Mountain man Zeb Simms takes a job working for the missionary Marcus Whitman who doesn't listen to Zeb's advice on how to deal with Indians. The result is the Whitman massacre and the Cayuse Indian War.
Famed scout and mountain man Zeb Simms is grieving from the recent death of his Comanche Indian wife and is saved from suicide by the intervention of his Spanish friend Juan de la Vegas Porcifino de Anza.
Zeb takes a job with Marcus Whitman a missionary in the Columbia River Basin at the Waiilatpu Mission on the Oregon Trail, the Place of Rye Grass the Indians call it.
Whitman and his wife Narcissa are attempting to convert Cayuse Indians to the Christian faith, but the two do not understand Indian ways and despite Zeb’s attempts to advise them, manage to alienate the tribe.
Hordes of European immigrants arrive every month at the mission and their diseases decimate the Cayuse people increasing tensions with the Indians.
Whitman gives Zeb the task of convincing Tiloukaikt the Cayuse chief to bring his people in to accept religion and take up the white man’s ways of farming and living. However, before he can accomplish this Zeb is waylaid on a meat hunting expedition.
Zeb and his partner de Anza are stranded in the wilderness on foot with nothing between them except the rags on their backs and a few picked berries to eat, only to wind up being captured and made slaves to be bartered by Shoshone Indians.
What follows is a harrowing adventure of wilderness survival, starvation, living off your wits and what you can scrounge. During a long trek, Zeb and Anza are staked out as bear bait, fed to red fire ants, forced to chew the gizzards of animals, shelter inside the body of a gutted buffalo and run a race for life against pursuing Native Americans.
Set against a backdrop of the rugged Oregon Country of 1847 (today Western Idaho and Eastern Washington State), Zeb and the Missionary is also the story of the Marcus Whitman massacre and the clash of cultures that resulted in the Cayuse Indian War.
Excerpt
Ahead over a turn in the river, steam rose filtering through some trees. This was a tributary they had missed on horseback when they arrived the day before. There in front of them were mineral pools, bubbling hot with a stink of rotten eggs in the air. Deep sink holes in the grass with steaming water as clear as glass you could see the bottoms of the basins, red iron-ore-impregnated rock with white (travertine) collars around the lips, five sink holes in all.
“I hear that water is good to drink but we won’t catch any fish out of those we could boil them here I suppose,” Zeb said.
Anza nodded. “It is the devil’s sauna.”
Zeb looked at Anza quizzically.
“A bathtub,” Anza said.
“Look there.” Zeb pointed.
Nearby was what had been a mineral pool but had dried up leaving an adobe-like shell with wet mud in the center. There on a small island in the middle stood a very large goat and a donkey.
“Look at that, we can get that donkey we can ride.”
“It is a small animal,” Anza observed of the donkey.
Zeb reached with his good arm into his possibles bag and took out a length or rope the height of a man he kept for emergencies.
“Yes, we couldn’t ride him together but you could ride while I walk and then we switch. If it came down to it and we needed to we could eat him. You help me get a lasso over his head.”
Zeb and Anza approached. The donkey seemed not to care and pawed the mud evidently oblivious. Such animals often sought mud holes to bathe in and once the mud caked on the skin and dried helped to keep pesky flies off.
They came closer. The goat watching them come became agitated. The goat charged.
“Watch out.”
Both men went down. The goat snapped at Zeb and tried to bite his leg then attempted a head-butt with curled horns at Anza’s raised rear. The two scrambled away Zeb on one hand his shoulder burning like fire.
The goat didn’t press its attack, but evidently satisfied, calmly walked back and resumed its position next to the donkey as if guarding it.
“Help me up,” Zeb said.
Anza lifted, struggled Zeb to his feet.
“Never saw anything loco like that before.”
“Maybe the two are married,” Anza said.
Zeb nodded. “They’re mighty close friends for sure. We want that donkey we got to get rid of that goat. I know what we can do. We take ‘em from two sides. That damn goat won’t be able to make up its mind who to go after.”
Anza placed Zeb’s rifle with his possibles bag on the ground.
Zeb motioned for Anza to go around. Anza stepped about in a wide circle placing himself on the far side of the goat and donkey. Zeb gestured. They started to approach from two sides.
The goat watched them come, calmly.
The donkey stared off into space seeming unaware.
Zeb had his length of rope he had fashioned into a lasso.
They crept closer.
The goat charged Anza to knock him down. Anza dove to miss the curled horns, falling flat on his face in the mud. The goat whirled about and charged Zeb. Zeb reached and grabbed the horns. He hung on as the goat pushed him backwards but his wounded arm burned as though on fire. Zeb forced the horns downward to his midsection. He was being pushed and bulled. For a moment Zeb flipped over, twisted the horns and was on top of the goat, riding the animal that bucked like a wild mustang. The goat threw Zeb to one side shaking its head powerfully.
Zeb fell, got up, slipped, and fell in the mud.
Anza tried to come up and help but the goat turned and charged him. Anza dove again into the mud. He crawled over to where Zeb was sprawled in the muck. The goat stood looking down at Zeb, as if undecided whether to make another attack.
“Retreat,” Zeb whispered.
They crawled away on their stomachs, their faces and bodies caked with mud.
The goat, white chin whiskers blowing in the light wind, rejoined his donkey friend.
Zeb and Anza reached his rifle and meager belongings.
“That goat is the reincarnation of a devil,” Anza said.
“What’s reincarnation mean?”
“You die and come back as an animal.”
Zeb nodded. “Yeah, we had a robber and horse thief we strung up to a sour apple tree. Maybe that goat is him come back to get even.”
“Do we shoot the goat?”
“Let’s wash up over at the hot pools first.”
Anza and Zeb went to the thermal pools but the water was too hot to touch so they hunched there with caked mud drying on them.
“It just dries and you brush it off,” Zeb said. “Did you see that donkey?”
“I was running too fast senor.”
“I got a better look at him. The eyes are silvered over. Moon blindness, that donkey’s blind. The goat’s been acting as his protector, a seeing-eye goat. Guides the donkey around everywhere they go together.”
The following day Zeb primed his Hawkin to down the goat so they could get the donkey but as he took deadly aim at the beast, an easy shot of only a few yards, Zeb lowered his rifle. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t shoot a goat dedicated to protecting a donkey. If Zeb had one weakness and he had more than one, it was a reverence for loyalty.
“I can’t shoot that damned goat.”
Zeb and Anza moved off, downriver, but curiously, as they did, the seeing-eye goat and the donkey followed. This was a sign of domestication, the goat and the donkey had come off a farm somewhere no doubt and associated humans with food and shelter.
They could be tempted out of their semi-wild state.
They could be captured with kindness.
Zeb found some timothy meadow cat’s-tail plants, particularly succulent, prized as forage for horses and mules. Hand-held clumps of this did the trick. The goat became docile, accepted the feed from Zeb’s hand, and later that day even let Anza mount the blind donkey.
Zeb and Anza continued on with their new escort.
“We’re men of property again,” Zeb joked.
“I feel like I’m your Sancho Panza,” Anza said, riding the donkey as Zeb walked alongside. The goat followed along behind them.
“Who?”
“A servant of Don Quixote, it is a novel, a book from my country about a nobleman who becomes a knight and sets out in the world with his servant to fight injustice and to do heroic deeds.”
“This fella Don, you think he’s like me?”
“You are much like him, a gentle kindly man who can make evil men respect and fear him, a man who defends those less powerful.”
“I don’t know if I agree with that. I’ve always pretty much done things for myself. But I do expect that if I treat people fair they ought to treat me fair too. A lot of times they don’t.”
The river canyon was lessening in steepness the walls of rock on both sides fading away and here were brown more sun-parched scrub weeds and needle-like pucker bushes. The stream, shrinking in width and depth, continued to snake along sluggishly on the flattening plain amid white rocks.
“Will you seek revenge on that man you fought?” Anza asked.
Zeb looked straight ahead. “I’d rather call it justice. Out here there ain’t no law. All a man’s got is his honor and his word when he gives it. Problem is, if you let a man steal say your horse and make off with it others will get the idea it’s okay and they’ll steal a horse.”
“Then you are a constable of the law.”
Zeb nodded. “I suppose I am. Every decent man is. You can’t go and have a world where wrong doesn’t get punished. When you’re on a trek you don’t leave a man to die that’s a rule of mountain men from times long ago and it doesn’t have to be written down. Mister Langley made his choice. I will make mine.”
“Where are we headed?”
Zeb pointed. “Due northwest, same as the sun, just follow the sun.”
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