Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont

by Jason Karlawish

  “Thank you, Colonel. We accept your invitation. I know Mrs. Beaumont will enjoy such an evening. As will I.”

  “The officers here take great pride in our outpost of civilization. Many of them have their wives here. We have assembled a library to rival that of a town back east. Mrs. Beaumont is welcome to peruse it and yourself as well, of course.”

  “Thank you, Colonel.”

  Colonel Taylor seemed distracted. He cleared his throat repeatedly. “You've been at Fort Howard. And before that?”

  Beaumont narrated his previous postings. At the mention of Captain Pearce, the colonel spoke up.

  “It's a tragedy what happened to Captain Pearce. I knew the man from the war. He was with Scott at the invasion of Fort Erie.”

  “Captain Pearce was a great man and a patriot. I have fond memories of the man.”

  The colonel nodded.

  “It's evident you've experience in these parts, among the voyageurs and Indians. Mackinac and Prairie du Chien are quite similar in that regard, though I should reckon the winters here are far more sociable.”

  “The Indians were not as visible in Mackinac. They had a kind of village along the beach.”

  “Your experience is most valuable to the army.”

  “Thank you, but of course it's all in my duty.”

  “Certainly. D'you know Dr. Phineas Clark?”

  Beaumont shook his head slowly.

  “He was our surgeon until near a month ago but had reason to vacate his duty with great haste. I've sent word requesting a replacement. We need at least two physicians here, though we've managed with one. But as the Indians gather to collect their tributes, word spreads of their discontent. The Winnebagos protest that we're taking their lead mines. Clever Black Hawk and his band of Sauk warriors resist vacating to lands west of the Mississippi. Sometimes I think we should have wiped that man out in the last war. But never the mind. The past is past. I've got Indian agents telling me the company's trading liquor to the Indians. The Sioux are furious at the Foxes. Needless to say, affairs are getting complicated. The Great Council of 1825 seems ready to disintegrate, Doctor. I must prepare. We must prepare. Your arrival is most propitious. Most. I expect Indian affairs are soon to boil over. We've been managing with the help of Clark's steward, a young lad named Badger.”

  The colonel hesitated.

  “To be honest, I can't recall the fellow's first name. Everyone calls him Badger. The fellow's good, I'm told, but it's been getting difficult with the fevers coming on as well. A garrison such as this needs at least one physician. Two would be adequate.”

  Beaumont nodded, uncrossed his arms and tucked his hands beneath his thighs.

  “My corporal can show you to the physician's quarters. The hospital adjacent. Floods have been and remain a perennial problem here. You might have noted the waterline along the walls from last year's surge. This was once a modest French structure. When they first settled they should have seen that there wasn't a tree about, but never the mind, London was probably built on a swamp. But this ain't England, I'll grant you that. I've petitioned the secretary of war for funds to construct a new fort on higher ground to the east above the bluffs. When that starts, I'll have men quarrying stone, burning lime and cutting timber. But the space you have is adequate. You simply need to prepare a requisition of supplies, and you have my assurance they'll be sent with all haste up from St. Louis.”

  “If I may ask, Colonel, when is Dr. Clark to return?”

  “Here? I'd expect he's gone.”

  “And his replacement is due when?”

  “Well, that's you until I hear otherwise. I'll send word to the Jefferson Barracks. I've a communiqué to go out within the week.”

  Beaumont's temples were pounding.

  Colonel Taylor rose and stepped around his desk.

  “I shall see you at dinner? Seven is when we start with sherry.”

  He extended his hand. His boots were worn and scuffed at the tips. After they shook hands, the captain kept his grip.

  “I, I do know that this is not as you expected. Please understand, I have been posted to over twelve assignments, at least that, and passed some twelve years along this frontier. This is my first posting with my Mary at my side in over two years. I haven't seen my farm in Louisiana in seven years. I had a daughter I never saw. God rest her innocent soul. This is our duty, Doctor.”

  DEBORAH WEPT. As her husband recounted the meeting in Colonel Taylor's office, she had her handkerchief wrapped around her right hand and was wiping at her eyes. When he reached the end of the story, he embraced her, and she leaned her head on his shoulder, and they sat silently in the lengthening shadows of the afternoon.

  They sat on the same stone bench where the Reverend Keyes and Beaumont had sat earlier in the day. Deborah's hair was combed smooth and tied up in a tight French braid, and she wore the pair of river pearl ear-rings Beaumont had given her upon their marriage. Her robin's egg blue cotton dress, one of her better muslin dresses, fringed with lace, smelled of lavender and cedar. The harshest leg of their journey was over. She had been planning on a few days of rest before their steamboat journey to St. Louis. Beside the swell of her pleated skirts lay her much-worn copy of Pamela.

  “You could resign from the army.”

  “I can't do that. You know that.”

  “You have your promotion,” she insisted. “The Griswold affair is behind you and now to be forgotten.”

  “Deborah, please let's not quarrel over this. We need the steady income the army grants me. I've expended considerable time and money on Alexis. He's an investment that has yet to pay its returns. We need him back.”

  “Yes, of course,” she snapped. She reached for her novel.

  By the morning of the following day, Deborah was dressed in one of her gray calico work dresses, sweeping the cobwebs from the rafters and corners of the dusty surgeon's quarters. She beat the spiders to death underfoot.

  The place was filthy and cluttered. Only one of the two bedrooms, as well as what passed for a sitting room, bore evidence of human occupation. The other four rooms, including the kitchen, had not been used for months. She quickly abandoned all pretense of dignity. Her dress was sweat stained and damp about her breasts and the crease of her buttocks.

  “Did he even eat?” she asked as they sorted through the dented cook-ware and cleaned out a cast-iron cooking stove in which mice had made a nest.

  “Perhaps he took his meals in the mess hall,” Beaumont said flatly.

  She drew up a list of supplies they required: paint, fabric to drape the windows, new glass to replace several broken panes, varnish for the floor, new mattresses for all the beds. It would take two weeks before the quarters were fit for habitation.

  TWENTY-NINE

  THE HOSPITAL, LIKE THE NEARBY surgeon's quarters, stood outside the fort in a long, pitch-roofed, wooden building. Its weatherworn gray wood was much patched. Beaumont was astounded to find the hospital was over-seen by a boy. The lad was barefoot and dressed in britches that exposed his skinny knees and wore a kind of butcher's smock. His straight brown hair, cut along the rim of a bowl, left his wide ears entirely visible.

  “How old are you?”

  “About fifteen, sir.”

  Beaumont simply nodded.

  “You the new doctor from Fort Howard?”

  “I am. Dr. William Beaumont. And you are?”

  “Charles Badger, Doctor. Steward of this here hospital. At your service, sir.” He made a kind of salute with two fingers of his left hand.

  “You're Badger. Colonel Taylor mentioned there was a steward.”

  “That is I, sir.”

  In an older man, Badger's smile would have been annoying, even mocking, but in this short lad, it was entirely endearing. The patients seemed to share an affection for the steward.

  “He's Young Badger,” said a toothless man who stood with a thin gray towel draped over his head. Several other men laughed and nodded. The man then hobbled to his narrow
cot. One of his legs was bandaged and evidently lame.

  Beaumont looked about the room. It was perhaps double the size of the hospital at the Mackinac garrison, more akin to one of the hospitals in Plattsburgh during the war, with tandem rows of twenty cots each along a long corridor. Windows were spaced at regular intervals, except many of them were covered with boards. The light that filtered through the dust and grime of the remaining panes caused those panes to glow. The cots were evidently not sufficient as there were blanket rolls set between some of the beds.

  In August 1828, two months after Beaumont arrived in Prairie du Chien, he managed a note to Theodore Mathews: We are not settled in St. Louis. Duty has assigned me to Fort Crawford for an indefinite tenure. I will send news whether this shall change, but until I receive further orders, we remain here, and Alexis should come here upon my word.

  There were rains, and the multiplying chorus of frogs sang a kind of nighttime prelude to the fevers to come. After the rains, as the heat grew steady and withering, the stagnant pools in the flooded marshes turned green and began to bubble. The fevers came. At first, the cases were sporadic, but in time, they multiplied: an entire platoon of soldiers on hay-gathering duty, whole households, developed bone-shattering agues, some so violent they squeezed the very marrow from their bones until they pissed black water, while others suffered mild shivers that only interrupted dinner conversation. Badger and he made an efficient team. The lad was skilled at the lancet and sorting the treatable sick from the few hopeless cases.

  Beaumont ordered Deborah and the children to keep away from the village, to rest in the shade of a dry place, to wear shoes and drink only the water from the springhouse. During the worst of the fevers, he was away from home for days at a time, sending messages that he was well and receiving notes in her elegant cursive that they too were well. The ladies had organized a reading salon, and little Sarah was learning needlepoint.

  The French villagers soon came calling for the doctor's help. By autumn he had collected or was owed a handsome tally of fees from the merchants and traders and tavern keepers. The fevers abated, but there was no pause in Beaumont and Badger's labors. Construction of the new fort on the plateau above the town had begun. Crews were detailed to gather lumber, there being not a usable tree within six miles of the fort, to cook lime and to haul stones. Those assigned to clear the land on the plateau found centuries' worth of bones, skulls and vertebrae, smooth clay pots with images of running animals, jagged lines and whorls, obsidian tools whose fine edges looked to be worked with tiny hammers. They carried these relics out in barrows and tossed them over a cliff into the river below. The pots exploded on the rocks.

  Injuries multiplied, a fractured jaw, smashed hands, cuts deep to bone, and in winter, frostbite and delirium. Work on the new fort continued until the winter storms came, whereupon the soldiers retired to the fort and rested until the spring thaw. Some of the soldiers made a hobby of fashioning toys or scrimshaw with the Indian bones. The officers put on the English comedy Who Wants a Guinea? They transformed a barracks into a theater; painted scenery hung from canvas drapes. Bayonets with candles secured into their grips served as improvised lighting. There were three tiers of seating: the first for officers and distinguished citizens, the second for soldiers and white laborers, and the third for the Gumbos, Negroes and Indians.

  In February of the New Year, just before Lent, the French villagers of Prairie du Chien spent many evenings in the taverns and grog shops, lit lanterns and torches to illuminate the dirty snow-packed streets and roasted whole goats and sheep upon spigots. They drained kegs and smashed the empties to add to the bonfires. They danced in a frenzy until dawn. Then on Ash Wednesday they stood patiently in line before the priest, as he recited a Latin phrase and used his thumb to smear ash on their foreheads. In the forty days following, they composed themselves in a sullen display of tipsy penance. On Easter Sunday, they dressed in their finery, slaughtered lambs, lit fires and drank and danced again.

  By winter's end the Winnebago had accepted a treaty that reinforced their claim to the mines and guaranteed twenty thousand dollars compensation for the trespasses upon their land in exchange that no harm would come to white men who trespassed. The United States would pay the Winnebago for the damage done by the white man. Though disagreements existed with the Chippewa over lumber they claimed had been unlawfully taken from their land, Agent Burnett was confident that with enough presents for the tribe he could broker an arrangement.

  But the spring thaw seemed to unleash dormant passions, both Indian and white. Borders were once again in dispute. Allied bands of Sauk and Foxes were furious at the Menominee and Sioux for transgressions upon their land. Chief Blackhawk was once again agitating that his former land in Illinois had been unjustly seized, that the treaty of 1804 which set in motion the subsequent treaties was itself null and void. He promised that he would cross the Mississippi to make corn on the eastern shore, on the land he claimed was rightfully his tribe's.

  Captain Hitchcock had news from Washington. He had returned from hurried travels up and down the Mississippi River to forts Snelling, Armstrong and Edwards to coordinate the army's response to the Indian agitation. The recently inaugurated Jackson administration was sending more Indian commissioners west to reopen negotiations with all the tribes, but the captain was privy to Secretary of War Eaton's secret orders. Erase the Winnebago, Pottawattamie, Ottawa and Chippewa Indians' claims to any land east of the Mississippi and south of the Wisconsin River. Drive the Indian west.

  Hitchcock and Beaumont were returning from a morning bird hunt in the plains above the village near the site of the new fort. The incomplete structure glowed white in the morning sun. They walked with their fouling pieces over their shoulders. Captain Brown's speckled bird dog trotted in a zig-zag before them, its pink nose on the ground before it. Each man carried a brace of pheasants that turned on their leather cords. Their knee-high boots were slick with dew. Hitchcock was bothered by all that he had seen and heard.

  “This notion that Burnett and the rest of the agents have that the Mississippi River is to be the boundary of our progress—I consider it a fiction. Have you seen the steam engines that race along two parallel iron rails? What shall stop one of those from traversing this river on a bridge like the London Bridge? A mere river is not going to stop our nation's ambition. We will drive the Indian to the very shores of the Pacific.”

  “I understand those engines are delicate contraptions.”

  “You've seen the Erie Canal, have you not?”

  “Aye. I've one of the medals that commemorate the construction.”

  “Well then? There you have it. A canal of water. Rails of iron.”

  The two men walked on for several minutes.

  “I fear,” said Hitchcock, “that further covenants, agreements and treaties with the Indian are simply a means to an end, not to be valued and upheld. It's war by another means.”

  Beaumont considered the point.

  “We might be here for years then.”

  Hitchcock nodded slowly.

  THAT EVENING AFTER DINNER Beaumont explained the situation to Deborah.

  “What does it mean for us?” she asked.

  “It means that this is not a temporary stay. By June, July at the latest, this place will be overflowing with Indians of all tribes. Hundreds, perhaps thousands will gather for a council. By all events, we shall be here for some time, and it shall be busy.”

  She continued scrubbing a pot.

  “I am certain I could arrange for you and the children to go on to St. Louis.”

  “Don't be silly. We are a family.”

  He watched her as she worked over the dishes.

  “I'm not going to let this stop me, you know. I shall write soon to Theodore Mathews to have Alexis sent down. Pierre Reynard has agreed to lend out a set of rooms for Alexis and his family. It will not cost a cent. It's in return for the care I gave to him and his family.”

  Deborah did not
pause in her labors. “Family?”

  “Pierre has a wife and five children. I cared for them when they had the fever.”

  “You said Alexis's family.”

  “His wife and children. He insists on coming with them. I told you.”

  She wrung out her dishrag and draped it neatly over the dowel. “You did. Yes, you did. You will be busy. We will be busy.”

  “Please, Deborah, don't be sharp like that.”

  “I'm not being sharp, just stating a plain fact. What will she do?”

  “His wife?”

  “Yes, of course.”