Into the Savage Country Read online

  ALSO BY SHANNON BURKE

  Safelight

  Black Flies

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Shannon Burke

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Burke, Shannon.

  Into the Savage Country / Shannon Burke.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-307-90892-6 (hardcover : alk. paper).

  ISBN 978-0-307-90893-3 (eBook).

  1. Male friendship—Fiction. 2. West (U.S.)—History—19th century—

  Fiction. 3. Western fiction. 4. Adventure fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.U7555158 2014 813′.6—dc23 2014006429

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Jacket image: Mountain Landscape with Indians (detail) by John Mix Stanley. Detroit Institute of Arts, U.S.A. / Gift of Wayne County Medical Society / Bridgeman Images

  v3.1

  For Charlie and Nicholas

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Book One: The Voyage Out

  Book Two: The Settlement

  Book Three: The Far West

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Nature is loved by what is best in us.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  BOOK ONE

  The Voyage Out

  I was twenty-two years old and feverish with the exploits of Smith and Ashley. I followed their accounts in the Gazette and the Intelligencer and calculated their returns and dreamed of their expeditions. The fur trade was warring and commerce and exploration, and above all else in my mind, it was adventure. But the trade was also notoriously unprofitable, a fool’s errand—everyone knew that—and I’d resisted joining a brigade for more than a year.

  St. Louis had five thousand inmates as I called them back then. The French lived on the north side, on the high ground. I was living on the south end at a boardinghouse—a withered old widow for a landlady. She made it hot for us, bawling at any racket or laughter and particularly at me for bringing bloody pelts back, which, it is true, she had reason to complain of.

  On the morning this narration begins, June of 1826, an acquaintance named Blanchard appeared beneath my window, calling up to say he was off to visit a Canadian half-breed who brain-tanned hides. The Canadian, he said, would increase the value of pelts more than she charged to tan them, and wasn’t hard to look at, either.

  “I’ll join you on such a worthy venture,” I called down, and a moment later was striding carelessly through the mud and muck of Market Street with Blanchard, hardly suspecting that little errand would change my life.

  As we passed the Rocky Mountain House, a bellowing roar blasted from the doorway, and a French trapper named Goddard tottered out, waving a trade gun, breathing Taos Whiskey.

  “Give an honest turn for the firearm, Blanchy?”

  Blanchard needed a musket, and with Goddard falling down drunk, thought he’d get the better of him. Blanchard went into the alehouse and I went on to the half-breed’s alone, not displeased to cut out the competition.

  I don’t know what I expected from Alene Chevalier—a feather in her hair and dancing around a bonfire or some nonsense like that. Not at all. She was foreign, to be sure, but French, with a quarter native blood that showed in her hair and eyes—a petite woman with olive skin and a long skirt and a shawl that she wore buttoned to her neck with a silver clip at the throat and her hair tied up with a wooden clamshell. All very proper and European in her manners and setting me in my place, though not uninviting, either. She trod that middle ground between warmth and propriety that the French have perfected and has never been replicated in our maidens, who seem to me to be either bawdy or puritanical.

  “I’m Wyeth. A hunter,” I said. “I have deer and muskrat pelts.”

  “Let me see,” she said.

  She had a bit of a French accent. Enough so you knew she was foreign, though not so much that you couldn’t understand what she said. She ran her small hands along the first pelt slowly then flipped it over with an abrupt, practiced gesture. The administrators at the tannery were suspicious of native pelts and she wanted to maintain her reputation and did not take in furs that were old or poorly skinned or damaged.

  “Twenty-five cents a pelt.”

  “Done,” I said.

  “Not much for bargaining, are you?”

  “Not when I have a maiden to bargain with,” I said, trying to be gallant, though she smiled thinly at that bit of nonsense. She was calculating the profits in her mind and by not bargaining I’d lowered myself in her estimation.

  I carried the pack of furs along a hardened dirt path to the back of her cottage. She had a workshop beneath a pine scaffolding with willow hoops stacked in a row and a heavy pole at hip height for the scraping. There was a tub of mashed brains that looked like pink paste and a wooden flask of oil with a cork stopper and a basin with ash and murky water and a compressor with a pulley system and weights. I noticed she used a dulled carving knife to flesh. Also, a buffalo rib, a stained pumice rock, and a beveled deer antler. I saw indications of additives to the paste like liver and bone marrow and fish oil and pine nuts and wild rhubarb. I took note of all these ingredients, though I did not know the quantities or the process used to mix them. By her reputation, and later by the quality of the furs, I knew she had refined the process.

  I heaved the pelts into the hard-packed clearing and she lifted soaked pelts from a basin and hung them on a wooden beam and put the first of my pelts, hardened and stiff, into the basin. Then she took one of the soaked pelts and sat on a smoothed log and stretched the pelt onto a willow hoop, affixing it with deer sinew and a curved wooden hook. She saw me watching, and said, “My father was a voyageur for the Northwesters. I learned from him.”

  “Is he with Hudson’s Bay now?” I asked, but she shook her head, and by the way she did it I knew he was not with that company, or any other.

  “Consumption,” she said. “Two winters past. He battled the Ree with Ashley. Went on the winter march to the Medicine Bow. But it was the elements in St. Louis that took him.” She made a drinking motion.

  “The same ailment’s taking my father,” I said. “A farmer and man of property in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Least it was two years ago when I last spoke with him.”

  It was a maudlin way to put it, but I said it in a careless tone, as I wanted her to think I was rugged and indifferent to the gales of life, and that we were two of a kind. If she saw the connection, she did not remark on it.

  She finished with that first fur and when she reached for the second I knew I was meant to leave. I started back around the cottage and when I did she set her pelt aside and went through the doorway and I saw her writing out a ticket on a little pink slip of parchment. There was no need to give a ticket and, later, I thought she went through that bit of theater because she’d heard the sound of education in my voice and wanted to show she could read and write as well as any college professor—that neat cursive hand, the polite, precise sound of her voice, that Frenchified way of hers. She mistook me for a gentleman and didn’t want me putting on airs, which, if she
’d known me, she need not have worried about, as I worked as a laborer in a warehouse along the river.

  I went on my way and seven days later I was back in front of her little cottage with my pink ticket. She met me at the door hauling a neatly bound pack of furs, rocking her slight body back and heaving the pack and carrying it, duckwalking, to the porch. I’d been thinking of conversation all week and come up with nothing but banalities. As I paid she said, “You won’t be long for St. Louis. Les vrais gentlemen ne restent jamais ici.”

  “Où est le vrai gentleman?” I said, and she laughed, and said, “Ici même, j’espère. C’est bien ce que je crois, oui.”

  “Not all would call me a gentleman,” I said. “Talk to Professor Stanton at Temple. I put a fish with a pickle in its mouth in his desk. I won’t be let back. So it’s into the savage country for me. My education will be in the notable wonders of the far west.”

  “You’ll join a brigade to the fur country?”

  “Up to the Green River,” I said boisterously. I did not believe I’d join a brigade at the time. I said it to be gallant, but I saw disappointment settle. She’d imagined I was a gentleman hunter with a carriage and a fortune, not some cast-off ne’er-do-well with no family or home to speak of. Something in her closed off to me.

  “It’s a hard life,” she said.

  “But an exciting one.”

  “The excitement ends quickly. The difficulties don’t,” she said.

  I considered countering with some saucy remark, but she had been born to the life and undoubtedly knew it better than I did.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I said, and slung the furs on my back and thought that was that. I was not a gentleman and she had decided against me in her mind.

  I walked out the gate and when I looked back I saw that she’d gone through the cottage and was out behind collecting the willow hoops and stacking them with a clacking sound that followed me down her dusty street.

  The memory of that short conversation stayed inside me all day.

  The next day General Ashley arrived on a keelboat, and all of St. Louis gathered to greet him. Even at the advanced age of forty-six Ashley was a formidable figure, dashing and romantic in a way that has died out now—hair turning silvery and a nasty-looking scar across his forehead and at ease carrying a sword. It is true that he was drunk for much of his political career, but it is also true that he’d braved many hardships and faced enemy fire without retreating and he did it all with dash and verve that maybe is not necessary for that life but certainly makes it more palatable. The state had made him a brigadier general for running the militia during the war and he’d supplied the gunpowder for the militia, a tricky bit of business given that he approved the contracts himself. It landed him in court later, but he survived that scandal with most of his fortune intact and put the remaining money into the fur trade. Like nearly all who invested in that blighted business he lost his fortune, then was lucky enough to make a portion of it back on the shoulders of Jedediah Smith, William Sublette, and David Jackson, those immortal trappers and adventurers who have lent their names to the rivers, streams, and mountains of the west and will live on as long as this nation does. These men enabled Ashley to get out with dignity if not with the riches he had once commanded.

  At the time of which I’m speaking, the spring of 1826, Ashley had sold the Rocky Mountain Fur Company to Smith, Sublette, and Jackson, but stayed on as the hiring and purchasing agent. Like many connected to the fur trade, Ashley cursed the pelts for ruining his life and soiling his reputation and draining his finances and vowed to cut his losses and forgo even wearing fur hats, but those were idle threats. Despite the endless hardships and the constant setbacks there was nothing like the fur trade for camaraderie and adventure and excitement, and once the trade got its hooks into you everything else was pale and lifeless and seemed an imitation of life, rather than the genuine article.

  After vowing to leave the business for the hundredth time, General Ashley was floating in on the deck of a keelboat, a foot up on the prow and that white hair blown back and a bear prowling behind him, chained to the mast. Ashley pretended he didn’t know what sort of romantic figure he cast. He knew all right. Smith and company were shrewd when they kept him on as their hiring agent. The sight of Ashley on that keelboat coming on the heels of that reproof from the pretty tanner blasted the last of my hesitation. I had boasted to Alene that I’d join a brigade, and as it turned out, it was true. I would do it. I walked straight to the agent’s storefront on Market Street and told them they could have me if they wanted me. You practically signed your life away if you were taken on as a camp hand. I did what I could to avoid that servitude. I lied about what I’d done and got Blanchard, who had joined me in my folly, to verify all my mistruths. We were taken on as company trappers, which right away was a better position if you could afford the equipage, which I could.

  I spent the next week securing my traps and filling my possibles sack. I bought a J. Henry long rifle from Blanchard, as he’d gotten the musket from Goddard. I stocked up on all the necessaries: lead, a ladle and mold, a Sheffield knife, and a mirror for shaving so I’d look good for the squaws, as I’d heard they would call a bearded man dogface. I bought several parchment notebooks with vellum covers to record my observations. Like so many of my fellow travelers I planned on writing my memoirs if I survived and retiring on the glories and riches reaped from my misspent youth. All of us who signed on that year were puffed up with self-importance, as the Treaty of 1818, which had established the western boundary of our nation, was scheduled to be renegotiated, partially along trade lines, and the heart of the sales pitch for the various brigades was that a young man could make a fortune while battling the Brits and the mighty HBC and save Oregon Territory and New Caledonia for the nation. The trapping brigades were commerce and patriotism and battling and adventure and it was all westward ho, young man, out into the savage unknown, and other nonsense like that.

  In truth, few of us had any idea what lay ten miles beyond St. Louis.

  On my last days in the city I labored over a letter to my father, half justification for my misdeeds, half apology. I had parted from home two years earlier after a dispute over a piece of property. I could hardly blame my father for keeping the land from me, as I had done little to merit the gift and much to make him reluctant to pass it on, but he’d given my brothers their share on their eighteenth birthdays and he did not give me mine, and I’d accused him of stinginess. He blamed my restless nature for the delay. I called it favoritism, and our battle escalated. I left cursing him, and him me, and I had not talked with him since.

  Now, two years later, I was leaving the States for at least a year, and probably much longer, and I meant to make it up before I departed. But while in the act of trying to amend my halfhearted apology I received a letter from my sister, sent months earlier, informing me that my father had died. I knew he was sick and medicating himself with the drink, but I did not think the illness would kill him. I probably thought he would never die and would be there at my funeral still casting aspersions. But no, there it was in print: dead and buried in the family plot, and it was like my whole insides collapsed. We’d had our battles, to be sure—no one could deny that—but I had not thought they were permanent. I admit that I bawled like a child.

  The storm of grief lasted about an hour—it was furious, black, and desolate—but once it passed I realized I felt lighter. It’s a hardhearted thing to say but the sad news of my father’s death gave me a feeling not of victory or of dancing on his grave but of being cut loose from a past that was a blot on the mind and on the conscience, and as a sign that I was meant to do what my father had never dared. Since I was a boy I’d known I was made of different stuff from my brothers. They were born to the plow and pew while I craved the forest and woods and the vast, wild spaces. For better or for worse, I was fated to test my mettle in the west. If I didn’t make a fortune, I thought, I would live my life up to the hilt and satisfy that in
ner craving and have something to talk about in my dotage.

  I wrote to Mother that I was sorry I had not been there for her during father’s passing and that she’d hear from me again when I made my fortune (and I could imagine her saying, “Well, that’s the last we’ll hear of him”). And that was that. The final strand to the past was severed. I was cut loose on the world, and within a week would be off to the savage country.

  I selected a pony from the company stock that I paid for from my future riches and I bid my adieu to all my companions in the Rocky Mountain House, and then, three days before my departure, I was walking the waterfront when I came upon two men battling, one an Italian sailor with an oiled black mustache, and the other Henry Layton, the son of Gene Layton, who owned half the warehouses along the waterfront. Layton the younger was an infamous bachelor: a twenty-four-year-old dandy considered to be the most intelligent, unpleasant, and mischievous young man in St. Louis. It was in keeping with everything I knew about Layton to find him with his jacket off, surrounded by drunken riffraff, battling with a laborer. Layton and the Italian exchanged blows for several minutes until Layton connected with a crosscut that snapped the Italian’s head back. Layton, being hot, jumped in to stomp the deckhand after he’d fallen and had to be dragged off, frothing. It was an ugly scene, and I wandered off thinking this a fitting ending to my stay in St. Louis—a dandy with the world at his fingertips stomping on an Italian deckhand.

  That night I cleared out my room and left a pile of muskrat innards on the floorboards, like a turd. I put the innards on a scrap of deer hide so as not to stain, but I did leave it. The landlady had let me feel her tongue one too many times when I had no means of striking back, being her tenant. I left feeling vicious and wild and later remembered that pile of offal with a sick feeling. That sad old lady who was hanging on in youthful St. Louis and who took her bile out on the reckless young men who must have reminded her of her dead husband. I ought not to have left that nastiness. I know that now. That memory is a stain on the generally happy recollections of that time.