Charbonneau

by Win Blevins

  The hotel clerk handed Baptiste an envelope of heavy brown paper: It was from New York.

  New York, New York

  August 1, 1829

  M. Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau

  In the care of General William Clark

  Superintendent, Bureau of Indian Affairs

  St. Louis

  State of Missouri

  M. Charbonneau:

  Harper & Brothers are pleased that you have thought of our firm in connection with the publishing of your projected book. We are receptive to seeing your completed manuscript, or to seeing any part of it that you may at present have written.

  Sincerely yours,

  A. J. Gurney

  Editor

  “Goddamn,” Baptiste grinned. He showed the letter to Paul, who declared himself happy for his protege; Baptiste begged for three or four days to do some writing so that he could send off a part of the manuscript to New York before they set out upriver. Paul consented.

  Baptiste’s manuscript:

  In the summer of 1829, after an absence of nearly six years from the shores of North America, le sauvage naïf returned to the United States with Prince Paul. Because of his wide experience of the world and his university education, he considered himself well fitted for a substantial post in commerce or any other post that might be open to a young man of twenty-four years of comparable knowledge and experience; yet because of his too intimate acquaintance with the prejudice of whites against “breeds,” he also feared that few or no avenues would be open to him. Therefore he was partly receptive to the arguments of his old benefactor and friend, General Clark, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, that he should enter the service of the U.S. government as an Indian agent: General Clark declared convincingly that the young man, having the languages and the knowledge of both peoples, could render great service to his red people and promote understanding between the two races.

  Fate, however, sometimes take a determining hand in these matters. Just as Charbonneau was giving heed to the General’s well-intended words, an event transpired, with an irony that seemed Providential, to close his mind to such a possibility forever.

  In August, not long after Prince Paul and Charbonneau’s arrival in St. Louis, five chiefs of the Flathead and Nez-Percé Indians lifewise entered the city; though they had come only half the distance in miles, they had ventured from a place much further from St. Louis in other ways—from their home on the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains in the Oregon Territory. They had made this journey, incomparably difficult for them, a wayfaring into the mysterious and unknown, as a kind of pilgrimage: They said they had come for the white man’s book, the Bible.

  These Indians, living in one of the least accessible areas of all the West, the mountains where Lewis and Clark made their arduous crossing of the Continental Divide, have had almost no contact with the white man, much less than the warlike Sioux and the infamous Blackfeet. Yet they heard from British and French-Canadian fur traders of the Bible; and they wanted to discover the medicine hidden in this great book for themselves. Therefore they made a long journey from their homes through unfamiliar country to find the Red-Headed Chief. (They remembered Clark with trust and affection from nearly a quarter of a century earlier, and recalled the promises of friendship and assistance he had given them.) Hearing that he was in St. Louis, they did not heed that the way was long and hard and led through the lands of tribes hostile to them; they resolutely took the trail eastward.

  On arriving in St. Louis, they found that no one in that city accustomed to Indians spoke their language. They were obliged to explain their pilgrimage to Clark through primitive and unclear sign language. (Clark, wanting to baptize his Paump in the responsibilities of Indian agents, asked your Charbonneau to assist in interpreting.) First there was much smoking of the ceremonial pipe, and many repetitions and elaborations on both sides of the friendship and loyalty both white and red had for each other. When the chiefs turned to the substance of their mission, General Clark could scarcely believe the words of the interpreter; he himself watched the hands of the chiefs carefully several times over while they repeated what they wanted. Were they indeed asking for the white man’s book that told the secrets of the white man’s God? The Bible? Even General Clark, wise in the ways of the Indians through his long experience, was inclined to see here the evidence of the hand of God, the sign of a miracle. What, other than the mysterious ways in which God works, could lead benighted Indians to seek the salvation of their souls through Jesus Christ? However, he remained uncertain that he understood them and continued the parleys.

  General Clark could not easily give them the Bible anyway. They had no knowledge of writing, much less of the languages in which the Bible is printed. He had it in the back of his mind to report this extraordinary event to the various missionary societies that were beginning to clamor for the conversion of American savages to Christianity, but he took no action yet except to continue talking with them. It was during these extended talks that Charbonneau came to realize what great goal the chiefs had come to St. Louis to achieve.

  Indian medicine, that is, religion, is the source of Indian power in this world, rather than the source of his salvation in the next. The Indian assuages and implores the forces around him with his magical chants, songs, dances, and prayers; in that manner he believes he gets what he needs to live. When he wants rain, he appeals to the gods of thunder and the west wind. When he wants meat, or blankets, or hides for his tipis, he does a buffalo dance. When he wants great strength, he prays to the grizzly bear, perhaps even eats some of the fur of that bear. He gets the necessities of life through his medicine, his religion.

  When these Indians saw the white man’s guns, his watches and compasses, his brass buttons, his clothing, his saddles, they were amazed; they had no knowledge of manufacturing and therefore assumed that the white man got these marvellous objects through his religion, through prayer and the conjuring of his God. It must be a powerful God, they concluded, who dispenses such gifts on the people who pray to him.

  Charbonneau, observing that the chiefs recurrently mentioned the white man’s book and the goods that they wanted, in close relationship, as though connected, at last realized that there was a connection between the two in the Indians’ minds: They did not seek the Bible to cleanse their souls against Judgment Day; they sought it so that they could pray to God and magically get guns and other trade goods. They wanted to own for themselves the goose that laid the golden eggs!

  Charbonneau urgently pointed out to General Clark what he believed to be the key to the chiefs’ thinking. General Clark confessed that he was beginning to surmise the same. Then the extraordinary event: General Clark averred that he could see nothing to do but tell the chiefs that he would try to send them, in due time, someone who could tell them about the white man’s medicine as taught in the white man’s book; and he felt obliged to report the Indians’ plea for Christianity to the churches.

  Le sauvage naïf, feeling more than ever naïf and somewhat outraged, protested emphatically, to no avail.

  Why, he demanded rather too peremptorily of General Clark, could the matter not be suppressed? Why could the chiefs not be told that the white man’s science, and not his religion, produces the wonders that the Indians coveted?

  “Paump,” said General Clark, using still the affectionate name by which he knew me as an infant, “we must not cavil about these things. Perhaps the Indians ask to know our Lord for the wrong reasons. Our Lord has used even stranger means to bring lost souls to the light. My conscience could not rest easy if I did not at least inform the missionary societies of this appeal. I might be responsible for souls lost that could have been saved.

  “Even if I wanted to stop the missionary movement to the Indians,” he continued, “I could not. This summer Bill Sublette has taken wagons to the Rocky Mountains. Organizations are being formed to promote emigration to Oregon, and in ten or twenty years white settlements there will be substantial. The dut
y of the government is to protect the lives and property of its citizens: That means that the wagon route to the Pacific Coast must be made safe; it means that the Oregon settlements must be protected from Indians. It means that the Indians of the West must learn to live with the white man. All that is inevitable, Paump. Perhaps missionaries can help to persuade the Indians to be peaceful; if not, then the U.S. Army must pacify them. The missionaries are the more kindly means. And,” he added pointedly, “the whites will make every effort to convert the Indians anyway.”

  It is the old story, thought Charbonneau: First the traders, then the missionaries, then the soldiers.

  It was a classic case of two races, two peoples of different cultures, misunderstanding one another. The Indians do not want salvation in the next life; they want material goods in this life. They have asked for goods, and they will be misunderstood, with cause, by millions of Americans who cannot know what the Indians really want. In good conscience these Americans will offer them a terrible delusion which will in time lead to terrible disillusion. It will also lead to the further subjugation of the American Indian.

  This event was a crossroads for Charbonneau. Whatever thoughts he had entertained of entering government service to promote understanding and peace between the red and white peoples, both of whom are his blood kin, he now abandoned. It seemed to him that the U.S. government, for all its stated benevolence, was embarked on a course detrimental to the Indian; it also seemed to him that the gulf of misunderstanding was too wide to be bridged without prodigious effort. It is the sincere hope of the author that this may contribute something to the mutual understanding now so sorely wanting.

  Baptiste included a letter with this piece of manuscript:

  St. Louis, September 3, 1829

  Mr. A.J. Gurney, Editor

  Harper & Brothers

  New York, New York

  Dear Sir:

  I thank you for your letter of August 1. Enclosed for your perusal is a section of my manuscript relating a recent event. I choose it because it seems to bring into bold relief the misunderstanding of the red and white races, each of the other, the same misunderstanding which I humbly hope partially to alleviate. I should add that while the theme of my book is the nature of two different, even conflicting cultures, its specific matter is a series of improbable and colorful adventures of a member of both races, myself.

  Prince Paul and I set out for the Rocky Mountains tomorrow. On this expedition I hope to deepen my knowledge of Indian culture for the sake of my book. Correspondence will either be carried to me by courier in Indian Territory or held for me in St. Louis until my return.

  Your humble servant, &c.,

  Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau

  Coco was stretched on the damask linen among the spiky weeds, the sun full on her face. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was on the verge of a smile: He imagined that she was watching the shifting, yellow-red glow the strong sun made on her eyelids—she liked that sometimes. Her hair, still an outrageously bright red, twirled behind her head in patterns more intricate even than the twilling of the damask; the sun glinted on both.

  Baptiste, looking down at her face, and sometimes looking the length of her nude body, very white and very freckled, wondered how he might describe this feeling if he were to put it in his book. The only words he could think of were full, or complete. He put his dark wrist against her shoulder to see the difference in tone, and smiled. She opened her eyes into his face.

  “I’ll be back in May, I think,” he said. They had not spoken of the fact that he was leaving on the morrow, and they had not spoken of the future.

  A strange look, sad perhaps, nickered in her eyes and passed. She put a hand on his hoop, dangling from his neck through the open shirt and rubbed the stone with a forefinger. “Baptiste,” she said, “in May, if things work out, I will probably be engaged to be married. I may be married. I must.” She drew him down gently by the stone and kissed him lightly on the lips.

  DECEMBER, 1829: This Kenneth MacKenzie seemed more than hospitable. He’d put Paul and Baptiste up in part of the apartment he’d built for himself in Fort Union, and invited them to a dinner they “wouldn’t be accustomed to in this country” that night.

  They had ended up here at Fort Union because their traveling was by courtesy of the American Fur Company. They had gone by steamboat up to Fort Atkinson at the mouth of the Platte; Paul had spent some time with the Sioux there, giving Baptiste a chance to improve his Sioux-speaking skills. Then on by horseback through Sioux country to Fort Kiowa, with a small American Fur party, and on to the Arikara villages and then the Mandan villages. It had all been familiar to Baptiste, homecoming more of curiosity than enthusiasm. Paul had been fascinated by the Mandans, who lived in big circular huts made of grass, and had developed a complex ceremonial society. They both took copious notes for their respective books on the graded orders of Mandan society—Fox, Foolish Dog, Half-sheared, Make-mouth-black, Dog, Crow, Buffalo Bull, and Black-tail-deer for just the men alone—on their elaborate ritual dances, and on their colorful symbolic dress.

  To winter on the plains, to get some shelter against the blizzards, the ferocious winds that swept down from Canada, and the sub-zero temperatures, they had accepted the offer to go on to Fort Union at the mouth of the Yellowstone, the headquarters of Kenneth MacKenzie, the King of the Missouri, and the chief ambassador for John Jacob Astor in the West.

  MacKenzie was expansively gracious that evening. Though the fort was only a year and a half old, by now he had the accoutrements of civilization. He offered them wines, apéritifs, brandies, and fine cigars. The meal was a handsome affair in several courses served by beautiful Assiniboine girls. Baptiste had already heard that he dressed his Assiniboine mistress in the latest fashions St. Louis had gotten wind of from New York, though he hadn’t seen the lady. Clearly, MacKenzie was a man of style.

  And of ambition. He expounded his ambitions over dinner. In the first two summers at the fort they had accomplished great things: They had driven cows and hogs from Missouri to the Yellowstone, and were getting the butter and cheese and bacon Paul and Baptiste were now enjoying. They had planted the first corn crops this far west. MacKenzie had even brought up a still that he used to produce corn liquor. Before long, he indicated, he would have turned Fort Union into a burgeoning oasis of civilization on these vast, sun-burned plains.

  And he would make it pay. American Fur already had the river trade well in hand—they’d been trading with the tribes along the Missouri for beaver pelts for years—but the mountains were the gold mine. The mountains, still several hundred miles to the west, where Ashley, Henry, and the others had found untrapped country and had been harvesting it alone. You had to send trappers instead of traders there, MacKenzie explained. He would be sending some next summer to the mountains, and he intended to do what the Ashley bunch had never been able to bring off—build a fort in the heart of Blackfoot country and open trade with the most hostile Indians in the West. Mr. Crooks—Ramsay Crooks, the head of the fur end of John Jacob Astor’s empire—believed in the mountains and the West. MacKenzie would justify Crooks’ faith.

  Paul inquired about the customs of the principal Indians of the area, the Assiniboines. MacKenzie knew nothing about that.

  Baptiste wanted to know whether the trappers who Worked the mountains found it profitable.

  “They do,” MacKenzie said, “they certainly do. A good trapper brings a high wage. But they never get to spend it.” He smiled a little. “When Ashley brought them to the mountains, he thought they would stay a year or two for the money and then get back to the settlements, out of harm’s way. But they don’t. They stay in the mountains. They live like Indians, like savages, and they enjoy it. The money just sits in a bank in St. Louis, what of it they don’t spend on whisky.”

  When Paul and Baptiste retired for the night, one of MacKenzie’s aides told them quietly that if they would only say the word, girls would be made available to them. Paul seemed
embarrassed about that. Baptiste laughed.

  MacKenzie treated them well that winter—he was aware that his firm was host to a prince. Paul and Baptiste were fascinating guests for MacKenzie. The prince, aside from lending a certain distinction by his mere presence, was interested in commerce. The King of the Missouri talked with the Prince of Württemberg for hours about MacKenzie’s dreams for the area—dreams that reached beyond the fur trade and amounted to a virtual empire. Paul noted that MacKenzie would be giving the Indians useful employment, and approved. Baptiste seemed to MacKenzie to be a moody young man, but he was still intrigued by the slender, handsome breed who spoke half a dozen languages, could read and write and quote the Latin poets, sometimes reminisced about European courts, and had had the shrewdness to make himself companion to a king. MacKenzie admired shrewdness.

  In the long evenings of the northern plains, around a huge fire that prodded back the cold, Baptiste would sometimes play his harmonika. He would play American country dance music, which MacKenzie liked because he could take a turn or two with his favorite Assiniboine girl, and sometimes Baptiste would even play the compositions of one Beethoven. MacKenzie had not heard of the composer, but he knew that the music lent a touch of class to his crude drawing room, an aura of courtliness to the primitive palace of MacKenzie’s empire.

  JANUARY, 1830: An Assiniboine meat-making party, following some buffalo tracks that a scout had found, was ambushed by a larger Blackfoot party and virtually wiped out. Two braves made their way back to the tipis clustered around Fort Union to tell the story. The Assiniboines promptly held the largest and most elaborate war-dance ceremonial that Baptiste had ever seen.

  He was singing the songs aloud again, so that he could copy down the notes as well as the words for his book, when MacKenzie walked into the apartment.