Collection of Nebraska Pioneer Reminiscences

by Daughters of the American Revolution. Nebraska

"I don't know, Nikumi; I may have to go over, for there is much land and houses and fields to be cared for. I am going down to see Sarpy, now. He came up on the boat today."

She watched him as he strode off down past the cattle station towards the fort. In the summer time her love of her native life asserted itself, and she left the log quarters which Dr. Gale provided for her, and occupied a tipi, or tent of skins, down among the cottonwoods and willows of the bottom lands where portions of her tribe were generally to be found. When he passed out of sight she took her baby and went to a tipi a short distance from hers, where a stalwart buck lay on a shaggy buffalo robe on the shady side, smoking a pipe of kinnikinick, and playing with some young dogs. She spoke with him a few minutes. He ceased playing with the dogs, sat up and listened, and finally with a nod of assent to some request of hers started off towards the fort. She followed shortly after and glided about from the post store to the laundresses' quarters, stopping here and there where groups of soldiers were gathered, and listening attentively to their talk about the news that had come by the boats.

She learned that these boats were to be loaded with furs from Sarpy's trading post and go back to St. Louis in a few days. In the meantime the young buck, who was her brother, had gone by her directions to Sarpy's trading post, just below the fort. She had told him what she knew and surmised; that the "pale-faced medicine man," as the Indians called him, had received a paper from his friends across the great waters towards the rising sun which told his brother was dead, and that he might have to go there to care for the houses and lands his brother had left; that she had heard him say "If I could take the child," and she feared he might take her papoose away; "and he shall not," she said passionately. "I must know what he will do. Go you and listen if the medicine man talks with Sarpy; watch him closely and find out all."

He had followed the Indian trail which skirted along the edge of the high bluffs on the eastern boundary of the fort, and reached the trading post from the north. Going in he uttered the single word "tobac," and while the clerk was handing it out to him he glanced around in the aimless, stolid Indian manner, as if looking over the blankets and skins hung against the logs. Back at the further, or southwest, corner of the store, near a window, and partially screened by a rude desk made of a box set upon a table and partitioned into pigeon-holes, sat two men. One of them was Dr. Gale, the other, Peter A. Sarpy.

To the ears of most readers the name will convey no particular impression; if a resident of Nebraska it would call to mind the fact that a county in that state was named Sarpy, and the reader might have a hazy consciousness that an early settler had borne that name; but in the days of this story and for thirty years later it meant power and fame. The agent of the American Fur Company in that section, Peter A. Sarpy's word was law; to him belonged the trading posts, or so it was believed; he commanded the voyageurs who cordelled the boats and they obeyed. Every winter he went down the great river before it was frozen over, to St. Louis, and every spring his boats came up after the ice had broken up, and before the great mountain rise came on in June, with new goods that were anxiously looked for, and eagerly seized in exchange for the buffalo robes, the beaver, mink, otter, and deer skins that had been collected through the winter. He was of French parentage, a small man, with the nervous activity of his race; the brightest of black eyes; careful of his dress, even in the wilds; the polish of the gentleman always apparent in his punctilious greeting to everyone; but making the air blue with his ejaculations if his orders were disobeyed or his ire aroused. Famous the length of the river for his bravery and determination, he was a man well fitted to push actively the interests of the company of which he was the agent as well as a member.

The Indian passed noiselessly out and going around to the side of the building seated himself upon the ground, and pulling his long pipe from the folds of his blanket, filled it with the "tobac," rested it on the ground, and leisurely began to smoke. It was no unusual thing for the Indians thus to sit round the post, and no one took any notice of him, nor in fact that he was very near the open window, just out of the range of vision of the two men sitting within.

"So upon me devolves the succession of the estate of Burton Towers," Gale was saying to Sarpy, "and my sister-in-law writes that some one is imperatively needed to look after the estate as there is no male member of the family left in England."

"And you will leave your wild life of the prairies to go back to the tame existence of rural English life? Egad, I don't believe I could stand it even to be master of the beautiful demesnes which belong to my family. Power is sweet, but Mon Dieu, the narrowness, the conventionalities, the tameness of existence!"

"No worse than the tameness of this cursed fort for the last year or two. It was very well at first when the country was new to us and the Indians showed some fight that gave us a little excitement, but now we've exhausted all the resources, and an English squire, even, will be a great improvement. You've some change, you know. St. Louis in winter gives you a variety."

"What are you going to do with Nikumi and Mary?"