Centennial (39 page)

He was irritated beyond endurance. He resumed the hard questioning of Clay Basket which he had conducted sporadically through the twenty-two years of their marriage, and one day, as she had reviewed once again her father’s life, he recalled something of importance.

“Didn’t I see in your father’s tipi a buffalo skin with paintings on it? His coups?”

“Yes, my mother painted it.”

“Where is it?”

She shrugged her shoulders and explained again that among her people, when a man died his goods were distributed.

“I know that,” he snapped. “But who got the picture skin?”

“No one.”

He could not accept this as an answer, and shook her. “What do you mean, no one?” he shouted, and she explained that at her father’s death the painted skin simply disappeared.

After a while he had to believe this, but then he had another clever idea. Let Clay Basket recall the incidents on the skin so that Pasquinel might reconstruct the places that her father had visited. It was a pleasure for her to visualize her mother’s beautiful paintings, and she ticked off the scenes.

There was the raid on the Comanche, but that wasn’t gold country. There was the victory over Never-Death, but Pasquinel already knew that land.

She went through the litany of courage, but could come up with only seven incidents, whereas even Pasquinel knew there had been eight. He badgered her, charging her with holding back the crucial information because she didn’t want him to find the gold ... wanted to save it for the Arapaho after he was dead.

She punished her brain, trying to reconstruct her father’s life, and then, as she was making pemmican, she recalled a small painting. in the corner, of her father cutting tent poles and fighting Ute warriors. “I know!” she called, and Pasquinel came running.

“It was when Lame Beaver went into the mountains to cut tipi poles. He had a fight with some Ute warriors, and I’m sure he took their pouches. And that’s where the bullets must have been.”

“Tipi poles, where?”

“Blue Valley.”

“We camped there,” Pasquinel shouted. “Damn it, we camped there.”

“That’s where it was. I remember the story now.”

It was much too late to shift camp to Blue Valley now, but all that winter among the bleak monuments rimming the Platte, Pasquinel visualized Blue Valley, and how the stream cut through the meadow, and where in the hills the gold might lie. Finding it became an obsession many times stronger than it had been when first he held the two gold bullets in his palm.

His life had not worked out well. Had he stayed with any one of his white wives he could have had a reasonably happy time of it; his many children were likable and he supposed they were doing well. But he had wanted to keep running; that’s what he was, a coureur de bois. The beaver had been plentiful and he had earned much money from them, but it was all gone now. What he needed was to find that gold—to climax his failures and his indifferent years with a grand exploration and so much wealth that men from Montreal to New Orleans would speak of him with enduring respect: “Pasquinel who found the gold mine.”

He would leave his Indian sons with the Oglala Sioux. They would be happier there; they were Indians now, and the Sioux would be glad to have two more braves. Yes, he and Clay Basket and the little girl would move south to Blue Valley as soon as the ice broke. The beaver? They could wait. It was getting more difficult to find them, and if he could locate the gold, there would be no more need for beaver.

McKeag, still operating alone, was not gathering many pelts either, certainly not enough to warrant another trip to Saint Louis. In the autumn of 1829 he had to decide where he would trap during the coming winter. He preferred to hole up at Rattlesnake Buttes for the cold months, then work the tributaries of the Platte when the thaw came, but even a cursory examination of those streams satisfied him that the animals were gone. Beaver Creek, which had been jammed with beaver when he first trapped it, had none at all, and the creeks farther west were little better.

He had no alternative but to abandon this congenial country and move into the foothills of the Rockies. With regret he said farewell to an area which had been kind to him and from which he had taken a modest fortune, now safely banked in Saint Louis.

Traveling on foot, he moved to the northwest toward a spot he had marked some years before, a chalk cliff which afforded protection from storms and had likely streams near at hand. There he found enough scraps of wood to erect the outlines of a hut and enough branches to keep a fire going.

It was a bad winter and he was soon snowed under. Drifts covered him and once more he lived at the bottom of a cave. Since he had survived such entombments before, this one did not cause apprehension, and there was one change which brought a measure of contentment. Each day at sunset, after be had crawled back into his tunnel, he brewed himself one small cup of lapsang souchong, and as its smoky aroma filled the cave, it brought visions of Scotland: he saw his mother at the peat fire, his father stomping in from tending sheep. Then, no matter how hard he tried to limit his thoughts, he saw himself in a yellow apron, dancing at the rendezvous, and Pasquinel stepping forward to dance with him—and he could no longer deny how much he loved this difficult man.

They had fought side by side and each had saved the. other’s life. In long winters they had sat by meager fires, hardly speaking for days at a time. They had been loved by the same woman, that remarkable Arapaho. Above all, they had explored an uncharted continent. They were closer than brothers. They were children of the buffalo, inheritors of the plains.

Pasquinel had taught McKeag the meaning of freedom, of man alone on the infinite prairie hemmed in only by the horizon, and it forever receding. How pitiful the horizons had been in Scotland: a tiny glen dominated by one rich man and all terrified of him and his power. West of the Missouri there were no rich men, only men of courage and capability, and if a man lacked either, he was soon dead.

And yet, as McKeag thought of Pasquinel now, thirty-two years later, he saw all his faults, and he wondered if the Frenchman had ever really known the meaning of freedom. He had cherished the companionship of women, but he had always fled at the first sense of encroachment. He had loved his numerous children, but he had left them for his wives to rear. He had always been a man running away from something, courageous in physical battle, a coward in moral values. He had called it freedom, but it was flight.

McKeag, the tentative one, actually felt compassion for Pasquinel, who had arrogantly directed their ventures. He was sorry that so gallant a man had come to so poor an end, but at the same time he recognized that they were still bound together by the indissoluble bonds of dangers shared and work done. Suddenly he no longer wished to live alone. He wanted to share a tipi with Pasquinel and Clay Basket on the open prairie and to seek with them such beaver as survived.

He spent a week pondering what overt action this decision entailed: At the next rendezvous I will become partners with him again. Fortified by this resolve, he began to look forward to summer, and his snow-bound cave became less oppressive.

So on a brilliant, storm-free day in March, as he climbed out to see whether spring was coming to the streams be intended trapping, he felt himself gripped by a force greater than any he had previously known. It was as if a great hand pulled him, and he heard himself cry, “Pasquinel needs me.” With irrational frenzy he packed what gear he could carry, lashed a pair of snowshoes to his feet and set forth on his difficult journey to Blue Valley.

The drifts were deep and the sun blinding. To invade mountains in such weather was preposterous, but he was convinced that Pasquinel had to be there, so he forged ahead.

Night fell, and he huddled in the lee of a rock, covering himself with snow to keep from freezing, but before dawn he resumed his trek and all that day clawed through drifts.

At last he found the branching stream that flowed down from Blue Valley, and now he was guided by the little stone beaver that climbed the cliff.

As he neared the plateau where the valley rested he had a hideous thought: Suppose Pasquinel is not here? Impossible. He would not think about that.

With a new surge of energy he clambered up the last rocks and looked down into the valley. With immense relief he saw that a lodge had been erected and that signs of life surrounded it, signs the uninitiated might miss: a branch missing from a tree, scuffled snow where an antelope had been shot.

Running as fast as his snowshoes would permit, he shouted, “Pasquinel! I’m here!”

He was close to the lodge before anyone responded. Then he saw that the door had been torn from its hinges, and Clay Basket stood on the threshold, holding a child in her arms. Clay Basket’s face was streaked with blood and she seemed to comprehend nothing.

“Pasquinel!” McKeag screamed into the unechoing snow. Kicking off his snowshoes, he dashed into the lodge. There on the floor, face down, lay Pasquinel, his body riddled with arrows and his scalp gone McKeag looked at him dumbly, then knelt to turn the body over, as if it might still contain life.

“Who did it?”

“Shoshone.”

“The boys. Didn’t they help?”

“Pasquinel left them with the Sioux.”

He took charge of everything, cutting the arrows from the dead body and preparing it for burial. He washed away the blood and brought in wood to keep the fire going. Before sunset he cleared away a patch of snow and hacked out a shallow grave in the frozen earth. There he buried Pasquinel, man of many wounds, many victories.

That night McKeag recalled that his partner had often predicted that some day the Indians would kill him, and they had. They had caught him kneeling to inspect the stream bed, turning over the gravel to see if perhaps this was where Lame Beaver had found his gold. They shot him full of arrows just as he was reaching for a glistening object. He staggered back to the lodge to protect his wife and child, as he had always protected the weaker in a fight, but they were away gathering wood, and he had died alone, as he always knew he must. In death he had two dollars and eighty cents and owed four thousand; the glistening nugget he had spotted was soon covered over with gravel.

For two uneasy days McKeag stayed in the valley, but then he was pulled by a sense of obligation back to his own traps, to his tunnel under the snow.

“Trap here,” Clay Basket said in a low voice.

“Your sons will care for you,” he said.

“They are gone,” she said. There was a silence, after which she said in a whisper, “I am alone.”

These words cut McKeag, for they were his words, thrown back at him. In confusion he tried to sort out ideas, but no order prevailed. All he was able to understand was that he no longer wanted to be alone. He acknowledged how wrong it was. He had climbed a mountain of frozen snow to regain a brotherhood he had once known, only to find that such brotherhood was no longer possible.

Could it be, he asked himself, that the mysterious summons he experienced might have involved not Pasquinel but Clay Basket? But he was afraid. He was deeply afraid that he was not meant to share his life with a woman, that he wouldn’t know what to do. He was especially afraid that she might laugh at him, as he had heard the Indian women laughing at other men.

For three days he wrestled with this ugly problem and almost convinced himself that he was destined to live alone, but as he looked up at the great mountain and saw the stone beaver forever climbing, he realized that men, like animals, must climb whatever cliff confronts them.

With new courage he returned to the lodge. “We’ll start down the stream today,” he said.

“In this snow?” she asked.

“My traps are down there,” he said.

“The little one?”

“She will be mine,” he said, taking the child in his arms. “Her name will be Lucinda.”

But as they set forth, and he realized that he was accepting responsibility for these two as long as they lived, the dreadful doubt returned. He put down the child and took Clay Basket by the hands. “You won’t laugh at me?” he asked.

“I will not laugh,” she promised.

CAUTION TO
US
EDITORS. The attractiveness of the rendezvous should not be underestimated. Pragmatic decisions relating to the political and governmental future of the west were made by the Frenchmen, the English, the Scots, the Americans and the Indians who met for informal discussion at these gatherings. It was the town meeting of New England, transferred to the valley and punctuated by gunfire, murder and the screams of Indian women being raped.

I have omitted some of the gorier details: the planned battles against Indians, a drunk whose friends doused him with a bucketful of pure alcohol, then set him ablaze and watched him burn like a torch until he was pretty well consumed, the woman visitor who saw with horror, after one epic brawl, four men playing pinochle and using the stiffening corpse of a friend as their table.

The rendezvous continued from 1825 through 1840, fifteen years in all. In 1831 it did not convene; the wagon train bringing the whiskey from Taos got lost and ended up three hundred and fifty miles off course to the east, where the Laramie River enters the Platte. Name of the mixed-up guide: Kit Carson.

The rosters of those attending each rendezvous have been compiled. Notables like Jim Bridger, N. J. Wyeth, Captain Bonneville, Marcus Whitman and Father De Smet abound. You might want to look into Peter Skene Ogden, the savagely anti-American Englishman after whom Ogden, Utah, was named, and Alfred Jacob Miller, the painter, who did some sketches of the 1837 meeting.