Rocky Mountain Company (42 page)

They paused then in silence, leaning on their axes, letting the silence of the wintry day remind them of the fate of all men and the voyage of the human spirit through life. Fitzhugh removed his stocking cap, and others did as well. The Creoles had no priest for the burying or the prayers, but Trudeau led them through half-remembered verses.

When the Creoles finished with remembrances of their fallen comrade, Fitzhugh cleared his throat. “This hyar man is one I’ll remember long as I live,” he said. “Back there in the Cass trading room, with Hervey fixin’ to murder me, and me sprawled on the floor, Alain Lemaitre leapt up on Hervey’s back and rassled him long enough for me to git free. He saved my life. He was a good and brave man. May he be with God, and rest in peace.”

Fitzhugh’s post had claimed its first man.

They walked silently back to the post, through frostbit air, each man absorbed in his own thoughts, the toll exacted by the fur business and wilderness and hardship a vast distance from the cities and farms and shops and churches of the east, alive in his mind. Many went into the wilderness; a third came back.

Maxim returned to the trading room, his gaze caressing everything, as if only the sights before his eyes could allay the disbelief he still felt within. He yearned to tell his father of this: to say, we are ready now. We have enough to make a profit. We will trade for horses and then take the wagons out, just as we planned. We might succeed.

But his father lived some interminable wintry distance away, months away, and all Maxim could do was think the thoughts and wish they could fly through the ether and into the minds of his parents. He refused to doze. The day had become much too important to miss even the smallest moment.

When the sun had reached its feeble zenith that second day of January, every mortal in the post gathered in the barracks to begin ceremonies that normally would occur in mid-summer, upon the arrival of the year’s outfit. Maxim had expected a smoke and a speech; he’d heard about all that. But now before his eyes, every Cheyenne wore his ceremonial finest, which they had all carried clear from their village on Crazy Woman Creek. Chief White Wolf wore his eagle-feather bonnet with fine otter tassels at either side, and hawk bells sewn to the red tradecloth headband. The headmen wore their ensigns of office, elaborate quilled and beaded shirts of leather, medicine pouches, grizzly-bear claw necklaces, scalp-bedecked staffs.

Fitzhugh himself wore a black frockcoat that Maxim never knew he had, a touch of formality that startled the young man and seemed utterly incongruous with Fitzhugh’s wild red beard and receding red hair, his fringed britches and scuffed boots. He sat on a stump-chair because he couldn’t manage sitting crosslegged on the floor. They did smoke, at least the headmen and Fitzhugh and Trudeau, passing the long calumet with its red pipestone bowl in the circle. Then White Wolf stood and made a considerable speech which Maxim couldn’t understand and wished would come to an end; and Fitzhugh stood and welcomed them all, many by name, in English mixed with Cheyenne.

Then the trader distributed gifts. A twist of tobacco to each Cheyenne as a friendship and peace offering; packets of powder and a one-pound lead bar to the chief and headmen; plus a pound of sugar and a pound of precious coffee for White Wolf. It took a long time, Maxim thought, fighting back sleep. But at last the Cheyenne stood, and began to dig through their parfleches.

“Hyar, Maxim, you got to keep a record of all this,” Fitzhugh said. “You sit beside the trading window, and I’ll dicker. Me and Trudeau.”

All that afternoon Fitzhugh, still in his amazing black frockcoat, pulled buffalo robes onto the counter, spread them out for examination, looked for thickness of hair, flaws, color, whether the robe was a split sewn from two halves, looked for thin spots, weaknesses on the fleshed side, lice and bugs, softness of the tanning, and age.

“This hyar’s a good one, boy. Mark it to Looks at Stars, and give him what he wants up to two dollars.”

Wearily, Maxim scribbled in the ledger. Was this what clerking was, he wondered? Looks at Stars bought powder and ball, a five-inch Wilson knife, a yard of red ribbon, and two mirrors.

The afternoon snailed away at its own slow pace, and Maxim wrote until his fingers numbed. Some times he carried the heavy, acrid-smelling robes out to the warehouse, where they would be sorted and graded, and eventually pressed into bales when they built a robe press. He ran errands for Trudeau and Fitzhugh, scrambled for things off shelves — the yeller calico up there, the ten-inch knives, the ivory combs, not the tortoise-shell — and slowly acquired a sense of prices. He hadn’t the faintest idea what a trade item would go for, or what a pelt would be worth. He realized, suddenly, he knew nothing about the trading itself; the values, the ways to tell a good robe from a poor one, the amounts to charge for hundreds of items on the shelves. It bewildered him. He had to learn and fast. A robe usually fetched a yard of cloth — trader’s measure from fingertip to neck — or sixty loads of powder and shot, or three pounds of sugar, or two of coffee beans, or one hank of beads.

Mid-afternoon, Fitzhugh turned the trading over to Trudeau entirely, and walked outside with White Wolf. Through the trading window Maxim could see them dickering for horses in the bright glare: the chief, the owners of various ponies, and Fitzhugh, who walked around each shaggy beast, ran his hands down hocks, picked up hoofs, hunted for galling under the thick winter hair, and watched warriors saddle them and ride them, or hook a travois to them if they were selling a draft animal. Maxim got busy again and didn’t know how the trading went, but soon he saw Cheyenne warriors carrying bundles of osage orange, and saw half a dozen nondescript ponies, mustang blood, tied separately to one of the Pittsburgh wagons. The post had horses again; one team and two saddlers, plus the three recovered mules. Those as well as the four belonging to Abner and Zach. A joy effused Maxim, because those horses would mount hunters and meant meat, and travel, and the use of the wagons.

They didn’t shut the trading window until well after dark. White Wolf wanted to leave for his village at once, but not until every one of his warriors had traded. Then, as suddenly as they’d appeared, they mounted their ponies and rode away, gaudy in their new finery. It astonished Maxim that they’d leave at night, and not spend their final hours in the comfort of the large barracks.

“They’re plumb itching to git back, Maxim. They’ll spread the word, and we’ll see other bands come in soon. They won’t freeze, boy. They know how to make good huts outa robes and blankets if it gets too nippy. Now count up, boy. Let’s see how we done on our first day.”

Maxim began tallying, muttering as he went, blinking back sleep, his eyes blurry, some crazy happiness keeping him going. He checked and rechecked because he wanted his figures to be totally accurate.

“A hundred fifty seven robes, Monsieur Fitzhugh. Twenty of them summer robes. Papa will be so glad.”

“He har!” yelled Brokenleg Fitzhugh. “We’re in business!”

But Maxim had fallen asleep over his ledgers.

Gregoire let Ambrose Chatillon out upon Chestnut Street, while Guy Straus watched. Chatillon had arrived that very evening, and had hastened to Straus’s home after finding the offices of Straus et Fils dark.

Guy returned to his study, and read the letters from Fitzhugh and Maxim, holding them close to the coal oil lamp. Everything in them exactly agreed with Chatillon’s account. Good and bad. They were alive and well; they hadn’t lost a man; they’d almost completed a new post, even with only the handful they had to build it. But they hadn’t a single buffalo robe. Nor any other pelt, such as beaver or elk or otter. Worse, their entire outfit, save for the spirits and the bow wood, had been kept from them by the man whose name most men in the fur trade dreaded — Julius Hervey. It made him faint of soul just to think of that.

It depended on Fitzhugh, he thought. He’d thought it from the beginning, and had come to believe what the broken-legged rough cob of a man would succeed where a hundred men of fainter heart would fail. Maxim thought they would fail, in spite of their heroic labor. That seemed plain, between the lines.

Late February. Saint Louis lay in the grip of winter still, but soon it would abate. Great floes of ice drifted past the levee, and in the grog shops there, mountain men talked of spring and green grass and the next trip out upon the far-flung wilds.

He stood at the window, peering into a dark night. A few windows glowed up and down Chestnut Street, but mostly a foggy dark possessed the town. He saw no one on the rutted street. He’d have to tell Yvonne in a moment, the good and bad. She had retired earlier, from a habit of going to bed early in winter. Lamplight strained her eyes, she’d always said. She’d be overjoyed with the news that Maxim was well, and growing stronger daily. Good and bad. Probably bad. Snatching the outfit out of Hervey’s hands would take more than even Fitzhugh could come up with. Guy thought to pay a visit to Pierre le Cadet the next day, down at his offices near the levee, and say a few sharp things. But it’d do little good, he knew. One did things for the record.

Guy wouldn’t know the outcome until late June or early July, when Max and Fitzhugh would come down the river on LaBarge’s packet, with the year’s returns. A long time to wait, Guy thought. But that was what any business required, and especially the fur business. In New England or New Orleans, daring entrepreneurs sent their fragile vessels out upon a harsh sea, and then waited, day by day, month by month, for news. So it was with the fur business, although the news would come over a sea of land, not of water.

He’d long since trained himself to wait, and be optimistic. He thought of that red-haired lion out there, and smiled.

Some of the background characters in this story were real people. Among them Joseph LaBarge, pioneer Missouri riverman, pilot and captain. Pierre Chouteau, Jr., along with his numerous family and relatives, owned and brilliantly managed the fur company that dominated the robe trade on the upper Missouri, at one time Pratte and Chouteau, and later, Chouteau and Company. He did not actually purchase the name, American Fur Company, from John Jacob Astor, but the name lingered on, and Chouteau’s company was informally called American Fur, a convention I have followed in this story.

Alec Culbertson and his Blood wife Natawista were real people also, the royalty of the Upper Missouri. Culbertson was in charge of operations through the 1840s and 1850s.

My fictional character Julius Hervey is loosely based on the real Alexander Harvey, perhaps the most brutal and villainous man ever to enter the fur trade. His conduct was so appalling that it would not be believed if presented in fictional form. The traits I have ascribed to the fictional Julius Hervey were present in much more violent form in the real Alexander Harvey. Nonetheless, Harvey was a competent trader, and was successful in the fur business, both with American Fur and in opposition.

The most notorious of Harvey’s many deeds was the revenge he took against the Blackfeet, either for stealing a milch cow, or for the killing of a black slave. At Fort McKenzie, probably in 1843 or 1844, Harvey and a colleague loaded a howitzer with grape shot — some say nails — and then opened the gates of the post to the crowd of Piegan men, women, and children waiting to trade, and touched off the cannon. The shot scythed them down, including the women and children, and up to thirty died. The exact number is not known. The whites, under Harvey, then apparently shot the wounded and that night forced the wives of the victims to participate in a scalpdance. That episode cost American Fur Company its Blackfoot trade for years. Fort McKenzie was abandoned and burned.

Harvey murdered another fur company employee as well as other Indians, beat up any who opposed him, stole the wives of the employees and dared them to do something about it. My fictional Julius Hervey is a somewhat milder version of an amazing character.