Snow Mountain Passage (8 page)

You take that day by the Humboldt. I still wonder if he really had to ride off like that. Maybe he already believed he had some punishment coming, even before he pulled his knife and started waving it like a man who is drunk outside a bar. Maybe he was yearning to be put through some kind of test even worse than the hell he’d already seen—to prove something to the rest of them, or take some scar upon himself for what he’d done, or failed to do.

Our stop at Fort Laramie was another time when things could have gone another way. And this was many weeks before the trouble started, while the animals were still healthy and the wagons were still loaded with provisions and the women still had time to think about what they’d fix for the Fourth of July, still holding on to the places they’d left behind, and in that way trying to make Fort Laramie an outpost of civilization, which it was not, though on the day we rolled in, there were more people congregated than you would have found anywhere else in the entire West. We saw buffalo hunters and shaggy, wild-eyed trappers with mules and squaws and furs to trade. Thousands of Sioux were camped outside the fort, along with half the wagons on the trail. Papa called out to men he hadn’t seen since Independence. He saw a pair of mules he was sure he recognized, ones he’d sold just before we crossed the Missouri.

I remember a green meadow above the broad, sandy river we’d been following for weeks. Where Laramie Creek spills into the Platte, it looked like a park. I wanted us to stop, but we splashed on through the creek and climbed past the meadow until we came upon the fort, the long clay walls, the wooden gate, the blockhouse over the gate where riflemen could stand. Before dinner papa walked over there to look up the man in charge. He came walking back with a fellow he hadn’t seen in fourteen years, since they had fought together in the Blackhawk War. Papa invited him to sit down for a cup of coffee, which was gratefully accepted. The man had not sniffed a cup of coffee in about six months, or so he said.

He was not with any of the westering parties. He was bound in the opposite direction. He had been a trapper and some kind of guide, and now he was on his way east from what the Mexicans used to call Alta California, said he was headed home to Illinois before these new crowds spoiled all the unspoiled places he had come to love.

Mama invited him to stay for dinner, but she didn’t like him much. She had known him in Illinois, knew something about him from those days, though I think mainly it was the terrible smell that followed him like a shadow. All of those mountain men who wore the same clothes for weeks and months on end, you have no idea what a foul-smelling bunch they were. He wore moccasins and buckskin trousers and a buckskin shirt with fringes dangling from the sleeves, and his shirt was shiny smooth. Parts of it were nearly black with grease and smoke and weather. He carried a powder horn slung from his shoulder and a Bowie knife at his waist. He had so much hair you could hardly see his face, just his blue eyes peering out like he was inside a thicket. I asked him if it was hard to breathe with all that hair around his mouth.

When the Mountain Man laughed, bad teeth showed through his beard, and gaps where other teeth had fallen out. The missing teeth gave him a bent mouth and a bent smile. “Sometimes it’s hard to breathe,” he said “but it catches all the bugs and skeeters ‘fore they fly down my throat, so I don’t mind.”

After dinner papa opened one of his quarts of ten-year-old brandy, and they started talking. Around that fire they talked for hours. Papa had news about towns this fellow would be going back to, the prices, the state of the Union east of the Mississippi. The Mountain Man had news from all the places papa was so eager to see. He was the first person we met who’d actually been where we were headed. He’d just come overland from Sutter’s Fort, where things, he said, were “heating up.” Papa wanted to know what he meant by that.

“Coming to a head,” he said.

He was a storyteller. Before he began a story he would take a long pull from the brandy bottle. I can’t remember all the stories he told that night, but I remember how his Adam’s apple seemed to roll beneath the hair along his throat. And I remember the brightness of papa’s eyes in the firelight when he first mentioned the name of Lansford Hastings.

“You’re talking about the fellow who wrote the book,” papa said.

“The very one.”

“I wonder if you’ve read it.”

“Don’t need to read no guidebook, Jim. I’ve been to just about every place a person can get to.”

“But you know something about Mr. Hastings.”

“Know about him! Hell, I rode with him! We rode a thousand miles together, from this side of Sutter’s, clear around Salt Lake, on up to Bridger’s.”

I could see the color rise into papa’s face, which meant he was either angry or threatened or excited or drunk or all four.

“And what do you make of him?”

“He knows how to cover country, he surely does. He’s been back and forth through there, I don’t know how many times. But he is a talker, too. He will talk California till your ears fall off. You travel around for a while like I have, you find some people are content just to get where they’re going. Ol’ Hastings, he wants to be the prophet who will lead us all out of our misery. We were somewhere past Truckee River, bound for Salt Lake, and I looked at him, thinking, Hey, Moses, you are heading the wrong way if it’s the Promised Land you’re looking for, this feels like the road to Egypt. About the time we hit the Humboldt Sink I quit listening. Getting through that kind of country takes all my concentration.”

Papa had walked over to his saddlebags and come back with a scuffed-up copy of
The Emigrants’ Guide,
which he’d been looking at once or twice a day. As he sat down again he was flipping through the pages.

“When you came by Salt Lake, which way did you travel? To the north, or to the south?”

“Ol’ Hastings, now, he wanted to try the way Captain Fremont took last spring. I went along with it because I hadn’t seen that stretch since I’d rowed across Salt Lake in a bull boat. This might of been twenty years ago, and then some …”

He reached for a pull on the brandy bottle. Papa could see another story coming, so he broke in, reading from the book, real slow, like every sentence had to be savored.

As he listened, the Mountain Man nodded. “Yessir, that’s more or less it, and it ain’t no route for wagons, Jim, if that’s the way you’re thinking. We crossed it last month. But we were half a dozen mounted men. With a string a wagons like this, cattle and all … I tell ya, it is some of the meanest land I have seen.”

“According to Mr. Hastings, it’s the nearer way.”

“It’s nearer, and that’s a fact, if you don’t mind a land God has turned His back on. After that you still have a lot more desert, and then you start the climb for Truckee Pass …”

“But why take a roundabout way when you can save three hundred miles or more?”

“I’ll tell you why. You go north by Fort Hall you will get there. I guarantee it. That is the main idea, wouldn’t you say? To get there?”

“We’re already so far behind,” papa said, “three hundred miles is something to think about.”

“If it was me, I’d take the Fort Hall route and never leave it.”

“But saving two weeks … we’d surely make those last mountains before a snowfall. Isn’t that true?”

Papa made this a challenge, holding him with his eyes. He still had the
Guide
open in front of him. The Mountain Man looked at it like papa had a live lizard by the tail.

In the years since then, people have faulted papa for having more faith in what was printed on a page than in the man right beside him. What a lot of them don’t know is that he had made promises to mama. He had made promises to all of us, and promises to himself. His own craving for the land where all the promises would come true ran so deep he dared not doubt the man who’d spelled it all out for him, page by page. It was a whole lot easier to doubt the foul-smelling survivor of a dozen expeditions through the country we were about to cross. That night at Fort Laramie there was a reverence in papa’s voice, as if he were reading Scripture. After he let the covers fall closed, he held the little volume close to his belly, the way preachers sometimes hold copies of the New Testament.

The Mountain Man must have noted this. He’d known papa for quite some time, must have known how single-minded he could be, how important it was for him to end up on the right side of a discussion, and end up in California ahead of other wagon parties too timid to try a new and shorter route. The Mountain Man wasn’t one to argue. He was at heart a lonesome fellow who cherished his solitude and carried with him all he owned. He savored human company when it came his way, but he didn’t seek it out. Live and let live was his philosophy. He would tell you what he thought. If it didn’t appeal to you, he would go his way, as he was about to do again.

“We still have some days to travel,” papa said, “before we need to choose one way or the other.”

“That you do. You’ll have upwards of two weeks, from here to South Pass, then past there to Little Sandy Creek.”

Having spoken his mind, he now sat looking at the fire. Papa passed him the brandy bottle, but this time the Mountain Man declined.

IT MUST HAVE
been two or three weeks later, I guess we were halfway through the Rockies, climbing the long grade to South Pass, when a rider came galloping out of the west. He had a message to read aloud, like a proclamation in the town square, though there was no town and no square, just a crowd of weary travelers starting to wonder why they had ever taken the first step on such a journey.

He was riding from company to company with an open letter to all the emigrants on the trail. It said Lansford Hastings was assembling a new wagon train that he would personally guide along his new and faster route. Right now he was waiting at Fort Bridger.

Since then I’ve talked with some who saw that letter, written with flourishes in Hastings’s own hand. They say it was somewhere between a travel brochure and a battle cry. Wagons ought to be bunching up in larger groups, it said, now that the U.S. had gone to war. No telling where we’d run into the Mexicans or how many there’d be. But if we all stuck together and followed his lead we would not only finish our trip in record time, we would join the ranks of a new society on the far Pacific shore. And somehow, while all this happened, Hastings himself would be at the forefront.

Well, you have never seen the kind of buzzing and scurrying around stirred up by this letter. It started an argument that went on for days, just adding to the squabble and disagreement boiling up ever since we’d left Fort Laramie. People argued till we reached the banks of Little Sandy Creek, where each family had to decide which way to go—north by Fort Hall, which is what most folks had done all summer long and continued to do for years to come, or south by Fort Bridger, clear on down in the bottom corner of what is now the state of Wyoming. There were long meetings, and papa was a fervent speaker. It was like an election, where politicians try to convince you who to vote for.

“I’m heading north,” one fellow said, “and staying north till I git to Oregon, and California can be damned!”

“I’m sticking with Jim Reed,” said someone else.

“Jim Reed can be damned, too,” the first fellow said. “You can all be damned! I might just turn around and go back home!”

“It’s too late to turn around,” said someone else.

Papa’s voice had the passion that could sway such fellows. He stood on a log and read from Hastings’s book, while fire came into his eyes. He slammed the book shut and cried, “You think I would do this heedlessly? Risk the lives of my very own loved ones? By the southern route we can save two weeks of traveling time. And we NEED those weeks, people! So do our animals. Believe me! They’ll be that much tougher for the final days of climbing!”

His voice was strong, and many listened and finally set out with papa and the Donners as one long line of wagons started south. And yet there remains the riddle I ponder to this very day. For all his desire to save time and make a speedy crossing, why had papa built that family wagon so big and cumbersome it slowed down everyone who traveled with us? The fact is, nothing like that wagon had ever been seen before. In its day it was the largest thing anyone had tried to move across North America. When I was eight I took it for granted that this was the way you traveled. Looking back, I can see how preposterous it was to imagine something that size could have a chance of rolling clear from Illinois to Sutter’s Fort. Just getting as far as it did must have set some kind of record.

A few days after papa was banished, we were fifty or sixty miles farther along the Humboldt when that wagon came to its final halt and resting place. The poor creatures pulling us along just stopped in their tracks from exhaustion, and it was decided that we would have to abandon the wagon papa had designed. We would unload what we could and leave it by the side of a river that got smaller day by day, as we drew closer to what the Mountain Man called the Humboldt Sink, where the river finally plays itself out and trickles away into the sand.

It was another blow for mama. But she knew they were right. We spent the rest of that day moving what provisions we had left into one of the three Graves family wagons, along with a few odds and ends of clothing and ammunition and whatnot, and our little dog, Cash, who was the last of the pack of dogs we’d started out with, so skinny now he had to be carried half the time, but none of us could bear to lose him.

You might think it strange that we would be moving belongings into a wagon owned by one who so recently wanted to hang my father. It seems strange to me even now, and yet this is no stranger than anything else about those long-ago days. Uncle Billy could not simply leave us standing in the desert. He was already feeling bad for what he’d done and wishing papa were still among us, if only to lend his back and two strong arms to the daily struggle. William Eddy would tell mama what he heard others saying, how they would argue over who had been at fault, and how some who had not spoken out were coming around to papa’s side. Already it was becoming clear, the folly of this vengeance. People who had been so eager to condemn, they would all do things as bad as papa had done, or worse, in the weeks and months ahead, and I would witness them, deeds that can still cause my gorge to rise. With their eyes they were already begging for forgiveness, begging ME, at my young age. Their eyes would say, You have no idea what grief and desperation can drive a person to!