Chapter 29

We took to calling Sin’s brother “The Kid” and eventually he added his own real name to it and he was “Billy the Kid”. I knew from my time traveling perspective that he was not the original Billy because we were in the wrong geographic location and he was not cut from that mean-spirited mold.

I was surprised that Kit and Sin took to each other like long lost sisters and I was circumspect about humping Kit anywhere Sin was nearby enough to hear her making a racket like she was prone to do when she descended into that “girl’s got to have it” mood.

The Indian contingent with the exception of the original trio of braves with me from the very beginning of our western expedition headed out with typical spread-out fashion to the northern border and I knew they would not stop until they felt a bit safer under the thumb of the mostly unbiased red-coated Mounties. In fact, most of those Mounties had Indian wives, or, females they called their wife because all it took in those days was the inclination and not the ceremony.

I wished them all well and suspected we might not be seeing each other again unless I ran into some dire calamity and had to skedaddle north to get out of the way of trouble.

We started to run into a lot more fences or partial fences and small settlements the closer we got to the coastline. It was beginning to seem like every day was starting off with almost automatic periods of fog and then a fine mist that soaked into your muscles like the sea spray that came up into your face on a fast-moving vessel. In fact, the scent of the Ocean was constantly in the air even though we didn’t get but fleeting glimpses of the water off in the distance.

My negro detachment had been whittled down to only about a half dozen hardy souls armed to the teeth and itching for any kind of a fight to take away the boredom of shepherding a bunch of white women to find a suitable niche in the frontier life.

We crested the top of the low rolling coastal hills not too far from Portland on a cold, dreary Sunday morning plumb tuckered out from the constant daily routine of tending the animals and making at least twenty miles a day while we still had light.

My last muster showed our troop to have been reduced to only thirty fighting men and a female presence of fifty or so unattached women and girls of nubile age. The children numbered almost twenty but a sizable number of them had expired for various reasons totally unrelated to armed conflict. The sour belly blues and the whooping cough were the main culprits and they were aimed at the youngest amongst us to the disadvantage of the minor children. We had three of the grown women in a family way with no clear idea of which lucky man was the suspected father. In my travels in this somewhat uncivilized time period, I had grown accustomed to the randomness of coital relationships and lack of preventive tools to forestall unwanted pregnancies other than the customary quick withdrawal method to keep the seeds from being planted in fertile ground.

We had almost forty wagons and our animals were in fine shape due to the plentiful supplies of free grass and careful tending to keep them in tip-top shape for travel. With the possible exception of the narrow band of steep terrain along the western mountain range, the topography was not detrimental to travel and once over the top, our forward progress was eased by a downward slope that made travel much easier. The smell of smoke was in the air, but it seemed that it was from the heating fires of domiciles using plentiful wood from the endless forests.

I noticed that the settled areas had paid special attention to removing the unwanted brush from the areas around a structured building. I thought that to be most beneficial to preventing danger from wind-driven wild fires started by spontaneous combustion in a random act of God.

The city in the distance appeared to be laid out in an orderly fashion and it was largely centered about the proximity to the endless blue Ocean at their very doorstep.

The abundance of seafood was the most impressive boon to the northwestern coastal cities.

The only California city with a similar atmosphere was the hodge podge called San Francisco with its sheltered Bay and scenic hills favored by the rich and famous. The common folk were treated with customary rudeness by the powerful barons from the East. In a way, any inclination to compare the Northwest Territory with the California magnet of prosperity was met with ruthless discouragement by the local power brokers.

It would have been easy for us to just join the crowd and head to the Sacramento Basin or the lure of San Francisco, but the unknown and unexplored Pacific Territories drew me like a hypnotic force in a way that caused me to surrender with scant objection.

Once we crossed that final obstacle of the hilly terrain along the coast, we rolled into the blustery and rain drenched Portland area like a swarm of locusts ready to devour anything that took our fancy.

The females reigned supreme because in those early days, the presence of a nubile European or American woman stirred the loins of the crude adventurers seeking to find their fortune after the gold and the prime real estate was run out and unavailable to newcomers. The forties and the fifties were the era of fortune making and all that was left in the Post-Civil War era was the crumbs to be found in the seventies and eighties for the latecomers to scratch out from the rocky coastline.