Charbonneau (28 page)

JULY 1836: The whole camp was grumbling. First Gabe and Fitz, the White-Headed Chief, had give up, the summer before, and throwed in with American Fur. Independents just couldn’t compete with the Trust, which baited them with money and then gobbled them up. So the boys had to buy and sell with the only store in town, which meant selling low and buying high. Baptiste thought MacKenzie must be gloating back at Fort Union. But he wasn’t. The fickle people in St. Louy and New York and London who had kept the demand for beaver up for a couple of centuries, doffing hats made of nothing else, had suddenly decided that silk was better. The price of plews dropped like a stone into a well, and broke when it hit bottom. “In the old days,” Luke Habber declaimed, “it was three dollars a pound, old ’un or kitten.” Now it was a dollar a pound for fine plews only. The boys were in the squeeze. And so were Kenneth MacKenzie and American Fur, for whatever consolation that brought.

But the price of living didn’t go down. Baptiste still had an outfit to buy, and some foofuraw for Sophie, whose high spirits called for a certain sartorial flair; and Jesus, there were her relatives to take care of. Since Baptiste had carried fine gifts to Mountain Ram, back in the spring of ’35, that particular bunch of Snakes never missed a rendezvous. Of course, all Baptiste’s in-laws expected presents from their rich relative; Bazel was like a child when it came to presents, and Sacajawea had some coming; on top of that, it seemed that Running Stream’s near relations amounted to three dozen Shoshones.

So Baptiste was gladdened, with all the other boys, when the sound of rifles down the Siskadee below Horse Creek signaled the supply train and a chance for a bust-out. Baptiste jumped onto his fastest pony bareback to race a dozen other trappers to the train. He saw Fitz, the White-Headed Chief, at the head of it, with another Irish aristocrat, Bob Campbell, alongside him, and behind them—Baptiste couldn’t believe it, so he rode right up to make sure. Some child must be buffler-witted. For next to the missionary doctor, Whitman, sidesaddle, was a handsome blonde woman in full skirt and stays. And behind, bumping uncomfortably on a wagon seat, came a solemn-looking fellow and another woman, scowling. The first white women had set foot in the Rocky Mountains.

Wall, it was at least cause for a celebration. The boys painted themselves up like Blackfeet on the warpath that night and treated the missionaries to an actual Blackfoot war dance. Truth was, so many good beavers had gone under to Blackfoot balls in the last year that the dancers meant it. The Shoshones, sparked by the notion of making Blackfeet come, joined in. Dr. Whitman, who had seen it all the summer before, thought the spectacle a high time, though he wondered whether he ought to. His lovely, buxom wife, Narcissa, delighted in it openly. The Reverend Henry Spalding was appalled by the white men who made themselves as low as savages. His self-righteous spouse, Eliza, retired to their tent at the start of the dancing.

Some of the men thought Narcissa a fantasy come true. Hadn’t they dreamed and even sung about the girls they’d left behind across the wide Missouri? And warn’t Mrs. Whitman a picture, with that red-gold hair piled on top of her head and them fine tits parading out front?

The Indians welcomed them too. After all, these missionaries were the answer from the white man to the plea that had gone to the Red-Headed Chief seven years before. Some Nez Percés were in for rendezvous, and immediately begged the missionaries to live with them and teach them the true way. The Snakes were heated up to learn it, too. Besides, the squaws were fascinated by the dresses with all their fancy stitching and embroidery.

Old Gabe just shook his head. He knew they warn’t long for that country. How could them ladies get by whar the sun would parch thar skin and the wind tan it to leather and the alkali water turn their bowels to water? Wagh! But he was obliging. As the head chief and host, he entertained them with yarns: About the river he’d found what run so fast downhill that it was hot at the bottom from friction. About echo canyon, whar the walls that threw a child’s voice back at him was so far away that it took six hours for the echo to get back whar it started; Gabe used the echo for an alarm clock, he did.

Baptiste was disgusted. He had some idea of how much they knew about what they were getting into—about as much as that first missionary who’d come two years ago, alone, and who thought that Flatheads were Flatheads because their mothers bound their heads as children and deformed them. He’d given that preacher credit, though. He’d cleared out of the mountains, moved on to Orgeon, and eventually had gone back to the States and told everyone that the Indians couldn’t be made Christians until they were made white men. Which was right. Were these damn fools come to make them white? No chance in this country. Why the land itself said no. The mountains and the plains would defy anyone who meant to divide them up, fence them, and farm them. Nature would say no to God.

Campbell liked Baptiste. The Irishman had come to the mountains for his health a decade before: he became a graduate man, and then turned for profit to supplying the rendezvous. He hadn’t lost his sophisticated tastes; Baptiste was the only Indian he’d ever met who’d even heard of Shakespeare, and the only Indian he knew who spoke English, French, German, and Spanish, and bore himself, even in buckskins, with the grace of a courtier.

As cavalier to Narcissa Whitman—he disliked Eliza Spalding—Campbell took Baptiste by to call. Narcissa was emphatically religious, he told Baptiste on the way to the Whitman tent. The report was that she had married principally to get to the mission fields; and for a fact she had worn black at her wedding, presenting herself as the bride of death.

For such a bride she seemed full of life. She served tea on her canvas-topped veranda, on an actual white tablecloth and in proper cups. She was full of curiosity about the trappers, and pealed with laughter at the stories of their lives—especially one Baptiste told about Milton Sublette climbing a tree to get away from a grizzly and ending up with a bear hug on the trunk two feet off the ground. At mention of mountain marriage she blushed a splendid crimson which only made her look more alluring, he thought, and seemed to mask fascination rather than disapproval. Baptiste entertained her graciously with anecdotes of Europe and Africa; he did not mention his dalliances. He was just thinking what a splendid, high-spirited woman she was when Old Bill creaked up and unceremoniously sat on the ground. He was, Baptiste judged, tanked up but coping nicely.

“Mrs. Whitman,” offered Baptiste, “permit me to introduce you to the most considerable man I have met in these mountains, variably known as William S. Williams, Master Trapper, Old Bill, Old Solitaire, Parson Bill, and the old so and so.”

Bill looked like he wanted to spit fire at Baptiste, but he said “How de do” without touching his felt hat. Narcissa greeted him graciously.

‘This rheumatic, ornery, canny old coon has been my personal master and genie in learning mountain life,” Baptiste went on devilishly. “Despite his uncouth appearance, he is an educated man, deciphering letters as well as he reads Blackfoot sign, and parsing both Latin and Greek as well. I doubt that he is suitable for your company, though, as he is a fallen angel. He was once a preacher and a missionary. He has declined into a thorough savage, regrettably, even to the point of putting faith in Indian superstitions.”

“Is that so, Mr. Williams?”

“It is, Marm, though that scalawag would say so if it warn’t. This child has preached to the Osages, away back to Missoura, and he’s put the fear of God into a many. And he’s sent some Injuns to the other place, too, if I do say it myself. But this child has lamed some’p’n, Marm, he has. He knows pore bull from fat cow, and he has kept his ears and eyes op’n, he has lamed some about religion from the Injun, damned as they be.”

“They are damned, Mr. Williams, because they do not see the divine light. Dr. Whitman and I hope to help them to see.” Narcissa was still smiling.

“Wall, Marm, this child doesn’t but think thar’s some the Injuns could help any white man to see, meanin’ no disrespect.”

“Do you believe in Indian religion then, Mr. Williams?”

“No, Marm, this child don’t. He’s no damn fool of an atheist now, but he don’t cotton to no set religion. This child has seed his own religion. But white folks could larn some from the Injuns, yet. They could larn that thar’s the One-who-created-all, as the Injuns call him, everwhar they look. In Horse Crick right over yonder, it’s what makes the water sweet and cold and run downhill. It’s pushed up them Grand Tetons up north of here, and put Jackson Lake right smack in front of ’em, whar a coon’d want to set down on his haunches and gawk and never stop gawkin’. And it’s what makes them columbines poke thar heads up right after the snow melts to water ’em. And it’s in the grass and the pines and the rocks and the buffler and the elk as same as it’s in man. The Injuns know that.”

“And still they’re sinners, Mr. Williams, and lost in the sight of God.”

Bill looked at her hard. “Wagh! This child don’t doubt that they be, Marm, but he knows what he does know. It’s sin as’ll spile this hyar country, and it’s missionaries as you what be bringin’ sin out hyar.”

Campbell interrupted. “It’s too fair an afternoon for heresy, Mr. Williams.”

“No,” said Narcissa, “I want to hear what he has to say.”

“Since ye ask, Marm, this child’ll give tongue to his thoughts. ’Ee recollect the story of Adam, what was set down in paradise and then sp’iled it all? Why, we is set down in paradise again, right hyar. So we be.

“A man was born to be free and nat’ral. Even the critturs know that. But over the centuries them Britishers and Frenchies and Dutchmen and Eyetalians, why they did mess things around. They got theirselves kings to boss around men as were born to be kings on their own. They got theirselves priests and told ’em what war nat’ral war wrong. They got theirselves a bunch of laws as to corral ’em. It war agin nature, Marm, but they done it.

“But the One-who-created all, he done give us a fresh start. He opened up this New World. And folks give it the monicker New World on account of it war a chance to get rid of them kings and priests and laws and things what put ropes around a man.

“Right off some fellers tried to start up with that old stuff agin, but it didn’t shine. Too much land. If a beaver didn’t take to all them stake-ropes, he could walk over yonder hill and be whar thar warn’t none. That’s how come my pap crossed the Cumberland Gap and settled in Kentuck’. And lots of other beavers too. Meant to be thar own kings on thar own place.

“Right quick them as like to regalate everbody else, why they followed on with thar damned, beggin’ yer pardon, laws and thar churches. But we just come further west. We walked out of thar reach. And we mean to stay out, Marm, these children be free men”—he took in the whole camp with his hand—“and this airth ain’t seen many free men. What we be is Adams. Adams in a new Eden: American Adams, that’s what we be. Whelped in Original Goodness.

“Now ’ee missionaries kin ride out hyar and tell the Injuns to mend thar ways. ’Ee kin try to tell us beavers what know better. Wagh! But it don’t shine, Marm, and it ain’t gonna take. No way to pen a man up when over yonder ridge be a valley whar no coon kin find him, nor rule him. Set your eyeballs upon the land, Marm. The country hyar be too wild and fierce and just too damned big, beggin’ yer pardon, Marm, for any man to fence it up, parcel it out, make it go by no rules. This be an Eden, Marm, what war true made for Adams. Sin ain’t got no place hyar.”

Narcissa beamed. “You should have kept your calling, Mr. Williams, for you are an eloquent preacher. I fear, though, that you are lost to the cause of Jehovah. And from your smile, Baptiste, I fear that your mentor has led you astray as well.”

Narcissa, who had read the great romances, told Dr. Whitman that night in their tent that Baptiste and Bill were a veritable Lancelot and Merlin. But they and their fellows, she added, were as much in need of divine instruction as the Indians.

Chapter Seven

1838: The Underground Railroad was by now well established.

1837, MAY 10: New York banks suspended specie payment, precipitating the Panic of 1837 and a seven-year depression.

1838: Joseph Smith and followers fled to the Far West, near Kansas City, Missouri; after a conflict with the Missourians, the Mormons would relocate to Nauvoo, Illinois, before making their emigration to Utah.

1840: During, the 1840s the temperance movement gained such impetus that fourteen states adopted prohibition.

1841: The first wagon train crossed the plains, the mountains, and the deserts to California.

1841: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
Essays
(first series) appeared.

1841: New England Unitarians and Transcendentalists founded Brook Farm.

1842: Charles Dickens visited America to great adulation.

1843, MAY 22: Over 1000 settlers left Independence, Missouri, for Oregon, beginning the Great Migration.

1843: Lt. John Frémont’s second Far West expedition explored the Oregon Trail, the Great Basin, and California.

JANUARY, 1838: Baptiste was riding with the Bridger brigade for American Fur now. Trapping had fallen on lean times, and Old Gabe wanted Baptiste and Kit Carson for his lieutenants that year for a big hunt in Blackfoot country. Hell, Baptiste would rather have been out on his own, but with the price of plews so low, he couldn’t get a dollar for his possible sacks. And Gabe was offering handsome wages, wages that would let Baptiste set something by for the child Sophie was carrying. She’d be light in the spring.

The hunt was trouble from the start, skirmishes with Bug’s Boys all along the way. The brigade spent more time in secure camps than out working the cricks. Just before winter set in for sure, the scouts reported a lot of Blackfoot lodges down the Yellowstone a little way. Carson, who’d come to the mountains a year after Baptiste and was younger, clearly had the ha’r of the b’ar in him; he was always ready for a fight. So were a lot of the boys: Too many of their friends had gone under because of Blackfeet; besides, times were bad and spirits festering. So little Kit led half the brigade downstream, set up in a good spot behind some rocks, and made thirty of the critturs come before dark spoiled the fun.

Gabe moved camp a ways up the Yellowstone and settled in for the winter on a spot between a steep bluff and the frozen river. He had sixty men, enough to make even riled Blackfeet wary of a fight.

But he kept a weather eye out for trouble. And one afternoon in January he thought he’d found it. Ten miles to the south a whole plain was swarming with Blackfeet, his scouts said—more than they had ever seen assembled in one spot. Jim ordered a six-foot breastwork of tree trunks thrown up around the three exposed sides of the camp. He had Baptiste and Kit hand out the DuPont and Galena he’d kept in his packs. He sent men to keep watch on the bluff. And he waited.

The next morning Baptiste led a small party to take a look at the Blackfeet. They laid less than half a mile off and watched them for an hour. “Gabe,” Baptiste said when he got back, “there’s more’n a thousand of ’em. Their faces are blacked, and they’re dancing for war.”

“Druther they came on, John.” Most of the trappers would rather they came. Some of the squaws, there in the middle of the camp, singing softly their songs designed to ward off injury and death, weren’t so sure.

That night the sky gave a lurid show—a spectacular display of northern lights, flashing red and green and yellow for a couple of hours, then settling into a huge expanse of blood red covering the northern half of the sky. Some of the trappers were superstitious enough to wonder if it was a bad omen.

Morning broke brilliantly clear and bitter cold. At dawn the men could hear the sharp crack of cottonwoods popping in the sub-zero temperatures. From the bluff the watch could see nothing. At mid-morning a few Blackfeet crept to within three hundred yards and let fly some useless, silly sniping. Gabe changed the watch. This was the biggest force the Blackfeet or any Injuns had brought against mountain men. They surely didn’t mean to stop at snipin’.

At noon the watch reported the whole Blackfoot army on the march, coming up the ice and the banks of the river. This was it. The trappers spread behind the breastwork, primed, and thought on what the Blackfeet might do. Gabe, Kit, and Baptiste were to have their men fire alternately, so that part of the brigade would always have its Hawkens loaded. It was simple: If the Blackfeet had the gumption for a charge, the brigade would go under, every man, woman, and child. But probably the niggurs would decide a direct charge was too expensive.

When the Blackfeet pulled up in ranks, out of range, a chief held up a white blanket. With two other chiefs, well armed, he walked toward the breastworks. Gabe waved to Kit and Baptiste, and the three walked out to meet him. At fifty yards the chief with the blanket stopped, laid down his gun and his knife, and walked forward again. Gabe did the same. Baptiste knew it was a ruse. What he couldn’t figure out was why the Blackfeet were stalling for time.

“Bad medicine,” signaled the chief. He spread his arms toward the northern sky, back toward the Blackfoot camp. Baptiste couldn’t hear whether Gabe and the chief were talking, but he could see the signs.

The chief smacked his left fist into his right palm, sketched a medicine pipe in the air with both hands, and pointed his right arm into the distance. Sign language for: Friendly. Smoke pipe. Leave.

Gabe sat with the coon and blew smoke in the ceremonial tribute to the earth, the sky, and the four winds. When he got back, he permitted himself a grin. “Queer-somest thing I ever seed,” he allowed.

DECEMBER, 1838: The Bridger brigade settled in this winter with the Shoshones. It had been a poor spring hunt, a dispirited rendezvous, and a poor fall hunt. Beaver was scarce. The price for beaver was still low. Eight more missionaries—four couples—had come to rendezvous. Even some of the fun was dwindling: The trappers’ favorite enemies, the Blackfeet, had been nearly wiped out by smallpox the previous spring. So the boys didn’t have many good scraps to liven things up. Old Gabe, when he found the Blackfoot lodges filled with infected bodies, reckoned that the chief had been right, that them northern lights were bad medicine after all.

Winter camp was a quiet time, with no one stirring much. Occasionally some braves and trappers would make meat; but mostly they sat it out around the fires and stew-pots in their tipis. Baptiste and Running Stream—their child had been stillborn—sat many long afternoons in the lodge of Mountain Ram. He was old now, half blind, and knew that he did not have long to live. He liked to spend the days with his daughter and his son-in-law, though he would have been more pleased if they had children. He liked to spin tales for hours on end—tales of coup he had counted, tales of wonders he had seen, tales of how he had outwitted an arrogant neighbor, tales of how Shoshones outmaneuvered the fierce Blackfeet. His mind turned even further back, to the peculiar blends of history, myth, legend, and fantasy that made up Indian history and was handed down from generation to generation. One afternoon he told Baptiste the story of the origin of the dance of the buffalo calves:

A man married a buffalo. She ran away and rejoined her herd. He followed her. The buffalo chief came galloping up to him as if to gore him. But the man stood fast and declared he would not depart without his wife. The chief retired, and another came up in the same threatening way. Four times this happened. Then the chief said, “If you can identify your son four times among the dancing calves, you may have him and your wife.” So the man entered the camp.

His son secretly came to him and said: “In the first dance one of my ears will be drooping, and so you will know me. In the second I shall have one eye closed. In the third I shall limp.” So three times the man identified his son. For the fourth dance, however, he had no sign. He could not tell which calf was his son. He made a mistake. The old buffalo thereupon stampeded and trampled him to death. There was nothing left of him. The buffalo went away.

With his father the man had left his medicine-robe, a buffalo-skin with the horns attached. This he used in curing the sick. He had told his father why he was going away, and if something happened to him his father would know it by the robe. Lying on his pallet, the father heard the rumbling bellow of a buffalo. He said to his wife: “The robe has made a noise. It means that something is happening to our son. He is killed. Let us look for him.” He had the small hoop and shafts used in the game
itsiwan
. They made ready for a journey. After four motions he threw the wheel to the ground. It rolled away. They walked beside it. Sometimes it would stop where the young man had stepped in water. The man would throw it again. Whenever the young man had stepped in water or stopped to drink, the wheel stopped. At last it stopped in a place where the grass over a large space had been trampled by buffalo. The old man picked it up and threw it down with four movements. It went a little way and came back in a circle to the center of the plot. Four times it did this. Then the man knew his son had gone no farther.

He searched for some sign, and at last found a bit of hair and a long-bone partially covered with earth. He said: “Let us see what we can do for our son. Give me the robe.” He spread it on the ground and wrapped the hair and the bone in it. He laid the bundle down. He raised it, and called his son, “Aiakatsi (gambler), we are going to gamble!” He spat on the hoop, and with four motions dropped it to the ground. It rolled in a circle, and the robe stirred. His son got up, alive. He told them that the buffalo had said if he could defeat them in a fight, he should recover his wife. So he was going to fight the buffalo. He covered himself with the medicine-robe. He threw himself on the ground and rolled like a buffalo and grunted. He stood up, a buffalo. He pawed the earth. They saw a large bull coming. Behind him was the herd. The two bulls charged. Neither could succeed in goring the other. After a long struggle the young man was weary. Just then he recognized his wife standing by. He implored her help. She ran up and gored her buffalo husband, making a long gash in his flank. He retreated, and Aiakatsi ran forward and gored him to death. The buffalo chief told him that since he had won he could take his wife and his son home. The buffalo became a human woman, the calf a boy. They went home, and the young man founded the Horn society, to perpetuate the dance of the buffalo calves.

When Mountain Ram was not telling stories of old times, his squaw was telling obscene stories and jokes, in the bluest language Baptiste had ever heard. He wished the missionaries could hear it.

Or he spent days sitting with Bazel and Sacajawea. She liked to listen to his music, so he would work on new songs in the long evenings, not songs about objects or places, but songs that brought up moods, songs of feeling that he remembered and associated with various places in the mountains. Sacajawea made a singular audience. He could never have gotten an impression of whether she liked the music—the notion of liking or disliking a song was utterly foreign to her—but he got her solemn attention, her reverence in the presence of something mysterious, sacred, and powerful.

He was developing new impulses in his own songs. They had a sliver of the four-voice Protestant hymns of his childhood, a sliver of the Catholic liturgical music of his puberty, a piece of the square-dance and boatmen’s tunes of his adolescence, a large piece of the Haydn-Mozart-Dittersdorf-Humrnel-Beethoven he had heard in Europe, and a piece of Indian music laid over the whole. It would have driven a musicologist batty. But Baptiste had an idea now why Indians spoke of being given songs in dream-visions: He heard songs in his head, involuntarily, any time he was willing to listen—when he was riding quietly, or waiting for a deer to come out of the brush, or looking into a fire or relaxing after making love to Running Stream. When he paid attention, interior music made an inexhaustible accompaniment to his life.

One afternoon he asked Sacajawea whether he should not have a Shoshone name. Most of the American trappers called him John. Some of them, especially the French-Canadians, called him Baptiste. Some Crows called him Long Foot, because of the time he got his horse killed and made a seventy-mile walk into rendezvous; some Snakes called him Wooden-Shoe-White-Man. But neither Indian name had stuck firmly. And Baptiste felt his separateness from his wife’s people, his mother’s people, halfway his own people, when they called him by his white name.

Sacajawea summoned Thunder Cloud, the tribe’s medicine man, who had been given, as a sickly teen-ager, a great vision that came from the thunder gods of the west. She gave him three buffalo robes, and Baptiste added a pony. Thunder Cloud promised to divine Baptiste’s name.

He listened for hours to the story of Baptiste’s life. Sacajawea told of the bitter, stormy winter day when he was born with red and white blood. She told of the long journey with Lewis and Clark, and of the way the infant Paump charmed Clark with his dancing. Baptiste told of his early education by two tales of the white man’s god, of his years spent east of the salt-water-everywhere, of his return to the white man’s great village on the Mississippi, of his journey to the mountains, of his decision to stay in the mountains as a trapper. He explained to Thunder Cloud the medicine of the hoop-and-stone necklace Sacajawea had made for him.

Had any bird ever spoken to Baptiste? Thunder Cloud wanted to know. Or any other animal? Or rock or tree or cloud? Baptiste said no.

Had Baptiste had any dreams in which power was revealed to him? Had he received in dreams any deeds he must do? No. Any dances? No. Any sacred words? No. Any songs?

Baptiste considered and said yes, sort of. He supposed that tunes that ran in his head were something like that.

Thunder Cloud was primed now. Would Baptiste sing the songs for him, so that he could feel Baptiste’s medicine?

Baptiste grinned as he showed Thunder Cloud his harmonika. Thunder Cloud had no idea what it was. Baptiste started with “Lone Mountain Song,” then “Riding Song,” then “Swift Creek Song,” then “Song of the Fire.” He took time between songs to notice that Thunder Cloud was puzzled, maybe dumbfounded, that he could find no string that might untie the strange bundle of this music. But they said nothing. Thunder Cloud listened in utter, trance-like concentration while Baptiste played “The Song of the Running Buffalo” and “Aspen Grove Song.”