River, which is the best knife in the world, and just the article to practise the trick that Ilderim Khan had taught me, with infinite patience, on the Kabul Road almost ten years before. As Richey adjusted his target, I threw the knife overhand; my eye was well out, for I was nowhere near the mark, but I damned near took his ear off. He looked at the blade quivering in the trunk beside his face, while the tall buffoon cackled with laughter, and the buckskin men doubled up and haw-hawed – if I’d put it through the back of his head, I daresay that would have been a real joke.
Richey pulled the knife free, while his pals rolled about, and drifted over to me. He looked at me for a moment with those steady blue eyes, glanced at the tall chap,6 and then said in that gentle husky voice:
‘I’m Uncle Dick. An extra hunnerd, ye said – cap’n?’
The men hoorawed and shouted, ‘Good ole Virginny! How’s yer ha’r, Dick?’ I nodded and said I would see him at sunrise, sharp, bade them a courteous good-day and rode back to Independence without more ado – I know when to play the man of few words myself, you see. But I didn’t delude myself that I had proved my fitness to be a wagon-captain, or any rot of that sort; all I had shown, through the eccentric good office of our friend in the Tin-Belly coat, was that I wasn’t a know-nothing, and Wootton could take service under me without losing face. They were an odd lot, those frontiersmen, simple and shrewd enough, and as easy – and as difficult – to impose upon as children are. But I was glad Wootton would be our guide; being a true-bred rascal and coward myself, I know a good man when I see one – and he was the best.7
We started west three days later, but I am not going to take up your time with wordy descriptions of the journey, which you can get from Parkman or Gregg if you want them – or from volume II of my own great work, Dawns and Departures of a Soldier’s Life, although it ain’t worth the price, in my opinion, and all the good scandal about D’Israeli and Lady Cardigan is in the third volume, anyway.
But what I shall try to do, looking back in a way that Parkman and the others didn’t, is to try to tell you what it meant to ‘go West’ in the earlies8 – and that was something none of us understood at the time, or the chances are we’d never have gone. You look at a map of America nowadays, and there she is, civilised (give or take the population) from sea to sea; you can board a train in New York City and get off in Frisco without ever stepping outside, let alone get your feet wet; you can even do what I’ve done – look out from your Pullman on the Atchison Topeka as you cross Walnut Creek, and see the very ruts your wagon made fifty years before, and pass through great cities that were baldhead prairie the first time you went by, and vast wheatfields where you remember the buffalo herds two miles from wing to wing. Why, I had coffee on a verandah in a little town in Colorado just last year – fine place, church with a steeple, schoolhouse, grain warehouse, and even a motor car at the front gate. First time I saw that place it consisted of a burning wagon. Its population was a scalped family.
Now, you must look at the map of America. See the Mississippi River, and just left of it, Kansas City? West of that, in ’49, there was – nothing. And it was an unknown nothing, that’s the point. You can say now that ahead of the Forty-Niners stretched more than two thousand miles of empty prairie and forest and mountain and great rivers – but we didn’t know that, in so many words. Oh, everyone knew that the Rockies were a thousand miles off, and the general lie of the country – but take a look at what is now North Texas and Oklahoma. In ’49, it was believed that there was a vast range of mountains there, blocking the way west, when in fact the whole stretch is as flat as your hat. Somewhere around the same region, it was believed, was ‘the great American Desert’ – which didn’t exist. Oh, there’s desert, plenty of it, farther west; nobody knew much about that either.
I say it was unknown; certainly, the mountain men and hunters had walked over plenty of it; that crazy bastard Fremont was exploring away in a great frenzy and getting thoroughly lost by all accounts. But when you consider, that in ’49 it was less than 60 years since some crazy Scotch trapper9 had crossed North America for the first time – well, you will understand that its geography was not entirely familiar, west of the Miss’.
Look at the map again – and remember that beyond Westport there was no such thing as a road. There were two trails, to all intents, and they were just wagon-tracks – the Santa Fe and the Oregon. You didn’t think of roads then; you thought of rivers, and passes. Arkansas, Cimarron, Del Norte, Platte, Picketwire, Colorado, Canadian – those were the magic river names; Glorieta, Raton, South Pass – those were the passes. There were no settlements worth a dam, even – Santa Fe was a town, sure enough, if you ever got there, and after that you had nothing until San Diego and Frisco and the rest of the cities of the west coast. But in between, the best you could hope for were a few scattered forts and trading posts: Bent’s, Taos, Laramie, Bridger, St Vrain, and a few more. Hell’s bells, I rode across Denver when the damned place wasn’t even there.
No, it was the unknown then, to us at least; millions of square miles of emptiness which would have been hard enough to cross even if it had truly been empty, what with dust-storms, drought, floods, fire, mountains, snow-drifts that could be seventy feet deep, cyclones, and the like. But it wasn’t empty, of course; there were several thousand well-established inhabitants – named Cheyenne, Kiowa, Ute, Sioux, Navajo, Pawnee, Shoshoni, Blackfeet, Cumanche … and Apache. Especially, Apache. But even they were hardly even names to us, and the belief – I give you only my own impression – in the East was that their nuisance had been greatly exaggerated.
So you see, we started in fairly blissful ignorance, but before we do, take one last look at the map before Professor Flashy endeth the lesson. See the Arkansas River and the Rockies? Until the 1840s, they had been virtually the western and south-western limits of the U.S.A.; then came the war with Mexico, and the Yankees won the whole shooting-match that they own today. So when we jumped off for California, we were heading into country three-quarters of which had been Mexican until a few months before, and still was in everything but name.10 Some of it was called Indian Territory, and that was no lie, either.
That was what lay ahead of us, gullible asses that we were, and if you think it was tough you should have seen the Comber caravan loading up in the meadow at Westport. I’ve squared away, and ridden herd upon, most kind of convoys in my time, but shipping a brothel was a new one on me. Visiting ’em in situ, you don’t realise how elaborately furnished they are; when I saw the pile of gear that had come ashore off the steamboat, I didn’t credit it; a stevedore would have taken to drink.
For one thing, the sluts all had their dressing-tables and mirrors and wardrobes, stuffed with silks and satins and gowns and underclothes and hats and stockings and shoes and garters and ribbons and jewellery and cosmetics and wigs and masks and gloves and God knows what beside – there were several enormous chests which Susie called ‘equipment’, and which, if they’d burst open in public, would have led to the intervention of the police. Gauzy trousers and silk whips were the least of it; there was even a red plush swing and an ‘electrical mattress’, so help me.
‘Susie,’ says I, ‘I ain’t old enough to take responsibility for this cargo. Dear God, Caligula wouldn’t know what to do with it! You’ve had some damned odd customers in Orleans, haven’t you?’
‘We won’t be able to buy it in Sacramento,’ says she.
‘You couldn’t buy it in Babylon!’ says I. ‘See here; two of the wagons must be given over to food – we need enough flour, tea, dried fruit, beans, corn, sugar, and all the rest of it to feed forty folk for three months – at this rate we’ll finish up eating lace drawers and frilly corsets!’ She told me not to be indelicate, and it would all have to go aboard; she wasn’t running an establishment that wasn’t altogether tip-top. So in went the fancy bed-linen and tasselled curtains and carpets and chairs and chaise-longues and hip-baths, and the piano with candlesticks and a case of music – oh, yes, and four chandeliers and crystal lampshades and incense and bath salts and perfumes and snuff and cigars and forty cases of burgundy (I told the demented bitch it wouldn’t travel) and oil paintings of an indecent nature in gilt frames and sealed boxes of cheese and rahat lakoum and soap and pomade, and