The True Account (36 page)

A
T DAWN, SMOKE
, wearing red and black war paint and carrying his feathered lance, and I, with my easel, paints, brushes, and the metal tube containing all my finished paintings, rode our horses toward Chief Mountain with an escort of twelve Blackfoot warriors. At the base of the mountain I gave my rifle and ammunition to Buffalo's Back Fat to hold for me, telling him that I would rely entirely on my “wizardry.” Smoke assured the other riders that well before noon he would be back with my scalp, and he ordered them to be ready, along with his thousand warriors, to ride to the place where they would ambush the Americans. The other men rode off without looking back, and Smoke and I started up the first slope.

As we approached a stand of tall firs, he said to me, “There is a glade on the other side of these woods, American. I'll meet you there in the same time it has taken us to ride this far”—which was about an hour. Then he appeared to transform himself into a wisp of mountain fog and slipped out of sight into the woods.

I dismounted, removed my belongings from Bucephalus, and took off his saddle and bridle. “Now, sir,” I said. “For two years and more you've served me better than I could ever have wished for. Regardless of what happens to me today, you're free.” I whacked him on the flank, and he nickered once and headed back down the mountain.

I started into the woods and some minutes later reached the glade Smoke had mentioned. Here, surrounded by lupines and paintbrush flowers, I set up my easel and went quickly to work.

 

Smoke was approaching. I could not hear him, but I could smell the tang of charred wood as a man-shaped column of smoke drifted toward me across the opening. Abruptly, the Blackfoot chief appeared in his own shape, not far from where I was kneeling. So swiftly I could scarcely follow the motion, he brought back his lance and hurled it straight through my chest. With a war cry he sprang at me, flourishing his knife—only to discover that a painting of a man cannot be scalped. His shout of triumph turned to a scream of anger. But by then I was gone from my hiding place in the nearby forest, and he was left with nothing but a torn painting. The great Smoke had killed a picture.

 

Noon. The sun beat down through the stunted trees and glanced off the cliffs above me. I was faint from lack of food, but there was plenty of water on the mountain, and the breeze off the ice fields above the cliffs was cool. This time I was wedged into a fissure in a rock wall. Just as the sun reached the meridian, a white wolf trotted up the defile. He tested the air with his nose, howled, and transformed into Smoke, who instantly threw his lance through my second painting. When he realized his mistake, his cry of rage was not a man's but a wolf's. He changed back into the animal and, with a dodging motion, ran off howling.

So far, Tawny Panther's stratagem had worked perfectly. But I knew I would see Smoke once more before nightfall. And our third encounter would determine Lewis's fate as well as my own.

 

Sunset was less than an hour away. All afternoon I had eluded the shape-shifter, who had taken the form now of a wolf, now a bear, now a bighorn sheep. As we climbed higher on the mountain, up onto the steep snowfields, where I needed to use the metal tube holding my paintings as a walking staff, I grew weaker.

I found the ice cave exactly where Yellow Sage had said it would be. And just as she had told me, it seemed to go entirely through the side of the mountain, a natural tunnel with frozen blue walls. I hurried through the passageway, past flickering images in the ice of long-dead Blackfoot chiefs and medicine men. At the far end I removed my paintings from the tube and arranged them around the walls of the cavern so that the slanting sunlight shone in on them, illuminating my tableaux of the Great Falls, the Land Where the River of Yellow Stones Rises, the Bitterroots, the Columbia, and all the rest. Then, with the last of my strength, I set up my easel and rapidly began to paint what might very well be my final picture.

 

I stood in deep shadow and regarded what I had created—a portrait of myself at the easel, placed so that the low rays of the sun shone fully on it. Again I smelled smoke. My adversary appeared suddenly in the mouth of the cave, this time in his own form. He took two running steps and hurled the lance straight through the painting and the easel. Instantly I stepped forward and turned the torn picture around to show, on the reverse, the painted figure of Smoke himself. When the magician saw whom he had destroyed, he screamed. Before my eyes he transformed into a catamount, crouching to leap at me.

“Smoke!” I shouted. “Look around yourself. You know what powerful medicine my paintings hold. I will give them all to you in exchange for the safety of the American explorers. You and the Blackfoot Nation will have dominion over all the vast country they portray.”

The cat's long tail twitched. Then he sprang. My head struck the wall of the cave and all was black.

 

I could not have been unconscious for more than a few moments, but when I opened my eyes, struggled to my feet, and stepped out of the cave, the only creature in sight was a war eagle with a gleaming white head, flying toward the sinking sun with the tube containing my paintings glinting in its talons. The bird gave a piercing cry, and as it screamed I caught on the evening air the scent of sage. The girl standing beside me pointed to the west, toward a land of rolling green hills, blue lakes, and quick rivers gleaming in the afterglow.

“Once upon a time an American painter named Ticonderoga fell in love with a Blackfoot girl of innumerable ways and stays named Yellow Sage Flower Who Tells Wise Stories,” she said, and as she continued her story we headed down the mountainside together toward the Sweetgrass.

July 3, 2003

Dr. Stephan T. Black Elk, Curator

Museum of the American Plains Indians

Browning

Blackfoot Nation, Montana Territory

 

Dear Dr. Black Elk,

Thank you very much for your prompt confirmation of the safe arrival of the crates and your most welcome news that their contents were undamaged. I am also delighted, though of course in no way surprised, that your preliminary tests have confirmed the authenticity of the paper and ink of the manuscript. As you pointed out in your letter, the accuracy of my ancestor's narrative, or of parts of it, will no doubt remain a matter of debate, particularly among our good friends the Lewis and Clark scholars, for decades to come. But I am happier than I can say that you have already found “several good western university presses” interested in publishing it. Wouldn't it be ironic if the publisher turned out to be my dear, skeptical late husband's former place of employment, the University of Montana?

I am also happy to accept your most gracious invitation to deliver the keynote address at your upcoming Lewis and Clark bicentennial celebration, and to formally present the manuscript to the museum and unveil the contents of the crates in person. My husband loved to tease me about rattling on forever once I got started on Ti and True
—
until, as I have suggested to you, we had to table the subject to preserve harmonious relations. But I promise not to take more than ten minutes, or fifteen at most, to say what I have to say about my interesting ancestors.

In the meantime, you asked if I could provide a bit more of the history of True and Ti Kinneson for your press release. Gladly.
Over the several decades following the L and C expedition, Ticonderoga Kinneson established himself as the first American painter of Louisiana. Many of his contemporaries felt that he wanted only a small measure of additional technique to do for the West what Audubon and Wilson, say, did for the East. His large story tableaux recording the bison hunters, the Red River buffalo-cart brigades, and the annual summer rendezvous of mountain men the likes of Bridger and Carson are quite incomparable, as are his dozens of portraits of the Blackfeet, Crow, Assiniboine, etc. He painted the gold rush at Sutter's Mill in '48, the silver stampede in Nevada, the great covered wagon trains to Pikes Peak. He was there to see it all happen, and he recorded it faithfully. If Ti's purpose, as he hinted in his narrative, was to tell the story of Louisiana, and his life and times there, he did it well, taking a page from Franklin and other contemporary Indian artists.

Ti's beloved wife, my great-great-grandmother, Yellow Sage Flower Who Tells Wise Stories, died in the smallpox epidemic of 1838, leaving Ti, their daughter, Helen of Troy Kinneson, her husband, Crouching Panther (Smoke's son), and their daughter, Sacagawea Kinneson. Ti himself lived to the advanced age of ninety-one, and continued painting all his life.

As for True, he successfully made the balloon trip in the
Dutchman Two
from Chief Mountain to St. Louis, swept the ravishing Miss Flame Danielle Boone off her feet with tales of his great adventure, and married her two days later. True's famous father-in-law, Daniel Boone, was reportedly so glad to see his spinster daughter settled that he presented his old adversary with a bearskin and a five-dollar gold piece and proudly gave away the bride. The happy couple then returned to Vermont to meet Ti's father and Helen of Troy, and soon afterward proceeded across the Atlantic, taking the stages of London and the Continent by storm with the private's great new epic,
The One True Account of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,
and its cast of more than two hundred American Indians.

Now to the contents of the crates. I would suggest that the museum arrange them chronologically, beginning with Ti's pictures of the Natchez Trace and St. Louis, moving on to the firelight council of the Teton Sioux and the Okeepa ceremony of the Mandans, Buffalo Jump on the Little Missouri, and then the great tableaux, highlighted by
Crossing the Bitterroots
and
Down the Columbia.
But exactly how you will present Ti's paintings in your new wing is, of course, up to you.

You kindly asked if I had a favorite painting that I might like to keep. At eighty-three, I don't wish to keep any of them
—
or anything else, really, except perhaps my wits about me until Napi sees fit to call me to the Sweetgrass. But yes, I do have a favorite. Forgive a bit of vanity on the part of an old lady, Dr. Black Elk. It's
Yellow Sage Bathing at the Three Forks,
and for the purely shameless reason that I rather fancy that my magical great-great-grandmother resembles me at that age. Then, too, I am terribly partial to Ti's portrait of True flying away in his great pink and yellow balloon, waving triumphantly, mail and head plate gleaming in the sunset.

Finally, in response to your question, I would like to suggest an inscription for the plaque at the entrance to the new gallery.
Why not let Ti have the last words? As in fact he did. When True died, in 1846, Flame and their children asked Ticonderoga to write his uncle's epitaph. It is engraved on his stone, next to Flame's, in a windy hilltop cemetery up in the far northern mountains of his beloved Vermont. I cite it overleaf.

Sincerely yours,

Cora Soaring Eagle Kinneson

The first American to visit the Pacific Ocean by land; a playwright of note; the first and best lexicographer of the languages of the Indians of Louisiana; an ingenious inventor; a classicist and schoolmaster nonpareil; a fervent Aristotelian; a loving brother, husband, father, grandfather, and uncle, whose imagination was unfettered by either convention or fact; whose hopefulness and good nature yielded to no force, human or natural; and whose ways and stays ranked second to none in the history of the world.

H
OWARD
F
RANK
M
OSHER
is the author of ten books, including
Waiting for Teddy Williams, The True Account,
and
A Stranger in the Kingdom,
which, along with
Disappearances,
was corecipient of the New England Book Award for fiction. He lives in Vermont.