Sacajawea (79 page)

Down the steep rocks that overhung the sea, the party followed Twiltch to the Tillamook village, where the great whale lay stranded on their shore. But Clark’s outfit was too late. The Tillamooks had stripped off everything that could either be eaten or boiled down for oil. Only the skeleton remained. Some of the Tillamooks were still there storing whale oil in bladders and the whale’s own entrails. Clark managed to buy three hundred pounds of blubber and a few gallons of oil by offering them brass buttons, tiny bits of wire, and a steel file.

Sacajawea walked, unhurried, around the huge skeleton, her tongue making clicking sounds within her mouth. Clark said it was a small whale, but it was the largest animal she had ever seen.

“The water must be very deep to have such huge creatures live in it,” she said to Charbonneau as she let Pomp walk inside the whale and peer between the rib bones.

“Femme,”
said Charbonneau with an authoritarian tone, “there are many monsters in the sea. Big ones like this eat the next big ones, like the seals. The seals eat the salmon, and the salmon eat the smelt. The smelt eat minnows. That’s what happens all the time in the sea. The big eat
les petites.”

“Why?” she asked, wondering why creatures could not live without fear for their lives.

“Pourquoi
? They are hungry. To swim all the time makes them hungry.”

“Ah,
ai.”
She studied the whale carefully so that she might be able to describe it to the People when she returned. I will return to the People with so much totell, she thought. It will be something to see their faces when I tell of this fish as large as a tepee.

Charbonneau pulled Pomp out of the path of some barefoot children where he had wandered. The children were walking logs in the brush to avoid the snakes that lay curled on the damp ground. A child sidled up to a sluggish snake and boosted a path through the weeds for himself with one toe.

“This is a place you like?” asked Twiltch, watching Charbonneau carefully. “You come over for a visit? Maybe we get up a stick game. Everybody likes the stick game.”

Charbonneau hitched Pomp a little higher on his hip, smiled so that his yellowish teeth showed in the sunlight, and said with hand signs that he would do that when he had the time, certainly.

“You bring round coins,” said Twiltch.

“You mean money?” indicated Charbonneau, astounded.

“Money,” answered Twiltch, not making any hand signs, but taking a buckskin sack off his belt and clanking it for the answer.

Charbonneau bent forward to see the contents.
“Capitaine!”
he yelled. “This here Chinook, he is a rich man.”

Clark looked over the sack of coins. “Looks like a lot of British Northwesters medals to me, and a couple Russian, and see here, a Spanish piece. Interesting, eh? This might be Chinese.” He held one up for a better look.

“He won them in the stick game,” said Charbonneau excitedly.

“Must be a lot of white trading going on up and down this coast. Yes, sir, maybe more than we have thought.”

“You have coins for the stick game?” Twiltch moved his hands fast.

“Non,
not me,” said Charbonneau with his hands.

“You can’t play?” said Twiltch, making a noise in his throat as if he had choked on something bitter.

There were five cedar cabins in this Tillamook village, which was beside a freshwater creek. Sacajawea called it Whale Creek and chased after Pomp, who made it a game to run between the lodges just out of his mother’s reach. The lodges were sunk four feet into theground and covered with ridgepoles making sloping roofs. The sides were boarded with rough slabs of cedar, laboriously split with elkhorn wedges and stone hammers. A door in the upper gable admitted the Tillamooks to their half-underground home by means of a ladder outside and another inside. Around the inner walls, pallets of rush mats were raised on scaffolds, two or three feet high. Under the pallets were skin boxes of dried berries, roots, nuts, and fish. In the center was the fireplace, six to eight feet long, sunk in the floor, and surrounded by a low cedar wall and mats for the family to sit on. The walls, lined with mats and cedar bark, formed a warm shelter.

Sacajawea saw large wooden bowls, spoons of horn, skewers and spits for roasting meat, and beautifully woven, watertight baskets. She noted that each squaw carried a knife fastened to her right thumb by a loop of rawhide and hidden under her robe when visitors came. These knives, bought from seafaring traders, were invaluable for digging roots, cutting wood, meat, and fish, splitting rushes for mats, baskets, and the tall crowned hats, and cutting animal skins.

Sacajawea’s mouth dropped open as she heard some Tillamooks talking with Twiltch. Interspersed among their native words were English: “damned rascal, musket, knife, son-of-bitch, powder, heave the lead, bloody redskins.” She asked questions, but they seemed to know no other words, or other foreign language. None had any idea where the traders had come from or where they went on their floating lodges; they just pointed southwest and shook their heads,
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then asked Sacajawea why she asked so many questions. “Are you chief of these men?” asked a Tillamook, who thought Sacajawea was bad-mannered for speaking out and asking too much. The Tillamooks turned their backs toward her, but Sacajawea broke in unexpectedly, using hand signs and the jargon she had picked up.

“I just want to ask one more thing. Do you set aside anything for trading? For instance, do you save spuck
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pelts to trade for these?” She pointed to three rusty British muskets leaning against a lodge and a brass kettle in the yard.

Now the Tillamooks were all nonplussed, not knowing whether to ignore her and talk with only Captain Clark, or to answer her last question.

“This tribe and my tribe both collect weasels and spuck for trading with the inhabitants of the floating lodges.” Twiltch’s voice was brittle and unfriendly as he spoke for the Tillamooks. The Tillamooks then grunted an imperious affirmative and stepped away from her and closer around Captain Clark and his men.

This tribe is touchy, Sacajawea said to herself. I will be more careful. She looked up in time to see Pomp slide down a mud-slick bank and dive, head first, into the creek. She ran to pull him out, all the time thinking, I have committed another discourtesy. I have not kept my thoughts on my baby, who is slippery as a fish, sliding from my eyes the moment I take an interest in something else.

“You stupid
femme!”
yelled Charbonneau. “You are not here as an interpreter. You came along as the cook.”

“I think you are to be the cook also, as on the trail to this place. We both turn the meat.”

“I am not doing squaw’s work,” he said sullenly, looking away into space. “And make your child stop hollering. I hate that noise. God curse him. He’s wet. Do something with that mess!”

She removed the baby’s clothing, wrapped him in her blanket, and slung him over her shoulder, saying to herself, Thank the Great Spirit for keeping the truth of this baby’s wetness from his father. She built up the cooking fire. Pomp slept the rest of the afternoon while his mother cooked and the men stayed on at the Tillamook village and held a council. Sacajawea put chunks of elk meat on sticks over the fire and turned them at intervals to roast evenly. Curious how that huge fish came out of the sea just at this time. Is it an omen? Strange how he landed when I was here with the white men so I could look at him. No one has ever seen a whale on this beach before. It is sad! The fish has no future, and we can know nothing of his past, only of this, now. One thing is certain, he is a part of the land now, forever.

Her ears heard almost imperceptible approaching footsteps. The footsteps stopped behind the rise going to the white man’s camp. Then she heard Pat Gass’svoice. “There is good indication the Russians and Spanish have not been here too often.”

And Chief Red Hair’s voice. “Janey was the one to find out the Tillamooks and Clatsops store up weasels and spuck for trade with incoming ships. I think we can get this trade in the hands of the United States. I believe that is exactly what Tom Jefferson had in mind when he sent us out here. Damn those Tillamooks for their customs! I would have liked Janey to sit in on that meeting with them. Her questions are pertinent.”

The men, Sacajawea, and Pomp went back to the salt camp on January 9, spent the night there, and the next day returned to Fort Clatsop.

Two days later, the Clatsop chief, Comowool, from the village on the south bank of the Columbia, and Chief Comcommoly, from the north side, came to visit the white chiefs. Clark was ready with more questions about ships and traders. The native chiefs huddled beside the fire in the parade ground of Fort Clatsop. Comcommoly was muffled high about the face in a threepoint blanket from the Hudson’s Bay Company, so that only his hooked nose and his beady right eye showed above it. Comowool’s shoulders were bare. His legs were covered by a pair of moth-eaten navy blue woolen trousers.

Clark pointed to the royal blue blanket. “Who brought this?”

Comcommoly raised his hand and made signs, saying the name “Haley” and indicating, ‘Three masts brings presents. We like him.”

“Tell me when he will be back,” said Clark.

“Three moons.”

Clark nodded, then prodded the men more. “Name others who come in ships to trade. Tell me something about them.”

Comcommoly’s face wrinkled with a smile as Droui Hard sat beside Captain Clark and spoke fluent jargor with him. “Maybe we’ll learn something today,” Droui Hard said as an aside to Clark, and he gave both of the men a pair of gray wool socks with the toes and heel completely worn out.

Comcommoly said, “Tallamon, not a trader; Callalamet, wooden leg; Fallawan, floating lodge has guns which killed some of my people. He does not trade now. Davidson, no trader, hunts elk; Skelley, only one eye.” The chief pointed to his own empty socket and was silent as the pipe was passed for smoking.

Finally Chief Comowool shrugged his bare, scarred shoulders and shifted his weight on the woven backrest he had brought with him.

“Moore, comes in four-masted ship, maybe he will be back in two moons to trade; Captain Youens, he will come in one moon for trading.”
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The chief went on with a weasely voice, “Swipton, Mackey, Jackson, Balch—all traders with three-masted ships.”

When the two chiefs left, Clark walked along the bay with his spyglass pointed out to the gray-green sea. He saw no ships, but he ran across a slough lined with hundreds of beautifully carved canoes. These were coffins, with burial gifts still around the passengers; the skeleton feet all faced the sunset. Clark passed two old Chinooks fishing with nets, and he pointed up toward the bayou. The old men shrugged; they did not know whose bones they all were. They indicated, “Those old, old people. Long ago the skin broke open, and they lay in their lodges, on the sand, in the brush.”

The other old man bowed his head, his hands moving quickly, “There was great mourning along the river at one time.”

Clark guessed that hundreds of Chinooks were cut down long ago by smallpox.

It was much milder than it had been at Fort Mandan the winter before, but the continual rain, fog, and murky skies were depressing. Boredom was a problem, created by the sedentary routine in the wake of months of strenuous activity and danger on the westbound journey. The captains did all they could to keep everyone busy, but this was not always possible, and onerous chores were resented. Sacajawea, York, and a couple of the men sewed moccasins from the elk hides they dressed until they had an average of about ten pairs per person. Saccgawea saw moccasins in her sleep. Any excuse was used for a change of pace from the daily routine.

On February 11, York announced after the morningmeal, “This is to be a celebration for the first birthday of Master Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, known to us as Pomp.”

The men sang and danced with Pomp during the day. Some told him stories, or held him on the back of the dog, Scannon, so that he could have a “pony” ride. The dinner was elk’s tongues and candle-smelt. At the finish, York brought out a large round sheet of flat bread made from wapato root and topped by one elk-tallow candle. Charbonneau complained that the bread tasted sour.

“You feisty old bastard, put salt on it,” said John Potts.

Shannon put one of the Chinooks’ conical grass hats on the baby’s head. It almost covered his eyes, and he moved his head up and down, trying to see.

Lewis held up both hands for quiet. “I bought many of these hats and will give them to all of you to keep the sun and rain off your heads on the way back to the States.”

There was a loud clapping, and someone cried, “Hup, hup, hooray for our captain!”

Bratton came in from the saltmakers’ camp with a barrel of salt and a string of tiny yellow matched shells for Pomp to wear around his neck. Bratton was fed, and when he finished, he sat Pomp on the mess table to put the shells around his neck so that all could admire them. No one noticed that Pomp pushed the soft, halfburned tallow candle to the floor. Bratton took a step backward to look at Pomp, and his moccasins slipped in the greasy tallow.

“Hey!” he called, trying to hold himself up. He lost his balance and went down flat on his back. “Curses on the poxridden joker,” he said, trying to get up.

Some of the men close by were laughing at the way Bratton’s feet flew in the air as he fell. “You looked like a puppet on a string!” laughed Shannon.

“Shut up! My damn back is broken! I can’t move!” Bratton’s face was red and his upper lip wet with perspiration from the pain in his lower back.

Lewis carefully moved his own hands over Bratton’s back and said, “I don’t think any ribs are broken, and the vertebrae seem all right. Maybe it is a pinchednerve. I think York could try to pull out your spine and line it up. If it is a pinched nerve, that might just relieve it.”

“No way!” Bratton snapped. “Don’t touch me! The pain—oh God, it is great!” His head rolled to one side, and all the men were quiet as they saw that Bratton had passed out.