Into the Savage Country (6 page)

Fort Burnham was a U.S. Army encampment just upstream from the juncture of the Missouri and the White River. The fort had ten-foot-high palisades and four-pound guns and room for two garrisons. Inside the palisades there was a blacksmith and commissary and a powder room, a hospital, and a storeroom with fifty sacks of grain and enough sustenance for the entire company for nearly a year. In 1827 eighty men were stationed at the fort on eighteen-month tours of duty. It was considered a hardship to be stationed in that desolate stretch of country where there was little hope for conflict or possibility of advancement, far from civilization and also far from the trapping regions. The soldiers spent their time farming and clearing land and improving the settlement, which was originally called Fort Burnham, and later, when the fort was moved five miles downstream to the juncture of the White River with the Missouri, and the town overgrew the garrison, the settlement was called Smitts Bend, as it is called today.

The garrison of U.S. soldiers, which was under General Burnham’s command, lived in the original fort at the very high point of the ridge that ran up the middle of the loop of the river. Half a mile beyond the settlement there was an infirmary for natives dying from smallpox, an illness that had ravaged the easternmost tribes and would sweep across the entire continent, decimating
the native populations. There was a half-mile stretch of prairie, a barrier between the sickness and the town, and then a few square blocks of low wooden structures with wood-shingle or sod roofs, containing a general store and a dry goods store and little cottage houses with hardened mud between the logs, all with very thin, translucent deerskin or cloth in the windows instead of glass. Many of the cottages had half sunk into hills and were little more than caves with earthen roofs. Though this settlement would be considered paltry now, it was the only “civilization” for five hundred miles.

The doctor at the fort, Isaac Meeks, was a tall, stooped, awkward man with bifocals and a protruding Adam’s apple, a scratchety high-pitched voice, and a broken thumb that had healed incorrectly so he had imperfect usage of his left hand. Meeks was a nervy bore around women, but he had a marvelous curiosity about everything in the west, and was wonderfully concerned about the natives and their sickness. Two or three times a week Meeks walked to the infirmary where foreign nuns cared for natives who were dying at an astounding rate, dying of mild sicknesses that hardly affected the whites. The doctor treated the natives as human beings, an attitude which set him apart from much of the settlement. He tried poultices and bleeding and quinine and even the sweat lodges and medicine men. Nothing worked. The natives grew sick and died and it cast a shadow over the good doctor’s life, though some at the fort seemed to consider the death of the natives as good riddance or even God’s judgment.

It was the summer of 1827 when I arrived at the settlement, wounded and near death. The men secured a lodging for me with Smitts the innkeeper and assured my care with Dr. Meeks, extracting a promise from me that I would join them on the spring hunt, not adding “if you survive,” though I am sure this
was in their minds. They started back the seven hundred miles toward the trapping lands and I was left to my sick bed.

I do not remember much of my recovery, as I was wracked with fever for weeks, but as it turned out, I did live, and within a month I was out of danger.

During my recovery I lived in a one-room cabin next to a dry goods store, paying for everything with IOUs and treated like a rich man, as Ferris and the others had greatly exaggerated the size of our returns, hoping to assure my adequate care.

Once I was healthy enough to move about, Smitts did everything to keep me in the settlement rather than have me and my supposed riches move on to St. Louis. I enjoyed the luxury of sleeping as late as I wished and riding leisurely out to set traps in the nearby creeks and lowlands. I trapped the White and the small braids of the Missouri, and hunted in a loop of the great river, which made an enclosed hunting grounds. Each night I played a sort of billiards on a rough pine board with Plochman, the owner of the general store. The talk in the settlement was always of the encroachment of the Brits on American land and the greediness and devastation British brigades left behind, and the worry that the only thing standing between St. Louis and the British Empire was the garrison at the fort and a few trappers.

Apart from playing billiards with Plochman, I spoke almost daily with General Burnham, who was eager to extract every bit of information from me about the land and the natives to the west. He was always peppering me with questions, asking me if I’d seen this or that tribe, and how I distinguished one tribe from another at a distance, and how many poles they used in their lodges, what sort of wood and fiber they used, how many feathers in their arrows, what kind of horsemen they were, and whether they carried firearms, and if so, of what sort, and if I’d worn their
moccasins, and if not, if I’d seen them, and how they compared with some other tribe’s moccasins, and a thousand other questions of that sort, most of which I hardly knew the answers to. It seems strange to me now that the man who seemed most appreciative of the natives and their way of life was the one who was out there to wage war against them.

I was injured in June. By late August I was completely recovered. I could have returned to the brigade but I did not, and at the time I said I was still too weak to travel, but it was lassitude and not weakness that kept me in the settlement. Every morning I’d set a few traps, and then wander down to the river and wash myself, spending hours in the roiling, sandy water. I’d clamber out stiffly afterward, hopping from foot to foot in the soft mud, letting myself dry in the sunlight, then stepping up steep bluffs through tall grass and wild onions to view the tan-colored grasslands spread out in all directions.

I am recovering, I told myself. That is why I cannot return. I’m still too weak.

It was only gradually that I understood it was not a physical injury I was recovering from but, to my shame, a mental one. For weeks after my physical recovery, in the hot, dry days of late summer, I reconstructed the moments leading up to my injury. I was pursuing the young buffalo up the steep hill. I was waiting to shoot and then I saw the blanket wad come out of Bridger’s gun. I hit the clay and was jolted. The event repeated itself endlessly in my mind, as if I was trying to discover a flaw in the memory, until in the end I understood that I was grappling with the realization that I had almost died and someday I would be dead. That was it. That was the length and breadth of my great realization. I was not immortal. I would die someday. My youthful mind could not quite comprehend it.

It took me about six weeks to understand and to overcome this sapping lassitude, and by then it was too late in the year to join the brigades for the fall season. Regardless, by that time I had found something else to divert my interest, and that was probably the best remedy of all. I have found that questions about death are never really satisfied with the intellect, but they can be neatly conquered by distraction.

I had been in the settlement for six weeks and was making my first visit to the infirmary. Smitts and Plochman would not even allow natives in their stores, yet the young soldiers were constantly visiting the infirmary, as all had heard this unlikely structure held the settlement’s only real attractions. There were the nuns and the nuns’ Italian and French helpers and a woman called the Widow Bailey who excited much speculation among the young soldiers.

The native infirmary was half a mile south of the town, in a long, low structure built into a hill with a rock chimney at either end. The shutters were kept open during the summer, and the two wings of the infirmary were connected by high walls, making a rectangular courtyard between them. The walls of the courtyard had doors embedded into them that allowed children to enter and exit without being exposed to the illness.

On this day, August 1827, I walked south along the top of the bluff, crossed the high point where the road dwindled to not much more than a path, and walked down toward the double-winged building where the sick natives were cared for.

I heard moans and murmured native dialects and the clink of cupping glasses inside the infirmary. I entered a long, low room with makeshift cradles made from straw baskets. On the east side
there were pallets with impossibly skinny natives, some of them asleep, others hacking into tubs of murky water. Scalpels were tossed into porcelain basins. There was the smell of chemicals and death. I tipped my hat to Dr. Meeks, who said, “You shouldn’t be here, Wyeth,” and I agreed with him as I furtively surveyed the room’s attractions.

I ducked through another low door into a courtyard where native children sat in rows in a sort of classroom. A woman in European clothes scratched at the dust with a wooden stick. She was drawing the letter
C
with the stick and the children were drawing with their fingers or small twigs in the dust.

“
C
is the third letter … 
C
,” the teacher intoned.

She had a French accent, and dark hair cut short and pulled back with a wooden clamshell that gave me a strange feeling. Then there was a flip in my mind, a kind of vertigo. I realized the teacher was Alene Chevalier, the Canadian tanner whom I’d conversed with before I left St. Louis. She was dressed in black and wore work boots that were too big for her small feet and her skin was so dark from the sun that I had mistaken her for a full-blood native.

She saw me in the doorway, let out a brief shout, but recovered almost immediately. “William Wyeth. Upright and interrupting my classroom,” she said.

“My apologies,” I said, and stood there grinning foolishly, not able to contain my happiness at finding her there.

She motioned for me to go, which I did, but only after she assured me she’d follow in a moment. She went on with the stick, scratching in the dirt. “
C
 … the third letter is
C
 …” I walked back through the infirmary and out over the hard-packed dirt and waited near the path.

I was grinning and pacing back and forth with all manner of
hopes and fancies surging inside. We were hundreds of miles from St. Louis and I’d been in that settlement more than six weeks and somehow I had not seen Alene or known of her existence there. I realized she was the woman they called the Widow Bailey and was in black because she was in mourning.

My mind went back to the last time I’d seen her and how she’d stood in front of her cottage with Henry Layton and Horace Bailey.

Blast the dandies, I thought. She must have married that pork-eater Bailey.

I stood there, piecing this together, while a few natives slumped in the shade and watched me. Five minutes passed. Children straggled from the courtyard and started for the Indian camp. Then Alene came out, wiping her hands of dust.

“So, you’re here,” I said jovially. “The Widow Bailey.”

“Yes. And I knew you were here. I came to see you during your fever. You don’t remember. They weren’t sure you’d live.”

“And now you’re disappointed that I have lived,” I said.

“I was pleased to hear you’d recovered,” she said in a measured tone. “I apologize. I meant to visit.”

“You were hoping to pilfer my buffalo robe and moccasins,” I said.

“Yes. They were such high quality.” That stung a bit. “Not properly fleshed,” she said. “You did it?”

“I traded with the Crow.”

“You traded with the wrong Crow. Not properly fleshed,” she said again.

Though her composure was in keeping with her black dress, I could not contain my happiness.

“Well, this is good luck,” I said. “Not the circumstances, of course, but I’m pleased to find an acquaintance in this godforsaken
place. And you … you’re in mourning. For … Horace Bailey? Am I right?”

She nodded. “We were married two months after you departed.”

“Congratulations.”

She bowed her head. “He died four months after that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.”

She kept her head lowered. There was a long silence. I waited for her to explain her present situation. She did not.

“But—how did you end up in the settlements?” I asked.

“Horace joined the regiment.”

I could hardly imagine that fat dandy Bailey as a soldier. I started to say about three things, then merely said, “I’m sorry to hear of his demise.”

“Yes,” she said. “He was forced out of St. Louis by his creditors and his father. He participated in some underhanded dealings arranged by Henry Layton. You remember him?”

“He was with Bailey the last time I saw you.”

“Horace lost his considerable fortune, or at least the part that he was allowed to access, all because of that blackguard Layton. Despite his circumstances, we agreed to be married. His father arranged for Horace to become an officer, and he came out here to separate himself from St. Louis and its low occupants and to recover what was left of his good name. Now it’s killed him.”

She said all this bitterly.

“Was it the natives?”

“A fall from a horse. He was hunting.”

I was trying to be as grave as possible and was putting on a horrible show of solemnity. Blast the lazy man, I thought. Gambling in some business venture with Layton, then having his
father arrange an officership and falling off a horse and stranding Alene out in the settlements with patched clothes and dusty hair.

“And now you have chosen to stay?”

“I have no means of leaving,” she said evenly. “He had only debts. The doctor has offered me an occupation. And the children need me.”

“His family was wealthy.”

“His family had cut their ties with us before he died.”

“Because of his debts?”

“Because of me,” she said matter-of-factly.

She had a quarter native blood.

“I knew his father slightly,” I said. “My initial impression was of an arrogant, heartless man. Now I have another reason to dislike him. I’m sorry to hear of all this. I offer what assistance I can.”