Sign-Talker

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  And perhaps even more to the heart of the matter, here the captains could not proclaim power over the country. This was beyond the land Jefferson had bought from France. Coming down the Columbia, the officers had quit demanding allegiance or trying to win the natives with promises of alliance. The whitemen just weren’t very important to these people.

  The captains had chosen to build their winter quarters in a place they hated, among people they scorned, so they would be nearby if a ship came into the bay. But then they had built in a place from which they couldn’t see the bay, and had been barely civil to the Clatsops and Chinooks who might bring them word if a ship did come. That was one of the reasons why Drouillard had tried to remain friendly with the Clatsops near the mouth of the Columbia. If a ship did come while the corps was here, he wanted them to let the captains know it.

  They needed another canoe because they had acquired so many Indian-made treasures to take back to Jefferson, and preserved plant and animal specimens. Even though they had traded away most of the goods they struggled so hard to bring west, they had traded them for bulkier things: otter and ermine skins, fur capes, fine basketry, weapons, robes.

  Drouillard suggested they lighten their load by leaving things with the Clatsops, with instructions to Chief Coboway to turn them over to the first American ship that came. But Lewis didn’t trust the Indians. He thought they would keep it all themselves. All he might agree to entrust to Coboway would be a letter or report that could go back to the United States by ship. And then there were the paper things, including the first map of all the rivers and mountains and Indian lands ever made between the Mandans and the coastal mountains, all of which had been blank in previous maps of the continent. Of course, Lewis would not entrust this to a slant-headed, bare-bottomed Indian chief to give to a ship captain, if one came. Therefore a canoe was needed to take it all back up the Columbia.

  So Drouillard sighed and agreed. He wouldn’t steal the canoe himself. But if one was taken and Coboway found out about it, Drouillard would say it was because of the meat stolen from his cache. Lewis needed to steal a canoe, but needed an excuse so he wouldn’t think of himself as a thief. Now Drouillard just wished the captain would go away and let him lie here and rest.

  It was good, being a man who could always be relied upon, but sometimes he wished he didn’t have to be a part of everything.

  He winced with a new stab of pain in his side, held the compress on his cut arm and tried to go to sleep. He remembered how hard it had been coming down the rivers from the mountains, and wondered if it would even be possible to go back up.

  The captains had been working on a plan to split the corps in the mountains, with Lewis taking the Nez Perce shortcut to the Great Falls and then going up to see how far north Maria’s River originated, and thus perhaps claiming more land for the United States, and Clark going back down to the Shoshone land and crossing over to explore the upper Yellowstone, then the two groups rejoining at the mouth of the Yellowstone for the rest of the way down the Missouri. Leave it to them to find a way to make a hard task harder, Drouillard thought. He might have enjoyed going with Clark to see some new lands, in company with York and Bird Woman and her baby; they had come to feel like his family. But Lewis had already named him as his own hunter and scout for that northern exploration.

  If indeed they even made it up to the mountains.

  PART THREE

  March, 1806–September, 1806

  we determined allways to be on our guard as much as the nature of our situation will permit us, and never place our selves at the mercy of any savages. we well know that the treachery of the aborígenes of America and the too great confidence of our countrymen in their Sincerity and friendship has caused the distruction of many hundreds of us … the well known treachery of the natives by no means entitle them to such confidence … our preservation depends on never loosing sight of this trait in their character. and being always prepared to meet it in whatever shape it may present itself.

  —Meriwether Lewis

  Chapter 22

  Columbia River

  March 24, 1806

  A bad and embarrassing start home: rain, wind, ebb tide, and the fleet of canoes wandered into the wrong shallow channel among islands. An Indian man in a small canoe came to guide them. He was very tense as he guided them through, then finally worked up the courage to tell them that he recognized one of the canoes. It was his.

  There followed a long silence. Captain Lewis did not admit that his men had stolen the canoe, but offered the Indian an elk skin in exchange. Being in the midst of a party of well-armed soldiers, he had no choice. After the fleet was through the maze, the Indian vanished in the blowing rain. Lewis was glum and silent for a long time after that.

  The fort had been abandoned to the custody of the nearest chief, Coboway of the Clatsop tribe, in the expectation that his people would likely make use of it anyway. It was a gesture the captains hoped would incline him to speak well of them after their departure. They also had given to him and other neighboring Indians a written roster of the members of the corps, inscribed:

  The object of this list is, that through the medium of some civilized person who may see the same, it may be made known to the informed world, that the party consisting of the persons whose names are hereunto annexed, and who were sent out by the government of the U’States in May 1804 to explore the interior of the Continent of North America, did penetrate the same by way of the Missouri and Columbia Rivers, to the discharge of the latter into the Pacific Ocean, where they arrived on the 14th November 1805, and from which they departed … March 1806 on their return to the United States by the same rout they had come out.—

  All the men on the list were yearning eastward, sick of the constant rain, wind, dankness, boredom, weary of the unvaried diet of scrawny elk and root mush and rancid fish. To them the fort had been a gloomy, moldy, flea-infested prison. They knew they had a continent to recross and it would be hard and hazardous and they might not make it—but they were going homeward, and that was their inspiration now. Men were talking of their families; Captain Clark had mentioned his betrothed, Miss Hancock. Lewis had been overheard wondering whether his mother was still alive, or President Jefferson. He had half a continent to deliver to Jefferson, in the form of maps and sketches and hundreds of thousands of words, and in specimens of plant life and Indian clothing and handiwork, all in canoes full of watertight skin bundles. But ahead lay roaring rivers, snowy mountains, Indians, grizzly bears. Beyond that a big question: the rest of their lives, if God granted them any more.

  The Columbia Narrows

  April 21, 1806

  Drouillard wasn’t sure they would get out of this mess alive. The demon was in Lewis, the worst he had ever seen it.

  When they had sped down these roaring water chutes between the high cliffs last fall, Drouillard had wondered how they could ever get canoes back up, either through or around.

  And there had not been so many Indians along the river then, compared to the thousands who were now waiting for the spring salmon run to start up. Worse, they were all kinds of Chinooks, whom Lewis had come to hate and scorn. Still worse, they were being themselves and Lewis was being himself. They were pushy and insolent and thieving. He was angry and impatient. There had been threats.

  The river was in spring flood, faster and higher than it had been then. The captains needed to get up to the Nez Perce by May so they could cross the mountains. They had expected to feed the corps by purchasing dried fish from the tribes along the Columbia, but then rumors came down that the Indians were in famine upriver. So Drouillard and his hunters had scoured the Cascade country to kill and dry meat, slowing progress. At the portage, doubly hard and dangerous because the river was high, Indians crowded around, picking up anything the moment it was unguarded. Three men had even run off with Lewis’s dog one evening, and Seaman had to be retrieved at gunpoint. Private Shields bought a dog to eat, and had to pull his knife to scare off some young brav
es who tried to take the dog carcass from him. During the strenuous portage along a steep, slick path, a few Indians entertained themselves by throwing stones down on the soldiers. Tomahawks and other items were stolen; Indians were grabbed and searched. A small gang of swaggering youths jumped John Colter and tried to get his tomahawk away from him; they all ended scattered and bruised in the dirt. At every town, Lewis came to the point of telling the natives they would be shot if they touched another thing, that he would burn their towns.

  Now these narrows. There was no way to take the canoes up the roaring chutes, and the big ones couldn’t be portaged. The natives were swarming and belligerent. The captains had decided to obtain enough horses to carry the cargoes overland to the Nez Perce country. Captain Clark had gone above the falls on the north side of the river and set up a trading station to bargain for horses with the few trade goods that remained. He wasn’t doing very well. After two days of being tantalized and toyed with by Indians who knew it was a seller’s market, Clark had three poor horses for which he had traded his best blanket, his sword, and his military coat, and now he was almost as ill-disposed toward the natives as Lewis.

  Lewis, meanwhile, had gone into the darkest and meanest frame of mind. When the horses carried the goods to the upper end of the portage, instead of trading the abandoned canoes or giving them to the Indians as a parting gesture of conciliation, Lewis ordered them chopped up, piled with oars and poles, and set ablaze with the Indians watching. He looked like a malevolent whiteman devil standing there in the heat and smoke. And when one Indian boy tried to salvage an iron pole socket from the edge of the pyre, Lewis gave him a severe beating, every blow a relief and a venting of the captain’s fury, and had the soldiers kick him out of camp. That was when Drouillard resigned himself to the possibility of ending his days here in a windswept, fishy-smelling desert with a river roaring through it. There was nothing, it seemed, to keep these hundreds of people from rushing and annihilating the thirty whitemen, either now or in their camp at night.

  But the captains staged an impressive display of rifle target practice with a large Indian audience. Soon thereafter, the people left.

  Drouillard himself had been annoyed and embarrassed by the behavior of these wretched representatives of the race; he felt that somehow their tribal discipline and decorum had failed, that the elders perhaps had lost their influence.

  But irritated as he was with them, he still saw the spiteful burning of the canoes through their eyes. He knew that if he were an Indian living here, and witnessed that mean and wasteful act done by strangers coming through, he would never want to see any more men like them in his country again. Lying that night in a cold, nervously guarded soldier camp, nipped by fleas, without even any campfire fuel because Lewis had burned the canoe wood in a venomous fit, Drouillard went to sleep and dreamed again of the woman staring at Lewis and cutting her arms with flint.

  In a changing part of the dream, flint blades were cutting flesh and the woman was staring straight at him. Drouillard woke up with a racing heart, and where in his dream he had started to feel flint edges cutting his groin, fleas were biting him. They kept him from going back to sleep for a long time.

  Nez Perce Country

  May 5, 1806

  One of Tetohoskee’s cheerful young warriors was apparently amused that soldiers liked to eat dog meat. It was good to be among friendly Indians again. The Walulas at the great bend of the Columbia had held a dance and feast for the soldiers and had helped them obtain about twenty good horses, and now a few days later the corps was climbing up into the country of the amiable and handsome Nez Perce. Tetohoskee, one of the Nez Perce chieftains who had traveled by canoe with them down the Columbia last fall, had joined them as they came back up, and it was good to see the old friend again.

  They had also had the good fortune to encounter a Nez Perce elder whose lame knee Captain Clark had treated last fall with liniment and hocus-pocus. The old fellow was perfectly well now, and Clark’s reputation as a great healer had spread. This enabled him to trade doctoring for food—mostly roots and dogs, as the salmon run had not reached these streams yet. The corps had come out of the desert and sage country into a land of grazing grasses and some pine woods. The weather was cold, windy and rainy, sometimes with hail, and the paths were slick and dangerous, but contact with the Nez Perce had lifted the spirits of the troops. It had also lifted the spirits of many ailing Nez Perce people with eye problems and other health troubles, who had heard that the red-haired healer was back. They kept coming in, and left Clark with little time for other duties.

  One ailing man Clark had not been able to help was one of his own soldiers. Private Bratton’s back had first crippled him while he was working at the salt camp on the coast. It had improved little since last winter, and last month he aggravated it during the portage at the cascades. Since then he had been unable even to walk, becoming just another load for the packhorses. Bratton’s agony and despair were pathetic to watch. He was lying under a hide shelter nearby as the young Nez Perce laughed about the dog-eating whitemen.

  A puppy wandered in, sniffing at the roasting dog meat. A youth scooped it up with one hand and tossed it toward Lewis’s plate, which was on his lap, as if to say, “Pups are more tender than dogs.”

  Lewis snatched up the squirming pup as if it were a rock and hurled it with all his strength at the young man’s face.

  With a yip of pain it fell thrashing to the ground, and Lewis leaped to his feet with his tomahawk cocked to strike. “Damn you! One more impertinence from you and I’ll split your head!”

  The young man turned and left without looking back, while Drouillard stood looking in astonishment at Lewis. He had hoped that getting away from the Chinooks and being among the friendly Nez Perce would settle Lewis down, but apparently it had not.

  May 10, 1806

  The Clearwater River

  Drouillard examined the deer decoy and learned how it was used, and realized how hard hunting was for these Nez Perce who still used bow and arrow. The decoy was the skin from the head and neck of a deer. It would be put over a frame of sticks to look natural, then a concealed hunter would move it in the motions of a deer feeding, until live deer would see it and graze within bowshot. This was how they hunted deer in the wooded and rocky country when they couldn’t chase them down on horseback.

  Drouillard saw other signs of how bad the hunger could be in the mountains in winter. He found pine trees cut down and peeled for their edible inner bark, their cones twisted open for the seeds inside, and learned that a kind of hanging lichen was also gathered off the pine limbs and boiled for food. It was no wonder these people had such a yearning to obtain guns for easier hunting. But even more, they wanted guns because their enemies in the north and northeast had been obtaining guns from the English traders in Canada. Drouillard had no illusions that the Nez Perce liked the Americans. It was obvious they hoped this cooperation would help them obtain more and better guns than their enemies had.

  Relieved as the captains were to have found the Nez Perce, some troubling matters had come to light. They were now close enough to the mountains to see them heavily clothed in the snows that had almost fatally entrapped the expedition last fall. Even here in the foothills they were riding through seven and eight inches of snow.

  Another trouble was that Twisted Hair, whom they had been so anxious to see, was cold and nervous, and evasive about their horses, which he had agreed to take care of over the winter. The branded horses were not all there at his village, a situation that seemed to have something to do with other chiefs.

  As Drouillard had feared, the situation required that he be put right in the middle of the quarrel, as only he could use and read hand-sign well enough to understand and interpret it. He spent several days going from one chief’s camp to another, getting them to come individually, then together, to hash it out before the captains. There was a Shoshone boy, a captive, among the Nez Perce, who understood Nez Perce and could have tran
slated to Bird Woman, but the youth had enough sense to refuse to interpret a dispute between chiefs.

  The other chiefs were Broken Arm and Cutnose, who had been absent last fall, away raiding Paiutes, when the expedition came through. Cutnose was a not very impressive man whose most memorable feature was the result of getting a lance up his nostril during a long ago fight against the Shoshones. Broken Arm was formidable of physique, and proud.

  Old Twisted Hair said that when those two had returned from their raids, they accused him of taking too much importance upon himself in agreeing to care for the whitemen’s horses. Probably they were jealous of the two muskets and ammunition he had been promised in payment. He said the two chiefs had so troubled him that he had neglected the horses and let them stray.

  The version of the story told by Cutnose was that Twisted Hair had not been taking good care of the soldiers’ horses, that he had let his young man use them so hard that some had been hurt. He said Twisted Hair was a two-faced, bad old man.

  The deep snow on the Bitterroot Mountains made it obvious that the expedition would be here longer than expected—perhaps as much as a month—and so this sore spot among the chiefs would have to be doctored as tenderly as the abcesses and sore eyes of Captain Clark’s patients, who kept coming in from the hills, several a day. The troops would need Nez Perce cooperation with food, horses, and camp resources, and, when the snow eventually melted in the mountain passes, Nez Perce guides to lead them back through the maze by which old Toby had brought them last fall. Even to Drouillard, who had done his best to remember it, the route was broken and baffling. He recalled how streams had seemed to turn around and run uphill.