Charbonneau

by Win Blevins

  FEBRUARY 11, 1805: She felt it first as no more than the gentle tensing of a muscle—the flexing of a calf muscle, maybe—so she paid no attention. She was squatting on the dirt floor of one of the huts, stitching buffalo hides together into the conical shape of a tipi. Her left hand gripped the edges of the hides tightly, and her right darted quickly and surely, the awl carved from bone pulling the deer sinew through the skins and binding them together. She made sure of the stitches. She and her husband and their child would be sleeping in this tipi in the Moon when the Ponies Shed and for many moons beyond on the long westward march, sleeping in it with the Long Knife Chief and the Red-Headed Chief. She noticed that the tensing came every once in a while and that it stayed for a moment. But it did not hurt, it was only there. She kept stitching.

  She was a slight girl, slender and lithe, but frail-looking. She was plain except for her eyes, which were too wide for her small face and looked as though she were constantly surprised and often delighted. Anyone would have thought her a healthy, supple girl with the promise of a healthy woman, except that the size of her belly signified that she was already a woman, and she seemed too slight for that. The belly bulged hugely and comically, making her look like a bulbous root tapered at both ends or a snake that had swallowed a bird. The men made jokes about that because she was a Snake Indian and her husband said that her name was Bird Woman.

  The tensing came again and rose to pain, like the pain of her every-moon-bleeding. She stared at a log wall as she felt it and decided that her time had come. She wished that some of the older women of her tribe were here. They would shut her away in a tipi and tend to her and tell her what to do and help her when the final time came. But they were many, many sleeps away. The only other woman at the fort then was Otter Woman, her tribes-woman and another wife to her Frenchman. And Otter Woman was younger than she, and childless. When the pain eased, she stood up to go and tell someone.

  The morning was clear and bitter cold. The sun, an hour off the eastern horizon, made the Dakota prairies shine a brilliant white, but the wind off the river cut its warmth away. Icicles pointed down from the door sill where the girl came out, and the branches of the trees were circled with clear ice that sparkled as the limbs waved in the wind. The girl squinted her eyes against the harsh glaze and held her buffalo robe tight at the throat. After a warming, the Moon of the Cold that Split Trees had returned.

  She found Jessume, the French-Canadian interpreter, and told him. The Red-Headed Chief was away hunting, he said, and no one knew where her squaw man was, but the Long Knife Chief was there, and Jessume would help her. The girl felt shy about speaking to the Long Knife Chief, but Jessume said he would do it for her. She went to the log pile, picked up an armload of sizable fire sticks, and stepped into the darkness of the hut. As she was making the fire grow, the pain grabbed at her again. She lay down, as Jessume had said to do. It was like the clenching of a fist in her belly, and it got stronger as it held. Then suddenly it was gone. When the next pain came, she went back to squatting. That was more comfortable.

  Jessume could see, early that afternoon, that the pain was severe. The girl tried to chatter amiably with him in Minataree between pains, but the seizures cut her off cold, and her smile in between looked wan. She said everything was well, using the Minataree when she would have usually exercised her few words of French. He had come to offer her some meat and broth from a stew made of poor, scraggly elk. But she turned it down. He was getting her to sip the broth a little when Charbonneau came in.

  “Cą va?” he asked his squaw lightly, sure that cą va. She looked at him blankly, not understanding. Charbonneau put a hand on her belly then sagged against a wall, half sitting and half sprawling. Jessume could see he had gotten a little whisky from someone. Just as well. Jessume crossed the yard to see Captain Lewis. “The squaw she too small,” he indicated, hands touching hips, “maybe hard.”

  Lewis stood over the girl smiling slightly. He seemed far away. The pain came and held and gripped harder, and for a long time they all—Jessume, Long Knife, and her man behind her—went away. When it went, Lewis was looking at her strangely. Is something wrong? she wondered. It couldn’t be. She reached for the cup the captain was holding for her, and smelled it. Whisky. Lewis gave another cup to Charbonneau, and she set hers behind for him as well. She didn’t like the smell, and thought it would make her throw up.

  Outside, the wind was up, and the sky was half-clouded. “Want Bluster Bear drunk enough to be out of way,” Jessume said in his heavy accent. They called Charbonneau “Bluster Bear” because one of the several derisive names the Mandans had for him was Forest Bear, and the word for forest sounded like bluster. The men of the expedition thought it fit. Jessume and Charbonneau didn’t get the joke, and thought they were mispronouncing the word.

  She had been running for hours. She had never felt so tired in her life. She kept running. She had the terrible ache in her gut from running too long. The silver leaf of an aspen darkened, and falling off the tree, blackened. She knew before she saw the change, before the black leaf struck the ground, that it was a NunumBi. She clutched at her belly, saw his arrow huge before he shot it, and bolted in another direction. She turned downhill through the sparse fir, toward the wide meadow. More light there. She could hear many NunumBi behind her. A rock jumped and clawed at her ankle. She screamed.

  She saw the door open, and Jessume appeared against the reddened sky. He crossed and stooped down beside her. “It is soon now,” he said softly in Minataree. She didn’t know what he said but knew he meant well. Her arms and chest hurt from tightened muscles. She clamped down on her stomach, holding against when the pain would come again, trying to control its long surge.

  She remembered the Long Knife Chief shooting the wind gun to show the Mandans. He set a melon on the ground at fifty paces, aimed, and pulled the trigger. Only a sound of sudden wind. But the melon jumped and rolled over with an awful splatting sound. She saw it all split apart, its pulp and seeds smeared the grass, the rind in little pieces. She laughed without knowing why.

  The cold settled in now. She sweated terribly, and shivered at the same time. Between pains once she rolled to one side and vomited. Then she lay back, legs spread wide, tired beyond caring, unable to go on. She thought she was going to die.

  She heard the voices above her, but even when the pain left, she did not try to understand. Lewis had asked four or five times whether nothing could be done. Jessume smiled a little at him. The captain had big medicine. His mother was said to be an herb doctor, and Lewis administered herbal medicines to the Indians. Yet in the face of so simple and common an event as this, the captain was helpless. Jessume thought Lewis felt his helplessness, and berated himself for it.

  “The Minatara say the rattle of a rattlesnake broken in water will help,” he told the captain. He himself did not know whether to believe it.

  “I have a big rattle for a souvenir,” Lewis said. “I’ll get it.” Lewis left quickly. Jessume wondered whether he only wanted to be away from there.

  The girl pushed. All that she was she gathered from her head and shoulders and chest and knit it together and sent it down to her groin in a push. She was nothing else. She knew that she would die, that the thing inside would tear her like a deer being gutted and she would die. She didn’t care. She felt nothing but an overwhelming want to push the thing out. Something in her bowels seemed to be in the way, and she was pushing it out too. Everything in the middle of her she was forcing out.

  Jessume made her drink something. She took it only to get him away by the time the next push came. She felt it rise in her and she gave herself to the push. She had never worked so hard in her life.

  With the next one she was sure the time had come. Now it would split her as a bullet splits a melon, but it would be gone. She was no longer afraid. It would happen. She pushed and felt her body relax and lost herself in the push. That felt right. She felt an immense stretching. Now, she thought, now I am coming apart.


  “Pousses!” Jessume yelled. “Pousses très fort. Maintenant, encore.” She heard nothing over the roar in her mind. Jessume could see the baby’s head.

  In three more pushes it was over. Jessume held up the baby for her to see. A boy. She pushed again and felt something follow. Yes, a boy. She was pleased. She supposed she was alive. She felt peaceful. She had never imagined such a feeling of peace.

  Jessume woke Charbonneau against the wall. “Regards ton fils,” he exclaimed. “C’est un garçon. Un beau garçon.”

  “Garçon,” muttered Charbonneau. “Evidemment un garçon.” He passed out again.

  When Jessume put the child on her chest, the girl realized she had fallen asleep. She looked long at the child’s head lying just below her chin. At length she felt the strength to pick him up and inspect his arms and legs and belly and eyes—light eyes, she noticed—and gaze at his tiny face, shiny wet and wrinkled as a dried grape. She set him down and the child sucked at the buckskin. She opened it and put him to her small breast.

  She looked at Jessume squatting beside her. His face showed how worried he had been, “Ça va,” she said, and smiled. “Ça va, merci.” Within an hour she was carrying wood to the fire.

  The next morning William Clark and George Drewyer, the interpreter, were straightening out the chaotic aftermath of the elk hunt in a hut, Drewyer knocking the ice off clothes and hanging them to dry, Clark treating a man’s frostbitten toes.

  Charbonneau lumbered through the door with a swagger, the girl on his heels with the child smothered in blankets. Clark sprang up to look, touched the baby’s cheeks with a huge forefinger, and grinned broadly. “Garçon,” Bluster Bear kept proclaiming, “boy, garçon.” He started to open the blankets to show Clark the unmistakable evidence, but the Red-Headed Chief put a hand on his wrist.

  “What’s his name?” Clark asked the girl.

  “Comment s’appelle-t-il?” helped Drewyer.

  “Jean-Baptiste,” interjected Charbonneau. “Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau.”

  The girl said something rapidly to Charbonneau in Minataree and smiled broadly at Clark. “Aussi Paump,” she said, “aussi Paump.”

  “Paump?” Clark raised his eyebrows at Charbonneau.

  The French went much too fast for him.

  “First-born it means,” said Drewyer. “It is a Snake word. It means first-born, or leader, or head man. The man.”

  Clark looked a long moment at the girl. “It is good,” he said, and waited for Drewyer to translate. “He is named for a great leader, a great man of religion, a great medicine man of the white people of his father.” Again a wait. “And he is named for a chief of the people of his mother. It is good. May he be a great leader to both peoples.” The girl beamed.

  “Sah-kah-gar-we-a,” Clark lettered it phonetically into his journal weeks earlier. He mumbled the sound of the name to himself two or three times while he inspected the letters he had made. The captain had not had much schooling, and knew he didn’t spell well. He wasn’t sure that he had the hang of the Shoshone girl’s strange-sounding name, but he had sounded it out the best he could, so he was satisfied. He had taken to calling her “Jawey” for short. Charbonneau said her name meant Bird Woman, but then he didn’t speak Shoshone. Drewyer, the expedition’s specialist in sign language, said that Sacajawea signed to him that the name meant “canoe launcher.” Hell, Charbonneau didn’t speak any language very well, and probably didn’t know his own wife’s name.

  Wife—and mother. Those words seemed strange for such a slip of a girl. Clark judged her to be no more than fourteen or fifteen; Lewis, who was given to amused cynicism, said she might be twelve or thirteen. For she was a slave girl. Though Clark didn’t like to think about it, he knew that she must have been used by any fired-up brave or pubescent boy who had a mind to. Jean-Baptiste was her first child, and clearly she would have conceived him as soon as she was physically able. Clark was glad that he and Lewis had at least maneuvered Charbonneau into marrying her a while before she gave birth. But the squaw man treated his fahms, as he called them, as Indians treated their women generally. “She’ll still be a kind of slave,” Lewis had said. “We can’t help that.”

  The captains had gotten her story from the girl herself, in her combination of broken French, Minataree, and signs, with Charbonneau and Drewyer interpreting. Her people, the Shoshone, lived in the mountains, on the side where the waters flow to the west, the land of the thunder and the setting sun. Each summer they made a journey across the mountains to the headwaters of the Missouri River and the buffalo plains. They needed to get meat for the winter and to break their meager diet of fish and roots. But they went in stealth and never stayed long, fearing the warlike Blackfeet. Five seasons ago, during this annual hunt, they had camped on the most westerly of the three rivers that flowed together to form the Missouri. A far-ranging band of Minatarees had raided them there. In the general flight, Sacajawea and several other children had been captured. The Minatarees had brought them here to their village, a thousand river miles from their homeland and their people. Here where the great river was brown and muddy, where the plains stretched away flat in all directions, where men saw no mountains, here where the earth was parched. Some children had escaped, but not Sacajawea and Otter Woman. A season ago Charbonneau won Sacajawea from her owner. And he bought Otter Woman. So he had two child-slaves as fahms. Sacajawea had now borne him a son—she was proud that it was a son—and Otter Woman was with child.

  The girl told this story matter-of-factly, even brightly. The captains detected no sorrow in her, merely acceptance. But her story had roused an interest in her that Sacajawea could not have guessed. She was from beyond the Continental Divide. Her people crossed the mountains to the eastern watershed every summer. She might help them pass some of their most formidable barriers. Did she remember the way across the mountains? Yes, but the way was hard and long.

  Maybe the girl could guide them across the mountains. More important, maybe her people would give them horses. They knew that although their assignment was to find a waterway to the Pacific Ocean and thereby open possibilities of trade with the Orient, they would have to make a land portage of indeterminate distance from the eastern to the western watershed. For that, horses would be crucial. Perhaps with Sacajawea to ease the way they would get their horses and learn something of the route to the ocean.

  So they talked it over in their tent that evening. Each man had sentimental reasons for wanting to take the girl along. Lewis, of Welsh stock, was a reflective, melancholic, romantic man; the notion of having an Indian girl on the first crossing of the United States and the rest of the continent to the Pacific Ocean appealed to the romantic in him. Clark, of Scottish stock was a sensible, practical, and fatherly man, though unmarried; he felt protective of the girl and her infant son. Besides, both men liked the slender wisp of a girl-woman. She was plucky, full of fun, always cheerful. But both were also officers of the United States Army on an enterprise of high seriousness and grave danger. They were battle-tempered Indian fighters. So they didn’t speak about sentiments.

  “We don’t know when shell drop,” said Lewis with a wry smile. “We can’t afford to wait for the baby.” The plains were full of boasts that the Sioux would attack their Fort Mandan and massacre the invading white men as soon as spring came. The captains were planning to move their boats upstream even before the river was clear of floating ice.

  “She’ll give birth in a month or so,” said Clark—this was about Christmas—“but she may not be fit to travel for a while.”

  “The woman we could handle. But I don’t see how we can take a newborn child.”

  “Though Indian women always travel with them,” Clark said. “During a march they go to the bushes, have their babies, and catch up with the tribe a couple of hours later.”

  Lewis mused a moment. “Hell, old Bluster Bear might be more trouble than she’d be. He’s no good for anything.”

  “I’d bet on it.”


  “Still, she says she knows the pass. She says her people will trade us horses.” Lewis looked straight at Clark. “It’s too good a chance to pass up.” Clark nodded.

  Lewis stood up. “Maybe we’ll create another Pocahontas,” he grinned. And he stepped out to check the watch.

  Later, the captains decided to get Charbonneau to marry Sacajawea. That might make it easier to keep the men away from her. The last thing they needed was an amorous squaw, rivalrous soldiers, and a jealous squaw man. Sacajawea seemed as uninhibited as any Indian woman, and a lot of squaws would have liked being community property, if the community was white.

  APRIL 7, 1805: The expedition set out from the Mandan Villages for the mountains.

  APRIL 9, 1805: Lewis noted in his journal that the Indian “squar,” poking in some driftwood with a sharp stick, had turned up some roots for the stew. They looked like Jerusalem artichokes, and tasted like them too.

  MAY 14, 1805: The white pirogue, bearing the expedition’s crucial instruments, was making its way upstream under the charge of Pierre Cruzatte. Charbonneau was at the rudder, though he was a timid waterman and steered capriciously. A sudden gust of wind ripped the sail out of a man’s hands, Charbonneau turned the rudder the wrong way, and she tipped until the sail hit the water. With Cruzatte threatening to shoot Charbonneau unless he brought her around, and both captains screaming from the shore, she shipped gallons of water. Sacajawea, in the turmoil, calmly plucked boxes of equipment from the river back into the boat. And Charbonneau, screaming to God for mercy, finally righted the boat. Lewis ascribed to Sacajawea “equal fortitude and resolution with any person on board.”

  MAY 20, 1805: Lewis’s journal: “The hunters returned this evening and informed us that the country continued much the same in appearance as that we saw where we were or broken, and that about five miles ab[ov]e the mouth of the shell river a handsome river of about fifty yards in width discharged itself into the shell river on the Stard. or upper side; this stream we called Sâh-câ-ger we-ah or bird woman’s River, after our interpreter the Snake woman.”