Snow Mountain Passage (12 page)

This time he sleeps for sixteen hours and wakes to find his companions gone. He tries to rise, as if to follow and catch up with them, but he doesn’t have the strength. And so he lingers another day at Johnson’s Ranch, and then another, while she applies the sticky poultice, and a pulp of heated roots, and feeds him bowls of a bitter, medicinal brew, and murmurs words strange to his ears. He tries to learn her name, but she won’t tell him. He offers her money, but she won’t take it. Johnson tells him, with a satisfied grin, that she doesn’t know what money is. “And the less she knows, the better, wouldn’t you say so, Mr. Reed?”

One night he feels well enough to sit up late. He and Johnson eat large chunks of recently slaughtered beef that have been skewered on pointed sticks and roasted over the open fire. They eat without plates and throw the bones and rims of fat into the flames, where they blacken. Their hands and faces gleam with the grease. From a jug they sip aguardiente brought up from Sonoma by way of Sutter’s. Jim can’t remember how long it has been since he’s had a drink. A month? His last bottle of brandy is packed away somewhere in the Palace Car, in safekeeping for a moment such as this, to celebrate his arrival in the promised land.

The liquor goes straight to his head. He will have to pace himself. This is a night for swapping the stories of their lives. Where do you come from? Where have you been? What curious twists and turns have brought each of us to this particular place at this odd time? Yet there are certain things he shouldn’t talk about tonight. His fight, for one. On this side of the mountain, why spread the news around? Until the rest of them make it through, who’s to agree or disagree?

On the other hand, why can’t he revise the story here and there? With the aguardiente warming his insides, Jim is tempted to make the knifing of the teamster a tale of high danger and desert bravery. But no. No. Better not to risk raising doubts in any mind, when you’re going to need all the help you can get.

Already he is looking for allies. Already he knows Johnson’s will be the leaping-off place. When you’ve come from overland, this is your first stop. Heading out the other way, as Jim knows he soon must do, it is your last stop. So he deletes the murder scene, as he relives all the rest, the thirsty days, the mountain nights, the plight of families left behind.

Johnson listens and scratches his chest. He scratches his thick, grease-polished beard and wags his head in near disbelief, as if Jim is claiming to have landed from the moon.

“I’d go back in there with ya,” he says, “but I wouldn’t be much good, since I never been up as far as you fellas been. Farthest I’ve traveled is one day’s ride out the Bear River canyon. That’s my limit. I’m no mountaineer and got no cause to be, though I don’t mind the view. It’s pleasant having mountains to look at from time to time. You want to know the truth, I have had my fill of snow. That’s why I shipped out when I did. I’d had my fill, and when I heard about the South Seas, that sounded like the place for me. But what with one thing and another …”

He’d been a ship’s mate and had sailed around Cape Horn, touching all the famous ports, Santiago, Acapulco, San Pedro, Honolulu, Sitka. Six years ago he stepped ashore at Yerba Buena and left the sea behind to become a riverman working cargo on the Sacramento.

Then this land came up for auction, he says. “Me and a partner located a hundred and fifty dollars and made our bid, and lo and behold, I got me a rancho now and a herd of cattle and two young squaws to keep me company at night.”

His laugh spills upward with the fiery sparks, a loud and raucous laugh full of mischief and wonder. Johnson is still astounded at the way his life has turned out.

“You mind if I ask how much land you got for a hundred and fifty dollars?”

Johnson scratches his neck, as if he minds a little. He finds something there, a tick or a chigger, squeezes and tosses it aside, flinging his arm wide in helpless surrender to his windfall. “Haven’t had time to find out where all of it exactly is. Somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand acres …”

“You say twenty
thousand?”

“Or twenty-two. Maybe it’s twenty-two. And I paid a whole lot more than the last fella paid. You know what the word ‘grant’ means? It means free for the asking. That’s the way the greasers do it. They just pass out ranchos to each other like pieces of birthday cake. First one to have this spread got it straight from the gobernador.”

“And where is he now?”

“The gobernador?”

“The one who had the ranch.”

“They hung him.”

“Who hung him?”

“You have to understand there are two kinds of greasers. Them from Mexico. And them from California. And they hardly ever get along.”

Johnson drinks from the brandy jug and passes it to Jim, who drinks and settles back to listen to the story of Johnson’s Ranch. Soon he will be hearing such stories wherever he goes. The struggle with Mexico has been brewing for years. In the province known as Alta California no one has ever been in charge for very long. The land is vast and empty. The laws are feeble. The men in power appear and disappear like coyotes.

Until last year, Johnson tells him, the gobernador was a politician sent up from Mexico City. The local rancheros never liked him much, and they were getting ready to run him out. When Captain Sutter got wind of their plan, he tried to send a warning down to Monterey, since he was then on the side of the gobernador, angling for more land grants of his own. Sutter’s messenger, a fellow called Pablo, was the one who used to own this ranch. He and Sutter had been together for years, ever since they’d worked the Santa Fe Trail together back in the 1830s. Before Pablo left the fort, they fitted him out with a special boot that had some kind of false sole where the secret message was concealed. Alas, it didn’t stay concealed for long. Some Californios captured him on the road to Monterey. They searched him up and down. They tore his saddlebags apart, and his saddle. Then they tore his boots apart and found the message written by Captain Sutter to the hated gobernador who had been appointed by indifferent officials three thousand miles away. They hung poor Pablo right there by the side of the road, just south of San Jose, hung him without mercy, says Johnson, “the way them greasers do.”

“Next thing I hear, there is going to be a land auction down at Sutter’s Fort. When you been out here a while you learn to strike while the iron is hot. Captain Sutter, you see, he’d had a hand in this deal from the start. In these parts he is the judge and the jury and the land agent and the bank and the chief of police and just about anything else you can think of. Him and the gobernador were thick as thieves—that is, before the gobernador got run out. When Pablo petitioned for all this land, Sutter spoke up for him, and that was good enough for the gobernador, who signed the grant. Now the gobernador is long gone, back to Mexico City with his tail between his legs. And Pablo is dead, God rest his soul. And I got the land. And Captain Sutter, far as I know, he kept the hundred and fifty dollars, though that is none of my business, as long as each man gets what’s coming to him.”

STARTING SOUTH
the next morning, Jim still hears this story as he rides, wondering how much of it is true. He has never heard of one man possessing so much land. And for so little! A hundred and fifty dollars for twenty-two thousand acres? Why, that’s less than a penny an acre. It is hard to believe. Yet he wants to believe it. He wants to believe that in this new country all things are possible. As he follows the Bear River he doesn’t think about the muddy-footed bricklayers or the woman who ministered to him, whose people have lived here for so many thousands of years. Nor does he think about the governor from Mexico who has never been near the huge tract he signed over to a fellow from Santa Fe. Jim is thinking about the extraordinary timing and Johnson’s luck. The earth here is rich. Already many bushels of wheat have been gathered. They make their own bread. Their own cheese. And water flows all year long, flowing down from the Sierras.

Beyond the river, rolling foothills gradually level out, across miles of pastureland and open country. How much of it belongs to Johnson? There’s no way to tell. He has so much land his cattle run loose, without fences, like buffalo.

Jim follows the Bear to its junction with the Feather and from there heads farther south through marshy bottomland even richer than the pastures higher up. Today his eyes seem sharper, his head clearer. He looks at this place with clearer eyes, yet what he sees is like a dream. Between the long mountain ranges east and west, it is a vast park, perfectly flat. He figures crossing it would take a day of steady riding. The channel of the Feather is lined with oak and sycamore. Wild grapevines wind through the undergrowth along its banks. He sees unfamiliar creatures here, cranes and pelicans. Around him groves of oak trees decorate the broad and level plain, their canopies like sculpture. He sees elk and blacktail deer. Under gnarled, spreading limbs he sees a herd of pronghorn antelope, two hundred animals at least, who take no notice of his passing. He sees ponds where wild ducks feed, and more ponds, a chain of mirrors under a sky without clouds, until a cloud of ducks obscures the sun, flapping and veering, a thousand ducks, or five thousand, he cannot tell.

Silently he mouths “Hallelujah!” The virginal abundance is like an alcoholic fume. Wonder fills his heart, and stronger than the wonder is a welling desire that intoxicates him. He is here at last. Yes! He has made it, though not in the way he once imagined he would make it, never dreaming he would arrive alone, with so many miles and days between him and his family. Perhaps it is a blessing to have arrived at all, and he gives thanks that he may have arrived in time to possess some part of this unspoiled place, to inhabit it, make his mark upon it and make it his own. Make it
their
own.

This time he speaks the word aloud. “HALLELUJAH!,” an outburst to ward off an unexpected pang of doubt. Somewhere inside this wondrous spectacle he feels a menace. What it is or where it is, he cannot say. His eyes are following a shadow thrown across the valley by the thick cloud of ducks, so many they eclipse the sun. It occurs to him that it might be too soon to bring a family into such a wild place. Are the Mexicans as dangerous as they are made out to be? Should he have waited another year to try this journey?

By early afternoon he has crossed the American River, so low at the ford this time of year the water is no higher than his horse’s knees. The trail here is heavily used, passing through more level country, spotted with oaks. He sees a village, a cluster of domes covered with dirt and built close to the ground. He sees the smoke of cooking fires. He passes a field where cowboys are cutting longhorn cattle out of a herd. They are local Indians, he later learns, working for Sutter. One fellow does something Jim hasn’t seen before. He rides with a coil of rope in one hand, throws it toward a moving bull, and the loop falls deftly around the horns. Jim watches another fellow do this, and another, then they lead the reluctant creatures toward the fort, now a mile or so ahead, on a swell of land well back from the river.

There are deep ditches here, four or five feet wide, to separate the unfenced rangelands from broad stubbled fields where grain has been harvested. Closer to the fort he sees a few emigrant wagons with the clutter of their rustic campsites under oaks. He sees corrals and storage sheds, then the whitewashed walls are rising ahead of him—after all these hundreds of empty miles, an adobe bulwark three times higher than a man is tall, with corner blockhouses notched for artillery.

Compared to Fort Bridger, with its log-cabin trading post and picket-fence stockade, this is a fortress. This is a castle. A white building shows above the walls, and on a pole rising from the peak of its sloping roof an American flag now flies.

A broad dirt track leads up to the gate. In front of it, two Indian soldiers in military jackets and buckskin trousers pace slowly back and forth, underneath a wizened face that grins down at all who pass. Above the gate, a human head has been impaled upon a spike so that it too, like the flag, can be widely seen. The eyes are long gone, pecked out by birds. The skin is dark, sunburnt and shriveled, drawn back from yellowing teeth. Strands of black hair dangle past the neck.

A
T A SECOND-STORY
window John Augustus Sutter looks out across his compound toward the south gate where yet another emigrant stands seeking entrance. Who is it, he wonders, and what will he want? A bed? A fresh horse? A sack of flour? A job? How many has he seen this year? How many more will be coming, the longed-for multitude that now fills his days with apprehension?

Sutter wears an unbuttoned military jacket so that a pot belly is revealed, pushing against his shirt. A moustache curves above his upper lip. Beneath his mouth there’s a small triangular goatee, a bushy medallion on his chin. The hair across his scalp is almost gone, or perhaps has been relocated to the long, full sideburns that drop past his ears. Alone at the window, he stands erect, with his shoulders shoved back, as if inspecting a squad of recruits, wishing he were a captain again, instead of second in command at his own fort.

He is thinking of the courier who rode in this afternoon from Monterey, who ran sweating across the plaza in search of Fremont’s anointed lieutenant. Can things get any worse? That message should have come straight to
him!
Until this summer, all couriers from Monterey came looking for John Sutter. Now, in his own house, he is the last to learn what is going on. Two hours later the news came trickling across the compound, mouth by mouth, and who knows how much truth remains in the story he has heard, of American forces at Los Angeles Pueblo being beaten back, driven to their ship. A hundred marines had sailed down from the Bay of San Francisco to quell the insurrection, and now we’re told they have been defeated, with six dead—or sixteen? or sixty?—and the southern pueblo once again under Mexican control.

Did he, Sutter, make another mistake by letting the Americans take charge here and fly their flag above his fort? Is it possible that the Mexicans might somehow win this struggle after all? Surely they can’t last much longer. They have no ammunition, no defense against ships of war. Their troops are untrained, their artillery useless. This remote, badly managed province was abandoned years ago.