Ride the Moon Down

33

It had taken Joe Walker and the rest more than eight days to get that small herd of horses back to Fort Davy Crockett and the Shoshone. Two of those days were spent rounding up the strays after a freak winter thunderstorm blew in from the southwest—pelting the countryside with a hard, icy rain driven by tempestuous winds and accompanied by flashes of lightning and prolonged peels of thunder that promptly frightened the skittish ponies and set off a wild stampede across miles of muddy ground. The Shoshone were satisfied.

But Prewett Sinclair was furious that Craig hadn’t come back with Thompson’s scalp. After some heated debate Sinclair and Craig decided they had best part company. Once their present stock of goods was disposed of, their partnership at Fort Davy Crockett would be dissolved.

Late in February, just before Bass was preparing to set off for the foothills in search of beaver, Sinclair formed a new venture with a trapper grown weary of dangerous work and poor prospects. While Sinclair remained at the post, Robert Hewell loaded more than three hundred pelts onto their packhorses and headed out for Fort Hall to barter for trade goods and supplies.

Down in the spring Shad and Titus had run onto Kit Carson. Because Dick Owens had ended up turning around on them to throw in with Thompson, Williams, Peg-Leg, and those others headed for the California ranchos, Carson had enlisted Jack Robinson as his new partner for the spring hunt. After a night of pitching tales and swapping lies the trappers saddled up to go their separate ways the next morning.

“See you to ronnyvoo on the Seedskeedee!” Bass had cried.

Carson wagged his head. “I can’t figger there’ll be no more ronnyvoo, Scratch.”

“You ain’t coming to Horse Creek?” Sweete asked.

“Ain’t planning to,” Kit confessed. “Don’t see no sense in making a long ride to somewhere there ain’t gonna be no trader, no trade goods.”

Sadly, Titus asked, “So what you gonna do, Kit?”

“We’ll see if Robidoux treat us fair down at his Winty post. He better—seeing how we should’ve burned him out for hiding them horse thieves.”

“Fort Robidoux, eh?” Bass brooded. Then sighed as he gripped Carson’s hand tightly. “You boys watch your topknots, hear? One day we’ll run across your sign again.”

“Keep your eye on the backtrail,” Carson called out as he and Robinson started away.

The backtrail. That’s about all it seemed they had anymore, Bass ruminated more and more throughout that spring and into the first part of summer as he and Sweete started for the Green River. The backtrail. There sure as hell wasn’t any future to speak of, what with the way the company had threatened not to show up at all for the coming rendezvous.

When he really got down in his mind, it seemed as if everything he had ever wanted, all that had ever mattered in his life, it all lay behind him. Then he would look at Flea and Magpie … or feel Waits-by-the-Water’s head rest against his shoulder, and he would grow hopeful anew.

Maybe the beaver were about killed off. Maybe folks weren’t wearing beaver any longer and the fur companies didn’t give a damn about trappers no more … and maybe the only folks who would ever come through these mountains would be settlers destined for the fertile ground of that rainy place called Oregon Territory.

That was all right, he convinced himself as he held her tight through those nights when he couldn’t sleep for brooding on the terror it gave him. He had his powder and lead so his family would never go hungry. But what of those pretty things he wanted to provide for her—what if the trader didn’t show this summer? Never showed again? Would he have to go to Fort Hall, or Fort Union, or over to the South Platte if he didn’t ride over to see Robidoux or Sinclair?

He wasn’t sure just how he felt one day to the next as he and Shad continued north. One morning he found himself hopeful, but the next he was sure that life as he had known it was over. His emotions were taking the same sort of ride a broken twig would endure racing down a swift mountain stream swollen with spring run-off.

For all these years he figured he had come to count on things outside himself. Now, Scratch realized … he could not put his faith in anything but Titus Bass. In this world turned upside down, that faith in himself might well be all he could count on.

This summer of 1840 the Flathead had come again to the Green near Horse Creek, waiting for the man of God who had been promised to them for many years. In those warm days while they all kept a patient vigil, Bass came to feel sorry for those Flathead, seeing how they sent out riders every day to watch for the approach of the trader’s caravan from the States. For years now missionaries had come overland, briefly visiting rendezvous before they continued on to the far northwest to establish themselves, their schools and their churches among the Palouse and Nez Perce … always passing the Flathead by. Every summer the missionaries had taken their potent medicine from God elsewhere.

So there was no small celebration in the valley of the Green that thirtieth day of June when the first Flathead rider came racing back to rendezvous screaming with delight.

Those trappers who understood the Flathead tongue quickly translated the happy news emanating from the village. The trader was coming! Carts had been spotted. Many people. And four wagons.

Surely, now, with the white man’s lumbering white-topped wagons, there had to be missionaries along. And—dare they hope after all these years—those new missionaries had finally come to bring their power to the Flathead?

Three Protestant ministers and their wives had come west with Andrew Drips and his caravan. But to the soul-flattening disappointment of those joyous Flathead who turned out to greet these arrivals from the States, the six missionaries were bound for the Oregon country. While the Shoshone gave the caravan a raucous greeting, firing guns and racing round and round the column, the Flathead were turning back for their village in despair.

Sympathizing with their unfathomable grief, Scratch watched with curiosity as a lone man peeled off from the caravan on foot, calling out in his heavy accent for the Flathead to stop, to turn around and wait for him. Having walked on foot all the way from St. Louis, the stranger was nothing short of slit-eyed and sunburned beneath his flat-brimmed black hat. With stinging alkali dust coating his long wool frock, Belgian friar Pierre Jean deSmet shook hands with the head men. An amused contentment was written on his face at the joy the Flathead wore on theirs when he announced he had come alone to teach them how to turn their faces to God.

But no one could have been more happy than Titus Bass.

With Flea on his shoulders, Scratch walked out from the trees, Shad Sweete at his elbow. It was as if his hopes, his very prayers, had been answered by the arrival of that caravan. The fur trade wasn’t dead. No … not yet.

“Truth be, didn’t really figger we’d see a supply train this year, Shadrach.”

“Me neither. But there it comes, Titus!”

What with the way the company partisans had been grumbling about the poor returns, the dwindling number of trappers to work the mountains, and of course the sinking number and quality of furs harvested, more than half of those men gathered in the valley of the Green River were genuinely surprised that their patience had been rewarded.

For days now the white men had reminded one another that they really wouldn’t be disappointed if Drips didn’t show. After all, summer was not the time to be chasing beaver anyway. The fur wasn’t worth much, so a man might as well follow the Flathead, Nez Perce, and Shoshone on down to Bonneville’s old fort on Horse Creek to look up some old friends, share some stories of the glory days, and keep one eye on the horizon.

Maybe Drips would show with a few carts and trade goods and a little whiskey. Maybe the mountain trade wasn’t dead yet. Just maybe …

Bass turned to his tall friend, tears glistening in their eyes. His voice cracked as he said, “Damn the settlements while there’s still beaver in the mountains, Shadrach.”

Sweete’s moist eyes grew big, his mouth moving with no sound coming forth as he started to point. “L-lookee there, Scratch!” he finally gasped. “It’s Jim! By God, it’s Jim Bridger!”

“Gabe?” and he squinted into the bright distance. “Damn if it ain’t Gabe hisself!”

Patting little Flea on his back, Shad roared, “And ol’ Frapp too!”

Sure enough, out in front of the short caravan Andrew Drips was leading into the creek bottom was none other than Jim Bridger and his old partner, German-born Henry Fraeb, whose family had emigrated to America, on to St. Louis when Henry was but a child.

Racing out on horseback to meet the train was Joseph Walker. He tore the hat from his head, waving it wildly as another man on foot suddenly angled away from the wagons and sprinted his way, kicking up dust with his ill-fitting boots. Walker reined up in a spray of yellow dirt, vaulting to his feet where he embraced the stranger who threw down his rifle to wrap his arms around the trapper.

“Who you figger that is with Joe?” Titus asked.

“Maybe its Joe’s brother,” Shad said with a smile. “You recollect Joe said he’d be on the lookout for his brother, ever since Joe got a letter from him saying he was gonna be coming west to settle in Oregon this summer.”

“Settlers?” He nearly choked. “Now there’s settlers going to Oregon?”

Shadrach nodded, his smile disappearing. “Maybeso they’ll just keep on going, Scratch. And you won’t have nothing to fret about. I imagine them folks’ll just pass on through and won’t ever stop to fill up these here mountains.”

“Oregon can have ’em,” Bass snarled. “That wet, rainy country is fit for the likes of farmers … such as my pap. Fit for the likes of them Bible-spouting preachers too. With their angry eyes, and sad mouths, and their bitter tongues spouting against ever’thing natural a man gonna do. You damn bet their kind better just pass on through. Let Oregon have ’em, I say!”

The next day after their reunion with Bridger, when Drips opened his packs and set up shop, instead of hurrying for the trading canopy, Bass and Sweete turned in a few furs for that first kettle of whiskey, then sat in the shade of a cottonwood calmly watching the bartering begin.

Wiping droplets from his shaggy, unkempt mustache, Titus asked, “You was with Ashley, wasn’t you?”

“Just a sprout then.”

“I come west in the spring of twenty-five, year Ashley had his first ronnyvoo,” Titus explained. “But I didn’t see my first ronnyvoo till twenty-six.”

“That first’un wasn’t nothing more’n the Gen’ral taking in furs and passing out supplies. Not a drop of whiskey. And there sure weren’t no such thing as a free man anywhere in sight since we was all Ashley men in twenty-five,” Shad reflected.

They fell quiet, listening to the drone of big green-bottle deerflies and the noisy murmur of trappers and clerks, the clatter of beads and tacks, the clink of tin cups inside whiskey kegs.

“Summers, they were good back then,” Bass sighed. “For a time there, every new ronnyvoo was better’n all the ones that’d come a’fore it.”

“I’ll say. Ever’ one got bigger. Wilder. More men and mules, more whiskey and women too. If’n a man only got one chance to celebrate all year long in a year of hard, dangerous living … then them was the celebratingest times a child could ever hope to have.”

And now those days were gone. Bass told himself he had better admit that beaver would never shine again, not the way that beaver had shined back then.

It almost made a growed man wanna cry, it did. Sitting here sipping cheap puke-up liquor, watching a handful of sad, old hivernants try to wrangle themselves a square deal from a bunch of Pierre Chouteau’s slick city types out from St. Louis. Men like him and Shad who had seen the sun set on better than five thousand days of glory in these high and terrible mountains … men who had withstood freezing winters and blazing-hot summers … men who had stared right back into the eye of sudden, certain death and withstood the grittiest test of wills … the sort who had always treated every other man fairly and given more than a day’s work for what wages the company offered him when it came time for an accounting beneath the trading canopy.

Men who now were all but begging Andrew Drips’s weasel-eyed hired hands to realize that for seasons beyond count they had risked their health, their hair, their very lives to trap that beaver the company was buying less than cheap. These last few members of a dying breed, who for a short time in history had stood head and shoulders above any man anywhere in the world, were being told that their labors weren’t worth much at all, that the risks they had taken were worth even less than that … that their lives had little meaning in a world that was already passing them by.

So rather than openly bawl, Bass sat there and drank. Sip by sip, cup by cup, hoping to numb the goddamned pain of watching those proud men come to the counter to beg for another year’s supplies, men willing to turn over their hard-won beaver dirt cheap, willing to pay prices that would choke a big-boned Missouri mule for what possibles might get them through till next summer.

Then Drips came out to stand before less than a hundred trappers gathered there. Bridger and Fraeb stood off to the side, their long faces showing they already knew what the partisan was about to tell the crowd.

“I s’pose it don’t come as no surprise to most of you,” Drips began before that hushed assembly. “For the past two summers, there’s been rumors Pratte and Chouteau weren’t going to send out no supply caravan to ronnyvoo.”

He waited a moment while some of the crowd muttered in disgust and disillusionment.

“But they was just rumors, men. Rumors. Last summer we come, even when the beaver take wasn’t worth the trip. And this spring the company decided to give it one last try.”

For a long time Drips looked over the crowd formed in a huge crescent around his trade canopy. It seemed that his eyes touched almost every man there—most he knew, some better than others. Perhaps he was struggling to find the words. Perhaps—Scratch thought—Drips was trying to decide whether or not to use those words Bass was certain the partisan had practiced all the way out to rendezvous.

“Men … this here’s the last supply train to the mountains.”

It was as if they already knew. There was no sudden gasp of surprise or alarm. These men already knew. While Drips himself might have expected anger, a torrent of unrequited rage … Bass realized these men likely felt they had been owed more than rumors. They were damn well due the truth. And now they knew for sure. Rather than be hung out on a strand of spider’s silk for another year, not knowing. Not knowing.

Now they could get on with what it was they were going to do with the rest of their lives.

“What about the brigade?” a voice cried out in that hot, breathless, midsummer stillness.

“Yeah!” hollered another of those deep voices. “Ain’t the company gonna put a outfit in the field this year?”

But Drips stood there, unspeaking.

“Ain’t you gonna take us north for the fall hunt?”

Still the company partisan remained mute, staring at the ground.

“Sure they will!” another voice cried, strong with hope. “Bridger’s back to pilot!”

“No,” Drips finally declared, his face a bland and emotionless mask. “I’m turning back for St. Louis when the trading is done and I can get on my way.”

A stunned, quiet pall had overtaken them as every last man of them stood there in numbed silence.

Then Joe Meek took a step forward. “How ’bout you, Gabe?” he asked. “You gonna lead a brigade this fall, ain’cha?”

Bridger hung his head, staring at the toes of his moccasins for some time, eventually pushing himself away from the tree where he had been standing beside the crusty Henry Fraeb. Jim said, “’Fraid there’s no more company brigade, Joe. You’ll recollect I quit off the company last year. So I ain’t part of it no more. Now I’m … I’m just the same as all of you.”

“S-same as us?” Robert Newell echoed, his voice rising an octave in grave concern.

“I don’t see nowhere else for any of us to go but to the trading posts now, boys,” Bridger tried to explain, his voice quiet in that hush of a summer afternoon that stretched out long and warm west of the Continental Divide. “Any man what figgers to go on trapping beaver … he’s gonna have to trade his plews, gonna have to get his possibles at them forts from here on out till … till …”

When Bridger’s words drifted off into an uneasy stillness, a croaky frog of a voice called out, “Till what, Jim?”

“Till there ain’t no more call for beaver.”

No more call for beaver?

Jehoshaphat! What had become of the world?

For longer than he could imagine, folks had been wearing beaver hats. Because of those hats, there had always been those who went after the beaver, and those who traded the beaver from them. But now there were nowhere near the beaver a man once found on the streams. Damn, if he and his friends hadn’t worked so hard, they’d worked themselves right out of a job.

Scratch was sure Bridger turned away because he felt all those eyes boring into him. Here was a friend who had faced the very worst that winter could throw at a man, faced the very best any painted-up, blood-in-his-eye enemy could hurl his way … of a sudden grown self-conscious, maybe even a mite scared, of staring down all those broken-hearted men.

“So can I buy you a drink, Scratch?”

He turned to find Sweete at his shoulder, the big man’s eyes brimming above those cheeks of oak-tanned leather.

Titus felt the weariness come of those seasons spent high and alone right down into the bone of him. Quietly he said, “Don’t mind if I do, Shadrach.”

Men slowly drifted off in more than a dozen directions. Some stepped back to the trading canopy with their plews at the end of each arm, though there really wasn’t all that much beaver in camp to speak of. But many more clustered around Andrew Drips now, firing questions at the partisan on how they were to go about getting their pay if they chose not to continue in the mountains, asking how a man might accompany the fur caravan back to the settlements when Drips turned for the States.

Sad questions, Titus thought, questions from confused and bewildered, worried men.

With Shad he returned to their tree, to their kettle and their cups. Returned to their memories of brighter times, shining times. Sip by sip of the potent grain alcohol diluted with some creek water and bolstered by a handful of peppers too made the memories easy to conjure up.

By and large, though they looked weathered and worn and weary, their kind were still young men, most no older than Bridger, who was here in his midthirties. But for a brief time they had been the cocks of the walk. Poor frontier boys from the southern mountains, adventurous souls from far up in New England—some Scotch, Irish, and English too, even a few Delaware and Iroquois thrown in. They had laid down moccasin tracks where few men had ever dared to walk—at least no white man.

In this land as wild as the red men who roamed across it, these few daring souls took on the dress of those who had been there far back in time: some of this reckless breed combed their hair out with porcupine brushes so that it would spill in great manes over the collars of their blanket coats while others twisted their hair in a pair of braids interwoven with colorful ribbons or wrapped in sleek otter skins; across their backs they sported a merry calico or buckskin shirt tanned a fragrant smoky hue; intricate finger-woven sashes or wide leather belts decorated with brass tacks held up leggings of doe skin or blanket wool, even drop-front britches sewn of durable elk hide.

While most coupled with tribal women only at summer rendezvous or in winter camps, some proudly took one or more tribal women as wives. A few hung hoops of wire adorned with beads or stones from their ears, and a handful even painted themselves before every battle, or for every rendezvous debauch. They learned to lavish on their best horse the same attention a warrior would give his own war pony: tying up its tail, braiding ribbons in the mane, or dabbing its muscular flanks with earth pigment. No Indian dandy ever strutted with more swagger than these few hundred had in their heyday.

Moment to moment that afternoon and on into the evening, then through the few following days left them, Scratch and Shadrach, Bridger and Carson, Meek and Newell, talked round the whiskey kettles and the firefly campfires—enthralling one another with stories of tight fixes and derring-do, improbable windies and tall tales, brags and boasts big and small, all those noisy recollections as well as those quiet remembrances of those who no longer gathered with them … those gone on ahead to that big belt in the blue. Those who had already made that last solitary crossing of the Great Divide.

Damn, but there were too many of them, Bass thought as he struggled to hold back the tears. And now this would be the last reunion, this final gathering of a very, very small Falstaffian brotherhood.

In the shrinking camps most men made out not to give a damn—drinking hard, laughing loud, fighting and wrassling, doing all they could to hold back the specter of death the way most men are wont to do when they don’t know just how they should feel. From the Indian villages came the distant thump of drums, the soft trill of a lover’s flute, and a wail of voices singing of birth and war and death. Not the Flathead nor the Nez Perce, not even the Shoshone fully understood, much less believed, that this was to be the last gathering of these summer celebrants. Instead, for the wandering bands it would be life as they had lived it across the centuries: summer afternoons and sweet, cool evenings smoking their pipes, watching children chase and play, scraping hides and sewing beads, telling stories of warpath heroism or creation myths.

Where would they go now? he wondered. Did the tribes go back to the way things had been before the white man came out west with his long caravans of shiny trade goods and powerful weapons?

So bittersweet was that flood of the memories, soul-prints of his life made across mountain and plain: juicy hump rib and buffalo tongue around a winter fire, beaver tail and painter meat on the spit, the sharp relish of strong coffee or a handful of high, glacial water so cold it set your back teeth to aching. Games of hand or taking a chance on the well-worn cards of euchre and Old Sledge, foolish wagers on shooting a mark or throwing a ’hawk, running a’foot or racing your horse … they were times when a man knew who his friends were and how their stick would float.

But now those sweetest of days were gone like river-bottom sand a’wash come spring runoff, swept away in the rush of the seasons.

So like youth, held here but briefly in one’s hand—youth truly experienced by those who believe youth will be theirs forever—the high times in these shining mountains had come and were never to be again. Like impetuous youth, these men did not realize their era had come and gone until the light had begun to fade for all time. And like the young who never fathom the precious gift granted them, these rough-hewn souls had squandered their days, wastrels with those brief seasons allotted them.

Late of a lazy summer morning Robert Newell strode back into camp, eager to share some news with his friends, especially that best of companions.

“Joe!” Doc hallooed as he approached the group lounging upon the ground whiling away these last hours of this last summer reunion.

“You’re ’bout to bust at the seams, Doc,” Titus said. “Just lookit him, boys. G’won, Doc—spill your beans.”

“Them missionary folks what’s bound for Oregon country,” Newell began in a gush as he knelt in their midst, “well, now—you know they asked Black Harris to guide ’em on west from here.”

“Ain’t he gonna do it?” Joe asked.

Newell shook his head emphatically. “One of the preachers, named Little John, he fetched me over to their camp and told me Harris was asking far too much to pilot them on to Oregon …”

When Newell paused dramatically, excitement flickering in his eyes, Carson said, “Spit it out, man!”

“Them preachers asked me to pilot ’em all the way to the Columbia country, boys!”

Meek bolted to his feet, looking every bit as stunned as he had when Bridger announced his bad news. “You … you g-going to take them folks on to Oregon ’stead of trapping beaver with me, Doc? ’Stead of staying in these mountains with us?”

Newell grabbed his best friend by the forearms, gazing intently into Meek’s eyes. “Come with me, Joe.”

“C-come with you?”

Doc’s head bobbed eagerly. “We are done with this life in the mountains, so come with me, Joe.”

“Done?”

“We’re done wading in beaver dams, done with freezing or starving. Done I say—done with Injun fighting and Injun trading. Look around you, Joe: the fur business is dead in these mountains, and the Rockies is no place for us now.”

Meek gasped in surprise, “Doc Newell—fixing to leave the mountains for good?”

“Goddamned right, Joe! We are young yet, and we have all life laid out a’fore us! We can’t waste it here when this life is dead!”

“But … Oregon?” Meek asked uncertainly.

“We ain’t the sort to go back to the States,” Newell said, affectionately slipping an arm around the big man’s shoulder. “I say come with me, Joe. Let us go on down to the Willamette and take up farms.”

“Oregon,” Meek repeated the word as if trying out the sound of a mysterious lodestone for the first time. “Oregon, you say?”

“We’ll take them preachers and their wives, that Walker family too—all of their wagons on to Fort Hall where we’ll gather up our wives and light out for Oregon.”

Bass watched the glow cross Meek’s face, so contagious was Newell’s enthusiasm. It was the look of a man grown so weary and old, suddenly granted new vigor. Where resignation once was scrawled, now Titus could read the hope and joy boldly written on Joe’s face.

“There’s nothing left for you boys here,” Bass charged them as he got to his feet, flinging one arm around Newell and the other around Meek. “Man needs to find him some country what he can call his own. Sounds to me that Oregon is where you two will make your stand.”