“But—damn! This here’s prime beaver country!” Jackson shrieked in protest.
“Trap over on the other side,” Smith suggested in that polite, preacher’s-son tone of his. “In Jackson’s hole!”
Round and round that afternoon the partners argued the question, but in the end the resurrected Smith’s Christian charities prevailed upon the other two.
“Maybeso it’s a hard country, after all,” Sublette relented. “We’re liable to lose good men, horses, and traps up there to the goddamned Blackfeet anyway.”
“There isn’t anything to be gained south and west of the Great Salt Lake either,” Smith informed the crowd. “No beaver of any worth down there.”
So Sublette prodded, “What you say of California, Jed?”
“Nary any sign there, and the Spanish soldiers are near as bad as Blackfeet.”
And in the last few seasons the valleys of the southern Rockies were being trapped by various brigades based out of Taos and Santa Fe: the Uinta and Wasatch front were trapped out by the likes of Etienne Provost and Ewing Young.
Compelled to decide just where they should concentrate their efforts now, the partners determined they would claim that country east of the mountains, on the southern fringe of Blackfoot country, in the land of the Madison and Gallatin, even crossing over to the Yellowstone to trap the rivers west of where Milt Sublette’s brigade was at work.
Jedediah Smith’s crossings to the Pacific coast had cost the company thousands of dollars in animals and equipment. Accounting for both desertions and massacre, only two of the original expedition who had bid farewell to friends as they departed Sweet Lake back in 1826 were returned to this land of the shining mountains.
While some might eventually say that these expeditions were nothing less than catastrophes, at that moment in the late summer of 1829, there beneath the shadow of the Tetons in Pierre’s Hole—let no Englishman doubt that the Americans had come, once again stretching their arms from sea to shining sea.
Call it “manifest destiny,” call it what you will—the Americans had come to tramp and map, lay their traps and eventually conquer all of what lay between the Atlantic and the far Pacific.
By that summer of 1829 it was plain the Americans had come to stay.
* In St. Louis those furs he had traded $9,500.00 in supplies for would garner the company a return of $22,476.00. Campbell would not return to America and his beloved mountain west until the famous Rendezvous of 1832 in Pierre’s Hole.
* At their camp on the Umpqua River in the present-day Oregon, near the site of old Fort McKay—July 14, 1828.
17
Pushed up against the late-summer sky stood over a hundred hide lodges, brown as a Snake woman’s breast. While both the Shoshone and the Flathead bands chose to spread the horns of their camp circles across the valley floor itself, the white trappers had spread their blankets and raised their canvas shelters back against the trees that bordered this stream flowing right out of the snowfields still mantling the Tetons like a creamy shawl.
Here tarried the morning shadows, and cool mists clung to the surface of every narrow thread of water draining both the Teton and Big Hole ranges that defined this long, narrow valley. There was wood and water and graze enough for those hundreds of Indians and something on the order of 175 white men. With those who had followed Milt Sublette into the Bighorn country, all told, Bass reckoned that there was no more than 220 Americans working the mountains of the far west. A damned rare breed what wandered about in all that lonesome country.
The face of a white man wasn’t so common a sight—not yet, he figured that August morning. And he thought back to all those days and weeks and more he had spent on his own—alone by choice, or made lonely by chance. How many times in the past two years had he just wished he could go without hearing another human voice? If only for a whole day. If only to go for enough days with nothing but the soothing quiet of the wilderness itself until that quiet became so overpowering that he could then seek out his own kind.
As long as he had yearned for that rendezvous on the Popo Agie, as much as he had reveled in this even bigger, bawdier Pierre’s Hole rendezvous, Bass awoke before sunup this morning, unable to go back to sleep. Restless, unsettled, not knowing what it was plaguing him with a nagging itch he’d have to find some way to scratch.
On the Popo Agie and again here, there had been enough copper flesh pressed against his to sate the woman-hunger until another winter had arrived. Enough too of the numbing alcohol to remind Titus of just how much a fool it could make him and the others as they rolled and wrestled and romped like the young pups none of them were any longer.
Two years now, he thought again—awakened and restless in that predawn darkness. And peered at the six long mounds that were Hatcher and his men cocooned in their blankets. Good men. Men who had saved his life, taken him in, made Bass one of their own. Men who had shown him the very best of the beaver ground in the Bayou Salade, then introduced him proper to Mexican territory, Taos lightning, and those gringo-loving senoritas.
Two years now …
Was there such a thing as too much companionship?
He grappled with that dilemma as he stared into the dark and impatiently waited for morning to come. Was this an itch to strike out on his own, or only that annual itch to be done with this summer fair and on to the autumn hunt, planning his winter ground, cogitating on where spring would find him breaking ice to set his traps?
So Scratch watched the light come creeping across the horizon, nothing more than a graying of the sky behind the jagged spires of those Pilot Knobs that rose so stately there could be no denying that a man must surely feel himself anointed to be here in this high kingdom, must surely consider himself one of the chosen to step foot in this virgin land … in some way embraced as one of the few who would ever get a glimpse of what lay beyond this world and into the next. So high, so high did they travel that such men as he should surely see right on through the sky.
For too long he had lived in one place. Was it only that his moccasins grew itchy, and he grew anxious to be on the tramp again? Trapped back east among so many people for most of his life, to discover so late what a balm the aloneness could be for his soul. To discover just what the silence in all that was outside of him could do to create serenity for all that rested inside at the marrow of him.
Gone to the banks of the stream as the sun brushed the sky to blue and the Indian camps came alive, Bass splashed cold water on his face, then pushed himself out over the water on locked elbows, dipping his chin right into the bracing liquid so shocking it made him gasp. On the far side sat some women bathing their tiny naked ones in the grass, the children stoic and mute as the sparkling droplets tumbled from their shivering bodies onto the lush green blanket of trampled grass. As he stood, and finally turned to move away, the giggle of children drew him past some tall, concealing willow to find a trio of girls busily chasing a huge bullsnake with their sticks through the grass and brush.
They reminded him of little ones in those camps of the Ute, Crow, and Shoshone where he had passed winters at peace. During those long cold moons the warrior bands were content not to move until the village decided to pick up and find another valley when the wood ran low, or the game disappeared, or the ponies required more of the autumn-cured grass.