Sacajawea (164 page)

Crying Basket had known long before, and the fact that she had known something before her mother was something that made her smile. The three of them drew hope and comfort out of the well of nature in the thought of Suzanne’s coming baby. To them it was the pledge and hope that the world was going on, that not even the winter’s cold could stop it.

Seated by the fire, smoking his pipe and watching the women conferring eagerly about some little problem of sewing an infant’s garment, Joe, a trapper, mountain man, and river-ferry operator, smiled and marveled at the similarity between these squaws and his own mother and two sisters, one of whom married young.

Suzanne’s son was named Joe, and she was content to live in the trapper’s cabin near Fort Hall. Her man shot bear, antelope, and elk. If he did not sell the hides, he papered the walls of his cabin with them. This was something new and quite lovely to Suzanne.

Toward fall, the Shoshoni horses were raided. Some said it was the Crows. The scouts said they had seen a large band of Arapahos heading toward an opening in the hills.

Washakie called a quick powwow. The men decided that they would track the Arapahos. They followed the Snake River north until the going became too rough and they were forced to make camp. At dawn they forded the river and found Arapaho tracks. They moved cautiously toward the Lost River. The terrain was rugged and they made little mileage. About noon, bullets spattered around Nowroyawn and Shoogan. The Shoshonis fired back. They were spread along a steep, broken slope. Minutes later they charged, using mostly bows and war axes—bullets were precious. The Arapahos were unhorsed and soon running, leaving three warriors dead. Then the Shoshonis dug in.

At nightfall, the firing ceased. Two Shoshonis had been wounded. The others collected the dead Arapahos’ rifles and rounded up half a dozen horses. All night the Shoshonis kept watch with a chorus of whooping and drum-pounding, hoping to discourage their foe from further attack. The next morning, Washakie was sure the Arapahos had been chased off. They returned to Fort Hall, admitting that they had not seen a sign of their own stolen horses. “And so—the Arapahos are our natural enemies, anyway,” said Nannaggai, Washakie’s oldest son. “It serves them right to be sent running like the white man’s chickens.”

In the fall, it was decided to move the whole Shoshoni band, under the guidance of Washakie, closer to the Salmon River country. The land was full of hills and valleys and rocks and deer. It was the latter the Shoshonis wanted for their winter’s supply of food. Nowroyawn assured the people the Arapahos had left the country weeks before. Sacajawea and Crying Basket packed their goods and folded the tepee coverings. When all was packed and ready to go, they said their goodbyes to Suzanne and the baby, Joe. Sacajawea promised to come back for a visit as soon as she could, perhaps by the next summer.

The band followed the Snake River to the ford. It took an entire day to get the whole band with all the supplies across the river safely. The air was cool and crisp and bracing as they made the night camp. Getting herself up to make the small morning fire, Sacajawea knew that the first gray of dawn must have come into the sky behind the mountains, though she could see no glint of it yet. She could hear the running hoofbeats of a scout’s horse as he rode into camp. Then she thought she saw some stirring around the fire of Washakie, and at the same instant came the insistent whisper, “Get ready! We move out! Over the next two hills is a camp of Arapahos.” The whisper went all through the camp, and when it quieted, the fires were black and the people were packing, soothing children with bits of jerky stuffed into their mouths, and then they were moving out to the northwest.

The next few days were uneventful. The men found the deer plentiful. Some wanted to find a suitable place here for a winter camp. Washakie said it was too close to the Arapahos. They should put more days and nights between their two camps. He did not want the Arapahos to recognize the horses he’d raided earlier, so he ordered several young warriors to paint all the horses with patches of brown mud.

On the fifth day out from Fort Hall, the Shoshonis stopped to smoke the meat they had so far. Sacajawea set up drying racks alongside the other women. The country began to seem familiar to her in a remote way. “This must be the same country my feet traveled when I was a small child,” she said to Crying Basket. “This is what I remember—rocks and cedars, and white water in the streams. This is the Agaidüka country.” When the meat was smoked and dried, it was packed in leather bags and loaded with the other supplies on the travois. The Shoshonis moved on. Grass and water became more plentiful as they neared the Salmon River. Just after sunrise one morning occurred an incident that embittered them against the Arapahos.

Scouts had located a small Arapaho hunting party, and one of the men appeared to be badly cut up, as though mauled by a bear. The party seemed undecided what to do next, because they were one horse short.

“How many of them?” asked Washakie.

“Four, counting the one cut,” said a scout.

“We could send them a horse—just let it wander into their camp,” suggested Nowroyawn. “One of their own horses. What could it matter?”

“No,” said Nannaggai. “Would they do that for us?”

Sacajawea could not hold herself in.
“Ai,”
she said, coming around the circle of men. ‘They would if we did it for them and they knew we wished to help the wounded one back to his camp.”

“How would they know if we let the horse loose and hid ourselves?” asked Nowroyawn’s son, Pina Quanah, or Smell of Sugar.

“Use the mud to make the markings of our band on the chosen horse.”

“This would be a good joke on them. One of their own horses wandering back with the markings of the

Shoshonis on it,” laughed the scout. “Porivo gives the best advice!”

Their compassionate effort was brutally rewarded. The Arapahos spotted the two scouts leading the painted horse and met them with gunfire, even though the Shoshonis made signs of friendship. Soon one scout lay dead. The Arapahos stripped his body and cut off his arms and feet. They took his horse and the one he led. The other scout could hardly tell the rest of the story. They killed the painted horse and roasted some of its flesh before leaving southward. Most of the horsemeat was left to rot.

Now the Shoshoni warriors were enraged. No Arapaho anywhere, it seemed, could ever be trusted. Shoshoni hearts would be set against all Arapahos from this time on.

The band crowded together in a canyon. It was decided that six men should pursue the Arapahos while the rest waited one night for them. The next day, the six men came back panting; they had traveled all night. There were many Arapahos in a place half a day’s ride away. The Shoshonis now crowded together. The last thing they wanted was a fight in which they were outnumbered. So the band of Shoshonis now traveled day and night, pressing hard, at times covering up to fifty miles in twenty-four hours. When they came to the place where the Salmon River branched, they stopped for a day’s rest. Then they traveled down the river’s branch until they were in a warm valley at the base of the mountains. There they could not believe their eyes. The white men had built some wooden houses, log cabins. There were tepees of a band of Bannocks nearby.

“At,” said Washakie, “this is where we will spend the winter. Here we will be safe.”

While Washakie and his subchiefs met with the important men of the Bannock tribe, Sacajawea introduced herself to the Bannock women, and asked about the white people who had moved onto this land.

“Oh, these are called the Saints,” said one of the women, Black Hair. “They teach us to grow squash and beans and to make bread. You go to them and they give you bread each time.” Black Hair’s eyes sparkled as sheshowed Sacajawea a part-eaten loaf of salt-rising bread. She gave Sacajawea a green squash for her kettle.

During that winter, Chief Washakie thought a great deal about the white men who had pushed Bridger out of his fort and the Arapahos who had pushed him up the Salmon River to live beside the Mormom missionaries at their Salmon River Mission. We all seem to be running from enemies and seeking friends, he thought. That is a race that should be stopped. It is best if we are at peace with whites, at least. He thought perhaps if the Shoshonis did some trading with the Mormons they could better understand one another.

In the spring, Nowroyawn and several others tried raising a small garden of beans, squash, and wheat. When the crops were prospering, they were invited by the Mormon missionaries to be baptized into the Mormon faith. Nowroyawn was baptized and named Snag. Nannaggai was given the name of Elijah.

Sacajawea attended all the important festivals and prayer days of the missionaries and each time came back with a fresh loaf of salt-rising bread, and a broad smile on her face.

The Mormon missionaries named the branch of the Salmon River on which they had built their fort the Lemhi, after a neophyte king (Limhi) in the Book of Mormon. They also began calling the Agaidüka Shoshonis the Lemhi Shoshonis because their camp was on the banks of the newly named river. The name of Lemhi Shoshonis is even now used by historians for that band to distinguish them from other Shoshoni bands.

In the fall, the Mormons decided to tighten the ties of the Lemhi band to themselves and asked several of the important people to participate in their Pioneer Day celebration. At this celebration Shoogan made this speech:

“I feel well to see grain growing on the Shoshoni land, for our children can get bread to eat, also milk. Before you came here, our children were often hungry; now they can get bread and vegetables when not fortunate in hunting meat.”

Sacajawea noticed that the Mormons received Shoogan’s talk well and distributed loaves of bread to the Lemhi families that were there. Secretly she hoped theywould not give out any more cow’s milk. It was sickeningly sweet to her taste, and she knew Crying Basket would throw it all out behind the tepee. Sacajawea was convinced that it was not all bad to learn farming, for she had seen other nations do this to supplement their meat supply. And she had noticed over the last several years a scarcity of buffalo, antelope, and deer. She knew the Shoshoni men did not really care for the farming, but maybe she could convince some of the women to work in the fields in order to put food in the bellies of their hungry children.

Crying Basket was not interested in field work; she was making calf eyes at the young braves. Sacajawea knew that soon she would be alone in her tepee unless she could talk Crying Basket into following the old way and bring her man to live with her mother. But the old way was not so popular. The older ones believed that those who rode and hunted were stronger than those who planted corn and beans. The younger ones were breaking the rules and learning things from the whites. They learned to carry heavy loads with wheels instead of the old travois. Even Chief Washakie was learning new rules. He learned to capture water and spill it slowly on the dry lands when there were no rains so that the crops of the Shoshonis would grow tall and green. He accepted a Book of Mormon from the missionaries during a ceremony at their Salmon River Mission. In accepting the gift graciously, even though he could not read, he caused the Saints to say that he, Chief Washakie, and his Lemhi band were noble, hospitable, and honorable.

When Washakie came to the tepee of Shoogan to show off his black book, Sacajawea could not contain herself. She shook his hand in the manner of congratulating on receipt of such a fine thing, then said with a smile, “This book is of no real value to you. If the Mormon had nothing better to give, he should have cut out the paper and thrown it away, then sewn up the ends and put a leather strap on it. You can see it would make a fine bag to carry the white man’s money in. But then you have no use for that, for there is no money in your pocket to put in it.”

Dancing Leaf snickered behind her hand.

Chief Washakie pointed to the far side of the tepee, indicating that Sacajawea should sit there for the remainder of his visit. “Porivo has made a little joke about my gift,” he said. “But if the white man can make this”— he held up a pocket watch—“a little thing he carries in his pocket so that he can tell where the sun is on a dark day—and when it is night he can tell when it will come daylight—his mind is strong. If we learn enough of the white man’s ways, we will be able to make astonishing things. Do not anger the white men. Do not raid their farms and pull plants to put into your own gardens.”

Sacajawea hung her head. She was truly sorry she had made fun of such a thing as a gift belonging to the chief. She wished there was some way she could make up for her quick tongue.

“I used to think that a few white men in our land would make no difference at all,” Washakie confessed. “But look, I was wrong; it has made so much difference that some of my subchiefs and braves are raising crops instead of hunting for meat. That is not a sign they are weak squaws; it is a sign that they understand the shortage of meat in our mountains better than I.”

With the first chill of winter in 1858, the Mormons and U.S. Army troops were engaged in rebellion. There was an uneasiness in the air once again. The winter was hard on the Shoshoni band. The Mormons no longer gave handouts each time one of the Lemhi women went to the missions. In fact, much of the time the mission was closed to all Shoshonis and Bannocks. The Lemhis were weakened by illness, cold weather, and little food. Eventually they wore out with time and the elements, and surrendered to move southward in early spring.

Before the move, Crying Basket brought her man to live in the tepee of Sacajawea. He was Nowroyawn’s son, Pina Quanah, or Smell of Sugar. Sacajawea gave her daughter the pearl earrings, which had been a gift from Judy Clark, as a wedding present.

“We will go back to Fort Hall,” announced Washakie. “It is better to live near the white man’s forts than be raided and shot up by our enemies.”

This announcement gladdened the heart of Sacajawea. She would now have time to visit with Suzanneand hold her grandson before he became too old for hugging. She sniffed the air. If it snowed, the horses would slip on the rocks they must travel over. She checked the packs on her horses and thought the damp leather had a good, rich smell. The haze darkened; if it snowed, the men would hunt deer. The women would wait in a temporary camp, their feet near a fire. She saw streams winding dark and unfrozen between white banks, then piñons too closely matted to be penetrated, and open meadows where one could walk freely. She was ready to move out.