The True Account

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “‘Now mother, O mother, go dig my grave, go dig it deep and narrow,’” crooned my uncle. “‘Sweet William died for me today, I will die for him tomorrow.’”

  “Uncle, will not your singing frighten away every Indian within ten miles?”

  “Hardly, Ti. The native peoples of Louisiana will soon be singing ‘Barbrie Allen’ with me. The dulcet strains of my ballads will call them nigh, as the Sirens did Greek sailors.”

  Sometimes my uncle was joined in his singing by field larks with flashy yellow and black cravats, or the softly melodious bluebird, or the twittering black-capped bobolink. Every copse on the great grassy terrace above the river held feeding deer, flocking turkeys, or black bears that sallied forth to graze on the first ripe strawberries, lifting their heads to watch us pass, then resuming their feeding unconcerned. The backwaters of the river were loud with ducks and teeming with fish. Tight-sitting snipe went up from under my horse’s feet, hooting wildly as they traced out their intricate high dance against the dawn and twilight skies. The meadows were ablaze with many-colored wildflowers unknown to us New Englanders.

  But on windless days the mosquitoes rose out of the tall grass by the millions; and though we besmeared ourselves with mud and tallow and bear grease, they assailed us all day and all night as well, insinuating themselves, along with their yet more numerous cousins, the stinging midges, into every opening in our clothing and every crease of our exposed skin—between our fingers, in the lines at the corners of our eyes and mouths, where the hair left off on our necks. My uncle did valiant battle with them, swatting right and left and crying, “Now the Sioux and Blackfeet show their true colors, Ti. Down with them. Crush them. We’ll plow salt into their fields as the Romans did those of old Carthage.” To no avail. All we could do was keep to the high ground, where the wind was most apt to blow. Evenings we built smudgy fires of sodden driftwood culled from the riverbank and crept as near to the smoke as we could get, coughing like a fine pair of consumptives. Soon our clothes and skin alike were aired like a Vermont ham.

  Sometimes, when the endless rolling prairie grew tedious after we had been riding most of the day, we would pass the time by posing to each other the old riddles my uncle had taught me when I was small. “A stick in his hand, a stone in his throat, answer this riddle and I’ll give you a groat,” I’d call out.

  Then my uncle would frown and ponder and knit his white brows until, abruptly, he would smite his copper crown with his hand and cry, “A cherry! Ha ha, Ti. You must get up early in the morning to get one past me.”

  After which he would think for a few moments, then smile slyly as though this time he would stump me once and for all, and say, “Little Nancy Ettycoat wears a white petticoat and has a red nose; the longer she stands, the shorter she grows.”

  “I can’t imagine,” I would say, after pretending to rack my brain. “You have me there, uncle. You have riddled me.”

  “A candle,” he would cry, and then I would smite my head as though I should have known the answer all along—as indeed I had.

  I was amazed by the flatness of the country. To a Vermont farm boy brought up in a land so tilted that it was said that the cows’ legs were a foot shorter on one side from grazing steep hillsides all day, the endless prairie was dizzying; and sometimes we both felt lost under the ever-widening sky. “Here we are, Ti,” my uncle would suddenly cry out, two or three times a day, with a jingle of his bell. To which I would always reply, “Here we are, sir.”

  When my head started to spin from the vastness of our surroundings, I found it best to fix my attention on some closer feature of the landscape or on my unchanging uncle, riding along with the sunshine flashing off his mail and trolling his old ballads. But exactly where we were, and exactly why, and exactly what sort of place this Louisiana might be, other than a very flat one, I could not say.

  I missed my father and mother, especially at night. Then we would get out our spyglass and gaze upward into the heavens until we felt like the only human beings in the universe, and my uncle would jingle the bell on his cap all over again to convince himself of his own existence.

  I don’t know how a person knows when he’s being watched. He does, though. Just as he knows when he comes to a bad place in the woods where a killing or some other terrible thing has taken place. About ten o’clock one morning, we both felt it and knew someone was watching us from nearby. “We’re about to see your Indians, Ti,” my uncle told me. “Limber up your paintbrush.”

  At the time we were riding through some tall cottonwoods close to the river. As we reemerged onto the open prairie, we sighted no one, and by noon we had decided that whoever it was had gone on about their business. But the next morning we spotted three young men on horses across the river on a bluff where no one at all had been a moment earlier. They were armed with bows and arrows, and their long hair was dyed bright carmine, with one side of their faces painted black, the other white.

  Now, for reasons known only to himself, my uncle had long held the conviction that while our eastern Indians had probably originated from a band of nomadic hunters from the far north, western Indians might well have come from China. Therefore he called out loudly, in what he assured me was good Cantonese, “We greet your celestial personages with much respect and bring the felicitations of the Supreme Khan of America, Thomas Jefferson. We are travelers come to see your Great Wall from Vermont, where we have stone walls ourselves. And you must not think yours superior to ours, though I’m sure it’s very sturdy.”

  This salutation, uttered in a high, fast singsong, seemed to have no effect upon the Indians other than, after a minute, to cause them to laugh. Whereupon my vexed uncle said he was surprised that so polite a people as the Orientals had not taught their youth better manners, and for all he cared the three newcomers could “go straight back to China in a handbasket.”

  As we rode on, my uncle muttered to himself about the sad state to which the young had sunk the world over, while the Indians kept pace with us along the opposite side of the river. From their gaudy appearance, I believed they were out looking for enemies or for horses to steal, but I was not greatly alarmed so long as the Missouri lay between us. After a while they went away. But the following morning the trio appeared again, this time on our side of the river.

  My uncle was now determined to force an audience with our admirers and put an end to this puss-and-mouse game. Accordingly, we stopped on the edge of the ever-present cottonwoods along the river, where he instructed me to paint his face black and white, which I must say gave him a very fearsome aspect. But though we remained there for above two hours, the Indians never came forward and after that we saw them no more.

  Two days later we nooned it at the mouth of the Kansas River. As we ate our meat, we noticed many large white feathers drifting down the current. At first my uncle was greatly alarmed, supposing that some young Icarus of Louisiana, attempting flight with wings fashioned from feathers and wax, had flown too near the sun, which had melted the wax and precipitated him to his death somewhere up the river. I assured him that this could not be the case, since the river was choked with feathers, far too many to have come from one flying boy. Instantly he got out his “Chart of the Interior of North America” and boldly crossed out the word “Kansas,” substituting Fluvius Pennae, or “River of Feathers.” But where was all this plumage coming from? Determined to solve the puzzle, my uncle said that we would adventure up along the tributary for a certain distance and see what we could discover.

  We had not gone far before we came to a large island covered with what I first mistook for snow. How this could possibly be I had no idea—my uncle feared it was a mirage thrown up by some giant or wizard to confuse us. But as we came closer we saw that the island, about half a mile long and a third wide, was covered with pelicans. The birds—so numerous that many had been crowded off into the water—were molting, and the white feathers choking the river were theirs.

  More interesting still, just off the l
ower tip of the island, in a very primitive-appearing dugout canoe on a sandbar buried deep in feathers, sat a tiny, angry-looking man wearing nothing but a nightshirt. “Heyday, what have we here, Ti?” cried my uncle. Then, to the stranger, “Private True Teague Kinneson, at your service, sir.”

  “It’s you, is it?” the nightshirted man called out in a querulous voice. “Throw me a rope and tow me off this accursed bar, and for God’s sake be quick about it. I’ve been befeathered here for three days and two nights. The River Missouri, you said. Go west by the River Missouri, John Ledyard, if you wish to cross the continent. Well, gentlemen, thank you for the excellent advice. The River Missouri, I must inform you, is half a mile wide and an inch deep and too thick to drink and too thin to plow and I’ve gone so far wrong that I don’t know if I’ll ever go right again. What in the deuce held you up? Do you have any rum?”

  “Jehovah forbid, no, John Ledyard,” my uncle replied. “Rum has gotten me into trouble enough before now. We have no strong spirits, but something else that’s far better for you. I mean, of course, hemp. Here”—throwing him a rope, which the angry little voyageur affixed to a spike in the bow of the canoe—“we’ll pull you ashore.”

  “Uncle,” I whispered. “Who does he think we are? And who is he?”

  “I don’t know who he thinks we are, Ti, but I know I’ve heard his name,” my uncle said. “I just can’t recollect where.”

  I had no notion what to make of this bad-tempered mannikin. Once we got him safely to shore and boiled up some tea and offered him half a pipeful of hemp, he asked in the same vexed voice if we would like to hear his story. We said yes, very much; so, crossing his legs like a tailor and puffing away like a miniature chimney, John Ledyard announced that he was a Connecticut man, born and bred, and the first American to set foot in the Oregon Country, when he was there in ’76 with Captain Cook.

  My uncle lifted his stocking cap and smote his copper crown. “I was certain that I knew your name, sir. You went round the world with James Cook on his first circumnavigation.”

  “I did,” John Ledyard said, “stopping in Oregon en route.”

  Talking on at a great rate of speed, Ledyard explained that he had met with Thomas Jefferson when Jefferson was ambassador to France, and convinced him that he could travel by foot through Siberia, cross the Bering Sea on a Russian fur-trading vessel, then hike across North America west to east (much as my uncle believed we had done). “But I am nothing if not misfortune’s stepchild,” he went on, explaining that in Siberia he had been chased by a tiger, nearly trampled by a mammoth, impressed by a local warlord into a salt mine, taken into bondage by a fierce princess directly descended from Attila, and finally imprisoned by Queen Catherine the Great and then expelled from the country.

  “But wait,” cried my uncle. “Didn’t you next undertake to journey to Africa, with the design of discovering the source of the Niger River?”

  “Of course,” Ledyard snapped. “Where else would I go?”

  “But I thought you died along the way, in Cairo,” my uncle exclaimed, and he began to tremble quite violently for fear that he was holding conversation with a ghost.

  “No, no, that was a base, false rumor bruited about by my enemies, and mere wishful thinking. Though I was set upon by lions and hippopotami and a troop of pecking ibises, and finally I had to turn back in the face of an army of one hundred thousand Nigers armed to the teeth. But none of that was anything to what I’ve encountered here on this infernal Missouri River.”

  “This is the Kansas River, sir,” I interjected. “It branched a short way back.”

  “Or the Fluvius Pennae,” my uncle added. “I believe that is the name that will stick. It is the more poetic.”

  “Poetic?” cried Ledyard. “You call this waterway to Hell poetic? Fluvius Hades you might better call it. Let me tell you what’s happened to me since I took the fork a month ago—evidently the wrong fork, if what you say is so. I have been robbed and stripped of all but my nightshirt by Missouri Indians, beaten with willow sticks by Kansas women, jeered at by the Omaha, stung in every pore of my body by each kind of vicious bug in Louisiana, bitten on the nose by a water viper, and pelted with Osage oranges by some boys belonging to that tribe—I mean the Osage. I was chased by the Yankton Sioux for twenty miles, and finally took refuge in a backwater inside a beaver lodge, and though I evaded the Sioux, a monstrous buck beaver flung mud at me and flailed me so brutally with his great tail that I still have the bruises to show for it. Finally, I found myself—I believe for the first time in the annals of exploration—befeathered. With Cook I was becalmed many a time; and often bemused by the marvels we saw; and once or twice nearly beheaded; but never befeathered. I am on my way back to St. Louis, gentlemen. Not to retreat. I never retreat. But to sail to New Orleans and thence Brazil and then round the Cape and up to the mouth of the Columbia on the first vessel going that way.”

  “Then for Jehovah’s sake, allow us to help you,” said my uncle. “We have extra clothing, and some cornmeal and meat, and a blanket—for the prairie nights are cold.”

  I voiced a wish to paint John Ledyard in his dugout, with the molting pelicans on the island in the background, and he consented. But in the late afternoon he set off down the river, with neither thanks for our assistance nor any farewell, paddling hard to get to New Orleans and Brazil.

  I found Ledyard’s story most foreboding and wished again that we, too, were posting back to St. Louis and safety. But as he passed out of sight, my uncle said, “I don’t know, Ti, when I’ve met a fellow who pleased me more. John Ledyard is undaunted. Mark my words. That brave man will be heard from. For he has a vision and he cleaves to it. I should be proud to be beaten to the Pacific by an expeditionary of his mettle. God bless him. God bless all the John Ledyards in the world!”

  “Amen,” I said, thinking that they would need it, and we would, too. And for good measure I said again, “Amen.”

  19

  THE FOLLOWING DAWN I awoke to discover Bucephalus gone. I whistled like a jaybird—his signal to come—to no avail. Though my uncle did not seem unsettled, my panic grew as the daylight strengthened. To be stranded horseless in this country would surely throw us upon the mercies of the local Indians, a prospect I found very alarming after hearing how John Ledyard had fared at their hands.

  Nothing else was missing, only Bucephalus. But once more I felt that we were being watched closely. My uncle thought the same, and after a few moments of reflection, came up with an idea for recovering my mount and meeting our first Indians into the bargain. I thought his plan, as he explained it, improbable at best. But in the absence of any better strategy it seemed worth trying.

  In what I hoped would appear to be an unhurried manner, I set up my easel on the prairie about one hundred paces from our camp and the same distance from the cottonwoods along the river. Then, while my uncle went a-fishing as if we had no concerns in the world, I began to paint. In the background I painted the river and the bluffs opposite, some trees, a pelican flying overhead, and our camp, leaving a large space in the center of the canvas blank. Presently an Indian rode out from the trees on a black and white pony. After watching me intently for a time, he began to dash back and forth along the edge of the cottonwoods, approaching a few feet closer with each sprint. I continued to fill in the background and foreground of the painting, which he could not yet discern from his angle.

  As he drew closer, I was surprised to see that he was just a boy, one or two years younger than myself. He was dressed in buckskins much like my own, only with a fringe of yellow, white, and red quillwork on his leggings. His face was painted somewhat differently from those of the Indians who had followed us earlier, with red predominating on his forehead, upper cheeks, and nose, then black below to his chin. Perceiving that I was unperturbed by his darting feints, which were sometimes accompanied by a howl, he suddenly leaped off his running horse by bringing one leg and foot forward, vaulting over the animal’s mane, and alighting perfec
tly balanced, strung bow in hand. As he sidled closer, nocking an arrow, I continued my work—though my heart was in my throat—now painting my young friend in the central space I’d reserved. He advanced one step at a time, edging around to come at me from downwind, as if stalking a deer or some other keen-nosed quarry. This very much amused me, though I was constantly aware of the arrow fitted to the string of his bow, which I painted at the ready in his hands, so that the boy appeared to be about to loose his barb directly at the viewer of the picture.

  When I was done I casually boxed up my paints and returned to our camp, leaving the picture on the easel. As I walked away with my back to the Indian, the hair on my neck prickled; it would have been but a moment’s work for him to send his long-shafted arrow straight through my heart. But when I reached the camp I could see him, from the tail of my eye, approaching not me but the easel, creeping closer and closer, and still taking great care to keep downwind of it.

  I cut a willow sapling about eight feet long, attached a fish line and hook, and repaired to the nearby backwater where my uncle was angling. In the meantime, the Indian boy peeked around the corner of the easel and saw his portrait. Letting out a yelp, he jumped back. At this I laughed aloud, causing him to stamp his foot in anger. He then lifted his bow, pulled the nocked arrow to his shoulder, and approached the picture again, no doubt believing that he was taking his life in his hands. This time, after regarding his portrait for a few moments, he dropped his bow to the ground. Both his hands shot up to his mouth. Snatching up the bow again, he compared it to that in the painting. He appeared to count the colored bands of porcupine quills on the figure’s leggings, then on his own, matching color to color. Again he was overcome by wonderment, covering his eyes with his hands and reeling. Finally he touched the canvas, smelled the wet paint on his fingertip, and brought it to his tongue.