Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  We reached Hardscrabble without difficulty and found plenty of dried corn in a crib. It took little to persuade its owner, a Mormon named Hamel, to part with it. The only trouble was that it was dried ears and the man didn’t have a sheller. But I put the men to the task, which they undertook eagerly, knowing that corn would feed man and beast alike in the high country. They set to work with their skinning knives, and ere long we harvested a hundred thirty bushels of good feed, ample to keep the mules in good condition during our week or ten-day crossing of the three chains of the Rockies. All this golden treasure was carefully loaded into panniers, and I made sure each pannier was tied shut and the loads were balanced.

  Hardscrabble was as miserable as the pueblo farther downriver, a shantytown full of lazy mountaineers plus a few hardworking Mormons. It was also hard against the flanks of the Wet Mountains, the first range we had to negotiate, and stood at the confluence of the river and Hardscrabble Creek. It was here that I made my first decision. Once again I rented an adobe house and once again my men slept warm. It would be the last time they would see walls and a roof for some while. The next morning, we loaded early. I was itching to be off.

  “We’re going up Hardscrabble Creek,” I told Old Bill. “And then over. There’s a pass there.”

  Williams blinked at me so long I thought maybe he was slow witted.

  “Huerfano Road. Mosca Pass,” I said.

  “Oh, is that what you call it,” he said, slouching so much he was actually staring up at me, even though he had six inches of height on me. “You wanting to make a railroad there?”

  “It’s closer to the thirty-eighth parallel.”

  “Why this parallel, eh? You bought this parallel from Uncle Sam? There’s a lot of them parallels.”

  “It’s where we’re going.”

  “Why don’t you run your railroad where it’s halfway level, eh? Follow a buffalo trail. The buffalo got it all worked out.”

  I smiled and turned away. I’d heard enough of that.

  On the afternoon of November 25, we finished with the corn, broke camp, and Old Bill led us up the creek, through a deepening snow-packed canyon. We were now headed straight south, in the direction of the pass I had heard much about. But we were also running into snow. Half a foot at first, no trouble.

  Then we were pushing through a foot of it, even as we gained altitude. Williams rode a mule we had given to him, his old rifle across his arms, his body slouched so deep in his saddle he looked bent in the middle. He wore an odd cap made of skins, with earflaps he could pull down if needed, but the temperature was mild.

  Some of the men thought the cap made him look like he had fox ears. The rest of his ensemble was just as odd, but I decided not to worry about him. He’d spent a life in the mountains, and he would see us through. I wondered why I didn’t really believe it.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Micajah McGehee

  We abandoned the Arkansas River valley the afternoon of November 25, having loaded the mules with shelled corn. We had all enjoyed pumpkin and chicken and sheltered beds that night, a luxury we would be dreaming about the rest of the trip.

  Colonel Frémont was taking us south, up Hardscrabble Creek, to some pass he and the new guide, Old Bill, knew about. I didn’t know the route and was a simple foot soldier on this trip. Back in Saint Louis I discovered that the colonel was recruiting for a California expedition, and I thought to join it. I was footloose and California intrigued me. I have that itch. He said there would be no pay, although his father-in-law would introduce legislation to subsidize the trip. A rail line at midcontinent would satisfy both the North and the South, Frémont said, and Congress might come through. It sounded plausible enough.

  Most of the recruits thought that the government would eventually pay them, but I never took it that way. The way I calculated it, I should be shelling out a few coins to the colonel for a guided trip west. This would be my ticket to California, and that’s as much as I needed. So I had signed on. I found myself enjoying the company of the three Kerns, Andrew Cathcart, and Frederick Creutzfeldt, all well-educated men like myself, and so we made something of a party to ourselves.

  Hardscrabble Creek soon plunged into a gloomy canyon lined with white oak and pine as well as cactus aplenty, and as we veered westward toward the Wet Mountains the snow increased. Still, it wasn’t bad, and I saw that once a trail was broken through the pillows of soft snow by the leaders, the rest of our heavily laden mules followed easily enough on the packed snow. If this was winter, I would have no trouble with it, even though I had been reared in Mississippi. We were all in fine spirits. The corn did it. That golden wealth stuffed into sacks and panniers was, for us, more assuring than metallic gold.

  There were storms aplenty just before. En route to Hardscrabble, an overcast sawed off the mountains, and we no longer could see the snowy reaches of Pike’s Peak. That and the brutal wind made that leg of the trip worrisome and hard. There’s no way to fight the wind. No matter what a man wears, the wind finds its way through, shooting icy fingers down your neck, pushing up your trousers, bullying in at the waist, and nipping at ears and noses and chins. The men made rawhide throatlatches to keep their slouch hats from flying away and eventually made their own leather caps with earflaps. We hunted for momentary relief any way we could, pausing under cutbanks, stopping in a copse of trees, hunkering low behind a rock.

  Darkness caught us only three miles from Hardscrabble, but it was a start. We made a good camp under a cliff, out of the wind, where there was plenty of dead pine to fuel our fires. We could find no grass, but put the feedbags on the mules and gave them all a quart of shelled corn, something we had to do in shifts because we had only twenty bags. One quart went down those mule throats in a hurry, and they looked just as hungry when the bag came off as before. But there wasn’t a blade of grass in sight. Frémont introduced us to his rubberized sheets, big tan waterproof affairs that let us settle into our bedrolls on top of muck or snow without getting soaked. The colonel divided up the watch, two guards, two hours apiece, and so we settled down. The night was mild enough, though I could never sleep outside in a bedroll as well as I could on a good stuffed-cotton mattress in a house. In that I was lacking, for Frémont’s veterans were soon sawing wood, their hulks quiet near the several wavering watch fires.

  Before dawn Godey was rousing us, and we shook the sleep out of ourselves, packed our kits, huddled around the breakfast mess fires to down some gruel, and began harnessing the mules. I yearned for some golden johnnycakes fried from cornmeal, but those weren’t on the menu. The flour was already gone, and we would be surviving entirely on game soon. We were low on grains.

  Now Godey was a man to inspire confidence. I pegged him as the more sensible of the two leaders, and I knew I wouldn’t start worrying until I saw Godey worry. The veterans of Frémont’s previous trips didn’t share my views. For them, Frémont was a man of uncanny destiny. I can’t say why I distrusted Frémont’s judgment, but I did. As long as Godey thought things were alright, I would, too. I supposed my views were colored by the court-martial and conviction. I had followed the case closely.

  It had turned cooler, and soon we were trudging up the canyon, still on foot, past giant red boulders topped with snow, following a twisting path ever higher. We had the drill down now, even without the colonel’s orders. A few of us would break trail until we wearied and then fall back, and a few more of us would pick up the lead, and so on, as we rotated the hard work and spared the mules as much as we could. The mules had enough to worry about on slippery ground with a heavy load on their backs.

  The only peculiar thing about all this was that this wasn’t a route for a railroad. There was evidence of a crude wagon road out of Hardscrabble, but it forded the creek constantly, and I suspected that during certain spring months the whole canyon bottom would be flooded.

  I spurred my mule, Betsy as I called her, up to Ben Kern.

  “Do you think a railroad could run thisaway?” I inq
uired.

  “I’m a doctor, not an engineer,” he replied. “But it’s a mystery, isn’t it?”

  “It’s the thirty-eighth parallel, that’s what it is. Frémont’s going to stick with it. What’s so sacred about it, do you know?”

  “You know what it is?” he replied. “It’s a golden highway across gentle grades with tropical weather to either side, coal seams every hundred miles, ample water, and easy connections. I hear it runs straight to California, without any detours. Once we’re on it, friend Micah, we’ll just race right along. You just ask the colonel, and he’ll tell you.”

  That’s what they called me. Micah McGee is how they shortened it. I was used to that; it had started about when I was old enough to notice. Doc Kern was smiling.

  But what we were getting into was no tropical highway. The creek had swung west and was tumbling out of the Wet Mountains now, splashing over boulders, and we were breaking through two feet of snow. We were climbing through gloomy pine and aspen woods. Word came back to us that we should dismount, save the mules, which were burdened with all that corn. I slid down into the snow, hoping I had used enough neatsfoot oil to keep my boots tight against leaks. Up ahead, I saw Frémont shifting leads. He would put one group of men and mules up front for a while, and then another, thereby spreading the hard work of making a trail among as many men and animals as he could. I supposed he would call on me soon, though so far he was using only his veteran men.

  The man was the least like an army colonel as I could imagine. Did he bark orders, demand instant obedience, dress down fools and knaves? No, he never raised his voice, never even seemed impatient, and somehow won the allegiance of his men. Not least, he broke trail himself for a spell, off his mule, kicking open the snow. Old Bill, I noticed, did no such thing, but hung back in the middle, staring amiably at the rest of us and hawking up great gobs of yellow spit now and then. For that he was earning a wage.

  I’d come to admire Frémont, in a tentative way. So far as I could tell, he was a gifted man in the field and a natural leader whose very presence seemed to make this journey easier and more secure. And yet something nagged at me and wouldn’t let up. Maybe, someday when I knew Doctor Kern better, I’d ask him why I kept pushing aside doubts that swarmed like horseflies in my head.

  The men ahead of me showed signs of wearing down. But we continued, one step at a time, and because most of the party was ahead of me I was less worn than most. Still, I had to admit that we were making progress. Snow or not, we were snaking through the Wet Mountains, a lengthy line of men and animals.

  All in all, we made good time that day, maybe nine miles, and darkness caught us near the summit. I suppose one could call it a pass. But I just kept wondering how you’d get twenty tons of iron horse up there, especially if that horse was drawing a dozen steam cars.

  The next day we started downslope, which was harder because the snow was heavier on the western side of the mountains. Men kept stepping into the unknown and taking a tumble. We were wet and cold ere long. The canyon narrowed until its walls vaulted up on either side of us and we were caught in a creek, fighting through pines and white oak. Giant red rocks hemmed us, and I thought that a railroad company would be detonating tons of powder to break through all that. We made only a few miles through deep snow and finally retreated up a side canyon and camped away from the gorge we were descending. We fed the mules more corn, since there wasn’t a blade of grass in sight.

  Colonel Frémont seemed perfectly relaxed, as if all this were the most ordinary passage in the world. And somehow the men seemed just as relaxed. He had a way of pacifying our worries. We boiled up some beans, having trouble keeping heat under the kettles because the wood was so wet and we were so high up. The mules were restless; a quart of corn a day didn’t appease their hungers a bit, and they were primed to cut and run toward anything that looked like fodder. It was hard to drive them through an aspen grove, because they had a hankering for the smooth bark of the younger trees and could peel it off with their teeth.

  Frémont’s veterans taught me something one night when the wind had died. They built pole racks next to their campfires; stripped out of their soaked and cold duds, right to the buff; and then hung their wet, water-stained clothing next to the roaring fire to dry out. They wrapped their blankets around themselves for the hour or two they were drying their duds. Most of them had woolen undershirts and drawers, and these absorbed campfire heat and some smoke too. But they dried. When I tried it, the first in my mess to do so, the Kerns eyed me askance, but they saw the merit of it. After a couple of hours beside the cook fire, my duds were bone dry and felt good when I clambered back into them. I marveled. The dry clothing lifted my spirits. It took the Kerns a few more nights to attempt it, but Captain Cathcart saw the merit and soon was drying his clothing whenever he could.

  I did notice one thing. Frémont himself never toasted his underwear. In fact, he stayed buttoned up in that blue overcoat he wore constantly, a military coat without any insignia on it. His conduct was entirely private. He had his own tent, and inside that canvas, shielded from our eyes, he did his toilet, arranged his clothing, slept, ate, trimmed his beard, read his law books, and hid from us. I gradually realized he was a true loner, and this nightly retreat from us was a need in him, just as staying buttoned up to the chin was a need in him. He didn’t want us to see anything of him but his dressed-up self, even in the worst weather. Dry clothing was so valuable to me I marveled that Frémont didn’t dry his. But his manservant, Saunders, never brought any duds out of that tent to dry by the fire, so either the colonel’s clothing never got wet or he chose to wear wet clothing. It sure set him apart from his veterans and also from those of us traveling with him for the first time.

  The weather was mild enough, and little wind caught at us that night, so I didn’t hear much complaining. Indeed, Frémont and his vision of a new path west seemed to have infected us all, and we could only think of the magical railroad that would be constructed in our wake. The only worrisome thing was that Godey and the hunters weren’t finding any game, not even a track in the snow. The deer and elk had retreated to bottomland for this hard winter, and we were working through a silent country without so much as a crow above us. I thought little of it, because we were heading down the canyon and at its foot we would find game, and the thirty-three men in the company would enjoy some elk or venison.

  We could not see what lay below the snow and kept stumbling over hidden logs and rocks and obstacles we could not fathom. The burdened mules were lamed by sudden plunges into the snow, when there was no footing. Sometimes we had to dig one out. Mules virtually vanished, plunging into snow so deep that it was all we could do to keep their heads clear so they could breathe. Then the company would halt while the few with shovels dug around the trapped mule until we could drag the wretched, overburdened beast out of its snow prison. Thus our progress came nearly to a halt, and we lost precious time.

  But then we reached the western foothills. The canyon widened out, the snow lessened, and the worst was over, or so it seemed. Ahead lay an arid anonymous valley, and beyond its broad reaches, another white wall, which we understood to be the Sangre de Cristos, which stretched from this general area deep into New Mexico. We gathered on a plateau for a rest, having utterly exhausted ourselves and our mules in that miserable canyon, and our mood was not lightened by what we beheld. Those brooding peaks presented a wall much higher than the range we had just traversed, and we understood that beyond these lay yet another range, wider and higher and more rugged than the one that was evoking such dread in our hearts.

  We had managed one range, fed out half our corn, and there was not a blade of grass anywhere to be seen. Colonel Frémont seemed to think nothing of it. After a brief rest, he set us on our course once again, and we descended the rest of the way to the intermountain valley without great difficulty.

  The weather turned warm, and we were heartened by an occasional bare patch covered with sagebrush. Never had ba
re earth looked so friendly. We were further heartened when Godey’s hunters shot a deer; we would have meat for supper, which somehow gave rise to our hopes. This wasn’t so bad; the colonel’s calm was entirely justified. The Pathfinder knew exactly what he was about. The valleys were full of game; we would stock up, find grass, recruit our mules between assaults on the slopes, and so pass through the difficult country.

  By the time we had reached the valley floor, an icy wind was billowing out of the northwest, and that stung us to hasten along. Old Bill Williams had taken command here, and he steered us south.

  “Why do you suppose he’s doing that? Just to keep his back to the wind?” I asked Doc Kern.

  “He knows of a pass, easy as a hot knife through butter. Robidoux’s Pass is what they’re calling it. And we’ll slide across this range as if it hardly existed.”

  I stared at Kern, wondering whether he believed this monstrous proposition, and caught a wry turn of his lips.

  “That’s what they’re saying up ahead,” he added.

  The Sangre de Cristos did not look very hospitable.

  “You see any railroad prospects here?” I asked.

  “Here, there, everywhere,” Kern retorted.

  We camped in a wind-sheltered spot in the valley. Godey’s hunters fanned out, but I knew beforehand they would come back empty-handed. There wasn’t an animal track to be seen. The next day was arctic, and between the bitter wind and the low temperatures, I wondered how I would endure. The valley had snow up to four feet in some places, bare ground in others, and no feed for our mules. What looked like grass here and there proved to be the tips of sagebrush. They couldn’t find a thing to eat except a little cottonwood bark where we camped. It was odd, watching them gnaw at green limbs of the younger cottonwoods, peeling off the tender bark with their big buck teeth. The mules had thinned badly; they had no flesh left to burn off and nothing to fill their empty bellies.