Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (13 page)

The trader also carried Perfecto Garcia cigars made in Tampa, Florida, and Happy Moment made by Winfrey and Parker in Tacoma, Washington. Camel cigarettes were popular at the time on the reservation. The advertisements promised a mild blend of Turkish and Virginia tobacco. Aloysius liked the image of the camel on the package, and he painted the camel blue when we arrived three years later in France.

Augustus secretly bought eight tiny bottles of French Pernod Fils. The absinthe had been banned as a poison three years earlier and was rare and expensive. Our uncle told us that absinthe was the glorious spirit of artists, but we could never afford the taste. The spirit was distilled and flavored with fennel, anise, flowers, and the wormwood plant. We never learned what was poisonous.

Odysseus had displayed absinthe spoons at the hotel for the past three years, including one spoon in the shape of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The spoons were used to dissolve sugar cubes in the absinthe, and the spoons were a hint that the trader carried the forbidden spirit. Natives were scarcely the primary buyers of absinthe. The ritzy rituals of absinthe spoons and sugar cubes were not considered a manly drink on the reservation. Augustus, Doctor Mendor, the bank manager, and, we were told in confidence, one teacher at the government school bought absinthe from the trader every summer.

Foamy was not aware of the absinthe trade.

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Odysseus wore the blue raven wooden medal and surprised my brother that summer with a gift of rare native art. The trader presented two original paintings of blue horses. The paintings were bound in linen and carried in a leather telescope case. Yes, great blue horses in abstract flight across the plain art paper. The horses were outlines and painted with colored pencils. The native art was almost forty years old at the time. The native artists were political prisoners, and had never studied art or drawing. The blue horses were totems of native visionary artists.

Bear's Heart, the first native artist, was Cheyenne. He painted four colored horses, yellow, brown, green, and uneven blue. Each of the native riders wore a bright ceremonial headdress and carried the traditional shield of
a warrior. The buoyant horses were in a row, colored horses and high riders, and with no horizon, perspective or landscape. The scene was visionary, a visual memory, and without the practiced technique of vanishing points.

Aloysius was moved by the blue horses.

Squint Eyes, the second native artist, was Cheyenne. He used colored pencils to paint four horses, brown, blue, green, and black. The two horses in the center of the painting were blue and green. The brown horse faced the viewer, and the black horse was turned away. The colored horses were in motion from the right to the left side of the paper, a natural direction in native perception and stories. The scene consisted of only four ceremonial riders and colored horses on plain drawing paper, nothing more, and that native manner of visionary art awaited the imitators and primitive modernists.

Squint Eyes, Bear's Heart, Heap of Birds, Making Medicine, and more than sixty other natives were prisoners of the military at Fort Marion in Saint Augustine, Florida. Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Comanche warriors became visionary artists in prison. Fort Marion turned into the unintended native center of creative arts, a new academy of native visionary art.

Henry Benjamin Whipple, the Episcopal bishop of Minnesota, owned many paintings by natives at Fort Marion. He bought several drawing books from the prison artists, including “Drawings by ‘Making Medicine,' Cheyenne Prisoner.” Making Medicine, we learned later, had created an art book of seven paintings with many horses, red and blue, in a magical gallop above the earth.

Odysseus told my brother that Bishop Whipple wrote to President Ulysses S. Grant to praise the artists and to support the petition to release the natives from prison. Naturally, the trader remembered every story about the namesake president.

Odysseus surprised my brother once again when he ordered thirty raven peace pendants. He would pay one dollar for each pendant, and wanted a few done immediately and the rest delivered when he returned the next summer. The trader wore the medal of peace on the trail and many natives admired the blue raven. He would trade the pendants for ledger art and jewelry.

Aloysius carved medals of peace that summer.

The trader carried peyote for the doctor, and the transaction, as usual,
was confidential. We never learned what was actually traded for peyote every summer at the Hotel Leecy. That night, however, the doctor and the trader wisely remained in the livery stable with their horses. Foamy had been told about the peyote ceremonies and he rode out with a posse of mounted native police to seize the mescal buttons and thwart the singers at Bad Boy Lake.

The peyote visionaries had vanished that night without a trace of breath, beat, or song. The moon was down, and the dancers rode north to the headwaters outside the federal treaty boundary of the reservation. Government commissioners, agents, reformers, priests, and churchy protectors were dead set against the use of peyote by natives, but the native ceremonies were not criminal. Foamy, though, would hound natives, the trader, and the doctor for any reason on the reservation.

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S
NOW
E
GGS

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1915
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John Leecy delivered formal invitations to Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu and Basile Hudon Beaulieu, mere stable boys, to supper in the hotel dining room with Odysseus, Doctor Mendor, Catherine Heady, the federal teacher, and our mighty uncle Augustus Hudon Beaulieu.

Aloysius painted blue ravens with the abstract faces of the dinner guests that night. Naturally, the stories were timely, spirited, and ironic, and the best stories on the reservation started with the absence of the federal agent. Foamy was on a greyback mission with the native police to capture peyote visionaries.

Foamy was mocked at the high table.

John Leecy poured a taster of the banned absinthe to honor the trader, the secret bond of the boozers, and the absence of the agent. The spirit was strong, and just enough for two salutes to ancestors and remembrance. Aloysius watched the others and savored the scent of the spirit. We were captivated by the conversations and stories that night at dinner.

The Green Fairy burned our tongues, but we pretended to be mature drinkers. We were dinner guests at the high table with our employer, the doctor, our favorite uncle, a severe teacher, and our friend the trader who wore a medal of peace.

John Leecy served dinner in four courses, the best we had ever eaten. We could never afford the cost of a formal dinner, but many times we ate good food from the kitchen. Margaret Fairbanks was one of the most famous chefs in Minnesota. She was native, a distant relative, and learned how to cook in the pricey resort hotels on the North Shore of Lake Superior. Messy was a reservation nickname because she was the messiest cook in the state.

Messy delivered leftovers two or three nights a week at the livery stable. The hotel dining room was always crowded with hungry visitors from
around the world. Every week a few travelers on the train between Winnipeg and Minneapolis stayed over just for dinner at the Hotel Leecy.

The first course was
mandaaminaaboo
, native corn or hominy soup. Native corn is
mandaamin
and was grown by selected families in every generation to continue the tradition. The main course was fresh broiled walleye caught at Red Lake,
Gratin
Dauphinois
, thinly sliced potatoes with cream, garlic, and cheese, mounds of mashed rutabaga with maple syrup and nuggets of wild garlic, wedges of cabbage with spears of carrots, radish, and chunky pepper, buttered turnips, peas, green onions, and wild rice blended with tidbits of salt pork, and mounds of freshly ground horseradish. The third course was a delicious Camembert and hard cheeses from the Marin French Cheese Company in California. Each course was served with wine. The last course was a choice of desserts,
Oeufs à la Neige
, Snow Eggs, made of meringue, vanilla custard, and caramel, and puffy warm doughnuts with powdered sugar and cinnamon. Every course was a complement of at least one good story and the start of another. We remembered every conversation and story that summer night at the Hotel Leecy.

John Leecy celebrated the great company.

Odysseus saluted his father Jefferson Young.

Catherine recited a short poem by Walt Whitman.

Augustus praised the absinthe and wine.

Doctor Mendor toasted the chef Messy.

Aloysius toasted his namesake the priest and saint.

Basile honored the mongrels and Misaabe.

My brother painted blue ravens on the napkins that night and then waited for the perfect moment, a pause in the courses and stories, to remind the company about the trader, the agent, and goober peas at the reservation hospital five years earlier, when we were only fifteen years old.

Odysseus laughed, leaned back and told the story about how he lured the suspicious and bumptious federal agent into a round of the song “Goober Peas.” Confederate soldiers sang that southern ditty during the American Civil War. Foamy was uneasy in ordinary situations, and that night in the hospital he was easily duped to sing along. The trader raised his hands and sang in a loud voice, and the guests in the restaurant joined in at the end of the song,

Goodness, how delicious,

Eating goober peas!

The slight taste of absinthe was followed with fine wine, and then hard whiskey. The wine was from the Beaulieu Vineyards in Napa County, California. Father Aloysius served the very same red sacramental wine at services, and on other occasions with visitors and friends. Augustus had been invited many times to share the sacramental wine in the parsonage. The priest and our uncle seldom agreed on the mission of the church, but they freely poured the wine. There was always a good reason to gather over sacramental wine, but they drank many more bottles when they shared the same critical comments on the patronage and abuse of political power by the Episcopal Church on the White Earth Reservation.

John Leecy was worried about the economy, the lingering economic recessions, success of the railroad, and the cost of the First World War. Augustus drank more wine and waved those concerns aside. He declared loudly at the high table that the enemies of the economy and native civil liberties were the Protestants and the political patronage of the federal government on reservations. The more he drank the more intense he became about the new “federal fascists” of religion and the commissioners, agents, and government missions of the United States. Our uncle had real investments in land that he could not develop on the reservation because of restrictive federal policies.

The most memorable stories that night turned to the nostalgia of the old traders who brought exotic wares from distant and foreign worlds to barter on the reservation, and did so with humor and courage before the advent of patent inside newspapers, the telegraph, mail order catalogues, and the mighty railroads. Those marvelous stories lasted until the break of dawn.

Odysseus turned to the side and gestured with his chin and one hand in the direction of Santa Fe, New Mexico. His stories were told with gestures of an actual sense of place and presence, and natives trusted his stories for that reason. The trader traveled as a child with his father to western cities and visited pueblos and reservations in the fantastic Southwest. Jefferson taught his son how to ride, how to pack a bundle, pace his horses, sing on the trail, and how to show respect to natives and other traders.

Odysseus was a natural at the trade and was never deceptive about his
wares. He could easily smile and tease his way around any tricky situation. As a boy he was on the trail most of the year with his father. Later they rode together as traders until his father died nine years ago on April 10, 1906.

Odysseus was a chosen son of the old traders, and they became his family, friends, and his best teachers. He was teased on the trail in the native way, as a gesture of favor and salutation. Odysseus told us that he had traveled as a trader in native communities for more than thirty years, and most of that time he shared the experiences and stories of the trade with his father.

Jefferson Young named his son in honor of President Ulysses S. Grant, and because he had read
The Odyssey
by Homer. Odysseus was the only boy of seven children. He was born at home in South Carolina. His tiny mother, Dovey Williams, and two of his sisters died during the influenza pandemic in 1889.

Jefferson introduced his son to the early traders who were active in Indian Territory, Omaha, Nebraska Territory, Santa Fe, Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico Territory, Arizona Territory, Navajo Reservation, South Dakota, Leech Lake, and the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. Odysseus told many stories about the traders late that night in the Hotel Leecy.

Catherine was moved by the trade poetry.

Julius Meyer, for instance, established the Indian Wigwam in Omaha, Nebraska Territory, at the end of the American Civil War. Julius bought, sold, and traded native ledger art, curios, clothing, hides, cradleboards, peace pipes, quivers, tomahawks, and many other objects. He traveled most of the time to trade directly with natives. Julius learned several native languages, and that was an advantage for any trader. He served as an interpreter for General George Crook, and counted as his native friends Sitting Bull and Red Cloud. No doubt he survived among natives on the Great Plains because of his sense of irony.

Julius and three older brothers were Jewish immigrants and became distinguished merchants in frontier Omaha. The Meyer brothers were born in Bromberg, Prussia. Odysseus recounted that Julius traded with natives, and his brothers Max, Moritz, and Adolph sold cigars, gold jewelry, solid silverware, spectacles, penknives, guns, and many musical instruments.

The Meyer brothers established a great store in Omaha.