“I heard it depends on which way the wind blows.”
These two could talk for hours, trading news, and they would, if this were after sundown instead of after sunup. Charlie feels the burden of his mission, pushing east now at a steady pace. Last night he camped lower down the valley. He wants to make the Yuba River today, and Jim is tempted to join him, tempted to turn around right now. Charlie and his two Indians, along with these fresh animals—it might just be enough to bring the party through.
He is tempted until he takes a close look at how much Charlie is packing, the many sacks of flour and beans and jerked beef.
Together they calculate the days it will take his mule train to reach the party, and where the wagons are likely to be found—somewhere along the Truckee?—and how many days from there to bring them past the summit. They figure how much game can be counted on, and how many mouths must be fed for that many days, and they realize, as they talk it through, that Charlie’s provisions will not get eighty people all the way across. With no large setbacks, they might make it to the top of this valley. They might. Or they might not. But if food and fresh animals were waiting somewhere between here and the summit, well, that could make the difference.
As he studies Charlie’s load, Jim’s future takes its first clear shape. It is like a military campaign. In his mind the days line up. He will meet them right up there, above Bear Valley, and his accusers can be damned. His accusers! He will show them that it takes more than squabbling and blaming to bring a wagon party through. He sees his own mule train with another load like Charlie’s, piled with fresh provisions. Already he sees the lead wagon coming toward him, as it clears a distant rise. He feels the thrill of that first sighting. By God, he will show them….
Charlie beckons to the Indians, who wait near their horses. He calls them Salvador and Luis. They speak Spanish, but no English. They are not like the starvlings Jim saw in the desert. They too look well fed, full in the face, with clear eyes that do not connive or plead. They wear ranching clothes and are solidly built, muscular, alert. From the way they move the animals around, Jim sees that they’re capable horsemen who could be good allies on the long trail back. They could turn on Charlie, of course, as soon as these wagons are out of sight and earshot, and steal the laden mules. But he seems to trust them, and they have some fear of Sutter, he says, who has threatened to execute them if any mules are lost.
Jim looks at Charlie, marveling again at the loyalty of this man who could have remained in the settlements, who has no earthly reason to take these hazards upon himself—none but his own sense of honor. How rare it is these days, Jim thinks, to find a man of honor. The thought grips him, and the idea that these seven mule loads are headed toward the dusty band still plodding along somewhere between the Humboldt and the Truckee. He feels tears welling.
“You’re a prince, Charlie. Once we have all made it through, we’ll have a banquet. We’ll have the biggest damn banquet you or I have ever seen, and you will be the honored guest. I swear to you, this shall not be forgotten!”
Embarrassed by his outburst, Stanton has to turn away.
“How do you say ‘thank you’ in Spanish, Charlie?”
“They say ‘grassias.’”
Jim knows he should be wary around any kind of Indian and never let his guard down. But the moment gets the best of him. He reaches for a hand, hoping to convey the depth of his gratitude for what they’re all about to do. He wants to trust them. He has to. The lives of his wife and children now depend upon these men.
“Grassias,” he says.
“They put ‘moochas’ in front of that,” Charlie says. “Say ‘moochas grassias, Salvador.’”
Jim squeezes the hand. “Moochas grassias, Salvador.”
“De nada,” says the Indian.
“Moochas grassias, Luis.”
The men smile courteously, uncertain how to handle this. “De nada,” they mutter. “De nada.”
“And Charlie, please tell Margaret you saw me. Tell her I’m doing fine. No need to mention how I look, you hear? You tell her I’m doing fine, and we’ll meet up again in no time.”
“I surely will tell her that, Mr. Reed.”
Charlie gives him one of Sutter’s horses and a packet of jerked beef and flour. Then they move out in single file, Charlie and the Indians riding, the mules behind. Jim walks with them to the edge of the trees. He watches them cross the valley and begin the slow, torturous ascent up the wall he and Walter tumbled down yesterday. It looks to be six or seven hundred feet of loose rock where few trees have ever found a hold.
From the grove he looks across the wide meadow that runs the length of Bear Valley. For the first time in days his heart lifts. The sun is bright and warming him, making green things greener, the wild peas and mallow and the broad-leaved mule ear along the marshy banks of the stream. What a fine place this will be to bring his family for their first taste of California, an early moment of reward, where we can rest the animals before the final trek out to the settlements. Charlie has heard that last year the summit was passable until December, and that’s still six weeks away. This morning not a cloud is to be seen from here to the farthest granite dome.
His Heart’s Desire
WALTER IS TOO sick to move. The tallow has caught up with him. Everything has caught up with him. An Illinois family takes him in, people who traveled with Jim’s party for a while along the Platte, lingering here a few more days to fatten up their stock. Jim is not much better off than Walter. He too should linger a while and fatten up, but won’t let himself. After one day’s rest he says good-bye to Walter and the mare and joins two horsemen from Tennessee heading for sea level.
The trail out of Bear Valley is the steepest yet, another drop where animals slide, where wagons will have to be lowered with chains and oxen led down one by one. His head pounds with each plunging lurch. Twice he nearly tumbles from the saddle. Staying close to the river, they pass Mule Springs and Steep Hollow Crossing. As they swing away from the river’s narrow channel, to climb again, he falls behind the others, nearly blind with headache. Then they are clambering in and out of canyons. In Jim’s wobbly condition the long westward unfoldment of the Sierras seems a maze of ridges and gullies without pattern, without end.
One day about noon, when a voice calls from high above, he does not understand the words. He doesn’t react, keeps plodding up the raggedy slope toward a voice not aimed at him. From the top of a long rise he finally sees what the others see. After all these months the dreamed-of destination is laid before them, the valley of the Sacramento, still miles away but vivid in transparent light. Through the center a line of heavy growth marks the north-south course of its largest river, with tributary streams and creeks marked by lesser lines that fan and wiggle outward like the branches of a great tree spread across the flatness.
“Thar she blows!” shouts one of the men.
“Ain’t she a beauty!” cries the other.
“Be goddamned if we ain’t made it across!”
Jim nods his throbbing head and smiles and lets them do the shouting. His jaw and temples feel swollen. His belly hurts. He doesn’t trust this view. He has been deceived before. He wants to get down closer to it, look for the trail that will take them into the lower foothills and the place Stanton told him about, the first outpost, William Johnson’s ranch.
Two more hours bring them to a building, low and squat, sitting on cleared dirt with no road leading toward it or away from it. There appears to be a stretched cowhide for a door. In the ten weeks since Jim left Fort Bridger, it’s the first sign of any settlement at all, a two-room shack, half adobe, half timber, set back from the Bear River, with pens beyond, a rickety corral. No fences. No barns. He sees a few more wagons scattered among the nearest trees, and unyoked cattle grazing.
Though there is no gate, Johnson is a kind of gatekeeper at this end of the emigrant trail. They find him behind the shack, where two naked Indian men are layering adobe bricks. Their bodies are da
rk and muscular. Their hands and feet are covered with gloves and stockings of chalky brown mud. Johnson’s trousers are muddy to the knees. He wears an ancient felt hat but no shirt. He too is brown, barrel-chested. He is cursing the mud and the sun and welcomes the chance to leave this task and see to his visitors. He has a rough, wind-worn face, a reddish beard streaked with gray, the rolling walk of a man who has spent some time at sea.
Johnson seems accustomed to strangers, used to their hungers and their dazed wonder at having survived this far. He acts as if he has been expecting Jim and the Tennessee men, says he doesn’t have much to offer, but there might be some cheese and milk and bread.
“I ain’t been here hardly a year,” he says.
As Jim dismounts, his knees give way and he drops to the ground. In the midday heat it feels like high summer. His cheeks and brows glisten. They drag him into the shade and prop him against the timbers. Johnson calls out in a language Reed doesn’t understand.
He lets his eyelids close, waiting for the wooziness to pass. When he opens them an Indian woman is hunkering at his side. She studies the welts festering on his scalp. She doesn’t speak. Her face is young and pleasant. Her eyes are oval. Her black hair, held by a tightly rolled bandanna, falls past her shoulders in two thick strands. When she stands and leans over him for a closer look, he sees that she is wearing a short skirt of furred skin, perhaps deer, with bits of shell around the waist, and a necklace made of shell bits, but nothing else. Her flesh is very smooth. Her breasts are large and pendulous, much larger than Margaret’s. He wants to look at her, but again his eyelids close. He falls into a long, dreamy sleep, a half-wakeful sleeping dream, during which the woman twice appears. When he wakes he is alone inside the dark cabin, and he thinks she may have been a phantom, but soon she is next to him again. Her hands are gentle as she applies to his scalp a sticky poultice that smells like pine.
This time he sleeps for sixteen hours and wakes to find his companions gone. He tries to rise, as if to follow and catch up with them, but he doesn’t have the strength. And so he lingers another day at Johnson’s Ranch, and then another, while she applies the sticky poultice, and a pulp of heated roots, and feeds him bowls of a bitter, medicinal brew, and murmurs words strange to his ears. He tries to learn her name, but she won’t tell him. He offers her money, but she won’t take it. Johnson tells him, with a satisfied grin, that she doesn’t know what money is. “And the less she knows, the better, wouldn’t you say so, Mr. Reed?”
One night he feels well enough to sit up late. He and Johnson eat large chunks of recently slaughtered beef that have been skewered on pointed sticks and roasted over the open fire. They eat without plates and throw the bones and rims of fat into the flames, where they blacken. Their hands and faces gleam with the grease. From a jug they sip aguardiente brought up from Sonoma by way of Sutter’s. Jim can’t remember how long it has been since he’s had a drink. A month? His last bottle of brandy is packed away somewhere in the Palace Car, in safekeeping for a moment such as this, to celebrate his arrival in the promised land.
The liquor goes straight to his head. He will have to pace himself. This is a night for swapping the stories of their lives. Where do you come from? Where have you been? What curious twists and turns have brought each of us to this particular place at this odd time? Yet there are certain things he shouldn’t talk about tonight. His fight, for one. On this side of the mountain, why spread the news around? Until the rest of them make it through, who’s to agree or disagree?
On the other hand, why can’t he revise the story here and there? With the aguardiente warming his insides, Jim is tempted to make the knifing of the teamster a tale of high danger and desert bravery. But no. No. Better not to risk raising doubts in any mind, when you’re going to need all the help you can get.
Already he is looking for allies. Already he knows Johnson’s will be the leaping-off place. When you’ve come from overland, this is your first stop. Heading out the other way, as Jim knows he soon must do, it is your last stop. So he deletes the murder scene, as he relives all the rest, the thirsty days, the mountain nights, the plight of families left behind.
Johnson listens and scratches his chest. He scratches his thick, grease-polished beard and wags his head in near disbelief, as if Jim is claiming to have landed from the moon.
“I’d go back in there with ya,” he says, “but I wouldn’t be much good, since I never been up as far as you fellas been. Farthest I’ve traveled is one day’s ride out the Bear River canyon. That’s my limit. I’m no mountaineer and got no cause to be, though I don’t mind the view. It’s pleasant having mountains to look at from time to time. You want to know the truth, I have had my fill of snow. That’s why I shipped out when I did. I’d had my fill, and when I heard about the South Seas, that sounded like the place for me. But what with one thing and another …”
He’d been a ship’s mate and had sailed around Cape Horn, touching all the famous ports, Santiago, Acapulco, San Pedro, Honolulu, Sitka. Six years ago he stepped ashore at Yerba Buena and left the sea behind to become a riverman working cargo on the Sacramento.
Then this land came up for auction, he says. “Me and a partner located a hundred and fifty dollars and made our bid, and lo and behold, I got me a rancho now and a herd of cattle and two young squaws to keep me company at night.”
His laugh spills upward with the fiery sparks, a loud and raucous laugh full of mischief and wonder. Johnson is still astounded at the way his life has turned out.
“You mind if I ask how much land you got for a hundred and fifty dollars?”
Johnson scratches his neck, as if he minds a little. He finds something there, a tick or a chigger, squeezes and tosses it aside, flinging his arm wide in helpless surrender to his windfall. “Haven’t had time to find out where all of it exactly is. Somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand acres …”
“You say twenty thousand?”
“Or twenty-two. Maybe it’s twenty-two. And I paid a whole lot more than the last fella paid. You know what the word ‘grant’ means? It means free for the asking. That’s the way the greasers do it. They just pass out ranchos to each other like pieces of birthday cake. First one to have this spread got it straight from the gobernador.”
“And where is he now?”
“The gobernador?”
“The one who had the ranch.”
“They hung him.”
“Who hung him?”
“You have to understand there are two kinds of greasers. Them from Mexico. And them from California. And they hardly ever get along.”
Johnson drinks from the brandy jug and passes it to Jim, who drinks and settles back to listen to the story of Johnson’s Ranch. Soon he will be hearing such stories wherever he goes. The struggle with Mexico has been brewing for years. In the province known as Alta California no one has ever been in charge for very long. The land is vast and empty. The laws are feeble. The men in power appear and disappear like coyotes.
Until last year, Johnson tells him, the gobernador was a politician sent up from Mexico City. The local rancheros never liked him much, and they were getting ready to run him out. When Captain Sutter got wind of their plan, he tried to send a warning down to Monterey, since he was then on the side of the gobernador, angling for more land grants of his own. Sutter’s messenger, a fellow called Pablo, was the one who used to own this ranch. He and Sutter had been together for years, ever since they’d worked the Santa Fe Trail together back in the 1830s. Before Pablo left the fort, they fitted him out with a special boot that had some kind of false sole where the secret message was concealed. Alas, it didn’t stay concealed for long. Some Californios captured him on the road to Monterey. They searched him up and down. They tore his saddlebags apart, and his saddle. Then they tore his boots apart and found the message written by Captain Sutter to the hated gobernador who had been appointed by indifferent officials three thousand miles away. They hung poor Pablo right there by the side of the road, j
ust south of San Jose, hung him without mercy, says Johnson, “the way them greasers do.”
“Next thing I hear, there is going to be a land auction down at Sutter’s Fort. When you been out here a while you learn to strike while the iron is hot. Captain Sutter, you see, he’d had a hand in this deal from the start. In these parts he is the judge and the jury and the land agent and the bank and the chief of police and just about anything else you can think of. Him and the gobernador were thick as thieves—that is, before the gobernador got run out. When Pablo petitioned for all this land, Sutter spoke up for him, and that was good enough for the gobernador, who signed the grant. Now the gobernador is long gone, back to Mexico City with his tail between his legs. And Pablo is dead, God rest his soul. And I got the land. And Captain Sutter, far as I know, he kept the hundred and fifty dollars, though that is none of my business, as long as each man gets what’s coming to him.”
STARTING SOUTH the next morning, Jim still hears this story as he rides, wondering how much of it is true. He has never heard of one man possessing so much land. And for so little! A hundred and fifty dollars for twenty-two thousand acres? Why, that’s less than a penny an acre. It is hard to believe. Yet he wants to believe it. He wants to believe that in this new country all things are possible. As he follows the Bear River he doesn’t think about the muddy-footed bricklayers or the woman who ministered to him, whose people have lived here for so many thousands of years. Nor does he think about the governor from Mexico who has never been near the huge tract he signed over to a fellow from Santa Fe. Jim is thinking about the extraordinary timing and Johnson’s luck. The earth here is rich. Already many bushels of wheat have been gathered. They make their own bread. Their own cheese. And water flows all year long, flowing down from the Sierras.
Beyond the river, rolling foothills gradually level out, across miles of pastureland and open country. How much of it belongs to Johnson? There’s no way to tell. He has so much land his cattle run loose, without fences, like buffalo.
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