Sacajawea (180 page)

“Then say it!” he said. “Say it! I can’t wait to hear if it is the name used for the woman who traveled to the west with the soldiers.”

“Sacajawea,” she said as the tears welled in her eyes.

Jim stared at his great-grandmother in awe. After a time he said, “Then it is true, all the stories you have told and what some of the Carlisle boys say? You have traveled and seen more than any other woman alive. You met the white men after you left the Big Bellies, and you came back and lived near the Mandans for a while. You have relatives that call you Wadzewipe, from the south in Indian Territory, going to Carlisle. These boys said their grandmother went to the Great Western Waters with white soldiers. When our teacher told us about two captains appointed by President Jefferson to go west, these relatives of yours asked many questions about a Comanche woman who went with them. Then someone from Dakota Territory told the story of the Big Bellies, because he said he’d been told this girl’s spirit followed the white men to the Great Western Waters. I’ve waited all this time to ask you. But I believe I knew the whole time who they were speaking about. My great-grandmother!”

“See, it is legend now. I belong to my time, and it has passed. Even the old Hidatsa story is turned inside out and put together wrong. People try to blame something they do not understand on something they do. It will always be that way. And when you listened you heard those Comanche boys say that the woman they knew was Comanche—but you knew she was Shoshoni.” She dropped her sunken eyes down to her new boots. “Your thoughts come out in a straight line. I think if it were the other times now, you would be in line to be a chief because I can see you standing above yourself. And you are generous with old people.” Again she glanced at her new boots. “Bring me the leather pouch that hangs just inside behind the tepee flap.”

When Jim returned, she had stretched out on an old torn gray blanket. “This Mary you visit in the wooden houses of the whites—is she pretty?”

Jim colored and mumbled, “Of course she’s pretty.”

“I have never seen her, but her smell I know well. When you come back from the agency, you bring it on your shirt and in your hair. Oh, do not deny it. You are a man, and it is time you sought out a woman. The spring of life rises in you, and it cannot be denied. Now, I have a gift for you.”

She fumbled with the pouch strings. Into her lap fell a blue feather, a small red feather, then a small, smooth polished stone, rusty red, with a white free-form bird embossed on the surface. One clawlike finger darted inside the pouch and dug out a thin leather thong that had the sky blue polished stone threaded in the center. It was an exquisite piece of rare turquoise. “A woman needs pretties,” Sacajawea said, passing the sky blue stone on the thin thong slowly to Jim. “She will make a good woman and mother, and her sewing will improve each season.”

Jim knelt beside his great-grandmother and whispered near the sallow, wrinkled face, “I shall not forget this day. I think you should know that Mary is half-white. The other half is Shoshoni from Tendoy’s band. She is going to Carlisle.” He placed the knotted hands of Sacajawea over his heart, signifying love between them.

Sacajawea leaned toward her great-grandson. Her voice seemed caught in her throat. “I am lonely for the people I used to know. The longer one lives, the shorter life seems. At night when the stars are close to the earth I think I can reach out and touch one. I know I never can and I know that I am nothing in the big scheme of the Mother Earth. When I was your age I thought everything I did was important and meant something, but now I see nothing is of much importance. People all go, their bones crumble to dust and finally no one remembers them. Only a few live on in memories. Some that linger in memories are not the ones that were most important.” She sat still, as though half-frightened by her own words. Her thin, bony hands shook. “People make heroes from anyone, because they need to believe all life’s activity is important. It’s important to respect each other. I have known some highly esteemed people—they are gone now and forgotten by most. In another age or two no one will know they were even here.” She began to sing softly to herself.

“Grandmother,” interrupted Jim, “everyone is important, because what each of us does is built from what those before us have done. One bead on a string might be forgotten if it is lost, but it is missed. With all the beads in place, one after the other, the string is something good to look at, and to keep adding to. You know what I mean to say?” He rubbed his hands together and looked at his grandmother, whose beady eyes seemed to have a faraway, watery luster.

When summer was over, Jim made a large woodpile for Sacajawea, and together they dried half a dozen large boxes of beef strips. On the day Jim left for Carlisle Sacajawea said, “Please, make the sleeping couch in my tepee comfortable with more pine boughs. Also, I would like some sweet wild parsnips for my stew, my grandson.”

That winter was mild and she spent no more than six weeks in the wooden lodge of old Shoogan and his family. The noise of the great-grandchildren was harsh in her ears and she was happy to be back in her quiet tepee. She talked to herself for company. “When I was getting wood this morning, I could see the snow on the Wind River Mountains was shrinking. The wind is warmer and carries moisture. The month of melting snow is here.”

The chinook wind rose by evening, and there was water running deeper in the streams. The tepee skins bellied out with the warm gusts of wind and Sacajawea found more rocks of red sandstone to hold the skirt firmly to the ground.

When the snow melted or was blown from her pathway she walked slowly and stiffly with the help of her cane to pick up her rations. The agency had a new Episcopalian Minister—the Reverend John Roberts, who was called White Robe. He was middle-aged and wore a brown beard on his chin. He was determined that the Shoshonis and Arapahos have the full benefit of Sunday school, church, prayer meeting, Bible reading, and grace. There was to be no working on the Sabbath, except what could not be avoided. There was to be no laughter, no card playing, no dancing, no gambling, no horse racing, and positively no drinking. Whenever he passed a group of young men sitting on the ground gambling with hidden plum pits, drinking eighty percent alcohol, fruit-flavored extract from innocuous tin cups, they all rose up and smiled. He bowed and said, “How do you do?”

Sacajawea could not figure him, so she avoided him as much as possible.

Late one night the chinook wind died and the last cold snap of the season fell over the land, making the melted snow hard and slick as glass. Then just as suddenly it was April and the snow was nearly gone, except for the deeper drifts on the north sides of the hills. This was the month when the meadowlark’s song brightened the greening meadows. Sacajawea sat, wrapped in a thick blanket, against the cottonwood near her tepee. She dozed in the sunshine while listening to the sounds of spring.

Her grease-stained tunic seemed as old as the ground she sat on. The sun moved down little by little, giving the mountains a rose-colored glow and casting a gold shimmer on the river’s water. Then, without warning, a strange radiance lit up the dusky evening. The light seemed to come from the agency. It flickered brilliantly over the tops of the wind-stunted trees, then died and left only a fleeting smell of charred pine resin.

Sacajawea rose unsteadily to her feet, feeling no sense of emergency. She took her time checking the adequate woodpile and stack of brush behind her tepee. She went inside and poked at the small pile of molding parsnips. She looked in her coffee tin and saw there was some left. She opened the cornmeal sack and saw only a few weevils on top, so she knotted the sack closed. She had forgotten to go after her last rations. She had not been hungry and even now did not eat much. But she felt fine and her mind was clear as the mountain air.

She scuffled around with the high, side-button shoes on for a while, then she pulled them off. She rested a few moments before slipping her stockinged feet into the comfortable old frayed moccasins. She turned her head to one side, listening. The sound of footsteps came up the trail and stopped outside her tepee. She got up and shuffled out. She could see a lighted lantern swinging back and forth held by a man in heavy, black wool coat and wool cap. His eyes were watery blue, and his mouth pulled in a tight line above the neatly trimmed brown beard on his chin. It was Reverend Roberts.

“How do you do?” she asked in a low but clear voice.

“I have come to tell you not to be alarmed—there was a fire at the agency, but it is under control now and nothing to worry about. We saved most everything, except a box of old papers and some things left by Dr. Irwin and his wife. He probably won’t miss it. Don’t worry now. Goodnight.” Then, as an afterthought, he turned back. “Could I send someone out Sunday to bring you in to church, Old Grandmother?”

“Thank you,” she said in a calm voice, without anxiety. “You are considerate. But by Sunday I shall be gone. Goodnight.”

“I don’t advise you to go anywhere in this upcoming weather, Old Grandmother,” Reverend Roberts said. “It seems mild now, but it will be raining by tomorrow or the next day for sure. Can’t you smell the rain coming in that wind? Take care.”

She listened to his receding footsteps.

She went back inside and put her side-button shoes on the shelf. She undid the cornmeal sack again and scooped a heaping pie tin full of the meal for her old horse. After feeding it she left the horse unhobbled for the night. Then she scooped out more cornmeal and scattered it on the ground for the birds and chipmunks. When she came back inside to close the cornmeal sack, she left the tepee flap pinned open so that the night spirits could come in or go out as they wished. The night air was chilly, with a feel of frost, so she pulled on her woolen skirt and wrapped the blanket tighter about her shoulders. She was breathing heavily and sat to rest on her pine-bough couch. When her legs stopped shaking and she felt stronger, she got up and pulled down the old, beaded leather pouch. Her bent, clawlike fingers fished out the polished, rusty red stone with the white bird marking. She held it in her fist until it took in her body warmth.

Keeping the red stone in her fist she clumsily folded two thin, but new, woolen blankets given to her by the government. She put them beside her open tepee flap along with several of her favorite cooking pots and polished horn dippers and stirrers. She broke the tops off the limp parsnips, and threw them out the doorway. She dipped the parsnips in her water bucket and washed them, then dropped them in the kettle of simmering stew. She did not build up the smoldering fire. She swept the dirt floor with a straw broom, so that it looked as if a fine rake had gone over it. All the while she held the red stone in her fist. Then she lay down on the couch to rest. When her breathing steadied, she pulled a worn buffalo robe over herself.

After a short nap, her scrawny, hooked hand came out with the red stone. She fumbled with the old, thick blanket she had wrapped around her shoulders and then she reached under her tunic and placed the warm stone between her sagging breasts. This was the only thing that held many memories for her. She had a long lifetime. She knew nothing was lost, only the forgotten memories. Nothing was gained, only the addition of remembered knowledge.

Sometime in the middle of the night, the smoldering coals turned cold, as did the body warmth of the old woman on the pine-bough couch. All was dark and still inside the old tepee. Outside, dark clouds hung low, ready to rain in teardrop-size splatters over the Wind River area, making the dust and rock deep red and shiny. The heads of all the prairie plants bowed with the wind.

There were several fires at the agency of the Wind River Reservation in the late 1870s and early 1880s. But the United States Government has no documents in its present files stating exactly when those fires took place or whether they were in fact at the agency or the government barracks at Fort Washakie.
¹

Finn. G. Burnett, government farmer on the Wind River Reservation, wrote in 1926:

It seems unusual that the Irwins did not take their personal, valuable papers with them when they were transferred to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1873. Instead, they apparently left them behind at the agency office on the Wind River Reservation.

Reverend John Roberts, Episcopalian minister on the Wind River Reservation, conducted a Christian burial ceremony over Sacajawea’s grave in the cemetery of the reservation on the day she died. Dr. Hebard stated in her book that Sacajawea had no last illness and was found in her tepee lifeless on the morning of April 9, 1884.
³

In the parish records kept by Reverend Roberts appears this record: