“The dread of a vengeance, you think. That a blacker follower than ‘Atra cura post equitem.’”
I tire of these unwholesome characters I am describing. But I did not put them into the story. They took their places themselves. I find that brutality interferes in most dramas and most lives. Brutality the male sin, disloyalty the female sin,—these two are always doing their best to baffle and blight heroism and purity. Often they succeed. Oftener they fail. And so the world exists, and is not annulled; its history is the history of the struggle and the victory. This episode of my life is a brief of the world’s complete experience.
CHAPTER VIII.
A MORMON CARAVAN.
Still, as we rode along, the same rich, tranquil days of October; the air always potable gold, and every breath nepenthe.
Early on one of the fairest of afternoons when all were fairest, we reached Fort Bridger. Bridger had been an old hunter, trapper, and by and by that forlorn hope of civilization, the holder of an Indian trading-post. The spot is better known now. It was there that that miserable bungle and blunder of an Administration more fool, if that be possible, than knave,—the Mormon Expedition in 1858,—took refuge, after its disasters on the Sweetwater.
At the moment of our arrival, Bridger’s Fort had just suffered capture. Its owner was missing. The old fellow had deemed himself the squatter sovereign of that bleak and sere region. He had built an adobe mud fort, with a palisade, on a sweep of plain a degree less desert than the deserts hard by. That oasis was his oasis, so he fondly hoped; that mud fort, his mud fort; those willows and alders, his thickets; and that trade, his trade.
But Bridger was one man, and he had powerful neighbors. It was a case of “O si annulus iste!”—a Naboth’s-vineyard case. The Mormons did not love the rugged mountaineer; that worthy Gentile, in turn, thought the saints no better than so many of the ungodly. The Mormons coveted oasis, fort, thicket, and trade. They accused the old fellow of selling powder and ball to hostile Indians,—to Walker, chief of the Utes, a scion, no doubt, of the Hookey Walker branch of that family. Very likely he had done so. At all events, it was a good pretext. So, in the name of the Prophet, and Brigham, successor of the Prophet, the Latter-Day Saints had made a raid upon the post. Bridger escaped to the mountains. The captors occupied the Gentile’s property, and spoiled his goods.
Jake Shamberlain told us this story, not without some sympathy for the exile.
“It’s olluz so,” says Jake; “Paul plants, and Apollyon gets the increase. Not that Bridger’s like Paul, any more’n we’re like Apollyon; but we’re goan to have all the cider off his apple trees.”