Snowbound and Eclipse (38 page)

I strolled hard by the blue Mississippi this bright chill morn, and an hour out of town I spotted the solitary figure of a familiar and esteemed man before me, also stretching his legs. Drouillard, our Shawnee-French guide, interpreter, and hunter was the most valuable of all our men, supplying our hungry bellies with meat where none among us could find anything to shoot at. He is a dark, heavy-boned, and solitary man, preferring to roam apart from us, keeping much to himself, and yet he always had a kind word for me, and I mark him among my favorite of all those in the Corps of Discovery.

He saw me and paused.

“George, taking the air, I suppose?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“How is your circumstance? Were you released?”

“Yes, sir. Captain Lewis paid me my twenty-five a month, which he got out of the merchants, and my service is over.”

“You linger here, though.”

“It is a place to make money, Captain. Half a dozen merchants have approached me about going upriver. Lisa, Chouteau, all of them. I may do so. I've been where they want to go, so it seems I am a man of some value.”

“Along with most of the others,” I said.

“A few. Most are indisposed.”

“And the regulars are still under command. Who's indisposed?”

“Captain Lewis could tell you better than I.”

“I thought by now most of the corps would have recovered. Better food, plenty of rest, warmth, and comfort.”

Drouillard grunted.

“But maybe too much to drink, is that it?”

“There's a parade of them visiting Doctor Saugrain, Captain.”

I knew of it, and knew why. “Poxed, are they? Captain Lewis told me he had appointed Saugrain an army surgeon; it would be cheaper than paying for every visit.”

“Poxed, yes. Half the corps.”

“But not you. You were lucky.”

“No, Captain, it was not luck. I do not live by luck, but by calculation. I did not like the chances.”

I thought back to all those evenings among the Mandans, Hidatsas, Shoshones, Nez Percés, Clatsops, and all the others, when men slipped away into the darkness with the laughing women. Meriwether and I had to guard our stores to keep the men from stealing a hank of ribbon or an awl or a mirror to give to the squaws. I could not remember Drouillard indulging himself. Maybe he was, like me, a careful man. We could no more stop our men than we could stop a waterfall.

That put me in mind of York. The squaws had fallen all over him, and yet he was unscathed by pox, though he had lain, I reckoned, with more Indian women than anyone else in the corps. How he fascinated them! I could not fathom it, though I would have been much vexed if he had sickened and lost his value to me. He bothers me now; the expedition taught him too much independence, and he looks at me now with a gaze I don't like, and intend to do something about.

I had Judy to think of, and a dream of a good life, and that was enough to teach me prudence. I thought it would suffice for Captain Lewis, also. Meriwether had several belles in mind, and a physician's knowledge in his head, garnered from his mother, Doctor Rush of Philadelphia, and Saugrain as well before we started. No doubt he was aware of the venereal, but maybe thought to avoid it or heal it.

He didn't. He was poxed like the rest and was dosing himself with the calomel, though no word of it entered our journals. I do not know whether he suffered the drip, or worse. I cannot name the time or place, though it was plain he was suffering by the time we descended from the Bitterroots into the Columbia drainage. I myself treated those festering eruptions on his legs and arms when we were among the Nez Percés, though he bade me do so privately in our tent, fearing discovery by our men. I kept his secret.

Though Drouillard had said nothing specific, I realized suddenly why Meriwether had not headed for Washington earlier. He would not go until Doctor Saugrain was done with him. That put a new light on things, and I pitied my co-commander. Were Drouillard and I the only two of the corps who had kept our senses—and our health?

He fell silent as we blotted up sun. Then he paused.

“You will excuse me, I trust, Captain,” he said, and turned off the path. That was the way of him, to vanish from our midst after the briefest encounter.

I hiked well north of the town that day, restless and itching to get on with life, but actually still under orders. We managed to go clear to the Pacific while maintaining the fiction that we were co-commanders; but that was solely because I, Lieutenant Clark, did not press the issue when we differed. I would not press it here. It was Lewis's expedition, and he was admirably suited to the task, and to my dying day, I will view him with unbounded admiration and affection.

I returned to St. Louis with a breeze at my back.

I supped this evening with Meriwether at Christie's Tavern, as we usually do, now that the city's merchants had at last wearied of our tales of great brown bears, buffalo beyond number, tribes that subsist on salmon, and the presence of sea trader's items far up the Columbia.

I examined him with some care, it having been revealed
to me why he tarries so long in St. Louis. He looked well enough; certainly better than when we had arrived. Dr. Saugrain has done him some good. As if to confirm it, he announced that we would leave for Washington City in a week or so.

He ordered porter, and then another goblet of it.

“I've had to outfit quite a party, you know. The Osages and Mandans. Chouteau's people. Several of our corps. But I imagine in a few days, Will, you'll be in the bosom of your family.”

“And then Fincastle,” I said, smiling.

“Ah! You are a lucky man. I have never had much luck with women, though I plan to change that,” he said lightly. “Miss Randolph, for one. Miss Wood, for another. But my burdens have been so heavy, I haven't given it much thought … until now. Wish me luck, eh?”

There was something in the way he said it that saddened me.

I truly wished him luck.

My joy upon arriving at my Virginia home, Locust Hill, was unalloyed. I discovered my mother, Lucy Marks, my brother, Reuben, my half-brother, John Marks, and my half-sister, Mary, all present and in good health.

My mother met me on the lawn that sixteenth day of December, for word of our arrival preceded us. When I dismounted, she clasped me to her, her hands telling me how glad and grateful she was, and how proud, too.

“My very own Meriwether,” she whispered. “At last my fears are behind me. And now I have a mother's pride. Ah, my son, alive and honored …”

I laughed, told her we would have a long visit in which I promised to reveal to her every wonder, every success, every danger. Her fingers lingered on my arm, touching the son she had thought she would never see again.

I had Big White and his family and our translators with me, and Private Frazier, who served as my aide; but Sergeants Ordway and Gass and Private Labiche, who had left St. Louis with us, had gone their separate ways. At Frankfort, on November 13, we had split up: Will had taken the trace to Fincastle, Virginia, Pierre Chouteau headed for Washington City with his Osages, and I took my party to Ivy, in Albemarle County. Ultimately I would progress to the City of Washington.

It had been a triumphant progress, and we were greatly slowed because every hamlet along the Ohio River wished to banquet us and celebrate with grand oratory, toasts, and bonfires. Most of all they wanted to hear our stories, and we had obliged them as best we could. I am sure they were disappointed that we did not encounter mountains of rubies, fields of gold, giraffes, elephants, and pygmies.

Little girls in dimity met us with bouquets tied with yellow ribbons; raggedy barefoot boys wanted to inspect our Harper's Ferry rifles. Clerks and butchers and harness-makers wanted to shake hands, and memorize maps, and learn if the soil out west was fertile. They all wanted souvenirs, anything at all, even a patch of cloth, that had been to the far Pacific. And everywhere, towns spread their bunting, the red, white, and blue, and hoorahed us, and told us we were as bright as the circle of stars in the flag, and men of destiny.

But at last I was home in sweet hazy Virginia; we settled
Big White and his family in a spare bedroom. We were at once beset by convivial neighbors, for word of our arrival had preceded us, and in the hubbub I discovered that we would be honored at a great banquet in Charlottesville two days hence, with all the leading lights of that part of Virginia attending us.

“You look splendid,” my mother said, when at last we had a moment. “I would have supposed to find you worn to a skeleton.”

“That aptly describes our circumstance on more than one occasion,” I replied. “We had moments so desperate I despaired of feeding my men. But somehow we survived, and we had learned the woodsman's art so well that we made meals of things civilized people scorn.”

My mother, small and thin and discerning, with eyes that probed me, drew me to her and examined me, somewhat to my discomfort, for it was as if I could have no secrets from her. She was not a physician, but was much called upon for her medical knowledge, and put stock in a number of simples that were famous in the county, herbs and barks and roots she gathered in the fields each year which she decocted into teas. They said she was better than any doctor in Virginia.

“Are you well, Meriwether?” she asked velvetly, her fragile hands resting in mine.

“See for yourself,” I replied. “I endured everything that harsh nature could devise for us, and yet we all got home, except for Sergeant Floyd.”

I was in the very bloom of health, having benefited from the efficacy of Doctor Saugrain's courses, and I was certain that
lues venerea
was a thing of the past, and gave it no more thought.

She touched my cheek, stubbled from the neglect wrought by travel, and I was grateful that I was unshaven, for the skin
eruptions of 1805 had left the faintest brand on my cheeks, small circles of obscure scar I fervently hoped she would not discover. Doctor Saugrain told me that the disease scarcely yields scar tissue, and that the healing of the skin is complete, but in my case a sharp eye might see the track of my tribulations. Under her scrutiny I had to nerve myself into the appearance of calm.

“I hope that it is so,” she said softly, and I felt a great uneasiness. I did not wish for my mother to learn the nature of the vile disease that had afflicted me, and that I now had conquered; the plague of scoundrels, vagabonds, and loose women.

How swiftly our house filled. Here were laced and perfumed cousins and aunts and uncles: Lewises and Meriwethers, including my uncle Nicholas Meriwether, who had been my guardian after my father died.

And they had questions. What was it like out there? A desert worse than the Gobi? What lies beyond the Mississippi? An aching void? Did you see no white men at all for three years? Is it all barren and naked, unfit for any but savages?

For me there was no longer a mystery in it, but for them I had undertaken a journey as exotic as an exploration of darkest Africa. I may as well have been describing a probe up the Amazon, or a marooning at Juan Fernández Island.

“Louisiana,” I said, “is a land so great, so rich, so filled with natural treasures, so fertile, that when it is finally settled we shall be the largest and most populous and most powerful nation on earth.”

“But what of the tribes?”

“They will become our friends; I made great progress with them, except for those fiends, the Sioux, which know no fear of anything but force.”

Even as I spoke, I was watching Big White and his squaw,
Yellow Corn, who were wandering in sheer bewilderment through our home, marveling especially at the mounds of food hastily brought by our slaves to the dining table, along with our splendid sterling silver and Wedgwood china. Civilized life was beyond their fathoming and I was glad they were being introduced to it, because once they returned to the Mandans with their stories, the power of the American eagle would be understood within the minds of all the Missouri River savages.

Using the good offices of my translator, René Jessaume, whose own Mandan squaw was quite as dumfounded as the chief, I urged my family and neighbors to converse with this wild specimen of Louisiana mankind, which they did with great relish, along with much finger-wiggling, evoking solemn responses from the chief.

Ah, that was fun. Chouteau was on his way to Washington with the Osages, and the purpose was the same: we would overawe them all, they would return to their huts and tell the others what they had witnessed, and that would establish permanent peace and prosperity in the unsettled country.

“Well, Meriwether,” said my uncle Nicholas, “you have done a grand thing. Your fame has spread far beyond the county, and I have no doubt that your name will be celebrated even in Vermont, and Georgia.”

I relished the compliment and am not shy about taking credit for the successful expedition, which I knew to be the greatest in history.

But I was keenly aware that others had contributed to our success, and was fervent in my wish to give credit where it was due. “Will Clark was my equal in all respects, sir. And we had doughty men who, after certain disciplinary troubles at the start, welded themselves into an unmatchable corps, so devoted to duty and mutual protection that it was
scarcely necessary for me to drill or order them about, or even instruct by the time we began our second year. But Will Clark, with his boating and mapping skills, sir, that is what made us a match and a team.”

“You share the glory generously, Meriwether.”

“That is my exact purpose.”

After an interval I looked after my aide, Private Frazier. He had never been in so fine a house, and he gaped his way through our white-enameled parlors, studying the oil portraits, the Hepplewhite and Sheraton pieces, and ended at last at our lengthy dining table, where cold pink beef and a succulent sugar-cured Virginia ham rested, with orange yams, brown breads, creamy sauces, and sundry other items, including an ample stock of whiskey and porter. I ate my fill, and urged him to do so also.