The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (7 page)

O
N
13 N
OVEMBER
1833, an enormous Leonid meteor shower lit up the night sky over North America, from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. It was a truly national event, remembered years later by people who had witnessed it from various points throughout the country. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who at the time was a teenaged slave on a Maryland farm, recalled that “the air seemed filled with bright descending messengers from the sky.”
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Near Kirtland, Ohio, the Mormon leader Joseph Smith was roused at four in the morning by one of his followers to behold the sight, which he interpreted “as a sure sign that the coming of Christ is clost [
sic
] at hand.”
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And a young odd-jobber named Abraham Lincoln watched the spectacle from the window of his boardinghouse in New Salem, Illinois. Years later as president, during one of the darkest hours of the Civil War, Lincoln supposedly used his memory of the incident to reassure anxious listeners that “the world did not come to an end then, nor will the Union now.”
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Indians of the northern Great Plains were not so sanguine on that autumn night. As described by Alexander Culbertson, an AFC clerk who had escorted Prince Maximilian upriver earlier that summer, the natives at Fort McKenzie regarded the celestial display, which included a total eclipse of the sun, “as forerunners of some great catastrophe.”
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Little did they know that disaster was already upon them. Having embraced the trade goods brought by the
napikwans,
the Blackfeet began to spurn the old ways. Whereas such items had once been the rarest of luxuries, by the time the stars fell on that November evening, Culbertson noted that the average lodge possessed “one gun, an axe, a kettle, and ten knives.” Though such objects made life easier, they also eroded the Indians’ autonomy by creating economic dependence upon the outsiders.
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Other ominous signs indicated that the Piegan world was changing as rapidly and dramatically as it had a century before, with the advent of the horse and gun. On 16 June 1832 the
Yellow Stone,
the first steamboat to travel so far up the Missouri, reached Fort Union, carrying George Catlin among others. The Piegan reaction to “the fire boat that walks on the water,” as some Indians called the vessel, must have been similar to that which Catlin observed among other native peoples during the upstream voyage.
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Of those Indians, the artist noted that “some of them laid their faces to the ground, and cried to the Great Spirit—some shot their horses and dogs, and sacrificed them … some deserted their villages and ran to the tops of the bluffs some miles distant.”
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The AFC’s use of steamboats, urged by McKenzie and endorsed by Chouteau, facilitated the movement of more goods and
napikwans
into Blackfeet country while degrading the river valleys of the Missouri and its tributaries, as the
Yellow Stone
and each of its brethren devoured an astonishing twenty-five to thirty cords of wood for every twenty-four running-hours.
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Even worse, AFC steamboats brought vast quantities of spirits to the Upper Missouri. Like other native peoples of the northern Plains, the Blackfeet had never tasted liquor until traders brought it among them in the late eighteenth century. Having no word for it in their own language, they called it
napiohke
(“white man’s water”) and refused initially to pay for it, since the lakes and rivers of their country provided all the liquid refreshment they needed.
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Nevertheless, it was soon entrenched among them, used by British, Canadian, and American outfits alike to lubricate the trading process. McKenzie even constructed an illegal still at Fort Union in 1833, though it was short-lived. Spiked sometimes with ingredients like strychnine or gunpowder to heighten its effects, whiskey wreaked havoc in Indian communities.

At the time there was growing concern about the consumption of alcohol more generally in the United States, anxiety that led to the establishment of the American Temperance Society in 1826. Reformers of the period, including the evangelical leaders Charles Grandison Finney and Lyman Ward Beecher, emphasized the evils of drinking, and the Whigs, formed in the 1830s as the opposition to Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party, incorporated abstinence into their political platform, although temperance did not become the law of the land, for a brief period, until a century later.
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It was a different story beyond the Mississippi, where U.S. officials were so concerned about liquor’s pernicious influence among the western tribes that the government passed a strict prohibition law in 1834. No matter, because the aptly named Andrew Drips, the Indian agent for the Upper Missouri, turned a blind eye to the AFC’s extensive smuggling operations.
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And yet of all the dangerous imports—from guns to liquor—brought to the northern Plains, it was a microbial agent, invisible to the human eye, that left the most devastating impact. In the summer of 1837 an AFC steamboat, the
St. Peters,
arrived on the Upper Missouri carrying passengers infected with smallpox. Although the disease had raged among area tribes in 1781, most of the natives had no immunity to the affliction and thus died in staggering numbers. Learning of the outbreak at Fort Union, Culbertson tried vainly to keep away a keelboat headed upriver to Fort McKenzie with passengers and cargo from the larger post. But a camp of some five hundred Piegan and Blood lodges insisted upon the delivery of the trade items once the vessel arrived. Within days the disease spread like a prairie fire throughout Blackfeet country, and no Indians visited the fort for two months. Around 1 October, Culbertson, who himself had fallen ill, traveled from Fort McKenzie to the Three Forks to see how the Piegans had fared. He smelled the camp before he saw it: sixty lodges, littered all about with the decaying bodies of people, horses, and dogs. When the epidemic finally burned out later that fall, more than six thousand Blackfeet had perished.
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For all the riches it brought to some native peoples, the fur trade immiserated many more, and few groups suffered as much as the Blackfeet.

Coth-co-co-na

On a stifling morning in late August 1833, near the middle of his monthlong stay at Fort McKenzie, Prince Maximilian was jolted from his slumber by a post employee and urged to take arms. Ascending the ramparts and wielding a double-barreled shotgun, Maximilian beheld an astonishing scene unfolding below: hundreds of Cree and Assiniboine warriors, whom he described as “a red line … of fighters,” had descended on a small camp of about twenty Piegan lodges pitched in the shadows of the fort. Since the Piegans had caroused late the night before, passing the cup and pipe while marveling at the sounds of Karl Bodmer’s music box, they were slow in mounting a defense. Their attackers showed no quarter, indiscriminately shooting and stabbing men, women, and children, all of which the prince observed from inside the compound.

After Karl Bodmer,
Fort MacKenzie, August 28th 1833,
ca. 1833. Bodmer personally witnessed this fight between the Piegans and a joint force of Crees and Assiniboines during his visit to the Upper Missouri with Prince Maximilian of Wied. Courtesy of the Joslyn Museum of Art, Omaha.

Riveting though the battle was, it was sadly typical of the day, as Indians competed bitterly with one another for the spoils of the American trade, not to mention horses and captives stolen from native rivals. The prince regarded the spectacle with a mixture of fascination and horror; he was struck especially by the activity surrounding White Buffalo, a highly respected Piegan warrior who in the early going had suffered a head wound so severe that “his brain seemed to be protruding into his hair.” To dull his agony, several native women plied him with whiskey and in short order he was “completely stone drunk.” The battle raged all afternoon just outside the walls, but with help from the post’s employees as well as many additional Piegans who hurried to the fort from their main camp nearby, the Indians drove off the war party, though not before losing several dozen of their people.
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Somewhere in the maelstrom, perhaps, was a young Piegan girl.
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The terror she would have felt that late summer morning is easy to imagine, since Bodmer painted a tableau of the struggle. The watercolor depicts utter chaos: wisps of gun smoke, a rearing horse, and pockets of furious hand-to-hand combat. After the battle an old Piegan medicine man named Distant Bear thanked Bodmer profusely, insisting that no bullets had cut him down because Bodmer had made his portrait a few days earlier, which had worked as good medicine. The little girl, however, probably felt no such assurances amid the fighting all around her—maybe she took cover inside the fort with other Piegans, or found a hiding spot among the trees or in the wreckage of a lodge. She might even have seen a group of Piegan women and children exact their revenge on the body of a fallen Cree warrior, taking his scalp, smashing his limbs, and splitting his head in two. If so, it would not be the last time she bore witness to such violence.

L
ITTLE IS KNOWN
for certain about the girl except that her name was Coth-co-co-na and that her parents were a Piegan warrior named Under Bull and his wife, Black Bear. Coth-co-co-na was probably born around 1825, the same year that the Erie Canal joined the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, and that John Quincy Adams assumed the presidency after prevailing in a bitter electoral struggle against Andrew Jackson. However, like most native people of the time and place, Coth-co-co-na is almost entirely absent from written historical records, appearing in a letter here, a census record there, maybe a pioneer reminiscence of the frontier era. Still, it is possible to sketch the contours of her early existence given the rhythms of Piegan life during the first few decades of the nineteenth century.
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Shortly after Coth-co-co-na’s birth, Under Bull called upon a person of distinction within the tribe to choose a name for his child, building his guest a sweat lodge and bestowing presents upon him, waiting for the namer to suggest a handful of monikers from which he, as the father, chose.
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Thereafter Under Bull was probably a more distant figure in Coth-co-co-na’s world. If she had brothers, he spent more time with them, teaching the boys how to hunt and fight. On almost all matters Coth-co-co-na would have looked to Black Bear and other female relatives for guidance. And she knew hard work from a young age: gathering berries, collecting wood, carrying water, mending clothes, stitching lodges, and building travois.
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When she was a bit older, her mother (or, in her absence, another female relative) taught Coth-co-co-na the most important skill known to Blackfeet women—tanning a buffalo hide. Such expertise was necessary, of course, for basic survival; after all, bison skins gave the Indians clothing and shelter and brought them trade goods from the
napikwans
. Tanning was also important as a marital prerequisite, for Blackfeet men relied upon their wives to dress the animals they killed. So critical was the work of Indian women that, as the robe trade increased, so did the practice of polygyny, whereby native men acquired additional spouses, and at increasingly younger ages, in order to meet their growing labor needs.

Dressing a buffalo hide was a messy and backbreaking task, as Coth-co-co-na learned. Once she tore the skin from an animal’s body, a native woman “fleshed” the hide by staking it to the ground (hair side down) with wooden pegs and scraping away any bits of tissue, fat, or dried blood, an exhausting and time-consuming process. She then left the skin to bleach in the sun for several days before scraping it again to achieve a uniform thickness. Finally, she applied a mixture of brains and fat to soften the hide before smoothing it out with strokes from a rough stone. It took two full days of work to tan a single robe.
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As in earlier native-white encounters throughout North America, some newcomers to the Upper Missouri were appalled by the division of labor among the Blackfeet, believing that men’s hunting was a form of leisure or sport while their wives were treated like drudges and forced to do the heavy lifting required for the trade in animal skins.
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Although life for Piegan women was undeniably hard—beyond tanning hides and preparing food they were also responsible for child rearing—the prejudice and chauvinism of most European and American outsiders make such accounts problematic at best. And it is worth noting that some later observers emphasized the essential role of Piegan women in religious and ceremonial rites.
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