Cheyenne Winter (2 page)

The Trapper
, captained by Joseph Sire and piloted by Black Dave Desiree, whaled up the Missouri for the second time that year. The first voyage had departed from St. Louis March 27, carrying the resupply of the American Fur Company, destined for Forts Pierre and Union. It had sailed downriver a few weeks later bearing the returns — baled buffalo robes and pelts — of both Chouteau’s American Fur and the new Rocky Mountain Company as well. And on board were Brokenleg, Little Whirlwind, and Maxim Straus.

Now it was flailing the Missouri again, this time on the second (or June) rise, and carrying the resupply for the Rocky Mountain Company, which it would deposit at the foot of Wolf Rapids on the Yellowstone, the practical end of navigation unless the river ran very high — which it didn’t. From there, Fitzhugh’s engages would wagon and keelboat the resupply to the company’s little post at the Big Horn.

Brokenleg chafed at the delay. His giant rival would have its goods shelved and be trading weeks ahead of the buffalo company, but there was no help for it. Their annual meeting was delicately positioned to allow Jamie Dance to get in from New Mexico, which he could do only when the grass was up. It hurt the northern trade and endangered the resupply because the treacherous river dropped rapidly after the mountain melt-off and its upper reaches would no longer be navigable by mid-July.

Today, Sires told him, they’d reach Bellevue, and that was good news. Around Bellevue something began to change not only in the river but in himself. Below Bellevue the riverbanks were lined solidly with hardwoods, and the trees suffocated him until he could barely breathe. Down in steamy St. Louis he had to hold himself in like a caged creature, his mountain spirit wrestling with people, buildings, dampness, traffic, manners — not to mention coping with people like Guy and his family, Jamie and his, and that raft of slaves. It always made him crazy, like being assaulted by a whole hive of wasps at once. That was true of Dust Devil, too. She stood beside him on the hurricane deck high above the water, looking glad.

Near Bellevue the trees thinned and the air dried and became more transparent. The steam of the southern river gave way to dry heat. The banks no longer crowded the river. The Missouri flowed through long stretches of prairie, open country where a man could see to tomorrow, and the grass pinned the trees to dense copses in low flats or cedar-choked islands. For Fitzhugh it was like freedom; jail bars falling. Soon they’d see buffalo. They’d long since seen the last vestige of civilization, the last farm, the last shack, so that the land seemed clean and pure, and as joyous as a rendezvous wedding. In St. Louis he’d survived on spirits, numbing his senses each day just to endure. He didn’t need spirits so much here; only now and then when his bum leg tortured him, or he got the itch.

At Bellevue, too, they’d face their last hurdle. The Indian Agent there performed the final U.S. Government inspection of the packet, looking in particular for contraband spirits. At Fort Leavenworth the army inspected each packet, but leniently, with a knowing appreciation of the way the fur trade worked. Alcohol lubricated the business and no acts of Congress could prevent the passage of spirits up the river. There was rarely trouble at Leavenworth. In the days when General William Clark was Indian commissioner he gave the fur companies generous permits for the legal boatmen’s ration. And the lieutenants at Leavenworth who poked and probed the mountain of cargo in the shallow holds never bothered to look closely at the compact rundlets marked turpentine or vinegar or lamp oil.

Still, they’d been careful. Not until well above Bellevue, at a certain wooding lot, would the Rocky Mountain Company’s annual supply of two-hundred proof ardent spirits be boarded, along with several cords of dried cottonwood to fire the boiler. No company could afford to lose its license. Even Chouteau’s giant company had once come close when a rival had tattled, and only the intervention of that friend of western men, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, had allayed disaster. Fitzhugh had six thirty-gallon casks awaiting upriver, carried there by mulepack at considerable cost to the company. The very thought of it built a joyous dry in his throat.

“Grass,” he said to Little Whirlwind.

“Home,” she replied. “The land of the buffalo.”

She’d been as miserable in St. Louis as he, pulling into herself and glaring at the white man’s world with ill-concealed scorn. She’d refused to don the clothing of white women, no matter that St. Louis summer was steamy and leather was clammy to the touch there. Instead, as an act of tribal pride, she’d adorned herself in the most elaborate ceremonial dress of her Cheyenne people, wearing velvety bleached-white doeskin fringed at the hem and sleeves; calf-high moccasins, elaborately beaded; and a heavy bone necklace. She’d worn her sleek jet hair in braids and wrapped each braid in white rabbit fur and garlanded it with a bow of red ribbon. And then, just to defy the customs of the whites, she’d streaked her forehead with vermilion, as if to announce that she was Cheyenne, and the Cheyenne were a finer people than any she set eyes upon in that filthy city.

Now she stood beside him feeling the throb of the twin steam pistons and hearing the thrash and rumble of the sidewheels of
The Trapper
as it fought the relentless river. But her face had softened, he thought. He knew why: the grass. The prairie, with its promise of liberty, running unfenced to distant horizons where her Cheyenne people lived and hunted and worshipped their everywhere-god, Maheo. And soon, the sacred buffalo, the commissary of her people. Her face would soften again some time soon when they spotted their first buffalo.

They passed the confluence of the Platte, that shallow flow out of the Rockies far west, and Fitzhugh’s mind leapt up that river to the beaver camps and rendezvous he’d know at the end of that highway. Then he heard the clang of bells and the muffled sound of voices erupting from the speaking tube that connected the pilothouse atop the texas to the engine room. The packet slowed and began slewing in the current. Ahead, around a bight, would be Bellevue and after that — freedom.

Even as the duckbilled prow of the packet slid toward the levee a small crowd of Otos and Omahas collected there, running down the steep paths to the water’s edge. For years Bellevue had been run as a trading post for American Fur by Peter Sarpy. The comfortable post was still a trading center, but it had a new resident as well, the U.S. Indian Agent for the Omahas and other local tribes — the Reverend Mr. Foster Gillian, a portly divine of the Congregational Church. It had become Indian Bureau policy to appoint ministers as Indian Agents, supposing civilizing good would come of it. Brokenleg hawked up some spit and spat. He had his notions about all that.

From up on the hurricane deck Brokenleg eyed the fat cleric in his black clawhammer frock coat and silk top hat. The man was teetotal. And worse, he’d been imposing his morals on tribesmen until they brimmed with resentments, turning a happy, fruitful trading post into a seething mass of hatreds. Still, this would take all of twenty minutes and they’d be on their way upriver. Below, on the main deck, a motley mob of deck passengers, ruffians and mountain men mostly, swarmed to the rail. Brokenleg hardly knew any of them — the old beaver men, his rendezvous pals, had mostly vanished into some void. Oh, where had all them coons gone? Men he drank with, trapped icy streams with, told tall tales with through a wintry night? The Stony Mountains had become as silent as a trapped-out creek.

Deck hands lowered the stage and a welter of men boiled off the packet to stretch their legs and explore the loveliest of all the Missouri River fur posts. After that exodus the reverend proceeded forth, as stately as a whale, accompanied by a horde of factotums, mostly breeds. Brokenleg decided he’d better head down to the main deck even though descending the companionways was torture for a man with a leg welded straight at the knee by an old injury.

But Captain Sire was down there to greet the agent, and young Maxim as well; the boat and the company were represented, so he didn’t hurry. At length, after some babble, the deckhands opened the hatch and the Reverend Foster Gillian lowered his portly self down the ladder, a glassed candle-lantern in hand. Maxim accompanied him; no one else bothered. By the time Brokenleg limped up, the hold had swallowed the reverend.

Down there, Brokenleg knew, Maxim would steer the man along the two aisles through inky blackness, warning him not to bring the lantern close to casks of gunpowder, occasionally shifting crates and bales of trade goods to let the inspector examine what lay beneath. That had been young Maxim’s duty from the start; he kept the books, did the clerking, checked the cargo against theft each day.

Nearby, Mrs. Gillian awaited under a white parasol, respectably isolated on the deck by cowed passengers. Brokenleg did not introduce himself. Something about Mrs. Gillian’s manner forbade it. He wondered how she treated the red men in her husband’s charge. He heard the scuff and scrape of shifting cargo below and knew Maxim was being put through a workout. And then he detected rising voices.

Maxim’s head bobbed up at the hatch, looking worried. “We need two deck hands,” he said, shooting an unhappy look at Brokenleg.

The mate sent down two deckhands, and in short order three rundlets were hoisted to the main deck looking like fat felons, followed by the lumbering bulk of the minister, who was helped out upon the planking, and stood puffing after his exertion up the ladder.

He had a bung starter in hand and proceeded to twist it into wood until he was able to extract the plug, which taxed his muscles to their limit. Then he bent his portly frame until his nose probed the hole, and sniffed.

“Vinegar indeed,” he wheezed. “I smell foul spirits.”

Brokenleg was amazed. The company had no spirits aboard. He limped forward, plunged a finger into the bung, and sniffed. It wasn’t vinegar.

“And who are you?” asked Foster Gillian, drawing himself up to peer down his aquiline nose.

“Fitzhugh. Partner in the company.”

“Your full name?”

“Brokenleg Fitzhugh.”

“Brokenleg? Have you no other?”

“Not as I remember.”

“I must have a name.”

“Robert, it was.”

“You’ve violated the laws of the Republic.”

“I don’t reckon so. This ain’t our spirits.”

“Oh, fiddlededee!” The Reverend Mister Gillian wheezed out his scorn. “I suppose you’ll tell me it was not on your cargo manifests.” He waved the papers as if they were holy scripture. “Here! Three thirty-gallon casks of vinegar. A little legerdemain. A little chicane.”

“What’s that?”

“Fraud. Foul fraud. A base effort to debauch and demoralize the savages in our charge.”

“I know nothing about it,” said Brokenleg. He wheeled toward Maxim. “You know anything about this?”

The youth looked frightened. “Yes. I — the barrels weren’t on the manifests,” he stammered. “I thought a mistake had been made so I added them to it.”

“Ah!” cried Foster Gillian. “A mere youth corrupting the savages! And toying with the law of the United States. What sort of company is this?”

Maxim reddened. “My task is to look for theft. Each day I check the hold for theft. There’s often miscounts — differences between what’s on the manifests and what’s in the hold. I — it’s nothing unusual.”

“Stammering! A sure sign of a guilty conscience. Truth will out!”

“That isn’t it — that isn’t it. Someone put them there!”

The reverend wheezed, setting his whole torso to rocking. “I may be a minister, young man, but I’m not naive. I know that your foul trade is fueled by spirits. You fur and robe men think nothing of debahing whole tribes — corrupting helpless innocents, mere children, with your vile poisons.”

Maxim stiffened and pressed his lips shut. He was plainly through talking.

Fitzhugh felt like hollering but didn’t. No matter what he said he’d only dig their grave deeper. As far as he was concerned tribesmen were adults. They could choose to trade a robe for some firewater or not, same as any white man.

“I’ve caught you red-handed! That’s plain. Enough spirits to send whole villages into the pits of hell!”

“Maxim, come hyar — I want to talk.” Fitzhugh dragged Maxim out of earshot.

“Stop!”

“We’re havin’ us a company meeting.”

“Fiddlededee! Fiddlededee!” The reverend scowled but there was nothing he could do. Fitzhugh halted at the roaring firebox. “Maxim — what do you know about this hyar?”

“Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!” he screamed. “They’ve been on board for a long time, Brokenleg,” he mumbled. “I noticed them the first day. There’s two manifests — one for the captain and my own. The vinegar was listed on the ship manifests but not on mine. I just thought — ”

Fitzhugh growled. “You jist thought! You jist thought!”

Maxim looked so miserable that Fitzhugh wanted to calm down, but couldn’t. “Maybe you cost us the license! Maybe you busted your pa and the rest!”

That was too much for Maxim. He wept.

“You coulda told me!” Fitzhugh roared. “You coulda said we got three casks of vinegar. Vinegar! Who the hell uses three casks a vinegar? I shoulda done it myself.”

He knew he was cutting the boy to ribbons and he didn’t care. Out in the wild lands anyone that made mistakes — them coons went under. The wilds, the Injuns, didn’t give a second chance. This robe trade, with all its cutthroats, didn’t give a second chance! He left the boy weeping spastically while firemen pretended not to stare, and stomped back to the Indian agent.

“I’m sayin’ it and you can believe it or not. Suit yerself. I’m sayin’ it for the record. We didn’t put them casks in thar and we didn’t know what they had in ’em. Someone else done it.”

The Reverend Mister Foster Gillian looked amused. “I’ll make note of your fiddle-faddle in my report to the Indian Bureau.”

“Make plumb sure you do!”

“Oh, this heinous traffic in spirits will cost you your license. Don’t you doubt it.” He turned to Captain Sire. “I am confiscating this contraband. Have your blackamoors pour it into the river, sir. But leave a little for evidence.”