“No,” Skaggs said, “Mormons? Oh my good God. Our Polly has been persuaded by that lunacy?” He had lived in Illinois during the Mormon purges and murders in the early forties.
“She’s with one,” Granby snarled. “On their way to some place called Honeypot, or Birds and Bees…”
Ben turned on the old man still holding the shotgun. “What,” he asked sharply, “do you mean to say, sir?”
“The girl, Priscilla,” Danforth explained, “is apparently”—he paused, as if he had sniffed something foul—“betrothed to a young man who was raised a Mormon. Mr. Whipple. Their intended destination is a community not far from the Mormons called Humblebee, on the far side of the Missouri.”
“The last one on her list,” Ben said. “The very last.”
“Polly has gone off,” Duff said, his voice full of awe, “to settle outside the States. On the frontier.”
Skaggs turned to Ben. “It must be another, oh, five hundred miles, at least,” he said.
“More than six hundred,” said Duff excitedly.
“In the morning, when we may see,” Skaggs said as the darkness deepened, “we can consult Colonel Frémont’s atlas of the Indian country, and find our destination.” His ridiculous purchase of the maps in Buffalo was suddenly vindicated.
“And we shall set out at dawn,” Ben announced.
Danforth chose his next words carefully, and the consociates watched him closely as he did. “May I ask, Mr. Knowles, your precise…relation to Miss Lucking? Are you her…inamorato?”
Ben took a breath before he replied. “I devoutly hope that I may deserve to be once more.”
“Ah yes,” Danforth said, smiling and raking his hair back from his forehead with one hand, “our strong-minded Miss Lucking is no easy target for Cupid’s arrows…” And then, realizing his tone was a jot too knowing, quickly amended, “…if I may presume, sir.”
THE NEXT DAY in Terre Haute they learned that Missouri River steamboats running as far north as Hemme’s Landing, Missouri—this side of the river from where Humblebee must sit, according to Skaggs’s map—were still infrequent. Most of the packets went only as far as Westport, the big jumping-off spot for emigrants to Oregon. The Omega, the steamboat agent told them, bound for Fort Leavenworth, St. Joseph, and beyond, would leave St. Louis the following evening—and the next steamer going so far north wasn’t scheduled for another two weeks. “Damn it to goddamn hell,” Ben said, to which the startled agent replied, “Guess you ain’t Mormons after all, huh?”
And so, Skaggs’s protests notwithstanding—“I would prefer instant death from an exploding boiler to enduring the slow, bone-shaking torture of another two weeks in a coach rattling down some prairie ditch”—Ben plotted an entirely overland route, due west by stagecoach through Illinois to Springfield and the Mississippi River, then straight across the state of Missouri and finally—two weeks hence, give or take a day or two—a ferry across the Missouri River.
“You know, Knowles,” Skaggs told Ben as they walked into a nearby saloon for a lunch of hard-boiled eggs and cheese, “I retract what I said in Cincinnati. I believe you have been thoroughly denationalized.”
“Meaning?”
“You are no longer English. You shave no more than once a week. Last night you shouted ‘Goddammit’ to Slicky Jim, a man—a minister—whom you’d just met. Now you have cursed again, in public.”
“You do speak real familiar to strangers now, Ben,” Duff said.
“Yes,” Skaggs said, “that toadeater just now, our stagecoach agent, you greeted with a great smile as if he were a dear old friend. Before we reach the frontier I expect you to be stuffing your mouth with tobacco chaws and guzzling bourbon and shouting ‘Whoopee!’ Benjamin Motley Mactier Knowles, son of Sir Archibald Knowles, has become American.”
Ben remembered that he had already tasted bourbon—on his first night in New York, as he’d stared across the dining room of the Astor House at a beautiful, talkative, smiling, strong-willed young blond woman in a blindingly yellow silk dress.
“You flatter me, Skaggs.”
“What’s that?” the bartender asked Ben, who was reaching into a bowl of pickled cucumbers set out on the bar. “What’d you say?”
“I’d like a good bourbon whiskey, please.”
44
August 21, 1848
Kanesville, Iowa, and the Mormons’ Winter Quarters
AT HIGH NOON on a breezy, hot, cloudless August day, the Missouri River current nudged the flat-bottomed ferryboat five hundred feet south and west along a rope stretched between the two banks, out of Iowa and the United States and over to Indian country. Two canvas-covered wagons, two families, a handcart, eight oxen, and a mule shared the deck with another group of travelers—two young women from New York and a young man from Indiana—who were just off the Omega, their St. Louis steamer. As they approached the far side of the river, they watched two human figures who stood near the landing, two half-naked men, two Indians.
“Uh-huh,” the ferry tender said, sounding bored. “They’ll want a biscuit, or a coin, or what-have-you.”
The men’s black hair hung to their shoulders, and both wore only breechcloths. Neither was young. The older one had placed a large piece of bark on the dried mud in front of them, and held a large stick cut with notches in one hand and in his other a smaller stick. As soon as all the white people were off the boat, he started to hum a tune and rub the small stick across the notches to make a rhythmic rasp. His companion began to dance. The dancer looked to Polly as if he were pantomiming a run and playing a game of patty-cake. Unlike the gyrating Indians she had seen on the stage at Barnum’s, these were unarmed and serene and sad.
She placed a penny on the bark, and then she and the others started up a trail toward the town, which appeared much bigger than St. Joseph, in Missouri, the largest place they had seen since leaving St. Louis. It stretched a mile along the river behind a picket fence that ran even longer.
They came first to a large corral, empty of animals.
Not far away, a gristmill’s waterwheel spun freely in its creek, disengaged from the gears and stones inside.
Next to the mill was a log fortress thirty feet on each side, a building more than twice as large as any log cabin they had seen along any of the rivers. Its only windows were cut into the thick earthen roof.
Nearby were stores and workshops, and dozens of houses—no, hundreds of houses. Some were built of sod bricks, but most were made of logs, with roofs of straw and willow branches and turf. Each had a surname painted or carved on its door.
The three visitors walked slowly down a wide dirt main street, crossing two, three, four streets, and stopped; ten streets remained before them. It was a small city. Every building was new. And there was not a soul in sight. The only noises were whip-poor-wills and turkeys, and the flapping of waxed-cloth squares tacked in the window openings of the log houses.
ONLY TWO YEARS earlier, this had been an empty bluff where birds and deer were occasionally shot, a mere hundred out of the million acres hunted by the local Indians.
And then suddenly—weirdly to the Oto and the Omaha, who had become accustomed to the trickle of laughing, angry, frightened, childlike wanderers and their wagons passing through on their way, the whites believed, to some western ocean—one particular horde of white people and their cattle had crossed the river and stopped, here, on this good scrap of the Indians’ land, and stayed. They’d called themselves “Saints.” They declared the riverbank their “Winter Quarters,” which sounded reassuringly temporary to the natives, although the whites had remained for two winters before moving west. For two summers, two falls, two winters, and two springs, the Saints had jammed themselves into their queer square city, and outnumbered all of the Oto and Omaha by two to one.
But then, only a few months ago, the last of them disappeared into the sunset as suddenly as they had arrived, loading up and driving their thousand wagons toward the bleak country occupied by the Arapaho
and—may the whites’ god protect them—the Dakota, and over the mountains to the great desert. Why? They had simply abandoned all their buildings (and burial grounds), into which they had so recently invested so much furious sweat and pride. If they’d really known beforehand that they were going to leave two years after they arrived, why had they constructed permanent houses and stores? Not to mention their inexplicable wooden fence that stretched for two miles along the river. Was it all a monument to themselves or their god, or some utterly bewildering folly? And why had such busy, busy people failed to harvest and store enough wild grapes and plums and berries and roots and leaves in the summer and fall so that during the winter their flesh would not become scrawny and sick and black and dead? The Saints had promised the Indians that after they left they would never return, and said that any Omaha or Oto was free to take up residence in the square houses, to live in the city as if it were their own. And the offer apparently had been intended neither as a trap nor as a joke.
From the start, the Saints had explained their ways by saying they were “a peculiar people”—“a white tribe,” in the phrase of the interpreter. But to the Oto and Omaha, the Mormons were simply insane. Their “tribe,” they’d told the Indians, without smiles or embarrassment, had been created sixteen years before. (The Indians were sure there had been some mistake in the translation.) No wonder the other whites in the east had driven them west across the big rivers, to be rid of them for good.
Since last spring the Oto had been debating whether their descendants would believe, a century hence, long after all the log houses had rotted into the earth, the story of the ten thousand white Saints appearing from the east, building a city, and then almost immediately—for no good reason at all—disappearing into the west forever. Would the children of their children’s children consider it an exaggeration or hallucination or some ancient fable? But since such an event had actually happened here on this very spot before their own eyes, some of them said, well then, all the old tales of talking bears and shape-shifting women must be true as well.
“IT IS exactly as Absalom described,” Billy said again and again as they walked up and down the empty streets and among the abandoned buildings.
He had stayed in touch with the eldest of his brothers, thirteen-year-old Absalom. Billy had come here to see the Winter Quarters, where his family had lived since he left them. In particular he wanted to unearth the little treasure his brother had left for him. In Absalom’s last letter, he’d written that he had buried nine china marbles, each decorated differently, each representing one of his parents and his siblings, “right next to the BIG cottonwood near B. Smith shop.” He’d also written that he prayed every day that Billy would join them in the promised land, at the Great Salt Lake, and that when he finally did, he could “stop at the Winter Quarters at the Camp of Israel to dig up my marbles and hold the whole family in your pocket until you reach Zion and hold us in the flesh.”
After Billy’s apostasy in 1846, he had been part of the exodus out of Nauvoo—when the Whipples and the twelve thousand other Saints had gone west, he had headed east to Chicago and later to Glee. Although he knew from Absalom’s and his cousin Truman’s letters that the Winter Quarters were to be evacuated this summer, he was nonetheless astonished to find this new, perfect, instant, vacant Mormon town in the middle of nowhere.
It was the strangest scene the two women had ever seen. Polly was reminded of a big Italian book of etchings her father had shown her when she was eleven in a library in Washington, with its fabulous pictures of the ruins of Roman antiquity. Unlike those abandoned Roman buildings, though, these were still tidy, slightly overgrown but none of them crumbling or collapsing—not really ruins at all, not yet, and they were the very opposite of ancient.
They had passed two blacksmith’s shops, but neither was close to any cottonwood trees. Billy stopped and turned to Priscilla. “Dearest, may I ask…if it isn’t too much trouble for you, if you might…think about where Absalom’s little buried treasure could be.” She had told him, of course, about her occasional psychic sensations.
Priscilla smiled at the request and his bashfulness. “I am not a dowser, Billy.” She wiggled her fingers. “I have no divining rod. But yes, I shall try for you.” She took a deep breath and tilted her head back. Her face was expressionless. She closed her eyes, then opened them, staring straight up into the blue. Her curls waved in the breeze. Billy watched hopefully. For most of a minute she stared into the sky.
Polly was about to suggest they continue searching on foot, with their eyes, when suddenly Priscilla shivered and stroked her neck from one ear to her shoulder. She lowered her gaze and then shivered again as gooseflesh arose on her arms as well. Her breathing became rapid, as if she’d run from somewhere.
“I think your brother—your brother,” she said excitedly, nodding toward Polly, “and Mr. Knowles and, and another man are—I don’t know exactly how to put this into words. But…they are aiming at us, and they have lately occupied some place that we occupied as well.”
“Some place?” Polly was baffled. “In New York, some theater or store…?”
“No, not a city at all. It’s green and quiet. Could they…might they be back at Glee?”
Polly snorted.
“Perhaps not…Perhaps I have it mingled with the other picture that came to me.” Now Priscilla looked at Billy. “Your brother’s buried things are here. A ways back that way,” she said, pointing west, to the higher ground away from the river, “maybe up there.”
On a bluff, they found the cemetery. And near an elm tree, not a cottonwood, in a section of newer graves, they found those of Eliza Whipple, age four, and Absalom Whipple, age thirteen.
Billy sat down next to his brother’s patch, looking over toward his sister’s. “I had a letter from him in the spring, and none had passed at New Year’s,” he said, sounding as if he had been tricked. But he did not cry.
Later, walking back through the empty town toward the ferry, Billy spotted his father’s name, G. WHIPPLE, painted in white on the front door of a house—his family’s house. And three cabins down the street, Priscilla saw the house of a certain B. SMITH. Behind it they found a shed that had been used as a pottery shop, and just behind that was a cottonwood tree that looked a hundred feet tall. The nine marbles were there, wrapped in a piece of waxed cloth Absalom had signed with his full name.
THIS HAD NOT been the only unhappy surprise of the last twenty-four hours. The day before, they had disembarked at Hemme’s Landing, across the river from Humblebee, which they’d expected to be their new home. The Humblebeevians had arrived in 1846, and already planted a pear orchard and built houses and a small brewery. In addition to bartering beer and guns to the local Indians, they had been traveling among their neighbors to proselytize—to persuade the Oto and Missouria and Pawnee to reorganize themselves into cooperative “phalanxes,” without private ownership of land or “the means of production.” The Indians had been mystified, and had tried to explain that they were already organized in such a fashion.
Unfortunately for them, Humblebee had been colonizing Indian country, in violation of the U.S. Indian Intercourse Act. Furthermore, the colony was on the Nemaha Half-Breed Reservation, which the government and the Indians had agreed to carve out as a home for all the inconvenient products of…Indian intercourse throughout the Missouri Valley.
The grizzled little fellow in charge at Hemme’s Landing had informed Polly as soon as she’d stepped off the Omega that Humblebee was no more. A cadre of army dragoons from Fort Leavenworth had ridden up in June and evicted the Humblebeevians, escorting them across the river back into the States, where they belonged. Their houses and brewery had already been dismantled and scavenged by whites. “But we should be pleased to have you stay here in Missouri, ma’am,” the man had said cheerfully, glancing at Priscilla and Billy, “unless you all are Mormon. And if you are, you better get back on the boat and don’t get off until you reach Hart’s Bluff.”
/> “Where is Hart’s Bluff?” Polly had asked.
“Up in Iowa, ma’am, what the Indians used to call Council Bluff. Lately people’ve called it Miller’s Hollow.” He’d spat his dripping chaw on the dock. “It’s where all the Mormons have gathered up like a bunch of hungry rats in a corncrib.”
“Actually, sir,” Billy had said, “now they have renamed that town Kane.”
“So I heard,” the geezer had replied quickly with a self-satisfied sneer, pleased that the boy had fallen into his little trap, “named by those banished murdering Mormon heathens after the banished murderer Cain!”
And with that they had reboarded the steamer and proceeded upriver to the Mormons’ temporary frontier metropolis.
THEY CROSSED BACK from the empty Winter Quarters to the bustling Iowa side and found the cabin of Billy’s relative. Truman Codwise was at home, and delighted to see his cousin, prodigal or not—and said that God must have guided them here for a reunion, because in only a few days he was leaving for the Great Salt Lake—Zion. When he learned they had come because Billy wanted to be married in Truman’s presence, if he could bear to witness a gentile wedding, Truman chuckled and then cried, which made Billy start to bawl as well. Both young men continued to sniffle as they prepared a dinner of catfish and watercress and mulberries.
Lately there were two gentiles living in town, Truman said, a new storekeeper downtown and a miller out east on Mosquito Creek, and he had heard that one of them was a Christian minister of some kind who would probably marry the two of them for a dollar…unless, he said, they did want an eternal marriage, in the temple, in which case he could quickly arrange for Priscilla’s baptism and conversion…Billy declined, and Polly said they would remain only a short time after the wedding, and then make their way back east to find a place from among the several communities on Polly’s list that they had skipped along the way in Iowa and Wisconsin.
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