Dreams Beneath Your Feet (29 page)

 

 

 

The missionaries and colonists were right about the rush of emigrants soon to set out for Oregon. In 1843, just two years after the end of this book, the plains, mountains, and deserts were filled with prairie schooners rolling their way across the Oregon Trail, a tidal wave of people.

Unfortunately, Hannibal MacKye turned out to be right about the Cayuse people coming to despise Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and the other missionaries at Wailatpu. In 1847, because of a measles epidemic they blamed on the whites, the Cayuses killed Dr. and Mrs. Whitman, Joe Meek's daughter Helen Mar, and eleven others and took the remaining sixty people of the colony hostage, to be ransomed one month later by the Hudson's Bay Company.

Hannibal was also right about California becoming a true New World. Discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in 1848 drew an explosion
of people to California from every corner of the globe. San Francisco became one of the world's great cities. California jumbled red, white, black, brown, and yellow together indiscriminately. The chaos did not cohere into a new kind of society for years, and the mixing together did not lead to ideal relationships between the races, as Hannibal hoped. Then or now.

Hannibal's vision of the New World as a second chance for mankind, a beckoning utopia, has been beautifully expressed by Eduardo Galeano in his
Faces and Marks:

[Since the discovery of the New World] pursuers of hallucinations have continued heading for the lands of America from every wharf. Protected by a god of navigation and conquest, squeezed into their ships, they cross the immense ocean. Along with shepherds and farmhands whom Europe has not killed by war, plague, or hunger, go captains and merchants and rogues and mystics and adventurers. All seek the miracle. Beyond the ocean, magical ocean that cleanses blood and transfigures destinies, the great promise of all the ages lies open. There, beggars will be avenged. There, nobodies will turn into marquises, scoundrels into saints, gibbet-fodder into founders, and vendors of love will become dowried debutantes.

Though it remains a beguiling illusion, the vision helps to define the American character.

 

 

 

The world of this book is faithful to the time and places it depicts. The state of the fur trade, the situations of the forts and the companies that ran them, the missions and missionaries, the Hawaiian people in the Northwest, traffic on the Oregon and California Trails, the political struggle between the United States and Great Britain for the Oregon country, the relationships between Anglos and Indians in the region—all were just as I have drawn them.

Many of the characters here are historical: Frank Ermatinger, Francois Payette, Dr. John McLoughlin, and other employees of the Hudson's Bay Company; Andrew Drips of American Fur; Joe Meek and Doc Newell (and their adventure in taking the first wagons to Oregon); the four missionaries Doc guided to Fort Hall, and even Father De Smet; Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and their daughter, along with the state of their mission at the time.

Also, the letters attributed here to Narcissa Whitman are ones she actually wrote.

Most of the principal characters—Sam Morgan and his family, the Flat Dog family, Hannibal, all the individual Hawaiians, Grumble and Abby—are the children of my imagination.

 

 

 

The six volumes of the Rendezvous series form one big story. An undertaking like this is a daunting challenge for a writer, and finishing, saying good-bye to characters who have been friends for years, is an emotional experience. I found some eloquent sentences, spoken by the narrator, in a novel by Dean Koontz that speak for me:

I wrote this to explain life to myself. The mystery. The humor, dark and light, that is the warp and weft of the weave. The absurdity. The terror. The hope. The joy, the grief. The God we never see except by indirection.

—Dean Koontz,
Life Expectancy