He learned something about the medicinal herbs these people used, such as dogwood and yarrow for fevers, and the various stalks and leaves that would yield a dye, such as alder and bloodroot. He pestered Perrault endlessly, until the old Iroquois breed laughed or growled at him, but Skye knew that he had to learn, and fast, to survive, and that this tribe could teach him much of what he needed to know.
All these arts and crafts came naturally to a people who planted nothing but hunted and fished and gathered nature’s own bounty. He knew if he could master even the half of what these people knew, he would improve his chance to survive his long journey across the continent.
He discovered that these people had religious and spiritual traditions that conformed to their way of life, but he could grasp little of them. He saw no sign of organized religion, but he discerned that each person had his own religion—Perrault called it medicine, an odd but fitting word—his own spiritual helpers, his own protectors and mentors. Some wore small totems, or little bags suspended from the neck; others wore amulets, often a small carved turtle of wood or bone. These things interested him less than the ones that he could employ to survive in the wilds, but he was curious about them. Perrault was little help on that score, and shrugged off Skye’s endless questions, sometimes turning surly when Skye pushed too hard.
“You crazy,” he snarled. “Damn! You owe me whiskey.”
Perrault did tell him about one useful thing: the tribes could communicate with a hand language. Skye vowed to learn all he could; then, at least, he would have some way to communicate with these people. Maybe someone at the rendezvous could help him learn the sign language.
They emerged from the valley into a broad hazy land, with foothills rising to the east and arid drainages to the west.
“Pretty damn soon, now, Skye—ah, damn, Mister Skye. You be crazy.”
Then one morning Skye sensed an excitement in camp. The Shoshones astonished him with their festival dress. The women decked themselves in quilled or beaded buckskins or flannel; the men wore all their war honors. A barbarous beauty pervaded the whole village, along with an expectation that Skye could feel as well as see in eager, joyous faces.
They paraded that grand July day, their horses mincing and dancing, their exodus orderly and spirited. Skye felt something mad and wild clear to his bones, and rode eagerly, scarcely able to believe the transformation around him. He didn’t need to be told: today they would arrive at the rendezvous.
They turned east along a sluggish river, and followed it into a wide valley with grassy plains. It seemed a barren place to Skye, almost treeless except along the river. But a haze of blue smoke hung over this place, and the rolling grasslands were dotted with horses of all descriptions and colors. Lodges clustered near the river, intermixed with brush arbors that supplied shade. Skye could see two or three white men’s tents of canvas, rectangular and angular compared to the conical skin lodges. As the Shoshones approached, they began to sing and dance. The warriors strung their bows and withdrew arrows from their quivers. Was this going to be a battle? Skye watched nervously, wondering what all this was about. And then, in one wild swoop, the Shoshones dashed madly into the rendezvous, a mock attack that was met by mock resistance from other Indians, and by white men who discharged their rifles into the skies and howled right along with the Shoshones. Then the Shoshones paraded through the whole vast encampment, whooping, displaying their gauds and war honors, strutting, whirling their horses.
Skye rode among them, astonished at all this, astonished at the odd-looking white men, most of them dressed in peculiar costumes, part European but largely adapted from the tribes around them. They sported beards as luxurious as Skye’s. Some wore necklaces of bone, which won Skye’s curiosity.
Perrault rode beside Skye. “Dem’s Crows. Dey got here before us,” he said. “Dat’s de rendezvous, and now de fun start. Pretty soon dey all come sniffing around. Den dey give ribbons and looking glasses and calico and needles and knives an’ stuff for my women and me. You get me jug of whiskey, and den you get one woman or the other any time.” He slapped his bony knee and howled like a wolf.
Skye stared. Perrault was selling his women.
Chapter 20
Jedediah Smith dreamed of two things, adventure and wealth. A fortune would assuage the yearnings of his Calvinist soul and prove his worth before God and man. Adventure would test his mettle and make life sharp and exhilarating.
There in Cache Valley that July of 1826 he saw a way to have both. While the free trappers with Ashley and Smith’s fur company began their rendezvous frolic, he was busy forming a new company to buy out General Ashley, who had at last made a fortune in beaver plews, and wanted to escape the fur trade before some new disaster laid him low.
The new partners and Ashley had been dickering all morning in their buffalo-skin lodge, but they weren’t far from agreement. The lodge cover had been rolled up two or three feet, letting the playful breezes sweep in. That cooled the occupants and let them keep an eye on the glistening prairies just outside, where veteran trappers were sucking trade whiskey from Ashley’s store after a year’s parch, and swapping elaborate lies.
On hand also were Davey Jackson and Bill Sublette, experienced mountaineers and participants in the great Ashley-Henry venture that had probed up the Missouri River in search of a fortune in beaver pelts. There had been much to negotiate, but now an agreement was in sight, forged by Ashley and the new company of Smith, Jackson, and Sublette. The idea was simple, even if the details were complex. The new booshways, as the free trappers called them, were buying out Ashley, and would pay him with beaver pelts the following year. If they sent Ashley an express asking for more supplies, he would deliver them to this rendezvous site next July and return to the States with the pelts.
Smith knew Ashley was getting the best of the deal: the real profits in the fur trade went to its suppliers, who charged several times St. Louis prices to bring the goods a thousand dangerous miles to the Stony Mountains. But Smith didn’t expect the new partnership to suffer: in Jackson and Sublette he had two masters, canny veterans who would lead trapping parties to the beaver in the fall, winter, and spring when the pelts were prime, and harvest the wealth of the wilderness. They would do, along with a handful of brilliant mountaineers, such as Bridger, Harris, and Fitzpatrick.
The partners and Ashley broke for the nooning and meandered out of the lodge into the brilliant sun. Before them lay a vast undulating prairie with enough grasses on it to keep horses fat during the entire rendezvous. The Wasatch Mountains rose to the east, their lower slopes dry and barren. Far to the southwest lay the Great Salt Lake, guarding a hostile desert beyond. Closer at hand, an emerald band of trees and brush lined the river, supplying firewood, game, and shelter to the great trapper’s fair.
The event had barely begun and would last five or six weeks, until the wildmen of the mountains had squandered their last plew and the booshways were organizing and outfitting their brigades. Jed Smith—they called him Diah—was not one of those wildmen, and had blown nothing on trade whiskey—actually, pure grain alcohol seasoned with tobacco and spices and diluted with river water. He was one of them and yet he wasn’t, a man apart, a man who daily read his King James Bible and sought the blessings of God upon his endeavors. And yet he was a man born to lead, born to adventure, and withal, tougher and more sagacious about wilderness than any of the others. The trappers trusted him more than any other brigade leader, knowing he would get them through. He understood the revelries and the animal hungers that fueled them so far from civilization, and never intervened or criticized, although he kept apart. The trappers, in turn, understood that about him and accepted his leadership without cavil, a bond built on mutual respect.
Buffalo stew bubbled in an iron pot, and he helped himself with a thick iron ladle. There had never been many of the shaggy beasts on this side of the mountains, and this rendezvous had doomed the last of them. But the Cache Valley abounded in deer and elk and an
telope, and the mountaineers would wallow in fat meat.
So far, the rendezvous had been a quiet affair. When Ashley’s pack train trotted in two days earlier, the trappers lined up at Ashley’s tent store and bought jugs and cups of trade whiskey to allay a year-long thirst. The next days were devoted to serious drinking and gambling, usually euchre or monte, using greasy old cards that had survived for years in someone’s kit. But they were really waiting for the Shoshones and Crows to arrive so they could begin the contests, the games, the wrestling, shooting, brawling, and other revels, such as the debauchery and whoring that took place largely at night. This was Snake country, and these were friendly Injuns who cheerfully lent or sold their comely daughters and wives to any trapper with a bit of foofaraw. That’s when the midsummer’s saturnalia would really begin.
Almost as if to answer his thoughts, Smith saw a stirring among the trappers. Someone came whooping in with news, and in minutes the word was bruited through the disorderly camp: the Snakes would be arriving in an hour or two. Bearded, buckskinned men, with visions of fair and dusky maidens dancing in their heads, laughed and howled and bayed at the sun. Tonight the party would begin.
But in his starchy way, Smith turned his thoughts elsewhere. The Shoshones would have furs to trade at Ashley’s big store-tent, and Ashley would return to St. Louis with prime peltries—buffalo, elk, deer, otter, fox, as well as beaver—all handsomely tanned and valuable in the East. Next year, Ashley’s store would be the Smith, Jackson, and Sublette store, and his own company would be dealing with tribesmen for those pelts, all for a fat profit. Smith reminded himself to invite the Crows and Bannacks and other tribes to come next summer and bring all the pelts they could produce. They all had furs to trade, and he intended to buy them. The Indian trade was especially profitable because they wanted so little for their furs—a little trade whiskey, a small hand mirror, a cup of sugar, a few lead balls, a few ounces of powder, some fishhooks, some calico, ribbons, and blankets.
By common consent the negotiations were adjourned that afternoon. The arrival of the Snakes was not a sight to be missed. They would be wearing their festival finery; their nubile honey-tinted maidens would be gauded out and painted; their bronze young men would be wearing their war honors, carrying their shields and lances, riding prized horses. Their ponies, many of them the spotted Appaloosa gotten from the Nez Perce, would be ribboned and painted.
Smith guessed there would be a few white men among them, probably Hudson’s Bay booshways. The powerful HBC had fought the invasion of their turf by free trappers and now kept a baleful eye on the fiesty Yanks. Worse, the HBC had lost many of its trappers to the Ashley interests, and might be looking for ways to cause trouble. The Yanks paid a trapper good money for pelts instead of giving him a skimpy salary. An industrious trapper could earn several times more as a free entrepreneur than as an engagé, as the French-Canadians called them, and stay out of debt if he chose to.
“Well, Diah, now we’ll see how the stick floats,” said Bill Sublette.
“We’ll make them welcome. Give their headmen some powder and galena. I want them to know that the partnership will be running the store next summer,” Smith replied, his mind never far from business.
“I’ll pass out some vermilion to cement relations,” Sublette said. “I know most of their headmen.”
“It’ll pay off,” said Davey Jackson. “I reckon we’ll do better than Ashley and Henry, if only because we’ve got the experience under our belts. We’ve a notion what to do and not to do.”
That was how they all reckoned it, Smith thought. He himself had gotten five thousand dollars out of his brief junior partnership with Ashley, and was plowing it all back into the new company. Where else in the United States could a man make so much in a year? A few years like that and he could return to Ohio, marry, and live in comfort the rest of his life.
The thought made him itchy. Maybe he would not enjoy life in Ohio’s Western Reserve, where the westering New England Smiths had finally settled after stops in upstate New York and Pennsylvania. Return? Not after he had heard the call of the wild. The wilderness was a temptation, not only to his flesh but also his soul and his pride. It was something to pray about, this demon in him. He knew he should return to civilization and settle down and become a deacon in his church.
He discerned a great stirring on the northern horizon. Trappers whooped and ran for their mountain rifles, anticipating what would come. Gabe Bridger grinned. Tom Fitzpatrick and the rascal Jim Beckwourth slid caps onto the nipples of their rifles while Black Harris and Louis Vasquez waited patiently, a faint smile on their weathered chestnut faces.
The Shoshones raced in, their warriors kicking lathered horses straight toward the camp, lances lowered, bows drawn, the whole lot howling like wolves. It was enough to terrify a pork-eater, as pilgrims were called. But Smith watched laconically, enjoying the fun as much as anyone else. On they came, screeching blood-freezing taunts, like an army from hell. Rifles popped, the balls puncturing the sky, as the Snakes swept into the encampment.
“It’s a sight,” Ashley said, standing beside Smith. “Makes a man want to reach for his piece and throw up a breastwork.”
Smith nodded. The Snake warriors were curvetting their ponies, counting mock coup, and showing off like military cadets on a lark. Right behind them the main body of Shoshones walked in, chiefs and shamans, squaws overseeing the ponies that dragged the lodges, all gauded in bright trade cloth, blue and red and green, with horn bonnets and fringed leggins. What a sight!
But what caught Smith’s eye was the lone white man, no doubt an HBC agent spying on the opposition. Ermatinger maybe, or the legendary Peter Skene Ogden, a man as shrewd and forceful as any Yank trapper, and then some. But this one didn’t seem familiar. He was an odd duck, thick as a plow horse, wearing a beaver topper and a buckskin shirt, and riding a brown palouse. The young man examined Smith and the other trappers with a gaze that had palpable force behind it, a gaze that drilled meaning out of everything he saw.
What struck Smith the most was the man’s somberness. Unlike the Shoshones, he was all business. The more Smith watched, the more curious he became about the stranger. Whoever the fellow was, he had made his mark simply with his raking examination of the whole rendezvous. Well, Smith thought, he would know the man’s name soon enough, and probably his business as well.
The Shoshones chose a river site east of the rendezvous for their own, and the squaws set to work raising lodges and unloading the innumerable travois. Trappers crowded about them, eyeing the maidens with hungry gazes, eager for the great July debauch to begin. This night many a trapper would squander much of his year’s income, the product of long, lonely hours wading icy streams and skinning beaver and sleeping on cold ground.
Smith hiked toward the new man, who was watching silently, his gaze piercing and cautious, as if he were fleeing a past or had perceived trouble here. The man was stocky and powerful, his face dominated by an enormous nose that had probably been broken more than once. The new man squinted at this strange world from blue eyes that revealed nothing of his mood or motive. He seemed ill-equipped, and had only a bow and quiver for weapons. But it wasn’t his ragged exterior that intrigued Smith. This man radiated determination and will.
The man seemed to come to some decision, dismounted, and headed for Smith and Ashley in a strange, rolling gait, leading his brown horse. “Are you Yanks?” he asked in booming voice.
“Americans, yes, and you?”
“I’m a man without a country. I’ve been looking for you to get some information. How far is it to Boston?”
“Boston? Boston?” Smith stared.
“Boston, mate. I’m on my way to Boston.”
“Why, she’s just over them hills hyar,” said Bridger. “Maybe a two-day hike. Just foller the turnpike.”
“I was told it was a lot farther. I’ll rest my horse for a few days and then head east. Hope you can tell me a little about it. It’s Boston I’m headi
ng for, and I need to make my way. If I can be of service for a bit of food, I’d welcome it.”
Trappers crowded around the man. “What’s your handle, friend?” asked Black Harris.
The man hesitated. Smith knew the signs. This man was a fugitive. “Handle? Ah, a name, yes. Skye, sir. Mister Skye. Call me that. Barnaby’s the Christian name.”
“You from England?”
The man nodded.
“This pilgrim’s looking for Boston,” said Bridger to the rest. “I told him straight, it’d be two, three days if the pikes ain’t muddy.”
“Yes, that’d do it,” said Broken Hand Fitzpatrick.
The rest nodded solemnly.
“You have to be careful of buffler in Boston,” Beckwourth said. “There’s a city law against making meat on the streets. Other than that, Boston’s just the place.”
“Skye,” said Smith, “why are you going to Boston?”
“It’s Mister Skye, sir. That’s how I want it.”
“Well, then, Mister Skye, you might enlighten us.”
“There’s a university in Cambridge, near Boston, and I’m going there to finish my schooling, sir. I didn’t catch your name, but I take it you’re in charge here.”
“No one’s in charge, Mister Skye. These are free trappers, not employees. But yes, I’m a partner in the fur company.”
“This fellow’s going to Boston,” yelled Black Harris.
“You don’t say,” said Louis Vasquez. “Boston, is it?”
Skye nodded. “Boston, sir. It seems to be less far than I thought.”
“Just head east, and before you know it, you’ll be matriculating,” said Davey Jackson.
“I’m much obliged to you, sir,” the Englishman said. “Is there a way a man could trade some labor for some food?”
“Nope, there plumb ain’t,” Sublette said.
Skye looked crestfallen. “Will labor buy me a rifle, or anything at all?”
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