Buffalo Palace (38 page)

“Makes six Blackfeet what won’t devil none of us no more,” Fraeb emphasized.

“Much trouble as them niggers are, the trapping’s some up in them parts,” Fitzpatrick said.

Titus asked, “Some?”

Potts turned to look at Bass. “Means it’s just ’bout the best there is, child.”

“Blanket beaver,” Bridger added with an approving cluck. “And the rivers is so thick with ’em, all a man has to do is walk down to the water and club ’em over the head.”

“Sounds like some crock of bald-faced to me!” Cooper spouted, a disbelieving grin creasing his dark beard.

The dour Fraeb scratched at his nose with the black crescent of a dirty fingernail. “Haps you free trappers ought just go on up there to that Blackfoot country and see for yourselves.”

“No thankee,” Cooper replied, eyes dancing with mirth as he winked at Hooks. “I favor my skelp to stay locked right where it is!”

Billy tore the fur cap from his head and grabbed a handful of his own long, greasy hair. “Ain’t the red nigger born what can take this from me, Silas!”

Then Tuttle observed, “For balls’ sake—only way you Ashley boys can poke your noses up there in that Blackfoot country at all is to travel in a hull bunch like you done.”

“Yessirreebob!” Hooks added, spreading his arms wide. “And there ain’t but four of us!”

Potts leaned close to Bass and asked under his breath, “You still so sartin sure you don’t wanna throw in with us come ronnyvoos?”

For a few moments Titus looked over Fitzpatrick’s bunch, then eyed what the ten had themselves in the way of fur. As much as there was, man for man, the Ashley trappers didn’t have a thing on Cooper’s bunch—despite having trapped that spring in the beaver-rich country haunted by the bloodthirsty Blackfoot.

Then Bass glanced at Tuttle, Hooks, and even the bruising hulk of Silas Cooper himself before he turned aside to Potts and said, “Thankee anyway, Daniel. You offer a handsome prospect, mind you. But the way I see it—I’d rather work for my friends than be working for some trader what brings his goods out to the mountains come once a year.”

“Fitzpatrick’s a good man to foller,” Potts explained, “an’ Bridger’s gonna make him a fine booshway one day his own self.”

“Booshway?”

“Man what leads a brigade hisself.”

“Yeah,” Scratch replied. “Plain as sun to see Bridger’s older’n his years.”

The jovial Potts tugged on Bass’s elbow, whispering low. “Come join us, Scratch. You’re a good man to have around for a smile or two.”

As much as he might take pleasure in the honor of those words, Titus weighed matters a mite different from most, perhaps. Here he was offered the chance to cut the losses in beaver he’d already suffered and get out from under the ominous shadow of Silas Cooper … or he could stay on with the men who had come along to give him the companionship of an open hand—no matter that the same hand had closed itself into a brutal fist of a time. No, Titus saw himself as a loyal, steadfast man, the sort of man another could easily put his faith and trust in without question.

He wasn’t the sort to let down those who had very likely saved his hide.

Bass slapped a hand on Daniel’s shoulder, saying, “Thanks anyway, Potts—you’re a good man, and this appears to be a likely bunch but … I got my own place where I already been took in.”

“Ever you see anything like this before?” Tuttle asked.

All Bass could do was shake his head.

In his youth he had floated down two of America’s greatest rivers, shoulder to shoulder with a crew of hard-bitten, double-dyed Kentucky boatmen. He had even reveled in the rum-sodden fleshpots of Natchez-Under-the-Hill and “The Swamp” farther down in the port of New Orleans. But none of that had prepared him for the sheer joy of camaraderie expressed by those men gathered on the grassy, willow-veined floor of what would one day very soon come to be known among the mountain trappers as Cache Valley.
*

True enough, he had seen the hustle and bustle of those Ohio River port cities: Cincinnati and Louisville. And he had soaked in the heady, noisy air of raucous New Orleans, where more than a dozen languages were spoken around him. But never had Titus expected he would find anything quite like this out here in the middle of all this wilderness.

They had rolled in that afternoon with Fitzpatrick’s brigade, Cooper’s outfit joining all the rest whooping and
bellering back at those who were screeching and shouting to welcome every group of new arrivals.

More than a hundred of them had already gathered in Willow Valley, at least half the faces pretty near scraped clean of whiskers. Out they came from beneath blanket and brush bowers to fire their rifles into the air, whoop like wild, red-eyed warriors, and greet these last to pull in. Lunging through the dottings of the large creamy flowers that towered along the tall stalks of the Spanish bayonet, they jumped and cavorted—slapping and jabbing at the horsemen they knew, offering their hands to those they did not. Horse hooves and moccasins trampled the bold sunflower-yellow of the arrowleaf balsamroot as every last one of these men celebrated this midsummer homecoming of old friends and new, drawn here from distant parts.

In addition to all those trappers Ashley was responsible for bringing to the mountains in the past few seasons, Etienne Provost led his own band of partisans, who had worked their way north out of Mexican territory far to the southeast, down below the international boundary of the Arkansas River. This redoubtable figure had first grown concerned, eventually desperate, in recent weeks when his own partner, Francois Leclerc, had failed to show up with supplies from Santa Fe at the appointed place and time for their own rendezvous. No telling what ad happened—but the unspoken belief was there among Provost’s men that Leclerc’s outfit could well have been wiped out on its way north toward the Wasatch and Uintah country.

Along the banks of a stream stood more than a dozen small wickiups belonging to the wives of some twenty-five Iroquois trappers who, until a year ago, had been employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company working out of English posts far to the north and west on the Columbia River. But in the summer of 1825 the Iroquois had encountered the shrewd William Ashley, who sweet-talked them into turning their backs on the English and trading their furs to him instead. That Ashley-instigated betrayal would be the beginning of some bad blood between the HBC’s Snake-country outfits operating under the hard-bitten Scotsman John Work and those upstart and most undisciplined Americans probing ever deeper into the beaver
country of the inner basin. A land the English had had all to themselves … until now.

Besides the lion’s share in attendance—those who owed some sort of allegiance to one company or another—here gathered a generous sprinkling of free trappers already making their presence known in these fledgling years, plying the waters of the great continental spine on their own hook. Men who, like Provost, had originally plunged into the mountains from the north along the Upper Missouri River drainage, besides those many and more who had first come overland to the tiny villages of Taos and Santa Fe at the far northern reaches of Mexican Territory.

This summer at least two dozen such men were in attendance—men who, like Silas Cooper’s bunch, owed allegiance to no man.

Yet one thing was as clear as those streams flowing down from the Bear River Range this midsummer of 1826: if a man didn’t hanker to march all the way south to Taos country, or east over yonder to the posts on the Lower Missouri, then General William H. Ashley was offering them the only game in these parts. If a trapper wanted to deal himself in for the coming year, he damn well had to sit down at the general’s table and be willing to play with the general’s deck.

Not that Ashley hadn’t had a tough time of it getting there himself. The overland journey, hauling his supplies and twenty-six men up the Platte to the Sweetwater then down to Ham’s Fork, had turned out to be such a test of endurance that nearly half of his men had eventually deserted the general. But there on Ham’s Fork that warm day back in late May, Ashley had been greeted with nearly sixty-five of his own trappers brought in by his partner, Jedediah Strong Smith, and the iron-legged Moses Harris. Their reunion was not to last long, for Ashley pushed the whole brigade on west to the Bear River, where they followed its meandering bend to the south, ultimately reaching the site he had designated last summer for this rendezvous—Willow Valley.

Near the site where the competitors under Danish sea captain John Weber and the mountain veteran Johnson Gardner had passed the previous winter, that late June
day Ashley must surely have gazed about at plenty of tall, ripening grass gently waving in the breezes to fill the bellies of their stock, the many streams gurgling down from the circuit of sheltering hills, the thick vegetation choking every creekbank, branches and vines heavy with ripening fruit, as well as the beauty of the nearby peaks still mantled with snow at this early season … and decided it was good.

Here they would hold their second mountain rendezvous—now at the very dawn of that most glorious era of western exploration. Lewis and Clark had cracked open the portal, laying out the lure and the bait. Manuel Lisa and Alexander Henry had together been the first to throw their shoulders against the sturdy door to that imposing wilderness. And now it was these very men gathered in Willow Valley that hot summer of 1826—those trappers bound to Ashley as well as those bound to no other—who would in the seasons to come shove wide-open the gate, thrusting themselves against a barrier that would never, could never, be closed again.

Let there be no doubt, even in those earliest days of the mountain fur trade, these hardy hundred were ready for a celebration after all they had accomplished in the last season.

When the Ashley men had broken up into brigades for their spring hunt, Fitzpatrick’s band had marched north to trap the Portneuf River all the way to the Snake—where they dodged Blackfoot war parties more times than they’d care to recount. A second brigade moved far afield that spring, pushing past the Great Salt Lake not only in search of beaver but in search of that wondrous new country off somewhere in the interior basin. Still another band pushed all the way north to Flathead country, plunging into the mountains that would soon become known as the Bitterroots, where they found sign of and bumped up against their competitors trapping for John Bull’s Hudson’s Bay Company.

Ashley’s men had worked hard and repeatedly put their lives on the line to earn this rendezvous. A good thine it was Ashley had thought to bring liquor along for the first time this trip out. Even better-that a large band of the western Shoshone had been curious enough at this
growing gathering of the white men to wander in and join the celebration. Trouble was—no one knew at first if those horse-mounted warriors who suddenly appeared in the distance were friend or foe.

“Dammit all anyway,” Bud Tuttle grumbled that second day after reaching the rendezvous site, “just when I was getting my dry gullet ready for some of Ashley’s whiskey—those damned red niggers go an’ show up and wanna fight!”

Every man had turned out that late morning as the alarm spread and weapons were taken up. The men were grumbling, for it was to have been that day Ashley tapped his kegs of raw, clear corn liquor … and now, by bloody damn, a few hundred Injuns showed up on the nearby hills to make trouble. But Bridger, Fraeb, and two others quickly mounted up bareback and started off loaded for bear—counting on determining if these strangers be the friendly sort, or a fighting breed.

“Where the blue blazes you think you’re bound?” Cooper demanded the moment he realized Bass was pulling his horse free of its picket pin.

“Going with them yonder to have a look-see at the Injuns.”

Silas snorted, wagging his head with a grin. “If’n that don’t take the circle, boys! We got us a greenhorn what goes riding off to make hisself trouble with red niggers … like them red-bellies ain’t trouble enough all by themselves!”

“This h’aint none of your ’ffair,” the old German-born Fraeb grumbled as Bass joined the quartet loping toward the low hills.

“My skelp too—so I figgered to see for my own self,” Titus replied as he reined his horse in alongside the others strung out in a broad front—their smooth faces bright in the summer sunshine of that morning, their long hair fluttering like battle flags behind these rough-edged knights-errant.

Bridger’s eyes quickly dashed over the newcomer’s outfit, spotting the pair of pistols stuffed down in his belt and the long, heavy, and serviceable mountain rifle clutched atop Bass’s thighs. “Might’n be some of the same goddamned Blackfoots we fit not far north of here,” he
declared by way of warning to the older man riding on his left. “Maybeso they follered our sign, figgering to have themselves another go at us.”

Fraeb asked, “Ever you fit Injuns?”

“Last spring it were,” Titus answered as they watched the horsemen on the crest of the hill begin to spread themselves out in a wide front. “’Rapahos, they was.”