He told himself he would come back and take that old Honey Tree yet, but deep down inside he knew he never would, and suddenly he found himself hoping that nobody else would, either…
Neither Rob nor he had felt like talking. They just stood there, and he kicked a clod out of the grass on the Walker lawn.
“Guess you’ll be seein’ Indians, and everything,” Rob said.
“I guess so.”
“You going to write me? You going to tell me all that happens?” “I’ll write … maybe won’t see any post carrier for a long time, but I’ll write.”
It was his first goodbye, and he did not like it. A long time later, sitting under the cottonwoods and watching the campfire on the little creek west of Independence, he thought of that. He missed Rob, and he missed the swamp, too, but he missed them only a little now because there was so much to see. Not that there was no trouble, for trouble seemed to go with him wherever he went. He remembered what had been said when the others of the westward-bound company discovered he was a boy. The objections had been violent and profane. But Captain Hutchins faced them, his feet a little spread, cool as he had been that morning when he killed Bob Ring. “The boy goes or I do not. I’ve a notion he’s worth the lot of you, and he’ll walk as far or trap as much fur as any of you.”
Captain Hutchins owned most of the horses, and Captain Hutchins had been free about providing powder and ball and the others knew they would be a while finding a man to replace him. It finally simmered down until only one man objected and Captain Hutchins faced him. “If it’s a choice between you or the boy,” he said coolly, “I’d rather have the boy beside me. If you don’t like his going, I’d suggest, sir, that you find a party more suited to your temperament.” A man named Peter Hovey, leaning on his elbow against a wagon wheel, had said, “Was I you, Ryle Beck, I’d back up an’ set down. I’ve a notion you’ve overmatched yourself.”
Beck glowered and grumbled, but after a little bluster he shut up and went back to the fireside.
Captain Hutchins turned to Hovey. “Thanks, man. It’d be a bad thing to begin a journey with trouble.”
“Aye, an’ trouble enough for us all will be seen before we’ve found our bait of fur.” He glanced at Jean. “Are you a trapper, boy?” “I caught my living at it, furs and herbs, more’n four years now,” he said, “but it was swampland and not the mountains. I’d be obliged if you’d teach me.” “You’ll do.” Peter Hovey grinned. “I’ve a thought you’ll do your share.”
And so it began.
Days later, moving westward, Captain Hutchins swung a wide arm at the country about them. “One man, Jean, a man with a vision, gave us this. If Tom Jefferson hadn’t gone ahead, overriding the little men without vision, all the frightened little men, we’d not have this. By signing the Purchase agreement he risked his political future, but he doubled the size of the nation. You might even say he created a nation. Before the Louisiana Purchase we were a cluster of colonies; after it we became a world power.”
“Is that good, sir?”
“Who knows, Jean? But nations and men are alike: they go forward or they stagnate and die.”
There was new respect for him when it was learned he was the son of Smoke LaBarge. Peter Hovey had known him, had trapped with him on the Upper Wind River. Smoke had been killed by Blackfeet the following year, Hovey thought. But you could never be sure. He had a way of turning up. They went to Pierre’s Hole and traded there, and for the first time the others began to see that young Jean LaBarge knew fur. He had learned it by selling his own, and had learned trapping, too. Although only a boy, his take for the season was almost as good as the men’s.
With Captain Hutchins and a party of twenty mountain men they went up through the country along the Wind River and the Teton Peaks, and then floated down the Missouri to St. Louis. It was the biggest town Jean LaBarge had seen, and it was there, from old Pierre Choteau, that he first heard the magic name … Alaska. “Alaska,” Choteau said, “you know … Russian America. Talked to a man who had been there to trade with Baranov. A rich land he said, the furs are thicker there because of the cold. Untrapped country. If I was younger …” Alaska was an exotic name like Kashgar, Samarkand and Bagdad, but different, stronger, stranger. It was wild, untamed, lonely … or so it sounded to him. That night he had written to Rob Walker about it, his first letter home, after so long a time. He told him, in pages of writing, what they had done, of the mountain men he had met—Jim Bridger, Milton Sublett, Peter Hovey. But he wanted to go to Alaska. Rob must meet him in San Francisco and they would go together. Was that when their love for Alaska began? Or had it begun in that other so-called wasteland, the Great Swanp? Others despised and feared it, yet Jean had lived there, made his way there, known its richness and its beauty. The experience made him wary of the term wasteland. Now he was seeing great western lands that old Mister Dean had disparaged. He was seeing millions of geese, millions of buffalo, streams with beaver, forests of splendid trees, and the waters of the Missouri. He remembered a big, hairy-faced trapper who grinned at him and said, “Takes a man with hair on his chest to drink from the Missouri. Cowards cut it with whiskey!” Rob had been away at school when Jean next heard from him, receiving the letter at Astoria, and a package containing a translation of Homer. Captain Hutchins had already given him a Bible. Later, a drunken trapper gave him a copy of Plato’s Dialogues.
He read his books at night beside the campfire, and read them lying in his bunk at Astoria, and later in San Francisco. Several times after they arrived there he took trips with Captain Hutchins back into the Sierras or the Rockies, and each time he took a book with him.
At sixteen he had read just seven books, but had read them over and over, and at sixteen he was a veteran of nine battles with Indians, and victor in a man-to-man fight with a drunken trapper.
When his seventeenth birthday came around, he had read only one more book, but had read it, Plutarch’s Lives, four times. He had a fight with Comanches under his belt by that time, carried the scar of his first wound, and had recuperated in Santa Fe.
By the time he was twenty he had covered the length of the Rockies and the Sierras, had nearly died of thirst, carried the scar of another wound and was over six feet tall, lean as any savage warrior, and stronger than any man he had so far met. That was the year he lost all his furs on the Green River when his canoe upset, and lived two months with Ute Indians while they made up their minds whether to kill him or not. By the time they decided he had chosen his horse and rifle, and the night before his captors came for him, an Indian who had befriended him loosed the rawhide bonds they had finally tied him with, and he slipped out of camp in the darkness and rode south until he struck the trail from Santa Fe to California. Two months later, broke, ragged and hungry, he had showed up at Captain Hutchins’ office on the wharf at San Francisco. The following year he bought furs for Captain Hutchins, read twelve more books and tried prospecting in the gold fields without luck. Twice he made strikes but both petered out.
Returning one night from the wharf he heard a woman cry for help from an alley in Sydney Town. He rushed into the alley and something struck him a terrible blow across the back of his head. He came to, to find himself lying in a stinking bunk in the fo’c’sle of a windjammer bound for Amoy and Canton, China. The mate, a burly ruffian with tattooed arms and a heavy chest, came down the ladder with a marline-spike and jerked men from the bunks. Tentatively, Jean LaBarge swung his feet to the deck.
“Hurry it up, you!”
He looked up and started to speak and the mate hit him. His head still throbbed from the night before and this second blow did him no good. He painfully got to his feet, as tall as the mate when standing, lean and hard as a wolf, but he only choked back his anger and went on deck.