Deep as the Rivers (Santa Fe Trilogy) (65 page)

   
They both looked down on the scene around them from the vantage point of Micajah’s considerable height. The giant frontiersman towered over David’s father as well as the other tall men in the assembly, the baby’s godfather, Santiago Quinn, and his dark and mysterious half-caste brother, Joaquín. During the ceremony little Liza Shelby’s godmothers, Elise Quinn and Louise Freul had taken turns holding her while Olivia and Samuel beamed their approval.

   
Father Louie completed the prayers and the group in the small chapel at Fort St. Francoise filed out into the bright autumn sunshine, laughing and talking. Louise Freul reluctantly handed the now quieted baby back to Elise, whose daughter, Orlena, and niece, Aurelia, hovered near, eager for a chance to hold the newest member of their family.

   
“Never fret, my dear, you’ll have plenty of chances to spoil your namesake,” Albert Freul said to his sister as she watched little Elizabeth Louise adoringly.

   
“So many children in your husband’s family,” Louise said to Olivia, watching as Elise bent down to lace her six-year-old son Samuel’s boot, which had come untied while the three tall dark sons of Orlena and Joaquín Quinn talked with their father and Uncle Santiago, who was holding his two-year-old son, Elkhanah.

   
“I was delighted that Elise and Santiago were able to convince his brother Joaquín’s family to come all the way from Santa Fe,” Olivia said. “It’s so good to have all the cousins together. Samuel and I visited with Joaquín and his family when we were in New Mexico last winter. Then I understood why Elise named her daughter after Orlena—just as I named mine after you and her. It means a great deal to me that you and Albert made the long journey from New Orleans all the way up the Missouri to attend the christening,” she said, fondly squeezing the elderly doctor and his sister’s hands.

   
“We would not have missed it for anything,” Louise replied, smiling as Micajah Johnstone approached them. “I see Mr. Johnstone has his handsome grandson in tow,” she said, admiring Micajah, who had cleaned up remarkably for the occasion, even having his shaggy hair barbered and his beard neatly trimmed.

   
“Micajah had to explain to David what Father Louie was doing. After all, he is David’s godfather as well as his grandpa and he takes both roles very seriously,” Olivia replied, noting her older friend’s interest in the giant frontiersman. “Have all of you been formally introduced?” she inquired of Dr. Freul and his sister.
What a striking couple they’d make,
she thought as she presented her beloved mentor to Louise Freul.

   
Micajah startled her by making a courtly bow over Louise’s hand as the doctor stood by, amused. David turned up his nose in the manner peculiar to small boys. “Mushy stuff,” he said, grimacing at Dr. Freul, who laughed.

   
“Yew shore are a rare sight, mad’mozel,” Johnstone said, looking into Louise’s dark eyes. “Hit ain’t often a feller my size meets up with a female he kin look in th’ eyes without gettin’ a crick in his neck. Yore a right handsome lady.”

   
Louise’s face pinkened as if she were a schoolgirl, but her Gallic common sense remained in place as she replied, “In Creole society I have always been considered a bit over long, Mr. Johnstone.”

   
“Why, thet’s jist ‘cause them Cree-ols ‘er sech leetle-bitty fellers. Thet heavy air down south plumb stunts thar growth. Yore a Missouri-sized woman, an’ from whut my Sparky tells me, yew got a heart as big as all Loosiana.”

   
Olivia and Dr. Freul beamed in approval as the tall couple strolled across the compound, headed for the open gate of the fort.

   
Samuel approached his wife and whispered, “I couldn’t help noticing the, er, interest Micajah and Louise seem to have in each other.”

   
“It looks as if Father Louie might have another marriage to perform,” she replied, her lips bowed into a mischievous smile.

   
He squeezed her hand affectionately and brought it to his lips. “Micajah will be a lucky man if it works out as well as ours.”

   
“Aw, more mushy stuff,” David said with a sigh, looking from his father to his mother.

Author’s Note

   
There is something mystical about big rivers. Perhaps I feel this way because I grew up at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi in St. Louis. After a twenty-five-year exile, I returned home and knew I had to set the final book of the Santa Fe Trilogy on the rivers.

   
I had a great deal of assistance on this book, which became the most sweeping saga I’ve yet written. I would like to express my appreciation to the Public Libraries of St. Louis City and County for getting me started, and to the Mercantile Library and its tireless reference director, Charles Brown, master of arcane information on old St. Louis and New Orleans. For arming my protagonists and their foes, I am once more indebted to Dr. Carmine V. DelliQuadri, Jr., D. O., weapons expert extraordinaire, and to my husband, Jim, who gave “Sparky” her shooting lessons, as well as devoting countless hours to copyediting the text.

   
The Trans-Mississippi West at the opening of the nineteenth century was a microcosm for the American mythos. All the players shaping modern American history were in the great river basin in that pregnant year of 1811: dispossessed Native Americans, fighting to retain their culture and their land; intrepid French voyageurs, fearlessly braving the far reaches of the Upper Missouri in search of beaver and riches; Spanish soldiers, manning their isolated outposts against the American deluge; British agents provocateur, promising friendship and providing weapons to the restive tribes along the rivers; and squirrel-tough Appalachian frontiersmen, bringing their families and their plows to new and fertile soil.

   
Nature itself reflected the cataclysmic winds of change. Eighteen-eleven was the year of the great earthquake at New Madrid, Missouri, the most violent quake in recorded history on the North American continent. The Mississippi’s channel was completely redrawn and the topography of half a dozen states significantly altered. Miraculously, little life was lost owing to the sparcity of population. Although there is some disagreement among geologists, diarists at the scene said the river ran backward for a brief period of time as I described in this story. The best single compendium of eyewitness accounts I found was by James Lal Penick, Jr.,
The New Madrid Earthquake
.

   
At the opening of the nineteenth century, the Napoleonic wars eventually embroiled the fledgling American republic in its first genuinely international conflict. Both England and her Spanish allies wanted to halt the steady westward expansion of the United States. They made common cause with Native Americans, supplying them with weapons and recruiting them to serve under European commanders. My secret agents Samuel Shelby and Stuart Pardee are fictitious, but in real life such men did exist on both sides. The Osage, gatekeepers of the Great Plains, were the pivotal tribe in the Trans-Mississippi West. The most numerous and powerful group, they were firmly in the American camp. A successful British bid to undermine this alliance could have materially changed the outcome of the war. Ironically, the men most responsible for holding Osage loyal to the United States were a descendant of New Orleans Creoles, Pierre Chouteau, and a renegade Spaniard, Manual Lisa. Both these early St. Louisans had become American by default when Thomas Jefferson made the greatest real estate deal in history, the Louisiana Purchase.

   
The real losers in the War of 1812 were not European but Native American. Tecumseh’s dream of an independent Indian state free from white encroachment was doomed to failure. In spite of Osage loyalty to the United States, they suffered the same fate as all the other tribes. In researching Native American life and politics during this critical era, I used John Joseph Mathews’s,
The Osages
; William T. Hagen’s,
The Sac and Fox Indians
; and Patrick Brophy’s
Osage Autumn
. The seminal reference work remains
The Imperial Osage
by Gilbert C. Din and Abraham P. Nasatir.

   
Micajah Johnstone was a joy to create. Although fictional, he epitomized the American trailblazer, a hearty frontiersman who braved everything from grizzlies to geysers in pursuit of his dream.
Wilderness
, a poetic epic about Hugh Glass and John Colter, written by Roger Zelazny and Gerald Hausman, provided the inspiration for his character, as well as some of the improbable but true adventures which Samuel and Olivia experience. Other splendid resources that helped me weave the rich tapestry of frontier life were Thomas James’s
Three Years Among the Indians and Mexicans
; Stanley Vestal’s
The Missouri
; Hiram Martin Chittenden’s
American Fur Trade of the Far West
; and the superb pictorial,
The Trailblazers
in the Time-Life Old West Series, text by Bil Gilbert. As Micajah might have said, “Yew fellers is sharp as a Osage plantin’ stick in early spring.”

   
I thought Samuel Shelby was hero material when I first created him as the heroine’s idealistic younger brother in
White Apache’s Woman
. Reader mail confirmed my opinion, so I gave him his own story. I knew he would follow in Elise’s footsteps and become a spy. Conveniently, the War of 1812 rolled around just when I needed it. Samuel certainly had his work cut out for him: If the various tribes up and down the Mississippi river basin had united against the Americans, and if Pakenham and Cochrane had planned their invasion of New Orleans with greater care, the Treaty of Ghent might well have opened a British corridor stretching from Canada to the Gulf, ending our westward expansion.

   
The real life men and women who prevented this from happening are every bit as fascinating as those any writer could imagine. The Madisons and James Monroe are portrayed much as history records them, as are the mysterious and romantic Baratarians. No book set during this era could overlook the Battle of New Orleans and its general. Andrew Jackson can be hero or villain, depending on whose accounts you choose to use or whose shoes you stand in. Jackson was an inspired backwoods militia leader and stump politician—a real man of the people—providing, of course, your people did not happen to be Native Americans. In any interpretation he still remains larger than life.

   
Since its rescue from obscurity by revisionist historians, the War of 1812 has become a popular subject.
Dolley Madison: Her Life and Times
by Elswyth Thane is a rich and sensitive account of her remarkable life.
The Expansionists of 1812
by Julius W. Pratt,
The United States and the Disruption of the Spanish Empire
by Charles C. Griffin and
The Scorching of Washington
by Alan Lloyd provided excellent background material.
The Battle of New Orleans
by Zachary F. Smith gives a detailed account of the American triumph. Even better is the wry and insightful commentary of John R. Elting in
Amateurs, to Arms!
, which exposes not only the government’s bungling of the war effort, but also Jackson’s rather dilatory performance enroute to accidental glory.
The Baratarians and the Battle of New Orleans
by Jane Lucas De Grummond gives excellent evidence supporting the Lafittes’ contributions.

   
After writing the first two books in the Santa Fe Trilogy,
Night Wind’s Woman
and
White Apache’s Woman
, I found it difficult to bring the saga to a conclusion in
Deep as the Rivers
. I hope I have provided the Quinns and the Shelbys all the happy endings they deserve. If you would like to ask questions or make comments about my writing, I promise to reply to your emails, and if you are interested in other of my generationally related sagas, please visit my website:
www.shirlhenke.com
.
 

About the Author

SHIRL HENKE lives in St. Louis, where she enjoys gardening in her yard and greenhouse, cooking holiday dinners for her family and listening to jazz. In addition to helping brainstorm and research her books, her husband Jim is “lion tamer” for their two wild young tomcats, Pewter and Sooty, geniuses at pillage and destruction.

   
Shirl has been a RITA finalist twice, and has won three Career Achievement Awards, an Industry Award and three Reviewer’s Choice Awards from
Romantic Times