From Sea to Shining Sea (126 page)

“Is this Mister Burr really the same what kilt Alexander Hamilton?” Freeman asked as they splashed across the shallows. The items of Eastern news were read from newspapers by those who could read, and then circulated by word of mouth among those who couldn’t, so the people in Kentucky, like this fellow, knew the news, but vaguely.

“Aye, it is,” George replied, now urging his mount up through a leaf-strewn gully out of the riverbank, “shot him in a duel, they say. I gather he’s a ruined man back east, on account o’ that.”

George had been annoyed at this intrusion. But now the many intriguing things he had read and heard about Burr came crawling into his mind, and his curiosity began to wax. It was not
unusual for fugitives from failure and scandal back east to drift westward through these parts, often on new schemes. And as George had learned through his encounters with James Wilkinson, it was good for a guardian of the back country to know as much as he could about the intentions of any heroes or scoundrels who came through.

Wilkinson, he thought now, riding up through the baked-earth streets of Clarksville. I wonder does this visit have anything to do with Wilkinson. Wilkinson had got himself appointed governor of the new Louisiana Territory, with his capital at St. Louis.

If Mr. Burr tells me he’s on his way to St. Louis, George thought, I’ll wager it’s him and Wilkinson up to something.

I
T WAS A GOOD VISIT FROM THE START.
B
URR WAS CHEERFUL
and charming; he seemed not in the least bitter or dispirited about his fall from grace. He brought more news, and insights into the events of the news, than a dozen newspapers. But he was a voracious listener and a probing inquirer as well, and seemed to have a hundred questions about the West. He was a dandy on the surface, as graceful as a dancing-master, hair silky-black and curly above a high, pale promontory of a forehead, brown eyes alert and quick under satanic eyebrows, a handsome, sensuous, sometimes mocking mouth set in a strong but fine-boned face. He was three years younger than George but looked twenty years younger. George noticed that he only
seemed
to be drinking, as if to guard his words. It was this that first caused George to feel that Burr was up to something covert; his demeanor was so reminiscent of Wilkinson’s.

They talked for a long time about the French Revolution, about Napoleon, about the Louisiana Purchase, about the Voyage of Discovery, about Meriwether Lewis.

They went down off the porch once to examine some of the fossils and great bones. Burr sat on the huge bone George sometimes used as a bench and touched it with his hand. “I shouldn’t want to have lived when this did,” he said. “A fellow of my stature would make hardly a bite for it. Ha, ha! Now, you, General, would make two bites.”

“Likely it would never have eat either of us,” George said, “’less we’d happened to be up in a tree it was dining on at the time. My opinion is, the beast was arborivorous, notwithstanding what inferences they’ve made at the academies. Come look at this tooth on the porch and I’ll show you what I mean.” George showed him that a tooth of the great beast was not the tooth of a meat-eater.

“I’d no idea you were a naturalist,” said Burr. “One hears back east only of your generalship, your accomplishments in the Revolution.”

“My thirst,” George growled. Then he wished he had not said that. Even to a trusted man, it was not good to reveal one’s bitterness. But the liquor had made him a little hot-brained. “Anyway, if they remember that service at any time, they forget it when it’s time to vote me any relief.”

“I know of your disaffection with the government,” Burr said now, as if he had been waiting for some cue to bring forth a particular subject. “I was most interested, sir, in your part in the Genet matter. I should have given my whole approval to those moves, had I been in a position to have done. Ahm …” He paused here, and George made a business of pouring liquor so as not to seem too intently curious about where Burr was going to go with this line of discussion. “I think Washington was too indulgent to the arrogant Spaniards.”

“Eh. Well. That’s past. Just another of those things, as my Ma would use to say, that turn out one way rather than the other. And p’r’aps better this way, as Louisiana’s ours now and no blood shed for it either. That makes it better, to my mind.”

“An unusual sentiment from a celebrated warrior, if I may say it, sir:”

“My kind of war, Mister President, was to gain as much as possible with as little blood wasted as possible. I lost not a man in my Illinois campaign.”

Burr sat with a forefinger laid in the hollow of his cheek and studied George, and looked as if he were pondering whether to say something. At last he ventured: “You are, I gather, still disaffected with your country.”

“With my country’s
government,”
George corrected him.

“Your government, then. Would you now, ten years later, still be of a spirit to do such a thing?”

“That’s an odd sort of question, sir. I should have to have a grievance against someone besides my own government in order to go against that someone. And Louisiana is ours now; there is no Spanish block anymore, so I am indifferent to Spain, if that ’someone’ you’re alluding to is Spain. I am, in fact, indifferent to the whole business of government squabbling. Still interested as a student of war and power, of course, but indifferent. Another way of saying it, sir, is that I have since the activities of Citizen Genet considered myself retired from the public life, and right glad of it too.”

“A naturalist.” Burr seemed deflated, disappointed. George said:

“Aye, sir. I am hard to provoke anymore. Maybe I’m a fossil, like those.” He smiled, with just a shade of wistfulness, and inclined his head toward his boneyard. Then he said: “If I may inquire, to what do we owe the honor of having you tour among us?”

“Oh, ahm.” Burr straightened suddenly in his chair and brought his hand down from his cheek. “I am most interested in the West, General. But I know as little about it as you know much. Since the affair at Weehawken—Secretary Hamilton, I mean, rest his soul—I’ve felt a need for open space. The West.” He gazed out over Kentucky.

“The West is out there, now,” George said, pointing down the Ohio toward the setting sun. “This isn’t the West anymore.”

“I’m on my way to St. Louis,” Burr said.

So, George thought, Wilkinson
is
in this, whatever it is. I wouldn’t go near it. But what are they up to, I’d like to know. “Allow me to tell you a story,” George said. “This is one I’ve hardly even told my family, as it doesn’t much illuminate the better side o’ man …” He leaned forward. Sometimes if one gave a confidence, he would get one in return, and this was an old harmless one, not much to give out. Burr leaned forward eagerly to hear it. “As you may remember,” George said, “I once was in opposition to a man named Hamilton, too. Governor
Henry
Hamilton.”

“Ah, indeed!”

“Well, in my case, the vanquished fared better than the victor. He was freed in an exchange o’ prisoners, and went back to Canada to govern again. Then to Bermuda. Anyways, when he returned to resume his mischief in Canada, he sent me a secret emissary here. ’Twas near the end of the war. He offered me great wealth and position if I’d switch sides.”

He stopped there, sat back, sipped. After a pause, Burr half-smiled, and said: “Invitation is the sincerest flattery!” Then he chuckled at his own wit.

“I dispatched him without much ceremony,” George concluded. “But I will say, encounters o’ that sort do make a body wonder where the honor is that gentlemen profess.”

For a while then the talk circled around and about the word honor, and then Burr asked: “Have, ahm, have you ever stood on the field of honor, sir?”

George’s eyes bored into Burr’s, and it was a while before he said: “If you mean the dueling ground, no. For some reason, nobody’s ever flung a glove in my face. Rather, they turn knives in my back.”

*     *     *

T
HE
V
ICE
P
RESIDENT STOOD LATER ON THE FERRY LANDING
at Louisville and gazed back across the river toward Point o’ Rock. He was very disappointed that General Clark was no longer interested in adventures of conquest against the Spaniards. He had been led by some back East to believe the old conqueror might be available.

Still, it had been a most pleasant day, and that evening in his guest lodgings in Louisville, Burr wrote:

On the other side of the river, George sat gazing over a solitary dinner grown cold on the plate, the corners of his mouth downturned, unconsciously rubbing his thumb back and forth along his index finger. The Vice President’s mysterious visit had been a delight, but now it left George with a vaguely unsavory aftertaste. Burr had revealed nothing, really, of what he and Wilkinson were up to, but George had a feeling that President Jefferson should be keeping an eye on them. And George was glad he had made it clear he was not going to get embroiled in it. Even if there might have been a fortune in it. With those two involved, it surely was no
little
scheme.

If I were to guess what they’re aiming at, I’d guess they mean to overset the Spaniards in the Southwest somehow, and make themselves emperors or something. They’ve both got that air about them of would-be emperors, he thought.

They still come to me, he thought. They still come looking for someone to lead a Western army.

But now they’re looking for one they think might betray his country one little way or another.

I’d rather they’d just forget me altogether.

Anyways, it’s Billy carries the point for this family nowadays.

N
OW DOWN IN THEIR SOULS THERE WAS AN UNRELENTING
sense of urgency. They awoke in the darkness to the sounds of Scannon barking at bears, of coyote-howls, of mountain lions coughing and yowling, of the gurgling, murmuring Missouri; they awoke with mosquitoes at their ears or rain-damp on their cheeks, and lay thinking about time and distance and chance, and they would be unable to go back to sleep for thinking about it: that they were racing against time but had no way to go faster.

It was late summer now, and they were in the canyons among the Rocky Mountains, and still they had not seen one Shoshoni Indian. They had found old Shoshoni lodges; they had found little sun-screening booths made of willow bushes; they had found Indian roads; they had found horse tracks four or five days old; they had not seen, however, one Indian. They had come through gloomy, rugged canyons with steep crags of purplish-brown volcanic stone; they had found, too late now, forests of pine that would have provided pitch for the iron boat. They had poled the boats between perpendicular cliffs of flint and solid rock sixteen hundred feet straight up, so sheer and forbidding that they had named them the Gates of the Rocky Mountains. The captains had taken turns leading advance parties to search for the Shoshonis, pushing ahead through the towering landscapes until they could scarcely walk from fatigue and tortured feet, leaving pieces of paper, ribbon, and linen on bushes along the trail as signs that they were coming as friends; still they had not seen an Indian.

This search for a sight of the elusive Shoshoni would have been frustrating enough if there simply were no Shoshonis around. But there were. The captains were certain they had been seen by Shoshonis, or at least that their hunters’ guns had been heard. On July 20, upriver from the Gates of the Mountains, they had seen clouds of smoke in the sky to the southwest, as if the whole countryside had been set afire. That was the sign among tribes that an enemy was approaching. “Hard fortune for us,” William had groaned. “Now we’ll have to try to find ’em
where they hide. And even if we do that, we’ll have to convince ’em we’re friendly.” Sacajawea had gazed at the yellow-white smoke with her forefinger on her lips and a speechless appeal in her eyes. It was as if she were trying to send her thoughts ahead to her people, to make them wait, to make them stay and see that these were not enemies.

T
HIS FEAR, THAT THE
S
HOSHONIS WITH THEIR WONDERFUL
horses would fade further and further into the mountains, drove William like an obsession. Leaving Lewis to bring the main party and the canoes along, he took Private Frazier, the Fields brothers, and Charbonneau, and they set off ahead, carrying in their knapsacks a few light gifts for Indians.

They went twenty-five miles over an Indian road through the mountains the first day. The prickly pear was worse than ever, as if making the men pay in blood for the beauty of its blossoms. By nightfall William’s feet were blistering and lacerated and swollen, and the old carbuncle on his ankle was swollen again.

They covered a like distance on the second day, all limping now. The country was opening out now, onto a wide and fertile plain. William drew Frazier up beside him on a rise, and pointed. “There,” he said, “mark my word, will be the three forks.”

Frazier stood, panting, pinched sweat out of his eyes and said, “The end o’ the Missouri, Cap’n? Truly?”

William nodded. “There’s God knows how many miles of river above it, but no name for it. Aye, Frazier. Th’ end of the Missouri.”

“Praise the Lord!”

A
ND IT WAS
. T
HEY FOLLOWED THE FAST, DEEP, CLEAN
M
ISSOURI
between steep, crumbling gray bluffs about three hundred feet high, bluffs layered with well-defined strata of uptilting stone, topped with juniper and pine; they crashed through cottonwood and willow thickets, refreshing themselves with gooseberries and serviceberries and currants, and watched the valley spread out before them as they plodded toward the southwestern end of the canyon.

“Lookee there. She forks once.” William pointed. Just beyond the funnel made by the canyon, a small river led in from the opposite shore. The party stayed on the right bank of the larger stream, going ahead in the stifling heat, tormented by flies and mosquitoes. That was just
two
forks, William thought. Lord help us if we’ve got bad facts from the Minnetarees. “Wait here.” He
went to the bluff, hobbling through rock debris at its base, and began climbing.