Sacajawea

by Anna Lee Waldo

OLIN D. WHEELER, The Trail of Lewis and Clark, vol. II. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904, p. 124.

  This may be the same medal discovered more than a century later, at the same location in Franklin County, Washington, in 1964, where the Palouse River empties into the Snake River.

  Washington State ethnologists found it in a canoe burial while excavating an ancient village site. It is much like the Chief Yellept Medal found in 1890 in size and composition and structure. It differs, however, in that it has a perforation immediately above Jefferson’s head. Erosive effects have destroyed the finer details of this piece. Lewis and Clark made no mention of presenting medals to Indians at the mouth of the Palouse, though they did give one to Chief Cutsahnem at the confluence of the Snake and the Columbia Rivers.

  On March 1, 1899, an engineer named Lester Hansaker, was doing some excavations for the construction of a roadbed for the Northern Pacific Railroad when he came across an Indian grave at the mouth of the Potlatch River (called Colter’s Creek by Lewis and Clark) in Nez Percé County, Idaho. In the grave he found a Jefferson Medal, which is now located in the American Museum of Natural History, New York. It was wrapped in many thicknesses of buffalo hide. This may be the same medal with the suspension ring which the captains gave to Twisted Hair, the Nez Percé chief and tewat.

  The Oregon Historical Society has a Jefferson Medal that is silver, of the shell type, with a diameter of about 2¼ inches. It was found in the early 1890’s in a grave on an island near the mouth of the Walla Walla River and lacks the suspension loop and has suffered considerable damage due to unknown causes. This medal may be the one which Captain Clark presented Chief Yellept on the Expedition’s return journey. The explorers met Yellept’s Walla Walla tribe below the mouth of the Walla Walla River on the west bank of the Columbia, in what is now Benton County, Washington.

  Recently some Indian treasures have been found at the ancient Chinook village of Wishram, in the state of

  Washington. Among the treasures was a silver dollar with the date 1801 on it. Also two Washington Season Medals of silver, 1¾ inches in diameter and perforated. Originally they may have had suspension loops, though they are missing today. On the reverse the inscription “SECOND PRESIDENCY OF GEO WASHINGTON MDCCXCVI” has been completely eroded away, and the marginal wreath of oak and laurel leaves shows distinct wear. On the obverse all detail is gone except that the outline of the man sowing wheat and, below, portions of the letters, “USA.” These two medals are on loan to the Maryhill Museum, Washington, from Mary Underwood Lane, a granddaughter of Chief Chenoweth, a famous Cascade Chinook, who may have lived in a village just west of the present North Bonneville, Washington. As to the history of these medals, no one actually knows, but they might be the very ones given to the chiefs Chillahlawil and Comcommoly on November 20, 1805 by Lewis and Clark.

  PAUL RUSSELL CUTRIGHT, “Lewis and Clark Peace Medals,” The Bulletin. St. Louis: The Missouri Historical Society, vol. 24, no. 2, 1968, pp. 160–67.

  CHAPTER

  22

  Over the Mountains

  Since snowshoes were used for walking, the lightest possible construction was wanted. Easily made “bear-paw” snowshoes were a bit less than a foot wide and about a foot and a half long. They were roughly egg shaped to spread the weight of the wearer, and the more pointed end was the front. Bear-paw frames were often crooked. They had two thwarts, and all the spaces were filled in with coarse twined weaving, very open, so as to pick up the least amount of snow.

  EDWIN TUNIS, Indians. New York: The World Publishing Co., 1959, pp. 50–1.

  A week later, Captain Lewis had already moved his people to Clark’s forward camp, and the expedition was once again together. By this time, the outfit was left with Old Toby and only one of his four sons, Cutworm, as guides. The other Shoshonis accompanying the white men had turned back home. This was a relief to Captain Clark, because during the days just before turning back, the Shoshoni women had become so jealous of Sacajawea’s having her own horse and such a favored position with the expedition, that he was afraid there would be some outward confrontation to settle. If that happened, he knew he’d put the blame squarely on Captain Lewis’s shoulders, where it belonged. Some scheme! he thought. Giving Janey her own horse was like planting an overhot powder keg in the midst of a Shoshoni powwow. It served its purpose to keep her with the expedition, but did not keep feelings from reaching a boiling point.

  Sacajawea was furious with the women’s attitude and tried desperately to make them understand her position. They all pretended not to comprehend and made malicious remarks behind her back and spoke cattishly to her face. For example, even Willow Bud said on the day of departure, “Don’t cry. When we see you next year, maybe you will be chief of these palefaces.”

  The remark stung and brought more tears to Sacajawea’s eyes, but for once she held her tongue.

  The expedition moved forward through the precipitous canyon of the North Fork of the Salmon River and headed northeast toward the Bitterroot Valley, where Old Toby assured the captains he could easily pick up the trail by which the Nez Percés crossed the mountains to the buffalo plains. The Shoshonis had sold them a total of twenty-nine horses and two strong-backed mules for packing.

  The wind was the master, but the men blessed it since, while it blew, the haze of flies was held impotent in the shelter of the rock lichens or hidden in favored canyon niches where there were a few scrawny spruces, none of which stood more than a yard high.

  Just before dusk, the hunters joined the main party, empty-handed. For several days Sacajawea had looked for game signs, but saw not a bird nor an animal track. This land seemed deserted. Then one morning a faint animal smell came in with the wind, but she could not place it. It was neither deer nor rabbit; not ground squirrel, fox, or bird. Then the odor vanished and Pomp’s hungry cry rose above the moan of the wind.

  As this day faded, Three Eagles, chief of the Selish tribe of the Flathead Nation, was scouting for horse thieves, but to his astonishment he saw in the canyon valley a line of men that belonged to no tribe or nation he knew of. Not one brave in this line wore paint on his face or a robe on his back. He thought perhaps horse thieves had robbed them also, because to his knowledge all men wore robes in this cold, windy weather. He noticed that there were two men riding together at the head of the string. A few men walked, leading packhorses, and they made their way openly, not secluding themselves behind rocks or the poor, ugly little trees like a war party. They had only one squaw among them, and she carried a papoose on her back. War parties never permitted women and children in their midst. Three Eagles wondered where the other women of these men were. Had the horse thieves taken them also? Then he saw one huge man, painted all black for war.

  The string of men seemed to be heading straight for his village. Hurriedly, he ran off to the village, where he ordered all horses driven in beside the tepees and everything prepared for defense. Then he stood on a rise, hidden behind a boulder, and watched the strangers come on. Some were bone white. Were they all sick? They did not ride or walk like men who were ill. Curious about these visitors, he went back to his village and greeted the men with quick, deft movements of his hands, and he asked his squaws to find buffalo robes among the people of his village to replace those that must have been stolen from these poor men.

  Then Old Toby stepped forward and interpreted with hand signs for the captains. He told the chief that the white men had blankets in their packs, but used them only at night to sleep in.

  “This bone-white tribe has strange customs,” said Chief Three Eagles. He was a big, swarthy-faced man with long, flowing hair, and not overly clean. He invited the expedition to stay the night. There were about thirty-three tepees. Captain Lewis estimated eighty men, three hundred women and children, and at least five hundred horses.

  Lewis thanked Three Eagles and promised that his party would stay the night in their own camp a few hundred yards upstream. Sacajawea recognized their odor as that which had co
me fleetingly on the wind, and she knew these people were of the Flathead Nation. The expedition was treated to a meal of boiled venison after they gave out a few gifts of colored beads and ribbons. The Selish Flatheads laughed and chatted with a low, guttural clucking, resembling that of so many turkeys.1 They did not seem to have definite words, only a soft crooning to their chatter.

  Old Toby asked the whereabouts of the trail to the Nez Percy’s camp. Three Eagles pointed out a trail to the northwest that was no more than a faint game trail winding through stones and deformed juniper. “It leads to the Nez Percés, who live on the other side of the mountains. The trail is empty.” The chief rubbed his belly and bent double to show hunger pangs for want of food, indicating the trail held little game.

  “Praise the Lord!” shouted the elated Captain Lewis, ignoring the fact that game would be scarce. “I knew it! There had to be a way across these mountains.”

  The next morning, the captains bought thirteen more horses and three colts, and exchanged seven that were worn out. They then traded for half a dozen bags of jerky from the Selish before moving north down the Bitterroot Valley. Hunters were sent out during the day and found no large game, but fortunately came in with several cranes and some pheasants for the evening meal.2 That day the horses took much punishment from the cold, bitter winds, little grass for food, and the steep rocky terrain. “A high-grain diet would help the beasts ward off the cold,” sighed Captain Lewis.

  Riding became dangerous. The men slipped and struggled forward over slabs of rock that dipped steeply over the sides of the trail. The trail skirted the mountain slope, then dipped and swung to the west. The expedition found itself in a grove of tall pitch pine. Some trees must have been up to one hundred and sixty feet in height, and many had fallen. The trail twisted and turned to avoid them, so much so that the head and tail of the outfit was frequently in a position to reach over and shake hands from opposite sides of some huge log. Even winding around, and jumping everything they could possibly get over, the men still had to cut the trail open in several spots.

  The evening was gray, cold, and still, with a threat of snow in it. Nothing was stirring, and there was no sound—not even from the stream, which here fell swiftly and quite silently through level flats of an old lake basin. It was as if the stillness of death lay on the camping place. A mist crept along the walls of the tiny valley like a gray, formless, frozen ghost, and the mountains were hidden from the party by a low canopy of leaden clouds. Not even the Flatheads had used this place in many years. There was a place where the men off-saddled, a knoll, where a fire had been made—but the sign was old. Grass and dry seed heads of dead flowers were poking through the ashes; moss covered the blackness of the charred logs. A set of tepee poles was piled against a rock, but it was long since the poles had been used and they were all rotten. Not far from the poles were three circles of boulders, half-hidden in the moss and lichens. Sacajawea walked into the center of one of these tent rings and found under the dry grass the blackened embers of a center fire. Near the dead fire she found a ladle of elk’s horn and a bone sewing awl. She wondered what made the women of this lodge hurry away so fast, leaving behind a hard-to-fashion ladle and awl.

  Before sunup, she was wakened by the whimpering of Pomp, who was hungry. She snuggled him to her breast. When Pomp was again asleep, she rose and walked away from the camp to relieve herself. Along the edge of the old lake basin she found rows of small stones set up by children playing and perhaps twenty tepee rings scattered here and there. Around the rings she found a bone fish hook and other tools of the people who had once lived here. A wooden ornament for some woman’s hair was discarded in the moss. Beside it lay a section of bow with a good spring still in its fibers. Nearby was an empty stone cache. Normally it would be used to hold the excess meat during the winter. It looked unused, not stained with blood or animal tissue or hairs. Why had these people left so suddenly? What terror could have made a woman abandon the beautifully woven vegetable tray—a thing of enduring value—to split and whiten under the summer suns and winter snows? And how could men flee when their bows and fish hooks remained in the deserted camp?

  Before she left the camp of tepee rings, the ancient inhabitants seemed to speak to Sacajawea and tell her of fleeing from an insidious enemy so quickly that there was no time to pack all hunting gear and household goods. On second thought she believed they did not rush, they just didn’t pack well because they didn’t care. The enemy had left them weak and debilitated. As the sun came through the peaks of the mountains, there was no other sound than the harsh piping of the newly rising wind. No birds, no chipmunk chatter, no scurrying of field mice was in the air. The enemy was starvation.

  As she walked around the back side of the rings, she found a large block of blue argillite up-ended to form the marking of a burial mound whose roof had been constructed of the owner’s cradleboard. The openings had been neatly filled with rocks and thatched with willow, and the whole was so well made that the crypt had remained almost intact. Beside the grave were child-sized deep spears, bow drills, and arrows, indicating that the dead child had been a boy. These would be needful things for the boy to show that he had left the world well prepared to face the next. It was a peaceful grave. But when Sacajawea turned back, she found half a dozen more children’s graves, and beyond them were ten or eleven adult graves. She found herself hurrying away and felt an almost hysterical desire to see living men again. She almost ran the last few yards to camp, where she was greeted by York and in turn greeted the man with an effusiveness that startled him. York then told her that the hunters had been sent out once again, but there were no signs of game around the camp. This was small comfort, for the party had counted on stocking up with meat before they continued climbing into the higher ranges of the mountains and into the unknown lands to the northwest. The expedition’s food supplies bought from the Flatheads were almost exhausted. The short rations were beginning to undermine the strength and to some extent the morale of the party.

  Captain Lewis brought out the portable soup, which was an experimental ration he had made up in Philadelphia. It was made from dried vegetables that had been fortified with iron, in the form of ferrous sulfate. No one liked this soup, which had a stronger, more bitter flavor than the wild grouse, but it was better than chewing on moccasin leather. Thinking of the people of the rings, Sacajawea ate all of her soup, saying nothing about the way it set her teeth on edge.3

  As they left the area of the old lake basin that morning, the sun was suddenly covered with sullen storm clouds and the long moan of the wind rose above the noise of the horses’ hooves clattering over the blue-and-green talus. Along the stark rocky meadows that soon lay beneath the expedition, Sacajawea saw the old camps of those unknown people. Beyond, the little rock mounds rose above the stone surface like gray boils on the bones of the land.

  “It would be no marvel if that black sky sent us rain and the rain turned into sleet by midday,” hollered Charbonneau, blowing on his hands to keep them warm. “Or even snow.”

  During the morning the hills came closer to the streams until they passed through deep gorges, where the roar of the torrent floated up to them from below. They were forced to wallow across in deep water, and the horses somehow clambered their way up the scarp of shale. Paths wound in every direction. But they were not game trails, only washes from wind and melting snow. The hunters found no game. In the evening they again had portable soup. It was getting harder to find wood for the night cooking fire. And this night the wet clothing had to be dried.

  The precipitation had not come by the end of the next day. But the temperature dropped by nightfall, and the men knew they would sleep fully clothed in their blankets because the exertion of staking out the horses, hunting the few spare sticks of firewood, and setting up camp caused them to sweat easily. They felt weak with hunger. The small fire would not dry out sweat-dampened clothing and also make the watered-down portable soup. It they took off their damp clothes th
ey would freeze up, and next morning they would never get them back on.

  During the night Sacajawea caught Pomp’s nose gently between her thumb and forefinger, her palm over his mouth, to stop his crying. Her milk was not rich enough. When he began to twist for breath, she let go a little—but only a little—and at the first sign of another cry, she shut off his air again. She did not want him to wake the others. She crooned ever so softly as she did this, a growing song of the Agaidükas, to make the boy straight-limbed, strong of body and heart. She held him tightly, keeping him warm; feeling that his fingernails were long enough to scratch, she bit off each nail to the tip of his fingers.

  The next morning, Old Toby and Captain Lewis walked to the top of a nearby ridge to survey the route with the good spyglass. There was nothing to be seen but rock and steep terrain. The ground was bare, except in the gullies, where a light powder snow had drifted some days back.

  The constant climb was treacherous, and the horses had a rough time of it. For three more days, the expedition faced cold and wind that did not let up once.

  Sacajawea confided to Charbonneau, “I must have circles under my eyes and a bend to my shoulders, like poor Willow Bud in the Season of Snow. It is cramps from being constantly hungry.”

  Charbonneau’s belly contracted, and he yelled, “Damn you! That kind of talk will bring cramps to everyone. Shut your mouth!” He pulled off a leather whang from his sleeve. “Chew on this.”

  She turned from him and sniffed, pulling the sharp smell of a wind-tormented mountain cedar deep into her lungs. At least the smell made her feel good. In a way it did; but in another way it didn’t. It made her think of food. Her mouth watered as she thought of the sweet ground corn of the Mandans—she could lap up the meal and drink a little water from a gourd, hold the meal and water in her mouth and knead it with her tongue while she rode. The thought didn’t do her belly any good. She gave it up and pushed her horse on ahead of Charbonneau to ride at the side of Old Toby.