Snow Mountain Passage

by James D Houston

  When he saw me next to him, he reached out his arm and drew me close, and I asked him if he was going to go away.

  “I don’t know, Patty.”

  “I saw what happened, papa. Johnny started it.”

  His voice cracked when he said, “That he did, darlin’, that he did.”

  “If you go away, I’m going with you.”

  “Mama’s going to need you more than ever, darlin’.”

  “Milt and Virginia and James Junior can take care of mama all right. But who will take care of you?”

  “I’ll do just fine.”

  “Please take me with you, papa.”

  “I didn’t say for sure I was going anywhere, did I?”

  “But if you do.”

  He picked me up and held me and pointed toward the east where the sky was glowing as if a forest had caught fire somewhere beyond the nearest mountain. Then the first glint of moon showed at a ridgetop, and we watched it swell up, round and yellow and nearly full, and spread its silver light across the long, long desert.

  He and mama stayed up talking half the night, whispering under the camp tent. The next morning John Snyder was buried in the sand in a shroud, with one board below his body and one above, to discourage the coyotes. After the burial, papa climbed onto his mare and said good-bye.

  I have already compared that river to a snake, and it was not by chance. Every river I have ever seen goes curving and looping from where it starts to wherever it ends up. The Snake River, which I have not seen, is one example. The Humboldt is another. For a while it was called the Mary’s. But that is one they could just as well have called the Snake, in my opinion, instead of naming it for a fellow who never even saw Nevada. It makes an evil mark through a devilish place, and I am glad I have not had to go anywhere near it since the time we made the crossing. We had to stand by that river and watch papa ride out on a starving horse with his head wrapped in a bloody kerchief and his hat split to fit around the bandage. He was wearing buckskins then, like some of the other men, trousers and fringed tunic, so elegant when we left Fort Laramie, all smeared and dark now with firesmoke and sweat, and nothing in front of him but sand and chalk and bare mountains. I can tell you it was the hardest day of my life up to that time, and the hardest day for mama too, though we would all have worse days before that trip was done.

  She had put one husband in the grave. Now she had followed her second husband to the very end of the world and was surely imagining that she could be widowed again, at thirty-two. She looked as if it had been her who took the knife blow to the chest, not Snyder, as if it was her life that flowed into the sand beside the river. I know now that she wanted to fall down and quit right there, but she braced herself against the wagon, so she would not seem to falter. She had decided to be strong for the rest of us, and I have to say that from that day forward she was strong in ways none of us had seen before. As I have said, the stabbing of John Snyder changed all our lives.

  That evening she made up a packet of jerked beef and biscuits. Where it came from, I still don’t know. She wrapped up some powder and percussion caps too, in defiance of the terms of banishment, and passed them to Milt Elliott, along with papa’s rifle. Under cover of darkness he and Virginia followed the river trail on horseback. They rode all night, caught up with papa, and got back to the wagons before dawn. I know she hoped papa would take her with him, to be his horse-girl companion, as she’d been all the way across the plains. I had wanted him all to myself. So did she. But he knew better than anyone else what lay in store for him.

  After he sent Virginia back with Milt, she cried without letup. She cried until our wagons came upon the place where they had found him camping. There were the markings of the fire he had built, and scattered around it were the loose feathers of a bird he must have shot the next morning—which was his way of telling us he’d already made good use of the rifle and found himself something to eat. Mama said we would build our family fire on the same spot, as if the place held some of his spirit, or perhaps by making a fire there we would send our blessing forward to travel with him. Or perhaps it was just a family’s way to keep the flame of hope burning from one day to the next, touching papa’s campfire spots and, when we could, gathering one feather of a bird that had helped keep him alive.

  A few days later, when we caught up with the advance party, we learned that he spent a night with the Donners before moving on. So we knew he made it at least that far along the Humboldt. They gave him another packet of food to carry and a partner to travel with, a young teamster who no longer had a team to drive with all the animals and wagons we had lost. Crossing the desert was too risky for one man alone. The Donners couldn’t spare a horse, but they could spare a teamster. So papa and his new partner had one horse between them. They made a lonesome sight, I heard George Donner say, heading out at dawn, one mounted, one on foot. Getting through to the Truckee River would be the test, he said. “Then there’s water again … and after that … the Sierra Nevada.”

  George Donner had white hair and a deep, captivating voice, like a preacher’s or like an actor playing King Lear in a huge empty theater. The way he said “Sierra Nevada” made it loom in my mind. Before long I would learn that it means “Snowy Mountains.” But I didn’t know any Spanish yet, so I didn’t see snow. What I imagined was a soaring palisade of stone and timber that could only be crossed with the blessings of God and many angels. That night I prayed for all the angels in heaven to watch over papa, wherever he was on the long trail to California.

  NUMEROUS PEOPLE have observed that our journey that year was a fateful journey. In hindsight anyone can see signs along the route and find a dozen or a hundred times when things could have gone some other way. Of course, they did not go some other way. Things never do. Things always go the way they’re going to go. And I still have to wonder how much of it was fate and how much of it was papa’s nature.

  Every party on the trail had a hard time somehow or another. Everybody ran low on water and threw out furniture and shot oxen for meat and had arguments that would set one clan against the next. Our party, of course, had a special talent for arguing and disagreement. I can see that now. Surely there has never been a more mismatched bunch having to spend half a year trying to get from one place to the next. I suppose you can call that a kind of fate. It wasn’t anything papa had planned ahead of time, though he was at the center of it all.

  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 coul
d 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.

  By recent explorations a very good and much more direct wagon way has been found, about one hundred miles southward from the great southern pass…. The most direct route, for the California emigrants, would be to leave the Oregon route about two hundred miles east from Fort Hall; thence bearing west southwest to the Salt Lake; and thence continuing down to the Bay of San Francisco …

  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.