Sign-Talker

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  While Clark wrote a letter to Lewis, Drouillard and his uncle strolled into the town for a quick round of visits and libations with Lorimier’s many friends there. Afterward there was enough afternoon left for the twenty-mile ride overland to St. Louis on refreshed horses. The trace led southeastward up over the forested bluff and then emerged onto an intensely green vista of rolling prairie broken with copses of woods. Drouillard, carrying Clark’s letter about the cargo shift and the whipping, rode close alongside his uncle, knowing this could be his last sight of him for a long time.

  “So, neveu, the américain fleet at last moves. And you have not changed your mind?”

  “Sometimes I am ready to ask for my promise back. But I go along. They might not get much farther. The soldiers are wild, and they might desert or mutiny. They already hate that heavy boat. Their sergeant told me each man pulls about a ton. And they have perhaps a hundred times as far to go as they have come.”

  Lorimier nodded. “The town people did not like the whipping of the soldier. Did you see it done?”

  “I did. I expect to see more. In the camp the soldiers were always in trouble, and they find this much harder than camp.”

  Lorimier was keenly interested in whether this voyage would succeed or fail. He said, “Do they talk of quitting?”

  Drouillard shrugged. “They fall quiet when I come near. They think of me as the captains’ man, since I’m their courier. Even the boatmen are wary of me. I don’t like that.”

  Lorimier put his head back and laughed. “You like to be alone, you, the hunter! This will help you be alone! Ha ha! But I tell you, I think they will get over the trouble and succeed. You must understand the power an officer has. It is all written, in army books. When an officer may whip, or cast out, or shoot a soldier.”

  “Such things as your sons go to learn in the army school, eh?” Drouillard pictured the likable but spoiled boys, Guillaume and Louis, stiff-necked in blue soldier coats, with the authority to whip or shoot soldiers. He thought of soldiers now as he thought of York the slave, all probably wanting to run away, but afraid of the invisible whips, guns, and chains.

  Lorimier rode along, chuckling, occasionally flicking a fly with the end of his braid. “C’est ça, alors. Not all bad for us. As I have said, it is good to be early in a promising place. Good also to have relations and prestige. You know that your father was a better trader and interpreter because he married your mother. And look at me. I am a shining portrait of le pratique!”

  Drouillard thought of Manuel Lisa, saying these same things about early advantages. Lisa had seen him as being of value because of the knowledge he would gain. If his uncle foresaw that, he had not said so. To Lorimier, it seemed, he had failed for good when he ran away from school and became a hunting Indian, and apparently could never be as promising as the two soft and dissipated sons who would become officers. They had gone east earlier this month, along with some Osage headmen who needed to be overawed by the great cities and the Great White Father Jefferson.

  “Eh bien,” Drouillard said. “Who knows what will come of all this? Sometimes it does not look so good to me.” He was thinking not just of the difficulties he had seen, but those of his dreams.

  “You are that dubious,” Lorimier said with a slanting smile and a shake of the head, “yet you seem to be going.”

  “I gave my word. And, speaking of that: I gave my word too to Mr. Graeter about my debt to him. It is a month past due. But the captains keep me so busy running between them, I haven’t been able to go to Massac and pay any back, or renew the note. The captains gave me no advance to pay him off with. Now we’re going up the river and I have no chance to keep my word with him.”

  Lorimier chuckled. “Neveu, there are two kinds of promises. The kind you must keep as promptly as you can, and the kind you make to moneylenders.” Drouillard looked at him in surprise. A promise was a promise, and he had never suspected that his uncle made distinctions. Lorimier shrugged. “I will tell M’sieu Graeter your excuse, and that he must wait. He will still be here when you return. And if he isn’t, even better!”

  “Uncle, you are certainly free with the honor of my name.” He was not comfortable with leaving the debt untended, and knew it would linger in a part of his mind. But Lorimier knew of money things, and he knew Graeter.

  Over the next rise their view deepened below and to the east. Across the Mississippi the last of the evening sun gilded the lush green woods on the slopes and top of the ancient mound-hill, and it stood forth glowing above the bottomland, which was now in shadow. The great, dusky lowland with the broad river curving through it and the sacred hill glowing in its ancient silence swelled his heart. This place among the joining rivers was the land most familiar to his feet and to his eagle’s eyes. The thought of leaving it gave him an ache.

  But now, below, on this side of the river, were the roofs and chimneys of the whitemen’s town of St. Louis. As this valley was the place to which the river waters all flowed, this town would be the place to which all wealth flowed, if the plans of the whitemen came out as they hoped.

  And he of the many languages was to help them make it so. He still wondered sometimes why the Master of Life had put him in the path of the Captains Lewis and Clark. But if the teachings of his mother were true, that was what had been done.

  June 12, 1804

  Drouillard had killed two bears on the prairie the day before, and he was making jerky of the leftover meat by drying thin strips on a rack above a bed of coals when a shout came from the river.

  Two boats were coming down, carrying several whitemen and a boy, all dressed in skins. They came ashore.

  They had been trading far up the Missouri with the Yankton band of Sioux, and had hides and furs in their vessels, en route to St. Louis. A very rugged and weathered old man was in charge of them. He introduced himself as Pierre Dorion, a patroon of the trader Loisel. He had traded twenty-five years among the Sioux. Within minutes the old man was cackling with the happy realization that Captain Clark was a brother of the great soldier George Rogers Clark, whom Dorion had aided during his Revolutionary War campaign on the Mississippi. Drouillard shook his head in disbelief. One couldn’t get away from that man’s reputation, even two hundred miles up the Missouri.

  The captains bought three hundred pounds of buffalo grease and tallow from the traders. Then they set about persuading the old man to join them and go back up as far as the Sioux towns, where he might be very valuable as an interpreter and might use his influence to convince some Sioux chiefs to go east and meet the President. They told Dorion about the purchase of the territory, amazing news to him, and about the President’s plan to shape all the Indian nations into a trade network. Dorion wasted no time deciding. He transferred himself, baggage, and his dim-witted camp boy to the red pirogue of the voyageurs, and sent the rest of his party on down the Missouri to market their yield.

  Chapter 5

  Mouth of the Kanzas River

  June 29, 1804

  Already, poor Collins was about to get whipped again. A hundred lashes this time. Just when the slashes on his back were fully healed from the punishment at St. Charles. He stood shirtless in the hot afternoon sun while the troops lined up with their fists full of whips. And Private Hugh Hall was stripped for whipping too. Fifty lashes he was to get.

  Drouillard knelt a few yards away, rolling up wet deerskins to tie in bundles with wood ash, which would loosen the hair for easy removal. He wouldn’t watch this whipping business. Some of the voyageurs were helping him with the skins, others were loading the keelboat and pirogues with big bundles of cooked and dried venison they had been preparing during the two-day encampment, here where the Kanzas flowed into a sharp bend of the Missouri. Drouillard had shot dozens of deer in the weeks coming upriver, and some bears. He cut the meat in thin strips and dried it in the sun on such days as this, when there was no rain.

  He felt like a free man again, ranging through this vast new country, back in his natural ro
le as a hunter and scout. Now that the two captains were together, he didn’t have to carry letters and pouches back and forth between them as he had for so many weeks, and for the greater part of every day he felt as if he were roaming alone through a hunter’s paradise. Being the main hunter, he was excused from guard duty at night and from the labors of rowing, poling, and pulling the boats up the swift river. But he made up for it with all this butchering and work on the hides.

  Over by the gauntlet line Captain Lewis was making some angry pronouncement. The soldiers were warming up their whipping arms, switches swishing and hissing in the air, but Drouillard could hear hardly any of it over the drone and whine of the flies that blackened and dotted everything, especially his butchering places. His eyes and mouth would fill with flies if he opened them wide.

  He had never hunted so hard or trimmed so much meat in his whole life as a hunter, even when feeding the troops back at Fort Massac. It was because he had never hunted for anyone who was working as hard as these soldiers. He guessed every man was eating maybe ten pounds of fresh meat every day, yet they grew leaner and leaner from their exertions. They were always drenched, with river water and rain sometimes, but usually with their own sweat. They were wretched with blisters, scald foot, and boils from the constant rubbing of sodden clothes, wet shoes, sweat-slick oars and push-poles and tow ropes, all aggravated by the bites of deer flies and black flies in the daytime and the clouds of mosquitoes at night. Many had other skin problems, rashes and tumors, which the captains blamed on drinking the scummy, muddy water of the Missouri. The men used bear grease faster than he and Colter could bring it in, to soothe their irritations and discourage biting insects. They all greased up liberally but sweated it off almost as fast.

  Now to add to their skin problems, these two, Collins and Hall, were about to be whipped raw with green switches. And the soldiers would whip them without mercy or restraint this time, in righteous anger:

  The two had stolen from the corps liquor supply.

  Drouillard knew how the men felt about the whiskey. To them it was one of the most precious parts of the cargo, equal in their minds and hearts to gunpowder and tobacco. They thought of it all day. The whiskey ration every evening was the high point of the day. It lifted their spirits and compensated for their physical miseries. And there was too little of it as it was, without selfish blackguards taking more than their share. In their meticulous preparation of the cargo manifest, the captains had determined that there was room for just a little over a hundred gallons. The soldiers mulled their liquor calculations over and over: less than three gallons per man, on a voyage that was going to last two years or more. They had figured the number of drams in a gallon and knew there was probably not enough to last the way west. They feared some of it would be used medicinally or shared with Indians and would be depleted even sooner. There would be no way to get any more when this ran out.

  The whiskey was their sacred reserve, but on guard duty last night Collins had sneaked an unauthorized drink from the keg, then another, and more as it made him more careless. Then Hall had caught him at it, so Collins offered him some, and they had got quietly drunk. The captains had convened a court-martial late this morning, with Sergeant Pryor presiding and Private John Potts acting as Judge Advocate. Collins had pleaded not guilty and was swiftly pronounced guilty, one hundred lashes well laid on as punishment. Perhaps expecting to be acquitted if truthful, Hall admitted his guilt and was sentenced to fifty strokes.

  Orders were shouted. Despite himself, Drouillard watched Collins go down the line. Even over the whine of flies he could hear the fierce hissing of the switches. He heard one of the soldiers shout, “Collins, you flyblown turd, y’ need a flywhisk on ye! Take this!” Shish! Shish!

  “No commentaries needed,” Captain Lewis barked. “Just do your duty.” The switches hissed and whistled in the air, splitting and snapping with the force; splinters and blood mist filled the air in Collins’s wake, and he was grimacing and beginning to stagger. But as before, he made no outcry. When he was through, Captain Clark led him aside to anoint his tattered flesh. Then as Hall started through, Drouillard turned away, and was surprised to see the slave York squatting beside him, helping to smear the wet ash on one of the deer hides. York’s headkerchief was pulled down over one eye, which had been hurt a week before when Collins, pretending to be playful, had thrown river sand in the slave’s face. Captain Clark had thought York would lose the eye, but after a few days of pain and infection, it was beginning to heal.

  “Eh, York, you don’t have to do this bloody work. You’re the cap’n’s helper, not mine.”

  York looked at him and chuckled. “I don’ mind, Mist’ Droor. Ra’r be a-puttin’ this treatment on a deerskin than medicine on that man’s skin. Heh!” He smeared the ashy paste, which grayed his thick black hands and wrists.

  Drouillard nodded. So they worked together. Hall yelped a few times as he went through the gauntlet. Drouillard shook his head. “Mean!” he said softly. “Y’ know, my people never even switch a child. I can’t get used to this.”

  York murmured deep and said, “’N’en you never been whipped?”

  “I’d kill a man who ever tried it.”

  York peered at him with his good eye, glanced around at the hides, bones, fly-covered guts, and bloodsoaked sand, nodded and said, “Reckon so.”

  Drouillard had seen the whip scars on York’s broad back a few times, when the slave had stripped to swim ashore and gather cress and other greens to add to the captains’ diet. He and York ate with the captains, and the four of them were the only ones free of the skin problems. Drouillard asked, “You get whipped often?”

  “Not often. I been a good boy.”

  “Cap’n didn’t do the whippin’ himself, you said?”

  “Had somebody c’d do it better who di’n like me. Cap’n beat the tar out o’ me when we play-fighted, though.”

  Drouillard squinted at York. “You ever hit him?” The idea of the man and his slave fighting was a cheering notion.

  York again chuckled deep, and shook his head. “Lucky a couple times, is all. ’Em Clark boys all, woo, watch out!”

  Drouillard hadn’t considered whether there might be other Clark brothers besides the Town Burner. “How many brothers?”

  “Four now. Was six, till the war.”

  “Hm. They all play-fought you?”

  He chuckled. “Oh, only Mas’ Billy. Only my own boy.”

  My own boy, Drouillard thought. Like he owns the cap’n, rather than the way it really is.

  It had taken them a month and a half to reach this river, the Kanzas. Captain Clark said they had come 366 miles in that time. The captains were always measuring and writing down. With compasses and other instruments they measured every turn in the river. Clark seemed to be able to measure miles in his mind, whether he was in the keelboat or walking on shore. Almost every day he drew little map sketches and wrote down numbers. At every river mouth, if the sky was clear, the captains measured sun and moon and stars with their strange look-through devices, and determined just where it was in the world by numbers. They seemed to see everything in lines and numbers, and they wrote something down about every living creature they saw. Lewis would kill a bird and measure its wings and legs and count its feathers and write all that down for his president. He pressed plants and flowers between papers, skinned animals, stuffed birds, and wrote everything down. It all looked like so much trouble. It seemed to Drouillard it would have been easier for Jefferson just to have come out and looked the country over himself.

  Drouillard had been more hunter than interpreter so far. Five days out of St. Charles, they had met the Kickapoo hunters with whom Lorimier had counciled, and Drouillard had talked for them to the captains. The Kickapoo tongue was almost exactly like Shawnee, and the tribal name so similar to Kithkopo, the Shawnee war clan, that Drouillard suspected they must have splintered off from the Shawnees long ago. At any rate, his skill in talking with them had delighted
the captains. The Kickapoos had brought three fresh-killed deer for the soldiers, explaining that Lorimier had told them to have meat ready when the whitemen’s boats came up. That had of course increased the captains’ appreciation of Lorimier.

  All had gone so well that day that the captains gave the Kickapoos two quarts of whiskey, and the troops had looked on, aghast, at the sight of their precious liquor passing into the hands and down the throats of mere savages. Maybe Collins and Hall had just decided to drink theirs before the captains gave it all away to the numerous Indians ahead.

  But since those Kickapoos, there had been no Indians at all, and when Drouillard found their trails while hunting, they showed no recent use. For about a month now, in fact, the expedition had met no one along the river, except a fur trader named Loisel, old M’sieur Dorion’s boss, returning from a winter of trading with the Sioux, some four hundred miles above. Here Drouillard had served well as interpreter, this time of the French of Dorion and Loisel. The two had given the captains much recent information about Indians, trade, and traders, which would be useful ahead, or so they hoped. Then Loisel had gone on down.

  Drouillard spent his days hunting, his evenings evaluating the officers and men, or occasionally serving as intermediary between the voyageurs and the officers—a frustrating and distasteful task. Captain Lewis in particular was contemptuous of the French boatmen, whom he found disorderly and frivolous, a bad example to the soldiers he was trying to discipline. Drouillard kept encouraging Private Cruzatte to assume more responsibility for that, since he was now both a voyageur and a soldier.

  Clark was easy to like and admire, but Lewis seemed a man out of balance. The energies he had expended on manipulating and flattering the leading families around St. Louis, and in buying goods for the journey, he now expended on scampering and snooping along the riverbanks after anything that might interest Jefferson. Climbing a cliff one day, he had fallen off the edge, barely saving himself by wedging his knife into a crack, giving himself and Clark a good scare. When not giddy with excitement, he was a stickler and a fretter.