Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  We still have Meriwether for supper each night, and he joins us in our dining room to discuss the state of the territory. He is a gifted man, and yet I worry about him. Why does he provoke Frederick Bates almost beyond reason? I have no trouble with Bates, apart from considering him a windbag and a vain man. But Meriwether turns Bates into a rabid dog.

  I visited Bates in his office a week or two after the great public contretemps, and told the secretary that I was acting as an intermediary and peacemaker, and I regarded him a friend.

  “Frederick, maybe it is time to reconcile with the governor,” I said, after we had gingerly visited a bit. “You might find him eager to accommodate you if you were to stop by and see him.”

  Bates would have none of it. He sprang to his feet, in a huff, and began shouting.

  “No! The governor has injured me and he must undo the injury or I shall succeed in fixing the stigma where it ought to rest. You come as my friend, but I cannot separate you from Governor Lewis. You have trodden the ups and downs of life with him and it appears to me that these proposals are made solely for his convenience.”

  I nodded, for there was nothing more to say, and retreated.

  Once out the door of that meticulously disciplined office, where not a pin is out of place and every paper is nested in its proper folder, I smiled. The secretary evokes that in me.

  But Bates’s conduct opened certain avenues of thought that perplexed me deeply. The man has trouble getting along with anyone, and routinely ruptures relations with men all over the territory. And yet, and yet … why is he doubly venomous toward Meriwether? And is there blame on both parts? Mr. Jefferson and Secretary of War Henry Dearborn have confidence in Bates, and that says something.

  If Bates has succumbed to an excess of feeling, so has Meriwether, and this new quality in my old friend puzzles me. If it had existed on the expedition, he had checked it so thoroughly that I never imagined him to be turbulent. But Meriwether is increasingly troubled here, just when he should be quiet of heart.

  I took Bates’s obdurate response back to the governor, who simply shook his head. His heat about Bates has left him, and he queried me about other things, not least the health of my expectant bride.

  “She’s aglow, Governor. But she’s wallowing about like a walrus and wishing it was over. I will tell you something. If it is a boy, we will name him Meriwether Lewis Clark.”

  The governor paused, his blue gaze gentle upon me, registering that. “I wish I could do the same for you,” he said. Then he brightened. “Why, what a thing to do! I hope the little rascal is bright as a button!”

  He beamed at me, and I saw a flash of the old Meriwether shining for a moment.

  But then he clouded again, and I saw something haunted in his face. “I’m just a musty old bachelor,” he said. “I’ll never have children, though it has been my deepest desire for as long as I can remember. I’m getting old and set in my ways, and there’s not a woman who would want such a man.”

  I meant to put a stop to such melancholia, but instead it seemed to drive him deeper into gloom.

  “Governor, every time I see you at a party, half the women have eyes for you, and the other half wish they weren’t married,” I said.

  He turned to me with such seriousness, with such pain in those blue eyes, that I supposed I had accidentally stepped on his most tender humor, and I pulled back at once.

  “Old friend,” I said, “the right woman will come along and then you’ll know the bliss of marriage, an estate that I find suitable to my temperament.”

  He brightened. “I have an eye for the ladies, and maybe I’ll go wooing,” he said, but with that odd brittleness in his voice again.

  I sensed he wouldn’t. I sensed that woman was an unscalable alp for Meriwether, but I am dumb about such matters, and didn’t even hazard a guess why.

  “Thank you anyway,” he said softly. “I never have had a child named for me. Ah, Will …” He sighed.

  I do not know why I worry so about the governor.

  The new year approaches. We have just received word that Mr. Madison probably will be our next president, though they were still counting rural precincts and nothing was official. He is an intelligent bantam with a bright new wife named Dolley, a Virginian like Thomas Jefferson, but not a quarter the man. I worry about whether he grasps how close we are to war with England and what the Canadians are regularly doing across our western frontier.

  I would like to travel to Washington to take the measure of the man, and also to brief him about our parlous defenses here. I could use a few tons of powder, a thousand muskets, and a few dozen artillery pieces, not to mention a shipment of uniforms, boots, gloves, hats, and mess kits, but that won’t happen unless James Madison’s secretary of war is a man of vision. The new president’s appointments will tell the tale.

  My ears have already picked up a scandalous rumor, spread by Bates of course, that Meriwether will be replaced shortly. I don’t doubt that the secretary of the territory is doing everything in his power to cause it to happen. He is a veteran letter-writer, and a facile one, and I cannot help but believe that the man whom Mr. Jefferson regarded virtually as a son will be the target of abundant criticism now that Meriwether’s patron is leaving office. I would not want to be in the governor’s shoes.

  His future is bleak. He was orphaned during the revolution, and now he may be orphaned again, in a different but equally grave manner. But he is a grown man, inured to hardship, and surely he will ride any storms. The new men in Washington will honor him as an explorer, but whether they will honor him as a governor remains to be seen. He scarcely knows any of them. They don’t know me, either, and I intend to go east next year to make sure that there is some acquaintance among us.

  This evening at supper with Julia, I quite unwittingly provoked in Meriwether the first petulance he has ever directed toward me. It came so suddenly I scarcely was girded for it, and came on the wings of a question so innocent of malice that I had to take stock a moment.

  I said, simply, “How are the journals coming?”

  He shook his head and swallowed some of the pureed potatoes before him.

  “I suppose you’re about finished,” I said.

  He flared up. “I will write at my leisure, and do a proper job, and correct the innumerable errors, and if that doesn’t suit you …” He left the rest unsaid.

  I sat, astonished. Not in all the three years we toiled side by side on the expedition had he raised his voice to me.

  I did not quite let go of the subject.

  “We have a lot invested in it. The artwork is done; the astronomical calculations are done; the maps are complete. I would like to see the first edition. Money has become a pressing matter with me.”

  Meriwether glowered. “You have no idea the work that goes into the task,” he said. “It requires education and intelligence and abundant time.”

  I still had no answer. I did not know whether one page or a thousand had been organized and transcribed for Mr. Conrad.

  “You could hire it done. I imagine five hundred dollars would pay for an editor.”

  He continued upon his biliousness, first dabbing his face with a napkin.

  “First of all, I don’t have five hundred. Secondly, I am the only one who can do it. I alone have been there, know what we saw, and have the schooling to set it down properly.”

  I grinned at him, and the governor reddened, and we mopped up our gravy in silence.

  25. LEWIS

  I have been sick abed this entire wassail season and am uncommonly slow to recover. It is the ague again. I have dosed myself with the extract of cinchona bark over and over, but it has little effect. The chills were not present this time, either. Usually, a few hours of chills and shakes precede my fevers, and I am puzzled by the lack this time.

  I purged myself with one of Doctor Rush’s Thunderclappers, and that seemed to avail me somewhat, but the remedy cramps my belly.

  I have second-floor rooms
on the Rue L’Eglise now, a parlor and chambers for myself and my manservant. This Monday morning, the second day of January, 1809, Pierre Chouteau stopped in to greet me and found me abed.

  “Ah, it is the maladie. Shall I summon Reuben, my friend?”

  “No, no, I know as much as he does,” I said. “We’re a medical family.”

  “Bien, if you need a physician, let me know, then, mon ami.”

  “I have not only the proper remedy but a knowledge of my mother’s simples, which I used effectively during the entire expedition. I have just taken some ginseng and goldenseal.”

  He pursed his lips a moment. “I know of an excellent physician, a royalist refugee from Paris, who practices the most advanced medicine anywhere—”

  “Doctor Saugrain,” I said. “I know him.”

  “Your Excellency, he is the man to consult.”

  “Yes. I’ve had dealings with him. I engaged him as an army surgeon to look after my men when we came back from the West. Some were sick, others wounded, and all half starved. He did an excellent job.”

  “Ah! Then you know of his prowess. A great treasure in St. Louis! I can send a boy and have him here in no time.”

  “No!” I said sharply.

  Chouteau shrugged, that Gallic signal of resignation. “Very well, mon ami. I keep account of your men; their health matters to me. We wish to employ them to go up the river with the new company. Ah, the experience they have! They would be invaluable, knowing every mile, every danger. And so I keep track. They are all well, save one.”

  “Who is that, Pierre?”

  “The private called John Shields.”

  “He’s sick? I hadn’t heard.”

  “Oui, yes, très malade, very sick. The good doctor Saugrain cares for him.”

  “I am tired. Thank you for your concern,” I said abruptly.

  I must have addressed him brusquely because he apologized and hastened out the door. I did not mean to be so abrupt with my friend, who was only trying to help. I must curb this uncivil habit; too often I have seen people retreat from me after an exchange. I am under pressure, and sometimes that rules me.

  The news of Shields’s sickness troubled me. He was one of those who accompanied me in search of the Shoshones that summer of 1805. Shields, MacNeal, and Drouillard and I had gone ahead of the corps to find the Shoshones and their horses.

  Poor Drouillard. He went to work for Lisa, was sent to find a deserter named Antoine Bissonnette and bring him back dead or alive, and he brought him back lifeless. The man’s relatives demanded that Drouillard be tried for murder. He was acquitted, but the stain is upon him and he has fled upriver. My best man, who saved the whole corps with his brilliant hunting, being tried for murder. It puts me in the bleakest humor.

  Shields in poor health, Shannon a cripple after having a leg amputated; who of the old corps will be next? I am most worried about Shields and think I might go to Antoine Saugrain and inquire privately about the matter when I am up again. I want to know the nature of his illness, just for my own information.

  So I lie here, in my rented upper rooms on the Rue L’Eglise, with a view overlooking the levee and the great gray river, mending while the business of the territory languishes. Will has come by regularly, and on him rather than Secretary Bates the good order of the territory depends.

  Will tells me the baby is coming soon; that Julia is strong and healthy but so burdened with child that she barely can navigate. She depends now on the slaves to bring her meals to her. Even before she was well along, she preferred to retire to her room for her supper, leaving the dining table to Will and me.

  My manservant John Pernia attends me daily even though I have little use for him during my illness, and this time I had a request for him apart from fetching my meals, which I purchase at the Old Tavern.

  “Bring me Doctor Saugrain,” I said.

  Pernia, a capable man, nodded and left, and I waited but a short while for the little Frenchman to make his appearance at my chambers.

  He bustled in, eyed me, and pulled up a walnut chair beside my bed. Even as he perched on that chair, his slender face rose barely above my head. He had changed none at all since I had engaged him to look after my corps. The black suit, ivory face, pince-nez, coal eyes, spade beard that jutted cockily outward, the flowing salt-and-pepper hair that was gathered at the nape of his neck with a purple ribbon, all comforted me somehow.

  “Ah, monsieur, Your Excellency, the governor,” he said with a lavish and Gallic sweep of the hand. “You are indisposed?”

  “No, I’m getting well, a bit of ague, but it is almost behind me now.”

  “Ah, the ague, an intermittent fever that torments its victims. We shall look at it.”

  “No, no, I just want to ask you about my old Corps of Discovery private, John Shields. He is under your care, I believe.”

  “I cannot talk about the ailments of others in my care, Your Excellency, so forgive me a thousand times—”

  “I think you can talk to the governor,” I said, “and to the commander who arranged with you for the medical care of my men.”

  He considered a moment, all the while reconnoitering me with his practiced eye. At last he sighed, frowned, and proceeded.

  “Monsieur le capitaine,” he said, thus revealing the military grounds by which he would breach a confidence, “it is so. The private Fields suffers from lues venerea in the third stage, afflicting his heart and arteries, and my treatments no longer avail. I would give him maybe a few months at the most.”

  It could not be! “But Doctor, so short a time!”

  He shrugged amply, his small arms spread Christ-like upon a phantom cross. “The disease takes its own form in each victim,” he said. “In some it advances slowly; in others it is like a rampage of evil and consumes the victim in a few years. In some it disappears and does not emerge until many years later, and then it is often fatal.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “A classic case, Your Excellency. Fast, yes, but as you yourself pointed out to me, your men were weakened by starvation and hardship and the gates of the body were wide open. It was not hard for a disease to enter the door and conquer.”

  “But the disease mimics several others! You might be mistaken!”

  “I might. There is always that.”

  “What are Shields’s symptoms?”

  “The disease assaults his heart and arteries. Already there have been hemorrhages. His pulse is erratic. He may fail from an aneurysm. His nerves fail him. He walks on feet that flop about, as if severed from his brain.”

  I felt a great weight lift from me. I laughed. “What other symptoms of the third stage do you observe?”

  “Why, my capitaine, unexplained intermittent fevers, the gummas, or thickenings, especially around the face, destruction of the throat, usually with craters in the middle of them, scars from lesions, copper-colored nodules, hoarseness, an aortic murmur, the femoral pistol-shot sound and double murmur known as Duroziez’s sign, aneurysm, strokes, advancing paraplegia …”

  “When do these appear?”

  “Usually it takes a few years. Who knows exactly?”

  I laughed again. His brows shot up.

  “It depends, my capitaine. The lues venerea attacks the weakest system in the victim. So each case is different. In the most tragic cases, it attacks the system of nerves and the brain, and in time induces paresis, or madness, or deterioration of the mind, of thought, of rationality, of feeling, and the worst of it is that the victim knows exactly why his mind is failing and why his feelings are tempestuous; the unspeakable disease is rendering him into a blundering idiot.

  “He can read the signs. He remains mostly rational until the last. There may be seizures. Loss of short- and long-term memory. Flawed judgment, loss of language ability and vocabulary, strange moods, irritability, anger, delusion, hallucination, apathy, weakness of muscles …

  “He can share his grief with no one. He hides it from the world. He closets himself.
He prays, in his saner moments, that no one will ever discover that his madness was caused by a moment of illicit pleasure and that he got from it the most shameful of all sicknesses. Ah, monsieur, that is the worst case.”

  I laughed, for none of that had anything to do with me.

  “Is there any cure?” I asked.

  “None. The salt of mercury, it is less and less sovereign as time goes by, and by the third stage, it does little good at all, and only briefly. It might delay, but it cannot conquer.”

  “My mother has simples for everything.”

  He lifted those little ivory hands again. “Then I shall gladly learn from her,” he said gallantly.

  “You’ll have the chance. I plan to bring her and my family here shortly.”

  “Now that I am here, do you wish an examination, Your Excellency?”

  “No, I’m recovering from the ague, and have dosed myself.”

  “Ah, I see. The bark, oui?”

  “Yes, and some calomel.”

  “Ah, I see. Shall I listen to your chest?”

  I had no wish to be examined, but as long as he was here, I supposed it might not be a bad idea.

  He was already opening his bag and extracting his black lacquered listening horn, so I lay back and waited, knowing I shouldn’t submit because I have no way to pay him in the immediate future.

  “Ah, now, Your Excellency, we shall see,” he said.

  26. LEWIS

  In this disquieting manner did the year eighteen and nine begin for me. The Lilliputian poked and probed my anatomy, including the bottoms of my feet, employing his listening horn to hear the rumble of my vitals, and his magnifying glass to examine assorted skin rashes. I was amused, though too feverish to enjoy it all.

  “Extract of cinchona bark five times daily,” I said. “Five drops of laudanum in water, as needed.”

  He harrumphed and smiled.

  A hard sun low in the heavens bit brightly into the room. At last he ceased, and carefully placed his horn and magnifier into his black bag. He turned to the window, his jutty beard poking at the sun, his small body arched to make it an inch taller than it usually was.