Read Online Snow Mountain Passage by James D Houston - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: James D Houston
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foot. Getting through to the Truckee River would be the test, he said. “Then there’s water again … and after that … the Sierra Nevada.”
George Donner had white hair and a deep, captivating voice, like a preacher’s or like an actor playing King Lear in a huge empty theater. The way he said “Sierra Nevada” made it loom in my mind. Before long I would learn that it means “Snowy Mountains.” But I didn’t know any Spanish yet, so I didn’t see snow. What I imagined was a soaring palisade of stone and timber that could only be crossed with the blessings of God and many angels. That night I prayed for all the angels in heaven to watch over papa, wherever he was on the long trail to California.
NUMEROUS PEOPLE have observed that our journey that year was a fateful journey. In hindsight anyone can see signs along the route and find a dozen or a hundred times when things could have gone some other way. Of course, they did not go some other way. Things never do. Things always go the way they’re going to go. And I still have to wonder how much of it was fate and how much of it was papa’s nature.
Every party on the trail had a hard time somehow or another. Everybody ran low on water and threw out furniture and shot oxen for meat and had arguments that would set one clan against the next. Our party, of course, had a special talent for arguing and disagreement. I can see that now. Surely there has never been a more mismatched bunch having to spend half a year trying to get from one place to the next. I suppose you can call that a kind of fate. It wasn’t anything papa had planned ahead of time, though he was at the center of it all.
You take that day by the Humboldt. I still wonder if he really had to ride off like that. Maybe he already believed he had some punishment coming, even before he pulled his knife and started waving it like a man who is drunk outside a bar. Maybe he was yearning to be put through some kind of test even worse than the hell he’d already seen—to prove something to the rest of them, or take some scar upon himself for what he’d done, or failed to do.
Our stop at Fort Laramie was another time when things could have gone another way. And this was many weeks before the trouble started, while the animals were still healthy and the wagons were still loaded with provisions and the women still had time to think about what they’d fix for the Fourth of July, still holding on to the places they’d left behind, and in that way trying to make Fort Laramie an outpost of civilization, which it was not, though on the day we rolled in, there were more people congregated than you would have found anywhere else in the entire West. We saw buffalo hunters and shaggy, wild-eyed trappers with mules and squaws and furs to trade. Thousands of Sioux were camped outside the fort, along with half the wagons on the trail. Papa called out to men he hadn’t seen since Independence. He saw a pair of mules he was sure he recognized, ones he’d sold just before we crossed the Missouri.
I remember a green meadow above the broad, sandy river we’d been following for weeks. Where Laramie Creek spills into the Platte, it looked like a park. I wanted us to stop, but we splashed on through the creek and climbed past the meadow until we came upon the fort, the long clay walls, the wooden gate, the blockhouse over the gate where riflemen could stand. Before dinner papa walked over there to look up the man in charge. He came walking back with a fellow he hadn’t seen in fourteen years, since they had fought together in the Blackhawk War. Papa invited him to sit down for a cup of coffee, which was gratefully accepted. The man had not sniffed a cup of coffee in about six months, or so he said.
He was not with any of the westering parties. He was bound in the opposite direction. He had been a trapper and some kind of guide, and now he was on his way east from what the Mexicans used to call Alta California, said he
George Donner had white hair and a deep, captivating voice, like a preacher’s or like an actor playing King Lear in a huge empty theater. The way he said “Sierra Nevada” made it loom in my mind. Before long I would learn that it means “Snowy Mountains.” But I didn’t know any Spanish yet, so I didn’t see snow. What I imagined was a soaring palisade of stone and timber that could only be crossed with the blessings of God and many angels. That night I prayed for all the angels in heaven to watch over papa, wherever he was on the long trail to California.
NUMEROUS PEOPLE have observed that our journey that year was a fateful journey. In hindsight anyone can see signs along the route and find a dozen or a hundred times when things could have gone some other way. Of course, they did not go some other way. Things never do. Things always go the way they’re going to go. And I still have to wonder how much of it was fate and how much of it was papa’s nature.
Every party on the trail had a hard time somehow or another. Everybody ran low on water and threw out furniture and shot oxen for meat and had arguments that would set one clan against the next. Our party, of course, had a special talent for arguing and disagreement. I can see that now. Surely there has never been a more mismatched bunch having to spend half a year trying to get from one place to the next. I suppose you can call that a kind of fate. It wasn’t anything papa had planned ahead of time, though he was at the center of it all.
You take that day by the Humboldt. I still wonder if he really had to ride off like that. Maybe he already believed he had some punishment coming, even before he pulled his knife and started waving it like a man who is drunk outside a bar. Maybe he was yearning to be put through some kind of test even worse than the hell he’d already seen—to prove something to the rest of them, or take some scar upon himself for what he’d done, or failed to do.
Our stop at Fort Laramie was another time when things could have gone another way. And this was many weeks before the trouble started, while the animals were still healthy and the wagons were still loaded with provisions and the women still had time to think about what they’d fix for the Fourth of July, still holding on to the places they’d left behind, and in that way trying to make Fort Laramie an outpost of civilization, which it was not, though on the day we rolled in, there were more people congregated than you would have found anywhere else in the entire West. We saw buffalo hunters and shaggy, wild-eyed trappers with mules and squaws and furs to trade. Thousands of Sioux were camped outside the fort, along with half the wagons on the trail. Papa called out to men he hadn’t seen since Independence. He saw a pair of mules he was sure he recognized, ones he’d sold just before we crossed the Missouri.
I remember a green meadow above the broad, sandy river we’d been following for weeks. Where Laramie Creek spills into the Platte, it looked like a park. I wanted us to stop, but we splashed on through the creek and climbed past the meadow until we came upon the fort, the long clay walls, the wooden gate, the blockhouse over the gate where riflemen could stand. Before dinner papa walked over there to look up the man in charge. He came walking back with a fellow he hadn’t seen in fourteen years, since they had fought together in the Blackhawk War. Papa invited him to sit down for a cup of coffee, which was gratefully accepted. The man had not sniffed a cup of coffee in about six months, or so he said.
He was not with any of the westering parties. He was bound in the opposite direction. He had been a trapper and some kind of guide, and now he was on his way east from what the Mexicans used to call Alta California, said he
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