Drouillard himself was perhaps even more delighted than the captains that Charbonneau had repented and stayed on. Though it had at first seemed foolish to bring a woman and baby on such a grueling journey, Drouillard had been changing that opinion little by little. The presence of this little family was growing to be strangely comforting to him, for various reasons, some of which he hadn’t thought out yet but simply felt in his heart. The presence of a woman and child made this seem less like an army, more like a tribe. The soldiers, while not inclined to care much for Indians, had some regard for the presence of a married woman, and if Bird Woman’s presence had done nothing else, it had muted their farting contests. And the sight of this slight, dignified girl with a baby at her breast seemed sometimes to make them wistful. He had seen the soldiers watching her by firelight with something deeper in their eyes than they used to have. Perhaps, as they now were heading farther and farther from their homes, this little nursing mother made them think more of their own sisters and mothers thousands of miles behind. Or for some of them, surely, she was a reminder of recent tender pleasures they had enjoyed in their long winter among the Mandan girls and their families. The baby Jean Baptiste was also an object of their gentler curiosity; there was hardly a man, even the most cocky and swaggering, who had not at least once enjoyed the small triumph of teasing a coo and a smile out of the little half-breed.
Half-breed, Drouillard thought, watching Captain Clark hand the cradleboard to the Bird Woman. One like me. He remembered that, just like Charbonneau, his father had been a French-Canadian interpreter for English-speaking white soldiers, with a petite Indian wife and a half-breed baby. Maybe that was a part of what he felt. Maybe this was how his family had looked among soldiers thirty years ago, back at that distant place called Detroit. His mother a Shawnee girl, this one a Shoshone girl. Shawnee. Shoshone. Shoshawnee. He played with the words and brushed mosquitoes away from his face.
There were direct and practical reasons for appreciating this Shoshone girl too. She was an excellent forager. Wandering the riverbanks with her baby on her back and a pointed digging stick in one hand, she would come back to camp with tubers, roots, and sprouts that eased the monotony of the meat and meal diet.
So he watched this little family in the firelight with a deep and thoughtful pleasure. He doubted that Charbonneau was as educated or intelligent as his father Pierre Drouillard had been. On the other hand, Charbonneau likely had never been and never would be the sot that Pierre Drouillard had become. Maybe not. Though he was certainly gay and glassy-eyed with the dram he’d had this evening.
Drouillard was seated on a crate that he had never seen opened, though he had seen it in the keelboat’s cargo, and now it was dutifully loaded and unloaded as the pirogues and canoes made their way up the river. It looked like a gun crate, with rope handles, and having helped lift it a few times, he knew it was one of the heaviest parts of their cargo. It was said to be a set of connecting iron bars that could be assembled to make the frame for a cargo boat. Captain Lewis intended to have it assembled at some point along the way and covered with skins, if there should be someplace where boats were needed and no timber to make them, as perhaps on the rivers beyond the Shining Mountains. It was in any case a tremendous burden for the soldiers who had to bring everything along up these rivers. Like many of the things Captain Lewis had brought, it had intelligent planning behind it but seemed more trouble than it was worth. Likewise the immensely heavy gunpowder canisters. They were made of lead, with screw-in lids that were sealed with wax to make them waterproof. When emptied, the canisters could be cut apart and melted down to make bullets. Apparently these were inventions that Captain Lewis and President Jefferson had dreamed up during the long years they had spent planning this adventure.
Drouillard sat on the crate watching the dancing, and listened to the campfire conversations. Potts was lamenting that the voyageur Rivet had left the party for St. Louis because “I’m sure there’s many an Indian ahead who’s never seen a man dance upside down.”
“Well, then!” exclaimed John Colter. “When that time comes, I’ll dance on my hands for ’em!”
“Hah!” cried Potts. “You can hardly dance on your feet, Colter, let alone your hands!” Drouillard couldn’t see Potts from where he sat, but recognized his voice and Dutchy accent. He remembered a night more than a year ago when, coming up from Tennessee, he had lain by the campfire talking with Potts about dreams. He had been with these whitemen so long that he could recognize their voices in the dark.
“So y’ say!” Colter cried. “Watch me!” He leaped into the firelight, bent down and put his palms on the ground, kicked his feet skyward, went on over and landed with a thump on his back with his feet in Sergeant Pryor’s lap. “Well, I need a little practice.”
Among the soldiers for some days there had been much speculation about the white bears, or grizzlies, about which the Indians had given such dire warnings. “The Hidatsas,” Captain Clark said, “told me that they actually put on paint and go through the war prayers before they hunt these bear, just as if they were going to war against men.”
Captain Lewis waved a hand as if to dismiss the whole notion. “With bow and arrow, and those worthless muskets the British sell ’em, it well might be a frightful scrap. But with these rifles, and American riflemen, why, this bear will prove to be just another animal. Let’s ask our bear hunter. Drouillard, are you fearful of the white bear?”
Several people were looking and listening for his answer. He thought for a minute, and then, having had his dram of whiskey, he replied, “Well, Cap’n, I guess I’d greet a white bear the way I’d greet a white man: with good manners and some suspicion.”
There were still a few men with energy left to sing after the dancers had dropped with fatigue. Hugh McNeal and Tom Howard, accompanied only by a tambourine, were singing, one bass and one falsetto, with many elisions and slurs:
“I married a wife,
Oh then, oh then,
I married a wi-ife, oh then,
I married a wife, the plague of my life,
Now I long to be single again!
Again and again, and again and again,
again, again and again,
I married a wi-ife, the plague of my life,
Now I long to be single again!”
As their song went on, interrupted by disputes over what came next, whether the wife took fever and died in the same stanza, or waited to die in the next stanza, whether the husband “laughed and he cried” or “laughed till he cried,” Drouillard got up and slipped out of the firelight to make water. He noted with gratitude that he had no discomfort from it, apparently having avoided the cock pox that almost every other man had caught. He moved in the darkness down toward the Yellow Stone’s bank and stood watching the sentry who was guarding the boats. From ten paces away he could smell the man’s dense odor: woolen clothes bearing countless days’ dried sweat, cock dribbles, and shirttail smirch, and his breath reeking of tobacco quid. The sentry now and then tried to hum the tune that came so haltingly from the glowing camp off through the cottonwoods, and Drouillard would hear him spit. The breeze was busy with other odors. He could smell the latrine close by; he could smell the putrescence of old carrion, here in this rich valley where elk and buffalo carcasses lay so abundant that the wolves and buzzards and ravens couldn’t pick them all clean, and left them for the flies and beetles to finish; he could smell buffalo dung and deer scat, and the rank boundary piddlings of wolf urine; he could smell fishy river-muck and beaver gland, campfire smoke and tobacco smoke, and, when the breeze shifted, that sentry again. But what he was trying to pick out was bear.
He had detected what he thought was a slight whiff of bear earlier today, while coming down the Yellow Stone’s bank.
“My wife took a fever, oh then, oh then,
My wife took a fever, oh then,
My wife took a fever, I hope it won’t leave ’er,
For I long to be single again …”
He wondered again whether the so-called white bears, or yellow bears, could really be so different in spirit from the bears he knew back home.
These days the captains themselves were doing much of the hunting. They took turns walking on shore as the pirogues and canoes came along, and both were spoiling for a fight with the bears. So their invasion of bear country would be hostile from the beginning. The bears would spread the word ahead: whitemen are enemies, not brothers.
Or, he thought, maybe the bear will smell these soldiers coming and say, Those must be bad! He and the Bird Woman were the only two members of this party who bothered about bathing their bodies or rinsing their clothes every day. She went to the water first thing every morning if possible, as he did, no matter how cold the water was. Her husband Charbonneau, like several soldiers of the corps, could not swim and thus was afraid to wade in and bathe, but she kept herself and her baby clean.
“My wife she die-ied, oh then, oh then,
My wife she die-ied. Ooooooh, then,
My wife she died, and I laughed till I cried,
For I finally was single again!”
In his years as a trader, Charbonneau had probably spread the pox, or at least gonorrhea, in many a village, and Bird Woman likely had it from him. And as she had been traded among several Hidatsa captors before Charbonneau got her, she might have been sick with it even before Charbonneau bought her, and the other Shoshone girl, from the Hidatsas.
It was by no means a love story. Yet she seemed a dutiful wife to him, and they occupied their own little circle of existence, with their baby at its center.
McNeal and Howard argued a little in the distance, and soldiers laughed, and then the song went on:
“I went to her graveside, oh then, oh then,
I went to her graveside, oh then,
By her graveside, a fair maiden I spied,
And I longed to be married again …”
When Charbonneau and his wife first visited Fort Mandan last fall, some flinching, cringing manner about her had made Drouillard suspect that he was brutal to her, but he had seen no sign of it since. Her timidity might have lingered from her girlhood ordeal among her Hidatsa captors. It was not a love story, it was a slave story.
“So I married another, oh then, oh then.
I married another, oh then,
I married another, she was worse than the other!
Now I long to be single again!
Again and again, and again and again …”
The music was different now that the voyageurs were gone. Drouillard had liked their music. Fortunately, Cruzatte was still along with his fiddle, and Labiche now and then sang in French.
It was strange to him, how he was about this body of people. He was still the hunter, the Indian, independent from them. But in their minds he had become theirs. He knew they took pride in his prowess. And the truth was that he found himself concerned about them all the time. Keeping them fed fresh meat was his job, and at first that had been all of his concern. Now he was bemused to find himself worried about anything that might happen to them, be it sickness, drowning, or stirring up bears.
He shook his head, silently laughed at himself, and went back toward the firelight.
May 14, 1805
Drouillard was at the tiller of the white pirogue with a good east wind from astern, steering close to the south bank with the sail shading him from the afternoon sun ahead.
The captains had deemed him a “natural sailor,” as they put it, and so now he seemed to spend more time crewing the captains’ boat with Cruzatte than hunting. This boat carried all the medicine, sky instruments, books, journals, notes, and specimens—everything used in their work for the President. It also carried the people who couldn’t swim, since it was the most stable vessel.
As a rule, one captain or the other stayed with this boat, which led their little fleet, but neither was aboard now. Cruzatte and Labiche were forward near the mast, tending the braces of the square sail. Three soldiers loafed and gambled amidships, and Charbonneau and his family were nestled amidst the cargo nearly at Drouillard’s feet. Bird Woman had the baby out of his cradleboard and was repacking it with clean filler, which she made by pounding the inner bark of cottonwood until it was fluffy.
He heard on the wind four gunshots almost at once, then another, some frantic yelling, then another shot and more yelling.
Indian attack or bear attack? He was sure it was another bear incident. Astern he saw the red pirogue with sail up coming along behind, but only four of the six canoes following. Then he saw that a little way back, the other two canoes were on the bank, no men in them. Above on the bluff a huge yellow bear was chasing soldiers all over the place. Six shots. All the men had emptied their rifles and now the bear was doubtless wounded and in a fury. There had been several bear sightings since the camp at the Yellow Stone last month, and as he had feared, in each case the men—including Captain Lewis—had attacked the bears instead of just observing them.
Neither captain was anywhere near this bear fight. Both had gone ashore on the north bank an hour ago to stalk a buffalo herd. Everybody on board the white pirogue was gazing back at the distant melee in helpless dismay. Two of the canoes were turning, going to help. Drouillard saw that it was too far for him to shoot.
“Pierre!” he shouted to Cruzatte. “Drop the sail!” Drouillard turned the tiller, swinging the pirogue about, and told the soldiers to man oars and row. He hoped to get close enough to help before the bear caught and mauled any soldiers. He saw that two soldiers had tumbled down the bluff and were trying to get into a canoe.
There were two more shots; someone had reloaded. Still the maddened bear was roaring. He saw it chasing a man who was sprinting toward the edge of the bluff. He saw the man drop his gun, run straight off the bluff and plunge twenty feet down into the river.
The bear didn’t stop. It hurtled off the bluff after the man. He couldn’t tell whether the bear landed on top of the man. Now all of the other vessels were turning back to help.
The man in the water surfaced a short distance ahead of the bear and swam toward the oncoming canoes as fast as he could thrash water, but the bear was closing on him.
It was still too far to shoot at a target as small as a bear’s head. Drouillard saw a man with a rifle on the bluff kneel and take aim. It looked like Colter. The muzzle flashed, banged; a puff of smoke billowed on the wind.
The bear jerked and its head vanished underwater. Triumphant shouts came from the bluff and the canoes. The swimming soldier slowed and looked back, then trod water waiting for the canoes to reach him. The men in the canoes pulled him from the water.
By the time the pirogue reached them, they had a rope on the dead bear and had towed it to shore.
Drouillard went ashore to examine the beast, and told Cruzatte to take the pirogue on up. The captains, far ahead on the other shore, must have heard all this shooting. The fleet moved back out into the river, except the two canoes of the hunters who had first attacked the bear. Drouillard was irritated at all of them for going out of their way to attack it, but said nothing; they were all nearly out of their minds with relief and excitement. They had got la gloire, though it had nearly been costly.
With its yellow-brown, white-tipped fur soaked, its massive torso and powerful limbs were terribly evident. The soldiers were guessing its weight at half a ton, but of course it looked enormous to them. Drouillard estimated it at six or seven hundred pounds.
It was leaking blood from everywhere. It looked as if eight rifle balls had hit it before the shot in the head had killed it.
He looked at the disheveled, wild-eyed, jabbering soldiers, and then down at the bear, its head as broad as a man’s chest, its huge teeth outlined with blood from its own bullet-riddled lungs, its long tongue drooping pink against the gray mud of the riverbank. He thought of the powerful spirit that had just passed out of this animal, and he thought that spirit might just now be hurrying ahead toward the west to warn
all the other bears ahead that there could be no peace with these whitemen coming up the river. The soldiers were laying claim to claws and teeth to keep as souvenirs of their thrilling battle.
“Get him aboard,” Drouillard said, “and we’ll catch up. Cap’ns’ll want to know what all this shooting was about.”
He sat in the canoe with the carcass and took up a paddle.
“Weather coming,” he said. The pewter-colored water of the broad river was getting choppy. The sails of the pirogues ahead were pale against a purple-gray line of squall clouds running ragged on the western sky.
Now he could see the two captains on the narrow bottomlands on the other side of the river, tiny at nearly a half-mile distance, trotting downstream, waving to signal the pirogues, their calls barely audible in the wind. Probably they were trying to warn the crews of the oncoming storm. The canoes now all veered toward shore to avoid the rising chop.
Then Drouillard noticed that Cruzatte was not at the tiller of the distant white boat; he was forward near the mast. Charbonneau was steering. Cruzatte must have given him the tiller so he could go forward and shorten sail for the coming blow. Not a wise choice: Charbonneau had almost capsized the pirogue by steering her broadside to a gust the last time he had the tiller. He could not swim and had no sense of wind or sail. His wife with their baby sat low among the bundles and instruments. Cruzatte and Labiche were just getting ready to take in sail when the wind struck the vessel on her fore quarter and turned her almost broadside.
Charbonneau, instead of putting the pirogue before the wind, threw the tiller the other way to head into it. With a whap audible halfway across the river, the square-sail brace was jerked from Labiche’s hand. The pirogue heeled over, part of the sail shivering, part in the water, side-slipping downriver and foundering in bursts of spray. Through the rush of wind Drouillard heard Cruzatte bellowing at Charbonneau, and Charbonneau wailing to heaven in his terror. Two gunshots banged on the far shore, the captains apparently trying to get the crew’s attention; they were yelling but the wind carried their voices away. Drouillard saw Captain Lewis drop his rifle, sling off his gun bag, and start to strip off his coat as if to swim out, but Clark restrained him.
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