Sacajawea

by Anna Lee Waldo

  Captains Lewis and Clark, Toby, and Drouillard sat up most of the night discussing their situation. It had taken the others a long time to fall asleep in the cold. It was still blowing, and they would have more ground drift to contend with in the morning. So the four of them sat there in that cold and knew they might not last another day if something weren’t done. As they sat there, Clark’s eyes fell on a twenty-pound canister of tallow candles. Suddenly an idea came to him.

  He dumped out the candles and stood the tin canister on its end. With his ax he cut two holes in the side and a larger one at the top. He then rummaged through some of the gear until he found a couple of smaller tins.

  By using the small tins, the men fashioned a crude stove with a stovepipe. Then they put the old tepee skin and all the lean-tos closer together, pushed snow around the outside for warmth, made a hole between two lean-tos for the stovepipe to fit through, and closed over the gap with a piece of elk skin, so that the snow wall would not melt when they got a fire burning. Clark brought in the battered remains of his prized desk, which was quickly chopped up and set ablaze. Everyone stood there with their mitts off, coughing and choking on the soot and smoke, but enjoying the first warmth they had felt in days.

  Sacajawea’s hands felt so numb that she could have put them right on top of that hot stove, and even though her hands would have been sizzling, she would not have felt the pain. To begin with, the warmth felt good, but soon she was in agony, as were most of the others. Her hands and nose, cheeks and chin had all been frozen, and now they suddenly began to thaw out. Huge frost blisters burst out on her face. Clark had a blister down one side of his nose and others across both cheekbones. Lewis had one across his chin. Charbonneau had one all across his nose and under his chin whiskers. Many of the men had swollen fingers that had turned dark red in color as the skin became stretched and shiny.

  Old Toby had told them that the sudden warmth would cause trouble with the frostbite, but he could think of no option. The best way to fight frostbite, he advised, was to put the affected part in water. Clark had laughed, telling him, “There are too many affected parts.”

  Then Old Toby laughed, pointing out that the biggest problem was the white men’s whiskers. “Only greenhorns wear beards outdoors, or men in desperate trouble. Beards are a nuisance in cold weather. I notice the breath freezes in a man’s beard, and he soon faces trouble.” He was looking at Charbonneau.

  “Well, with no hot water, we have been unable to shave for some time,” Charbonneau answered.

  “Looks like you have not seen hot water in several years,” kidded Drouillard.

  The moisture frozen deeply in the beards of the men had indeed contributed to frostbitten chins and cheeks, and now the warmth of the fire made those bearded faces sting as though they were on fire. As soon as they had thawed out and dared move without suffering excruciating pain, the men looked through the gear until someone found a big kettle in which to melt snow to make soup from the horse meat.

  The soup kettle bubbled and poured forth steam, and the air inside the lean-to became soggy with moisture. Everyone’s clothing became wet as the embedded ice crystals melted.

  No one complained that the soup lacked vegetables or that the larger hunks of meat were not entirely cooked. Some men carefully sipped the broth, finding that chewing moved muscles that hurt their frostbitten faces. Others pulled chunks of meat from the liquid with their fingers because it was too painful to put the hot broth near their lips. Sacajawea took pieces of meat out of her tin cup with her fingers, ate them, then coaxed Pomp to sip the broth, which held more nourishment for her baby than her own milk.

  Feeling full and warm, the next thing she did was to give some of the cooked meat to Scannon, doling out a little bit at a time so he could handle it. Lewis decided the expedition should stay in this camp for a day to rest the horses, to enable the men to put medication on the legs and feet of the horses and feed them some inner bark from the few stunted fir trees in the area, and to let the men get some needed rest themselves.

  A day later, the horses were much improved. Then the mild time, forecast by Old Toby through Sacajawea, began. There was a shuddering undercurrent of cold, but the sun shone, and though it gave light rather than warmth, it took much of the bleakness out of the landscape. On the scarps the little firs were bent and ragged with the winds, and the many bald patches were bleached by storms.

  The party plodded on; the horses marched forward, and Sacajawea walked, even in snowshoes, with her queer toed-in stride. They saw hanging glaciers, cirques, and arêtes with poised avalanches. The expedition followed a network of ridges and seemed rarely to lose elevation; they passed gullies and glens, but nevertheless they had been descending steadily. The expedition had crossed Lolo Pass and were coming down the Clearwater watershed.

  One morning Sacajawea found she could hardly move. Her face was still raw from the frostbite, and her legs and back ached. She was sweating under her blankets. She looked up and saw York standing near with Pomp on his shoulder.

  “You’se played out,” he said. “We let you sleep in. But not this Pomp. He’s been walking on my chest as I try to rest on my back. We all laugh at the sturdy push of his legs. Frost never touched him.”

  Sacajawea smiled, but found it took some effort. She was filled with a sick lassitude, an increasing loss of will to do anything, and, worst of all, persistent diarrhea.

  “Today we rest. Tomorrow we go slow,” promised York.

  Tomorrow, she thought, will I be wretchedly ill, or indifferent to any feeling at all? What has suddenly happened to me? She fell asleep as if drugged.

  “That woman of yours is worn out, same as the rest of us,” Captain Clark said to Charbonneau.

  “She’s got the mountain sickness,” puffed Charbonneau, who had an armload of firewood. “No goddamn stamina. She could die, like a stinking squaw.”

  Captain Clark’s reply was an angry shout. “By God, she’ll get well, you bloody-minded Canuck. You know if she were a man she’d be a chief. She’s made of strong stuff.”

  Charbonneau squirmed himself around inside his shirt and gave a forced, awkward laugh. “Squaws are like spoiled pelt—no good except that a man has them to keep him warm. That woman right now couldn’t bring much more’n a rabbit fur would.”

  “Listen, you can’t tell fur by the price it fetches. I’ve heard traders working on a drunken Osage, telling him his pelts were no good, giving him a gourd of watered rum for prime beaver that would buy a whole year’s outfit. Man, can’t you see Janey is prime squaw? She could bring about an understanding of the Indian as a human being to the whites, given half a chance. I’ve been thinking about this.”

  “Capitaine, she’s more like trade goods that the Northwesters peddle. She don’t always wear so well.”

  “For God’s sake, Charbonneau!” Captain Clark sounded as though his patience had about run out. “She’s an intelligent human being.”

  “Zut, a sick femme is nothing but a burden,” Charbonneau mumbled as he walked away.

  The next morning Sacajawea felt better, but there were others with the unpleasant illness. Stopping at frequent intervals off the trail was hard enough with snowshoes clumsily in the way, but the deep apathy made it even worse.

  Then, partway down a ridge, they could see below them a level plain spread out like a tabletop. The plain was dotted with pines. Captain Clark said, “To my dying day I’ll never forget this. What beauty below.” He strapped Pomp between some bedrolls on one of the packhorses and let him ride there all day instead of on Sacajawea’s back. Despite their persistent diarrhea, the morale of the men bounced upward. Surely there would be game among the pines below.

  By late afternoon they were caught in a blinding blizzard of wet snow, which drove down out of the north and blew straight in their faces.

  For ten miserable miles they walked straight into the eye of the storm. Wet snow plastered their caps, trousers, leather chaps, and Mackinaws; it whitened the hors
es and piled up in between the packs. They walked with their heads down and without speaking except to shout at some wandering packhorse. They suffered—and when the storm stopped abruptly, they were all deeply grateful.

  Late that afternoon, Captain Lewis scanned over the rocks and fallen trees with the spyglass. Finally Captain Clark said, “Here, let me look.” Then the glass was passed from hand to hand, but there was no mention of anything unusual until York spoke.

  “I see them tough sheep,” he commented, handing the glass to Shannon. Shannon saw the band of sheep, their yellowish coats almost invisible against the snow, coming down the cliffs. There were between fifteen and twenty of them, including several pairs of ewes and lambs. Passing the glass from hand to hand, the men and Sacajawea watched as the lambs were taught to handle themselves on the face of a mountain. The ewe would come down some steep and dangerous place to the ledge below. Then she would turn around and look up, obviously telling the lamb that it was safe to follow. Nothing doing; the lamb would stand there hesitating, looking down and not liking what he saw, timidly putting first one foot and then the other forward. The ewe would go again to nuzzle the lamb and tell him to have confidence—then down again to show the way. Usually he followed; but on one or two occasions a mother had to perform the climb as much as three times, and once a ewe gently pushed her unwilling offspring until he had to go. Once they moved, the lambs were surefooted. They had to be, for a slip in this place meant death.

  In the morning Captain Clark took nearly half the party ahead to hunt. They quickly dropped to the tree line, where the air was warm and sheltered from the wind. Captain Clark left a note on the inner face of a hunk of pine bark, which was pushed into an overhanging forked tree branch, for Captain Lewis. It told that the hunting was good and the country was level—easy going. They had shot two thin elk.

  When the two outfits finally met again, Captain Clark’s party was in high spirits, even though a couple of the men were still suffering from the lingering diarrhea. They had reached what they thought to be a navigable branch of the Columbia, and it was only a day’s march ahead. They had met a stray horse, killed and butchered it. They had breakfasted on the horse meat and saved the rest for Captain Lewis’s group. The horse meant that Indians were in the vicinity, and, in fact, two days later they had walked into a small village of Nez Percés. They were good people who had given them a pack of dried salmon and some flour made from camass root.

  The party under Captain Lewis had not been so fortunate. They had eked out their small stock of horse meat, then killed a coyote and a crow. More of the men had come down with dysentery. Sacajawea had made a concoction from chokecherry bark, which she fed freely to the men. They took it, thinking that a Shoshini ought to know what was best to counteract the effects of the damned mountain sickness. To add to their discomfort, they had been plagued by the constant assault of insatiable flies that rose from the soft snow at their feet until they hung like a malevolent mist and took on the appearance of a low-lying cloud. The black flies and mosquitoes came in such numbers that there was simply no evading them.

  Charbonneau complained, “If I have to expose myself once more to those flies, it will be impossible for me to sit down. I pray to the Madonna that these runs dry up.”

  To stop for rest or a ration of food was torture. At times a kind of insanity would seize not only Sacajawea but some of the others as well, and they would plop wildly on their snowshoes in any direction until they were exhausted. But the pursuing insect hordes stayed with them, and they got nothing from those frantic efforts except a wave of sweat that seemed to attract even more mosquitoes.

  Sacajawea felt them from behind her ears, from beneath her chin. A steady dribble of blood matted into her clothing and trapped the insatiable flies until it seemed she wore a black collar made up of their struggling bodies. The flies worked down under her tunic until stopped by her belt. Then they fed about her waist until her tunic stuck to her with drying blood.

  The land they were passing over offered no easy routes to compensate for the agonies the flies inflicted upon them. Captain Lewis and his party had hit rolling country, and across the path ran a succession of mounding hills whose sides and crests were strewn with angular rocks jutting out of the softening snow. On these rocks their snowshoes were cut and split and their feet were bruised until it was agony to walk at all. The horses all had bruised feet. Each valley had its own stream flowing down its center. Though these streams were less than five feet in width, they seemed to be never less than five feet in depth. Around these streams the snow fleas came out in swarms, smelling like rotten turnips, and blackened yards of snowbanks with their jumping, twitching bodies.

  The men’s faces were doubly aggravated from the frostbite blisters, which had not healed. Most were bearded, with ragged whiskers growing out through their frostbite and blisters and insect welts. It was too painful to even think of removing their whiskers at this time.

  For their reunion they shared the dried salmon for supper, and York made fiat, parchmentlike bread from the camass flour and water. Luckily they had found a ridge where a little breeze played and held back the flies.

  Charbonneau came running up from the brush to receive his share of salmon. He pulled off his old felt hat and waved it above his head. There was a pasted-down line around it from the sweat under his hat. He curled his upper lip, showing his yellow, gappy teeth, and making his mustache jerk. His nose was red and peeling. “I don’t know about the rest of you,” he cried, in a forced voice that was too high, “I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough walking, especially among these damn pesty flies. Do we have rights as men of an official expedition, or don’t we? We’re tired of wearing out moccasins in broken-down snowshoes.”

  “Well, sure we are,” answered Pat Gass. “What’s that got to do with how you feel?”

  “Considerable. We gotta get down to them trees there and make canoes. If we wait, them fish-eating Indians could scalp us. This is ambush country. I can feel it.”

  “They ain’t showed us no inclination to part our hair,” said Shannon.

  “What do you mean you can feel it, Charb?” asked Cruzatte.

  “I’ll tell you! Sacre! The Indians down there know this country. We don’t. They have been surveying us for days now. I can feel their eyes on the back of my neck. For that matter,” he yelled, raising his voice higher, “what if that river ain’t a branch of the Columbia? We sweat ourselves sick and freeze ourselves to death and get eaten alive by flying beasts, and then what if we find that Old Toby led us right into these bloodthirsty Indians!”

  “You’re getting edgy for nothing,” said Drouillard. “The frostbite, trots, and flies have got to your brain.”

  “When I’m wrong I’ll say it.” The words came all at once now. Charbonneau spurted words the way a keg does whiskey when the bung is started. “By Jésus, men, I ask you, are we going to slink behind trees and walk in hiding toward some great stinking pool of water? If we stand here yapping, we’ll have all those thieving Indians at our backs. I can almost feel the arrows whizzing past my ears now. I say stretch our legs toward the canoe country or turn back—to hell with seeing that big stinking ocean. What you bastards say?”

  He had jolted the men. Captain Lewis began to listen to Charbonneau.

  “He’s bit off more than he can swallow,” said Captain Clark quietly. “The trail through the mountains took a lot out of him.”

  “Took a lot out of all of us,” whispered Lewis. “He just scares easily.”

  “Scared men do things a drunk man wouldn’t do,” answered Clark.

  Charbonneau was sweating, and he stared around at the men, rolling his bloodshot eyes, scratching one shoulder, then the opposite thigh. And he was not yet finished. He wiped his face on his sleeve and blew his nose between his fingers, and when he spoke again, his voice went up so high it cracked. “I say we get out of this country. We do it fast. We go back to the Shoshonis. We just get our asses out of this bloo
dy fool country.”

  He twirled his cap between his hands. His breathing became audible. He rocked back and forth on his toes, his voice high-pitched, as though someone were pinching his windpipe.

  “I’m going to get my horse and gear and femme and head east. If nobody else wants out of this hellhole, I will go it alone.” He stood still, breathing hard, looking from one man to the other.

  Now Captain Clark wanted to say something. He raised one hand, his face tight, expressionless. At his salute the men quieted. “No, Charbonneau, you’re not. You try going back over those mountains and I’ll have you tied tighter than a queue done up in wet green hide. No one leaves the party now. Is that clear?” Captain Clark stood looking straight ahead, still as a rock, hardly breathing.

  The men stood in unison and shouted that they were with the captains all the way. Old Toby and Cutworm yelled “Ai!” with the men, not actually understanding what it was about. Those two knew that Charbonneau had the mountain madness, but in two or three days he’d be back to his old self. Old Toby shook his head because to him it was incredible that so much ferocity had not killed Charbonneau long ago, weak and whim-pery as he appeared at other times. Instead, his blustery talk and fuzzy thinking made him stronger.

  Charbonneau had turned, and he now groped through the men; he did not even put his black felt hat back on. He wheezed, and his lower lip stuck out, reaching for his mustache. He looked as though he were close to tears. His throat bulged with the sounds inside it. “There’s times the Capitaine Clark acts like living among the Indians has turned him red inside. He can freeze his face up as blank as any redskin I’ve ever met. C’est fantastique!” He walked off into the brush to cool off.