Sacajawea (115 page)

With the trappers staying in town, the boys found that the price of furs rose until a good slough muskrat brought three dollars from
engagés
at Chouteau’s. The river rats were smaller and less valuable, but more within their reach, and the traps that in summer were used for gophers, they used for muskrats quite as well. From the time Baptiste was nine until he was nearly twelve, he and his brother trapped the river with a good deal of persistence. And when they bundled up their take one spring they had fifteen muskrats, nine ermine, and a beaver that they had skinned closed; they had not opened it up by cutting through the belly, which would have rendered it worth next to nothing.

The boys made small change by picking wild cherries, blackberries, gooseberries, wild raspberries, currants, or persimmons for home-canning housewives. Picking gooseberries at ten cents a quart, even when the berries hang on the underside of the prickly stems in heavy rows, is not a way to get rich. The meagerness of their total earning power was an analogue of the way their mother worked and the rewards she got. There were afternoons when the boys would crawl under the plank sidewalk in front of the hotel and search among the dirt and papers and old tobacco cuds for coins that had fallen through the cracks.

The discipline at school was not very rigid for either boy. At Father Neil’s the boys were allowed to smoke at any and all times, and the smoke from the black cigars the students bought just outside the grounds was often so thick that one could hardly see across the room.

On weekends the boys liked to see who had learned to inhale deepest. Tobacco for Tess was a step in the progress of education, as was the hard liquor served with meals to the students at William and Mary College in the days when General Clark attended that institution.

The good Catholic brothers at Father Neil’s school taught a kindly companionship combined with a certain manliness that would stand the boys in good stead when battling with the rough frontier life they faced. The congenial brothers made frequent trips with their students to all places of note in the vicinity. Tess was much interested in visiting a wonderful cave with subterranean vaults and chasms where they heard the roaring of water. No one ever found the source of the water. But they found the cave infested with thousands of bats. Tess often went with other boys to catch the bats, carrying them in a bag and turning them loose in the school dormitory. This always gave any new boy a little excitement and caused him to forget his homesickness for a time.

Baptiste explained to his mother during one Easter holiday, “I cannot always tell if I am Indian or white. I was taught to endure pain. I can put a hot stone on my flesh and not cry out. I can sit in the icy river and not jump out right away. But it is hard for me to study. This makes me Indian. The white boys are not made to endure pain, and they seem to study easier. But I can make my bed, wash my clothes, and keep my room neat. This makes me white. I can catch more frogs, snare more rabbits than the white boys, but I can sleep as easily in a soft bed as between two buffalo robes. I can eat with a fork and a spoon and keep my fingers dry, or I can use my fingers and wipe them dry in my hair.”

“To be strong against hardships is good, my son. You will know the ways of the whites and be liked by them. You will know the ways of the Indians and be liked by them. In this way you can help the understanding between two nations, whites and Indians.”

Baptiste thought about the time when he was a small boy in the woods. He looked back and saw his life stretching like a cord behind him. And the brightest piece was when he ran free in the woods. It had a glorythat school did not. He dug into his leather bag and found his knife, its blade well protected by the tallow he had rubbed on it. He tested the blade with his thumb.

“You can use my oilstone,” said Sacajawea.

He sat before the fireplace whetting his knife on his mother’s stone. “Then sometimes I believe the Indian in me is dying,” he said. “I think I have poor eyesight and a limited sense of smell, just like the whites.”

Quietly Sacajawea talked to her son. “I taught you to speak with a straight tongue. I showed you right and wrong. I bound you to my heart with strong new vines. Now these vines have rotted and they tear apart to let you stay at the white man’s school so that you can become a man. This is a new way of living where there are whites coming to live on the land that once belonged to Indians.

“Your father taught you game signs and animal habits and where to find them. He taught you to hunt and shoot a straight arrow. You give me no shame as a hunter or trapper. I have told myself on winter days that when I am old, when my bones creak, my son will keep me in bear’s oil and venison. When the ashes of life cool, you will kindle the fire to warm my old age.”

Baptiste heard his mother and was deeply moved.

“My mother,” he said in French, “I would rather follow my father into the woods and be a trapper or an interpreter. I can learn the languages of the different tribes easily. Their language is much easier than those the white teachers put in books for me to write and speak. The French of my father is easier than the French of a textbook.”

Sacajawea looked at him with sternness and pity for many minutes. “Pomp,” she said, purposely using his baby name, “you were born under unusual circumstances. The very first clothes upon your back were the soft blanket clothes of the white man. You were not dried with soft doeskin, but with white cloth. You were not wrapped in rabbit fur, but in a woolen robe. You did not have the power of animals rubbed into you, so you will never develop the instincts necessary for survival. That is why the Indian in you has died. Can you smell a deer upwind? Or count the tailfeathers of an eagle in flight?

“No.”

“Your ancestors could. The People still can. After you are in school more time, you will enjoy it. It will be easier. There is much white blood in your heart. It has been planned that way. Your father was half-white. He understood the whites and the Indians, but he did not really care about either, only himself. You will never be a small man like that. The Great Spirit has put you in the stream of life with Chief Red Hair, so you must do what comes into your life and do it well. Do it in the manner of a chief. A chief must be strong, kind, honest, and wise like Chief Red Hair. Be polite without groveling. If you are ever afraid of anything, do not deny it, but behave as if you feared nothing.”

The boy’s mouth was stopped. He could say nothing, only look at his mother, whom he had always loved. He knew as well as if she had come out and spoken the truth that his mother had loved Governor Clark when they had been together on the western trail so many years before. She respected him, but she had never respected, or really loved, his father. His mother wanted him to attend school because it was Governor Clark’s desire.

Sacajawea’s life moved along in this settled and quiet routine. She often discussed the Indians’ problems with Governor Clark, who was worried about his charges. The Indians were adopting the white man’s evils, not his good qualities. The Indians’ spirit was being subdued; their lands were being taken away; their language, which ran untroubled as a spring brook, was decaying into hoglike grunts; their stalwart men were being corrupted by the firewater of the greedy trader; their women were being diseased by filthy white men.

“Janey,” Clark said to her, “the Indians need a friend they will listen to and trust. Somehow your people have escaped all this corruption and disease because we have not been able to get a fort established for any length of time near them. Maybe your Great Spirit has seen a way to keep them from losing their souls by keeping them in their homes in the Shining Mountains, even though they suffer a bit from hunger. Isn’t that better than losing dignity?”

The new thought startled her. It was certainly a strange way to consider the People’s misery. Then she realized that she, too, had found it a struggle to adjust her ways to those of the whites. She still would rather do her cooking outside over an open fire than in the fireplace. She could see that her boys were going through a time of adjustment, but for them the path was smoother through reading the talking books and living with white boys at school. She wondered if the People would ever need to adjust to these new ways, or if they would live forever in the way their fathers had.

“There is a boat in the water that has no sails and no oars, but it moves,” bragged Tess. “I have seen it.”

“No,” said Sacajawea, “you are telling me this for a joke. It cannot be!”

“It’s true!” shouted the boys together.

“You will see,” said Tess. “It is a steamboat. You have seen the steam rise when the water boils for soup?
Mon dieu,
that is the power.”

Sacajawea shook her head; she did not understand.

“It is strong when it is shut up; it makes a lid dance,” Baptiste tried to explain. “Sometimes the lid pops off, and the water foams out of the kettle. That is power, like a man working. Man has harnessed the steam like a horse and makes it work for him. It pulls the boat on the river.”

“That takes much thinking,” said Sacajawea skeptically.

Early the next morning, they followed the crowd to the levee. Others also wanted to see this new wonder, the steamboat. It was true—there were no sails, no oarsmen bending their backs, no cordeliers. It was a magic boat that sailed alone by an unseen hand. People danced and sang. They all could see it with their own eyes, yet it was unbelievable. Sacajawea shared with the white men something that was new to all. It seemed to her that she was pulled closer to them from this instant on. She looked at the ship. “White man’s magic,” she said softly, feeling that it affected her as much as any of those standing around her. She joined in the shouting: “Hurrah for the steamship!”

Ten days later, Tess witnessed a duel between

Thomas Benton and Charles Lucas. Lucas, who lived on Main Street, exchanged angry words with Benton in court. Benton was a large man of powerful build. He had the dignity of a great statesman and orator. Lucas did not like him because of that quality. Their dislike for one another smoldered and waited for any small thing to cause it to flare. It flared at the polls on election day, August 4, 1817, because Lucas contemptuously asked if Benton had paid his tax in time to entitle him to vote. This small comment was justification enough to these men for a duel.

They met on the morning of August 12, 1817, on Bloody Island. Tess was there with some schoolmates to witness the fun. Each man fired one shot; Lucas was wounded in the neck, while Benton received a slight contusion below the knee. Benton would not let the matter rest. He said he expected Lucas to meet him again as soon as his neck wound healed.

Tess followed Benton to his boat and taunted,
“Zut,
you fight like a squaw. I bet you couldn’t hit poor old Lucas again if you stood only ten feet apart! Does that scratch on your leg pain much?”

Benton pulled up one of the boat’s oars and threw it at Tess, which only made Tess laugh more.

Tess and his friends huddled together several times after classes in the next few weeks. Then, their scheme well in hand, they sent a messenger to Lucas’s home on the morning of September 27, asking for a second duel.

Most of Father Neil’s students waited several hours for the big scene, which they viewed with all the frivolity of children at a circus. Never once did it cross these young boys’ minds that this duel would be considered one of the most regrettable ever fought in Saint Louis. The two men met once again on Bloody Island and took their positions, ten feet apart.

The men fired at the same time, and Benton’s ball penetrated Lucas’s heart. Lucas lived a half hour longer—not long enough to get him off the island, across the Mississippi, to Saint Louis.
¹

Tess took great delight in telling Baptiste the gory details of Lucas’s fatal wound the following weekend.

“Scare Bleu!
Blood all over. I did not know a body held so much.”

As he spoke, he saw Baptiste’s and Sacajawea’s shining brown eyes intent upon him. His heart seemed to swell, and he felt important. So he added more to the story, with expressions of horror on his face, aiding his words with the movements of his hands. He said that it had rained on the island and Lucas’s powder became wet, but that Benton had protected his powder by keeping it in his armpit until it was time to be tamped down the barrel. That was why he had won. That was why he had been able to shoot right into the heart of Lucas.

The mood of the story was shattered as the door of the cabin was thrown open. In stalked a short, heavyset man whose face was framed in a matted, graying beard. His hair was uncombed, and his face was lined and drawn. The old man was followed by a young, plain-looking Indian girl. Her skin was smooth, her forehead broad, her nose fine, her mouth straight, and when she walked she did not bounce overly much. Her flesh was as rigid and solid as stone. She was perhaps fifteen summers old.

Startled, Sacajawea jumped to her feet and started toward them. But she drew back, quivering. “Charbonneau! My man!” she blurted out, frightened by the appearance of a man believed dead.

“Horreurs,”
laughed Charbonneau, “you look like you have seen a ghost. You ain’t happy to see me?” He had a devilish grin as he approached her. “Come, give me nice big kiss for welcome home.”

Sacajawea could not speak. She just stood staring at the apparition. Her shoulders dropped and her mouth pursed as though she were trying to hold herself together.

Charbonneau looked from one boy to the other as their faces flushed under his scrutiny.
“Sacrée Marie,”
he muttered. Time had slipped by him, he could see that easily enough now. He faced the older boy.

“I am your papa, Little Tess.” He stretched his greasy hand out to shake. “I come back.”

Tess shook hands with his father. He had no hard feelings toward him and remembered the fun of the old days, trapping for beaver.

Baptiste, too, timidly extended his hand.

Finding himself welcome, Charbonneau nodded to the woman in the doorway. “This is my new squaw. She’s called Eagle. She’s Minnetaree, niece of Kakoakis. Remember him? Ha, same damned, filthy buzzard.”