Crack in the Sky tb-3

by Terry C. Johnston

  Asa nodded. “Flatheads was follering Jackson south. Likely make it a day or so behind us.”

  “How many’s the lodge?” Solomon inquired.

  “Enough to keep this bunch of hydrophobic wolves busy for some time!” McAfferty roared. “Least sixty … seventy lodges.”

  “Whoooeee! Flathead girls!” Isaac sang.

  McAfferty continued, “Jackson got word there was a big village of Snakes coming here to the valley too.”

  “Gonna be some shinin’ times now!” Caleb cried.

  “‘Do not prostitute thy daughter, to cause her to be a whore; lest the land fall to whoredom, and the land become full of wickedness,’” McAfferty snarled.

  “Weren’t but a few gals on the Popo Agie,” Hatcher explained.

  “That where Sublette opened up his likker kegs?” Asa inquired.

  “Ain’t all that good on your tongue,” Rufus said. “But it can sure ’nough kick you in the head!”

  “Sublette have any likker left him?”

  “Near as I know,” Hatcher said, “he’s got him least half of what he brung out from St. Louie.”

  McAfferty wiped some fingers across his lips. “I got me a hankering to end this longtime dry, boys. Sublette’s up to trading, is he?”

  “Damn right he is,” Caleb said. “You got plews?”

  “I got plenty of plews, Mr. Wood. ‘The Lord maketh poor, and maketh rich: He bringest low, and lifteth up.’”

  Hatcher turned to Bass and gestured a thumb at McAfferty. “’Sides allays spouting his Bible talk, Asa here allays was one of the best for bringing flat-tails to bait. Why, hell—I’ll bet he’s almost good as you, Scratch!”

  Asa asked, “This here new man that good, is he?”

  “Notch or two better’n you ever was, Asa,” Caleb bragged.

  “That so?”

  “McAfferty allays was the best at finding prime beaver country too,” Jack continued. “Shame when ye up and decided ye was leaving us to ride out on yer own hook, Asa.”

  Slowly tearing his measuring eyes from Bass, McAfferty stated, “Man goes where a man is called to go. And if the Lord calls him to come alone … a man must listen to the commandment of the Lord his God.”

  “Damn—but you still preachify as purty as you ever did!” Elbridge cried in glee.

  Hatcher laid an arm over Bass’s shoulder and asked him, “Don’t that oily tongue of his’n just make ye wanna ask Preacher McAfferty to bring hisself on out to yer place for dinner on church meeting day?”

  “Dear Lord, ’Preserve me from those who would trouble met!’” Asa roared.

  “So you camping with Jackson’s bunch?” Caleb asked.

  “I go only where the breath of God leads,” McAfferty answered. “Usual’, that keeps me off on my lonesome.”

  “Throw in with us for a few days,” Isaac suggested.

  For a moment Asa looked them over; then his eyes landed on Bass. “Mr. Hatcher—you say this nigger’s better trapper than me?”

  “That’s gospel in my book, McAfferty.”

  The others muttered their agreement, and Caleb echoed, “The only man I ever knowed better’n you, white hair.”

  “Awright then,” McAfferty confirmed. “I’ll camp with you boys for a few days … and see just what I can learn that makes this here Titus Bass the finest trapper any of you devil’s whelps ever see’d.”

  In two more days it came to pass that the Flathead camp and a large village of Shoshone reached the pastoral valley where some 175 company men and free trappers had thrown up tents, lean-tos, and blanket shelters at the western foot of the Tetons. The Indians arrived right about the time that the renewed celebration was working itself into a genuine lather.

  For better than a day now Sublette had had his kegs opened for trade beneath his canopies. Jackson’s Flathead brigade were as eager as any men could be to have themselves a real blow, and the company owners themselves rejoiced in this unexpected reunion.

  Like so many others, both skin and free trappers, Titus Bass joined those who gathered in the shady grove where Jedediah Smith captivated his audience with tales of crossing the Mojave desert, the terrible blow of losing ten men to the treachery of those Mojave Indians, and dealing with the capricious Spanish who ruled that land from their Californio settlements and ranchos. Hour after hour he described his confrontations with the haughty and suspicious Monterey officials who kept his men under custody until ultimately releasing them upon Smith’s promise never to return to California. From there he described how they had hurried north, selling some of his furs to an American captain who anchored his ship in the Bay of San Francisco before Smith’s brigade continued its search for the mythical but famed Buenaventura River that was rumored to carry a man from the west slope of the mountains all the way to the great Pacific Ocean.

  But along the southern coast of Oregon country,* Jedediah’s company clerk and men let down their guard and allowed a band of seemingly peaceful and childishly curious Kelawatset Indians into their camp one morning—only to be savagely set upon and brutally butchered as the warriors pulled knives, axes, and clubs from beneath their blankets. A lone man, Arthur Black, managed to escape into the forest with his wounds. In addition, due to the fact that they had been out of camp on some duty or another at the time, Smith and two others survived the attack. At first Black believed himself to be the only one alive as he stumbled north to Fort Vancouver. Smith as well believed his little party to be the sole survivors, pushing north themselves with only what they had on their backs, knowing too John McLaughlin’s Hudson’s Bay post lay on the Columbia River.

  Horses, mules, weapons, traps, blankets, buffalo robes—everything was gone in that senseless massacre.

  By early August the four reunited within the bosom of McLaughlin’s generous bounty. Through the autumn and into the winter, Smith explained to his awestruck listeners now, the gracious post factor sheltered the Americans, treated them with every courtesy, and even dispatched a sizable brigade to punish the Kelawatsets. What his employees were not able to recover from the severely chastised tribe, McLaughlin promised to do everything he could to repay.

  After one of the survivors elected to stay on at Vancouver, and another journeyed east with an English brigade, Smith and Black finally set off for the Rocky Mountains once more in early March, beginning their epic and solitary journey of more than a thousand miles that took them across the entire extent of the great northwest. Passing Fort Colville at Kettle Falls and on past Flathead Post on the Clark’s Fork, the pair finally stumbled onto their old friends in the Kootenai country. Familiar faces! At last—back in the arms of their own countrymen!

  So here in Pierre’s Hole, Smith stood before that gaggle of Americans and reached inside his well-soiled, smoke-smudged shirt to pull forth a leather envelope, from which he took a folded parchment. As one of the few in that assembly who could read, Jedediah clipped off the words scrawled by the hand of no less than Chief Factor John McLaughlin—a draft on the great and powerful Hudson’s Bay Company itself!

  “I didn’t have an idea one you had such a paper on you!” Davy Jackson exclaimed as he and Sublette pounded Smith on the back. He turned to Sublette and explained, “When ’Diah come upon me, we was camped by the shore of the Flatheads’ lake, all he and Black was carrying on their skinny, crow-bait horses was a few otter skins they brung all the way from the western ocean! Them, and the hide from a moose he shot last winter up near the Englishes’ fort. Now, don’t you know ’Diah here looked like one poor digger Injun, that’s for sure!”

  Because of McLaughlin’s kindnesses and his even-handedness in making those reparations to the destitute Americans, Smith now told the hushed gathering that, although the Snake River country was by treaty jointly held by the U.S. and Britain, he had taken it upon himself to promise on behalf of his company that no American trapping brigade would trouble any waters on the west side of the Rockies.

  “But—damn! This here’s prime beaver country!”
Jackson shrieked in protest.

  “Trap over on the other side,” Smith suggested in that polite, preacher’s-son tone of his. “In Jackson’s hole!”

  Round and round that afternoon the partners argued the question, but in the end the resurrected Smith’s Christian charities prevailed upon the other two.

  “Maybeso it’s a hard country, after all,” Sublette relented. “We’re liable to lose good men, horses, and traps up there to the goddamned Blackfeet anyway.”

  “There isn’t anything to be gained south and west of the Great Salt Lake either,” Smith informed the crowd. “No beaver of any worth down there.”

  So Sublette prodded, “What you say of California, Jed?”

  “Nary any sign there, and the Spanish soldiers are near as bad as Blackfeet.”

  And in the last few seasons the valleys of the southern Rockies were being trapped by various brigades based out of Taos and Santa Fe: the Uinta and Wasatch front were trapped out by the likes of Etienne Provost and Ewing Young.

  Compelled to decide just where they should concentrate their efforts now, the partners determined they would claim that country east of the mountains, on the southern fringe of Blackfoot country, in the land of the Madison and Gallatin, even crossing over to the Yellowstone to trap the rivers west of where Milt Sublette’s brigade was at work.

  Jedediah Smith’s crossings to the Pacific coast had cost the company thousands of dollars in animals and equipment. Accounting for both desertions and massacre, only two of the original expedition who had bid farewell to friends as they departed Sweet Lake back in 1826 were returned to this land of the shining mountains.

  While some might eventually say that these expeditions were nothing less than catastrophes, at that moment in the late summer of 1829, there beneath the shadow of the Tetons in Pierre’s Hole—let no Englishman doubt that the Americans had come, once again stretching their arms from sea to shining sea.

  Call it “manifest destiny,” call it what you will—the Americans had come to tramp and map, lay their traps and eventually conquer all of what lay between the Atlantic and the far Pacific.

  By that summer of 1829 it was plain the Americans had come to stay.

  * In St. Louis those furs he had traded $9,500.00 in supplies for would garner the company a return of $22,476.00. Campbell would not return to America and his beloved mountain west until the famous Rendezvous of 1832 in Pierre’s Hole.

  * At their camp on the Umpqua River in the present-day Oregon, near the site of old Fort McKay—July 14, 1828.

  17

  Pushed up against the late-summer sky stood over a hundred hide lodges, brown as a Snake woman’s breast. While both the Shoshone and the Flathead bands chose to spread the horns of their camp circles across the valley floor itself, the white trappers had spread their blankets and raised their canvas shelters back against the trees that bordered this stream flowing right out of the snowfields still mantling the Tetons like a creamy shawl.

  Here tarried the morning shadows, and cool mists clung to the surface of every narrow thread of water draining both the Teton and Big Hole ranges that defined this long, narrow valley. There was wood and water and graze enough for those hundreds of Indians and something on the order of 175 white men. With those who had followed Milt Sublette into the Bighorn country, all told, Bass reckoned that there was no more than 220 Americans working the mountains of the far west. A damned rare breed what wandered about in all that lonesome country.

  The face of a white man wasn’t so common a sight—not yet, he figured that August morning. And he thought back to all those days and weeks and more he had spent on his own—alone by choice, or made lonely by chance. How many times in the past two years had he just wished he could go without hearing another human voice? If only for a whole day. If only to go for enough days with nothing but the soothing quiet of the wilderness itself until that quiet became so overpowering that he could then seek out his own kind.

  As long as he had yearned for that rendezvous on the Popo Agie, as much as he had reveled in this even bigger, bawdier Pierre’s Hole rendezvous, Bass awoke before sunup this morning, unable to go back to sleep. Restless, unsettled, not knowing what it was plaguing him with a nagging itch he’d have to find some way to scratch.

  On the Popo Agie and again here, there had been enough copper flesh pressed against his to sate the woman-hunger until another winter had arrived. Enough too of the numbing alcohol to remind Titus of just how much a fool it could make him and the others as they rolled and wrestled and romped like the young pups none of them were any longer.

  Two years now, he thought again—awakened and restless in that predawn darkness. And peered at the six long mounds that were Hatcher and his men cocooned in their blankets. Good men. Men who had saved his life, taken him in, made Bass one of their own. Men who had shown him the very best of the beaver ground in the Bayou Salade, then introduced him proper to Mexican territory, Taos lightning, and those gringo-loving senoritas.

  Two years now …

  Was there such a thing as too much companionship?

  He grappled with that dilemma as he stared into the dark and impatiently waited for morning to come. Was this an itch to strike out on his own, or only that annual itch to be done with this summer fair and on to the autumn hunt, planning his winter ground, cogitating on where spring would find him breaking ice to set his traps?

  So Scratch watched the light come creeping across the horizon, nothing more than a graying of the sky behind the jagged spires of those Pilot Knobs that rose so stately there could be no denying that a man must surely feel himself anointed to be here in this high kingdom, must surely consider himself one of the chosen to step foot in this virgin land … in some way embraced as one of the few who would ever get a glimpse of what lay beyond this world and into the next. So high, so high did they travel that such men as he should surely see right on through the sky.

  For too long he had lived in one place. Was it only that his moccasins grew itchy, and he grew anxious to be on the tramp again? Trapped back east among so many people for most of his life, to discover so late what a balm the aloneness could be for his soul. To discover just what the silence in all that was outside of him could do to create serenity for all that rested inside at the marrow of him.

  Gone to the banks of the stream as the sun brushed the sky to blue and the Indian camps came alive, Bass splashed cold water on his face, then pushed himself out over the water on locked elbows, dipping his chin right into the bracing liquid so shocking it made him gasp. On the far side sat some women bathing their tiny naked ones in the grass, the children stoic and mute as the sparkling droplets tumbled from their shivering bodies onto the lush green blanket of trampled grass. As he stood, and finally turned to move away, the giggle of children drew him past some tall, concealing willow to find a trio of girls busily chasing a huge bullsnake with their sticks through the grass and brush.

  They reminded him of little ones in those camps of the Ute, Crow, and Shoshone where he had passed winters at peace. During those long cold moons the warrior bands were content not to move until the village decided to pick up and find another valley when the wood ran low, or the game disappeared, or the ponies required more of the autumn-cured grass.

  Perhaps the warrior had it right, after all, Scratch brooded as he headed downstream toward the Flathead camp.

  Indian males celebrated their togetherness in many ways: in the buffalo hunt, at pipe ceremonies, making war, and with those informal talks on all manner of things as they sat in the warm sun while their women went about the camp chores. But, too, many were the warriors he had known who would set off on their own for the hunt, or eager to earn themselves a battle honor, perhaps to steal horses, or only to find an answer to their seeking somewhere on high.

  Suddenly stopping dead in his tracks, Scratch nodded emphatically. Although he was alone, he spoke out loud.

  “Yes.”

  Having decided answers came only to those wh
o took their own path.

  All a man found among others was the noisy answers that fit only those other men: a garbled babble of talk that was hard to divine.

  To find his way back to that serenity he had first discovered in this huge land, Bass realized he had to make his way back toward solitude.

  Barefoot and dressed in nothing more than tiny strips of cloth that served as breechclouts held around their waists by narrow rawhide strings, a half-dozen little boys came chasing after another handful as he neared the outer lodges of the village. Yelling taunts and shouting encouragement to one another, flinging their sapling lances or shooting their boyhood bows, they played at these deadly lessons of warfare, this study of dying and death learned so young.

  At the edge of a morning fire sat a young woman who glanced up at the white man walking past. In her lap she cradled the head of her free-trapper husband, his eyes closed in exquisite relaxation. Carefully the Flathead squaw parted her husband’s coal-black hair, inspecting the scalp painstakingly—until she found another louse, which she seized and cracked between her teeth before tossing it into the fire, then continued her search for the next.

  Men and women came and went on foot, or on horseback. Warriors rode past bareback, the expressive eyes in their impassive faces locked on some nether point and never touching his. Girls of marrying age watched him pass as they whispered to one another, their sparkling eyes gleeful above the hands they held over their mouths as they shared secrets about him, giggling coyly, playful at the arts of catching themselves a mate.

  “Mr. Bass!”

  He stopped, turning toward the sound of the voice, searching for the caller. Ahead in the shadows stood a small group of Flathead warriors, busy with some concern near a lodge door. One of the men waved, called out.

  “Ho, Mr. Bass!”

  Only then did he see how that warrior differed from the others. While the rest wore their hair plaited, braided, adorned, and unmistakably black, the one who called wore white.

  “McAfferty? That you?”