Snowbound and Eclipse (24 page)

At the next campsite we found ample evidence that the colonel's whole party had spent the night. A fire still smouldered. Not all the deadwood had been used up. It was a fine place, a level flat where two streams joined, with abundant wood and plenty of shelter and not enough snow to trouble us. But we were still behind the colonel's party and feeling more and more isolated. We began unburdening ourselves of our packs, and Richard began constructing a shelter, because we had seen mare's tails across the sky and knew another white fury would soon descend on us.

He stayed in the new camp to build us a shelter and collect wood and tend the fire, while Captain Cathcart and I and the Indian lads struggled back to the old camp, which was at a much higher elevation. There were more packs to drag down, packs we could not abandon. But none of them contained food. The others were soon ahead of me, and I found myself giving out. I hadn't gone but a quarter of a mile upslope when I lost the rest of my strength and toppled into the snow. I felt my heart labor, and my muscles quit me, and I lacked the strength to get up. I would have to
retreat to the lower camp but didn't know how. I rested until the chill of the snow had worked through my rags, and then began to crawl on hands and knees, a little at a time, grateful that I did not have to cope with a drift. The trail was well worn. I continued in that fashion, resting when I had to, until I reached the lower camp. Richard spotted me, helped me up, and dragged me into the pine-bough hut he was building. I was soon lying on the rubberized canvas, feeling my heart and lungs labor.

“I wore out,” I said.

He glanced sharply at me. “We'll stay here,” he said.

He was adding boughs, which formed a sort of thatch, and helped make the hut tight against the wind. There would be little snow filtering through all that. The wavering fire threw heat into it, and I lay comfortably, but too worn to go on. I thought maybe the mountains would claim me after all, but I would make a fight of it.

“Richard, take my journal with you tomorrow. It's all that's left of me.”

He turned. “Ben, don't talk like that.”

“I quit writing in it a few days ago.”

“You and your journal are both coming along with us tomorrow,” he said.

The next evening we were delighted to welcome Raphael Proue to our humble camp. Proue was the oldest of the Creoles with Frémont and was clearly worn to the bone backtracking from the main party to our camp.

“I bring this,” he said, unloading a heavy burlap sack.

We clustered around and found frozen haunches of meat, cornmeal, and coffee.

“Dis here, it's buffalo the Colonel saves and pork and buffalo fat and some meal, eh?”

“His private stores. I didn't know he had any,” Richard said.

We were amazed. Where had this provender come from? I stared at the food as if it were gold. The very sight of it sent a wave of strength and energy through me.

“You're worn out, Raphael. Sit with us,” Ned said. He knew Proue from the time they both served together.

“I do dat,” Proue said. “I got no strength left, not any.”

He dropped heavily onto the rubberized tarpaulin before the fire.

“It's gonna snow,” he added. “You got some good hiding place here.”

We soon were pumping Proue for news. Had the relief party returned? Were food and mules coming, as everyone hoped?

“They aren't far ahead of us. We can tell, maybe day or two. Dunno what slowed them down, but they aren't doing good.”

No relief in sight. That was discouraging.

“The colonel, he's got a place picked out to cache the stuff. Down from here five, six miles. He says we gonna cache everything we can, and then wait. He's gonna take a bunch and head for the settlements himself and leave old Vincenthaler in charge, and after the cache we should maybe keep on going. Good hunting maybe.”

I hardly knew Lorenzo Vincenthaler, but I knew he had been with Frémont's California expedition and had served in the army during the Mexican War. He had been so quiet that I scarcely had visited with him, and the only impression I had of him was that he was a stickler for rules and wanted to do everything by the book. Well, I thought, that was an odd choice, but it would be alright.

Proue stayed the night, and we fed him from the fresh provisions he had brought. He looked worn, but so did we all. I was a ghost of the man I had been only weeks before. Captain Cathcart was down to bones, and his clothing
flapped on him. My brothers were a little better, but looking gaunt. And the Indian boys were down to ribs. But Proue alarmed me. When he started downriver the next morning, he staggered his way along the trail and staggered his way out of sight.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Alexis Godey

When we reached the foothills bordering the San Juan Valley, with the Rio Grande winding through it, Colonel Frémont summoned me.

“We need to cache everything,” he said. “There's a cave up La Garita Creek a bit; you probably noticed it. That's where we'll stow our goods.”

He smiled amiably.

“Everything, Colonel?”

“Why, yes. My goods are scattered clear up the mountains, and now we'll cache them while we await the relief party.”

That was a, how to say it?—formidable—order. There were packs and gear scattered for miles over our downhill route, most of it mule tack and saddles. It made no sense to collect all this useless gear, and I eyed my leader sharply before I surrendered. “Oui, I'll begin at once, Colonel.”

“I knew you would,” he said. “We'll set up camp under the cliffs there.”

He had chosen a sheltered notch on the west edge of the Rio del Norte Valley, a place where there were trees and cliffs to supply some comfort. But to the east, there was nothing but arid plains. Not a tree to stop the wind or supply fuel.

“I'll put the company to it. They're as scattered as the packs.”

He smiled, yawned, and walked away.

I corralled various of my best men. “We'll be caching the colonel's equipment in that cave we passed. And that means we'll be heading up the creek, maybe clear to Groundhog Creek, where the Kerns probably are.”

They were game but not happy. Every one of them looked worn and ragged. While the colonel and his manservant set about making the new camp, my men and I began the long trek into the mountains again. Fortunately the drainage was wide and the way was easy. But we were trumped by the weather. The warm interlude between Christmas and New Year's Day had passed, and now a bitter wind howled out of the north, weakening and dispiriting all of us. It stung our cheeks, as if our beards weren't even there. Nonetheless, there was a task the colonel wanted done, so we set out to do it. I would do it, as required, but I wondered why. I could not fathom why Frémont had such a grip on me.

We examined the shallow cave in the point of rocks and decided it would do. The colonel had a good eye. But that abandoned gear stretching miles up the trail darkened our mood. I heard no man complain. No one had ever complained about Colonel Frémont, at least in my presence. The question in my mind was whether to obey his command or not. Was the colonel mad? Did he have any grasp of how worn to nothing his men were? I did not give the order I ached to give, by which I would relieve these desperate men of this foolish mission. So we proceeded up the mountain once again.

We hiked up the drainage, step by step. Whenever we found some of the seventy-pound packs, we sent a man or two back with them, while the rest of us continued up the valley. When Preuss and I reached the Kerns' camp we
discovered them lying mutely in their blankets, their fire dead. They were in a bad way. Wordlessly, the German and I started their fire going and got some deadwood together and revived their spirits.

“We're collecting the packs,” I said. “When you can, work your way down to the colonel's camp. He's on the near edge of the San Juan Valley at the foot of this drainage. Bring what you can.”

Ned Kern had revived the most with the fire blazing. “We'll be there. Have you any food?”

I shook my head. What little I had of macaroni and sugar had to go to the men hauling the colonel's instruments and tack and bedding. “You're on your own,” I said. “But keep warm. It's the cold that does a man in, not hunger.”

Ned nodded. He was the one veteran among them and had been with the colonel in California, but I could see he was the most disheartened.

“Ned, I'm appointing you to keep your brothers and Captain Cathcart warm, and the Indian boys, too. I'll have Micah McGehee keep an eye on you.”

The bright fire seemed to pump life into those wretches in Richard Kern's hut, and that was the best I could do. I nodded to my men, and we plodded up again, through deepening snow as we retraced our steps to the mountaintop.

That day we collected fifteen of the packs, but it wore my men to the bone. The north wind was our master, slicing through our frayed defenses and taking the strength straight out of us. We were spread out now, in half a dozen camps up and down the creeks. As January progressed, so did the cold. There was no more cloth or leather to repair boots or make moccasins or fashion into hats or waistcoats or leggins, and we were being frostbitten again—ears, noses, chins, fingers, toes, ankles, lips. Around our miserable fires, which did little to warm any of us because the wind sucked
away the heat, we worked thong through our clothing and boots, sewing together what we could, making do with rags and scraps of leather.

Some of my men resented the Kerns because they weren't helping with the hard work of getting the colonel's packs down to the cache. Indeed, they told me that they found Richard playing his flute by the fire one time. Just like some Philadelphians, they said. I was less judgmental, having seen them at death's door. In fact, Ben looked ashen to me, gray of flesh despite weeks of outdoor living, and I knew he wasn't far from his Maker. A man ought to play a flute when he could. A song, a melody, a flute could cleave the living from the dead.

But the men didn't like it, and they didn't like my forbearance. I thought it was best to let well enough alone. On the sixth of January Hubbard shot a prairie goat, or antelope as they are called, and generously divided the precious meat up and down the line. Even the Kerns and Cathcart got a small meal of it, and all were heartened.

We were far enough off the mountain to be among game again, and the very thought inspired every man who was dragging those parfleches and packs through the snow. I lost track of what the colonel was doing down below, but mostly he was simply waiting for relief. It never came. For my part, I camped at the point of rocks and oversaw the cache. The packs had to be dragged into that shallow cave, after we put down some brush and limb bedding to keep the packs dry, and then laid up, one on another, to make use of the small space. And once we finished with it, we would need to seal it and conceal it from the Utes, who roamed these mountains.

The Kerns were boiling up pieces of hide now to make a gluey gruel, but there was some nourishment in it, and I didn't worry much about them. We would soon have relief.
By my calculation we were nearly at the end of the sixteen-day period we had allotted for King's party to return with help.

Then Proue died. The old Creole woodsman had shambled along day by day, getting by until the cold struck, and then he simply began to freeze up. He was dragging packs right to the end, when he tumbled into the snow and said he couldn't go on. His legs were frozen below the knee. Someone wrapped his blanket around his legs, but no one had the strength to help the old man, and so he perished in the snow, the icy wind soon stopping his heart. We had no way to drag him anywhere, so he lay on the trail, frozen to the ice underneath, as man after man passed him by, dragging the colonel's goods down to the cache. That happened on the ninth day of January, and at a time when the cold was the worst I could remember, making us numb and driving us deep into our rags.

I stared at the old man, so cold and still, the snow filtering over his white face, caking his beard.

“Raphael, mon ami, au revoir,” I said, watching the crystals collect in his eye sockets. “I'll come for you when I can. I'll let your people know.”

If he had any living brothers or sisters, I did not know of them. But I would try to contact relatives in Saint Louis.

Others of us stopped and stared, watching the whirling snow filter through his beard. No one said anything.

That was the fourteenth day since King's party had left the Christmas camp. We were expecting relief within sixteen days at the worst. Proue had missed help by two days. Or was it simply that he had died needlessly dragging the colonel's packs? I refused to think in those terms and set the thought aside. But there was another thought worming through me: Proue's death was the direct result of our effort
to drag the useless gear down the mountain. It was a death that Colonel Frémont could have avoided.

I worried about the men, the grunting, laboring men, numb with cold, so cold they could not feel their fingers, skidding the packs past the snow-lost body of Raphael Proue. What were they thinking? Who would be next?

I could not rally them. They were spread out by twos and threes. The company was no longer a single unit but disintegrating before my eyes as men made their own choices and shifted away from their messes. I knew what that foretold and was helpless to stop it. The Frémont company was falling apart.

I paused one last time at the hut the Kern brothers had built and found them huddled within. But the fire was going.

“When you can, make your way down to the colonel's camp,” I said. “This wind should quit pretty soon.”

“We're out of food,” Richard said.

“The relief is due any moment. That's all I can say. Starving won't kill a man. It's cold that kills a man, quick as a knife thrust. Starving men make it through.”