Cheyenne Winter (3 page)

Sire said nothing. At his nod two deckhands lifted the first cask and mournfully poured the pure grain spirits overboard. They gurgled out while men stared as if watching a fatal wound bleed their life away. And then the next. And the next. Indians, breeds, ruffians, mountaineers, boatmen, watched in agony. Mrs. Gillian, a tent under a parasol, pursed her lips. All three new engages who’d signed on with the Rocky Mountain Company studied the spirits as they departed the living.

That done, the reverend turned to Brokenleg. “I ought to seize your entire cargo and this ship as well. Believe me, this vessel’s navigation license is in jeopardy. Oh, I’ll put a stop to this traffic one way or another. Not a drop, not a drop of these poisons will touch the lips of these savage children of the West. One way or another I’ll halt this nefarious traffic.”

Bluster. Brokenleg stopped listening and turned to the business ahead: informing Guy; defending the trading license; trying to prove somehow that things were less damning than they seemed. That was a task made all the more difficult because all fur companies winked at the law and circumvented the inspections. Everyone knew it, from David Mitchell, in charge of the Indian Bureau back in St. Louis, on down — and up.

“You’re not even paying attention! I’ll report your insolence as well.”

Brokenleg focused on the man and listened to the rest of his sermon, or appeared to. The man irked him. Preachers had wrecked everything in Indian Country. The Indian Bureau’s noble experiment had been worse for red men than the corrupt agents the preachers had replaced. The preachers, including this bubbling tub, had withheld food and treaty annuities from any Indians who failed to abandon their old ways and become Christians. The result had been seething hatred on the reserves.

After some interminable time, after Sire’s impatient coughing, after deckhands had wandered off and spectators had wilted, the Reverend Mister Gillian concluded, swept the mountainous Mrs. Gillian down the stage, and marched furnerally up the slope.

Brokenleg turned to Captain Sire. “I reckon we’ve got to git word down to Guy Straus. Next time we pass a mackinaw or a keelboat give me a holler.”

Sire nodded. “Monsieur, truly, those weren’t your spirits, were they?”

“Nope. Some skunk put ’er there. This hyar was old Chouteau cadet’s doin’, sure as I’m standin’ hyar.”

“It is a different handwriting,
oui?”

Sire handed him the ship’s copies of the cargo manifest. The three casks of vinegar had been entered in a cruder hand than the rest.

“We must delay no more,” Sire said. He waved to Black Dave Desiree high above in the pilot house. Deckmen hauled in the hawsers. The twin chimneys belched black smoke that lowered down upon them all. The escapement pipe shrilled off steam. The packet drifted backward a moment. Then the eighteen-foot side-wheels bit water and the riverboat wrestled the violent current of the river.

He found Maxim still standing near the firebox at the boiler and hauled him out into the sunlight; to the duckbilled prow. On either side the river swirled by, a murky green color this far upstream.

“Now Maxim. You write your pa about this and we’ll hail the next keelboat and send the letter down. He’s got to know right fast. It’s that or send an express. You write him good. You can say ’er a lot better than I can. Give him all the facts. Give him everything — every little thing. He’s got to deal with Mitchell, keep the IB from pullin’ our license. You up to it or do I haveta do it?”

“Oh I’ll do it. It’s all my fault anyway.”

“I reckon it’s not your fault that them spirits got put in there. That was old Chouteau Cadet.”

“It’s all over. The company’s over.”

“Naw. Maybe not. We’re standin’ in this hyar prow, cuttin’ water. We’re goin’ up to trade robes. We’re goin’ to make us a profit. American Fur, they weasled out of it more’n once. Cost a fine or two but they kept on. We’ll keep on. And we both learnt a piece.”

“The fine could sink us.”

“It’ll hurt. Maybe we can lasso Senator Benton, like Chouteau did that time when ol’ Wyeth visited Kenneth McKenzie at Fort Union in the beaver days, and peached on him — told the Indian Bureau they had a corn whiskey still runnin’ juice up thar. They got out of it. We’ll git out of it.”

But he wasn’t very sure of that. The next afternoon they closed on a mackinaw carrying five men and sent Maxim’s letter down river in the hands of a buffalo-tongue outfit. It’d get to Guy ahead of the reverend’s report to Davy Mitchell. But what might happen after that was anyone’s guess. Meanwhile, he reckoned he’d have a little palaver with the company’s three new engages.

At each wooding stop along the river Captain Sire put every man on board to work, deckhands and passengers alike, and urged them to be quick about it. Woodyards were famous for sudden death. At this yard, a little above Sergeant Bluff, something unusual would happen. Maxim Straus stood at the duckbilled prow as the packet slid toward the riverbank. He felt moody and rebellious. He would not answer the clanging of the ship’s bell summoning able-bodied men to work. Especially here.

Farther downstream woodcutters operated the wood yards, piling up cordwood along the riverbanks. At those stops the crew and passengers trotted the three- or four-foot lengths aboard while the mate or the captain settled with the wood hawks. But not here. Not out in Indian country where no wood hawk would survive long. Here and the rest of the way up the Missouri, the crews were on their own. They had to girdle living trees for future use and hack them down and into pieces as swiftly as possible. Some captains had a small sawmill aboard and cut the logs while they traveled. Captain Sire had no such equipment. An upriver wooding stop meant that the bankside cottonwoods and willows had to be felled and cut to length several times a day.

Occasionally Indians themselves prepared a load of wood and charged for it, often with a great deal of haggling because they were never in a hurry. Their presence in a wooding yard slowed things down so much that some captains preferred to avoid them if they had alternative sites — which enraged the tribesmen. As a result, a captain never knew when a volley from bankside rifles would rip into his boat, killing passengers and crew.

But Maxim wasn’t looking for Indians here. He was looking for something else — three men and a string of mules bearing thirty-gallon wooden casks. He half-hoped he wouldn’t see them. He’d come to hate the whole business of smuggling spirits past the federal inspectors. But there they were, waiting quietly in the shade of the dense cottonwood forest that spread east from the bank. The company’s whiskey-runners. Delivering one hundred eighty gallons of two-hundred proof ardent spirits. Enough pure grain alcohol to make nine hundred gallons of firewater after it had been diluted. Nine hundred gallons of trade whiskey, consisting of spirits, river water, tea for color, pepper or ginger for taste, a few plugs of tobacco for bite, and anything else a trader felt like dumping into the pot to make the beverage entertaining. Enough to demoralize whole tribes. Enough to bring in thousands of robes, untold wealth.

Maxim hated it.

The ship’s bell clanged and everywhere deckmen and mountaineers crowded to the stage, grabbing axes and saws from a box there. Even while the crew made fast the packet, wrapping hawsers around stumps on shore, the mob trotted toward the trees and began butchering them. High up on the texas, ship’s officers watched for Indians, glassing the surrounding bluffs diligently.

Maxim didn’t budge. He glared sourly as the whiskey-runners led their mules up the stage onto the main deck and began unloading the casks. Brokenleg was there to meet them and examine the bung of each cask, looking for signs of tampering, watering down, light weight, and joking with them all the while. In short order the six casks had vanished into the shallow hold, the whiskeymen had been paid off and had vanished into the timber with their mules. An illegal transaction.

No one cared. No one among the mountaineers or deckmen even stared. Nothing was hidden. Any observer might have reported it to the Indian Bureau but no one ever would. No engage of the rival American Fur Company would peach because spirits were essential to the trade, not only to bring in robes and pelts, but to provide an occasional drunk, a Christmas or New Year’s bacchanal for bored and hard-bitten men.

But Maxim seethed. He’d been wounded at Bellevue not only by the minister but by Fitzhugh. He dreaded the future; dreaded that his name would be entered in federal records. Dreaded that he might be arrested upon his return to St. Louis; tried, imprisoned, shamed. That was his handwriting adding those vinegar casks to the company’s manifests. It’d been a terrible mistake. He felt he was always making mistakes and Brokenleg was always rebuking him in his savage way. He could never go home. He knew he’d get a letter eventually from papa, telling him to stay away, live in the wild lands for a few years. It broke his heart even to think about it.

But that wasn’t what had turned him sullen as he leaned over the rail at the prow and stared moodily at the eddying water. The whole thing offended his sense of decency. His family was engaged in a corrupt enterprise. His own father! His brother, too. And himself. There was no subterfuge in banking and finance, and Straus et Fils had borne no shame. But this! Pouring out watered spirits to Indians, getting them drunk, enticing them to trade anything, anything, all the robes in their lodges for just one more cup of diluted firewater. Whole villages impoverished themselves in one big drunk, peddling every last robe and pelt to greedy traders for another drink. And the traders made each batch progressively weaker; the drunker the Indians, the more they were cheated, until at the last the firewater had scarcely any spirits at all in it.

Fitzhugh didn’t seem to mind. Neither did Jamie Dance. And not even his father minded! It filled Maxim with disgust that the people he was with would not see what they were doing, ruining villages, turning proud, strong native people into sots. He’d done it himself last year through the whole trading season. He’d seen it with his own eyes, dipped the cups into the pot and poured out a robe’s measure. A rogue’s measure, he corrected himself. He’d seen them outside the post, staggering, bellowing, brawling like animals, the last restraint loosed in them all. And other things. The squaws drank, too. And when they did — he blushed to think about it. He’d seen it all and it had sickened him. And he had done it. He himself.

Fitzhugh limped toward him, fire in his eye. “You sick or somethin’?”

“No.” Maxim turned his back on Brokenleg and stared into the murky water.

“Somethin’ in yer craw?”

“No.”

“Then git yer little butt out there and help. These hyar yards are dangerous. The faster we wood, the better.”

Maxim ignored him.

Fitzhugh spat, snarled, and turned to perform his usual task. His limp kept him on board but he helped stack the wood into neat cords close to the firebox where firemen could lift each heavy piece and shove it into the blistering firebox. But he stopped.

“You upset about them spirits? After gittin’ burned back in Bellevue?”

Maxim refused to turn and face his tormentor.

“I guess that’s it,” Brokenleg said. “I figure if the government was serious about it they’d shut us all down. Chouteau, small traders, us. They ain’t serious. They want us hyar. Helps claim the territory. Keeps the British out. Wasn’t for us, the fur men, we’d have no claim to Oregon country. That whiskey law — that’s just a little sop for the people back East. Don’t you worry it none. And don’t you worry about Bellevue, neither. Your pa, he’ll pull a few strings. Him and Davey Mitchell. And it’ll all pass.”

“No it won’t!” Maxim cried. “It’ll never pass. We’re ruining the tribes! We’re stealing.”

Brokenleg was startled, and sputtered something.

“It’s not a sop. It’s what decent people insist on. It’s what I would want. We’re so greedy we don’t care! Don’t care if some poor Indian trades everything — everything — for another cup of  . . . of water with a dash of spirits in it!”

Much to Maxim’s surprise Brokenleg didn’t get angry, didn’t bark harshly at him, as he usually did. Instead, he limped forward and leaned over the rail, peering down into the water beside Maxim.

“Them Injuns, they’re adults,” he said. “Nothin’ compellin’ them to trade a robe for a cup of spirits. A lot don’t. The Crows don’t hardly at all. They make their own choices. I reckon we’re just providin’ a product like anything else.”

“It’s not the same!” Maxim shouted at him. “They’re not used to it. It’s new. It’s not in their — their ways. They’re — savages.”

“Oh, you got a point there, boy. Savages. Get an Injun drunk and he’s likely to go mean, go crazy, start butcherin’ and carryin’ on like no white man I ever seen. Well, ah, I take that back. I seen a bunch o’ white men turn savage, too, some spirits in ’em. Real savage. Like at the rendezvous.”

“We shouldn’t be doing it. It’s against the law. It’s against — decency!”

“I don’t suppose it’d convince ye to say we’d go outer business fast; that we got to, or Chouteau’s men’ll take away our trade.”

“No it doesn’t,” Maxim said. “Just because they’re doing it — that doesn’t make it right!”

Fitzhugh studied the water. Behind them the ship’s bell clanged, summoning all on shore aboard. “There’s two things, boy. There’s what is, and there’s what should be. The robe trade is. It just is, and no one knows how to change it. The Indian Bureau, it made Indian agents of a passel of ministers and it didn’t do nothing except rile up the Injuns. They don’t like having some white man hold back food and government annuities unless they start goin’ to church, give up their ways, quit having two, three wives, quit huntin’ buffler, start plowing the ground and sweatin’ like no Injun never sweat before — naw. It ain’t workin’. Nothing works good. I understand how you feel, boy. I feel real bad myself some times. But it don’t do no good to feel bad. The world is. That’s all there is to it. It just is.”

Maxim turned to Brokenleg. “No,” he said softly. “I won’t do it anymore. I’m going back down the river with
The Trapper
, Brokenleg. I’m going home if they’ll let me in the house.”