Charbonneau (4 page)

Lewis explained the native garb: He had met the Shoshones a couple of days earlier and, after initial fright, they had been friendly. When he tried to get them to come down the mountain to meet Clark and help with the baggage, they had been afraid of a trick, an ambush. They were scared of all their enemies, Lewis explained. They stayed high in these mountains, living on only nuts and fish, to avoid the other tribes. When Lewis’s men shot deer to provide food for everyone, the Shoshones thought they were being attacked. Finally, to reassure the chief, Cameahwait, the three white men had given the Indians their hats and other white clothes and had put on the Indians’ clothes.

The captains had duty to attend to. They followed Cameahwait to a shade of willows, removed their moccasins, and began the pipe-smoking ceremonies. Taking off the moccasins was important for both sides: It said, symbolically, “If I am not sincere, may I ever go barefoot”—a stern penalty in the mountains. Cameahwait offered the pipe to the earth, the sky, and the gods of the four winds, puffed reflectively, and passed the pipe left. Clark knew that there was no hurrying the smoking.

When they were ready to talk, the captains sent for Sacajawea to be interpreter. She slipped in, took the humble place at the far right of the circle, and sat down. Abruptly she jumped up, threw her arms around Cameahwait, wrapped her blanket around him, and began to cry. She had recognized Cameahwait as her brother. The chief was visibly moved, but not so expressive.

Lewis and Clark then made the necessary speeches about the Shoshones’ dependence on the government of the United States for items of trade, and that government’s friendliness toward them and willingness to protect them. This trade could not begin, Lewis went on, until the long knives returned to their home country. In order to return they needed many strong Shoshone horses, guidance toward Salt-Water-Everywhere, and help in transporting their goods across land. Cameahwait regretted that he must give horses now in return for promises rather than rifles—the British were already giving his enemies, the Blackfeet, rifles—but he would do so. And so the council ended.

That was when Sacajawea, already overcome by the rejoining, was told that all her family was dead except for two brothers and a nephew. She burst into tears again. Immediately she adopted her nephew, Bazel, as her own son.

Outside the tent was bedlam. The men had not seen any Indians—especially any Indian women—since they left Fort Mandan over four months before. And the squaws were making over them, exclaiming at the marvelous whiteness of their bellies, their faces were dark as any Indians, oohing at tiny pieces of mirror, aahing at blue beads and strips of ribbon, toying with belt buckles. The braves were distracted with rifles and pistols.

The biggest sensation was York. They were awed by his hugeness, his kinked hair, his black-all-over skin. None of the long knives had painted themselves black for war except this one. He was painted black all over—a powerful warrior—and his color was permanent. A man who feared nothing. The squaws were fluttering and chattering like wrens around him, touching him, poking at him, smiling and giggling like children. York was basking in it. He was surprising them with the places on him that were blackened. The display was about to become indecent, though the Shoshone would consider nothing indecent. Clark found himself hoping that York would stop assuring his sexual future and head into the bushes to enjoy his sexual present. The Shoshone teen-age girls, not yet worn by hard work, were quite handsome, he had to admit.

“Nothing to do about it, Captain Clark,” observed Lewis.

“These Indians haven’t seen many white men, maybe none,” said Clark. “Maybe they don’t have Louis Veneris.”

Lewis made a noncommittal sound. They were worried about a further breakdown in the expedition’s health. Lewis took some braves off to demonstrate the air gun. a rifle that worked on compressed air which he had had made and brought along and of which he was inordinately proud. It drew the appropriate amaze. Clark noticed that York had gone into the bushes.

After an hour a new clamor got started. Colter had killed a deer, and these people had almost no meat to eat. A train formed behind him as he dragged the carcass into camp. Braves, squaws, and children tore at the raw flesh as soon as Colter stopped, and stuffed it down. They shrieked and picked like crows. One young brave, evidently of strong stomach, Lewis thought, took the small intestine aside, put one end in his mouth, and sucked it down inch by inch without biting or chewing, squeezing the contents out the other end with his hands as he swallowed.

Several older squaws were fussing over Paump. They scrutinized his dark hair, his light eyes, his light brown skin. They looked from the child to his father, very white, and a chief among the long knives. They touched the child, wondering whether he had the big medicine of the Frenchmen (as they called whites) coursing in his veins. Would he bring the medicine to them? They looked at Sacajawea, holding the child on one arm, head cradled in the palm of her hand, and wondered whether she could give them the medicine. They doubted it. One old squaw, stooped with years and her face crevassed, shaded the child’s squinting eyes with her hand and looked long at his face.

“Your first-born?” she asked.

“My Paump,” Sacajawea affirmed.

“Will Togowata give him a name?” Shoshone children were named by wise old men or medicine men, usually when they were much older.

“He has been given his name by my Frenchman and the Red-Headed Chief,” said Sacajawea, and beamed. “He is called Jean-Baptiste, after a great medicine man of the whites.”

The old woman looked at her long and smiled a slow smile. Sacajawea knew that it was good.

While Lewis stayed to bargain for horses, Clark set out to check the water route to the Pacific. Cameahwait, making mounds of sand for mountains and finger-lines for rivers, indicated that this river, the Lehmi, flowed into the Salmon River, which cut steeply through the mountains and emptied into the Snake, which emptied into the Columbia. Could they take canoes down the Salmon? Cameahwait shook his head no. Clark went into the deep cut to make sure. A week later he confirmed that the Salmon was as rough and turbulent a river as he had seen. They would have to travel on horseback until they found smoother waters. President Jefferson’s dream of a transcontinental water route was dimming.

At length, with fine promises, more than the dwindling trade goods, they persuaded Cameahwait to part with twenty-nine horses, many of them Appaloosas. An elderly guide, Toby, led them across the pass, down the Bitterroot River to a wide, handsome meadow with a creek joining the river from the west; they named the spot Traveller’s Rest and camped there for two days, gathering food and repairing clothing. Game was scarce, and the men were getting thin. It was September 9, and they had been snowed on once already. Here they would strike directly west across rough mountains. Cameahwait said the Pierced-Nose Indians used that way to go to the buffalo plains, but that it was almost impossible. Lewis and Clark decided that if the Pierced Noses could do it, so could they. And so they came out of the Bitterroot Mountains, having passed the Great Divide.

SEPTEMBER 11, 1805: The expedition set out across the Lolo Trail, an arduous route through high mountains barren of game.

SEPTEMBER 26-OCTOBER 10, 1805: The expedition, wearied from severe cold and hunger and suffering from dysentery, made recuperative camp with the Nez Percé Indians on Wieppe Prairie. From here the Clearwater River was navigable, so they made canoes.

OCTOBER 31-NOVEMBER 2, 1805: The expedition passed around and through the two sets of great falls on the Columbia.

NOVEMBER 14, 1805: The captains saw, for the first time, what they took to be the Pacific Ocean, at the mouth of the Columbia.

CHRISTMAS DAY, 1805: Clark’s journal: “at day light this morning we awoke by the discharge of the fire arm of all our party & a Selute, Shouts, and a Song which the whole party joined in under our windows, after which they retired to their rooms were chearfull all the morning.…The Indians leave us in the evening all the party Snugly fixed in their huts. I reeved a presnt of Capt. L. of a fleece hosrie Shirt Draws and Socks, a pr. Mockersons of White-house a Small Indian basket of Gutherich, two Dozen white weails tails of the Indian woman, & some black root of the Indians before their departure. Drewyer informs me that he saw a Snake pass across the parth to day. The day proved Showerey wet and disagreeable.

“we would have Spent this day the nativity of Christ in feasting, had we any thing either to raise our Sperits or even gratify our appetites, our Diner concisted of pore Elk, so much Spoiled that we eate it thro’mear necessity, Some Spoiled pounded fish and fiew roots.”

NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1806: Hungry, restless, and tired of the relentless rains, the men completed Fort Clatsop.

MARCH 23, 1806: Clark’s journal: “This morning proved so raney and uncertain that we were undetermined for some time whether we had best set out & risque the [waters] which apeared to be riseing or not. the rained seased and it became fair about Meridian, at which time we loaded our canoes & at 1 p.m. left Fort Clatsop on our homeward bound journey, at this place we had wintered and remained from the 7th of Deer. 1805 to this day and have lived as well as we had any right to expect, and we can say that we were never one day without 3 meals of some kind a day either pore Elk meat or roots, notwithstanding the repeated fall of rain which has fallen almost constantly since we passed the long narrows.”

MAY, 1806: The expedition camped and relaxed with the Nez Percés on Wieppe Prairie, waiting for the snows to melt in the high mountains ahead. Later, half the Nez Percé tribe claimed members of the Lewis & Clark expedition as their forefathers.

JULY 3, 1806: After a short stay at Traveller’s Rest, the expedition divided and moved out. Lewis went due east to find a short route through the mountains to the Great Falls. Clark, with Charbonneau and Sacajawea, took the previous year’s route in order to pick up caches of supplies, and then swung south to explore the Yellowstone River.

JULY 24, 1806: Late afternoon. A stand of cottonwoods alongside the wide, lazy Yellowstone. The sun glistened yellow on the clear water and glanced up at the faces. Clark and George Shannon were squatting on logs on a sandbar, the captain looking toward the far rise of the Rocky Mountains, the private whittling at a stick and unconsciously humming an old hymn. A small fire of dead fall burned between them, almost unnoticeable in the glow. Sacajawea was moving around the fire, roasting hump ribs slowly, the fat dripping down and firing spurts of flame. She poked quickly at the tongue cooking under a pile of coals become ashes. Charbonneau was stretched out sleeping on the sand to one side. Except for the soft sizzle of the ribs, the late afternoon was perfectly quiet.

Paump was playing near Clark. The child picked up a driftwood stick and poked it into the sand, flicked some up, touched the grains with a finger. He picked up a small stone and slung it in an awkward half throw. He toddled over to Clark, jabbed the stick into his right palm, and rubbed it around. He wanted to play tug. Clark tugged lightly, then picked the boy up and set him on one knee.

The air, cool with the coming of evening, stirred gently. Clark looked over the child’s head toward the Rockies. The sun was almost on the ridges now, half behind the clouds that hung on the high peaks. It had reddened perceptibly. The river glowed rose, the cottonwood branches beyond blackened against the sky, the buffalo grass on prairie was rose lights and rose shadows, as though glazed with alizarin crimson. Captain Clark looked west but thought east, thought of the girl named Julia he wanted to marry, a girl twenty years his junior—Sacajawea’s age, in fact.

The Shoshone girl, slight but hardy, as Clark well knew, was cleaning currants and gooseberries to go with dinner. Clark put his big hands on Paump’s belly, aware of the softness and warmth of the child’s skin. Paump smiled big-eyed at Sacajawea. Bending over, she looked up at Clark and smiled lightly and easily. The soldier drew in the night air deeply, and caught the good smell of ribs with it. His eyes settled toward the Rockies. He would be glad to be back in the States. But he would miss the mountains.

A few days later, Clark spotted a huge stone monolith rising up on the right bank. Examining it more closely he found Indian paintings on it; he climbed up, surveyed the countryside, and decided to cut his own name into its face. He named it Pompey’s Pillar.

AUGUST 12, 1806: Clark’s party waited for Lewis a few miles below the mouth of the Yellowstone, uncomfortable in the windless heat and plagued by mosquitoes. They had waited for nine days when Lewis showed up, an invalid. The day before he had gone with Cruzatte into the underbrush to kill an elk. Cruzatte, an expert hunter and boatman, was blind in one eye and dim-sighted in, the other. When Lewis raised flintlock, Cruzatte shot him straight in the backside, the ball passing through one buttock and grazing the other. “Damn you, you’ve shot me in the ass,” Lewis howled and laughed at once. But that night the wound got very painful, and Lewis could neither sit nor stand the next day. Sacajawea giggled when she saw the wound, Charbonneau guffawed, and Clark cleaned and dressed it, wondering aloud whether the men had been creative in their jokes about their bad-assed captain.

That night the company celebrated its reunion. They feasted on ribs and boudins—the buffalo intestine they had learned to like—and beaver tail. John Collins distributed some beer brewed from bread made from roots, and it was judged toluble. Late in the evening, a fine, clear, warm evening with unnaturally bright stars, Cruzatte hauled out his fiddle and scraped some tunes for dancing. The men partnered each other and kicked up their heels. Paump was fascinated. He stood on his small, fleshy legs and wavered and bumped unsteadily. Cruzatte leaned down and rolled his good eye at the boy, and Paump gave a comical, sucking laugh. At length Clark offered him a thick finger to hold onto, and the eighteen-month-old boy began to dance, hopping up and down somewhere near the rhythm, stomping, shrieking with glee. He danced for some ten minutes, fell down, and collapsed into sleep. Sacajawea picked him up and wrapped him in his blankets.