Centennial (38 page)

They called for some Arapaho women to tend him, and McKeag supervised them as they lugged him to a tipi, where they laid him face down on buffalo robes. Gently they massaged his back, feeling the sunken arrow and manipulating it into a position where it hurt less.

During the night Haversham heard of the incident and said airily, “Simple. Cut the damned thing out.” He was the ebullient type of Englishman who refused to admit that anything was impossible. “I’ve cut out many a bullet in me day,” he said enthusiastically. “Let’s have a look.”

He went to the Arapaho tipi and asked a squaw to hold a lantern over Pasquinel’s back while he inspected the ancient wound. “Don’t leave it in there a day longer, old fellow,” he said professionally. “I’ll cut it out as soon as we get sunlight.” With that advice he returned to his tent-store and honed a butcher knife to razor sharpness. Then he drank off a bottle of whiskey and fell into a stupor.

He was up at four, building a small fire in which he sterilized the knife. Placing a chair where the sun would strike it, he shouted, “Bring him over here.”

McKeag, the two Pasquinel boys and three Arapaho women carried the sick man to the operating chair. He was placed on it so that his arms hung over the wooden back. “Lash ’em down,” Haversham directed, and thongs were tied around his arms, securing them to the chair. “Legs too,” Haversham cried. When Pasquinel was properly trussed, the surgeon took his knife and neatly slit the back of his shirt, exposing the scar.

McKeag thought, He could of taken it off before he tied him down.

But the surgeon had moved to other problems. Washing his knife in whiskey, he waved it menacingly in the air to dry it. He then gave Pasquinel a large swig of the whiskey and took one himself. Patting the trussed man on the head, he assured him, “I’ve done this many times.” With that he stepped behind Pasquinel, studied his muscles, and with deep confident cuts, laid open his back.

Pasquinel made no sound. “Give him a pistol to bite on,” the surgeon cried belatedly, but this proved unnecessary, for Pasquinel had prepared himself, and the pain could grow many times more excruciating before he would react.

The back was now open and the arrowhead exposed. With the point of the butcher knife Haversham tried to dislodge it, but cartilage had grown about it and held it fast to the backbone and rib. “A little whiskey,” Haversham called, and some was poured over the fingers of his right hand.

Without hesitation, and with rude force, he jabbed his fingers into the bloody mess, caught the arrowhead by one side and worked it back and forth three times. “Hold your breath,” he shouted, and Pasquinel, sweat pouring from his face, fixed his eyes stolidly on the horizon.

With wrenching force Haversham pushed the flint deeper into the flesh, twisted it, broke the cartilage and tore it loose from its ancient prison. He thrust it before Pasquinel’s nose, and the Frenchman, seeing the mass of blood on Haversham’s hand, came close to fainting.

It was five-thirty in the morning and Haversham stayed drunk all that day, refusing to see anyone. Pasquinel, fortified by shots of Taos Lightning, recovered quickly and was stumbling around by nightfall. He was so grateful to the Arapaho women for helping him that he arranged a party and spent much money on drink and presents, but Haversham, the hero of the affair, did not attend. He stayed in his tent, appalled by the realization of what he had done. He had never cut a human being before: there was so much more blood than he had anticipated ... the arrow had been lodged so tightly. In the end he had wedged his fingers under the man’s backbone. He could still feel the bone, and felt nauseated.

As the party grew rowdier, McKeag was approached by one of the Hudson’s Bay men, a voyageur from Montreal, who drew him away from the merriment. “Is Pasquinel your partner?” he asked. Since the honest reply would have to be “Yes and no,” McKeag equivocated, and the Canadian asked, “Is it true that he has a wife in Saint Louis?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t mean his Indian wife. Every man with good sense has an Indian wife—at least one.” He laughed nervously at his joke. “What I mean,” the Canadian said hesitantly, “is that in Montreal he has a real wife.”

“I doubt it,” McKeag said evenly.

The Canadian moved so that they were facing. “She is my cousin,” he said.

McKeag did not care to hear such news and tried to leave, but the Canadian held on to him. “He left her with two children. We have to pay the money.”

McKeag stared over the man’s head, but the Canadian continued: “You’ve been in Saint Louis with him. I know it. Does he have a wife there?”

“I know nothing of any wives,” McKeag said stubbornly. He left the man in shadows, and in that way the rendezvous ended.

During the next year, 1828, a series of events occurred, apparently unrelated, which had a lasting effect upon life on the plains. After this climactic year the beaver men would continue to move up and down the rivers for a time, but their disappearance was ordained. The boisterous rendezvous would convene each year for more than a decade, but its doom, too, was sealed, and even Alexander McKeag, so perceptive about beaver, would be involved in these changes without being aware of them.

It started during the winter at Beaver Creek. For some years now the beaver along this stream had been doing poorly. They had no aspen to feed on, and such cottonwood as persisted was poor. Good trees did not exist, for men had cut them down for winter refuges, and even puny trees were difficult to find, for the same men cut them for kindling.

Once there had been a hundred beaver lodges on this creek, each with its own dam, each with its yearly replenishment of kits and two-year-olds. There had been in those days so many beaver that a hungry Indian or a lone trapper could take what he needed without depleting the stock, and all had prospered.

Now the lodges were cleaned out, trapped dry. Year after year the avaricious trappers had raided the dams, drowning the parent beavers, killing the two-year-olds with clubs, leaving the kits without protection or food. The inexhaustible supply was exhausted.

The second event which determined the development of the plains occurred in London, where on a spring morning the young and fashionable David, Earl Venneford of Wye, found that his prized beaver hat had been badly soiled the night before when it toppled out of his landau while he was fondling the left thigh of the Marchioness of Bradbury. He stopped by his hatter to see what repairs were possible, for this was a hat he treasured. It fit him well and had been his favorite since his Oxford days. But now, apparently, its usefulness was ended.

“I could, of course, brush it well and get the sand out,” his hatter said. “But it’s badly worn here, my lord, and if I tried to repair it, you’d never like it. I’m afraid it’s gone, my lord, and that’s the sum of it.”

“You couldn’t replace that worn spot? With new fur?”

“I could, if all you wanted the hat for was shooting in the country, but not for London wear, my lord.”

“Then what’s to do? A new beaver?”

“We have a hat here ... We’ve been experimenting with Messrs. Wickham. It’s a hat we’re sure will become the fashion.” He handed young Venneford a handsome deep-blue hat made of some new substance.

“This isn’t beaver,” the earl protested. “I’d not want this.”

“It’s a new style, sir. I assure you, it’s what all London will be wearing next year.”

“What is it?”

“Silk, my lord. French silk. Stiffer than beaver and easier to maintain.”

Venneford twirled the hat on his right forefinger. He liked the shimmering play of light. Tapping it with his left thumb, he liked the crispness. “This could be very attractive,” he said. “I could grow to like a hat of this nature.”

At lunch that day he showed his new acquisition to the ladies. “It’s silk. French silk. Very ... what shall I say?”

“Fashionable,” the Marchioness of Bradbury suggested. “It’s very fashionable, David, and a heavenly blue.”

When word passed through London that David Venneford was wearing one of the new silk things from Paris—only the silk was from Paris, mind you, the workmanship was by Messrs. Wickham—there was a flurry in the world of fashion. Later when Venneford was married wearing one of the silk hats, of a shimmering silver-gray, a style was set, the fate of the monotonous brown beaver hat was sealed. A whole way of life on the distant plains of America was doomed.

In one of the coincidences of history, the beaver was largely exterminated in the mountains at the exact time when its pelts were no longer wanted in the cities.

“It’s not so easy to find pelts now,” McKeag reported to Bockweiss. He stayed in Saint Louis for several weeks, marveling at the changes that had overtaken it as an American city. Grand Rue was now Main Street. Rue de l’Eglise and Rue des Granges were now Second and Third streets, and wherever he went he heard that Bockweiss had bought this or sold that.

Lise Pasquinel, hearing that her old friend was in town, invited him to supper at her big brick house on Fourth Street, and after he had climbed to that height he saw what a splendid view she had. “The Mississippi runs for you,” he told her, but he became tongue-tied upon finding that Grete and her prosperous husband had been invited too. “I thought you’d like to meet old friends,” Lise explained, and the sisters were so gracious that they forced him to forget his shyness.

There was much talk of American military action along the frontier, as they now called it, and repeated questions about Indians. After supper Hermann Bockweiss stopped by, bringing the two Pasquinel children. Cyprian, a tall young man, aged twenty-four, appeared in a Parisian outfit: tight trousers, ornate vest, jacket, ruffled shirt, stock, pointed shoes and one of the new silk hats. He was a courteous young fellow and said he was helping his grandfather buy land. Lisette, aged thirteen, was a pert child, pretty in a French way, but firm-chinned like her German mother; she wore a princesse gown with the belt line of the bodice very high and the skirt flaring away in lovely patterns. McKeag could not help contrasting the civilized behavior and dress of these Pasquinel children with that of their half brothers on the prairie; they spoke English, French and German equally well. They were not deceitful enough to act as if they were interested in talking with McKeag; they scarcely knew who he was and were eager to be off.

“Fine children,” McKeag said impulsively as they left. “Pasquinel would be proud of them.”

This inappropriate observation produced a chill, but without obvious embarrassment Lise leaned forward and asked, “How is Pasquinel?”

“Hasn’t he been here?”

“We haven’t seen him for seven years,” she said evenly.

McKeag looked at her without speaking. How pitiful, he thought. No big fight, not even a difference of opinion. Just a fur trapper who got fed up with the city and left one day, a Daniel Boone asking the world to leave him alone. He felt deep compassion for Lise but could find no way to express it. Her brother-in-law broke the silence to ask, “What’s he up to now?”

McKeag reflected. What was Pasquinel up to? From the myriad answers he might have given he chose a strange one: “They cut that arrowhead out of his back.”

“Did they!” Lise cried.

“How’d they do it?” Grete asked. And McKeag went into such detail, explaining what the rendezvous was like and how the Englishman Haversham sold lapsang souchong, that any tenseness over Pasquinel was eased. Later he said with considerable infelicity, “I think it was after they cut out the flint ... Pasquinel was drunk, but he stood stock-still and allowed his son—well, both of his boys—to shoot a whiskey bottle off his head.”

There was another silence, which none of the listeners cared to break. Then Grete’s husband asked quietly, “His sons?”

“Bockweiss knows about the sons,” McKeag said, but as soon as the words were spoken he realized that the old German had sought to protect Lise’s feelings by not telling her of the Indian family. Now, having betrayed the secret, McKeag felt that he should complete it. “They are younger than Cyprian,” he told Lise. “Marcel has possibilities. Jacques, the oldest, is a terrible monster. What might happen with him, not even God knows.”

Lise listened to this information impassively and refused to comment.

As McKeag started to leave, he noticed again how luxurious the house was, filled with fine things shipped from the east. “My children will be marrying soon,” Lise said. “They’ll live here at first, I hope, and maybe one of them will want the house and allow me to stay on.” She was a composed, gracious woman, the finest lady McKeag had ever met.

“Thank you for supper,” he said, and the way he spoke was so formal that she reached out and grabbed his hands, pulling herself to him and kissing him on the cheek.

“Alexander! We’re old friends!” And she dragged him to a different corner of the house and showed him the room she had built for him. “This is your room, Alexander,” she cried, pressing her fingers against her tears. “As long as you live, when you come to Saint Louis you are to come here ... stay with us. There will be no more living along the river.”

She insisted that he move in that night, sent servants down to the shore to gather his belongings lest he go and not come back, and when his meager equipment was installed she sat on his bed, smoothed out her skirt and said, “Now tell me about Pasquinel.”

During that autumn of 1828 Pasquinel, Clay Basket, the two boys and their baby sister pitched their tipi among the red-stone monuments that lined the North Platte east of where the Laramie River joined. This was country occupied by the Oglala Sioux, a warlike tribe that Pasquinel liked, and while his sons rampaged with the young braves he held long talks with the chiefs, trying to ascertain whether they knew anything of Lame Beaver’s gold. They knew nothing.