Snowbound and Eclipse (41 page)

“Cost too much, though,” he said. “An engaging folly, this scheme, but you got back in one piece and I suppose the government can afford a little nonsense.”

I smiled benignly. If my future father-in-law could summon a compliment for Mr. Jefferson, the courtship would not go badly. He was a great oddity in Virginia. The bastion of the Federalists was New England, and rare was the Virginian who would make common cause with the Adams family, or the late Hamilton.

“What are the western lands like?” she asked me one day, as we sipped mulled cider before the hearth.

“The air's so clear you can't imagine it, and the prairies run off to the horizon, and you can see a hundred miles, and see the future. It's a place so big it doesn't know you're walking over it.”

She shuddered, and touched me. I thought to make her shudder more, and touch me more.

“Most of the savages are friendly sorts, but there's some with a look in their eye that's like a tomahawk blade, and it's pretty easy to see what's boiling inside their skulls. The proud mean ones maybe keep quiet because the chiefs make 'em, but you know what's itching them, and what they want to do.”

“I don't think I would care for that!” she said, this time shuddering right up tight, and drawing her fingers over my sleeve.

I thought maybe I could shudder her into just the right mood, and get the assault over with.

“And if it isn't the savages, it's the big brown bears, so big they tower up on their hind legs and stare down at you from the treetops, almost, with their little pig eyes, and claws as long as kitchen knives, thinking how they maybe will claw you to pieces and have you for supper because you stumbled into their lair.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed, this time wrapping a fastidious arm around my neck. “I hope we never go there!”

I realized the moment had come, and cleared my throat.

“Miss Julia … you would find Kentucky much to your liking.”

“Captain Clark, I am not sure I would care for Kentucky, with all its savages.”

“They're just as subdued as all the servants here, and you needn't worry about them.”

She laughed.

“I am a tad older than you, but you will find that much to your advantage,” I said.

“Why?”

“You will know later.” That was all I could manage. “Now, it is my design to lay the proposition before your father, if you are so inclined.”

She pouted a little, and I realized I had not made any declaration. Somehow I found the matter most difficult, and while I normally am plainspoken and forward, this time I was tongue-tied and flummoxed.

“Ah, my little Julia, I have had you in my mind all these years.”

She frowned. “Well, I never knew it. After all, you are being presumptuous.” She sipped the steaming mulled cider and eyed me levelly, being far better at the game than I. I thought hotly that I would abandon this place and head for
Washington. I would be too late for Christmas but my reception there would be warmer than the chilly one here.

Then she laughed.

“Ah, Julia, the truth is, I have had naught but the vision of you in my bosom all this while; it was upon me at the very shore of the western sea. I am not a young man, being more than twice your years, and yet in all my days I never was drawn to any but you, and so I declare myself.”

It was awkward, but my plain tongue had deserted me.

“I have not heard the word,” she said.

“Ah, ah, it is you I love.”

She smiled, and touched me again, with such gentleness that I turned to wax. “I should rather like an older man,” she said, and I kissed her, servants be damned.

So it was, that Yuletide, that I formed my alliance, but first I had to take the case to her father. Since my purposes were known from the beginning, I didn't surprise him, and it no doubt had helped that the Clarks and Hancocks were well intertwined over several generations.

The colonel received me in those office chambers from which he counted his tobacco receipts and totted up the costs of the plantation. I supposed that this was a transaction like any other. He received me the afternoon of Christmas Eve, his square ruddy face surveying me with a sardonic silence. He wore his dark hair in a queue, a sign of his Federalist leanings.

“Sir, I should like Julia's hand,” I said.

He smiled thinly. “And she approves?” he asked, in that thick, hoarse voice that suggested too intimate experience with the fine-leaved product of his fields.

“You might ask her,” I replied cheerfully.

He gazed out upon the barren fields, half exhausted because tobacco depleted the soil. “And your age is no impediment to her?”

I shook my head. “She rather prefers a man to a boy.”

“It's an impediment to me. She's barely upon her womanhood.”

“My mother married at fifteen.”

He nodded. “She has grown up in pleasant surroundings,” he said. “Can you assure me that it will be so in the future?”

“I am expecting considerable back pay and a land grant of some size.”

“In Kentucky.”

“Yes, federal lands in the west.”

He opened the snuffbox and inhaled a pinch, wheezing a moment. “I never imagined she would end up with one of Jefferson's radicals,” he said. “I don't suppose you'll be heading for France to lop off the heads of a few noblemen—and women.”

I laughed. “I believe simply in an aristocracy of merit, not heredity.”

“And not in the leadership of good families?”

“Good men, yes, that is close to my republican principles, sir. Let them elect good men.”

“There are no impediments? Your health is good?”

“Excellent, sir. I know of no impediments at all.”

“A soldier's life is hard.” There was a question in his observation.

“I am no longer a soldier. I resigned my commission, and for good. I have no disability.”

He grunted, his brown eyes glowing brightly. “Your intentions have been plain, Will, and that has given me time to ponder the matter, and discuss it as well with my wife. We are close, our families, and I am pleased by the connection, but we think it would be desirable to wait a year. She is but half a woman still, at least to us, and knows you little enough. If you should agree to that, and would postpone until January of eighteen and eight, we would welcome you most heartily
into our family, and into our bosoms.” He smiled. “Even if your politics are impossible.”

We laughed. I shall always remember the moment, Colonel Hancock wheezing his delight; rising up and clapping me on the back, and leading me back into the great house to inform the mistress, and receive her congratulations, and then to the parlor where Miss Julia sat doing crewelwork for the seat of a dining chair.

She peered up at her parents and at me, and set aside her yarns.

“It is a very special Christmas, Julia,” her father said. “Happy for us, happy for the Clarks, happy for you, I trust.”

Julia smiled, uncertainly.

“If you can manage to wait a year, settle into womanhood a while, make sure of your heart, then you have our blessings to marry this big redheaded son of our kin John Clark.”

Julia cried, and I took her hand and lifted her up from her chair, and we had the most sweet and sacred of Christmases.

The deplorable sergeant Patrick Gass is forcing my hand. He has announced the forthcoming publication of his journal, even though I have expressly forbidden it. I gave permission only to Private Frazier to publish his account, but Gass has proceeded anyway, much to my annoyance.

These are unlettered men, not versed in any branch of arts or science, and likely to spread a great deal of misinformation. They have the advantage of me, hastening their
small journals into print while I labor at larger tasks, not least of which has been securing the back pay of all the men in the corps, including Sergeant Gass.

This Thursday morning, the twelfth of March, 1807, I stormed into the president's office with the Gass prospectus in hand, and insisted that something be done to stop it. Gass would ruin everything.

Mr. Jefferson eyed me through those gold-rimmed spectacles of his. “It's not among my principles to stop publication of anything,” he said quietly, after studying the publisher's brochure. He stared out upon the lawn. “But I do think it's going to be damaging to us. I'd suggest a warning to the public that it and any other diaries are not authorized by you, the commander, and also that they are likely to be unreliable.” He smiled at me. “You wouldn't be fretting about your profit, would you?”

“Certainly not, sir. I want only for the truth to reach the public.”

Jefferson laughed, which irritated me. Why couldn't the man be serious? I am not after the money; I'm concerned with the
truth,
and worried that half those note-takers among my corps will publish undisciplined, uneducated versions of events and permanently twist what Will and I so assiduously recorded.

But even the president thinks I want the bootleg journals suppressed so that I can make an additional dollar. I flatter myself that my conduct is grounded upon the highest motives of patriotism and truth, and that such base motives as private gain have no hold upon me.

We agreed that I would write the letter and he would vet it, and maybe put a stop to this bootleg publication of journals. And by afternoon that was accomplished. I wrote the
National Intelligencer
condemning these spurious publications by persons unknown to me, and cautioning readers to
beware and to hold out for the true goods, the first of which I would bring out by year's end. I mentioned as well that I had authorized the publication only of Frazier's journals, but took pains to point out that the man is only a private, unlettered, unacquainted with science, and that his work must not be taken seriously. I sent it off today, and expect it to run tomorrow.

I cannot stop these pirate editions, in part because I have resigned my commission in the army and have accepted Mr. Jefferson's appointment of me as the governor of Upper Louisiana, which was affirmed by the Senate March 2. I suppose I shall have to bear the burden of these inferior tracts. Will and I ordered the sergeants to keep journals; the more of them, the safer the record of discovery. Some of them merely copied what we had written. And now these unlettered men want to cash in, and their greed disgusts me.

I face the complex task of reducing the official journals to a coherent narrative, excising those entries not intended for the public eye, and organizing the scientific discoveries, and producing the maps we completed, and not until then will the public receive an accurate and sound depiction of all that we experienced.

Gass's brochure has put me into a funk from which I will not recover for some while. What makes it all the worse is that from the dawn of this year, Mr. Jefferson and I have been doing our utmost to extract from the public purse worthy rewards for my Corps of Discovery. We proposed to Mr. Alston of North Carolina, who chairs a special committee of the House to see into our compensation, that all my men, including those who returned from Fort Mandan with the keelboat, be given double pay and a land grant of three hundred twenty acres. And that Will Clark receive a compensation equal to my own, a recognition he richly deserves.

Alas, the War Department, in the annoying person of Mr. Dearborn, recommended less for Will Clark, a thousand acres for him as opposed to sixteen hundred for me, and a lieutenant's pay for him, and a captain's for me. But the president and I got Alston's ear, and the chairman was able to even things out somewhat: Will and I each will get sixteen hundred acres.

The president submitted my appointment as governor of the Upper Louisiana territory, and also asked Congress to raise Will Clark to a lieutenant colonel, but again the secretary of war managed to foil Mr. Jefferson, and Congress eventually agreed with him, it being the wish of the members to abide by seniority and not jump Clark over the heads of other deserving men. But I was heartened by the news that they would gladly confirm Clark in any other office within their power, and thus, at the president's behest, he will be our superintendent of Indian Affairs in St. Louis, and a brigadier of militia.

All this business consumed my days and nights this winter. It took a month of heated debate before the representatives passed even a scaled-down version of what I had asked for my doughty corps, but at least the Senate nodded it through in a trice, and I am gratified that my courageous men will benefit from a grateful republic.

Meanwhile I am the cynosure at one banquet after another. It seems all of Washington must have me at its table. The city welcomed me with a great affair January 14, in which I was the honored guest, along with Chouteau and Big White. I vaguely remember seventeen toasts. (
Vaguely
is the exact word for it.) It was at that time that Joel Barlow, powdered, periwigged, and bedizened in scarlet and periwinkle silks, first intoned his new ode, “On the Discoveries of Lewis,” and I was greatly smitten by some of the bard's orotund verses:

With the same soaring genius thy Lewis descends,

And, seizing the oars of the sun,

O'er the sky-propping hills and the high waters he bends

And gives the proud earth a new zone …

Then hear the loud voice of the Nation proclaim,

And all ages resound the decree:

Let our Occident stream bear the young hero's name

Who taught him his path to the sea.

I fancied teaching the Columbia which way to go. And I wondered what Big White thought of all that.

There have been balls to attend, and the social life is heady. I am finding feminine company abounding, and little doubt that I shall make a proper match. I require a serious woman to match my own seriousness, and that is no simple matter, especially in Washington. There seem plenty of the fair sex making themselves pleasant to me, but I have no stomach for the twittering things.