Ride the Moon Down (27 page)

The following year found him pushing upriver with his brother’s partner, Robert Campbell, to challenge the might of the American Fur Company on the upper Missouri by establishing some rival posts adjacent to the company’s established forts. Their eye-to-eye challenge to Astor’s empire quickly bore fruit, and the two competitors agreed to divide the fur company between them. Andrew
was chosen to carry the articles of agreement, along with all the property the partners were turning over to the company, up the Yellowstone to Fort Cass in the summer of 1834.

From the Bighorn he had pushed south for Independence Rock on the Sweetwater, then on to the North Platte to reach the new post being constructed by his brother and Campbell by the last week of September. Later that fall, when Andrew first met the older Louis Vasquez at Fort William, Sublette and Campbell were already considering their withdrawal from the mountains. Back and forth they discussed their belief that the fur trade had reached its zenith, with profits sure to continue their slide.

Eager to step out of his brother’s shadow that autumn, Andrew marched south with Vasquez, striking the South Platte, where they constructed a temporary post they christened Fort Convenience, trading for buffalo robes from the Arapaho and some Cheyenne hunting in the area.

Then in late December of thirty-four, excited by the heavy packs of furs and their prospects, the partners set out overland for St. Louis after briefly considering whether or not they should attempt to float the furs downriver in mackinaw boats. Surely they had proved to themselves that there was a vast potential for raising a post squarely between Fort William to the north and Bents’ Fort south on the Arkansas. The future seemed theirs for the taking.

By April of thirty-five Andrew had returned to Fort William with Robert Campbell to assist with the transfer of the post to Fitzpatrick, Bridger, Drips, and Fontenelle. Early in the summer Louis was back in St. Louis where they both presented themselves to William Clark, petitioning for a license to trade among the tribes. Returning to the South Platte by late summer, the new partners started on their stockade with the help of a few men hired in St. Louis, struggling to raise enough shelter before the first winter storm rumbled down the slopes of Long’s Peak to batter them.

Reaching that high ground east of the river, Scratch and Waits-by-the-Water found workers furiously felling
trees and dragging those cottonwood timbers back to an open patch of ground where they were raising stockade walls.

“Soon as the frost is gone from the ground next spring,” explained the stout Vasquez, “we can start making ’dobe bricks. Like the Bents done on their fort.”

Titus told them how he had been to that post on the Arkansas, had seen plenty of adobe construction for himself down in San Fernando de Taos.

“You bring your furs here,” the thinner Andrew Sublette promised, “beaver or buffalo—we’ll give you top dollar.”

“You don’t go so far away, not down to Bents’,” Vasquez said. “Get furs in these hills, trade them here too.”

“We’ll be back,” Scratch promised. “Maybeso camp for the winter.”

After resting nearby for two days watching the construction, Bass led his wife and animals across the sandy bottom of the South Platte and pushed into the foothills where Long’s Peak brooded over them for the next ten weeks as he worked this stream, then another. Gradually pushed down from the high country a little farther day by day, Scratch and Waits-by-the-Water worked feverishly, rising well before first light to wolf down some food before he trudged away into the dark and she began her hide scraping before Magpie awakened. Each night found them working on the hides, cleaning the weapons, making repairs in clothing and adjustments to the square-jawed American traps or those manufactured of Juniata steel.

By the middle of December when the cold had grown serious, they traipsed down from the foothills, returning to the banks of the South Platte to find that the laborers had thrown up enough of a shelter to protect the traders and their goods from winter’s furies.

Reaching the edge of the prairie at the foot of the mountains where the river meandered north, they chose a spot to camp out the rest of the winter near the new stockade. In a small copse of old cottonwood they chopped down the saplings they needed and cleared out a clutter of underbrush before erecting their shelters. The smallest protected
the beaver pelts he caught and she grained and stretched. A partially enclosed bower gave her a place to work throughout the day as she cooked and tended to Magpie’s needs close by their fire. And on the opposite side of the fire pit sat their sleeping shelter, where they could lash down all the flaps the better to withstand the passing of each icy gale winter hurled at them.

In less than a week he rode off again, this time on his lonesome. Bass turned once, looking behind to find the child standing hand in hand with her mother. Waits bent to say something, and when she straightened, both of them waved. He knew the woman was crying, probably angry with herself that she could not stop the tears that might frighten Magpie.

Back again after eleven days of trapping, he moseyed up to the post one afternoon, hungry for some male conversation.

“I don’t think much of your big brother,” Bass told Andrew Sublette. “He done all he could to ruin the fur trade for other men. And now he’s run off back east when the running’s good.”

The handsome twenty-seven-year-old failed to protest. Instead, he reluctantly nodded. “I don’t agree with all what Billy’s done, but I can’t figure him for a bad sort.”

Dryly, Louis Vasquez asked, “All’s fair in love and business, eh?”

Andrew glared at his partner a moment. “No matter what any man says, Billy made a go of everything he done. So maybe if we’re gonna make it out here our own selves, you better savvy we’ll need some of Bill’s determination to see we don’t come out second-best.”

Scratch wagged his head. “How your brother cheated that Yankee fella named Wyeth, same time Billy was throwing your other brother Milton square into the middle of it—”

“Milt was already in the middle of it!” Andrew fumed.

“Don’t put that underhanded back stabbing on Milt,” Bass growled. “I heard the story of how Billy slipped around seeing to it that Rocky Mountain Fur Company
refused them supplies they told Wyeth to bring out to ronnyvoo. Then your brother Billy made Milt out to be part of all his bamboozling!”

“Billy had no other choice,” Andrew answered defensively, yet without much conviction. “Don’t you see? Those five partners still owed him a debt from previous years. So when Billy learned they arranged to have the Yankee bring out their supplies, he figured they was breaking their contract with him when they was already bound to him—”

Vasquez interrupted. “Even though Billy Sublette was determined to keep every last one of them a prisoner in his grip?”

“If Billy was a better businessman than them partners were, so be it,” Andrew admitted grudgingly.

“That strikes center, it does,” Bass added. “I’ll agree that Gabe and Fitz and the rest of ’em, they was better trappers, better
men
than they was businessmen.”

“Don’t you remember, Andrew—how the two of us decided we wasn’t gonna be the sort of trader your brother was?” the Spaniard asked in that tiny trading room where more than a dozen men sat smoking their pipes and drinking coffee to wile away a winter afternoon.

“Billy don’t run me, Louis,” Andrew vowed. “We don’t need him no more.”

“’Sides, I heard him and Campbell ain’t ever coming back to the mountains,” Bass said.

“That’s right,” Vasquez declared, looking at Scratch evenly. “Seems them two’re buying up land back in St. Louis. Gonna be country gentlemen. So maybe Andrew’s right after all: we ain’t gonna worry ’bout Billy Sublette making trouble for anyone out here no more.”

Each time Scratch returned to Waits-by-the-Water throughout the rest of that winter, bringing in more beaver pelts from the streams and creeks ribboning the nearby slopes, he couldn’t help but notice how the ricks of buffalo robes multiplied in the fort’s storage house when he rode over to the post for the sound of male voices, some man’s talk, or just to hear a bit more English than he could wring out of his wife.

And with the mountain man’s every visit to the stockade, young Sublette gently prodded Scratch. “Ain’t you getting a little old to be traipsing off all alone into them snowy hills anymore?”

Bass’s eyes would twinkle, and he’d wink at the older Vasquez when he replied, “I ain’t so old I can’t take care of myself, you pup.”

“Man smart as you,” Sublette chided, “I would’ve thought you’d figured out some easier way to make a living.”

On that Louis Vasquez would agree. “Trapping’s gotta be some of the meanest work any man can do, Scratch.”

“Hard work never kill’t no man I know of,” he grumbled over the lip of his tin cup.

Every visit Sublette would say, “Don’t you figure it’s time you quit scratching out a living with your hands, and start making your living with your wits?”

“I told you, I ain’t fit out to be no trader,” Bass told them, a little stronger this third time, as they sat out a storm.

At the stockade walls a wolfish wind howled as dawn approached. The sudden subfreezing gale had come on so fiercely that Scratch abandoned their camp and hurried his wife and daughter through the moaning trees that loomed out of the darkness to reach the walls of the fort. In the last few hours Waits-by-the-Water and Magpie had slept snugly in a far corner of the trading room behind two bales of buffalo robes while he had dozed fitfully, his back propped against a pack of beaver in another corner.

Once Vasquez had awakened, he shoved open the plank door to start some coffee brewing over the fire Scratch kept going in the mud and river-stone fireplace. Two of the fort employees had abandoned their blankets to sit before the flames, kneading their cold hands and inhaling the luring fragrance of brewing coffee.

It wasn’t long before Sublette himself had appeared at the ill-fitting door where a sudden gust billowed a rooster tail of snow around him as he struggled to shut off the wind, forced to throw his shoulder against the rough planks. Even as he sat and accepted his tin cup from Vasquez, Sublette had begun to prod the old mountain man.

“When you going to admit you’re just the man Louis and me need to trade with the bands hereabouts?”

“There’s traders, and there’s trappers,” Titus snapped. “And one ain’t fit to be the other.”

Then he sat silent while Vasquez moved from man to man with the huge coffeepot, filling each steaming tin before moving on.

“Pretty plain our friend doesn’t want us to beg him anymore, Andrew,” the Spaniard stated with a wry look of amusement on his face. “The matter’s dead. Isn’t a concern to Scratch that the bottom is getting torn out from
under the beaver trade. He doesn’t have to worry with none of it.”

“Damn right,” Scratch grumbled. “I’ll stay on trapping what I can, trading for what I need. I ain’t been a hired man in almost eleven years. So I ain’t about to sign on now.”

“You got a family,” Andrew lobbied. “How you figure to provide for them when beaver goes to hell?”

“Just the way any man would!” he shrieked, then realized how loud his voice had grown and sneaked a quick look at the far corner where wife and daughter slept. Whispering, he continued, “We ain’t gonna starve, long as I can hunt.”

Sublette asked, “How do you propose to pay for lead and powder? For your coffee and tobacco, sugar and salt—not to mention those nice things your wife deserves?”

Bass snorted with a grin. “Damn, if you ain’t got a lot of your oily-talkin’ brother Billy in you, young Sublette,” and he hoisted his coffee cup in salute. “Comes to it, a man with a strong back and his wits about him can allays find himself work.”

Vasquez said, “We got work for you right here.”

“Dammit, boys—ain’t neither of you give thought I got me a Crow wife? How you ever ’spect me to take a Crow woman into them ’Rapaho and Shian camps?”

Sublette shrugged, muttering, “I … I—”

“You doing your damndest to make me think you got horse apples for brains, ain’cha?”

“It ain’t so foolish as you’re making it out to be,” Sublette argued as he glanced over at his partner, finding Vasquez grinning in his dark face. “You been riding off from her to trap all winter long. Come back to your wife and her camp when it pleases you. Tell me what’s so different with going off to find some villages and trade for their buffalo robes?”

“Long as there’s beaver in the hills, there’s lots of differ’nce,” he answered firmly. “I’m a man gonna choose how he makes his living, how he works out the rest of his days.”

Vasquez came over and squatted down next to Titus.
“Ever you consider trading with the Crow up north? You’re married to one, gotta know plenty of them bucks too. It might work out well for you and us.”

But he wagged his head. “Things ain’t so good ’tween me and them Sparrowhawks right now. Ain’t none of you been paying no notice I spent the winter here, ’stead of up there in Absaroka? Don’t that tell you nothing?”