LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter I.

       A Company Dissolves and a New Venture Starts

       Table of Contents

      One of the most vivid impressions of my youth is of a certain evening in the spring of 1865. It was the evening of May 21. Just before sundown the first steamboat of the season, the Yellowstone II, arrived from St. Louis and brought the astounding news that the American Fur Company was going out of business and was selling its various trading-posts, forts and stocks of goods, good-will and all, to private individuals.

      To most of us in Fort Benton, factor, clerks, artisans, voyageurs, trappers and hunters, it was as if the world were coming to an end. The company—by which we meant the Chouteaus, father and sons—was the beginning and the end of our existence. We revered the very name of it; we were faithful to it and ready to die for it if need be. Now we were left to shift for ourselves. What were we to do?

      Boylike, I had gone aboard the boat as soon as it landed and had passed an hour in wandering about it from end to end and from hold to pilot-house. Up in the pilot-house I found Joe La Barge, the most famous and trusted of the Missouri River pilots.

      "Well, Master Thomas Fox," he said to me, "it is bad news that we have brought you, isn't it? What is your Uncle Wesley going to do, I wonder, now that the company is selling out?"

      "The company is selling out? What do you mean?" I faltered.

      He told me, and I turned from him instantly and ran ashore. I sprang through the stockade gate of the fort and paused, struck by something unfamiliar there in the great court: it was the strange silence. The voyageurs, the trappers and hunters, most voluble of men, were sitting in the doorways of their quarters and saying never a word; the terrible news had tongue-tied them. I had been hurrying to my uncle's quarters to ask the truth of what the pilot had told me; but the dejected attitude of the employees was proof enough that the news was true.

      A tall, lean voyageur rushed by me to the center of the court and raised his outstretched hands to the sky. "My frien's," he cried, "dis ees mos' unjust! Dis ees one terrible calamitee! I call le bon Dieu to weetness dat eet is but two summer ago, een St. Louis, dat Pierre Chouteau, he say to me, 'Louis, you are ze bon cordelier! You are serve us mos' faithful dese many year! W'en de time come dat you can no longer pull eet de cordelle, de company, he shall give you a pension; een your hold hage you shall be mos' comfortable!'

      "An' now, my frien's, ze great company, he ees dead! Ze pension pour le pauvre Louis, eet is not!" he went on in an increasingly frenzied shriek. "My frien's, I am hask you, w'at am I to do? I am fear ze Pieds Noirs; ze Gros Ventres; ze Assiniboins! I no can trap ze beav'! I no can hunt ze buf'! Eet ees zat I mus' die!"

      He turned and with wild gestures fled from the court. His listeners slumped even more dejectedly into their lowly seats. I went on to my uncle's quarters and found two of the clerks, George Steell and Matthew Carroll, sitting with my uncle, and his wife, Tsistsaki,—true mother to me,—at his shoulder. I sat down upon my cot in a corner of the room and listened to their conversation and gathered that the Chouteaus had written to the three men, offering to sell them the fort and its contents upon most reasonable terms, and that my uncle had declined to enter into partnership with the two in purchasing the place and carrying on the business. At that, like poor Louis, the voyageur, I, too, was dismayed. "What, then, are we to do?" I asked myself.

      The two visitors expressed great regret at my uncle's decision, said that they feared he would soon find that he had made a mistake, and went out. As soon as the door closed behind them, my uncle sprang from his seat, whirled Tsistsaki round three or four times, made a pass at me, and cried, "Well, my woman, well, Thomas, this is my great day! I am no longer under obligations to the company—there is no more company. I am free! Free to be what I have long wanted to be, an independent, lone Indian trader!"

      Tsistsaki thoroughly understood English but never spoke it for fear that she would make a mistake and be laughed at. In her own language she cried, "Oh, my man! Do you mean that? Are we to leave this place and with my people follow the buffalo?"

      "Something like that," he told her.

      "O good! Good!" I all but shouted. "That means that I shall have no end of good times riding about and hunting with Pitamakan!"

      He, you know, was my true-and-tried chum. Young though we were, we had experienced some wild adventures. We two had passed a winter in the depths of the Rockies; we had been to the shore of the Western Sea and back; and we had seen the great deserts and the strange peoples of the always-summer land. It was in my mind, now, that this sudden turn in the affairs of my uncle was to be the cause of more adventures for us. I could fairly scent them.

      As to Tsistsaki, she went almost crazy with joy. "The gods are good to us!" she cried. "They have answered my prayers! Oh, how I have begged them, my man, to turn your steps to the wide plains and the mountains of our great hunting-ground! It is not good for us, you know, to live shut within these walls winter after winter and summer after summer, seeing no farther than the slopes and the cutbanks of this river bottom. To be well and happy we must do some roaming now and then and live as Old Man, our Maker, intended us to live, in airy buffalo-leather lodges, and close upon the breast of our mother [the earth]. Tell me, now, where we are going and when, so that I may have all our things packed."

      "I cannot tell you that until I have talked

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