Sacajawea (90 page)

Lewis sat, expressionless, and looked at the man with whom he shared the honors of this expedition. Clark seemed an equally grave and dignified scarecrow. Lewis had the sudden mad desire to shout with laughter and roll on the ground in hilarity.

The next day, they saw only patches of drifted snow as they came down the northeast side of the Rockies.
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Roots were the only food left.

As Sacajawea slogged over the soggy loam, each step seemed to drag along some of the hillside. Her thighs were numbed, and she had a sickening ache in her back. She managed to struggle down to the tree line, and then collapsed on a damp, mossy bank. Charbonneau picked her up and set her on some rotted bark. She got up and started down the hill, but again fell. A whistle from Shannon brought Clark back, and a glance showed where the trouble lay.

“You got to ride, Janey. There’s plenty of horses. If you don’t ride, you’ll be sick. There’s no camp for a sick squaw until we get into the big timber.”

Charbonneau spoke up. “Squaw walks. Her legs arestrong. Horses carry the baggage, and the hunters need to ride. So—there’s no room for a squaw on horseback.”

“Shut up!” Clark said in French. “She obeys my orders. She rides.”

She obeyed and finished the rest of the descent in a miserable half doze, her arms slung through baggage thongs to keep from falling off. Clark kept Pomp in front of him on his horse.

They found a deer carcass lying on the trail where the hunters had left it. Sacajawea began to sing a sad song in her soft Shoshoni tongue. Bratton and Whitehouse packed the venison on a horse, and she did not hear them shout their thanksgiving for the fresh meat. Her mind was buried inward, upon dying, winter-starved people. She imagined the men were in great sorrow. Clark watched her constantly.

To her he was an enveloping shield, and she felt protected merely by the sounds he made near her, so that nothing could intrude across the invisible circle. And she felt completely alone. She did not care what the others did and never looked at them. If occasionally she was separated from Clark, a restlessness began in her mind and grew steadily, like the wind in the trees moving down to move the snow into great drifts. Sweat formed on her face and hands, and she would start out after Clark. With only a glimpse of him in grease-stained leggings and shirt laden with soot, these sounds would retreat.

She refused to eat, and slept little.

“Janey needs the sweat bath,” said Bratton. “She suffers the mountain sickness.”

The next afternoon, the expedition found a luxury—a hot spring that the natives had dammed with stones and mud to make a bathing place. The men had baths, and the four guides remained in the hot spring as long as they could, then ran to plunge into the creek, which had ice at its edges.

At the campfire Clark urged Sacajawea to go bathe her child at the spring. “Do not go near while she is there,” he warned the men. “Perhaps she will go in with the child, and it will warm her bones as much as a good sweat. Maybe Bratton is right. This will do her good.”

The child giggled and gurgled as she held him inwater that made his brown skin pink and glowing. The pitted scar behind his ear was a vivid red. She ran her fingers lightly over it. It is a mark, like a reminder, so I will remember how precious a life can be, she thought. It is not an ugly mark. It is beautiful and sets my son apart and shows for all to see how he overcame the badness in his body.
“Skookumchuck,
something grand,” she said to him in Chinook, laughing with Pomp. She sat him on a blanket and slid from her greasy tunic and swam in the delightfully warm water, first looking around so that she could see Clark’s back where he sat by the fire. She took great handfuls of sand and rubbed her hair to remove the old, rancid oil. When she was finished, she sat on a stone and combed her long hair over and over with a two-pronged stick, forgetting to keep her eyes on Clark, but watching her child and hearing the low babble of the men’s voices from over the rise. She braided her hair, dipped her tunic into the water, and cleaned it with sand and hard rubbing. She squeezed it dry and smoothed it over her thin body, knowing her own heat would dry it before night. Slowly she slipped in beside Clark and Charbonneau at the fire, her eyes bright, her face glowing. She held her child and listened to the men and saw her child asleep in her lap. He is my
skookumchuck
, she thought again.

By low grunts and hand signs, the native guides were telling about barefoot tracks they had seen in the loam that morning. “It was a Flathead fleeing from a Blackfoot,” they said.

The four Nez Percé guides regarded the trail of the white men into the country of their hereditary enemies, the Blackfeet, as a venture to certain death. Now they were close enough to Blackfoot country. They rapped on their heads, significantly drew their knives across their throats, and pointed far ahead into the star-filled sky. They wanted to go back to their own country. The four Nez Percés quietly left the campfire that night and started back up the mountain. Lewis ran after them, begging them to direct the expedition as far as the East Branch of Clark’s River, so they would be headed in the direction of the Missouri. Lewis gave the brother of Chief Cut Nose, Yomekollick, a small seasons medal. Yomekollick gave his name, Folded White Bear Skin, to Lewis in exchange, and agreed to stay a few more days.

The day after, Sacajawea stood petrified with fright as Lewis rolled with his horse forty feet over the edge of a cliff. Ordway scrambled after him and found Lewis unhurt but shouting, “The horse, the horse! We must get him up! Put him on his feet!”

To Sacajawea’s surprise, the horse was also unhurt and stood up. With an effort she shook off her fright, shoved Pomp into Shannon’s hands, and scrambled down, heedless of briars and stones, to guide the horse back to the trail. Ordway pushed Lewis back up to the trail. The men on the top of the embankment shouted encouragement and stretched out hands to bring the three up over the edge, and at the same time, the horse scrambled to the trail with Sacajawea following, nearly breathless.

“That was a close enough call for me,” sighed Lewis, wiping his hands on his leggings.

By nightfall they were back in their old camp, “Traveler’s Rest,”
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where they had stayed early in September of the year before. By the firelight Sacajawea pulled thorns from her scratched legs and rubbed bear’s oil in the cuts. She sang in English the songs the men sang and chatted easily with them about the next day’s trial. She had overcome the mountain sickness. She looked at Lewis. “I am glad we did not have to eat your horse.”

During the winter at Fort Clatsop, the captains had decided that when the expedition returned to Traveler’s Rest they would divide. Lewis, with Yomekollick as his guide, decided now to go on to the Great Falls by the route the Nez Percés had told about, which was shorter than the one they had taken nearly a year before. His party would go up the Hellgate and Blackfoot rivers, cross the Divide, and go down to the Great Falls by way of either the Dearborn or Sun River. From there, Lewis wanted to go to the Marias River and see if it had a northern branch. Pat Gass, Drouillard, the two Fields brothers, Frazier, Werner, Thompson, Goodrich, and McNeal were going with him. The last three men would go as far as the Great Falls portage. They would make camp there, raise last year’s cache, put the equipmentin order, and wait for Clark and his party to join them along the river.

Clark said, “I want only the good swimmers with me if we are to float.”

Sacajawea’s heart sank because Charbonneau could not swim, and so she was certain she would be assigned with him to Lewis’s group.

But Clark continued, “I’ll take Janey. She is invaluable at retrieving goods from a canoe that ships water. However, we might have to tie her man to the supplies so that he’ll get pulled out in case of an accident.”

Charbonneau laughed heartily, but his face was black from an inner hatred of being teased.

Lewis and his party turned north. Clark, with the remainder of the outfit and fifty horses, went south along the Bitterroot Valley.
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The expedition found the valley pink as a rose with the delicate bloom of the bitterroot. The soft violet and pink shooting stars pointed their yellow tips toward the fair sky. Wild strawberries still bloomed, along with raspberries and thimbleberries. The outfit hiked, leading the horses, through old, bearded forests, past moist alpine gardens, alive with sparkling water and the vivid green of moss, sheltered in the heart of the mountains from wind and burning sun. They passed marmots and rock rabbits, and the smell of white serviceberry blossoms was pungent and sweet on the air.

Deer ran before Clark’s party, leaping across the clear streams. The men saw herds of bighorns on the mountains at the edge of snowbanks. When they rode horseback in the bright sunlight, the ground threw back heat. The grass became dry, the trees parched, and small stream beds dry. Once they rode the horses slowly along a stony watercourse. Clark stopped and pointed upward where none of the others had been looking. They had ridden through a gap in the stone into a kind of rocky, waterless cirque. Looking up, Sacajawea was first to see what Clark pointed at. It was hard to see exactly what it was.

She dismounted, left her horse in the dry creek, and scrambled up a short slope of broken stone to the foot of the cliff. There, worked in some red pigment, low down on the cliff face, was a small representation of atepee. Smoke rose from the smoke hole, and in the left foreground stood a dog. The whole thing looked like the work of some native child, and the men who had come to look stared wonderingly.

“What does that mean?” asked Shannon as he backed down the slope a few paces to get a better sight of the bluff.

And then, maybe twenty feet up, he saw a painting of native hunters. It was old and faded; the full glare of the sun made the figures nearly invisible. The figures of men were scattered about, some hunting buffalo, some smoking peacefully, some walking under a huge red sun.

“Just look at that!” exclaimed Clark. ‘To reach the high point on the face of that rock, those artists must have built themselves a scaffold of poles lashed together with thick thongs.”

“How old?” asked Sacajawea, looking upward.

“Fifty years. I don’t really know, maybe much older,” said Clark, who seemed struck with delight over the fact that unknown human beings had moved about in this trailless country long before he came.

“This ancient place may be the meeting ground of a buffalo hunt, and the people made pictures while waiting to pass the time,” said Sacajawea.

“Aw, these drawings are supposed to bring in the buffalo,” suggested Shannon.

“And it’s a might weighty thing to send to President Jefferson,” teased York.

The party went on across an intervening coulee. Then they had to lead the horses and try to keep ahead of them. The horses came up the steep slope with a rush. Charbonneau’s horse began running loose. He had somehow got ahead of the group in the coulee. Charbonneau ran behind his horse, leading the packhorse. All he could do was watch that monstrous rump up above him, clawing and scuffling away at the mountain and hurling down rocks, which those below had to dodge. Charbonneau urged his horse on with horrid threats and a quirt whenever he could reach him because if the horse hesitated and fell, he would sweep the whole lot with him. And there was no question of turning back. That horse could not have turned around on so steep a slope, with so poor a footing, let alone go back down it. Up went the party, hoping. It was all they could do—and fortunately at the top there was a gravelly, rocky slope. They could see where to descend into Ross’s Hole. There were some signs of recent occupation—a tire still burning and fresh sign of two horses—but no sign of the native Flatheads or anyone else.

Charbonneau looked uneasily at Clark and wondered fleetingly what it would be like to know that hostile bands were watching them, to feel that stalking enemies were on the lookout in that desolation—after all, hadn’t they come across the ashes of other men’s fires? Charbonneau put the thought away deliberately and laughed nervously.

They followed an indistinct trail across the Continental Divide down into the large valley of the Jefferson River.
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In that valley Charbonneau spotted a buffalo. He kicked his horse into action and primed his rifle as he rode, but he did not keep his balance as he watched the buffalo and worked with his rifle. He was thrown to the ground and remained stiff and sore for a week. George Gibson fell off his horse and landed on a sharp snag, which ran nearly two inches into his thigh. This lamed him so badly that he had to be carried in a litter made of poles lashed and woven across by rawhide thongs.

Sacajawea rubbed rancid bear’s oil on the face and arms of Pomp to keep off mosquitoes. She passed it to Gibson and Charbonneau. The mosquitoes were small and penetrated the netting covering Pomp at night. Some of the men slept facedown against the ground to keep the insects off. Pomp’s face became red and swollen like some huge puffball even with bear’s oil and protective netting.

“Deer in these parts are poor on account of these torturous insects,” Clark grumbled. “The ravenous pests have sucked away most of the animals’ blood.”

There were large and aggressive rattlesnakes that the horses had to sidestep. There was a close call when Sacajawea comforted her child and did not watch the trail carefully. Her horse stepped into a nest of small rattlers, but the horse pulled out so fast there was no time for any to strike.

The following day, they came to Shoshoni Cove, where they had buried canoes the year before. Now in the Shoshoni country, everyone kept a lookout for the Agaidükas. Sacajawea found the meadow grass waist-tall when she stopped to gather camass roots. Always she hoped to see somewhere women of the People out gathering roots. She saw no one and no marks of a recent camp. The trees were full-leaved, and the whole wide cove was spread green. The rimrocks seemed silver around it, and the sky like a sheet of blue silk.