Sacajawea

by Anna Lee Waldo

  Ahead, Captain Lewis had halted at a spring before angling up the next ridge. The horses pulled at some sparse yellow grass. Then the rocks on the trail shuddered as a packhorse snorted and rolled down the embankment. The trail didn’t shake, but it seemed to as another packhorse followed the first, going sideways down the bank. They were hurt, but not badly. With a rope, several men had them back on the trail. Their packs were still in good shape. But before making night camp, the pack on the horse carrying the prized desk of Captain Clark loosened and caused the horse to misstep. He rolled forty yards down from the trail and lodged against a stunted juniper. The horse was not hurt, but the desk was smashed. Captain Clark insisted that the pieces from the desk be packed up so that he could repair it at the first opportunity.

  The worst part of seeing the horses back on the trail was the feeling that if they had been hurt badly, they could have been used for food. Sacajawea had not got it through her head until now that the white men would not shoot a packhorse, unless he was in total misery.

  Before moving on, Captain Lewis looked down into the blue, shadowy valley they’d angled away from. It faded out of sight into the dim haze of twilight, and there seemed to Lewis a feeling of mystery about it that he could not catch and set down in words in his journal. The sight moved him. He thought there was a softness to it, almost as if he could feel the breath of the Pacific coming from over the mountains. It drew him like a dream, like a place he’d seen before.

  They all rode on in silence, hoping to make a few more miles before night came down upon them. Coming over the side of a slope, they rode down into some fallen timber that was hard to cross.

  Day by day, Old Toby picked their way of ascent. He was an excellent guide, for he knew how to read the ridges and gullies and he was gracious about pointing out things of natural interest—the winter colors of the saskatoon, a cluster of thin-stalked, yellowed mountain laurel, the gray of the deer moss. He knew much and enjoyed talking Shoshoni with Sacajawea, who also had Indian eyes. For it was she who first spotted the creamy white object that seemed to be no different from the surrounding rocks.

  “Chief Red Hair,” she called.

  “Yes?”

  “There is a sheep not far, up in the rocks. Old Toby says he will be needed to keep away frostbite.”

  “There!” Captain Clark said. “I see him.”

  “I see him, too,” answered Lewis. “He’s nearly a mile away. I don’t know about frostbite, but I’m sure he can take away our bellyaches. Drouillard, come here. What do you think?”

  “I could go up,” he said, already measuring the distances and looking to the priming of his rifle. The powder grains lay there, crisp and dry. He closed the pan and gave the butt a mild jolt on a root to snug the charge down in the barrel.

  “See that overhanging rock? If that moves, half the mountain will start rolling. Watch yourself,” warned Captain Clark.

  “Lord, it looks like a good meal walking away,” Captain Lewis sighed as the sheep disappeared. Drouillard was soon on the slope, to the left and heading higher in pursuit of the sheep. All eyes were turned on him. He was climbing a series of zigzag ledges that were occasionally narrow enough to throw him into view. It looked impossible. It was a sheer precipice. Suddenly from above came a thunk-a-thunk-a sound as rock pounded down the mountainside. The men gasped as the sheep passed right over their heads and struck a slope of scree behind them. Climbing downward from the argillite outcrops was the small, agile figure of Old Toby.

  Seeing the way things were going with Drouillard and the loose rock, Old Toby had carefully climbed above the men to a shelf of rock, and being able to see the sheep when they could not, Old Toby had moved close enough to make a magnificent shot with his bow and arrow.

  It was the years this old ram had spent climbing around these hills that made him the toughest meat any of them had ever tasted, but the soup made from the mutton was delicious.

  During the day, while the mutton lasted, Old Toby stretched the sheep’s hide between the rocks at each stop, and at odd times he cut and sewed four moccasins for Scannon, for the dog’s feet were bruised by sharp stones.

  And long after the mutton was gone, and the outfit no longer slept with full bellies, each evening Old Toby told how he, with a bow and arrow, had made the magnificent shot that had kept the white men from starving. “Smoking sticks, paugh! No good for sheep.” But the feat was not repeated.

  On Friday, September 13,1805, the expedition came upon several hot springs, which Old Toby called Indian baths. A frenzy of scrubbing and scouring and washing possessed them.

  Sacajawea bathed and scrubbed her clothes clean with sand, and bathed Pomp and scrubbed his clothes, hanging them on the stunted subalpine firs growing near the blazing fire York had built up. She rinsed her hair until it made a squinching sound between her fingertips. Then she bathed Pomp again and poured handfuls of water down his round back. “You must swim,” she told him.

  Others waited patiently, pleased with the sight of Janey giving Pomp a swimming lesson, and though it was an indulgence, for already snow was smothering the peaks, they camped early that day and Captain Lewis led a hunting party to scour the rocky ledges for game. Old Toby found a small shrub with curled, oval, fragrant leaves. He skinned the leaves from the stems and urged York to boil them with water. It made a tolerable tea. Everyone sipped, but remained hungry. No game was found, and tempers grew short.

  Shannon lost his patience with Sacajawea when she could not pronounce the English word tamarack. “Land alive, Janey! You’re as bad as a schoolchild. Stop fidgeting. Sit down.” She sat down meekly and quickly.

  “I see a tree. It is a tamarack,” he said.

  Sacajawea knew he could not see it. There were no trees that tall among the rocks here.

  “Janey!” Shannon’s voice darted at her, as brisk as his knife. She jumped as though he’d pricked her.

  “I see a tree. It is a tam-aw-rack,” she recited, and then stopped Captain Clark from picking up Pomp, who was crawling near the fire.

  “No, no. Do not stop him,” she said. “He must learn to make his own decisions, take the responsibility for his actions. It is like I hear you tell the men.”

  “At this incredibly early age?” gasped Captain Clark, rubbing his chin. Sacajawea could hear the whiskers scraping like two dry pines in a high wind.

  “When he begins to crawl, no one cries no and drags him from the enticing red of the coals. I am watching that he does not burn. He must learn himself the bite of fire and to let it alone. See how he jerks his hand back?”

  The baby whimpered, and with a tear-wet face brought his burned fingers to Captain Clark, who was nearest him, for soothing. Clark immersed the baby fingers into his now-cold tea.

  “See,” Sacajawea continued. “His eyes do not turn in anger toward his mother or any other person who might have pulled him back, defeating his natural desire to test, to explore. His anger is now against the red coals. So—he might creep back another time, but cautiously. So—soon he will discover where warmth becomes burning.” She let her hands fall into her lap, and Clark handed the child to her. Automatically Sacajawea pulled aside the slit tunic, cupped out her left breast, and gave it to the papoose. The child’s lips quickly found her dark-brown nipple. When Pomp fell asleep, Sacajawea took soft cattail-down mixed with dried moss from a leather box and pressed generous handfuls between Pomp’s chubby legs and wrapped him in his blanket. The feathery down made the baby sneeze, but he did not wake.

  “Go on, Janey.” Shannon stopped whittling and looked around. “La, what’s come over you? I vow you ain’t got your mind on learning.”

  She thought his neck seemed too thin to support his head. His ears protruded. He hadn’t shaved for the last few days, and there was a trace of blond hair on his pale upper lip and thin cheeks. She wondered if he were sickening with this teaching.

  “You can go,” Shannon told her. “I’m in no mind for lessons, either. My mind’s plaguing me thi
s last hour with thoughts of food we don’t have. Well—” Shannon picked up the knife and swung it toward the ground, making it stick. “Oh, get along now, Janey.”

  Other tempers were short. Pat Gass swore, “God grant there’s no worse place on earth than this cursed damned mountain country.” And he said more to make the air blue as his horse stumbled during the night picketing and lost its load, sending the packs flying in every direction.

  That night, cold and hungry, they killed the youngest colt for supper.

  For several days beyond Colt-killed Creek,4 the Nez Percé trail continued to head west, following ridges, not valleys. The view they saw when they finally reached the stony plateau was the view of a new world.

  In the foreground the land dropped steeply through a thrust into a gorge that seemed to converge to a central trough. But it was not the foreground that held Sacajawea’s eyes—it was the immense, airy sweep of the snowfields and ice pinnacles beyond, and the tall peaks soaring into the blue.

  Soon most of the men had rubbed ashes under their eyes and put bear’s oil on their arms and necks to avoid sunburn. The mountain sunlight was dangerous.

  “I doubt I’d burn much,” said Shannon. “I’m already brown as I can get, but just to be safe—” He took a handful of ashes from the dead fire and rubbed them on his face and forehead. He stared at the scene without a word now, without even an exclamation. At last he drew a long breath and edged over near Sacajawea. “God!” he said. “Them’s the biggest mountains in North America, and only you and me has seen them, and a few of the men, and maybe some Indians, like Old Toby and Cutworm. It’s going to be a blasted country to travel. Lookee there at that black gash in that dip. I reckon that’s where the Columbia River flows, and it’ll be hell’s own job to get down to it.”

  The cold blue sky beyond the mountains dulled to a colder gray, and all light went out of the landscape. More cold weather was trying to get through; it was not making much headway, but the pressure was there; a switch in the wind and the snow would be driving down the Bitterroot Valley by nightfall. They made camp against that possibility and put up elk-skin lean-tos. The snow came as ice splinters. Soon there was nothing but white around them, except the tops of the little gnarled firs.

  The next morning, Old Toby pushed large squares of wool pads cut from the old mountain sheep’s hide into the hands of each member of the expedition. He explained carefully how to rub cheeks and noses with the oily wool pad to prevent frostbite. He made certain the wool moccasins on Scannon were secure.

  That day the thin, cold air seemed to cut through their clothing, but the sun was out for six hours. Sacajawea, after sniffing the air, pronounced on the weather. The first snow had fallen, so there would be three days of cold and more snow, then for maybe ten days there would be a mild, bright spell, then the big snows and fierce cold would come. The mild spell would enable the party to finish the ascent before the deep cold set in.

  “Where’d you learn that?” asked Drouillard.

  “I have listened to Old Toby tell it to Cutworm,” she said.

  Old Toby and Cutworm rested after the day on the trail, but this evening they were sorting out many small pliable willow sticks in the snow.

  “And where did they find those?” asked Drouillard, pointing to the willows.

  “They have carried them in that large pack for this time on the mountain,” said Sacajawea. “They knew we would have deep snow above the timberline.”

  Old Toby began twisting the pliable sticks into “bear paws,” or snowshoes. Cutworm helped by holding the sticks over the fire to make them bend more easily. These snowshoes were lightweight, constructed in a round shape to spread the weight of the wearer. Two separate rods were joined by the toepiece and raised in front at a sharp angle. The centers were of finer willow crisscrossed in a large mesh and whipped around the outside edges. On such shoes, Old Toby explained, an active man could easily travel forty miles a day on the level. All the men who wished to walk and lead their horses had snowshoes. Old Toby spent considerable time showing the trick of walking without tangling up both feet.

  The day-old snow lay deep, and under the strictures of the frost, it was dry and crunchy, so that Old Toby went first, followed by Cutworm, to break the trail. In the dry snow, Old Toby’s efforts did not make a firm track, so that the stages had to be short, and by the midday meal the men were at the end of their tether. Some horse broth revived them, but their fatigue was such that Captain Lewis ordered camp made an hour before nightfall.

  The next morning, they felt the same penetrating cold. The wind was gusting, sharp flurries picking up the powdered snow and swirling ice particles around them, forcing the men and horses to turn their faces away from the painful blasts. The men soon learned to keep their faces covered with a kerchief or the end of a blanket, and to rub their faces frequently with the pad of sheep’s wool Old Toby had given them to tie on the back of their mitts. Between each gust was an eerie calm, when it became possible to hear the crunching of the horses’ hooves on the snow and the soft scuffling of Scannon’s feet, and when the men’s cheeks felt suddenly hot in the momentarily still air.

  Charbonneau tried to brush the ice from his beard. He’d had that beard so long now. How many years since he’d first grown it? Maybe twenty—he’d started it back in his early trapping years. He’d kept it, worn it like a badge of maturity when he was drinking at the Hudson’s Bay Post when Toronto was no more than a couple of log cabins and half a dozen skin tepees. The beard and the peeling face—he’d even been foolish enough to feel proud the first time he’d got a touch of frostbite. He rubbed his face with the oily wool. He could just make out Old Toby leading the party in the dim distance ahead, with the horses moving along in a string behind. Then the whiteness all around him thickened—rose up in a cloud—seemed to be piling in. Whirls of snow flew high over the lead horses—sometimes the horses themselves disappeared. He sighed and moved up closer to the rest of the men. He felt his legs beginning to stiffen. He had the strange feeling he was being drawn into a nightmare. “This is going to be one goddamn stinking storm,” he shouted into Drouillard’s ear.

  Once again they made camp early, using the old tepee skin Charbonneau had brought from Fort Mandan, and lashing the lean-tos together. By now some of the men had frostbitten fingers, which functioned clumsily. Even taking the job of making camp in relays, their hands went numb in a few minutes; and even with the aid of the wool pads, some of their faces had frozen in the combination of deep cold and strong, gusting winds. Along most of the trail, they had been riding right into the wind, and it is impossible when snow-shoeing to keep one’s face averted from the wind all the time. Shannon’s nose and cheekbones were showing frostbite, and Pat Gass’s nose was badly frozen. Captain Clark had a patch of frostbite on one cheek, and his other cheek had a tiny patch of white in the center.

  Just by being in out of the wind under the enclosed lean-to, they were a little warmer. No one bothered to take off his boots at night, and they all slept with their hands tucked down in the groin—the warmest part of the body. That night on the high scarps the men neither ate nor talked about food. No one bothered to hunt under the snow for the scarce sticks. No one went out to chop the stunted firs. The expedition was thoroughly exhausted, and the men could do nothing but roll up in their blankets.

  Scannon was not happy that night, either. He was cold and shivering and weakened because he had not been fed. Captain Lewis had been forced to hit him to keep him moving. At a time like this, he could not afford to be easy on his dog; if he didn’t keep going, he would drop and freeze to death.

  Scannon had walked along slowly, and every now and then had stopped and stared after the party. He had been left farther and farther behind. Sacajawea really liked that dog and had called to him, and he had come walking on, wobbling and staggering. She’d waited and patted him and talked to him, and once she had asked Lewis to put him up on a horse right beside where she was walking so she could keep her ar
m around him. But he was not accustomed to riding and had been frightened, so that he struggled under the blanket Lewis had tied around him to keep him on the horse. Sacajawea had patted him with her hand. She was certain that a rest would perk him up, but he kept struggling feebly and once he had fallen off. Lewis swore that he was too tired and cold and miserable himself to be kind-hearted, but he had gone back and picked him up and hit him to make him walk. After a while, instead of plodding along as usual with his hands tucked up under his arms for warmth, Lewis had put Scannon back on the horse and, along with Sacajawea, kept an arm across the side of the dog. Lewis had felt his hand freezing. His face was giving him some trouble with frostbite by this time, too.

  When they stopped to camp, Sacajawea noticed that Scannon just dropped when lifted from the horse. She knew that a dog would normally dig down into the snow and curl up to protect itself from the cold. Using one of her blankets, she built a windbreak around Scannon to keep the wind off.

  The party pushed on through the next day. They didn’t make many miles, and the horses were visibly weakening. The captains were worried. Sacajawea kept rubbing Pomp’s face with the soft patch of wool and crooning to him. She ate handfuls of snow, trying to keep her thin milk from drying up altogether. Dinner was some old bear’s grease Lewis had found in a pack. Scannon refused to eat even the bear’s grease. This refusal seemed to signify what really alarming shape the outfit was in. They had another cold camp that night.

  The next day was a nightmare. If anything, the weather had deteriorated. They snowshoed through quite steep country now, cliffs that rose up and rolled down. There was nothing to do but keep going, indicated Old Toby, beckoning with his arms. At the noon rest the men noticed that one of the packhorses had gnawed at his groin and rear legs where he was getting frostbitten. His flesh just seemed to split and become a raw wound, and he had tried to bite at the pain or lick at the frozen places because they hurt. Captain Lewis had a couple of the men distribute the packs from this horse on several that were not heavily loaded, and then he shot him. The carcass froze after it was skinned out. Without wood for fire, the men ate the meat in raw hunks, letting it thaw in their mouths. Sacajawea urged Scannon to stay beside her. She fed him pieces of meat, little by little.