Into the Savage Country

by Shannon Burke

  She does not want your companionship, I thought. Most likely she never did, and she certainly does not now. She is in mourning. Leave her to it.

  In my free time I began to pore over maps of the west and my mind returned to the fur country. I made preparations for joining a brigade in the spring.

  Mid-fall now, and the nights were cool and in the morning, if it was clear, there was mist over the river. Several fully laden keel-boats passed the settlement on the way to St. Louis and every afternoon the men would gather in front of Plochman’s and discuss the encroaching of the Brits and the diminishing of fur-bearing creatures of all sorts, along with the various American trapping companies that were springing up like mushrooms in St. Louis. Often during these discussions Alene hurried past, giving a slight wave or nod, but never stopping to talk. Plochman would whisper that her inheritance had been contested by Bailey’s family and that they vowed she’d receive nothing, or he’d inform us that all she bought was on credit, but despite her poverty she would not take charity. Smitts and Plochman and their wives consulted on various schemes, wondering how to help her, and one day that fall an idea presented itself to me.

  Fort Burnham had no official trade with the natives like the Hudson’s Bay Company had at Fort Vancouver and Flathead Post. Unlike the British, the American government, in a misguided effort to avoid conflict with the natives, discouraged all trade of any sort. This stricture was foolish and shortsighted, but it meant there was much opportunity for an individual in buying and selling trinkets and pelts. Many of the soldiers tried their hand at the trade but they were handicapped by not knowing a good pelt when they saw one and not having spent enough time with the natives to understand their customs. With the natives you had to be patient, smoking the pipe and spending a whole day bartering to get what you desired. Also, because of the amount of time needed to negotiate with the natives, the general discouraged the soldiers from making a side income. I knew a good pelt when I saw one, I knew the basics of tanning, and I had learned a great deal about the natives in my half season on the march. All that was to my advantage. So that fall I took up bartering for pelts and made nearly as much as I’d have made in the mountains, at a tenth of the risk and a twentieth of the effort.

  All through that fall Mandan and Sioux natives would show up at my lodging in twos or threes, bare-chested and tossing furs down with disdain, demanding powder or balls or vermillion. These natives I traded with were not accustomed to our manner of exchange and did not know what was expected of them, and the pelts were often of the worst quality and close to unusable, though they’d act as if they’d just brought me a king’s ransom. There was always much bickering about how much they’d receive and accusations that I favored Americans over the natives. I did not. At least, I think I did not. Often the natives did not care for their furs in the proper manner. They took beaver who were too young or in summer when the furs were thin, or acquired the furs at the proper time but left them out in the elements and ruined them, or scraped them too thin or patched holes incorrectly. I advised the various natives I traded with on what they could do to improve their rate of return, and a few times got Alene to speak with them, as she was known as a medicine woman among them. I thought that might have some impact on them but it did not. They’d listen silently, haughtily, and go on treating the pelts carelessly. This is not really part of my story but it seems my difficulty with this group of Mandan and Sioux was indicative of relations between the natives and the Americans as a whole. The natives took on some of the trappings of our civilization, covetous of our knives and guns and horses, but they never really took on our system of trade enough to use it to their advantage. They participated in the trade without forethought, always leached by it, never benefiting.

  The fall passed. The beaver and deer pelts piled up in my room until I had somewhere between sixty and eighty pelts. That would be an enormous number of pelts for one man a few years later, but at that time I thought I’d have gathered a far greater number out on the trail, though I’m not sure this is true.

  Six weeks had passed since that slap on the bluff. The first snow had fallen and melted, and a few mornings afterward there was a hard frost. The dawn was very cold and very still. Every straw-colored blade of grass glistened, white with frost. I loaded the deerskins on my pack horse and led it out to Alene’s sod cottage beyond the infirmary. It was half dwelling and half hole in the earth, with the wind howling through visible gaps in the roof and a single window of untreated deerskin that let in a weak light. Hardly a lodging for a lady.

  She must have heard my horse, and not wanting to invite me inside, came out with a buffalo robe wrapped around her shoulders. I loosened the straps on my pack horse and the bound wrapping fell to the ground.

  “Native pelts,” I said. “Deerskin. Can you tan them? I’ll pay you. And if you can use them to make shirts or leggins you could sell the finished product to the soldiers and we could split the profits.”

  “I have no paste,” she said.

  “I have arranged with the Sioux scouts to bring the brain paste, if you’ll agree to tan them, at the normal price, with the normal quality. I have found no tanner who can preserve the hides as you did in St. Louis.”

  This was not an exaggeration and she knew it. I could see her making various mental calculations.

  “And the willows?” she said, half unconsciously.

  I had not thought of that.

  “I can cut willows in the marshes and be back by evening.”

  “At what price?”

  I thought of saying at no price and then saw her ragged clothes and the buffalo robe flapping at the door and her proud manner.

  “Five percent discount.”

  She nodded and said, “Yes. I’ll try. If I can acquire the paste.” And then, after a moment. “Thank you.”

  “I will thank you if the quality is as before,” I said, and heaved the pack and walked it through the low door and into a dirt-floored lodge where I saw bits of straw on the floor and a few chickens pecking about. There was a straw mattress in the corner and a rough-hewn table and a single candle with the drippings hardened on the round, ridged lid of a tin. I dropped the pelts near a broken wagon wheel that leaned against the wall and met her outside.

  “A soldier named Gadaira will bring the materials tomorrow.”

  “I will start as soon as he arrives,” she said faintly.

  I rode straight from her lodgings down to the river to cut the willows. I made a drag like the natives did with two poles and buffalo hide strung between them and the willow saplings thrown on top bound with deerskin. I hauled the willows up from the river and dumped them in front of her cottage and did not go in to say hello and did not stop by for all that week other than to accompany Gadaira when he delivered a capped barrel that had held powder, heavy now with buffalo-brain mash gathered by one of the wives of a Sioux employed as a scout by the general. Alene wanted the barrel not at her lodging but at the infirmary, as she would do much of the work there.

  I rolled the barrel through the front room and into the sunny courtyard as she’d directed and saw the willow hoops were already stretched with pelts, and the children, eager to help her, were setting the furs in the sun to dry after the soaking.

  Two weeks later I came back and the pelts were stacked and wrapped and somehow compressed. The pelts, which had been stiff and rigid, were now pliable and scraped thin and smoked so they would not return to rawhide after they got wet. I paid her what she asked and no more and with no swaggering, though I admit, this was more by calculation than by lack of feeling. When I held the coins out she snatched them up and stashed them in a deerskin pouch around her neck.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Thank you for doubling the worth of my pelts,” I said.

  Over the next week I brought her more skins and there was the usual conversation of commerce: payments, numbers of pelts, and supplies.

  The next week I ventured to loan her a book. I offered Th
e Scottish Chiefs, but she did not seem to think much of Porter.

  “Do you have any Richardson? Radcliffe?” she asked.

  “The general’s wife has a copy of Clarissa and all of Radcliffe. I’ll get them for you, if you like.”

  Alene tried to hide her eagerness, but said, “That would be kind, William.”

  Two days later I brought her a copy of The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and The Italian, with promises to bring others later.

  She devoured these books eagerly. She was a great reader and despite her long hours of labor kept each volume for less than a week.

  This exchange of books and of pelts went on all that fall, and then one day in early November she told me to stop by the infirmary. I waited several hours, then rode by when I thought the classroom had let out. It had not. She only had a moment, and came hurrying out to meet me so I hardly had time to get off my horse.

  “Bend down,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Oh, you ignorant savage. Bend your head.”

  I bent my head so it was near hers and she slipped a hat over my ears. It was a round hat made from a processed beaver pelt, simple but expertly made and very warm. She must have gotten the pelt from Gadaira because it was not one of mine.

  “That should keep your big head warm this winter,” she said.

  I did my best not to smile foolishly, at least not until I was out of sight of the infirmary.

  I suppose everyone knew I courted Alene with this commerce. I’m sure she knew it herself. Yet I thought little of my chances. I told myself that she was in mourning for a very rich man and that she was the heir to one of the largest fortunes in St. Louis. Despite her present conditions, I thought there was little reason for her to consider me. I imagined she found me diverting and harmless, and yet, with every interaction my feeling for her grew and my disdain for my own faint heart increased. At the time I thought another man would have at least attempted to penetrate her defenses and it was only my shrinking nature that made me delay, though I think now that this is not true. There are men who are persuasive with women, but I think these men make love to women who are ready to have that effect put on them. Alene was not ready to be courted, so my shyness was fortunate and maybe even persuasive in its own way. But just because I did not woo her does not mean I did not want to. All that time I was awash in a mixed haze of self-deception and longing, terrified that I would show my heart too openly but equally terrified that another might sweep in and conquer her while I stood back being cordial. I suppose there may have been some basis in that second fear.

  A few days before Thanksgiving I noticed an expensive black thoroughbred in Smitts’s stables. I dismounted and walked past the stables and on up the boardwalk and into what we called the tavern but was really just an open area with rough-hewn tables and high stools at a plank-wood bar and a few bottles on a shelf below the rafters. A man with riding boots, muddied to his knees, sat with his feet spread, and a heavy glass on the table next to a bottle of Taos Whiskey. A pistol rested on the table and a shotgun on a chair nearby. The traveler had long, dark hair and a black riding jacket of an expensive cut. I noticed he had not bothered to wipe his feet before he entered and there were chunks of drying mud around his expensive boots. The traveler turned as I entered and held a hand up and said, “William Wyeth, western adventurer, I heard you graced this lovely settlement. How kind of you to call.”

  By his voice and not by his rough appearance I realized it was Henry Layton, the St. Louis dandy, now somehow transported to Fort Burnham.

  Layton had changed greatly in the sixteen months since I’d last seen him. He’d lost a fifth of his weight, and his smooth cheeks were now covered with a dark beard. He sat laconically, exuding a casual arrogance.

  “I hear you’ve been keeping Bailey’s widow company. Damned honorable to respect her mourning, Wyeth.”

  “I’ve respected it much more than I’d like,” I said, and he laughed loudly.

  “Alene will make gentlemen of us all despite our protestations. She had only started her work on Bailey. Damn the poor whapper.”

  “I was sorry to hear of his death,” I said. “You were friends.”

  “Hardly,” Layton said dryly. “We shared the same bottle, nothing more. We had some unfortunate business dealings that he blamed me for. Unjustly. All of the money and none of the grit. But he’s dead now. No reason to speak of his shortcomings. Alene resented me for judging him honestly. I am sure you know that already.”

  “I do not know her thoughts,” I said. “She is in mourning. We are not intimate.”

  “You can’t blame that on her mourning,” he said. “Mourning is a time for rich widows to weigh their options.”

  “She’s hardly a rich widow.”

  “She will be, though not without a fight. I have brought her correspondence from Bailey’s family in which they refer to her as ‘the Squaw.’ ”

  “That was generous of you to read it.”

  “It was generous of me to bring it. Damned generous. I diverted five hundred miles to come here. And damn the misplaced morality, Wyeth. How is she?”

  “She’s surviving.”

  “I have heard that surviving is the only word for what she’s doing. She is tending to sick natives, exposing herself to infection, and has gone back to tanning pelts while Bailey’s sisters eat off Imari plates, bickering among themselves about which barouche to buy. She is the rightful heir to Bailey’s fortune, which was considerable. There will be a scandal when my letter arrives.”

  “Does she know this?”

  “Of course she knows it. She’d rather wallow in some obscure dust pit than fight for what is hers. I have no such reservations. Sit,” he said again. He waved to Smitts. “Bring Wyeth a glass. I haven’t had a conversation worth a nickel since St. Louis. I don’t know what Wyeth will rate, but in this settlement he’ll have to do.”

  I hesitated, and he added impatiently, “I was insufferable in St. Louis. I know that. Against my nature I have been forced to reform. My presence in the settlements is proof of that. I hear you have traveled the western mountains. Talk to me, Wyeth. I’m dying for conversation.”

  He kicked a chair out and after a moment I did sit.

  “You were injured. Tell me the story. I imagine some heart pounding and gallant act. You were wounded while dashing across a desert waste and battling hostile savages.”

  “I was shot by another trapper while hunting buffalo. And I missed the beast before I was shot.”

  “Bravo, Wyeth. A truthful trapping story. We will need to amend that.”

  Smitts arrived with a glass and Layton poured me a drink.

  “Where were you? In the Tetons?” he asked as he poured.

  “No. South of there.”

  “Do you have a map?”

  “No.”

  “Could you make a copy from memory?” he asked casually.

  If I had not understood it by his presence there, I understood then without a doubt that he had joined the fur trade in some capacity.

  “I could not draw a map with an accuracy that would make it useful,” I said.

  “Can you describe the land?”

  “It was rolling hills. Sparse in the lowlands. Lush farther up. Snowy on top in midsummer. Three days’ ride from the southern border of the Mountain Crow.”

  “And there was much game?”

  “In the mountains, yes. But we almost starved several times in the lowlands.”

  “There was beaver?”

  “In the high drainages but not before. It was very sparse on the way up. And it would all be much less fertile now that we have been there.”

  “They were great mountains?”

  “Higher than any we’d seen before. Passes closed far into June.”

  “West of the Great Lake.”

  “Not so far as that.”

  He opened a notebook and wrote for several minutes.

  “You’re on your way out west now?” I said when he’d fin
ished scribbling.

  “I am.”

  “The season will be over before you arrive.”

  “I make preparations for the spring season,” he said. “I have been financed by my father and he wants a return on his money. I’ll give him a return or I won’t return. That’s my motto. Tell me, you lodged with the natives?”

  “We traded with the Crow. We did not lodge with them.”

  “Are they openly hostile?”

  “The Crow are not. Nor are the Sioux. Though you cannot leave your weapon uncharged with any of them. The Blackfoot are aligned with the British and will attack any brigade that is vulnerable and even some that aren’t. The rest are opportunistic. But I traveled at the edge of Crow land for nine months and we had no battles. When our guard was kept up, we felt relatively safe.”

  “And what precautions did you take?”

  “Never being unarmed. Two sentries at night. Picketed the horses and cached the furs when necessary. We trapped in groups of four and always showed openly that we were prepared for attack. Always assume you’re being watched.”

  Layton made a few more notes, and at the same time, with his left hand, fingered a chunky looking pistol with a cylinder above the trigger. I had never seen anything like it. I searched for the firing pan and did not see it. Layton grinned, pleased with my interest, and slid the weapon over.

  “Collier,” he said. “Automatic.”

  He drew the pin out. The cylinder was on a spring mechanism and it popped open and fell to the side. I could see many chambers. Each contained a cap and ball.

  “It’s self-priming. Powder is automatically released from the chamber into the firing pan when the hammer is cocked. It can fire eight times without reloading.”

  “Does it work?”

  “That was my question,” Smitts asked. He’d wandered over and was pouring for us as he inspected the pistol.

  “You think I’d have carried it out here if it didn’t?” Layton said.