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PROLOGUE

The hole was dry. Jed Smith was discouraged, not surprised. He had been warned about this stretch of the Santa Fe Trail. The old timers called it "The Water Scrape." For good reason. Smith and his lead scout, the Irish-born Thomas Fitzpatrick, dismounted and ran their fingers through the clumpy alluvium at the bottom of the wash. The granules were cool, damp. Fitzpatrick unsheathed his long-handled fleshing knife and began scraping for an underground spring. Smith, climbing back to the lip, raised his spyglass and swept the horizon.

It was late May 1831, and months of severe drought had rendered the entire Southwest parched and brown. Even the Arkansas River, where their wagon train had topped off its water barrels before crossing into Mexican territory, had been but hip deep. Those casks, lashed beneath the twenty-two Murphy freight wagons laden with trade goods, had been empty going on four days. By the time Smith and Fitzpatrick plunged ahead in their search, the swollen tongues of the wagon mules were lolling out of their mouths. Even Smith's and Fitzpatrick's mounts, sturdy mustangs evolved to ride for days without water, had begun to wobble, close to staggering.

Smith reckoned they were perhaps twelve miles out ahead of the caravan. Over the nearly ten years in which he had traversed the far west's mountains and deserts, its prairies and forests, he had developed an innate sense of direction. Especially distances. Whether covered or yet to be traveled. He knew the Cimarron River had to be near. He squinted through his spyglass. A scraggly yucca, a purple bloom of sage, a sagging cottonwood, would mean they were close. But no vegetation appeared for as far as he could see. All was empty; the only movement came from the ever-shifting sand piles, the eerie "walking hills," carried on their never-ending journey by the blistering south wind.

A stretch of broken ground, twisted and faulted and seeming to snake through a series of knobby rises, finally caught Smith's attention. Some three miles distant, nearly due south. Rocks? Like the subterranean Mojave he knew all too well, the Cimarron was a dry river, its flow disappearing beneath a gravelly bed for months at a time only to resurface after heavy rains. Or when forced upward by an immovable impediment. Like nonpermeable rock. Smith, saving his saliva, tossed a pebble to catch Fitzpatrick's attention.

He swung his chin toward the craggy heights. The Irishman, hard as hickory bark, understood. The two had been boon companions since their initial trip up the Missouri and into the mountains during what seemed a lifetime ago. Words were not needed. Fitzpatrick would continue to dig, awaiting the arrival of the desperate wagon train. Smith would ride south. Fitzpatrick watched through his own spyglass until his friend's silhouette vanished beneath the rim of a distant arroyo.

* * *

Despite having risked a good third of his life breaking mountain trail, trapping and trading beaver pelts, fording ice-strewn rivers, and battling hostile tribes, the vast and rugged territory west of the Mississippi River remained a country of myth to the deeply religious Jedediah Smith—a parable, in a sense, meant to illustrate God's munificence to any man willing to keep the Christian faith through the many trials the Almighty set before him.

Smith had kept his faith; if anything, it had sustained him during his time with heathens and apostates both red and white. It was said that he made the mountaintop his confessional, the forest glade his altar. The high-country outfits he had piloted were sprawling amalgamations of licentiousness and vice, yet he himself touched alcohol sparingly, shied away from tobacco, and—despite myriad opportunities—had never "womaned up." "With his ears constantly filled with the language of the profane and dissolute," a contemporary chronicler wrote, "no evil communication proceeded out of his mouth."

Up to this point, Smith's Lord had indeed placed many trials in his path, few if any more hazardous than at present. The buffalo tracks crisscrossing The Water Scrape, headed in all directions, formed a crazy quilt. The freshest hoof marks, however, appeared to lead to and from the rock outcropping he had spotted, now close enough to make out without his spyglass.

He was within a half mile of the rounded bluffs when the riders showed themselves. Through the shimmering heat haze, Smith counted fifteen, maybe twenty. Comanche or Kiowa, he could not be certain. It was said that a veteran plainsman could tell the difference by studying the ornate stitching adorning their buckskin leggings and moccasins. Smith's attention was more focused on the sunlight glinting off the metallic blue barrels of their rifles and the steel-tipped points of their buffalo lances.