Sacajawea (183 page)

CHAPTER 8
The Mandans

1
. Deacon, pp. 108–12, 184, 217.

2
. Paul Herrmann,
Conquest by Man,
transl. by Michael Bullock. New York: Harper and Bros., 1954. Copyright Hoffman und Campe Verlag,
do
Curtis Brown, Ltd.

3
. Williams, pp. 11–12.

4
. The titular head of the Mandans was The Wolf Chief,
Ha-na-ta-nu-mauk,
who was so haughty and overbearing that he was more feared than loved by his people. From
George Catlin and the Old Frontier,
by Harold McCracken, p. 94. Copyright 1959, Crown Publishers, Inc.

5
.
Mah-to-toh-pa,
Four Bears, second chief, was first in popularity. He was generous, gentlemanly, and handsome. Catlin thought him a most extraordinary man. Catlin, Vol. I, p. 92.

6
. Pheasants were not introduced into Dakota Territory until at least twenty years after both North and South Dakota became states in 1889. Presumably, the fool hens, prairie chickens, and various species of grouse in the Dakota region at this time were generally called pheasants.

George Catlin translates the Mandans’ name,
See-pohs-ka-nu-mah-ka-kee,
as
People of the Pheasants.
Catlin, Vol. I, p. 80.

7
. The homosexual male Indian generally remained in the village to take care of the women and children when the other men were hunting or at war. The Indians thought that these men had been informed by a dream or “medicine vision” to dress and act as women. They had no loss of status. The nineteenth-century writer referred to gay Indians as
beaus
or
dandies.
McCracken, pp. 87–8.

CHAPTER 9
The Okeepa

1
. In Mandan
Okeepa
means
to look alike.
In this important ceremony the Bull Dancers were the same height and stature, painted and dressed alike. Alfred W. Bowers,
Mandan Social and Ceremonial Organization.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950; Midway Reprints, 1973, p. 111.

2
. The Lone Man collected the knives and sharp-edged tools and threw them into the Missouri River as an offering to the Grandfather Snake. A few robes along with seven corn balls were thrown into the water also. Bowers, p. 150.

3
. Besides the rod the Devil wore as an artificial penis, he had two small pumpkins representing testicles. His limbs seemed to have holes through them at the joints, due to the manner of painting a red spot with a white circle around it. Bowers, p. 145.

4
. During the “Going In” ceremony, two skewers were inserted through the skin on the back or on the breast by which the candidate was suspended in midair. Other skewers were inserted through the skin of the legs from which buffalo skulls were hung. The Mandans believed that the experience with the supernatural at this time was intensely spiritual. Bowers, p. 135.

CHAPTER 10
The Game of Hands

1
. Lowie, pp. 131–34, describes the game of hands and states that it was played by tribes even beyond the Plains area. It was played with pairs of small objects, either bone, stone, sticks, or plum pits. One object was always marked by carvings or an incised line or string around the middle. The other object was left plain. Theguesser had to guess the hand holding the unmarked object. The game was accompanied by singing and the person hiding the objects swayed his body, arms, and hands to the rhythm of the music. The movements were graceful, yet intricate enough to be confusing to the guesser. Sometimes horses were the main prize, or the entire contents of a man’s lodge, or his wife or wives.

Garcia, pp. 185–86, also gives an excellent description of how skilled the Native Americans were in manipulating the small, polished, hand-hidden objects of this game. Also see Lavender, pp. 149–50.

CHAPTER 11
Lewis and Clark

1
. Blanket points were five-inch lines woven into the blanket edge behind the front color stripe to denote size, from one to four points. The wool blankets cost one beaver pelt per point. The Hudson’s Bay Company four-point today is a double blanket, 144 inches long.

2
. The French explorer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de la Vérendrye had visited the Mandans as long ago as 1738. He found nine Mandan villages at that time near the mouth of the Heart River, about sixty miles downstream from where Lewis and Clark found them. A French-Canadian named Menard, who was engaged by a British fur company, found the Mandans in the late 1780s and lived among them for nearly fourteen years. The nine villages were decimated by smallpox about 1790, and the number of people gradually decreased until only two villages were found by Lewis and Clark in 1804. Lewis and Clark also found two Hidatsa (Minnetaree) villages and one Amahami village in the same general area on the banks of the Missouri in what is now North Dakota.

3
. Big White was amiable, fat, weak in character, and not much respected by his people. Sergeant Gass thought he was “best looking Indian I ever saw.” John Bakeless,
Lewis and Clark, Partners in Discovery.
New York: William Morrow and Co., 1947, pp. 145–46.

4
. The explorers built their fort none too soon for safety. On November 5 the Sioux held a powwow, inviting many of their tribes and the Arikaras to join them in the spring in a fight against the white explorers. The Sioux put off the fight until spring to catchthe white men by surprise and because they saw the fort was equipped with the air gun, the swivel, which was adapted for mounting on stockades, rifles, and blunderbusses. Bakeless, pp. 152–53.

The air gun was bought by Lewis in 1803 in Pennsylvania. The air was compressed about ten times so that the single ball went as far as sixty to seventy yards. This air gun was not a repeater, but it could be fired as fast as one could drop the balls into the muzzle. When Lewis first purchased the gun someone examined it and accidently pulled the trigger. The ball grazed the temple of a woman forty yards away. Bakeless, p. 102.

Lewis wrote on the 7th of August, 1805, “My air gun was out of order and her sights had been removed by some accident. I put her in order and regulated her. She shot again as well as she ever did.” From
The Journals of Lewis and Clark,
edited by Bernard DeVoto, pp. 180–81. Copyright 1953 by Houghton Mifflin Co.

This air gun was used in 1806 at the mouth of the Columbia to impress local natives, so it may be assumed that the gun went back to St. Louis with the Expedition. From Carl P. Russell, “The Guns of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,”
North Dakota History,
27–1 (Winter, 1960), p. 29. Copyright, State Historical Society of North Dakota, 1960. Used by permission.

The swivel gun was frequently referred to in the expedition’s journals. It was a small cannon that was fired on such occasions as Christmas and New Year’s Day and for farewells from various tribes. On June 26, 1805, it was placed in a cache below the Missouri’s Great Falls. On the return trip the explorers took it back to the Mandans and gave it as a farewell gift to Chief Kakoakis. Russell, pp. 32–3.

Lewis’s 1803 requisition asks for 15 US Model 1803 rifles, along with 15 powder horns and pouches, 15 pairs of bullet molds, 15 pairs of wipers or gun worms, 15 ball screws, 15 gun slings, plus extra parts of locks and tools for repairs, and 500 best flints, 200 pounds of the best rifle powder and 400 pounds of lead. Any broken rifles could easily be repaired. Probably Lewis believed 15 regular Army men were sufficient to make up privates and noncommissioned officers. However, by 1804 there were 31 enlisted men in the permanent party andseven other soldiers who went as far as Fort Mandan. The journals do not make it clear if Lewis ordered more than 15 rifles for the extra men of the expedition. The ten civilian boatmen, who accompanied the party from St. Louis to Fort Mandan and back, may have had muskets of the short, light fusee variety. Charbonneau had such a musket that was lost in the June 29,1805, cloudburst. Russell 1960, p. 29.

Russell wrote that Clark refers to his “small rifle,” in addition to his “rifle.” From this comparison Russell suggests that the small rifle is probably a Kentucky squirrel rifle. He also suggests that because the journals mention gunpowder grades and musket balls, that the US Flintlock Musket, Model 1795, was among the expedition’s arms. On July 15, Hugh McNeal broke his musket in two pieces when he clubbed a charging grizzly, according to Lewis. Russell, pp. 30—1.

The blunderbuss was a short firearm with an expanding bore, flaring out like a bell at the muzzle. It was developed in Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century. The name may have come from the German,
Dunder Buchse
(thunder gun). The load for the early gun was as many pistol balls or as much buckshot as the chamber could hold. Later the exaggerated flares were modified to an almost round bore and the flare was only a decorative thickening of the metal on the outside. This decorative bell had no effect on the spread of the shot, but if the gun were pointed at anyone, it had a frightening effect. The blunderbuss was used during the flintlock period and larger versions of this gun could be mounted on swivels. From
Encyclopedia of Firearms,
edited by Harold L. Peterson. Copyright (c) by George Rainbird Ltd., 1964. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, E. P. Dutton, Inc., pp. 57–8.

The two blunderbusses of the Lewis and Clark Expedition were equipped with swivels and could be mounted on either of the two pirogues as the men went up the Missouri River. Unfortunately, the guns were mounted on the keelboat on September 25, 1804, when the explorers had trouble with the Teton Sioux. DeVoto, 1953, p. 37.

At Fort Mandan the blunderbusses must have beenmounted on the roof of the storeroom for use by the sentry in case of any Indian trouble. Russell, p. 30.

Russell believes that even though little was written in the journals about hand guns, it was a general custom then for U.S. Army officers to carry their own personal pistols. On July 27, 1806, Lewis wrote about using his pistol in the fight with the Piegans. Russell thinks that if Lewis’s pistol were not personally owned by him and specially made for him, it had to be the Model 1799 made by Simeon North. Russell, p. 32.

The Indians near the mouth of the Williamette River had been supplied with pistols before the coming of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, according to the journals for November 4, 1805. The explorers saw their first Indian trade gun on October 30, 1805, at the Cascades of the Columbia. From that time on to the west coast the explorers saw Indians with light fusees. The explorers obtained one of the common trade guns on the Columbia and one when Lewis fought the Piegans. Russell, p. 31; see also DeVoto, 1953, pp. 438–39; Barbour has an excellent writeup on the guns used by the expedition in the 1964
Gun Digest.

5
. On November 11, 1804, Captain Clark was visited by two Indian girls known among the Minnetarees as the “Snake” or Shoshoni women of Charbonneau. On December 25 Sergeant Gass and Private Whitehouse wrote that the only females at their Christmas Dance were “the three wives of our interpreter.” Two of these “wives” or girls were not mentioned again in the expedition’s journals—the other girl was Sacajawea. Clark and Edmonds, p. 12.

CHAPTER 12
Birth of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau

1
. Lewis recorded in his journal of February 11, 1805, that Jussome suggested rattlesnake rattles be given in small portions to Sacajawea to hasten the birth of her child. He also wrote, “perhaps this remedy may be worthy of future experiments, but I must confess that I want faith as to its efficacy.” Chuinard 1980, p. 270, says that Lewis “demonstrated the attitude of the true scientist: doubt, but willingness to investigate.”

Chuinard also points out that none of the explorers mention Sacajawea or the baby having any postpartumcomplications. From E. G. Chuinard,
Only One Man Died: The Medical Aspects of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
Glendale, CA: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1980, pp. 269–70.

CHAPTER 13
Farewell

1
. Antoine Larocque, Charles McKenzie, and one other man were sent by the Canadian, Charles Chaboillez, from Fort Assiniboine in Canada, to go up the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains. These three men left two months after the Lewis and Clark Expedition left Fort Mandan. The three men never reached the Rockies in the four and a half months they were gone. They explored what is today Montana and Wyoming. Larocque’s maps were so poorly drawn it is impossible to tell where the three men explored. John Bakeless,
Lewis and Clark, Partners in Discovery.
New York: William Morrow and Co., 1947, p. 159.

CHAPTER 14
A Sudden Squall

1
. Drewyer and Drouillard are the same person. The difference is the American and French spelling of his name.

2
. Dr. Antoine Saugrain was a protégé of Benjamin Franklin, who lured him to America from Paris. Dr. Saugrain’s work in St. Louis earned him the title of the First Scientist of the Mississippi Valley. He built one of the finest homes in St. Louis, occupying the block bounded by Second and Third Streets, Gratiot and Lombards Streets. The block was surrounded by a seven-foot stone wall to keep Indians from running through his property. Dr. Saugrain had one of the largest libraries in St. Louis at that time. Legend says that he not only provided medicinals, a well-stocked medical kit, friction matches and medical advice to both Lewis and Clark, but that he made the explorers’ thermometers by blowing and calibrating glass tubes which he filled with mercury melted from his wife’s mirrors. Between the mid 1600s and mid 1800s, mirrors were made from sheets of glass backed with a silver-colored amalgam of tin and mercury. From E. G. Chuinard,
Only One Man Died: The Medical Aspects of the Lewis and

Clark Expedition.
Glendale, CA: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1980, pp. 195–212.