Evan Hunter - The Chisholms - A novel of the journey West

Sarah Comyns was nursing her baby when the Indian appeared.

They’d camped the night of the thirteenth on the bluffs overlooking the Kansas River, three to four miles wide there, the river valley thick with timber, the hills rising from a prairieland as green as Minerva’s eyes. In the morning, they moved on to a nooning place where the river was boiling yellow. Their rest period seemed in contrast more peaceful than it normally did, the stillness of the camp exaggerated by the incessant roar of the river. The men were talking about how they planned to get to the other side. Timothy suggested that they take off the wheels and float the wagons across like barges. But there were no hides to nail to the bottoms, and Comyns was afraid they’d sink without waterproofing. Hadley thought they should build themselves a raft. There was plenty timber to cut, and fashioning a raft was a simple thing enough. The women had washed the dinnerware and put it up already; Minerva and the girls were resting now in the shade under the trees. Inside the Comyns wagon, Sarah briskly removed a breast from within the unbuttoned yoke of her bodice, reacquainted her baby’s mouth with the oozing nipple, and then cupped breast in hand, kneading it, her eyes closed as the baby began to suck. When lazily she opened her eyes again, the Indian was staring in at her from the rear of the wagon.

He was at least five feet ten inches tall, his face an oval with prominent cheekbones, eyes almost the color of his skin, long black hair falling to his shoulders. He said something to her, Sarah didn’t know what and didn’t care. She yanked her squirting breasts loose from her baby’s mouth and began screaming. The Indian turned and ran from the wagon. He got no more than ten feet toward the woods beyond when Jonah Comyns dragged him kicking to the ground. There was a pistol in Comyns’s hand. He put it at once to the Indian’s head. In that moment, Timothy came running around the corner of the wagon. “Hold your fire!” he yelled, and clamped both hands onto the carpenter’s wrist.

“Let go!” Comyns shouted. “I’ll shoot the bastard dead!”

Inside the wagon, the baby began shrieking. The Indian was babbling frantically now, the pistol flailing closer and closer to his head, Timothy desperately trying to hear his words over the baby’s squawling and Comyns’s shouting. The widower Willoughby came running toward the wagon with his suspenders hanging, a rifle in his hands, his face pale. The youngest Comyns boy ran up and began dancing a frightened little jig.

“Let him be!” Timothy shouted. “He wants to ferry us across the river!”

From inside the wagon, Sarah said, “He spied me naked.”

The Indian was a Delaware.

He had come as spokesman for his tribe, searching for someone with whom he might negotiate, and had peered into the nearest wagon only to find himself face to face with a crazed white woman. Now that everyone had calmed down, he explained that his tribe, together with their partners the Shawnee, had constructed a raft sturdy enough to transport the party across the river. This for a price the white man would surely recognize as reasonable. He said all this in Algonquian — which Timothy understood but incompletely. He gathered the Delaware’s name was Ferocious Storm, but it might well have been Fearful Storm, or indeed Fear of Storms; the Indian spoke quite rapidly, never once deferring to Timothy, who was trying to converse in a tongue not his own.

Ferocious Storm asked a gallon jug of whiskey for each wagon his people carried across the river. In addition, he wanted four eggs for each. And three kegs of flour. And a dozen trinkets he would personally select from whatever jewelry the women had with them, plus thirteen yards of blue homespun.

They haggled for close to an hour.

By the end of that time, Ferocious Storm had reduced his total price to one gallon jug of whiskey, half a dozen eggs, two small kegs of flour, two calico bonnets he saw the women in the camp wearing, and in place of the jewelry and the thirteen yards of homespun, six slabs of bacon. Timothy said they would give the Indians all save the whiskey and the meat.

“Then I will have some sweets,” Ferocious Storm said.

“Sweets as how?” Timothy asked. “Preserves.”

“In what amount?”

“Three jars of fruits.”

“Nonsense.”

“It is my price,” Ferocious Storm said, and rose to leave.

“Two jars and we have a bargain.”

“The river is high; we will have to work hard against it. Three jars.”

“And if we lose livestock or property in the river?” Timothy asked.

“Then there is no price. You have made the crossing without it costing you a penny.” Ferocious Storm grinned suddenly. His teeth were stained a brown darker than his skin, and some of them were missing, and the rest of them were crooked. But his smile was so contagiously mirthsome that it caused all the men standing around him to grin in return. “And if any of you should drown,” he said, smiling, “ we will pay you the agreed-upon price.”

Timothy laughed. The others, not knowing what had been said, laughed too. The bargaining had been concluded.

The Indians had built their landing at a bend downstream, where a rock-strewn cove of silt and coarse sand formed a small natural harbor. Their vessel was a raft some fifteen feet wide and thirty long. It lay at the landing now, its forward end lashed at each corner to the makeshift dock, its stern — if one could so distinguish either end from the other — tossing and bobbing in the restless current. The raft looked flimsy and primitive, its lashings frayed, its logs of uneven length, battered and skinned from collisions with river rocks and floating timber.

Close by the landing, a white man crouched over a small pit, striking sparks from his flint into a bed of tinder. He was brown and grizzled, the knuckles on his hands oversized, the wrists bony; he seemed to be made altogether of sinew. A woman probably his wife was coming up from the river carrying meat dripping water. She was as tall, as spare, and as brown as he was. Her flowered dress and sunbonnet were both faded almost white and one of her shoes was worn through at the little toe. A little way off, a covered wagon stood on a grassy level patch of earth. A pair of hobbled oxen were grazing alongside it. Two young boys with pale pinched faces peered through the puckered opening of the cover.

The woman put the meat into a skillet. Her husband asked her to get some buffalo chips from the wagon, and she went to it and returned a moment later carrying a handful of dried dung. Hadley knew there were no buffalo this side of the Kansas nor even anywhere nearby on the other side. So where’d the buffalo chips come from?

“Good morning, sir,” he said.

“How d’you do, sir?” the man said, and glanced up briefy at Hadley, and then went back to the fire.

“Hadley Chisholm,” Hadley said.

“Ralph Hutchinson.” He did not introduce the woman. She stood waiting for the tinder to catch. When it did, she dropped the buffalo chips into it and fanned them to a blaze with her bonnet.

“Where are you bound, sir, may I ask?” Hadley said.

“East to Council Bluffs,” Hutchinson said.

From the corner of his eye, Hadley saw Jonah Comyns walking up from the river landing, where he’d been inspecting the raft. “Are you traveling alone then?” he asked.

“Just me and mine,” Hutchinson said. “Left a train of eleven wagons bound for Oregon.”

Comyns was at the fire now. He nodded to Hutchinson in brief greeting. Hutchinson nodded back.

“How far ahead are they?” Hadley asked.

“Left them a week ago.”

“Any reason?”

“Children took ill,” Hutchinson said.