Although Sublette announced he would not be hammering in the bungs to those whiskey kegs until the following morning, there was no dearth of gaiety that evening as twilight broke across the valley of the Popo Agie. Whiskey would be pouring soon enough, they knew, but for now the booshways stored the potent grain alcohol in Campbell’s lodge, where a rotation of trusted guards would be stationed throughout the night.
Meanwhile more of the newcomers were assigned the task of picketing the pack animals, some to erect the five large awnings under which Sublette would conduct his business from the shade. A pair of greenhorns assembled a large balance scale beneath the oiled sheeting that was to be Sublette’s headquarters, while a few trusted clerks began to unpack the trade goods, checking off every item as it emerged from those canvas and paper and blanket bundles wrapped up back in early spring, back in St. Louis, back in the far, far States of America.
Fires roared and meat roasted, coffee boiled and men laughed, pulling uproarious pranks or puffing unbelievable windies for the newcomers fresh off the prairie who suddenly found themselves here now among these half-wild veterans of the wilderness, those hivernants who had wintered in the fastness of these terrible mountains inhabited by never-before-seen savages and unimaginable beasts. This first night always served as an initiation of sorts—a tradition none too kind but always applied in good humor to those greenhorns struck dumb to suddenly discover themselves in the company of these hard cases who had survived Blackfeet and blizzards, scorching deserts and dry scrapes, men who had outlasted loneliness and deprivation … yet were willing still to risk it all again for another roll with Lady Fate’s dice.
Here and there in the bright, flickering flames, the few among them who could read each sat with a cluster of those who could not, reciting those undecipherable words written by mothers and fathers, sisters or brothers, or even more moving—soul-wrenching prose and promises written by sweethearts left behind when men abandoned hearth and homes, daring to challenge these mountains. Letters of yearning and words of caring scribbled on small sheets of foolscap, stories from home counties read from yellowed newsprint. Lockets of hair sent west many, many months before, sent beyond the wide Missouri with faith and a prayer that it would reach a beloved son, would make it to a beloved brother, by the hope of some aching heart that it might just find its way to a beau known to be somewhere out west beneath a wide and faraway sky.
Stories and news of the east were dragged from the newcomers, tales of places and rivers and towns left far behind, a long time ago. Some men laughed at themselves and traded jokes on others, while more sat on downed logs and listened with red-rimmed eyes to what was read them of home another world away. Men who sat in abject silence, listening, men who sat remembering those dim-lit faces once more, remembering the black-earthed closeness of those gently rounded hills and hardwood forests, men who thought back to how long it had been, how far they had come since choosing to leave all that had been, since choosing to cast their lot with the few, with these bravest of the brave.
Like men become so crazed, they dared not consider the odds against them. Men torn by not knowing if they ever would return to what was left behind … men not able to understand why they didn’t really care if they ever did go back.
Night came down on that far valley, the sun hiding its face beyond the Wind River Mountains. Although he had no letters, although he had no loved ones who knew where to write him—Scratch felt that here he was among his chosen brotherhood. Families were no more than a matter of chance. Here he felt himself embraced in the bosom of those who were his family of choice. Men who expected no more from him than they were willing themselves to give in return.
Songs of old leaped from those strings that Jack Hatcher pressed beneath his dancing fingers, tunes came wheezing and wailing from that squeezebox of a concertina that a weaving and bobbing Elbridge Gray clutched at the end of his outstretched arms.
Into that wide circle of fires’ light, pairs of hardened men came. Turning to bow to one another, they readily clasped hands and danced with festive abandon: whirling recklessly—ofttimes spinning one another so robustly they landed in a heap at the very edge of the merry flames, where they guffawed at one another until bounding to their feet, stomping and shimmying some more. While some preferred to imitate the fancy steps learned long ago in polite white company back east, others stomped toe and heel round and round, swooping low and howling in their own earsplitting rendition of the scalp or buffalo or war dance.
And at the border of that open-air dance floor stood those copper-skinned spectators who looked on in unabashed amazement at this unfettered celebration by men who had survived another year in the mountain trade, witnessing this raucous revelry of those who had journeyed west to join that small fraternity of white men come to challenge an unforgiving land. Shoshone males brought their women and children across the creek, here to watch impassively this annual gathering of the white man’s own noisy, strutting warrior bands.
A few like Bass turned their gaze upon this young woman or that, wondering just what it would take in the way of foofaraw to talk one of those dark-skinned beauties into the willows, to convince her to join him back into the shadows where a few minutes of fevered coupling might ease this aching woman-hunger he suffered, might quench his parched thirst for a moistened coupling with a woman soft, a woman smooth, a woman as eager as he.
Which of them might he convince that she simply could not live without a clutter of shiny beads in his palm, without a strand of red ribbon, without a tin cup filled with trader’s sugar?
Which one of those cherry-eyed squaws would eagerly hike up her short leather dress and let him spend himself inside her before he grew one day older?
The next morning Campbell’s trappers had first crack at the treasures excavated from Sublette’s packs.
Company men were first when it came to trade goods brought west by the firm of Smith, Jackson, & Sublette.
“The rest of you gonna have to wait till tomorrow,” Sublette warned the small knots of free men who had gathered by the trader’s awnings. “Might so have to wait long as the day after till we get our company business taken care of.”
There weren’t all that many free trappers in yet, nowhere near as many men as the combined brigades—considering the number Campbell brought down from the Powder River country when coupled with the fifty-four hands Sublette brought out from St. Louis. Close to a hundred men already.
And no more than two dozen free trappers on the Popo Agie.
So all Bass could do was grumble. Sit in the shade and watch the company men come and go about their company business, come and go with their company kettles filled with Sublette’s whiskey.
It was enough to make a saint cuss a blue streak, had there been a saint in that valley of the Popo Agie.
“By damned, they better leave enough wet for our whistles and a good drunk or two outta this ronnyvoo!” Hatcher snarled.
Caleb added, “That trader better leave us enough plunder to see this outfit through ’Nother winter.”
“Likker!” Jack snapped at Wood. “The rest’ll take care of itself. Long as we get some likker.”
Most of the other free trappers hung close by the trader’s awnings too—watching as Sublette’s greenhorn clerks sorted through each company man’s hides, graded them into three stacks, then lashed each stack into a bundle they hung from that huge wooden balance arm where another clerk carefully added weights until both sides swung evenly. That tally was entered in a tall leather-bound ledger—then Sublette informed that mountain employee what he had earned for the year. After the trapper had paid off what he owed from the last rendezvous, after he had settled up for any broken traps, lost tack, or busted saddles, after he had paid for a horse run off by the Crow … he would find out just how much, or how little, celebration he had in store for himself.