The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West Read online

  Indians of the northern Great Plains were not so sanguine on that autumn night. As described by Alexander Culbertson, an AFC clerk who had escorted Prince Maximilian upriver earlier that summer, the natives at Fort McKenzie regarded the celestial display, which included a total eclipse of the sun, “as forerunners of some great catastrophe.”63 Little did they know that disaster was already upon them. Having embraced the trade goods brought by the napikwans, the Blackfeet began to spurn the old ways. Whereas such items had once been the rarest of luxuries, by the time the stars fell on that November evening, Culbertson noted that the average lodge possessed “one gun, an axe, a kettle, and ten knives.” Though such objects made life easier, they also eroded the Indians’ autonomy by creating economic dependence upon the outsiders.64

  Other ominous signs indicated that the Piegan world was changing as rapidly and dramatically as it had a century before, with the advent of the horse and gun. On 16 June 1832 the Yellow Stone, the first steamboat to travel so far up the Missouri, reached Fort Union, carrying George Catlin among others. The Piegan reaction to “the fire boat that walks on the water,” as some Indians called the vessel, must have been similar to that which Catlin observed among other native peoples during the upstream voyage.65 Of those Indians, the artist noted that “some of them laid their faces to the ground, and cried to the Great Spirit—some shot their horses and dogs, and sacrificed them … some deserted their villages and ran to the tops of the bluffs some miles distant.”66 The AFC’s use of steamboats, urged by McKenzie and endorsed by Chouteau, facilitated the movement of more goods and napikwans into Blackfeet country while degrading the river valleys of the Missouri and its tributaries, as the Yellow Stone and each of its brethren devoured an astonishing twenty-five to thirty cords of wood for every twenty-four running-hours.67

  Even worse, AFC steamboats brought vast quantities of spirits to the Upper Missouri. Like other native peoples of the northern Plains, the Blackfeet had never tasted liquor until traders brought it among them in the late eighteenth century. Having no word for it in their own language, they called it napiohke (“white man’s water”) and refused initially to pay for it, since the lakes and rivers of their country provided all the liquid refreshment they needed.68 Nevertheless, it was soon entrenched among them, used by British, Canadian, and American outfits alike to lubricate the trading process. McKenzie even constructed an illegal still at Fort Union in 1833, though it was short-lived. Spiked sometimes with ingredients like strychnine or gunpowder to heighten its effects, whiskey wreaked havoc in Indian communities.

  At the time there was growing concern about the consumption of alcohol more generally in the United States, anxiety that led to the establishment of the American Temperance Society in 1826. Reformers of the period, including the evangelical leaders Charles Grandison Finney and Lyman Ward Beecher, emphasized the evils of drinking, and the Whigs, formed in the 1830s as the opposition to Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party, incorporated abstinence into their political platform, although temperance did not become the law of the land, for a brief period, until a century later.69 It was a different story beyond the Mississippi, where U.S. officials were so concerned about liquor’s pernicious influence among the western tribes that the government passed a strict prohibition law in 1834. No matter, because the aptly named Andrew Drips, the Indian agent for the Upper Missouri, turned a blind eye to the AFC’s extensive smuggling operations.70

  And yet of all the dangerous imports—from guns to liquor—brought to the northern Plains, it was a microbial agent, invisible to the human eye, that left the most devastating impact. In the summer of 1837 an AFC steamboat, the St. Peters, arrived on the Upper Missouri carrying passengers infected with smallpox. Although the disease had raged among area tribes in 1781, most of the natives had no immunity to the affliction and thus died in staggering numbers. Learning of the outbreak at Fort Union, Culbertson tried vainly to keep away a keelboat headed upriver to Fort McKenzie with passengers and cargo from the larger post. But a camp of some five hundred Piegan and Blood lodges insisted upon the delivery of the trade items once the vessel arrived. Within days the disease spread like a prairie fire throughout Blackfeet country, and no Indians visited the fort for two months. Around 1 October, Culbertson, who himself had fallen ill, traveled from Fort McKenzie to the Three Forks to see how the Piegans had fared. He smelled the camp before he saw it: sixty lodges, littered all about with the decaying bodies of people, horses, and dogs. When the epidemic finally burned out later that fall, more than six thousand Blackfeet had perished.71 For all the riches it brought to some native peoples, the fur trade immiserated many more, and few groups suffered as much as the Blackfeet.

  Coth-co-co-na

  On a stifling morning in late August 1833, near the middle of his monthlong stay at Fort McKenzie, Prince Maximilian was jolted from his slumber by a post employee and urged to take arms. Ascending the ramparts and wielding a double-barreled shotgun, Maximilian beheld an astonishing scene unfolding below: hundreds of Cree and Assiniboine warriors, whom he described as “a red line … of fighters,” had descended on a small camp of about twenty Piegan lodges pitched in the shadows of the fort. Since the Piegans had caroused late the night before, passing the cup and pipe while marveling at the sounds of Karl Bodmer’s music box, they were slow in mounting a defense. Their attackers showed no quarter, indiscriminately shooting and stabbing men, women, and children, all of which the prince observed from inside the compound.

  After Karl Bodmer, Fort MacKenzie, August 28th 1833, ca. 1833. Bodmer personally witnessed this fight between the Piegans and a joint force of Crees and Assiniboines during his visit to the Upper Missouri with Prince Maximilian of Wied. Courtesy of the Joslyn Museum of Art, Omaha.

  Riveting though the battle was, it was sadly typical of the day, as Indians competed bitterly with one another for the spoils of the American trade, not to mention horses and captives stolen from native rivals. The prince regarded the spectacle with a mixture of fascination and horror; he was struck especially by the activity surrounding White Buffalo, a highly respected Piegan warrior who in the early going had suffered a head wound so severe that “his brain seemed to be protruding into his hair.” To dull his agony, several native women plied him with whiskey and in short order he was “completely stone drunk.” The battle raged all afternoon just outside the walls, but with help from the post’s employees as well as many additional Piegans who hurried to the fort from their main camp nearby, the Indians drove off the war party, though not before losing several dozen of their people.72

  Somewhere in the maelstrom, perhaps, was a young Piegan girl.73 The terror she would have felt that late summer morning is easy to imagine, since Bodmer painted a tableau of the struggle. The watercolor depicts utter chaos: wisps of gun smoke, a rearing horse, and pockets of furious hand-to-hand combat. After the battle an old Piegan medicine man named Distant Bear thanked Bodmer profusely, insisting that no bullets had cut him down because Bodmer had made his portrait a few days earlier, which had worked as good medicine. The little girl, however, probably felt no such assurances amid the fighting all around her—maybe she took cover inside the fort with other Piegans, or found a hiding spot among the trees or in the wreckage of a lodge. She might even have seen a group of Piegan women and children exact their revenge on the body of a fallen Cree warrior, taking his scalp, smashing his limbs, and splitting his head in two. If so, it would not be the last time she bore witness to such violence.

  LITTLE IS KNOWN for certain about the girl except that her name was Coth-co-co-na and that her parents were a Piegan warrior named Under Bull and his wife, Black Bear. Coth-co-co-na was probably born around 1825, the same year that the Erie Canal joined the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, and that John Quincy Adams assumed the presidency after prevailing in a bitter electoral struggle against Andrew Jackson. However, like most native people of the time and place, Coth-co-co-na is almost entirely absent from written historical records, appearing in a let
ter here, a census record there, maybe a pioneer reminiscence of the frontier era. Still, it is possible to sketch the contours of her early existence given the rhythms of Piegan life during the first few decades of the nineteenth century.74

  Shortly after Coth-co-co-na’s birth, Under Bull called upon a person of distinction within the tribe to choose a name for his child, building his guest a sweat lodge and bestowing presents upon him, waiting for the namer to suggest a handful of monikers from which he, as the father, chose.75 Thereafter Under Bull was probably a more distant figure in Coth-co-co-na’s world. If she had brothers, he spent more time with them, teaching the boys how to hunt and fight. On almost all matters Coth-co-co-na would have looked to Black Bear and other female relatives for guidance. And she knew hard work from a young age: gathering berries, collecting wood, carrying water, mending clothes, stitching lodges, and building travois.76

  When she was a bit older, her mother (or, in her absence, another female relative) taught Coth-co-co-na the most important skill known to Blackfeet women—tanning a buffalo hide. Such expertise was necessary, of course, for basic survival; after all, bison skins gave the Indians clothing and shelter and brought them trade goods from the napikwans. Tanning was also important as a marital prerequisite, for Blackfeet men relied upon their wives to dress the animals they killed. So critical was the work of Indian women that, as the robe trade increased, so did the practice of polygyny, whereby native men acquired additional spouses, and at increasingly younger ages, in order to meet their growing labor needs.

  Dressing a buffalo hide was a messy and backbreaking task, as Coth-co-co-na learned. Once she tore the skin from an animal’s body, a native woman “fleshed” the hide by staking it to the ground (hair side down) with wooden pegs and scraping away any bits of tissue, fat, or dried blood, an exhausting and time-consuming process. She then left the skin to bleach in the sun for several days before scraping it again to achieve a uniform thickness. Finally, she applied a mixture of brains and fat to soften the hide before smoothing it out with strokes from a rough stone. It took two full days of work to tan a single robe.77

  As in earlier native-white encounters throughout North America, some newcomers to the Upper Missouri were appalled by the division of labor among the Blackfeet, believing that men’s hunting was a form of leisure or sport while their wives were treated like drudges and forced to do the heavy lifting required for the trade in animal skins.78 Although life for Piegan women was undeniably hard—beyond tanning hides and preparing food they were also responsible for child rearing—the prejudice and chauvinism of most European and American outsiders make such accounts problematic at best. And it is worth noting that some later observers emphasized the essential role of Piegan women in religious and ceremonial rites.79

  As Coth-co-co-na reached puberty, Black Bear instructed her daughter on the rituals of courtship and marriage.80 Thereafter the husband enjoyed almost total control over his wife or wives. To impress upon her daughter the importance of a woman’s marital conduct, Black Bear might have held up to Coth-co-co-na the powerful example set by a medicine woman. This individual was the chief figure in the annual Sun Dance, the tribe’s most important religious ceremony. In order to qualify, a woman had to possess unimpeachable character, marked especially by unwavering devotion to her husband.81 And yet for Coth-co-co-na and other girls of marrying age, it was likely the punishment for female adultery that made the stronger impression. As Prince Maximilian recorded in his journal, “[Men] punish the infidelity of their women swiftly and severely; they cut off their noses; and one saw many such horribly disfigured faces among the Piegans.”82 Surely Coth-co-co-na took note of them.

  Despite Black Bear’s prominent role in raising Coth-co-co-na and preparing her for marriage, it was Under Bull who ultimately chose a suitable husband for their daughter once she reached her teens. And like many other prominent Blackfeet men in the 1830s and 1840s, he did not select a young and distinguished Piegan warrior for his son-in-law, but opted instead for a fur trader named Malcolm Clarke, whom the Indians called Ne-so-ke-i-u, or Four Bears.

  UNDER BULL’S DECISION to marry his daughter to a white man can be understood only in the context of the refashioned social conditions brought about by the advent of the fur trade in Blackfeet country. Intermarriage between white men and native women was found everywhere throughout the continent where Europeans and their descendants sought animal skins, from the valley of the St. Lawrence to the far Southwest, from the Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains.83 Such arrangements à la façon du pays—“according to the custom of the country”—were especially common among HBC and NWC employees and reflected indigenous ceremonial practices as well as the natives’ own social and economic imperatives.

  By comparison, those who settled the American colonies largely resisted intermarriage, both because white women were present in many such locales right from the start and because early interaction between natives and newcomers often led to violent conflict. In the lands that became the eastern United States, removal or extermination was thus as likely an outcome as any sort of cultural exchange or interpenetration.84 And yet around the turn of the nineteenth century, some westering Americans warmed to the concept of intermarriage. They had an unlikely champion in Thomas Jefferson, who during his presidency viewed such unions as the key to peaceful frontier absorption as well as the eventual assimilation of Indians into mainstream Anglo-American society. He exhorted a group of Delawares and Mohicans in 1808, “[Y]ou will unite yourselves with us … and form one people with us, and we shall all be Americans; you will mix with us by marriage, your blood will run in our veins, and will spread with us over this great island.”85

  Jefferson’s enthusiasm for such liaisons stood in stark contrast to his vehement opposition to white romantic relationships with blacks, who he believed should be placed “beyond the reach of mixture” (this despite his own thirty-eight-year affair with his slave Sally Hemings, who bore him seven children).86 While Jefferson intimated that African Americans were racially inferior, according to one biographer his comparatively progressive views about Indians stemmed from an “an authentic admiration mingled with a truly poignant sense of tragedy about their fate as a people.”87 Even so, official attempts to promote native-white intermarriage failed at both the state and the federal levels in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, defeated by intense and near unanimous hostility from white lawmakers.88

  Despite the routine nature of intermarriage throughout North America’s fur country, it is still worth pondering why Under Bull and other Blackfeet fathers would embrace such a practice. After all, few native groups had so consistently and violently opposed white expansion into their territory. While it was one thing to trade beaver skins and buffalo robes for guns and whiskey, it was quite another to give their daughters in marriage to the napikwans, whom the Blackfeet usually found repulsive, with their hairy faces and the sour smell of their unwashed bodies. In the end, just like native groups to their east such as the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras, the Blackfeet accepted intermarriage with whites because of its extraordinary political and economic benefits.

  For one thing, such unions made good business sense. An Indian father who married his daughter to a white man built an invaluable trading relationship with his son-in-law. The marriage secured the native man’s access to coveted trade goods, both for his own consumption and for wider distribution among his people, which in turn earned their loyalty and thus enhanced his prospects for a tribal leadership position. The fact of the marriage itself lent a crucial measure of prestige to the man’s family. For his part, through intermarriage the trader obtained not only the skins and pelts gathered by his father-in-law but likely the haul of other male family members as well. Moreover, the union integrated the trader into his wife’s extended kinship network.89

  It would be a mistake, however, to assume that these intimate relationships were all about economics. Consider the case of Alexander Culbertson. In
the winter of 1840–41 he married Natawista, the teenaged daughter of a Blood headman named Two Suns. Though Culbertson, whom the Blackfeet called Little Beaver, no doubt benefited financially from a close alliance with his wealthy and powerful father-in-law (not to mention Seen From Afar, Natawista’s influential brother), Culbertson’s intense physical attraction to Natawista led him to seek her hand. So strong were his feelings—supposedly from the moment he first saw her at Fort McKenzie, when she was in her early teens—that he readily agreed to Two Suns’ stark preconditions: a delay of marriage until Natawista had grown a bit older, and a renunciation of his other romantic liaisons, which included a previous marriage to a Piegan woman.90

  Thus in short order, a heady mix of love, sex, power, and especially money had led intermarriage to take hold among the Blackfeet by the 1830s (just as it had elsewhere in fur country). So pervasive was the pattern that fur traders who did not marry Indian women became the exception. Like Alexander Culbertson, Kenneth McKenzie and James Kipp took Indian wives, as did almost all of the white men who lived and worked at Fort Union and its satellites. These marriages usually conformed to the region’s rough social hierarchy, so that women from more prominent native families tended to marry upper-level employees like the bourgeois or his clerks, while girls of more modest means found husbands among the engagés, the fur posts’ rank and file. Although many of these unions broke apart when traders elected to return to the eastern climes of the United States, others, like Culbertson’s, lasted for years, suggesting a degree of closeness that some white visitors to the Upper Missouri found inconceivable.91

  ONE CAN ONLY speculate as to how Coth-co-co-na viewed the arrangement of her 1844 marriage to Malcolm Clarke. Certainly she understood that she had to accede to Under Bull’s wishes, but perhaps she nursed some quiet doubts about the union. Maybe there was a young warrior in camp or even a different trader whom she preferred as a husband. Or possibly she ached at the notion of leaving behind her mother, who, by custom, would now visit Coth-co-co-na only during Clarke’s absence, for among the Blackfeet it was improper for a married man to speak with his female in-laws.