The Yellowstone by Win Blevins Read Free Book Online Page B

always traders, Mac’s Uncle Hugh said. Scots liked to go to exotic places and bring back exotic coins.
    But Mac had never wanted to be a trader. His father and uncle set up in mercantile trade in St. Louis—they spent their patrimony on it. Hugh liked the business and thrived in it. Alexander, Mac’s dad, loathed it. The only loves for Alexander were Mac, the verses of Bobby Burns, and whiskey. He died when he passed out on the levee in St. Louis, drunk, and fell into the river.
    Mac took off for the mountains. He’d always loved the fields and the forests, and the crafted beauty of his gun. Mountain men came into his father and uncle’s store on Fourth Street, full of stories, looking wild as Injuns, and smelling that way, too. As a lad, Mac had even seen painted Indians on the streets of St. Louis.
    To him, like his dad, the mercantile business was tedium—the mountains were romance. Now he would do mountain mercantile.
    Of course, Mac had no money to start a trading post. No wherewithal to buy blankets, knives, kettles, beads, tobacco, coffee, lead, guns, and whiskey to trade for hides. He would need five thousand dollars, or more likely ten thousand, for a modest outfit.
    On the sentinel rock above the Yellowstone he swung his legs exuberantly. The mere lack often thousand dollars didn’t matter to him now—he had an idea, an answer. He could stay in the mountains.
    The image of Annemarie rose in his mind. Stay in the mountains, he was saying to himself, and have Annemarie.
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    Perhaps Mac Maclean was in love with a woman, or rather a girl. Certainly he was in love with a place.
    He had come to the Shining Mountains three summers ago, 1840. He rode out with the annual far caravan—up the Platte, rising from prairies to high plains, past Laramie, on to the Sweetwater, across the top of the continent at South Pass, and up the west side of the Wind River Mountains to rendezvous.
    It was a glum affair, the 1840 rendezvous on Green River. A small Company caravan. The fur boss, Drips, couldn’t say whether the Company would be sending any more wagon trains to meet the beaver men in the wilds. The price of plews made it a bad proposition.
    Camp talk was of what men would do now. Go to Oregon and set up farming. Head for Californy and sport among the Mexicans. Go to sea and visit the Sandwich Islands. Go back to Westport or Springfield or Chillicothe or Williamsburg and live like a white man.
    Some of the plans sounded good, but Mac didn’t think they would work. The problem was, not many of the fur trappers seemed like white men anymore. None of them was accustomed, any longer, to white ways—to the labor of the plow, the commerce of the store, the commands of the boss, the will of the community, the sway of church, the rule of law.
    Mac thought all American frontiersmen were enamored of adventure, danger, and wild-hair freedom, but these men were addicted.
    Besides, it didn’t matter to Mac what they decided to do. During rendezvous he explored the valley of the upper Green River with the Delaware Jim Sykes and a Shoshone named Black Circle. Mac shot a mountain lion and saw Bighorn sheep on the high ridges. He camped by Stewart Lake, the most gorgeous spot he’d ever seen. He fell wildly and romantically in love, in the way only a very young man can. He cared nothing about whether he could make a living here—spending his days in these mountains was all that mattered.
    So Mac Maclean partnered up with Jim and Til and Skinhead. They traced the Uintas and spent the winter at the little post Bridger was building to trade with the trappers, a substitute for rendezvous.
    In the spring Mac again rode with Skinhead and some other scalawag trappers hunting beaver. Across the Green River they went, and north along the Wind River. Over the divide and into Jackson Hole. Across the high, rolling geyser country to the Yellowstone.
    All the way the other men groused. When they found beaver, they crabbed about the low price.