Free Snow Mountain Passage by James D Houston

was headed home to Illinois before these new crowds spoiled all the unspoiled places he had come to love.
    Mama invited him to stay for dinner, but she didn’t like him much. She had known him in Illinois, knew something about him from those days, though I think mainly it was the terrible smell that followed him like a shadow. All of those mountain men who wore the same clothes for weeks and months on end, you have no idea what a foul-smelling bunch they were. He wore moccasins and buckskin trousers and a buckskin shirt with fringes dangling from the sleeves, and his shirt was shiny smooth. Parts of it were nearly black with grease and smoke and weather. He carried a powder horn slung from his shoulder and a Bowie knife at his waist. He had so much hair you could hardly see his face, just his blue eyes peering out like he was inside a thicket. I asked him if it was hard to breathe with all that hair around his mouth.
    When the Mountain Man laughed, bad teeth showed through his beard, and gaps where other teeth had fallen out. The missing teeth gave him a bent mouth and a bent smile. “Sometimes it’s hard to breathe,” he said “but it catches all the bugs and skeeters ‘fore they fly down my throat, so I don’t mind.”
    After dinner papa opened one of his quarts of ten-year-old brandy, and they started talking. Around that fire they talked for hours. Papa had news about towns this fellow would be going back to, the prices, the state of the Union east of the Mississippi. The Mountain Man had news from all the places papa was so eager to see. He was the first person we met who’d actually been where we were headed. He’d just come overland from Sutter’s Fort, where things, he said, were “heating up.” Papa wanted to know what he meant by that.
    “Coming to a head,” he said.
    He was a storyteller. Before he began a story he would take a long pull from the brandy bottle. I can’t remember all the stories he told that night, but I remember how his Adam’s apple seemed to roll beneath the hair along his throat. And I remember the brightness of papa’s eyes in the firelight when he first mentioned the name of Lansford Hastings.
    “You’re talking about the fellow who wrote the book,” papa said.
    “The very one.”
    “I wonder if you’ve read it.”
    “Don’t need to read no guidebook, Jim. I’ve been to just about every place a person can get to.”
    “But you know something about Mr. Hastings.”
    “Know about him! Hell, I rode with him! We rode a thousand miles together, from this side of Sutter’s, clear around Salt Lake, on up to Bridger’s.”
    I could see the color rise into papa’s face, which meant he was either angry or threatened or excited or drunk or all four.
    “And what do you make of him?”
    “He knows how to cover country, he surely does. He’s been back and forth through there, I don’t know how many times. But he is a talker, too. He will talk California till your ears fall off. You travel around for a while like I have, you find some people are content just to get where they’re going. Ol’ Hastings, he wants to be the prophet who will lead us all out of our misery. We were somewhere past Truckee River, bound for Salt Lake, and I looked at him, thinking, Hey, Moses, you are heading the wrong way if it’s the Promised Land you’re looking for, this feels like the road to Egypt. About the time we hit the Humboldt Sink I quit listening. Getting through that kind of country takes all my concentration.”
    Papa had walked over to his saddlebags and come back with a scuffed-up copy of
The Emigrants’ Guide,
which he’d been looking at once or twice a day. As he sat down again he was flipping through the pages.
    “When you came by Salt Lake, which way did you travel? To the north, or to the south?”
    “Ol’ Hastings, now, he wanted to try the way Captain Fremont took last spring. I went along with it because I hadn’t seen that stretch since I’d rowed across Salt Lake