Snow Mountain Passage (16 page)

After the fire was out, their eyebrows and hair were singed, but their dark faces glowed with pleasure. There was no question that without their quickness and the risks they took, three more wagons would likely have been lost. Everyone agreed on that. So papa told them to eat with us, which they did, using their fingers and slurping food right off the plate. Yet they were so grateful and so happy you didn’t mind the sound. The way they curled up next to the fire, I figured they had joined us and now we’d have some Indian guides to help us get across the desert.

The next morning I was as surprised as anyone else to wake up and find them gone. They took a yoke of oxen belonging to Uncle Billy, and one of his favorite shirts—losses he immediately blamed on papa for befriending these scoundrels, for being soft on Indians and forever doing things that added to the burdens of our journey.

On the day papa fought with John Snyder, Uncle Billy was smarting from those recent losses. And two weeks later it was still on his mind, as he cautioned Charlie Stanton that when it comes to Indians you can’t ever afford to give an inch. If those first two had been chased after and scalped, he said, we might have saved ourselves a lot of grief. If it was up to him, he would scalp these two right here and now and hang them by their heels and let them be messengers to all the other cattle-rustling bandits that had been dogging us ever since we hit the Humboldt.

I have to hand it to Charlie. He stood firm. These men aren’t Paiutes or Shoshone, he said, they are from the valley of the Sacramento, and they are Christians too. Captain John Sutter himself had vouched for their good character, and so would Charlie. What’s more, Sutter had warned these fellows that if anything happened to so much as one of his mules, he would have Salvador and Luis hunted down and hung. They were on their best behavior, Charlie told us all, and they would be a great asset to the company.

The next morning mama led me toward the one named Salvador. He was going to hoist me up onto his horse. By that time I had seen a lot of Indians, but I’d never been this close to one. The night the Paiutes sat by our fire, I had kept well back, just watching and, I have to confess, mighty disappointed. We had all grown up on Indian stories. Those Paiutes, they didn’t have tomahawks or headdresses. They were the skinniest two people I had ever seen.

Salvador was not skinny. He looked pretty well fed, compared to the rest of us. But he was another disappointment, at first, since he was dressed about like everybody else you saw those days—shirt and trousers made of homespun, heavy boots, a dirty hat.

I held back until his head tipped up and I saw his face. He had a look that quickly won me over. His eyes were so brown they were almost black. He wasn’t smiling, yet he seemed about to break out in laughter, as he pointed to himself and said, “Salvador.” He put the accent at the end. I thought he was speaking an Indian language.

“Sal-va-DOOR,” I said.

“Si,” he said, then pointed at me.

“Patty,” I said.

“Pat-tee,” he said.

“Si,” I said.

He slapped his horse. “Caballo.”

“Ca-ba-yo,” I said, thinking this was the horse’s name.

He held out his hands, and this stopped me. I looked at them as if they were detached from his body. I had never touched an Indian, or been touched by one. I looked at his hands, afraid to move. Finally mama said, “Get on, Patty. Hurry up now. Folks are waiting. We have to go.”

Charlie had given her one of the mules to ride. Tommy was already perched up on its back. Thanks to Charlie, we would all be riding now. He could see how our family was down to nothing. But since he hadn’t witnessed Johnny’s stabbing, he didn’t have to take sides on that, the way some still did, holding mama herself responsible.

James Junior was going to ride behind Luis. Virginia was going to ride behind Charlie. They were all mounted now, watching me.

I raised my arms, and Salvador grabbed and lifted. “Cuidado, señorita,” he said, as he set me on Caballo’s rump.

He swung up into the saddle, with a look back at me and said, “Bamanos.”

“Ba-ma-nos,” I said, though I did not yet know it meant “let’s go.”

Charlie and the Indians knew more about the route now than anyone else, so we were in the lead. As Caballo began to move, I placed my arms around Salvador’s waist. He had worked cattle in the open country around the Mission of St. Joseph and also around Sutter’s Fort, so he was a very fine horseman, good with all the animals. He was strong and firm. Underneath his coat his body was as hard as a tree. He didn’t talk much at all, but little by little he taught me my first bits of Spanish. Buenos dias. Adios. Muchas gracias. Por favor. Me llama Patty Reed. Each time he lifted me onto his horse he would say, “Cuidado, señorita.” Take care, little lady. And I finally learned to say, “Y usted también, señor.”

It was our ritual, our trail game.

He wore a thick wool coat. Sometimes, holding on tight, I would press my face into his back and feel the rough wool against my cheek and smell the heavy smell of woodsmoke and horseflesh and sweat, with some dampness added to the smoky scent, first thing in the morning. To this day I can close my eyes, sitting here above the lake, and the smell of Salvador comes back to me.

THE RIVER FINALLY
brought us to what was called Truckee Meadows, where the town of Reno stands today. A silence fell over the company when we saw the Sierras rising ahead of us, with fresh snow showing all across the peaks and looming cloud cover everywhere you looked. Soon after we’d set up camp near the river, it started to rain, a cold rain very close to snow, and that started people arguing about what to do now, whether to linger a few days here where grass was thick, so the animals could fatten some before we started into the mountains, or to push on before the weather turned. It was only the end of October, some said. By rights, they said, we ought to have another month at least.

“I’ve heard of parties crossing close to Christmas,” one man said, without much conviction.

Such stories did not change the long line of snowy peaks to the west, nor did they change the desperation in the air.

This was where a young fellow named William Foster shot his own brother-in-law in the back for no reason anyone has ever been able to agree on. He had been with us all the way, part of the Murphy clan. His relatives tried to call it an accident, but I still have my doubts, considering some things Foster did later on. He had a mean streak in him. According to the story we’ve been told, his brother-in-law, William Pike, was cleaning a pepperbox pistol. The two of them were getting ready to set out for Sutter’s, hoping to bring back more supplies. When his wife called for some firewood, Pike stood up to fetch it and he passed his pistol to Foster.

You don’t see pepperbox pistols much anymore, except in museums and fancy gun collections. Even in those days you didn’t see them much, because the six-shooter had already come along. But William Pike still carried an old pepperbox, which was an early form of six-shooter, with six small barrels in a ring, one for each bullet. It was an awful-looking contraption, and a mess to clean. But men love things like that. Foster had been itching to get his hands on this pistol. Moments after Pike handed it to him, the gun went off. Pike was shot in the back, and he died by the fire with his wife and children watching.

Did Foster have some family grudge against his brother-in-law and choose this moment to pull the trigger? Or did the gun go off by itself? Or did it somehow explode in his hands, as his relatives claimed?

It was just one more event to divide us, with the animals down to skin and bones, and the resentment and aggravations swelling day by day—this family unhappy about traveling with Indians, that family still arguing about who had started the knife fight and whose idea it was to take the Hastings Cutoff, the next family squabbling over whose fault it was so many cattle had been lost. Now they were all wondering how a man could get shot in the back for no reason, though this time you did not hear Lewis Keseberg demanding “an eye for an eye,” since he had run a long thorn through his foot and it had swollen up so bad he couldn’t walk. Nor did you hear Patrick Breen say, “A killing cannot go unpunished.” His animals had made it across the desert in better shape than anyone else’s. He was eager to get away from Truckee Meadows, figuring he could now make better time on his own. Council meetings were a thing of the past. It was each family for itself.

Then came the sight we all feared most. The day they buried William Pike, the cold rain turned white, and the skies hung over us like the heavy cloak of God. They had buried grandma by a bubbling spring. They had buried Luke Halloran in salt, and John Snyder in dry sand. Now they buried William Pike in the first snow.

By the time we started into the mountains we weren’t a wagon company anymore. We were just a scattering of wagons and cattle and mules and horses and frantic people strewn for miles along the trail. When we came at last to Truckee Lake, the one they now call Donner, a foot of snow had fallen around the shore. The lake was gray as a rifle barrel, and all the trees above the lake were white. The Breens had pushed ahead and had already tried the summit trail and run into drifts too deep for their oxen. Five feet, they reported. Men were saying we’d have to leave the wagons where they stood, pack up whatever the animals could carry and press on before all traces of the trail were buried. It was our only hope to clear the summit.

After that it was bedlam by the lake, the panic in the air thicker than the falling snow, with some men still lashing at their fallen animals, and others berating frozen hands as they struggled to unyoke the teams, and wives screaming at their husbands about what to leave behind and what to carry, the food, the money, the blankets, the extra boots.

Salvador was in the lead again once we started climbing. Since he’d seen the trail and was the best rider, they had given him the strongest mule. I held on to his woolen coat, certain he could get us through. Indians were supposed to know everything about trails and forests and canyons and so forth. He’d already been over this pass. His mules had made the journey too. As long as I had hold of Salvador’s coat, his mule would make it one more time.

Back behind us I could see wagons tilting where they’d lost the trail. I saw other mules and oxen up to their bellies. Some had already pitched into the snow. I saw mama and Tommy on another mule, and Luis right behind us, with my baby brother, and farther back Virginia riding with Charlie Stanton. With one arm I held on to Salvador, with the other I held on to little Cash, our dog. Back at the wagons he had barked until I scooped him up. Now he was curled inside my shawl. Somehow, I imagined, if we could all make it to the top, papa would be waiting there. I didn’t know what the top looked like, or how far it was, or how papa would get himself there. But my mind was working to see a way through, and this was my vision. If I held tight enough, Salvador would lead us to the summit and get us past it to a sunny place where papa would be waiting.

I did not have any idea what the weather had in store, or what snow can do to you at that altitude, nor did I know that Salvador and Luis were valley people just like all the rest of us, flatlanders from the fertile valleys of California. We were farmers and blacksmiths and carriage makers and mule skinners from Illinois and Missouri. That is the heartbreaking part, as I look back, all of these flatlanders finding themselves at six thousand feet in the blinding snow and trying to climb to seven thousand feet.

Salvador was in the lead. But he didn’t know much more about what to do in this kind of weather than anyone else pushing for the summit that day. His tribe had learned long ago to stay out of those mountains in the dark of the year, and you have to wonder what was going through his mind. You have to wonder if he wasn’t asking himself, How did I get up here breaking trail for these crazy whiteskins where only a fool would be?

U
NDER A CLEAR
sky the great valley sprawls behind them now—four men and thirty animals strung along the rocky trail. Up ahead, snow-covered peaks and slopes loom closer, ever closer, glimpsed in and out of gathering clouds.

As they move through the foothills, above Bear River canyon, Jim observes the curving hunch of Mac’s great shoulders, his slouch hat pitched forward, his long legs bent. He likes riding with this man, likes his spirit, a man who loves his family, who always goes the extra mile to do his share and more, and doesn’t talk much unless he’s stirred up or drinking. In his saddlebag Mac carries a trinket for little Harriet, his one-year-old, something he picked up at Sutter’s, a miniature whistle on a rawhide thong. Jim has seen it, a short, polished tube of wood with a hole notched. It makes a trilling birdlike note.

Jim remembers when the McCutcheons joined the wagon company, outside Fort Laramie, young and eager, remembers seeing Mac’s generous face and massive frame, thinking, We can use this kind of muscle. Mac and Amanda had to leave another company when he came down with fever, had to lay low for ten days and sweat it out. At the time Jim didn’t think much about it, Mac seemed so strong and fit, as if the rest had done him good. But the fever has stayed with him, flared up again when he reached Sutter’s, and Jim can still see it in his eyes. They are too bright. The color in his cheeks is unnatural. Today his voice has a raspy edge.

When the rain finally hits and revives his cough, Mac looks bewildered, as if he himself cannot believe a man of his size could be afflicted for so long. He does not complain. He will never complain. He will ride until he drops. But Jim doesn’t want him to drop, or come close to dropping. Four men on such an expedition is already too few.

They climb through a cold and muddy downpour. It rains for hours, steady, soaking everything. At Mule Springs they see the first scatterings of snow. A while later all the ground is white. The rain turns to sleet. On the long steep ascent into Bear Valley they plod through sleet, prod and pull the animals upward, and make camp in a night so wet they can’t build a fire.