Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher Read online

  Mountain Man

  Vardis Fisher

  1965

  For Joe

  who was one of them

  To the Reader

  WHAT THE Author of this novel would like to say to the reader has been so well said by various writers that I am going to let them say it to you. George Frederick Ruxton was one of the sharpest and most sensitive observers of the Rocky Mountains area and its people in the time of this book, or a little before it; and his observations he left to us in his books, chiefly in Life in the Far West, published in London in 1849.

  On the Indian woman’s relationship with whitemen he wrote:

  “The Indian women who follow the fortunes of the white hunters are remarkable for their affection and fidelity to their husbands, the which virtues, it must be remarked, are all on their own side; for, with very few exceptions, the mountaineers seldom scruple to abandon their Indian wives, whenever the fancy takes them to change their harems; and on such occasions the squaws, thus cast aside, wild with jealousy and despair, have been not unfrequently known to take signal vengeance both on their faithless husbands and the successful beauties who have supplanted them in their affections. There are some honourable exceptions, however, to such cruelty, and many of the mountaineers stick to their red-skinned wives for better and for worse, often suffering them to gain the upper hand in the domestic economy of the lodges, and being ruled by their better halves in all things pertaining to family affairs; and it may be remarked, when once the lady dons the unmentionables, she becomes the veriest termagant that ever hen-pecked an unfortunate husband.”

  On the nature, of the mountain men a number of perspicacious writers have expressed their views. Just before the time of this novel W. A. Ferris wrote his Life in the Rocky Mountains, in which he said:

  “Strange, that people can find so strong and fascinating a charm in this rude, nomadic, and hazardous mode of life, as to be estranged themselves from home, country, friends, and all the comforts, elegances, and privileges of civilization; but so it is, the toil, the danger, the loneliness, the deprivation of this condition of being, fraught with all its disadvantages, and replete with peril, is, they think, more than compensated by the lawless freedom, and the stirring excitement, incident to their situation and pursuits. The very danger has its attraction, and the courage and cunning, and skill, and watchfulness made necessary by the difficulties they have to overcome, the privations they are forced to contend with, and the perils against which they must guard, become at once their pride and boast. A strange, wild, terrible, romantic, hard, and exciting life they lead, with alternate plenty and starvation, activity and repose, safety and alarm, and all the other adjuncts that belong to so vagrant a condition, in a harsh, barren, untamed, and fearful region of desert, plain, and mountain. Yet so attached to it do they become, that few ever leave it, and they deem themselves, nay are, with all these bars against them, far happier than the in-dwellers of towns and cities, with all the gay and giddy whirl of fashion’s mad delusions in their train ….

  “Scarcely, however, did I ever wish to change such hours of freedom for all the luxuries of civilised life; and, unnatural and extraordinary as it may appear, yet such is the fascination of the life of the mountain hunter, that I believe not one instance could be adduced of even the most polished and civilised of men, who had once tasted the sweets of its attendant liberty, and freedom from every worldly care, not regretting the moment when he exchanged it for the monotonous life of the settlements, nor sighing and sighing again once more to partake of its pleasures and allurements.”

  Wrote the late historian Bernard DeVoto:

  “… but the loveliest myth of all America was the far West … a lost impossible province … where men were not dwarfs and where adventure truly was. For a brief season, consider, the myth so generously begotten became fact. For a few years Odysseus Jed Smith and Siegfried Carson and the wing-shod Fitzpatrick actually drew breath in this province of fable. Then suddenly it was all myth again. Wagons were moving down the trails, and nowhere remained any trace of the demigods who had passed this way.”

  Of the mountain man: “But he was a man. He possessed the most formidable skill ever developed on this continent. He possessed, too, a valor hardly to be comprehended. He went forth into the uncharted peaks and made his way. The Indians slaughtered him in hundreds and he slaughtered them as casually and passed on …. This record of him [Bonner’s Beckwourth] and of his casual hardships, murders, and inattentive violence is quite, quite true.”

  “There is, perhaps,” wrote Washington Irving, “no class of men on the face of the earth, says Captain Bonneville, who lead a life of more continued exertion, peril, and excitement, and who are more enamored of their occupations, than the free trappers of the West. ” “These,” wrote Stanley Vestal, “were the mountain men, a breed of heroes …. These mountain men, far more than the soldiers and the statesmen, were the real means of seizing, holding, and settling our vast Far West. They were the men of destiny, whose skill and courage enabled those Americans who followed their trail to conquer a continent …. Those mountain men were only a few hundreds in number, hardly more than a thousand all told. Of these the free trappers were the cream, men whose careers, illustrated perfectly the principle of the survival of the fittest. To be rated one of the best of these is as proud a title to manhood as the history of these States affords.”

  Justice William O. Douglas has approached the “wilderness” as a botanist and a poet: “What I had experienced was a symphony of the wilderness. Those who never learned to walk will never know its beauty. Only those who choose to get lost in it, cutting all ties with civilization, can know what I mean. Only those who return to the elemental world can know its beauty and grandeur-—and `man’s essential unity with it. “

  Lawrence Gilman, the distinguished music critic, says in Nature in Music: “… M. Pierre Janet, who holds that those who, at different times in the history of the world’s civilization, have manifested a strong attraction toward the natural world, have always been persons of a dehnite and particular type: emotional, subject to exaltation of mood, impatient of hampering traditions, essentially anti-conventional. Mr. Havelock Ellis, in his study of the psychology of the love of wild Nature, characteristics all such persons as, in a greater or less degree, ‘temperamentally exceptional} In the strongest and simplest manifestations of the type, these lovers of wild Nature have been persons who were instinctively repelled by their ordinary environment …. Chateaubriand, who had small use for mountains except as ‘the sources of rivers, a barrier against the horrors of war,’ is balanced by Petrarch, who, climbing Mont Ventoux … observed that his soul ‘rose to lofty contemplations on the summit.’ … The strongest appeal of natural beauty has always, then, been chiefly to individuals of emotional habit, and especially to those of untrammelled imagination and non-conformist tendencies: in other words, to poetically minded radicals in all times and regions. It is probable that the curious and enlightened inquirer, bearing in mind these facts, would not be surprised to find, in studying the various expressions of this attraction as they are recorded in the arts, that the uniquely sensitive and eloquent art of music has long been the handmaid of the Nature-lover; and he would be prepared to End the Nature-lover himself appearing often in the guise of that inherently emotional and often heterodox being,. the musicmaker.”

  Readers interested in exemplars of Mr. Gilman’s concluding statement can find them in the “forest” and “spring” symphonies of the eighteenth century; Handel’s attempts to capture in music winds, bird music, running water; Knecht’s “Musical Portrait of Nature” and Viva1di’s “The Four Seasons”; and in the tonal landscape-painting of more recent tim
es, such as Debussy’s “Aprés-midi d’un faune,” d’Indy’s “Jour d’eté at la montagne,” MacDowe1l’s “Wandering Iceberg,” and many others.

  Readers familiar with the history of the American West will be aware that Sam and Katie are drawn in some degree from John Johnston, the “Crow-killer,” and Jane Morgan, whose family was slaughtered on the Musselshell. Though these two persons actually lived they are today almost completely lost in legends.

  PART ONE

  LOTUS

  1

  HE HAD PAUSED to listen to the exquisite madrigal of a Western meadow lark, and had offered to sing with it, choosing as his own, “Give Me the Sweet Delights of Love”; but he had found no bird that would sing with him, though now and then one, like the chat, would try to entice him into mimicry. On his packhorse in a piece of cheverel, the fine soft leather made of kidskin, he had a mouth organ; and a mile and ten minutes later he took it out and looked round him for sign of enemies. He had learned that playing Bach or Mozart arias when in enemy country was not only good for his loneliness; the music filled skulking Indians with awe. At this hour, back home and far away, his father might be playing the pianoforte.

  An hour later the object that held his gaze as he sat astride his black stallion, two heavy handguns at his waist and a rifle across the saddletree, was a huge brownish-yellow monster that some men called the grizzly. In a frenzy of impatience the beast was digging into the wet loam, its powerful curved claws thrusting in like chisels. It would pause now and then to poke its face into the hole and sniff, and then would dig again with what seemed to be twice its previous energy. The man on the horse thought the bear was trying to dig out a prairie dog, though why the idiot should ever do that was beyond anyone’s guessing: at the last moment the dog would flash up and out, and be off and away, and the monster would sit in doleful frustration on its huge fat rump, as though sunk to its waist in fur. Its small eyes would scan the world roundabout.

  Suddenly the man on the horse felt the shock of amazement. It was not a dog’s hole the beast was invading but the lair of a badger, and a deadlier fighter than a badger this man had never seen. The man thought he knew what had happened: the badger, eyes glowing black with anger and outrage, had retreated to the end of its underground run and there in the dark, lips snarling, had waited. At last, its blood boiling in fury, it had rushed up the tunnel and with teeth as sharp as needles had seized the bear’s nose.

  With the emotion of grandeur filling him big and full the man watched the remarkable drama before him. A bear’s nose was so tender and sensitive that an assault on it was an affront that filled the big creature with mountainous rage. This brute, weighing, the man guessed, about a thousand pounds, now exploded from its chest a series of wild woofing roars and rose to its hind legs, with thirty pounds of infuriated badger hanging from its nose. Badger claws were striking like lancets at the bear’s face and eyes. Having risen, the monster turned round and round, like a great fat man in a fur cloak, its head shaking from side to side, as it tried with feeble gestures to shake off its foe. But the badger had most of its teeth set deep in bear nose, and it was thirty pounds of savage fighting fury. The man gave a snort of incredulous delight and went on staring.

  He had seen some remarkable fights since coming west, seven years ago, but none had made his eyes bug as they bugged now. The bear kept turning and shaking and woofing, or whimpering like a frightened or wounded child; and all the while the four badger feet raked across the eyes and face and down the throat. The grizzly’s front legs looked as helpless as they might have looked if they had been broken or the claws had been pulled. The man watching did not fully sense that with all those badger chisels buried in the sensitive nose the big fellow was so filled with astonishment, with bewildered outrage, with confusion and pain, that its will was paralyzed. It could only keep turning round and round, sinking now to four feet, now rising, and all the while pouring out the mournful whimpering lament of a thing whose heart was breaking.

  “I’ll be damned!” the man said aloud. He looked round him and sniffed for the scent of enemies. He heard a lark singing, and for a moment he thought how strange it was that in the same scene a bird’s throat was pure music and two beasts had turned as black as night with murderous fury.

  As suddenly as it began it was all over. Into the monster’s tiny dull brain came realization of its two powerful paws; with each it seized the badger and literally tore it apart. Like a prince of dignity overwhelmed by disgust, it flung the bloody pieces to the earth, and still crying like a child with a broken heart, it sank soundlessly to front feet and loped softly away into a river thicket.

  The man rode over and dismounted. He saw what he had expected to see: the flesh part of the bear’s nose was in the vise of the badger’s jaws.

  It was a Sunday forenoon early in August, in the year 1846. The big man who stood there on the Musselshell, looking with admiration and wonder at a badger’s head, was a free trapper, hunter, and mountain man, on his way up the river and over to the Bitterroot Valley, where he expected to take a wife. He was a giant, even among the mountain men of the American West. Without his moccasins he stood six foot four, and without clothing weighed about two hundred fifty pounds. He was twenty-seven years old. Trapping was his trade, the Rocky Mountains and their valleys were his home, and the killing of Indians was only the clearing away of things that got in his path. He admired courage above all other virtues; next to that he admired fortitude; and third among the few values by which he lived was mercy to the weak or defenseless. His passions were love of life, mortal combat with a worthy foe, good music, good food, and that quality of nature which would compel a poet to say, a hundred years later, that its heartbreaking beauty would remain when there would no longer be a heart to break for it. Besides his rifle and handguns he had at his belt a Bowie knife with a honed blade ten inches long. It was a genuine Bowie, not a Green River or a Laos, or other cheap imitation.

  He looked at the badger a full minute, paying, in his silent way, his respect to a peerless fighter. He listened, but heard no sound of the grizzly. He scanned the horizons and sniffed the air for scent of Blackfeet. Then, mounting his black stud, he took the path up the river, his gray-blue eyes searching the country around him. His friends and relatives back east might have thought this desolate God-forsaken land, its bluffs eroded and hot, its pine and juniper jaundiced from the heavy lime; but this man loved it, all of it, even the alkali where no plants grew. He loved this whole vast grandeur—the mountains snow-crowned, the valleys berry-laden, the meadows looking like parks that had never heard a mowing-machine, the prairies with their vast herds of antelope and buffalo. It was good for a man to be alive, his belly full of steak and berries and mountain water, a fleet horse under him, a rifle that never missed fire, his pipe glowing, his mouth harp in his possibles bag, a lark spilling sweet music from its tiny bird-soul and a vesper sparrow flitting along the way as though to guide him. God, how he loved it all!

  This was Blackfeet country to the north and west of him. Ever since that day, forty years ago, when Meriwether Lewis and Reuben Field killed two of them, in self-defense, on the upper Marias, they had bent their savage wills to the extermination of all white people. This man, so far, had had no trouble with them, but he knew that they were the most vengeful and cruel and dangerous of all his red enemies, and when near their lands, as now, he never for a moment plugged this ears or closed his eyes.

  It was already said of him, by other mountain men, and would have been said by eagles and wolves if they could talk, that his sense of sight was that of the falcon; of smell, that of the wolf. His sense of hearing was not so keen. He thought his sense of smell had twice saved his life, but he might have said, if any man could have got him to talk about it, that like the mourning dove, the bittern, the Indian, he had a sixth sense.

  What he thought of as his sixth sense was in fact only what his five senses agreed on and communicated to his mind, acting together, like an intelligence agenc
y, topsort out, accept or reject, and evaluate the impressions that came to them. When, a few miles up the river from the scene of the fight, he drew gently on reins and stopped, he did not crane his neck and gawk round him, as a greenhorn might have done, but sat motionless, his senses searching the earth and air and reporting to him. He had seen the rufous breast of a bluebird high in a cottonwood; had heard the soft warning whee-uuuh whistle of the willow thrush; and had smelled the presence of enemies. Five minutes he sat stone-still, all his senses poring over the evidence; and he then was sure that a party of Blackfeet warriors had passed him, not more than ten minutes and two miles back. He touched a heel gently to the beast’s flank and moved forward.

  After half a mile he stopped again, deeply troubled by something close but unseen. Two birds had given alarm calls; a redwing, hopping about in the river willows, was acting with that agitation that made it tremble and call its alarm, when enemies approached its nest. But this was not its nesting season. An unseen dove was lamenting somewhere ahead of him. But his sharpest realization of something strange and dangerous came through his sense of smell. He was certain that he had smelled fresh blood. Again he went forward, over the low rise of a hill, and looked upriver; stopped, and looked and listened and sniffed; and again moved forward, to come soon and suddenly on the most dreadful scene he was ever to look at.

  2

  JOHN BOWDEN was a stubborn man. His stubbornness he called will power. In his home town an attorney had said to his face, “You have the most headstrong unyielding intractable contumacy of any man between here and Adam.” The wagon train headed for Oregon, of which John and his family were members, was encamped on the Big Blue when Bowden, angry and impatient, said to the overseer that the old map he had with him was right and did in fact, as he had said before, point out a better and shorter route than the one by South Pass and the interminable desert. Why go by the Platte and the Sweetwater, merely because damned fools had been going that way? The overseer, as in former encounters, had refused to listen and had sharply dismissed him, whereupon Bowden had detached his wagon from the train, and with his wife and three children had set forth on one of the most fantastic and dangerous journeys in human history.