Snowbound and Eclipse (19 page)

The bitter wind never quit, and I knew this would be one of the worst days of my life. And yet the camp was uncommonly cheerful. We stood at the very base of the ridge that would take us into the drainage of the Colorado River and ultimately the Pacific. The ridge was not half a mile distant, though this last assault would be steep and cruel. There was, among the company, a sense of victory. Beyond, we could tumble our way west, into warmer climes, where grass grew and a man could pull off the layers of leather and wool that now kept him alive.

So we saddled the mules, which stumbled stupidly as we brought them in one by one, brushed the snow out of their coat, and threw packsaddles and loads over them once again. One mule simply went down, and no tail twisting could wrench him up. He had played out, lying inertly in the snow, too worn to resist the bullying. I watched it lying there, its lungs pumping irregularly, its neck arched back, its mouth open. And then with a shudder, it ceased to breathe. And even as it died, snow was filtering into its hair.

No one came to butcher it while it was possible to do so.

I saw Ben Kern staring, mutely, and he saw me, and a faint shake of his head told me his every thought. I felt an inconsolable sadness. The mule had died even before we raised camp and tackled that terrible grade. What would the
hard day ahead do to the rest? So there they were, the Creoles and Missourians and the rest, offering not even some heated water to these miserable beasts and loading them with all the tons of gear and our own remaining fodder before leading the stumbling creatures up the valley once again, one slow step at a time, the men in front wielding giant clubs made of deadwood to hammer a trail through thick snow that sometimes reached the shoulders of men sitting on those mules.

I counted it a miracle that the mules walked at all. They are noble beasts and were giving their last breath to the task. But as soon as the grade rose dramatically, they could go no farther and simply stood in that trench cut into the drifts, heads hanging.

“We'll pull them up. Then it'll be downhill,” Godey said, so we dragged out our hempen ropes, fashioned cruel halters over the snouts of the mules, and tugged them upward, one step at a time. But the mules were beyond walking and simply stood where they stood. It became a great exercise of force, men in front of and behind each animal, pulling and pushing, yanking and shoving, as we climbed the last few hundred yards toward that treeless summit not far ahead.

Then Godey's own mule, Dick, gave out. He had treated it more severely than the rest, and now it folded to its knees and would not budge, its half-frozen body blocking the trench trail. Godey saw at once it was over for Dick and swiftly unsaddled the animal, and we pushed it into a drift, where it expired, one last sad rush of air, and then lay inert, its mouth open, tongue hanging out, neck crooked back. Godey said nothing, which was the only decent thing to do, and set off on foot, dragging the mule that had stood in line behind Dick. And so we spent a whole morning and midday struggling up the last few hundred yards to the barren summit.

And when we got there, we saw grass, a whole slope of it that the wind had whipped free and clear. But when we finally emerged on that great cap of the world, the subzero gale blew heat out of us so swiftly that no living creature could survive there for more than a few minutes. To put the mules on that grass would be to kill them all within the hour.

We paused up there to look about. There we were, on top of the world. The distant valley of the Rio del Norte was behind us, and beyond it, the white peaks of the Sangre de Cristos. To the north and south, range after range, peak after serrated peak whitened the landscape, beneath a bold blue sky. I saw cirrus clouds to the west, heralding another storm, and knew we were in for worse than this cold day. But that is not what stopped my heart. To the west, some miles distant, stood another wall of mountains, with a notch in them well above the one from which we all gaped at this alpine world. We had not crossed the divide. The valley into which we would now descend was yet another drainage of the Rio Grande and led to the Atlantic.

But in this bright, eye-smarting place we could not tarry, not for an extra second, because the icy gale was plucking the last heat from us and further destroying our mules. We studied the mountains and hastened across the ridge, dropping into a gulch so steep we could not keep our footing, and floundered our way downslope through giant drifts higher than we could stand, amid yellow pines. And there more mules simply halted, too worn to proceed, but we could not stay there in that awful place and hurried on, needing all that was sustaining about lower altitudes and escape from wind and perhaps fodder for the mules, which were now clearly in extremis. My own mind was filled with terrors now. We had not crossed the divide, as Frémont had promised us, and we could see nothing to the west or north that suggested descent or cessation of this towering range.
It was as if, up there, we were witnessing our death warrant. Or so I thought. We were all too numb ourselves to say a word to one another. We slid and stumbled and plowed our way down that steep slope for as long as we could endure, never reaching any sort of bottoms that might yield feed for our wretched animals or game for ourselves. I felt trapped.

Finally, in the last hour of December light, the colonel decided we would camp in a wind-sheltered bottom, in four or five feet of snow. There would be plenty of firewood but not a bite for the mules. We unloaded the mules and heaped the tack in a single place where we could get at it in the morrow. We had to keep our tack from the mules, which were gnawing at leather and canvas and rope and trying to break into the panniers for whatever would fill their bellies. Most of them had lost manes and tails, which had been gnawed away by other mules.

Some of the men attempted to dig out a camping place, while others wearily spread a rubberized sheet over the snow and collapsed onto it. I had never experienced such silence in a bivouac, each man among us entirely private. If their thoughts were similar to my own, it was no wonder. They dared not utter what they were thinking. So deep was Frémont's grip on his veterans of previous journeys that they would follow Frémont to their doom rather than wrestle him or set themselves loose from the rest of us. I could not fathom it, and yet I was doing the same thing. There I was, in probably fatal circumstances, meekly accepting my fate.

The mules stood stock-still in the bottoms. A little brush poked through, and a few of them found the energy to nip at stalks and twigs. But most had given up and numbly awaited their death. No one seemed to care. I was weary, but I made my way to the bottoms and flailed away with a piece of deadwood, gradually exposing more brush for a few
mules to masticate. I was satisfied to see several of them begin to nip and chew. I hoped that my example would stir the others to open some of the snow fields to the forage, but I made no progress there, though most of the men had watched me carefully, and all of them knew my purpose. It was as if they needed a command from Colonel Frémont to undertake the labor, and that command was not forthcoming.

In time they did complete a makeshift camp, and mess fires burned in holes in the snow, their heat glazing the walls of the pits. The company could find warmth in those protective circles, which reminded me of the walls of an igloo, and there the men congregated as a lavender darkness descended, and along with it an icy downdraft from that ridge above, which was ladling killing air down that draw, air that would murder the weakened mules.

Some men, it turned out, did go upslope, and they recovered eight of the beasts and herded them down, arriving in camp at dusk, the mules stumbling and sliding so slowly that they barely made it while daylight lingered. These eight were simply herded in with the rest, to live or die as fate saw fit. I once again felt a great loathing for men who would not make every effort to sustain their beasts. And yet these same men were so weary they could barely sustain themselves, so I supposed my judgment was harsh.

The bright fire down in that snow pit cheered me that night. Our mess had the greenhorns, the ones who had never been out on an expedition before, the ones unknown to Colonel Frémont, the ones least familiar with the arts of survival. Some boiled macaroni cheered us. It was good to get something solid in our bellies. The glazed walls caught the heat, until it seemed we were in a parlor instead of high in the Saguache Mountains, as they seemed to be called by these men. I peered upward uneasily, suddenly aware that
the ice-chip stars above had vanished, and I knew that we would soon be inundated once again. The night would not be so pleasant.

“How much food have we?” Ben Kern asked. “Does anyone but the colonel know?”

“I know. I looked in the packs,” his brother Richard said. “We have three packs of macaroni, maybe fifty pounds of sugar, salt, and some frozen elk that the colonel is saving.”

“Just that, for thirty-three men?” Ned asked.

“That and the mules.”

“What good are frozen mules, that's what I want to know,” Creutzfeldt asked. “I couldn't hack them up with an axe.”

“How far to the Continental Divide?” Ben asked.

No one could answer him. That next ridge west could be days away, with the mules so broken down.

“The mules could be helped with warm water mixed with sugar,” I said.

None of them responded at first.

“We'll need the sugar ourselves, I am thinking,” Creutzfeldt said.

That's where it ended. Later, it began to snow, thick flakes that soon buried us as we lay in our bedrolls. The snow had become a prison, shackling me. Now there were walls rising in every direction. We could not return from whence we came. We could not go forward. The silent snows ruled us.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

John Charles Frémont

I wondered how Jessie was faring. She probably was still in Saint Louis, readying herself for the Panama trip. She was made of sturdy stuff, and I little doubted that she would negotiate a successful journey to California. A lesser woman could manage it. I felt no qualms about consigning her to the fates of the traveler, knowing she was a Benton. I supposed she was pining for news of me, but I had no means of telling her that I was somewhere close to the Continental Divide, being guided by a lummox who might or might not know the way, and only time would tell.

I had strong men with me during the army expeditions, and some of them were with me this trip, having left the service or taken leave. They were from good stock and had weathered all the adversities of life lived in raw nature. Preuss was a tough little German who knew how to keep himself comfortable. Godey, of course, is the very prototype of his sort, as strong as they come, and a veteran. King is another one, a veteran who was with me in California and who is made of sturdy stuff. Add my California men Taplin, Martin, Stepperfeldt, Ferguson, Wise, Vincenthaler, and Breckenridge, as well as my veteran Creoles, Proue, Tabeau, and Morin, and there is my cadre of hard men, good stock, who never urged on me the counsels of despair. It was the rest who concerned me, but I didn't let them know it. They were soft city men, unused to hardship.

We were being guided by a degenerate, and that caused me some difficulty. It was plain to me that Williams had been a poor choice, though the only one available, so I can
scarcely fault myself. He had not lifted a finger the entire trip, reasoning that a guide need not concern himself with food, firewood, saddling and grooming and feeding the mules, breaking a trail, or making and breaking camp. He assumed no responsibility, not even for the mule we provided him, letting my company do every lick of work whilst he meandered about.

That he had led us into a perilous circumstance high in the San Juan Mountains did not escape my attention. He had barely said a word, and I knew he was avoiding me as much as he could. Now we had topped a saddle Old Bill had assumed was the divide, only to discover that many miles distant rose another chain, higher than the one we had topped, and we were far from crossing over to warmer and safer climes. Indeed, I found myself wondering whether this odd degenerate had the slightest idea of where he was leading us, and that morning I decided to find out.

After my morning toilet I sought him out. He was lounging on one of our rubberized sheets watching my company once again prepare to tackle massive drifts and to hack a passage for our weary mules.

My men were busy; the mules had this night eaten saddle blankets, ropes, manes and tails, woolen clothing, belts and shoes and canvas, in the process damaging such tack and equipment as we had at hand. It was almost impossible to keep them out of camp.

I squatted down beside him as he lounged, picking his teeth with twig. I seethed with contempt for the lout but carefully set aside my private thought and smiled.

“Well, Williams, we obviously have a long way to go to cross the divide,” I said.

“Goodly way, yes.”

“I wonder if you could show me the pass. I see nothing but another wall of white mountains off to the west.”

He grinned, his tongue working the gaps in his teeth. “Oh, she's there. I always know it when I see it.”

“Is there feed for the mules ahead?”

“Oh, could be, depending on how she blows.”

“How steep is it?”

He lifted his cap off and scratched his hair, or maybe it was a cootie he was scratching. “Depends on which way we go,” he said. “It don't make a difference.”

I found the answer maddening. I espied a knob to the right and saw how it might offer advantage.

“My friend, we'll go up there,” I said, pointing. “Then you may enlighten me.”

He studied on it. “That's a far piece and full of snow.”

“I'm sure it's of no consequence to a man of your abilities.”

He offered me no resistance save for some mumbling, and we struck through heavy drifts, sometimes waist high, ascending a rough slope that revealed only the tops of the pines growing on it. In no time he was heaving air in and out of his ill-used body, whilst I ascended easily, the steam of my breath dissipating in the icy air. It was a clear and sunny morning with a cobalt sky, and that would help me accomplish my purpose.