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 agency, 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.
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.