Ride the Moon Down (23 page)

Joe Meek draped a mighty arm over Carson’s small shoulder. “C’mon with Gabe—we ought’n have us some whiskey wet our gullets now that bastard’s dead, Kit!”

Carson finished shaking hands with Scratch, then turned to Meek. “We’ll all have us that drink together after supper, Joe. Right now I got something I better tend to.”

“Tend to?” Newell echoed, scratching the side of his head. “What you gonna do that’s better’n wetting down our dry with Bridger’s whiskey?”

Carson winked at them, saying, “Right now, boys—I’m on my way to buy me a wife!”

Nine days after his partner Thomas Fitzpatrick had reached the rendezvous at the mouth of New Fork River on the Green, Jim Bridger started north with his brigade.

With his sixty men went not only his new wife’s family and Insala’s band of Flathead, but the Nez Perce who had once again visited the white man’s rendezvous in their unremitting hope that a man of God would come to live among them, to show them how to earn their eternal reward. After two disappointing journeys to the trappers’ rendezvous, these Nez Perce were finally returning to their native ground with just such a man and his medicine book.

Reverend Samuel Parker.

This dour, humorless fifty-six-year-old evangelist had just volunteered to press on into the wilderness while his younger associate, Dr. Marcus Whitman, returned east to enlist more recruits for their mission work among the heathen savages of the Northwest. While Whitman might not approve of all the earthy and raw habits of the mountain trappers, the doctor nonetheless chose not to preach to or condemn them—unlike the bookish and haughty Parker.

Extending an uncharacteristic and polite patience to
the good reverend, a large number of the unrefined trappers listened attentively as Parker discoursed on their need to immediately abandon those worldly ways he found so deplorable, including how the white men squandered away their hard-won wages in an orgy of whiskey and debauchery, having nothing left to show for their labors than the baubles they purchased for their pagan wives and half-breed children.

Shocked less at the violence he had witnessed in that bloody duel between Carson and Chouinard, the reverend fierily preached his brimstone on the evils he had seen at rendezvous—in particular scolding the trappers on the practice of some who held up a common deck of playing cards before the visiting Indians as the white man’s holiest book. Able to purchase several of these inexpensive packs of cards from the company’s trader during rendezvous, many trappers convinced gullible Indians that unless their wives and daughters were not lent for carnal pleasures, then the white man’s powerful God would hurl down all manner of fiery and eternal torment suffered among the flames of hell. Time and again, without refusal, the women were turned over.

Those sins of the flesh, magnified by the sin of bearing false witness!

But just as Parker was working himself into a ranting lather, a horseman rushed up to announce that buffalo had been spotted up the valley. Without a by-your-please, the reverend’s grease-stained congregation leaped to their feet, grabbing rifles and horses, racing off to run those buffalo. Their sudden exit left the disgruntled Parker reassured that he was taking the right course in going to preach and convert the Nez Perce rather than attempting the salvation of those profane trappers who showed absolutely no hope of God’s redemption.

To better make his case for continued donations and funding from the American Board of Missions, Dr. Whitman was overjoyed to discover a Nez Perce boy who spoke a smattering of English. After securing permission from the youngster’s father for the trip east, the doctor christened the lad Richard. During that ceremony a second Nez
Perce father promptly presented his son to accompany Whitman east where he could be taught the white man’s religion. The doctor baptized this second companion John.

Six days after Bridger’s departure for Davy Jackson’s Hole with his Flathead family and the rest of the tribe, Fitzpatrick started for Fort Laramie with the company’s fifty men, some two hundred mules bearing the year’s take in beaver along with some buffalo robes, and more than eighty former employees who were abandoning the mountains. Accompanying them on their journey was the party of scouts and hunters employed by Scottish nobleman Sir William Drummond Stewart. That long snake of men and animals strung out through the valley and beginning to wind up the hills made for an impressive leave-taking that late August morning.

Gone now was the jubilation that had rocked this fertile bottom ground like a prairie thunderstorm. Some began to realize just how late it was in the season. As far back as any man could remember, the trader’s caravan always reached rendezvous anywhere from late June to early July. But this summer’s delay translated into five lost weeks—weeks the brigades and bands of free trappers weren’t able to use in tramping to their fall hunting grounds. Now they would have to labor long and hard to make up for that lost time.

With Elbridge Gray and the other three already gone with Bridger nearly a week, and with Fitzpatrick just starting east to turn the caravan over to partner Fontenelle who was recuperating at the company’s Fort William, Andrew Drips led his eighty-man brigade south by west for the fall hunt among the Uintah and Wasatch ranges. No man among those white Americans, French voyageurs, and half-breeds would leave any record of their travels that winter.

No more trace than what any of those bands of free trappers would leave behind on the banks of the New Fork: the cold, black smudge of a string of long-abandoned fire pits and faint moccasin-clad footprints quickly erased by the ever-present autumn wind or buried
beneath untold inches of icy snow. No tales of their passing were left for generations yet to come.

They might as well have been ghosts chasing down the moon.

As Zeke roamed along either side of their path, Scratch hurried Waits-by-the-Water and little Magpie east across that trampled and familiar path. Striking a little south of east, they crossed the Big Sandy, then climbed that barren saddle of the Southern Pass where they struck the first narrow channel of the Sweetwater which took them east, down to the North Platte. Day after day for two weeks they descended, following Fitzpatrick’s trail, encountering the great sprawl of his campsites until they finally caught up with the caravan one day before the entire cavalcade came within sight of La Ramee’s Fork.

Near the river’s mouth stood the tall cottonwood stockade that the year before had been christened Fort William in honor of one of its original owners. But in leaving the mountains for more sedate business ventures, William Sublette and Robert Campbell relinquished this massive post to the victors who would stay to the bitter end.

While Fitzpatrick’s caravan plodded on down the gentle slope toward the impressive timbered walls, Titus pulled the pack animals to the side of the march and halted. Waits reined up beside him.

“That’s some,” he gasped in English.

Removing the hand she had clamped over her mouth in awe, she repeated, “Some.”

“Only see’d two other forts,” he continued in his native tongue. “One on the Missouri called Osage, and that post of Tullock’s they call Cass. Both of ’em small.”

She nodded, wide-eyed with wonder. “Cass.” And made a sign using her two hands, “Small.”

He chuckled and said, “Nothing like this. This here’s a hull differ’nt place, woman. A hull differ’nt place.”

Scattered across the plain within a half mile of the stockade walls stood the lodges of those bands invited there to trade—three camp circles, along with their separate herds, where riders moved to and from the fort,
women and children streaming back and forth along the shady riverbanks for water, bathing, or to swim naked in the glistening waters. It struck Bass as a damned fine idea that hot afternoon.

“Who are these people?” Waits asked in Crow.

“They look familiar?”

“Those are not Crow lodges,” she said guardedly.

“I didn’t figure they would be,” he replied, a little cold water suddenly dashed on his ardor. “This ain’t Crow country.”

“Ak’ba’le’aa’shuu’pash’ko,
” she said. “Your northern people call them Sioux.”

“What northern people?”

It took her a moment to consider how to explain that. “They do not talk like the men from your country,” Waits said. “Their skins are fair, like yours and your friends’, but their tongues speak a different language—”

“Parley-voos!” he roared, remembering a dim tale told here and there. “That’s right. Them parley-voos call ’em Sioux.”

But the sound of the word did little to bring him comfort. Not that he had ever had a run-in with the tribe, but he had heard a few stories from those who had bumped up against these powerful warrior bands pushing farther and farther west across the plains until they now had virtually reached the foot of the Rocky Mountains, claiming that prime hunting ground by right of might.

They would just do their best to stay clear of any what might stir up some trouble.

Pointing at a piece of open ground to the southwest of the fort, Waits-by-the-Water asked, “What do your people call those boxes with the round white tops and large rosettes on the side?”

With the one good eye Scratch squinted a little into the distance obscured by the summer haze, then chuckled. “We call them wagons. The rosettes turn and roll—hoops called wheels. They carry the wagons.”

“Do men push them?”

“No,” he said, and scanned those six wagons, finding that not one of them was hooked to a team. Instead, all sat
abandoned, motionless on that open bottom ground, their tongues either pointed heavenward, or lying hidden among the tall grass. “Horses pull them. Most times, four horses or more. The people ride, just the way we ride a horse, or your people pull someone on a travois.”

She nodded as if beginning to understand. “I see: they are the white man’s house that he takes with him the same way my people move our lodges from camp to camp?”

With a grin he agreed. “Jehoshaphat, but you’ve got it right.”

“God dit,” she repeated with a wink.

As they ambled toward those fifteen-foot-high palisades, Titus could not remember the last time he had seen that red-and-white-striped flag. A banner every bit this big had flown from the top of the Fort Vancouver flagpole, but he figured he hadn’t seen America’s flag since reaching St. Louis to track down Silas and Billy more than a year back. With every tug of the wind, the huge flag snapped taut for a moment, allowing him to count another row of stars until he tallied up twenty-four. With each star representing a state, Bass reflected what new states had joined the union since he had abandoned the settlements back in twenty-five.

Craning his neck as they came alongside the walls, he peered up at the huge bastion that hung over the top of the northwest corner. He found another like it constructed at the southeast corner. And midway down the southern wall stood the massive gate where he reined to a halt and gazed up to take in the massive blockhouse perched atop the wall more than fifteen feet above them.

“Ho!” he called to a face he saw watching from the west window cut in the blockhouse.

“Ho, yourself,” the shaggy graying man called down.

Pointing at the gaping southern window, Scratch asked, “That your cannon?”

“It’s a cannon—but it ain’t mine,” the man replied. “Only here to visit. C’mon up an’ get yourse’f a good look-see for far an’ wide.”

“Holler down and have ’em open up the gate for us,” he asked.

Hanging partway out the window, the man shook his head. “They ain’t gonna open up these’r gates, on ’count of all them Sioux out there.”

Bass turned in the saddle to peer once again at all the lodges. “Afraid them Injuns’ll rush the fort?”

“I s’pose they are,” the man answered. “Most of ’em belong to a chief name o’ Bull Bear. Campbell invited ’em down from their country north of here to do some trading.”

“And now these fellers here won’t trade with ’em?”

“They been trading with them bucks last couple of days,” the man declared. “But the company don’t let very many come in at one time. No more’n a dozen I s’pect.”

“So how’s a man to get in?”

“She with you?” the stranger asked.

“My wife and our daughter.”

“Likely you come on round to the back side where you come in the corral gate.”

“Someone there to open up?”

“There will be in a shake or two,” he responded as he pulled his head back in the window and disappeared.

“We ride to another gate,” Bass explained in Crow.

On the river side they found a pole corral constructed along the entirety of that northern wall. Pulling back one half of a suspension gate wide enough to admit a wagon, Scratch was able to lead their animals into the corral where no more than a dozen horses grazed on dwindling piles of cut grass.

The narrow door behind them creaked open, and the older man poked his head out, looked this way and that, then spoke. “Tie off your critters there, then you come on in with me.”

Once they passed through the narrow door, the three of them entered a cool and shady part of the fort. The stranger started them for a low-railed balcony. Beyond it Titus caught a glimpse of the huge open courtyard.