Across the Endless River

by Thad Carhart

  Baptiste explained in a voiceless whisper that they planned to ford the river a mile downwind of the buffalo, then join the hunters on that side of the herd. An hour later they were riding into a makeshift camp where twenty Pawnees were listening to a warrior who said only a few words and filled in the rest with gestures and grunts. Baptiste drew close to whisper an explanation. “The scouts have just come in. Their hunters are about to drive the herd toward us.”

  The Pawnees jumped on their horses, bareback or with a flimsy hide girthed well forward, and seized the reins. Paul noticed that instead of bridles, cords of braided hair were lashed around the horses’ lower jaws. Eagle feathers tied to their manes and tails fluttered in the light breeze. The hunters wore only loincloths and moccasins. Each held a bow in one hand and had a whip lashed to the other wrist and a quiver of arrows slung across his shoulders. Their excitement was growing. The first riders began to leave, heading up a nearby hill that separated them from the herd.

  Schlape hissed at Baptiste, half in request, half in alarm. “I have no weapon. I had best wait here until you return.”

  “You will come with us!” Baptiste replied. He was astonished at how completely Schlape misunderstood what was about to happen. “This draw may be full of stampeding buffalo in another ten minutes. Just stay close, hang on, and, no matter what happens, don’t get off your horse!” Then he turned, waited for Paul and Schlape to follow the Indians, and fell in at the rear as the band set off at an easy run to the top of the rise.

  They sat their horses side by side along the ridgeline, no longer concealing themselves. Paul beheld the beginning of a classic pincer movement, as pure as the map exercises he had studied in military school. From a range of hills directly opposite, about a mile distant, a dozen riders could be seen descending on the left flank of the herd. To the right, another group of hunters was riding toward the buffalo at a full gallop; the animals on that side of the herd had begun to turn and run toward the river to the left. As the herd turned and gained speed, some of the bulls began to gallop up the hill toward the line of motionless horsemen. The Pawnee warrior at the far end of the line raised his bow high, gave a piercing yell, and the riders descended at a full run into the immense basin filled with stampeding buffalo.

  They forced the approaching bulls back down the hill and into the headlong race toward the river. In less than a minute, all was chaos. Paul was surrounded by running buffalo and the riders were lost to view in the walls of dust thrown up by their pounding hooves. The din was like a long explosion, the thunder of thousands of hooves punctuated by the bellowing of the bulls as they took flight. Several times Paul’s horse shied away from buffalo that came too close, but it never faltered on the uneven terrain. The basin floor, which had looked smooth from above, was in fact pitted by an endless network of dry cracks and fissures that sometimes opened into larger holes, and Paul’s mount instinctively avoided the dangers. As the herd thinned out and less dust hung in the air, Paul saw that most of the buffalo had run through ravines or breaks in the hills away from the river.

  All around him lay the carcasses of freshly killed animals as whooping Pawnees continued to pursue smaller groups of buffalo, drawing close alongside and shooting arrows into their furry hides. Paul caught sight of Schlape, an indifferent rider, who grasped the leading edge of his small saddle with both hands as his piebald horse bounded forward. In an instant he was gone in a flurry of thick dust. The exhilaration of the first clash with the herd throbbed in Paul’s veins and the impulse to continue the chase took over. Ahead he saw a Pawnee close in amid a band of buffalo that had veered down a dry wash, and he reined his horse sharply in pursuit.

  The Pawnee hunter disappeared over the edge of a shallow ravine, and Paul galloped directly behind a dozen buffalo. His horse drew close to the trailing bull and dodged a jerk of its head and its dangerous curved horn. The buffalo’s repeated attempts to gore the horse slowed it. Trusting the horse to maintain a safe distance, Paul grasped the reins in two fingers of his left hand, raised his twin-barreled rifle with his right, and sighted behind the point of the shoulder. He fired and saw the animal flinch as a trickle of blood appeared along its hump of muscle, but the beast continued to run at full speed. He pulled the trigger again, and this time the buffalo abruptly slowed and soon stopped.

  Paul reined in his horse and stood off from where the wounded bull faced him, its tongue lolling out heavily, dripping saliva and blood onto its matted beard. From the frenzy of the chase the atmosphere was transformed into an eerie quiet, an intimacy between hunter and prey. Paul could hear the bull’s labored breathing, their isolation accentuated by the distant cries of the others. Two or three times the buffalo turned its head, its glassy eyes staring dully, as if waiting for something. Paul felt for his belt and found his small revolver. He removed it as he started to coax his horse toward the bull. A close-range shot to the head would surely be an adequate coup de grâce.

  “Stop!” he heard Baptiste cry. He was descending the nearby rise at a gentle gallop. As he drew close, he explained. “Pistol shot won’t do a thing to that animal except rile him up.” He walked his horse carefully to the other side of the bull. “Yearling bulls usually have a lot more fight left in them than you would think.” He loaded his rifle with a tamping iron that was slung around his neck, raised the barrel, and drew a bead behind the bull’s shoulder blade, aiming to pierce its heart. He fired, and the bull shuddered, fell on its knees, then rolled heavily onto its side as blood poured from its mouth. Its outstretched legs shivered violently, and it was still.

  In the excitement of the breakneck pursuit Paul had lost all notion of time or distance. As they made their way back to the river, he took in how much ground he had covered in the chase. They had traveled several miles. He and Baptiste came upon small groups of Indians skinning and butchering the dead animals. The air was thick with the drone of flies and yellow jackets as the hunters stacked pieces of bloody raw meat next to the carcasses. Paul watched the Indians work their knives quickly to separate flesh from bone, occasionally stopping to eat a choice morsel sliced from the innards.

  They passed three Pawnees gathered around a massive bull in a small hollow. One of the hunters was a boy Paul judged to be no more than twelve years old. As he and Baptiste drew near, the boy shouted and laughed to his companions and reached into the gut of the buffalo with his knife. He withdrew a steaming mass of dark brown jellylike flesh and held it high above his head and twirled around in a little dance. Then the boy took a bite of the dripping viscera and his friends shouted their approval. Paul was astonished, but curiosity quickly overcame his surprise. Baptiste turned in his saddle to explain.

  “It’s his first buffalo. He’s eating the liver to celebrate.”

  The boy saw them watching and ran to where their horses stood, holding the liver up to Paul and nodding exuberantly as he offered his trophy. Baptiste said, “It’s a great honor to taste his first kill.” Seeing Paul’s eyes widen in disbelief at what was expected, he added, “Even a very small bite is enough to save him from insult.” Paul nodded slowly, breathed deeply, then leaned down to taste the boy’s prize. He felt the warm ooze of liquid on his moustache and chin as he bit off a piece of liver and closed his mouth. He swallowed without breathing, tasting the bitterness of the buffalo’s gut and his own bile rising. Baptiste also took a bite of the liver, bestowing signs of congratulation on the boy, who had become a man that day.

  Vultures wheeled thickly above them as they continued toward the river. They encountered others collecting the spoils of the hunt. Women had appeared with packhorses and dogs fitted with travois poles to carry the meat back to camp. The groups laughed and shouted as they butchered the dead buffalo that lay all around.

  Not far from the river, they found Schlape in the company of three Pawnee women. He was lying on a buffalo hide watching them remove the tendons of a cow, his face, hands, and shirtfront covered with blood. Paul leaped from his saddle and approached him anxiously,
fearing a serious wound, but Schlape, guessing Paul’s concern, shook his head and smiled wanly. The two men conversed briefly in German.

  “He fell from his horse several miles from here,” Paul told Baptiste, “and these women found him and carried him here on their litter. He has only bruised his shoulder, but since he was very thirsty and far from water, they gave him the buffalo’s blood to drink.” Baptiste nodded as if this were normal. Paul’s hand, too, was stained with blood and his moustache soaked in it. In fact, everyone they passed bore the same markings. We look like a pack of wolves, he thought, our muzzles and paws soaked with the blood of our prey.

  PART TWO

  A NEW WORLD

  SIX

  DECEMBER 1823

  Baptiste gazed out over the gray expanse of the Mississippi Delta in the early-morning light and thought back to the beginning of the voyage. From his youngest days, he had been in and out of canoes on the Missouri and the Mississippi and on most of their tributary streams. Long river voyages were nothing new to him. Even the trip he and Paul made from St. Louis to New Orleans had not been so very different from what he had expected, though he had never before traveled by steamboat. The river was the river, and while it grew ever wider and more powerful as they headed south, its essential nature didn’t change. Its waters roiled constantly in muddy turmoil, snags of bushes and branches sometimes blocked the entire width of the channel, sand bars could ground a boat suddenly in a place where deep water had flowed only days before, but the fundamental proposition was always the same: the current wanted to carry you downstream, and your efforts and calculations had to take into account the simple fact of the river’s southward flow. He had been impressed by the way a river pilot could read its currents and moods in a glance, as if he were a hunter looking at a trail and assessing the recent passage of animals.

  Living on board the small steamboat had taken some getting used to. Its engine ran constantly and the paddle wheels churned to keep them in the channel and added to the downstream momentum. The lack of effort was the hardest part to accept, and the absence of contact with the water. In a canoe, the steady rhythm of one’s paddling became as automatic as breathing. He felt cut off, idly watching the banks roll by and sleeping on the boat, rather than making camp on the shore.

  At first the countryside was familiar, and boyhood memories returned as they steamed past places that held meaning: the broad sandy island in a bend of the river where he had shot and dressed his first buck; the flat shoals along which he and his father had camped twelve years earlier and been roused from their sleep by a tremendous shaking of the ground that turned the river into rapids wherever they looked; the fast-moving channel where a friend had drowned with his entire family when their flatboat smashed against submerged rocks.

  In those first days, too, they had passed the tiny group of wooden buildings on a sheltered inlet—a two-story tavern and three low shacks—where men stopped for an hour or two of pleasure with one of the women who lived there. Baptiste had visited a number of times in the last year with his earnings from Curtis & Woods, and he shrugged as he recalled the peculiar mix of longing, relief, and sadness that stayed with him after these encounters. Young women in the Mandan villages had encouraged his first awkward advances years ago, but since then he had understood that, in the white man’s world, marriage or payment were the only sure ways to be with a woman. The last time, it had been a Creole girl from downriver no older than him. When they had finished, she bit his ear as he sat up, then rubbed herself down with a cloth like an animal that has been exercised.

  Gradually he had watched the banks of the river change, and two days after they had passed the place where the Ohio joined the Mississippi, he became aware that he had never been so far downstream. He would not see any of these places for a long time, Baptiste realized, but the thought did not make him unhappy. He only wondered when he would return, and what sort of person he would have become. These and a thousand other thoughts filled his mind as they made their steady way toward the mouth of this river that was longer than he had imagined.

  Something set New Orleans apart from all the towns he had ever visited. In St. Louis, the men talked about setting off for the upper Missouri, loading up with supplies for their trips to the trading posts. Leaving with traps and guns and ammunition, they wouldn’t be seen for a couple of seasons or a whole year at a time. When you left St. Louis and headed upriver, you left behind the white man’s ways and entered the world of Indians. In New Orleans, there was no sense of being on a frontier. The long stretch between St. Louis and New Orleans was no longer wild and separate. The towns and settlements they stopped at along the route confirmed his impression that the white man was in possession of the river and the surrounding land.

  From Baptiste’s earliest years, he had known that other tribes were sometimes to be feared, and this sense of menace had always been a part of the landscape. For the first time in his life, he now came across a long stretch of the river where Indians not only were not feared—as they sometimes still were even in St. Louis—but thought of as shiftless louts or, at best, godless heathens, to be pitied and converted to Christianity. This was at odds with everything he had known before. In St. Louis, Indians were often vilified, but they were never dismissed as insignificant.

  The Indians in St. Louis were generally trading parties of Pawnee or Omaha, occasionally a group of Mandan or Crow that had made the trip downriver from the far north. They kept to themselves, doing business with one of the agents in town in the daytime and camping in the clearings across the river at night. Only a few Indians lived in town by themselves, cut off from their tribes for one reason or another. They were sad cases who helped at the livery stables or the blacksmiths and lived in shacks or haylofts behind the main buildings. Most often you would see them in a drunken stupor down by the water, but everyone understood that they were exceptions, and even the Indians who passed through scorned them pitilessly.

  In New Orleans, what he saw shocked him. Rather than a handful of individuals with a vacant look and a liking for whiskey, there were dozens of exhausted Indians wandering the streets or slumped in the shadows, sometimes in the company of similarly wretched Negroes or Mexicans who also seemed lost. Men, women, and whole families sat on the boardwalks or along the levee, begging handouts from passersby. No vestige of tribal clothing remained; rags and cast-off garments covered them. The look of despair in their eyes was like the look of frightened animals. Only the color of their skin showed that they were Indians.

  The memory of a chance encounter in New Orleans still troubled Baptiste. He had been walking along one of the arcaded streets near the cathedral in the company of Schlape when he was startled by a Mandan cry. A woman leaning against one of the arcade’s pillars yelled, “Young one!”

  The sound of Mandan so surprised him that he looked up at once, and as their eyes met there was no doubt she had been calling to him. She repeated the words more softly, and the familiar sounds resonated deep within. The woman stared as if she were looking through him to a place that only she could see. Her tone was so personal that at first he wondered if he knew her. Was she from the villages he had lived in as a young boy, a friend of his mother, perhaps, come to grief on the streets of this city? But he saw nothing familiar in her features, nor she in his, other than the sight of another Indian, incongruously dressed in a suit of clothes and conversing with a white man in a foreign tongue. Her eyes showed dismay.

  Schlape had broken the spell by producing a coin from his pocket and laying it at the squaw’s feet. She did not acknowledge the gesture, and Baptiste felt her eyes follow him as they passed by. He could at least have responded with a few words of Mandan, but words failed him, in any language. What had she wanted? Was it in his power to give it to her? Baptiste shook his head and tried to banish her memory. Here at the end of the Mississippi, the longest part of their voyage was about to begin.

  SEVEN

  FEBRUARY 11, 1824

  ABOARD TH
E SMYRNA

  Dear Captain Clark,

  I write to you near the end of our sea voyage. I have in mind your advice to commit my new experiences to paper and to send them your way when I can. These two sheets do not permit a full account of all that has happened since the Duke and I left St. Louis, but I will mention some of the things I have seen during my seven weeks aboard ship.

  Our ocean passage got off to a slow start. The day before Christmas, we boarded the Smyrna in New Orleans, twenty passengers all together, with all the Duke’s “specimens” in the hold. Then we set sail for the mouth of the Mississippi, but after a day the winds gave out and the current wasn’t strong enough to carry us on its own since the tide comes up the river so strongly. It wasn’t until the 7th of January that the wind shifted and we could leave the pilothouse at Balize and set out to sea. It was strange to leave the land behind, but pretty soon it seemed normal. I even got used to eating my meals at a table that rolled back and forth like a canoe in bad rapids.

  We saw the coast of Cuba and then some islands off Florida, but that was the last land we set eyes on. It was warm for the first couple of weeks, with a steady wind to keep us going. The water was so clear we could see fish every day, large bonitos and dorados, little ones with wings that sometimes flew right up onto the deck, and groups of dolphins that swam and jumped close to the ship. Duke Paul told me that dolphins are actually mammals and have to come up to breathe, like whales. We saw many whales the second week, not more than a hundred yards from the ship. Of course I thought of the story you told me about my mother holding me inside the whale skeleton. They make a loud snort, like a dozen buffalo bulls in rut, then they shoot a fountain of water from the nose hole on their backs.

  Around Newfoundland in Canada (I noted the latitude and longitude: 40° 36´ north, 54° 21´ west) the wind came up from the west and the sea turned as nasty as the clouds in a twister. The temperature dropped like a stone. We got hail, snow, and sleet, and even lightning and thunder. We lost gear overboard, some of the rigging blew away, and we all got wet, even inside with the doors closed. The waves were like mountains that moved, and all we did was go up one side of the mountain and down the other for ten days. The Smyrna is three times the size of your house, yet in that sea it felt small and flimsy. But, as you would say, we proceeded on—what else could we do? There were a couple of times when it seemed like we’d be headed straight to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean—even the other passengers felt so—but somehow we came through the storms in one piece and no one overboard.