The Yellowstone (6 page)

Mac rose and restrained himself from sprinting out.

Over at the rope corral, where Jim and Skinhead were green-breaking more horses, Skinhead assured Mac, “It’s as good as a promise, coon. You’ve got his word. Sure,” he gave a mock scowl, “you have to get down the river and back with your hair, and some horses, first.”

Mac didn’t know what to do. Jim and Skinhead were looking at him with stupid smiles. He decided to kick up his heels. He jumped up, whacked his heels together, and cried, “Whoopee!”

Chapter 8

September, 1843, Plum moon

The storeroom reeked with familiar smells, smells that took Mac Maclean back to his childhood—sweet, dark sorghum from Louisiana, musky hemp from Mexico, fragrant Virginia tobacco, Mexican cocoa with cinnamon, and coffee beans roasted New Orleans-style with chicory.

Mac had let himself in the back way because he wanted to remember for a moment before seeing his uncle, to stand here and drink it in. He was taken aback by how sharp these smells seemed, how overwhelming to a nose accustomed to the plains. Standing here in the half light, he felt a little tremulous, a shy eight-year-old again.

He went out into the main store. Uncle Hugh had expanded it—he must have bought the little milliner’s shop next door and taken out the wall. The store seemed to Mac a dazzling show of the wealth of the white man—bolts of calico, ticking, wool, kegs of nails, hammers, planes, drills, mirrors, needles, awls, oil lamps, ready-made canvas pants, even some with a buttoning fly instead of a drop front. Uncle Hugh didn’t miss a step.

Though the display was casual and matter-of-fact to St Louisians, to Mac it was breathtaking opulence. In the mountains these goods would be the gold of Peru. He planned to take such things to Indian country—with his uncle’s help.

He walked gingerly through the aisles. A clerk, showing a matronly customer some damask, looked up at Mac in consternation—Who’s coming out of the storeroom? Mac strode by toward his uncle’s cubicle. The customer said something like, “But Madame Labbadie wants…” If the housekeepers of the old French families were trading here, Uncle Hugh’s business was improving.

Hugh Maclean was working at his rolltop desk, as usual. He seldom left the desk except to go to the levee to get shipments. His long body was bent over papers, his half glasses well down his nose, his reddish hair a little thinner. His pipe was clamped hard in a corner of his mouth, and Mac knew it was stem-bitten.

Mac said softly, “Uncle Hugh.”

Hugh looked up abruptly, taken by surprise. He looked blankly at Mac for a moment, and then slowly smiled and pulled his long frame, bed-slat skinny, out of the chair.

In that smile Mac could see a glimmer of a younger and more playful man. It was a family joke that people thought Hugh looked like a leprechaun stretched to double length. And Hugh would grumble something about how they had their Celts mixed up, and the leprechaun was his nephew Bobby anyway.

Mac stepped into the cubicle and shook his uncle’s hand, hard as a walnut, like the rest of him.

“You’ve come back, Bobby. Are ye ready to give up roaming to be an honest tradesman? I could use ye, lad.”

Just like Hugh. Mac hesitated. “Yes, Uncle. I’ve come to borrow money from you to set up my own store.” Mac added a big grin.

Hugh Maclean got a shrewd look in his eye. “Coin from a Scot, lad, is blood from a stone.” He made a little cough of a laugh.

“Would you care to take dinner with me at Mansion House? After we get you into some decent clothes?”

First they walked to the levee, Mac in ready-made pants and shirt, which felt strange, and his comfortable old moccasins.

St. Louis was changing dizzyingly. The streets were better paved now—you no longer had to choose between tripping over the cellar doors of the old French houses or walking in the mud. In front of some of these houses gas lanterns stood like sentinels. And now these expensive homes were starting to look old and a little worn. The new houses, built by American businessmen, those were the opulent ones.

The big change was the sense of energy in the streets. When Mac was born, in 1819, St. Louis was a frontier backwater, fundamentally French. When he left for the mountains in 1840, it was floundering deep in the quagmire of economic hard times.

Now all was changed. St. Louis was a bustling American hub of commerce. The levee alone showed the difference. Steamboats were lined up everywhere, bringing products from Cairo, Louisville, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, New York, and Europe, or from Memphis, Natchez, New Orleans, and South America. The levee couldn’t hold them all, so they were moored upstream and downstream, loading and unloading, men scurrying up and down gangplanks, bosses bawling, workers rolling barrels, pulling dollies, lifting bales and boxes into drays.

“It’s wonderful,” murmured Mac. His uncle looked at him amused. “All these boats, people, animals…” Seeing Hugh’s look, Mac didn’t go on. But he was delighted, inspired. So many objects people wanted to buy, were willing to work for, pay for. Indians, too.

That’s what the Indian shared with the white man, Mac was thinking. The desire for material goods. The desire to use applied ingenuity to make life easier, less brutish. To Mac that felt like genuine progress. To bring such goods to the Indians would not be merely a business.

He said to himself, My children will be those Indians.

“Impress you, lad?” asked Hugh.

“Amazing,” said Mac.

Hugh nodded and smiled. “It would. Scots like to collect coins.”

For Mac, Mansion House was a gaped-mouth experience. At the noon hour the dining room was jammed with humanity consuming huge amounts and varieties of hors d’oeuvres, soups, viands, vegetables, pastries and cakes, fine wines, brandies, and for the Americans, whiskeys. They were served on linen tablecloths by black men in impeccable white uniforms. Uncle Hugh ate oysters brought upriver from New Orleans fresh in water-filled barrels, which amazed Mac. He himself indulged in smoked clams, creamed asparagus soup, and squab.

Ridiculous for a man who was starving two months ago. Ridiculous for a man used to making do in the wilds.

They ordered port. Ridiculous for a man used to
aguardiente
, the crude whiskey made by the fur bosses from pure alcohol and Green river water, spiced with red chiles, black pepper, tobacco, ginger, and whatever else was handy.

The owner of the hotel stopped by the table to inquire about their meal and ask after Mr. Maclean’s health. Hugh introduced Mac. The owner’s pleasure was unctuous.

When the owner left, Mac said, “He sure knows how to bow and scrape.”

“I eat here every Friday, lad.”

Hugh looked with feigned casualness around the room. “Are you interested in whom you’re breaking bread with?” Mac nodded. “The round man there by the window, on the left, is Robert Campbell. Not a bad fellow for an Irishman.”

Everybody in the mountains knew Campbell’s name. He and Bill Sublette built Fort William up next to Fort Union, and then sold it to the Company. Also built the other Fort William down on the Platte, which the Company also bought, and now called Fort Laramie. Mac was surprised Campbell was still young, forty or less, and more surprised that he was so elegantly dressed.

“The silver-haired man with the patrician face”—his tone made it clear that Hugh had no love for aristocrats—

“in the middle there is Pierre Chouteau, patron of art and science.” And owner of the Company. “He’s not in St. Louis so much anymore. He prefers New York society. But they don’t let him take his damned slaves to New York.” Hugh was a firm abolitionist.

“The man with him is Bernard Pratte, the less said the better.”

“What is Campbell doing now?” asked Mac.

“President of a bank.” Considerable change for a mountaineer. “The touch of Midas, that one.”

Mac felt impulsive. “Introduce me to him.”

Hugh smiled tolerantly. “Aye, ask Campbell what he thinks of the fur trade now. There’s a man made a fortune in it.”

Mac flushed.

“He usually stops to say hello. He’s seen you and will surely stop today.” Hugh signaled the waiter and asked for more water. The waiter poured Mac more port as well, and Mac realized he’d consumed most of a bottle while his uncle’s glass was untouched. The sweet wine seemed delicious to Mac. “Now let’s hear about what’s happening in the mountains, and about your plans.”

Mac told all. He told more than he realized he knew. Fewer trappers—many fewer. Lower prices for plews. Most traders gone except the Company, and that pulled out of the mountains far onto the plains, clear to Fort Laramie and Fort Union.

He told how they got robbed at Mackenzie. How they nearly starved, and then with the help of the Cheyennes finally made their way to Fort Union. How Mac bucked up wood for the steamboat to earn a few dollars and worked as a deckhand for his passage to St. Louis. He said nothing about Skinhead’s being in town, or about Annemarie, waiting in the mountains.

Mac then claimed he brought the future of the trade with him. Strikes Foot and other Cheyennes gave him hides to bring to St. Louis, to get a better price than the monopoly would give at Fort Union. There was profit in the trade, Mac said. The red man wanted the white man’s goods and would pay for them. He was bound to get more and more dependent on guns. If the beaver market was down, the whole fur market wasn’t. Mac got excellent prices for the buffalo hides this morning. The market for salted buffalo tongues was good. Ermine, wolf, muskrat, and otter were still worth plenty.

“The key is this,” Mac asserted. “The white trappers have mostly pulled out. The Indians are still a market. They’re responding to the traders now—bringing in plews, and buffalo hides. They’re amazed that they could trade these furs, which are so plentiful, for goods of real value. Beads—”

His uncle rose from his chair. “Good afternoon, Mr. Campbell. I don’t believe you know my nephew, Robert Burns Maclean.”

“Mr. Maclean,” lilted Campbell, gripping Mac’s hand. Ireland still sang in his voice. “You were speaking of the fur trade.”

“Yes, sir, I’ve been in the mountains three years.”

“Stop by my office, then, if you would. I’d like to hear the news.” Campbell handed Mac a card.

“Old times, sir?” Mac felt himself smiling fatuously.

Campbell shook his head. “Tomorrow. I always hope to find out what’s going to happen tomorrow.” Campbell put on his hat—silk, Mac noticed, not beaver—and moved on.

“That gentleman,” said Hugh Maclean, “has the capital to found a string of forts from here to California. But I don’t think he will.” Hugh’s eyes darkened. “And what do you want from your uncle?”

Mac took a deep breath. “I want to borrow five thousand dollars at two percent and pay it back in furs, on the Company steamboat, next summer.”

Hugh looked at him hard, rose, and put some pieces of silver on the table. “I was afraid of that. Let’s talk about it again this evening, shall we?”

Mac had to spend the next afternoon watchdogging Skinhead at Jake’s Tavern. Skinhead was deep into faro, too deep even to tell fantastical stories about life in the mountains, as he’d sworn to do to cadge drinks. He was deep into his cups as well, and Mac joined him out of duty. Mac enjoyed the sense of unreality that a little inebriation gave him—it matched his sense that everything about St. Louis was unreal. St. Louis was a dream. The plains and mountains were life.

Skinhead was evidently winning big and losing big, by turns. He’d somehow got more than his steamboat wages for a stake—now he was playing with other people’s money. Mac would cover his tail this afternoon, but he was glad he wouldn’t be partnering this unpredictable old man much longer.

Mac watched the game for a little while, for safety. There was a farmer from across the river, half-drunk, losing and not giving a damn. He looked as if he’d slept in his clothes for a week. There was a self-conscious, fastidious sort who might be a schoolmaster. He was playing the role of sober citizen, but his eyes gleamed tellingly. The banker was a pleasant, open-faced blond youngster, entirely sober, and less sporting than he acted.

Faro was a simple game. Mac had never seen it played before because it wasn’t a mountain game. The players chose any card they liked and named it to win or lose. The banker turned the cards over by twos, into a winner pile and a loser pile. If you named the six of clubs to win, and it turned up in the winner pile, the banker paid. If it appeared in the loser pile, he took. Clearly a fifty-fifty game if the dealer was square.

The open-faced youngster was cheating. He was what they called a palmer, or hold-out man. Amazing how easy it was to spot when you looked. Skinhead had taught Mac how.

Skinhead was doing his I’m-a-beast, I’m-a-wild-mountain-man act. Mac couldn’t tell how much of it was genuine. Skinhead liked to act drunker than he was, but this time he really was drinking. Still, he must know the kid was palming. If Skinhead named the jack of diamonds, the kid could palm it and drop it on the wrong pile anytime. Dangerous game.

The kid dropped the schoolmaster’s queen of spades on the loser pile.

Mac wandered in and out of the game, talking to people, cultivating the owner and bartender, Jake, catching up with the news. All the talk concerned westward expansion. Men said maybe a thousand people set out from Missouri last spring, headed mostly for Oregon, some for California. A thousand! Mac could hardly credit it. The city was booming because of the emigrants, said Jake. The bartender was glad to talk, but his eyes constantly roamed the room, keeping him aware of the goings-on. Mac wondered if he knew about the hold-out man.

The hot issues, according to Jake, were western: Annex Texas! Kick the British out of Oregon! And gossip about the Indian trade was on every man’s lips. Mac picked up more bits of news in St. Louis than out in the western country itself.

The most remarkable news was that Bridger had built another trading post, this time on Blacks Fork, and not to trade with the trappers or Indians—to trade with travelers. Good country, a week or more east of the Salt Lake, right on the main road to Oregon. Meant to take care of the emigrators, Old Gabe did, those thousand.

Think of it—Gabe Bridger gone to minding a store. A child of nature, Skinhead liked to say. And not yet forty years old.

All those Americans bound for Oregon. Too much to absorb right away. A thousand people buying supplies in St. Louis. No wonder Uncle Hugh was prosperous.

Mac’s first clue was Skinhead’s insinuating voice. It sounded jovial, but Mac knew better. He was going to the outhouse, Skinhead said too casually. Something was up.