by Roland Smith
The Mandans lived in large earth lodges about forty feet around. In each village there were forty lodges, with at least ten people living in each lodge. At night they brought their horses and dogs right into the lodge to sleep alongside them.
The men built our fort across from the first Mandan village. The gated wall surrounding the fort was made out of stout trees and stood eighteen feet tall. The captains had the swivel gun put on top of the wall in case we were attacked. Inside were two rows of small huts for the men to sleep in, a foundry, and a plaza to hold council with the Indians, of whom there was a steady flow.
The Mandan and Hidatsa villages functioned like the wharves I had grown up on, but instead of using money, transactions were based purely on trade. Each lodge was a store filled with goods. Cheyenne, Arikara, Sioux, Otos, French and English from Canada, Spaniards, and men and women from half a dozen other tribes traveled across the prairie sea to trade their wares here. A good horse might cost three tanned buffalo robes, one hundred blue beads, and twenty pounds of corn. The Indian who traded the horse would take what he got and trade it for something he and his family needed.
The Mandans were experienced traders. When we first arrived they offered us a few gifts of meat and corn, but after that it was all business. Dozens of Mandans showed up at the fort every day with bushels of corn and squash, meat, buffalo robes, furs, and other items. The men would sit down with them in the plaza and the long process of haggling over prices would begin.
It wasn't long before the cold descended and held us in its icy fist. The river froze solid and our men walked around with buffalo robes wrapped around themselves, the hair sides against their bodies. The Mandans didn't seem to be bothered by the cold. They wore thin moc casins and often spent the night out on the windswept prairie without a fire or a robe to keep them warm. Because of my fur, I was not particularly bothered by the cold. In fact I preferred the cold to the heat of summer.
When the men were off duty they huddled around the fires in their huts, trying to keep the chill away, or walked over to the Mandan villages to visit with the women.
The captains spent most of their time inside the fort. Captain Lewis worked on his notes for President Jefferson, and Captain Clark refined the maps of where we had been.
One day a Frenchman named Toussaint Charbonneau showed up at the fort and walked in on Captain Lewis unannounced, catching him in the middle of working on his animal collection. Charbonneau did not know better than to disturb the Captain when he was working.
"My name is Toussaint Charbonneau," he said with a heavy accent. "I would like to be your interpreter."
Captain Lewis looked up and glared at the intruder for a full minute without uttering one word. Charbonneau had a bushy unkempt beard, shoulder-length gray hair, and a unique smell to him that I placed somewhere between a buffalo's and a raccoon's. He took his hat off. The top of his head was as bald as a newborn mouse pup. While the Captain continued his silent stare, Charbonneau looked around the hut casually, without the slightest idea that his host was irritated.
"We already have an interpreter," Captain Lewis said finally, and looked back down at the skull he had been examining.
"You mean Drouillard?"
Captain Lewis looked up again as if he were surprised that Charbonneau was still standing there. "That's exactly who I mean."
"Ha!" Charbonneau slapped his ample belly.
Captain Lewis flushed in anger. He didn't like this loud Frenchman and he was about to throw him out of the hut when Captain Clark walked in.
Captain Lewis took a deep breath to calm himself. "We have a visitor," he said. "This is Toussaint Charbonneau."
"I've heard the name," Captain Clark said, putting his hand out. "You live up with the Hidatsas?"
"Yes, I do."
"He wants to be our interpreter," Captain Lewis said.
"But we have an—"
"I have already told Mr. Charbonneau that George Drouillard is our interpreter. He was not impressed."
"Perhaps I should start again," Charbonneau offered, finally seeing the Captain's annoyance.
"By all means," Captain Lewis said.
"I didn't mean any offense. I'm sure your man Drouillard is a good man, but does he speak fluent Shoshone?"
The captains looked at each other in surprise, not sure they understood. None of us had ever even seen a Shoshone Indian. But the captains were depending on the Shoshone tribe to sell us horses when we reached the mountains next summer. Making peace with the Shoshones and trading for their horses would be critical to the success of the expedition. The captains had been talking about the problem just that morning over breakfast.
"And I suppose you speak fluent Shoshone?" Captain Lewis asked.
Charbonneau launched into an involved answer, but Captain Lewis didn't understand what he was saying. "Tabeau!" he called. Tabeau stuck his head into the hut. "Can you find out if this man actually speaks the Shoshone language?"
Charbonneau and Tabeau spoke in French for several minutes.
"He does not speak Shoshone," Tabeau explained. "But he has two Shoshone wives living with him up at the Hidatsa village. The women were captured in a Hidatsa raid a few years ago and Charbonneau here won them in a bet with the warriors who owned them. He says he'll bring them with him. He also says that he's a skilled boatman."
The captains asked Tabeau to take Charbonneau outside.
"What do you think?" Captain Lewis asked.
"We need someone who can speak Shoshone. I don't suppose he'll allow one of his wives to come along without him."
"Probably not. And even if he were willing, having an unescorted woman along could pose a problem."
Captain Clark nodded in agreement. "We could use another boatman."
"True."
The captains talked for quite some time before calling Charbonneau back in. After another long discussion they reached an agreement with him. Charbonneau would be hired, and he would bring one of his wives with him.
The following week he brought his two wives to the fort. They were just girls, no more than fifteen or sixteen years old. When they were introduced to the captains they stared down at the ground shyly. Charbonneau had chosen the girl named Sacagawea to accompany us in the spring. "In the Hidatsa language," he said, "Sacagawea means Bird Woman."
The name fit her well. She was a small-boned girl with long crow-colored hair, pulled back and braided in the Indian way. I walked up to her and she immediately scratched my ears. As I stood there enjoying her attentions, I picked up an odd scent from her that could mean only one thing—Bird Woman was carrying a pup inside her. The captains were clearly unaware of this, and I suspected Charbonneau was no less ignorant. They would all find out soon enough.
When they left, Captain Lewis said, "I hope Sacagawea is strong enough to endure the rigors of our journey."
Bird Woman would surprise us all.
January 12, 1805
We brought in the New Year by taking a large group of men to the first Mandan village for dancing and merriment. A good time was had by all...
WE ENJOYED our time among the Mandans, but after a few weeks the men were already talking about proceeding on, hoping for an early spring. I was eager to leave as well. I had gotten used to wandering and discovering new sights and smells. The fort was secure and comfortable, but also confining. I spent a good part of each day roaming through the Mandan villages or out hunting with Drouillard.
Captain Lewis spent most days inside the fort, working on his notes and preparing his collection, which would be sent back with the French voyagers in the spring.
As the winter progressed, food became scarce. Our hunters often came back hungry and frostbitten, without a scrap of meat to show for their efforts.
The captains started doctoring the Indians in exchange for meat and produce. They treated wounds, colds, rheumatism, bad teeth, frostbite, and a number of other ailments. The word spread and every morning a dozen Indians lined up outside the cap
tains' huts, each with an armful of food, to wait their turn for the white medicine.
A second business was set up using the forge and the blacksmith and gunsmith skills of Private John Shields. The Indians brought in hoes that needed mending, axes that needed sharpening, and broken rifles. Eventually there wasn't a broken hoe in any of the Mandan and Hidatsa lodges. The axes were all sharpened, and all the Indians' rifles were as good as new.
Business dropped off. The captains remedied this by helping Shields design a battle-ax—an item that became so popular he and the men helping him could hardly keep up with the demand.
I thought Shield's ax business was a little odd. On the one hand, the captains were telling the Indians to stop warring with one another. On the other hand, they were making battle-axes that the Indians would certainly use in raids. One day a Hidatsa war chief stopped by the Captain's hut on his way to pick up a battle-ax at the forge. He asked permission to raid the Sioux and Arikaras when the weather broke in spring. He got the ax but was told not to use it, which I could see made no sense to him.
February 11, 1805
Sacagawea began her labor today. Captain Clark and I are tending her, but the birth is taking an inordinate amount of time. I have grown very fond of her since she and her husband moved into the fort with us....
THE CAPTAIN wasn't alone in his feelings for Bird Woman. Soon after she and Charbonneau moved into the fort, she announced that she was pregnant. There was some heated debate among the men over the wisdom of her joining our tribe. They thought a woman with a child would be too much of a burden. But as they got to know her, the subject began to fade. There was something about her quiet shyness that appealed to all the men. And by the time she gave birth, they were looking forward to having a human pup on the journey.
Bird Woman spent many evenings picking burrs out of my fur. And from time to time she slipped me a dead mouse, because she knew I was partial to them. These two acts of kindness were more than enough to endear her to me forever.
Bird Woman's labor was long. The captains fretted over her as if they were the expectant fathers, not Charbonneau. After a time René Jessaume, one of the French traders living with the Mandans, suggested to Captain Lewis that he feed her a bit of rattlesnake rattle to hurry the labor along. "It works every time," René insisted.
Captain Lewis was doubtful, but he was getting desperate. He broke up a bit of rattlesnake rattle, put it into a cup of water, and offered it to her.
Sure enough, a few minutes after she drank the mixture down, our tribe had a new member. They named the pup Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, but Captain Clark called him Pomp, which is the name that seemed to stick.
About a month after Pomp was born Charbonneau and his family got kicked out of the fort. The problem began when the captains sat down with Charbonneau to go over his contract and he became uppity with them. He told the captains he would not perform any camp duties, carry any loads, or stand guard duty. He also informed them that he expected to be free to leave the party at any time and that they would have to supply him with provisions if he did. This of course was unacceptable and be was asked to leave that very day.
The captains were very disappointed at this turn of events and so were the men. The fort just wasn't the same without Bird Woman and Pomp. The men missed making faces and uttering odd guttural sounds at her pup. I missed them, too.
A few days after their departure I crossed the frozen river to the Mandan village where they were staying, to see how they were doing in their new circumstances.
Long before I reached the village I heard Bird Woman's voice, but she sounded more like an angry bear than a bird. She was calling her husband every bad name she could think of in Shoshone and Hidatsa. As best I could figure out between curses, Bird Woman wanted to go home to her family below the big mountains and could not believe Charbonneau's arrogance had ruined this prospect.
I did not hear Charbonneau utter a single word all during this harangue. The conversation was so one-sided, I thought she must have killed him and she was shouting at his corpse; but I was wrong. The buffalo-hide door of the lodge flew open and he stumbled outside in a daze, with Bird Woman still shouting at him.
Charbonneau found Tabeau and begged him to go over to the fort and intercede with the captains on his behalf. He told Tabeau that he would do anything the captains asked if they would just allow him and Bird Woman to go with them.
Tabeau crossed over to the fort and argued the case. The captains let Charbonneau stew for a few more days in Bird Woman's wrath, but they finally gave in and hired him back.
March 30, 1805
Our preparations for departure are nearly complete and within a week we will be on our way. Captain Clark and I have written a detailed letter to President Jefferson outlining our journey thus far. We will also be sending back the animal and plant collection and some of our notes.
From this point on we will be traveling into uncharted territory, but I am confident we will discover the Northwest Passage if what the Hidatsas have told us is true. We will be traveling in our two pirogues and in six dugout canoes the men have made, all of which have been rigged with sails. With these smaller boats we should make 25 miles a day, arriving at the Pacific this summer and perhaps even returning to Fort Mandan before winter.
Captain Clark and I are confident in the 26 men we have chosen to continue on with us in the permanent party. We have organized the privates into three squads, with a sergeant over each squad. In addition we travel with five civilians—York, Drouillard, Charbonneau, Sacagawea, and Pomp.
I am so eager to leave, I can barely sleep at night....
OUR FINAL DAYS at Fort Mandan were hectic, but at last the men were ready and the boats were loaded. The keelboat headed back down the Missouri toward Saint Louis with the French voyagers and the men not assigned to the permanent party. On board were all of the captains' notes, the dead animal collection, four live magpies, a live prairie dog, a live prairie hen, and Privates Reed and Newman.
After the long winter Captain Lewis wanted to stretch his legs and decided to walk alongshore. I led the way. We proceeded on.
The men tired easily at first. The long winter at Fort Mandan had softened them and the lack of meat had not helped matters. The Indians seemed to have killed nearly every animal for a hundred miles, and the few our hunters managed to shoot were in poor flesh after the harsh winter.
On most days I stayed on shore foraging, unless the Captain made me ride in the boat, which he seldom did. Sometimes I rambled by myself, sometimes with the Captain, sometimes with the hunters, and sometimes with Bird Woman.
She walked with little Pomp strapped to her back on a cradleboard, bundled in blankets and skins, with only his little black eyes and nose exposed. On warm days his arms were freed to play with his mother's black hair as she walked with her head down, looking for plants and roots and mice nests, which she found faster than I could smell them. When she discovered a nest, she opened it with a stick to retrieve the hog peanuts the mice had stored.
I was more interested in the mice than the peanuts, but the rodents were so quick I was lucky to catch one out of every other nest. And Bird Woman didn't allow me to eat the pink baby mice. The first time I tried to snap one of the blind squirmers up, she whacked me a good one across the nose with her stick. "Bad dog! It is wrong to eat babies that cannot run away."
She always left a couple of peanuts in the nest for the mice to eat, and covered the babies before she proceeded on.
At night the captains slept in a buffaloskin lodge along with Drouillard, Charbonneau, Sacagawea, and Pomp. I slept nearest to the door, so I could get out quickly if I heard something outside.
Charbonneau snored louder than any man I have ever heard, which added to Captain Lewis's irritation with him.
Before we left Fort Mandan Charbonneau had assured the captains he was a skilled boatman, but it became clear that this was not true. 1 was in his boat one day with Captain Lewis, Sacagawea, Pomp, Drouil
lard, and three men who could not swim. A sudden squall came up, turning the boat sideways. Charbonneau sat at the tiller frozen in fear, despite Captain Lewis's shouting at him to swing the bow into the current. The boat nearly sank with all of our trade goods, to say nothing of the men who could not swim. Drouillard, ever steady in the face of disaster, calmly lowered the sail and the boat righted itself. If it were not for Sacagawea, I am sure the captains would have sent Charbonneau back to the Mandan village that afternoon.
About this time an Indian dog showed up in camp. I had smelled it following us for several days and hoped it had the sense not to show itself, but its hunger drove it into camp late one evening. It slunk into the firelight and flopped down right in front of me. Poor thing. Bones sticking out, open sores on the skin.
"Look, Seaman has a girlfriend!"
"He could do better than that."
"Followed him all the way from the Mandan village."
She was not a Mandan or Hidatsa dog. She had been out on her own for quite some time.
Drouillard threw her a scrap of beaver meat, but she didn't touch it, fearing I might attack her. I backed away to give her room and she snapped up the meat and bolted back into the trees. Now that she had gotten a taste of food I knew she would be back, and I hoped she wouldn't suffer the same fate as my prairie wolf.
I had not seen White Feather since the fire on the Mandan prairie. Every time I heard a crow I would run to the sound and was disappointed when I found the cawing came from a common crow.
April 20, 1805
We have been held in camp for several days due to severe winds and I've taken advantage of our stay by making a thorough exploration of this area. I found a dead Indian on a scaffold not far from our camp. Lying next to him were several baskets, his tomahawk, the body of his dog, and his sled. The Indians often sacrifice the animals that have helped them in lift. I explained to Sea that I didn't think this would be necessary in his case if I should pass on, and for a moment I thought he understood what I was talking about.