Mountain Man - Vardis Fisher Read online

  With him were his wife Kate, his daughter Lou, sixteen, his son John, fourteen, and his son Robert, twelve. As the other members of the train watched Bowden and his family slowly disappear into the northwest they thought he had gone out of his mind. They thought they would never see him again. The defiant and foolhardy fellow staked his life and his family’s on a map that had never been any good, and on his knowledge of the western land, though he had never been more than twenty miles from his dooryard in Pennsylvania. With his family he vanished into Cheyenne land, and then into Crow land, and at last into Blackfeet land, or would have done so if he could have found a ford across the Musselshell. For eight hundred miles into a wilderness of hostile Indians—across a dozen rivers and hundreds of creeks—around great mountain chains and on and on the tenacious and obdurate man took his way, never faltering, never doubting himself, never looking back. He had the luck of an infinitude of fools: not one lone wagon in a thousand could have traversed that vast distance where no wagon had ever gone. That he and his family were not set on by Indians and murdered and scalped long before they reached the Musselshell. or even the Cheyenne River or the Powder, was to become an incredible tale that would be told by trappers around. a thousand campfires. How under heaven did he get across the Yellowstone anyway? “I figger,” said Windy Bill, “thet he jist looked torst heaven and walked on water.” Did no Indians ever see them in that journey of eighty days and eight hundred miles? Indeed, no Indians ever saw them; and the oceans of buffalo, even the wolves, even the grizzlies, fled before them. Not once in eighty days did they see the smoke of a fire, except their own. Bowden had so little knowledge of Indians that he tethered or hobbled his two beasts at night as though he were in his own yard back home, and with the innocence of angels he and his wife and children sank into deep sleep. Kate came to believe that he was guided by a higher power that had told him of a shorter and safer way to the Pacific coast. Before setting out she had heard stories of the hardships en route, and of all the graves along the South Pass trail. There had been hardships but no graves on the path John took.

  The fact is that, sulking and brooding, he had only the dimmest notion of what he was doing and where he was. He went so far north that at the end of eighty days he found himself on the Musselshell, only a few miles south of its junction with the Missouri. It might as well have been the Columbia or the Saskatchewan, for all that he knew about it. He had never heard that on Monday, the 20th of May, 1805, William Clark, en route to the ocean, had written of this river as the Shell and the Muscle Shell, noting in his journal that it emptied into the Missouri “2270 miles up” from that river’s mouth. Clark had found it to be 110 yards wide and of a greenish-yellow color. John knew only that it was too deep to ford. He saw ripening fruit on the river bottom, and because his rickety and squealing wagon needed repairs he decided to tarry on the east bank a few days. It is hard to tell what he might have thought if he had known that a Blackfeet scout lay on his belly behind a dwarf cedar and watched him. He said he would get things in shape while his family gathered and dried fruit. That he could decide to camp for a week on the very edge of the Blackfeet nation indicates the bottomless depths of his ignorance.

  In the morning of the day that Samson John Minard headed up the river, Bowden left his camp and took a game trail through bottomland to look for his two horses. When he did not return after half an hour his wife first called to him and then sent the three children to find him. They had hardly passed out of sight when something—she would never have been able to say what—so alarmed her that she stood rigid and listening. It may be that she heard a scream, or possibly she smelled blood. Seizing an axe, she ran on the path her husband and children had taken and in less than three hundred yards came to a scene that might have turned a weaker woman to stone. In the first instant of amazement and shock she had a lightning image of these things—of her husband bound to a tree and bent forward, the whole top of his head crimson with blood; of her two sons lying on the earth, with hideous redmen bending over them; and of her daughter, also fallen, but screaming and heart-stricken, as an Indian seized her hair and raised his tomahawk.

  Kate turned not to stone but to female tiger. Her fury was such that her strength was multiplied tenfold as she rushed forward and raised her axe. She moved with such devastating speed and her blows were so unerring that four warriors fell before any of them realized that an avenger was on them. At the moment the tomahawk fell on the daughter she buried her axe three inches deep in a red spine at the base of the skull. The two blows were simultaneous. With almost no pause at all she flew to a warrior bent over a son, and she split his skull so deep that the two halves actually sank toward his shoulders. The third, and again the fourth, she also felled with a single blow. It was all over in a few seconds. In the moment when she was returning to her daughter two Indians slashed the thongs binding Bowden, flung him across a horse, and were in flight down the river before Kate could understand what they had done. A half dozen Indians and a scalped and dead or dying man vanished, and Kate Bowden stood, shuddering with rage and tremors and lunacy, her dead children and four dead Indians around her. Her mother-fury turning to nausea, her whole body shaking so terribly that she had the movements of a mechanical toy, she stood, Indian blood over her hair and face and clothes, and so fully sensed the immense and unspeakable horror of it that her conscious mind was blotted out. The only thing she did for half an hour was to drag the fallen Indian off her daughter.

  She was still there, trembling, sick, numbed, and witless, when a man rode into view and sat on his horse forty yards away, looking at her. In the first instant he knew that a war party had passed him on its way down the river.

  He had a clear view of the seven prone persons, all of whom seemed to be dead, and of the woman, with blood all over her and with a bloody axe in her hands. He had seen men kill men. He himself had slain and scalped eight Indians since he left St. Louis and headed west. In the world where he now lived the killing of the weak by the strong was the first law of life, all the way from the tiniest gnats and spiders up to the wolf, the elk bull, the grizzly. No day passed in which he did not see creatures killing other creatures. No day passed in which enemies did not look at him and covet his flesh. This was not a country for persons dedicated to the prevention of cruelty by the living on the living.

  Sam was not a man who could be easily moved by death and loss but he was moved by the scene before him. It was not the dead warriors; he cared nothing about them. Possibly it was not the sons and the daughter. It must have been the way a mother stood, looking round her and back and forth; the way she bent a little forward and peered at a son, and slowly turned to look at the daughter; the way she knelt and searched the dead faces and bright bloody skulls of the sons, who only a little while ago had thick mops of brown hair; or the way she knelt and looked at her daughter, with the deep tomahawk cleft in the upper face and forehead. So absorbed was she by the grim facts that had desolated her life and soul, so darkened and blotted out was her conscious mind, so depressed was her pulse and her breathing, that she had almost no sense of being left alone in the world, God only knew where.

  Sam had at least a faint notion of it all. He supposed that this woman had killed four Blackfeet braves with nothing but an axe, who now was completely helpless before her enemies. Would she kneel there all day and all night, before her dead children? Was she praying? She had dropped the axe and now crawled back and forth, back and forth, between the children. Twenty minutes after Sam came in view she was kneeling by the girl and she seemed to be trying to clothe her; she stripped a thin shawl from her shoulders and laid it over the girl’s flanks. In one moment she glanced at the cottonwood tree where her husband had fallen forward. In that moment she understood what they had done to him, but she would understand that only in fleeting moments of insight, and only for a week or two. There would be a few brief flashes in the gathering darkness, when she would know that nothing was left to her but the dead, an old wagon, some b
edding, a few utensils, an axe, a rifle ….

  Turning from her daughter, she saw the big man on the horse. She leapt to her feet, recovered the axe, and began to run. Because he was in the path down which she had come she made a wide detour across river bottom, running with what the man thought was astonishing speed. A few moments later she came down the path toward him, a rifle in her hand, and he felt a vivid flash of horripilation, the bristling of body hair called gooseflesh. The expression on his face changed. Good God, did she intend to shoot him? “Woman, you’d better stop there!” he shouted to her, but she would not have stopped for droves of tigers or rivers of fire. She came on, but at twenty paces from him did stop, abruptly, and with both hands tried to raise the rifle and aim at him. He thought she was shaking too hard to put the sight on a target but he hung his rifle from the saddle’s pommel, threw a leg over, and slipped to the earth, both hands high above his head. He advanced toward her and all the while she was trying to aim the gun at him. Failing in that, she threatened him with it.

  “Woman,” he said sternly, “I’m your friend. It looks like you need one.” When she gave no sign of friendliness he again advanced, slowly, trying to look into her eyes; and when twenty feet from her he unbuckled his revolvers and let them fall. He put his arms out wide, his fingers spread. “I’m Sam Minard, New York State. Like I said, you need a friend. We have graves to dig. You have a shovel?”

  Holding her rifle with both hands, its muzzle pointed at him, she did not speak. She had so much redman’s blood on her face that he couldn’t tell what kind of face it was, except that it looked strong, like his mother’s. She had blood over one upper eyelid, and when she blinked the red spot flashed in the high sun. Sam was looking at her with wonder and admiration; he would never have believed that a woman with no weapon but an axe could kill four warriors, without herself being touched.

  For two or three minutes he looked at her and waited. Knowing that her will had faltered and that he was no longer in danger, he buckled the guns round his waist and went back to his horses. Leading the stud and with the packhorse trailing, he went up the trail to the woman’s camp, observing along the way the spots where her husband or children had uprooted firewood. He wanted to ask what in hell they were doing away up here in Crow and Blackfeet land, and where they thought they were going, but he doubted that he would ever get a word out of her. She was wary, like a wild thing; she was lost in blood and horror. What would she do when her dead were buried? Would she let him take her north to the Missouri, to wait for a river boat, or far south to the trail?

  He found a shovel in the camp, and thinking one spot as good as another, he was about to dig when she came running toward him, gesturing, like a mute. He followed her and she climbed to a tableland that was high enough to overlook the river and its bottoms, both north and south. She took the shovel from him and marked off three spots. Then, convulsed, it seemed to Sam, by frustration or anguish, she fell to her knees and with a stick made a small rectangle, and close to it another, twice as wide. He understood that she wanted her two sons in one grave. He had seen no tears in her eyes, no sign of the hysterical grief that he associated with women. Now that he was used to her bloody face he saw that it was rugged, with strong jawbones and chin and a line forehead. He thought her eyes were gray but could not tell, for they were alive with eerie apparitions of light. She had strong hands.

  Up here, he thought, was no place for graves, where the soil was meager and the wild winds of wintertime would sweep across in forty-below-zero cold. Still, the soil was drier and rich in lime. So he began to dig, and after a few minutes his face was moist with sweat. She brought blankets from the camp. When the graves were dug he took a blanket and with his ride across his left arm went to the scene of the massacre, followed by the woman, who had put her rifle away somewhere. Sam spread the blanket at the dead girl’s side and gently laid her on it, the mother intently watching him all the while. He folded the blanket over her nakedness and at the same moment drew the shawl away. He then handed his rifle to the woman, and with the girl cradled in his two arms he carried her to the grave. So much blood had gushed from her horrible wound and down over her face that he could not tell what she had looked like, but he could tell that she had a full womanly form and he liked to think of her as one who had been superlatively lovely. He knelt and very gently lowered her three feet, to the bottom. In the next instant the mother was across the grave from him, kneeling, and though he could hear no words and see no movements in her lips he thought she was praying; and bowing his head, he prayed with her. Surely the Almighty was listening now. She still knelt, while he placed shovels of earth on the blanket, till the tomb was filled. The two lads he buried with the same gentleness as the daughter, laying them on a blanket side by side and covering them with elkskins that he took from his pack. Again, as before, he knelt across from her and prayed.

  He then left her by the graves and went to the dead Indians. With skill learned from older mountain men he scalped the four, and while tying the scalps together he wondered if the woman would go away with him, to rejoin her people, or if this spot would be her home. In any case he intended to consecrate the graves as well as he could with four outposts; so now he cut off the four heads, with no more emotion than he would have felt in cutting off the heads of four deer, and took them, and four strong chokecherry stakes, to the grave area. The woman was sitting by the graves, bowed almost to her knees. Studying the scene, Sam decided to set the four stakes equidistant from the graves, at a distance of about forty yards; but while digging a hole it occurred to him that the tough dwarf cedar would last a lot longer, as posts, than the chokecherry; and so with the axe he went up the hill. It was almost sunset when he had the four cedar posts set, and with both hands was bringing the heads down with terrific force, so that the stakes were rammed up the throats and against the skulls. These four heads would be a warning to the Blackfeet, the sons of bitches, and to the Crows, if they came skulking around. These would tell them to leave this woman alone. The ravens would come and pick the skulls clean—the shrikes and magpies and buzzards, the beetles and all the insects; and before long they would be four white grinning skulls, facing the four corners of the world.

  John Bowden had set up a crude brush lean-to at his campsite. Looking in, Sam had seen bedding, utensils, a few tools, and some food. Nearby was the rickety wagon. Did she want him to take these things up to the graves tonight? He stood in night dusk, looking up the hill toward her; he supposed she would want to be alone with her grief and loss. Poor thing, poor thing! She was sitting between the two graves, her rifle across her lap, her right hand laid on the mound that covered her sons, her left hand on the mound above her daughter. Never had he seen woe as deep as this, or known man or woman who in one blow from heaven or hell had suffered such overwhelming loss.

  Wondering if she would sit there all night, he took his horses to the river for water. Somewhere north of him the Blackfeet war party was still racing toward a village of lodges where—it was always this way—the whole hideous screaming pack of them, squaws, children, and dogs, would torture and mutilate this woman’s husband, killing him horribly and very slowly, with the fiendish skills in producing agony of which the Blackfeet were masters. Sam Minard hated the Blackfeet. There was no mountain man from the Rio to the Athabasca, from the Ohio to the Pacific Ocean, who did not detest this red people. The hatred in some of the men was such a fierce wild passion that it boiled in their emotions and flamed in their talk, and kept them busy whetting their hatchets and knives. The Bloods and Piegans of the Blackfeet nation were the most savage tribes in the West; but most of the mountain men hated all Indians, and placed high among their mountain-man laws the axiom that the only good Indian was a dead Indian—and not only dead but picked clean by the ravens and wolves.

  Securing his horses for the night, Sam went to the woman’s camp to see what she had. A dark night had come. His ear detected a sound above the sound of tree toads. He listened. Yes, there
was a sound, blood-chilling-a wild insane keening, up there by the graves. Again he felt goosetlesh, as he stood, facing her, listening: in his mind he saw her there, month after month, year after year, fighting off eagles and wolves and making her heartbroken jeremiads to God, until at last she withered and shrank and died, of cold and loss and loneliness. He was afraid she would forget her camp, her bedding and food, and sinking into stuporous woe, fold over on her lap and die.

  He was to learn that he did not know her.

  After going halfway up the hill to listen, and coming back down, he thought of supper. Ordinarily when journeying through enemy lands he made fireless camps, even in wintertime; he would eat a chunk of jerked buffalo and roll into his buffalo robes. But he had labored hard this day and was as famished as a winter wolf. He decided to make a fire but first he would wait for the moon to come up, for he thought he could slip out to the hills and get a mule deer. Two hours later he came in with a fat buck over his shoulder. Opening it from throat to rump, he cut away the choicer portions, including the liver, loin, kidney fat, and the upper parts of the hams. He built a fire and brought water from the river. All the while he was thinking that it would be son-like to take hot steaks or a fine roast to the mother.

  After eating four pounds of venison, a pint of dried serviceberries, and a quart of black coffee he filled his cob pipe and sucked flame into it. It was a nice night. He could hear the wings of night birds and the river’s flowing waters. Above him he could see a thousand stars. Around him he could smell tobacco smoke, the fertile loam of river bottom, magpie and crow nests in the cottonwoods, mole runs, moss pads, hot lime hills cooling in the night, and the embers of aspen and willow in the fire. He wondered if he should have used two of his robes as burial shrouds. He was not a very sentimental man; he knew that in no time at all the dead person or the dead beast was only a few bones but he knew also that people liked to lay their loved ones down in the best they could aiford. He had two large robes and several small ones. He guessed he would give one of them to the woman. Tomorrow if she refused to go north with him and wait for a river boat, or south to the trail, he would give her more powder and ball and anything else he had that she could use. If she was determined to stay here he doubted that she could long survive in a land where the strongest went down one by one. She would be all alone with four skulls and two graves. She would never see a human being, never in God’s world, except a redman on a distant hill, or a mountain man going up or down the river.