Free Rocky Mountain Company by Richard S. Wheeler

kindly. They liked the grave boy who talked French, and knew he was doing what all fur company clerks do.
    “Where’s the spirits, eh?” they had asked, half humorously.
    “Coming, coming, messieurs,” he had replied. “Soon you will carry it on your backs into the hold.”
    A fib. It bothered him to do it.
    They arrived one lusty summer day at Fort Clark, high in Dakota. Like Pierre, it was an American Fur Company bastion, but somehow different, perhaps because it stood hundreds of miles farther up the endless river from St. Louis. Nearby were the Mandan and Hidatsa villages, tragic ghosts now because smallpox had destroyed their populations, and reduced these quiet, stable, crop-gathering tribes to handfuls. And along with them, Fort Clark had declined in importance, but still traded for robes. A few years earlier the Mandans had been a proud and happy people, living in great earthen lodges that housed several families and supplied warmth and shelter, cultivating vast fields of corn.
    Just a few passengers, mostly metis and their squaws, debarked there, carrying their few belongings. Even so, they were AFC people and Maxim watched them sharply from his post beside the gangway, his eyes studying every bag and parfleche leaving the boat. Then Brokenleg took him to meet James Kipp, the partisan there, who bantered a bit, as Chardonne had done many leagues downstream. Maxim liked Kipp, and saw a clear eye and a face unburdened by craft. Was the famous skulduggery of AFC unknown to this amiable man? It puzzled Maxim, this meeting a man he expected to loathe, and finding instead a commanding trader who enjoyed guests, enjoyed the Opposition, and wished Brokenleg and Maxim success.
    But even as they talked, the boat’s whistle blew, erupting steam into the light transparent air of the upper plains. Captain LaBarge would not waste a minute. Maxim hastened toward the riverboat, having trouble keeping up with Fitzhugh who limped like a charging bull. He paused on the levee, peering about suspiciously at a few crates and the motley crowd, mostly metis and a few young Hidatsa dressed brightly in tradecloth blouses and skin leggins. He spotted nothing amiss. Fort Clark had been resupplied a few weeks earlier by the fur company steamer Trapper , the very one that had brought the whitemen’s plague with it a few years earlier.
    A few hours later Fitzhugh summoned him to the railing and pointed. Far off on a golden bluff lay the village of earthen mounds that once thrived as the home of the Mandans. It looked forlorn, even in the golden warmth of summer, and indeed, the cornfields down on the bottoms looked untended and going to weeds and cottonwood saplings. He wished Captain LaBarge would stop and let him explore the dark village, let him find souvenirs, if any remained — surely arrowheads, bows, pots, fired clay bowls. The farther he traveled from St. Louis, the stranger everything had become. He wanted bits and pieces of it. He yearned to draw and paint, so he could send folios down to papa and maman, with the barren grassy hills showing, the broad flood of water that lay blue in the bright daylight but turned green and gray in shadowed times, the powerful tall native people he’d seen — he couldn’t tell one tribe from another, but M. Fitzhugh had rattled off names. How could the man tell? For the life of him, Maxim couldn’t see how the bourgeois could separate one tribesman from another.
    The air had changed. They’d climbed steadily from St. Louis, though never visibly. This land lay about sixteen hundred feet above sea level, which made the skies a more intense blue than he’d experienced in St. Louis. The river occasionally narrowed now, and the bluffs rose closer. He marveled at the flow of water, the steady flood that boiled out of the distant fabled mountains in a volume beyond fathoming. And yet, he’d never seen the mountains, and M. Fitzhugh told him he wouldn’t. There was still a vast wilderness to