Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (12 page)

French-Canadian missionary priests who visited the Katogoula gave up trying to learn the tribe’s original language, though it was apparently Muskogean in character, superficially akin to Choctaw. U.S. Indian Agent John Sibley, President Jefferson’s friend and appointee, reported in 1808 that he made himself intelligible using Mobilian Jargon, a composite language based on Choctaw, Chickasaw, and loan words from the European tongues. With the Katogoula, as with many other tribes forced to deal with the colonial powers, Mobilian Jargon—more precisely, Mobilian K, an evolving variant—became the accepted language around the middle of the eighteenth century, during the last years of the French regime.

Leaning back with his head wedged in his palms, Nick squandered a few minutes staring at the wall, pondering the ancient helix of chance and determination weaving through the new and strong friendship that had formed between Tommy and his Katogoula tribe, and Chief Claude and the Chitiko-Tiloasha . . .

At length he sat up, shook his head, and flexed his shoulders. Another bout of aimless philosophizing wasn’t getting him anywhere. He forced his attention back to the slanted viewing surface of the microfilm reader.

The Internet was certainly a boon to the modern genealogist; yet, Nick took perverse pleasure in the fact that all the servers in the world couldn’t hold the century upon century of genealogical material contained in courthouses, places of worship, governmental agencies, libraries, attics, basements. . . . The day might come when the world’s genealogical source material would be captured in bytes, but it wasn’t here now. Real genealogy still required the researcher to physically venture into the field for patient spade and brush work, just as any good archaeologist would think it necessary to crawl around on hands and knees in an excavation. In both disciplines, part of the art was knowing where to dig and what to seek.

Hichborn Library, despite the cutbacks, was an excellent facility, as long as you knew your way around the hundreds of microfilm drawers, and the special manuscript collections that weren’t listed in the library catalog—and Nick did know his way around. It was still a great place to research French colonial archives, and no slouch either when it came to the vast assemblage of Spanish colonial records collectively known as the
Archivo General de Indias
, the lion’s share of which was housed in Seville, Spain. Of especial interest to Nick was one of the
Archivo
subdivisions holding a wealth of Louisiana materials: the
Papeles Procedentes de Cuba
. Louisiana as a Spanish colony fell within the administrative sphere of the viceroyalty of Cuba, and that’s where great quantities of
Louisiana records of the time were sent and stored, before most of the surviving records were ultimately transferred to Spain.

Unfortunately, the Hichborn lacked an important part of the
Papeles
: the
Legajos de Luisiana
, “bundles” of documents that were themselves a newly rediscovered portion of the famous
Fondos de las Floridas
, which contained material relating to East and West Spanish Florida. The
Legajos de Luisiana
included documentary details even more useful to researchers interested in the colonial history of the area that became central Louisiana.

The
Fondos
and the smaller
Legajos
were left in Havana after most other colonial records had been removed to Spain in the late 19th century as the former superpower gradually lost its New World foothold. In the 1990s the Historic New Orleans Collection created an academic sensation by gaining permission from Cuba and the U.S. government to microfilm the
Fondos
on-site at the National Archives of Cuba, where conservational conditions had always been wanting. THNOC pulled off another major coup more recently by returning to Havana, during a time of renewed diplomatic tension, and capturing on microfilm nearly 20,000 pages of the deteriorating
Legajos de Luisiana
.

Since the
Legajos
microfilm set, much less a digital version of it, had not been released for sale and was expected to be very expensive when it finally was completed, scholars from all over the world were swarming to the Collection’s beautiful complex of landmark buildings in the French Quarter for a crack at this trove of historical information. Nick had lately treated his friend from THNOC, vivacious Veronique, to quite a few expensive, cholesterol-laden dinners, during which he subtly mentioned how grateful he would be if she could use her influence to move him up the waiting list of researchers. Chills ran up and down his spine as he thought about getting his hot hands on THNOC’s
Legajos
.

Was genealogy replacing sex as his primary source of excitement? he asked himself . . .
C’est la vie!

Today Nick was exploring the
Papeles
and the
Fondos
, having first consulted several guides and articles that directed him to productive fishing grounds amid this ocean of information. For hours he slogged through hundreds of microfilmed pages of beautiful script, vowing to himself to brush up on his Spanish and French during his next slack period—the
Papeles
and
Fondos
contained records in both languages, a fact highlighting the peculiar political reality of the colony: the French would be French, no matter whose flag flew over them.

Each page lay projected before him like an insubstantial slice of a core sample drilled down into history itself.

He discovered several references to a devastating intertribal war that nearly wiped out the Katogoula and probably destroyed their ally, the smaller Yaknelousa tribe. The enemy tribe, the Quinahoa, was utterly extinguished, according to the colonial officials who were trying to understand the convoluted power politics of dozens and dozens of tribes. Precisely when this war had been fought—if it had been fought at all outside the mists of legend—Nick was unable to discover.

He did find evidence that the Katogoula were well established in Louisiana when the infamous Removals began in earnest, in the 1820s. Ironically, these times of trouble were relatively good for the Katogoula, and the tribe’s numbers increased.

The territory of the Katogoula was one of the last stops on the mournful trip to the government-selected reservations. Fleeing individuals and family groups of many Southeastern tribes peeled off and sought shelter in the wild backwoods of central Louisiana, avoiding the forced marches to Oklahoma and other frontier lands. Many walked back from Indian Territory, finding life unbearable there, separated from
the familiar sky, sun, animals, forest, and waters of their traditional way of life in the Southeast.

When Nick surfaced again, he realized it was late afternoon. He returned his films and books to the appropriate carts, and took the stairs to the third floor—Literature and Languages, faculty carrels, and Hawty Latimer.

CHAPTER 9

“H
ow can you read this chicken scratch?” Hawty Latimer asked, the expression on her brown face somewhere between teasing and contempt. “If you’d gone to grade school where I did, up in north Louisiana, they’d have broken you of this left-handed writing. One run-in with the principal’s wooden ruler—that would have been
that
.”

After a few more silent moments, she tossed back the pages of cramped, chaotic scribbling Nick had produced. He suspected she would make a good principal herself—and wouldn’t spare the ruler. She was a formidable young woman, in both mind and body, with more drive and joy for living than anyone—in or out of a wheelchair—Nick had ever known.

“But you can’t fault the content, right?” Nick asked hopefully. “Even if the form isn’t up to your lofty standards of penmanship.”

Sarcasm was their normal mode of communication. That Nick employed Hawty in his genealogical firm wasn’t immediately obvious; a person could be pardoned for thinking their relationship was the other way around.

It was past six o’clock now, and they sat in Hawty’s carrel on the third floor of the library. The carrel was a drab seven-by-five-foot study area, painstakingly constructed, Nick often thought, to exclude any naturally occurring material. A silvery plastic grid suspended
over the carrel’s walls filtered fluorescent light from a higher coffered acoustic ceiling that extended over all of the carrels. It was too cold and too dry in here; too bright, yet not bright enough; and there was the restive silence of unseen people straining to overhear conversations or muttered secrets. Still, a carrel was a nice perk for grad students and for professors too busy to return to their offices. If you were the kind of person who could lose yourself in your work, then the facsimile of privacy would become real. Hawty had added a few comforting touches: a lamp here, a family photograph there, the odd sentimental tchochke.

Her volcano-orange wheelchair mocked the sterility of the enclosure. This wasn’t her usual chair, which she referred to as her “chariot.” Normally she rode a motorized, gizmo-crammed computer-lab-on-wheels that made Nick wonder how he’d missed the leap from present-time to science fiction.

“Oh, I suppose 1771 isn’t bad. For a start,” Hawty said.

Nick had found references to the Katogoula that far back and was proud of having done so.

“Just so happens I ran across this thesis.” She held up a slim pamphlet. “Nineteen forty-three. A girl in one of Herbert Bolton’s classes, out in your neck of the woods—Berkeley. She did some really outstanding work on Louisiana Indians.”

“Bolton, Bolton. Sounds vaguely familiar. Refresh my memory.” He knew she loved to do that.

“Herbert Bolton was a big-time historian a UC Berkeley between the world wars who broke ground with studies of the colonial Spanish and the Indian tribes in Louisiana and Texas.”

Hawty handed him the thesis and continued. “This student quotes from an unpublished journal of 1768. She says she studied it in the possession of descendants of the writer, in southwest Texas. The
journal’s author was a clerk of Athanase de Mézières. Mézières, as I’m sure you know—and if you don’t I’m going to tell you anyway—was a Frenchman, son-in-law of St. Denis, although only briefly because the great man’s daughter died in childbirth, and later, during the Spanish period, commandant of Fort St. Jean Baptiste—”

“Natchitoches.”

Louis Antoine Juchereau de St. Denis was a daring French-Canadian officer, explorer, and diplomat originally in Sieur de Bienville’s command, now remembered in Louisiana primarily as the founder of the picturesque city of Natchitoches, in 1714.

“You got it,” Hawty confirmed. “Mézières, in his spare time, mediated for the Spanish between feuding Texas tribes—”

“Oh, come on, Hawty,” Nick said, interrupting her. “Sounds to me like a transparent imitation of another well-known journal. I bet she’d read about Jean Penicaut, St. Denis’s carpenter—”

“I know, I know. St. Denis’s carpenter, who later wrote about the expeditions to Louisiana’s Red River area and into Spanish territory. I get where you’re coming from,” Hawty said. “But I think our clerk’s journal is real and gives us a reliable earlier Katogoula sighting than you found.”

Nick had begun shaking his head even before she finished. They were in the habit of defending mutually exclusive positions, eventually moving to some midpoint of compromise or proving the other wrong, in Socratic style.

“She decided to create her own source,” he said. “Happens all the time. Look at the
New York Times
and the Jayson Blair scandal a few years back. Academia, and especially genealogy, aren’t any different. Deadlines, ideology, fear of failure—writers of all types sometimes feel pressured to take ethical shortcuts.”

“Don’t be dissing my newspaper,” Hawty warned.

“Sorry. No great mystery here. She was trying to please the esteemed scholar, Bolton, her professor. A simple case of fraud brought on by a raging need for approval. Maybe she had a thing for the old guy.”

“I’ll ignore the sexism implicit in your allegation. And look who’s accusing somebody of intellectual dishonesty. Don’t you even want to hear the facts? Reminds me of the case of a certain English professor wrongly accused of plagiarism.”

Chastened, Nick readjusted himself in his chair and slowly exhaled in an attempt to expel any remaining opinionated cantankerousness. She had a knack for keeping his feet on the ground.

“Hush up and listen,” Hawty said, doggedly sticking to her point, mixing down-home gruffness with higher-ed decorum. “Maybe you’ll get something useful in that overstuffed head of yours. Besides, there’s more to this journal than simply moving three years further back than your date.”

“I’m all ears.”

She’d begun to finger her elaborate arrangement of six-inch-long braids. “Do you like my hair? Took
four
hours.” It was her third new look of the month.

Ah, youth!
Nick thought.
All innocent narcissism, gullible idealism, blissful self-absorption!

Not waiting for an answer, Hawty quit bothering her braids and plowed on. “You say there in your notes that scholars believe there was a big intertribal war over inland salt sources and rock deposits for projectiles.”