The Yellowstone (16 page)

“It was a beautiful ceremony,” she said, lying back, tired, and smiling lazily at the two of them. “Annemarie and I agree. De Smet won’t perform my wedding.”

“Why not?” asked Mac.

“Because he’s against bigamy.” Mac just looked at her, puzzled. “Annemarie and I agree. I’m going to marry you. When you’re man enough for two wives.”

Annemarie was covering her mouth, laughing.

INTERLUDE

In 1844 Robert Burns Maclean built Yellowstone House, and for the next twenty years he lived outside the pageant of history. The so-called great events of the time—war and peace, booms and busts, the deeds of presidents, the comings and goings of famous people—these left him untouched. He took only casual notice of the principal events in the West—the Mexican War, the migration of the Mormons to Utah, the discovery of gold in California and Colorado. Even the War Between the States did not affect him.

His story, unlike history, was measured in simple, personal experiences—the births of children, the deaths of friends, the moments of intimacy between wives and husbands, the rise of the river, the stories old men tell in winter, a room added to a house, a book read, a good garden or a bad one, the time spent riding over the prairie with wives and sons and daughters.

His life was seasonal. Spring marked the year’s first hunt. He made fresh meat, a cause for celebration after a winter of jerky and pemmican. He took buffalo robes still thick from winter. Mac did his hunting with Strikes Foot’s band of Cheyennes, to let his children understand what it meant to be an Indian, and a nomad.

Summer was spent on the move. In June, known to the Cheyennes as the time when the horses get fat, he made a trip to the mouth of the Yellowstone. There he met the steamboat and exchanged bales of fur, packets of accounts, and letters addressed to his Uncle Hugh in St. Louis, for letters and bales and kegs of trade goods in return. In July, the moon when the buffalo bulls are rutting, he and his family visited the Cheyennes for the annual renewal of the sacred arrows, their homage to the beneficence of the earth.

In autumn he shipped his bales of fur downstream again, this time by bullboat, then keelboat, and finally steamer, all the way to St. Louis. And he conducted another buffalo hunt. He set the robes and dried buffalo tongues aside to ship to St. Louis—they were now far more valuable than beaver pelts—and put up meat for the coming months of cold and snow.

In the winter he worked at projects in the trading post, brought his books up to date, and wrote long letters to Hugh. Among the Cheyennes, winter was the time to tell stories, and with Mac and his family it was the time to read the histories and novels of the white man, which seemed as fairy-tale fantastic as the legends of the Indians. Mac read to his wife and children and taught them to read. Books were scarce and precious.

And every winter, in the hoop-and-stick-game moon, which white men know as January, Mac took a trip into the high country where the Yellowstone River sprang up, the land of geysers, waterfalls, and hot springs. It was a difficult trip in the snow, but the plains were almost always passable enough for him to ride as far as the mountains. Then he would snowshoe to the hot spring where the younger Mac had found solace when he was lost. The trip always felt like a pilgrimage to him, and he always went alone.

In every season he smoked the pipe, raised the cup, and traded with the Cheyennes, Sioux, Crow, and Blackfeet who journeyed to the fort, exchanging the products of manufacture for the products of nature.

He became a kind of Indian, his lodge and his family as welcome as any in the Cheyenne circle of lodges. But he knew he was not truly a Cheyenne. He did not forget, or regret, that he was a white man. He did not suffer through thirst and hunger to seek a medicine dream. He did not dance before the sun and mortify his flesh until he dropped, exhausted. Instead Mac chose to be a civilized man in a savage land. To him, wonderfully savage.

He did develop his own place of meditation, the small summit of that chimney rock overlooking his beloved river, where he first had the idea of Yellowstone House, in 1843, when he was half-starved. He called it a place to think. A Cheyenne would have called it a place to envision.

Mac also developed a place for spiritual cleansing. Below the sentinel rock the river widened, got shallow, and left a small island just a few yards off the bank. There Mac built his own sweat lodge with his own hands. At irregular intervals he went there to sweat alone, naked, contemplative. Sometimes he stayed all night, alternating between the intense heat of the sweat lodge and the sweet cold of the river. His ceremony was his own, adapted from the Cheyennes and every other tribe. He found renewal in it.

From time to time the outside world, the so-called civilized world, imposed itself on Mac. In June of 1846, at Fort Union, he heard that the United States was warring with Mexico. In September of that year, when Jim Sykes made the run to Taos to trade for
aguardiente
, he found the entire province of New Mexico in the hands of American armed forces. What’s more, Jim reported to Mac, an immense herd of religious fanatics had crossed the Oregon Trail that year and settled in the valley of the Great Salt Lake. Mormons, they called themselves. Short on sense, according to Jim, but hardscrabble and then some.

None of that mattered to Mac, Annemarie, and Lisette. It was too far away. The birth of their first son did matter, borne by Annemarie that winter. To please Uncle Hugh they called him Adam Smith Maclean.

Lisette and Annemarie persuaded Mac to expand his family by one wife before Felice was even a year old. In the autumn of ’46 Little One was brought to bed with twin girls, but they were stillborn, and she was barren from that day.

Mac heard from the factor at Fort William, the next June, that the United States had laid hold of all of the Southwest, Texas to California, via the Mexican War, and had also settled its boundary dispute with Great Britain and taken the Oregon country into the Union, from the Rockies to the sea. The nation, once a north-south strip from Maine to Florida, now swept majestically west to the Pacific Ocean.

Hurrah! said Mac pleasantly, and lifted his glass. Practically speaking, it didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference to him what the government of the United States did. It seldom ventured within a thousand miles of him, never helped solve his troubles with Indians or white men, or deep snows or raging rivers. It didn’t protect his life or property or give him a court to seek justice in—it asked him for nothing and gave him nothing. Which was fine with Mac. Yet he loved his country for its ideals: It was the first country to say no man is born higher than another.

That same summer Dreyfuss left Yellowstone House. He didn’t know why, he said. He was a Jew, he said, a minor revelation, but not one that mattered in any way Mac could see. Dreyfuss didn’t know what he wanted to do with the rest of his years. He said that he felt like some benign Wandering Jew, destined to roam the earth until he understood…something. He speculated that he should simply walk about and observe humankind. That was hard for Mac to understand. Yet it was Dreyfuss. Mac gave Valdez the clerking job, but he missed Dreyfuss sorely.

After the Mexican War the country turned its energies to quarreling about slavery, but that had no direct effect on the Macleans, except for the abolitionist declamations Uncle Hugh started adding to his letters. As an abolitionist, Hugh was in the minority in St. Louis.

Those same letters showed that Mac was doing well as a trader—he was prosperous, if not rich. The prosperity was theoretical. Money in some St. Louis bank changed nothing in the way the Macleans lived.

The business was tricky. Mere trading was relatively easy. The reliable patronage of the Cheyennes was invaluable to Mac. Getting other Indians to come in and keeping them peaceable if enemy bunches showed up, that took some subtlety. It was even trickier getting goods to and from market. Robert Campbell was financing competition to American Fur Company, no doubt in a spirit of gleeful malice, so he sent a steamboat upriver, on the spring rise. Usually, but not always, it got to the mouth of the Yellowstone, three hundred miles away. Mac floated his furs down to Fort William, Campbell’s post near Fort Union, and picked up his own consignment there.

He was not prosperous enough, though, to do without his partners, Uncle Hugh and Robert Campbell. In 1849 Bloods swooped down on Mac and his men on the way back from Fort Union and stole a year’s worth of trade goods. Mac thought he had been betrayed by two of his guards. It was not lost on him that they had worked for American Fur Company for years, or that the Bloods were allies of the Company. American Fur played by hard rules, or none at all.

The next two years were splendidly profitable, but Mac was wary and felt he never knew when he might go broke. When he had enough cash to do without his partners and financiers, he decided to keep them anyway.

In the summer of 1847 Annemarie gave Mac a second son, Thomas Jefferson Maclean.

Three years later she had a difficult birthing, and their second daughter was born with palsy. They named her Christine, Charbonneau’s Frenchman name for Lame Deer. Lame Deer said she was a special child, touched by the spirits, and might bring to the people a great dream. Mac doted on that afflicted infant as he had on no other.

The next year an urgent request came from Broken Hand Fitzpatrick—come to Fort Laramie with the Cheyennes for a big talk. Mac knew the Cheyennes, Fitz said, and could help them get what was due them.

What Mac knew about the Cheyennes was that they already had what they needed, and what they wanted. But he went, and immediately saw the problem. The Oregon Trail was a line laid waste through a grand country. The earth was rutted and baked, stripped bare of timber, the game driven away. Yes, the Indians of the plains deserved payment for this devastation. The agreement reached at that big conference gave the whites the right to the Oregon road, and to forts and soldiers. It drew boundaries around the hunting grounds of the various tribes. It elicited promises the Indians couldn’t keep. And the payment? About a dollar per person per year for just ten years. A joke. A treaty that was unfair, unenforceable, meaningless, and the despair of Fitzpatrick, Bridger, Mac, and every man who knew the Indians.

Mac felt profoundly grateful he’d built his post in the Yellowstone country and not on the Oregon Trail. He saw no reason his country would ever change.

The world of civilization did keep sending emissaries to the Yellowstone country, and odd ones. The same year, 1843, that Mac nearly starved walking across Judith basin, Sir William Drummond Stewart conducted an elaborate hunting trip, and John James Audubon came up on a Company steamboat to do research for his
Quadrupeds of North America
. De Smet also came to the Yellowstone valley that year. In 1851 a young Swiss painter, Rudolph Friedrich Kurtz, showed up at Fort Union, full of ambition. He was going to paint the world’s most romantic subject, the Indians of the plains, and display his work in art galleries, as George Catlin had done. But the Indians remembered Catlin and connected his paintings with the smallpox epidemic of 1837, and felt reluctant. And the booshway insisted on ordering the young man to paint this but not that. After a winter as a Company clerk, Kurtz went home disgruntled.

Perhaps the strangest of these visitors was Sir George Gore, of Sligo, Ireland. Jim Bridger guided Gore to the Ywllowstone country in 1855. Gore wanted adventure, which to him meant hunting and fishing. He also needed advice, supplies, and more hands who knew the country.

Gore did things in style. He traveled with six wagons and twenty-one French carts, painted red. He had forty employees, 112 horses, twelve yoke of oxen, fourteen dogs, and three milk cows. He required an entire wagon to carry his guns—over a hundred of them, made by celebrated gunsmiths. He brought two wagons of fishing gear, and a skilled man to tie flies.

Mac and Jim Sykes took turns in the employ of the rich man, partly just to get to visit with Bridger. Leaving the Yellowstone country, bound for his home in Ireland and then on to grand hunting expeditions in Africa, Siberia, and other far-flung places, Gore showed Mac the list of his kills on the great plains: 40 grizzlies, 2,500 buffalo, plus too many elk, deer, antelope, and small game to count.

A few prospectors roamed the country as well. Mac told Annemarie that the white people were enamored of great fantasies—country to explore, books to write, pictures to paint, fortunes to find. They liked to use the Rocky Mountains as a stage for their grand romantic gestures and go home with a splendid fund of stories.

None of the excursions of the dream seekers into the Yellowstone country had much impact on Mac or his family, or the crew at the post or the Cheyennes. They lived to the rhythms of the earth and the seasons and noticed little else, except perhaps as a diversion.

In 1860 Mac and Lisette took the boys, Smith and Thomas, to St. Louis to enroll them in a private school. There they found out that a man named Lincoln had been elected President. In April, 1861, when the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, Mac was back in the remote vastness of the Yellowstone country.

It was not until 1863 that the white world broke into their lives. A white man showed up unannounced and spoke two words…

BOOK TWO

Chapter 1

September, 1863, Plum moon

“Yellow metal,” said John Krier with a tight smile. Mac didn’t like the sound of those two words.

“At a place called Alder Gulch, above the Ruby River.” Krier let a tick of the clock go by, dramatically. “More than King Solomon’s mines.”

That news disgusted Mac. He’d been watching about a hundred “white people, even a few women and children, troop into the courtyard of Yellowstone House. An incredible hundred white people, nearly as many as had ever been in the Yellowstone country over all the years. Milling around the courtyard wanting things to eat, things to wear, things to get warm in—things Mac didn’t have.

They’d arrived on boats, for Christ’s sake. Mackinaws. From upstream.

He turned back to Krier. More than King Solomon’s mines. “Damn,” he said softly. “How many prospectors?”

“Not a one,” replied Krier drily. He had the soft accent of Southern gentry. From what Mac could see of his face under the broad-brimmed hat, Krier looked like a handsome man, tall, with long brown hair curling to his shoulders. And a hard man. “Nobody has to prospect for it. Two thousand men panning it, rocking it, sluicing it, getting it every which way. If a man drinks that water, he could get dust out of his shit.”

A lot of words for a man as unsocial as John Krier seemed. Mac wondered what he was after.

“Two thousand men,” murmured Mac.

“And adding a hundred and more a week,” said Krier, “up from Salt Lake and Bannack way. Virginia City, they call it. Varina City, really, after Jefferson Davis’s wife. But damn United States federal judge wouldn’t write her name down.”

So Krier was Secesh. And a federal judge had gotten to Idaho Territory. Mac was having trouble soaking up all the news.

“It’s a tent city now, but not for long. Plenty of dust, and nothing to spend it on. For sure no food. Is there somewhere we can talk in private?” Evidently Krier meant to tell Mac why he felt talkative today.

Bannack. Way on the west side of the big divide, where they’d also found some gold, Mac had heard. Country of the Bannocks and Shoshones. Gold rushers going there from the other diggings, from Colorado Territory and all the way from California. Brought their wagons up from Salt Lake City. Brother Brigham and his Mormons must be supplying them. Profitably. Which would please Brother Brigham uncommonly.

The only good part about the gold chasing, to Mac, was that it stayed clear of him, his family, the Sioux and Cheyennes, and the entire Yellowstone country. From above the Platte to the Missouri River was a vast, untouched buffalo pasture. No one had found any gold there. Or looked. Or would—because the Indians wouldn’t let them. Mac had put Yellowstone House in the right place, square in the middle of it.

Annemarie motioned to Mac from the door of the trading room. “Just a minute,” said Mac. Krier stayed right with him.

Annemarie and Valdez looked confused, amiably confused, not yet flustered. Men were offering them little bags of gold dust. Dust for cloth, thread, and needles. Dust for whiskey and tobacco. Dust for flour, coffee, sugar, bacon, jerky, and beans.

Mac smiled at his wife and his clerk. He could see amusement glint behind Valdez’s glasses. These white folks were ragged, dirty, half-sick, and emaciated from hunger. They had nothing, especially not the skills and knowledge to get what they needed. But they had gold. And they were sure, ragingly sure, that gold was everything there was to have.

They couldn’t guess that gold dust was mostly just so much corral grit to Mac. He and his family couldn’t eat it, wear it, or trade it to the Indians. It would be worth something later, when he could pay someone to take it to St. Louis and exchange it for useful items. Even the cost of the trip undercut the value of the gold.

Mainly, the MacLeans didn’t have any emotional attachment to the stuff. Hell, Yellowstone House didn’t even have a way to weigh the little sacks of dust, and Mac, Annemarie, and Valdez didn’t know what it was worth, except by somebody else’s word. The Cheyennes would have scorned it. Mac wished he could do the same.

The three of them had a look at the ledger. Prices weren’t set in dollars—who in this country gave dollars for goods? But the accounts showed what they paid for each item, in dollars, and they knew what they had to get in robes, so you could figure it out. Valdez could—Annemarie didn’t do figures much. That Valdez had the brain of a trader.

“The Crows,” Annemarie reminded Mac. She meant that of the bands who usually came to trade early in the autumn, Long Hair’s Crows still had not appeared.

Mac nodded. He wrote down a way for Valdez to convert prices in robes into prices in dust. Valdez smiled in approval. Yellowstone House’s profit would be shining.

“We could trade wagonloads of flour, bacon, and beans,” said Valdez.

Mac had to laugh. What would a trading post in the middle of the Yellowstone country be doing carrying food of any kind? With buffalo thick as grass on the plains, who would ask for food?

The pork-eaters stood in front of the counter, gaping.

“Don’t run us out of anything,” Mac said to them “Anything at all.”

“Hell,” said Krier, butting in, “these people need you. We’re counting on you.”

“We have our regular customers to think of,” said Mac. You can stop at Fort Alexander, at the mouth of the Rosebud. And Fort Union will have quite a bit.”

Krier glared at him. “These are white people. You are a white man, aren’t you?’

Mac didn’t answer. He didn’t say that the Crows depended on him and would suffer this winter if he failed them. Or that he was their friend. Or that he wasn’t so damn sure he felt much like a white man anymore. Krier was putting Mac into a corner where he had to stand up for red against white, or the other way. That made him feel guilty, and that made him mad.

Mac took Krier into his office. He decided not to offer the man a drink. “No flour!” wailed a voice from the trading room. Mac closed the door.

Krier’s idea turned out to be that Mac and he should go partners. Krier would transport goods up the Yellowstone and people down. Mac would put up the supplies both ways. People were desperate up at Alder Gulch, Krier said. Desperate for any kind of food but game. Desperate for amenities—he actually used the word “amenities”—such as calico, that would make them feel as if they were better than the wild Indians.

Better than wild Indians. But going hungry in the middle of the finest buffalo country in the world. Mac didn’t smile.

If they struck it rich, Krier went on, these people were usually desperate to get back to civilization where they could spend their money. And if they didn’t, they were desperate to get home.

“Hell, Maclean, this is your chance to get rich. Panning is chancy, but supplying is a sure thing. You can set yourself up for life. Those people have the money.”

Mac let him run on. He was already set up for life, unless the gold chasers spoiled it.

Krier had things all worked out. Water transportation was easier than wagons back to the States—half the time of going all the way to Salt Lake and across the Oregon Trail. Not much work—the river provided the power. And people were willing to pay to float down.

“Use the Missouri,” said Mac finally, sounding more antagonistic than he meant to. “You’re almost right on the Missouri.”

Krier shook his head. “The Falls.” The Great Falls of the Missouri that forced Lewis and Clark to portage. “Plus it’s longer. Anyway, feller in your position shouldn’t even breathe of the Missouri.”

Mac got up, took two tin cups from the sideboard, and poured two whiskeys. He needed a drink. He wanted nothing to do with this man, but had to think how to handle it judiciously.

The implications were immense. Could be a lot of people would be rushing through the Yellowstone country for a few years. With any luck, just a few months. But Krier had said “more than King Solomon’s mines.” Damn. Fortunately Mac could count on the Blackfeet, Crows, Sioux, and Cheyennes.

“Krier,” he said, “it’s too damn dangerous. The Laramie treaty gave all this country to the Indians. They accept wagons on the Oregon Trail. They accept steamboats on the Missouri. On the Yellowstone they’ll burn every boat they see and scalp the folks.”

Krier snickered. “Hell, Maclean, you think Injuns can keep white people out? There’s a man named of Bozeman right now making a wagon track from the Oregon Trail. Right along in front of the Big Horns. He started putting it in last spring, when there was just the Bannack diggin’s. Alder Gulch makes Bannack look puny. Bozeman ought to be along with a wagon train anytime.”

“The Sioux won’t let them through,” Mac said flatly.

Krier looked a little irate. “I’d say the U.S. government will have something to say about that. That’s what soldiers are for, I’d say.”

“Government’s back east.”

“Yeah, got their hands full with Jefferson Davis,” Krier snickered.

“You don’t know the Sioux, Krier.”

“Maclean,” Krier said in his soft, upper-class tones, “you don’t want to get rich, do you?” Krier sounded disgusted. Mac stood up.

Krier took the hint and got to his feet. “Damn squaw man,” he muttered, and strode out without a backward look.

An hour later, when Krier had his boats loaded, Mac didn’t even go to the river to say good-bye. He was up on his sentinel rock, smoking his clay pipe, looking down on his nook in Indian country, thinking what it all might mean. He thought the Sioux and Cheyennes would put a quick end to it. That’s what he really thought.

He chuckled to himself. Krier left miffed. Fellow must have thought talking to Mac was like sucking on a thorn.

Squaw man, he called me, thought Mac. For twenty years Mac had been like any other white man he knew. He and his wives had been looked up to. And his children. They were the gentry of the Yellowstone country. If the whites came, he supposed, that would change. He would become a squaw man, a barbarian. Worse than the Indians, people would call him. They’d call Annemarie and Lisette the same. And Felice Maclean, Adam Smith Maclean, Thomas Jefferson Maclean, and Christine Maclean.

He spat into the canyon below.

“Coyote must have sucked out his brains for breakfast,” Mac said unhappily in their quarters that evening.

“He doesn’t see the buffalo,” Lisette said. “He thinks Indians go to the store for groceries.” Ever since Little One went to St. Louis with Mac and the boys—when they started at the academy—she’d been sarcastic about white people. If her husband and children weren’t white, Mac thought, she’d have no tolerance for white people at all. And he wasn’t sure her husband mattered.

The children weren’t exactly hers. Lisette had borne Mac no children, and that was a sadness. But in her eyes Felice Red Hair, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and Christine were hers too. And in Mac’s eyes, and in the kids’.

“Krier just doesn’t know any better,” said Annemarie. That woman was understanding of everything and everybody.

“He says people are hungry up there.” Mac lay down on the robes in his long Johns. The Macleans didn’t like a bed. The three of them slept together on a thick stack of robes and blankets on the floor. To Mac, that was luxury. A hell of an improvement on the white man’s shuck mattress. For that matter, he wished they spent less time in their post quarters and more in their lodge.

“They won’t be ready for winter,” suggested Annemarie. She slipped in next to him, naked. He noted with pleasure that though she was nearing forty, her body was still firm.

“Maybe they won’t stay the winter,” said Mac.

“Huh!” Lisette snorted. “They’ve got gold fever.”

“A strike on the west side of the divide would take them back,” said Mac.

“And a strike here would put them in our laps,” said Little One. She got her book,
Ivanhoe
. Mac had read all the Walter Scott books to them. Lisette liked to read the ones she knew alone, by candlelight in the dining room, after Mac and Annemarie were asleep. In the marriage Lisette treated Annemarie a little like Mac’s wife and herself as his mistress.

“This isn’t gold country. That fellow with Raynolds told me so.” Lieutenant Raynolds had led a government “exploration” party into the Yellowstone country, four decades after the area was well-known to mountain men.

“Where is Alder Gulch?” asked Annemarie.

“Between the Madison River and the Ruby,” said Mac. Annemarie knew that meant over two hundred and fifty miles away.

“Bad to travel in winter,” she said.

“I better send Jim down to Union for supplies anyway,” said Mac. “Even flour.”

“Flour,” Lisette sniffed, and started out. Just then Felice came in.

“Did you see the one on the sweep?” she asked Lisette. The mackinaw steered with a sweep at the rear.

Felice these days seemed to expect Lisette to understand her better than her other parents. At nineteen, she was taller than her mother or father, slender, dark as an Indian, but auburn-haired and blue-eyed. Tall young men all over the upper Missouri country wanted to court her. But she was being kept back—against her will.

“The really tall one? Black-bearded?” said Lisette.

Felice smiled and nodded.

“Zachary Lawrence,” said Mac. “An Irishman.” He was really tall. If he hadn’t been skinny, people would have called him a giant.

“Good-looking,” said Felice. She was talking such bold stuff in front of her parents more often, thought Mac. “Is that what they mean by black Irish?”

“Yes,” said Mac.

“I like it.”

“A pork-eater,” said Annemarie.

Felice deliberately misunderstood her mother. “I wish we got to eat pork,” she said. It was a sore point with Felice that her brothers had been to St. Louis, even wintered there a couple of times, and she hadn’t. She loved to hear about the great city, and to page through the catalogs of merchants and the advertisements in months-old newspapers. Of Mac’s children, she was the most enamored of white ways.

“Maybe I better strap you into a chastity belt,” Mac said, closing his eyes.

Felice followed Lisette to the door. “It’s past time you can Mistai me, Daddy.” The Cheyenne word meant something like “boogeyman.”