The True Account

by Howard Frank Mosher

  To his credit, Blue Moon stood his ground—expecting, he later told us, to be swooped away at any moment by the thousand invisible shrieking banshees loosed by the pipes. But as the knight-errant drew near the stricken chief, in a gesture of magnanimity that he later said would no doubt be talked of on the upper Missouri for centuries to come, he left off his dreadful medley and, lifting over his head the rush strap by which the bagpipe hung from his neck, presented the instrument to his adversary. “Compliments of Private True Teague Kinneson, sir,” he told the deafened chief. “Expeditionary, playwright, lexicographer, and piper through and through.” The field was silent for a moment. Then, at this unprecedented act of graciousness, wave upon wave of roaring applause went up from the spectators, equally honoring the great Blue Moon and my uncle.

  Later that day, the victorious piper instructed me to paint, in large red letters on a tanned buffalo hide, the message “Welcome to the Lewis and Clark Expedition from Private True Teague Kinneson, First to Reach the City of the Mandans, October 1804.” But just as we finished hanging this rather boastful banner between the upper branches of two soaring cottonwoods on a bluff overlooking the Missouri, where the explorers would be sure to see it as they approached the community, an emissary from the Indian village came running with a most unexpected report. Blue Moon’s war eagle, having apparently conceived a most violent romantic passion for the bagpipe, had swooped down upon his master and plucked the instrument out of his hands before the chief had any inkling of what was happening. The smitten bird of prey had carried it off to a treetop, and he refused to let anyone, even the astonished Blue Moon, come near, lest his new inamorata be disturbed on her nest.

  “Ah,” said my uncle with his hand on his heart, “so great, Ti, is the power of love.” And he liked the sound of this sentiment so much that, this time with a tear in his eyes, he said again, “So great is the power of love.”

  27

  November 15, 1804

  Charles and Helen Kinneson

  Kingdom Common, Vermont, United States of America

  Dear Father and Mother,

  I write to you from the Mandan Indian villages some 1,800 miles, as the river winds, above St. Louis, to report that uncle and I are both in excellent health and progressing rapidly toward the Pacific Ocean. After an interval with the Teton Sioux, we forged ahead of the official expedition (with whom uncle supposes he is engaged in a race) and arrived here at the Mandans’ well before them, in a manner I will describe to you in detail upon our return.

  The Mandan and Hidatsa Indians, among whom we intend to spend the winter before resuming our journey in the spring, have been very little corrupted by outside influence, and their original society has remained almost perfectly intact. They dwell in a large metropolis—considerably larger than St. Louis or Washington—consisting of five villages strung out along the upper Missouri, each made up of several hundred circular earth lodges. The headman of one of these towns, Black Cat, has kindly invited uncle and me to stay with him and his family. Captain Lewis’s expedition, when at last it arrived, built a fort upriver.

  I miss you both very much, and also Vermont; yet each day here brings something new, and uncle says I am progressing as an artist by leaps and bounds and that “Louisiana is my Oxford and he my Scholia Aristotle.” I hope to post this letter, of which I will keep a copy, in the spring when Corporal Warfington will return to St. Louis in the expedition’s big keelboat. Captain Lewis and Captain Clark, with the main party, will continue to the Rocky Mountains in their pirogues and canoes, and uncle and I by horse- and mule-back.

  Though the captains and their soldiers seem to be very fine men, uncle refuses to hold much commerce with them because of his belief that he, not Lewis, should have been selected to lead the official expedition. Nor, frankly, do they seem to know quite what to make of us. Perhaps we will become better acquainted over the winter. I will try to write again before we leave, and much look forward to that happy time in a year, two at most, when you will once again see, in our beautiful Green Mountains, your taller, browner, stronger, but ever-faithful and loving son,

  Ticonderoga

  28

  SINCE OUR ARRIVAL at the Mandans, I had painted many of the principal men of the tribe, including their two main chiefs, Big White and Black Cat. On the afternoon of Black Cat’s sitting, I noticed, loitering near the door of my lodge, a tall, well-set-up, finely dressed young man, whose name in Indian sounded something like Fra-hank-a-line. I had seen Fra-hank-a-line rouging his face and associating with the Mandan womenfolk, and therefore supposed him to be one of the “exquisites” of the tribe—the Indians’ designation for a species of dandy-men, who dwelt together in a lodge designed for their use alone, where they spent all day primping and preening and fixing their ground-length hair. But I had also noticed that, unlike his painted brethren, this gentleman carried a war lance and a bow four feet long and as white as ivory. Upon inquiring, I learned that in addition to being a warrior of renown, Fra-hank-a-line was also a famous Indian artist, whose stick figures painted on tepee covers, depicting the exploits of various chiefs and medicine men, were greatly in demand.

  Finishing with the Cat, I invited Fra-hank-a-line into my painting room and began to sketch out his features. He stood for his portrait, the better to show off his hair, which was adorned with tufts of sweetgrass and bright feathers set at a swank angle, and so long that it swept the ground when he walked. I was quite delighted to have an opportunity to paint this tinseled fellow. He carried a fly-brush fashioned from a buffalo’s tail, a fan of turkey feathers, and a medicine bag made of coyote skin, in which he kept all kinds of hoca-poca appurtenances—birds’ feet, snakes’ rattles, odd-shaped river stones, feathers, bear claws, and what have you—that the Indians believed protected them or gave them power.

  Fra-hank-a-line, who was perhaps ten years my elder, had upon his painted face an expression of superior complacency and general satisfaction, as well as a knowing, amused gleam in his eyes, which were as blue as my own. He watched me paint for a while, then suddenly called out, in excellent English, “Come, sir. Have the goodness to swing your easel about and show me your efforts, that I may judge of their merits for myself.”

  I nearly dropped my brush and palette. When I showed Fra-hank-a-line the portrait, he tilted his head, closed one eye, and said in the assured manner of a seasoned man of the art world, “You could benefit from a few months with our great Indian painters, Ticonderoga. While I don’t presume to detract from the energy of your work, it has no sense of telling a story or preserving history. Which, after all, is the raison d’être for all painting.”

  Again, I was speechless to hear an Indian, albeit a blue-eyed one, speak my native tongue so eloquently. Fra-hank-a-line proceeded to explain that he was the son of a Blackfoot chief’s daughter and a North West Company factor. He and his younger sister had been orphaned as children when, visiting Fort Mackenzie, his parents had contracted diphtheria. The fur company had sent them to school at Sault Ste. Marie, where it became evident that he was something of a savant, and his sister as well. The girl had returned to their ancestral home in the Rocky Mountains several years earlier. Fra-hank-a-line was now on his way to visit her. He had gotten as far as the Mandan village this fall, and planned to proceed up the Missouri and then north to her village in the Land of the Glaciers, deep in the Rocky Mountains, in the spring.

  As I painted, Franklin—for this was his name in English—continued to lecture me on my craft. I could scarcely wait to introduce him to my uncle, but just as I finished his portrait, a terrific din of whooping, yelping, and drum-beating broke out. I was certain that the Teton Sioux were attacking. As I seized my rifle, the clamor was augmented by such a bellowing and stamping that I supposed our enemies to be fimneling a whole herd of buffalo through the village, with the design of trampling us to death.

  Franklin, smiling at my panic, informed me that the annual dance to lure the bison had begun. He urged me to accompany him to
the center of the village, where the entire population of men was gathered, as well as many women and children, well wrapped in buffalo robes against the piercing cold. In front of the great medicine lodge a dozen or so men painted with buffalo tallow mixed with soot and wearing masks made from skinned buffalo heads with the horns still attached were dancing in a tight circle. Nearby, with a pair of buffalo horns on his head, my uncle was supervising this quadrille, exhorting his pupils in the most amusing capers, parodying the feeding, watering, voiding, and mating of the buffalo. From time to time the old schoolmaster joined in the figure himself, in a kind of prancing shuffle, to demonstrate the proper execution of the steps. I was so distracted by True’s ribald antics in the incarnation of a bison in rut that I could scarcely concentrate for laughing. Had there been any buffalo within fifty miles of us, they would certainly have heard this concert in their honor, though whether they would have ventured closer seemed doubtful. Franklin assured me, however, that the dance never failed to be effective. Explaining that perhaps this was because the ceremony always continued until a herd of these animals chanced by, whether this took two days, two weeks, two months, or until half the village died of starvation.

  The savant then called my attention to some men standing on distant bluffs and eminences of the snow-covered prairie, whose task was to “throw their robes”—that is, to wave their blankets in the air to signal the arrival of any animals summoned by the dance. As I sketched on into the icy afternoon, the dancers wearied. When a man became too fatigued to continue, he would bend far forward, a signal for his fellows to shoot him with blunt arrows, at which he fell as if mortally wounded, instantly to be replaced by a fresh dancer. Onlookers brandishing knives then dragged the fallen man out of the circle by his heels and pretended, with a series of menacing cuts in the air, to butcher him as they would a buffalo.

  This ritual continued uninterrupted for several days and nights, during which it was nearly impossible to sleep because of the din. By this time the village’s meat supply was entirely exhausted. On the fifth morning, while I was sequestered in Black Cat’s lodge at work on my painting of the dance, every woman in the village began to scream. I ran outside, brush in hand, to see them pointing at a parti-colored creature racing pell-mell on all fours toward the town from the west. When it stood up on its hind legs and looked around, as if scenting the air for danger, I saw that it was a man wearing horns and nothing else but the briefest clout about his loins. He was all striped in circular green, crimson, and saffron patterns, with dripping red fangs painted on his face. Franklin told me that the ladies were screaming that the Evil One, in the person of his provincial governor, Lord Phallus, was attacking the village, bent on perpetrating a rape upon them to people the region with more of his homed kind. Indeed, such seemed to be the case, for before him, as he rushed onward, Lord Phallus pushed a long blue stick with a flaming red ball at the end, resembling a grotesque, oversized buffalo member. Yet the women did not retreat from this monster. Instead, as he galloped into the village, they screeched with laughter and taunted and teased him with such unmistakable gesticulations that he soon attained a veritable frenzy of lust.

  Now forth from the medicine lodge, to a huge roar, came the old Mandan conjuror Hawk Talons, bearing a long pipe, which he passed twice or thrice in front of the creature wheeling the phallus, putting him into a trance. Upon which the women, still laughing, seized the mobile organ, broke it into a dozen pieces, and threw it onto the fire; and the would-be ravisher was jeered out of the village in ignominy. But as he reached the outskirts of town he suddenly turned and whipped off his buffalo horns, revealing to the throng not the Devil but the good, honest visage of my uncle himself. To thunderous applause, the triumphant thespian was borne back into the center of the village on the shoulders of four young warriors, all the time donning and doffing his buffalo horns to the cheering onlookers, and calling out to Franklin and me that he had “violated none of Scholia Aristotle’s unities, nay, not a one, in my little morality play.”

  But no sooner had Chief Black Cat conferred the title of Great Conjuror upon our Vermont author-actor-lexicographer, investing him with a trailing bonnet decorated not with eagle feathers but with those of crows, vultures, and magpies, than the chanting dancers and drummers, who had kept up their work throughout the charade, were drowned out by a great cry of joy from the villagers. Everyone was pointing off to the north, where, on a swell in the prairie a mile away, a spotter was waving his robe over his head to signify the arrival of the buffalo.

  The famine was over.

  29

  UNDER THE DIRECTION of Black Cat’s son, the Otter, twenty of the village’s best buffalo hunters went out to scout the location and size of the herd and to kill enough animals to relieve the villagers’ immediate distress. I was invited to join this group, on Bucephalus. As we thundered past the excited spotter, still flapping his robe, he pointed toward a low ridge. On it we could make out half a dozen shaggy bison—the vanguard, everyone hoped, of a large migrating herd.

  The best approach to these animals was through a narrow defile on a well-beaten trail used by northbound Mandan hunters for many years. But as we entered this gully, still about four hundred yards from the bison, they disappeared below the ridge top. The Otter reined in his pony and threw up his hand for us to stop. Herding buffalo were usually not so shy; moreover, we were coming at them from downwind. With a puzzled expression, he turned to Chief Big White’s son, Turkey Man.

  The Otter and Turkey Man seemed to be considering splitting our party or selecting another angle of approach. But after exchanging opinions, they merely shrugged and urged their ponies forward into the gully. I put my heels to Bucephalus, who was neck and neck with the Otter’s spotted pony, there being just sufficient room between the walls of the ravine to admit two horses running side by side. Suddenly, at least forty yelling Sioux, bedaubed from head to toe in red and black war paint, all screaming like demons, broke out of a little side draw and galloped down upon us with their painted warhorses under full whip. At the same time, the grazing buffalo reappeared on top of the ridge, only to stand up on their hind legs, cast off their robes, and transform themselves into more armed Sioux, who began tossing a deadly volley of arrows down upon us. Masquerading as bison drawn by the buffalo dance, our enemies had lured us into a death trap.

  Outnumbered two or three to one, we wheeled our horses and started back the way we’d come. From a gulch between us and the open prairie there burst forth yet another war party, cutting off escape. Arrows flew at us from all directions. I could hear them whizzing through the frigid air around my head and making a horrible ripping noise as they tore through the bodies of my companions and their horses, who were falling all around me.

  It was my Mandan friends who saved my skin, though at a dreadful price to themselves. Wherever a man fell, several Sioux leaped off their horses to compete for his scalp, thereby allowing Bucephalus and me, by a stroke of sheer good fortune, to escape from the melee. I had nearly reached the mouth of the ravine when out from behind a swell in the prairie came a coal-black, wolf-masked warrior, whom I recognized as the rider who had circled the ghost village where my uncle and I had forted up earlier in the fall. Mounted on a pure black horse and carrying a black shield with a white wolf skull painted on it, he brandished a black lance decorated with red cranes’ feathers. The black rider bore down on me as I galloped full tilt toward him. He drew back his lance arm. I raised my rifle and, at the exact moment that he released the lance, I fired. His weapon creased the left side of my head. But Black Wolf fell dead from his horse with a bullet through his heart.

  To this day I do not know why I reined in Bucephalus and looked over my shoulder. Behind me the other Sioux were either rounding up the horses of my Mandan friends or working at their grisly task with their scalping knives, encrimsoning the new snow with the blood of their victims. As I beheld this slaughter, the Partisan’s nephew, Blue Goose, ran up to the Otter, who was sprawled out with
his legs trapped under his fallen pony. He lifted his victim’s head by the hair and cut his throat, afterward taking his scalp in the same circular motion. Enraged, I leaped off Bucephalus, grasped the dead Black Wolf by his mask, ripped it off, and, pulling out my knife, served him the same. I was stunned by my own capacity for barbarism. I was more stunned still, upon looking down at the dead warrior’s features, to discover that he was not a man at all. To my horror, I had shot, killed, and scalped Little Warrior Woman.

  30

  THE BISON APPEARED, of their own accord, a few days later. But for the rest of the winter of 1804–5, I didn’t care whether I lived or died. I stayed in Black Cat’s lodge day and night, but from the middle of December through February I did not paint a single picture. I spoke rarely and ate next to nothing. When my uncle tried to counsel me, I turned my face to the earthen wall of the lodge. I slept or lay in a stupor for eighteen or twenty hours out of every twenty-four. Later it was reported to me that for several days after the battle with the Sioux I refused to allow Little Warrior’s body to be removed from my presence, hugging her close and speaking to her tenderly, until the natural processes made it necessary that she be taken away and placed on a burial scaffold on the edge of the village. After that I visited her frozen remains two or three times a day, standing in the fierce prairie wind until I nearly froze myself.