the broad front of warriors and the five white men.
“Why, them’s Snakes!” one of the others stated.
“Damn right they are,” Bridger agreed, getting close enough to recognize faces.
“Same bunch wintered up with us?” one of the others asked.
Bridger whooped, “By God, if they ain’t!”
Following the young man’s lead, the rest again urged their horses into a lope, reining up only when they came nose to nose with the Shoshone ponies.
“By damn, these are a handsome people, ain’t they?” Bridger asked, turning aside to Bass. Then his hands grew busy, dropping rein and resting the rifle across his thighs as he commenced talking sign.
In the quiet of that brief conversation, disturbed only by the snorting and blowing of the horses and the shrill cry of a golden eagle that circled overhead, Bass watched the far slope as the ground behind the cordon of warriors filled with those the horsemen had been ready to defend: the old men, women, children, all those on foot and urging along the pack animals, travois, and pony herd.
One of those handsome, smiling warriors who had been using his flying hands to talk with Bridger now turned atop the bare back of his pony and signaled with the long feathered lance he held aloft and waved, scalps and birds’ wings fluttering on the summer wind along the shaft.
Instantly a universal cry went up from the far hillside as the mounted warriors bellowed their happy approval and burst into motion—their ponies moving this way and that along the side of the hill, everyone waving, singing, shouting at those behind to hurry on into the valley.
“This feller’s name is Washakie,” Bridger explained, putting the emphasis on the last syllable. “One of the leaders of this here bunch what wintered up near one of our other brigades in these parts. Down yonder in that very valley.”
“You don’t say,” Fraeb grumbled with disgust.
Bridger would not let the old German’s sourness nettle him a bit. With a wry grin Jim said, “Washakie says he remembers him a feller named
“Don’t he mean Sublette?” one of the others interrupted.
“One and the same,” Bridger replied, his eyes twinkling. “An’ he recalls a man what’s so tanned by the sun Washakie says he has the face of a feller been burned with powder!”
“Only one coon like that,” Fraeb roared. “Black Harris!”
By that time the front of the Shoshone procession had all but enveloped them. Titus reached out and grabbed young Bridger’s arm. “This feller, Harris—he a Negra like Beckwith?”
Flopping his head back and laughing, Bridger ended up slapping a knee as he answered, “Not near as none of us know! Oh, he might have him some Negra blood back on one side of his family or t’other … but his skin ain’t brown like no Negra’s skin. No, his hide is like nothing I ain’t never see’d afore—Washakie got it right: just like Harris gone and got his face burned with powder. There be a blue-blackish sheen to it, see? Ain’t the color of his hands—not his skin nowhere else on him. Just on the man’s face.”
As the procession swept up to them, the Shoshone leaders nudged their ponies into motion. Reining their horses about in the midst of the Shoshone, the four white men began that short ride back to Ashley’s camp, leading the noisy Shoshone cavalcade in grand order. As they drew closer to the streamside bowers and shelters the trappers had erected at the edge of a large meadow, brown-skinned singers suddenly began to raise their voices in half a hundred different songs of welcome, homecoming, or in the spirit of good hunting. At least that many or more beat on small handheld drums or shook rattles made of gourd, some constructed of dried animal bladders or animal scrotums filled with stream-washed pebbles, then tied to short peeled sticks. Children chattered, their high voices tremulous above all the others, and women occasionally shrieked at unruly ponies, flailing switches at those yapping, playful dogs darting in and out among the legs of people and ponies alike.
“What you think, Bass?”
Titus turned, finding the young Bridger had reined his horse into a walk beside him just before they entered the top of the trappers’ camp. “About what?”
“Don’t you figger these Snake women to be just about the purtiest a man can find him in these here mountains?”
“S-snake women?”
“Snake, Shoshone,” Bridger repeated. “I s’pose they’s called Snakes on account for the way they sign their tribe.” Shifting his rifle to his rein hand, Jim raised the other and made a wriggling motion, in the manner a reptile would slither along the ground. “Snake.”
Bass nodded, turning now to steal himself a look at some of the black-eyed women who were threading their way in among the warriors as the men of Ashley and Provost formed a long corridor for the Shoshone to pass through on their way to selecting a campsite farther south in Willow Valley. While he figured he would wait until he had himself a chance at a right-close inspection to offer his judgment on the pouting-lipped beauty of the squaws, he nonetheless could readily see that they were, by and large, a lighter-skinned people than the Ute he had come to know over the past winter.
Down, down through a wide gauntlet of grinning, gaping, brown-toothed white men the Shoshone paraded like royalty come to visit. While the trappers occasionally fired off a rifle into the air, perhaps a smoothbore musket or their belt, pistols, the Snakes waved and sang, shouted and shrieked, pounding their drums and shaking their rattles even louder. A few warriors held eight-inch lengths of wing bone in their lips, small and delicate fluffs tied at the end of these whistles to dance on the wind while the men blew that eerie, high-pitched screech of a golden or bald-headed eagle. How easily its call rose above the noisy clamor of all the rest.
Bridger slapped Titus on the arm and motioned Bass to follow him away from the hubbub grown so noisy it was useless trying to talk. They joined Fraeb and the other two trappers angling off to the side of the procession, where they reined up to watch the parade pass them on by. The Shoshone streamed right on through the trappers’ camp, down the valley a good half mile where their pony herd would not have a chance to mingle with the white man’s horses and mules grazing across the creek on the benches farther up the valley.
More than a dozen men jogged up to stop among the five horsemen.
“Them’s your Snakes, ain’t they, Bridger?”
“They are that, Jedediah,” Jim replied with a filial pride. “Prettiest people in these mountains, to my way of thinking.”
“Appears Bridger’s gone and got himself partial already,” Harrison Rogers commented.
As brigade clerk, Rogers was never far from the side of the taller, square-jawed man who stood as erect as a hickory ramrod at the center of that group of men on foot. A devoutly Christian man, a New Englander who had carried his Bible into what many back east considered to be a godless heathens’ wilderness, one of the handful who refrained from the burn of whiskey on his tongue or the heat of a naked squaw wrapped up with him in a blanket— this fire-eyed partisan was no less than Jedediah Strong Smith himself.
“If any of you men are going to partake in the sins of the flesh before we set off,” Smith began, hurling his booming, fire-and-brimstone voice over those who had followed in his wake, “the next few days might well be your last for a long, long time to come.”
One of the eleven called out, “You mean you’re ’Mowing us to have a spree with them Injun womens, Jed?”
Smith turned to John Reubasco. “Until I tell you it’s time to pack up and move out, what sinning you do will be between you and your God.”
“But I don’t have me no God, Jed,” cried Abraham LaPlant, another of Jed’s brigade and one of Smith’s closest friends, a man who could get away with joshing their devout leader.
Smith wagged his head, his grin widening. “Then all I can do is to warn you and your kind, Abe: best see that none of you go swilling down Ashley’s liquor like it was baptismal water!”
They all laughed heartily at that, then Rogers inquired, “How long you figger till we’re packing oft to the southwest, Jed?”
In turn, Smith looked up at Bridger. “You got any news on the general’s plans, Jim?”
Bridger shrugged. “I figger ronnyvoo’s over when he gets him all the fur bought up.”
Smith added, “Sure to snatch up what furs Provost and the others brung in too.”
“Likely the general will light out for St. Louie soon as he has all of his packs filled with them geegaw goods traded out,” Bridger continued. “Then there ain’t no more reason for ary a man to hang on here at ronnyvoo, an’
