T
hey rolled west that afternoon, and encountered few trains. The overburdened oxen required frequent rests, and during these interludes other companies passed them by. Yet there was none of the fear or dread in these trains that had oozed from the earlier ones. They waved cheerfully in passing, or one of their number paused to visit, exchange news, and learn what might lie ahead.
Skye reasoned that these later trains never got word, and didn't know about the consumptives. News did travel back and forth among the various wagon outfits nearby, but the New Bedford Company had fallen well behind the ones that had left Fort Laramie about the same time.
And something else: it was now very late to reach either California or Oregon. Any train that had come only this far west faced brutal Sierra snows or harsh Oregon winter. So these were stragglers, people slowed by problems like the Massachusetts company.
Still, there was trouble brewing. The weary livestock could not drag the wagon and cart much farther. Not even
harnessing the remaining Morgan to help drag the wagon up hills helped. And there was more.
“Mister Skye, sir, we've been so slowed down that our larder is diminishing sadly. It's taking many more days than I was advised to prepare for.”
“Then we'll have to go on half rations, Mister Peacock. If you're hoping we can hunt our way west, don't think it. There isn't a deer or antelope closer than ten miles each side of this road, if that.”
“I take it we're still a month from Salt Lake,” Peacock said.
“At least that. More if the livestock give out. But Bridgerâ²s Fort isn't so far.”
Other companies passed by, and Skye took to bargaining with them. He offered the Sharps rifle for a span of oxen, but he got nowhere at all. One Tennessee captain, who seemed to know a thing or two, summed it up:
“Sirrah, you ain't get your head straight you think you can get livestock for that piece of steel. Oxen, they're the gold out heah. They's none. You have to get to Salt Lake to get oxen. The Mormons, they fatten them up. Soon as some train or other cuts wore-out oxen loose, the Saints git â²em and drive'em down there to Deseret and put the feed to'em. But they don't come cheap. No sirree. You'd better git ready to cut off an arm or a leg to buy a span of good fat oxen.”
Then an apparition appeared. Two wagons, each drawn by six mules, racing west at a fast clip, the jingles on their collars singing a merry tune.
Skye intercepted them. He drew Jawbone alongside the lead wagon, where a gent with a battered straw hat and a corncob pipe and a tuft of beard held the lines, and his plump wife sat beside him.
“Mister Skye here, sir. I'm looking for livestock.”
“Happy Mikaelsen here, my friend, and this is my little woman, Marletta. Now, I'm fresh out of livestock.”
“But you're trailing a pair of mules behind the other wagon.”
“Those are rotator mules, Mister Skye. There's always two mules hoofing it loose behind. Every couple hours, they go back into the collars and two more lucky cusses get to waltz a while.”
“We need them and would buy them.”
“Whole world needs'em. No, Mister Skye.”
“They're fat; how do you do that?”
“Oats. I says to the missus, we'll take oats and nothing more. Oats are a two-gaited chow, good for animals, or good for gruel. We got two boys to feed, and they get gruel. We got stock ain't getting much grass, so they get oats.”
“But you'll run out soon,” Skye said.
“Not until we hit the Columbia, and then those wagon beds turn into flatboats, and we're home.”
“Over the falls?”
“They've got Injun porters, we're told. Portage around the falls. They get the mules for pay. Probably eat the whole lot for dinner.”
Skye saw how this would go, and laughed. The muledrawn wagons jingled ahead and were soon out of sight.
Skye slowed Jawbone and drifted back to his own lumbering company.
“No luck, Mister Peacock. I think you'd better plan on abandoning that wagon.”
“We can't! That's the hospital. It's lighter than any cart on this road. Bright built it, hickory, ash, the planks planed down, the spokes lathed down, everything light as a spiderweb.”
Skye saw how it would go. “All along this road we've seen discards, chests of drawers, trundle beds, trunks, tools, harness, anything to save weight. You'll need to throw out everything you can throw out before the oxen give in.”
Peacock eyed Skye sharply. This was a familiar decision, a decision every company heading west had to face.
“I must do whatever is required for the sick, Mister Skye,” Peacock said.
“Think on it,” Skye said.
The North Platte oxbowed through arid flats carpeted with sage. These baked in the heat of July, making the air close and hard to breathe. Skye wondered how those young people could breathe when even healthy people found the hazy air unsatisfying. There were gnats and flies now, sometimes swarming over these helpless passengers who either lay in the cart or sat stoically on the tailgate of the wagon. A thunderhead built in the west, lost in white haze. Skye felt sweat pool under his arms and evaporate in the brutal dry.
Still they rolled west. The weary oxen plodded through thick powder, step by step, dragging the wagons behind them, slavering from open mouths, their tongues white and caked with clay. Bright was rotating the oxen, changing wheelers and leaders to even the load. But not even his careful management was keeping these overworked animals from sliding into exhaustion.
They halted at dusk at a place that had not seen an immigrant camp and had a little miserable grass poking from under the sagebrush. It lacked firewood but Skye thought he and his women might collect enough debris for a small quick fire. No other heat would be needed that evening when the heat lingered in every rock and the clay itself, and no fresh breeze brought the slightest relief.
His women did not raise the lodge; not a cloud lowered over them, and only the thunderheads over distant mountains even hinted at the possibility of rain. Skye didn't like the place. It seemed naked and defenseless. But he had, over a lifetime lived out-of-doors, ended up on thousands of such spots, alien and mean, but all that could be bought from the natural world before dark.
The youngsters who could walk headed for the river to wash away the miserable grit that caked their hair and faces and clothing. Skye watched them wend their breathless way to the bank, slide down to the much-diminished river, and hesitantly try to clean themselves. The Bridge sisters did it best, bravely splashing the murky water over themselves. Peter Sturgeon seemed worst. He slumped at the bank and stared into the turbid water, too exhausted to do his toilet. Anna Bennett, always one to do things her own way, stood at the stream bank and did nothing, and Skye intuited that she would perform her ablutions in the cloak of darkness.
Skye unsaddled Jawbone and led him down to the river and straight into it. Jawbone felt his way toward the middle, where current tugged at his hocks, and then slowly capsized until the water roiled over his back and neck, driving gnats and flies out of the mane. Jawbone, at least, knew how to deal with this oppressive heat. Eventually the great blue roan stood, shook, splashed to shore, and shook himself again, scattering a pleasant rain over Skye, who laughed. Jawbone snorted and bared his teeth in triumph.
Mary unlaced North Star from his cradleboard, cleaned his bottom with fragrant sage leaves, and let the child stretch on a buffalo robe, free at last from the binding that had pinned him for hours. Then she nursed him quietly, her gaze first on
Skye, then on her boy, and there was a small tender smile on her face.
The oxen drank, stood quietly in the water, their tails switching at flies, and then lumbered up to graze on the flat, their big snouts poking under the sagebrush to snap at grasses there. Skye's ponies spread out, ruthlessly tugging grass from the thickest sagebrush, somehow finding grass hiding under the prickly sage that most domestic animals would miss or ignore. The whirling flies and gnats and mosquitoes were terrible, pestering the horses as well as the whole company, but there was little anyone could do except dip neck-deep into the river.
A distant wagon train rolled by on the trail, not stopping to turn off at this unlikely place, but Skye could see that these people were curious about what fools might camp where there was no wood and so little grass, at least to the untrained eye.
Victoria watched them hurry on.
“They are all in such a hurry. What will they do when they get there? They will turn themselves into slaves. Dammit, Mister Skye, you belong to a mad people.”
“We live in the future; you live in the present,” he said. “They dream of gold.”
But she was drawing lodgepoles out of the bundles they carried.
“I will make a travois for my pony, and I will walk,” she said.
Skye nodded. There were no lodgepoles here and no place up the trail to cut them. If she began building travois, they could no longer raise their lodge. But it had to be done. A travois for her pony, another for the Morgan horse that Bright was using on upgrades, and the wagon could be lightened.
She laid out poles, dug into her rolls of thong, found her hatchet, and began chopping the crossbars. Skye took over that task while she bound the bars to the longest lodgepoles.
That drew Enoch Bright.
“Two travois,” he said.
“One for my pony, and one for your Morgan,” Victoria said testily. She had not consulted with him about using the Morgan to draw a travois.
“Three travois,” Mary said. “The boy will ride on one. I will walk.”
“Three?” He stared.
“It is good.”
“Between four and five hundred pounds off the wagon, sir,” Skye said.
Bright peered owlishly at them. “When I invent a flycatching trap, you will get the first one.”
T
hey reached one of those message centers that dotted the trail. This was a sandstone cliff and it was plastered with notices, mostly daubed on the rock with axle grease.
Some were instructions. Others were death notices or changes of plan: Eliza Jones, d. Aug 15, 1847. Ella, taking Hastings, Gilbert. Columbus Co. July 28, 1849. Amy Quill, go to Sacramento. Bloomfield Train, June 30, 1850. Lost Eddy, contact Vasquez, Bridger Fort.
Skye paused as he always did, learning what he could from what sufficed as a post office. Here people were lost and found, warnings were posted, deaths announced, and advice given.
Older messages had faded in the sun and wind and rain and were often overwritten by newer ones. A fresh one, the black stain of axle grease bold in the yellow rock. “Plague party ahead, Green Wagon. Many dead.” It had a crudely drawn skull and crossbones.
Skye studied it, knowing trouble was brooding. Peacock pulled up beside him and spotted the new message.
“I'd hoped we were past that,” he said.
Bright and the wagons appeared. The youngsters on the tailgates studied the cliff. Finally Skye's family.
“What the hell does it say?” Victoria asked.
Skye told her and Mary.
“Well, hell, we got grease and we cover it up.”
It was a temptation. But the real trouble lay ahead, not behind. At Fort Bridger, probably, or at the Saints' Great Salt Lake City. Word traveled forward.
“Too late,” Skye said.
Lloyd Jones, gaunt but still teamstering, studied the message. “I feel like I've been put into a debtors prison. There's no way out,” he said.
“We'll push along,” Peacock said. “Let's not borrow trouble.”
The whale oil merchant had a steely resolve that Skye admired. They would deal with trouble as it came.
They drove west for several days. The oxen were slowly gaunting in spite of the lighter load, and Skye hoped fresher animals would be available at Fort Bridger, or at least some grain. He would trade that Sharps for fresh livestock or grain, whatever it took.
Twice more they found warnings against the plague company daubed into rocks, and once on the side of an abandoned wagon. Someone ahead was making a major case out of it, whipping up trouble. Each time they came across one of these warnings, the young people grew more and more distressed.
The Tucker twins burst into tears. Eliza and Mary Bridge could not comfort them. Sterling Peacock scowled, and threw pebbles at these terrible notices, daubed in oversized letters in an effort to dominate the message areas. Pete Sturgeon, too weak to do much but lie in the green wagon, learned of it and
buried his head under his blanket. But Anna Bennett was a different sort.
“Next camp we see, I'll go visiting and watch them run from the wicked witch,” she said.
No one laughed.
Skye stared helplessly from a distance. The quarantine separating him and his family from these consumptives was carefully observed by the sick and the well. Skye and his women were washing themselves far more than usual too.
Victoria needed to have each sign read to her; not just the ones warning of a plague party, but the rest. She was a great student of the ways of European people. But Mary absorbed herself with her son, with cooking and camp-tending, and keeping the travois loads balanced.
Few parties passed them because they were the stragglers now, and only one company seemed to notice the green wagon. They whispered to one another, pointed, and hurried past while Peacock's little company rested beside a tributary creek. Maybe it would come to nothing, Skye thought. Most of these companies bound for California or Oregon were, after all, far ahead now.
July days, and then August days slipped by without incident. By traveling slowly, resting frequently, and sparing the oxen as much as possible, they struggled westward without any breakdowns. If even one ox died or failed, they would be out of luck. Fort Bridger loomed ahead like heaven itself. It would be the place to trade worn oxen for fresh. There would be blacksmith services, wheelwrights, skilled men with tools, as well as everything anyone would need, all for sale. The post had been started by the old mountain man Jim Bridger and his partner Luis Vasquez, but the Mormons had gotten hold of it and now ran it as a lucrative business
catering to the migrants. Just now it looked like some sort of heaven to Skye.
According to the gossip along the trail, the Mormons were trading two worn oxen for one rested ox, which Peacock could not afford, but the Sharps would make the difference. Skye was prepared to trade it for two rested oxen and wouldn't take less. That Sharps was some gun, all right. He wished he could keep it, but the welfare of the company came first.
They reached the Sweetwater, struggled through Devil's Gate, entered a land of slopes that wore hard on the oxen, a land denuded of grass by the migration. The livestock starved. Still they struggled west along the one little river in all the West that enabled the migrants to go to Oregon and California. They were climbing now, but so subtly that the Massachusetts people barely noticed, though Skye observed the distant peaks of the Wind River range. This was a naked land, inhospitable, barren, and cruel. The higher they progressed, the less able the young people were to breathe. The air in this high country was thin and unsatisfying, and the consumptives suffered.
Then one day Skye halted the party on a barren slope. Far to the north lay high country; off to the south the land was enveloped in white haze.
“This is South Pass, the continental divide,” he said. “You hardly notice. From here, the waters run to the Pacific. We'll start descending to Little Sandy Creek, and then we have a bad stretch we must cross at night. Then we'll drop into the Green River valley, and it'll be heaven. But I must warn you. We're in for some tough going. The sick will have to walk or the livestock will quit and die.”
They stared solemnly at him, absorbing more bad news.
They started downslope in windless heat, the sun's blast radiating from the very earth. Soon they were parched. Skye urged them onward.
“We'll hit the Little Sandy soon. You can see the valley from here even if you can't see the creek,” he said.
But those around him could see nothing in the white heat haze. He rode onward. At least the oxen didn't have to pull hard; not the way they had toiled up the long slopes to South Pass. The country was so large it seemed frightening, and there were brooding clouds over distant mountains, waiting to pounce on the unwary.
The heat was oppressive, and in spite of the dry air, man and ox sweated. The trail was so well worn here it cut a deep notch in the desert. They were never out of sight of debris, abandoned cargo left by desperate companies. Peacock took to looking for food in all the junk, especially grain or flour, but wily captains of other trains had raided the discards for every useful thing.
They rolled into the anonymous valley where Big Sandy Creek ran, barely two feet wide but still cool, cool water. Skye turned his party upstream a little, hoping for grass but found nothing. They would water here, rest, and then tackle the long night passage to the Green River valley.
The oxen and Skye's ponies slowly lapped up the water and kept their muzzles in it, tonguing it occasionally, sometimes standing in the same spot for ten or twelve minutes at a time. Then they stood still, miserable, their eyes accusing their owners of starving them.
Two other trains came and went, but Skye waited for the cool of evening, waited for his animals to recover as much as possible in that cruel heat. Then at twilight he steered them west across a blinding white desert. There would be no water
until the next day sometime, depending on how fast they moved. He had a canteen. Peacock had one small cask, mostly for his sick young people. There wouldn't be enough to water any animal in a meaningful way.
They were lucky. A chill August breeze descended out of distant mountains, freshening the air, invigorating the stock, and even helping the consumptives a little. They all did better than Skye imagined they could, plodding through starlight, and then by the light of a thin moon, into the unknown. At times Skye could barely see the trail but it had been carved so deeply into the caliche that he was never lost for long. As the sun lit the east, they descended into a branching valley, ever downward, past arid cliffs, and finally, in the middle of morning, into the lush valley of the Green River. Somehow, miraculously, they had survived intact. He once again turned them away from the trail, hoping to find good grass. There wasn't much, but it would do. They spent most of that day recovering beside this River Jordan that had become their salvation and baptismal font.
Skye thought to put a few miles on that evening, and they progressed through complex country, with the trail branching off in various directions, cutoffs, shortcuts, who knew where?
He was feeling pretty good. That dry run to the Green River was probably the cruelest lap of the trip, and now it was behind them. Ahead, not far, lay Bridger's Fort, brimming with salvation and hope and renewal.
Then they hit another sign, daubed on the turnoff that would take them to Salt Lake City. This was the famous Hastings Cutoff, which steered the California-bound trains south and into a waterless desert that was brutal on livestock, especially now when the heat was high. It was a graveyard to
many a dream and hope, but it could save time if a traveler was superbly equipped with grain and water and fresh stock.
A sign had been erected there to guide travelers. “Welcome, friend. Bridgerâ²s Fort straight ahead. Oregon stay right. Hastings Cutoff straight ahead. California via Spanish Trail, straight. We have what you need.”
“First friendly sign I've seen in a while, Mister Skye.”
“Maybe we'll get some oxen,” Skye said. “The Mormons are looking for business.”