Deadville

by Robert F. Jones

  The tribe which the Daughters belonged to were Mountain Crows, a small band called the Erarapi’o, or Kicked-in-Their-Bellies, while the main body of Mountain Crows was known as the Araraho. “Why the name Kicked-in-Their-Bellies?” I asked. Plover didn’t know, but the Calf said it came from an incident many many winters ago when a proud old chief of the Araraho got kicked in the belly by a horse he had stolen from the Sioux. The Araraho laughed and laughed, so that finally the proud chief got very angry and took his whole family away to live separate from the main body. Oh, the Crows love a joke, they do, but they can be mighty rough about it.

  These River Crows around the fort were a sorry sight. Their tepees were ragged and worn like they hadn’t killed any fresh buffalo robes for years, all smoke-stained at the top and halfway down, some of the Indians reeling around drunk even this early in the morning. One toothless old woman lay passed out in the road, her white old head resting on a pile of horse manure over a puddle of vomit. You could smell the booze reek a rifle-shot downwind of her.

  “Fort Indians,” Spybuck said, riding up alongside me. “They grow dependent on the trader’s goods, iron tools at first—arrowheads, lance tips, awls, needles, kettles, guns—then of course gunpower and lead, coffee and sugar; end up swapping their wives and ponies for a drink of diluted whiskey. I have seen it happen too many times; my very own people, once the fiercest, proudest warrior nation east of the Big River, have been unmanned by this hunger for white man’s goods. It’s not a good thing, but how can we prevent it? I’m afraid that only a holy war, red against white, can stay our doom.”

  Fort Cass at least appeared ready for one. The whole shebang was defended by two sturdy blockhouses, which dominated the northeast and southwest comers of the stockade. The blockhouses stood two stories high and had pointed roofs. On each of them was mounted a brace of swivel guns or blunderbusses, plus a one-pounder cannon apiece which could fire (I was told) sixteen musket balls per shot. Together these guns covered all four walls, and of course the main gate. So long as Mr. Samuel Tulloch, the company agent, and his halfbreed engagés stayed alert, no Indian war party was going to break in on them for thievery or mayhem.

  We arrived at the fort on the morning of July 14, 1833, discharging our weapons as we approached, both to alert the crew to our presence and to display our peaceful intentions. The gates swung wide. After exchanging introductions and pleasantries with Mr. Tulloch, a spry, small but well-knit man of middle years, and enjoying a fine breakfast of buffalo steaks, boudins, small beer, and the first fried eggs we had eaten since leaving the Missouri, we commenced trading. When Tulloch learned that the Shawnee wished to sell his catch of beaver, he broke out a keg of whiskey and offered Spy a drink.

  “Not just yet,” Golightly said.

  “So be it,” Tulloch replied, leading the way to the parlor. One of his pork eaters hauled in the packs of peltry.

  “Fine plews for the most part,” Tulloch allowed as he leafed through Spybuck’s packs. “Good, thick muffoon; no spoilage.” He slung the packs one by one onto the scale. They came to 260 pounds. “How many skins all told?”

  “One hundred and seventy-five,” Spybuck said.

  Tulloch looked at him over his spectacles. “You do not mind if I inspect them individually, I am sure.” He was afraid we might have freighted the pelts with sand to increase their weight, or perhaps slipped a few heavy but less valuable badger pelts into the packs.

  “Help yourself,” Spy said.

  It was as the Shawnee had told him. Tulloch did some ciphering on a slate. “Will you be wanting hard cash or credit?” he asked us.

  “How much of each or either?” Spy asked.

  “I can pay you 500 dollars in coin of the realm, or extend to you 600 dollars in credit. I must say you have a remarkable command of the American language, sir, especially for a red man.”

  “Oh, we have been dealing with you for a long while now, beginning in the days of my illustrious uncle,” Golightly said, smiling. “You may perchance have heard of him. He was known as Tecumseh?”

  Tulloch’s eyebrows shot up behind his specs, and so, too, I am sure, did mine. Every schoolboy in America had read of the great Shawnee war chief, and many had nightmares about him to this day. Or anyway, this one did! Tecumseh was the Shooting Star, the blazing Comet of the Shawnees, back in the days when they and their allies the Wyandots and the Delawares terrorized the Old Northwest with battle ax, scalp knife, and firebrand. In league with the British, Tecumseh and his brother, the Prophet, led a great, bloody, all-scourging holy war against the settlers who came in ever greater numbers across the Alleghenies, through the Cumberland Gap, and down the Ohio from Fort Pitt. It was not until Tecumseh ran afoul of Gen. William Henry Harrison at Tippecanoe in 1811 and two years later on the Thames River near Detroit that the Shooting Star burnt out. He died in the last battle.

  “As to your price,” Spy continues, cool as spring water, “I was told by Mister Kenneth McKenzie himself, only last winter at Fort Union, that the American Fur Company would be paying three dollars and a quarter a pound for prime beaver this year. Your own scale puts my catch at 260 pounds, which by my humble reckoning would come to 845 dollars.”

  Well, this was news to me. That damn rascal Captain Beckwourth had led me to believe the paying price for beaver in the mountains was only three dollars per plew, each of which weighed a pound and a half. He had short changed us by 50 percent, plus a quarter of a dollar, on each and every pelt. My plews should have been worth $650, where he valued them at only 400. Oh, damn him for a thief and a liar!

  Mr. Tulloch quick says, “I have had advice by courier from downriver, only recently, that the Saint Louis price for beaver has fallen below three dollars. Seems like the fashion in men’s hats has changed over in London. They now prefer silk to beaver pelt. … Say, I am a mite bit thirsty, what with all this ’rithmetic talk; won’t you gents join me in a glass a of Old Killdevil?”

  “No,” says Spy. “But I will buy a keg off you once we agree on a fair price for my peltry.”

  “Oh, I dassen’t sell any whiskey, not to Indians or white men, either one. The goverment is quite strict about that nowadays. Each keelboat that comes up the Yellowstone is inspected thoroughly for contraband. What I have here is for my personal use only, though I should like to share it with you all on this festive occasion.”

  “How the hell much are you going to pay for the damn beaver?” Owney says. I look over, and by God, his blood is up! He wants to get moving toward that gold, and all this dawdling is driving him bats.

  “I can go up to $715, hard cash,” Tulloch says. “Not a penny more.”

  “Seven fifty,” Owney counters. “That is, seven-five-zero, or we will take the furs down to Saint Louis ourselves.”

  “Or, by God, burn them!” Spy adds.

  “Seven forty-five,” says Tulloch. “Eight hundred in credit.”

  Owney looks over at Spybuck. The Shawnee nods.

  “Done. But we shall take it in credit, if you please. We must buy ourselves an outfit for the White Hart Hollow, and cash, I take it, don’t go far in that country.”

  “No, it don’t,” says Tulloch.

  “Now I will have that whiskey,” Spybuck says.

  MORE HAGGLING ENSUED as Owney ordered picks, shovels, axes, adzes, saws, sledges, hammers, spikes, and nails; gunpowder, lead, a spare bullet mold; and so forth and so forth. Pine Leaf and the Daughters had been out and around the fort, drinking cup after cup of hot sweetened coffee with the pork eaters. Now they came skittering into the parlor and began demanding foofaraw. Yipping in high excited voices, even the Pine Leaf. Finally Owney had to buy a quantity of colored beads for them, along with some moccasin awls, a pound of vermillion (for ten dollars!), one of blue paint, and another of yellow ocher (not quite so dear), along with half a dozen looking glasses, just to shut them up.

  “Now we will need us some staunch pack mules to lug this lot upcountry with,” Owney said when they’d finished. Tu
lloch led us out to the corral. Spy brought along the whiskey keg; by the ease with which he lifted it I could tell he’d depleted it some already. Yet he did not stagger. His eyes, though, were turning an ominous red.

  Most of the horses were Indian ponies, swirling wild-eyed away from our approach like a calico whirlwind; the mules stood tall and calm, off in one corner of the corral; only the occasional twitch of an ear or a writhe of rump hide to scare off the flies betrayed the fact that they were indeed alive.

  “What do you think, Spy?” Owney asked.

  The Shawnee studied the mules for a few minutes. Then he climbed through the rails and went over to them, lifting lips, checking for galls, punching bellies, and knocking his knuckles against cannon bones. Finally he led four of them over to us by their halters.

  “These the best,” Spy said. “Rest too old, too sick. No last long on trail.”

  He sounded strange, his voice thick, his grammar that of a stage hall Indian. It was how the booze took him, I was to learn. …

  “How much?” Owen asked Tulloch.

  “Eighty apiece.”

  “Too damn much,” Spy said. “Sixty.” He spit in the dirt.

  Wait a minute, I thought yet again. Beckwourth charged us $200 apiece to buy back our horses, and mules are more costly than horses out here. Once again my blood neared the boiling point. …

  “Seventy.”

  “Sixty-five,” Owney said, “with the pack saddles included; take it or leave it.”

  “Done,” said Tulloch, grinning now for the first time. “You are a hard man to deal with; it was a pleasure doing business with you.”

  DURING THE NIGHT, after a fine supper of chitterlings, roasted turkey, Yorkshire pudding, mince pie, and coffee, I woke up restless. We were sleeping in the warehouse and I saw right away that Spy was gone. He had eaten only a spot of supper, pouring himself cup after cup of whiskey instead. I went to the door and looked outside. A gang of fort Indians was staggering around in the moonlight, and there was Spy with them in the compound, dead drunk, reeling like a fort Indian himself. Spy had a powder keg with him and was laying down a train to the little log house that served as the fort’s magazine. By God, I thought, he is about to begin his holy war by blowing the whole damn establishment to kingdom come!

  The fort Indians slipped into the shadows soon as they saw me, like the rats old Thump used to hunt at the dump. But these rats were all wasted with booze and consumption. I could hear them hacking and wheezing there in the dark. Anyway, I figure that’s what set Spy off, the plight of those poor devils.

  He turns and sees me now. Mutters something in Shawnee. “Ne- kah-noh. …” Which I later learnt meant “My friend.” Then he looks at me more closely, and his eyes go squirrelly. “Matchele ne tha-tha!” he yells. “You are my enemy!

  “Tschi!” he says. “Kill!”

  Well, I coldcocked him easy enough alongside the head with a billet of firewood I had carried with me for a club, and dragged him back to his blankets, where I wrapped him up good. Then I took the whiskey keg out to the compound and poured the sorry few ounces that remained of it onto the ground. From the shadows came the sudden mournful howls of the fort Indians; as I closed the warehouse door behind me I saw them dash out into the moonlight and lap up what they could of the dregs.

  WHEN WE WERE packed and ready to leave the following morning, Tulloch told us he had spent a lot of time up in that Blackfoot country where we were headed, trapping the headwaters of the Snake and clear on over to Day’s River in the Oregon Territory. “That was back in the twenties when I was working for Smith, Jackson, and Sublette,” he said. “Bug’s Boys—the Blackfeet—is some tough. The Blackfoot nation consists of four tribes: the Siksika or Blackfeet proper, the Bloods or Kahna, the Pikuni or Piegans, and sometimes the Grovan of the prairies, who also call themselves the Atsina. Bloods and Siksika are the meanest; the Piegans are usually willing to trade but will kill you just as dead if they take a mind to it. The Grovan is just plain sneaky and murderous. Early in ’28 me and four other Americans, one of them Pinckney Sublette, was holed up with a British fur brigade under Peter Skene Ogden, of the Hudson’s Bay Company you know; snowed in we were, and we had no snowshoes. Damn Ogden, he had plenty, I am certain sure, but he would not sell us any. We made some, but they did not work right. Snow eight feet deep anyway. Finally, in March, when the snow begun to melt, we got away, heading for the Three Forks of the Missouri, up where you fellers are going to, and Bugs Boys jumped us good. Grovans, I think they was, though we had no time to ask them. They killed Pinckney, an Iroquois named Baptiste, and two others of my party. Young Pinckney was brother to Bill and Milton Sublette; a good man, hard to lose him. And it would not have happened if that accursed Briton Peter Ogden had just sold us those webs we so desperately needed. Hell, I wouldn’t have minded if he’d charged us ten times what they were worth. If we’d had them we’d of been long gone before the Blackfeet were on the prod.”

  He pauses to let the moral sink in.

  “Now, boys,” he says, “I happen to have some very fine snowshoes in the warehouse, Nez Percé webs they are, and at a bargain price. What say ye?”

  “My brother and I hail from Vermont,” Owney says. “We grew up on snowshoes, and know how to build them—snowshoes that actually work.”

  “Suit yourselves,” says Tulloch, but he looks dubious nonetheless.

  Spybuck groaned, rubbed the knot on his head where I’d hit him, and we rode on out of there, west by southwest for the Three Forks.

  SEVEN

  WE TRAVELED UPSTREAM along the Yellowstone, through open prairie for the most part, with small herds of buffalo grazing as far as the eye could see. Some of the fort Indians followed along with us for a ways, hoping, I guess, that we had another keg of whiskey in our packs, but when none was forthcoming they lost heart, stole a small brass cook pot and a few forks and spoons from our messware, and counted it a worthwhile excursion. I was for chasing after them and getting our stuff back, but Spy said, “Let the poor devils go. They have little enough in life. Besides, they will only stick a butcher knife in your guts if you catch them.”

  The sole landmark of note along the way was Pompey’s Pillar, a great block of sandstone that rises along the left bank of the river 150 or 200 feet high. Lewis and Clark found it… or actually Captain Clark found it on his way back to the Mandans in 1806, coming down the Yellowstone in dugout canoes after their winter in Oregon. He named it for Pomp, the baby son of the Indian squaw Sacajawea and her husband, the Frenchman Charbonneau, who was their guide and interpreter on the trip. Captain Clark is said to have carved his initials in the sandstone.

  We got there late in the day and made camp by the river; and while Spybuck and Bar-che-am-pe went out to shoot us some supper, the Daughters and I climbed the rock to see if we could find Captain Clark’s initials. We found them, and fooled around some up there. It was a fine view of the prairie with broken, nameless mountains to the south of us and far to the west the great green heave of the Absarokas just topping the red horizon. A big angry eagle circled us where we sat up there on top of the Pillar, swooping down on us from time to time; and the Daughters shrieked and made like they was scared, so nothing would do for it but that I calm their fears with a bit of hugging and kissing and more. Oh they were always in the mood for it, yes indeed.

  “You make baby for me just like that Pompey boy, hey?” said the Calf.

  “No, he make two babies!” Plover yelped. “One for each of us.”

  God forbid, I thought.

  We forded Clark Fork of the Yellowstone with no problems, and then the smaller Stillwater River ditto; these were good steady mules Spy had picked for us. Then with the Absaroka Range to our left, a big brawling stream that Spy said was called the Boulder River came crashing out of the mountains, and then the Yellowstone hooked to the south, up into some really high country. The river had been muddy and slow for most of the distance we’d come from Fort Cass, but now it got narrower, clear
er, colder, and we could see big trout holding along the bottom and snapping grasshoppers whenever the wind blew them on the water. We left the Yellowstone and pushed on west over a low pass, to drop down into the headwaters of the Missouri.

  So far we had seen not a single Indian, nor sign of their smoke.

  “That will change from now on,” Spy said. “We’ve been passing all this way through Crow country. Beyond this point are Grovans, whom some call the Big Bellies. We must post a guard each and every evening, taking turns through the night to keep watch over our stock. Picket pins and hobbles is the rule in this country.”

  “Are the Grovans as fierce as Tulloch said?” Owney asked.

  “Yes, they can be. Like all these Missouri River Indians, they will steal everything they can lay a hand to if you let them. They will come into your camp professing peace and friendship, hug you and sigh fondly, rolling their eyes with the joy of it, and meanwhile pick your pockets. If you let loose of your gun, even for a moment, they will grab it and shoot you with it, then lift your hair. Yet on another day, when maybe their medicine is bad, they will play the Good Samaritan, feast you on the best bits of buffalo, offer their wives and daughters for your bed; even give you some of their horses free of charge if you are afoot. You cannot predict their moods. But the one thing the Grovans really hate, and all the other Blackfoot bands for that matter, is white men or other Indians poaching in their country, killing their beaver or buffalo, which is like stealing money from their pockets. Oh, they will trade gladly enough, but if they catch you alone on a trap line they will kill you quick as they can. Or maybe not so quick. We red folk are overly fond of torture. I suggest that Dill and I hide our traps right now, bury them deep in the mule packs, and bring them out for use only when we are sure no Blackfeet are in the vicinity.”