Centennial

by James A. Michener

  Then the thaw came and he was able to proceed. To make a living trading for beaver it was necessary to be at the Indian camps in late winter, when the animals came out of hibernation, their fur sleek and thick. The same animal trapped in midsummer wasn’t worth a sou. Beaver trading was a winter job, and Pasquinel knew every trick the Canadians had developed for staying alive in freezing weather.

  “Four Frenchmen can live where one Englishman would die,” they said in Detroit, and he believed it. He thought nothing of spending eight months alone in unexplored territory, if the Indians would allow him into their camps. If his canoe was destroyed, he could build another. If his stores were dumped, it didn’t matter, for he had invented a canny way of keeping his powder dry. But if Indians proved hostile, he stopped trading and got out. Only a fool would fight Indians if he didn’t have to.

  Now he entered the land of the Pawnee, reputed in Saint Louis to be the most treacherous tribe. Fais attention! he warned himself, moving so stealthily that he spotted the Indian village before they saw him.

  For one whole day he kept his canoe tucked inside a bank while he studied his potential foe. They seemed like those he had known in the north: buffalo hunters, a scalp here and there, low tipis, horses and probably a gun or two—everything was standard.

  It was time to move. Methodically he laid out a supply of lead bullets, poured some powder, checked the oil patches required for tamping, and wiped the inside of his short-barreled fusil. His knife was in his belt and his hatchet close by. Taking a deep breath, he paddled his canoe out into the stream and was soon spotted.

  Children ran down to the bank and began calling to him in a language he did not know. Grim-lipped, he nodded to them and they shouted back. Three young braves appeared, ready for trouble, and these he saluted with his paddle. Finally two dignified chiefs strode down, looking as if they intended to settle this matter. They indicated that he must pull his canoe ashore, but he kept to the middle of the river.

  Angered, the two chiefs signaled a group of young men to plunge into the cold water and haul him ashore. Lithe bodies jumped in, walked easily to the middle of the river, and dragged him ashore. They tried to take his rifle, but he wrested it from them and warned in sign language that if they molested him, he would shoot the nearest chief. They drew back.

  Then from the tipis came a tall, fine-looking chief with a very red complexion. Rude Water, they said his name was, and he demanded to know who Pasquinel was and what he was doing.

  In sign language Pasquinel spoke for some minutes, explaining that he had come from Saint Louis, that he came in peace, that all he wanted was to trade for beaver. He concluded by saying that when he returned through Pawnee lands, he would bring Chief Rude Water many presents.

  “Chief wants his present now,” a lieutenant said, so Pasquinel dug into his canoe and produced a silver bracelet for the chief and three cards of highly colored beads made in Paris and imported through Montreal. Genuflecting, he handed Rude Water the cards and indicated they were for his squaw.

  “Chief has four squaws,” the lieutenant said, and Pasquinel brought out another card.

  The parley continued all day, with Pasquinel explaining that the Pawnee must be friends to the great King of France, but have nothing to do with the Americans, who had no king. Rude Water embraced Pasquinel and assured him that the Pawnee, greatest of the Indian tribes, were his friends, but that he must avoid the Cheyenne and Arapaho, who were horse stealers of the worst sort, and above all, the Ute, who were barbarians.

  The desultory conversation resumed during the second day, with Rude Water inquiring as to why Pasquinel would venture into the plains without his woman, to which the Frenchman replied, “I have a wife ... north, but she is not strong in paddling the canoe.” This the chief understood.

  On the next day Rude Water still insisted on playing host, explaining that Pasquinel could not take his canoe up the Platte—too much mud, too little water. Pasquinel said he would like to try, but Rude Water kept inventing new obstacles. When Pasquinel finally got his canoe into the river, the entire village came down to watch him depart. Rude Water said, “When you come to where the rivers join, take the south. Many beaver.” The parting was so congenial that Pasquinel had to anticipate trouble.

  He paddled upriver all day, suspecting from time to time that he was being followed. At dusk he pitched his tent ashore and ostentatiously appeared to sleep, but when darkness fell he slipped back to his canoe and lay in the bottom, waiting. As he expected, four Pawnee braves crept along the riverbank to steal his canoe. He waited till their probing hands were almost touching his.

  Then, with fiendish yells and slashing knife, he rose from the bottom of the canoe, threw himself among the four, cutting and gouging and kicking. He was a one-man explosion, made doubly frightening by the dark. The four fled, and in the morning he continued upstream.

  He had gone about fifty miles farther westward when he became aware that he was again being followed. Pawnee, he concluded. Same men.

  So once more he laid out his bullets and honed his knife. He judged that if he could repel them one more time, they would leave him alone. He traveled carefully, avoiding mud flats and staying away from shore. He was watchful whenever he knelt to drink or stopped to relieve himself. It was an ugly, difficult game, which the Pawnee stood every chance of winning.

  The showdown came at dawn. He had slept in the canoe lodged against the southern shore, and was bending over to retrieve his paddle when a Pawnee arrow struck him in the middle of his back. A torturing pain coursed down his backbone as the slim arrow tip struck a nerve, and he might have fainted except for the challenge he had to meet.

  Ignoring his wound, he grabbed for his fusil, raised it without panic, took aim and killed one of the braves. Ice-cool, he swabbed the barrel, poured his powder, inserted the patch, put in the ball, tamped it down, took aim and killed another. Methodically, while the blood ran down his back, he reloaded, but no third shot was required, because the Indians recognized that this tough little stranger had great magic.

  That long winter’s day, with the low sun beating into his canoe, was one Pasquinel would not forget. Reaching blindly behind his back, he tugged at the arrow, but the barbed head had caught on bone and could not be dislodged.

  He tried twisting the shaft, but the pain was too great. He tried pushing it in deeper, to get it past the bone, but produced a pain so excruciating that he feared losing consciousness. There was no solution but to leave the arrowhead imbedded, with the shaft protruding, and this he did.

  For two days of intense pain he lay in his canoe face down, the arrow projecting upward. At intervals he would sit upright and try to paddle his canoe upstream, his back reacting in agony with each stroke but with the canoe moving ever farther from the Pawnee.

  On the third day, when he was satisfied that the arrow was not poisoned and when the point was beginning to adjust to his nerve ends and muscles, he found that he could paddle with some ease, but now the river vanished. It contained no water deep enough for a canoe, and he had no alternative but to cache his spare provisions and proceed on foot.

  The digging of a hiding place for the canoe called into play new muscles, and their movement caused new pain, which he alleviated by rotating the shaft until the flint accommodated itself. In one day he finished his job. Then he was ready to resume his journey afoot.

  Like all coureurs, he used a stout buffalo-hide headstrap for managing his heavy burden. Passing the strap across his forehead, he allowed the two loose ends to fall down his back, where he fastened them to the load he had to carry. Normally his pack would have rested exactly where the shaft of the arrow protruded, so he had to drop the load several inches, allowing it to bounce off his rump.

  In this manner he trailed along the Platte to that extraordinary. where the two branches of the river run side by side, sometimes barely separated, for many miles. There, lucky for him, he met two Cheyenne warriors and in sign language explained what had hap
pened at the Pawnee camp. They became agitated and assured him that any man who fought the Pawnee was a friend. Placing him on his stomach, they tried to rip the arrow out by brute force, but the barbs could not be dislodged.

  “Better cut it off beneath the skin,” they said.

  “Go ahead,” Pasquinel said.

  They handed him an arrow to bite on, then cut deep into his back, and after protracted sawing, they cut off the shaft. Within ten days Pasquinel was able to hoist his burden up from his rump and place it over the scar, where it rode not easily but well. Occasionally, as he hiked, he could feel the arrowhead adjusting itself, but each week it caused less pain.

  He reached a Cheyenne village in late February 1796 and traded his bangles and blankets for more than a hundred beaver pelts, which he wadded into two compact bales. Wrapping them in moist deerskin which hardened when it dried, he produced packets like rock.

  He now divested himself of every item not crucially needed, fastened the buffalo strap across his forehead and suspended the two bales from it. They weighed just under a hundred pounds each. His essential equipment, including rifle, ammunition, hatchet and trading goods, weighed another seventy pounds. Pasquinel, twenty-six years old that spring, and still suffering the ill effects of his wound, weighed somewhat less than a hundred and fifty pounds, yet he proposed to walk two hundred miles to where his canoe was cached.

  Adjusting the huge load as if he were going to carry it from house to barn, he satisfied himself as to its balance and set forth. He created an extraordinary image: a small man, five-feet-four, with enormous shoulders and torso, gained from endless paddling, set upon matchstick legs. Day after day he trod eastward, keeping to the Platte and resting occasionally to drink from its muddy bed. He had to guard against wolves, lurking Indians and quicksand. Sometimes, to relieve the pressure on his temples, he squeezed a thumb beneath the buffalo band across his forehead.

  He ate berries and a little pemmican he had made during the winter. He deemed it wise not to pitch camp and cook an antelope, for his fire might attract Indians. The worst of the journey, of course, was the spring insects, but he grew accustomed to them at his eyes, taking consolation in the fact that when summer came their numbers would diminish.

  As he shuffled along, he muttered old songs, not for their words, which were trivial, but for their consoling rhythms, which kept him moving:

  “My canoe is made of fine bark

  Stripped from the whitest birch.

  The seams are sewn with strong roots,

  The paddles carved from white wood.

  “I take this canoe and embark

  Down the rapids, down the turbulence.

  See how it speeds along

  Never losing the current.

  “I have traveled along great rivers, the whole St. Lawrence,

  And have known the savage tribes and their various tongues.”

  On one especially trying day he chanted this song for eight hours, allowing its monotony to pull him along. At dusk a pack of wolves came to the opposite bank for water. They must have recently feasted on a deer, for they looked at Pasquinel, drank and ambled off. This caused him to break into a silly song much loved by the coureurs:

  “On my way I chanced to meet

  Three cavaliers with horses neat.

  Oh, you still make me laugh.

  I’ll never go back home.

  I have great fear of wolves.”

  In this way he trudged back to where his canoe lay hidden, and when he got there he sighed with relief, for he suspected that he could not have held out much longer; the burden was simply too great. He rested for a day, then dug the canoe out and ate ravenously of the stored food. Tears did not come to his eyes, for he was not an emotional man, but he did give thanks to La Bonne Sainte Anne for his survival.

  He loaded his canoe with the rest of the food and the two hundred and sixty pounds he had been carrying and climbed in, but within that day he discovered that the Platte had so little water he could not move. Disgusted, he got out and started pushing the canoe from behind, and in this way struggled down the middle of the river for about a hundred miles. There the water was only inches deep and he was faced with a difficult decision.

  He could either abandon the canoe and resume portaging his pelts all the way to the Missouri, or he could camp where he was for six months and wait for the river to rise; he chose the latter. He built himself a small camp, to which Cheyenne reported from time to time, seeking tobacco. Thus the long summer of 1796 passed, and he lived well on antelope and deer, with now and then a buffalo tongue brought in by the Cheyenne. Twice he visited one of the Cheyenne villages and renewed acquaintances with the two braves who had cut the arrow from his back. One of their squaws was so convinced she could work the flint to the surface—she had done this for her father—that Pasquinel submitted to the ordeal, but she succeeded only in shifting the area of pain.

  When the river finally rose, Pasquinel bade farewell to the Cheyenne and resumed his trail eastward. “Be careful of the Pawnee,” his friends warned.

  “Rude Water is still my friend,” he assured them.

  “With him be most careful of all,” they said.

  When he reached the Pawnee lands, Rude Water greeted him as a son, then set eight braves to wrecking his canoe, stealing his rifle and running off with the precious bales of pelts. Unarmed and without food, Pasquinel was left alone, a hundred and fifty miles from the Missouri.

  He did have his knife, and with it he grubbed roots and berries to keep alive. He walked by night, relieved in a sardonic way that he no longer had to carry his packs. By day he slept.

  But he by no means intended merely to escape to the Missouri, there to be picked up by some passing white men. He was at war with the whole Pawnee nation and was determined to recover his pelts. He calculated that the Indians would appreciate their value and try to make contact with traders, and that the meeting place might be the confluence of the Platte and the Missouri.

  When he reached that forbidding spot he made no effort to hail any of the Company boats he saw floating along with their own cargoes of skins. Instead, he hollowed out a hiding place among the roots of trees and waited. Two weeks passed, then three, and no Pawnee. It didn’t matter. He had time. Then in the fourth week he saw two canoes coming down the Platte, heavily laden. As he spied on them he felt a surge of excitement, for there were his pelts, just as he had wrapped them.

  His joy was premature, for it looked as if the Indians intended paddling all the way to Saint Louis to dispose of their treasure. The two canoes entered the Missouri River, hesitated, and came back to the Platte. Pasquinel was much relieved when the Pawnee moved ashore and set up camp. They were going to wait for a downriver boat.

  They waited. He waited. And one day down the Missouri came a pirogue bearing an improvised sign Saint Antonine. As soon as the Pawnee saw it they paddled out to flag it down. They had beaver, much beaver.

  “Throw ’em aboard,” the rivermen cried.

  While they haggled over price, Pasquinel swam into the middle of the stream, came silently onto the Pawnee canoes, turned one over and began slashing with his knife, killing two Pawnee. In the confusion the rivermen saw a chance to make off with the pelts, so they began firing point-blank at the surviving Indians.

  Pasquinel swam alongside the boat, shouting in broken English, “Thees my peltries!” He was about to climb aboard when one of the rivermen had the presence of mind to club him over the head with an oar. He sank in the river.

  He drifted face down, afraid to show signs of life lest they shoot at him, and after they disappeared around the bend he swam ashore. Shaking himself like a dog, and pressing water from his buckskin, he looked for a place to sleep. His canoe, his rifle, his store of beads and his pelts were gone: “Two years of work, I got one knife, one arrowhead in the back.”

  He would not give up. If by some miracle he could reach Saint Louis before the pirates sold his furs, he might still reclaim them, and
on that slim chance he acted.

  He slept a few hours, then rose in the middle of the night and began running along paths that edged the river. When he reached the spot at which the Missouri turned for its long run to the east, he sought out a Sac village and traded his knife for an old canoe. With only such food as he could collect along the banks, he paddled tirelessly toward the Mississippi, hoping to overtake the robbers.

  The day came when he detected a new odor, as if the Missouri were, changing character, and in spite of his disappointment at not catching up with the pirates, he felt a rush of excitement. He paddled faster, and as he turned a final bend he saw before him the great, broad expanse of the Mississippi, that noble river flowing south, and he remembered the day on which he first saw this stream, far to the north. He had decided then to explore it all, and in the pleasure of meeting an old friend, he forgot his anger.

  The Missouri ran much faster than the Mississippi and carried such a burden of sand and silt that it spewed a visible bar deep into the heart of the greater river; as Pasquinel rode the current far toward the Illinois shore, he could see that delicate line in the water where the mud of the Missouri touched the clear water of the Mississippi. For twenty miles downstream this line continued, two mighty rivers flowing side by side without mingling.