Part 36 (1/2)
The site of the post itself could not better have been chosen. Here the flattened and dividing waters of the Black's Fork, icy cold and fresh from the Uintah Mountains to the southward, supported a substantial growth of trees, green now and wonderfully refres.h.i.+ng to desert-weary eyes.
”The families are coming!”
Bridger's clerk, Chardon, raised the new cry of the trading post.
”Broke an' hungry, I'll bet!” swore old Jim Bridger in his beard.
But he retired into his tepee and issued orders to his Shoshone squaw, who was young and pretty. Her name, as he once had said, was Dang Yore Eyes--and she was very proud of it. Philosophical withal, though smarting under recent blows of her white lord, she now none the less went out and erected once more in front of the tepee the token Bridger had kicked down--the tufted lance, the hair-fringed bull-neck s.h.i.+eld, the sacred medicine bundle which had stood in front of Jeem's tepee in the Rendezvous on Horse Creek, what time he had won her in a game of hands. Whereupon the older squaw, not young, pretty or jealous, abused him in Ute and went out after wood. Her name was Blast Your Hide, and she also was very proud of her white name. Whereafter both Dang Yore Eyes and Blast Yore Hide, female, and hence knowing the moods of man, wisely hid out for a while. They knew when Jeem had the long talk with the sick white squaw, who was young, but probably needed bitter bark of the cottonwood to cure her fever.
Painted Utes and Shoshones stood about, no more silent than the few local mountaineers, bearded, beaded and fringed, who still after some mysterious fas.h.i.+on clung to the old life at the post. Against the newcomers, profitable as they were, still existed the ancient antipathy of the resident for the nonresident.
”My land sakes alive!” commented stoical Molly Wingate after they had made some inquiries into the costs of staples here. ”This store ain't no place to trade. They want fifty dollars a sack for flour--what do you think of that? We got it for two dollars back home. And sugar a dollar a tin cup, and just plain salt two bits a pound, and them to guess at the pound. Do they think we're Indians, or what?”
”It's the tenth day of August, and a thousand miles ahead,” commented Caleb Price. ”And we're beyond the buffalo now.”
”And Sis is in trouble,” added Jed Wingate. ”The light wagon's got one hind spindle half in two, and I've spliced the hind ex for the last time.”
Jackson advanced an idea.
”At Fort Hall,” he said, ”I've seed 'em cut a wagon in two an' make a two-wheel cart out'n hit. They're easier to git through mountains that way.”
”Now listen to that, Jesse!” Mrs. Wingate commented. ”It's getting down to less and less every day. But I'm going to take my bureau through, and my wheat, and my rose plants, if I have to put wheels on my bureau.”
The men determined to saw down three wagons of the train which now seemed doubtful of survival as quadrupeds, and a general rearrangement of cargoes was agreed. Now they must jettison burden of every dispensable sort. Some of the sore-necked oxen were to be thrown into the loose herd and their places taken for a time by cows no longer offering milk.
A new soberness began to sit on all. The wide reaches of desert with which they here were in touch appalled their hearts more than anything they yet had met. The gra.s.sy valley of the Platte, where the great fourfold tracks of the trail cut through a waving sea of green belly deep to the oxen, had seemed easy and inviting, and since then hards.h.i.+p had at least been spiced with novelty and change. But here was a new and forbidding land. This was the Far West itself; silent, inscrutable, unchanged, irreducible. The mightiness of its calm was a smiting thing.
The awesomeness of its chill, indifferent nights, the unsparing ardors of its merciless noons, the measureless expanses of its levels, the cold barrenness of its hills--these things did not invite as to the bosom of a welcoming mother; they repelled, as with the chill gesture of a stranger turning away outcasts from the door.
”Here resolution almost faints!” wrote one.
A general requisition was made on the scant stores Bridger had hurried through. To their surprise, Bridger himself made no attempt at frontier profits.
”Chardon,” commanded the moody master of the post to his head clerk, ”take down your tradin' bar an' let my people in. Sell them their flour an' meal at what it has cost us here--all they want, down to what the post will need till my partner Vasquez brings in more next fall, if he ever does. Sell 'em their flour at four dollars a sack, an' not at fifty, boy. Git out that flag I saved from Sublette's outfit, Chardon.
Put it on a pole for these folks, an' give it to them so's they kin carry it on acrost to Oregon. G.o.d's got some use for them folks out yan or hit wouldn't be happenin' this way. I'm goin' to help 'em acrost. Ef I don't, old Jim Bridger is a liar!”
That night Bridger sat in his lodge alone, moodily smoking. He heard a shaking at the pegs of the door flap.
”Get out!” he exclaimed, thinking that it was his older a.s.sociate, or else some intruding dog.
His order was not obeyed. Will Banion pulled back the flap, stooped and entered.
”How!” exclaimed Bridger, and with fist smitten on the blankets made the sign to ”Sit!” Banion for a time also smoked in silence, knowing the moody ways of the old-time men.
”Ye came to see me about her, Miss Molly, didn't ye?” began Bridger after a long time, kicking the embers of the tepee fire together with the toe of his moccasin.
”How do you know that?”
”I kin read signs.”
”Yes, she sent me.”
”When?”