Snow Mountain Passage

by James D Houston

  “What does it mean?” asks Jim.

  “Who knows? Every year is different from the last. You learn to be careful about predictions.”

  “Will there be snow across the entire range?”

  “I think so. If the storm comes from the north, as this one did. It takes us by surprise.”

  While the recruiters fan out south and west, Jim and Mac spend a day rounding up their gear, loading the animals with jerked beef and beans and flour—enough, they hope, to bring eighty people through one last week in the high country. While they work, they watch the snow line. Jim tells himself that even with this bad turn in the weather, time should still be on their side. Nearly a month has passed since he said good-bye. On his mind’s trail map he has followed their progress day by day. He calculates that they should have just about cleared the summit. At that altitude Margaret and the children would have had a hard night, a miserable night. But the worst part should be behind them now. He prays that this is so.

  On the second morning after the rain Jim and Mac start north with thirty horses, one mule, and two of Sutter’s Indians. At dawn their caravan fords the American River, heading back toward Johnson’s Ranch.

  from The Trail Notes of Patty Reed

  Santa Cruz, California

  November 1920

  Our journey had advanced;

  Our feet were almost come

  To that odd fork in Being’s road,

  Eternity by term.

  —Emily Dickinson

  DUCKS swoop in across the lake and settle, as they have done for who knows how many thousands of years. Wild ducks and geese mix with the gulls that float above the beach on shoreline breezes. The lake is inland from the beach, bordered with tules. They call it a brackish lagoon, half runoff from the wintertime rivulets and rained-on slopes, half salt water seeping under the sand. We have a boat moored down below the house, a little dinghy tied to our spindly pier. It will get you across the lake and back, and I have been out there a time or two, but I’m too old for boating. Sitting still seems to suit me fine. Late afternoons I watch the wind move across the water, and the odd effect it has.

  You expect water by the ocean to be flowing toward the larger body. But here it seems to be the opposite. Sea wind keeps the surface moving inland, back the way it has come, and the movement gives the afternoon sheen a rippled look. The lake seems to jump with light, like a million tiny minnows out there leaping for joy, and the glare so bright you can hardly see beyond it.

  The brightness burns my eyes. But I don’t mind. If I gaze right into it I can almost see papa moving across the lake, looking the way he used to look. After all these years I still expect to see him coming back, just as I expected him all the time we waited. Waiting for papa. Waiting for anyone.

  If I gaze long enough I am eight years old again instead of eighty, and it is the day we finally reached the Truckee River, after two days of the emptiest country you have ever imagined. Things out there were so flat you could see the river coming for miles away. The line of trees was like a lifeline stretched across the sand. It was the first sign of hope we’d had in days, though some people wouldn’t believe it. We were all so maddened with thirst, this could have been another mirage. The animals told us otherwise. They smelled the water hours before we got there. Oxen that looked to be breathing their final breath were suddenly straining at the yoke. A horse bolted, the one carrying mama and my brother Tommy. She couldn’t hold it back, and they went galloping away ahead of us.

  Virginia and I were walking. Just about everyone was walking, to lighten the wagonloads. I wonder how many of us could have lasted another day out there. But now we had those trees to guide us in, and what a welcome sight they were! When we finally reached the riverbank, people fell into the water with their boots and shirts and dresses on, like a whole crowd of children splashing and ducking in the sweetest water we had ever felt or tasted.

  How sweet it was to drink our fill and then lie back on wet green grass and look up into the leaves. By that time it was the middle of October. Trees along the Truckee, alder and aspen and cottonwood, looked like they had caught fire, the colors were so bright and crisp. That afternoon Virginia and I began to gather autumn leaves, just like we would have done back home. There was every different kind of yellow, pale yellow, chalky yellow, lemon yellow, lime-tinted greenish yellow. Some leaves had a persimmon tinge, and some were red as blood. Sunlight coming through these leaves made an actual glow above the river, and the light dancing on the water was like the light out here dancing across the lake today. It was strange and wondrous water, moving in the wrong direction.

  For three weeks our guide had been the Humboldt, winding through the desert from east to west. Now here was the Truckee flowing the other way. To my young eyes the river was flowing backward, and this added to the magic of that afternoon. Somehow it pushed the light right at you. I remember how the yellowy persimmon light reflected up onto the faces, so that everyone looked younger and fresher, their faces shining like saints, as if we had finally arrived at the golden place of all our dreams.

  We saw tracks of hare and fox and deer along the river. Pretty soon Bill Eddy came back with nine geese to pluck and cook. We rested there a whole day, and drank and drank, and didn’t want to leave. But we had to. Time was running out. So on we went, along the eastward-running river. I guess it was a day later we met some men on horseback riding toward us. We had just come around a bend. It was afternoon again. We were heading toward the sun, with light filtered through a blaze of autumn leaves. All the air around the river seemed to shine, and right in the middle of that light we saw a figure in the lead. The glare was so bright you couldn’t see who it was, but I knew who it was, and I started running along the bank.

  Every day I’d expected to see papa come riding into view. I didn’t know how far it was to Sutter’s Fort, a day, or a month, or a year. But he had already gone off twice—once while we were crossing the Wasatch, and once while we were crossing the Salt Desert. Both times I’d watched and waited, and both times he’d come back.

  Virginia had spotted him too. We were both running along the riverbank calling out, “Papa! Papa!”

  Even after we got close enough to see that it wasn’t him, I wouldn’t believe it. The man on the horse looked shorter than papa, and thicker, and wore glasses, and a silly-looking derby hat. But I kept trying to make him look different than he looked. I waited until I could see his face, and I tried to make it into papa’s face, find a way to see papa’s eyes and mouth and beard, and only gave up when I heard the folks who’d run along with us begin to call out, “Charlie! Charlie! By God, it’s Charlie Stanton! He’s come back! Thank the Lord! Look at them sacks, look at them mules! God bless you, Charlie Stanton!”

  Men and women crowded in to grab his hand and throw their arms around him and kiss him and call his name, and mama was right among them, wanting to know if Charlie had seen papa anywhere along the way. Charlie looked at her and grinned and said, “Yes, ma’am. We had breakfast at Bear Valley.”

  “Where’s that?” she said.

  “Day or so past the summit.”

  “You mean he made it across?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And he was all right?”

  “Fit as a fiddle, Mrs. Reed. He looked just fine.”

  Her thin shoulders dropped, as if a load of wood she’d been carrying for miles had just dissolved. She sank onto the riverbank and sat with her face in her hands. She was wearing the hat she’d worn all the way across the plains, whenever the sun was out, a Shaker-style hat like so many of the women wore, made of leghorn straw and curved almost like a hood so it held in all her hair. The ribbons underneath her chin were trimmed with red roses. I don’t know how it had lasted so long. The worn-out sweetness of that hat, the rose-tinted sweetness of the dangling ribbons, made me want to weep. Virginia went over and put her arms around mama. I did too, imagining she felt as brokenhearted as I did then, though I was wrong about that. Thro
ugh her fingers the words came spilling. “Thank God.” She said it over and over. “Thank God. Thank God.”

  Much later I would understand that her relief that day was mixed with something else. From the gentle way her shoulders shook, I could feel it, though I couldn’t yet speak it. Much later I would learn that as often as she had prayed for papa, she had cursed him for bringing such a fate upon his family, cursed him because she was the one who had to talk him into leaving the wagon party, cursed him for the looks she had to take from those who now held her responsible for Johnny’s stabbing, and cursed herself for ever marrying such a man. That day by the Truckee she trembled with gratitude and shame.

  We all wept with her, but not for long. Mama soon stood up and wiped her eyes and said with a brave smile, “C’mon, let’s see what those mules are packing.”

  Everyone else was drifting toward the mules, eager to unload the sacks. Charlie told George Donner what they were carrying, and George took charge of passing out the provisions. We ate biscuits for the first time in many days, and boiled beans, and some pieces of a rabbit somebody shot. With all the water flowing by, Milt and mama made coffee again that night, to drink with dinner. Coffee still tasted bitter to me, but I already loved the smell. Somehow it stood for the comforts of regular life. To my eight-year-old nose, the smell of coffee underneath the trees along the riverbank meant things were almost ready to be normal again.

  * * *

  NOWADAYS IT’S HARD to imagine how isolated we were out there. Charlie brought the first news we’d had from anywhere in many weeks. There weren’t any roads, no mail or newspapers, or telegraph lines or telephone. This was even before the Pony Express. The whole government could have fallen and Washington, D.C., gone up in flames and we would never have heard a thing about it. Our one and only link with the rest of the world was Charlie Stanton, and he brought back a whole lot more than food. He brought back stories of the place we’d all been imagining. I would say he brought back our faith that such a place was actually somewhere up ahead and waiting for us. He restored our belief in something we had almost stopped believing in. He had been to California, and here he stood, human proof that a person could get there and live to tell the tale.

  He was a hero in every way but one. What in God’s name—some people wanted to know—had possessed him to travel in the company of these two redskins? Even if they’d helped him get through the mountains, did we really want to let them join our party, after all the trouble we’d been having with the desert tribes?

  Along the Humboldt we’d lost dozens of cattle, and it hurt us bad, slowed us down, doubled the work for the teams that had survived. In hindsight I suppose you could see the Paiutes had about as much right to our cattle as we did to the buffalo herds back there on the plains. Of course, you could not have told that to any of the families whose animals had been shot at. You would have died with those words in your mouth. If thousands of buffalo were running around loose, why it stood to reason they must belong to ANYBODY WITH A RIFLE. But these cattle here, well, they are different. They all belong to US.

  Papa’s shadow hung over the presence of Charlie’s two Indian companions, the way it seemed to hang over everything that came along to divide up our company. I would not say papa was partial to Indians, but neither did he despise them on sight, the way some folks did. Just a couple of nights before the stabbing, he had let two Indians creep in close to our campfire, gaunt and underfed and making friendship signs.

  Uncle Billy raised his voice in protest, as did several others, but papa wouldn’t listen. He let them hunker next to our fire. Pretty soon they began to talk, as anyone would, on a cold night—sit by the crackling flames and talk. They might have done this before, with other wagon parties, since they knew a few words of English. With sign language they were trying to explain something about the trail farther on, when some sparks from the Graves’s family fire suddenly leaped into the blanket of dry grass that spread out from where we’d camped. In no time a sheet of fire was flashing and licking all around. It was a frenzy there for the next few minutes. While some folks stamped their boots and some flailed bedclothes and some ran to the river with buckets, the two Paiutes sprang into the fire. They had skins wrapped around them. They rolled across the burning grass with a speed that could scarcely be believed. They jumped up flailing and seemed to be everywhere at once.

  After the fire was out, their eyebrows and hair were singed, but their dark faces glowed with pleasure. There was no question that without their quickness and the risks they took, three more wagons would likely have been lost. Everyone agreed on that. So papa told them to eat with us, which they did, using their fingers and slurping food right off the plate. Yet they were so grateful and so happy you didn’t mind the sound. The way they curled up next to the fire, I figured they had joined us and now we’d have some Indian guides to help us get across the desert.

  The next morning I was as surprised as anyone else to wake up and find them gone. They took a yoke of oxen belonging to Uncle Billy, and one of his favorite shirts—losses he immediately blamed on papa for befriending these scoundrels, for being soft on Indians and forever doing things that added to the burdens of our journey.

  On the day papa fought with John Snyder, Uncle Billy was smarting from those recent losses. And two weeks later it was still on his mind, as he cautioned Charlie Stanton that when it comes to Indians you can’t ever afford to give an inch. If those first two had been chased after and scalped, he said, we might have saved ourselves a lot of grief. If it was up to him, he would scalp these two right here and now and hang them by their heels and let them be messengers to all the other cattle-rustling bandits that had been dogging us ever since we hit the Humboldt.

  I have to hand it to Charlie. He stood firm. These men aren’t Paiutes or Shoshone, he said, they are from the valley of the Sacramento, and they are Christians too. Captain John Sutter himself had vouched for their good character, and so would Charlie. What’s more, Sutter had warned these fellows that if anything happened to so much as one of his mules, he would have Salvador and Luis hunted down and hung. They were on their best behavior, Charlie told us all, and they would be a great asset to the company.

  The next morning mama led me toward the one named Salvador. He was going to hoist me up onto his horse. By that time I had seen a lot of Indians, but I’d never been this close to one. The night the Paiutes sat by our fire, I had kept well back, just watching and, I have to confess, mighty disappointed. We had all grown up on Indian stories. Those Paiutes, they didn’t have tomahawks or headdresses. They were the skinniest two people I had ever seen.

  Salvador was not skinny. He looked pretty well fed, compared to the rest of us. But he was another disappointment, at first, since he was dressed about like everybody else you saw those days—shirt and trousers made of homespun, heavy boots, a dirty hat.

  I held back until his head tipped up and I saw his face. He had a look that quickly won me over. His eyes were so brown they were almost black. He wasn’t smiling, yet he seemed about to break out in laughter, as he pointed to himself and said, “Salvador.” He put the accent at the end. I thought he was speaking an Indian language.

  “Sal-va-DOOR,” I said.

  “Si,” he said, then pointed at me.

  “Patty,” I said.

  “Pat-tee,” he said.

  “Si,” I said.

  He slapped his horse. “Caballo.”

  “Ca-ba-yo,” I said, thinking this was the horse’s name.

  He held out his hands, and this stopped me. I looked at them as if they were detached from his body. I had never touched an Indian, or been touched by one. I looked at his hands, afraid to move. Finally mama said, “Get on, Patty. Hurry up now. Folks are waiting. We have to go.”

  Charlie had given her one of the mules to ride. Tommy was already perched up on its back. Thanks to Charlie, we would all be riding now. He could see how our family was down to nothing. But since he hadn’t witnessed Johnny’s stabbin
g, he didn’t have to take sides on that, the way some still did, holding mama herself responsible.

  James Junior was going to ride behind Luis. Virginia was going to ride behind Charlie. They were all mounted now, watching me.

  I raised my arms, and Salvador grabbed and lifted. “Cuidado, señorita,” he said, as he set me on Caballo’s rump.

  He swung up into the saddle, with a look back at me and said, “Bamanos.”

  “Ba-ma-nos,” I said, though I did not yet know it meant “let’s go.”

  Charlie and the Indians knew more about the route now than anyone else, so we were in the lead. As Caballo began to move, I placed my arms around Salvador’s waist. He had worked cattle in the open country around the Mission of St. Joseph and also around Sutter’s Fort, so he was a very fine horseman, good with all the animals. He was strong and firm. Underneath his coat his body was as hard as a tree. He didn’t talk much at all, but little by little he taught me my first bits of Spanish. Buenos dias. Adios. Muchas gracias. Por favor. Me llama Patty Reed. Each time he lifted me onto his horse he would say, “Cuidado, señorita.” Take care, little lady. And I finally learned to say, “Y usted también, señor.”

  It was our ritual, our trail game.

  He wore a thick wool coat. Sometimes, holding on tight, I would press my face into his back and feel the rough wool against my cheek and smell the heavy smell of woodsmoke and horseflesh and sweat, with some dampness added to the smoky scent, first thing in the morning. To this day I can close my eyes, sitting here above the lake, and the smell of Salvador comes back to me.

  THE RIVER FINALLY brought us to what was called Truckee Meadows, where the town of Reno stands today. A silence fell over the company when we saw the Sierras rising ahead of us, with fresh snow showing all across the peaks and looming cloud cover everywhere you looked. Soon after we’d set up camp near the river, it started to rain, a cold rain very close to snow, and that started people arguing about what to do now, whether to linger a few days here where grass was thick, so the animals could fatten some before we started into the mountains, or to push on before the weather turned. It was only the end of October, some said. By rights, they said, we ought to have another month at least.