Colter's Journey Read online

  The third girl had brown hair and green eyes. Not quite as tall as Patricia Scott, not quite as pretty, but a good-looking girl. Had her fool parents not taken her away from whatever Eastern state they had called home, she would have grown up to be a pretty woman till she married and had a dozen kids and grew fat and lazy and old and ugly.

  The Blackfeet would love her, though.

  She probably wouldn’t care much for them.

  “And your name?”

  “Nancy,” she said just loud enough for Jackatars to hear.

  He didn’t care much for that name. Too plain. He sheathed his knife and clapped his hands. “Very well. I am Louis Jackatars. I bid you welcome to my camp. We have a hard way ahead of us, so sleep when you can, eat when we feed you, do your business before we put you on the horses and before you go to bed. Do as I say, and when I say it. Do this, and you live. Disobey, and you die. Do you understand?”

  They were well-trained.

  “Yes,” all of them—even stubborn Patricia Scott—answered in unison.

  “We ride in an hour,” he said, and moved back toward the main camp, motioning for the Spaniards to return.

  “Mr. Jackatars?”

  He turned on his heel and smiled at the girl named Patricia Scott.

  “Yes?”

  “What about the boy? The one that ran from the camp when you . . . you . . . attacked?”

  “The coward?”

  He liked the anger that flashed in the girl’s eyes.

  She knew better, however, than to contradict him. Swallowing down anger and pride, she ignored his insult and asked, “What happened to him?”

  Jackatars shrugged. “As they say to the south, ‘¿Quién sabe?’ Who knows? The coward is dead, of course. Baillarger . . . the man I left behind . . . he kills everyone and everything. He has killed more men than I have.” Laughing, he walked away, barking out his orders to get ready to ride.

  He ordered Dog Ear Rounsavall to ride out ahead, on a scout, make sure no Indians or no trappers were to be seen. The gravediggers, he yelled, would have to catch up with them, and they had better make sure no one could ever find the two bodies of the men Jackatars had killed.

  He beckoned one of the Spaniards, the Basque called Abaroa. In a mix of Spanish, English, and sign language, Jackatars told him to wait until they had gone, mount his horse, and ride back to South Pass. Find out what had happened to Baillarger. “But be careful. Don’t be caught by white men. If they find you, tell them that you saw a raiding party of Indians, and that they were headed northwest.”

  As Abaroa walked to find his horse, Rounsavall approached Jackatars and whispered in French, “Any man who is not blind can follow our trail from South Pass.” He pointed at the camp they had made. “You seem careless, my friend. Once you would make a camp where no one would ever be able to see that you had camped here.”

  Jackatars clapped the French trapper hard on the back.

  “This time, my friend, I wish to be followed.” From his possibles sack, he removed a Ute headband and feather, which he slipped into a sagebrush, making sure the wind would not carry it away.

  Let the white men find that, he thought, moving quickly to his horse.

  CHAPTER 14

  Climbing up the hills was tiring. Tim found himself stopping for breath a lot more often than he thought he would. The captain of the wagon train had said South Pass was something like seventy-five hundred feet in elevation. His pa had joked to the family that that was only seven thousand feet higher than Danville.

  Tim drank some water, but it didn’t help his headache. It would be easy to stop, to rest, but he didn’t want those raiders to get farther away from him.

  His chest heaved, his legs ached, and the country seemed to get higher and rougher, but he made himself keep walking. It was slow-going, but at least he moved in the right direction. Following the horse prints seemed easy enough, and when the ground got too hard for any tracks, he found horse dung, broken twigs, and overturned stones. He couldn’t be certain, but he seemed to think he was moving in the right direction.

  As he walked, he remembered.

  * * *

  “Horses and mules aren’t what people are using anymore,” Mr. Scott told Pa. “Oxen. That’s what you’ll need to reach Oregon. Not that Percheron.”

  “Oxen.” Pa shook his head. “They move so slow, we’ll never get there.”

  Mr. Scott laughed. “Slow, but sure. They are not prone to being stopped by mud and snow. They don’t get as sick as horses and mules.”

  “You have to shod them.”

  “Yes. And that’s no easy chore, but few people moving to Oregon use horses or mules anymore. Most of the leaders of the wagon trains won’t allow the Conestogas to be pulled by anything but oxen.”

  Pa glanced at the Percheron. “I’m taking that stallion.”

  “Of course. He’ll make you rich in Oregon. But he won’t be pulling your wagon.”

  Tim continued walking . . . walking and remembering.

  The Colters and the Scotts said their farewells, loaded their wagons with furniture and supplies, and left Danville, traveling in their mule-pulled wagons—Tim’s pa bought the oxen later in Kansas—to Pittsburgh, the biggest, wildest, roughest city Tim had ever seen. One of the largest cities west of the Alleghenies, it was filled with wooden homes and factories belching smoke. It was as though storm clouds always blocked out the sun, but coal dust and fibers of cotton rained instead of moisture . . . and the air smelled of soot and ash.

  * * *

  Tim shuddered, glad he did not live there. Too many people—maybe 20,000, his pa had said—and lots of them foreigners. He’d heard Scottish brogues and what he took as German. Most of the people worked on the Pennsylvania Canal or in the iron- or glassworks. “Traveling down the Ohio River all the way to the Mississippi was a lot more fun than Pittsburgh, even if it was named after William Pitt, whoever he was. I liked the river. It was amazing.”

  Tim leaned against the railing and watched the river and the ever-changing land sweep past.

  “Nine hundred and eighty-one miles,” a burly deckhand with a face and beard blackened by soot and tattoos covering his forearm, told him and Patricia. “All the way to Cairo, Illinois.”

  “La Salle called it La Belle Rivière,” the ship’s captain told them on another afternoon. “But it ain’t always so beautiful, children, especially when heading downstream back when we had to deal with the Falls of the Ohio. But the Louisville and Portland Canal has eliminated that hazard. Still, I like the name Ohio better than the name La Salle give her. That’s what the Iroquois called it. Ohio means ‘The Great River.’ And she is that.”

  It seemed like an adventure. Tim had seen hardly anything other than Danville, but on the river, he saw more—amazing towns, landings, and cities. Parkersburg . . . Wheeling . . . Huntington . . . Steubenville . . . Marietta . . . Gallipolis . . . Portsmouth . . . Cincinnati . . . Madison. . . New Albany . . . Evansville . . . Mount Vernon . . . Ashland . . . Covington . . . Owensboro . . . Paducah. It was the most amazing piece of water Tim had ever seen . . . until they reached Cairo, Illinois and he gawked at the Mississippi.

  Cairo was not much—nothing like Pittsburgh, although you could breathe the air without coughing too much, even if you might suck in a pound or two of gnats and mosquitoes. The banks were flat and low—like the houses. Even the trees did not appear tall. The land was swampy, and the air was hot.

  But the river?

  Strong and wide, a mile from bank to bank in places, and even wider elsewhere, muddy, the current slow—six miles an hour, on average, said the second mate of the second ship Tim found himself on—with logs shooting down the river like battering rams.

  “Aye,” the mate said, “’tis the snags ye have te watch. The snags and the sawyers . . . they can send a boat and all hands aboard to watery graves.”

  On one dark night, when Tim had ventured out, another mate had let him stand by him, and they stared at the dark water
in front of them, his hand near a bell.

  “You look for the ripple,” the mate said. “That tells you when—” Immediately, he rang the bell, and a moment later, the ship seemed to slam to a stop so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that if the mate had not grabbed the waistband of Tim’s britches, he would have fallen overboard.

  The bell rang seven more times that night before Tim went to bed to hear his father cursing that it was impossible to sleep when he kept being pitched off his cot.

  Tim smiled. He remembered most the times he’d spent with Patricia Scott. They’d strolled the decks, watched men fishing from the banks and the islands, looked at the land, the river, and the men working the boats. Sometimes, when they were certain no one had been looking, they’d held hands, fingers together, and now and again he had squeezed her hand and smiled when she’d squeezed back. Twice, when the moon shone down upon them and the Mississippi River, they’d even kissed.

  Thinking of those moments made him more determined than ever. He kept walking . . . and remembering.

  They left the ship in St. Louis, a raw, ugly town full of rough-looking men, mosquitoes, and a city that reeked of dead fish, smoke from the steamboats, mud, smoke, urine, and dung. Pa exclaimed that since this would be their last touch of civilization, they should eat at the finest hotel the city offered. So they spent a small fortune at The Planter’s House.

  Granted, they saw most of the towns only from the river, but St. Louis seemed different from any other they passed. It wasn’t strictly frontier, since Main Street and the sidewalks were paved, although part of both desperately needed repairs. Tens of thousands of people lived there—men in buckskins, homespun, or the finest clothes Tim had seen since Danville. Soldiers, on leave from Jefferson Barracks south of the city, sang out drunkenly from cafés and dram shops; pack mules carried furs and hides.

  “Used to be practically all beaver plews,” one man in a silk hat and spectacles told Tim and Patricia, “but ’tis now mostly buffalo.”

  They saw more Irish and Germans, and for the first time in their lives, they stared at slaves.

  St. Louis, their mothers decided, was too raw a place for anyone to travel alone, so after breakfasting at the Planter’s Hotel the Sunday before they boarded their last steamboat and headed across the state along the Missouri River, traded their mules for oxen, and began the long, arduous journey to Oregon, the two families walked the streets of the foul-smelling city together.

  A tall man of color, dressed resplendently in a garnet waistcoat, stood at one corner, reading from a newspaper to a crowd of black men and women. Some were dressed in ragged muslin and had no shoes; others would have fit into white society if not for the color of their skin.

  “I was told that the coloreds have their own church,” Mrs. Scott said, “and that it is attended by slaves and freemen and freewomen.”

  “Their masters allow the slaves to attend church?” Patricia asked.

  “This is a day of rest,” Pa said. “For slaves and regular folks.”

  “I have never seen our domestic institution,” Ma said.

  “I have seen enough of it,” Patricia said under her breath, and walked away from the wretched slaves in their worn clothes and bare feet.

  Barber emporiums and shops of all kinds lined the streets. A fight broke out between a man in patched woolen britches with a hook for his left hand and a bearded man in buckskins. Tim felt disappointed that he did not get to see the fight, as Pa and Mr. Scott hurried their wives and children across the street and then back down toward the Planter’s House.

  They ate supper at their camp that night and slept underneath their wagons. The next morning, after a breakfast of hotcakes and coffee, they watched the Conestogas loaded onto the last steamboat, the Chautauqua, then the men paid for their passage and freight up the Missouri River.

  Tim had thought if a person had seen one river, he had seen them all, but he realized how different rivers were. Of course, until he had started out for Oregon with his family and the Scotts, he had known only the North Branch of the Susquehanna. Traveling cross-country, he had seen the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri.

  They disembarked at the Town of Kansas where they heard rumors that Pittsburgh had been destroyed by a great fire just a few weeks after they left it. Pa and Mr. Scott agreed that God must have been watching after them. If they had started out later, they might not have gotten out of Pittsburgh in time.

  “It’s a blessing,” Mr. Scott said.

  Tim frowned. As he followed the trail of the raiders, he wasn’t so sure about that.

  They went on to Westport where they sold their mules, bought oxen, and met Henry W. McConnell, who had been voted captain of the train of wagons due to leave in the next week.

  That first night in camp, he introduced the families to their guide, Just Jenkins.

  “We must leave by the fifteenth,” Jenkins told them.

  He wore his thick red hair to his shoulders, with streaks of blond in the long beard. His clothes were buckskins from foot to shoulders, and a wide-brimmed hat the color of the earth topped his head. One eye never moved, and Tim discovered it was made of glass. The other eye missed nothing.

  A brace of pistols Just Jenkins wore in a yellow sash—the one piece of his wardrobe not made from a wild animal. He spoke forcefully, as if he had been guiding wagon trains all his life. “Fort Kearny in a month, Fort Laramie by June, Independence Rock by July, South Pass a short while later. That will get you to Oregon in early September. Leave later, you might not get there at all.”

  Pa said that Jenkins was a man who knew what he was doing, though Mr. McConnell kept saying—when Jenkins could not hear—that the uncouth scout was a simpleton and that he, as train captain, would question the idiot’s every decision.

  Tim settled in for the night, alone in a wilderness, sick from the altitude, and missing his dead parents.

  They had done everything Captain McConnell and Just Jenkins had told them to do, but his parents and Mr. Scott would never see Oregon. They were buried some miles back to the south. Patricia, Mrs. Scott, and Tim’s sisters might never see that promised land, either.

  The way Tim felt, by morning, he might also be dead.

  CHAPTER 15

  Most folks gave Robert Stuart and his Astorians credit for finding South Pass. After all, the Astorians, trappers with the Pacific Fur Company under Stuart’s guidance, had crossed there back in 1812—when Jed Reno was just a boy in Bowling Green, Kentucky—delivering dispatches to John Jacob Astor back in St. Louis from Oregon. The men Jed Reno called friends, however, said credit should be given to ol’ Broken Hand Tom Fitzpatrick and Jedediah Smith, because they had found it again back in ’24 when they and Reno had been part of General William Henry Ashley’s One Hundred.

  Reno, of course, always believed that long before Ashley’s One Hundred or a bunch of Astorians were in those parts, Indians had to have known about the pass. Sioux, Cheyenne, Shoshone. Maybe the Crow. Or some ancient tribe the Sioux or Cheyenne had long ago sent retreating to some other safer clime. It didn’t rightly matter, Reno figured, who discovered it. South Pass had been discovered likely by accident, considering how hard it was to see. It was deceptive. A wayfarer could see the Wind River Mountains, just north of the pass, for days before ever getting here, but when they went through the pass—actually, two passes, cutting through the Wind River range and, to the south, the Oregon Buttes—they would be sorely disappointed. The pass didn’t feel like a pass, and once they had pretty much entered the Oregon Territory, that land of promise, what stretched out before them for an endless amount of miles wasn’t much more than sand and sagebrush.

  Still, no matter who discovered it and no matter what people thought, once they had reached South Pass, the point was that it had been discovered. Even worse for men like Jed Reno, ever since Captain Benjamin Bonneville had shown that wagons could reach the summit back in ’32, the pass was being used regularly.

  Reno reined in his horse, and the mule s
topped behind him.

  “Hell.” Sighing heavily, he rode up the trail toward the train of prairie schooners that stretched for about a mile. Any game he might have found had long been frightened off by the bellicose shouts of the men—those fool emigrants—pointing and cursing until one of them happened to notice Jed Reno, riding easily in their direction.

  One of the men lifted his fowling piece, but a man in buckskins stepped forward, putting a massive hand on the barrel and forcing it down. As Reno drew nearer, he recognized the old trapper.

  “Terrance,” he said with a nod as he reined in.

  “Well, ol’ Plenty Medicine is still kickin’,” Terrance Jenkins said warmly. Reno was the only man who knew his given name. “But it won’t be if you keep callin’ me by that handle.”

  “You guiding emigrants these days?” Reno asked, and added with a smile, “Just?”

  “Man’s gotta eat, Jed.” Just Jenkins looked ashamed.

  “Reckon so.” Reno tried to remember when he had first met Terrance “Just” Jenkins, a latecomer to the beaver business, but not a bad sort. Must have been in ’38, when they had rendezvoused up on the Popo Agie, not too far from hereabouts. The prices of beaver plews were already dropping by then, and Jenkins had been one of the men who had guided some missionaries bound for Oregon. The Hudson’s Bay Company had hired him, but he quit them at the Rendezvous, called to this wild, glorious land like so many others. Problem was, Terrance Jenkins got the calling a bit too late. Beaver were playing out, and so was the demand for beaver hats. The last rendezvous was held only two years later.