Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Chouteau listened, saying nothing.

  “Captain Lewis and I found that the tribes were much more tractable when goods were available, and we expended much of what we brought with us as gifts to pave our way. And that is where you come in. We want you to join the party with a trading expedition of your own; your traders and boatmen would enhance the strength of the party. The government will provide your entire party with rifles, powder, and shot, and we’ll include four hundred dollars of presents. You and your fur trading party can continue upriver, trading for pelts at your leisure, once we return the Mandans to their people.”

  “Ah, it is formidable,” he said. “Formidable.”

  “We had some trouble with the Sioux, who are a danger, and you might have some difficulty getting past the Arikaras because of the presence of Big White on your keelboats. But we think some gifts will smooth that over. With your group of traders, and our soldiers, you will be as large and as well armed as our Corps of Discovery. What do you say?”

  “My general, we do not hesitate for one moment. I myself will go.”

  “Good. We’re going to open up that river and license the traders and make the fur business profitable and safe. And you’ll be in a good position to profit from it.”

  He nodded, happily. How could he refuse? I didn’t doubt he would corral a small fortune from the expedition, and he would enjoy the safety of our troops as well.

  I turned to other matters. “Mr. Chouteau, this territory is torn by rivalries. I am a plain man and will ask a plain question and hope for a plain answer. Are the Creoles happy with us, indifferent, unhappy, hostile?”

  Chouteau did not hesitate, and as far as I could tell, he did not hedge.

  “General, in the bosom of every Frenchman is the hope that the tricolor of France will fly here. But if the choice is between Spain and the new American republic, there is no choice at all. We are Americans. The Spanish, you see, have a peculiar attitude toward business. They seek to make business as difficult as possible, and at the same time, extract every possible centime for the crown. For as long as they held New Orleans, we could barely win a profit out of furs. We like your liberty. We like your equality.” He shrugged, an expressive, Gallic shrug that spoke more than words ever could.

  I knew then I need not worry about the French of St. Louis, and could turn to more urgent matters, including the scheming of the British, who wanted to pluck the territory from us without wasting a shot, by using the tribes as their proxies.

  14. LEWIS

  My struggles with the War Department exhausted me. They want receipts for everything, and I cannot provide them. I wrote numerous drafts on the treasury, every one of them to purchase essentials, wasting not a penny, and yet I was treated as if it had been my intent to skin the government. En route, I traded my officer’s coat to some Indians for a canoe and wish to be reimbursed; how shall I receipt that?

  I left Washington as soon as I could to escape the steamy heat, intending to improve my health at Locust Hill. The air of Albemarle County is better. It is November now but the ague still afflicts me, and just when I feel I am past it I am besieged once again with the usual chills, shakes, fever, and sweats. As soon as I arrived here, much to my delight, my mother began administering the cinchona bark extract that abates the intermittent fever, and supplemented with those simples for which she is so renowned in Albemarle County. I have in addition the services of my brother Reuben, who in my absence had completed his medical training. They have steadily nursed me back to some sort of health, though I remain oddly indisposed and afflicted with a melancholy.

  She doses me every two hours with a tea decocted from the bark of yellow birch, sweet flag, thoroughwort, and tansy, boiled and then mixed with sweet wine. Her other remedy is distilled from burdock, narrow dock, yarrow, knotgrass, cleavers, bloodroot, Jacob’s ladder, and wormwood, boiled in rainwater. Of this I am to take all that my stomach will bear.

  When I was able, I rode to Monticello and discussed Upper Louisiana with Mr. Jefferson. I promised him a paper detailing my observations about the economic potential of the territory and the nature of the tribes inhabiting it. I work on it desultorily, every word wrenched from my brain.

  Mr. Bates, the territorial secretary serving as governor until I should arrive in St. Louis, writes flattering and alarming letters, urging me to hasten west to my post because, he explains, the turbulent territory needs a governor’s authority which he cannot provide. I will go when I can; but now I must enhance my health and vigor, and where better than in the hands of my two physicians?

  Mr. Conrad petitions me for the edited journal pages, so he can begin work. I have not yet started, and do not quite know why I keep putting off the task. Mr. Jefferson presses me on every occasion, reminding me how important the publication of the journals is to several branches of science. And to the nation, and I might add, to his administration. He regards the expedition as the crown jewel of his two terms, but it will require the publication of our journals to persuade his adversaries, the Federalists, that there was much good gotten from the trip.

  I have looked over Captain Clark’s entries, and mine, and they bring back a host of memories, struggles and triumphs, matters that only he and I know about, things barely hinted at in the pages. I dread to touch any of it. The whole task of editing those journals is so formidable it seems worse than the trip itself. Shall I correct our field notes or leave them intact? How much should I alter the original? What should be cut out? What is not for the public eye?

  All these matters swim in my head. I have tried twenty times to begin; to take the first of the bound journals and simply begin copying in an orderly manner, dates, places, times, observations, men, equipment, miles traveled, solar and weather data, plants discovered, sickness, equipment failures. All of it. I spread some foolscap before me, dip the nib of my pen into the inkpot, and then do nothing. I cannot explain it. I wish this task might be lifted from me, but the thought of that afflicts me because then I could not control what is used, what is not, and decide whether some things might best be rewritten.

  At first I supposed I was troubled simply by the fierce desire to make the journals perfect; that I was simply paralyzed by the cry of soul that insists that my task must be to make the flawed flawless, the insipid fascinating, the obscure clear, the language precise and accurate. Now, after numerous attempts to start the great work, I simply don’t know, and with each effort, I find myself less willing to proceed. I am disappointing Mr. Jefferson, Will Clark, the publishers, and everyone at the American Philosophical Society.

  And the more I sense their disappointment, as time drags by, the worse I suffer. Captain Clark expects half the profit. The society expects a treasury of new information. The government expects maps and an understanding of the tribes and a substantiated claim upon unexplored lands.

  And here I am, with more burdens pressing me than I can endure, sinking deeper into melancholia each day. I do not know what to do. Time has slowed to a halt. I am the governor of a territory several hundred miles distant, but here I languish.

  Maybe in St. Louis I will do better.

  My mother keeps a shrewd eye on me, but stays apart because I am not in the mood for company. She is the model of all womanhood, and I despair of finding a mate who can even approach her graces and learning and ability. I am constantly invited to balls and banquets all over Virginia, and I accept some, though my heart is not in the social life. I have been toasted and honored too many times, if such a thing is possible. I attend these affairs, so that the world might see the explorer in the flesh, and drink their toasts, and return to Locust Hill all the more melancholic.

  At Captain Clark’s behest, I traveled to Fincastle, near Roanoke, to visit Julia Hancock and to meet some of the young women he thought I might find attractive. I have met more women in the past months than I can count, but they all fall short one way or another. I am fussy. If an eligible young woman is not serious, and cannot address me on the terms of
my own thinking, then I find little of interest in her, and she drifts into the arms of someone else.

  At Fincastle, while a guest of Colonel Hancock, I finally discovered a young woman who filled the bill, so far as I could see. Certainly Letitia Breckenridge is a comely damsel, of exceptional beauty and quickness. I met her and her sister Elizabeth by design, for Will had paved the way. They are daughters of General James Breckenridge, and thus well suited to my social requirements.

  I well remember when we met; the nankeen dress, the subdued intelligent gaze from hazel eyes, the seriousness she displayed, unlike her more boisterous sister. She did not then know that I would court her; the whole had been artfully arranged by Colonel Hancock so as to appear to be a Sabbath stroll, taking the air while the weather held.

  By then they were calling me “your excellency,” or “governor,” and all that, so I had the advantage, and made haste to pace beside her on a stroll along a shady lane that led into the hazy hills, and thus engaged, made inquiry into her nature. She did not measure up in terms of education, but no woman does, and I assumed that she would be too busy rearing a family to pursue scholarship further. She had a sublime form, which the shifting gold muslin, a lovely autumnal color that complemented her bold beauty, sometimes revealed to me as we strolled.

  “Your Excellency, when you are quit of St. Louis, what will you do?” she asked.

  “I am thinking of high office,” I replied. “Often I ask myself the same thing. Just now, I wrestle with a paper that distills everything I have learned of the Western country for the edification of Mr. Jefferson and future presidents. But that’s just the beginning, you know. Here I am, at thirty-five, and known from top to bottom. I am thinking that the Democratic-Republicans may call upon me, and so I regard my tenure in office as a sampler, Miss Letitia.”

  “Call upon you?”

  “I am a simple man, much given to philosophy, and my predilection is to return and look after my mother, and care for Locust Hill. But if duty calls, I will be ready.”

  “I see,” she said.

  I inquired of course into her political views, and found them appropriately republican, at least as someone in her female estate might grasp the term. I discerned that she was exploring me, as well, inquiring into my plans, how long I should reside in distant St. Louis, and whether I had slaves. I confessed that I had none as personal property, but I oversaw the estate of my mother, who possessed many, and was therefore familiar with the handling of them.

  I found myself coming to life at last, after so long a hibernation, and when we returned to the Hancock home I raised a toast to her and the happy future, and then several more. She flushed, and this time her gaze was averted. I could not tell how I was affecting her, but knew that I would pursue her.

  I had seen a President’s House devoid of its mistress, and while the vivacious Dolley Madison, wife of dapper James Madison, served admirably for Mr. Jefferson, the president’s society wanted that domestic touch. I eyed the lady beside me with that in mind, and I fancied that Letitia understood the matter.

  Her father collected her in time to drive his carriage home after an afternoon’s repast, and I raised a last toast to her, her sister, and her illustrious father before settling them in their carriage. I spent the next days in a reverie. Here was a woman I might propose to; in most respects suitable, and one to stir my blood. I had been smitten many times since returning from the West, but in the end, all of those damsels were unsuitable. Letitia was suitable. I proposed to call on her in a day or two.

  But Fate intervened. When I did ride to the Breckenridge estate, some miles distant, I discovered that Miss Letitia had gone to Richmond with her father and would be away for some while. I grieved, and then put it out of mind. I never should have confided my ambition to her. But I am too serious a man to waste feeling on a disappointment of the heart. I considered Elizabeth, but set it aside. She was not adequately serious.

  I languished unwell in Ivy this autumn, uncertain what was eroding my health. My discerning mother eyed me sharply from time to time, and once even inquired if I was well. I assured her I was, and yet I was much fatigued and in a distemper. I resolved to see my friend and companion of the trail General Clark married in Fincastle in January, and then be on my way west, though I would be traveling in winter. The general would honeymoon and then join me in St. Louis, where by arrangement I would board with them.

  I completed my lengthy treatise on the West, which I presumed would form the foundation of Indian and fur-trade policy for the next twenty years, and fell into one of my moods again. I do not know why I was able to write ten thousand words with fierce discipline, yet am stymied every time I open my journals. Is it because the journals are mostly Will’s? Or is it because the whole world awaits their publication?

  It was then, nearing the end of November, that Mrs. Marks, the legendary healer of Albemarle County, called me into her drawing room, and into the aura of the tile-clad stove.

  “You are still unwell,” she said. “Indisposed. Fevers.”

  “It is only the ague.”

  “Yes, the ague,” she said. “But the weather has turned.”

  “I am in perfect health; just a little of the intermittent fever now and then.”

  “You wander the plantation, doing nothing, writing nothing. Are you troubled, Meriwether?”

  “Not a bit!”

  “Thirty-five and a bachelor.”

  Her candor shocked me. “I simply am unlucky,” I replied testily. I did not want her sympathy. Letitia Breckenridge had fled, for whatever reason, and I hadn’t met another I cared about more than a day or two.

  “When are you going to St. Louis?” she asked.

  “When I am ready!”

  “You were appointed in March; now the year has passed.”

  “I have things to do here.”

  She asked me to draw close, and ran her experienced hand over my face and neck, discovered some gummy thickening of the flesh on my forehead, and along the jawline, lumps so subtle I had not been aware of them myself until her fingers found them.

  “Let me see your arms and hands, Meriwether.”

  I undid my sleeves, and pushed them up. She examined my arms, her gaze pausing at the arciform red-stained scars there.

  “Your hands?”

  I extended them to her, filled with a nameless and terrible dread, a pit of horror whose jaws were opening wider and wider as the minutes fled by.

  She studied the palms, turned them over and examined the backs. I saw nothing amiss with them. But she traced her finger over a discolored area.

  “There, you see? I am fit as a fiddle.”

  “Meriwether,” she said, “I am here only to help, not judge a son whose life has taken him so far from the comforts of civilization and religion. It is necessary to begin a course of mercury immediately, and I have some simples, my wandering Meriwether, that will relieve you. The venereal is far advanced.”

  15. CLARK

  Tomorrow, January 8, 1808, will be my wedding day. I await that holy event with scarce-concealed anticipation. Tomorrow, before the Episcopalian parson from Roanoke, the Reverend Mr. Smith, my Julia and I will recite the vows. The colonel has turned his spacious home into a virtual hostelry, so many are the guests.

  I arrived here in Fincastle, Virginia, from St. Louis in ample time for the Yuletide, and spent a most joyous Christmas at the hearth of my in-laws, who have treated me with grace and affection. There is merriment in their eyes. They permit me a while alone each day with Julia, and make much reference to the mistletoe once again hanging from the cut-glass chandelier in the parlor.

  She has met me each day, her face flushed and bright, her lips soft and welcoming. She has been full of questions about St. Louis, and wild Indians, and the ruffians of the border, and the army. I assure her things will be terrible; we will live in a dirt-floor log cabin, she will slave at the hearth and garden and spinning wheel, I will shoot marauding redskins through the loopholes of ou
r fortress house every hour or so, and we will lack beds, tables, chairs, windows, and privacy, and sleep on bearskin robes.

  She laughs, but uneasily. I tell her that I am a general of the militia, and command an entire army of bedbugs. She thinks that is very merry, and I see panic in her eyes and kiss it away, enjoying the moment.

  Guests are arriving at every hour; my brothers and sister and assorted relatives are staying with friends in the area. Colonel Hancock has put me in one of the bedrooms, and York out with the darkies, and that offends him. I will let him taste the whip if he remains in such a mood for long.

  Ah, tomorrow! For too long have I dreamed of this. I will sweep my bride away to a bower that is prepared for us, and there we shall know each other in tenderness and joy. It is for this heaven that I have returned from St. Louis; it was for this heaven that I sustained my courage and resolution on that long journey into the unknown West. A wedding is a little like a voyage of exploration. We do not know what land we are piercing, or what we may find there; but I do not doubt it will be full of wonders and sunshine.

  Soon after my arrival I met with Meriwether about the condition of the territory he governs, and found him in a peculiar mood, taut and irritable but papering it over with vast bonhomie. Something is troubling him.

  He ventured here from Ivy a few days after I had arrived, knowing how much I wished to be with Julia. I greeted him, noted that he seemed unsettled as we exchanged news, and then we closeted ourselves in the front room to discuss affairs of state.

  “Secretary Bates begs for you,” I said. “You are certainly needed.”

  “What sort of man is he?”

  “An able one, I think, but a handwringer.”

  Meriwether laughed, a brittle, strange cackle that was entirely new to me. “Not used to command, I take it.”

  “No, and brimming with anxieties.”

  “That is not a kind assessment.”

  I sighed. “I am a plainspoken man,” I replied, and let it stand. Frederick Bates had rubbed me wrong, and I could not fathom why Thomas Jefferson had entrusted him with so weighty a position.