At the end of the evening meal. Chief Twisted Hair and his subchief, Tetoharsky, sat with Captain Clark, who had been talking with Sacajawea and bouncing Pomp on his lap.
“We want two horses,” said Twisted Hair. “We do not trust the Chinooks, and we want to get out of here. You saw how they took your goods without asking. We are much afraid of the men who live beyond this part of the river. They fight over nothing and make war with everyone who passes.” They made hand signs to indicate they had been growing uneasy for some time about the Chinooks.
Captain Clark sent York to trade for two horses for the Nez Percé guides. “We’ll smoke the pipe before you leave,” suggested Clark.
Twisted Hair looked pleased and said he would conduct the ceremony according to his custom. “This is the time for you to smoke, and anyone can talk on whatever serious subject he wants to. The woman can also talk. Don’t talk too long.” He looked pointedly at Sacajawea. “Just say what you want to say if you have a notion. Just say a few words.” Now he looked at Captain Lewis. “You can talk again. Don’t talk too fast.” He looked at Drouillard, who interpreted his speech. “If it is the Great Spirit’s will, you will all live long. If you talk out your words too fast, you won’t live long; that is what we all believe. When you go visiting us on your way back over the mountains, if we don’t give you a gift, that’s all right. If we give you too much too often, you might not live long. If you get horses on the warpath, don’t go again too soon. You might get killed. Conserve what you have. Do everything in a measured way. The Great Spirit wanted us to live on this earth, and here we are. These are the things that the Great Spirit gave us—the camass, the sand and salmon, and deer, and other things—and we must take care of them. We cannot throw away or waste anything. We cannot know what is going to happen in the future.”
Tetoharsky began, “This is your time to talk. We are not in a hurry. If you have a story to tell, tell it. I would like to leave before the sun is in the sky one more time. I want to see my woman and her children.”
Drouillard spoke. “I would like to see the Pacific Ocean. How do the rest feel about that?”
There was much nodding of heads, and then Captain Lewis spoke. “I am going to get a hundred pounds of ammunition out tonight and make sure everyone knows where it is.”
Si Goodrich said, “Good idea, in case these Chinooks are not too friendly like the old chief here says.”
Captain Clark thought this an opportunity to make peace between the downriver villages and those on the upper river, and he begged Chief Twisted Hair to stay.
Several of the men made some remark on these matters, then Shannon proposed that they all shake hands with the two Nez Percés to show their appreciation and friendship.
Sacajawea stood up, but Charbonneau pulled on her skirt, saying, “Sit down, femme. None of the other fellows stood up to make their speech. Why should you?”
She scowled at him, then looked at the Nez Percés and said in English, slowly, “We have spoken. We are friends. Goodnight and thank you.” That broke up the ceremony. York was back with the horses.
Before sunup, the expedition was ready to move farther downriver and saying farewell to the Nez Percés. “We go back to look after the white men’s horses staying at our village,” called Chief Twisted Hair, waving both arms and bouncing on his horse.
After Chief Twisted Hair’s warning about the warlike nature of the Chinooks in front of them, the captains were wary, but the ammunition Captain Lewis issued was never used. The Chinooks were infested with lice, squinty-eyed, excellent at swiping small items, but quite friendly. Many of the Chinooks flattened their babies’ heads with a board attached to the cradleboard, and their language was a series of tongue clacks, which was hard for Drouillard to distinguish.
CHAPTER
25
The Pacific
On November eighth the ocean was sighted. “Great joy in camp,” wrote the usually unemotional Clark. “We are in view of the Ocian, this great Pacific Ocian which we have been so long anxious to see, and the roreing or noise made by the waves brakeing on the rockey shores [as I suppose] may be heard disti[n]ctly.” The estimated distance the explorers had traveled from St. Louis to the ocean was four thousand one hundred miles.
From Sacajawea, by Harold P. Howard. Copyright 1971 by the University of Oklahoma Press, p. 83.
At the Short Narrows of the Columbia River, the water rushed through steep rock walls not more than forty-five yards apart. Travel here was dangerous, but a portage around the rapids was next to impossible because the banks were too difficult to climb. Captain Clark took the riverman, Cruzatte, with him for a walk along the narrow shore to examine the wild water.
“This is a bad stretch,” said Clark.
“We’ve had worse,” said Cruzatte. “It’s not going to be bad as long as we can let the canoes down with ropes. It’s when we have to take them out of the water that it’s misery.”
The canoe in which Cruzatte paddled stern reached some willows, then was caught in a stronger current. The men in it bent to their paddles. Still it swung sharply away from the bank.
“They have gone too far!” shouted Clark.
“Watch out!” someone else yelled.
“Work her in! Work!”
“Make into the shore! Hey—they’ll need a rope!” called Captain Lewis.
The backs of Cruzatte, Gass, Labiche, and Colter were bowed under the strain. The canoe shot from beneath them. It stood up on its stern, then spun like a twig, danced, and lunged through foaming water with the four men clinging to it. It swept in toward the bank, danced, slipped up on a rock, and caught. Cruzatte, Gass, Labiche, and Colter were on the rock. Then, chestdeep in dangerous water, Cruzatte pulled the canoe in close to shore. “Hang on!” Lewis shouted to the other three, then swung a braided elk-skin rope over their heads.
The rope sailed across the water, and Gass was the first to catch it. The four men, chest-deep in the water, braced themselves as the rope jerked taut. Then the dugout was slapped violently across the water and against the shore. Hands waited there to grab them and drag them to safety. Taking up the rope from Captain Lewis, Cruzatte carefully brought the other four canoes through safely, one at a time.
Charbonneau commented on the fast-swirling water, “Looks like a horrid, agitated gut, swelling, boiling, and whirling in every direction.” That evening he brought out his French harp, to the delight of the expedition and the local Chinooks. Cruzatte played his violin in accompaniment until Charbonneau’s wind gave out.
The day after the Short Narrows was also bad because the Columbia passed through hard, rough, black rock, from fifty to one hundred yards wide, swelling and boiling all the time. The men called this the Great Shoot.1 Here the river dropped sixty feet in two miles. Cruzatte admitted the canoes could not make it through and doubted if a man would get through alive. The men began the portage over the rock-strewn shore, along the edges of the cliffs, sweating, panting, chanting, wet with spray, half the time waist-deep in dangerous water, numbed to the hips. They made camp at a flat place that had been used recently as a camp by a tribe of Chinooks. When the men cleared away the dried grass and fish skins, they discovered they were covered with fleas and had to strip and duck in the cold water in order to get the insects off their legs and bodies.2
Across the river was a small encampment of Chinooks. Their lodges were different from any yet seen. They were made of wood with roofs, a door, and gables, like frontier cabins. In the front of each lodge were stacks of salmon.
“Ten thousand pounds,” wrote Captain Clark in his journal that evening, “all dried, baled with twisted grass rope, and probably bound for traffic further down the river. What a smell.”
Moseying near Charbonneau, Reuben Fields said with a teasing glint in his eyes, “Hey, when the wind comes over the water just right, I swear I can smell your boots on the opposite bank.”
“My boots,” replied Charbonneau, squinting his eyes to peer through the slits,
“will smell the way you do every day when they have gone through this damn river country. Poulet merde!” He held his nose and walked away, not wishing to enlarge on the subject.
The terrain began to change, and more trees grew along the riverbanks. Mountains, large and glistening white with snow-covered peaks, were seen ahead. The expedition passed ancient burial places where the deac were stacked one upon the other and the whitened skull were placed in a circle on a high platform in the trees On either side of the river channel they saw rocky pal isades, green-mossed and dripping. Waterfalls came down the slopes and fell in a rainbow mist to the river
One morning Pat Gass felt his head after passing under a burial platform beside a falls and said, “I sin cerely hope it is the mountain mist that bedews my to] hair, and not some disintegrating remnants of some one’s great-grandmother.”
A river flowing into the Columbia was named after Baptiste LePage, and another after Pierre Cruzatte. Or the rocks around these rivers lay many sleeping hair seals. Sacajawea pointed them out to Pomp, saying “See, the river people are out there taking a rest.”
One evening a local Chinook stole Charbonneau’ old blue capote and hid it under the roots of a tree to pick up later. Sacajawea found it and took it to Char bonneau. He scolded her for letting his coat get full of muck and wet leaves and crawling with fleas. “Go wash it!” he yelled.
The Chinook tribes they now saw tattooed their face: by putting charcoal under the skin in intricate design: in the belief that it improved their looks.
York was panting for breath when he found Char bonneau. “I’se been looking quite a spell for you,” Yorl said. “There’s this fellow who looks like his face was made permanent blue with huckleberry stain, with you coat rolled under his arm and moving, like he’s expecting to be shot, for the other side of camp.”
“My capote?”
“Did you trade him that coat for something? Man you’se going to need it. The nights are already cold.”
“My femme found it. Damn thieving Chinooks! Hey don’t tell her I know a Chinook swiped it.”
“Why not?”
Charbonneau acted like he did not hear the last question and did not seem in a mood for conversation, so York sauntered on to talk to some of the other mer about the peculiarities of the Chinooks.
“Did you notice how all those squaws look alike? can’t tell one squaw in a family way from another in a similar condition. Do you suppose they all belong to the same ladies’ aid society? Watch! See how they go around sucking in and measuring each other with their eyes? I’ll bet my beaded moccasins and woolen stockings they’re getting ready to unload all at once. Each squaw will have a papoose to carry around to be admired at the same time—almost like what happens back home when the church ladies carry their prize johnnycake in a fancy covered dish to the parsonage for a circle meeting, all holding up their creation for the admiration of all and feeling good for the effort put into making something beautiful.”
The men laughed. Thus reinforced, York went on, “And can you guess the diet of these folks? They eat olives. It’s a kind of pickled acorn, flavorsome enough if you don’t know what they was pickled in, and they eat dogs—that’s why they raise so many inside their villages—and then they have a chaser, which is a kind of watery stew made of fish eyes. Listen to this: I seen one big buck eat fire. Honest! He licked it right off a chunk of pine pitch and snorted a big stream of it eight foot out into the air. I think he eats it on his boiled fish like it was pepper sass.”
The men guffawed and pounded York on the back.
“Them natives is an outfit, all right,” agreed Gibson.
For the next couple of days the expedition was in the valley of the lower Columbia, the home of the warm Chinook wind. The country was one of long slopes, running against the sky. The hills and swales were still green, and the air was warm and moist with rain. Swarms of swans, geese, ducks, cranes, storks, gulls, cormorants, and plover flew overhead. They were a delicious change in diet from the salmon. For a time the canoes drifted smoothly, then suddenly they descended into deep river canyons, and then in a little while they were back on smooth water between rapids again. There were the unique wooden huts of the Chinooks on both sides of the river. The huts always had racks of drying salmon around them, and everywhere the banks of the river were strewn with fish skins, making a sickening stench.3
When the expedition passed by the Hood River inlet, the Chinooks ran from their outside chores into their lodges. All were terrified as though they had never before seen white men. They could not be persuaded to come out, and they never ventured near the expedition’s camp. This tribe was dressed in skins from the shaggy mountain goat. Beside each hut was a wooden box with salmon, halibut heads, and roe, putrefying. Holding her nose, Sacajawea showed Clark the carved goat-horn spoons and wooden dishes, elaborately carved, that lay inside the boxes. She pointed out that this might be a tribal delicacy, comparing it to the Hidatsas’ liking of rotten buffalo flesh. She laughed when Clark made a face and held his stomach. They called to the people as they passed lodges and racks of salmon and other fish, split, dried, and some boxed with oil. Finally Clark left a few gifts near a large cache of dried fish. The odor of decaying fish and rancid oil lay heavily over this village.
Below the Hood River there were abandoned wooden huts, which the captains examined. They were built of split red cedar with a top smoke hole, or roof well, that could be opened for light or shut by an arrangement of sliding boards. The entire hut depended on notching and mortising; no pegs were used. The dead were placed in open wooden boxes, which Bratton found in an area to one side of the abandoned village. Inside, the bones were weathered white. Some of the boxes contained baskets made of spruce and cedar roots woven together. There were bowls beautifully carved with a kind of sea monster. The features were a mixture of bear and shark, with curved lines on the cheeks representing gills, a shark’s tail, and bear’s paws. The men found carvings in stone and baked clay in the grave goods. Sacajawea half believed that the spirits of those people might not wish to be disturbed, so she fought her curiosity to look inside and looked instead inside the forsaken huts. She found a tiny amulet of a human figure, carved from a beryl; the knees were slightly bent and drawn up against the chest, the kneecaps were flattened, and the feet were merged with the base. The head was large in proportion to the body, almost equaling the shoulders in width. The figure lay discarded in a corner, and she found it because its reddish coloring attracted her attention. She squealed with delight and ran out to find some discarded rope or sinew that could be used to tie around the little doll. She found some braided, hairlike twining in another hut and placed the doll around Pomp’s neck. His baby fingers examined it, then he popped it into his mouth, sucking on the feet. Sacajawea belatedly remembered the captains’ policy of not taking anything from any village unless it was especially given as a gift. She knew Captain Lewis would judge her more harshly than Captain Clark.
“Why didn’t you tell me you wanted a toy for the child?” chided Clark.
“I didn’t know until I saw this. It is a gift to him from me.”
“I should have had one of the men make Pomp a doll. Gass could make a toy to amuse the boy. I was not thinking or would have had something made weeks ago.”
“Now he has it,” she said, her face brightening. “I do not have to put it back?”
“It did belong here, and if the former resident came looking for it, what would he think if he found it around your son’s neck?”
“The right size for that child,” she said, holding her breath a moment.
“You believe the child who owned it before grew up and discarded it?”
“Ai.”
Clark was amused and put his arm around her shoulders. “Let your son enjoy it, then.”
Sacajawea was more breathless than after an uphill run. She was weak in the knees. Then it came to her that being with the white men was happiness. Some days were hard, ai, but there was always happ
iness. And here with Chief Red Hair outlining her eyebrow with one finger gave her more happiness than her heart could contain. It ached. And she thought that this was a pain that only more pain could cure; like some sickness, she’d feel worse before she felt better.
That day the canoes passed by villages of Chinooks who had flatter heads because of the practice of strapping a padded board across the head of every infant.
“It is I’malade!” Sacajawea cried, imitating Charbonneau’s French.
“I don’t like it, either,” agreed Clark.
“Worse even than putting a bone through the nose,” said York.
In the evening they camped upriver from a village that was packing fish into large canoes. The expedition had not seen such long, light craft on the river before. These were tapered at the ends, wide in the middle, and the stern and prow lifted into beaks like a Roman galley. The projecting bows served to repel wave action in rough water and prevented swamping. The canoes were painted red, brown, black, or white, and had carved figures at the bows.4
“Good Lord,” said Lewis, “those craft will carry sixty men and maybe three tons of fish.”
The canoe was paddled with leaf-shaped paddles with a crutch-top handle. The steersman in the bow had a longer paddle.
“They use sails,” remarked Shannon, pointing to a canoe with very thin planks reinforced with strips of wood and sewn at top and bottom. Then he pointed again. “Two canoes lashed together. See, there!” Two canoes were tied and a plank deck was being laid over them.
Not far from the canoes was a platform over a stream. The women there were gaffing and netting the tightly packed fish as they moved upstream.
“These people look too busy to be interested in visiting with us,” said Drouillard.
Around the expedition’s camp the cedar timber grew scant because the ground was too sour and weak for it. Only a few dwarf trees grew between black-mud marshes full of cattails and dwarf elder bushes heavy with bunches of mouth-puckering blackberries.
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