Snow Mountain Passage

by James D Houston

  The Captain’s fervor has lifted Valentine from his seat. “By God, you can, sir! Isn’t this the day we’ve waited for?”

  Another murmur, a swell of agreement, from all but the Alcalde, who seems to tolerate Valentine the way you tolerate an unruly relative. He has listened with a mounting agitation, as if he did not expect this scenario. He lifts his thick and meaty hands, his face more burdened now, his wiry brows bent.

  “We are given to understand, Captain, that the men who did the kidnapping were not soldiers or Mexican regulars. They were ranchers from up that way.”

  “It happened on a ranch, that’s true. As to who were involved …”

  “If they have taken hostages, my guess is they want something. They want to negotiate.”

  Valentine interrupts. “It’s too late to bargain!”

  The Alcalde ignores him. “Before we rush into battle, the prudent move would be to make contact with their leaders, find out what they want. I’d do that first.”

  The Captain’s face is fixed in a drinker’s smile of elaborate courtesy. “Perhaps you can tell us, sir, what it is they want.”

  Unsure of his ground, the Alcalde hesitates, intimidated by the ruddy marine. “Ranchers around here … have all lost stock. Fremont’s men took everything that walked. I myself gave up dozens of horses, though not as many as some.”

  “There were orders for that,” says Valentine with loud impatience, “directly from the Northern Department.”

  “Who had orders to strip the ranches?”

  Valentine sighs, as if they’ve already gone through this too many times. “There was authorization from the Commandant himself.”

  “Yes,” the Alcalde says. “And that gentleman has now sailed away. Am I correct?”

  “Many have sailed for the fighting farther south.”

  The Alcalde’s voice is trembling with anger, his frail composure broken. “How long must we endure this? These officers arrive, drop anchor and sign edicts that shape our fate, then sail again before the costs are known! Families come to me, law-abiding families who have been treated like animals!”

  “Some will whimper,” Valentine says, “but troops need horses.”

  The Alcalde glares at him, shakes his head. “With all due respect for the good captain, the threat of Mexican regulars landing this far north is just another fantasy. You navy men don’t know our region. You don’t know these people. Nor do you speak the language they speak …”

  The Captain has unrolled a long page of heavy paper and rattles it dramatically.

  “According to our intelligence the enemy was two days ago assembled in force at Point San Pedro, a dozen miles below the entrance to the bay. I repeat in force, sir! Does that sound like disgruntled ranchers? We may well be facing a full-scale invasion!”

  The Alcalde looks trapped. His eyes search the room. The Captain seizes his advantage.

  “They’ve taken the mayor of Yerba Buena. Who do you think will be next? Every official in this region is now at risk.”

  The older man’s uncertain silence seems to be a form of surrender.

  Valentine chimes in, grinning with confidence. “We’ll set out in the morning.” He stands beside the Captain as if together they have hatched this campaign. “A scouting party will ride ahead, a dozen men, to find out where they are, which way they move. Then we mobilize. We strike. We bring them to their knees!”

  A Volunteer speaks up, an Indiana man who recently settled in the pueblo. “Some of us got families and need a day or two to take care of things. We been riding for more’n a week. Some are about give out, you want to know the truth, and might not ride at all if we got to start again first thing …”

  Valentine looks offended. “You think the greasers are going to rest up? We don’t have time to wait, wouldn’t you agree, Captain?”

  “Not when American lives are in grave jeopardy.”

  Alarmed, overwhelmed, the Alcalde says, “Hold on! Hold on! You cannot simply sally forth and leave this pueblo undefended. That is your solemn duty, Valentine. Why else were you appointed to the post? For weeks on end we do not see you …”

  “I defer to the Captain, sir, a man of wide experience in the art of war. Oftentimes the best defense is to go on the offensive. We can sit here and wait to be attacked, or we can move with speed and gain the upper hand.”

  “We have an agreement,” the Alcalde urges them, “to treat all citizens with respect.”

  Valentine has been flexing his fingers as if preparing for a fistfight. Compulsively he grabs one wrist, pressing, massaging. “Respect, you say! Perhaps you can teach that lesson to the California horse gangs who strip their own ranchos when it suits them. What difference does it make who gets there first?”

  Again the Alcalde tries to speak, one arm raised, like a preacher in a pulpit with a warning for his congregation. But Valentine has ignited the room. Now all talk at once, on their feet, pouring their own drinks, animated, planning and protesting, agreeing and lecturing one another. Glasses are raised again, and Jim’s is among them, his voice as loud as anyone’s, though he has his doubts. For all the stories he has heard, for all his riding up and down the trails of Alta California, he has yet to see with his own eyes one Mexican ship or the uniform of any nation but the United States.

  He watches the Captain tilt his head and empty a tumbler of brandy in a single gulp. He watches Valentine do the same, a man who claims never to drink but is much taken with the Captain and his naval tunic, as if they are veterans posing side by side. Jim knows he is the veteran of something. He has heard that Valentine once was kidnapped by a band of Californians and so foully treated he bears a grudge against them all, soldiers, ranchers, elders, priests. Who knows? Perhaps he feels some special bond with the seven captives.

  Jim watches the Alcalde, wondering if he could be right. He’s a wiser man than Valentine. Jim wants him to be right, now that he has offered the mission orchards, or seemed to, almost as an enticement. Jim wants the smoke to clear so he can sit down with this fellow. And maybe that’s what the Alcalde was driving at—help us get this smoke cleared, wherever it comes from, then we’ll talk. Jim isn’t sure. The Alcalde is another man pulled two ways, like Captain Sutter, out here long enough to be divided within himself, half American, half Californian. He can see it in the Alcalde’s eyes. In times like these, with our boys taken hostage and a pueblo threatened, you cannot be of two minds. With a war on, you have to be of one mind, like the Captain, a fellow who sailed around Cape Horn with the Pacific Fleet and up the long coast of South America and on past the ports of Acapulco, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Monterey. He told Jim he was sent here with fifty men to defend the town and not to stray beyond its edges. After a month of waiting he is sick of rutted alleyways and windowless adobe cubicles and interminable nights in the dim cantina playing cards with women who can’t pronounce his name. He is fed up with his superiors in Yerba Buena who will not make decisions. “A maddening situation there,” he said to Jim. “Two men of equal rank cannot agree on who’s in charge, so one contradicts the orders of the other, and here we sit.” The Captain is itching for something to happen. He doesn’t much care what it is. That’s about how Jim feels too, impatient, unable to sit still now, though his eyes burn with fatigue.

  As he thinks of setting out again tomorrow, his shoulders feel weighted with sandbags. Yet moving seems better than not moving. A foe of any kind is better than the void of not knowing where to turn. He can’t turn back, that much he knows. He can’t stay put. And peace, he tells himself, peace must be restored at any cost. If families are going to settle here and thrive, isn’t peace the first step?

  Strangers

  LATE INTO THE night they talk and scheme. The next morning Jim wakes to the ranch bell. The Alcalde is up ahead of him, riding out to check his herds and confer with his foreman. Indian servants lay out a hearty breakfast, coffee, tortillas, eggs with chorizo sausage, the finest breakfast he’s had in a month. He could get used to this ran
chero’s way of life. He feels born again, his head abuzz, as he steps into the crisp morning air.

  He is halfway to the barn when he comes upon the Alcalde’s wife. She stands between the barn and a smaller shed, with a rebozo pulled tight, covering her head against the chill. In the yard she looks smaller, more vulnerable. She is listening to a vaquero whose face, at first, is turned away. Jim’s sudden appearance catches her off guard. She offers a careful smile.

  “Señor Reed, buenos dias.”

  “Buenos dias, señora.”

  She glances at the vaquero, then at Jim. With a hand held outward she says, “Mi primo,” and adds haltingly, “my cuzzin.”

  He turns, a lean man wearing leather trousers and a close-fitting jacket of dark suede. Jim has seen him before. But where?

  On the plaza?

  In the cantina?

  With the bartender there?

  No.

  No, this is the fellow they stopped south of the pueblo, the fellow with the two sons and the fifteen horses.

  As they regard each other, the man’s black eyes go wide with recognition. His swarthy features do not move, but the eyes look Jim up and down. His back seems to stiffen. Finally he forces a thin smile, a curt nod.

  “Buenos dias, señor.”

  “Buenos dias,” says Jim.

  To the Alcalde’s wife he says, “My apologies. I didn’t mean to interrupt. Again I am most grateful for the hospitality here. I have slept well and eaten well. Moochas grassias. Moochas grassias,” nodding as he moves toward the barn to saddle up.

  When he leaves the ranch, heading for the plaza, they are still talking. Cousins, Jim thinks. Did Valentine know this when he commandeered the horses? Perhaps such things cannot be avoided. He has heard that sooner or later they are all cousins, these Californians. It is strange to observe the two of them. It makes him feel strange. For just a moment Jim feels foreign, a man who has peeked into the window of a stranger’s house and seen something he did not expect to see.

  Consuela

  IN THE MORNING chill she stands alone, thinking she will go to the church and light a candle and pray. Yes, in spite of his warning she will go to the plaza and enter the church and light a candle. But what will she pray for?

  First, for guidance. She will ask the Virgin to guide her through the confusion of these times.

  Then she will pray for Antonio, the son of her mother’s closest sister. He is like a brother. They grew up together. He is the brother she never had. She watches him ride off across open pasture, heading north. She knows where he is going, and she knows he is filled with bitterness, the kind of bitterness that can only bring harm. She knows he cannot forgive the Americans. She will pray that he can somehow look into his own heart and find patience before he gets himself killed.

  He cannot win. These insurgents with their hostages, they do not have a chance. The Americans will not be stopped. In the harbor at Monterey she has seen their ships of war. Until today she believed there was no reason to try and stop them. She has believed that in the hands of the United States, California would be a better place than it has been in the hands of Mexico. Her husband has told her of his homeland and still promises to take her there one day. He has told her of the many houses made of wood. Every town has a school, he says, and a mill, and many kinds of shops. She has been to Mexico City, where her great-uncle Rosario lives. She has seen how they look down upon those from Alta California. Even the nuns in the convent school took pity on her for having to return to such a far-off and barbaric place. The Mexicans have never cared for us, her father used to say, so we must care for ourselves. They do not know this land as we know it, he would say, How can they know our hearts? Her father thought California should be a separate country. Antonio still thinks so.

  She remembers the day her husband appeared in the plaza. It seemed incredible to her that this handsome foreigner should be suddenly in their midst, as if he had dropped from the sky. So many years ago now. The first American she had seen. He rode a fine palomino, and his hair was still blond. Everyone talked about him. He spoke Spanish, and he went to Mass. Women schemed to meet him. Today Americans occupy half the houses in the pueblo, while more come every week. They park their wagons under the trees, or her husband invites them to spend the night.

  Her husband likes this fellow Reed. Antonio does not. Before he rode away, Antonio told her Reed and Valentine led the band that stole his horses. They had a disagreement he could not understand. But in his view they are the same. Consuela isn’t sure. Reed has a feverish and driven look, but he is not a vicious man. He speaks with courtesy. Her husband tells her he has a wife and four children. Antonio tells her not to be fooled. The Americans arriving now, he says, are not like the Alcalde. They are worse than the Mexicans, he says, and Valentine is the worst of all, a thief with no mercy.

  It is the third time Antonio’s ranch has been raided by foreign soldiers, or by men who claim to be soldiers. They say they need horses for the war and cattle for their food. But where does the war come from, Antonio says. The Americans bring the war. Then they use it as an excuse to take whatever they want. All the ranches are suffering, he says. Ships have come to Monterey to trade for hides, and men have missed the shipment for lack of horses and saddles to round up their stock. One by one they join the forces gathering south of Yerba Buena. Who knows where their desperation will lead them or where they will strike first? If San Jose is attacked, says Antonio—and this is what he came to tell her—she will not be harmed, nor will the Alcalde be harmed, as long as they both stay close to the rancho and do not venture toward the plaza where the marines are stationed.

  You are the one who will be in danger, she told him, not I. You cannot win against the Americans. Do you have ships? Do you have cannon?

  Try to understand me, Antonio said. We cannot let these foreigners simply walk across our borders and treat us like slaves in our own land. Isn’t our honor worth more than certain victory?

  She can still see him, far across the field, the cousin who could be her brother, who loves this land as she has loved it. And if you die, Consuela thinks, what then is all your honor worth?

  After he disappears among the distant oaks, she is gazing at the land itself, broad pasturage where her father once presided, until he passed this piece of his holdings on to her and to her husband. Consuela was born one mile from where she stands. The long valley of Santa Clara, with its rim of mountains east and west, is the world of her childhood, the world of her marriage and her married years. She shivers with cold and with a rush of sentiment for the spectacle before her. This hard, crisp chill is the bite of winter coming on, the Christmas bite, she calls it, as familiar as the hills of summer when dried grasses give the rising contours a tawny lion’s skin.

  By late December the hills are green, the mornings blue, and the town prepares for a pageant at the church. Yet now Antonio comes to warn her to avoid the plaza where American marines have built a fortress around the juzgado, the old adobe courthouse. Why are they here? And who could have imagined the plaza could become such a dangerous place? Her husband says they came to protect the pueblo. Yet they only bring more danger. In her heart she knew this from the day they arrived, though she has tried not to know it. Today, with Antonio’s warning, she feels it all around her, like a dark mist rising from the valley grass.

  A Common Enemy

  THREE DAYS PASS, three days of rain, windless days with water spilling down upon them. The Volunteers can’t remember when it began. This is the eternal rain, with no beginning, no end. For the scouting party the trails are troughs of goopy muck. Riders follow the margins of the trails where hooves churn up the grass. Water leaks inside their slickers and into their saddlebags.

  Enemy troops are out here too, somewhere, hunkered down perhaps, or on the move, using weather as a screen. The scouts bring back reports of a large campsite among redwoods in the mountains to the west. Fire pits were seen, cattle bones charred and scattered. In this rain it’s hard
to say how recently men camped there, or how many. But there is evidence enough for Valentine and for the Captain, who sends half his men to plod along behind the mounted Volunteers, two dozen drenched marines in mud-thick boots.

  On the fourth day a new report tells them what they do not want to hear. The unseen foe has looped behind them, passing in the night, or under cover of wooded groves that stripe the foothills. It is New Year’s Eve, but celebrations will have to wait. They swing around and head back the other way, joined by forty men who have marched down from Yerba Buena, a few more marines, another militia, and men from the port who thought they could not take off for three months to travel with Fremont but who can’t stand idly by when attackers might soon be right outside the gate. They bring a small ship’s cannon, an eight-pounder on a two-wheel carriage, pulled by a yoke of glum and dripping oxen.

  The next afternoon, under sheets of drizzle, the whole party—numbering a hundred, plus their mules and horse herds—veers westward to avoid a broad mudflat where the cannon would sink to its hubs. Sighting a benchland above the plain, they clamber toward it. As darkness falls they reach two shepherds’ huts, which offer a rickety and worthless gathering point.

  It is the first of January. The night comes quick and early, with no sunset, just a dimming of light under murky clouds. As Jim Reed turns in, he prays for this wet campaign to lead him somewhere, anywhere, and soon. The troops from Yerba Buena saw nothing on their journey southward, which must mean the entire enemy force is maneuvering for an assault on San Jose. They can’t be far from us, he thinks. Tomorrow they will show themselves. They have to. As he falls into a troubled sleep, he feels tomorrow heading toward him like the herd of wild horses in the San Joaquin. He turns and squirms and calls out in the darkness and dreams a now familiar dream …

  He sees a cobalt sky, a world of blue both pure and perilous. Granite peaks loom large against the blue. He hears the wheezing grunts as teams of oxen strain to haul canvas-covered wagons up a final cliff. He hears the whip and sees the teamster with his sleeves rolled back, his trail hat tilted, slashing away at their bony ribs and haunches. But wait. This man is not a teamster. He has the golden beard and moustache of Lewis Keseberg, that arrogant smirk. With every slash the thick-butt whip draws blood.