Where the Lost Wander: A Novel(106)
I realize now that life is just a continual parting of the ways, some more painful than others. We refused to say goodbye to the Shoshoni; we just kissed Lost Woman and embraced Hanabi, and John promised Washakie he would see him again. When I looked back through tear-filled eyes, the tribe remained where we left them, their belongings on their backs and piled on their horses, a watercolor painting I’ve since tried and failed to recreate.
John wouldn’t look back. It hurt too much, and I was reminded of Ma keeping her eyes from the graves of the little ones because she couldn’t carry that pain. John carried it anyway. He carried that pain all the way to the gold fields at the base of the Sierra Nevada and for a long time after that. He will always be Two Feet, straddling two worlds, and there is nothing I can do but give him something—someone—to hold on to. To belong to. Worlds pass away. People do too, but he left a part of himself among the Shoshoni, wandering in the hills and along the streams beside Washakie. I’m sure one day, when ages have passed, his spirit will return there, and mine will have to follow.
A week after we left the winter range, we reached the spot where John and my brothers had buried the wagon. The cross was still standing, though it had teetered some. We straightened it and piled more stones on top of the wagon box, but this time when we left, I didn’t look back. I couldn’t feel my loved ones there, and I was glad to leave that desert behind.
It was July 1854 when we reached Coloma, a mining town that had sprouted up in 1848 when a man at Sutter’s Mill had found gold. John and I shed our skins and wore the only homespun clothing we had left, which wasn’t in the best of conditions. John’s hair was so long he was afraid someone would shoot and ask questions later, so I rode in front, shielding my eyes from the setting sun, stunned by the shelters and the ramshackle cabins dotting the landscape in every direction. I didn’t know how we would ever find my brothers.
But they saw us coming.
Abbott had a claim from ’49 with a one-room cabin that wasn’t much more than a shack, but he kept the boys together. They hunkered down, waited out the winter, and eked out the spring working at the sawmill and panning for gold. Webb still had no shoes, Will had grown a foot, and Wyatt had no boy left in him, though he cried in my arms like a baby.
There are no words for joy like that. Our legs wouldn’t hold us, and we fell on each other in a quivering pile, laughing and crying and embracing. We tried to speak and finally gave up, weeping until we were all dried out.
“John promised us. He promised, and he kept his word,” Webb said, and what was dry became wet all over again.
John has a way of making things work. He managed to trade a little of this and exchange some of that, and before we knew it, we had a place to call home, a storefront, and a round corral, big enough to start a mule business with Kettle and a few mares. Wyatt got work, and Abbott got married, much to all our surprise, considering his purported lack of feeling from the waist down. We sent letters to Missouri, and Jennie and John Sr. always wrote back. They even sent a little money and presents for the boys. It wasn’t a bad life, not at all, but John still carried that pain.
In 1856 we took the boys and the budding mule business to the Great Salt Lake Valley so John could keep another promise. Through the long summer, John watched the travelers and the tribes coming in and out of the market, knowing that one day, Washakie would come to trade.
You can imagine the joy on the day he did; John brought him home, and he and his men spent two days camped in our paddock, telling stories and reminiscing. Washakie is well thought of here, and no one gave them any trouble. Webb, Will, and Wyatt sat among them, listening and laughing, though they couldn’t understand a word anyone said.
Washakie didn’t ask about our babies and why there weren’t any, but before he left, he told John he would have a son. John said he already had three May boys to father, but Washakie said there would be a whole line of John Lowrys, and John’s descendants would tell his story and honor his name.
He’s like Ma that way, Washakie, with his dreams and premonitions. When we saw him again the following year, I was rounded with child, and the night I delivered, there were tracks in the snow.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
There really was a John Lowry, born in Missouri to a Pawnee woman and a white father, who came west and ended up in Utah in the 1850s. He was my husband’s five-times great-grandfather. Some disputes in the family exist over whether his father (also named John Lowry) was really his father or just the white man his Pawnee mother married after her Cheyenne husband (Eagle Feather) and newborn daughter died. That is something we won’t ever know for sure. John Lowry was the name he passed on to his son, also named John Lowry, and to the generations after that, but I sincerely hope there is an afterlife so I can hear the real story from him. I don’t know if our John Lowry ever knew Chief Washakie, but after writing this book, I feel like I know them both.
As a boy, my husband spent summers traipsing the Wind River Range with his father, and he keeps a picture of Chief Washakie tucked into an old harness that hangs in our room. He grew up with a reverence for Chief Washakie that I didn’t understand until I started forming the idea for this story. Washakie predicted people would write about him in their books, and I’m just one person making that prediction a reality. Washakie made many predictions that came true. The vision mentioned in this book happened in 1850, though Naomi’s part was fictional. I wanted to include it in the story because it was such a formative part of Washakie’s life and leadership. A painting of the vision was made in 1932 by Charlie Washakie, one of Chief Washakie’s sons. I made Naomi’s depiction nothing like the real thing, so as not to confuse the reader. Washakie’s Vision, painted on elk skin, can be seen in an exhibit at USU Eastern.