L'or Read Free Page B

regales them all, drinks the night away, tirelessly interrogating his guests.
    In his mind, he analyses, classifies and compares all these stories that he hears. He. remembers every word and never forgets the name of a mountain, a pass or a river, or place-names such as Dry Tree, Three Horns, Bad Man's Ford.
    One day, an illuminating idea strikes him. Every last one of the travellers who have filed through his house—the liars, the chatterboxes, the braggarts, the loudmouths, and even the most taciturn — all, all have uttered one immense word that sheds its grandeur over their tales. Those who speak it too often as well as those who speak it too rarely, the boastful, the timid, the hunters, the outlaws, the traders, the settlers, the trappers, all, all, all, all speak of the West, speak of  nothing, in fact, but the West.
    The West.
    Mysterious word.
    What is the West?
    This is the notion that he has of it:
    From the valley of the Mississippi to beyond the gigantic mountain ranges, vast territories stretch far, far away to the West: marvellously fertile lands and arid steppes reaching to infinity. The prairie. The homeland of countless tribes of Redskins and the huge herds of buffalo that ebb and flow like the tides of the ocean.
    But then, beyond that?
    There are Indian legends that tell of an enchanted country where the towns are built of gold and the women have but a single breast. Even the trappers who come down from the North with their cargoes of furs have heard, in their remote latitudes, tales of this wondrous country of the West where, they say, the fruit is made of gold and silver.
    The West? But what is it? What is to be found there? Why do so many men make their way there, never to return? They are killed by the Redskins. But those who get through? They die of thirst. But those who survive the deserts? They are halted by the mountains. But the man who crosses the pass? Where is he? What has he seen? Why is it that so many of the travellers who pass through my house strike out for the North but, the moment they are in the wilderness, turn sharply towards the West?
    Most of them go to Santa Fe, that Mexican colony deep in the Rocky Mountains, but these are nothing but common traders attracted by easy profit, they give no thought to what lies beyond.
    John Augustus Sutter is a man of action.
    He sells his farm and turns all his possessions into cash. He buys three covered wagons and stocks them with provisions. Armed with a double-barrelled gun, he mounts his horse. He joins a company of thirty-five merchants who are going to Santa Fe, more than eight hundred miles away. But the business is ill-prepared, the organization haphazard and his companions a bunch of ne'er-do-wells who rapidly fall by the wayside. Sutter, like the rest, would have lost everything, for it is too late in the season for such a venture, but he manages to establish himself amongst the Indians of these territories and to live by bartering and trading.
    And it is there, among the Indians, that he learns of the existence of another country, extending even further to the West, well beyond the Rocky Mountains, beyond the vast sandy deserts.
    And, at last, he knows its name.
    California.
    But in order to reach this country, he must first return to Missouri.

    He is obsessed.

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THIRD CHAPTER
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    8
    June 1838, Fort Independence on the border of the State of Missouri, on the banks of the river of the same name:
    The caravans are making ready.
    A wild confusion of animals and equipment. People are shouting at one another in every language under the sun. Germans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Spaniards, Indians and Negroes jostle one another busily.
    People are setting off on horseback, in carriages and in long processions of covered wagons pulled by twelve pairs of oxen. Some leave on their own, others in large companies. Some are returning to the United States, others leaving them to make for the south, in the direction of Santa Fe, or for the north,