“Sorry,” he murmured.
“Next,” Will went on, as though he hadn’t been interrupted, “yes, I will have to leave Alice and the baby here, but if Brother Brannan’s right, then the Saints may end up here. Then she won’t have to go anywhere. As far as my leaving her alone, you’ll be here to make sure she’s cared for.” He took a quick breath. “And as for meeting your Kathryn and your new baby, I understand how you feel. But remember, my family is coming across the plains too. I haven’t seen my father and mother in over a year now. Savannah and the other children—they are my brothers and sisters. I am as anxious to see them as you are to see Kathryn.”
Again Peter stirred, but said nothing when he saw Alice’s look.
“Finally,” Will went on, “I know Samuel Brannan well. You have met him only once. We have lived with him and dealt with him for over a year now. I know how he thinks and acts, and that’s important. He can be very frustrating at times.”
He stopped, and Peter leaned forward. Alice looked at the two of them. “Are you finished, Will?” she asked.
He nodded, and Peter jumped right in. “I know Brannan now too, so that’s no great advantage for you.”
Away they went again, and Alice jumped to her feet a second time. They sputtered out like candles in a rainstorm. When they were silent, she spoke quietly but forcefully. “I would like to rule on what I’ve heard,” she said.
They both nodded, watching her expectantly.
“You both make strong arguments, but . . .” She turned to her husband and her eyes softened. “But I’m afraid that I’m going to rule in favor of Peter.”
“
Alice,
” Will cried. “I—”
She cut him off quickly. “I know that you think it’s because I don’t want you to leave me, Will. And that’s true, of course. But that’s not enough. There’s one reason stronger than all the rest. That’s why Peter has to go.”
“What?” Will asked, already seeing that he was going to lose this one.
“Kathryn and the baby,” she answered quietly. “That outweighs everything else. If it were me out there, Will, I would want it to be you that came for me.”
Sam Brannan had somehow secured the services of Charles C. Smith, an experienced mountain man and trail guide, and that was a great comfort to Peter. As they checked their saddle girths and the lashings on their pack mules one last time, he remembered what John Sutter had said the night before. “This is pure, unvarnished folly,” he had exclaimed in his heavy Swiss accent.
“Now, John,” Brannan replied, trying to smooth things out. “Charles here knows what he’s doing.”
Sutter just harrumphed at that. “First of all, it’s madness for three men to travel alone. Yes, yes, I know it’s the end of April, but even the Indians are saying they’ve never seen the snow deeper in the Sierra. It’ll take you two months just to get over Truckee Pass.”
“We’re counting on the warmer weather and the rain to help pack the snow more solid,” Smith had drawled lazily. “Some of them up in Bear Valley are reporting that a horse can pretty well stay on top of the snow now, especially at night.”
Sutter ignored that. “You’ll never make it, Brannan. Give it another month.”
Peter didn’t say anything through all of that. He had been in that snow twice now, and he had deep misgivings. But he also trusted Charlie Smith.
None of that changed Sutter’s mind, but it was not like him to pout about it. This morning as they prepared to leave, Sutter had come out to wish them farewell and Godspeed. He also brought a sack with almost twenty-five pounds of dried beef to send with them.
Brannan looked around, then at his two companions. “Are you ready?”
“I was ready three days ago,” Smith drawled amiably.
“Ready,” Peter answered.
Will stepped forward and gripped Peter’s hand. “You take care now, you hear?” he said softly.
“When I see your parents, I’ll tell them you wanted to come.”
“Thanks. It’s okay, Peter. Alice is right. It’s you who should be going.”
Peter went to Alice and took the baby. He kissed him quickly, even as Jared struggled to be free of the attention. “Good-bye, my little friend,” Peter said. Then he gave Alice a big hug. She threw her arms around him and hugged him back tightly.
“That’s for all the family,” she said, near tears. “And especially for Kathryn.”
“I’ll give it to her,” he promised. Then he stepped back and mounted his horse. Smith was already up. Brannan shook hands with Will and Alice, then with Sutter one last time. Then he too mounted up, and with a jaunty wave he nudged his horse and it started for the gate.
Peter thought he had been exhausted before. The night he and the Reeds had come across the Salt Desert they had gone over thirty miles on no more than three or four hours of sleep. But that had been a child’s task compared to what they were undergoing now. They had ridden the twenty-five miles to Johnson’s Ranch, rested for less than an hour, and pushed on, making an estimated forty miles before they stopped. When they camped at Mule Springs at the head of Bear Valley that first night, it was clear and cold. By morning the temperature dropped and a light rain started. Charlie Smith looked up towards the mountains, which were hidden in the gray clouds. “This will be snow on top,” he said darkly.
That did it. Aside from the risk of being trapped themselves, Brannan did not want to be delayed further. Peter had not yet figured out exactly what urgency was driving the leader of the
Brooklyn,
but whatever it was, it was driving him hard. They set out immediately. Within an hour they were in snow five or six feet deep, but Charlie was right. The weeks of warmer weather mixed with rain had packed the snow in a denser mass than the deep powder Peter and James Reed had tried to bull through. The crust was not hard enough to carry the weight of a horse and rider, but a horse alone could stand in most places without breaking through. So they tied their horses in a string and moved ahead on foot.
It was the twenty-seventh of April. In the valleys below them, spring had come two months before. But here winter still had the mountain locked in its grip. They made the pass at about five o’clock that night. As they stood amid the rocky crags, looking down on the lake below them—still partially covered with ice—Peter felt sick to his stomach. From the descriptions given by the survivors and the rescue party, he knew exactly where the camp had been. He was looking at the site. There below him was the place of death and suffering, and it made him sick to think again of those he had known who had died there.
Brannan was watching him closely. After a moment he touched Peter’s arm. “Come on,” he said. “We won’t stay long.”
Charlie Smith looked at the sky. Snowflakes were floating gently down upon them. “It’s all down from here,” he said with satisfaction. “I think we beat the main storm.”
When they reached the meadows near the east end of the lake, the snow was only three or four feet deep, and there were bare patches of ground around the trees and where the sun shone in its strength. Brannan stopped the horses for a rest. “I’m going to go take a look,” he said. “Do you want to come, Peter?”
Peter immediately shook his head. “I’ll stay here with the horses.”
Brannan nodded and handed him the rope; then he and Charlie set off at a brisk walk and disappeared into the trees. They were gone only about fifteen minutes. When they reappeared, Peter watched them closely for any reaction. Both were shaken. Brannan looked a little gray, but that might have just been the fading light.
“Unbelievable!” Brannan muttered, then said nothing more. Charlie Smith kept looking back in the direction from which they had come and shaking his head. They took their horses to the creek and let them drink. As they waited for the animals to get their fill, Charlie suddenly gave a short, triumphant laugh. “Don’t you wish old John Sutter were here?”
“Why?” Brannan asked.
“He said it would take us two months to get over the pass.”
The other two nodded. This was only their second day since leaving the fort, and they had come all the way from Bear Valley in just over fourteen hours.
“I know we’re tired,” their guide continued, “but I think we need to keep going, all night if necessary, and get out of the mountains.”
“Agreed,” Brannan said.
Smith laughed again. “If you figure another eight to ten hours to get down, that means we will have crossed the pass in under thirty hours. I’d like to rub Sutter’s nose in that a little.”
With a nod, Peter and Brannan fell into line behind him. As they started eastward again, Peter did not turn and look back, not even once.
Kathryn Ingalls stopped for a moment, leaning heavily on her cane, and looked back into the room. It was empty now except for the plain wooden table and three stools that Derek couldn’t fit into the wagon. For a moment, there was a twinge of sadness. Last spring when she and Peter had started out with the Reed family from Springfield, Illinois, who could have guessed that by fall she would be teaching school on the Arkansas River at a little place in the middle of nowhere called Fort Pueblo? But she was glad. Here she had taught as many as twenty-one pupils. Some spoke with the deep twang of Mississippi; others chattered away in Spanish. Some were fair skinned and blue-eyed. Others had eyes as black as a beetle’s belly and either the olive skin of the Mexicans or the copper skin that spoke of white fathers and Indian mothers.
Here also she had given birth to little Nicole. Here they had spent a lonely Christmas far from their families. Here she had spent many an hour on her knees praying for Peter’s safety. Now they were leaving and would never see it again.
The little cabin wouldn’t stay empty for long. There were only seventeen of them heading north this early. The rest of the nearly two hundred and fifty people here now would wait for this lead group to send word back if they had found the Latter-day Saints before they came on. So one of the families from Mississippi would move in here before they had been gone an hour. At Fort Pueblo, housing was too limited for a dwelling to sit empty for very long.
She turned as Rebecca came into the cabin to stand beside her. “Is Nicole still asleep?” Kathryn asked.
“Yes. Christopher is watching both her and Leah.” Rebecca looked more closely at her sister-in-law. “Does it make you sad to leave?” she asked.
Kathryn instantly shook her head. “No. We were happy here, but I am so ready to leave.”
Rebecca slipped her arm around Kathryn’s waist and squeezed her. “Me too. In fact, I am so excited, I barely slept a wink last night.”
“A wink?” Kathryn asked in mock surprise. “That would be a very long time compared to how long I slept.”
Rebecca laughed.
They stood in silence for a time, and then Kathryn straightened. “If we’re so happy to be leaving, how come we’re still standing here?”
“Good question,” Rebecca said, taking her arm. “I think everyone’s ready. Let’s go.”
They came outside to where the five wagons were waiting. The last one was theirs, one Derek had gotten in trade for working most of the winter for one of the traders at Fort Pueblo. Robert and Elizabeth Crow and their extended family would have the three lead wagons. George Therlkill, a son-in-law of the Crows, had one for him and some of his own immediate family, and the Ingallses had one for their three adults and four children.
As the women came up, Derek was talking with Brother Crow. He stopped and smiled. “Are you ready?”
“More ready than I have ever been for anything else in my life,” Kathryn said eagerly.
Robert Crow laughed softly. “We feel exactly the same, Kathryn. So let’s mount up and get this party on the road.”
It was their twenty-fifth day out of Johnson’s Ranch, and their twenty-third since coming out of the Sierra. Once again the endless monotony of the landscape left Peter feeling depressed and despondent. He had been especially melancholy since they had passed the sandy hill where he and Milt Elliott and James Reed had tried to take Reed’s wagon up and around John Snyder’s wagon. The memory of that instantaneous flash of anger that left John Snyder dead came back as vividly as if it were happening again. Against his will, his eyes searched the ground for the dark stain where John Snyder had fallen, but thankfully, there was nothing now in the sand but the eroded marks of the wagon tracks.
They moved steadily eastward, making twenty to thirty miles on some days, but dropping the average to more like twenty when they had to stop to hunt or to rest their animals. When he saw the dark line that was the Ruby Mountains and watched it grow close enough to beckon them with its pine-covered slopes and snowcapped peaks, Peter began to watch more carefully the trail they were following. Finally, about two o’clock on this, their twenty-fifth day, he saw what he was looking for. It was faint, and had he not been watching they might have passed it by.
“There it is,” he said quietly, reining in his horse.
Sam Brannan and Charlie Smith pulled up as well. Charlie stood in his stirrups, squinting against the harsh glare of the sun off the desert floor. Then he grunted and sat down again. “I see it.”
Brannan nodded. “I don’t understand. Why were you coming up from the south at this point?”
“Well,” Peter responded, “that was one more little surprise that Lansford Hastings hadn’t warned us about.” He pointed toward the wall of the Ruby Mountains that stood directly east of them. “The Great Salt Desert is about straight east from here, but when we reached the other side of the Ruby Mountains there, there was no way for wagons over the mountains.”
“That’s for sure,” Smith grunted.
“So we turned south and went all the way around them.” He shook his head, his eyes dark with the memory. “It took us ten days.
Ten days!
Do you realize what that ten days would have meant to them in the Sierra?”
Charlie was looking at the high mountains, whose top third was still snow covered. “I can see why you didn’t want to take wagons over that,” he noted, “but we could make it fine with horses and mules.”
“No,” Peter said, more sharply than he had intended.
Brannan shook his head too. “Peter’s right, Charlie. The Hastings Cutoff is not for us. We’ll stick to the known trail.”