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

by Robert Lewis Taylor

  She didn’t waste time on polite gabble but helped me get to work. We had him down on his buffalo robe, partly moaning and partly trying to sing the second verse of the song, which wasn’t really fit for a young girl’s ears, so whenever it began to come out, I sort of stopped him up for a second with a sock, taking care to let him breathe on schedule. But now we had the problem of trying to get the medicine down, and it was a puzzler. Whenever the girl tried to pour in some out of a cup, he thrashed around and spilled it. We were about strapped for a way out, when I said, “There’s only one solution—we’ll have to use the coal-oil funnel. It’s just the ticket.” She looked doubtful, but there wasn’t time to complain. I got the funnel and shook it out carefully, because of course we didn’t want coal oil in the remedy, and put the end in his mouth, and after that we waltzed along. He spit the first dose straight up in the air, like a geyser, but after that it appeared to go much easier. There wasn’t any doubts about it; that medicine took the fight out of him in a hurry.

  I don’t much like to tell the next part, but I’ve got to own up and face it. Along toward 3 A.M., with me asleep on my robe and Po-Povi gone to her tent, my father began to make some very peculiar noises, like a volcano that’s about to give notice. Then he raised up and said he was dying. He looked so white and sober I believed it, too. So I got the girl and we talked it over pretty fast. She knelt over him, and looked confused. “Don’t worry,” I said. “It isn’t your fault. The medicine’s taken him wrong—it does that sometimes. I’d better go for Doctor Merton.” I was back in ten minutes, but I must say that this Dr. Merton appeared to be in a poor humor, and said he hoped it wasn’t any kind of joke; he’d be obliged “to make representations in the proper quarter.”

  But it wasn’t. He took one look at my father, counted his pulse, tested his temperature, listened to his heart with a heart cone, and told me to rouse Mr. Kissel at once. We sat outside the tent, Po-Povi and I, and waited. I’ll have to admit I was a little worried. It’s entirely possible that nobody but a doctor should make medicine; I realize that now. But to give her credit, I believe the Indian girl was on the right track. Somewhere along the line, I’d thrown the remedy out of balance. I don’t know where I went off but I guess I learned a lesson.

  It was nearly dawn when Dr. Merton came out, rolling down his sleeves. “It’s all right,” he said. “He’ll live. But I don’t mind telling you it was a very narrow squeak. You woke me just in time; another half hour and it might have been a different story.”

  He said my father appeared to have swallowed a very powerful alkali, “on the order of lime or lye,” and that there was evidence of further poisons that he hadn’t come in contact with during his professional career. “Altogether,” he said, “it’s been a very singular case, though there are aspects of it I hope to illuminate more fully later on.”

  I didn’t hope so. I said my father had drunk some whiskey up at the drovers’, and had likely got hold of a piece of tainted meat. “Mr. Coe also gave him some sherry,” I said, “and it looked old to me. All the printing had faded off the label. I’ll make any bet that bottle had gone bad.”

  “Interesting explanation,” said Dr. Merton, and left. I didn’t say anything else; I wasn’t feeling very brash.

  Well, they had the wedding at noon, and I took good care not to get out of line. They had three little flower girls, and me, but I said I wouldn’t put on a dress to see the Queen of England get married to King Solomon, so they let me wash up and join in anyhow. A man whose name I’ve forgotten with a wooden leg played the fiddle, and played it very well, too, and some of the women had baked a real winner of a cake, with what they called “matrimonial devices” on top. They handed it around; each person got a piece, even the children.

  Some way or other, this wedding had a different effect on me than what I’d imagined. It was pretty. Jennie looked as handsome and blushing and smiling as a bud that’s just opened up, and softer, you would say, than usual. They had wax candles, just like a regular wedding, back home, and with that awesome high Chimney Rock in the background, it was kind of solemn. The officiating was done by a Reverend Mr. Campbell, a tall, baldish man with hair in his ears and a voice on the order of a soothery foghorn, mellow and churchy, and an interesting way of coming out strong on the last letter of a word, making it more important, such as “folks-ah,” whilst rocking up on his toes at the same time, and he read a beautiful service. Weddings can get at you; there’s no doubt about it. I hate to say so, but for removing all the frivolity out of a person, they’ve got it over funerals.

  The only things that went wrong, from Jennie’s side, were that my father, who meant to give the bride away, was flat on his back in bed, and that Mr. Kissel, the best man, was also laid up, with a severe cold and fever of over a hundred. It was rotten bad luck, but my father called her in and said he’d fixed everything so nobody would suffer; the festivities wouldn’t be hampered any. He said he’d appointed Mr. Coulter to act in his place and that Mr. Coe would be best man. “The two most distinguished personages of the train. And God bless you, child. I’ll be thinking of you as I lie here in my pain.”

  Well, wasn’t she mad? For a man as intellectural about some things, my father could be an awful fool when he tried. If he’d gone to work and picked Benedict Arnold to give the bride away he couldn’t have made a worse choice than Coulter. Her eyes just blazed, and her color was so high I thought she’d explode. But it was too late to do anything now—there weren’t only a few hours left—so she flounced out and went about trying on the elegant dress Mrs. Kissel had made with her own hands, the good, kind soul, with all the other things she had to do, too.

  When the Honorable Coe heard about his last-minute substitution, he was as pleased as punch. He was a very fine-mannered man; everybody said so. And from that point forward, he practically took over the wedding. He declared that everything must be in order according to the rules. He had a book on ettiket, as they said, and he brushed up on his duties as best man; he told them he’d done it twice before but had become rusty. Digging into it deeper, he saw there were some problems to get over, if you went by the book. For example, he was supposed to either get the railroad tickets for the groom or hire a carriage for him if they stayed in town. It was awkward. There weren’t any railroads around for miles, and the only carriages in sight were these big old lumbering wagons, and they were full of things like pots and pans and rocking chairs and children and garden scythes and such like. So he had to give that part of it up. Then he read, aloud, that the main duties of a best man were to be “ ‘valet, expressman, and companion-in-ordinary,’ ” but since Brice wasn’t going anywhere to speak of, there wasn’t any packing to do, so Coe just concentrated on being a valet.

  And he did a bang-up job of it. I saw so many people Congratulating him after the ceremony you’d have thought it was him that got married instead of Brice. He had on striped pants and a frock coat and a flowing pearl-gray tie, and he dressed Brice up just as gaudy, out of his own wardrobe.

  I don’t want to make Coe sound silly, because he worked like a dog at this wedding. His heart was in it; he gave it class. Jennie told me the other day—I mean a long time after this—that what Mr. Coe did in his officious, pompousy way provided her with something nice to have always about this wedding.

  Those words make me realize what I should have known years before, that Jennie really cared for that poor, bewildered Brice. She looked upon him as something that needed mothering, and cherishing, and if she mistook it for love, a lot of others have done the same thing, just as my father said. They both needed somebody, so it was all right.

  At the last minute, she decided to have a maid of honor and she dressed little Po-Povi up in a real linen dress that set off her dusky skin and made her nearly as respectable as a white person. She was proud-looking; her eyes practically sparkled for a change, and instead of being somber, her mouth was curved in a half-smile.

  When the wooden-legged man, who I think they call
ed him Jim Hardesty—he’d once had an argument with a buzz saw, and lost-struck up the wedding march, everybody got downright teary. I could feel the goose-pimples coming out on my arms. Coe, with his long blond mane and moustaches carefully brushed, and Brice at his side, marched up the little aisle they formed, stately and grand, and then Jennie came forward, with her hand resting very lightly on Coulter’s arm. For once, there wasn’t any frippery about this roughneck. He didn’t only seem deadly serious, he looked almost angry, and his face had turned a funny kind of pale under his tan. I couldn’t understand it. But Jennie was beautiful—only a fool could deny it—and I had some guilty thoughts about the ways I’d plagued her. All at once it came to me that she meant as well as could be expected. She was bossy and peckish, but she’d gone through a lot of troubles, and lost her entire family. Looking at her shining, strong-featured face, and thinking what a good shotgun shot she was, I almost loved her.

  The Reverend Mr. Campbell read the service and pronounced them man and wife. Coulter started to turn away, but after Brice had kissed the bride, he took Jennie by the shoulders roughly and gave her a kiss that made everybody gasp. It really shook her. And when he let loose, she slapped his face. In a second, everybody had passed it off as a joke, and Coulter disappeared. Then they tackled a fine wedding luncheon, or as good as you can manage with the sort of fodder we had, and Jim Hardesty fiddled for dancing all afternoon long. It was the pleasantest time these people had seen in weeks. Nobody got drunk, if you except my father’s indisposition in the tent; nobody got in a fight; nothing broke down anywhere. It was as peaceful a wedding as the frontier had ever seen; I heard one of the drovers say so, but he didn’t sound happy about it.

  That night, all worn out, I crawled into our tent, and lay there, suffering a little but not knowing why. I felt blue, now that it was over.

  “Is that you, son?”

  I said, “Yes, father.”

  “Wedding went off like clockwork, didn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bride got a lot of fine presents?”

  “Yes, father.”

  He himself had given them a handsome silver carving set he’d picked up somewhere along the trail and carefully saved away for just such an occasion.

  “You still there, son?” It was such a stupid question that it sort of broke the camel’s back, so to speak. I began to whimper; I couldn’t help it.

  “You come over here,” he said, and I did so, and hung on. Maybe you think it’s sissified, but all of a sudden I missed my mother.

  “Now, Jaimie, boy, I know you’re ashamed of me, and I don’t blame you, but I want you to believe it won’t happen again. You’ll be grown soon—you’re shooting up fast—and you’ll understand that adults, in their way, are fuller of flaws than children. We’ll make this trip, and we will get the gold, and we’ll go back to Louisville in a hurry. You’d like to see your mother, wouldn’t you?”

  I said yes, rubbing at my eyes with my sleeve. “You’ll see her, my boy, and you’ll see her soon. Now before we go to sleep, let’s dream for a minute about the good fun that lies ahead. When you make your strike, you know, you build an oblong, sloping, 12-foot trough that they call a ‘Long Tom’—for the water that does the washing—and at the bottom of it you have a piece of flat, perforated sheet-iron, resting directly over what’s known as a ‘riffle box.’ ”

  He went on, painting the pretty pictures, cheery and optimistic, just as always, and inside I think he was dying. We seldom know anybody until it’s too late.

  Chapter XXVI

  During the next few days we encountered any number of people turning back, for one reason and another. It was discouraging, because we began to have troubles, too. We were now in the Western Nebraskas, moving up the north fork of the Platte toward Fort Laramie and the junction of the Laramie River, We had mostly passed the plains, and were in a kind of foothilly, boulder-strewn land that lay before the mountains. There was grass, but it was cropped down and eaten away because they said a caravan of Mormons was up ahead, and they wouldn’t only consume the blades but generally took the roots along with them, and felt sorrowful if they had to leave the soil.

  Anyhow, the grass that was left was full of stickers and burrs, and crawling all over with crickets so fat they made good targets for a slingshot. I had a very good time all one morning, counting up as many as twenty-five solid hits, until a small granite pebble, no bigger than your thumb, and certainly nothing to make a fuss about, glanced off a rock and hit a Mr. Millsap behind the left ear. After they got him back on his feet, he spoke up pretty brisk, being probably in a bad humor about something, and my father made me put the slingshot in the wagon.

  The area all about was so rocky and coarse, and graveled everybody so much, that Coulter told us to put on heavy boots if we had them. So my father traded for a pair of cowhide boots with a party returning to Ohio, but he said they were too stiff and rubbed his right ankle above the “malleolus internus.”

  The road had become littered with dead oxen. The more that died, the harder the wagons were to pull, because now we were going uphill considerable, too. One of Mr. Kissel’s animals dropped dead in its traces and another lost its cud. But when we stopped to noon, near a very mired-up quaggy place, they gave it a piece of fat bacon dipped in salt, and it was soon chewing again. But nobody looked very glad, neither in our own group or up and down the train.

  The third night out from Chimney Rock, camped on a plain beyond a place they called Scott’s Bluffs, where we could see the peaks of the Rocky Mountains in the distance, we had an electric storm that scared everybody half to death but hardly did any damage at all. The left rear wheel of one wagon was smoked up where a bolt hit a bush nearby; that was all. But that lightning squirted around as if the whole sky was on fire. Nobody in the train had ever seen anything like it. For about an hour it was as pale as day and the air just quivered; the lightning was going all the time, never any let up. There was such a crackling and hissing of current that it crawled along the wagon tops in a blue-white liquid, and rolled and dripped off nearly everything in sight. It’s a wonder we weren’t all killed.

  Lying flat on our robes but with the tent flap open so we could see, my father made some remarks about a man named Ben Franklin, who had gone out in such a storm to fly a kite, he didn’t say why. Drunk, likely. I didn’t pursue it. My father had some most amazingly ignorant patients, and there weren’t half of them ever paid up from one year to the next. But I remembered now there was a family of Franklins, poor white trash, filthy and uneducated, used to sell catfish out of a peddler’s cart in Louisville, and one of them was said to be a half-wit. That was it, then; that must be this same Ben. Why, a child would know better than to take a kite out under conditions like these.

  From here on toward Laramie, things got worse; even Coulter seemed downhearted. The wife of one man, a Mrs. Gurney, died of galloping pneumonia, and a number of other people were sick in their wagons. It kept my father and Dr. Merton on the jump all the time, and many a time way off in the night, I’d awaken, struggling up not quite to being conscious, the way you do, and hear somebody whispering in his ear that a person needed tending. He looked worried, and he was so peaked and drawn I wondered if he wasn’t apt to get sick himself. But he kept encouraging people, and telling them how close we were to California—though we hadn’t got halfway yet—and finally, in a burst of confidence he wrote my mother a letter that for plain, downright humbug surpassed anything he’d come up with yet. I know because he read it to me and asked me if I thought it “misrepresentational.” I was tempted to tell him it was nothing but a pack of lies, but I didn’t have the heart. In the business of writing one of those letters, he always worked things around to believe it himself, partly, so was in a better frame of mind.

  It was an interesting letter, though, and laid stress on everybody’s “exceptionally robust” health, their bouncing good spirits, and their all-around satisfaction that they’d decided to come. He gave it to thr
ee men from Oregon who were heading back to Missouri and raise a flock of sheep to drive out. They said they’d post it, the first chance they got, and in return my father tested one of them that he said was anemic and advised him to take a long sea voyage and rest up. The honest truth is that, along in here, he was so ground down and overworked he was sort of addled.

  Even so, he hardly let a day go by without writing an addition to his Journals, and in these he was as honest as anybody could get. I believe, today, that down underneath he felt he could excuse everything—debts, drinking, skylarking off for gold, all the doubts that plagued and chafed him—if he would leave behind a good, true, faithful document of pioneering that people might read later and profit from. As he saw it, this was his contribution now, far more than doctoring, and he put into it every ounce of uprightness that formed the core of his disposition.

  On the twentieth of August he wrote that, “The road is getting heavy with sand; it’s a dead, heavy pull, and we are compelled to rest the oxen often. As a person walks, his foot slips back one or two inches. We have passed Horse Creek, over a sandy, barren country. Now must use sagebrush for fuel, as the buffalo are, for the moment at least, behind us. We are finding the carrot seed troublesome. It sticks to both blankets and clothes …”

  And a few days later, after riding Cream up a slope a mile or so ahead, he sat down on a rock and wrote: “Because of the saline incrustations, I have noticed little ulcers in many of the horses’ noses. At first, I was fearful that these might develop into full-fledged cases of glanders, but all of them responded well enough to a treatment by washing in a weak solution of alum.