The Snake River (3 page)

“He’s asked even his family to call him Dr. Full except when we’re entirely alone. He says us treating him with respect will show others they must. And he addresses us formally.”

“Out here, lass, a man who doesn’t know poor bull from fat cow won’t get much respect.”

“I think a man of God is always due respect,” she said with a hint of heat.

“I left civilization behind, not God,
musha colleen og
” (dear little girl), Flare said quietly. “An Irishman can run, but he can’t leave God behind.”

She eyed him, hesitated, then blurted, “I think you’re a good man.”

“I think you’re a winsome lass,” he answered.

“I want you to guide us.”

“Dr. Full doesn’t want me.”

She pursed her lips, wagged her head. “He can be persuaded. Come at noon.” She got up, grinned back at him, and walked off.

Sure and you’re heading for trouble, Flare said to himself. You like her too much, which will never shine in her crowd.

Well, he’d taken jobs for worse reasons.

Dr. Samuel Full rode away from the Laramie stockade irked. The clerk, one Vernon Scharp, would recommend no guide handy at the post now. He said he needed his employees, and the free trappers were gone to rendezvous on Green River. The man didn’t even speak heartily for Mr. O’Flaherty. A good man, said Scharp, but into his cups, far into his cups. But who said Scharp was an honest man?

Dr. Full needed to think, and he needed horseflesh under him while he thought. Being high, having a sense of sovereignty and domain always made him think better. He would walk his horse slowly back to camp.

It all started when he cornered Jameson LaLane after the fool’s sermon at the church in Philadelphia. LaLane was squirming, and Dr. Full had no idea why. Lalane was the head of the Oregon mission, the man given the job Dr. Samuel Full and other every enthusiastic minister of God of the Methodist Episcopal Church coveted. He was the object of everyone’s envy. And the fool was unsure of himself.

Dr. Full said nothing. He watched LaLane feint, duck, and dodge—when there was nothing to dodge. He was the guest of honor. The church women were treating him with respect, even awe. The man had the world in his hand. Why all the fancy footwork?

Dr. Full waited until the women were gone. He was taking LaLane home for Sunday dinner, but that could wait. LaLane looked at Dr. Full sheepishly. Dr. Full looked back. And looked and looked.

When the question came, it came whole, polished, a gleaming gift from God. True, it was an insane question—rude, confrontational, wildly out of order. But gloriously on target.

“How many Indians have you converted?”

Jameson LaLane did not hesitate, feint, or dodge. He blurted it out, a man flinging his burden to the ground: “None.”

None! In four long years in the wilderness? None?

The sacrifice of Christ had balmed not a single savage soul in Oregon? Dr. Full couldn’t believe it. Yet LaLane’s eyes told the truth. They were direct—shamed, but direct and open, confessional. The man had gone to Oregon to convert the heathen, spent three years at his labor, and accomplished nothing.

Now he was touring the United States to tell of his effort, of his desperate need for more money, more Christians, more help. He was come to sing the necessity of bringing the Gospel to the heathen. And on all his tour, no one had dared ask the man of God a simple question: How many savages have you brought to Christ?

None.

Yes, the man had accomplished something physically—buildings built, crops in, a working wilderness post. But nothing toward the goal he was sent for.

Dr. Full saw his great fortune.

Then the excuses began. At first they were general. LaLane knew Indians were children of darkness—the Scripture tells us that—but he had not realized how benighted they were. The most terrible curse of all was not to dwell in darkness but to be blind, unable to see the light when it shone forth all about you. Jameson LaLane had held high his beacon, and no one had seen it.

Then, with prompting, the facts emerged. The Indians had moved away from the missionaries—they’d abandoned the traditional sites of their villages to get away from the whites. The first two years they lived nearby, and a few even let their children come to the mission school. When LaLane and others went among them to teach, they listened politely and sometimes asked questions, but the questions showed they understood nothing. “Nothing,” said LaLane bitterly, his mouth twisting at the memory. “They thought if they prayed, guns and whiskey would rain down upon them as manna from heaven.”

He switched plans and tried to get them interested in farming. If they learned industry, diligence, and perhaps a little cleanliness, he thought, they might begin to get a glimmer of the light. At least farming would keep them from gallivanting about all the time, Lord knows where, sometimes in search of food, but often to perpetuate their abominable devil worship.

They responded a little. Some could see the benefit of crops, though none was inclined actually to plow, plant, and hoe. But the country was forgiving—it would grow anything, and with the merest hint of effort.

Then they began to get sick. Fevers, dysentery, agues—every plague known to man. The children, especially, sickened and often died.

It was an old story. The mountain men had told LaLane of how white men brought diseases the Indians were not accustomed to, and how they seemed to die of any fever. LaLane heard, but he didn’t realize.

By the end of the second summer the mission had no Indian neighbors. A few children stayed at the school, after elaborate, barbaric ceremonies to ward off evil spirits. The ceremonies disgusted LaLane utterly, but he saw no chance of talking the pagans out of them. He accepted the children. Otherwise they not only couldn’t convert the Indians, they couldn’t find them.

If they left their children at the school, though, the savages would come back for them.

“But not a single convert?” Dr. Full knew where his leverage was.

LaLane gave an involuntary cry, half laugh, half wail. His face was the face of a man who had ventured forth into the darkness, gazed into its heart, and found despair. “The truth is,” he rasped hoarsely, “they are Indians.”

It took Dr. Full no time at all. It was easy to persuade LaLane that the mission’s first need was now a doctor like himself: How could you save the Indians’ souls if you couldn’t keep them alive? The mission board, though it ignored most of LaLane’s urgings, quickly approved this proposal. Its other decisions fit nicely with Dr. Full’s plans. LaLane would stay in the States another year, traveling and lecturing with the two Indian boys he’d brought East as an appeal to sympathy, visiting churches with hat in hand. The mission board itself had no way to give LaLane the funds he said he needed.

Some of the board members saw that by sending the manly and energetic Dr. Full a year ahead of LaLane, they might be changing leadership. They didn’t care. LaLane saw it, too. He was too worn down to care.

So Dr. Samuel Full got his due. Four years earlier, when Jameson LaLane was chosen head of the Oregon mission, the board passed over Samuel Full because he had less experience with congregations than LaLane. He had less experience because he’d apprenticed himself to a physician, learning to heal the body as well as the soul. Nearly two years he’d spent in that apprenticeship, and he had a touch for pulling teeth. The two years once seemed to cost him his ambition, the greatest opportunity for bringing lost souls to the Gospel since the early centuries of the Christian church. He wanted to sing out the Gospel in the darkness of the great American wilderness.

And now he was justified. Now his knowledge of doctoring got him what he wanted.

Last winter, in the East, he put together a small group of the faithful with the skills he wanted in Oregon. The mission had veered from its purpose. It had become too mindful of worldly matters, had sent back word to the States for carpenters, farmers, mechanics, blacksmiths.

Samuel Full would continue to build the settlement, the outpost of civilization on the Pacific Coast. He would also return it to its high purpose. He would save Indian souls.

To that end the assembled people who would be tools in his hand. Another minister, Parker Jones, an older man whose wife was dead and children grown, congenial, without personal ambition. A young Christian with understanding of account books and numbers, Sheppers Smith, and a particular admirer of Dr. Full. Another blacksmith, Wineson. A schoolteacher for the white children, Elvira Upping. And most crucially, a teacher for the Indian girls, Maggie Jewel.

Aside from their skills, they all had a quality that would serve Dr. Full well: They were malleable, they could be forged into the shapes that his great purpose required. Sometimes he wasn’t sure of Miss Jewel, but she was especially well trained, his sister in Christ, and a woman. She would learn. His band of the called needed people with the self-discipline, the sense of station, to make good followers.

That was the problem with Mr. O’Flaherty. The man was a wild hair. Dr. Full had a subtle eye for people, and he was seldom wrong about them. The man O’Flaherty would not bend.

The question was: Did it matter?

O’Flaherty would take them to the Willamette and be gone, gone to his Indian sluts or into his cups or taken by his juvenile yearning for adventure. Who cared where he went?

If he wanted to struggle with Dr. Full for supremacy within the traveling band of the chosen, why not? It would be amusing. Maybe even an Irish sot could learn something.

“No wagons.” Flare had to make sure of it.

“Agreed,” said Dr. Full. “Will you help me trade them?”

Flare nodded. “And I will be in charge.”

“Yes.”

“That means I choose the route, say when we set out and when we stop, choose the watches, choose the fords—the lot.”

“Yes.” The fellow didn’t like having it put to him strong. Flare didn’t blame him.

“Listen, man, when we deal with Indians, you and all your outfit must follow orders. If any man reaches for a weapon, a lot of hair might be lost.”

“I understand.”

“It’ll be a thousand dollars,” Flare said.

“I’m prepared for that.”

“I’ll need some in advance. Truth to tell, I’m flat broke.”

“So we heard,” Dr. Full said.

“Two hundred here, three hundred at Fort Hall, five hundred at the Willamette.”

“At the mission,” Dr. Full corrected

“Aye.” Flare held out a hand. “You bet.” They shook.

That phrase, “you bet” was a fine American affirmative. Flare liked it.

Dr. Full disappeared into a wagon and came back with a handful of gold coins. He handed them over.

“I’ve business at the fort,” Flare said.

“You won’t get drunk on us?” Dr. Full asked.

“No more in this lifetime,” Flare said simply.

Full just turned away.

The trouble with one like that, Flare reflected, is that you can’t win. He’ll just come back meaner.

Chapter Two

“Would you like to hear the story of the putrefied forest?” asked Flare. The kids clamored for it. Miss Jewel rolled her eyes comically. “‘Putrefied’ is mountain-man funny for ‘petrified,’ children,” she said.

“Mr. O’Flaherty,” said Dan doubtfully, “is this true?”

“You bet,” said Flare.

This was the time Flare liked. They’d made their miles. In fact, he had this greenhorn outfit whipped into pretty good shape, into the routine without complaint, and even with pride. So at night, before he took the first watch (he also took the last), they could enjoy the campfires and his yarns.

What kind of mountain man would he be if he couldn’t stretch the kids’ ears with twenty years’ worth of tall tales? Even if they seemed a spiritless bunch of kids?

“Us beavers was riding up on the Snake River, across that malpais. Lava-flow country, terrible stuff. Hit was summer, and we wuz froze for meat.” Flare liked to mimic American backwoods talk. He could mimic anybody’s words, or their walk. “Over there ain’t buffler country. You’ll see when we get thar. Old Gabe and me, there was, and Black Harris, and Mr. Skye, and three or four other hosses as know what way the stick floats.”

He looked merrily at Miss Jewel. She got a kick out of good yarns.

“Well, we rode up Henry’s Fork and into some mountains. If you went a long way on that ways, you came to whar was the boiling springs, as I told you about, and whar the water shoots into the sky and you can smell the sulfurs of hell down below.

“As we come into these mountains, it turned peculiar, like you never see in that country. For half a day we rode in a fog, so’s we could scarce see whar we was headed. Finally we got to feeling lost and made camp.

“When we woke in the mornin’, it was a puzzlement such as you never did see. We was in a hole, open meadows surrounded by forested hills, and this child noticed right off everthing was quiet-like, no sound at all. That’s onnatural in the woods. And it was onnatural still—seemed like the grasses didn’t wave nor the leaves flutter in the wind. But I thought nothing of it. Just ain’t no wind, I told myself.

“This child walked down to the little crick to fetch water, and the water was froze. Not just ice on the surface but froze solid to the bottom. In the middle o’ August.

“I goes back to tell Old Gabe, and I sees that hoss holding offhand on somethin’. There’s the elk, right close, only a couple of hundred steps away and in the open, an easy mark for Old Gabe. He let fly with Old Bullthrower, and right back comes the loudest THOCK! you ever did hear, like an ax hitting a tree. Echoed everwhere. The elk just stood there like nothing happened.

“‘Old Bullthrower don’t miss,’ said Gabe suspiciously. He throwed down and nailed that elk agin. THOCK! Echoes. Elk standing up handsome. Gabe began to look around like the place was full o’ haunts.

“Right then Mr. Skye hollered out from the edge of the woods. He’d walked up there and took his wiping stick in case he saw a fool hen, and he did see one, and whacked it, and it broke the stick. Oh, was he a-hollerin’.

“Gabe and this child and another’n or two run over there, and you wouldn’t believe it if’n you didn’t see it. Mr. Skye, with the biggest chest and arms I ever saw, was whomping and whomping away, till his wiping stick was splinters. That fool hen was stone, solid stone.”

Miss Jewel put in, “That’s what petrified means, children, turned to stone.”

“And hit really do happen, don’t it, Miss Jewel?”

“Certainly,” she said.

“Wall, then all us hosses begun to look around good. Everthing was putrefied. The trees was stone, their leaves was stone. That elk was putrefied solid, you could’ve broke your head on it. The birds was putrefied. Finally I figured out that even their songs were putrefied, and that’s why it was so onnatural silent.

“Now Old Gabe, he’s some, he’s seen everthing and remembered it all, but he’s superstitious-like. So that hoss says, ‘Boys, let’s get out’n this queer place.’

“We was packed and saddled and ridin’ before Gabe could cuss at us. But we couldn’t see how we come in through the fog, on account of the putrefied ground showed no trail. So we headed for the divide on the north. When we got to the crest, there was a chasm half a mile wide, with a river far down in the bottom. We rode east and west and all around, and everwhere was that chasm. Seemed that river run in a circle, penning us in that putrefied forest.

“This nigger was about to say there was some way out, we damn well got in, when Old Gave said he had an idea.

“He backed his horse up a little and galloped straight toward the chasm. We thought he was gone loco. Comin’ to the edge, he spurred good, and horse and rider just flew over the chasm like a kite in a fine wind. Clear on across. And then waved to us to come on over.

“Well, we did. Never had such a feelin’, afore or since. Mountain men soarin’ like eagles.

“As we rode off, this child says to Gabe, ‘How’d you know?’

“‘Figgered it out,’ he says. ‘The law of gravity was putrefied, too.’

“You bet.”

At first Miss Jewel thought fleetingly it was the glow of the sun setting. She looked up at the real sun, still two hours high. She turned every which way. And saw.

The fiery glow on the crest of the hill ahead wasn’t the sun. It was flickering, crawling down the wind like a red worm, bright and malignant.

“Prairie fire,” Mr. O’Flaherty said softly.

Cold went through her like lightening.

She looked sideways at him. Mr. O’ Flaherty stared hard at the flames, in good view now on the crest of the hill and sweeping this way. He looked to the right into other hills, to the left toward the Platte, back toward the flames. He was erect, motionless, seemingly calm. She could see calculations running through his eyes.

“The river!” he shouted, and started loping downhill. Following his example, the rest of them kept their horses to a canter, in no great hurry.

At the river he rode forward toward a bend, but also toward the flames. In faith, Miss Jewel followed.

Below the bend stretched a gravel bar. Mr. O’Flaherty went onto it, into the shallow water downstream of it, and splashed his horse all the way across the river, knee deep to the rider. As the others crossed, he rode back and yelled at the packhorses to make them move along.

On the far bank Miss Jewel suddenly discovered she’d been holding her breath. She exploded it out, and a tear or two almost came with it. She’d been badly frightened.

Riding up, Mr. O’ Flaherty gave her one of his mad Irish grins.

“Are prairie fires common?” she huffed.

“Sure and they are when Indians set ’em, you bet.”

“Indians?” sputtered Dr. Full.

“Indians,” Flare repeated quietly. “Let’s camp on that bench!” he hollered to everyone, pointing just above.

“We don’t want to camp with Indians close by,” said Dr. Full.

“That’s just what we want to do,” said Flare. They needed to get set, and he had no time for fools.

“But—”

“Dr. Full,” Flare said menacingly, “get your mules unloaded, your horses picketed, and your tent up. Now!”

The man’s face flushed ripe red, but to his credit he went and did it.

Flare started getting the gear arranged in a line to lie down behind. A poor defense, but better than none.

“Will we be able to hold ’em off, Mr. O’Flaherty?” It was Sheppers Smith, the fellow Flare thought of as Dr. Full the younger, sounding melodramatic. Flare nodded toward the gear to be stacked.

“Won’t have to, lad. They’re playin’, not fightin’.”

“That fire wasn’t any play!” He grabbed an armload and set to work.

“Aye, lad, it was but play. They knew what we’d do when they set it. Big trouble, if they’d meant to make it, would have come quieter. Naturally, if we’d been foolish enough to let the mules run off, they’d have accepted the gift.”

“So what now?” It was Alan Wineson, the addled blacksmith, pitching in, too. Dr. Full came up behind. Maybe the big man wasn’t ashamed to soil his fine clothes.

“They’ll be along tonight or tomorrow morning. Expecting some presents.”

“Swine,” said Dr. Full. “Thieves.”

“Don’t know as I’d call ’em thieves,” said Mr. O’Flaherty. He lifted. Stacked. Lifted.

“Maybe you wouldn’t.”

Flare ignored the slight. “Dr. Full, you say your object is to create a colony at first, and then a real settlement, and finally to settle the Willamette valley thoroughly.”

“It is. We will not merely preach the Gospel but teach the white way.”

“Takes a lot of bodies and souls to do that.” Lift and stack. “The whole lot traipsing across this trail. Killing the game, drinking the water, burning the firewood.”

He stopped and looked at Dr. Full. “This is
their
land, Dr. Full.”

“They have no title,” he said.

Flare suppressed a chuckle and surveyed the work. It would do. He didn’t expect to need it, and if he did, it would do. “No, Indians don’t deal in titles, Dr. Full. But it’s theirs. When we take a little, we’ll pay a little. And feel grateful for the bargain.”

“Can we stand them off with this?” Full gestured at the barricade.

“No. We’ll be outmanned.” Maybe not in raw numbers, but in numbers who could fight. “But they won’t attack a defended position. Unless they’re drunk.”

Drunk was what they were. Drunk descending to hung over.

They were Arapahos, eight of them, young men, surely out to steal horses from the Crows. That had more cachet than stealing horses from Americans, who were easy targets. But Americans would do, especially if the youths had gone against the Crows and were headed home empty-handed.

They came a half hour before dark. Flare didn’t like it. Clearly they meant to camp with the whites, damned dangerous in their state of inebriation.

“Disgusting,” Dr. Full said bitterly, like that was the worst of it.

“Sit on my left,” said Flare. “Smoke the pipe when it’s passed to you. And no matter what happens, keep your mouth shut.”

Flare got out his pipe, sat and invited his guests to sit, and took his time filling the bowl while he thought.

Flare had a lifelong thirst himself, and fellow feeling for another man with thirst. But he didn’t believe the Indians and firewater mixed. He’d given Indians whiskey when he traded for the Northwest Company those first two years, but not when he traded for Hudson’s Bay Company. The Bay didn’t believe in it. Which was the only thing that bunch of Scottish and British bastards got right. Whiskey ruined Indians. Flare had seen brother kill brother, and father rape daughter, all because of drunkenness. A Flathead friend had even broken Flare’s nose in a drunken stupor.

Ten years ago, drunk, he’d quit the Bay and come over to the Americans. Trouble was, the Americans gave Indians whiskey. Good way to compete with the Bay, they said. It was, if you didn’t give a damn for consequences. Some outfit had given these Arapahos whiskey yesterday, and today Flare and his lot were facing the consequences.

Maybe after a generation the Americans would learn. It took the Bay longer than that. If the God-cursed fur trade lasted another generation.

So he decided. He would give these Arapahos a little whiskey—there wasn’t any way out of it. But he had a little trick to make it safer.

He lit the pipe. He watched the smoke rise. In English, translating into sign language, he offered the pipe to Mother Earth and Father Sky to the West, where the thunder lives, the North, from where the cleansing winds come, the East, home of the dawn, and the South, where we are always looking.

This was always a solemn moment for Flare. He didn’t
believe
anything about it—those cursed with a Catholic education believe little they’re told ever again—but you didn’t have to believe in the earth and sky. They were terms of your life. And it was a ritual he used to say something. With smoke he honored the earth he walked on, the sky he lived under, the four directions in which he wandered. By sharing the pipe with fellow human beings he promised truthfulness and goodwill.

Then he passed the pipe in the ritual manner, and each man smoked in silence. Flare hoped no one noticed the look of distaste on Dr. Full’s face when he put his mouth to the stem.

When the smoke was done, Flare gave them a little tobacco, a few strands of beads, and some cloth. He spoke his friendship, of his appreciation for being able to cross the country of the Arapaho on his way to where the white people lived by the big water, of his pleasure in smoking with these men.

The leader simply said, “Awerdenty.” It was the trapper and Indian mangling of the Taos word for whiskey.

Flare was offended at the man’s bad manners, and distressed at his abasement. But it would not do to give any sign of unhappiness. Instead he told the man that this was a group of Christians who believed whiskey was bad for all men. He himself had given whiskey to many Indians, and his heart was low because it hurt his friends. He asked his new friends, these Arapahos, to drink no whiskey. He himself would drink no more whiskey as long as he walked the earth.

“Awerdenty,” the man said, crudely, and perhaps dangerously.

Flare would make one last try. He started out sincere and turned into a terrible hypocrite. As he spoke, Flare developed an epic thirst, the thirst of a sailor surrounded by water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink. Flare had tasted a dram or two before he left Ireland, 1814 it was, but he’d come to love drink in Montreal. Brandy in particular. And after he learned truly to love it, to take it to his bosom like the wife he never had, he was plenty fond of even Indian whiskey. He hated to think, even now, what ingredients he put into the trade whiskey. Tobacco was the most pleasant, snakes’ heads the least.

Now he could feel the glow in his veins, like letting a heavy glass with a candle inside warm your hands on a cold night. He imagined the brandy glass once more warm in his hand and lifted to his eyes, and the yellow light in its center like a will-o’-the-wisp. When you chased that will-o’-the-wisp, when you let the whiskey roar through your veins, you were witty, you were wise, you were strong and long-lived as gods, and damn all.