A Light in the Wilderness

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  Letitia watched as a string of cattle followed along the river on what looked like a shell-covered trail. Davey could have come this way where we could have met up at night. But she soon lost sight of those animals and learned later the cattle would be two weeks behind, with many lost to the ridges and rivers. When Letitia saw rafts and families portaging supplies back and forth while she carried her child and her bag with candlesticks and baby-helping supplies, she realized how fortunate she was. Davey had paid for her fare and the extra work of portaging, men walking beside the barge-like crafts using ropes to wrestle it from the river until they could safely be brought back on. Davey had done right by them.

  The current was swift, but they made a steady way, streaming past blue herons, and when Rothwell howled and sniffed the air, she thought she might have seen a bear on the rocky shoreline. The weather held even through the night when she slept beneath a tent, not worrying that anyone would bother them. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t worry; if she’d been under a tent alone in Missouri or Kentucky, she would have feared through the night. Maybe that was what freedom meant, being in a place where one didn’t fear.

  At the rapids of the Willamette River, they pulled ashore where other Hudson’s Bay canoes waited to take emigrants on to Fort Vancouver. Rothwell sprinted around, exploring. Letitia watched as people embarked on the Calapooia, a small scow schooner, and overheard that the craft would take them from the foot of the rapids upriver on the Willamette to Oregon City, heading south as this strange river ran north here. They’d land a short distance from Oregon City. Davey would have to come to that city first. What sense did it make for her—and Davey—to travel to Linnton?

  She had a few coins and she could sell some of the supplies to stay there, sleeping near the wagon parts until Davey arrived. They could immediately head south to claim land rather than his having to find her.

  “We’s changed our mind,” she told the Hudson’s Bay man who looked to be in charge of several people. “We going to Oregon City. That be closer. Davey Carson pay our way. We need some money back by not going on to Linnton.”

  “I’ve no author-i-ty to return cash to a madam changing her mind.” He spoke with an accent.

  “I knows where I’m headed. Oregon City. I needs fare for that schooner to take me and my cargo.” She pointed with her chin. “And my baby.” She turned that he might see the baby in the board on her back.

  He scratched his bulbous nose with peeling skin. “Oui. I will tell the cap-i-tan and release the money to him. But it will be a cred-it given by the Chief Factor. Your husband will talk to the cap-i-tan. That is all I can do.”

  That was enough. She boarded the craft and watched as their goods were loaded, the few barrels, ox harnesses, Davey’s anvil, and the wagon boards, bows, wheels, and canvas. As they chugged upriver, she saw tiny cabins peek out from the undergrowth of green-needled trees. She imagined she and Davey would build such a cabin before cold weather set in. A mix of mist and smoke filled the air, drifting over trees so thin at the top they could be cut for broom handles.

  Arriving at the landing of Oregon City she paid laborers to begin the work of setting up the wagon, directing them when they faltered, surprised she knew more about the piecing of the wagon, even though she hadn’t gone to Bethel long months before to see how the wagon was made. She had more than one offer to purchase the wagon, but she knew its value and people accepted that she had the right to tell them no. On the second day, with the wagon all pieced together, she placed her candlesticks and her bag for helping birth babies in the back; then came herbs, coconut oil, her medicines. Finally, she put Martha in her board and laid her on the backboard while she changed the child. Rothwell jumped through the front bow, sniffing in the wagon bed. They were in Oregon City, with sounds of voices reminding her of Kentucky and that nose-tone of folks from the cold north. New smells, new tastes, new everything except the waiting for Davey.

  For Nancy and her family the rafts worked well carrying them and the oxen down the river, and then on the north side they hitched the animals to the wagons, driving through mud that bogged the oxen, exhausting everyone having to unhitch, unload, pull and tug, then rehitch. It was almost as bad as Meek’s journey, but at least they had food. They rolled past “death houses,” frame structures placed over bodies of the deceased, the houses built by Indians months or years before. People were silent through this passage but for the crunch of wheels over wind-scattered bone. At a lower landing they saw Hudson’s Bay crafts prepared to take people to the south side of the river where the men pushed cattle onto barges. Judge White, her mother, and Nancy Hawkins took the barge, set up their wagons, and rolled on in to Oregon City. It was there she struggled with what to do next when her brother brought her “the way through your sorrow,” as he told her.

  “You’re to meet Thomas Read. He’s a widower with two children and he needs a wife.”

  “Tell him no. It’s too . . . I can’t.”

  “He’s a farmer. Well-educated though. From New Hampshire. I knew his people.” They stood beneath one of the big trees with needles. Fir, they called them. Around them the town crowded with the influx of worn-out wagons and equally worn emigrants trying to figure out what was next in this westward trek.

  “I appreciate that, Judge. But—”

  “You can’t put this off, sister. Where will you spend the winter?”

  “Are you saying there’s no room with you?”

  “No, of course not.” Her brother was a handsome man with decisiveness like ink lines etched across his forehead. “You can’t waste time grieving over what was. You have to move on. Zach would want you to.”

  “I don’t think you know what Zach would want.” She ought not be so sharp with him, but he didn’t listen to her, he never had.

  He sighed, came to her as the tears rolled out, patted her back, his arms around her. “Will you at least meet the man? He’s getting ready to head south. You could marry here, then leave together.”

  “It’s not possible, Judge. It’s just not. I’ll think of something to provide for me and the children.”

  Judge cleared his throat. “Samuel says he wants to come with us.”

  “Oh, does he.” She pulled away. “Well, his mother has something to say about that.”

  “You have four other mouths to feed. And if you won’t do the sensible thing, then your eldest son at least needs security.”

  He would take my son from me? “Tell Mr. Read we can talk. But that’s all I agree to. All. And Samuel—and Edward—stay with me.”

  She’d not let her brother decide her future. She’d had enough of being weak.

  The cows were scattered. Charity, gone. But Davey was most worried about the woman, fragile and frail. Her husband carried her over fallen trees. Davey’d carried one of the boys on his own back. They’d start making bad decisions soon. Intense wet and cold did that to a person, played tricks with the mind. He’d even known of men taking their clothes off in such states, no longer aware that what they felt wasn’t heat but numbing cold. He wouldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t. Letitia expected him to show up. He had to.

  “Keep going. The snow’s letting up. We’ll find flat ground and make a camp. The packers’ll be calling back anytime now. Keep going.” He wished for a moon to light the dark. At least the snow had lessened.

  “Grass ahead!”

  Did he hear that?

  A shout from one of the packers. “Found flat ground!” Their words, water to a parched throat.

  Gathered beneath a large tree, one of the men shot into a pile of shavings that the packers had managed to whittle from a branch and a slow flame appeared. He’d never been so happy to see fire. Davey urged Mrs. Walden toward the flames. She was listless except for the shivering. As the fire grew, they brought her still a little closer and her husband gave her a biscuit, the last of any of their food. The fire thawed the woman, torturing her while saving her. Silent tears fell as she endured the pain of her limbs gaining
feeling and then she’d cry out, a sound Davey was sure he’d never forget.

  He dozed, kept the fire going. He knew they’d have to find the cattle. They’d been two days without food.

  The morning with its blue skies and melted snow acted like a pretty girl flaunting her beauty and forgetting she’d teased her beau to distraction the night before.

  “You and your boys stay and keep the fire,” Davey told Sarah Walden. He could see his breath in the cold. She nodded. She could stand now and the fire through the night had dried her clothes. “We’ll find the cattle, right, men?” There were nods of encouragement.

  The men backtracked and then climbed higher through brush and timber when Davey thought he heard something. “Shh!” The men stopped and he heard it again. A cowbell! “Hey boys, that’s a cowbell.”

  Charity. It has to be Charity.

  He scrambled now, following where he thought the sound came from when the men entered a ravine. “Well, lookee here.” There stood the cattle huddled together under a long rock ledge, out of the wind and the snow.

  “We shoulda been so lucky,” one of the drovers said.

  Davey approached and grabbed Charity’s leather collar. He removed the bell from her neck, talked to her, then squatted beneath her and milked the cowbell full and drank his fill. He refilled it for each of the men. “Come on, boys, drink up. We need all the energy we can get afore I push this cow down the mountain. I’m praying the others will follow.”

  But the cows weren’t having it. They’d shift a few feet then circle back, stumble and shake their heads. The men shouted, poked the bony ribs, pushed and pulled until exhausted, their faces full of sweat despite the cold air.

  Davey wasn’t sure what changed the cows’ minds—with cows one never was—but they tired at last and let the men push them back toward the fire. It was noon. There they milked more into the cowbell for Sarah and the boys, who brought out branches of tiny blue berries, and with the milk ate a meal as satisfying as corn pone and pork. One of the men removed his hat, spoke thanksgiving.

  “Right,” Davey added. “We thank the Lord and hope he’ll bring us by tomorrow where we’ll see fires in cabins and shelter ourselves with new neighbors.” And the next time he herded a bunch of cows he’d have Rothwell with him.

  “Lookee, woman. What are you doing here?”

  “I makes a change. A good woman thinks, don’t she?” Her eyes sought his and warmed at the joy she saw there.

  “I guess. But I told you—”

  “I’s here with Martha now. You’s here. My Charity here ’cuz I see her over there, hear that bell clanging. Roth happy to see you.”

  “That bell saved our bacon. Not sure we would have found those cows without that.” He stroked Martha’s hair. “It was good you didn’t come with me, Tish. We met up with a small party and Mrs. Walden nearly died from the wet and cold. No, you were good to obey me.”

  “I finds wisdom in what you wanted, so I chooses it.”

  He frowned, then his eyes lit up and he grinned. “A good way to put it.” He touched Martha’s fingers that were outside of the leather wrap of the board. She jerked her little arms at him, reaching. “I was getting ready to come get you but wanted to spot out some land south first.”

  “You have me wait weeks?”

  “I knew you’d be safe.”

  “I safest with you. Now what we do?”

  “We’re crossing this Willamette River and heading south. Good land’s been claimed by many here for a few years already. But trappers say this valley is long and lush, so we’ll head south maybe fifty miles or more.”

  She hoped they could stay here for a little while, maybe see Nancy Hawkins again, but the weather would continue to get worse. Already a misty rain visited daily. They’d have snow before long. She’d pay the postman to write out a letter to be left for Nancy. Other than that there was no one she wasn’t already with who needed to know where she was. That was a freedom too.

  Oregon Country

  The Woman and Little Shoot halted so she could bind up her leggings. She would need new sinew before long. Though the snow rarely got deep nor lasted long, the cold would find her telling Little Shoot to wear his heavier leggings too. They made their way back toward the village where they’d winter. A cold, steady mist common in this “good month” made her pull her wolf coat closed. This good month is when the Missionaries celebrated the birth of a child, Jesus. Good food accompanied this celebration and she heard the story each year with happiness in her heart. She answered to the name Betsy then, though she thought of herself as The Woman.

  She heard something changing the silence. Cattle, ten, twelve, many more animals, crashing through the timber, flaring out from the trapper’s trail that edged the prairie. They ripped at grasses where The Woman and Little Shoot many months earlier collected first camas. Little Shoot pointed and she nodded.

  Behind the cattle rode a man on a horse followed by two mules packed with white cloth around mounds of supplies like the trappers carried. A wagon rolled behind them all, driven by a small boy. The Woman’s mouth opened wide in surprise as the wagon rolled toward Soap Creek. The boy . . . no, woman . . . wore burnt-seed skin like the Kalapuya, but darker. The Woman watched the party, surprised even more by the board attached to the wagon seat. There is a child.

  Where the spring burbled onto the grasses, the travelers pulled up their horses and mules. The man looked here and there, pointed to the butte then Soap Creek. He called out to the woman and then he dismounted, walking back toward her to say something only she and the child could hear. But when he walked toward the spring on the side of the hill she was certain his face smiled despite being wrapped as it was in a beard the color of sunset in the budding month.

  “Nothing stays as we know it,” she told the boy. “It is the only certainty a Kalapuya knows.” This is a thing to remember.

  22

  Settled In to Freedom

  No one asked to see her papers. No one close could hear the chink! chink! of Davey’s ax as he felled trees to build their home. The weight she carried on the overland journey lessened; here she faced each morning with a lifted spirit despite the ever-present rain dribbling onto the canvas over the wagon. No heavy winter storms pushed against them and the green beneath the trees reminded her of plantation lawns tended by slaves and grazing sheep. This was her home now, and she was reassured each day that coming west had been the right decision.

  The ground wasn’t frozen, so before they started any other work, Letitia said they needed to plant the apple saplings.

  “I’ll put the house here.” Davey walked the lines to serve as borders, pointed out the merits of being close to the spring and out of any high winds. “That creek doesn’t look very big so I’d say we build close to it.” Letitia had washed clothes in that creek water and she could see why the trappers called it “Soap” as it bubbled her lye bar. “And if that spring dries up you’d be close to washing and drinking water. Yup, I’d say this is the spot.”

  “I’s partial to the side hill, closer to the spring.”

  “I told you, Tish: if the spring dries up you’ll be hauling water from the creek and it’ll be quite a trip up the hill.”

  She wasn’t sure why but she liked being up higher, to see the valley and the creek, to notice sooner when the weather changed and came rolling in over the buttes that surrounded. “Likes I say: I’m partial to hillsides.”

  “I told you why you don’t need to be.”

  “I’s the one spending time in the house and I’s the one hauling water from the creek if the spring gives out. You can say ‘I told ya so.’ But I’m plantin’ the apple trees by the spring and I want it near my home.”

  “You do that. And I’ll build the house near the creek.” He dug the heel of his brogans in the dirt, marking his intention.

  Their disagreement sat like bad meat in her stomach. She could go with what Davey wanted just because he wanted it, but this was a new place and here she was
allowed to speak her piece and now and then get her way, wasn’t she? She just didn’t know how to make it happen.

  Within a week, Davey returned to Oregon City for more supplies and to file a claim of 640 acres with the provisional government. He’d walked the property, and with Soap Creek and the trapper’s trail and the spring and Coffin Butte Peak as landmarks, he was able to tell the land surveyor enough to stake his claim until that section of Oregon country was officially surveyed. He and Letitia knew that once Oregon country became a territory, he’d have to re-register, and when Oregon became a state, re-register again. But a section of free land “put wealth on the table,” as Davey described it.

  He went without her to file the provisional land claim. He’d tell them he was a citizen—if they even asked. He’d heard they often didn’t, just assumed if they’d come all that way across the country for free land that they’d have the right to it. Hadn’t he already renounced his beloved Ireland and the not-so-beloved queen? It wasn’t his fault the papers were late. He sent a little prayer that he wouldn’t be struck dead for his sin—and the postman would soon erase his lie.

  With Rothwell, Letitia tried to keep their stock within sight. One day, Martha would walk with a stick to bring the cows up for milking. Today, Letitia saw them and then they’d disappear as the mist lowered itself onto the bushes like an old woman sinking into a chair she’d have trouble rising from.

  “What’s harshin’ on you, Roth?” The dog growled low. Letitia looked to see what might be out there with the cows. “Wolves?” She did hear them at night, but they didn’t frighten her the way men did. Still, she’d be glad when she and Martha and Davey slept inside logs instead of the wagon. Rothwell barked then and she saw beyond the herd a man riding on the old trapper’s trail Davey had pointed out.

  Letitia wished they’d set the tent further into the trees. She patted the dog’s head and before long he left her to do his duty, covering the scat with his nose like a house cat. She stayed near the tent and the gun Davey left her, watching the pack string make its way near their claim. Or their soon-to-be claim. A splice of sun broke through, promising a change in weather, but she’d learned that this little sun break said nothing about keeping the rain from falling within minutes.