Centennial (32 page)

Very proper and grave, he stepped into the street as drums beat and fifes whistled. At his signal, the Spanish flag was slowly lowered while the battery on the hill thundered an eleven-gun salute. The ensign was folded and retired, with no one shedding a tear, since there were few Spaniards in town.

But now things changed. The new flag of France, Napoleon’s tricolor, was briskly unfurled, attached to the halyards and run up the pole. Many guns were fired and fifes played martial airs. Captain Stoddard, loyal emissary of Napoleon, accepted the transfer and led the French contingent in cheers, with Pasquinel tossing his red cap in the air, and for twenty-four glorious hours Saint Louis was again French.

That day and all that night Pasquinel toured his old haunts, declaring, “Je suis Français. Je serai toujours Français. A bas l’Amérique.” In the morning, bleary-eyed and sad, he invited half a dozen equally depressed Frenchmen to his home on Rue des Granges for breakfast, after which he trooped back to the governor’s residence and stood with tears in his eyes as De Lassus, once more a French lieutenant, turned the region over to Captain Stoddard, once again the loyal representative of President Jefferson.

Out of decency a member of the committee cried, “Three cheers for the United States!” but to his embarrassment no one responded. Pasquinel spoke for the citizenry when he said, “I’d like to cut my throat.”

That autumn, immediately after his son was born, he and McKeag set off for the Platte, with Pasquinel determined to find the Arapaho gold mine. Wherever they went, he asked for news of Lame Beaver’s family, but it was not until June of 1805 that they came upon a Cheyenne war party whose members knew what had happened.

“Blue Leaf is dead. Snow.”

“Dead!” Pasquinel erupted. “She was too young.”

“She’s dead.”

“The girl? Clay Basket?”

“We don’t know.”

It was here that Pasquinel announced a decision which gave McKeag his first intimation that ultimately there must be trouble in Saint Louis. The Frenchman said, “I’m not going back this summer. I’m going to stay here until I find that gold.” McKeag tried to argue that this was inhuman, seeing as how Lise had just had a baby, but Pasquinel replied brusquely, “Bockweiss will look after her. He’ll always look after her, that one.”

Accordingly, Pasquinel cached their pelts, his preoccupation with gold having prevented the partnership from accumulating more than two bales, then led the way over a wide scatter of abandoned campgrounds and empty river basins. The Arapaho seemed to be hiding, maliciously: they were not at Beaver Creek or at Rattlesnake Buttes or at that fine spot where the rivers met. Winter approached and the traders camped at some nondescript place, not even bothering to build a proper shelter.

They did not return to Saint Louis during all of 1805, wasting their time looking for the gold, but in April of 1806 a Ute war party passed on its way to steal horses from the Pawnee, and they advised him that as they came out of the mountains, they had seen signs that a band of Arapaho had moved into Blue Valley.

“Où est-ce?” Pasquinel asked with unconcealed agitation.

A Ute pointed toward the mountain up whose side climbed the stone beaver and said in sign, ‘Stream right, stream left.”

Pasquinel and McKeag first saw Blue Valley during an April storm. Rain swept in from the mountain and the area was covered with mist, but as they progressed the sun came out in explosive splendor, and they saw a compact meadow bisected by a stream of crystal water, with many aspen trees to the right and a mass of dark spruce to the left, each needle clean and shining.

“A place for gold,” Pasquinel said, but McKeag just looked. He saw the trees, the lovely sweep of the meadow and the myriad beaver lodges.

“We could trade here for years,” he said, but Pasquinel was not listening.

“This has to be where he found the gold,” he said.

They saw a modest trail leading into the heart of the valley and deduced correctly that this must be where the Ute war party had passed. Following it for about a mile, they saw farther ahead where the Arapaho were camped; running forward to identify himself, Pasquinel saw with delight that this was the band to which Lame Beaver had belonged. When they met the chief, they said they were sorry that Lame Beaver was dead.

“He staked himself out. He wanted to die.”

“Blue Leaf?”

“Her time to die.”

They asked where the Arapaho got their bullets, and the chief showed them a sheet of lead and his bullet mold. Pasquinel asked casually if he could see some of the bullets, and the chief summoned a squaw and commanded her to show the ones she had made that day. They were lead.

As Pasquinel hefted them, McKeag saw Clay Basket coming down the valley. She was now sixteen, tall, shy, but deeply interested when children cried that the white men had come back. When she saw them she stopped, smoothed down her elk-skin dress and adjusted the quills about her neck. Her black hair fell in two braids, and she seemed somewhat pale from the effects of winter, but she was even more bright-eyed than she had been as a child. Walking gravely to McKeag, she placed her hand softly on his right shoulder and asked in English, “Good?”

He thumped his shoulder and replied, “Good.” Pointing to Pasquinel, he said, “He fix.” He delighted the Indians by taking off his shirt and showing them the clever device that Pasquinel had fashioned from buffalo hide, a kind of armor which fitted over his damaged shoulder, enabling him to jam the rifle butt against the hardened hide and fire without fear of the kickback. Clay Basket touched the harness and approved.

May and June of that year were the happiest months Pasquinel, McKeag and Clay Basket had shared. The valley was superb, but the weather had grown so warm that passing Indians no longer had pelts. There was no specific reason for the white men to linger, but Pasquinel still did not know where the gold was, and he did not propose leaving until he found out. He became so attentive to Clay Basket that the Arapaho women, shrewd detectives where sex was concerned, deduced that although it was Pasquinel who had fallen in love with her, it was McKeag she had chosen for her mate.

They were confirmed in their judgment when a young brave who up to now had assumed that he would marry Clay Basket picked a fight with McKeag. It was settled when the Scotsman gave the young man a buffalo robe. Here was an opening for McKeag to pursue his suit, if he wished, but as the women had expected, he did nothing.

In midsummer Pasquinel asked one of the women, “What will Clay Basket do?”

“Difficult,” she replied. “Poor girl, she loves Red Beard.”

“Will she ...”

The woman laughed. “Red Beard will never take a wife. Everybody knows that.”

“Then what?” Pasquinel asked.

Again she laughed. “Clay Basket will marry you. Next moon.”

And that’s how it happened. With the whole Arapaho nation—at least that part encamped at Blue Valley—knowing that Clay Basket preferred Red Beard, she married Pasquinel, who intended by this device to pry the secret of the gold from her. When McKeag realized the callous thing his partner was doing, he was appalled. But it was not the bigamy that distressed him, for many traders had an Indian wife on the prairies to complement the white one back in Saint Louis, but rather the harsh misuse of a young girl. He thought several times of protesting, but Pasquinel was in no mood for moral debate—he never referred to his bigamy; all he said was, “Now we’ll find the gold.”

It wasn’t much of a ceremony. Pasquinel had to give her brother a gun and some beads and a pouch of tobacco while Clay Basket watched. She was most beautiful that day, decked in fresh porcupine quills and blue stones bought from Indians who traveled the plains to the south. She tried not to look at McKeag and he helped by staying at a distance. A medicine man pointed to the sky, then to the eastern horizon, and said something that McKeag couldn’t translate, and that night when Pasquinel was alone with his new wife he asked her, “Where is the gold your father found?”

“Gold?” she asked.

“Yes, the gold.”

“What gold?”

He was infuriated by her stupidity, or her deception, he wasn’t sure which. He repeated the question and got the same answer, and in frustration, asked, “Why did you marry me when it was Red Beard you wanted?”

In English she offered an explanation which astonished him. “That first night, many years ago, when my father crept into your camp at Beaver Creek ... you could have killed him and he could have killed you. He watched you in those days and loved you—because you were brave. So before he staked himself out at the Pawnee camp he told me, ‘The dark man will come back. Marry him.’ In this way I knew it would happen.”

Pasquinel sat silent for some time, then asked, “Before he died, he told you where the gold was?”

“No,” she said.

He knew she was lying and turned away from her. This distressed her and he could feel her shoulders tensing, as if she were sobbing. He left her alone and crossed the stream to wander amidst the aspen. How incredibly beautiful it was that night, with a summer moon and the sound of an owl in the distance, and after a while Clay Basket joined him, and she placed her hand in his and told him, “I am your woman. Always I will help.”

“Where’s the gold?” he asked.

“I do not know,” she said, but he believed that as she came to trust him more, she would confide her secret. In the meantime, she was a beautiful girl and there was no reason why he should not enjoy her whenever he returned to the prairie. With this idea in mind he led her back to the bridal tipi, and as they crossed the clear stream, they stepped on pebbles hiding the nuggets of gold he sought.

He and Clay Basket would have three children: the famous Jacques Pasquinel, born in 1809; his brother Marcel, born in 1811; and a daughter Lucinda, who would be known by another name, born late in 1827. It was a union that lasted.

But after three years of agonizing attempts to locate Lame Beaver’s gold, Pasquinel had to conclude that his wife did not know where it was, though he never ceased believing that somewhere in the hills frequented by the Arapaho there was much gold, and he purposed to find it. If his resolution failed, he had only to recall those two bullets he had held in his hand. They were real and they were gold.

In 1807 when he and McKeag returned to Saint Louis they found many changes. For one thing the house on Rue des Granges was bigger. Since Lise enjoyed entertaining she felt the need of extra rooms, and whatever money Pasquinel had given her over the years she had spent on carpenters. Her father now had two apprentices in his flourishing jewelry business and was sending surplus pieces downriver to New Orleans, but his profits he invested in Saint Louis real estate.

Now came a chain of years when Pasquinel kept increasingly to the prairies, sometimes not appearing in Saint Louis for three years at a stretch. When the partners did come back with their pelts, McKeag studied Lise to see how she was reacting to this strange behavior, but if she felt aggrieved she did not show it. And Pasquinel, when he was on hand, proved an exemplary husband and father, resuming his pattern of life as if he had been absent for only a few days. He loved his son Cyprian and delighted in telling him tales of the west. On Sundays he proudly held his wife’s arm as they attended the Catholic church, whose priest he helped with contributions.

He found stubborn pleasure in arguing with those American officers he met at his wife’s entertainments, and warned them that if they wanted to hold the west, they ought to be sending out exploration parties to locate the mountain passes. He was amused at their presumptions of knowledge and told them: “Isn’t it strange that a handful of French coureurs who loved these western lands know more about them than your entire government?” One inflated colonel, guarded by six riflemen, took a boat trip of only one hundred and fifty miles up the Missouri, not even coming close to the mouth of the Platte, and when he returned to Saint Louis he was flushed with heroism and a great expert on Indian affairs. Pasquinel listened courteously as he expounded his theories on Indian control, but when the officer began speaking of his own courage in facing the savage, Pasquinel could not control himself. Laughing crudely, he said, “Colonel, on our trips home from real Indian country, when we get to where you were, we no longer keep lookouts. Because we know we’re in women-and-children country.” Lise, instead of being outraged at this rebuke to an exalted guest, winked at her husband, and soon thereafter the colonel left.

As time went on, she viewed with growing dismay Pasquinel’s protracted absences. At first she suspected that she might be at fault, that she suffered some deficiency in ardor, and once when he was absent for three years she thought seriously of divorce. She was hurt personally by the gossip concerning her husband which circulated in the city, but kept her reactions to it secret. McKeag was never able to ascertain how much she knew, but it was apparent even to him that the marriage had deteriorated.

It appeared that she had made a fundamental decision: with or without Pasquinel, she would live as good a life as possible and raise her son to be as happy and stable as she was. Pasquinel would always be welcomed, would always have an honored place in their home, but they would not allow themselves to be punished by his irresponsible behavior.

At the conclusion of his visits, Pasquinel, broke as usual, would borrow money from his father-in-law, stock his canoe and head for the Platte where at some appointed place Clay Basket would be waiting with their two boys. These prairie reunions were tender and even passionate, and Clay Basket would have a tipi ready with the kind of furnishings she knew Pasquinel liked: a willow-reed bed with backrests, buffalo robes on the floor, a reliable flap for emitting smoke.