We had been walking for a day and a half without having much in the way of a meal, when we stumbled across the cow and her calf. It was strange to think that we were now in the not-quite-wilderness. We had seen very little sign of humanity previous two days, and here, as we came out of a patch of conifers into an open area of yellow grass and short sagebrush, stunted by the high elevation, were ‘farm’ animals.
It would have been an easy shot. The calf particularly would have been a quick butcher with tender meat soon to be cooking over a fire. For a moment, I thought about priming the pan of my rifle, but decided against it. We couldn’t really carry the rest of the meat, it would be wasted, and we probably didn’t have that much further to go. Maybe another day or so. We had hard tack and jerky enough.
Besides, if we did shoot it, our luck would be that the rancher would come over the hill and catch us doing so.
Still, the idea of fresh, juicy meat cooked over a fire was tempting.
We kept walking, staying with the aspen trees that bordered the lower area of the field. About 20 minutes later, another odd image appeared — a pickup truck came bouncing across the field, straight towards us. He waved. We waved. He pulled up, rolled down the window, and asked: “Are you two hunting? It’s not muzzleloader season yet.”
“No. We’re walking down to the Fort Bridger Rendezvous.”
He didn’t look completely convinced. I noticed the shoulder insignia, Wyoming Fish and Game. Were we in Wyoming already?
Despite his initial skepticism, he could see we were dressed the part of fellows walking to a shoot, or maybe a freak show, and not really dressed like deer hunters. I had leather leggings, elk skin, a cloth breech cloth, cotton old-style shirt. Jeff was dressed similarly, except he was wearing jeans. I had a .45 caliber flintlock rifle, Jeff was packing my 12-ga flintlock smoothbore. We each had a blanket rolled up with our personal items inside, tied with a strap over our shoulders.
The officer looked us over a few times, then said “Are you doing any fishing?” There was a small creek running through the open area. It did have fish, though the biggest were about six inches long. “No.” We didn’t have any obvious fishing gear. “OK” and he drove off.
I was glad we didn’t have calf blood on our clothes or hands.
***
Two days prior, we had left from high on the north side of the Uintahs, at Elizabeth Ridge, in Utah (elevation 10,235 feet) intent on walking into Fort Bridger, Wyoming (elevation 6,674 feet). This was the third annual Rendezvous, Labor Day weekend of 1975. I had been to the previous two Fort Bridger Rendezvous events. The Mountain Men of the Wasatch, of which I was a member, were the originators and organizers.
It was a rendezvous, not a shoot. No paper targets. There was shooting competition, but it was a blanket shoot. The entry fee each event was this: you put something interesting, something period, worth $5 or better, down on the blanket. Afterwards, you would take something off the blanket, in order of winning. If you didn’t see anything you liked better, you could take what you put down. Theoretically, you only needed one $5 blanket prize to shoot the entire long weekend. But you wanted more than one blanket prize. There were too many cool things to be won that you didn’t want to give up.
Targets might be a cracker on a plank, or an axe blade with a clay pigeon on either side. Aim at the blade straight on, split your ball, one piece going to either side, breaking both clay pigeons. It was surprising how often this actually happened, splitting a ball on an axe-blade.
Camping on the Fort site itself was primitive. Mostly tipis, a few canvas tents. Just across the highway, the ‘tin tipi’ area — campers, trailers, modern tents.
It was early September. I had graduated high school last spring. Jeff worked together at McDonald’s in Sandy, attended different high schools, and he was a couple years younger than I. He had never been to Fort Bridger, but was interested.
I was walking in moccasins I had made. Jeff had shoes. We both slept on the ground, using just the blanket we carried. We were not accustomed to that, and didn’t get as much sleep as we were used to. But we were teenagers. It was OK.
We didn’t have a map, but I basically knew where Fort Bridger was: some 50 miles downstream, if one wandered basically in the proper direction. The idea was to follow the creek until it came to the river, then into Fort Bridger.
The first night, we made camp still high in the mountains, in a thin draw along a creek, trees all around. We made a fire, boiled up some water in my small billy-can, made a little stew from the hardtack and jerky I had made back at home. As we were sitting there, Jeff looked up at a tree that had been chewed off about 8 feet up.
He asked: “What did that?”
I looked up. “Beaver.”
“Hmmm.” He seemed thoughtful.
As the light failed, we rolled out our blankets and each of us wrapped up. I fell asleep fairly fast. A while later, I could hear Jeff rolling about a bit. I decided I needed to pee and unwrapped my blanket.
“How big are those beaver?” Jeff asked.
“Normal size,” I laughed, “but the snow gets deep here in the draws during winter.”
He had not been able to get to sleep, perhaps thinking of monstrously tall beaver prowling the area.
The next day was spent mostly walking downhill. We could see the flats out in the distance, but couldn’t make out Fort Bridger or any city or buildings. Too far away still. Or maybe not visible from that angle.
Our breakfast was more hardtack and jerky stew, and not a lot of that. We really didn’t know how many days our trek would take, but we did know how much hardtack and jerky we had — not much. We assumed we might find some squirrels, which were not considered game animals at the time or place — Utah. Didn’t know about Wyoming, but I didn’t think it would be different. And I didn’t think we were yet into Wyoming.
As we came into a flatter wooded area, we spooked a squirrel. Squirrel meat was interesting to us. The technique for shooting a small squirrel with a larger-bore muzzleloader is to as ‘bark’ the squirrel. The idea is to strike the tree limb just under the squirrel, and the exploding wood kills the squirrel by concussion. Too high of a strike, hitting the squirrel with a .45 caliber roundball, would probably destroy most of the meat on the little thing. Too low, straight into the branch, you scare the squirrel, and it runs away. With a muzzleloader, no quick second shot. The idea is to just graze the top of the branch under the squirrel. I had barked squirrels before. I had also missed them before.
The squirrel being up on a branch maybe 12 feet above ground, I took aim and fired. You don’t get much time with a living animal, because they move. The squirrel tumbled to the ground. It wasn’t dead. It was badly injured. My ball had struck about correctly on the branch, but maybe a bit to one side. I don’t like to see the animal suffer, and this was my doing. Not wanting to grab a thrashing wild animal with one hand and cut its throat with the other, I crushed its head with the butt of my rifle. Jeff didn’t have much hunting experience, and the look on his face was not a pleasant one. I don’t know what my face looked like. “Get this done,” perhaps.
With the squirrel dead, I took out my replica Green River butcher knife, opened up the belly, gutted it, then skinned it. We started a fire with flint and steel, then made a little spit where we roasted the carcass. It wasn’t much meat, but it was fresh and hot. We were hungry and quickly devoured it.
My grandfather taught me how to make campfires when I was quite young. Not flint and steel, but only one (1) match. If you didn’t make it work, then someone else got to start the fire. So everything had to be ready for that. I knew how to make a campfire. He also taught me to make sure the fire was out, dead out, before leaving it. Usually this involved a bucket of water. We didn’t have a bucket, just the small billy can, and more importantly, we had no stream nearby, no water source. It wasn’t a big fire. We let it die down as we ate and cleaned up. Still, I was taught to leave a fire dead out. As it turns out, of course, we did have a water source. Two water sources, actually. Two bladders. On the remains of a small fire, that works.
The next day, shortly after our encounter with the Wyoming Fish & Game fellow, we got down into a flatter area, a valley with a reservoir at the downhill side. I hadn’t checked the map well enough, apparently, because this was a surprise to me. The river bottom was full of brush, over head height. But it was flatter, easier than walking on the side of a mountain. At least that’s what I thought.
I built my first flintlock rifle, the .45 caliber Numrich Minuteman I was carrying on this trip, in 1972. I had fired hundreds, more likely a couple thousand, rounds at various outings, camping trips, shoots, and rendezvous prior to this year’s Fort Bridger. At a shoot, which almost always took place in civilization, even if that just meant the cars were close by, we would typically be dressed in our buckskins, calico shirts maybe. A possible bag and a powder horn draped over the shoulder. We weren’t trapping or tromping around in the mountains, intent on business or work. This was recreation. If it was a weekend event, we had a camp area, usually quite open, and the shooting area, also open ground with a backstop of some sort at one end.
So, we developed a style for that activity. One thing was the powder measure used when loading the gun. Mine was the tip of a deer antler, hollowed out to hold the proper charge of gunpowder. Brass powder measures were also common. My powder measure dangled with a leather strap from the end of my powder horn. It was easy access there.
It was also handy to have a touchhole prick, a piece of wire that could be used to clean out debris, such as burnt powder residue, in the touch-hole, a hole in the barrel linking the flashpan to the charge inside the barrel. It was a handy tool, so I had that in something like a button hole on the strap of my powder horn.
We also each had various things dangling, ready at hand, and looking cool, we thought. Being in the rendezvous, mountain-man mindset meant that you liked the look of old-timey things.
As we walked downstream towards the reservoir, the brushy area got denser and denser. We were forcing our way through brush, trying to keep our faces from getting too scratched. After a time, this became old, so we moved off to the right side, to get out of the brush.
Open on the more open ground, in the trees, we sat down and took account of things. At first, it was the matter of pulling various stickers and twigs out of our bedrolls. As we sat there, I noticed my powder measure was missing. And my vent prick. Nearly everything that had been out dangling, looking cool, was gone.
This was a good lesson. Don’t dangle gear on bits of leather on your bag or belt. Keep what you need in a safe place.
Still, if there were newspaper folk about, he’d be the one to be interviewed. We’d be invisible.
Jeff and I went over to the cafe for lunch. Thinking roast-beef dinner again, with mashed potatoes and gravy. As we sat down, we noticed a black fellow at the next table. We said ‘hi’ to each other, and he asked if we were locals. Nope. We’re here for the rendezvous. He had no idea what we were talking about.
Our meals arrived shortly after his. As he was eating, he set up a banter, loud talking. He started out talking about all the dead flies on the window sill. We had not noticed them before. “How hard is it to clean them up?” he asked out-loud. It was a deep window sill, maybe a foot. Probably 40 dead flies laying there. I was thinking it might take three minutes to sweep them up, counting going and getting the dust-pan and broom. The last time those particular three minutes occurred was probably weeks, if not months, ago. “You guys have any flies in your gravy?” It did have some black flecks in it.
From behind the ‘order-up’ counter, one of the cooks said “I lost my ring. Has anyone seen it?” to the other two tending to kitchen duties back there. “A prize for whoever finds it in their mashed potatoes!” said the black guy.
Laughing, we began to notice the mashed potatoes were a bit lumpy. And the gravy was perhaps overly thick, coagulating as it cooled down. The string beans were clearly from a can. The meal was still good, but not as good as it had been the first day. Hunger is the best sauce. Dehydration is right up there, too.
Folks started arriving, setting up camp. An amazing amount of tipis. The first Fort Bridger, 1973, we had 12 tipis. The next year, 19. This year, 1975, over 50. Absolutely astounding!
Friends from the Salt Lake area arrived, including Stephen and Gary, the two older friends who had dropped Jeff and me off in the Uintahs at the beginning of this adventure. Adults. Stephen was in his later-20s and Gary would have been pushing 30, perhaps pushed by a few years. I’m guessing they were glad to see us, as they might have felt some responsibility if we never appeared again. Then again, maybe not. The Universe is a marvelous and strange place. The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda, describes a way of understanding consciousness and one’s place in the Universe through the use of native American hallucinogenics, particularly peyote. Castaneda’s writings were a big influence at the time for Stephen, probably for Gary as well. I read the book, and I thought it was interesting, though peyote use was a step farther than I ever wanted to go.
After Jeff and I wandered off generally downhill on the northern Uintahs, Stephen and Gary found a campsite for the evening near Elizabeth Pass. They spent the night there, dropping a little peyote apparently, being out in the natural area. As the evening wore on for them, one of them brought out a rubber, novelty-store ‘dead & plucked chicken’ which then became a telescope, which then became the telescope used by John C. Fremont in 1843 when he was exploring the area that came to be known as Fremont Island, although John C.’s name for it was Disappointment Island. The chicken’s foot became the lens cap that was lost on the aforesaid island in the Great Salt Lake The lens cap was said to have been discovered some many years later, possibly during the 1860s.
The chicken foot may still be atop Elizabeth Ridge.
I wasn’t there with them for the festivities. It did sound like some amazing evening.
The tin tipi area, just across the two-lane highway from the Fort, was filling up as well. Campers and trailers. In the case of my mother and my friend Brett, a modern canvas tent. Which is where I would be sleeping, too. Jeff’s folks came up for the day, wandered around a bit with him, then they all went back home to the Salt Lake Valley.
Brett had moved to Sandy at the beginning of the previous school year, my senior year and his junior year. He was a fellow trombone player, as well as a fellow wise-ass. We hit it off immediately.
I had recently purchased a reproduction Brown-Bess bayonet and asked my mother to bring it up when she came. She did. That afternoon, Brett and I played mumbly peg with it on the Parade Grounds.
Mumbly peg, our variant of it, is a game played by two. Standing face to face, feet at maybe shoulder-width to begin with. You need a knife, usually a pocket knife, because we always had one of those in our pocket. The idea is to stick the knife in the ground near your opponent’s foot. The opponent then had to move his foot to where the knife was, and return the favor, throwing it into the ground near your foot. If you threw it too far from your opponent’s foot, you lost. If you fell over holding a wide stance, you lost. If you hit your opponent’s foot, you lost, but they had the knife in their foot. Maybe. If you couldn’t stick it into the ground, what are you, some kind of klutz?
Or maybe your rules are different. Tossing a knife, trying to maintain balance at a wide stance, the rules decided who lost, not who won.
So we decided to play with the bayonet. At about 20-30 feet. And yes, this was stupid. But we survived and had fun. A twenty-one-and-one-half-inch bayonet flying through the air, landing somewhere near your foot is an impressive feeling. Makes a ‘wop, wop, wop’ sound as it turns through the air. Mostly we were just tossing it. Neither one of us wanted to accidentally impale the other.
Late afternoon, Brett and I wandered over to the tipi circle, found some friends, and went in a tipi. Bottles were being passed around, as were pipes. I saw my mother smoking pot. “What? You smoke mari….er, knickkinnick?” Tipis have thin, not-at-all-soundproof, walls. There were certain folk who we wanted to be able to maintain ‘plausible deniability’, as they say now. And others might have been surprised that such behavior was going on and may have taken action to stop it. So we said “knickkinnick” and not “marijuana” or “pot”, man.
“Well,” my mother said, “I can’t tell you everything I do. You might take it as it being ok for you to do it, too.”
I was stunned. I had resisted Stephen’s invitations to smoke marijuana for a few years, and had just taken my first ‘tokes’ the previous May. Once I did that, however, it seemed that everyone I knew also smoked marijuana. Since I was “one of them”, others seemed comfortable to let me know they did, too.
Not everyone, of course. Many of the older fellows — Korean War vets and such — did not. But most of those of Vietnam War age, did, with George being an exception. He did not drink alcohol, either. He did enjoy a tobacco pipe, and introduced me to many interesting — and legal — ‘pipe-weeds’ over the years.
Also, my mother was not one to not tell us what she was doing, often going into far more detail than either my sister or I wanted to know. Years later, with sufficient time to process the event, I deduced my mother was actually not a knickkinnick smoker. It may even have been her first time. It was a ruse. My mother, an adult, was trying to be cool in front of others. That’s not a criticism of her. She was 20 years older than I, so 38 at the time of this event. I’m 30 years older now than she was then. I’m aware that such behavior lingers with us far longer than the adolescent me would have believed.
And the ‘not telling me everything’ was consistent with her do-as-I-say-not-as-I do approach to parenting. Some things were ok for grownups, and not ok for kids.
As it turns out, however, 50 years later Brett read an early version of this story and admitted to trying to kiss her, following his “bad interpretation of her behavior.”
What a woman! Oh, well. I never had the pleasure of hanging out with her after that night. I suppose I could have, but, well, you know, self-preservation and all.
Back at Stephen’s tipi, George was frailling away on his early 1900s open-back Whyte Laydie banjo. Someone else had a guitar. We were singing ‘ancient’ Peter, Paul, and Mary songs, from way back in my childhood, more than 10 years prior. Also John Denver songs, folk & country tunes. It was great. For those who imbibed, there was plenty to be had. A jug or bottle would go around the circle inside the tipi. A pipe, however, would only go around to the person nearest the door, then back in the other direction, reversing again at the person on the other side of the opening. The pipe had a sacred quality. A bottle or jug was just for fun. So, a jug could pass across the entrance-hole, while a pipe did not.
At one point, someone decided it would be a good idea for all of us to pour a bit from whatever bottle we had into a big cup. I had a jug of hard cider, one of those old crock jugs, whitish bottom, brown top, with a loop handle near the top, and a cork to plug the pour hole. My mother had carted the jug up from Salt Lake in her car. The cider had been fermenting in there for a few weeks.
What I didn’t know at the time was that there was a layer of organic material on the bottom of that jug, bugs, straw, and other debris, which probably helped with the maturation of the cider. No one died from it, as far as I know.
I added a pour of cider to the big cup and passed it along. Once it had been around the circle, it was stirred with a big spoon, then passed around again for everyone to have a drink. I can’t tell you what it tasted like because I have never tasted anything similar sense. It was potent. And it was fun.
The music continued. People would think of a song, maybe someone would know it. Brett piped up: “Let’s sing some Injun songs. Let’s sing some Injun songs.” He kept this up between tunes for a few times until I asked: “What Injun tune?” “Oh, how about Engine, Engine Number 9?” That cracked me up, and it also cracked up Big Eddy, sitting right next to me. I didn’t know Big Eddy, a tall, big, muscular fellow, maybe had been a football player in high school. Older than I was, and he cracked me up. He had been thinkng “Injun” as well. When we stopped laughing, Brett suddenly looked at us, with a mock-offended look on his face, leaned towards us with a a wide-open mouth and yelled “Ha ha ha ha ha” as an accusation.
“We thought it was funny,” said Big Eddy. “Cool it.”
Folks wandered in and out of the tipi. My mother left. So did others. Others came in. Typical for the event. A while later, my mother came back, asked me to come outside. Ok, what’s up? Can you walk me back to the tent? Ok. It wasn’t far, maybe a couple hundred yards.
It turned out that Big Eddy had followed her out of the tipi, and attacked her. He tried to push her down behind some bushes. She hollered, some other folks poked their heads up. Big Eddy took off.
Stupid. Unthinkable. This was a Rendezvous. There were guns and knives, tomahawks and pistols everywhere. We all trusted each other. Or so I thought. I didn’t have my gun, but I did have my bayonet and my Green River butcher knife. Even then, I knew how to put a good edge on the knife. I was ready if we saw Big Eddy, that son of a bitch. We didn’t. And that was lucky, for all of us. My life-trajectory could have been much different had there been an encounter.
I was not a fighter, but in those days, growing up in the 1960s and 70s, most boys fought from time to time. Teachers often ignored this sort of behavior, thinking it natural, unless a fight actually took place in the classroom. ‘After-school in the playground’ was a conventional time and place. I usually avoided fights. The few I did have mostly didn’t go well for me. I held my ground and landed a few punches. Because of that, I never had a fight with the same fellow more than once. There were easier targets around.
I didn’t see Big Eddy again at the Rendezvous. He either left or laid low.
The next day, Sunday, more shooting. Stephen and I sponsored the upside-down flintlock shoot. You held your gun upside down, stock resting atop your head, sighting down the barrel at a target, perhaps a cracker, tacked to a wooden fence set-up for the shooting. With a flintlock, if your gun misfired, the powder in the pan would fall out. You’d have to bring the gun down, re-prime the pan, and take aim again. Misfires were common. Less than half the time, but perhaps more than 1 out of 10. Maybe 1 out of 5. Could be 1 out of 1 if things weren’t right.
This was our second year of sponsoring that shoot at Fort Bridger. The previous year, a fellow had asked: “Can I hang upside down from my buddy’s neck?” Stephen and I looked at each other. Ok, why not?
So this fellow, let’s call him Sport, was much shorter than his tall buddy. Sport would load and prime his gun, then lay down on the ground. Buddy would lean over, Sport would wrap his legs around Buddy’s neck, locking his feet behind. Buddy would partly stand up, hands on his knees in a crouching position, until Sport was fully suspended.
The advantage of this was that Sport could aim his gun in a normal fashion, that is, stock against his shoulder, fingers normally wrapped around the wrist, other hand holding the gun from ‘underneath’ the barrel.
The disadvantage was that if a misfire happened, re-priming was more complicated. That happened four or five times in a row for one shot. Sport finally re-knapped his flint, and the next time he pulled the trigger, the gun went off. And so did all the powder that had fallen on the ground just a few inches from his head. No harm done, but there was a good flash and plenty of smoke.
There was no repeat of this upside-down strategy at this rendezvous.
Later that night, Brett said: “Let’s go out on the Parade Grounds.” It was dark by then, and the stars were come out in amazing number. Good dark skies there, we could see structure in the Milky Way. Brett pulled out a bottle of Canadian Club.“We’ve known each other a whole year.” Yes, we had. We met when he started at Jordan High School, his junior year and my senior year. We took a swig. We took many swigs. We reminisced about our year in band class and events with the theater group. He was the actor, not I. We had become good friends, having a similar sense of humor and being part of the approximately 5-10%-minority non-Mormon student population. Folks were friendly to us, but at some level we were outsiders, of a different caste.
Our bottle was empty. We had known each other an entire year.
We decided it was time to head back to the campground. We’d be leaving tomorrow, back for home. I’d be in a car, not walking.
Standing was interesting. Half-a-bottle of Canadian Club downed in an hour or so by an 18- and 17-year-old has some significant effect. Walking was difficult. I could see where I wanted to go, but when I tried to walk, I would go off-angle a bit. Then I’d overcompensate by a greater angle to the other side and need to re-take my bearings.
Eventually we made it to the fence at the edge of the Fort grounds, which ran alongside the highway into town. Camp was on the other side of the highway. To get over the fence, there was a wooden style, consisting of maybe four or five steps up, then another four or five back down the other side. I could negotiate the style. Brett could not. I climbed back over, but could not figure out how to help him over.
Finally an older couple came by, on their way back to the tin-tipi area. They had well-tailored buckskins, coming from a different era. I would say the late 1950s, early 1960s. Their buckskins were tailored, as one would see on the Davy Crockett TV series. My stuff was rough. Handmade, by my hand. By a hand that didn’t really know what it was doing, sewing shirts and such. I tried to dye my shirt red, but it came out pinkish. And after living in it for nearly two weeks, Brett had named it Pinky Stinky. Over this, a dyed green hunting frock, probably more of the late 1700s Pennsylvania, but I figured the styles endured and a few must have made their way out west during the fur trade. I made it as well, from a pattern in a book, and it was better than pinkie-stinkie, but not what one would call ‘tailored’.
This couple looked like they could be TV extras, in a black-and-white Western. They could have made the clothes, and probably did, but by appearance, they knew how to make clothes. I admired their upright postures, stylish buckskins, and reserved manner. They had a sense of dignity, something I don’t think I’ve ever been able to pull off.
“Can you help my friend across the style?” I asked. Brett was sitting on the bottom step. They agreed to, and once everyone was on the other side, they walked to their camper or trailer. I doubt they were in a tent. I staggered across the road. Brett was on hands and knees by this time.
At the tent, he went inside and collapsed into his sleeping area. I sat outside, started a small fire, lit a pipe of tobacco, and waited for my mother to show up.
A while later, I noticed a figure staggering along the side of the highway. Mom! I managed to stand up and walk out there to her. Earlier in the evening she had walked to the local bar and proceeded to get very drunk. I helped her into her sleeping area, let the fire die down, then went to bed myself.
The next morning, my mother and Brett both looked like they had been dragged around the edge of a shallow pond a couple of times. Brett’s morning mantra was: “I’m never going to drink again. I’m never going to drink again. I’m never going to drink again.”
I didn’t feel too bad. Not perfect, of course. Ragged yet upright.
“Breakfast?” I asked. “Oh God, no” and sounds of restrained retching from both of them.
So I walked into town to the small grocery store, bought a quart cartoon of chocolate milk, came back to camp, and drank it in front of them.
They watched me. It had the desired effect. It sickened them even more.
Yes, that was mean. I still think it was funny, which probably means I’m still not mature nor of a reserved manner. After drinking a quart of chocolate milk, I didn’t feel all that well, either. I was not about to let on in front of them.
I did get my comeuppance. My mother informed me that she would not be driving. So I did, from Fort Bridger, Wyoming, to Sandy, Utah, at the south end of the Salt Lake Valley, while those two slept it off. At least the car had an AM radio.
As for my previous comment that Jeff and I were invisible to the press, that turned out to not be true.
From the Salt Lake Tribune, Monday, September 1, 1975, front-page of the second section (page 17), written by Vandra Webb, Tribune Staff Writer.
“Jeff Anderson, 16, and Ken Pollard, 16 (sic), got so wrapped up with the historical aspects of mountainmanning (sic) that they decided to walk in.
“ ‘It didn’t seem right to pull up in a car. So we were dropped off in the Uintas and walked in. You really got to respect those guys. It was a hard life,’ Ken said, showing the hole in his moccasins.”
I was 18, and now at 67, I’m still not sure ‘mountainmanning’ is a word. We were not in either of the two photos for the story. The first photo shows Bill Watts, a friend and a classic gray-grizzled-looking mountaineer. He also appeared in local TV commercials as a mountain man. The other photo shows a handsome young Dave Osmundsen in full regalia tossing a tomahawk. Our mention is near the end of some 24 column-inches of text.
As Stephen said later, the hole in my moccasin proved nothing. I always had a hole or worse. And that was true. Born with wide feet, by the time I got to high-school age, I wore moccasins more often than not, including to school. I made multiple pairs a year, getting as much use out of each as I could.
We also showed up in a photo in a magazine from the same general time, “Friends”, a General Motors (GM) trade magazine. ‘Big Red’, a fellow Mountain Men of the Wasatch friend, has a full-face photo. We’re in another photo, some distance away, standing beside a tipi, talking with someone inside, apparently. I recognize us by the clothes. We’re not the subject of the photo nor mentioned in the story. But, hey. GM. National exposure. It will be subtracted from my 15 minutes of fame.
This photo of me and my Brown Bess bayonet did not appear in a newspaper or a national magazine. It was taken by my good friend George.
Targets might be a cracker on a plank, or an axe blade with a clay pigeon on either side. Aim at the blade straight on, split your ball, one piece going to either side, breaking both clay pigeons. It was surprising how often this actually happened, splitting a ball on an axe-blade.
Camping on the Fort site itself was primitive. Mostly tipis, a few canvas tents. Just across the highway, the ‘tin tipi’ area — campers, trailers, modern tents.
It was early September. I had graduated high school last spring. Jeff worked together at McDonald’s in Sandy, attended different high schools, and he was a couple years younger than I. He had never been to Fort Bridger, but was interested.
I was walking in moccasins I had made. Jeff had shoes. We both slept on the ground, using just the blanket we carried. We were not accustomed to that, and didn’t get as much sleep as we were used to. But we were teenagers. It was OK.
We didn’t have a map, but I basically knew where Fort Bridger was: some 50 miles downstream, if one wandered basically in the proper direction. The idea was to follow the creek until it came to the river, then into Fort Bridger.
The first night, we made camp still high in the mountains, in a thin draw along a creek, trees all around. We made a fire, boiled up some water in my small billy-can, made a little stew from the hardtack and jerky I had made back at home. As we were sitting there, Jeff looked up at a tree that had been chewed off about 8 feet up.
He asked: “What did that?”
I looked up. “Beaver.”
“Hmmm.” He seemed thoughtful.
As the light failed, we rolled out our blankets and each of us wrapped up. I fell asleep fairly fast. A while later, I could hear Jeff rolling about a bit. I decided I needed to pee and unwrapped my blanket.
“How big are those beaver?” Jeff asked.
“Normal size,” I laughed, “but the snow gets deep here in the draws during winter.”
He had not been able to get to sleep, perhaps thinking of monstrously tall beaver prowling the area.
***
The next day was spent mostly walking downhill. We could see the flats out in the distance, but couldn’t make out Fort Bridger or any city or buildings. Too far away still. Or maybe not visible from that angle.
Our breakfast was more hardtack and jerky stew, and not a lot of that. We really didn’t know how many days our trek would take, but we did know how much hardtack and jerky we had — not much. We assumed we might find some squirrels, which were not considered game animals at the time or place — Utah. Didn’t know about Wyoming, but I didn’t think it would be different. And I didn’t think we were yet into Wyoming.
As we came into a flatter wooded area, we spooked a squirrel. Squirrel meat was interesting to us. The technique for shooting a small squirrel with a larger-bore muzzleloader is to as ‘bark’ the squirrel. The idea is to strike the tree limb just under the squirrel, and the exploding wood kills the squirrel by concussion. Too high of a strike, hitting the squirrel with a .45 caliber roundball, would probably destroy most of the meat on the little thing. Too low, straight into the branch, you scare the squirrel, and it runs away. With a muzzleloader, no quick second shot. The idea is to just graze the top of the branch under the squirrel. I had barked squirrels before. I had also missed them before.
The squirrel being up on a branch maybe 12 feet above ground, I took aim and fired. You don’t get much time with a living animal, because they move. The squirrel tumbled to the ground. It wasn’t dead. It was badly injured. My ball had struck about correctly on the branch, but maybe a bit to one side. I don’t like to see the animal suffer, and this was my doing. Not wanting to grab a thrashing wild animal with one hand and cut its throat with the other, I crushed its head with the butt of my rifle. Jeff didn’t have much hunting experience, and the look on his face was not a pleasant one. I don’t know what my face looked like. “Get this done,” perhaps.
With the squirrel dead, I took out my replica Green River butcher knife, opened up the belly, gutted it, then skinned it. We started a fire with flint and steel, then made a little spit where we roasted the carcass. It wasn’t much meat, but it was fresh and hot. We were hungry and quickly devoured it.
My grandfather taught me how to make campfires when I was quite young. Not flint and steel, but only one (1) match. If you didn’t make it work, then someone else got to start the fire. So everything had to be ready for that. I knew how to make a campfire. He also taught me to make sure the fire was out, dead out, before leaving it. Usually this involved a bucket of water. We didn’t have a bucket, just the small billy can, and more importantly, we had no stream nearby, no water source. It wasn’t a big fire. We let it die down as we ate and cleaned up. Still, I was taught to leave a fire dead out. As it turns out, of course, we did have a water source. Two water sources, actually. Two bladders. On the remains of a small fire, that works.
***
The next day, shortly after our encounter with the Wyoming Fish & Game fellow, we got down into a flatter area, a valley with a reservoir at the downhill side. I hadn’t checked the map well enough, apparently, because this was a surprise to me. The river bottom was full of brush, over head height. But it was flatter, easier than walking on the side of a mountain. At least that’s what I thought.
***
I built my first flintlock rifle, the .45 caliber Numrich Minuteman I was carrying on this trip, in 1972. I had fired hundreds, more likely a couple thousand, rounds at various outings, camping trips, shoots, and rendezvous prior to this year’s Fort Bridger. At a shoot, which almost always took place in civilization, even if that just meant the cars were close by, we would typically be dressed in our buckskins, calico shirts maybe. A possible bag and a powder horn draped over the shoulder. We weren’t trapping or tromping around in the mountains, intent on business or work. This was recreation. If it was a weekend event, we had a camp area, usually quite open, and the shooting area, also open ground with a backstop of some sort at one end.
So, we developed a style for that activity. One thing was the powder measure used when loading the gun. Mine was the tip of a deer antler, hollowed out to hold the proper charge of gunpowder. Brass powder measures were also common. My powder measure dangled with a leather strap from the end of my powder horn. It was easy access there.
It was also handy to have a touchhole prick, a piece of wire that could be used to clean out debris, such as burnt powder residue, in the touch-hole, a hole in the barrel linking the flashpan to the charge inside the barrel. It was a handy tool, so I had that in something like a button hole on the strap of my powder horn.
We also each had various things dangling, ready at hand, and looking cool, we thought. Being in the rendezvous, mountain-man mindset meant that you liked the look of old-timey things.
***
As we walked downstream towards the reservoir, the brushy area got denser and denser. We were forcing our way through brush, trying to keep our faces from getting too scratched. After a time, this became old, so we moved off to the right side, to get out of the brush.
Open on the more open ground, in the trees, we sat down and took account of things. At first, it was the matter of pulling various stickers and twigs out of our bedrolls. As we sat there, I noticed my powder measure was missing. And my vent prick. Nearly everything that had been out dangling, looking cool, was gone.
This was a good lesson. Don’t dangle gear on bits of leather on your bag or belt. Keep what you need in a safe place.
Foot-note: Using Google Maps while writing this (2025), I can say this was Meeks Cabin Reservoir, just at the border between Utah and Wyoming, at an elevation of 8,700. We probably lost most of our loose gear in Utah. The dam was constructed from 1966 to 1971. (Wikipedia) It’s quite possible the map I consulted prior to our walk predated the construction. The Wyoming F&G officer ‘caught’ us in Utah.
We made it around the small reservoir. Once past the dam, we could see that the country was fairly flat. Fort Bridger was still a good distance off. And there were houses. Not many, but they were there, scattered about in the distance. Ranchers homes, I suspected, for the most part.
Since it was going in the right direction, we decided to stay on the dirt road leading downstream from the dam.
The first house we passed had loud hard rock music playing. We didn’t see anyone there, and don’t know whether they noticed us walking along, but the juxtaposition between our mountain-man mindset and the electronic music was jarring.
A bit further down the road, the land became brushy again, even a few trees. The road was enclosed on both sides by vegetation and barbed-wire fencing. I had never been back east, but I imagined that in the old days, it must have been like this. Overgrown and green alongside the road. I could see myself walking along this stretch of road back in the Civil War days.
We walked around a curve and about 60 yards up the road was a bull. A big bull, with horns. I did not like being around bulls. I did not trust bulls. I was carrying my .45 caliber rifle, which was not going to stop a bull. Jeff had my 12 ga. smoothbore, loaded with bird-shot, for squirrels, rabbits, but bird-shot was not going to stop a bull, either. I told Jeff to put a roundball down the barrel, on top of the shot, and if that bull charged us, shoot it. He told me he didn’t think he could do that. We traded guns. I could do that, and would.
With the .69 caliber roundball down the barrel of the smoothbore, we started walking again, towards the bull. He was on one side of the road, we were on the other. We were moving slowly. He was not moving at all. Just watching us.
I had the barrel pointed at him with the hammer at full cock as we passed him. He finally went back to grazing. Later, when I discharged the smoothbore with its double-load of lead, it gave quite a kick.
The road left the stream. Since we didn’t know where the road went and did know where the stream went, we followed the stream. It was more interesting country anyway. Trees, greenery. A bit scrubby, but not too bad. We hiked down the stream, which now could be called a river, a fair bit until we came across a small island just a bit off shore. The sun was starting to set.
“Have you ever slept on an island?” I asked.
“No,” Jeff answered.
“Me, neither. Let’s do that.”
We took off our footwear, waded across, and set up camp.
Making a small fire, we cooked up some food, then wrapped in blankets and went to sleep.
We both woke what was apparently a short time later. We were freezing. Everything was wet from the moisture in the air. It wasn’t even completely dark. We could still see some sunlight on the tops of the trees on the far side of the river. This was not going to work. We decided to roll up and move inland, away from the river.
Rolling up took a little time. After crossing the river and putting our shoes back on, it was getting dark. We headed inland. It became brushy, very thick. Pushing through the dense growth in dark light, no moon at the time, we could not see what was ahead of us. We had to go quite a distance. When we finally got to an open area, we dropped everything, unrolled the blankets, and went to sleep.
It was getting light in the morning when we woke up. Geesh, that was a night, eh? Looking around, we discovered we were in what was probably considered a backyard by the home owners, though there was no fence, just brush surrounding it. Some young kids were starring out the window at us. We smiled and waved, rolled up our camp, picked up our guns, and dove back into the brush, back to the river.
If we thought we had picked up stickers in the brush around the reservoir, it was nothing compared to what we picked up escaping from the island adventure. Our blankets resembled porcupine hides, and felt somewhat like that as well.
The terrain became flat. Very flat. The river seemed to lose its main channel, becoming a mass of small streams, fanning out over acreage. Maybe there was a main river in the middle. We couldn’t see it.
After walking downstream a ways, we picked up the road again. Probably the same road. It probably just bypassed that last bend in the river. We were now completely in the flats, sagebrush, no trees, or not many at all, and a barbed-wire fence some 30 feet off either side of the dirt road. Dry and hot.
We didn’t have much breakfast, not wanting to start a fire in someone’s backyard. We ate some jerky and hard tack as we walked along. We spotted a jackrabbit less than 10 yards away, in the area between the road and the barbed-wire fence. Shoot it? I don’t know. Do we cook it alongside the road? That didn’t seem interesting. Not much firewood around, either. The rabbit stayed sideways to us, headed in the same direction, moving slowly and staring at us with one eye that seemed to bobble a bit like a crazy person. Its fur was mangy. Gangly legs.
We both decided that not shooting that rabbit, and certainly not eating that rabbit, were both good decisions. Had it known, the rabbit would have agreed.
We walked for a few hours. We were moving, but since we were down in the flats, and there were no mountains ahead of us, it didn’t seem as if we were making any progress. A pickup truck came from behind us, slowed, and stopped. The fellow rolled down the window: “Where ya headin’?” “Fort Bridger.” “Do you want a ride?” I wanted to walk to Fort Bridger, all the way. I did not want to arrive there in a motor vehicle. “How far is it?” “Maybe 2 miles.” Not far. And yet quite a distance. The road was hard-packed with plenty of river-rubble sized stones. My moccasin soles felt thin. And the scenery was boring — flat land, walking a dirt road hemmed in on both sides by barbed-wire fence. I was tired. “Yes, thanks.” We put the gear into the back and climbed into the cab.
During the short ride, we chatted. He was a local, had heard about the rendezvous, but didn’t really know much about it, having work to do. Well, you ought to come by, say hi. He said he’d try. We never saw him again after we got out and thanked him for the ride.
So, we were at Fort Bridger. Still a couple days to go before the rendezvous started. We had the gear we had carried, and assumed we could just sleep on the grounds of the Fort even though the event hadn’t officially started yet. But could we? We decided to visit the Museum, talk to the folks there.
Were we planning to set up a tent? No, we don’t have a tent, just blankets to wrap up in. That struck them as a really weird thing, but they thought it would be ok. Don’t sleep on the roadways. We agreed not to do so. We mentioned that we thought under the trees off the parade grounds might be a reasonable spot. That was ok.
Next in our minds was food. We decided to go across the road to a local cafe, have a dinner. Sitting down on the bench seats either side of the table — luxury! What do you boys want? Hot beef sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy. Coming right up.
Hot food on a plate with silverware. So alien! We had been eating while sitting or standing around a little fire for a long time — four whole days! Well, for kids raised in the second half of the 20th Century, accustomed to three decent meals every day, the change had been noticeable. Here, the meat, delicious, atop white bread, with thick, brown gravy smothering it and the mashed potatoes. None of it sat long on the plate. We paid our bill and left.
The next morning, back to the cafe for eggs, toast, and coffee. Man, that was living the good life.
We didn’t really have much to do for the day. No one I knew had arrived yet. I was able to telephone my mother, let her know we had arrived. Pay-phone and a collect call, so I got my dime back. Always had a dime with me. That was an old Boy-Scout notion. Keep a dime with you so you can make a call if you need to. Be prepared.
By the following day, rendezvous folk started arriving, setting up tipis. Jeff and I were walking around next to the creek. Noticed a fellow, a full-grown, bearded man wearing beautifully tailored buckskins, clean, with long fringe. He had a long-rifle in the crook of one arm, standing there looking as one would expect.
We were kids, in comparison, a bit of whiskery peach-fuzz after not shaving for a week, visible when the sun was just right. Simple clothes. Elk-skin leggings, with some grease smears, maybe a bit of squirrel blood, a breach-cloth, cotton shirt. Jeff was nearly the same, though wearing jeans. We were not filthy, not completely filthy, just a bit dirty looking. And I was wearing glasses. Old-timey glasses, round wire-frames from the early 20th-century, with new lenses in them. I probably looked like an eighteen-year-old guy you wouldn’t want hanging around your flock of sheep.
This fellow, though, he was exactly what you would see in a promo shot for the Rendezvous, or maybe a newspaper story. Tough-looking. A fur trapper or an Oregon Trail guide. Eyes like flint, surveying the horizon. Not a bit of mud or blood on him.
In actuality, though, he did not look like a mountain man. Too old. Too clean. More like an actor in a movie or, at best, from the days of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows. Along with some growing disillusionment about the rendezvous visuals, we also felt somewhat superior. We had walked some 50, er, 48 miles, in moccasined feet, to get there. This fellow probably walked 48 feet from his Winnebago, where he would take a shower tonight then watch Johnny Carson on his generator-driven TV. We’d be sleeping under the trees at the edge of the field, rolled up in our blankets, hoping it didn’t rain.
Since it was going in the right direction, we decided to stay on the dirt road leading downstream from the dam.
The first house we passed had loud hard rock music playing. We didn’t see anyone there, and don’t know whether they noticed us walking along, but the juxtaposition between our mountain-man mindset and the electronic music was jarring.
A bit further down the road, the land became brushy again, even a few trees. The road was enclosed on both sides by vegetation and barbed-wire fencing. I had never been back east, but I imagined that in the old days, it must have been like this. Overgrown and green alongside the road. I could see myself walking along this stretch of road back in the Civil War days.
We walked around a curve and about 60 yards up the road was a bull. A big bull, with horns. I did not like being around bulls. I did not trust bulls. I was carrying my .45 caliber rifle, which was not going to stop a bull. Jeff had my 12 ga. smoothbore, loaded with bird-shot, for squirrels, rabbits, but bird-shot was not going to stop a bull, either. I told Jeff to put a roundball down the barrel, on top of the shot, and if that bull charged us, shoot it. He told me he didn’t think he could do that. We traded guns. I could do that, and would.
With the .69 caliber roundball down the barrel of the smoothbore, we started walking again, towards the bull. He was on one side of the road, we were on the other. We were moving slowly. He was not moving at all. Just watching us.
I had the barrel pointed at him with the hammer at full cock as we passed him. He finally went back to grazing. Later, when I discharged the smoothbore with its double-load of lead, it gave quite a kick.
The road left the stream. Since we didn’t know where the road went and did know where the stream went, we followed the stream. It was more interesting country anyway. Trees, greenery. A bit scrubby, but not too bad. We hiked down the stream, which now could be called a river, a fair bit until we came across a small island just a bit off shore. The sun was starting to set.
“Have you ever slept on an island?” I asked.
“No,” Jeff answered.
“Me, neither. Let’s do that.”
We took off our footwear, waded across, and set up camp.
Making a small fire, we cooked up some food, then wrapped in blankets and went to sleep.
We both woke what was apparently a short time later. We were freezing. Everything was wet from the moisture in the air. It wasn’t even completely dark. We could still see some sunlight on the tops of the trees on the far side of the river. This was not going to work. We decided to roll up and move inland, away from the river.
Rolling up took a little time. After crossing the river and putting our shoes back on, it was getting dark. We headed inland. It became brushy, very thick. Pushing through the dense growth in dark light, no moon at the time, we could not see what was ahead of us. We had to go quite a distance. When we finally got to an open area, we dropped everything, unrolled the blankets, and went to sleep.
It was getting light in the morning when we woke up. Geesh, that was a night, eh? Looking around, we discovered we were in what was probably considered a backyard by the home owners, though there was no fence, just brush surrounding it. Some young kids were starring out the window at us. We smiled and waved, rolled up our camp, picked up our guns, and dove back into the brush, back to the river.
If we thought we had picked up stickers in the brush around the reservoir, it was nothing compared to what we picked up escaping from the island adventure. Our blankets resembled porcupine hides, and felt somewhat like that as well.
The terrain became flat. Very flat. The river seemed to lose its main channel, becoming a mass of small streams, fanning out over acreage. Maybe there was a main river in the middle. We couldn’t see it.
After walking downstream a ways, we picked up the road again. Probably the same road. It probably just bypassed that last bend in the river. We were now completely in the flats, sagebrush, no trees, or not many at all, and a barbed-wire fence some 30 feet off either side of the dirt road. Dry and hot.
We didn’t have much breakfast, not wanting to start a fire in someone’s backyard. We ate some jerky and hard tack as we walked along. We spotted a jackrabbit less than 10 yards away, in the area between the road and the barbed-wire fence. Shoot it? I don’t know. Do we cook it alongside the road? That didn’t seem interesting. Not much firewood around, either. The rabbit stayed sideways to us, headed in the same direction, moving slowly and staring at us with one eye that seemed to bobble a bit like a crazy person. Its fur was mangy. Gangly legs.
We both decided that not shooting that rabbit, and certainly not eating that rabbit, were both good decisions. Had it known, the rabbit would have agreed.
We walked for a few hours. We were moving, but since we were down in the flats, and there were no mountains ahead of us, it didn’t seem as if we were making any progress. A pickup truck came from behind us, slowed, and stopped. The fellow rolled down the window: “Where ya headin’?” “Fort Bridger.” “Do you want a ride?” I wanted to walk to Fort Bridger, all the way. I did not want to arrive there in a motor vehicle. “How far is it?” “Maybe 2 miles.” Not far. And yet quite a distance. The road was hard-packed with plenty of river-rubble sized stones. My moccasin soles felt thin. And the scenery was boring — flat land, walking a dirt road hemmed in on both sides by barbed-wire fence. I was tired. “Yes, thanks.” We put the gear into the back and climbed into the cab.
During the short ride, we chatted. He was a local, had heard about the rendezvous, but didn’t really know much about it, having work to do. Well, you ought to come by, say hi. He said he’d try. We never saw him again after we got out and thanked him for the ride.
So, we were at Fort Bridger. Still a couple days to go before the rendezvous started. We had the gear we had carried, and assumed we could just sleep on the grounds of the Fort even though the event hadn’t officially started yet. But could we? We decided to visit the Museum, talk to the folks there.
Were we planning to set up a tent? No, we don’t have a tent, just blankets to wrap up in. That struck them as a really weird thing, but they thought it would be ok. Don’t sleep on the roadways. We agreed not to do so. We mentioned that we thought under the trees off the parade grounds might be a reasonable spot. That was ok.
Next in our minds was food. We decided to go across the road to a local cafe, have a dinner. Sitting down on the bench seats either side of the table — luxury! What do you boys want? Hot beef sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy. Coming right up.
Hot food on a plate with silverware. So alien! We had been eating while sitting or standing around a little fire for a long time — four whole days! Well, for kids raised in the second half of the 20th Century, accustomed to three decent meals every day, the change had been noticeable. Here, the meat, delicious, atop white bread, with thick, brown gravy smothering it and the mashed potatoes. None of it sat long on the plate. We paid our bill and left.
The next morning, back to the cafe for eggs, toast, and coffee. Man, that was living the good life.
We didn’t really have much to do for the day. No one I knew had arrived yet. I was able to telephone my mother, let her know we had arrived. Pay-phone and a collect call, so I got my dime back. Always had a dime with me. That was an old Boy-Scout notion. Keep a dime with you so you can make a call if you need to. Be prepared.
By the following day, rendezvous folk started arriving, setting up tipis. Jeff and I were walking around next to the creek. Noticed a fellow, a full-grown, bearded man wearing beautifully tailored buckskins, clean, with long fringe. He had a long-rifle in the crook of one arm, standing there looking as one would expect.
We were kids, in comparison, a bit of whiskery peach-fuzz after not shaving for a week, visible when the sun was just right. Simple clothes. Elk-skin leggings, with some grease smears, maybe a bit of squirrel blood, a breach-cloth, cotton shirt. Jeff was nearly the same, though wearing jeans. We were not filthy, not completely filthy, just a bit dirty looking. And I was wearing glasses. Old-timey glasses, round wire-frames from the early 20th-century, with new lenses in them. I probably looked like an eighteen-year-old guy you wouldn’t want hanging around your flock of sheep.
This fellow, though, he was exactly what you would see in a promo shot for the Rendezvous, or maybe a newspaper story. Tough-looking. A fur trapper or an Oregon Trail guide. Eyes like flint, surveying the horizon. Not a bit of mud or blood on him.
In actuality, though, he did not look like a mountain man. Too old. Too clean. More like an actor in a movie or, at best, from the days of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows. Along with some growing disillusionment about the rendezvous visuals, we also felt somewhat superior. We had walked some 50, er, 48 miles, in moccasined feet, to get there. This fellow probably walked 48 feet from his Winnebago, where he would take a shower tonight then watch Johnny Carson on his generator-driven TV. We’d be sleeping under the trees at the edge of the field, rolled up in our blankets, hoping it didn’t rain.
Still, if there were newspaper folk about, he’d be the one to be interviewed. We’d be invisible.
Jeff and I went over to the cafe for lunch. Thinking roast-beef dinner again, with mashed potatoes and gravy. As we sat down, we noticed a black fellow at the next table. We said ‘hi’ to each other, and he asked if we were locals. Nope. We’re here for the rendezvous. He had no idea what we were talking about.
Our meals arrived shortly after his. As he was eating, he set up a banter, loud talking. He started out talking about all the dead flies on the window sill. We had not noticed them before. “How hard is it to clean them up?” he asked out-loud. It was a deep window sill, maybe a foot. Probably 40 dead flies laying there. I was thinking it might take three minutes to sweep them up, counting going and getting the dust-pan and broom. The last time those particular three minutes occurred was probably weeks, if not months, ago. “You guys have any flies in your gravy?” It did have some black flecks in it.
From behind the ‘order-up’ counter, one of the cooks said “I lost my ring. Has anyone seen it?” to the other two tending to kitchen duties back there. “A prize for whoever finds it in their mashed potatoes!” said the black guy.
Laughing, we began to notice the mashed potatoes were a bit lumpy. And the gravy was perhaps overly thick, coagulating as it cooled down. The string beans were clearly from a can. The meal was still good, but not as good as it had been the first day. Hunger is the best sauce. Dehydration is right up there, too.
***
Folks started arriving, setting up camp. An amazing amount of tipis. The first Fort Bridger, 1973, we had 12 tipis. The next year, 19. This year, 1975, over 50. Absolutely astounding!
Friends from the Salt Lake area arrived, including Stephen and Gary, the two older friends who had dropped Jeff and me off in the Uintahs at the beginning of this adventure. Adults. Stephen was in his later-20s and Gary would have been pushing 30, perhaps pushed by a few years. I’m guessing they were glad to see us, as they might have felt some responsibility if we never appeared again. Then again, maybe not. The Universe is a marvelous and strange place. The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda, describes a way of understanding consciousness and one’s place in the Universe through the use of native American hallucinogenics, particularly peyote. Castaneda’s writings were a big influence at the time for Stephen, probably for Gary as well. I read the book, and I thought it was interesting, though peyote use was a step farther than I ever wanted to go.
After Jeff and I wandered off generally downhill on the northern Uintahs, Stephen and Gary found a campsite for the evening near Elizabeth Pass. They spent the night there, dropping a little peyote apparently, being out in the natural area. As the evening wore on for them, one of them brought out a rubber, novelty-store ‘dead & plucked chicken’ which then became a telescope, which then became the telescope used by John C. Fremont in 1843 when he was exploring the area that came to be known as Fremont Island, although John C.’s name for it was Disappointment Island. The chicken’s foot became the lens cap that was lost on the aforesaid island in the Great Salt Lake The lens cap was said to have been discovered some many years later, possibly during the 1860s.
The chicken foot may still be atop Elizabeth Ridge.
I wasn’t there with them for the festivities. It did sound like some amazing evening.
***
The tin tipi area, just across the two-lane highway from the Fort, was filling up as well. Campers and trailers. In the case of my mother and my friend Brett, a modern canvas tent. Which is where I would be sleeping, too. Jeff’s folks came up for the day, wandered around a bit with him, then they all went back home to the Salt Lake Valley.
Brett had moved to Sandy at the beginning of the previous school year, my senior year and his junior year. He was a fellow trombone player, as well as a fellow wise-ass. We hit it off immediately.
I had recently purchased a reproduction Brown-Bess bayonet and asked my mother to bring it up when she came. She did. That afternoon, Brett and I played mumbly peg with it on the Parade Grounds.
Mumbly peg, our variant of it, is a game played by two. Standing face to face, feet at maybe shoulder-width to begin with. You need a knife, usually a pocket knife, because we always had one of those in our pocket. The idea is to stick the knife in the ground near your opponent’s foot. The opponent then had to move his foot to where the knife was, and return the favor, throwing it into the ground near your foot. If you threw it too far from your opponent’s foot, you lost. If you fell over holding a wide stance, you lost. If you hit your opponent’s foot, you lost, but they had the knife in their foot. Maybe. If you couldn’t stick it into the ground, what are you, some kind of klutz?
Or maybe your rules are different. Tossing a knife, trying to maintain balance at a wide stance, the rules decided who lost, not who won.
So we decided to play with the bayonet. At about 20-30 feet. And yes, this was stupid. But we survived and had fun. A twenty-one-and-one-half-inch bayonet flying through the air, landing somewhere near your foot is an impressive feeling. Makes a ‘wop, wop, wop’ sound as it turns through the air. Mostly we were just tossing it. Neither one of us wanted to accidentally impale the other.
***
Late afternoon, Brett and I wandered over to the tipi circle, found some friends, and went in a tipi. Bottles were being passed around, as were pipes. I saw my mother smoking pot. “What? You smoke mari….er, knickkinnick?” Tipis have thin, not-at-all-soundproof, walls. There were certain folk who we wanted to be able to maintain ‘plausible deniability’, as they say now. And others might have been surprised that such behavior was going on and may have taken action to stop it. So we said “knickkinnick” and not “marijuana” or “pot”, man.
“Well,” my mother said, “I can’t tell you everything I do. You might take it as it being ok for you to do it, too.”
I was stunned. I had resisted Stephen’s invitations to smoke marijuana for a few years, and had just taken my first ‘tokes’ the previous May. Once I did that, however, it seemed that everyone I knew also smoked marijuana. Since I was “one of them”, others seemed comfortable to let me know they did, too.
Not everyone, of course. Many of the older fellows — Korean War vets and such — did not. But most of those of Vietnam War age, did, with George being an exception. He did not drink alcohol, either. He did enjoy a tobacco pipe, and introduced me to many interesting — and legal — ‘pipe-weeds’ over the years.
Also, my mother was not one to not tell us what she was doing, often going into far more detail than either my sister or I wanted to know. Years later, with sufficient time to process the event, I deduced my mother was actually not a knickkinnick smoker. It may even have been her first time. It was a ruse. My mother, an adult, was trying to be cool in front of others. That’s not a criticism of her. She was 20 years older than I, so 38 at the time of this event. I’m 30 years older now than she was then. I’m aware that such behavior lingers with us far longer than the adolescent me would have believed.
And the ‘not telling me everything’ was consistent with her do-as-I-say-not-as-I do approach to parenting. Some things were ok for grownups, and not ok for kids.
I know now that is sometimes true, too.
As the sun set, Brett and I wandered back to the tin-tipi area, on the other side of the highway. A couple of young ladies I knew from McDonalds were there, in part because one of them was related to a Rendezvous attendee — father, grandfather, or uncle, I don’t recall — and partly because I had been talking about it to them at work. Said they should come up. I don’t recall their names, so I’ll call one Cindy, whose family was into the blackpowder scene, and the other I’ll call Natasha.
Natasha was wild, fun, and deliciously attractive. I really wanted to know her better, and she seemed somewhat interested in me. We had a campfire to hang out around, circled by tents, pickup-campers, cars, and trailers, including the trailer the girls were staying in. We had fun, laughing and talking about whatever came up. No drinking or smoking around this fire. Good, clean fun. At one point, Natasha feigned anger at me, stood up, walked a few steps over to their trailer and climbed up the two steps. She turned her head back to me and said: “Do you want to kiss my ass?” and wiggling her backside in my direction.
I thought: Yes. I do. I really, really do.
What I said was ‘uhhh.…’ She laughed, went in, and came back out in a few minutes, rejoining the fun. I don’t recall who else was there, maybe six or eight of us young folk were standing around the campfire. Rendezvous was a family affair.
The sun went down and the sky grew dark, the fire still burning. I mentioned the mumbly peg game and Natasha said she wanted to see the bayonet. I pulled it out from my belt and handed it to her. She looked at it, then tossed it straight up into the air.
The sky was pitch-black. Our pupils were small from staring at the fire. Sudden silence and stillness around the campfire. ‘Wop, wop, wop’ above our heads. None of us could see where it went, but it was somewhere up there, above our heads. Of course, we knew it was going to be coming back down momentarily. Run? Stand still? In my mind I could see my bayonet coming down point-first on the top of someone’s car parked just feet away from the fire.
When it hit the ground nearby, safely missing anything important, we all laughed.
And I learned not to hand a bayonet to Natasha.
The evening wore on. Folk moved in and out from around the fire. I noticed Brett was off a distance, bent over, gasping, his hands between his legs. “What happened?” I asked. “This,” said Natasha and she kicked him in the nuts, a second time.
Brett and I decided to head back to the tipi area. On the way I asked him: “What did you do?” He said, “Nothing. She just kicked me. Twice.” At the time, I believed him. Mostly.
***
As the sun set, Brett and I wandered back to the tin-tipi area, on the other side of the highway. A couple of young ladies I knew from McDonalds were there, in part because one of them was related to a Rendezvous attendee — father, grandfather, or uncle, I don’t recall — and partly because I had been talking about it to them at work. Said they should come up. I don’t recall their names, so I’ll call one Cindy, whose family was into the blackpowder scene, and the other I’ll call Natasha.
Natasha was wild, fun, and deliciously attractive. I really wanted to know her better, and she seemed somewhat interested in me. We had a campfire to hang out around, circled by tents, pickup-campers, cars, and trailers, including the trailer the girls were staying in. We had fun, laughing and talking about whatever came up. No drinking or smoking around this fire. Good, clean fun. At one point, Natasha feigned anger at me, stood up, walked a few steps over to their trailer and climbed up the two steps. She turned her head back to me and said: “Do you want to kiss my ass?” and wiggling her backside in my direction.
I thought: Yes. I do. I really, really do.
What I said was ‘uhhh.…’ She laughed, went in, and came back out in a few minutes, rejoining the fun. I don’t recall who else was there, maybe six or eight of us young folk were standing around the campfire. Rendezvous was a family affair.
The sun went down and the sky grew dark, the fire still burning. I mentioned the mumbly peg game and Natasha said she wanted to see the bayonet. I pulled it out from my belt and handed it to her. She looked at it, then tossed it straight up into the air.
The sky was pitch-black. Our pupils were small from staring at the fire. Sudden silence and stillness around the campfire. ‘Wop, wop, wop’ above our heads. None of us could see where it went, but it was somewhere up there, above our heads. Of course, we knew it was going to be coming back down momentarily. Run? Stand still? In my mind I could see my bayonet coming down point-first on the top of someone’s car parked just feet away from the fire.
When it hit the ground nearby, safely missing anything important, we all laughed.
And I learned not to hand a bayonet to Natasha.
The evening wore on. Folk moved in and out from around the fire. I noticed Brett was off a distance, bent over, gasping, his hands between his legs. “What happened?” I asked. “This,” said Natasha and she kicked him in the nuts, a second time.
Brett and I decided to head back to the tipi area. On the way I asked him: “What did you do?” He said, “Nothing. She just kicked me. Twice.” At the time, I believed him. Mostly.
As it turns out, however, 50 years later Brett read an early version of this story and admitted to trying to kiss her, following his “bad interpretation of her behavior.”
What a woman! Oh, well. I never had the pleasure of hanging out with her after that night. I suppose I could have, but, well, you know, self-preservation and all.
***
Back at Stephen’s tipi, George was frailling away on his early 1900s open-back Whyte Laydie banjo. Someone else had a guitar. We were singing ‘ancient’ Peter, Paul, and Mary songs, from way back in my childhood, more than 10 years prior. Also John Denver songs, folk & country tunes. It was great. For those who imbibed, there was plenty to be had. A jug or bottle would go around the circle inside the tipi. A pipe, however, would only go around to the person nearest the door, then back in the other direction, reversing again at the person on the other side of the opening. The pipe had a sacred quality. A bottle or jug was just for fun. So, a jug could pass across the entrance-hole, while a pipe did not.
At one point, someone decided it would be a good idea for all of us to pour a bit from whatever bottle we had into a big cup. I had a jug of hard cider, one of those old crock jugs, whitish bottom, brown top, with a loop handle near the top, and a cork to plug the pour hole. My mother had carted the jug up from Salt Lake in her car. The cider had been fermenting in there for a few weeks.
What I didn’t know at the time was that there was a layer of organic material on the bottom of that jug, bugs, straw, and other debris, which probably helped with the maturation of the cider. No one died from it, as far as I know.
I added a pour of cider to the big cup and passed it along. Once it had been around the circle, it was stirred with a big spoon, then passed around again for everyone to have a drink. I can’t tell you what it tasted like because I have never tasted anything similar sense. It was potent. And it was fun.
The music continued. People would think of a song, maybe someone would know it. Brett piped up: “Let’s sing some Injun songs. Let’s sing some Injun songs.” He kept this up between tunes for a few times until I asked: “What Injun tune?” “Oh, how about Engine, Engine Number 9?” That cracked me up, and it also cracked up Big Eddy, sitting right next to me. I didn’t know Big Eddy, a tall, big, muscular fellow, maybe had been a football player in high school. Older than I was, and he cracked me up. He had been thinkng “Injun” as well. When we stopped laughing, Brett suddenly looked at us, with a mock-offended look on his face, leaned towards us with a a wide-open mouth and yelled “Ha ha ha ha ha” as an accusation.
“We thought it was funny,” said Big Eddy. “Cool it.”
Folks wandered in and out of the tipi. My mother left. So did others. Others came in. Typical for the event. A while later, my mother came back, asked me to come outside. Ok, what’s up? Can you walk me back to the tent? Ok. It wasn’t far, maybe a couple hundred yards.
It turned out that Big Eddy had followed her out of the tipi, and attacked her. He tried to push her down behind some bushes. She hollered, some other folks poked their heads up. Big Eddy took off.
Stupid. Unthinkable. This was a Rendezvous. There were guns and knives, tomahawks and pistols everywhere. We all trusted each other. Or so I thought. I didn’t have my gun, but I did have my bayonet and my Green River butcher knife. Even then, I knew how to put a good edge on the knife. I was ready if we saw Big Eddy, that son of a bitch. We didn’t. And that was lucky, for all of us. My life-trajectory could have been much different had there been an encounter.
I was not a fighter, but in those days, growing up in the 1960s and 70s, most boys fought from time to time. Teachers often ignored this sort of behavior, thinking it natural, unless a fight actually took place in the classroom. ‘After-school in the playground’ was a conventional time and place. I usually avoided fights. The few I did have mostly didn’t go well for me. I held my ground and landed a few punches. Because of that, I never had a fight with the same fellow more than once. There were easier targets around.
I didn’t see Big Eddy again at the Rendezvous. He either left or laid low.
***
The next day, Sunday, more shooting. Stephen and I sponsored the upside-down flintlock shoot. You held your gun upside down, stock resting atop your head, sighting down the barrel at a target, perhaps a cracker, tacked to a wooden fence set-up for the shooting. With a flintlock, if your gun misfired, the powder in the pan would fall out. You’d have to bring the gun down, re-prime the pan, and take aim again. Misfires were common. Less than half the time, but perhaps more than 1 out of 10. Maybe 1 out of 5. Could be 1 out of 1 if things weren’t right.
This was our second year of sponsoring that shoot at Fort Bridger. The previous year, a fellow had asked: “Can I hang upside down from my buddy’s neck?” Stephen and I looked at each other. Ok, why not?
So this fellow, let’s call him Sport, was much shorter than his tall buddy. Sport would load and prime his gun, then lay down on the ground. Buddy would lean over, Sport would wrap his legs around Buddy’s neck, locking his feet behind. Buddy would partly stand up, hands on his knees in a crouching position, until Sport was fully suspended.
The advantage of this was that Sport could aim his gun in a normal fashion, that is, stock against his shoulder, fingers normally wrapped around the wrist, other hand holding the gun from ‘underneath’ the barrel.
The disadvantage was that if a misfire happened, re-priming was more complicated. That happened four or five times in a row for one shot. Sport finally re-knapped his flint, and the next time he pulled the trigger, the gun went off. And so did all the powder that had fallen on the ground just a few inches from his head. No harm done, but there was a good flash and plenty of smoke.
There was no repeat of this upside-down strategy at this rendezvous.
***
Later that night, Brett said: “Let’s go out on the Parade Grounds.” It was dark by then, and the stars were come out in amazing number. Good dark skies there, we could see structure in the Milky Way. Brett pulled out a bottle of Canadian Club.“We’ve known each other a whole year.” Yes, we had. We met when he started at Jordan High School, his junior year and my senior year. We took a swig. We took many swigs. We reminisced about our year in band class and events with the theater group. He was the actor, not I. We had become good friends, having a similar sense of humor and being part of the approximately 5-10%-minority non-Mormon student population. Folks were friendly to us, but at some level we were outsiders, of a different caste.
Our bottle was empty. We had known each other an entire year.
We decided it was time to head back to the campground. We’d be leaving tomorrow, back for home. I’d be in a car, not walking.
Standing was interesting. Half-a-bottle of Canadian Club downed in an hour or so by an 18- and 17-year-old has some significant effect. Walking was difficult. I could see where I wanted to go, but when I tried to walk, I would go off-angle a bit. Then I’d overcompensate by a greater angle to the other side and need to re-take my bearings.
Eventually we made it to the fence at the edge of the Fort grounds, which ran alongside the highway into town. Camp was on the other side of the highway. To get over the fence, there was a wooden style, consisting of maybe four or five steps up, then another four or five back down the other side. I could negotiate the style. Brett could not. I climbed back over, but could not figure out how to help him over.
Finally an older couple came by, on their way back to the tin-tipi area. They had well-tailored buckskins, coming from a different era. I would say the late 1950s, early 1960s. Their buckskins were tailored, as one would see on the Davy Crockett TV series. My stuff was rough. Handmade, by my hand. By a hand that didn’t really know what it was doing, sewing shirts and such. I tried to dye my shirt red, but it came out pinkish. And after living in it for nearly two weeks, Brett had named it Pinky Stinky. Over this, a dyed green hunting frock, probably more of the late 1700s Pennsylvania, but I figured the styles endured and a few must have made their way out west during the fur trade. I made it as well, from a pattern in a book, and it was better than pinkie-stinkie, but not what one would call ‘tailored’.
This couple looked like they could be TV extras, in a black-and-white Western. They could have made the clothes, and probably did, but by appearance, they knew how to make clothes. I admired their upright postures, stylish buckskins, and reserved manner. They had a sense of dignity, something I don’t think I’ve ever been able to pull off.
“Can you help my friend across the style?” I asked. Brett was sitting on the bottom step. They agreed to, and once everyone was on the other side, they walked to their camper or trailer. I doubt they were in a tent. I staggered across the road. Brett was on hands and knees by this time.
At the tent, he went inside and collapsed into his sleeping area. I sat outside, started a small fire, lit a pipe of tobacco, and waited for my mother to show up.
A while later, I noticed a figure staggering along the side of the highway. Mom! I managed to stand up and walk out there to her. Earlier in the evening she had walked to the local bar and proceeded to get very drunk. I helped her into her sleeping area, let the fire die down, then went to bed myself.
The next morning, my mother and Brett both looked like they had been dragged around the edge of a shallow pond a couple of times. Brett’s morning mantra was: “I’m never going to drink again. I’m never going to drink again. I’m never going to drink again.”
I didn’t feel too bad. Not perfect, of course. Ragged yet upright.
“Breakfast?” I asked. “Oh God, no” and sounds of restrained retching from both of them.
So I walked into town to the small grocery store, bought a quart cartoon of chocolate milk, came back to camp, and drank it in front of them.
They watched me. It had the desired effect. It sickened them even more.
Yes, that was mean. I still think it was funny, which probably means I’m still not mature nor of a reserved manner. After drinking a quart of chocolate milk, I didn’t feel all that well, either. I was not about to let on in front of them.
I did get my comeuppance. My mother informed me that she would not be driving. So I did, from Fort Bridger, Wyoming, to Sandy, Utah, at the south end of the Salt Lake Valley, while those two slept it off. At least the car had an AM radio.
***
As for my previous comment that Jeff and I were invisible to the press, that turned out to not be true.
From the Salt Lake Tribune, Monday, September 1, 1975, front-page of the second section (page 17), written by Vandra Webb, Tribune Staff Writer.
“Jeff Anderson, 16, and Ken Pollard, 16 (sic), got so wrapped up with the historical aspects of mountainmanning (sic) that they decided to walk in.
“ ‘It didn’t seem right to pull up in a car. So we were dropped off in the Uintas and walked in. You really got to respect those guys. It was a hard life,’ Ken said, showing the hole in his moccasins.”
I was 18, and now at 67, I’m still not sure ‘mountainmanning’ is a word. We were not in either of the two photos for the story. The first photo shows Bill Watts, a friend and a classic gray-grizzled-looking mountaineer. He also appeared in local TV commercials as a mountain man. The other photo shows a handsome young Dave Osmundsen in full regalia tossing a tomahawk. Our mention is near the end of some 24 column-inches of text.
As Stephen said later, the hole in my moccasin proved nothing. I always had a hole or worse. And that was true. Born with wide feet, by the time I got to high-school age, I wore moccasins more often than not, including to school. I made multiple pairs a year, getting as much use out of each as I could.
We also showed up in a photo in a magazine from the same general time, “Friends”, a General Motors (GM) trade magazine. ‘Big Red’, a fellow Mountain Men of the Wasatch friend, has a full-face photo. We’re in another photo, some distance away, standing beside a tipi, talking with someone inside, apparently. I recognize us by the clothes. We’re not the subject of the photo nor mentioned in the story. But, hey. GM. National exposure. It will be subtracted from my 15 minutes of fame.
***
This photo of me and my Brown Bess bayonet did not appear in a newspaper or a national magazine. It was taken by my good friend George.
