They called this place Camp Hope because Frémont had announced that he would send a relief party to the Mexican settlements. We had dragged most of the packs over the saddle to the southerly drainage in two days, but even on Christmas Day a few men were trailing the three miles between camps. Ben and Richard Kern were among them and reported seeing two or three surviving mules at Camp Dismal, miserably awaiting their fate.
So much for Williams’s claims about seeing spirits, I thought.
Alexis Godey became chef de cuisine on Christmas Day, preparing a wondrous feast, given the paucity of our stores. We did enjoy the elk that the colonel had set aside, along with minced mule pies that reminded me of haggis. Godey spread remarkable cheer through the camp, wandering from one mess to another. These were located in snow holes so deep we could not see the neighboring messes or the men at them.
But the good cheer was a damnable fraud. There was not a man among us who did not wonder whether this would be his last Christmas or whether we would ever get off that mountain. The cheer was an artifice, a sweet jam spread over the stark reality of our circumstances. The truth was that this company of scarecrows sat on a mountaintop a hundred miles from the nearest settlement and was running out of food. Its men were weakened by altitude, cold, and poor diet, for none of us could eat enough to replace what was burned away in our labors. We were shod in decrepit boots that shipped snow with every step. Such mules as might still be alive at Camp Dismal were useless.
I kept my thoughts to myself, not wanting to be unseemly. I also didn’t want to spoil such miserable pleasures as the men might find on that Christmas Day. What troubled me most was that we were Frémont’s prisoners. He held our fates in his hand. And now, having decided to send for relief, he turned to Blackstone’s commentaries, once again choosing to impress his eerie calm on us by this means, rather than take an active hand in overcoming the crisis. I was not impressed. I could see that his regulars, those veterans of the previous expeditions, were awed. There Frémont was, reading a law book, while the rest of us wondered whether on the morrow or the next day or the day after that, we might perish.
I both admired and loathed the man, and I itched to make my feelings known but chose instead to honor the birth of the Prince of Peace. I wanted to find the good in the man, but I could not bring myself to it. I wanted to seek peace on earth that Christmas and give Frémont my peace, but it was beyond me. At least I could bury my private thoughts behind a wall of holiday cheer. I had always kept my feelings to myself. I kept to myself in the Queen’s hussars, and I would in this place and among these Yankees, no matter how I might seethe inside. Let other men whine; Captain Cathcart would not. By God, I was a Queen’s man and I would act like it.
It was a cheery camp, with ample deadwood to feed our fires and good elk steaks to fill our bellies, cut from a frozen haunch the colonel had kept for this moment. It seemed luxurious after the hardships we had endured. But I could only think of those dead mules, whose ghosts would celebrate no Christmas ever. This was an odd sentiment in a born hunter, but it gripped me as I stood there, studying our distant and bland leader who was poring over his law texts in the most theatrical manner he could manage.
He deigned to join us when Godey had the elk roast well seared and sliced for us, and I watched him slowly put the ribbon betwixt the pages and close his leathern volume, smile benevolently at his underlings, and drift toward the nearest mess, Godey’s own, where Frémont’s manservant, Jackson Saunders, and Godey’s young nephew, Theodore McNabb, made their home. With a soft wave of his bare hand, he summoned us. We gradually collected there, around that snow pit where Godey and his nephew were cooking meat.
Frémont stood at the far edge, smiling, scarcely bothering to bundle up. His veins ran ice water, and one rarely saw him smothered in leather and fur and wool.
“We’ll take a little detour from the thirty-eighth parallel,” he said.
The very idea of it startled me. Was this man still thinking of a rail line over the 38th parallel? And not about his weakened men, his dwindling food, his lost mules, his perilous camp?
“We’re not far, actually, from whatever help we may need. Our friend Bill Williams tells me help is available down the Rio Grande, not more than a hundred miles distant, and most of that downslope and over flat river bottoms, which should be full of game. We’ll need to reach lower altitudes where we may find game, and tomorrow we’ll begin. I’m sending a relief party to the Mexicans at Abiquiu on the Chama River, and the relief party can also continue to Taos on the Rio Grande if more help is needed. I’ll appoint Henry King its commander, and he will be accompanied by Frederick Creutzfeldt, Tom Breckenridge, and our guide, Bill Williams. I’m also sending Godey partway, to find a way down the mountain for us. While this takes place, we will begin moving downslope by stages. In short, we’ll be moving toward the relief party that will be coming for us.”
So the obsessed colonel had finally decided to do something. It seemed sensible enough.
This was indeed a Christmas gift. I looked at the colonel benignly and thought maybe even a testy old Cathcart could endure the man.
They debated how long it would take for the relief party to reach the settlements and return with mules and supplies. It seemed no great trip, and Old Bill Williams supposed it might take four days, and then the relief could be back in a dozen days, sixteen at the outside, given that the company would steadily be descending this drainage and heading into the Rio Grande Valley. It heartened the men, and they plunged into their Christmas repast with relish.
The next morning, after we had scraped away the usual six or eight inches of fresh snow with our mess plates, we prepared to break camp. But before that, we helped ready King’s relief party. Frémont gave them four days of rations, enough to see them to the settlements, or so everyone thought. These consisted of a pack of macaroni and some sugar and some mule meat. There was nothing else to offer. Godey supplied himself and made sure his rifle was in good condition. He was a born hunter, and these men would descend to the river bottoms, where game might be found.
Four days, twenty-five miles a day. We watched them slide and skid down this drainage, along a nameless creek that tumbled through a steep and difficult gorge.
“All right, we’ll build sledges,” the colonel said, and we set about doing that, using axes to shape runners and fashion crossbars, which we lashed in place with rawhide. The progress was slowed by snow. It was no easy task to hack down limbs and shape the runners into anything we could use, but we were inspired by the knowledge that the relief had left, and we would soon follow toward safety.
I was optimistic. We would load the packs and drag them downhill without great difficulty, benefitting from the tug of gravity. Little did I know. But we toiled at that sledge-building project for days, watching our macaroni and mule meat diminish to the point that I wondered where our next meals would be coming from. Then, amazingly, the Creoles managed to drive three live mules over the saddle from Camp Dismal, and we all were heartened. The wretched mules were no good for packing, but we would have meat on the hoof.
On December 27 we set out, dragging the sledges down the creek bottom. The day was mild and we were in high spirits. But the canyon ahead was narrowing and forested right to the banks of the rushing creek. Still we kept on, believing that the relief party ahead of us was making faster time and was now probably out of the mountains and onto the great plain marking the Rio del Norte. What fools we were.
The mild weather held, and we proceeded down the drainage with little difficulty and amazing good cheer. The brooding sensation that we were at the margin left us. We were alive, had food enough, and would soon be in the Rio Grande Valley with its game. I even found myself revising my opinion of Frémont a little; not that I admired his judgment, but at least he had not plunged us over the brink, and it seemed likely that we would soon be enjoying the comforts of the New Mexicans. We made a cheerful camp that evening.
Then we encountered Godey, slogging his way up the drainage. We collected around him, eager for news. But what he imparted was entirely dismaying.
“We can’t get through down there,” he said. “It’s a narrow canyon, choked with downed timber and boulders. You have to cross the creek a dozen times an hour. There’s no other way except through this choked-up maze.”
“You’re saying we can’t use the sledges?” Frémont asked.
“No. It’s too steep, jammed with boulders, and the only passage is the creek itself in places. Sledges are worthless. And the creek drops so fast, with rapids, there would be no hanging on to packs.”
We stared at one another. We were three days down a steep-sided canyon with no way out. What Godey was saying, though no one wanted to put it into words, was that we would have to retrace our steps, drag the sledges back to the top of the mountain, and find another way down—that or leave our equipment behind.
The Creoles responded first. Without a word they turned the sledges and began the weary climb that would take them toward the Christmas camp, and then over the first saddle into the next drainage.
The silence was palpable. I was determined to wrestle my way up that slope, but some of the men just wilted.
“Where are the relief men now?” Frémont asked.
“I’m not even sure they’re at the bottom of that canyon. They were crawling over deadfall and rock and wading the rapids.”
“They were to reach the settlements today,” Frémont said.
“They’re hardly on their way,” Godey said.
“Did they find game?”
Godey simply smiled and shook his head.
They had a pack of macaroni to hold them. I calculated that they would take two weeks or more to reach the settlements, and food would run out long before, unless they made meat. Still, they had Williams with them. He might make meat. But why had he let them descend that morass? Did he know less about this country than he let on? It was a mystery.
I eyed Ben Kern, who was feeling poor, and wondered if he could make it up that trail. I thought maybe the altitude was weakening him. Whatever the case, he was utterly unable to drag a heavy sledge uphill.
“I’ll help ye, Ben,” I said.
He simply shook his head and began to drag a sledge mounded with packs up the snowy grade. I watched, worried. His every step was labored. The air was still rarefied, and he had been struggling for breath.
Round and about, the company was turning sledges around and starting the weary hike uphill, through heavy drifts. At least we had broken a trail, but if it snowed, we would be fighting our way up the mountain through massive drifts once again.
No one spoke, but I knew the cheer that had pervaded the company only minutes before had fled it, and now we were all privately pondering the odds and wondering whether fate would visit us after all.
The mild weather held, and that was a blessing. But this climb seemed longer and harder than any I had ever known in my life. Frémont strode ahead cheerfully, oblivious to the suffering behind him. What good was it to haul all this stuff? Most of it was mule tack, though scarcely a mule lived and the last of them would soon be food. He could have cached the tack, but didn’t. He plainly was determined to haul it up and down the mountain to save himself the purchase of replacements later. But now we were human mules, and the halters were over our own snouts, and no one objected.
Ben Kern was so weak and gray that now and then I took hold of the cord he used to drag his sledge.
“Take a breath, Ben, and I’ll keep us up,” I said.
He didn’t object but sat in the middle of a snowbank, his lungs rising and falling, his bluish face haggard. Still, the doctor was game, and soon enough he caught up and relieved me of my double burden.
Little by little we ascended that mountain, worn and melancholic and silent. There yet was hope. Down below, somewhere, four experienced men were working steadily toward the settlements. Frémont had entrusted King with some sum of money, the exact amount I did not know, with which to purchase whatever was needed. There would be gold to offer to the New Mexicans, and gold always spoke loudly.
We arrived in Christmas Camp and surveyed the ruin mutely, pausing only to see whether there might be anything to salvage. But such carcasses that existed had vanished under several feet of fresh snow, and we could not cut another mule steak from any.
We needed still to top the saddle to the next drainage, and we did, though I am not sure how any of us managed it. Sheer grit, I would say. Ben Kern was so gray I feared for his life. But we somehow descended to a suitable campsite and quit. We were falling behind the colonel’s party, but we could go no further. It was December 30, 1848.