From Sea to Shining Sea (45 page)

T
HEY HAD RIDDEN THROUGH THE HIGH, RIPPLING TAN GRASS
of a rolling meadowland some four miles, northward from St. Louis, and then veered toward the east, under a vast sky full of towering sun-tinted cumulus clouds, past copses of yellowing maples and scarlet oaks, and now suddenly the ground seemed to drop out from under them and they were on the point of a bluff looking down on a hazy, lush, wooded valley five or six miles wide, full of broad waters and willow-covered sandbars and forested islands. The vista was so grand that it made George draw a deep breath. The Spanish governor said beside him:

“There, my friend. The Missouri. You see it now.”

George sat on his horse and looked down at the juncture of the two great rivers. Beside him sat the elegant Don Fernando de Leyba, lieutenant governor of Spanish Louisiana. Behind him was Teresa de Leyba, the governor’s sister and ward, sidesaddle on her mare, the breeze whipping at her black dress and riding cloak, her face a perfect pale oval in the sunlight. And around them, a hundred yards off in every direction, sat George’s bodyguards, hats pulled low to shade their eyes, gazing about with their long rifles resting on the pommels of their saddles. It had become necessary for him to have bodyguards, because in these four incredible months he had become the preeminent figure in the whole Mississippi watershed. Or so he was called by his new friend and ally, the Spanish governor.

Here the Mississippi came yellow-brown down from the north, the blue Illinois bluffs five miles beyond it; and curving down into it from the northwest, flowing under the bluff on which they sat, was the murky, gray-brown Missouri, itself two miles wide here at its mouth: roiling, shallow, carrying large trees as if they were bits of chaff. Its discharge made a wide, curving smear of muddy gray out into the slightly clearer water of the Mississippi.

It was an awesome stream, the Missouri, as voluminous, it seemed, as the Ohio. George gazed up it as far as he could see, ten or twelve miles, he estimated, until its wide channel and islands disappeared among woods and hazes, and then he thought beyond that; he thought away to the Shining Mountains,
and over them, and down to the western sea.

“Our fur traders,” the governor was saying, “believe it is a thousand miles to its source.”

George turned to look at the governor’s handsome, almost beautiful, face, beautiful because it was so much like his sister’s: dark-eyed, delicate-featured, sensitive. “More than a thousand,” George said, “more than that by far. Verendrye went up it as far as the Mandans, and his narrative placed their towns some fifteen hundred miles from here. And even at that place it was a big river, having come maybe another thousand, by what he could gather from the Indians.”

De Leyba looked at George in wonder. “Verendrye?”

“Forty years ago, a French explorer.”

“Don Jorge, my friend! I did not know of this person.” He shrugged, a rueful smile on his lips. “I am embarrassed! I am governor of this territory and you tell me things I do not know of it! Ha, ha! Teresa, my sister, listen to this wizard of yours! This Cid!” He reached over and squeezed George’s upper arm, his favorite gesture of affection.

De Leyba belied almost everything George had ever been led to believe about Spaniards. He was warm, gentle, naive, and humble. He was an aristocrat’s orphaned son, who had suffered a plague of misfortunes in the Old World and at last had fled to New Spain with his sister and wife and two small daughters, to try to rebuild a life. Governor Galvez in New Orleans had assigned him to the remote post of St. Louis, where the previous administrator had died of fever. And just two months after his arrival here, this Virginian had arrived on the other side of the river, sweeping out the British presence and astonishing every living soul in the valley.

This invasion had made de Leyba and Colonel Clark natural allies—not because Spain harbored any love for American Rebels, who would rise up against a king, but because of her eternal hatred and suspicion of Britain. As governor, de Leyba was commandant of St. Louis’s garrison, and he was in awe of George’s conquest of the Illinois. Had he known how small and destitute George’s so-called army was, he would have been more awe-struck—but perhaps a little less comforted by its presence, since he saw the Americans as a buffer between his territory and the British.

Still more astounding to the Spaniard were the Indian councils that his friend Don Jorge Clark had been holding for two months at Cahokia across the river. From his stone mansion above St. Louis, de Leyba could see the hundreds of Indian
campfires twinkling at night, and, when the wind was right, hear drums. The trader Vigo came to St. Louis every week with amazing reports from Cahokia: Colonel Clark by now had made treaties with a dozen tribes who had been carrying the tomahawk for Britain. Indians had been coming from as far as 500 miles away to see and hear this Long Knife chief, and he had orated to them, threatened them, made promises to them, and made friends of them. Most often, Vigo related, Don Jorge would convince them that they were fools to fight Britain’s war, that it was beneath the worth of true warriors to be used by white men. He did not want them to fight on the American side, but simply to stay neutral and keep out of his way as he drove the British from his country. The Indians, Vigo said, were amazed at such direct and forceful talk from a white man, and were spreading his fame even to the Great Lakes and into the plains of the Missouri.

As for himself, Don Fernando de Leyba considered himself fortunate to have stepped up alongside an extraordinary man, a man of destiny, at a most propitious time, and was excited at the prospect of helping him. Besides that, he
liked
this Don Jorge Clark better than he had ever liked any man, of any age or nationality. Here was a man who was as de Leyba imagined men should be: fair, cheerful, unafraid, tireless, and honest, and a patriot to his state. And almost unconsciously, then, when those first unexpected flickerings of passion between his sister Teresa and Don Jorge had become evident, Fernando de Leyba had begun to promote their affection. Rather than try to cloister his maiden sister against the attentions of a bold outsider, as a Spanish don would be expected to do, he had encouraged her to be kind to him, to play her
gitarra
for him in recitals and take his mind off the tension of the Indian councils across the river. Teresa had complied, and within weeks Don Jorge Clark had surprised and delighted de Leyba by asking him to permit their betrothal.

George turned now in his saddle and stretched his arm back toward Teresa. “Come up,” he said. “I want to look at this with you by me.”

She rode alongside and stopped, and they sat with the brisk fall breeze on their faces and looked into the valley.

This entrance of the demure Spanish beauty into his heart was one of the happy strokes of fortune that had befallen him since his arrival in the valley of the Mississippi. She seemed to him sometimes like a princess in a chivalric tale. His sway over the French people of the valley, their apparent devotion to him, his success in swinging the loyalties of those thousands of savages on
the other side of the river—all these serendipities had bathed this whole region in an unreal light, and now finding himself in love with this almost ephemeral wraith of a virgin was like a part of the glowing legend he found himself living. He was so clothed in triumph and the admiration of the people around him that he might fairly have tingled with the sense of his own potency; yet Providence had played such a strong role in his successes that he had to feel as reverent as a crusader. There had come over the whole unlikely adventure a sense of magic, of enchantment; even his raw, rough frontiersmen seemed to feel it sometimes, the strangeness, the specialness.

Sometimes when George was standing in the shade of the great council elms at Cahokia, with the symbolic sword and war belts and peace belts in his hands, watching the fine, proud, handsome faces of his former brown enemies warm and soften in the smoke of peace pipes, he would look aside at Joe Bowman and Johnny Rogers and others of his officers and men, and he would see in their faces the same childish wonderment that he had used to see in the faces of his little brothers and sisters when he spun stories for them. These few soldiers of his knew they were in a perilous circumstance, of course; they knew that one wrong word or gesture under the council elms could cause the horde of savages to rise up and slaughter them on the spot. And yet they too, like the crusaders of antiquity, seemed to feel that they were safe within some holy spell, hardly able to believe what was happening to them and yet having faith that it would turn out well. It was a kind of spell George had to resist sometimes, with his own hardened frontier sense of reality. But the spell was on him this morning as he sat under the glowing clouds with a princess at his side, looking over a rich valley which he controlled as surely as might a king in armor. And Fernando de Leyba was aware of it, too; that was why he sometimes referred to his friend as the Cid.

And now, as if to add another dimension to the bright dream, George was here looking down upon a river whose name had always been mythical to him, and it was even more awesome than he had imagined it. He remembered a day only four months ago, though it seemed now to have been a day in another and a lesser era, when he had trailed his hand over the side of a boat and felt the waters of the westward-flowing Ohio with his fingers.

“Wait,” he told his princess and her brother, and he spurred his horse and rode down the steep bluff, through brush and high grass, down and down through dry leaves and deadwood till he
was at the foot of the bluff and galloping across the bottomland toward the river.

He dismounted in a copse of cottonwood saplings, looped his horse’s reins, and strode out to the half-sandy, half-muddy riverbank. He waded out through the shoreside eddies to a place where a strong current ran between the shore and a parallel sandbar.

He stood there, in the cold water as deep as his thighs, and dipped that same hand in the current. He felt the water and looked upstream.

This water, he thought. Once it was snow on the Shining Mountains.

He looked up once and saw them all on the bluff almost a half a mile above him: Teresa and her brother, and the guards with their long rifles sticking up like the lances of knights.

He remembered the dream of the white-pillared house on a bluff above the river, and the lady in a billowing dress sitting beside him. He saw it again now, that vision, and now the woman had a face. A delicate, pale oval face.

He turned back to the river and looked down at his hand in it and thought of all the miles and of the land’s end.

Someday, he thought. Somehow and someday.

B
UT SOMETIMES WHEN HE WAS AWAY FROM
T
ERESA, ALONE
in his cot in a guarded room in Cahokia, with the murmur of a thousand encamped warriors nearby, the enchantment would dissolve like mist and show him the thin, hard lines of reality.

His army, never a fourth the size it pretended to be, was now reduced by expired enlistments to some seventy men and officers, and these were divided between Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and Vincennes. When George was not counciling, he was trying to run his newly conquered empire by pen.

The Illinois Regiment was suffering from want of clothing and shoes and supplies, and winter was nigh. So far there had been no word from Governor Henry in Williamsburg. George did not even know whether Montgomery’s party had got east alive with Rocheblave. George had also sent a courier named Myers directly to Henry, bearing written reports of the conquest and a desperate plea for men and money and provisions. But he did not know whether Myers had gotten there, either.

As there was no money, everything had to be got on credit: cloth, blankets, leather, flour, salt, beef, rum, tobacco, and such services as blacksmiths, physicians, and even washerwomen, had to be got on the credit of the State of Virginia. The villagers and merchants in the valley were happy to provide all these for their
new allies, but not free. They did not know the State of Virginia itself, but they had enough faith in its Colonel Clark to accept his personal signature on their bills. Soon, George hoped, Governor Henry would send money and troops to enable him to hold this vast territory which he had secured so handily. In the meantime, the Kaskaskia garrison would send bills up to Cahokia, and George would sign them for Virginia, and the bills would be sent back down to Kaskaskia so the purchases could be made. But with each authorization, George would admonish his officers: “Keep purchases at a minimum. We must live spare, being so far from the resources of the Mother State. Above all, keep a notation of every expenditure, however small.”

He constantly reminded his officers wherever they were to keep the strictest discipline. “Every man is under scrutiny by French, Spaniards, and Indians. Challenge them to be a good emissary of our country,” and not to reveal how few they were. “We play mockingbird, making so many sounds they’ll guess we’re hundreds.”

And at Cahokia the councils continued, in the shadow of the great ancient Indian mounds, and the fame of the Long Knife spread through the vast Middle Ground, and George knew that the Hair-Buyer, the Englishman on the other side of the chessboard, surely was finding fewer and fewer Indians who would hire out to ravage the frontiers. For George, that sense of performing a sacred duty continued to grow, and to enchant the whole adventure.

And yet there were these moments of clarity, when he would lie awake in his lonely cot in Cahokia surrounded by the Hair-Buyer’s former mercenaries, and the parade of Indian faces would fade, and through his satisfaction would penetrate the feeling that he was holding up his whole shaky empire with nothing but words: with nothing but the signature
G.R. Clark
on treaties and commissions and vouchers, and the breath of his speeches.