But what I remember best is not that brief unexpected ceremony, or the obligatory ecstatic thrashings on the bed of our plushy-gilt stateroom under the picture of Pan leering down appropriately while fleshy nymphs sported about him, or Susie’s imprisoning embrace as she murmured drowsily: “Mrs Comber … Mrs Beauchamp Millward Comber,” over and over – none of these things. What I remember is slipping out when she was asleep, to stand by the breezy texas rail in the velvet dark and smoke a cheroot, looking out over the oily waters as we ploughed up past Baton Rouge. The great stern wheel was flickering like a magic lantern in the starshine; far over on the east shore were the town lights, and from the main saloon on the boiler deck beneath me came the sound of muffled music and laughter; I paced astern and looked down at the uncovered main deck – and that’s what I can see and hear now, clear across the years, as though it were last night.
From rail to rail the great deck was packed with gear and people, all shadowy under the flares like one of those Dutch night paintings: here a couple of darkies crooning softly as they squatted in the scuppers, there a couple of drummers comparing carpetbags, yonder some rivermen lounging at the gangway and telling stretchers – but they were just the few. The many, and there were hundreds of them, were either groups of young men who gossiped eagerly and laughed a mite too loud, or obvious families – Ma wrapped in her shawl beside the children huddled in sleep among the bales and bundles and tied wagons; Pa sitting silent, deep in thought, or rummaging for the hundredth time through the family goods, or listening doubtfully near the groups of the noisy single men. Nothing out of the way – except for a strange, nervous excitement that rose from that crowded deck like an electric wave; even I sensed it, without understanding, for I didn’t know then that these ordinary folk were anything but – that they were the emigrants, the vanguard of that huge tide that would pour into the wilderness and make America, the fearful, hopeful, ignorant ones who were going to look for El Dorado and couldn’t for the life of them have told you why, exactly, except that Pa was restless and Jack and Jim were full of ginger. And Ma was tired – but they were all going to see the elephant.
He was crowded two deep along the port rail, was Pa, soberly looking west as though trying to see across the thousands of miles to where he hoped they were going, wondering what it would be like, and why hadn’t he stayed in Pittsburgh? The single fellows had no such doubts (much); beneath me a bunch in slouch hats and jeans were passing the jug around boisterously, and one with a melodeon was striking up:
Oh, say, have ye got a drink of rum?
Doodah, doodah!
I’d give ye a taste, if I had some,
Doo-doodah-day!
and his mates clapped and stamped as they roared the chorus:
For it’s – blow, bully-boys, blow!
For Californeye-o!
There’s plenty of gold as I’ve been told
On the banks of the Sacramento!
You never hear it now, except maybe on a sailing ship when she’s upping anchor, and I doubt if it would have the same note of reckless hope that I heard off Baton Rouge – it wasn’t too well received then, either, with cries of shet-up-cain’t-ye? from the sleepers, and damn-yer-eyes-I-reckon-we-kin-sing-if-we-want-to from the optimists, and then a baby began to wail, and they piped down, laughing and grumbling. But whenever I remember it, I have an odd thought: I never suspected that night that I – or Susie and the sluts, for that matter – had the least thing in common with those folk down on the main deck, but in fact we all belonged to a damned exclusive company without knowing it, with a title that’s a piece of folklore nowadays. Millions came after, but we were the Forty-Niners.
That claim to immortality lay ahead in the unseen future; as I pitched my cheroot into the river I was reflecting that wherever the rest might be going, I was bound for home, admittedly the long way about, and they could keep Californeye-o for me. If there were pickings to be got along the way, especially from the overfed trollop snoring and sated in the stateroom, so much the better; she owed me something for the amount of tup I’d given her, and no doubt would give her again before the journey’s end. There were worse ways of crossing America – or so I thought in my innocence. If I’d had any sense I’d have followed my cheroot and taken my chance among the enemies hunting me along the Mississippi valley.
* * *
m A swine from the devil’s herd.
n I see and approve better things, but follow the worse which I condemn.
Chapter 4
Fifteen dollars a bottle they were charging for claret at the Planters’ Hotel in St Louis that year, and it was like drinking swamp-water when the mules have been by; I’ve tasted better in a London ladies’ club. But you daren’t drink anything else because of the cholera; the good folk of St Louis were keeling over like flies, the whole town stank of camphor and burning bitumen, you could even find bodies lying in the street, and the only place more crowded than the Planters’ must have been the cemetery – which was probably as comfortable.
It wasn’t only the plague that worried me, either; St Louis was the town where a few weeks earlier they’d been posting rewards of a hundred dollars for my apprehension, describing me to a T and warning the citizenry that I had Genteel Manners and spoke with a Foreign Accent, damn their impudence. But the Choctaw Queen went no farther, and we had to wait a day for a vessel to carry us up the Missouri to Westport, so there was nothing for it but to venture ashore, which I managed in safety by purchasing one of the new “genuine cholera masks, guaranteed to prevent infection” for two bits, and sneaking into the Planters’ looking like a road-agent.
There I had further proof, if I’d needed it, of my new wife’s strength of character, and also of the length of her purse. Would you believe it – she had bespoken half a dozen rooms, and when the manager discovered that four of them were to be occupied by twenty nigger wenches, he had the conniptions; by thunder, he’d swim in blood before any black slaves stank up his rooms, no matter their airs and refinements. Unfortunately for him, Susie had the girls settled in and their doorkeys in her reticule before he realised it; he and she had a fine set-to in our parlour, while I kept safely out of view in the bedroom, and she told him that since her “young ladies” were on no account going to be herded in the pens with fieldhands and such trash, nor in quarantine neither, he’d better put a hundred dollars in his pocket and forget it. I’d have let ’em go to the pens myself, but it was her money, and after some hem-haw he took it, and retired with a grovelling request that the “young ladies” keep to their rooms, for his reputation’s sake.
But what with the din of the overcrowded hotel, the stink of sulphur smouldering in the fireplace, and the fear that some sharp might discover Mr Comber was the notorious slave-stealer Tom Arnold, I was mightily relieved when we boarded the Missouri packet next evening, and I felt it safe to drop my cholera mask over the side – the passengers included sufficient tall dark strangers with every kind of accent, whether their manners were genteel or not. She was a smaller and much dirtier vessel than the Choctaw Queen, and the girls had to make do in steerage among all the roughs and roustabouts and gamblers and frontier riff-raff; Susie just singled out the four biggest and ugliest and paid them handsomely to keep the wenches safe in a corner – which to my astonishment they did, for four days up to Kanzas Landing. The first drunk who tried to paw a crinoline was tipped over the side without ceremony, and the gamblers haw-hawed and laid bets whether he’d float or sink. After that our Magdalenes were left alone, but they had a miserable passage of it, even under the lean-to which the toughs rigged up to keep out the fog and drizzle, and they were a doleful and bedraggled jam of tarts by the time we tied up. Susie and I shared a cramped and stuffy saloon on the texas with about seventeen snoring merchants and dowagers with bad breath, but for once I didn’t mind the lack of privacy; I needed the rest.
They tell me that Kansas City nowadays covers the whole section, but in those days the landing and Westport and Inde
pendence were separated by woodland and meadow. And I wonder if today’s city contains more people than were crowded along the ten miles from Independence to the river when I first saw it in ’49: there were thousands of them, in tents and lean-tos and houses and log shacks and under the trees and in the few taverns and lodging-places; they were in the stables and sheds and shops and storehouses, a great swarming hive of humanity of every kind you can imagine – well, I remember the Singapore river in the earlies, and it was nothing to Westport-Independence. The whole stretch was jammed with wagons and carts and carriages, churning the spaces between the buildings into a sea of mud after the recent rain, and through it went the mules and oxen and horses, with the steam rising from them and the stench of hides and dung and smoke filling the air – but even that was nothing to the noise.
Every other building seemed to be a forge or a stable or a warehouse, a-clang with hundreds of hammers and the rasp of saws and the crack of axes and the creak of wheels and the thump and scrape of boxes and bales being loaded or unloaded; teamsters snapped their whips with a “Way-hay, whoa!”, foremen bellowed, children shrilled, the voices of thousands of men and women blended with it all in a great eager busy din that echoed among the buildings and floated off to be lost in the surrounding forest.
I daresay it was nothing to what it must have looked like a year or two later, when the gold-fever was at its height and half Europe came pouring to America in search of fortune. But in that spring every human specimen in North America seemed to have assembled at Kanzas Landing for the great trek west – labourers white and black and olive, bronzed hunters and pale clerks, sober emigrants and raffish adventurers, harassed women with aprons and baskets prodding at vegetables set out before the store-fronts and slapping the children who bawled round their skirts; red-faced traders in stove-pipe hats and thumbs hooked in fancy weskits, spitting juice; soldiers in long boots and blue breeches, their sabres on the table among the beer-mugs; Mexicans in serapes and huge-brimmed sombreros leading a file of mules; farmers in straw hats and faded overalls; skinners with coiled whips, lounging on their rigs; bearded ruffians in greasy buckskins bright with beadwork, two-foot Bowies gleaming on their hips, chattering through their noses in a language which I recognised to my amazement as Scotch Gaelic; bright-eyed harpies watchful in shack doorways; Spanish riders in ponchos and feathered bonnets, their sashes stuffed with flintlock pistols; a party of Indians beneath the trees, faces grotesquely painted, hatchets at their belts and lances stacked; silent plainsmen in fur caps and long fringed skirts, carrying buffalo guns and powder horns; a coach guard with two six-shooters at his hips, two five-shooters in his waistband, a slung revolving rifle, a broad-sword, and a knife in his boot – oh, and he was gnawing a toothpick, too; an incredibly lean and ancient hunter, white-bearded to the waist, dressed in ragged deerskin and billycock hat, his “nail-driver” rifle across the crupper of his mule, staring ahead like a fakir in a trance as he rode slowly up the street, his slovenly Indian squaw at his stirrup, through the crowds of loafers and porters and barefoot boys scuffling under the wagons, the swaggering French voyageurs, gaudy and noisy, the drummers and counter-jumpers and sharp-faced Yankees, planters and crooks and rivermen, trappers and miners and plain honest folk wondering how they’d strayed into this Babel – and those are only the ones I noticed in the first mile or so.
But soft! who is this stalwart figure with the dashing whiskers so admirably set off by his wideawake hat and fringed deerskin shirt, a new patent Colt repeater strapped to his manly rump, his well-turned shanks encased in new boots which are pinching the bejeezus out of him? Can it be other than Arapaho Harry, scourge of the plains? – that alert and smouldering eye must oft have hardened at the sound of the shrill war-whoop, or narrowed behind the sights as he nailed the rampant grizzly – now it is soft and genial as he chivvies the dusky whores into the back of the cart, an indulgent smile playing across his noble features. Mark the grace with which he vaults nimbly into the driver’s seat beside the bedizened trot in the feathered bonnet – his aunt, doubtless – and with an expert chuck on the reins sets the team in motion and bogs the whole contraption axle-deep in the gumbo. The whores squeak in alarm, the aunt – his wife, you say? – rails and adjusts her finery, but the gallant frontiersman, unperturbed save for a blistering oath which mantles the cheeks of his fair companions in blushes, is equal to the emergency; for two bits he gets a gang of loafers to haul them out. The western journey is not without its trials; it is going to be a long trek to California.
But at least it looked as though we were going to make it in some style. Once we’d got the rig out of the stew, and rattled through Westport and the great sea of emigrant tents and wagons to Independence – which was a pretty little place then with a couple of spires and a town hall with a belfry, of which the inhabitants were immensely proud – we were greeted by the celebrated Colonel Owens, a breezy old file with check trousers full of belly and a knowing eye; he was the leading merchant, and had been commissioned to outfit Susie’s caravan. He and the boys made us welcome at the store, pressed sherry cobblers on me, bowed and leered gallantly at Susie, and assured us that a trip across the plains was a glorified picnic.
“You’ll find, ma’am,” says the Colonel, ankle cocked and cigar a-flourish, “that everything’s in real prime train. Indeedy – your health, sir. Yes, ma’am, six Pittsburgh wagons, spanking new, thirty yoke of good oxen, a dozen mules, and a real bang-up travelling carriage – the very best Hiram Young4 can furnish, patent springs, hand-painted, cushioned seats, watertight for fording streams, seats half a dozen comfortable. Fact is,” with a broad wink, “it’s one of the new mail company coaches, but Hiram procured it as a personal favour. Indeedy – you won’t find a more elegant conveyance outside Boston – am I right, boys?”
The boys agreed that he was, and added in hushed tones that the mail company intended to charge $250 a head for the three-week non-stop run to Santa Fe, and how about that?
“We’re goin’ to take three months,” says Susie, “an’ ten cents a pound for freight is quite dear enough, thank you. To say nothin’ of fifty dollars a month for guards an’ drivers, who’ll eat like wolves if I know anythin’.”
“Well, now, ma’am, I see you’ve a proper head for business,” chuckles the Colonel. “An’ a real pretty head it is, too, if I may say. But good men don’t come cheap – eh, boys?”
The boys swore it was true; why, a good stockman could make two hundred a week, without going west of Big Blue.
“I’m not hirin’ stockmen,” snaps Susie. “I’m payin’ high for reliable men who can look after theirselves, and me.”
“And you shall have the best, ma’am!” cries the Colonel. “Say, I like your style, though! Your health again, Mr Comber! Indeedy – eight outriders, each with a revolving rifle and a brace of patent pistols – why, that’s a hundred shots without reloading! A regiment couldn’t afford better protection! A regiment, did I say? Why, three of these men rode with Kearny in the Mexican War – seasoned veterans, ma’am, every one. Isn’t that so, boys?”
The boys couldn’t fault him; dogged if they knew how the Army would have managed without those three. I remarked that so much firepower was impressive, and seemed to argue necessity – I’d been noting a bill on the store wall advertising:
Ho! Hist! Attention!
Californians! Why not take, among other necessaries, your own monuments and tombstones? A great saving can be effected by having their inscriptions cut in New York beforehand!!!5
The Colonel looked serious and called for more cobblers. “Indian depredations this past ten years, sir, have been serious and multiplying,” says he solemnly. “Indeedy – red sons-o-bitches wherever you look – oh, beg pardon, ma’am, that runaway tongue of mine! However, with such vast convoys of emigrants now moving west, I foresee no cause for apprehension. Safety in numbers, Mr Comber, hey? Besides, the tribes are unusually peaceful at present – eh, boys?”
The boys couldn’
t remember such tranquillity; it was Sunday afternoon the whole way to the Rockies, with all the Indians retired or gone into farming or catching the cholera. (That last was true enough, by the way.)
Susie inquired about a guide, reminding the Colonel she had asked for the best, and he smacked his thigh and beamed. “Now, ma’am, you can set your mind to rest there – yes, indeedy, I reckon you can, just about,” and the boys grinned approval without even being asked.
“Is it Mr Williams?” says Susie. “I was told to ask for him, special.”
“Well, now ma’am, I’m afraid Old Bill doesn’t come out of the mountains much, these days.” The boys confirmed that indeed Old Bill was out west with Fremont. “No, I’m afraid Fitzpatrick and Beckwourth aren’t available, either – but they’re no loss, believe me, when you see who I’ve engaged – subject to his meeting you and agreeing to take the command, of course.” And he nodded to one of the boys, who went out on the stoop and bawled: “Richey!”
“Command!” says Susie, bridling. “Any commandin’ that’s to be done, my ’usband’ll do!” Which gave me a nasty start, I can tell you. “He’s in charge of our caravan, and the guide’ll take ’is pay ’an do what he’s told! The idea!”
The Colonel looked at the boys, and the boys looked at the Colonel, and they all looked at me. “Well, now, ma’am,” says Owens doubtfully, “I’m sure Mr Comber is a gentleman of great ability, but—”
“’E’s an’ officer of the Royal Navy,” snaps Susie, “an’ quite accustomed to command – aren’t you, my love?”
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