Life Of Kit Carson Part 4

Amid the motley company it might be expected that quarrels would arise, and disorderly conduct, growing out of the feuds among the tribes of Indians. These were kept in abeyance as much as possible, and already Carson's popularity with them enabled him to act the part of peace-maker between them and the quarrelsome whites, as well as between each other, for many of them recognized him as the brave who had led excursions, whose success they had felt and suffered, and even though leader of victorious parties against themselves, they admired his prowess still; for the party of Blackfeet came to the rendezvous under the protection of the white flag, and for the time, no one more truly buried the hatchet than Carson, though just recovered from a wound given by a party of that tribe, which had nearly cost him his life, and of which we have written in a previous chapter.

There was belonging to one of the trapping parties a Frenchman by the name of Shuman, known at the rendezvous as "the big bully of the mountains," exceedingly annoying on account of his boasts and taunts, a constant exciter of tumult and disorder, especially among the Indians.

Bad enough at any time, with the means now for intoxication, he was even more dangerous.

The habits of the mountaineers, without law save such as the exigency of the moment demanded, required a firm, steady hand to rule. Carson had feared the results of this man's lawlessness, and had often desired to be rid of him, but he had not as yet found the proper opportunity. The mischiefs he committed grew worse and worse, and yet for the sake of peace they were borne unresistingly. At length an opportunity offered to try his courage. One day Shuman, boasting of his exploits, was particularly insolent and insulting toward all Americans, whom he described as only fit to be whipped with switches. Carson was in the crowd, and immediately stepped forward, saying, "I am an American, the most inconsiderable one among them, but if you wish to die, I will accept your challenge."

[Ill.u.s.tration: CARSON WAS IN THE CROWD, AND IMMEDIATELY STEPPED FORWARD SAYING, "I AM AN AMERICAN."]

Shuman defied him. He was sitting upon his horse, with his loaded rifle in his hand. Carson leaped upon his horse with a loaded pistol, and both rushed into close combat. They fired, almost at the same moment, but Carson an instant before his boasting antagonist. Their horses' heads touched, Shuman's ball just grazing Carson's cheek, near the left eye, and cutting off some locks of his hair. Carson's ball entered Shuman's hand, came out at the wrist, and pa.s.sed through his arm above the elbow.

The bully begged for his life, and it was spared; and from that time forward, Americans were no more insulted by him.

If, as in other duels, we were to go back to remoter causes, and find in this too, the defence of woman--a Blackfoot beauty--whom Shuman had determined to abuse, which Carson's interference only had prevented, for the sake of truth, of honor, and virtue, as against insolence, falsehood, and treachery, although the girl did belong to a tribe that was treacherous; we shall be but giving a point to the story that it needs for completeness, and show Carson in the exalted manliness and fidelity of his character.

The trappers made arrangements at the rendezvous for the fall hunt; and the party who were so fortunate as to secure Carson's services, went to the Yellowstone River, in the Blackfeet country, but met with no success. Crossing through the Crows' country to the Big Horn River, they met the party of Blackfeet returning from Green River. Carson held a parley with them, as was his custom whenever it was safe to go to an Indian camp. He told them he had seen none of their people, and that the tomahawk was buried if they were faithful to him. "But," said he, "the Crows are my friends, and while I am with them, they must be yours."

On the Big Horn, too, their success was no better, and Carson did not meet his Crow friends. On the Big Snake, too, which they next visited, the result was the same.

They here met a party from the Hudson Bay Company, led by a Mr. McCoy.

Carson and five of his companions accepted the offer he made them, and went with him to the Humboldt river, trapping with little success from its source to the desert where it loses itself, and where the termini of several other large rivers are all within a day's ride, according to the statement of residents at this point. Capt. McCoy said to Carson, as he and two of the company started off upon the desert,

"Do not be gone longer than to-morrow night, and if you strike a stream where there is beaver--there must be water between here and those snow mountains--we will trap a few days longer."

On they rode over the artemisia plain till the lake was out of view from an eminence which Carson climbed; then struck a tract of country entirely dest.i.tute of every sign of animal or vegetable life, with surface as smooth as the floor for miles in extent, then broken by a ridge a few feet high, like the rim to a lake, whose bottom they had pa.s.sed, to plunge immediately upon another like it, with perhaps a white and glistening crystalization spread thinly over it.

Carson knew he must be upon the celebrated Mud Lakes of which he had heard, and of which he had seen miniature specimens further east. Over these lake bottoms of earth, that broken, seemed like mingled sand and ashes, but which bore the tread of their horses, and over which they seemed to fly rather than to step, so fragrant and exhilarating was the atmosphere, they traveled thirty miles, then struck the artemisia plains again, only there was less of even this worthless production for the next ten miles than he had seen before for long a distance.

Through a heavy sand, the weary horses plod, for they had come forty or fifty miles beneath a burning sun without food and without water. On they ride, for rest and refreshment to themselves was not to be thought of till they have it for the animals. The river is gained! a broad, deep current of water, muddy like that of the Platte, supplies the moisture to the trees, whose tops ascend only a few feet above the desert level, and whose trunks rise from green meadows but little above the surface of the water. The bottom lands are narrow, and the abrupt bank descends to the water perpendicularly twenty feet or more, seemingly of clayey earth, so soft, the water constantly wore upon it, and evidently the river channel was settling, as the years advanced. There were no signs of beaver, and, from the nature of the banks, there could be none, unless high up on the stream.

CHAPTER XII.

Capt. McCoy had calculated that he would soon find game in the country through which his route lay, and therefore he had turned over to Carson, and the division of the party under his command, nearly all the food which was left, but this was insufficient to give them full meals for more than three days. Their prospect was a dreary one indeed, for at the earlier season of coming down the river, they had not half enough to eat, even with the few beaver they had taken, to add to the supply, and even this was now denied them. And now, that the reader may understand Carson's position, we invite him to enjoy with us a few of the incidents pa.s.sed through, and views observed in our pa.s.sage up this river, which the untraveled eastern man would find so entirely new, and the man of travel and of letters would find so full of interest, as did the man whose name the river bears, for it was named by Fremont, after Carson, whom he had learned to love and respect, long before he reached it. We shall speak especially of the features of this country, common to so much that lies between the civilizations of the Atlantic and the Pacific slopes, though the latter was not a civilization; and when from the desert Carson gazed with admiration at the snow mountains, he surmised, as he afterwards realized through hunger, cold, danger, and suffering, that this was the chain of mountains which separated him from California.

At the station-house, upon the lake, called the Sink of the Humboldt, we were told that the Humboldt did not connect with this lake, except in the spring season, after the rains; and that for the last two years it had not been connected even at that time; and that in the autumn one could pa.s.s between the lake and the limit of the marsh in which the river loses itself, upon dry ground; and that the sinks, or the margins of the lakes or marshes in which the Carson, the Walker, and the Susan Rivers, neither of them less than a hundred miles in length, and some of them several hundred, in the wet season empty or lose themselves, were all within the limit of a single day's ride, and in the direct vicinity of the desert upon which the reader last saw Carson.

It was the evening of the second of July, during a rain storm, (an unusual occurrence at this season of the year, no traveler having ever reported a similar one so far as we had heard,) that, weary, and wet, and cold, we found our way in the dark to this river in the wilderness.

The house of the traders at the sink was made of logs, with two rooms--the logs having been drawn from the mountains, forty miles distant. There was no timber in sight, and nothing that was green except some gra.s.s about the lake, which we were told was poison, and on examining, we found it encrusted with a crystalization of potash, left on it by the subsiding water in which the gra.s.s had started.

During the wet season, the water of the lake overflows its banks, and the banks of the river are also overflowed, while the water standing upon the surface of the ground is strongly impregnated with potash, not only near the sink, but far up the stream, nearly to its source, the same cause existing, though only in occasional spots is it exhibited to the same degree as about the lake. It is not improbable that some immense coal formation might have been consumed here in some remote past age, though that is a matter for more scientific examination than becomes this work.

But, to leave speculation; the occupants of the station, whilom trappers in the mountains, furnished barley for our animals, and we might have purchased coffee, or a rusty gun, or bad whiskey, but little else, for their regular supplies for the emigrants who were soon expected to arrive, had not yet come in. The parties bound east had pa.s.sed, and the Mormons, with their herds of cattle for the California markets, had been met beyond the desert. A party of Pah Utah or Piete Indians, a tribe of Diggers, were hanging about the encampment, and possibly had caused the stampede of the Mormon oxen, which one of their herdsmen had reported to us as occurring here. The traders on the plains are charged with conniving at such expeditions of the Indians, and of sharing with them the plunder. These traders may not have been privy to any thing of the kind, but certain it is they always stood ready to purchase the worn out stock of the overland emigrants, much of which is worthless to cross the desert, after the prior fifteen hundred miles of travel.

This is made a lucrative business, as will be readily imagined, when the number of animals driven over is taken into consideration, which has amounted to a hundred thousand annually, by this route, during several of the years since the quest for gold.

The traders said they had twenty-five hundred horses and as many oxen, in charge of herdsmen in a mountain valley. Shrewd men they were, one of them with an eye we would not warrant to look out from a kindly soul.

Miserable wretches were these Humboldt Diggers, with scarcely a trace of humanity in their composition, for they have not improved since Carson first met them, many years ago. The old chief was delighted with a lump of sugar, which one of our party gave him. He wore a long coat made of rabbit skins, warm and durable, strips of the skin with the hair out being wound around a deerskin thong, and these rolls woven into a garment, but the rest of the party were nearly naked.

Pa.s.sing La.s.sen's meadows where the party lunched at a spring, indicated, as we approached, by a growth of willows, and striking upon the artemisia plain that const.i.tutes the larger portion of the river valley, when about fifty miles from the station, we left the road by a blind trail, and approached the river, descending to the bottom land by a precipitous bluff thirty feet in height. The mountains approached close on the opposite side of the river, probably a mile distant, and enclosed us in a semi-circle, while the bluff was lined with a scattered growth of alders.

It rained, was raining violently when we halted, and stretching a rope from alder to alder, with a blanket thrown over it, we thus made a tent, and established ourselves cosily to spend here the nation's Sabbath-day, the 4th of July.

The rain turned into snow towards evening, and covered the mountains to their base, but melting as it fell where we were encamped, and with the cooing of the doves which filled the alders, the croaking of the frogs in the marsh next the river, and the patter of the rain upon the bushes, we had other music--nature's deep ba.s.s--in a constant roaring sound, like that of old ocean at full tide on a sand beach of the open coast of the Pacific; or like the sound of Niagara, heard half a mile away, but there was no discoverable cause.

Going a mile up and down the river from the camp--if there is up and down to a dead river--we still heard the sound, the same in tone and power. Our Wyandotte--a member of the party who had crossed the plains with Col. Fremont--suggested that it was "the Humboldt sinking."

All the day of the 4th of July we rested here, with our animals in clover, amid the snow which reached even to the foot of the mountains opposite, and the dirge played for us by the unseen hand. It was a quiet, still sweetly sad day--pleasant in memory, and such an one as we shall never spend again--so far from civilized humanity, and in a place so remote from human footsteps, it seemed a natural wonder which had never been properly examined and explained.

Sooner than the old trappers antic.i.p.ated, will the Humboldt be lined with farms, and the little mountain valleys filled with grazing herds, and the church spire and the cross upon an una.s.suming building in the centre of a six mile square prairie, indicate the advance of civilization. Yet, except in the mud-lake localities, there is no tract of country that can well be more unpromising than that about the Humboldt; and not many years will elapse before science will make plain and palpable that wonder of the world, "the sinking of the Humboldt."

CHAPTER XIII.

Through the country we have thus briefly described, Carson and his men had trapped taking some small game, intending to return late in the season when the cold of this high alt.i.tude, with the sun low, was becoming terribly severe, while the gra.s.s was dead, and the birds of pa.s.sage had all departed. Their prospects were cheerless and unpromising, nor were they at all improved after they left the Humboldt; for their route lay through an artemisia desert, varied only by an occasional little valley, where springs of water in the early season had induced the growth of gra.s.s.

On reaching Goose Creek, they found it frozen, so that there was no possibility of finding even roots, to satisfy their hunger. Though to-day this is the trail of California emigration, with plenty of gra.s.s, for a great portion of the way, in its season; now all was desolate, and inured as they were to hardship, Carson's men had never before suffered so much from hunger, nor did their animals fare much better.

Capt. McCoy had taken with him all not needed by Carson's party, because he could give them food, and it was fortunate for them he had adopted this course.

The magnificent mountain scenery on the route could scarcely excite admiration or remark from this company of hungry, toil-worn men; even that unique exhibition of nature's improvised ideality, done in stone--pyramid circle--with its paG.o.das, temples, obelisks, and altars, within a curiously wrought rock wall, they only wished were the _adobe_ walls and houses of Fort Hall. However, nothing daunted by the dreary prospect before them, they here bled their horses, and drank the precious draught, well knowing they were taking the wind from the sails upon which they must rely to waft them into port, if they ever reached it.

The next day, they were meditating the slaughter of one of their horses, when a party of Snake Indians fortunately came in sight. They had been out on the war trail, and returning, had little food, but Carson managed to purchase a fat horse, which they killed at once, and thus managed to live luxuriously till they reached the fort, able now to walk and give the horses the advantage of their diet.

Epicureans of civilization, when the squeamishness of an appet.i.te, perverted by too delicate fare, is invited to such a repast, may rest a.s.sured that they know not the satisfaction such fare afforded to Kit Carson and his party. Horse beef was sweeter food to these starving men, than epicures had ever tasted.

After recruiting for a few days at the fort, and learning that there were large herds of the game, which they gloried most in hunting, the buffalo, near by, Carson and his party started for the stream on which they could be found, and were not long in discovering a large herd of fine fat buffalo. Stretching lines on which to hang the strips, they killed, and dressed, and cut; and soon had dried all the meat their animals could carry, when they returned to the fort.

Three days before reaching the fort, a party of Blackfeet Indians were again upon their trail, and watching for their return.

On the third morning after their arrival, just as day dawned, two of the Indians came past their camp to the _corral_ of the fort in which their animals were confined, let down the bars and drove them all away; the sentinel thinking the Indians were men of his party who had come to relieve his watch, had gone into camp and was soundly sleeping before the animals were missed. By this time the Indians had driven them many miles away, and as a similar _ruse_ had been played upon the people at the fort a few days before, by which all their animals were run off, there was no possibility of giving chase.

Of course there was now no alternative but to wait the return of Capt.

McCoy from Walla Walla, which he did in about four weeks, bringing animals enough to supply Carson and his party, besides, the men at the fort, which had been obtained of the Kiowas, or Kaious Indians, in Oregon. These Indians range between the Cascade and the Rocky Mountains, in what is now the eastern portion of Washington and Oregon Territories, living by the chase, and owning immense herds of horses, of which the chief of this tribe owned ten thousand. In this same locality the Indian bands reported by the parties of trappers in the American Fur Company, had abundance of horses, with which they hunted deer, "ringing or surrounding them, and running them down in a circle." But while antelope, and elk, and deer, as well as beaver, were abundant, their locality was not frequented by the buffalo, its ranges being further toward the south and west.

Many suppose that buffalo never existed west of the Rocky Mountains; but to attempt a correction of this impression with our readers, is no longer necessary, as we have seen Carson killing them on the Salmon River, on the Green River, and lastly, in the valley of a stream that flows into the Salmon.

From Baird's General Repository, published in 1857, we quote,

"It will perhaps excite surprise that I include the buffalo in the fauna of the Pacific States, as it is common to imagine that the buffalo has always been confined to the Atlantic slopes, because it does not now extend beyond the Rocky mountains. This is not true. They once abounded on the Pacific."

This animal has not been found in California nor in Oregon, west of the Cascade mountains, within the present generation of men, and the limit of its ranges, narrowing every year, is now far this side of the Rocky Mountains. Really a wild animal, incapable of being domesticated, as the country is more and more traversed, he retires--is killed by thousands by the hunter--and seems destined, as really as the Indian race, to become extinct. Could either be induced to adopt the modes of life which residence among the races of civilized men requires, their existence might be prolonged perhaps for centuries, but there seems to be no care, on the part of anybody who has the power, to preserve either the Indian or the buffalo as a distinct race of man, and quadruped.

A writer who reports his trip from California in the summer of '57, by Humboldt River and Fort Laramie, says: