Charbonneau (21 page)

This event was a crossroads for Charbonneau. Whatever thoughts he had entertained of entering government service to promote understanding and peace between the red and white peoples, both of whom are his blood kin, he now abandoned. It seemed to him that the U.S. government, for all its stated benevolence, was embarked on a course detrimental to the Indian; it also seemed to him that the gulf of misunderstanding was too wide to be bridged without prodigious effort. It is the sincere hope of the author that this may contribute something to the mutual understanding now so sorely wanting.

Baptiste included a letter with this piece of manuscript:

St. Louis, September 3, 1829

Mr. A.J. Gurney, Editor

Harper & Brothers

New York, New York

Dear Sir:

I thank you for your letter of August 1. Enclosed for your perusal is a section of my manuscript relating a recent event. I choose it because it seems to bring into bold relief the misunderstanding of the red and white races, each of the other, the same misunderstanding which I humbly hope partially to alleviate. I should add that while the
theme
of my book is the nature of two different, even conflicting cultures, its specific matter is a series of improbable and colorful adventures of a member of both races, myself.

Prince Paul and I set out for the Rocky Mountains tomorrow. On this expedition I hope to deepen my knowledge of Indian culture for the sake of my book. Correspondence will either be carried to me by courier in Indian Territory or held for me in St. Louis until my return.

Your humble servant, &c.,

Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau

Coco was stretched on the damask linen among the spiky weeds, the sun full on her face. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was on the verge of a smile: He imagined that she was watching the shifting, yellow-red glow the strong sun made on her eyelids—she liked that sometimes. Her hair, still an outrageously bright red, twirled behind her head in patterns more intricate even than the twilling of the damask; the sun glinted on both.

Baptiste, looking down at her face, and sometimes looking the length of her nude body, very white and very freckled, wondered how he might describe this feeling if he were to put it in his book. The only words he could think of were
full
, or
complete
. He put his dark wrist against her shoulder to see the difference in tone, and smiled. She opened her eyes into his face.

“I’ll be back in May, I think,” he said. They had not spoken of the fact that he was leaving on the morrow, and they had not spoken of the future.

A strange look, sad perhaps, nickered in her eyes and passed. She put a hand on his hoop, dangling from his neck through the open shirt and rubbed the stone with a forefinger. “Baptiste,” she said, “in May, if things work out, I will probably be engaged to be married. I may be married. I must.” She drew him down gently by the stone and kissed him lightly on the lips.

DECEMBER, 1829: This Kenneth MacKenzie seemed more than hospitable. He’d put Paul and Baptiste up in part of the apartment he’d built for himself in Fort Union, and invited them to a dinner they “wouldn’t be accustomed to in this country” that night.

They had ended up here at Fort Union because their traveling was by courtesy of the American Fur Company. They had gone by steamboat up to Fort Atkinson at the mouth of the Platte; Paul had spent some time with the Sioux there, giving Baptiste a chance to improve his Sioux-speaking skills. Then on by horseback through Sioux country to Fort Kiowa, with a small American Fur party, and on to the Arikara villages and then the Mandan villages. It had all been familiar to Baptiste, homecoming more of curiosity than enthusiasm. Paul had been fascinated by the Mandans, who lived in big circular huts made of grass, and had developed a complex ceremonial society. They both took copious notes for their respective books on the graded orders of Mandan society—Fox, Foolish Dog, Half-sheared, Make-mouth-black, Dog, Crow, Buffalo Bull, and Black-tail-deer for just the men alone—on their elaborate ritual dances, and on their colorful symbolic dress.

To winter on the plains, to get some shelter against the blizzards, the ferocious winds that swept down from Canada, and the sub-zero temperatures, they had accepted the offer to go on to Fort Union at the mouth of the Yellowstone, the headquarters of Kenneth MacKenzie, the King of the Missouri, and the chief ambassador for John Jacob Astor in the West.

MacKenzie was expansively gracious that evening. Though the fort was only a year and a half old, by now he had the accoutrements of civilization. He offered them wines, apéritifs, brandies, and fine cigars. The meal was a handsome affair in several courses served by beautiful Assiniboine girls. Baptiste had already heard that he dressed his Assiniboine mistress in the latest fashions St. Louis had gotten wind of from New York, though he hadn’t seen the lady. Clearly, MacKenzie was a man of style.

And of ambition. He expounded his ambitions over dinner. In the first two summers at the fort they had accomplished great things: They had driven cows and hogs from Missouri to the Yellowstone, and were getting the butter and cheese and bacon Paul and Baptiste were now enjoying. They had planted the first corn crops this far west. MacKenzie had even brought up a still that he used to produce corn liquor. Before long, he indicated, he would have turned Fort Union into a burgeoning oasis of civilization on these vast, sun-burned plains.

And he would make it pay. American Fur already had the river trade well in hand—they’d been trading with the tribes along the Missouri for beaver pelts for years—but the mountains were the gold mine. The mountains, still several hundred miles to the west, where Ashley, Henry, and the others had found untrapped country and had been harvesting it alone. You had to send trappers instead of traders there, MacKenzie explained. He would be sending some next summer to the mountains, and he intended to do what the Ashley bunch had never been able to bring off—build a fort in the heart of Blackfoot country and open trade with the most hostile Indians in the West. Mr. Crooks—Ramsay Crooks, the head of the fur end of John Jacob Astor’s empire—believed in the mountains and the West. MacKenzie would justify Crooks’ faith.

Paul inquired about the customs of the principal Indians of the area, the Assiniboines. MacKenzie knew nothing about that.

Baptiste wanted to know whether the trappers who Worked the mountains found it profitable.

“They do,” MacKenzie said, “they certainly do. A good trapper brings a high wage. But they never get to spend it.” He smiled a little. “When Ashley brought them to the mountains, he thought they would stay a year or two for the money and then get back to the settlements, out of harm’s way. But they don’t. They stay in the mountains. They live like Indians, like savages, and they enjoy it. The money just sits in a bank in St. Louis, what of it they don’t spend on whisky.”

When Paul and Baptiste retired for the night, one of MacKenzie’s aides told them quietly that if they would only say the word, girls would be made available to them. Paul seemed embarrassed about that. Baptiste laughed.

MacKenzie treated them well that winter—he was aware that his firm was host to a prince. Paul and Baptiste were fascinating guests for MacKenzie. The prince, aside from lending a certain distinction by his mere presence, was interested in commerce. The King of the Missouri talked with the Prince of Württemberg for hours about MacKenzie’s dreams for the area—dreams that reached beyond the fur trade and amounted to a virtual empire. Paul noted that MacKenzie would be giving the Indians useful employment, and approved. Baptiste seemed to MacKenzie to be a moody young man, but he was still intrigued by the slender, handsome breed who spoke half a dozen languages, could read and write and quote the Latin poets, sometimes reminisced about European courts, and had had the shrewdness to make himself companion to a king. MacKenzie admired shrewdness.

In the long evenings of the northern plains, around a huge fire that prodded back the cold, Baptiste would sometimes play his harmonika. He would play American country dance music, which MacKenzie liked because he could take a turn or two with his favorite Assiniboine girl, and sometimes Baptiste would even play the compositions of one Beethoven. MacKenzie had not heard of the composer, but he knew that the music lent a touch of class to his crude drawing room, an aura of courtliness to the primitive palace of MacKenzie’s empire.

JANUARY, 1830: An Assiniboine meat-making party, following some buffalo tracks that a scout had found, was ambushed by a larger Blackfoot party and virtually wiped out. Two braves made their way back to the tipis clustered around Fort Union to tell the story. The Assiniboines promptly held the largest and most elaborate war-dance ceremonial that Baptiste had ever seen.

He was singing the songs aloud again, so that he could copy down the notes as well as the words for his book, when MacKenzie walked into the apartment.

“What in hell are you doing,” MacKenzie asked, not meaning to be unpleasant, “getting worked up to attack the fort?”

“Noting down Assiniboine songs for my book,” Baptiste laughed. He explained a little about the project; MacKenzie didn’t seem particularly sympathetic.

“Your Herr Beethoven may be a discovery of worth,” MacKenzie judged, “but I doubt that the compositions of Watery Eyes will get a following.” That was MacKenzie’s nickname for Sky-Blue-Eyes, the young warrior-leader.

“But they have more of a place in my book.”

“Here’s a letter for you,” MacKenzie smiled. It was from Harper & Bros, in New York. “Courtesy,” MacKenzie elaborated, “of the U.S. Postal Service by steamboat to St. Louis, the U.S. Army by steamboat to Fort Atkinson, and the American Fur courier by horseback and snowshoe from there.” He waited for effect. “You’re lucky. I get papers from Chouteau once a winter.”

New York, October 2, 1819

M. Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau

In the care of General William Clark, Superintendent

Bureau of Indian Affairs

St. Louis

State of Missouri

Dear Sir:

We are in receipt of your letter of September 3 and of your partial manuscript.

I fear that in our opinion the completed section does not augur well for the book in its entirety. In this section you deal both with the policy of our government in regard to the proper treatment of Indians and with public sentiment about their conversion to Christianity. It seems to us that your own attitudes in these matters are perhaps more radical than would be acceptable to the American public, and your expression perhaps gives not enough judicious consideration to the views of others. In brief, it seems to us that you hold attitudes which the majority of your readers would find unacceptable. Harper & Brothers could not at this time consider a manuscript which flies in the face of the very public on which Harper & Brothers is dependent for its support.

We are aware, of course, that a partial manuscript may misrepresent the whole, and remain open to consideration of your efforts.

Sincerely yours,

A.J. Gurney

Editor

“Efforts without balls,” Baptiste said.

Two trappers wandered in during late January with horseback loads of furs and settled down to wait for spring. One, a bent fellow who called himself Old Bill Williams, didn’t have much to say except that he’d got tired of freezing through the winter with the miserable bunch of Crows down on Powder River, and he reckoned he’d have a look at what MacKenzie would give him for his plews. Williams worked alone, apparently, which astonished Baptiste. MacKenzie gave him a handsome price. The King admitted to Baptiste that it was mostly a ploy to get Williams’ business—American fur would take a loss on these plews—but the money went a long way toward keeping Old Bill’s thirst quenched and his tongue loosened.

Bill was called by other names, he confessed, Parson Bill and Old Solitaire and some others as were discomplimentary. He was an educated man, for a fact, and he had been a Baptist preacher when he was nigh seventeen. Next he’d carried the Word to the Osages. He’d taught them to worship the white critturs’ God, sure enough, but they’d taught him to worship their gods too. He’d ended by chucking the whole thing, layin’ in some powder an’ lead an’baccy and pointin’ his old mule toward the mountains.

Bill was gray, but he could have been almost any age. His face was tanned to the roughness of buckskin from years in the sun and wind. His eyes were slits from squinting into strong light, and crow’s feet forked out from their corners like the branches of a tree. His nose bent like a hawk’s beak and threatened to play footsie with his chin. His back humped about halfway up, thrusting his head forward, and he walked in a slouch. With an old Hawken rifle, .55 calibre, that he shot with an odd wobble, he let fly at some chunks of firewood in competition with Paul, an expert shot; Bill could shoot with the prince.

The traders had heard stories about him. He was supposed to be a loner, working the small creeks in high mountains by himself while the other trappers marched about in brigades. He had had a string of squaws to keep his blankets warm and his lodge tidy, but he turned them back as often as he got them. He was said to be ornery and mean. The word was that in starving times it wasn’t a good idea to ride a trail in front of Bill Williams.

He didn’t really talk about himself, but he told stories. One night, late, when they had both drunk too much, Baptiste asked him what kind of wives squaws made.

When Bill got started, Baptiste knew better than to interrupt:

“From Red River, away up north among the Britishers, to Heely in the Spanish country—-from the old Missoura here to the sea of Californy, I’ve trapped and hunted. I knows the Injuns and thar sign, and they knows me, I’m thinkin’. Twenty winters has snowed on me in these hyar mountains, and a niggur or a Spaniard would lam some in that time. This old tool,” he tapped his Hawken, “shoots center, she does. And if thar’s game afoot, this child knows bull from cow and ought to could. That deer is deer and goats is goats is plain as paint to any but a greenhorn. Beaver’s a cunning crittur, but I’ve trapped a heap. And at killing meat when meat’s running, I’ll shine in the biggest kind of crowd.