Stories and news of the east were dragged from the newcomers, tales of places and rivers and towns left far behind, a long time ago. Some men laughed at themselves and traded jokes on others, while more sat on downed logs and listened with red-rimmed eyes to what was read them of home another world away. Men who sat in abject silence, listening, men who sat remembering those dim-lit faces once more, remembering the black-earthed closeness of those gently rounded hills and hardwood forests, men who thought back to how long it had been, how far they had come since choosing to leave all that had been, since choosing to cast their lot with the few, with these bravest of the brave.
Like men become so crazed, they dared not consider the odds against them. Men torn by not knowing if they ever would return to what was left behind … men not able to understand why they didn’t really care if they ever did go back.
Night came down on that far valley, the sun hiding its face beyond the Wind River Mountains. Although he had no letters, although he had no loved ones who knew where to write him—Scratch felt that here he was among his chosen brotherhood. Families were no more than a matter of chance. Here he felt himself embraced in the bosom of those who were his family of choice. Men who expected no more from him than they were willing themselves to give in return.
Songs of old leaped from those strings that Jack Hatcher pressed beneath his dancing fingers, tunes came wheezing and wailing from that squeezebox of a concertina that a weaving and bobbing Elbridge Gray clutched at the end of his outstretched arms.
Into that wide circle of fires’ light, pairs of hardened men came. Turning to bow to one another, they readily clasped hands and danced with festive abandon: whirling recklessly—ofttimes spinning one another so robustly they landed in a heap at the very edge of the merry flames, where they guffawed at one another until bounding to their feet, stomping and shimmying some more. While some preferred to imitate the fancy steps learned long ago in polite white company back east, others stomped toe and heel round and round, swooping low and howling in their own earsplitting rendition of the scalp or buffalo or war dance.
And at the border of that open-air dance floor stood those copper-skinned spectators who looked on in unabashed amazement at this unfettered celebration by men who had survived another year in the mountain trade, witnessing this raucous revelry of those who had journeyed west to join that small fraternity of white men come to challenge an unforgiving land. Shoshone males brought their women and children across the creek, here to watch impassively this annual gathering of the white man’s own noisy, strutting warrior bands.
A few like Bass turned their gaze upon this young woman or that, wondering just what it would take in the way of foofaraw to talk one of those dark-skinned beauties into the willows, to convince her to join him back into the shadows where a few minutes of fevered coupling might ease this aching woman-hunger he suffered, might quench his parched thirst for a moistened coupling with a woman soft, a woman smooth, a woman as eager as he.
Which of them might he convince that she simply could not live without a clutter of shiny beads in his palm, without a strand of red ribbon, without a tin cup filled with trader’s sugar?
Which one of those cherry-eyed squaws would eagerly hike up her short leather dress and let him spend himself inside her before he grew one day older?
The next morning Campbell’s trappers had first crack at the treasures excavated from Sublette’s packs.
Company men were first when it came to trade goods brought west by the firm of Smith, Jackson, & Sublette.
“The rest of you gonna have to wait till tomorrow,” Sublette warned the small knots of free men who had gathered by the trader’s awnings. “Might so have to wait long as the day after till we get our company business taken care of.”
There weren’t all that many free trappers in yet, nowhere near as many men as the combined brigades— considering the number Campbell brought down from the Powder River country when coupled with the fifty-four hands Sublette brought out from St. Louis. Close to a hundred men already.
And no more than two dozen free trappers on the Popo Agie.
So all Bass could do was grumble. Sit in the shade and watch the company men come and go about their company business, come and go with their company kettles filled with Sublette’s whiskey.
It was enough to make a saint cuss a blue streak, had there been a saint in that valley of the Popo Agie.
“By damned, they better leave enough wet for our whistles and a good drunk or two outta this ronnyvoo!” Hatcher snarled.
Caleb added, “That trader better leave us enough plunder to see this outfit through ’Nother winter.”
“Likker!” Jack snapped at Wood. “The rest’ll take care of itself. Long as we get some likker.”
Most of the other free trappers hung close by the trader’s awnings too—watching as Sublette’s greenhorn clerks sorted through each company man’s hides, graded them into three stacks, then lashed each stack into a bundle they hung from that huge wooden balance arm where another clerk carefully added weights until both sides swung evenly. That tally was entered in a tall leather-bound ledger—then Sublette informed that mountain employee what he had earned for the year. After the trapper had paid off what he owed from the last rendezvous, after he had settled up for any broken traps, lost tack, or busted saddles, after he had paid for a horse run off by the Crow … he would find out just how much, or how little, celebration he had in store for himself.
Lowest of the three stations of company men were the camp keepers.
“Parley-voos?”
“Damn right,” Jack growled with disdain. “Frenchy pork eaters. Most of ’em, leastwise.”
Hatcher went on to explain that this bottom rung had received its name because those camp keepers who had accompanied the earliest expeditions forging up the Missouri River had been French laborers who ate salted sowbelly while the Americans dined on the lean red meat of game hunted on either shore. No better than slavery, Bass figured—forced to perform every dirty, menial task the booshway ordered.
“Company trappers are up from there a big notch,” Jack continued. “It’s where a man with any pluck at all got him a chance to show he’s up to Green River,” referring to that company’s name engraved right at the guard of their knife blades, clearly meaning a trapper who made the supreme effort to plunge into any effort clear up to the hilt. “That man’s got him a chance to prove he’s got the makings of a mountain man.”
While company trappers still had to do whatever task the booshway assigned, their reward nonetheless remained the coming season to show their brigade leaders that they could make a profit for the company as well as hanging on to their hair.
And if a man survived, then someone like Campbell or Sublette or Jackson could promote that man to the top rung of “skin trapper.” Such a man signed on with the company but with no guarantee of wages. When he moved up from company to skin trapper, a man indebted himself for company equipment at the same time he swore to sell his furs only to the company at what price the company quoted. And if there was anything left over when his accounts were settled, then the skin trapper could more than satisfy his thirst for whiskey, or have enough in trade to buy himself a squaw for a night or two, perhaps enough to purchase himself a wife, who would accompany the brigade wherever it wandered in the coming seasons.
But above all three ranks of company men stood the most coveted class of all: the free trappers.
While they might be forced to wait until the trader dispensed with his hirelings, those free men had what Sublette desired most: the finest of plews brought to rendezvous by the “master trappers,” men who traversed the high country on their own hook, beholden to no booshway, in debt to no company.
While the Smith, Jackson, & Sublette men still wore a frontiersman’s wool or leather breeches and some sort of linen or calico shirt, most free trappers gaily sported Indian leggings and war shirt, the twisted fringes of which were caparisoned with tiny brass hawk’s bells, steel sewing thimbles, or strewn with Indian scalplocks, leather garments decorated with wide bands of brightly colored porcupine quillwork. Beneath that outer layer of warrior’s clothing they wore a greasy, soiled, and sooted cloth shirt and woolen longhandles when the seasons turned cold.
Many plaited their hair in two long braids, tied up in bright ribbons of red trade wool or wrapped with otter skin. They daubed purple vermilion down the center part in their hair, often smeared earth paint on their severely tanned faces, and trailed long fringes or small animal skins from the heels of their moccasins. Some ambled about camp wearing a colorfully striped blanket belted around their waist in the fashion of a tribal chief, while others brandished a wide wool sash finger-woven back in eastern woodlands, where they stuffed a brace of pistols, a
