From the Bighorn he had pushed south for Independence Rock on the Sweetwater, then on to the North Platte to reach the new post being constructed by his brother and Campbell by the last week of September. Later that fall, when Andrew first met the older Louis Vasquez at Fort William, Sublette and Campbell were already considering their withdrawal from the mountains. Back and forth they discussed their belief that the fur trade had reached its zenith, with profits sure to continue their slide.
Eager to step out of his brother’s shadow that autumn, Andrew marched south with Vasquez, striking the South Platte, where they constructed a temporary post they christened Fort Convenience, trading for buffalo robes from the Arapaho and some Cheyenne hunting in the area.
Then in late December of thirty-four, excited by the heavy packs of furs and their prospects, the partners set out overland for St. Louis after briefly considering whether or not they should attempt to float the furs downriver in mackinaw boats. Surely they had proved to themselves that there was a vast potential for raising a post squarely between Fort William to the north and Bents’ Fort south on the Arkansas. The future seemed theirs for the taking.
By April of thirty-five Andrew had returned to Fort William with Robert Campbell to assist with the transfer of the post to Fitzpatrick, Bridger, Drips, and Fontenelle. Early in the summer Louis was back in St. Louis where they both presented themselves to William Clark, petitioning for a license to trade among the tribes. Returning to the South Platte by late summer, the new partners started on their stockade with the help of a few men hired in St. Louis, struggling to raise enough shelter before the first winter storm rumbled down the slopes of Long’s Peak to batter them.
Reaching that high ground east of the river, Scratch and Waits-by-the-Water found workers furiously felling trees and dragging those cottonwood timbers back to an open patch of ground where they were raising stockade walls.
“Soon as the frost is gone from the ground next spring,” explained the stout Vasquez, “we can start making ’dobe bricks. Like the Bents done on their fort.”
Titus told them how he had been to that post on the Arkansas, had seen plenty of adobe construction for himself down in San Fernando de Taos.
“You bring your furs here,” the thinner Andrew Sublette promised, “beaver or buffalo—we’ll give you top dollar.”
“You don’t go so far away, not down to Bents’,” Vasquez said. “Get furs in these hills, trade them here too.”
“We’ll be back,” Scratch promised. “Maybeso camp for the winter.”
After resting nearby for two days watching the construction, Bass led his wife and animals across the sandy bottom of the South Platte and pushed into the foothills where Long’s Peak brooded over them for the next ten weeks as he worked this stream, then another. Gradually pushed down from the high country a little farther day by day, Scratch and Waits-by-the-Water worked feverishly, rising well before first light to wolf down some food before he trudged away into the dark and she began her hide scraping before Magpie awakened. Each night found them working on the hides, cleaning the weapons, making repairs in clothing and adjustments to the square-jawed American traps or those manufactured of Juniata steel.
By the middle of December when the cold had grown serious, they traipsed down from the foothills, returning to the banks of the South Platte to find that the laborers had thrown up enough of a shelter to protect the traders and their goods from winter’s furies.
Reaching the edge of the prairie at the foot of the mountains where the river meandered north, they chose a spot to camp out the rest of the winter near the new stockade. In a small copse of old cottonwood they chopped down the saplings they needed and cleared out a clutter of underbrush before erecting their shelters. The smallest protected the beaver pelts he caught and she grained and stretched. A partially enclosed bower gave her a place to work throughout the day as she cooked and tended to Magpie’s needs close by their fire. And on the opposite side of the fire pit sat their sleeping shelter, where they could lash down all the flaps the better to withstand the passing of each icy gale winter hurled at them.
In less than a week he rode off again, this time on his lonesome. Bass turned once, looking behind to find the child standing hand in hand with her mother. Waits bent to say something, and when she straightened, both of them waved. He knew the woman was crying, probably angry with herself that she could not stop the tears that might frighten Magpie.
Back again after eleven days of trapping, he moseyed up to the post one afternoon, hungry for some male conversation.
“I don’t think much of your big brother,” Bass told Andrew Sublette. “He done all he could to ruin the fur trade for other men. And now he’s run off back east when the running’s good.”
The handsome twenty-seven-year-old failed to protest. Instead, he reluctantly nodded. “I don’t agree with all what Billy’s done, but I can’t figure him for a bad sort.”
Dryly, Louis Vasquez asked, “All’s fair in love and business, eh?”
Andrew glared at his partner a moment. “No matter what any man says, Billy made a go of everything he done. So maybe if we’re gonna make it out here our own selves, you better savvy we’ll need some of Bill’s determination to see we don’t come out second-best.”
Scratch wagged his head. “How your brother cheated that Yankee fella named Wyeth, same time Billy was throwing your other brother Milton square into the middle of it—”
“Milt was already in the middle of it!” Andrew fumed.
“Don’t put that underhanded back stabbing on Milt,” Bass growled. “I heard the story of how Billy slipped around seeing to it that Rocky Mountain Fur Company refused them supplies they told Wyeth to bring out to ronnyvoo. Then your brother Billy made Milt out to be part of all his bamboozling!”
“Billy had no other choice,” Andrew answered defensively, yet without much conviction. “Don’t you see? Those five partners still owed him a debt from previous years. So when Billy learned they arranged to have the Yankee bring out their supplies, he figured they was breaking their contract with him when they was already bound to him—”
Vasquez interrupted. “Even though Billy Sublette was determined to keep every last one of them a prisoner in his grip?”
“If Billy was a better businessman than them partners were, so be it,” Andrew admitted grudgingly.
“That strikes center, it does,” Bass added. “I’ll agree that Gabe and Fitz and the rest of ’em, they was better trappers, better men than they was businessmen.”
“Don’t you remember, Andrew—how the two of us decided we wasn’t gonna be the sort of trader your brother was?” the Spaniard asked in that tiny trading room where more than a dozen men sat smoking their pipes and drinking coffee to wile away a winter afternoon.
“Billy don’t run me, Louis,” Andrew vowed. “We don’t need him no more.”
“’Sides, I heard him and Campbell ain’t ever coming back to the mountains,” Bass said.
“That’s right,” Vasquez declared, looking at Scratch evenly. “Seems them two’re buying up land back in St. Louis. Gonna be country gentlemen. So maybe Andrew’s right after alclass="underline" we ain’t gonna worry ’bout Billy Sublette making trouble for anyone out here no more.”
13
Each time Scratch returned to Waits-by-the-Water throughout the rest of that winter, bringing in more beaver pelts from the streams and creeks ribboning the nearby slopes, he couldn’t help but notice how the ricks of buffalo robes multiplied in the fort’s storage house when he rode over to the post for the sound of male voices, some man’s talk, or just to hear a bit more English than he could wring out of his wife.