Where Trails Run Out

By Anna Prince Redd

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Chapter 2

Synopsis: A company of twenty-four young men, and two families — James L. Davis, his wife Mary, and their four children; Henry H. Harriman, his wife Elizabeth, and their five children — are called to explore a route from Cedar City, in Southern Utah, to San Juan County, Utah.

The two families are to remain in San Juan, and, at a point where the Montezuma Creek comes into the San Juan River, are to establish an outpost and prepare for the coming of the main company of settlers, members of the San Juan Mission. The twenty four scouts are to return to their homes and report their findings.

The purpose of the mission is to cultivate and maintain peaceful and friendly relations with the Indians, who are almost the sole occupants of the large and isolated country. While driving her team at night, across a sultry, menacing desert, Elizabeth has a frightening experience with a strange, mysteriously inexplicable Indian.

Like the tick of a loud clock, Elizabeth’s heart recorded the seconds. Silence was pitted against sound; reason against fear. This couldn’t be too grave a danger, reason argued, or her brother George and Captain Smith would know of it. If she needed them, they would be close by. All she had to do was to turn her head toward the thing she feared and fear would be gone.

She forced her breath to an even pulse and tried to turn her head, but she could not move. A queer feeling of suspension was making her giddy. Fear became so overpowering that she knew she was going to scream— a long, thin scream that would throw the sleepy wagon train into a bedlam of excitement, for she was afraid of the silence.

But the pacing figure beside her said one quiet word, “Chiniaga,” and it released her like a spring. “Potlatch,” the voice repeated. “Gimme.”

Elizabeth turned toward the voice, and she could breathe again. She knew the meaning of the quiet, Indian word. “Bread?” she repeated softly, and savored the familiar sound. “Give bread? Chiniaga?”

“Gimme,” the voice repeated. “Me friend. All day much ride.”

Elizabeth reached out her hand in the darkness, suddenly wanting to say that she was a friend, too. But she caught herself quickly. What had come over her? This huge figure in the dark had nearly frightened her to death, yet she wanted to see his face, to shake his hand. It was inexplicable. Yet, somehow, she knew that this was no ordinary Indian. When had an Indian been known to apologize for his begging? But, to say that he had been riding all day and was hungry, was certainly an apology. It put this huge shadow of a man in a special class for his race.

From the grub box under the seat where she kept biscuits and dried grapes for the children, Elizabeth extracted four biscuits. But she did not give them up immediately. Now that fear was gone, natural caution began to assert itself. She didn’t want a horde of squaws and papooses coming down on their small company to beg. If she gave the impression that they were a poor company, perhaps he would go away and not trouble them again. She dropped two of the biscuits back into the box and held the other two out to the Indian. But, before he could take them, she drew her hand back, reached into the box, and brought out the other two again, together with a long bunch of shriveled, sweet grapes. She handed them to the Indian, and he was gone, as silently and mysteriously as he had appeared. Before she had time to wonder about the manner of his going, the slow, easy-going voice of her brother filled the pause.

“I’m right proud of my sister Elizabeth,” George Hobbs said. “I wondered if you would scream.”

“George!” Elizabeth cried, laughing shakily. “You’re as bad as that Indian. You frightened me, too!”

“Not much, I hope. You seem to be almost sorry that the Indian is gone. He was unusual, wasn’t he?”

“Why, how do you know? Did you hear him? Certainly you could not see him. I couldn’t.”

“It’s my business to see and hear,” George said. “It could have meant trouble, you know. I’m not too sure about it yet.”

“Well, I am!” Elizabeth cried, raising her voice excitedly. “I’d stake anything that he is a good Indian. We’ll see more of him. I just know that we will.”

“Perhaps,” George answered. “But, for the present, say nothing about him to anyone. I doubt if even the captain knows we’ve had a visitor.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that, George,” the captain said, from the other side of Elizabeth’s wagon.

“Well!” Elizabeth laughed with relief. “If this isn’t a game of get there first, I never saw one!”

“George would like to have such a slip on my part to crow about,” Silas Smith chuckled. “I might have missed this one, if the Indian’s horse hadn’t stumbled.”

“And you knew, from the sound, that the animal was going west, and not east,” George said. “Scouting is an interesting profession.”

Telling Elizabeth goodnight, the two men dropped back to the rear of the wagon train.

Elizabeth smiled happily. George had said he was proud of her! George didn’t often compliment women, even his sisters. It was a night to remember. There would always be the feeling that someday she would see this very special Indian again. For all the rest of the journey she would scan the face of every Indian who came in sight, and maybe she would see him.

The night hours wore slowly on. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Still there was no command to halt the company. But driving was easy, since team followed team in sleepy procession. Elizabeth wondered if Mary was asleep. What would Mary think if she knew that a big Indian had been riding along in the train with them, when they weren’t even near Indian country? It was well that he knew to which woman to speak. With Mary not being well, it would have been bad if he had chosen the wrong wagon. Maybe he knew that Mary was in poor health.

And maybe he didn’t, she scoffed to herself. What an imagination I’m developing! I’d better settle down and sleep, if I can.

But she couldn’t. She sat erect and wide awake until Captain Smith called the company to halt for the night.

As soon as the word was given, the two women, Mary, sleepily obedient, and Elizabeth, keenly alert because of her imaginings, climbed out of their wagons to spread the men their beds for the night. A few blankets on the warm sand were enough, for the company would not rest long. As soon as it was light again, they would be on their way. The women prepared no food, and but little water was distributed to the camp, for there were still many miles between them and their next camp at Lee’s Ferry, on the Colorado River. That camp could not be reached before the next night, and every drop of water must be hoarded.

“When we get to the Ferry,” Mary murmured sleepily, “I’ll feel like we are almost to San Juan. Will you, Elizabeth?”

She smoothed her blankets and turned them down at the top, then tucked them under tightly, alla round, to keep out the scorpions and snakes.

Elizabeth answered, “It’ll be a long way yet, Mary. I’m already so tired of the rocking wagon that I’d like to lie right here and sleep in the sand, scorpions and all!”

Mary shuddered. “I’d not sleep in such a place, not ever. I’d feel like there were snakes and bugs crawling all over me.”

“There probably would be, too,” Elizabeth answered. “But I don’t mind bugs. If only the coyotes wouldn’t howl, I’d be all right.”

She did her bed-making in a much more casual manner than Mary. She figured that if centipedes and scorpions and snakes were going to get into people’s beds, well, they just would, that was all, and there wasn’t much you could do about it. besides she didn’t think they were as poisonous as people said they were.

Mary finished her beds and climbed up the wagon wheel, then paused before going into the wagon and to bed. “I sort of hate to cross the river, Elizabeth,” she confessed, looking down at her friend. “I’m afraid of water.”

“I’m not afraid of water, so I don’t suppose I’ll mind the crossing so much. it’s the Indians that bother me,” Elizabeth replied, brushing the sand from her skirts.

“I worry about Indians, too,” Mary laughed. “That gives me one to go on. I always have one worry ahead of you. I say I’m afraid of something, and you say you’re not, but that you are afraid of something else. And when I discovered that I’m afraid of that, too! I can’t ever come out even with you.”

“We’re both of us fraidy cats,” Elizabeth said tenderly. “But you’re less of a fraidy than IU am.”

Mary climbed on into her wagon and, calling a muffled goodnight from the folds of her voluminous nightgown, she was soon asleep.

My fears don’t come out even, either, Elizabeth thought. And the worst one is that I know so little of what to do when a baby is born. Thank goodness we will soon be at our journey’s end. Then Mary can rest and get ready for her ordeal. She will need all her strength then. And, surely, there will be other women at Montezuma. where there is a fort, there are usually a few women, at least.

Elizabeth closed her eyes resolutely on the thought, but it was an hour before she finally fell asleep, curled up on her own hard bed in her wagon.

Late in the afternoon of the next day, thirsty and scorched with heat, they neared the Colorado. Henry came to sit beside Elizabeth in her wagon. He said: “I hope Moenkopi is a good town, Elizabeth. Captain Smith says we will stay there for a week to rest our stock and mend our wagons. after that, there will be bad roads and – well, everything.

He flicked his buckskin whip at the desert sage as they passed, then let the thong trail in the wheel track, as he sat thinking.

“You’re not good at evading, Henry,” Elizabeth asserted. “Everything means Indians, I suppose?”

“Nonsense, my dear. The Indians have been friendly enough. they have given us no trouble so far.”

“But this is our side of the river. The other side is theirs, remember. And, once we cross the Colorado, it will be different.

“You mean they think the other side is theirs. We aim to teach them better.”

“And that’s exactly why they will fight us,” Elizabeth declared.

“You’re right, I suppose,” Henry agreed. “We have got to make the Indians see that we bring to them more than we take away.”

“Well, I hope it is that easy!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “But the fact that we haven’t been bothered thus far, doesn’t mean much.”

She was thinking of the night visit one Indian had paid her. What would Henry think if he knew about that?

“That looks like the break where the river runs,” Henry cried, leaning forward. “And it is! We are heading downward.”

He leaped to the ground and ran to his own wagon, shouting, “Keep close, Elizabeth, you and Mary. Your wagons will be loaded first!”

The teams and stock, smelling the water, though it was yet a mile or more away, quickened their feet, straining against the neck yokes in their eagerness to reach it.

“Isn’t it exciting!” Mary called, as the train pulled up at the river’s edge, not far from the ferryboat landing.

“It certainly is!” Elizabeth called back, gazing at the long lane of clay-colored water. Both women scrambled to the ground, almost falling from the top of their wagon wheels, int heir eagerness.

“I hope you don’t get seasick when we cross, Mary.” Elizabeth lifted her youngest child to the ground and reached for the next one.

“I’ll be too excited to even think of myself,” Mary answered. “And look at those handsome boatmen!”

The Lee boys, John and Walter, stood close to their boat, watching the small company as it wrangled into position for the loading of the ferry. Neither had spoken, except to give a short greeting, but there was an all-encompassing expression in their eyes.

“I’ll bet they know all about us,” Elizabeth predicted.

“Well, that wouldn’t be much,” Mary laughed. “We look pretty seedy right now!”

Under the direction of the boatmen, the wagons were loaded and the Lee brothers prepared to shove the boat out into the stream. it was near sundown. John took the wheel and Walter the steering spike. The cable swayed, tightened with a jerk, and the boat began to move steadily toward the other shore, propelled by the great paddles of the wheels that churned on either side of the big, flat ferry.

Mary and Elizabeth, sitting rigidly on the high spring seats atop their wagons, smiled at each other.

“We even have to ride when we float,” Elizabeth jested.

“And drive, too,” Mary added. “It’s less jolty, however.”

To Elizabeth, the crossing was a bit disappointing. “What a dreary looking river,” she said to her husband, who stood close to his own outfit, next to hers and Mary’s. “I’ll bet the Indian trouble we’ve been promised won’t amount to a bit more than the crossing of this river does.”

“The Colorado sure looks peaceful,” Henry agreed. “Except right here next to us!” He pointed to a fifty-foot tree that had just emerged from the gray water, not more than ten feet from the boat.

“Henry!” Elizabeth clutched the sides of the spring seat and clung on frantically, expecting to be catapulted from the ferry, wagon and all. But when nothing happened, she stammered, “How— how did that tree get there, Henry?”

“It passed, calm and peaceful like, right under our feet,” Henry replied.

Elizabeth’s teeth began to chatter. She looked at Mary, but Mary’s head was turned toward her children in the back of the wagon. She had seen nothing of the big tree’s passing.

Henry waited for Elizabeth to look his way again, and, as she did, he smiled reassuringly. “You see, Bethy,” he said, using his rare nickname of endearment, “you can’t tell much of what is underneath a smooth surface.”

Elizabeth straightened her bonnet with a jerk, then, because she couldn’t breathe from its starched depth, she pushed it back from her head. “The sooner I get off this boat,” she declared, “the better I will like it.” Then she added, indignantly, “Give me a Redskin any day!”

“That’s the old spunk,” Henry approved. “The Redskins had better look out!”

They laughed a little, and then fell silent. The ferry scraped bottom, hit the bank with a shiver, and was knocked back out into the river. Suppressing a scream, Elizabeth clung on while the ferrymen nosed the unwieldy boat back to the bank again. A gangplank of loose boards was laid, and she climbed out of the wagon and tottered up it to the beach.

“Never did soil feel so good!” she exclaimed. “I’ll never take my children on a thing like that again, Henry Harriman! That tree could have crushed us to pieces!”

“A miss is as good as a mile,” James Davis laughed, hopping up the gangplank, holding Mary’s hand in mock fear of falling.

Elizabeth looked at him angrily. “You would joke at your own funeral, James L. Davis,” she cried. “No wonder they call you London Jimmy!”

“I don’t see what that has to do with his joking,” Mary retorted, coming to her husband’s rescue. “They call James that because there is another James Davis living in our town. It’s distinguishing.”

“If not distinguished,” James chuckled, irrepressibly.

Elizabeth laughed in spite of herself. “What jumpy people we are getting to be. A right good Indian scare would be good for all of us.”

Mary said, “A miss may be as good as a mile, but I’ll take the mile, if it leads me away from this river. I think from what your husband has just told me, Elizabeth, that you have plenty of reason for being nervous. I almost wish I’d seen that big tree. It would have made the river seem almost human. To think that it can pick up a tree that’s a thousand years old, and carry it along like that!”

Walter Lee, who had been standing close to the ferry, waiting for the load to be taken off, turned to Mary, approvingly. “You are exactly right, Mrs. Davis. This old river is human in more ways than one. It is cantankerous, humorous, vindictive, destructive, and greedy, all by turns. And in between times it’s as kind as a grandmother. Humans aren’t so different.”

He gave the boat a shove with his spiked pole, and it rocked along the cable into the middle of the river.

Mary and Elizabeth looked at each other, then after the ferryboat, with its two darkly handsome figures, and neither could express the mixture of her feelings.

The drovers had already started to swim the stock across the river. Their bawling and shouting raised such a din that the sounds struck the cliffs and were multiplied in metallic echoes. It was nearly morning before the last, straggling animal clawed its hoofs into the slippery bank and heaved itself out of the river onto the dry, warm sand.

And then the camp was quiet ….

There followed days of uneventful travel through a country of such color and grandeur that they were awed with wonder of it. Monuments as old as the ages, as scarred and beaten as time, rose from the desert on every side, and stretched away into the far, multi-colored distance. Lakes burned like craters in the sunset. Forests as old as the monuments dwarfed time into eternity, yet stood unmoved, unbent by the wind and rain and sun, marred only by the hand of man as he hewed and chopped his way into it and out again, toward a precarious destination.

On the fifth night out from the Colorado, they made camp without water. At five in the morning they were moving again, and by noon had reached such rough terrain that the going was nearly impossible. It took all their skill to keep their wagons weaving around boulders, petrified tree boles, and out of the maze of canyons and ledges that confronted them. There were no roads to follow, and often only the trails of wild animals marked the terrain. Sand was giving way to shale and clay, and the grade was steep.

“Lee’s Hogback!” someone cried, pointing ahead to a steep incline that bristled with jutting layers of sharp shale rock.

“And the hog ain’t been fed since the year one,” another shouted.

“It looks more like a snorting, thousand-horned mammoth than a hog,” Mary cried. “No hog could look as mean as that!”

Elizabeth pulled her team sharply to one side, looking back at Mary.

“Hold on there, Elizabeth,” George Hobbs shouted. “You’ll tip over! Keep going straight ahead.”

“Over that?” Elizabeth questioned, incredibly.

“Certainly. It’s the only break in this whole mesa!” George answered.

“It’s like fighting a huge porcupine with bare hands.” Elizabeth spoke grimly, and held her team to the tracks of the wagon ahead.

For a few minutes after the climb started, there were laughter, cheers of approval, and jesting predictions of disaster from the men. But, as the road became steeper and narrower, they settled to the serious business of getting over the hump without mishap.

The wagons crawled upward. The ridge suddenly dropped away on both sides of the narrow spine, leaving only a fraction of earth beneath the sliding wheels.

Suddenly a wagon, with its teams and drivers, careened from the ridge, wheels skyward. It balanced, lunged over again, twisting its tongue out, then struck a cedar tree with such force that both were splintered to kindlings. The two drivers and their goods went rolling down the ledge.

Clawing at the steep sides of the ridge, neighing with fear, the teams clung on, hopelessly entangled in their harnesses and chains.

(To be continued)