Centennial (57 page)

On the next day came a moment of triumph, for the small caravan passed over the Continental Divide, and Purchas shouted, “From here on, downhill all the way!” Elly reflected the reaction of many emigrants when she wrote:

August 9, Friday ... I cannot believe it. All my senses rebel at the idea, but it seems true without challenge. From Pittsburgh, which cannot be much above sea level, we have never once climbed a mountain nor even a hill, so far as I remember. The path has been absolutely level, yet now we find ourselves across the Rockies and at the top of a rise more than eight thousand feet high. I wonder if life is not much like that. We go along unmindful and all the while we are climbing a very steep mountain of insight and understanding. Remember how we used to guess about men and marriage. It was so much simpler than we thought ...

And then, as if Elly Zendt had been guilty of the sin of hubris, on the night of August 10, when the road lay clear and easy to Oregon, her husband Levi went into the darkness to check his four remaining oxen, and out of the shadows rose the elephant. It was gigantic, thirty or forty feet tall, with wild, curving tusks and beady eyes that glowed. It seemed to Levi to represent all the terror they had experienced and all that might lie ahead on the way to Oregon. It was overwhelming—the menace of that towering creature, and Levi knew that he was destined to turn back.

He returned to the camp, wakened Elly and said, “I saw the elephant.”

“Where?”

“Out there. We’re turnin’ back.”

She made no attempt to dissuade him, and before dawn he wakened the other two and told them, “We’re turnin’ back.”

“Why?” Seccombe asked.

“I saw the elephant.” That was enough. On this trail, when a man saw the elephant, clear and overwhelming, rising out of the darkness with those beady, flaming eyes, he must heed its warning.

“So you’re a turnaround?” Purchas asked contemptuously.

“I saw the elephant,” Levi said, “and he showed me you with your head hangin’ to one side, because in Oregon sure as hell they’re gonna hang you.”

For some minutes he lost sight of Purchas, for he was saying farewell to Seccombe. Despite their partnership in a perilous venture, the Englishman showed no regret at their forced parting. “We’ll meet somewhere,” he said nonchalantly. And as if he had no care in the world, this young man started to whistle as he and Sam Purchas headed west for Oregon. Levi thought they were moving with unusual speed, but it was not till some hours later, when he and Elly were well started on their long retreat, that he discovered what Purchas had been up to and why he had left so swiftly.

“The bastard stole my rifle,” he said, and Elly searched the wagon and the beautiful curly-eyed-maple Melchior Fordney was gone. So was her knitted cash bag and her good scissors. They were about to rain curses on the old trapper, but the bitterness of this final indignity was so great that instead of reviling him, they burst into laughter at his pitiful bravado: his constant drawing of knives, his tobacco-stained beard, his bit-off nose, the futility of the man—and as they drove east they laughed, but that night Elly wrote the long letter which one scholar has called “The Litany of the Loser”:

August 11, Sunday ... We have devised many names for what we are doing in turning back, but the real name is one we have not used. The word is
defeat
, the defeat of all we had hoped for. The horses we loved are lost. The wonderful oxen who were so good to us are dying, and those that live break my heart with their loyal plodding. They can
’t
last long. We have thrown away most of the things we were going to use in Oregon for our new life and even our wagon is a poor thing, cut in half, with only two wheels that cannot continue turning much longer. We have nothing, and now we have lost hope
...

On August 19 they arrived at Fort John again, this time from the west, and they were relieved to see it, for with only a half-wagon, they had begun to run short of supplies. They headed directly for the store, where McKeag said, “I never figured you for a turnaround,” and Levi said, “I saw the elephant.” They talked for a long time, and finally Levi asked, “That place to the south. Rattlesnake Buttes you called it. You ever think of goin’ back down there?”

“Every day of my life,” McKeag said without emotion. “But I never found a partner.”

“Why don’t we try it?”

“Why not, indeed?” McKeag said, and he called out to his wife. When Clay Basket appeared he said, “This one wants to open a trading post for Indians down at Beaver Creek,” and she said, “This fort is no place to keep our daughter.” They called Lucinda and the five of them spent no more than fifteen minutes discussing the dangers involved, and all agreed that they would head south as soon as McKeag could turn his accounts over to another.

They were three days out of Fort John when McKeag astounded the Zendts by announcing, “At the bank in St. Louis, I’ve got twenty-three thousand dollars, so we’ll have them send us up three wagonloads of stock.”

“Where’d you get twenty-three thousand dollars?”

“Saved it ... when Pasquinel was wastin’ his. When word gets out that we have trade goods, the Indians’ll come flockin’ in, and I can speak most of their languages.”

“I can put in two thousand dollars,” Levi said. “Where’d you get two thousand dollars?”

“Sold my horses ... in St. Joe.”

In this manner a solid partnership was formed, the sea and such in McKeag’s life, and he would prove as faithful to the second as to the first. Of the relationship Elly wrote:

August 25, Sunday
...
On a day like this I often wonder if our misfortunes on this trip came to us because we traveled on the Sabbath. I think that perhaps the Fishers and the Fraziers were right and that we should have rested as God commands. And yet when I look at the three people who are traveling with us today I find that they are more Christian than those we were with before. But Mr. McKeag has no relationship with God, while Clay Basket and Lucinda do not even know the name, and since none of the three can read, they cannot know the Bible. Yet God seems to smile on them so that whatever they do prospers, while on Levi and me he has frowned
...

As she was finishing these lines, Lucinda came to the half-wagon and asked, “Is it hard ... to learn writing?” and Elly told her, “No, but I think you must start young,” and Lucinda, who was the same age as Elly, asked, “Am I too old?” and Elly replied, “No. I’m sure you could learn;” and she promised to teach her.

Summer was nearly over, and McKeag explained that since it was too late to get loaded wagons back from St. Louis this year, they would occupy the time building a really substantial home at Beaver Creek, on a rise he remembered where they would be safe from the Platte when it flooded. From then on they spent each evening planning how the house should be built and of what.

Clay Basket had noticed that a significant change was taking place in Elly and suspected that she had not yet told Levi, and one night when the men were discussing where they might find a supply of straight logs, she took Elly aside and said, “We must insist on another room, because your child will need it as she grows up.”

“How did you know?”

“Indian women watch.”

“I think it will be born in winter. Will that be difficult?”

“If the house is warm ...” She paused, then added, “And McKeag builds warm ones.”

“I haven’t told Levi yet ... the disappointments he’s had.”

“A child is no disappointment. Maybe that’s what he needs most of all.”

When Elly decided to tell her husband, she discovered that he had known almost from the first. “I kept watchin’ you,” he said, “and I noticed little things. But it came clear that day when you were swept away at the Big Blue.”

“What could you have seen? You were looking ahead.”

“No, at the last moment I turned. And saw you protectin’ your stomach as you fell. That’s why, when Purchas made for you that day ...” His voice trailed off. “I would have killed him.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked, as if disappointed that he had ferreted out her secret.

“Because you’re growin’ so beautiful. Clay Basket didn’t find out because you’re fatter. She saw it in your face.” This was true. With her growing pregnancy Elly had attained a serenity she had not known before, and her thin face was becoming actually beautiful. She would never again be a scrawny, sixteen-year-old willow stem; she was now a mature woman of seventeen with a burgeoning loveliness, as if the prairie had called forth a miracle.

“It wasn’t really the elephant that made me turn back,” Levi confessed. “It was wantin’ to protect you and the baby.”

That evening while Levi wandered over the prairie, collecting buffalo chips so that Elly would not have to work, she stayed in the wagon, writing to Laura Lou. This letter stands as an epistle of hope and prescience, epitomizing the contributions made by the brave women who crossed the plains in pioneer days:

August 27, Tuesday
...
To be pregnant takes away the sting of defeat, for just as we shall be starting a new community where the rivers meet, so Levi and I shall be starting a new family.. Also, the land we are traveling through is the kind that makes you proud, for it is beautiful in a manner that those of us who lived always in Lancaster could never have dreamed or appreciated. This afternoon we came over a hill and saw before us the two red buttes which have been our target since we left Fort John. They stood like signal towers, or the ramparts of a castle, and they created such a strong sense of home that all of us halted on the hill to appreciate the noble place to which God had brought us. I think Clay Basket had tears in her eyes, for this was where she had lived as a girl, and her father, who must have been a pretty important man, liked to pitch his tent between the two buttes, and as she looked at them she thought of her family, for she told me,
“
My mother was called Blue Leaf from the name of a very beautiful tree that grows in the mountains.
”
Mr. McKeag had often camped alone at the Buttes and told us of how, when the snows came, he might be alone underground for three or four months at a time. And Lucinda, who is trying to learn the alphabet, listened most carefully, for she had not heard these stories before. Levi and I spent only a little while looking at the buttes, because our attention was taken by the mountains to the west, and we both thought that if we were to live within the shadow of such majestic hills we would become like them. It was now growing dark, and the sun disappeared and over the prairie which we have come to love so well came a bluish haze and then a purple and finally the first dark shades of night itself and we were five travelers on the crest of a hill. I feel assured that any family which grows
up in such novel surroundings will be strong and different and I thank God that I am pregnant so that I can watch the growing.

Next morning Elly was up early to prepare breakfast, and as she moved briskly toward the small pile of buffalo chips that Levi had gathered for her, she did not heed the warning sound, and as she stopped to lift a large chip, a giant rattlesnake, bigger around than her arm, struck with terrifying speed and sank its fangs deep into her throat. Within three minutes she was dead.

“It’s God’s mercy,” McKeag said as Levi Zendt came rushing up, too late for even one last kiss. “It’s God’s mercy,” the red-bearded Scotsman repeated, as he gripped Zendt by the shoulders. “I’ve seen ’em die slow, all swole up. Levi, it’s better this way.”

The stocky Dutchman could not be consoled. He had grown to love Elly as few men love their wives, for she had been finer in every way than what he could have expected. Life with her had been a constant unfolding of promise that the better years lay ahead and to lose her at the moment when a new life was beginning was intolerable.

All that morning he wandered about the buttes, coming back repeatedly to her limp body to touch it, to inspect the fatal dots on her neck, but in the afternoon McKeag said, “Levi, we got to bury her.” Zendt refused to listen, until the Scotsman said, “It ain’t decent.” Then they took their shovels and dug a narrow grave in the lee of the western butte, and there she lay—Elly Zahm, patient, understanding, loving, the mother of lost children. She had come voluntarily on this great adventure and had won the love of all she met, and now she rested within the shadow of the butte. With her Levi buried her paper, proving that she had been married.

On their way to the river another ox died, and the next day the wagon itself collapsed, both wheels gone. Levi was too numb to do anything about it, but McKeag and Clay Basket lashed his gear onto the backs of the three surviving oxen and chopped the wagon up for wood.

So Levi Zendt reached the west bank of Beaver Creek, where the trading post was to be, bereft of all he had started out with. His sorrow was so heavy that for a long time he could not talk. But as the months passed, he did find some comfort in the task of helping McKeag build two sturdy houses and then a stockade enclosing the whole, with a battlement at the northwest corner, where attacks would come if they came at all. By November the place was secure, and on a cold, windy day McKeag went to the Platte and chopped himself a set of stakes. Taking Levi and the women with him, he paced off plots, each a mile square, three of them on the western bank of the creek, two on the eastern, and he staked out the corners and told his group, “We’re layin’ claim to five sections. One for me, one for Levi, one for Clay Basket, one for Lucinda, and one for dead Elly, and we will defend them against trespass.”