Sacajawea

by Anna Lee Waldo

  He held up his hand and said, “Ho!” Then he began to make clumsy signs. Sacajawea held out her shaking left hand and said impulsively in English, “Hello, Dr. Irwin. How are Sarah and your two daughters?”

  The agent was surprised at the good English. He was pleased and said, “What is your name, Grandmother?”

  “I go by many names,” she said. “Your woman has come often to my tepee. She calls me Porivo.”

  “So you are the one she has been writing about.”

  “I guess so,” Sacajawea said. She was thinking, This man does not really care about the People. He does not even know where it is his woman goes each morning.

  “May I say good-bye?” He tipped his hat. “This is our last day at Wind River. We are moving to the Pine Ridge Agency.”

  “The Sioux Reservation?” Surprise showed on her face. The Story Writer Woman had not mentioned this.

  “Grandmother, I am a doctor, and my duty is where I am called. I’d like to have you cooperate with the new agent as soon as he comes.5 Tell the mothers to keep sending their children to Bishop Randall’s church and mission school.” He again tipped his hat and turned away.

  It was not lost on Sacajawea that the man had mentioned Bishop Randall when there were so few that attended his Sunday morning services, but most of the reservation children went to the school. Whether the statement reflected on the agent’s ignorance or forgetfulness, she could not guess.

  It had been debated at the agency before Dr. Irwin was transferred about bringing the Arapahos in to live on the Shoshoni Reservation a short while, until a reservation of their own could be laid out. It had been discussed for several weeks during issuing of rations, in the camps and degenerating councils. Finally, after many words, Chief Washakie and Chief Black Coal, of the Northern Arapahos, gave their reluctant consent. Chief Black Coal’s final speech was, “My people have no land to call their own because the Cheyennes drive them off hunting grounds, the Blackfeet drive our camps away from drinking water. Our women are thin, and our children cry out at night with hunger pains.”

  “I do not wish to see anyone starve or have little children freeze to death on the cold plains or in the icy mountains,” said Washakie with his head bowed.

  ‘Perhaps these people will stay only during the cold winter until another place can be found for them,” said Jim Patten, the teacher. He shifted his seat on the ground, finding patience in the thought that their talk did not matter now because they all knew once the Arapahos came in they would stay. He looked off to where dusk was putting a dull shine on the Wind River.

  Chief Washakie was also staring at the river, thinking it was good water before the people had begun coming in to spoil it, bringing plows to rip up pastures and cattle to graze ranges, and now the Arapahos with sheep to make affairs worse. This was the new way—too many people, too much stock, too many homestead claims, so that wildlife disappeared and streams ran tame and clouded.

  Chief Black Coal spoke. “You won’t be sorry.” He spoke as if he wanted to say it again so that Washakie could hold tight to that thought and not lose it, an elbow resting on his cocked knee, his upheld hand fixed to his pipe.

  The Shoshonis accepted this brief alliance only as a necessity.6 “The filthy Arapahos can sleep on the prairie with their sheep!” some said. Others said, “Why don’t they eat their sheep instead of trying to sell them to the white men? Then they would have full bellies and warm fur robes!” “We don’t want them near us!” “They cry like old women in a snowstorm.”

  Some talked with Sacajawea, who shook her head and grinned at them. “I have no confidence in the Arapahos,” she answered. “I have seen them offer large amounts in trade for rifles and ammunition. They cannot be trusted. But someone must listen to them if they wish to live with the Shoshonis on the reservation. Someone must tell them they must live without arms and ammunition except for hunting meat.”

  “There are more of us than them. One of our men is worth three of theirs,” someone said.

  Sacajawea believed it was a natural thing that the strong dominated the weak. But she was against any deliberate wrong done by someone in power which advanced the powerful, but was paid for by the weaker underdogs. She believed in individualism, though the progress brought about by individual self-interest was slower than that achieved by one strong leader pushing around the masses. Her way required much patience and much time.

  She saw the white man’s government temporarily place the Arapahos with the Wind River Shoshonis in 1872, then move the Arapahos back to Pine Ridge with their allies, the Sioux, and now return them to Wind River. The government men seemed at a loss for finding a home for the Arapaho, maybe because they repeatedly attacked miners, settlers, and other Indians in the Sweetwater, Bridger, and Wind River areas.7 The government men were now demanding that titles for the most productive portion of the Wind River Reservation be cleared for the Arapaho.

  Sacajawea saw the shadow on her mind. She and Washakie had talked about the plight of the Arapahos, who had no land of their own and never enough to eat. Both agreed there was plenty of suffering, but it would be an injustice to reward the Arapaho by making them a permanent gift of the Shoshonis’ best land. The Arapahos were traditional enemies, the same as the Blackfeet, Sioux, and Cheyenne. Washakie admitted that he was sick and cold, meaning he was troubled. “I will hold a council with them. When I see their faces, I can understand their intentions,” he said.8

  The wind had come up again. It shrieked through the pines, whistled over the rocks, and blew up the dust. Another winter was coming. Sacajawea would need plenty of wood before she would find herself slowly walking the trail to Shoogan’s wooden house next to the agent.

  Now the Shoshonis did not refer much to the old times and the fights with their enemies. They had stopped referring to the winter tales and legends because they began to question them. But they passed around the story about some suspicious Arapahos who had murdered eight white men and escaped with live-stock and horses. “Stinking Arapahos,” they said. The settlers from a Sweetwater mining settlement organized and went into the Popo Agie to hunt the Arapahos and met a small band under the leadership of Chief Black Bear. The white men killed Black Bear and ten of his braves. Black Bear’s woman and seven children were captured. The word had been, “Serves them right.”

  One small boy was brought to Fort Washakie by General C. A. Coolidge. This Arapaho boy had hidden from the white men and was wandering dazed when Coolidge, of the Seventh Infantry, found him. He was given the name Sherman Coolidge and dressed in soldier blue. “See the crybaby Arapaho who thinks he is white,” some Shoshonis said, pointing a finger at the child.9

  The morning air was cold when Sacajawea walked behind her cedar stick to Jakie’s store. She noticed that a crowd was gathering near the trail to the fort. She recognized Toussaint, by himself. The winter before, both his women had been sick and had died not more than a day apart. He seemed small and withered, brittle as a dead twig. He looks old, she thought. His face was sharp and sallow. She began to follow the crowd; she was mostly curious.

  On March 18, 1878, 938 starving Arapahos were brought en masse to the Wind River Shoshoni Reservation under military escort.10 The Arapahos were taken to the eastern side of the fort where the ground was not strewn with shale, but was covered with fertile soil, so that in summer it was thick with prairie grass, sage, and camass. The grass could be scythed and sold to the soldiers as hay. Now the grass was damp and yellow and lay close to the red soil wherever the fierce winds had blown the snow off the land. The sage looked like upright, gray skeletons.

  Most of the Shoshoni and some Bannocks had come to stare at the newcomers. The gaunt Arapaho men staked out their few horses. They beat bare arms across their chests to keep warm, or crossed them on their chests so that they could keep their hands warm in their armpits.

  Frail-looking women cleared off the wet grass and put some cooking pots on the frozen ground. Then they sent children for sticks, old cow-pie
s, or dry grass for a small fire.

  Toussaint shuffled near and spoke English to them, and French, and bits of nearly forgotten Mandan. They only stared, not even offering hand signs.

  The young man with the broad face yelled, “Are you just a band of old women?”

  The Lemhis were surprised because a poorly dressed man stepped over and spoke to them in Shoshoni. “I am their chief, Sorrel Horse, and we wish to thank you for your generosity.” Another sad-looking man stepped near, saying, “I am Friday, a subchief. You will not be sorry for this kindness.”

  Sacajawea watched the man called Sorrel Horse entertain the children and white soldiers. She decided he was an Arapaho medicine man because he performed magic tricks and feats of ventriloquism. His woman stood close behind him as protection from the chilling wind. She had no blanket. The children’s lips looked purple in the cold that blew from the snow-covered hills. Sacajawea’s fingers picked at her old red blanket. It had seen better days, but it was still warm. She turned to face her own people and said with a loud voice so they could hear past the rush of wind, “I am stunned! You Shoshonis walk around like you have always lived on a high horse! Get down and look at these newcomers and remember how an empty belly pinches and how the wind bites your bones.” The people were silent. “These people have no skins nor canvas for tepees.” Her body straighted a little and she pointed to a huddled group of shivering children. “I will put my blanket here to start a pile. The rest of you give what you can to give some comfort to these people.”

  A woman in the crowd yelled, “Old Grandmother, they are Dog-Eaters.”11

  “I am ashamed you said that. Maybe their dogs were the only thing that has kept them alive. Look how skinny they are.” Just then a baby cried out with a thin, piercing wail.

  “Skinny and ugly and noisy!” some discourteous Bannock yelled.

  “I add my moccasins to the blanket,” said Sacajawea, kicking her fur-lined winter moccasins next to the blanket. She shivered and looked at her people, whose eyes were downcast, until someone moved forward and dropped his robe on the blanket. One by one they came forward until the pile of warm outer-wear was good-sized. Sacajawea smiled at them, and her large, sunken eyes seemed to emit two points of warm light.

  Someone else gave the chief, Sorrel Horse, a blanket. “I have some old skins you can build a shelter with,” another called and hurried back down the trail to get them. Someone else brought up their ration of cornmeal and gave it to an Arapaho woman. Toussaint called out in an oily, crude voice, “I have some skins I will trade for hard coins.” Then there was much laughing and making of hand signs until the Shoshonis and Bannocks left to go about their own business, each thinking in his own way, The Arapahos aren’t so bad. They are in need of many things; they are as hungry as the Shoshonis have been.

  In time, Washakie went to the tepee of Sacajawea to tell his feeling about the Arapahos occupying the best farmland of the reservation. “I do not think it is just,” he said, his bony finger pointing in the direction of the circle of canvas tepees. “If the government wants the Shoshonis to be happy on this reservation, the Arapahos must go to a reservation of their own. Our people have less meat because they had to divide with their friends the Bannocks, and now they are without flour and must eat cornmeal, which they do not like, because of the Arapahos.”

  Sacajawea placed an arm about his shoulder and pulled him close. Then, as though she were making an announcement to the universe in general, she said, “You are an old goat! You are like an old grandfather! I would have thought you would look at life more closely than at the things of this day. Days change, but life endures. To have a little less meat is not so bad, but the meat is not the same. It has no strength to it. You and I cannot chew it because most of our teeth are uprooted. What you truly long for is the first young calf you killed when you were a boy. That meat was tender, and you believed it would make you stronger. Ai?”

  Washakie searched her face with a vaguely grieved, apprehensive look. “Ho-ho! But then, surely you are right! I am an old goat! Ho-ho!”

  When school was over in May, Jim McAdams left Carlisle and went back to Sacajawea’s lodge on the Wind River Reservation. The two of them talked about the Shoshonis’ land division. They talked about the bitter hatred between Arapahos and Shoshonis. They talked about Washakie withdrawing more and more into his dreams: dreams where the mountain streams were thick with trout, where there were plenty of deer in the meadows, and where the horses never tired; dreams in which his women never scolded, but saw to his every need, and his people lived in comfortable lodges and did not know hunger.

  “It was this lack of reality in our chief,” said Sacajawea, “and the idea of living so close to the Arapahos that drove off some of the tribe under the leadership of Norkuk, the half-breed. They are living in the Green River area.”

  “I know Norkuk,” said Jim. “Some say his father was a white soldier. He is crafty, but mostly ambitious. He wants to be civil chief, but Washakie is in his way.”

  “Washakie’s heart is still great. He will never push the Arapahos away now. Everyone will have to learn to walk in the new road, even Norkuk.”

  “I heard Norkuk took his warriors to Utah to get washed,” said Jim. “They will come back calling themselves Mormons.”

  Sacajawea sat silently. She passed her pipe to be filled and lit. She thought about the young people, like her grandson, who were not as stoic in their fear of the white man as the old people were. The young people had discarded their comfortable leather clothing for cowboy boots, blue jeans, and wide-brimmed hats. They earned diplomas from the mission schools and some went on to Carlisle with a cardboard suitcase tied shut with a horsehair rope. The rope was the same braided lasso they had used in calf roping on reservation field days. Jim McAdams transferred his feelings to his great-grandmother, Sacajawea. These were the same feelings other Indian youths throughout the country were beginning to experience—restlessness and discontent.

  Together they spoke quietly about human beings and their place on Mother Earth. They did not talk of laws and property so much as the value of a man’s life.

  In the twilight of midsummer, Jim found his great-grandmother bent to a horizontal from the hips, her thin hair white against the background of the dark earth, her sharp face shining with beads of perspiration, plying an ax among the gnarled remainders of the woodpile.

  “Wagh!” she remarked, smiling brightly up at him and panting. “You see, I can get my own wood if you stay overlong with your white friends in the wooden lodges.” Yielding the ax to Jim with some reluctance, she shuffled toward the tepee, apparently unaware of the worn moccasins that gave no protection to her heels and toes against the stones and prickly pear.

  When the evening cook fire was going merrily, Jim said, “Grandmother, I have brought you a gift.”

  With something girlish lighting her face, she made a nasal sound, an elevated crescendo of pleasure and surprise as Jim handed her a pair of high, gray kidskin, side-button shoes.

  “I traded some used schoolbooks for them,” he said.

  She held them in her hands and giggled like a schoolgirl, then kicked off the ragged moccasins and pushed her bare feet into the new, hard-soled shoes, pulling and pushing until her feet settled comfortably inside. “Thank you, my grandson,” she said, her eyes squinting at him for a few minutes. “I am very old, though sometimes I do not feel so old. But in my heart I know that I have learned so many things that I do not know much anymore.” She was quiet for some minutes, and Jim sat patiently waiting for the old woman to emerge from her reveries. Finally, as she gave no indication of emerging, Jim broke the silence. “There is a funny story going around Carlisle. I want to tell it.”

  “All right.” She nodded and was silent again while she filled her pipe carefully and lit it.

  “The story is about a legendary dog that was sacred to a tribe up the Missouri River as far as the Knife. The tribe was wiped out by smallpox, but their legend lasts.”
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  A tension tightened the muscles like a little wave in Sacajawea’s face; then she relaxed and said, “You can tell me, my grandson.”

  “A young girl was taken captive when she was but a baby and she lived with this tribe, which was called the Big Bellies. She was unusually bright, but not friendly with the Big Bellies. She worked in the fields and always wore a covering robe, even on the warmest days. She sang as she planted, and her corn came up out of the earth greener and stronger than her neighbors’. The women began to watch how she worked. Her bright smile seemed to be the sun that warmed Mother Earth beneath her feet, and her flowing hair the cool breeze that kept the land from parching. They asked her advice, and soon the harvests were bountiful. But the girl did not care about the people and their crops; she loved only the beasts she romped with when the moon was bright. She was leader of a pack of wild dogs. And it is said she was the mate of the most powerful dog.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  Jim knew he must not say anything foolish, yet he must go on. The words were in his throat, but they stuck. He took a deep breath and wondered what he feared. Would his grandmother be angry? Would she laugh? Would she sit back with tears in her eyes and say the story was false, made up by someone with a forked tongue? He went on without answering Sacajawea’s question.

  “Once the dog became bold and wanted to come in the lodge with the girl. The owner of the lodge became frightened and killed the dog.”

  “Who thinks this is funny?” asked Sacajawea, her mouth twitching.

  “The girl danced as she wept, keeping her head lowered, and the Big Bellies saw she never opened her eyes. She danced like a being far away, with no part in what surrounded her. ‘She is not of us,’ the chief of the village said. ‘She is with the wild dog even now. We must do away with her.’”