Slogging out of the widening river, Bridger set his rifle and pouch in the limbs of a nearby tree, then returned to the bank, where he struggled to tip the bullboat over, completely filled with water as it was. Finally he was able to drag the heavy boat with its green waterlogged buffalo hide a few feet up the bank, where he turned it upside down to drain. Then he shivered as the cold wind came up, and decided he’d best build himself a fire.
“Later that afternoon when my buckskins was dried and I had pulled the wet load in my rifle, I figgered it was time to climb on up the rocks and see for myself just where that devil of a river did go off to.”
High in those rocks as the late-autumn light started to fade, Bridger finally discovered just how the wagers would be won or lost. He could see that the river continued south. Meandering though it was, it seemed to continue angling off to a little west of due south.
“But that wasn’t the pure marvel of it,” he admitted now, just as he had told the tale many times before.
As he stared off into the distance, his eyes following the river toward the far horizon, “Of a sudden—way out yonder—I happed to see more water’n I ever see’d since the day I was born.”
For a moment he turned and gazed back to the north, thinking about his original plans to return overland once he had determined just where the river flowed. But now, as he stared off into the distance, he felt again that unmistakable itch to search and discover, an itch that he knew he could not deny.
“Come sunup the next morning I put that bullboat back in the water and I was on my way. It weren’t long afore the world around me went so quiet, it was like everything was dead. By the time I come to where the river opened up into a peaceful stretch of water, I dipped my hand over the side and brung it to my lips. Salt! Sweat of the Almighty—that’s what I tasted, fellas. Salt! Good Lord, I thought—had that river floated me all the way to the far salt ocean?”
In actuality Bridger had drifted on out of the mouth of the Bear into a great bay some twenty miles wide,* where he could barely see land far off to the right and left of him—but where the bay opened up to the south, there was nothing but water … for as far as he could see.
“I ain’t ashamed to tell you I was scairt,” Bridger confided. “Figgering I’d made the ocean, I wasn’t a stupid pilgrim about to go floating off to the other side of the world in that leaky ol’ bullboat. So this child poled hisself over to the shore quick as he could. Stepped my moker-sons out on a layer of salt that crunched under my feet, and I pulled that boat out behind me.”
With the sun rising toward midsky, young Jim set out on foot instead, moving south along the shoreline. He had put miles behind him before he finally made out the first sign of distant land. The farther south he walked, the more it became clear what he was seeing was a huge island** rising far out in that lifeless, salty expanse of endless water. Far, far to the southeast, it appeared the shore he was walking went on forever.
“And I never did see the other side of it neither!” Jim exclaimed, handing his cup to one of his compatriots for refilling. “Still scairt pretty bad, I took off on the backtrack. Made it back to my bullboat just afore dark. Gathered in some wood, started me a fire, and rocked that boat up on its side to hold off the cold winter wind. Next morning I started walking north, back the way I come.”
As he came up to those gathered around the fire and stopped, Jedediah Smith asked, “You know what Jim told us when he showed back up a few days later?”
Potts called out, “Bridger said, ’Hell, boys! I been clear to the Pay-cific Sea!”
“Would’ve been nice, fellas,” Smith said, gazing wistfully down at the fire, “if what Bridger did find two winters back was in fact a big bay of the Pacific Ocean.”
“You figger some way Jim run onto the Buenaventura, Jed?” Harrison Rogers asked.
“It would be by the hand of God, if it were,” Smith answered reverently, gazing off toward the west, where the legend of that fabled river dictated its waters would carry a man all the way from the spine of the Rockies clear down to the Pacific.
Fitzpatrick said, “Why, if it were the Buenaventury, Jed—we’d have only to pack our plews down to the shore, where the big ships would tie up and take on our beaver.”
Rogers added, “Then and there they’d off-load our supplies and likker, fellas!”
Smith grinned in the yellow sheen of that fire. “Just think of it, men: Jim Bridger here could well be the feller what found it for us.”
“That’s what we’re heading off tomorrow to find out, ain’t we, Jed?” Rogers prodded.
With a nod Smith replied, “That’s why we’re marching south by west. Yes—to find out just where the Pacific is. To discover just how close … or how far we are, from the sea.”
“I’ll be damned,” Tuttle exclaimed with a gush. He slapped a hand on Bass’s knee. “Ain’t that something, Scratch? Think on it, man! Just out there, maybeso not all that far off—the great salt ocean lays watting for us to go see it!”
“That is something,” Titus agreed quietly, the immensity of the thought almost overwhelming him.
Down at New Orleans he had looked out on that harbor and tried to fathom the immensity of those great rolling oceans where tall triple-masted schooners rocked atop frothy waves as tall as houses, moving to and from faraway ports where folks of many colors spoke all those foreign tongues he had heard fall upon his ears on that youthful trip to New Orleans with Hames Kingsbury’s boatmen. How so many of the sounds and sights and smells of the world were brought into that one place rolled up beside the ocean.
And now another such ocean might not be all that far away to the west, after all.
“Let’s drink to young Jim Bridger!” Beckwith roared suddenly, standing with his cup held high. “And to Bridget’s Hole!”*
Immediately they all shot to their feet. But Bridger was the last, looking young and sheepish among their lined faces scraped clean of beard these past few days. The fire danced in their eyes, flickered on the dull sheen of their tin cups, as together they roared, celebrating one of their own.
“Hear, hear! To young Jim Bridger!” Bass shouted with the others.
Taken altogether, those men gathered in Willow Valley that night were a pitifully small lot indeed.
“Hear, hear! To the far salt ocean!”
But few in numbers though they be, each man of them stood tall, head and shoulders above any who had chosen to stay behind, those who cowered east of the Missouri … this breed here and forever after to stand taller still than any of those who would come in their wake.
“To the beaver, by God!”
Here they were of a breed just newly born, yet already beginning to die … so short was their glorious era.
“To the Rocky Mountains, by damn!”
“Hear, hear!” Scratch shouted with them, tears coming to his eyes, so emotional was it to stand among these men strong enough to match those high and terrible places.
“To the very heart of the world!”
“To the Rocky Mountains!”
“Jumping Jehoshaphat!” Titus cried as he bolted to his feet with the first shots up the valley. “What you make of that?”
Cooper barely budged, his eyes fluttering open slightly. He squatted with his back resting against a pile of their bedding: buffalo robes and blankets. “Target shooting. Feller wins, he get hisself a drink of likker.”
But those shots were coming too close together, Bass thought. And they damn well came from the wrong direction. From the Shoshone camp!
“What you think, Billy?” Bass inquired, nervously scratching at his bearded cheek.
Hooks kept on whittling the bark off another short section of willow. He had a pile of pale sticks on one side of him, and a rumpled pile of curled slivers of bark on the ground between his legs. “I figger them red niggers’ business is their own business. Leave it be.”
“But—the shootin’!”
“Ain’t no one shootin’ at us,” Cooper snapped. “Just let it be and lemme sleep.”
Then Bass whirled on Tuttle, “You think we ought’n go see what’s the ruckus, Bud?” He watched Tuttle glance at Cooper, as if asking permission.
“Nawww,” Bud finally answered, “like Silas said: ain’t none of our affair—”
Hooves pounded up on the valley floor—three horses skidding to a halt as their riders leaned over to throw
