FOR EDMOND,
WHO FIRST INTRODUCED ME TO
THE ENEMY OF HORSES.
AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
There are numerous authorities for the things James Beckwourth did, but none at all, as far as I know, for why he did these things or what he thought and felt while he was doing them. This is true even of Jim’s own autobiography, which is most strongly eloquent in what it never says. Therefore, this book is a work of fiction, based on certain incidents in the remarkable life of a very remarkable man.
However, I have not knowingly altered any historical fact. And while Dave Richards, Sam Carson, and a few of the minor characters in the story are products of my imagination, Jim himself, the redoubtable Ashley men, the Bents, Pegleg Smith, Walkara, and most of the Crow and Cheyenne warriors are not.
GREEN GRASS
ONE
The noises came from the end of the lane, where it wound out of sight into the mud and mist of the riverfront. Jim stopped where he was and listened. Fighting. Three men at least. Maybe four or five. Mean fighting with a sound of death in it. Drunken men brawled and shouted and sometimes somebody got killed for sure, but that was different. These were sober quiet men, and if they killed it wouldn’t be from hot blood or accident.
Jim shifted from one foot to the other, scratching the back of his neck and thinking.
It was late, well after two o’clock of the morning. There weren’t many houses around here, only big ramshackle sheds and warehouses, and there were no people to see what he did. He had left Francie less than half an hour ago and he was still feeling high and happy, keyed up for anything.
He didn’t think long. A chance like this did not come too often. He went down the lane toward where the sound of fighting was.
He made very little noise, going light-footed on the soft ground. He was young and lightness came easy. He stopped again by the comer of a shed and peered around it.
The fight was right on top of him now. There was a flat space between him and the black gliding water and the men were there, moving in and out among the roiling mists, in the heavy wet river-stink, their feet sucking in the mud. A little light came from the stars, a little more from lower down along the shore where raft and keelboat hung in the slack and the waterfront life of St. Louis went on and on as though sleep was a word nobody had ever heard. Put all together, the light wasn’t much. But it was enough to show that there were four men, and that three of them were doing most of the moving. The fourth had his back set against the rotten pilings that were all that was left of an old wharf washed out in some spring flood. The three men wore dark clothing and Jim was sure they all had knives. River rats. They kept dancing and circling around the fourth man, but he had something long and heavy in his hands and he was swinging it murderously, talking all the time in a rattling, hard-edged voice.
“—know what they’d do to you? They’d put skirts on you, make you sit with the women, do squaw’s work. Squaws? Why, you ain’t even that good. I’ve seen little Sioux girls hardly out of their cradle boards could fight rings around you.” He brought his bludgeon whistling and whacking down and laughed as the men scattered. “Run away, little polecats. You ain’t wolves, to pull down big game.”
Jim smiled. Here was a man who liked to talk so much he couldn’t shut his mouth to save his life. But Jim knew from the talk what he was, though he couldn’t see much of him. He was a trapper, and the heavy thing in his hands was a long rifle, clubbed.
All of a sudden the flow of talk stopped short in a grunt of pain. The trapper bent sideways as though a big hand had pulled him and Jim understood why the three men were not in any hurry to get their skulls cracked. They had already cut their man. They were just waiting for him to bleed out so they could finish him easy.
Seeing him waver, they thought perhaps the time had come. They moved.
Jim hunched up his shoulders and went in.
He caught the first man before anybody knew he was there, coming up behind him and swinging a hammer blow behind the ear that put him down grunting and floundering. The knife dropped out of his hand. Jim reached for it, feeling for it with his fingers, not taking his eyes off the other two men. The trapper let go an Indian yell.
There was some quick and vicious French from the two men. One of them came for Jim, sidestepping around the third man who was tiying to get up again. Jim got his fingers on the knife. He waited, watching the shape of the man loom over him black and swift like something in a dream, and he was hot and his eyes shone. He caught the dull flicker of steel high over his head, saw it start down, and came up fast under it and inside. His body shocked against another body, squat and broad and powerful, smelling of sweat and dirty wool. An eye glared at him briefly, wide and startled above a thick cheek. Jim’s hand drove down with the knife in it and the man fell away from him with a hoarse cry. Jim didn’t think he was dead. He didn’t care.
He stepped aside and the trapper yelled, “Behind you!”
Jim whirled. The man he had knocked down was on his feet again and coming. There was no time to get out of the way. The man’s bullet head took him in the belly and flung him back breathless onto his shoulders, and now the knife went spinning out of Jim’s hand. The man fell on top of him.
He was a big man, and heavy. Jim felt mud streaking cold and slick under his collar. He reached up and got a fistful of clothing. He wrenched and kicked as they rolled. His mouth was full of mud, sour, gritty. A thumb gouged at his eye and he squirmed his face deeper into the all-pervading muck, thrashing his legs and clawing with his free hand for the other man’s face. He lost track of the third man and the trapper. He did not really care much whether the trapper’s life was saved or not. The fight was the main thing. The fight was everything and it filled the world. He was feeling pain now and the immediacy of more pain, fingers clawing around his eyes and then hot wine-and-tobacco-smelling breath puffing at him as the man came snapping like a bulldog after his nose. “Come on,” he panted, “you dirty gumbo, I’ll kill you.” Filled with an ecstasy of hate, Jim arched his body and heaved, kicking powerfully.
The balance shifted. He found an ear and dug his nails in and tore. He bore down with his knees, his elbows, roughing, savaging, mauling the man down deep into the mud, and the man fought back and it was good. After a while Jim realized that the man was not fighting any more. He climbed off him and stood looking around bleary-eyed, his fists balled and swinging.
The other two river rats were gone. The trapper stood with his feet wide apart and his back braced against the piling. He was doing something with the rifle, very deft and quick even in the darkness, and before Jim knew what was happening the long barrel was pointing his way.
“Much obliged to you,” the trapper said. “Reckon they could have pulled me down at that.”
Jim felt relaxed, every muscle pleasantly stretched and wrung. The sore spots wouldn’t really hurt until tomorrow. The trapper had a Tennessee accent. Malice brought out Jim’s best high-toned Virginian. “That’s the damndest way of saying thank you I’ve seen yet,” he said, and laughed.
“I’ve already been trustful once too often tonight,” the trapper said. “How did you happen in on this?”
“I happened, that’s all. And now I’ll be going.” He paused. “When you’re carrying money, stick to the lighted streets. Good night.”
“Just a minute.” The long cold barrel gleamed, rocksteady in the starshine. “How do you know I’m carrying money?”
“Even gumboes don’t kill for a pair of old moccasins. And if I didn’t know already, there’s that.” He pointed to the rifle.
The trapper grunted. “I guess it was a silly question. Gentleman, eh? You sure don’t fight like one. Mostly they’re too proud to use
their hands. Well, all right.” The barrel wavered and sank. “I’ll take a chance on you. Got any wherewithal to plug up this hole?”
“Let’s see it.”
The trapper fumbled with his belt, muttering all the while. “I would have stayed to the lighted streets, right enough, but I ain’t used to the town way of thinking. Worse’n Blackfoot country—” The hunting shirt fell open. Jim spread back the buckskin. It was wet and slippery with blood. “My sweetheart kissed me good-bye as pretty as you please and sent me on the shortest way. Hah! And when these three jumped me, I found she’d taken the flint out of my rifle—” He broke off with a gasp and a curse. “What are you doing there?”
“They cut you long,” Jim said, “but they didn’t cut you deep. You’ll live.” He started hauling out his shirttail, found it was already out and soaked with mud. Then he remembered the handkerchief Francie had given him tonight. She had made it out of a piece of the fine white cambric left over from the petticoats of the French lady she sewed for, and she had expected him to be excited about the rolled hems. It was in his pocket and still clean. He laid the folded cloth over the gash in the trapper’s side. The man’s body felt light and lean to his fingers, with hard ropy muscle over the bones. Out of the tail of his eye he saw the man he had beaten roll over and get to his knees. The trapper stiffened. “Forget him,” Jim said. “He’s through for tonight.” The man crept clumsily away. Jim held the wad of cloth tight while the trapper closed his shirt and cinched his belt over it.
“That’ll hold you till you get where you’re going,” Jim said. “Good night.”
“Hold on.” The trapper caught his arm. “You ain’t going to go and leave me like this. What’s to stop them from coming back as soon as you’re gone?”
“You’ve got a flint in your rifle now.”
“And I’m too weak to lift it.” This was an exaggeration, Jim knew, though the man had lost a lot of blood. “If it was my own money I wouldn’t care so much, but it ain’t mine, it’s the General’s. General Ashley. And he can’t afford to lose it. So I’d be obliged—”
“Ashley,” Jim said.
The calmness that had been in him vanished and the old gnawing, raging hunger was back full force. In 1805 Jim had come joggling in his father’s train from Virginia to find a whole new universe spread before his seven-year-old eyes. There were blockhouses, and Indian attacks, and scalpings, and the polyglot swarming streets of a town that was more Spanish and French than American but where in three languages all men talked of something called the West. In 1806, uncomprehending but shaken none the less with a tremendous excitement, he had seen Lewis and Clark come down the river with all St. Louis on the levee to welcome them, and he had learned new words, the names of waters that rang mysterious and splendid in his head—the Missouri, the Yellowstone, the Columbia, the far Pacific.
Since then the words had multiplied and so had the men. Manuel Lisa’s brigades of the Missouri Fur Company brought the peltries down the river and Jim watched them come, saw them carouse like grizzly bears, shaking the waterfront, and then set out again, the hard free dirty men fighting the keelboats up the current, up and up and up to where the Shining Mountains stood holding the sky and there was an end to all eastward-flowing waters.
Lisa was dead now and a lot of others with him, but the men and the boats still went and the word was still West. Last year William Ashley, General of the Missouri Militia and Lieutenant Governor of the state, had advertised in the St. Louis papers for a hundred men to go clear to the headwaters of the Missouri and trap there for three years along the beaver streams.
Jim looked at the dim shape of the trapper and hated him.
“—a man waiting for it,” the trapper was saying. “It’s all my fault this happened, but it generally is. The Old Man’s threatened to sell my hide for a penny more than once, and he’d do it, too, if he could find a buyer. So I’d be much obliged if you’d go with me. Besides, I don’t like to be beholden to a stranger.” He held out his hand. “My name’s Richards, Dave Richards, but everybody calls me Rich. I’d be proud to know yours. I’d be proud to buy you a drink, as an earnest, you might say.”
His hand in Jim’s was small but very strong. A monkey paw, Jim thought, poke and pry and pull and never let anything alone. He smiled to himself. “All right,” he said. “I’ll come with you.”
“Much obliged,” said Richards. “Much obliged.”
They walked side by side in the mud and dark and the river mist. Richards’ moccasins padded softly beside Jim’s big stiff-soled boots. Richards talked, about Ashley and his partner Major Henry and beaver and Blackfeet and many rivers. Jim thought of high plains and open sky and wind that had no taint in it, no stink of crowded slave quarters, fever flats, and garbage, all rotting together in the heat.
“I hear,” said Jim, the malice leaping again to his tongue, “that Ashley’s a bad-fated man, and some of it because he’s a fool. He didn’t have to stick his head in the trap at the Rickaree towns. I hear he lost fifteen men and all his horses because he wouldn’t listen to good advice.”
“I won’t argue with you,” Richards grunted. “I was there, pinned down on a sand bar listening to the shot plunk into the dead horse I was cuddled up to. Finally managed to get back into the water and swim for it—the damned cowards on the keelboats wouldn’t come in for us. Sure the General was a fool. Sure Rose told him true about the Injuns and he didn’t listen. I reckon you’ve made your mistakes too.”
“I didn’t get fifteen men killed by them.”
“Did you have fifteen men?”
There was no answer for that. Jim walked, hungry and hating, and there were lights ahead.
“What’s he doing now, the General?” Jim asked. “He can’t even get past the Rickarees, how’s he going to get past the Blackfeet? I hear they’ve closed the river at the Yellowstone. I hear they pretty near wiped out Henry—”
“Don’t you do anything but listen?” asked Richards mildly. “And I’m getting a mite doubtful about that drink.”
Jim laughed.
“There’s a fleer in your voice I don’t just like, friend,” said Richards.
Jim laughed again.
“And I’ll tell you what the General’s going to do now,” Richards went on. “He’s got a whole new scheme. He ain’t going to depend on Indian trade any more. We’re going to get the furs ourselves. Henry’s men are out there now, working, and we’re going to join ’em. And the General’s going to leave the big river to them that want it and do his business overland.”
The lights were closer, splashing circles of yellow radiance on the ground. They walked on cobbles now and there were human sounds in the air, voices, clatterings, thumpings.
“Nobody’s ever done that,” Jim said.
“Does that say it can’t be done?”
“A lot of people say it can’t. A lot of people say Ashley’ll lay his bones on the prairie, and every man with him, too.” Richards said slowly, “A lot of people know more’n a jackass can haul downhill in a wagon, and I’ve noticed they’re generally the people who do the sitting and talking, not the doing. And I—”
He stopped short in mid-breath, in mid-stride. The circle of lamplight had taken them in and now they could see each other. Jim looked at Richards, waiting for him to speak. He was a wiry man, as Jim had thought, not very big, and perhaps ten years older than Jim, a hard ten years that had weathered and lined his skin and shrunk it tight over the sharp bones of his face. His eyes were pale, as bleached of color and as bright as the long heartless horizons they were used to looking at.
Abruptly Richards threw back his head and laughed. “I will be damned,” he said. “A gentleman! Where’d you learn to talk like that?”
“Listening to my father,” Jim said. “He’s a gentleman. My mother was a slave, and that makes me a blacksmith. Would you still be proud to buy me that drink?”
“No,” said Richards, “but a debt’s a debt irregardless.” He opened his belt
pouch.
“I thought that was the General’s money,” Jim said.
“I got that where it’s safer. This is my own, what’s left of it.”
“All right, white man,” Jim said softly, “how much do you think your life is worth?”
Richards looked up at him. “You mean I can’t settle it like that.”
“That’s right, you can’t settle it like that.”
“How then?”
Jim shrugged. “Maybe some day I’ll tell you.”
Richards stood, narrow eyed, silent, thinking. Finally he nodded like a man accepting something he can’t help.
“I told you I don’t like to be beholden to strangers. What name shall I call you on that day?”
“Beckwourth,” Jim said. “James Pierson Beckwourth.”
“I’ll remember.”
“Maybe,” Jim said cynically, and went away into the dark.
TWO
I am a blacksmith, Jim thought, and brought the hammer clanging down on the soft iron. I am not a mountain man. I am a blacksmith, a black smith, and I will never see the headwaters of the Missouri.
Clang, clang, clang on the yielding iron.
The shoe is shaped. Wild horses wear no shoes, the Indian ponies run barefoot. Only the enslaved wear iron shoes, and iron yokes around their necks. I am not called a slave now, but I might as well be.
Take the shoe with the tongs and thrust it down into the water. The steam boils up and the live cherry red turns a dead black.
Pull it out cold and heavy and nail it on, a weight for the free-striding hoof.
“Stand still, brother,” Jim said, and gave the restive sorrel a crack under the belly with the hammer. He stood. Jim drove the nails home.
“Out late again last night, Jim?”
Jim looked up. Sam Carson was standing watching him. He had probably been standing for some time and he had a look in his eye that Jim knew well after ten or eleven years of apprenticeship. There was nothing wrong with Sam Carson. He was a fair man by his standards, and his standards were of the best. Jim had always had plenty to eat and a decent place to sleep, and Carson had not habitually worked him over twelve hours in the day, sometimes less. He had been moderate with the harness strap in the early years and Jim’s adult back bore no scars such as marked many another. He has treated me well, Jim thought. I ought to be grateful that he’s treated me well. But I’m not. Why shouldn’t he treat me as well as he treats his horses?
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