Cheyenne Winter
Authors: Richard S. Wheeler
AN
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BOOK
New York, NY
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, scanning or any information storage retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the Author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1992 by Richard S. Wheeler
First e-reads publication 2003
www.e-reads.com
ISBN 0-7592-5420-6
For Terry C. Johnston
There was still another matter to put before the partners. Guy Straus knew what their response would be, and he could override it if he chose. He owned two-thirds of the Rocky Mountain Company while Brokenleg Fitzhugh and Jamie Dance each owned a sixth.
This first annual meeting of the buffalo company, as they commonly called it, had yielded no surprises. Up on the Yellowstone, Brokenleg had weathered fierce competition from the American Fur Company and had broken even. Out on the Arkansas, Jamie Dance had managed a lively trade with the Comanches for robes, assuring an overall profit for the 1841– 42 robe season.
Guy peered around the beeswaxed table in the salon of Straus et Fils, still astonished at the changes in his sons who’d been out at the posts; and in the rock-hard strength of his weathered partners, a pair of mountain men who’d turned themselves into buffalo-robe traders.
Sitting decorously along the walls were their wives, Teresa Maria Dance, looking lush and vibrant; and Little Whirlwind, as angular and haughty and unapproachable as ever. Guy felt a vast affection for them both, though only a year ago he’d wondered whether they might be serious liabilities. In a way they still were. Little Whirlwind of the Cheyennes — Fitzhugh called her Dust Devil — breathed fire against other tribes. And Teresa Maria had already shown Guy she could scold with the worst of them.
“Oh, your reports hearten me. Brokenleg, when all that bad news filtered down the Missouri I thought the company was finished before it had traded a robe up there. I don’t know how, but you held off the Chouteau interests . . . And Jamie, your courage at Fort Dance — yours and that of my son David” — Guy saw his son stare at the burnished table — ”fought off the Bents, the Comancheros, and the Mexican government, and won us a solid profit.”
The thing that struck Guy was that they were all strangers. He’d sent two soft, inexperienced sons out upon the wilderness, and now, a year later, they were tanned veterans at ages seventeen and nineteen. They’d become strangers — as if they’d seen sights that Guy had only experienced through the whiskey gossip of fur and robe men at the Planters House. Not even his partners seemed the same: they’d come to him as beaver men, free trappers out of luck in the Rockies. Now, the passage of a year had turned them into hard, discerning managers of themselves and others.
“I should tell you that we have old Pierre
le cadet
worried down there in his lair on the levee. American Fur eats competitors. So do the Bents, I might add. You’ve both told me of buy-out offers. They must have been a temptation to you both — when things ran against you. Well . . . Brokenleg, you’ve got Pierre in a lather.”
Guy unfolded the letter that lay before him, written in Pierre Chouteau’s own crabbed hand, in French — a not subtle appeal to Guy, over the heads of Guy’s English-speaking partners. It was dated just the day before, June 1, 1842, St. Louis. Timed perfectly, Guy thought.
“I will translate this as I go along,” Guy said, donning his gold-rimmed spectacles. Brokenleg could read and write but Jamie couldn’t, and Guy made a point of reading everything aloud at the annual meetings.
“My dear Guy. Chouteau and Company, along with Bent, St. Vrain and Company, propose to buy your interests in the Rocky Mountain Company, along with those of your partners. We propose to pay a fair mountain price for existing inventory at the posts, as well as livestock, wagons, and furnishings. In addition we propose to pay two thousand for each post, and an additional thousand dollars, guaranteeing you and your partners a profit, to be divided as you choose.”
Guy interrupted the reading. “That’s an offer of fourteen or fifteen thousand by my calculations. I imagine after deducting what’s owed Straus et Fils, we three partners would share four or five thousand — on top of the profits we’ve made this year.”
“I ain’t buyable,” muttered Brokenleg. He glared at Guy.
Jamie said nothing but listened closely. That was the difference between them, Guy thought.
“We are also willing to buy your interests alone, Guy, and assume a majority partnership in the company. We assume your colleagues would be delighted to have a new senior partner if you should decide to protect your investment.”
“Haw!” exclaimed Brokenleg.
Guy smiled. “There’s more detail — time limitations and so on. But I would like your opinions about this much of it. I’ll ask you first, Brokenleg.”
The mountaineer adjusted his bad leg and glared. As always when he was trapped in St. Louis he looked like a keg of powder ready to explode. “Old Cadet, he’s fixin’ to drive a wedge betwixt you and us. I mean, ah, there’s you, friends of him and all — and there’s Jamie and me.”
Guy nodded.
“He say anything about what he’s gonna do if he buys two-thirds of the Rocky Mountain Company? Him and the Bents, are they fixin’ to boot us out?” asked Jamie.
A good question, thought Guy. “No, he says nothing of his intentions. That’s for you two to infer.”
“You’d git out clean. I mean, Straus et Fils. He’s fixin to give you a get-out profit.”
Guy nodded again. “A rather good one.”
“It ain’t us that needs askin’ then; it’s you,” muttered Brokenleg. “You gonna sell out from under us?”
“Would you like me to?”
Brokenleg Fitzhugh scrambled to his feet, a clumsy act because of his locked knee. “I reckon’ this is standing-up talk so I’ll deal on my feet. I didn’t go clear to the Yellowstone and work myself to the bone and git myself almost kilt half a dozen times to quit. And neither did your Max here. We got buy-out offers all along — and damn, we fought instead, and we got us robes in aplenty and built a whole post — just a handful of us. I don’t want to hear quit-talk. Not one more word.”
That was vintage Brokenleg, Guy thought. He had picked his men well. He turned to Jamie.
Dance didn’t rise; in fact, talking was his excuse to slouch deeper in the gilded conference chair until he was nearly horizontal, his legs poking out from across the table. Instead, Dance grinned. “We shore must be raisin’ hell — pardon, ma’am — raisin’ grief with their plans. I got us a mess o’ prime robes, David hyar and me, and I plan to get a mess more right out from under the noses of them Bents and half the officials of Mexico.”
Guy knew his sons would enthusiastically back the partners. A year ago they wouldn’t have. But maybe they’d waver, even as Guy himself wavered, if they knew the rest. Guy found the buy-out a great temptation, a chance to clear a profit on this shaky adventure and return to the conservative financial practices that had been the hallmark of Straus et Fils for decades.
“There’s more,” Guy said blandly, adjusting his spectacles. “You filled us with admiration — this is Chouteau again — with admiration for your diligent efforts in the field. It took great skills and planning and courage on the part of your young men. But will it happen again? Who knows what the robe trade will bring? This year’s profit could become next year’s disaster. For our part we will compete by whatever means. You must let us know of your decision before your resupply goes out to the posts.”
Guy waited for that to sink in. He wasn’t even sure if his partners understood Pierre Chouteau’s Aesopian language. Both Brokenleg and Jamie stared at him, not seeing much gravity in it. But David spoke up. How that young man, so lean and adult, startled Guy.
“It’s a threat, isn’t it, Papa? He’s saying more than is on paper.”
“That’s correct, David.”
“Hey’s saying that we’ve got to sell out or face — bad things. That’s been the rule in the fur trade — erase the opposition.”
David had a keen analytical mind, Guy thought.
“You gonna let threats whip us?” muttered Brokenleg, who was still standing.
“Threats become reality when the Chouteaus want them to be, Brokenleg,” said Guy gently. “You know them all. I don’t need to list the way property and lives can be destroyed in the wilderness.”
“They sure fought back in the beaver days, but Bridger and Fitzpatrick and the Sublettes — they fought back and won.”
“For a while. In the end they lost, Brokenleg. American Fur — Pratte and Chouteau — absorbed them all. Every one, except the Bents in the south. You might ask yourselves how that happened.”
“We expected the old divil to try,” persisted Brokenleg. “He tried last year and got whupped.”
“Pierre Chouteau is a man who profits from his mistakes,” Guy said. “Especially the mistake of underestimating the competition.”
They argued it back and forth, with his sons hesitant to take sides. And the more they talked the more Brokenleg hardened in his belief that the company should reject the offer. Guy wasn’t so sure. Jamie slowly sided with Brokenleg. He wanted another crack at the Comanche trade and a crack at the tribes the Bents thought were in their pocket.
In the end, Guy conceded. Actually he felt trapped. He couldn’t quite bring himself to oppose two fierce mountain men who wanted to lick the two most powerful fur companies in North America.
“Well then, we’ll try for another profit,” he said wearily, filled with foreboding.
* * *