Charbonneau

by Win Blevins

  They were only kissing, standing up by the bookcase. Not bad. They didn’t notice her. “Coco,” she said calmly, “this is out of the question.” They sprang apart awkwardly. She ordered Baptiste to the parlor and stayed to talk with Coco. After five minutes she walked in magisterially and said, “Baptiste, we invited you here out of our generosity. You have betrayed our trust. What you’ve done is understandable, but improprietous. You must not return.”

  “Damn it,” Baptiste started.

  “I’m surprised,” she cut him off, “that you’ve lost your sense of decorum. If you do it again, or if you try to see Coco in the future, I will speak to M. Berthold about your dismissal. Good night.” And she stepped out of the room.

  Baptiste was split by hurt and loss and fury. After a sleepless night, he sneaked a note to Coco: “I love you,” the first time he had used those words. “If you love me, write to me through Fr. Neil.”

  For two days he heard nothing from her. On the third he marched into Berthold’s office at the back of the store. “Monsieur Berthold, I wish to resign my position as clerk.”

  Berthold, who had not yet assimilated the hints of what had happened, looked stunned. “But Baptiste—”

  “I was having an innocent romance with Coco. We were fools enough to believe that caring about each other mattered. Madame Berthold found us out and forbade us to see each other again.” Berthold was too stupefied to speak. “One day,” Baptiste said, “this continent will change. It will have to. Indians are just as good as whites.”

  On the street he felt good, really good, until he thought of Coco again. That night he went to the Green Tree and got roaring drunk.

  FEBRUARY 13, 1822: An advertisement published in the Missouri Gazette & Public Advertiser—along with the usual offerings of merchandise like liquors, mackerel, boots, bar iron, Indian goods, and cigars, and announcements that certain husbands would no longer be responsible for the debts of certain wives—created a hubbub in the frontier town of 5,000 souls:

  TO

  Enterprising Young Men

  The subscriber wishes to engage ONE HUNDRED MEN, to ascend the river Missouri to its source, there to be employed for one, two or three years.—For particulars enquire of Major Andrew Henry, near the Lead Mines, in the County of Washington, (who will ascend with, and command the party) or to the subscriber at St. Louis.

  Wm. H. Ashley

  The subscriber, as everyone knew, was the lieutenant-governor of the state. General Ashley did not have to spell out the duties of the enterprising young men at the source of the Missouri: They’d be trading for the Indians’ beaver. After a dozen years—since Manuel Lisa and the same Andrew Henry got chased out of the mountains by the Blackfeet—Ashley intended to push the fur trade again beyond the plains to the Stony Mountains.

  The next day, in response to a note brought by Isaiah, Baptiste went to dinner at Clark’s house. As he expected, it was a small birthday celebration. (Because Clark was out of town, and because of the upset with the Bertholds, his seventeenth birthday had passed unobserved on the 5th.)

  “Paump,” Clark began over his after-dinner brandy and cigar, “you saw General Ashley’s offer yesterday?” Baptiste nodded. “It is an important enterprise, commercially and politically. Establishment of the fur trade in the Rockies proper is inevitable, and highly desirable. Those who get an early footing will reap the advantages later. I can secure a place for you if you’d like to go along.”

  Baptiste was already squirming. Iron traps and greasy skins were a long way from the clavichord, Byron’s poetry, and attractive ladies. “I don’t think so.”

  Clark raised an eyebrow, drew on his cigar, and blew the smoke out slowly. “The fur trade offers great opportunities for you. You have the background, you have the languages, you are familiar with Indians. Eventually the trade will penetrate even to the Shoshones, who would make you welcome. You don’t have to trap—you can clerk, making use of your education. Some day I hope that you will become an Indian agent. The government needs men of understanding to help the Indians adjust. The fur trade would be an auspicious start.”

  “I feel that I have a great deal to learn here, Sir, for the present.”

  Clark considered. “I understand. If you continue with Berthold, will you agree to go up to the lower Missouri this summer to learn the operation of the posts?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Splendid.” He relit his cigar.

  “Sir, I must tell you that I am working for Pratte, not Berthold.”

  “What?”

  “I resigned a week ago. Monsieur Berthold gave me a recommendation to Monsieur Pratte.”

  “Why’d you resign?”

  “It was just over a little flirtation, Sir, entirely innocent, with Coco. Madame Berthold found us out and declared me unwelcome in their house.” He just let the words sit there, bluntly. Clark waited for an explanation.

  Baptiste’s voice sounded harsh to himself, and he was afraid it would break. “Sir, I love Coco, at least I did love her. Now she doesn’t communicate with me, but I think she loved me as well. Truly, I believe that Madame Berthold liked me. She ran me off, Sir, because I’m a breed. Nothing more. It’s stupid, Sir. I hate it.”

  Clark cut him off. “You want to ask whether prejudice against Indians and breeds will change. Yes. Slowly. I will not see it. You may not see it. Baptiste, don’t kick against the pricks. Don’t. And engaging yourself with young white girls—particularly young white girls of standing—is not the way to make the peace that must be made.”

  For a moment Baptiste hated Clark. Then he wanted to cry. He kept it back.

  He flung himself into his studies, amazing Father Neil with his ardor, staying up into the wee hours with books propped open, his eyes struggling to focus. He stole hours of practice on the clavichord at the rectory and sometimes to play the great cathedral organ. Father Neil noticed that he played with more expressiveness than Neil had previously heard from him, and thought the boy had a special gift. Despite Baptiste’s ardor, Neil found him growing remote and impersonal, a strange contradiction.

  Pratte found him the very model of correctness, with a formality odd in such a young man. Baptiste worked on the stock meticulously, and with the customers graciously; he seemed less conscientious in the fur-storage shed.

  Baptiste took what invitations he could get to socialize, and occasionally sat in the parlors of the fine houses. Sometimes he visited his friends on the Row, sometimes had a drink with Jim, though the friendship had cooled. He dressed smartly at all times, and spiced his conversation with Latin proverbs and quotations from Shakespeare and Lord Byron, which amused the social set and the tavern bunch alike. Underneath all that, he concealed his rage.

  Chapter Four

  1823

  1823: Charles J. Ingersoll defended American culture against criticism by British intellectuals in a lecture before the American Philosophical Society.

  1823, DECEMBER 2: James Monroe proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine.

  1824: Jedediah Strong Smith discovered South Pass, the gateway through the Rocky Mountains.

  1824: Weavers in Pawtucket, R.J., held the first recorded strike in the U.S.

  1825: Eight Northern legislatures proposed the emancipation of all slaves at federal expense; Southern states rejected the proposal.

  1825, MARCH 4: The sixth President of the U.S., John Quincy Adams, was inaugurated.

  1825, OCTOBER 26: The Erie Canal was officially opened to shipping.

  Eighteen Hundred Twenty-Three

  SEPTEMBER 1823: It was a lazy afternoon, an afternoon spliced between the dog days of late summer and the cool days of October when the maples, elms, and the great oaks turn color, an afternoon of Indian summer. Baptiste was sitting cross-legged on the east bank of the Missouri, his back against a cottonwood tree, enjoying his next-to-last afternoon before going back down the river to the city and to his job. He watched the muddy river ease by, lazing its way toward the Mississippi so slowly that it
looked still. In places it eddied around and pushed up current for a moment, resisting the quiet but awesome force that took it to St. Louis.

  Baptiste’s mind was far away. He was practicing a song, one of the songs taught him by Broken Foot, an Osage medicine man, the summer before. He learned some of the old stories of the Osage and the Pawnee and the Sioux in his first summer, and he tried to learn the songs. They were difficult, because they were sung by men who had been given them in dreams. To sing them truly a man must have had the dream, must believe in the songs’ sacred power to change events through incantation, must transform himself into a trance of belief that puts him in touch with the magical powers of the world. They were also difficult to sing because they were against the forms of the music that Baptiste knew; they ignored the mathematically measured rhythms and seemed to play devilishly with the twelve known pitches.

  Baptiste took no stock in their magical powers, but he responded to the feelings in some of them. He had gotten them down in singing pretty well. He was trying, now, to transfer their sounds to his mouth organ.

  The song he was playing, “The Song of the Maize,” might be rendered into English like this:

  A mid the earth, renewed in verdure,

  A mid rising smoke, my grandfather’s footprints

  I see, as from place to place I wander.

  The rising mist I see as I wander.

  A mid all forms visible, the rising mist

  I see, as I move from place to place.

  A mid all forms visible, the little hills in rows

  I see, as I move from place to place.

  A mid all forms visible, the spreading blades

  I see as I move from place to place.

  A mid all forms visible, the light day

  I see as I move from place to place.

  In this song, the medicine men explained to him, the spirits of the dead were speaking of the coming of spring, the reawakening of the earth from the deadness of winter to fertility. In the morning mist they see the planted rows, the tiny blades of growing corn, the day itself and, most of all, the signs of the Great Spirit—grandfather’s mysterious footsteps—whose power makes things grow.

  Baptiste liked the simple appreciation of this power fundamental to life. But try as he might, he could not get the mouth organ to render its sound. The notes didn’t fit the instrument, and his playing sounded like an approximation of the song without sounding like the song.

  It had been a good summer, the first time in Indian country that he thought of himself as a grown man. He spent part of it moving with his father around the plains of the lower river—meaning below the mouth of the Platte—from tribe to tribe, and had spent a lot of it at Fort Kiowa and Fort Recovery. Old Charbonneau, who was now over sixty, found work mostly as an interpreter and errand-runner for the traders, and sometimes for the U.S. troops led by Colonel Leavenworth. Baptiste had met some of the Plains Indians and was mildly intrigued by them. He observed them as an outsider rather than as their blood kin: He liked their openness about sex—one chief was known for walking about the village naked and perpetually tumescent; most Indians told jokes for which “ribald” was too mild a word; and plenty of women were always available for a man who had the urge. He was amused by their emphasis on honor and the manly virtue of making war; he was appalled by their brutal violence, including their custom of dismembering the bodies of dead enemies. He was puzzled by their treatment of women, making drudges and beasts of burden of them generally, offering their bodies to other men for baubles, but punishing them severely if they committed adultery without permission. He was amused by their native spiritualism, their custom of seeking spirits behind all natural forces, their passionate belief in dreams, their serene trust in totem objects, their conviction of the magical power of word and song.

  Yet it was the word and song that enchanted him most He remembered hearing and seeing a rain dance:

  Hi-iya naiho-o! The earth is rumbling

  From the beating of our basket drums.

  The earth is rumbling from the beating

  Of our basket drums, everywhere humming.

  Earth is rumbling, everywhere raining.

  Hi-iya naiho-o! Pluck out the feathers

  From the wing of the eagle and turn them

  Toward the east where lie the large clouds.

  Hi-iya naiho-o! Pluck out the soft down

  From the breast of the eagle and turn it

  Toward the west where sail the small clouds.

  Hi-iya naiho-o! Beneath the abode

  Of the rain gods it is thundering;

  Large corn is there. Hi-iya naiho-o!

  Beneath the abode of the rain gods

  It is raining; small corn is there.

  As he listened Baptiste had to smile at the singers’ faith that the rumble of their drums would bring the rumble of thunder, that the cloudlike eagle down would bring the clouds, that the rain would fall and help the corn grow. But he did not smile at their singing. He listened to the chanting, the wailing, the high-pitched screeches, the plaintive calls, and he thought they had power. They were music. They were no more superstitious, he thought, than “Amazing Grace,” and much more beautiful.

  But he wasn’t thinking of all this by the cottonwood tree. He was only trying to torture his mouth organ into making the corn song.

  He heard the cloppings and stopped. Two horses, he thought. On the plains it could be important to know from the sound. He stood up to look.

  “Did I hear what I thought I heard?” asked the young man. “An Indian song on a mouth organ?” He spoke English with a heavy German accent. He was wearing riding breeches with leather trim, expensive knee-length leather boots, and a proper riding coat. The other fellow, older, dressed similarly. Baptiste had never seen anything quite like them on the plains.

  “You did, Sir. Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau,” he introduced himself and shook both men’s hands.

  “You have the honor of standing before Paul, Prince of Württemberg,” the older man said stiffly. “I am Heinrich Dusse.” The younger man—the prince?—seemed amused by the proceedings.

  “Est-ce que vous parlez français?” Baptiste wanted to make it easier for them.

  “Bien sûr,” smiled the young man. “And do Indians of America,” he went on in French, “speak perfect French and English?”

  “I have,” Baptiste nodded deferentially, “English, French, Latin, Mandan, Minataree, some Shoshone, Sioux, and Pawnee, figures, history, theology, a General as my benefactor, a derelict as my father, a squaw as my mother, and a great respect for Your Highness.”

  It worked. Paul laughed.

  “We are on our way to the house of Messieurs Woods and Curtis, fur traders. Is this the way?” asked the prince.

  “It’s less than a mile downstream, up the hill. I am staying there. May I show you the way?”

  “With pleasure. And will you give us more of your Indian song?”

  Baptiste walked and played the “Corn Song.” His mind was working furiously. A prince. And perhaps for himself, a deus ex machina?

  Over dinner the two exchanged their stories. Baptiste, at his most fluent and entertaining, told of being carried on Sacajawea’s back on the Lewis and Clark expedition, of his early years among the Indians, of his education in St. Louis (which he exaggerated slightly), of William Clark, of his experience in the fur trade.

  Prince Paul was inclined to be reticent about himself. He was the second son of Duke Eugen of Württemberg, the brother of King Friedrich I of Württemberg. He had fought on the side of Prussia in the post-Napoleonic Wars of Liberation, but he was by preference a naturalist. He had come to North America to observe the flora and fauna, and to make notes about the peoples and their ways—strictly a scientific expedition, he assured Baptiste. But Baptiste gathered that he was a hardy and venturesome traveler: He had been to Cuba, New Orleans, up the Ohio, and to St. Louis. He had come up the Missouri with a boat provided by the Chouteau brothers, bound for Fort Kio
wa. He was riding downriver among the banks ahead of the boat though, with only three retainers, a countryman, a Creole guide, and a half-breed who liked his liquor. So he was running some risk from the Osages, the Kansas, and the warlike Iowas. Baptiste judged him to be in his mid-twenties.

  The prince spoke carefully and formally, always as though he were at some official meeting. He was curious about Baptiste, about his mixed blood, about his education, about his acceptance in St. Louis, about his plans for the future.

  Baptiste, trying to answer, was becoming more and more aware that he was talking to a prince, an actual prince. He had never heard of Württemberg, and wasn’t sure whether he remembered Stuttgart, its capital. But this was a king. His mind, slightly intoxicated with exotic, regal perfumes, swam with fragments of memories of Queen Elizabeth and Julius Caesar and Napoleon. A man to put the mere Chouteaus, Prattes, Bertholds, Ashleys, and Claries to shame. He wondered, as he spoke hesitantly of rising as a clerk in the fur trade, what the odds would be of a half-breed boy becoming first the protege of William Clark, United States Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and then meeting a prince. Baptiste wanted to laugh crazily.

  Paul listened politely, then withdrew to talk to Curtis before dinner.

  Grand Louis strutted up in time to eat. Louis, a big French-Canadian with a Creole wife, was the head man of the area. Of course, the area was small. There were a half-dozen cabins (including Louis’s) five miles below the mouth of the Kansas, hunters with squaws, who lived by their rifles and by raising a few cattle, hogs, and chickens. The nearest settlement of any size was Liberty, in the state of Missouri, several miles below the cabins. Louis was a braggart, a daredevil, a man who loved to raise hell with whisky and women, and a damned good hunter. Paul had stopped at his place earlier, and Louis clearly intended to pursue the acquaintance, very sure that he himself was the most interesting natural phenomenon of the territory.