Lowest of the three stations of company men were the camp keepers.
“Mangeurs de lard,” Hatcher instructed Bass in the mountain man’s hierarchy.
“Parley-voos?”
“Damn right,” Jack growled with disdain. “Frenchy pork eaters. Most of ’em, leastwise.”
Hatcher went on to explain that this bottom rung had received its name because those camp keepers who had accompanied the earliest expeditions forging up the Missouri River had been French laborers who ate salted sowbelly while the Americans dined on the lean red meat of game hunted on either shore. No better than slavery, Bass figured—forced to perform every dirty, menial task the booshway ordered.
“Company trappers are up from there a big notch,” Jack continued. “It’s where a man with any pluck at all got him a chance to show he’s up to Green River,” referring to that company’s name engraved right at the guard of their knife blades, clearly meaning a trapper who made the supreme effort to plunge into any effort clear up to the hilt. “That man’s got him a chance to prove he’s got the makings of a mountain man.”
While company trappers still had to do whatever task the booshway assigned, their reward nonetheless remained the coming season to show their brigade leaders that they could make a profit for the company as well as hanging on to their hair.
And if a man survived, then someone like Campbell or Sublette or Jackson could promote that man to the top rung of “skin trapper.” Such a man signed on with the company but with no guarantee of wages. When he moved up from company to skin trapper, a man indebted himself for company equipment at the same time he swore to sell his furs only to the company at what price the company quoted. And if there was anything left over when his accounts were settled, then the skin trapper could more than satisfy his thirst for whiskey, or have enough in trade to buy himself a squaw for a night or two, perhaps enough to purchase himself a wife, who would accompany the brigade wherever it wandered in the coming seasons.
But above all three ranks of company men stood the most coveted class of alclass="underline" the free trappers.
While they might be forced to wait until the trader dispensed with his hirelings, those free men had what Sublette desired most: the finest of plews brought to rendezvous by the “master trappers,” men who traversed the high country on their own hook, beholden to no booshway, in debt to no company.
While the Smith, Jackson, & Sublette men still wore a frontiersman’s wool or leather breeches and some sort of linen or calico shirt, most free trappers gaily sported Indian leggings and war shirt, the twisted fringes of which were caparisoned with tiny brass hawk’s bells, steel sewing thimbles, or strewn with Indian scalplocks, leather garments decorated with wide bands of brightly colored porcupine quillwork. Beneath that outer layer of warrior’s clothing they wore a greasy, soiled, and sooted cloth shirt and woolen longhandles when the seasons turned cold.
Many plaited their hair in two long braids, tied up in bright ribbons of red trade wool or wrapped with otter skin. They daubed purple vermilion down the center part in their hair, often smeared earth paint on their severely tanned faces, and trailed long fringes or small animal skins from the heels of their moccasins. Some ambled about camp wearing a colorfully striped blanket belted around their waist in the fashion of a tribal chief, while others brandished a wide wool sash finger-woven back in eastern woodlands, where they stuffed a brace of pistols, a tomahawk, and perhaps the long stem to their personal smoking pipe.
How plain it was that this breed prided themselves on just how much like an Indian they appeared—but for the long, shaggy, ofttimes braided beards. Oh, how they seized this chance to swagger and strut before Sublette’s gaping greenhorns and mule-eyed pilgrims come fresh-as-dew to the far west.
It was just as clear that such men would never again feel comfortable setting their feet down among civilized company. Doubtful was it that any of their breed would ever return east. Little, if anything, remained for them back there in what had been.
As the long morning dragged on, Titus returned to wait out the hours in camp with Rufus, Elbridge, and the others. To kill some of the time, he brought both Hannah and his saddle horse into camp, securing them to a tree branch while he went to work fancying them up in the fashion of an Indian warrior. First he tied up their tails just as a man would do when about to ride off on the warpath. Then he braided their forelocks with narrow strips of varicolored Mexican ribbon he swapped from Caleb Wood for a single plew of beaver. Next Scratch braided the manes of both with more of that ribbon and looped in a half-dozen feathers from a golden eagle that Bird in Ground had killed during his first winter with the Crow. And finally he made a thick paste from the white clay he discovered in an alkali bed along the creek, using it to paint crude lightning bolts and hailstones, even pressing his own handprints along the neck and flank of both horse and Hannah.
That task complete, Bass collapsed against a huge Cottonwood, where he dozed as the air warmed and the flies droned.
Later that afternoon he meticulously honed his knife and camp ax on a stone and steel, then cleaned his weapons before he finally decided to run some balls for both pistol and rifle: melting bars of soft Galena lead in a small pot from which he dipped tiny ladles of the molten silver and poured the liquid into the round cavity of his bullet molds. Hot work this was at the edge of a fire in this midsummer heat, but that sweaty job was one task more that helped him pass the hours while the free trappers waited for their crack at Sublette’s treasures.
After supper of elk tenderloin, buffalo tongue, and prairie oysters, he joined Hatcher, Fish, and Wood as they moseyed off for the company camp at twilight.
“I would’ve figgered a bunch the size of Campbell’s outfit would’ve had ’em more beaver took in,” Jack appraised as they came to a halt near Sublette’s awnings, where a handful of men still clustered around the stacks of blankets and crates of goods, arguing this point or that with the trader’s clerks.
“Maybeso that Powder ain’t so prime a country as it be back toward the mountains,” Bass observed.
“Not for beaver, it ain’t,” Solomon added.
“If’n a man wants to hunt him prime plew,” Caleb declared, “that nigger’s gotta stick his neck out some.”
“I ain’t never been afraid to stick my neck out some,” Jack said. “Way I see it—to get us the best fur, we gotta trap the edge of Blackfoot country … but I don’t aim to lay a trap where I’ll get my hull damned head cut off!”
Bass spread his fingers and ran them through the skins at the very top of three tall stacks of pelts under the wary eye of a Sublette clerk. “Our fur looks a damned sight better’n this here, fellas.”
“It ought’n be better,” Solomon grumbled. “We damned near lost our hair to Bug’s Boys trapping that beaver!”
“Bug’s Boys?” the greenhorn behind the beaver pelts repeated.
Hatcher gazed at the man fresh out of the settlements. “Ye ever hear tell of Blackfoot, mister?”
“Blackfoot? I heard tell of ’em, yeah. Sublette says the Englishers set them Blackfoot out to kill off Americans like his men.”
“Damn them black-hearted bastards,” Solomon growled. “Too many good men gone under at their hands.”
“Sublette says the Blackfoot is why Davy Jackson ain’t come in to Popo Agie yet.”
Titus asked, “Trader figgers Jackson’s gone under?”
The man’s head bobbed, his fleshy jowls quivering like the wattle at the neck of a tom turkey. “Maybe his whole outfit too. Just like Jed Smith—the other’n who’s a company partner. Word is he’s dead somewhere far west of here with all his men. Been two years now, and Smith ain’t showed up at rendezvous.”