Both of Carson’s arms came up as he plucked the weapon from the sky, drew the hammer on back from half cock, and wheeled about in a crouch at the very moment Chouinard raced up, leaning off the side of his horse, attempting to impale the short American on that long knife.
But Kit dropped to one knee, gripping the huge pistol with both hands at the end of his outstretched arms, pulling the trigger point-blank in the Frenchman’s face—the force of that blow driving the giant off the far side of his horse as the huge lead ball entered just below the left eye socket before it flattened to splatter out the back of his immense head an instant later.
Kneeling there with the smoking pistol still in his hands, Carson remained motionless as the big man drooped farther and farther in the saddle, then suddenly collapsed into the grass.
From one side rushed Bridger and from another came Drips, both of the company booshways reaching the Frenchman as some in the hushed, murmuring crowd pressed forward, step by curious step.
Drips wagged his head as Bridger stood and announced, “Bastard was dead a’fore he hit the ground.”
The crowd erupted.
Meek was at Carson’s side, pulling Kit onto his feet. “Shot him in the saddle, Kit! By jump—you been shot too!”
Staggering a moment, Carson regained his balance and touched the side of his neck. “Just a graze, Joe.”
Newell, Bass, and a gaggle of others were crowding in on Carson now as Drips was ordering some company men to drag the body away. In a moment Bridger shouldered his way through the clamoring crowd, each one of them loudly reliving the frightening seconds of that duel, all at the same time.
“Damn—if this don’t call for a drink!” Bridger hollered above the noise.
“Maybeso later tonight, Gabe,” Carson announced as he turned to Bass, his hands shaking. Passing the pistol back to its owner, he said, “Thanks, Scratch. I’m beholden to you. Saved my life.”
“Maybeso, Kit—you’ll have yourself a chance to save my ha’r one day.”
Joe Meek draped a mighty arm over Carson’s small shoulder. “C’mon with Gabe—we ought’n have us some whiskey wet our gullets now that bastard’s dead, Kit!”
Carson finished shaking hands with Scratch, then turned to Meek. “We’ll all have us that drink together after supper, Joe. Right now I got something I better tend to.”
“Tend to?” Newell echoed, scratching the side of his head. “What you gonna do that’s better’n wetting down our dry with Bridger’s whiskey?”
Carson winked at them, saying, “Right now, boys—I’m on my way to buy me a wife!”
11
Nine days after his partner Thomas Fitzpatrick had reached the rendezvous at the mouth of New Fork River on the Green, Jim Bridger started north with his brigade.
With his sixty men went not only his new wife’s family and Insala’s band of Flathead, but the Nez Perce who had once again visited the white man’s rendezvous in their unremitting hope that a man of God would come to live among them, to show them how to earn their eternal reward. After two disappointing journeys to the trappers’ rendezvous, these Nez Perce were finally returning to their native ground with just such a man and his medicine book.
Reverend Samuel Parker.
This dour, humorless fifty-six-year-old evangelist had just volunteered to press on into the wilderness while his younger associate, Dr. Marcus Whitman, returned east to enlist more recruits for their mission work among the heathen savages of the Northwest. While Whitman might not approve of all the earthy and raw habits of the mountain trappers, the doctor nonetheless chose not to preach to or condemn them—unlike the bookish and haughty Parker.
Extending an uncharacteristic and polite patience to the good reverend, a large number of the unrefined trappers listened attentively as Parker discoursed on their need to immediately abandon those worldly ways he found so deplorable, including how the white men squandered away their hard-won wages in an orgy of whiskey and debauchery, having nothing left to show for their labors than the baubles they purchased for their pagan wives and half-breed children.
Shocked less at the violence he had witnessed in that bloody duel between Carson and Chouinard, the reverend fierily preached his brimstone on the evils he had seen at rendezvous—in particular scolding the trappers on the practice of some who held up a common deck of playing cards before the visiting Indians as the white man’s holiest book. Able to purchase several of these inexpensive packs of cards from the company’s trader during rendezvous, many trappers convinced gullible Indians that unless their wives and daughters were not lent for carnal pleasures, then the white man’s powerful God would hurl down all manner of fiery and eternal torment suffered among the flames of hell. Time and again, without refusal, the women were turned over.
Those sins of the flesh, magnified by the sin of bearing false witness!
But just as Parker was working himself into a ranting lather, a horseman rushed up to announce that buffalo had been spotted up the valley. Without a by-your-please, the reverend’s grease-stained congregation leaped to their feet, grabbing rifles and horses, racing off to run those buffalo. Their sudden exit left the disgruntled Parker reassured that he was taking the right course in going to preach and convert the Nez Perce rather than attempting the salvation of those profane trappers who showed absolutely no hope of God’s redemption.
To better make his case for continued donations and funding from the American Board of Missions, Dr. Whitman was overjoyed to discover a Nez Perce boy who spoke a smattering of English. After securing permission from the youngster’s father for the trip east, the doctor christened the lad Richard. During that ceremony a second Nez Perce father promptly presented his son to accompany Whitman east where he could be taught the white man’s religion. The doctor baptized this second companion John.
Six days after Bridger’s departure for Davy Jackson’s Hole with his Flathead family and the rest of the tribe, Fitzpatrick started for Fort Laramie with the company’s fifty men, some two hundred mules bearing the year’s take in beaver along with some buffalo robes, and more than eighty former employees who were abandoning the mountains. Accompanying them on their journey was the party of scouts and hunters employed by Scottish nobleman Sir William Drummond Stewart. That long snake of men and animals strung out through the valley and beginning to wind up the hills made for an impressive leave-taking that late August morning.
Gone now was the jubilation that had rocked this fertile bottom ground like a prairie thunderstorm. Some began to realize just how late it was in the season. As far back as any man could remember, the trader’s caravan always reached rendezvous anywhere from late June to early July. But this summer’s delay translated into five lost weeks—weeks the brigades and bands of free trappers weren’t able to use in tramping to their fall hunting grounds. Now they would have to labor long and hard to make up for that lost time.
With Elbridge Gray and the other three already gone with Bridger nearly a week, and with Fitzpatrick just starting east to turn the caravan over to partner Fontenelle who was recuperating at the company’s Fort William, Andrew Drips led his eighty-man brigade south by west for the fall hunt among the Uintah and Wasatch ranges. No man among those white Americans, French voyageurs, and half-breeds would leave any record of their travels that winter.
No more trace than what any of those bands of free trappers would leave behind on the banks of the New Fork: the cold, black smudge of a string of long-abandoned fire pits and faint moccasin-clad footprints quickly erased by the ever-present autumn wind or buried beneath untold inches of icy snow. No tales of their passing were left for generations yet to come.
They might as well have been ghosts chasing down the moon.
As Zeke roamed along either side of their path, Scratch hurried Waits-by-the-Water and little Magpie east across that trampled and familiar path. Striking a little south of east, they crossed the Big Sandy, then climbed that barren saddle of the Southern Pass where they struck the first narrow channel of the Sweetwater which took them east, down to the North Platte. Day after day for two weeks they descended, following Fitzpatrick’s trail, encountering the great sprawl of his campsites until they finally caught up with the caravan one day before the entire cavalcade came within sight of La Ramee’s Fork.
