By then the boat was taking on more and more water, losing its natural buoyancy in the process as it slowly sank lower and lower in the freezing river. Then the strain of holding so much liquid began to tell on the bullboat’s crude, handcrafted framework. Creaking and groaning, the limbs began to shift with the weight of the water, and then some of Bridger’s sinew stitching began to unravel and loosen—the long strands of animal tendon becoming soaked to their limit.
“I figgered I was a goner an’ if I didn’t get sucked down under the ground with that river—then that river was bound to thrash me against the rocks,” Bridger told the group grown quiet as they were drawn further and further into the desperate story.
“Only thing for me to do was try to save myself,” Jim said. “So I reached down and felt in the water at the bottom of my boat to find my sack of meat. I stuffed it down inside my coat an’ made ready to jump out and try for some rocks where I could least get outta the water. Maybeso I could get my strength back and climb up the side, get back to the prerra—anything before that river sucked me right under the ground with it.”
But by some miraculous hand, right as he was preparing to cast his fate upon the water, the bullboat twisted around ungainly and Bridger caught a glimpse of what lay downriver.
“I’ll be damned if it didn’t look like smooth water!” Jim told the hushed crowd, many of whom had heard his story time and again—but found themselves caught up in its drama nonetheless.
Something told him to hang on, told him not to jump—giving him faint hope of riding it out a few moments longer. But he was sinking all the faster now, the river’s surface inching closer and closer to the top of his unwieldy craft. Then as he listened and shook uncontrollably with cold, Bridger realized the thundering roar of the rapids had begun to fade behind him. After so many terrifying minutes that had seemed more like endless days— Jim finally thought he could hear the pounding of his own blood at his temples.
“I don’t know how I done it, but I got that boatful of water poled over to the first stretch of sandy bank I come across. Just in time, too—for my boat was ’bout ready to go under for good.”
Slogging out of the widening river, Bridger set his rifle and pouch in the limbs of a nearby tree, then returned to the bank, where he struggled to tip the bullboat over, completely filled with water as it was. Finally he was able to drag the heavy boat with its green waterlogged buffalo hide a few feet up the bank, where he turned it upside down to drain. Then he shivered as the cold wind came up, and decided he’d best build himself a fire.
“Later that afternoon when my buckskins was dried and I had pulled the wet load in my rifle, I figgered it was time to climb on up the rocks and see for myself just where that devil of a river did go off to.”
High in those rocks as the late-autumn light started to fade, Bridger finally discovered just how the wagers would be won or lost. He could see that the river continued south. Meandering though it was, it seemed to continue angling off to a little west of due south.
“But that wasn’t the pure marvel of it,” he admitted now, just as he had told the tale many times before.
As he stared off into the distance, his eyes following the river toward the far horizon, “Of a sudden—way out yonder—I happed to see more water’n I ever see’d since the day I was born.”
For a moment he turned and gazed back to the north, thinking about his original plans to return overland once he had determined just where the river flowed. But now, as he stared off into the distance, he felt again that unmistakable itch to search and discover, an itch that he knew he could not deny.
“Come sunup the next morning I put that bullboat back in the water and I was on my way. It weren’t long afore the world around me went so quiet, it was like everything was dead. By the time I come to where the river opened up into a peaceful stretch of water, I dipped my hand over the side and brung it to my lips. Salt! Sweat of the Almighty—that’s what I tasted, fellas. Salt! Good Lord, I thought—had that river floated me all the way to the far salt ocean?”
In actuality Bridger had drifted on out of the mouth of the Bear into a great bay some twenty miles wide,* where he could barely see land far off to the right and left of him—but where the bay opened up to the south, there was nothing but water … for as far as he could see.
“I ain’t ashamed to tell you I was scairt,” Bridger confided. “Figgering I’d made the ocean, I wasn’t a stupid pilgrim about to go floating off to the other side of the world in that leaky ol’ bullboat. So this child poled hisself over to the shore quick as he could. Stepped my moker-sons out on a layer of salt that crunched under my feet, and I pulled that boat out behind me.”
With the sun rising toward midsky, young Jim set out on foot instead, moving south along the shoreline. He had put miles behind him before he finally made out the first sign of distant land. The farther south he walked, the more it became clear what he was seeing was a huge island** rising far out in that lifeless, salty expanse of endless water. Far, far to the southeast, it appeared the shore he was walking went on forever.
“And I never did see the other side of it neither!” Jim exclaimed, handing his cup to one of his compatriots for refilling. “Still scairt pretty bad, I took off on the backtrack. Made it back to my bullboat just afore dark. Gathered in some wood, started me a fire, and rocked that boat up on its side to hold off the cold winter wind. Next morning I started walking north, back the way I come.”
As he came up to those gathered around the fire and stopped, Jedediah Smith asked, “You know what Jim told us when he showed back up a few days later?”
Potts called out, “Bridger said, ’Hell, boys! I been clear to the Pay-cific Sea!”
“Would’ve been nice, fellas,” Smith said, gazing wistfully down at the fire, “if what Bridger did find two winters back was in fact a big bay of the Pacific Ocean.”
“You figger some way Jim run onto the Buenaventura, Jed?” Harrison Rogers asked.
“It would be by the hand of God, if it were,” Smith answered reverently, gazing off toward the west, where the legend of that fabled river dictated its waters would carry a man all the way from the spine of the Rockies clear down to the Pacific.
Fitzpatrick said, “Why, if it were the Buenaventury, Jed—we’d have only to pack our plews down to the shore, where the big ships would tie up and take on our beaver.”
Rogers added, “Then and there they’d off-load our supplies and likker, fellas!”
Smith grinned in the yellow sheen of that fire. “Just think of it, men: Jim Bridger here could well be the feller what found it for us.”
“That’s what we’re heading off tomorrow to find out, ain’t we, Jed?” Rogers prodded.
With a nod Smith replied, “That’s why we’re marching south by west. Yes—to find out just where the Pacific is. To discover just how close … or how far we are, from the sea.”
“I’ll be damned,” Tuttle exclaimed with a gush. He slapped a hand on Bass’s knee. “Ain’t that something, Scratch? Think on it, man! Just out there, maybeso not all that far off—the great salt ocean lays watting for us to go see it!”
“That is something,” Titus agreed quietly, the immensity of the thought almost overwhelming him.
Down at New Orleans he had looked out on that harbor and tried to fathom the immensity of those great rolling oceans where tall triple-masted schooners rocked atop frothy waves as tall as houses, moving to and from faraway ports where folks of many colors spoke all those foreign tongues he had heard fall upon his ears on that youthful trip to New Orleans with Hames Kingsbury’s boatmen. How so many of the sounds and sights and smells of the world were brought into that one place rolled up beside the ocean.