by Win Blevins
A cut of light brightened the tipi for a moment as the girl slipped in. She stood there, between the flap and the fire, looking shy and confused. Sacajawea realized that she couldn’t see in the darkness after the glare of sun on snow, and did not notice that the old woman was sewing in the shadows. The girl stooped and felt in the half light for Baptiste’s buffalo robes, put a pair of moccasins on them, and bolted out.
When he came back, Baptiste turned the moccasins over and over in his hands. They were quilled and beaded—Sunday-go-to-meetin’ moccasins. He looked quizzically at Sacajawea. He had never been proposed to before.
“Running Stream is set apart for Spotted Horse,” Sacajawea said quietly.
He hardly knew Running Stream. She was fourteen or fifteen, the late-in-life daughter of Mountain Ram, once a warrior leader and now a graying councillor. She was a tall girl, rangy, broad-shouldered, with the easy movement of a natural athlete. Report had it that she was envious of the boys’ duties and bored with women’s work. Baptiste was sure that Mountain Ram had taught her a proper Shoshone squaw’s obedience, but apparently she had a mind of her own. He grinned. She sure did—set down for Spotted Horse but proposing to Baptiste.
“Spotted Horse staked three ponies for her,” Sacajawea said, “at the start of winter camp. He heaped honor on himself last summer against the Crows. It is thought a good match. Mountain Ram will reply soon.”
It was just as well. She was comely enough, he’d watched her, but she wasn’t worth a feud. Besides, for a rover like him it wasn’t suitable to have a squaw in tow.
But Running Stream did have a mind of her own. Shoshone women were accorded more respect and independence than the women of other plains and mountains tribes, and Running Stream took advantage. She openly eyed Baptiste. Once she went so far as to smile at him. She lingered around Bazel’s lodge when she could find an excuse. Finally she topped it off by giving him an elaborately decorated buckskin shirt. It was downright embarrassing. And Spotted Horse was starting to fume openly, and to mutter obscure threats.
Bazel told Baptiste one afternoon that Spotted Horse was preparing himself—painting himself, chanting incantations, putting on his medicine objects. So Baptiste made sure to keep his Green River and his pistol about him.
He heard it just soon enough to duck sideways. Spotted Horse’s stone ax hit him on the shoulder. It ached like it was broken. Damn, so Spotted Horse had meant to kill him right off. But by this time Baptiste had spun off and was facing the bastard. Spotted Horse was screeching to whatever his medicine was. That meant he was scared.
“You are a child,” Spotted Horse cried. “Your bowels run cold as winter rain. You are a woman, you would rather weep than fight. You have the blood of a Shoshone squaw in your veins, but none of a Shoshone brave. The spirits scowled on the day you were whelped. I will spread your blood on the dust, and from now nothing will grow there. But I will not eat your heart, because it is yellow. I will not let my dogs eat it. I will throw your flesh to the ravens, and they will scorn it.”
Baptiste growled fiercely and faked a head-on charge. Spotted Horse jumped back. Baptiste had proven his point, and grinned mockingly.
Spotted Horse was ashamed. He marshalled his courage and charged, swinging the ax at Baptiste’s head. Baptiste jumped to the side, and the ax changed direction, hitting him on the left arm without force. O.K., Spotted Horse’s charge was wild. Baptiste grabbed his own arm with his right hand, as though hurt. Spotted Horse was quick. The ax arced toward Baptiste’s head. Baptiste grabbed it and used the momentum to pull it past him, closing on Spotted Horse. He kneed Spotted Horse violently in the groin. When Spotted Horse doubled up, Baptiste brought his fist and the shaft of his Green River down hard at the base of his neck and his knee up into his face. It didn’t work. The neck was not broken. But Spotted Horse crumpled.
Baptiste pounded on him, rolled him onto his back, and jammed the point of the Green River at his throat. It would only be decent to kill the bastard. They glared at each other. Baptiste moved the knife tip down to Spotted Horse’s chest. He made a long, thin cut down the breast bone. Then he crossed that cut low down on the ribs. “I have cursed you with the sign of the white man’s God upside down,” he said. And he walked away. Now the niggur would be afraid to come back at him. Running Stream, he saw, had been crying, and he heard her wail during the fight.
He walked to Mountain Ram’s tipi and took away Spotted Horse’s three ponies. Then he thought about it some. Sacajawea made the trip to Mountain Ram’s tent to summon Running Stream. The girl came in with her head down, still crying, and wilted to the ground far to Baptiste’s right. Sacajawea sat behind her in the shadows. Baptiste moved close to Running Stream and lifted her face so that he could see it in the firelight. She could not look at him.
“I fought for you,” he said. She cried more freely. “I fought for you to be my woman. You will go away with me.” The girl nodded yes. No one would deny his right to her now. He looked at Sacajawea, back at Running Stream, and added, “Tonight.”
“It is right,” said Sacajawea.
Later he thought what Joe and Doc and Bill would say, seeing him womaned. If they were aboveground to say anything. Well, hell, he could always trade her for a good buffalo horse.
The elopement was easy. Mountain Ram and his squaw were expecting it, so Running Stream openly tied her belongings into skin bags, said her good-byes, and waited at the entrance of the lodge a while after the moonrise. Baptiste brought his six ponies, two of them carrying jerky, pemmican, robes, and lodgeskin. He strapped Running Stream’s light pack onto a third, mounted without a word, and set out.
No one had asked him where he meant to go. Probably they figured that, since winter was setting in, he would pitch their lodge in one of the nearby Shoshone camps, more of a gesture at elopement than the real thing. But he intended to find Milton Sublette and the RMF winter camp up on the Salmon. In present weather that was ten sleeps away. With heavy snow, it would be much longer or—well, he didn’t want to think about it. Too many mountains between here and there.
It was a clear, cold night, the sort that comes after snowfall. The snow lay thin on the ground, crusted to ice, and the horses’ hooves crunched as they walked. The moon made the plateau nearly as light as day, and the cold hurt his lungs a little. It made Baptiste feel good. The girl said nothing at all. When Baptiste figured they had covered ten miles, he made a fireless camp in the lee side of a big overhanging tree, where the ground was bare.
He thought Running Stream would be withdrawn, shy, remote—still suffering the aftershock of the fight and the elopement. But as he watched her standing silhouetted against the white sheen of snow, she slipped off her buckskin dress and came to the buffalo robes with him naked. She teased him a little. Then she kept him awake for a couple of hours, dog-tired as they both were, making love and playing and making love. Damn, she has fun with it, he thought as he drifted off.
The next day he forced them thirty miles, and the day after that they made a freezing ford of the Snake River. Running Stream never complained, and did whatever Baptiste told her to do quickly and efficiently. The snow held off as they crossed the lava beds. When they reached the mountains and set out down a wide valley between parallel ranges, the snow was still not deep enough to trouble the horses, and Baptiste thought they would make it.
They made camp under the boughs of a big fir tree. Running Stream gathered wood for a fire and brewed tea from the needles. He drank it almost boiling hot. As they were finishing their pemmican, she told him the most obscene joke he had ever heard. While he was still guffawing, she reached out to play with him. He started to come over her, but she pushed him onto his back, held him down, and then showed him he could enjoy being passive. That night Running Stream demonstrated that she had imagination as well as enthusiasm in the buffalo robes. The next morning he told her that he must give her a Frenchwoman’s name for the other Frenchmen to use: Sophie.
The snow did fall for o
ne day and one night, a windless time with huge snowflakes falling and drifting on the air like the leaves of maples back in Missouri. Baptiste took his leisure that day, noticing how snow curled over the lips of small cricks, watching two deer nibble at the ends of branches, listening to the big, soft silence that falling snow creates. He played songs into the silence, and Running Stream listened reverentially. The next day, though, he had to hurry on, to find graze for the horses.
He opened his eyes and caught Sophie leaning over him and examining his necklace. Her eyes fell. “It’s all right,” he said. “It is a piece of a star that traveled here from the far heavens, a stone of many stones. It came with me when I traveled far across the salt-water-everywhere. But I no longer travel among strangers.” She smiled like a child.
He came on Milton and the brigade just below where the North Fork flows into the Salmon, in the big canyon where the snow never stayed on the ground all winter long although the high ranges around were completely impassable. The boys didn’t remark much on his squaw, but they did seem to think she had a way with a story.
Baptiste had to sign some notes for what he wanted—a fine saddle decorated with silver brought clear from Taos for Sophie, and every sort of trading goods for Mountain Ram. When he finished bargaining, and trade goods were even more expensive than they would have been at rendezvous, he’d spent almost all of what Prince Paul had given him. Well, what did dollars matter in a country where there were no grocery stores anyway? He surprised Sophie with the saddle, and delighted her. The boys reckoned that Baptiste was a little gone on that squaw.
JULY 1836: The whole camp was grumbling. First Gabe and Fitz, the White-Headed Chief, had give up, the summer before, and throwed in with American Fur. Independents just couldn’t compete with the Trust, which baited them with money and then gobbled them up. So the boys had to buy and sell with the only store in town, which meant selling low and buying high. Baptiste thought MacKenzie must be gloating back at Fort Union. But he wasn’t. The fickle people in St. Louy and New York and London who had kept the demand for beaver up for a couple of centuries, doffing hats made of nothing else, had suddenly decided that silk was better. The price of plews dropped like a stone into a well, and broke when it hit bottom. “In the old days,” Luke Habber declaimed, “it was three dollars a pound, old ’un or kitten.” Now it was a dollar a pound for fine plews only. The boys were in the squeeze. And so were Kenneth MacKenzie and American Fur, for whatever consolation that brought.
But the price of living didn’t go down. Baptiste still had an outfit to buy, and some foofuraw for Sophie, whose high spirits called for a certain sartorial flair; and Jesus, there were her relatives to take care of. Since Baptiste had carried fine gifts to Mountain Ram, back in the spring of ’35, that particular bunch of Snakes never missed a rendezvous. Of course, all Baptiste’s in-laws expected presents from their rich relative; Bazel was like a child when it came to presents, and Sacajawea had some coming; on top of that, it seemed that Running Stream’s near relations amounted to three dozen Shoshones.
So Baptiste was gladdened, with all the other boys, when the sound of rifles down the Siskadee below Horse Creek signaled the supply train and a chance for a bust-out. Baptiste jumped onto his fastest pony bareback to race a dozen other trappers to the train. He saw Fitz, the White-Headed Chief, at the head of it, with another Irish aristocrat, Bob Campbell, alongside him, and behind them—Baptiste couldn’t believe it, so he rode right up to make sure. Some child must be buffler-witted. For next to the missionary doctor, Whitman, sidesaddle, was a handsome blonde woman in full skirt and stays. And behind, bumping uncomfortably on a wagon seat, came a solemn-looking fellow and another woman, scowling. The first white women had set foot in the Rocky Mountains.
Wall, it was at least cause for a celebration. The boys painted themselves up like Blackfeet on the warpath that night and treated the missionaries to an actual Blackfoot war dance. Truth was, so many good beavers had gone under to Blackfoot balls in the last year that the dancers meant it. The Shoshones, sparked by the notion of making Blackfeet come, joined in. Dr. Whitman, who had seen it all the summer before, thought the spectacle a high time, though he wondered whether he ought to. His lovely, buxom wife, Narcissa, delighted in it openly. The Reverend Henry Spalding was appalled by the white men who made themselves as low as savages. His self-righteous spouse, Eliza, retired to their tent at the start of the dancing.
Some of the men thought Narcissa a fantasy come true. Hadn’t they dreamed and even sung about the girls they’d left behind across the wide Missouri? And warn’t Mrs. Whitman a picture, with that red-gold hair piled on top of her head and them fine tits parading out front?
The Indians welcomed them too. After all, these missionaries were the answer from the white man to the plea that had gone to the Red-Headed Chief seven years before. Some Nez Percés were in for rendezvous, and immediately begged the missionaries to live with them and teach them the true way. The Snakes were heated up to learn it, too. Besides, the squaws were fascinated by the dresses with all their fancy stitching and embroidery.
Old Gabe just shook his head. He knew they warn’t long for that country. How could them ladies get by whar the sun would parch thar skin and the wind tan it to leather and the alkali water turn their bowels to water? Wagh! But he was obliging. As the head chief and host, he entertained them with yarns: About the river he’d found what run so fast downhill that it was hot at the bottom from friction. About echo canyon, whar the walls that threw a child’s voice back at him was so far away that it took six hours for the echo to get back whar it started; Gabe used the echo for an alarm clock, he did.
Baptiste was disgusted. He had some idea of how much they knew about what they were getting into—about as much as that first missionary who’d come two years ago, alone, and who thought that Flatheads were Flatheads because their mothers bound their heads as children and deformed them. He’d given that preacher credit, though. He’d cleared out of the mountains, moved on to Orgeon, and eventually had gone back to the States and told everyone that the Indians couldn’t be made Christians until they were made white men. Which was right. Were these damn fools come to make them white? No chance in this country. Why the land itself said no. The mountains and the plains would defy anyone who meant to divide them up, fence them, and farm them. Nature would say no to God.
Campbell liked Baptiste. The Irishman had come to the mountains for his health a decade before: he became a graduate man, and then turned for profit to supplying the rendezvous. He hadn’t lost his sophisticated tastes; Baptiste was the only Indian he’d ever met who’d even heard of Shakespeare, and the only Indian he knew who spoke English, French, German, and Spanish, and bore himself, even in buckskins, with the grace of a courtier.
As cavalier to Narcissa Whitman—he disliked Eliza Spalding—Campbell took Baptiste by to call. Narcissa was emphatically religious, he told Baptiste on the way to the Whitman tent. The report was that she had married principally to get to the mission fields; and for a fact she had worn black at her wedding, presenting herself as the bride of death.
For such a bride she seemed full of life. She served tea on her canvas-topped veranda, on an actual white tablecloth and in proper cups. She was full of curiosity about the trappers, and pealed with laughter at the stories of their lives—especially one Baptiste told about Milton Sublette climbing a tree to get away from a grizzly and ending up with a bear hug on the trunk two feet off the ground. At mention of mountain marriage she blushed a splendid crimson which only made her look more alluring, he thought, and seemed to mask fascination rather than disapproval. Baptiste entertained her graciously with anecdotes of Europe and Africa; he did not mention his dalliances. He was just thinking what a splendid, high-spirited woman she was when Old Bill creaked up and unceremoniously sat on the ground. He was, Baptiste judged, tanked up but coping nicely.
“Mrs. Whitman,” offered Baptiste, “permit me to introduce you to the most considerable man I have m
et in these mountains, variably known as William S. Williams, Master Trapper, Old Bill, Old Solitaire, Parson Bill, and the old so and so.”
Bill looked like he wanted to spit fire at Baptiste, but he said “How de do” without touching his felt hat. Narcissa greeted him graciously.
‘This rheumatic, ornery, canny old coon has been my personal master and genie in learning mountain life,” Baptiste went on devilishly. “Despite his uncouth appearance, he is an educated man, deciphering letters as well as he reads Blackfoot sign, and parsing both Latin and Greek as well. I doubt that he is suitable for your company, though, as he is a fallen angel. He was once a preacher and a missionary. He has declined into a thorough savage, regrettably, even to the point of putting faith in Indian superstitions.”
“Is that so, Mr. Williams?”
“It is, Marm, though that scalawag would say so if it warn’t. This child has preached to the Osages, away back to Missoura, and he’s put the fear of God into a many. And he’s sent some Injuns to the other place, too, if I do say it myself. But this child has lamed some’p’n, Marm, he has. He knows pore bull from fat cow, and he has kept his ears and eyes op’n, he has lamed some about religion from the Injun, damned as they be.”
“They are damned, Mr. Williams, because they do not see the divine light. Dr. Whitman and I hope to help them to see.” Narcissa was still smiling.
“Wall, Marm, this child doesn’t but think thar’s some the Injuns could help any white man to see, meanin’ no disrespect.”
