Snowbound and Eclipse (6 page)

Meanwhile, I did not at all mind being thrown in with the newcomers. One of our chaps came from Mississippi and had the impossible name of Micajah McGehee. Now how do you pronounce that mouthful? I reduced him to Micah, and he cheerfully accepted it as long as he could call me Cap. He was along entirely for the adventure, as fiddle-footed as I am. So our mess was almost entirely adventurers, save only for Edward Kern, a Frémont veteran. I had the hunch that it was going to be better this way than if we had been roped into the other messes. The Creoles had their own mess, which included the black servants. I took that as a sign of social status here in the States.

By some mysterious process, the company completed its preparations, and on the eve of October 19, 1848, the Pathfinder announced that we would break camp in the morning and travel only a few miles, the purpose being to test our mules and packs and deal with any difficulties. I had supposed we would be at Boone Creek another week or so and was delighted at the prospect of leaving. As usual, Godey drove Mrs. Frémont back to the Delaware agency that evening, and I wondered whether we would be seeing Mrs. Frémont again, at least until we should meet on the Pacific shore. If the colonel and his lady said any private good-byes, these were invisible to the rest of us. He seemed concerned, instead, with assigning saddle mules to each member of his company, trying to gauge which mule best suited which rider.

As Godey drove Mrs. Frémont away, she turned to look at us one last time, her expression obscured by her bonnet. But I knew exactly what passed across her face; it was an inexpressible yearning and a grim determination not to show the slightest feeling. I felt an odd pity. We were her rivals. As for the Pathfinder, he seemed not to notice. And in a few moments, Godey's wagon and its cargo disappeared
around a tree-carpeted slope, and I never saw Jessie Benton Frémont again.

I felt just then an acute homesickness. I have felt it often, but those smudges under her eyes set it off in me, a longing for Ayrshire, from whence I came, that I could scarcely endure. For it was there, facing the western sea, that I grew to manhood, and it was the sea that lured me ever westward and was still taking me away from my people. I don't know what makes me roam, what it was about the western seas and the mysteries beyond them that lured me away from my hearth; from the kind and sometimes reproachful eyes of my mother; from the settled world of Ayr, its hardy cattle, its sere slopes and mild winters so gloomy at the time of the solstice that a cheery fire lighting our parlor seemed like heaven. Why had Jessie Benton's departure plunged me into that secret melancholia that I have struggled so long to ignore?

I was suddenly angry at this man Frémont.

We raised camp rather late that morning of the twentieth, coping with the usual difficulties. Some of the greener mules had other notions than to haul our goods. Some of the company proved to be inept at saddling. Others discovered they had too many goods and too little space in panniers and packs. One mule bit a man's finger, and Ben Kern applied a plaster.

We arose before dawn, actually, and completed our morning mess in darkness with a steady breeze chilling us. A simple meal of gruel sufficed, and we soon had our kettles and tin bowls packed away. Frémont wandered freely, at ease, and I never heard a command issue from his lips. His veterans seemed to anticipate what he wanted. An occasional question was all it took for him to make his will known. At least among his old companions of the wilds there was great jubilation, as if this were the beginning of
something sweet, a nectar that befell only the most privileged of mortals. I marveled at this.

The break-in trip was not without its mishaps. A girth strap loosened, sending a pack of macaroni and sugar and coffee southward until it hung beneath the quivering beast's legs. But these things were swiftly remedied, and no harm was done. Here on the backs of a hundred-odd mules was grain for the stock, tents, tools, flour for ourselves, rubberized sheets for wet ground, and a myriad of other items too numerous to detail. All those mules were transporting a miniature city as well as thirty-three men heading west into the unknown to look for a place where shining rails might span the midcontinent.

I found mule transportation much to my liking. A mule's gait is dainty compared with the gait of a horse and gives the rider the impression of floating. It was in perfect ease that I spent my hours in the saddle. Mules can be uncommonly stubborn, but mine seemed determined to keep up with the rest, and I had no need to deal with insubordination. I thought that maybe the Queen's hussars ought to weigh the benefits of mule travel.

The five miles proceeded peaceably enough through grassy country under a variable Wedgwood sky, and Frémont called a halt for the day in ample time to inspect the mules for sores on their withers and for the evidences of all sorts of troubles. It had been an easy day's travel, wisely shortened to permit adjustments to the tack and equipment and to break in the mules for what would be a long haul. The hunters, Godey especially, had proceeded ahead of us and left two does and a buck on our path, ensuring us a fine venison dinner that eve. These bloody carcasses had been loaded onto skittish mules, which alarmed them, but eventually our parade resumed.

“Easy trip, eh?” I said to Doctor Kern, who was unloading his truck from a mule.

“No worse for wear,” he replied. “I must say, Frémont has a way about him.”

That was the very thing that had struck me through the entire day. I had never seen a commander less conspicuous or more effective. I wondered what his secret was. Whatever it was, he induced men to see to their appointed tasks without ever addressing them. It was as if he had a secret finger signal for every whim.

I chose not to raise a shelter, it being mild and with little sign of rain, and settled into my Hudson Bay blankets at some distance from the fire. I did vaguely remember that well into the night a horseman left camp in some hurry, the rapid gait conveying some urgency to me just as I drifted into sleep. I gave it no further thought until morning, when Frémont appeared out of the east, on a worn horse.

He had, it seemed, decided to spend one last hour with Jessie and had returned to Major Cummins's agency well beyond Boone Creek, awakening her and her servant in the small hours. She had welcomed him happily, he said, and had set Kitty to making some tea, and there the lovers whiled away an hour before he saw fit to return to his company.

It had been a cruel night for her, apparently. Cummins had found a wolf den nearby and knocked the pups in the head. When the wolf bitch returned and found her pups gone, she began the most pathetic howling and mewling and whimpering and coaxing the dead to return to her bosom. This dirge did not cease. The forlorn wolf did not surrender her hope but continued through the deeps of the night to lure her pups back to her breast. All of which stirred the most dire melancholy in Mrs. Frémont, who was aware that the major had destroyed the wolf pups. She felt the wolf's
suffering within her own bosom, as only a mother who has recently lost a child can do, and so passed a night of torment and sadness, broken by the startling arrival of Frémont.

All of this he told us in his usual offhand way, while we listened silently. His veterans thought all the more of him for his romantic journey back to see his wife and to comfort her in her moment of sadness. My own instincts were otherwise. I wondered why he was telling us about this night passage. Frémont's trip was an attempt to salve his neglect of his wife, and the man was a bastard.

CHAPTER SIX

Henry King

We started west with great ease. The company's outfitting was so perfect that we had no difficulties and proceeded steadily along the Kansas River, making twenty-five or more miles each day across frost-nipped grassland. The whole company was at ease and in the finest of spirits. I could not have been happier myself. Just being with Frémont once again was enough to fill my days with delight. No man ever led a happier band.

Our mules were in good flesh and carried us easily as we progressed across the plains, rarely encountering any serious climb or descent. There was yellowed grass waiting for them at the end of each day, and our skilled muleteers put the mules out on it. We maintained a light but ready guard against thieving Indians but didn't expect trouble.

The timing of this expedition worked out perfectly. I was afraid that Frémont might leave a fortnight earlier, which would have been awkward for me because it would have interrupted
or postponed my wedding. But it was all just fine. We married, Beth and I, and I enjoyed a few days in the bosom of hearth and home before I set off for Westport Landing, even as the restlessness in my heart was growing unbearable. I could not, under any circumstances, avoid this trip, which I had fastened on ever since I heard that Colonel Frémont was planning it. I was with him in the California Battalion, rising to captain in an irregular armed force that was composed of the army's topographic corps and civilian Yanks in Mexican California.

There were several veterans of that campaign with us now, the memory of our easy conquest of California glowing in our bosoms. Without half trying, the colonel had welded together the most powerful armed force on the Pacific Coast, drawing on a motley crowd, whether regular soldiers or Bear Flag rebels or settlers. Most of us were irregulars, but it didn't matter. It wasn't only that we took California with ease; it was that we had such a good time doing it and achieved it without much cost in blood. We were a terror, bearded men in buckskins, and I never forgot it.

I was eager to renew an old friendship. Charles Taplin had been with Frémont during the conquest, rising to captain in the colonel's irregular army. We had been through the whole campaign together. I spurred my mule forward to catch up with him. Fortunately, our mules were gaited much the same. It is next to impossible to conduct a conversation when two beasts have different gaits and one or another rider must always rein in or spur forward.

“Ah, Henry, I was hoping you might join me,” Taplin said.

“This brings back the old days for sure,” I replied.

He smiled wryly at me. “And you abandoned a wife for it?”

“She can wait,” I said.

“I don't know that I would abandon a wife after just a fortnight.”

“She's the picture of domesticity,” I returned, enjoying his needling. “She's especially skilled at mending my socks. But her cooking is still wanting.”

“Probably an improvement on the cooking around our campfires,” he replied.

“No, sir. I don't think any woman can achieve the perfection of good cow buffalo hump, nicely blackened on the outside, or buffalo tongue, well roasted on the outside and pink within.”

“I take it you're not done with adventure, Henry. I'm done with it. I'm going to settle in California. I was greatly smitten by the climate. It's like living in perpetual springtime. When I resigned my commission, I had in mind heading west. This seemed the way to do it.” He touched heels to the mule, evoking a slight spurt before the sullen animal settled back to its indolent walk. “I should like to find a Californio lady. It strikes me that a diet of chili peppers yields a hot nature in them.” He eyed me again. “But of course, that doesn't interest you.”

I laughed. I was not going to let Captain Taplin make me the butt of this company's humor the entire trip. A bridegroom was considered exotic in this crowd.

“I love this country,” I said earnestly. It stretched ahead to a distant brown horizon lost in fall haze, mile upon mile, with naught but wind and sun and cured yellow grasses. This time we would climb over the roof of the continent and make our way to the far coast again. It was that ridgepole part of it that excited me. The colonel could inspire his men to achieve anything, summer or winter, desert or mountain.

“An improvement over the fair sex,” Taplin agreed.

He was not going to let go of it, so I simply grinned at him. Silence was the best reply I could offer. I knew then
and there that I was going to hear about this the entire journey, and the day we topped the Sierra Nevada and beheld California, they would still be asking whether this was an improvement on Beth. The joke was going to be on Captain Taplin, once he discovered that those chili peppers he yearned for were volcanic in more ways than one.

Even as we rode, I saw Frémont's veterans taking their ease, enjoying the trip while the greenhorns were struggling, sore in their saddles and worn out by the middle of the day. I supposed they would harden eventually, and then life would become easier for them. I didn't know what a botanist was doing on a railroad survey, but maybe the colonel wanted to achieve the very thing he accomplished the previous times as an army officer, making a major contribution to science. He always had his eye on the public, like a man planning to run for president. A few more laurels wouldn't hurt. Still, since this was an underfinanced commercial expedition, I didn't quite fathom it. Every businessman I'm acquainted with wants to cut unnecessary expense, and here we had an odd German named Cruetzfeldt with us whose task was to pluck flowers. I supposed he didn't leave a new wife behind. That sort of man never marries.

I could understand Preuss. He was along on the previous trips, doing his mapmaking and reading the instruments and furiously writing notes, pretending not to enjoy himself. The man wouldn't smile. It always ended up a sneer or a grimace. I always wondered what he put in his diaries. If you're going to run a railroad, you need a map and some topographic knowledge, what kind of grades you'll be facing, things like that, and that's what he supplied. And I could understand Ned Kern, too. He was with us in California. He could sketch, and a railroad needs to have drawings of the terrain if it's going to run a line through it. I supposed I could even understand Kern's brother Benjamin. A doctor
is handy to set a bone or fix a mule, but he'll not be doctoring the veterans. Only the newcomers will get snake bit or fall off cliffs or get kicked by a mule.