Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  I had yearned to escape the mountains, thinking that things would improve the moment we reached the great plain. But now, as we absorbed the naked valley ahead, each of us knew the mountains had been our friend; that the bleak plain offered no comfort at all. I stared at my colleagues, wondering if the other poor bastards were thinking what I was thinking. That stretch to the river would be tenfold harder than our descent.

  That was the last sheltered camp. We found wood enough to warm us that one last night, and we divided the last of our provisions, the tallow candles that Frémont had given us. Never did anything taste so good as that tallow. We each had a half a candle, the white tallow like a king’s feast, and then we dug deep into the snowbank, to put ourselves out of the wind if we could, and huddled miserably.

  Worse was to come. No sooner had we emerged from the shelter of the mountains than a bitter north wind engulfed us. If it was cold in the canyon, it was murderous here where not a tree, not a shrub, not a cliff stayed the winds. The winds caught us unprepared. Somehow we had expected the valley to be our sanctuary, with shelter and wood and game and quiet air and sunshine warming our frozen beards. Instead it was a blinding white hell that made our eyes hurt from squinting. Had a band of elk marched slowly before us, none of us would have seen them at all, much less shot any for the solace of our ravenous bellies.

  How we continued I don’t know. I shot a hawk, which we tore to pieces and devoured raw, but it did nothing to allay our misery. We struggled slowly ahead. Far in the distance a thin band of trees marked the river. But the distance from where we saw it to there seemed impossible to negotiate on our frozen feet. We were stumbling now and could walk only a few yards at a time. No man complained, not even our guide.

  It had become impossible to walk. Our frozen feet chafed in our boots, and each step tormented us. We would crawl, just to get off our feet, and when we could crawl through the snow no more, we would clamber to our feet and plunge forward another few yards. We were still following the tributary, and after a mile or so that day we stopped where some cottonwoods grew along the bank and dug a shelter for ourselves and our miserable fire. If we stayed upwind of it we got no heat out of it; if we edged downwind we didn’t get much more heat, but we got the bitter smoke of cottonwood in our faces.

  And for food we did what we had to do. We removed our tormenting boots, cut strips off of our blankets with which to wrap our swollen feet, and tied these makeshift moccasins tight. Then we sliced leather from our boots and set it to boiling. We stared at those slivers of leather, watched the boiling water percolate through them, extracting a thin yellowish paste and softening the leather itself. It took a long time and a lot of dead cottonwood before we had reduced the boot leather enough to eat it. We devoured it swiftly, and it did nothing at all to alleviate the howl of my innards. But we pronounced it tasty. We tied the boots together by their laces and would carry them with us, for that was the only food we had. That night, the temperature plummeted, and there was no way that our thin and diminished blankets could spare us from the brutal cold. Not even the fire was a solace.

  I did not know where my feet were or whether they were connected to my body. They were severed from my senses by cold, and only when the fire had warmed them did they start to hurt and prickle. I sat there, shivering, and wondering whether I would live to see any more dawns.

  The next day was much the same. We stumbled ahead, ate more of our boots, fought snow blindness, cut more strips off our blankets to wrap around our feet, and in all we made only a mile or two. We had ceased talking: to speak was to waste energy. At one point Bill Williams sat down and wouldn’t budge, but we urged him on, and so we reached another place where a little wood might be found, again dug into the snow to get out of the deadly wind, and again boiled up our boots. We had, in all, managed another mile or two; I could no longer reckon distances, and none of us could see a thing, having been so blinded by snow that all the world was a glinting blur.

  That night was, if anything, colder than the previous, or maybe our bodies could no longer generate enough heat to keep us alive. Save for the fire, we might have perished. I surveyed the misery around me, and a great darkness filled me. King was gaunt and drawn, the flesh gone from his face, his eyes sunk in pits. Creutzfeldt was no better off but had a little more energy. Williams had crawled inside of himself. There were great icicles hanging from his beard. And the tears from his ruined eyes had frozen on his cheeks. I began to experience a leaden sensation in my muscles, as if they could function only in the slowest and heaviest manner, and I judged that the others were afflicted in the same way. We boiled more of our boots that night. There were still a few miles between us and the Rio del Norte, and I didn’t know if we would ever reach those bottoms or see the game we prayed would be awaiting us.

  And so we lived, following the ice-topped bed of the tributary, crawling when we could not walk, leaving pink snow behind us from our bleeding feet. Some nights there was not a tree in sight; we dug a hole in the snow, laid a blanket under us and the remains of the rest over us, and shivered through the darkness. The smallest storm would have destroyed us, but we lived. We boiled the last of our boots when we could; started in on our scabbards; and, when those were gone, boiled our belts. After that we had nothing.

  One day we found a rotted and frozen otter, half–picked over by carrion birds. We boiled it and somehow gagged down its foul and gamy flesh. It was food. It kept us alive one day more. The only thing in our favor was that the tributary of the Rio Grande had no snow on it. The wind had scoured the ice. In our weakened estate, that meant much to us. Slogging through snow would have been fatal.

  We consumed still more of our blankets, wrapping the strips around our ruined feet, but they wore out swiftly, and the cold ate at our ruined toes and heels. At least we were progressing toward the wooded bottoms of the Rio Grande, making a mile or two each day. The promise of the river bottoms, wood and game, was all that kept us alive.

  Then, scarcely a quarter of a mile from the bottoms, King sat down.

  “I just can’t,” he muttered.

  “We’re almost there, it’s just one last hike,” Creutzfeldt said.

  King shook his head. “You go on. I’ll rest, and then catch up.”

  “You must come with us,” I replied sharply.

  But he slumped inert, barely bothering to refuse me.

  “I’ll follow along,” he said at last.

  No amount of urging could change his mind.

  “We’ll come back for you,” Williams said.

  With foreboding, we struggled the last quarter of a mile, which took us three hours of our usual crawling and walking. We did at least reach the timbered bottoms and found ample wood, and with our last energies got a good fire going. It would need to burn for an hour before it would throw out any heat, but at least it heartened us.

  “I’ll go back for him,” Cruetzfeldt said, but he was plainly not fit for it.

  “He’s dead,” Williams replied. “I saw the birds circling. I can tell when the birds circle. They circle smaller and smaller, and then come in.”

  It hardly seemed possible. The youngest and strongest of us might be gone.

  “I’ll go look,” Creutzfeldt said.

  We watched him struggle into the dusk. When he returned, out of the dark, he was carrying several pounds of meat.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Micajah McGehee

  The colonel tasked us with caching the packs at the rocky landmark at the edge of the great valley, but we were too far gone to do it. The men were strung up the nameless creek. The Kerns and Cathcart were the farthest behind. With the cruel storms of January upon us, every step was misery, and yet we persisted, sliding the heavy packs downslope or dragging them across flats. All because the colonel required it.

  But the food had given out. The Kerns’s mess was boiling rawhide and parfleches. Doctor Kern was particularly weak, and I thought for sure he was gone from us. But he lingered on, kept alive
by warm fires. The Kerns were reluctant to abandon the hut they had built, but I urged them on. We needed to make our way toward the settlements.

  The thing that was gnawing at us more and more was the silence. We saw no relief. We awaited each hour the arrival of burros laden with food, blankets, and needful things, but no one arrived. The sixteen days that Colonel Frémont, Godey, and Preuss had calculated to be the maximum required to get relief to us were almost gone, and I heard that Frémont was anxious, pacing about his camp below us, and sending scouts out every little while to try to locate the relief.

  Meanwhile the storms returned, and we were not only starved but also newly frostbitten. Men stumbled on bloodied feet, where frost and thaw and frost again had ruined flesh and set it to bleeding. During all this movement, we passed Proue’s body, inert and half-covered with snow, and there was nothing we could do about this horror. Then Elijah Andrews gave out. He and I were trying to get down to the river, but he simply quit, lay down in the snow.

  “I’m done,” he said.

  “Elijah, you’ve got to come along,” I said. “Got to.”

  He shook his head and slumped into the snow. I knew what lay ahead for him and was determined to prevent it. Just up a shallow slope was a cave, and I somehow dragged him there, where at least he was beyond the curse of the winds and out of the whirl of snow. But he was well nigh inert, and I knew time was fleeing me. I struggled up the slope, needing to reach the timber, but the Arctic blast felled me. Atop the ridge, I found what I needed and tumbled dead piñon down that snowy precipice. I had to work in fits and starts, taking advantage of the slightest cessation of the gale, but in time I tumbled a lot of dry pine down to the cave, and there, in the shelter, with a little powder and flint and steel, I started a fire somehow and watched the wary flame slowly lick at the sticks. It gave no heat at all, but I saw that it cheered Andrews and gave him heart. The warmth was a long time coming, but the cave served my purpose, and soon Andrews was resting comfortably. About then Captain Cathcart and Richard Kern found us and tumbled in, hard-pressed by the storm. And thus we staved off trouble, or so we thought.

  We had among us one cup of macaroni and one of sugar, and this we prepared to divide with perfect scruple, there being nothing else. But poor Andrews, still numb, with muscles that did not do his bidding, tumbled the pot over, and the flames soon covered the last miserable bit of provender among us all. No one spoke. No one blamed Elijah. We stared sorrowfully in the fire, locked in our own thoughts. In extremity, I don’t think with words, but with images. I saw my mother’s bread pudding before me, and a pink rib roast, dripping with juices. I saw eggs frying on a skillet, their yellow yolks mingling with their whites. I smelled my mother’s yeasty bread, cooling on her counter. What was I doing here, in this place?

  I could never manage my hunger. It had become a dull ache, a throb, and worse, an estate fraught with menace. There was something sinister in it, this conjuring of food, not a thing to eat and a thousand miles from succor, or so it seemed. There was slow death in it. There was weakness; I lurched and wobbled when I walked, as if my protesting muscles were at their limits.

  Cathcart clambered to his feet and stepped into the blizzard, and then stumbled back into our shelter.

  “I thought I heard the relief,” he said. “Could have sworn it.”

  At least we were warm. Elijah Andrews recovered as the heat of the fire bounced off the walls of our rocky abode. Only two hours earlier, he had stared up at me, surrender in his face. It was cold that murdered; starvation would only weaken us, at least for a few days more.

  If only a stray mule would wander by.

  The storm never ceased. I discovered a ball of thong in our midst, cut it into strings, and boiled it. I prowled the cliffside and found wolf bones. These we pulverized between stones and added to our thong soup. We knew that others of our company had been caught as well and were harboring in the hollows of that cliff, awaiting whatever fate would bring. There seemed so little we could do; our fates were no longer in our hands.

  When the storm lifted two days later we stumbled our way toward the colonel’s camp, down in the great valley, seeing no game all the way. If there were animals anywhere near, they had been driven to shelter somewhere. The thing we had hoped for, an abundance of game down in the wide valley of the Rio Grande, was nothing more than a thin dream. I made my body work, one step at a time, step by step on frozen feet, as we staggered toward the colonel’s camp. The rest stumbled, too. We helped one another. When someone wanted to quit, we hectored him, made him continue.

  By January 9, 1849, we were all out of the mountains, save for old Proue, whose frozen body lay mutely behind us, buried in drifts. A few of us remained at the cache; the rest had collected in Frémont’s camp. That day was important. It was the day we should have relief, even if King’s company had been greatly slowed. It was sixteen days past the Christmas camp, when the colonel sent King and Williams and Creutzfeldt and Breckenridge off, with our salvation in their hands.

  What had happened? No one knew, but the prospects were forbidding. Frémont sent scouts downriver, but they saw only silence and cruel white snow. How we ached for the jingle of harness bells or the crunch of hooves on snow or the shouts or shots that meant our relief was coming. Down there, out of the mountains, the wind was crueler than ever, but we found shelter in the timbered banks along the river, and so endured. The few rations still in the colonel’s possession were carefully divided. We got a spoonful of macaroni or a bit of sugar dissolved in warm water. But no one died, and we had ample deadwood and shelter, and since we weren’t moving, our tormented feet had a chance to heal. I pulled my boots off and discovered deep cracks between my toes, with raw flesh visible in them. Some leaked blood. Strange white patches pocked my toes and ankles. The terrible truth was that my feet were better off than most.

  Then, on the eleventh, the colonel decided that the King party was not going to reach us, and he resolved to form a new relief, consisting of himself; his manservant, Saunders; Alexis Godey; Godey’s young nephew, Theodore; and the little scientist, Preuss, who had weathered over several expeditions as a resourceful and tough man.

  Frémont gathered us together on his departure. He looked gaunt and hollow eyed and was suffering from snow blindness more than most of us. And his voice had an odd, thin ring to it.

  “I’m taking a party with me to get relief. The King party should have been here by now. Take heart; we plan to move fast, make up for lost time. As fast as you can, head for the Rio Grande and follow it toward the Mexican settlements. As fast as you can, bring the baggage to the Rio Grande and meet the relief party at Conejos, Rabbit River, which you can’t miss. It’s a summer settlement for herders. There will be shelters. Maybe even some stored grains. Look for relief there, eh? You can hunt along the way; we’re in game country now. In a day or two, after we collect at Taos, I’ll be going to California by the southern route.”

  I stared at the man, astonished that he was thinking about that leg of the trip, even while we were caught in our extremity far to the north. Had we just heard what we had heard? I saw others staring at Frémont, not believing their ears. But Frémont was oblivious to our disbelief and continued on.

  “Now, I’m putting Lorenzo Vincenthaler in command. He’s a veteran of my California expedition, and he will see to your safety.”

  Vincenthaler. I knew so little of him. He was one of the quiet sorts, a part of Frémont’s inner circle of veterans, and not one at any of my messes.

  I knew he was an Ohio man and a veteran of the war. I saw no difficulty in it and imagined he would be as good as any. And yet one could not help but wonder at the colonel’s choice.

  The next two days were miserable in the extreme, as we hauled the rest of the colonel’s luggage with us and subsisted on boiled parfleche, which produced a repellent, thin gruel. We dragged his barometers and thermometers, spare rifle parts, kettles and spoons, heavy rubberized camp mats, iron rods, canvas, and packs
addles. Then, at last, we set forth along the frozen Rio del Norte, choosing the ice in the middle because it was free of snow and because we could drag the packs more easily. But the farther we pierced into that naked valley, the worse the winds, and soon they were sapping what little energy we possessed. We saw no game and were too snow-blind to kill any.

  There was no point in staying. The sooner we headed downriver, the sooner we would meet our relief. Two of the Frenchmen in the company, Vincent Tabeau and Antoine Morin, decided to go ahead. They were veteran voyageurs. They had been with the colonel on all three of his previous expeditions. They were seasoned and familiar with hardship. Now they were going ahead, perhaps to find game, perhaps to meet up with our relief. Whatever their private intent, they left the day after the colonel, with Vincenthaler’s blessing.

  Our new commander divided the last of the edibles, doling out exactly one cup of sugar to each man, two tallow candles, and a mismatched supply of parfleche leather and thong to boil down to a foul gruel. That was it. There was nothing more to support life.

  The rest of us started down the river the next day, January 13, making our slow progress south. We had resolved to stay together and help one another, but the weaker men soon lagged behind. I was among the weaker. I was in the company of the Kerns and Andrews and Cathcart, whose ragged clothes flapped about him. But I didn’t suppose I looked much better. And Ben Kern could barely walk, managing only a few paces at a time before he had to rest. Plainly, it would be a slow, hard trip.

  Now the dazzling white world rendered our eyes useless. Our heads ached from squinting; we leaked tears that froze to our cheeks and beards. We pulled hats down over our brows, anything that would spare us that glare.

  But if the snow blindness was a torment, our frost-ruined feet were worse. Every step was a torment. Our toes and ankles had frozen and thawed and frozen and whitened and blackened and turned to pulp. Then the California Indian lad, Manuel, surrendered. His feet were black. He begged Vincenthaler to shoot him, and when our commander refused, the young man turned back, intending to die in the camp we had left behind us, and no amount of urging on our part could change his mind. The last I saw of him, he was hobbling back, back, back to a sure death. It was a horror I could scarcely swallow. But that was only the beginning.