Sacajawea (48 page)

When Sacajawea found it impossible to swallow another drop of the hot tea, she insisted she felt fine and went to the skin tent to lie down. She rummaged through the leather boxes until she found the down she had collected for Pomp’s cradleboard. She packed herself as another spasm came and went. Never would she tell these men the truth of what her man had done. A recurring cramp forced her to sit. The world began to drift again, but she remembered and got her head down quickly. With her cheek resting on the ground, things came back into focus almost at once. She was learning to fool the dizziness. She pulled herself to her buffalo robe and found Pomp sound asleep there. The effort of getting out of her tunic and moccasins muddled her; she was not sure any longer where she was—she seemed to know only that she had to get under the robe and hold her baby safe.

Captain Clark came inside and gently raised her hand and felt her pulse. She seemed weak, and there was no color in her lips. He consulted with Captain Lewis and came back with a dose of salts. She took the bitter medicine and hardly realized what she had done. He tucked a woolen blanket around her, saying if she would only take a good sweat, this cold would soon pass off. Sacajawea obeyed like a docile child while he took a rag, dipped it in lukewarm water, and wiped her face.

“In the morning I may decide to bleed you before we load the canoes.” He patted her head. “This is just a cold. Captain Lewis is getting over the same thing. Nothing to be ashamed of. Here, let me take Pomp to York for the night. You get some rest. York loves kids.” Captain Clark gently took the baby and called for Ben York.

“Yes, sir,” said York, looking down at Sacajawea. “That there child look peaked all right.”

“Take care of the baby. See that he has some warm soup if he wakens, and do not bother his mother.”

York looked again at Sacajawea. “I knew it was acoming. You gonna make a mammy out of me.”

“It’s fine practice,” Clark said, smiling. “You might have to do this sometime to your own young’uns. Might as well start now.”

“Aw, Master Clark, sir,” York said, thinking of his Kentucky sweetheart, “Cindy Lou sure does want a passel of children, that’s the truth.” He lifted the fat papoose out of Clark’s arms, found a blanket from his bed to wrap around him, and hung the four-month-old boy over his shoulder like a sack of flour.

“Come on, Pomp, you got to listen to them songs around the fire tonight.”

Sacajawea was asleep. Captain Clark felt her pulse again and heaved a sigh of relief. It was fuller and more regular.

In the morning Cruzatte took half a dozen men to a dry place on high ground and showed them how to make a cache. They cut the heavy prairie sod from a twenty-inch circle and laid it aside, then dug down to enlarge the hole underneath. The earth they removed was carried to the river and dumped in, so that there would be nothing to give wandering Indians any hint that anything might be buried nearby. When the excavation was six feet deep, the bottom was hollowed out to receive any water that might seep in, and dry sticks were used to keep the contents from touching the moist earth. When the hole was nearly filled with the things they were to leave behind—Captain Lewis’s writing desk, the forge, tools, reserve rations, salt, ammunition, tin cups, steel traps, skins, and specimens—the cache was covered with leather hides, and earth rammed in between this covering and the surface. A few days after the original twenty-inch circle of sod had been replaced, the grass had grown enough to conceal the hiding place completely. This was an Indian scheme.

The captains decided at this time to get rid of the red pirogue that Lewis and six others had been paddling upstream. They hauled it to the middle of a small island in the North Fork and tied it with leather strips, face down, with bungs out but tucked safely inside, to several low-growing juniper bushes. The bushes completely hid the pirogue, which lay snugly on the ground. The men made deep, jagged cuts in four nearby trees to mark the place where the pirogue was hidden in order to find it easily on their return trip. Also, wandering Indians would not touch anything that had been marked in such a manner.

Sacajawea slept that entire day, but during the night she woke bent over with cramps. Captain Clark gave her a dose of opium in hot water to reduce the cramps and put her back to sleep. In the morning, when she seemed no better, he bled her with his penknife, which he sterilized over an alcohol flame. She wanted to tell him that she was already bleeding profusely, but she could not find the words. He also gave her a full cup of mineral water laced with opium to drink.

“York has your man, Charbonneau, out looking for cattails for your son’s cradleboard,” he said, trying to reassure her that the child was well taken care of.

The following morning Captain Lewis, who had developed a cold and was feeling weak, with aching joints, took Scannon, George Gibson, the Fields brothers. Si Goodrich, and Drouillard up the South Fork to study the river and look for signs of Indians in that region. The others were to follow the next morning if Sacajawea was able to travel.

Captain Lewis’s party had not gone far when he realized he was really ill. By midday he had violent intestinal cramps, and as the pain increased, so did his temperature. “You and the little squaw have the same bugs eatin’ on your innards,” explained Gibson.

“Take the leaves off the chokecherry twigs there and boil the twigs in a little water. We’ll pull the canoes in here,” Captain Lewis ordered, then twisted about as another spasm of pain hit his middle.

The bitter black concoction puckered his mouth, but he drank a pint and in an hour repeated the dose.

“I wouldn’t take any more,” suggested Gibson. “Your teeth might dissolve.”

By that evening Captain Lewis was free of pain and fever. He had a good night’s rest and was ready to start out in the morning, quite revived. He recalled his mother, Lucy’s saying that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and so he drank another pint of the vile astringent liquid. At noon he was able to eat several perch that Goodrich had caught.

Sacajawea insisted that she was well enough to travel, but she was fretful in the bottom of the pirogue, and she seemed delirious at times. Captain Clark tried to make her comfortable, and regretted he knew so little about relieving her ailment.

Charbonneau sat at the back of the pirogue, not looking at his woman, wishing she would not create so much attention, and praying to the Holy Mother that his “medicine” had caused her to abort, if by chance she were pregnant. He had asked permission to take her back to the Minnetarees and their Medicine Man, but Clark had refused. Charbonneau could not have managed the trip by himself, and there were no men to spare.

York held Pomp propped between his knees as he sat at the bow and paddled.

“You are a sweet-looking mother,” Charbonneau kidded him clumsily.

“Well, I don’t hear you asking to bounce your son on your knee.” York scowled. “Besides, if you did, I wouldn’t say yes. This here child is too much fun. I’se going to teach him to fish and shoot himself a bear.”

“I’d like to teach him to read and write,” added Captain Clark.

For days the canoes made their way slowly upstream on the South Fork of the river. Sacajawea was hardly aware of their progress, conscious only that Captain Clark tended to her needs and plied her with medicines. These days were hard on the men, who kept a sharp eye out for grizzlies, which were more and more numerous. The men with the tow ropes tried to keep the canoes from shipping too much water and their feet were cut and bruised on the sharp stones and spines of the prickly pears. They slipped in the rattlesnake-infested mud trying to pull the canoes past sawyers, dead trees bobbing underwater. To make matters worse, several others fell ill with the intestinal cramps, two men had toothaches, two had large boils, and another had a carbuncle plus a slight fever. Private Whitehouse had the cramps, too, but he kept quiet about them, only writing about his griping pains in his journal when the expedition camped for the night.

One morning Sacajawea was well enough to walk to the spring beside which they had camped. She gave thanks to the Great Spirit for showing Chief Red Hair the medicines to bring her health back. Soon she was examining the pink moccasin flowers, and then her eyes found the wild crabapples in most of the trees around her. She tasted one, then another. Their tartness was good. Charbonneau sauntered to the spring and gathe red a few apples, telling her that if they tasted good they certainly wouldn’t hurt her.

“Hey, don’t let Janey eat too many of those green apples,” warned Captain Clark.

Still hungry, she went to Ben York and asked if he had some perch left in the pan from the morning meal. York was so delighted to see her up and feeling better that he gave her several raw fish and pointed to the frying pan. Then he chided Charbonneau, who snatched the pan away, saying, “Squaws like raw fish best. Just look how she gulps them fish down.”

“You should take better care of your missus. Raw fish don’t seem like fitting food to me.”

When the party turned in for the night, Sacajawea awoke moaning with pain. Her fingers were clammy, and her stomach ached. She refused all medication, not wishing to cause more trouble, but became delirious. Captain Clark continued to nurse her, for Charbonneau had turned surly and refused to tend to her. When she seemed hardly able to breathe at all, Captain Clark cried out to Charbonneau.

“If she dies, it will be your fault, Charbonneau. You don’t take good care of her, you lily-livered coward. I admit once in a while I was amused by your bragging, but now I am fed up—up to here.” He put his hand on top of his head.

Ben York calmed his master down, knowing that he was worn out from nursing the little squaw. York knew also that if Sacajawea died he would have the four-month-old child to carry across the continent and back, spoon-feeding him with soup and gruel the best he could manage. “I guess we’d better use God and pray for this squaw,” he said.

And then, on the evening of June 14, Joe Fields came with a note from Captain Lewis, who was proceeding slowly up the river, to say that the forward base camp was only ten miles from the falls that Sacajawea had told them about. They would be in Shoshoni country any day now.

Captain Clark was more than happy. The news would perk up Sacajawea, and he had dreaded retracing his steps if they were on the wrong river branch. Clark went to see Sacajawea, who was bedded down in a lean-to made with the skin tent. She was much worse and looked like skin and bones. Captain Clark sat on the ground beside her. “You must get well now,” he said.

“I am sorry to be trouble.”

“No, no, we are sorry we cannot help you. All the men depend on you. We need you. We are coming to your people’s land. Your son needs you. And your man needs you. Without you he is nothing.”

My people, she thought. My people are near. We have reached the River That Scolds at All Rivers. Her eyes filled with tears.

“There, don’t get upset,” soothed Captain Clark. “Rest and get well.” York was squatting near the entrance.

“Watch over her,” said Captain Clark to York. “I’m going to send someone to bring some water from the sulfur spring we passed about six or eight miles back. I should have thought of it then.”

Several of the men volunteered, but Shannon was the one who took a pail and hurried off. When he returned, Captain Clark forced Sacajawea to drink almost a pint of the foul-smelling sulfur water, and then gave her a mixture of quinine, opium, and oil of vitriol. He spent the night nearby, with a great deal of anxiety, as she slept.

By morning she was perspiring, and her pulse was fuller and more regular. The crisis had passed.

Clark’s Journal:

June 29th Satturday 1805

…the rain fell like one voley of water falling from the heavens and gave us time only to get out of the way of a torrent of water which was Poreing down the hill in the River with emence force tareing everything before it takeing with it large rocks and mud, I took my gun and shot pouch in my left hand, and with the right scrambled up the hill pushing the Interpreters wife(who had a child in her arms) before me, the Interpreter himself makeing attempts to pull up his wife by the hand much scared and nearly without motion, we at length reached the top of the hill safe where I found my servent in serch of us greatly agitated, for our wellfar, before I got out of the bottom of the reveen which was a flat dry rock when I entered it, the water was up to my waste and wet my watch, I scercely got out before it raised 10 feet deep with a torrent which [was] turrouble to behold, and by the time I reached the top of the hill, at least 15 feet water …

BERNARD DEVOTO
, ed.,
The Journals of Lewis and Clark.
New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1953, p. 152.

W
hen the expedition reached the falls, they were faced with the unhappy prospect of an eighteen-mile portage. A hole for another cache was dug, and the white pirogue was hauled to the bank, the bungs removed, and the whole thing covered with leaves and branches after being tied to trees in the same manner as the larger red pirogue they had already hidden. The other canoes were brought as close to the falls as possible, to shorten the portage.

Eighteen miles around the falls was a long way to carry supplies, with the sultry wind and no trees to give shelter or firewood for cooking. But there would be plenty to eat. Thousands of buffalo, in one herd, went down to the falls to drink as Captain Clark watched. Elk, deer, and antelope roamed about, and there were rainbow trout, pike, cutthroats, bluebacks, and chub, all easy to catch from the river.

A base camp was set up at a place they called Portage Creek, and Sacajawea stayed there with Captain Clark, Charbonneau, York, Goodrich, and Ordway, so that she might benefit from the nearby sulfur spring. The portage began on June 20, 1805, the day Sacajawea was really on her feet once again.