Centennial

by James A. Michener

  McKeag also built the press, a most essential item, since the transport of two hundred pelts in loose form would have been impossible; they had to be compacted. Using stout logs, he constructed a rectangular box with vertical slits at each end. Into this box the sun-cured beaver skins were placed, and when the pile had risen, a long, heavy pole was dropped into the slits so that it rested on the pelts. McKeag now chained the thick end of the pole to stakes sunk in the ground; then he and Pasquinel, with loud exhortations and grunting, swung themselves upon the upraised free end, dragging it slowly down to earth. This compressed the skins into a tight and manageable bundle, but the contraption was more than utilitarian. It was great fun, McKeag thought, to be swinging aloft in the air with his partner, straining together in their joint enterprise and hearing him call, “Goddamnit, you skinny Scotchman! Pull your weight!” And both of them sweating and shouting and straining to make the free end of the pole touch ground. It was the best part of trapping.

  The press could accommodate about eighty pelts, and when these were hammered into a bale, McKeag enclosed them in moist deerskin while Pasquinel sewed the seams. Such a bale was worth more than six hundred dollars and weighed about a hundred pounds, hard as rock and watertight.

  They were good trappers, and with the help of the two boys they put together six bales that first year. They experienced no trouble with the Sioux; in fact, the only difficulty they encountered was with the Arapaho, and not because they were hostile, but because they were too friendly.

  In the winter of 1818 Pasquinel decided to hole up at Beaver Creek, and using such logs as he could find along the Platte, build a snug sod hut, with logs at each corner and framing the door. He judged correctly that this would be a cold winter, so he directed his sons to bring in branches to line one whole side of the hut. Things looked good until the Arapaho arrived.

  On a cold day in January, Chief Large Goose appeared at the door and said, “Cold. Cold. I stay here.”

  “Wait!” McKeag protested, trying to bar the door.

  “Warm. I stay here.”

  “You can’t do this!” McKeag bellowed. He sent Marcel to fetch his mother.

  “I stay,” Large Goose said, muscling his way inside. “I am her uncle.” Nothing McKeag could do dislodged this large Arapaho. The hut belonged to Clay Basket; but he was her uncle, so it belonged to him, too.

  When the other Arapaho saw how comfortable Large Goose was finding his niece’s hut, another uncle decided to join them: “I am Red Buffalo. Her uncle.” And he pitched his robes on the floor beside Marcel’s bed.

  McKeag was outraged. He spent some time arguing with the two chiefs, then informed Pasquinel, “Hell, they ain’t her uncles. They ain’t even cousins.” Vainly he tried to make them evacuate, but they pointed out that the winter would soon be over. They would be staying for only two or three months, and they persuaded another uncle to join them, which made the hut warmer than ever.

  The three chiefs showed the boys how Indians made tipis and tracked buffalo, and impressed upon them the gallant history of their grandfather, Lame Beaver, and his many coups. Jacques was nine that winter, Marcel seven, when the three chiefs made the boys deeply and indelibly Indian. The boys were breeds no more; they were Arapaho.

  Pasquinel saw the value of having the three uncles in the hut to instruct the boys, but he also saw that the voracious men were eating up his stores. They would see a jar of food and take it. Lead bullets were attractive, too, and they could not resist tobacco. If they knew a friend whose buffalo robe was frayed, they filched one of McKeag’s.

  “I cannot support the whole Arapaho nation,” Pasquinel cried one morning when he saw Red Buffalo going off with one of his blankets.

  “They are my uncles,” Clay Basket said.

  It got so that each autumn, when Pasquinel and McKeag passed through the Pawnee villages, they would ask first where the Arapaho were. “South Platte,” the Pawnee might answer.

  “Good. We’ll go to the North Platte,” Pasquinel would reply, and it was at that special spot where the Laramie joins the Platte that the unfortunate events of 1823 occurred.

  The hunting for beaver that year was not good. Trappers sent out by the English company had pretty well cleaned out the area and were paying Assiniboin to harass the Pasquinel camp. There were skirmishes, with Pasquinel forced to wound two of the Indians, and the winter was not easy. What made it worse, Jacques Pasquinel was now fourteen and his father naturally wanted to teach him the secrets of setting traps, and as they worked together McKeag felt that he was being superseded. When the trapping yielded few beaver he grew edgy, concluded that young Jacques was not competent and began making pointed observations to that effect.

  Scar-faced Jacques was a hot-tempered youth and did not propose to accept criticism from a man he despised. He wanted to fight, now, but his father dissuaded him; “McKeag is our best friend.”

  “I don’t want him for a friend,” Jacques snapped, and in late March when a whole line of traps yielded not one beaver, he waited for McKeag to say something.

  “Looks like the traps were set too high,” the Scotsman said.

  Jacques leaped for him, but Pasquinel held him back. McKeag interpreted this as support and added, “From now on I set the traps.”

  Jacques broke loose from his father and caught McKeag by the throat. “I set those traps right,” he said grimly, “and I’ll set them right tomorrow.” He threw McKeag backward, and the Scotsman would have reached for his knife had not Clay Basket intervened. Calming her son, she edged McKeag away.

  The fight was merely postponed. Next day when McKeag prepared to set the traps, Jacques contested his right to do so. McKeag pushed the boy aside, and Jacques whipped out his knife. McKeag anticipated this and was ready.

  Along the dark Laramie, flecked with cakes of ice, the boy attacked the man, silently but with deadly intent. Each knew how to handle a knife, how to trip and gouge, and each used this knowledge viciously. McKeag, as the older and more experienced man, should have had an advantage, but actually it was young Jacques who dominated, for he offset any immaturity with a hideous determination to kill this enemy.

  In the middle of the fight McKeag caught a fleeting glimpse of the boy’s face as he made a thrust, and the Scotsman was terrified by what he saw: the awful hatred, the violent rage of an alien face. He had wanted only to teach the boy a lesson; the boy wanted to kill him.

  Jacques made a clever feint to the left, threw McKeag off guard, then lunged at him, catching him solidly under the left armpit. Before the inexperienced youth could extract his knife—“Never drive it in to the hilt,” old-timers warned, “because it’s hard to pull out”—McKeag caught his arm, flipped him over and landed him on his back. With a savage leap the Scotsman landed atop the boy, his knife at his throat. He could have killed Jacques then; perhaps he should have. In later years he would often recall that moment and visualize himself driving the knife home.

  Instead, he rose, helped Jacques to his feet, then went into the hut. Even though he was bleeding, he packed his gear and prepared to leave.

  He was nine hundred miles from Saint Louis, without adequate provisions, but nothing could persuade him to stay. Pasquinel came running after him, crying, “McKeag! Are you insane?” But McKeag kept walking south.

  Clay Basket came too, begging him to wait, at least to let her tend his wound, and as she was pulling at him, with Pasquinel arguing, he stopped and cried harshly, “That boy will kill you all.” With that he vanished into the great prairie.

  Word passed through the west: “McKeag has left Pasquinel. He’s trapping on his own.” This seemed an unlikely story, but in June of that year Pasquinel arrived in Saint Louis with three bales of fur and McKeag was not to be seen. Later the Scotsman came downriver alone, thin and angry, with only one bale. When he threw the pelts down at the Bockweiss office, the foreman said, “Mr. Bockweiss wants to see you.” He did not wish to see the German then, and left. But Bockweiss tracked him t
o his mean shack by the river.

  “Can I speak to you, McKeag?” The Scotsman grunted. “Man to man?” Another grunt.

  Bockweiss sat down, on a box, cleared his throat, then launched into a discussion which obviously was not the one intended: “Did my men pay you for the pelts? Good. Do you need an advance?”

  “I keep my own money ... in the bank.”

  “I speak to you as a father,” Bockweiss said, dropping his voice. “McKeag, does Pasquinel have a wife in New Orleans?”

  “Ask him.”

  “I’m asking you. I’m pleading with you to help me. As a father.”

  “Never been to New Orleans,” McKeag said.

  “Has he ever told you ... You know him better than anyone else.”

  In flat, unemotional tones McKeag said, “I’ve heard him say ... different times ... a wife in Montreal, at Detroit, in New Orleans. Also Quebec, I think. He was joking.”

  Bockweiss rose and pressed his hands to his forehead. Then he sat down again and said, “You were at Fort Osage in 1816. When he stabbed that man.” Since word must have traveled to Saint Louis, McKeag nodded.

  “Did he have an Indian wife with him? Two sons?”

  McKeag pondered this for some time and decided that it was not his duty to report on his partner’s Indian family. Without replying, he rose to leave the shack, but Bockweiss caught him by the arm. “Please, I am a father trying to protect his daughter.” McKeag shook himself free, but Bockweiss barred the way. “I went to New Orleans,” he said brokenly. “I met the girl. They were married ... she had papers ... the children.”

  With unaccustomed force McKeag pushed free of the German. He could not bear to hear ugly stories about Pasquinel, not what he had done in New Orleans or in Saint Louis either. In many ways the Frenchman had treated him badly, and his behavior toward Clay Basket and Lise was deplorable. But Pasquinel was the only solid friend McKeag had ever known and he did not propose to listen to gossip about him, even though the partnership was ruptured. Stalking down to the river, he climbed into his canoe and disappeared.

  He became a forlorn man, prowling the prairies. He built himself canoes and kept his traps oiled. Where others failed to make a bale of pelts, he succeeded, and it was said of him, “He can smell castoreum better than most beavers.”

  But he was alone, cut off from the few people he cared about. Some years he did not even bother with Saint Louis. Collecting what pelts he could, he would build his own press and operate it by his own weight, and if some other trapper chanced by, he would sell his bales for a pittance, allowing the stranger to carry them to Saint Louis for large profit.

  The English company tried several times to engineer catastrophe for him, but he was trusted by Indians and they could not be paid to damage him. No trapper of that period was more accepted by the Pawnee and Ute, the Arapaho and Cheyenne, than this lanky, red-bearded Scotsman. He gave them honest counsel and helped them conduct their traffic with Americans. In 1825 he showed up in Santa Fe, translating for the Ute, but most often he wandered the land between the two Plattes, wintering sometimes at the Laramie, sometimes at Rattlesnake Buttes.

  In the deep winter of 1827, when snow lay fifteen feet in the passes, he spent three weeks in his lodge at the bottom of a considerable drift without once seeing the sky. Then for the first time in his life he thought seriously of death. For the past seven months be had not seen or spoken to a human being, and now in the darkness he did not dare even to speak aloud to himself, as if the sound of a human voice might shatter his universe.

  I can still trap for many years, he thought. I seek no trouble with the Indians. I doubt they will kill me, though they could. Perhaps some winter the snow will come extra deep. How it could be much deeper than this would be difficult to say; if a man could survive this winter he could survive anything.

  The snow will keep coming and the world will be used up, he thought. There will be no water, no food, no air. How much water there used to be in Scotland! His mind dwelled on this, then returned to the conceit: No air.

  Suddenly he felt closed in, as if the air were already consumed, leaving him to suffocate. He visualized himself at the bottom of a great drift, with the tunnel snowed shut, and a fear mightier than any he had ever known gripped him and he thrust himself into the tunnel and began digging furiously, throwing soft snow behind him as a dog does when digging underground. With superhuman effort, gasping for breath, close to suffocation he burst from his snowy prison to find that the storm had ceased and there was no cause for fear.

  Alone as few men have been alone, he stood at the entrance to his tunnel and surveyed his universe. The sun was brilliant. The sky held not a single cloud nor any bird. There were no trees, no tracks of animals, no sound. There was only snow and air, a cold, clear frosty air from horizon to horizon.

  Wait! To the west, at a great distance, emerged the shadowy outline of the profound mountain, and up its side with immortal persistence climbed the little stone beaver.

  “Aggghhh!” McKeag shouted in a meaningless, almost inhuman cry. “Little beaver!”

  In his lifetime he had slain so many beaver, had lugged so many pelts to Saint Louis, but there climbed his only friend in all the universe. Neither the sun nor the stars nor the rivers nor the trees were his friends, but that little stone animal was.

  All that wintry afternoon he watched the beaver, and as light began to fade and vast streaks of color shot out from the mountains, he wanted to delay the night, but the stars appeared and light vanished and the mountain was gone. He stood in the evening silence for some time, as the stars increased.

  It was a night of overwhelming beauty, so silent that the fall of a final snowflake would have been audible. He knew that if he wanted to sleep, he must climb back down the tunnel, for to do otherwise would mean death, but still he delayed. The majestic dome of night lowered over the world, and the silence deepened.

  With a great crash it ended. There was a cry, a violent cry torn from the soul: “Oh, God! I am so alone!” It was the voice of Alexander McKeag, forty-nine years old, a permanent exile from his home in Scotland, a voluntary recluse on the prairies.

  He heard the voice as if it came from another. He listened, refused to translate its meaning, and after a while climbed dutifully down the tunnel and into his cave of darkness.

  That spring the trapper who stopped by to pick up his pelts told him, “You ought to meet with us at the rendezvous.”

  “I don’t care for Saint Louis.”

  “No! Bear Lake, over by Snake River.”

  Another party of trappers passed his way in early summer, lugging their pelts westward instead of to Saint Louis. “Where you goin’ with your pelts?” McKeag asked.

  “The rendezvous,” the men said. “British buyers come up from Oregon.” They pushed westward.

  For some weeks McKeag pondered this curious information—a rendezvous, men from Oregon, Scotsmen perhaps. He wondered if he ought to join the trek to satisfy himself as to what it signified, but his decision was made by others.

  He was trudging home from an unsuccessful hunt for antelope when he saw approaching from the east an unprecedented number of men. They were riding horses and throwing such a clutter of dust that he could not accurately guess their number; there must have been at least two dozen, and they were not Indians. As they drew closer he saw that they were far more numerous than he had guessed. “At least fifty of ’em!” he shouted to no one. “And what are they draggin’?”

  Actually there were sixty-three white men, all from Saint Louis, on their way to the rendezvous. They led thirty-seven horses loaded with merchandise for trading, and that remarkable thing he had seen was a heavy brass cannon capable of throwing four-pound iron balls. It was seated on a stout two-wheeled cart drawn by two ugly mules.

  “What’s the cannon for?” he asked.

  “You come to the rendezvous and see,” they told him, and they were off, singing an army song, raising a great dust in the sunset and taking
a portion of his imagination with them.

  “I’m goin’!” he said aloud that night, and by dawn he was packed.

  He traveled north till he reached the North Platte, Holding to its southern bank, he headed west and in a sweeping arc dipped south across a pass in the mountains. That put him on the western slope of the Continental Divide; he was now on land controlled principally by England out of its headquarters in Oregon and by Mexico from its foothold in California. It was beautiful land, open and windswept, with prairies even more bleak than those McKeag knew on the eastern slope. The rivers were turbulent: Sweetwater, Green, Snake, Yellowstone, but the hills were rolling and much less severe than the Rockies. It was an amiable land and McKeag felt an easiness creep into his bones as he crossed it.

  Traveling alone, he covered ground swiftly and soon overtook a group of four mountain men who had been working the western slope of the Rockies north of Santa Fe. They were loud and violent, much given to drink and boastful of their mastery of the mountains. “How long you been here, Jake?” one asked another. “Three years,” the man replied. “And you?” they asked McKeag.