Buffalo Palace (42 page)

One of the group crowed, “We figgered you was the only one we could talk into it!”

“See what I mean, fellers?” Bridger asked Tuttle and Bass. “Well, now—I didn’t know no better than to be proud they asked me.”

“Shit, it made sense!” someone called out. “You was the youngest, boy!”

“So we figgered you was the best’un to try that hellhole river run,” another added.

A new voice bellowed, “If’n you didn’t come back—weren’t no sad loss, you being the sprout of the brigade!”

With a shrug at all the abuse he was taking, Bridger continued, “Don’t make me no never-mind now that I didn’t know they figgered it to be a damn lark they was putting me up to … that trip sounded like it’d be just the chance to pull the tiger’s tail.”

One of the older, grizzle-bearded trappers declared, “Young’uns like Bridger allays wanna be first to pull on a tiger’s tail!”

“Better’n sitting in winter camp all day, ever’ day,” Jim continued. “So I told ’em I’d settle their li’l argeement.”

“Not one of these here gaping fools figgered Jim were serious,” Fitzpatrick added. “Till next morning when they rolled outta their bed-shucks and found Bridger building hisself a boat.”

“A b-boat?” Tuttle asked in surprise.

“T’weren’t no big shakes—nothing more’n some stout willow branches I chopped down, just the way I’d watched the Injun squaws do it.”

An apt and eager student, Bridger had relished this opportunity to try his own hand at building a bullboat.
Driving the butt-ends of the willow into the ground around a four-to-five-foot circle, he bent the limbs over and tied all their narrow ends together to form something on the order of an upside-down basket.

“I tried to talk the fool out of it,” Fitzpatrick explained.

“And some of the rest of us too,” another claimed, “when we saw he’d got hisself serious ’bout going into that devil’s canyon.”

“You get that, boys? That morning while’st I was working on my boat, a handful of the ones what talked me into going come up to try talking me into
not
going,” Bridger explained. “ ‘What, you’re crazy as a March hare, young’un!’ said one of ’em to me. ‘Why, you don’t even know if’n you can find your way back here to us!’ said ’nother. ‘How ’bout waterfalls—likely you’ll drown like a rat!’ Then ’nother of ’em warned me, ‘How ’bout the Injuns? By God, you don’t know a damned thing about what Injuns is in that country!’ ”

Fitzpatrick added, “And I told Jim it didn’t matter a twit about which way the river goes anyhow.”

“Didn’t make me no never-mind,” Bridger said. “I kept my hands busy. Far better, I figgered, to be going somewhere. Not like the rest of them what were having their fun with me—all they was doing was sitting on their arses in camp.”

As the others laughed in agreement, Jim continued his story, telling how he had woven smaller willow limbs among the thicker ones, lashing each loop to make the framework as strong as he possibly could before he took a green buffalo hide and laid it over his small dome—hide to the inside. Then the detailed work began: sewing the buffalo skin to that willow framework, binding it all around the edge of that circular opening.

“By that next night I was ready to make her seaworthy,” Jim boasted proudly.

At a cookfire he heated up a large kettle of tallow rendered from a bear recently shot while he built himself a small fire over which he set the upside-down boat. When the hide grew hot to the touch, Bridger took a small wooden spoon and began to smear the melted tallow over
every seam and stitch and hole in that buffalo hide. That done, it was time to let his craftsmanship cool and harden.

“At sunup the following morning, I cut me as long a pole as I could find,” Jim told the group. “Something to push along again’ the bottom with, or shove me away from the rocks in the canyon, if that need be.”

“I give him one last chance to stay back,” Fitzpatrick stated with a shrug. “But he was bound to go, no matter what. I figgered I’d seen the last of the lad.”

Bridger continued, “Got my rifle an’ pouch, strapped on tomahawk and knife, then throwed in a big sack of some dried buffler meat—an I pulled that boat on over to the river.”

Potts shook his head, saying, “We all thought we was seein’ the last of Jim Bridger.”

Finally in the river, he slipped away slowly at first. Jim waved to the men on the bank and settled into his boat, gripping his pole, pushing his way into the main current. The men on the bank waved and shouted their farewells, many taking off their hats and raising them into the air in salute to his courage. Then all too soon Bridger couldn’t see them any longer. And beyond the second bend in the narrowing canyon, the river seemed to crash in upon itself, the current picking up speed.

Breathlessly, Bridger told the silent group, “It were like nothing I ever done afore.”

The Bear picked up that tiny bullboat with its lone passenger and hurtled them along faster and faster between the rising walls of the river’s canyon as the serene water transformed into a frothing, crashing, boiling cauldron that whirled Bridger round and round, bouncing the boat first against one wall, then against the rocks on the other side of the narrow chute. Eventually the sound of water crashing against rock began to thunder about him, pounding on his ears so brutally that it drowned out his own thoughts.

“I been drunk an’ wild-headed afore,” Jim explained. “But my head ain’t never been that twisted round and round!”

It was a cold ride too. He had begun to shake—not just out of fear—but there in the early winter the river
spray soaked him, the canyon wind chilled him … and before long he was shaking uncontrollably, frozen to the marrow. Yet somehow he maintained his death-grip on that long pole, struggling to push his boat this way, then that, doing his best to pitch through the center of the narrow gorge. And through it all he kept his rifle locked between his knees in the event he was pitched out by one of the many dizzying whirlpools, or by the series of frothy rapids he was flung over like driftwood, or hurled up against the boulders raising their heads in the middle of the channel—threatening to smash him and his tiny bullboat to splinters.

Then, despite his dulled reactions, Bridger realized the immense cold he was feeling was actually water. Looking down, he found his boat slowly filling with the dark, icy river. But try as he might in the next frantic minutes, Jim realized he wasn’t going to shove the boat to either shore: there simply was no bank—only canyon wails. On and on he hurtled, slowly taking on more water with every mile.

“I figgered I was damn well going under,” Bridger exclaimed calmly as he raised his face to the sky dramatically. “Began to think back to my time as a young’un in Missoura—I’d heard me many a story of the ol’ salts who talked about rivers out here what disappear right underground on a man.”

“Under … underground?” Titus asked with a gulp. Just like the rest of them, he was caught up in the young man’s story now.

“Yup—that’s what some of them ol’ fellers tolt me. Them rivers go right down a hole in the ground. So I figgered it was just ’bout any time I’d be sucked right into some hole with that mighty river—an’ I’d never see daylight, or the Rocky Mountains, or my friends ever again.”

It was no wonder Bridger felt such dire fate awaited him.

By that time the late-autumn sky was beginning to cloud over and the sun was all but blotted out as he careened on down the canyon, its walls growing steadily steeper—the sky became nothing but a narrow and darkening strip far overhead. Now there were times when his bullboat was suddenly thrust against an outcropping of rocks, where it was suddenly wedged—with the full force
of the water thundering against it—until Jim could free himself, using every last reserve in his young body … only to shove his boat back into the swirling madness of the gorge.

By then the boat was taking on more and more water, losing its natural buoyancy in the process as it slowly sank lower and lower in the freezing river. Then the strain of holding so much liquid began to tell on the bullboat’s crude, handcrafted framework. Creaking and groaning, the limbs began to shift with the weight of the water, and then some of Bridger’s sinew stitching began to unravel and loosen—the long strands of animal tendon becoming soaked to their limit.

“I figgered I was a goner an’ if I didn’t get sucked down under the ground with that river—then that river was bound to thrash me against the rocks,” Bridger told the group grown quiet as they were drawn further and further into the desperate story.

“Only thing for me to do was try to save myself,” Jim said. “So I reached down and felt in the water at the bottom of my boat to find my sack of meat. I stuffed it down inside my coat an’ made ready to jump out and try for some rocks where I could least get outta the water. Maybeso I could get my strength back and climb up the side, get back to the prerra—anything before that river sucked me right under the ground with it.”

But by some miraculous hand, right as he was preparing to cast his fate upon the water, the bullboat twisted around ungainly and Bridger caught a glimpse of what lay downriver.

“I’ll be damned if it didn’t look like smooth water!” Jim told the hushed crowd, many of whom had heard his story time and again—but found themselves caught up in its drama nonetheless.

Something told him to hang on, told him not to jump—giving him faint hope of riding it out a few moments longer. But he was sinking all the faster now, the river’s surface inching closer and closer to the top of his unwieldy craft. Then as he listened and shook uncontrollably with cold, Bridger realized the thundering roar of the rapids had begun to fade behind him. After so many terrifying minutes that had seemed more like endless days—
Jim finally thought he could hear the pounding of his own blood at his temples.

“I don’t know how I done it, but I got that boatful of water poled over to the first stretch of sandy bank I come across. Just in time, too—for my boat was ’bout ready to go under for good.”

Slogging out of the widening river, Bridger set his rifle and pouch in the limbs of a nearby tree, then returned to the bank, where he struggled to tip the bullboat over, completely filled with water as it was. Finally he was able to drag the heavy boat with its green waterlogged buffalo hide a few feet up the bank, where he turned it upside down to drain. Then he shivered as the cold wind came up, and decided he’d best build himself a fire.

“Later that afternoon when my buckskins was dried and I had pulled the wet load in my rifle, I figgered it was time to climb on up the rocks and see for myself just where that devil of a river did go off to.”

High in those rocks as the late-autumn light started to fade, Bridger finally discovered just how the wagers would be won or lost. He could see that the river continued south. Meandering though it was, it seemed to continue angling off to a little west of due south.

“But that wasn’t the pure marvel of it,” he admitted now, just as he had told the tale many times before.

As he stared off into the distance, his eyes following the river toward the far horizon, “Of a sudden—way out yonder—I happed to see more water’n I ever see’d since the day I was born.”

For a moment he turned and gazed back to the north, thinking about his original plans to return overland once he had determined just where the river flowed. But now, as he stared off into the distance, he felt again that unmistakable itch to search and discover, an itch that he knew he could not deny.

“Come sunup the next morning I put that bullboat back in the water and I was on my way. It weren’t long afore the world around me went so quiet, it was like everything was dead. By the time I come to where the river opened up into a peaceful stretch of water, I dipped my hand over the side and brung it to my lips. Salt! Sweat of
the Almighty—that’s what I tasted, fellas. Salt! Good Lord, I thought—had that river floated me all the way to the far salt ocean?”

In actuality Bridger had drifted on out of the mouth of the Bear into a great bay some twenty miles wide,
*
where he could barely see land far off to the right and left of him—but where the bay opened up to the south, there was nothing but water … for as far as he could see.

“I ain’t ashamed to tell you I was scairt,” Bridger confided. “Figgering I’d made the ocean, I wasn’t a stupid pilgrim about to go floating off to the other side of the world in that leaky ol’ bullboat. So this child poled hisself over to the shore quick as he could. Stepped my moker-sons out on a layer of salt that crunched under my feet, and I pulled that boat out behind me.”

With the sun rising toward midsky, young Jim set out on foot instead, moving south along the shoreline. He had put miles behind him before he finally made out the first sign of distant land. The farther south he walked, the more it became clear what he was seeing was a huge island
**
rising far out in that lifeless, salty expanse of endless water. Far, far to the southeast, it appeared the shore he was walking went on forever.

“And I never did see the other side of it neither!” Jim exclaimed, handing his cup to one of his compatriots for refilling. “Still scairt pretty bad, I took off on the backtrack. Made it back to my bullboat just afore dark. Gathered in some wood, started me a fire, and rocked that boat up on its side to hold off the cold winter wind. Next morning I started walking north, back the way I come.”

As he came up to those gathered around the fire and stopped, Jedediah Smith asked, “You know what Jim told us when he showed back up a few days later?”

Potts called out, “Bridger said, ’Hell, boys! I been clear to the Pay-cific Sea!”

“Would’ve been nice, fellas,” Smith said, gazing wistfully down at the fire, “if what Bridger did find two winters back was in fact a big bay of the Pacific Ocean.”

“You figger some way Jim run onto the Buenaventura, Jed?” Harrison Rogers asked.

“It would be by the hand of God, if it were,” Smith answered reverently, gazing off toward the west, where the legend of that fabled river dictated its waters would carry a man all the way from the spine of the Rockies clear down to the Pacific.