None of us could see much anymore, and that was why we scarcely knew what was coming upon us until men and horses plunged into our camp. I arose, startled, to see the hazy shapes of horses, some bearing men. Other men were walking. They collected silently around us, peering down.
“Breckenridge? Is that you?”
The voice was Colonel Frémont’s.
“Yes, sir,” I croaked.
“And Williams? And who is this?”
He was pointing to Creutzfeldt, and indeed, the scarecrow in rags bore no resemblance to the man the colonel knew.
“I’m Creutzfeldt, sir.”
“I see now,” Frémont said.
He dismounted and peered about, and I suddenly was glad there was no meat in camp and no sign of any cooking.
“I have men with me; we thought you were lost. I’m the relief this time,” Frémont said.
I could not tell what men were with him, so terrible were my eyes. There was an Indian among them.
“Have you food?” Williams asked.
Frémont ignored him. “Twenty-two days ago you started out. What happened?”
“We had food only for four,” I said. “It took that just to get out of the mountains.”
“Rough country, like I say,” Williams added. “I been saying it.”
“Two or three miles a day?” Frémont asked.
This was accusation, and I didn’t care for it. “No one could have done better,” I replied.
“Have you chow?” Williams persisted.
“Not up to your tastes?” That was Preuss talking. I still hadn’t figured out who all was with Frémont.
“We got a little jerky from the Ute,” Godey said. I knew the voice.
I managed to focus long enough to see the whole party. Frémont had the German with him, Preuss, tough little devil. And his manservant, Saunders, and Godey’s nephew, Theodore. And an ancient Ute.
“His horses, not ours,” Frémont said, to allay any instinct of mine to slice the throat of one of the miserable animals. What those starved beasts fed on, I could not imagine. “He’s taking us to the settlements. We’ll get help there.”
Now I could see that these scarecrow horses were the poorest I had ever seen. They carried packs, except that the strongest carried Frémont. There were four. The rest of the company, along with the Ute, walked. Or maybe they exchanged rides.
Preuss studied our camp, poked around its periphery, as if looking for something, but we had nothing to show him. We had bedrolls, a few tools, and a rifle or two. I thought they would stay, but Frémont had other ideas.
“We’re going to put in another hour,” he said. “I’ve got hungry men upriver waiting for relief. We can’t dally.”
He let the word hang in the air. We had dallied. On the other hand, we had not met any Utes with horses and food to trade, either.
“We have no food,” I said.
“I can imagine,” Frémont replied. He studied us a moment. “Alex, how much jerky is there?”
Godey dug into a pack on the back of a scrawny horse. “Maybe thirty pounds,” he said.
“Give them a third,” Frémont ordered.
Godey parceled out a third of the jerky and handed it to Williams. Old Bill instantly handed a piece of jerky to Creutzfeldt and me, and I jammed it between my teeth.
“Follow along. I’ll send relief out as soon as I can.”
“How do we get to the settlements?”
Frémont stared at Old Bill Williams and me. “Charts show some hills west of the river below here a mile or two. Leave the river there. Circle around the hills and bear southeast across open country. There won’t be any running water, and not much wood.”
“Our feet have given out,” I said, wanting leather or blanket or anything I could get. We were walking on strips of blanket.
“We could use some canvas for our feet,” Williams said.
“So could we,” Frémont replied.
“You’ll send the Mexicans?” I asked.
“I’ll send relief as fast as possible. And I’ll be outfitting for the California leg while you others come in.”
“California?”
“The next leg. We’ll head south and then west to the Gila River and across. I’ll be buying livestock and stores. I’m going to reorganize, recruit a company, head down the Rio Grande. The place where we head west is near Socorro. That will take us to the Gila drainage. It should be a warm and pleasant trip, that far south.”
“California?” I whispered.
“Don’t lose heart,” Frémont replied. “You’ll make it.”
With that, he reined his pony and the whole party drifted away, leaving us behind. I watched, hating Frémont and Godey. I hoped the Ute would steal away with his ponies in the middle of the night. I loathed the man. They could have taken us along. Abandoning us was probably a death sentence.
Preuss had looked through me, as if I were transparent. The others were cold. Godey, usually the most affable of men, had stared quietly. Surely we had been found out. But I was beyond caring. I stuffed another stick of jerky in my mouth and tried to make a meal of it, but there is nothing less satisfying. It is nothing but an emergency ration, and not a good one at that. Still, if we resisted the temptation to devour it all, right then and there, we might make it.
“Bill, maybe we should divide up that jerky,” I said.
He grinned wolfishly, but then he did arrange the sticks of meat into three piles and beckoned. I grabbed one, the others caught up theirs. It would suffice us or we would die. I ate mine in small crumbs, letting my saliva release the flavor. If I could not really eat, at least I could pretend to and let the juices linger in my mouth.
We stumbled back to our campfire and collapsed in the small circle of heat it threw out. We ate more jerky than we intended, since none of us could slow down.
There was something gnawing at me: “He didn’t ask,” I said.
“No, I reckon he didn’t,” Old Bill said. “Like maybe he had that part of it all figured out.”
“They know,” I said.
“Anyone coming by, they’d sure enough know,” Williams said. “So what? It don’t matter none. Happens all the time, and a man can be glad of it.”
The unasked question haunted me. They knew. It was in all their faces. It was in the ginger way they talked. It was in their politeness. It was in their silence when I asked for food.
I should have just accepted it, but instead I was enraged.
“They’d have done the same,” I snapped.
“Maybe more,” Williams said. “There’s a lot more to King than a pair of hams.”
I stared into the twilight. Not far south the second relief party was cheerfully marching into the dusk, accusations in the minds of them all. Still, maybe none of them would say a word. If I knew Frémont, I knew he would bury it deep.
We started the next morning in a whip of snow. The restless wind would not leave it alone but drove it into drifts and carved hollows in it. Still, we made our way slowly along the route that angled away from the river. It would save us miles by cutting across the oxbow, but we would lack shelter.
In many ways, those legs of our trip were hardest of all. There was no wood for fires, no shelter from the wind, no comforts at night. We could only huddle in our thin blankets, one beneath the three of us, the other rags heaped over us, and endure until the next cruel sun would blind us but offer no heat. We sucked our jerky, gathered our strength, and marched out on another blinding day.
But our feet were failing us. They were frostbitten, bleeding, numb, and painful all at once. We left pink trails behind us. We took to crawling for a hundred yards at a time, just to relieve the pain that was lancing our every step. We exhausted ourselves on our hands and knees; that consumes more energy than walking, but our feet rebelled at every step we took, and we had no leather or cloth to ease our torment.
I raged because Frémont didn’t take us with him. They could have carried us. They saw our feet
, the ragged bits of blanket, and yet they paused only for an hour and then hurried on.
But we didn’t die, and I credit the jerky for it. By the third day we had consumed the last of it and were more starved than ever, but we pushed on. The settlements were nigh, and the reality that we were close to help and comfort was the only food we possessed.
I gazed ahead, with snow-blind eyes, aching to see our rescuers coming toward us, bearing food and blankets, mules and warmth. But we saw nothing at all, nothing but the great, hollow snow-swept valley, and we stumbled on.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Benjamin Kern, MD
It was only later that I grasped the horror of Frémont’s intent. With men starving to death and frozen and weakened, his thought was of his equipment. We spent days ferrying the truck that had been scattered up that creek down to the cache, days spent consuming the last of our energy.
I was too numb to see it, and so were the rest. If the colonel wanted his equipment collected and cached, then it was up to us to do it. I heard in that awful span of time no complaint at all. The colonel had a mesmerizing effect on all of us, and we would have followed his instruction unto death. I do not know where or how he acquired that grip over other mortals, but he had it and used it, his soft polite voice sealing our doom.
His choice of Vincenthaler is instructive to me now. The man was a dutiful sergeant, incapable of doing anything but following the colonel’s command no matter what new circumstances arose. I think Frémont intuitively understood that; in Lorenzo Vincenthaler he had the man whose will was a slavish copy of the colonel’s own. So without question or cavil, our new commander set us to the task, no matter that his own eyes told him we were all on the brink of collapse and our sole chance lay in leaving the mountains at once, reaching the bottoms of the Rio Grande, and finding game. But he did not abandon the mountains. He didn’t send his best hunters ahead to scout for game. He didn’t send the strongest of his men to prepare a warm camp that might sustain us for one more night. As the perfect surrogate of the colonel, he required us to drag the last of the colonel’s stuff over the snow and stow it in the cache. Then we set out across the valley, in a gale out of the north that began murdering men before we were a mile or two out of the mountains.
Then, with several men down, he chose to abdicate.
He collected those of us who had survived a day of stumbling along with our rifles and blankets and nothing more and announced his decision:
“You’re on your own,” he said. “Some of us are stronger, some weaker, and I can’t let the weaker delay the stronger. So, I’ll take the stronger men with me and try to get relief. I can do no more.”
It made sense in a way, if you wish to excuse the days we had spent sliding the colonel’s stuff down the mountain. We devoured the last bits of tallow candles that night. The next morning Vincenthaler’s chosen party sneaked away before the rest of us were even aware. He took with him the two California Indians, Joaquin and Gregorio, as well as Scott, Martin, Bacon, Hubbard, Ducatel, and Rohrer. There was hardly a man among those of us left behind who could lift a rifle to shoot a passing raven. There was Andrew Cathcart, skin and bones but doughty and alive; Micajah McGehee; Captain Charles Taplin; Joseph Stepperfeldt; Elijah Andrews; my brothers, and I. We were on our own, we who were so worn we could scarcely walk thirty paces to collect firewood. We vowed we would not leave one another, so long as there was breath in us, and so strengthened ourselves in our solidarity.
Still, we were not yet defeated. If we had no flesh on us, we still had heart. I surveyed the creek where ice did not cover it, looking for anything, water bugs, fish, aquatic plants, that might sustain us, but it was a feckless search. I did find some wild rose shrubs and collected some rose hips and shared these with the rest. They are known to allopathic medicine as being therapeutic. It behooved us to be off. The farther ahead the stronger party got, the worse would be our chances. If they might shoot a deer, they would send a fair portion of it back to us if we didn’t lag too far, or so I believed. I should have known better.
All that day we proceeded along the river, sometimes a few steps at a time, but never failing to make headway. By dark we were spread out again, but some of us went back for the stragglers whilst the rest got a fire going and made some warmth. I was one of those stragglers and had fallen insensate only to have the rest get me to my feet, and by that means I staggered into the camp and the welcome warmth. There remained only Andrews not accounted for, and soon we heard one hoarse cry and nothing more. We found him a hundred yards back and got him in, but he lay inert, in a stupor that awakened a dread in me. I have seen that sort of stupor all too often in my practice.
Then Rohrer came in, rising out of the dusk, much to our surprise.
“Couldn’t keep up,” he muttered.
We welcomed him to our campfire, where he collapsed in a heap. Soon he was warming himself, but I eyed him sharply and didn’t like what I saw.
We were much too famished to break camp the next morning and resolved to hunt whilst we had strength enough to shoulder a rifle. The whole lot of us were so snow-blind I couldn’t imagine we would have much luck, but my friends persisted, and in time, they brought in two prairie hens. Oh, that was a fine moment, even if it meant only one bite apiece for the nine of us. We divided everything, including the entrails, and felt that single morsel slide into our gullets.
One of us, Taplin if memory serves me, found a dead wolf and dragged it in. It was mostly gone, gnawed away by raptors and other hungry creatures, but we got some well-boiled flesh out of it, boiled the hide for more, and ground up the bones and gulped them down, too. That barely sustained life, but in truth we could travel no more. We were worn out.
Elijah Andrews lingered in a stupor, and nothing I could do induced him to live, and so he perished quietly in the night. He was a Saint Louis man and had served long years in the navy, only to meet his Maker out in the middle of the continent. He had struggled to live but had weakened steadily. McGehee had saved him earlier in the mountains, but the span of his life was only a few days more. I wondered what little family in the city would soon be sorrowing.
We found a small gilded bible in his pocket and resolved that if any of us should live, we would deliver it to Andrews’s relatives in Saint Louis. It was a most sacred vow: that bible would be carried from one end of the continent to the other, if need be, but it would come home in Saint Louis. We laid Andrews out flat; the cold wasted no time permeating his flesh, and we covered him with brush, for that was all we could do.
My eye was on Henry Rohrer, who was mumbling and ranting and drifting to and from the fire. He was a millwright, making his way to California, where his skills would be greatly valued. I knew the madness as a prelude to what would come next, but I was helpless. I had no remedy but hot water, which I attempted to put into the man and thus warm his innards, but he would not drink it. I could not fathom what he was saying, but the flow of words told me he was off in his own memories, or his own world, and already lost to us. So our camp began another deathwatch, as we waited for the maddened man to quit life. It did not happen at once. By unspoken agreement, we planned to head downriver as soon as Rohrer left us. I don’t suppose anyone wanted to remain in camp with two of the dead.
But ere long, his breath stopped. And so we had lost another. We stared at the bodies. That’s when my brother Ned, one of Frémont’s trusted lieutenants in the conquest, offered the proposition:
“It’s a hard thing to say, but that meat’s as good as any other,” he said.
I wasn’t surprised. Or rather, I thought it might be Richard, the weakest among us, who would raise the prospect. Ned had his ways in the wilds and managed to pull bits of food from everything he passed. I once watched him dig up cattail root and mash and eat it. But now he had come to his Rubicon and was proposing that we all cross that river, even as Rohrer’s body began its long and fateful cooling.
I had no objections. Men do what they have to do in ext
remis. My own empty stomach groaned with need. Captain Taplin, who was the strongest among us and had stayed with us to hunt if he could, simply stared. The awful prospect hung among us.
“Do what you must, but out of my sight,” Taplin said roughly. “I will not see it.”
But McGehee, courageous lad from the Deep South, offered his own plea. “Let us wait. Relief is coming. It might be here tomorrow. We can endure. Give it three days, and then we shall do whatever we must do.”
That was a sensible and courageous suggestion. We nodded, feeling the hollowness of our bellies, our tongues and teeth and throats and stomachs rebelling against this great moral act Micajah had proposed. But for the moment, we subsided. I pulled a bit of canvas over Rohrer, the millwright who wanted to live out his life in a sunny, warm land. The canvas cast a veil over him and made a small, redoubtable barrier.
“Who’s going to write them?” I asked, thinking of all the newly made widows and orphans, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters scattered across the country, but most commonly in Saint Louis and Missouri.
“Someone must,” McGehee said.
“The colonel, of course,” Taplin said. “It’s his duty.”
It’s odd how that thought dispirited me.
Hunger doesn’t abate. It’s there, down in the gut or under the ribs every waking moment and during sleep as well. It is not only a physical pain but an incompleteness. It feeds a gnawing worry; life isn’t right. Now this hunger afflicted us all. The faces in these men, as I watched them in the flickering light, were almost unrecognizable. Something had scooped and shrunk their faces, like a lingering disease. I wondered how well I might read the sign of my own failure, and thought I could well enough.
I forced my mind to other things. Tomorrow, if I had any strength, I’d chop through the river ice and see about fishing. A morsel of fish would go a long way among us. I had nothing to fish with, but the dream of catching one fevered me.
Captain Taplin was a saint. He was hardier than the rest of us but chose to shepherd us and hunt for us instead of joining Vincenthaler’s party ahead. If we survived, he would be the rock of our salvation. It was he who collected wood and fed the fire and drove away the misery of the icy night. It was he who helped me up when I fainted away and got me to this place.
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