Sacajawea (87 page)

York brought clover tea, but he refused to swallow. “He has a nasty earache there,” York said, shaking his head slowly.

Clark came to look at Sacajawea’s child. He brought hot wool packs for his neck and ear. He eased the pain with drops of warm oil mixed with laudanum in the child’s left ear.

“The Lord, he knows this little soldier is sick,” York comforted Sacajawea. “He’s watching and going to keep him safe.”

“I want him to be a man like Chief Red Hair,” she murmured.

During the night, she thought of a medicine man who could work a chant for a sore throat. But she did not even know how he would work up such a thing. She thought about what she might do and remembered her grandmother. Quietly Sacajawea found a place between two tall birches, a place where she stood among the wild green ferns under the night sky. She stood quietly, drained, letting herself go, letting her thoughts flowwhere they would. The Great Spirit is aware of my child’s sickness, she thought. Her mind turned to the healthy child he had been. For many moments her brain would not clear. Then, as if under a hypnotic spell, she heard the child’s laughter over and over. She thought, Time flows over some as the Kooskooskee flows over leaves and flowers that are whirled away and gone. Time flows over others as over a firm stone that does not float away. My son is like a stone. He is not a delicate flower.

She stepped slowly away from the clump of ferns and birches. She was satisfied that her continued love and care would bring her child through the bad sickness to good health. She slept peacefully for several hours.

In the gray, misty dawn, Clark made an onion poultice for the reddened swelling under the child’s ear and gave him a cream of tartar slurry to swallow. Pomp had to be coaxed. He could not swallow comfortably.

The next morning, Clark made a fresh poultice and let the child sleep. Sacajawea stayed close, letting Clark take care of the ailing natives alone or with the sporadic help of York.

“Don’t think me selfish not helping you with the sick natives,” she said once, “but I cannot leave Pomp today.”

“Janey, you must stay with him,” said Clark. “You must tell me if there is any change, either way, better or worse. This child is more important to us than all those Nez Percés with aching backs.”

The child slept, and she sat beside him in a makeshift lean-to of hides and pine branches. She noticed the Nez Percés as they waited their turn to be doctored by Clark.

The men were stout, portly, good-looking, rather like her man, Charbonneau, without his facial hair. They were better dressed than the Chinooks, Clatsops, or Walla Wallas. Their tunics were clean and white, as were their leggings of deerhide. They wore bandeaus of foxskins like turbans on their brows. The women were small, with good features, and they dressed neatly in tight-fitting woven-grass caps and long buckskin skirts, whitened with clay.

Then she watched several small boys carrying a wicker coop with some young eaglets from one lodge toanother. They raised the birds for their tailfeathers. She daydreamed of Pomp dressed in white leather with a vermilion breastplate.

The child whimpered, and she darted quickly to his couch. She rocked him in her arms and sang to him. His feverish eyes opened, sought restlessly for some object, and rested on four black puppies nipping at the heels of two small girls. The girls began to run after Lewis’s big black Newfoundland, Scannon. They were trying to show him the puppies. It dawned on Sacajawea that the puppies were, in fact, Scannon’s offspring. The huge dog stopped and sniffed at the pups. Then he pushed one off its feet, then another and another. He barked for them to get up, and he romped through the camp with the puppies following. And so—he is proud of his children, thought Sacajawea.

Pomp’s eyes shifted and rested on Clark, who had come into the lean-to. “My throat hurts,” he whispered.

“I know,” Clark replied quietly. He looked at the child’s swollen neck. Pomp cried out when his fingers passed over the left side. “Get Charbonneau to hunt more onions.”

Sacajawea laid the child in Clark’s arms and ran to find her man.

“That boy, he is only cutting teeth,” said Charbonneau at first. But seeing how concerned she was, he followed her to the lean-to and looked on as Clark fed Pomp another dose of warm water with cream of tartar. Much of the slurry trickled from the corners of his mouth.

“The neck, she is puffed. My son is ill. Do something now, for he must get well!”

“Well, now, you get some onions,” said Clark, giving the child to his mother. He reluctantly left to help York give out more eyewater and laudanum to the ailing natives.

Charbonneau then turned to face Sacajawea. “Do not give the boy any of those dirty Indian cures, like putting some magic bone on his neck or plastering it with horse dung. I’ll get a beaver castoreum to rub on the redness and cover it with the beaver’s tail. That is the best cure for this poison.”

She shook her head at the old French-Canadian coureur de bois treatment and shook her finger at the onion poultice. “Chief Red Hair’s medicine is best.”

Charbonneau sulked off with a sharp digging stick so that he could easily ply the onions from the dark loam.

The following day, Pomp was no better, but he was no worse. He was too warm and fussed a great deal. Twice Clark applied a fresh onion poultice, and twice he threw out a wad of beaver fur that Charbonneau had slipped in the swath of bandaging that held the poultice.

Sacajawea ate little during mealtimes, but hurried back to see if her child would begin nursing. She held him as though trying to pour a bit of her strength into his weakening, feverish body. Clark managed to get a few drops of water into him several times a day. The child needed fluids badly. Discarding the onion poultices, Clark tried a salve of pine resin, beeswax, pitch, and bear’s oil.

Within a week, the abscess began to ooze. Clark decided not to lance it because he was certain the tissue would scar less if he did not cut it open to drain. He was certain that the child would have a large enough permanent scar from this infected mastoid. As the abscess continued to drain, Clark continued to apply the hot pine resin.

When the abscess stopped oozing, Charbonneau was certain his son would be well. He begged Sacajawea to leave him on the pine couch and help with food preparation for the outfit. Sacajawea would not go. She rocked the child back and forth as he slept. Sometimes he shivered in his sleep. Other times he perspired profusely. She could see his body was no longer plump, and his rosy brown coloring was only a grayish tan.

The day that Pomp eagerly searched for her breast and nursed hungrily, Sacajawea, too, was certain her child would be well. His fever now subsided quickly. Even though he was weak, he smiled and chattered baby talk. Sacajawea took him out in the warm afternoon sunshine to see the doves cooing and the camass flowers covering the prairies like a deep blue lake. She picked yellow glacier lilies growing at the edge of the pine forest, the pink moccasin flower, and the pairedyellow flowers of the honeysuckle. She showed Pomp the delicate petals and stamens. Then she looked eagerly for the tall, dense racemes of beargrass with its slippery, grasslike leaves, a sure sign that the snow had receded from the foothills. Returning to camp, she nuzzled the warm body of her child and thought, I could hold him in my arms forever.

For years he would be her most precious and prized possession. In a country where material goods were few, men found some token or talisman to prize above all other things. It was their innate instinct to have something, no matter how small or insignificant. Often a warrior prized one certain arrow and would give his woman or daughter up before he would loose that prized possession. A man could always take another woman and have another child, but never another arrow with the magical powers of the prized one.

The child meant many things to Sacajawea. He was of her flesh, and he was white, like her beloved Chief Red Hair. He was a symbol of joy and laughter. He had gone with her on this long trail into many strange nations, and his eyes had covered much land, sky, and water. He had endured hardship, and shared in the plenty the men had enjoyed. He could speak words of several languages. And she knew, as a mother knows, he would be great among her people and among the white men.

Clark’s Journal:

Tuesday June 17th 1806

our baggage being laid on Scaffolds and well covered, we began our retrograde march at one
P.M.
haveing remaind. about three hours on this Snowey mountain, we returned by the rout we had advanced to hungary Creek, which we assended about two miles and encamped, we had here more grass for our horses then the proceeding evening, yet it was but scant, the party were a good deel dejected, tho’ not as much so as I had apprehended they would have been, this is the first time since we have been on this tour that we have ever been compelled to retreat or make a retrograde march.

BERNARD DEVOTO
, ed..
The Journals of Lewis and Clark.
New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1953, p. 405.

T
he expedition moved several miles down Commearp Creek on May 18, then turned north along the Kooskooskee, which was very high and overflowing its banks at many places because of the melting mountain snows. The next day, the expedition forded the river at a wide, shallow spot and swam the horses over, with the baggage tied securely to their backs. York found a circular area about thirty feet in diameter sunk nearly four feet in the ground and surrounded by a three-and-a-half-foot-high wall of earth.

“That is something very old,” agreed Sacajawea. “It was used for defense against enemy attack. Many men could hide inside behind that earth wall.”

Captain Clark suggested the men erect shelters of sticks and grass facing outward, and within the sunken area erect a shelter from skins and place the baggage there.

The Nez Percés told the group that they could not cross the mountains for three or four weeks at the earliest. “The snow is too deep to walk in, and there is no forage for your horses.” Each day the men looked at the snow-covered Bitterroots and confirmed the Nez Percés’ statements among themselves.

The free time available while waiting for the snow to melt gave the men considerable relaxation. Footraces were run with the Nez Percés, and many dances were held. Baptiste LePage and Charbonneau went to the Nez Percé village to test their skill at trading elk’s teeth and squirrel tails for more camass roots. “Janey will pound those roots dry, and York will make that good, crisp flat bread,” said LePage.

During this time Shannon, Collins, and Potts traded for a Nez Percé canoe, which they used to cross the Kooskooskee to trade in another river village for
kouse
roots to use as vegetables. One day late in May when they landed on a narrow strip of beach, the canoe swung broadside against some trees and filled with water. Potts had to be pulled out because he could not swim. While pulling him out, Shannon and Collins had to leave a couple of blankets, a capote, and all their trading beadsin the bottom of the canoe so that they could fight the rapids. Shannon told Captain Lewis, “We lost all our goods, sir, but we saved good old Potts.”

When Charbonneau heard the story, he snorted, “Damn careless! Those blankets and things should have been tied in that canoe. They would be wet, but not lost for good.” Then, two days later, LePage and Charbonneau themselves lost a dressed elk skin, packets of vermilion paint, and their packs. They were going to trade for more camass roots, but they had not tied the packs on securely, and as they forded the river, the packs loosened and were lost in midstream.

That afternoon, both Lewis and Clark cut buttons off their threadbare blue Army coats and gave them to Hugh McNeal and Ben York, along with eye-water and pine salve to use in trading across the river. By evening, the two men had returned with three bushels of camass and some flat bread made of kouse-root flour.

That same afternoon, Drouillard came back from a trading mission to report that some Nez Percés had taken a couple of tomahawks that belonged to the expedition. “And one of those we all prized highly, because it belonged to Sergeant Floyd.
¹
Those God-cursed, thieving savages.”

Captain Clark could see Drouillard was in a temper and tried to calm him down. “Go back to those coots who stole the tomahawks and see if you can trade something to get them back.”

“That whole outfit stinks like polecats in rut! They make my guts boil,” said Drouillard.

“Here are some pink scallop shells Janey found on the beach above Fort Clatsop. They should catch their eye. Try to get the tomahawks back for these.” Clark handed the shells to Drouillard, who seemed to be calming down.

“For Christ’s sake, those men had better trade back those tomahawks. They are offal, but what can one expect from people who are childish and without manners. I’ll get them back. You can count on it!”

“That’s what I want to hear,” said Clark. “I’ll personally return Floyd’s tomahawk to his family when we get back to the States.”

I ought to put their heads on spikes, thought Droui-llard.. He did not say his thoughts aloud, though, because his fit of temper had somewhat subsided. It left altogether when the Nez Percés gave the tomahawks back for the scallop shells.

Each day, the captains watched the rising river and melting snows from the mountains. Bratton was so well now that he rode in the bareback horse races. Pomp ran about with Nez Percé children watching the games and pitching quoits.

One day a young woman, her hair tied back with a thong, brought her dark-skinned, kinky-haired newborn to show off proudly to Sacajawea. The new mother wore only a skirt and a leather vest carelessly untied over her breasts. “See, how big he is already! And he came two moons early,” she said proudly. “He is strong like the father.”

“Something good.
Skookumchuck,”
said Sacajawea, cradling the papoose and humming to him while he slept. She knew York had fathered this papoose on the westward trail. “He is called York?” asked Sacajawea.