February 11, 1805
Sacagawea’s son, Jean Baptiste
Charbonneau (Pomp), is born
November, 1805
Lewis and Clark–led parties reach
the Pacific Ocean
March 23, 1806
The return trip begins
May 3, 1806
The party returns to Nez Perce
village for horses; forced to fall
back until snow thaws in the
Bitterroots
July 3, 1806
Led by Nez Perce guides, the party
breaches the mountains
August 17, 1806
Party leaves Sacagawea, Pomp, and
Charbonneau at Mandan village
September 23, 1806
The party arrives in St. Louis to a
cheering crowd
Nov. 5, 1806
Lewis, Clark, and York arrive back
in Louisville
Oct. 11, 1809
Lewis dies in Tennessee from an
apparent suicide
1811–1816
York works as a wagoner in
Louisville
Dec. 20, 1812
Sacagawea dies
1815
York works for drayage business
formed by William Clark and his
nephew, John Hite Clark
1832
In interview with Washington
Irving, Clark reports York’s death
1838
Clark dies in St. Louis
Another Trek
York’s Nez Perce Legacy
After an evening reading at Summer Fishtrap, a writing conference held every year in Nez Perce country at the foot of the Wallowa Mountains, just outside Joseph, Oregon, I stepped outside of a wooden cabin nestled near the opposite end of beautiful Wallowa Lake and the grave site of legendary Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph. There I met Diana Mallickan, a park ranger stationed in Spalding, Idaho, on the Lapwai reservation, and Allen Pinkham, an important Nez Perce elder and former chair of the tribe’s governing body. I was holding my breath in anticipation of a critique of my book of poems entitled Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004).
I had already survived criticism from Lewis and Clark enthusiasts and history scholars, but the audience I feared the most, representative voices of people most absent in the telling of the Lewis and Clark saga, now stood before me in the dark. I braced myself for the worst but breathed a sigh of relief when Pinkham held out a hardback copy of Buffalo Dance for me to sign.
The private and warm exchange that began that night continued over several years and grew to include a public reading at the University of Idaho, in Moscow, and an invitation to visit and read from the York manuscript at Lapwai High School, a Native American secondary school on the reservation. The initial meeting at Fishtrap also led to an opportunity to present my poems during the signature event of the National Lewis & Clark Bicentennial Commemoration at Lewis and Clark College and again in St. Louis for the commemoration’s final event, called Currents of Change.
After a series of visits back to the reservation in Lapwai, including numerous visits with my son, D’Van, in tow, we were invited to play basketball, attend a powwow and a sweat lodge, and to dine with members of the Nez Perce tribe.
On one of our northwest excursions, having already followed the Lewis and Clark Trail along the Columbia River all the way to the Pacific, my son and I drove north from the reservation to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and over to Travelers Rest, Montana, then followed the Bitterroot River back through the mountains to the reservation. We traveled over rugged Lolo Pass, following the old buffalo trail that served as part of the official Lewis and Clark trail and features hot springs and unspoiled views that York himself must have seen. Every incredible vista, meal, and personal encounter with the Nez Perce proved invaluable, but the greatest gift of all was the invitation to visit the Nez Perce National Historical Park Research Center’s library and archives at the Spalding station. I knew I was in sacred space when an archivist pulled up several computer images of Harlem Renaissance–era Native American jazz bands in war bonnets and full native regalia. Most important for my work was the discovery that the archives housed, among other treasures, transcribed oral history related to York’s time spent with the Nez Perce.
The materials in the archives relating to York not only echoed the same welcome spirit that my son and I experienced during our visits, they also revealed information previously unrecorded in all my earlier research on York and the Lewis and Clark expedition. Important facts, not present in the Lewis and Clark journals, indicate that York, Clark, and other members of the party took native “wives” and, in many cases, fathered children during the time spent with various tribes. These records finally addressed, head-on, rumors that historians have heretofore carefully avoided and ceremoniously dismissed in almost every historical treatment of the expedition. The archival material specifically detailed a recognized public relationship between York and the daughter of Chief Red Grizzly that resulted in the birth of a son, also named York. The transcribed history described their courtship, including canoe rides on the Clearwater River.
Moreover, during our visits to the reservation, we had several meals with known descendents of York, a feat ironically impossible in Kentucky and Virginia, where such descendents are not publicly recognized. The legacy of devaluing the families and marriages of enslaved individuals like York continues today; his slave wife’s name, for example, is still absent from our history books, along with all references to any children they might have borne together.
It was also at Fishtrap where I met the late Marc Jaffe, who was working with Alvin M. Josephy Jr. on an important anthology of Native voices called Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes (New York: Knopf, 2006), which included essays by Allen V. Pinkham Sr., N. Scott Momaday, Roberta Conner, and other recognized Native American writers, scholars, and leaders. This collection would prove extremely useful in helping to shift the focus in the public discourse around the importance of the great trek to include a Native perspective, just as the bicentennial commemoration was coming to a close.
The information contained in the transcribed oral histories from the Nez Perce I had encountered, in addition to Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes, forced me to take another look at the voices from this story that were, after all this time, still silent. These resources encouraged me to begin looking at the Lewis and Clark expedition again, but this time through the lens of the women in York’s life—specifically his Nez Perce wife and his slave wife, whose voices provide the emotional undercurrent in this latest retelling of the journey.
I tried to look for light wherever the poetic prism led. Many works helped me to re-enter the space these poems come from. There were general sources on the expedition, such as The National Council of the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial’s brochure called A Guide to Visiting The Lands of Many Nations & to the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial; NebraskaLand Magazine’s America Looks West: Lewis and Clark on the Missouri, 80, no. 7 (2002); and the more specialized Or Perish in the Attempt: Wilderness Medicine in the Lewis & Clark Expedition, written by David J. Peck (Helena, Mont.: Farcountry Press, 2002).
The scholarly work of Dr. Jim Holmberg’s Dear Brother: Letters of William Clark to Jonathan Clark proved invaluable, and Ken Burns’s film on the expedition entitled Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery (PBS, 1997) continued to help me to visualize the landscape all the way from Kentucky to the Pacific when I needed to re-see what I was writing about.
To reacquaint myself with the voices of the participants, I looked again at The Journals of Lewis and Clark, edited and abridged by Anthony Brandt (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Adventures Classics, 2002); as well as the journals of expedition member Patrick Gass, The Journals of Patrick Gass, Member of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, ed. Carol Lynn Mac-Gregor (Missoula, Mont.: Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1997), which
provided an additional point of view. Robert B. Betts’s In Search of York (Boulder: The University Press of Colorado, 2000) was important in exploring the main character of my story.
Books on slavery, such as Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider’s An Eyewitness History of Slavery in America From Colonial Times to the Civil War (New York: Facts on File, 2000); Velma Mae Thomas’s Lest We Forget: The Passage from Africa to Slavery and Emancipation (New York: Crown Publishers, 1997); and the primary sources contained in John W. Blasengame’s Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977) were crucial to the voices I wanted to develop. Additionally, Joseph M. Murphy’s Santeria: African Spirits in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993) helped me to address this necessary component of the narrative.
There were many sources that helped to contextualize the Native American voices and lives I wished to know better, including Edward S. Curtis’s Native American Wisdom: Photographs by Edward S. Curtis (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1994); William S. Lyon’s Encyclopedia of Native American Healing (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996); Peter Nabokov’s edited volume, Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations From Prophecy to the Present, 1492–2000, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1999); and Kent Nerburn’s edited collection, The Wisdom of the Native Americans (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 1999). In considering the Native American experience of the expedition, however, no resource was more significant than the original oral histories of the Nez Perce themselves, transcribed by Baird, Diana Mallickan, and Swagerty, “Voices in Nez Perce,” vol. II.
Wading through these many volumes, traveling the thousandplus miles to the ocean and back, sitting in the sweat lodge, walking the same riverbanks and staring up into the same big sky that embraced York, and spending time with the same beautiful people that made a home for him is the reason these poems breathe air. I pray my own feeling and beliefs don’t get in the way of the voices of the individual voices assembled here, which must speak their own truths.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to my research assistant/partner/wife, Michaele L. Pride. Thanks for the feedback and eyeballs of Mitchell Douglas, Jim Minick, Parneshia Jones, Drew Dillhunt, James Holmberg, CX Dillhunt, Tim Seibles, Greg Pape, Debra Magpie Earling, and Vivien Ara. Thanks to Cheryl Floyd-Miller for the brilliant, probing questions. Thanks to Diane Malikan, Allen Pinkham, Jeff Guillory, and the Nimiipuu (Nez Perce Nation) for welcoming me to the Rez, Lapwai High School, and the sweat lodge. Thanks to Roberta Conner, Pam Steele, Brian Conner, the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Great Falls, Montana, and the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute. Thanks to Laurel Lightner for light. Thanks to the Cave Canem family for continuing to raise the bar and to the Affrilachian Poets for holding up their end. Thanks, Faith, for your continued presence and blessings, and the Lannan family in Santa Fe, and Marfa for the generous support and encouragement to find these poems, and the wonderful staff at the University Press of Kentucky and Deborah Meade for carving this collection into a book. Aché.
About the Author
Frank X Walker is the author of three collections of poetry: Affrilachia; Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York; and Black Box. He is the founding editor and publisher of PLUCK! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture. A founding member of the Affrilachian Poets and a Cave Canem Fellow, he received the prestigious 2005 Lannan Foundation Poetry Fellowship. His other awards and honors include honorary doctoral degrees from Transylvania University and University of Kentucky, the 2004 Lillian Smith Book Award for Buffalo Dance, a Kentucky Arts Council Al Smith Fellowship, and the 2006 Thomas D. Clark Award for Literary Excellence. A graduate of the University of Kentucky and Spalding University’s MFA in Writing Program, he is Lecturer of English and Writer in Residence at Northern Kentucky University.
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