by Win Blevins
“D’ye hear tell of John Colter?” Louis began ceremonially after dinner. They had their chairs tipped back around the cookstove, and Baptiste saw that everyone was in for a spell of yarn-spinning. Louis recited the Colter yarn with some flair and more than a few embellishments: How Colter didn’t go home with Lewis and Clark, but Stayed in the mountains. How he lived with the Crows and crossed the Continental Divide alone. How he wandered into strange b’ilin’s around Yellowstone, and seen clay and b’ilin’ water throwed into the air, and smelled hell-fire just beneath the ground, and saw flames, and cleared straight out lest he run into the Old Gentleman himself. Also the time he got caught by the damned Blackfeet and they stripped him jaybird nekked and give him a start runnin’, and he run six miles and outrun ’em all and hid in a beaver dam, near freezin’ to death, and got away. It was a handsome tale, but Baptiste had heard it before. Besides, he was feeling edgy, left out.
Woods told a story about two voyageurs who had come up the river the spring before. He heard that the prince was a fine shot, Woods said, and won the prizes at the shoot down to Liberty. Wall, these fellows was some shots, this Fink and Carpenter. (Baptiste paid attention now. He’d had no news of Mike and Bill since they went to the mountains with Ashley the year before, and Jim Beckworth went with them.) Woods told how they amazed some Kansas Injuns, who looked a little like they’d a mind to fight, by shooting cups of whisky off each other’s heads. They’d won buckskins and mokkersons and two women for each for the night, too.
Baptiste decided to risk it. “The Osage have a story about the origin of creation,” he ventured. “It doesn’t have the drama of Genesis, but it’s curious.” He saw that the locals were impatient with him, but Paul and the other German looked interested.
“Way beyond,” he started, “some of the Osage lived in the sky. They wanted to know their origin, how they came to exist. They went to the sun, and he told them that they were his children. They went to the moon, and she told them that she gave birth to them, and that the sun was their father. Then she told them that they had to go down to the earth and live there.
“They came to the earth, but it was covered with water. They couldn’t go back, and they didn’t know what to do. They wept. They floated around in the air, hoping that some god would send them an answer, but none came. The animals were floating around too, and one of them was the elk, the most handsome and stately, who inspired all creatures with confidence. So they asked the elk for help. He dropped into the water and started sinking. Then he called out to the winds, and they came from all quarters and blew the waters up into mists.
“At first only rocks showed, and the people and animals walked on rocky places where nothing grew and they had nothing to eat. Then the water went down and exposed the soft earth. When that happened, the elk was so happy that he rolled over and over on the soft earth, and all his loose hairs clung to the soil. The hairs grew, and from them sprang beans, corn, potatoes, and wild turnips, and then all the grasses and trees.”
The prince clapped his hands. “Marvelous, wunderbar! Do you know more?”
Baptiste thought for a minute. “I can sing you a song,” he offered. “I heard it from a priest who came up from Santa Fe, and he got it from the Indians.” Baptiste wasn’t ready to try the mouth organ yet and, throwing back his head, he went into a wailing chant:
Tsegihi.
House made of dawn.
House made of evening light.
House made of the dark cloud.
House made of male rain.
House made of dark mist.
House made of female rain.
House made of pollen.
House made of grasshoppers
Dark cloud is at the door.
The trail out of it is dark cloud.
The zigzag lightning stands high upon it.
Male deity!
Your offering I make.
I have prepared a smoke for you.
Restore my feet for me.
Restore my body for me.
Restore my mind for me.
This very day take out your spell for me.
Your spell remove for me.
You have taken it away for me.
Far off it has gone.
Happily I recover.
Happily my interior becomes cool.
Happily I go forth.
My interior feeling cool, may I walk.
No longer sore, may I walk.
Impervious to pain, may I walk.
As it used to be long ago, may I walk.
Happily may I walk.
Happily, with abundant dark clouds, may I walk.
Happily, with abundant showers, may I walk.
Happily, with abundant plants, may I walk.
Happily, on a trail of pollen, may I walk.
Happily may I walk.
Being as it used to be long ago, may I walk.
May it be beautiful before me.
May it be beautiful behind me.
May it be beautiful below me.
May it be beautiful above me.
May it be beautiful all around me.
In beauty it is finished.
Baptiste thought that Paul was about to compliment him again, but Grand Louis busted in. “Damn, I hate to hear them Injun screechin’s here. In a white man’s house.” He looked sharply at Baptiste. “Remembers me you’re half Injun, boy.” Baptiste started to flare, but shut up.
So Louis told a story about when he ran into a grizzly bear with her cubs—she was tall and broad as two oxen—in a thicket, and she chased him into the river and he hollered for help and it took eleven balls to bring her down. Everyone but the guests knew that he was borrowing the story, since grizzlies didn’t live this far down the Missouri and it was an old story anyway. After a while Baptiste suggested that Grand Louis show everyone a dance, which Louis was pleased to do, and Baptiste cut a tune for him on the mouth organ. Finally the prince excused himself, pleading fatigue. Baptiste said he would like to speak with the prince in the morning, with the prince’s permission.
After breakfast Baptiste spoke casually about his education, about Clark’s benevolence, about his future as a fur trader. Maybe he would work for General Clark, he said, as a U.S. government Indian agent. He had come upriver even now, he claimed, to improve his knowledge of Indian culture and to learn Indian languages and sign language, the lingua franca of the plains and mountains.
Finally he quit stalling. “Sir, I believe you are traveling to St. Louis on horseback, staying in contact with the Chouteau boat?”
“That is so.”
“I am to return by the same boat. May I ride with you instead?”
“Of course,” the prince said, and then seeing the look on Baptiste’s face, added, “but why?”
“Because, Sir, I wish to have time to persuade you that I can be of service to Your Highness. I want you to employ me, in whatever capacity you see fit. I will save my apologia for myself for the trail.”
Paul nearly laughed out loud. “Of course, join us, by all means.”
Within a few days it was settled. Baptiste’s arguments ran to his languages, his wide education and sophistication, his knowledge of the country, his unique position as an urbane half-breed. He did not have to advance them insistently, since Paul was disposed to hire him anyway. Paul’s reasons had little to do with Baptiste’s arguments.
“Yes,” Paul said on the morning of the fourth day, “yes, I will employ you. That is, I will if you are willing. Because when I get to St. Louis, I am moving on to New Orleans. And then by ship to Germany, your new place of employment.” He gave that a moment to sink in. “Among other things, you can help me with my book about North America. You might also attend the university. You will live at the castle as a member of the royal household. I promise that you’ll be well taken care of, and that you may return when you like.” The prince seemed vastly amused. “Will you go?”
Baptiste thought for a moment that the words wouldn’t come ou
t: “I will.”
NOVEMBER 3: Baptiste’s diary: “Embarked early this afternoon on the steamboat Cincinnati for New Orleans. Much fuss filling Paul’s many trunks with Indian and natural memmoribilia and carrying them on board and stow’d, in contrast to my own few poor things. All appears promising: Gen. Clark most heartily gave blessings and a sum of money. Everyone impressed and pleased for me. Coco seemed still distant but sincere and perhaps even moved in her well-wishing, and I promised a suitable surprize from Europe. It is very grand. I really cannot quite believe how grand it is.”
JANUARY, 1824: The wind was in his face. He felt it cold on the bridge of his nose and on his cheekbones and against his forehead, where it had stretched the skin tight as a tautly stretched tanning skin. He was looking past the bow, toward the western coast of Europe out there somewhere, toward Le Havre-de-Grâce, at the far end of several thousand miles of ocean. He could see nothing in that direction, only a night blacker than any he could remember. Just on the port side of the bow the water flared out in phosphorescent foam, flickering iridescent white and violet. He kept his back to the cloudlike billowing of sails and to the moon that hung behind them. Above the blackness of the ocean glimmered pin-pricks of cold light, tiny jabs from stars millions of miles from the earth and serene in their remove.
He rubbed his eyes with his sleeve. It was 14 degrees below zero, the captain had informed him, that night off the coast of Newfoundland. The wet air was crusting to ice on his eyebrows and the bone in his nose ached from cold. He looked forward again. He had not climbed up here to think—about Paul’s formal and impenetrable benevolence, about the captain’s fatuous cordiality, about the endless lessons in German, the coaching about Napoleon and the Hapsburgs and the tsars, the well-wishing of General Clark, the interminable delays at St. Louis and New Orleans. He had come to be alone. He sat looking out at the sea for a long while, and admitted to himself, “I am afraid.” Then he turned his back to the wind and walked the foredeck back toward his cabin. He had to work on German syntax.
FEBRUARY 14, 1824: Baptiste disembarked at Le Havre-de-Grâce, and set foot in a Europe in a state of transition. Napoleon had been quelled less than a decade earlier, and old regimes had reasserted themselves. The Congress of Vienna in 1815, intending to reestablish the old order in a chaotic Europe, introduced once more an era of oppressive regimes; Charles X brought the monarchy back to France, and with it various forms of repression, including control of all books and newspapers; Metternich, the majordomo of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, set out to increase the power of the Hapsburgs; in the German federation of small, quasi-independent states, royal families who had been subject to Napoleonic rule now picked up the reins again and aligned themselves with Metternich. As they will after a period of revolution, conservative forces were waxing, and often reawakened an ancien régime decadence.
Yet the powerful impulses that gave rise to the French Revolution were still at work. The new ideas of government, of religious freedom, of the worth and equality of all men, of freedom of expression, of the importance of the individual, the non-divinity of monarchs, would not be unseated. The Industrial Revolution was pushing its way into politics. In 1822, King William of Württemberg, uncle of Prince Paul, had given his small, southwest German kingdom the first constitution granted to a German state. In France, in 1830, Charles X would fall in the July Revolution and Louis-Phillippe would rule: in 1848 Louis-Phillippe would give way to another Republic. The forces of royalism had won the battle of arms but lost the war of ideas.
In the arts, all Europe was agog about the doings of George Gordon Lord Byron, who wrote verses brilliantly and behaved scandalously. Huge audiences awaited new historical romances by Walter Scott. The iconoclast Beethoven was at the height of his fame, though Haydn and Mozart were more revered. Within months of Baptiste’s disembarkation, Alexandre Dumas, pére, would stand Paris on its head with his first play. Before the 1820s were out, Victor Hugo would do the same; and Frederic Chopin would captivate Paris salons with his compositions for the pianoforte, which was new enough that middle-class families could not yet own one. In 1824, the year of Baptiste’s arrival, Lord Byron would die fighting for freedom for Greece, and thus give the revolutionary spirit a celebrated martyr. Romanticism was burning at its most intense.
APRIL 1824: Baptiste was transfixed. He was sitting between Paul and the Queen Mother in the royal box, but he had long since stopped noticing where he was. He was listening to the orchestra and swimming in the sounds. He had no idea what he was hearing. He had been given a program that listed eight or ten pieces; since he spoke little German, neither the names of the pieces nor of the composers meant anything to him. He only listened, without thoughts, and lived inside the sounds.
Baptiste would not have been able to put any words to the music or to what was happening to him. Having slight literary education, he did not think the music noble or tragic or pastoral or passionate or whimsical. He took in the sounds themselves simply, naively, amazed. At first he was taken with the sheer sound of an orchestra; though he had read about orchestras, he had never heard one. Then he began to recognize in the music feelings of his own—he did not identify them, but he experienced them as his. He felt as though someone had stepped inside him and rendered his own responses into sound and played them back for him; or, rather, had taken his glimmerings of feelings and had amplified them and played them back on a grander scale. But he would not have known how to say any of that.
At intermission he was relieved that he could not yet speak German well enough to understand the talk in the box. It seemed unduly light. He himself wanted nothing but for the orchestra to begin again. He sat through the concert, nearly four hours of it, entranced.
After the concert Paul and one of the guests tried to tell Baptiste about the music in French. He tried to be polite in paying no attention. He was absorbed in his strange state, an exhilarating sense of being clean. He interrupted to ask Paul if he could resume his music lessons. Paul promised to assign him to the Kapellmeister himself, the man who had just conducted the orchestra. Baptiste quaked with excitement. He let his mind drift back to the music. He could not hear the sounds as clearly as he could remember the feelings. It was as though someone had knocked down one of the four walls of reality and had shown him another world.
That night in bed, he reflected that if he had doubts about coming to Europe, about discovering more of the white man’s world, the concert alone had made the journey worthwhile.
OCTOBER, 1824: Karlheinz he liked. Karlheinz, having noticed him in the lecture hall, ferreted out his rooms and simply appeared late one afternoon with two bottles of Rhein wine, several cigars, and Hamlet, his Great Dane. “Would you permit me to introduce a personage of some distinction?” he said when Baptiste opened the door and looked on Karlheinz for the first time. “Hamlet, the Dane, the descendant of the most eminent attendant of this fair university.” Karlheinz tapped his leg and Hamlet rose on his hind legs to an awesome height, right paw extended. Baptiste shook it. “I am his retainer, Karlheinz Ehrlichmann, last son and black sheep of the family of the youngest son of a family obscurely related to the House of Hanover. May we join you?” Blue eyes gleaming and small red beard flaming, he brandished the whisky and cigars.
The talk had broken an afternoon of tedious and frustrating study, for Baptiste was lost with his curriculum at the University of Württemberg. In fact it had broken the year’s studies, because Baptiste only dabbled in his courses after that afternoon.
Karlheinz had a flair for living. He did it without money, of course, because the last son of a cousin of the head of a royal household was relatively disenfranchised. Karlheinz supposed that he would eventually enter the military as his only way of advancement. In the meantime he went forth in style, thanks to the ingenuity and arrogance with which he begged and borrowed. He knew the people who counted, not the royal family of Württemberg, Baptiste’s patrons, but the young who lent some brilliance to the salons of Stuttgart
, the men of fashion, the poets, the intellectuals, the musicians, and the beautiful young women. Beside them, the royal family was stuffy.
It was Karlheinz who nicknamed him “le sauvage naïf” and introduced him to everyone thus. It was Karlheinz who pointed out that the clothing Paul had brought him, though expensive, was boring and bourgeois and gave him the look of a banker’s son. Karlheinz picked out some smarter outfits for him—frock coats fitted tightly at the waist, trousers of fawn or pearl gray that showed the shape of his legs, lace white shirts that opened deep onto the chest. It was Karlheinz who made him familiar with the taverns of Stuttgart on all-night carousals. Their invariable companions were Hamlet and fimilie, Karlheinz’s servant-mistress who lived in his rooms, whom Karlheinz liked to disguise as a boy.
And it was Karlheinz who introduced him to Sophie Hoffman. She was, to put it mildly, different from anyone he had met in Europe.
Baptiste’s first months in Württemberg had been spent in relative seclusion. After their arrival at Stuttgart about March 1, 1824, Paul installed the two of them in a well-appointed apartment in the castle of Stuttgart. Paul wanted to catalog his various specimens and memorabilia from North America for a permanent collection, and for that he chose the help of Dr. Lebret, his old teacher and a distinguished professor of natural sciences at the University. Besides, Paul, having been educated under the auspices of his royal uncle at Württemberg University, felt at home in Stuttgart as with his own family in Karlsruhe.
Baptiste’s days were largely given to the tutor Paul assigned him—improving his German, learning something of the French Revolution and Napoleon and Lord Byron, and Herr Beethoven—simply learning something of the world he now moved in. His evenings were spent in quiet dinners with Paul, who did not care for society, or sometimes with the royal family at performances of chamber music. King William loved Haydn and Dittersdorf and Hummel, and tolerated the assault and battery of Beethoven. Twice Baptiste went with Paul to the opera, an event he understood not at all.
