Free Snow Mountain Passage by James D Houston Page A

in a bull boat. This might of been twenty years ago, and then some …”
    He reached for a pull on the brandy bottle. Papa could see another story coming, so he broke in, reading from the book, real slow, like every sentence had to be savored.
    By recent explorations a very good and much more direct wagon way has been found, about one hundred miles southward from the great southern pass…. The most direct route, for the California emigrants, would be to leave the Oregon route about two hundred miles east from Fort Hall; thence bearing west southwest to the Salt Lake; and thence continuing down to the Bay of San Francisco …
    As he listened, the Mountain Man nodded. “Yessir, that’s more or less it, and it ain’t no route for wagons, Jim, if that’s the way you’re thinking. We crossed it last month. But we were half a dozen mounted men. With a string a wagons like this, cattle and all … I tell ya, it is some of the meanest land I have seen.”
    “According to Mr. Hastings, it’s the nearer way.”
    “It’s nearer, and that’s a fact, if you don’t mind a land God has turned His back on. After that you still have a lot more desert, and then you start the climb for Truckee Pass …”
    “But why take a roundabout way when you can save three hundred miles or more?”
    “I’ll tell you why. You go north by Fort Hall you will get there. I guarantee it. That is the main idea, wouldn’t you say? To get there?”
    “We’re already so far behind,” papa said, “three hundred miles is something to think about.”
    “If it was me, I’d take the Fort Hall route and never leave it.”
    “But saving two weeks … we’d surely make those last mountains before a snowfall. Isn’t that true?”
    Papa made this a challenge, holding him with his eyes. He still had the
Guide
open in front of him. The Mountain Man looked at it like papa had a live lizard by the tail.
    In the years since then, people have faulted papa for having more faith in what was printed on a page than in the man right beside him. What a lot of them don’t know is that he had made promises to mama. He had made promises to all of us, and promises to himself. His own craving for the land where all the promises would come true ran so deep he dared not doubt the man who’d spelled it all out for him, page by page. It was a whole lot easier to doubt the foul-smelling survivor of a dozen expeditions through the country we were about to cross. That night at Fort Laramie there was a reverence in papa’s voice, as if he were reading Scripture. After he let the covers fall closed, he held the little volume close to his belly, the way preachers sometimes hold copies of the New Testament.
    The Mountain Man must have noted this. He’d known papa for quite some time, must have known how single-minded he could be, how important it was for him to end up on the right side of a discussion, and end up in California ahead of other wagon parties too timid to try a new and shorter route. The Mountain Man wasn’t one to argue. He was at heart a lonesome fellow who cherished his solitude and carried with him all he owned. He savored human company when it came his way, but he didn’t seek it out. Live and let live was his philosophy. He would tell you what he thought. If it didn’t appeal to you, he would go his way, as he was about to do again.
    “We still have some days to travel,” papa said, “before we need to choose one way or the other.”
    “That you do. You’ll have upwards of two weeks, from here to South Pass, then past there to Little Sandy Creek.”
    Having spoken his mind, he now sat looking at the fire. Papa passed him the brandy bottle, but this time the Mountain Man declined.
    IT MUST HAVE been two or three weeks later, I guess we were halfway through the Rockies, climbing the long grade to South Pass, when a rider came galloping out of the west. He had a message to read aloud, like a proclamation in the town square, though there was no town