Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  So I will put them all under York’s supervision, and make space in the attic. It will be crowded up there, but they should be grateful to be out of the cold. The alternative would be to build a slave shack in the back lot, next to the slaves’ privy.

  This evening I will tell Meriwether our family is growing and we need the space. He will understand, being a sensitive man and affectionate friend. He has already told me that he can have a room with Chouteau until he finds rooms.

  I hunted for York, and found him carrying stove wood into the parlor, his black muscles rippling.

  “You lookin’ for me, mastuh?”

  “I’m bringing three more slaves into this household, and placing them under you. Two laundresses and a houseboy.”

  He settled the wood carefully, unsmiling. I had thought he might enjoy having more of the darkies around.

  “You gonna stick them up the attic, too?” he asked.

  “There’s room enough.”

  “Room enough, yassuh, so there is, lying side by side.”

  “You have objections?”

  He fidgeted a moment, his yellow eyes peering at the floor. “I’ve been meaning to ask, boss. You maybe hire me out in Louisville for some little while? You gets the money for me workin’?”

  “Why?”

  “Ah sure wanna see my wife, mastuh.”

  “No, I need you here,” I said.

  He looked so crestfallen that I regretted my tone. “Maybe a visit. I can send you back there for a few weeks, but not now. Next year.”

  His cheerfulness deserted him entirely. “You mind if I ask something? You let me speak some?”

  I nodded. He was my old friend. We had grown up together from childhood and he had been my personal servant for as long as I could remember.

  “I goes out on that big trip, and I’s as good as any man you got there. I cooks the food just as good, and I hunts good, and I lifts and totes just as good, and I paddles hard, and I guards you like a soldier. I gets just as hungry as them white men, and I gets colder because I’s the last to get some skins to wear. But I never do no complaining, not like some white men. You nevah hear a word of anger out of me all them days. You pay them, but you don’t pay me because you own me.”

  He was raising my bile but I pushed it back. I knew where this was heading and didn’t like it. He was virtually a free man out West, welcomed into the company of my men. He had the same liberty as they; wooed the dusky maidens as they did. Carried a rifle and hunted, dressed the meat, cooked and walked and paddled and starved. It was like schooling. Once they learn their ABCs, they’re ruined. You can’t make a slave out of them if they get their learning, and the only use is to sell them for field hands and let them taste the whip. Now, suddenly, York is remembering how it was, and he’s little good around here anymore.

  “Get it out of your head, and don’t ever let me hear it again,” I said. “I’m not going to let you go. I’m not going to let you buy your way out, either. You’re worth fifteen hundred dollars, and I can’t afford to replace you. You are going to keep on right here, and do it cheerfully, or I’ll sell you to someone who’s a lot harsher than I am. Count yourself lucky.”

  He seemed to pull deep into himself.

  “You can see your woman next spring,” I said, intending to soften the decision a little.

  He said nothing, but he lifted his gaze from the floor, and stared directly into my face, and I could see those yellowbrown eyes examine me, as if I was on trial. He radiated pain, a hurt so strong and dark that I almost recoiled.

  “Yes, General,” was all he said.

  I stalked away, itching to whip him for his insolence. But I am a man of slow temper and I checked myself. I do not fathom why he irked me almost beyond my limits.

  This evening, while Meriwether and I sipped some New Orleans amontillado while we waited for the mammies to finish cooking the supper, I braced him.

  “We’ve a child coming, Meriwether, and my wife would like to commandeer the rest of the house.” I smiled. “She is a woman of great determination, and has taken to ordering the general of militia around.”

  “A child! I might have guessed! Congratulations, old friend!” Lewis exclaimed, the brittleness of it odd in him. I had never heard this tone during the whole expedition.

  “I shall be the gallant and remove myself forthwith,” he said.

  “Meriwether, I salvaged a little from her onslaught: we hope you’ll continue to sup with us.”

  “General, how can I resist, with so fair a young lady as Miss Anderson to grace our table?”

  There it was again, this banter about women. “We always have certain matters to discuss, and it seems a very good time to do it,” I said.

  “I fear we just bore your beauteous niece with our business,” he said.

  I had no answer to that.

  21. LEWIS

  Almost every day I open the journals and read them. Most entries are in Will’s hand, and are brief. He was faithful to the task, and recorded the day’s events without fail, save only for a brief hunting trip, and even then summarized what had happened during that one lapse.

  I planned to keep a full journal myself, but found myself otherwise occupied, so that I did not live up to my good intentions. I wish to excel in everything I do. But it had been a matter of indifference to me whether the events of a dull day were recorded. I always had a higher task in mind, which was to record anything of importance: plants, animals, geographical features, oddities, weather, and always, the savages. This I did as faithfully as steady old Will kept the daily accounts of mundane matters.

  It is a matter of temperament, that’s all. I am inclined to scribble endlessly about a new species; he is content in his phlegmatic way to record the miles we traveled, the latitude and longitude, and the condition of the troops.

  I room now with Pierre Chouteau in a spacious, sunny manse delicately appointed in all the latest fashion, with fabrics and furniture sometimes brought clear from Paris or England. The place suits me, though I will not abide here long for fear of their hospitality wearing thin. I am looking for rooms. I have rented an office not far from Will’s house, to which I still repair after a day’s toil to sup with him and his blossoming Julia. She seems more at ease now that I no longer intrude upon her nest.

  The journals cast a spell over me and I cannot escape it. They seem heavy in my hand, like pigs of lead, crushing my fingers under their weight. And yet it is all illusion. The cold weight, really, is the expectations of the world and the growing impatience of Thomas Jefferson and the eagerness with which my colleagues in the American Philosophical Society await the detailed account of our great voyage. Here it is, mid-October of 1808, and I have not yet started.

  Each day I open them intending to begin an edited version for my publisher, Conrad. Each day I read the entries and they release a flood of memories in me. Here Will describes the time Charbonneau almost sank the pirogue. There I describe the magical moment when I beheld the falls of the Missouri. And here is where we finally found the Shoshones, shy as mice, and with them and their horses, our salvation …

  I page through them: Will’s hand is as familiar to me as my own. His want of learning shows; my schooling shows whenever I put nib to paper. His entries are strong, honest, and prosaic; mine extend beyond the ordinary realm, soaring into feeling, speculation, observation—especially observation, for I pride myself on a keen eye, and with that eye I discovered more new species of plant and bird and beast than I can name.

  It is an odd thing, opening those journals and swiftly returning to that bright sweet land, never before seen by white men, the shining sun-baked prairies, the gloomy snowmantled mountains, the wary savages thinking unfathomable thoughts, the rolling river, the salt-scented breeze off the western sea. This flood of images trumps my best intentions. Why do I pen letters and long treatises on policy, but never put nib to paper when it comes to these journals? It is maddening.

  I don’t suppose mere words can ade
quately describe our great journey, the sight of men toiling up the river, the fear and pleasure as we set ashore at the Sioux or Arikara or Mandan villages, the dread with which I first sliced a gray morsel of roast dog and put it in my mouth, the rejoicing when we tasted the brine of the western sea. No, these are too private, too vivid, to convey to the world.

  But my president grows restless. And underlying that restlessness is the simple fact that these journals are not really mine or Will’s; they belong to the government. We recorded events as officers in the army, as a part of our public mission, expressly for the government.

  Mr. Jefferson has graciously given us the priceless opportunity to profit from them, a gift so much larger than anything else he or Congress did for us that it chastens me. There is a large profit to be had from it. Will and I have invested most of what we received in back pay from the voyage of discovery in the project, but after publication there will be money enough to keep us in fine style for years to come. And yet I have not begun. And daily, Tom Jefferson’s disappointment in me deepens.

  I tax myself with it. Why have I delayed? It is now two years since we set foot in St. Louis. I am stopped! My mind recoils! In the East I proceeded at once toward publication, getting an education in the printer’s arts in the process. I hired various artists, even Charles Willson Peale; put a fine mathematician to work on our celestial observations, put draftsmen to work on the maps, got out an attractive prospectus, and all the rest. They have all been busy working with my drawings and specimens: Frederick Pursh, the botanist, has rendered the plants exquisitely. Everything progresses except me.

  I offer myself excuses. I was ill and privately closeted at Locust Hill, I’m pressured by the chaotic territory with its catalogues of troubles, I am in great demand as a speaker and guest and civic leader, which consumes most every evening. My Masonic lodge consumes my time. But they all seem lame to me. I know only that each day I fail to write, I feel further squeezed by a terrible vise, and now I contemplate these journals with quiet desperation.

  I have been fitful this autumn, suffering the ague twice, and conquering it with the familiar extract of cinchona bark called quinine that is commonly available here for the malady, as well as some calomel. My body aches; I believe the privations of our long overland journey taxed it and I have been slow to recover. I am increasingly excitable, a humor I ascribe to the pressures I labor under.

  To curb my restlessness I sip spirits during the day, porter, wine, and sometimes whiskey. In the evenings, I samplewhatever my hosts and hostesses place in hand, and am calmed. My sleep has been restless, but I have found a good remedy in the drops of laudanum I drink before bed.

  Pierre Chouteau is the soul of hospitality, and includes me in the bright evening society of the Creoles. I take breakfast with him, and for all this he scarcely charges me anything, which is just as well because my accounts are strained to the utmost.

  I have made progress on all but one matter: our Mandan guest, Big White, remains in St. Louis, and I am charged with getting him home. Indeed, Mr. Jefferson considers it the highest of my priorities, believing rightly that our entire Indian diplomacy in the West depends on our success.

  She-He-Ke, his wife and son, and the interpreter Jessaume, had been settled at Cantonment Bellefontaine, under the watchful eye of the army, but the chief grew restless and insisted on coming here. Chouteau is good with Indians and I have put our guests in Chouteau’s care.

  Big White has gotten but a few English words, and I cannot communicate with him, but I gather from Jessaume that he regards himself as a brother of the president, that is, a chief of state very like Mr. Jefferson, and wants to be wined and dined as such. And so we do, at the expense of the territory.

  Jessaume and his Mandan wife and son have been cooperative. I’ve taken a liking to the boy, and see some potential in him and have offered to school the boy if Jessaume wishes it. I have in mind making him a factor in the fur trade someday; maybe putting him in charge of one of the government posts we are erecting. In all this I am borrowing a leaf from Will, who offered to settle our interpreter Charbonneau and his Shoshone squaw hereabouts and raise and educate their son, Pomp. It’s my fancy to do much the same.

  Meanwhile our savage guest has gotten himself up in a fine broadcloth outfit, along with his wife, and they parade through St. Louis daily, delighting the citizens with their affable greetings, their wonderment at all the devices of white civilization, and their prodigious appetites, for no plate is large enough to placate She-He-Ke’s appetite.

  Meanwhile I brood about the task before me. With the Arikaras so violently opposed to our passage because of an imagined insult, the whole might of the United States is checked, and the British are playing havoc. The Rees, as most men call them, suppose one of their sachems was murdered by us while visiting here, though in fact disease took him off, and on that misunderstanding rest our difficulties.

  The regular army cannot help me. I made application to them and was rebuffed. They are understaffed and desperately trying to prepare for war with England. It’s going to be up to our militia to do the job, but I have been thinking there might be ways to engage enough men to get past the Arikaras.

  Thanks to the good offices of Chouteau, we are well advanced on a plan. The idea now is to form a company, the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company, subscribed by leading men here, to equip a formidable force that can return our guests to their home. Chouteau has lined up Will Clark as a partner, along with my brother Reuben, though I will not participate because this is to be a mixed government and private enterprise.

  The partners will include Auguste Chouteau, the wily Spaniard Manuel Lisa, that knowledgeable Creole merchant Sylvestre Labbadie, Pierre Menard, William Morrison, and the merchant Benjamin Wilkinson, who is a brother of the conniving general, which worries me. Most of these are merchants. Reuben brings medicine and youth to the enterprise, and preserves our family interest in the venture.

  They are working on articles of agreement now, though I have carefully stayed out of it. But my plan is to pay them a considerable sum of public money to take Big White home; a sum that will, with their own capital added, permit them to raise a formidable army of trappers and traders. I shall, of course, impose strict conditions, and require their departure as early next spring as possible.

  It seems the best way to get Big White back, given our lack of resources. I can only hope that Secretary Dearborn cooperates and approves. It is a matter most vexing to have to explain the realities of life on the far western borders to men back East; and the secretary has often proven to be obtuse. He will raise stern objections to my proposal to arm these private citizens, and supply them with trading goods with which to ease their way past the numerous tribes along the river.

  Shall the government endow a favored few who are thus enabled to make a great profit? Actually, it saves the government great expense. Persuading him of the merit of this plan is crucial, and failure to explain the necessity will be the death of me, I suspect.

  22. CLARK

  I fear I will end up in debtor’s prison unless the new company earns me a good return. For some reason beyond my ken, Meriwether had done nothing about the journals, and with each passing day my hope of gain for the heavy investment I have shouldered to prepare them for publication seems to retreat.

  I had put my back pay into them; my stipend as superintendent of Indian Affairs and as a brigadier doesn’t stretch far enough to cover my large household, much less get me out of financial peril. I have land in Kentucky, but could scarcely give it away just now. I have household slaves but they don’t earn their keep, unlike field slaves who produce marketable crops. Here it is December, over a year after publication was promised, but I have said nothing to Meriwether about the endless delay. Whatever is bothering him, it is afflicting my purse.

  Meriwether must be even worse off, because he continually borrows small sums from me, an incontinence that surprises me, but that I indulge. He is spending considerab
le in taverns and seems to be arrayed with medicines, but I don’t ascribe his straits to that but to his speculations in land. He is purchasing thousands of arpents of farmland, most of it from the Chouteaus, almost entirely on credit. I privately question his wisdom. He had not been so injudicious on the expedition, and now his conduct puzzles me.

  The new fur company revives my hope of gain. The principal merchants of St. Louis have been gathering regularly in Pierre Chouteau’s parlor to contrive an agreement. Meriwether was on hand at every meeting, and in fact we could not launch the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company without his support.

  We have a sense of possibility and optimism. Manuel Lisa and his partners returned from the upper Missouri with a fine harvest of beaver pelts and buffalo robes. They had gotten past the Arikaras. Now the three of them, Lisa, Menard, and Morrison, are forming the core of the new outfit. They want me in the organization for several reasons, in part because I can license them, in part because of my knowledge of the upper Missouri, and in part because I have been involved in marketing the government’s pelts acquired through our factory trading system, and know how to get the best prices.

  So we gathered this chill evening to fashion an agreement, after much discussion. Chouteau had a fine blaze going in his fireplace, and treated us to black cheroots and a lusty red port. The Cuban cigars wrought a pungent haze in the candlelight, and put us all in a good humor.

  The governor, who had plainly done some thinking, offered us his terms, pacing the parlor with an energy that startled me, as if he contained within something that would burst him wide open unless he released it.

  “The government places utmost importance upon returning Big White to the Mandans. Mr. Jefferson requires it of me and has authorized any reasonable expenditure. We lack the armed strength to do it, and must rely on you. I will pay you seven thousand dollars for the safe delivery of Big White. With this money you will equip your own militia of at least a hundred twenty-five men, and will supply them with rifles and powder and lead, as well as other necessaries.