Snow Mountain Passage (3 page)

She was a recent widow whose husband had lost his life when cholera came creeping up the long, humid Mississippi valley like an invisible cloud. Margaret was her name. She was only twenty. The untimely death left her bedridden for weeks, like a wounded cat lying still, waiting to heal. During the season of her mourning Jim would keep the widow company. He knew her family, had often been a Sunday dinner guest. Next to her he felt a brotherly kinship, sometimes a fatherly kinship. At thirty-four he felt protective. He brought her books to read. They talked about her health and her parents and her brothers and other people in the town and whether or not she would go back to teaching school, which she had done for half a year, until her daughter came along.

As Margaret’s strength returned, they would take short walks, and he would carry little Virginia on his shoulders, tickle her ankles and make her laugh. Once they all rode in a carriage out to his land, and he described the house and barns he planned to build. Neither of them would ever be able to say precisely when consoling turned to courtship, when one form of intimacy led to the next. Margaret had large, watchful eyes and walnut hair that hung in curls beside her cheeks. She was lying on her bed in a robe and running a fever on the day he took her hand and asked her to marry him.

“Maybe we should wait,” she said, “until I am entirely back on my feet.” Her face was glowing, pink and moist and vulnerable.

“No,” he said, his eyes wide with eagerness and desire. “We mustn’t wait. I want to marry as soon as we possibly can.”

He leaned to kiss her, and she turned aside, as if to say,
Whatever has afflicted me might be contagious.
He touched her chin and brought her face around and placed his lips upon hers, as if to say,
I have no fear of it, my love is so much larger than my fear.
She allowed it then, she allowed the kiss. She allowed his eager hand to touch her neck, to slide across her shoulder and push the cotton robe aside, to roam the pale and lustrous flesh. Her eyes opened as if for the first time, as if she were new on earth, and regarded him as if he were the first creature she had seen. He had never observed eyes at such close range. Threads of light glinted around the small, dark centers. Her arms opened. Falling back against the pillow she drew him into her circle of heat. She whispered his name and seemed to swoon, with a little moan, barely audible. Jim swooned too, as her lips melted into his, as she surrendered her mouth and the sweet tips of moisture all around her mouth.

IN TIME HER
fever subsided. But other ailments followed, one upon the next. While she ran her household wisely, neighbor women called her “frail.” Ten years and three children later, when she and Jim began to dream of moving farther west, she suffered from headaches that could cripple her once or twice a month. Whether the cause was a lingering grief, or the stresses of childbirth, or some irritant rising from the soil or drifting down from the trees or from the spore-generating coats of animals, no one could tell. Her headaches became a mystery often wondered at, never solved.

On the days of her confinement, after the worst had passed, he would read aloud from books and articles he had collected about the distant shoreline and the western trail. She would lie back and listen, as if to folktales of ancient and improbable events. He read from Thomas Farnham, from John Bidwell’s diary, from the accounts of Captain Fremont’s second expedition. He read from
The Emigrants’ Guide,
by Lansford Hastings.

“Close your eyes,” he said to Margaret, turning down the corner of a page so he could come back to these lines and study them. “Just close your eyes and picture this.”

He looked up from the page and saw that this passage had revived her. She was gazing at him with amusement. In her eyes he saw a playful doubt. “Can there really be such a place? Do you think it’s possible?”

“This Hastings is no fly-by-night. He’s a lawyer from Ohio. His book was published in Cincinnati.”

She laughed like a child delighted by a nonsense rhyme. “People say outlandish things in books, James.”

“But he has been there. He has been there twice. He led one of the first emigrant parties. He has visited all the principal towns. Think what it could mean! A place without fevers. Without mosquitoes. Or malaria. In our county alone, how many have died of malaria since the last rains?”

“It’s something to think about, all right.”

Now he sounded like an attorney arguing a case. “I can’t see that he makes any claim for himself. He isn’t trying to persuade us to invest money in some far-fetched scheme. He describes what he has seen. Why would anyone lie about matters of health and well-being?”

“Well, yes,” said Margaret, sitting up on the couch. “And when you think of it, what would be the point?”

“There you have it! There wouldn’t
be
any point. You see what I am trying to say? Suppose we could travel to a place where you would never have another headache? Isn’t that worth considering? I am just thinking out loud….”

“What else does it say, James? What does it say about the towns?”

He read some more. He read accounts of places called Sonoma, Yerba Buena, San Jose de Guadalupe, Santa Barbara—all free of pestilence, surrounded with pasturelands and sunny valleys where anything would grow. There were harbors and vineyards and limitless supplies of water, and this was not ancient history or some half-cocked brand of wishful yearning. Weren’t these things Lansford Hastings had seen within the past three years? Jim read some more:

It sounded too good to be true. But Jim and Margaret wanted it to be true. They wanted to believe such a place could exist somewhere on Earth. They told themselves that of course getting there would take a bit of work. If getting there were easy, well, wouldn’t such a place have long ago been overrun?

And so they talked themselves into it, little by little, though Jim did most of the talking. He had a rising lust for this journey, this pilgrimage, while Margaret could not suppress the hundred doubts that soon sprang up to hover around the plan. What about the house? What about the furniture? The children? Their schooling? What about the many friends and relatives we leave behind? What if we need a physician out there?

Jim listened. He made promises. He made lists. He collected maps and articles from newspapers in St. Louis. He wrote to merchants for advice on what to bring and what to buy en route. He conferred with George and Jacob Donner, farmers in Springfield, prosperous men, like him, and past the time in life when you set out to make a new mark in the world. They had no real reason to leave their fields and holdings, yet they too were willing to make the leap. High risk was in the air. High stakes. High promises. Jacob Donner, in poor health and pushing sixty, was ready to gamble on the outside chance that he could find a land free of arthritis, kidney stones, and hot sweats in the middle of the night. His brother, George, liked to pontificate about “larger opportunities,” quoting James Polk, who had said in his inaugural address that our dominant place in the Far West was only a matter of time. Britain was about ready to let go of the Oregon Territory and cede it to the United States. California surely would be next, according to the president, who had advised Mexico, for its own good, to get out of the way.

These Illinois men felt history gathering like a wind, like a river current that could not be resisted, and upon it they would be borne west like gamblers on a riverboat—though they would not be traveling as so many gamblers before them had, in the singular, as men alone.

Jim Reed knew all the famous tales of trappers and explorers setting out for the farther shore. Meriwether Lewis. Kit Carson. Lansford Hastings. Jedediah Smith. As a younger man he had known that kind of itch. The Mississippi was about as far west as he could have imagined at the time, the last frontier, they said, before you stepped off into Indian Territory. He had crossed the Alleghenies to the Ohio and worked barges to the mouth, then started up the valley of the Mississippi, talking to settlers, getting the lay of the fertile land, on past St. Louis, where they still spoke French, until he reached Illinois and found a job in the lead mines. It was dirty and dangerous. Every day or so a man passed out from poisons in the air. But Jim lasted long enough to get some money ahead, and he moved again, to Springfield, in the middle of the state, where the land was richer, where he leased himself a farm and found a wife.

He was feeling it again, that itch, that hunger to move, but it was not a young man’s hunger now. He did not imagine setting out alone, to push ahead and stake a claim. He was a husband and a householder. He saw them all together on the long trail west. It was a husband’s dream. A father’s dream. He imagined them arriving in California together, as a clan. Already he saw the house, the rolling acreage, his sons and daughters galloping home in time for dinner.

One by one he took them aside, to explain the plan and where they would be going. The man who had never known his father had become the father of four. He spoke first to the boys, because they would be easy, too young yet to make demands—James Junior was five, Tommy three. The girls, he knew, would want to negotiate. Virginia was nearly thirteen, slender and pretty and good in school. He figured, rightly, that she would let her classes go for a while and agree to almost anything if he promised her a new pony. He leaned toward her to savor the kiss, as she threw her arms around his neck. He told her they would ride together across the plains, with the wind in their hair and herds of buffalo thundering in the distance.

He could not foresee what his younger daughter would want or say. She was a mystery to him, and thus his favorite, their first child together, his firstborn and named for his mother, Martha Jane, though everyone called her Patty. From infancy she’d had a bold look, as if wise beyond her years. “A sage,” said Margaret’s mother, when Patty was still in the crib. “This child’s bound to be a sage, or a fortuneteller. Over in Virginia where we come from, I once saw a child had a look like this from an early age, and she had second sight.”

Patty was eight and already seemed to be a very small adult. She had the thin, light bones of a bird, so light she appeared to defy gravity when she walked, as if floating, as if about to take flight. Her black eyes could look right through you. They looked through Jim, as he told her about the journey they would all soon undertake. She watched his face as if he were the one who needed to be taken aside and spoken to.

When he finished, she said, “Then, papa, I will want a very good pair of leather boots.”

“And of course you shall have them, darlin’.”

“I will need them to keep up with mama.”

“Oh, you will all be riding in the wagon, you know. Just wait until you see what I have planned.”

“I mean after that.”

“After what?” said Jim, watching her brow furrow above the cryptic smile he never quite understood.

* * *

AS THE FALL
of 1845 turned to winter, as pendulous skies lowered upon the valley of the Mississippi and the ground froze, the meadowlands and villages along the Pacific coast grew sunnier and sunnier in the mind, and Jim carefully plotted the months ahead. He would bring cattle for milk and meat, and dogs for company, and keep a dozen oxen in reserve. There would be books for his children and medicine for Margaret and a bit of good brandy for himself. There would be two wagons to haul supplies and furniture, the flour and the lard, coffee and sugar and tools and cloth and spare parts and bullets, with hired hands to work the teams. A third wagon would be for the family, and he stayed close to his carpenters, making sure they got it right.

He was not going to be bound by what the average traveler expected a wagon to look like. He saw an opening you would enter from the side, through a swinging door, and step up into a sitting room with throw rugs, and with chests along the walls, and spring-cushion seats like a railroad car. There would be mirrors, and a woodstove with a chimney pipe rising through the roof, and drawers for books, and compartments for sewing gear. Built up on posts there would be a second level, with comforters and blankets and pillows. It would be a home away from home, a rolling parlor with sleeping loft attached. With a gang of restless children and an ailing wife who needed her daily rest, what better way to move across the plains and through the mountains? A man alone on horseback might make it in sixty days or so. A family, a household, could take four months, or five. What was the point of rumbling along like gypsies if you didn’t need to?

Before they set out, the huge rig was much admired in the town. “My Lord, Jim Reed,” said his neighbor’s wife, “ain’t nobody gonna hold a candle up to
you!”

AFTER THE BUFFALO
robes were returned, word quickly spread from wagon to wagon. The next morning, hearing that Lewis Keseberg pulled out before daylight, some said good riddance. Others were sorry to see him leave. They liked his wife, her ready smile, her raisin cookies. They hoped that in the long caravan of emigrants, some other party might find a way to take them in. Around the breakfast fires they wagged their heads, saying Reed did what had to be done. And yet some wondered about the way he did it.