The True Account (16 page)

Again, I was speechless to hear an Indian, albeit a blue-eyed one, speak my native tongue so eloquently. Fra-hank-a-line proceeded to explain that he was the son of a Blackfoot chief's daughter and a North West Company factor. He and his younger sister had been orphaned as children when, visiting Fort Mackenzie, his parents had contracted diphtheria. The fur company had sent them to school at Sault Ste. Marie, where it became evident that he was something of a savant, and his sister as well. The girl had returned to their ancestral home in the Rocky Mountains several years earlier. Fra-hank-a-line was now on his way to visit her. He had gotten as far as the Mandan village this fall, and planned to proceed up the Missouri and then north to her village in the Land of the Glaciers, deep in the Rocky Mountains, in the spring.

As I painted, Franklin—for this was his name in English—continued to lecture me on my craft. I could scarcely wait to introduce him to my uncle, but just as I finished his portrait, a terrific din of whooping, yelping, and drum-beating broke out. I was certain that the Teton Sioux were attacking. As I seized my rifle, the clamor was augmented by such a bellowing and stamping that I supposed our enemies to be fimneling a whole herd of buffalo through the village, with the design of trampling us to death.

Franklin, smiling at my panic, informed me that the annual dance to lure the bison had begun. He urged me to accompany him to the center of the village, where the entire population of men was gathered, as well as many women and children, well wrapped in buffalo robes against the piercing cold. In front of the great medicine lodge a dozen or so men painted with buffalo tallow mixed with soot and wearing masks made from skinned buffalo heads with the horns still attached were dancing in a tight circle. Nearby, with a pair of buffalo horns on his head, my uncle was supervising this quadrille, exhorting his pupils in the most amusing capers, parodying the feeding, watering, voiding, and mating of the buffalo. From time to time the old schoolmaster joined in the figure himself, in a kind of prancing shuffle, to demonstrate the proper execution of the steps. I was so distracted by True's ribald antics in the incarnation of a bison in rut that I could scarcely concentrate for laughing. Had there been any buffalo within fifty miles of us, they would certainly have heard this concert in their honor, though whether they would have ventured closer seemed doubtful. Franklin assured me, however, that the dance never failed to be effective. Explaining that perhaps this was because the ceremony always continued until a herd of these animals chanced by, whether this took two days, two weeks, two months, or until half the village died of starvation.

The savant then called my attention to some men standing on distant bluffs and eminences of the snow-covered prairie, whose task was to “throw their robes”—that is, to wave their blankets in the air to signal the arrival of any animals summoned by the dance. As I sketched on into the icy afternoon, the dancers wearied. When a man became too fatigued to continue, he would bend far forward, a signal for his fellows to shoot him with blunt arrows, at which he fell as if mortally wounded, instantly to be replaced by a fresh dancer. Onlookers brandishing knives then dragged the fallen man out of the circle by his heels and pretended, with a series of menacing cuts in the air, to butcher him as they would a buffalo.

This ritual continued uninterrupted for several days and nights, during which it was nearly impossible to sleep because of the din. By this time the village's meat supply was entirely exhausted. On the fifth morning, while I was sequestered in Black Cat's lodge at work on my painting of the dance, every woman in the village began to scream. I ran outside, brush in hand, to see them pointing at a parti-colored creature racing pell-mell on all fours toward the town from the west. When it stood up on its hind legs and looked around, as if scenting the air for danger, I saw that it was a man wearing horns and nothing else but the briefest clout about his loins. He was all striped in circular green, crimson, and saffron patterns, with dripping red fangs painted on his face. Franklin told me that the ladies were screaming that the Evil One, in the person of his provincial governor, Lord Phallus, was attacking the village, bent on perpetrating a rape upon them to people the region with more of his homed kind. Indeed, such seemed to be the case, for before him, as he rushed onward, Lord Phallus pushed a long blue stick with a flaming red ball at the end, resembling a grotesque, oversized buffalo member. Yet the women did not retreat from this monster. Instead, as he galloped into the village, they screeched with laughter and taunted and teased him with such unmistakable gesticulations that he soon attained a veritable frenzy of lust.

Now forth from the medicine lodge, to a huge roar, came the old Mandan conjuror Hawk Talons, bearing a long pipe, which he passed twice or thrice in front of the creature wheeling the phallus, putting him into a trance. Upon which the women, still laughing, seized the mobile organ, broke it into a dozen pieces, and threw it onto the fire; and the would-be ravisher was jeered out of the village in ignominy. But as he reached the outskirts of town he suddenly turned and whipped off his buffalo horns, revealing to the throng not the Devil but the good, honest visage of my uncle himself. To thunderous applause, the triumphant thespian was borne back into the center of the village on the shoulders of four young warriors, all the time donning and doffing his buffalo horns to the cheering onlookers, and calling out to Franklin and me that he had “violated none of Scholia Aristotle's unities, nay, not a one, in my little morality play.”

But no sooner had Chief Black Cat conferred the title of Great Conjuror upon our Vermont author-actor-lexicographer, investing him with a trailing bonnet decorated not with eagle feathers but with those of crows, vultures, and magpies, than the chanting dancers and drummers, who had kept up their work throughout the charade, were drowned out by a great cry of joy from the villagers. Everyone was pointing off to the north, where, on a swell in the prairie a mile away, a spotter was waving his robe over his head to signify the arrival of the buffalo.

The famine was over.

U
NDER THE DIRECTION
of Black Cat's son, the Otter, twenty of the village's best buffalo hunters went out to scout the location and size of the herd and to kill enough animals to relieve the villagers' immediate distress. I was invited to join this group, on Bucephalus. As we thundered past the excited spotter, still flapping his robe, he pointed toward a low ridge. On it we could make out half a dozen shaggy bison—the vanguard, everyone hoped, of a large migrating herd.

The best approach to these animals was through a narrow defile on a well-beaten trail used by northbound Mandan hunters for many years. But as we entered this gully, still about four hundred yards from the bison, they disappeared below the ridge top. The Otter reined in his pony and threw up his hand for us to stop. Herding buffalo were usually not so shy; moreover, we were coming at them from downwind. With a puzzled expression, he turned to Chief Big White's son, Turkey Man.

The Otter and Turkey Man seemed to be considering splitting our party or selecting another angle of approach. But after exchanging opinions, they merely shrugged and urged their ponies forward into the gully. I put my heels to Bucephalus, who was neck and neck with the Otter's spotted pony, there being just sufficient room between the walls of the ravine to admit two horses running side by side. Suddenly, at least forty yelling Sioux, bedaubed from head to toe in red and black war paint, all screaming like demons, broke out of a little side draw and galloped down upon us with their painted warhorses under full whip. At the same time, the grazing buffalo reappeared on top of the ridge, only to stand up on their hind legs, cast off their robes, and transform themselves into more armed Sioux, who began tossing a deadly volley of arrows down upon us. Masquerading as bison drawn by the buffalo dance, our enemies had lured us into a death trap.

Outnumbered two or three to one, we wheeled our horses and started back the way we'd come. From a gulch between us and the open prairie there burst forth yet another war party, cutting off escape. Arrows flew at us from all directions. I could hear them whizzing through the frigid air around my head and making a horrible ripping noise as they tore through the bodies of my companions and their horses, who were falling all around me.

It was my Mandan friends who saved my skin, though at a dreadful price to themselves. Wherever a man fell, several Sioux leaped off their horses to compete for his scalp, thereby allowing Bucephalus and me, by a stroke of sheer good fortune, to escape from the melee. I had nearly reached the mouth of the ravine when out from behind a swell in the prairie came a coal-black, wolf-masked warrior, whom I recognized as the rider who had circled the ghost village where my uncle and I had forted up earlier in the fall. Mounted on a pure black horse and carrying a black shield with a white wolf skull painted on it, he brandished a black lance decorated with red cranes' feathers. The black rider bore down on me as I galloped full tilt toward him. He drew back his lance arm. I raised my rifle and, at the exact moment that he released the lance, I fired. His weapon creased the left side of my head. But Black Wolf fell dead from his horse with a bullet through his heart.

To this day I do not know why I reined in Bucephalus and looked over my shoulder. Behind me the other Sioux were either rounding up the horses of my Mandan friends or working at their grisly task with their scalping knives, encrimsoning the new snow with the blood of their victims. As I beheld this slaughter, the Partisan's nephew, Blue Goose, ran up to the Otter, who was sprawled out with his legs trapped under his fallen pony. He lifted his victim's head by the hair and cut his throat, afterward taking his scalp in the same circular motion. Enraged, I leaped off Bucephalus, grasped the dead Black Wolf by his mask, ripped it off, and, pulling out my knife, served him the same. I was stunned by my own capacity for barbarism. I was more stunned still, upon looking down at the dead warrior's features, to discover that he was not a man at all. To my horror, I had shot, killed, and scalped Little Warrior Woman.

T
HE BISON APPEARED,
of their own accord, a few days later. But for the rest of the winter of 1804–5, I didn't care whether I lived or died. I stayed in Black Cat's lodge day and night, but from the middle of December through February I did not paint a single picture. I spoke rarely and ate next to nothing. When my uncle tried to counsel me, I turned my face to the earthen wall of the lodge. I slept or lay in a stupor for eighteen or twenty hours out of every twenty-four. Later it was reported to me that for several days after the battle with the Sioux I refused to allow Little Warrior's body to be removed from my presence, hugging her close and speaking to her tenderly, until the natural processes made it necessary that she be taken away and placed on a burial scaffold on the edge of the village. After that I visited her frozen remains two or three times a day, standing in the fierce prairie wind until I nearly froze myself.

My uncle continued to exhort me not to give in to my grief, adducing a hundred instances from the classics in which despair had destroyed promising young men, from Hector to Hamlet. He allowed that he, too, had once experienced low spirits for a few minutes, when he first regained consciousness after striking his head at Fort Ti—but, recollecting that despair was a deadly and pernicious sin, he marshaled his will and proceeded with his life, though admittedly on a somewhat different plane.

Captain Lewis, learning of my misfortune, came down from Fort Mandan and tried to physic me with some all-purpose purgatives known as Rush's evacuation pills or “thunder-clappers”—bullet-sized boluses of calomel, chlorine, mercury, and jalap. But they did no more good for me than they had for poor Sergeant Floyd, who had died of a raging stomach colic the previous summer. Captain Clark, too, came by several times. He told me, with real feeling, that he was heartily sorry for the fate of Little Warrior, but that I must not blame myself, for I had no way to know her, all sooty and with a wolf's mask; and what sort of trick was it to try to murder a young blade for taking French leave when no lasting harm had been done? Clark told me a tale that I no doubt would have found most amusing under other circumstances. It seemed, he confided, that in the guise of an “exquisite” my elegant Blackfoot friend Franklin had been regularly visiting the Mandan ladies' societies to offer them his services not as a seamster or chef but rather a bedfellow, disporting himself with half a dozen different women each night. But even this revelation did not bring a smile to my face.

One February day Franklin himself appeared in my lodge in all his finery. “Ticonderoga,” he announced, “there is a pretty sure cure for your sickness if you dare take it.”

I turned away from him.

“Screw up your courage, lad,” he declared. “The one remedy that our Mandan friends guarantee is the Okeepa. Get up on your hind legs and come along with me. You have my word: the Okeepa will cure you or kill you.”

A
S I ENTERED
the village medicine lodge, to a roar of acclaim from the men, women, and children who had gathered in the public square to see the American undergo the Okeepa, I could not guess what awaited me. I had brought Little Warrior's wolf mask and, at Franklin's suggestion, my paintbrush and easel. The acrid odors of earth and peeled cottonwood poles filled the lodge.

When my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I saw Black Cat and Big White—both still grieving for their sons killed by the Sioux raiders—and eight or ten other headmen, sitting against willow back-rests on one side of the central fire. My uncle and Franklin seated themselves with the chiefs, while two men in bear masks conducted me to a cleared area in the center of the lodge, just opposite the dignitaries. Eight rawhide ropes dangled from a round hole in the ceiling twenty feet above me. My guides now placed me in the midst of these cords so that they brushed my shoulders and legs. Was I to be hoisted up and slowly roasted over the fire? Weakened from my prolonged fast and lack of exercise, I thought I might faint dead away on the spot.