Sign-Talker

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  So the captains decided to stick by their old agreement with Twisted Hair, if his young men could indeed round up the horses and bring them in, and then council with the other chiefs to elevate their sense of importance to the level where they would no longer resent the old man. As long as the expedition was stuck here, it should do as much Jefferson diplomacy as possible, and build an alliance with these strong and likely people. That would, of course, mean promising they would be rewarded with goods and guns—someday.

  When two more of the leading Nez Perce headmen came, Bloody Chief and Five Big Hearts, it was deemed a proper time for a major council with the Nez Perce nation. Captain Lewis gathered his wits and braced himself for his biggest presentation in a year. It was done with a pipe ceremony, the presentation of medals, the demonstration of magnets, compasses, mirrors, telescopes, and the air gun. The Shoshone captive participated by translating Nez Perce to Shoshone, which Bird Woman then passed to Charbonneau in Hidatsa, and his French then was translated to English by Drouillard and Labiche. Thus the talk took most of the day. In the meantime, Captain Clark in a nearby lodge of Broken Arm’s town dispensed eyewash, liniments, pills, and laudanum, and performed minor surgery, back rubs, and adjustments with his capable and powerful hands. While Lewis was giving the council difficult new political and commercial concepts to mull over—trading posts, peace missions, arms sales, and delegates to the Great Father in the East—four men carried an especially important and difficult patient to Clark: a big, fleshy chief, beloved by his people for his wisdom, in apparent robust health with good pulse, appetite, and digestion, but paralyzed from the neck down for the last three years. This appeared to be a case that might at last put limits on the captain’s burgeoning fame as a medicine man. Clark told the Indians that he doubted he could help the man but would soon begin trying.

  The second day of the council was the time for the Nez Perce to answer Captain Lewis’s proposals. Another forty or fifty patients had showed up for Clark, most needing eyewash. The Indians held a morning council in which all the Americans’ proposals were discussed. Then Broken Arm mixed some root flour in water and distributed it to every man in the council. He told them that if they agreed to follow the advice of the whitemen, they should eat the mush; anyone opposed should not. Drouillard watched carefully from the edge of the council. Some women outside the circle began wailing and pulling their hair, as if afraid of such an alliance, but it appeared to Drouillard that every man tipped his bowl and swallowed the contents.

  The chiefs went to where the captains and their interpreters sat waiting. Drouillard told them of the method and outcome of the vote. Then commenced an outpouring of good cheer and generosity such as he had seldom seen. The captains were approached by two young Nez Perce men, who presented each with a fine horse. Then Cutnose came forth and gave Drouillard an excellent gray gelding. Clark grinned at him and said, “By God! Reckon they think you’re an officer, George!” Drouillard was so moved he could only look at Cutnose and nod and smile, swallowing hard.

  The captains gave each chief a flag, a pound of powder, and fifty musket balls, and also gave powder and shot to the two young men who had presented them with the horses. Broken Arm said the council’s answer would now be presented by their best orator, the father of Bloody Chief. But first, he said, there were more people in pain waiting to see the red-haired medicine man. And so Dr. Clark returned to his waiting room while Lewis remained to hear the Nez Perce’s declarations of agreement.

  When Clark returned in mid-afternoon, he brought a vial of white vitriol and sugar of lead to Broken Arm, and had the interpreters tell him how to dilute it to make eyewash for his people after the whitemen were gone. The war chief washed his own eyes out with sudden uncontrollable tears. “Cap’n,” Drouillard told him, “if you don’t mind me saying it, you’d make a good Indian.”

  Lewis closed the business by giving Twisted Hair a musket, a hundred balls, and two pounds of gunpowder for taking care of the horses, and promised to give him another gun and a like amount of ammunition when the last nine horses were delivered. Then, as if to make as good an impression on these people as Clark had, he held a shooting match with the Indians, hitting a small mark twice at 220 yards.

  Ah-huh, Drouillard thought. Yes. They’ll do whatever you want to get guns like that. But if they ever get any American guns, they won’t be good rifles like that. They’ll be cheap muskets. My Shawnee people can tell you about whiteman promises.

  By early June the snow in the mountains still showed no signs of melting, and Lewis was getting frantic. It was three thousand miles to St. Louis from here, and at this rate it would be late summer before they even reached the Missouri River. The possibility of being somewhere on the Great Plains when the Missouri froze next fall or winter was almost too dreadful to contemplate. The men wanted to go.

  Drouillard, aside from that worry, felt that if one could not go anywhere, this was the best place one could be. It was not just the high, beautiful country, the smell of evergreens and moss and the music of fast water, or the challenge of hunting the scarce deer, mule deer, and bears; it was these people.

  For all their hard life, they were kind and generous, high-spirited, brave and playful, and their joy on receiving anything was beautiful. They reminded him of his own Shawnee people as he remembered them from childhood. The troop had found a campsite with good graze and water, and the round pit of an old winter lodge in which to store the goods. They had asked Twisted Hair and his followers to camp nearby, and he had taken that as a great honor. These Nez Perce sang a friendship song when they approached the camp. When they found a stray horse or anything else lost by the soldiers, they brought it to camp. Even Captain Lewis was hard put to criticize these Indians. After a visit from Bloody Chief, who wore the scalps and fingers of his enemies on his breast yoke, Lewis was very thoughtful and subdued.

  Tuesday May 27th 1806

  The chief told us that most of the horses we saw runing at large in this neighbourhood belonged to himself and his people, and whenever we were in want of meat he requested that we would kill any of them we wished; this is a peice of liberallity which would do honour to such as bost of civilization: indeed I doubt whether there are not a great number of our countrymen who would see us fast many days before their compassion would excite them to a similar act of liberallity.

  Meriwether Lewis, Journals

  The captains noted that these people were uncommonly kind and attentive to their old people, and treated their women with more respect than did the plains tribes.

  For many days the family of the paralyzed chief kept returning to Captain Clark, expressing faith that he could heal him, even though no medicines had worked. Private Shields had suggested a sweat pit treatment for Bratton, and in a few days it had cured him fully after his weeks of immobility. Clark considered that a similar treatment might work on the helpless Indian, but he was too large for Bratton’s sweat pit, so his companions enlarged the pit. Then he could not sit up on the wooden seat. So his father, a very old man, got in with him and held him in the sitting position, and sprinkled water on the superheated earth in the hole, which was covered with blankets. Everyone expected the old man to die, but when the ordeal was over he stood and helped them lift his son out. The next morning the chief was able to move his hands and arms and sat up much of the day, declaring that he had not felt so good in a year and would recover. Clark himself looked as if he would drop to his knees any minute and yield up prayers of thanks for the miracle. Other things added to the joy in camp that day. The Bird Woman’s child, who had been severely sick with fever and a terribly swollen neck, was beginning to respond to the captain’s medicines. And a long spell of futile hunting seemed to be broken when Drouillard, Cruzatte, and Labiche brought in five deer.

  It was days like those that made Drouillard not altogether unhappy with the delay enforced by those snowy mountains.

  It was not surprising that the gratitude of these people to Captain Clark took
many forms. Soon he began disappearing into the village on those occasions when he had leisure from his doctoring, mapmaking, and journal writing. One day he made a journal note that, while the Nez Perce men plucked all the hair from their faces, only the women kept the hair plucked from a lower part.

  “How do you know that?” Lewis asked.

  Clark turned almost as red as his hair. “Uh—Uh, well, you—you know that I give a great number of rubdowns and massages as their, um, medicine man.”

  Bird Woman had been in a state of quiet distress during the weeks of her little boy’s fever, but nevertheless remained useful, gathering roots and greens. Although she kept apart from the main society of Nez Perce women, she did have a friend and confidante in old Watkuweis, the woman who had first spoken in favor of the whitemen when they came through on their way west. Watkuweis, it was suspected, was a link in the chain of communication that had started the run on Captain Clark’s services.

  Clark did not have any illusions about his doctoring skills. He relied heavily on information and guidance from Lewis, who knew more about cures and simples. But Lewis recognized the great value of Clark’s popular reputation, and they both vowed to prescribe nothing harmful, and hoped their luck would hold out.

  His medical services had become the main currency for obtaining food from the Nez Perce. Almost everything that could be traded was gone. These people were not much interested in beads and ribbons and trinkets. They preferred useful items like awls and knives and other small tools. When a damaged length of surveyor chain came up for discard, the soldiers crafted moccasin awls from its links and traded those. One ornamental item became popular with the women, perhaps more as souvenir than decoration: brass uniform buttons. In a few days what was left of uniforms were bereft of all metal buttons, and the men were making buttons of antler for their own use.

  With the Nez Perce warriors, Drouillard for the first time in his adult life felt that he was among peers, if not brothers. He relished their pride and their cheerful disregard of discomfort or injury. They admired him as a hunter and marksman. He and his team of hunters shared game with the tribe as much as they could. And he was the one they could talk to best in hand sign. Though Captain Clark and Private Gibson had learned some, and Charbonneau, Labiche, and Cruzatte were adequate, Drouillard seemed to be the Talking Chief of the soldiers, and important talks simply were not attempted unless he was present.

  While the captains waited and waited for the mountain snows to melt, they worried that the soldiers—except Drouillard’s hunters—were growing slothful and getting out of condition. And so they encouraged athletic competitions with whatever bands of Nez Perce hunters and warriors visited. Drouillard and Reubin Field had over the last two years edged out Colter as champion sprint-runners in the corps, but there was one rangy brave of Bloody Chief’s band who always finished right beside them. As for distance, no one had a chance against Drouillard. When he went into his running trance, all the soldiers eventually staggered out in his wake. The Nez Perce relied on their horses for distance travel, and that kind of running was beyond their experience. So Drouillard became also the Running Chief.

  The Indian men best loved games that were easy to bet on, like races, archery, and shooting arrows or throwing lances at rolling hoops. But the Americans drew them into team games, like tag and prison base, all dust, sweat, and hilarity, with occasional bruisings. Sometimes Drouillard would ride in from the hunt and at half a mile distance would know what was going on at the camp and village; he would hear the shouts of the soldiers, the whooping of the Indians, and the women’s incessant pounding of roots, which Lewis said reminded him of a nail factory.

  Another year here, he thought sometimes, and these soldiers might just forget about wanting to go back to that wretched and complicated tangle of trouble they called civilization.

  The corps now had more than sixty horses, most in good condition—enough for each man to have a riding mount and a packhorse on the trek over the mountains. A corral had been built near the camp. When the young stallions became troublesome, it was Drouillard’s duty to geld them, because no one else in the party admitted to having any experience with that odious process.

  One of the stallions was the horse Lewis had ridden west across the mountains last fall, a very special horse to him, and Drouillard suggested to Captain Clark: “Maybe you should do him. You’re the doctor.”

  Clark laughed. “Sorry. I’ve got to go give a lady a liniment rub.”

  “I could do that for you, while you do this.”

  “Go cut.”

  Two Nez Perce men were hanging around the corral. They watched as Drouillard and three soldiers roped the stallion’s legs, threw it on its side, sat on it and drew up the rope rig that pulled its hind legs up tight and forward. Drouillard told one man to blindfold the stallion, then leaned over its quivering haunch, cut the scrotum, pulled, cut again, tied a ligature, all in swift motions while the horse surged and screamed. It was a hot day but he was sweating more from concentration than from heat or effort. When he jumped up and told the men to release the leg ties, he saw the two Indians shaking their heads and making signs at him.

  He went to see what they wanted, holding the bloody testicles in his hand while the soldiers led the whinnying new gelding away, leaving the blindfold on because a horse that can’t see moves cautiously. He thought the warriors might be asking for the testicles; some people thought them a delicacy. But they were telling him not to do something. They were saying, Do not tie off. They were saying, Let bleed is good.

  Tying off was how it had always been done around Lorimier’s. The horse would be in pain a few days and have swelling, with a little chance of getting infection. But these two men said they would show whitemen how to do it so the horse didn’t hurt so long and wouldn’t get sick.

  He knew this tribe gelded most stallions young and let only the best ones breed; that was why their horses were so good. He sent a soldier to ask Lewis if the Nez Perce could do a couple of stallions their way, and Lewis came out to watch.

  They did it with a flint knife, without tying off, and although these two horses bled freely as they were taken away, they settled down quicker, and seemed to forget about it even while Lewis’s horse was still in distress.

  Two weeks later Captain Lewis’s horse was still in agony and had fallen off in flesh and spirit so badly that Lewis ordered him shot. The other two were nearly recovered.

  There was much to be learned about horses and riding from these people. The soldiers had thought they were good in the saddle, but these riders put them to shame. They could shoot arrows quickly and accurately at a rolling hoop while controlling a horse at full gallop with their knees. At a full run they could hang off the horse’s side and snatch an object off the ground, or throw a slipknot loop over a free horse’s neck and capture it. The soldiers watched bug-eyed as the Indian riders went headlong down slopes almost too steep for a man to stand on. They rode with a rein-rope trailing twelve or fifteen feet on the ground so that if they fell they could grab it and keep the horse from running off. Horses were the main wealth of these people. A man might have a personal herd of fifty. Horses were interwoven with many aspects of their spiritual life. Not long ago, it was learned, Cutnose’s wife had died; he and her relatives had sacrificed twenty-eight horses at her rock-pile grave, a testimonial of their great love and esteem for the woman.

  Cutnose seemed to believe that Drouillard was as important a chief as the captains, because he was the whitemen’s Talking Chief, and nothing could be more important than a Talking Chief. He taught Drouillard that Coyote had created all people, giving them his own weaknesses and faults and cunning. That he had made them from chunks of meat of a monster he had slain. But the Ni Mi Pu, the True People known as Nez Perce, had grown from drops of monster blood that Coyote had washed from his hands. “Ah-huh!” Drouillard exclaimed, remembering his mother’s old stories: his people had become Shawnees when their ancestor hero killed the Horned Ser
pent that was terrorizing all the creatures. He was beginning to feel as if Cutnose and all his people were his own relatives.

  Monday June 2nd 1806

  McNeal and York were Sent on a tradeing voyage over the river this morning in order to prepare in the most ample manner in our power to meet that wretched portion of our journy, the Rocky Mountains, where hungar and Cold in their most regorous form assail the waried traveller; not any of us have yet forgotten those mountains in September last. I think it probable we never Shall.

  William Clark, Journals

  A week later the formerly paralyzed chief was standing on his own legs. The troops were in fit condition from their athletic contests and excited to move eastward to their families; they danced to the fiddle after dark. But the mountains were still covered with snow.

  June 21, 1806

  Chief Cutnose and Drouillard smoked in the chief’s lodge and talked of many things, and for a while they sat together and admired the young pair of nestling eagles that perched, tied by their legs, on a rack made from a branched sapling. Cutnose had gone down the river a few days ago to capture them from their nest. He would raise them here in captivity, and when they molted, he would have their feathers to award to his warriors when they earned them. He said it might seem sad that eagles should spend their lives in captivity, but that it was their honor to decorate brave men, and they understood it. Despite the disfiguring scar, Cutnose was a man whom Drouillard was always delighted to see. This man had given him the best horse he had ever owned. And recently he had gone with Drouillard to the lodge of a Nez Perce man who had stolen a tomahawk from Captain Clark, to help him get it back. It was a tomahawk that had belonged to Clark’s relative, Sergeant Floyd, the soldier who had died two years ago on the Missouri, and the captain cherished it because he had meant to take it back to the United States and present it to Floyd’s relatives. Cutnose and Bloody Chief helped Drouillard persuade the thief’s family to return the tomahawk. It was just one more of the many kindnesses that made Drouillard’s affection for this man so strong that he had told him his private joke name, Followed by Buzzards. Cutnose loved to call him that.