De Leyba looked at George in wonder. “Verendrye?”
“Forty years ago, a French explorer.”
“Don Jorge, my friend! I did not know of this person.” He shrugged, a rueful smile on his lips. “I am embarrassed! I am governor of this territory and you tell me things I do not know of it! Ha, ha! Teresa, my sister, listen to this wizard of yours! This Cid!” He reached over and squeezed George’s upper arm, his favorite gesture of affection.
De Leyba belied almost everything George had ever been led to believe about Spaniards. He was warm, gentle, naive, and humble. He was an aristocrat’s orphaned son, who had suffered a plague of misfortunes in the Old World and at last had fled to New Spain with his sister and wife and two small daughters, to try to rebuild a life. Governor Galvez in New Orleans had assigned him to the remote post of St. Louis, where the previous administrator had died of fever. And just two months after his arrival here, this Virginian had arrived on the other side of the river, sweeping out the British presence and astonishing every living soul in the valley.
This invasion had made de Leyba and Colonel Clark natural allies—not because Spain harbored any love for American Rebels, who would rise up against a king, but because of her eternal hatred and suspicion of Britain. As governor, de Leyba was commandant of St. Louis’s garrison, and he was in awe of George’s conquest of the Illinois. Had he known how small and destitute George’s so-called army was, he would have been more awe-struck—but perhaps a little less comforted by its presence, since he saw the Americans as a buffer between his territory and the British.
Still more astounding to the Spaniard were the Indian councils that his friend Don Jorge Clark had been holding for two months at Cahokia across the river. From his stone mansion above St. Louis, de Leyba could see the hundreds of Indian campfires twinkling at night, and, when the wind was right, hear drums. The trader Vigo came to St. Louis every week with amazing reports from Cahokia: Colonel Clark by now had made treaties with a dozen tribes who had been carrying the tomahawk for Britain. Indians had been coming from as far as 500 miles away to see and hear this Long Knife chief, and he had orated to them, threatened them, made promises to them, and made friends of them. Most often, Vigo related, Don Jorge would convince them that they were fools to fight Britain’s war, that it was beneath the worth of true warriors to be used by white men. He did not want them to fight on the American side, but simply to stay neutral and keep out of his way as he drove the British from his country. The Indians, Vigo said, were amazed at such direct and forceful talk from a white man, and were spreading his fame even to the Great Lakes and into the plains of the Missouri.
As for himself, Don Fernando de Leyba considered himself fortunate to have stepped up alongside an extraordinary man, a man of destiny, at a most propitious time, and was excited at the prospect of helping him. Besides that, he liked this Don Jorge Clark better than he had ever liked any man, of any age or nationality. Here was a man who was as de Leyba imagined men should be: fair, cheerful, unafraid, tireless, and honest, and a patriot to his state. And almost unconsciously, then, when those first unexpected flickerings of passion between his sister Teresa and Don Jorge had become evident, Fernando de Leyba had begun to promote their affection. Rather than try to cloister his maiden sister against the attentions of a bold outsider, as a Spanish don would be expected to do, he had encouraged her to be kind to him, to play her gitarra for him in recitals and take his mind off the tension of the Indian councils across the river. Teresa had complied, and within weeks Don Jorge Clark had surprised and delighted de Leyba by asking him to permit their betrothal.
George turned now in his saddle and stretched his arm back toward Teresa. “Come up,” he said. “I want to look at this with you by me.”
She rode alongside and stopped, and they sat with the brisk fall breeze on their faces and looked into the valley.
This entrance of the demure Spanish beauty into his heart was one of the happy strokes of fortune that had befallen him since his arrival in the valley of the Mississippi. She seemed to him sometimes like a princess in a chivalric tale. His sway over the French people of the valley, their apparent devotion to him, his success in swinging the loyalties of those thousands of savages on the other side of the river—all these serendipities had bathed this whole region in an unreal light, and now finding himself in love with this almost ephemeral wraith of a virgin was like a part of the glowing legend he found himself living. He was so clothed in triumph and the admiration of the people around him that he might fairly have tingled with the sense of his own potency; yet Providence had played such a strong role in his successes that he had to feel as reverent as a crusader. There had come over the whole unlikely adventure a sense of magic, of enchantment; even his raw, rough frontiersmen seemed to feel it sometimes, the strangeness, the specialness.
Sometimes when George was standing in the shade of the great council elms at Cahokia, with the symbolic sword and war belts and peace belts in his hands, watching the fine, proud, handsome faces of his former brown enemies warm and soften in the smoke of peace pipes, he would look aside at Joe Bowman and Johnny Rogers and others of his officers and men, and he would see in their faces the same childish wonderment that he had used to see in the faces of his little brothers and sisters when he spun stories for them. These few soldiers of his knew they were in a perilous circumstance, of course; they knew that one wrong word or gesture under the council elms could cause the horde of savages to rise up and slaughter them on the spot. And yet they too, like the crusaders of antiquity, seemed to feel that they were safe within some holy spell, hardly able to believe what was happening to them and yet having faith that it would turn out well. It was a kind of spell George had to resist sometimes, with his own hardened frontier sense of reality. But the spell was on him this morning as he sat under the glowing clouds with a princess at his side, looking over a rich valley which he controlled as surely as might a king in armor. And Fernando de Leyba was aware of it, too; that was why he sometimes referred to his friend as the Cid.
And now, as if to add another dimension to the bright dream, George was here looking down upon a river whose name had always been mythical to him, and it was even more awesome than he had imagined it. He remembered a day only four months ago, though it seemed now to have been a day in another and a lesser era, when he had trailed his hand over the side of a boat and felt the waters of the westward-flowing Ohio with his fingers.
“Wait,” he told his princess and her brother, and he spurred his horse and rode down the steep bluff, through brush and high grass, down and down through dry leaves and deadwood till he was at the foot of the bluff and galloping across the bottomland toward the river.
He dismounted in a copse of cottonwood saplings, looped his horse’s reins, and strode out to the half-sandy, half-muddy riverbank. He waded out through the shoreside eddies to a place where a strong current ran between the shore and a parallel sandbar.
He stood there, in the cold water as deep as his thighs, and dipped that same hand in the current. He felt the water and looked upstream.
This water, he thought. Once it was snow on the Shining Mountains.
He looked up once and saw them all on the bluff almost a half a mile above him: Teresa and her brother, and the guards with their long rifles sticking up like the lances of knights.
He remembered the dream of the white-pillared house on a bluff above the river, and the lady in a billowing dress sitting beside him. He saw it again now, that vision, and now the woman had a face. A delicate, pale oval face.
He turned back to the river and looked down at his hand in it and thought of all the miles and of the land’s end.
Someday, he thought. Somehow and someday.
BUT SOMETIMES WHEN HE WAS AWAY FROM TERESA, ALONE in his cot in a guarded room in Cahokia, with the murmur of a thousand encamped warriors nearby, the enchantment would dissolve like mist and show him the thin, hard lines of reality.
His army, never a fo
urth the size it pretended to be, was now reduced by expired enlistments to some seventy men and officers, and these were divided between Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and Vincennes. When George was not counciling, he was trying to run his newly conquered empire by pen.
The Illinois Regiment was suffering from want of clothing and shoes and supplies, and winter was nigh. So far there had been no word from Governor Henry in Williamsburg. George did not even know whether Montgomery’s party had got east alive with Rocheblave. George had also sent a courier named Myers directly to Henry, bearing written reports of the conquest and a desperate plea for men and money and provisions. But he did not know whether Myers had gotten there, either.
As there was no money, everything had to be got on credit: cloth, blankets, leather, flour, salt, beef, rum, tobacco, and such services as blacksmiths, physicians, and even washerwomen, had to be got on the credit of the State of Virginia. The villagers and merchants in the valley were happy to provide all these for their new allies, but not free. They did not know the State of Virginia itself, but they had enough faith in its Colonel Clark to accept his personal signature on their bills. Soon, George hoped, Governor Henry would send money and troops to enable him to hold this vast territory which he had secured so handily. In the meantime, the Kaskaskia garrison would send bills up to Cahokia, and George would sign them for Virginia, and the bills would be sent back down to Kaskaskia so the purchases could be made. But with each authorization, George would admonish his officers: “Keep purchases at a minimum. We must live spare, being so far from the resources of the Mother State. Above all, keep a notation of every expenditure, however small.”
He constantly reminded his officers wherever they were to keep the strictest discipline. “Every man is under scrutiny by French, Spaniards, and Indians. Challenge them to be a good emissary of our country,” and not to reveal how few they were. “We play mockingbird, making so many sounds they’ll guess we’re hundreds.”
And at Cahokia the councils continued, in the shadow of the great ancient Indian mounds, and the fame of the Long Knife spread through the vast Middle Ground, and George knew that the Hair-Buyer, the Englishman on the other side of the chessboard, surely was finding fewer and fewer Indians who would hire out to ravage the frontiers. For George, that sense of performing a sacred duty continued to grow, and to enchant the whole adventure.
And yet there were these moments of clarity, when he would lie awake in his lonely cot in Cahokia surrounded by the Hair-Buyer’s former mercenaries, and the parade of Indian faces would fade, and through his satisfaction would penetrate the feeling that he was holding up his whole shaky empire with nothing but words: with nothing but the signature G.R. Clark on treaties and commissions and vouchers, and the breath of his speeches.
CAROLINE COUNTY, VIRGINIA
Thanksgiving Day, 1778
THE CLARK FAMILY TABLE HAD THREE EMPTY PLACES THIS SECOND Thanksgiving Day, but there was much cause for thanks: everyone was surely safe for a while.
Johnny was alive. Word had come that he was a prisoner of war, and that, as late as last summer, he was still living. He was on a prison ship anchored off New York, which, to the family at home, seemed a fairly safe place during the war. Perhaps it was not a good and healthful place to be; Mister Freeman down the road had been informed that his son Mike had died on a prison ship, of putrid fever. But the Clarks could pray that Johnny was on a better-kept ship. Maybe he was well. Maybe.
Jonathan was absent again this Thanksgiving, but he and Bill Croghan were apparently in a state of relative security for the winter. Both armies were settled in for the season. Jonathan was now second in command of a regiment commanded by Colonel Light Horse Harry Lee, encamped somewhere in New Jersey near Washington’s headquarters. Bill Croghan had become a regimental adjutant.
As for George, he too probably was safe from harm. Judging by all the news about him that had trickled east over the mountains, he was very much in control of everything in that remote region, and had made treaties with most of the tribes that before would have threatened his garrison. And so, for the first time in many years, the family thought it did not have to worry so much about George.
Another blessing to be thankful for, in Ann Rogers Clark’s mind, was that daughter Annie for a change was not with child. Shortly after baby Samuel’s birth, Owen had gone away to serve in the Continental Army, and so Annie was having a respite. She was here at home with her family; her two toddlers and the baby were here with her, but at least she was not pregnant, and probably would not be for a while—unless Owen should manage somehow to get a winter furlough.
The fowl on the table this year was the yield of Billy’s rifle instead of Edmund’s. Edmund had shot four turkeys in the week before Thanksgiving, but they had been served in other ways on other days, and Billy’s first kill had the place of honor in the middle of the table. He was very proud of it, and referred to it several times during the meal as “my turkey,” and with a benevolent smile kept watching everybody eat. They all were aware of his eyes on them and had the tact to eat it with apparent relish, and say “yum,” and smile back at him, although it was in actuality rather a tough and scrawny old bird that probably would not have lived through the winter even if it had not caught Billy’s bullet.
Edmund knew his own turkeys had been fatter and more tender, but he was so proud of what he had taught Billy about hunting and shooting that he really was as pleased as Billy that this one was on the table, and he grinned as he chewed and chewed and chewed.
Billy Clark in his eighth year had been doing men’s work on the plantation, and now he had also begun to put game on the table, so he not only felt worthy, he also was happy in the knowledge that, for another year at least, he was not going to be sent to Parson Robertson’s school. This pleased him. His brother George, he knew now from all the family stories, had been a misfit in that school, and so Billy knew quite well that he would have been likewise if he had had to go there.
Thus the family was happy and content this Thanksgiving Day, and the only foreshadowing was Dickie’s enlistment. He had, with his father’s reluctant permission, signed to go with Lieutenant John Montgomery when and if Montgomery could raise a company of reinforcements to take back out West to George. Governor Henry had gotten the Assembly to authorize such a company after the news had come of George’s success in the Illinois. But recruitments had been slow because manpower was scarce, and so Dickie was here for one more holiday, waiting. One thing John Clark could be thankful for was that delay; with the rivers freezing now and the mountain passes filling with snow, it appeared that Montgomery would not be able to set out until spring thaws. And so son Dickie too was safe for a while to come.
They talked long after dinner about George in the West. Each member of the family had images of what his life must be like now that he was a conqueror.
“He lives in a palace,” said Fanny. “He sits on a throne, and servants bring him meat and bread to eat. And when he’s full, he gives the rest to the Conquered, who eat it all up greedily. And the Conquered love him because he doesn’t make them starve.”
The family always sat bewildered when this doll-like five-year-old was giving one of her perfectly enunciated recitations like this, not just because her speech was so precise and certain, but also because her imagination was so vivid. In her mind, the Conquered were a people who crawled on all fours and fawned at the feet of her brother.
“He doesn’t live in a palace,” Elizabeth now tried to correct her. “Out in the West all they have to make houses with are grass and animal skin and strings.” To Elizabeth, the main image of the West was the great prairie they had crossed in John Montgomery’s account.
“It is so a palace,” replied Fanny. “It’s made of gold the Spanish gave him so he would be kind to them. The Spanish are afraid he will conquer them if they aren’t polite. In his palace he has a waterfall with a statue in it. He also has a cage with a whippoorwill bird in it to sing him to sleep at night, for he is q
uite homesick, you may be sure.”
“He doesn’t need a whippoorwill to sing to him,” Billy scoffed. “He can sing whippoorwill songs better than the whippoorwills can. Isn’t that right, Mama?”
“As well,” Mrs. Clark said. “I don’t know about better, but he sounds just like them.”
“You promised to tell us ever so long ago about Georgie and Grandmama Rogers and the whippoorwill song,” Elizabeth reminded her.
“So I did.” Ann Rogers Clark could see that her little ones’ images of George were becoming fantastical, so she decided to tell that story, in which George himself had been a child of the family. “All right, then. Now, you remember I told you all how your Grandpapa Rogers would come to call on your good Grandmama before they were married?”
“In a canoe,” said Elizabeth.
“And he’d whistle like a whippoorwill,” said Billy.
“And she went a thousand times to the willow tree when a real bird sang, because she was in love,” said Fanny.
“Aye. And she was in love all of her life, right up to the very last day,” said Mrs. Clark, “and he with her just as much so. Well, you know that your Grandpapa taught Georgie a great part of what he knows.”
“To survey,” Billy piped up. “Making lines on the land.”
“And he also taught him to make that whippoorwill call. That was one of the first things Georgie learned from his Grandpapa Rogers, and he did learn it well. I swear that Georgie would sit on the roof of the house outside his window at night, and carry on a conversation with the whippoorwills out beyond the fence. Jonathan used to complain—remember this, John?—that he couldn’t study for all the bird calls outside his window?”