Sacajawea

by Anna Lee Waldo

  Before sundown the wind came up and brought in a rank sea smell, along with great marsh hawks and a flock of sandpipers and dippers looking for a tasty mouthful in the stream’s backwater.

  “Oh, is that the smell of the Stinking Waters?” asked Sacajawea.

  “Janey, the Western Sea can’t be far,” said Lewis, twitching his nose, “but the ocean smell is so mixedwith rotting fish, it is no wonder it is called Stinking Waters. Lord, will I ever smell anything but decaying fish?”

  “I am wondering if we’ll ever get to the ocean. Constantly now, I ask myself, what will the terrain be like? What sort of natives live on its shores? Will we meet with a sailing vessel? Lewis, I can hardly wait for the days to pass now until we get a view of that ocean,” said Clark, nudging a little tree toad off a deadfall into the lush ferns.

  York brought in a few wild blackberries. Sacajawea went out to gather wapato root from the marshy soil.5

  Sacajawea chased a long-toed salamander, colored like the dark mud and with a wide yellow band from the back of its head to the tip of its tail. All of a sudden she stopped. She was face to face with a black bear digging lily bulbs or grubs from the mud. The bear backed a few feet away from her, but continued to dig. Saliva ran from its mouth. Sacajawea turned slowly, and still looking over her shoulder to make certain the bear did not leave, she hurried back to camp to find Captain Clark. “I know a hunter can have a good shot. Wouldn’t fresh bear steaks be good?” She licked her lips and rubbed both hands over her braids, as if wiping off the bear’s grease already.

  “I’ll get McNeal and Hall to go after it,” said Clark, his mouth watering.

  One crack from a rifle was heard, and before the men had time to argue who had shot it, the two were back in camp with the bear over their shoulders. It was the best meal the expedition had had in days. The men stuffed themselves as though they would not get any meals the next day. About all they could do that evening was sit around the fire and sing and tell stories.

  Slowly the Chinooks from across the river came over, inspected the five canoes of the expedition, then sat quietly listening to the white men sing. The captains smoked with the chief and learned that these people smoked dried clover. In fact, the clover patches seemed to be privately owned, and small areas were marked off by grass ropes. The chief explained through Drouillard and with hand signs their fishing habits.

  “When spawning time comes, the salmon ready tospawn make their way back to the freshwater streams from which they came, leaping falls and overcoming all obstacles. We have five to seven salmon runs a year.” He held his fingers up. “The fish going upstream are ready for the taking.”

  Then he surprised Drouillard by telling his belief in the supernatural power of the salmon. In fact, he taxed Drouillard’s interpretive powers and he was not certain he got the story straight. “The fish allows itself to be taken in our nets, or by our gigs. Its spirit, released by death, returns again and again, provided the proper “are is taken that no offense is given. The salmon live in great houses under the sea. There they assume the same form as you and I and have feasts and potlatches among themselves.” Here, Drouillard shook his head and told the captains he was not sure his interpretation was what the chief meant, but it was some Chinook mythology that they had believed for a long time. “So,” Drouillard went on, “only when they assume salmon form do they sacrifice themselves. And so—it is our custom to return their bones to the sea, just as those dead salmon are seen returning downstream; then they can assume their human form under the sea and can come again to us.”

  The chief waved his arms all around. “To throw salmon bones carelessly away would prevent the return of the spirit to the sea and give great offense. The salmon might withhold themselves, and the humans on land would suffer. My village asks you to please return all the bones to the river.” The chief crossed his arms in front of his chest and sat silently a few moments.

  Captain Clark noted that this particular group of Chinooks had a cleaner-looking village than most because they did not leave the fish skins, heads, and bones lying around.

  Lewis wondered how this village dealt with the villages farther upstream, who were so much more careless with the salmon leftovers and did not appear to honor this myth.

  “I think they ignore them,” said Drouillard. “Once they had a smart headman who knew a way to keep the stink down and have a cleaner place for his peopleto live. This village remembers those ideas; the others have forgotten over the years.”

  “I would have thought other smart men would have seen the same thing and done something about keeping villages cleaner,” said Clark.

  “The rain cleans things up,” said the chief after Drouillard had tried to make the captains’ questions clear to him.

  The following evening the wind came down off the snow peaks with a stiffening coldness, and the expedition camped in the protection of a cliff. The wind snapped at their fire and brought rain. Rain fell throughout the next day from low, leaden clouds, which concealed the snow mountain. They ate the bear meat until it was gone, then had wapato stew.

  The rain continued. Beneath the grasses the earth was now a level, dark brown floor. The weather was foggy, cold, and raw. The wind grew more violent, and the waves in the wide river became higher. The water became brackish. It was so salty that a few of the men became ill from using it to prepare the dried and pounded salmon, which, after the bear was finished, had again become the mainstay of their diet. No other game was seen anywhere. They searched the water for beaver, but it was too salty.

  The tips of the snow peaks dropped lower in the northeast and at last vanished beneath the floor of the earth. The wind stirred the cold sand of the wide valleys and lashed the men’s faces with it. Sacajawea pulled a robe high around Pomp’s face for protection against the biting sand. The valleys were bordered by ridges whose rim lines were scribbled across the sky.

  The blankets and robes were continually wet and mildewed, and there was no way to replace them or slow down the growth of mold. After two weeks of this wet weather, even their clothing was rotting away to rags.

  If there had been large game, there would have been no time to tan the hides. The shores on each side of the river were steep and rocky, with pinnacles rising up and up. Once the canoes passed over a forest of gigantic submerged tree trunks. One small stream after anothercame tumbling down, free of rock, in cascades of white, frothing water. The north shore was an unbroken battlement of beautiful multicolored rock. None of the men had dreamed of such a magnificent land. But neither had they dreamed of this raw wind, and rain, and penetrating dampness.

  “Vicious, beautiful country,” Clark remarked. “Rather think I’m dreaming, or can it be as bad and as beautiful as it seems?”

  “Oh, Jésus, worse,” said Charbonneau, sniffing and coughing and shivering, “much worse. We have to keep working to keep from shivering to death.”

  The expedition spent the night of November 8 in Gray’s Bay on the north side of the Columbia River. They all felt miserable. Sacajawea sat huddled in a blanket, with Pomp wrapped in a small robe, trying to keep him from fretting. He was too old now to be happy confined to a robe all day. He squirmed and whined and nearly wore his mother out rocking him and singing to him. He wanted to walk or crawl and explore his surroundings as any ten-month-old would.

  Wind, rain, cold, and waves were never-ending. The brackish water was bitter, undrinkable. The hills came so close to the shoreline that there was no level ground to sleep on. The baggage had to be piled on a logjam to keep it above the incoming tide. As the tide rolled in, one of the canoes was inundated by a huge breaker. It sank before it could be unloaded. The tide brought in immense trees, two hundred feet long, four to seven feet across, dashing them against the beach. Two other canoes sank during the night from the breakers rolling over them. It was all the men could do to keep the canoes from complete destruction. No one was dry. The men shivered as they worked or ate or rested.

  Sometimes it wa
s a case of each man for himself. Some found shelter in rock crevices, others on the hillside among the many varieties of toadstools and mushrooms, none of them looking like an edible variety. Fog shrouded the water, and debris was driven against the shoreline, where precipitous banks alternated with spits, points, and what Clark called “nitches.” Cold rain fell constantly. Drouillard and the captains camped on some logs that had jammed upon the rocks with the tide. Theyerected poles and spread cattail mats on top, umbrellafashion, to keep the rain off. There were no robes, no blankets, no clothing that was not moldy, worn, and soaked.

  Shannon worked lashing the baggage down and hardly ate anything. He was sick of fish and talked about hunting large game. There was no game in the area that any of the men could find. By evening Shannon sat on the logjam and shivered. Cruzatte tried to get him up to help lash in the canoes, but he did not seem to hear. Charbonneau offered him his Mackinaw. Shannon just sat in a stupor.

  “Hey!” yelled Charbonneau, “something’s wrong with this kid. He shivers, and he does not look right!”

  Clark was beside Shannon in a minute, asking him to the shelter. Shannon jerked to his feet and tried to walk, but his feet would not move. His arms jerked in the direction of the shelter. He did not talk.

  “He probably has a cold or sore throat,” said Captain Lewis, feeling Shannon’s head and hands. “Lord, feel the boy,” he said to Clark, “he’s not hot, he’s cold!”

  They carried Shannon to the shelter and took his wet clothing off. They dried him as best they could, put a pair of woolen socks on his feet, and wrapped him in Charbonneau’s large wool Mackinaw. They then rolled him against the back of Lewis’s big dog to keep the warmth in his body.

  Lewis rubbed Shannon’s hands and arms to bring the warmth back into them. Shannon moaned, but he was still shivering. He did not seem able to respond to any questions asked him. By morning he was sleeping and the shivering had stopped. The captains decided to stay another night so that they could be certain Shannon was all right.

  When the fog lifted just before noon, there was much hollering in the camp. “That is the Pacific Ocean!” shouted Clark, peering way out beyond a piece of land that jutted into the wide river. “I am certain it is the Stinking Waters. I can feel the big breakers shake the earth under my feet here.”

  “I think I can see those breakers rolling in!” shouted Lewis. “We have finally arrived at our destination!”

  The men were all smiling despite the rain. Sacaja-wea sneezed and tried her best to keep Pomp amused and warm if not dry.

  “Keep wool next to your skin,” Cruzatte advised. “Then you won’t get the shakes the way Shannon did.”

  “Keep working. Don’t get chilled,” someone else advised.

  “Don’t get chilled,” Charbonneau mumbled. “Everyone in camp is chilled, even the dog. We need wool trousers under these leather ones. That would keep us warm, even if they were wet.”

  “Let’s think about getting to the Pacific,” suggested Pat Gass.

  The men did think about their destination. They talked about how far they had come to see a fog-covered sea. Shannon woke for a while and let York feed him a few pieces of fresh salmon. Instead of being cold, he was now feverish, and wanted to kick off the blankets piled on him.

  Because the men thought they had seen the ocean that day, there was some singing in the camp that night. The singing came from various shelters as the men bedded down. To Sacajawea it sounded like echoes bounding back and forth in the mountains.6

  In the morning Shannon was awake, feeling a little better, but still weak and feverish.

  “We’ll stay in this miserable place one more day,” announced Captain Lewis. “We’ll build a fire and dry out as much as possible.”

  “What will we build a fire with?” asked Charbonneau.

  “Everything is soaked,” said Gibson.

  “There must be degrees of wetness,” said Clark. “We’ll find driftwood under this logjam that is not as wet as that on top.”

  When the fog lifted after midmorning the men could see a Chinook camp across the bay. The cedar plank lodges were quite large, square, and set on top of a swell of ground. There were a few dozen men with rabbit and fox furs draped over their shoulders, napping on reed mats just above the high tide line. They were short and paunchy with broad, flattened heads and muscular arms and legs. They did not rouse from their sleep to acknowledge the waving and shouting from the strangers on the opposite bank.

  Later in the afternoon the fog was again a thick shroud and the explorers could not see the large ocean breakers they believed were vibrating the ground under their feet.

  Next morning, when the fog had dissipated some, Drouillard signaled the Chinooks. One man idly made hand signs saying, “We cannot bring trade goods over to your side until the tide goes out. You newcomers should make fun of this rain and fog.”

  Flocks of gulls swooped in on the flopping salmon washed up on a mud spit in front of the Chinook village. With the least amount of fuss someone would stroll into the cluster of screeching gulls, shoo them out of the way with a wave of hands, and drag the salmon back up to a drying rack. Drouillard guessed the salmon averaged thirty or forty pounds apiece.

  “Looks like they can bring in three hundred pounds of food an hour during low tide,” said Drouillard. “No wonder these people aren’t too excited about food gathering.”

  Sacajawea sat cross-legged on the sand with Pomp in her lap, watched the Chinooks drag up a dozen large salmon, and then she stood and stated that she would be back. She carried Pomp down through the brush looking for a place to rest and watch the tide go out without miring halfway to her knees in the mud. She found some old rough boards, probably from a collapsed Chinook plank house, and she made a crude lean-to over a large, flat rock. She squatted there with Pomp, half dozing in the shelter.

  By late afternoon the tide was out, and she waded across to the village. This was no mountain stream they were camped by, but a big tide-reach nearly half a mile wide. She made hand signs and traded her ratty woolen blanket for two nice-looking, cream-colored goat hides. The hair on the hide was exceptionally thick, and she was pleased with her trade. She pulled out four pairs of outgrown beaded baby moccasins from the robe around Pomp. These people had never seen colored trade beads and were much impressed with the bright colors on the little moccasins. These she traded for two dozen weaseltails. The weasel tails were the largest and finest she had ever seen, of the purest white, adorned with blacktipped tails, faintly stained with pale gold. She hid these away at the bottom of Pomp’s robe. As she was leaving, several Chinook women ran after her, pointing to her belt of blue beads. Sacajawea shook her head no, not for trading, no. The women moved closer to feel and exclaim at the beauty. One woman held out a conical hat made from cedar bark, large enough to keep rain off a man’s shoulders. The woman looked disappointed as Sacajawea walked back across the bay’s shore, not interested in trading her belt for the hat.

  Clark had put up the remains of Charbonneau’s old tent across the back of the shelter for more protection against the wind and rain for Shannon, who was now sitting up and talking some. Sacajawea laid one of the goat hides over Shannon’s knees. “Wear this in the rain. It will keep you warm and the rain will fall off it.”

  “Hey, Janey, where did you find it?” he said. “It’s better than any of my old, worn blankets. Thanks!”

  Charbonneau ambled by to see how Shannon was doing, and when he left, he mumbled something about his femme not bringing him a new robe, and he didn’t even have his Mackinaw to wear, only the heavy, old, musty capote. That night he pulled his tattered buffalo hide over himself and did not even bother to look for more shelter. He snored in the rain.

  Sacajawea slept in the shelter with Pomp rolled up in the new goat hide. Clark lay at the edge of the shelter so that he could keep an eye on Shannon.

  Sacajawea wanted to sleep, but could not. Her mind kept hearing the wind. They were so close to the sea now that i
ts booming jarred the timbers under her head. The waves sounded like a herd of horses coming on a dead gallop, and whenever she started to doze, it roused her with a scared feeling that she was about to be run over by them. It was much more restful not to sleep at all, so she lay awake and considered her situation.

  She was feeling more and more as though she belonged with these white men. They accepted her as one of them. She was learning to speak their tongue. York and even Shannon had dug roots with her. York sometimes carried Pomp. She had acted as an interpreterand was at times treated more like one of the men than like a squaw. She then wondered if these men really had much sense. They gathered wood and set up the camp. This was actually a squaw’s work. Then there was another way of looking at things. She had learned to play Cruzatte’s fiddle some, had fired a rifle, and had sung in public. These were things done only by men. But here, with these people, it made no difference. Life was good here, despite the rain and cold and Charbonneau, who did not bother her overmuch.

  She opened her eyes wide and looked at the few inches between herself and Chief Red Hair. Suddenly she longed to fill those few inches and place her body close to his. She wanted to lie secure where he might put his arm over her.

  In the darkness the wind blew the elk skin from one of the pegs. Clark refastened it and then, not realizing Sacajawea was awake, wiped her damp face with his handkerchief. He wondered at her endurance and uncomplaining nature. He thought she was learning more of the outgoing ways of the whites, leaving some of the submissive, slavish ways of the squaw behind. He overcame a sudden desire to hold her in his arms and shelter her from the rain. Then he thought, A man’s not clearheaded at night. Night’s like a room; it makes the little things in your head too important.

  The first grayish hint of dawn crept over the camp and faded Sacajawea’s thoughts, so that she was no longer sure of them. She wondered if there were a kind of insanity coming from being under a roof of any kind, even a tattered elk skin and cattail mats. I’m too cooped up and cannot look at these thoughts against the real size of things. She lay quiet, feigning sleep until Pomp awoke, cold, wet, and hungry. She dried him as best she could, put the goat hide around his head and back, and moved outside to a dead log to nurse her baby in the fog.