Sacajawea

by Anna Lee Waldo

  “With these hands? I can’t.”

  “Ai, you can with the leather protecting them. I promise you will feel nothing today.”

  He followed her numbly into one of the waiting canoes. She sat near the back with Pomp held between her knees.

  On March 30, the campsite was on flat, green prairie where the hunting was good.5 Trumpeter swans beeped over green patches of sedges, and flocks of brant made rolling, guttural honks that blended into a babble of noise that carried far into the distance.

  Wood smoke from the evening fires of a Shahala village rose into a high dusky sky trail that lay above the western larch with its soft, short bundles of green needles. When the expedition settled around their own fire, the Shahalas came to inspect them. They were dusky brown and their bodies squat from sitting most of the days in the bottom of a canoe. The man who seemed to be their chief had his hair cut shorter than the others, ragged above his ears.

  “Katah mesika chaco?” Lewis asked him in Chinook.

  “Halo, muckamuck,” said the man, shaking his head and rubbing his protruding belly. “Fish are gone, andthere is nothing to eat, muckamuck. The salmon will not come until the next full moon.”

  “Do you hunt the deer and elk?” asked Lewis, again in Chinook.

  This thickset chief chuckled with amusement. His people had no weapons for large game. They netted fish and made snares for only small animals.

  For ten days the party camped near the Shahala village.6 They needed meat for the mountain crossing. A dozen men went out to hunt the abundant game while the rest were kept busy cutting and hanging the meat on maple-stick racks over smoldering fires to dry.

  With the leather bandaging off, Charbonneau rubbed the raw palms of both hands with fish oil. The flaps of dead skin were dry and horny. He stood beside Sacajawea, who was cutting meat into thin strips. “Shouldn’t these flaps be cut off?”

  She inspected his hands and seemed to hesitate a moment, then went to her leather pack and thrust around inside, coming out with a mat woven from cattails, which she placed on the ground for Charbonneau to sit on. She began paring off the flaps and some of the horny skin around the wounds on both palms with her butcher knife.

  Charbonneau slipped off his moccasins. Sacajawea said, “The time to cut your toenails is during wet weather. Not a day like today.” She began working on his toenails with the hunting knife. Sacajawea alternately wiped the knife on her skirt and dug at his toenails. Then she started on his fingernails. Charbonneau sat there mumbling now and again when she seemed to cut too close to the skin. “Damn femme, take it easy. I need toes and fingers.”

  Suddenly a noise rose above the camp and came toward them. Dogs jumped into view, barking deliriously. Children ran after them, laughing and squealing. The rest of the Shahala population came straight through the trees, singing and tramping over the blankets and gear stacked around the base of a large fir.

  Charbonneau gazed, terror-struck, at the freshly yellow-painted faces. He stood up, and his knees trembled with an impulse to run; he felt Clark and York pressing against him.

  “Sweet Jesus,” York breathed. “If I didn’t know they’se peaceful—”

  Charbonneau crossed himself.

  Clark shouted so close that Sacajawea’s ears rang. “Whoa! Stop right there! Hold back!”

  The Shahalas stopped. There was absolute silence. Then the chief with the short hair stepped forward and Sacajawea gasped. The man was weeping. The tears rolled down his expressionless features, along the furrows of skin that was freshly painted in white-and-yellow bands.

  The women divided and moved behind Sacajawea. They all had yellow paint in their ears.

  Clark put his hands on the bony shoulders of the chief, looked him in his gaunt face, then spoke to him about this sudden visit of all the tribe. Clark nodded, understanding, and rubbed his stomach, announcing loudly, “We will let this whole crowd eat with us. They have had nothing much for nearly two weeks and won’t have anything much until the salmon move upstream for spawning in a month or so.” He motioned for Sacajawea to cut off no more strips for drying, but to help York and Charbonneau set up spits to roast the remainder of the elk for the starving village.

  There was a deafening clamor as the villagers scrambled up close to the roasting fire and pressed forward to sit in a tight circle, men first. Halfway through the meal, two other men wandered into the camp wearing nothing but cedar-bark breechclouts. No Shahala looked up to notice them, but continued to eat greedily. They rubbed their bellies and stood outside the circle, waiting patiently for someone to invite them to eat.

  First Clark asked where they came from. “Kah mesika illahee?”

  “By the falls of the great river flowing into the Columbia from the south,” answered one of the newcomers.

  With a stick, the other drew the river in the sand.

  “Multnomah.”

  Lewis nudged Clark. “We saw no river in the south What are they talking about, do you suppose?”

  “Feed them; then I’ll go with them,” Clark suggested

  In the middle of the afternoon, Clark followed thetwo men on a level stretch of land through which a river wound out of sight between high, grassy banks. They used a dugout canoe to come to the mouth of the river, which had been so masked with islands that the expedition had failed to see it. Clark walked inland with the two men to a slough where many native women were carrying long, slim canoes on their backs. The women plunged, waist-deep, into the cold water, frightening up ducks and geese. They loosened wapato with their toes. The bulbs rose to the surface and were tossed into the small canoes.

  Clark stopped at the village, called Clackamas, where the two men lived. “Will you trade a basket of the wapato bulbs for these awls and fish gigs?” he asked, taking the awls and gigs from his pocket and placing them on the ground before the two men.

  The men shook their heads no. Then they explained that the wapato was the only thing they had to keep themselves from starving until the salmon came up their river. Nothing was valuable enough to trade for their wapato roots.

  If Janey were with me, she’d dig in with her brown toes same as these women, thought Clark. She’d keep our camp supplied with these roots. Then he had another thought. He looked around and saw that the women had stacked much of the wapato to one side, as though they were stockpiling it. To Clark that meant they would not starve if they sold him a couple of baskets of the roots. He took out a piece of artillery fuse from the leather pouch hanging on his belt.7 He dropped it into the fire outside the nearest bark lodge. Then he took out his pocket compass and a small magnet and sat himself down on a rush mat. The fuse blazed up into a bright red flame as he made his compass needle follow the movements of his magnet very quickly. The people were astonished with the magic he held in his hands. Some who watched were actually terrified and ran to their lodges crying, “Meschie! Meschie! Big medicine!”

  Some of the women began piling several baskets of wapato at Clark’s feet. They begged him to put away the pieces in his hand and put out the terrible red fire. Clark assured them he would do this right away, andalmost immediately the portmatch was exhausted. He put the compass and magnet in his pocket. Then he paused to shake his head in thanks for the roots and to light his pipe from a burning stick. Before smoking the dried willow bark, Clark moved the pipe as if sending bits of the smoke to the sky and the earth and the four winds. He drew four acrid puffs and passed the pipe to the men. They smoked and talked in low tones. Clark shoved the awls and fishing gigs toward the women; then he turned and walked away, carrying a basket of roots. The two men who had brought him to their village picked up a basket apiece and carried them out to the canoe beyond the slough. The people of the village had turned and were chanting something in unison as they left the bank.

  “What are your people saying?” Clark asked.

  “Oh, they repeat a legend, as old as many grandfathers, that says a great chief will come to lead them to a land of feasting and plenty. They w
onder if you are that chief. They looked closely and saw plainly that your face is brown like theirs. The legend says the man is white on his face, like the fine beach sand.”

  Amused with the superstitious legend, Clark impulsively rolled up his sleeve, and the two men stared at the whiteness of his skin. When they beached the canoes, the men indicated they would also carry the basket Clark had and the pack on his back. They insisted, waiting patiently for him to pull it off. Clark bent to drink from a small spring. The men waited with an agreeable unconcern about time. They did not drink.

  “You don’t believe that legend about a white chief, do you?” Clark asked finally.

  “What is there to believe? The legend is old. The white chief must have died long ago on his way to our village. He looked, but he could not find us.”

  Two days later, Clark took seven of his men and two of their canoes to explore the Multnomah River once more.8 At one view they could see five snow peaks. Clark took soundings in the uniform flow of the river. “There seems to be water enough for a good-sized ship,” he said. “And I feel certain it could supply fresh water far down the southern Pacific Coast.” He measured at leasttwo-thirds of the width and could find no bottom with his five-fathom line.9

  Clark and his men examined the low-growing plants, the mullein, hawkweed, tansy, yarrow, thistle, butter-and-eggs; the soil, black humus; the bushes, vine-maple that grew low at the edge of the wood with a pinwheel leaf; the timber, one-hundred-foot-high incense cedars, a yew with long, spreading branches, glossy dark top, and deep yellow-green on the underside, white oak, dogwood, red alder, Oregon myrtle. They measured a white fir that had fallen and found it to be three hundred and eighteen feet tall.

  Two days later in camp, Clark sat on his haunches watching Pomp sniff wild rose blossoms and told Sacajawea of several empty villages he and the other men had found while they examined the inlet on the south side of the Columbia. “The lodges were not entirely empty. Inside was furniture, sleeping pallets. Actually, everything was left as if the people were coming back in a few moments. Yet everything was quiet. There were no dogs, no old people left behind. There were grinding mortars and pestles, canoes by the doors and along the beach, mats, bladders of fish oil, baskets, bowls, trenchers—all undisturbed. The fires were dead ashes. Where are those people?”

  “Where?” she asked.

  “They all went to the Clackamas village to wait for the coming of salmon.” Clark winked.

  She made a face. “More fish? Are you going to follow them?”

  “Who said I wanted to net stinking salmon? I’d rather the men hunted elk and you stripped out the meat and dried it for us.”

  Again she felt the familiar pang that took her breath away, and she longed to put new moccasins on his feet and bring him food. However, she was sure that he would never bring his thoughts out into the open because she was Charbonneau’s squaw. She also knew that she was expected to suppress her feeling and never let it come to the surface again.

  That Frenchman will never appreciate her, thought Clark as he turned to smile at her. “Janey, tell me—”

  “Ai?” she asked faintly, keeping her face away fromhim, and the spirit of her voice was as quiet as a deep river that lets no storm raise foam upon it.

  He shifted his feet on the rocky ground and said, “Today my men and I rounded the Old Warrior’s Point and went up a well-worn trail to an old village. The Multnomahs lived there. Their lodges have fallen to the ground, and there is no sign of the Multnomahs anywhere. Where did they go?”

  She looked at him with laughter in her soft brown eyes. “They went to the Clackamas village to wait for the coming of salmon?”

  “No.” He shook his head but noticed how beautiful she had become. He thought, That full, rich Shoshoni womanhood is striking. “It was something else. Some unknown thing. There is no longer a tribe called Multnomah, only the river.”

  She did not answer immediately. She spread her hands out. “Muckamuck, nothing, but rotting lodges?”

  “Muckamuck,” Clark answered.

  Now her face was a mask. “I will find out.”

  She moved among the bark huts of the Shahalas, watching the women and children in the mud from the afternoon drizzle. Where she could, she walked on grass. The leaves of the alders dripped water. The smoke of the village hung like a fog around the tops of the huts and among the upper branches of the trees. The camp smelled soggy.

  Two women were pulling their drying rack and grinding equipment under the shelter of a broad awning of patched leather in front of their hut. The women squatted in the doorway and surveyed the area under their shelter. Both wore long fringed skirts suspended from the waist down past the knees. These garments were made of the inner rind of cedar bark, twisted into threads which hung loose, and flapped and twisted with each body motion, and giving the women a kind of duck’s waddle.

  A new flurry of rain began, and Sacajawea took it as an excuse to walk over and take refuge under the awning. She asked, “Is it all right for me to stand here?”

  The women grunted.

  “I’d like to ask something.”

  “I don’t have any roots to trade,” said one woman with wisps of tousled hair poking out of her grass hat.

  “No, I do not want to trade for food.”

  The women looked at her with black, suspicious eyes. “What did you want to talk about?” asked the other woman, who had badly decayed front teeth.

  “Well, it seems that I have a lot of questions about women’s medicine. You see, the white men know nothing about how a woman feels or what is best to keep her well.”

  The women shook their heads slowly. The one with bad teeth said, “Men! We know how that is. What society do you belong to?”

  “Society? I am Shoshoni, that’s all.”

  The woman laughed and said, “Oh, if young people would only listen to their elders these days. If they would listen to those with more experience, they could learn something.”

  The woman with the hat went into the hut and came out shortly with a red-hot coal held between two sticks. She dropped the coal in a small fire pit dug in the center of the sheltered area. The butt of a dead limb extended into the hole; the coal sent a little puff of smoke out, and two thin yellow flames licked over the wood. Sacajawea held her hands outstretched over the faint warmth. Since she was wet, the fire felt good.

  “I guess there’s plenty that women like you would know that someone like me doesn’t. About the old tribes. What they did. Where they went. What their women did about cramps.”

  The woman with the hat went back into the hut and came out with three mats of woven grass, which she placed on the ground around the fire pit; she sat upon one, cross-legged. The other woman sat, and Sacajawea could see that they were willing to talk. She asked, “What can you tell me?”

  “Well,” said the woman with bad teeth, “first you get in a woman’s society. If you don’t already belong to one, you have to start at the bottom. The Red Salmon society teaches you how to dance in the right way and what foods to avoid so you won’t suffer cramps. And my advice for that is plenty of hard work; stand up, sitdown, stand up, sit down, bend, straighten, bend, straighten, and you feel no cramps.”

  “So—don’t forget,” said the woman with the hat, “the members of the Red Salmon learn how to lure the fish up small streams close to the village. Many women belong to these societies. Societies are not just for men. When you belong, you have to be able to plunge your arms in boiling water and complain that it is cold. Could you do that?”

  “Why is that?”

  The woman with the hat looked at Sacajawea as if she thought she was deliberately slow-witted. “Because it shows you are a person who can take hardship and still not call it hard.” The woman snorted. “You don’t know much. I can easily see that living with only men has not done you much good.”

  Sacajawea wondered if she could point her questions in the right direction without arousing suspicion or antagonism. She was
the newcomer, the person who was different, and she was smart enough to know newcomers were never well accepted at first. “Have the women of your tribe always worn these easy-to-make, one-piece skirts?”

  The woman with the conical, woven-grass hat bent forward. “You can see we sew well. Your eyes are sharp anyway.”

  Sacajawea thought that the skirt only deserved praise for its simplicity. “I can see that on a quiet day those threads hang in place until you move or walk, but in a breeze you cannot be covered by much, and in a hard wind—kiyi—if it is the month of snow, the place where your legs come together will suffer frostbite. Could you weave the threads in a solid piece?” As soon as she had finished she was sorry. Her words were wrong. She looked from one woman to the next. Her neck and face felt warm. “I am only asking you to help me understand your customs,” she said weakly.

  “We can tell you need plenty of help. For your information, in the month of the shoulder moon we have blankets to wear that are woven from dogs’ wool. It takes five or six good dogs. A matting of bark threads is for canoe sails.”

  “Shoulder moon?”

  “Shoulder-to-shoulder around the warm fire.”

  “Uumm,” said Sacajawea, wondering how to go on using her limited Chinook jargon. “What do you eat—besides salmon?” She used hand signs as she spoke.

  “Are you hungry?” asked the woman with the rotting teeth. “Would you like to gamble for something to eat? Dried salmon, boiled crab or clam? Some fresh fish oil? A box of smoked pigeon breast?” The woman got up and with her ducklike gait went inside the closest hut. It was built of split cedar planks set on end. The roof was gabled and supported by posts and covered by overlapping boards. She came out holding a red, squarecornered, cedar box. She pointed to the box, then pointed to the moccasins Sacajawea wore.

  Sacajawea took the box. She had never seen anything like it. The thin cedar boards, when thoroughly wet from steaming, had been bent around partial cuts, and the box was tight enough to hold even liquids. The corners were sewn with fibers, and the lid was decorated with inlaid shells. “Skookumchuck! Something good!” Sacajawea decided to say only complimentary things.