Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Later that very day, Henry Wise, a hardy Missourian, simply sat down in the snow and perished. I watched him sit; I watched him slump. I watched him slowly tumble onto his side and await his fate. None of us could help him. There was only that awful silence that comes from witnessing the things our very eyes were seeing, and then we had to leave him there on the river ice and continue on our way, the dark sight we had witnessed crowding our minds and weighing like stones in our bosoms. Joaquin and Gregorio, the other Indian boys, gently covered Wise’s body with brush and snow, and I marveled that they had the energy to do it.

  That night, as we sheltered as best we could from the bitter wind, a new horror rose among us. Another veteran, Carver, from Wisconsin, went mad. He rambled through our messes, ranting, saying he would go on and find food. He had a plan. All night we listened to his exhortations, and with the following dawn he drifted away, and we could do nothing to oppose it. It is odd, how well I remember my very last glance, remember the exact expression on Carver’s face. And the last on Wise’s. These were moments when I was staring into the great void.

  The horrors had not passed. The Frenchman, Tabeau, who had rejoined us, began to rave. This, he said, was a visitation from God. His suffering was beyond what any mortal can endure, but somehow he survived the night. When we once again started down the icy river, he stumbled along as best he could for an hour or so, utterly blinded by the glare, and then sat down. His old friend Morin sat beside him, the two choosing to depart from this life together, and that was the last we saw of them. They never caught up with the rest of us again.

  After we made camp, the rest of us drifted in one by one, each man on his own, all semblance of a company gone. We had gone through the last of our provisions, even the miserable leather.

  Vincenthaler had only one thing to say to us as we struck our fires and warmed our tormented feet.

  “You’re on your own now,” he said. “I can do no more.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  John Charles Frémont

  Ere long, we picked up the trail of King’s relief party and followed it. The information it yielded was not good. Preuss noted that the camps were only two or three miles apart and that their progress was so slow that they would not yet have reached the Mexican settlements.

  “What do you suppose was the trouble?” I asked him.

  He simply shook his head. None of us could know. But it might simply have been the want of food. Now they were somewhere ahead, foraging for food as they went. We had a bit of sugar and macaroni and nothing else to sustain life. But unlike King’s company, I had first-rate men with me.

  Godey roamed ahead but found no game, and our own position was growing desperate. We examined each of the camps of the relief party, looking for clues, but they yielded nothing. No bones or feathers, no blood, no apparent sickness. Just miserable progress wandering down the middle of the frozen river, camping wherever they could find shelter.

  My own party was about to experience the same fate. We ate the last of the macaroni, boiled up the sugar, and prepared to feast on our boots and scabbards, when one of those fateful turns of fortune caught us up. Our own progress was slowed. Theodore, Godey’s nephew, could scarcely walk, and I feared for Preuss. There, ahead, was an Indian. I was so snow-blind I could scarcely make him out and thought he might be one of King’s party, but as we approached Godey told me this was an old Ute. He was all alone, or so we thought.

  I made the peace sign, palm up.

  He stood somberly, wrapped in a leather cape, his gray hair falling in two braids. He carried a bow and quiver of arrows, one of which was nocked. His face was seamed copper, and his cheekbones ridged his face. He surveyed us one by one, reading our hunger.

  I knew little of the hand language and feared we might have trouble.

  He said something in a tongue I could not fathom. I remembered that this people had generations of contact with the Mexicans and tried Spanish.

  “Buenos días,” I said.

  “Hablo un poco de español,” he replied.

  After that, with much hesitation, we conducted what surely was one of the most critical negotiations in my life. He seemed slow, almost ponderous, all the while weighing us in ways I could not fathom.

  I learned that he was with a small Ute hunting party camped nearby. Yes, they had seen the other party and had seen their smokes but had not visited them. The other relief party had spilled much blood in the snow.

  “Are they alive?” I asked.

  He hesitated, and finally nodded.

  “How far ahead?”

  It was not a question he could answer, so he remained stone silent.

  “Have you food we could trade for?” I asked.

  He eyed us, seeing our rifles and powder horns and the bedrolls we carried on our backs.

  I told him we needed horses or mules, food, and I wanted a guide who would take us to the closest Mexican settlements on the Chama River. He studied us, uncertain whether we were true friends or somehow dangerous.

  “I have blankets, a rifle and powder and shot to trade,” I said.

  I could not make out his reply, but then he beckoned, and we followed him up a drainage to the south and came suddenly on a small encampment of brush huts with skins thrown over them, with perhaps a dozen men in it, all of them warmly dressed in skins. I did not see a woman. They circled around us, wary but not hostile, and I once again made my wishes known to them. I feared ambush; their numbers were large enough to put arrows into us. But it didn’t happen. Instead, they invited us to sit at their council fires.

  We received a thin, hot meat broth. As I downed this blessed soup, drinking directly from a pottery bowl that was being passed around, I noticed several bony horses gnawing at bark and sticks in the brush nearby. A sorrier lot of horses I never did see, and how they had survived in this white world I could not imagine, and I thought maybe the horses couldn’t imagine it either. But I knew one thing: I wanted those horses. I wanted them so badly I would trade anything and promise anything to get them. They would carry us to safety.

  I needed to give them some sort of gift and settled on my camp hatchet, which I laid before the coppery old man. He nodded and examined it with pleasure. Anything of metal was a treasure to a Ute.

  That broth was so savory we could have emptied their kettle, and I know every man of us stared hungrily at that soup, but it was time to negotiate our salvation.

  I told him my name was Frémont and waited to see whether it brought a response. He said he was known as San Juan, a chieftain of the Utah people. That was a good start.

  I told him, fumbling for simple words, that we needed food and horses and a guide to the settlements. We had things to trade. What would he want in return?

  He arose, came to me, touched my Hawken rifle, shot pouch, powder horn, and bedroll, which held two blankets in a canvas groundsheet. He pointed to the horses and held up five fingers, and then to a parfleche, which he opened. It was brimming with jerked meat, probably venison. There were twenty or thirty pounds of it as far as I could tell.

  “More food?”

  He shook his head. That was all he could give us, and it wouldn’t sustain us long.

  “If you guide us to Abiquiu, I will reward you when we get there,” I said.

  “How?” he asked.

  “I will see to it,” I replied, for I had no idea what I might discover there.

  He arose, sharply commanded a youth to follow, and then headed into the brush. In the space of a few minutes he and the boy returned with four scrawny nags, so poor I wondered if they would carry us far. He laid the heavy parfleche before me. I slipped my rifle off of my shoulder and handed it to him, along with the powder and balls and patches, and then pulled my bedroll from my back.

  He smiled broadly, baring gaps in his browned teeth. It was our moment of triumph, and I felt my burdens slip away. It was my destiny.

  But it was not quite as I had thought. The horses would carry us or our bagga
ge but would remain his. We would borrow them. He would come with us to the Mexican settlements, and then he would reclaim his horses. He was being abundantly paid for this service and a little food, but I ignored his extravagant demands. These tribesmen put a larger value on things than they’re worth.

  I explained my negotiations to Godey and Preuss, who congratulated me.

  We started at once, the four bony nags hauling our truck, and San Juan leading the way. We cut across an oxbow of the river and soon picked up the trail of the relief party. Both Godey and Preuss, who had become a keen mountaineer, noted that the camps seemed fresher. We were gaining on King’s party. I had become so snow-blind that I could barely see and gladly left the navigation to the old Indian. For the moment, we walked, but there was not a man among us who didn’t wish to throw himself over a bony horse and be carried to safety. Either that or eat the horse.

  We made good time. The guide was able to bivouac us in drainages where thick brush supplied a little fodder for the starved horses, as well as some shelter from the relentless wind. We boiled up a thin soup of jerky and a few roots the old man dug up from the frozen earth, and so mollified the demands of our stomachs, though we were just as hungry after as we were before.

  We rejoined the Rio Grande and were quickly comforted by firewood and the prospect of game. I left it to Godey to hunt, since I no longer had a rifle, and I noticed the old chieftain was walking wide of us, hoping to scare up game. Then, not far from the frozen river, we came upon a disturbance in the snow, some blood frozen to the earth, giving it a pink pallor. But there was no sign of life here or habitation or a camp. Maybe they had killed an animal and dragged it to the river.

  “Something live, or newly dead, was butchered here,” Godey said. “If there’s blood, it was not a frozen animal.”

  It was a good observation. There were skid marks, so we pursued them the quarter or third of a mile to the frozen river, and there we found another campsite, fresher than the others, and with some sign that it had been used for several days. There had been two fires, and not all the wood they had collected had been consumed by them. But there was no sign of the animal they had consumed, which led me to believe that they had devoured every scrap of it.

  But the German was restless and began a slow circle of the camp, poking and probing the dense river brush. What he was hunting for was quite beyond my imagination until he stopped suddenly.

  “Ach!” he exclaimed.

  We headed at once through dense willow brush to Preuss, who stood sourly, his lips curled down.

  There, at his feet, was King. Without trousers. And without legs. King’s open eyes stared upward. The carrion birds had not yet plucked them out. In fact, there was no sign that any animal at all had discovered this frozen corpse caught deep in the tan brush. The man’s legs had been crudely severed, perhaps with an axe, and there was no nether part of him in sight.

  “So,” Preuss said. “They should have put an apple in his mouth and baked him whole.”

  I knew at once whose work this was.

  “Williams! I’d been warned about him. That man’s a degenerate. He’d eat the whole party if he had to.”

  Godey knelt beside what was left of King and attempted to roll him over, but his shirt was frozen to the ground. With some effort, Godey pulled King loose and turned him over. There was no evidence of violence, other than the lost legs.

  “Froze to death,” Godey said.

  “It was Williams. No man of my company would do it,” I said.

  Preuss grinned at me. He was an oddly cynical man and could annoy me at times.

  “I want that body removed from here, far away, buried in brush. I don’t want this known,” I said. “I want this kept entirely between us and of course request your silence.”

  I waited. Godey nodded. Preuss grinned and nodded. Young Theodore frowned. The boy was the most likely to talk.

  “Theodore, I want your word of honor. Some things must never be mentioned, not ever.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  The Indian stood quietly. I knew the more I urged silence from him, the more he would whisper, so I ignored him. No one would believe him anyway. He stared at the body, then at us, a deep curiosity in his seamed face. Then he looked away, into the white skies.

  Godey found a canvas and rolled King onto it, and he and Preuss slowly dragged the corpse through brush, into timber, and finally to a frozen swampy spot. They put King out among the cattails, where he would sink as soon as the thaw came. Then they heaped brush over King’s body.

  I thought it was a good choice.

  I did not want Senator Benton to know, nor Jessie. Or my sponsors. I didn’t want the army to know, nor the public or the press. I didn’t want the rest of the company to know. I did not want it said that there was cannibalism on my expedition or in my command. But if word did leak out, I knew exactly what I would say. Old Bill Williams was the responsible party; men of mine would not do such a thing but would choose to perish before eating the flesh of any other mortal.

  It was a good and valid riposte. It was well known that the beaver trappers and mountaineers had sometimes resorted to desperate measures in starving times, and many a man now living in Saint Louis owed his life to the flesh of his companions. So, if whispering began, it would not be about Frémont but about the guide, who had deliberately slowed the party, let it starve, and finally had partaken of the forbidden.

  “Are we going to say a word over this man?” Godey asked.

  “A word? I’ve asked you not—oh, you mean a prayer. We’ll have a moment of silence,” I said, and doffed my fur hat and felt the icy fingers of the north wind filter through my ragged hair.

  Later, I wondered how his widow would receive the news.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Tom Breckenridge

  I hated Creutzfeldt. I despised Williams. I peered at them through snow-ruined eyes, the tears freezing on my lashes. I had partaken of the meat; I was helpless to stop myself. I swallowed it as soon as it was half-cooked over the windblown fire. King ham. Precious little of it, too. What good were two skinny thighs of a half-starved man? There were hardly ten pounds of flesh for the three of us. I have no recollection of the taste; it didn’t matter. It could have been chicken or elk or beefsteak. It was poor food, and it went down with my stomach clawing at it, and my revulsion vomiting into my soul.

  I could never again walk through the doors of my church. I could never receive the bread and wine of communion into my mouth.

  I looked at Creutzfeldt and loathed him. He was the devil. He had tempted me. He had turned into something grotesque, some gargoyle or griffin guarding a dark building. His cheeks had sunk, his eyes bulged, his matted hair flapped out from his grimy hat. Williams was quieter, and I loathed the man. It was he who had built up the fire, sliced meat from King’s hambone, and set it sizzling in the miserable snow pit we occupied. I stared at myself, at fingers that had held the dreadful meat, the devil’s fingers. And yet my belly stopped gnawing at me, at least for the moment.

  By unspoken agreement, we set the rest aside. We could go two days on it, a pound of King a day for each of us. It would get us a few miles farther toward the northern settlements. Or Taos on the Rio Grande. I didn’t care which. If we made it, we would walk into the village and they would know. The mark of Cain would be on our foreheads. We could not hide ourselves.

  I looked into the sorry sky, knowing nothing had been hidden. Later, I imagined our conduct might be hidden; life would go on. But there are no secrets; every foul deed is made known, sooner or later. By agreement, the three of us dragged King into some brush, hoping wild animals would obscure our sin, then fled the abattoir and stumbled southward once again, carrying six or eight pounds of King. The snow wounded my eyes; I could see nothing through the frozen tears but followed mutely along. Williams led the way; we stumbled behind, Creutzfeldt and I. And so we passed a day, camped in some sheltering brush that night, hid under the cutbank against th
e wind, and ate another parcel of King. We had made only a few miles before we had all given out. And then we tackled the next day, crueler than the previous, and made a few more miles. Who knows how many? That eve, Old Bill settled us in a riverside woods, where shelter and firewood were plentiful. And there we demolished the last of King. Our friend had given us only a reprieve. We were still forty miles from the Chama River villages. What had King’s flesh bought us but a stone in the bosom for the rest of our days?

  The next day, with wind lifting and whipping snow, we set off again, this time aware that no meal would await us at the end of the day. We resolved to hunt; I checked my load. I fantasized. I would find a few deer; I would steady myself, aim, and drop one, and we would be saved. There would be venison enough to see us through. But in my feverish imagination, I saw myself shooting an antlered King and slicing him up. Still, we had put King behind us; we were three days along the river road from that horror. If I could have run, I would have run and run, day and night, run away from that place. And we were seeing signs of game in the snow; hoofprints, tracks, marks of passage everywhere. Surely, surely, I would find a deer, and that would somehow wipe away our shame. We would eat clean, well-cooked venison, and be freed of the stain. I even pushed ahead, weary as I was, so that I might have first crack at any game we found. But the afternoon stretched away in silence, and the winter sun plummeted, and we made camp in a good place where we would be warm—and starving once again.