Crack in the Sky tb-3

by Terry C. Johnston

  Then, as the other survivors began to pick their way out of the rocks, Scratch turned his face to gaze at the sky so immense overhead, wondering—wondering just how far a man was from God out here now.

  “Mind my word, boys: I ain’t gonna pay these scalpin’ prices to no man, no booshway, no goddamned company!”

  Scratch stepped up to the outer fringe of that gathering of free trappers who were loosely circled around a bareheaded older man intently haranguing the swelling crowd beneath a hot summer sun that late morning four days after their scrap with the Blackfeet.

  “Damn the mountain prices!” someone called from the crowd.

  “But that’s just what they are!” Jack Hatcher bellowed as Bass stopped at his elbow. “These here are mountain prices, Glass—and a free man pays or a free man don’t dance!”

  “You … you say his name is Glass?” Scratch asked in a whisper.

  From the side of his mouth, Hatcher said with an admiring grin, “Yep. Glass be that ol’ wolf-bait’s name.

  “Turning and taking a step closer to Mad Jack, Glass-grumbled, “I’ll wager you’re the kind what riggers it’s fair for the traders to charge us twice or three times what things is wuth just for ’em bringing the goods all the way out here to us, eh?”

  “Every man’s entitled to have hisself paid for his labor,” Jack argued. “Even a damned double-backed, gobble-necked trader!”

  Glass wagged his head, sputtering, “B-but, you’re a free man!”

  Bass whispered, pursuing his question, “That really Hugh Glass?”

  “And I’ll die a free man! A free man what don’t pay no tariff to no company, and no tariff to you neither!” he hollered back at Glass. Then Hatcher quickly turned his head to look Titus square in the face. “Ye heard tell of that ol’ coon?”

  “I do,” Scratch replied in a hush. “First heard of him clear back to St. Louie. Friend of mine told me ’bout that ol’ feller dragging hisself back to the Missouri after a sow grizzly chewed him up an’ he was left for dead by the bunch he was traveling with.”

  Hatcher grinned. “That’s the man awright. One and the same. Have him show ye his scars after he steps down from preachin’ hellfire to this short pew of sinners.”

  “What’s the rub he’s greasin’?” Scratch asked.

  “Like Glass is saying: all these here men ought’n take a stand against being dangled at the mercy of the traders. Him and a few others trailed in here with him yesterday and called all the free men together out of the camps to grouse about the tall prices we’re faced with payin’ to Smith, Jackson, and Sublette.”

  “For the life of me, sounded there like you was coming down on the other side of this fight,” Scratch replied.

  “Nawww,” Jack explained with a widening grin. “Hell, Glass does have him a good point. An’ he’s right on most every count. I’m just the nigger what likes to argufy with that ol’ buzzard ever’ now and then ’cause it gets him so riled—’bout as steamed as a unwatched tea kettle over the fire.”

  “So what’s Glass figger we can do about what toll the traders charge us for their goods?”

  “And for what they give us for our plews,” Hatcher added. “Don’t forget they got us two ways of Sunday!”

  “Like I told you—them three friends of mine got rubbed out with my furs last summer, they figgered to float downriver to the first post they come onto and trade there, ’stead of packing our plew into ronnyvoo, where a trader can skelp us both top and bottom.”

  As the heated discussion continued among the gathering, Jack wagged his head. “Ye saying we should pack our furs all the way to a fort, Scratch? Ye know how far the closest post is nowdays?”

  “Why—we ride in all the way to ronnyvoo,” Bass explained. “Ain’t nothing more to ride our plew all the way to a fort.”

  “Damn—closest fort’s clear over to the Missouri—taking a man right through Sioux and Ree country, Scratch!”

  Glass shushed the crowd and stepped toward Titus and Jack. “Did I just hear you fellers talkin’ ’bout taking your furs to a fort clear over on the Missouri?”

  “As crazy a notion as I’ve ever heard!” Hatcher snorted with a wry grin.

  “Then again, maybe not,” Glass declared, turning his eyes to gaze at Scratch. “Way you’re talking, friend—must be you heard of the new post they’re building at the mouth of the Yallerstone.”

  With a shake of his head Titus answered, “No—I ain’t heard no such a thing.”

  “That’s old news, Glass!” cried someone in the crowd.

  Another man called out, “No man’s had the balls to open Henry’s old post in many a year!”

  Whirling on the naysayers, Glass roared, “You dumb, Digger-brained idjits! I ain’t talkin’ ’bout Henry’s old post!”

  “What fort at the mouth of the Yallerstone ye speakin’ of?” Jack demanded, glaring at the old trapper.

  “Mackenzie’s post.”

  Amid the sudden noisy murmurs in the crowd, Hatcher asked, “The same Mackenzie been on the upper river for some time?”

  “That’s the nigger,” Glass declared. “The one what runs the Upper Missouri Outfit for American Fur now.”

  His head bobbing, Caleb Wood shouted, “That’s a man knows what he’s doing!”

  Titus asked, “Where you hear all this news, Glass?”

  Glass turned back to Scratch. “From Mackenzie’s own tongue hisself.”

  The mumblings and murmurings grew louder among the free trappers until Glass waved his arms and got the crowd shushed.

  “This last spring I run across a bunch of pork eaters raising their stockade walls up there on some high ground just above the mouth of the Yallerstone,” Glass explained after he had those curious men completely quiet. “Mackenzie his own self was there—seeing the place was built proper. Said he was naming it Fort Floyd.”

  “That’s still a hell of a trip up to that country,” Solomon Fish complained, scratching contemplatively at his beard of blond ringlets.

  “Then come to ronnyvoo year after year,” Glass replied with a shrug, “and pay mountain prices.”

  Hatcher demanded, “Mackenzie’s prices gonna be better?”

  “Yeah!” Scratch protested. “And is he gonna give us a better dollar on our plew?”

  Stepping back toward Titus, Glass explained, “Mackenzie didn’t say much more’n asking me to come down here to ronnyvoo and tell you he was open for business, even while they’re building the post.”

  Some of the men looked at one another, almost as if calculating the journey they would have to make then and there that very summer if they chose to pack their beaver all the way north to where the Missouri River issued out of the badlands.

  Matthew Kinkead stepped up to ask, “If’n you come as a courier for this Mackenzie and the American Fur Company—what you get out of it, Glass?”

  “I got me a new rifle, and a hundred pounds of bar lead, boys,” Glass admitted, then began to tap his chest with a gnarled finger. “But more’n that—I come away from this here meeting knowing I done right by all the free men in these mountains.”

  Isaac Simms asked, “So what’s a man left to do who don’t see going all the way to the mouth of the Yallerstone to trade with American Fur?”

  “Way I figger it,” Glass replied, “least a man oughtta have him a choice.”

  “If’n Mackenzie didn’t tell ye to guarantee he’d beat mountain prices,” Hatcher began, “what’s to come of us when we get all the way there and this here Mackenzie turns out to be just as much a thief as Ashley, Sublette, or any of ’em?”

  Bass held up his arms for quiet, and before Glass could reply, he said, “Maybe you ought’n go back to Mackenzie and tell him we’re interested, but … but he should bring his trade goods to ronnyvoo, where we’ll have us two traders to sell to on the same spot.”

  “Two traders!”

  “That’d keep prices down!”

  Then another voice bellowed, “And plew prices up!�
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  The roar was unanimous. Excitement energized the congregation as they babbled about the possibility of actually having competition among traders: competition in the dollar given for beaver, in those prices charged for a man’s necessaries once a year. No longer would they be at the mercy of one trader who kept the price of beaver low, and the cost of goods sky-high.

  “Is that the word what you fellers want me to carry back to Mackenzie at Fort Floyd?” Glass inquired after the crowd fell quiet once more.

  The first man yelled, “Tell the Upper Missouri Outfit to come to ronnyvoo!”

  “Tell Mackenzie the free men in the mountains will make it worth the trip!”

  And a third cheered, “Tell him men like us ain’t at the mercy of traders no more!”

  That summer of 1828 none of those double-riveted, iron-mounted free trappers had any idea that the invitation they were extending to Alexander Mackenzie of the American Fur Company’s Upper Missouri Outfit would prove to be akin to the sort of dinner invitation the inhabitants of a henhouse would extend to a hungry fox in a well-known children’s fable.

  For now, the only men truly standing between the free trappers and their being at the mercy of American Fur’s total monopoly in the mountains were St. Louis traders William Ashley and Billy Sublette. In less than a decade, however, John Jacob Astor’s company would be trading without competition in the far west, able to dictate what it would pay for fur, to demand what it would for supplies. In less than a decade American Fur would be king of the mountains.

  But for now … for the next few glorious seasons of an all-too-brief era in the early west, the free men would rule the Rockies.

  As it was, things did not look all that bright for the American Fur Company that hot July. The previous fall Joshua Pilcher and his partner, William Bent, led a party of forty-five men west from Council Bluffs, their supplies and trade goods provided on contract by Astor’s company. Then somewhere on the upper North Platte, the Crow struck and drove off most of their horses. Pilcher was forced to cache most of his trade goods before proceeding over South Pass and on to the Green River, where he planned to winter his brigade.

  Having traded for horses from the Shoshone with the arrival of spring, Pilcher sent some of his hands back to raise their cache—only to find most everything destroyed by water seepage. With what little he could salvage, the booshway didn’t have much to offer those coming to rendezvous at Sweet Lake. Showing up late, and hampered by his pitifully small supply of goods, Joshua Pilcher succeeded in trading the free trappers for a paltry seventeen packs of beaver before the fur hunters began drifting off in all directions. As the grasses browned and the land baked late that summer, Pilcher and Bent dissolved their partnership.

  While Bent started back to St. Louis with their miserable take for the year, Pilcher and nine of his trappers left rendezvous following David Jackson and Thomas Fitzpatrick on their way north to the land of the Flathead, that brigade bolstered by a good share of the trappers who had deserted Pilcher at Sweet Lake. That next morning the brigade led by Robert Campbell and Jim Bridger departed for Powder River country and the home of the Crow.

  Company partner Jedediah Strong Smith hadn’t shown up at Sweet Lake that summer. The carousing men drank toasts to him and his California brigade, hoping that Jed’s boys had not bumped up against disaster. Maybe next year they would all be together once more.

  “It’s been a good season!” cheered William Sublette as he started his caravan on its return trip to St. Louis. “We’re out of debt, and in control of the mountain trade.”

  “Let Astor have the rivers,” Davy Jackson had proposed.

  “Damn right,” Sublette agreed. “The mountain trade is ours.”

  “See you on the Popo Agie next summer, Bill!”

  “See you on the Popo Agie!”

  This business was growing, slow and sure. And rendezvous had proved to be the way to supply the company men, the way the partners could secure the biggest return from the trappers’ dangerous labor in the mountains. That first day of August, Sublette turned east with more than seventy-seven hundred pounds of beaver that they had purchased for three dollars a pound, fur that would bring them over five dollars per in St. Louis. In addition Sublette had forty-nine otter skins, seventy-three muskrat skins, and twenty-seven pounds of castoreum aboard his pack mules.

  After paying off General Ashley the twenty thousand dollars they owed him for the year’s supplies, the three partners were left with a profit of more than sixteen thousand dollars.

  It had indeed been a good year in the mountains.

  5

  “Say, Mad Jack!” the fiery-headed trapper cried as he tottered up atop one good leg, the other a wooden peg, his face rouged with the blush of strong liquor.

  “Tom! Ye ol’ she-painter!” Hatcher shouted back as he took the fiddle from beneath his chin. “Thought ye’d took off with Jackson or Bridger awready.”

  “Nawww,” the peg-legged trapper said as he came to a weaving halt, his bloodshot eyes glassy. “Me and some boys are moving southwest in a few days. See for our own selves what lays atween here and California.”

  “Yer favorite tune still be ‘Barbara Allen’?”

  “Damn right,” Tom Smith replied. “That squeezebox feller know it good as you?”

  Jack laughed. “Elbridge knows it better’n me!”

  “Sing it for me, boys,” Smith said as he collapsed onto the grass, stretching out that battered wooden peg clearly the worse for frontier wear. “Sing it soft and purty.”

  In Scarlet town where I was born,

  There was a fair maid dwellin’,

  Made ev’ry youth cry, “Well a day,”

  Her name was Barb’ra Allen.

  ’Twas in the merry month of May,

  When green buds they were swellin’,

  Sweet William on his deathbed lay,

  For the love of Barb’ra Allen.

  “I ain’t never see’d a man stand so good having him only one good leg,” Titus whispered to Matthew Kinkead.

  “Peg-Leg Tom?”

  Scratch nodded. “How he come by it?”

  Isaac Simms answered, “Cut it off hisself, Scratch.”

  “The hell you say!” Scratch replied in amazement, staring at the crude whittled peg.

  He sent his servant to the town,

  The place where she was dwellin,

  Cried, “Master bids you come to him,

  If your name be Barb’ra Allen.”

  Well, slowly, slowly got she up,

  And slowly went she nigh him;

  But all she said as she passed his bed,

  “Young man, I think you’re dying.”

  “Isaac speaks the bald-face truth,” Caleb Wood stated with one bob of his jutting chin.

  “Injun’s rifle ball broke both bones in the leg, right here,” Kinkead declared as he bent over and tapped his own leg just below the knee.

  Simms snorted, “Figger on how much that’d pain a man!”

  She walked out in the green, green fields,

  She heard his death bells knellin’,

  And every stroke they seemed to say,

  “Hard-hearted Barb’ra Allen.”

  “Oh, father, father, dig my grave,

  Go dig it deep and narrow.

  Sweet William died for me today;

  I’ll die for him tomorrow.”

  “Lookit the man just sitting there easylike, tapping the end of that ol’ peg on the ground like it was his foot,” Solomon said.

  Scratch prodded, “So tell me who really cut it off him.”

  “Isaac tol’cha: Smith done it his own self!” Kinkead declared. “Well, most of it anyways. First off he got good and drunk afore starting down through the meat with his own scalping knife.”

  “Shit,” Bass whispered with a shudder.

  “Passed out by the time it was to cut on bone,” Simms took up the story. “Two other’ns had to finish the job for him. They burned the end of that st
ump with a red-hot fire iron to stop the bleeding, then went off and buried the leg far ’nough away that Smith could never go lookin’ for it.”

  “Go looking for it?” Scratch repeated.

  “Damn, if that ain’t what I seen happen with ever’ man lost a arm or leg,” Solomon Fish stated. “Like something pulling, an’ yanking ’em to find that missing part of themselves.”

  They buried her in the old churchyard,

  Sweet William’s grave was nigh her,

  And from his heart grew a red, red rose,

  And from her heart a briar.

  They grew and grew up the old church wall,

  ’Til they could grow no higher,

  Until they tied a true lover’s knot,

  The red rose and the briar.

  “Most ever’ man I know of in the mountains calls Tom by the name Peg-Leg Smith now,” Caleb said.

  “Never have I seen a man get around so good on a peg,” Bass observed with fascination.

  As Hatcher and Gray finished the song, Smith clapped and hooted, then asked, “How ’bout something a man can get up an’ stomp to, Jack!”

  Hatcher thought a moment, then suggested, “Say, Tom—how ’bout a tune writ special for all of us bachelors?”

  Smith asked, “Bachelors? What the hell’s that?”

  “What we are, ye stupid nigger!” Hatcher roared. “Any man ain’t married, he’s a bachelor!”

  “Then sing it, by God!” Smith cried merrily as he struggled to rise, clambering clumsily onto his leg and peg, clapping and hobbling about in exuberance. “Sing it for all us happy bachelors!”

  Come all you sporting bachelors,

  Who wish to get good wives,

  And never be deceived as I am,