5

THE YELLOW APRON

HE WAS A COUREUR DE BOIS, ONE WHO RUNS IN THE WOODS, and where he came from, no one knew.

He was a small, dark Frenchman who wore the red knitted cap of Quebec, and his name was Pasquinel. No Henri or Ba’tees or Pierre. No nickname, either. Just the three full syllables Pas-qui-nel.

He was a solitary trader with Indians, none better, and in his spacious canoe he carried beads from Paris, silver from Germany, blankets from Canada and bright cloth from New Orleans. With a knife, a gun and a hatchet for saplings, he was ready for work.

He dressed like an Indian, which was why men claimed he carried Indian blood: “Hidatsa, Assiniboin, mebbe Gros Ventre. He’s got Injun blood in there somewheres.” He wore trousers made of elk skin fringed along the seams, a buffalo-hide belt, a fringed jacket decorated with porcupine quills and deerskin moccasins—all made for him by some squaw.

As to where he came from, some claimed Montreal and the Mandan villages. Others said they had seen him in New Orleans in 1789. This was confirmed by a trader who worked the Missouri River: “I seen him in Saint Louis trading beaver in 17 and 89 and I asked him where he was from, and he said, ‘New Orleans.’ ” Both sides agreed that he was a man without fear.

Early in December of 1795, in his big birch-bark canoe which he had been paddling upstream for five weeks, he appeared at the confluence of the Platte and the Missouri, determined to try his luck along the former.

The spot at which these rivers joined was one of the bleakest in North America. Mud flats deposited by the Platte reached halfway across the Missouri. Low trees obscured the shores, and swamps made it impossible for traders to erect a post. It was an ugly, forbidding place.

It was Pasquinel’s intention to paddle his canoe about five hundred miles up the Platte, reach there in midwinter, trade with whatever tribes he found, then bring the pelts down to the market in Saint Louis. It was a dangerous enterprise, one which required him to pass single-handed through Pawnee, Cheyenne and Arapaho country, going and coming. Chances for survival of a lone coureur were not great, but if he did succeed, rewards would be high, and that was the kind of gamble Pasquinel liked.

Pushing his red cap back on his head, he sang a song of his childhood as he entered the Platte:

“Nous étions trois capitaines

Nous étions trois capitaines

De la guerre revenant,

Brave, brave,

De la guerre revenant,

Bravement.”

He had paddled only a few miles when he realized that this river bore little resemblance to the Missouri. There progress depended solely upon strength of arm, but with the Platte he found himself often running out of water. Sandbars intruded and sometimes whole islands, which shifted when he touched them. Not only did he have to paddle; he had also to avoid being grounded on mud flats.

It’s only during the first part, he assured himself. Not enough current to scour the bottom.

But three days later the situation remained the same. He began to curse the river, setting a precedent for all who would follow. “Sale rivière,” he growled aloud in Montreal French. “Où a-t-elle passé?”

A cold spell came and what little water there was froze, and for some days he was immobilized, but this caused no fear. If he could not force his way upstream, he would look for Indians and trade for a few pelts.

Then the thaw came and he was able to proceed. To make a living trading for beaver it was necessary to be at the Indian camps in late winter, when the animals came out of hibernation, their fur sleek and thick. The same animal trapped in midsummer wasn’t worth a sou. Beaver trading was a winter job, and Pasquinel knew every trick the Canadians had developed for staying alive in freezing weather.

“Four Frenchmen can live where one Englishman would die,” they said in Detroit, and he believed it. He thought nothing of spending eight months alone in unexplored territory, if the Indians would allow him into their camps. If his canoe was destroyed, he could build another. If his stores were dumped, it didn’t matter, for he had invented a canny way of keeping his powder dry. But if Indians proved hostile, he stopped trading and got out. Only a fool would fight Indians if he didn’t have to.

Now he entered the land of the Pawnee, reputed in Saint Louis to be the most treacherous tribe. Fais attention! he warned himself, moving so stealthily that he spotted the Indian village before they saw him.

For one whole day he kept his canoe tucked inside a bank while he studied his potential foe. They seemed like those he had known in the north: buffalo hunters, a scalp here and there, low tipis, horses and probably a gun or two—everything was standard.

It was time to move. Methodically he laid out a supply of lead bullets, poured some powder, checked the oil patches required for tamping, and wiped the inside of his short-barreled fusil. His knife was in his belt and his hatchet close by. Taking a deep breath, he paddled his canoe out into the stream and was soon spotted.

Children ran down to the bank and began calling to him in a language he did not know. Grim-lipped, he nodded to them and they shouted back. Three young braves appeared, ready for trouble, and these he saluted with his paddle. Finally two dignified chiefs strode down, looking as if they intended to settle this matter. They indicated that he must pull his canoe ashore, but he kept to the middle of the river.

Angered, the two chiefs signaled a group of young men to plunge into the cold water and haul him ashore. Lithe bodies jumped in, walked easily to the middle of the river, and dragged him ashore. They tried to take his rifle, but he wrested it from them and warned in sign language that if they molested him, he would shoot the nearest chief. They drew back.

Then from the tipis came a tall, fine-looking chief with a very red complexion. Rude Water, they said his name was, and he demanded to know who Pasquinel was and what he was doing.

In sign language Pasquinel spoke for some minutes, explaining that he had come from Saint Louis, that he came in peace, that all he wanted was to trade for beaver. He concluded by saying that when he returned through Pawnee lands, he would bring Chief Rude Water many presents.

“Chief wants his present now,” a lieutenant said, so Pasquinel dug into his canoe and produced a silver bracelet for the chief and three cards of highly colored beads made in Paris and imported through Montreal. Genuflecting, he handed Rude Water the cards and indicated they were for his squaw.

“Chief has four squaws,” the lieutenant said, and Pasquinel brought out another card.

The parley continued all that day, with Pasquinel explaining that the Pawnee must be friends to the great King of France, but have nothing to do with the Americans, who had no king. Rude Water embraced Pasquinel and assured him that the Pawnee, greatest of the Indian tribes, were his friends, but that he must avoid the Cheyenne and Arapaho, who were horse stealers of the worst sort, and above all, the Ute, who were barbarians.

The desultory conversation resumed during the second day, with Rude Water inquiring as to why Pasquinel would venture into the plains without his woman, to which the Frenchman replied, “I have a wife … north, but she is not strong in paddling the canoe.” This the chief understood.

On the next day Rude Water still insisted on playing host, explaining that Pasquinel could not take his canoe up the Platte—too much mud, too little water. Pasquinel said he would like to try, but Rude Water kept inventing new obstacles. When Pasquinel finally got his canoe into the river, the entire village came down to watch him depart. Rude Water said, “When you come to where the rivers join, take the south. Many beaver.” The parting was so congenial that Pasquinel had to anticipate trouble.

He paddled upriver all day, suspecting from time to time that he was being followed. At dusk he pitched his tent ashore and ostentatiously appeared to sleep, but when darkness fell he slipped back to his canoe and lay in the bottom, waiting. As he expected, four Pawnee braves crept along the riverbank to steal his canoe. He waited till their probing hands were almost touching his.

Then, with fiendish yells and slashing knife, he rose from the bottom of the canoe, threw himself among the four, cutting and gouging and kicking. He was a one-man explosion, made doubly frightening by the dark. The four fled, and in the morning he continued upstream.

He had gone about fifty miles farther westward when he became aware that he was again being followed. Pawnee, he concluded. Same men.

So once more he laid out his bullets and honed his knife. He judged that if he could repel them one more time, they would leave him alone. He traveled carefully, avoiding mud flats and staying away from shore. He was watchful whenever he knelt to drink or stopped to relieve himself. It was an ugly, difficult game, which the Pawnee stood every chance of winning.

The showdown came at dawn. He had slept in the canoe, lodged against the southern shore, and was bending over to retrieve his paddle when a Pawnee arrow struck him in the middle of his back. A torturing pain coursed down his backbone as the slim arrow tip struck a nerve, and he might have fainted except for the challenge he had to meet.

Ignoring his wound, he grabbed for his fusil, raised it without panic, took aim and killed one of the braves. Ice-cool, he swabbed the barrel, poured his powder, inserted the patch, put in the ball, tamped it down, took aim and killed another. Methodically, while the blood ran down his back, he reloaded, but no third shot was required, because the Indians recognized that this tough little stranger had great magic.

That long winter’s day, with the low sun beating into his canoe, was one Pasquinel would not forget. Reaching blindly behind his back, he tugged at the arrow, but the barbed head had caught on bone and could not be dislodged.

He tried twisting the shaft, but the pain was too great. He tried pushing it in deeper, to get it past the bone, but produced a pain so excruciating that he feared losing consciousness. There was no solution but to leave the arrowhead imbedded, with the shaft protruding, and this he did.

For two days of intense pain he lay in his canoe face down, the arrow projecting upward. At intervals he would sit upright and try to paddle his canoe upstream, his back reacting in agony with each stroke but with the canoe moving ever farther from the Pawnee.

On the third day, when he was satisfied that the arrow was not poisoned and when the point was beginning to adjust to his nerve ends and muscles, he found that he could paddle with some ease, but now the river vanished. It contained no water deep enough for a canoe, and he had no alternative but to cache his spare provisions and proceed on foot.

The digging of a hiding place for the canoe called into play new muscles, and their movement caused new pain, which he alleviated by rotating the shaft until the flint accommodated itself. In one day he finished his job. Then he was ready to resume his journey afoot.

Like all coureurs, he used a stout buffalo-hide headstrap for managing his heavy burden. Passing the strap across his forehead, he allowed the two loose ends to fall down his back, where he fastened them to the load he had to carry. Normally his pack would have rested exactly where the shaft of the arrow protruded, so he had to drop the load several inches, allowing it to bounce off his rump.

In this manner he trailed along the Platte to that extraordinary place where the two branches of the river run side by side, sometimes barely separated, for many miles. There, lucky for him, he met two Cheyenne warriors and in sign language explained what had happened at the Pawnee camp. They became agitated and assured him that any man who fought the Pawnee was a friend. Placing him on his stomach, they tried to rip the arrow out by brute force, but the barbs could not be dislodged.

“Better cut it off beneath the skin,” they said.

“Go ahead,” Pasquinel said.

They handed him an arrow to bite on, then cut deep into his back, and after protracted sawing, they cut off the shaft. Within ten days Pasquinel was able to hoist his burden up from his rump and place it over the scar, where it rode not easily but well. Occasionally, as he hiked, he could feel the arrowhead adjusting itself, but each week it caused less pain.

He reached a Cheyenne village in late February 1796 and traded his bangles and blankets for more than a hundred beaver pelts, which he wadded into two compact bales. Wrapping them in moist deerskin which hardened when it dried, he produced packets like rock.

He now divested himself of every item not crucially needed, fastened the buffalo strap across his forehead and suspended the two bales from it. They weighed just under a hundred pounds each. His essential equipment, including rifle, ammunition, hatchet and trading goods, weighed another seventy pounds. Pasquinel, twenty-six years old that spring, and still suffering the ill effects of his wound, weighed somewhat less than a hundred and fifty pounds, yet he proposed to walk two hundred miles to where his canoe was cached.

Adjusting the huge load as if he were going to carry it from house to barn, he satisfied himself as to its balance and set forth. He created an extraordinary image: a small man, five-feet-four, with enormous shoulders and torso, gained from endless paddling, set upon matchstick legs. Day after day he trod eastward, keeping to the Platte and resting occasionally to drink from its muddy bed. He had to guard against wolves, lurking Indians and quicksand. Sometimes, to relieve the pressure on his temples, he squeezed a thumb beneath the buffalo band across his forehead.

He ate berries and a little pemmican he had made during the winter. He deemed it wise not to pitch camp and cook an antelope, for his fire might attract Indians. The worst of the journey, of course, was the spring insects, but he grew accustomed to them at his eyes, taking consolation in the fact that when summer came their numbers would diminish.

As he shuffled along, he muttered old songs, not for their words, which were trivial, but for their consoling rhythms, which kept him moving:

“My canoe is made of fine bark

Stripped from the whitest birch.

The seams are sewn with strong roots,

The paddles carved from white wood.

“I take this canoe and embark

Down the rapids, down the turbulence.

See how it speeds along

Never losing the current.

“I have traveled along great rivers, the whole St. Lawrence,

And have known the savage tribes and their various tongues.”

On one especially trying day he chanted this song for eight hours, allowing its monotony to pull him along. At dusk a pack of wolves came to the opposite bank for water. They must have recently feasted on a deer, for they looked at Pasquinel, drank and ambled off. This caused him to break into a silly song much loved by the coureurs:

“On my way I chanced to meet

Three cavaliers with horses neat.

Oh, you still make me laugh.

I’ll never go back home.

I have great fear of wolves.”

In this way he trudged back to where his canoe lay hidden, and when he got there he sighed with relief, for he suspected that he could not have held out much longer; the burden was simply too great. He rested for a day, then dug the canoe out and ate ravenously of the stored food. Tears did not come to his eyes, for he was not an emotional man, but he did give thanks to La Bonne Sainte Anne for his survival.

He loaded his canoe with the rest of the food and the two hundred and sixty pounds he had been carrying and climbed in, but within that day he discovered that the Platte had so little water he could not move. Disgusted, he got out and started pushing the canoe from behind, and in this way struggled down the middle of the river for about a hundred miles. There the water was only inches deep and he was faced with a difficult decision.

He could either abandon the canoe and resume portaging his pelts all the way to the Missouri, or he could camp where he was for six months and wait for the river to rise; he chose the latter. He built himself a small camp, to which Cheyenne reported from time to time, seeking tobacco. Thus the long summer of 1796 passed, and he lived well on antelope and deer, with now and then a buffalo tongue brought in by the Cheyenne. Twice he visited one of the Cheyenne villages and renewed acquaintance with the two braves who had cut the arrow from his back. One of their squaws was so convinced she could work the flint to the surface—she had done this for her father—that Pasquinel submitted to the ordeal, but she succeeded only in shifting the area of pain.

When the river finally rose, Pasquinel bade farewell to the Cheyenne and resumed his trail eastward. “Be careful of the Pawnee,” his friends warned.

“Rude Water is still my friend,” he assured them.

“With him be most careful of all,” they said.

When he reached the Pawnee lands, Rude Water greeted him as a son, then set eight braves to wrecking his canoe, stealing his rifle and running off with the precious bales of pelts. Unarmed and without food, Pasquinel was left alone, a hundred and fifty miles from the Missouri.

He did have his knife, and with it he grubbed roots and berries to keep alive. He walked by night, relieved in a sardonic way that he no longer had to carry his packs. By day he slept.

But he by no means intended merely to escape to the Missouri, there to be picked up by some passing white men. He was at war with the whole Pawnee nation and was determined to recover his pelts. He calculated that the Indians would appreciate their value and try to make contact with traders, and that the meeting place might be the confluence of the Platte and the Missouri.

When he reached that forbidding spot he made no effort to hail any of the Company boats he saw floating along with their own cargoes of skins. Instead, he hollowed out a hiding place among the roots of trees and waited. Two weeks passed, then three, and no Pawnee. It didn’t matter. He had time. Then in the fourth week he saw two canoes coming down the Platte, heavily laden. As he spied on them he felt a surge of excitement, for there were his pelts, just as he had wrapped them.

His joy was premature, for it looked as if the Indians intended paddling all the way to Saint Louis to dispose of their treasure. The two canoes entered the Missouri River, hesitated, and came back to the Platte. Pasquinel was much relieved when the Pawnee moved ashore and set up camp. They were going to wait for a downriver boat.

They waited. He waited. And one day down the Missouri came a pirogue bearing an improvised sign Saint Antoine. As soon as the Pawnee saw it they paddled out to flag it down. They had beaver, much beaver.

“Throw ’em aboard,” the rivermen cried.

While they haggled over price, Pasquinel swam into the middle of the stream, came silently onto the Pawnee canoes, turned one over and began slashing with his knife, killing two Pawnee. In the confusion the rivermen saw a chance to make off with the pelts, so they began firing point-blank at the surviving Indians.

Pasquinel swam alongside the boat, shouting in broken English, “Thees my peltries!” He was about to climb aboard when one of the rivermen had the presence of mind to club him over the head with an oar. He sank in the river.

He drifted face down, afraid to show signs of life lest they shoot at him, and after they disappeared around the bend he swam ashore. Shaking himself like a dog, and pressing water from his buckskin, he looked for a place to sleep. His canoe, his rifle, his store of beads and his pelts were gone: “Two years of work, I got one knife, one arrowhead in the back.”

He would not give up. If by some miracle he could reach Saint Louis before the pirates sold his furs, he might still reclaim them, and on that slim chance he acted.

He slept a few hours, then rose in the middle of the night and began running along paths that edged the river. When he reached the spot at which the Missouri turned for its long run to the east, he sought out a Sac village and traded his knife for an old canoe. With only such food as he could collect along the banks, he paddled tirelessly toward the Mississippi, hoping to overtake the robbers.

The day came when he detected a new odor, as if the Missouri were changing character, and in spite of his disappointment at not catching up with the pirates, he felt a rush of excitement. He paddled faster, and as he turned a final bend he saw before him the great, broad expanse of the Mississippi, that noble river flowing south, and he remembered the day on which he first saw this stream, far to the north. He had decided then to explore it all, and in the pleasure of meeting an old friend, he forgot his anger.

The Missouri ran much faster than the Mississippi and carried such a burden of sand and silt that it spewed a visible bar deep into the heart of the greater river; as Pasquinel rode the current far toward the Illinois shore, he could see that delicate line in the water where the mud of the Missouri touched the clear water of the Mississippi. For twenty miles downstream this line continued, two mighty rivers flowing side by side without mingling.

Rivermen said, “The Mississippi, she’s a lady. The Missouri, he’s a roughneck, plunging at her with muddy hands. For twenty miles she fights him off, keeping him at a distance, but in the end, like the mayor’s daughter who marries the coureur, she surrenders.”

When Pasquinel reached the calmer waters of the Mississippi he turned his canoe southward, and within the hour saw the sight which gladdened the hearts of all rivermen: the beautiful, low, white walls of Spain’s San Luis de Iluenses, queen of the south, mistress of the north and gateway to the west. When the little town first hove into view Pasquinel halted for a moment, lifted his paddle over his head, and giving the town its French name, muttered, “Saint Louis, we are coming home … empty-handed … for the last time.”

In that critical period in central North America a thousand small settlements were started, and some by the year 1796 had grown like Saint Louis into prosperous towns with nine hundred citizens, but most of those would subsequently languish. Saint Louis alone would grow into one of the world’s great cities. Why?

Brains. When Pierre Laclède, the Frenchman who started the settlement in 1764, did preliminary exploring to find a perfect site, he naturally chose that spot where the Missouri empties into the Mississippi; logic said that with two rivers the location had to be ideal, except that when he investigated the spot he found mud and brush twenty feet high in the trees. That could only mean floods and he abandoned that spot in a hurry.

Accompanied by his thirteen-year-old assistant, he moved a little farther south and found another attractive site, but it, too, had straw in the branches, so he continued to move south, league by league, and at the eighteenth mile he found what he was looking for: a solid bluff standing twenty to thirty feet above water, with two secure landing places upstream and down. This location provided everything needed for the growth of a major settlement: river port, lowlands for industry, higher sites for homes, fresh water, and to the west an endless forest.

Brains had done it. When other settlements along the Missouri and the Mississippi were under water during recurrent floods, Saint Louis rode high and clear. When other harbors silted up, the river scoured the waterfront at Saint Louis, keeping it clear of sand, so that commerce could continue. In 1796 no one could predict whether it was to thrive or not, but as Pasquinel paddled his canoe into the landing, he was satisfied on one point: “This is the best town on the river.”

As soon as he landed he started asking in French, “Have you seen the pirogue, Saint Antoine?” A fur buyer said, “Yes, it was sold for lumber.”

Pasquinel ran to the southern end of town, where a carpenter from New Orleans bought boats as they finished their run and broke them up for timber. Saint Antoine? “Yes. Broke it up two weeks ago.” Where did the men go? “Who knows? They sold their pelts and they’re gone.” Where are my pelts? “Part of some shipment on its way to New Orleans.” Bitter and without a sou, he moved about the town, cursing Indians and rivermen alike.

Saint Louis would have a confused history, owned by France, then Spain, then France again, then America. Officially it was now Spanish, but actually it was French. Indeed, even the Spanish governor was sometimes a Frenchman, and all of the businessmen. The latter fairly well controlled the fur trade, for they received licenses and monopolies from the Spanish government in New Orleans to trade on this or that river, and it was to them that individuals like Pasquinel had to look for both their financing and their legal permission to trade.

There was a Company, run by a combine of wealthy citizens; there were also private entrepreneurs who were granted monopolies and who then outfitted coureurs, and Pasquinel had worked for one of them. But after the present disaster this gentleman showed no further interest in sinking additional capital in such a risky venture. Pasquinel therefore moved from one French license holder to the next, trying to cadge money to outfit his next expedition: “You buy me a canoe, some silver, beads, cloth … I bring you plenty peltries.” No one was interested: “Pasquinel? What did he bring back last time? Nothing.”

Along the waterfront a riverman told him of a doctor who had recently fled the revolution in France: “Dr. Guisbert. Very clever man. He can cut that arrowhead out of your back.” He went to see the newcomer, an enthusiastic man, who told him, “On your trips you should read Voltaire and Rousseau. To understand why we no longer have a king in France.”

“I know nothing of France,” Pasquinel said.

“Good! I’ll lend you some books.”

“I can’t read.”

Dr. Guisbert inspected his back, moving the flint with his fingers, and said, “I’d leave it alone.” As Pasquinel replaced his shirt, Dr. Guisbert gave the flint a sudden push with his thumb, but the trapper barely winced. “Good,” Guisbert said. “If you can stand the pain, it’s doing no damage.”

He liked the spunky coureur and asked, “Where’d you get that wound?” Pasquinel haltingly began to explain, and Guisbert became so interested in beaver pelts and Cheyenne villages that the conversation continued for some time, with the doctor saying impulsively, “One of my patients is a merchant who has a trading license from the governor. Perhaps we can form a partnership, we three.”

And so, staked with the doctor’s money and under the protection of the merchant’s license, Pasquinel prepared once more for the river.

He bought himself a new rifle, twice the trade goods he had had before, and a sturdy canoe. At the wharf Dr. Guisbert told him, “You wonder why I risk my money? When I pushed that arrowhead deeper into your back, I know it hurt very much. A man doesn’t learn to bear pain like that without having courage. I think you’ll bring back pelts.”

On New Year’s Day, 1797, Pasquinel reappeared at the Pawnee village to settle affairs with Chief Rude Water: “If you send your braves to attack me this time, I will kill them and then kill you. But that won’t happen, because you and I are trusted friends.” A calumet was smoked, and he told Rude Water, “Last year we fight. Frenchmen run off with pelts. This year we friends.” Again the calumet was smoked, and Pasquinel concluded the deal: “I come back, I give you one pelt in five.”

Rude Water assigned four braves to escort Pasquinel to the point where the Platte ran out of water, and there they helped him cache his canoe, bidding him good luck as he departed for alien country.

That winter he traded well with the Cheyenne, but when he had assembled two bales of pelts, a Ute war party stumbled upon him and decided this was a good chance to grab a rifle. For two days he defended himself and was able to survive only because the Ute did not learn quickly how long it took him to reload. In the end one daring brave dashed in, touched him with his coup-stick and retreated, claiming victory. This satisfied the Indians and they withdrew.

This year, remembering the torture of that previous portage, he had planned to lug the pelts downstream one bale at a time: take the first bale down, cache it, come back for the second; cache it, then proceed with the first in a continuing operation. But with the Ute on the move, he judged that he must not risk so prolonged an operation, and he loaded himself as before.

For thirty-two days he staggered down the river, his muscles bulging, his eyes nearly popping from his head. When he reached the hiding place for his canoe, he was in better condition than when he started. Placing the freight in his fragile craft, he pushed it downstream across the sandbars of summer. He had covered less than a hundred miles when he saw with quiet joy four Pawnee braves approaching to help.

Standing ankle-deep in the Platte, he hailed them. “Many furs,” he said in sign language.

“Big happening!” they said in sign, pointing downstream toward their village. “We have white man.”

“Who?” They could not explain except to say, “Red hair, red beard.”

As they neared the village Chief Rude Water came to greet them, holding in his hand a buffalo thong, the far end of which was attached to the neck of a tall red-bearded young white man about nineteen years old. With a neat flick of the halter, Rude Water tossed him forward so that he stood facing Pasquinel, and in this unusual manner the coureur met Alexander McKeag.

“Depuis combien de temps êtes-vous ici?” Pasquinel asked.

“Six months,” McKeag replied in broken French, using a low, gentle voice. “Captured tryin’ to go upstream … to trade for beaver.”

“Il y a des castors là-bas,” Pasquinel said.

He showed Rude Water the two heavy bales and reminded him that one-fifth of the pelts belonged to the Pawnee, but when the braves started to rip the bales open, Pasquinel shouted for them to stop. He then tried to explain in sign that it would be more profitable to the Indians if they allowed him, Pasquinel, to sell the pelts in Saint Louis.

“I speak Pawnee,” McKeag interrupted quietly.

“Tell him he’ll get more goods.”

In this way Alexander McKeag, refugee from a tyrannical laird in the Highlands of Scotland—whom he had clubbed over the head with a knotted walking stick—started his career as interpreter. He convinced Chief Rude Water that the Indians would profit if they allowed Pasquinel to represent them in Saint Louis, whereupon Rude Water asked, “How do we know he will bring the goods back?”

When this was translated, the Frenchman said, “I am Pasquinel. I came among you unafraid.”

The pact was sealed with a calumet, and after Pasquinel had smoked his share, he stepped to McKeag and untied the buffalo thong. “Dites-leur que vous êtes mon associé,” he said, and in this way the partnership was formed.

Their first venture was a dandy. Pasquinel huddled with Rude Water and said, “Remember those rivermen? Killed your braves. Stole our pelts.” Rude Water did remember. “They ought to be coming back down the river about now. Lend me some braves who can swim.”

A war party of nine canoed down to the Missouri and camped there for some weeks, watching several fine boats drift past, Saint Geneviève, Saint Michel, laden with pelts from the Mandan villages.

And then the boat they waited for appeared, long and ragged, like the Saint Antoine, with the same rough men lounging with rifles, waiting for something to shoot at.

“Maintenant,” Pasquinel whispered to McKeag. “Vous partez. They won’t know you.”

So McKeag pushed his canoe into the Missouri and called, “Hey there! Passage to Saint Louis? I have pelts.”

The boat slowed. The man at the rudder fanned water and another with a pole worked against the current. The leader studied McKeag, saw he was under twenty, and cried cheerfully, “Sure. Throw the pelts up.” One of the men slipped to the rear, taking a heavy oar with which to knock McKeag senseless once the pelts were aboard.

As the rivermen reached for the bales, Pasquinel put a bullet through the head of the leader. With terrifying calm he handed the smoking rifle to a Pawnee helper, took McKeag’s rifle and drilled a bullet into the man lurking with the oar. He then reached for a third gun, but by this time the Pawnee braves were climbing aboard the flatboat, where the remaining crew were massacred. Young McKeag, who had never seen Indians lift a scalp, was shaking by the time Pasquinel got aboard.

“I didn’t think we’d kill them,” he said softly.

Pasquinel said, “L’année dernière ils ont essayé de me tuer.”

“How do you know they’re the same men?” McKeag asked.

“That one I know. That one too. The others? Mauvais compagnons vous apportent de la mal chance—Bad companions bring bad luck.”

Young McKeag was impressed by the assurance with which Pasquinel operated; the Frenchman was only eight years older, but he always seemed to know what to do. “Throw the bodies overboard,” he told the Pawnee, and after McKeag interpreted this, he added, “Tell them they can have anything on the boat they want.” McKeag protested that he and Pasquinel could use some of the gear, but the Frenchman snapped, “I want it to look as if pirates had struck,” and he smiled thinly as the braves did their ransacking. When the Pawnee headed their canoes back toward the Platte, McKeag started to wash down the decks, but Pasquinel stopped him: “I want blood to show—especially the hair—when we talk to the soldiers in Saint Louis.”

Pasquinel defeated and Pasquinel victorious were two different men. This year he brought the pirogue with its cargo of furs to the Company landing like a Roman proconsul returning from Dacia. Seeking out the merchants who had invested in the pirogue, he described the savage attack by the Pawnee, the scalping of the crew, McKeag’s bravery and his own gunning down of the Indian miscreants. He displayed the matted hair, the blood, and bowed gracefully when they applauded his defense of their property. He turned his own bales over to Dr. Guisbert.

He began to enjoy himself in Saint Louis. Without money Pasquinel had been withdrawn; with it he became a robust, singing drunk. The lonely discipline of the prairie vanished and he spent his profits lavishly, for the sheer love of spending. He financed vagrants for explorations they would never make, and paid off old debts with bonuses.

After two months of this, he was broke. Sobering up, he applied to Dr. Guisbert for his next advance. The doctor had been expecting the call and did not flinch when Pasquinel said, “This year, twice as much. I have a partner now.”

He and McKeag paddled slowly upstream with enough trade guns for Chief Rude Water to drive the Arapaho and Cheyenne clear off the plains. At the village McKeag saw the white men’s scalps and felt sick, but Pasquinel told him, “The coureur, he ends as a scalp. Vous peut-être, et moi aussi.”

The winter of 1799 was the one they spent at Beaver Creek, meeting for the first time Lame Beaver of the Arapaho. It was that winter, too, when McKeag performed the impossible, learning a little Arapaho so that he could later serve as interpreter for them.

They formed a strange pair, this short stocky Frenchman and this slim red-bearded Scot. Each was taciturn when on the prairie; neither pried into the affairs of the other. Without commenting on the fact, McKeag had now heard Pasquinel tell others that his wife was in Montreal, Detroit and New Orleans, and he began to suspect that there was none. It would never have occurred to him to ask outright, “Pasquinel, you married?” for that would be intrusive.

When McKeag developed into a competent shot, Pasquinel taught him the one overriding secret of successful trading: “Keep your powder dry.”

“How do you do that when the canoe upsets?”

“Simple. You buy your powder, then you buy your lead for the bullets. With the lead you make a little keg … very tight lid … wax on top … sealed in deerskin.”

“Why not buy the keg?”

“Ah! That’s the secret. You make the keg out of just enough lead to be melted into bullets for the powder. When the powder’s gone, the keg’s gone.”

He taught McKeag how to use the two-ball mold into which the melted lead was poured to produce good bullets; he gave a further exhibition of his resourcefulness when the Scotsman broke the wooden stock on his rifle. To McKeag it looked as if his gun was ruined, for he could not fit it against his shoulder or take aim, but for Pasquinel the problem was simple.

He fitted the three pieces of wood together, then steamed a chunk of buffalo hide until it was gelatinous. With a bone needle and elk sinew he sewed the skin as tightly as he could about the broken wood, but McKeag tried it and said, “Still wobbles.”

“Attends!” Pasquinel said, and he placed the rifle with its pliable buffalo patch in winter sunlight, and as the moisture was drawn out, the skin tightened, becoming harder than wood, until the stock was stronger than when McKeag bought it.

One sun-filled morning in May, as they were wandering together north of Rattlesnake Buttes looking for antelope, McKeag had a flash of insight: it occurred to him that he and Pasquinel were the freest men in the world. They were bound by nothing; they owed no one allegiance; they could move as they wished over an empire larger than France or Scotland; they slept where they willed, worked when they wished, and ate well from the land’s bounty.

As he looked at the boundless horizon that lovely day he appreciated what freedom meant: no Highland laird before whom he must grab his forelock. Pasquinel was subservient to no Montreal banker. They were free men, utterly free.

He was so moved by this discovery that he wanted to share it with Pasquinel. “We are free,” he said. And Pasquinel, looking to the east, replied, “They will be moving upon us soon.” And McKeag felt a shadow encroaching upon his freedom, and after that day he never felt quite so untrammeled.

In the fall of 1799 Dr. Guisbert staked them for an exploratory trip up the North Platte. It was a difficult journey, past strange formations and along lonely stretches of near-desert. They saw congregations of rock which resembled buildings in some dream city. They saw needles, and passes between red cliffs, and long defiles through ghostly white mountains.

“Impossible country,” McKeag said one evening as they camped among strange towers.

“Il y a des castors,” Pasquinel replied.

When they left the area of monuments they entered territory occupied by a tribe of Dakota, and the Indians sent braves to notify them that they could not continue their march. Pasquinel directed McKeag to say, “We shall continue. Trading beaver.”

The Dakota, furious at their insolence, withdrew behind a small hill, and Pasquinel warned McKeag, “Tonight we fight for our trade.” And he showed the young Scot how best to prepare for an Indian fight: “Be ready to kill or be killed. Then see that it doesn’t happen.”

Just before dusk the Dakota swept in on horseback, with every apparent intention of destroying the two intruders. “Don’t fire!” Pasquinel warned McKeag. But Pasquinel did. He sent a bullet well in front of the warriors. Then he took McKeag’s gun and sent one harmlessly behind. The Indians wheeled, came roaring back, and this time Pasquinel held his fire altogether. One Dakota touched McKeag, then off they stormed, shouting and kicking their horses.

Next day Pasquinel calmly packed his gear, stowed his rifles and led the way upriver. At the Dakota camp he conducted powwow with the chiefs, giving them presents and assuring them there would be more on the return trip. No word was said of the attack the previous night or of the bullets fired.

When the traders were safely out of Dakota territory, Pasquinel said, “If you give an Indian a fair chance, you can avoid killing.” He paused. “In years to come those braves will sit around the campfire and tell about the coup they made on the two white men … the whistling bullets.” He smiled sardonically, then added, “And you will sit in Scotland and tell of the tomahawks and the arrows.”

In this manner they made their way among the various tribes. At each step they were surrounded, though they could not see them, by thousands of courageous Indians who could have destroyed them. There were skirmishes, but if they held firm and did not run, they were allowed to move westward.

The skirmishes were testings, like the ancient war parties the Arapaho had sent against the Pawnee and the Pawnee against the Comanche. They were moves in an elaborate game by which the white man probed and the Indian reacted, and when word passed through the tribes, “Pasquinel, he can be trusted,” it was better than a passport. A multitude of coureurs from Montreal, St. Louis and Oregon would in the years ahead traverse Indian country, and for every man who was killed, six hundred would pass in safety.

Pasquinel and McKeag decided to winter at one of the loveliest spots in all America, that trim peninsula formed where the North Platte was joined by a dark, swift river sweeping in from the west. In later years it would be called after a French coureur de bois who had once trapped with Pasquinel, Jacques La Ramee. No finer river crossed the plains; deep and clean, the Laramie formed a haven for beaver. Wild turkey nested and deer came to feed. Ducks sought refuge, and elk. Buffalo used it as their watering spot, and on dead branches, brown-gray hawks stood guard.

In that winter of 1800 the team acquired six bales of superior peltries and were about to head south when a band of Shoshone attacked. The Indians were driven off, but returned to lay siege. A desultory gunfight occurred, but nothing much would have happened except that one Shoshone dashed into camp, astonished McKeag by counting coup on him, and the Scotsman reached for his gun, whereupon the Indian struck him with a tomahawk, gashing his right shoulder.

The wound festered. McKeag became delirious, and any thought of his lugging bales east that June had to be abandoned.

In lucid moments, when McKeag comprehended the dangerous position in which he had placed his partner, he urged Pasquinel to move out: “Begone with you. I’m bound to die.” Pasquinel did not bother to answer. Grimly but with tenderness he tended his stricken partner.

The wound worsened. It became repulsive and threatened death; its smell contaminated the hut. In one of his lucid moments McKeag begged, “Cut it off.” Pasquinel replied, “If you had no arm, how would you fire a gun?”

By mid-July it appeared that McKeag was doomed; again he pleaded with Pasquinel to amputate the arm, and again the Frenchman refused. Instead, he took his ax, chopped a mass of fine wood and built a fire. When it crackled, he plunged the ax in, allowing it to become red-hot. Without warning, he slammed the incandescent metal against the corrupt shoulder, pinning McKeag to the paillasse as he did so.

There was a stench of burning flesh, a sound of screaming. Pasquinel maintained pressure on the ax until he judged that he had done enough. This drastic treatment halted the corruption; it also permanently destroyed some of the muscles in McKeag’s right arm. Henceforth it would be cocked at the elbow. When he realized what Pasquinel had done, or rather not done, he ranted, “Why didn’t you cut it off altogether?” He lapsed into delirium and would probably have died had not Lame Beaver’s band of Arapaho wandered by on the prowl for buffalo.

When women from the camp saw McKeag’s condition they knew what had to be done, and they sent girls into the stream beds, looking for those plants which were effective in poultices, and soon the swelling subsided.

“Bad scar,” Blue Leaf told McKeag in Arapaho as she tended him.

“He’ll use his arm,” Pasquinel asserted when this was translated.

One morning while three Arapaho women were watching him—and thinking he was asleep—they began women’s talk about the various braves in camp, and in the robust manner of Indian women, who were never intimidated by their men, they began discussing the sexual equipment of the braves, pointing out any conspicuous deficiencies. Such talk disturbed McKeag, who had been reared in a strict Presbyterian home, and he became even more uncomfortable as the gossip grew rowdier, with even Lame Beaver’s capacity reviewed and found wanting.

At this point Blue Leaf came in and the women stopped their talking, but she could guess what the subject of their conversation had been. “This one speaks our language,” she reminded them, and the three watchers moved to the bed to see if McKeag was awake, and when they were satisfied that he was not, they resumed their chatter and one said that she had seen him when she bathed him and that he seemed even poorer than one of Our People. Blue Leaf silenced them and drove them from the lodge; then she roused McKeag to poultice his shoulder.

Among the Indian girls who gathered medicinal plants was Clay Basket, then eleven and promising to be as pretty as her mother. During the long afternoons she sat with McKeag, learning a little English. She warned him not to call her father chief, for he had never been one. She tried to explain why, but could not make herself clear. Instead, she fetched the buffalo hide which recounted his many coups, and there McKeag saw the Arapaho version of Lame Beaver’s invasion of their tipi two years before. Looking at the impressive record of Lame Beaver’s feats, he told Clay Basket, “Your father chief … big chief,” and she was pleased.

It was now too late for the traders to return down the Platte, so they prepared to winter at the confluence, strengthening the walls of their hut and making pemmican. McKeag was too weak to hunt, nor was it known whether he would ever be able to fire a gun again, for his shoulder remained a gaping wound. He stayed in the lodge, doing what work he could and talking with Clay Basket about why the Cheyenne were trusted allies and the Comanche wicked enemies.

One afternoon Pasquinel returned with an antelope. He was in an evil mood and with a curse threw the animal at McKeag’s feet. Then he grabbed McKeag’s rifle and pointed to the stock that he had mended with buffalo hide.

“Goddamn! Same thing your shoulder!” He searched for English words, found none, and in frustration, resorted to a method of direct communication which shocked the Indian girl. Pulling his right arm far back, he struck McKeag in the wounded shoulder so forcefully that he knocked him down. Before McKeag could regain his feet, he struck him twice more, then thrust the gun at him, shouting, “Use it. Take gun. Goddamn, use it.” With that he shoved McKeag from the hut.

McKeag, followed by Clay Basket, walked to the banks of the river, and with considerable pain, placed the gunstock against his right shoulder, but he could not muster the strength to lift his hand to the trigger. Sweat stood on his forehead, and against his will, for he did not want an Indian child to see him cry, tears filled his eyes. “It’s too much,” he groaned.

He would have halted the experiment at that point, but Clay Basket now understood what Pasquinel intended. Either McKeag must learn to function again, or die during the winter. She forced him to lodge the rifle once more against his shoulder. Then taking his right hand in hers, she slowly raised his arm, breaking the scar tissue, until his hand touched the trigger. He bit his lip, held the hand there for some seconds, then let it fall.

Again and again Clay Basket forced the hand up, and there the lesson ended for that day. McKeag refused to speak to Pasquinel, who ignored him.

On the third day Clay Basket lifted the hand easily into position, and when she was satisfied that McKeag could do this by himself, she took the rifle from him, swabbed it, poured in some powder and inserted a ball, as she had learned to do. Ramming the load home, she thrust the gun back into his hands and said, “Now.”

“I can’t,” McKeag protested, refusing to accept the gun.

“Now,” she cried.

She badgered him into taking the gun and raising it into firing position. Slowly she brought his right hand to the stock, placing his forefinger on the trigger. “Now,” she said softly.

Apprehensive of the pain that was about to strike him, McKeag could not pull the trigger. Clay Basket looked at him with pity, thinking of how her father had hung suspended by his breast for a whole day. When it was apparent that McKeag was not going to fire, she raised herself on her toes, placed her small finger over his and gave a powerful jerk backward.

With a shattering explosion the gun fired. She had poured enough powder to fill a cannon, and when Pasquinel rushed from the lodge, all he could see was a cloud of black smoke and McKeag on the ground.

His wound was opened by the recoil, but Blue Leaf stanched the flow of blood with wet leaves. A week later, when scar tissue had barely begun to form, Clay Basket had McKeag out again with the gun. “This time I load,” he said, but when he actually held the stock against his shoulder, the pain was too much. So once again the girl slipped her finger over his and pulled the trigger. When he voluntarily reloaded and fired again, she was so proud of his courage, she shyly pressed her lips against his beard.

It was now time for the Arapaho to move on, to locate one more herd whose meat would sustain them through the winter. Lame Beaver came by to say farewell, and Blue Leaf, stately as a spruce, assured McKeag that his shoulder was now mended. Clay Basket, bright in beads, gently touched their faces and told them in English, “I know you come back.”

The snows came and winds swept down from the north. The river froze and even deer had trouble finding water. From aloft eagles inspected the camp, and the two men sat in their lodge and waited.

There were days, of course, when the winds ceased and the sun shone as if it were summer. Then the partners, naked to the waist, worked outdoors. In their lodges the beaver began to stir, as if this were spring, and elk grazed in the meadows.

But such interludes were followed by storms and temperatures thirty degrees below zero. For three weeks that February the men were snowed under: drifts came clear across their lodge, and like animals they had to burrow out. This caused no concern; they had a comfortable supply of meat and wood. For water they could melt snow—God knows, there was enough of it.

They had no books … no loss … neither could read. They had no work, no place to go, no problem but survival. So there, deep beneath the snow, they waited. For five hundred miles in any direction there were no white men, unless perhaps some stubborn voyageur from Detroit had holed up in some valley to the north, like them, awaiting spring.

Occasionally they talked, but mostly they sat in silence. Already they had six bales of beaver, worth at least $3600, plus prospects for six more during the coming season. They were rich men, if they could sneak the pelts back through the Indian country.

On the rare occasions when they did speak they used a strange language: French-Pawnee-English. McKeag’s native tongue was Gaelic, a poetic language spoken softly. When he uttered words it was with a certain shyness; Pasquinel was more glib. But even so, whole days passed with hardly a word being said.

Then the snowfall diminished and drifts began to melt. Mountain streams grew strong and the river became a torrent. Beaver in their lodges began to stir and moose dropped last year’s antlers. Buffalo pawed at the earth and wild turkeys came down from their winter roosts. During warm spells rattlesnakes emerged from deep rocky crevices. One day when the full wonder of spring was about them, Pasquinel said, “We trade six weeks, go home.”

As they were returning down the Missouri, along that endless east-west reach the river takes before it enters the Mississippi, their rhythmic paddling was interrupted by the appearance of a solitary man bringing a canoe upstream and shouting their names: “Pasquinel! McKeag! Great news for you.”

Sweating with nervousness, he pulled his canoe alongside theirs and introduced himself: “Joseph Bean, Kentucky.” His attention focused immediately on the bales, and he said, “What good luck I bring you. I act as agent for Hermann Bockweiss.” He stopped, as if this startling information carried its own interpretation.

“Qui est-il?” Pasquinel asked.

“Silversmith from Germany. Makes wonderful trinkets for the Indian trade.” Pasquinel shrugged his shoulders, and Bean continued frenetically: “Came to Saint Louis last January. Heard you were the best trader on the river. Says he will advance the money for your trips.”

Pasquinel replied brusquely, “No need. I work Dr. Guisbert.”

“Aha!” the American cried. “That’s just it! Dr. Guisbert … his partner died and he moved to New Orleans for a rich life downriver.” He explained the new situation in Saint Louis: Pasquinel would deliver Guisbert’s pelts to the German, who would sell and send Dr. Guisbert …

On and on Bean went, an irritating man, perspiring constantly, but so insistent that the traders had to consider this invitation. When they finally landed at Saint Louis they saw gleaming down at them from the shore the round, plump face of Hermann Bockweiss, silversmith, lately from Munich.

He occupied the house formerly owned by Dr. Guisbert, and in the rooms that had once been devoted to medicine he plied his delicate trade. Using silver imported from Germany and brought up the Mississippi from New Orleans, he fabricated not only the trinkets so loved by the Indians but also the ornate jewelry desired by women as far north as Detroit.

His own childlike enthusiasm enabled him to predict what gleaming device would catch an Indian’s fancy. It was he who invented the ear wheel for the squaws, dainty pendants enclosing tiny wheels which revolved, and silver-inlaid tomahawks for the braves. He offered a set of five half-moon pins for women and three wide bands for the upper arm of a man. His specialty was the fish-eyed brooch, an ordinary flat pin upon which he had deposited a score of small, glistening beads of silver; his most impressive item was the silver-chased peace pipe, a stunning affair adorned with pendants of multicolored beads.

At the same time this canny German realized that in the long run his profits would have to come from whatever trade he established with the local gentry, and he had real skill in combining the demands of French elegance with the sturdy approach to silver design he had learned in Bavaria. Indeed, a Bockweiss piece tended to become an heirloom, a subtle blending of two cultures.

His relationship with Pasquinel was interesting. Since Saint Louis still had fewer than a thousand inhabitants, there was no public hotel, and coureurs from the west had to find such lodging as they could in private homes. Most families did not care to board the filthy and profane men, but Bockweiss insisted that Pasquinel and McKeag accept his hospitality. He had two daughters, Lise, the strong-minded one, and Grete, the coquette, and he convinced himself that one day the coureurs would become his sons-in-law. Normally a father in Saint Louis would have preferred his daughters to marry more substantial types, say, established businessmen, but Bockweiss had not made the long journey from Munich to Saint Louis because he was cautious. He was a romantic who relished the idea of probing unsettled prairies and saw that McKeag and Pasquinel fitted the pattern of his new country. So the coureurs moved in to rooms above the shop, and Bockweiss noticed with gratification that Lise was developing an interest in Pasquinel, while Grete confided that she thought McKeag congenial.

There was competition. Local girls, spotting the way Pasquinel spent his money buying presents for anyone connected with the fur trade, thought he might make a good husband. He was generous. He was entertaining. In looks … well, he was small but he was not ridiculous. Best of all, he seemed to be lucky.

They made known their interest, but Pasquinel excused himself, as he always did, on grounds that he already had a wife in Quebec. He was willing to give them money, pay for their drinks and bed with them as chance provided, but he could express no interest in marriage.

Lise Bockweiss was not so easy to dispose of. She was a solid, forthright girl with all the domestic qualifications a husband might expect. She also had a sense of humor and could appreciate the comedy in watching the New Orleans French girls trying to catch this elusive trader. She was taller than Pasquinel but she had the knack of making him seem important when she was with him, and from time to time even Pasquinel had the fleeting thought: This one could make “une bonne femme.”

The four ate together frequently, but between Grete and McKeag little was happening. He was timorous with ladies and blushed as red as his beard when pretty Grete teased, “I’ll bet you have a squaw hidden upstream.” It was not long before young Grete concluded that there was little future for her in wooing McKeag, and she turned her attentions to a shopkeeper who appreciated her.

It was more difficult for Pasquinel to evade Lise. For one thing, her father took a heavy-handed interest in the courtship; he was aware that Lise was seriously considering the coureur and he did not propose to let the Frenchman slip away. Bockweiss could not believe Pasquinel’s vague talk of having a wife. He persuaded the coureur to visit with him in his shop, and in the process of explaining how he cast his jewelry he found opportunity to speak of his daughter: “That one has a solid head on her shoulders. A man would always be proud of that one.”

The silver reached him in ingots, which he melted in a small furnace activated by an arm-powered bellows: “Lise’s mother taught her how to cook … good.”

When the silver assumed liquid form, he poured it meticulously into molds shaped like butterflies, or wheels, or arm bracelets: “It’s no easy thing to bring two daughters all the way from Germany, but when they are both angels, especially Lise, it’s worth it.”

When the silver cooled, he used delicate files to remove any excess, catching it for reuse later. Then he took the pieces to a buffer wheel, turned by a foot pedal, and as he pumped he said, “A man with a good business like you ought to marry. I myself plan to marry again next year, but of course, finding a good woman isn’t easy.”

He now took the pieces and began the delicate etching and decoration which made a Bockweiss silver piece so desirable. He had large, fat fingers which seemed unsuitable for intricate work, but he used his tools with such skill that he could carve almost any design: “Pasquinel, let me be frank. I sell a piece like this for ten dollars. I’m going to be a wealthy man. With my daughters, especially Lise, I can afford to be generous. You would have a fixed home here in Saint Louis. A fixed home is something.”

As the time approached for the traders to return to their rivers, Lise Bockweiss took over where her father had stopped. She gave a dinner to which Pasquinel was invited and showed him concentrated attention, after which her father took the Frenchman aside and said, “As long as the world lasts, women will want jewelry and Indians will want trinkets. You do the trading. I’ll make the silver. It will be a good partnership.”

He continued expansively: “And as your partner, Pasquinel, I would be very happy … that is … should you at some point in time wish to join my family.” This was said with Germanic gravity and with such obvious regard for Lise’s welfare that not even Pasquinel could treat it jokingly. A proposal was being made, one most advantageous, and he was forced to give it attention.

McKeag, watching this from a comfortable distance, since Grete was no longer applying pressure on him, saw that his partner was being maneuvered into marriage, and he began to take seriously Pasquinel’s repeated statements that he had a wife somewhere else, Montreal or New Orleans or Quebec. He was not surprised, therefore, when Bockweiss invited him to the shop one day to speak of this matter, but he was taken aback when he found Grete’s shopkeeper there, accompanied by a blonde from New Orleans.

“Herr McKeag,” Bockweiss said bluntly, “this young lady has told us that your partner Pasquinel has a wife in New Orleans. What of that?”

McKeag took a deep breath, looked first at the girl, then at the shopkeeper, and said, “Pasquinel jokes about this … to keep from getting trapped. One time he says he has a wife in Montreal, another time Quebec. I suppose he said New Orleans too.”

Bockweiss laughed nervously, but with obvious relief. The blonde, however, felt that she had been insulted and was not disposed to let the matter drop. “He told me nothing. I heard it from a New Orleans girl. When I told her that I liked Pasquinel, she said, ‘No good. He has a wife in New Orleans.’ ”

“Did she know the wife?” Bockweiss asked.

“How do I know?”

“You could ask her.”

“Ask? Ask? She’s gone.”

The meeting was inconclusive, and Bockweiss, feeling an impropriety in having raised such a question about a potential son-in-law, yet wanting reassurance as a father, suggested that perhaps McKeag might want to question his partner, but at this the Scotsman rebelled. Blushing deeply, he fumbled, “I wouldn’t know … I couldn’t.”

So the businessman was deputized to interrogate Pasquinel, and it was a futile interview. The little Frenchman laughed and said, “This town is too much. I better get back to the Indians.”

“But do you have a wife in New Orleans?” the man pressed.

“No.”

After this reassurance the Bockweiss family concluded there was no impediment. Plans went forward for a wedding, even though the groom had not said definitely that he was entering into the union, and finally Bockweiss put the matter to him bluntly: “Can we have the wedding before you go back to the plains?”

“Yes.”

It was a charming affair. Normally the local French would have ignored such a wedding, but the Bockweiss family came from South Germany, an area friendly to France, and in addition, were Catholic, which made them doubly welcome in the community. At the celebration, Bockweiss and his daughters made a favorable and lasting impression on the inhabitants, while Pasquinel, looking very short and muscular beside his taller German wife, behaved himself, and the approving news was flashed through the crowd: “He’s turning over whatever savings he has to his wife. Bockweiss has acquired a grant of land from the governor, and she’s building a big house.” Before the coureurs left Saint Louis, the new bride assured McKeag, “We’ll always keep one room for you,” but when the canoe was heading west the Scotsman thought, One more freedom gone.

In the late summer of 1803, as they came down the Platte from Rattlesnake Buttes with seven bales of beaver, they heard at the Pawnee village news that was doubly sad. Chief Rude Water had been slain by an Arapaho war party: “Big devil Lame Beaver, he staked himself out. Shot Rude Water.”

“Pasquinel!” McKeag called. “You hear that? The Arapaho who helped us up north, Lame Beaver. He killed Rude Water.”

“What happened to Lame Beaver?”

McKeag translated this for the Pawnee, and they replied, “We killed him.”

Pasquinel shook his head sadly. “Deux braves hommes … morts. Dommage, dommage.”

Then the Pawnee continued with additional information that proved even more startling: “Lame Beaver killed Rude Water only because he used special bullets.” And they showed Pasquinel the two bullets.

“They’re gold!” Pasquinel cried, letting them drop heavily into a cup.

McKeag interrogated the braves for nearly an hour, trying to determine how Lame Beaver could have obtained gold bullets, and in the end it was agreed that he must have located a lode. Where? No one knew. When? It must have been after the winter when the Arapaho helped cure McKeag’s shoulder, because that year there was no evidence of gold bullets.

“Where did he go that winter, after he left us?” Pasquinel asked.

“After buffalo,” McKeag answered. “Don’t you remember? They said, ‘We’ve got to find one more herd before winter’? That’s what they said.”

“Are there any mountains north of that river?” Pasquinel demanded.

The question was interpreted for the Pawnee, who answered, “No. Flat. Flat.”

Pasquinel became obsessed with Lame Beaver and his gold bullets. Somewhere this clever Indian had found gold. The trick now was to determine where. Guidance could come only from Blue Leaf; she would know where her husband had found his treasure, so during the forthcoming season they would seek her out and extract the secret. In the meantime, they would carry the two gold bullets to Saint Louis and sell them for the Pawnee.

Unfortunately, when he reached home, Pasquinel’s preoccupation with the bullets diverted his attention from the inventive work his wife had completed during his absence. Applying the funds he had left with her, plus others she had wheedled from her father, she had purchased a lot on the residential Rue des Granges. It commanded a comprehensive view of the town; it seemed above the river yet part of it. Here she had built a good stone house with a porch on four sides. The house contained many features suitable for dwelling along the edge of a German forest, yet its outward appearance was completely French, built only of such materials as a frontier town could provide. If a needed brick or fabric was unobtainable, she turned up some ingenious substitute.

And she was the major adornment of the house, a large, capable young woman with zest for whatever was happening in the world. If persons of importance passed through Saint Louis to the western frontier, she wanted to know them, to talk with them of their prospects. In the winter of 1804, for example, she entertained frequently for Captain Meriwether Lewis and his assistant, Lieutenant William Clark, as they prepared an expedition to explore the upper Missouri River, and perhaps points farther. But her special guest was Captain Amos Stoddard, who had been sent to Saint Louis by President Jefferson on a mission of peculiar delicacy. He and his aide, Lieutenant Prebble, made her house their virtual headquarters, and conversation was good.

Pasquinel fitted easily into such entertaining. He was a rough, convivial host, and what he lacked in social grace, he made up for with tales of his adventures on the prairie. Such guests as joined the parties liked to talk with him of Indians, and he expounded views which were more readily accepted by his French listeners than by Captain Stoddard and his aide. “I have one rule,” Pasquinel often said. “Never fight the Indian if you can avoid it. Never betray him in a trade. Bring him to you by faithfulness.”

It was remarkable that the French, who had followed these precepts in Canada, would enjoy three hundred years of amiable relations with their Indians, while the Americans, who were sure the ideas were wrong, would breed only agony with theirs. Perhaps it was because the French wanted trade; the Americans, land.

Lieutenant Prebble voiced the prevailing view: “We found in Kentucky—and everywhere else, for that matter—that the only reasonable way to handle an Indian is to kill him. Trust? He doesn’t know the meaning of the word. I say thank God there’s a wilderness out there where decent white men will never want to live. I say let’s throw every damned Indian into that desert and let them keep it till hell freezes.”

In February, after one such dinner, Lise told her husband and her father that she was pregnant, and they had a private celebration, to which they summoned McKeag, who was alone in his room. There was laughter and prediction as to what the boy would be, assuming, as Pasquinel did, that it would be a boy. Bockweiss suggested that he become a silversmith, to keep the profitable business going, and to everyone’s surprise, Pasquinel agreed. “Keep him in Saint Louis,” he said forcefully. “Never let him work the rivers.”

He himself spent the winter interrogating voyageurs as to where gold might be found, but none of them knew. He asked Captain Lewis, who said, “There’s no gold in America.” Lieutenant Prebble gave him a book on the subject, but of course, he couldn’t read.

On March 9 of that year Pasquinel and the other Frenchmen in Saint Louis watched approvingly as Captain Stoddard engineered a comical, warm-hearted charade. He had been ordered by President Jefferson to inaugurate United States rule in the sprawling Louisiana Purchase recently acquired from Napoleon of France. But there was a complication.

Since Spain had never got around to relinquishing control of the area to France, as she had been obligated to do by one of those treaties which periodically ended European wars, Saint Louis was still Spanish, and French authorities could not legally hand it over to America. It was Stoddard who devised the ingenious stratagem whereby everything could be set right.

“The top Spanish officer in the area must formally cede this domain to the top French officer in the area,” he suggested. “Then the French officials can, with propriety, yield the territory to the United States.” Few proposals in the brief history of Spain’s San Luis de Iluenses had been more enthusiastically received, and through the streets ran Pasquinel, shouting, “Tomorrow we shall all be French again.”

But there was another difficulty. In the entire area there was no Spanish official; strange as it may seem now, the only Spanish officer in the territory was Charles de Hault de Lassus, a French lieutenant who happened to be serving as the Spanish governor of Upper Louisiana, and if he was required to represent Spain in this transfer, where could a French officer be found to represent the Emperor Napoleon? Captain Stoddard was not only resourceful, but also gallant, and he volunteered to fill the breach: “For this one day I designate myself as the legal representative of his august majesty the Emperor of France, and on his exalted behalf I shall accept the transfer.”

So on the morning of March 9 a varied crowd surrounded the governor’s residence, a squat building on Rue de l’Eglise marked by a flagpole. First in attendance were the Indians assembled from four neighboring tribes to witness the celebration: Delaware, Shawnee, Abnaki, Sac. It was a cold day and they stood in buffalo robes, turning their heads sharply whenever cheers or guns exploded. Second came the French contingent, led by Captain Stoddard, eleven men, including Pasquinel, in Sunday clothes. Third were a few casual Americans, quite dirty and out of place. And finally there was Governor de Lassus, a Frenchman making believe he was a Spaniard in this gracious puppet play.

Very proper and grave, he stepped into the street as drums beat and fifes whistled. At his signal, the Spanish flag was slowly lowered while the battery on the hill thundered an eleven-gun salute. The ensign was folded and retired, with no one shedding a tear, since there were few Spaniards in town.

But now things changed. The new flag of France, Napoleon’s tricolor, was briskly unfurled, attached to the halyards and run up the pole. Many guns were fired and fifes played martial airs. Captain Stoddard, loyal emissary of Napoleon, accepted the transfer and led the French contingent in cheers, with Pasquinel tossing his red cap in the air, and for twenty-four glorious hours Saint Louis was again French.

That day and all that night Pasquinel toured his old haunts, declaring, “Je suis Français. Je serai toujours Français. A bas l’Amérique.” In the morning, bleary-eyed and sad, he invited half a dozen equally depressed Frenchmen to his home on Rue des Granges for breakfast, after which he trooped back to the governor’s residence and stood with tears in his eyes as De Lassus, once more a French lieutenant, turned the region over to Captain Stoddard, once again the loyal representative of President Jefferson.

Out of decency a member of the committee cried, “Three cheers for the United States!” but to his embarrassment no one responded. Pasquinel spoke for the citizenry when he said, “I’d like to cut my throat.”

That autumn, immediately after his son was born, he and McKeag set off for the Platte, with Pasquinel determined to find the Arapaho gold mine. Wherever they went, he asked for news of Lame Beaver’s family, but it was not until June of 1805 that they came upon a Cheyenne war party whose members knew what had happened.

“Blue Leaf is dead. Snow.”

“Dead!” Pasquinel erupted. “She was too young.”

“She’s dead.”

“The girl? Clay Basket?”

“We don’t know.”

It was here that Pasquinel announced a decision which gave McKeag his first intimation that ultimately there must be trouble in Saint Louis. The Frenchman said, “I’m not going back this summer. I’m going to stay here until I find that gold.” McKeag tried to argue that this was inhuman, seeing as how Lise had just had a baby, but Pasquinel replied brusquely, “Bockweiss will look after her. He’ll always look after her, that one.”

Accordingly, Pasquinel cached their pelts, his preoccupation with gold having prevented the partnership from accumulating more than two bales, then led the way over a wide scatter of abandoned campgrounds and empty river basins. The Arapaho seemed to be hiding, maliciously: they were not at Beaver Creek or at Rattlesnake Buttes or at that fine spot where the rivers met. Winter approached and the traders camped at some nondescript place, not even bothering to build a proper shelter.

They did not return to Saint Louis during all of 1805, wasting their time looking for the gold, but in April of 1806 a Ute war party passed on its way to steal horses from the Pawnee, and they advised him that as they came out of the mountains, they had seen signs that a band of Arapaho had moved into Blue Valley.

“Où est-ce?” Pasquinel asked with unconcealed agitation.

A Ute pointed toward the mountain up whose side climbed the stone beaver and said in sign, “Stream right, stream left.”

Pasquinel and McKeag first saw Blue Valley during an April storm. Rain swept in from the mountain and the area was covered with mist, but as they progressed the sun came out in explosive splendor, and they saw a compact meadow bisected by a stream of crystal water, with many aspen trees to the right and a mass of dark spruce to the left, each needle clean and shining.

“A place for gold,” Pasquinel said, but McKeag just looked. He saw the trees, the lovely sweep of the meadow and the myriad beaver lodges.

“We could trade here for years,” he said, but Pasquinel was not listening.

“This has to be where he found the gold,” he said.

They saw a modest trail leading into the heart of the valley and deduced correctly that this must be where the Ute war party had passed. Following it for about a mile, they saw farther ahead where the Arapaho were camped; running forward to identify himself, Pasquinel saw with delight that this was the band to which Lame Beaver had belonged. When they met the chief, they said they were sorry that Lame Beaver was dead.

“He staked himself out. He wanted to die.”

“Blue Leaf?”

“Her time to die.”

They asked where the Arapaho got their bullets, and the chief showed them a sheet of lead and his bullet mold. Pasquinel asked casually if he could see some of the bullets, and the chief summoned a squaw and commanded her to show the ones she had made that day. They were lead.

As Pasquinel hefted them, McKeag saw Clay Basket coming down the valley. She was now sixteen, tall, shy, but deeply interested when children cried that the white men had come back. When she saw them she stopped, smoothed down her elk-skin dress and adjusted the quills about her neck. Her black hair fell in two braids, and she seemed somewhat pale from the effects of winter, but she was even more bright-eyed than she had been as a child. Walking gravely to McKeag, she placed her hand softly on his right shoulder and asked in English, “Good?”

He thumped his shoulder and replied, “Good.” Pointing to Pasquinel, he said, “He fix.” He delighted the Indians by taking off his shirt and showing them the clever device that Pasquinel had fashioned from buffalo hide, a kind of armor which fitted over his damaged shoulder, enabling him to jam the rifle butt against the hardened hide and fire without fear of the kickback. Clay Basket touched the harness and approved.

May and June of that year were the happiest months Pasquinel, McKeag and Clay Basket had shared. The valley was superb, but the weather had grown so warm that passing Indians no longer had pelts. There was no specific reason for the white men to linger, but Pasquinel still did not know where the gold was, and he did not propose leaving until he found out. He became so attentive to Clay Basket that the Arapaho women, shrewd detectives where sex was concerned, deduced that although it was Pasquinel who had fallen in love with her, it was McKeag she had chosen for her mate.

They were confirmed in their judgment when a young brave who up to now had assumed that he would marry Clay Basket picked a fight with McKeag. It was settled when the Scotsman gave the young man a buffalo robe. Here was an opening for McKeag to pursue his suit, if he wished, but as the women had expected, he did nothing.

In midsummer Pasquinel asked one of the women, “What will Clay Basket do?”

“Difficult,” she replied. “Poor girl, she loves Red Beard.”

“Will she …”

The woman laughed. “Red Beard will never take a wife. Everybody knows that.”

“Then what?” Pasquinel asked.

Again she laughed. “Clay Basket will marry you. Next moon.”

And that’s how it happened. With the whole Arapaho nation—at least that part encamped at Blue Valley—knowing that Clay Basket preferred Red Beard, she married Pasquinel, who intended by this device to pry the secret of the gold from her. When McKeag realized the callous thing his partner was doing, he was appalled. It was not the bigamy that distressed him, for many traders had an Indian wife on the prairies to complement the white one back in Saint Louis, but rather the harsh misuse of a young girl. He thought several times of protesting, but Pasquinel was in no mood for moral debate—he never referred to his bigamy; all he said was, “Now we’ll find the gold.”

It wasn’t much of a ceremony. Pasquinel had to give her brother a gun and some beads and a pouch of tobacco while Clay Basket watched. She was most beautiful that day, decked in fresh porcupine quills and blue stones bought from Indians who traveled the plains to the south. She tried not to look at McKeag and he helped by staying at a distance. A medicine man pointed to the sky, then to the eastern horizon, and said something that McKeag couldn’t translate, and that night when Pasquinel was alone with his new wife he asked her, “Where is the gold your father found?”

“Gold?” she asked.

“Yes, the gold.”

“What gold?”

He was infuriated by her stupidity, or her deception, he wasn’t sure which. He repeated the question and got the same answer, and in frustration, asked, “Why did you marry me when it was Red Beard you wanted?”

In English she offered an explanation which astonished him. “That first night, many years ago, when my father crept into your camp at Beaver Creek … you could have killed him and he could have killed you. He watched you in those days and loved you—because you were brave. So before he staked himself out at the Pawnee camp he told me, ‘The dark man will come back. Marry him.’ In this way I knew it would happen.”

Pasquinel sat silent for some time, then asked, “Before he died, he told you where the gold was?”

“No,” she said.

He knew she was lying and turned away from her. This distressed her and he could feel her shoulders tensing, as if she were sobbing. He left her alone and crossed the stream to wander amidst the aspen. How incredibly beautiful it was that night, with a summer moon and the sound of an owl in the distance, and after a while Clay Basket joined him, and she placed her hand in his and told him, “I am your woman. Always I will help.”

“Where’s the gold?” he asked.

“I do not know,” she said, but he believed that as she came to trust him more, she would confide her secret. In the meantime, she was a beautiful girl and there was no reason why he should not enjoy her whenever he returned to the prairie. With this idea in mind he led her back to the bridal tipi, and as they crossed the clear stream, they stepped on pebbles hiding the nuggets of gold he sought.

He and Clay Basket would have three children: the famous Jacques Pasquinel, born in 1809; his brother Marcel, born in 1811; and a daughter Lucinda, who would be known by another name, born late in 1827. It was a union that lasted.

But after three years of agonizing attempts to locate Lame Beaver’s gold, Pasquinel had to conclude that his wife did not know where it was, though he never ceased believing that somewhere in the hills frequented by the Arapaho there was much gold, and he purposed to find it. If his resolution failed, he had only to recall those two bullets he had held in his hand. They were real and they were gold.

In 1807 when he and McKeag returned to Saint Louis they found many changes. For one thing, the house on Rue des Granges was bigger. Since Lise enjoyed entertaining, she felt the need of extra rooms, and whatever money Pasquinel had given her over the years she had spent on carpenters. Her father now had two apprentices in his flourishing jewelry business and was sending surplus pieces downriver to New Orleans, but his profits he invested in Saint Louis real estate.

Now came a chain of years when Pasquinel kept increasingly to the prairies, sometimes not appearing in Saint Louis for three years at a stretch. When the partners did come back with their pelts, McKeag studied Lise to see how she was reacting to this strange behavior, but if she felt aggrieved she did not show it. And Pasquinel, when he was on hand, proved an exemplary husband and father, resuming his pattern of life as if he had been absent for only a few days. He loved his son Cyprian and delighted in telling him tales of the west. On Sundays he proudly held his wife’s arm as they attended the Catholic church, whose priest he helped with contributions.

He found stubborn pleasure in arguing with those American officers he met at his wife’s entertainments, and warned them that if they wanted to hold the west, they ought to be sending out exploration parties to locate the mountain passes. He was amused at their presumptions of knowledge and told them: “Isn’t it strange that a handful of French coureurs who loved these western lands know more about them than your entire government?” One inflated colonel, guarded by six riflemen, took a boat trip of only one hundred and fifty miles up the Missouri, not even coming close to the mouth of the Platte, and when he returned to Saint Louis he was flushed with heroism and a great expert on Indian affairs. Pasquinel listened courteously as he expounded his theories on Indian control, but when the officer began speaking of his own courage in facing the savage, Pasquinel could not control himself. Laughing crudely, he said, “Colonel, on our trips home from real Indian country, when we get to where you were, we no longer keep lookouts. Because we know we’re in women-and-children country.” Lise, instead of being outraged at this rebuke to an exalted guest, winked at her husband, and soon thereafter the colonel left.

As time went on, she viewed with growing dismay Pasquinel’s protracted absences. At first she suspected that she might be at fault, that she suffered some deficiency in ardor, and once when he was absent for three years she thought seriously of divorce. She was hurt personally by the gossip concerning her husband which circulated in the city, but kept her reactions to it secret. McKeag was never able to ascertain how much she knew, but it was apparent even to him that the marriage had deteriorated.

It appeared that she had made a fundamental decision: with or without Pasquinel, she would live as good a life as possible and raise her son to be as happy and stable as she was. Pasquinel would always be welcomed, would always have an honored place in their home, but they would not allow themselves to be punished by his irresponsible behavior.

At the conclusion of his visits, Pasquinel, broke as usual, would borrow money from his father-in-law, stock his canoe and head for the Platte, where at some appointed place Clay Basket would be waiting with their two boys. These prairie reunions were tender and even passionate, and Clay Basket would have a tipi ready with the kind of furnishings she knew Pasquinel liked: a willow-reed bed with backrests, buffalo robes on the floor, a reliable flap for emitting smoke.

He loved his Indian sons and spoiled them, bringing them gifts from New Orleans and small rifles for shooting birds. He was especially indulgent with Jacques, who at six could ride his pinto at a gallop. The boy was headstrong, and several times McKeag tried to discipline him, warning him not to speed his pony through places where Indian families were cooking meals, but Jacques rejected such advice, and any further interference by McKeag only served to irritate Pasquinel, who wanted his son to become a fine rider. Marcel was quite different, a chubby little fellow who liked people and was becoming a master in devising tricks to get from them what he wanted.

It seemed to McKeag that the boys stood halfway between the two worlds of white men and Indian, uncertain as to which they would ultimately prefer. Pasquinel brought them white-man toys but steeped them in Indian tradition. They loved their father, but stayed mostly with their mother. They spoke Arapaho primarily, but were at ease in the mélange of French and English spoken when the two men were present.

McKeag was especially disturbed over the fact that throughout the west, both in camps and in Saint Louis, such children were called breeds and treated with contempt—half-breeds who had a rightful home in neither race. He suspected that the time must come when this pejorative term would be thrown at young Jacques. Then there would be trouble, for the boy gave promise of becoming almost the archetype of that word: a real two-breed individual.

The first confrontation came during the postwar year of 1816. Pasquinel so enjoyed his Indian sons that he proposed taking them and their mother to Saint Louis with him that year, wanting the boys to see the city. He seemed to have no comprehension of the scandal that would ensue or of the hurt it would inflict on Bockweiss and Lise, and when McKeag pointed this out, Pasquinel’s reaction convinced McKeag that the coureur was not insensitive, he just didn’t give a damn.

“Don’t worry,” Pasquinel said, but McKeag flatly forbade him to take his Indian family to Saint Louis, explaining that it would be especially difficult for Clay Basket.

So Pasquinel compromised. He would take them down the Platte, past the Pawnee villages and onto the Missouri. They would drift down that river as far as the westernmost American fort, recently reopened; Fort Osage it was called. There Clay Basket and the boys would be able to see what civilization was like, with the probability that their visit could be kept secret from Saint Louis.

It started as a happy family vacation organized around the two canoes, and that was what caused the first discord. Since Pasquinel, with his powerful shoulders, could paddle with twice the power of McKeag, it was arranged for Pasquinel and Marcel to ride in the lead canoe with four bales, while McKeag, Clay Basket and Jacques rode in the following canoe with only one bale. Since Jacques, now seven, could handle a paddle, the propulsion of the two canoes would be equalized, but this didn’t work, because as a partner for McKeag, Jacques proved quite intractable. If the Scotsman said, “Shift sides,” Jacques refused to do so, and he did not try to mask his contempt. Before they passed the Pawnee village he began complaining of the fact that McKeag allowed Pasquinel’s canoe to get far ahead, and he continued this complaining until Clay Basket was forced to reprimand him, but Indian mothers had little authority where sons were concerned, and Jacques repeated his complaints. McKeag thought it ridiculous to allow a boy of seven to agitate him, but as they approached the Missouri he shouted ahead for Pasquinel to stop.

“You take him,” he said brusquely.

“What’s the matter? You can’t handle?”

“I cannot,” McKeag said without apology, and the boys traded canoes.

They now entered the swift-flowing Missouri and would have covered the distance to Fort Osage quickly had they not been stopped en route by a guide who pushed his canoe out from the left bank of the river. “I need help!” he called, and when he drew alongside Pasquinel’s canoe, the Frenchman saw that it was Indian Phillips, a lanky, dour-faced half-breed who prowled the backwoods as hunting companion to a unique American.

“He’s sick,” Phillips said.

“Where?”

“Morteau’s shack.” They followed him along a path leading up from the river, and after a ten-minute walk beneath dense foliage, came to a palisaded hut occupied by a mournful French hunter, Pierre Morteau, who greeted them at the door.

“He’s awful sick,” Morteau said, leading the group inside.

In a chair, refusing to lie down although it seemed he must be close to death, sat a gaunt, bearded man in his eighties. He seemed delighted to see Pasquinel and the boys. His breath came unevenly, and his large, frail hands trembled, but when he spoke his voice was crisp, as it had been throughout his life.

He was Daniel Boone, recluse on the lower reaches of the Missouri, who had sworn that each year, as long as the Lord allowed him to live, he would take hunting trips, spring and fall, into the wilderness. This one had gone badly, and it seemed impossible that the gaunt old man could make it back through the woods to his headquarters.

“You want me to take him to Fort Osage?” Pasquinel asked Morteau quietly.

“Not a bit of it!” Boone yelled. “I walked here. I’ll walk out.”

“He looks very weak,” McKeag said. He had no idea who Boone was and asked Pasquinel in a whisper.

“Famous Indian fighter,” Pasquinel said. “Saint Louis … too many people for him.”

“Too goddamned many!” Boone shouted. “You leave me here. Phillips, damn him, he got me here and he’ll get me back.”

The half-breed grinned ruinously, gaping holes showing where teeth used to be. It was his job to accompany Boone on his yearly forays and to bury him if he died. “I don’t want no funeral in Saint Louis,” Boone growled. “Too damned many people there, a man can’t hardly breathe.”

“What can we do?” Pasquinel asked.

“You can tell those dudes at the fort I’m still huntin’ ba’ar and I’ll be walkin’ home soon.” He noticed Clay Basket and said, “Never cottoned much to Injuns but she looks a good ’un.” Of the boys he asked, “Breeds?” and Pasquinel nodded.

Boone took Jacques by the hand and drew him to his side. “Stay on the prairies, lad. Don’t let ’em talk you into livin’ in no town.” He started coughing and Clay Basket pulled her family away.

“He knows when it’s time to die,” she said in Arapaho, and they resumed their trip down the Missouri.

For Clay Basket and her sons, Fort Osage was a marvel, their first acquaintance with the power of the white man. The fort had been built in 1808 on a cliff seventy feet above the Missouri, and from each of its five towers it commanded a vast sweep of the river. Batteries of cannon were trained downward upon the waterway, interdicting any enemy boats that might attempt to force a passage, and from the river, as Pasquinel and his troupe approached, it looked as if each cannon were waiting to blow them out of the water.

“Look at them!” Pasquinel told his sons, and when they had made their canoes fast and had climbed the steep cliff, he asked the guard, “When do the guns go off?” and the guard said, “Have your boys here at sunset.”

So as the sun went down, Pasquinel took his wife and sons to the master battery overlooking the western approaches, and they all stood at attention as a sergeant gave orders. The boys gasped as the battery fired and a mighty reverberation echoed down the caverns of the river. “American guns,” Pasquinel said. He was not much impressed with Americans in general, but he did respect their cannon.

The Indian agent at the fort was Major George Champlin Sibley. His rank was honorary, and he acted principally as the man in charge of the commissary, where rifles and powder could be bought for beaver pelts. An acidulous, correct gentleman who dressed in western Missouri as he might have done in Washington, he had been respected when he served at the fort in the period from 1808 through 1813, and the Indians in the area had been disconsolate when he had to close it down during the War of 1814. But now that he was back, with the fort flourishing once more, he was actually loved.

“It isn’t the major so much,” an Osage explained to Clay Basket. “It’s his wife.”

They had heard about Mrs. Sibley from other sources, always with obvious love; she seemed a remarkable woman, but McKeag, who was perplexed as to why an agent’s wife should be so highly regarded, was told, “It’s the noise she makes.” McKeag could make nothing of that, but a Pawnee who had drifted south to the fort told him, “Oh, what a wonderful noise she makes.”

The party did not see this extraordinary woman until late afternoon on their second day at the fort. At five, some thirty Indians and traders crowded into Major Sibley’s living quarters, and McKeag saw that in one corner of the room stood a piano. So the noise, which had so captivated the Indians, was merely a piano. He smiled.

Then Mrs. Sibley appeared, a marvelous little wren dressed in a frail white dress gathered high beneath her breasts, with pink satin slippers on her tiny feet and a pale-blue ribbon in her hair. At fourteen, as the daughter of one of the distinguished citizens of Saint Louis—Judge Easton had been in turn postmaster, judge and congressman—she had formed the habit of slipping out of her parents’ home at dusk, riding bareback twenty miles to attend military dances, waltzing all night and riding back at dawn. Many soldiers had proposed to her, but shortly after her fifteenth birthday she married Major Sibley, promising “to go anywhere on earth with him that he cared to go.” He had brought her to Fort Osage. At first he was fearful lest the Indians frighten her, but at the end of the first week they loved her so that they would have attacked Saint Louis had she requested it.

McKeag continued to smile as she sat at the piano, adjusted her shimmering dress, turned and bowed to the Indians. This so pleased them that they made varied sounds of greeting, whereupon she started playing in dainty fashion a Mozart gigue which had floated up the river from New Orleans.

It was delightful, and Clay Basket clutched her boys to her, indicating to them how much she enjoyed it, but one of the Sac chiefs looked at Pasquinel and whispered, “Pretty soon now,” and McKeag noticed that all the Indians were bending forward, their eyes ablaze.

What happened next McKeag could not accurately determine, but Mary Sibley launched into a rather livelier tune, and with her left foot, in a most unladylike fashion, began kicking an extra pedal, which activated a large bass drum hidden in the rear of the piano. A French dance resulted, with the drum pretty well drowning out the music. As the Indians cheered, fragile Mrs. Sibley began pumping bellows with her right knee, activating a hidden wind instrument which played “Yankee Doodle Dandy”—and what with the booming drum and all of her ten fingers banging the keys as hard and as fast as possible, a veritable explosion of noise filled the salon.

Clay Basket thought it one of the finest things she had ever experienced, and the boys were enchanted with the mysterious and multiple noises. Major Sibley appeared, offering sweet punch to the chiefs and whiskey to the five white traders, while his wife passed little cakes to the women and the boys. Obviously the concert could have continued all night without tiring the audience.

“We came across Daniel Boone in the wilderness,” McKeag told the major. “He seemed near death.”

“He’ll be hunting bear by Christmas,” Sibley predicted confidently. He knew Boone and suspected that he was a long way from dying. “And if he dies, Indian Phillips is there to bury him. Boone wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Fort Osage would have been a lively place even without its chatelaine; most traders on their way to the upper Missouri halted there, and there were usually a few adventurers in attendance who didn’t know where they were headed. The boys were delighted with the varied activity and each day observed scores of things they could not have seen on the prairies: the shoeing of oxen, the tapping of a beer keg, repairs to a keelboat, Sibley’s commissary store with its nails and buckets and brooms. Even Marcel, only five at the time, watched omnivorously as mule trains and river boats unloaded.

There were problems. This was an American military post, painfully un-French and lacking even a knowledge of prior Spanish occupation. The commandant was from Delaware and his men from Kentucky and Tennessee, and they had brought their prejudices with them. Frenchmen they distrusted; Indians they despised, and at meals they tried to abuse Pasquinel by calling him Squaw Man, knowing that this was a term normally used for launching a fight. He accepted it with a laugh, adding, “You bet. Make one fine wife.” One stranger, seeing his dark skin and Indian costume, made the mistake of calling him “you goddamned Indian,” which he also accepted gracefully.

“What kind of Indian you think?” he asked. “Cheyenne, Pawnee?”

The newcomer, guessing him to be a Sioux, said, “Sigh-ox,” at which Pasquinel jumped about acting like a Sioux at a dance and shouting, “Me Sigh-ox!” In time the hangers-on at the fort stopped trying to insult him.

But they moved onto very different terrain if by word or act they insulted Clay Basket. She was a beautiful woman, her black hair hanging below her shoulders and her face with the placid composure that high cheekbones and amber skin impart. It was inevitable that in a frontier post like Fort Osage incidents would happen, but when they did, Pasquinel’s knife appeared like the fang of a rattler and even drunk men backed off.

That year passions against Frenchmen were already high over the war at New Orleans. Rumors circulated that French in the region had supported the British invaders, so it was not surprising when a newcomer from Virginia, out to survey the frontier defenses, took exception to having Pasquinel at table with him. He announced, “As a gentleman, I do not relish dining with traitors.” Pasquinel rose and left the table. At this point Clay Basket arrived, leading her two boys in for their meal.

The Virginian, flushed by his victory over the husband, did not intend sharing the table with his squaw, so he said firmly, “This is for Americans. We don’t allow Indians here,” and Clay Basket moved dutifully away. McKeag, who was watching mutely from his own place, grew apprehensive, but still Pasquinel did nothing.

Jacques, however, did not intend coming so close to food without getting any and he pushed his way to the table. The Virginian shoved him off, snapping at him, “No breeds here. Out! Out!”

In a flash, Pasquinel’s knife was loosed and with one terrifying backhand sweep he gave the Virginian a near-mortal gash across the neck. The sight of blood inflamed the others, and they leaped at Pasquinel. In so doing, Clay Basket was knocked down. McKeag, when he saw her fall, reacted automatically, leaping into the brawl with his knife. Someone from the fort fired a pistol and soldiers rushed in to halt the riot. Pasquinel and McKeag retreated methodically, forming a bastion behind which Clay Basket and the boys gathered. In this way they left the mess hall.

Pasquinel had a slight cut across his chest. McKeag had a hand wound, which was easily stanched, and Clay Basket was unhurt, but in spite of this she gave a scream of pain, for she saw that Jacques had suffered a bleeding gash across the right side of his face. Some flashing knife, intended for his mother, had caught him. One inch lower and his throat would have been severed.

The child made no outcry. Putting his hand to the cut, he saw the blood and pressed his fingers against the wound to halt it. His eyes kept moving, imprinting the scene indelibly upon his angry brain: the lights outside the room; the soldiers running about; the cut across his father’s chest; and especially his mother’s anxiety. He was seven years old that night, and he would remember everything.

In the morning the agent visited the lodge where Pasquinel was staying and said, “You’d better head north.”

“The others started it,” Pasquinel said.

“I’m sure of that,” Major Sibley said. “But it’s too risky … having you here now.”

Pasquinel felt no necessity to thank McKeag for his assistance in the brawl. It was taken for granted that each would support the other, and that kind of partnership required no periodic review. McKeag was distressed, however, when Pasquinel casually announced, “You take Clay Basket and the boys back to the buttes. I’ll take the pelts down to Saint Louis.” McKeag argued that now was not the time to desert the Indian family, since they were already disturbed by affairs at the fort, but Pasquinel brushed such objections aside: “I’d like to see Lise and the boy.” And it was that summer, after an absence of several years, that he fathered his daughter Lisette.

During Pasquinel’s happy stay in Saint Louis, his other family and McKeag paddled west in a canoe burdened with contention. Clay Basket enjoyed being with McKeag and loved anew this quiet, gentle man, but he was mortally afraid of her, proscribed as she was by being the wife of his partner. Young Jacques was abominable, despising each moment of a trip from which his father was missing; he sensed the constraint that existed between his mother and McKeag, and suspected that something was wrong between McKeag and his father. He moved in a world of insecurity and hate, and tried to punish his younger brother for it, but chubby-cheeked Marcel simply laughed at his tormenting.

By the time the little party left the Pawnee village on their journey home, a kind of truce had been arranged between McKeag and Jacques. The travelers would probably have reached Beaver Creek without incident, except that a band of Kiowa, invading from a remote area to the south where guns were not yet common, came to trade with the Pawnee for rifles. In the village was an agent for an English fur company, and he saw the Kiowa as a means to rid himself of troublesome competition, so he offered them two badly worn rifles and a bottle of cheap whiskey if they would pursue McKeag’s unprotected group and destroy it. The Kiowa, seeing a chance to obtain two children for their tribe, set out in eager pursuit.

They overtook the canoe at a barren spot in the river. McKeag and Clay Basket were already in trouble, for there was not enough water for paddling, and they looked with misgiving as the strangers approached. Prudently McKeag laid out his armament as Pasquinel had taught, hauled the canoe against a bank and reminded Clay Basket how to load the two guns.

The Kiowa halted a short distance away and launched an arch of arrows, which accomplished nothing. McKeag waited for them to draw closer, and saw that there were six in the party. His first rifle shot would be crucial. Taking careful aim, he held his breath as the warriors crept closer, then fired almost point-blank at the leader, killing him with much display of blood. As the others drew back, McKeag took from Clay Basket his second gun and killed a horse. Its rider fell and became tangled in the reins, and with his first gun reloaded, McKeag could have killed him, but he wisely contented himself with hitting the man in the legs. There was much shouting and confusion, and after a while the Kiowa withdrew. They had the beads and the whiskey; they had tried to kill the trader but that could wait till another day. Placing their wounded comrade on the horse of the dead warrior, they rode south.

It was not until they were out of sight that Jacques displayed the only casualty. A Kiowa arrow, launched at random, had come down in a sweeping arc to strike him in the hand, severing the tip of his little finger. Clay Basket found the arrowhead, sharper than a knife, and McKeag bored a small hole through the shank so that Jacques could wear it about his neck.

A half-breed child only seven years old, he had already been scarred twice, once by the knife of a white man, once by the flint of an Indian.

Pasquinel had such a good time in Saint Louis that he prolonged his visit. Lise surprised him with the information that she had sold the stone house on Rue des Granges in order to build a substantial brick house atop the hill, and when Pasquinel protested that no one would want to climb so high for a family visit, she assured him, “Soon all the interesting families will live up here. The Presbyterians are even building their church on this level.”

Life with Lise was more enjoyable than he had remembered, and sometimes he wondered why he ever deserted so pleasant a place to endure privation on the prairie. Hermann Bockweiss was doing well with his silver, but Pasquinel noticed that the prudent German was still using his profits to acquire pieces of real estate whose value would grow if the town expanded. It was this possibility that Bockweiss had in mind when he took his son-in-law aside and said, “Why not stay here permanently? You’re getting older. Your son needs you.”

Pasquinel replied that his job was in the mountains trading for pelts. “No,” Bockweiss reasoned, “you have a partner for that. Leave the trapping for him.”

Pasquinel gave this idea serious consideration, because it had logic behind it. McKeag with his languages was now the expert trader, and soon young Jacques would be old enough to help. Clay Basket? It didn’t matter much about her. Any Indian squaw who had learned to live with one white trader could easily catch hold of another, and as a matter of fact, one of these days McKeag would be needing a wife.

He had every reason to stay in Saint Louis. But in the end he decided against it. In December he was back in his canoe heading west, and when he reached Rattlesnake Buttes the customary emotional reconciliation took place and even little Jacques was happy again.

McKeag marveled at the ease with which Pasquinel switched from one of his families to the other and his lack of compunction about doing so. But when McKeag compared Pasquinel with other traders who also kept Indian wives, he had to admit that Pasquinel handled this problem with far more grace than any of them. The others always deprived one of their families, but not Pasquinel; he treated both equally. He loved Lise and was proud of the way she ran his house, and after his initial disappointment over the gold, he had come to accept Clay Basket as the superior woman she was. He strove to be a good father, and showed equal affection for his half-breed children and his white.

It was during a visit to his Saint Louis family in the autumn of 1817 that he made a crucial decision. Observing that Bockweiss had developed a large and profitable market in New Orleans and the smaller settlements along the Mississippi for his major silver pieces, he told his father-in-law, “It’s a waste of your time to keep on making trinkets for the Indians.”

“True,” the German agreed. “But where else would you get them?”

“I don’t need them any more. I’m through with trading. Going to trap my own beaver.”

Bockweiss frowned, for he had followed the history of other coureurs who had tried to by-pass the Indians and trap directly. They all ended with arrows through their hearts. “The Indians will fight you,” he warned.

Pasquinel shrugged. “Traders also get killed,” he said, recalling his own narrow escapes.

Bockweiss started to argue this point, but when he saw Pasquinel’s obstinate determination, he halted. “How many traps will you need?” he asked.

“For daily use in the rivers, fourteen. For spares, six.”

“I’ll buy them,” Bockweiss said, and with the traps taking the place of trade goods, Pasquinel set forth upon the adventure that would lure him and his Indian family deep into the Rockies. When he reached McKeag and Clay Basket he told them, “No more trade goods. No more trapping. We’ll get our own beaver.”

“What will the Indians do?” McKeag asked cautiously.

“They’ll fight us,” Pasquinel said. “They’ll probably kill us. But we might as well die rich.”

“Do you know how to trap?” McKeag asked.

“I know this,” and he showed McKeag and his sons a small bottle of castoreum. Early next morning he gave a demonstration of the trapping process.

“Set your traps about four inches under the surface of the water. Fasten one end of the chain to the trap, the other to a stick of dead wood. It must be dead or the beaver will stop there to eat. Then jab another dead stick into the bank so that its end hangs over the hidden trap. And on the end of this stick is where you put your castoreum. Like this. No beaver can come down this stream and smell that without coming over here to investigate. To reach it, he has to plant his feet right in your trap. Slam! He dives for deep water and the weight of the chain drowns him. You come by next day, one beaver.”

In January, February and March, when trapping was impossible, Pasquinel spent his time studying dams, calculating where the hibernating animals would appear when thaws came. While he was so occupied, McKeag took responsibility for feeding the camp, and with his thrifty approach, reckoned a day lost if he fired bullets without bringing down game. Turkey, antelope, buffalo calf, young deer—they ate well. It was also his job to cure hides; he made two good buffalo robes for their beds. To be prepared when Pasquinel started bringing in beaver, he spent much time in winter looking for aspen saplings, which he cut and bent into circles about four feet across, lashing the ends with elk sinew so as to form rigid frames.

McKeag became an expert in skinning beaver: a swift cut from neck to anus plus four quick cuts around the feet, and he had the skin off. With deer sinews attached to a long bone needle, he sewed the moist skin to the frame, using big looping stitches. At times their camp would have thirty skins hung to dry at one time.

McKeag also built the press, a most essential item, since the transport of two hundred pelts in loose form would have been impossible; they had to be compacted. Using stout logs, he constructed a rectangular box with vertical slits at each end. Into this box the sun-cured beaver skins were placed, and when the pile had risen, a long, heavy pole was dropped into the slits so that it rested on the pelts. McKeag now chained the thick end of the pole to stakes sunk in the ground; then he and Pasquinel, with loud exhortations and grunting, swung themselves upon the upraised free end, dragging it slowly down to earth. This compressed the skins into a tight and manageable bundle, but the contraption was more than utilitarian. It was great fun, McKeag thought, to be swinging aloft in the air with his partner, straining together in their joint enterprise and hearing him call, “Goddamnit, you skinny Scotchman! Pull your weight!” And both of them sweating and shouting and straining to make the free end of the pole touch ground. It was the best part of trapping.

The press could accommodate about eighty pelts, and when these were hammered into a bale, McKeag enclosed them in moist deerskin while Pasquinel sewed the seams. Such a bale was worth more than six hundred dollars and weighed about a hundred pounds, hard as rock and watertight.

They were good trappers, and with the help of the two boys they put together six bales that first year. They experienced no trouble with the Sioux; in fact, the only difficulty they encountered was with the Arapaho, and not because they were hostile, but because they were too friendly.

In the winter of 1818 Pasquinel decided to hole up at Beaver Creek, and using such logs as he could find along the Platte, built a snug sod hut, with logs at each corner and framing the door. He judged correctly that this would be a cold winter, so he directed his sons to bring in branches to line one whole side of the hut. Things looked good until the Arapaho arrived.

On a cold day in January, Chief Large Goose appeared at the door and said, “Cold. Cold. I stay here.”

“Wait!” McKeag protested, trying to bar the door.

“Warm. I stay here.”

“You can’t do this!” McKeag bellowed. He sent Marcel to fetch his mother.

“I stay,” Large Goose said, muscling his way inside. “I am her uncle.” Nothing McKeag could do dislodged this large Arapaho. The hut belonged to Clay Basket; but he was her uncle, so it belonged to him, too.

When the other Arapaho saw how comfortable Large Goose was finding his niece’s hut, another uncle decided to join them: “I am Red Buffalo. Her uncle.” And he pitched his robes on the floor beside Marcel’s bed.

McKeag was outraged. He spent some time arguing with the two chiefs, then informed Pasquinel, “Hell, they ain’t her uncles. They ain’t even cousins.” Vainly he tried to make them evacuate, but they pointed out that the winter would soon be over. They would be staying for only two or three months, and they persuaded another uncle to join them, which made the hut warmer than ever.

The three chiefs showed the boys how Indians made tipis and tracked buffalo, and impressed upon them the gallant history of their grandfather, Lame Beaver, and his many coups. Jacques was nine that winter, Marcel seven, when the three chiefs made the boys deeply and indelibly Indian. The boys were breeds no more; they were Arapaho.

Pasquinel saw the value of having the three uncles in the hut to instruct the boys, but he also saw that the voracious men were eating up his stores. They would see a jar of food and take it. Lead bullets were attractive too, and they could not resist tobacco. If they knew a friend whose buffalo robe was frayed, they filched one of McKeag’s.

“I cannot support the whole Arapaho nation,” Pasquinel cried one morning when he saw Red Buffalo going off with one of his blankets.

“They are my uncles,” Clay Basket said.

It got so that each autumn, when Pasquinel and McKeag passed through the Pawnee villages, they would ask first where the Arapaho were. “South Platte,” the Pawnee might answer.

“Good. We’ll go to the North Platte,” Pasquinel would reply, and it was at that special spot where the Laramie joins the Platte that the unfortunate events of 1823 occurred.

The hunting for beaver that year was not good. Trappers sent out by the English company had pretty well cleaned out the area and were paying Assiniboin to harass the Pasquinel camp. There were skirmishes, with Pasquinel forced to wound two of the Indians, and the winter was not easy.

What made it worse, Jacques Pasquinel was now fourteen and his father naturally wanted to teach him the secrets of setting traps, and as they worked together McKeag felt that he was being superseded. When the trapping yielded few beaver he grew edgy, concluded that young Jacques was not competent and began making pointed observations to that effect.

Scar-faced Jacques was a hot-tempered youth and did not propose to accept criticism from a man he despised. He wanted to fight, now, but his father dissuaded him; “McKeag is our best friend.”

“I don’t want him for a friend,” Jacques snapped, and in late March when a whole line of traps yielded not one beaver, he waited for McKeag to say something.

“Looks like the traps were set too high,” the Scotsman said.

Jacques leaped for him, but Pasquinel held him back. McKeag interpreted this as support and added, “From now on I set the traps.”

Jacques broke loose from this father and caught McKeag by the throat. “I set those traps right,” he said grimly, “and I’ll set them right tomorrow.” He threw McKeag backward, and the Scotsman would have reached for his knife had not Clay Basket intervened. Calming her son, she edged McKeag away.

The fight was merely postponed. Next day when McKeag prepared to set the traps, Jacques contested his right to do so. McKeag pushed the boy aside, and Jacques whipped out his knife. McKeag anticipated this and was ready.

Along the dark Laramie, flecked with cakes of ice, the boy attacked the man, silently but with deadly intent. Each knew how to handle a knife, how to trip and gouge, and each used this knowledge viciously. McKeag, as the older and more experienced man, should have had an advantage, but actually it was young Jacques who dominated, for he offset any immaturity with a hideous determination to kill this enemy.

In the middle of the fight McKeag caught a fleeting glimpse of the boy’s face as he made a thrust, and the Scotsman was terrified by what he saw: the awful hatred, the violent rage of an alien face. He had wanted only to teach the boy a lesson; the boy wanted to kill him.

Jacques made a clever feint to the left, threw McKeag off guard, then lunged at him, catching him solidly under the left armpit. Before the inexperienced youth could extract his knife—“Never drive it in to the hilt,” old-timers warned, “because it’s too hard to pull out”—McKeag caught his arm, flipped him over and landed him on his back. With a savage leap the Scotsman landed atop the boy, his knife at his throat. He could have killed Jacques then; perhaps he should have. In later years he would often recall that moment and visualize himself driving the knife home.

Instead, he rose, helped Jacques to his feet, then went into the hut. Even though he was bleeding, he packed his gear and prepared to leave.

He was nine hundred miles from Saint Louis, without adequate provisions, but nothing could persuade him to stay. Pasquinel came running after him, crying, “McKeag! Are you insane?” But McKeag kept walking south.

Clay Basket came too, begging him to wait, at least to let her tend his wound, and as she was pulling at him, with Pasquinel arguing, he stopped and cried harshly, “That boy will kill you all.” With that he vanished into the great prairie.

Word passed through the west: “McKeag has left Pasquinel. He’s trapping on his own.” This seemed an unlikely story, but in June of that year Pasquinel arrived in Saint Louis with three bales of fur and McKeag was not to be seen. Later the Scotsman came downriver alone, thin and angry, with only one bale. When he threw the pelts down at the Bockweiss office, the foreman said, “Mr. Bockweiss wants to see you.” He did not wish to see the German then, and left. But Bockweiss tracked him to his mean shack by the river.

“Can I speak to you, McKeag?” The Scotsman grunted. “Man to man?” Another grunt.

Bockweiss sat down on a box, cleared his throat, then launched into a discussion which obviously was not the one intended: “Did my men pay you for the pelts? Good. Do you need an advance?”

“I keep my own money … in the bank.”

“I speak to you as a father,” Bockweiss said, dropping his voice. “McKeag, does Pasquinel have a wife in New Orleans?”

“Ask him.”

“I’m asking you. I’m pleading with you to help me. As a father.”

“Never been to New Orleans,” McKeag said.

“Has he ever told you … You know him better than anyone else.”

In flat, unemotional tones McKeag said, “I’ve heard him say … different times … a wife in Montreal, at Detroit, in New Orleans. Also Quebec, I think. He was joking.”

Bockweiss rose and pressed his hands to his forehead. Then he sat down again and said, “You were at Fort Osage in 1816. When he stabbed that man.” Since word must have traveled to Saint Louis, McKeag nodded.

“Did he have an Indian wife with him? Two sons?”

McKeag pondered this for some time and decided that it was not his duty to report on his partner’s Indian family. Without replying, he rose to leave the shack, but Bockweiss caught him by the arm. “Please, I am a father trying to protect his daughter.” McKeag shook himself free, but Bockweiss barred the way. “I went to New Orleans,” he said brokenly. “I met the girl. They were married … she had papers … the children.”

With unaccustomed force McKeag pushed free of the German. He could not bear to hear ugly stories about Pasquinel, not what he had done in New Orleans or in Saint Louis either. In many ways the Frenchman had treated him badly, and his behavior toward Clay Basket and Lise was deplorable. But Pasquinel was the only solid friend McKeag had ever known and he did not propose to listen to gossip about him, even though the partnership was ruptured. Stalking down to the river, he climbed into his canoe and disappeared.

He became a forlorn man, prowling the prairies. He built himself canoes and kept his traps oiled. Where others failed to make a bale of pelts, he succeeded, and it was said of him, “He can smell castoreum better than most beavers.”

But he was alone, cut off from the few people he cared about. Some years he did not even bother with Saint Louis. Collecting what pelts he could, he would build his own press and operate it by his own weight, and if some other trapper chanced by, he would sell his bales for a pittance, allowing the stranger to carry them to Saint Louis for large profit.

The English company tried several times to engineer catastrophe for him, but he was trusted by Indians and they could not be paid to damage him. No trapper of that period was more accepted by the Pawnee and Ute, the Arapaho and Cheyenne, than this lanky, red-bearded Scotsman. He gave them honest counsel and helped them conduct their traffic with Americans. In 1825 he showed up in Santa Fe, translating for the Ute, but most often he wandered the land between the two Plattes, wintering sometimes at the Laramie, sometimes at Rattlesnake Buttes.

In the deep winter of 1827, when snow lay fifteen feet in the passes, he spent three weeks in his lodge at the bottom of a considerable drift without once seeing the sky. Then for the first time in his life he thought seriously of death. For the past seven months he had not seen or spoken to a human being, and now in the darkness he did not dare even to speak aloud to himself, as if the sound of a human voice might shatter his universe.

I can still trap for many years, he thought. I seek no trouble with the Indians. I doubt they will kill me, though they could. Perhaps some winter the snow will come extra deep. How it could be much deeper than this would be difficult to say; if a man could survive this winter he could survive anything.

The snow will keep coming and the world will be used up, he thought. There will be no water, no food, no air. How much water there used to be in Scotland! His mind dwelled on this, then returned to the conceit: No air.

Suddenly he felt closed in, as if the air were already consumed, leaving him to suffocate. He visualized himself at the bottom of a great drift, with the tunnel snowed shut, and a fear mightier than any he had ever known gripped him and he thrust himself into the tunnel and began digging furiously, throwing soft snow behind him as a dog does when digging underground. With superhuman effort, gasping for breath, close to suffocation, he burst from his snowy prison to find that the storm had ceased and there was no cause for fear.

Alone as few men have been alone, he stood at the entrance to his tunnel and surveyed his universe. The sun was brilliant. The sky held not a single cloud nor any bird. There were no trees, no tracks of animals, no sound. There was only snow and air, a cold, clear frosty air from horizon to horizon.

Wait! To the west, at a great distance, emerged the shadowy outline of the profound mountain, and up its side with immortal persistence climbed the little stone beaver.

“Aggghhh!” McKeag shouted in a meaningless, almost inhuman cry. “Little beaver!”

In his lifetime he had slain so many beaver, had lugged so many pelts to Saint Louis, but there climbed his only friend in all the universe. Neither the sun nor the stars nor the rivers nor the trees were his friends, but that little stone animal was.

All that wintry afternoon he watched the beaver, and as light began to fade and vast streaks of color shot out from the mountains, he wanted to delay the night, but the stars appeared and light vanished and the mountain was gone. He stood in the evening silence for some time, as the stars increased.

It was a night of overwhelming beauty, so silent that the fall of a final snowflake would have been audible. He knew that if he wanted to sleep, he must climb back down the tunnel, for to do otherwise would mean death, but still he delayed. The majestic dome of night lowered over the world, and the silence deepened.

With a great crash it ended. There was a cry, a violent cry torn from the soul: “Oh, God! I am so alone!” It was the voice of Alexander McKeag, forty-nine years old, a permanent exile from his home in Scotland, a voluntary recluse on the prairies.

He heard the voice as if it came from another. He listened, refused to translate its meaning, and after a while climbed dutifully down the tunnel and into his cave of darkness.

That spring the trapper who stopped by to pick up his pelts told him, “You ought to meet with us at the rendezvous.”

“I don’t care for Saint Louis.”

“No! Bear Lake, over by Snake River.”

Another party of trappers passed his way in early summer, lugging their pelts westward instead of to Saint Louis. “Where you goin’ with your pelts?” McKeag asked.

“The rendezvous,” the men said. “British buyers come up from Oregon.” They pushed westward.

For some weeks McKeag pondered this curious information—a rendezvous, men from Oregon, Scotsmen perhaps. He wondered if he ought to join the trek to satisfy himself as to what it signified, but his decision was made by others.

He was trudging home from an unsuccessful hunt for antelope when he saw approaching from the east an unprecedented number of men. They were riding horses and throwing such a clutter of dust that he could not accurately guess their number; there must have been at least two dozen, and they were not Indians. As they drew closer he saw that they were far more numerous than he had guessed. “At least fifty of ’em!” he shouted to no one. “And what are they draggin’?”

Actually there were sixty-three white men, all from Saint Louis, on their way to the rendezvous. They led thirty-seven horses loaded with merchandise for trading, and that remarkable thing he had seen was a heavy brass cannon capable of throwing four-pound iron balls. It was seated on a stout two-wheeled cart drawn by two ugly mules.

“What’s the cannon for?” he asked.

“You come to the rendezvous and see,” they told him, and they were off, singing an army song, raising a great dust in the sunset and taking a portion of his imagination with them.

“I’m goin’!” he said aloud that night, and by dawn he was packed.

He traveled north till he reached the North Platte. Holding to its southern bank, he headed west and in a sweeping arc dipped south across a pass in the mountains. That put him on the western slope of the Continental Divide; he was now on land controlled principally by England out of its headquarters in Oregon and by Mexico from its foothold in California. It was beautiful land, open and windswept, with prairies even more bleak than those McKeag knew on the eastern slope. The rivers were turbulent: Sweetwater, Green, Snake, Yellowstone, but the hills were rolling and much less severe than the Rockies. It was an amiable land and McKeag felt an easiness creep into his bones as he crossed it.

Traveling alone, he covered ground swiftly and soon overtook a group of four mountain men who had been working the western slope of the Rockies, north of Santa Fe. They were loud and violent, much given to drink and boastful of their mastery of the mountains. “How long you been here, Jake?” one asked another. “Three years,” the man replied. “And you?” they asked McKeag.

His face grew blank. How many years had he been on the plains? Thirty years, or was it thirty-one? A long time, a long, long time. He would not want to shame these lively men, so he did not answer.

“I asked ya, Red Beard, you a tenderfoot?”

“In the mountains?” McKeag asked.

“What else? The mountains.”

“I’ve never been in the mountains,” he said. He looked so weather-wise and his clothes so Indian that they couldn’t believe this. One of the younger men, well drunk on summer whiskey, grabbed him by the shirt and said, “Don’t you make fun of us, Scotty. We’ll break your back. How long you been in the mountains?”

“Never been there.”

“Then how long on the prairies?” the man shouted. “How long chasin’ beaver?”

“Thirty years,” McKeag said.

“Thirty years!” one of them cried in open admiration. “You musta known Pasquinel.”

McKeag caught his breath. Something in the way the man spoke seemed to indicate that Pasquinel was dead, and in the pain of that moment, McKeag acknowledged to himself that the only reason he was heading for the rendezvous was to meet Pasquinel. “Is he all right?” he asked in a whisper.

“All right?” One of the men bared his left arm to display a long knife gash, dating back but still lurid beneath the scar tissue.

McKeag fingered the scar, laughed thinly and said, “He was always good with a knife.”

They traveled together some days till they reached the Green River, and at night they told McKeag of their journey along the Arkansas, of Santa Fe and the western slopes and the high plateau. They seemed to have fought everyone: Comanche, Apache, Mexicans, Ute. “Of all the Indians we met,” one said, “the Ute know how to handle their horses in a fight.” They had a high opinion of that tribe and asked McKeag which he preferred. “Arapaho,” he said, volunteering no reason.

As they swung north toward Bear Lake, where the rendezvous was to be held—the word having been flashed across the whole west, from Oregon to Saint Louis, from Canada to Chihuahua—they came upon six different tribes of Indians heading for the month-long celebration: Ute, Shoshone, Gros Ventre, Snake, Nez Percé, Flathead. The newcomers were showing off their mastery of sign language, a few symbols covering the most meager ideas, when McKeag was greeted by a Ute from the eastern slope, with whom he fell into conversation. A Gros Ventre came up, and McKeag spoke to him in Arapaho. The mountain men were impressed.

“You a squaw man?” they asked.

“Trapper,” McKeag said.

They now mounted a small hill, and from its brow they looked down upon the shimmering lake and the extensive meadows which would house the rendezvous. Already two thousand Indians were camped there and more were drifting in from north and west. “Last year we didn’t have enough grass for the horses,” one of the trappers said.

“You been here before?” McKeag asked.

“Third year. This is better’n goin’ to Saint Louis,” the man said enthusiastically, his excitement heightened by actual sight of the locale. “Scotty, you’re goin’ to see more hellfire … And let me tell you one thing, if that little bastard Pasquinel tries to cut me up again …”

“Will he come?” McKeag asked.

“They invented this for him. He won’t be sober ten minutes in ten days.”

Another trapper broke in. “First year he came alone. Drunk all the time. Last year he brought his squaw. Labe here tried to fussy her up. That’s when he got his arm cut. Pasquinel had to fight eight different men during rendezvous.”

As they descended the hill, mountain men from various parts of the west recognized the four from Santa Fe and moved in to deliver messages from absent friends. McKeag stood apart, surveying the lake and marveling that so many white men had lain hidden in the hills, that so many warring tribes could convene in peace. He was about to rejoin his group when the air was shattered by a tremendous blast, so powerful that some trappers had their caps blown off.

McKeag looked about to see what had caused it. The men with the cannon had fired a blank to welcome the Santa Fe contingent, one of whom asked, “What’s the cannon for?”

“To scare Indians. Look!” His men had erected a tipi on an opposite hill and around it had piled a formidable collection of logs, on top of which stood a trapper waving a red flag attached to a pole. All the white men stared at the tipi, and scouts moved through the Indian section to be sure they were watching.

The man waved his flag for some minutes. Then a pistol shot was fired and he dropped the flag and ran as fast as he could down into a gully. At the cannon an artilleryman touched a flame to the fuse and jumped back. There was a loud blast, and a four-inch iron ball shot across the intervening land, took one dusty bounce and crashed into the logs, carrying the tipi some distance away, collapsing it.

A trapper from the north, excited by the noise and the good hit, let out a yell, jumped in the air and flung his arms wide in sheer exuberance. “Alllleeezzzz!” this Canadian shouted. “Anyone want the apron?”

He whipped out from underneath his Indian blouse a yellow apron. It was about twenty inches wide where the strings were attached, twenty-four from top to bottom, very colorful, very yellow. He swung the apron by one string, bringing it under McKeag’s nose. The Scot did not know what it signified, but one of the Santa Fe men did, and he grabbed the other flying string, ripped the apron out of the Canadian’s hands and tied it deftly about his own waist. Men in the area stopped to cheer, and one struck up a song, “Old Joe with a Wart on His Nose.” Soon everyone was singing and clapping hands, whereupon the man wearing the yellow apron danced a few pretty steps and pirouetted like a girl.

This delighted the Canadian, who swooped down upon the dancer, took his two hands and began a jig. Then he slipped his arm around the man’s waist and ran forward and backward in long, awkward steps. At the end of this maneuver the man in the yellow apron pushed his partner away, danced lightly about the circle and indicated another man.

This pair danced with some grace, the man in the apron still playing the role of the woman, and after some minutes they tried an intricate waltz, which went so well that the crowd cheered. The man of the partnership bowed and retired, whereupon the man in the apron minced up to McKeag, offering to dance with him, but the Scotsman flushed.

“I can’t dance!” he protested, and the aproned man slid gracefully to the next in line, who cut a good figure with jig steps, ending by swinging the “girl” high into the air, then around in a circle parallel to the crowd, lifting him one moment and dropping him nearly to the earth the next. It was a fine dance, and the Indians stood gape-mouthed, like McKeag.

The clapping had obscured a more somber noise which came from a brawl a short distance away. When it became obvious that a substantial fight was under way, the crowd moved there, and McKeag, pushed along against his will, saw with a mixture of delight and disgust that Jacques Pasquinel, now a husky lad of eighteen, was fistfighting with a man much older and heavier. It was a hard-breathing affair, with each contestant trying to damage the other, and after a series of blows which seemed to be about even, the older man struck one that gave him an advantage which he was eager to follow up.

Drawing back his right arm and cocking it for a major blow, he was about to finish young Pasquinel off when one of the watching trappers shouted, “Watch out, Emil. The knife.”

Feeling himself about to lose, Jacques had whipped out a long-bladed knife and was ready to close in on his opponent, but a friend of the fighter’s had anticipated such a move and had taken out a pistol, which he pointed at the young man’s head, shouting as he did, “Pasquinel! Drop the knife!”

Jacques turned to see who had called his name, saw the pistol leveled at him, and without a moment’s hesitation, dropped his knife and broke into a smile. Kicking the needle-pointed knife, he laughed, “Only play.”

“I know,” the man with the pistol said.

There might have been more words had not a wild shout arisen, whereupon a group of Arapaho on horseback came thundering in. They rode with crazy abandon through the encampment, throwing dust over all the campfires, then doubled back and crossed in the opposite direction. To his dismay, McKeag saw that the two chiefs, Large Goose and Red Buffalo, who had once eaten up his supplies, were in the lead, and he swore that this time they would get none of his gear … none. But he suspected that this might be an easier promise to make than to keep, for now Large Goose spotted him and reined his horse.

“Red Beard!” he shouted, running over and embracing his long-absent friend. “You got tobacco?”

“I have no tobacco,” McKeag said firmly in Arapaho.

“Yes, yes! Where’s your tipi?”

“I have no tipi,” McKeag protested.

“You sleep my tipi,” Large Goose cried, embracing McKeag doubly hard.

“You been drinkin’?” McKeag asked.

“Yes, yes! Everybody drinking.” He pointed to the east, where one of the Santa Fe trappers was peddling bottles of Taos Lightning. The world’s crudest alcohol was mixed with caramel, a couple of camphor balls, copious amounts of water, pepper and a shredded plug of tobacco. For twenty cents a man could make a gallon of the stuff and trade it for a hundred dollars’ worth of furs. The Indian who drank it did not die, but often wished he had.

The Hudson’s Bay Company, a Canadian outfit long experienced in the fur trade, did not allow its representatives to sell liquor to Indians, but there was nothing in its rules to keep the Canadians from robbing the Indians in other ways. It sponsored a custom that required an Indian, when purchasing a rifle, to pile beaver pelts as high as the top of the barrel; the Canadians produced a rifle with a barrel twelve inches longer than ordinary, then spread the rumor that it was this extra length that made it deadly.

A Canadian with the strong Scottish name of McClintock had opened a tent by the southern tip of Bear Lake and was buying in beaver pelts as fast as the Indians could unload them, and McKeag gravitated toward this area, wondering vaguely if there might be news from Scotland. After he had waited some minutes for the Indians around the tent to thin out, he edged his way to where a large bearded man in filthy Indian dress and matted hair was speaking rapidly in some north Indian tongue. McKeag caught his eye, and the Canadian stopped his harangue, pushed the Indians to one side and strode over.

“Name’s McClintock. You got beaver to sell?”

“Name’s McKeag. I sell in Saint Louis.”

“You’ll do better with me. Where you from?”

“Wester Ross,” McKeag said, giving the name of a remote and little-known part of Scotland. McClintock had never heard of it. “Are you from Scotland?” McKeag asked nervously.

“Never saw it. My grandfather, mebbe. Lived in Nova Scotia.”

McKeag was about to leave when the Canadian grabbed him by the arm. “Did you say McKeag? You the man who used to partner Pasquinel?” McKeag nodded.

“Pasquinel!” the Canadian bellowed, and from inside the tent the familiar, stocky figure of the Frenchman appeared. He was now fifty-seven, heavier, his hair grayed, a couple of front teeth missing. He had a new scar along his chin, but his clothes were the same: Indian dress that Clay Basket had made him, but with more decoration than before, red wool cap. He stood in the sunlight, holding a flap of the tent in his left hand, and stared at the figure before him. At first he did not recognize McKeag, for he was drunk, and the lean Scotsman felt a pang of sorrow. He was about to retreat, from natural shyness, when McClintock bellowed, “Pasquinel! It’s your old partner McKeag.”

The shroud of drunkenness dropped away from Pasquinel. His eyes cleared and he saw, swimming in space before him, his partner of long ago. “McKeag,” he whispered softly, “you come to a strange tent to find me.” He extended his two hands and stepped forward uncertainly. He stumbled and McKeag grabbed him. “Merci,” the Frenchman said gravely. “Il y a longtemps.”

Before McKeag could respond to this deeply felt welcome, the area was disturbed by two figures running at great speed toward the tent. “Father!” the lead figure yelled. It was Marcel Pasquinel, now sixteen, followed by Jacques. They rushed up to their father, and before he could protest, had stripped him of his two knives, each boy taking one and jabbing it inside his belt.

“It’s Emil Borcher!” Marcel shouted back over his shoulder. “If he starts again, we’re goin’ to kill him.” In a cloud of dust they disappeared, but within a moment they were back again, and Marcel was grabbing McKeag by the arm and swinging him around.

“It’s McKeag!” he shouted with real delight. Throwing his arms about the Scotsman, he embraced him warmly, then shoved him along to Jacques, who greeted him with less enthusiasm.

“Last time we were fightin’,” Jacques said.

“You’re bigger,” McKeag said uneasily. Then grasping for something to say, he asked, “Is your mother here?”

The brothers laughed at this, and Jacques said, “Here last year. Too many fights.”

“We’re lookin’ for a fight right now,” Marcel said. “Emil Borcher. He started it … had one of his friends come at Jacques with a gun.” McKeag thought it best not to say that he had seen Jacques attack Emil with the knife. They ran off, seeking more trouble, and that night when the brothers could not have known that McKeag was listening, he overheard Jacques telling a crowd of young bullies, “McKeag. He used to trap with my father. I had to drive him out of camp … cut him up bad with my knife … caught him in bed with my mother.”

McKeag felt so unclean, so humiliated that he wished the ground might envelop him right then to get him out of this evil place. I should have killed him years ago, he thought, and during the rest of the rendezvous he avoided the brothers.

For Pasquinel the turbulent meeting was heaven-sent. He was drunk most of the time, bought enormous quantities of good alcohol from the Canadians, who were allowed to sell it to whites, and danced and fought and chased Indian girls and sought out other Frenchmen to sing the traditional song of the voyageurs, “A La Claire Fontaine,” that haunting melody with words that caught the full meaning of youth and the start of life:

“Sing, nightingale, sing!

You have the singing heart.

You have the heart that laughs …

Mine is the heart that weeps.

Chante, rossignol, chante.

How long, how long have I loved you.

Never, never will I forget.

“Now I have lost my sweetheart,

Without any reason at all.

It was just a bouquet of roses

That I forgot to give her.

Chante, rossignol, chante

How long, how long I have loved you.”

Pasquinel bought the singers drinks. He was a generous man, respected for his ability to survive; old-timers knew how often he had stood alone against assailants. He was also the champion singer of love songs, the patron of the rendezvous.

But he was a difficult man, for he attracted trouble. He fought as often as the meanest-minded man at the rendezvous, and when McClintock, his proved friend, remonstrated with him about the behavior of the two boys, claiming that Jacques had raped the daughter of an Arapaho chief without paying, Pasquinel grew furious.

“Lie! Pasquinel always pays.”

“You do,” McClintock assured him, “but not your son.”

Pasquinel pulled back his right arm, launching a hard blow, which McClintock parried. Immobilizing the stocky Frenchman, he lectured him: “You warn Jacques to keep his fingers out of my ball and powder. He’s a thief.”

“By God!” Pasquinel roared, trying to strike his friend again.

“Tell him, McKeag,” McClintock said, thrusting the pugnacious Frenchman from him.

“How’s trappin’?” Pasquinel asked his old partner, forgetting his fight with McClintock as easily as he had begun it.

“The streams are beginning to lose their beaver.”

“Jamais,” Pasquinel roared. “You just have to go higher in the mountains.”

This started a long discussion, in which several mountain men participated. Those who trapped in the high Rockies agreed with Pasquinel that beaver could never diminish. “They hide in those lodges all winter making babies,” a newcomer said.

But the Oregon trappers, who had been working the rivers for a longer time, knew that McKeag was right. The beaver were thinning out. “Always farther up the river,” an Englishman from Astoria said. “Pretty soon you won’t make a bale a year.”

“Ah!” Pasquinel replied. “Last winter … Blue Valley … I make six bales … no work.”

“I don’t know Blue Valley,” the Englishman said. “I suppose it’s fairly high.”

“You climb … you climb,” Pasquinel said.

“That’s what I mean,” the Englishman said. “I’ll wager there are no streams above it.”

“Well,” Pasquinel began. He stopped, and across his face came a look of bewilderment which all could see, the confession that above Blue Valley there were no more streams. There was a moment of painful silence, broken by his hearty cry, “Ah! So long as men wear beaver hats, so long we have beaver.”

On the sixth day after McKeag’s arrival there was great excitement at the rendezvous. A teamster arrived from Saint Louis. He had come up the Missouri by boat, had disembarked at the Platte, and had brought his cargo over the pass and now to Bear Lake. It was an amazing cargo, so rich and varied as to allure the white man as much as the Indian.

There were penknives and jars of preserved peaches and new pistols and better knives and cloth and beads galore. There were shoes and smoked dried beef and cured pork and bottles of French wine and English brandy and Kentucky whiskey. There were little barrels of candy which the men grabbed for as if they were children, and hard sweet cookies, and forks and hammers and screwdrivers and dried chickens.

Whoever in Saint Louis had packed these twenty-two horses had exercised imagination of the highest quality, for when the goods were unloaded, there was something for every man, something calculated to stir the heart of any woman. When the horses set out, they carried stock worth four thousand dollars in Saint Louis. At the rendezvous they would sell for fifty thousand.

McKeag bought nothing, would not even look seriously at anything. He had so simplified his life that he had all he required; his lead and powder he bought at regular intervals from whoever was passing his lonely camp. To indulge in something like sweetened peaches was beyond his imagination. And yet at this rendezvous he savored something so enticing that he would ever thereafter be its slave.

In the late afternoon he was standing by a tent run by a trapper-merchant from Oregon, an Englishman named Haversham, the only man at the rendezvous in European dress, and Haversham asked, “Care for a cup of tea?” It had been a long time since McKeag had drunk tea and he said, “Don’t mind if I do.”

The Englishman had two china cups and a small porcelain pot. Washing the cups with steaming water, he took down a square brown tin, opened the top carefully and placed a small portion of leaves in the pot. To McKeag they bore no visible difference from the tea leaves his mother had used, but when Haversham poured him a cup and he took his first sip, an aroma unlike any he had ever known greeted him. He sniffed it several times, then took a deep taste of the hot tea. It was better than anything he had previously tasted, better even than whiskey.

What did it taste like? Well, at first it was tarry, as if the person making the tea had infused by mistake some stray ends of well-tarred rope. But it was penetrating too, and a wee bit salty, and very rich and lingering. McKeag noticed that its taste dwelled in the mouth long after that of an ordinary tea. It was a man’s tea, deep and subtle and blended in some rugged place.

“What is it?” he asked. Haversham pointed to the brown canister, and McKeag said, “I can’t read.”

Haversham indicated the lettering and the scene of tea-pickers in India. “Lapsang souchong,” he said. “Best tea in the world.”

Impulsively McKeag asked, “You have some for sale?”

“Of course. We’re the agents.” It was a tea, Haversham explained, blended in India especially for men who had known the sea. It was cured in a unique way which the makers kept secret. “But smoke and tar must obviously play a part,” he said. It came normally from India to London, but the English traders in Oregon imported theirs from China.

“How long would a can like that last?” McKeag asked, cautiously again.

“It’ll keep forever … with the top on.”

“I mean, how many cups?”

“I use it sparingly. It would last me a year.”

“I’ll take two cans,” McKeag said, without asking the price. It was expensive, and as he tucked his small supply of coins back into his belt, Haversham explained, “The secret in making good lapsang souchong lies in heating the cup first. Heat it well. Then the flavor expands.” McKeag hid the canisters at the bottom of his gear, for he knew they were precious.

The incident in this rendezvous which the mountain men would refer to in their camps for years to come started when Pasquinel got drunk and went among the tents shouting, “The Hawken is the best goddamned rifle in the world.”

This naturally brought wagers from the Oregonians, who used European guns, which in years past had proved superior to any American product. Recently, however, Jacob Hawken in Saint Louis had begun perfecting a rifle which was to command the plains, and men like Jim Bridger and Kit Carson had performed some commendable feats with it. The Hawken partisans felt that this was the year to pick up some English money, and a contest was proposed.

Negotiations led to so many arguments about rules and scoring that Pasquinel, drunk and impatient, halted the bickering with an announcement: “I show you how good the Hawken is.”

He had acquired, on his last selling trip to Saint Louis, a splendid example of Hawken’s work; he had been steered to the German gunsmith by Hermann Bockweiss, who had bought him the gun as a present. It had a thirty-six-inch barrel, which the English thought too short, and fired a .33-caliber ball, which they thought too small. Its metal parts were beautifully machined but the woodwork was only average. It was a better gun than it looked.

Pasquinel paraded his rifle for anyone to see, and the crowd expected him to try to perform some difficult feat. Not so. He called for his son Jacques and for an empty whiskey bottle. Placing the boy in a favorable spot, he handed him the gun and walked unsteadily about forty yards away, planted his feet firmly and put the bottle on his head.

It was William Tell in reverse, and men started taking bets as to the four possible outcomes: the boy would miss altogether, would hit the bottle, would wound his father, would kill him outright. The scar-faced lad raised the rifle, took careful aim and knocked off the top of the bottle.

The crowd applauded, but Pasquinel senior was not through. Returning to where men were congratulating Jacques, he took the Hawken and handed it to his younger son, Marcel. Holding the bottom part of the whiskey bottle on his head, he started to walk back to the target position, but now some sensible Englishmen protested that this was insane.

“He’s got to learn sometime,” Pasquinel called over his shoulder. Taking his position, he stared at his younger son. Marcel raised the heavy gun, steadied it, aimed carefully and pulled the trigger. The glass shattered, and Pasquinel told the crowd, “I said it was a good rifle.”

In the closing days of the rendezvous something happened which had a profound effect upon McKeag. One afternoon one of the Santa Fe men was wearing the yellow apron and numerous trappers had taken turns waltzing with him and doing improvised square dances they remembered from Kentucky. After a while he tired, held up his hands and said he had had enough, so the yellow apron was passed to an Englishman from Oregon, and he drew loud applause for his steps in English style. Half a dozen Americans volunteered to dance with him, and he displayed considerable grace as he tried to match their robust movements. It was agreed that he was excellent, but in time he tired, too, and passed the apron on to the first man he saw.

It happened to be McKeag, who was both embarrassed and confused. He knew little about dancing and certainly nothing about women’s steps. He fumbled with the apron, allowed it to fall, then picked it up and tried to fob it off onto someone else.

“Dance! Dance!” the trappers shouted, and someone tied the apron around his middle. Hands forced him into the dancing area and he stood there, looking quite foolish. A Canadian with a fiddle, knowing that McKeag was Scottish, struck up a Highland tune, and from his remote boyhood in the Highlands, McKeag remembered a rude dance.

He began awkwardly. Then his feet caught the rhythm and hesitantly started to respond. His body swayed. His head cocked saucily to one side and he began to recall how the steps went. Slowly and with an almost audible creaking of time’s joints, he began to dance, and the terrible isolation of recent years dropped away. In dancing he became whole again.

While he remained preoccupied with doing the right steps, he became aware that another person had moved into the area and he was afraid lest he make a fool of himself with a partner. Then he looked up—it was Pasquinel, drunk and ready for yet another exhibition. McKeag looked at him and perhaps his fear communicated itself, for Pasquinel saw that he was frightened and forgot whatever foolishness he had planned. Slowly his feet began to move in accordance with McKeag’s, and gradually the two men evolved a kind of harmony. What resulted could scarcely be termed a dance, for it had little grace and less rhythm, but it was the related movement of two human beings and those who watched treated it with respect.

As the dance reached its climax, with Pasquinel breathing heavily and holding his left shoulder conspicuously low, McKeag closed his eyes and allowed the music to command him, and for the first time in many years felt actually happy. “I was so lonely,” he muttered to himself, and he had barely said these words when he heard trappers shouting, “Give him air!” and he looked down to see that his partner had fainted.

When they got Pasquinel stretched out, with McKeag at his head still wearing the yellow apron, he opened his eyes and whispered, “The arrow …”

They called for some Arapaho women to tend him, and McKeag supervised them as they lugged him to a tipi, where they laid him face down on buffalo robes. Gently they massaged his back, feeling the sunken arrow and manipulating it into a position where it hurt less.

During the night Haversham heard of the incident and said airily, “Simple. Cut the damned thing out.” He was the ebullient type of Englishman who refused to admit that anything was impossible. “I’ve cut out many a bullet in me day,” he said enthusiastically. “Let’s have a look.”

He went to the Arapaho tipi and asked a squaw to hold a lantern over Pasquinel’s back while he inspected the ancient wound. “Don’t leave it in there a day longer, old fellow,” he said professionally. “I’ll cut it out as soon as we get sunlight.” With that advice he returned to his tent-store and honed a butcher knife to razor sharpness. Then he drank off a bottle of whiskey and fell into a stupor.

He was up at four, building a small fire in which he sterilized the knife. Placing a chair where the sun would strike it, he shouted, “Bring him over here.”

McKeag, the two Pasquinel boys and three Arapaho women carried the sick man to the operating chair. He was placed on it so that his arms hung over the wooden back. “Lash ’em down,” Haversham directed, and thongs were tied around his arms, securing them to the chair. “Legs too,” Haversham cried. When Pasquinel was properly trussed, the surgeon took his knife and neatly slit the back of his shirt, exposing the scar.

McKeag thought, He could of taken if off before he tied him down.

But the surgeon had moved to other problems. Washing his knife in whiskey, he waved it menacingly in the air to dry it. He then gave Pasquinel a large swig of the whiskey and took one himself. Patting the trussed man on the head, he assured him, “I’ve done this many times.” With that he stepped behind Pasquinel, studied his muscles, and with deep confident cuts, laid open his back.

Pasquinel made no sound. “Give him a pistol to bite on,” the surgeon cried belatedly, but this proved unnecessary, for Pasquinel had prepared himself, and the pain could grow many times more excruciating before he would react.

The back was now open and the arrowhead exposed. With the point of the butcher knife Haversham tried to dislodge it, but cartilage had grown about it and held it fast to the backbone and rib. “A little whiskey,” Haversham called, and some was poured over the fingers of his right hand.

Without hesitation, and with rude force, he jabbed his fingers into the bloody mess, caught the arrowhead by one side and worked it back and forth three times. “Hold your breath,” he shouted, and Pasquinel, sweat pouring from his face, fixed his eyes stolidly on the horizon.

With wrenching force Haversham pushed the flint deeper into the flesh, twisted it, broke the cartilage and tore it loose from its ancient prison. He thrust it before Pasquinel’s nose, and the Frenchman, seeing the mass of blood on Haversham’s hand, came close to fainting.

It was five-thirty in the morning and Haversham stayed drunk all that day, refusing to see anyone. Pasquinel, fortified by shots of Taos Lightning, recovered quickly and was stumbling around by nightfall. He was so grateful to the Arapaho women for helping him that he arranged a party and spent much money on drink and presents, but Haversham, the hero of the affair, did not attend. He stayed in his tent, appalled by the realization of what he had done. He had never cut a human being before: there was so much more blood than he had anticipated … the arrow had been lodged so tightly. In the end he had wedged his fingers under the man’s backbone. He could still feel the bone, and felt nauseated.

As the party grew rowdier, McKeag was approached by one of the Hudson’s Bay men, a voyageur from Montreal, who drew him away from the merriment. “Is Pasquinel your partner?” he asked. Since the honest reply would have to be “Yes and no,” McKeag equivocated, and the Canadian asked, “Is it true that he has a wife in Saint Louis?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t mean his Indian wife. Every man with good sense has an Indian wife—at least one.” He laughed nervously at his joke. “What I mean,” the Canadian said hesitantly, “is that in Montreal he has a real wife.”

“I doubt it,” McKeag said evenly.

The Canadian moved so that they were facing. “She is my cousin,” he said.

McKeag did not care to hear such news and tried to leave, but the Canadian held on to him. “He left her with two children. We have to pay the money.”

McKeag stared over the man’s head, but the Canadian continued: “You’ve been in Saint Louis with him. I know it. Does he have a wife there?”

“I know nothing of any wives,” McKeag said stubbornly. He left the man in shadows, and in that way the rendezvous ended.

During the next year, 1828, a series of events occurred, apparently unrelated, which had a lasting effect upon life on the plains. After this climactic year the beaver men would continue to move up and down the rivers for a time, but their disappearance was ordained. The boisterous rendezvous would convene each year for more than a decade, but its doom, too, was sealed, and even Alexander McKeag, so perceptive about beaver, would be involved in these changes without being aware of them.

It started during the winter at Beaver Creek. For some years now the beaver along this stream had been doing poorly. They had no aspen to feed on, and such cottonwood as persisted was poor. Good trees did not exist, for men had cut them down for winter refuges, and even puny trees were difficult to find, for the same men cut them for kindling.

Once there had been a hundred beaver lodges on this creek, each with its own dam, each with its yearly replenishment of kits and two-year-olds. There had been in those days so many beaver that a hungry Indian or a lone trapper could take what he needed without depleting the stock, and all had prospered.

Now the lodges were cleaned out, trapped dry. Year after year the avaricious trappers had raided the dams, drowning the parent beavers, killing the two-year-olds with clubs, leaving the kits without protection or food. The inexhaustible supply was exhausted.

The second event which determined the development of the plains occurred in London, where on a spring morning the young and fashionable David, Earl Venneford of Wye, found that his prized beaver hat had been badly soiled the night before when it toppled out of his landau while he was fondling the left thigh of the Marchioness of Bradbury. He stopped by his hatter to see what repairs were possible, for this was a hat he treasured. It fit him well and had been his favorite since his Oxford days. But now, apparently, its usefulness was ended.

“I could, of course, brush it well and get the sand out,” his hatter said. “But it’s badly worn here, my lord, and if I tried to repair it, you’d never like it. I’m afraid it’s gone, my lord, and that’s the sum of it.”

“You couldn’t replace that worn spot? With new fur?”

“I could, if all you wanted the hat for was shooting in the country, but not for London wear, my lord.”

“Then what’s to do? A new beaver?”

“We have a hat here … We’ve been experimenting with Messrs. Wickham. It’s a hat we’re sure will become the fashion.” He handed young Venneford a handsome deep-blue hat made of some new substance.

“This isn’t beaver,” the earl protested. “I’d not want this.”

“It’s a new style, sir. I assure you, it’s what all London will be wearing next year.”

“What is it?”

“Silk, my lord. French silk. Stiffer than beaver and easier to maintain.”

Venneford twirled the hat on his right forefinger. He liked the shimmering play of light. Tapping it with his left thumb, he liked the crispness. “This could be very attractive,” he said. “I could grow to like a hat of this nature.”

At lunch that day he showed his new acquisition to the ladies. “It’s silk. French silk. Very … what shall I say?”

“Fashionable,” the Marchioness of Bradbury suggested. “It’s very fashionable, David, and a heavenly blue.”

When word passed through London that David Venneford was wearing one of the new silk things from Paris—only the silk was from Paris, mind you, the workmanship was by Messrs. Wickham—there was a flurry in the world of fashion. Later when Venneford was married wearing one of the silk hats, of a shimmering silver-gray, a style was set, the fate of the monotonous brown beaver hat was sealed. A whole way of life on the distant plains of America was doomed.

In one of the coincidences of history, the beaver was largely exterminated in the mountains at the exact time when its pelts were no longer wanted in the cities.

“It’s not so easy to find pelts now,” McKeag reported to Bockweiss. He stayed in Saint Louis for several weeks, marveling at the changes that had overtaken it as an American city. Grand Rue was now Main Street. Rue de l’Eglise and Rue des Granges were now Second and Third streets, and wherever he went he heard that Bockweiss had bought this or sold that.

Lise Pasquinel, hearing that her old friend was in town, invited him to supper at her big brick house on Fourth Street, and after he had climbed to that height he saw what a splendid view she had. “The Mississippi runs for you,” he told her, but he became tongue-tied upon finding that Grete and her prosperous husband had been invited too. “I thought you’d like to meet old friends,” Lise explained, and the sisters were so gracious that they forced him to forget his shyness.

There was much talk of American military action along the frontier, as they now called it, and repeated questions about Indians. After supper Hermann Bockweiss stopped by, bringing the two Pasquinel children. Cyprian, a tall young man, aged twenty-four, appeared in a Parisian outfit: tight trousers, ornate vest, jacket, ruffled shirt, stock, pointed shoes and one of the new silk hats. He was a courteous young fellow and said he was helping his grandfather buy land. Lisette, aged thirteen, was a pert child, pretty in a French way, but firm-chinned like her German mother; she wore a princesse gown with the belt line of the bodice very high and the skirt flaring away in lovely patterns. McKeag could not help contrasting the civilized behavior and dress of these Pasquinel children with that of their half brothers on the prairie; they spoke English, French and German equally well. They were not deceitful enough to act as if they were interested in talking with McKeag; they scarcely knew who he was and were eager to be off.

“Fine children,” McKeag said impulsively as they left. “Pasquinel would be proud of them.”

This inappropriate observation produced a chill, but without obvious embarrassment Lise leaned forward and asked, “How is Pasquinel?”

“Hasn’t he been here?”

“We haven’t seen him for seven years,” she said evenly.

McKeag looked at her without speaking. How pitiful, he thought. No big fight, not even a difference of opinion. Just a fur trapper who got fed up with the city and left one day, a Daniel Boone asking the world to leave him alone. He felt deep compassion for Lise but could find no way to express it. Her brother-in-law broke the silence to ask, “What’s he up to now?”

McKeag reflected. What was Pasquinel up to? From the myriad answers he might have given he chose a strange one: “They cut that arrowhead out of his back.”

“Did they!” Lise cried.

“How’d they do it?” Grete asked. And McKeag went into such detail, explaining what the rendezvous was like and how the Englishman Haversham sold lapsang souchong, that any tenseness over Pasquinel was eased. Later he said with considerable infelicity, “I think it was after they cut out the flint … Pasquinel was drunk, but he stood stock-still and allowed his son—well, both of his boys—to shoot a whiskey bottle off his head.”

There was another silence, which none of the listeners cared to break. Then Grete’s husband asked quietly, “His sons?”

“Bockweiss knows about the sons,” McKeag said, but as soon as the words were spoken he realized that the old German had sought to protect Lise’s feelings by not telling her of the Indian family. Now, having betrayed the secret, McKeag felt that he should complete it. “They are younger than Cyprian,” he told Lise. “Marcel has possibilities. Jacques, the oldest, is a terrible monster. What might happen with him, not even God knows.”

Lise listened to this information impassively and refused to comment.

As McKeag started to leave, he noticed again how luxurious the house was, filled with fine things shipped from the east. “My children will be marrying soon,” Lise said. “They’ll live here at first, I hope, and maybe one of them will want the house and allow me to stay on.” She was a composed, gracious woman, the finest lady McKeag had ever met.

“Thank you for supper,” he said, and the way he spoke was so formal that she reached out and grabbed his hands, pulling herself to him and kissing him on the cheek.

“Alexander! We’re old friends!” And she dragged him to a different corner of the house and showed him the room she had built for him. “This is your room, Alexander,” she cried, pressing her fingers against her tears. “As long as you live, when you come to Saint Louis you are to come here … stay with us. There will be no more living along the river.”

She insisted that he move in that night, sent servants down to the shore to gather his belongings lest he go and not come back, and when his meager equipment was installed she sat on his bed, smoothed out her skirt and said, “Now tell me about Pasquinel.”

During that autumn of 1828 Pasquinel, Clay Basket, the two boys and their baby sister pitched their tipi among the red-stone monuments that lined the North Platte east of where the Laramie River joined. This was country occupied by the Oglala Sioux, a warlike tribe that Pasquinel liked, and while his sons rampaged with the young braves he held long talks with the chiefs, trying to ascertain whether they knew anything of Lame Beaver’s gold. They knew nothing.

He was irritated beyond endurance. He resumed the hard questioning of Clay Basket which he had conducted sporadically through the twenty-two years of their marriage, and one day, as she had reviewed once again her father’s life, he recalled something of importance.

“Didn’t I see in your father’s tipi a buffalo skin with paintings on it? His coups?”

“Yes, my mother painted it.”

“Where is it?”

She shrugged her shoulders and explained again that among her people, when a man died his goods were distributed.

“I know that,” he snapped. “But who got the picture skin?”

“No one.”

He could not accept this as an answer, and shook her. “What do you mean, no one?” he shouted, and she explained that at her father’s death the painted skin simply disappeared.

After a while he had to believe this, but then he had another clever idea. Let Clay Basket recall the incidents on the skin so that Pasquinel might reconstruct the places that her father had visited. It was a pleasure for her to visualize her mother’s beautiful paintings, and she ticked off the scenes.

There was the raid on the Comanche, but that wasn’t gold country. There was the victory over Never-Death, but Pasquinel already knew that land.

She went through the litany of courage, but could come up with only seven incidents, whereas even Pasquinel knew there had been eight. He badgered her, charging her with holding back the crucial information because she didn’t want him to find the gold … wanted to save it for the Arapaho after he was dead.

She punished her brain, trying to reconstruct her father’s life, and then, as she was making pemmican, she recalled a small painting in the corner, of her father cutting tent poles and fighting Ute warriors. “I know!” she called, and Pasquinel came running.

“It was when Lame Beaver went into the mountains to cut tipi poles. He had a fight with some Ute warriors, and I’m sure he took their pouches. And that’s where the bullets must have been.”

“Tipi poles, where?”

“Blue Valley.”

“We camped there,” Pasquinel shouted. “Damn it, we camped there.”

“That’s where it was. I remember the story now.”

It was much too late to shift camp to Blue Valley now, but all that winter among the bleak monuments rimming the Platte, Pasquinel visualized Blue Valley, and how the stream cut through the meadow, and where in the hills the gold might lie. Finding it became an obsession many times stronger than it had been when first he held the two gold bullets in his palm.

His life had not worked out well. Had he stayed with any one of his white wives he could have had a reasonably happy time of it; his many children were likable and he supposed they were doing well. But he had wanted to keep running; that’s what he was, a coureur de bois. The beaver had been plentiful and he had earned much money from them, but it was all gone now. What he needed was to find that gold—to climax his failures and his indifferent years with a grand exploration and so much wealth that men from Montreal to New Orleans would speak of him with enduring respect: “Pasquinel who found the gold mine.”

He would leave his Indian sons with the Oglala Sioux. They would be happier there; they were Indians now, and the Sioux would be glad to have two more braves. Yes, he and Clay Basket and the little girl would move south to Blue Valley as soon as the ice broke. The beaver? They could wait. It was getting more difficult to find them, and if he could locate the gold, there would be no more need for beaver.

McKeag, still operating alone, was not gathering many pelts either, certainly not enough to warrant another trip to Saint Louis. In the autumn of 1829 he had to decide where he would trap during the coming winter. He preferred to hole up at Rattlesnake Buttes for the cold months, then work the tributaries of the Platte when the thaw came, but even a cursory examination of those streams satisfied him that the animals were gone. Beaver Creek, which had been jammed with beaver when he first trapped it, had none at all, and the creeks farther west were little better.

He had no alternative but to abandon this congenial country and move into the foothills of the Rockies. With regret he said farewell to an area which had been kind to him and from which he had taken a modest fortune, now safely banked in Saint Louis.

Traveling on foot, he moved to the northwest toward a spot he had marked some years before, a chalk cliff which afforded protection from storms and had likely streams near at hand. There he found enough scraps of wood to erect the outlines of a hut and enough branches to keep a fire going.

It was a bad winter and he was soon snowed under. Drifts covered him and once more he lived at the bottom of a cave. Since he had survived such entombments before, this one did not cause apprehension, and there was one change which brought a measure of contentment. Each day at sunset, after he had crawled back into his tunnel, he brewed himself one small cup of lapsang souchong, and as its smoky aroma filled the cave, it brought visions of Scotland: he saw his mother at the peat fire, his father stomping in from tending sheep. Then, no matter how hard he tried to limit his thoughts, he saw himself in a yellow apron, dancing at the rendezvous, and Pasquinel stepping forward to dance with him—and he could no longer deny how much he loved this difficult man.

They had fought side by side and each had saved the other’s life. In long winters they had sat by meager fires, hardly speaking for days at a time. They had been loved by the same woman, that remarkable Arapaho. Above all, they had explored an uncharted continent. They were closer than brothers. They were children of the buffalo, inheritors of the plains.

Pasquinel had taught McKeag the meaning of freedom, of man alone on the infinite prairie hemmed in only by the horizon, and it forever receding. How pitiful the horizons had been in Scotland: a tiny glen dominated by one rich man and all terrified of him and his power. West of the Missouri there were no rich men, only men of courage and capability, and if a man lacked either, he was soon dead.

And yet, as McKeag thought of Pasquinel now, thirty-two years later, he saw all his faults, and he wondered if the Frenchman had ever really known the meaning of freedom. He had cherished the companionship of women, but he had always fled at the first sense of encroachment. He had loved his numerous children, but he had left them for his wives to rear. He had always been a man running away from something, courageous in physical battle, a coward in moral values. He had called it freedom, but it was flight.

McKeag, the tentative one, actually felt compassion for Pasquinel, who had arrogantly directed their ventures. He was sorry that so gallant a man had come to so poor an end, but at the same time he recognized that they were still bound together by the indissoluble bonds of dangers shared and work done. Suddenly he no longer wished to live alone. He wanted to share a tipi with Pasquinel and Clay Basket on the open prairie and to seek with them such beaver as survived.

He spent a week pondering what overt action this decision entailed: At the next rendezvous I will become partners with him again. Fortified by this resolve, he began to look forward to summer, and his snowbound cave became less oppressive.

So on a brilliant, storm-free day in March, as he climbed out to see whether spring was coming to the streams he intended trapping, he felt himself gripped by a force greater than any he had previously known. It was as if a great hand pulled him, and he heard himself cry, “Pasquinel needs me.” With irrational frenzy he packed what gear he could carry, lashed a pair of snowshoes to his feet and set forth on his difficult journey to Blue Valley.

The drifts were deep and the sun blinding. To invade mountains in such weather was preposterous, but he was convinced that Pasquinel had to be there, so he forged ahead.

Night fell, and he huddled in the lee of a rock, covering himself with snow to keep from freezing, but before dawn he resumed his trek and all that day clawed through drifts.

At last he found the branching stream that flowed down from Blue Valley, and now he was guided by the little stone beaver that climbed the cliff.

As he neared the plateau where the valley rested he had a hideous thought: Suppose Pasquinel is not here? Impossible. He would not think about that.

With a new surge of energy he clambered up the last rocks and looked down into the valley. With immense relief he saw that a lodge had been erected and that signs of life surrounded it, signs the uninitiated might miss: a branch missing from a tree, scuffled snow where an antelope had been shot.

Running as fast as his snowshoes would permit, he shouted, “Pasquinel! I’m here!”

He was close to the lodge before anyone responded. Then he saw that the door had been torn from its hinges, and Clay Basket stood on the threshold, holding a child in her arms. Clay Basket’s face was streaked with blood and she seemed to comprehend nothing.

“Pasquinel!” McKeag screamed into the unechoing snow.

Kicking off his snowshoes, he dashed into the lodge. There on the floor, face down, lay Pasquinel, his body riddled with arrows and his scalp gone. McKeag looked at him dumbly, then knelt to turn the body over, as if it might still contain life.

“Who did it?”

“Shoshone.”

“The boys. Didn’t they help?”

“Pasquinel left them with the Sioux.”

He took charge of everything, cutting the arrows from the dead body and preparing it for burial. He washed away the blood and brought in wood to keep the fire going. Before sunset he cleared away a patch of snow and hacked out a shallow grave in the frozen earth. There he buried Pasquinel, man of many wounds, many victories.

That night McKeag recalled that his partner had often predicted that some day the Indians would kill him, and they had. They had caught him kneeling to inspect the stream bed, turning over the gravel to see if perhaps this was where Lame Beaver had found his gold. They shot him full of arrows just as he was reaching for a glistening object. He staggered back to the lodge to protect his wife and child, as he had always protected the weaker in a fight, but they were away gathering wood, and he had died alone, as he always knew he must. In death he had two dollars and eighty cents and owed four thousand; the glistening nugget he had spotted was soon covered over with gravel.

For two uneasy days McKeag stayed in the valley, but then he was pulled by a sense of obligation back to his own traps, to his tunnel under the snow.

“Trap here,” Clay Basket said in a low voice.

“Your sons will care for you,” he said.

“They are gone,” she said. There was a silence, after which she said in a whisper, “I am alone.”

These words cut McKeag, for they were his words, thrown back at him. In confusion he tried to sort out ideas, but no order prevailed. All he was able to understand was that he no longer wanted to be alone. He acknowledged how wrong it was. He had climbed a mountain of frozen snow to regain a brotherhood he had once known, only to find that such brotherhood was no longer possible.

Could it be, he asked himself, that the mysterious summons he experienced might have involved not Pasquinel but Clay Basket? But he was afraid. He was deeply afraid that he was not meant to share his life with a woman, that he wouldn’t know what to do. He was especially afraid that she might laugh at him, as he had heard the Indian women laughing at other men.

For three days he wrestled with this ugly problem and almost convinced himself that he was destined to live alone, but as he looked up at the great mountain and saw the stone beaver forever climbing, he realized that men, like animals, must climb whatever cliff confronts them.

With new courage he returned to the lodge. “We’ll start down the stream today,” he said.

“In this snow?” she asked.

“My traps are down there,” he said.

“The little one?”

“She will be mine,” he said, taking the child in his arms. “Her name will be Lucinda.”

But as they set forth, and he realized that he was accepting responsibility for these two as long as they lived, the dreadful doubt returned. He put down the child and took Clay Basket by the hands. “You won’t laugh at me?” he asked.

“I will not laugh,” she promised.

CAUTION TO US EDITORS. The attractiveness of the rendezvous should not be underestimated. Pragmatic decisions relating to the political and governmental future of the west were made by the Frenchmen, the English, the Scots, the Americans and the Indians who met for informal discussion at these gatherings. It was the town meeting of New England, transferred to the valley and punctuated by gunfire, murder and the screams of Indian women being raped.

I have omitted some of the gorier details: the planned battles against Indians, a drunk whose friends doused him with a bucketful of pure alcohol, then set him ablaze and watched him burn like a torch until he was pretty well consumed, the woman visitor who saw with horror, after one epic brawl, four men playing pinochle and using the stiffening corpse of a friend as their table.

The rendezvous continued from 1825 through 1840, fifteen years in all. In 1831 it did not convene; the wagon train bringing the whiskey from Taos got lost and ended up three hundred and fifty miles off course to the east, where the Laramie River enters the Platte. Name of the mixed-up guide: Kit Carson.

The rosters of those attending each rendezvous have been compiled. Notables like Jim Bridger, N. J. Wyeth, Captain Bonneville, Marcus Whitman and Father De Smet abound. You might want to look into Peter Skene Ogden, the savagely anti-American Englishman after whom Ogden, Utah, was named, and Alfred Jacob Miller, the painter, who did some sketches of the 1837 meeting.

The 1827 rendezvous, which McKeag attended, had a distinguished list of participants: William Sublette, David Jackson, James Clyman and James P. Beckwourth, the famous black. But I think you might want to focus on the group of nineteen hardened veterans who came in from California under the leadership of Jedediah Smith; for me their names form an authentic roll call of the mountain men:

x Boatswain Brown

x William Campbell

x David Cunningham

Thomas Daws

x Frances Deramme

Isaac Galbraith

x Silas Gobel

Joseph La Point

Toussaint Marishall

x Gregory Ortaga

? Pale

Joseph Palmer

? Polite

x John B. Ratelle

x ? Robiseau

Charles Swift

Richard Taylor

John Turner

Thomas Virgin

These nineteen had one hell-raising time at the rendezvous; a few days after they departed, they were jumped by a band of Mohave Indians who had been suborned by the Mexican governor of California. Those marked with x were murdered.

On the other hand, the train of sixty-three men who brought in the cannon and the trade goods returned to Saint Louis without incident, carrying with them one hundred and sixty-four bales of beaver, valued at just under $100,000.

Photographs. Should you want authentic shots of a rendezvous, the citizens of Sublette County, in western Wyoming, recreate this raucous affair each year on the first Sunday in July. It convenes at Pinedale, and practically everyone in the area participates in an authentic, emotionally exciting remembrance of the days when beaver were prime and lonely men penetrated the farthest mountains in search of them.

Note: When trappers like Pasquinel and McKeag outfitted in Saint Louis they bought their stores from a son of Daniel Boone, who had set up shop in that city. Daniel himself did not die in that lonely cabin in 1816. He died four years later in 1820, continuing to hunt till the last.

Warning: Do not fall for the popular belief that bison bison bison took its American name buffalo from the fact that French coureurs like Pasquinel called the animal a boeuf, which degenerated quickly into boeuf-alo, hence buffalo. Good story, but unfortunately the early Latins called Europe’s similar beast a bubalus, which was corrupted in Late Latin to bufalus and from that to bufalo. The animal was never known in America during the historical period as anything but buffalo, and most westerners from 1750 to this day would be astonished to find that their regional symbol was really a bison.

Names. A voyageur was a man employed by Canadian fur companies to transport supplies, usually by canoe, to and from distant stations. A coureur de bois was an illegal, that is, unlicensed, petty trader in the backwoods who carried trinkets to Indians in exchange for pelts. A trapper was one who gathered pelts himself, without bothering with Indian intermediaries. A mountain man was the later but lineal descendant of any of these types.

River. Confusion surrounds the name Platte. Probably no river in history had been called by so many different names—at least thirty-one—of Spanish, French or Indian origin, but in each tongue at some point it was called “flat” river. In Spanish it was Rio Chato, in Pawnee the Kits Katus, in French La Rivière Plate, so named by the daring Mallet brothers Pierre and Paul in their 1739 exploration. Most wide of the mark was one claim printed in the 1860s that it was named by the Indians a few years earlier in honor of a white woman missionary named Platte. This is patently ridiculous because Nasatir reproduces a French map dated 1796 showing Rivière Plate clearly and accurately. But all this is of little moment, for if the Platte is a nothing river, it can survive with a nothing name.