Colter's Journey Page 6

  The woman, with her blond hair wet with sweat, crawled from underneath the dead man.

  Jackatars turned toward the men who had gathered to watch and cheer and laugh. He dropped his empty pistol in the sage and pulled the curved knife with his right hand. He had killed more men with knives than with pistols, anyway. One look at his gang and he knew he had nothing more to fear.

  He repeated in English, French, Métis, and Crow, what he had told the dead Indian and gestured at the corpses behind him. Using the small knife as a pointer, he picked four men and ordered them to bury the dead men deep, so no wolves and no white men would ever find their bodies.

  Finally, sheathing both blades, he walked to the woman. She was good-looking, even with her busted lip and a face paled with fear. Trembling fingers held her chemise together, keeping her breasts from spilling out where the fiends had ripped the undergarment, but the two men had not done anything else—thanks to Louis Jackatars. He shook his head.

  Idiots. Did they think they could have gotten away with it? Were they that drunk or that lustful?

  Kneeling beside the woman, he held out his hands. “You are safe now.”

  Color returned to her face and life suddenly filled her eyes. She spit between his moccasins.

  Jackatars laughed. “You have spirit. That I like in a woman.”

  She came up to her knees quick as a rattlesnake and struck out with her right hand. He caught her wrist with his left and jerked her forward, close to him, then took her left hand and squeezed like a vise until she cried out and tears ran down her cheeks.

  “Spirit I like, but only so much. Too much salt spoils the food.”

  He shoved her to the ground, admiring her breasts for a moment, before rising. “Go to your child and her friends, wench. Fix your chemise so no one else gets any fool notions. Remember that I saved your life and the lives of your daughter and those other two girls. Remember that I, and only I, Louis Jackatars, can keep you alive.”

  He tried to remember the woman’s name and the names of the three teenage captives. Lois. No, Doris. She was the mother of the girl named Patricia. The other two girls, the sisters of the brother who had fled into the woods when they had attacked, he could not remember. There had been another woman, the mother of the two other girls and the boy who had escaped death—unless Baillarger had found him and killed him and was on his way to join Jackatars and his renegades. But she had fought against Dog Ear Rounsavall too hard to live. He regretted having to kill the woman. None of the men had any regrets about killing the two men.

  They had been fools, as most of the emigrants were, and had died easily. After filling the men’s bodies with arrows, the renegades had taken their scalps—and even the scalp of the dead woman—and ransacked the trunks they had found in the wagon. They’d considered burning the wagons, too, but decided against it, in case a hunting party was in the area and came too quickly to discover that white men and renegades had been responsible, and not the relatively peaceful Indians to the north.

  By the time the mother was being comforted by the teenage girls and four of his men were carrying the dead men away, Jackatars saw the horseman riding in from the south.

  It was Malachi Murchison, and from the looks of the trapper and his horse, he had ridden hard—too hard—from Bridger’s Trading Post on the Green.

  CHAPTER 9

  Jed Reno rode along Bitter Creek on the rim of the Red Desert, heading east. Eventually, he would turn north and ride toward the Popo Agie country, probably cutting through along the divide between Essex and Steamboat Mountains. His mule was fully packed and restocked after his visit with Jim Bridger and run-in with Malachi Murchison. If Louis Jackatars was around, Bridger had told him, he’d likely be around Sinks Canyon or heading north into the Tetons and Colter’s Hell.

  Murchison’s trail had made a beeline northwest from Bridger’s place, turning north after swimming the Green, toward the Big Sandy, Father DeSmet’s mission, and those old Rendezvous sites that held so many memories for men like Jed Reno and Jim Bridger.

  Reno didn’t follow Murchison’s trail, however. They would be expecting him, he figured, and Jackatars could lay an ambush with the best of men. Instead, Reno would try to sneak up on the evil Métis and knife-slashing Murchison by making a roundabout trip in country scarce of people, pick his way to South Pass, and then into the Rocky Mountains.

  Jed Reno was no fool.

  His bones creaked and his muscles ached as he shifted his weight in the saddle. Old bones, he figured, and not so much from the fight with Murchison. He tested his side, but those stitches of mule hair still held. No blood had leaked from the knife slash, though Malachi Murchison would give Reno another scar. Still, he was alive. He would make Murchison pay, partly thanks to old Bridger. Yep, Jim was mighty handy when it came to patching up his old pards.

  If Murchison wasn’t lying, Louis Jackatars was set to start an Indian uprising. But how? Most tribes had been feeling relatively peaceable of late, and even those long lines of prairie schooners trodding across the Great Plains and greater mountains did not trouble the Indians too much. The white men and women kept moving across the country of the Pawnees and Arapahos and Shoshones and Cheyennes and Paiutes and Utes . . . or whomever claimed it at the moment. The emigrants didn’t scare off that much game, or take too much meat from Indian bellies, and they left behind a lot of interesting trinkets—blankets and mirrors and boxes and books, even furniture, when the fools traveling west realized that they had packed too much in their wagons for such an arduous journey.

  The whites did not stop, so the Indians usually let them go.

  The whites did not stop . . . yet. Jed Reno was a white man—at least, he had been once—and he understood that before long, the whites would stop. Oregon could not hold them all. Even fool emigrants would soon learn the land they were crossing was mighty good. When they started settling there, and when the Army sent its Dragoons and cannons and idiot soldier-boys to protect the new white settlers, war would come. It would be bloody, ugly, and last a long, long time.

  Oh, the Indians would eventually lose. Whites would try to grow crops, or raise pigs, or something. The elk and the buffalo would disappear like the beaver. The country would not be fit for a man like Jed Reno. And Jed Reno did not see himself minding a store and swapping stories like Jim Bridger was doing down by the Green.

  Of course, Jed Reno had once been like many of those starry-eyed white men, taking his family across the Great Plains and through the Rockies. Back when he had two eyes, wore duds made of muslin and wool, and learned his letters and to do his ciphering thanks to his mother. As he rode along, he gave in to long ago memories.

  Bowling Green, Kentucky, had not been much of a place compared to Independence or St. Louis or Cincinnati, but it was home. It hadn’t been called Bowling Green back when his ma and pa had settled on the north bank of the Barren River back in 1783. Back then, folks called the settlement McFadden’s Station.

  Jed came along in April of ’96, four years after Kentucky had become the first state west of the Appalachians. He was the fifth child and fourth son to live. Two more girls followed.

  Jed was not quite two years old when Warren County had been carved out of the wilderness, and Robert Moore, one of the first homesteaders, donated a couple acres for county trustees to put up some public buildings, and then some thirty or forty acres to plot out a new town. Bowling Green was incorporated in 1798. Of course, by the time Jed could count and even knew his ABCs, nobody could quite remember exactly how that name had been chosen.

  He remembered turnips and beets the most about his hometown. Oh, there were plenty of people—maybe a hundred and fifty back when he was fourteen—not to mention riverboats. Folks had already been talking about erecting canal locks and building dams to make the Barren River easier to navigate and thereby making Bowling Green more important.

  He dug up turnips that had a circumference of better than thirty inches, and beets weighing upward of fiftee
n pounds. Corn sprouted up like weeds. Sweet corn, too, some of the best a man would ever eat. He chopped down hickory. He hunted in the woods. To a teenage boy, Kentucky was paradise.

  Yeah, I’d probably still be in Bowling Green, with a fat wife, a farm of his own, a couple coon dogs, and a brood of young’uns, attending camp meetings regular and frequenting the tavern only twice a week . . . if Pa hadn’t been such a miser and a fool.

  His pa decided to apprentice Jed to a wheelwright in Louisville. After all, even fifteen-pound beets and giant turnips couldn’t feed seven kids. One less mouth to feed seemed a good financial incentive, and, well, Jed Reno always was on the wild side. He got the most whuppings and was prone to talk back to his elders, even the circuit-riding preacher.

  Louisville was huge and right on the Ohio River. The wheelwright wasn’t a bad fellow. In fact, Jed probably liked Mr. Sneed better than he liked his own pa. The food wasn’t bad, either. Even if Mrs. Sneed made Jed wash on Saturdays and took him to church on Sundays and wouldn’t let a body do a thing on the Sabbath except listen to the boring sermon and then read the Bible and pray and eat and sleep, they did let him go exploring for a few hours on Saturday afternoons.

  It was on one such Saturday afternoon that he sneaked aboard a steamboat and went down the Ohio.

  The crew quickly found him, but just worked him like a dog until they reached New Madrid on the north side of the Mississippi River’s Kentucky Bend. That’s about the time they got sick from bad pork and blamed Jed as a jinx. He hadn’t been taken with vomiting and the runs, but only because the crew hadn’t let him eat supper that night. But you couldn’t tell a bunch of ruffians that, and Jed was sick of living on a keelboat, anyhow. They might have flogged him or just left him at the landing, but they kept him until the keelboat had pulled out and turned south toward New Orleans. After that, three men tossed him overboard about a mile downstream.

  They figured he wouldn’t know how to swim, but he had three older brothers who loved tossing him into the Barren back in Kentucky. Of course, the Mississippi was a whole lot wider, with a stronger current, but Jed made it to the Missouri side and walked back to the settlement.

  He stole at first, but quickly got caught doing that, and the store owner put him to work, though he did let him sleep on a blanket in the storeroom and took to feeding him like a stray puppy dog after a couple days. About a week later, the owner, a man called Chester, started paying Jed five cents a week.

  Jed might have worked his way up to becoming a respectable citizen in Missouri. New Madrid was small, and the forests and river kept a boy active when he wasn’t clerking, but something wild happened on December 16, 1811.

  Jed shook his head, surprised he remembered the exact date. He’d been looking at the calendar on the wall, making an X over the date, and suddenly he realized that his X was straying out of the sixteenth box and the jar of sugar beside him was crashing to the floor. The whole store kept shaking, spilling ax handles he had carved, and Mrs. Chester was clutching her throat and screaming that the world was coming to an end.

  He fell back into the memory of that day.

  Earlier, while sleeping on the floor, the floor seemed to shake. He thought he was dreaming. That morning, the ground began rumbling and the building kept rattling a whole lot worse.

  It didn’t last long. When it was over, and Mrs. Chester stopped screaming, and Mr. Chester brought out the broom to sweep up the spilled sugar, everyone settled down. New Madrid went back to business.

  About a month later, the world shook again. Things were a bit different. Jed was in the street, leading a mule to the stable across from the store, when the mule stopped dead in its tracks about a half-minute before the ground shook. Jed saw the ground, well, it seemed to be warping. He dropped the hackamore, dropped to the ground, and the mule bolted toward the river. What he saw almost caused him to soil his britches. A ditch was carving straight down the road toward him, but nobody was digging the ditch. Mrs. Chester said it was God’s work. Mr. Chester blamed the devil.

  When the world stopped shaking, Jed had gone hunting the mule. He didn’t find the mule, but he did see uprooted trees, caved in banks of streams, and a few more ditches, either dug by God or Lucifer.

  Well, that got folks talking about earthquakes and what might happen next. He hoped that the Chesters would decide to light out for somewhere the ground did not shake so hard and so often.

  They decided, though, that they would keep right on running their store. Most of the handful of people who lived in New Madrid felt the same.

  Till two weeks or so later.

  Late that night or early in the morning, well before dawn, anyhow, when most folks were asleep, the ground started shaking and didn’t stop so soon. Jed made it out of the store just before the chimney collapsed. Being February, cold as a coonhound’s nose, the store went up in flames. The Mississippi flowed backwards. Waterfalls sprang out in the middle of the river, and water moved inland. A keelboat moored at the landing swayed up and down and sideways. Trees crashed in the forests surrounding the town. Birds screamed as they flew away. Dogs howled. Horses whinnied. People screamed and prayed. The air smelled of sulfur. Someone shouted that the gates of hell had opened. Above the roar and panic, Jed thought he could make out the church bell in Cahokia pealing.

  “It’s Judgment Day!” someone shrieked.

  More chimneys toppled. The ground stopped its roaring, and settled down, while the river kept roaring.

  After dawn, another quake shook the earth, but by then, there wasn’t much left of New Madrid.

  Jed and the Chesters and several more lighted out for St. Louis, wading through knee-high water, saying at least they didn’t have to worry about snakes. They did find a few dead bodies and buried them in shallow graves, but by the time they reached Cape Girardeau, things seemed to be a little more normal and a whole lot safer. The Chesters decided to stay there, but Jed kept on with others to St. Louis. Any place where the ground shook so violently that the river ran backwards and formed new lakes, well, that wasn’t where he wanted to live.

  For the next eleven years, he worked odd jobs in St. Louis. He worked on the waterfront, and saw the first steamboat arrive back in 1818. He even served as a mate for about six months, but didn’t take to riverboat life. He found his calling when a restaurant hired him to bring in game. That Jed could do. In fact, he was soon hauling in so much fresh meat, the restaurant owner couldn’t handle it all, so he sent him to three other cafés, and Jed finally had enough money to do as he pleased.

  He was in a tavern on the waterfront one evening when he picked up a copy of the Missouri Republican. He couldn’t recall reading any articles, but he did remember the advertisement. A hundred “enterprising young men” were sought to “ascend the river Missouri to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years.” Applicants needed to be well-armed, tough, and good shots.

  The next morning, he sought out William Henry Ashley. Jed wasn’t the first to sign up, but he did become one of Ashley’s Hundred. Ashley and his partner, a bullet maker named Andrew Henry, were looking for furs. They provided everything a trapper needed. For that, they split the profits fifty-fifty with the men they hired.

  Reno managed to keep his eyes moving, clearly watching and looking for anything that might cause him difficulty. Not seeing anything, he smiled, thinking of the men—the hundred and fifty whose blood ran just like his own.

  Jim Beckwourth and Hugh Glass. Thomas Fitzpatrick and Jim Bridger. Jedediah Smith and the Sublette boys, William and Milton. Kit Carson and Joseph Meek. And men he would never call friends—Malachi Murchison and Louis Jackatars.

  Reno set out with Henry, some twenty-odd men, sixty horses, and a keelboat. The next boat, captained by Daniel Moore, sank. Ashley took the third keelboat. Once they reached the mouth of the Yellowstone River that autumn, they put up a post they decided to call Fort Henry.

  Jed Reno found his true calling. He became a trapper. He became a mountain ma
n.

  Nothing lasts forever. That was a saying he heard enough. Well, he knew that for a fact. Fort Henry was around maybe a year. Andrew Henry quit the company after a couple years, went back to mining lead and making bullets. He died sometime back in ’32 or ’33, maybe ’34.

  Ashley sold his share of what had become the Rocky Mountain Fur Company to David Edward Jackson back in ’26. Ashley had, of course, not retired back to St. Louis just to dabble in politics. A former lieutenant governor, he did run for the big office in Missouri but didn’t win. But he had helped set up the Rendezvous system. He had set up a few other trading posts, too, and done his fair share of exploring, to the Great Salt Lake and down south in the Colorado country.

  Reno sighed. Ashley and Jackson, those two old rich Virginians, were also dead. He decided he better stop reminiscing and think about living.

  Six Indians were loping toward him.

  CHAPTER 10

  Tim Colter slept next to his mother, hoping that when he woke she would be alive.

  Of course, she wasn’t.

  He had looked all around for his sisters and Patricia Scott, but they were gone. What looked like horse tracks—except the horses wore no iron shoes—led off to the northwest. The Indians must have taken the girls away. Remembering what all the white men he had met had said what a red-skinned savage would do to a white girl made Tim sick to his stomach.

  The Indians had also taken Pa’s prized Percheron stallion and all of the oxen that had been pulling the wagons since Independence.

  He found the bodies of his father and Mr. Scott, but couldn’t figure out why he did not find Mrs. Scott. Maybe she got away. He shook his head no and felt sick again. More than likely, the Indians had taken her with the girls.