“God dang you, I can’t make out what kind of a crazy y’air,” exclaimed Helm. “One minute you got us hangin’ on t’ th’ bank o’ th’ Missipp by our fingernails, an’ th’ next minute you’re set to go after Hamilton in his own lair! You …” He paused at the sound of excited voices outside the house. The lieutenant of the guard stepped into the doorway and saluted.
“Beggin’ your pardon, sir,” he said, “but Mister Cerré is here beggin’ an audience with Colonel Clark, sir.”
“Good!” George stood up. “Bring ‘im in. I’m eager to see this man.”
The merchant Gabriel Cerré entered the headquarters with an air of injured dignity. He was obviously a man accustomed to a place high in society, and did not easily wear the suppliant or defensive manner which his present circumstances now had forced him to assume. He was large, sleek, and pink-jowled, with a network of flaming capillaries running from his cheekbones into his nose. His coat of wine-colored velvet was rumpled and his white stockings were stained with the bilge water of the freight bateau in which he had been brought over from the Spanish side of the river. But he was freshly shaved, redolent of some sort of cologne, and his silvering, kinky dark hair was pulled back neatly and bound in a perfect queue. George confronted him with folded arms and expressionless visage, not taking his proffered hand. Cerré looked like one who would have heaped vituperation upon anyone else who had greeted him with such apparent indifference, but he was not in the least haughty before this Virginian who now seemed to be in charge of his fate.
“Mon colonel, please. The understanding I have is that certain people in this village accuse me of being very much in the British interest. But no. I trade at Detroit only because the British control the trade here. I am without politics, a world citizen, but with a deep love for France. No politics, sir. No politics at all.”
“I’ve been told that some of your goods are used to pay the Indians for their depredations upon my people. That would be a bloody crime in my eyes, m’sieur.”
“But it is not so! I abhor the practice of employing savages in warfare! Sir, I truly suspect—I would wager—that the whole body of my accusers are persons who are in my debt and would love to see me ruined so that their obligations would be nullified!”
George ran his tongue over his eyetooth thoughtfully. All this was as Gibault had hinted, and perhaps there was a way to verify it. “M’sieur Cerré, I don’t want to hear any more of your story at this time. Will you please retire to the antechamber over there and close the door, and wait until I summon you. This little matter can be dealt with justly, I think, if you’ll let me do this my way.”
Within fifteen minutes, all the citizens who had complained against Cerré had been assembled in the parlor. They numbered about a dozen, and sat or stood, fidgeting. George came in and took a seat behind the desk. “We’re here now,” he began, “to hear various charges made against the merchant Cerré …” A babble of nasty voices went up in the room, and George silenced it by striking the desk top with the side of his fist. “Before you begin, messieurs—one at a time—I believe the accused has the lawful right to face his accusers. Cerré!”
The antechamber door opened; Cerré stepped out and glanced over the gathering. A look of contempt formed on his face and the startled accusers began to squirm and look frightened. One or two edged backward toward the door, and slipped out.
“This ‘trial’ is in session,” George said. “Now who will be the first to record his complaints against Monsieur Cerré formally?”
A dense silence followed, then the shuffling of feet and the clearing of throats. Cerré stared from one to another. None spoke. The merchant’s countenance grew colder and colder. One by one, eyes on the floor, the people got up and crept out. Soon there was only one remaining, near the front of the room, a lumpish fellow in peasant smock. He looked up and saw Cerré staring at him; his eyes bulged and his Adam’s apple worked. When he glanced over both shoulders then and saw that all the others had left, he turned pale, got up, and lumbered toward the door, knocking aside two chairs in his haste.
Now Cerré stood looking across the empty room at the open door, his lips drawn thin, hands clasped behind his back. He turned slowly. “Well, mon colonel?” he said. George gripped the edges of the desk top with both hands, stared back at him for a minute, then leaned back and laughed.
“As I see it,” he said, “the case is closed.”
Cerré was delighted with the Virginian’s system of justice. Within another half an hour he had taken the oath of allegiance to the United States, and ten minutes later was drinking brandy with George and discussing cheerfully the many ways in which his travels, goods, and influence might be used in support of the new Franco-American alliance.
GEORGE WAS SURPRISED IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS TO FIND THAT MOST of the citizens of Kaskaskia were as delighted with the handling of Cerré’s trial as was Cerré himself, and the young commandant’s reputation as Solomon soon augmented his renown as a benevolent conqueror. The citizens and traders continued spreading his praise far and wide among the Indians, and within a few days he had heard from chiefs of another half-dozen tribes, some as far away as the Great Lakes and four or five hundred miles west of the Mississippi. He began to plan a great council, to be held at Cahokia because of its importance as a center for Indian trade. There would also be an opportunity to see Joseph Bowman there, and perhaps to make a diplomatic call on Lieutenant Governor de Leyba at St. Louis across the river.
He delayed the departure, however, until the return of Father Gibault and Doctor Laffont from Vincennes. They arrived, as they had promised, on the first of August. Their joyful report was that the people of Vincennes, after reading George’s proclamation and hearing about the state of harmony in the Illinois villages, had embraced the American offer almost unanimously, and had signed the oath of allegiance. The priest handed this document, covered with the signatures and marks of the Vincennes people, to George with a shy pride like that of a child presenting its parent with a handmade gift.
George sank back in his chair with a great sigh of relief. Now the whole Northwest territory, with the exception of Detroit and its environs, was, in a tenuous way at least, under American occupation. He smiled and silently gave thanks for the success of the expedition. But that was followed immediately by a strange sense of apprehension. Apparently it showed on his face; Father Gibault leaned toward him, asking, “What is troubling you, my son?”
“Nothing, nothing,” George demurred. But what he wanted to say was, It was too easy somehow. Everything has been charmed and it doesn’t seem real. Have we earned this success, he wondered, or has it been given to us?
Well, he thought then. Perhaps neither. We are still earning it, I suspect.
GABRIEL CERRé HELD A BALL ON THE EVE OF GEORGE’S DEPARTURE to Cahokia. For the first time in nearly three years, George had the pleasure of holding women in his arms, feeling them sweep and turn in the movements of the dance, feeling the suggestion of their supple backs within the confines of hooks and stays. Their bold and merry eyes stirred his blood; their laughter was full of invitation. Several of them, who spoke a little English, made inquiries about when he would return, and whether, when he did, he might be disposed to attend any entertainments in their homes. It was obvious that the leisure moments of his stay here, if there should ever prove to be some leisure moments, could become cozy and pleasurable. These Frenchwomen, it seemed, could be quite forward, and he had become the main object of their attention in these recent peaceful weeks. None of them made any deep impression on his heart, but he did make note of two or three of them who had left him in a state of lingering excitement. All in all these French and Creole ladies seemed too fickle and spoiled and frivolous for his taste. The women he had most admired in his youth were the young pioneer women, with their attitudes of self-reliance and commitment and courage. Few of them were as attractive or provocative as these. But they were, he felt, of superior character.
He wh
irled about the floor now, in this same ballroom at Cerré’s house which he had invaded only a month before, and that seemed like a vague dream now, an incident from the life of someone else. Now he was well-fed, clean, comfortable in fine fabrics, awash in polite words and lilting music, beguiled by flashing eyes and by the intricate messages on young women’s smiling mouths. Cerré fussed about in the far end of the room with his stout wife, being the proud and perfect host, now and then catching George’s eye and saluting him with an expansive wave of the arm. George momentarily studied the delicate neck, tawny shoulders, and scented bodice of the auburn-haired maiden whose weight now swooped and swung cradled on his right forearm; she was a daughter of some trader, whose name escaped him at the moment because he had not yet mastered its strange pronunciations; and the trader, resplendent in a coat of forest green velvet and white summer breeches, watched from a wall chair, smiling the smug but nervous smile of a father intent on giving a daughter away to the right man. In this sense, George mused, gazing down now at the voluptuous creature in his arms, it’s not unlike being back in Virginia.
“Vous êtes heureux, m’sieur?” she inquired, in a squeaky voice that somehow did not seem to go with her ripe body and adult face.
“Très heureux,” he replied, understanding that simple question. “Yes, I am very happy, mademoiselle. Et vous?”
“O, mais oui,” she squeaked.
I wonder, he thought, if the Spaniards try so avidly to pass off their young women. Surely not. I understand they protect them jealously.
We shall see soon enough, when we go to Cahokia, he thought.
And that wan, vulnerable face, which he had seen only once, in that month-old dreamlike moment, the face of de Leyba’s young woman, appeared once again in his mind’s eye.
He was amazed that he remembered it so well.
“WELL, GEORGE,” SAID LEONARD HELM, SITTING BY THE CAMPFIRE a few miles north of Kaskaskia, picking little chains of triangular green burrs off his trouser legs and flicking them into the flames, “it’s going to be a while, ain’t it?”
“It is, and I surely do hate to divide us up.” He sighed and looked around the camp, where some forty Americans and French volunteers sat by their cooking fires in the dusk at the foot of the river bluff. Part of the force would split off here in the morning and go eastward toward Vincennes, where Captain Helm would assume the command of Fort Sackville and begin making treaties with the Wabash Indians. The rest of the troop would accompany George up the Mississippi Valley Road to Cahokia, where he would stay at Joseph Bowman’s garrison and treat with the Illinois tribes. “I’m going to miss you, Len.”
“Same here, George,” Helm said, masking his sentiment and his anxieties by turning back diligently to the removal of the burrs, which he had picked up while dismounted at a drinking spring earlier in the afternoon. George watched him, quietly, thoughtfully.
Those little burrs carry seeds, George thought. They hook onto clothes or animal fur going by, and they take a ride to some new place where there aren’t any burrs and fall there and take root and become like they were in the old place. It’s like people coming to new places in boats across an ocean or down a river, where they try to make a new world for themselves like the old one, but with more space. The way we came to this continent from England and France, he mused, or the way we came down these rivers and made the Kaintuck settlements, or the way the French and Spaniards made these settlements here in the Mississippi and Wabash valleys.
People can think all that out before they go, and can design a boat, and bring familiar things along to make their new life somewhat like the old one, he thought. But how do burrs get smart?
He asked Helm what he thought about that, and the question made Helm stop and really examine a burr he was holding, as if he had never really seen one before.
“Bamboozles me,” he said after a while, flicking the burr into the fire and looking long and seriously into the flames after it Finally he grinned. “I’ve seen fruit seeds in bird shit Them seeds been smart too, I reckon, but I think if I was a seed, I’d figure me out a nicer way to git around.”
George chuckled and shook his head.
He really was going to miss Leonard Helm.
15
ST. LOUIS, UPPER LOUISIANA TERRITORY
August 1778
DON FERNANDO DE LEYBA WAS IN FINE SPIRITS. WORD BROUGHT up the river from Kaskaskia day by day supported his good first impressions of Don Jorge Clark. And he had already had the pleasure of sending to Clark a bateau of American military stores which had come up the river from Oliver Pollock, the American agent in New Orleans. Colonel Clark and his shabby followers obviously were in great need of these goods, which had arrived at St. Louis before Clark had appeared at Kaskaskia.
De Leyba had a few days earlier written a long letter to Governor Galvez in New Orleans, describing Clark’s astonishing arrival in the Illinois; now he was continuing his exuberant appraisal of the young American’s progress. Putting quill to paper, he addressed the letter:
Señor Governor General,
My Dear and Most Respected Sir:
Colonel Clark deserves the greatest courtesy from all the inhabitants of this district since they are debtors to him for his pleasant manner, clemency, and upright administration of justice. Although his soldiers are bandits in appearance, he has them under the best of control. I am expecting this gentleman’s visit from day to day. I shall show him all the courtesy I can and expect to have the best of dealings with him.
I remain with all respect at your Lordship’s service. My dear Sir, the hand of your Lordship is kissed by your most devoted servant,
FERNdo DE LEYBA
Lieutenant Governor, Upper Louisiana
He folded the letter, melted wax over the fold, and was impressing his ring into the wax when the sound of walking horses and feminine voices came through the open front door of the mansion. Draining off the remains of a glass of Madeira, he rose, a little tipsy, from his desk and went toward the vestibule. He had been sipping the wine throughout his afternoon of correspondence, not heeding how often he had refilled his glass. Must regulate that a little better, he thought. His wife had been growing concerned over his tendency to be inebriated by the early evenings.
He stepped to the front door to greet the entourage. His wife, Maria, his sister, Teresa, and Lieutenant de Cartabona reined their horses in at the mounting block. His daughters, Maria Josefa, now nine, and Rita, six, in white cotton dresses and sun hats, were behind them in a tiny, two-wheeled cart pulled by a pony; the rear was brought up by four of the lieutenant’s mounted militiamen. Black footmen went out, helped the ladies to dismount, unloaded from the cart a picnic basket from which hung the corner of a soiled groundcloth, and led the horses and pony out of sight toward the stables. The little girls ran squealing to their father, who stooped to embrace them and hear their excited account of their outing. Maria embraced him then, an expression of distaste fleeting over her face when she smelled the miasma of wine about him, then took the children into the house. Teresa stood near Lieutenant de Cartabona, who remained mounted. Fernando noted how often and how tenderly these two looked at each other. It was not entirely good, in his opinion. Cartabona was a charming fellow, and apparently alleviated Teresa’s ennui here in these humid summer months, but he was a soldier of limited leadership qualities and had, before Teresa had begun to command his attention, built for himself some reputation as a gambler and rakehell. Only through the strict tradition of chaperonage could de Leyba permit them to spend so much time in each other’s company.
“Much excitement in the countryside, Excellency,” said de Cartabona. “I suspect a good half of our population has sailed over to Cahokia in the last few days to get a glimpse of the Bostonese, and they come back with the most fantastic giant stories!”
“Not so fantastic as you might think,” de Leyba laughed. “They are giants, eh, Teresa?”
She frowned and came away to stand nearer her brother. He
put his arm around her.
“Yes,” he said. “She still has nightmares about it. And premonitions. What, little sister?”
She nodded, looking at the ground, troubled.
“Well, then, Tenente,” said de Leyba. “Farewell, and thank you for escorting my dear ones.”
“The pleasure was mine, Excellency. Adiós, Senorita, until I may have the honor again.” And de Cartabona, always proud of his horsemanship, led his militiamen away down the cobbled street at a pretty canter, all obviously for her eyes.
16
CAHOKIA, ILLINOIS COUNTRY
August 1778
CAHOKIA, THOUGH IT SAT IN A SPLENDID SITE, WAS A WRETCHED place, reflecting the indolence of its inhabitants, who were more committed to Indian trade than to farming or husbandry. It was a straggling line of some thirty-five or forty dilapidated houses, along a road which led from its mill to the juncture of the Cahokia River and the Mississippi. Directly in the mouth of the Cahokia stream nestled a picturesque wooded island; beyond that, in the middle of the two-mile-wide Mississippi, lay a smaller island, and on a bluff on the far side of the great stream the distant buildings of St. Louis could be seen on a clear day. To the east of the village of Cahokia was a long, curving lake which apparently once had been part of the Mississippi’s earlier channel. Now all the lowland between the town and the lake was full of the camps and horses of Indians who had come to hold council with the Big Knives. The tribal camps sprawled over the lush green grass in the humid summer morning mist of the valley. Dominating the terrain was one ancient Indian mound, huge as a hill.
George Rogers Clark, with Captain Bowman at his side, stepped out of the large stone house which had been serving as Bowman’s command post and walked out through the gate of the newly built palisade. Outside the gate, exactly between two great fan-shaped elms, a long council table had been set up, with benches at both ends and along the side nearer the fort. Sitting on the ground before the table in tribal groups were several dozen Indian chiefs and chieftains, and behind them stood hundreds of warriors, a great, breathing semicircle of gleaming brown faces, scalplocks, feathers, bead necklaces, greased skin, knives in fringed sheaths, long breechclouts decorated with brilliant beads and quills, woven or metal armbands. Some of the chiefs wore scarlet British uniform coats. They watched the American colonel with intense eyes but impassive faces as he strode to the table, bareheaded, the brass buttons on his buff-and-blue uniform glinting at them in the morning sunlight. A low murmur went among the Indians as they studied this lithe youth who had suddenly appeared in their country preceded by his own new legend. The Indians were not disappointed at the sight of him. Here was a man who looked like his legend. His hair seemed to burn like a flame in the sunlight and his eyes were like deep cold water.
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