Here, in the shade of the willows, the two captains touched the rims of their glasses and drank to Independence Day. Nearby stood the provisions and equipment, under tied-down hides, and the canoes’ sails had been stretched between willows to make awnings for the camp.
“Two years ago this day,” Lewis said, “Mister Jefferson and I touched glasses like this to celebrate the purchase of the Louisiana Territory. It’s hard to believe that was but two years ago, because I’ll swear it seems like I’ve been in this same bedamned Louisiana Territory since I was born.”
“Likewise,” said William with a wink. “And, say, wouldn’t it be a fine joke on us if he’d got tired of it and sold it back to ’em while we been out here?”
Lewis threw his head back and laughed. He was in an unusually good state of mind. His iron boat—which the men had dubbed Experiment—finally had been sheathed with shaved elk skins and singed buffalo hides, submerged in the river and then placed on racks over smouldering fires to shrink the skins tight, and he was immensely pleased with the look of her. Eight men could carry her easily despite her length, and she would accommodate, he estimated, five to eight tons. He still had not devised a satisfactory way to seal the seams, but was sure that ingenuity would arrive with something. He had scoured the valley for pine driftwood, which had been put in a homemade kiln to cook out pitch, but that thus far had been in vain; it had yielded none. “Never mind that,” he said. “Bees wax, buffalo tallow, and charcoal will make ’er tight enough to float till we get up in the mountains, and there we’ll find pine gum enough to cork a navy. But I’m very anxious to go. The season’s wasting.”
“Aye. Three months since we left Fort Mandan, and we’re still not into the mountains. We’ve had two Independence Days on this river, and I hope to have my next in Kentucky.”
Lewis looked at him for a long time. “Well,” he said, “don’t bank on it.”
Up on the plains they could hear the mating bellows of bull buffalo; it sounded like hundreds of them were roaring at once. Lewis slapped himself on both sides of the neck, killing several mosquitoes that were feasting on him there. “As for now,” he said, “let’s us go make our speeches to the men, and then have at the feast.” He sniffed the air. The aromas of bacon, beans, dumplings, and buffalo tongue came from the camp.
Several of the men pretended to weep—or perhaps really did—as the last ounce of the Corps’ whiskey was poured that evening after the feast. But they got suitably merry on it, and danced to Cruzatte’s fiddle until a rainshower at nine o’clock drove them in under the sail awnings, and there they sat and sang and told jokes and tall tales until the middle of the night.
“Oh, God, Cap’n,” Sergeant Ordway asked William in a lugubrious tone, “why did you gentlemen only bring enough ardent sperrits for two years?” Everyone in the shelter nodded.
William put a hand on Ordway’s shoulder and replied with a wistful smile, “Reckon we just didn’t know you fellers well enough. We thought we’d brought enough for five years.”
LEWIS COULD NOT EVEN WAIT TO GET DRESSED THE NEXT morning. He clambered out of his bedding and darted down to the Experiment in only his breeches. William saw him run down the shore to the place where the vessel lay bottom up on its rack over the coals, silhouetted against the glittering morning-lit river. Then he saw him running his fingers over the hull. Then he saw him turn and swing his fist downward as if flinging an imaginary hat to the ground.
“Oh, oh,” William murmured, and he got out of his blanket and, barefooted on the cold, dewy ground, went down.
Lewis was scowling; his eyes were puffy from sleep but watering with tears of frustration. “Look. Damn it. God damn this place!” The suit of skins had dried snug on the boat frame, as they should have, but the stitch holes gaped; through virtually every one, a speck of light could be seen. “Damnation, what a corking job that’s goin’ to be, and not a drop o’ pitch to be had. Well. Well somehow, we’ll make do.”
William said nothing. But when the hunters went out for meat, he quietly told them to keep a lookout for trees big enough to make a few more dugout canoes—just in case the Experiment might prove a failure altogether.
IT DID.
By July 9, Lewis had covered the entire hull with the bees wax compound, so that it looked not like a skin boat but a smooth black hull molded all in a piece, and for a few hours of that day he had the joy of seeing the long vessel floating like a duck. Then a sudden windstorm swamped the Experiment and all the canoes, wetting most of the provisions, and when the storm had subsided, most of the composition had peeled off the skins, and the vessel was as seaworthy as a sieve.
Lewis stood in the river, water to his knees, hands on hips, and stared down at the sunken boat, nibbling his lips, while everyone stood away, afraid to say anything.
“Lookee there,” he said. “The stuff stayed on the buffalo hides, ’cause we left hair on ’em. If we hadn’t shaved the elkskins, she’d likely be afloat yet. Well. Live and learn. No time to start over. We’ve got to move on. Sergeant Gass, knock ’er down and fold ’er up and bury ’er. Save the hides for our tailors.”
And he said not another word about his beloved invention.
William’s party of boat-hewers labored for four days in a mosquito-infested cottonwood grove up the river where they had found two large but windshaken trees. Much of the time was spent in replacing tool handles, fourteen of which broke the first day. “God,” Shields groaned once. “What I wouldn’t give for a nice piece of ash.”
By carving to clear the cracks and twists of the cottonwood, the woodsmen finally completed two deformed but serviceable dugouts to carry most of what would have been borne in the Experiment. The main party, meanwhile, had buried the boat frame, some more baggage, William’s map of the Great Falls, and the wagon wheels that had carried all this freight around the falls.
It was July 15. The portage around that great obstacle had required almost a whole month. The little dugouts were so loaded with meat, grease, baggage, and Indian trade goods that everyone but the oarsmen would have to walk. Some twenty miles ahead stood the snow-topped first range of the great Rocky Mountains. Somewhere about two hundred miles up within the maze of mountains they expected to find the next landmark the Indians at Fort Mandan had told them about: the high, wide, fertile valley where three mountain rivers flowed together to make the headwaters of the Missouri. By their reckonings, they had labored twenty-three hundred miles up this mighty and troublesome river; the Missouri had come to be their very lives.
They rowed the canoes up the river now, a river one hundred yards wide and flanked with sand banks, through a land ablaze with blossoms: prickly pear, great, nodding yellow sunflowers, narrowdock, salmonberry, and lambsquarters. On the plains above them the bull buffaloes roared and mated; behind them the thunder of waterfalls, which had been in their ears for a month, began to fade.
Just ahead lay the Rocky Mountains, gigantic, unknown, yet to be crossed, and they were running out of summertime. Tomorrow was a great question mark.
42
FALLS OF THE OHIO
July, 1805
“GENERAL CLARK, SIR!”
George heard the voice above the rush and trickle of the water, and looked up from the work of his fossil-diggers to see Freeman the mill-hand riding toward him across the shallows of the Ohio. George squinted against the blazing white stone and bright yellow mud of the fossil bed exposed by the low stage of the river.
George waved, signaling the man to come on, then turned back to his helpers. Tick, tick, tick, tick, went their picks and hammers, and their shovels grated as they scraped away marl fragments and mud. Here on this flat, the muck of the riverbed dried into dizzying patterns of rectangular cracks, and it was across this that the messenger was now riding. George brushed flies away from his face. The sun burned through the linen shirt on his shoulders and broiled the bald part of his scalp. “Finesse, now, Hez,” he warned. “That’s the biggest and best cockleshell ever, and I
don’t want it broke.”
“Here’s another one o’ them putrified buffalo pats, Gen’l,” said one of the shovelers, prying up the edge of a turban-shaped rock with the end of his shovel.
“‘Petrified’ is the word, Jack. Put it over yonder with those.” Now the rider was close, and George turned to greet him. He hoped it would not be a real interruption. The river seldom got low enough to uncover this shelf, and whenever it did, he spent most of his daylight hours here. He had found many fine specimens here, from mammoth bones to coral and many-legged seabottom creatures perfectly imprinted chalk-gray on the surface of darker stones. When he worked here his mind was submerged in the slow coagulation of eons, and the problems and disappointments of the present seemed to matter not at all.
“Sir,” Freeman said, “they say it’s the Vice President come to see you, sir!”
“Eh? Aaron Burr is here?”
“They say that, Gen’l.” The messenger’s eyes were alive with curiosity.
George instructed the diggers to bring up on mules the specimens they were working on, and reluctantly mounted his horse.
“Is this Mister Burr really the same what kilt Alexander Hamilton?” Freeman asked as they splashed across the shallows. The items of Eastern news were read from newspapers by those who could read, and then circulated by word of mouth among those who couldn’t, so the people in Kentucky, like this fellow, knew the news, but vaguely.
“Aye, it is,” George replied, now urging his mount up through a leaf-strewn gully out of the riverbank, “shot him in a duel, they say. I gather he’s a ruined man back east, on account o’ that.”
George had been annoyed at this intrusion. But now the many intriguing things he had read and heard about Burr came crawling into his mind, and his curiosity began to wax. It was not unusual for fugitives from failure and scandal back east to drift westward through these parts, often on new schemes. And as George had learned through his encounters with James Wilkinson, it was good for a guardian of the back country to know as much as he could about the intentions of any heroes or scoundrels who came through.
Wilkinson, he thought now, riding up through the baked-earth streets of Clarksville. I wonder does this visit have anything to do with Wilkinson. Wilkinson had got himself appointed governor of the new Louisiana Territory, with his capital at St. Louis.
If Mr. Burr tells me he’s on his way to St. Louis, George thought, I’ll wager it’s him and Wilkinson up to something.
IT WAS A GOOD VISIT FROM THE START. BURR WAS CHEERFUL and charming; he seemed not in the least bitter or dispirited about his fall from grace. He brought more news, and insights into the events of the news, than a dozen newspapers. But he was a voracious listener and a probing inquirer as well, and seemed to have a hundred questions about the West. He was a dandy on the surface, as graceful as a dancing-master, hair silky-black and curly above a high, pale promontory of a forehead, brown eyes alert and quick under satanic eyebrows, a handsome, sensuous, sometimes mocking mouth set in a strong but fine-boned face. He was three years younger than George but looked twenty years younger. George noticed that he only seemed to be drinking, as if to guard his words. It was this that first caused George to feel that Burr was up to something covert; his demeanor was so reminiscent of Wilkinson’s.
They talked for a long time about the French Revolution, about Napoleon, about the Louisiana Purchase, about the Voyage of Discovery, about Meriwether Lewis.
They went down off the porch once to examine some of the fossils and great bones. Burr sat on the huge bone George sometimes used as a bench and touched it with his hand. “I shouldn’t want to have lived when this did,” he said. “A fellow of my stature would make hardly a bite for it. Ha, ha! Now, you, General, would make two bites.”
“Likely it would never have eat either of us,” George said, “’less we’d happened to be up in a tree it was dining on at the time. My opinion is, the beast was arborivorous, notwithstanding what inferences they’ve made at the academies. Come look at this tooth on the porch and I’ll show you what I mean.” George showed him that a tooth of the great beast was not the tooth of a meat-eater.
“I’d no idea you were a naturalist,” said Burr. “One hears back east only of your generalship, your accomplishments in the Revolution.”
“My thirst,” George growled. Then he wished he had not said that. Even to a trusted man, it was not good to reveal one’s bitterness. But the liquor had made him a little hot-brained. “Anyway, if they remember that service at any time, they forget it when it’s time to vote me any relief.”
“I know of your disaffection with the government,” Burr said now, as if he had been waiting for some cue to bring forth a particular subject. “I was most interested, sir, in your part in the Genet matter. I should have given my whole approval to those moves, had I been in a position to have done. Ahm …” He paused here, and George made a business of pouring liquor so as not to seem too intently curious about where Burr was going to go with this line of discussion. “I think Washington was too indulgent to the arrogant Spaniards.”
“Eh. Well. That’s past. Just another of those things, as my Ma would use to say, that turn out one way rather than the other. And p’r’aps better this way, as Louisiana’s ours now and no blood shed for it either. That makes it better, to my mind.”
“An unusual sentiment from a celebrated warrior, if I may say it, sir:”
“My kind of war, Mister President, was to gain as much as possible with as little blood wasted as possible. I lost not a man in my Illinois campaign.”
Burr sat with a forefinger laid in the hollow of his cheek and studied George, and looked as if he were pondering whether to say something. At last he ventured: “You are, I gather, still disaffected with your country.”
“With my country’s government,” George corrected him.
“Your government, then. Would you now, ten years later, still be of a spirit to do such a thing?”
“That’s an odd sort of question, sir. I should have to have a grievance against someone besides my own government in order to go against that someone. And Louisiana is ours now; there is no Spanish block anymore, so I am indifferent to Spain, if that ’someone’ you’re alluding to is Spain. I am, in fact, indifferent to the whole business of government squabbling. Still interested as a student of war and power, of course, but indifferent. Another way of saying it, sir, is that I have since the activities of Citizen Genet considered myself retired from the public life, and right glad of it too.”
“A naturalist.” Burr seemed deflated, disappointed. George said:
“Aye, sir. I am hard to provoke anymore. Maybe I’m a fossil, like those.” He smiled, with just a shade of wistfulness, and inclined his head toward his boneyard. Then he said: “If I may inquire, to what do we owe the honor of having you tour among us?”
“Oh, ahm.” Burr straightened suddenly in his chair and brought his hand down from his cheek. “I am most interested in the West, General. But I know as little about it as you know much. Since the affair at Weehawken—Secretary Hamilton, I mean, rest his soul—I’ve felt a need for open space. The West.” He gazed out over Kentucky.
“The West is out there, now,” George said, pointing down the Ohio toward the setting sun. “This isn’t the West anymore.”
“I’m on my way to St. Louis,” Burr said.
So, George thought, Wilkinson is in this, whatever it is. I wouldn’t go near it. But what are they up to, I’d like to know. “Allow me to tell you a story,” George said. “This is one I’ve hardly even told my family, as it doesn’t much illuminate the better side o’ man …” He leaned forward. Sometimes if one gave a confidence, he would get one in return, and this was an old harmless one, not much to give out. Burr leaned forward eagerly to hear it. “As you may remember,” George said, “I once was in opposition to a man named Hamilton, too. Governor Henry Hamilton.”
“Ah, indeed!”
“Well, in my case, the vanquished fared be
tter than the victor. He was freed in an exchange o’ prisoners, and went back to Canada to govern again. Then to Bermuda. Anyways, when he returned to resume his mischief in Canada, he sent me a secret emissary here. ’Twas near the end of the war. He offered me great wealth and position if I’d switch sides.”
He stopped there, sat back, sipped. After a pause, Burr half-smiled, and said: “Invitation is the sincerest flattery!” Then he chuckled at his own wit.
“I dispatched him without much ceremony,” George concluded. “But I will say, encounters o’ that sort do make a body wonder where the honor is that gentlemen profess.”
For a while then the talk circled around and about the word honor, and then Burr asked: “Have, ahm, have you ever stood on the field of honor, sir?”
George’s eyes bored into Burr’s, and it was a while before he said: “If you mean the dueling ground, no. For some reason, nobody’s ever flung a glove in my face. Rather, they turn knives in my back.”
* * *
THE VICE PRESIDENT STOOD LATER ON THE FERRY LANDING at Louisville and gazed back across the river toward Point o’ Rock. He was very disappointed that General Clark was no longer interested in adventures of conquest against the Spaniards. He had been led by some back East to believe the old conqueror might be available.
Still, it had been a most pleasant day, and that evening in his guest lodgings in Louisville, Burr wrote:
I never met a man of greater intelligence and natural capacity than Gen’l Clark.
On the other side of the river, George sat gazing over a solitary dinner grown cold on the plate, the corners of his mouth downturned, unconsciously rubbing his thumb back and forth along his index finger. The Vice President’s mysterious visit had been a delight, but now it left George with a vaguely unsavory aftertaste. Burr had revealed nothing, really, of what he and Wilkinson were up to, but George had a feeling that President Jefferson should be keeping an eye on them. And George was glad he had made it clear he was not going to get embroiled in it. Even if there might have been a fortune in it. With those two involved, it surely was no little scheme.
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