The True Account

by Howard Frank Mosher

  Instead of the desert of the upper Columbia, here were huge evergreen trees, thick undergrowth, and a misty sky. I let my hand trail in the water, brought it cupped to my face to wash off the grime and sweat, and tasted salt. Having traveled some forty-five hundred miles from Vermont, we had reached the Pacific.

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  THE INDIANS who had gathered at the finish line were very much impressed with our performance—all but Butcher Boy, who was so disappointed by the outcome of the race that he threw his marrow-hammer and other tools into the river. But my uncle pulled the canoe of the dejected Dorsal Fin up onto the sand beside the tidal pool, shook his hand, and loudly thanked him for most graciously allowing us to win the race as a demonstration of his great generosity and hospitality to strangers. Then he gave the Fin his umbrella. At this the chief brightened considerably. He declared that we had acquitted ourselves in the rapids very well, and even if he and his men had not deliberately laid off their paddles in the home stretch, he was quite sure that, with the help of the magic wind-parasol, we would have come in a close second. And coming in second to the greatest rivermen in the universe was no mean feat and nothing to be ashamed of. But Butcher Boy, who had now thought better of relinquishing his hammer and, neck-deep in the tidal pool, was groping around for it, called out that although we survived the Five Demons, the larger party to come surely would perish in them, and he still would have livers enough to trade to the Tlingits for a dozen new canoes.

  That afternoon I began a new picture. In the foreground Franklin and my uncle and I sat in our canoe, with the private in the bow, his umbrella cocked at a jaunty angle over his shoulder, his “Chart of the Interior of North America” on his lap as he bent over it drawing the Columbia River. The canoe was about to shoot the rapids below a high falls, which I showed looming behind my uncle and slightly to his right. But the map extended beyond the canoe, and by degrees the blue line on his chart representing the river unspooled into an actual cascade of whitewater between black rocks, with a few sparse sage and cactus bushes clinging to the steep banks. In the center of the tableau the chart became a full-fledged picture, though still with the curling upturned edges of a map. It showed, in rapid succession, the compressed narrows, the Chute, and the tidal basin surrounded by glossy green rhododendrons and the lush undergrowth of the Pacific rain forest. On True’s face was an expression of utmost concentration and delight. Along both banks of the river were soaring stacks of dried fish, wooden lodges, people spearing salmon, and the bustle of a civilization “as teeming as that of old Memphis on the Nile,” as my uncle said in praise of my picture, with the full confidence of a man who had visited old Memphis himself. Far off in the distance were the snowy peaks of the Cascades and a glint of the blue Pacific. This picture pleased me very much. I called it Down the Columbia.

  WINTER BY THE PACIFIC

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  NOW CAPTAIN LEWIS, who was never thoroughly comfortable with any Indians, detested the Chinookan people around the mouth of the Columbia River in particular. More than once at the expedition’s winter quarters at Fort Clatsop, several miles inland, he called them low sneaking thieves; and indeed, some few of them were just that. But as my uncle immediately pointed out, where had they learned to steal but from the white sailors who had come to the Columbia and were reported to be a thoroughly disreputable set of fellows? Of the Clatsops, who had encouraged us to bide that winter on the south side of the river, the captain thought slightly better.

  My uncle confided to me that Lewis’s difficulty with these Pacific Indians was that he couldn’t seem to get it through his head that the Clatsops and the Chinooks were important. The Sioux were important because they threatened to prevent American traders from passing by their villages on the Missouri and because there were so many of them. The same with the Blackfeet, only more so. The Shoshone were important because we had desperately needed their horses, the Nez Perce because they were tending our mounts over the winter. But the Clatsops and Chinooks were neither especially dangerous to the expedition nor especially useful, so Lewis tended to ignore them and to make hasty judgments about them. Finally he gave them to understand that they were unwelcome around the fort and he did not wish to hold further commerce with them.

  The Pacific Indians did not think much more of Lewis than he of them. Unlike the Shoshone, most of whom had never seen men with white skin, the Clatsops and Chinooks had for years been accustomed to white sailors and so saw nothing about the Americans to marvel at except for the odd fact that the party refused to trade seriously with them. In fact, the expedition was running out of trade goods. But the Clatsops and Chinooks could not understand why people would come all this way if not to barter. Like Sage’s Blackfeet, all of the Indians we had met in Louisiana and beyond prided themselves on their generosity; when I tried to explain that the captains and their men were low on trade goods, my Chinook friend Doubting Seal only asked why the Americans didn’t simply give his people some of their supplies.

  Along with learning the Blackfoot language from Franklin during our winter at the Pacific, I painted hard. And when I ran out of colors and ran low on blank canvases, I fashioned paints from the minerals and plants of the area, as Yellow Sage had taught me, and substituted tanned elk and deer skins for canvas. As I continued to refine pictures from our journey, I found myself working more like Franklin, using bright colors and simple figures with the principal aim of telling a story and preserving a record of what had happened. Crossing the Bitterroots and Down the Columbia prefigured much of the work I did afterward.

  During December and January I painted both a Clatsop and a Chinook village and many artifacts from the culture of each. My uncle, however, wished to fish and explore more of the region. So at the end of February, Doubting Seal invited us, and Franklin as well, to accompany him up the coast on a fishing and sightseeing expedition. Promising that he would show us many wonders we had never seen before, the Seal added that he would have been glad to take Lewis, too, but for his patronizing attitude toward the Chinookan people. And he seemed to derive considerable satisfaction in thinking that Lewis would not have the pleasure of seeing these things. My uncle was in a tizzy of curiosity, the more so because he hoped on this journey to meet the ferocious Tlingits, whom he believed to be the descendants of Norsemen. For indeed, every three or four years they swept down, in their ocean-going canoes, from their home in the far north to plunder the coastal villages of the Clatsops and Chinooks.

  We set out in two sea canoes, the Seal, his father, the ancient Chief Tillamook, and I in one, Franklin and my uncle in the other, and six powerful Chinook paddlers in each craft. Behind us we towed a third, empty canoe, I supposed to carry back the spoils of our fishing and hunting. We made a gaily colored little procession in our painted canoes with high carved stems and long shelf-like cutwaters. My uncle stood on one of these extensions to fly-fish. Like our paddlers, he wore a suit of arrow-proof moose-hide armor, and, over his stocking cap, a tall, brimless conical hat, woven of cedar bark and bear grass, cunningly designed to shed the rain, and brightly studded here and there with salmon flies.

  “When in Rome,” he called out in explanation of his costume, completed by his mail and galoshes. Adding that he was a “man of whatever country he traveled in.” To complete the picture, he had bound a short fir plank to the back of his head, under his rain-hat, by a very tight leathern thong around his forehead, with the intention of flattening out his cranium as the Chinooks did. But this method was effective only with infants, and so uncomfortable besides that he soon abandoned the device, saying that if his Maker had wished him to have a flat head he would no doubt have been born with one, and he would have to be satisfied with his copper crown, which was probably enhancement enough anyway.

  In this way we proceeded north along the coast for several days, seeing many curious rock formations, catching hundreds of salmon, killing two smallish whales for their blubber, and keeping a sharp eye out for any sign of the Tlingits.

  On
the fifth day of our trip, we came to the handsomest coastline imaginable and saw, lying on a sandy beach, the bleached white bones of a one-hundred-foot-long whale. Here I began my tableau Wonders of the Pacific by painting some jutting offshore rocks under a watery January sun such as emerged briefly from the sea-fog every three or four days. In a tidal pool in the center foreground, just off the beach, I added a score of animals and birds previously unknown to science, including Kinneson’s purple sea urchin, the black-turbaned Kinnesonian snail, a bird my uncle called True’s oyster-catcher, and another he named Teague’s cormorant. The whale skeleton I revitalized in all its former glory and represented leaping through a huge hole in the middle of a bronze-colored boulder. When Franklin looked at the painting, he said it lacked only some human beings. He advised me to paint my uncle, fishing from the bow of our sea canoe, with his fly-rod bent in a springing arc, playing the leaping whale. This I did, with the sunshine reflecting off his chain mail and copper crown.

  While I painted, Franklin fly-fished, taking four of the five new varieties of salmon we had discovered on the Pacific Coast. Nearby my uncle discovered a grove of maple trees, not as tall as our lofty sugar maples at home, and with slightly smoother bark and much broader leaves. As it was coming on spring here, and the sap was beginning to rise, he set about carving hollow spouts out of alder twigs an inch in diameter; notching the maples about three feet off the ground, he conducted the sweet drippings from the trees through these spouts into water-tight cooking baskets that the Chinooks had brought with them. Then, in a large kettle, he boiled down some very passable, if rather dark, maple syrup, which he refined into cakes of delectable sugar.

  While my uncle was maple sugaring and I painting and Franklin fishing, the Chinooks built a cedar post-and-plank house, similar to their fine dwelling lodges, with the carved head and maw of a whale for a doorway. This edifice, about thirty feet long and ten feet wide, was situated on a promontory overlooking the sea where old Chief Tillamook had journeyed long ago, as a boy with his father, to kill his first whale. Inside the house they placed the spare canoe.

  Doubting Seal now explained that his father’s time to die was at hand—he had sensed it coming for several weeks—and he had asked to have his tomb constructed here. Accordingly, one evening Tillamook very cheerfully hobbled into the whale-house, climbed into the canoe with a paddle to help him on his great voyage, and lay down singing the sea-hunting song he and his father had sung long ago. Doubting Seal explained that we should not grieve, because by this time tomorrow his father would be embarked on a passage more wonderful even than our great journey across America.

  My uncle thought for a moment, then said, “Ti, fetch me my hemp.”

  “Oh, sir,” I said, “the chief will surely have no need for hemp where he’s bound.”

  “Nonetheless, Ti, fetch it.”

  I brought my uncle his Dutch dock, from which he removed the seed-pouch—he had only a few ounces of hemp left—and put it in his carpetbag. Then, with a long, fond look at the old Knight of the Woeful Countenance painted on the clock case, he said, “Well, friend, a marvelous new adventure now awaits you as well.” As Tillamook settled himself comfortably in the heaven-canoe, my uncle handed him the clock and his sextant and astrolabe and told him that with these navigational implements he would at all times know exactly where he was in the universe and what time it was at Greenwich as well. Whereupon the chief thanked him very graciously and said that while he hunted whales with his father and other ancestors, he would certainly check the time on the clock and take his position. And if a lull ever fell over the conversation (which he thought unlikely, his father being a very garrulous, jolly old fellow with a hundred jokes for all occasions) he would not be surprised to see that it was twenty after the hour.

  I was deeply touched by this scene, yet wondered what it might signify that my uncle was willing to give up the clock. I hoped he was not planning any such voyage as Chief Tillamook’s very soon. He assured me that this was not the case and that, indeed, for the last several months he had felt little need to orient himself. And while he hoped that in other respects his ways and stays had not diminished, for he wished always to be “true to True,” he felt “better in his head” than he had since his old accident. He would willingly have given Tillamook his belled cap as well, he said, but he wanted first to trade the cap to Smoke in exchange for safe passage past the Blackfeet on our return trip. I did not think Smoke would much desire the cap, but I said nothing.

  The next morning old Chief Tillamook was dead. This somber event occasioned a philosophical discourse between Franklin and my uncle on the nature of heaven. Franklin said that each Indian nation had its own afterworld. The Blackfoot heaven, for instance, was located just north of a lovely land called the Sweetgrass, in the heart of the Land of the Glaciers. True, who was equally certain of a place of eternal reward, conceived of paradise as a sort of extension of Kingdom County, Vermont, only perhaps with slightly milder winters, like these here on the Pacific. And he said that all of its residents were about my age, for he could not imagine a more idyllic situation than to be a boy or girl forever in a place like Vermont. So, despite the departure from this world of the old Chinook chief, this interval of painting and fly-casting and maple sugaring and philosophizing beside the Pacific was another of those very happy times that seemed to make all of our ordeals worthwhile. At such times I understood perfectly why we had made such an arduous odyssey and I would not have traded the experience for anything. My uncle felt the same way and even coined another of his famous axioms: “To be human is to travel.” Franklin said this was perhaps the most philosophical statement made since the days of Solomon and Socrates. Doubting Seal agreed, pointing out that when you turned the axiom around—“to travel is to be human”—it made every bit as much sense.

  In the meantime I finished my tableau, painting the whale-house burial vault of Chief Tillamook on the crag above the bay. Everyone said it was my best work. My uncle allowed that it brought to his ears the constant sharp cries of the seabirds, the crashing breakers, and the scrape of pebbles drawn back down the shingled scree by the retreating waves. He inclined his long tin ear trumpet to the picture to listen to the pebbles rattle along the beach and said aye, aye, he could surely hear them. As indeed he could, the actual beach and the breaking waves being about fifteen feet away. And he claimed to smell the briny tang of the ocean in the air around the painting as well.

  Heading back toward Fort Clatsop, we encountered a cold and steady rain for three days, but Doubting Seal would not allow us to build a fire for fear of attracting a Tlingit raiding party. On the afternoon of the third day, the Seal and I were again in the lead canoe, two or three miles ahead of my uncle and Franklin, who had lagged behind to enjoy a few final hours of fishing.

  As we started round the headland between us and the Columbia, I noticed a small cloud out at sea coming our way. Approaching quickly, it split into two clouds, then three. I trained my pocket glass on them, then sharply drew in my breath. In its lens was a three-masted sailing vessel.

  “A trading ship!” I shouted, handing the glass to Doubting Seal.

  But he shook his head and passed the telescope back to me, indicating that I should look again. What we had sighted was no trading vessel but a warship flying a coal-black flag!

  As we continued around the breakers off the headland, the ship gave chase, and Doubting Seal chose this time to inform me that last fall, about a month before our arrival on the coast, the same vessel had put in at the mouth of the Columbia and sent a party ashore making inquiries for an American expedition coming overland under the command of one Captain Lewis. I demanded to know why the Seal hadn’t told us about the ship sooner.

  “Why, friend,” said he, “did not Captain Lewis expressly say that he was not interested in anything we had to tell him or in holding further commerce with us? We would gladly have informed him of the ship, but we did not wish to seem forward or impertinent.”

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nbsp; Ahead some hundred yards, a tall spout of water jetted up, as if a whale had breached. It was followed immediately by the dap of cannon fire. Another spray, fifty feet to our right, was accompanied by another report. A third ball, launched flatter, skimmed past our canoe, skipping several times on the surface of the ocean like a flat stone on a Vermont millpond. Whoever they were, these people meant business.

  We were still a mile or more away from the big river when a thunderous, rolling explosion filled the air and water all around us with flying lead. The ship had fired a full broadside at us. Several stone formations just offshore were sheared off or entirely demolished by the volley; a massive cedar tree on the shore snapped completely in two, as if struck by lightning. When it fell into the water, a huge wave washed over our canoe, swamping it. All we could do was cling to the gunwales and await the next volley.

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  I HAD AN IMPRESSION of a boat swooping down on us full of red-coated soldiers and a club descending toward my head; of being hauled aboard a ship in a sort of net, of seeing Doubting Seal and his paddlers shoved belowdecks; and of passing out and coming to briefly, then passing out again.

  As my vision cleared, I realized that I was aboard the warship. I was thirsty and had no idea how long I had been unconscious. When I called out in a croaking voice that I wished an interview with the ship’s commander, a rather elderly, dose-shaven man in a green frock coat stepped forward and identified himself as the ship’s first mate. The mate, who seemed very friendly and spoke in what I believed to be a British accent, assisted me to my feet and ushered me into a large, well-lighted cabin at the stem of the ship, where an austere-looking gentleman in a black suit sat at a desk reading a Bible. “Captain John ‘Mute Jack’ Jamieson, at your service, young sir,” said the mate.