Sacajawea (89 page)

The sky was milk-pale, the sun a mere ghostly disk. The world seemed hard, glassy, metallic, with no shadow, no depth or softness.

The cold cowed the dog, Scannon, and he lay close to the fire with his eyes partially shut.

“Iron freezes instantly to the skin,” said Drouillard. “Must be sixty below. If there was any sort of wind, I reckon we could not break camp. We’d have to bury ourselves all day in a hole. But we ought to make good time. Might even make Cut Nose’s camp by noon tomorrow.”

The hunters found one of the horses had foundered in a drift the night before and was frozen. They drank the blood from the animal’s throat and rested an hour. They carved as much meat as they could carry from the carcass and took it into camp. The next day they wentback for the horse. The others gathered firewood, roasted the meat, slept, and ate.

“I could spend some time in one of those smoke-filled lodges and not complain about choking to death,” said Pryor.

“How long you think this cold’ll last?” asked Shannon.

“Zut!
A couple days is enough!” answered Charbonneau, holding a mittened hand over his dripping nose. “Maybe three days, not more. Big freezes often come between the thaw and the real spring. In the north the Chippewas call it the Bear’s Dream. This cold pinches the old bear in her den and gives her bad dreams.”

The men were surprised that the violent weather, instead of numbing them, had put life into their veins. They walked stiffly, but felt as if they could go on for hours.

One day Charbonneau’s eyes burned with a different ache from that from the cook-fire smoke, and piercing flashes of pain shot through his head. The snow blindness kept him inside a lean-to for several days. He waited, with bandaged face turned in Sacajawea’s direction, for the times she left to turn the smoking horse meat or to gather wood, and then he sat in terror as the wilderness came toward him with gigantic steps. Once he was sure the wind had torn the lean-to away from his head; he tore off the bandage and rushed out to stumble into Sacajawea’s arms. He lost all sense of shame, following her, whimpering with the cold, while the others worked to keep him warm and fed.

During this waiting, Pryor and Windsor froze their feet and hands out hunting. Clark immersed their feet and hands in warm water. The men yelled out in pain. Sacajawea sat near watching. Suddenly she could take no more. She said sternly, “No warm water; do not bring those men near the fire; wait and let the strength in the rest of their body help heal and restore slowly.”

As the men’s feet thawed and blisters came on the skin, she opened the larger blisters with a sharp bone, heated momentarily over the fire, and in the night she crawled from her robe to lift their arms vertical, tying them upright with thongs to pine branches. Later—she seemed to know when it was needed, and was not theshy girl she had been last fall in these torturous mountains—she rubbed their legs and soothed their muscles and coaxed the lagging blood circulation.

Neither Clark nor Lewis interfered with her treatment. From what they knew of such bad frostbite, the men might have lost an arm or leg.

One morning Drouillard volunteered, “Shannon and I will go down to look for game and see if we can locate the Nez Percés.”

Clark agreed and found some forgotten beads in his pocket. He sent Joe Whitehouse along to buy salmon with the beads, in case they found some Nez Percés.

When the three men returned in two days, they had with them the brother of Chief Cut Nose and two other Nez Percé men, who had volunteered to serve as guides over the Divide for a fee of two rifles. Apparently no one wondered how three Nez Percé men were going to share or divide two rifles.

That evening the three Nez Percés, stripped down to their breechclouts, set fire to the lower branches of the pine trees around the camp. It took the chill off the mountain air, and transformed the trees into towering columns of flame.

Sacajawea woke her child to see the sight. The men were reminded of the Fourth of July celebration. The Nez Percés explained that this was done to bring fair weather for the journey ahead.

Gradually Windsor’s thawed hands came back into use and the pain in Pryor’s arms grew less and the muscles of his arms became obedient to their owner. On Windsor’s left wrist was a bracelet mark of healing blisters over the raw skin.

“That there is an emblem,” he said to Sacajawea. “There the mitten did not reach the end of the jacket sleeve, and the cold wind bit deep.” He stretched up both arms. “God, I’m thankful for good arms, fully restored. Janey, you knew when to pick each mischievous blister, when to lift the arms, when to rub them and tease and cajole them. I give you my name for all that.”

Sacajawea laughed. “You will call me Dick Windsor, then?”

Windsor laughed. “Truthfully, I like Janey muchbetter. And can you imagine the names the men would think up for me if they found you had mine?”

They both laughed.

“Say, tell me, what good is a moth-eaten piece of beaver fur on frostbite?”

“None.” She sobered.

“Well, that is what I told Charbonneau, but he insisted it is a cure for anything from hangnail to ringworm. I told him to wrap it around his mouth, because I noticed he did not use it so much when his eyes were sore.”

“He tries, but how can he know the medicines of my old grandmother?”

“I’m surprised he knows as much as he does. Listen, Janey, he’s really a knowledgeable woodsman. Only one thing—he panics fast. Now, take me; I never panic, but I don’t know enough to come in out of the cold.”

She smiled as he walked off toward the group of men skinning out a fresh buck deer.

The snow began to sink beneath the weight of sunwarmed air. The snow melted to ice; the ice became rotten, and water seeped through from beneath.

One of the Nez Percé men complained of not feeling well. He wanted to go back down to his village for a few days to recover. This caused some concern because sometimes such complaints with a native meant he was going to abandon any enterprise he was not well pleased with. Three days later, the ice was gone, and to everyone’s delight the man had really been ill. He came back. He helped collect the horses and pushed the outfit on while he was still recovering.

As the crows began to caw and small birds whistled in the bushes, Sacajawea found time to dig the knobby quamash roots. Pomp gathered the bright, blue flowers in his chubby fists and brought them to his mother.
³

“This makes a man gentle,” she tried to explain to him, “to notice delicate, short-lived beauty.”

Clark could not restrain himself, but he watched her boldly. He saw that her eyes laughed much of the time. Her features were not merely exceptionally attractive, but were arranged so that her expressions showed in a subtle way the restless harking of her soul. He could not read her deeper thoughts and wondered what itwould be like to take her thin-boned head in his hands, like a skull, and look inside to satisfy his longing to know. He imagined for a moment he could see the very blood under her bronze skin change with her emotions. There she was, a Shoshoni squaw, whom he admired. She was another man’s woman, yet he had come to depend on her for knowledge of herbs and edible roots, medicináis, and sewing his clothing. She amused him. Once, when the others were fishing and hunting, he had let her arrange his hair the way she liked, with braids over each ear and a necklace of small shells about his tanned neck.

“And so, still, you are nothing but an impostor with those red braids and sky blue eyes,” she said to him, suddenly smiling. “I cannot make you over.” She then shaved his cheeks, feeling that disturbing fluttering inside her breast. She wondered if white women felt the wings fluttering inside when they were near the man they cared for, or was it only a weakness felt by herself for the man she so admired and respected? She did not know.

He looked at her low, smooth forehead, the good, straight nose, full mouth, round face with the triangular cheeks, and small ears that flared out from her head. Suddenly he thought of some small, brown-skinned, quick-pulsed, furry being—some early human creature whose bones were buried under layers of sand, clay and dust.

On the afternoon of July 25, 1806, a stop was made on the south side of the Yellowstone River near a remarkable sandstone formation. It was located about 250 paces back from the river and measured some 400 paces in circumference. Clark estimated its height at 200 feet. He named it “Pompy’s Tower” after Sacajawea’s infant son, whom he had nicknamed “Pomp” or “Little Pomp,” but today it is known as Pompeys Pillar. Clark and some others climbed the only accessible side, the northeast. Near a spot on the path leading to the top where Indians had etched animal and other figures in the rock, Clark inscribed his name and the date. On the grass-covered soil of the summit, the natives had piled two heaps of stones. The surrounding countryside was visible for a distance of 40 miles.

ROBERT G. FERRIS
, ed., prepared by ROY E. APPLEMAN,
Lewis and Clark.
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Interior, National Park Service, 1975, p. 228.

O
n June 26, the expedition was back where it had stored the baggage for the retreat down the mountainside. The men had placed the packs on scaffolds in the trees. Nothing had been damaged. The snow here was seven feet deep and hard. The Nez Percé guides warned the men that they would have to hurry to reach the place where there would be grass for the horses. “Horses are again hungry,” they said.

The outfit welcomed a visitor in their camp that evening, a Chopunnish warrior who wished to accompany the white men to the Great Falls of the Missouri. Now the expedition faced the snowy mountain barrier with four guides, who they hoped could traverse this trackless region with instinctive sureness.

Later, Sacajawea asked this Chopunnish warrior if he knew of the man called Shadow, who had been captured by the Chopunnish when he was small, but by birth was a Shoshoni.

“No,” the Chopunnish said. “That man must come from a different tribe in this great Nez Percé Nation.”

The next day, the expedition stood on a high peak where some natives had built a large stone mound and put a tall tamarack pole in the center. All four guides insisted on stopping to smoke their pipe. This was a sacred spot to them.

Looking about, the captains realized both grandeur and danger in this savage country. “I doubt that we could find our way alone,” said Clark. “We are entirely surrounded by mountains and at this moment it seems impossible to escape them.”

“I am eternally grateful that those blizzards are over. Good Lord, I doubt we could have lasted another day or two in that,” said Lewis.

The fresh meat was soon exhausted, and Charbonneau was told to use a pint of bear’s oil with the boiled roots Sacajawea brought in. This was an agreeable dish.

Clark checked Pott’s healing leg at least once a day to make sure it was not breaking down. The swelling was now down, but the leg was black and blue and so stiff it was hard to walk on. Clark put pounded rootsand leaves of the wild ginger on the wound and wrapped it with a strip of wool.

“That ginger is great for pain,” said Potts. “Or the wrapping is so tight, I feel very little in my leg.”

Clark also kept an eye on Sacajawea’s child, Pomp, seeing that his head and ears were covered in the cold, driving winds. Several times he carried the boy ahead of him on his horse with blankets wrapped tightly about him. The boy remained so warm that he was sleepy much of the time as the horse jogged over the snows of the mountain pass. Pomp’s abscess was nearly healed, but there was a deep-pitting scar that would remain forever behind his left ear.

Two days later, the four guides were promising grass ahead. And, true to their word, early in the day they found rich patches of new grass scattered among the rocks. The horses needed it badly. In the afternoon, the snow’s softness made the going difficult. The air became almost mild. They camped under a rock shelter where they could all lie well away from the fire and sleep in comparative dryness.

Early in the morning, Lewis walked on the soft grass and paused to listen to the melting snow rushing into tiny streams. He was cheered to hear spring coming for certain to change places with winter. He bent to look into the water covering some dark silt and saw his own reflection.

He was startled to see in the water-mirror an unfamiliar, lean, lined face, surrounded with a scraggly beard. The nostrils were ringed in red, the brown lips cracked. The tanned cheeks were taut against the high bone, then sagged against the jaw. The blue eyes were embedded deep within their sockets and the eyebrows looked pale and brittle, like old winter grass. Tangled, overgrown whiskers hid insect bites. A bony hand scratched at the loose skin around one jaw. Sandy hair, now dark with an accumulation of oil and soot, was held away from the face by a grimy, black fur cap. The leather shirt was smeared with grease and mud and hung loose on jutting shoulder blades.

He was surprised to see this frightful scarecrow, who looked crafty and nervous as a trapped animal as it licked its dry, crusty lips. Lewis sat back on hishaunches, an easy, familiar posture by now. He pulled off his cap and his hair fell in strings against his neck. He scratched his head with short, broken fingernails, then deliberately pulled off his shirt. He stood and kicked off his moccasins and baggy leather trousers, then scrubbed the gaunt body with translucent gray, melting snow. His nose wrinkled with the foul body smell when he pulled on the filthy shirt and trousers and pushed his bare feet into the soiled moccasins. He ran a cold, wet hand through his hair and beard and sighed loudly at the tangles. Back in camp, he felt as if everyone was aware of his vanity. He felt guilty and ashamed for wanting to be clean when the others neglected a bath in ice water and waited for a warmer time.

Then he saw himself, a man who had been President Jefferson’s private secretary. A gentleman who had lived in the executive mansion in Washington, D.C., he was picking bits of horsemeat from a blackened kettle and enjoying it. In a smoke-filled skin and pine-branch leanto, he lit his pipe and passed it to half-naked natives before he took it from the savages’ mouth into his own.