Sacajawea (45 page)

“He won’t bite,” Lewis said, then softened his reproach of the dejected Charbonneau. “Lord, you gave us a scare today. But the damage to the pirogue is less than it might have been. Let’s have a drink.”

Charbonneau slowly relaxed.

Lewis had York break out a ration of spirits all around while they inspected the pirogue’s cargo. Some of the small medicine vials were ruined, but others could still be used and they were set out to dry. Only a few articles had rolled off the deck and sunk. The rest of the equipment could be salvaged.

Cruzatte examined his violin. “Dry in the prairie air and she be good as new. Many thanks.” He bowed to Sacajawea. “I’ll show you how to make music. You show me how to dance—sometime soon?” Sacajawea nodded and put her fingers on the sagging strings. “Oh, after I tighten a few things,” said Cruzatte.

Sacajawea went to help Lewis place the wet pages from his journal and his loose botanical notes on a clean, sandy place, with small stones on the corners of the papers to keep them from blowing into the river again.

When she finally sat down beside Pomp, she was exhausted. She picked up the baby and nursed him, half dozing herself. Something wet bumped against her arm. She looked quickly. It was Scannon, who lay with his head on his front paws beside her. She put a hand on his head, and it felt solid and strong. She passed down his neck, his back and flanks. He seemed to quiver and leaned his huge body against her. Then he bowed his head and licked her wet moccasins.

She began to talk. She told Scannon about the People, the family of Catches Two, Redpipe, and Charbonneau. Scannon listened, his eyes half-closed.

Charbonneau came over to tell her that York had food ready and she ought to dry her clothes out.

“Why you talk with that beast?”

“He does not talk back,” she said.

“Zut!”
spat Charbonneau.

Lewis did full justice that evening to Sacajawea. “She showed equal fortitude and resolution with any person on board,” he said to the men. Clark clapped his hands, and the others followed. Sacajawea lowered her head. Never had she had such great praise.

“Mon dieu,”
said Charbonneau. “I’ll never be able to do anything with that squaw if you make her something special and give her compliments.”

Sergeant Gass looked darkly at Charbonneau. “She didn’t ask for anything, but a little praise goes a long way. It is harmless.”

Sacajawea looked up. What had Gass said? She had understood only part of it. Was he defending her against her man?

“You have to thrash women once a week, maybe more if you treat them too nice,” answered Charbonneau.”

I guess you don’t know women like I do.” He laughed from deep within his throat.

“You ought to be hanged and have it prove a warning to you,” snapped Gass. “Maybe we could call the lass our mascot. Soldiers often have mascots, you know.”

The men clapped. Sacajawea sensed he had said a good word for her, and was pleased.

“Hey, Frenchy!” called John Ordway, “what were you thinking of out there this afternoon?”

Charbonneau looked up, shaken. “I—I did what I could.” He became quite pale.

“What does that mean?” asked one of the men.

“I can’t swim,” said Charbonneau with an awful grimace of embarrassment.

“My dear friend,” said Pat Gass, “you made the princely and self-sacrificing gesture of steering the pirogue when you were a stranger to water? We are two or three thousand miles from anywhere. With less men and equipment, the captains would have had to turn back.”

“Oui,”
admitted Charbonneau, his liver doing flipflops.

“Your behavior is intolerable in a military outfit,” said Gass.

“I’m mortal sorry,” said Charbonneau. “The dog growled and jumped at me, and I must have blacked out for a moment.
Oui,
that is it—I blacked out for a moment. Fainted.”

Sacajawea looked from her man to the others. It would not be the last time she would see him go to pieces under stress, but this night she did not know this and excused him, thinking he was frightened by the dog and had miscalculated the strength of the wind in the sails.

Clark’s Journal:

May 19th Sunday 1805

Capt Lewis’s dog was badly bitten by a wounded beaver and was near bleading to death.

BERNARD DEVOTO,
ed.,
The Journals of Lewis and Clark.
New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1953, p. 113.

T
he game was still abundant and tame. One fat, complacent wolf was killed with nothing more than an espontoon—a spear and ax combined—which was part of each officer’s equipment.

Not all the game was equally submissive. Scannon made the mistake of catching a beaver, probably the first he’d ever seen. He was bitten so severely that he nearly bled to death. Sacajawea showed Lewis how to stitch the wound together with some of the longer hairs from the dog’s tail. Three days later, the paw was swollen to double its size and infected. Scannon was listless and lay in the bottom of the pirogue. Sacajawea stared down at his face. The dog was suffering terrible pain; his features were distorted in agony. She placed her blanket so the sun was shielded from his eyes. Lewis could not help; he was busy on shore collecting rocks and leaves.

After the evening meal, she examined his foot, felt it, turned it over, clicked her teeth, and said “Ahhh,” as if she had done nothing else all the days of her life but tend such cases. The paw was as hard to the touch as a piece of firewood. She went to the cooking fire for the kettle of hot water. York thought she was going to bathe Pomp, but the papoose would go without his bath this night.

The sick dog kept his eyes fixed intently on her. Several of the men had come to see what she was doing with this huge Newfoundland, which was nearly as large as she. A close circle formed around the two. The captains also joined. Her face was sober, but all the while she kept talking in fast Minnetaree syllables.

“I think it is blood poisoning, sure as the Lord’s watching,” said Lewis.

“Let’s give him a bit of laudanum so he will be still while she works on him,” suggested Clark, going after one of the medicine boxes.

“Ought we to let that squaw work on my dog?” asked Lewis.

The dog pulled away from Clark and had to be forced to drink the water with the alcohol-opium mixture. He refused to be moved from Sacajawea’s side.

“Can you do something with that swollen foot?” asked Lewis, looking doubtfully at Sacajawea.

“Ai.
Bad spirits inside!” She dipped her hands in the hot water and rubbed them several times on the swollen paw. Slowly she dipped the paw in the water. Finally the dog permitted her to hold his paw in the hot water for several minutes. She drew on the great store of knowledge she had gathered as a child from her grandmother. First, she massaged the flesh around the wound for a long time, then moved upward to the dog’s ankle. She rubbed with the palm of her hand, making circular motions, gently for a while, then more strongly, and firmly. By then, the dog was sleeping.

She looked up and said something to Charbonneau. “She wants a drink of rum!” he spluttered.

“Well, she shall have it, then,” said Clark, sending York for a tin cup.

“My Lord!” exploded Lewis. “The nerve of her!”

Clark handed her the cup of spirits. They all expected her to drink it. Instead, she drew the sleeping dog’s paw from the warm water and poured the rum directly into the now soft, oozing wound. Her face was flushed, and her eyes shone in the firelight.

She made motions of wrapping the great paw. Lewis pulled some strips of white linen from the medicine box and swathed the paw. The dog gasped and whined and moaned as the opium wore off, but he did not try to stand. All night he lay beside the little fire. Sacajawea was certain from the dog’s face that the pain was growing no worse. He even slept off and on.
¹

The whole camp was asleep now. Sacajawea felt tired and drowsy. Both captains had gone to sleep, and Drouillard was snoring. Pomp was asleep in the cradleboard, and she could see York with his feet close to the fire in the center of the skin tent. The dog slept. She lay on her robe, half-asleep. Suddenly she lay very still, listening. In another instant she was wide-awake. She had heard steps off to one side, steps that seemed to be hesitating as if in fear. They came on cautiously, drawing closer and closer; then they stopped, as if the person were listening. Sacajawea glanced around. The dog was still sleeping; the fire was low and did not give much light. The others seemed asleep. She got up quickly and squatted close to the fire, looking for a large piece of firewood to use in case she needed some protection. The steps were now approaching firmly. The next moment her man, Charbonneau, stood within the circle of the campfire’s glow, looking at her silently, the partially empty cup of rum shaking unsteadily in his hand. His yellowed teeth flashed as he raised the cup to his lips.

Sacajawea whirled like a flash and caught hold of his arm; she grasped it firmly and gave it a violent twist. A howl of pain echoed through the camp.

“What are you doing?” cried Charbonneau in Minnetaree as she wrenched loose the cup with her other hand.

“That is medicine for my friend. Do not touch it.” She spoke in broken English, looking so fiercely at him that he slunk off to his robes.

“That woman needs no help,” whispered Clark, sitting up in his blankets. He yawned and lay back down. There was a gentle chuckle among the others.

“She spoke of the dog as her friend,” said Lewis. “She actually spoke of Scannon as though he had a human soul. Lord, she sends a chill through me.”

In the morning, Sacajawea was up, her eyes on the dog, whose breathing was shallow. She remained silent as the men prepared for the day. Tears hung in her eyes; her heart fell. She pushed a tin plate of water near the dog. His eyes opened, and he drank a little. Then his nose gently nudged her hand, which held two breakfast biscuits York had brought to her from the cooking fire. He ate one, then the other; then he lay back. He was panting, and she pushed more toward him. He whacked his tail against the ground.

“I am happy to see my friend once more. I have not forgotten how you ran through the tall weeds to chase a rabbit. You made my papoose laugh. I have not forgotten how you barked at a bear cub in a tree, or howled when York sang. You made us all laugh.”

When Scannon fully recovered, Lewis knew he had to give Sacajawea some gift to show his appreciation of what she had done for his dog. He fetched out a silk handkerchief that was in the stores he had bought in Saint Louis more than a year before. It was checkered all over with bright colors, and the silk had a glossy surface that set those colors off to great advantage.

To Sacajawea that silk handkerchief was a more than satisfactory return for cleansing and massaging Scannon’s painful paw, and noticing his weakness and hunger, and making him strong with her biscuits. The intrinsic value of an article had no meaning in the mind of Sacajawea. She cared only that her effort was appreciated, but the gift tickled her fancy.

Soon Scannon was distinguishing himself again by his skill at catching wild geese and bringing them ashore for the expedition’s dinner.

One evening past the middle of May, when camp had been made near the river named the Musselshell by the Mandans, and clearly drawn on the Wolf Chiefs map, Pat Gass stood up after supper to announce that there was a river, about fifty yards wide, that discharged itself into the Musselshell River about five miles from its mouth. “I propose that the captains name it Bird Woman’s River after our Shoshoni woman. We can make a note of it in our writing this evening.”

“Hey, I thought you didn’t like squaws!” yelled Bob Frazier.

“Well, that is generally so, but this here one saved old Scannon from blood poisoning, didn’t she? And she dug and brought us these here vegetables for supper. They taste fine, like carrots. She ain’t so bad. She ain’t complained once. Which is more than you can say for some of us.”

Sacajawea felt greatly honored, and her problem of what to do for Pat Gass in return was solved a couple of days later when Drouillard and Gass killed two Rocky Mountain sheep. Sacajawea was wide-eyed when they were brought into camp. Rocky Mountain sheep were highly prized by the Shoshonis for their meat, skin, and horns which bent backwards and were encircled with a succession of wavy rings.

She fingered the horn of one animal, then with deft hand signs told Pat Gass she would like a small section of the horn. He laughed at her childish request and chopped one side up for her. She grabbed two pieces and ran down to the gravel bed by the mouth of the river. There she spent several hours chipping and forming a small, semitranslucent bowl for Gass. She explained that her people made cups, small plates, and spoons from the big horns.

Gass was so taken with the gift that he showed the crude bowl to Clark.

“Say, Pat,” said Clark, “I can imagine that our white women would like this elegant material made into hair combs.”

“Sure,” agreed Gass. “Even Janey”—which was their nickname for Sacajawea—“might like that. She combs her head with a pear thorn or her greased-up fingers.”

Everything living responded to the increase in the warmth and length of the days. The deer, which were still plentiful, had changed to their reddish summer coats, and the does were accompanied everywhere by their fawns. Wood duck cruised with their fleets of ducklings on the small tributaries of muddy water that foamed on either side of the Missouri.

Several huge cedars had toppled because their roots were shallow in the marshlike soil. Large gaps of light, where the trees had once been, formed windows in the forest roof. Sacajawea could see the crossed branches of giant trees. It seemed like a battle of arm wrestling. The limbs pushed and pulled at one another under the influence of wind until one of them fell. Lewis, Drouillard and Sacajawea, with Pomp on her back, walked along the bank, enjoying the sunshine after the damp, foggy days. The air was filled with the smell of honeysuckle blossoms and the buzz of bees, mosquitoes, and metallic, blue-colored flies.