Ride the Moon Down tb-7

by Terry C. Johnston

  “I will certainly do my best to return, once I’ve seen to some nagging family and financial affairs back east,” the nobleman answered, grown all the more melancholy as they watched.

  “Mayhaps you should shet yourself of what nags at you,” Bass suggested. “Put it behind you here and now, no matter if you don’t make it to another ronnyvoo.”

  Sighing thoughtfully, Stewart eventually nodded. “I came to my first rendezvous with George Holmes—a traveling companion. Since setting off across the plains, we had tented together. Poor George. In rendezvous camp I had arranged a liaison … arranged for a squaw to come to our bower for the night, so I prevailed upon George to sleep elsewhere.”

  Stewart related how Holmes had taken this request for privacy in good humor, carrying his blanket with him to a grassy spot near their bower, and lain down to sleep beneath the light of a nearly full moon. Sometime in the deep of early-morning darkness, the barking of dogs, shouts of men, and hammer of running feet awoke the nobleman. With a curious crowd he hurried to the commotion, finding a rabid gray wolf glaring at its victim without showing the slightest fear of the men rushing up. A few feet away sat George Holmes—his face torn and bleeding.

  Turning to Whitman, Stewart explained, “There was nothing our Dr. Harrison could do for poor George but bathe his wounds and bind them up. In the next few days I couldn’t shake the sickness I felt in my soul that I had been the cause of this tragedy.”

  Although Holmes’s wounds healed quickly, his normal, lighthearted mood began to worsen. Over the next few weeks, the nobleman explained to his audience, George began to grow more morose and despairing, expressing his certainty that he was bound to die of hydrophobia.

  “It wasn’t until weeks later that poor George suffered his most terrifying fit,” Stewart declared. “He tore off his clothing, ripped out his hair, scratched at his skin as he ran shrieking into the timber. We immediately went in search of … but we never found a trace of him.”

  “Not uncommon,” Whitman replied. “There is nothing anyone can do once the hydrophobia attacks the brain.”

  His eyes begging for sympathy, Stewart said, “Never has a day gone by when I haven’t reproached myself for that sad, sad night.”

  “Like the doctor said, I don’t figger you can blame yourself for what the wolf done,” Bass declared. And thinking that he should change the subject, he asked, “You said you made two mistakes. What of the second?”

  For some time Stewart stared at the flames, then spoke with guarded resignation. “I have shot men in the heat of great battles, where I have run them through with my sword—looking them in the eye as I killed by my own hand. But never before have I indirectly done harm to another, much less caused their death. Not only did I bring about the ruin of George Holmes, but with heedless words uttered in the heat of my anger, I as much as pulled the trigger on the gun that killed another.”

  From the corner of his eye, Scratch watched Antoine Clement suddenly turn away and step into the darkness beyond the fire’s light as if he were no longer able to endure his employer’s self-inflicted pain.

  “Don’t mean a damn—you didn’t shoot the man yourself,” Tom Fitzpatrick consoled gruffly.

  Stewart waved off that comfort and said, “I might as well put the gun to Marshall’s head.”

  “Marshall?” Whitman repeated.

  “It was the English name I gave to the servant who had been with me since thirty-three when we first crossed the plains for these mountains. He was of the Iowa tribe,” Stewart explained. “From time to time I caught him stealing some trifle from me.”

  “The man is responsible for his own death,” Clement argued, suddenly stepping into the firelight as if to set the record straight. “For some time you knew he was a thief. No one made him steal your horse.”

  Rising to turn his rump to the flames, the nobleman began his story. “My party was working our way north after a winter in Sante Fe, several days north of Bents’ Fort when Marshall—for some unknown reason—decided that he wanted to steal my prized thoroughbred, Otholo.”

  On their way north along the Front Range, Marshall stole off one night on the Scotsman’s prized horse, also purloining Stewart’s favorite English rifle. When the nobleman discovered the loss the next morning, the short fuse of his anger flared. Exploding in a fury, he roared that he would offer a five-hundred-dollar bounty to the man who brought him the thief’s scalp.

  “Unfortunate that Markhead was in the sound of my voice,” Stewart declared sadly.

  Although there was no braver man than this Delaware Indian come west to trap beaver, many would question if he possessed even a modest strain of common sense. As a guide for the Scottish nobleman, Markhead evidently took it as his personal quest to hunt down the young horse thief. Besides, five hundred dollars was nothing short of a fortune to him.

  Without saying a word to anyone, the Delaware slipped away from camp on his own.

  Two days later Markhead returned, leading Stewart’s thoroughbred and brandishing Marshall’s scalp at the end of the recaptured English sporting rifle.

  “My thoughtless words, spoken in a fury, killed that Indian boy,” Stewart groaned.

  Disgusted and sickened, the Scotsman tossed the scalp into the brush, but eventually paid Markhead that handsome reward so rashly offered.

  “I don’t figger you can lay claim to knowing what’s in the addled brain of another man,” Bass declared, thinking back on an old friend of his own, Asa McAfferty. “Can’t none of us know what another’ll do.”

  “Two deaths by my hand, as surely as if I held the payment of their eternal debt in the balance.” Stewart stood and stretched, holding his palms over the flames. “To die in battle, under the honor of arms, is one thing. But here in this wilderness, I’ve learned there is no certainty of an honorable death. What a bitter lesson this has been for me, gentlemen: learning how quick and capricious, and truly senseless, death can be.”

  Whitman stood beside Stewart, asking, “Is death anything but capricious?”

  The British soldier gazed at the missionary physician and said, “Men ride into battle, finding they can smell the nearness of that horror. In war, death is not capricious. It is an absolute, a veritable truth. But here in your American wilderness … I have seen truth stood on its head.”

  Snowflakes big as cottonwood shavings landed on his back and shoulders, slowly seeping into his deer-hide shirt as he hunched over the last of the trap sets.

  The flakes fell slow and heavy, almost audible when he held his breath, when he stilled his frozen hands and clenched his chattering teeth. Soaked all the way to the scrotum, Bass listened as the storm tore itself off the high peaks above him, careening down the slopes toward the foothills below him. Listened to these first newborn cries of another winter storm a’birthing.

  Two more days and he would have enough beaver collected that he could ride back to her. They would spend a few nights together; then he would pack Samantha and take off again to try another one of those streams that tumbled down from the timbered slopes along the Front Range here below the barren hood of Long’s Peak—named by that intrepid explorer who ventured across the Central Rockies in the wake of Lewis and Clark’s expedition through the northern mountains.

  For the past several months he had forged this pattern: six or seven days alone among the spruce and pine and barren quaky, then returning for two or three nights in her arms, days spent bouncing Magpie on his knee, teaching the girl and her mother a little more English by the fires at night.

  Each time he rode off, Bass left behind a stack of hides for Waits-by-the-Water to scrape while he was gone. Gone long enough for a man to grow lonely for the sound of the woman’s voice, long enough for him to become ravenous for her flesh. Each time he returned, she seemed surprised with the fury of his coupling, yet responded to his hunger with an insatiable appetite of her own.

  Here, deep in his forty-second winter, it seemed that he took longer to convince his joints to
move each morning as he awoke in that cold loneliness before dawn. And it took all the longer for his bones to forgive him their immersion in the freezing water, longer to warm themselves when he returned from his trapline. But he nonetheless continued to find the beaver, though forced to ride farther into the hills, deeper still into rugged country. Those days of endless meadows clogged with beaver dams and lodges were gone. Gone too were the huge rodents who yielded pelts so big the mountain men called them blankets.

  Gone were the days of easy beaver.

  Now it was enough that a man catch something in a trap every two or three days. Not near enough beaver sign that Bass could expect to bring one to bait every day, but he still figured these long winter sojourns into the hills were worthwhile. Every winter pelt was one plew more that he wouldn’t have had if he had dallied until spring began to thaw the high country.

  Maybeso the trapping would have been all the better up north in Absaroka this past autumn, but then they would have been obligated to lie in for the winter with the Yellow Belly’s Crow. Which would rub him right up against Strikes-in-Camp. And Crane too. Scratch didn’t figure he was ready to see that much grief on one woman’s face, not ready to find out how it would tear his own wife apart again. Better all around that they had turned south from Fort William, making for the South Platte where they ran onto Fort Vasquez, the new post founded just that autumn by partners Andrew Sublette and Louis Vasquez.

  Louis was one of twelve children born to a father who had migrated to Canada from Spain, where he married a Frenchwoman before migrating again, south this time, to St. Louis on the Mississippi where his children grew up around that heart of the fur trade.

  Andrew was the younger brother of the legendary William and Milton. After making his first trip west with his eldest brother to the Wind River rendezvous of 1830, the last for the firm of Smith, Jackson & Sublette, Andrew next accompanied Bill on that ill-fated 1831 trip to Taos that saw the tragic death of Jedediah Smith on the end of a Comanche buffalo lance. By 1832 and the famous rendezvous fight with the Gros Ventres in Pierre’s Hole, Andrew was becoming a mountain man in his own right.

  The following year found him pushing upriver with his brother’s partner, Robert Campbell, to challenge the might of the American Fur Company on the upper Missouri by establishing some rival posts adjacent to the company’s established forts. Their eye-to-eye challenge to Astor’s empire quickly bore fruit, and the two competitors agreed to divide the fur company between them. Andrew was chosen to carry the articles of agreement, along with all the property the partners were turning over to the company, up the Yellowstone to Fort Cass in the summer of 1834.

  From the Bighorn he had pushed south for Independence Rock on the Sweetwater, then on to the North Platte to reach the new post being constructed by his brother and Campbell by the last week of September. Later that fall, when Andrew first met the older Louis Vasquez at Fort William, Sublette and Campbell were already considering their withdrawal from the mountains. Back and forth they discussed their belief that the fur trade had reached its zenith, with profits sure to continue their slide.

  Eager to step out of his brother’s shadow that autumn, Andrew marched south with Vasquez, striking the South Platte, where they constructed a temporary post they christened Fort Convenience, trading for buffalo robes from the Arapaho and some Cheyenne hunting in the area.

  Then in late December of thirty-four, excited by the heavy packs of furs and their prospects, the partners set out overland for St. Louis after briefly considering whether or not they should attempt to float the furs downriver in mackinaw boats. Surely they had proved to themselves that there was a vast potential for raising a post squarely between Fort William to the north and Bents’ Fort south on the Arkansas. The future seemed theirs for the taking.

  By April of thirty-five Andrew had returned to Fort William with Robert Campbell to assist with the transfer of the post to Fitzpatrick, Bridger, Drips, and Fontenelle. Early in the summer Louis was back in St. Louis where they both presented themselves to William Clark, petitioning for a license to trade among the tribes. Returning to the South Platte by late summer, the new partners started on their stockade with the help of a few men hired in St. Louis, struggling to raise enough shelter before the first winter storm rumbled down the slopes of Long’s Peak to batter them.

  Reaching that high ground east of the river, Scratch and Waits-by-the-Water found workers furiously felling trees and dragging those cottonwood timbers back to an open patch of ground where they were raising stockade walls.

  “Soon as the frost is gone from the ground next spring,” explained the stout Vasquez, “we can start making ’dobe bricks. Like the Bents done on their fort.”

  Titus told them how he had been to that post on the Arkansas, had seen plenty of adobe construction for himself down in San Fernando de Taos.

  “You bring your furs here,” the thinner Andrew Sublette promised, “beaver or buffalo—we’ll give you top dollar.”

  “You don’t go so far away, not down to Bents’,” Vasquez said. “Get furs in these hills, trade them here too.”

  “We’ll be back,” Scratch promised. “Maybeso camp for the winter.”

  After resting nearby for two days watching the construction, Bass led his wife and animals across the sandy bottom of the South Platte and pushed into the foothills where Long’s Peak brooded over them for the next ten weeks as he worked this stream, then another. Gradually pushed down from the high country a little farther day by day, Scratch and Waits-by-the-Water worked feverishly, rising well before first light to wolf down some food before he trudged away into the dark and she began her hide scraping before Magpie awakened. Each night found them working on the hides, cleaning the weapons, making repairs in clothing and adjustments to the square-jawed American traps or those manufactured of Juniata steel.

  By the middle of December when the cold had grown serious, they traipsed down from the foothills, returning to the banks of the South Platte to find that the laborers had thrown up enough of a shelter to protect the traders and their goods from winter’s furies.

  Reaching the edge of the prairie at the foot of the mountains where the river meandered north, they chose a spot to camp out the rest of the winter near the new stockade. In a small copse of old cottonwood they chopped down the saplings they needed and cleared out a clutter of underbrush before erecting their shelters. The smallest protected the beaver pelts he caught and she grained and stretched. A partially enclosed bower gave her a place to work throughout the day as she cooked and tended to Magpie’s needs close by their fire. And on the opposite side of the fire pit sat their sleeping shelter, where they could lash down all the flaps the better to withstand the passing of each icy gale winter hurled at them.

  In less than a week he rode off again, this time on his lonesome. Bass turned once, looking behind to find the child standing hand in hand with her mother. Waits bent to say something, and when she straightened, both of them waved. He knew the woman was crying, probably angry with herself that she could not stop the tears that might frighten Magpie.

  Back again after eleven days of trapping, he moseyed up to the post one afternoon, hungry for some male conversation.

  “I don’t think much of your big brother,” Bass told Andrew Sublette. “He done all he could to ruin the fur trade for other men. And now he’s run off back east when the running’s good.”

  The handsome twenty-seven-year-old failed to protest. Instead, he reluctantly nodded. “I don’t agree with all what Billy’s done, but I can’t figure him for a bad sort.”

  Dryly, Louis Vasquez asked, “All’s fair in love and business, eh?”

  Andrew glared at his partner a moment. “No matter what any man says, Billy made a go of everything he done. So maybe if we’re gonna make it out here our own selves, you better savvy we’ll need some of Bill’s determination to see we don’t come out second-best.”

  Scratch wagged his head. “How your brother cheated that Yank
ee fella named Wyeth, same time Billy was throwing your other brother Milton square into the middle of it—”

  “Milt was already in the middle of it!” Andrew fumed.

  “Don’t put that underhanded back stabbing on Milt,” Bass growled. “I heard the story of how Billy slipped around seeing to it that Rocky Mountain Fur Company refused them supplies they told Wyeth to bring out to ronnyvoo. Then your brother Billy made Milt out to be part of all his bamboozling!”

  “Billy had no other choice,” Andrew answered defensively, yet without much conviction. “Don’t you see? Those five partners still owed him a debt from previous years. So when Billy learned they arranged to have the Yankee bring out their supplies, he figured they was breaking their contract with him when they was already bound to him—”

  Vasquez interrupted. “Even though Billy Sublette was determined to keep every last one of them a prisoner in his grip?”

  “If Billy was a better businessman than them partners were, so be it,” Andrew admitted grudgingly.

  “That strikes center, it does,” Bass added. “I’ll agree that Gabe and Fitz and the rest of ’em, they was better trappers, better men than they was businessmen.”

  “Don’t you remember, Andrew—how the two of us decided we wasn’t gonna be the sort of trader your brother was?” the Spaniard asked in that tiny trading room where more than a dozen men sat smoking their pipes and drinking coffee to wile away a winter afternoon.

  “Billy don’t run me, Louis,” Andrew vowed. “We don’t need him no more.”

  “’Sides, I heard him and Campbell ain’t ever coming back to the mountains,” Bass said.

  “That’s right,” Vasquez declared, looking at Scratch evenly. “Seems them two’re buying up land back in St. Louis. Gonna be country gentlemen. So maybe Andrew’s right after all: we ain’t gonna worry ’bout Billy Sublette making trouble for anyone out here no more.”

  13

  Each time Scratch returned to Waits-by-the-Water throughout the rest of that winter, bringing in more beaver pelts from the streams and creeks ribboning the nearby slopes, he couldn’t help but notice how the ricks of buffalo robes multiplied in the fort’s storage house when he rode over to the post for the sound of male voices, some man’s talk, or just to hear a bit more English than he could wring out of his wife.