Snow Mountain Passage (4 page)

“Like he’s a colonel,” said a farmer from Iowa, an Irishman named Patrick Breen, “and we are all his troops. But we are not an army regiment now, are we? We’re just common folks trying to get from here to there, and you ought not to order a person out of the wagon party as if he has traded secrets to the enemy.”

“Well,” said his wife, sipping at her coffee, “what else do you expect from him who drives a wagon so big it takes a whole herd of cattle to pull it along? He thinks a lot of himself, this Mister James Reed. Who is he, anyhow?”

“He’s bringing more animals than most anybody else, I know that much.”

“Does it mean he has to have carpets inside and fancy chairs fixed up like a banquet hall?”

“I ain’t worried about his wagon,” said their nearly grown son, whose job it was to keep an eye on the family mules. “I’m still thinking about them Sioux. Ol’ Keseberg leaving doesn’t mean we get off scot-free.”

Breen and his wife exchanged grave looks, their eyes asking,
Yes, what about them Sioux?

All along the line, as fires were kicked out, and the teams hitched up for another dusty, plodding day, this was the first question in the air. Can Indians really tell one white from another? They might still come swooping down upon us for revenge. Double the guard, then. Stay close together. Keep the children inside, and keep the weapons loaded.

Such talk went on all day and into dinnertime. Late that night, Breen the Irishman sprang awake at a sound out of the darkness, certain his worst prairie dream was coming true at last, a merciless assault and massacre that would leave them all in pools of blood while the wagons burned. He listened for an hour. But the fearful noise, whatever it had been, was drawn back into the throat of the night, swallowed by silence, and the next morning the wagon train set out once again across the world of endless grasses, under a vast sky piled with clouds.

On a good day, over level ground, if they had no creeks to ford or rain to turn the trail to mud, they could make twenty miles. After a week of good days had passed, with the chief’s scaffold far behind them, the fears of reprisal dwindled. They could think again of what lay ahead, what they would buy when they reached Fort Laramie, what equipment needed repair, which route they would follow once they moved past the fort and toward South Pass, where streams and rivers stopped running east across the continent and began to flow the other way.

T
HEY HAD ROLLED
out of Springfield with three families and nine wagons among them. Two months later they were forty wagons and twenty families plus the single men on horseback. There were companies ahead of them and others strung away behind them, strung for a hundred miles across the prairie, or so they’d heard. There’d never been anything like it. A thousand families for their thousand reasons had all decided to set out on the same trail in the same season, heading in the same direction. Before long the whole damn country will be on the move, they would say to one another during the nights of waiting for the next day’s sun.

And yet the farther west they moved, the less they heard this kind of talk. As the weeks passed, patience wore thin. The hopes wore thin. The less they could agree among themselves on where they were going, or why, or which route to follow, or what they had in mind. They squabbled, and they subdivided. Wagon parties broke up and recombined. At the news that war had finally been declared with Mexico, rumors leaped from wagon to wagon, from fire to fire.

“I hear Mexicans are armed to the teeth,” one fellow said, “and waiting for us at the border.”

“Nonsense,” said another. “There ain’t no border.”

“Well,” said someone else, “if you was a Mexican in the middle of a war, would you just sit there and let a whole damn wagon train come rumbling into town?”

Some who’d been bound for California changed their minds, joined up with parties bound for Oregon, heading farther north until the smoke cleared. Some families who’d been waiting for any honorable excuse to give it up turned around and went back home. Others closed their ears to all such news but split off anyway, just for meanness, or for peace of mind, and traveled on their own a while. Some teamed up with total strangers, as Lewis Keseberg had done, falling back to linger on the trail until another band of travelers took him in.

Three weeks went by, and one evening there he was again, with his wife and children and wagons and all his animals, camped at the end of the Donner-Reed train as if he’d never left.

This time a council meeting was called. A vote was taken, and forgiveness carried the day. “I have paid for my crimes,” said Keseberg in his own behalf, “whatever they were.” His blue eyes looked penitent and sincere. “As for the Sioux, aren’t they long forgotten now?”

“But why travel with us?” said Jim, who still mistrusted him.

“My wife has friends here. She misses her friends.”

Jim saw more trouble coming. Afterward he regretted that he’d held his tongue that day. In hindsight, of course, it would be easy to see all the signs and portents. At the time, he let himself be persuaded by the eyes of Keseberg’s pretty wife, shining with reunion, though she still wore a bonnet after sundown and wrapped her neck in scarves.

* * *

NOW THREE MORE
months have passed. The lead parties in the long transcontinental parade have finally reached Oregon and the Willamette Valley or crossed the Sierra Nevada and arrived at Sutter’s Fort and heard the news of the Bear Flag Revolt at Sonoma and the raising of the Stars and Stripes over the field of horned skulls and abandoned cattle bones that fill the plaza there. They have fanned out north and south into the Sacramento Valley or floated down the river toward the little town of Yerba Buena, where U.S. warships wait offshore, at the edge of San Francisco Bay.

Jim had hoped his wagons would be among the earliest. He once imagined appearing outside Sutter’s Fort like Hannibal emerging from the Alps, with his herds and his handsome children and his wife dressed in the highest fashion of the day, and his letter of introduction from the governor of Illinois. But it hasn’t turned out that way. He did not foresee that he would end up leading such a motley and cantankerous band, with their weapons and aggravations and rivalries. He did not imagine that he would ever fall this far behind and have to abandon wagons filled with mahogany furniture and the many dresses Margaret might have worn. Supplies are running perilously low. Shrunken wheels are splitting in the heat. Many oxen have died or run away or been picked off by hungry Paiutes. The remaining animals are gaunt, worn down, and the emigrants are worn down too, following the Humboldt as it winds among old cinder cones.

Two days ago half the wagon party pushed ahead so that all the stock would not be competing for the same meager grazings. In this rear segment, twelve wagons have barely enough oxen to pull them through the ash-dry terrain. The nearest hills resemble slate. Along the riverbank, soil is so chalky almost nothing grows. The wheels and hooves send up plumes of dust that hang above the trail. It covers the beards and moustaches and hat brims and settles on the shoulders and upon the backs of animals. White dust clings to the eyebrows and the kerchiefs, making all their faces ghostly in the middle of the day.

There are no trees, nothing for the wind to rustle or rub against. Even the river is silent. Through this stripped country, the only thing moving, other than the wagons, is the narrow bend of water, and it is not at all like the canyon rivers they have followed, which spill and tumble. The water is very blue and very silent, and on this long afternoon members of the party are silent too, waiting for one of their wagons to make its slow way up a blistering, sandy slope.

By double-teaming, seven wagons have already made the climb. But one young driver has decided he doesn’t need to borrow anyone else’s team and yoke it with his. Perhaps he does not want to face the truth about how weak his animals have become. Perhaps the heat and short rations are working on him, as they work on all of them, and he has reached some kind of limit, so that no advice or good counsel can make a difference.

Four wagons wait in line behind him, while his wheels slide and sink. The emigrants watch him draw his whip and begin to curse, and they wait a while longer because they understand his fury. They are all at the edge of fury and outrage. Maybe they don’t mind seeing some of it expressed by a fellow who has been well liked by all of them, sun-browned and muscular enough to be a trapeze artist, and still handsome, even as his face contorts above the harnesses, the straining flanks.

This is John Snyder, a twenty-five-year-old teamster from Illinois. He joined the party late in the crossing, a week after they left Fort Laramie, traveling with the family of Uncle Billy Graves, whose third wagon he is now trying to move. At the top of the slope Uncle Billy stands pulling on his beard and waiting. Beside him stands his daughter, Mary Graves, who loves John Snyder and plans to be his bride. They were sweethearts back home. She is the one who persuaded him to join her family for this expedition. She is the reason Snyder is here, and maybe he performs for her this afternoon. Maybe, for the hell of it, he has some point to make about his skills as a teamster.

But he isn’t getting anywhere. His oxen are reluctant and irritable and tired, and the driver of the next wagon has run out of patience. This is Milt Elliott, who works for Jim Reed, a loyal driver and handyman. He has six oxen hitched to the Palace Car, and he has waited long enough. He is going to pass John Snyder and get over this hill so they can make a few more miles before sundown.

Milt snaps his reins and calls out to his animals. The lumbering double-decker begins to move, but very slowly, since it now carries everything the Reeds have left, an unwieldy warehouse, so filled to overflowing that the four Reed children must walk beside it. The wife who needs her daily rest, who still falls to her knees with blinding headaches, is walking the last three hundred miles to California.

“Be careful, Milt,” she says. “Keep well away from John’s team.”

“Don’t worry!” Milt shouts, loud enough for Snyder to hear. “Johnny might be climbing this here hill till midnight!”

Snyder turns sharply, and sees the crowd of oxen gaining on him. His scowl pleases Milt, who detests the other teamster for his good looks and his popularity. At the end of the long, difficult days, Snyder has been known to lift everyone’s mood by dropping a wagon’s tailgate and dancing jigs in the desert air. He is light on his feet and a charming singer. All the young women and some of the wives have crushes on John Snyder.

No one has a crush on Milt. He is tall and loose-limbed and homely. His jaw is crooked and his ears are large. He cannot sing or dance, nor has he been able to get a reaction from Mary Graves, whom he has coveted since the day she joined the party. But Milt is good at what he does. He can get a reaction from the cattle. With the reins he now urges them upward, while John Snyder, stuck in the sand, is standing at the wagon seat cursing his animals and cursing Milt, cursing the heat and the sky and the wagon that is gaining on him and the man who built the wagon. This is more than he can bear.

Snyder hates the Palace Car, the look of it, the size of it, the very idea of it. All he wants to do with his life is get to California and find some acreage with good water and a grove of trees and settle down with Mary Graves and work his ranch and raise a family and have a little extra time to sit on his front porch in the evening and contemplate his land. They could have been there weeks ago had they not joined up with this doomed wagon party led by a barn of a wagon that has held them back and slowed them down every foot of the way.

“Go easy down there, Johnny,” Uncle Billy calls from the top of the hill.

John doesn’t hear. He sees Milt’s oxen next to him, and he remembers a covetous look he has seen when Milt’s eyes have gazed too long at Mary. Jerking on the reins, he begins to flail his animals, causing his lead ox to flinch and stumble and veer, just as Milt’s right front wheel hits a soft spot. The Palace Car tilts. The teams collide. Two wooden yokes somehow lock or overlap. Harness lines are tangled, and Snyder leaps in between the teams, beating oxen on the head with the butt end of his whip, first his own team, then Milt’s team.

“You sonofabitch!” John shouts. “You sonofabitch! Damn you! Damn you! Damn you worthless sonofabitch!”

From behind the wagons a loud voice bellows, “Johnny! Johnny!”

It is Jim Reed, who rode off early with his rifle to hunt for food, and has returned in time to see the collision. Now he is out of his saddle and standing in the sand.

“Stop it, Johnny! We need these animals!”

For Snyder, the sight of Reed and his horse is another goad, the sight of a man who can roam around at will while the rest of the world has to drive teams and work the trail.

“What the hell do you know about animals?”

“I know we are dead without them! Now back away!”

“You and your goddam wagon!”

He still hammers on the heads and backs of the helpless oxen. Seams of blood begin to seep through their chalky, dusty hides.

“Milt!” Jim cries. “Unhitch the teams! Let’s help John get his wagon up!”

Snyder shouts back, “I don’t need nothin’ from you or your teams!”

“Calm down, Johnny.”

“You’re the one got us into this mess!”

“You can’t accuse me. I’ve been gone.”

“I do accuse you!”

“I won’t hear this!”

Snyder has climbed up onto the wagon tongue, brandishing his whip. Uncle Billy Graves is loping down the hill in long, sand-sliding hops, with Mary right behind him. Margaret Reed steps toward her husband, hearing in his voice a sound that frightens her. She moves toward the sound, as if her upheld hand might silence it.

“James, James,” she says.

But Snyder and Reed both are deaf to the voices around them. Jim knows they have been saying this for weeks, laying at his feet all the blame for their delays. It eats at him. It’s a sign of weakness, this blaming. When things go wrong, they dare not blame themselves. Late at night he has been thinking, Have I not done my best? God knows, I’ve given it my all at every turn…. Exhausted, yet he cannot sleep, worrying till dawn then arising to another day of sand and heat, as hour by hour his hold on the future turns literally to dust, crumbling around him, disappearing with the wind. Two wagons lost, eighteen cattle gone, his wife and children walking, all losing weight, their faces thinning in a way that can break a father’s heart, yet still watching him with the child’s faith that he will bring them through. And now to come back, after a morning’s fruitless search for game, to find John Snyder beating on the head of one of his last oxen, as if he wants to beat the poor starving creature into the earth. Isn’t this precisely what has brought them all to such a place? This senseless show?