Into the Savage Country (2 page)

At the time of which I’m speaking, the spring of 1826, Ashley had sold the Rocky Mountain Fur Company to Smith, Sublette, and Jackson, but stayed on as the hiring and purchasing agent. Like many connected to the fur trade, Ashley cursed the pelts for ruining his life and soiling his reputation and draining his finances and vowed to cut his losses and forgo even wearing fur hats, but those were idle threats. Despite the endless hardships and the constant setbacks there was nothing like the fur trade for camaraderie and adventure and excitement, and once the trade got its hooks into you everything else was pale and lifeless and seemed an imitation of life, rather than the genuine article.

After vowing to leave the business for the hundredth time, General Ashley was floating in on the deck of a keelboat, a foot
up on the prow and that white hair blown back and a bear prowling behind him, chained to the mast. Ashley pretended he didn’t know what sort of romantic figure he cast. He knew all right. Smith and company were shrewd when they kept him on as their hiring agent. The sight of Ashley on that keelboat coming on the heels of that reproof from the pretty tanner blasted the last of my hesitation. I had boasted to Alene that I’d join a brigade, and as it turned out, it was true. I would do it. I walked straight to the agent’s storefront on Market Street and told them they could have me if they wanted me. You practically signed your life away if you were taken on as a camp hand. I did what I could to avoid that servitude. I lied about what I’d done and got Blanchard, who had joined me in my folly, to verify all my mistruths. We were taken on as company trappers, which right away was a better position if you could afford the equipage, which I could.

I spent the next week securing my traps and filling my possibles sack. I bought a J. Henry long rifle from Blanchard, as he’d gotten the musket from Goddard. I stocked up on all the necessaries: lead, a ladle and mold, a Sheffield knife, and a mirror for shaving so I’d look good for the squaws, as I’d heard they would call a bearded man
dogface
. I bought several parchment notebooks with vellum covers to record my observations. Like so many of my fellow travelers I planned on writing my memoirs if I survived and retiring on the glories and riches reaped from my misspent youth. All of us who signed on that year were puffed up with self-importance, as the Treaty of 1818, which had established the western boundary of our nation, was scheduled to be renegotiated, partially along trade lines, and the heart of the sales pitch for the various brigades was that a young man could make a fortune while battling the Brits and the mighty HBC and save Oregon Territory and New Caledonia for the nation. The trapping
brigades were commerce and patriotism and battling and adventure and it was all westward ho, young man, out into the savage unknown, and other nonsense like that.

In truth, few of us had any idea what lay ten miles beyond St. Louis.

On my last days in the city I labored over a letter to my father, half justification for my misdeeds, half apology. I had parted from home two years earlier after a dispute over a piece of property. I could hardly blame my father for keeping the land from me, as I had done little to merit the gift and much to make him reluctant to pass it on, but he’d given my brothers their share on their eighteenth birthdays and he did not give me mine, and I’d accused him of stinginess. He blamed my restless nature for the delay. I called it favoritism, and our battle escalated. I left cursing him, and him me, and I had not talked with him since.

Now, two years later, I was leaving the States for at least a year, and probably much longer, and I meant to make it up before I departed. But while in the act of trying to amend my halfhearted apology I received a letter from my sister, sent months earlier, informing me that my father had died. I knew he was sick and medicating himself with the drink, but I did not think the illness would kill him. I probably thought he would never die and would be there at my funeral still casting aspersions. But no, there it was in print: dead and buried in the family plot, and it was like my whole insides collapsed. We’d had our battles, to be sure—no one could deny that—but I had not thought they were permanent. I admit that I bawled like a child.

The storm of grief lasted about an hour—it was furious, black, and desolate—but once it passed I realized I felt lighter. It’s
a hardhearted thing to say but the sad news of my father’s death gave me a feeling not of victory or of dancing on his grave but of being cut loose from a past that was a blot on the mind and on the conscience, and as a sign that I was meant to do what my father had never dared. Since I was a boy I’d known I was made of different stuff from my brothers. They were born to the plow and pew while I craved the forest and woods and the vast, wild spaces. For better or for worse, I was fated to test my mettle in the west. If I didn’t make a fortune, I thought, I would live my life up to the hilt and satisfy that inner craving and have something to talk about in my dotage.

I wrote to Mother that I was sorry I had not been there for her during father’s passing and that she’d hear from me again when I made my fortune (and I could imagine her saying, “Well, that’s the last we’ll hear of him”). And that was that. The final strand to the past was severed. I was cut loose on the world, and within a week would be off to the savage country.

I selected a pony from the company stock that I paid for from my future riches and I bid my adieu to all my companions in the Rocky Mountain House, and then, three days before my departure, I was walking the waterfront when I came upon two men battling, one an Italian sailor with an oiled black mustache, and the other Henry Layton, the son of Gene Layton, who owned half the warehouses along the waterfront. Layton the younger was an infamous bachelor: a twenty-four-year-old dandy considered to be the most intelligent, unpleasant, and mischievous young man in St. Louis. It was in keeping with everything I knew about Layton to find him with his jacket off, surrounded by drunken riffraff, battling with a laborer. Layton and the Italian
exchanged blows for several minutes until Layton connected with a crosscut that snapped the Italian’s head back. Layton, being hot, jumped in to stomp the deckhand after he’d fallen and had to be dragged off, frothing. It was an ugly scene, and I wandered off thinking this a fitting ending to my stay in St. Louis—a dandy with the world at his fingertips stomping on an Italian deckhand.

That night I cleared out my room and left a pile of muskrat innards on the floorboards, like a turd. I put the innards on a scrap of deer hide so as not to stain, but I did leave it. The landlady had let me feel her tongue one too many times when I had no means of striking back, being her tenant. I left feeling vicious and wild and later remembered that pile of offal with a sick feeling. That sad old lady who was hanging on in youthful St. Louis and who took her bile out on the reckless young men who must have reminded her of her dead husband. I ought not to have left that nastiness. I know that now. That memory is a stain on the generally happy recollections of that time.

The next afternoon I stopped to bid Alene Chevalier farewell. I was decked out in my new leggins and deerskin and meant to steal a kiss before my departure, but as I neared the cottage who should be inside her fence but that blackguard Henry Layton, face bruised from the battle with the deckhand and the knuckles of his right hand scraped and swollen. Horace Bailey, a complacent, fat fellow, worth at least half a million, stood with Layton, both of them in black tailcoats and white cravats. I would have turned aside if I could have, as the show of money has always made me wilt. It has taken half a life to contain this feeling, but I have never quite extinguished it. I immediately regretted my deerskin and moccasins.

“William Wyeth in leggins like a booshway of the west,”
Alene called. “Come parley, you savage. You know Henry and Horace?”

I steadied myself, strode forward, and held out my hand. “Hello, gentlemen.”

Layton, who was a quick-witted fellow, played it off rather well.

“This blackguard watched me battling yesterday and did not come to my aid.”

“You needed little aid for stomping the man as he lay in the dust,” I said.

“Tried to stomp. Unsuccessfully,” he added, laughing. “But how good of you to mention that part of it, Wyeth.” He turned to Alene. “I tapped a laborer with my riding crop to save him from being trampled and the damned rogue cursed me for saving his life. My temper was high, I admit, and I carried the battle beyond the boundaries—for which I would have apologized if given half the chance. Don’t imagine I damaged the fellow. He was dancing a jig on the deck of a keelboat an hour later, waving a bottle that I had sent over, and thanking me for the diversion.”

“True,” Bailey said.

Motioning to my deerskin, Layton said, “What brings you here in that costume, Wyeth? Are you off to hunt squirrels and water rats?”

“I depart at dawn for the western drainages. I came to say goodbye.”

“For how many seasons?” fat Bailey blustered in a gruff voice.

“A year, two, maybe three. I’ll take the measure of it and see.”

“Which company?” Layton asked.

“Rocky Mountain.”

“Bravo, Wyeth. Up to the hilt.”

The Rocky Mountain Fur Company was considered to be the most recklessly aggressive of the trapping companies.

“I hear it’s magnificent country. Fertile and beautiful and savage and the whole world thirsting after it. I envy you. Truly,” Layton said in that half-mocking tone of his so I could not tell if he jested.

“I’ll end up some savage’s pin cushion, no doubt,” I said.

“But you’ll have done it,” Layton said. “It’s what I ought to be doing, but”—he flicked his belt hooks—“these damnable straps are like shackles.”

“Then take them off,” I said, and expected some jesting remark, but he only nodded and said, “True. My enslavement is my own doing.”

He cast a glance at Alene as he said this, and I noticed with a small satisfaction that she turned from his gaze.

“My enslavement comes only from my own ambition,” I said. “My family thinks me fainthearted and vacillating. I will show my worth in the savage country, and return a gentleman with a fortune.”

“A fortune will hardly be sufficient to make you a gentleman,” Alene said, laughing, and Layton checked to see how I took this barb.

“It will be sufficient to thrust beneath my brothers’ noses and show them that they were wrong about my deficiencies.”

“Or that they were right, which is why you succeeded,” Layton murmured, but seemed to approve of what I said.

I thought there could be no benefit in idling, not with the two dandies spectating and speculating on my station in life. I moved to make my departure.

“I’ll return in a year or more,” I said to Alene. “If I survive,
I’ll bring you a native’s headdress and a gourd of water from rivers that flow into the Pacific.”

“When you return, you’ll have been in the trapping country for at least a year,” Alene said. “I’ll be too timid for you.”

“I’ll be just brave enough to come for no reason,” I said under my breath, and she laughed—a light, cheerful sound. It was the one thing I’d said without preparation, and the one thing that went off well.

Furtively, Alene took something from her pocket wrapped in a pink slip of paper like that on which she wrote her ticket. Inside the creased parchment there was a Saint Christopher medallion on a silver chain.

“Take this,” she said. “Many don’t come back.”

She moved to affix the chain herself and I could see the places where her hands had been scrubbed raw and I smelled rosemary. I had to stoop, as I am a tall man, and she was hardly five foot. For a moment, as she put the chain around my neck, the tight brown coils of her hair were on my cheek and I felt her firm fingers on my shoulder, and the others watched with envy, which was satisfying.

“Don’t forget me while I’m on my travels,” I said.

“It’s you who’ll forget me with the squaws,” she said, laughing again, a light sound that I remembered later. I turned to her companions. Bailey waved a pudgy hand. Layton stood straight, clacked his heels, and saluted from the porch.

“Westward ho and all that, Wyeth. When you return I’ll come to hear of your adventures.”

That was good-natured, I admit. I held a hand up as I turned, an attempt at offhand gallantry, and departed. I walked to the loading flats along the river and stood on the banks with the geese
flying overhead and a keelboat’s sail unfurling and accordion music drifting by and let my new situation settle into me. Now I am cast out of all society, I thought, belonging to no one, on the cusp of everything, the world’s great heart beating inside me.…

I cringe now to think of all that youthful nonsense, but it warms me nonetheless.

After that minute of foolish reverie I went on to the warehouse where the recruits slept and where I had moved since leaving the lodging house. Buffalo robes lined the dirt floor with lanterns hanging from wooden hooks in the rafters and just outside the door an enormous iron cauldron on a
trois pied
burbled. Men sprawled playing bucking the tiger and I lay on a robe and looked at the ceiling planks where a moth darted. A veteran trapper with a gnarled beard and wearing deerskin leggins and jacket wandered over and sprawled out next to me, smoking a blackened calumet that he’d undoubtedly traded for on the trail. He said nothing until I looked at him, and he nodded and I asked him which brigade he was from.

“Andrew Henry’s,” he said.

“What was your take?”

“Two packs or just under. Hundred and fifty-two pelts a man.”

I did the calculations. That was a fair sum.

“How many in the company total?”

“Eighty-four.”

“How many gone under?”

“Seven. Four from the savages. Two from bears. One starved or froze.”

He didn’t say their names. Just how they died. Seven men out of eighty-four in a season. That was about average or even below average. He lay there smoking quietly. You could feel the wilderness
in his gestures. He was aware of everything around him and was comfortable with silence.