Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Someone will prepare the journals after I am gone and catalogue the plants after I am gone, and write a history of Louisiana after I am gone, and they will find my hand in it all, and none of it done on my account, but for Mr. Jefferson and the republic.

  I never want to leave that sacred place where the world is inexpressibly beautiful, but the rain drives me off, or a passing fisherman breaks the spell and I am among people again. When I leave it is like descending a long path from a tabernacle to the mundane world, and I am no longer with the eagles, and at the end of the path is only Secretary Bates, and Dr. Saugrain.

  34. CLARK

  John Shields is dying. George Shannon sent word, and asked if I might go see the doughty private in the Corps of Discovery. I sent word that I would.

  We in the corps look after each other, or at least those of us in St. Louis. We were bonded into a rare brotherhood by three years of trial and fire; now we have settled into our vocations. Some have married. A few, like Sergeant Gass, have gone east. Most have foolishly traded their warrants for three hundred twenty acres of public land, awarded by a grateful Congress, for a few dollars. Frederick Bates bought some of the warrants for very little. Several men have entered the fur trade and gone upriver. John Colter is such a one, George Drouillard is another, Shannon another, and it cost him a leg which had been amputated after the fight with the Arikaras.

  I have watched over them fondly, and with a deep affection and pride. They were good men to begin with, and some of them had been transformed into exceptional men by our common ordeal. I try to watch over the Field brothers, Private Labiche, and all the rest, and I know Meriwether does, too. Never a letter goes east from either of us but that we don’t inquire after those loyal and greathearted men.

  I had heard Shields was sick, but the news that he is sinking shocked me.

  “Are you sure?” I said to the black boy who had brought me the message.

  “Mr. Shannon, he asks you to go right quick, sir.”

  I nodded.

  Shields has a smithy at Fort Bellefontaine, a few hours’ walk from my office. He had traded his land warrant for a complete smithing outfit and is a respected gunsmith and blacksmith in the area, employing the trades he gave the Corps of Discovery. He had been a lean, muscular man with powerful shoulders and an iron grip. I could scarcely imagine such a Hercules sinking into the Stygian depths.

  I saw nothing on my desk that required attention. The mid-July heat had already built, and I would be in a sticky sweat by the time I reached there, even if I should summon a carriage or a wagon. But I would walk. Walking keeps me hale.

  I sent word to Julia that I might be detained and headed for the governor’s lair, down the street, intending that we both should go and pay our respects to our corps man.

  I found Meriwether studying a petition. The windows were open and he looked flushed by heat.

  “Ah, Will!”

  “You have a little time?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “John Shields lies ill; they say he won’t last. I have in mind paying him a call. Would you join me?”

  “Shields? Shields?” Some strange light filled his eyes. “No. Busy, can’t.”

  “I’ll get a carriage and trotters, Meriwether. It won’t be but three or four hours there and back.”

  “No!”

  That rejection came so explosively that we stared a moment.

  Then he retreated.

  “I regret that I can’t. Tell him so. Give him my heartfelt apologies and high regards. He’s a good man. None better. He was our salvation several times when he made ironwork to trade to the Indians. If he dies, I’ll grieve his passage. If I can help find his heirs, count on me. If I can do anything …”

  He subsided into a blank gaze. I did not know what was amiss, but Meriwether was acting strange again.

  “You go; tell him his old captain honors him,” Meriwether said. “He gave his life for the corps.”

  “He gave his life?”

  “He wouldn’t be so ill now if he hadn’t come with us.”

  “What is it that he suffers?” I asked.

  “Fevers.”

  I ransacked my memory. “You treated him and MacNeal and others with mercury for the venereal at Fort Clatsop.”

  Meriwether nodded curtly.

  “Do you suppose it’s the venereal?”

  Meriwether shrugged.

  “Well, I’ll find out and do what I can. Will the army or the territory bury him?”

  Oddly, Meriwether didn’t reply. He had slipped into his own world, and was slumped deep in his chair.

  “My regrets, Will. I’d see him if I could,” he said.

  I left him lost in reverie, went to my house, kissed Julia and peered at the sleeping infant, collared York, got a hamper of ham and bread and stew and jams from the kitchen, and we set off through a muggy morning for the cottage of John Shields, not knowing what we would find there.

  We hiked north on a military road. The army had bridged Coldwater Creek, corduroyed over some marsh, and widened a horse trail into a wagon trace from the city to the fort that governed access to the Missouri River and did a lively Indian trade as well. Shields held a smithing contract there, and lived nearby.

  York followed along behind me a few paces toting the hamper. We hadn’t talked much since his return from Louisville and I knew he was still looking for a way to be set free. He had been careful to fulfill his duties and to escape my wrath, but something between us had vanished.

  The lifeless air seemed oppressive and forbidding.

  I was perfectly familiar with Fort Bellefontaine, although it was a regular army post and not a militia site. And I knew Shields’s cottage, so I headed there directly rather than paying my respects to Colonel Hunt, First U.S. Infantry, inside the post.

  The stained log cottage baked quietly in the sun. Its shutters were open, letting light in and releasing silence to the world.

  Someone must have seen us coming, because a door opened quietly, and a small composed woman greeted us.

  “Gin’ral,” she said, her glance sweeping me in. I heard Ireland in it. She was no doubt some noncom’s wife, hired to look after the dying.

  “We’ve come to see Mr. Shields, madam.”

  She nodded and motioned us in.

  “I am General Clark.”

  “Oh, sir, I know, and I’m Mrs. Tolliver, and me man is Corporal Tolliver.”

  I glanced toward the bed. “How is he?”

  “Oh, sir, you can see.” She spoke softly and tenderly.

  In spite of the open casement, I smelled death.

  Shields lay in a narrow bunk on the far side, his eyes open but staring sightlessly. His mouth had curled into a permanent O, and his face had shrunk around his skull, save for some thick lumps along his neck and cheeks.

  The woman started to retreat, but I stayed her.

  “Madam, please …”

  She stood back. York hung back, too, and I motioned him in. He put the wicker hamper on a rude table.

  “I brought some ham and some other things,” I said.

  Shields didn’t move; life was visible only through the slight rise and fall of his chest. I took off my hat and stood there before the ruin of a splendid soldier and a fine companion of three years of travel. Here was a man who had gone the whole route, across the prairies, over the mountains, down the Columbia to the salt water, and all the way back, as valuable a man as we had with us.

  “Who’s attending him?” I asked Mrs. Tolliver.

  “The little Frenchman,” she said. “Saugrain.”

  “What does he say?”

  “I ask him, and he just shakes his head. He comes up to my neck, sir, and I look down upon him. I say to him ‘What is this malady, Doctor, that robs a good smith of life?’ And he just pats my hand gallantly and says it is a certain fever of soldiers. Oh, may my man never catch such a thing!”

  I stood over Shields again, trying to discover awareness in him.

>   “John, it’s your old captain. Clark here. I’m here to wish you all the blessings God can bestow on a good man. You walked to the Pacific with me, did your job well, gave more than was asked of you. I remember you looked after your fellows loyally and faithfully, followed our command, used your abilities and trade to make the Corps of Discovery a success, and you stand tall now. You’re the best of men.”

  I discerned nothing at all. Those eyes did not track me. I studied that ravaged face, the lips that puffed oddly, the mouth caught in a death rictus, and I knew he was at the gates of eternity.

  York edged close, uneasily, his eyes seeking permission from me and from the woman. He studied Shields a moment and then exhaled deeply, a great long gust of sadness.

  “Mastuh Shields, I am saying goodbye. You be a good man, you my friend, and I am wishing you get well, but …”

  He stopped, fearful that I would rebuke him for being too familiar. But I didn’t. They were all brothers on that trip across the continent; strangers at first, brothers by the time we had returned. And York was a brother, too, the brother of us all.

  I turned to Mrs. Tolliver. “Have his relatives been notified?”

  “I think the colonel is seeing to it, Gin’ral.”

  “All right. I will do anything in my power to help. Please extend my apologies to Colonel Hunt, but I must return.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  We paid our respects a few moments more, and then left.

  “Mastuh, what’s he got taken him?” York asked.

  “Perhaps Doctor Saugrain will tell me.”

  “You say he walked to the ocean, and he done all things right, and he help the corps, and he give all he got, and he don’t need orders but just do it all without asking, and he be the best of men.”

  I nodded.

  “I done that, too,” York said.

  35. LEWIS

  We buried John Shields today, Friday, July 21, 1809. I wore my blue and white captain’s uniform in honor of the man who served in my command. I looked dashing in it and my servant, Pernia, took pains to freshen it and black my boots and brush my tricorne.

  They wanted me to do a eulogy and I agreed, though I would not have chosen to do so. There are things a man is required to do, and I do them without cavil. I rode to the post in Chouteau’s carriage and took Will Clark with me.

  All those from the Corps of Discovery round about St. Louis, save for York, were present to pay our respects to Private Shields, blacksmith, gunsmith, and carpenter, whose skills repeatedly saved us from disaster and starvation during that journey into the unknown.

  Last night I went to my journals to refresh my memory. The man was our salvation. We had bartered Shields’s skills for corn or other provender in the villages. He repaired the broken rifles and muskets of the tribesmen, or fashioned battle-axes and lance points out of sheet metal from a burnt-out stove, and in return we got what we needed to subsist ourselves. He had made nails and hinges for our winter posts, and carpentered tables and chairs and beds as well. He had been a fine soldier, swift to obey any command and eager to go the extra mile. A hunter too, and a gifted woodsman, comfortable in the wilds.

  All this came back to me in a flood as I examined my entries. I turned finally to those of August 1805, when Shields, MacNeal, Drouillard, and I, in advance of the main party working up the Jefferson River, had ascended the eastern foothills of the Bitterroot Mountains and discovered the Shoshones, the Indians we wanted most of all to meet so we could barter for horses. They were shy as deer, and it took all our wiles to persuade them that we meant no harm. But at last we did meet Chief Cameahwaite and his hungry band, and boundless was our joy.

  Their joy matched ours because Shields and Drouillard shot deer and pronghorn and fed them all. We all rejoiced in the lavender August twilight. They danced for us around a spark-shooting fire and offered us their tawny young squaws, and I well remember that night, though I have wished a thousand times since then that I had remained steadfast in my resolve. Only Drouillard stayed apart, for whatever reasons only that silent French and Shawnee scout and translator could say. And only Drouillard was spared what followed.

  If I could take back that evening, blot away that eager, smiling, raven-haired, yellow-fleshed Shoshone girl with whom I could not speak a single word, repeal the eager smiles and caresses, purge every voluptuous second of it from my life, I would not hesitate to do so no matter the cost. From that moment onward, even though I ascended from triumph to triumph, I sank further and further into a hell beyond mortal reckoning.

  My entry of August 18, 1805, caught my eye:

  “I was anxious to learn whether these people had the venereal, and made the inquiry through the interpreter and his wife; the information was that they sometimes had it but I could not learn their remedy; they most usually die with its effects …”

  I remembered why I had inquired so anxiously.

  I sighed and put away the journals. I had garnered enough to offer the assembled veterans a glistening catalogue of John Shields’s worth as a man. And I would do so boldly, concealing morbidity of my own soul from them all.

  We assembled at the grave on a blistering afternoon.

  There was the old corps, or some small portion of it. George Shannon, leaning into a crutch; John Ordway, third in command and a gifted sergeant, and now farming outside of St. Louis; Robert Frazier, private, living in St. Louis; Ensign Pryor, still in the army, a career soldier and skilled noncommissioned officer; William Werner, now one of Will Clark’s subagents; and Will Clark, erect and commanding as ever. Of those in Louisiana, only York was absent, and I regretted that Will had excluded him.

  Doctor Saugrain was there, enduring the heat in his black suit, a tiny white-bearded presence at the head of the coffin, which rested on poles over the yawning grave. He had removed his top hat, his gaze sometimes shifting to me.

  I saw, as well, one of the Creoles who had come with us, and had a troubled moment trying to remember his name. François Labiche? Jean Baptiste LePage, Pierre Cruzatte, who had put a ball through my buttocks? I think it was Labiche. I cursed my bad memory.

  We are dwindling.

  Potts is dead, killed last year by the Blackfeet though his partner, Colter, had miraculously escaped and I hear from traders returning to St. Louis that he is alive in the West, at Lisa’s post. Gibson is dead, succumbing this year, like Shields, of the lues venerea. I remember dosing him heavily at Fort Clatsop. I heard of his death too late to attend the service, and I knew his relatives had hidden his sordid sickness from the world and hastened him into his grave. MacNeal has vanished, MacNeal, who was with me in the Shoshone village. I suspect he too has perished of the mortal disease that stalks us. We sought horses among the Shoshones, and instead bought death.

  Bratton remains in the army, and so do Willard and Windsor. Joseph Field died in 1807 but his brother Reubin lives in Kentucky. I know nothing of Goodrich. Sergeant Patrick Gass is in the East, enriching himself with his journal and blackening me with every letter he writes to the press. Hugh Hall, Thomas Howard, Peter Weiser, Joseph Whitehouse, all gone from view, some dead I am certain.

  I was sweating by the time the preacher summoned me to give the eulogy, and my damp hands blurred the notes I had scribbled, so I couldn’t remember what I wanted to say about John Shields. Inside my blue tunic, I was drenched with sweat and I ached to tear it off and let some breezes cool my fevered flesh.

  I felt my sweat gather at my brow under my tricorne, and traverse my cheeks, and drip relentlessly into my stock. I felt my armpits leak moisture, and knew it was sliding down my sides, dampening my linens. I felt as if I was standing on the brow of hell, feeling the heat, watching that fine old soldier John Shields slide into the eternal pit.

  I gave him a good soldier’s eulogy; he was brave, resourceful, obedient, courageous, honorable, an asset to our command. There were no parents and no widow and no children to receive my words; only a few old corpsmen with better memories than I have. So I di
dn’t dwell on Shields’s achievements for long; the words were more for us than for his family.

  I spoke of what we had done, the odds we faced, the way we came together into an indomitable and well-knit force bonded by danger and brotherhood and sheer joy. I told those privates and sergeants and my officer colleague that we had done something grand, something that would shine forever in the eyes of the people of the United States, and John Shields had marched with us from the first step to the last.

  Will spoke a few words, too, plainspoken and true, remembering the good soldier in John Shields and the brave companion of a thousand days of danger. Will looked grand in his Missouri militia uniform, a faint scatter of gray at his temples, his demeanor dignified and serious, his gaze welcoming each man present and acknowledging the gift of that man’s attendance at the last.

  We saluted. A trumpeter borrowed from Fort Bellefontaine played the dirge. Colonel Hunt and a few regulars stood at a distance, sharing the moment with us.

  “Dust to dust,” the preacher said, tossing some sand upon that plain plank coffin, the yellow shellac of the pine glowing in the hot sun. And then we lowered it into that yawning hole, a pit that looked all too familiar to me as I peered into its gloom. Who would the Stalker stalk next?

  Will and I headed back together in the carriage.

  “You look done in,” he said.

  “Hot in this uniform.”

  “You sure it’s not fever?”

  I didn’t reply. For years I had blamed the ague, and now I could not.

  “Why don’t you stop for some refreshment?” he said. “I’ll put Julia and the servants to it.”

  “I’ll get to see my namesake?”

  Will smiled. “Governor, the baby’s fat and happy, and we’re calling him Meriwether and he’s old enough to respond to his name, and fixing to walk, and before we know it, he’ll be walking to the Pacific Ocean and back.”

  Somehow, all that good news only deepened my morbidity.