Across the Endless River

by Thad Carhart

  That afternoon Lewis had the men stretch one of the large sails overhead as a shield from the sun, and robes were spread out beneath it so that he, Clark, and the principal Shoshone chief, Cameahwait, could confer and negotiate for horses. By now they had parleyed with the chiefs of several tribes and they prepared the setting for these talks with care. It was important that a sense of hierarchy prevail, that they be seen as chiefs from the great nation whose distant father had set them on their path. The three men smoked a pipe and made the formal statements of respect and good will necessary before any bargaining could begin. The chain of languages took time—Shoshone to Mandan to French to English, and back again—but all was going well, both captains agreed, in the first part of this negotiation that had to be successful.

  Suddenly Sacagawea rose up from her place, ran to where Cameahwait was seated between Clark and Lewis, and threw her blanket over his shoulders, wailing his name repeatedly as she embraced him. Although his formal mien and the chief ’s ceremonial headdress of otter fur and eagle feathers had masked his features, she had finally recognized him. It was like the way one of the small mirrors the captains offered as gifts—things like solid water—dazzled the eye with sunlight, and in the next instant showed you your face. He was her brother.

  The captains offered coats, leggings, ax heads, knives, tobacco, and the usual mix of minor trade goods that often sealed the bargain: beads, flints, handkerchiefs, and the like. Cameahwait was presented with a medal bearing the likeness of President Jefferson who, he was told, was now the Great Father to him and his people. On its reverse, Clark pointed out as he placed it around the chief ’s neck, the clasped hands of an Indian and a white man stood out in relief beneath a crossed pipe and tomahawk. Around these symbols were inscribed the words “Peace and Friendship.” In return the Shoshone provided twenty-nine horses, all they would need.

  During the several days of preparation for the trek across the mountains, Sacagawea discovered that she was a curiosity to her tribe, a go between whom they asked to explain the white man to them. Why did they have fur on their faces? Was the one they called York from the spirit world, with his curling hair and skin the color of a beaver? They wondered if Lewis’s huge black dog was a kind of bear cub, they wondered how the rifles and the air gun threw their power to any far place. And they asked about Pompy: why did he have his mother’s hair and skin, but eyes the color of the evening sky?

  When she was alone in the tepee with her baby, she thought about all their questions and her attempts to explain. They have not seen what I have seen. How can I tell them? The joy of her return to the people she had grown up with was tempered by a new awareness. These are my people, but this is not my home anymore. Charbonneau was French, she told herself, but he lived with the tribes and on the river more than he did with his people. So did René Jesseaume and Georges Drouillard. They were whites who didn’t live like other whites. It was a path they had chosen or, rather, two paths that made them something else. I have two paths also, she thought. I am Shoshone and not-Shoshone, Mandan and not-Mandan. And I travel with a voyageur. This is my life.

  The day before the departure, when all was ready, Clark took her and Charbonneau aside in the camp. He looked into her eyes and said, “Cameahwait wants you to spend the winter with your people while we cross the mountains to the Pacific. It would be safer for you and your baby.”

  She waited for Charbonneau to interpret Clark’s statement into Mandan, but she had understood its sense. Without hesitating she said in English, “We go.” She held Pompy in her arms and said the words in Mandan that came without thinking. “We will go across the mountains and back. Our path is with you.”

  JANUARY 8, 1806

  FORT CLATSOP

  In November the Corps of Discovery descended the Columbia River and reached the Pacific Ocean, completing the outward-bound leg of Jefferson’s enterprise. They spent some weeks along the river’s estuary, battered in their makeshift camps by perpetual winter storms. In early December they chose a sheltered cove and built a winter camp, Fort Clatsop, where they would wait for spring before beginning the return journey. Most of the men visited the coastal beaches on hunting parties or to collect salt, but by January Sacagawea had not yet been to the ocean’s edge. One evening in that first week of the new year, Captain Clark entered the hut where Charbonneau, Sacagawea, and Pompy were quartered.

  “A group of Tillamook report a whale has washed up onto the beach south of our salt camp,” he told Charbonneau. “Tomorrow I want you to go with me and ten other men to see what meat and oil we might take from the carcass.” Understanding part of what was said, Sacagawea pressed Charbonneau for details. Clark turned to leave but she put her hand on his elbow and spoke rapidly, her eyes wide with anger and impatience.

  “She says she has traveled very far to see the Great Waters; she has walked as swiftly as the others and carried her baby without complaint,” Charbonneau told Clark, surprised at the forcefulness of her words. “Now there is a huge fish lying on the very edge of the ocean. It is unlike you, Captain, to keep her from seeing either. She would take it hard.”

  Clark met Sacagawea’s imploring gaze, which was full of indignant dismay. “Very well,” he said. “Tell her to be ready to go with us at dawn.”

  When they reached the low sand flat where the whale had been beached, they found not a carcass but a skeleton. The whale had been stripped bare by the Tillamook, the structure of its bones intact on the muddy inlet, but all the blubber, skin, and oil already taken away. Clark overcame his initial disappointment and set to measuring the animal’s remains. “One hundred and five feet in length,” he announced with awe. He wrote all the numbers in his book, as he always did. “It is so that the animals and plants we see can tell their story to others,” he explained to Sacagawea through Charbonneau. Then he set out on foot to the nearby village to see if he could buy some blubber or oil.

  Sacagawea stayed on the wide beach with Pompy and looked out upon the water, constantly rolling toward her in blue and black waves streaked with white, like an endless storm on the river. Some called it The Big Lake That Smells Bad, others The Great Waters or the River Without Banks, but to Sacagawea it was more like the sky: you could stand at its edge and look at it, but you could never cross it. Before the others returned she held Pompy in her arms and stood upright between the whale’s ribs, as one might stand in a sizeable room. She talked to her child as she nuzzled and kissed him, turning this way and that so his wide eyes could see what surprising creatures sometimes emerged from the belly of the earth.

  JUNE 30, 1806

  They were over the mountains. The Bitterroots had still been covered with snow, but on the return they had Nez Percé guides and never lost their way. Their horses had grass on every day but one of the six it took to get across. Now they were camped at the place the captains called Traveler’s Rest, a valley on the eastern slope that afforded the party plentiful game in a series of grass-covered meadows along the mountain stream.

  We will live, Sacagawea allowed herself to think. I have not been the cause of my baby’s death. After this voyage we will return to the Mandan and make our lives on the river with Charbonneau. She knew that perils still lay ahead—dangerous rapids, unseasonable storms, hostile Indian raiding parties—but the mountains had threatened them more than anything else, and the fear had been lifted from their shoulders like a heavy burden that had fallen away. Even the captains allowed themselves to smile and walked with a light step.

  The evening of their second day there, the warmth of the sun stayed in the valley until dusk, and the men made a fire by the stream. They sat along the banks and lay on the grass, talking and arguing in an easygoing way. Captain Clark stood with Pompy at the water’s edge, a shallow stretch of back current with a gravel bottom. He was a robust baby, almost seventeen months old, despite all the ordeals of the expedition. He stood facing the small river, holding each of Clark’s massive thumbs for support, and ventured into the water, where
he stamped his feet in delight.

  Cruzatte had begun to play his fiddle, one of the old Breton tunes the men favored, and Pomp stamped half-rhythmically to the music. He gave forth little squeals, surprised and pleased at the explosions of wetness that his feet made upon the captain’s leggings. It turned into a dance as Clark lifted his feet and turned the boy back and forth. Seaman, Clark’s good-natured Newfoundland, barked and wagged his tail, striding into the water to join in the fun. Everyone laughed, Clark most heartily of all, and Sacagawea saw that more than one man had to turn away to hide moist eyes. The winter had been wet, cold, and cheerless, and they were still far away from home, but for the first time they could taste the end of the voyage. This vision of the child’s joy in the surrounding warmth of others made each man conjure a memory of his family. They needed to be among their own: sweethearts and siblings, parents and elders. Each one missed his home most sharply that night.

  AUGUST 14, 1806

  They reached the Mandan villages in the late afternoon, coming down the river like boatloads of visitors appearing from the spirit world. It seemed impossible to the Indians that all those who had set off sixteen months before in search of a route to the Great Waters had reached their goal and returned safely, including the squaw and her newborn. It gave her and her voyageur husband a new status in the eyes of the Mandan, and everyone agreed that the boy was destined to lead. “In his first year he has been where none of us has been,” the Mandan chief Black Cat announced when the captains smoked a pipe to mark the reunion. “His spirit has breathed in the trail to the west, and we will learn from it.”

  The news from the tribes was not good. While they had been gone, the Arikara had attacked white traders as well as Mandan and Hidatsa canoes below the villages, making any travel south along the river extremely hazardous. The Sioux, too, were acting warlike, and several bands had raided the Mandan and Hidatsa lodges. Anxious to return to St. Louis and to get news of the expedition’s successful conclusion to President Jefferson, the captains assured the Mandan of their support. They convinced the Mandan chief Sheheke to accompany them downriver and then continue to Washington to visit the Great Father, the better to make known his people’s grievances against the Arikara and the Sioux.

  Two days later the captains said their goodbyes and prepared to leave. Charbonneau and Sacagawea had decided to remain with Pompy in the Mandan villages, promising to journey to St. Louis when river travel was safer. Lewis was ailing and gave a feeble handshake from the makeshift litter on which he lay. As the last of the canoes was being loaded, Clark drew the couple and their son to one side at the river’s edge.

  “Do not forget, Toussaint Charbonneau, my pledge to you: bring your darling boy to me in St. Louis and I will raise him as my own and see to his proper education.” He shook Charbonneau’s hand and turned to Sacagawea, who held Pompy close. During their sixteen months together on the trail, Clark had formed a strong attachment to the baby. “Let him learn the white man’s ways,” he said to her, pleading with his eyes. His hand reached out and stroked the boy’s hair lightly, then he strode away quickly and the boats shoved off.

  TWO

  DECEMBER 28, 1809

  In the following months Clark sent several letters to Charbonneau in which he repeated his offer to look after Pompy in St. Louis, entrusting his mail to fur traders headed north to the Mandan villages. Soon, however, the Sioux and Arikara closed the river, attacking any who dared to cross their territory. Even Sheheke could not return to his people for many months after his arrival in St. Louis on the way back from Washington. Only after several armed expeditions and extended negotiations did a relative peace return, and the Mandan chief was escorted to his village in September of 1809.

  Finally, three years after their voyage with the Corps of Discovery, the little family headed to St. Louis in the fall, before the river froze. Just after Christmas Charbonneau had his son baptized by a French priest. Lewis had died in October of that year, and Clark was in Washington on government business, but Auguste Chouteau, cofounder of St. Louis and its preeminent citizen, served as godfather. The boy’s Christian name was Jean-Baptiste. He was almost five, and of the ceremony he would remember nothing but the clean smell of the priest’s starched white vestment as he splashed water on his head, and the vision of his godfather, patient and encouraging, kneeling at his side and holding his right hand as he showed him how to make the sign of the cross.

  SPRING 1810

  When the ice broke up the following spring Charbonneau prepared to head north with Sacagawea, leaving Pompy in Clark’s care. The captain had married two years before, and he and his young wife now had a one-year-old son, Meriwether Lewis Clark. Charbonneau promised to return soon so that Pompy could spend some part of each year with his Mandan cousins, but meanwhile he was to attend school in St. Louis and live as Clark’s ward.

  Before they went down to the landing where the keelboat was being loaded, Sacagawea took the boy into the small garden behind the boarding house where they had lived for the winter months. The apple trees were beginning to leaf and a bright green mantle of grass surrounded the newly turned rows where kitchen vegetables would soon be planted. Together they stood looking at the simple plot, silent and watchful, until a small gray bird appeared and hopped about the clumps of upturned soil. Sacagawea lowered herself fluidly so that she was crouching at Pompy’s side. She placed in his hand a small figure of a bird made of polished black stone and closed his fist upon it. Still holding his hand in her own, she looked in his eyes and motioned to the bird, which continued to search for grubs and worms. “My spirit will be your spirit,” she told him in Mandan. “Always keep the bird with you and I will be with you.” He opened his hand and they both looked at the tiny figure, worked in obsidian, with the outline of wings etched into the stone and two dots of white shell for eyes. When they looked up the bird had flown away.

  Although he showed no fear and adopted the solemn countenance that his Mandan uncle, Limping Bear, counseled for what he called Pompy’s new path in life, a feeling of bottomless dread took hold of his belly when his parents set off up the river and left him behind. His young body vibrated with a resistance to everything that surrounded him, all of it strange and new.

  St. Louis was an awful place to stay. Captain Clark’s wooden house creaked and whistled at night. In the Mandan village, his parents’ lodge had been like every other, adorned with clothes, blankets, weapons, and utensils. Captain Clark’s house was bigger and fancier than all but a few of the other houses in town, filled with shiny wood furniture that was rubbed and polished daily so that it resembled brown glass. Everyone he met told him how lucky he was to be living there, but he didn’t feel lucky. He felt confused and alone. The people looked different to him, yet soon he discovered that he was the one who stood out. He was a mixed-blood. Clark’s housekeeper, Alberta, a short, fat old Negro woman who kept a kindly eye out for him, used to tell him periodically in those first months, “You look down the road before trouble finds you, honey, ’cause there’s people would love to see you run into some.” Young as he was, he understood: he had to keep his eyes and ears open and never forget he was different.

  Pompy became Baptiste, his Indian name used only by Clark as a term of endearment when the two of them were alone. Clark’s slave, York, took him to the dry goods store and watched while Mr. Kennerly fitted him out according to the captain’s instructions with corduroy pants, a flannel shirt, socks, shoes, a woolen coat, and a brimmed hat. The shoes, especially, troubled him. Baptiste had never had anything but moccasins on his feet, and now he did not like to wear these strange pieces of footgear with their rigid soles, stiff leather uppers, and a complication of holes and laces. When he complained, Captain Clark was understanding but firm. “Save your moccasins and deerskin shirt for the river, Pomp. If you are going to live with white people, that means dressing like them, right down to your toes.”

  So he dressed like them and talked like them. His French was much st
ronger than his English, but that soon changed. At first he stayed with the Clarks, but before long he moved into the home of a Baptist minister and schoolteacher who boarded Indian and mixedblood boys whose parents had gone up the river in the fur trade. The Reverend Welch was a stern disciplinarian, but he was a patient schoolmaster and Baptiste enjoyed his lessons. Baptiste’s sundry supplies for school were the first thing he owned aside from his clothes and the few objects in his medicine bundle, and he doted on them as if they were living creatures that could receive his affection.

  The small slate and sticks of chalk intrigued him. He had seen slate outcroppings along the river, but he had never imagined its use for this purpose. Sums tired him, though, and soon the association of arithmetic with his slate was inevitable; he used it only when obliged. But his sheets of paper and quill pens were another matter. From the outset, the deliberate precision required for writing captivated him. He loved the way the continuously changing pressure of his hand on the quill moved slender lines of ink across the page, magically blossoming into words and then sentences. Like languages, writing—“the art of penmanship,” Reverend Welch called it—was something that came to him easily, its satisfactions inherent in the act itself.

  After they wrote out the alphabet many times, each boy was told to cover a sheet of paper with his own name. “Jean-Baptiste” appeared five times in his tenuous hand before Reverend Welch, walking among the benches, covered Baptiste’s hand with his own and stopped him. “You are named after John the Baptist,” he intoned, “a very great honor since he was so close to our Lord. In English we write only ‘John.’ ” But the name never stuck, and beyond that one exercise, he continued to be Baptiste to all in St. Louis.