Snowbound and Eclipse (23 page)

The mild weather held, and we proceeded down the drainage with little difficulty and amazing good cheer. The brooding sensation that we were at the margin left us. We were alive, had food enough, and would soon be in the Rio Grande Valley with its game. I even found myself revising my opinion of Frémont a little; not that I admired his judgment, but at least he had not plunged us over the brink, and it seemed likely that we would soon be enjoying the comforts of the New Mexicans. We made a cheerful camp that evening.

Then we encountered Godey, slogging his way up the drainage. We collected around him, eager for news. But what he imparted was entirely dismaying.

“We can't get through down there,” he said. “It's a narrow canyon, choked with downed timber and boulders. You have to cross the creek a dozen times an hour. There's no other way except through this choked-up maze.”

“You're saying we can't use the sledges?” Frémont asked.

“No. It's too steep, jammed with boulders, and the only passage is the creek itself in places. Sledges are worthless. And the creek drops so fast, with rapids, there would be no hanging on to packs.”

We stared at one another. We were three days down a steep-sided canyon with no way out. What Godey was saying, though no one wanted to put it into words, was that we would have to retrace our steps, drag the sledges back to the
top of the mountain, and find another way down—that or leave our equipment behind.

The Creoles responded first. Without a word they turned the sledges and began the weary climb that would take them toward the Christmas camp, and then over the first saddle into the next drainage.

The silence was palpable. I was determined to wrestle my way up that slope, but some of the men just wilted.

“Where are the relief men now?” Frémont asked.

“I'm not even sure they're at the bottom of that canyon. They were crawling over deadfall and rock and wading the rapids.”

“They were to reach the settlements today,” Frémont said.

“They're hardly on their way,” Godey said.

“Did they find game?”

Godey simply smiled and shook his head.

They had a pack of macaroni to hold them. I calculated that they would take two weeks or more to reach the settlements, and food would run out long before, unless they made meat. Still, they had Williams with them. He might make meat. But why had he let them descend that morass? Did he know less about this country than he let on? It was a mystery.

I eyed Ben Kern, who was feeling poor, and wondered if he could make it up that trail. I thought maybe the altitude was weakening him. Whatever the case, he was utterly unable to drag a heavy sledge uphill.

“I'll help ye, Ben,” I said.

He simply shook his head and began to drag a sledge mounded with packs up the snowy grade. I watched, worried. His every step was labored. The air was still rarefied, and he had been struggling for breath.

Round and about, the company was turning sledges around and starting the weary hike uphill, through heavy
drifts. At least we had broken a trail, but if it snowed, we would be fighting our way up the mountain through massive drifts once again.

No one spoke, but I knew the cheer that had pervaded the company only minutes before had fled it, and now we were all privately pondering the odds and wondering whether fate would visit us after all.

The mild weather held, and that was a blessing. But this climb seemed longer and harder than any I had ever known in my life. Frémont strode ahead cheerfully, oblivious to the suffering behind him. What good was it to haul all this stuff? Most of it was mule tack, though scarcely a mule lived and the last of them would soon be food. He could have cached the tack, but didn't. He plainly was determined to haul it up and down the mountain to save himself the purchase of replacements later. But now we were human mules, and the halters were over our own snouts, and no one objected.

Ben Kern was so weak and gray that now and then I took hold of the cord he used to drag his sledge.

“Take a breath, Ben, and I'll keep us up,” I said.

He didn't object but sat in the middle of a snowbank, his lungs rising and falling, his bluish face haggard. Still, the doctor was game, and soon enough he caught up and relieved me of my double burden.

Little by little we ascended that mountain, worn and melancholic and silent. There yet was hope. Down below, somewhere, four experienced men were working steadily toward the settlements. Frémont had entrusted King with some sum of money, the exact amount I did not know, with which to purchase whatever was needed. There would be gold to offer to the New Mexicans, and gold always spoke loudly.

We arrived in Christmas Camp and surveyed the ruin
mutely, pausing only to see whether there might be anything to salvage. But such carcasses that existed had vanished under several feet of fresh snow, and we could not cut another mule steak from any.

We needed still to top the saddle to the next drainage, and we did, though I am not sure how any of us managed it. Sheer grit, I would say. Ben Kern was so gray I feared for his life. But we somehow descended to a suitable campsite and quit. We were falling behind the colonel's party, but we could go no further. It was December 30, 1848.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Benjamin Kern, MD

We were falling behind, and it was my failing. Colonel Frémont and the other messes had worked down the new drainage, finding the way easy. They were even riding their packs on the slopes and enjoying the sledding. I watched them vanish far below, around a bend where the forest projected into the creek bottoms, and then all was quiet.

It was a grand, mild winter day, the sort when the sun warms not just the flesh but the heart and soul. The winds had died away, and only gentle zephyrs played with our coats and hats that last day of 1848. I had never seen a bluer sky. A vast sea of white stretched serenely in all directions, dotted only by what seemed to be scrub forest except that what we were seeing was the needled tips of fifty-foot pines which now lay buried.

I ascribe that benevolent weather to my survival, for surely I would have perished had another storm raked us just then. My brothers, Ned and Richard, and Captain Cathcart
had observed my distress. At the worst of it on the thirtieth, when we were struggling upslope and over the saddle, I gave out after a couple hundred yards and could do no more than crawl on hands and knees. They soon gathered around and lifted me up and took my packs, and slowly we worked our way up that awful incline and down. We had to go back once more to collect our rifles, but finally we were settled in a pleasant woods. The next day, the last of the year, was much better. The sun, while making only a brief appearance because of the towering cliffs to either side of us, warmed the air, and we walked and tumbled down the watercourse, enjoying ourselves. And yet Frémont's main party continued to gain ground on us, and all we saw was the swath of disturbed snow marking the colonel's passage.

We were joined by two of the three California Indian boys Frémont was returning to their people, Manuel and Joaquin, whose cheerful countenances added to our levity. Ned and Richard were especially solicitous of me, asking often if I was doing well. In truth, I was feeling a bit better, and the lower altitude was helping me along. My heart was not so labored as it had been during the climb to the saddle.

I am a worrier by nature, and the deepening distance between ourselves and Frémont troubled me. We knew of his passage only by what the snow told us. Still, I am a man of faith, and I assured myself that soon the colonel would send for news of us and make sure we were not in trouble.

“I'm sorry I'm holding us back,” I said to Cathcart at one point while we were resting in afternoon sun, which playfully warmed my face.

“We're doing better than they are,” he said. “Gaining strength as we go.”

We reached the colonel's previous camp that New Year's Eve and found that it offered exactly what we needed: ample
firewood, level ground, shelter from the night wind offered by coppery cliffs, and the comfort of sun-warmed rock. Best of all, there were only two feet of snow. So we settled there, knowing the main party would now be several miles down the slope. I looked for messages for us, hoping for instruction from the colonel, but saw none. Perhaps it was a compliment. He was assuming we were fit and able and would find our way as well as we could. But any sort of message stuck in an obvious place would have comforted me.

Ned and Richard were in a gay mood and soon built a warming fire and prepared a comfortable hutch out of limbs and tenting for me. We had rubber ground cloths to keep the wetness from creeping into our bedding at night, and these proved once again to be among the most valuable of Colonel Frémont's provisions. When I examined Cathcart with a medical eye, I was certain he was sicker than I but concealing it. He was down to a skeleton. His face was so drawn that his eyes bulged. It was not just that we didn't eat enough; it was not proper food for good health, and no matter how much mule meat we demolished, it didn't renew us.

We would have mule haunch that night. The colonel had seen to it that all the messes got the last of the meat, and we had received enough to feed us that festive evening and New Year's Day as well. Ned minced the mule meat, which was by far the best way to cope with that stringy stuff, and added macaroni and baked some minced-meat pies for our celebration, which we consumed with gusto. It seemed a grand feast, and for once I was full up, warm, and content as the last light faded and we plunged into the night that would bring us to the new year.

We explained to the Indian boys what all this was about, and they grinned back. I am not certain how much of it they mastered, but it mattered not. They were soon joining us as
we sang a few old favorites, and then we crawled into comfortable bedrolls content.

New Year's Day was much like the previous one, mild and quiet. We broke camp after eating the last of the mincedmule pies and dragged our packs down that long slope, which at times became precipitous. But we never lost control, and eventually we reached another of the colonel's camps, this time at the confluence of a creek. This too had little snow. We had passed gulches where snow lay a hundred feet deep or more, burying tall pines. But now, well down the mountain, the snow was thin. We had made steady progress but were uncommonly tired, and I knew I needed rest. There were more worries to trouble me, the worst being that we were now at the very gates of starvation.

“I wish I had a mousetrap. A few mice would look good to me now,” I remarked to Captain Cathcart.

“We're not far from the colonel and the rest,” he replied.

“They may be worse off than we are.”

“They have excellent hunters.”

“You're a fine hunter, Captain.”

“There would be no game here, not after twenty men passed through. And we're still miles from the San Juan Valley.”

That was true. The whole descent from the mountaintop to the valley was eight miles, but in our enfeebled estate it seemed three times farther. This, too, was a pleasant camp, and Richard sketched it. He had somehow sketched through the entire journey, carefully placing each sketch, carefully labeled, in his portfolio.

I was feeling cautiously optimistic in spite of the grave want of food. The relief party would be closing in on the Chama River settlement by now and would soon be back with provisions and pack animals. Still, I began wracking my head, wondering what we might eat from nature if we
had to. We had descended to an area of brush, where there might be rose hips, and perhaps we could find trout in the stream or pine nuts, a famous staple of the local tribes. It might be that Manuel and Joaquin could help us with that. We had but a little macaroni, and our trusty rifles if we could shoot most anything that flew. And that was a real possibility. The lower we descended, the more crows and hawks we spotted. But my eyesight was poor now. Bad food and snow blindness had taken their toll, leaving me blurry eyed. I was hoping Cathcart, a fine shot, was in better condition.

“Are your eyes good?” I asked him.

“I can't see a bloody thing,” he growled.

Only Richard's eyes were unaffected, and he could barely manage a rifle. It was a fix I had not anticipated.

The second day of January we struggled once again down the drainage, but we were about done in. The packs were too heavy. Sadly, we went through our books and journals, saving only what was absolutely essential and burning the rest. I had ceased writing daily entries in my journal and couldn't say why. Some of those evenings when we were high up the mountain, I lacked the strength even to put a few sentences down, but there was more to it. I had intended from the start to record only those things I would not hesitate to make public someday. Then the day came when every thought in my head was a private one, so I wrote nothing. I had been observing our leader for a long while and realized one day that I did not wish to record the true nature of my thoughts of Colonel Frémont's character. And the worse our condition, the less I felt like writing. But both Edward and Richard pursued their journals, managing to take a moment each day, even now, no matter how exhausted they were. Their journals would be worth something someday; mine, poor dishonest thing, would not. But I didn't discard
it, and I included it in the bundle we were putting together to drag over snow to the next camp.

I watched the pages of a botany text darken, curl, and burn.

“There goes my only plant guide,” I said.

The weakening of our bodies was insidious. We discovered we lacked the strength to carry all our truck in one trip, so we started down the broad valley, knowing we would have to come back. The day was warm and sunny, but I was dispirited, and so were the rest. We were all diminished by the constant hardship and miserable food. I couldn't remember when last I had some greens. We kept our rifles at the ready, knowing what a folly that was, but the thought of game gave us a thin thread of hope.