Sign-Talker

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  And so while traveling far all the last fall and winter and now into the spring, among the Crows and their allies, and trapping beaver, and teaching the mountain bands how to use the steel traps, Drouillard had also been seeing in his mind the great map. Colter was doing likewise as he ranged through other mountains farther to the west and south of the Yellow Stone, summoning those Indians to Lisa’s trading post. Though they were thousands of miles from that admirable man Clark, they were still doing what they could do for him.

  Drouillard thought often of Clark. He wondered whether he had freed York yet. Whether he had married. He wondered whether Charbonneau and Bird Woman had yet found a way to take their little boy down to St. Louis to be schooled by Clark, or by the Black Robes. Coming up through the Mandan and Hidatsa towns with Manuel Lisa’s boats late last summer, Drouillard had not been able to inquire about Charbonneau’s family because the Mandans and Arikaras were at war again. Their war had made it a dangerous journey. It had seemed no tribe wanted to let the boats pass. The Arikaras had fired warning shots as the convoy passed, probably fearing that they were going up to trade with the Mandans. Then the Mandans had refused to be civil because Lisa would not stop there and stay with them for the winter; they feared he was hastening up to trade with their rivals the Assiniboines. To show his disdain for Mandan anger, Manuel Lisa had got off his boat and walked alone through the Knife River towns. His show of bravery was so impressive that no one had bothered him. But no one had talked to him either. Drouillard, in charge of bringing the convoy past the towns, had gazed up at hundreds of grim Mandan warriors, former neighbors and companions in the Fort Mandan days, armed and scowling down, while half the boatmen rowed and the others stood with guns ready. Even one who had given Drouillard his wife in the ceremony stood scowling down.

  Later, farther up, they were threatened by great numbers of Assiniboines shouting from the bluffs, resentful because they were faithful to the British traders in Canada and saw these boats as a threat to their dominance in trade. The Assiniboines had backed down only after a fusillade of shots over their heads. Drouillard had held a pipe smoking ceremony and council with them, persuading them to stop menacing the convoy.

  Often he had thought, on that troubled voyage up the Missouri, how disappointed the captains would be with the utter failure of their peace councils. The ideas of Jefferson meant nothing up here.

  Lisa had established his first post on the Yellow Stone instead of the Missouri because of the lateness of the season. In autumn his men had built him a stockaded trading post at the mouth of the Bighorn River, the first whiteman building ever constructed on the Yellow Stone. From there, Colter and Drouillard and the mulatto man Edward Rose had trekked out into the surrounding country to invite the tribes to trade. Rose had taken goods and vanished, to live as a big man in a Crow town, confirming Lisa’s judgment of him.

  To the ambitious Lisa, this trading fort was just a start. Now he would leave Vasquez and some of his men here to trap beaver and develop the trade with the Crow nation. He would go back down to St. Louis and prepare a bigger expedition, to come up next year and build a second post, up on the three forks of the Missouri. He would take Drouillard back with him to help arouse investors for the three forks enterprise. It was Drouillard who best knew the richness of that beaver country: the best he had seen anywhere on the continent.

  And so Drouillard knew that this would be his last morning with Moves Behind. She knew it too, but didn’t resent his leaving. He had been a good lover, filling her loneliness, and through him she had attached her band to the whitemen’s store at the mouth of the Bighorn, where they could get guns and powder to hunt and feed their people better, but also defend themselves against such enemies as the Blackfeet who had killed both her husbands.

  She swam to Drouillard and her streaming head and face rose from the water in front of him and she breathed, gasping from cold, and laughed. They had never talked together with spoken words, not knowing each other’s words. She embraced him in the water, wrapped her legs around his waist, motioned with her head and eyes toward her lodge.

  It would be so hard to go from her, from this, from these mountains and clear streams, where he seemed to belong more than anywhere else, to go far back down to the whitemen’s world and help them do their whitemen things. He did not fool himself; he knew he was important to whitemen only as a tool of their plans to make wealth. They were using his knowledge and skills and money and translation and the trust these good, wild people put in him, but he was not one of the whitemen, he was their tool. Like all nonwhites, he was doing their work for them.

  The good thing in him was that he knew all that, and he was still free to choose. He might go back and help them again as they expected. Or he might instead leave them and go on east to Ohio and see if there was a way to help that Shawnee Prophet, who had from time to time, this last year, come in Drouillard’s dreams and sung the Old Songs.

  Or he might just fade like a spirit into these mountains and himself become one of the Old Singing Voices. And whitemen might say, “Whatever became of that Indian, Drouillard?”

  Chapter 28

  St. Louis

  August 1808

  Even before Manuel Lisa’s pirogues reached St. Louis, Drouillard regretted that he had left the mountains. They learned in St. Charles that Antoine Bissonnette, the deserter, had died from Drouillard’s bullet.

  Lisa’s response was, “Son of a bitch deserved it.”

  The bigger news they had learned at St. Charles was that Meriwether Lewis was now Governor Lewis, and that he had unleashed upon the territory a disturbing, bewildering uproar of changes, schemes, speculation, and Indian problems.

  The number of keelboats and barges moored off the St. Louis waterfront was almost beyond belief. The heat was oppressive. The Mississippi was low and everything stank of fishy mud and human waste. The bundles of beaver pelts and other furs and hides had to be carried across a wide mud flat up to Lisa’s warehouse on the waterfront street. Flies swarmed and droned everywhere.

  Much of the town was in siesta or stupefied in the shade, and only a few curious townspeople came wandering down to see who had arrived. There was no celebration, as when the captains had returned from the dead; this was just another boat coming down from somewhere upriver, a more commonplace occurrence these days.

  A letter from Lorimier was being held for Drouillard: his aunt Charlotte Penampieh, Lorimier’s consort for twenty-four years, had died in March at age fifty. She had been Lorimier’s great love and helpmeet through his hardest years, and Drouillard’s last living aunt. Suddenly overwhelmed with sadness and weariness, Drouillard took up his knapsack, excused himself from Lisa’s office and went up into the town to arrange for lodging with the Cerré family. He would take his map information to Clark perhaps tomorrow, then go as soon as possible down to Cape Girardeau to see his uncle.

  It was General Clark now, not Captain Clark. He was now Indian Agent for all the West, and he was married.

  Governor Lewis, spoiled by months of adulation as a national hero back East, was still a bachelor. He had replaced the corrupt Gen. Wilkinson as territorial governor and had torn into his new job with a frenzy. He had rescinded most of the trading licenses granted to non-Americans by Wilkinson, at once making for himself many powerful enemies.

  Monsieur Cerré gave Drouillard news but no opinions. It was plain that he was afraid his opinions would get back to someone in power, which could be harmful to him. The whitemen’s world was indeed complicated, even more than Drouillard had remembered, and the facts and their ramifications thrummed around his head like the bull-roarer toy he had played with as a child.

  Governor Lewis was speculating in land. He was also developing a cartel of investors to exploit the fur trade up the Missouri, and had brought his brother Reuben Lewis out from Virginia to participate in it. He was trying to persuade the War Department to send him enough troops and weapons to control the Missouri River Indians and drive the Brit
ish traders at once from the Upper Missouri. He had encouraged several tribes to war against the Greater Osage band because it refused to acknowledge his authority over Osage trade. In the St. Louis jail now were some Iowa warriors who were to be hanged for murder in another dispute, their fate hanging on the judgment of the governor, who seemed to be too busy with his own schemes to give them a thought. He had established a Masonic lodge in St. Louis and was its first Master. He had helped establish the Missouri Gazette, the first newspaper west of the Mississippi, for which he wrote long philosophical tracts and policy statements.

  Cerré was careful not to criticize or be too explicit, but it was apparent that as everyone feted and fawned over America’s most famous young hero, Lewis was making up for the year spent out West without whiskey.

  Drouillard left his weapons at Cerré’s house and walked to Clark’s house by the river. He was greeted at the door by York, wearing the fancy black and white clothes of a servant. For an instant York’s face lit up with joyous surprise at the sight of him. Then he looked ashamed. After all he had done in the great voyage, he was again a house slave. He murmured, “Mist’ George, I keep tryin’.” Drouillard squeezed his wrist and nodded, and they went in.

  Drouillard entered a room where a portly, fat-jowled man in elegant clothes stood by a paper-strewn table. The big man came toward him with a hand extended, and when Drouillard heard his deep voice and saw his carefully combed thatch of red hair, he realized that this fat man was William Clark. Clark saw his astonishment, saw him looking at his bulging waistcoat, and laughed, patting himself on the belly. “Hello, George, and welcome back to civilization. You, um, you’re looking at a man with a good cook.”

  “Eh heh. I was going to say maybe you got a better hunter now.”

  “There’s no such thing. Well, now! We’ve got lots to catch up on. How went your venture with Mr. Lisa? I hear you set up on the Yellow Stone? Shall we sit in the garden, where there’s air and shade? By the way, old Big White will be here shortly. Jessaume’s bringing him over.…”

  “I brought sketches for your map, Cap’n—I mean, Gen’l. From where I went and where Colter went. Colter’s with us up there, did you know. And Potts and Weiser are up at Lisa’s post …”

  The house was elegant. Clark’s wife Julia was fair, pretty, pregnant, and flushed and mottled from the sultry St. Louis weather. Clark was proud of his bride and joked about poor Lewis, who, despite his fame and glory, hadn’t been able to find a wife and was envious of the marital bliss in this house. “He lives with the Chouteaus but dines with us,” Clark said. “But I can’t seem to get him fattened up.”

  “If he’d eat ’stead o’ drink,” York muttered nearby. A flicker of anger went across Clark’s face but he pretended he hadn’t heard.

  Drouillard learned that the Mandan chief Big White was still lolling miserably in St. Louis with his homesick family. He had been east to see his Great Father Jefferson long ago, but couldn’t get home. A year ago he had been taken up the Missouri by an armed escort commanded by Sergeant Nat Pryor, promoted to Ensign Pryor, but the force had been attacked and driven back by the Arikaras. Three men of the escort had been killed and seven wounded—among them young George Shannon, whose wounded leg had to be amputated. Now Governor Lewis was planning a stronger expedition of many soldiers, hired gunmen, and fur entrepreneurs, a powerful enough force that if the Arikaras tried to interfere again, they would be wiped from the face of the earth. Such an expedition would get Big White home, and would also intimidate the Sioux, and run the British traders off into Canada. Clark hoped that Drouillard and Manuel Lisa might join that expedition next spring, as they were obviously planning to go back up anyway. It was apparent that if the Mandans didn’t get their beloved chief back, the United States would lose favor even with the Mandans, if it hadn’t already.

  Drouillard told Clark of the animosity of all the tribes on the trip up. On the way back there had been less hostility; Drouillard had visited Charbonneau and the Bird Woman. They had said their little boy would be old enough next year to be brought down for schooling. Clark was delighted. He in turn had news for Drouillard.

  The one thing President Jefferson wanted most from Lewis was preparation of the expedition’s journals for publication. Lewis had scarcely begun such work, and was utterly neglecting it now, but had tried to prevent Sergeant Gass and Private Frazier from publishing theirs. In fact, Gass’s account of the expedition was published last year by a Pittsburgh bookseller and had been popular enough to require a second edition. “Between us,” Clark said to Drouillard, “I think Mr. Jefferson thwarted his own ends. He should have set ’im down to finish those books before he put him in public office.” By now Drouillard had seen and heard enough in this house and Cerré’s to sense that there was much worry about Lewis.

  It was Clark who brought up the subject of the Shawnee Prophet. He spoke of Indians from the Mississippi country here, and even farther north and west, who kept going to Ohio to hear the preachings of the Prophet and came back wrapped in an air of pride and mystery. Clark told of an angry rivalry between the Shawnee principal chief, Black Hoof, and the Prophet. Drouillard remembered Black Hoof from childhood: one of the great warriors he had seen at Lorimier’s post in Ohio in the war years, one who had signed the big treaty of the defeated Indians. With seemingly casual questions, Drouillard tried to eke out more information, and Clark kept telling him more because the teaching of the Prophet seemed to be a growing worry that might affect his responsibilities clear out here, as Indians from his jurisdiction grew more involved in it. A brother of the Prophet had risen into visibility in the past year. He had spoken at a council of whitemen who were worried about the Prophet’s activities, and though he had assured them that his brother’s intentions were peaceful, he had scolded and mocked the whitemen. His name was Tecumseh, and Clark’s friend Harrison, the governor of the Indiana Territory, suspected that he was a renegade, what Clark called “a shit-stirrer.” Clark said that Harrison had spies in the Prophet’s town. And then he came out with what he must have been leading up to: if Drouillard spent any time among Lorimier’s Shawnees this winter, perhaps he might keep his eyes and ears open and, ahem, let him know if any Missouri Shawnees were under the influence of those brothers?

  Drouillard sat very still for a while, concealing his anger.

  Yes, they still thought he was their tool. These whitemen. Everybody was supposed to work for the whitemen and do what they wanted. Clark wanted Drouillard to spy on his own people, and presumed he would because he had always worked so well for the American whitemen.

  Drouillard knew how to be an Indian: Tell the whiteman what he wants to hear. But he couldn’t tell Clark he would go and spy on the Shawnees for him, because it wouldn’t be the truth. He wouldn’t do that. After thinking a while, he said: “I won’t be at Lorimier’s this winter. Sorry. I want to go visit my brothers and sisters up by Detroit. Might be my last chance. Been wanting to do that a long time.”

  What he didn’t tell Clark was that on the way there he would go find that Shawnee Prophet and his brother called Tecumseh, and see if he could do anything to help them.

  Damned if he was going to work for whitemen anymore. He had done the map thing for Clark, and that was the last thing he had promised.

  On the way out he told York, “Get free of him. I’m tired of seeing you a damn slave.” His tone of voice and what was in his eyes must have shocked York. The slave didn’t even say goodbye.

  Drouillard saw Big White and Jessaume and their families coming toward Clark’s house, but they didn’t see him and he was in no mood for them. Big White was outlandish in a tall, plumed hat and frock coat, waddling along with a walking cane, and his wife was decked out like a St. Louis trollop. Drouillard slipped around a corner and kept walking, thinking, planning. He felt as if he were already on his way, leaving all whitemen and their purposes behind him forever.

  He was “worth” maybe six or seven thousand dollars now. Clark had sa
id that according to Harrison’s spies there were so many Indian pilgrims at the Prophet’s town, they were always hungry. Six or seven thousand dollars could buy much food. Or if they needed something else: blankets, clothing, tools, salt.

  Or guns. Drouillard was so angry with whitemen now …

  Three men stood in his path, in sweaty shirts. Two held pistols.

  “Vous êtes George Drouillard, n’est-ce pas?”

  “C’est moi.” He felt he shouldn’t have left his guns at Cerré’s.

  “M’sieu, I am Alexandre Bellisaume. I have an order to arrest you for the murder of one Antoine Bissonnette.”

  No window. Air hot, sour with old urine, rank with excrement, old vomit. His sweat trickled and lice tickled. He who had lived free on the mountainsides and plateaus, trapping in green meadows and swimming in transparent waters, was moldering in a jail.

  He was used to discomfort. In the mountains and on the plains, on the sea-pounded rock coast and in the dripping forest, he had endured every extreme of cold and heat and wet and fatigue, fleas, mosquitoes, ticks and deerflies, prickly pear thorns, hunger, thirst, dust storms in his eyes.

  But always then he had been free to move and act. And always he had been respected, his honor unquestioned.

  Here he sat immobile in filth and gloom, said to be a malicious coward who had shot a man in the back without provocation.

  Somewhere in another cell were the three Iowas who had been sentenced to hang, also for murder. Governor Lewis had said they should be hanged, but within these thick walls they waited. Sometimes he faintly heard the prisoners singing of their misery or fear. Or they sang prayers, or death songs. Their voices were high in the nose, deep in the throat, with sobbing breaks. Maybe they were singing to be heard by other Iowas who were in the town trying to plead with the governor for them. Sometimes they sounded like the Ancient Voices that sang under the wind and rain at the top of the great mound on the other side of the river.