The white men who had come to this Indian country to catch the beaver had either toughened themselves enough to survive, or they had died. Her husband explained how some of his kind had turned around and fled back to the land of the whites. Waits doubted these soft women raised inside their immobile lodges could endure a nomadic life lived outdoors through all seasons.
For now these two clearly seemed relieved to have reached this raucous white man’s gathering. Neither of them appeared to have any children, and it was pretty apparent that neither Narcissa nor the glowering one would have to raise a hand to do much of anything in caring for themselves. In fact, their hands weren’t soiled at all. Not the way dirt and soot permanently etched every knuckle and scored every wrinkle on Waits’s hands. No doubt these women didn’t know the first thing about graining a hide, chopping wood, or removing the organs of an antelope without pricking the bladder or rupturing a bowel. These white women had men who leaped right in to do everything for them. With all those trappers fluttering around like hummingbirds at a vine of sweet blossoms, it was no wonder these women didn’t know the first thing about taking care of themselves.
They didn’t have to.
The more Waits-by-the-Water watched the comings and goings in that camp, the more she decided it was a very, very good thing these women weren’t staying. Almost laughable, she thought, how these hardy, coarse men became such different creatures around their white women. Waits contented herself that the women were only passing through.
And she hoped the white men would bring no more of these soft creatures to this land.
For the first time since Bass could recollect, there were nearly as many free men come to rendezvous as there were company trappers. And a damned sight fewer of both camped this year near the mouth of Horse Creek.
Slightly more than a hundred Americans had come in with the Bridger and Drips brigades, along with no more than fifty Frenchmen between them. With the supply caravan, Tom Fitzpatrick brought in another seventy hands to wrangle more than four hundred horses and pack mules, but the lion’s share of those men would be turning right around for the States once the beaver was all bought up.
At Fort Laramie, Fitzpatrick had abandoned the long train of wagons, packing everything they couldn’t fit into nineteen two-wheeled carts onto the backs of their mules for that last leg of the journey over the Southern Pass and on to Green River. Milton Sublette, courageously recovering from the recent amputation of his leg, bounced all the way into rendezvous in one of those carts. Before he slid to the ground, Milt strapped on the cork leg purchased for him in Philadelphia by Hugh Campbell, Robert’s brother.
It brought some hot moisture to Bass’s eyes to watch that man, an unvarnished hero four years before at the Battle of Pierre’s Hole, now wobble and waver on that one good leg as old friends rushed up to hug and shake his hand as if it were a pump handle on a long-ago dried-up well. Especially the tall, slab-shouldered Joe Meek and his Shoshone wife.
Titus remembered the story fondly told of this woman and the two inseparable friends. Seasons ago Umentucken, the Mountain Lamb, had married Milton Sublette, known as the “Thunderbolt of the Rockies.” Back in thirty-two she and their young child had been with Milt’s brigade that summer morning in Pierre’s Hole when they chanced to bump into a large band of Blackfoot.
Eventually Sublette’s leg refused to heal from an arrow wound his friends claimed was poisoned. Reluctantly deciding to return east to have the infection cared for, not knowing if he would ever return to the mountains, Milt gave his wife over to his best friend, Joe Meek. For the last few years Joe had cared for this beautiful woman, raising Milt’s child as he did his own.
Shyly now, the Lamb stepped out from behind her new husband and inched up to embrace Sublette.
Not one man there mentioned the tears they saw well in Milt’s eyes, or the way he bravely snorted and swiped at his nose as the crowd pounded on his back and gawked at his new cork leg.
“By damn!” Scratch roared. “You ever think you’d have one’a your legs make it to hell afore you!”
“Shit! Don’t matter I got only one good leg,” Sublette chortled, “I can still outrun the devil hisself!”
“That’s right, Scratch!” Bridger agreed. “With you and Meek galloping to keep ahead of the devil, Milt don’t have to worry none about running the fastest … he only, gotta be fast ’nough to stay ahead of you!”
“You figger I’m so slow, the devil gonna get his claws in me, eh?”
“Damn right he will, Bass!” Milton bawled with laughter.
“One of these days, mayhaps,” Scratch confessed with a grin. “But not till I’m so old and stove-up I can’t outrun him no more … and all you niggers are already there to greet me!”
By the following day Fitzpatrick’s hands had fixed up the largest of a handful of squat log structures first erected a short distance from the Green by Captain Bonneville’s fur brigade back in the spring of 1832. Rather than hacking any windows in the crude eighteen-by-eighteen-foot square, the builders settled for what light streamed between the unchinked timbers or through the only entrance: a six-foot-wide, two-foot-high rectangle laid on its side some four feet off the ground. It was through this lone opening that furs were passed in and trade goods handed out, the better to protect against pilfering. For a roof Fitzpatrick’s Frenchmen had stretched some oiled sheeting across the timbers they laid overhead in an attempt to protect the valuable goods from those fickle summer storms known to visit this high valley.
All told, more than thirteen hundred Indians were in the valley to greet the incoming train. The Shoshone and Bannock had camped along Horse Creek, while up the Green near Bonneville’s Fort both the Flathead and Nez Perce had raised their lodges.
Moseying over to have himself a good look at the trade goods Fitzpatrick had packed out from St. Louis, Titus watched the man in fancy buckskins dismount from his showy white mule and walk up to shake hands with Bridger and Drips. Together the three of them ambled toward the awning where Milt Sublette sat in the shade.
“Who’s that in them foofaraw booshway clothes with all the red wool and blue beads?” Scratch asked of a familiar face who had turned from Bridger’s side and was walking his way.
“Name’s Joshua Pilcher,” the tall man said when he stopped beside Bass. “I hear he was on the upper Missouri with Lisa afore Ashley ever come west. When the Spaniard died, Pilcher took over Lisa’s company, and they did well till Immel and Jones got butchered by the Blackfoot in twenty-three. Drips and Fontenelle, even one of them Bent brothers, they all worked for Pilcher one time or other. Some time back I heard talk he offered the English up north he’d trap this side of the mountains for the Hudson’s Bay.”
Glaring at Pilcher, Bass grumbled, “On American territory? That’d make him a traitor to his own country and his own kind!”
“The English turned him down, but a couple years back they made him agent on the upper Missouri for all these Injuns,” the big man declared.
“That what brung him here?” Scratch demanded. “Something to do with the Injuns out here?”
“Naw. Says he’s come here to buy out Bridger and the rest.”
“B-buy ’em out?” Scratch sputtered in surprise. “With whose plews?”
The tall man shrugged. “Sounds like it’s St. Louie French money.”
“Damn if that don’t take the circle.” Turning to stare up into the younger man’s eyes, Titus said, “I see’d your face at many a ronnyvoo, round some fires, over at the trade tents. But I don’t recollect I ever caught your name.”