The Yellowstone (5 page)

Chapter 6

July, 1843, Moon when the buffalo bulls are rutting

Mac Maclean had an idea. That was about all he had, being shorn of gun, horse, and meat, yet it was enough to make him happy.

The sun was up. Mac, Skinhead, and Jim had scattered to look for food. Mac had found nothing. It would probably be a hungry day. Ten days ago, before the calf, he would have been panicky. But now they had bow and arrows and would find buffalo, or elk, or deer. He wasn’t starving. He was simply hungry, and content with that.

Because he had an idea. An idea how to stay in the Yellowstone country.

He was sitting on a sentinel rock projected out from the ocher sandstone that rimrocked the Yellowstone, dangling his legs, looking down on a bench above the river about three miles below the mouth of the Big Horn River. Below him was a fine, grassy bottom shaded by big, old cottonwood trees.

In the bottom sat the fountain of Mac’s happiness, the remains of old, abandoned Fort Cass. Tulloch’s Fort, some called it. The American Fur Company had Sam Tulloch build it here back in ’32. Went off and left it in ’35—the Company started pulling back from the mountains then.

Sublime accident, Mac thought, that he had stumbled on it. The Yellowstone River was the southern edge of Blackfoot country. The Big Horn was Crow country. A little east, the Yellowstone along the Rosebud and the Tongue and the Powder was Cheyenne and Sioux country. This spot, the mouth of the big Horn, was a crossroads.

Three hundred miles to the east, Fort Union had the Indian trade. Fort Union, far out on the plains, huge, impregnable, once the castle of Kenneth Mackenzie of the American Fur Company, the king of the Missouri. Fort Union of booshway James Kipp, the vain. Of illegal whiskey stills. Of monopoly prices. Hated Fort Union.

But it wasn’t as invulnerable as it used to be. American Fur had pulled out and left it to Pierre Chouteau of St. Louis, who did not have untold wealth and could not afford to ruin competitors by buying high and selling low.

American Fur (everyone still used that name, though it was now Chouteau’s outfit) had just lost Fort Mackenzie, its mountain post. It had no trading post close to the Crows. No post for the Sioux and Cheyenne short of Fort Laramie, to hell and gone south on the Platte. No post in the middle of the West’s best buffalo country.

Skinhead had decided to go back to St. Louis. Gonna trade his mountain yarns for the sweet flow of whiskey in the taverns, he said. Jim didn’t know what he was going to do, as usual, and didn’t seem to care. Now Mac had seen his personal light on the road to Damascus. He chuckled at his vision: He would be a trader. A merchant. Restorer and owner of Fort Cass, crossroads of the northern plains. And proud resident of the Rocky Mountains.

Perched on the sentinel rock, looking over his new domain, he was giddy with delight. Or is it hunger you’re giddy with, Mac Maclean? he teased himself.

Mac was amused at the irony. Scots had always been traders—Hudson’s Bay Company had been spearheaded by Scots in Canada. Northwest Company, too. King Mackenzie was a Scot. Yes, Scots were always traders, Mac’s Uncle Hugh said. Scots liked to go to exotic places and bring back exotic coins.

But Mac had never wanted to be a trader. His father and uncle set up in mercantile trade in St. Louis—they spent their patrimony on it. Hugh liked the business and thrived in it. Alexander, Mac’s dad, loathed it. The only loves for Alexander were Mac, the verses of Bobby Burns, and whiskey. He died when he passed out on the levee in St. Louis, drunk, and fell into the river.

Mac took off for the mountains. He’d always loved the fields and the forests, and the crafted beauty of his gun. Mountain men came into his father and uncle’s store on Fourth Street, full of stories, looking wild as Injuns, and smelling that way, too. As a lad, Mac had even seen painted Indians on the streets of St. Louis.

To him, like his dad, the mercantile business was tedium—the mountains were romance. Now he would do mountain mercantile.

Of course, Mac had no money to start a trading post. No wherewithal to buy blankets, knives, kettles, beads, tobacco, coffee, lead, guns, and whiskey to trade for hides. He would need five thousand dollars, or more likely ten thousand, for a modest outfit.

On the sentinel rock above the Yellowstone he swung his legs exuberantly. The mere lack often thousand dollars didn’t matter to him now—he had an idea, an answer. He could stay in the mountains.

The image of Annemarie rose in his mind. Stay in the mountains, he was saying to himself, and have Annemarie.

Perhaps Mac Maclean was in love with a woman, or rather a girl. Certainly he was in love with a place.

He had come to the Shining Mountains three summers ago, 1840. He rode out with the annual far caravan—up the Platte, rising from prairies to high plains, past Laramie, on to the Sweetwater, across the top of the continent at South Pass, and up the west side of the Wind River Mountains to rendezvous.

It was a glum affair, the 1840 rendezvous on Green River. A small Company caravan. The fur boss, Drips, couldn’t say whether the Company would be sending any more wagon trains to meet the beaver men in the wilds. The price of plews made it a bad proposition.

Camp talk was of what men would do now. Go to Oregon and set up farming. Head for Californy and sport among the Mexicans. Go to sea and visit the Sandwich Islands. Go back to Westport or Springfield or Chillicothe or Williamsburg and live like a white man.

Some of the plans sounded good, but Mac didn’t think they would work. The problem was, not many of the fur trappers seemed like white men anymore. None of them was accustomed, any longer, to white ways—to the labor of the plow, the commerce of the store, the commands of the boss, the will of the community, the sway of church, the rule of law.

Mac thought all American frontiersmen were enamored of adventure, danger, and wild-hair freedom, but these men were addicted.

Besides, it didn’t matter to Mac what they decided to do. During rendezvous he explored the valley of the upper Green River with the Delaware Jim Sykes and a Shoshone named Black Circle. Mac shot a mountain lion and saw Bighorn sheep on the high ridges. He camped by Stewart Lake, the most gorgeous spot he’d ever seen. He fell wildly and romantically in love, in the way only a very young man can. He cared nothing about whether he could make a living here—spending his days in these mountains was all that mattered.

So Mac Maclean partnered up with Jim and Til and Skinhead. They traced the Uintas and spent the winter at the little post Bridger was building to trade with the trappers, a substitute for rendezvous.

In the spring Mac again rode with Skinhead and some other scalawag trappers hunting beaver. Across the Green River they went, and north along the Wind River. Over the divide and into Jackson Hole. Across the high, rolling geyser country to the Yellowstone.

All the way the other men groused. When they found beaver, they crabbed about the low price. When they didn’t, they groused about the country’s being trapped out. Mac didn’t care. The place—the high, sun-struck summits of the Tetons, the cold cricks, the alpine meadows rich with elk, the mountain buffalo, the majestic waterfalls, the delicious hot springs—these meant everything. Mac learned the country, learned the Indians, learned the ways to survive. He ceased to be a pork-eater, the term for a greenhorn, and became an honest pilgrim.

Then by luck he took the step that made him a mountain man.

That second autumn in the mountains, Skinhead, Jim, Til, Mac, and the bunch took the old Indian trail from Togwotee Pass north into the Yellowstone high country, one of Mac’s favorite places. Out exploring late one afternoon, Mac simply got lost. He never did figure out how he did it. Didn’t know where camp was. Rode around in big circles for a couple of days through the complicated high country and never did see it. So he swallowed his fear and set out on his own to get to winter camp at the mouth of Clarks Fork.

He struck out north across some of the continent’s most rugged and most beautiful country. Keeping the valley of the Yellowstone in sight far to his left, he followed the ridges. When he saw the big canyon of the Yellowstone, with what seemed like the two biggest waterfalls in the world, he knew where he was. From last autumn he knew the Indian trail crossed the river near another falls not far downstream. He followed parallel to that trail toward Clarks Fork.

During those sunlit days he unconsciously changed from afraid to at home. He became aware of the benevolence of the earth. The nights frosted, but the days were pleasant. He saw game galore. Twice he stopped at hot springs and eased his body with the warmth. He felt that this adventure alone was worth coming to the Rocky Mountains for.

At the mouth of Clarks Fork he was in country to live in, not just travel through. He hunted every day while he waited for his companions and made plenty of meat. Since Skinhead and company had wasted a week looking for Mac, they turned up irritable. But Mac had grown from pilgrim to mountain man, and found his home country in the mountains, the Yellowstone River.

Yes, he’d found a home, and now he would build a house. Right here at the mouth of the Big Horn. Wouldn’t be traveling so much—have to stay home to trade. A good place to call your own.

It was nearly dark. The three would be moving out soon, down the Yellowstone, looking for Strikes Foot’s Cheyennes. They were gnawing at the bones of two sage hens Jim had killed that morning, pip-squeak bones, Skinhead called them. And Skinhead, prompted by Mac, was telling tales of this spot where the Big Horn flowed into the Yellowstone.

Manuel Lisa built a stockade when he came into this country in ’07. Crazy thing happened. Lisa sent a man named John Colter out to spread word of the trading post among the Indians. Colter took off alone and disappeared for months. Walked all this country just for the hell of it, clear to Jackson’s Hole, even saw the high Yellowstone country, saw the boilings over on the Stinking Water River, brought back tales no one believed. Exploring new country. Alone. Crazy beaver, Colter.

“What happened to the fort?” Mac asked.

“Wagh!” grunted Skinhead. “Blackfeet kicked Lisa’s tail out of the country. Kept kicking everybody else out, too. This nigger helped Major Henry build a fort here in ’23, the year Glass got et by Old Ephraim and showed up months later, riz from the dead. Pilcher had made a fort here a couple of years before. Blackfeet burned both of them. Blackfeet was rambunctious in them days.”

“What about Fort Cass? Today I saw what’s left of it.”

“Damn Company. Finally got the Blackfeet peaceable and went off and left the fort. Good spot for it—Company don’t know nit from gnat.”

Mac stuck to his decision to say nothing of his plans to Skinhead or Jim. Skinhead would blab it all over the mountains. But as Mac traveled that night, one foot after another automatically between his partners, he spun dreams. A substantial building, timber, not adobe, and not as big and gaudy as Fort Union. Comfortable, though not stocked with fancy wines, like some. He could float the furs to Fort Union, a real advantage, and ship them downstream on the paddlewheelers—that would cut the cost of getting his goods to market.

Imagine, Skinhead would snort, paddlewheelers in the Rocky Mountains. But right here you were protected against the steamboats—forever, Mac thought. They’d never come past Wolf Rapid, at the mouth of the Tongue River, several days away. So you had the use without the nuisance. And Mac dreamed on.

Just like a white man, Jim would have said, to be living high in his head when he was starving afoot, unarmed, and wore out.

Chapter 7

Moon when the buffalo bulls are rutting

Dogs were barking at the strangers. Some children disappeared. Others, recognizing the Frenchmen, ran away laughing and screaming. For a moment Mac thought the girl bringing water from the creek was Annemarie, but she was too slender. When children darted into the lodges, sometimes adult heads popped out to have a look at the odd spectacle.

The three trappers had come onto the Cheyennes all together in one huge camp, all the people who lived between the Big Horn Mountains and the Black Hills, gathered together in their half-moon village for the ceremony of the sacred buffalo hat and then the sun dance.

“Good time to be here,” said Skinhead. “Get religion.” But Mac was uneasy about Cheyenne religion and wanted to be off for St. Louis. Or he would want that if he could get beyond craving food and get a gun and a horse.

A voice called out their Cheyenne names: Skinhead, Man Who Doesn’t Stir Air, and Dancer.

Strikes Foot ducked his huge shoulders through the lodge door and gimped toward them fest, grinning. He shook hands white-man style all around, even with Jim, who didn’t like the custom. “Do you have hunger?” he said in Cheyenne.

Mac was acutely embarrassed to be coming into camp this way—dirty, ragged, emaciated, broke, helpless, sore-footed, almost barefooted—hell, almost naked. A beggar in flour-sack rags, and with his face blistered and peeling. But not too embarrassed to use one of his Cheyenne words. “Eat and eat and eat,” he told Strikes Foot.

“We come to you starving,” said Skinhead formally. Strikes Foot would have been too polite to mention it.

“Calling Eagle is making food,” he said. They could see her at it in front of the lodge.

Calling Eagle welcomed them chatteringly. She was a tall, husky woman, always cheerful and animated and bristling with talk, yet odd. She added water to the kettle and said she’d kill a young dog to celebrate. The kids were around somewhere. Annemarie, she added to Mac, had gone to see the Assiniboins.

Mac masked his disappointment. It meant she and her mother were visiting the family Lame Deer was born to. He told himself it was just as well—now she wouldn’t actually see him in this humiliating state. But he also wouldn’t see her before going to St. Louis. Well, that might make it easier to ask Strikes Foot for her.

A pretty girl came out of the lodge, and Calling Eagle introduced her—Strikes Foot’s new wife, Yellow Bird. She smiled shyly, eyes down, and set to work peeling cattail roots for the stew. Three wives now, thought Mac. And usually bunches of kids, all except Annemarie, visiting or adopted. A different sort of family.

Strikes Foot was a huge man, six and a half feet, Mac guessed, extra broad, bull strong, full of life. Strange thing was, he had a clubfoot. It made him gimpy. Usually he kept a buffalo hoof strapped onto it—certainly for ceremonial occasions, or hunting or fighting. But he didn’t let his foot slow him down—he had a considerable reputation as a man of war and was a leader in the Shield society.

Mac wrestled him once and got thrown, over and over. Strikes Foot couldn’t run fast on that hoof in a straight line, but he was quick as a prairie dog on it. And he got his name, Skinhead said, from learning how to kick the hoof into enemies’ chests. Skinhead said Strikes Foot was a good friend and a bad enemy. For Skinhead, that was the highest of compliments.

They ate. And ate. Jerked meat, first. Then cakes of cornmeal—Strikes Foot had been trading down at Fort Union. And at last boiled pup. Mac thought again that food was the greatest pleasure of life.

After eating, they lounged in the tipi with the lodge skirts up, the evening breeze making the July heat tolerable. Strikes Foot told about the trip to Fort Union in the moon when the ponies shed their coats, and leaving Annemarie and Lame Deer with her family for the summer. He said nothing about having taken a third wife—its significance was evident. Strikes Foot was a prosperous and respected Cheyenne.

Yellow Bird sat by her blankets, head down, working with her awl, like a proper woman. Calling Eagle, the sits-beside-him wife, joined in the talk just like a man, commenting, giggling, putting in every two-cents’ worth she had. She was the only Indian woman Mac had ever seen act like that. He watched her on the sly, trying again to get a feel for her oddness. She carried on as heartily as any man. Yet her gestures were soft, delicate, feminine until they were nearly a mockery of the female. And she gazed at Strikes Foot so meltingly it was embarrassing.

Skinhead told about their spring trapping season—“misuble”—and the trip to Fort Mackenzie. “Hear what happened at Mackenzie?” he asked Strikes Foot.

The warrior spoke two Cheyenne names that meant Francis Chardon and Alexander Harvey. The word was that they killed several Blackfeet near the fort, Strikes Foot said, killings that made no sense. Then they headed out for Fort Union as fast as they could, with all the crew and trade goods. They knew the Blackfeet would take hair for hair. Instead the Indians had to settle for burning the place down.

Mac thought he was hearing satisfaction in Strikes Foot’s voice.

“Guess the Blackfeet will trade at Fort Macleod now,” said Skinhead. Strikes Foot didn’t know.

Fort Macleod—Canada. The British, and their damned Hudson’s Bay Company. Mac had other ideas where the Blackfeet could take their trade, ideas he was keeping to himself.

When Skinhead started in on how Magpie robbed them, Mac got some bear grease from Calling Eagle in a cup, excused himself, and went outside. He headed across the village toward Porcupine Creek. He wanted to be alone, to think, to smoke his pipe. This was his need, his craving, to be alone for a while each day and be still. And he needed to think what to say to Strikes Foot about Annemarie.

Mac kept telling himself he was unduly nervous about getting Annemarie for a wife. The girl was interested in him, maybe even infatuated—she had flirted with him, bold behavior among the Cheyenne.

He took his feet out of the little eddy and checked them over. Four hundred miles of walking had taken their toll. Now that the blood was gone, he saw they were terribly chafed and cracked. He’d pushed them hard the last couple of days to get to the village—he hadn’t thought the feet had more than two days of travel in them without a long rest.

He spread the bear grease thick on them and rubbed it in. That would help. He massaged what was left into his face. In the mountains he always treated his fair Scots skin with fat as a precaution—until now he had never known how essential it was. The grease felt wonderful. He imagined Annemarie’s fingers massaging it in. And imagined his hands on Annemarie. He’d been fantasizing about finding out how far her flirting would go. Cheyenne mothers encased their teenage daughters in hide chastity belts. But hide did cut.

Still, Mac knew his fantasizing was idle. You didn’t ruin your chance with your future wife, and future in-laws, by fooling around. A Cheyenne girl who got seduced got exposed publicly, and mocked, mocked almost unto death. No one would marry her—she was an outcast.

Mac heard people coming his way, a couple of female voices and a man’s—no, Calling Eagle’s strange, reedy voice. The women must be coming for water. Embarrassed for no reason, Mac sat still, hoping they wouldn’t see him.

The women came from the cottonwood shadows into the light by the stream, an old woman, Calling Eagle, and a little girl. The girl straddled some rocks and reached out into some swift water to fill her buffalo-stomach pouch. The old woman dipped her gourd and drank. Calling Eagle had a firkin, another sign of Strikes Foots’ prosperity. She hiked up her skirt and waded in knee-deep downstream of the girl to fill it. The little girl was afraid of losing her balance. The old woman stretched a hand out to help the child back. The girl wobbled and pulled the old woman off balance and they both fell in.

Whooping and laughing, soaked, the girl and old woman hurried back toward their lodge. Calling Eagle shooed them along with words. Then she started searching the edges of the creek—probably for small, flat stones, thought Mac. She made lovely bead necklaces accented’ with bone and such stones.

Evidently finding nothing, she set the firkin on the bank and stretched her arms. She walked to the trees without the firkin, pulled her skirt up, and—what?

She was holding something suspiciously like a penis in one hand. Piss was jetting out of it onto the cottonwood.

“Wagh!” grunted Skinhead. “I thought ye knowed, boy.”

Mac merely flushed with anger. Jim looked from one to the other with suppressed amusement. Mac was leading a pony around the rope corral, and Jim was sitting it bareback.

“This child told you she’s
hemaneh
.”

“How was I to know it meant queer?”

“She ain’t exactly queer, beaver.”

“You mean she and Strikes Foot don’t do it?” Mac challenged. He was thinking of the nights he lay in Strikes Foot’s lodge and heard sounds of sexual goings-on. He was hoping it had been Strikes Foot and Lame Deer.

“This child wouldn’t say that neither,” Skinhead proceeded calmly. “He didn’t rightly think as you’re ready to know about
hemaneh
.”

Mac turned back toward Skinhead and pulled the pony’s neck awkwardly. “Hey!” said Jim softly. Mac paid attention to his leading.

They were going to have to borrow horses from Strikes Foot to get to Fort Union, so they might as well get them green-broke for him. Now it was almost too dark to work.

“Don’t make no never mind to you, anyway,” ventured Skinhead.

The hell it doesn’t, Mac was thinking—I’m about to marry into this damn bunch.

“She ain’t interested in you.”

“He,” Mac said sharply.

Skinhead shook his head. “She. That’s important. She. You call her he and you’ll offend everyone. Cancel our welcome, you would.”

Jim slid off the pony and took the halter rope to give her some more leading.

Mac walked toward Skinhead. “Don’t make sense.”

“You don’t see the sense of it.
Hemaneh
means would-be woman. It’s one way.”

“Queer way,” muttered Mac.

Skinhead cocked an eye at him. “You worried about being husband to a Cheyenne now?”

Mac just looked at him.

“You got lots to learn,” Skinhead went on. “Wait till you see the squaws torturing some poor Blackfoot. And your squaw leading the way, cutting his balls off. They got the taste for torture, indeed they do. Maybe you oughta stay a few weeks, learn something about your new family.”

“Seems like being Cheyenne would be hard to take,” Mac admitted.

“Don’t think so.” Skinhead began opening his fold-over hunting shirt. Mac realized he had never seen his friend undressed.

On Skinhead’s chest, seeming to glare in the half dark, were pearly white vertical scars. “They put the medicine-lodge sticks in here,” Skinhead said. “This child is proud to be a Cheyenne. And sorry to be heading for the settlements to pretend to be a white man.”

Looking at the scars from the sun dance ceremony, thinking of the pain and self-deprivation, Mac thought it was past time his friend did become a white man again.

Mac had never felt more empty-handed. He came when Strikes Foot was alone in the lodge, the women and other trappers outside. He had been coached in the courtship customs of the Cheyenne by Skinhead. He had made certain of the key words in Cheyenne. He understood the inadequacy of his proposal, but was determined to plunge forward.

“Welcome, Dancer,” said Strikes Foot.

Mac suggested they smoke. Strikes Foot nodded and sat down where the center fire would have been if the evening were cool. Mac handed over his clay pipe, a lucifer, and a plug of tobacco. Embarrassingly, it was tobacco he had borrowed from Strikes Foot.

Somberly, the warrior lit the pipe, held it up, blew smoke to the four directions, as was customary, and handed it to Mac. Mac repeated the ritual.

For a few minutes they smoked in silence. Mac was supposed to make small talk, but he could not. At last he blurted it out. “I want Annemarie for my woman.’

Strikes Foot just looked at him, probably surprised at his clumsiness. Neither of them knew how to proceed.

“If I were a Cheyenne,” Mac lurched on, doubling his Cheyenne words with signs, “I would do this differently. My relatives would come to you with many fine gifts. But I am a Frenchman. I have no relatives here. Besides, we do such things differently. Perhaps the Frenchman’s way is not bad—Annemarie’s father was a Frenchman, too.”

Strikes Foot closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them, perhaps accepting Mac’s point. In taking the woman and her son by old Charbonneau into his lodge, he had invited strange behavior.

“Still,” Mac forced himself forward, “I do not ask for her now. I simply declare my intentions.”

He let it sit a moment and drew on the pipe. The next part was the worst, and Mac lacked the patience to approach it in a measured way.

“Today I am poor. I came to you starving. It is my plan now to go to St. Louis with my friends. I intend to return. They do not. I will return with many blankets, guns, powder, lead, tobacco, beads, and other goods for trade.” He didn’t mention whiskey. He’d have to have whiskey, but Strikes Foot was against it.

He took a deep breath. “My plan is to live at Fort Cass and trade these goods for hides. I hope Strikes Foot and the Cheyenne people will trade with me there. And I hope Strikes Foot’s daughter Annemarie will be my woman there.”

Strikes Foot nodded. To Mac it seemed a resounding chorus of assent.

“I have spoken of my plans to live at Fort Cass to no one but you. I hope my secret is safe with you.”

Strikes Foot nodded again.

“I do not wait for an answer now,” Mac said awkwardly. He was supposed to chat again and simply leave without mentioning an answer, but he couldn’t bring that off.

Before Mac could get up, Strikes Foot spoke. “I believe my daughter cares for you.”

Mac waited on tenterhooks.

“And she does have Long Knife blood.”

Mac waited again, unable to believe his luck.

Strikes Foot shrugged.