Downriver

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “Sonofabitch,” she said, echoing the trapper vernacular she had picked up. She loved the trappers’ expletives and used them with rich imagination, especially when she was in the company of anyone who disapproved of them.

  “Greetings, gents, greetings, Mister Skye,” said MacKenzie, the huge chieftain, so formidable it must have taken an extra yard of fabric to cover him. Skye thought the man must be six and a half feet, and would weigh sixteen stone. MacKenzie himself was dressed in somber black and looked like an outsized minister or mortician. He had built the post, got into trouble years earlier for operating a still and was removed, but had returned to his familiar haunt once again, the absolute Lord of the North.

  “And you must be Victoria. You are a legend, madam. You are the queen of the mountains!”

  “Whatever that is,” she said. “You gonna put up our horses or must I do it?”

  “Tonight, madam, it would be our honor to care for your nags. Tomorrow they’ll be boarded.”

  “On that fire canoe? The horses?”

  “Your two saddle horses and equipage. They’ll go as far as Bellevue, where you’ll pick them up when you return.”

  “That dog, he goes with us, goddammit.”

  “Of course. A dog and his mistress cannot be separated.”

  It all made sense to Skye. Downriver, at Bellevue, on good prairie benchland near the confluence of the Platte River, the factor, Peter Sarpy, would board the Skye saddle horses until Skye headed back upriver, and provide him with packhorses in exchange for the ones he would leave here.

  “Kipp here,” said the second in command, a short but powerful gent with an iron grip. “Come along now, and see the post.”

  James Kipp hurried the Skyes and Bonfils and others up a steep path to the fort, which stood close to the Missouri. The interior yard was about what Skye expected, ample and solid, and the tall picketed walls stilled the blustery wind so that the air was quiet within. The great Kenneth MacKenzie, who had built the post, had built well. Encased by the cottonwood walls were warehouses, barracks, a kitchen, a chief factor’s home with eight real glass windows and a shake roof. At opposite corners were bastions sporting small cannon for defense, and something more … an air, a feeling, a sense of imperial power that Skye hadn’t felt since leaving Fort Vancouver, the Hudson’s Bay post.

  Below, the sweating engagés were loading the packs and bales of fur directly into the Otter under the gaze of a man Skye would soon meet, its master, Captain Marsh.

  Kipp showed the Skyes to guest quarters.

  “Dinner at eight in the chief factor’s dining room,” he said to Skye. “Mrs. Skye will eat with the women.”

  “Mr. Kipp, my wife would enjoy the company of the traders.”

  Kipp paused, scratched his whiskers. “I’m sorry. It’s tradition here. The dinner table is set for gentlemen, and includes those of higher rank. There’s a dining hall for the engagés—”

  Kipp was plainly discomfited.

  “I think perhaps we’ll eat with the engagés,” Skye said.

  “Dammit Skye, you go eat with the men,” Victoria said.

  Skye knew the arrangements bothered him more than her. Many were the functions and meals within her Crow tribe that divided the sexes. He didn’t know why he was so unhappy with this arrangement here, but he was.

  “All right,” he said, reluctantly.

  “I’m sure Mrs. Skye will enjoy the company of our many ladies, most of them Assiniboine, but she’ll be meeting my Mandan wife, some Sioux and Cree ladies, and so on …”

  “Hell yes,” she said. “Goddammit, Skye, go eat.”

  Kipp grinned. Barnaby Skye’s wife was a legend in the mountains.

  At the appointed hour, which seemed very late to Skye, he approached the chief factor’s residence and was immediately invited into a sunny parlor for cordials, which turned out to be a robust port wine. Skye drank greedily, remembering all the joys of rendezvous he had surrendered to come here, but thinking that as the chief trader at Fort Cass he could have his nip each evening. Being a trader, with his own table and own wine casks, enough to last a year, enchanted him.

  And so he met the great men of the American Fur Company, assessing them even as they assessed him. He met the bewhiskered red-faced master, Benton Marsh, natty in a blue uniform, and his mate, Trenholm. Marsh looked to be a choleric man, but one who smoothed things over out of long practice. Skye found himself peering into cold gray eyes, and felt a certain wariness.

  He remained quiet, as was his wont, but Alexandre Bonfils was circulating gregariously, making friends, offering bon mots, and bragging not a bit modestly about the pelts he had acquired at great risk in the heart of Blackfoot country, pelts now resting in the bowels of the Otter.

  At the stroke of eight, sounded by a handsome pendulum clock in a cherrywood cabinet, MacKenzie escorted his black-clad clerks and motley guests into his long dining room, where a splendid table awaited them. Here were furnishings Skye had not seen in the West, except at Fort Vancouver. A snowy linen cloth and napkins, elaborate silver, Limoges china, crystal goblets, a table groaning with condiments and awaiting the platters of food being prepared by all those pox-marked Assiniboine women.

  MacKenzie seated them all by rank, the junior clerks at the far end of the great table, ascending to the most senior men and senior guests at the head of the table, above the salt. Skye and Captain Marsh were seated at MacKenzie’s right and left, and that was how the trouble started.

  “Ah, my friend Kenneth,” said Bonfils, “how is it that Skye sits above me?”

  MacKenzie reddened. “Because I have arranged it.”

  “But I am senior, monsieur,” he said blandly.

  “I believe, sir, that Mister Skye has been in the mountains far longer than you, and we are pleased here to honor that.”

  “Ah, you are mistaken. I have been in service to Pratte, Chouteau quite a bit longer than he has, having begun my engagement seven years since.”

  The room quieted. Young Bonfils, so well connected to the company’s owners, was asserting rank.

  MacKenzie, the strongest of men, decided to settle the matter. “My young friend, you are my guest here—”

  “I will resolve this,” said Skye. “Mister Bonfils, by all means, take this seat. I will join my wife.”

  Skye smiled gravely at this august assemblage, and walked slowly out the door.

  six

  Skye brushed off the trouble, but Victoria didn’t.

  “Why didn’t you stay?” she asked in the quiet of their small chamber.

  He threw a big hand over her and drew her tight. “Some men want rank,” he said. “I don’t worry about it.”

  “But dammit, Skye, you should have let the big chief MacKenzie decide.”

  “Maybe so,” he said. “But I did what I did, and it’s over.”

  “It’s not. That man Bonfils, he will put this to good use. He will tell the world that you are not big man enough to be a trader.”

  Maybe she was right. He had felt something sinister brush him as lightly as a feather; something lurking just beyond his understanding.

  After Bonfils’s outburst, Skye had nodded at MacKenzie and stalked out while the others stared. MacKenzie had started to protest, but let him go. Bonfils was grinning amiably, and the instant Skye neared the door, the young rival edged toward the vacated place near the head of the table. Captain Marsh and the senior men seated at that table like a row of penguins had said nothing, but their gazes followed Skye.

  He had headed for the mess hall where ordinary men ate, and was able to catch a meal just as the cooks were clearing away the trenchers. No one there said anything either. He felt more comfortable among them than he did with those zealous men of rank and all their pretensions. There was something stinking and fraudulent about all that faked opulence, so far from the true seats of power and commerce. Everything had been imported, from the casks of wine to the table linens. The Assiniboine women decorating that post, trick
ed out in bright taffetas and the latest Paris styles, were there to foster the illusion of civilization, but they were merely concubines and servants, the company’s pox-marked whores.

  Skye dismissed the episode from mind; it was not important. Obviously, Bonfils regarded rank as something so important that he made a public protest. The man had a point: he had been with the Chouteau interests much longer than Skye had. And his trapping brigades had done brilliantly, bringing in more beaver than anyone else’s. Maybe he deserved the honor. Maybe it was a passion of the very young, like Bonfils, to enjoy rank. He wore a medal on his chest, and had his family crest veneered to his equipage, so rank obviously meant everything to him, even a thousand miles from any world where rank meant something.

  Had Skye casually thrown away the esteem of those substantial men when he bowed out? Company politics were new to him. He had never entertained ambition. He had been too busy surviving in a mountain wilderness even to consider advancement within the company. But now, suddenly, a trading position meant a great deal to him. With it, he would have a future. Without it … he didn’t know.

  Skye remembered his life in the Royal Navy, where he was the lowliest of the low. Rank had been important to everyone with any ambition, and men zealously guarded their rank, and all the manifestations of rank. A lord admiral wanted every honor and prerogative associated with his high position. Even a lowly jack tar might want the ship’s company to know he had been in his majesty’s service longer than those young whelps.

  Skye breakfasted with the engages the next dawn, and then watched the rivermen build fires in the boilers and get up steam. He watched intently as the deck hands boarded his saddle horses and penned them in a cage on the foredeck. Even as firemen started to build boiler steam, woodcutters were carrying the last of the cottonwood logs they had stacked bankside. An amazing eight or nine cords of firewood rested on the deck, handy to the firemen, and Skye wondered how long that would last. That riverboat would eat wood.

  “Ah, so it’s you, Skye,” said Bonfils, drawing up beside. “An exciting adventure, oui?”

  “It’s Mister Skye, mate.”

  Bonfils laughed. “So I’ve heard. A fine cachet for a mountain man.”

  That sally from a man who wore a royal medal on his chest. Skye remained quiet. That Mister was, after all, the rank he had insisted on ever since escaping the Royal Navy.

  “Well, Mister Skye, we missed you last night. Talk turned to weighty things, including the future of the fur business, the decline of beaver, the advances in firearms, the sonnets of Shakespeare, the means by which redskins can be persuaded to part with furs and pelts for less and less of value, and the ultimate ownership of Oregon. I ventured the opinion that anything dyed a gaudy color, no matter how trifling its value, would fetch a good price from the savages, and I must say, the gentlemen at table largely applauded my observation. But I suppose those things are not of any consequence. You aren’t a citizen, I gather, and have no interest in the republic or its commerce, or in belles lettres either.”

  “And how would you conduct trade at Fort Cass, Mister Bonfils?”

  “Monsieur Bonfils, if you can manage it. I am for profit, by whatever means, and so I loudly proclaimed. Why hire trappers and hunters when we can engage the Indians to do these, for the price of a few dyed turkey feathers?”

  Skye began to grasp the sharp-edged drift of banter like this, and dismissed the young man. “It’s time to fetch my wife, sir.”

  He headed back to the post, hearing Bonfils’s easy chuckle behind him.

  MacKenzie stood just inside the post, and hailed him:

  “Mister Skye—”

  “Mister MacKenzie, don’t apologize. Young men seek their moment of glory. I had a fine buffalo feast with the engagés.”

  “No, that doesn’t do. I regret the whole business.” He hesitated, and then spoke. “If you had stood your ground, I would have made it clear who’s the host and who’s commanding the post. You would have given me a chance to say a thing or two.”

  MacKenzie offered a meaty hand, and Skye shook it.

  Skye found Victoria in their gloomy room, perched on the soft bed which owed its comfort to its tick, which was stuffed with the thick beards of buffalos. Her cheeks were wet. No Name, their yellow mutt, sat at her feet guarding her against a world neither liked.

  “Victoria—”

  “Dammit, Skye! Something bad’s gonna happen! Maybe we won’t see the mountains again!”

  He knew enough to keep quiet. Over the years he had come to understand her mysterious, sometimes uncanny sense of the future, something she called her medicine. Her spirit helper, the magpie, often darted before her, telling her what lay ahead. And now she sat on the edge of the bed, her honeyed cheeks wet with tears and foreboding.

  “You may be right,” he said. “Riverboats get into trouble fast. Boilers blow. They snag. Some catch fire. They’re always trouble—”

  She pressed his hand and stood. “Dammit, we’ll be late.”

  He lifted two battered parfleches, and she grabbed two others, and thus they transported most of their worldly possessions through the yard of the post, out the narrow gate, and down the steep grade to the levee, where the Otter rocked and vibrated like a rabid wolf. A palpable fear swept over Victoria, but she walked determinedly beside her man, and they boarded amidships, on a gangway. The dog sulked, bristled, and followed, sniffing the deck and everything on it, and then wet some firewood.

  Bedlam prevailed. Everywhere, engagés and sailors were loading goods; buffalo haunches for the cooks, bales of buffalo robes and deerskins and elk hides which had to be lowered with a boom and spars and tackle into the low hold, where another crew pushed and hauled the cargo to spead its weight evenly. A cabin boy threw a pail of slop overboard. A crew rolled casks of water aboard, not to drink but to replenish the boilers.

  Skye and Victoria found their way aft to a cramped cabin and entered it, finding several small compartments around a central hall where meals would be served on folding tables. There was a small woman’s compartment aft, farthest from the boilers and thus the safest, but Victoria scorned that and chose to bunk with her man.

  The quarters were spartan, trimmed in oak but walled with plank. A small glassed window provided the only light. A simple washstand with an enameled tin basin and pitcher supplied the only bath.

  No Name whined, sniffed the corners, and vanished into the cabin, and then out the door onto the deck, where he sat, quivering with dread. Skye followed him, feeling suffocated by that tiny dark compartment, and knowing that Victoria would snarl at him if he stayed longer. She was plainly having a bad time of it, wrestling with a thousand new things as well as a terror beyond describing.

  Now he could hear the rumble of the firebox and smell the billowing smoke as it descended over the vessel. The escapement pipe, which released used steam, began to pop and hiss as the boat turned into a living thing, a monster trembling on the great hawsers that pinned it to Fort Union.

  A crowd gathered at the bank; the gaudy Assiniboine women in their finery, the engages, mostly wearing leather and wool, the breed children scooting about, the black-clad monkish clerks, and scores of tribesmen and their squaws solemnly wrapped in blankets to ward off a sharp dawn chill, the low sun gilding their bronze faces.

  Skye had put his mealtime with the ship’s company to good use, asking innumerable questions. This riverboat ran 120 feet and needed four feet of draft loaded, which was too much, especially with the river lowering almost daily as the spring floods receded. There would be sandbars just a foot below water level, sinister sawyers, the broken limbs of sunken trees, waiting to tear the hull apart, currents whipping the boat into rocks and obstacles, and always the desperate need of wood.

  Ten cords each day this monster burned. And many hundreds of miles along the Missouri where there was not a tree in sight. A single trip up the river and back consumed the wood of over fifteen hundred trees: hardwoods down near St. Louis; softer wood
s, such as the prolific cottonwoods and willows upstream. A full load of wood weighed thirty to forty tons.

  Then, suddenly, a shrieking whistle blew, and the mate bellowed in the megaphone. No Name laid back his head and howled. Captain Marsh stood on the upper deck, called the texas, and watched his sailors loosen the hawsers.

  Skye marveled that such a complex piece of equipment could pierce so far into utter wilderness. From the jackstaff a triangular American Fur Company pennant fluttered, and a Stars and Stripes hung from its staff at the rear. There were shouts, men winding hawsers on capstans, and then the boat shuddered free and into the swift cold current, its speed sickening.

  Victoria caught his hand and squeezed it. The dog bristled. The cannonade of the escapement pipe deafened them now as the wheels rumbled inside their housing and thrashed the river. Fort Union began to shrink into a blurred blue horizon.

  Up above, standing next to Captain Marsh like the Angel Gabriel, was Alexandre Bonfils, whose uncles owned this vessel.

  seven

  Alexandre Bonfils lounged beside the helmsman in the pilothouse seething with importance. He had perched himself at this lofty station so that he might view the passing world from the best perspective, yet didn’t see the shaggy old buffalo bull lapping water at the bank, or the soaring golden eagle, or the kingfisher diving for minnows, or the stretching green distances of the northern plains, as the river passed through mysteries.

  His vision was focused elsewhere, no matter what the world brought to his empty gaze. He wanted that position at Fort Cass, and knew he could not win it unless he took certain measures. Fort Cass wasn’t much of a post, merely a satellite of Fort Union, and the Crows didn’t do a large trade. But it was the only trading position available because there were so many senior men, all veterans, in the company; the only one likely to open in the next several years, the only one that would advance his ambitions. Some day, he would take over the firm from his mother’s cousin, Pierre Chouteau, and be the Emperor of the West, and the Prince of St. Louis.