The True Account (17 page)

Ranged in a rough semi-circle to my left were what I first mistook for four gigantic tortoises with eagle feathers attached to their shells. In fact, these were drums constructed from the tough neck skin of buffaloes—filled, I was later told, with “the first water created on earth.” At each of these instruments sat a drummer. By my feet lay several splints of tough wood about six inches long and an inch in diameter. Beside them was a jagged flintstone knife.

My two conductors began to chant in unison, the words unintelligible to me and somewhat muffled behind their bear masks. Suddenly one of them bent over, seized the flint knife, and with three or four swift motions cut my buckskin clothing off my body. As I stood naked, holding my brush and easel in one hand and Little Warrior's wolf mask in the other, the conjuror proceeded to seize an inch or so of loose skin on each side of my chest just below the shoulder, and thrust first the jagged knife, then a wooden skewer, through my flesh in the most excruciating manner, while his associate affixed the ends of the dangling cords to these pieces of wood.

I was later told that the young Mandan braves who underwent this torture bore the knife and skewers with the utmost serenity, smiling at their tormentors and thanking them in the most gracious terms. Not Ticonderoga Kinneson. I howled like a lynx at bay, and would have bolted out of the lodge at the first haggling cut had not six assistants to the medicine men held me fast.

Now the surgeon wielding the knife began to hack into the skin at the backs of my thighs, calves, and upper arms and to ram through these apertures more splints. To these he attached, by short thongs, a buffalo skull, an elk antler, a freshly killed beaver, and two or three medicine bags crammed with sacred plants, stones, and amulets. Franklin, on our way into the medicine lodge, had assured me that the apprehension of the Okeepa was far worse than any actual pain I would experience. But as with so many fine-sounding sentiments, the exact opposite turned out to be true. Nothing I had ever experienced compared to the anguish of the butchery visited upon me by this quack and his accomplices.

I screamed bloody murder. But the professional percussionists at the tortoise-drums—all deaf from years of being subjected to their own music—beat their ancient instruments the louder, drowning out my wailing. This seemed to be the signal for several men on the roof to haul on the ropes attached to the splints through my shoulders and chest, raising me a foot or so off the floor. With the ponderous buffalo skull and other ceremonial paraphernalia dangling from the splints in my arms and legs, I was a bundle of pain.

Just when I supposed that the pangs of this dreadful crucifixion could grow no greater, two medicine men began to turn me with long poles—spinning me back and forth in ever-faster arcs. I could feel the flesh of my arms and legs tearing with the weight of the sacred objects. And all the time the drummers beat louder and louder.

Several times I lost consciousness and was dropped to the floor, revived with a dash of icy river water, and hauled up again. Once I supposed I was at home in Vermont, with my father inquiring how I could keep track of my uncle while depending from the smoky ceiling of a Mandan lodge like a fly in a web. In another hallucination, my uncle, dressed in a long flowing robe like Abraham about to slay poor Isaac, addressed the Mandans as follows. “My friends, I so love Louisiana and its people that I have given you my only begotten nephew, Ticonderoga Kinneson, to pierce with cottonwood splints, and hang up, and murder.”

As the day wore on, I begged my Mandan sponsors for a little drinking water. But like Job's false encouragers, they said that if I could bear up under my extremity until sunset, they would take me down and pronounce me “Great Physician.” Then I would go forth knowing that, having endured the Okeepa, I could survive any other torment, be it heat, cold, hunger, illness, mistreatment at the hand of man, or my own artistic inadequacies. When I began to pass out once again, my uncle jumped up and, with tears starting from his eyes, rushed forward, knife drawn, shouting, “Gentlemen, enough.” But before he could cut me down, the six big hearties who had earlier held me fast for their physicians ministrations seized him and put him out of the lodge. A few minutes later the sun set; and, to another great roar from the villagers waiting outside, the medicine men severed the cords and withdrew the splints.

My torment was not yet over, though. As soon as I was able to stagger out of the lodge, with the buffalo skull and other weights still hanging from the torn and bleeding flesh of my arms and legs, the medicine men bound my wrists together with a rawhide strap and began to drag me all through the village, with the skull, amulet bags, elk antler, and dead beaver thumping along the frozen ground beside me. This sprint was called “the last race.” Finally, one by one, the weights dropped off as the strips of skin to which they were attached tore free. When I shed the last of them I was simply left in the middle of the village, to recover or not, as the Great Spirit deemed best. But Franklin and my uncle carried me tenderly back to Black Cat's lodge and washed and bound my wounds, and said that I had come through my trial with flying colors. When I next awoke I found myself still clinging to my brush and easel, which I had never dropped throughout the entire travail, though Little Warrior's wolf mask had fallen from my hand just before I was lowered to the ground at sunset.

I
HAD LAIN
in a swoon for two days and nights, during which time a steady procession of Indians came to ogle the first American to undergo the Okeepa. My uncle was at my side the whole time, feeding me buffalo-marrow broth, tending my wounds, and encouraging me not to give up the ghost. But my first clear thought when I regained my senses was that Little Warrior was still dead.

Over the next month or so I engaged in a prolonged debauch—gambling with the Indians, swilling a highly intoxicating beverage concocted by the enterprising Field brothers the previous fall from dried chokecherries and buffalo berries, and consorting with a jolly, plump Mandan widow of about thirty who taught me many of the ways of her people and, not to put too fine a point on it, the ways of the world as well. Suffice it to say that she was very willing to be my mentor (and not in the way of Scholia Scholasticus!), and I her pupil.

My uncle finally had to take my paintings away to keep me from staking them in wagers. What I most regret about that time, however, is the missed opportunities to paint priceless scenes of the Mandans and to record, as well, the winter activities of Lewis's party. In February alone, the men worked nearly three weeks trying to cut the keelboat out of the river ice, where it had frozen solid; Captain Lewis assisted the trader Charbonneau's young Shoshone wife, Sacagawea, in a long hard labor with her first child, by crushing the rattles of a serpent into a powder, which he then administered to her in a potion to hasten the delivery; and blacksmith John Shields saved everyone from starvation by manufacturing battle-axes from the sheet metal of an old stove and trading these weapons to the Mandans for corn and beans.

At last I did a portrait of myself strung up in the medicine lodge, enduring the Okeepa. That was my first picture since the fall, and it seemed to bring me out of my downward spiral. Even Franklin agreed that this painting was a step in the right direction because, like his pictures, it told a story.

Throughout this time my uncle remained as busy as a honeybee in a Vermont hollyhock. He helped the men of the expedition, half of whom were illiterate, write letters to be sent home in the spring with Corporal Warfington. He set up a grammar school for the Mandans, teaching them simple English words and a bit of Latin and Greek “for their souls.” In the evenings he gave fiery lectures on ancient history and the classics to anyone who would listen. He put on his comedy several times, and even took a touring troupe of Indian actors upriver to Blue Moon's village, where they performed
Ethan Allen
to an enthusiastic audience of Hidatsas.

Spring was coming on apace. The river was breaking up in great plates and cakes of ice, and drowned buffalo carcasses by the hundreds clogged the open current. Willow buds were swelling. The prairie breezes smelled of thawing earth and fresh shoots of green grass.

With the arrival of warmer weather, the Mandans' official rainmaker put it into the gossip mill that a great and sudden flood was about to descend upon the land, drowning out all those who did not believe in his meteorological powers. But if his followers would clamber up onto the roofs of their earthen lodges, there to wait out the deluge, they would certainly be spared. On the morning of the predicted cataclysm—which dawned clear as a bell—Rainmaker and a handful of his fellow believers ascended to the tops of their houses, and the magician beat a large drum all day long in the bright sunshine, with no other result than to provoke the laughter of the villagers. About dark they were pelted down off their roofs with clods of dried buffalo dung. Much disappointed that the watery retribution had not been sent, Rainmaker put the best face on the matter by assuring the town that he had
fended off
the catastrophic flood by his mummery, for which service the people owed him a great debt of gratitude. The Mandans were about equally divided in their opinion of this miracle.

One afternoon a few days later a deranged-appearing Cheyenne staggered into the village. He said that while he was away from home hunting buffalo, he learned that his village had been burned and his family slaughtered by a great war party of whites and Indians. Although he had not seen these marauders himself, he believed they were under the direction of a Spaniard from Santa Fe and were now headed north to intercept and destroy another party of whites on their way to the great sea-ocean; furthermore, this Force of Terror, which numbered over three hundred, was annihilating all the Indian towns in its path.

After interviewing the Cheyenne through Black Cat, my uncle immediately conducted him to Fort Mandan, where, with the Cat assisting, he had him repeat his story to Captain Lewis (Clark being off with a contingent of carpenters hewing out cottonwood canoes to accompany the pirogues upriver). Lewis felt great pity for the Cheyenne, but in the end dismissed his tale as an extravagancy of grief and madness or, possibly, a rumor planted by the Spanish to stop the American expedition in its tracks. The next morning the Indian did away with himself by leaping off a high bluff into the swollen river.

 

On the afternoon of the Cheyenne's suicide, True said that he and I had some business to discuss. We rode out over the greening prairie together, stopping about a mile west of the Mandan village on an eminence from which we could see a great way up the winding river. “Ticonderoga,” the private announced, “I must and will go on to become the first explorer to travel overland to the Pacific. I intend to discover or—ha ha—
rediscover
the Northwest Passage. Our little jaunt up the Missouri thus far has only whetted my appetite. Friend Franklin has agreed to accompany me. But you are nearly seventeen and man-grown. You must make your own decision.”

Looking far up the river at the unknown land ahead, I hesitated. “Uncle, tell me. Is there any real reason to believe that we can reach the Pacific? Much less get there before Lewis and his expedition?”

“Reason, Ti? Why, yes. There is every reason in the world to believe so. But in the end, it is not reason that will see us through but our imaginations. Lookee, lad. What faculty was it that inspired Tom Jefferson and Lewis to launch their expedition in the first place? It was the imagination. They
imagined
what might be here in the West—the scientific wonders, the many splendid Indian nations, their ‘practicable waterway' to the Pacific. The President
imagined
the benefit of this place called Louisiana to the United States, and Lewis
imagined
that, by dint of diligence and the ability to anticipate in advance the needs of his expedition, he could get through to the ocean. I imagined the same—and to get there first, and to fish in every fine river along the way to boot. Nay, Ti. The greatest achievements in the history of the world have all sprung from the imagination. Think of the adventures of Odysseus, Aeneas, and King Arthur, not to mention the great Don from La Mancha.”

I still had my doubts, the more so since all the figures my uncle saw fit to cite were themselves creations of the imagination. But as the great knight-errant stood on the promontory, shading his brow with one hand and pointing west with the other, his eyes gleaming with anticipation of whatever great adventures lay ahead, I knew that I could never abandon him, nor did I wish to.

“Uncle, I'll give you my decision this instant. Where you and your wonderful imagination go, there go I. Here is my hand on it.”

As the good man seized my hand, tears sprang to his eyes. “It is what I hoped you'd say, Ti. And believe me, the larks we have had thus far—although not altogether insignificant—will pale before those to come. Oh, nephew—the all-puissant Blackfeet, the impenetrable Rockies, the raging Columbia. Excelsior!”

 

On the day before the captains' expedition was scheduled to embark, Blue Moon planned to head out with a hunting party of twenty men for the Little Missouri River, which entered the Missouri proper about ninety miles above the Mandan and Hidatsa villages. His design was to press up the tributary to a bluff known as Buffalo Jump, and there, by setting the prairie on fire and creating a stampede, to drive the migrating bison over the brink of the cliff to their destruction on the rocky riverbank below. Their women, who would follow on the river with round little “bull boats” made from buffalo skins stretched over willow frames, would butcher the animals and take the meat back to their village. Our plan was to accompany Blue Moon's hunting party to Buffalo Jump, then strike out overland, reconnecting with the Missouri near the mouth of the River of Yellow Stones, which was the farthest west any white trader had ever penetrated up the river.