disappeared into the forest beyond the few whitewashed buildings marking out the agency street.
“Maybe Uncle Jesse’s right: we’d better have a look at them -- and set our own house in order,” he said, letting the curtain drop.
“I beg your pardon, young man,” Lindsay responded. “Are you speaking to me as your father or as your superior? You are, I believe, only a Commissary.”
“Yes, and I acknowledge you’re the Agent. But if someone from Washington is going to be requisitioning the records, then maybe we should all look together first.” He turned and studied his father’s face, then added, “This is, I imagine, a scene going on in more than one place, but here it involves all of us.”
“Come along, now, Lindsay,” Jesse said to his brother. “Some say this reservation is a joint-stock company. It’s got ‘Applegate’ written on it from top to bottom. And I won’t have our name pulled through the mud. Wrongly or rightly. I don’t think we’ve got much to fear, but we should look at the records together. This evening. That’s what I came down here for. I don’t want to get keel-hauled over this one the way we were with the road.”
That, of course, settled it. When Jesse made up his mind to the ‘right way,’ nothing could deflect it. At fifty-eight, he was Lindsay’s junior by three years, but there never had been much question about who was the ‘senior partner.’ It had been the same twenty-five years earlier when the idea for the new trail bit him.
Weren’t they short on settlers here in Oregon?, he asked then. Didn’t the territory need them? Wasn’t the land there for the taking? What would set them all up was more commerce. Didn’t Lindsay see the beauty of the idea? With just a little persuasion, he said, the flow of settlers could be turned into Oregon across a new cut-off that would come right up their valley. No need to lose them all to California or wait for them to trickle down from the route up along the Columbia, their wagons abandoned at The Dalles. Where their kin could drown as easily as their two boys had before anyone could get to them.
Jesse had not rested until he had towed Lindsay and fourteen others eastward, out along the old Indian and trapper trails across the Modoc highlands to Goose Lake, over what they now called Fandango Pass and the Warner Mountains through Surprise Valley. Trusting scraps of map he got off of an old explorer, waterless, watching provisions disappear, Jesse captained them over the desolation of Black Rock Desert wilderness, to the place he calculated that season’s westward-headed settlers had to have reached.
With that strange urgency of his, he had hurried along, cajoling and trail-blazing, rushing to be in time to intercept the wagons before they took on the desolation of the Humboldt sink.
“New promised land!” he said waylaying them at last at Fort Hall, clear over in Idaho country. Worn down by the trail, their losses, the emigrants stopped and listened to this man with the pugnacious jaw and desert-crusted face, fearful of what was to come, aware that time was now shifting against them. Maybe his scheme made sense. It was true that you could feel the change in the air, they told each other. No doubt there was more heat coming in the days ahead, but still, something was different: the angle of the light, a new sharpness to the wind. It frightened them, reminded them that they had to hurry. Jaded as they were -- sick, beat, exhausted, tired to death of one another -- there was no time to waste here talking, except that these Applegate men were saying they had a new way, a shortcut. To Oregon. Easier. Quicker. Into new country they had settled that was just waiting to welcome new folks.
Here it was, August. Some of the wagons which had started off from the Missouri in April at the beginning of the season, maybe eighty or one-hundred of them, had already passed this point of intersection. But the rest could turn off here and get, in a shorter time, to a better place. That’s what these brothers, this what’s-his-name was saying.
Indians? Some, but that would be true no matter the direction. The Snakes, really Wahooskin Paiutes. Then there were Achumawi -- Pits, they were called -- there by the pass between Surprise Valley and Goose Lake. Then came the Modocs. Four, five days, a week at most would take the wagons through their country once they had passed Goose Lake, to the range of the Shastas, then up into the valley by the Rogue.
There was this odd eagerness about this ‘Jesse’ -- the way he rushed on -- as if he had thought of everything. They had only to do what he told them.
Adequate water stops almost all along the way, at least after the burnt desert part, the dry stretch. Send a crew of able-bodied men to widen the trail the Applegates had just blazed. Send a party two or three days ahead of the wagons to dig out reservoirs at the springs. Save the Antelope Springs and Rabbit Hole Springs water for the teams. Drive the loose animals on through to Black Rock, where there was hot water aplenty, twenty -- no, a hundred -- acres of green for the cattle. You could do it. Not exactly easy going, but much better than the torture that was waiting for them if they gambled they could make it along the Humboldt.
Good grazing once you were over the mountains west of the desert. Then eventually, after the train crossed into California and turned up into Oregon, bountiful country. Timber. Good stock-raising territory, good farm-land. After the Umpqua, the Willamette Valley. Good for orchards. Time then to drop the traces off the oxen, turn them out to recruit themselves in the grass. Yes, the Applegates knew for sure.
Jesse showed them the waybill he had kept, detailing the distances and stopovers they would make, laying out the route he intended the cutoff to take. The men in the wagon train passed the notebook among them, studying it by the fire light.
Of course, these Applegates and the others said. They had been there since ‘43. Certainly. They would lead them. It was meant to be, the settling of that land. The words poured like balm over the trail-wounded people.
Looking at the fiery man who had burst in on their camp, stamping afoot ahead of his party in his eagerness to lay hold of them -- looking at the crew come to lead them through the last of their agonies, the settlers doubted. Then they dared to believe the man’s words. Catching fire themselves, they dogged his steps around Fort Hall and pestered him with eager questions as he resupplied for the return. Settled on it then, their minds made up, they turned their stock and wagons off the Humboldt trail and followed him westward.
Well, it had sort of worked the way he promised. Until the end. When, in October, the by-then lollygagging, loafing settlers had dragged things out too long, he said. And the winter storms, come too early, laid the cat’s paw of catastrophe on their wagons in that canyon bottom in Oregon. All these years later, there were still those who said the fault belonged to the Applegates. Those had never forgiven them.
So much had been that way here in this country, right from the beginning: jobs to be done, too few to do them, too little cash, too many detractors. Disaster waited behind every enterprise, unless a man stayed on his toes, all the time.
Take even this agency. It should have proved up better for Lindsay than his go at mining or that failed toll road he hawked his soul for over in the Siskiyous. This agency should have been Lindsay’s and his sons’ ticket to security, but now it seemed otherwise.
#8
When the front door banged open, Lindsay stopped sorting through the desk drawers and looked up. He could hear, outside, the sound of the horse being led away to the barn. As was always the case when his middle son appeared, it felt as if the air in the room compressed.
“Sorry,” Oliver said. “I rushed to get here on time, but I got tied up at Ashland. The post: it wasn’t ready.”
He tossed the packet of papers onto the table, then turned to pull off his coat and hat. He hung them next to the others on the hooks beside the door. “It’s come, I believe, father, just as you said it would.”
“Get yourself something to eat,” Lindsay grumbled at him, returning to his searches through the desk. “We didn’t wait on you.
“How