to Oregon, and planning and provisioning for such an expedition was no small matter, given the number of thieves and scalawags always eager to prey on the unwise.
What was more, another cholera scare had encouraged still more pilgrims and strangers to seek shelter in Independence. While the disease did all too often wreak genuine devastation along the western routes, as well as up and down the Mississippi, it was not an uncommon practice among unscrupulous promoters and shopkeepers to spread rumors about such outbreaks in other settlements, because towns like Independence vied with the likes of St. Joseph, Omaha, and Council Bluffs for trade money. Recently, the nearby haven of Westport had been chosen, and now there was an epidemic of fantastic reports that “folks there is droppin’ like horsetail flies.” This panic precipitated a shift in an already itinerant population and put still more pressure on scarce accommodation and inflationary-priced supplies. The result was a cacophonous hammering and banging, as new and often ill-made buildings were erected as if by indefatigable insects, and the hawking of wares in loud voices for absurd sums.
The first steamboat to venture up the Missouri had stopped here in 1819. Now it seemed that nothing would stop for long, and any signs of the famous personages who had passed through, like Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea, or John James Audubon, were lost in a carpentered frenzy of plank, tank, and chicken dirt. Hephaestus had never seen so many blacksmith sheds or wagons that needed repairing. There looked to be a mule for every man and at least a bottle of whiskey (which was perhaps not a good ratio in a locale where each adult white male more than likely also carried a loaded firearm).
Smitten with sorrow about Hattie, Lloyd dragged his feet forward, his eyes blinking at the populace that swirled around them, every bit as turbid as the river had been. Wary-looking Spaniards, their faces shadowed by broad hats, cooked over both open fires and buried ovens. Smells of corn bread, charred rabbit, pulled pork, and bubbling beans surrounded them, as if they had concocted a fortress of aromas to defend against the pipe smoke, forge fires, and manure. Travel-weary Baptist women as stiff as split-oak rails peered out from under sweat-stained blueberry bonnets, stirring great boiling kettles of laundry with fence pickets. Negroes lounged under sagging awnings, eyes peeled raw for trouble, and more Indians than Lloyd had ever imagined lurked and bartered or tethered shaggy ponies to flagpoles and barber poles and poles that held up signs saying not to tie up horses there.
There were Foxes and Sauks, some with shaved heads and painted faces. Others with visages that looked vaguely Mexican wandered in and out of the shops wrapped in old blankets, muttering. Germans mingled with Scots decked out in plaid pantaloons and hobnailed boots. Methodist-looking ducks paraded about. Children’s faces peeped out from the covers of the heavy French carts called mule killers. A grizzled loner leading a buffalo horse on a rope shared a water trough with a busty Mexican lady beneath a battered parasol astride a white donkey, just like a man. And everything was for sale—from a rotgut alcohol whose origins lay in homemade sorghum to apple butter, corn pones, and fresh brown eggs in hickory-bark baskets.
If you had the money you could buy women’s dresses colored with walnut dye, men’s shirts that felt as tough as chair seats woven from slippery elm, or telescopes, knives, shovels, and guns. A barrel of salt, a beaded necklace, a young hog, or an oxen yoke—everything had its price. And there was always someone happy to yell out the amount if you were in any doubt.
Desperate to keep his mind from thoughts of his beloved Hattie, whom he felt sure was safe but probably scared for her life on board the Defiance, Lloyd scanned the throng. There were so many strange- and dangerous-looking folk, it would have been impossible to pick out any potential threat of the kind he was concerned with. He took it for granted that any emissary of the Vardogers would be invisible in such a tangle, and so he just let his eyes feast on the scene for color and detail, trying to distract himself from the grief of his lost love, and the fear for her safety on the lonely, risky road that lay before her.
Despite the swagger and suspicion of the loiterers or the boisterous perspiring of the workers, amid all the hagglers,