From Sea to Shining Sea (104 page)

Here, William thought, is where he expects me to lose my nerve.

Instead, he reached across his waist to the hilt of his sword. “Ready arms,” he said to the two troopers as he pulled the blade out of its scabbard. He heard the hammers of their flintlocks click back. He brought the sword point up to a place inches from Partizan’s throat. Everyone, especially Partizan, was silent now. William heard the whispering of the river, the buzz of flies, the breathing of the soldiers, the soft thumping of the Indian ponies’
hooves on the ground. Across the water came Lewis’s voice calm but clear: “Every man stand to arms. Put grape in that swivel gun. Load the blunderbuss with buckshot. Sergeant, get a squad ready to go to Mister Clark. Lively, now.” William could hear the faint bustle as the keelboat was put in fighting trim. He heard the hinges squeak as locker tops were raised to make the vessel bullet-proof.

Now we’ll see, William thought, sweat trickling into his collar. They could massacre us, but they know it’ll cost ’em dear.

Now he turned to face Black Buffalo. “Tell him to get his people off our boat,” he said to Cruzatte. The Frenchman passed that message, but Black Buffalo did not respond. “Tell him again,” William rumbled.

This time Black Buffalo strode down to the beach and grabbed the rope from the three warriors, and tossed it aboard. He said something to the fourth Indian, who released the mast and stepped off into the shallows. William realized that, though the boat was now released, he and the two troopers beside him were surrounded. He spoke calmly to the men on the oars. “Go get that squad.” He still held his sword point in front of Partizan’s face, and was careful not to let it tremble the least bit. “You,” he said now to Black Buffalo. “Hear what I say. We were sent here by your new father the grand chief of the United States. Try to misuse us, sir, and he will send enough soldiers like those to destroy you all in a moment. By God, your manners are a disgrace! Did someone tell me the Sioux are proud and great? Ha! I’d say y’re nought but a gang o’ peevish ruffians. Great men aren’t mean in spirit!”

While he was thus haranguing the chief, the pirogue returned with its squad of riflemen, bristling with their shiny rifles. The warriors, perhaps sixty or seventy of them now, and more coming over from the mainland every minute, still held their arrows pointed at William.

But Black Buffalo evidently could see now that bluster had failed, and he said through the interpreter:

“I see you are not merchants. You do not have many goods. But we are sorry to see you leave so soon. We would like our women and children to visit your great canoe. They have never seen such a thing.” Now they were asking, not demanding. William sent men to get the awning and mast.

“We’re going on,” William said, now sheathing his sword. The braves were returning arrows to their quivers. “You will see that we do what we wish. You will remember it. Now,” he said,
suddenly breaking into a big smile and holding out his hand, “forget what was unpleasant today.”

They ignored his extended hand, and turned to go back up on the sandbar. Partizan joined them and the three stood, seemingly having an argument, while the dismantled camp was put aboard the pirogue. William got in the boat and a last soldier shoved it off the sand and hopped on the bow. The boat turned, and as the rowers propelled it toward the keelboat, Black Buffalo and Buffalo Medicine turned away from Partizan and came running into the shallows, each with a bodyguard following. To William’s astonishment, they begged to spend the night on the big boat. William ran through his mind all the possible subterfuges this might mean; but the look in their faces was so guileless—they seemed like different people without Partizan between them—that William relented. He gave them a hand and they clambered aboard, water pouring out of their moccasins and leggings.

William decided to try to believe them; probably they really did want their families to see the keelboat. But he knew that with these two men and their braves aboard, it would be another wakeful night.

T
HEY ROWED THE KEELBOAT A MILE UP THE RIVER
. I
N THE
light of sunset, they anchored off an island, which Lewis dubbed Bad-Humored Island in recognition of the way he felt about their first day with the Teton Sioux.

B
Y DAWN
, W
ILLIAM WAS THINKING THAT THE CHIEFS’ ONLY
reason for inviting themselves onto the boat had been to keep the Corps from getting any sleep.

Black Buffalo and Buffalo Medicine had wanted to sit up all night in the crowded cabin of the boat, their elbows on the little table, in the warm light of the oil lamp that hung from the ceiling. They had been amiable enough guests, smoking plenty of the good Virginia tobacco, drinking two drams each of whiskey without getting more than a good hum on, and finally sipping something they never had tried before: coffee. Maybe the coffee had been a mistake, William thought now. He loved coffee himself, and it had never kept him awake. But these Indian chiefs, unaccustomed to the stuff, had broken out in a sheen of sweat and sat wide-eyed until far past midnight, wanting to talk. William and Lewis had tried to take the opportunity to learn all they could from them, about the Sioux’s sphere of influence, their beliefs, their attitudes, their enemies—all those matters
President Jefferson had asked to know about—but all these two chiefs had seemed to want to talk about was getting the white men to stay for a few days. They had kept insisting that all the Teton Sioux, men, women, and children, should have the opportunity to see this great boat and all its magic objects. Stay, they had pleaded a dozen times. We will give a feast and a dance for you. There will be women for you to lie with. You are brave men and we would like to have your blood in the veins of the Sioux people. In the meantime, the sentries had kept reporting all night that the riverbanks were aswarm with whispering, prowling Indians, apparently trying to stay near their chiefs. The guests finally had lain down to sleep after two in the morning, but no one had slept more than a few winks. The chiefs had kept rising all night to go topside and urinate into the river—another result of coffee—and whenever one had gone up, so had their bodyguards, and the whole boatload of fitful, suspicious Americans had been stirred out of sleep again.

Now William was up with the dawn’s first light, dressed in uniform and feeling as dead and gritty as a run-out hourglass, and the first thing he saw on the banks of the gray river beyond Bad-Humored Island was Indians, hundreds of them. “I suspect,” Lewis said, joining him at the gunwale, “why they want to keep us here so earnest is so that more warriors have time to gather. Are you o’ the same mind?”

“I’d like to trust our honored guests,” William replied, “but frankly they don’t inspire much confidence, do they?”

“I almost wish that Partizan had come aboard, ’stead o’ these two,” Lewis mused.

“Aye,” William said, scanning the shore for a sight of him. “So’s to keep an eye on ’im, eh?”

“Rather, we’d have had a chance to drown ’im last night.”

Everybody on deck laughed, and William felt better.

T
HEY DECIDED TO GET THE BOATS UNDER WAY EARLY, BUT
when the chiefs came up, puffy-eyed and scratching themselves, and saw the preparations, they again began begging the captains to stay over for a day of Sioux hospitality and friendship.

“Well, what d’ ye say?” William asked.

“I’m heartily tired o’ these people,” Lewis said. “But I think we inspired some fear in ’em yesterday. And diplomats
is
one thing Mister Jefferson sent us to be,” he reminded himself. “Sergeant Ordway, put the men at leisure and let ’em breakfast. We’ll not be movin’ out yet.”

Late in the afternoon, William said, “If they kept us here for
their people to look at, they must be done by now. I been looked at so much I feel like I’ve got blisters from it.”

He scanned the high riverbanks which were, as they had been all day, covered with Sioux of both sexes and all ages, sitting, standing, strolling, pointing, and murmuring. The boat deck had come to seem like a stage in a crowded theater, with the audience watching it with minute attention from the sloping high banks above, noting every move the soldiers made. Indeed, the crowd had so enjoyed watching Private Bratton move his bowels over the side that William had ordered a keg set below decks as a latrine lest the Corps of Discovery lose all its dignity.

While waiting for the summons to the feast, William sat at his little desk on the quarterdeck and brought his journal up to date, writing about the incident on the sand bar the day before. Having finished that, he now picked up a telescope to study the Indians and make notes on them. It was amusing to be here watching them watch him. He laid the telescope down from time to time and wrote:

There was a commotion on shore now. Six muscular young braves came trotting through the crowd to the river’s edge, carrying a rolled hide. They talked for a moment with Cruzatte, who turned and called:

“Sirs, t’ey come for t’e red-hair chief!”

Lewis pursed his small, narrow lips. “That’s you, my friend,” he said. But as William rose, Lewis, looking suspicious, put a hand on his arm to detain him, and called to Cruzatte:

“Ask them why just one of us!” His eyes came back to William, smoky and alert. “I don’t like this; they’re dividing us for some reason.” Then Cruzatte’s voice came back from the shore:

“For that they can carry but one at a time,
mon capitaine
!”

“Carry?” William frowned, donning his hat and buckling on his sword.

He understood when he stepped from the pirogue onto the shore. The six braves unrolled the hide and spread it on the ground. It was a beautiful buffalo robe, its skin side up, finely tanned and painted with colorful hunting scenes and symbols. “T’ey say, please to sit,
mon capitaine.”

He sat on the robe, crossing his legs, holding his rifle across his lap. The braves, three on a side, stooped, got firm grips on the edges of the hide with both hands, and lifted. The crowd clapped their hands and murmured happily as the men started up the bluff with their burden. William grinned at this amusing conveyance. “If these fellers be pallbearers,” he joked to Cruzatte, “I don’t aim to lay down dead.”

Cruzatte, walking alongside, explained. “You are too honored; your feets are not permit to touch the dirt.”

It was several hundred yards to the village, and the braves were sweating and huffing by the time they reached it. William, though rawboned and grown quite lean during the four months coming upriver, still weighed probably two hundred pounds. As this portage continued into the heart of town, many of the spectators from the river followed, the women chattering, boys running with the agility of antelopes through the crowd. William rode as comfortably as he could in this strange mode, hoping he did not look as ludicrous as he felt.

The village was large, nearly a hundred tipis and mound-shaped lodges, all covered with neatly sewn hides decorated with painted symbols. The streets among these dwellings were packed dirt and crushed tan prairie grass. Here and there stood burial scaffolds on tall poles, the mummies covered with wooden latticework to keep off the buzzards and ravens. The village was tidy, pleasant, full of rich food-smells and people-smells, and, in the mellow golden crosslight of the late prairie afternoon, aglow with beautiful colors. The costumes of the men and women were even more brilliant; the Sioux must have spent countless hours dyeing, cutting, and sewing ornaments of quills, feathers, fibers, and beads. Belts, leggings, breechclouts, pouches, and moccasins were thus decorated, and almost every adult wore a necklace of beads, bear claws, or metal bits. Over the hubbub of voices and laughter there were those persistent, rhythmic, rattling, and jingling sounds. Everything has a meaning, too, William thought, and despite his weariness he was stirred by an understanding that the society of these Indians was as rich and complex as that of the white men—perhaps even more so.

“Look,
mon capitaine,”
Cruzatte said. “Omahas there; prisoned, I t’eenk.”

To his left, William saw them. In a corral of poles, under guard, stood and sat about two dozen wretches, squaws and boys, in different garb, some naked, most of them dishevelled, many looking sick or hurt.

That looks like the stuff for a peace lecture, William thought. “Talk to those prisoners today if ye get a chance,” he told Cruzatte. “Find out how they got taken. Tell ’em we hope to do something for ’em.” Cruzatte was fluent in the Omaha tongue.

The bearers had brought William to the center of the village now, and were carrying him toward the door of a great council house. It was a loaf-shaped structure, not conical like the tipis. It seemed to be forty or forty-five feet in diameter, made of skins sewed together and stretched three-fourths of the way around a circular pole frame to leave the south quadrant open. As he was carried through the entrance, he saw that about seventy finely dressed men were seated on robes in a circle inside. In the part of the circle opposite the door, the three chiefs sat, all in their showy feather headdresses. There was a space vacant between Black Buffalo and Partizan on his right, and another between Black Buffalo and Buffalo Medicine on his left. The eyes of all the men in the lodge were on William as he was carried to the place on the chief’s right. Here the bearers stopped and let him step down onto another fine, dressed buffalo hide and take a seat upon it. Then they left. Cruzatte, at a sign from the grand chief, seated himself on another robe behind William.