The True Account (13 page)

T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON
, on the west bank of the Missouri, we came into a great village of soaring conical lodges painted red, blue, yellow, and green, covering the plains for a vast distance. Little Warrior Woman had led us straight into the metropolis of the Teton Sioux. Whether they were more astounded by her happy reappearance, having given her up as lost to the Omahas, or by my uncle the knight-errant was impossible to tell.

The men galloped their horses alongside him, yelling to prove their bravery. Women pointed. Boys dashed up and touched him with their riding crops. Several pretended to suppose him the long-awaited reincarnation of their chief's grandfather, a warrior named Black Wolf. The private was enormously gratified by this reception; he wondered if perhaps the noble Sioux might not have heard in advance of his great comedy and were showering laurels upon him, much as the foremost Greek poets were honored at the feast of the Dionysian Apollo.

Little Warrior Woman soon had enough of all this and began to lay about herself with a willow quirt, administering a good smarting cut to anyone who ventured near. At the same time, she directed us to the blue-painted lodge of the headman of the nation. His name was Black Buffalo, and he was Little Warrior's father. When we arrived he was speaking with a fur trader from the British North West Company named Tabor, who told us Little Warrior's name in English and said that from her earliest years she had been a great hunter, tomboy, and daredevil.

When Black Buffalo learned how we had rescued his daughter from a most horrible death on the prairie, he embraced us repeatedly. He carried at all times a war lance decorated with the scalps of forty enemies, but so great was his love for Little Warrior that he wept openly, and named me her elder brother and my uncle her godfather. His two wives, Pretty Elk and Bouncing Deer with a Black Tail, wept, too—Pretty Elk being Little Warrior's mother and Bouncing Deer her aunt. Though very fearsome-looking, these people seemed as affectionate among themselves as my family at home. It was hard for me to imagine them committing such an atrocity as we had witnessed on the death-raft. I was more certain than ever that that outrage was the work of the Pariseau party, causing me to wonder, though in St. Louis we had heard the Teton Sioux referred to as “savages,” who the true savages were.

Black Buffalo ordered up a feast consisting of a ragout of venison, elk, antelope, wild goose, and dog. During the meal, Little Warrior refused to leave my side, which embarrassed me and amused my uncle. In token of his gratitude to Bucephalus for carrying his daughter safely back to the village, Black Buffalo brought him, too, into the lodge and gave him some cottonwood sticks, the bark of which was considered by the Sioux to be a great delicacy for horses.

As we ate, my uncle began his lexicon of the Tetons' language by pointing to items and asking their names and writing them down in his day-book, which impressed our hosts very much. Afterward came speeches by the three chiefs of the Tetons—Black Buffalo, the Partisan, and Buffalo Medicine.

Black Buffalo spoke first. With the trader Tabor translating for our benefit, he thanked us for saving his daughter's life, then politely inquired how we had come into their country. Did we fall out of a dark thunderhead? Or fly up out of the earth?

Just so, replied my uncle, and claimed that he had ebony wings, rather ragged at the outer edge like a turkey buzzard's, and had soared out of a gaping cleft (that we had earlier noticed) in the bluff above the mouth of the Teton River. A general clamor broke out among the Indians. Many seemed amazed, but others warned Black Buffalo to beware—that no man could fly, and my uncle must be the greatest impostor in the world.

The Partisan stepped into the firelight, looked all around, nodded sagely, and held up his jingling braceleted arms. Then he drove his lance into the ground and demanded to know where my uncle's wings were. With a very superior smile the private replied that they were folded up neatly beneath his buckskin shirt and chain mail, and that the purpose of the mail was to protect them.

Now Little Warrior Woman, presuming on her status as Black Buffalo's daughter and a warrior herself, sprang up and thrust her lance quivering into the earth next to the Partisan's, proclaiming that when she had first seen us, my uncle was in fact flying in over the prairie at about the height of a mature cottonwood. “And his white mule flew, too,” she added with supreme haughtiness. “Though somewhat awkwardly.”

I was touched by Little Warrior's loyalty to us. But the Partisan laughed so hard he doubled over.

Stepping into the firelight himself now, my uncle fired up his long clay hemp-pipe, took several puffs, passed it to each of the chiefs in turn, puffed again himself, and handed it round once more.

“What sovereign tobacco is this, brother?” Buffalo Medicine said with a very droll smile. “Where do you grow it and how can we get some?”

“Why, sir,” said my uncle, with Tabor translating, “you can grow it along the river or wherever you please”—he refilled the pipe from his stock of crushed leaves and passed it again to the eager chiefs—“but it isn't tobacco. It's hemp. The same fibrous material my lariat is made of. As for procuring it, I'll supply you with one hundred seeds to plant in the spring like com, each in a little hill with a quantity of horse manure; and if you water it faithfully, and keep away the weeds, it will grow taller than your tallest warrior. In the late summer, when the buffalo gather to migrate, you may harvest enough leaves from this stately vegetable to maintain a sanguine outlook for an entire year, not to mention all the seeds you could ever want and more left over for trading purposes.”

“I'll tell you what, old friend,” said the Partisan, who was becoming very mellow, “we won't trade the seeds, since once the other tribes have them, they won't need to rely on us. We'll trade the leaves, and hoard up the seeds for ourselves.”

“That's a good idea,” Black Buffalo said. “I'll volunteer my services to be keeper of the sacred hemp seeds.”

“Oh, no you won't,” Buffalo Medicine said. “Your two prying wives, Pretty Elk and Bouncing Deer, will get into the stockpile of seeds. We don't want our women using this great medicine. Heaven alone knows what notions it would put in their heads.”

Then we repaired to the lodge of Black Buffalo, where Little Warrior composed herself at the head of my robe. And, it being then very late, I fell asleep almost immediately.

 

The next morning we breakfasted on the same delicious stew we'd eaten for supper. Afterward my uncle assembled the whole tribe at the center of the village to watch me paint portraits of the chiefs. Out of deference to our host, Black Buffalo, who seemed to enjoy the largest following among the Tetons, I began with him.

I set up my canvas and easel, and although I was very nervous at first, I began by lightly outlining his dimensions with my pencil, then worked carefully on the planes and angles of his face. Soon I was entirely caught up in my work. Painting at my usual swift pace and using only nine colors (I had no more), I was able to catch Black Buffalo tolerably well. Over bare shoulders, he wore a painted robe depicting himself shooting, stabbing, or trampling beneath his horse many of the victims whose hair adorned his lance, which he held upright throughout the sitting, or rather, the standing, since that is how he wished to be painted. The feathers on his war bonnet pointed downward to indicate coups, and his leggings and moccasins were bright with vividly dyed porcupine quills.

The Sioux reacted to their chief's portrait-in-progress in a number of interesting ways. Some of the women, peeking at it through their fingers, declared that such sorcery made them feel faint. Some of the men glanced at it once, then turned their heads and stalked away, perhaps supposing that if they did not acknowledge the picture it would somehow cease to exist. Despite Black Buffalo's many censorious frowns, Pretty Elk and Bouncing Deer with a Black Tail kept up a running commentary, as they seemed to do on all that transpired in the village. Pretty Elk declared that the portrait was becoming a “fully living being,” very probably a twin of their husband. Bouncing Deer assured her sister that it was most certainly not a twin. Nor, in her estimation, was the portrait fully alive, though she allowed it to contain
some
life. Indeed, she believed that the picture might well outlive their husband, in which case he would never rest easy in his grave. At this notion, both of the good wives, and Little Warrior Woman as well, shrieked with delight.

Next came the sitting of Buffalo Medicine. He had clapped a great bison mask over his face for the occasion. The mouth and eyes were outlined in vermilion; its horns were painted the same color; and dangling from the neck-cape were coyote skins, a badger pelt, and the beaks and heads of various birds of prey. The Partisan, when his turn came, posed wearing only a clout and rabbit-skin leggings, his otherwise naked body painted in circles of yellow, blue, and crimson.

After finishing the headmen's portraits, I spent the remainder of the day with Little Warrior Woman. First we went fishing. Next we played a game whose objective was to throw a ball, using a sort of cradle, through a goal, and involving at least five hundred boys and young men, none of whom could keep pace with Little Warrior. Then she roped a buffalo calf for me to paint, ran down a young elk, and taught a prattling magpie she had tamed to say my name. Also she showed me, by many comical signs, how to get a buffalo's hump closer to right in my pictures by not making it so pronounced.

Little Warrior Woman and I were very happy together for the next several days. At the same time, she teased me mercilessly and constantly, as her mother and aunt did Black Buffalo, and asked me so many questions about Americans that we had to request trader Tabor's offices as a translator. How many wives did we take? What were their duties and prerogatives? She understood why our women were not allowed to participate publicly in the government of the nation; that would have humiliated our men, as the Teton men would certainly have been humiliated by their wives' superior sense had Sioux women been allowed to speak at councils. But surely our women, like theirs, privately told their husbands what to do and say in those meetings? She refused to believe that American women did not make constant fun of their husbands, both behind their backs and to their faces. What kept our men from becoming insufferably self-important?

After supper one evening I informed Little Warrior that it was our intention very soon to go to the great western ocean, a journey of a year or more, and I was quite certain that her doting father would not allow her to accompany us. Therefore, I proposed that she and I renew our acquaintance upon my return.

Renew our acquaintance,
she angrily repeated and added that she was surprised I should imagine that she would ever consent to spend one day of her life apart from me; she would deal with her father and, if he proved unyielding, we would elope, since she, too, longed to see the ocean and all the country between here and there; and finally, if my uncle and I wished to have any hope of reaching our destination safely, we would need her to guide us, introduce us to the Indians we came upon, and provide food. In a word, she would be ready to leave when we were.

As Tabor translated, my uncle shot me many significant glances, mouthing the word “shrew” and muttering “Now you see why a certain playwright has eschewed the company of women.” But before I could frame a reply to Little Warrior, she laughed, took me by the hand into her lodge, and proposed a flirtatious diversion similar to blindman's bluff, in which first I, then she, would play the blindman and conduct a most thorough search for the other. We had just commenced this entertainment when a tremendous hullabaloo broke out in the village, and my uncle, thrusting his stockinged head into our tepee, announced that Captains Lewis and Clark had arrived with the official expedition.

N
OW THE TETONS
naturally supposed that the captains and their men must be traders. Still, many things about the American expedition they could not fathom, including the long keelboat and its cannon, the captains' uniforms, and the medals they passed out engraved with the President's visage. Finally, the Sioux concluded that the newcomers were not of this world but from a different realm altogether, in which conjecture my uncle encouraged them by suggesting that the Americans were from the
red planet Mars
and had come to earth by mistake in their keelboat and pirogues; but that they meant no harm, and he would help the Tetons deal with them. First, however, he was determined to tweak the captains' noses.

“Hear this, sirs,” he announced to them, “and tell me what you think.” Then, in his booming stage voice, he read the following letter.

 

The Editor

Washington Gazette

KINNESON PARTY TAKES HUGE EARLY LEAD IN RACE TO THE PACIFIC

 

Reliable reports from Louisiana and the West have placed the Vermont Kinneson expeditionaries well out in front of the Lewis and Clark party this fall in the Great Race to the Ocean Pacific. We have recently learned that, in order to give their laggard opponents a chance to catch up, and to help those same feckless competitors pass safely through the land of the relentless and treacherous Sioux, the Vermont party has stopped at the Teton village to wait for the official government party. It is widely agreed by those who have reason to know that sporting gentlemen who wagered on the Lewis party had best by prepared to
meet their obligations
. Thus far, the Kinneson expedition has shown all the advantage of superior speed, experience, and
élan
. Further reports may be expected from the Mandan City, Rocky Mountains, etc.