Sacajawea (44 page)

When the hunters dressed a buffalo they had killed one morning, Charbonneau, now acting as cook, called, “Keep all the guts! Two bobs and a flirt in the muddy Missouri and she is ready for stuffing and the fine meal.”

Charbonneau held fast to one end of the six-foot-long piece of large gut with his right hand, while the thumb and forefinger of his left hand compressed to discharge, as he explained, “That which we’d choke on.” He stuffed the gut with fillets and kidney suet, salt, pepper, and flour, calling it
“Bon pour manger.”
Then he tied both ends of the gut, boiled it, and fried it to a golden brown in bear’s oil over a fire of buffalo chips.

Sacajawea licked her fingers when she had finished her sausage, then wiped her fingers in her hair to make it shine from the bear’s oil.

One evening Lewis set himself up as cook and made a suet dumpling for each man. But generally he was off in the hills with Clark, taking a look at the country, finding plant and mineral specimens, or recording temperatures and wind directions and measuring the terrain, noting the information later on his maps.

Sacajawea often brought in cress and other greens for an evening salad. She studied the ground, searching for things that were edible. In sunny spots the white stars of the bunchberry were already opening, and bluebeard lily buds swelled at the tops of their tall stems. Wild strawberry blooms hid under sprouting ferns and grasses like bits of leftover snow. She saw brown toads blink in the damp shade and brightly spotted green frogs hop away from her. Once a tiny chipmunk fled with a squeak and watched her from the top of a stump that was garlanded with trailing strands of dark green, soon to be covered with paired, pale pink twinflower bells. She stopped at some driftwood and saw the holes that field mice had made. She poked into the holes and then dug deeply as she found the clean white artichoke roots the mice had stored. She made several piles of the wild roots, then ran to find Clark.

“Eat.” She indicated they should be boiled and eaten.

“It seems to me,” Clark said, “if they are good, we should have them for dinner.” He helped her take them back to the camp.

York and Charbonneau served the boiled roots on the tin mess plates with roast venison.

“Hey,” said Pat Gass, “these here wild potatoes ain’t bad.”

“That’s a treat from Sacajawea, here,” said Clark.

Gass glanced quickly in her direction and spat on the dirt.

Drouillard laughed. “Once she gets to your belly, you’ll think the woman is wonderful.”

Some of the men guffawed and slapped their knees.

“Never!” snapped Gass. “It is not my idea of a military outfit to let a squaw gather its food.”

Around the evening fire the captains brought out stub quill pens and inkhorns so that they and the others could record the day’s adventures. Ben York sang a spiritual, soft and low, and Scannon howled at the night sky.

Sacajawea, who was never idle, bathed Pomp with warm water from the cooking fire, and filled his cradleboard with clean moss. Then she mended several of the men’s moccasins, fortifying the shoes with hard, dried buffalo skin so that the sharp stones and prickly pear thorns would not so easily penetrate them.

Shannon sat shyly beside her. Using hand signs and the words of Minnetaree he had learned from Otter Woman, he told Sacajawea the words in York’s songs. Then he began to talk of Otter Woman. “She is quiet and not bossy like the white girls back home.” Sacajawea smiled, understanding that the boy felt a tenderness toward the sad-eyed Shoshoni girl. She put her hand over her mouth so that Shannon would not talk more, for Charbonneau had come to sit close by. His jealous nature would not permit another man to admire his women.

“Hey, this soldier is still hungry!” yelled LePage, who was sitting beside the cradleboard, contentedly watching his namesake make sucking noises in his sleep.

“He be mostly belly!” yelled Charbonneau back at him.

Sacajawea reached for the baby to put him to her breast.

The men gradually rolled up cocoonlike in their Mackinaw blankets, with their feet to the fires, while one man stood guard, listening to the melancholy wail of coyotes and humming insects. Sacajawea, with Pomp, the two captains, Drouillard, and Charbonneau, slept on the soft boughs in the skin tent. The wind rose off the prairie grass and roared among the cottonwoods.

On two sides of the expedition’s camp lay camps of the Sioux, each one’s presence unknown to the other. This tribe had gone to attack the expedition’s camp at Fort Mandan because they thought the white men were bad medicine. They had missed them and were now going home. Chief Black Cat of the Mandans had disapproved of this Sioux scheme so strongly that he had not let his people trade or give food to them. By Indian standards this was the sharpest rebuff possible. Black Cat knew this band was warlike and wanted mainly the guns and ammunition the white men carried.

The Missouri River was beginning to look something like a swamp. The bed was shallow, and the men with the cordelles were sometimes out all day pulling and hauling the canoes. Sometimes the banks were steep and the men had to wade up to their armpits in the cold river; other times they climbed and scrambled over the sharp rocks and prickly pear along the shore. At times the banks were slippery with mud that clung to their moccasins, so they were forced to go barefoot. Dirt and stones showered these men from the crumbling cliffs.

One afternoon during a heavy rain, the expedition was forced to stop. A fire was laid on high ground in the center of the skin tepee, and as many as could gathered inside to keep dry. The others built small lean-tos that were not completely watertight but much better than sitting in the open or even under a tree.

Gathering sticks and saplings for the lean-tos, Gass noticed hoofprints. Drouillard and Cruzatte came to investigate. They reported to Clark that a Sioux war party traveling with many horses had been in this same spot only twenty-four hours before. No one wanted to meet these Sioux. The men began to speak of Corporal Warfington’s party going downriver to Saint Louis in the keelboat. Would they miss the attacking Sioux? Fortunately both parties had traveled sooner and much faster than the warring Sioux had reasoned they would. The Pirogues and canoes averaged about twenty miles a day going upstream.

Alkali dust rose, blown into clouds, and sifted into Clark’s double-cased watch until the wheels refused to move more than a few minutes at a time. The riverbank was perfectly white, and the river itself became milky white. Lewis remarked, “The Missouri looks to me like a cup of tea my grandmother used to make, with a tablespoon of milk stirred in it.”
⁴

The game became so tame that the men had to drive the elk and deer from the cordeliers’ path with sticks and stones. Sometimes the yellow cougar watched from some rock ledge. When a rock was thrown in its direction, the animal would growl and slink away. The expedition ate beaver, elk, prairie hens, turkeys, and ducks.

Little meadows were radiant with shooting stars, honeysuckle, morning glories, trillium, dogtooth violets, spring beauties, and buttercups. Wild cherry and plum blossoms perfumed the air. For two days they traveled past second-growth fir. The original timber had been burned off a generation before. The undergrowth was filled with vine-maple, or Virginia creeper. The captains investigated a clone of aspen, genetically identical, which had grown from one root.

Toward the end of April, Lewis studied the map drawn by the Wolf Chief and led a small party ahead to the mouth of the Rochejaune, or Yellowstone River. This had been named on a map drawn by James Mackay ten years earlier. Lewis had a copy of that map for study also, and he decided that the junction would make an ideal location for a future trading post. Pat Gass suggested the post be made of local limestone. Charbonneau suggested starting trading fairs, such as the Mandans and Minnetarees held.

Lewis and Drouillard wandered about, studying the terrain. There were a couple of square miles of open ground, walled on three sides by a stand of black fir timber that looked solid until the men got within two yards of it; on the fourth side was a growth of mountain-ash saplings fencing the river. The open ground was a swale of yellow snapdragons and lavender-flowering wild pea vine. Silently, out of the timber, loped two grizzlies.

Instantly Lewis recalled the awe and terror with which the Mandans had described these “yellow bears,” the king of western beasts. Never did they go out to meet the grizzly without war paint and all the solemn rites of battle. As with the cave bear of ancient legend, no weapon of theirs was adequate to meet this dreaded beast. In parties of six or eight they went, with bows and arrows or, in recent years, the smoking-sticks of the French-Canadian traders. To kill one grizzly was equivalent to killing two enemies.

With these things swirling in their minds, Lewis and Drouillard faced the snarling animals. Each man fired his rifle; each wounded his bear. One beast ran back into the dense copse. The other turned and chased Lewis. A lucky third shot from Drouillard laid the bear low. He was only a cub, but the men estimated his weight at close to five hundred pounds, larger than any bear in the Atlantic states.

No wonder Indians who slew the grizzly were respected and in line to become chiefs. No wonder the bear’s claws became a badge of honor, an emblem of unflinching valor, and the skin a chiefs robe. There must be no enemy so fierce as an enraged and famished grizzly, thought Drouillard.

They pulled the huge animal to the shore for butchering, and its fleece and skin made a load that two men could scarcely carry. York rendered several gallons of oil from the bear. Charbonneau was so pleased with this much bear butter for his cooking that he volunteered to steer the white pirogue that afternoon.

No one, except perhaps Lewis, quite realized that Charbonneau was the worst steersman of the party. Both the captains were on shore at the time, which was very unusual. Almost always, one of them remained with the pirogue.

Charbonneau began to sing, “I’m a riverman. I’m half alligator and half horse, with the rest of me crooked snags and the red-hot snapping turtle. Cock-a-doodle-do!” He stopped, amazed at his own powerful voice. He was going to steer the pirogue and show those rogues he was more than just a cook with this outfit.

Scannon barked. Charbonneau turned and grinned, “By gar, you growl at me again and I’ll scream through my nose. I’m all bull ‘gator. If I set my teeth in your ear—”

He became silent; a puff of wind came up, then another, stronger one. Instead of putting the pirogue before the wind as he had been told, he luffed her into the wind; then he gloated about his seamanship, never giving another thought to luffing. A sudden squall struck the pirogue obliquely. The wind came in such a strong gust that it drew the brace of the square sail out of Drouillard’s hand. Sacajawea looked about, then toward the shore. Lewis had fired his gun to attract Charbonneau’s attention, gesturing him to cut the halyards and take in sail.

“Let Drouillard steer!” called Sacajawea.

The craven Charbonneau stood paralyzed with fear. His knees were jelly, his mind water. He squawked, “Shut up, squaw, we are going to drown.” Then he dropped the tiller and crossed himself, saying,
“Jésus, l’enfant,
save us.”

Charbonneau had turned pale and was staggering.

“Take hold of the helm, or I’ll shoot you on the spot!” yelled Cruzatte, enraged at Charbonneau’s cowardice.

Charbonneau was conscious of a tremendous weight upon him and the feeling that he would burst open. Instinct alone made him cling to the bottom of the boat.

Looking three hundred yards across the river, the two captains saw the pirogue heel over, then lie for an agonzing half minute on her side. Finally the sail was pulled in and the pirogue righted, but she was filled with water to within an inch of the gunwales. Lewis began unbuttoning his coat to swim out, but then realized how hopeless that would be. “Lord help that Frenchman!” he exploded.

Gradually Charbonneau came to and began to spit out muddy water and gasp for breath. Cruzatte hauled him out of the water in the bottom of the pirogue, and Charbonneau slumped against the gunwale in a half-conscious condition. His hands were numb, and he kicked a cask of water, deciding that was the weight that had been on top of him as he lay half-submerged in the bottom of the pirogue. If his life had depended on his doing something, he would have been lost.

Sacajawea, with her baby tied to her back in the cradleboard, began swimming after papers and articles that had floated off the deck. Beside her was Scannon, who had rushed into the water the moment she did. Drouillard frantically bailed as Cruzatte rowed the pirogue to shore.

There was nothing to do but stop the expedition for the rest of the day and unload the dripping, muddy cargo. Sacajawea paddled to the shore. Her arms were filled with papers from Lewis’s journal and his botanical notes. Hitched under one arm she carried Cruzatte’s violin in its dripping case, and the sextant. Slumping down on the moss-covered bank, she pulled the tumpline from her forehead and slipped out of the cradleboard. She was spreading the baby’s clothes, which she carried in the foot of the cradleboard, on stones to dry as Lewis ran up.

“Man,” he said to Charbonneau, “if the pirogue had capsized while you were steering, it would have cost us dearly.”

Scannon shook himself, spraying water over the two men, then barked loudly.

Charbonneau cringed. He dried his face with his shirtsleeve, but it stayed wet.

“You realize,” Captain Lewis went on angrily, “we have valuable instruments, papers, medicine, and presents for natives on board, to say nothing about the people here, including your own woman and child. Clumsiness cannot be tolerated on this trip!”

Charbonneau hung his head and mumbled, “Go to the devil!” And he mumbled something about a changing wind. He looked at Scannon and shook his head. What good was the dog, anyway, he thought.

Scannon growled and showed his teeth.

Charbonneau stared at the dog. “Holy saints, that dog’s mouth looks like a crater, and his bark can shake the canoe worse than the river rapids. It was that dog that caused the pirogue to shift. I’ll shoot him if he tries to bite me!”