But there was some news that gripped Drouillard: a prophet had risen among the Shawnee people, back in Ohio, and Governor Harrison was alarmed because Indians of all nations were flocking to hear the Prophet’s words. It was rumored that the Shawnee Prophet had made the sun go dark at noon last spring, to prove his medicine powers. What troubled Governor Harrison was that the Prophet had built a pilgrim town in Ohio, land the whites said they owned by treaty.
Drouillard lay on the cot in the hot St. Louis night, sipping brandy, oppressed by the square confines of the room, but his spirit was stirred by that rumor. Were the Shawnees in Ohio not quite defeated after all? He wondered what his uncle knew of that, what he thought of it. What would the Shawnee Prophet be saying? Should I go there? he wondered.
Through a window came the street sounds of the American whitemen’s town: Jew’s harps, angry taunts, loud oaths, breaking bottles, screams, iron-shod hooves, whores’ laughter, drunks caterwauling bad songs.
Yes, there was even a voice he recognized: Private Whitehouse singing drunkenly:
“Ohhhh, my cap’n has wind! Now hold your nose
While he blows his farts through his bullet holes!”
When Drouillard went to Pierre Chouteau’s grand house the next morning, he found Big White filling a whole wide bench, bewildered but gracious, receiving the homage of a crowd of curious St. Louis townspeople, their false flatteries being translated by a puffed-up and proprietary Jessaume. The captains were transformed: clean-shaven, red hair washed and gleaming, neatly queued. They were in clean lace shirts, white breeches and boots, but their eyes were puffy with fatigue. Lewis no longer limped from his wounds, but this morning he was walking with a pained hobble.
“Strangest damn thing,” Clark said to Drouillard, shaking his head. “Could not sleep on a feather bed! All those years on the ground, I guess.” He laughed. “We finally got down on the floor and dozed a little. But we had to get letters written, so we were up early. Take these to Mr. Hay. He’s the postmaster at Cahokia, and he’s expecting them before noon. This is Captain Lewis’s letter to the President, this one’s mine to Governor Harrison, and these are to my friends and family in Kentucky. These are the first accounts of our return, so do impress upon Mr. Hay that they are extremely important. All right, then? And you, Drouillard. Did you celebrate with the boys last night? Y’ look pretty chipper.”
“I slept deep, Cap’n. No writing in my head.”
Clark chuckled. “From what I hear, our boys behaved fairly well last night, no mayhem to speak of.”
“Well, sir. See how they do when they’ve been paid out.”
They laughed. York, toting a tray, nodded sadly at him. Lewis said, “In regards to pay, George, keep this to yourself, and don’t count on it till you see it. But we’ve discussed your performance of duties and we intend to petition the States for extra pay for you, five dollars a month over what we agreed. You were our civilian, but you were an example of duty and discipline to every soldier we had. Now, better hurry. Mr. Chouteau’s got a boat and oarsmen waiting for you at his establishment at the quay.”
“Cap’n Clark, Cap’n Lewis, I … I do thankee.” He was moved.
“We’re not through with you, George Drouillard. Before you make other plans, talk to us,” Lewis said.
And Clark said, “We’ll have better lodgings for you when you come back from Cahokia. Pascal Cerré and his family told me they would be honored to have you as guest.”
Drouillard strode down the street, stepping carefully to avoid the outflung night waste from St. Louis’s finest imported French porcelain chamber pots. He knew who the Cerrés were. Merchants and lenders. They had been helpful to Captain Clark’s brother during the Revolution. It was remarkable how rich men gathered around an opportunity to become richer. Like buzzards over a kill.
He turned onto the riverfront, which was crowded with merchants and boatmen, voyageurs, soldiers, town Indians and other beggars, black laborers, fishermen, ladies, and tarts and bawds with their graduated shades of respectability. He passed, hearing talk of prices and politics, but the talk was mostly about the expedition just returned from the far places. Many an eye glanced at him, at his handmade leather clothes, breechclout, weapons. Some probably recognized him as one of those travelers. Then they would look at his face and see that he was an Indian, and look past him.
“Bonjour, M’sieu Drouillard,” said a familiar voice. There in the door of a storefront, hands on the lapels of his waistcoat, stood Manuel Lisa, short, dark and handsome, nodding and smiling that smile with one corner of his mouth turned down. He stopped out and offered his hand. “Bienvenue, et félicitations.”
“Merci, M’sieu Lisa.”
“I hear marvelous things.”
“Eh. So.”
“I do hope you remember, though it was long ago that I had the pleasure of your company, that I invited you to visit me upon your return? That invitation remains fresh and sincere. At your convenience, of course. I should enjoy to hear about the mountains, and the tribes there. And your achievements.” He watched Drouillard with dark, keen eyes, and glanced at the letter pouch, as if he had already guessed everything about it. Then he raised a finger. “Ah, ami, I nearly forgot; I have word for you from your uncle, Lorimier.…” That was a surprise; the two scarcely tolerated each other. But of course three years had passed, and things must have changed since this place had become America. “He presumed that I might see you on your return before he would,” Lisa said. “This message was months ago, let me remember … ah, yes. That your father’s widow, ah …”
“Angelique? What?” He was afraid of the news; it would mean that all his half brothers and sisters were orphans and would be even more needful.
“That she remarried. Actually, it was before you left, but of course the letter didn’t come until you were gone. He said to tell you the new husband is substantial; they want for nothing. Your uncle holds the letter for you, but he wanted me to tell you if I saw you first.”
Of course, he thought. So that I wouldn’t send off more of my pay, since they don’t need it now. In fact, didn’t need it when I sent it.
“Thank you, m’sieu, for remembering so well, with all you have on your mind.”
“I have much on my mind, mon ami. Especially now that you and your American captains are safely returned. I am very eager to talk with you.”
“I am on an errand just now, but, soon.”
“Until then.”
“Until then.”
He sprang ashore from Chouteau’s boat on the Cahokia side of the river and dismissed the rower. He delivered the letters, and the admonition about their importance and urgency, to the postmaster, who had detained a boat for them. Obtaining a receipt for the letters, Drouillard walked out of town on the river road. He remembered coming along this road in a sleet storm, bringing up the soldiers from Tennessee, nearly three years before. Not a day like this. It was hot and steamy in the Mississippi Valley today, and the giant oaks and elms and sycamores, the profusion of greenery and shade, wavered in the moist haze, nearly overpowering after all the emptiness of the Great Plains.
He went along past cabins and farms and fields of stumps, then turned off eastward along an ancient path worn into the ground long ago but unused now, and passed along through woods and fields, watching the birds and small game fly and skitter out of his way. For a while he thought of the matter of that money he had sent where it wasn’t needed, thought of his half siblings with their new stepfather, thought of Lorimier being in touch with Manuel Lisa. He thought of the letters he had just sent off, of the great stir they would cause across the whole country when they were published in the newspapers. The captains expected to be the most famous men in the United States. He knew they were expecting glorious rewards. He had heard them talking and planning all the way down the Missouri in the white pirogue, while Lewis’s wounds healed, hurrying so that they seldom let anyone ashore to hunt, some days eating nothing but sweet pawpaws.
/> The captains had their foothold in the West, and intended to profit by it. Already coalescing around them in St. Louis were the principals of a fur trading company that would replace the British on the Upper Missouri, now American country. They would cut the Sioux out of the commerce entirely until they learned to cooperate. The captains spoke of bringing their own families into the company. Lewis had a younger brother named Reuben who could use an opportunity like this to help build the family fortunes. Clark had older brothers who were already successful businessmen in Louisville, not as famous as the Town Burner brother, but more wealthy. Lewis intended to publish an account of the great journey and make a fortune from that. They were full of grand ideas, confident that their achievements would bring them the approval and gratitude of the nation, and the President himself was their greatest champion. They had suffered to open the West, and hoped for just rewards.
And in their minds, it seemed, Drouillard himself fit in somehow.
The old path led him through a glade of perfectly level ground. He stopped in the middle, aware of an utter silence: no birdsong, no rustling of creatures, not even the hush of a breeze in the surrounding treetops. He felt through his moccasin soles a vibration in the ground. It felt something like the drumming of the great waterfalls of the Missouri, but there was nothing to hear.
There has been something sacred here, he thought, in the time of the ancient ones. He rubbed tobacco and sprinkled it on the ground.
Then he went on, toward the sacred place he already knew. Its slope rose in front of him, and he started up, climbing the mound among the trunks of the old trees. Very little sunlight penetrated the canopy of leaves, but beams here and there dappled the ferns and the little leaves of the crow’s-feet, the trout lily, that grew among and around the tree roots.
He reached the level summit of the mound and went to the place where he had built a fire and stayed on a drizzly night almost three years before. And where, as a boy long ago, he had come to find his Spirit Helper.
He found the fallen tree against which he had sat all that rainy night. It was more mossy now, and had decayed a little farther into the ground. Much of it had been clawed to punky shreds by a bear seeking grubs. Black bear. Man’s brother. He thought of the grizzly bears on the plains who had fought back when the soldiers made war on them. It was good to be back with black bears. He wondered how much a bear knew of the ancient spirits here, whether the spirits sang to them too. He thought they probably did.
When he had come onto this mound that rainy night three years ago to see what the old spirits would tell him, he had not known what their answer was, only that they had told him something. Then he had made his own free choice to go across the land. And when he was out there he saw the people living as the old ones had lived, going where they pleased because there were no whiteman lines they couldn’t cross.
He stood here on top of the mound and thought of the Shawnee Prophet he had heard of, he who ignored the whitemen’s lines and called the Indians back to the Shawnee homelands.
He stood on the top of the mound and filled his pipe, then rubbed some of the punk wood of the old tree between his fingers until it was powder and sprinkled that on top of the tobacco in the pipe, so it would catch fire quicker when he focused his burning glass in it. When the smoke started, he turned to all the directions, and smoked in the silent sunbeams, with the smoke curling up in shapes in the beams, and in the smoke he saw again the shape of the old one with something hanging in the center of his forehead. The breeze moved the leaves in the treetops, and he heard the faint songs. And it was as he had remembered: these were the same songs he had heard the gray-haired Nez Perce woman sing, the woman who had cut her arms and bled. The songs said one thing to an Indian of any time.
It was this: Creator gave this land to the Real People. The visitors are much trouble, but they are only passing through.
PART FOUR
May 1807–May 1810
the killing was perpetrated thro’ express malice … it was murder in the fullest and most strict sense of the term.
—John Scott, attorney general of the
District of St. Louis,
against George Drouillard,
accused murderer
September 23, 1808
Chapter 26
Mouth of the Osage River
May 14, 1807
Drouillard remembered this place. He had hunted here in the rain, in 1804, on the way up. It was a high tongue of land between the Osage and the Missouri. In the point stood a high limestone bluff, with some of the old mounds on top. Manuel Lisa knew the place too. He had traded with the Osage tribe for a decade and had been here often.
“Shall we climb up and see the old mounds?” Lisa suggested. The Spaniard was more pleasant to Drouillard than to any of his other men—but still patronizing.
“I would like to see them again. Hey, Potts! Weiser!” he called down to the boats. “Remember this place? Let’s go up.” The two ex-soldiers trotted up from the riverbank, grinning. The trader looked annoyed that the two mere employees would join their climb, but he was aware that they were Drouillard’s old compatriots and said nothing. The two men always had wads of tobacco in their cheeks.
Drouillard was an investing partner in this voyage, as well as the one who had all the knowledge needed for its success. He had emerged from the Voyage of Discovery a rather well-to-do Indian. He had even bought a hat. It was black, and he wore it with the brim pinned up on the rifle-aiming side. Congress had voted to double his expedition pay. He had collected his bets from the soldiers. He had bought Collins’s and Whitehouse’s land grants, then soon sold them, with his own, for twice their original value. Aside from his old three hundred dollar debt to Frederick Graeter, which he hadn’t got down to pay off, Drouillard was “worth,” as whitemen put it, more than four thousand dollars. By the end of this new venture, if all went well, he’d be worth twice that. He had never dreamed that twenty-five dollars a month interpreter pay would swell into such a fortune.
When they reached the summit, Lisa looked around, puzzled. All the trees lay dead and brown in the undergrowth, bark falling off, chopped stumps still standing. “What’s happened here?” he asked. “Who—”
“Me,” Weiser said. “Me and about six others. Cap’n Lewis had us clear it so he could use his sky insterments. They’d always get a fix on things whenever we come to a big river or somethin’, wouldn’t they, George?”
“You,” Lisa snapped at Weiser. “You will address him as ‘Mister Drouillard.’ He is a principal and an investor in this enterprise.”
Weiser raised his eyebrows and dropped his jaw, glancing at Drouillard, who said, “Ah, señor, I’ve always been just ‘George,’ or ‘Drouillard.’ Or just ‘our Indian.’ They don’t need to call me ‘Mister.’ I’d rather they didn’t.”
“I insist; they must show you the proper respect.”
“Well, sir,” Weiser said, eyes flashing, “whatever he’s called, I already got more respect for George than for anyone else in this shebang, incl—” He stopped himself from saying “including you,” but Lisa caught the intent and looked ready to hit Weiser or shoot him. Drouillard winked at Weiser and barely tilted his head, then put a hand under Lisa’s elbow and led him toward the mounds.
He could see that an enterprise with Manuel Lisa was not going to be easy or pleasant. He had been warned in that regard by many before leaving St. Louis. This man was as intense as Meriwether Lewis, but unlike him, had no military code governing his treatment of his men. Lisa cared little what anyone thought of him, except those—like Drouillard just now—whom he really needed. It appeared so far that discipline in his expedition would be based on fear of Lisa’s temper.
* * *
Just before Lisa’s fleet—two keelboats and several pirogues—was ready to depart from the Osage River landing, a big, shaggy mulatto man came down the Osage in a canoe and leaped out on shore. As he came up, Drouillard knew that he had seen him somewhere. Lisa nod
ded and grinned at him, and said, “You! Well, Rose, what do you want? Or need I ask?”
“I came t’ join ye,” the man said. His whiskers hid his expression, but from the display of teeth, which were big and brown-edged like those of a twenty-year-old horse, Drouillard guessed that the man was grinning. He shifted his gaze to Drouillard. “I’ve saw him,” he said. Now Drouillard remembered. He had seen Lisa eject this man from his store in St. Louis years ago, leading him with a knife up his nostril.
Lisa said, “This is George Drouillard. He’s second in charge. Represents Mr. Menard and Mr. Morrison. Lately he was scout for the Americans who crossed over the Western mountains. Mr. Drouillard, here is Ed Rose, who sometimes trades with the Osages for me, sometimes steals from me.”
Rose extended a hand to Drouillard, saying, “Not stealing. We don’t always agree on the value of things, is all, and sometimes I must make adjustments. I am proud t’ know another good man who ain’t got all lily-white blood in ’is veins. What people, sir? Omaha? Missouria?”
“Shawnee.”
“Well now! Like Mr. Lorimier’s people, that would be! Would ye know that gentleman?”
“I would. He’s my uncle.” Drouillard had visited Lorimier awhile just before setting out on this voyage, finding him firmly ensconced in American causes. In fact, one of his sons had just been graduated from the military academy at West Point, a matter of great pride and some ironic joking for Lorimier.
Lisa agreed to take on Ed Rose for this trip to the mountains, subject to immediate dismissal if his honesty came into doubt again. This seemed to be a dispute of long standing.