The True Account (8 page)

Motioning for me to follow, my uncle cut down through the pine trees at an angle to the stream. When he was abreast of the entrance to the cave, he halted behind a rock outcropping large enough to conceal our mounts. “Ti,” he said in a hushed voice, “I cannot do better now than to follow old Caesar's advice and come at mine enemy from high ground. You wait here. When I give the signal, grab up Cissie and ride as if the Gentleman from Vermont himself were after you. Jehovah willing, I'll meet you back on the Trace.”

With a smart salute, the private reined Ethan Allen around the outcropping and continued along the knoll and up through the woods toward the top of the cliff above the cave. I continued to study the conical huts through my glass, but it trembled so in my hand that I could not bring them into focus. My heart was drumming in my ears from fright, for I had no doubt at all that these Harpes would kill us if we did not kill them first.

Presently they emerged from the pines with Cissie onto a sandy clearing beside the pool below the waterfalls, no more than a stone's throw from the boulder behind which I was hiding. At the sight of the pelts they wore and their weird, sloped hats, my heart began to race even faster. With trembling hands I poured powder into my rifle. But which outlaw would I shoot at and when? Where would I aim? And how, with my hands shaking so, could I possibly hit what I aimed at?

The men dismounted, and Bigger dragged Cissie off his brother's horse. “I shall have her first,” he muttered between pulls at his jug.

“You had the last one first,” Big growled. “This un's mine.”

As I trained the weaving barrel of my primed rifle first on one of these monsters, then the other, the clear tingling of a bell sounded from the hill above us. The quarreling Harpes whirled around and looked up. Pulling a pistol from his waistband, Bigger started up the path beside the waterfall. Big came along behind him, his own pistol at the ready. With surprising stealth, the huge men crept from tree to tree until they stood on a narrow shelf just before the mouth of the cave. Twenty feet above them, my uncle's stocking cap jutted over the lip of the cliff. The Harpes both fired at the same time, the report of their guns reverberating off the cliffsides like gunfire from a whole regiment.

Instantly a booming voice roared out,
“Veni, vidi, vici.”
First one, then another, then yet another of the little thatch-roofed huts came tumbling down the cliff face, pouring out thousands and tens of thousands of angry bees, which swarmed over the Harpes from head to foot. The brothers whooped, danced, screamed, dropped their pistols, and, dripping broken slabs of honeycomb and straw and fist-sized clusters of bees, plunged into the deep pool. In a raging frenzy, the bees pursued them out of the stream and into the woods on the far bank. Big and Bigger crashed through the trees, while their horses, which had bolted at the pistol shots, galloped off in the opposite direction, hastened on their way by a blast from my uncle's arquebus.

“Now, Ti!” he shouted.

I rode out into the sandy clearing and called to Cissie to jump aboard behind me and hold on. Moments later we were racing north on the Trace, my uncle beside us on his white mule, and the screams of the Harpe brothers fading off in the distance.

“
Veni, vidi, vici,
” the private cried again. “Do you know your Caesar, Cissie? ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.' We have conquered the Harpes. You'll be home with your grandmama by morning.”

The terrified girl just held tighter to my waist, as though she never intended to let go, while my uncle congratulated me for doing yeoman's work, and said that his old colonel Ethan Allen would be proud. But for many days and nights after we had safely delivered Cissie to her overjoyed grandmother, I could not rid my mind or dreams of the feather-hatted, vermin-clad Harpes and their hillside den on the Natchez Trace.

 

 

 

 

E
ARLY ONE MORNING
in mid-May we presented ourselves and our mounts at a quay just below the frontier city of St. Louis. I excitedly set up my easel and began to paint a picture of the waterfront, while my uncle made a short reconnaissance up into the town proper.

From the quay I could count the sign-boards of fifteen taverns. Besides these drinking establishments the street was lined with mercantiles, boarding inns, furriers, smithies, lumberyards, flatboat yards, and encampments of Indians, many of whom were strutting about in foil ceremonial regalia. Every establishment flew the Stars and Stripes. For as the ferryman had told us, the citizens of St. Louis had chosen this very day to hold a jubilee in honor of the transfer of Louisiana to America, with a ball to follow that evening at the house of Auguste Chouteau, the town's principal merchant.

In my painting I depicted the muddy track called a street, the log houses, the men spewing tobacco, the ladies picking their way around milling hogs, and the effluvia of the riverside slaughterhouses, tanneries, and stables. Many of the celebrants were already drunk and had collapsed in the street, where they were constantly in danger of being run over by drovers and wagoneers near as drunk as themselves. For the entertainment of the more sober public, one man exhibited a live elk on a rope, and another showed a mangy buffalo in a pole pen. This was the first bison I had ever seen. Though it appeared to be rather sickly, I had no trouble imagining what a thousand such rugged giants trampling over the prairie in prime condition might look like, and it whetted my appetite to start up the Missouri and into the wilderness. Still, there was plenty to see and paint here in St. Louis. A fifteen-foot alligator named Monsieur Ponchartrain had been brought up from New Orleans for the celebration, a bear danced in a priest's frock and collar, whiskeymen clad in untanned buffalo hides dipped raw spirits out of barrels, hard-looking women sashayed past in ostrich boas, cardsharps gambled on planks thrown across trestles, and a doctor in a green velvet top hat hawked nostrums guaranteed to ward off malaria, smallpox, whooping cough, and cholera.

“You, boy. Be you fixing to paint the Battle Royale?” the quack asked me.

“I don't know,” I said. “What is it?”

He gestured with his cane toward the buffalo's pen, where a throng of people was gathering. “It's a contest to see which wild beast will prevail when pitted against other savage beasts,” he said. “In honor of the Louisiana Purchase they're a-going to enter Father Marquette—that's the bear—and the gator agin Old Teton, that big bull buff.

“It's to be the highlight of the jubilee,” he continued. “I've put my money on the gator. Though I was sorely tempted to go with Father Marquette. A blow from a bear is a powerful blow, as any man who's ever watched a bearbaiting will attest.”

The unfortunate animals were now being dragged and whipped toward the entry of the pole enclosure, roaring, growling, or hissing, as the case might be. What a cheer went up from the citizens of St. Louis when all three creatures were together inside the pen. But I had seen enough. I had hoped to paint the beasts of Louisiana in a natural state, not watch them tear one another to pieces for the fun of a drunken mob.

Before I could decide what to do, pell-mell down the street on his white mule, firing his arquebus into the air and scattering the crowd, came my uncle. Throwing a noose of a lariat over the flimsy corner post of the buffalo pen, he galloped off at an angle, yanking away the entire side of the cage and enabling Old Teton, Father Marquette, and Monsieur Ponchartrain to make their escape.

Now the creatures that had so lately been at one another's throats turned their full attention to their tormentors, who were fleeing down the hill in a panicked stampede. The buffalo, bear, and alligator were joined by the elk, which in the turmoil had broken its leash and was posting hard toward the Mississippi. There it leaped into the water, where it was soon joined by Old Teton and Monsieur Ponchartrain, all swimming hard for the Illinois side of the river and freedom.

The crowd now began to press around my uncle, shouting “Tar and feather him” and, more alarming still, “Lynch the old fool.” My uncle objected to being called old, said he would not stand still for it, and began to cite instances from both the classics and the Bible in which men “well-stricken in years” had performed amazing feats of vigor. But before he knew what had happened, someone had thrown his own rope around his neck and yanked him off his mule.

I reached for my firelock as several men, led by the bear owner, hauled my struggling, protesting uncle through the mud toward a flagpole. I raised my rifle and, terrified though I was, felt fully prepared to shoot the ringleader, when another shot rang out over the streets and a deep, commanding voice shouted, “Unhand that man.”

A tall rider dressed in buckskin, with long red hair flying out from under a black hat, galloped into the crowd on a big bay horse, striking right and left with the barrel of his gun. To the mob, some of whom demanded to know what authority the man had to curtail their sport, he shouted, “Unless you want my pappy and forty armed clansmen down on your town like the Furies of Hell, you'll restore law and order here yourselves and mind your manners. If you have any manners to mind.”

With his stocking cap askew, one overshoe rolled up and the other down, and his crimson codpiece half undone, my uncle jumped to his feet and pulled the rope off his neck. “Private True Teague Kinneson, with eternal gratitude, sir,” he said, saluting smartly.

“Flame Danielle Boone, scout and frontierswoman,” cried his red-haired benefactor, grabbing his hand and pumping it up and down like a fellow soldier. “I'd be honored to invite you to escort me at the ball tonight, private, as my personal guest.”

B
Y THAT AFTERNOON
my unde had begun to have second thoughts about attending the ball with Miss Flame Danielle Boone, who, according to St. Louis scuttlebutt, was desperate to procure a husband. But I was most eager to go myself and so came up with the following stratagem. By telling the knight-errant that,
having rescued a fair damsel in distress,
chivalry required that he escort her to that night's gala, I managed to persuade him to accept Flame's invitation. And I must attend, too, and sketch him “at the reel,” where he would have an opportunity to show the people of St. Louis what dancing was all about.

We arrived about nine
P.M.
In attendance, besides the redhaired spinster, who at six feet and two inches tall cut a very striking figure in her lime-colored evening gown, were the governor-general of St. Louis; the mayor; an emissary from the Spanish seat of government at Santa Fe; Madame and Monsieur Chouteau; and Captain Meriwether Lewis and his friend and fellow officer Captain William Clark, who together would lead President Jefferson's official expedition to the Pacific.

Miss Boone introduced my uncle (dressed in his chain mail, galoshes, and codpiece, with his night-stocking set rakishly back on his head to reveal part of his copper crown) to the captains, who were both tall, fine-looking young men. Captain Lewis was very interested to learn that we planned to strike out for the Pacific ourselves, and more so yet that we had already, the previous summer, come overland from the western coast. But Captain Clark gave my uncle a skeptical look.

“You've been to the Pacific?” he said. “And come back through the Rockies?”

“Aye, of course,” said my uncle, as if our great journey had been no more than a simple day's outing—which in fact was the case.

“And you, son?” said Clark with a broad smile.

“I was with my uncle,” I said, feeling that to be the safest—and perhaps the
only
—thing I could honestly say.

“Well, what did you and your nephew see, Private Kinneson? It must have been a wonderful odyssey.” This from Lewis, who was smiling himself now, though very good-naturedly.

“It was a great deal of hard walking. We went mainly by shank's mare, you know.”

“Did you encounter hostile Indians?”

“Yes, sir, we did. It was touch and go with the Blackfeet all one afternoon.”

“Your military background interests me, private,” Lewis said. “You've been on many campaigns, no doubt?”

“Why, yes, sir, I believe I may say so without fear of contradiction. Besides my little jaunt across Lake Champlain with Ethan Allen, I was with young Alexander when he crossed the Hellespont; with Leonidas when he defended the pass at Thermopylae; and with Julius against the Visigoths. More recently, I stood beside Wolfe at Quebec and with Washington at Yorktown. I know how to besiege a city, defend a fort, joust in the lists, fight in single combat—”

“Well,” Lewis interrupted, shaking his head and laughing, “those are mighty qualifications indeed, Private Kinneson. We have enjoyed meeting you, sir. We must get back to our men now, for we depart at dawn. Good luck on your expedition.”

“And good luck to you, too,” my uncle cried fervently, shaking hands with both captains in the most cordial way and giving his bell a jingle. “Good luck to you, too!”

Miss Boone escorted us to the dining room, at the same time engaging my uncle in a very lively conversation on the art of gigging catfish. We ate venison, bear meat both smoked and fresh, buffalo hump and tongue, jellied calves' brains, and Mississippi sturgeon. The damask cloth and the silver, the fine-wrought gravy chargers, the crystal and English bone china, the embroidered linen napkins—all were of the best quality. Flame Danielle gave a hilarious running account of a recent bear hunt with her famous father, which seemed quite to captivate my uncle. The wine flowed copiously, augmented by sparkling punch, rum, and whiskey from a gilded barrel.

The main topic of conversation was the Teton Sioux, who were said to dwell in a large village about a thousand miles, as the river wound, above St. Louis. For years, these “pirates of the Missouri,” as they were called, had exacted heavy tribute from French and Spanish traders plying the river between St. Louis and the City of the Mandan Indians. The previous spring St. Louis's two rival fur companies had each sent traders—the Pariseau and Thibeau parties—upriver to buy furs from the Mandan Indians. Since then, no word had been received from either group, and there was now much anxiety over their fate. With the Thibeau party had gone a popular young priest, Father Gilles LaFontaine, who had lived for a season with the Teton Sioux and was determined to persuade them to adopt a more peaceable approach toward white traders. But no one seemed to hold out much hope that he would be successful in this endeavor. Flame Danielle was certain that the Sioux had annihilated them all, and urged my uncle to scalp every last redskin on the river, as her pappy would have done in his prime.