Charbonneau

by Win Blevins

  Sometimes Bill smoked at night while Baptiste applied himself to the skinning again. Sometimes he told stories. He had a favorite about the time he was up to the head of the Yallerstone, fust time he ever was, whar was b’ilin’ springs and hot clay, and the water shot out of the ground like God spittin’, and he seen an elk standing still grazin’ more’n twenty-five yards away. He knelt right down and let fly with his Hawken, which wasn’t this’n but another’n what also shot center, and the elk didn’t move. Didn’t fall, didn’t run, didn’t do nothin’. Bill couldn’t figure it out so he powdered and patched and rammed another ball home and primed and let fly again. Still nothin’. Bill was beginning to wonder if that elk was a statue made of bronze by some fancy fellow back to St. Louy. But he crawls up to ten yards away and lets fly the third time. Still nothin’. So he says, Goddam it, this child’ll make you know he’s hyar, even if you’re a damned divil. So he ran up to the niggur holding his Hawken by the barrel, meanin’ to club the crittur over the head. Just as he was about to swing, something knocked him flat on his withers. He got up, cautious-like, and begun to feel around with his fingers. Pretty soon he figured it out. Thar was a glass mountain, clear as a mountain crick, ’atween him and that elk, and it was actin’ like a telescope, makin’ that elk seem close when actual it was twenty-five mile away on the far side of the mountain.

  Bill didn’t stay anywhere long. After no more than three days in the same camp, he’d decide to pick up and move on. Didn’t want any Crows to get a bead on him, and there were plenty of them around. Real civil fellows when they met you in a brigade, but right unfriendly when they caught you alone or in twos and threes. So the two would pack up and move south over a little divide to another crick, work down it for three days, cross another little divide onto another crick and work up it.

  Bill always led them into new areas by ridges. He rode slowly and silently; Baptiste had to learn that jawboning was forbidden on the trail. As soon as Bill topped a ridge, he turned himself into a bundle of nerve endings, all eyes, ears, and nose, picking up the minute signs of what was going on in that vicinity. If he saw a duck swimming down a crick, he could tell whether it had been frightened by human beings above or was just looking for food. He registered without thinking whether a stick had fallen into the water or had been knocked in by a hiding Indian. He could tell by the way a deer stood whether its enemies were nearby. So when Bill kicked his mule to the crest of a divide, everything he could see, hear, and smell was an encyclopedia of what had been happening in the area, what was happening, what was about to happen. He would sit quiet for a few minutes, absorbing, then ride slowly on, being careful not to silhouette his party against the sky, soaking in all the information he could. He explained to Baptiste once that a coon didn’t think about that, didn’t do it consciously, just did it. That was how come Bill didn’t get caught by the Injuns, and a lot of beavers was gone under when he was still aboveground.

  In that fashion they worked their way up the length of Powder River, crossed the Big Horn Mountains above its source, trapped west across the Big Horn River and into the Absaroka range. They never saw Indians. Bill saw plenty of sign, and knew where they were often enough, but he and Baptiste slipped around them. Bridger and Sublette and them critturs liked to travel in brigades, Bill said, big bands of fifty and sixty. No need for it. It would pass if you wanted to outfight the Indians—and some of them liked to kill Blackfeet, he guessed. “But this child don’t want to fight ’em. Jist ease around ’em.”

  JUNE 29: Baptiste’s journal: “Old Bill told me last evening a saying of the Indians which he is fond of, and evidently much given to quoting: They say that once a man drinks of a streamlet in the high mountains, one of those fledgling rivulets that will assemble later into wild, turbulent mountain rivers and still later into the more stately rivers of the plains, the cold, clear, pure water must inevitably draw him back to that place to drink once more before he dies. The saying is expressive of the idea, more generally, that the high Rockies exert a mysterious force on people that, like a magnet, must pull them back to the mountains. I can believe that. The white man insists on claiming the arable plains of the Ohio River Valley for himself, and on assigning to the red man these vast reaches of mountain and desert. In doing so, he may have ironically ceded the most remarkable land of this continent to those whom he wishes to see disinherited. If those eastern lands have more of value for commerce, these may have more of value for the spirit.

  “Poesy is full of tributes to mountains; yet the verses of even the greatest poets suggest a gentle and idyllic clime suitable for the musings of the gentlemen and gentlewomen. Here unfolds a virile, masculine poetry: The stony ridges rise unadorned by plant or tree above the pine forests, arrogant in their supremacy; even the rough-and-jumble of rocks draws their boulders, each chaotically shaped in itself, into a larger rhythm; they rise toward the sky like melodies, with many intricate variations, but united in the universal motion of ascension. Yet these melodies do not impress with their sweetness, their charm, or their wit; rather they awe with their nakedness, their jaggedness, the immensity of their upward thrust. Perhaps the poets do better to leave these mountains alone; for, truly represented, they are no suitable subject for lyric muse. Poor words do not do justice to their thunderous poetry, nor to their drama: for in their majesty they are capable of a fierce hostility to the men who dare travel them, and can dispense death with a terrible and swift unexpectedness.

  “Again no words are appropriate to them because scribbling draws back the mind from their immediacy. ‘Old Bill’ is even now chuckling at his companion for putting down these words; while le sauvage naïf (!) scribbles and keeps his eye on the pen and page, ‘Old Solitaire’ lets his eyes and ears reach out to the amazing world around him, recording, experiencing, being. A man who chooses to write about these mountains puts himself at one remove from them; the men who understand them best write nothing, but merely live among them. Perhaps they have a secret of which civilization knows nought.”

  He closed the journal and put it away; he wondered whether he would be troubling much longer with pen and page.

  JULY, 1830: The Crow touched the medicine object at his neck, a small hoop with four eagle feathers and a lock of hair; he closed his eyes and uttered two little piercing cries, falling in pitch. Then he smiled at Baptiste and rolled his eyeballs. He tossed the piece of bone, carved into the shape of a tiny war club, between his hands four times. He clasped his hands together, the bone between, wrung them for a moment, then stuck them Out in Baptiste’s face. Baptiste touched the right hand. The young Crow opened the left, showing the bone, and gave a series of little whoops.

  Baptiste slid the blue beads in front of the Crow, clapped his hands to get the fellow’s attention, and put down a mirror. The Crow pushed the beads out and started the ceremony again. Baptiste had already lost twenty dollars in trading goods to this damned puppy, and he was mad. He lost again. He figured the crittur must have got the cloth for his red sash and his cap with rolled ermine tails at this damn game. He quit.

  Joe was tellin’ again about the time last winter when he’d got lost and wandered into Yallerstone, and the place reminded him of Pittsburgh. Baptiste had heard it. He was about to plop down next to Joe when they heard shooting—a lot of shooting—down to the south of camp. They saddled up, with four or five other trappers, and rode down to have a look.

  It was Bill Sublette come with the supply train to the rendezvous of 1830 on the Wind River.

  Sublette’s packs were full of what the trappers and Indians had been waiting for, so they got straight down to business. Sublette’s men set up the bar first thing—selling whisky that had been watered down with water from the Sweetwater River a ways back and was spiced with tobacco, molasses, red peppers, and ginger. It went through a considerable mark-up, from about five dollars a gallon to twenty dollars a pint, but nobody gave a damn. It was the only drink in town, and it sure topped pots of coffee made for the third time
from the same grounds. Besides, Elkanah over yonder in those aspens, already getting bleary, needed to forget about the time two good beavers had gone under up at the Three Forks and he’d run like a divil-chased mule hisself. Adam was glugging at it to forget the letter he’d written home last rendezvous about coming home rich, and to help him decide whether to write another pack of lies. Jamie, sitting opposite Adam and looking scarcely old enough to drink, was still trying to warm his toes from the frostbite he’d got on the Judith—the things were still tingling and a little numb. Old Frapp, prone in the cottonwoods, was trying to get rid of the memory of the taste of crickets he’d et on the lava plains around the Snake River last autumn during real starvin’ times. And they all were trying to get drunk enough not to notice the mountain price of Sublette’s St. Louy-bought goods this time; they knew he’d charge as much as two thousand percent of what he paid for ’em.

  Joe’s friend Long Otter, a Shoshone, begged Joe and Baptiste for some firewater. Joe grinned at Baptiste and dumped his tin cup over Long Otter’s head. Long Otter instantly considered himself insulted, grew very solemn, asserted that he was a made-to-die, and challenged Joe to mortal combat. Joe laughed and fumblingly explained to Long Otter, with signs and his few words of Crow, that he meant to make a joke, such as Crow clowns make. Robedo, who spoke better Crow, confirmed what Joe said. Long Otter was uncertain, but since Baptiste was laughing hard, he seemed to agree to be pacified at the cost of a full cup for himself.

  Joe was handing the cup to Long Otter when Robedo reached out with a stick and knocked the whisky into Joe’s face. Long Otter started laughing hysterically. Joe slapped Robedo as hard as he could. Robedo, still laughing, kicked Joe in the thigh, and Joe knocked him down. Baptiste and Long Otter jumped onto Joe to tear him off Robedo, but the fight had started. Someone Baptiste never saw thumped him so hard on the back of the head that he nearly lost consciousness. He rolled to one side, lay still a moment, and watched the brawl. Long Otter had gotten out of it too. Joe and Robedo were tussling on the ground. Five or six trappers were having at each other—sometimes standing stock-still to take a bone-shivering blow, recovering, and then giving one back while the other fellow stood still, sometimes wrestling, throwing each other over shoulders, all the while whopping and hollering like Injuns in a battle. Baptiste gathered it wasn’t serious—no biting, no eye-gouging, no knife-play. The boys were just having fun.

  Joe got some the best of Robedo, who was a smallish French-Canadian. The fellow looked dazed. Joe helped him up. “Robedo,” he said, “no hard feelin’s.” He clasped his arms around Robedo’s shoulders. “You’re a good beaver, and I recollect when you saved my skin that time I fell asleep on watch. Ye’ve got the ha’r of the b’ar in ye. I surely am sorry.”

  “Sorry? Son of a bitch, he says he’s sorry. I buy you a drink, to make up for next time, when I lodgepole you.”

  Joe saw Baptiste stretched out off to the side, relaxing. “Don’t cotton to a little scrap, John?”

  “It might spoil my complexion,” Baptiste said.

  “Onliest way to keep out of fightin’ around here is thar whar ye are, knocked out, or passed out.”

  Robedo brought them both a drink.

  Late the next afternoon a huge tribe of Crows rode by the main camp at a respectful two hundred yards. Baptiste had never seen anything quite like it. The Crows were on what General Clark would have called dress parade. The braves led, in large groupings. Robedo explained that the Crows had societies within the tribes, units of warriors in friendly competition, sort of like clubs. Each of these societies was putting up a kind of show. The braves galloped forward, stopped abruptly, reared the horses prancing lightly in neat files. What surprised Baptiste was the next maneuver, a curvet in which the riders persuaded the horses to leap with both front feet off the ground at once and make little half circles as they landed. The Crows were the best horsemen in the mountains and on the plains, and these were making their best show.

  Their dress was likewise spectacular. Baptiste couldn’t really distinguish the societies by their dress—he didn’t know the religious emblems—but all the men were hand somely decked out. Some of them were roached, others had half-shaved heads, others yet wore roach headdresses or ermine caps. Robedo pointed out that some of them held long straight staves and some curved staves, signifying different positions of honor. The staves were decorated with eagle feathers or rolled ermine tails or otter skins. Some braves were draped in big red sashes—that was why the cloth was in demand, thought Baptiste—and others had belts of kit-fox skin. All of them carried buffalo-skin war shields, and most had ornamented rattles. Robedo said that though they were too far away to see, every brave had a medicine object, one that had been revealed in a dream as his personal protection, around his neck or tied to his buckskins. Baptiste reminded himself to note it all down that night for his book; but he didn’t get around to it.

  After the braves came the women and children, walking or riding in travois, following drably in the dust of the show horses and bearing the belongings of the tribe.

  “Them squaws won’t be so meek later on,” grinned Joe. “Just wait till they get slickered up.”

  The squaws did not show up for some time, as they were obliged to take care with their toilette. They made their long, black hair glossy with porcupine-tail brushes. They perfumed their hair and bodies with herbs, grasses, pine needles, and flowers. They put finger-spots of vermilion on their foreheads, cheeks, and noses, and a streak of it where their hair parted. They put on dresses of doeskin that they had beaten thin and whitened; the skirt might be fringed with tiny bells, the bodice decorated with colored quills and ribbons. And they would be looking, when they did get to the main camp, for a trapper who would give them more foofuraw to bedeck themselves with.

  They came in the twilight, the splendiferous braves and their wives and daughters of age, to launch their bargaining. They had some furs to trade to Sublette and his partners, Jed Smith and Davey Jackson; and the ladies were prepared to make buckskins or moccasins for any trapper who needed them. But, mainly, they intended to trade, for the slightest of trifles, the sexual services of the ladies. In return they wanted the great medicine that the white man conjured, the cloth, knives, beads, vermilion, mirrors, and all the rest. Foofuraw, the trappers called it—frippery. The Crows were amazed that the trappers would give so much for so little. Some of them figured their must not be any white squaws.

  “Ye’ll be buying ye a dose of the clap,” scratched a high-pitched voice. It was Old Bill, sidling up between Joe and Baptiste. He stood with them for a minute to watch the circulating squaws. “Ye make the damnedest friends. This Joe Meek hyar, he believed me last year when I told him that whisky would kill the clap. But he drank it, ’stead of puttin’ it on his pecker. He don’t know what way the stick floats.”

  “I seen how you done with the whisky,” Joe said, keeping his eyes on the squaws. “You guzzled till you couldn’t get it up. That did keep the clap away.”

  “I do believe I druther play euchre tonight,” Bill squeaked, and wandered off. Baptiste had scarcely seen him since they got to rendezvous, as Bill had kept to himself.

  “Lookee thar,” Joe observed. “That un’s flirtin’ with ye.” It was a Crow girl, no more than fourteen, and not bad looking. The Crow women were not particularly beautiful, being tall, broad-shouldered, and flat-faced, like the men. But this girl wasn’t grown.

  “See how she gapes.” The girl was glancing up, shyly, it seemed, at Baptiste from time to time while her father was bargaining with another trapper. “If they don’t keep their eyes to the ground, they’re practically invitin’ ye,” Joe explained. “Their manners don’t allow women to look men in the eye.”

  Baptiste watched while the other trapper shook his shoulders, started to walk away, acted reluctant, and, in general, whittled the price down. When he walked away with an older squaw, maybe the girl’s mother, Baptiste stepped in. He knew better than to talk to the girl dir
ectly, but it was easy to reach an agreement with her father. Trappers liked the Crows because they were always friendly to whites; their way of being free with their women was part of being friendly.

  Baptiste felt a hand on his shoulder, and was instantly awake. “Easy,” someone said. “I heard you was here.” The big black face grinned. Under the eagle-feather headdress and behind the gaudy red sash Baptiste could still recognize Jim Beckwourth. “Long time, John,” Beckwourth said, and shook his hand. The girl stirred uneasily on the blanket beside him. They walked aways from her to talk.

  “Damn, are you a Crow?”

  “Been living ’mongst the Crows for two years. I’m a sort of chief.”

  “Chief? Shit.”

  “Wall, a kinda war chief.” He said he was a made-to-die in the Fox society.

  Jim had a long story to tell. He had gone to the mountains the year Baptiste went to Europe—Baptiste knew that. He’d been an Ashley-Henry man, and then had trapped for Smith, Jackson & Sublette. He’d done some fearsome things—set fire to a thicket once where eighty Blackfeet was holed up and burned ’em out, killed nearly all of ’em. Niggurs’d killed and sculped some Shoshone women. Lived up with the Blackfeet once, like no other mountain man had ever done. Jim Bridger—did Baptiste remember Jim, that shy, skinny little kid?—was up there with him. Beckwourth had married—wall, not really married, naturally—the daughter of the chief, and had axed her for disobedience. Then the chief give him the other daughter for his bed. Meanwhile, the first girl rose from the dead and come back to his blankets, so he had two. He was full of other stories, too.

  How come he’d turned Crow? Baptiste wanted to know.

  Crows liked him, mainly. When he’d first come out, they was excited about his black skin, though they’d seen another of what they called the black white men. Still, it made him popular, particularly with the squaws. Which was a change from the settlements. And then old Ezekiel told them a story, at the rendezvous of ’28, about how many Blackfeet Jim had killed, and it was true he’d killed a many. But Ezekiel concocted a tale about Jim being born part Crow and getting kidnapped by the Blackfeet, so the Crows welcomed him as a long-lost son. And Jim, wall, he just went along with it. He had a good thing with the Crows. Soon American Fur would be stepping up their Crow trade, and Jim was in a position to deliver it to MacKenzie and make himself a lot of money working for American Fur among the Crows.