From here on out, the West would never be the same.
Within days of the missionaries’ departure, Thomas Fitzpatrick and Milton Sublette packed up their furs and started for the post on La Ramee’s Fork, now no longer called Fort William but renamed Fort Lucien when Fontenelle and his partners purchased it from Sublette and Campbell back in thirty-five. While the one-legged Sublette would remain as
The most significant transaction there on the banks of the Green River was not the trading of furs for sugar and coffee, powder and lead, but that sale of Fontenelle, Fitzpatrick & Company to Joshua Pilcher, agent for Pratte, Chouteau &c Company. With no more than a whimper the grand and raucous rivalry that had raged between competing outfits was now a thing of the past.
A new American Fur Company had won the pot. But while those wealthy St. Louis Frenchmen might have defeated their less-well-heeled American competitors, Pratte, Chouteau &c Company still did not have the fur country to themselves. With Hudson’s Bay continuing to skulk around the edges, this business of beaver pelts was bound to be not only a competition between two companies, but a sharpening of the rivalry between two countries.
While Andrew Drips once again led a small brigade south by west past the Snake River country for the Wasatch and Uintah ranges, Lucien Fontenelle departed with Kit Carson and some thirty men for a fall hunt on the Musselshell, intending to winter on the lower Powder, a favorite with trappers because of its protection from the winter winds and the numbers of buffalo that grazed there throughout the cold months.
“Due north, where we’ll stab our way into the gut of Blackfoot country again.” Thus Sweete explained where Bridger’s brigade was heading as he held out his hand, preparing to move out at first light that late July morning.
“Got us plenty of time to trap a’fore we winter somewheres over on the Yellowstone,” Jim Bridger added as Bass shook their hands in farewell.
Scratch embraced his old friend. “You boys gonna watch your ha’r up there in the land of Bug’s Boys, ain’t you, Gabe? Maybe we’ll run on you come winter. Spring at the latest.”
“You’ll be up north too?” Sweete asked.
With a nod Bass said, “Fixing to winter on the Yallerstone with my wife’s people. Crow, they are. We lost her pap to the Blackfoot two year ago. Time we got back up there to see to her mam.”
Bridger glanced at Cora who sat atop her pony nearby. “Reckon I know how your stick floats when it comes to your wife’s family. Many don’t just marry a woman.”
“He ends up hitching hisself to all her kin,” Titus concluded. “It’s a good thing too, Jim—what with that doctor’s wife gone to Oregon now. Shiny-eyed gal like that being around just naturally made my woman jealous. Yours too.”
“What? My Cora?”
“Yep. Reason I know is, my wife had a good talk with me—worried all sorts of white gals was coming west and I wouldn’t want her no more,” he explained, watching Bridger turn to stare at Cora.
“I had me no idee I done anything to make her worry.”
“She’s carrying your child now, Gabe.”
Jim nodded and said, “So I made her worry I was gonna leave her high and dry with a young’un?”
“Take it from a feller what has one pup and ’nother on the way—carrying a child makes a woman act like she was bit by the full moon for no reason at all. Best for you just to figger she’s gonna bawl at nothing, scream at you for nothing too.”
Grinning, Jim commented, “I know my way round the mountains, know a Blackfoot mokerson from a Crow, know when to fight the niggers and when to run … and damn if I ain’t a fool to think I knowed women too!”
“At times, Gabe—there be no sign writ on a woman’s heart, so it’s for us to find out for our own selves.”
“Thankee, Scratch,” Bridger added, shaking Bass’s hand again before he turned, swung into the saddle, and waved his arm as he hollered for his brigade to mount up.
“Time for the trail,” Sweete said as he crawled atop the strong, jug-headed Indian pony, the man’s legs so long they all but brushed the tops of the meadow grass as he reined away for the column starting out of the valley.
Titus waved, crying out, “See you boys on the Yallerstone!”
Some of the finest moments in his life were spent sitting on a hillside such as this, listening to autumn pass with such a hush that most folks simply weren’t aware of its journey across the face of time until winter had them in its grip.
Now that summer was done, every few days Titus dawdled among the shimmering quakies, leaning back against a tree trunk there in the midst of their spun-gold magnificence to gaze out upon the valley below where he ran his trapline. Since leaving rendezvous, he had keenly anticipated this season of the year, this season of his life.
The quiet murmur of the land as it prepared for a winter’s rest. The frantic coupling of the wild creatures big and small before the coming of cold and hunger. That soul-stirring squeal of the bull elk on the hillside above him. Those heart-wrenching honks of the long-necks as they flapped overhead, making for the south once again to complete a grand circuit of the ages.
As he sat there today, gazing down at how the wind stirred tiny riffles across the surface of the stream, Scratch remembered the ancient Flathead medicine man who had died early that July morning his village was preparing to depart the white man’s rendezvous. Only the day before the old man’s death had Bass gone to the Flathead camp with Bridger, Sweete, and Meek, who had come along with Cora to visit some of her kinfolk to have a divination, a portent of their autumn hunt.
The ancient one unexpectedly called the trappers to his shady bower where he lay suspended on his travois of soft blankets and robes beneath a buffalo-hide awning. His daughter, old herself, remained at his side.
“My father wants to talk to you,” the widow had explained, looking up at Bridger, then the others, with tired eyes.
“Who is your father?” Sweete asked in sign.
And Bridger inquired with his hands, “Why does he want to talk to me?”
“Come,” she gestured. “He will tell you everything.”
The old man reached out a frail, bony hand, looking more like a bird’s claw, the moment he heard his daughter return, heard the trappers shuffle up and position themselves self-consciously around the travois.
“Touch his hand,” she signed, rubbing the back of hers with her fingers. “So he knows you are here.”
Bridger knelt and rubbed the back of the ancient one’s veiny hand. Then Scratch touched it, amazed at how the dark cords stood out like tiny ropes against the sheen of the malleable brown skin.
“Does he hear?” Bass said, then remembered to make the sign.
The woman nodded and laid a hand on her father’s cheek, spoke to him softly in Flathead.
When he began speaking, it was only a few words at a time, almost as if he was having to fight for breath between each phrase. And when he sighed, resting, the old woman translated with her hands.
“He says to you: it is good that you come to listen—you leaders of the white men who are strangers to this land,” she signed.
“Many long winters ago when I was a boy, I remember the seasons as good. Then the first white men arrived.
“Your kind came to our country as no wild creature ever came to our villages before. And we did not understand.
“The white man did not stay at the edges of our camps like other creatures, but he came straight into our village. He ate the beaver and all the animals in our mountains with his iron teeth.
“Because the white man has such a great appetite for everything in our country, now my grandchildren and great-grandchildren are hungry.”
While the old woman signed these last words, her ancient father wiped his watery eyes and clutched a tiny tortoiseshell rattle against his chest as if he had finished. Sweete, Bridger, Bass, and Meek began to rise—but the
