Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Then she laughed.

  “Ah, Julia, the truth is, I have had naught but the vision of you in my bosom all this while; it was upon me at the very shore of the western sea. I am not a young man, being more than twice your years, and yet in all my days I never was drawn to any but you, and so I declare myself.”

  It was awkward, but my plain tongue had deserted me.

  “I have not heard the word,” she said.

  “Ah, ah, it is you I love.”

  She smiled, and touched me again, with such gentleness that I turned to wax. “I should rather like an older man,” she said, and I kissed her, servants be damned.

  So it was, that Yuletide, that I formed my alliance, but first I had to take the case to her father. Since my purposes were known from the beginning, I didn’t surprise him, and it no doubt had helped that the Clarks and Hancocks were well intertwined over several generations.

  The colonel received me in those office chambers from which he counted his tobacco receipts and totted up the costs of the plantation. I supposed that this was a transaction like any other. He received me the afternoon of Christmas Eve, his square ruddy face surveying me with a sardonic silence. He wore his dark hair in a queue, a sign of his Federalist leanings.

  “Sir, I should like Julia’s hand,” I said.

  He smiled thinly. “And she approves?” he asked, in that thick, hoarse voice that suggested too intimate experience with the fine-leaved product of his fields.

  “You might ask her,” I replied cheerfully.

  He gazed out upon the barren fields, half exhausted because tobacco depleted the soil. “And your age is no impediment to her?”

  I shook my head. “She rather prefers a man to a boy.”

  “It’s an impediment to me. She’s barely upon her womanhood.”

  “My mother married at fifteen.”

  He nodded. “She has grown up in pleasant surroundings,” he said. “Can you assure me that it will be so in the future?”

  “I am expecting considerable back pay and a land grant of some size.”

  “In Kentucky.”

  “Yes, federal lands in the west.”

  He opened the snuffbox and inhaled a pinch, wheezing a moment. “I never imagined she would end up with one of Jefferson’s radicals,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’ll be heading for France to lop off the heads of a few noblemen—and women.”

  I laughed. “I believe simply in an aristocracy of merit, not heredity.”

  “And not in the leadership of good families?”

  “Good men, yes, that is close to my republican principles, sir. Let them elect good men.”

  “There are no impediments? Your health is good?”

  “Excellent, sir. I know of no impediments at all.”

  “A soldier’s life is hard.” There was a question in his observation.

  “I am no longer a soldier. I resigned my commission, and for good. I have no disability.”

  He grunted, his brown eyes glowing brightly. “Your intentions have been plain, Will, and that has given me time to ponder the matter, and discuss it as well with my wife. We are close, our families, and I am pleased by the connection, but we think it would be desirable to wait a year. She is but half a woman still, at least to us, and knows you little enough. If you should agree to that, and would postpone until January of eighteen and eight, we would welcome you most heartily into our family, and into our bosoms.” He smiled. “Even if your politics are impossible.”

  We laughed. I shall always remember the moment, Colonel Hancock wheezing his delight; rising up and clapping me on the back, and leading me back into the great house to inform the mistress, and receive her congratulations, and then to the parlor where Miss Julia sat doing crewelwork for the seat of a dining chair.

  She peered up at her parents and at me, and set aside her yarns.

  “It is a very special Christmas, Julia,” her father said. “Happy for us, happy for the Clarks, happy for you, I trust.”

  Julia smiled, uncertainly.

  “If you can manage to wait a year, settle into womanhood a while, make sure of your heart, then you have our blessings to marry this big redheaded son of our kin John Clark.”

  Julia cried, and I took her hand and lifted her up from her chair, and we had the most sweet and sacred of Christmases.

  9. LEWIS

  The deplorable sergeant Patrick Gass is forcing my hand. He has announced the forthcoming publication of his journal, even though I have expressly forbidden it. I gave permission only to Private Frazier to publish his account, but Gass has proceeded anyway, much to my annoyance.

  These are unlettered men, not versed in any branch of arts or science, and likely to spread a great deal of misinformation. They have the advantage of me, hastening their small journals into print while I labor at larger tasks, not least of which has been securing the back pay of all the men in the corps, including Sergeant Gass.

  This Thursday morning, the twelfth of March, 1807, I stormed into the president’s office with the Gass prospectus in hand, and insisted that something be done to stop it. Gass would ruin everything.

  Mr. Jefferson eyed me through those gold-rimmed spectacles of his. “It’s not among my principles to stop publication of anything,” he said quietly, after studying the publisher’s brochure. He stared out upon the lawn. “But I do think it’s going to be damaging to us. I’d suggest a warning to the public that it and any other diaries are not authorized by you, the commander, and also that they are likely to be unreliable.” He smiled at me. “You wouldn’t be fretting about your profit, would you?”

  “Certainly not, sir. I want only for the truth to reach the public.”

  Jefferson laughed, which irritated me. Why couldn’t the man be serious? I am not after the money; I’m concerned with the truth, and worried that half those note-takers among my corps will publish undisciplined, uneducated versions of events and permanently twist what Will and I so assiduously recorded.

  But even the president thinks I want the bootleg journals suppressed so that I can make an additional dollar. I flatter myself that my conduct is grounded upon the highest motives of patriotism and truth, and that such base motives as private gain have no hold upon me.

  We agreed that I would write the letter and he would vet it, and maybe put a stop to this bootleg publication of journals. And by afternoon that was accomplished. I wrote the National Intelligencer condemning these spurious publications by persons unknown to me, and cautioning readers to beware and to hold out for the true goods, the first of which I would bring out by year’s end. I mentioned as well that I had authorized the publication only of Frazier’s journals, but took pains to point out that the man is only a private, unlettered, unacquainted with science, and that his work must not be taken seriously. I sent it off today, and expect it to run tomorrow.

  I cannot stop these pirate editions, in part because I have resigned my commission in the army and have accepted Mr. Jefferson’s appointment of me as the governor of Upper Louisiana, which was affirmed by the Senate March 2. I suppose I shall have to bear the burden of these inferior tracts. Will and I ordered the sergeants to keep journals; the more of them, the safer the record of discovery. Some of them merely copied what we had written. And now these unlettered men want to cash in, and their greed disgusts me.

  I face the complex task of reducing the official journals to a coherent narrative, excising those entries not intended for the public eye, and organizing the scientific discoveries, and producing the maps we completed, and not until then will the public receive an accurate and sound depiction of all that we experienced.

  Gass’s brochure has put me into a funk from which I will not recover for some while. What makes it all the worse is that from the dawn of this year, Mr. Jefferson and I have been doing our utmost to extract from the public purse worthy rewards for my Corps of Discovery. We proposed to Mr. Alston of North Carolina, who chairs a special committee of the House to see into our compensation,
that all my men, including those who returned from Fort Mandan with the keelboat, be given double pay and a land grant of three hundred twenty acres. And that Will Clark receive a compensation equal to my own, a recognition he richly deserves.

  Alas, the War Department, in the annoying person of Mr. Dearborn, recommended less for Will Clark, a thousand acres for him as opposed to sixteen hundred for me, and a lieutenant’s pay for him, and a captain’s for me. But the president and I got Alston’s ear, and the chairman was able to even things out somewhat: Will and I each will get sixteen hundred acres.

  The president submitted my appointment as governor of the Upper Louisiana territory, and also asked Congress to raise Will Clark to a lieutenant colonel, but again the secretary of war managed to foil Mr. Jefferson, and Congress eventually agreed with him, it being the wish of the members to abide by seniority and not jump Clark over the heads of other deserving men. But I was heartened by the news that they would gladly confirm Clark in any other office within their power, and thus, at the president’s behest, he will be our superintendent of Indian Affairs in St. Louis, and a brigadier of militia.

  All this business consumed my days and nights this winter. It took a month of heated debate before the representatives passed even a scaled-down version of what I had asked for my doughty corps, but at least the Senate nodded it through in a trice, and I am gratified that my courageous men will benefit from a grateful republic.

  Meanwhile I am the cynosure at one banquet after another. It seems all of Washington must have me at its table. The city welcomed me with a great affair January 14, in which I was the honored guest, along with Chouteau and Big White. I vaguely remember seventeen toasts. (Vaguely is the exact word for it.) It was at that time that Joel Barlow, powdered, periwigged, and bedizened in scarlet and periwinkle silks, first intoned his new ode, “On the Discoveries of Lewis,” and I was greatly smitten by some of the bard’s orotund verses:

  With the same soaring genius thy Lewis descends,

  And, seizing the oars of the sun,

  O’er the sky-propping hills and the high waters he bends

  And gives the proud earth a new zone …

  Then hear the loud voice of the Nation proclaim,

  And all ages resound the decree:

  Let our Occident stream bear the young hero’s name

  Who taught him his path to the sea.

  I fancied teaching the Columbia which way to go. And I wondered what Big White thought of all that.

  There have been balls to attend, and the social life is heady. I am finding feminine company abounding, and little doubt that I shall make a proper match. I require a serious woman to match my own seriousness, and that is no simple matter, especially in Washington. There seem plenty of the fair sex making themselves pleasant to me, but I have no stomach for the twittering things.

  In January Will Clark wrote me that his assault upon the fair citadel of Fincastle pulchritude was successful, and that he would capture his prize in January of next year. I rejoiced at his success, and have regretted being so busy with the president and Congress that I scarcely have found a moment to pursue the lovely and fragile beauty that appears at every prospect.

  I expect him momentarily. He will head for St. Louis at once, with Private Frazier, bearing back pay for my men. He will also take our Mandan royalty, She-He-Ke, and his entourage, back to St. Louis and begin the preparations to take the chief upriver, past the hostile Arikaras, which will be a delicate business but one Will Clark can well manage.

  I am glad he has delayed his journey to the capital because the President’s House has been a hospital for several days. First Tom Randolph caught the catarrh; then I, and finally Mr. Jefferson. I bled the president’s son-in-law considerably, and he recovers slowly.

  Doctor Saugrain in St. Louis opposes bleeding, saying it weakens the patient, but he is isolated. I prefer the counsel of the eminent Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, the finest of all physicians this side of the Atlantic, who instructed me in medical matters before I headed west. He, of course, believes with all progressive physicians that it is necessary to purge the blood of whatever bad humors evoke the disease, and the way to do it is to drain away the tainted blood and let the body generate healthier blood.

  As for me, I examined myself with some concern upon taking sick, studying my mouth, my gums, my eyes, my skin, and found nothing amiss but a bilious fever, and for that I had Rush’s excellent Thunderclappers, specially compounded to abate fevers, which I took to good effect, and upon this very day I am back to my usual bloom of health, and so is Mr. Jefferson, though Randolph lingers abed. I make no public or private mention of Saugrain; it is as if I have never met the man, though of course I am privately grateful to him.

  I expect to wind up my business here by the end of the month and head for Philadelphia, where I will join the savants of the American Philosophical Society, and negotiate with a printer to begin work on the journals. Mr. Jefferson has been conversing with me about Upper Louisiana. We will need to pacify the tribes on the Missouri, arrange free passage of our traders, license them to deal with the tribes, keep the British out, and encourage settlement sufficient to anchor that vast territory firmly to the union of states.

  Ah, Philadelphia! My pleasure in presenting the most learned men of America a bounty of new plants and animals, all carefully observed and recorded, along with accurate maps, and a firsthand account of the passage through that great mystery, the interior of North America, will, I imagine, be unparalleled and perhaps will exceed even my pleasure in reporting to Mr. Jefferson that I had fulfilled his mission in all respects.

  I expect to be in Philadelphia some little while preparing the journals and discovering just what the printer needs. I am in no hurry to head for St. Louis; not with Will Clark on hand to handle our Indian diplomacy, and not with an old acquaintance, the experienced public servant Frederick Bates, brother of my old friend Tarleton Bates, heading there to be secretary, my lieutenant. I rather expect the two of them will govern excellently while I see to the maps and papers, and to that sacred duty to transmit what I have learned of the world to these men of science.

  I reflect, when I am alone in my room in the President’s House, how fortune has smiled upon me. It was not long ago, writing on the occasion of my thirty-first birthday in the Bitterroot Mountains—just after that moment of weakness—that I wondered whether I had given the world anything worthwhile or done anything notable during my life. Now I know I have.

  But I have no desire to dwell upon memories; the future beckons. I am torn between my wish to become a man of science and a man of public affairs, and I will have to resolve the matter eventually. I am in a rare position to choose my course in life. For the moment I must set science aside and focus on the western reaches of the republic, and if I am blessed in this endeavor, perhaps I will be invited to fill larger offices, perhaps even the office held by the resident of this very house.

  My public purpose, then, is to draft a paper informing Mr. Jefferson and his successors what lies to the west, and how to subdue it, and how to encourage commerce in it, and how to treat the tribes that live upon it. I will make it a first order of business to provide the government with my insights, and if my perceptions find favor, so will I.

  I should like to be regarded as the new Sage of the West, publish my thoughts regularly in some news sheet, and stand up and be counted. If all that occurs as I hope, then someday my confreres in the Democratic-Republican ranks might find me worthy of higher office. And I would accept it gladly.

  I have come into myself; for this was I set upon the earth. That vast Louisiana territory is mine; etched indelibly on my mind, though the world knows little of it, and won’t until I publish my journals. How odd it is, during these reflective moments, that I sometimes find myself reluctant to share all that wealth of information with the public. I have little desire to publish. I would rather confide my secrets privately to men like Benjamin Smith Barton, of the philosophical societ
y, than cast my pearls before the swine.

  The Missouri country is a comely land, well watered, hilly, forested, verdant, and fertile, and I will make it my home. I am especially fond of it because it windows the world that I recently conquered. I see myself rooted in the West, settled upon a great green estate, my happy bride beside me, our children blooming. I should like to settle out there in the virgin land, my eyes upon the horizons. I should like to be a country squire, rather like Tom Jefferson, holding office, improving knowledge, and devising better ways to prosper. Every door is open.

  10. LEWIS

  I arrived in the City of Brotherly Love on April 10, and after settling into a room on Cherry Street rented by a Mrs. Wood, I began at once to tackle the business before me. The chestnuts were in new leaf and so was I, so happy was I to be there in that seat of learning.

  I have been paid by Congress at last and am in comfortable circumstances, and can indulge my every whim if I choose. But I am a serious man, and do not indulge myself. I did, however, lay in a stock of porter, ale, and Madeira, with which to entertain guests at my lodging.

  Those journals weigh heavily on my mind, along with the hundreds of specimens and drawings and pressings of plants that I have with me; not only what I had brought from the Pacific, but much that the president had kept for me, sent to him from Mandan villages in 1805.

  Upon good recommendation, I chose John Conrad as my publisher and found him at his chambers at 30 Chestnut Street. I liked the man at once; a dusty, gray, scholarly gent who took his tasks seriously. His seriousness recommended him to me.

  I had taken but one of the journals, and this I showed to him after we had exchanged greetings.

  “I have in mind the publication of the journals in one volume, and the scientific findings, maps, and so forth, in another,” I said.

  He pulled on his wire-rimmed spectacles and examined what I regarded as my treasure; the daily records, mostly done by Clark, that supplied a day-by-day progress of our journey.