THE DAY THE CANDLE BLEW OUT

The days were short at the American Fur Co.’s Oglala Post that January—the Moon of Frost in the Tepee by the Lakota way of marking time. Trader Thomas L’Estang Sarpy had perched a candle atop the counter for light as he and two assistants put the storeroom in order. One of three brothers in a prominent St. Louis fur-trading family, Sarpy had married into the tribe and was wintering in the post at the confluence of the Cheyenne River and Rapid Creek (near the Black Hills in present-day South Dakota) to barter trade goods for buffalo robes and furs.

Then it happened—perhaps a robe or an elbow bumped the candle, which toppled from the counter into the trade goods stacked below. For Sarpy the world ended with a roar that day, Jan. 19, 1832. In