“What they laughing at us for?” Titus asked, feeling sheepish—as if some joke were about to be played on them.
Bridger offered up a cup of liquor, handing it to Bass as he said, “Don’t fret none, now: some of these here coons ain’t got the brains God give a buffler gnat.”
One of the scoffers cried out, “Just ’cause we don’t believe you floated where you said you floated, don’t mean we got us gnat-brains!”
“Sit yourselves down, fellas,” young Bridger said, “an’ I’ll tell you ’bout that leetle trip I had me through hell’s canyon in a bull boat—”
“All the way to the Salt Sea!” bellowed one of the doubters, accompanied by roars of laughter from the rest.
Wagging his head as if he was used to the good-natured ribbing, Jim exclaimed with mock seriousness, “I’ll swear. There be times a mountain man is a most consarned critter, boys. Now, you go take a look at them niggers laughin’ their bellies sore over there on their logs, and you’ll see just what I mean. Some of these here beaver trappers are the most uncertainest fellers ever—cuz they’ll argeefie about near anything. And that even includes argeein’ about argeein’!”
*
13
“There t’weren’t a bit of blamed sense in argeein’ about it,” Bridger declared, back to being solemn-faced now that he was warming to his tale. “But these here other yahoos good for that.”
Many of the rest pounded their knees and back-slapped one another in unbridled mirth, guffawing lustily as the liquor and the camaraderie warmed them all that summer night as stars shown like diamonds and the moon hung like a slice of translucent mother-of-pearl right over their heads.
“What they don’t got in good sense,” Fitzpatrick declared, “these fellers make up for with big grins!”
“Last year it were!” one of the laughers roared out, anxious to get on with the tale. “G’won, Jim—tell ’em!”
“I will,” Bridger snorted, and turned back to Bass and Tuttle with a wink, “just as soon as you yabberin’ yahoos shut your fly-traps!”
“Shut up! Shut up!” commanded one of the laughers, who stood, weaving a bit in his drunkenness, waving his arms at the others for quiet. When they all fell silent behind hands, he declared, “Go right on ahead, young Jim. We’s a’waiting on your windy story.”
Just then another unruly trapper cried out, “Best tell us only the true of it, boy!”
That sent the entire bunch into fits of laughter that did not end until Bridger had gone to the kettle with his tin cup, dipped some of the heady grain liquor from it, and resettled back on the trunk of a downed Cottonwood. Casually he took himself a swig and looked round at those gathered there as things quieted once again.
He asked them, “You ’bout done with your pokin’ fun at me?”
“G’won head, Jim,” Fitzpatrick said gravely as he bent forward to select a stout cottonwood limb from the stack of wood near the fire. “I’ll damn well thrash the next son of a bitch what interrupts young Bridger’s story with his silly gaping!”
“Thankee, Fitz,” Bridger replied, and took himself another sip of the liquor before he set the cup on the ground between his worn moccasins. “Like that big-nosed yahoo over there told you, it were some two winters back.”
“A year and a half ago?” Tuttle asked.
Nodding his head, Bridger replied, “Near ’bouts. Late fall it were.”
“Hell, it could’ve been early winter too, Jim,” declared Fitzpatrick. “Nobody was keeping track nohow.”
“Leastwise—the first snows had come to this here country,” Bridger continued. “Most of us was settling in for the winter not far on down this here same valley, it were.” He pointed south with a wag of his arm. “Seemed that not all the trapping outfits was in yet—but most was already here.”
Ashley’s men were settling in real good, too, Jim explained. They had cut down strong saplings and lashed them together into eastern-style wickiups over which they interlaced branches to turn the dry snows of that high prairieland. Here in what they had come to call Willow Valley the previous year, the trappers had a good source of water, plenty of grass to last their animals for the winter, and plenty of protection from the harshest of the season’s winds. Firewood lay within easy reach along the creeks and streams that tumbled out of the surrounding hills. Day by day they shot buffalo, laying in more and more of the hides they fleshed and draped over the wickiups for insulation, slicing and drying thin strips of the lean red meat over smoky fires … knowing the hard days of bitter cold and deep snows were not long in coming.
Just beyond that range of hills to the west of them lay the valley of the Bear—a river that would soon become the irritating source of contention between the Ashley men.
Earlier that July of 1824 more than fifty of them had followed Jedediah Smith and John Weber across the deceivingly low South Pass and on to the country of the Green River. By late August that year they had reached the crest of an unexplored mountain range and peered off to the west, down into the valley of a new river they would soon find had already been visited and named by the John Bull trappers for the Hudson’s Bay Company.
From the heights Smith’s men could see how the Bear flowed north out of a lake they would come to name for the sweet taste of its water. But upon following this new river the trappers discovered the river precipitously reversed itself in some forbidding lava beds. Steadfastly following the Bear upstream, the trappers continued their march south. Eventually that autumn they reached the Willow Valley, and there they decided to winter. Just to the southwest of their encampment the trappers could climb to high bluffs and stare down at the Bear River as it appeared to twist back to the north in the distance once more—but this time it flowed through a narrow canyon filled with thunderous white water.
Just as it is the way with any men who find too much time on their hands, the trappers turned their discussions of that unpredictable Bear River into an argument—with nearly every soul taking a side—and then that argument boiled into a matter of wagers: did that river continue north, or curl itself back south still another time? Hell, just what did happen to that fitful, fickle river after it disappeared in that high-walled gorge?
“Until Fitz here reminded ever’ last nigger of us there weren’t no way to know who’d win them wagers,” Jim continued his story in the hush of that starry night, “because no man knowed for sure where that river went.”
Fitzpatrick said, “Hell—I didn’t figger there’d be a man among ’em what’d go to find out for his own self!”
“Didn’t count on young Jim here!” Daniel Potts cried out.
“He’s a struttin’ cock if ever there was one!” another man shouted as others added their admiration.
“Wasn’t like I jumped at the chance,” Bridger admitted. “But some of these here yahoos come to me with such straight, no-account faces and told me I was the coon they could trust to take on that there canyon—which’d put their argeement to rest, once’t and for all.”
One of the group crowed, “We figgered you was the only one we could talk into it!”
“See what I mean, fellers?” Bridger asked Tuttle and Bass. “Well, now—I didn’t know no better than to be proud they asked me.”
“Shit, it made sense!” someone called out. “You was the youngest, boy!”
“So we figgered you was the best’un to try that hellhole river run,” another added.
A new voice bellowed, “If’n you didn’t come back—weren’t no sad loss, you being the sprout of the brigade!”
With a shrug at all the abuse he was taking, Bridger continued, “Don’t make me no never-mind now that I didn’t know they figgered it to be a damn lark they was putting me up to … that trip sounded like it’d be just the chance to pull the tiger’s tail.”
One of the older, grizzle-bearded trappers declared, “Young’uns like Bridger allays wanna be first to pull on a tiger’s tail!”
“Better’n sitting in winter camp all day, ever’ day,” Jim continued. “So I told ’em I’d settle their li’l
