Centennial

by James A. Michener

  Rivermen said, “The Mississippi, she’s a lady. The Missouri, he’s a roughneck, plunging at her with muddy hands. For twenty miles she fights him off, keeping him at a distance, but in the end, like the mayor’s daughter who marries the coureur, she surrenders.”

  When Pasquinel reached the calmer waters of the Mississippi he turned his canoe southward, and within the hour saw the sight which gladdened the hearts of all rivermen: the beautiful, low, white walls of Spain’s San Luis de Iluenses, queen of the south, mistress of the north and gateway to the west. When the little town first hove into view Pasquinel halted for a moment, lifted his paddle over his head, and giving the town its French name, muttered, “Saint Louis, we are coming home ... empty-handed ... for the last time.”

  In that critical period in central North America a thousand small settlements were started, and some by the year 1796 had grown like Saint Louis into prosperous towns with nine hundred citizens, but most of those would subsequently languish. Saint Louis alone should grow into one of the world’s great cities. Why?

  Brains. When Pierre Laclède, the Frenchman who started the settlement in 1764, did preliminary exploring to find a perfect site, he naturally chose that spot where the Missouri empties into the Mississippi; logic said that with two rivers the location had to be ideal, except that when he investigated the spot he found mud and brush twenty feet high in the trees. That could only mean floods and he abandoned that spot in a hurry.

  Accompanied by his thirteen-year-old assistant, he moved a little farther south and found another attractive site, but it, too, had straw in the branches, so he continued to move south, league by league, and at the eighteenth mile he found what he was looking for: a solid bluff standing twenty to thirty feet above water, with two secure landing places upstream and down. This location provided everything needed for the growth of a major settlement: river port, lowlands for industry, higher sites for homes, fresh water, and to the west an endless forest.

  Brains had done it. When other settlements along the Missouri and the Mississippi were under water during recurrent floods, Saint Louis rode high and clear. When other harbors silted up, the river scoured the waterfront at Saint Louis, keeping it clear of sand, so that commerce could continue. In 1796 no one could predict whether it was to thrive or not, but as Pasquinel paddled his canoe into the landing, he was satisfied on one point: “This is the best town on the river.”

  As soon as he landed he started asking in French, “Have you seen the pirogue, Saint Antoine?” A fur buyer said, “Yes, it was sold for lumber.”

  Pasquinel ran to the southern end of town, where a carpenter from New Orleans bought boats as they finished their run and broke them up for timber. Saint Antoine? “Yes. Broke it up two weeks ago.” Where did the men go? “Who knows? They sold their pelts and they’re gone.” Where are my pelts? “Part of some shipment on its way to New Orleans.” Bitter and without a sou, he moved about the town, cursing Indians and rivermen alike.

  Saint Louis would have a confused history, owned by France, then Spain, then France again, then America. Officially it was now Spanish, but actually it was French. Indeed, even the Spanish governor was sometimes a Frenchman, and all of the businessmen. The latter fairly well controlled the fur trade, for they received licenses and monopolies from the Spanish government in New Orleans to trade on this or that river, and it was to them that individuals like Pasquinel had to look for both their financing and their legal permission to trade.

  There was a Company, run by a combine of wealthy citizens; there were also private entrepreneurs who were granted monopolies and who then outfitted coureurs, and Pasquinel had worked for one of them. But after the present disaster this gentleman showed no further interest in sinking additional capital in such a risky venture. Pasquinel therefore moved from one French license holder to the next, trying to cadge money to outfit his next expedition: “You buy me a canoe, some silver, beads, cloth ... I bring you plenty peltries.” No one was interested: “Pasquinel? What did he bring back last time? Nothing.”

  Along the waterfront a riverman told him of a doctor who had recently fled the revolution in France: “Dr. Guisbert. Very clever man. He can cut that arrowhead out of your back.” He went to see the newcomer, an enthusiastic man, who told him, “On your trips you should read Voltaire and Rousseau. To understand why we no longer have a king in France.”

  “I know nothing of France,” Pasquinel said.

  “Good! I’ll lend you some books.”

  “I can’t read.”

  Dr. Guisbert inspected his back, moving the flint with his fingers, and said, “I’d leave it alone.” As Pasquinel replaced his shirt, Dr. Guisbert gave the flint a sudden push with his thumb, but the trapper barely winced. “Good,” Guisbert said. “If you can stand the pain, it’s doing no damage.”

  He liked the spunky coureur and asked, “Where’d you get that wound?” Pasquinel haltingly began to explain, and Guisbert became so interested in beaver pelts and Cheyenne villages that the conversation continued for some time, with the doctor saying impulsively, “One of my patients is a merchant who has a trading license from the governor. Perhaps we can form a partnership, we three.”

  And so, staked with the doctor’s money and under the protection of the merchant’s license, Pasquinel prepared once more for the river.

  He bought himself a new rifle, twice the trade goods he had had before, and a sturdy canoe. At the wharf Dr. Guisbert told him, “You wonder why I risk my money? When I pushed that arrowhead deeper into your back, I know it hurt very much. A man doesn’t learn to bear pain like that without having courage. I think you’ll bring back pelts.”

  On New Year’s Day, 1797, Pasquinel reappeared at the Pawnee village to settle affairs with Chief Rude Water: “If you send your braves to attack me this time, I will kill them and then kill you. But that won’t happen, because you and I are trusted friends.” A calumet was smoked, and he told Rude Water, “Last year we fight. Frenchmen run off with pelts. This year we friends.” Again the calumet was smoked, and Pasquinel concluded the deal: “I come back, I give you one pelt in five.”

  Rude Water assigned four braves to escort Pasquinel to the point where the Platte ran out of water, and there they helped him cache his canoe, bidding him good luck as he departed for alien country.

  That winter he traded well with the Cheyenne, but when he had assembled two bales of pelts, a Ute war party stumbled upon him and decided this was a good chance to grab a rifle. For two days he defended himself and was able to survive only because the Ute did not learn quickly how long it took him to reload. In the end one daring brave dashed in, touched him with his coup-stick and retreated, claiming victory. This satisfied the Indians and they withdrew.

  This year, remembering the torture of that previous portage, he had planned to lug the pelts downstream one bale at a time: take the first bale down, cache it, come back for the second; cache it, then proceed with the first in a continuing operation. But with the Ute on the move, he judged that he must not risk so prolonged an operation, and he loaded himself as before.

  For thirty-two days he staggered down the river, his muscles bulging, his eyes nearly popping from his head. When he reached the hiding place for his canoe, he was in better condition than when he started. Placing the freight in his fragile craft, he pushed it downstream across the sandbars of summer. He had covered less than a hundred miles when he saw with quiet joy four Pawnee braves approaching to help.

  Standing ankle-deep in the Platte, he hailed them. “Many furs,” he said in sign language.

  “Big happening!” they said in sign, pointing downstream toward their village. “We have white man.”

  “Who?” They could not explain except to say, “Red hair, red beard.”

  As they neared the village Chief Rude Water came to greet them, holding in his hand a buffalo thong, the far end of which was attached to the neck of a tall red-bearded young white man about nineteen years old. With a neat flick of the halter, R
ude Water tossed him forward so that he stood facing Pasquinel, and in this unusual manner the coureur met Alexander McKeag.

  “Depuis combien de temps êtes-vous ici?” Pasquinel asked.

  “Six months,” McKeag replied in broken French, using a low, gentle voice. “Captured tryin’ to go upstream ... to trade for beaver.”

  “Il y a des castors là-bas,” Pasquinel said.

  He showed Rude Water the two heavy bales and reminded him that one-fifth of the pelts belonged to the Pawnee, but when the braves started to rip the bales open, Pasquinel shouted for them to stop. He then tried to explain in sign that it would be more profitable to the Indians if they allowed him, Pasquinel, to sell the pelts in Saint Louis.

  “I speak Pawnee,” McKeag interrupted quietly.

  “Tell him he’ll get more goods.”

  In this way Alexander McKeag, refugee from a tyrannical laird in the Highlands of Scotland—whom he had clubbed over the head with a knotted walking stick—started his career as interpreter. He convinced Chief Rude Water that the Indians would profit if they allowed Pasquinel to represent them in Saint Louis, whereupon Rude Water asked, “How do we know he will bring the goods back?”

  When this was translated, the Frenchman said, “I am Pasquinel. I came among you unafraid.”

  The pact was sealed with a calumet, and after Pasquinel had smoked his share, he stepped to McKeag and untied the buffalo thong. “Dites-leur que vous êtes mon associé,” he said, and in this way the partnership was formed.

  Their first venture was a dandy. Pasquinel huddled with Rude Water and said, “Remember those rivermen? Killed your braves. Stole our pelts.” Rude Water did remember. “They ought to be coming back down the river about now. Lend me some braves who can swim.”

  A war party of nine canoed down to the Missouri and camped there for some weeks, watching several fine boats drift past, Saint Geneviéve, Saint Michel, laden with pelts from the Mandan villages.

  And then the boat they waited for appeared, long and ragged, like the Saint Antoine, with the same rough men lounging with rifles, waiting for something to shoot at.

  “Maintenant,” Pasquinel whispered to McKeag. “Vous partez. They won’t know you.”

  So McKeag pushed his canoe into the Missouri and called, “Hey there! Passage to Saint Louis? I have pelts.”

  The boat slowed. The man at the rudder fanned water and another with a pole worked against the current. The leader studied McKeag, saw he was under twenty, and cried cheerfully, “Sure. Throw the pelts up.” One of the men slipped to the rear, taking a heavy oar with which to knock McKeag senseless once the pelts were aboard.

  As the rivermen reached for the bales, Pasquinel put a bullet through the head of the leader. With terrifying calm he handed the smoking rifle to a Pawnee helper, took McKeag’s rifle and drilled a bullet into the man lurking with the oar. He then reached for a third gun, but by this time the Pawnee braves were climbing aboard the flatboat, where the remaining crew were massacred. Young McKeag, who had never seen Indians lift a scalp, was shaking by the time Pasquinel got aboard.

  “I didn’t think we’d kill them,” he said softly.

  Pasquinel said, “L’année dernière ils ont essayé de me tuer.”

  “How do you know they’re the same men?” McKeag asked.

  “That one I know. That one too. The others? Mauvais compagnons vous apportent de la mal chance—Bad companions bring bad luck.”

  Young McKeag was impressed by the assurance with which Pasquinel operated; the Frenchman was only eight years older, but he always seemed to know what to do. “Throw the bodies overboard,” he told the Pawnee, and after McKeag interpreted this, he added, “Tell them they can have anything on the boat they want.” McKeag protested that he and Pasquinel could use some of the gear, but the Frenchman snapped, “I want it to look as if pirates had struck,” and he smiled thinly as the braves did their ransacking. When the Pawnee headed their canoes back toward the Platte, McKeag started to wash down the decks, but Pasquinel stopped him: “I want blood to show—especially the hair—when we talk to the soldiers in Saint Louis.”

  Pasquinel defeated and Pasquinel victorious were two different men. This year he brought the pirogue with its cargo of furs to the Company landing like a Roman proconsul returning from Dacia. Seeking out the merchants who had invested in the pirogue, he described the savage attack by the Pawnee, the scalping of the crew, McKeag’s bravery and his own gunning down of the Indian miscreants. He displayed the matted hair, the blood, and bowed gracefully when they applauded his defense of their property. He turned his own bales over to Dr. Guisbert.

  He began to enjoy himself in Saint Louis. Without money Pasquinel had been withdrawn; with it he became a robust, singing drunk. The lonely discipline of the prairie vanished and he spent his profits lavishly, for the sheer love of spending. He financed vagrants for explorations they would never make, and paid off old debts with bonuses.

  After two months of this, he was broke. Sobering up, he applied to Dr. Guisbert for his next advance. The doctor had been expecting the call and did not flinch when Pasquinel said, “This year, twice as much. I have a partner now.”

  He and McKeag paddled slowly upstream with enough trade guns for Chief Rude Water to drive the Arapaho and Cheyenne clear off the plains. At the village McKeag saw the white men’s scalps and felt sick, but Pasquinel told him, “The coureur, he ends as a scalp. Vous peut-être, et moi aussi.”

  The winter of 1799 was the one they spent at Beaver Creek, meeting for the first time Lame Beaver of the Arapaho. It was that winter, too, when McKeag performed the impossible, learning a little Arapaho so that he could later serve as interpreter for them.

  They formed a strange pair, this short stocky Frenchman and this slim red-bearded Scot. Each was taciturn when on the prairie; neither pried into the affairs of the other. Without commenting on the fact, McKeag had now heard Pasquinel tell others that his wife was in Montreal, Detroit and New Orleans, and he began to suspect that there was none. It would never have occurred to him to ask outright, “Pasquinel, you married?” for that would be intrusive.

  When McKeag developed into a competent shot, Pasquinel taught him the one overriding secret of successful trading: “Keep your powder dry.”

  “How do you do that when the canoe upsets?”

  “Simple. You buy your powder, then you buy your lead for the bullets. With the lead you make a little keg ... very tight lid ... wax on top ... sealed in deerskin.”

  “Why not buy the keg?”

  “Ah! That’s the secret. You make the keg out of just enough lead to be melted into bullets for the powder. When the powder’s gone, the keg’s gone.”

  He taught McKeag how to use the two-ball mold into which the melted lead was poured to produce good bullets; he gave a further exhibition of his resourcefulness when the Scotsman broke the wooden stock on his rifle. To McKeag it looked as if his gun was ruined, for he could not fit it against his shoulder or take aim, but for Pasquinel the problem was simple.

  He fitted the three pieces of wood together, then steamed a chunk of buffalo hide until it was gelatinous. With a bone needle and elk sinew he sewed the skin as tightly as he could about the broken wood, but McKeag tried it and said, “Still wobbles.”

  “Attends!” Pasquinel said, and he placed the rifle with its pliable buffalo patch in winter sunlight, and as the moisture was drawn out, the skin tightened, becoming harder than wood, until the stock was stronger than when McKeag bought it.

  One sun-filled morning in May, as they were wandering together north of Rattlesnake Buttes looking for antelope, McKeag had a flash of insight: it occurred to him that he and Pasquinel were the freest men in the world. They were bound by nothing; they owed no one allegiance; they could move as they wished over an empire larger than France or Scotland; they slept where they willed, worked when they wished, and ate well from the land’s bounty.

  As he looked at the boundless horizon that lovely day he apprec
iated what freedom meant: no Highland laird before whom he must grab his forelock. Pasquinel was subservient to no Montreal banker. They were free men, utterly free.

  He was so moved by this discovery that he wanted to share it with Pasquinel. “We are free,” he said. And Pasquinel, looking to the east, replied, “They will be moving upon us soon.” And McKeag felt a shadow encroaching upon his freedom, and after that day he never felt quite so untrammeled.

  In the fall of 1799 Dr. Guisbert staked them for an exploratory trip up the North Platte. It was a difficult journey, past strange formations and along lonely stretches of near-desert. They saw congregations of rock which resembled buildings in some dream city. They saw needles, and passes between red cliffs, and long defiles through ghostly white mountains.

  “Impossible country,” McKeag said one evening as they camped among strange towers.

  “Il y a des castors,” Pasquinel replied.

  When they left the area of monuments they entered territory occupied by a tribe of Dakota, and the Indians sent braves to notify them that they could not continue their march. Pasquinel directed McKeag to say, “We shall continue. Trading beaver.”