Rocky Mountain Company Read Free

to establish a post on the United States side of the Arkansas River and avoid trading in Mexico. There were none to move into, and it would have to be built from adobe or cottonwood. During that first year, they wouldn’t have much of a post at all: Jamie intended to drive his wagons out to the villages and trade there. William Bent was already doing that, but Jamie felt sure he could best Bent at his own game. Jamie would deal primarily with the dangerous Comanche, Kiowa, and Lipan Apache, because Bent’s wife was a southern Cheyenne, and Bent, St. Vrain had a lock on the Cheyenne trade.
    All this the three future partners had discussed by the hour over coffee, or sometimes bourbon, at the Planters House that winter. Today’s events were more ceremony than substance, and Guy didn’t suppose they would alter things much.
    “You’ve each picked out a trade outfit you think is suited for the tribes you’ll be dealing with. Are you quite satisfied with it? We have a few hours to add or subtract. Our rivals are wily men, messieurs. Nothing — truly nothing — escapes the attention of Cadet Chouteau, or Monsieur Bent and his frères. But I keep hoping you might think of something, some petite entrée — “
    “Wall, as a fact, I’ve got me an ideah,” drawled Jamie Dance. “Not so much for my outfit as Brokenleg’s. Them tribes up there haven’t got much choice for bow wood. They make their bows outa juniper or chokecherry mostly, and it’s poor doing compared to osage orange. They trade most anything for a good stick of osage orange, from this country here, just so they can have them a first-rate bow. I don’t think the big outfits ever cottoned on to it — I mean, how much those warriors lust for a stick of osage orange. But I reckon we’d get a dressed robe for a stick of it.”
    Bois d’arc! A tanned robe worth four dollars for a stick of wood that grew so commonly in Missouri it could be gathered by the ton. The very thought excited Guy. “Where? How?” he asked.
    “Best groves of it are over the other side of the state, east of Independence. That’s where the Osage tribe cut the wood. I’m thinkin’ — to save time — when LaBarge sends his deckmen to shore for a wooding, we can put our engagés to work cutting the osage orange sticks. I’ll show ’em what’s good sticks and what’s poor doin’s. Most of it should go up the Missouri with Brokenleg, but I’ll fetch along a few hundred myself. It’s got to dry six months, so we don’t be makin’ a robe killing until next year.”
    “Ah, mon cher Monsieur Dance, that is the edge, the advantage, we’ve been looking for, eh? A robe for a stick of wood?”
    “Should work,” Dance replied. “Most of those warriors can’t afford a parcel of robes for a fusil, but they can spare a robe or two for a prize bow wood that let’s ’em put an arrah thirty yards further than their best wood bows.”
    “Only for the Cheyenne!” spat Dust Devil, from a shadowed corner. “Never to the Absaroka dogs!”
    There, right there, lay one of the Rocky Mountain Company’s potential weaknesses, and Guy thought to deal with it — again.
    “Madame Fitzhugh,” he began amiably. “A trading post makes a profit, and guarantees its safety, only by observing the strictest neutrality. The bois d’arc must be available to all who wish to trade for it, I’m sure you and your husband will agree. For your own safety.”
    He wasn’t so sure they agreed. Dust Devil had made it a life mission to fight the traditional enemies of the Cheyenne, especially the Absaroka, or Crows, but also the Assiniboin. She was a Suhtai Cheyenne, and thus of the special clan that largely governed the tribal religion and its sacred symbols, including the medicine hat. Fitzhugh himself was more Cheyenne than European these days, speaking his wife’s tongue adequately, and favoring her people in all tribal matters. If the post made its bias too obvious, it would collapse — and sink