Slapping a hand against one cheek, there beneath an eye about ready to tear as if he were swatting at a fly, Ashley turned on his heel and took up the reins handed him by one of the thirty-man escort who would accompany him back to St. Louis with his fortune in furs loaded on more than a hundred horses and mules. Tugging his hat down on his head while the rest of the escort rose to their saddles, the general led the cavalcade away without looking back.
“Farewell, General!”
The crowd surged forward, almost as one, as if those in the lead might just drag him from his horse—yet something restrained them as more of these hard men not easily given to sentiment sang out with voices hoarse and croaking.
“God’s speed, General! God’s speed!”
So it was that they parted, one from another … again.
That quixotic booshway Davy Jackson marched his band away from rendezvous with Ashley’s pack train. Somewhere west of South Pass he would bid his farewell to the general, then after trapping the country around Ham’s Fork and the Green, would point his own nose north toward the rich beaver country that lay at the foot of those pilot knobs the French voyageurs called Les Trois Tetons, or the Three Breasts.
Jedediah Smith took his small band of fifteen and moved west of south toward the great and salty inland sea, obsessed with what lay across that great expanse of desert even if it took him into Mexico: even if it meant he marched all the way to the land of the Spanish Californios.
Working their Way north to the Snake River, Billy Sublette would lead his brigade over to the Blackfoot River, turning east through Jackson’s Hole and marching north to eventually reach the land that would soon be known as Colter’s Hell. Two full decades before them, the wily trader Manuel Lisa dispatched Lewis-and-Clark veteran John Colter off from the mouth of the Bighorn to tell the Crow bands they were invited to Lisa’s post to trade. Traveling on foot and alone into the teeth of a Rocky Mountain winter, Colter was the first white man to visit this strange land of sulfurous smokes, boiling cauldrons of mud, and spewing geysers that would one day bear his name.
This trip out Jim Bridger would serve as one of Sublette’s lieutenants. And the stories the young trapper would soon tell of that mystical land of spewing waters and many smokes would for a generation be considered some of the biggest whoppers ever concocted by a frontiersman.
Meanwhile, the streams of the northern Rockies beckoned to Fitzpatrick once more. Despite the chances being good that he and his men might just rub up against more Blackfoot, north they headed nonetheless—hoping to trade with the Flathead for horses and skins until the beaver began to put on more fur come late autumn.
At the same time, Etienne Provost led his loose band of trappers west of north into the beaver-rich interior basin of the Snake River, where the odds were they would run across the Hudson’s Bay men under Peter Skene Ogden.
“Good huntin’!” came the cry from those off in one direction.
“Yup!” called those bound away in another. “Y’ best watch your topknot!”
And soon only the Shoshone village and a scattering of free trappers had Willow Valley to themselves. No more than a half-dozen small knots of hardy men tarried behind the company brigades—those of an independent streak who stubbornly refused the offers of one outfit or another to join up and ride along for the season.
“Maybeso it’s better to travel in small strings,” Scratch explained the common wisdom expressed by those of such persuasion. “A big outfit just hap to attract too much attention.”
“Possibly so,” Daniel Potts protested that last morning before Sublette’s brigade pulled out, “but if’n I’m to face them gut-eating Blackfoots again, I’d ruther have me a hull passel of fellers along for the fight.”
“But we don’t aim to stick our noses in Blackfoot country,” Bass replied.
Potts had pursed his lips as if he could see his words were winning no convert. “So be it, Titus Bass. Stay warm this winter … till next we ronnyvoo at the south end of Sweet Lake.”
“Till ronnyvoo,” Scratch repeated the word as if it had already become some spiritual incantation, shaking Daniel’s hand as they pounded one another on the shoulder.
The mulatto had offered his hand next, “Could well be we could winter here again. So remember our offer stands—you come join us if you grow tired of the company you’re keeping.”
Bass watched Beckwith glance over to the trees where Cooper and the other two reclined against their saddles, watching the great departure of the brigades hour by hour, without much excitement of their own or interest at all.
“I got me a place I belong,” Titus repeated.
His eyes filling with concern, Daniel said, “They ain’t your only friends, Scratch. Anytime, you just come looking to find us—”
“It’s a wonderful thing for a man to have him such good friends as you,” Bass interrupted, his eyes smiling.
Understanding at last that there no longer was any sense in trying to talk Bass into joining them, Potts pursed his lips and went to the saddle in a hurry, galloping off with Beckwith to catch up with the last brigade on its way out of the valley. In less than an hour the midsummer air grew quiet but for the occasional call of birds and the incessant drone of flies or the whine of bees. No longer could Titus see the telltale smudge of dust there along the horizon. The company men were gone for another year.
All sights ana sounds of that merry gathering were nothing but memories now.
What grass the stock hadn’t eaten had been trampled into pathways by hooves and moccasins. Dry and flaky piles of horse droppings dotted the close-cropped pasturage of the valley floor for as far as the eye could see. The rib-bare skeletons of willow wickiups and leafy bowers built streamside now stood naked in the strong sunlight of high summer. No more were blankets and buffalo robes unfurled in the shady places where men once lounged to swap stories or merely sleep off the terrible effects of Ashley’s potent liquor throughout those long, hot days of summer. Refuse and litter from repairs made to saddles, bridles, and pack harness lay discarded and scattered among what kegs and empty burlap sacking had been carried here from faraway St. Louis.
Clouds of bottle-green deerflies and black-winged horseflies buzzed in annoying clouds over every latrine hole, flitted over every campsite, and blackened every stinking gut-pile. Ants and hard-shelled beetles crawled and scritched through the trampled grass to lay claim to what refuse the robber jays weren’t already picking over—wings flapping and beaks squawking when another bird landed to threaten their bloody morsel. Rings of darkened stones surrounded the countless black circles once fire pits. Butchered, bone-bare carcasses of elk and deer hung numberless like gory sacrifices from the branches of trees where the many had feasted upon the few: men cutting away a ham, or loin, or a fat steak to sizzle over the flames—each fire a gathering place where all came in turn to eat, to drink, or merely to commune with one’s own kind.
In the span of less than two momentous years, a breed was born out here among these rich valleys sheltered and shadowed by the high and snowy places. A novice who was at first content to follow others up the Missouri River to the beaver country, William H. Ashley had ended up fathering a whole new strain of frontiersmen. Unlike their predecessors, those “longhunters” who had roamed the hardwoods forests back east of the Mississippi, these fledgling grandsons were only beginning to tramp across an unfathomable territory much more hostile in both geography and native inhabitants than anything ever before encountered by their eastern forebears.