The True Account

by Howard Frank Mosher

  I was eager to do a painting of the Indians’ trade rendezvous, but I was running low on colors and blank canvases and wished to husband what I had left for our journey to the Pacific. “Is that all the trouble?” Sage said after I explained my dilemma to her. “Go shoot us a buffalo.”

  I did as she bade me, and in the animal’s gall bladder she collected about a gallon of rainwater from a pothole on a red mesa. This she boiled down to a thick, pasty substance, which she compounded with a little buffalo tallow to form a brilliant madder-red. From sage twigs boiled with the leaves attached she concocted a glowing yellow. She extracted a royal purple from the huckleberries that grew abundantly in the high natural parks of the nearby mountains, and a lovely azure blue from the dried dung of some teal who were raising a second brood beside the Lake Where the River of Yellow Stones Rises. White she procured from a snowy clay resembling our kaolin.

  After scraping the hair from the hide of a mountain sheep, Sage tanned the underside with a mixture of buffalo brains and fat, smoked it over a fire-hole for a day, then set me to pounding it with a rock to make it soft and white. When I was finished, she stretched the hide over a frame of four willow sticks about the thickness of her little finger—thus making me a painting surface as smooth as canvas. To hold fast the colors, she showed me how to extract a more than passable sizing oil from wild sunflower seeds mixed with the glue from a boiled beaver tail and the hoofs of a buffalo. From the edge of a buffalo’s scapula she cut a light, porous applicator that received paint well and applied it in an even flow; and for finer work she fashioned a true brush from a deer fibula tipped with the hairs of a bull elk’s underbelly. Henceforward, while in the West, I would never be without the means to paint.

  I finished Indian Rendezvous at the Lake Where the River of Yellow Stones Rises on the last day of the fair. That evening the Crows put on a performance for the assembled tribes, which they called the Ballet of the Swimming Horses. Under Horse Stealer’s direction, their ponies conducted an elaborate water-dance in the lagoon of the lake just above the outlet. It was very beautiful to see, and afterward, at the Crows’ Tobacco Ceremony, my uncle presented the chief with a small sack of hemp seeds to plant in their home to the east. In exchange, the women of the tribe made him the first male member of Tall Mare’s Amazonian society.

  But no sooner had these ceremonies taken place than a hail of arrows and musket bullets announced the arrival of Smoke and a heavily armed party of Blackfoot warriors galloping up from the lagoon, bent upon capturing Sage and returning her to the Land of the Glaciers.

  51

  “WELL UNCLE,” I shouted over the roar of the river. “This is a very pretty situation.”

  “A very pretty situation indeed, Ti. The Blackfeet want Yellow Sage back and are determined to get her. The Crows are desperate to secure my services as commander of the Amazonian raiding party. The two nations have us surrounded. And if they don’t wipe each other out first, I can’t imagine what will happen. Two years ago we would hardly have dared hope for such an exciting—”

  Exciting what, I never heard. “Adventure,” I feared he might have said. But the word was drowned out by the thunder of falling water. My uncle, Sage, and I were ledged up with our mounts in a niche behind the first high cascade on the River of Yellow Stones, a few miles downstream from the lake. We had managed to flee into the woods during the skirmish the night before at the lagoon; but with dawn fast approaching, we would soon have to come out and deal with our pursuers, now arrayed on opposite sides of the river just below the falls.

  “I beg your pardon, my dear?” my uncle shouted to Sage, who was attempting to say something to him over the terrific din. Out came his tin hearing trumpet, which he placed as close to her ear as possible. But the only words I could make out were “my grandfather.”

  “I hope this works,” I said as Sage and I led the horses down the bank toward our Crow allies at sunrise. “It seems most improbable.”

  “Where Napi is concerned, the more improbable the plan the better,” Sage called back. “What could be more improbable than making his first wife out of ice?”

  I refrained from pointing out that it was exactly such experiments that caused me to be a bit skeptical of her grandfather’s wisdom. But if my uncle could slip away undetected while Sage and I distracted the Indians, there was a chance—just a chance—that her idea might actually work.

  The Crows and the Blackfeet were now hurling insults back and forth across the river at each other. Horse Stealer and his people blamed Smoke for breaking the time-honored truce of the fair. Smoke shouted back that the Crows had no right to detain Yellow Sage. Sage lost no time informing him that she was here in the Land Where the River of Yellow Stones Rises by her own choice, and would on no account rejoin them. But there was no doubt that the Blackfeet could cross the river, wipe out all of the fairgoers, carry off Sage, and kill me in the bargain if they wanted to.

  “So I see you’re ready to go against the wishes of my grandfather, Lord Napi,” Yellow Sage called out over the rapids.

  “I’m glad to learn that you alone know Napi’s will,” Smoke shouted back.

  “As a matter of fact, I do. He spends his summers not far from here, and I’ve spoken to him very recently. I’ll be glad to take you to him so that he can tell you himself.”

  “What kind of nonsense is this? Do you think I’d be so foolish as to let you lead me into a trap in some dark canyon?”

  “My grandfather lives in no dark canyon but on a high, airy plain. Bring your soldiers if you’re afraid to come alone.”

  Smoke agreed to accompany us, so long as the Crow force remained behind, which in fact they seemed very willing to do. But after Sage and I picked our way across the powerful river and we headed out with Smoke and his war party, the chief demanded again to know where we were leading him. Sage explained that Napi could be found in a nearby underground lodge, where he took a steam bath each morning to alleviate the ailments of advancing age. For, by her estimate, her grandfather was somewhat over ten thousand years old.

  “Absurd,” Smoke said. “Lord Napi is immortal and quite immune to human ailments.”

  “Be patient,” she replied. “We shall see what we shall see.” Soon the terrain began to look familiar. Just ahead a little puff of steam went up from some rocks. Smoke gave a harsh laugh. “Is that great Napi’s sweat lodge?”

  “Yes,” Yellow Sage Flower said. “Ride up and gather around the warm rocks in a circle if you wish to see him.”

  The disbelieving chief and his soldiers urged their mounts close to the smoking rocks. Suddenly a voice thundered out in the Blackfoot language, “WHO DARES APPROACH MY SACRED STEAM BATH?”

  At this all of the Indians but Smoke fell back in confusion. “Who speaks?” the chief said.

  “I AM NAPI,” roared the disembodied voice as the rocks began to send forth steamy exhalations. From deep in the ground came a muttering.

  Smoke, to his credit, stood his ground and even pulled back his lance arm. But even as he did so, a hiss like ten thousand rattlesnakes emerged from the shaking ground, and up shot a huge jet of hot water and steam. Riders shouted as scalding droplets rained down on them. Smoke’s pony whirled and galloped off, with the chief hanging on for his life and the rest of the horses thundering after him.

  “Napi has spoken, my children,” my uncle said, stepping out from behind a boulder with his tin trumpet in his hand. “Let us proceed to the mountains and the Ocean Pacific.”

  52

  TWO DAYS LATER WE were overjoyed to discover the tracks of Franklin’s pony on an upper fork of the westernmost branch of the Three Forks. Nearby on a pole was a note from the savant saying that Lewis’s party was laboring up the river some miles behind him, the shallows and rapids being very tedious to navigate in heavy canoes. Immediately my uncle forged ahead on his mule to meet Sage’s brother. She and I stopped only long enough for me to sketch a hill in the shape of a swimming beaver, which occasioned the following co
nversation between us.

  “Granted that the beaver is the most industrious animal,” I said, “which, then, is the smartest?”

  “Which do you think?” Sage said.

  “The coyote? Or the gray prairie wolf?” I was remembering how the wolves had decoyed the young antelope away from the herd back on the Missouri, which seemed to me to require great ingenuity and perhaps even some power of forethought.

  “Certainly not,” Sage said. “Sister Raven is the smartest. For she can not only be taught to talk, she can always feed herself and her family, even in times of famine. Now, tell me, Ticonderoga. If Grandmother Beaver is the most diligent, and Sister Raven the smartest, which of our wild brethren is the most beneficial?”

  “The horse?”

  “Wrong again!” she cried out delightedly. “Brother Bison is the most beneficial because he provides us with both food and shelter.”

  Ahead a bobcat—a creature of great temerity, even in Vermont—sat on a cottonwood stump near the trail and watched us pass by not twenty paces away. “Why, if you know so much,” said Sage, “does Bobcat have such a short little scut of a tail?”

  When I admitted that I had no idea, she said, “About six thousand years ago, Bobcat stole a rabbit Napi was cooking for his supper. My grandfather tried to stop him, but all he got was the tail. Since then all bobcats have been born with short tails.”

  From her parfleche Sage produced a raw buffalo liver as large as my mother’s doormat at home, and began to tear into it with her white teeth. After eating her fill of this delicacy she handed me what remained and insisted I try a bite; but I could not bring myself to swallow it. She laughed. And in this light-hearted way, we continued upstream toward the Land of the Shoshones.

  The following afternoon we started up an Indian road to the west. There were fresh signs of many horses here, but we rode until nightfall without seeing another soul. The next morning we traced our way up a little rill until at last, near an icy spring encircled by lupines, we stood on what we judged to be the Great Divide separating the waters of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico from those of the Pacific. Off to the west loomed range upon range of soaring, snowcapped peaks. Although I had expected to find more mountains between the Divide and the Columbia River, these were taller than any I had seen thus far, and blocked the way along the entire western horizon. Even Sage seemed daunted. Not only was there no discernible waterway through these peaks, there seemed to be no pass at all. It was as if a whole new continent stretched out between vis and the Pacific, with the most difficult part of our trek yet to come before we reached the ocean.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s Tree Feller, the great red-cockaded woodpecker. He’s hammering at a dead trunk in a place that echoes,” Yellow Sage said.

  The ringing blows resounded through the woods as we worked our way down the western side of the Divide beside a stream through the willows until, at the bottom of the ridge, in a bowl surrounded by steep hills, we discovered not the estimable Tree Feller but my uncle and Franklin, putting the finishing touches on a large log platform. “Not another prairie ark?” I inquired, after a warm reunion. Whereupon Franklin assured me that this was no ship but something altogether new and wonderful, with which my uncle hoped to call forth the Shoshone, who had melted into the mountains at their approach, leaving only trampled meadows where their horses had grazed and smoldering cooking fires by the stream.

  That evening at sunset, we built up a leaping bonfire behind the platform. My uncle then strutted out onto the logs and announced to the empty hillsides that he would now present a one-man performance of his comedy, Ethan Allen. Without further ado he began to charge up and down the stage, acting out all the parts of the play. Sure enough, as the drama progressed, Indians began to appear on the slopes above, first by ones and twos, then in small groups, then throngs. When the play finally ended, with the fall of Fort Ti and Ethan’s great speech, the audience maintained complete silence for above a minute. Finally, a child tittered. Then another. Soon, all over the hills, Shoshone men, women, and children were roaring with laughter. Never had I heard people laugh so hard. The Indians poured down off the mountainsides and shook my uncle’s hand over and over. And the next day, when he indicated that he would like to muster up a troupe for another performance, there was such a press of volunteers that only the highest-ranking braves could be selected to participate.

  When I was growing up in Vermont, our neighboring farmers said that certain men were “land-poor,” meaning that though they owned hundreds of acres, they rarely had any ready cash. Our new Indian friends were “horse-poor.” The Shoshone had been driven off the plains into these barren mountains by Yellow Sage’s Blackfoot relations, who had British muskets. And although the Spanish in California refused to trade guns to the Shoshone, or to any other Indians in their sphere, our hosts had a great abundance of excellent Spanish horses. Their encampment of about three hundred people owned at least one thousand first-class mounts; and it seemed likely that their chief, a fine-looking older man named Cameahwait, would be willing to trade some of them to Lewis’s party, who would certainly need horses to cross the Bitterroots, as the mountains to the west were called.

  Since there were several possible routes that the expedition might take over the Divide, my uncle asked Cameahwait if he would send some of his men out to find the American party and bring them along, with a letter from us urging them to come forward with all expediency. For the Indians had warned us that with fall coming on, and winter close behind, we and our friends must waste no time in getting through the mountains. As the scouting party to locate the official expedition was being made up, however, a young Shoshone named Goat Horns, who had been away on a week-long vision quest, rode hard into camp. He reported that after six days, no vision had been vouchsafed to him. But that morning, as he was morosely riding back toward the camp, he had encountered three apparitions near the cove of a creek just across the Divide to the east. These demons had advanced toward him, calling out repeatedly, “Ta-ba-bone,” which in the Shoshone language meant “stranger” or “enemy.” The wraith in the middle had rolled up his sleeves, evidently to show his white arms. This further alarmed Goat Horns by confirming his fear that these creatures were not men but ghouls. Putting his heels to his horse, he galloped for camp to warn his people.

  Despite all our reassurances that the expedition meant them no harm, the Shoshone were terribly alarmed. At last my uncle broke out his hemp in order to put them in a more tranquil state of mind—and he pointed out that on his Dutch clock the witching hour of midnight was now past, so they did not need to worry so much over the possibility of apparitions.

  This comedy of misunderstandings ended happily enough. Cameahwait and his people ventured out to greet Captain Lewis and hugged him to a fare-thee-well, since by now they were all under the affectionate influence of my uncle’s cannabis. Then we went together in a party to meet Clark and the main body of the expedition, which, though much delayed on the river, eventually came straggling along. In an unexpected twist, Cameahwait turned out to be Sacagawea’s older brother. But no sooner were we reunited with the captains than a most tragical disaster befell our own little party, which I must now narrate.

  Early that evening Franklin decided to go a-fishing on No Return River, as the Shoshone called the tumultuous waterway that ran in front of their camp. Now the No Return was said by the Indians to flow a hundred miles before joining a larger river that they called the Serpent. The Serpent, after another two hundred miles or so, debouched into a major tributary of the Columbia. This network of watercourses would certainly have been our first choice, and the captains’, too, for proceeding to the Pacific, but for one difficulty. According to the Shoshone, the first sixty or seventy miles of the No Return passed through a canyon said to be utterly unnavigable.

  Just at twilight, while angling from a borrowed canoe below two long fish weirs in the pool in front of the Indian camp, Franklin hooked an enormous s
almon. “Fish on!” he cried, as the silvery giant raced up the length of the pool, stripping line off his reel. The savant held his rod high over his head for maximum leverage (and show) as a great crowd of Indians gathered on the bank to see the outcome of this epic battle. My uncle, in the meantime, was running along the shore calling out all kinds of advice, much of it contradictory. One moment he told Franklin to keep a tight line, the next to let the salmon run or he would certainly lose his trophy. The fish jumped once, twice, thrice. “Heyday!” cried Franklin. “I shall call this fish Izaac Walton.”

  Izaac Walton leapt yet again. But then, as hooked fish will sometimes do, he took it into his head to make a dash straight down the river toward the raging whitewater below. “Follow the fish, the rapids be damned!” called my uncle. Whether Franklin actually intended to do such a foolish thing, I do not know. But the current above the rapids ran deceivingly fast, and before the Blackfoot sportsman knew what was happening, his canoe had been swept past the fish weirs and was bobbing down the river on the crests of the whitecaps. Sooner than one would think possible, our dear friend had disappeared around the far bend between the sheer red walls of the No Return, leaving our entire party stunned and grief-stricken—all but Yellow Sage, who said that Napi would never let his grandson drown in that or any other river. I was not hopeful, however. For mile after mile below our encampment the No Return was said to be one unbroken thundering cascade between high walls of rock; even Captain Clark, the expedition’s best waterman, was obliged to conclude that no canoe could survive for ten seconds in such water.