Sign-Talker

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  October 21st 1805

  a verry cold morning we Could not Cook brakfast before we embarked as usial for the want of wood or Something to burn.—one of our Party J. Collins presented us with Some verry good beer made of the quar-mash bread, the remains of what was laid in … at the head of the Kosskoske river which by being frequently wet molded & Sowered &c. we made 33 miles to day.

  William Clark, Journals

  By the next day they were out of the desert. Mountains and cliffs rose high on either side of the river, and high up there were trees. Moisture and the scents of greenery were on the cool breeze, vaguely detectable even through the pervasive smell of fish. The gorge of the Columbia was deep. It appeared to have bored its way through a mountain range; in some places it was half blocked by huge boulders as if whole cliffs had fallen in. They ran through fast, roaring channels, skillfully avoiding boulders as big as houses. The long canoes were clumsy to steer, but they had become skillful, confident that if they had a foot of water under the hull and two feet of paddling space on either side, they could go anywhere. They swept by Indians fishing on flimsy pole scaffolds and in graceful, wide-bottomed canoes. They swept by the mouths of spectacular little rivers that fell into the Columbia on the south side through steep canyons. They passed big fishing towns that appeared to be permanent, not seasonal, nestled on picturesque rock ledges. They saw smoke drifting over the villages and sniffed the welcome odor of real wood smoke, tangy and piney.

  Now Twisted Hair and Tetohoskee were tense and alert, and suddenly the old chief signaled toward the right bank, almost frantically.

  And up the high-walled gorge rolled a sound deeper than the familiar rush of river and rapid: that familiar roar of a waterfall. Ahead a mile or so the broad river appeared to end at a wall of rock, and from beyond it rose a mist. Near the head of a rock ledge the five canoes were brought to shore on a rocky beach, above which a large village perched on a high, straight ledge. Behind that ledge rose high hills that dwarfed the town, echoing and magnifying the booming roar of the falling water.

  This was the great waterfall the Nez Perce had been telling of for days, at the village of the Eneeshur nation. Here they would have to get out and carry everything.

  They walked out, exploring a huge island of rock cut through by several narrow channels of racing water. Toward the other bank lay another rock island of about a quarter mile in length. A cascade of five steps thundered between the two islands, falling perhaps forty feet in a beaten, greenish-white froth. Drouillard felt the water force through the solid rock beneath his moccasins and inhaled deeply of the fresh wet air, his face up into the refreshing mist. His spirits were higher than they had been for days. What a place this was to see: cliffs, mossy rock, pure water churning, mist full of sunlight, eagles, pelicans, cormorants against a blue sky straight overhead, dizzying to watch. And by facing a particular way he could see no whitemen.

  The carry path was a little more than half a mile, along the north bank, down to a little cove around the bend, and the Eneeshurs had a few horses for hire to carry the bundles of goods. There the bundles were set under guard and the corps camped. The next day Clark took the canoes upriver a way and then brought them down and landed on a rock bank just above the sheer pitch of the falls on the south side of the river. Most of the men were needed to carry the water-soaked vessels down a dry channel about a third of a mile to emerge below the main pitch of the falls. Unfortunately, that portage channel was a sun-warmed trough of silt and fish skins and rotting vegetation, putrid and infested with so many fleas that the men were covered instantly. Below this portage remained a fall of eight feet, down which the canoes had to be lowered by ropes. All the men took off their clothes and did this work in the water to wash off the fleas. The natives gathered on high banks and ledges on both sides to amuse themselves with the sight of the naked, white-skinned men shouting and easing their long log canoes down through white water. An elk-skin rope broke when one of the canoes was being let down, the men shouted and the vessel bobbed and floated loose below, but some Eneeshur fishermen in their canoes rounded it up, and it cost the captains a bit of merchandise for their trouble.

  That evening Captain Lewis traded for one of the finely crafted native vessels, giving the little pilot canoe, a hatchet, and some trinkets for it. Eight dogs were purchased for food. The men rinsed as many fleas out of their clothes as they could, and settled down for a tired camp with real wood to burn and the thunder of the vanquished falls behind them.

  The next morning, the Nez Perce chiefs wanted to leave and go home. They explained in sign language that the people below the falls—the Chinooks—had a different kind of language and were not friendly to the Nez Perce. They expected that they would be killed if they went on down.

  But Captain Lewis was not through with them yet. The next falls, near below, they had said were very dangerous, and he wanted their help in approaching them.

  And the captain had not forgotten his peacemaking mission. If the people below were hostile, that should be changed.

  No, they said. They wanted the goods that had been promised them for their services to this place, and they wanted to go home.

  The only control Captain Lewis had over their choice was by withholding their reward. Frightened and sullen, they got into the canoes and prepared for the worst.

  October 24th Thursday 1805

  At 9 o’Clock A.M. I Set out. at 2 ⅕ miles the river widened into a large bason to the Stard Side on which there is five Lodges of Indians. here a tremendious black rock high and Steep appearing to choke up the river … the Current was drawn with great velocity to the Lard Side of this rock at which place I heard a great roreing. the natives went with me to the top … I could see the difficuelties we had to Pass … The whole of this great river must pass thro’ this narrow channel of 45 yards wide as the portage of our canoes over this high rock would be impossible … I thought (as also our principal waterman Peter Crusat) by good Stearing we could pass down safe … notwithstanding the horrid appearance of this agitated gut Swelling, boiling & whorling in every direction

  William Clark, Journals

  Charbonneau with his family, and all the men who could not swim, were assigned to carry the papers, instruments, ammunition, and guns overland to a likely campsite on calm water below the roaring narrows. When the natives of the vicinity got word that these strange visitors were going to get in their canoes and go through that churning chute on purpose, they hurried to gather on the heights. Drouillard looked around at the two dozen designated paddlers who were nervously securing everything in their five vessels. He went over to York, who would be in the elegant Chinook canoe with Captain Clark and his paddlers, and shook hands with him. Then he pointed at the spectators. “Ready to watch us perish, I reckon.” York swallowed and nodded. Drouillard motioned with his chin toward numbers of Indian men and women who were hurrying down the riverbank. “Those, I bet, are going down to the eddy where they reckon our pieces and remains’ll wash up. This could be a profitable day for them, eh?”

  “’F you tryin’t’ scare me,” York said, “it’s too late. I already am.”

  Drouillard feigned surprise. “Eh? I’d never’ve known it! You’re the only one of us not gone pale!”

  York managed to laugh. Then he licked his lips and looked all around, put out his hand again and said, “Mist’ Droor, I been please t’ know ye.”

  “Likewise. You and your boss man both.” He glanced over at Captain Clark, who was talking to the men, inaudible against the roar of the water, but making gestures that apparently had to do with steering. Drouillard watched the rugged, cheerful, red-haired captain and remembered all the bragging York had done about him, and considered that just about every day in nearly two years since, that man had proven that York wasn’t so much bragging as understating. Clark had basically been running everything, and doing most of the writing as well, since the descent from the mountains. Lewis was physically recovered now but had been in a surly, m
elancholy state for a long time, occasionally rousing himself to study some novel plant or halfheartedly do his Jefferson ceremony in the fishing villages.

  Now, Clark whooped and waved to summon York. Drouillard took a deep breath and went to his canoe, which would be the last through.

  In single file, well-spaced, the canoes were paddled upstream and then curved around to aim straight down the chute. Captain Clark’s canoe, Cruzatte steering, headed down, all paddles flashing. Cruzatte had taught everyone that a canoe can be handled better in fast water if it is going a little faster than the water, instead of just being carried along with current pushing the stern. That Indian-made canoe might be the only one to make it through, Drouillard thought, if any did. It was wide, lightweight, tapered and high at both bow and stern. He watched it enter the chasm, skimming like a leaf, speeding up, then receding from sight like a toboggan going down a hill. Whooping voices were lost in the roar of water. Then the second canoe went, then the third, then the fourth, and now his own canoe was in the fast current, entering the high rock funnel, stern tending to drift to the right until he reminded his paddlers with a rude shout to dig in. Then the chasm walls were blurring by on both sides and they were racing downhill on a dimpled sheen of water, the crew howling with exhilaration. Drouillard could see the other canoes ahead, all paddles rising and dipping furiously, every canoe going arrow-straight, none sideways. His heart rose up and he couldn’t contain his voice: it trilled out of his throat like the old war cry of his people.

  They were all giddy and wishing they could have that much fun again when Captain Clark walked up from scouting below and said there was another chute much like it two miles below, but a longer funnel and not quite so narrow. Once again the nonswimmers set off overland with the valuables, and the canoes sped through another roaring, dark chasm, with vertical cliffs high on either side. By the end of this day they all felt they were ready to take on any kind of rapid that God saw fit to put in their way. Or at least they were saying they felt that way; there were a few who waded into the shallows below and pretended they were washing fleas out of their breeches. Potts, who had been a paddler in Drouillard’s canoe, was forthright about what his breeches were full of, saying, “Hell, I was just fine, till ye give out that ’ere heathen war cry, damn ye!”

  Clark had walked down to a Chinook village, where he met its principal chief and invited him to come up to the canoe camp, where the crews had unloaded the canoes to dry their cargoes.

  When the Chinook headman came up with a few of his men, the initial wariness between them and the two Nez Perce chiefs was soon dispelled, and all the Indians gave the captains their pledge to be peaceable toward each other. The Chinook leader was given a medal and other gifts, which he accepted with pleasure, and then Cruzatte played on the fiddle and the men danced for the visitors. The captains smoked with the Chinooks until late at night, and did what they could to begin recording a Chinook vocabulary for the President.

  While the corps paused here to mend canoes and dry cargoes, there was time for Drouillard to take some hunters up out of the river gorge and onto a mountain to hunt, up into the pines and oaks. It was a joy to hunt again. They came back with four deer, the first venison in weeks. The men drooled while it was roasting. The captains had learned from the Chinooks that more dangerous falls and rapids lay yet between there and the sea they were seeking. That below these mountains lay tree-covered mountains inhabited by deer and elk, and other animals good to eat. That more salmon were in the rivers than one could count, and more swimming birds, and swimming animals with beautiful fur. The captains presumed those would be seals or sea otters.

  They learned that they would find another range of mountains below these, mountains full of fog and ferns, where streams of water fell from cliffs and rain fell from the sky most days, where the trees were so thick and tall and dark on the mountainsides, they looked black—trees so big and straight that perfect, wide planks could be split from them.

  They learned that they would meet Indian nations down there who knew the white men who came from the sea in huge boats with wings. Those Indians spoke the Chinook tongue but knew also how to talk trade with the whitemen, and had obtained many metal things from the whitemen who came every year in their big boats. The captains learned that there was a good bay in the mouth of this river where the whitemen’s boats came in, for protection from the sea storms and to trade with those Indians down there.

  These Chinooks knew all about what lay below, because those people from the ocean came up here to sell whiteman things and seashells and waterproof baskets and mats they made, and a kind of cloth they made of cedar bark, and a kind of root they harvested in great quantity, called wapato, not the same as the quamash roots the Nez Perce brought down from the mountains to trade, but just as good. These Indians here knew the tribes from up the river very well too, because here where the upper river and the lower river were separated by the falling waters was the center of the trade, and these people who lived here controlled the trade; all had to pass through them. This was a statement of their own importance. These chiefs had skins from the mountain animals and furs from the water animals below, and they had brass buttons and ornaments and bells, and metal knives and awls, and woolen blankets, even a few muskets and swords. These people took fingers instead of scalps from dead enemies. The chief had fourteen.

  Drouillard and the Nez Perce chiefs translated all this. Some things for which they knew no hand signs could just be pointed to in the Chinook houses—such as the wide planks and the wapato roots and the seashells. The language of these Chinooks was spoken with tongue-clicks and throat-clucks. Most of the women here were short and obese, with the worn-down teeth. Their foreheads were broad and sloped sharply back from the brow to culminate in an almost pointed crown of the skull. They achieved that shape by compressing their babies’ skulls with an angled board attached to the cradleboard. Thus the profile of a Chinook woman at her most beautiful was a slope from the crown of the head to the end of the nose or even the upper lip, as if to imitate the shape of the head of the fish that dominated their lives.

  Old Twisted Hair and Tetohoskee had served their promised role in the voyage down the Columbia. They had been fine friends and helpful comrades throughout this strenuous downstream journey of some four hundred miles. Back at their home in the mountains they still had the responsibility of keeping the whitemen’s horses for them until next year. They would all meet again and renew their great friendship then, if the soldiers returned east by the way they had come.

  As the captains readied their canoes to go on down, they paid the two chiefs in goods. It was an emotional parting. The chiefs could not hide their affection or their sadness no matter how hard they clenched their jaws. They promised that their people would always be the whitemen’s friends and would always watch for them to come into sight, whether up the rivers or down the mountains.

  “Tell them,” Captain Clark told Drouillard, “that we deem them the finest Indians we have met, all across this whole land. And tell them those are words from my heart.”

  It was time to get in the canoes and go on. Depending on the course of the river, it could be between a hundred and two hundred miles yet to the Pacific. It would soon be winter, and as they had learned, even downstream was not easy.

  Chapter 20

  The Columbia Estuary

  November 7th Thursday 1805

  Great Joy in camp we are in View of the Ocian, this great Pacific Octean which we been So long anxious to See. and the roreing or noise made by the waves brakeing on the rockey Shores (as I Suppose) may be heard distictly

  William Clark, Journals

  Joy, disappointment, and misery. What the captains had thought was the seacoast was only a rocky point jutting into the wide mouth of the Columbia, a mouth so wide and fog-shrouded that they could not see across it, and so beaten by swells and rollers that the canoes could neither proceed to the coast nor retreat to calmer waters.

  And there
was no level ground on which to make camp. They could not camp on beaches at the foot of the cliffs because the waves roared in and swept over them, and the tides came in and inundated them. Huge driftwood logs, five and six feet thick and two hundred feet long, washed in and piled up, rubbing and groaning against the cliffs, threatening to smash the canoes. The soldiers found niches and crevices in the face of the cliff and hung on, cold, soaked with rain and spray. There was nothing to eat but the rancid pulp of dried, pounded salmon they had bought from natives.

  The hunters couldn’t go up and hunt, because the cliffs were too steep to climb, and thick with undergrowth and fallen deadwood. To lie down, the soldiers had to spread their mats on jumbles of stones. Their weatherworn deerskin clothes were rotting on their bodies. Rain poured down day and night, loosening stones on the cliffs, which came clattering and bouncing down among the hunkering men. The winds were gales much of the time, sending tremendous waves bursting against the rocks.

  When they tried to board the canoes to find better campsites, they were nearly swamped by the surging, gray seas, and forced to take shelter in other alcoves as bad as the previous one, or worse, and by then they were seasick. Bird Woman was among those with the most violent seasickness. And several of the men had got nausea and diarrhea by drinking the brackish river water instead of collecting rain.