The wagon wheels crunch, horses lunge, as though escaping the very thing they drag behind them. The rear of the wagon careens around the switchback, shifting the weight of the pigs from side to side, sending the wagon up on two wheels then dropping, hard, as we twist to make the next turn. I hear Dick shouting and realize by the closeness of his voice that he’s moving faster than he should be, too. I can’t take time to look, my wagon is rushing, pushing, way too fast, and I’m bouncing on my seat, standing, sitting, pulling on the reins, wondering why I cannot get the wagon stopped despite my desperate slamming of the brake.
It has taken on a life of its own, my wagon, with the shoats protesting, bouncing in the back, and I am sure we will not make the next tight twist in this excuse for a road when we round the bend and the ground levels out, blessedly, to run more gently beside the rushing Deschutes River where the horses at last, slow.
I breathe prayers of thanks while catching my breath, and finally pull the horses up and stop. Dick hauls up beside me.
“Whooee!” he shouted, his dimples deep, his boyish face washed in grin as he towers over me. “What a ride, hey, Mrs. Sherar? You can drive for me anytime. Whooee!” He lifted his hat and wiped his forehead then made a sweeping, gallant bow. He was full of compliments while I was feeling fury. He jumped off, helped me down, and balanced me a moment on my shaky legs before he checked my wagon and what was left of the squealing pigs.
“You were way too close,” I snapped at him. “Scared the horses and me half to death. Could have gotten us all killed.”
He looked surprised. “Just trying to warn you. The leather split, dropped off back on the trail,” he pointed behind him. “You didn’t have no brakes to speak of. Pulled back soon as I saw you were having a hard time with ’em. But hey, Mrs. Sherar, you done good! Lucky no bells rang. We had the road all to ourselves. Really put the steam on. Just the way I like it.”
Later, when passengers stepped off the stage at our hotel, I always had a special sympathy for those who rode with Dick. Many reported walking down that grade rather than ride with the Wheeler Stage Company’s handsome young driver. I knew how he liked to take his big Concord down the steep twisty road at breakneck speed. He grew bigger with the thrill of that steep grade while I shrank smaller than my five feet.
We finished the drive in the shadow of the rimrocks, noticing the tangled remains of a raven’s nest and the resident’s white droppings dribbled down the red rocks. I heard the falls, could see the turquoise twist of water surging through the lava cuts roaring beneath the splintered bridge. Then we stopped, presenting fourposter and pigs to the base of the canyon and our new home.
We had survived the day. Even the tossed-out pig found his way to his mates having taken a short cut. Once we actually lived at the river, I worried we’d lose pigs, that they’d wander too close and fall in. Only Joseph’s assurance of their intelligence—“they can probably swim”—and the thousand other demands coughed up by our decision to move kept me from dwelling long on the shoats’ fate.
The stove, too, proved troublesome to move. And we had to take with us a winter’s supply of pinewood and fir so we’d have other than brush to burn through our first winter at the river, there being no trees where we had chosen to live, just rock.
But the most difficult and unexpected part of the move was Benito and Anna’s response to it.
“Is not personal,” Benito said, stirring the spoon in his coffee a little too vigorously the day Joseph carried his enthusiasm to Benito and Anna, announcing his purchase of the falls. “We stay here.”
“Ye don’t wish to be part of it?” Joseph asked.
“We do our part. Here,” Benito insisted. “Buy this claim if you let us, run cattle, this place. Or other.” His finger tapped into the tabletop with each phrase, tentatively emphasizing his point.
“I need you,” my husband said, still surprised. Corlamae climbed onto Joseph’s tall knees, sat in her “uncle” Joseph’s lap. Aware of the tension, she sucked on her fingers and leaned her head into Joseph’s shirt. “It won’t be the same if you don’t come,” he said.
Joseph had not considered that Benito and Anna and their children might have different plans. I suppose he figured he had discussed his wish so often with Benito that he expected his friend would share in it as he had with all the rest. Or perhaps he never asked.
“This is what we came north for,” Joseph persisted. “You’re the one who urged me to come all those years ago. Now you want out?” Anger in his voice hid the pain.
Benito nodded his head in disagreement. “Not out. Different.” He smiled and I realized for the first time that it was not a smile of pleasure I often saw, but a habit, a way of expressing his discomfort, of buying time. I could tell he did not relish this discussion, disagreeing with his life-long friend over something so important as the future. He diverted his eyes from Joseph’s face, studied the crack in his cup. “This is our home now,” he continued. He reached around the waist of Anna who had moved to stand beside him. Her arms crossed over her chest, she willed her strength onto her husband in this. “We stay here, yes? Or we take other claim,” he said.
“You’d move somewhere. Just not with us.” Joseph said. He chewed on his lower lip, patted Corlamae’s arm as she tensed on his lap.
“Is not personal,” Benito said, “against you or Missus. But is for us. Personal.” He sighed, struggling with the words. “We … to have own place. Not always ride drag behind big friend. Do not want to start again, far from things. Want to do things … different … even make mistakes.”
“Haven’t I treated you fairly? Haven’t I—”
“You have a right to your own dreams,” I said. “I doubt being fair has anything to do with it.”
“What if I don’t want to sell?” Joseph said.
I squeezed my husband’s shoulder gently as I stood behind him. “Each has a different path. Isn’t that what you’ve always said, Joseph? It isn’t about you and Benito. It’s about Benito and Anna, what they want for their family.”
His gaze went to his hands hugging the small child. He was quiet.
I looked across the table at Anna. We each stood behind our husbands, our eyes sharing a message. The friendship matters, her eyes said. But more, my husband’s pride, of who he is and yet will be away from the shadow of Mr. Sherar.
“You’ll visit?” I said, lighter than I felt, aware at once of how much I would miss them, their ready laughter, good sense, the smell of Anna’s cooking, the chatter of Spanish mixed with English. “Bring the children?” My words caught in my throat. Oh, how I would miss the children!
“Yes, si,” Benito said. “And will help with roundup. Share, still. Just set own pace,” he said, his eyes pleading with me, with Joseph, to understand.
Anna left her husband’s side and came to mine, her eyes searching, each knowing what we would miss, each supporting the loves of our lives. “I save seeds,” she said softly, “so you can plant at the river. We will share some of the same view. Come. I show you,” she said, and we walked arm in arm outside.
I’m not sure Joseph understood until much later. Sorting out the change in their relationship and how it would affect our move to the falls took energy. It was as though he had to ruminate on other old connections, with his brother, his father, have them work to the surface whenever some current encounter attached to the past. Slowly, though, my Joseph washed his feelings in the soothing water of time and we moved to Sherar’s Bridge without his life-long friends.
It was called Sherar’s Bridge almost immediately. I never understood that. Todd and May and Hemingway and O’Brien—not to mention the Tyghs and Teninos and Warm Springs people—all had their marks on that piece of the river. Somehow “Sherar’s” stuck.
O’Brien had begun work on a wooden flume to bring spring water from a grassy ravine above the rock ledge to a storage tank near the cabin. It was our water supply. Finishing that task took Joseph’s first energies, begun even before we bega
n the move. Then he started on the house.
The place came with a single-story frame structure, made up of a large kitchen with a room to eat in and gather, a small parlor, and on the other side, three bedrooms, two for weary travelers. Almost at once, Joseph determined to add on, to enlarge the small parlor into a saloon. He wanted to expand the kitchen area, create a long, rectangular dining room with eight small bedrooms sticking out from the saloon. Each little room would house a narrow bed, a washstand for a chamber set, a Chatham-square mirror, and two clothes pegs pounded into one wall. I wondered how weary travelers could sleep with their tiny bedrooms attached like nipples to the belly of the bar, but they did.
Thirteen rooms in all. Finished, it would be larger than the home we left behind, very different, as we prepared for the increase in passengers Joseph was sure would follow with his improvements in the road.
I always appreciated that he tended to the house first even though it must have galled him some. He knew the roads so badly needed work. Perhaps he concentrated on the house because it was October, and he knew it was futile to begin the real road work before spring. I prefer to think his efforts reflected his remembering: my wish for a house with room enough for a large family to slip their feet beneath the table; room enough to strike up the fiddle and hear the shuffle of smooth soles across the polished floor; room enough to house all my memories and hopes.
At the same time, the bridge itself did require his attention. He wished to secure it, make it sturdier, and widen it to accommodate the larger loads and traffic he imagined would come down the ridge and cross. I often wonder if he ever imagined that just ten years later Jess and Stephen Yancy would bring five loads of thirty thousand pounds each to that bridge, having eased their way down the grade, the owners trusting in his construction enough to creak their heavy, ponderous fifteen-ton load of a light plant to the water’s edge. They hoped what they carried in their wagons would illuminate the entire town of Prineville, south of Cross Hollows—if they could only reach the other side. I marvel that my visionary husband could have engineered something that inspired such confidence, especially that first fall.
And there were other pressures on us as we moved to our new home. Developing a crew was one. We needed men to handle the livery animals, harness and tend to traveling teams. If we were successful in building roads, we’d have stagecoaches making that treacherous grade. They’d require feed to refresh their mounts to make it up the other side. There’d be passengers to serve, tolls to collect, food to prepare for travelers and our own crew, assuming we had one.
“So who will we hire for the road work?” I asked my planning husband. “There’ll be enough work to keep what buckaroos we have busy without releasing them each day for the road.”
“Been thinking on that for a while, now,” Joseph said. “Going to make a ride to the reservation. Want to come along?”
He knew he didn’t have to ask twice.
Sunmiet greeted me with a warm embrace and invited us inside. Seeing us, Standing Tall bristled, grunted a greeting as he pushed his way past us to the outside without further comment. He left unmended dipnets on the floor. “He is busy with the horses today,” Sunmiet said awkwardly, “and forgets his manners. Please, sit.” She made room for us on the furs and blankets and it dawned on me as we sat that there were no chairs in the room. Nothing, actually, of the white man’s world. Rock pestles, spear shafts, snowboards, all handmade. Even Sunmiet wore the buckskins of her own tanning. “You like dried salmon?” she offered.
Joseph declined, saying he had really come to see Peter and would do that now. I accepted her offer though I wasn’t hungry. I knew that giving meant much to her. “You stay,” Joseph urged me. “Visit, while I look for Peter.”
“You look young, happy as a child,” Sunmiet said. “And still so slender, as an eel. Tiny waist,” she laughed, “not like mine.” She patted her stomach, sharing her secret.
“Iyái? Again?” I said, surprised and happy for her as she smiled. It pleased me that I felt no jealousy for my friend’s happiness.
She blushed, blinked her eyelashes. “We cannot seem to find the cause,” she said, laughing. “And so it keeps happening.”
“When?”
“In the spring. During salmon feast. He will be a big baby, like my others, Kása tells me. Aswan!” She raised her voice to bring the youngster from his digging in a basket. “No more candy for you! You’ll be sick! Maybe I will call the Whip Man, to help you remember to stay out of what is not yours!” Aswan quickly pulled his fingers from the basket as though bitten by a snake. He said something in Sahaptin which his mother answered in kind. Then to me she said, “He has seen the Whip Man at his friend Tepo’s. Bubbles called him in and the Whip Man disciplined Tepo with a willow swat to his legs. The other children too, but Tepo got the worst. It works.” She smiled as her oldest son picked up a spearpoint and scurried out the door. “We will see you at the falls?” she asked. She already knew then, of our move.
“We’ll be there always, now,” I said, and something made me ask, “Does Standing Tall resent our being there?”
Sunmiet looked away from my face. “He does not think any white man should live where the fish come up the river. He says their presence will scare the fish away. He is not alone in his thinking.” She fidgeted with the fringe on her dress. “Others disagree. There is much discussion in the council.” She looked back at me, her eyes tired. “Some argue about white man and fish. Others say the Modocs are the trouble.” She sighed. “Maybe it is because the men have little else to do now, so they talk often and long.”
I didn’t know how to respond. I felt sad for her, for Standing Tall. Yet we were not the first to have lived at the bridge. And I knew Joseph would take care there, though I wasn’t sure about the Modocs’ intentions. Surely we wouldn’t hurt the fish or her family’s livelihood.
“Now I can see you every summer,” I said. “And Aswan and Anne and this new one when it comes. You can put me to work, cleaning fish again, or watching the babies.” Sunmiet reached for her beadwork, began work as we talked. “You’ll like how we improve the bridge. And the roads, for easier traveling.”
“Standing Tall says there are too many people passing there now. A better bridge and roads will bring more. He says new men come with books and drawings to cut up our world like a hunted deer. We will be left like dogs with only the bones.”
“And your father? What does he say?”
She looked back at me, her brown eyes showing a depth of pain I had not noticed before. “He and Standing Tall disagree. My father stands with Peter and others who say the white man is here forever, like the fish jumping up at the falls, pushing themselves over the impossible because they have a place calling them, a place to go to. And living with them, taking their ways and making them fit into ours, molding them to our ways, stretching them on our drum rings, will be better for our people than trying to stop them from being here at all.” She worked again with her beads, talked into the design. “It is my experience that non-Indians never turn deaf ears to their calling over impossible places.”
Eagle Speaker’s and Peter’s views prevailed that day. For when Joseph returned to pick me up, he was elated. “Peter will bring men,” he said, “in the spring. Some who helped at Blivenses’ like that kind of work and the steady pay. There’ll be twenty or thirty—of families who camp there every year and fish. Some new people. Peter seems to think they can do both: fish and build roads. I like his attitude. So we’ll see. Following round-up next two weeks, he’ll come by.” He put his hands out for me to step into, push up onto my horse. “We’ll ride where I want to build and he’ll see what I mean, translate to those not speaking English.” Joseph’s joy was complete.
As we rode back I heard him speaking beneath his breath, his hands moving this way and that as he does when he’s in deep thought. “What?” I asked.
“Just remembering,” he said. “Never imagined when I rode down Buck Hollow the first time an
d shook hands with Peter and his son, that one day we’d be working side by side. Funny, isn’t it, how when you’re on the right road, life has a way of meeting you over and over at the switchbacks?”
Our fall had one last big event before we settled in to our first winter at Sherar’s Bridge: round-up. Work on the bridge and the house and the general moving in all halted for that process of gathering animals from the ridges and ravines, driving them through grasses torn short to the corrals near the Y homesite now occupied by Anna and Benito. As before, buckaroos roped, flopped calves, held the bawling animals’ legs with one boot holding their necks and the other driven into the dirt. With strained arms and legs, they kept the animal still while another buckaroo wielded the hot branding iron, burned a J in the red hair on the left hip side. The area reeked of singed hair. As before, we doctored leg injuries, pulled cheatgrass from eyes, and drove curious calves sporting noses filled with porcupine quills into the wooden chutes to pull the barbs, leaving behind bloody noses and calves wondering if we’d really helped. I suspect the bull calves we converted into steers wished to ask the same question of our efforts with a sharp knife. And as before, we culled out animals who had not made the weight gain we would have liked, made plans to sell the calfless mothers with no yearlings by their side. The steers we’d cut at spring round-up stood fat and sleek, now ready for market.
The final step meant driving cows to join herds bought up by eastern buyers in their silk vests gathered at the Umatilla House or the Globe Hotel in The Dalles.
Joseph always thought making the eight-hundred-mile drive of cattle from The Dalles to the Union Pacific railroad at Kelton, Utah, would have made an interesting time. But we sold “on foot, as is” and let the buyers find their own buckaroos to drive the cattle south. “Enough trouble getting the hard-headed horn-growing bovines twenty miles to town let alone another eight hundred miles across the territory to Utah,” Joseph decided anew each year.