Snow Mountain Passage

by James D Houston

  “I’ve heard of parties crossing close to Christmas,” one man said, without much conviction.

  Such stories did not change the long line of snowy peaks to the west, nor did they change the desperation in the air.

  This was where a young fellow named William Foster shot his own brother-in-law in the back for no reason anyone has ever been able to agree on. He had been with us all the way, part of the Murphy clan. His relatives tried to call it an accident, but I still have my doubts, considering some things Foster did later on. He had a mean streak in him. According to the story we’ve been told, his brother-in-law, William Pike, was cleaning a pepperbox pistol. The two of them were getting ready to set out for Sutter’s, hoping to bring back more supplies. When his wife called for some firewood, Pike stood up to fetch it and he passed his pistol to Foster.

  You don’t see pepperbox pistols much anymore, except in museums and fancy gun collections. Even in those days you didn’t see them much, because the six-shooter had already come along. But William Pike still carried an old pepperbox, which was an early form of six-shooter, with six small barrels in a ring, one for each bullet. It was an awful-looking contraption, and a mess to clean. But men love things like that. Foster had been itching to get his hands on this pistol. Moments after Pike handed it to him, the gun went off. Pike was shot in the back, and he died by the fire with his wife and children watching.

  Did Foster have some family grudge against his brother-in-law and choose this moment to pull the trigger? Or did the gun go off by itself? Or did it somehow explode in his hands, as his relatives claimed?

  It was just one more event to divide us, with the animals down to skin and bones, and the resentment and aggravations swelling day by day—this family unhappy about traveling with Indians, that family still arguing about who had started the knife fight and whose idea it was to take the Hastings Cutoff, the next family squabbling over whose fault it was so many cattle had been lost. Now they were all wondering how a man could get shot in the back for no reason, though this time you did not hear Lewis Keseberg demanding “an eye for an eye,” since he had run a long thorn through his foot and it had swollen up so bad he couldn’t walk. Nor did you hear Patrick Breen say, “A killing cannot go unpunished.” His animals had made it across the desert in better shape than anyone else’s. He was eager to get away from Truckee Meadows, figuring he could now make better time on his own. Council meetings were a thing of the past. It was each family for itself.

  Then came the sight we all feared most. The day they buried William Pike, the cold rain turned white, and the skies hung over us like the heavy cloak of God. They had buried grandma by a bubbling spring. They had buried Luke Halloran in salt, and John Snyder in dry sand. Now they buried William Pike in the first snow.

  By the time we started into the mountains we weren’t a wagon company anymore. We were just a scattering of wagons and cattle and mules and horses and frantic people strewn for miles along the trail. When we came at last to Truckee Lake, the one they now call Donner, a foot of snow had fallen around the shore. The lake was gray as a rifle barrel, and all the trees above the lake were white. The Breens had pushed ahead and had already tried the summit trail and run into drifts too deep for their oxen. Five feet, they reported. Men were saying we’d have to leave the wagons where they stood, pack up whatever the animals could carry and press on before all traces of the trail were buried. It was our only hope to clear the summit.

  After that it was bedlam by the lake, the panic in the air thicker than the falling snow, with some men still lashing at their fallen animals, and others berating frozen hands as they struggled to unyoke the teams, and wives screaming at their husbands about what to leave behind and what to carry, the food, the money, the blankets, the extra boots.

  Salvador was in the lead again once we started climbing. Since he’d seen the trail and was the best rider, they had given him the strongest mule. I held on to his woolen coat, certain he could get us through. Indians were supposed to know everything about trails and forests and canyons and so forth. He’d already been over this pass. His mules had made the journey too. As long as I had hold of Salvador’s coat, his mule would make it one more time.

  Back behind us I could see wagons tilting where they’d lost the trail. I saw other mules and oxen up to their bellies. Some had already pitched into the snow. I saw mama and Tommy on another mule, and Luis right behind us, with my baby brother, and farther back Virginia riding with Charlie Stanton. With one arm I held on to Salvador, with the other I held on to little Cash, our dog. Back at the wagons he had barked until I scooped him up. Now he was curled inside my shawl. Somehow, I imagined, if we could all make it to the top, papa would be waiting there. I didn’t know what the top looked like, or how far it was, or how papa would get himself there. But my mind was working to see a way through, and this was my vision. If I held tight enough, Salvador would lead us to the summit and get us past it to a sunny place where papa would be waiting.

  I did not have any idea what the weather had in store, or what snow can do to you at that altitude, nor did I know that Salvador and Luis were valley people just like all the rest of us, flatlanders from the fertile valleys of California. We were farmers and blacksmiths and carriage makers and mule skinners from Illinois and Missouri. That is the heartbreaking part, as I look back, all of these flatlanders finding themselves at six thousand feet in the blinding snow and trying to climb to seven thousand feet.

  Salvador was in the lead. But he didn’t know much more about what to do in this kind of weather than anyone else pushing for the summit that day. His tribe had learned long ago to stay out of those mountains in the dark of the year, and you have to wonder what was going through his mind. You have to wonder if he wasn’t asking himself, How did I get up here breaking trail for these crazy whiteskins where only a fool would be?

  In the High Country

  UNDER A CLEAR sky the great valley sprawls behind them now—four men and thirty animals strung along the rocky trail. Up ahead, snow-covered peaks and slopes loom closer, ever closer, glimpsed in and out of gathering clouds.

  As they move through the foothills, above Bear River canyon, Jim observes the curving hunch of Mac’s great shoulders, his slouch hat pitched forward, his long legs bent. He likes riding with this man, likes his spirit, a man who loves his family, who always goes the extra mile to do his share and more, and doesn’t talk much unless he’s stirred up or drinking. In his saddlebag Mac carries a trinket for little Harriet, his one-year-old, something he picked up at Sutter’s, a miniature whistle on a rawhide thong. Jim has seen it, a short, polished tube of wood with a hole notched. It makes a trilling birdlike note.

  Jim remembers when the McCutcheons joined the wagon company, outside Fort Laramie, young and eager, remembers seeing Mac’s generous face and massive frame, thinking, We can use this kind of muscle. Mac and Amanda had to leave another company when he came down with fever, had to lay low for ten days and sweat it out. At the time Jim didn’t think much about it, Mac seemed so strong and fit, as if the rest had done him good. But the fever has stayed with him, flared up again when he reached Sutter’s, and Jim can still see it in his eyes. They are too bright. The color in his cheeks is unnatural. Today his voice has a raspy edge.

  When the rain finally hits and revives his cough, Mac looks bewildered, as if he himself cannot believe a man of his size could be afflicted for so long. He does not complain. He will never complain. He will ride until he drops. But Jim doesn’t want him to drop, or come close to dropping. Four men on such an expedition is already too few.

  They climb through a cold and muddy downpour. It rains for hours, steady, soaking everything. At Mule Springs they see the first scatterings of snow. A while later all the ground is white. The rain turns to sleet. On the long steep ascent into Bear Valley they plod through sleet, prod and pull the animals upward, and make camp in a night so wet they can’t build a fire.

  From here on, they tell themselves, the wag
on party could turn up anywhere, anytime. This hope gets them through a damp, bonechilling night, and through the next day, as they cross Bear Valley, now under two feet of snow, and climb the wall Jim and Walter slid down.

  They climb its slippery zigzag trail, and Jim can tell the Indians don’t like the work at all, up this high, driving thirty horses through thickening snow. For two days he has not heard either of them speak. What are they thinking? Do they really know what this trip is for? Do they care? Are they doing it for wages? Sutter uses threats to keep his men in line. But does Sutter’s arm reach this far into the mountains?

  Above Bear Valley the snow is waist-deep. The night is colder as they bed down, and utterly silent under the pines. A restless clatter from the horse herd rouses Jim and Mac. They call out to the Indians, who have camped apart, but get no answer. They hear hooves crunching through icy crust. They are up and running in the dark.

  Jim stays with the herd while Mac resaddles, to give midnight chase down the long incline, plunging back the hard way they have come. But the Indians elude him, and once again he climbs the slope out of Bear Valley, returning before dawn to tell Jim their wranglers have disappeared, along with three horses.

  When they have finished damning the runaways and damning Sutter and damning the snow and the cold and the endless night, after Mac has fallen exhausted into his bedroll, Jim lies in the darkness wondering how long Charlie’s Indians stayed loyal to the cause. They seemed to be trustworthy fellows. But so did these two, as they left the fort, giving their Indian promise to bring all Sutter’s horses back. So had the Paiutes Jim let hunker by his desert fire.

  The next morning it begins to snow, a dry, windless, powdery fluff that gradually fills the trace of the trail. Jim rides in front of the pack train. Mac rides behind, as the snow deepens, hour by hour, soft and feathery, up to the bellies of the horses, up to their haunches. Under heavy loads of flour and beans the animals struggle. Some give out, stumble and fall, unable to rise. Their mouths and noses lift for air, as if coming up from underwater through foamy surf.

  Jim has never been this high so late in the year. With the Indians gone and the horses floundering, it seems hopeless. Yet it is not hopeless. He won’t let it be. He does not know this Sierra weather. But he remembers the terrain. Didn’t he already cross it once? He thinks he knows where he is and where the summit is likely to be. He calls back that they will leave the herd and ride ahead on saddle mounts, just the two of them.

  Mac shouts something in reply, but Jim doesn’t hear it. He doesn’t want to hear it. He is thinking that Margaret and Virginia and Patty and Tommy and James Junior are now caught in something similar, somewhere not very far from here. Perhaps they struggle toward him as he pushes toward them. Perhaps ten miles away. Maybe less. They could be an hour away. Or half an hour! At any turn in the trail, at any clearing he could have a glimpse of the first mule or campfire flame.

  In his mind’s eye he sees the whole route, the soothing trees along the Truckee, the wide bowl where the river spreads thick with tule, the eastern Sierra face. He sees the oval lake and the summit beyond the lake, the bleak grasslands higher up, the alpine valleys, then the crossing and recrossing of the Yuba, right on to this very spot where his horse heaves its chest against the mounds and heaps of white.

  Nearly a month has passed since Jim and Charlie Stanton went their separate ways. By all calculations the party should have come this far by now. Where are they? Did Charlie make it through? Maybe his Indians did something worse than take off in the night with a few animals. Or maybe the snow stopped all of them somewhere before the summit. But no. That doesn’t figure. Something else went wrong. Could other fights have broken out? Lord knows, they were on a hair trigger, the whole company, day and night. Maybe Keseberg thought he’d try to hang somebody else, and this time succeeded. Right now Jim would like to have that moment back, facing Keseberg with the weapons loaded. He should have shot him while he had the chance. Yes. If he had that moment back he would shoot Lewis Keseberg in the heart and gladly watch him die. This spurs him on—the thought that one day he will have another chance.

  He urges his panicky horse to drive forward, drive against the chest-high drifts. Each slow, bucking plunge moves the wheezing animal one yard closer to collapse.

  At last they can go no farther. Jim dismounts, sinking in up to his belt. He throws a pack and bedroll over his shoulder and hurls himself at the white field, as if a refusal to stop will cause the snow to melt away in front of him.

  Mac shouts, “Jim!”

  He doesn’t turn.

  “Jim, what the hell are you doing?”

  “We have to keep going!”

  “We can’t get anywhere in this stuff!”

  “C’mon! C’mon!”

  Jim is certain now that the party is within shouting distance. They could be holed up just past this ridge. They have to be. It stands to reason. He calls out, “Hallo! Hallo!”

  They don’t have snowshoes. Neither of them thought of snowshoes. Where Jim comes from you don’t need snowshoes, and they weren’t mentioned in any of the guidebooks. They make another hundred yards, descending through powder up to their armpits. Downhill it is a slow floating fall through banks of cotton. They reach a ledge with a view along a white and empty slope toward the course of the Yuba. It has stopped snowing. Again Jim calls, “Hallo! Hallo!”

  They listen.

  They peer.

  Not a sign. Not a sound. Not even an echo. The whole mountain range is empty. No one here but two snow-spattered men with heaving chests and steam puffing over the drifts, and silent flakes falling again, closing off the view ahead. All the streams are gone, buried. The Yuba’s gone. Perhaps he hears it hissing down below. Perhaps not.

  At last Mac gets his breath. “This has got to be it.”

  “This can’t be it.”

  They look at each other, eyes red-rimmed under frosted brows. Mac stifles a wet, phlegmy cough, and Jim hates his cough, tells himself this is Mac’s fever talking, another body giving out the way the horses gave out.

  Mac says, “We have to go back.”

  “Goddam it, we can’t go back!”

  “Even if we got through, what good is it without the pack herd? Wherever they are, they need food, not two more bellies to fill.”

  Jim can’t bear this thought. Neither can he bear to speak his own heart. He knows Mac is right. He, too, is ready to collapse. He could bury himself right here in the powder and sleep for a year. He waits and lets Mac speak the terrible truth, the voice low and hoarse, words breaking in the breezeless cold.

  “We’re stuck, Jim. They’re stuck too.”

  “We’ll get back down to Sutter’s … get some more horses.”

  “Horses can’t make it through this, don’t ya see?”

  “He’ll stake us to whatever we need.”

  “Fifty more horses. A hundred and fifty. Don’t make no difference. We’re all stuck, us and them, and right now there ain’t a goddam thing on earth you or me or anybody else can do about it.”

  His words join the flakes that drop between the thick coats and their stoic faces, spoken, then gone, swallowed into the huge, white, all-surrounding silence. The men don’t move, as if still waiting for any distant flicker of a sign, a sound, perhaps a reaction from the place itself, some recognition that they have come this far to stand and listen. The indifferent snow falls lightly on their hats, their shoulder packs, their sleeves, the laden pines.

  —PART TWO—

  ORCHARDS

  A Ray of Hope

  THEY TURN BACK. But he hasn’t given up. They dig out the packhorses and at Bear Valley stash sacks of flour and jerked beef high up in the pines, still hoping that by God’s grace the company, or some part of it, might get this far. As they wind their way down toward the lowlands, he is already calculating what it will take to recross these mountains, spotting sites for backup camps.

  They went about it all wrong, he sees that now. We’ll need a b
ase camp below the snow line. We’ll need a forward camp higher up, and enough men to hold them while a lead team pushes for the summit. We’ll need tents, heavier blankets, and mules as well as horses, and a dozen men next time, or more, if we can find them. That means packing twice as much food for the trip in, and enough stored along the trail to get everyone out.

  In the valley again, on the level plain, they follow the Feather. By midmorning it warms up. They’ve had some sleep. As Jim feels his strength again he scolds himself for listening to Mac. Another mile or two might well have brought them face-to-face with the families at last. He wants to get back up there. He wants to push on through. And soon. Soon! SOON! The sooner the better. In his mind the plan of rescue comes to life, the route, the catalog of details large and small—gloves, saddles, beans, flour, coils of rope …

  Mac’s mind is filling too, though he has doubts. “I just don’t know,” he says repeatedly. “I just don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?” says Jim.

  “I’ll give ‘er anything I’ve got.”

  “I know you will.”

  “I sure don’t see how we’d make it past where we were.”

  “We are going to!”

  “Goddam it to hell, Jim …”

  “That’s all there is to it.”

  “I want to bring my family through same as you …”

  “What are you saying, Mac?”

  “When I think what it was like, with us not near the summit and …”

  “And?”

  “You have to wonder what it’ll be like once a full winter sets in.”

  “So we leave them all in the mountains to freeze.”