Downriver

by Richard S. Wheeler

He saw two does drinking at river’s edge, far below, too far to shoot at; he didn’t feel like hunting anyway, and rode past them. If he had veered in their direction, they would have vanished into the wrinkled slopes.

  They descended into the creek bottom at dusk, and could hear the whack and thump of axes before they saw the riverboat or the woodcutting crew. Skye led the uneasy Cheyenne woman to the vessel, which rocked gently bank-side, tied stern and stern to trees. They waited while the crew manhandled cordwood up the gangway. The Cheyenne children looked terrified, but their mother solaced them with sof words. She looked ill at ease herself, her black eyes focused on the white superstructure, the busy white men, the smoke eddying from the chimneys from the dying fires under the boiler.

  Skye led her and the children on board, while Victoria held the horses, and then up the companionway to the pilothouse.

  Marsh stared sharply at the young woman and her brood.

  “She’s Lame Deer—Cheyenne—and wanting a ride to St. Louis,” Skye said. “She’d like to take the two ponies, too. She’s looking for her husband. I guess he’s there all right.”

  “I can’t take her.”

  Skye studied the master, finding him in a testy mood, wanting to finish the day’s work.

  “She brought twelve fine-tanned robes, some beaven plews, and some ermine. Says she’ll trade it all for the ride.”

  “I don’t want a squaw and some breed brats.”

  Skye felt the rumble of anger building in him. “Maybe I’ll ride horse down to St. Louis with her. You can tell Chouteau why.”

  Marsh backed off. “Deck passage.”

  “No, women’s quarters. She needs shelter for the children.”

  “They’re not used to it. Never saw a chamber pot.”

  “She’s a trader’s wife.”

  Marsh sighed. “I’ll regret it,” he said, but he nodded.

  fourteen

  Benton Marsh was an irascible man, and now he was even more so. He didn’t like vermin-ridden Indians on his packet, a view he kept private because the American Fur Company depended entirely on trade with the savages.

  He peered out upon the world from behind a brown beard which he kept neatly trimmed to within an inch of his sallow face. Some might have called him handsome. His composure was so total that few guessed that behind his quiet calm raged a man of harsh and savage judgments, which he kept entirely private, veneered with a faint smile on occasion.

  His ability to ferret out the frailties of every mortal had earned him the respect of Pierre Chouteau and the other chiefs of the American Fur Company, who treated him as a sort of privy counselor and consulted him about personnel. He found more pride in that role than in his mastery of the river.

  If the trip upstream was perilous, the trip downstream was even more so. The paddle-wheel boat was carried along by the seven- or eight-mile-per-hour current at uncomfortable speeds, at the very time when the water levels were dropping daily as the spring runoff vanished. It was on the downstream trip, when the boats were burdened with a year’s prize of peltries, that they most often succumbed to assorted disasters.

  He stood in the pilothouse, along with his pilot and helmsman, studying the treacherous river, reading the currents, examining the heavens for rain and wind and storm, all dangerous to navigation. Not to mention Indians, who could amass along the bank at any point where the channel took the boat close to shore.

  Simon MacLees’s squaw!

  Marsh was appalled. Of all the wild strokes of bad fortune! But maybe not so bad: knowledge is power, he thought. He could deal with it; with her.

  If he had known who Lame Deer was, he would have flatly rejected passage. But Skye had brought her aboard and settled her before the whole story emerged. Now there was trouble, and Marsh fumed. This was a personal matter, affecting his-family, as well as a business matter.

  The red slut was going to St. Louis, and she would get there one way or another unless he found a way to prevent it. He wished he had never set eyes on her. She was Simon MacLees’s mountain woman, and that spelled trouble right in the bosom of his family. His stepdaughter, Sarah Lansing, was soon to be married to MacLees; in fact, within days of the time he expected to return to St. Louis.

  Marsh had known MacLees and his partner, Jonas, for years. St. Louis might be a bustling and brawling city of thousands, but the fur business was a small, closed circle. MacLees and Jonas had been an opposition firm until Pierre Chouteau, with his usual ruthlessness, had crushed them every way possible—by undercutting, by causing them license problems with the Indian superintendent General Clark, by filing complaints about the use of alcohol, by establishing a rival post nearby, where American Fur Company traders bought pelts for more, and sold goods for less, even at a temporary loss, until MacLees had virtually run out of options. The drift of the Cheyennes down to the southern plains and Bent’s Fort had been the final blow.

  And here came his filthy squaw! When he got to St. Louis he would have the squaw’s cabin fumigated and scrubbed down. For that matter, he would have the Skyes’ quarters fumigated. Victoria was another squaw he couldn’t do anything about until he got his boat back. This was Chouteau’s bidding; if Marsh had any say about it, the dirt-crusted redskins would be allowed only on the boiler deck for trading, and that as little as possible. And never, not ever, in the cabins.

  Marsh grunted. There were going to be some explosions in St. Louis. He was privy to some things no one else on the boat knew. The American Fur Company was about to offer MacLees a position, which is what it often did with defeated rivals. Unknown to Skye and to Bonfils, MacLees, a veteran trader, was Pierre Chouteau’s first choice for the Fort Cass position. The man knew Indians, knew trading, knew how to make a profit, and that was more than Skye or Bonfils knew.

  It helped MacLees that he was betrothed to Sarah Lansing, daughter of a Chouteau company attorney, August Lansing, who was once married to Marsh’s wife, thus adding to the threads and connections that gave him the inside track for a high position. Sarah Lansing was Marsh’s own stepdaughter; his wife’s child by the earlier marriage, raised by the Lansings.

  And now, along comes MacLees’s mountain woman! Just in time for the wedding! How delighted Sarah would be to learn about this red whore and her breed brats! Marsh smiled sardonically. What a fine scandal it would be … if the woman actually reached St. Louis. It would break Sarah’s heart. But that would not happen.

  Marsh hadn’t decided what he would do about her, but he knew that he would unload her somewhere and send her back to her people, with a stern warning never to set foot in Missouri. If he took that squaw clear to St. Louis, and raised a scandal, his friend Pierre Chouteau, and his acquaintance August Lansing, not to mention his own wife and stepdaughter, would land on him and he would never hear the end of it.

  So MacLees had himself a red woman! And that red woman was riding the Otter! Marsh enjoyed the irony.

  Mountain wives were an unspoken part of the trade but one didn’t hear about them in polite society—unless they showed up on someone’s doorstep. MacLees had abandoned his, and never dreamed he would see her again.

  MacLees was the obvious choice to trade with the Crows. That Cheyenne squaw wouldn’t help matters. Not that Sarah would go west into an utter wilderness. MacLees would do what so many traders did: impregnate her and leave for a year; and then return and repeat the cycle. After a few years, he would have his fortune and his children and would retire in St. Louis, while she would be busy managing a family in St. Louis.

  Marsh watched carefully as his pilot and helmsman negotiated a broad shallows, pocked with a thousand stumps and other debris. The channel ran straight through the middle of it, braiding itself around islands and bars. It was one of the most treacherous spots on the upper Missouri, and the doom of half a dozen captains before him, all of them running Opposition boats.

  That took the better part of an hour, with only one crisis, when some invisible sawyer scraped along the port side, banged on
the wheelhouse, and levered the entire packet sideways. But no damage was done and the boat drifted through another hundred yards of trouble before striking a clear channel again.

  “We made it, no thanks to you,” he snapped at his pilot.

  He rang a bell, signaling the engineers to open the throttle, and was rewarded with a chatter of popping steam from the escape pipe.

  The crisis over, he returned to his musings. Somewhere, he would unload the Cheyenne woman. Fort Pierre was next. It was Chouteau’s new fort, the headquarters for the whole region, and the supply depot for the satellite posts the company had established in the area. Chouteau himself had picked the site several years earlier on his first excursion up the river.

  He wondered what to say to the woman, and decided he would not say anything: he would simply put her off and tell her to go home. He would have liked to put Skye’s squaw off too, but thought better of it.

  He had little use for Skye. The man might have a reputation as a mountaineer, but he was a cockney oaf, without the brains to make anything of himself. He was doomed to the life of a mountain exile, attached to that barbaric Crow woman, and St. Louis would swiftly mock him and send him back to the wilds.

  He had even less use for Bonfils, primping dandy, reckless fool, but Marsh could do nothing about it. Bonfils was connected by blood to the owners. Nonetheless, Marsh intended to catalogue Bonfils’s follies during this voyage south, and make mincemeat of the young man in the privacy of Pierre Chouteau’s study.

  Chouteau was particularly eager to learn the weaknesses of his relatives; and Benton Marsh had been his primary source for years. Just why Chouteau cherished the salacious news about his cousins and uncles and nieces and nephews more than any other gossip, Marsh could only guess at. Amusement, probably. Pierre Chouteau loved to offer witty toasts at family affairs that harpooned one or another of his Creole kin.

  Tomorrow, if the wood and water and weather held, they would dock at Fort Pierre, the most splendid edifice on the river save for Fort Union. It stood on the right bank, upon a generous plain well above high water level, a rectangle of pickets encasing a dozen or so commodious buildings. Its factor, Pierre Papin, traded with the Teton, Yankton and Yanktonai Sioux, and sent a great harvest of buffalo hides and robes southward each year, an increasingly profitable trade for the company.

  The Otter would take on as much of this wealth as it could, and catch the rest on a return trip this far up the river if there would be water enough. The Bad River, which flowed into the Missouri just below Fort Pierre, usually made the difference, supplying the water for late-season navigation.

  Marsh turned the vessel over to the pilot. This stretch of the river offered no obstacles and cut serenely across open flats guarded by distant amber bluffs. It was a monotonous land, suited only for the savage spirit. White men required a country with more amenities. The entire area was useless, save for cattle raising, whenever the buffalo were exterminated along with the tribes who fed on them.

  Yes, Fort Pierre would be the end of the journey for the squaw, who even now was circling the deck, gazing at wonders beyond her sullen comprehension.

  He would tell her at Fort Pierre to debark; she and her brats and those two scrawny ponies. Yes, that was all that was required. A word. If necessary, he would have Skye or his squaw put it into the finger-language of the plains. But that probably would not be necessary. He would send Trenholm to her cabin and have him evict her.

  He would like to debark the Skyes, too, but they would be another matter. Skye was no fool. Marsh knew he would need a good reason to debark them; something that would stand up with Chouteau. He would come up with one. Bellevue, downstream, would be the obvious place. That was where the Skyes would leave their horses and pick them up again en route to the Crow country.

  That would narrow the field to MacLees and that reckless fop Bonfils. The master of the Otter would make sure MacLees was selected—for the good of the company, of course. And for Sarah.

  fifteen

  Victoria found good company in the Cheyenne woman, Lame Deer. The young mother could understand English well enough. Apparently Simon MacLees had been able to converse with her in Cheyenne, and they had employed both tongues.

  The Cheyenne and Absaroka might be hostile, but that did not wither the blossoming friendship between them as they roamed the decks of the riverboat, sometimes leaning over the rails to watch the turbid river flow by; sometimes sitting on the hurricane deck where they could see the majestic stream in all its grandeur flowing between distant slopes.

  For Victoria, the chance to coddle the little ones was a moment precious beyond words, for she had borne no child and felt that she would be forever barren. She scarcely knew which one she loved more; the bright girl, Singing Rain, with red bows in her glossy black hair, or the feisty boy whose name she shortened to Echo. To Lame Deer she explained that Echo was the English word for sound coming back, and Lame Deer repeated it with a smile.

  It was good to have a woman of the People for company; they could be together all the way to the big place where all the white men’s wonders came from.

  Victoria wanted to see where metal came out of the earth, and where the powder that exploded came from, and the little brass caps Skye slid over the nipple of his rifle. She wanted to see how cloth was woven and how blankets became so thick, and whether a thousand frail white women were employed making these things, out of sight.

  But those things didn’t interest Lame Deer at all.

  “I will find my man, and he will be gladdened. His heart will grow when he sees the children we have made. He will stand taller than the others. He will look upon me with wisdom. He will walk with the footsteps of a great chief of his people. He will touch me and I will shiver with gladness.

  “He will take me to his father and mother, and they will welcome me. I will present our children to them, and they will make blessings and do the sacred things of their people, and sprinkle them with sacred waters, for this is what Simon MacLees told me once, when the night was very black and our robes were very warm.

  “They will tell me the story of their people; where they came from, and how they were made, and who this Christ is, just as I have told him about Sweet Medicine and how he teaches the People. And we will all be friends and kin together, in a moment of great feasting. And I, Lame Deer, will be very proud and my heart will sing. And after that we will go back to my people again, and he will be great among them.”

  Lame Deer spoke these things almost in a dream state, as if she were in the midst of a vision quest. She made the white men’s words so beautiful that no white man could ever match her. If she were an Absaroka woman, she would be revered as a story-giver, and given much honor by the People because she could see beyond vision, and hear beyond what the ears knew.

  But Victoria listened sadly. She had been around reckless white trappers a long time, and she sensed that the happy young woman’s dream might be dashed on the rocks of things the Cheyenne didn’t grasp. Such as that the white men got tired of living so far away from their own kind and often abandoned their Indian families and married white women; the very white women that neither Victoria nor any other Crow had ever seen.

  “It is a big place, this St. Louis. How will you find him?” she asked the Cheyenne.

  Lame Deer only smiled and shrugged. “I will say the name, and the town crier will take me to him,” she whispered. “For all the world knows that name.

  “I have been to Monterrey, a city far to the west, the place of a people called Californios, so I have seen a place with many houses,” she said. “There are more than can be counted. And they have habits we do not know. There was no town crier there, to tell them about those who come. There are some places a woman can’t go. And they have a religion that is very strange. To enter a place where they hide their God, I must wear something upon my head.

  “I will find MacLees.”

  “I’ll help you,” Victoria said. “I know white men better. I
’m not afraid to ask. I will see a man in the street and I will ask him if he knows Simon MacLees. And if he doesn’t, I will walk into a place they have called a taberna, and ask the men there. That is the Californio word; it is a place to drink whiskey. And maybe they will tell me.”

  “You will help me, then. You know them better than I do.”

  They were standing at the blunt prow, watching the river part before the flat-bottomed boat. There was little to see; the far shores revealed no life; the water was blank and told her nothing. The children peered at the murky tide, at the solidly built boat, and accepted it all, though Victoria was not at ease surrounded by water-spirits and white men’s mysteries.

  “What did your man tell you when he left?”

  Lame Deer puzzled that shyly. “He said he was going to St. Louis, the place of many lodges, to do business.”

  “Did he say when he would be back?”

  Lame Deer slowly shook her head, a sadness in her brown eyes that touched Victoria. “He come back sometime.”

  Victoria didn’t want to say what she thought, but she needed to prepare this girl-woman for rejection. “What if he will not come back?”

  “He come back. Simon MacLees, he come back. For he has held me in his arms, and touched my lips, and gazed into my heart. He is like a lion roaming the hills for food for us.”

  But Victoria caught the doubt in her tone.

  “What if he can’t?”

  Lame Deer stared. “Why do you say such things?”

  “This company, American Fur, it is big medicine. Very strong. MacLees, little medicine. Maybe this big outfit, it says no to MacLees; he can’t trade no more with your people.”

  Lame Deer’s lovely face crumpled. “Sometimes I think that,” she said sadly. “But he come back. He’s my man. These be his boy and girl. See how they have the look of us both. No good man leave behind his own child.”

  Victoria wondered whether to suggest other possibilities, and decided she had a whole trip of many days to do so, and it would be best to prepare Lame Deer for bad news a little bit at a time.