Wind Walker (69 page)

All that remained for the more than ten thousand visitors to do on the morning of the eighteenth was to await the long-overdue wagon train that was bringing what Mitchell had promised was a mountain of gifts.

For as far as the eye could see, the grassy hillsides had been cropped all the way down to the prairie. Every step of a hoof or moccasin, every little gust of wind, stirred up clouds of dust. After two weeks in this same location, the human refuse, pony droppings, and offal from all those butchered dogs and ponies made for an unimaginable stench. The first to go were Major Chilton and his soldiers, who struck their tents and moved their camp two miles on down the North Platte to a sweeter-smelling locale. Yet Mitchell and his commissioners held fast.

“We will stay with these Indians,” Mitchell vowed. “We have asked them to believe our word that the presents are
coming. The least we can do is to stay here with them till the annuities arrive.”

So the warrior bands waited out the eighteenth, then the long, hot nineteenth, feasting both nights, since the camps still boasted plenty of dogs. Then on September 20 the long wait was over! With Chilton’s dragoons posted on either side of the long train, the freight wagons finally rumbled into the valley, down to Mitchell’s arbor, and squared themselves into a large corral as some ten thousand Indians cheered, sang, and shouted, all of them eagerly pressing forward, expecting the flow of presents to begin. But the superintendent had his interpreters explain to their wards that he would not be presenting the gifts until the following morning because he had to go through the annuities and separate the goods.

At long last the great day arrived. Again Mitchell had the cannon fired, and the chiefs advanced on the brushy arbor. The crowd waited breathlessly while the most important men in each band were presented with army uniforms. Dealing with rank among the plains and mountain tribes was always an extremely sensitive and touchy affair, something that would have been horribly botched if it weren’t for men like Fitzpatrick and Bridger firmly establishing the order in which the chiefs and their subalterns were called forward for their individual ceremony. To each Mitchell presented a wool coat dripping with braid and ribbon, along with a pair of wool army britches. To the most important of the delegates, Mitchell also presented a sword and a peace medal suspended on a bright blue ribbon.

One after another the chiefs put on their coats, patting the shiny brass epaulettes on their shoulders, running their tawny hands over the gold braid and glittering buttons, strutting before their people with unabashed self-importance. When Pretty On Top and the other headmen returned to the circle with their gifts, britches draped over their arms, Scratch leaned over and whispered to his wife.

“What you figger our chiefs gonna do with them pants?”

“Pants?” she echoed the English word.

He patted his leggings, then pulled up the hem of his cloth shirt and tugged at his belt. “Pants.”

With a grin she said, “They cut off.”

“Cut off?” he asked.

“See how Flat Mouth does now,” she said, pointing at the war chief.

The war leader had dropped to his knees, pulled out his belt knife, and begun cutting both the crotch and the seat out of the light blue army britches until he had a pair of wool leggings. Quickly untying his buckskin leggings from his belt, he cut some pieces of fringe from them and threaded it through the belt loop that remained at the top of each wool tube. Then he stuffed one of his bare appendages down the pants leg and tied it to the outside of his belt. In a few easy steps Flat Mouth had made himself a new pair of fancy leggings, warm for the coming winter.

“I’ll be gusseted for a hog!” Titus exclaimed in a whisper. “If that don’t beat all. I figgered for sure them fellers was gonna throw those white-man pants in the first fire they come to!”

Now the murmurs of the crowd grew to become bedlam as Mitchell called the chiefs forward again, this time to assist in passing out more than $50,000 worth of blankets and beads, kettles and bolts of cloth, along with all the rest of the shiny new trade goods to their respective peoples. Each band impatiently waited their turn through the rest of the morning, into the afternoon, and on till sunset, when Mitchell suspended the presentation of the annuities. But at 9:00 a.m. the following morning, the ceremonies continued. It wasn’t until early afternoon of the twenty-second that everything had been distributed. Rather than waiting until the next morning, some of the bands began tearing down their lodges, gathering their herds, and starting away for the fall hunt.

At sunrise the following day, Robert Meldrum waited with the Crow while Scratch went to fetch Fitzpatrick for some final words before the trader started Pretty On Top’s delegation back for the north country.

“When do you reckon I’ll see your face up near my post again?” Meldrum asked as they watched the white-headed agent shaking hands with each of the three dozen Crow delegates.

Titus shrugged. “Don’t rightly know. Late in the season as it is now, we’re likely to lay over the winter with Bridger. Maybeso see what comes next summer when them emigrants start rolling through.”

“It’s for sure Jim can use your help about his place, busy as I hear he is with them folks bound for Oregon.”

Titus gazed at Meldrum, held out his arm to the trader. “Don’t know when I’ll find myself on your doorstep again.”

“Been a long, long time since you ever had to be anywhere.” And Meldrum grabbed Scratch’s arm, shaking it vigorously.

“Onliest place I ever had to be was ronnyvoo!” he said. “I’ll see you again one of these seasons,” Titus promised. “Leastways, that’s what Real Bird promised me.”

“Real Bird? The old seer?”

“That ol’ rattle-shaker said I was gonna leave the Crow two more times, but no more after that,” he explained. By then the Crow were mounting up all around them. “So I figger I still got some travelin’ to get outta my mokersons afore my bones go white and groan in the wind.”

“Stop by the fort when you come back to the Yellowstone, Titus Bass,” Meldrum said with melancholy as he started for his horse. “We’ll share us a drink of that special brandy you don’t like at all, the stuff you still guzzle down like a thirsty man stumblin’ in off the desert!”

He smiled at the trader and tugged down the wide brim of his floppy hat. “Watch your back trail, friend.”

“You watch what you got left of your topknot, Titus.” Meldrum reined his horse around, then suddenly brought it around in a half circle again to stop beside Scratch for one last word as the_ Crow delegates set off. “I like your company, Titus Bass. I like your company a lot. I sure hope the First Maker sees to it we have more time to share together.”

That sentiment brought the hot sting of tears to his eyes. “Me too, Robert Meldrum. I pray you an’ me got a lot more time to share together too.”

While the Crow slogged their ponies through the shallow, muddy waters of the North Platte, Bridger rode up and dismounted. Together with Fitzpatrick, the two old mountain men came over to stand with Bass and his family.

When Titus turned at last to look at the Indian agent, he got tickled looking at the wide grin carved on Fitzpatrick’s face. “Shit, Tom—you look like the barn cat what just ate a nest of swallows!”

“I s’pose it’s bound to show.”

Bridger held out his hand and shook with Fitzpatrick. “You done good here, Tom. You done real good.”

“If this peace holds—I will feel like I done some good,” the agent responded. “All of us tried to make a go of the fur trade, but the big money ripped the beaver out from under little fellas like us. I’ve tried my hand at this and that for the last ten years … so everything I’ve set my mind to now is resting on this treaty.”

“By Jehoshaphat, you done it, Tom!” Bass cheered.

“I sure as hell hope so,” Fitzpatrick replied. “Maybeso, we can count that treaty paper as the promise of a lasting peace here on the High Plains.”

“What’s your plans now, Fitz?” Bridger asked. “Can you come over to the post with us for a visit, maybe do some huntin’ like the old days?”

“You ’member when we cut our way right into Blackfoot country, that brigade you an’ me was leadin’?” Tom replied. “I’d like to do that sometime, come over to your place and have us a good talk about the old days.”

“Ain’t no better time’n now,” Scratch advised.

Fitzpatrick shook his head. “Official duties, fellas. We’re lighting out this morning for Washington.”

“W-Washington?” Scratch echoed. “You an’ who?”

“We’re going east with Mitchell,” Fitzpatrick explained. “Now he’s gotta sell Congress on the treaty terms we wheedled outta these chiefs.”

“Just you an’ him?” Bridger asked.

“No—we convinced eleven chiefs to go with us.”

“All the way east to Washington,” Titus enthused. “That’s a piece of travelin’, Tom.”

“Sioux, Cheyenne, an’ some Arapaho too,” he said, then looked at the ground a moment. “I sure hope them government fellas can hold the promise of what we guaranteed these Injuns over the last few days.”

Bridger laid his hand on Fitzpatrick’s shoulder. “Soon as you get back to the mountains, come on over to Black’s Fork.”

“That’s right,” Bass said, holding out his arm to clasp the agent’s wrist. “No matter what them gussied-up, stuffed-shirt folks do to you an’ your treaty back in Washington … count on me an’ Jim bein’ there to share a jug with you—either to celebrate your treaty, or to cry in mis’ry with you, that too.”

The two of them threw their arms around one another, then Fitzpatrick embraced Bridger. Without another word, the whitehead turned and trudged away for the council grounds.

“Damn,” Titus grumbled in a whisper after the Indian agent was out of earshot.

Quietly Bridger said, “You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?”

“What’s that, Gabe?”

“Fitzpatrick’s treaty don’t stand a ghost of a chance, does it?”

“Nothin’s gonna change, Jim.” He turned to look at his old friend. “Those white men back east ain’t gonna keep givin’ a few presents to these tribes out here … but these warriors ain’t gonna give up their fightin’ for a few beads and blankets. The tribes been makin’ war on each other for longer’n there’s been white men out here to the mountains.”

“No piece of paper ever gonna change that,” Bridger agreed.

Scratch looked at his family gathered nearby, busily rolling up their bedding, as he said, “Only thing what might change one day is them tribes gonna stop makin’ war on each other … an’ they’ll start makin’ bloody war on them white,
gussied-up folks made all them tomfool promises to ’em way back when.”

Bigger than life, Shadrach Sweete himself was standing with Bridger’s longtime partner, Louis Vasquez, outside the stockade walls of Fort Bridger, both of them watching the return of the Shoshone delegation. On up the valley from the post stood more than five dozen lodges, pony herds dotting the meadows. Down in the creek bottoms the cottonwood blazed with a golden fire, touched by the late-autumn sun. For the old man known as Titus Bass, this place and this moment had the feel of homecoming.

“Jim Bridger!”

Gabe shouted in glee, “Shadrach Sweete, his own self!”

As Vasquez waved his hat and the tall man started toward the riders, Sweete suddenly stopped, his huge moccasins kicking up dust. “Could that really be Titus Bass?”

“Hell if it ain’t!” he roared back as he reined up, kicked his right leg over and plopped to the ground. “Damn, but you’re back from Oregon!”

All three of them met at once there in front of the open double gates while curious Shoshone men and women came out from camp to shout their greetings to Washakie’s returning delegates.

“You give up on farmin’?” Titus asked as he and Jim gazed up at the face of their old friend.

“Never was much for scratchin’ at the ground,” Sweete admitted.

“Been four year now,” Bridger stated as he pounded a hand on Shad’s shoulder. “What you done with yourself, young’un?”

“Pray tell how’s that daughter of mine—Roman an’ their li’l’uns?” Scratch inquired before Shad could utter a word.

“I spent some time with them, raising a cabin an’ a barn with Roman,” he explained. “At the same time I was helping Esau get a roof over his head for the comin’ winter too.”

Bridger asked, “You have Hudson’s Bay folks lookin’ over your shoulder?”

He nodded and stepped between the two of them, looping an arm over Jim’s shoulder, another thick arm around the bony Titus Bass, as they started moving slowly toward the open gates where Vasquez had disappeared, headed for the trading room. “We never went hungry, my family didn’t. Plenty of folks needed help, an’ they paid us in vittles. Me an’ Esau even lent a hand to Meek a’times.”

“He ever come back to Oregon after them Cayuse troubles?”

“Sure did,” Shad remarked. “Don’t know why he took a southern trail after he got word of the Injun murders back to Washington. But he traipsed on down through Santa Fe.”

“I was wondering where he went,” Jim said. “After him and Squire Ebbert come through late that winter of forty-eight, I ’spected to see ’em come back through again inside of a year.”

Coming to a halt just inside the double gates, Sweete turned to Bridger and said, “That had to be hard on you too, Gabe—losin’ your li’l Mary Ann—”

Grabbing the front of Jim’s cloth shirt, Titus interrupted, “I didn’t know you’d lost your daughter too, Jim.”

“Like Joe lost his li’l Helen, my Mary Ann was carried off by them Cayuse,” he confessed as he stared at the toes of his moccasins. “She was less’n thirteen summers by then. No tellin’ if them bastards killed the girl … or a buck took a shine to her an’ made her his squaw.”

“Vaskiss’s missus told me you took a new wife,” Shad announced as women and children dismounted and kept their horses at a distance from the walls.

“Hell—sounds to be you’ve been here long enough to catch up on all my news!”

“Little more’n a week now, I callate,” Sweete said. “Snakes was already camped yonder when I got in. I s’pose they been markin’ time for Washakie and his chiefs to get back from the big talks over to Laramie.”

“Truth be,” Titus whispered, “Gabe’s been married twice’t since you left, Shadrach.”