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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.
Excerpted from Into the Savage Country by Shannon Burke. Copyright © 2015 by Shannon Burke. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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