The True Account

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Two days later the captains departed. That night, True said, the Tetons planned to hold a council to determine what to do with “the meddling and warlike Martians,” and we had best be present so we could alert Lewis to their latest machinations.

  Buffalo Medicine spoke first. “These haughty fellows from Mars have forty guns, but they won’t trade a single one. I say we must turn them back so that they don’t arm our enemies up the river, the Mandans.”

  “Turning the Martians back is easily enough done,” the Partisan replied, “but they may just return with more of their outlandish ilk. My thought is to lay an ambuscade in the narrows of the river north of our village and kill them for their guns and warship. Then we’ll raid the Mandans and wipe them off the face of the earth once and for all.”

  The Partisan’s speech was greeted with much acclaim. Black Buffalo, however, was prepared with a countering argument. As for seizing the Martians’ guns and exterminating the Mandans, who then would their sons and grandsons fight? Which indeed they must do to prove who among them was bravest and most fit to be a chief. He conceded, however, that it had been most presumptuous for the Martians to designate him as first chief, since that was the business of the Tetons themselves; and, holding up the tricornered uniform hat Captain Lewis had presented to him, he declared that he now and forevermore renounced the title he had been given, and hurled the hat into the fire.

  There was a stunned pause, then a huge clamor, a swelling roar that went on and on. But now my uncle stepped forward with his long clay hemp-pipe, which he passed to each of the three chiefs in turn. When they were sufficiently primed, he distributed the one hundred hemp seeds he had earlier promised. After which he advised moderation in dealing with the Martians, stating that if the Sioux harmed them, far more would descend from the skies—more than the buffalo of the plains, and fiercer, too. Adding that, among other depredations, the Martians would no doubt confiscate all their hemp.

  Faced with this prospect, the chiefs reluctantly agreed to allow the captains and their party to continue. But confiding to me that the pacific effects of the hemp smoke were “as ephemeral as the sunny summer days that nurtured the plant to grow tall and green,” my uncle said we must leave to warn the captains that very night.

  When Little Warrior and I retired to her father’s tepee, I intended to tell her goodbye. In the event, coward that I was, I could not muster the nerve, and instead asked her in my very broken Sioux to tell my future, a skill that the Teton women especially prided themselves in. She indicated, by tapping her head and shaking it, that only a very foolish person wished to know his fate. To this I responded that I was interested in just one aspect of it. Drawing a large circle in the dirt by the fire, to represent the ocean, then making wavelike motions with my hand and pointing to myself, I made her understand that I wanted to know whether I would make it through to the Pacific. This Little Warrior seemed willing enough to divine. Fetching a small clay bowl of water, she looked several times from the reflection of the firelight in my eyes to the liquid. Then she sorrowfully nodded yes, I would see the ocean. Which, she suggested by brushlike motions with her hand, I would also paint.

  “Why so glum, then?” I asked, making teardrop tracks down her cheeks with my fingertips.

  Little Warrior continued to regard me sadly. At last, by pointing first at me, then at the bowl, and nodding, then pointing to herself, then the water, and shaking her head no, she indicated that while she saw me at the Pacific, I was there alone, not with her. Then, holding her arms up at a forty-five-degree angle—the Sioux sign for the world—and pointing to herself and again shaking her head, she suggested that soon she might not exist at all.

  Assuring her that such an unthinkable eventuality would make me the most miserable person alive, I snatched up the bowl of water and threw it outside, then took Little Warrior, now sobbing, into my arms and held her tight, saying the Sioux word for “no” over and over until at last her gasping breathing evened out and she fell asleep.

  I waited only until I was sure I would not wake her. Then I rose, fetched my horse, and stole off into the night to join my uncle, who was waiting with his mule just upriver from the village. I told myself that we must leave immediately if we meant to leave at all, yet I knew in my heart that this was only part of the truth. The other part was that I was running away from my dear friend Little Warrior Woman, who would have followed me to the end of the earth.

  25

  WITH TEARS STILL in my eyes, I rode with my uncle some miles out into the western prairie before we turned north on a shaley ridge that would not hold tracks, figuring that we would cut back to the Missouri after we had shaken any pursuers. By midmorning, however, we could see a thick column of dust rising into the sky no more than ten miles downriver. “Aha,” said the private. “Even as the Greeks pursued Paris after the rape of Helen, the Sioux pursue us, Ti. Launching not a thousand ships but a thousand armed riders. The race is on!”

  “I’d almost rather have the Greeks and their ships after me, uncle.”

  “Aye. For that race would make us famous. This may get us scalped.” My uncle chuckled and nodded and seemed to take considerable satisfaction in contemplating this terrifying notion.

  We urged our mounts forward at a canter; but the tough little ponies of the Tetons could run all day without tiring, and by late morning the dust cloud was much closer. Short of a miracle, our pursuers would overtake us before nightfall.

  What to do? While my uncle was even now preparing to take his customary noon observations, I feared that if we could not hit upon some immediate expediency we would be back in the hands of the Sioux within hours.

  For his meridian calculations, True selected a level field not far from the river, which had at some time in the past year been under cultivation. Out came his Dutch clock and other instruments, and try though I might, I could not dissuade him from taking our position. While he occupied himself in this way, I passed the time by exploring the nearby prairie. Here and there dry brown cornstalks jutted up, with squash vines running between them. The plants were shorter than ours at home, no more than three feet high. The few ears I found were short as well, only four or five inches long, with dark purple kernels.

  But if the corn was strange, just over a low knoll I discovered something stranger still—a completely abandoned city of earthen houses. Excitedly, I called for my uncle, now finished with his astronomical shoot, which placed us just east of Capetown. He wondered if his astrolabe had played him false and we had stumbled instead on the ruins of Old Carthage. With the Sioux bearing down upon us, I did not think we had much leisure to pursue this speculation, but he acted as if we were on an archaeological holiday. Leaving our mounts by a great cairn of colorful river stones, we walked through the streets between the silent houses. Inside many of these earth dwellings, of which there were at least three hundred, we found, to our horror, the remains of entire families. Their desiccated faces had been painted white—the universal custom, in Louisiana, when a tribe was ravaged by smallpox.

  This dreadful discovery gave my uncle an idea. Our family having been among the first in Vermont to be inoculated against smallpox, which my uncle had feared we might otherwise contract on our many “voyages and expeditions,” we were not concerned that we might fall prey to the plague ourselves. Therefore he declared that we would paint each other’s faces and hands white and, securing our mounts inside one of the dwellings, hide up on the roof under a buffalo robe until the Sioux arrived. This we accordingly did, and none too soon, for we had no sooner concealed ourselves on the roof than the Indians appeared.

  After going to the river to collect stones, the Tetons—of whom there were at least four hundred—rode up to the memorial cairn at the edge of the village. Black Buffalo, Buffalo Medicine, and the Partisan leaped off their horses. Like their warriors, the three chiefs were painted in red and black stripes from their faces down over their necks and chests. When they were within a few paces of the cairn and ready to
deposit their stones, my uncle sat up suddenly, whispering to me to do the same, and pointed a long white recriminating finger straight at the Indians. Who, to my amazement, fell back in dismay, with many shrieks and cries of lamentation.

  The courageous Black Buffalo made a short rallying speech, the gist of which seemed to be that the war party should lay siege to the village from a safe distance and wait for us to come out, for we could not possibly be dead from the pox yet, and this must be some ruse. But as brave as these people were, so strong in their minds was the evil aura of the stricken village that they were already riding off in disarray. Finally, a man wearing a wolf mask and painted as black as night rode to the cairn and shook his lance at us. Lifting his head to the heavens, the blackened warrior let out a war cry more bloodthirsty than all the wolves of Louisiana could muster. He then began to ride around the abandoned village, shaking his lance and howling at the top of his lungs. Finally Black Buffalo and two other men returned and, though he resisted furiously, bore the black warrior off with them to the south.

  My uncle and I remained in the village until we were certain that the Indians would not return, then struck out north toward the City of the Mandans. But I was unable to shake off the feeling that we had not seen the last of the Teton Sioux, and that our next encounter with them would not turn out so fortunately.

  WITH THE MANDANS

  26

  “I RATHER MISDOUBT, TI,” said my uncle, “that either of us could have predicted that we would make our entrance into the Mandan City thusly.”

  “Why, no, sir. I think we could not have.”

  “In fact,” he continued, “I think it very safe to say that not the grim patriarchs of old, not Prophet Elijah himself, nor even the prescient oracle at Delphi, could have forecast how we would come into the City of the Mandans.”

  Again I concurred, for we were being conveyed toward that city not on the shoulders of heralds, nor on an empurpled buffalo robe, but rather clapped up in a narrow cage of cottonwood poles. A Hidatsa raiding party had crept up to our campsite several nights before, swooped down upon us while we were asleep, and made us their prisoners.

  The Hidatsas, who lived just west of the Mandans, at the place where the River of Flint Knives emptied into the Missouri, had been on a summer-long raid to the Rocky Mountains under the leadership of their great fighting chief, Blue Moon. In addition to us and our cage, which was being pulled along on a travois by Bucephalus and Ethan Allen, the raiding party was bringing back several dozen captured Shoshone and Arapaho slaves. Also, to exhibit at the great Mandan harvest fair, they had in cages a mountain lion with a long, switching tail, a wild sheep with massive curling horns, and a bearded wild goat—not to mention Blue Moon’s two closest comrades, a full-grown grizzled bear he had raised from a cub and a war eagle with brilliant white and black plumage, which rode alternately on the shaggy back of the bear and on Blue Moon’s shoulder.

  Though my uncle had learned much of the Hidatsa language during the three days and nights that we had been kept captive in this strange circus caravan, he had not been able to discover what our captors intended to do with us. But as we approached the great Indian city on the bluffs above the Missouri, with the returning raiders shouting and singing, and people running out to see the spoils and wonders brought back from the mountains, he said, “Well, Ti, the little inconvenience of our temporary imprisonment notwithstanding, we have beaten Captain Lewis’s party to the Mandans. Now, let us see who spies their city first. We will make a little game of it to pass the time, knowing that we have won the first half of the race with Lewis hands down.”

  “I offer you my greatest felicitations, sir,” I said through rattling teeth. “But isn’t our victory in the race rather like that of King Pyrrhus? Who, as you taught me when I was very young, defeated the Roman legions but suffered such heavy losses that his triumph was in name only?”

  “Lewis will ransom us when he arrives, Ti. I have no doubt of that. It would look mean and low of him not to, you know, after losing the first half of the race to us. I acknowledge that being dragged into the city in a cottonwood-pole cage is not exactly the arrival I had in mind. But set your mind at rest. Even if we are not ransomed, I have a proposal to place before Blue Moon that will win our freedom and ensure the kindest reception for us with both the Hidatsas and Mandans for the entire winter. Aha! There’s the city ahead. I spied it first. You must get up early in the morning to steal a day’s march on me.”

  “Uncle, you seem to relish our situation.”

  “Say what you will, Ti, it is an interesting way to travel through the countryside.”

  The trade fair of the Mandans was held on a plain adjacent to the principal town of the metropolis. Here on the prairie overlooking the river, several thousand Indians had gathered for the annual fall market of the upper Missouri. As we were hauled into the center of the fairgrounds along with the catamount, the goat, the sheep, and the other captives, Indians from many tribes pointed and laughed at us. “Sit tight, Ti,” my uncle said, as if I had a choice. “Soon we’ll be as free as the birds of the air.

  “Hail to Private True Teague Kinneson,” he roared out at the top of his lungs. “The winner of the first half of the great race to the Pacific greets you.”

  The people, both the Mandans and their guests, crowded around the cage, and poked and prodded us in the most familiar manner. Some of the warriors fingered my long, light-colored hair and commented to each other in a very unsettling manner. Others seemed to be trying to purchase us.

  “Blue Moon,” cried my uncle in Hidatsa, or something approximating it. “This is a very shabby way to treat an American soldier who stood at the side of Ethan Allen at the fall of Fort Ticonderoga. I will fight fifty of your greatest warriors, including you and your bear, for our freedom.”

  “Do you know that with a single swipe this bear of mine can break the neck of a full-grown charging buffalo?” Blue Moon inquired.

  “No doubt,” said my uncle. “But without wounding you or the good bear or your fifty warriors with arrow, bullet, or blade and without doing lasting harm to any of you, I can rout you all from the field of battle.”

  At this bold declaration, Blue Moon laughed heartily. Then he spoke to his bear, which also appeared to laugh, as did his war eagle. Nonetheless, the Hidatsa chief could not turn down my uncle’s challenge, which had been made very publicly; and the battle was scheduled to take place the following morning at sunrise on the Mandans’ ball-playing field adjacent to the fairgrounds. In the meantime, my uncle asked that we be released from the cage on our word of honor that we would not try to escape. His request was granted, and he immediately began to prepare for the next day’s engagement.

  From a Mandan woman he bought a bison bladder as large as my mother’s five-gallon beanpot and a square of buffalo hide with the hair still attached. Along the river he collected some tall bulrushes, and nearby he cut six cottonwood saplings two to three inches in diameter. From a Cheyenne trader he purchased a tanned antelope skin as tough as leather.

  The Indians showed great interest in my uncle, with his gleaming copper head plate and chain mail and tall boots and courtly mannerisms. He bowed chivalrously to all the women and offered his hand in a forthright manly fashion to the warriors (who mimicked his gestures exactly, to much laughter), and entertained the children in a hundred little amusing ways, now quacking like a duck, now strutting like a tom-turkey in his belled stocking cap. Everyone was curious about his invention-in-progress, which looked like a featherless dead goose with several headless necks. When I inquired what it might be, he bade me wait and see—he believed I would be as surprised as the Indians by his ingenuity.

  At dawn the next morning, at one end of the ball-playing field, my uncle positioned himself on Ethan Allen like a knight of yore preparing to enter the lists. Just at sunrise, with his invention in his arms, he commenced down the field at a slow and stately pace. At the opposite end, Blue Moon, on his warhorse, proceeded toward him at
a walk, accompanied by fifty warriors on one flank and the grizzled bear on the other, with the eagle hovering about a hundred feet overhead, its white plumage sparkling in the sunrise. I attended on Bucephalus a few paces behind True, more terrified than I had ever been in my life, even during our encounters with the murderous Harpe brothers and the war party of the Teton Sioux.

  Blue Moon nocked an arrow. “That good chokecherry shaft has my name on it, Ti,” my uncle observed. “But never fear. We will live to use it as a toothpick. See the troops arrayed against us like the Persian cavalry facing Alexander!”

  With this encouraging observation, he affixed the large end of his tin ear trumpet to his invention, raised the small end of the trumpet to his lips, and gave a long blast, at the same time compressing the buffalo bladder with a powerful squeeze and filling the prairie for miles around with the most hideous screeching squeal ever produced by the breath of mortal man. Rising in crescendo to an unbearable pitch, the screeling echoed and re-echoed off the sides of the slopes above the field, the waves of sound emanating outward met by the waves bouncing back, creating an unbearable field of pure horrible NOISE. Blue Moon and his men and all of the spectators dropped whatever they were holding and clasped their hands over their ears, so that the entire assemblage of Indians looked like my poor father, replicated a thousand times.

  I had earlier, at my uncle’s insistence, stuffed my own ears, and those of Bucephalus, with soft dried grass, after the fashion of Odysseus’s men stopping their ears with wool so that only he would hear the Sirens’ seductive strains. Even so, Bucephalus reared. The charging bear whirled twice, like a dog chasing its tail, and shot off toward the river. The eagle pulled out of its dive and veered away. But my uncle, on his deaf mule, continued into the very teeth of his enemies, blowing and squeezing and squeezing and blowing upon his homemade bagpipe for all he was worth.