Merline Lovelace
Authors: A Savage Beauty
Dear Reader,
Imagine a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee married to a drop-dead-gorgeous Oklahoma cowboy (an Oklahoma State University cowboy, that is). Yep, that’s me. After my husband and I hung up our air force uniforms for the last time, we settled in his native Oklahoma and I immediately became fascinated by the history of my adopted state.
In our rambles, Al and I have visited the prehistoric Spiro Indian Mounds; Heavner State Park with its mysterious rune stones; many of the Native American tribal headquarters; working cattle ranches along the Chisholm Trail; Forts Gibson, Reno and Sill, where Geronimo was imprisoned; historic Guthrie, start of the Great Land Run of ’89; Robbers’ Cave, once refuge to Jesse James and Belle Star; and many of the oil-baron mansions that rival any castle in Europe.
The tapestry woven from these different strands utterly intrigues me. So much so, I jumped at the chance to do a series of novels that begins when a United States Army expedition chartered to explore the southern reaches of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory enters the splendid, untamed wilderness that ultimately becomes Oklahoma.
So snuggle in, put your feet up and travel back in time with me to the formative years of a great state!
MERLINE LOVELACE
THE CAPTAIN’S WOMAN
THE COLONEL’S DAUGHTER
THE HORSE SOLDIER
THE UNTAMED
A Savage Beauty
T
he first pale-skins came up the Great River so long ago, they are remembered only in legend. Their canoe had strange carvings on its prow and was rowed by many oars.
They were big men, some with beards that flamed like fire, others with hair that gleamed like the full moon at harvest time. And their eyes! Such strange eyes. Not dark as night like those of the People, but blue. As blue as the summer sky.
These strange-looking warriors left the Great River and navigated its tributaries, until the banks narrowed and they could row no farther. There they encountered the Mound Builders, shrewd traders who bartered for conch shells from the south and turquoise stones from the west and constructed great ceremonial chambers covered by towering piles of packed earth.
The pale-skins stayed with the Mound Builders for only one winter. They cut strange symbols in stone to mark their presence. A muscled giant with a scar
on his right cheek—called Bjorn Strongarm by his companions—placed several of these stones at the entrance to a small valley and vowed he would return someday to claim the land he’d marked as his.
He never returned, but the woman who’d warmed his bed that winter swelled with child. The babe was born with the copper skin and black hair of the People, but with the eyes of her father. On the day of her birth, a great storm blew up and rained hail as large as a man’s fist, flattening the crops all around. The Mound Builders were forced to barter their precious shell earrings and bracelets for corn to survive the winter.
The next spring, no rain fell at all. Streams and rivers crept away from their banks. Crops withered. Animals fled the forests. Then, on the very day the blue-eyed babe marked her first year, another storm arose. The sky darkened. The winds shrieked. A twisting black cloud destroyed a great ceremonial mound that had taken many lifetimes to construct. The priests read the omens and declared the Mound Builders must cast out the strange-eyed child. Her mother took her away and, after months of foraging for food and shelter in the forests, found a home with the Cave Dwellers in the mountains to the north.
Many, many summers passed before pale-skins came again. These men, too, rowed up the Great River. Girded in iron helmets and breastplates, they searched for gold and treated those they encountered with great cruelty. One iron-hat captured a young
maiden with eyes like wildflowers in bloom. Legend has it she was descended from the daughter of Bjorn.
This pale-skin used his captive brutally. Bruised and bleeding, she plunged a dagger into his throat and escaped to the mountains. The headman of the iron-hats, called de Soto by his men, took revenge for her act. Villages were burned, men put to the sword, women savaged. Once again, a blue-eyed child had brought death and destruction to the People.
The People fought back. They took to the rivers and the woods, harassing the iron-hats until they were forced to retreat. So desperate was their flight that when their captain sickened and died, they placed him in a hollow log, weighted him with his armor and sank him in Great River so the People couldn’t mutilate his body and thus destroy his spirit.
The legend of the blue-eyed child was told and retold over countless fires. So often, its origins became lost in the mists of time. So often, the People began to believe the disasters she’d wrought were merely myths, greatly exaggerated with each telling.
Then French trappers paddled up the Great River, and men calling themselves Americans soon followed….
December 19, 1806
Six months’ trek out of St. Louis,
along a bend of the Arkansaw River
R
ifle Sergeant Daniel Morgan stopped dead. Wrenching his gaze from the deer tracks he’d been following, he raised his head and sniffed the frosty air.
He smelled coffee. Real coffee. Either that or his senses had gone addled from the boiled tree bark he and his small troop had been gulping down for weeks now in a futile attempt to keep their insides from freezing as stiff and hard as their fingers and noses.
His nostrils quivering, Daniel drew in another whiff. No, he’d pegged it right. That
was
coffee. Chicory flavored and strong smelling as a bull moose. The scent set his mouth to watering and his empty stomach to dancing a jig with his spine.
He gave the deer tracks another, frowning glance.
They went west, through a copse of bare-branched oak trees. The breeze carrying the tantalizing scent blew in from the east. Cradling his rifle in the crook of his arm, Daniel pondered his choices.
He’d left seven men hunkered down under a hastily erected shelter—a nervous lieutenant, four frostbitten privates and two Osage guides. They had departed St. Louis in July, part of a twenty-eight man expedition led by Lieutenant Zebulon Pike. Like the Lewis and Clark expedition that had set out two years before and had yet to return, Pike’s group had been formed to explore the immense territory recently acquired by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. Where Lewis and Clark had gone north, following the Missouri River, Pike and his band had headed west across the plains toward the mountains.
Daniel’s small band had broken off from the main expedition near the end of October. With orders to chart the course and the navigability of the river called the Arkansaw by those living along its banks, they’d carved a dugout, constructed another boat of bent branches and tight-stretched hide, and paddled south.
In the two months since, the eight-man detachment had suffered just about every disaster that could befall a weary band of travelers. Within hours of leaving Pike, their boats had grounded in shallow water, requiring long, exhausting portages overland. Hostile Pawnees had raided twice. A submerged tree trunk had ripped through the canoe and caused the loss of most of their supplies—including much of their pre
cious powder and shot. Luckily, a chance encounter with a hunting party of friendly Osage had provided a fresh supply of meat and enabled them to press on.
As winter closed in, the temperature had fallen below freezing. Snow made travel slow and hazardous. Frostbite and chilblains had become their constant companions. Ice blocked the river and forced the men out of their canoes and into the water. Using axes and bare fists, Daniel’s small detachment chopped and hacked their way down the waterway they’d been sent to chart.
Two of his men, he suspected, were within a hair of deserting and finding their own way back through the wilderness to St. Louis. The others were fast losing what little remained of their determination to complete their assigned mission. Half starved and near frozen, they were all in a sorry state. Daniel had promised to bring back fresh meat to revive their flagging spirits and fill their empty bellies. He’d do just that, he decided, and maybe surprise them with a handful of coffee beans, as well.
Veering left, he followed the enticing scent. Some minutes later he spied a curl of smoke lifting above a stand of spruce. His boots crunching on the crusted snow, he approached cautiously. The camp was a temporary one, he saw, with only a single blanket draped teepee-like from a low-hanging branch. Snowshoes and a bulging haversack lay propped against the tree’s trunk. A tightly bound bundle of beaver pelts rested beside the haversack.
Daniel took a moment to study the figure hunched
on a fallen log, warming his hands at the campfire. A Frenchman, judging by the tasseled, red knit stocking cap pulled down over his ears. Strands of sparse gray hair wisped out from under the cap and over the folds of his bearskin coat.
His companion was hunkered down beside a small, ice-encrusted stream some twenty or so yards away, skinning beaver and pegging the pelts out on the bank to dry. Daniel eyed both for some moments before stepping out from behind the screen of spruce.
“Good day to you, sir.”
Springing to his feet, the grizzled trapper snatched up his musket and rattled off a rapid stream of French. Daniel didn’t understand the words, but knew he was being asked to stand and identify himself as friend or foe.
“I’m Rifle Sergeant Daniel Morgan. Second United States Regiment of Infantry.”
The trapper’s musket lowered. A grin split his seamed face. “
Bienvenue,
Sergeant. Come in. Come in. Share my fire.”
Only too willing, Daniel crossed the small clearing. The Frenchman thrust out a horny paw.
“I am Chartier. Henri Chartier. And this—” With a jerk of his chin, he indicated his companion. “This is my little Louis.”
Daniel gave the figure by the stream another glance. Small and slight, the boy was almost lost under his wolfskin cap and buffalo robe. The bloody knife in his hand and the dozen or so fresh-skinned beaver attested to his industriousness. The copper
hue of his cheeks and the glossy, blue-black hair straggling out from under his shaggy cap attested to his Indian blood.
Briefly, Daniel wondered about his relationship to Chartier. Hired assistant? Purchased slave? Son by a Native wife? The Frenchman didn’t elaborate and Daniel didn’t ask. He’d spent a good many of his fourteen years of army service at remote frontier posts. He’d learned early to respect the privacy of those who chose, for reasons of their own, to leave the towns and cities to roam these untamed forests.
Waving the boy back to work, the trapper offered his unexpected visitor coffee. The brew was thick as mud and bitter as day-old sin, but more welcome to Daniel than a bucket of home brew.
“Sit by the fire,” Chartier invited, “and tell me what you do here.”
“I’m with a company of soldiers. We’re charting the course and navigability of the Arkansaw.”
“You are the first, I think. The very first soldiers from your country to come so deep into Osage Country.”
As far as Daniel knew, he was right. Aside from the expedition headed by Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, only one other military probe had attempted to penetrate the Louisiana Territory. Headed by Captain Richard Sparks, it had set out from Natchez earlier that spring, but had been turned back by a heavily armed company of Spanish dragoons at the disputed border between the United States and Spanish Texas.
At that point, Major General Wilkinson, military governor of the Louisiana Territory and as slippery an eel as ever swam through murky waters, had chartered the band led by Lieutenant Pike.
Sipping the hot, bitter coffee, Daniel thought back to the day General Wilkinson had called him in and announced he’d personally chosen Rifle Sergeant Morgan as part of the Pike expedition. Daniel’s instinctive surge of excitement had quickly been tempered by the burden of his responsibilities at home, but duty had won out.
Only after the troop had departed St. Louis did Daniel learn the real reason behind his selection. Because of Sergeant Morgan’s years of experience at frontier posts, the general had specified he was to accompany Pike’s second in command when he broke away from the main party to follow the Arkansaw.
Unfortunately, the second in command was none other than General Wilkinson’s second son, Lieutenant James Biddle Wilkinson, as nervous and dithering a young officer as ever wore a uniform. Pike’s private instructions to Daniel, just before the small detachment started south two months ago, were to keep the lieutenant from getting hopelessly lost or shooting off his own foot, if at all possible.
Daniel had managed to avoid those disasters. Barely. Now if he could just get the lieutenant and the rest of his troop down the last hundred or so miles of the Arkansaw…
“How long have you been voyaging down the river?” the trapper asked, breaking into his thoughts.
“We picked it up in Pawnee Country, about two hundred miles north.”
“You’ve come far, my friend.”
“Very far.”
Daniel’s gaze lifted to the snow-covered ridges topped by a sky so blue it hurt his eyes to look at it. After the flat, rolling plains of Pawnee Country, these rugged mountains seem to stretch clear to heaven.
“This is a vast land,” he murmured, “and a savage one.”
“And rich,” the trapper added. Shaking his head, he spit into the fire. “Me, I cannot believe it when I hear the upstart Napoleon takes these lands back from the Spanish, only to turn around and sell them to your president Jefferson.”
“France and England are at war,” Daniel said with a shrug. “Wars devour a treasury.”
“But to sell eight millions of acres for mere pennies an acre! Pah!” He spit again. “Such stupidity is to be expected of a Corsican bourgeois, one supposes.”
The haughty pronouncement sounded incongruous coming from a gray-beard with rheumy eyes and a mouth missing most of its teeth.
“Your president Jefferson knows,” the old man grumbled, “if Napoleon does not, the plentiful bounty to be found in these mountains and valleys. So plentiful even the Norsemen once tried to claim them.”
“Norsemen?” Wondering what the devil he was talking about, Daniel took another swig.
“Danesmen.” The trapper cut circles in the air with his hands in the extravagant way of the French. “Vikings.”
The coffee stuck in Daniel’s throat. Choking, he coughed it down. “Vikings here, thousands of miles from the open sea?”
“Oui.”
Chartier had been in the wilds too long, Daniel decided. He’d started spinning tall tales in his mind to entertain himself.
“It’s true,” the old man insisted. “I swear to you on the blessed Virgin. The Wichita and Osage tell tales of red-bearded warriors. Me, I have seen the marks they carved there, on that very bluff.”
Dubiously, Daniel eyed the ridge he pointed to.
“You do not believe me?”
“Well—”
“It is only a short climb. Come, I will show you.”
Before Daniel could protest, the trapper rolled to his feet and rattled off a flurry of French to the crouched figure down at the creek.
Daniel rose more slowly. He should use what remained of the daylight to hunt. He had seven hungry men awaiting his return with fresh meat. On the other hand, one of their expedition’s main tasks was to record the location of Indian camps and the natural landmarks of the territory they explored. If Vikings had indeed visited these parts long ago and carved
marks in stone, the lieutenant would want to make note of it in his journal.
Incredulous but willing to be convinced, Daniel followed Chartier.
A half hour later, the two men crested the high ridge. Their breath frosting on the frigid air, they paused to survey the vista spread out below.
It was a scene of stunning, primeval beauty that seemed to go on forever. Forests of pine and spruce spilled down the steep ridges, dark and verdant against the snow blanketing the earth. Above, eagles floated on the endless blue sky. Far below, the Arkansaw formed a winding ribbon of silver.
Chartier cradled his musket in the crook of his arm as his rheumy eyes roamed from bluff to bluff. “She is beautiful, this place.”
“Yes,” Daniel agreed, breathing in the sharp tang of resin. Despite the hardships he and his troop had endured since entering Osage Country, these steep crags and wide valleys stirred something deep inside him. “She is beautiful.”
He could live in this great, untamed land, he thought. Too many settlers were pushing west of the Alleghenies for his liking, moving into Kentucky and Ohio and Tennessee territories. Over the often violent protests of the eastern tribes, farmers cut down trees, plowed up meadows, chased away game.
These forests would swallow the sound of an ax. These rivers would provide fish and furs for any who wanted to paddle them. For a moment, he felt a fierce
stab of envy for the freedom to roam enjoyed by the grizzled trapper beside him.
“I have trapped these mountains for forty years,” Chartier murmured, as if reading his mind. “Always I find peace here, where the rivers run and the eagles fly. Just this morning I tell my little Louis, it is here, on this ridge, where I wish to be buried.”
Unless his little Louis sprouted a considerable set of muscles in the next few years, Daniel thought wryly, the boy would have a time of it hauling Chartier’s carcass up to this high bluff.
“How much farther to these Viking marks?” he asked, feeling the pinch of his responsibilities to his men.
“Not far,” Chartier replied. “We climb past those rocks and—”
The Frenchman broke off, freezing in place as a high-pitched scream split the air. It was a sound like no other, a frenzied cry that stopped Daniel’s heart. Whipping around, he brought his musket barrel up and thumbed back the hammer. The trapper did the same, his watery eyes searching the slope behind them.
A small shower of snow from the branches of a massive pine was their only indication that the danger came not from below, but from above. By then, it was too late.
With another high-pitched scream, the mountain cat leaped from an overhanging bough. Fangs bared, claws outstretched, it was a blur of tawny fur and fury.
“Mon Dieu!”
Chartier barely had time to fling up an arm before the snarling, slavering cougar landed on him. Daniel fired off a shot that spouted a blossom of red in the beast’s side, but the wound only goaded it to greater fury. Locked together in a tangle of thrashing legs and slashing claws, Chartier and the cat rolled over and over, the cries of one as terrible as the cries of the other. Daniel tossed his musket aside, pulled his hunting knife from its leather scabbard and leaped into the fray.
When the beast finally gave a last, tormented cry and went limp, Daniel scrabbled to his knees. His chest heaving, he used both hands to pry apart the animal’s locked jaws and free the Frenchman.
Chartier fell back against the reddened snow. What was once his face was now raw, unrecognizable pulp. Air whistled from his throat, torn open to expose glistening white tendons. Blood pumped from the gaping wound. Panting, Daniel dropped back on his heels. He’d seen enough battle wounds to know the next breath or two would be Chartier’s last.
