The Indifference of Tumbleweed Read online

  THE INDIFFERENCE OF TUMBLEWEED

  REBECCA TOPE

  PRAXIS BOOKS

  Praxis Books

  Herefordshire.

  ISBN: 978 09559517 25

  Copyright © Rebecca Tope 2014

  For Leonie

  Contents

  Author’s Note:

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Afterword

  Author’s Note:

  The impetus for this book came during a drive across the western states of America in 2012, and in particular a visit to the museum at Independence, Missouri. There I purchased a copy of Desperate Passage by Ethan Rarick, which charted the whole story of the Donner Party in 1846. The idea came to me of writing an imagined account of what happened to those in the original wagon train who stayed on the tried and tested trail to Oregon, instead of risking an unknown cut-off down to California.

  There are a few real people here: Francis Parkman, who wrote The Oregon Trail in the 1840s, for example. And Virginia Reed herself, whose account of the Donner Party’s disaster is pivotal. There were two brothers in the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-5 named Fields, whose later lives remain obscure.

  Several books and websites helped with the historical background, as well as the geography. Seven Alone by Honoré Morrow; The American West by David Lavender; Soiled Doves by Anne Seagraves are the most noteworthy.

  The Tennant Party

  The Collins family. (8 in all)

  Patrick Collins

  His mother.

  His wife.

  Children: Charity, Reuben, Fanny, Lizzie, Naomi (Nam)

  The Bricewood Family (9 in all)

  Mr Bricewood.

  His wife.

  Children, Benjamin, Henry, Hannah, Martha, Letitia, another unnamed, Joel (adopted)

  The Tennant Family (12 in all)

  James Tennant

  His sons, Luke and Barty, and their wives, Elizabeth and Esther.

  Abel, son of Luke.

  Twin boys, sons of Barty. Also a baby boy.

  Two unnamed girls, and a baby boy, children of Luke and Elizabeth.

  The Franklin Family (10 in all)

  Mr Franklin

  His wife

  His sons, Allen, Jude, Billy, two unnamed girls, baby daughter Emily

  His sister-in-law, Hope Gordon

  Her son, Tommy

  The Fields Family (5 in all)

  Moses Fields

  His wife, Jane

  Three children, Jimmy, Ellie, Susanna

  THE INDIFFERENCE OF TUMBLEWEED

  Chapter One

  We watched Grandma shaving her chin, nudging each other and smothering our giggles, like two much younger girls. She thought herself well hidden behind the wagon, a small mirror propped on top of a molasses barrel, pulling a bare razor carefully over dry skin. It looked sore and dangerous, and I knew it wasn’t really funny. We were laughing because our lives had become so intensely exciting and different in recent days. Where only a month before we had been living in a big house, with a well out in the yard and a lamp in every room, now we were nomads, all our belongings in a wagon pulled by four oxen at a pace even the smallest child could match. Everything was bright and thrilling and hopeful. We were part of a great movement into the mysterious West, where we could fashion life as we wished, far from the changing face of the east coast, with the many thousands of drunken illiterate poverty-stricken Irish who had been arriving over the past few years. To be Irish – as we were - carried an increasing stigma, which offended and alarmed my father. He had made his way in business, drank sparingly and was as literate as any fancy Protestant up on the Beacon Hill in Boston. But after a number of years in that fair city, we relocated to Providence, a much more tolerant place. There were Baptists, Quakers, Catholics and others all peaceably rubbing along together. We might never have given a thought to packing up a second time and migrating westwards if it had not been for a government man urging families to seize the opportunity without delay. Land would be freely given, in a fertile valley where crops and livestock would flourish. There would be an urgent need for businessmen of every sort, and my father with his special skills with horses was just the man to avail himself of the chance.

  Ahead of us were mountains and a huge ocean, great herds of buffalo and strange solitary men who lived by trapping animals with thick soft fur. We had listened avidly to the tales that never ceased, fitting them to our history lessons in which the French and the British and the Spanish all wrangled over great unexplored tracts of the new country and rights to trade furs and create settlements. Our heads were bursting with the adventure of it.

  There had been no question of leaving Grandma behind, despite her age. Born in 1775, in a tiny Irish village, she was accustomed to privation. At the age of five, she had been whipped by a priest for insisting that her best friend was a leprechaun named Seamus. It had achieved nothing but a precocious scorn for the clergy, she said. Seamus had remained faithful until she turned twelve, when he vanished in a green mist in the heart of a clump of bracken, never to be seen again.

  In 1826 she had sailed to the New World with her single surviving son – my father. ‘I was already too old then to learn new ways,’ she reported; a starkly obvious untruth. Even her Irish brogue had changed and expanded to embrace the variety of language heard on the streets of Providence. But she clung to many of her earlier ways, including disdaining the American habit of frequent washing, which she regarded as Puritanical and unhealthy. Her hair affirmed her opinion – iron grey, thick and vigorous, despite seldom experiencing water or lye. The hair on her chin and neck was almost as luxuriant – hence the shaving. My youngest sister had been heard to mention Grandma’s beard, not so long ago, leading to an uncharacteristic embarrassment on the old lady’s face.

  During his twenty years on the east coast, my father had acquired five children and a restless zeal to see the great expanse of the continent to the west that had been readily sparked into action by the urgings of the government men. So here we all were, assembled with many hundreds of others, preparing to embark on the long-awaited adventure.

  The mass of people was beyond anything I had seen in my life, the sense of all being crowded together with a common purpose utterly different from the disparate lives of city dwellers. Children became lost, dogs skirmished and livestock bellowed from hunger. Horses and oxen jostled for every last blade of spring grass on the flat plains around us. The air was thick with the smells of food and fresh-cut timber and the secretions of so many thousands of bodies – human and animal. Wagons were steadily filled with the necessities of life, the packing a science for which advisors came in useful. Not everybody understood that it was essential to place items not required until the end of the trail in the centre, with food stocks and clothes where they could readily be reached. Not only that, but the positioning of objects according to their shape could make a great difference to the quantity the wagon could be persuaded to contain. Fragile or aw
kward items should be secured to the hoops over which the cover would be drawn, to avoid being crushed. There should not be an imbalance between the two sides, since there would be times when the whole equipage might tip drunkenly one way or another, and undue weight might cause it to twist and fall, with terrible consequences.

  My mother was initially unprepared for any of this work. Certainly she had no intention of laying her own hands on the boxes, barrels, trunks and crates that were to be loaded onto our wagon. She looked to the bands of working men, most of them black, who roamed around the camp offering their services as porters and packers. But when they named their fees, she thought again. ‘That is extortion,’ she said flatly. ‘My husband and son will manage, thank you very much.’

  She was right, it seemed to me. All our personal possessions were already accumulated under a large leather tarpaulin, having been unloaded from a cart several days earlier. Once we had acquired our wagon and oxen, Reuben and my father positioned them close to the stack, and began to argue as to precisely what should go in first, and how the weight must be distributed. My mother and I both had ideas of our own on the subject, so that very soon all four of us were shifting heavy objects back and forth until we could agree that all eventualities had been considered. My three younger sisters came and went, showing a sporadic interest that only strengthened when one of their own boxes was involved. The thought of instructing hired packers and porters in this complex task was not appealing.

  In the previous months, countless other details had been debated between my parents and Reuben and now and then myself. How many horses should we take with us? Would we need mules? How much meat were we likely to consume, and was it best transported alive or dead? Would we need spare rifles and a great quantity of cartridges, to shoot wild animals and perhaps Indians? How would we manage for water? What was the most sensible footwear for many months of steady walking? Advice was sought, but was not always easy to find. Our project was not wholly original, but a trek of two thousand miles over a massive mountain range, in the company of hundreds of other migrants, was not a common experience.

  The words two thousand miles were heard every day, spoken with wonderment or pride, as well as plain disbelief. The distance was a known fact, to be beaten into familiarity by repetition. It would take half a year of travelling, give or take. We had all done the calculations, based on averaging seventy-five miles each week, making it out to be a full six months. I would turn twenty on 25th September, and the hope was that we would have crossed the worst of the mountains by then.

  None of us would ever forget the crazy scenes that unfolded when we began to move out of town. Wagons jostled for a more forward position, so as to find easier pasturing for their stock, jamming together and upsetting their puzzled oxen, who had yet to learn exactly what was required of them. It took three chaotic days for the last of the long train of wagons to leave the great assembly area outside Westport. We finally took our first steps on the morning of the third day, delayed by the refusal of an ox in the party ahead of us to be yoked. The poor animal was beaten cruelly by a man who my father said had only himself to blame. ‘He got the beast cheap, and never thought to train it to the yoke,’ he told me with a bitter look. Our own oxen had been with us for ten days already, meekly accepting the heavy wooden bar across their necks, and extremely tame after hours of attention from the children.

  My father said it was expected that some people would abandon the idea of migration completely when their oxen baulked, or ran free and were lost. I thought about that for a long time. How terrible to change the plan, to go back to a hotel in Saint Louis or the empty riverside camp to wrangle over when might come next. We had a family who had belatedly joined our own party, of which the mother was utterly against the whole emigration plan. We heard her shouting in the night, then pleading that her health was too poor for such a lengthy trek. Fanny and I were in a tent close to theirs and heard her lower her voice, telling her husband that she was with child again and would be terrified to give birth on the trail. ‘I told you already how close to death I came with the last one,’ she hissed.

  ‘Surely he knows that already?’ whispered Fanny in my ear. For all she was younger than I, Fanny seemed to have a much better knowledge of such matters. I merely shrugged.

  The man, it seemed, was implacable. ‘There’s nothing for us here,’ he told her angrily. ‘The die is cast. In Oregon we can make a fine life. Would you hold your children back with such selfishness?’ He had a deep musical voice, which carried great conviction – at least for me.

  ‘Poor woman!’ My sister sighed, plainly taking a different view from mine. ‘She sounds so afraid.’

  I hoped the man would make allowance for his wife’s fears, but more than that I hoped she would find courage from somewhere and join the migration. What alternative did she have? Returning east, against the tide, settling in Kentucky or Tennessee where all the best land was already under firm ownership? The sense of failure would be with her forever. And was she not culpable in permitting the family to reach this final stage of preparation, and still remaining reluctant?

  This family had approached us only the previous day, after our party had formed itself. Since we were a smaller group than many of the others, and it was evident that there was space for more, we made no objection, despite some glances flying around at the man’s apparent origins. He was far from being one of us – that is, of Catholic Irish roots, our accents and crucifixes plain evidence to that effect. The father of the new family had walked up to Mr Tennant, as the most senior man in our party, and humbly begged permission to join us.

  ‘How many are you?’

  ‘Five, sir. Myself, wife Jane and three youngsters. We have provisions, sir. Our wagon is lightly loaded, and drawn by just two oxen.’

  ‘Two?’ Mr Tennant was shocked. He had six fine beasts to each of his two wagons. ‘You can never keep up the pace with two.’

  ‘We will, sir. All the little ones will walk every step of the way, and we have brought no furniture with us.’

  Mr Tennant pulled a face. His vehicles were massively loaded with all kinds of furniture, china, carpets and large quantities of best bacon, dried fruit and the more luxurious foodstuffs. His vehicles were both prairie schooners, newly made. The newcomer had indicated an old farm wagon with added hoops to support the canvas covering.

  Democracy and equality were working in the supplicant’s favour, and Mr Tennant was a decent man. But it was clear that he did not like or trust this newcomer, in his humility and poverty. ‘It would not be in the interest of your wife and children to make the journey with insufficient provisions and an inferior wagon,’ he warned. ‘What stock will you bring?’

  ‘Three bullocks, a cow and a pony, sir.’

  I heard no more of their deliberations, but it was manifestly clear that our party had been augmented, next morning, as the smaller wagon sat close by and the children shyly watched the turbulent preparations of loading wagons and training oxen to the yoke.

  Chapter Two

  The first day out of Westport was momentous for us all. Ahead stretched an unknowable future, which filled my mind as an airy sort of fog, without landmarks or solid shapes. It was coloured blue, with streaks of pink and orange, which perhaps reflected the western sunsets I had known all my life. We walked all day, stepping out briskly, proud of our sturdy legs and healthy feet. Chatter filled the air and the exhilarated yapping of the dogs, set free to run alongside us or explore unusual scents, as the whim took them.

  When the first night loomed, after a day in which the train had rolled forth in some kind of order, the various parties arranged and the procedures for camping overnight close to being established, I ventured to walk back a little way to discover who might be behind us. The parties had many acquaintances between themselves, after the weeks spent in Westport preparing for the journey. There were many hundreds of individuals all travelling together, like a moving city, building relationships and rivalries; joining
and separating according to a complex system of judgement and prejudice. Nobody could hope to rule over the entire train, which explained the division into smaller parties who could make their own decisions. But there were laws that everyone was required to obey: obvious Christian laws that carried severe penalties if broken. No killing, or theft, or adultery.

  I strolled inquisitively along beside the great wagons, with barrels and boxes lashed to their sides, babies crying inside them, dogs running around and beneath them. Woman were lugging their Dutch ovens from the wagon to the fire, their daughters peeling vegetables or kneading dough. I nodded to familiar faces and ducked my head modestly when I passed close to a man. Even after so short a time there were real divisions between the parties. Our own people were just that – bonded to us in a special way that brought feelings of trust and familiarity. First came the family, of course, then individual members of other families, until finally we knew the names and personalities of all those in our party. It made me nervous to find myself amongst the wagons of the Wilson Party, no member of which I knew by name other than Mr Wilson himself, and I quickly turned back to the sanctuary of those I knew.

  A minute or two later I heard the familiar whining voice before I saw the woman. Their wagon had been lagging behind the rest of us all day, but they were unarguably part of us. The grouping had been established, the party a fixture now until we reached our destiny in the autumn.

  A glance at their wagon told me a great deal about them. It was old, already the darker grey colour that the timber changed to with weathering. There was grime at the joints, with all the dust and seeds that became ingrained in the grease used to lubricate the moving parts. The canvas top was more grey than white, and I saw a ragged rent in it, which would bring misery when the rains came. A farm wagon such as this could be used by emigrants, as well as a prairie schooner, but it had to be given a cover. All the others I’d seen boasted fine new canvas, clean and white, and carefully puckered at each end, with the open spaces just the right size to let in air and light, but repel rain.