He stood in the shade of the boiler deck promenade, watching this island of civilization startling up from a grassy wild, a thing that didn’t belong here — any more than the fort he would soon occupy belonged on the confluence of the Yellowstone and Bighorn Rivers. Two Stars and Stripes flew, one from each log blockhouse at opposite corners — a Yankee presence in an alien land. The log stockade appeared to be shaped in a perfect square, and he could see the peaked roofs of civilized and carpentered buildings within. This post was no rude log affair, but one painfully transported from downriver, and well settled after a decade of service and refinement. He liked the place: it had that quality of amiable welcome to tribesmen, combined with a business-like military bearing that announced flatly that it could deal death and pain to those who misbehaved. The fort made a statement without words.
He felt the packet settle into quiet waters, suddenly released from the turbulent power of the main channel, and at the same time heard muffled bells and a metronomic slowing of the great steam pistons that drove the gouging paddles.
“Your first gander at an upriver fur post,” he said to the youth beside him.
“I want to learn everything inside. Will ours be like it?”
“Some. I’ve got my ways, and American Fur has its ways. But fetch a look at how it works, Maxim.”
“But will they welcome us? I mean, we’re the Opposition.”
“Oh, I imagine. There’s a kind of rule out here that a post welcomes any white man and offers vittles and a bunk. I suppose it’s because there’s so few. Back in the beaver days, trappers’d drift in for a winter, and the fort’d make do. Buffler meat’s there for the asking, usually. Mostly, the booshways are as itchy for company as anyone can get . . . out here where there’s none to be got.”
“You mean they want us?”
“Of course. Guests’re big doings. Most booshways, they’ll put out a spread if they’ve got it. By spring they’re out of most everything. By May or June, they’re desperate for coffee and sugar and airtights of vegetables.”
Maxim eyed him sharply. “The engagés told me that the company will hurt us any way it can. Even — bloodshed. How are you so sure that — “
“Wait and see. I don’t know who’s the trader here, but he’ll probably have a French name and a fair-enough smile. All but one. There’s one of the top AFC men I’d rather not tangle with.”
Maxim waited, obviously wanting a name, but Brokenleg didn’t see fit to supply it. Last he knew, Julius Hervey hunkered up on the Missouri somewhere. No man in the robe trade seethed with as much hatred, imagining slights and inventing grievances even while he rode roughshod over others, red and white alike. He’d killed men and brutalized others, and made a mocking game of it all, a sort of plaster god out beyond the reach of law, discipline, and ordinary decency. It would be something to watch out for.
“You’re a wise lad to be thinking about that, Maxim. Chouteau’s got his ways.”
“Is it safe, Mister Fitzhugh? Is it safe to land?”
The youth’s urgency struck Brokenleg. He selected his response carefully. “First, lad, call me Brokenleg or Robert, like any other man — “
“But the French are more formal, sir — “
“Whatever way you prefer, Maxim. No, it’s not safe. That’s something to learn about the mountains and the country here, up the river. Nothing’s safe. We’ll put in here, and maybe there’ll be trouble. All the time I trapped beaver and watched how the stick floats, I never felt safe. And the ones that did, lad — they went under.”
Maxim turned silent, watching the looming post soberly as the packet slid toward the levee. From the near blockhouse a boom erupted, followed by a puff of white, and a percussive aftershock.
“Mountain welcome. Six-pounder.”
“This isn’t the mountains.”
“That’s how it’s all called back here.”
A mob gathered at the levee, engagés, tribesmen in breechclouts, squaws in bright calicoes, bare-armed and some barefooted, scampering golden children. And out of the front gate, back from the river, a burly graying man running to fat, his white hair riding back upon his shoulders, made his gouty way down the soft naked slope.
Brokenleg grunted. “Ulysses Chardonne,” he muttered.
Maxim peered, uncertain what that meant.
“The booshway. Good enough trader,” he said. “And good company man,” he added tightly.
The escapement pipe of the Platte erupted, the steam shrilling the boat’s own welcome note before evaporating in the dry air. The paddles halted their labor like resting oxen, and the boat slid close to the bank. In a flurry, deckmen tossed hawsers to waiting hands on the bank, and the packet was made fast.
“Well, Maxim. Come along now. We’ll have us a little palaver with old Chardonne, and you’ll learn a few things — such as how much the fur company knows about what we’re doing. A lot. You’ll discover ol’ American Fur Company knows what we’ve got in the hold, where we’re going, and what tribes we’ll be trading with.”
“How can they know that?”
“Because on the upper Missouri — they’re God.”
“Ah, mon ami Fitzhugh, it is you!” bellowed Ulysses Chardonne as they stepped off the stage onto dusty ground. “Come along, come along. We will make the talk, eh?”
“You’re looking well, Ulysses,” Fitzhugh replied, limping as badly as the gout-tormented factor.
Chardonne grunted. “Neither of us is exactly, what is the precise word — new. In new condition.”
“Ulysses, this hyar stripling is Maxim Straus, Guy’s boy. Come to help me.”
“Oh, I know.” The jowly factor stared at Maxim. “The country’s not safe for a lad like you, well-educated, prepared for a life in finance. Maybe you should stay here, wait for the company boat to take you down.”
“Maxim can made up his own mind,” Fitzhugh said hastily.
They pierced through a gate in the looming stockade into an inner yard surrounded by frame and clapboard buildings of unpainted milled wood that had been hauled a vast distance upriver. Engagés’ barracks occupied one side; dining, kitchen and storage rooms the other. In the warehouse, robes had been gathered into bales of ten, and filled the air of the yard with a pleasant redolence. Before them stood Chardonne’s own house and offices, a peak-roofed structure that looked as if it had been ripped from the east somewhere and planted here.
No sooner had the bourgeois led them into an ornate parlor with red silk settees than an Indian woman — Sioux, Fitzhugh thought — emerged silently, carrying a tray with a decanter of brandy, and wide snifters. He could only guess at her relationship with Chardonne, but one thing was certain: he had an eye for beauty.
“Ah, a little something to make wet the throat on a day like this. We were resupplied three weeks ago when the company packet came in, and for a while, now, we’ll make a few luxuries. . . . Young master Maxim, would your father permit you some brandy, or shall I have Ix-ta-sah bring some tea?”
“I am permitted a few sips, M. Chardonne.”
The bourgeois smiled. “A French boy.”
Fitzhugh sipped from the proffered glass, and felt the fire scour his tonsils and clear his nose.
“And what is the news, my bon ami Brokenleg? It is the Opposition, yes? Tell me about it all. Here you bravely tackle M. Chouteau, and off to the south, you engagé Bent, St. Vrain. A penchant for bloody noses, I’d say.”
“Buffler robes ought to fetch more than beaver, Ulysses.”
“But the market, she is already flooded. What are they good for? Carriage robes. And how many of those can all these fur companies sell? What else? In Europe, they don’ like the buffalo, and like the fleece of the sheep, yes? And what of the rawhide. No one makes a decent shoe or boot from the buffalo. No one can make the tan so the leather’s just right, not too soft, not brittle. So — it is a great mystery, why you and M. Straus and that wildman Jamie Dance, you get together and do this crazy thing.”
&n
bsp; Fitzhugh realized that the wheezing bourgeois had not wasted a minute, and would be getting to the point shortly. “That’s for Guy Straus to work out, Ulysses. I’m just the coon that exchanges a few gewgaws for robes.”
“Ah, and what makes you think you can offer what we can for the robes, or pay as little as we do for the tradegoods, eh?”
“I imagine we’ll give it a whirl.”
“Ha. Madness. The tradegoods disappear. The hides rot or get wet or bugs eat them. There are great calamities on the river. A tribe trades with you one day, and makes grief the next, he? It is not a game for little companies, but only giants that can absorb the losses, eh?”
“We’ll take our chances.”
“Ah, Fitzhugh, indeed you will. Do you trust the savages? Will they never strike when you are away from the post, out on the prairie somewhere, with a wagon of goods they want, or a wagon of robes you’ve traded for, plus a few horses, eh? They strike, and you die only once, and then what?”
“I suppose it’s plumb unsafe, Ulysses,” Fitzhugh said, thinking to help this little waltz along. He slid some of that fiery brandy down, to keep his whistle wet.
“I’ll tell you how to be safe, bon ami. I’ll tell you how to avoid the heartache, the loss, the awful feeling when the news comes that the packet, she is wrecked with all of a season’s returns on board, eh?” He leaned over, swilling the brandy around in his snifter. “M. Chouteau has authorized me to buy your entire stock of trading goods at cost plus ten percent. A true profit, a handsome profit, eh? And of course, retire from the business.”
Fitzhugh let it hang for a moment, but he had known this would come and how he’d reply. It was the standard offer, but only half of the proposition.
“I reckon we’ll take a stab at the robes. There’s a profit in them, oh, hundred to five hundred percent, if we get the robes downriver next spring.”
“Ah. If. Big if. Le grand if. But you Opposition fellows, you hardly ever do, eh?”
Five
* * *
LaBarge would not tarry an instant longer than necessary, not with a third of the river left to conquer. As soon as the few passengers bound for Fort Pierre had debarked, along with their meager belongings, the packet’s whistle shrilled, catapulting flocks of magpies into raucous flight. The stop had consumed only twenty minutes.
Brokenleg hurried through the post, prodding the gawking boy before him, and down the soft slope to the river. It had been much as he’d expected, and he’d have to think over some of the things Chardonne said. That was the way of American Fur: amiable hospitality on the surface, but something else flowing beneath.
They hastened aboard, the last passengers, and the deckmen lifted the stage and coiled the hawsers that had tied the packet to posts at the levee. The Platte shuddered and belched black smoke, its wheels churning placid water, gathering the strength in its loins to tackle the brutal current of the channel.
“M. Chardonne treated us kindly, don’t you think? I like him.” Maxim said.
Fitzhugh grunted.
“He invited me to stay, and was concerned about my safety. I shall tell papa that some of the company, at least, are very civil people.”
“Maxim — you’ll find that sort of hospitality at any post, American Fur or Opposition, including ours. It means little.”
“Mister Fitzhugh, surely you take a dark view of an amiable man.”
Fitzhugh sensed that no matter what he said, the youth would take it wrong. It would be best not to say anything. Some things couldn’t be told, but had to be experienced. And the youth would remember only Chardonne’s easy smile and affable talk, and not realize the swift talk over a slug of brandy had been business and worse — a series of threats. Oh, indeed, how AFC would love to have young Maxim, the son of the Opposition’s key financier, as its guest — as its hostage. And Maxim didn’t know that once Fitzhugh had refused the company’s usual buyout — its standard offer to any opposition outfit coming upriver — the catastrophes that Chardonne had delicately warned of would begin to happen, and they wouldn’t always be accidents.
“Stay alert, Maxim, and watch.” Fitzhugh didn’t have the fancy words or the grace to describe what really had transpired, and he feared he’d only harden the lad’s favorable view of Chouteau’s men and methods.
He left the boy on the main deck, where engagés huddled in the shade escaping the furnace heat of the sun. Then he limped and sweated up the companionway’s two flights, and emerged into the blinding glare of the hurricane deck. He saw her there, standing alertly, leaning forward as if to hasten the packet in its progress. She wore a hip-length white blouse cinched at the waist with a blue quillworked belt, and full skirts of bottle green. She smiled, and he discovered ease in her chiseled features he’d not seen there for months. Her sharp, eager gaze took in the vast panorama before them, the distant yellow bluffs and the treeless plains humping and rolling toward a vast emptiness beneath an enameled blue sky. Not far to the west rose the Black Hills, and Bear Butte, where Sweet Medicine had received the Four Arrows sacred to the Cheyenne people. This was the eastern edge of her people’s land, and the sight of it had transformed her.
Instinctively he slid an arm about her waist, in spite of the fierce heat, and she responded softly, sidling closer to her man as they watched the shore creep by. Then, just as impulsively, she pulled free and fixed him with a disdainful gaze that told him that he and this packet and all aboard it were invaders and trespassers. A part of him accepted that, and a part resented it. He’d married into the Cheyenne tribe, and had bonded himself to them, and become a part of them. The land of Sweet Medicine had become his own; he felt much more possessive of this vast lonely country than anything back east where he’d come from. Dimly he recollected upstate New York, his innkeeping parents Nathaniel and Bethany, his brothers and sister, the intimate green vales of that settled country. It would never be his again. Neither would the civilities that went with it. His family would find him harsh, violent, uncouth now, acid of tongue and direct of eye. This land of Dust Devil’s, of her people, of Sweet Medicine, held upon it all he had.
“ ’bout home,” he said.
She eyed him scornfully and pulled free. His eyes were watering from the glare, so he left her there and limped around to the small stair that led to the pilothouse, and gimped up it.
“Sorry to weigh anchor so fast, but the river’s already crested, and I’ll be fighting sandbars all the way back,” LaBarge said.
“I know.”
“Chardonne try the usual?”
“Cost plus ten percent and an agreement not to go into opposition.”
LaBarge nodded. “When they found we’d had the Platte built, they wanted to charter it exclusively. They were provoked when my brother and I declined, and warned us of all the usual hazards on the river. One never knows, does one?”
“You’ve made serious opposition possible, Joe.”
The master nodded. Up until now, opposition companies could ship tradegoods upriver on American Fur packets only at exorbitant rates which gave the monopoly all the advantage in trade.
“I don’t doubt that some of my crew have been bought. But I’ve not spotted anything — yet.” He peered earnestly into Fitzhugh’s eyes. “You’d be wise to run a daily inventory of your tradegoods down in the hold — and take a close look at your wagons and stock every day.”
“I’ll teach Maxim. That’s a clerk duty that he can learn.”
“I wouldn’t do it that way,” LaBarge said, sharply, and didn’t elaborate. But Fitzhugh caught the warning.
“Sandbar,” muttered Roux, pointing at a long swell of water angling out from a bight.
LaBarge’s attention shifted totally to the coiling river, which was working its way around a broad oxbow studded with prickly pear and a little yucca. The channel ran between visible snags tilling the water on the right and the glassy swell of the bar arrowing toward them on the left.
“La-haut,” he said to Roux, pointing at
a patch of darker water scarcely thirty yards wide. The pilot, who was manning the helm himself at this hour, turned the duckbilled prow a bit to the right. LaBarge pulled the bellcord, and a moment later the packet slowed to a lazy crawl into the upwelling torrent.
A giant hand seemed to rise from the river and clamp the vessel in its grasp. Fitzhugh stumbled forward on his game leg into the wainscoting. Below, cargo shifted, and men yelled. The boat stood stock still while the river sucked by, gurgling at the intrusion. LaBarge pulled the bellrope, a series of tugs, and from below came a clanging of metal, and a thrashing of paddles in reverse, churning aquamarine water into white froth. But the bar didn’t yield its prey. After a moment, LaBarge tugged the bellrope again and the paddles quieted. He leaned out of the pilothouse and nodded to the mate, far below.
“We’ll grasshopper,” he said to Fitzhugh. “There was no bar here last year. This is a bad one, and we’re thirty or forty feet onto it.”
Down below, deckhands lowered the front spars, normally used for lifting heavy items out of the hold, into the water until they settled into the sandbar. They rigged manila lines that ran from cleats on the foredeck to pulleys at the top of the spars, and back down to a capstan on the foredeck, and then, with a long rod through the capstan, began the slow twisting that wound the line around the capstan, lifting the whole front end of the packet upward on its spars, like a grasshopper rising on its legs. The spars themselves had been set at an angle, leaning forward to give the vessel a push when the moment came. The packet creaked and the rope hummed and spit spray as the prow inched upward.
Roux nodded, and LaBarge yanked the bellrope hard, and a sudden roar of the steam pistons echoed. The eighteen-foot wheels churned, driving the packet ahead on its spars until the angle was too great and the packet settled back onto the sandbar, but twenty feet forward of its previous position. Fitzhugh had seen it before, and marveled at its ingenuity as much now as when he’d first witnessed a riverboat being eased over shallow water. It took two more grasshopperings before the packet slid free on the far side of the bar, and danced on the sparkling waters like a manumitted slave while men cheered down below.
Rocky Mountain Company Page 5
