Centennial (33 page)

He loved his Indian sons and spoiled them, bringing them gifts from New Orleans and small rifles for shooting birds. He was especially indulgent with Jacques, who at six could ride his pinto at a gallop. The boy was headstrong, and several times McKeag tried to discipline him, warning him not to speed his pony through places where Indian families were cooking meals, but Jacques rejected such advice, and any further interference by McKeag only served to irritate Pasquinel, who wanted his son to become a fine rider. Marcel was quite different, a chubby little fellow who liked people and was becoming a master in devising tricks to get from them what he wanted.

It seemed to McKeag that the boys stood halfway between the two worlds of white men and Indian, uncertain as to which they would ultimately prefer. Pasquinel brought them white-man toys but steeped them in Indian tradition. They loved their father, but stayed mostly with their mother. They spoke Arapaho primarily, but were at ease in the mélange of French and English especially spoken when the two men were present.

McKeag was especially disturbed over the fact that throughout the west, both in camps and in Saint Louis, such children were called
breeds
and were treated with contempt—half-breeds who had a rightful home in neither race. He suspected that the time must come when this pejorative term would be thrown at young Jacques. Then there would be trouble, for the boy gave promise of becoming almost the archetype of that word: a real two-breed individual.

The first confrontation came during the postwar year of 1816. Pasquinel so enjoyed his Indian sons that he proposed taking them and their mother to Saint Louis with him that year, wanting the boys to see the city. He seemed to have no comprehension of the scandal that would ensue or of the hurt it would inflict on Bockweiss and Lise, and when McKeag pointed this out, Pasquinel’s reaction convinced McKeag that the coureur was not insensitive, he just didn’t give a damn.

“Don’t worry,” Pasquinel said, but McKeag flatly forbade him to take his Indian family to Saint Louis, explaining that it would be especially difficult for Clay Basket.

So Pasquinel compromised. He would take them down the Platte, past the Pawnee village and onto the Missouri. They would drift down that river as far as the westernmost American fort, recently reopened: Fort Osage it was called. There Clay Basket and the boys would be able to see what civilization was like, with the probability that their visit could be kept secret from Saint Louis.

It started as a happy family vacation organized around the two canoes, and that was what caused the first discord. Since Pasquinel, with his powerful shoulders, could paddle with twice the power of McKeag, it was arranged for Pasquinel and Marcel to ride in the lead canoe with four bales, while McKeag, Clay Basket and Jacques rode in the following canoe with only one bale. Since Jacques, now seven, could handle a paddle, the propulsion of the two canoes would be equalized, but this didn’t work, because as a partner for McKeag, Jacques proved quite intractable. If the Scotsman said, “Shift sides,” Jacques refused to do so, and he did not try to mask his contempt. Before they passed the Pawnee village he began complaining of the fact that McKeag allowed Pasquinel’s canoe to get far ahead, and he continued this complaining until Clay Basket was forced to reprimand him, but Indian mothers had little authority where sons were concerned, and Jacques repeated his complaints. McKeag thought it ridiculous to allow a boy of seven to agitate him, but as they approached the Missouri he shouted ahead for Pasquinel to stop.

“You take him,” he said brusquely.

“What’s the matter? You can’t handle?”

“I cannot,” McKeag said without apology, and the boys traded canoes.

They now entered the swift-flowing Missouri and would have covered the distance to Fort Osage quickly had they not been stopped en route by a guide who pushed his canoe out from the left bank of the river. “I need help!” he called, and when he drew alongside Pasquinel’s canoe, the Frenchman saw that it was Indian Phillips, a lanky, dour-faced half-breed who prowled the backwoods as hunting companion to a unique American.

“He’s sick,” Phillips said.

“Where?”

“Morteau’s shack.” They followed him along a path leading up from the river, and after a ten-minute walk beneath dense foliage, came to a palisaded hut occupied by a mournful French hunter, Pierre Morteau, who greeted them at the door.

“He’s awful sick,” Morteau said, leading the group inside.

In a chair, refusing to lie down although it seemed he must be close to death, sat a gaunt, bearded man in his eighties. He seemed delighted to see Pasquinel and the boys. His breath came unevenly, and his large, frail hands trembled but when he spoke his voice was crisp, as it had been throughout his life.

He was Daniel Boone, recluse on the lower reaches of the Missouri, who had sworn that each year, as long as the Lord allowed him to live, he would take hunting trips, spring and fall, into the wilderness. This one had gone badly, and it seemed impossible that the gaunt old man could make it back through the woods to his headquarters.

“You want me to take him to Fort Osage?” Pasquinel asked Morteau quietly.

“Not a bit of it!” Boone yelled. “I walked here. I’ll walk out.”

“He looks very weak,” McKeag said. He had no idea who Boone was and asked Pasquinel in a whisper.

“Famous Indian fighter,” Pasquinel said. “Saint Louis ... too many people for him.”

“Too goddamned many!” Boone shouted. “You leave me here. Phillips, damn him, he got me here and he’ll get me back.”

The half-breed grinned ruinously, gaping holes showing where teeth used to be. It was his job to accompany Boone on his yearly forays and to bury him if he died. “I don’t want no funeral in Saint Louis,” Boone growled. “Too damned many people there, a man can’t hardly breathe.”

“What can we do?” Pasquinel asked.

“You can tell those dudes at the fort I’m still huntin’ ba’ar and I’ll be walkin’ home soon.” He noticed Clay Basket and said, “Never cottoned much to Injuns but she looks a good ’un.” Of the boys he asked, “Breeds?” and Pasquinel nodded.

Boone took Jacques by the hand and drew him to his side. “Stay on the prairies, lad. Don’t let ’em talk you into livin’ in no town.” He started coughing and Clay Basket pulled her family away.

“He knows when it’s time to die,” she said in Arapaho, and they resumed their trip down the Missouri.

For Clay Basket and her sons, Fort Osage was a marvel, their first acquaintance with the power of the white man. The fort had been built in 1808 on a cliff seventy feet above the Missouri, and from each of its five towers it commanded a vast sweep of the river. Batteries of cannon were trained downward upon the waterway, interdicting any enemy boats that might attempt to force a passage, and from the river, as Pasquinel and his troupe approached, it looked as if each cannon were waiting to blow them out of the water.

“Look at them!” Pasquinel told his sons, and when they had made their canoes fast and had climbed the steep cliff, he asked the guard, “When do the guns go off?” and the guard said, “Have your boys here at sunset.”

So as the sun went down, Pasquinel took his wife and sons to the master battery overlooking the western approaches, and they all stood at attention as a sergeant gave orders. The boys gasped as the battery fired and a mighty reverberation echoed down the caverns of the river. “American guns,” Pasquinel said. He was not much impressed with Americans in general, but he did respect their cannon.

The Indian agent at the fort was Major George Champlin Sibley. His rank was honorary, and he acted principally as the man in charge of the commissary, where rifles and powder could be bought for beaver pelts. An acidulous, correct gentleman who dressed in western Missouri as he might have done in Washington, he had been respected when he served at the fort in the period from 1808 through 1813, and the Indians in the area had been disconsolate when he had to close it down during the War of 1814. But now that he was back, with the fort flourishing once more, he was actually loved.

“It isn’t the major so much,” an Osage explained to Clay Basket. “It’s his wife.”

They had heard about Mrs. Sibley from other sources, always with obvious love; she seemed a remarkable woman, but McKeag, who was perplexed as to why an agent’s wife should be so highly regarded, was told, “It’s the noise she makes.” McKeag could make nothing of that, but a Pawnee who had drifted south to the fort told him, “Oh, what a wonderful noise she makes.”

The party did not see this extraordinary woman until late afternoon on their second day at the fort. At five, some thirty Indians and traders crowded into Major Sibley’s living quarters, and McKeag saw that in one corner of the room stood a piano. So the noise, which had so captivated the Indians, was merely a piano. He smiled.

Then Mrs. Sibley appeared, a marvelous little wren dressed in a frail white dress gathered high beneath her breasts, with pink satin slippers on her tiny feet and a pale-blue ribbon in her hair. At fourteen, as the daughter of one of the distinguished citizens of Saint Louis—Judge Easton had been in turn postmaster, judge and congressman—she had formed the habit of slipping out of her parents’ home at dusk, riding bareback twenty miles to attend military dances, waltzing all night and riding back at dawn. Many soldiers had proposed to her, but shortly after her fifteenth birthday she married Major Sibley, promising ‘to go anywhere on earth with him that he cared to go.” He had brought her to Fort Osage. At first he was fearful lest the Indians frighten her, but at the end of the first week they loved her so that they would have attacked Saint Louis had she requested it.

McKeag continued to smile as she sat at the piano, adjusted her shimmering dress, turned and bowed to the Indians. This so pleased them that they made varied sounds of greeting, whereupon she started playing in dainty fashion a Mozart gigue which had floated up the river from New Orleans.

It was delightful, and Clay Basket clutched her boys to her, indicating to them how much she enjoyed it, but one of the Sac chiefs looked at Pasquinel and whispered, “Pretty soon now,” and McKeag noticed that all the Indians were bending forward, their eyes ablaze.

What happened next McKeag could not accurately determine, but Mary Sibley launched into a rather livelier tune, and with her left foot, in a most unladylike fashion, began kicking an extra pedal, which activated a large bass drum hidden in the rear of the piano. A French dance resulted, with the drum pretty well drowning out the music. As the Indians cheered, fragile Mrs. Sibley began pumping bellows with her right knee, activating a hidden wind instrument which played “Yankee Doodle Dandy”—and what with the booming drum and all of her ten fingers banging the keys as hard and as fast as possible, a veritable explosion of noise filled the salon.

Clay Basket thought it one of the finest things she had ever experienced, and the boys were enchanted with the mysterious and multiple noises. Major Sibley appeared, offering sweet punch to the chiefs and whiskey to the five white traders, while his wife passed little cakes to the women and the boys. Obviously the concert could have continued all night without tiring the audience.

“We came across Daniel Boone in the wilderness,” McKeag told the major. “He seemed near death.”

“He’ll be hunting bear by Christmas,” Sibley predicted confidently. He knew Boone and suspected that he was a long way from dying. “And if he dies, Indian Phillips is there to bury him. Boone wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Fort Osage would have been a lively place even without its chatelaine; most traders on their way to the upper Missouri halted there, and there were usually a few adventurers in attendance who didn’t know where they were headed. The boys were delighted with the varied activity and each day observed scores of things they could not have seen on the prairies: the shoeing of oxen, the tapping of a beer keg, repairs to a keel-boat, Sibley’s commissary store with its nails and buckets and brooms. Even Marcel, only five at the time, watched omnivorously as mule trains and river boats unloaded.

There were problems. This was an American military post, painfully un-French and lacking even a knowledge of prior Spanish occupation. The commandant was from Delaware and his men from Kentucky and Tennessee, and they had brought their prejudices with them. Frenchmen they distrusted; Indians they despised, and at meals they tried to abuse Pasquinel by calling him Squaw Man, knowing that this was a term normally used for launching a fight. He accepted it with a laugh, adding, “You bet. Make one fine wife.” One stranger, seeing his dark skin and Indian costume, made the mistake of calling him “you goddamned Indian,” which he also accepted gracefully.

“What kind of Indian you think?” he asked. “Cheyenne, Pawnee?”

The newcomer, guessing him to be Sioux, said, “Sigh-ox,” at which Pasquinel jumped about acting like a Sioux at a dance and shouting, “Me Sigh-ox!” In time the hangers-on at the fort stopped trying to insult him.

But they moved onto very different terrain if by word or act they insulted Clay Basket. She was a beautiful woman, her black hair hanging below her shoulders and her face with the placid composure that high cheekbones and amber skin impart. It was inevitable that in a frontier post like Fort Osage incidents would happen, but when they did, Pasquinel’s knife appeared like the fang of a rattler and even drunk men backed off.

That year passions against Frenchmen were already high over the war at New Orleans. Rumors circulated that French in the region had supported the British invaders, so it was not surprising when a newcomer from Virginia, out to survey the frontier defenses, took exception to having Pasquinel at table with him. He announced, “As a gentleman, I do not relish dining with traitors.” Pasquinel rose and left the table. At this point Clay Basket arrived, leading her two boys in for their meal.