Sacajawea

by Anna Lee Waldo

  Sacajawea put her two hands over her face.

  “During a period of feasting they left all the meat bones under the sacred tree where the dog’s remains were tied. At the end of the feasting, the bone pile was so high it covered the lower branches of the tree. At night they heard the spirit howls of the dog. They believed he was crying for his mate.”

  Sacajawea was rocking in the hard, leather-heeled, kidskin shoes. “There was no feasting and the girl was not mated to any dog, which was more coyote than anything else!”

  Jim went straight ahead in the telling. “The Big Bellies shot arrows into the girl, and she was not wrapped or cleansed, but given back to Mother Earth, ragged and dirty and wild, and she was placed on top of the bones. Then their crops began to fall off and shrivel in the summer heat. Some Big Bellies saw the spirit of the girl. She lived with a neighboring tribe. They left more gifts on the bone pile. But they lay down and died like dogs in their lodges. The spotted sickness destroyed them. But their neighbors say it was the spirit or memory of the girl that really destroyed them. The Big Belly land is barren now, as it was in the beginning before any came to live there.”

  Oddly enough, Jim found it hard to continue with the most important part. His mouth was dry and his hands were sweaty. He was not so sure his grandmother would answer his final question. He wondered if he ought to not ask, but just make a statement and see her reaction. He tried licking his lips. “I heard you once say that you were a small girl among the Big Bellies and that you tamed a wild dog yourself.”

  Sacajawea was silent now for a long time. Then, drawing hollow-cheeked upon her pipestem, she smoked awhile and brooded.

  “In the story going around Carlisle, what did you hear was the girl’s name?”

  Jim’s mouth was so dry he had to prime himself with a drink of water. “They mentioned a name that is neither Comanche nor Shoshoni.”

  “I was thinking,” she admitted with a deep, explosive chuckle, “of making you stop in the middle of the story—but then I wanted to see what the Big Bellies or their neighbors made up next.” She rubbed her hands together as if to loosen the tension.

  “Can you say the girl’s name?” asked Jim, feeling now as if something had been released inside his stomach.

  “Ai,” she said.

  “Then say it!” he said. “Say it! I can’t wait to hear if it is the name used for the woman who traveled to the west with the soldiers.”

  “Sacajawea,” she said as the tears welled in her eyes.

  Jim stared at his great-grandmother in awe. After a time he said, “Then it is true, all the stories you have told and what some of the Carlisle boys say? You have traveled and seen more than any other woman alive. You met the white men after you left the Big Bellies, and you came back and lived near the Mandans for a while. You have relatives that call you Wadzewipe, from the south in Indian Territory, going to Carlisle. These boys said their grandmother went to the Great Western Waters with white soldiers. When our teacher told us about two captains appointed by President Jefferson to go west, these relatives of yours asked many questions about a Comanche woman who went with them. Then someone from Dakota Territory told the story of the Big Bellies, because he said he’d been told this girl’s spirit followed the white men to the Great Western Waters. I’ve waited all this time to ask you. But I believe I knew the whole time who they were speaking about. My great-grandmother!”

  “See, it is legend now. I belong to my time, and it has passed. Even the old Hidatsa story is turned inside out and put together wrong. People try to blame something they do not understand on something they do. It will always be that way. And when you listened you heard those Comanche boys say that the woman they knew was Comanche—but you knew she was Shoshoni.” She dropped her sunken eyes down to her new boots. “Your thoughts come out in a straight line. I think if it were the other times now, you would be in line to be a chief because I can see you standing above yourself. And you are generous with old people.” Again she glanced at her new boots. “Bring me the leather pouch that hangs just inside behind the tepee flap.”

  When Jim returned, she had stretched out on an old torn gray blanket. “This Mary you visit in the wooden houses of the whites—is she pretty?”

  Jim colored and mumbled, “Of course she’s pretty.”

  “I have never seen her, but her smell I know well. When you come back from the agency, you bring it on your shirt and in your hair. Oh, do not deny it. You are a man, and it is time you sought out a woman. The spring of life rises in you, and it cannot be denied. Now, I have a gift for you.”

  She fumbled with the pouch strings. Into her lap fell a blue feather, a small red feather, then a small, smooth polished stone, rusty red, with a white free-form bird embossed on the surface. One clawlike finger darted inside the pouch and dug out a thin leather thong that had the sky blue polished stone threaded in the center. It was an exquisite piece of rare turquoise. “A woman needs pretties,” Sacajawea said, passing the sky blue stone on the thin thong slowly to Jim. “She will make a good woman and mother, and her sewing will improve each season.”

  Jim knelt beside his great-grandmother and whispered near the sallow, wrinkled face, “I shall not forget this day. I think you should know that Mary is half-white. The other half is Shoshoni from Tendoy’s band. She is going to Carlisle.” He placed the knotted hands of Sacajawea over his heart, signifying love between them.

  Sacajawea leaned toward her great-grandson. Her voice seemed caught in her throat. “I am lonely for the people I used to know. The longer one lives, the shorter life seems. At night when the stars are close to the earth I think I can reach out and touch one. I know I never can and I know that I am nothing in the big scheme of the Mother Earth. When I was your age I thought everything I did was important and meant something, but now I see nothing is of much importance. People all go, their bones crumble to dust and finally no one remembers them. Only a few live on in memories. Some that linger in memories are not the ones that were most important.” She sat still, as though half-frightened by her own words. Her thin, bony hands shook. “People make heroes from anyone, because they need to believe all life’s activity is important. It’s important to respect each other. I have known some highly esteemed people—they are gone now and forgotten by most. In another age or two no one will know they were even here.” She began to sing softly to herself.

  “Grandmother,” interrupted Jim, “everyone is important, because what each of us does is built from what those before us have done. One bead on a string might be forgotten if it is lost, but it is missed. With all the beads in place, one after the other, the string is something good to look at, and to keep adding to. You know what I mean to say?” He rubbed his hands together and looked at his grandmother, whose beady eyes seemed to have a faraway, watery luster.

  When summer was over, Jim made a large woodpile for Sacajawea, and together they dried half a dozen large boxes of beef strips. On the day Jim left for Carlisle Sacajawea said, “Please, make the sleeping couch in my tepee comfortable with more pine boughs. Also, I would like some sweet wild parsnips for my stew, my grandson.”

  That winter was mild and she spent no more than six weeks in the wooden lodge of old Shoogan and his family. The noise of the great-grandchildren was harsh in her ears and she was happy to be back in her quiet tepee. She talked to herself for company. “When I was getting wood this morning, I could see the snow on the Wind River Mountains was shrinking. The wind is warmer and carries moisture. The month of melting snow is here.”

  The chinook wind rose by evening, and there was water running deeper in the streams. The tepee skins bellied out with the warm gusts of wind and Sacajawea found more rocks of red sandstone to hold the skirt firmly to the ground.

  When the snow melted or was blown from her pathway she walked slowly and stiffly with the help of her cane to pick up her rations. The agency had a new Episcopalian Minister—the Reverend John Roberts, who was called White Robe. He was middle-age
d and wore a brown beard on his chin. He was determined that the Shoshonis and Arapahos have the full benefit of Sunday school, church, prayer meeting, Bible reading, and grace. There was to be no working on the Sabbath, except what could not be avoided. There was to be no laughter, no card playing, no dancing, no gambling, no horse racing, and positively no drinking. Whenever he passed a group of young men sitting on the ground gambling with hidden plum pits, drinking eighty percent alcohol, fruit-flavored extract from innocuous tin cups, they all rose up and smiled. He bowed and said, “How do you do?”

  Sacajawea could not figure him, so she avoided him as much as possible.

  Late one night the chinook wind died and the last cold snap of the season fell over the land, making the melted snow hard and slick as glass. Then just as suddenly it was April and the snow was nearly gone, except for the deeper drifts on the north sides of the hills. This was the month when the meadowlark’s song brightened the greening meadows. Sacajawea sat, wrapped in a thick blanket, against the cottonwood near her tepee. She dozed in the sunshine while listening to the sounds of spring.

  Her grease-stained tunic seemed as old as the ground she sat on. The sun moved down little by little, giving the mountains a rose-colored glow and casting a gold shimmer on the river’s water. Then, without warning, a strange radiance lit up the dusky evening. The light seemed to come from the agency. It flickered brilliantly over the tops of the wind-stunted trees, then died and left only a fleeting smell of charred pine resin.

  Sacajawea rose unsteadily to her feet, feeling no sense of emergency. She took her time checking the adequate woodpile and stack of brush behind her tepee. She went inside and poked at the small pile of molding parsnips. She looked in her coffee tin and saw there was some left. She opened the cornmeal sack and saw only a few weevils on top, so she knotted the sack closed. She had forgotten to go after her last rations. She had not been hungry and even now did not eat much. But she felt fine and her mind was clear as the mountain air.

  She scuffled around with the high, side-button shoes on for a while, then she pulled them off. She rested a few moments before slipping her stockinged feet into the comfortable old frayed moccasins. She turned her head to one side, listening. The sound of footsteps came up the trail and stopped outside her tepee. She got up and shuffled out. She could see a lighted lantern swinging back and forth held by a man in heavy, black wool coat and wool cap. His eyes were watery blue, and his mouth pulled in a tight line above the neatly trimmed brown beard on his chin. It was Reverend Roberts.

  “How do you do?” she asked in a low but clear voice.

  “I have come to tell you not to be alarmed—there was a fire at the agency, but it is under control now and nothing to worry about. We saved most everything, except a box of old papers and some things left by Dr. Irwin and his wife. He probably won’t miss it. Don’t worry now. Goodnight.” Then, as an afterthought, he turned back. “Could I send someone out Sunday to bring you in to church, Old Grandmother?”

  “Thank you,” she said in a calm voice, without anxiety. “You are considerate. But by Sunday I shall be gone. Goodnight.”

  “I don’t advise you to go anywhere in this upcoming weather, Old Grandmother,” Reverend Roberts said. “It seems mild now, but it will be raining by tomorrow or the next day for sure. Can’t you smell the rain coming in that wind? Take care.”

  She listened to his receding footsteps.

  She went back inside and put her side-button shoes on the shelf. She undid the cornmeal sack again and scooped a heaping pie tin full of the meal for her old horse. After feeding it she left the horse unhobbled for the night. Then she scooped out more cornmeal and scattered it on the ground for the birds and chipmunks. When she came back inside to close the cornmeal sack, she left the tepee flap pinned open so that the night spirits could come in or go out as they wished. The night air was chilly, with a feel of frost, so she pulled on her woolen skirt and wrapped the blanket tighter about her shoulders. She was breathing heavily and sat to rest on her pine-bough couch. When her legs stopped shaking and she felt stronger, she got up and pulled down the old, beaded leather pouch. Her bent, clawlike fingers fished out the polished, rusty red stone with the white bird marking. She held it in her fist until it took in her body warmth.

  Keeping the red stone in her fist she clumsily folded two thin, but new, woolen blankets given to her by the government. She put them beside her open tepee flap along with several of her favorite cooking pots and polished horn dippers and stirrers. She broke the tops off the limp parsnips, and threw them out the doorway. She dipped the parsnips in her water bucket and washed them, then dropped them in the kettle of simmering stew. She did not build up the smoldering fire. She swept the dirt floor with a straw broom, so that it looked as if a fine rake had gone over it. All the while she held the red stone in her fist. Then she lay down on the couch to rest. When her breathing steadied, she pulled a worn buffalo robe over herself.

  After a short nap, her scrawny, hooked hand came out with the red stone. She fumbled with the old, thick blanket she had wrapped around her shoulders and then she reached under her tunic and placed the warm stone between her sagging breasts. This was the only thing that held many memories for her. She had a long lifetime. She knew nothing was lost, only the forgotten memories. Nothing was gained, only the addition of remembered knowledge.

  Sometime in the middle of the night, the smoldering coals turned cold, as did the body warmth of the old woman on the pine-bough couch. All was dark and still inside the old tepee. Outside, dark clouds hung low, ready to rain in teardrop-size splatters over the Wind River area, making the dust and rock deep red and shiny. The heads of all the prairie plants bowed with the wind.

  Epilogue

  There were several fires at the agency of the Wind River Reservation in the late 1870s and early 1880s. But the United States Government has no documents in its present files stating exactly when those fires took place or whether they were in fact at the agency or the government barracks at Fort Washakie.1

  Finn. G. Burnett, government farmer on the Wind River Reservation, wrote in 1926:

  I can remember distinctly how interested Mrs. Irwin [her husband, Dr. James Irwin, was Indian agent and surgeon] was in Sacajawea’s description of the expedition. Mrs. Irwin was well educated. The paper on which she wrote this history was legal cap, with a red line down the side, and it was more than twenty-five sheets; rolling it up, it made quite a large roll. I cannot definitely state the number of pages. The last time I saw it, it was kept with an autographed letter from President Lincoln to Dr. Irwin, for services rendered by him on the field of the battle of Shiloh. The last time I saw it, it was at the office of the agency, which was burned. I can’t remember the date, but it seemed that part of the records were saved. We hunted diligently for the letter from President Lincoln and the manuscript, realizing even then that they were valuable. Some years after, at the request of Mrs. Irwin’s daughter, I hunted for the letter and manuscript, but was unable to discover either one.2

  It seems unusual that the Irwins did not take their personal, valuable papers with them when they were transferred to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1873. Instead, they apparently left them behind at the agency office on the Wind River Reservation.

  Reverend John Roberts, Episcopalian minister on the Wind River Reservation, conducted a Christian burial ceremony over Sacajawea’s grave in the cemetery of the reservation on the day she died. Dr. Hebard stated in her book that Sacajawea had no last illness and was found in her tepee lifeless on the morning of April 9, 1884.3

  In the parish records kept by Reverend Roberts appears this record:

  DATE April 9, 1884

  NAME Bazil’s mother (Shoshone)

  AGE Near one hundred

  RESIDENCE Shoshone agency

  CAUSE OF DEATH Old age

  PLACE OF BURIAL Burial ground, Shoshone agency

  SIGNATURE OF CLERGYMAN J. Roberts4

  One of Sacajawea’s neigh
bors, Mrs. Lane, wife of an Indian trader, told Dr. Hebard about Sacajawea’s death.

  One morning word was received that Bazil’s mother was dead. Mr. Lane, the Indian trader, said, “I’ll go to the tepee.” At the door of the tent Bazil arrived with tears running down his face. Speaking to me, he said, “Mrs. Lane, my mother is dead.” I saw Bazil’s mother taken from the tepee wrapped in skins and sewed up for burial. The body was placed on her favorite horse, the horse being led by Bazil. Probably the body was to be taken to where the coffin was, for she was buried in a coffin according to the statement by Reverend Roberts and others.5

  The Reverend John Roberts had a remarkable memory to be able to state that the woman called “Bazil’s mother” was in fact Sacajawea after he had been on the reservation only a year before this old woman died. The old woman probably did not go far from her lodge; possibly she never went to services in the Episcopalian church, at least while he was there. She was very old and feeble. Dr. Hebard did not question Reverend Roberts overly in this matter.

  In 1885, the man called Baptiste died on the reservation. His body was taken by a few Indians and carried into the mountains west of the agency and let down forty feet between two crags. After the body had been loweredby rope, a few rocks were thrown down upon the corpse, one of which struck the skull and crushed it. Later a rock slide completely buried his remains.

  Edward N. Wentworth of Chesterton, Indiana, wrote to Clyde Porter, a collector of western relics, on December 2, 1955.

  There used to be a big fellow from Lander [Wyoming], Ed Farlow, who was with Buffalo Bill for a while in charge of the Indians who went to Europe and I had many talks with him concerning the reservation and the Indians up there. He finally told me that he thought neither the Indians nor the whites had the slightest idea who was buried there. He was quite certain that the man who they claimed to be Sacajawea’s son was not a son of Sacajawea. However, he was a publicity man more than a student and I didn’t pay much attention to him then–I wish I had.