Across the Endless River (4 page)

Pompy became Baptiste, his Indian name used only by Clark as a term of endearment when the two of them were alone. Clark's slave, York, took him to the dry goods store and watched while Mr. Kennerly fitted him out according to the captain's instructions with corduroy pants, a flannel shirt, socks, shoes, a woolen coat, and a brimmed hat. The shoes, especially, troubled him. Baptiste had never had anything but moccasins on his feet, and now he did not like to wear these strange pieces of footgear with their rigid soles, stiff leather uppers, and a complication of holes and laces. When he complained, Captain Clark was understanding but firm. “Save your moccasins and deerskin shirt for the river, Pomp. If you are going to live with white people, that means dressing like them, right down to your toes.”

So he dressed like them and talked like them. His French was much stronger than his English, but that soon changed. At first he stayed with the Clarks, but before long he moved into the home of a Baptist minister and schoolteacher who boarded Indian and mixedblood boys whose parents had gone up the river in the fur trade. The Reverend Welch was a stern disciplinarian, but he was a patient schoolmaster and Baptiste enjoyed his lessons. Baptiste's sundry supplies for school were the first thing he owned aside from his clothes and the few objects in his medicine bundle, and he doted on them as if they were living creatures that could receive his affection.

The small slate and sticks of chalk intrigued him. He had seen slate outcroppings along the river, but he had never imagined its use for this purpose. Sums tired him, though, and soon the association of arithmetic with his slate was inevitable; he used it only when obliged. But his sheets of paper and quill pens were another matter. From the outset, the deliberate precision required for writing captivated him. He loved the way the continuously changing pressure of his hand on the quill moved slender lines of ink across the page, magically blossoming into words and then sentences. Like languages, writing—“the art of penmanship,” Reverend Welch called it—was something that came to him easily, its satisfactions inherent in the act itself.

After they wrote out the alphabet many times, each boy was told to cover a sheet of paper with his own name. “Jean-Baptiste” appeared five times in his tenuous hand before Reverend Welch, walking among the benches, covered Baptiste's hand with his own and stopped him. “You are named after John the Baptist,” he intoned, “a very great honor since he was so close to our Lord. In English we write only ‘John.' ” But the name never stuck, and beyond that one exercise, he continued to be Baptiste to all in St. Louis.

The domestic arrangements were simple, but there was always activity and companionship: daily chores and lessons, Sunday church, meals together at the big table of rough-hewn planks that took up half the kitchen. Boys came and went for extended periods when their parents reappeared, but there were usually six or eight at any one time. The only part of the routine that was disagreeable to Baptiste was the weekly bath. Every Saturday evening a long zinc tub of hot water stood in the wash house at the back of the main structure, and the boys took turns. As the youngest, Baptiste went last. The water was invariably tepid and dirty, a week's worth of sweat and grime forming a thin gray scum that covered the surface. Mrs. Welch stood guard outside the door, and after they had put on their trousers, she made each barechested boy hold up his arm for her to sniff so she could be sure he had used the thick yellow block of soap. “I will not have you smelling like a herd of buffalo,” she announced with a shrewish look. “Not under
this
roof!” In later years, whenever Baptiste thought of Mrs. Welch, that was the image that came to mind: a bony-faced woman in a plain long-sleeved dress waiting expectantly to thrust her nose in the armpit of the next boy.

Captain Clark's household was different, and Baptiste was often invited for meals. “You are always welcome here,” Clark told him, and he understood that the captain's special bond with his parents extended to him. But “No Indians in the house” was Mrs. Clark's rule, as she did her best to make the family's quarters as close an approximation of southern refinement as memories of her plantation girlhood in the Virginia Piedmont could conjure. Baptiste felt she admitted him there upon sufferance, but fortunately her domain, and the genteel rules that went with it, extended no farther than the main house.

Captain Clark was the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the entire territory, and anyone who had business up the river had first to secure his say-so. Indians from various tribes, government agents, slaves, French
voyageurs,
Negro freedmen, soldiers, adventurers—all could regularly be found around the large wing of Clark's house that was his office. Its walls were covered with Indian objects from the many tribes along the upper river. Baptiste often sat against the wall in the big council room and watched them come and go as they consulted Clark for advice, examined his hand-drawn maps, petitioned for assistance, or argued among themselves. Unless a private meeting required Clark to close the door to his inner office, Baptiste was never excluded. The Superintendent often introduced him to his visitors, but Baptiste discovered that he most enjoyed watching and listening. When you weren't noticed, he found, you could learn a lot.

The sound of the different languages entranced him. He understood the chiefs who spoke Mandan and Hidatsa, and he understood some of the related tongues of the Omaha, the Osage, and the Dakota Sioux. The occasional groups of Pawnee or Arikara, however, spoke a different language, whose inflections were unknown to Baptiste. The same was true for the Arapaho and the Cree. All of the Indians were obliged to use an interpreter to converse with Clark. Among themselves, the tribes whose languages were dissimilar relied on sign language.

French in its many variations was frequently heard. The
voyageurs
from the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay region spoke with flat, nasal intonations, while the Creole merchants and traders from New Orleans had a lilting, singsong openness to their words that sounded like music to Baptiste. Travelers newly arrived from France spoke in an entirely different way, and they often had trouble understanding the
voyageurs. “Monsieur, parlez français!”
Baptiste overheard a Frenchman say to an old trapper whose pronunciation he could not comprehend. The
voyageur
spoke French with the same inflection as Baptiste's father, and to a recent arrival from Paris the sounds were impenetrable.

English, too, resonated in tones that could have been different languages until you knew the speaker's origins. Captain Clark's speech was soft-toned and even, with a gentle cadence that commanded attention, while his wife had a Virginia drawl. Factors and tradesmen often spoke English with the strong accents of their native tongue—French, German, Spanish—but they always made themselves understood. The household slaves, Baptiste noticed, spoke English clearly and well when they addressed their masters, but among themselves the sound of their talk changed altogether, a barrier of inflections, rhythms, and meanings that kept others from understanding.

The clothes of the visitors were as varied as their ways of speaking. The fur traders usually wore fringed buckskin leggings and shirts, fur hats, and colorful sashes at the waist. Indian chiefs displayed their full tribal regalia: massive bear-claw necklaces, beads and shell loops dangling from their ears, stiff roaches of vermilion-tinged hair standing up from shaved scalps, elaborately painted robes of buffalo or elk hide about their shoulders, and often a silver peace medal from the Great Father gleaming on their painted chests. As the government's representative, Clark was careful to create a sense of occasion with his clothes also. He wore a deep blue uniform with gold piping and epaulets, a black silk neck scarf over a starched white shirt, and highly polished black boots. Government officials and judges sometimes appeared wearing clean white shirts, fancy cravats, broadcloth coats, and carefully creased trousers, dress that was as exotic in its way as the tribal costumes from throughout the territory. No one wore formal clothes above St. Louis.

His parents returned in the summer of that first year and took Baptiste to the faraway Mandan villages, where he remained with them for the warm months. He knew the other children in the tribe, and Limping Bear, the head of their clan, made sure he was included in the Kit Fox Society, the “young foxes” who together prepared for their initiation as men. Their activities, supervised by elders, developed the skills young boys would need in adulthood: the use of a knife to remove the skin of an animal with fluid and precise movements; how to wait noiselessly in the places where animals passed along their trails and at favored points for crossing streams and rivers; where to find the best wood for a bow and how to fashion its grain into an arc that had strength and suppleness. These and a hundred other things they learned in organized groups that often erupted in play against the ceaseless flow of the river. There was an openness to life with the tribe that felt very different from the rhythms he had known in St. Louis.

One evening during that first summer, he had finished playing with his companions on the sandbank along the river's edge. Tired, hungry, and dripping water from his soaked leggings, he ran to the tepee his mother had put up at the edge of the camp. He burst through the flap to the hot and close interior. Directly in front of him he saw his father astride his mother, who lay uncovered on a deer skin, her knees drawn up to her chin. Her eyes were shut tight, a kind of grimace playing across her features as high, piercing sounds issued from her half-open mouth. His father looked up in breathless surprise and with one arm gestured furiously toward the outside as he continued to move his hips rapidly across Sacagawea's prone body.

Baptiste turned and ran, stumbling outside. As he picked himself up, he saw Otter Woman, his father's second squaw, sitting to one side of the tent as if she were waiting. He looked at her and she looked back, her gaze passing through him. She offered no word of reproach, explanation, or comfort, just her strange and disquieting presence on the other side of the taut animal hide that provided no barrier at all to the sounds within. Baptiste walked away quickly; the mix of shock and wonder he felt was amplified by Otter Woman's silent presence.

For the next few years Baptiste followed this seasonal rhythm, traveling up the river with his parents when the ice broke up and returning to St. Louis before the current froze again. In the Mandan village he fit in, though the other boys wondered why he disappeared to the white man's world for months at a time. In St. Louis, too, he found his place, and his periodic absences seemed normal to the other boys. But at first his two homes made him feel like two different people: he had different names, languages, food, clothes, lodgings. Nothing was the same in his two worlds. Gradually, though, and with the encouragement of his parents, he came to see that he was one of the few who, like them, could go back and forth. Sometimes he felt as if he lived in between the two places, but eventually he accepted that he lived in both places alternately. As he grew, passing from one to the other came to seem natural.

As Baptiste got older, Auguste Chouteau, the patriarch of a rich and influential clan of fur traders, often included him in family gatherings. In the French manner, Chouteau took seriously his role as Baptiste's
parrain,
his godfather, and liked to tell him stories from the old days on the river. The French-speaking Chouteau household was unlike the Clarks' or the Welches'. The big house was always alive with Indian visitors, various white and mixed-blood traders,
voyageurs
just off the river with boatloads of furs, strong women who were actively involved in the business, an occasional priest, and children of all ages who were members of the extended family.

Everyone talked incessantly: business, politics, family matters—it didn't matter what the topic was. What counted, Baptiste saw, was to be part of the conversation, and to speak well when someone asked a question. The other constant in daily life among the Chouteau clan was good and plentiful food, sumptuous dishes prepared with rich sauces and savory spices that Baptiste had never eaten anywhere else. The bounty of the frontier was not simply consumed, but transformed into feasts that lingered in his memory when he returned to the plain dishes at the Reverend Welch's or Captain Clark's. Baptiste learned the delight the French took in the occasion of a meal. “Food is just fuel for the body,” Captain Clark told him once when he enthused about a dinner he had shared with his godfather. “It need not be fancy.”

Chouteau had several mixed-blood children and grandchildren by what he called his “country wives,” Indian squaws who lived among the tribes he visited when he bartered for pelts. Baptiste made a number of friends among the Chouteau cousins of his generation; under their roof he never felt different or excluded. Though often lonely, Baptiste knew that his situation was one of privilege compared to most of the other boys at the boarding house. Chouteau and Clark were two of the most important men in St. Louis, and both looked out for his welfare.

F
EBRUARY 1813

One snowy evening when he was eight years old, his father appeared at Reverend Welch's house. There were shouts followed by whispers, then his father took him for a walk along the river. Reeking of whiskey, Charbonneau told him that his mother had died, breaking down several times and swearing in his sentimental way that he would have a Mass said for her every month.

“She caught the belly fever,” his father told him in a choked voice. “She took sick, and within ten days the fever burned her up until she was gone.”