Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “What about the militia? And Burr?”

  There I was on better ground. “I inherited a paper militia that could not muster a hundred true men. It was shot through with Burrite officers, too. Frazier got me a list of them. I did some interviewing and cashiered most of ’em. Now I’m rebuilding. It’s hard to turn border men into a force, and the only hold I have on ’em is Indian dangers. I’ve been working with some loyal noncoms, good stouthearted men, and building around them rather than the officers, who are mostly sunshine soldiers. When I get a militia I can trust, we’ll have a grip on the territory.”

  Lewis nodded. “You got Big White back to the Mandans?”

  “What? I thought you knew!” I said.

  He shook his head. I had sent the news by post, but that was a slow and unreliable means, often two months between St. Louis and Washington this time of year.

  I told him about Ensign Pryor’s trip up the Missouri to take the Mandan chief home, in the company of Pierre Chouteau and twenty-two trappers. It had come a cropper at the Arikara villages, where the tribe we supposed to be our friends savagely assaulted the party on September ninth, killing three of Chouteau’s traders, wounding ten men including our old friend from the Corps of Discovery, Private Shannon, whose leg had to be amputated. Pryor had fled down the river, reaching St. Louis not long before I headed east. She-He-Ke, Big White, and his family remained in St. Louis, his way home barred by the suddenly ferocious Rees.

  Meriwether absorbed that, his gaze darting about, his brow furrowed. “We will have to try again with a stronger party. The president will be distressed. He takes it as an obligation of honor to get Big White safely back … and now this.”

  “We’ll try again,” I said. “A stronger party. Meriwether, I can’t properly govern, and Secretary Bates is, well, ineffectual, and Upper Louisiana can’t be governed from Virginia. We need you.”

  He glared at me, as if I had affronted him. “I will come when I am ready. I am pursuing important matters here.”

  “The editing?”

  “The work is proceeding. Pursh is drawing the plants. Hassler’s astronomy calculations are almost done. Peale is sketching the animals. I have an artist on the birds.”

  “Soon, then. You promised the first edition by year’s end.”

  He looked horrified. “Well, not so immediately.”

  “I would welcome the profit, Meriwether. The burdens of marriage and office tax me and the salary of an Indian superintendent doesn’t cover.”

  “Well, I can help you. When are you returning to St. Louis?”

  “We will honeymoon a few weeks in Virginia, visiting relatives. I hope to be in St. Louis early in the spring.”

  “Count on the army,” Lewis said. “I will move you.”

  That sounded like a good offer, and I chuckled. “I think you ought to find some lady and follow suit.”

  He laughed almost boisterously. “I’m just an old bachelor, too fusty and musty for ’em,” he said.

  “No, Meriwether, you are the most eligible man in the United States.”

  He cackled happily. “Then they’ll give me a good chase,” he said. “I will let one catch me.”

  His laugh was as brittle as old parchment. He was hiding his sorrows, and I knew at once that his disappointment at the hands of Letitia Breckenridge had afflicted his spirits.

  “Governor, let me tell you, in St. Louis the belles will flock to the balls, and if you know a few words of French, such as oui, oui, oui, you will captivate more hearts than you’ll ever know.”

  He wheezed out a laugh, and it was like hearing old paper crumple.

  “You look to be in good health, Meriwether.”

  “I’m in perfect health, brimming with life, ready to advance my fortunes in St. Louis. But I’ve been wrestling with the ague. It comes and goes, you know, but as soon as my dear mother gives the word, I’ll head down the river.”

  That sounded fine to me. We spent an hour talking about the politics of the territory, the innumerable trading licenses General Wilkinson had granted to cronies before he departed, the smoldering embers of the Burr conspiracy to peel the whole area away from the republic and build a new nation out of scoundrels and traitors. Lewis brought me up to date on a myriad of things; the Burr trial and acquittal in Richmond, Jefferson’s struggles with the British, who were boldly provoking war by pressing American seamen and engaging in other calculated affronts. That worried me.

  “Meriwether, if there is war, I command a hopeless rabble. Half don’t have rifles. We need some steel—cannon, rifles, everything—and I’ll count on you to apply for it from Congress.”

  He nodded, unhappily. Again I had the deepening impression that Lewis was a troubled man, insecure, in pain of some sort.

  That was the last I saw of him until today. He arrived for the wedding, looking fit and strong, and acting more like his old self, gorgeously accoutred in his gold braid and blue. I had little time other than to greet him and see to his quarters.

  York greeted the old captain effusively. “Massah Lewis, Captain, is mighty nice you come to this heah wedding,” he exclaimed.

  But Meriwether ignored the darkie, as if York had not traveled with us clear to the western sea. I watched York closely, worried that the man’s insolence would get the better of him, but York held his peace.

  Lewis is much the center of attention today; men, women, children all press him to spin his anecdotes once again, but he does so reluctantly and by rote. He’s worn down by the attention. There is a banquet tonight, and a ball tomorrow, and Colonel Hancock has kept the punch bowl filled for days.

  Meriwether hangs about the punch, downing cup after cup along with port and porter and whatever other spirits the Hancocks provide.

  It has been a long while since we returned from the West, and yet that expedition affects us both even now, and Lewis especially. I see it in the face of everyone I talk to; they see the explorer, and not the Clark. I am eager to turn a new leaf.

  Tonight they will hide Julia from me and I will not see her until the sacred rites, when she will be an angel on the arm of her father. I will be waiting there, in the green parlor, when she waltzes down the stairs in rustling white silk and ivory lace, her hair aglow, her lips ruby, her eyes shining upon me like little suns … or slides down the banister with a whoop, if I know my Julia. I will be there, and so will the preacher, and so will a hundred guests, my brothers and their spouses, my sister and hers, assorted cousins and friends. And I will take my beloved to my bosom there, pledge myself to her there, hear her pledge herself to me there, and that will be the beginning, as well as an end.

  16. LEWIS

  I tarried this January of 1808 in the frail warmth of Locust Hill, but my heart is cold. Many were the dreams that had sustained me during my eventful life. I had dreamed of honor. I had dreamed of love. I had dreamed of devotion to our infant republic, that we might prove to the whole world that men may live free and equal. I had dreamed of accomplishment. I had wanted to make my widowed mother proud. I wanted the name Lewis to shine for a thousand years. I had hoped for children. I had hoped for an illustrious name that would echo through the generations, a name unstained and blameless.

  Now, by terrible mischance—or was it my own folly?—everything that I dreamed of, everything that I was, everything that I might still be, lay in ruin, blackened by a shameful disease that evoked the loathing of the world, a disease whose name was not uttered.

  I could not talk to my mother about it; not Lucy Marks, who had borne me, raised me up, educated me, and quietly nurtured me through the vicissitudes of youth. I could barely talk to my physician brother Reuben, either, but held it all in, mortified, desolated by the scourge that rotted my parts as well as my very soul. I told Reuben very little; only a date: August of 1805. He had remarked the speed at which the disorder had devastated my body, faster than usual. I had no reply other than that we were famished, eating poorly, and suffering the want of many necessaries in our diet, a
nd maybe that had advanced the plague within me, which rolled like a black tide through my flesh and blood.

  He held out a little hope, and I clung to it.

  “Meriwether, often the pox passes by, and leaves the victim unscathed. It is the common thing,” he told me.

  “But what of the others? Half the corps has it.”

  “We’ll never know how they fare. It’s a disease that mimics several others. It attacks different parts in different people, choosing the weakest portion. In some, it savages the heart and veins and arteries. In others it assaults the mind and nerves. In others it aggrieves the flesh, muscle, bone. I see none of that in you.”

  He was holding out hope to a mortified, mortifying man, and I clung to it desperately. He put me on mercury courses while Lucy Marks boiled her simples, and fed me this or that extract or broth. She brewed a tea of cuckold (or beggar-ticks as it is sometimes named), especially sovereign against venereal complaints, but also ginseng, fitroot, slippery elm, and burdock, which purifies the blood. She favors blue flag steeped in gin, which is also effective against venereals. She did not probe, but Reuben sometimes did. He wanted to know everything, as if my telling of those August nights in 1805 would somehow be my catharsis. But I knew he was merely curious.

  I will always keep those nights to myself. No one on earth knows of them, not even Drouillard, Shields, and MacNeal, the only men with me as we probed the east flanks of the Bitterroots looking for the Shoshones. Clark and the rest of the Corps of Discovery were far behind, toiling up the Jefferson River.

  We spotted a native boy; then some women, all of them shy as bats in daylight. But finally we did connect with the chief, Cameahwaite, and his band, and we rejoiced. They were starving and we got them meat. They promised to sell us horses. We went through tense times waiting for Clark to show up with what few items we had left to trade them for horses. But thanks to the sign-talker, Drouillard, we parleyed with the young chieftain, assured him of our friendship and demonstrated that we wished no ill upon them.

  By the firelight they danced for us in those mountain meadows, and got my two privates and Drouillard dancing, and persuaded me to dance as well. Their women were sinuous and comely and honey-fleshed, and their eyes glowed in the firelight. The chieftain offered us our choice; it being a great honor among their women to embrace an honored guest. It took little effort to persuade the soldiers, but I designed to tarry long after they had vanished into the buffalo-hide lodges that soft autumnal evening.

  I wrestled long with my own temptation: both Will Clark and I had steadfastly refused the offers of other tribes along the Missouri, though the men partook of all that savage hospitality, and paid a price for it in the drips and other venereals, all of which I treated with mercury salve and calomel. Sometimes the chiefs had taken great offense at our reluctance, thinking that we were disdainful of them and their women. I can’t speak for Will Clark, but I was merely being prudent. And he had his Judy to think of.

  I feared that Cameahwaite might take similar offense; he who could provide us with horses and spare the whole discovery expedition from disaster. And so I reasoned my way forward.

  This one time, far from the corps, far even from the eyes of my three companions, far from civilization, far from white men’s diseases in this remote corner of the mountains, far out upon a sea of wilderness, I might quickly enjoy the great embrace.

  I had, indeed, my eye upon a glowing young woman with come-hither eyes, lithe and sinuous, with strong cheekbones and smooth, tawny flesh; a woman with a bold assessing glance that spoke to me in ancient ways, beyond what words could convey.

  I smiled at her; she returned the compliment tenfold. We drifted off into the pine-scented darkness, far beyond the campfire and its dancing light, into a starlit void, and finally into an arbor paved with thick robes. And there I threw my life away, all unwitting, all with the purpose of avoiding offense to these savage people.

  Or so I tell myself. At other times, I am more honest. She had awakened in me a lust that had slept restlessly in my loins for more months than I could remember.

  Oh, if only that night had never happened! I have cursed my fate ever since, choked on my own desolation and shame. I prowl the hills, thinking of nothing else. I meet young women, and shy from them: can they see? Do they know? Has word about me filtered out insidiously, whispered from lip to ear, a blackening pool of horror about the explorer?

  I walk the lonely paths beyond the barren fields, thinking of Letitia, of the others, of the women I cannot have. If I am an honorable man I must not even taste the pleasures of an unsuspecting wanton, much less a woman of virtue. But all that is dead in me except for the dread of being discovered. It maddens me, the thought of whispers, the pursed lips, the side glance, the turned head. Did Letitia Breckenridge flee because she read something in me, something that I did not yet know about myself? Ah, God, what is left of my dwindling life? And how long will it run before my vile secret is made public?

  I tried to rejoice at Will’s wedding, but my heart was all ash. I bantered with him about women. I told him I would find mine. I made great sport of the chase and the conquest. And all the while my soul was shriveling inside of my parched and fevered body. I made a great show of merriment at the punch bowls, but I did not feel it, and any close observer of Meriwether Lewis must have seen my dissimulation and wondered at it. What did Will think? Or was he too much absorbed in his own good fortune to notice?

  My mother and brother have improved my health, and my indisposition wanes, and as it does my hopes prosper. Most survive! In many the plague vanishes! And yet I cannot put the horror of my condition out of mind. It is there, stalking me, my very shadow, whenever I take some porter at the public house and talk to my neighbors; whenever there is a quadrille or minuet or a hunt.

  Reuben warns me to avoid spirits; but if I were suddenly to stop, the world would study me too closely and wonder why. I cannot change my conduct in the slightest for fear of discovery. They may not know, but I do, and I cannot walk the lane without this grim ghost stalking behind me, my bleak shadow, my shame waiting to ruin me.

  I have not written a word. My journals are untouched. A thousand times I have opened the morocco covers, and plucked up a quill, only to slump in my chair, watch the rain drip from the eaves, and close the journal.

  My publisher, Conrad, presses me for pages. The president of the United States sends me letters in that fine hand of his, courteous, affectionate, but between the words is an edge, and I see it, and he means for me to see it. The unpublished journals reflect on his administration. I had promised the first volume before year’s end. It is not even begun. This is maddening. For the life of me I do not know why I avoid that great task.

  I hear from Secretary Bates, who says the territory is in an uproar and he is dealing with scoundrels, and that his word lacks the authority that mine must have. But his excellency Governor Lewis does not come, and Bates is growing desperate. I draw a governor’s salary from the federal treasury, but I languish a thousand miles from the seat of government.

  I cannot go. Not until my brother and mother finish the courses with which they treat me. I probably slow their progress, sipping as much as I do, and yet I will not stop. Reuben warned me; Dr. Saugrain warned me. My mother didn’t, but I see the disapproval in her eyes every time I sip some port.

  I tell them nothing of the laudanum I sometimes use for sleep, when my worries lie too heavy upon me and I can get no rest. Six drops in a tumbler of water puts me into a peaceful sleep, and I awaken refreshed, unlike so many nights when I lie abed swimming in my bitter fate.

  Reuben tells me I am much better and can leave in a fortnight if the weather permits. That would put me in St. Louis in March. I am eager to go. At moments a heady optimism lifts my spirits; I shall be one of those who has conquered the venereal! I shall put all this behind me, govern that unruly province with a firm and fair hand, deal sternly with traitors and opportunists.

  I will treat with th
e Indians, assuring them of the items they need, such as kettles and iron implements, in exchange for their good conduct. I will restore order to the fur business, get my Mandan chief, who still languishes there, back to his people, deal with those treacherous Rees, subdue the haughty Sioux, and return after a few years in triumph. Never let it be said that I lack determination.

  PART

  II

  17. LEWIS

  I arrived in this raw, secretive, scheming city of St. Louis on the eighth of March, 1808, after an overland journey in which I paused in Kentucky to make sure the family’s land claims, some of them won by my father for service in the Revolution, were in good order. That meant examining the tracts for encroachment, checking the stakes, making sure of the records. Reuben accompanied me that far and then sailed with my equipage down the Ohio and up the Mississippi, while I continued by land. He reached St. Louis a fortnight ahead of me.

  I am in robust health, never felt better, and am eager to begin governing this unruly province. For months I have been receiving a dire correspondence from Territorial Secretary Frederick Bates, describing the anarchy prevailing here, especially as regards Indian policy. I will deal with all that soon—if it really exists. St. Louis is tranquil, greening, and brimming with spring warmth.

  I paid a courtesy call at once upon Bates, who greeted me effusively, apparently relieved not to have to cope with the ambitions of various factions who want the government to stay out of Indian affairs altogether so that ruthless traders may have their dubious way with the tribes, virtually ruling them with their trinkets. I will see about that.

  Mr. Bates is a sallow and bag-eyed sort of man, mellifluent with words, an attorney given to much rhetoric but also bending with the wind. I very nearly drowned in his compliments. He was telling me all at once what villainous parties roam the territory; how treacherous are the Indians, British, Spanish, French, and other dubious sorts; how wisely he has governed, with shrewd appointments and policies intended to quiet the clamor and placate the cutthroat traders. I listened much, said little, and took the measure of the secretary. I sympathized: he had been the sole federal official for many months, with General Clark getting married and I at Locust Hill.