The colonel tasked us with caching the packs at the rocky landmark at the edge of the great valley, but we were too far gone to do it. The men were strung up the nameless creek. The Kerns and Cathcart were the farthest behind. With the cruel storms of January upon us, every step was misery, and yet we persisted, sliding the heavy packs downslope or dragging them across flats. All because the colonel required it.
But the food had given out. The Kerns’s mess was boiling rawhide and parfleches. Doctor Kern was particularly weak, and I thought for sure he was gone from us. But he lingered on, kept alive by warm fires. The Kerns were reluctant to abandon the hut they had built, but I urged them on. We needed to make our way toward the settlements.
The thing that was gnawing at us more and more was the silence. We saw no relief. We awaited each hour the arrival of burros laden with food, blankets, and needful things, but no one arrived. The sixteen days that Colonel Frémont, Godey, and Preuss had calculated to be the maximum required to get relief to us were almost gone, and I heard that Frémont was anxious, pacing about his camp below us, and sending scouts out every little while to try to locate the relief.
Meanwhile the storms returned, and we were not only starved but also newly frostbitten. Men stumbled on bloodied feet, where frost and thaw and frost again had ruined flesh and set it to bleeding. During all this movement, we passed Proue’s body, inert and half-covered with snow, and there was nothing we could do about this horror. Then Elijah Andrews gave out. He and I were trying to get down to the river, but he simply quit, lay down in the snow.
“I’m done,” he said.
“Elijah, you’ve got to come along,” I said. “Got to.”
He shook his head and slumped into the snow. I knew what lay ahead for him and was determined to prevent it. Just up a shallow slope was a cave, and I somehow dragged him there, where at least he was beyond the curse of the winds and out of the whirl of snow. But he was well nigh inert, and I knew time was fleeing me. I struggled up the slope, needing to reach the timber, but the Arctic blast felled me. Atop the ridge, I found what I needed and tumbled dead piñon down that snowy precipice. I had to work in fits and starts, taking advantage of the slightest cessation of the gale, but in time I tumbled a lot of dry pine down to the cave, and there, in the shelter, with a little powder and flint and steel, I started a fire somehow and watched the wary flame slowly lick at the sticks. It gave no heat at all, but I saw that it cheered Andrews and gave him heart. The warmth was a long time coming, but the cave served my purpose, and soon Andrews was resting comfortably. About then Captain Cathcart and Richard Kern found us and tumbled in, hard-pressed by the storm. And thus we staved off trouble, or so we thought.
We had among us one cup of macaroni and one of sugar, and this we prepared to divide with perfect scruple, there being nothing else. But poor Andrews, still numb, with muscles that did not do his bidding, tumbled the pot over, and the flames soon covered the last miserable bit of provender among us all. No one spoke. No one blamed Elijah. We stared sorrowfully in the fire, locked in our own thoughts. In extremity, I don’t think with words, but with images. I saw my mother’s bread pudding before me, and a pink rib roast, dripping with juices. I saw eggs frying on a skillet, their yellow yolks mingling with their whites. I smelled my mother’s yeasty bread, cooling on her counter. What was I doing here, in this place?
I could never manage my hunger. It had become a dull ache, a throb, and worse, an estate fraught with menace. There was something sinister in it, this conjuring of food, not a thing to eat and a thousand miles from succor, or so it seemed. There was slow death in it. There was weakness; I lurched and wobbled when I walked, as if my protesting muscles were at their limits.
Cathcart clambered to his feet and stepped into the blizzard, and then stumbled back into our shelter.
“I thought I heard the relief,” he said. “Could have sworn it.”
At least we were warm. Elijah Andrews recovered as the heat of the fire bounced off the walls of our rocky abode. Only two hours earlier, he had stared up at me, surrender in his face. It was cold that murdered; starvation would only weaken us, at least for a few days more.
If only a stray mule would wander by.
The storm never ceased. I discovered a ball of thong in our midst, cut it into strings, and boiled it. I prowled the cliffside and found wolf bones. These we pulverized between stones and added to our thong soup. We knew that others of our company had been caught as well and were harboring in the hollows of that cliff, awaiting whatever fate would bring. There seemed so little we could do; our fates were no longer in our hands.
When the storm lifted two days later we stumbled our way toward the colonel’s camp, down in the great valley, seeing no game all the way. If there were animals anywhere near, they had been driven to shelter somewhere. The thing we had hoped for, an abundance of game down in the wide valley of the Rio Grande, was nothing more than a thin dream. I made my body work, one step at a time, step by step on frozen feet, as we staggered toward the colonel’s camp. The rest stumbled, too. We helped one another. When someone wanted to quit, we hectored him, made him continue.
By January 9, 1849, we were all out of the mountains, save for old Proue, whose frozen body lay mutely behind us, buried in drifts. A few of us remained at the cache; the rest had collected in Frémont’s camp. That day was important. It was the day we should have relief, even if King’s company had been greatly slowed. It was sixteen days past the Christmas camp, when the colonel sent King and Williams and Creutzfeldt and Breckenridge off, with our salvation in their hands.
What had happened? No one knew, but the prospects were forbidding. Frémont sent scouts downriver, but they saw only silence and cruel white snow. How we ached for the jingle of harness bells or the crunch of hooves on snow or the shouts or shots that meant our relief was coming. Down there, out of the mountains, the wind was crueler than ever, but we found shelter in the timbered banks along the river, and so endured. The few rations still in the colonel’s possession were carefully divided. We got a spoonful of macaroni or a bit of sugar dissolved in warm water. But no one died, and we had ample deadwood and shelter, and since we weren’t moving, our tormented feet had a chance to heal. I pulled my boots off and discovered deep cracks between my toes, with raw flesh visible in them. Some leaked blood. Strange white patches pocked my toes and ankles. The terrible truth was that my feet were better off than most.
Then, on the eleventh, the colonel decided that the King party was not going to reach us, and he resolved to form a new relief, consisting of himself; his manservant, Saunders; Alexis Godey; Godey’s young nephew, Theodore; and the little scientist, Preuss, who had weathered over several expeditions as a resourceful and tough man.
Frémont gathered us together on his departure. He looked gaunt and hollow eyed and was suffering from snow blindness more than most of us. And his voice had an odd, thin ring to it.
“I’m taking a party with me to get relief. The King party should have been here by now. Take heart; we plan to move fast, make up for lost time. As fast as you can, head for the Rio Grande and follow it toward the Mexican settlements. As fast as you can, bring the baggage to the Rio Grande and meet the relief party at Conejos, Rabbit River, which you can’t miss. It’s a summer settlement for herders. There will be shelters. Maybe even some stored grains. Look for relief there, eh? You can hunt along the way; we’re in game country now. In a day or two, after we collect at Taos, I’ll be going to California by the southern route.”
I stared at the man, astonished that he was thinking about that leg of the trip, even while we were caught in our extremity far to the north. Had we just heard what we had heard? I saw others staring at Frémont, not believing their ears. But Frémont was oblivious to our disbelief and continued on.
“Now, I’m putting Lorenzo Vincenthaler in command. He’s a veteran of my California expedition, and he will see to your safety.”
Vincenthaler. I knew so little of him. He was one of the quiet sorts, a part of Frémont’s inner circle of veterans, and not one at any of my messes.
I knew he was an Ohio man and a veteran of the war. I saw no difficulty in it and imagined he would be as good as any. And yet one could not help but wonder at the colonel’s choice.
The next two days were miserable in the extreme, as we hauled the rest of the colonel’s luggage with us and subsisted on boiled parfleche, which produced a repellent, thin gruel. We dragged his barometers and thermometers, spare rifle parts, kettles and spoons, heavy rubberized camp mats, iron rods, canvas, and packsaddles. Then, at last, we set forth along the frozen Rio del Norte, choosing the ice in the middle because it was free of snow and because we could drag the packs more easily. But the farther we pierced into that naked valley, the worse the winds, and soon they were sapping what little energy we possessed. We saw no game and were too snow-blind to kill any.
There was no point in staying. The sooner we headed downriver, the sooner we would meet our relief. Two of the Frenchmen in the company, Vincent Tabeau and Antoine Morin, decided to go ahead. They were veteran voyageurs. They had been with the colonel on all three of his previous expeditions. They were seasoned and familiar with hardship. Now they were going ahead, perhaps to find game, perhaps to meet up with our relief. Whatever their private intent, they left the day after the colonel, with Vincenthaler’s blessing.
Our new commander divided the last of the edibles, doling out exactly one cup of sugar to each man, two tallow candles, and a mismatched supply of parfleche leather and thong to boil down to a foul gruel. That was it. There was nothing more to support life.
The rest of us started down the river the next day, January 13, making our slow progress south. We had resolved to stay together and help one another, but the weaker men soon lagged behind. I was among the weaker. I was in the company of the Kerns and Andrews and Cathcart, whose ragged clothes flapped about him. But I didn’t suppose I looked much better. And Ben Kern could barely walk, managing only a few paces at a time before he had to rest. Plainly, it would be a slow, hard trip.
Now the dazzling white world rendered our eyes useless. Our heads ached from squinting; we leaked tears that froze to our cheeks and beards. We pulled hats down over our brows, anything that would spare us that glare.
But if the snow blindness was a torment, our frost-ruined feet were worse. Every step was a torment. Our toes and ankles had frozen and thawed and frozen and whitened and blackened and turned to pulp. Then the California Indian lad, Manuel, surrendered. His feet were black. He begged Vincenthaler to shoot him, and when our commander refused, the young man turned back, intending to die in the camp we had left behind us, and no amount of urging on our part could change his mind. The last I saw of him, he was hobbling back, back, back to a sure death. It was a horror I could scarcely swallow. But that was only the beginning.
Later that very day, Henry Wise, a hardy Missourian, simply sat down in the snow and perished. I watched him sit; I watched him slump. I watched him slowly tumble onto his side and await his fate. None of us could help him. There was only that awful silence that comes from witnessing the things our very eyes were seeing, and then we had to leave him there on the river ice and continue on our way, the dark sight we had witnessed crowding our minds and weighing like stones in our bosoms. Joaquin and Gregorio, the other Indian boys, gently covered Wise’s body with brush and snow, and I marveled that they had the energy to do it.
That night, as we sheltered as best we could from the bitter wind, a new horror rose among us. Another veteran, Carver, from Wisconsin, went mad. He rambled through our messes, ranting, saying he would go on and find food. He had a plan. All night we listened to his exhortations, and with the following dawn he drifted away, and we could do nothing to oppose it. It is odd, how well I remember my very last glance, remember the exact expression on Carver’s face. And the last on Wise’s. These were moments when I was staring into the great void.
The horrors had not passed. The Frenchman, Tabeau, who had rejoined us, began to rave. This, he said, was a visitation from God. His suffering was beyond what any mortal can endure, but somehow he survived the night. When we once again started down the icy river, he stumbled along as best he could for an hour or so, utterly blinded by the glare, and then sat down. His old friend Morin sat beside him, the two choosing to depart from this life together, and that was the last we saw of them. They never caught up with the rest of us again.
After we made camp, the rest of us drifted in one by one, each man on his own, all semblance of a company gone. We had gone through the last of our provisions, even the miserable leather.
Vincenthaler had only one thing to say to us as we struck our fires and warmed our tormented feet.
“You’re on your own now,” he said. “I can do no more.”