Sign-Talker

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

a verry cold morning every thing wet and frosed, I went in front, & Saw Several of the Argalia or Ibex … our hunter killed a Deer which we made use of … I was the first white man who ever wer on the waters of this river.

  William Clark, Journals

  Drouillard found fresh hoofprints and moccasin tracks. One man had stood here in the snow, dismounted, watched from a thicket, then left, recently. Drouillard checked his flintlock and rode forward, sniffing and scanning. A raven was gurgling and croaking not far ahead. Near it, he thought he saw something of a buckskin color retreating through the bush. When he got to that spot, there were the fresh prints again, the scent of horse still in the air.

  Someone was spying on their approach and withdrawing as they came. When the captains caught up, he told them. They concluded that any Indians in this vicinity probably were Flatheads—the tribe the Shoshones were planning to meet down at the three forks for their fall buffalo hunt.

  Now the valley broadened to open their view on sloping ground with copses of evergreens, like a wide bowl ringed by snowy mountains, easier travel for the limping horses and footsore soldiers. As they rode along the bold stream, Lewis proposed naming it Clark’s River, since he had been the first to come upon it. Old Toby and Bird Woman were chatting cheerfully as the guide walked alongside the packhorse she was riding. She rode balanced atop the packsaddle, wrapped in a blanket that sheltered also the cradleboard on her back. Her baby, seven months old now, seldom cried. He slept, or rode with calm, dark-eyed curiosity through magnificent landscapes. When released from the confining cradleboard, he was always eager to kick up his fat legs and wave and reach, coo and laugh, and was most lively when he heard any kind of music, the singing of men or the squeak of the fiddle. Captain Clark had nicknamed him Pomp the Dancing Boy.

  Drouillard now saw several sets of hoofprints in the snow and soft ground, so he quickened his pace and went out ahead, swinging eastward away from the river toward pine timber, to have some cover as he studied the valley ahead.

  He smelled wood smoke.

  He rode among the pines and passed through, and when he came through to the other side, saw smoke hazing the dark pines of the distance, then the source of the smoke: tepee lodges, about thirty of them, beside the river and in the path of the oncoming soldiers. People were milling about on the near side of the camp, mostly men with lances and shields, some mounted, others holding horses by their bridles. Whoever had been watching the soldiers come had alerted the community, but for some reason the warriors had not ridden out yet.

  So Drouillard rode his horse out of the pines straight down toward the camp with his hand up and two fingers together in the Friend or Brother sign. This would be better than running back to tell the captains, he thought; doing that, he would look like a war scout going to give a warning. As he came out from the pines, he saw their horse herd on a grassy bottom beyond the camp, and there were hundreds.

  Just then someone saw him coming and yelled, and four mounted men broke from the crowd and rode toward him at a trot.

  They were dressed in beautifully tanned skins and robes, and their horses were superior. All the men wore their hair neatly plaited, with the braids wrapped in otter skins and hanging forward on both shoulders. They were gaunt like the hungry Shoshones, but did not seem timid or suspicious. The gray-haired rider in front returned Drouillard’s peace sign.

  They talked by hands without dismounting. The old one said he was glad the strange men were coming in peace. He had been watching them come and had seen a man among them with his face blackened, as for war. But he had seen that they had a woman with them, unlike a war party. The old man was Three Eagles, a chief. He called his people Ootlashoots; some tribes called them Flatheads. Drouillard told him that the people behind him were whitemen who were going to see the ocean, that they sought friendship with all peoples, and had recently been with the Shoshones. He said they would want to camp here because of the lateness of the day, and smoke and talk. That they gave gifts to express their desire for friendship.

  When the soldiers came down, a crowd rushed out to meet them. Many put robes over the whitemen’s shoulders; it was presumed they must be cold, because they were so pale.

  Thursday 5th Sept. 1805

  a clear cool morning. the Standing water froze … the Indian dogs are so ravinous that they eat Several pair of the mens Moccasons … these natives have the Stranges language of any we have yet Seen. they appear to us as though they had an Impedement in their speech or brogue on their tongue. we think perhaps that they are the welch Indians. &C. they are the likelyest and honestest we have seen and are verry friendly to us. they Swaped to us Some of their good horses and took our worn out horses and appeared to wish to help us as much as lay in their power.

  Sergeant John Ordway, Journals

  Neither Bird Woman nor Toby spoke the gurgling, throaty language of these people, and it appeared that Drouillard might have to sign-talk everything. But living among these people was a bright Shoshone boy who was fluent in both tongues. He translated the Flatheads’ words into Shoshone; Bird Woman translated Shoshone into Hidatsa; Charbonneau translated Hidatsa into French, which Labiche translated into English for the captains. That process was reversed as the captains explained their mission and trade prospects, offered gifts and medals, and swapped for more and better horses. It gave Drouillard time to go and hunt, as the Indians had nothing but dried berries and roots to share with their guests. He brought in a deer toward evening, which was stewed and gave at least a taste of meat to many hungry people, Indian and white. By then the captains had obtained three colts for emergency eating, and enough good horses to bring the number of pack animals to forty—enough to carry all the packsaddles, with a few relief horses, and to allow four hunters to go out mounted all the time.

  Neither group could linger. The tribe was running late for its buffalo-hunting rendezvous with the Shoshones. The whitemen needed to get through the mountains westward before too much snow fell. Some of the Flatheads said the trek across the mountains could be made in five sleeps.

  Chapter 17

  The Nez Perce Trail

  September 1805

  Five days travel had become ten, and there was still no sign of an end to the mountains. They had gone four days northward just to reach a creek that came down from the pass they were seeking, then two days up that creek on a brutally rough climbing trail often blocked by fallen trees, camping at night on slopes so steep there was no level place to lie down, and barely enough grass to keep the horses going. They had seen stone circles and charred wood from old Indian camps, which Toby said were former Nez Perce camps, evidence that they were now on that tribe’s trail over the mountains. Near the crest of the pass was a plume of steam, rising from a spring whose water was so hot it was painful to hold a finger in it a second. Several paths led to this spring, and a rock dam had been built below to form a bathing pool. A few miles farther up they had crested the divide to stand in the wind and look at an endless array of towering, snow-topped peaks thickly clothed with evergreen timber on their slopes. The next day Toby had taken a wrong turn and led them down to a clear, shallow creek rushing over round, many-colored cobbles and boulders, where the discovery of fishing weirs showed him that he had chosen a fish-camp trail instead of the correct route.

  In that steep-sided valley amidst gloomy forests of pine, spruce, and fir, wet and chilled by rain and hail, with no fresh meat, losing faith in their guide, they had killed and butchered a colt for meat to supplement the moldy “portable soup,” made of dried vegetables, carried from the East in tin boxes and more than two years old. They named a branch creek near that wretched camp Colt Killed Creek, then set out the next morning to climb several miles up a steep, rocky, deadwood-strewn switchback trail to regain the Indian road at the ridge, a climb that took all day and ruined two of the packhorses, which had to be abandoned. Other horses had tumbled unhurt down the mountainside, one such accident smashing Captain Clark’s portable desk. On regaining t
he snow-covered trail atop the mountain that night, they found no water, and had to melt snow for boiling the last of the colt meat.

  The next morning they all awakened nearly chilled to death and found themselves covered with snow that had fallen before daybreak. Drouillard had watched with pity as the soldiers, who had no socks, wrapped their benumbed feet in rags and pulled their frozen moccasins on over them. There was no game to be found on this snowy mountain, and the Indian path had become so filled in with snow that sometimes it could be discerned only by finding trees that had been worn and rubbed by the Indians’ packsaddles in past migrations.

  By the middle of the month they were on steep mountainsides whose thick pine forests were so laden with snow that the passing pack train was constantly covered with wet snow that cascaded from the branches upon them. The air was frigid, their clothes and thin moccasins soaked, and the fear of slipping down steep slopes kept them so tense that they were doubly fatigued at every day’s end. Then there was no level place to sleep. Visibility was poor, either because it snowed or because the mountaintops they traveled were in the clouds. More horses fell and were injured. On several days, the departure from camp had been delayed because of strayed packhorses. It seemed to Drouillard that he spent almost as much time hunting for horses as for game.

  By September 18 the third and last colt had been devoured. Game was so scarce that the hunters had not fired their rifles for days. The reconstituted soup gave no strength; the men were gaunt, losing flesh visibly, plagued with dysentery and skin eruptions, and were finally becoming drained of spirit. Provisions had been depleted to a few more canisters of the soup, a very little bear oil, and about twenty pounds of tallow candles. Some of the men were already gnawing their candles, which, though tasteless, helped their craving for fat to stoke their ever-chilled bodies. Drouillard, though more accustomed to cold and fasting than the others, found his hands going so shaky he wondered whether he could hit an animal if he ever saw one to shoot. Some of the soldiers, remembering the old guide’s mistake on the divide, feared that he had gotten them permanently lost. But Toby confidently asserted that they were still on the Nez Perce trail and would soon be descending into a rich lowland where everyone could eat well.

  18th Septr. 1805

  I deturmined to take a party of the hunters and proceed on in advance to Some leavel Country where there was game kill Some meat & Send it back&c. a fair morning cold at 20 miles I beheld a wide and extencive vallie in a West & SW Direction at a great distance. Drewyer shot at a Deer we did not get it, made 32 miles and Encamped on a bold running Creek which I call Hungery Creek as at that place we had nothing to eate.

  William Clark, Journals

  They awoke before daybreak famished and shaky. Reubin Field and John Shields blinked dumbly around in the firelight, all their hunter keenness gone. Their eyes were so hollowed and dark the men looked like skulls with whiskers. As morning dusk lightened the snowy copse, they looked around in vain for even a grouse to shoot. There was nothing.

  The seven men mounted at daylight and clambered back up the rocky banks of Hungery Creek to regain the high trail. After about six miles without a sight of game, they entered a long glade full of snow. Drouillard rode shivering, yearning for the lowland plain they had seen yesterday from a mountaintop, afraid it might have been just a vision. Captain Lewis and the main party by now might have reached the height of that mountain from which the plains were visible. Drouillard imagined old Toby pointing down at it and smiling in the face of his doubters, proving that an Indian can be right. He hoped they had seen it by now; if not, their hope might be dead.

  To his left, motion: snow cascading off the branches of a pine. Then in all that white snow and dark evergreen he saw a tiny spot of reddish-brown, like an animal’s hair. With cold-numbed fingers he readied his rifle and focused on the place. The animal must have brushed the tree and shaken loose the snow. He veered toward it, rounding a thicket, and saw it: a gaunt horse in shaggy winter coat, pawing snow, seeking grass, unaware of his presence. But then his own mount saw it and whickered. The wild one, a stray perhaps, raised its head and pricked up its ears, and came wading through deep snow to investigate. Drouillard heard Reubin say, “Horse meat, Cap’n!”

  “Shoot it, then,” Clark said.

  The horse heard the voices and shied. Drouillard and Reubin fired at the same instant. With a grunting sound the horse fell kicking in the snow, and went still.

  The horse meat was lean but not poor. The anticipation of meat was almost unbearable. While Collins and Colter were butchering the horse, Drouillard rode out in one direction, Shields and Field in others, hunting for other horses or any game. Captain Clark was hoping that with this horse meat and a fair quantity of anything else, his hunters could turn back toward the main party and feed them today.

  But there was not even a track of anything else, so Clark decided to hang the major portion of the horse carcass up out of the reach of wolves, where the main party would find it by the trail, and keep hunting down toward the plain. As the meat was broiled and served around, Drouillard saw some of the men shut their eyes and move their lips. Praying, in this expedition, was an individual matter. Lewis, like his president, didn’t believe in a god who listened or intervened, so he neither encouraged nor discouraged prayer. Clark seemed to believe, but the captains never disputed over it. Lewis claimed that man’s reason was sufficient to guide him. Lewis sometimes talked to Clark about what seemed to be a sort of brotherhood or clan of principled men everywhere in the world who were called “Masons.” Lewis was extremely proud to be one of them and told Clark that he should become one when he returned to civilization. Those in that brotherhood, he said, always knew what was right, so Drouillard figured that would be just the thing for Captain Lewis.

  Drouillard, in the manner of his people after a long hunger, put his first morsel of meat into the fire as thanks to the protecting spirit. He was salivating like a wolf as he put the meat in his mouth, and as he chewed he kept thanking the horse for its body and the protecting spirit for guiding the horse to this place.

  Friday September 20th 1805

  we were detained this morning untill ten oclock to collect our horses. we had proceeded about 2 miles when we found the greater part of a horse which Capt Clark had met with and killed for us. he informed me by note that he should proceed as fast as possible to the leavel country to the S.W. of us, which we discovered from the hights of the mountains on the 19th there he intended to hunt untill our arrival. at one oclock we halted and made a hearty meal on our horse beef much to the comfort of our hungry stomachs …

  Meriwether Lewis, Journals

  They went from dank cold to dry heat, from mottled boulders and gray cliffs to level prairies of short grass and open pine glades, all in a few hours of descending from that last terrible mountain. They had made it at last through the inhospitable maze of the Rocky, or Shining, Mountains. Drouillard looked back at the rocky ridge they had descended, seeing how a river came around each side of the mountain to join here in the gentle lowland. He had ranged in prairies and wooded hills and along creeks and rivers all his adult life as a hunter, seldom confused by stream courses or the lie of the land, but in those mountains he had been disoriented as never before. He had memorized as well as he could every knob and cliff and chasm, with as much detailed concentration as Captain Clark used in his measurements and maps. Always, if Drouillard had come by a way, he could go back by it. But there was something that had shaken him in those mountains. Rivers and roaring creeks zigzagged through the cold canyons with no apparent regard for the Creator’s rules of water flow. In that precipitous maze he had sometimes had to steady himself to keep from believing that a rapid rushing downhill had reversed its flow while his back was turned and started running uphill. Water rushed everywhere at the feet of those mountains, and it was hard to tell whether you were crossing five different streams in a day or the same one five times.

  While he was looking back at that
wall of mountains, he heard Reubin Field say, “Lookee, Cap’n! Young’uns!”

  Three Indian boys had just seen them, turned, scattered, and hid in the grass. Captain Clark said, “Don’t want them to alarm their people. Reubin, take my gun.” The captain turned and fumbled into his saddlebag. He brought out short pieces of bright ribbon. Dismounting, he walked out into the grass, holding up the ribbons with one hand, making the Friend sign with the other. He came upon two of the cowering boys and urged them to stand up. Smiling, he gave them the pretty ribbons. Then he signed to them, Go. Say friend men come. The boys, eight years old perhaps, looked at the ribbons, looked at the big, red-haired, blue-eyed creature before them, their expressions a mixture of fear and fascination, and ran. Clark mounted and they followed the boys at a walk. Beyond the pines they saw a camp, twenty or thirty tepee lodges of various sizes, covered not with hide but with rush or reed mats, situated in a pleasant bottomland, mostly overgrown with the slender leaves of a plant that looked like wild onion. As they rode toward the camp they saw trampled areas and large piles of bulbous roots.

  “Wonder if those are good,” Collins said. “I’m pretty damn hungry.”

  “Here comes a man out,” the captain said. “I reckon we’re about to meet the Nez Perce at last.”

  “Hope we don’t scare him away,” Colter said. “We look like the league o’ death.”

  It was true. Scrawny, sunken-eyed, hair and beards in filthy disarray, skin and ragged clothing smudged from resin-pine campfires, they looked like skeletons raked out of a pyre.

  “Now, Drouillard,” Clark said, “tell him about us.”

  Drouillard bent nearly double with the pain in his gut. But he straightened up quickly because the gassy swelling of his stomach squeezed his lungs and he could scarcely breathe. The bulbs harvested by these people were delicious and plentiful, and the natives had been generous with them. Captain Clark and his hunters, ravenous after their descent from the mountains, had stuffed themselves. They had eaten the roots steamed, and eaten them dried. They had eaten a delicious sweet bread whose main ingredient was a flour made from the dried roots. And the Nez Perce women had also served them dried berries and dried salmon.