Buffalo Palace

by Terry C. Johnston

  “For these faithful and devoted services I wish you to accept my thanks; the gratitude that I express to you springs from my heart and will ever retain a lively hold on my feelings.”

  With a loud sniffle the man beside Titus whispered, “I fought the Rees on the upper Missouri for the general.” He dragged the back of his sleeve under his nose. “And I’d still ride into hell and back again for the man.”

  Such was a commonly held sentiment among that group simply because Ashley had all but single-handedly brought them here to the Rockies himself. And it was here in these mountains that most of these double-riveted but sentimental men had discovered, for the first time in their lives, just what it truly meant to live.

  “My friends! I am now about to leave you, to take up my life in St. Louis. Whenever any of you return there, your first duty must be to call at my house, to talk over the scenes of peril we have encountered, and partake of the best cheer my table can afford you.”

  “An’ you’ll always be welcome at my fire, General!” cried one of the throng.

  “Hear! Hear!”

  Ashley held up both hands to the noisy crowd, and when they had quieted, he concluded, “I now wash my hands of the toils of the Rocky Mountains. Farewell, mountaineers and friends! May God bless you all!”

  Undoubtedly he must have felt the tide of good fortune was about to carry him home after four arduous western journeys. Twice he had fought his way up the Missouri, battling the Arikara and losing more than his share of good men. And twice now he had crossed the continental divide at South Pass—the very heart of the Rockies. No more would he face the scorching summer heat of the plains, nor the terrible, bone-numbing cold of the mountain winters … yet no more would he ever enjoy the company of such men as these.

  Slapping a hand against one cheek, there beneath an eye about ready to tear as if he were swatting at a fly, Ashley turned on his heel and took up the reins handed him by one of the thirty-man escort who would accompany him back to St. Louis with his fortune in furs loaded on more than a hundred horses and mules. Tugging his hat down on his head while the rest of the escort rose to their saddles, the general led the cavalcade away without looking back.

  “Farewell, General!”

  The crowd surged forward, almost as one, as if those in the lead might just drag him from his horse—yet something restrained them as more of these hard men not easily given to sentiment sang out with voices hoarse and croaking.

  “God’s speed, General! God’s speed!”

  So it was that they parted, one from another … again.

  That quixotic booshway Davy Jackson marched his band away from rendezvous with Ashley’s pack train. Somewhere west of South Pass he would bid his farewell to the general, then after trapping the country around Ham’s Fork and the Green, would point his own nose north toward the rich beaver country that lay at the foot of those pilot knobs the French voyageurs called Les Trois Tetons, or the Three Breasts.

  Jedediah Smith took his small band of fifteen and moved west of south toward the great and salty inland sea, obsessed with what lay across that great expanse of desert even if it took him into Mexico: even if it meant he marched all the way to the land of the Spanish Californios.

  Working their Way north to the Snake River, Billy Sublette would lead his brigade over to the Blackfoot River, turning east through Jackson’s Hole and marching north to eventually reach the land that would soon be known as Colter’s Hell. Two full decades before them, the wily trader Manuel Lisa dispatched Lewis-and-Clark veteran John Colter off from the mouth of the Bighorn to tell the Crow bands they were invited to Lisa’s post to trade. Traveling on foot and alone into the teeth of a Rocky Mountain winter, Colter was the first white man to visit this strange land of sulfurous smokes, boiling cauldrons of mud, and spewing geysers that would one day bear his name.

  This trip out Jim Bridger would serve as one of Sublette’s lieutenants. And the stories the young trapper would soon tell of that mystical land of spewing waters and many smokes would for a generation be considered some of the biggest whoppers ever concocted by a frontiersman.

  Meanwhile, the streams of the northern Rockies beckoned to Fitzpatrick once more. Despite the chances being good that he and his men might just rub up against more Blackfoot, north they headed nonetheless—hoping to trade with the Flathead for horses and skins until the beaver began to put on more fur come late autumn.

  At the same time, Etienne Provost led his loose band of trappers west of north into the beaver-rich interior basin of the Snake River, where the odds were they would run across the Hudson’s Bay men under Peter Skene Ogden.

  “Good huntin’!” came the cry from those off in one direction.

  “Yup!” called those bound away in another. “Y’ best watch your topknot!”

  And soon only the Shoshone village and a scattering of free trappers had Willow Valley to themselves. No more than a half-dozen small knots of hardy men tarried behind the company brigades—those of an independent streak who stubbornly refused the offers of one outfit or another to join up and ride along for the season.

  “Maybeso it’s better to travel in small strings,” Scratch explained the common wisdom expressed by those of such persuasion. “A big outfit just hap to attract too much attention.”

  “Possibly so,” Daniel Potts protested that last morning before Sublette’s brigade pulled out, “but if’n I’m to face them gut-eating Blackfoots again, I’d ruther have me a hull passel of fellers along for the fight.”

  “But we don’t aim to stick our noses in Blackfoot country,” Bass replied.

  Potts had pursed his lips as if he could see his words were winning no convert. “So be it, Titus Bass. Stay warm this winter … till next we ronnyvoo at the south end of Sweet Lake.”

  “Till ronnyvoo,” Scratch repeated the word as if it had already become some spiritual incantation, shaking Daniel’s hand as they pounded one another on the shoulder.

  The mulatto had offered his hand next, “Could well be we could winter here again. So remember our offer stands—you come join us if you grow tired of the company you’re keeping.”

  Bass watched Beckwith glance over to the trees where Cooper and the other two reclined against their saddles, watching the great departure of the brigades hour by hour, without much excitement of their own or interest at all.

  “I got me a place I belong,” Titus repeated.

  His eyes filling with concern, Daniel said, “They ain’t your only friends, Scratch. Anytime, you just come looking to find us—”

  “It’s a wonderful thing for a man to have him such good friends as you,” Bass interrupted, his eyes smiling.

  Understanding at last that there no longer was any sense in trying to talk Bass into joining them, Potts pursed his lips and went to the saddle in a hurry, galloping off with Beckwith to catch up with the last brigade on its way out of the valley. In less than an hour the midsummer air grew quiet but for the occasional call of birds and the incessant drone of flies or the whine of bees. No longer could Titus see the telltale smudge of dust there along the horizon. The company men were gone for another year.

  All sights ana sounds of that merry gathering were nothing but memories now.

  What grass the stock hadn’t eaten had been trampled into pathways by hooves and moccasins. Dry and flaky piles of horse droppings dotted the close-cropped pasturage of the valley floor for as far as the eye could see. The rib-bare skeletons of willow wickiups and leafy bowers built streamside now stood naked in the strong sunlight of high summer. No more were blankets and buffalo robes unfurled in the shady places where men once lounged to swap stories or merely sleep off the terrible effects of Ashley’s potent liquor throughout those long, hot days of summer. Refuse and litter from repairs made to saddles, bridles, and pack harness lay discarded and scattered among what kegs and empty burlap sacking had been carried here from faraway St. Louis.

  Clouds of bottle-green deerflies and black-winged horseflies buzzed
in annoying clouds over every latrine hole, flitted over every campsite, and blackened every stinking gut-pile. Ants and hard-shelled beetles crawled and scritched through the trampled grass to lay claim to what refuse the robber jays weren’t already picking over—wings flapping and beaks squawking when another bird landed to threaten their bloody morsel. Rings of darkened stones surrounded the countless black circles once fire pits. Butchered, bone-bare carcasses of elk and deer hung numberless like gory sacrifices from the branches of trees where the many had feasted upon the few: men cutting away a ham, or loin, or a fat steak to sizzle over the flames—each fire a gathering place where all came in turn to eat, to drink, or merely to commune with one’s own kind.

  In the span of less than two momentous years, a breed was born out here among these rich valleys sheltered and shadowed by the high and snowy places. A novice who was at first content to follow others up the Missouri River to the beaver country, William H. Ashley had ended up fathering a whole new strain of frontiersmen. Unlike their predecessors, those “longhunters” who had roamed the hardwoods forests back east of the Mississippi, these fledgling grandsons were only beginning to tramp across an unfathomable territory much more hostile in both geography and native inhabitants than anything ever before encountered by their eastern forebears.

  Unlike their grandfathers had ever done back east, men of this new breed would live their simple existence permanently in the mountains—but without a permanent base. Such rootlessness, such unending wandering, suited this new breed just fine.

  This was the dawn of a glorious era.

  The mountain man had been born.

  Two days after the last brigade pulled out, the morning breeze brought Titus the noise of snorting ponies being rounded up from the far meadows, driven in by pony-boys … the squawking orders of the women tearing buffalo-hide covers from lodgepoles, lashing travois together, and bundling every possession for the coming journey. In what seemed like a matter of minutes, the village was no more and the cavalcade was on its way north.

  “Shoulda tasted y’ one, Scratch.”

  Titus, watching the Shoshone depart, turned as Cooper and Hooks came up to stand by him. Billy had that indolent, contented look Scratch had come to recognize their winter with the Ute—the look he got when his belly was full, there was no work to be done, and his pecker was well satisfied.

  Titus looked at Silas. “Tasted what?”

  Cooper licked his lips. “Them Snake gals. Prime poontang—ain’t they, Billy?”

  As soon as Silas jabbed him in the ribs, Hooks giggled. His bloodshot-red eyes widened momentarily in remembrance. “Prime. Yessirreebob! Prime poon!”

  “Hell, even Bud went off to the Snake camp and dipped his quill in some gal’s inkpot. Didn’t y’, Tut?”

  “Ever’ man’s got him a right, Silas,” Tuttle replied smugly. “Ain’t none of us had no women since winterin’ with them Utes.”

  “’Cept Titus Bass here his own self.” Silas slung an arm around Bass’s shoulders. “How come you didn’t drop y’ one of them bang-tail Snakes, Scratch? Still fancy that Ute widder?”

  For a moment he studied the marble-eyed Cooper. Then Bass slowly unleashed himself from the long, muscular arm. “When you fixing on us to pull up pins and set off?”

  A brief look of consternation crossed the tall man’s face. “Say, boys—sounds to me like Scratch here got him a hard-on for one special gal.”

  “Yup, it do,” Hooks agreed. “Yessirreebob—a hard-on for one special Ute gal, Silas. Must be real sweet on her.”

  Titus glared up at Cooper. “We going today?”

  “Why so all-fired ready to trot, pilgrim?”

  “There’s miles to put behind us and beaver to trap when we get there.”

  It took a moment, but Silas finally grinned a rotten-toothed smile. “I’ll be damned,” he said softly. “Maybeso that’s why this here greenhorn nigger gonna make a better trapper’n either of you boys.”

  “I ain’t no greenhorn no more, Silas.”

  Cooper looked him down, then up again. Then the man’s dark eyes slowly went to the horizon where the Shoshone were disappearing beneath a distant cloud of dust. “No—I s’pose y’ ain’t no more at that, Titus Bass.” When his red-rimmed eyes came back to Scratch, they were filled with a begrudging admiration. “Y’ve made a right respectable trapper outta yourself.”

  It was closer to praise than anything he’d ever gotten from his pap. Titus swallowed hard, wanting his words to come out even. “Good as you, Silas?”

  “Almost,” Cooper conceded. “But y’ ain’t good as me yet. Till that day y’ are, best y’ hang in with us.”

  He finally let himself breathe as Silas stepped away, back toward the shade of the tall cottonwoods where the leaves rattled and the flies buzzed. The way it felt, that was about as good a fragment of praise as he was ever going to get, Bass figured.

  “You figger we can pull out come morning, Silas?”

  Cooper did not speak again until he settled on his blankets and robes, cocking an elbow beneath his head as he sank back onto his saddle. “I s’pose since there ain’t no more of that goddamned Ashley’s likker … and them Snakes has took off with all the spread-leg wenches in this here country … we might just as well see how the country looks up to the Bighorn.”

  Scratch’s heart skipped a beat. “Maybeso we go all the way to … the Yallerstone?”

  Silas grinned. “Why—don’t tell me y’ heard about the Yallerstone all the way back to St. Lou?”

  “I did. Word was it was good beaver country!”

  For the moment Cooper appeared interested. “A place where a man might winter up?”

  Bass hurried into the patch of shade, kneeling near the other three. “If a man’s to winter up, Silas—might’s well be in country where the spring trapping is its best.”

  “Awright, Scratch,” the strap-jawed Cooper eventually replied. “Let’s us just go see for our own selves that there Bighorn country y’ heard so much spoke of.”

  Hannah snorted downstream.

  High and wheezing.

  A sound he’d never before heard come from the mule.

  In his chest his breath froze like a chunk of January river ice. Scratch nearly choked trying to swallow down the thumping of his heart.

  Then the mule bawled.

  Like he was shot out of a cheap Indian-trade fusil, Bass flung the trap onto the bank and lunged out of the stream … but slipped back into the icy water. Angrily flinging himself against the bank again, he dragged his weight onto the frost-slickened grass by jabbing the sharpened float-pole into the ground, then throwing a leg up and onto the slippery ground, and finally seizing hold of the branches of fiery-red willow recently kissed by autumn’s cold breath.

  Grunting and grumbling in his exertions, Bass made enough noise to scare half the beaver for miles around right on out of the country.

  Filling one hand with the fullstock Derringer rifle leaning against that red-leafed willow, Titus bent low without missing a step, his left hand sweeping up the camp ax from the ground where it rested among the heap of long float-sticks and the rest of his square-jawed traps.

  Now he heard a grunting roar. Weren’t the mule. But: Hannah answered in kind—braying for all she was worth.

  Shards of pinkish light exploded before him as he slashed his way through the tall brush that climbed more than two feet over his head—his frantic race causing hoarfrost and icy particles to cascade into the new day’s rosy light.

  Another grunt, followed by a throaty and repeated snort as that new sound faded. Then Hannah kee-rawed with as close to a plaintive call for help as he’d ever heard a mule make. Not in all those years wrestling mules into harness, those hours spent behind both a plow and some mighty powerful rear haunches, his youth wasted struggling against stubborn, pigheaded animals … could he remember hearing a mule make a desperate plea quite like that.

  His moccasins slipped and slid as he dived this way and that. Spilli
ng in his haste, Bass crashed to the hard, frozen ground on one knee and that hand clutching the rifle. Swearing under his breath, only a puff of frost broke his lips as he sprang up and lunged forward again—with his heart high in his throat as he cleared the last of the thick willow … and onto the strip of open ground at the border of the shadowy timber not yet touched by that single finger of sunlight creeping down the side of the frosty bowl.

  Sliding to a stop, he brought the rifle down across the left wrist that held the ax. Quickly dragging his thumb back across the frizzen and hammer to assure that it was at full-cock, Bass jerked to the left.

  Hannah stood upstream, pulling hard against the long lead rope he had tied around her ears and muzzle like a halter. Yanking with all she had in her, Hannah’s eyes were about as wide as his mam’s fancy-dinner saucers, her powerful rear haunches bent and that rump of hers nearly swaying on the ground as her hooves dug up deep furrows in a frantic bid to free herself from danger. Again and again she flailed her head side to side, lashing herself to escape the hold of the rope, where he had left her knotted to a tree with enough line that she could leisurely crop the dead, frozen grasses there at the border of the timber.

  But in the next instant he wheeled right at the sound. He saw nothing from that direction, where he was positive he’d heard the rasp of a foreign noise. The hair prickling at the back of his neck, he suddenly picked up the scent of something on the wind. Like an animal, like old Tink herself—that family dog back in Kentucky—he measured the caliber of the upwind, attempting to sort out what that musky, heavy odor was that now prickled the hair on his arms beneath the buckskin war shirt and the heavy blanket capote.

  He discovered he was sweating, even as cold as it was. While he stood there in the chill half light of early morn, sniffing into the wind, Scratch sensed a huge drop of sweat gather at the nape of his neck where his long hair clung, a pendulous drop that slowly sank down the course of his backbone to land against the dark-blue wool of his breechclout, pooling there at the base of his spine. Where it froze him like January ice water.