The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana)

by Robert Lewis Taylor

  “If you were addressing me, my man,” he said, stepping forward, “have the goodness to use the prefix, ‘Mister.’ ”

  “That ginger beer,” said Coulter, not much taken down. “Pour it out. Your wagon is one of the worst offenders. Buying mules was boneheaded enough, but the belly-wash is a step too far.”

  “Coulter,” said Coe, smoothing his gloves, “there’s an axiom that conferring petty authority on an ignoramus will turn him into a swine. Your case is illustrative.”

  “Pour out the pop-skull,” said Coulter.

  “You may be damned, sir. I’ll do nothing of the kind. If my luxuries must go, they will go in style. The ginger beer will be served at an open house, or wagon, this evening before dinner. With the single exception of our friend here, you are all invited.”

  That night the people gathered at Coe’s wagon, very shy and tongue-tied, most of them, and Othello, the colored mule-butter, passed around the beverage. Coe had dressed him up in a sort of uniform, being a pair of dove-colored trousers, which looked uncommon odd against his bare feet, and a brown coat that I later heard was the valet’s, who was still sickly and unable to stand.

  Coe himself sat in his rocker and lorded it with even worse pomp than my father’s, and that was bad enough. My father seemed to have got it fixed in his head that he had arranged it, and he brought people up to be introduced, got little conversations going, and went around inquiring, “Have you tasted it?” “Do you care for it?” and “Take another—there’s plenty.”

  The object was, as they said, to get rid of all twenty-six cases. So there was enough to go around and to spare. The fact was, the emigrants tackled it in such hungry and starved-out good humor, after nothing but black coffee and water, that they kind of overdid it. I believe the first ones to vomit were two children who crawled over into the weeds and had a very sour time for a while, or until they were asked to shove aside and make room for some wagon drivers that had swallowed several bottles in a row. My father was then called to peer down one woman that had neglected to say she had kidney trouble and was on a diet, and one boy about nine got a cork stuck in his throat, which called for a plumbing treatment to unstop him. It made you proud to see how they waded into this excess-baggage problem, and it was certain to me they would do very well in the gold fields; they had good stuff in them, even before they drank the beer. A considerable number went right on swilling out of pure politeness, long after their thirst had been knocked out for a week or more, and altogether they disposed of twenty-two cases, four bottles. After that, they ran up the flag, and as they sipped along at the end, wobbly but game, Coe began pouring out the rest, after he had offered a panful to two mules and an ox, which declined.

  Coulter came over at one point and looked on from a distance, but he went away again shaking his head as if he’d been watching a pack of lunatics. And I can’t much say I blame him. It was about the ridiculousest sight ever seen on that prairie, and probably stands up so to this day.

  As hilarious evenings often do, this one had to end up in trouble. During the drinking, the people had thrown off their worries, except for what was going on in their stomachs, and had forgot the hardships and miseries that were mounting up on the trail, when someone called out, “Look at those fool dogs skylark!” Everybody turned around, and it was peculiar. Two or three families—an Irishman and a couple of others from, I believe, Illinois—had brought dogs along. They called them wagon-dogs, because the owners had formerly been cart drivers, you see, and the dogs were trained to trot along underneath, and not stray. Anyhow, Coulter had made a few grouchy remarks, but the dogs hadn’t caused anybody any fuss.

  But now, two of them seemed to be chasing the third, and they were bending down and humping themselves, too. I never saw dogs so wrapped up in their work.

  “Hold on!” cried one of the men. “That’s no dog—it’s a wolf!”

  It was heading right for us, and a minute later, with the women shrieking and the men scrambling up from the ground, it burst right into the circle, and we could see, with a kind of honor, that its jaws were slobbered all over with foam.

  “Get back! It’s mad!” my father yelled, and such a turmoil of boxes turning over, screams, and kids yowling, with the dogs trying to close in, you never heard. But that Mr. Kennedy, who was the grittiest man I ever met, and the mildest-looking, seized Coe’s stick and walked right up, lashing as hard as he could. The animal—it was lean and gray and had poor, scraggly fur—took half a dozen blows on the head and then jumped up and bit Mr. Kennedy several times, with quick, nervous snaps, on both arms. He fell back, the dogs held off for a second, and there was a report like a thunderclap.

  “It’s better off dead,” said Mr. Kissel, blowing the smoke out of Coe’s shotgun that he had taken down from its sling near the wagon seat. In his hulking but limber and easy way, he had sent both barrels clean through the wolf’s chest, and it lay breathing its last on the ground.

  While the owners held back the dogs, everybody came back up again, and examined it, and said what a close call it was. Then they congratulated Mr. Kissel, who only smiled his slow, peaceful smile and said yes, it seemed the thing to do.

  But we were bounced back to earth by Coulter’s familiar rasp-iness.

  “Well, doctor, and what’s to be done with our precious Mr. Kennedy?”

  In the hurly-burly, people had forgotten the bites he took. He was sitting back weakly in Coe’s chair; Coe and Othello were cutting away his sleeves, and Mr. Kennedy himself had about the awfulest look in his eyes I ever saw.

  “Tell me the truth, doctor. What are the chances?”

  My father bent over him and looked very closely at his bites, but the way he did it, in spite of his best effort to be offhand, was answer enough for anybody—the damage was done.

  “I won’t deceive you, Mr. Kennedy. But you needn’t be too downcast, either. You’ve been bitten by a rabid wolf. You stand a chance, perhaps only a slight chance, of contracting hydrophobia. Not everyone’s who’s bitten gets the disease—not by a long sight. Compose your mind; we’ll do everything possible.”

  Then he and the Dr. Merton that Coe had mentioned about his valet drew aside for a consultation, after which they asked the women and children to leave, and they cauterized the wounds, using a white-hot poker stuck in a campfire. Mr Kennedy was given a tin cup full of rum before they started, and they laid him unconscious in his wagon after it was over.

  That night, my father and Dr. Merton had a long talk in the fetter’s tent, over a lantern, and I pinched back my blanket to look when he came in to bed. He didn’t seem happy.

  Chapter XV

  We’d been on the trail eighteen days and had left behind us the Sweetwater Creek, a large gully with wooded banks, full of stones “that have a green slime moss on them which is eternally floating with the current.” This last part is from my father’s diary; he had been keeping it with a kind of doggedness that wasn’t usually noticeable with him except in the business of playing poker.

  Other people have since read these Journals and called them works of importance, and one man wrote that, “McPheeters quite obviously realized that what he was doing had literary and historic value.” Whether that’s true or not, I know he says things in his diaries a lot better than I say them in this book, but I’ve got a running start now and can’t back out.

  For instance, he throws in little bits that make you picture the country, and as I read back, I see that I haven’t really described it at all, but have maybe got too wrapped up in ourselves. In his entry of June 21, he speaks of finding “a cockleshell in the limestone,” and the next day he walked aside to pick “foxglove bells of lilac color, also a round ball of the cactus tribe.” And again, “some fine bloody bells three feet high.” For a physician, he had an uncommon interest in nature, and his booklets are filled with the carefulest sort of attention to plants: “There are some beautiful lilac-colored leaf daisies with orange-colored hearts. There is also a small pod with two or th
ree seeds just the size of clover seed; its leaves are trefoil, each about an inch long and hardly a quarter inch broad, lanciform, just as I remember the leaf of a sensitive plant.”

  Sometimes, taking his writing materials, he would stride up ahead, past Coulter, who he didn’t bother to nod to any longer, and seating himself on a hummock, study the train as it wound its slow way forward, the men cracking whips and crying, “Gee-haw!”, children romping along throwing stones, the women stiff on the seats in their sunbonnets, scared but determined.

  In dry areas, we raised rolling billows of dust, and for these reasons, and others, the oxen bellowed hoarsely. My father writes, “Gravel and sand began to mix with the slate stone [in the streams]. It must be like sharp grindstone to the cattle’s feet. None of our cattle or mules has ever been shod.”

  Mr. Kennedy lay sore in his mess’s wagon, after the unhappy attack of the evening. Some of the people said he seemed low in mind, and thoughtful, but they had to hold him from getting up to help with the chores. I don’t know what it was, maybe all the things like Mr. Kennedy, McBride, the dismal trouble with the wagons, and Brice laid up, but suddenly I was taken by a yearning to get out in the prairie alone. I wanted to shake off the miseries for a while. The day was fine; only a few puff-ball clouds broke the solid blue, the weather was soft and warm, and the bees were just going it in the blossoms. The more I thought it over, the more I couldn’t wait to get off by myself.

  Coulter had showed us a map, part of a Mormon Way-Bill that they sold to emigrants, and for the rest of the day we’d be going in a wide curve to the left, fetching up, as they hoped, at the Kanza Creek. Says I, I’ll just slide out and take a short cut, and see what’s in that prairie, away from the trail. With a little luck, it wouldn’t even be noticed—I often took some food in my jacket and spent the day visiting up and down the train. So this time I collared a few slam-johns and some bacon, took one of the pistols with several loads, took my hatchet that I’d borrowed from the people in Missouri, and was ready to explore.

  My sack of gold was in one of those pouches the emigrants sewed all over the roofs of their wagons. Inside, you could usually see upwards of a dozen of these patch pockets, for storage, you know, and Mrs. Kissel had made me one of my own. So I’d stuffed cotton in the bag, to keep the coins from jingling, and sewed it up there, saving it for I don’t know what. Two or three times I’d been on the point of telling my father, but somehow I couldn’t get it out. It’s a funny thing—I don’t know any better lip-buttoner than what gold is; it will dry up a man that’s ordinarily as gabby as a magpie, and I was to see it often like this later.

  I looked all around. Jennie was bossing Mrs. Kissel, Brice dozed in the sun on his wagon seat, and my father was up ahead gathering prairie peas that the women made pickles of, to ward off scurvy. All was clear. Now at eight o’clock the train already was moving in the slow bend that Coulter said would continue all day, so at the first dry creek bed, I slipped off, looking, I hoped, like I was searching for a handy place to go to the outhouse.

  Leaving the creek after two or three hundred yards, I found walking easy through the grasses and flowers. It was exciting. All around me the green swells rose and dipped as far as the eye could see. From my father I was learning the plants, and I could pick out verbena, spiderwort, wormwood, and larkspur, and along with them the currants here grew thicker than dewdrops.

  I watched the sun, to keep my directions, and had a good time. Some said that ravening animals, wolves and such, trotted free in these grasses, so I watched out sharp, but I saw nothing more wicked than prairie dogs, and nobody bothered about them. Still and all, I found this heaving prairie, this greenhouse carpet of a world, so bright and many-colored, and sleepily harmless in appearance and in sound, in reality a wild thing, a kind of pretty spider’s web where a good many dangers lay unseen.

  Crossing a creek bed, skipping stones in the puddles, I passed between some boulders and fell backward at the dry whirring we’d all been told to expect—the rattle, like peas shaken in a gourd, of the rattlesnake. It had been coiled and asleep on a rock baked hot by the sun, and had followed its frightened nature by striking. The fangs sliced clear through the heel of my boot. But when it drew back its head to try again, I scrambled up and left. I could have killed it with a stick, but I decided not to waste the time. And I soon learned to watch out for grease spots on flat rocks, for it was here that these snakes had lately been coiled, sunning.

  Some prairie hens went skittering along; we’d been warned not to chase them. They played a teasing game with the emigrants, it was said, and led them into the prairie to be lost. But a wild turkey shot out in front of me, and I went after it pell-mell with my hatchet. It was funny. He would get up with a noisy flapping, but he couldn’t fly only a few yards, and down he’d come again, with me right behind. More than that, being uncommonly fat, he couldn’t seem to make more than one good rise, but his shanks were very lengthy, and I was soon piped out. It was too bad; I’d counted on taking back a catch for the roasting pan, because a good many people like these turkeys, although I heard one man say that, “The tarnation critter would soak more butter in basting than it was worth.”

  It was just after I chased the turkey that I noticed the sky had clouded up; I couldn’t any longer see the sun, though I knew where it was from some copper-colored streaks. Well, this wasn’t any worry—I knew my directions all right, but it would have been nice to see a few trees, as landmarks, and to climb for a look around. For the first time I had a naggy feeling of how big this prairie was, and how empty of friends. You could have walked to China, almost, and nothing might hinder you, but it wouldn’t help you, either.

  The weather had begun to act downright odd. The sky wasn’t dark—it was patchy, with copper slants through clouds that were boiling-black in the middle and blue or silver on the edges. And a stiffish breeze had started to blow. I said to myself, confound the luck, I didn’t bring my poncho, so I’ll likely take a drenching. So I walked up a creek bed, hoping to stumble on something clever, and sure enough, here was a bend where flash floods had washed out a great slash of bank, and a grass-tufted rim hung over. It was a kind of gravelly cave, and suited me fine, with enough shelter for three my size.

  Well, the rain wasn’t long in coming, and how it zipped down! Everything happened fast on this prairie. One minute all was sunny and mild, and in the next the clouds were ripping and raging and tearing everything apart. I didn’t feel quite so fond of it as formerly. Crouching down in my cave, I watched the sky over the lip of the opposite bank, waiting for things to quieten. The rain stopped for a minute, like turning off a faucet, and the wind picked up to a screech, coming in swoops and gusts. It made a strange sight on the prairie—the grasses first tossing and waving, then flattening out like a wagon bed. There would come a broad ripple uphill and down, as if a giant roller had passed over, invisible to the human eye. It was awesome.

  Presently the sky lightened up and I felt so cocksure, being dry, that I skipped out for a look around the horizon. Then I noticed a very peculiar thing; I hope I never see another. Far over to the left, some of the black clouds had rolled up into a kind of funnel, with the spout hanging down, and it came lazing its way over the fields, pretty as a picture. You felt comical to see it dance and jump, now touching the prairie, now lifting a little, but making fair time, too, in my general direction. For a few seconds I didn’t connect up the roaring I heard with the funnel, but all of a sudden this wind spout curled down and touched a high clump of bushes, maybe two hundred yards off, and where they had been before they weren’t any more.

  I’d turned to jump back under the bank when the air became filled with such a hullabaloo of noise, rocks flying, twigs and leaves and sand sweeping past, and general bedlam breaking loose, that I couldn’t really think at all. Neither could I breathe—there wasn’t any air in the middle of that column. I heard some thuds like cannon fire and saw several creek-bed boulders weighing about half a ton slam into the bank,
but they hadn’t hit me, thanks to goodness. The next thing I remember was the grassy bank above tearing loose with a sound like cloth ripping, and then I didn’t remember anything at all. The last thing in my mind was a flutter of panic that I was about to be buried alive. Then everything went black.

  I haven’t any way to tell when I opened my eyes again. It must have been hours. The sun was shining, the birds were twittering, and that bright, two-faced prairie looked as innocent as angels painted on a church pane. I started to move my arms but couldn’t. I was buried to my chin in rocks and earth, and my head felt like stevedores had been drumming on it with a maul. It was easy to wiggle free, though, and I crawled out to take inventory. All intact, except for a lump on my head the size of a walnut, and the hair around it sticky with blood.

  But now I had a new problem. The sun was so low, and things were so shuffled around, both inside my head and out, that I’d lost my bearings. I brushed myself off, ate two slam-johns, threw them back up right away, and struck out over the prairie, hoping to hit the trail somewhere, in front of the train or behind; it didn’t much matter which. My head ached, and I stopped pretty often to bathe it in cold water.

  It’s hard to tell the feeling of being lost in an unfriendly place like a prairie. The first thing you want to do is run real fast and catch up; then you have the suspicion you may be running in the wrong direction, so you quit. Once I came across a bare patch where filth showed that Indians had been camping there, and not long since, judging by the flies.

  Well, I wasn’t anxious for a ruckus with Indians, so I took a little more care, climbing a hillock and looking all around before I ventured out into a high openness. It was baffling. Often I’d say to myself, now I’ve seen this before, but I’d find another place that looked just the same, so I knew I was wrong. I commenced to get mad at my bad luck, and kicked a number of rocks and shrubs, but there wasn’t much profit in it, because my feet were sore enough already. About this time I had the notion I was being followed, so I disappeared behind some bushes, stooped down and waited.