So Wild a Dream

by Win Blevins

  Joshua Pilcher, head of the Missouri Fur Company, was equally eager to teach the Rees some respect, and keep the Upper Missouri open to mountain men. He was in with whatever Leavenworth would do. O’Fallon sent an express to Ashley, telling him help was on the way and promising an end to the Rees’ intolerable behavior.

  Leavenworth headed upriver with three keelboats full of supplies and artillery, and two hundred and thirty officers and infantrymen, most of them advancing by land.

  Pilcher got word from upriver that his men on the High Missouri, above even Fort Henry, had suffered two massacres, and their year was a disaster. His firm was in trouble. All he could do was put together forty or fifty mountain men and follow Leavenworth.

  Ashley awoke in the wee hours of the morning. He twisted in his buffalo robes and looked up at the Big Dipper. About four o’clock. He was long used to telling the time in the dark hours of the night by the Big Dipper’s rotation around the North Star. In his year and more in the fur trade he had worried and worried.

  He slipped out of the robes on the pallet he kept for himself. He had his own sleeping spot with some small accommodations, like a lantern and a washbasin—he believed in hierarchy, which meant keeping himself apart from the men. But they were his constant concern.

  He padded quietly around the deck, checking on several of them by moonlight. All were out of danger, he thought. He spent a minute or two listening to young Morgan’s breathing. It seemed steady, easy, deep. Infections carried men away in wars more often than the wounds themselves. Sam’s youth had saved him. It was not a card he could play forever.

  He went to the bow, took off his Jefferson boots, lowered himself into the ankle-deep water, and splashed to the riverbank. They were still camped on the island at the Cheyenne River, and the men slept on the boat. Every night Ashley had trouble sleeping. Every morning these last ten days he kept a dawn vigil. At this hour he would have to walk first, walk back and forth and worry. If he did that on shore, at least he wouldn’t keep the men awake.

  This felt like a war, this fur-trading. For now. He hated that. As a military man he knew enough of war to despise it. He didn’t want to plunder the land, he wanted to trade. Naturally, he wanted fortune—fortune was the will-o’-the-wisp that drew big men to big risks. But he wanted to earn fortune, not steal it.

  Once at a party Cadet Chouteau had challenged him in the Frenchman’s usual superior tone about this matter. “What do we do to the Indians, hmmm? We take the riches of their lands, the beaver, and give them trifles and trinkets in return. Hardly a course that does us honor. We are not creatures to admire, we capitalists.”

  Ashley made a retort to Chouteau with a confidence that he recognized as peculiarly American. He did not see his enterprise that way, not at all. The fur trader took to the Indians wealth that was almost unimaginable to them—cooking pots, knives, axes, awls, blankets, cloth, guns and ammunition, all the bounty of an industrial civilization. In return he took the skin of an animal the Indians had no use for, the beaver. “We take little, we leave much,” he said.

  At that moment he noticed that most of the guests, nearly all French old-timers in St. Louis, had stopped to listen curiously to the ambitious American upbraid the young and arrogant Frenchman.

  So he plunged on in style. “We also leave something that is not material,” Ashley announced. “Something for the mind. The greater civilization shows the lesser the heights of possibility. The conversion of earthen ore into metal, which results in cooking in pots instead of buffalo stomachs; in metal awls instead of sharpened bones; in rifles instead of arrows. Blankets and cloths instead of the hides of beasts. Altogether we bring to them the idea of advancement, of progress itself. Having seen it, they want it. They bestir themselves in small ways even now, to the attainment of a greatness they see they lack. This is a high gift, a boon without charge.”

  Chouteau took the pause to reply, “That is, my dear Ashley, if our trappers make white men of the Indians. And what if it turns out the other way, we become savages?”

  There was a titter of nervous laughter in the room. Everyone had seen the rough men who came back from Indian country.

  Someone in the back said, “Bien sur, ces Americains sont tout naifs.” “Oh, these Americans are all so naïve.”

  Now Ashley paced the bank feverishly. Regardless of any debates, he didn’t like fighting Indians instead of trading with them. So now he shook an imaginary finger at himself. He lusted to show those damned Rees. He wanted to boat past their villages, fortified, and glare at them defiantly. Or sneak by them at night and let them discover in embarrassment, later, how he had bested them. Or he wanted to fight them straight out and give them a whipping. If Leavenworth came with troops, that’s what he would do. He would attack the villages straight on and let them feel the might and majesty of the United States. They would learn that white men were not to be trifled with. If they were penitent afterwards, he would sign a peace treaty with them, knowing what they did not—that it was infinitely to their benefit. If they were unrepentant, he would burn their villages.

  He walked this bank night after night, keeping this vigil, his imagination filled with gunpowder and blood. War was ugly, but it was necessary.

  He noticed the sky glowed with the first light before sunrise. He walked swiftly to the upstream end of the island. He would keep watch, as every day. If they came, he thought they would come at dawn.

  The trouble with all this inner debate was that he knew it was childish. He knew what he needed—a good fall hunt. The word Smith had brought from Henry was not encouraging. Because of their immobility, Henry’s men had not gotten much beaver in their first season. Twenty packs, a thousand hides. For a hundred and fifty men that was a miserable showing. The year’s income was less than what two minutes had cost him on the way up, when the keelboat sank and took ten thousand dollars in trade goods to the bottom. Aside from that, Henry had tried to make progress in establishing good relations with the Indians on the high Missouri and reaped a bitter harvest. The Blackfeet attacked his party on Smith’s River, above the Great Falls of the Missouri, killing four and driving the rest from the country. Henry had decided to abandon the fur-rich Blackfoot territory and hunt in the country of the Crows, who welcomed the mountain men.

  A year of retreat after retreat, loss after loss.

  He looked upstream, squinting, hoping to see something in the thin light.

  Now the Missouri River was closed to whites, so he couldn’t even get another party to the high Missouri.

  Ashley had spent a lot of capital and gotten nothing for it, or less than nothing—in huge regions he was the enemy.

  This fall and winter his creditors would press him. He needed to get some men into the villages to trade for furs, and into the creeks to trap beaver. He had to show a few nuggets of the vast wealth of the mountains. Or he would be just another man with a big dream, a beseeching smile, and empty pockets.

  A good fall hunt, yes. But he wanted to punish those Rees.

  Ashley looked upstream hard, not knowing what stirred him, hope or fear. Sometimes he didn’t like being General William Ashley.

  An hour later shouts startled him out of a reverie.

  Men on the keelboat were crying out. Voices floated down from upstream—in English. Ashley stood and stared.

  Movement on the water. He lifted his telescope.

  Canoes. Filled with white men.

  He forced himself to put down the telescope and wait.

  Someone hallooed the boat. He threw up the telescope. Andrew Henry cupped hands around his mouth. Jedediah Smith was waving.

  Smith and the French-Canadian had gotten through alive.

  Everything was saved. Maybe.

  A stout heart experienced a moment of softness.

  The canoes paddled up to the Rocky Mountains, and lines were grabbed and held by eager hands. Fifty men, blooded hands every one and well-armed, jumped on board. The stranded men of the keelboat welcomed them like wa
ter after a long drought.

  The thirty Kentucks begged to hear the story of the adventure of Diah Smith and Gideon—four hundred miles traveled on foot through dangerous country with not a scratch! Came back with rescuers, and all this in about four weeks! What a feat! They pounded the two on the back, exclaimed things like “You boys are some!” Smith wore a quiet smile that said, ‘All in a day’s work.’ Gideon beamed like a conqueror.

  From the day he shook off his fever, Sam felt his immobility painfully. He couldn’t hunt, he couldn’t jump in the river and cool off, he couldn’t go for a walk to stretch his body out. He could do nothing but crutch to the water pail for a drink, crutch into the shade or into the sun, or crutch to a different group of men to talk to. It was slow, it was awkward, it was humiliating.

  He gave Diah Smith and Gideon awkward, crutch-bound bear hugs, and was glad to see them as any man, in fact exhilarated. But it also hurt. Diah and Gideon walked four hundred miles and paddled several hundred more and got to be heroes. While he, Sam, hunkered over his wound. Sam wanted to do big things, too. He could taste it like brass and blood in his mouth.

  Now things were going to get a lot worse. Right after Henry and his men arrived, Ashley ordered the keelboat dropped down to the Teton River. Maybe there they could find the Sioux, he said, and trade for some horses. Which meant men would be heading out to Crow country for the fall hunt. And meant that Sam would be left behind.

  His leg was far from mended. As they were floating down to the Teton, another forty miles, Sam asked the surgeon Fleming if he could try putting weight, just a little, on his leg. All he got in return was a stare-down. It was worse than being called stupid.

  He didn’t try it. All right, weeks to go, he would wait. He wondered where the fur brigades would be then, and whether he would have to go downriver with General Ashley, and spend the winter in St. Louis. He wanted to spend it in a Crow lodge.

  Within several days a letter changed everything, like a wave of the hand from God.

  Ashley got an express from Benjamin O’Fallon, the Indian agent. Ashley read it out loud to all the men. Colonel Leavenworth was marching north with infantrymen and artillery—six-pound Howitzers! The men cheered. Joshua Pilcher of the Missouri Fur Company was coming along with forty or fifty mountain men. They hoped to recruit several hundred Sioux warriors as light cavalry. Men applauded. The Sioux had been fighting the Rees for years. They would take this chance to deal them a mortal blow. Ashley concluded with ringing words from O’Fallon—the combined forces of Leavenworth, Ashley, Pilcher, and the Sioux would put an end to “the repeated and most shocking outrages” of the Rees forever.

  Leavenworth had left on June 22, so he had already been en route for a couple of weeks. Two more weeks and he might be here. And then, by God, things would be set right. The mountain men shouted to the skies.

  Sam shouted too. More than wanting vengeance, he was hugely relieved. Two weeks or more before Leavenworth got here. A hundred miles to boat upstream to the villages. A battle to fight. Two hundred miles back downriver to Fort Kiowa, where the trade goods waited. A month at least. Sam surely would be walking again by then. Maybe he could go on the fall hunt. He felt good, damned good.

  Until Ashley spit on his polish. “Sam, I’m sending some men to Fort Kiowa to try to trade for some horses. You’d best stay down there until after the campaign.”

  Then Sam looked it in the face. A canoe trip of several days, being constantly lifted into and out of the canoe like he was a baby or an old man, a fort where he didn’t know anyone, and a month of sitting around doing nothing, this time alone.

  He was disgusted.

  Chapter Twelve

  Sam would have been more disgusted if he had known it would be most of July and all of August before the Ashley men showed up again, and almost into September before they could trade for enough horses to start for Crow country. The likely sources for horses, the Sioux, weren’t around Fort Kiowa but well to the west, hunting. It seemed the marching of armies and brigades up and down the Missouri, both red and white, had driven the game away from the river, to where sanity prevailed.

  A certain madness instead had held the day in the campaign against the Rees. Leavenworth’s infantry and artillery did at length get up to the villages, in the company of over a hundred mountain men commanded by General Ashley, Major Henry, and Joshua Pilcher, and six or seven hundred light cavalrymen—the Sioux. This great force, which they called the Missouri Legion, had met the enemy and produced a fiasco.

  Sam wanted to hear every morsel of what happened, but the men who fought the battles wanted only to forget them. The first day the Sioux rode ahead and got into a good skirmish in front of the lower village. When the white army appeared, the Rees ran for the village. Very well, everyone thought. The bear is in his den, and we will shoot him.

  The next day the army fired their six-pounders at both villages, with no apparent effect. At least the artillery fire did not force the Rees to come out and fight. Bored, the Sioux went off to steal corn, beans, pumpkins, and the like from the Ree fields. Leavenworth asked his officers about a direct assault on the villages, and was informed that the picketing and the ditch behind the pickets made it risky. Pilcher brought up the news that the Sioux had lost all interest and were wandering away.

  Now Leavenworth saw some Sioux parleying with the Rees near the village and went up. The Rees begged for mercy, especially for the women and children, who were suffering from the artillery. The troublemaker Grey Eyes was now dead—the tribe wanted peace.

  They proceeded to formal terms. Leavenworth demanded that Ashley’s property be returned to him, the river be opened to Americans to travel. The Rees were to promise agreeable behavior henceforth, and Leavenworth was to be given five hostages as a show of good faith.

  The Rees agreed, pleading only that the Sioux had stolen all the horses, so Ashley’s twenty couldn’t be replaced. Later it turned out that the Rees were willing to produce nothing of what Ashley had traded for the horses, except for a few fusils and buffalo robes.

  Now Leavenworth balked. Then Edward Rose, always willing to dare anything, went into the village and came back with a report that the Rees were getting ready to evacuate during the night. To keep them from running, Leavenworth capitulated—he said they didn’t have to make good on what was taken from Ashley.

  Pilcher was infuriated. Most of the mountain men were enraged. Leavenworth’s own officers were steaming.

  The next morning it turned out that the Rees had snuck past Leavenworth’s sentries during the night and were gone, gone, gone.

  Had they been taught a lesson? Maybe. That they could taunt the American bear and get away with it.

  Was the Missouri now open navigation?

  No fur trader would risk finding out.

  Right now all that felt long past. A dozen and a half men stood in a clump, packing their horses. Sam had no idea how to throw a diamond hitch, as the guide called it. He had to do it three times before the guide, Mathews, approved. Sort of a bossy guy, Mathews.

  The first brigade to be captained by Jedediah Smith was assembled and ready to head for the country of the Crows. Sam looked around at his companions. He was glad he was in. So was Clyman, the grave, slow-spoken Virginian. Bill Sublette, a gaunt, iron-faced Kentuckian. Irish Tom Fitzpatrick, small but sinewy and smart. Tom Eddie, a daredevil. Edward Rose, a brave man with the blood of three races. Also Arthur Black, Branch, Stone, and a handful whose names Sam couldn’t remember yet.

  He looked at Diah—most of the men called him ‘Captain Smith’ now—and wondered how he felt about being the leader. Sam had thought maybe Ashley would hold back with Diah, who was in his middle twenties, and choose Clyman, in his thirties. But Jim himself said, “Hey, who better?” Diah had taken expresses from and to Henry up at the Yellowstone. He’d been the last man off that beach at the Ree villages. He was smart and he had nerve.

  For nearly a month they’d tried to trade for horses and failed. These
horses were borrowed from Fort Kiowa and had to be returned. The guide, Mathews, would help them find the Sioux, then bring the horses back.

  Meanwhile, they walked. The horses were to carry supplies and trade goods, not riders. Diah advised Sam to carry his possible sack, not leave it on the packhorse, in case Indians ran the horses off.

  Sam did.

  They set out on foot. Embarrassing.

  Sam wasn’t sorry, though. He could barely ride a horse.

  Only Mathews rode, a king among peasants.

  The first several days were a nightmare. They walked all day across a high, rolling plain and finally dropped down into the valley of White River. Mathews warned them about the water. It looked white and gooey, and tasted sweetish. If they drank too much, Mathews said, they’d get the pukes and the runs.

  They’d been almost without water all day. The next morning nearly every man was sick. Sublette, the gaunt Kentuckian, was the sickest. Tom Eddie made a lot of fun of him, the sort Sam would never tell his mother or sisters.

  After a day and a half following the stream, they did a dry cutoff, avoiding a big bend in the river. Twenty-four hours dry, then a water hole, Mathews said, then another fifteen miles to the river. Being underprovisioned, they had little way to carry water. They trudged, thirsty, the horses uneasy.

  They made a miserable dry camp.

  At midday the expected water hole was dry. Dry beyond dry. So dry it wasn’t worth digging to try to find water.

  They trudged.

  Mathews rode ahead. Sublette drawled at Fitzpatrick, “You know where that bastard went?”

  “He doesn’t want to watch our lips split and our skin peel and our eyeballs go dry in their sockets and refuse to turn,” said the Irishman.

  “Don’t make no difference where he’s gone,” said Eddie. “All the water in this desert is burnt up.”

  Sam still wished he knew where Mathews was.

  The party straggled. Men spread out right and left, hunting water. Sam thought they might not ever get together again. Diah walked at the rear to keep an eye on everyone, but how could he?