The Dakota Cipher

fierce warriors the trappers seemed to lose interest.

Pierre said it was too late in the season to try to catch his North Men, so we swept south just ahead of winter. On October 13^th – another anniversary of the betrayal of the Knights Templar – we paddled onto the shelving levee of Saint Louis, where riverboats could ground to unload cargo before being pushed off the stone ‘beach’ again. Like Detroit, this French settlement was a hundred years old, but unlike Detroit it was growing instead of shrinking. French refugees from the aggrandizements of Britain and the United States fetched up here to make a new life in Napoleon’s empire. The city is just a few miles south of the Mississippi’s junction with the Missouri River, and a more strategic spot can scarcely be imagined. If Bonaparte wants Louisiana, he’ll have to assert control from Saint Louis as well as New Orleans. If Jefferson wants to reach the Pacific, his Meriwether Lewis must come through Saint Louis.

And so I ended my western sojourn. I was exhausted, heartsick, poor, had no proof that Jefferson’s elephants still lived – and couldn’t really reveal just what we did find since I had a hunch it might prove useful to an inveterate treasure hunter like me. Thira? Og? As always, the ciphers didn’t make a lick of sense. So I had my first hot bath in months, ate white bread light as a cloud, and slept on a bed above the floor.

My new boots hurt my feet.

Pierre said he’d never invite insane donkeys into his canoe again. It was awkward for a few days, because we were the closest of friends and yet he knew I was as anxious to go back to cities as he longed for the freedom of the voyageur. Both of us carried unspoken grief and guilt for the women who’d died, but it’s hard for men to talk of such things plainly. I wondered if I should persuade the little Frenchman to come back with me to Paris. But one morning, without word, he was gone. The only sign I had that this was his choice and not a kidnapping was that he left the mangled pyramid and bullet next to my bed.

Would I ever see him again?

It was in Saint Louis that I met a visiting Louisville squire named William Clark, a younger brother of the famed Revolutionary hero George Rogers Clark. This Clark’s own Indian fighting days had ended with nagging illnesses and a decision to settle down to domestic life in Kentucky, but he was a rugged-looking, congenial man who sought me out when he heard I’d been tramping through the northern Louisiana Territory.

‘I’m impressed, sir, very impressed indeed,’ Clark said, pumping my hand as if I were the president. ‘But perhaps not such a trick for the hero of Acre and Mortefontaine?’

‘Hardly a hero, Mr Clark,’ I said as I sipped a bottle of blessed French wine, bringing to mind past bliss in Paris. ‘Half the things I try seem to turn to ashes.’

‘But that’s the experience of all men, is it not?’ Clark asked. ‘I’m convinced the difference between a successful man and a failure is that the former keep trying. Don’t you agree?’

‘You seem to have the wisdom of my mentor Franklin.’

‘You knew Franklin? Now there was a man! A titan, sir, a Solomon! And what would Franklin have said of Louisiana?’

‘That it’s cosier in Philadelphia.’

Clark laughed. ‘Indeed, I bet it is! Philadelphia is no doubt cosier than Kentucky, too, but ah, Kentucky – such beauty! Such possibility!’

‘Louisiana has that as well, I suppose.’

‘But only for Americans, don’t you think? Look at these French. Bravest fellows in the world, but trappers, not farmers. They drift like the Indians. More Americans sweep down the Ohio in a week than all the French who live in Saint Louis! Yes, Americans are going to fill up the eastward bank here, and soon!’

‘Do you think so? I’m to report to both Jefferson and Napoleon.’

‘Then report the inevitable.’ He took a sip of wine. ‘Tell me. Did you like it out there?’

I considered, and decided to be honest. ‘It frightened me.’

‘It pulls on me. I wish I had the chance to see that land of yours, Ethan Gage. I’ve heard our new president is intrigued, and I know his secretary, a captain named Lewis. It would be great to set off again, but then I’ve got a family and troublesome digestion. I don’t know. I don’t know.’ His fingers played a tattoo, looking westward at things I couldn’t see. ‘So what will you tell Napoleon?’

That I needed to find Og, I thought. ‘That Louisiana is an opportunity, but of a different kind than he might think. I think I’ll tell him there’s money to be made.’ I was forming the report in my own mind. ‘I think I’ll tell Thomas Jefferson how to make a bargain.’

HISTORICAL NOTE

On November 8^th, 1898, an immigrant farmer named Olaf Ohman was clearing land near the village of Kensington, Minnesota, when he unearthed a stone slab the size of a grave marker that was entangled in the roots of a poplar tree. Upon inspection he realised the stone was carved with Norse runes, or letters, eventually translated as:

Eight Gotlanders and twenty-two Norwegians on a journey of acquisition from Vinland, very far west. We had camp by two rocky islands one day’s journey from this stone. We were out fishing one day. After we came home we found ten men red with blood and death. AVM save from evil.

And on the stone’s side:

Have ten men by the sea to look after our ships fourteen days journey from this island. Year 1362.

The authenticity of the Kensington rune stone, on display in a small museum in Alexandria, Minnesota, has been hotly debated for more than a century. Did Norse explorers really reach the upper Midwest some 130 years before the first voyage of Columbus? Or was the stone a clever forgery? The farmer never profited from his find and insisted to the day he died that he didn’t carve it. If a forgery, was it planted decades earlier, to give the tree time to grow around it? No white settlers lived there then. If real, was it moved from its original location? Why would medieval Scandinavians travel to a geographically nondescript place in western Minnesota?

Scholars who once scoffed at the idea of any pre-Columbian contact between Europe, Asia, and the Americans have in recent decades been inundated with fragmentary evidence and imaginative theories suggesting that transatlantic and transpacific voyages in fact took place. The most compelling find is the 1960s discovery of the L’Anse aux Meadows Norse settlement site in Newfoundland, which proved that stories of medieval Viking explorers reaching America are indeed true. Rune stones, meanwhile, have been found in Maine, Oklahoma, Iowa, the Dakotas, and Minnesota. So have metal fragments of European weaponry and tools. Some two hundred boulders with mooring holes that are similar to the type medieval Scandinavians used to moor their boats have been discovered in North America.

As this novel indicates, theories that other Europeans – or even Israelites! – preceded Columbus to America go back to Jefferson’s day and earlier. The lighter colouring of some Mandan Indians, and the fact that their agricultural settlements were more reminiscent of a medieval European village than a typical Plains Indian encampment, was commented on by French explorer Pierre de La Verendrye in 1733 and artist George Catlin in 1832. Their women were reputed to be among the most beautiful on the continent and were generously shared – a reputation that influenced the decision by the Lewis and Clark expedition to winter over there. All this fuelled speculation that Norse or Welsh genes, at least, had made their way to the Missouri River. Unfortunately, the Mandan and their Awaxawi cousins were entirely wiped out by smallpox and Dakota raids by the 1840s before any systematic scientific inquiry could be done.

There are legends that a Prince Madoc of Wales set out for the New World with ten ships in 1170, and that Saint Brendan sailed west from Ireland to the ‘Isle of the Blessed’ in 512. There has been debate that the volume of prehistoric copper mining in the Great Lakes is too great to be attributed to aboriginal use.

Anthropologists have also considered theories that America could originally have been populated not just by Asians crossing the Bering Sea land bridge during the Ice Age but by European ancestors island-hopping across the North Atlantic. Meanwhile, the date at which humans first appeared in the Western Hemisphere continues to be pushed back as new finds are made.

The odd notion that the Norse (or Welsh) made their way to the middle of the continent is at least possible because of the North American river system. Kensington is between the headwaters of the Red-Nelson river system, which runs north to Hudson’s Bay, and the Mississippi, which eventually drains into the Gulf of Mexico. The