Free Across the Endless River by Thad Carhart Page B

not see any of these places for a long time, Baptiste realized, but the thought did not make him unhappy. He only wondered when he would return, and what sort of person he would have become. These and a thousand other thoughts filled his mind as they made their steady way toward the mouth of this river that was longer than he had imagined.
    Something set New Orleans apart from all the towns he had ever visited. In St. Louis, the men talked about setting off for the upper Missouri, loading up with supplies for their trips to the trading posts. Leaving with traps and guns and ammunition, they wouldn’t be seen for a couple of seasons or a whole year at a time. When you left St. Louis and headed upriver, you left behind the white man’s ways and entered the world of Indians. In New Orleans, there was no sense of being on a frontier. The long stretch between St. Louis and New Orleans was no longer wild and separate. The towns and settlements they stopped at along the route confirmed his impression that the white man was in possession of the river and the surrounding land.
    From Baptiste’s earliest years, he had known that other tribes were sometimes to be feared, and this sense of menace had always been a part of the landscape. For the first time in his life, he now came across a long stretch of the river where Indians not only were not feared—as they sometimes still were even in St. Louis—but thought of as shiftless louts or, at best, godless heathens, to be pitied and converted to Christianity. This was at odds with everything he had known before. In St. Louis, Indians were often vilified, but they were never dismissed as insignificant.
    The Indians in St. Louis were generally trading parties of Pawnee or Omaha, occasionally a group of Mandan or Crow that had made the trip downriver from the far north. They kept to themselves, doing business with one of the agents in town in the daytime and camping in the clearings across the river at night. Only a few Indians lived in town by themselves, cut off from their tribes for one reason or another. They were sad cases who helped at the livery stables or the blacksmiths and lived in shacks or haylofts behind the main buildings. Most often you would see them in a drunken stupor down by the water, but everyone understood that they were exceptions, and even the Indians who passed through scorned them pitilessly.
    In New Orleans, what he saw shocked him. Rather than a handful of individuals with a vacant look and a liking for whiskey, there were dozens of exhausted Indians wandering the streets or slumped in the shadows, sometimes in the company of similarly wretched Negroes or Mexicans who also seemed lost. Men, women, and whole families sat on the boardwalks or along the levee, begging handouts from passersby. No vestige of tribal clothing remained; rags and cast-off garments covered them. The look of despair in their eyes was like the look of frightened animals. Only the color of their skin showed that they were Indians.
    The memory of a chance encounter in New Orleans still troubled Baptiste. He had been walking along one of the arcaded streets near the cathedral in the company of Schlape when he was startled by a Mandan cry. A woman leaning against one of the arcade’s pillars yelled, “Young one!”
    The sound of Mandan so surprised him that he looked up at once, and as their eyes met there was no doubt she had been calling to him. She repeated the words more softly, and the familiar sounds resonated deep within. The woman stared as if she were looking through him to a place that only she could see. Her tone was so personal that at first he wondered if he knew her. Was she from the villages he had lived in as a young boy, a friend of his mother, perhaps, come to grief on the streets of this city? But he saw nothing familiar in her features, nor she in his, other than the sight of another Indian, incongruously dressed in a suit of clothes and conversing