Sign-Talker

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  I’m too much an Indian to be caught by Indians, he had boasted this morning.

  Eh! Not as much an Indian as I should have been.

  He squeezed the trigger. The rifle cracked and bucked and the chieftain fell back over his horse’s rump, shot through the heart. At the sight of such a shot at that range, the Blackfeet checked their charge and began milling. He was already reloading: a charge of powder down the barrel, greased patch over the muzzle and a ball thumbed over it, ramrodded home. He held the ramrod under his left arm and primed the pan, hearing another shot go by him. They had stopped milling and a glory-seeker was charging forward to come full tilt at him. Drouillard shot him out of the saddle before he had gained twenty yards. The rest whirled and hesitated again, wheeling to discharge muskets at him. He stood behind the skittish mare, reloading, and heard two bullets hit her. She was whinnying and he had to grab the rein and settle her. Arrows were arcing over him, were falling around him, sticking in the ground and in the mare. One whiffed by his forehead, and he saw that it had come from the willows close by. He drew his other pistol and shot a man moving in the thicket.

  The mare was standing stupefied, bleeding. He had no idea how many arrows and musket balls she had taken that were meant for him. He primed the rifle as another rider yodeled a war cry and lashed his horse forward.

  Drouillard had been the best of the hunters and talkers but had never had the honor of being a Shawnee warrior. Now he could be a warrior. He answered the war cry. The rider was halfway to him when Drouillard fired and hit him.

  The good mare was heaving loudly and bleeding from the mouth, her head beginning to droop. There would be no riding her out of here. She could only be his fortification as long as she stood.

  They were still afraid to come on all at once, it seemed; some were even riding back to get out of his range. In their hesitation he had time to load the rifle and pistols. Wehsah! Good! The Blackfeet were clumsy with their guns, evidently not very familiar with them, and it was a long time between their shots.

  Drouillard stood behind the mare, sweat streaming down his face. Now there was gunpowder smell, not just beaver gland. He selected one of the warriors who had ridden farthest away, and just to put more fear into them, fired a three-hundred-yard shot, and the warrior’s horse crumpled to the ground, spilling its rider. He reloaded again; the rifle barrel was warm.

  He kept an eye on as many of the Blackfeet as he could, watching the willow thicket as well as the distant riders. There was movement in the foliage. Several more arrows and a musket blast came out of the thicket, and the mare sank on her haunches. He fired a pistol over her saddle and heard a yelp of pain from within the willows.

  Then he was staggered by the force of an arrow slamming through muscle at the right side of his waist. Bracing himself with an exhalation of breath, he discharged the other pistol into the thicket.

  Most of the riders were still regrouping in the distance, and he had a load in the rifle and started to reload a pistol. Blood from his waist was beginning to run down his hip and thigh, but the wound didn’t hurt terribly yet; the shock of the arrow had numbed it. It wasn’t bad. In muscle, not guts.

  He had taught them that they had good reason to be afraid of his rifle. He was beginning to get the outrageous idea that they might just give up and leave. Indians did not like to waste the lives of their people, and already he had hit perhaps a fourth of their number. As the mare stretched her front legs out forward as if to lie down for a roll in the grass, he knelt behind her, and now he saw her off side for the first time since this started: totally slick with blood, and bristling with six or seven arrows sunk deep.

  All three of his guns were loaded again and no one was charging. He laid the guns in the grass beside the wheezing, gurgling mare and felt around the right side of his waist. The flint point had gone in at the front of the muscle and come an inch or so out the back. So he unsheathed his knife and cut off the arrow shaft just ahead of the fletch, sheathed the knife, reached back with his right hand and gripped the arrowhead, clenched his jaw and pulled the arrow on through. He blew out a loud sigh and blinked against a bright blizzard of pain. When his vision cleared, he saw a warrior limping toward him with lance and shield. It was the one he had shot off his horse a hundred paces out. He had gotten on his feet and here he came, blood all down his front, but charging.

  Drouillard grabbed up a pistol, cocked it and fired at the man’s chest, but the bullet hit the edge of his hide shield, which deflected it enough that it hit his shoulder only. He spun all the way around, but then came right on at Drouillard with his lance. Drouillard thought, You’re like one of those bears, aren’t you? He rolled quickly aside and the lance stuck in the ground and its shaft broke. The warrior, a big-boned boy, grimaced and staggered, but didn’t fall. A war club hung from one wrist by a thong, and he grabbed the handle, raised it and came at Drouillard swinging. Drouillard ducked under the blow, grabbing his knife from its sheath, and stabbed the warrior under the ribs. As the man stumbled and fell, Drouillard heard the howls and the hoofbeats coming, and they were close. They had used this scuffle to get into close range.

  They weren’t shooting because the wounded warrior was too close in harm’s way, but they were almost on him with their lances and clubs and coup sticks, their yipping and yodeling sounding like a pack of coyotes. He stooped for his rifle but as he stood up with it, a horseman came by him inches away and something slammed against his left shoulder blade so hard he dropped to his knees. He fired point-blank at a looming figure and then ducked down and shifted his grip on the empty rifle and swung it like a club, hitting someone hard. Horses were circling all around him, and their riders were thrusting at him with lances, beating him with clubs, one stunning jolt after another. He kept swinging at them with the rifle until it was wrenched from his hands. Warriors were off their horses now, grabbing him by the arms, by the leather of his shirt. He saw a fury-maddened face just before him, kicked the man in the belly, fell to the ground, found his bloody knife and came up slashing with it, a last war cry trilling from his throat.

  Then he couldn’t move anymore. They had him by both arms and held his head by fistfuls of hair. A warrior with a flint knife was cutting his clothes off.

  They forced him to the ground on his back. They loomed over him, silhouetted against the bright sky, their feathers, their braids, their black-painted faces. Their hands were hard and ruthlessly strong and he couldn’t move. He lurched as a sharpness sliced his groin and ripped upward toward his chest, an excruciating, ripping sharpness, and he felt his torso fall out of control. A fist in his hair forced his head forward and he saw that he was laid open and a man was scooping out his guts, as he had so often scooped out the guts of deer and elk and bear and buffalo, gray and glistening and bloody. But those animals had been dead before he cast out their innards. He saw his own intestines being lifted, stretched out and out, strung far and slung on the ground. Now other blades were working at his wrists and hips. They were dismembering him. A warrior was right above his face looking at him with the hardest mockery he had ever seen in any eyes.

  He understood the language of those eyes. They were telling him to cry out and beg.

  In the long ago days when his people were still warriors, they had been taught to taunt their torturers, to say, “Is that the worst you can do? Do you think you can make me cry out, with your blades and your fire and your bone-breaking clubs?”

  Oh, this was awful, this was the end of it; they would leave him scattered on the riverbank in pieces. He wished he could die before he knew more about this butchering.

  But he was a warrior now. In this last bit of his life he had been a warrior that any of his warrior ancestors would have smiled on. He could hear the ancient voices, those from the top of the mound, those of the cut-up woman on the other side of the mountains, those old voices he had heard even in the sea on the rocks at the far end of the land. He could still see the hating, challenging eyes looking at him, waiting for
him to scream, and could feel a leg being yanked off at the hip and knives working elsewhere, and his spirit was starting to rise out. Now they were cutting his neck.

  But with the last of what was in him, he took a long breath and grinned into that face and laughed. Against the bright sky he saw the eagle soaring. He looked up at it and it grew closer and closer.

  Then he was the eagle looking down. Bodies and shields and dead horses lay scattered on a meadow near a willow thicket beside a river among mountains, and warriors were pulling a heart out of a headless torso. They divided it and put it in their mouths, and howled a song. They were eating a warrior’s heart to strengthen their own.

  He rose up and up, climbing with the great eagle feathers of his wings. The river and the valley grew smaller below and the mountains were white all around. Buzzards below him were gliding down toward two bodies by the riverbank. He soared over a little square whitemen’s fort and rose higher. Three rivers flowed together below to become one river, and it twisted and curved far down and between cliffs and ran on through wooded hills and then around islands and then went around a bend. He rose on earth’s breath higher and higher and saw endless green plains darkened by vast herds of buffalo, all so far below that they were tiny.

  There was falling water, foaming and falling. On an island in mist was one large cottonwood tree with his nest in the top of it.

  On eagle feathers he glided home.

  Author’s Note

  This is an Indian’s story, but with many white men’s written words threading through it.

  The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition are not just a daily log of one of history’s most significant journeys. They are also a treasure of American literature, in company with Moby Dick, Leaves of Grass, Walden, and Huckleberry Finn. The story of their writing, editing, publication, and annotation over the last two centuries is a fascinating epic in itself. Woven through the journals are many important lessons.

  The writings of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their subordinates can be read on many levels: as adventure narrative, as travelogue, as scientific field notes, as history-making, as essays, and as a report to the President, which was their original purpose. But they can also be read as American folk literature, and for insight into the character, intelligence, beliefs, and purposes of the authors themselves. We readers may be amused by the erratic spelling, but when Clark writes “norstrals” for “nostrils” and “turrable” for “terrible,” we are hearing his Virginia-Kentucky dialect. And when he writes of storing away “a few Small lumbersom articles” like a desk and books, he may be coining a word, but we know that he has lifted those things around and knows they are lumbering and cumbersome, and we have also a glimpse of subconscious wordplay in a serious, practical mind.

  Neither Lewis nor Clark ever spelled correctly the name of the protagonist of this novel, George Drouillard; it is a French name, and when Drouillard pronounced it correctly it sounded to them like Drewyer or Drewyear. One of my reasons for presenting Drouillard as barely literate in this book is that if he had been able to write, he would have been asked by the captains to keep a journal, and wasn’t. If the captains had seen his signature a time or two, they likely would have written his name as some variation of Drouillard, not as the Drewyer they heard. My examination of the few documents of Drouillard’s transactions convince me they were written for him by others, and signed in his own less practiced hand.

  Though Drouillard did not keep any known journals, he was, fortunately for us, in the company of men who wrote often about his deeds and abilities—not just Lewis and Clark, but Manuel Lisa’s fur-trading operatives with whom Drouillard made two subsequent journeys up the Missouri. The account of his last known words and the description of his mutilated corpse were written from eyewitness accounts.

  It is in the aggregate of those numerous written entries that the remarkable courage and abilities of this man Drouillard—a lowly half-breed by society’s measure—become apparent.

  As the expedition’s “other Indian,” he has been so overshadowed by Sacagaweah that few Americans know anything about him. Because he went by his French name, most people who read about Lewis and Clark presume he was another of the thirty-odd white men who made up the Corps of Discovery. If he had ever given the captains his Shawnee name (no doubt he had one), it might have gotten into the journals, and history’s notice of him would have been different; like black York and Indian Sacagaweah, he would have been conspicuous as a “person of color” in this Anglo-American troop.

  Sacagaweah deserves the fame that has attached to her name, even though her role as “guide” of the expedition has been much exaggerated and her life outrageously romanticized.

  Drouillard, the “other Indian”—a half-breed at that—does not deserve the obscurity that has clouded his name. He was important, even crucial, to the progress of the expedition, day after trying day. A study of his role makes it clear that without him, Lewis and Clark might very well have failed to complete the trip to the Pacific, their winter encampment there, or the trip back. Besides his extraordinary hunting and interpreting skills, acknowledged by the captains, there are more subtle indications that he went out among the tribes—the Clatsops and the Nez Perce are two examples—and untied knots of resentment and misunderstanding that threatened to stymie the captains’ purposes. I think he managed to do those things because he was an Indian and understood the doubts and feelings Indians had about these presumptuous white intruders.

  Therein lies my desire to tell this story through the viewpoint of George Drouillard, who stood in both cultures at a crucial time, a man whose own tribe had been destroyed by just such soldiers as he was working for—among them the Shawnees’ nemesis, George Rogers Clark, William’s older brother.

  The Lewis and Clark story, retold so often, so well, and so badly, has almost entirely been told by white men as their prideful tale of Manifest Destiny: the inspiring courage and resourcefulness of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, driven by the genius of Thomas Jefferson. The other side of the story—the Native American side—has scarcely been acknowledged, except by James P. Ronda in his balanced and scholarly Lewis and Clark among the Indians (1984), and a few lesser efforts.

  Apparently it has been hard for admirers of Lewis and Clark to admit that the explorers would not have succeeded without a great deal of hospitality, cooperation, guidance, and forbearance from the native populations along the way. True, the Indians granted some of that for practical reasons, in hopes of reward, or in fear of punishment. But much help was given simply because of the traditions of generosity that exist in American Indian societies. Tribes were much more civilized and well-governed than Thomas Jefferson suspected. Neither he nor Lewis knew much about Indians, and they calculated to gain compliance by inspiring awe, fear, and venality. They believed that white men, especially white men of English heritage like themselves, were morally and intellectually superior to people of any other race. They were as contemptuous of the “superstition” of Indians as of the Catholicism of Frenchmen and Spaniards.

  William Clark, though a product of the same Virginian roots as Jefferson and Lewis, had grown from boyhood on the Kentucky frontier, and had both fought and dealt with Indians. He understood them better, admired them more, and liked them, unless they got him mad. He was a remarkably steady and reliable backup man for the more volatile Lewis. Long gaps in Lewis’s journal-keeping lead some scholars to believe some of his writings may have been lost during the journey, but as likely an explanation is that Clark carried most of the leadership and journalizing load in times when Lewis’s depression rendered him incapable. During some of those gaps, Lewis is not only not writing, but is seldom mentioned in Clark’s or the enlisted men’s journals as doing anything.

  Drouillard, being a member of the captains’ “household,” I believe would have been aware early of Lewis’s instability and required to cope with it in many ways.

  I have interspersed journal entries through
Drouillard’s viewpoint narrative for several reasons:

  Sometimes Drouillard is separated from the main body of the Corps of Discovery, and the reader deserves to stay abreast of expedition activities that Drouillard isn’t there to witness.

  Sometimes this half-breed’s perception of events is quite different from the official viewpoint of the expedition and its leaders, and the reader deserves to see both viewpoints, to compare the Indians’ and white men’s understanding of events.

  Often the journal entries I’ve chosen refer directly to Drouillard’s deeds, and indicate how they were perceived by the captains.

  But always I have inserted journal entries for the reader’s sheer edification, inspiration, and delight. As I said at the beginning of this note, the journals of the expedition are American literature, full of flavor and wonder, humor and quaintness: windows not only into the time and place, but also into the minds and personalities of the authors themselves. And like most great American literature, they remain unread by most Americans, even though there is not an American whose life hasn’t been affected by the expedition and its outcomes.

  If, in the course of illuminating the life of one of America’s unsung heroes, I can also expose novel readers to an unread classic in the American annals, then I can feel that I’ve made some good use of my time and the readers’.

  All the journal excerpts I’ve used are very much condensed. The captains wrote hundreds of words to report the activities of almost every day for three years, and some single-day entries run to thousands of words. My selections have had to be much abbreviated in order not to distract from Drouillard’s story.