Charbonneau (30 page)

He knocks the ashes out of his pipe and gazes about at Baptiste, Jim, Bill, and the two squaws. “Well,” says Baptiste, “beaver may not rise. I know those civilized folks who used to wear beaver hats. They say silk is all the fashion. And they are fools for fashion.”

“Wagh!” says Bill, “they be.”

Baptiste and Running Stream spread their robes on a soft, grassy spot thirty feet from the fire under a sky clustered with stars thick and big as columbine in June.

“Paump,” she asks, “why do dollars matter to him?” Baptiste looks at her in the dark. Running Stream usually doesn’t ask questions.

“Just to buy possibles and trade goods,” Baptiste says.

“They don’t matter,” she claims. “Everything you need is here. My people have lived here since before the memories of the grandfathers of the oldest men. The One-who-created-all has provided everything for us here. You need no dollars. The white man is crazy for dollars, and he makes the Indian crazy for them.”

Sometimes he thinks she is a lot more than a squaw.

MAY, 1841: Two sleeps from Fort Laramie Baptiste, Bill, Jim, and Long Hatcher were making camp on the South Fork of the Platte. They heard footsteps. “Speak up,” said Baptiste, “or you go under.” Two Indians walked into the penumbra of the fire and made the sign for peace. “Sit and talk,” Baptiste told them in their own language.

The talk was the usual, effusive expressions of friendship and good intentions. After ten minutes the trappers found out what it was about—Bill’s mule hee-hawed, and then hooves clapped on the hard earth. Bill had his Hawken against the chest of one of the critturs before they could move. Jim and Baptiste ran into the dark.

“Mind to steal our ponies, do ’ee? Wagh! We’ll steal your topknots if ’ee try. This child’ll steal your cocks”—he mimed it with his Green River—“and deliver ’em personal to your squaws.”

“Bring back the horses,” yelled Baptiste somewhere in the dark, “or we kill the hostages.”

The movement off in the brush stopped. Then a voice called for time to consider.

Back around the fire Bill and Long Hatcher had the hostages trussed up. “Do ye hyar?” said Jim, “it’s the critturs or your scalps. Tell them,” he said to Baptiste, “that we burn ’em alive unless we get the animals back.”

Baptiste did. The Arapahoes immediately began to sing their death songs, calling for divine protection. “That won’t help,” Baptiste said. “Call out and tell your friends that they bring the horses back or we throw you on the fire.”

One of the braves got hold of himself enough to yell the threat in a quavering voice into the darkness.

“Wait and we talk,” called a voice from maybe thirty yards out. There was no sound from the horses, so the Arapahoes must have eased them further away.

Bill tripped one of the braves and shoved him face down into the fire. The man screamed and rolled out. The other brave pleaded with his friends to trade the horses for their lives.

After a couple of minutes a voice shouted that they would give two horses for the two prisoners. They had stolen eleven horses and mules.

“No deal,” Baptiste yelled. A few more minutes passed. “The niggur must be palavering with his buddies,” Jim said. Long Hatcher slipped out into the dark.

“Two horses for two men,” the same voice yelled.

“May the One-who-created-all curse you,” Baptiste yelled, “and give your children club feet.”

They heard the horses begin to move far out in the dark—moving away. Someone screamed out there. A moment later Long Hatcher walked into the camp with a fresh scalp. “He won’t do no more parleying,” Hatcher observed.

All four men built up the fire. The two Arapahoes went into a kind of trance, lifting their death songs.

Bill and Hatcher heaved the first one onto the fire and pinned him there with long sticks. They ignored his screams. After two minutes he stopped thrashing. Baptiste and Jim put the other one in the fire.

“They heered it,” Bill said. “Mebbe that’ll lam ’em.”

After three days the trappers caught up with the whole band. They slipped into the herd at night, knifed the guard, cut out eighteen head, and led them away undetected. Jim was furious, though, because in the dark he hadn’t found his buffler horse.

JULY, 1842: Baptiste and Jim, returning to meet Sophie and Yellow Leaf with the Shoshones on Black’s Fork, were riding through South Pass. The July afternoon was almost unbearably hot. The pass was a twenty-miles breadth of sagebrush flat and parched buffalo grass. The plain shimmered with heat waves, and the distant hills seemed to be detached from the earth. There was not a breath of air in the pass.

Ahead they thought they could see figures above the sagebrush, but in the shiny blur they couldn’t be sure. Figures, sure enough. A man and a woman, the man flopped on the ground, the woman bending over him, the horses drooping nearby.

“Afternoon,” Jim offered, “need some help?”

The woman looked a little scared. A breed and a niggur who look as rascally as Indians, Baptiste thought. She probably thinks we’ll scalp him and rape her.

“Water,” croaked the man. “I’m dying from lack of water.” A lot of words from a dying man, Baptiste thought.

Jim swung off his horse. “Don’t got no water,” he said, “but hyar’s some whisky.” They had been parceling out the whisky all the way from Laramie. Jim held the man’s head up and started to tip the kettle.

“What’s that ye say?” the man asked. He had just gotten a load of Jim’s black face.

“Whisky. Drink.”

The man turned his head out of the way of the pouring stream, and it dribbled off his cheek onto the ground. “God save me,” he sputtered, as though he’d actually gotten some in his mouth, “no spirits. I won’t partake of alcohol. I’d rather go to my Savior now.”

Jim looked at him disgustedly.

“You aire somteeng,” Baptiste spoke up for the first time. “You lay zere and die.
Idiot!
, and go to hell. No wan weel miss you.” Jim was grinning. “What about your wife? Standing here in ze sun? She ees not pretending to die. She is not yellow-leevered. She is fine, spirited woman, fit to leeve and make children. You go ahead and die. We take her with us.”

Jim grabbed her and helped Baptiste get her up behind him. She looked terrified. Baptiste gave his horse a kick and trotted off, him right behind. She was wailing in Baptiste’s ear about being left to die with her beloved, about being consecrated to him as though to Jesus. A quarter mile away Baptiste looked back and saw the fellow standing up in the sagebrush.

Down on Big Sandy Creek late that afternoon they caught up with the main party. Baptiste handed Mrs. Jones down with a polite flourish.

“Where’s Brother Jeremiah?” a big fellow asked.

“Left dying of thirst by the pass,” she said, crying only a little now.

The greenhorns found him halfway to camp. By the time the missionary got to camp, having guzzled Big Sandy refreshment, he was prepared to give Jim and Baptiste a proper chastising, and to turn them over to the local authorities. But they were gone on, having little tolerance for the company in the neighborhood. If the Reverend Jeremiah Jones saw hellfire in their eyes, they saw prissiness in his.

JUNE, 1843: Baptiste pulled Pilgrim up short. Pilgrim snorted impatiently, eager to move. Old Bill, Jim, and Joe Meek rode up alongside him and saw why he stopped. Their mules bore thick packs of plews; their swing through Pierre’s Hole, Jackson Hole, and the Absaroka Range had made a fine spring hunt. Idling their way toward Laramie for a good pay-off, they thought that trappin’ was shinin’ again. But there, reaching in front of them from above Independence Rock down past Devil’s Gate, spread a huge litter of white tops. The wagons were winding up the Sweetwater in a long, slow, sinuous crawl like the vertebrae of a snake.

“This child reckons it’s a thousand emigrators,” Bill wheezed. They just looked for a long time—at the river, at the mountains that rose, aloof, to nine or ten thousand feet to the south, at the cleft where the Sweetwater suddenly plunged down into the turbulent hell of Devil’s Gate for a quarter mile, at the land that changed through the seasons without ever changing, and at the wagon train inching up the valley. Baptiste figured there were more white men in that single train than had ever come into the mountains before. He kicked Pilgrim forward.

Baptiste saw Dr. Whitman riding in front of the lead wagon, and pulled up. “Where to?” he asked, sweeping his hand over the length of the train.

“Oregon, Baptiste, mostly the Willamette Valley. Hello, Joe, Bill.”

Bill grunted. “This ain’t fitten, Doctor.”

“You’re a reactionary, Bill, an amiable reactionary. And a sinner. Come to Walla Walla and be reborn.”

“Wagh! I’ll be reborn, sure.” He made antlers with his fingers. Whitman laughed.

“What’s the weather ahead?” Whitman asked.

“Quiet,” Baptiste said. “Shoshones to Black’s Fork. Old Gabe’s built a fort there. You can do some trading and smithing. Crows are mostly away up north. Utes were up a while back, and were raiding Shoshones, but they’re chased back south. Should be peaceable to the fort.”

“Thanks,” said Whitman. He looked at Jim as though to introduce himself, but apparently thought better of it.

“Preachin’ bastard,” Jim said as they rode off.

“Mark my words, boys,” cried Bill, “these fools is thumbin’ thar noses at nature. The mountains ain’t fitten for women and children. One day Colter’s hell ull open and swallow ’em up. Let ’em stay on
God
’s side of the Missouri River.”

“Welcome,” Baptiste called down from his horse, “back to Atlantis.”

Robert Campbell strode across and shook his hand warmly.

“What be Atlantis?” Jim asked, shaking likewise.

“The one-time home of the gods,” said Campbell. “I believe Baptiste is suggesting that the mountains will soon be the one-time home of you one-time gods. May I offer the gods a drink?”

They swung off. “Whew,” said Joe, “mighty fancy.”

“I want you to meet someone,” Campbell smiled, and led them toward the main tent.

“Captain William Drummond Stewart of Her Majesty’s Army,” Campbell announced. He was a friendly looking man of military erectness, with a splendidly bristling mustache and a beard of more recent cultivation. He wore riding breeches and high leather boots, but had shed his coat. After the formalities Campbell explained: “Captain Stewart is a Scottish baronet, proprietor of Murthly Castle. He’s here to shoot some mountain critturs and take back some trophies.”

Baptiste laughed out loud. “I hope you’re not planning to take any Indians to the Sahara desert.”

Steward looked dumbfounded. “Would you care to explain that over a glass of wine?” he smiled.

Running Stream and White Pebble—Jim had lodgepoled Yellow Leaf up at Pryor’s Gap and sent her home—took the pots to the Sweetwater, and set about making camp while the men drank. Captain Stewart, it turned out, had brought along in his wagon a generous selection of wines, brandies, whiskies, cigars, and various delicacies. He offered a Rhine wine cooled in the river and some smoked oysters. While Jim muttered about the sissy wine and spat out the oysters, Baptiste told Stewart about William Clark and St. Louis, Prince Paul, Stuttgart and King William, the University of Württemberg, France, England and North Africa.

“Hamlet’s university, eh? It is a good joke. My own lands include the Wood of Dunsinane. Wrong play, right author.” He considered. “It’s quite fantastic. The course of your entire life has been altered, incredibly altered, by chance encounters with two famous men.”

“Perhaps,” Baptiste answered. “But when all is said and done, I am still here, in the mountains, trapping—just where anyone would have predicted the son of a squaw and a fur trader would end his days. And that is not chance, but choice.”

“You have a somewhat richer perspective, I suspect, than your fellow trappers.”

Jim set down his empty wine glass impatiently. “Got any whisky?” he said in a mock growl.

“My friend’s palate is less than refined,” Baptiste smiled. “But what can you expect of a rude, uncouth trapper?” Stewart reached for a bottle. Baptiste stalled the pouring until he could pick some mint for juleps.

“Where to, gentlemen?” Campbell asked.

“Black’s Fort,” Baptiste said.

“Old Gabe’s built hisself a fort thar,” Jim elaborated. “‘Pears he’s a mind to set up at storekeepin’.”

“Gabe?” Campbell was amazed. “The king of the mountains tending a store?”

“It’s bad times, Bob,” Baptiste said. “Half the boys are leaving the mountains.”

“Yes, I saw Fitz and Kit guiding a Lieutenant Fremont above Ash Hollow.”

“And some of them are nursemaiding the emigrants across to. Oregon and Californy, meaning to set up as farmers when they get there,” Baptiste said. “The rest are just caching their traps.
Tempis fugit
.”

“He talks funny and he wears lace panties,” Jim said.

“Meet your squaws’ people at Bridger, and then what?” asked Stewart.

“Hunt for the Snakes a while,” said Baptiste. “Our squaws are Snakes. And then this child’ll trap, I guess.”

“Boys, there’ll be a rendezvous this summer. I know the rendezvous has gone under, but for old time’s sake. We’ve brought kegs of whisky, and there’ll be prizes for riding and shooting. Whole thing’s on Captain Stewart. He wants to see one.”

“Wagh!” grunted Jim. “A rendezvous on the peraira? You be flinging the dollars about.”

“Somewhere in the Wind Rivers,” added Campbell, “I’ll send a man to Fort Bridger to leave word where.”

“Tell all the trappers you see,” said Stewart. “And come yourselves. We’ll have some fun.”

“One last bust-out,” Baptiste said reflectively.

A young man walked up to them, but before Campbell could make the introduction, Baptiste recognized the red hair.

“Jefferson Clark,” he smiled, and stuck out his hand. They hadn’t seen each other in twenty years. “Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau.”

Baptiste shook his head in embarrassment. “I am delinquent in writing your father—he’s damn near
our
father. Will you carry a letter to him?”

“He died, Baptiste. Three years ago.”

Baptiste examined the young Clark for a long moment. “He lived an honest man,” Jeff nodded.