Sacajawea (76 page)

He crossed the rocks beyond the beach and walked in the same direction. He stopped and arranged some of the baggage and inspected the repaired canoe. Then he talked to Bill Werner, who was on south guard duty. He felt he had his emotions in control. He vowed not to let himself be carried away by his heart, not to let his guard down again. He was a captain of the United States Army and responsible for this outfit. His first duty was to his men and to his co-captain. Janey, God bless her, had a man.

After the storm, dozens of huge birds swooped down for the easy food. The men called the big birds vultures, but they were larger than any vulture anyone had ever seen before. Baptiste LePage shot one down, and it measured nine and a half feet from wing tip to wing tip, three feet, ten and a half inches from the point of its bill to the tip of its tail. The tail itself was fourteen and a half inches long, and the head and beak six and a half inches.
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York added the vulture to the three hawks and three ducks the hunters brought in later that afternoon for the evening meal. The hunters had seen elk sign, and the news brightened everyone’s spirits.

Captain Lewis managed to get a small canoe across to Point William, only to find that there were swamps on the south shore that would make overland travel impossible. He turned back to Meriwether Bay
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and found a site along a little river called Netual
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by the Chinooks. This place was ten miles from the Pacific Ocean, but within hearing of the dark, angry breakers. Selecting a high point on the west bank of the Netual, so that the permanent camp would be out of swampy land and the incoming high tide, Captain Lewis went back for the men to start work on shelter and fortifications.

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Captain Clark and Drouillard walked northwest, exploring the coast. They were often in mud and water to their hips, walking through bogs where the weight of a man would shake a half acre of ground. Drouillard was eager to explore and leave the cedar cutting for the winter cabins to the others. Clark was dubious about finding anything in the way of game, so he kept his notebook out so that he could sketch an unusual tree or plant. Clark was feeling a little uncertain about himself at this time, but he was eager to see this new country and talk to natives he had not seen before. Besides, the farther away he was from Janey, the better. If Janey wanted him for some silly advice or to answer some fool question, she could think of someone else. As for this exploring, if he didn’t find anything he would quit, even though he had told Drouillard they might be gone a couple of days.

It was afternoon when they came upon a small group of Chinooks. One of the men came forward and shook hands with both Clark and Drouillard, cleared his throat, and said, “Sturgeon very good.” After the initial surprise wore off, the men felt disappointment because apparently that was the only English the man knew. Drouillard sat with the man and used hand signs and jargon as they passed a pipe back and forth. The man said that once in a while the Chinooks attacked the white men that came off the ships, but they had not planned to attack the men of the expedition because there was not so much to gain. The expedition did not have many trading goods the Chinooks wanted. Drouillard found that the Chinooks were mainly interested in alcohol.

Around dusk they found a quiet, grassy spot protected from the wind where Clark could write in his notebook and sort out the day’s leaf and twig specimens. Silently several Clatsops, from a village on the south side of a line of boulders, crept close to the two men to observe them. Clark saw them and drew rough sketches of these silent observers. They were dark, their complexions running to deep brown rather than reddish. All seemed fat, and their faces had a combination of stupidity and covetousness. The females were tattooed on their lower lip with charcoal embedded under theskin, which left them with a line of dusky blue, as though they had spent the day in an elderberry patch.

The next morning Clark and Drouillard visited the Clatsop village. The people knew they were Clatsops, but somewhere in all the years of their existence they had forgotten or found it unnecessary to know the name of their particular tribe. They used strings of mussel shells ground into cylindrical beads for money, but were willing to go along with the barter system if they could purchase metal fish hooks. Their houses were built from the abundant supply of cedar planks and were window-less and rotten smelling. This was partly due to unwashed bodies and no ventilation, but mainly because of the small, dried smelt that were fastened by the tail in shell and pottery bowls and placed all along the walls. When burned they gave off a white light.

“They are as good as our candles, if you like the smell of putrefying fish,” commented Drouillard.

They ate this little candlefish with the villagers. Clark called them “anchovie,” and put several on the end of a wooden stick to roast. They were so fat they needed no additional sauce.

These Clatsops lived mostly on fish. They did trap some game and killed it with a bow and arrow at a range of from two to five feet. Clark and Drouillard watched them trap wild ducks by setting decoys on a brush-covered hole in the marshes, hiding under it until a flock landed, then grabbing their legs and pulling them underwater to drown.

They learned the Clatsop trick of treating the little creeks with a few bushels of hemlock bark. Then the stupefied speckled trout would float up by the bucketful.

Vegetable products were scarce; besides wild crab-apple, the Clatsop women picked a coppery-tinged wild sorrel, which, after cooking, Clark thought had the flavor of rhubarb.

The second evening at the Clatsop village Clark brought out his sketch materials. His first subject was a child sleeping in a cradleboard with a flattening board covering the top half of its head. While sketching, Clark thought of the ease with which these people lived, with food and shelter and clothing at their fingertips. Yet, he could think of nobody who would trade places with them. They had not perfected any great skill in arts or crafts or thinking; their easy living was not conducive to creativity. On the other hand they were not warlike and did not even try to explore new places along the coastline.

By the third day both Clark and Drouillard had seen enough of these self-contained, contented people, so the two men headed for the expedition’s camp. They discussed the unknown past and future of the indolent Clatsop band. Had the Clatsops’ ancestors landed on the shore in some small craft, or had they trekked overland in small hunting parties in the prehistoric past? Had these people once been warriors and recently tired of that uncertain life? At present they seemed to be going nowhere. If they all died out suddenly no other tribe would grieve. This one group had followed a trail to nonentity. On the other hand, the men argued, these people had no stress and were happy with the way things were.

Clark and Drouillard noticed the strong mixture of odors from the wild flowers and vegetation that hung in the thick forest’s unmoving air as they made their way back to camp. The balsam poplar buds were covered a glistening, freeze-resistant, winter coat of resin, making them look as large as peace medals. This ball of sticky resin was delightfully fragrant. The mosquitoes were a great annoyance and didn’t seem repelled by an application of rancid bear’s oil.

Back at camp the two men could not contain their curiosity and asked Sacajawea what she knew about the woody substance a few of the idle Clatsops chewed that turned their saliva blood red. She thought a moment, then said it was probably from the inner bark of the red alder and that the people probably chewed it to ward off diarrhea. Intrigued by this information Clark and Drouillard made a study of the alder that grew as large as three feet thick in every damp place. They found that the fresh wood was satiny white, but turned cherry red when it had been aged. Drouillard guessed that the bright color was tannic acid in the alder’s sap, which also explained the medicinal power of its inner bark.

During the weeks the men worked to get the winter cabins finished, they were troubled with dysentery, colds, aching muscles, colic, and boils because they worked out in the constant rain.

Clark and Drouillard tried the red alder medicine to relieve the distress of their dysentery. They soon found it worse than the disease. The moist, inner bark was so astringent that their mouths puckered for hours and the red juice made them look like they were bleeding to death. The soft wood tasted harshly bitter and biting and left their teeth ugly brown, which both men feared would become a permanent discoloration like the Clatsops’.

“This here timber makes the finest puncheons I ever saw,” said Pat Gass, with a carpenter’s appreciation of good white pine and cedar. “They can be split ten feet long and two feet broad, not more than an inch and a half thick.”

The logs were rolled up Boonesboro-fashion into winter shelters, made from some abandoned Clatsop boards that the Indians gave permission for the white men to use, fleas and all. By mid-December the men were chinking and mud-daubing the cabins. Using elk hides for weatherboards, they tightened up the cabins and began cutting doors.

The hunters had found plenty of elk by then, and the roasted meat helped cure the dysentery and colic. Mallard ducks settled wherever there was swampy ground, and the men managed to bushwhack a few with guns. Then they began to find plenty of deer, but complained because they were so small.
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Sacajawea stayed to herself, mending the tattered clothing and sewing new shirts, trousers, and moccasins as the hides became available. The issue of where she was going and whether she was headed directly there did not arise, for she knew she would spend time somehow—sleeping, eating, loafing—so she might as well spend it here; she would not die any sooner because she was here among white men. What is ahead in life is usually unknown.

She did not want to be troubled by the problems of her man, Charbonneau. She did not love him, but herlife because of him was good, so she felt a loyalty toward him. She wanted to be as free of him as possible so that he could not cast a net over her made of the strings of his dependence on her. Yet it was this avoidance of Charbonneau’s net that had run her directly into the strings of affection woven by Chief Red Hair.

It was to some extent to take her mind from him that she turned back to her memories. Those of her early childhood were pleasant. The memories of her later childhood were sharp and painful. Since her life with the white men, she had felt a belonging and a realization of their hold on her. They had their claws in her, like the sharp nails of a hawk fastened into a ground squirrel. It was not their conscious effort, but their endemic kindness. This kindness would remain with her, later not a memory of the past but of the present. It clinched her existence and her nature and twisted her, and she resented it in a kind of tender and anguished way. Why do I want to be like these white men and still be one of the People, especially when my childhood is a chaos of events?

By Christmas Day the fort was nearly done and the expedition men warm and dry, their colds nearly gone. They were living in the most luxurious quarters ever erected in Oregon country by 1805. They had spring water close by and wood enough down the draw. The cabins were sixteen by thirty feet. The south cabin contained a huge tree trunk that could not be removed. It was Shannon who had the great idea of smoothing off its top and making a table, and since it was rooted to the ground, the cabin had to be built around it.
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The doors of all eight cabins faced inward on a parade ground, forty-eight by twenty feet. The outer walls were joined by a stockade, eight feet high, with a gate and sentry box at the south end. The north buildings, for the noncommissioned men, were divided into three rooms. Each room was sixteen feet square with a fireplace in the middle. The south building had two officers’ rooms, each with a fireplace, and a separate storehouse, which was good—both for them and for the field mice and the wild rats that sneaked in at night. The sentry box was manned night and day. The gate was locked every night.

One sergeant and three privates constituted the guard, which changed each day at sunrise. All the natives were asked to leave at sundown, with the exception of one party of Chinooks caught barefoot in a freezing snowstorm late one afternoon.
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Captain Lewis had forbidden the “thieving Chinooks” to enter the fort without a special permit. Even on Christmas Day the guard was alert and stopped a small man with a hawklike face. He was bare to the waist and his breechclout seemed too big for his body, but he looked as though he had the strength and vitality to match even bigger clothing. He, like any Chinook, smelled of fish and carried lice. He said, “No Chinook!”

“Who, then?” asked the guard.

“Clatsop,” the man said, entering with wapato roots and cranberries.

“Beautiful,” said Captain Lewis, looking over the berries, “and they come on Christmas Day.” He gave the man a couple of files for the trade. The man squatted on his heels and poked the berries, not yet ready to leave.

While he was poking, Lewis called Drouillard to use his jargon with the man. The man puttered around the roots and rearranged them and chatted with Drouillard in a friendly manner, but rarely said more than “Yes” or “I think so.”

Finally he laced his fingers across his middle. “You know,” he said, “I talked those ignorant Klatskannins out of an attack on your camp. I told them your men were better hunters. They told me you would let the fish in the river die of old age while you tramp in the swamps after ducks and use the shooting-stick for the deer. But I think you know what you are doing. I have never seen such a lodge for keeping the wind out as this.” Then he settled back on his heels, looking small in his weather-bleached clout, but by his manner, clearly at ease with the strangers.

“What name do you go by?” asked Drouillard, all the time wondering if the Klatskannins were a large tribe and if there were any others in the vicinity who had similar ideas.