Centennial (28 page)

He ate berries and a little pemmican he had made during the winter. He deemed it wise not to pitch camp and cook an antelope, for his fire might attract Indians. The worst of the journey, of course, was the spring insects, but he grew accustomed to them at his eyes, taking consolation in the fact that when summer came their numbers would diminish.

As he shuffled along, he muttered old songs, not for their words, which were trivial, but for their consoling rhythms, which kept him moving:

“
My canoe is made of fine bark

S
tripped from the whitest birch.

The se
ams are sewn with strong roots,

The paddles carved from white wood
.

“
I take this canoe and embark

Down the rapids, down the
turbulence.

See how it speeds along

Never losing the current.

“
I have traveled along great
rivers, the whole St. Lawrence,

And have known the savage tribes and their various tongues.
”

On one especially trying day he chanted this song for eight hours, allowing its monotony to pull him along. At dusk a pack of wolves came to the opposite bank for water. They must have recently feasted on a deer, for they looked at Pasquinel, drank and ambled off. This caused him to break into a silly song much loved by the coureurs:

“
On my way I chanced to meet

Th
ree cavaliers with horses neat.

Oh, you still make me laugh.

I
’ll
never go back home.

I have great fear of wolves.
”

In this way he trudged back to where his canoe lay hidden, and when he got there he sighed with relief, for he suspected that he could not have held out much longer; the burden was simply too great. He rested for a day, then dug the canoe out and ate ravenously of the stored food. Tears did not come to his eyes, for he was not an emotional man, but he did give thanks to La Bonne Sainte Anne for his survival.

He loaded his canoe with the rest of the food and the two hundred and sixty pounds he had been carrying and climbed in, but within that day he discovered that the Platte had so little water he could not move. Disgusted, he got out and started pushing the canoe from behind, and in this way struggled down the middle of the river for about a hundred miles. There the water was only inches deep and he was faced with a difficult decision.

He could either abandon the canoe and resume portaging his pelts all the way to the Missouri, or he could camp where he was for six months and wait for the river to rise; he chose the latter. He built himself a small camp, to which Cheyenne reported from time to time, seeking tobacco. Thus the long summer of 1796 passed, and he lived well on antelope and deer, with now and then a buffalo tongue brought in by the Cheyenne. Twice he visited one of the Cheyenne villages and renewed acquaintances with the two braves who had cut the arrow from his back. One of their squaws was so convinced she could work the flint to the surface—she had done this for her father—that Pasquinel submitted to the ordeal, but she succeeded only in shifting the area of pain.

When the river finally rose, Pasquinel bade farewell to the Cheyenne and resumed his trail eastward. “Be careful of the Pawnee,” his friends warned.

“Rude Water is still my friend,” he assured them.

“With him be most careful of all,” they said.

When he reached the Pawnee lands, Rude Water greeted him as a son, then set eight braves to wrecking his canoe, stealing his rifle and running off with the precious bales of pelts. Unarmed and without food, Pasquinel was left alone, a hundred and fifty miles from the Missouri.

He did have his knife, and with it he grubbed roots and berries to keep alive. He walked by night, relieved in a sardonic way that he no longer had to carry his packs. By day he slept.

But he by no means intended merely to escape to the Missouri, there to be picked up by some passing white men. He was at war with the whole Pawnee nation and was determined to recover his pelts. He calculated that the Indians would appreciate their value and try to make contact with traders, and that the meeting place might be the confluence of the Platte and the Missouri.

When he reached that forbidding spot he made no effort to hail any of the Company boats he saw floating along with their own cargoes of skins. Instead, he hollowed out a hiding place among the roots of trees and waited. Two weeks passed, then three, and no Pawnee. It didn’t matter. He had time. Then in the fourth week he saw two canoes coming down the Platte, heavily laden. As he spied on them he felt a surge of excitement, for there were his pelts, just as he had wrapped them.

His joy was premature, for it looked as if the Indians intended paddling all the way to Saint Louis to dispose of their treasure. The two canoes entered the Missouri River, hesitated, and came back to the Platte. Pasquinel was much relieved when the Pawnee moved ashore and set up camp. They were going to wait for a downriver boat.

They waited. He waited. And one day down the Missouri came a pirogue bearing an improvised sign
Saint Antonine
. As soon as the Pawnee saw it they paddled out to flag it down. They had beaver, much beaver.

“Throw ’em aboard,” the rivermen cried.

While they haggled over price, Pasquinel swam into the middle of the stream, came silently onto the Pawnee canoes, turned one over and began slashing with his knife, killing two Pawnee. In the confusion the rivermen saw a chance to make off with the pelts, so they began firing point-blank at the surviving Indians.

Pasquinel swam alongside the boat, shouting in broken English, “Thees my peltries!” He was about to climb aboard when one of the rivermen had the presence of mind to club him over the head with an oar. He sank in the river.

He drifted face down, afraid to show signs of life lest they shoot at him, and after they disappeared around the bend he swam ashore. Shaking himself like a dog, and pressing water from his buckskin, he looked for a place to sleep. His canoe, his rifle, his store of beads and his pelts were gone: “Two years of work, I got one knife, one arrowhead in the back.”

He would not give up. If by some miracle he could reach Saint Louis before the pirates sold his furs, he might still reclaim them, and on that slim chance he acted.

He slept a few hours, then rose in the middle of the night and began running along paths that edged the river. When he reached the spot at which the Missouri turned for its long run to the east, he sought out a Sac village and traded his knife for an old canoe. With only such food as he could collect along the banks, he paddled tirelessly toward the Mississippi, hoping to overtake the robbers.

The day came when he detected a new odor, as if the Missouri were, changing character, and in spite of his disappointment at not catching up with the pirates, he felt a rush of excitement. He paddled faster, and as he turned a final bend he saw before him the great, broad expanse of the Mississippi, that noble river flowing south, and he remembered the day on which he first saw this stream, far to the north. He had decided then to explore it all, and in the pleasure of meeting an old friend, he forgot his anger.

The Missouri ran much faster than the Mississippi and carried such a burden of sand and silt that it spewed a visible bar deep into the heart of the greater river; as Pasquinel rode the current far toward the Illinois shore, he could see that delicate line in the water where the mud of the Missouri touched the clear water of the Mississippi. For twenty miles downstream this line continued, two mighty rivers flowing side by side without mingling.

Rivermen said, “The Mississippi, she’s a lady. The Missouri, he’s a roughneck, plunging at her with muddy hands. For twenty miles she fights him off, keeping him at a distance, but in the end, like the mayor’s daughter who marries the coureur, she surrenders.”

When Pasquinel reached the calmer waters of the Mississippi he turned his canoe southward, and within the hour saw the sight which gladdened the hearts of all rivermen: the beautiful, low, white walls of Spain’s San Luis de Iluenses, queen of the south, mistress of the north and gateway to the west. When the little town first hove into view Pasquinel halted for a moment, lifted his paddle over his head, and giving the town its French name, muttered, “Saint Louis, we are coming home ... empty-handed ... for the last time.”

In that critical period in central North America a thousand small settlements were started, and some by the year 1796 had grown like Saint Louis into prosperous towns with nine hundred citizens, but most of those would subsequently languish. Saint Louis alone should grow into one of the world’s great cities. Why?

Brains. When Pierre Laclède, the Frenchman who started the settlement in 1764, did preliminary exploring to find a perfect site, he naturally chose that spot where the Missouri empties into the Mississippi; logic said that with two rivers the location had to be ideal, except that when he investigated the spot he found mud and brush twenty feet high in the trees. That could only mean floods and he abandoned that spot in a hurry.

Accompanied by his thirteen-year-old assistant, he moved a little farther south and found another attractive site, but it, too, had straw in the branches, so he continued to move south, league by league, and at the eighteenth mile he found what he was looking for: a solid bluff standing twenty to thirty feet above water, with two secure landing places upstream and down. This location provided everything needed for the growth of a major settlement: river port, lowlands for industry, higher sites for homes, fresh water, and to the west an endless forest.

Brains had done it. When other settlements along the Missouri and the Mississippi were under water during recurrent floods, Saint Louis rode high and clear. When other harbors silted up, the river scoured the waterfront at Saint Louis, keeping it clear of sand, so that commerce could continue. In 1796 no one could predict whether it was to thrive or not, but as Pasquinel paddled his canoe into the landing, he was satisfied on one point: “This is the best town on the river.”

As soon as he landed he started asking in French, “Have you seen the pirogue,
Saint Antoine
?” A fur buyer said, “Yes, it was sold for lumber.”

Pasquinel ran to the southern end of town, where a carpenter from New Orleans bought boats as they finished their run and broke them up for timber.
Saint Antoine
? “Yes. Broke it up two weeks ago.” Where did the men go? “Who knows? They sold their pelts and they’re gone.” Where are my pelts? “Part of some shipment on its way to New Orleans.” Bitter and without a sou, he moved about the town, cursing Indians and rivermen alike.

Saint Louis would have a confused history, owned by France, then Spain, then France again, then America. Officially it was now Spanish, but actually it was French. Indeed, even the Spanish governor was sometimes a Frenchman, and all of the businessmen. The latter fairly well controlled the fur trade, for they received licenses and monopolies from the Spanish government in New Orleans to trade on this or that river, and it was to them that individuals like Pasquinel had to look for both their financing and their legal permission to trade.

There was a Company, run by a combine of wealthy citizens; there were also private entrepreneurs who were granted monopolies and who then outfitted coureurs, and Pasquinel had worked for one of them. But after the present disaster this gentleman showed no further interest in sinking additional capital in such a risky venture. Pasquinel therefore moved from one French license holder to the next, trying to cadge money to outfit his next expedition: “You buy me a canoe, some silver, beads, cloth ... I bring you plenty peltries.” No one was interested: “Pasquinel? What did he bring back last time? Nothing.”

Along the waterfront a riverman told him of a doctor who had recently fled the revolution in France: “Dr. Guisbert. Very clever man. He can cut that arrowhead out of your back.” He went to see the newcomer, an enthusiastic man, who told him, “On your trips you should read Voltaire and Rousseau. To understand why we no longer have a king in France.”

“I know nothing of France,” Pasquinel said.

“Good! I’ll lend you some books.”

“I can’t read.”

Dr. Guisbert inspected his back, moving the flint with his fingers, and said, “I’d leave it alone.” As Pasquinel replaced his shirt, Dr. Guisbert gave the flint a sudden push with his thumb, but the trapper barely winced. “Good,” Guisbert said. “If you can stand the pain, it’s doing no damage.”

He liked the spunky coureur and asked, “Where’d you get that wound?” Pasquinel haltingly began to explain, and Guisbert became so interested in beaver pelts and Cheyenne villages that the conversation continued for some time, with the doctor saying impulsively, “One of my patients is a merchant who has a trading license from the governor. Perhaps we can form a partnership, we three.”

And so, staked with the doctor’s money and under the protection of the merchant’s license, Pasquinel prepared once more for the river.

He bought himself a new rifle, twice the trade goods he had had before, and a sturdy canoe. At the wharf Dr. Guisbert told him, “You wonder why I risk my money? When I pushed that arrowhead deeper into your back, I know it hurt very much. A man doesn’t learn to bear pain like that without having courage. I think you’ll bring back pelts.”