The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (34 page)

I said yes, rubbing at my eyes with my sleeve. “You’ll see her, my boy, and you’ll see her soon. Now before we go to sleep, let’s dream for a minute about the good fun that lies ahead. When you make your strike, you know, you build an oblong, sloping, 12-foot trough
that they call a ‘Long Tom’—for the water that does the washing—and at the bottom of it you have a piece of flat, perforated sheet-iron, resting directly over what’s known as a ‘riffle box.’ ”

He went on, painting the pretty pictures, cheery and optimistic, just as always, and inside I think he was dying. We seldom know anybody until it’s too late.

During the next few days we encountered any number of people turning back, for one reason and another. It was discouraging, because we began to have troubles, too. We were now in the Western Nebraskas, moving up the north fork of the Platte toward Fort Laramie and the junction of the Laramie River, We had mostly passed the plains, and were in a kind of foothilly, boulder-strewn land that lay before the mountains. There was grass, but it was cropped down and eaten away because they said a caravan of Mormons was up ahead, and they wouldn’t only consume the blades but generally took the roots along with them, and felt sorrowful if they had to leave the soil.

Anyhow, the grass that was left was full of stickers and burrs, and crawling all over with crickets so fat they made good targets for a slingshot. I had a very good time all one morning, counting up as many as twenty-five solid hits, until a small granite pebble, no bigger than your thumb, and certainly nothing to make a fuss about, glanced off a rock and hit a Mr. Millsap behind the left ear. After they got him back on his feet, he spoke up pretty brisk, being probably in a bad humor about something, and my father made me put the slingshot in the wagon.

The area all about was so rocky and coarse, and graveled everybody so much, that Coulter told us to put on heavy boots if we had them. So my father traded for a pair of cowhide boots with a party returning to Ohio, but he said they were too stiff and rubbed his right ankle above the “malleolus internus.”

The road had become littered with dead oxen. The more that
died, the harder the wagons were to pull, because now we were going uphill considerable, too. One of Mr. Kissel’s animals dropped dead in its traces and another lost its cud. But when we stopped to noon, near a very mired-up quaggy place, they gave it a piece of fat bacon dipped in salt, and it was soon chewing again. But nobody looked very glad, neither in our own group or up and down the train.

The third night out from Chimney Rock, camped on a plain beyond a place they called Scott’s Bluffs, where we could see the peaks of the Rocky Mountains in the distance, we had an electric storm that scared everybody half to death but hardly did any damage at all. The left rear wheel of one wagon was smoked up where a bolt hit a bush nearby; that was all. But that lightning squirted around as if the whole sky was on fire. Nobody in the train had ever seen anything like it. For about an hour it was as pale as day and the air just quivered; the lightning was going all the time, never any let up. There was such a crackling and hissing of current that it crawled along the wagon tops in a blue-white liquid, and rolled and dripped off nearly everything in sight. It’s a wonder we weren’t all killed.

Lying flat on our robes but with the tent flap open so we could see, my father made some remarks about a man named Ben Franklin, who had gone out in such a storm to fly a kite, he didn’t say why. Drunk, likely. I didn’t pursue it. My father had some most amazingly ignorant patients, and there weren’t half of them ever paid up from one year to the next. But I remembered now there was a family of Franklins, poor white trash, filthy and uneducated, used to sell catfish out of a peddler’s cart in Louisville, and one of them was said to be a half-wit. That was it, then; that must be this same Ben. Why, a child would know better than to take a kite out under conditions like these.

From here on toward Laramie, things got worse; even Coulter seemed downhearted. The wife of one man, a Mrs. Gurney, died of galloping pneumonia, and a number of other people were sick in their wagons. It kept my father and Dr. Merton on the jump all the
time
, and many a
time
way off in the night, I’d awaken, struggling up not quite to being conscious, the way you do, and hear somebody whispering in his ear that a person needed tending. He looked worried, and he was so peaked and drawn I wondered if he wasn’t apt to get sick himself. But he kept encouraging people, and telling them how close we were to California—though we hadn’t got halfway yet—and finally, in a burst of confidence he wrote my mother a letter that for plain, downright humbug surpassed anything he’d come up with yet. I know because he read it to me and asked me if I thought it “misrepresentational.” I was tempted to tell him it was nothing but a pack of lies, but I didn’t have the heart. In the business of writing one of those letters, he always worked things around to believe it himself, partly, so was in a better frame of mind.

It was an interesting letter, though, and laid stress on everybody’s “exceptionally robust” health, their bouncing good spirits, and their all-around satisfaction that they’d decided to come. He gave it to three men from Oregon who were heading back to Missouri and raise a flock of sheep to drive out. They said they’d post it, the first chance they got, and in return my father tested one of them that he said was anemic and advised him to take a long sea voyage and rest up. The honest truth is that, along in here, he was so ground down and overworked he was sort of addled.

Even so, he hardly let a day go by without writing an addition to his Journals, and in these he was as honest as anybody could get. I believe, today, that down underneath he felt he could excuse everything—debts, drinking, skylarking off for gold, all the doubts that plagued and chafed him—if he would leave behind a good, true, faithful document of pioneering that people might read later and profit from. As he saw it, this was his contribution now, far more than doctoring, and he put into it every ounce of uprightness that formed the core of his disposition.

On the twentieth of August he wrote that, “The road is getting heavy with sand; it’s a dead, heavy pull, and we are compelled to rest the oxen often. As a person walks, his foot slips back one or two
inches. We have passed Horse Creek, over a sandy, barren country. Now must use sagebrush for fuel, as the buffalo are, for the moment at least, behind us. We are finding the carrot seed troublesome. It sticks to both blankets and clothes …”

And a few days later, after riding Cream up a slope a mile or so ahead, he sat down on a rock and wrote: “Because of the saline incrustations, I have noticed little ulcers in many of the horses’ noses. At first, I was fearful that these might develop into full-fledged cases of glanders, but all of them responded well enough to a treatment by washing in a weak solution of alum.

“The sand in places has been very loose, and often blazing-hot. The wheels now are apt to sink in as far as eighteen inches, making such a dire pull for the poor, exhausted, uncomplaining oxen that we are, again, discussing the common alternative of ‘packing’, that is, shifting our cargoes as well as feasible to the backs of mules and continuing our journey on foot. Coulter himself mentioned this only yesterday, and I foresee that a crisis in our resolution may develop at Fort Laramie, a more or less civilized outpost some miles distant on the trail. The wagon wheels, being constantly immersed in hot sand, are taking punishment of the most damaging kind. The felloes and naves shrink, the tyres loosen, and the spokes rattle like a bag of bones. For a while we were able to cure this by wedging and submerging them in water, but they are now far advanced on the road to disintegration.”

We reached Fort Laramie several days after this last entry, and found some excitement. Camped on the plain all around were upwards of three thousand Sioux, their horses staked out grazing, and about six hundred lodges sticking up like a harvest of tied-together corn shocks. It was a sight to behold. But before we got to them, we went by Fort Bernard, which wasn’t any more than a lopsided building made out of crude logs with holes punched in them to shoot through. Nearby, as Coulter rode up, followed by the first wagons of the train, stood a drove of mules tended by some Mexican Indians that kept saluting us by flashing the sun off a broken
piece of looking glass. It was annoying; I could see Coulter trying to hang on to his temper. For once, he did it tolerably well.

We stopped there only a few minutes, while some of the men talked about mules to a Mr. Richard, who was the principal of the post, as they called it. He was a big, red-faced man with white hair, not overly clean, not what you’d call sober, either, although the sun was perfectly high overhead. He invited us all to stay the night, meaning to sleep in our tents as usual, I judged. You couldn’t have herded all those people into the Fort without a very rackety jamboree, and one of the men of the train, a crude fool that cracked the rawest sort of jokes whenever anybody got near enough to listen, which was seldom, said, “I wouldn’t care to take the chancet My ol’ woman ain’t no rose, but she’s all I’ve got, and if we was to bundle in that cubbyhole she might scoot into the wrong bag by mistake. Could be I’d wake up brother-in-law to a Navahoo.”

This was certainly a poor joke, and three or four people told him so, said it was “indelicate,” but it didn’t faze him any. He bit off a chew of tobacco and had a very good time laughing; then he left, saying he was going back to tell his old woman, because he knew she’d enjoy it, too.

We moved on to Laramie, where the members of the train wanted to lay in supplies, those that could afford them, and make plans about what to do from here. A celebration was concluding when we pulled up; the Sioux had been doing a war dance inside. Somebody said the big encampment was because these Indians were planning to attack the Snakes and Crows, who were their natural enemies. They spilled out of the adobe gate in whooping bunches, shaking tomahawks and having a merry old time, and it wasn’t long before we saw they were mainly drunk. The women, too. These women were throwing themselves around in any old way, shaking their hips, and making gestures at our men in what several people said were “disgusting,” and “indecent” attitudes.

They weren’t any bad-looking women, either. A light copper color, some rouged on their cheeks, and dressed very rich, many of them, with buckskin worked up somehow so as to make it a creamy
white, wonderfully soft, and with shirt, pantaloons and moccasins decorated all around with porcelain beads of many colors. How these last shone and sparkled. Jennie said they were brazen hussies, and Po-Povi, walking beside me, seemed nervous at so many of her kind; she wouldn’t look at them at all.

Well, one of these women—not more than a girl—came up suddenly and flung her arms around Brice, who couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d peeled off her clothes, and Jennie cracked her smartly over the head with a skin reticule full of knickknacks. It was a beautiful lick. That girl’s eyes actually crossed—she was right in front of me and I saw them—and her legs wobbled her all around in a circle. I noticed Coulter move his right hand easily toward his revolver, but nothing came of it. The braves thought it was a prime good joke; they almost died laughing, the way a drunk’s apt to. Several of them walked forward, in mock interest and sympathy, to feel of the girl’s bump, but once they’d touched it, they collapsed with hilarity. This was just the kind of fun they liked. If the girl’s neck had been busted, they would have declared a national holiday and feasted for a week.

Still and all, these braves made a fine appearance: big men, fierce and proud. Later on, somebody in the Fort said there were eight to ten thousand Sioux altogether, of all nations. They claimed lands that extended over hundreds of thousands of square miles, but a lot of others claimed them, too, so there was always fighting. But the Sioux generally got the best of it, except when they found themselves odds-even against the Crows. The Crows were the toughest fighters anywhere, and the cruelest, if you want to except the Blackfeet, who were born with the outlook of a mountain lion and got steadily worse as they grew older. Among other things the Sioux claimed was this Fort Laramie, so the white men that ran it, called the American Fur Company, let them go right ahead. It didn’t bother anybody to be claimed; it didn’t cost anything; and it made the Sioux look better to other tribes. The only objections the Indians ever had around the Fort were to the crops that people occasionally set out. For some reason, these Sioux were powerful down
on farming. They were buffalo hunters and didn’t cotton to agriculture. So once in a while, to keep their hand in, and make their claim more valid, a bunch rode down and scattered the crops. In that way, they could maintain friendly relations and not have to massacre anybody; they’d showed who was boss. What’s more, they kept a handy place to buy whiskey, this way, and sometimes muskets and rifles. But only a few braves that I saw had guns; most were armed with knives and tomahawks, bows and arrows, and such.

The Fort itself was made out of the meanest kind of adobe, or sun-dried brick, undecorated, formed in what they call a military quadrangle, the walls having watch towers on the corners, and the gate protected by two brass swivel cannons. Along one side of the court, built into the walls, were offices and storerooms and mechanical shops, like a smithy, and against the opposite wall was the main building. The whole enclosure took up about three quarters of an acre. A few raggedy soldiers lounged here and there, with more Mexicans and Indians, a handful of traders, and trappers, the remnants of wagon trains that hadn’t made it, and altogether the scene wasn’t by any means one to perk up your spirits.

Well, while my father and some others went over to pay their respects to a Captain Cooper, and to the head of the Fur Company, a man named Monseer Burdeau, we loafed around and took in the sights. A few of our people bought things, but it wasn’t easy because the prices were so high. Coffee, sugar and tobacco were a dollar a pound, flour was fifty cents a pint, and they claimed whiskey was a dollar a pint, but I didn’t price it. Coulter rode his horse in to get the forward off-hoof shod, and did considerable grumbling at the blacksmith, which seemed like a poor idea because this fellow was about as broad as Mr. Kissel, though shorter, and had arms like young oak trees. He was wearing a pair of hide pants, a jersey, and a leather apron all marked up with burns, from flying sparks. His naked arms and shoulders were covered with red fur as thick as an ape’s, but he hadn’t a hair on his head. Perfectly bald and shiny, not even a fringe around the edge. It often works that way, I’ve noticed. Remove the clothes off an entirely bald man and you’ll
find that, in the line of growing hair, his strength was laid out elsewhere. On the other hand, I never saw a bald Indian or one with any hair to speak of except on his head; they’ve struck a nice balance that way, and seem advanced over the whites.