Snow Mountain Passage Read online

  To my father and mother, who brought their dreams to this western shore

  Epigraph

  Think of America, I told myself this morning. The whole thing. The cities, all the houses, all the people, the coming and going, the coming of children, the going of them, the coming and going of men and death, and life, the movement, the talk, the sound of machinery, the oratory, think of the pain in America and the fear and the deep inward longing of all things alive in America.

  —William Saroyan, in The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze

  Contents

  Cover

  Epigraph

  Map

  Prologue

  —PART ONE—: CROSSING

  Somewhere in Nebraska: JUNE 1846

  Lover, Husband, Father, Son

  Somewhere in Nevada: OCTOBER 1846

  Wounds

  Law and Order

  God’s Doing

  from The Trail Notes of Patty Reed: Santa Cruz, California: October 1920

  Floating Pictures

  His Dream

  His Heart’s Desire

  Another Man with a Secret

  Patriotism

  from The Trail Notes of Patty Reed: Santa Cruz, California: November 1920

  In the High Country

  —PART TWO—: ORCHARDS

  A Ray of Hope

  Voices

  Wild Horses

  Valentine

  Out of the Wilderness

  The Sight of His Flag

  He Doesn’t Want to Think

  from The Trail Notes of Patty Reed: Santa Cruz, California: December 1920

  Somewhere in California: DECEMBER 1846

  A Call to Arms

  Strangers

  Consuela

  A Common Enemy

  The Mustard Thicket

  Spoils of War

  from The Trail Notes of Patty Reed Santa Cruz, January 1921

  —PART THREE—: ANGELS

  Yerba Buena

  Kinship

  In the North Wind

  Homeward Bound

  Three Fathers

  A Web-footed Caravan

  What Eddy Heard

  from The Trail Notes of Patty Reed March 1921

  Springtime 1847

  from The Trail Notes of Patty Reed One More Entry

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  ALSO BY JAMES D. HOUSTON

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Map

  Prologue

  from The Trail Notes of Patty Reed

  Santa Cruz, California

  October 1920

  LAST night I dreamed again about my mother. She was standing in the snow. There were trees with snow-laden branches. She wore a long coat, and her hair hung loose. Her arms reached toward me. She was speaking words I could not hear. I ran through the snow, while her mouth spoke the silent words. I was young, a little girl, and also the age I am now. For a long time I ran toward her with outstretched arms. Finally I was close enough to hear her soft voice say, “You understand that men will always leave you.”

  I stopped running and in my mind called out to her, “No. It isn’t so!”

  Her mouth twitched, as if she were about to speak again. She wanted to say, “Listen to me, Patty.” She was trying to say it.

  I woke up then and spoke aloud. “Women leave you too.”

  I was speaking right to her, and I waited, expecting to hear her voice in my ear, as if she were close by me in the dark. I whispered, “Don’t you remember?”

  But she was gone.

  I dropped back against my pillow and lay there half the night trying to fall asleep so she would come to me again and speak again. I couldn’t sleep. I had started thinking about her life and papa’s life and all our lives, about who stays and who leaves who, and when, thinking how a man can be right there next to you and at the same time somehow gone off by himself, or maybe already gone away forever, how a mother can do that too, thinking then about all of them from those years so long ago, walking in and out of my mind like people in a pageant, ordinary people who did not expect such a crowd to be watching them pass by, papa and mama, my brothers and sister, the teamsters and mule skinners and grizzled husbands on their dried-up wagon seats and their women watching the trail ahead and the Indians who traveled with us from time to time, every kind of Indian you can think of, Sauk and Delaware and Sioux and Shoshone and Paiute and Washo and Miwok, along with all the others we met by accident on the way, though when you look back it seems anything but accidental.

  Now, this morning, from my porch I watch the road that runs beside the lagoon and down to the beach. Between the beach and this lagoon there is a rail line that follows the sand. It’s an odd sight. Hundreds of pilings support the track, like a centipede walking from town to town along the shoreline. Beyond the sand the water’s edge today is quiet, like a lake. Beyond the beach, beyond the rail line, the Pacific Ocean spreads and spreads.

  When I was a girl there were no trains anywhere yet out here. When we came through the mountains there was hardly any trail. Where the train cuts through the Sierra Nevada now, we made that trail. What a long road we have followed. And it has finally brought me here, to yet another house, where I have become another old woman looking out, looking back.

  The ocean I see is not what we came searching for. The farthest border of the land was not our goal, but the land itself. I should say, his goal—the farthest land my father could envision, where he would somehow be his own man at last or be a new man in some new way and have a hand in starting something fresh and bigger than himself. I am not saying this is how it turned out. But these were his dreams. He was a dreamer, as they all were then, dreaming and scheming, never content, and we were all drawn along in the wagon behind the dreamer, drawn along in the dusty wake.

  When you are eight years old, of course, you worship your father, as I worshipped mine. We trusted him to get us through these situations no one could have prophesied ahead of time. As long as he was riding beside the wagon on his precious mare, we figured nothing could go too far wrong. That’s how tall he was in my eyes then.

  Seventy years and more go by, and everything looks different. I look at where the dreaming led papa, and led us, and I cannot excuse him as I could when I was eight, or eighteen, or even twenty-eight. Yet neither is it my place to judge him, as others have, or judge the way he contended with the trials of that crossing. Some have blamed him entirely, and blame him even now, after all this time, since he was the one who had organized the journey out of Springfield in the first place. Donner, of course, is the name that stuck, the one they have named the lake for and the route through the mountains and the monument that stands beside the route, with its brave-eyed family cast in bronze atop a pedestal raised as high as the snow that year was deep.

  Maybe it has been a blessing, in the end, since the name itself causes a shroud to fall around the one who utters it, having become a synonym for disaster, poor planning, and savage behavior that makes the average person shudder and also salivate for the gruesome details of what went on. I have read stories and articles of what happened during that hateful winter until I am sick to death. Newspaper reporters and photographers still come around here to hound and pester me as if the only thing I ever did my entire life was spend five months in the snow. And yet, with all these books and diaries and endless accounts and semi-truths and outright fantasies that have spread around the world, the story of our family has been only partly told, and the story of my father. I have had a hand in that, I admit. Like a good daughter I have tried through the years to paint him as a hero, even when I knew better. And I do not apologize one bit. Why should I? He did some things almost any
one could call heroic. But now that there’s only me and the last few others still alive, there’s no harm saying he did other things that gathered enemies to him like an open jar of jam will gather ants and blowflies, and this cannot be denied.

  You take his wagon—a good example of what I’m talking about. Did he foresee that it would be the biggest contraption on the western trail? Did he foresee that his children would be envied and pursued by others hoping for the chance to ride along and test the springs in the fancy seats? Did it occur to him that other men would laugh behind his back, calling it ingenious, but also grandiose, while women would resent his wife for traveling as if she were some kind of Arabian princess?

  “If they’d have thought of it,” I once heard papa say in his own defense, “they’d all be riding along like this.”

  It takes you half a lifetime to figure out what your folks were really up to when you were young. Eventually you come to know them and what they were capable of. You get to be my age, their very natures lurk within your own, as year by year more and more of who they were is revealed to you. Some things I never heard my mother say with her living voice, I hear her saying now, her voice alive somewhere within me. Her face visible somewhere in my face. I look in the mirror. I say, There’s mama. There’s papa.

  Sometimes very early, before it gets light, I will still see him the way he looked the day we left Illinois. In his face I see true pleasure and a boyish gleam that meant his joy of life was running at the full. I see him with his hat tipped back, standing by the wagon he designed himself, the one other travelers would come to call the Palace Car. Everyone else who started west had been content with horses, mules, oxcarts, Conestogas. But not James Frazier Reed. A double-decker Palace Car that took four yoke to pull it, with upholstered seats inside, and a thoroughbred racing mare, and hired hands, and brandy after dinner—that was papa’s vision of being a pioneer. At least, when we started out it was. I have to say this for him, his vision was not like anyone else’s I have heard of.

  —PART ONE—

  CROSSING

  Somewhere in Nebraska

  JUNE 1846

  THEY HAVE BEEN following the sandy borders of the Platte through level country that changes little from day to day, an undulating sea of grasses broken here and there by clumps of trees along the river. Jim Reed likes it best in late afternoon, the low sun giving texture to the land, giving each hump and ripple its shadow and its shape, while the river turns to gold, a broad molten corridor.

  He likes being alone at this time of day, with the mare under him. He wears a wide-brim hat, a loose shirt of brown muslin, a kerchief knotted around his neck. His trousers are stuffed into high leather boots, and his rifle lies across the saddle. He has been scouting ahead, in search of game, and now, as he takes his time returning, his reverie is interrupted by the sight of another rider heading toward the wagons. As the man and horse draw nearer, Reed recognizes him and calls out.

  “Mr. Keseberg!”

  The German is not going to stop, so Jim overtakes him.

  “Keseberg, hold on! What are you carrying there?”

  “Something for my wife, to help her sleep a little easier.”

  Jim rides in closer. Two shaggy hides are heaped across the pommel. “Looks like buffalo.”

  “Indeed it is.”

  Jim has not seen a buffalo for several days. Keseberg isn’t much of a shot, in any event, nor could he have skinned a creature for its hide, even had he somehow brought one down.

  “May I ask where it comes from?”

  “This was a gift.”

  “A gift?”

  “From a dead Indian. The best Indian is a dead Indian. Isn’t that what you Americans say?”

  Keseberg seems to think this is funny. His mouth spreads in a boastful grin.

  “Some say that. I do not.”

  “But surely you will agree that these are fine specimens.”

  Keseberg is a handsome fellow, with penetrating blue eyes and a full head of blond hair that hangs to his collar. Knowing that he crossed the ocean less than two years ago, Jim is willing to make allowances. He wants to get along with this man, though he does not like him much. They will all need one another sooner or later.

  “Have you had much experience with Indians, Keseberg?”

  “As little as possible.”

  “If these robes come from a funeral scaffold, you’d better put them back.”

  His smile turns insolent. “So you can ride out later and take them for yourself?”

  “When I want a buffalo robe I will trade for it, not steal it.”

  “And in the meantime you would leave these out here to rot in the sun and in the rain.”

  This remark seems to please Keseberg. His face is set, as if all his honor is at stake and he has just made a telling point. Clearly he has no idea what he has done, nor does he care.

  Jim looks off toward the circle of wagons, which are drawn up for the night about a quarter mile away. He does not see himself as a superstitious man. He sees himself as a practical man. Stealing robes from a funeral scaffold is simply foolish for anyone to try, given all they’ve heard about the Sioux. It nettles him; it riles him. He does not like being snared in another man’s foolishness.

  Near the wagons he sees animals grazing, children running loose, burning off the day’s stored restlessness. Women hunker at the cooking fires. His wife will soon be laying out a tablecloth wherever she can find a patch of grass. “We’re going to stay civilized,” she will say to someone, once or twice a day, “no matter how far into the wilderness we may wander.”

  Such a poignant scene it is, and all endangered now by the thoughtless greed of this fellow who pulled up to the rear of the party on just such an evening and asked if he could travel with them. George Donner had met the man briefly in St. Louis before they crossed the Mississippi. At the time Jim had no reason to protest. Keseberg is young and fit, somewhere in his early thirties, and he is not a drifter or a desperado as some of the younger, single riders have turned out to be. He looks prosperous enough. He has two full wagons, one driven by a hired man. He has six yoke of oxen, two children, a pretty wife. She can barely speak English, but Keseberg speaks quite well for one so recently arrived. He is something of a scholar, too, knows four languages in all, or so he claims. The other German travelers have welcomed him, and so has Donner, whose parents come from Germany. Jim has never had any trouble with Germans. But he sees now that he is going to have trouble being civil to Keseberg. Rumors have been circulating that he beats his wife. This is why she wears so many scarves and bonnets, Margaret whispers, even on the warmest days. Jim shrugged this off at first. Now he wonders. Into Keseberg’s eyes has come a look that seems to say he is capable of such things. Defiant. Selfish.

  “Mr. Keseberg, these robes are not yours to keep.”

  “Nonsense,” he says.

  Jim’s color rises. “They have to be returned!”

  With sudden gaiety that could be a form of mockery, Keseberg says, “My God, man! The sun is going down! The day is done! My dinner will be waiting!”

  He gallops away toward the wagons, sitting tall, as if he is a show rider in a circus troupe.

  By the time Jim catches up to him, Keseberg has dismounted and is holding high one of the long robes for his wife to see, speaking endearments in German as he presents her with this gift, for his sweet one, the companion of his heart, for his dearest Phillipine. In front of her he has turned boyish, a schoolboy bringing something home for his mother, and she is smoothing down her skirt with nervous hands, as if preparing to throw this robe around her shoulders. She wears a bonnet, though the sun has nearly set, and she wears a scarf wrapped around her neck, while above the scarf her cheeks are flushed with happiness.

  Half a dozen emigrants from other wagons have stopped whatever they were doing to watch, and you might think a fiddler has just touched bow to string and these two are about to dance the prairie jig wrapped together in a buffalo robe. She is
like a girl at a dance. He is laughing a wild, high, adolescent laugh, as Reed climbs off the mare.

  “Keseberg, you idiot!”

  Turning to the small circle of observers, with his hands thrown wide, Keseberg says, “Why is this man calling me a criminal?”

  “You are a criminal! Dammit, man. If the Sioux come after us, you and I will be killed, our wives will be taken, our children too!”

  He is shouting. His eyes are wide and fierce.

  Someone calls out, “Hey Jim, what’s got into you?”

  “These are burial robes! But Keseberg thinks they belong to him!”

  “Better him than the Indians,” one fellow says.

  “Haw haw,” laughs another.

  “I don’t know,” says a third. “Wouldn’t mess with them Sioux.”

  “Me neither,” says someone else. “Ain’t worth no buffalo skins.”

  “I wouldn’t mind pickin’ off a brave or two,” the first fellow says. “Whatta we got rifles for?”

  “I think Jim is right. Maybe you’d pick off a few, but you wouldn’t live to tell the story. Any way you look at it, we’d be outnumbered a hundred to one, and don’t you think otherwise. It ain’t worth it. I’d get rid a them hides right now.”

  A dozen more have joined the circle, and the commentary spreads into a noisy debate. Some envy Keseberg’s trophies and are content to stand feasting their eyes on his handsome wife, imagining how she will look inside the wagon relaxing on these soft, seductive robes. Others grasp the full weight of this predicament, among them George Donner, an elder in the party, with the look of a patriarch, his face wide, his jaw firm, his hair silver. Though often regarded as a leader, he lacks Jim’s eagerness to take command.

  Donner listens a while, then looks at Keseberg. Quietly he says, “Jim is right. You ought to do what he says, Lewis, and the sooner the better.”

  Now Keseberg cannot look at his wife, who has been mystified by all the turmoil, her eyes darting wildly from voice to voice. She understands enough to fear that her new possession will soon be taken from her, and she clutches the robe to her chest. For the German this is very hard medicine, but he respects George Donner. “All right,” he says. “All right. I will do it first thing in the morning.”