Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  I halted the dray horse before Will’s house, tied up at the hitching post, and we escaped from the furnace of the sun into a close but cooler climate within.

  He studied me. “Are you sure you are well?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  He nodded, and soon was rousting out servants and Julia, making the whole house clatter to life just when it was lost in siesta to the heat.

  I waited until I was bidden to the nursery, where Julia curtsied. She wore a shapeless white cotton dress that hid her from an old bachelor’s admiration. I wondered if she might be expecting another child.

  “Your Excellency,” she said tonelessly.

  The boy dozed restlessly in the moist closeness, a loose-knit coverlet over him. Meriwether Lewis Clark. New life following death, the endless cycle repeated. This child was as close as I would ever come to a son.

  “He is a fine healthy boy,” I said politely.

  “We’ll raise him up to be the image of you, Governor.” Julia looked uncomfortable, and her fingers played with the muslin of her dress.

  “Please forgive me, but I think I will forgo your lunch,” I said.

  “Why, Meriwether …”

  I retreated as swiftly as courtesy permitted, under the concerned and tender gaze of General Clark.

  PART

  III

  36. LEWIS

  I stared at the letter from Washington, absorbing the bad news that had reached me this Friday, August 4, 1809. It came from a clerk in the State Department, one R. S. Smith, and with it came a voucher for eighteen dollars and fifty cents that I had submitted in February. The department, the letter explained, was returning the voucher because it lacked the authority to pay it.

  The sum was to pay a translator, Pierre Provenchere, to render certain laws into French, something entirely necessary in a bilingual dominion. How could the Creoles know the law if it were not comprehensible to them? But here was this voucher and a note that blandly said I had gone beyond my authority.

  Heat built in me. Clerks! They have no more vision than an earthworm. I fumed, reread the letter, and then began to worry about what else might befall me. I had signed hundreds of vouchers for necessary services. My signature as governor was all that any merchant or supplier required to ensure payment. And up to this moment everything I had signed, including the scores of vouchers for the Corps of Discovery, had been honored in Washington.

  When I had submitted the voucher for Provenchere last February, I made a point of explaining the purpose of the expenditure. The French translations of the law were published and distributed for a felony trial. What could be more essential to the course of justice? Any reasonable official, any clerk in any bureau, would swiftly understand the need, the legitimacy. But not Smith.

  I sighed, knowing that I would have to compensate Provenchere out of my own purse, and I would have to borrow again to do it. I did not even have enough to pay my manservant, John Pernia. The family estate in Virginia had not found a buyer and I was heavily in debt.

  And was this the first? Would more come floating back to me? Was this the work of some conspiracy whose design was to ruin me? Was this Bates’s spidery hand at work? He had threatened to protest my expenditures, and I knew he had done just that, appending little notes to each item announcing that it had been submitted over his protests. It doesn’t take much of that sort of footnoting of a man’s vouchers to ruin his credibility.

  I slumped at my desk. If this was the first skidding snow in an avalanche, I was in grave trouble. And so were the merchants who had until now trusted me. What could I say to them?

  I plucked up the letter and braved the heat, walking slowly toward Will’s office. We had shared everything for years; now I would share this.

  I waited in his antechamber while he heard out the petition of a Creole who wanted to go upriver to the Iowa country and trade with the Sauk and Fox tribes. I suspected that Will would turn the man down; the British had been stirring up the two tribes against us and that area was dangerous.

  Then at last we were alone.

  “Governor?” he said.

  I handed him the letter. He frowned, studied it closely, and set it down. “Everything boils down to money,” he said at last. He stood slowly, lumbered to a black iron strongbox, which was not locked, and extracted some national bank bills and some coin.

  “I haven’t asked,” I said.

  He grinned. “You were working up to it.”

  I withdrew my pocket ledger, borrowed Will’s pen, and entered the debt. There were too many such entries in my ledger.

  “What are you going to do about this?” he asked.

  “I can’t keep it a secret. Bates opens my official mail, and he knows about it, and it’s probably all over the city by now.”

  “It’s his doing.”

  “Yes, and I fear there will be many more of these.”

  Will nodded. He didn’t try to comfort me or pretend that this would be an isolated incident. We both knew it wouldn’t be. Not with the malevolent secretary appending his florid objections to my vouchers.

  The general ran a gnarled hand through his red hair. “When it comes to money, I have learned not to trust the government, any government,” he said.

  “Did you ever resolve your brother’s case?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “George doesn’t own ten cents to his name. The best we could do was switch the titles of a few properties to me. I am the nominal owner, and that’s the only way we’ve beat off the creditors and lawyers and courts.”

  It was a grim tale, and I had heard parts of it many times from Will and his family. General George Rogers Clark of the Virginia militia had staved off British occupation of much of the trans-Appalachian west during the Revolution. Because of his determined generalship, and skill at keeping a militia army in the field when most of the men just wanted to go home and plant their fields, and Indian diplomacy, the republic now possessed the vast lands east of the Mississippi.

  Operating as a general officer of the Virginia militia, he had signed scores of vouchers for munitions, clothing, arms, camp gear, footwear, horses and wagons, livestock, gifts for the always dangerous tribes, wages, and everything else to field an army in a wilderness owned by savages and British agents.

  Then came the reckoning. The commonwealth shrugged off its obligations on one thin excuse after another, mostly having to do with lost records. Frustrated by the commonwealth, Will’s older brother then appealed to the Continental Congress and was rebuffed: the debt was Virginia’s, not the national government’s. And then the creditors had moved in, claiming everything George Rogers Clark possessed.

  The heap of debt set off a widening collapse, as the merchants who could not be paid by Clark in turn went bankrupt, and spread the bankruptcy to several removes from the old general. Will had spent much of his time before the expedition dealing with his brother’s creditors and trying to salvage enough so that the whiskey-soaked general at Mulberry Hill could live in a modicum of comfort.

  Somehow it had not embittered Will Clark; he was too great a man for that. But now, when I showed him my rejected voucher, I saw a deep and knowing cynicism bloom in his eyes. He had walked that path, and knew the thousand small cuts of officials and creditors and lawyers, and he knew exactly what probably was in store for me.

  “We’ll wrestle this together, Meriwether,” was all he said to me. I had feared he might lecture me about my land purchases and living beyond my means, but he said not a word.

  I was grateful for that.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “Pay Provenchere for the translation; let people know that a minor refusal is no ground for alarm.”

  Will smiled wolfishly. He didn’t have to tell me what he was thinking: if Frederick Bates were not stirring up trouble, it might work. But Bates’s busy tongue was already undoing anything I might say or do.

  “I am an honest man! I will pay every cent!” I exclaimed.

&nbs
p; Will’s eyebrows arched and he scratched at his newly shaven jaw. “You might go talk to the man.”

  “He would not entertain my presence in his office. This is his design! His objections did this! He wants to ruin me! He’d stop at nothing! He and his Burrites, still smarting over their defeat.”

  “How do you know he was allied with Aaron Burr? I certainly don’t know it.”

  “Why else would he be so determined to destroy me?”

  Will grinned again. “Wants your office. Can’t stand to be subordinate to you.”

  There was more to it, even if Will didn’t think so. I saw threads leading back to shadowy men, leading back to Burr, and maybe General Wilkinson himself, men who wanted to turn the western country into their own satrapy to exploit and suck dry and then toss to the British, or the Spanish, when they were done. I saw design in it; men quietly maneuvering to fill their purses and assume the powers of state, men with stilettos and the will to use them.

  But Will Clark, as was his wont, had reduced it to the boneheadedness of clerks and accountants, bureaucratic naysayers, and above all, a pompous, busy, mean-spirited, self-important man who thought himself misplaced as the second in command. One of us was wrong, I thought darkly, and it wasn’t me.

  “I suppose you had better make some plans,” he said.

  “Such as?”

  “A trip east.”

  “What good would that do?” I asked truculently.

  Will shrugged. “I prefer to sit down with a man and get to know him and get him to listen if I have something to say.”

  “Do you think James Madison would even see me?”

  Will laughed easily, and that was answer enough.

  “I want to talk to Secretary Eustis. He’s the one I worry about. He reprimands me in almost every letter, and I don’t like the tone of his correspondence.”

  “I worry about him, too. He’s trying to trim down the army just when we’re facing another war. We’re fixing to hand the Louisiana purchase to the British if he doesn’t send me materiel.”

  I glared out the window at unseen knaves. “I have tried to govern this territory on the best model, employing all the wisdom I could garner from Tom Jefferson, from my army experience, from my readings, and now this blowhard threatens to undo my every act!”

  Will didn’t reply; he simply rounded his desk and clapped me on the back, threw an arm around my shoulder, and let me know in that language of friendship that lies above and beyond words that I could count on him. I was suddenly grateful for this stately, dignified Virginian who looked more and more like George Washington as the years etched him.

  “I’ll wait and see. Maybe it will blow over,” I said.

  “My powers with the pen aren’t much, but I’ll come to your defense if you want me to,” he said. There was a question in it.

  “I’ll fight my own fight,” I replied.

  “You’re outnumbered,” he said.

  37. LEWIS

  I downed a gram of Dover’s powder to quiet my racing pulse, and waited for the opiate to steal my anguish from me. The letter on my desk this eighteenth day of August had catapulted my pulse and deranged my every thought.

  I paced my chamber, some wildness keeping me from sitting myself down and reading the letter from Secretary of War Eustis a second time to measure its deadly impact. I pressed the lids of my eyes shut, wanting to drive out the sight of that awful missive, which had been written in mid-July but only now found its way to my hands.

  Such was my agitation that the powder did not take hold entirely; no peace filtered through me, but only a leaden weariness that did not allay my anxiety at all, but perhaps even deepened it. I was tempted to take another gram, but put the thought behind me.

  At last I felt my pulse slow, and my jumbled thoughts slow with my pulse, and I supposed that soon I could reduce the chaos of my heart to good order. Without the powder, I might have suffered an apoplexy beyond repair.

  I seated myself again in the squeaking chair and let myself stare at the fluted white woodwork of my office, the seat of government of Upper Louisiana, a territory comparable to the whole of the original United States of America, though I don’t suppose those back East ever fathomed that.

  I watched the progress of my hands, sweaty and trembling at first, and spastic in their motions. They dried. I regained control of them. I could hold the letter without smearing the ink or straining my eyes.

  It had been opened by Secretary Bates, who no doubt was even now trumpeting the tidings to his cronies, with many a joyous smirk and expression of hypocritical and pious horror. I reached to the cut glass decanter and poured a measure of ruby port and discovered as I lifted the glass that my hands were once again obedient to my will. I sipped, and again.

  The letter from Secretary Eustis professed puzzlement about the expedition I had sent forth in May to return She-He-Ke to his Mandan village. Or rather, it expressed puzzlement about what the hundred and twenty trappers would do once they got above the Mandan villages. He said the government had no understanding of any of that, or where the commercial party was heading, or whether it would even remain in United States territory, and I should have inquired before acting.

  This was official dissembling, the genteel lying of bureaucrats; he knew exactly what the trappers of the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company would do after they had delivered the Mandan chief to his village because I had thrice written Eustis in great detail about the arrangement, and what was required because the regular army would not do the job. I had enclosed a fair copy of the contract with the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company.

  All this the secretary knew, but now professed ignorance, which is the venerable way of effete functionaries to say no, or rebuke underlings, or express disapproval. James Madison’s pinchpenny secretary of war was not only no friend, but was now grimly undermining my every effort to secure the territory from the designs of the British, who continued to stir up the tribes against us.

  I detected the Machiavellian hand of Frederick Bates in all this: those snide asides, those grandiloquent objections to my every voucher, those raindrops of dissent descending on the governor, all had their effect. His noose was tightening around my vulnerable neck.

  The secretary of war wrote, in that dry, passive voice of his, that after his department had approved the seven thousand dollars for the expedition, “it was not expected that any further advances or any further agency would be required on the part of the United States.”

  He would, therefore, reject the voucher I had issued at the last moment for the additional five hundred dollars to purchase more gifts for diplomatic concourse with the tribes.

  The voucher would be my own responsibility. I now owed every penny of it to the merchants who had trusted my signature on a government draft.

  But Secretary Eustis wasn’t done with me. “The President has been consulted and the observations herein have his approval.”

  So Mr. Madison was rebuking me, too. There was no sympathetic ear in official Washington. It was a vote of no confidence. It was a blatant if unspoken suggestion that I resign. No governor can govern without the power of the purse, and Eustis knew it.

  It was, I felt certain, Frederick Bates’s carefully executed coup d’état.

  His office was but a few doors away, but I did not storm toward it. I reread Eustis’s letter and resolved to fight. The first step would be a reply in this very day’s post. I would again provide the exact details of the fur company expedition, the exact plans of the company after it had fulfilled its official function, and the exact costs. I have never been one to surrender under adversity, especially to the withered gray hand of bureaucracy, and so I wrote, the calmness adding to my lucidity, the powders subduing the clawing at my heart.

  I explained to Eustis that the feelings his letter excited were truly painful, and I reminded him that I had always accompanied my drafts with detailed explanations of what the funds were purchasing. And I concluded, “If the object be not a proper one
, of course I am responsible, but if, on investigation, it does appear to have been necessary for the promotion of the public interest, I shall hope for relief.”

  And I reminded him that “I have never received a penny of public money but have merely given the draft to a person who has rendered public service, or furnished articles for public use, which have been, invariably, applied to the purposes expressed in my letters of advice.”

  I fancied that it was one of the best of my letters to the secretary; and when I was done I signed it, sealed it with wax, and posted it myself rather than letting Bates see my correspondence.

  But I was not sanguine about the effect of that letter. If I wished to retain office, I would have to go east, at once, and sit down with the president and secretary and anyone else who might help me, and make my case.

  I dozed.

  Will Clark startled me awake. I peered up at him, shaking the cobwebs from my brain.

  “What’s this about a voucher?” he asked.

  So Bates had been telling the world after all. I handed the letter to Clark, who read it, frowning.

  “This indicts us all,” he said. “The fur company as well as your offices in setting up the expedition.”

  He had a steely set to his face I had seen only a few times before. An angry Will Clark was a force to be reckoned with.

  “So Eustis is feeding you to the hogs,” he said.

  “Where did you hear about the voucher?”

  “Ben Wilkinson. He asked whether the government would honor your warrants. He has several bills outstanding.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Who told Wilkinson about the letter?”

  “He just passed it off as rumor.”

  “Bates,” I said. “He’s the one who received and opened it and placed it on my desk.”

  Clark grunted. “You can’t answer backstabbers by writing letters. If you want to bend an official, look him in the eye. We’ll both have to go to Washington.”

  I nodded.

  He stared at me. “Are you indisposed?”