Into the Savage Country (29 page)

The next morning Red Elk found me as I cared for my horse, and with Branch translating, told me that years before, as a young man, he’d had a dream that a white man would be the conduit to save his village, and when he’d first seen me bleeding on those grassy hills after the surround he knew I was that man, and that was why he had looked at me so curiously when I writhed on the hilltop. It was why, when I raced against him, he had not brained me as he had Frazier. And he said that it was not only Ferris’s shot
that had convinced him to join in the raid on the British but my presence, as he was sure I would bring salvation to his tribe. He told me all this in his indifferent, sullen manner, and even now I do not know what to make of it. I do not believe in native magic, but I suppose I do believe in fate, and I know that Red Elk had looked at me curiously long before our lives were connected, and that I felt a strange affinity for him from the beginning and still do, and do not know how to explain this other than to say it happened and it seems a mystery to me, too.

Minutes later Red Elk jumped on his horse, held up the long gun that would defend his people for the remainder of his life, and without a word of farewell departed, Branch riding with him, as there was no free place for him in the settlements.

A half a day after that the brigade and our fortune reached Fort Ashley and as we crossed the last low rise and the fort came in sight, we all let out a cheer, as there was a keelboat being loaded with pelts at that very moment. It meant that the river was free of ice and those who desired could be back in St. Louis in a month. I had just taken this in when I saw a slight figure dressed in white on the deck of that keelboat. I was a quarter mile off but something thumped inside me and I knew that it was Alene standing on the deck and looking to the west. Instead of going to St. Louis as she had promised, she had endured all manner of hardships to be out there at Fort Ashley in case I returned.

I can hardly describe the feelings that overcame me at that moment. It was a relief combined with a sort of dropping inside. Momentarily flustered, I rode not toward her but away, galloping several hundred yards off with my heart pounding and my hands shaking. I don’t want to give the wrong impression. It was not regret I was feeling but the surprise of actually having survived and succeeded, and some other thing, too, that I can’t quite
name, something akin to the panic the mules get when they feel the yoke lowering, and perhaps, also, the glimmering thoughts of death that mingle with the conclusion of a great struggle. I had held myself steady for so long against failure and the imprecations of my father and the idea that my wandering nature was an unsteady and unsound foundation, and had been so certain of my eventual demise in some lonely place, that I hardly knew how to accept success. Alene had not left me but had ridden out to find me, and I felt my heart rising up to meet her sacrifice with my own. I understood that my days of adventure and wandering were over. It would be years before I understood how complete that ending would be, or how decisive.

By mid-spring we were back in St. Louis. Two months later we were married.

For a few months we were all famous men, but the brigade as a unit was never together again. Smith went back to his Rocky Mountain Fur Company and died two years later in an attack by the Comanche as he tried to open up a trade route with Santa Fe. Branch lived with the natives for many years and in his last days settled in a cottage to the west of the city with his Crow wife and was an emissary for the natives and their causes. Bridger became a scout for the government, a landowner, and father to at least fifteen native children. Glass retired to Oregon Territory and lives with his mule in the coastal mountains. And Ferris, as he’d promised, remained in St. Louis only to finish his studies, then returned to the mountains, and afterward has come back only infrequently, and increasingly unencumbered by pelts but laden instead with the wonderful canvases that are now spread across
the galleries in the great cities of our nation. When I see him now, bent-backed and aging, but still with that winning, open, carefree manner, it makes my heart surge, as Ferris still embodies the recklessness and grandeur and camaraderie of those early years in the drainages, and he brings back the memory of Layton and his triumphant final act, which is recorded in Ferris’s masterpiece,
Saving Grace
, where all can see the rock gates and the fire flaming and Layton in his fortification, brandishing his musket and defying the entire British brigade. Alene in particular admired this painting and several times remarked that as unlikely as it seemed, Layton had sacrificed himself for others, and must have been a much changed man after his year on the march.

As for me, with the returns from the company and the fame of being in the papers and Alene’s inheritance all coinciding, I’m afraid I paraded around for a few months, full of myself, and close enough to being intolerable that Alene once commented that she might as well have married Layton.

Several months after our marriage, Alene and I left for Pennsylvania to visit my family. Their correspondence had been full of misinformation about my glorious deeds, and I thought I ought to return while I was still worth something in their eyes. The journey home took three weeks on a paddleboat and another by cart, which I traded five miles from the farm for an expensive barouche. I put on a high collar and a Wellington hat and in that fancy carriage I sat next to Alene with my back straight and a stern expression. I could feel Alene scowling at me, thinking I was some puffed-up Grignon, hoping to lord my success over my poor relatives, but I told myself she did not know them, or know what I had suffered at their hands, and it was my dream to return in glory and riches and to impress them to no end. This will be my final triumph, I thought.

But as we passed the last bend of the county road and the old farm came into sight with its two oaks and little pond and orderly rows of greens, I felt my affected parading crumbling. Colonel, an old dog now, loped out to meet us. My brothers, portly and middle-aged, stepped out of the house, all smiles and excitement, eager to see their famous brother, and all my pretensions melted in an instant. My youthful exuberance surged and I leaped from the carriage and ran past that plodding horse, losing my hat, embracing them, one with each arm. I lifted my mother off the porch, and there was much free-flowing merriment on both sides, and I knew the barriers all along had not been in them but in myself, and I had conquered them at last, and I was happy and contented to be at home.

After a month we returned to St. Louis and Alene and I settled outside of the city on our own land to a life of comfort and industry that would make tedious recounting and does not belong on these pages. We have two sons. We have work to fill our days. I no longer yearn for the savage country, though I remember with satisfaction the adventures we had and the friends I made. I remember the days spent traversing the dark forests, the white rivers, and the far-off mountains. And though I have not forgotten our desperate moments, the dark times do not cling so much as the beauty and companionship, and this is as it should be. The compensation for youthful recklessness is contentedness and good nature in old age. Youth’s bright flame sears the mind and leaves us glorying in the past with an unalloyed affection that does not dim the present but enhances it with fond memories untarnished by their unpleasant parts. Layton, who died magnificently, would appreciate that, as even at his best, he was always a vain man. The hardships and horrors are covered over with time and those hills are so pretty from a distance.

This is a work of fiction and readers with close knowledge of this time period will find much that is familiar and also much that is bent to the purposes of the narrative. The timing of some historical events has shifted slightly. For example, we see General Ashley, Jedediah Smith, and Jim Bridger in places where we know they did not go and doing things we know they did not do. Despite this fictionalization, I hope the spirit of their characters and of the time rings true. In short, though I have made every attempt to be as historically accurate as possible within the confines of the narrative, this is a work of fiction and should be considered as such.

The sources that were read for this book, if listed, would stretch for several pages. There were three books in particular that inspired me: John Tanner’s
The Falcon
, W. A. Ferris’s
Life in the Rocky Mountains
, and Francis Parkman’s
The Oregon Trail
. I returned to these three books again and again to take in the spirit of adventure and curiosity that first attracted me to the trapping regions and the Indian country and the exploration of the west. Close readers of those three excellent books will find that I am indebted to them for many details of life on the trail. Diaries from the early trappers also make fine reading.

As always, I had the help of many generous readers who each improved this book. I’d like to thank in particular Tom Garrigus, Allison Glock, Chris Hebert, Michael Knight, Theresa Profant, Terry Shaw, Allen Weir, John Zomchick, and my family (Mom, Dad, Mike, Ian, and Erin), who all made this book better. I’d like to thank Jim Hardee at the Museum of the Mountain Man for offering his years of scholarship to minimize many foolish errors. I’d like to thank my agent David McCormick for believing in the book and my editor Deborah Garrison for her excellent advice and for shepherding the book to publication.