Charbonneau (5 page)

“Isn’t he something?” Clark exclaimed at large. “Sich a child.”

The talk around the fire that night was of home—of white women, of whisky, of proper American food, of their families, of the stories they would tell. Then it was of the plains and mountains behind—of the hugeness of the country, the strangeness of the Indians, the lust of the squaws, the fierceness of the grizzly bear, the stupidity of the buffalo, of the pure clearness of high-mountain streams, of the hungry and feasting times they’d seen.

“They’re going to bust with bragging,” Lewis observed to Clark.

“They’ve got it coming,” Clark answered.

AUGUST 15, 1806: The expedition arrived at the Mandan villages. Clark’s journal: “Colter one of our men expressed a desire to join Some trappers who offered to become shearers with and furnish traps &c. The offer a very advantagious one, to him, his services could be dispenced with from this down and as we were disposed to be of service to any one of our party who had performed their duty as well as Colter had done, we agreed to allow him the privilage provided no one of the party would ask or expect a Similar permission to which they all agreed that they wished Colter every Suckcess.…”

AUGUST 17, 1806: Clark’s journal: “Settled with Toussaint Chabono for his services as an enterpreter the price of a horse and Lodge purchased of him for public Service in all amounting to 500$ 33 ⅓ cents.…at 2 oClock we left our encampment after takeing leave of Colter who also Set out up the river in company with Messrs. Dickson & Handcock. we also took our leave of T. Chabono, his Snake Indian wife and their child who had accompanied us on our rout to the pacific ocean in the capacity of interpreter and interpretes. T. Chabono wished much to accompany us in the said Capacity if we could have prevailed the Menetarre Chiefs to decnd the river with us to the U. States, but as none of those Chiefs of whoes language he was Conversent would accompany us, his services were no longer of use to the U. States and he was therefore discharged and paid up. we offered to convey him down to the Illinois if he chose to go, He declined proceeding on at present, observing that he had no acquaintance or prospects of makeing a liveing below, and must continue to live in the way that he had done.”

Sacajawea had received no pay, but Clark had something in mind for her. “Your son,” he said to the two of them, “is a beautiful, promising child. Let me take him to the United States. I will see that he is educated. I will raise him as my own son.”

“Yes,” said Sacajawea tentatively,
“mais pas encore.”
Frustrated, she spoke rapidly to Charbonneau in Minataree. They exchanged several sentences.

“She likes it,” explained Charbonneau, “I not. Besides, the child yet.…” He smooched his lips to imitate suckling. “When next the ice breaks on the river, he comes, maybe.” Sacajawea spoke firmly to Charbonneau. “We come him then,” the squaw man said.

“Charbonneau,” said Clark formally, “he is a fine child and does you credit. Do not fail to send him. I will be as his father.”

Sacajawea and Charbonneau embraced Clark and walked toward their canoe. For the first time Clark could remember, Bluster Bear picked up his son, tossed him gently in the air, and caught him. From the stern of the canoe he waved to Clark, and gave a self-important little bow.

Three days later, at the Arikara Village, Clark wrote a letter and gave it to traders to take to Charbonneau and Sacajawea:

Charbono:

Sir: Your present situation with the Indians gives me some concern—I wish now I had advised vou to come on with me to the Illinois where it would most probably be in my power to put you in some way to do something for yourself.…You have been a long time with me and have conducted yourself in such a manner as to gain my friendship; your woman, who accompanied you that long and dangerous and fatiguing route to the Pacific Ocian and back, deserved a greater reward for her attention and service on that route than we had in our power to give her at the Mandans. As to your little son (my boy Paump) you well know my fondness for him and my anxiety to take and raise him as my own child. I once more tell you if you will bring your son, Baptiest, to me, I will educate him and treat him as my own child—I do not forget the promise which I made to you and shall now repeat them that you may be certain—Char bono, if you wish to live with the white people, and will come with me, I will give you a piece of land and furnish you with horses, cows, and hogs—if you wish to visit your friends in Montrall, I will let you have a horse, and your family shall be taken care of until your return—if you wish to return as an interpreter for the Menetarras when the troops come up to form the establishment, you will be with me ready and I will procure you the place—or if you wish to return to trade with the Indians and will leave your little son Paump with me, I will assist you with merchandize for that purpose.…and become myself concerned with you in trade on a small scale, that is to say not exceeding a pirogue load at one time. If you are disposed to accept either of my offers to you, and will bring down your son, your fahm Jawey had best come along with you to take care of the boy until I get him.…When you get to St. Louis write a letter to me by the post and let me know your situation—If you do not intend to go down either this fall or in the spring, write a letter to me by the first opportunity and inform me what you intend to do that I may know if I may expect you or not. If you ever intend to come down, this fall or the next spring will be the best time—this fall would be best if you could get down before winter. I shall be found either in St. Louis or in Clarksville at the falls of the Ohio.

Wishing you and your family great success, and with anxious expections of seeing my little dancing boy, Baptiest, I shall remain your friend.

WILLIAM CLARK

It was a big mouthful for a reticent man. He spent more than an hour by the fire that evening scraping it out. He showed it to Lewis.

“Think it’ll work?” asked Lewis.

“It’ll go to Bluster Bear’s head,” said Clark. “Though he doesn’t need more of that.”

“And Sacajawea will admire your English style,” smiled Lewis.

“She does respect writing.”

The Red-Headed Chief had thought about it since he’d left the Mandans, and a dim idea had been taking shape in his mind since the wintry day Paump was born. East of the Mississippi, whites and Indians were always fighting. They did it because they didn’t understand each other. Clark himself liked Indians, always had. Whites and Indians just needed to understand each other.

Maybe it would be a different story west of the Mississippi. Paump might make a good start. If the boy was white and Indian, if he had a white upbringing and an Indian upbringing, if he spoke English and French and Mandan and Minataree and Shoshone, well, at least he would be a fine interpreter. And maybe he would be a beginning toward two races’ being able to live together. He could explain them to each other.

So William Clark, offering Paump the great medicine of the white man, sent back to the Mandan villages a sample of that medicine—the marks that made words to tempt his mother, and an offer of prosperity to tempt his father.

Paump settled with Sacajawea and Charbonneau in the Minataree villages, and for four years lived the daily life of any Minataree child. The family lived in a wickiup during the winter, its entrance facing the rising sun in tribute. The child saw the ritual decorations of the lodges, the signs that placated or implored the forces of the earth. He saw the medicine bundles, with their magical feathers, claws, and stones, and noticed that the boys of the Lumpwood Society carried nobbed sticks onto the prairie to fast, where songs were revealed to them that would allow them to lure the buffalo into the pens they had built. He heard the war song of the Stone Hammer Society, made up of boys only a little older:

I am on the earth

just for a little while;

when there is a fight

I must die.

He learned that the members of the Dog Society behaved backwards, walking backwards, saying yes when they meant no and no when they meant yes, charging the enemy when told to flee, shouting when told to be quiet; for such was the oath of their society. In the summer, when the braves went on their sacred buffalo hunts, Paump stayed with his mother to tend the corn and sing the prayers that made it grow. In the evenings he heard the tales of the Shoshone—about NunumBi, elfin spirits that lurked in the woods and shot arrows of misfortune at passersby, and about the elders of Dinwoody, the dead braves of the Shoshone who lived in a cave in Dinwoody and would one day reappear. Most of all Paump learned what cannot be communicated in words: the way in which the life of the Minatarees and the Mandans and the other tribes they visited was governed by ritual, by revelation, by fear and reverence for the elements of the earth—sun, water, winds, growth, fire, death, the march of the seasons.

Chapter Two

1807, MARCH 2: Congress prohibited further importation of slaves into the jurisdiction of the United States.

1808: Robert Fulton’s steamboat made its inaugural voyage.

1809, MARCH 4: James Madison became the fourth President of the United States; Thomas Jefferson retired to Monticello.

1812, JUNE 18: Congress declared war on Great Britain.

1812: A representative of two missionary societies traveled through the territories between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi River and reported a lamentable want of religious instruction.

1814: The first factory in the world to make cotton cloth with power machinery opened in Waltham, Massachusetts.

1815, DECEMBER 24: The United States and Great Britain signed a peace treaty at Ghent.

1817, APRIL 11: America’s first Negro bishop was appointed head of the new African Methodist Episcopal Church.

MARCH, 1814: The Reverend J.E. Welch was festering. He walked along the mud track bumpily, a heavy wooden bucket in each hand, the fester jerking his hips about, his boots skating a little in the wet. He skidded at the fence and cracked a split rail with a bony knee. For a moment he glared at the black, white, and mud-colored hog, the one sidling over slyly and looking impassive. He dumped the buckets of slop into the pen. He drew himself erect for a moment and stared over the rolling hills toward the west. The sun was setting an apocalyptic red over the patchy snow. Welch was bareheaded, his hair sandy and thinning, his forehead split into red and white by forty years in the fields, his eyebrows bushy, his face knotty and cedar-colored. He was thin and bony and hard. He had a face of a certain mad intensity, and might have looked as imposing as an Old Testament prophet, had he not stood five-feet-four. His eyes fixed westward, as though he were trying to out-eyeball the sun. When his right eye shifted a little north, the left kept challenging the west.

“And these vittles to the nourishment of our bodies, amen.” Welch, his shabby frock coat slipped on over his slopping clothes, looked magisterially around the table, carefully taking in each boy, then sat down. All was in order, save Benjamin, and that required no comment. Dishes piled high with food were set in front of him. He spooned peas onto his own plate and handed them to the right.
“Des petits pois,”
he said flatly. He started each dish thus, and they worked their way back to him slowly. Five boys were seated around the plank table, ranging from perhaps six to fourteen years. A roundish woman of about thirty sat at the far end on the edge of her chair, as though forever about to rise. She was pretty in her soft, plump way, her eyes large and brown, her glance gentle as she watched the boys. She was timid, and almost never spoke at table. None of these boys were hers—four were Indian pupils and one, the oldest, was her stepson.

“Yves,” Welch spoke up, meaning the second Indian boy to his right,
“Dépêche-toi.”
Welch permitted French at table because it was
la langue du pays
and the boys were most accustomed to it. It was also his wife’s mother tongue. He insisted on prayers and Scriptures in English. The Bible in French sounded like papism to him.

Baptiste, on Welch’s immediate left, clanked his fork against his glass and looked studiously at his turnip greens. “Baptiste,” challenged Welch, “was that you?”

“No, Sir, not me,” Baptiste answered with a smile, looking straight at Welch. Just then Yves tapped a responding clank on Welch’s right. Welch glowered at him. Then he decided to ignore the whole thing. He knew what was going on. He heard the third clank.

Baptiste, who was now nine, always sat on Welch’s left. The Reverend’s left eye was glass. Since it didn’t move, Baptiste had nicknamed Welch Dead Eye. Each night he started the clanking ritual, and each night it eluded Welch. Baptiste had even gotten Welch’s teen-age sons to join in. If he didn’t hear five answering clanks on any given evening, he would find the culprit and assign him the duty of emptying Welch’s chamber pot the next morning. Tomorrow morning it would be Benjamin who drew that duty. Baptiste wasn’t big enough to force Benjamin, but he had his ways.

The Reverend J.E. Welch did not persecute the boys. He believed himself to be a good man. He also believed that he was one of the elect, and had spent his fifty years waiting for the laying on of hands. It had not come. As a boy in Virginia, on his father’s hillside farm, he had shown a knack for book-learning and, almost alone of the boys he knew, had learned to read and write. He could speak twenty or thirty verses of the Bible by heart before he was twelve. He had known early that God had chosen him for a mission in life—something special, something that others were not called to. He found a great thrill in the hymns that raised praises unto the Lord, and a special beckoning in the invitation at the end of preachment. He was saved at the age of ten. His mother said he would be a great Baptist preacher one day, and everyone marked him down as different. He hired out as an extra hand in the country, saved money, and sent himself to missionary school in Roanoke.

But the high functionaries of the Baptist Church Missionary Board were blind to the light the Lord put in him. Though they trained him to carry God’s word to the French-speaking Indians of the St. Lawrence River, and though he spoke the language to a fare-you-well, they never called him. He kept working on his father’s farm until he was thirty. He married, got his wife with child, built a second cabin on the place, annexed some more acres, and expanded the farm. Instead of cultivating souls, he cultivated tobacco and corn and beans and hogs.

In 1804 his wife died in the birth of their third son. In 1807 his father, long a widower, also died. J.E. Welch sold the old place, added Reverend to his name, and headed for St. Louis. It was new, it was American, there was room; he would let his light shine at last.

He set up a boarding school in St. Louis for Indian boys, Indian boys whose only white language was French. At forty-five he remarried, and his wife—a young Frenchwoman—knew a woman’s ways and a woman’s work. He was selected now—by himself, it was true—for even the eminent William Clark had sent him an Indian boy, Jean-Baptiste, for schooling. But somehow the coals still burned in him. J.E. Welch had three hatreds in this world—the sound of Latin in God’s house, the smell of tobacco in leaf, and the snort of a hog.

He was, nearly enough, what he thought himself—a good man, by his own lights. He was saving the heathen; he liked and understood heathen boys better than most of his contemporaries, though he knew that his temper was a failing. He meant to teach them to read and write, to wash and dress like civilized men, and then—if their heathen nature didn’t reassert itself—to till the land. He had no higher hopes for them: After all, they were what they were. But if they could not become merchants, teachers, and lawyers, or even carpenters and mechanics, they could learn obedience to civil and divine authority; they could learn to grow crops and stay put in one place. If their understanding of divine will was limited, that was as it must be. Perhaps their children could be taught to be white men. In the meantime, the key to their temporal and spiritual salvation was discipline, the fear of the Lord, and the fear of the Lord’s representative, J.E. Welch. Welch held onto hope for them: he remembered, always, that his God was a God of miracles.

He was reading Scripture aloud after dinner to the boys—the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac—when he heard Benjamin’s step. Welch looked as though that step had turned loose a spring in him. He jumped up, knocking his high-backed wooden chair flat, and bolted through the door to the parlor where Benjamin was creeping toward the room he shared with James. Baptiste heard Benjamin’s back crash against the wall.

“It’s divil whisky on your breath, is it?” screamed Welch. He took a hand off the boy to slap his face. But Benjamin, who was sixteen, and half a foot taller than his father, shoved and sent Welch sprawling backwards over a table. Benjamin shot out the door and back toward the riverfront. Before he got ten yards down the muddy street, Welch was within two strides of him.

“Ye’ve been drinking,” shouted Welch. Boot slaps while he caught his breath. “I kin smell it.” Slaps again. “And I’m gonna smell”—pause—“for your other evils.” Pause. “Been to the harlots, have ye?”

Benjamin’s groin, recently warmed, ran cold. Welch’s two big hands hit him flat on the shoulder blades and sent him headlong into the mud.

Welch dragged him into the house with mud all over his hands and face and back, his pants half off, and a big strawberry on one cheekbone. Mrs. Welch and the boys were gathered around the front door.

“He’s drunk and he’s been to the Frenchy whore,” Welch bellowed at no one in particular, and disappeared into the bedroom with Benjamin.

He was apoplectic. Baptiste had never seen so fine a rage before. He knew enough to stay out of Welch’s way at times like this: In his first five years he had caught some of Welch’s anger. Now he grinned at Yves. That night the boys swore that they would find a way to get out of Welch’s school before they started with whisky. Before they started with French whores, too, though they weren’t sure what you did with whores.

Baptiste didn’t mind Welch. He had been scared of him at first, less because he was violent than because he was strange. A six-year-old cannot understand the terrors of hell-fire-and-damnation as rendered in full plumage by a Baptist preacher, but he has easy access to terror. Baptiste, in the first couple of years, had been terrified of something, he didn’t know what. His mother hadn’t been able to help. She was in town sometimes, but she only told him that the white man’s god was most powerful and the re-vealer of the white man’s great medicine and that Baptiste must know this god and learn his medicine. She had taught him about the gods of the four winds, and he had seen the Thunder-being come from the west and unleash its power, so he knew that gods were awesome.

He had quickly learned how to pacify Welch. He memorized Scriptures easily and repeated them back. “The wages of sin is death,” he would enunciate carefully to Welch after dinner by the fire, getting his English and his Bible right at once. “Repent, O ye of little faith.” “For God so loved the world that he sent His only begotten son.…” He could remember the words with no effort, and he discovered that he only had to parrot them. He had nothing he could connect any of it to, but he knew that his diligence, his quick grasp, and his smile pleased Welch.

Mrs. Welch—the Reverend always called her Mrs. Welch as far as Baptiste could tell—had taken him under her wing when he first arrived. He had been too young to help out around the farm, so she kept him in the kitchen. And she sang as she worked—sang the songs of Aix-en-Provence, where she had been born. In a good mood and out of earshot of Welch she would throw in a saucy Creole song or two that she had heard in New Orleans; Baptiste didn’t get them entirely, but he loved the jaunty tone. While she did the lunch dishes, she would sing rounds, getting Baptiste started on the first round, then carrying the second while the boy sounded out his in a small, brave unsteady voice. When he would get lost, he would stamp out the rhythm with his feet while she finished. One afternoon the two of them were dancing in a circle in the kitchen to “Frère Jacques,” Mrs. Welch with broom in hand and her skirts picked up, when Welch walked in. The Reverend sent Baptiste to bed without any supper and scolded Mrs. Welch roundly in front of him. He didn’t expect his own wife to teach Indian boys, who had the divil in ’em anyway, the divil’s recreation of dancing. The next day they were dancing again in the kitchen anyway. Mrs. Welch was a French Protestant and had become a Baptist by marriage; this she didn’t understand, so they defied her husband on the sly.

Days on the school-farm were long and strictly regimented. Everyone got up in the pre-dawn light and ate a big country breakfast, eggs from the henhouse, pork they had slaughtered, milk from one of their two cows. First the boys of ten or older, including Welch’s sons, did chores until mid-morning, then had lessons until lunch, each boy working on his own level. Welch drilled them in reading and writing both English and French, read aloud to them in French the history of the world, told them stories of great men, and infused them with American patriotism. Mrs. Welch, who had a knack for figures, took over for arithmetic. It was a program, Welch reminded them constantly, remarkably advanced. A lot of whites didn’t read and write, and almost no Indians did. They were getting a headstart in life, for which they should thank the Lord.

After lunch came more chores and, at mid-afternoon, more lessons. After dinner he read the Scriptures to them—always in English—and told them the great Bible stories, Daniel in the lion’s den, Jonah and the whale, Jesus walking on the water and changing the water to wine (which was really grape juice, he explained), Paul being struck down on the road to Damascus. Baptiste loved these stories. And after an hour or so of Bible, they would sing hymns. Mrs. Welch played on one of her prize possessions, a clavichord. Her family had crated it over from France before they lost their modest fortune, and she had brought it to her marriage. It marked the Welch home, she thought, with a gentility rare to St. Louis, even if the Welches didn’t have any money. She didn’t know the hymns of the American Protestant backwoods, but she had a quick ear. And so “Amazing Grace” and “Nearer My God to Thee” resounded through the dusk of the Welch parlor. every evening. Baptiste loved the singing. And to bed at sunset, as there was no sense in wasting candles.

FEBRUARY, 1815: Baptiste fretted all day on February 5. It was a warm winter’s day with ragged clouds and fitful, spitting rain, and it was his tenth birhday. He smelled something special in the air. He mooned about, hanging around the kitchen with Mrs. Welch, dawdling through his lessons, looking at Mrs. Welch with big eyes. He had to wait all the day through dinner and through the Scripture readings.

When Baptiste heard the rapping on the door, Welch was praying aloud. Mrs. Welch crept away to let their guest in. William Clark stood in the doorway while Welch continued his conversation with God for some ten minutes, for the blessing of more funds to expand his work on the Lord’s behalf. Reverend Welch wanted the Brigadier General to know that he didn’t come before the Lord, or an American citizen’s right to talk with the Lord. Baptiste slipped to his feet when he saw Clark, but Clark solemnly lowered his head and Baptiste stood fidgeting the whole time, looking at Clark from under his eyebrows. At the words “In the name of our saviour, amen,” he sprinted across the room, coolly stopped, and stuck out his hand. Clark shook it with a smile. He had two packages in the other hand.