Snowbound and Eclipse (51 page)

I have been fitful this autumn, suffering the ague twice, and conquering it with the familiar extract of cinchona bark called quinine that is commonly available here for the malady, as well as some calomel. My body aches; I believe the privations of our long overland journey taxed it and I have been slow to recover. I am increasingly excitable, a humor I ascribe to the pressures I labor under.

To curb my restlessness I sip spirits during the day, porter, wine, and sometimes whiskey. In the evenings, I sample
whatever my hosts and hostesses place in hand, and am calmed. My sleep has been restless, but I have found a good remedy in the drops of laudanum I drink before bed.

Pierre Chouteau is the soul of hospitality, and includes me in the bright evening society of the Creoles. I take breakfast with him, and for all this he scarcely charges me anything, which is just as well because my accounts are strained to the utmost.

I have made progress on all but one matter: our Mandan guest, Big White, remains in St. Louis, and I am charged with getting him home. Indeed, Mr. Jefferson considers it the highest of my priorities, believing rightly that our entire Indian diplomacy in the West depends on our success.

She-He-Ke, his wife and son, and the interpreter Jessaume, had been settled at Cantonment Bellefontaine, under the watchful eye of the army, but the chief grew restless and insisted on coming here. Chouteau is good with Indians and I have put our guests in Chouteau's care.

Big White has gotten but a few English words, and I cannot communicate with him, but I gather from Jessaume that he regards himself as a brother of the president, that is, a chief of state very like Mr. Jefferson, and wants to be wined and dined as such. And so we do, at the expense of the territory.

Jessaume and his Mandan wife and son have been cooperative. I've taken a liking to the boy, and see some potential in him and have offered to school the boy if Jessaume wishes it. I have in mind making him a factor in the fur trade someday; maybe putting him in charge of one of the government posts we are erecting. In all this I am borrowing a leaf from Will, who offered to settle our interpreter Charbonneau and his Shoshone squaw hereabouts and raise and educate their son, Pomp. It's my fancy to do much the same.

Meanwhile our savage guest has gotten himself up in a fine broadcloth outfit, along with his wife, and they parade through St. Louis daily, delighting the citizens with their affable greetings, their wonderment at all the devices of white civilization, and their prodigious appetites, for no plate is large enough to placate She-He-Ke's appetite.

Meanwhile I brood about the task before me. With the Arikaras so violently opposed to our passage because of an imagined insult, the whole might of the United States is checked, and the British are playing havoc. The Rees, as most men call them, suppose one of their sachems was murdered by us while visiting here, though in fact disease took him off, and on that misunderstanding rest our difficulties.

The regular army cannot help me. I made application to them and was rebuffed. They are understaffed and desperately trying to prepare for war with England. It's going to be up to our militia to do the job, but I have been thinking there might be ways to engage enough men to get past the Arikaras.

Thanks to the good offices of Chouteau, we are well advanced on a plan. The idea now is to form a company, the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company, subscribed by leading men here, to equip a formidable force that can return our guests to their home. Chouteau has lined up Will Clark as a partner, along with my brother Reuben, though I will not participate because this is to be a mixed government and private enterprise.

The partners will include Auguste Chouteau, the wily Spaniard Manuel Lisa, that knowledgeable Creole merchant Sylvestre Labbadie, Pierre Menard, William Morrison, and the merchant Benjamin Wilkinson, who is a brother of the conniving general, which worries me. Most of these are merchants. Reuben brings medicine and youth to the enterprise, and preserves our family interest in the venture.

They are working on articles of agreement now, though I have carefully stayed out of it. But my plan is to pay them a considerable sum of public money to take Big White home; a sum that will, with their own capital added, permit them to raise a formidable army of trappers and traders. I shall, of course, impose strict conditions, and require their departure as early next spring as possible.

It seems the best way to get Big White back, given our lack of resources. I can only hope that Secretary Dearborn cooperates and approves. It is a matter most vexing to have to explain the realities of life on the far western borders to men back East; and the secretary has often proven to be obtuse. He will raise stern objections to my proposal to arm these private citizens, and supply them with trading goods with which to ease their way past the numerous tribes along the river.

Shall the government endow a favored few who are thus enabled to make a great profit? Actually, it saves the government great expense. Persuading him of the merit of this plan is crucial, and failure to explain the necessity will be the death of me, I suspect.

I fear I will end up in debtor's prison unless the new company earns me a good return. For some reason beyond my ken, Meriwether had done nothing about the journals, and with each passing day my hope of gain for the heavy investment I have shouldered to prepare them for publication seems to retreat.

I had put my back pay into them; my stipend as superintendent of Indian Affairs and as a brigadier doesn't stretch far enough to cover my large household, much less get me out of financial peril. I have land in Kentucky, but could scarcely give it away just now. I have household slaves but they don't earn their keep, unlike field slaves who produce marketable crops. Here it is December, over a year after publication was promised, but I have said nothing to Meriwether about the endless delay. Whatever is bothering him, it is afflicting my purse.

Meriwether must be even worse off, because he continually borrows small sums from me, an incontinence that surprises me, but that I indulge. He is spending considerable in taverns and seems to be arrayed with medicines, but I don't ascribe his straits to that but to his speculations in land. He is purchasing thousands of arpents of farmland, most of it from the Chouteaus, almost entirely on credit. I privately question his wisdom. He had not been so injudicious on the expedition, and now his conduct puzzles me.

The new fur company revives my hope of gain. The principal merchants of St. Louis have been gathering regularly in Pierre Chouteau's parlor to contrive an agreement. Meriwether was on hand at every meeting, and in fact we could not launch the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company without his support.

We have a sense of possibility and optimism. Manuel Lisa and his partners returned from the upper Missouri with a fine harvest of beaver pelts and buffalo robes. They had gotten past the Arikaras. Now the three of them, Lisa, Menard, and Morrison, are forming the core of the new outfit. They want me in the organization for several reasons, in part because I can license them, in part because of my knowledge of the upper Missouri, and in part because I have been involved in marketing the government's pelts acquired
through our factory trading system, and know how to get the best prices.

So we gathered this chill evening to fashion an agreement, after much discussion. Chouteau had a fine blaze going in his fireplace, and treated us to black cheroots and a lusty red port. The Cuban cigars wrought a pungent haze in the candlelight, and put us all in a good humor.

The governor, who had plainly done some thinking, offered us his terms, pacing the parlor with an energy that startled me, as if he contained within something that would burst him wide open unless he released it.

“The government places utmost importance upon returning Big White to the Mandans. Mr. Jefferson requires it of me and has authorized any reasonable expenditure. We lack the armed strength to do it, and must rely on you. I will pay you seven thousand dollars for the safe delivery of Big White. With this money you will equip your own militia of at least a hundred twenty-five men, and will supply them with rifles and powder and lead, as well as other necessaries.

“I will supply a departure date in the spring; you will need to leave before then or forfeit. I'll put that in the contract. We will provide you with trading licenses and whatever other assistance you require.”

Meriwether spelled out a great many details, almost as if they were rolling out of some articles of agreement already fashioned in his mind, while the partners—I should say future partners because no such articles of agreement have been completed—listened and smoked.

I knew they would agree to it, without a murmur.

There were men sitting in that parlor I did not trust. Lisa for one, the crafty Spaniard who had overcharged Captain Lewis for the goods he got us on the eve of the expedition. And Benjamin Wilkinson, brother of the conniving general.
But such was my fever to conquer the upper Missouri that I resolved to stomach the opportunists.

The British are up there, flagrantly and openly trading with the Mandans, Sioux, and Hidatsas, and other tribes in Upper Louisiana, and setting them against us. It is a part of their undeclared war, this nibbling at our sovereignty and our commerce.

If war does break out, we might well face a massive Indian uprising, orchestrated by the North West Company in Canada and intended to sever the whole territory from our grasp. To stop that, I would make alliance with the devil. The very word Briton is enough to put me in a bilious humor.

But these merchants are not devils, merely opportunists, and one way to secure their loyalty, and procure the allegiance of the tribes, is to let them profit.

“
Mes amis,”
said Pierre Chouteau, “we have heard the governor. Are we to form the company or not?”

We agreed to form one, a partnership in which we all would put in an equal share, as we had already discussed at length. I didn't know where I'd find the means, but I would, somehow. I had land to trade. Andrew Henry was as strapped as I, but had made enough from his lead mines to invest. About Reuben Lewis I didn't know, but he seemed as ready as the rest.

We spent the remainder of that evening hammering out the articles, while Meriwether sat silently by. Quite possibly he was a silent partner, with Reuben as his proxy, but none of us would ever know. Given his position, he was judiciously staying apart. Most of the partners would go up the river themselves; I was exempted because of my office. They made me the accountant and offered me a small salary to handle all the receipts, expenditures, and disbursements. Given what I knew of the fur markets, I thought I could do a good job of it.

The agreement had still to be drafted, copies made and signed, but we walked out of that meeting with a capitalized company. My fortunes would ride on its success. The government's Indian diplomacy would ride on our ability to restore She-He-Ke and his family to his people. If we did that, and showed our muscle, we would hold the Missouri River.

I started downslope that night with my cape drawn tightly about me, my mood as blustery as the wind. I rather hoped to encounter a pair of footpads, just so I could bang their skulls together. But no one molested me.

I knew what was roiling me: I ached to go upriver. The talk in Chouteau's parlor had unleashed a flood of memories, of breezy prairies under an infinite sky, of the river dancing in sunlight, of iridescent black-and-white magpies darting ahead of us and making as much commotion as they could, of standing on a bluff overlooking the sweet land, the sea of wilderness, seeing the bright snowy mountains on the farthest horizon, the backbone of the continent, and feeling more at home than at any hearth back in civilization. I wanted to go. The westering itch had nipped me. But I had a bride now, and a child on the way, and an army at my command, and a president looking over my shoulder.

An icy gale banged me into my house, and I pulled off my cloak and stood a moment in the darkness. York materialized out of the gloom, but the candles were out.

“You have a good meeting, mastuh?” he asked, taking my cloak and hanging it.

“The partners are saying yes,” I replied.

“Goin' up de river?”

“Beaver pelts and robes and maybe chasing the British back to Canada.”

“Lots of men goin' upriver, get past them Rees?”

“Two hundred anyway, including a hundred twenty-five armed.” I grinned. “We'll get Big White home this time.”

“They leaving in the spring?”

“May at the latest.”

“You want anything, mastuh?”

“No, York, I'll go to bed.”

“The mistress, she done gone an hour ago.”

I nodded.

“You mind I ask a question, mastuh?”

I stood, waiting.

“I's wanting to go up the river. You sell my services, you make plenty money, and I go work my way with them that goes to the mountains.”

I stared at him. He stood in the shadows, his hands wringing, his cat-eyes soft upon me.

“Mastuh? I been up that river. I knows the ropes. I's experienced. I's good with a gun. I's a good cook. I's a man can skin a hide off any critter. I's a man been there and back …”

He wanted to go up there plenty. I could see it in him. I could sell his labor, profit from him, two hundred dollars in my pocket and I wouldn't have to feed or clothe him. He'd be an asset to them. He'd be one of a handful who had been over every inch, who knew every trick.

“No, and don't ask me again,” I said, a steely tone in my voice.

“Mastuh?”

“I said no! No! You've got an eye for those savage women, and you can just forget that.”

“That ain't it, mastuh.”

I knew that wasn't it. Up in the mountains he would be a free man for a few months. He would do better than most of the whites, especially the greenhorns.

“York, go to bed. You will do as I say, when I say, and without objection.”