Across the Endless River (36 page)

How am I to describe the solitude and silence of the prairie just before sunrise to someone who has never been there? The horizon appears as a series of feathery lines, defined by the tops of grassy stalks higher than a man's head, stretching in waves to the far distance with the same undulating infinity that one observes at sea. A grouse calls from somewhere in the endless grass, then it is quiet, and then the call is repeated as the stars gradually lose their luster. A long, slow rhythm of awakening ensues as the sun rises above the horizon, first lightening the underside of clouds and finally bursting forth on the living, rolling plain. Accuracy requires that I also mention the hellish swarms of mosquitoes that accompany such visions of heaven on earth, but even they now seem like welcome tokens of a world that I long for.

Among the Indian tribes of the plains, there exists a way of looking at these things that is entirely at odds with our own. I have to thank Baptiste, in these months spent together in the laboratory, for reminding me how everything looks different to a Mandan. More than once he has corrected me when I referred to a distinction between Man and Nature to tell me there is no such separation. To a Mandan, Nature is the world, seamless and true.

One signal example is the Mandan's way of describing things around him from a point of reference that strikes me as demonstrably useful and profound. Mountains are big brothers, nearby hills their little cousins; the Missouri and the Mississippi are great patriarchs of water, their tributary streams lesser kin. Mature trees and saplings, huge granite outcroppings and the scree covering an adjacent hillside, towering thunderclouds and small puffs of cumulus—all are ranked in a cycle of growth, maturity, and death. It has a logic that I find comforting, but I am incapable of applying it to the landscape I encounter in Europe. I need to return to that world to feel the sense of life that resides in things themselves and connects them in mysterious ways.

A letter from Professor Picard tells me that he will visit this fall. How long it seems since I first introduced Baptiste to Picard in Paris and together we examined the first boxload of my treasures from North America. I will present him with a copy of my book, and expect to hear his wisdom on many matters that concern me.

T
HIRTY-SEVEN

M
AY 1828

A
ll morning Baptiste's mind was on Maura. He rode out to the mineral springs just after dawn to look at the work Paul had initiated, and to clear his head. He wondered what her reaction would be to his letter. He mused about the future as he let the dappled gray stallion retrace his steps at a brisk walk along the forest's edge. Would she go with him when he returned to St. Louis? He realized how much depended on her answer, but all he could do was wait.

In the late morning, Baptiste was in a storeroom at Castle Mergentheim with yet another list of objects Paul intended to catalog when he returned from Stuttgart later that day. Baptiste was to search the storerooms for the pieces on the list.
“Kriegsschild mit Hülle, Osagen,”
he read: a war shield with feathers from the Osage tribe. He found it in a corner with the next item on the list,
“Bisonfell mit Quill, Mandan,”
a painted Mandan buffalo robe with quillwork that Paul had acquired from one of the lesser chiefs at Robidoux's Post. The last item he did not recall:
“Puppe mit Menschenhaar,”
a doll with human hair, though they were fashioned by all the Dakota peoples. He set shield and robe aside and began opening the boxes near at hand.

The first contained only pipes, twenty of the long, slender calumets so common along the river and across the plains. Some had beadwork on the bowl, some were carved or inset with shells or lead, others bore feathers and tassels that dangled from the stem. He recognized many of the tribal markings—Crow, Sioux, Oto—though others were unfamiliar to him, and he wondered again at Paul's desire to have so many examples of each tribal piece. Baptiste recalled the gleam he had sometimes seen in fur traders' eyes when they stepped into Mr. Woods's storehouse. After a minute, when their gaze settled on the neat stacks of pelts—beaver, otter, wolf, bear, buffalo—they would nod once with a satisfied look and murmur, “I'll buy everything you've got.”

From the next box he removed a pair of fringed leggings, a beaded shirt of yellow-hued antelope, four pairs of moccasins, and four painted parfleches. Finding an item folded separately in its own cloth cover at the bottom of the box, he lifted a woman's buckskin dress with an elaborately beaded top of blue-and-red designs and a skirt with rows of rawhide strips applied with fancy stitching. It was the ceremonial dress of a Sioux woman, doubtless of some status, given the extent and fineness of the handiwork. He let the dress hang full at arm's length, looking at it for a long while as he considered the lives connected to the personal things he was unpacking. As he set them carefully aside, his stomach tightened. They were like the creatures that floated in jars of foul-smelling liquid.

Baptiste shook the image from his head and turned to the last of the small boxes. When he lifted the top, a familiar and pleasing odor rose from it. It carried him to the interior of his parents' lodge in the Mandan village of his earliest memories. It was the smell of buckskin, sweat, and the smoke of endless fires. He carefully lifted the cloth wrapping that concealed the box's contents. A tiny figure stared up at him: two beads for eyes, arms and legs covered by a miniature buckskin dress with beadwork decoration, the feet sheathed in intricately embroidered moccasins, and a lock of human hair attached to the head and draped on either side like a Mandan girl's long tresses. The doll resembled one his mother had made for him. His was a boy; it was one of the few things he still had from his mother. He had left it in the care of Captain Clark.

He held it to his face and inhaled deeply, just as he had done as a child, hoping that the boy spirit of the doll would become his spirit. He breathed in the smell of the lodge that clung to the doll in his urgent need to be there. Tears wetted his cheeks, and he nodded once at the power of the spirit that had been reawakened. He gently placed the doll on a table. A note in Paul's hand was in the box: “A doll with human hair—Dakota Sioux? Collected north of Fort Atkinson—September
11
,
1823
.” A flush of blood rose to his face and he left the room.

Paul returned in the late afternoon in high spirits and full of news from his friends at court and in the city. Paul had visited his mistress, as well. His wife was spending time with her mother in Regensburg, which lightened the mood further. He washed up, changed coats, and went to find Baptiste.

Baptiste was leaning over one of the dissecting tables. “Hard at work, I see!” Paul said as he entered the laboratory. “Professor Tredup feels there may well be a new species among the duck specimens I showed him!” Baptiste turned as Paul's eyes settled on the three long dissecting tables. His features clouded and his smile faded. “What is this?” he asked in a near whisper. The objects were arrayed in neat rows: a tall black boot, an embroidered silk purse, a cavalry saber, a tortoiseshell comb, a set of women's underclothes, various kitchen utensils. On the longest table was displayed a series of children's dolls fashioned after Napoleonic soldiers. Paul was trying to regain his carefree air of moments before, his features a combat between humor and doubt. Looking askance at Baptiste, he thought for an instant he had the key: “Have you been drinking?”

“These are my specimens,” Baptiste replied.

“What is the meaning of this?” Paul asked indignantly.

Baptiste responded, “If a natural philosopher from a faraway land, like myself, arrived at Castle Mergentheim, these are the things he might gather for his collection. Isn't that so?” He gestured to the objects. “Tell me,” Baptiste continued heatedly, “would you sell your favorite English rifle or the hand-tooled saddle Prince Franz gave you as a wedding present if the price was high enough?”

The two men glared at each other. “Of course not! But that is hardly the point when—”

Baptiste cut him off. “Your idea of success was to collect as many objects as possible, no matter what the cost, no matter what the pieces meant to the people who used them.”

Paul was dismissive. “But we can only comprehend the unknown by studying it with scientific rigor,” he said.

“Do you care that the beadwork on each pair of moccasins tells a story about its owner, about his tribe and his clan and his life? Do you understand what the pipes and the dolls and the shields and the bows meant to those who used them?”

“Comparing and contrasting similar objects is how we must proceed,” Paul said loudly, “assembling facts so that we can think clearly.” Then he added with a righteous air, “Even von Humboldt, returning from South America, did not have the range of specimens I have assembled.”

“Of course, Paul. You must have more than anyone else.” Baptiste's tone was bitter.

“You cannot possibly believe that is the purpose of my collection, you who know it more intimately than anyone but myself,” Paul responded. He was growing impatient. “One of the chief reasons for collecting these objects is to preserve a record for posterity.”

“They are not dead!” Baptiste shouted.

“Baptiste, your own General Clark told me he is powerless to stop the human tide coming up the river and flowing out onto the prairies. Eventually there will remain little of the Indians' life. Would you rather that I not save the things by which we can know how they lived?”

Baptiste understood Paul's reasoning, but he felt deeply hurt. “You can't understand an entire people, no matter how big your collection, by buying and displaying the things they use.”

“That is one thing that you and I can agree on.” Paul picked up the cavalry saber from the nearby table, withdrew it from its scabbard, and sighted down the blade before raising his eyes to meet Baptiste's gaze. “This weapon cannot teach you what it is like to be in the army of Württemberg, any more than those cooking implements can tell you how to prepare the food that is consumed here. But they are a start. Can you not see that? The things I have brought back from America are the physical evidence of a way of life that is bound to vanish. They are likely to be all that is left to us eventually.”

Baptiste turned away. The truth of Paul's words came to him in a wave. The fur trappers were just the edge of the blade that opens the wound. Already many of the tribes he knew along the lower river had been decimated by the white man's diseases and had bargained away their land. Now, with the army, steamboats, and sheer numbers, white settlers would keep pushing the tribes back until they had nowhere to go. Paul's ignorance of the pieces he collected was painful to consider, but it changed nothing overall. Baptiste looked out the window to the gently swaying branches in the main courtyard, trying to compose himself.

Paul continued in a softer voice. “I beg you to consider how vital it is to educate Europeans about the true nature of the Indian. Europeans describe Indians as violent savages so that they can take advantage of them. Think of the attitudes toward Africans and the endless misery of slavery to see what can befall a race that lies in the path of progress. But progress, alas, is its own sovereign, whose path is strewn with those who profit and those who suffer.”

“Those who suffer in the path of progress never seem to be European,” Baptiste said, turning slowly from the window. “How will you change anything?”

“There is always the chance that if Europeans know the Indians better, they will not destroy them. After all, public opinion in England has hastened the end of the slave trade in her colonies; that is one result of informing people. If people understand who the tribes of the Great Plains and Missouri and Mississippi basins are, perhaps they won't fall victim to the annihilation suffered by their cousins along the east coast of the continent.”

Baptiste looked at the table covered with soldier dolls, their uniforms perfect miniature replicas of Napoleon's Imperial Guard. His spirit bird called him from deep within. He did not belong here.

“Paul, I must go home.”

“Of course,” Paul replied. “Allow me to propose an arrangement.” He took a step forward, leaning in close to make his case earnestly.

“Stay with me until I finish the book and prepare the collection for display. We can return together to the Missouri next year.”

“I will help you with the book,” Baptiste said, “but I will leave before the end of the year. It is time for me to go.”

Paul saw that words would not change Baptiste's mind. “Very well.”

That evening, Baptiste walked along the streets of town in the warm and heavy air that followed a late-afternoon storm. Paul probably believed what he had said about using his collection as a tool for understanding, Baptiste reasoned, but his words seemed strangely separated from the way the world actually worked. He had no notion of what it was like to live among the tribes as they watched the white man bring disease, whiskey, and settlements farther up the river every month of every year. Paul saw it as progress, which made sense here in Europe, and his words sounded like those of the missionaries in St. Louis—except that for Paul, “science” was the answer, rather than religion.

T
HIRTY-EIGHT