From Sea to Shining Sea (101 page)

Lewis had also encouraged the men—those who could write—to keep journals, too, so that everything would be recorded even if he or William had forgotten something. Privates Gass and Whitehouse and Frazier were keeping journals. Sergeant Floyd had been seen writing on various days, and Sergeant Ordway kept a little sweat-stained writing book inside his shirt. The journals revealed the patterns of their progress.

William had commanded the boat most of the time, being a better waterman than Lewis. He was also in charge of map-making, and the constant recording of weather, measuring temperatures, wind direction, rainfall.

Lewis was happiest hiking on the riverbank, alone and communing with his field notes, or with Drouillard, hunting for game. He always had a notebook and a pencil with him, and a bag for collecting plant specimens. In one hand he would have his rifle, and in the other an espontoon, an obsolete infantry pike he had picked up at the Harper’s Ferry arsenal. He liked to use it as a walking stick, and also had found that it made a fine gun rest. It was a common sight to see Lewis standing on the brow of a distant hill, silhouetted against the blazing sky, the butt of the espontoon firm on the ground in front of his left foot, left hand holding his rifle barrel where it rested on the espontoon, aiming one of those incredibly long shots offered by prairie hunting.

William, as the expedition moved farther and farther toward the plains, hunted ashore more often, too, leaving the vessel under the care of the sergeants. He had lost count of the deer and elk he had killed. He still shot offhand, seldom using a gun rest. Instead of an espontoon, he usually carried the tomahawk-umbrella George had given him, using its shade to keep his fair skin from blistering and his brain from baking in the merciless prairie sun.

In these six weeks they had encountered several trappers’ rafts coming down, loaded with hides and peltries and animal fat. From one such trapper they had bought 300 pounds of grease for cooking, but had been using it mostly to coat their bodies as protection against sunburn and insects. Everybody stank of rancid fat; everything was stained with it.

Two days ago they had passed the Kansas River, having labored
nearly 400 miles, and a great bend in the Missouri there had changed their course from a predominantly westerly direction to a northerly one. The Missouri’s current seemed to grow swifter every day, and some days, even with half the men rowing, the other half towing, and the sails full of a stiff breeze, the
Discovery
could barely make a mile’s headway in an hour. The men’s energy flagged in the heat, and some had suffered sunstroke. Dysentery weakened most of the party most of the time. William attributed that to the Missouri’s muddy water, which, he wrote, had “
half a Common Wine Glass of ooze or mud to every pint.
”

But all the miseries and mishaps could not blind them to the beauty and the richness of the land, the fine, thickly timbered bottoms, the rolling plains aswarm with game, and the stupendous skyscapes. “Sunrises like Creation Day,” he had heard Sergeant Floyd say, “and storms like Doomsday.”

“Aye,” William had added, “and the evening sky so big, a whole sunset can get lost in one corner of it.”

B
UT
NOW
WHAT
HAD
TO
BE
DONE
WAS
SMALL
AND
UGLY.
The troops were being assembled. Each soldier had been instructed to cut nine green switches, long and limber. Now, armed with these, they were formed into two ranks facing each other at six feet apart. Hall and Collins stood at one end of this gauntlet, shirtless. Each was gray-faced but resolute. Collins’s back still showed pink stripes from his first whipping. Offshore, the
Discovery
lay at anchor, glowing in late afternoon sunlight. Beyond her was a sandbar overgrown with lime-green shrubbery, and beyond that flowed the muddy river, with a high, grassy, treeless bluff as background for the whole scene, all overtopped by a sun-gold anvil cloud piled five miles high in the north sky. Sergeant Ordway was indignantly lecturing the two culprits.

“We only got so much whiskey,” he was saying. “Now, you steal some, Hall, and that’s so much less for y’r friends. So you admit you deserve this, say what?”

Hall nodded.

Ordway went on: “And God damn y’r eyes, Collins, it were your sacred duty to proteck our whiskey from people like yourself, isn’t that so?”

“That’s so,” admitted Collins, and for the first time his defiant look wavered. Being put in these terms, it reached his conscience.

“So be it,” said Ordway. “According to th’ judgment of a court o’ your peers and friends, then, you men will walk—
walk
,
mind you—down ’twixt these two ranks, and take your due. Hall, you’ll walk through twice. Collins, you’ll walk through four times. If you faint or fall down, it won’t do y’ any good, ’cause you’ll have to finish when you get up. Now, then. Ready, gents. Hall, forward,
march
!”

Hall started down the line, head held high, staggering a little under the pain, but with a grin on. Each soldier, as Hall passed, drew back his fistful of nine switches and with righteous fury brought them whistling down upon Hall’s flesh. Hall grimaced; pieces of willow snapped off and littered the ground. When he reached the end of the line, blood was oozing from his back in a dozen places where lashes had crossed each other. He halted. Ordway ordered him to face about and march back, which he did. The grin was gone and his face was white when he was through. “Now go to Cap’n Lewis,” Ordway said, “and he’ll put some medicine grease on it.”

Then Collins made his round trip, blinking rapidly and grinding his teeth, turned about, and once more went down the line and came back. The bits of switch on the ground were flecked with blood, and the tattered handfuls of willow slips the men still held were crimson.

“Now go to Cap’n Lewis,” Ordway said. “Comp’ny, atten-shun! By this example, may we all be more true to our duty and fair to each other. Fall out!”

Captain Lewis’s eyes were dark and heavy-lidded as he smeared ointment on Collins’s seeping welts. He had nothing to say to this miscreant. But William looked at the soldier’s trembling jaw and said:

“Last time ever, Collins?”

“Aye, sir. I sure hope.”

F
ORTY
MEN
STOOD
ON
THE
BROW
OF
THE
HIGHEST
BLUFF
, hundreds of feet above the broad river, the hot wind over the treeless plains blowing the hair on their uncovered heads, making their clothes flutter around their limbs. They were not looking at the river, or their ship and pirogues tied at its shore, or at the smaller river that flowed into the Missouri half a mile upstream. They were instead looking at the shape wrapped in buffalo hide lying in the bottom of a fresh grave. Captain Lewis was
reading over the body of Sergeant Floyd, and his voice said in the whiffing and buffeting of the wind:

“… grant him an entrance into the land of light and joy, in the fellowship of thy saints, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

The men looked at the body and listened to the wind. Charles Floyd had died a long way from home. It had started with an ordinary bilious colic almost three weeks ago, and Captain Lewis had doctored him with everything he knew to use, but now Floyd was a dead man at age twenty-two, and this was an awfully lonely place to have to lie for eternity.

The men looked at him lying there. Not a soul of them had ever disliked him for a minute, even though he was a sergeant. Now they would have to leave him here on this high overlook, the highest point they had found, and they would go on still farther from home. William glanced around at the men, and he suspected that this lonely grave would haunt each man as they went on. He knew it was going to haunt him. This was a faraway place to die in. And they were getting closer to the Sioux country.

Floyd on his last day had dictated a letter to his parents, and William had written it down for him. But it might be a year before there would be a way to send the letter back to his parents. In the meantime, they would not know, and he would be lying here, a cedar post for his headstone, covered with rocks to keep wolves from digging him up, and the wind would whistle over him, and the river would flow by below. And maybe the Corps would never be back this way.

Captain Lewis’s gray eyes lifted now from the grave and he looked up the Missouri. Somehow, he felt, it was the bad water of the Missouri that had killed this fine young man. He had done everything he knew of, and felt sure that even a doctor back in the States could have done no more. He did not want to lose any more men to this river. They were his men and he was responsible for them. Here he stood with the book of prayer in his hands over Charles Floyd, and it crossed his mind that Thomas Jefferson, for whom they were doing this, did not believe in God. Lewis cleared his throat, and said:

“We’ll leave our friend here. And so that it won’t be forgot where he lies, we’ll name that stream”—he pointed to the unnamed tributary—“the Floyd River in his honor, and that’s what it’ll be on the maps, from this day on. Now, cover him secure, and let’s go on down.”

T
HE
F
RENCHMEN
HAD
BEEN
TELLING
THE
CAPTAINS
FOR
weeks about what they called “
les petits chiens
,” which they surely would be seeing soon here on the high plains. Labiche liked to throw the party into fits of knee-slapping hilarity with his imitations of “the little dogs.” He would stand on tiptoe by the campfire, hands hanging limp together at the center of his chest, peer around alertly while puckering his mouth to show his two front teeth, then would suddenly emit a series of high-pitched barking sounds, shrill as the chirpings of a bird. Whenever he did this, Scannon would leap up from his master’s side, and respond to the Frenchman with deep-throated barks until told to lie down. The Americans loved this show, and had made it part of their regular evening entertainment every night—partly, it seemed, to dispel the gloom over the loss of Sergeant Floyd.

Now, two days above the mouth of the shallow, sandy Niobrara River, word came back from one of the advance scouts on shore that a city of the little dogs lay ahead. Immediately, three or four men jumped up from their oars and made rodent faces, imitating Labiche’s imitation.

The report galvanized Meriwether Lewis into action, as new species always did. Over the last few weeks, the captains had discovered, described, and collected several new species of plants, such as buffaloberries and prairie apples, and had even observed a water snake that roared like a bull. But here would be their first new mammal, and Lewis could scarcely contain himself. He ordered Sergeant Ordway to bring the boats to a safe anchorage, then sprang ashore with his notebook, rifle, spyglass, and espontoon, and raced up the bluffs after the scout, with William at his heels and Scannon following.

“Scannon, no,” Lewis called, pointing to the boat. “Go back! He’d go wild if he saw a real one and drive ’im into hiding,” he explained. The dog, tail drooping with disappointment, went back to the shore and sat down.

“
Doucement
,” the scout said, putting his forefinger on his lips. They made their way silently through the willows of the river bottom and then ascended some forty or fifty feet up a grassy bluff onto the high plain. They walked swiftly and softly through the thigh-high grass, a great, boundless, rolling meadow spreading
around them to all the horizons. A herd of buffalo darkened a large knoll two miles away. Everything in the distance trembled through heat waves; the buffalo herd appeared to be floating on air. “Listen,” William said.

Above the long, dry rasping of locust songs now they could hear faintly the voice of the colony: those chirping barks.

And then there at their feet lay the “city.” An area of several acres spread just before them, dotted with small dirt mounds. Each mound, on close look, appeared to have a hole in the top. These apparently were doorways into burrows. The ground among the burrows was almost denuded of grass, and packed smooth as a street. Over these acres frisked or stood hundreds of creatures that looked like large, fat, yellow-brown squirrels, but with short, black-tipped tails. They stood upright in groups at the doors, their little forepaws hanging in front of their breasts, looking around and chatting like neighborhood gossips. Some hopped down the streets, stopping to visit with others who seemed to be sweeping their doorstoops, using their tails as brooms.

“Bless me,” William breathed, “it’s just like Louisville!”

Lewis had his spyglass up to his eye, and his hands were trembling with excitement at the sight of this strange, highly developed little society. But at that moment some of the nearest creatures became aware of the human intruders; immediately they scurried for their burrows, but almost every one, just before vanishing into the ground, stopped and barked a few times in those high-pitched chirps. This alarm spread across the colony in seconds, and soon the whole town lay deserted, baking silent in the sunlight.

Lewis turned to look at William, and his eyes were a-glitter. “By heaven! Mister Jefferson must get one o’ these!”

“They’re a wary tribe,” William said. “Maybe they’d come out an’ council if we showed the peace pipe.”

“I wish they would. I want one o’ these alive!”

This proved a tall order. Lewis conferred with the best hunters and trappers. First they crept close and lay in concealment at the edges of the village, and when the creatures would come forth to resume their social life above ground, the men would spring out and try to net them, chase them into the open grass beyond the refuge of their burrows, or any other trick they could think of. But the animals were too alert; their warning system was foolproof. After several hours, Lewis decided it would be necessary to dig them out. Leaving a sentry on each boat, he ordered the entire party up to the village with picks and shovels. Groups of
two or three men would spell each other on the shovels while others stood around them in circles, ready to catch any of the little beasts that might be unearthed.