undisciplined Americans probing ever deeper into the beaver country of the inner basin. A land the English had had all to themselves … until now.
Besides the lion’s share in attendance—those who owed some sort of allegiance to one company or another—here gathered a generous sprinkling of free trappers already making their presence known in these fledgling years, plying the waters of the great continental spine on their own hook. Men who, like Provost, had originally plunged into the mountains from the north along the Upper Missouri River drainage, besides those many and more who had first come overland to the tiny villages of Taos and Santa Fe at the far northern reaches of Mexican Territory.
This summer at least two dozen such men were in attendance—men who, like Silas Cooper’s bunch, owed allegiance to no man.
Yet one thing was as clear as those streams flowing down from the Bear River Range this midsummer of 1826: if a man didn’t hanker to march all the way south to Taos country, or east over yonder to the posts on the Lower Missouri, then General William H. Ashley was offering them the only game in these parts. If a trapper wanted to deal himself in for the coming year, he damn well had to sit down at the general’s table and be willing to play with the general’s deck.
Not that Ashley hadn’t had a tough time of it getting there himself. The overland journey, hauling his supplies and twenty-six men up the Platte to the Sweetwater then down to Ham’s Fork, had turned out to be such a test of endurance that nearly half of his men had eventually deserted the general. But there on Ham’s Fork that warm day back in late May, Ashley had been greeted with nearly sixty-five of his own trappers brought in by his partner, Jedediah Strong Smith, and the iron-legged Moses Harris. Their reunion was not to last long, for Ashley pushed the whole brigade on west to the Bear River, where they followed its meandering bend to the south, ultimately reaching the site he had designated last summer for this rendezvous—Willow Valley.
Near the site where the competitors under Danish sea captain John Weber and the mountain veteran Johnson Gardner had passed the previous winter, that late June day Ashley must surely have gazed about at plenty of tall, ripening grass gently waving in the breezes to fill the bellies of their stock, the many streams gurgling down from the circuit of sheltering hills, the thick vegetation choking every creekbank, branches and vines heavy with ripening fruit, as well as the beauty of the nearby peaks still mantled with snow at this early season … and decided it was good.
Here they would hold their second mountain rendezvous—now at the very dawn of that most glorious era of western exploration. Lewis and Clark had cracked open the portal, laying out the lure and the bait. Manuel Lisa and Alexander Henry had together been the first to throw their shoulders against the sturdy door to that imposing wilderness. And now it was these very men gathered in Willow Valley that hot summer of 1826—those trappers bound to Ashley as well as those bound to no other—who would in the seasons to come shove wide-open the gate, thrusting themselves against a barrier that would never, could never, be closed again.
Let there be no doubt, even in those earliest days of the mountain fur trade, these hardy hundred were ready for a celebration after all they had accomplished in the last season.
When the Ashley men had broken up into brigades for their spring hunt, Fitzpatrick’s band had marched north to trap the Portneuf River all the way to the Snake—where they dodged Blackfoot war parties more times than they’d care to recount. A second brigade moved far afield that spring, pushing past the Great Salt Lake not only in search of beaver but in search of that wondrous new country off somewhere in the interior basin. Still another band pushed all the way north to Flathead country, plunging into the mountains that would soon become known as the Bitterroots, where they found sign of and bumped up against their competitors trapping for John Bull’s Hudson’s Bay Company.
Ashley’s men had worked hard and repeatedly put their lives on the line to earn this rendezvous. A good thine it was Ashley had thought to bring liquor along for the first time this trip out. Even better-that a large band of the western Shoshone had been curious enough at this growing gathering of the white men to wander in and join the celebration. Trouble was—no one knew at first if those horse-mounted warriors who suddenly appeared in the distance were friend or foe.
“Dammit all anyway,” Bud Tuttle grumbled that second day after reaching the rendezvous site, “just when I was getting my dry gullet ready for some of Ashley’s whiskey—those damned red niggers go an’ show up and wanna fight!”
Every man had turned out that late morning as the alarm spread and weapons were taken up. The men were grumbling, for it was to have been that day Ashley tapped his kegs of raw, clear corn liquor … and now, by bloody damn, a few hundred Injuns showed up on the nearby hills to make trouble. But Bridger, Fraeb, and two others quickly mounted up bareback and started off loaded for bear—counting on determining if these strangers be the friendly sort, or a fighting breed.
“Where the blue blazes you think you’re bound?” Cooper demanded the moment he realized Bass was pulling his horse free of its picket pin.
“Going with them yonder to have a look-see at the Injuns.”
Silas snorted, wagging his head with a grin. “If’n that don’t take the circle, boys! We got us a greenhorn what goes riding off to make hisself trouble with red niggers … like them red-bellies ain’t trouble enough all by themselves!”
“This h’aint none of your ’ffair,” the old German-born Fraeb grumbled as Bass joined the quartet loping toward the low hills.
“My skelp too—so I figgered to see for my own self,” Titus replied as he reined his horse in alongside the others strung out in a broad front—their smooth faces bright in the summer sunshine of that morning, their long hair fluttering like battle flags behind these rough-edged knights-errant.
Bridger’s eyes quickly dashed over the newcomer’s outfit, spotting the pair of pistols stuffed down in his belt and the long, heavy, and serviceable mountain rifle clutched atop Bass’s thighs. “Might’n be some of the same goddamned Blackfoots we fit not far north of here,” he declared by way of warning to the older man riding on his left. “Maybeso they follered our sign, figgering to have themselves another go at us.”
Fraeb asked, “Ever you fit Injuns?”
“Last spring it were,” Titus answered as they watched the horsemen on the crest of the hill begin to spread themselves out in a wide front. “’Rapahos, they was.”
“That ain’t a good bunch neither, ’Rapahos ain’t,” Bridger said to Fraeb with no small measure of approval.
“Wagh! ’Rapaho h’ain’t never be no Blackfoot,” the old German howled disparagingly. Then his eyes mocked Bass as he said, “An’ one fide don’ make you no fider.”
“Leave ’im be, ol’ man,” Bridger scolded. “Sounds to me like this feller’s got him a few wrinkles on his horns already.”
As Fraeb glared at Bass a moment longer but ventured not one word more, it became immediately apparent to Titus how Fitzpatrick’s men had come to respect that youngster from Missouri—no matter his age or theirs.
“Lookee thar!” hollered the man on the off side of Fraeb.
Scalplocks and feathers fluttered in the breeze as the warriors arrayed themselves on the crest of the hill in a battle front.
“How many you make it, Frapp?” Bridger demanded as they slowed their lope to a walk.
Just then a half-dozen of the brown-skinned horsemen punched ahead of the others from the center of that phalanx arrayed on the hill.
“Coot be more’n a hunnert,” the old man roared. “H’ain’t allays good at ciphers come times like dis!”
“We gonna have our hands full,” commented one of the others. “Be no doubt of that.”
“Gloree!” Bass cried. “Bridger! Don’t count on a fight this day. Look yonder!”
The young partisan and the rest looked off where Bass was pointing, to the near side of the hill, where just then appeared more than a hundred women, children, and old ones among their packhorsescbegin to make out the beginnings of their pony herd.
“Believe this feller’s right, Frapp!” Bridger hollered into the dry, hot wind. “Man don’t bring him his squaws an’ pups along when he’s out for skelps and coup.”
The old German snorted, his eyes nicking at Bass with something bordering contempt. “Mebbe we just run up again’ a bunch on the move, Jim. Blackfoots move camp ever’ now and den.”
“These here ain’t Blackfoot,” Bridger declared as the six horsemen came to a halt at a point halfway between
