Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont

by Jason Karlawish

  He lay for several minutes in the darkness, his wife asleep beside him. Deborah was a woman, prone by nature to excessive sentiment, tamed only by Cupid, a quality no doubt exacerbated by her novel reading. It was her nature to let sentiment cloud her reason.

  He felt his way in the dark to his worktable and lit a candle, took out his penknife and the notebook in which he had written in the months after Alexis's departure and cut out those pages. He blew on the coals of the kitchen fire, and they glowed and pulsed red like living organs. Then he laid some of these pages gently on the coals, one beside another. The pages smoked, crinkled like autumn leaves and burst into flames. He fed his letter to Lovell into the golden flames. Some pages rose and twisted like feeble ghosts aspiring to haunt other men's dreams, but then they disappeared into ashes and smoke.

  NEAR THE MIDDLE OF OCTOBER, a private brought him a letter from Theodore Mathews. Beaumont quickly scanned over the usual pleasantries to find the information he desired.

  . . . He says he is eager to return to the service of his doctor and that he regrets his foolish ways of so many years ago, but he has responsibilities to wife and child, and he insists that they should accompany him and that you will employ his wife!!! I tried to convince him that this is an extreme request, that no servant can properly demand, but he insists. She is like him—French Canadian—but speaks not a lick of English. I suggest that your reply propose to engage St. Martin and his wife to stay with you.

  Beaumont stared at the letter. It meant Alexis's two children would come as well. The four of them dependent upon him. He could hear Alexis pleading his case to Mathews. His English would become increasingly incoherent as he became animated with emotion.

  “Goddamn and to hell with this!”

  “Excuse me, sir?” The clerk on the other side of the room looked up from his paperwork. “Did you ask me something?”

  Beaumont glowered at the young man.

  “I asked you nothing.”

  The clerk blinked and swallowed. “Right then.” He bowed his head over his paperwork.

  Beaumont began to work figures on the back of the letter's envelope. On the one side the expenses of Alexis alone and on the other of Alexis with wife and children. The sums were clear. Pay him less if he is to bring them. They will need just one house. He began to think of things he could not easily express as figures. Alexis having the wife and children, children no more than two years old, would be of advantage to the successful prosecution of the experiments. Alexis would have before him the constant reminder of his obligations as father and husband. As any man, he would have their burden, a burden that cultivated industriousness and made it nearly impossible to slip away in the cover of night.

  Beaumont drew a single line though the number 3 and wrote above it a 4. He would pay Alexis 400 dollars per year, and he should bring his wife and children.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  IT TOOK NINE TEDIOUS MONTHS to arrange affairs. In this time, Beaumont twice considered resigning from the army, but the tallies of his weekly balance sheet restrained him. With the new child and the prospect of studying Alexis, he needed his army commission. It provided a steady income and time both to perform his experiments on Alexis and to cultivate a private practice in St. Louis.

  The family would travel south by canoe and flatboat on the Lower Branch of the Fox River. At Fort Winnebago on the shores of Lake Winnebago they'd take the Upper Fox to Portage, where they would cross overland to the Wisconsin River and follow it to the Mississippi River and the trading hub of Prairie du Chien and Fort Crawford. There, they would rest before boarding the steamboat to St. Louis.

  In St. Louis, Beaumont was to assume the post as surgeon-in-chief to the Fifth Regiment's headquarters. He had Dr. Lovell's assurance that a private practice was permitted as well. He also had guarantees from Theodore Mathews and Ramsay Crooks that he had only to send word to the company's agents, and they would deliver Alexis and his family via bateau before the winter freeze.

  The journey to Prairie du Chien took nearly three weeks. They traveled in a flotilla of two flatboats, each armed with a swivel cannon, and five canoes. Among the passengers was Captain Ethan Allen Hitchcock, whose belongings included a heavy crate marked simply “Books—property Capt. E.A. Hitchcock”; Thomas Burnett, a morose Indian agent who read copies of the North American Review; and John Marsh, a young land speculator sent by his father from New York who, despite the heat and the dirt, dressed in a silk cravat and vest, kept his mustache combed and lustrous and sat cross-legged on a barrel in the shade of an umbrella. His charge was to secure leases on lead mines in Illinois and Iowa.

  The traveling party fell into an easy routine, rising before dawn to breakfast, traveling until a midmorning break for a second meal. Just after noon, they would rest until the shadows lengthened. Captain Hitchcock read Dante, Beaumont reviewed his notebooks, and Deborah took to sketching in her commonplace book. They passed banks lined on either side with golden flowers as far as the eye could see. Once they watched a black bear and her two cubs amble along the banks.

  They camped their last night in the shadow of the massive rocks of Grand Gres. The river's steady sough lulled them to silence. Some of the travelers lay back on their elbows and regarded the stars; others gazed into the fire's throbbing glow. The last miles of their trip along the Wisconsin River were swift and easy, and by noon of their last day, the countryside bore evidence they were nearing Prairie du Chien. Captain Hitchcock set aside his Dante to watch the passing scenery, and the young merchant John Marsh nervously asked how much further from Prairie du Chien they reckoned the journey to Monsieur DuBuque's magnificent lead mines might be.

  Most of the trees had been cleared, and the stump-stubbled riverbank was increasingly populated with Indian camps. It was midmorning of a hot Tuesday in June when the vista over the bow of the boats gave way to an ever-expanding body of water, and the party first sighted the swirling brown waters of the Mississippi. For Beaumont and his family, this was the edge of the world, Prairie du Chien, the outpost of American civilization.

  The northern banks of the terminus of the Wisconsin River were high and flat. The sharp smells of cooking fires and dust and horse urine grew distinct, and wisps of violet smoke hung over the water. They passed the bloated carcass of a pig. The banks gave way to lowlands cluttered with all manner of improvised dwellings and houses. The near banks were soon crowded with people running along the shore, some of them shouting and waving to the boats. The water was teeming with canoes and dugouts and log rafts crowded with men, women and children of all manner of color and dress, calling out greetings and instructions, offering trade and lodging. The air soon grew thick with the dust stirred up by horse and mule and foot, so thick that some bodies appeared as shades and the houses in the middle distance were silhouetted. At the riverbanks, tiny boys stood naked, looking like bronzed cherubs with their pooch-bellied bodies. From somewhere there came the sound of music and women singing. Dogs, some of them as big and dark and long jawed as wolves, barked and ran along the bank.

  The young merchant grinned, visibly aroused as he attempted to entice a canoe full of Indian women and girls with what looked like strings of colored glass beads. After a time, he simply laughed and tossed them the beads. Captain Hitchcock was hastily jotting notes in a small notebook. Burnett, the Indian agent, inspected his watch and then the angle of the sun. Now squinting, he consulted his watch again and then sat mutely on a box as the chaos of Prairie du Chien unfolded before them.

  “Ain't this place the shit hole of the US of A,” announced one of the soldiers sweating at the oars of the longboat.

  “Shut yur goddamn foul mouth,” the captain ordered from his tiller.

  They paddled north up the Mississippi River, keeping out of the river's swift center, past the town of Prairie du Chien on the east and the network of marshes to the west, until they reached an island barren save for the dirty gray walls of Fort Crawford.

  They traveled on a canal of slo
w-running, thick, bronze-colored water that smelled vaguely of rotting vegetables and fish and was crowded with crude canoes, dinghies and dugouts. On the bank opposite the fort, three soldiers stood at the end of a dock that displayed a faded American flag, beneath which flew a weathered regimental flag. Both hung limp and heavy. One of the soldiers whistled and hailed them over, and within fifteen minutes the party had disembarked in Prairie du Chien.

  Summer's heat and rains were rotting Prairie du Chien. The marshes smelled of putrefaction, and the populace was overrun by Indians, voyageurs and merchants crowded in lowland heat and dampness. Deborah stood mute as she cradled Lucretia in one arm while holding her umbrella in the other. Sarah clutched her thigh as if it were a tree trunk.

  Beaumont shuddered. Prairie du Chien was a place of fevers. They must rest no more than a few days here, avoid the water and proceed with all haste to St. Louis.

  At the docks, one of the soldiers signaled to the Beaumonts and pointed them to the base of the bluffs that led to the prairie, to the house of the Very Right Reverend Keyes.

  “Yonder by that wooden church. Look for the high fence covered with red trumpet vine,” the soldier instructed. “We'll have your baggage sent along straightaway. Go now.”

  THE REVEREND KEYES'S HOUSE was a substantial whitewashed structure behind a four-foot-high stone wall topped with another four feet of wooden fencing. The aging cleric rose slowly from his chair in the parlor and greeted the Beaumonts warmly. Sweets were brought out for Sarah, milk for Lucretia, and a high-backed copper tub the length of a man was filled. Within the hour Deborah and the children were bathing.

  Fifteen years ago, the Presbyterian minister had come west to dispute the Catholic theology and convert the Indian, but he had made little progress with either the residents of Prairie du Chien or the Indians. Within a year, he had lost his young wife to fever. He lived childless, writing his memoirs in his lonely, six-room dwelling.

  Beaumont sat with the reverend upon a weathered stone bench in the shade of a great maple in the garden. They were looking out at the over-grown tangle of roses as the reverend explained how rheumatism had crippled him from tending to his garden.

  Beaumont surveyed the house and the grounds. “You've a handsome home.”

  “Thank you. It's far more than I need, fit more for a family such as yours. It's been some years since the charm of a cultured woman graced my hearth. You say you're bound for St. Louis?”

  Beaumont nodded. “With all haste. I've much work to do.”

  “That's a fine city, I hear. Another Boston or Philadelphia. Some say it should be our nation's capital. I grew up in Philadelphia, you know. You're at the edge of it all here on the prairie. When I came here I was all intent to spread the word of the Reformed Church in a free land, throw off the shackles of Catholic superstition and European aristocracy. Convert the Indian. Educate them. I knew not a whit of what precisely I was striding into.”

  “Progress takes time,” Beaumont observed.

  “Begging your pardon, Doctor, but this old man knows that time's the problem. History, I mean. The time we know, not the time we hope for. The villagers here claim lineage to traders as ancient as Jean Nicolet in the 1600s. And the Indians, they don't know when they came, and they don't care. We Americans are newcomers. Tyrants, they call us. And I can see their point. After the war, when we took possession of the fort and village, Colonel Chambers ruled with an iron fist.

  “There's this story they tell of Charles Menard that's become legend. We found him guilty for selling whiskey to our soldiers, and his house was seized, and he was forced to march through the streets of the village with a bottle dangling by a leather cord around his neck while a band played the ‘Rogue's March.’ The colonel's punishments soon bore little relation to the nature or severity of the crime. He came to favor banishment in winter on Fever Island, seven miles north of here.

  “Now whole families bear grudges, try to claim properties as rightly theirs, produce deeds written in French and signed by noblemen with seals in wax. They'll never forget, and even when they do forget what it is that has them so angered, the memory is like a kind of ancient burl on some great tree trunk, its origins long forgotten. Lightning, wind or ax? Who knows what truly happened? But the mark and anger remain evermore.”

  The reverend laughed. “The Fourth of July's a spectacle here. The locals take up the ‘Rogue's March’ as a kind of anthem and carry on with a day's hard labor oblivious to our reverential celebration. Watch yourself. You enter certain taverns, the entire clientele falls silent, musicians set down their instruments, dogs bark like you were some kind of varmint. The innkeep disappears.”

  “Who has command now?”

  “Of the fort? General Zachary Taylor. Nice fellow, about your age. He tries to enforce the laws fairly, but it's a complex arrangement here. The town rightly claims municipal independence from the federal troops. The Indian agents claim the authority of the federal government and its treaties with Indians. But it's commerce that effectively rules us all.”

  “The company?”

  “Aye. Hercules Dousman and Joseph Rolette, the two of them are like brothers, living out of a dilapidated house seized after the war. They've got a steady business selling the Indian agents flour and salted pork, blankets, tools and sundry trinkets to fulfill the treaties, and when we encroach upon more Indian land and violate those delicate treaties, they sell even more to appease the Indians. The Indians become a kind of... I don't know what the proper word is, but it's the price of doing business, a kind of debit we cash in from time to time. You say you're going to St. Louis?”

  “That's right. I'm posted to the Jefferson Barracks.”

  “Were it not that my Abigail's buried here, I'd leave this place.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  IN THE AFTERNOON, BEAUMONT RECEIVED A MESSAGE that Colonel Zachary Taylor wanted to see him. He walked through the narrow red clay streets of Prairie du Chien, stepping carefully past piles of garbage, catfish heads, mounds of ashes, a dead chicken.

  On the cluttered dock where the party had landed earlier in the day, a group of seven mud-caked men worked with shovels, boards and mallets to shore up a collapsing bank that threatened to undermine the dock. One of the men looked up and signaled to another who drove his shovel in the muck and climbed onto the dock.

  The man was barefoot, and his legs were mud caked to his knees. Only the blue cap pinned with the dull bronze eagle medallion of the First Regiment signified he was a soldier. Beaumont pointed to the fort and explained his order, and the man pointed to one of the canoes pulled up the muddy bank.

  “Get in, and I'll paddle ye over.”

  Beaumont looked at the canoe and again at the soldier. “I can take myself.”

  “I'll take ye. Need the rest from that muckhole.” He motioned with his thumb to his fellow muddied laborers.

  As they were crossing the canal Beaumont asked the soldier why there wasn't a bridge to the fort, the space between shore and island being no more than thirty feet.

  “Last one plumb washed out in the flood.”

  FORT CRAWFORD was in rotting disrepair. Years of flooding had turned its lower timbers porous as old sea sponges. In some places, a man could kick the toe of his boot a good inch into the substance of a board, and on many walls the plaster of the first three feet was buckled, water stained and so often patched it resembled an explorer's tentative sketch of a map.

  A corporal ushered Dr. Beaumont into Colonel Taylor's dusty office. The colonel gestured Beaumont to a chair and apologized as he scribbled a few words on a document before easing himself back in his chair.

  Uniforms among frontier officers were often dingy and worn, but this officer's appearance displayed an almost accomplished disarray. His hair had prematurely whitened and was swept back off his high brow; it had been cut roughly, perhaps by himself without the aid of a glass. His cravat, such as it was, was tied in a loose knot and bore stains, and the uppermost collar button of his blo
use was missing. The sleeves of his uniform coat were frayed, and all but one of the brass buttons along the left sleeve were missing.

  “I trust the journey was acceptable?”

  “Very much so, sir. Captain Derling is an expert river man, and the company was most entertaining. Captain Hitchcock possesses a charming intellect.”

  “And your accommodations here?”

  “Quite fine. Reverend Keyes has graciously hosted us.”

  “The reverend is one of our most distinguished citizens. He has charge of the school.”

  Beaumont nodded appreciatively. “The situation was similar in Mackinac. Reverend Keyes's hospitality is superlative.”

  “I'd like to invite all of you, the reverend and you and Mrs. Beaumont, Captain Hitchcock, Mr. Burnett and the other Indian agents—we've three of them here—my general staff, Misters Dousman and Rolette from the company, to dinner tonight. There are a number of prominent residents at the fort and the town whom I want you to have the pleasure of meeting. Several of the junior officers were at West Point when Captain Hitchcock was its commandant, and Mary, my wife, is most eager to have the pleasure of meeting your wife.”