Across the Endless River Read online

  The domestic arrangements were simple, but there was always activity and companionship: daily chores and lessons, Sunday church, meals together at the big table of rough-hewn planks that took up half the kitchen. Boys came and went for extended periods when their parents reappeared, but there were usually six or eight at any one time. The only part of the routine that was disagreeable to Baptiste was the weekly bath. Every Saturday evening a long zinc tub of hot water stood in the wash house at the back of the main structure, and the boys took turns. As the youngest, Baptiste went last. The water was invariably tepid and dirty, a week’s worth of sweat and grime forming a thin gray scum that covered the surface. Mrs. Welch stood guard outside the door, and after they had put on their trousers, she made each barechested boy hold up his arm for her to sniff so she could be sure he had used the thick yellow block of soap. “I will not have you smelling like a herd of buffalo,” she announced with a shrewish look. “Not under this roof!” In later years, whenever Baptiste thought of Mrs. Welch, that was the image that came to mind: a bony-faced woman in a plain long-sleeved dress waiting expectantly to thrust her nose in the armpit of the next boy.

  Captain Clark’s household was different, and Baptiste was often invited for meals. “You are always welcome here,” Clark told him, and he understood that the captain’s special bond with his parents extended to him. But “No Indians in the house” was Mrs. Clark’s rule, as she did her best to make the family’s quarters as close an approximation of southern refinement as memories of her plantation girlhood in the Virginia Piedmont could conjure. Baptiste felt she admitted him there upon sufferance, but fortunately her domain, and the genteel rules that went with it, extended no farther than the main house.

  Captain Clark was the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the entire territory, and anyone who had business up the river had first to secure his say-so. Indians from various tribes, government agents, slaves, French voyageurs, Negro freedmen, soldiers, adventurers—all could regularly be found around the large wing of Clark’s house that was his office. Its walls were covered with Indian objects from the many tribes along the upper river. Baptiste often sat against the wall in the big council room and watched them come and go as they consulted Clark for advice, examined his hand-drawn maps, petitioned for assistance, or argued among themselves. Unless a private meeting required Clark to close the door to his inner office, Baptiste was never excluded. The Superintendent often introduced him to his visitors, but Baptiste discovered that he most enjoyed watching and listening. When you weren’t noticed, he found, you could learn a lot.

  The sound of the different languages entranced him. He understood the chiefs who spoke Mandan and Hidatsa, and he understood some of the related tongues of the Omaha, the Osage, and the Dakota Sioux. The occasional groups of Pawnee or Arikara, however, spoke a different language, whose inflections were unknown to Baptiste. The same was true for the Arapaho and the Cree. All of the Indians were obliged to use an interpreter to converse with Clark. Among themselves, the tribes whose languages were dissimilar relied on sign language.

  French in its many variations was frequently heard. The voyageurs from the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay region spoke with flat, nasal intonations, while the Creole merchants and traders from New Orleans had a lilting, singsong openness to their words that sounded like music to Baptiste. Travelers newly arrived from France spoke in an entirely different way, and they often had trouble understanding the voyageurs. “Monsieur, parlez français!” Baptiste overheard a Frenchman say to an old trapper whose pronunciation he could not comprehend. The voyageur spoke French with the same inflection as Baptiste’s father, and to a recent arrival from Paris the sounds were impenetrable.

  English, too, resonated in tones that could have been different languages until you knew the speaker’s origins. Captain Clark’s speech was soft-toned and even, with a gentle cadence that commanded attention, while his wife had a Virginia drawl. Factors and tradesmen often spoke English with the strong accents of their native tongue—French, German, Spanish—but they always made themselves understood. The household slaves, Baptiste noticed, spoke English clearly and well when they addressed their masters, but among themselves the sound of their talk changed altogether, a barrier of inflections, rhythms, and meanings that kept others from understanding.

  The clothes of the visitors were as varied as their ways of speaking. The fur traders usually wore fringed buckskin leggings and shirts, fur hats, and colorful sashes at the waist. Indian chiefs displayed their full tribal regalia: massive bear-claw necklaces, beads and shell loops dangling from their ears, stiff roaches of vermilion-tinged hair standing up from shaved scalps, elaborately painted robes of buffalo or elk hide about their shoulders, and often a silver peace medal from the Great Father gleaming on their painted chests. As the government’s representative, Clark was careful to create a sense of occasion with his clothes also. He wore a deep blue uniform with gold piping and epaulets, a black silk neck scarf over a starched white shirt, and highly polished black boots. Government officials and judges sometimes appeared wearing clean white shirts, fancy cravats, broadcloth coats, and carefully creased trousers, dress that was as exotic in its way as the tribal costumes from throughout the territory. No one wore formal clothes above St. Louis.

  His parents returned in the summer of that first year and took Baptiste to the faraway Mandan villages, where he remained with them for the warm months. He knew the other children in the tribe, and Limping Bear, the head of their clan, made sure he was included in the Kit Fox Society, the “young foxes” who together prepared for their initiation as men. Their activities, supervised by elders, developed the skills young boys would need in adulthood: the use of a knife to remove the skin of an animal with fluid and precise movements; how to wait noiselessly in the places where animals passed along their trails and at favored points for crossing streams and rivers; where to find the best wood for a bow and how to fashion its grain into an arc that had strength and suppleness. These and a hundred other things they learned in organized groups that often erupted in play against the ceaseless flow of the river. There was an openness to life with the tribe that felt very different from the rhythms he had known in St. Louis.

  One evening during that first summer, he had finished playing with his companions on the sandbank along the river’s edge. Tired, hungry, and dripping water from his soaked leggings, he ran to the tepee his mother had put up at the edge of the camp. He burst through the flap to the hot and close interior. Directly in front of him he saw his father astride his mother, who lay uncovered on a deer skin, her knees drawn up to her chin. Her eyes were shut tight, a kind of grimace playing across her features as high, piercing sounds issued from her half-open mouth. His father looked up in breathless surprise and with one arm gestured furiously toward the outside as he continued to move his hips rapidly across Sacagawea’s prone body.

  Baptiste turned and ran, stumbling outside. As he picked himself up, he saw Otter Woman, his father’s second squaw, sitting to one side of the tent as if she were waiting. He looked at her and she looked back, her gaze passing through him. She offered no word of reproach, explanation, or comfort, just her strange and disquieting presence on the other side of the taut animal hide that provided no barrier at all to the sounds within. Baptiste walked away quickly; the mix of shock and wonder he felt was amplified by Otter Woman’s silent presence.

  For the next few years Baptiste followed this seasonal rhythm, traveling up the river with his parents when the ice broke up and returning to St. Louis before the current froze again. In the Mandan village he fit in, though the other boys wondered why he disappeared to the white man’s world for months at a time. In St. Louis, too, he found his place, and his periodic absences seemed normal to the other boys. But at first his two homes made him feel like two different people: he had different names, languages, food, clothes, lodgings. Nothing was the same in his two worlds. Gradually, though, and with the encouragement of his parents, he came to
see that he was one of the few who, like them, could go back and forth. Sometimes he felt as if he lived in between the two places, but eventually he accepted that he lived in both places alternately. As he grew, passing from one to the other came to seem natural.

  As Baptiste got older, Auguste Chouteau, the patriarch of a rich and influential clan of fur traders, often included him in family gatherings. In the French manner, Chouteau took seriously his role as Baptiste’s parrain, his godfather, and liked to tell him stories from the old days on the river. The French-speaking Chouteau household was unlike the Clarks’ or the Welches’. The big house was always alive with Indian visitors, various white and mixed-blood traders, voyageurs just off the river with boatloads of furs, strong women who were actively involved in the business, an occasional priest, and children of all ages who were members of the extended family.

  Everyone talked incessantly: business, politics, family matters—it didn’t matter what the topic was. What counted, Baptiste saw, was to be part of the conversation, and to speak well when someone asked a question. The other constant in daily life among the Chouteau clan was good and plentiful food, sumptuous dishes prepared with rich sauces and savory spices that Baptiste had never eaten anywhere else. The bounty of the frontier was not simply consumed, but transformed into feasts that lingered in his memory when he returned to the plain dishes at the Reverend Welch’s or Captain Clark’s. Baptiste learned the delight the French took in the occasion of a meal. “Food is just fuel for the body,” Captain Clark told him once when he enthused about a dinner he had shared with his godfather. “It need not be fancy.”

  Chouteau had several mixed-blood children and grandchildren by what he called his “country wives,” Indian squaws who lived among the tribes he visited when he bartered for pelts. Baptiste made a number of friends among the Chouteau cousins of his generation; under their roof he never felt different or excluded. Though often lonely, Baptiste knew that his situation was one of privilege compared to most of the other boys at the boarding house. Chouteau and Clark were two of the most important men in St. Louis, and both looked out for his welfare.

  FEBRUARY 1813

  One snowy evening when he was eight years old, his father appeared at Reverend Welch’s house. There were shouts followed by whispers, then his father took him for a walk along the river. Reeking of whiskey, Charbonneau told him that his mother had died, breaking down several times and swearing in his sentimental way that he would have a Mass said for her every month.

  “She caught the belly fever,” his father told him in a choked voice. “She took sick, and within ten days the fever burned her up until she was gone.”

  It was important for Baptiste not to cry in front of his father; he felt that if he could keep the tears back, he could keep the ground beneath his feet from spinning and hurtling him down.

  When his father went back north two days later, he cried many times, always alone. Captain Clark was away in Washington when the news came, and he didn’t return for several months. Soon after Clark came back, Baptiste saw a light in his office late one evening; he knocked and let himself in. He found the captain, red-eyed and distracted, at his enormous desk in the big cluttered room. They looked at one another and both of them began to cry, and neither cared to hide it. Clark hugged him and tried to dry his tears, but Clark’s own sobs would not stop. They gave in to their sadness then and wept together.

  When Baptiste thought of his mother, he thought of his spirit bird. The summer before she died she took him aside, down to the stream where they gathered willow branches in the Mandan villages. She had him show her the small black bird she had given him. He knew that it wasn’t a Mandan or Hidatsa piece; it was one of the small fetish objects—all of them birds—that she kept in a medicine bundle that was always with her, whether among the Mandan, along the river, or visiting him in St. Louis. She sat him in front of her and declared in a kind of solemn song, “I am the Bird Woman, and the spirit bird will always protect you, no matter what path I have taken.”

  Now she was gone someplace he could not follow. Everyone claimed to be his father: Charbonneau, Clark, Chouteau, Limping Bear, President Jefferson, Jesus himself. But he missed his mother. When he attended Mass with the Chouteaus, the priest often reminded him that the Virgin Mary was everyone’s mother, but Sacagawea was his mother, and the sound of her voice, her smell, her touch came to him in dreams. When he woke he was pained by the endless distance that lay between them, and he gripped the bird as if it were life itself, his fingers bloodless and trembling. Opening his palm, he saw the stone’s faint imprint on his skin, slowly fading in the pale light of morning.

  THREE

  1813–1815

  For the next two years Baptiste remained in St. Louis. The United States was at war with England, and the Missouri and Mississippi river basins were disputed territory in their conflict, with many Indian tribes siding with the British. Word drifted down the river that Charbonneau was missing after a battle on the upper Missouri—perhaps killed, perhaps captured—and more than ever Baptiste felt cut off from his life among the Mandan.

  He thought often of his mother, the Bird Woman. Not every bird he saw made him think of her. The great flocks of blackbirds over the prairie, the eagles and vultures soaring above rocky outcroppings, the owls and nighthawks that flitted along the roads in the dusk: none of these brought Sacagawea to mind. But when he sat along the riverbank, immobile and watchful, and a single bird landed nearby to search the ground for food, his thoughts were full of her. As when she prepared to leave him that first time, the bird would hop about, then stand unmoving with its head tipped to one side, waiting for something unseen. At these moments he felt her presence, and he sensed that she still watched him.

  It was during this time that he discovered the miracle of letters. He saw Captain Clark write down his thoughts, send them far away, and the person who received the folded paper with his name on it would be able to read what was on his mind. He knew that Captain Clark sent such pieces of paper to family members in Kentucky and Virginia, with traders and merchants along the river, and with government officials in Washington. The Mandan said that this was one of the white man’s mysterious powers, that he could make known orders, plans, and wishes by sending paper along this great system, but only now did it come to mean something to him.

  Baptiste asked Captain Clark if he could send a letter to his mother so that he could share his thoughts with her. Clark looked up from the map he was working on at the long table.

  “You can write out what you have been thinking, Pomp. But it would be wrong to tell you that I can deliver it to her, or that she can reply. Do you understand that?”

  He did and he didn’t, but he said yes anyway.

  Clark put down his pen and laid his hand on Baptiste’s shoulder. “Pomp, I am sure that wherever she is, your mother can read your thoughts. But if you want to write them down and keep the letters for yourself, we call that a journal.”

  The next day Clark gave him a small cloth-bound book with blank pages and taught him to write the date at the beginning of each entry. He also cautioned him to keep his book in a secret place where others would not be tempted to read what he had written.

  Baptiste got into the habit of writing in his book once a week. It became a time that he looked forward to. At first he wrote only a line or two of what was on his mind, but gradually he included events and news that others talked about. And he always started as if it were a letter to his mother, since she was the farthest away.

  OCTOBER 1813

  Dear Mother,

  I think of you in the spirit world and hope you are content there. Sometimes I am sad here but I know it is my path and I will walk it. Your bird is always in my pocket.

  Your loving son,

  Jean-Baptiste

  JANUARY 1814

  Dear Mother,

  Captain Clark is now the Governor of the Missouri Territory and also the Superintendent of Indian Affairs. He wears a sword somet
imes, and says we will beat the English.

  Mrs. Clark had a baby girl on the first day of the year. She wants to take her away to Kentucky before the tribes fighting on the side of the English kill us all. Many people are afraid.

  Reverend Welch preached last Sunday that we are evil and must be washed in the blood of the lamb to be pure. I do not want to be evil or pure. Lamb is something we eat sometimes at the Chouteaus’. I do not understand what he says in church.

  Your loving son,

  Jean-Baptiste

  AUGUST 1814

  Dear Mother,

  Papa has come back to St. Louis! He escaped to the Mandan villages after fighting at Fort Manuel. He is often drunk, but I am still glad to see him.

  Soldiers came back last week from a fight on the Mississippi. Many were hurt, two have died here. The war is getting worse, the river is still closed. I want to see my Mandan cousins but I must wait.

  Mr. Chouteau explained why some tribes fight with the British and others with the Americans. I do not understand it.

  There are more water birds on the river this year than anyone can remember. No one knows why. I think of your spirit.

  Your loving son,

  Baptiste

  AUGUST 1815

  Peace was negotiated among the various tribes in the summer of 1815, and Baptiste was again able to go up the river with his father. It felt strange to be returning to the Mandan without Sacagawea, but the tribe’s village still felt like home.

  Baptiste stayed in Limping Bear’s lodge for two months rather than with Charbonneau and Otter Woman. The boys in the Kit Fox Society had learned much in the two years he had been away and were preparing for the ceremony in which the young men would become braves. His closest friend in the village, Jumping Fox, taught him some of the new skills, especially riding bareback and taking care of the horses. But the time passed too quickly and soon Baptiste was heading downriver in a canoe to continue his schooling. Now that the war was over, Baptiste wondered how he would choose between St. Louis and the Mandan.