Ride the Moon Down

“That ronnyvoo last summer no better’n this’un,” Bass said.

“Most fellers pretty down, that’s for sure, what with all them company clerks was telling ever’one,” Rufus explained. “Then we heard tell the company was so disgusted, they wasn’t gonna bring out no more trade goods. No more ronnyvoo.”

“Disgusted?” Titus repeated.

“Rumor was the company bosses tol’t Drips they wasn’t much happy with the mountain trade no more,” Elbridge took up the story. “They figgered maybeso to do it all from the fur posts.”

“Fur posts!” Titus squeaked in disbelief. “Won’t be no more ronnyvoo?”

Solomon said, “Ever’ year now more and more niggers give up trapping and ride off back east. That means there ain’t much beaver for them booshways no more.”

“What do Drips and Fontenelle fix to do if’n there ain’t no more mountain rendezvous?” Bass inquired.

“Fontenelle’s dead,” Elbridge disclosed. “I heard he died last year. Drips is the only one still running things in the mountains now.”

“He put Bridger out in the field with a strong brigade,” Rufus explained. “Joe Walker got ’nother outfit working for Drips. Damn if Walker didn’t come in to the Popo Agie last summer with a shit-load of Mexican horses. That was ’bout the best news the company got last summer. Needed them horses in a bad way.”

This was all so hard to comprehend. Right from Bass’s first year in the mountains, there had always been a summer rendezvous: a place to trade in his furs and barter for what he needed in possibles.

Titus wagged his head, unable to fathom it. “No more ronnyvoo?”

“But don’t you see?” Gray asked. “Drips ended up calling ever’one together and telling ’em the rumors was all wrong. Promised he’d be out here to Horse Crik this summer.”

Then Isaac said, “But the damage been done by the time Drips stomped on them rumors.”

“Damage?” Scratch asked.

“We heard tell of … maybeso a dozen fellers what listened to all them stories ’bout the company not having no more ronnyvoo,” Isaac continued. “Well, a few of them niggers slipped off from the Popo Agie ever’ night or so, taking their company traps and their company guns and their company possibles with ’em.”

“Ever’ last one of ’em running off with a good number of company horses too!” Rufus cried. “Ain’t never been so many deserters as there was last summer.”

Isaac said, “I s’pose it’s cuz no one was much for sure there’d be ’nother ronnyvoo.”

“Fact be, Drips says if we meet up next summer, he’ll show up here,” Elbridge explained. “Just this morning Drips got all the boys together and said Pierre Chouteau the younger back in St. Louis don’t know if he’ll send out another supply train next year—but if he does, it ought’n ronnyvoo with us right here where we been many times a’fore.”

“Damn if this all don’t take the circle!” Bass exclaimed in amazement. “Hard to reckon on them fellas stealing traps and possibles and horses from their brigades.”

Rufus shrugged in that easy way of his. “Man hears the company ain’t gonna be no more, I guess he reckons it’s time to take what he figgers is due him.”

“We … we even talked ’bout deserting our own selves last summer,” Solomon confessed.

“But we didn’t,” Elbridge stated firmly. “We signed on with the company to the end … and that’s damn well giving a man our solemn word. We ain’t none of us gonna steal from no man—not when we got our pride.”

“Makes a fella wonder,” Isaac ruminated, “what the hell we’re gonna do when the company tells us it don’t need us to trap its beaver no more.”

“Shit,” Bass growled as the others fell silent in the drone and buzz of busy insects. “From the looks of things—this here beaver business gone and sunk so low that white men even took to stealing from white men!”

* Swiss immigrant August Johann Sutter.

29

“You hear tell Bridger’s quit the company?”

For a moment there Titus Bass studied Shadrach Sweete’s face for any betrayal that the man was pulling his leg. “Gabe?” he asked in disbelief. “Not Bridger!”

The overly tall man bobbed his head as some others stepped up to listen in. “Can’t believe it my own self. I just come from Drips’s tent yonder. Last night Bridger said he might just do it—but I didn’t figger he ever would.”

“Quit the company?” asked an older, lanky man striding up in greasy buckskins.

“Told Drips he’d have to get someone else to guide the brigade this year,” Sweete explained as he turned to address the man nearly twice his age. “Bridger’s heading back to St. Louis with the fur caravan when it pulls out.”

If that report didn’t just about beat all the other bad news there was at this quiet little shindig beside the mouth of Horse Creek. First off, Bass had reached this rendezvous site on the Green River to find no more than one hundred twenty company trappers and fewer than thirty freemen waiting the arrival of the supply train. And from the looks of what few camps dotted the valley, one thing was certain as sun: no one had packed much in the way of beaver fur to this rendezvous of 1839.

Really didn’t matter, as things turned out, because when a rider hailed the camps a few days back, announcing that the trader’s caravan was approaching—Bass, like the rest, eagerly scanned that bench to the east, expecting to watch a long mule train or string of carts snake their way into the bottoms, bringing with them more recruits for the autumn brigades, perhaps joined by another large party of missionaries bound for Oregon country with their damned wagons, carriages, and milk cows.

But what caravan pilot Black Harris led into the valley was instead four small two-wheeled carts, each pulled by a pair of mules and carrying no more than eight hundred pounds of the company’s trade goods. On either side of each noisy, squeaking cart trudged a dust-coated, parched pair of St. Louis hired hands—no more than eight employees to assist in the exchange of furs across those few days it would take to trade furs for staples before Harris would turn his outfit around for the settlements. Besides those eight clerks, another half-dozen mule tenders were along to care for the cantankerous stock.

And there in the sheets of dust stirred up by them all, bringing up the rear of that pitifully small caravan, came two small carts and some missionaries, after all. In addition to those bound for the fertile fields of the heathens, Black Harris was accompanied by a German physician and his small party from St. Louis who had come to the mountains for a summer of recreation and adventure.

“Damn poor doin’s,” Scratch had grumbled. From what he could see, he didn’t figure he had missed a damned thing on the Popo Agie the summer before.

And now Gabe was headed east.

Maybeso if a man did have him some family back in Missouri country, Titus rationalized his old friend’s intentions, there might be reason for him to throw it all in and head back now that the business was no more than a ghost of its former glory. But he figured it had to be something mighty powerful to pull a man like Jim Bridger back to the States—quitting the beaver streams, abandoning his Flathead wife and children, forsaking these mountains for the runty hills of the east.

“You figger Gabe ain’t never coming back?” the tall bone rack of a stranger asked of Sweete.

Shad could only shrug. “Bridger ain’t said what he ’tends to do. But I don’t figger him for staying long back there. Most ever’thing he’s ever knowed is out here.”

“Damn straight,” the older man grumped, giving Bass a close, squint-eyed appraisal of a sudden. “If there ain’t beaver to skin and red niggers to skulp in the Big Stonies … by God there’s allays horses to steal from the greasers out to Californy!” And with that next breath he poked his face right into Scratch’s and asked, “I know you, pilgrim?”

“Maybeso,” Titus replied with a chortle, raising his arms into the air, one on either side of his head, fingers spread like antlers. “—If’n you’re that crazy nigger what’s gonna turn into a bull elk when you’re gone under!”