, and gave up.

He never complained; I'll give him credit, but McGehee was whining.

“Fat cow's what we want,” I said to the doctor.

“The other messes have tongue. I think I'll remember that.”

“Say, whiles I'm here, do you have powders for anyone bound up?”

“Salts, yes, purgatives. I have ample.”

“That's good. I get bound up on buffalo. Sometimes we go a week without seeing a green, and then it's misery.”

“See me, Mister King.”

“I guess a doctor's worth something after all,” I said.

A faint smile spread across his face. “I have my instruments. If you break a leg, I can amputate. A saw cuts right through bone, and I imagine your leg would be a good bit more tender than this old bull.” He was smiling blandly, obviously enjoying himself.

“I'm a young bull, alright.”

“Watch your tongue,” he retorted.

I had to admire the doc; he had some wit.

It was getting colder than I wanted. The wind smelled like December. It had a whiff of the Arctic in it. But the chill was nothing compared with the sheer pleasure in being hundreds of miles from the nearest shelter. That was the plains for you. A norther could blow out of the north and there was nothing to slow it down, and sometimes it plowed clear into Mexico.

We set off the next day in cold weather, a mean wind adding to our misery. I thought that pretty soon we'd hear some whining, but the greenhorns didn't emit a peep, and we made our grim way west through an increasingly arid country, broken now by gullies and slopes but utterly treeless. Ere long we'd be using buffalo chips for fuel.

The colonel seemed oblivious to the lancing wind and everything else and simply led us along a route that he did not share with us, content to let nature supply us. And it did. Godey shot a cow, and we feasted on good hump meat, plenty fat, and this time the greenhorns got a taste of prime buffalo meat. It made an impression on them, for sure. The whole trip, Frémont had scarcely given a command, and the slightest suggestion was all it took to remedy or achieve anything he wished. I didn't know, and probably will never know, what the man's hold was on others.

The Delawares left us the next morning. They had agreed to accompany us a way but didn't want to tangle with some of the tribes we were facing ahead. The colonel continued up the Smoky Hill fork for the next days. These were exposed stretches, with a howling wind that burrowed into a man's clothing and chilled him fast. The temperatures were mostly in the twenties and thirties, but it felt worse. There wasn't a tree in sight most of the time, nothing to break the gale that whipped through our straggling party.
Despite good cured shortgrass, some of the mules were weakening, and I wondered whether the colonel was aware of it. He wasn't stopping to let them recruit. Sometimes one day on good grass is all they need. But the colonel plunged on, through increasingly barren country, in weather that did nothing to lift the mood of the company. If the greenhorns needed hardening, they were getting it sooner than expected.

At least there were buffalo. For some reason, our hunters continued to drop bulls instead of good cows, but we made do with tongues and boiled bull stew, at least when we could find enough deadwood to build fires. There were places where the plains stretched to infinity and not one tree was visible. The messes were fed with some antelope and even some coon meat the hunters felled here and there, but the staple was bull meat, boiled until it surrendered.

Then one day Frémont turned us south, and we headed over a tableland that divided the drainages of the Missouri and Arkansas and plunged into a lonely sea of shortgrass that probably would take us to the Arkansas some hard distance away. But the winds never quit, and now they brought bursts of pellet snow, which settled whitely on the ground and on the packs, shoulders, and caps of our men. It was early and wouldn't last, but it was snow and it brought on chill winds that never quit and drove me half-mad. I just wanted to find a hollow somewhere, an overhang, a cozy place where that fingering wind didn't probe and poke and madden me. For the first time, I began to wonder about this trip. It made no sense at all to travel this time of year.

The colonel didn't seem to notice the cold or the wind. He rode without gloves and didn't hunch down in his saddle the way most of the men were hunched, trying to rebuff the cruel wind. I wondered what sort of god-man Frémont was, riding like that, as if he was unaware of the suffering around him, unaware that others were numb and miserable.
But he didn't choose to see what I was seeing. He had no eyes for the hunched-up mules that stopped eating and put their butts to the wind and hung their heads low. We sheltered where we could, sometimes under a cutbank, other times in a gulch, but it didn't help much. The wind always found us. The wind found everyone except Colonel Frémont. I swear, the wind quit dead when it came to him; I swear he rode in an envelope of calm warm air, never knowing what other men, mules, and horses were going through.

CHAPTER SEVEN

John Charles Frémont

We reached the valley of the Arkansas River in perfect ease, and I was satisfied that the exploration would proceed without difficulty. My outfitting had never been better despite limited funds, and we were proof against the worst that nature could throw at us. We entered the wide sagebrush-covered valley and found it largely denuded of trees on its north bank, so we crossed at a good gravel ford and then the travel was more comfortable and there were ample willow and hackberry and cottonwood to feed our fires and build our shelters. The road was excellent, not so churned up as it is on the north bank, where the Santa Fe trade had wrought quagmires.

I was satisfied that we had located a good rail route across the prairies, and Charles Preuss was, too. I trusted the man, dour as he may be, simply because he drafted excellent maps and kept unimpeachable logs during my first two explorations. His readings, both at high noon and of the polestar at night, were finer than any before attempted, and he could tell me within a few feet how high we were above the
sea. Now he was daily advising me about how far we wandered from the 38th parallel. He had a certain irony in his eye, knowing full well that by all Hispanic accounts there is no practicable route over the Rockies at this latitude or even anywhere close by. South Pass on the Oregon Road offers an excellent route along the 40th parallel and is much used now by the Oregon bound. And of course, the Sangre de Cristos peter out off to the south, offering unimpeded passage west. But we had been commissioned by men who want to run rails straight over the top, so we would find a route for them, even if it meant turning high mountain saddles into benign passes and impossible chasms into placid valleys.

The visionaries in Saint Louis thought there might be a practical route and had set me to find it. Preuss just shook his head, an ironic gleam in his eye, saying nothing and yet telling me everything on his mind with little more than an arched eyebrow. I tended, privately, to agree with him but could not confess it publicly, nor did I wish to refute my father-in-law or bring him bad news. Better to find a route of some sort and let them decide whether it will break the United States Treasury or bankrupt all the merchants of Saint Louis to build it. In any case, it is my fate to achieve the impossible. I have known all my life that I am destined to do what other men cannot do. It is out of my hands. If it is my fate to find a new route west, through the middle of the continent, then it will happen no matter what I may choose to do.

No sooner had we reached the south bank of the Arkansas than we ran into an encampment of Kiowas, old Chief Little Mound's people. Their tawny lodges were scattered through cottonwood groves. They seemed entirely friendly, and I saw little menace in them. And some of them were handsome, which pleased me, for I take them to be a noble
race. But I did halt my company and let them know that I had the utmost respect for Indians, and I required that all my men treat the savages with kindness and discernment. Of course I doubled the guard, not wanting my mule herd stolen.

They seemed an impoverished people, and I imagine they were verminous. Certainly they were unwashed. They mostly stood beside our trail, examining us one by one as we rode past. Who knows what thoughts were festering in their heads? When we camped that eve, there they were, collected silently around our perimeter looking for something to lift when we were occupied with other things. I brought few trade items because trade was not our business, which meant I could engage in little commerce with those people. And now I wished I had a few gewgaws.

But, oddly, Doctor Kern came to the rescue. They found out that he was a medicine man and were soon seeking him out. Godey and other of my veteran Creoles are pretty good sign talkers, and so the consultations proceeded. Kern hung out his shingle, examined the patients, and prescribed from his cabinet. In one case he compounded salves for some skin lesions. The Kiowas watched the compounding with wonder and took away these ointments as if they were gold. That made Ben Kern a very popular man among the Kiowas. The good doctor told me later that many of the Kiowas were flea plagued and he dreaded any contact with them because fleas are hard to get rid of.

The next days we traveled with the Kiowas, who were our constant companions, all of them curious about our ways and observing our every act. Apart from losing a saddle blanket, we suffered no losses, but it took constant vigilance to keep what was ours. I was especially zealous in protecting my instruments, which we needed to measure latitude and longitude as well as elevations and temperatures. We
had several instruments whose sole purpose was to give us an altitude above sea level. The mercury barometer was the simplest, but it was variable in its results because of shifting air pressures. It was a fragile device, a thirty-inch glass tube partly filled with quicksilver, and we took special care of it. So I put these things under guard at all times and kept the mules under watch.