Sacajawea (70 page)

Sea otter began to appear in the river, which was now much of the time too dangerous for the canoes, and long, tedious portages had to be made. Charbonneau continually crabbed about carrying all his gear, including the bedding. “I’m not a packhorse,” he snorted. “There’s no great rush,” he told Sacajawea sharply. She hurried ahead of him with bedding and clothing under her arms and her baby slung across her back.

“We have all day,” he said, but not so loud.
“Jésus,
I work my tail off getting the gear around one bad spot in the river, only to find another one waiting down below. That’s sense now, ain’t it?” He waved his old black felt hat around in the air. “I suppose if there was forty-eight hours in a day you’d just keep packing for
les capitaines.”
He trotted after her, cackling.

She did not look around, but she could still hear him.
“Allez! Jésus,
why hurry?”

She felt hot and angry, but she knew she would do nothing, not even say much. She plodded along in her toed-in way, and at a clump of sword fern stopped to suck in a couple of mouthfuls of air and get hold of herself. One thing she could see: if her man could make her so angry when there was nothing she could do about it, then a lot of the men must get stirred up with him, too.

“Do we have to be punished like this only because we cannot swim?” asked Charbonneau at another point where the river had so many whirlpools and rapids that Captain Clark sent all the men who could not swim ashore, loaded with the firearms and precious papers, to haul them overland. Actually, Charbonneau was against almost any kind of work that made him perspire and breathe heavily.

“This is the most fatiguing business I’ve been engaged in this week,” admitted Pat Gass. “But I guess this shows those old buck Indians on the shores watching that we are men. Real men.”

These were the Chinook Indians they were passing by, and each village seemed dirtier than the last. They were crawling with lice and did not seem to notice

A handful of Chinook braves offered assistance with their horses on an especially long portage around the Celilo Falls. Then they took their own pay by pilfering the stores for hatchets and a canister of black powder. Below the falls were stacks of salmon, dried, pounded, packed in grass baskets, heaped into bales, stored in mat huts, and cached in deep holes in the sand.

“I’d take a basket of pounded salmon just to get even,” said Shannon, “but I hate to add more of that to my belly. I don’t think it’ll ever wash out of my hair or ears, and I’ll always smell this way.”

At the end of the evening meal. Chief Twisted Hair and his subchief, Tetoharsky, sat with Captain Clark, who had been talking with Sacajawea and bouncing Pomp on his lap.

“We want two horses,” said Twisted Hair. “We do not trust the Chinooks, and we want to get out of here. You saw how they took your goods without asking. We are much afraid of the men who live beyond this part of the river. They fight over nothing and make war with everyone who passes.” They made hand signs to indicate they had been growing uneasy for some time about the Chinooks.

Captain Clark sent York to trade for two horses for the Nez Percé guides. “We’ll smoke the pipe before you leave,” suggested Clark.

Twisted Hair looked pleased and said he would conduct the ceremony according to his custom. “This is the time for you to smoke, and anyone can talk on whatever serious subject he wants to. The woman can also talk. Don’t talk too long.” He looked pointedly at Sacajawea. “Just say what you want to say if you have a notion. Just say a few words.” Now he looked at Captain Lewis. “You can talk again. Don’t talk too fast.” He looked at Drouillard, who interpreted his speech. “If it is the Great Spirit’s will, you will all live long. If you talk out your words too fast, you won’t live long; that is what we all believe. When you go visiting us on your way back over the mountains, if we don’t give you a gift, that’s all right. If we give you too much too often, you might not live long. If you get horses on the warpath, don’t go again too soon. You might get killed. Conserve what you have. Do everything in a measured way. The Great Spirit wanted us to live on this earth, and here we are. These are the things that the Great Spirit gave us—the camass, the sand and salmon, and deer, and other things—and we must take care of them. We cannot throw away or waste anything. We cannot know what is going to happen in the future.”

Tetoharsky began, “This is your time to talk. We are not in a hurry. If you have a story to tell, tell it. I would like to leave before the sun is in the sky one more time. I want to see my woman and her children.”

Drouillard spoke. “I would like to see the Pacific Ocean. How do the rest feel about that?”

There was much nodding of heads, and then Captain Lewis spoke. “I am going to get a hundred pounds of ammunition out tonight and make sure everyone knows where it is.”

Si Goodrich said, “Good idea, in case these Chinooks are not too friendly like the old chief here says.”

Captain Clark thought this an opportunity to make peace between the downriver villages and those on the upper river, and he begged Chief Twisted Hair to stay.

Several of the men made some remark on these matters, then Shannon proposed that they all shake hands with the two Nez Percés to show their appreciation and friendship.

Sacajawea stood up, but Charbonneau pulled on her skirt, saying, “Sit down,
femme.
None of the other fellows stood up to make their speech. Why should you?”

She scowled at him, then looked at the Nez Percés and said in English, slowly, “We have spoken. We are friends. Goodnight and thank you.” That broke up the ceremony. York was back with the horses.

Before sunup, the expedition was ready to move farther downriver and saying farewell to the Nez Percés. “We go back to look after the white men’s horses staying at our village,” called Chief Twisted Hair, waving both arms and bouncing on his horse.

After Chief Twisted Hair’s warning about the warlike nature of the Chinooks in front of them, the captains were wary, but the ammunition Captain Lewis issued was never used. The Chinooks were infested with lice, squinty-eyed, excellent at swiping small items, but quite friendly. Many of the Chinooks flattened their babies’ heads with a board attached to the cradleboard, and their language was a series of tongue clacks, which was hard for Drouillard to distinguish.

On November eighth the ocean was sighted. “Great joy in camp,” wrote the usually unemotional Clark. “We are in view of the Ocian, this great Pacific Ocian which we have been
so
long anxious to see, and the roreing or noise made by the waves brakeing on the rockey shores [as I suppose] may be heard disti[n]ctly.” The estimated distance the explorers had traveled from St. Louis to the ocean was four thousand one hundred miles.

From
Sacajawea,
by Harold P. Howard. Copyright 1971 by the University of Oklahoma Press, p. 83.

A
t the Short Narrows of the Columbia River, the water rushed through steep rock walls not more than forty-five yards apart. Travel here was dangerous, but a portage around the rapids was next to impossible because the banks were too difficult to climb. Captain Clark took the riverman, Cruzatte, with him for a walk along the narrow shore to examine the wild water.

“This is a bad stretch,” said Clark.

“We’ve had worse,” said Cruzatte. “It’s not going to be bad as long as we can let the canoes down with ropes. It’s when we have to take them out of the water that it’s misery.”

The canoe in which Cruzatte paddled stern reached some willows, then was caught in a stronger current. The men in it bent to their paddles. Still it swung sharply away from the bank.

“They have gone too far!” shouted Clark.

“Watch out!” someone else yelled.

“Work her in! Work!”

“Make into the shore! Hey—they’ll need a rope!” called Captain Lewis.

The backs of Cruzatte, Gass, Labiche, and Colter were bowed under the strain. The canoe shot from beneath them. It stood up on its stern, then spun like a twig, danced, and lunged through foaming water with the four men clinging to it. It swept in toward the bank, danced, slipped up on a rock, and caught. Cruzatte, Gass, Labiche, and Colter were on the rock. Then, chestdeep in dangerous water, Cruzatte pulled the canoe in close to shore. “Hang on!” Lewis shouted to the other three, then swung a braided elk-skin rope over their heads.

The rope sailed across the water, and Gass was the first to catch it. The four men, chest-deep in the water, braced themselves as the rope jerked taut. Then the dugout was slapped violently across the water and against the shore. Hands waited there to grab them and drag them to safety. Taking up the rope from Captain Lewis, Cruzatte carefully brought the other four canoes through safely, one at a time.

Charbonneau commented on the fast-swirling water, “Looks like a horrid, agitated gut, swelling, boiling, and whirling in every direction.” That evening he brought out his French harp, to the delight of the expedition and the local Chinooks. Cruzatte played his violin in accompaniment until Charbonneau’s wind gave out.

The day after the Short Narrows was also bad because the Columbia passed through hard, rough, black rock, from fifty to one hundred yards wide, swelling and boiling all the time. The men called this the Great Shoot.
¹
Here the river dropped sixty feet in two miles. Cruzatte admitted the canoes could not make it through and doubted if a man would get through alive. The men began the portage over the rock-strewn shore, along the edges of the cliffs, sweating, panting, chanting, wet with spray, half the time waist-deep in dangerous water, numbed to the hips. They made camp at a flat place that had been used recently as a camp by a tribe of Chinooks. When the men cleared away the dried grass and fish skins, they discovered they were covered with fleas and had to strip and duck in the cold water in order to get the insects off their legs and bodies.
²

Across the river was a small encampment of Chinooks. Their lodges were different from any yet seen. They were made of wood with roofs, a door, and gables, like frontier cabins. In the front of each lodge were stacks of salmon.

“Ten thousand pounds,” wrote Captain Clark in his journal that evening, “all dried, baled with twisted grass rope, and probably bound for traffic further down the river. What a smell.”

Moseying near Charbonneau, Reuben Fields said with a teasing glint in his eyes, “Hey, when the wind comes over the water just right, I swear I can smell your boots on the opposite bank.”

“My boots,” replied Charbonneau, squinting his eyes to peer through the slits, “will smell the way you do every day when they have gone through this damn river country.
Poulet merde!”
He held his nose and walked away, not wishing to enlarge on the subject.

The terrain began to change, and more trees grew along the riverbanks. Mountains, large and glistening white with snow-covered peaks, were seen ahead. The expedition passed ancient burial places where the deac were stacked one upon the other and the whitened skull were placed in a circle on a high platform in the trees On either side of the river channel they saw rocky pal isades, green-mossed and dripping. Waterfalls came down the slopes and fell in a rainbow mist to the river

One morning Pat Gass felt his head after passing under a burial platform beside a falls and said, “I sin cerely hope it is the mountain mist that bedews my to] hair, and not some disintegrating remnants of some one’s great-grandmother.”

A river flowing into the Columbia was named after Baptiste LePage, and another after Pierre Cruzatte. Or the rocks around these rivers lay many sleeping hair seals. Sacajawea pointed them out to Pomp, saying “See, the river people are out there taking a rest.”

One evening a local Chinook stole Charbonneau’ old blue capote and hid it under the roots of a tree to pick up later. Sacajawea found it and took it to Char bonneau. He scolded her for letting his coat get full of muck and wet leaves and crawling with fleas. “Go wash it!” he yelled.

The Chinook tribes they now saw tattooed their face: by putting charcoal under the skin in intricate design: in the belief that it improved their looks.

York was panting for breath when he found Char bonneau. “I’se been looking quite a spell for you,” Yorl said. “There’s this fellow who looks like his face was made permanent blue with huckleberry stain, with you coat rolled under his arm and moving, like he’s expecting to be shot, for the other side of camp.”

“My capote?”

“Did you trade him that coat for something? Man you’se going to need it. The nights are already cold.”

“My
femme
found it. Damn thieving Chinooks! Hey don’t tell her I know a Chinook swiped it.”

“Why not?”

Charbonneau acted like he did not hear the last question and did not seem in a mood for conversation, so York sauntered on to talk to some of the other mer about the peculiarities of the Chinooks.

“Did you notice how all those squaws look alike? can’t tell one squaw in a family way from another in a similar condition. Do you suppose they all belong to the same ladies’ aid society? Watch! See how they go around sucking in and measuring each other with their eyes? I’ll bet my beaded moccasins and woolen stockings they’re getting ready to unload all at once. Each squaw will have a papoose to carry around to be admired at the same time—almost like what happens back home when the church ladies carry their prize johnnycake in a fancy covered dish to the parsonage for a circle meeting, all holding up their creation for the admiration of all and feeling good for the effort put into making something beautiful.”

The men laughed. Thus reinforced, York went on, “And can you guess the diet of these folks? They eat olives. It’s a kind of pickled acorn, flavorsome enough if you don’t know what they was pickled in, and they eat dogs—that’s why they raise so many inside their villages—and then they have a chaser, which is a kind of watery stew made of fish eyes. Listen to this: I seen one big buck eat fire. Honest! He licked it right off a chunk of pine pitch and snorted a big stream of it eight foot out into the air. I think he eats it on his boiled fish like it was pepper sass.”