The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (8 page)

As Coth-co-co-na reached puberty, Black Bear instructed her daughter on the rituals of courtship and marriage.
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Thereafter the husband enjoyed almost total control over his wife or wives. To impress upon her daughter the importance of a woman’s marital conduct, Black Bear might have held up to Coth-co-co-na the powerful example set by a medicine woman. This individual was the chief figure in the annual Sun Dance, the tribe’s most important religious ceremony. In order to qualify, a woman had to possess unimpeachable character, marked especially by unwavering devotion to her husband.
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And yet for Coth-co-co-na and other girls of marrying age, it was likely the punishment for female adultery that made the stronger impression. As Prince Maximilian recorded in his journal, “[Men] punish the infidelity of their women swiftly and severely; they cut off their noses; and one saw many such horribly disfigured faces among the Piegans.”
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Surely Coth-co-co-na took note of them.

Despite Black Bear’s prominent role in raising Coth-co-co-na and preparing her for marriage, it was Under Bull who ultimately chose a suitable husband for their daughter once she reached her teens. And like many other prominent Blackfeet men in the 1830s and 1840s, he did not select a young and distinguished Piegan warrior for his son-in-law, but opted instead for a fur trader named Malcolm Clarke, whom the Indians called Ne-so-ke-i-u, or Four Bears.

U
NDER
B
ULL’S DECISION
to marry his daughter to a white man can be understood only in the context of the refashioned social conditions brought about by the advent of the fur trade in Blackfeet country. Intermarriage between white men and native women was found everywhere throughout the continent where Europeans and their descendants sought animal skins, from the valley of the St. Lawrence to the far Southwest, from the Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains.
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Such arrangements
à la façon du pays
—“according to the custom of the country”—were especially common among HBC and NWC employees and reflected indigenous ceremonial practices as well as the natives’ own social and economic imperatives.

By comparison, those who settled the American colonies largely resisted intermarriage, both because white women were present in many such locales right from the start and because early interaction between natives and newcomers often led to violent conflict. In the lands that became the eastern United States, removal or extermination was thus as likely an outcome as any sort of cultural exchange or interpenetration.
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And yet around the turn of the nineteenth century, some westering Americans warmed to the concept of intermarriage. They had an unlikely champion in Thomas Jefferson, who during his presidency viewed such unions as the key to peaceful frontier absorption as well as the eventual assimilation of Indians into mainstream Anglo-American society. He exhorted a group of Delawares and Mohicans in 1808, “[Y]ou will unite yourselves with us … and form one people with us, and we shall all be Americans; you will mix with us by marriage, your blood will run in our veins, and will spread with us over this great island.”
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Jefferson’s enthusiasm for such liaisons stood in stark contrast to his vehement opposition to white romantic relationships with blacks, who he believed should be placed “beyond the reach of mixture” (this despite his own thirty-eight-year affair with his slave Sally Hemings, who bore him seven children).
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While Jefferson intimated that African Americans were racially inferior, according to one biographer his comparatively progressive views about Indians stemmed from an “an authentic admiration mingled with a truly poignant sense of tragedy about their fate as a people.”
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Even so, official attempts to promote native-white intermarriage failed at both the state and the federal levels in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, defeated by intense and near unanimous hostility from white lawmakers.
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Despite the routine nature of intermarriage throughout North America’s fur country, it is still worth pondering why Under Bull and other Blackfeet fathers would embrace such a practice. After all, few native groups had so consistently and violently opposed white expansion into their territory. While it was one thing to trade beaver skins and buffalo robes for guns and whiskey, it was quite another to give their daughters in marriage to the
napikwans
, whom the Blackfeet usually found repulsive, with their hairy faces and the sour smell of their unwashed bodies. In the end, just like native groups to their east such as the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras, the Blackfeet accepted intermarriage with whites because of its extraordinary political and economic benefits.

For one thing, such unions made good business sense. An Indian father who married his daughter to a white man built an invaluable trading relationship with his son-in-law. The marriage secured the native man’s access to coveted trade goods, both for his own consumption and for wider distribution among his people, which in turn earned their loyalty and thus enhanced his prospects for a tribal leadership position. The fact of the marriage itself lent a crucial measure of prestige to the man’s family. For his part, through intermarriage the trader obtained not only the skins and pelts gathered by his father-in-law but likely the haul of other male family members as well. Moreover, the union integrated the trader into his wife’s extended kinship network.
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It would be a mistake, however, to assume that these intimate relationships were all about economics. Consider the case of Alexander Culbertson. In the winter of 1840–41 he married Natawista, the teenaged daughter of a Blood headman named Two Suns. Though Culbertson, whom the Blackfeet called Little Beaver, no doubt benefited financially from a close alliance with his wealthy and powerful father-in-law (not to mention Seen From Afar, Natawista’s influential brother), Culbertson’s intense physical attraction to Natawista led him to seek her hand. So strong were his feelings—supposedly from the moment he first saw her at Fort McKenzie, when she was in her early teens—that he readily agreed to Two Suns’ stark preconditions: a delay of marriage until Natawista had grown a bit older, and a renunciation of his other romantic liaisons, which included a previous marriage to a Piegan woman.
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Thus in short order, a heady mix of love, sex, power, and especially money had led intermarriage to take hold among the Blackfeet by the 1830s (just as it had elsewhere in fur country). So pervasive was the pattern that fur traders who did not marry Indian women became the exception. Like Alexander Culbertson, Kenneth McKenzie and James Kipp took Indian wives, as did almost all of the white men who lived and worked at Fort Union and its satellites. These marriages usually conformed to the region’s rough social hierarchy, so that women from more prominent native families tended to marry upper-level employees like the bourgeois or his clerks, while girls of more modest means found husbands among the
engagés
, the fur posts’ rank and file. Although many of these unions broke apart when traders elected to return to the eastern climes of the United States, others, like Culbertson’s, lasted for years, suggesting a degree of closeness that some white visitors to the Upper Missouri found inconceivable.
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O
NE CAN ONLY
speculate as to how Coth-co-co-na viewed the arrangement of her 1844 marriage to Malcolm Clarke. Certainly she understood that she had to accede to Under Bull’s wishes, but perhaps she nursed some quiet doubts about the union. Maybe there was a young warrior in camp or even a different trader whom she preferred as a husband. Or possibly she ached at the notion of leaving behind her mother, who, by custom, would now visit Coth-co-co-na only during Clarke’s absence, for among the Blackfeet it was improper for a married man to speak with his female in-laws.

On the other hand, a Piegan girl who wedded a
napikwan
gained clear advantages. Life at a trading post was easier. No longer would she have to pack and unpack her family’s belongings as they moved about on the Plains, and lower-level employees assumed much of her workload, like gathering firewood. As the Swiss artist and traveler Rudolph Friederich Kurz cynically observed during a visit to Fort Union in 1851, “an Indian woman loves her white husband only for what he possesses—because she works less hard, eats better food, is allowed to dress and adorn herself in a better way—of real love there is no question.”
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Kurz, however, was blind to the disincentives of intermarriage for the Indian bride, especially the loss of autonomy in child rearing and the increased exposure to epidemic diseases.
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Regardless of her anxieties or expectations regarding marriage to a white man, Coth-co-co-na must have seen attributes in Malcolm Clarke that intrigued her. Not only was he handsome, but he was well connected, too, having come upriver in 1841 with Alexander Culbertson, who assigned him to Fort McKenzie as a clerk. Clarke had quickly made a favorable impression upon the Blackfeet, who initially called him White Lodge Pole, a reference not only to his fair skin but also to his stature and perceived importance (the white lodge pole held in place the teepee where the tribal council met to discuss weighty affairs). Clarke later acquired the name Four Bears because of his hunting prowess, having once killed four grizzlies before breakfast.

Alexander Culbertson, Natawista, and their son Joe, ca. 1863. Taken during their residence in Peoria, Illinois, after Culbertson’s retirement from the AFC, this photograph shows perhaps the most famous intermarried couple on the Upper Missouri during the heyday of the fur trade. Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society.

His reputation, however, was not unalloyed. Even as the Piegans came to call him Four Bears, the name probably carried a whiff of irony. After all, it was common among the Blackfeet to bestow a deliberately contrary moniker; for instance, a band called the Never Laughs was in fact probably quite merry.
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Thus Clarke’s honorific, while seeming to flatter his skill with a rifle, may have been a rebuke for his wanton slaughter of a creature that most Blackfeet held in awe.
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Death and violence would shadow Malcolm Clarke during the three decades he spent in Blackfeet country.

Since there is no surviving record of Malcolm Clarke’s marriage to Coth-co-co-na, one can only surmise that it conformed in its particulars to the wedding between Alexander Culbertson and Natawista, which took place at Fort Union in the winter of 1840–41. Having divorced his first wife and lived alone in the interim, Culbertson had met the terms set by Natawista’s father. The union was solemnized by a simple exchange of nine horses each between Culbertson and his in-laws.
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Though the bride was just fifteen, their union was unremarkable for its time and place. Thus began a relationship that endured for thirty years and that perfectly illustrates the cultural confluence generated by the fur trade: the marriage of an Indian woman and a white man; their gift exchange on terms set by the Indians; and in due time, the birth—in this case—of five children of mixed ancestry.

2

Four Bears

N
ear the end of his first trip to North America, Charles Dickens made a brief stop at West Point, New York, in June 1842. Though put off by the customs of the local hotel, which forbade spirits and served meals at “rather uncomfortable hours,” the English novelist—who had achieved literary celebrity only a few years earlier—wrote rapturously of the little town nestled in the shadows of Bear Mountain and its famous institution of higher learning, the U.S. Military Academy (USMA). As he recorded in
American Notes
, the travelogue of his six-month journey along the East Coast and to the Great Lakes, the school—perched on a high granite bluff overlooking the Hudson River—“could not stand on more appropriate ground, and any ground more beautiful can hardly be.” Dickens was no less impressed by the rigorous course of study pursued by the academy’s cadets, which he praised as “well devised, and manly.”
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