Beauty for Ashes (34 page)

First Sam holds up the ring for all to see. Then he shouts to the mountain tops, “With this ring I thee wed.”

Meadowlark lets him put it on.

She says, “And I wed you.”

Then she permits a kiss that is probably the most conspicuous public display of affection ever permitted by a Crow woman.

“What God hath joined together,” announces Ashley, “let no man put asunder.”

“Joins with Buffalo!” shouts Beckwourth. “Meadowlark!”

A dozen voices echo his cry. “Joins with Buffalo! Meadowlark!”

Gideon strikes up a another tune. This time it's “Mairi's Wedding.” The newlyweds lead out and the whole company, whites, Frenchies, Spanyards, Delawares, Iroquois, and even some watching Shoshones dance behind them. The whites and Frenchies do jigs. The newlyweds and Indians dance with restraint, toe-heel, toe-heel. Some of the white men sing.

Around the fire they dance, across the buffalo grass, between the shrubs of sage, and on to Sam and Meadowlark's lodge.

Quick as a flash, the couple dashes in.

Beckwourth hollers, “I wonder what will happen in there.”

He backs up, takes a run at the lodge, and scrambles right up the buffalo skins. Just as he starts slipping, he lunges and grabs a lodgepole sticking out of the smoke hole. He pulls himself up. He pretends to peer down inside, where the lodge fire is nearly out, and the fleshly fire is not yet lit.

He throws a mock leer at the crowd.

A hundred men laugh, propose toasts, stumble over bushes, and collapse onto the ground. Some head for the Shoshone tipis, seeking their own fun.

Inside, Sam and Meadowlark undress each other slowly. They look at each other with wonder. Sam takes her left hand, raises it to his lips, and kisses the gold ring. Then he tumbles her onto the buffalo robes.

B
EAUTY FOR
A
SHES
is the second novel of the Rendezvous Series, which tells the story of the fur trade in the American West during its glory years, from the early 1820s to the late 1830s. It is an adventure tale and a love story told against a background that is scrupulously researched.

Most of the characters around Sam Morgan are historical. William Ashley, Jedediah Smith, Jim Beckwourth, Tom Fitzpatrick, James Clyman, and many others are characterized as the record shows them. Aside from Sam, the main fictional characters are the Crow characters, Gideon, Third Wing, and Micajah.

The fur trade, its conditions and circumstances, the landscape, the Indian peoples, and so on are also drawn carefully from the record. The struggles and subsequent success of the Ashley firm were just as suggested here. I have described the first and second rendezvous from accounts of men who were there. Ashley's instructions on how to find the meeting place (complete with “pealed trees”), for instance, is as he wrote it; Daniel Potts's letter telling his brother about the second rendezvous is what he actually penned.

My hope is to create, over the entire series, an authentic picture of a particularly splendid time in America, even more full of danger, conflict, wild possibility, villainy, cowardice, heroism, tragedy, and joy than most eras in American history.

A final note: Money was very different in the 1820s. A profit of $50,000 then may be the equivalent of a couple of million dollars now. The $1.50 a trapper paid for a pound of coffee was wages for a day or two back in the States.

Most of the unfamiliar words the mountain men use here are defined in the glossary in the first novel in the series,
So Wild a Dream.

F
OR THE MATERIAL
on the Crow people, thanks to my friends among the Crows, especially the men of medicine, Larsen and Tyler Medicine Horse. I also relied on the bible about Crow culture, Robert Lowie's
The Crow Indians.
I have relied for the doings of the mountain men particularly on two fine books, Dale L. Morgan's
Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West
and Fred R. Gowans's
Rocky Mountain Rendezvous
.

Thanks to Jan Blevins, Richard Hoyt, and others who provided crucial information.

My editor, Dale Walker, is a rock.

The Honorable Clyde Hall, man of medicine of the Shoshone people, has acted as my mentor for twenty years. Thank you, Clyde.