Into the Savage Country (3 page)

“You going back up?” I asked after a long while.

“Nope. One fifty-two. That’s it for me. You going up with Smith?”

“Yep.”

“You ever been up?”

“Nope.”

He reached over. “Good luck to you, son.”

“Good luck to you here in the city.”

His calluses were like hardened mud. He could have squashed my hand if he liked.

“Good night,” he said.

For the next four months the fifty-six men of the 1826 Rocky Mountain Fur Company brigade hauled a keelboat fifteen hundred miles up the Missouri. It was terrible, soul-crushing work, and in the first three weeks we lost sixteen men to defections. It was only the memory of my father’s dismissive words that kept me from joining those deserters. For fourteen hours a day we pulled on that cordelle or poled in mud flats, baked by the sun and hardened by constant exertion until our bodies became all browned skin and wiry muscle, and the notch in the shoulder where you leaned on the pole had a permanent divot and discoloration. At dusk we’d pull up along some mud bank and collapse, sleeping where we fell in the dirt.

I had imagined escapades in the wilderness and romantic dashes across the prairie on wild ponies, but for those first weeks I was nothing less than a galley slave, and it was not until the eighth week of my servitude that I got a real sight of the western prairie.

It was August 1826, and for once there was favorable wind and draft. The sail was unfurled and the voyageurs, as we jokingly called ourselves, were handed weapons and ordered to hunt. The horses, which had been driven along by handlers, were saddled up and the next thing I knew I was riding through a dry runnel on horseback. I crested a hilltop to see sparse grass and the sunburned vastness of rolling land spread out in all directions. The locusts were droning and droning and a single bird flew silently in the distance and the white sky seemed very far overhead. It was as if the world had suddenly grown much larger than I had ever imagined and though it was grand, it was also solemn. The feeling of the prairie was of being at the cusp of a great mystery, infinite, overwhelming, and bewildering, and above all else, absolutely solitary. The utter isolation of the place settled into me.

The favorable wind lasted for three days, and for all that time we hunted and dashed back and forth over the sparse land. On the morning of the third day we saw smoke to the west, and a kid from Ohio named Ferris, Blanchard, and I rode out to investigate. After an hour of scrambling up and down those thorny, rock-lined runnels we came across a smoldering Mandan village with the dead sprawled everywhere, heads bloated and blackened with their eyes bulged out and an awful smell. The bodies were stripped and animals had been at them. At a rock-lined well we found a naked boy with a prickly pear shoved in his mouth. He was missing his left hand and later I saw the hand, like a small black flower, stuck in the branches of a cottonwood.

Blanchard, who was showing himself to be a tedious blow-hard, acted as if the natives were nothing more to him than dead beasts. “Looks like this one’s got his manhood shoved in his mouth!” I remember him crying, as if it were a carnival spectacle.
That, and other unpleasant commentary, lowered him in my estimation.

Ferris countered Blanchard’s indifferent affectation pointedly by covering the native boy with a deerskin he found in one of the lodges. I can picture Ferris now, nineteen years old, as small and frail and boneless as a doll, setting rocks gently around the edges of that deerskin, as if the wolves would not dislodge them as soon as we left. My sentiments were with Ferris, and I even moved to help him in his labor, but the sanctimonious way Ferris futilely tucked up the corners of the covering made me think he secretly set himself above us. Ferris’s father, we’d all heard, was a physician and a man of wealth, and Ferris had paid a lump sum to be taken on, as they’d not thought he’d make it halfway up the Missouri. The knowledge of this pampered upbringing along with his self-satisfied manner damned him in my mind.

The three of us rode back to our encampment that afternoon and reported what we’d seen. Smith put up double sentries for the night, and the next morning the wind shifted and we went back to hauling on the cordelle. The memory of that massacre faded, but the feeling of heaviness and solitude from the prairie had lodged inside me and expanded and spread and became entangled with a sort of hesitation or uncertainty. I felt as if the enormity of the land were squeezing me and that I was dissolving into the utter silence and implacability of that immense, monochromatic, edgeless place. This oppressive heaviness and strangeness washed over me bit by bit until I understood what I was feeling: I was afraid. Afraid that I would not measure up to the others, and that I would fail in the tests that inevitably lay ahead. Afraid, too, that I would be slain in some lonely place with no one to mourn me, as my father had predicted. I was sure the others around me were
real outdoorsmen, mountain men, all of them. Gruff, talented, and indifferent to hardship. All that late summer and into the fall these fears simmered inside me and mingled with the feeling of solitude and isolation and utter vastness of that great burned country.

By early November we arrived at the juncture of the Missouri with a large river that flowed to the south called the Yellow Stone. It was here that the hauling ceased and we unloaded the keelboat and prepared to encamp until the spring season.

Fort Ashley, which was positioned just downriver from the juncture of the two rivers, was three low sheds half sunk in the dirt and surrounded by incomplete palisades of sharpened cottonwood trunks. Ashley, Smith, and a few others slept in what we called the commissary. The rest of the men slept outside the palisades in a wooded area to the south of the fort in lodges of deerskin and sailcloth pilfered from the keelboat.

One morning in November, a week after we’d arrived at the forks, we were woken in our encampment by the call, “Absaroka! Absaroka!”

Ashley stumbled from the commissary, bareheaded, and motioned to the south where forty Crow on horseback approached, black dots on a snow-covered hillside.

“Fingers off the triggers,” Ashley called. “They come to barter powder for sustenance. We’ll eat well tonight as long as you corncrackers don’t blast ’em.”

The Crow trading party rode down the snowy slope and pulled up at four hundred yards and saluted us. We saluted back, though in a paltry way, as we were conserving powder. The
natives continued down, and when they arrived we saw their pack animals were stacked with smoked buffalo and deer meat.

The natives, curious about everything, were soon wandering among us, fingering all our personals, and at times looking to pilfer. It was the first time I’d seen the western natives up close. They wore sheepskin pants and ankle-high moccasins with fringes and fur hats and buffalo robes held at the neck with bear-claw clasps. They exuded an air of foreignness and savagery and most of the greenhorns kept their distance, but Ferris, I noted, mingled with the natives, putting on an air of affected and annoying friendliness, all the while scratching in a vellum notebook much like my own. I thought he took notes for his own memoirs, which I resented immediately, but when I drew close I saw he was not taking notes but making very quick and accurate sketches of the natives. He’d already done half a dozen. I even recognize myself in one, much to my disapproval.

Later, Ferris sat cross-legged in front of an old brave who had been blinded in one eye, repeating phrases in the native dialect.

“Sho da chi,”
he said slowly, which means “hello” in Crow.
“Sho. Da. Chi.”

Blanchard found this horribly affected, and mimicked in a mincing tone, “Show dahhh cheee … Showww daaahhh cheee!,” which sent the men snickering, as they thought Ferris imagined himself to be some Lord Byron of the wilderness.

Ferris ignored our ridicule, and while conversing with the one-eyed savage, took out a pair of reading glasses with one lens missing. Ferris put the broken glasses on the one-eyed native with a sort of pomp, which I understood was done as a jest. The other natives, seeing their one-eyed comrade wearing one-eyed spectacles, thought this was about the most amusing thing they’d
ever seen. The natives leaped and hung on each other and laughed loudly, and Ferris stood there, grinning and rocking from foot to foot, childishly pleased with his prank.

Later Ferris showed them how the lens could be held at an angle and used to start a fire. This impressed them immensely. Ferris gave the glasses to the one-eyed savage, who returned Ferris’s generosity by giving a triple-thickness buffalo-hide shield, intricately ornamented on the edges and wedged with bits of glass to reflect the sunlight. It was a wonderful, much envied piece of native artistry that we passed around to examine, and that brought us all down a notch.

There were songs that night, and feasting, and a second-year named Bridger tried to break out a bottle of Taos Whiskey that had been stowed in a hollow gourd. Smith and Ashley swiped the bottle, as they did not want drunk savages in the encampment.

I went to sleep with the murmur of conversations in a strange tongue filtering into my brain, and the next morning when I stumbled out of my lodging I saw the natives had already departed, the last ponies still visible on a far slope. As they reached the crest of the ridge they turned and saluted, the crack of rifles searing across the snowy flatlands in a way that left a feeling of emptiness afterward.

When they’d passed out of sight, I realized that Ferris had also stood watching their departure and was still standing there when I turned back to my lodge. He did not acknowledge my presence, but I had the feeling he knew I was there, and that however long I stayed, Ferris would make sure he stayed longer.

In the following days I noticed that Ferris questioned all the old-timers on the various tribes—their habits and customs and the
location of their villages. The veteran trappers began mockingly calling Ferris “the White Indian.” At the same time they started calling me “the Professor” because I carried a quill and parchment notebook. I resented being grouped with Ferris, and to combat the impression of being a fainthearted schoolboy, and also the doubts within myself, I made sure I was always the first out on our expeditions around the fort, and the first up to trap the nearby drainages, and in early December I made secret plans to trap the hills to the north of the fort. Smith had prohibited the greenhorn trappers from entering these hills, claiming they were full of Blackfoot, which only made the prospect more inviting.

During an unusual warm spell that felt more like fall than winter, Bridger and I slipped off and headed into the forbidden hills which were increasingly rocky and lofty to the north and west of the fort.

Bridger was a sturdy fellow with short-cropped hair and a ruddy complexion, and though he was as ignorant of book learning as the day he was born, he possessed all the accomplishments needed west of the Mississippi. He had a fine shot and was an excellent tracker and hunter and was as comfortable sleeping on rock as he was in a feather bed. He admired me for my education, and I admired him for his knowledge in everything that mattered out west.

After half a day of crossing drainages and scrambling up rocky hillsides we established our encampment at some hidden spot beneath towering pines and spruce, and immediately started off toward some drainages with our traps clinking, making a racket like we were the only living creatures for miles. We were about a quarter of an hour from our encampment when a shadow detached itself from a pine tree and vanished into the gloom with the sound of fading hoof beats. It happened so fast that I hardly
understood what I’d seen but Bridger was already wheeling his pony, bolting after the native, brandishing his weapon. I understood I ought to follow, but in my surprise I managed to drop my pistol. By the time I’d retrieved it, Bridger had already vanished. I started out after him, following his tracks, which I lost.

After a quarter mile, I’d stopped to listen for them when a wolf wearing a leather harness padded into the clearing. The wolf’s harness was painted with eagle and bear sketches and had feathers dangling and I understood I must be very close to a native encampment. I backed my horse into a shrub, trembling and panicked, though there was a very small voice in the back of my mind that was saying: Well, now you’ll have a story to tell back at the Rocky Mountain House. The vanity of my youthful ambitions for glory touched a corner of my mind even at that moment.

Then I mounted and rode as quietly as possible back toward our encampment. I imagined Bridger bound and being roasted alive at that very moment, but I told myself correctly there was little I could do about it.

I picketed my horse two hundred yards from our encampment and crept forward until I saw the meat hanging on the trees. I was just about to enter the clearing itself when a native stepped into view. He was less than twenty yards from me and was dressed almost identically to the veteran trappers in the brigade. He was wearing a trapper’s buckskin jacket and a buffalo robe and a beaver hat and leggins and fur-lined boots. He carried a Northwester musket and his horse was painted with the same buffalo and bear emblems as the dog’s harness. The native had a pistol in his belt and what looked like an I. Wilson blade. He stood in the middle of the campsite and looked at the lodge and the hanging meat and the smoldering fire. We had left a fleshing knife stuck
in a log. The native pried the knife out and tested the blade then used it to cut a strip from the hanging meat. He licked his fingers, pocketed the knife, jumped on his horse, and rode off through the gloom while I crouched in the shrubbery, too frightened to move. I waited for several minutes, then stole forth and collected our lodge and robes, knowing he’d return. I packed everything as best as I could and dashed off.

An hour later I arrived at a promontory that overlooked the juncture of the two rivers. From that spot I could see the snowcapped mountains and the two wide valleys with the rivers converging, and beyond that, the smoke from our fort rising into the late-afternoon light. I saw a rider with a pack horse moving toward the forks and I knew that was Bridger. So he was alive after all, I thought, and stood there grinning, feeling as if my heart had been clenched in a fist and suddenly beat freely again.