Charbonneau - Winfred Blevins

by Winfred Blevins

  "I trust to your wisdom," Thunder Cloud said, "and I shall tell the people your name."

  Baptiste said silently to the image of Old Bill in his mind, "By God, I am an Adam, you old bastard."

  JULY, 1839: Rendezvous just wasn’t fun anymore. Baptiste had trapped Snake country in the fall and the Three Forks in the spring with Gabe; but the brigade was half the size it used to be, the plews were few, and the company had gotten tight with its wages and its liquor. Beaver didn’t shine, plews didn’t bring a price.

  Black Harris brought the supply train in to Horse Creek on July 4--a pitiful sight, just nine men and four mule carts. Jim Beckwourth came riding with it.

  "Wagh, John!" he said as he swung off "These days be pore bull, don’t they?"

  So they had a pipe together and swapped stories. Beckwourth had finally left the Crows because they turned on him. Their plews and their loyalty to the company didn’t bring much beads and firewater any more, so they blamed Jim.

  "Ye heerd the words of it?" Jim asked. "This child lost his job with the Crows so he come to rendezvous thinkin’ he’d jine these coons and set the old traps. But it won’t hold. Company ain’t gonna outfit any more brigades. They say the dollars ain’t in it no more. No more brigades, no more rendezvous. We is shot in the lights."

  "Unemployment comes to the wilds," Baptiste said wryly. "The fellers’ll shit when they hear tell."

  When Baptiste got to circulating, he found what he liked even less: The strangers Black Harris had brought to renezvous were a preacher, a scientist, and something entirely new--a band of emigrants headed for Oregon and Californy. The sign was getting plain enough for the most buffler-witted to read: Ordinary folks--civilized folks--were moving west.

  The camp simmered with grousing that night. Wall, the boys declared they weren’t ready to pack in their traps yet. They might not be able to thumb their noses at any war parties--they’d have to slip through the mountains in twos and threes, hoping that no Injuns saw them. They’d have to tote their plews to the forts which had been springing up, not only Cass and Union, but Fort Laramie at the mouth of the Sweetwater and Bent’s Fort down on the Arkansas on the trail to Taos. There wouldn’t be any more rendezvous. But on the whole they weren’t inclined to quit. In the mountains they were their own bosses.

  Gabe wasn’t ready to knuckle under, either. He wasn’t about to slink through mountains where he’d captained an army. He made up his mind to go back to St. Louy, collect his back wages, find some more money, and outfit his own brigade.

  Paump and Jim were at loose ends. Well, hell, they knew plenty of places between them where they could lay their hands on twenty packs of beaver. They’d just have to go higher into the mountains, up smaller cricks, into places a whole brigade couldn’t travel. They thought they’d give it a try down to Bayou Salade (South Park in Colorado) and to Taos for the winter.

  SEPTEMBER, 1839: Paump, Beckwourth, Kit Carson, Long Hatcher, and two more trappers are riding south on the plains between the South Fork of the Platte and the Arkansas. It is a hot, dry, late-summer noon. Burned, dusty hills stretch in all directions to the horizons, as big and wide as the perfectly blue sky. Heat waves shimmer on the ground, blurring features and minds. The next water is nearly fifty miles away.

  All the trappers seem to notice them at once--a band of Comanches on the top of a low rise, painted for war. Screeches cut through the dry air. There looks to be no cover, not even a deep gulley, for miles. The Indian ponies start moving.

  Carson is quickest; he jumps off his horse and drives his Green River into the neck of his mule. "Get the goddamn animals down for a fort," he yells. In moments each man slits the throats of his horses and mules and throws them into a crude breastwork. Paump and Jim lay side by side facing the charge. The others spread in a circle. "You first," says Baptiste. No one needs to say that half will fire, half hold, so that some Hawkens will always be loaded. Each man is focused on the Indians, coming forward at a trot. Each knows that he is likely to go under. Each thinks only of the job at hand.

  At a hundred yards the Comanches break into a canter. The trappers wait. Finally, at thirty yards, three Hawkens jump. The front Comanche and two just behind him fall to the ground and are trampled. The column splits in two and sweeps past on either side of the smelly fort. The trappers say nothing at all. The Comanches are regrouping.

  Twice more the same pattern-the charge, the center shots, the sweep by. The Comanches take time to talk things over.

  "They’ll come straight over this time," Carson warns. The dust is acrid in Baptiste’s nose and eyes. The stink of blood from the animals is thick and nauseating. Hell of way to go, he thinks.

  The Comanches are coming straight over. At the last minute three of them drop, and their horses go crazy--rearing, whinnying, trying to turn back into the charge. For long moments chaos: Horses bumping into horses, braves hurtling out of saddles, men and animals screaming, a melee in which Baptiste can see almost nothing.

  Then some riders skirt the mess and bear down on the fort. "Let fly," yells Carson. Two more drop. Now all the Hawkens are unloaded. If the Comanches keep charging, rifles won’t help. Maybe the pistol fire will keep them off

  Four more get through the turmoil. Beckwourth and Baptiste stand up, exposed, and kill two of them with pistols. But the others hold fire: The horses are refusing to come closer. Ten or fifteen yards away the horses slow, turn off and take the bits in their teeth, terrified. Some Hawkens are reloaded now, and the trappers drop two more. But chaos has changed to flight. The Comanche ponies are turning off and running away. In moments they’re gone.

  Carson is shaking his head. "The blood," Baptiste says. "The smell of blood is spooking the critturs."

  The trappers lie behind their putrefying fort all afternoon in the brutal sun, ready. The Comanches never come back. After dark the six of them, unscratched, pick up what they can carry and start walking to water. All make it. Four days later they hoof into Bent’s Fort. They have to buy new outfits, of course, mostly on credit. Each has lost nearly all his worldly goods. But hell, it’s all part of the fun.

  Bent’s Fort was full of bullwhackers and greenhorns on the way to Santa Fe or, sometimes, just out for a lark. The boys told them a few yarns, doubling the size of every war party and the length of every rattlesnake, and got on with them well enough, but they didn’t cotton to them. Greenhorns. Emigrants. Fellers as was safe back in Boston, Massachusetts, when the mountain men were living in the Rocky Mountains.

  "This child hates an American," said Long Hatcher on the way back to the mountains, "what hasn’t seen Injuns skulped or doesn’t know a Yute from a Shian mok’sin. Sometimes he thinks of makin’ tracks for white settlement, but when he gits to Bent’s big lodge on the Arkansas and sees the bugheways, an’ the fellers from the States, how they roll their eyes at an Injun yell worse nor if a village of Comanches was on ’em, pick up a beaver trap to ask what it is jist shows whar the niggurs had their brungin’ up--this child says, 'a little bacca ef it’s a plew a plug, an’ Dupont an’ G’lena, a Green River or so,’ and he leaves for Bayou Salade. Damn the white diggins while thar’s buffler in the mountains."

  JUNE, 1840: Paump, Beckwourth, and Old Bill are camping in a grassy meadow in Bayou Salade. Running Stream and Yellow Leaf, Jim’s new squaw, are smoking deer meat over open fires and converting the skins into clothing. They pound them with stones, wash them, stretch them, pound them, stretch them. Bill and Jim heave big rocks into a small crick to block it and form a pool. Walking a ways upstream, they step in and clomp down toward the rocks, splashing as much as they can. When they’ve pinned the trout in the pool, Jim peers into the water and neatly grabs one with his hands and tosses it onto the bank. While he keeps catching them, Bill stands knee deep in the crick, splashing and cussing about how the cold makes his old bones ache.

  Baptiste, having pocketed a quart of berries, walks on up high, climbing up from one basin into another narrower basin. Here the ground is cov
ered with dandelions from rock wall to rock wall--thick, healthy dandelions a foot and more tall. From a few yards away the ground looks solid gold. He takes a drink from the little stream--the water is cold enough to hurt--looks at the sun, and judges that he has three hours of daylight.

  He wades on through the dandelions in the upper end of the basin, climbs the boulder field, and then starts clambering up the rocks on the west wall. Before long the going gets harder. He climbs on small holds for his moccasined toes and his fingers. just below the spiny ridge the rock seems almost vertical. At length he grabs a big rock with both hands, pulls up, lets his legs swing, and mantles onto the ridge.

  For a while he sits and looks around. The looking isn’t purposeful. It is absorbing, smelling, drinking in rather than looking. A greenhorn would have thought it useless, wasteful. He sees a bighorn sheep over on the eastern ridge. The sheep seems to look straight at him for a while, unmoving. Then, with ease, it bounds up a vertical wall for twenty feet and disappears.

  As the sun begins to set, Baptiste starts playing his harmonica. He has a new song, "Alpine Sundown," that he plays two or three times.

  The sun is almost down. Paump watches the red rock of the eastern ridge. In the last hour of daylight, when it catches the reddening sun, it seems to glow, as though it did not reflect light but radiated its own light, a soft, rose-colored emanation, the phenomenon called alpenglow. He has no thoughts. He simply absorbs.

  In the twilight he hurries down the ridge and walks through the basin, gathering some dandelions to add to dinner.

  They have a guest for dinner, a child who calls himself Elkanah. Elkanah has arrived at a good time, not only fried trout and fresh greens and berries for dinner, but biscuits made from flour Jim has saved for weeks. They swap news--who’s gone under, what plews will bring to Taos, where the buffler are, what Injun trails they’ve cut--and then they swap yarns. They recollect the old days.

  Elkanah, sitting cross-legged in front of the fire, the light showing his browned and reddened face and his glints of eyes, nearly closed from years of sun, sounds the old theme: "Thirty years have I been knocking about these mountains from Missoura’s head as far sothe as the starving Heela. I’ve trapped a heap and many a hundred pack of beaver I’ve traded in my time, wagh! What has come of it, and whar’s the dollars as ought to be in possibles? Whar’s the ind of this, I say? Is a man to be hunted by Injuns all his days? Many’s the time I’ve said I’d strike for Taos, and trap a squaw, for this child’s getting old, and feels like wanting a woman’s face about his lodge for the balance of his days. But when it comes to caching of the old traps, I’ve the smallest kind of heart, I have. Certain, the old state comes across my mind now and again, but who’s thar to remember my old body? But them diggins gets too overcrowded nowadays, and it’s hard to fetch breath amongst them big bands of corncrackers to Missoura. Beside, it goes agin’ nature to leave buffler meat and feed on hog. And them white gals are too much like pictures, and a deal too foofaraw. No, damn the settlements, I say. It won’t shine, and whar’s the dollars? Hows’ever, beaver’s bound to rise. Human nature can’t go on selling beaver a dollar a pound. No, no, that aren’t agoin’ to shine much longer, I know. They was the times when this child first went to the mountains. Six dollars the plew--old ’un or kitten. Wagh! But it’s bound to rise, I say again. And hyar’s a coon knows whar to lay his hand on a dozen pack right handy, and then he’ll take the Taos trail, wagh!"

  He knocks the ashes out of his pipe and gazes about at Baptiste, Jim, Bill, and the two squaws. "Well," says Baptiste, "beaver may not rise. I know those civilized folks who used to wear beaver hats. They say silk is all the fashion. And they are fools for fashion."

  "Wagh!" says Bill, "they be."

  Baptiste and Running Stream spread their robes on a soft, grassy spot thirty feet from the fire under a sky clustered with stars thick and big as columbine in June.

  "Paump," she asks, "why do dollars matter to him?" Baptiste looks at her in the dark. Running Stream usually doesn’t ask questions.

  "Just to buy possibles and trade goods," Baptiste says.

  "They don’t matter," she claims. "Everything you need is here. My people have lived here since before the memories of the grandfathers of the oldest men. The One-who-created-all has provided everything for us here. You need no dollars. The white man is crazy for dollars, and he makes the Indian crazy for them."

  Sometimes he thinks she is a lot more than a squaw.

  MAY, 1841: Two sleeps from Fort Laramie, Baptiste, Bill, Jim, and Long Hatcher were making camp on the South Fork of the Platte. They heard footsteps. "Speak up," said Baptiste, "or you go under." Two Indians walked into the penumbra of the fire and made the sign for peace. "Sit and talk," Baptiste told them in their own language.

  The talk was the usual, effusive expressions of friendship and good intentions. After ten minutes the trappers found out what it was about--Bill’s mule hee-hawed, and then hooves clapped on the hard earth. Bill had his Hawken against the chest of one of the critturs before they could move. Jim and Baptiste ran into the dark.

  "Mind to steal our ponies, do ’ee? Wagh! We’ll steal your topknots if ’ee try. This child’ll steal your cocks"--he mimed it with his Green River--"and deliver ’em personal to your squaws."

  "Bring back the horses," yelled Baptiste somewhere in the dark, "or we kill the hostages."

  The movement off in the brush stopped. Then a voice called for time to consider.

  Back around the fire Bill and Long Hatcher had the hostages trussed up. "Do ye hyar?" said Jim, "it’s the critturs or your scalps. Tell them," he said to Baptiste, "that we burn ’em alive unless we get the animals back."

  Baptiste did. The Arapahos immediately began to sing their death songs, calling for divine protection. "That won’t help," Baptiste said. "Call out and tell your friends that they bring the horses back or we throw you on the fire."

  One of the braves got hold of himself enough to yell the threat in a quavering voice into the darkness.

  "Wait and we talk," called a voice from maybe thirty yards out. There was no sound from the horses, so the Arapahos must have eased them further away.

  Bill tripped one of the braves and shoved him face down into the fire. The man screamed and rolled out. The other brave pleaded with his friends to trade the horses for their lives.

  After a couple of minutes a voice shouted that they would give two horses for the two prisoners. They had stolen eleven horses and mules.

  "No deal," Baptiste yelled. A few more minutes passed. "The niggur must be palavering with his buddies," Jim said. Long Hatcher slipped out into the dark.

  "Two horses for two men," the same voice yelled.

  "May the One-who-created-all curse you," Baptiste yelled, "and give your children club feet."

  They heard the horses begin to move far out in the dark--moving away. Someone screamed out there. A moment later Long Hatcher walked into the camp with a fresh scalp. "He won’t do no more parleying," Hatcher observed.

  All four men built up the fire. The two Arapahos went into a kind of trance, lifting their death songs.[189J

  Bill and Hatcher heaved the first one onto the fire and pinned him there with long sticks. They ignored his screams. After two minutes he stopped thrashing. Baptiste and Jim put the other one in the fire.

  "They heered it," Bill said. "Mebbe that’ll larn ’em."

  After three days the trappers caught up with the whole band. They slipped into the herd at night, knifed the guard, cut out eighteen head, and led them away undetected. Jim was furious, though, because in the dark he hadn’t found his buffler horse.

  JULY, 1842: Baptiste and Jim, returning to meet Sophie and Yellow Leaf with the Shoshones on Black’s Fork, were riding through South Pass. The July afternoon was almost unbearably hot. The pass was a twenty-mile breadth of sagebrush flat and parched buffalo grass. The plain shimmered with heat waves, and the distant hills seemed to be detached from the earth. There was no
t a breath of air in the pass.

  Ahead they thought they could see figures above the sagebrush, but in the shiny blur they couldn’t be sure. Figures, sure enough. A man and a woman, the man flopped on the ground, the woman bending over him, the horses drooping nearby.

  "Afternoon," Jim offered, "need some help?"

  The woman looked a little scared. A breed and a niggur who look as rascally as Indians, Baptiste thought. She probably thinks we’ll scalp him and rape her.

  "Water," croaked the man. "I’m dying for lack of water.” A lot of words from a dying man, Baptiste thought.

  Jim swung off his horse. "Don’t got no water," he said, "but hyar’s some whisky." They had been parceling out the whisky all the way from Laramie. Jim held the man’s head up and started to tip the kettle.

  "What’s that ye say?" the man asked. He had just gotten a load of Jim’s black face.

  "Whisky. Drink."

  The man turned his head out of the way of the pouring stream, and it dribbled off his cheek onto the ground. "God save me," he sputtered, as though he’d actually gotten some in his mouth, "no spirits. I won’t partake of alcohol. I’d rather go to my Savior now."

  Jim looked at him disgustedly.

  "You aire somteeng." Baptiste spoke up for the first time. "You lay zere and die. Idiot! And go to hell. No wan weel miss you." Jim was grinning.

  "What about your wife? Standing here in ze sun? She ees not pretending to die. She is not yellow-leevered. She is fine, spirited woman, fit to leeve and make children. You go ahead and die. We take her with us."

  Jim grabbed her and helped Baptiste get her up behind him. She looked terrified. Baptiste gave his horse a kick and trotted off, him right behind. She was wailing in Baptiste’s ear about being left to die with her beloved, about being consecrated to him as though to jesus. A quarter mile away Baptiste looked back and saw the fellow standing up in the sagebrush. Down on Big Sandy Creek late that afternoon they caught up with the main party. Baptiste handed Mrs. Jones down with a polite flourish.