“Trader’s got us crumped over a barrel with his high prices,” Scratch groaned.
“And our beaver ain’t ever gonna be wuth much anymore,” Rufus added with a faint whistle between those four missing teeth.
“Time was, we free men was the princes in this land,” Elbridge declared beneath that big bulb of a nose scored with tiny blue veins. “But now we’re so poor we’re barely hanging on with our toenails.”
Simms wagged his head, complaining, “Man cain’t hardly make a living catching flat-tails no more.”
All too painfully true. This year almost a fourth of Bridger’s and Tom Fitzpatrick’s trappers had declared their intentions of dropping out of the brigades, choosing to return east with the fur caravan, waiting until they reached St. Louis so they would be paid in cash rather than take out their wages in trade goods for the coming season. Hard to believe that more than eighty men, not to mention Fraeb and Gervais—Bridger’s and Fitz’s old partners—were giving up on the mountains!
“Let ’em run on back,” Scratch had snorted when Elbridge Gray told him the surprising news. “There’ll allays be them what don’t belong out here. I say hurraw for all of ’em skedaddling with their tails a’tween their legs—goddamned flatlanders anyway!”
At rendezvous this summer there were no more than two hundred company trappers and well less than a hundred free men. For damned sure those Hudson’s Bay men who had followed Thomas McKay and John McLeod there again didn’t count. Where once more than six hundred red-eyed white hellions had run wild with rendezvous fever, buying whiskey and bedding squaws until they were sore-dicked, hungover, and once again deeply in debt … rendezvous this summer paled when compared to those robust carnivals of recent years. Not near the fun, nor near the trade goods and liquor. And even if there had been plenty of supplies and grain alcohol, there simply wasn’t all that many men who could afford the rampant, glazed-eyed sprees of bygone years.
Plain as summer sun this August of 1835, no longer was there anywhere near the beaver there had been.
Why, if it hadn’t been for that Presbyterian missionary Dr. Marcus Whitman cutting that iron arrowhead more than three inches long out of a three-year-old growth of bone and cartilage in Jim Bridger’s back, so far there had been little to make this rendezvous remarkable in more than a decade of summer fairs.
No sooner had he finished running spidery threads of elk sinew through holes he’d jabbed in Bridger’s skin to close the wound than another American Fur trapper stepped up to Whitman and yanked his own grimy shirt off to point at the lump of cartilage hardened around an arrowhead right under his skin—a wound almost as old as Bridger’s. And for the next three days this quiet man of God from the East had entertained one gamy patient after another—both white trapper and redskin alike—performing his minor operations and dispensing calomel to those who had grown bilious, even bleeding others. The Reverend Doctor Whitman had made a lifelong friend in Jim Bridger, and convinced the others that while all the rest of the religious Bible-thumpers who came west for the Nez Perce country were the sort to glower down their noses at the little fun these men allowed themselves every summer at rendezvous, there was at least one missionary who took the chalk.
It wasn’t long before news began to circulate from the American Fur camp that Lucien Fontenelle’s supply train might well not have made it to rendezvous if it hadn’t been for the good Dr. Whitman. Back along the Missouri, even before turning west along the Platte River Road, cholera had begun to burn its way through the caravan. And though he had little strength remaining in his own reserves, Whitman began to nurse the sick and dying, able to save all but two by the time every last man in Fontenelle’s train had been laid low by that terrible scourge.
They had lost a month there on the bluffs overlooking the muddy river: at least two weeks to let the epidemic run its course through the hired hands, and another two weeks until the men recuperated enough to continue their journey for the mountains.
To those unlettered laborers who had muscled Fontenelle’s wagons and mules west, to those illiterate but savvy princes of the wilderness, Whitman became no less than an unvarnished hero. As he began the next three days of recovering from the crude, open-air surgery, no less a mountain veteran than Jim Bridger himself had declared that the doctor would clearly do to ride the river with.
That praise was enough for any man jack of them there at the mouth of the New Fork.
Then, as if having that arrowhead cut out of his back four days ago wasn’t enough, Bridger handed the camps another reason for celebration.
“C’mon!” the burly trapper bellowed as he lunged back among the blanket bowers and canvas-covered shelters where Bass sat among old friends and company men.
“Grab yore guns!” roared the flush-faced man scurrying up on Joe Meek’s heels.
“Injun trouble?” Isaac Simms shrieked as he scrambled to his feet.
“Shit,” Meek huffed, coming to a halt. “Just bring your guns to shoot off when the marryin’ is done!”
“M-marryin’?” Rufus asked.
Robert “Doc” Newell leaned an arm on Meek’s shoulder, huffing as more than fifty company trappers hurried close to hear the news. “Booshway’s give us a half hour to gather a crowd, boys. Then he’s gonna let a ol’ hide-thumper marry him off to a gal he’s took a shine to.”
“Booshway?” Bass repeated. “You mean that ol’ whitehead Fitzpatrick? If that don’t beat all—Broken Hand’s getting hisself hitched!”
“Goddammit—Doc here didn’t say nothing ’bout Fitz tying the knot with a squaw!” Meek snorted.
Scratch shook his head. “But he said booshway—”
“Bridger, gol-dangit!” Newell bawled. “Bridger’s taking him a bride!”
Gabe must have been feeling more than pert. What with having that arrowhead cut out of his back, he must have been feeling downright cocky.
After more than a dozen years in the mountains, after bedding squaws every summer at rendezvous and occasionally of a winter encampment, Jim Bridger likely decided he was ready to settle down with a squaw. And not just the first one that caught his eye, Scratch discovered. This beauty was the cherished daughter of Flathead chief Insala.
Bass hurried back to camp where he fetched Waits-by-the-Water and Magpie, all three of them quickly donning their finest clothes. As his wife finished brushing her own black tresses, Titus dabbed a little purplish vermilion dye along the part of their child’s hair after he had dragged a porcupine-tail brush through her locks already reaching her shoulders. Then he tied Zeke to a tree with a long length of rope and gave the dog a new antelope bone to content himself with before the three of them mounted up and loped off for the Flathead village erected on the far side of the American Fur Company encampment.
Beyond Insala’s people stood more camp circles crowding this lush bottom ground: Nez Perce, Ute, Shoshone, and even a few lodges of Arapaho who had dared come trade with the trappers rather than to fight the white men. More than a thousand Indians all told, and most of them were streaming into the Flathead village with close to two hundred of the company trappers who were singing a variety of discordant songs, pounding on brass pots and iron kettles, one man even blowing reedily through an out-of-tune clarinet while several men dragged air through concertinas and others sawed catgut bows across the strings of their violins as the many processions threaded their way toward the center of the camp like throbbing spokes on a wagon wheel.
It was there the Flathead were not to be outdone as the old rattle shakers and thick-wristed drummers were already taking up their chants and high-pitched songs while the crowds shoved together, shoulder to shoulder, neck-craning to get themselves a good gander at the bridegroom riding into camp with an escort of the most dandified trappers Bass had ever seen. Wearing war paint of their own, feathers tied in their long hair as well as in the tails and manes of their horses, with strips of blue and red wool tied around their arms and legs or bands of brass wire encircling their wrists and upper arms, those half dozen who accompanied Bridger were a sight to behold.