Buffalo Palace

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Only thing for me to do was try to save myself,” Jim said. “So I reached down and felt in the water at the bottom of my boat to find my sack of meat. I stuffed it down inside my coat an’ made ready to jump out and try for some rocks where I could least get outta the water. Maybeso I could get my strength back and climb up the side, get back to the prerra—anything before that river sucked me right under the ground with it.”

  But by some miraculous hand, right as he was preparing to cast his fate upon the water, the bullboat twisted around ungainly and Bridger caught a glimpse of what lay downriver.

  “I’ll be damned if it didn’t look like smooth water!” Jim told the hushed crowd, many of whom had heard his story time and again—but found themselves caught up in its drama nonetheless.

  Something told him to hang on, told him not to jump—giving him faint hope of riding it out a few moments longer. But he was sinking all the faster now, the river’s surface inching closer and closer to the top of his unwieldy craft. Then as he listened and shook uncontrollably with cold, Bridger realized the thundering roar of the rapids had begun to fade behind him. After so many terrifying minutes that had seemed more like endless days— Jim finally thought he could hear the pounding of his own blood at his temples.

  “I don’t know how I done it, but I got that boatful of water poled over to the first stretch of sandy bank I come across. Just in time, too—for my boat was ’bout ready to go under for good.”

  Slogging out of the widening river, Bridger set his rifle and pouch in the limbs of a nearby tree, then returned to the bank, where he struggled to tip the bullboat over, completely filled with water as it was. Finally he was able to drag the heavy boat with its green waterlogged buffalo hide a few feet up the bank, where he turned it upside down to drain. Then he shivered as the cold wind came up, and decided he’d best build himself a fire.

  “Later that afternoon when my buckskins was dried and I had pulled the wet load in my rifle, I figgered it was time to climb on up the rocks and see for myself just where that devil of a river did go off to.”

  High in those rocks as the late-autumn light started to fade, Bridger finally discovered just how the wagers would be won or lost. He could see that the river continued south. Meandering though it was, it seemed to continue angling off to a little west of due south.

  “But that wasn’t the pure marvel of it,” he admitted now, just as he had told the tale many times before.

  As he stared off into the distance, his eyes following the river toward the far horizon, “Of a sudden—way out yonder—I happed to see more water’n I ever see’d since the day I was born.”

  For a moment he turned and gazed back to the north, thinking about his original plans to return overland once he had determined just where the river flowed. But now, as he stared off into the distance, he felt again that unmistakable itch to search and discover, an itch that he knew he could not deny.

  “Come sunup the next morning I put that bullboat back in the water and I was on my way. It weren’t long afore the world around me went so quiet, it was like everything was dead. By the time I come to where the river opened up into a peaceful stretch of water, I dipped my hand over the side and brung it to my lips. Salt! Sweat of the Almighty—that’s what I tasted, fellas. Salt! Good Lord, I thought—had that river floated me all the way to the far salt ocean?”

  In actuality Bridger had drifted on out of the mouth of the Bear into a great bay some twenty miles wide,* where he could barely see land far off to the right and left of him—but where the bay opened up to the south, there was nothing but water … for as far as he could see.

  “I ain’t ashamed to tell you I was scairt,” Bridger confided. “Figgering I’d made the ocean, I wasn’t a stupid pilgrim about to go floating off to the other side of the world in that leaky ol’ bullboat. So this child poled hisself over to the shore quick as he could. Stepped my moker-sons out on a layer of salt that crunched under my feet, and I pulled that boat out behind me.”

  With the sun rising toward midsky, young Jim set out on foot instead, moving south along the shoreline. He had put miles behind him before he finally made out the first sign of distant land. The farther south he walked, the more it became clear what he was seeing was a huge island** rising far out in that lifeless, salty expanse of endless water. Far, far to the southeast, it appeared the shore he was walking went on forever.

  “And I never did see the other side of it neither!” Jim exclaimed, handing his cup to one of his compatriots for refilling. “Still scairt pretty bad, I took off on the backtrack. Made it back to my bullboat just afore dark. Gathered in some wood, started me a fire, and rocked that boat up on its side to hold off the cold winter wind. Next morning I started walking north, back the way I come.”

  As he came up to those gathered around the fire and stopped, Jedediah Smith asked, “You know what Jim told us when he showed back up a few days later?”

  Potts called out, “Bridger said, ’Hell, boys! I been clear to the Pay-cific Sea!”

  “Would’ve been nice, fellas,” Smith said, gazing wistfully down at the fire, “if what Bridger did find two winters back was in fact a big bay of the Pacific Ocean.”

  “You figger some way Jim run onto the Buenaventura, Jed?” Harrison Rogers asked.

  “It would be by the hand of God, if it were,” Smith answered reverently, gazing off toward the west, where the legend of that fabled river dictated its waters would carry a man all the way from the spine of the Rockies clear down to the Pacific.

  Fitzpatrick said, “Why, if it were the Buenaventury, Jed—we’d have only to pack our plews down to the shore, where the big ships would tie up and take on our beaver.”

  Rogers added, “Then and there they’d off-load our supplies and likker, fellas!”

  Smith grinned in the yellow sheen of that fire. “Just think of it, men: Jim Bridger here could well be the feller what found it for us.”

  “That’s what we’re heading off tomorrow to find out, ain’t we, Jed?” Rogers prodded.

  With a nod Smith replied, “That’s why we’re marching south by west. Yes—to find out just where the Pacific is. To discover just how close … or how far we are, from the sea.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Tuttle exclaimed with a gush. He slapped a hand on Bass’s knee. “Ain’t that something, Scratch? Think on it, man! Just out there, maybeso not all that far off—the great salt ocean lays watting for us to go see it!”

  “That is something,” Titus agreed quietly, the immensity of the thought almost overwhelming him.

  Down at New Orleans he had looked out on that harbor and tried to fathom the immensity of those great rolling oceans where tall triple-masted schooners rocked atop frothy waves as tall as houses, moving to and from faraway ports where folks of many colors spoke all those foreign tongues he had heard fall upon his ears on that youthful trip to New Orleans with Hames Kingsbury’s boatmen. How so many of the sounds and sights and smells of the world were brought into that one place rolled up beside the ocean.

  And now another such ocean might not be all that far away to the west, after all.

  “Let’s drink to young Jim Bridger!” Beckwith roared suddenly, standing with his cup held high. “And to Bridget’s Hole!”*

  Immediately they all shot to their feet. But Bridger was the last, looking young and sheepish among their lined faces scraped clean of beard these past few days. The fire danced in their eyes, flickered on the dull sheen of their tin cups, as together they roared, celebrating one of their own.

  “Hear, hear! To young Jim Bridger!” Bass shouted with the others.

  Taken altogether, those men gathered in Willow Valley that night were a pitifully small lot indeed.

  “Hear, hear! To the far salt ocean!”

  But few in numbers though they be, each man of them stood tall, head and shoulders above any who had chosen to stay behind, those who cowered east of the Missouri … this breed here and forever after to stand taller still tha
n any of those who would come in their wake.

  “To the beaver, by God!”

  Here they were of a breed just newly born, yet already beginning to die … so short was their glorious era.

  “To the Rocky Mountains, by damn!”

  “Hear, hear!” Scratch shouted with them, tears coming to his eyes, so emotional was it to stand among these men strong enough to match those high and terrible places.

  “To the very heart of the world!”

  “To the Rocky Mountains!”

  “Jumping Jehoshaphat!” Titus cried as he bolted to his feet with the first shots up the valley. “What you make of that?”

  Cooper barely budged, his eyes fluttering open slightly. He squatted with his back resting against a pile of their bedding: buffalo robes and blankets. “Target shooting. Feller wins, he get hisself a drink of likker.”

  But those shots were coming too close together, Bass thought. And they damn well came from the wrong direction. From the Shoshone camp!

  “What you think, Billy?” Bass inquired, nervously scratching at his bearded cheek.

  Hooks kept on whittling the bark off another short section of willow. He had a pile of pale sticks on one side of him, and a rumpled pile of curled slivers of bark on the ground between his legs. “I figger them red niggers’ business is their own business. Leave it be.”

  “But—the shootin’!”

  “Ain’t no one shootin’ at us,” Cooper snapped. “Just let it be and lemme sleep.”

  Then Bass whirled on Tuttle, “You think we ought’n go see what’s the ruckus, Bud?” He watched Tuttle glance at Cooper, as if asking permission.

  “Nawww,” Bud finally answered, “like Silas said: ain’t none of our affair—”

  Hooves pounded up on the valley floor—three horses skidding to a halt as their riders leaned over to throw their news at the quartet of free trappers.

  “A bunch of bad Injuns just jumped the Shoshone camp, boys!” a rider announced, pointing. “Come riding down off the hills. Cutting up the Snakes’ camp something fierce. I s’pose they didn’t know we was here—or didn’t care.”

  Cooper stirred only enough to push his hat back from his face and ask, “What tribe?”

  “Blackfeets.”

  “Blackfeet,” Titus repeated almost at a whisper, his heart beginning to slam in his chest so hard, he thought it would squeeze right out between his ribs.

  “That’s right,” a second horseman said. “Bug’s Boys!”

  “Grab your gun and c’mon!” the third Ashley man ordered as more hooves pounded close.

  A half-dozen riders shot by, whooping and yelping, knees like pistons in the stirrups as the wind whipped back the brims on their hats, fluttered their long hair out behind them just the way it did the horses’ manes and tails. In their wake came a rider who peeled himself off and brought his mount crow-hopping to a jarring halt before Titus and Tuttle as the other trio of riders kicked their horses into motion and tore out after the six.

  “You comin’, Scratch?” Jim Beckwith asked breathlessly.

  “Fight them Blackfeets?”

  He nodded, swallowing. “Ain’t none of us ever gonna have a better chance to get in our licks.”

  Cooper snorted in derision, then said, “Sounds like pretty big words comin’ from a black-assed Negra.”

  Beckwith glared for a moment at the giant, then snarled, “I sure as hell don’t see you grabbin’ up your gun to show us all just how brave you are.”

  “You come down off’n that horse, Negra-boy … I’ll show you who’s brave an’ who I can pound into mule-squat!”

  Beckwith turned from Cooper as if to ignore him the best he could. “I’m going, Scratch. You can come with me … or you can stay with these here.”

  “He’ll stay with us,” Silas snapped, “’cause he knows better. That ain’t his fight.”

  Hooks echoed, “Yup—not your fight, Scratch.”

  Then Titus watched another dozen or so riders race past in a flurry of hooves and hair, weapons, whooping, and dust a’flying.

  “Maybeso it oughtta stay atween just them Shoshone against the Blackfoot,” Tuttle apologized for his reluctance.

  Wagging his head, Bass replied, “Looks to be it ain’t just the Snakes’ business. No, I gotta go.”

  As he whirled about to race over to unlash his horse from its picket pin, Cooper bellowed, “You go get yourself hurt in this foolishness—don’t y’ come whimperin’ to me.”

  “I won’t,” Bass promised, his heart rising to his throat as he yanked his horse back toward the spot where his blankets lay.

  Silas continued, “We got us plans for the fall hunt. If y’ go off an’ get yourself hurt—don’t figger on trapping with us none. I ain’t dragging along no bunged-up, strapped-down whimper boy!”

  “Awright,” Bass agreed as he swept up his rifle and dropped his pouch over one shoulder, “that’s a bargain: I get myself hurt by them Blackfoots, you three just go on off to hunt ’thout me this year.”

  Cooper was beginning to rise, his face growing more crimson as he found his warnings were going unheeded. “You ’member that scuffle we had us with the Arapaho, don’t y’?”

  “I do,” Titus replied, leaping atop the horse, bareback.

  “You was cut up good, y’ dumb nigger,” Silas reminded. “You was damned lucky it were winter time so we had us the time to wait on y’ to heal up—or we’d damn well left y’ to rot on your lonesome right there with them Utes!”

  “C’mon, Beckwith,” Bass said bravely as he reined around, turning his back on Cooper. “There’s Blackfeet to fight.”

  He gave the horse his heels in its ribs and flanks, setting the animal into a run. Although Bass could not make out the loud, angry words Silas flung at his back, he hoped Cooper’s anger would cool by the time he returned. It just might be an even wager: fighting the worst Indians in the northern Rockies, or suffering another one of Silas Cooper’s beatings.

  After no more than a quarter of a mile’s run they spotted the first of the buffalo-hide lodges in the distance. And gathered just this side of them were a swirling knot of trappers dismounting and handing off their horses to others on foot. At their center stood three men: Fitzpatrick, Fraeb, and one man Bass did not know.

  Leaping to the ground near the group, Titus asked Beckwith, “Who’s that younger fella with Fitz and Ol’ Man Frapp?”

  “Sublette.”

  Scratch joined Beckwith at the fringe of the group, whispering to the mulatto, “Billy Sublette?”

  Beckwith nodded as a small party of Shoshone raced up through the village on horseback. The trappers backed away slightly as the warrior leader sought out the chief of the trappers.

  “Gut Face!” the Shoshone called in English when he recognized Sublette.

  “I am Cut Face, yes!” the partisan replied, stepping forward.

  In troubled English the chief explained to Sublette, “Three of my warriors and two of our women—out gathering roots on the other side of camp—they are killed by the Blackfeet!”

  “I know,” Sublette hurried to say above the crackle of gunfire on the far side of the village. “We are here to help you fight those Blackfeet!”

  For a moment the Shoshone leader’s eyes roamed over the crowd. “You say that your warriors can fight, Cut Face? You say that they are great braves?”

  “They are brave fighters.”

  “Now let me see them fight—so that I may know your words are true.”

  Clutching his rifle to his breast with one hand, Sublette swept the other arm in a wide arc to indicate the white trappers. “You shall see them fight, and then you will know that they are all brave men.”

  “They are ready to die today?”

  Nodding, Sublette answered for them all, “I have no cowards among my men. Yes, we are ready to die for our Snake friends!”

  The chief turned briefly as the gunfire seemed to rumble all the closer, accompanied by the yells of men in battle. “Then b
ring your warriors to join mine.”

  Sublette turned from the war chief and shouted above the battle’s din to the trappers, “Now, men—I want every brave man to go and fight these Blackfeet. We must whip them—so the Snakes can see that we can fight. By damn, we’ll do our best in front of the Snakes and the Blackfeet as a warning to all tribes that would cause an American trouble!”

  “Let us at ’em!” a voice cried out.

  “That’s right!” Sublette replied. “I want no man following me who is not brave. Let the cowards remain in camp!”

  “No cowards here!” another shouted.

  With a wave of his war club, the Shoshone war chief ordered, “Bring your ponies!”

  “Follow me, men!” Sublette echoed as he leaped back onto his horse and reined away after the Shoshone warriors.

  At the far edge of the village the trappers suddenly confronted a wide crescent of the Blackfeet pressing against the lodge circle. But there was surprise, even shock, in the eyes of the enemy as they saw the numbers arrayed against them: white men and Shoshone alike, streaming through the lodges like water through a broken beaver dam.

  The painted, blood-eyed enemy began to inch back toward the willow and cottonwood. Farther and farther they retreated, foot by foot, yard by yard, darting among the shadows and behind what cover they could use skillfully. After those first few minutes Bass finally saw his first real target—something more than a flitting shadow.

  Dropping to his knee, Titus yanked the hammer back, set the trigger, and squeezed off his shot in one fluid motion. He thought he saw the enemy warrior spin about, clutching his side as the gunsmoke billowed up from the muzzle. Then Titus lunged forward, eyes intently watching that spot where he had seen the enemy. There, yes—the warrior was lurching off, hand plastered against his side—joining others in retreat.

  Guns roared and men yelled in three tongues. At times the air was filled with arrows hissing past his ear and over his head, fired from the short bows of one side or the other. The work was agonizingly slow and dirty for the first hour until the Blackfeet backed themselves right out of the brushy cover and began a full-scale retreat.