June 29th
Today we reached Fort John, on the bank of the Laramie River. The distance is said to be 650 miles from Westport, and undoubtedly the most gentle stretch of our whole journey is now behind us. We have averaged eighty miles per week, which has pleased everyone. Pasture for the stock has been plentiful and our oxen are in good shape. We rest here for five days. All the talk is of the war that has started with Mexico, and how men are needed to go and fight. We expect to be more concerned with coming challenges and choices of route, when we reach the mountains. There are very few passes across the Divide that will take a wagon.
My sister’s hand is quite restored after the dog bite. Lizzie has grown a whole inch since we set out. My mother has a persistent cough, but is scarcely weakened by it..
There are disagreements as to how great our loads should be. Mr Tennant will inspect them all and issue advice as to what might be disposed of.
My journal entry was a good summary, I felt, of the point we had reached. And yet it did not quite capture the prevailing mood. As at the outset, one heard numbers being repeated on all sides. We had done under a third of our journey in eight weeks. There would be four more months of much greater difficulty as well as much tedious travelling. Nobody felt entirely comfortable or optimistic about this. But we had certainly passed a point of no return.
The main building of the fort was made of mud, in a style we had never seen before. The walls were thick, and the construction formed a rectangle around an open courtyard. News from all points in the world awaited us. A whole room was assigned to the quantities of mail awaiting the travellers. My father had a long letter from his cousin back in Ireland, describing in harrowing terms the terrible famine there, caused by a blight on the potatoes. The worst of it had passed when he wrote – in the spring of the year – and deaths from starvation were no longer very numerous, but he recounted tales of families my father and grandmother had known who were destroyed by it. Those who had not left for the Americas had been suffering dreadfully. We passed the letter from hand to hand, and I think we all felt we were fortunate by comparison. The Collinses had done the right thing in leaving Old Ireland when they did, and my father was understandably complacent as a result. It was far from a new idea – rather something I had known all my life. The waves of poor Irish now arriving on the eastern coast and tainting the very name of our country were in general not enjoying life in America as we had done. We felt ourselves to be special, singled out by my grandmother’s foresight in anticipating the rush by more than two decades. This self-congratulatory attitude coloured our migration westwards. Again, we had a sense that we were in the vanguard, and thus most likely to find the finest land in Oregon, the best employment and the prime social positions. We would quickly become a senior family, establishing ourselves on the heights and behaving with condescension to those who came after.
I had letters of my own. In Providence I had enjoyed a close friendship with a girl named Madeleine, from a well-to-do Catholic family. At the same time as we departed for the west, her father took it into his head to try for a new life in California. ‘The climate is what decided him,’ wrote my friend. They had travelled by river for thousands of miles, and Madeleine wondered why anyone would be so foolish as to opt for a wagon train when it was all so much quicker and easier on a steamer. But there was danger of another sort, she admitted. California was contested land, not at all certain of its future. There were soldiers massing on all sides and talk of war. Her letter was dated the 2nd May. According to the more recent news at the Fort, a real war had broken out at almost precisely that date. Recruitment officers were waiting for us to arrive, so they could persuade our young men to go and fight with them away down in the south.
We had been aware, of course, before the start of our journey, that such a war was likely. It had been a minor but pertinent deciding factor in my father’s decision to head for Oregon, and not California. In Oregon, the British were a fading threat, by all accounts. They had drawn back, albeit without any official statement of intent, from their plans to include the region in their Colonies, and contented themselves with Vancouver, further to the north. Oregon, said everyone, was peaceful and fertile and every bit as habitable as California was. It was less arid, cooler and greener than the country to the south.
It came as a shock, nonetheless, to encounter men fixed on taking our boys off to fight in a war. Reuben, Abel, Benjamin, Allen, Jude were all prime material for their purposes, and were all coerced into listening to earnest speeches about the future of the United States depending on them. Without the great territories of Texas and California and everything lying between them, the new country would be sorely depleted and insecure. Mexico was a predatory nation, hungry for land and ruthless in its methods. Battles were being fought at that very moment, they told us, and men were urgently needed. The wagon train was amply supplied with mature men capable of dealing with the rigors to come as we crossed the Divide. Fewer mouths to feed would be an advantage, they said. As soldiers, the lads would receive payment, which they could conserve and use later to augment the new businesses and homesteads that would be waiting for them in Oregon when the war was won.
All this took place on the first morning after our arrival at the Fort. Relief turned to worry, mothers and sisters pale at the prospect of letting their sons and brothers go to war. Reuben, we murmured amongst ourselves, was less dispensable than many others, being the only male in the family other than my father. We asked each other how much power the recruitment officers really had – how voluntary was this sudden army service, in reality? Would the persuasion reach the point where resistance was impossible?
The older men were unsure of the rightful position to take. The fate of the country was of enormous importance in every way. If Mexico prevailed, expanding into California as far north as San Francisco and eastwards to the Mississippi, the loss of land would be tremendous. The whole thrust of the emigration would falter. Other elements would emerge to render life considerably less secure than we would like. Indians might capitalise on the defeat of the United States, Mormons would also take good advantage of any reduction in the numbers of migrants. The sacrifice, it was concluded, would have to be made. The young men would have to go and fight, for the good of us all.
And yet every family found convincing reasons why their sons should not go. Mr Franklin would be left with twelve-year-old Billy, two women and four small children. ‘That man is strong enough for two,’ said my father. ‘And Mrs Gordon is a useful sort of woman.’ I shuddered to myself at the notion that Mr Franklin’s put-upon sister-in-law might find herself with yet more work to do.
The Bricewoods assumed from the start that Henry would be exempted from any requirement to fight. ‘How so?’ demanded Papa. ‘Bonaparte was no taller than he is. Why should height be a requirement to fire a rifle or lead a mule train?’
Henry himself gave no indication as to his preferences. He perhaps had some idea of the cruel teasing that was liable to be his lot amongst crowds of soldiers. It was not merely his small stature, but his whole personality that would make it a torment for him. Or so I believed. It wrung my heart to think of it.
But I was more distressed by the prospect of Abel Tennant leaving. The bewildering magnetism that flowed between us had only strengthened with the passing weeks, and although I resolved to ignore it as far as I could, I made sure of putting myself in sight of him at least once each day. More and more I anticipated the warm surging that filled my body whenever he was close. It was like a drug, and brought with it the same mixture of delight and shame as whisky or laudanum might have done. Abel himself was hard to read. I had the impression that he put himself in my way more than he might have done, and that he took something of the same pleasure in coming close as I did. Of course there was no possible way that I could ask him. Even if I did, the reply would bring either despair or terror. I wondered, in the night, whether I might be in love with him. There was no other explanation that I could think of for the powerful urges that I could not ignore. And yet he was not at all the man I had imagined as a husband. He might have no discernible vices, but neither could I see any noteworthy virtues. The whole of Abel’s appeal lay in his handsome face, especially the eyes and their effect on me. And, I told myself, that meant there had to be a fine soul behind those eyes. There had to be a smouldering invisible personality simply waiting for the chance to reveal itself. I had counted on the coming months to give us both time to understand precisely what was happening and perhaps even to do something about it.
The recruitment officers were handsome upright men, in uniforms so clean and crisp they made us all look like ragamuffins and peasants. Even though we had dressed ourselves in the best clothes we could, most of the garments were badly creased from weeks crammed into trunks inside the wagons. Some were stained where there had been leaks. Mrs Gordon had a dark streak of ink on her skirt from where her brother-in-law had carelessly thrown his writing case on top of her clothes, in the final moments of packing. He had not felt any need to write anything since then, and the upended ink bottle had slowly shed its contents all over the fine cotton lawn. In addition, we were all burnished by the sun, however much we had pulled wide-brimmed bonnets and hats down over our faces. Noses were shining; cheeks roughened; hands especially darkened by sunlight and hard work. We were like slaves, grumbled Fanny. Her milky skin had always been her best feature, and the unaccustomed tanning had not suited her well at all.
For myself, it had had a more fortunate consequence. Almost all of my pimples had disappeared in the last week or so. The colour wrought by being outdoors all day was much kinder to me than to my sister.
Thanks to their good turnout and simple novelty, the officers attracted clusters of girls and young women wherever they went. There was a great deal of giggling and fatuous questioning and fluttering of eyelashes. The brothers of these females stood aside, with rueful faces. In consequence, many of them volunteered to fight, under the impression that the decision would make them more appealing to the fair sex. It was a long time before I grasped how deliberate this was on the part of the officers. The young migrants had been manipulated, and nothing their parents might say would sway them.
Not that the parents said a great deal. Anxiety and confusion rendered them mute. My mother repeatedly took my father aside and spoke in an urgent undertone to him that none of us could hear. There was no doubting the import, however. She was doing her best to persuade him to speak to Reuben in terms that would form a resolve in my brother to remain with the wagon train. My father patted her shoulder and shook his head and said something she did not find to her taste. I thought of all the tasks that Reuben routinely performed, every one of which would grow more onerous as the weeks passed. The land rose steadily for many hundreds of miles, as we could all too clearly see from where we stood. The South Pass through the mountains was spoken of in tones of awe and bravado. I overheard one conversation, however, which very much reduced my worries.
Jude Franklin was speaking with an older man who I took to be a scout. Jude was saying he could not settle his conscience comfortably if he left his family of women and children to the great struggle that would face them at the Pass.
‘The Pass is no cause for concern,’ said the scout. ‘You are imagining a narrow defile with great mountain walls on either side. It is nothing of the sort. South Pass is a gift from God, if ever there was one. No explorer or expedition has discovered another in the whole length of the Divide that will permit the passage of wagons. But here we have an easy stroll along a broad highway, that will deliver you into Oregon without losing a single ox.’
‘Broad highway?’ repeated Jude with a puzzled frown.
‘Twenty miles wide,’ nodded the man. ‘Ask anybody. You emigrants like to alarm yourselves needlessly, I know. All those terrors about Indians, bears, wolves, snakes. City folk, most of you, so it ain’t your fault exactly. Or else they’ll be farmers from some soft settled state like Pennsylvania, wishing life was somewhat more adventurous. Just listen to me. In a month, give or take, these wagons will be at the top of the world, looking down into the new lands, with the Pacific Ocean right ahead of you.’
‘You think it can be done with most of the young men missing?’
The scout scratched his head. ‘More work for the likes of me, I shouldn’t wonder.’ He noticed my eavesdropping and pointed an impolite finger my way. ‘And there are plenty of sturdy young women, I see, who can harness oxen and carry water when needed.’
‘More feeble old women and helpless babes,’ Jude shot back.
The scout rolled his eyes. ‘Your choice, son. I trust you were never promised a bed of roses, back there in Westport? The notion of manifest destiny is all very fine, and true enough, seems to me. But there’s a price to pay for so much cheap land as fertile as the Garden of Eden, and a secure future living on that good ground. You’ll value it all the more highly if you’ve had to wrestle a bit for it.’
‘I wouldn’t be wrestling, would I? I’d be far away killing Mexicans and never knowing what had befallen my family.’
‘Buying safety, son. Peace and prosperity can’t be had without a degree of killing. Look at your history books and see if I ain’t right.’
I smiled to think of this grizzled man, with his sun-baked face showing white furrows where he squinted into the distance, reading history books by his camp fire.
I drifted away, the conversation concluded. Was the South Pass really such an easy matter, I wondered. If we were likely to reach it by the end of July, that meant there was still close to a thousand miles yet to go from there. But Oregon was not part of the United States. The Indians knew this full well and had considerably less reason to respect our rights to be flooding their lands. There surely would be bears, wolves, great birds of prey and other wild creatures unminded to welcome us unless it be as food. Disputes between emigrants could only be settled amongst themselves, with no appeal to the law of the land.
For all this glimpse of a daunting reality, my mood was one of almost bewildering excitement. Not simply the unknown future, but the sights and sounds of Fort John itself, made my head whirl. There were dozens of Indian lodges pitched all around the central building, which was constructed of baked mud, the thick walls a smooth grey-brown, with small windows and a flat roof. On all sides, in heaps on the ground or on trestles in the open courtyard, there were goods for purchase, which acted as a magnet to us all. We would visit and revisit, fingering the furs and trying to make sensible choices from the dried and preserved foodstuffs. The Indians – who wore extremely scanty clothing and moved so silently they seemed like ghosts – offered skins, moccasins, beadwork and other tempting goods. The moccasins were especially popular amongst the women, who were finding their boots too warm in the summer temperatures.
The sudden cessation of our daily travelling had the unforeseen effect of making everyone feel intensely weary. With no need to rise early and set out to walk twelve or fifteen miles, we lay in our bedrolls until the sun was high in the sky. Then we played and purchased, and whispered about the Indians and how they lived. The war with Mexico was made more pertinent by the presence of several individuals from that land. They, it seemed, had built the fort in a style that was natural to them. They inhabited all the regions to the west of the Divide – Colorado, Nevada and other huge desert areas that were yet to be fully discovered by the emigrants. My father murmured that it might not be an easy thing to defeat them in battle, so very numerous and resourceful were they.
On the second day, the recruitment officers announced that they would have to leave at dawn next day with their new soldiers. Our caravan, they said, was the last they would be greeting in this way, since there was urgent need for a “Missouri army” as they termed themselves. Young men had been garnered and assembled from across the Great Plains and the resulting band was due to begin training very shortly. Allen and Jude Franklin were both joining up, plus Benjamin Bricewood and Luke Tennant, Abel’s father. Luke had been assumed to be too old to go, but word spread that he had been a soldier in his youth and was therefore likely to be useful now. Abel, however, was spared, in exchange for his father. The Tennants were thus left with the old man, his son Barty and grandson Abel as well as numerous women and children. He had called to my father, across the heads of a number of migrants, to say that there should be no hesitation in sending Reuben off to fight, since he could spare Abel now and then to take his place for heavy work. It was a clever move, as we slowly realised.
The public encouragement was a plain challenge to my father, as well as to Reuben himself. My brother was close by, his hair in his eyes, his hands hanging loose at his sides. ‘I don’t mind, Pa,’ he said.
‘You don’t mind what?’ flashed my father, goaded into a rare anger against his docile son.
‘Don’t mind soldiering,’ said Reuben. He smiled cautiously. ‘They pay us for it. Good money, the man said.’
My father closed his eyes, perhaps to avoid the interested stares of the surrounding people. There was much he would have said privately that could not be uttered amongst so many listeners. He would have enlisted our mother to help, but she was obliviously away somewhere with Lizzie and Nam. Instead, by this terrible casual exchange that said nothing at all, it was decided that Reuben should go. Even my brother was shocked, his expression more stunned than normal, when he understood what had happened.
But that evening, when the truth had sunk in, my mother became loud in her protests. ‘No!’ she cried, her voice painful to hear, as it so often was. ‘He is too young. How will he manage himself? Look at him.’
Reuben himself was the only one capable of consoling her. ‘Ma, I be eighteen and a half already. It pains me to leave you all here without me, with the stock needing so much care, and such. But go I must. I shall write to you, every time I can, to say how we be driving back them Mexicans and keeping America for the people who oughta have it.’
She had both her hands on his arm, shaking him as if to stop the words. ‘They have no need of you,’ she insisted. ‘What kind of a soldier would you make? Guns and killing – they’re not your world, my sweet boy.’
Reuben nodded slowly. ‘They are, Ma. Now they are. You canna stop me going. ’Tis all decided now. In the morning, we leave to join the army.’
She released him, defeated but dignified. ‘Then it’s proud I shall be of you, Reuben Collins. Go with God’s good blessing, and may you stay safe until we see you again.’
They rode out next morning, some on horseback, some in open carts drawn by mules, with the sun beating down on them. They were gone at a pace we could hardly credit, having grown accustomed to our lumbering oxen. Reuben had nodded vaguely at all the last-minute instructions he had been given: ‘Be sure to write when you can.’ ‘Do everything they tell you.’ ‘Stay with Allen and Jude if you’re permitted.’ ‘Take every chance you get to eat and sleep.’ My father was babbling, trying to make up for his earlier silence. Everything he had heard about the United States army flooded back to him: the unreliable food supplies and harsh punishment for disobedience. Reuben had always needed to be told things twice, at least. The full horror of it only hit us after they were all gone and it was too late for any kind of remedy.
‘Reuben a soldier,’ my father groaned repeatedly. ‘I never thought I’d see the day.’
Soldiering had not been a feature of our lives until then. We had no uncles or cousins engaged in battles. None of our forbears had fought in Kabul or India or even France. The Irish, it was generally agreed, did not make good recruits and history had mostly left them alone in this respect.
My mother was dry-eyed, which was another surprise on that day of drama. She pulled Nam to her side, touching the child’s arm and cheek. My little sister resisted, unused to such a display of affection, and she was released after a moment. My grandmother, who had been overlooked completely, came forward and addressed her son’s wife. ‘Every mother knows she will lose her son, sooner or later,’ she said. ‘’Tis nature. They grow into men, and we let them go.’
My mother gave her a sceptical look and nodded towards my father. ‘Except that for you, that is not true,’ she pointed out.
Grandma grinned. ‘Then let me be the exception that proves the rule. Could be ’tis my recompense for the little’uns I lost.’ I recalled again the ‘blue babies’ and opened my mouth to ask for some further explanation, but the moment was plainly not an apt one. My mother looked at us, her four girls, and sighed. ‘’Tis unjust,’ she said. ‘Henry Bricewood is two years older, and Abel Tennant is six months younger, and both remain in safety.’
‘Never seek for justice. That way lies disappointment,’ said Grandma flatly.
In the case of Henry, there did seem to be cause for complaint. He had simply absented himself from the recruiting speeches and the steady assembling of volunteers. The officers had overlooked him repeatedly. I had caught his eye one time, a second before he turned his back and began to swing his arms in a strange fashion. Then he kicked a small stone, following it across the sandy ground as if nothing else in the world mattered to him. It came to me that he was acting like a young boy, aimless and undisciplined. I was in grave doubt as to what to think of this. I admired his cunning, but deplored it too. It left me clear about his own preferences, at least. Henry Bricewood did not wish to go and fight with his fellows. He was therefore unpatriotic and rather deceitful.
But I was glad he was remaining with us. I had silently prayed that this would be so, and consequently felt myself somehow responsible when it happened as I had wished. Similarly, I had found myself fervently begging the Lord to spare Abel, too. I had not seen how anything could save him, and so when it happened so easily, I was dumbfounded. The double response from heaven made me giddy. Was I such a paragon that my prayers were so quickly answered? If so, perhaps I could ensure a smooth passage all the way to the Pacific Ocean for my family and all the others.
A total of sixty men from our wagon train went off to fight the Mexicans. Many more had been enlisted from farms in Missouri and Illinois, as well as other settlers on other trails and individual pioneers and adventurers of all kinds. A letter from Reuben awaited us at the next trading post, written barely a week after we parted from him, in which he gave us some of these figures and talked of men he had befriended.
Laramie - or Fort John, as it was known at the time - continued to fascinate us all. The Indians alone were amusement enough. They seemed to be in some ways the aristocracy of the whole camp, in a bizarre equality with the French-Canadians who were in charge. The two sets of people could not have been more different, but neither had any regard for ‘the families’ as they termed us. The Indians, we learned, had arrived in large numbers, barely an hour ahead of us, specifically to get what they could from us. Our camp was a short distance from the fort itself, and on the eve of the second day, in the midst of our despondency over the imminent loss of my brother, a large party of savages paid us a visit. We had been warned to expect this, but it was still extremely strange. The purpose of the visit was to receive food, and rows of them sat down and waited for coffee and cookies. We stared at them and they stared at us, with minimal levels of mutual understanding. Many of the women and children brought dogs with them, including young puppies. Our Melchior and a few others from the wagons took exception to this, and a great dog fight suddenly erupted, causing screams from both humans and animals. Men on both sides were slow to intervene, grinning with excitement at the violence and noise, but some women took courage and pulled the slavering creatures apart. Not before poor Melchior had lost half an ear, however, and suffered a long gash on his shoulder. Mrs Bricewood, who had never showed any particular fondness for him, cradled him tearfully and said some harsh things to the Indians, her tone unmistakable, even if the words were not understood. For a moment there was a crackling tension, in which breath was held and men made fists, or fingered knives in their belts. There was no actual violence, but the party declined into a scrappy grabbing of food by the Indians and an abandonment of any attempt to be hospitable on our part.
There were two storeys to the main fort building, the upper one with balconies overlooking the courtyard. The ground floor was divided into innumerable small dwellings, full of families that mostly comprised a European man with an Indian wife and many half-breed children. We migrants were consumed with curiosity about how everything was arranged and who all these people might be. The French-Canadians were rough bearded men, speaking in a language as strange to us as the Indians’. And amongst all this confusion was a tall English-speaking man who strode to and fro, speaking mainly with the senior Indian men, and often pausing to write something in a leather-bound notebook rather similar to my journal. He held the travelling families in transparent disdain and did his best to avoid us. We discovered that he lived in one of the most handsome rooms on the upper floor of the fort, with two other men, both Canadian. We none of us knew what to make of him, since he was so much more civilised than anyone else we saw. ‘An explorer,’ said Henry, who had been following the man with interest. ‘And a writer.’ When we saw the man ride away over the hills with two Indians, Henry guessed that he was being invited to visit the native villages that lay a few miles away, and was plainly envious.
‘We are like gypsies to him,’ sighed Henry bitterly. ‘A motley crowd of ignorant emigrants.’
Indeed we had been forced to see ourselves through other eyes, as we tried to barter for goods or glean information. The land we were in, with the absence of trees and endless views of low scrub and distant misty hills, was strange to all of us. Many of the people in the wagon train had been farmers in Missouri or Illinois or Indiana, where mankind had established a degree of dominion over nature, with orchards, gardens, diverted waterways, and fences on all sides. The rest were even more disoriented, coming from towns and cities with newspapers, grocery stores, factories and schools. Out here there was nothing familiar to soothe the eye or the spirit, and I began to notice the perpetual expression of bewilderment on almost every face. Only the very small children took each day as just another collection of experiences, no more strange than those of the day before.
We had imagined ourselves to be valued, as part of the movement west that the government very much desired. While doing good to ourselves, we were also obeying a universal imperative to colonise the lands in the western half of the continent. But here at the fort, there was no suggestion of this. We were seen as pathetic in our worn clothes and sunburned skin. I saw the French-Canadians openly sneering at one group of women, which included Mrs Fields and my own grandmother. When our boys were whirled away to a war they barely understood, none of the fort people showed any sign of sympathy.
Henry was one of the first to recognise all this. In his efforts to avoid notice by the recruitment officers, he had taken himself for walks, still behaving like a young boy, plodding along the muddy edges of the river or getting as close as he dared to the numerous lodges made of hides supported by long poles that had been erected by the Indians near the fort. In the process he had overheard conversations that taught him a great deal.
‘I learned French with my tutor,’ he told me. ‘So I understand much of what these men say. ’Tis an uncouth dialect, I can tell you, but somehow that makes it easier to follow. They use very simple grammar.’
‘French, philosophy, science – what else did you learn?’ I asked, thinking that the Bricewoods were of a different class to us, favouring education so much over everything else.
‘Mathematics, syntax, Latin, Greek – nothing out of the ordinary.’
‘You are certainly the most intellectual man in the entire caravan,’ I told him.
He laughed. ‘I should hazard there are a dozen or more who are greatly superior to me in that respect. We are no band of peasants, whatever they might think of us. Remember it takes substantial funds to assemble the equipment for a migration such as this. These families are people of means. There are very few who cannot read at least a little and write their names. The fort officers, by contrast, have no letters at all. I saw one of them holding a paper the wrong way up, making no sense of it whatsoever.’
‘I wager they can calculate well enough, and handle a rifle,’ I said. ‘And perhaps those are matters more suited to this world.’
‘They are ruffians.’ His eyes shifted, both in direction and expression. He was looking over towards the tepee village with a gleam of animation. ‘Does it not intrigue you, knowing there is such a large and alien population living here in this wilderness? They have lived here for a thousand years and more, without making more than the slightest mark on the land. And now we have come and nothing can ever be the same for them again. Why do they not kill us all?’
‘Because they have learned that more and more will come until we conquer them.’
‘I believe it is something else. A fatalism, perhaps, and a failure of imagination. And they are curious about us, and what we might bring them.’
‘Smallpox,’ I said, thinking of Mr Fields’ scarred face.
‘Indeed. And other diseases, as well as guns and all the killing that the white man knows so well how to do. And whisky, in some places. Even gambling.’
I was silent, unable to properly follow his thinking. We had all been so afraid of the Plains Indians before we began the migration, and now here we were surrounded by them, and nothing more than a dog’s torn ear to worry about.
‘There are wars between the different tribes, of course,’ mused Henry. ‘Bitter wars, with terrible slaughter. I have seen scalps hanging on walls inside the fort. The Dakota are entirely savage and bloodthirsty, as well as the Blackfeet, Snakes and Crow. That tall man who lives in the fort is trying to learn all about them. There has recently been a fierce war between the Dakota and the Snake Indians, for example.’
‘Have you spoken with him?’
Henry looked embarrassed. ‘I have, a few times now. He was reluctant to engage with me, until I spoke to one of his comrades in French, and learned that the third in their group is a medical man. I persuaded him that I am thoroughly interested in the Indians and their ways, and have little in common with the other emigrants. He told me of the Ogillallah and how they eat their dogs, as we would eat lambs or hogs. He told me a number of things, and gave me a few warnings.’
‘Warnings?’
‘The migrants must learn, he said, how to behave towards the Indians. We must stare them down when they show insolence, without mocking or sneering at them. As you would face a wolf or a bear – make yourself large and show no fear.’ Here he looked down as his own small self and smiled ruefully. ‘There must be an underlying respect for their humanity, because he says they have pride and an age-old system of morality that demands honouring an agreement and behaving with decency towards the women.’
‘Really?’ I was sceptical, having witnessed some roughness towards the Indian women on the part of the men. There were also multitudes of tales of Indian stealing horses and other livestock from wagon trains.
‘They have a form of marriage, which carries many of the same duties and obligations as we know in our own society.’
I had no reply to that, and was only passingly interested. ‘The man – what is his name?’
‘Parkman. Francis Parkman. He is shortly to leave to take up residence in an Indian village, in order to record as much as possible of their ways.’ Henry’s face was wistful. ‘Such determination and courage greatly impressed me.’
‘Will he be safe?’
‘He expects to survive, which is all anyone can hope for.’
‘He seems young when viewed at closer quarters.’
‘He graduated two years since, from Harvard. He has worked on his grandfather’s farm in New England and his father is a Minister of religion.’
‘He disclosed so much as that to you? When, may I ask?’
This question was rightly deemed of no significance and Henry showed signs of impatience to be on his way. He was consumed with fascination for a man who had successfully adopted a life that Henry himself would have enjoyed. Here was a model for himself, I concluded, and I was glad for him, that such a model had been encountered in all its solid reality.
‘Was this our appointed talk, then?’ I asked. ‘To be had now, after a mere week, rather than in a month’s time?’
He blinked in puzzlement. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘We were talking about the nature of mankind, only a week since, and you said I would come to agree with your opinions and we should speak of it again.’
‘Ah!’ He smacked his own head lightly. ‘Of course. Perhaps we might regard this as an interim assessment. Well?’
I breathed a huff of exasperation. ‘The question is too large,’ I objected. ‘From experience, I cannot say that people have shown any worse inclinations than before. You tell me the Indians make barbaric wars between themselves, but I see no evidence of it. The families in our party have continued to help each other when required.’ I faced him squarely. ‘All in all, Henry Bricewood, the only sign I see of human frailty is your successful avoidance of the recruiting officers.’
‘So I am a coward,’ he said with mock sadness.
‘Some might think so.’
‘If war is virtuous, then I must be vicious. The logic is manifest.’
‘You think yourself too good to die by a Mexican musket,’ I accused.
He smiled wanly. ‘I am guilty as charged,’ he said. ‘I cannot lie to you. I believe there are others far better suited than I to the task of subduing our southern neighbours – who have a claim to the land that I find to be of some substance. We are all colonists, it’s true. But the Spanish, and therefore the people of Mexico by and large, have had a foothold in these western lands very much longer than anybody else.’
I glanced around, fearful that he was uttering thoughts that would raise great anger. Innocent as I was of the protocols of warfare, it was plainly ill-advised to speak tolerantly of one’s enemy. ‘Hush!’ I hissed at him.
We separated then, and I cast his ideas from my mind. Henry Bricewood was beginning to feel like a dangerous friend to have. Just as Abel Tennant and Moses Fields were dangerous, in their very different ways.