Snowbound and Eclipse (43 page)

“I'll squeeze the nation first, and then raise a heavy contribution on the citizens individually; I'll cry down those one-volume journals and frighten publishers and no man, woman or child shall read a word about
my
tour unless they enter their names on
my
lists, and pay what price I shall afterwards fix on my three volumes and map.”

I was enraged, and for a while thought to challenge the man on the field of honor. My motives are as lofty as I can manage them, and I wish to produce a sound, educated, and thoroughly accurate account of the voyage of discovery, including every plant and animal we revealed to mankind, and every feature of the land we traversed. Profit doesn't even enter into it.

But the more I thought on it, the more I decided to forgo the satisfaction of honor. I contain, within my mind, a vast body of knowledge, which I alone possess, which my field notes only hint of, and not even Will Clark can imagine. The possibility that a ball from a dueling pistol might forever darken my mind, and deprive the world of the greatest body of information since the discoveries of Columbus, stayed me from that course. In the end I chose to ignore the scurrilous assault on my integrity, and proceed.

I returned to my printer, Conrad, who supplied me with an estimate: four thousand five hundred dollars to publish the journals and the scientific material and maps, and the supplement dealing with Indian glossaries and ethnographic observations. That was far more than I could afford, but Conrad had worked out some costs, and recommended that we offer subscriptions to the complete set, three volumes, published octavo, running four or five hundred pages each; the price to be thirty-one dollars. I agreed.

Worse, the entire burden of preparing drawings, engravings,
the map, reducing the astronomy observations to longitude, and finally the editing, would be borne by William Clark and me, and was not included in Conrad's services. I feared we would go heavily into debt, and Will Clark would be worse off because he had been paid less.

I hired a promotions man and commenced work on a prospectus advertising “Lewis and Clark's Tour to the Pacific Ocean Through the Interior of the Continent of North America,” and soon placed it in the
National Intelligencer,
where it occasioned much interest.

I must head back to Washington to settle the accounts. The clerks keep pestering me to provide receipts for the drafts levied on the treasury; I keep telling them that they traveled all the way across a wilderness to the Pacific and back, and some got lost. But that doesn't seem to faze officials: they want paper, or else to lay the bills upon me. I am growing testy about it.

I did not suppose I would ever weary of Philadelphia, the most civilized precinct of North America, and yet I am, and want to retreat to Locust Hill and begin work on my papers. They banqueted and toasted me here through the spring and summer, so much that my head would be turned by it all were it not for the steadiness of purpose and good character instilled in me by my mother.

I've attended three meetings of the American Philosophical Society, and in each case was besieged by members wanting to know about the West. I am flattered by such
attention, and have promised them numerous notes and papers. In May I visited the eminent Benjamin Smith Barton, head of the society, and returned to him a book about Louisiana I had carried all the way to the western sea and back. He was most delighted.

Nor was that the least of it. Charles Willson Peale, the eminent painter, sculptor, and museum director, has sketched me and done a facial mask. The sketch will become an oil portrait, and the mask a waxworks image of me. C. B. J. Fevret de Saint-Menim, the French artist, has done a fine likeness of me in native attire, especially the ermine coat given me by Cameahwaite. Here am I, at age thirty-three, greatly celebrated by savants and artists and poets. Peale's museum will be the repository of many of my artifacts. I have employed him as well to illustrate the journals with drawings of the animals we discovered.

I hired a fine German botanist named Frederick Pursh to plant my seeds, illustrate my books with renderings of my fieldwork, and classify my discoveries, so I have that aspect of publication well in hand. He was commended to me by a local nurseryman and botanist named McMahon, who has tenderly cultivated numerous of the Western species I managed to bring back, though so many were lost in the cache at the Great Falls of the Missouri that I am able to offer only a modest improvement in the knowledge of North American botany.

I hired the engraver James Barralet to portray the falls of the Missouri and Columbia, and employed Alexander Wilson to portray the birds. And for a hundred dollars I hired the Swiss mathematician Ferdinand Hassler to reduce my field observations to accurate longitude. Will and I had agreed to split the cost of preparing the journals but now I find myself suffering a want of funds, having laid out so much, so fast, to launch our journals.

So I have been very busy, but not so much that I could not enjoy many a night out with my old friend Mahlon Dickerson, a lawyer of great distinction and as much a man about town as a rural Virginian like me would want to know. He lightens my serious disposition, bantering about frivolous things, which I accept because he is at heart as serious as I am, and not given to triviality, which is the perdition of many a life. We have made a fine bachelor pair, roaming this venerable city, meeting the ladies at various levees, balls, musicales, and lectures, and sometimes escaping town to test our firearms against assorted stumps and toads.

It was upon one of those social evenings that I encountered the dazzling Elizabeth Burden, a young lady of such grace and fair beauty that I was instantly entranced. There she stood, in a green cotton frock, its waist gathered just under her bosom, with puffed sleeves, all of it summery and cool. I had no difficulty arranging an introduction: that occurred following an ethnology lecture at Carpenters Hall. She was in the company of her eminent father, a widowed ancient history professor at the university, and I sensed at once that here at last was the woman who combined the magnificence of form I cherished with the accomplishments that I considered absolutely essential.

I was particularly glad I had finally completed my new wardrobe. I had nothing to wear after returning from the West, and Washington was scarcely the place for a gentleman to be outfitted. So within a day of my arrival in the Quaker City, I engaged some tailors and put them to work. I certainly wanted appropriate clothing for my new and prominent life, and took pleasure in looking my finest.

This Wednesday evening, July 22, 1807, I was splendidly accoutered in cream silk knee-britches, a royal blue coat with brass buttons, white cotton stock, and a fine black bicorne, though it was perhaps too hot for such attire. I kept
my coat open so that I might not sweat too much at the armpits.

I invited the Burdens to a nearby tavern and they gladly accepted, eager to meet the explorer. I used my status shamelessly, and why not? What better entrée into the lives of strangers? I bought a round of Madeira and cheese and other sundries for the gentlemen, while Professor Burden ordered lemonade with pond ice for his daughter, and I got down to the business of exploring this fair lady as if she were an unknown continent, whose rivers I was gradually ascending to their source.

“Ah, what beauteous company we share this evening. Tell me, Miss Elizabeth, about your accomplishments, quite apart from being the cynosure of all eyes.”

She eyed me levelly, and I wondered whether it had been the wrong approach.

“I mean, you are here attending a lecture on Ohio River tribal ethnology.”

She smiled at last, and like a sunburst. “It was my father's wish.”

“I imagine you profited from it.”

“I imagine,” she said.

“You have been reared among books. Have you a library?”

“Governor, my particular joy lies in keeping a good house for my father, so that he may pursue his vocation. I bring him a tea tray every afternoon at four. I have a good hand. Sometimes he permits me to copy things he needs, or to prepare a draft he will be sending to a printer.”

“Oh? A copyist you say, familiar with unusual terms and all?”

“We have Doctor Johnson's dictionary. It doesn't always suffice.”

I began to grow excited. A copyist! And I, with an enormous
project looming over me. Not just a copyist, but one who could correct errors and spellings and put things right.

“I think you perform a most valuable labor,” I said, and turned to the florid-faced professor, who wore his gray hair in a long queue. “You have a great asset, sir, in this fair maid.”

“I've never thought of her as an asset, Governor.” There was a certain asperity in his tone, and I retreated.

“A helpmeet, then. A daughter who is there, upon your service, doing all that is required to advance knowledge and scholarship.”

He smiled. “I am the beneficiary, that is true, but I worry about my Elizabeth and her future. She is twenty-three.”

Ah, I thought, the fine old gentleman is playing Cupid. He's aware of what a match I would make, and what I can offer a woman. Twenty-three is older than the usual nuptial age, and she had been withering on the vine, and that only improved my chances.

Once I had properly inventoried her charms, I began at once to spin stories of my adventures.

“Mahlon has heard all these, but I always have some additional thing to tell about, and so he'll just have to listen,” I said.

She smiled at Dickerson, and I began anew to relive those crucial moments in my existence when I was walking across a wilderness populated by unruly savages, dangerous beasts, hunger and cold and sickness … Thus I entranced her for the evening, and managed to meet several more times, always during the bright June afternoons, to take tea in the company of her aunt.

I thought surely she would succumb, but then one afternoon she declined my attentions, saying she had a headache, and after that it became more and more taxing to see her, though I found out what lectures her father was attending
and sometimes caught a bright glimpse of her in those moments. She was always the soul of courtesy, but I knew that she had rejected my suit. Ah, this business of being a perpetual bachelor is woeful at times, though of course I cherish the liberty it affords me.

I knew that once again, domestic joy had eluded me, though I could not quite see how I had failed or what I had said that turned her away. St. Louis, probably. A woman so civilized and accomplished might not relish life in a raw town west of the Alleghenies. I could not find anything to fault in my own conduct, save perhaps that quality of which I am most proud, that I am a serious man and take life as a matter of much gravity.

I made light of it to my boon companion, Dickerson, and made ready to return to Washington to deal with those pesky accountants who could not grasp why I did not have duplicate or triplicate copies of every draft upon the treasury I signed during my preparation and after the corps had returned.

During this whole period I had not penned a word for Conrad. He was impatient, beseeching me to send him material so he could begin the great project, but I did not feel like doing it, and wanted to do it in a proper manner, with quiet exactitude, and not in Mrs. Wood's rooming house in a strange city. Mr. Jefferson had been beseeching me as well, saying that the scientific world awaits my journals, and he pressed me so much to begin them that I began turning aside his letters. I had scarcely gotten accustomed to life in civilization, and now I am facing impossible demands. So I am off to Washington to settle accounts, and then Virginia.

It is terribly hot. Jefferson is at Monticello, where he prefers to while away the moist summers, and I will visit Locust Hill to say goodbye to my family, and see the president there.

We have business to discuss. The Aaron Burr conspiracy trial has started, and I know he wants to brief me. I know little about the ambitious former vice president's grand scheme, having been on my great journey, but it is affecting politics in Upper Louisiana, and I will be forced to deal with the clamors of ambitious men whom Burr had recruited to sever the western territories from the republic. And the president will want to know how the publication of my journals was progressing. I could heartily assure him that work was advancing on all fronts, and I would soon begin the editing.

The heat has been troubling me; the damp air, soggy post roads, rainy weather, enervating warmth that leaves me sticky and uncomfortable and yearning for the dry high plains. And I am not feeling very well. I had some chills and diagnosed the ague and began taking an extract of cinchona bark, but the biliousness does not go away.

My return to St. Louis this April of 1807 was not nearly so arduous as the eastbound trip, because I employed gravity to good effect, taking my party on a sturdy flatboat down the Ohio River. It was painful to leave Julia behind, but I was buoyed by the knowledge that soon I would return to claim my bride. And meanwhile, I had urgent business to attend.

I was charged by Mr. Jefferson to pursue several matters with utmost vigor. First would be the difficult task of returning the Mandan chief, Big White, and his party to his
home, no easy matter with the hostile Arikaras blocking the Missouri River, and the Sioux sullen and questionable.

Another would be to reorganize the militia. And that would cause turmoil because I would need to purge it of numerous officers who had conspired with Aaron Burr to separate the whole territory from the republic. As brigadier, I would have to rebuild the weakened militia and prepare it for whatever might come, including war with the British, who are behaving in a deliberately provocative manner.

And finally, I would as superintendent of Indian Affairs need to effect Mr. Jefferson's policy of pacification and trade, a most arduous undertaking that would mean repealing some of the licenses General Wilkinson, the former governor, had awarded to friends, and at the same time build up government-operated trading posts, what Mr. Jefferson calls “factories,” where each tribe could obtain reliable goods and pay in furs, under the watchful eye of the government.