Charbonneau

by Win Blevins

  MAY 31, 1805: The expedition had passed into the Missouri River Breaks. Lewis’s journal: “The hills and river Clifts which we passed today exhibit a most romantic appearance. The bluffs of the river rise to the hight of from 2 to 300 feet and in most places nearly perpendicular; they are formed of remarkable white sandstone which is sufficiently soft to give way readily to the impression of water.…The water in the course of time in decending from those hills and plains on either side of the river has trickled down the soft sand clifts and woarn it into a thousand grotesque figures, which with the help of a little immagination and an oblique view, at a distance are made to represent eligant ranges of lofty freestone buildings, having their parapets well stocked with statuary; collumns of various sculpture both grooved and plain, are also seen supporting long galleries in front of those buildings; in other places on a much nearer approach and with the help of less immagination we see the remains of ruins of eligant buildings; some collumns standing and almost entire with their pedestals and capitals; others retaining their pedestals but deprived by time or accident of their capitals, some lying prostrate an broken othes in the form of vast pyramids of connic structure bearing a serees of other pyramids on their tops becoming less as they ascend and finally terminating in a sharp point, nitches and alcoves of various forms and sizes are seen at different hights as we pass, the thin stratas of hard freestone intermixed with the soft sandstone seems to have aided the water in forming this curious scenery. As we passed on it seemed as if those scenes of visionary enchantment would never have an end.”

  JUNE 21-JULY 15: The expedition portaged the eighteen miles of the Great Falls of Missouri, brutally hard work done in blistering heat and abrupt thunder and hailstorms. Sacajawea was sick, and the captains feared for her life.

  JULY 4, 1805: The hauling finished, the captains declared a celebration. In the evening they got out the last of their whisky and gave each man a gill. Pierre Cruzatte played his fiddle. John Potts called some square dances, and the men allemanded each other. York, Clark’s black, was the most enthusiastic dancer, rolling his lank frame smoothly to the tune, letting his arms fly, carrying on in the way that always titillated the Indians. Paddy Gass chorused Potts in his sing-song Irish, and for once didn’t resent even York. The Fields brothers, as partners, took turns aping feminine wiles. Drewyer, the French-Canadian interpreter, good-naturedly ribbed Bluster Bear, who didn’t know the steps but shuffled along by himself anyway. The captains stayed to one side, and asked Sacajawea to sit with them—no sense reminding the men how attractive she was. Sacajawea studied Paump. The child, five months old now, seemed transfixed by the dancing, or the music, or something.

  JULY 28, 1805: They pointed up the most westerly fork. “Yes, my people come to the plains along that river,” she said. The captains nodded at each other. That fork had to be it. So they named that southwest fork of the Missouri the Jefferson Fork, after “the author of our enterprize”; they called the middle fork the Madison, and the southeast fork the Gallatin, after two members of Jefferson’s cabinet.

  They had been traveling—hauling their cottonwood dugouts against the current—south up the Missouri from the Great Falls. They were standing at the landmark the Minatarees had told them about, the Three Forks of the Missouri. If the Indians were right, or if Lewis and Clark understood them aright, the pass to the tributaries of the Columbia River lay due west. And Sacajawea confirmed it. They had come to the crux.

  Lewis went ahead, and Clark stayed with the canoes to supervise the hauling. His ankle was infected and swollen, so he was no good for walking. Sacajawea and Charbonneau stayed back with their adopted uncle, Clark.

  The river began to batter the men now. It was in transition from a plains river to a mountain river, falling more swiftly, colder, rougher. The brush forced them into the water to haul, and the water was bone-cold. Soon the Jefferson forked again, into three tumbling mountain creeks. Lewis had left a note to take the middle fork. Clark forced his way up with grim persistence, making a shorter distance every day, encouraging his men and cursing the ankle that kept him inactive.

  Sacajawea pointed out to him the spot where she had been captured five years earlier; she’d been crossing the stream at a shoal place. She seemed singularly calm and equable about the incident. Lewis commented that she was of such philosophy that she did not permit her feelings to extend beyond having plenty to eat and a few trinkets to wear.

  Sacajawea looked high into the mountains now, in the long twilight when the sun was behind the Bitterroots but not yet down, thinking of her people up there, of her family. Charbonneau noticed her looking westward, wondered if she might be thinking of deserting him, and made up his mind to assert his authority over his property, to fight the bastards if he had to. Lewis noticed her looking westward but had no idea what the simple girl might be feeling—he guessed she had no strong feelings about her return. Another instance, to him, of the inscrutability of the Indian mind. Neither man knew her.

  AUGUST 10, 1805: Fifteen days after the party reached Jefferson Fork, Merne Lewis came to the junction of two creeks. He decided that it was the highest navigable point of the Missouri River, and wrote Clark a note to leave the canoes. With McNeal and Drewyer he struck west, looking for a pass.

  AUGUST 12, 1805: Lewis reached “the most distant fountain of the waters of the Mighty Missouri in surch of which we have spent so many toilsome days and wristless nights, thus far I had accomplished one of those great objects on which my mind has been unalterably fixed for many years, judge then of the pleasure I felt in allying my thirst with this pure and ice-cold water.” Just below, MacNeal stood triumphantly with one foot on each side of the rivulet and “thanked his god that he had lived to bestride the mighty & heretofore deemed endless Missouri.”

  They walked across Lehmi Pass, where Lewis looked westward toward the Pacific and saw high mountains partly covered with snow. Drewyer stood across the fountain-head waters of the Columbia and ceremoniously pissed into them. “And may God speed your message,” intoned Lewis, “to the great Pacific Ocean.”

  AUGUST 17, 1805: Sacajawea was walking through a high alpine meadow in the forenoon, Charbonneau alongside her and Clark, still lame, trailing a little behind. Small rivulets of creeks, only a stride across, crisscrossed the meadow, making the earth soft and the grass lush. Lodgepole pine, slender and straight, rose tall near the hillsides. The air was cool and abnormally clear, the sky the unnaturally deep blue of high-mountain country, the sun-glow light and wispy on the land. Clark was thinking that the girl did not so much walk as prance, playing her way across the meadow. Then she began to bounce up and down. She whirled around to Clark, dark eyes gleaming, and stuck her fingers in her mouth—sign language for Shoshone—and pointed to the high end of the meadow. Indians, Clark saw. Sacajawea ran to meet them.

  When Clark came up, he found a large group of Shoshones with Lewis, Drewyer, and MacNeal among them dressed as Indians. Sacajawea was embracing everyone, laughing and weeping at once. Suddenly she let out a great cry: She had found another teen-ager who was captured when she was, but had escaped. The two girls could scarcely stop babbling long enough to hear each other. The Shoshones greeted Clark exuberantly, hugging him and nuzzling cheeks until he got more than tired of the ritual.

  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 m
orning 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.