Sacajawea

by Anna Lee Waldo

  Both women nodded. The one with the bad teeth said, “Inside is much fish oil. Oil can be used to flavor fruit, or to rub on your face, all over, and in your hair. Keeps you young. Now you give me moccasins. You gamble nothing else.”

  “You want to trade—make a bargain?” asked Sacajawea.

  “Gamble, bargain, trade—ai.”

  Sacajawea shifted her weight on the mat and saw that the woman with the bad teeth shone with oil from her greasy hair to her shiny feet, which were bare. The woman with the umbrellalike hat wore moccasins with thick, ugly leather soles and tightly woven grass tops.

  “Good medicine too,” said the woman, reaching for Sacajawea’s moccasins, which were soft, buff elkskin.

  “Medicine?” asked Sacajawea. “The same oil used by the ancients? The Multnomahs?” She looked under the lid and found a yellowed bag of transparent gut, tied with stiff sinew to keep the oil from exposure to air, so it would not become rancid right away. She pulled her moccasined feet up under her tunic, pretending shewanted more time to talk before deciding on the gamble. “What happened to them?”

  The woman with the hat opened and shut one fist in the air several times, rapidly. “You ask more questions than can be answered. The words in your mind mill around like salmon before jumping up white water to spawn. Is that what you learn from all those pale eyes you are with?”

  Sacajawea bit her lip and looked from one woman to the next. “I just want to learn about your ways.”

  The woman with the hat picked up a stick and threw it at a scruffy dog who was sniffing around the drying rack. “Well—it is no secret that the Multnomahs gambled with men whose faces resembled the brown bear. Those people learned to depend on the gambling between themselves and these strangers. They were nothing until the big canoes came in sight and those men came ashore. They stopped attending the yearly salmon festivals or the horse fairs for their gambling. Then the strangers laughed at their important rituals and made them learn their tongue. They became nothing. But they thought the strangers made them more important than all of us—”

  The woman with the bad teeth interrupted, “At least you and those men you are with try to speak our tongue. That is in your favor.” She spat in the fire and smiled at Sacajawea when it sizzled. “My people speak the language of the strangers, but it means nothing.”10

  The other woman continued. “Those white men came to their village on floating lodges and stayed. They made their homes there and tried to get the Multnomahs to behave like they did. This was all long ago. The white men tried to break all the societies and set up something new. The Multnomahs hid, then practiced their personal medicine and held their society rites, anyway. They showed those foreigners every hospitality. But in time they learned those men were nothing. They were tilikum, common people.” She spat in the fire.

  The woman with the bad teeth said, “They were not real chiefs, like the ones you travel with.” She squinted into the fire that had blazed up. “Yet you can never be too sure. Best to take every precaution and be on the lookout for anything not just right. The Multnomahsmade that mistake. If they were here, they could tell you plenty of advice along that line; they learned it all the hard way. If the slightest hint of any sickness, especially ahn-cutty, comes your way, duck into the nearest sweat lodge, then dive into the cold water. That washes out your system. The Multnomahs just lay around their lodges until it took them away.”

  “Where? Where did they all go?”

  Both women grunted at the same time.

  “You are dumber than I thought,” said the woman with the bad teeth. “They died of ahn-cutty.” She pecked her face and arms with one finger. “The white men brought it to them. That was the fine gift they brought and gave to the Multnomahs in return for friendship.” She spat into the fire.

  “They were all sick?”

  “Everyone—young, old, men, women, fat and thin. Everyone, except the white men who were tilikum, and left when they realized there were no people to take their orders or follow their commands. I will say one thing, though, the white men put all the bodies in canoes, stacked one on top of another, and let them float in the bog away from the village. I believe that was the only desire of the Multnomahs those men carried out. I’m too young to remember. But their history is passed on along the river. They were a kind, good-hearted people, long ago.”

  Suddenly it occurred to Sacajawea that she had been gone a long time and she probably had all the useful information she needed. She rose and said, “I enjoyed talking. I have to go now.”

  “If you ever want to join the first woman’s society, I will sell you a membership in the Red Salmon. You could stay right here with us. There is usually plenty of work to keep you busy,” said the woman with the hat.

  Sacajawea slipped out of her moccasins and handed them to her and pulled the sewing awl from her blanket and handed it to the woman with the bad teeth. “Thank you,” she said and walked out into the rain. She hoped she had learned enough to satisfy the curiosity of Chief Red Hair.

  That evening, Clark stared at the sodden sky. Hehad hunted most of the day and was so tired he did not want to move. He ruminated vaguely on the difference between his weariness and Sacajawea’s liveliness. I drop in my tracks, he thought, and she sighs and continues to hunt for edible roots. Then in vexed admiration he saw her coming toward him, her feet hardly distinguishable because of the mud on them and on her legs. She sat with her legs folded in front. She did not say anything for some moments, then, ”Ahn-cutty. The whole Multnomah village died, long ago.”

  Clark sat up.

  “Smallpox. I talked with two old women while you hunted today. One showed me deep pits on her own face and said, ‘Ahn-cutty.’”

  While she told her story, Clark noticed that she had a feather ornament knotted in her hair. He felt a warm glow he had not experienced until she came into his life. He dragged a piece of driftwood to some dry sand by the cook fire and settled against it.

  Sacajawea moved with him. She hugged her muddy knees and waited with growing confidence for some expression of his satisfaction, feeling that the moment would last forever in her memory. She picked her teeth with a splinter and spat in the fire; yet she did not offend him. She met Clark’s gaze and stared back with the remote peacefulness of an animal.

  The next day she and some others traded their seats in the canoes to those with weary feet. She carried Pomp on her back in a thin blanket. They walked on a trail beaten leafless, which wound about, considering only the shortest way between boulders and broken cliffs. They kept to the bank of the river, which seemed to cascade from pool to pool or splashed over rock-strewn rapids. The woods receded around a succession of small fields. As the hours wore on, Sacajawea noticed that Clark always waved to the natives they passed. He talked with his men, and laughter surrounded him. It was a desire for friendly contact with him. She watched him gesticulating, wiping sweat from his face with the sleeve of his leather shirt, hitching his belt, emptying his moccasins, stretching out on his back with arms spread in the grass. He enjoyed everything.

  Charbonneau’s feet were hot in a short time, his shirt stuck to his skin, and his hair was tousled.

  After three miles of dense green timber, of pines and spruces, the trees began to stand apart in groves or small irregular groups. They found sugar pines and tasted the sugary pitch that exudes from the heartwood when wounds are made by ax or fire. The pitch comes out in kernels, crowded together like white pearl beads. Charbonneau ate considerable and was the first to learn of its laxative properties. By late afternoon they were back down to the grassy banks of the river. Charbonneau’s legs were weary and achy, and his shoulders drooped with fatigue.

  The canoes were already pulled up on shore. The mosquitoes were an intolerable agony. Lewis groaned aloud when he could no longer refrain from baring his naked hindquarters close to the ground, where the mosquitoes were a black layer of piercing needles.

  Charbonneau was tired enough to fall and simply lie
on the ground. The mosquitoes invaded his reasoning so that the most thoughtless, necessary action was torture. He slid down the embankment as if he had orders to do so, and placed one foot into a canoe. He knew that it was only on the water that he could find rest from the insects, somehow, while working.

  “Is this my canoe?” he called to Cruzatte, who was already kneeling in the middle.

  “Sure. We’ll go only a short distance before finding a campsite for this night.”

  Charbonneau was cautious about shifting his weight, and he had barely knelt in the canoe when it lurched unsteadily, moving off the shore. The next canoe, led by Lewis, was already being paddled upstream.

  A sigh escaped Charbonneau; he did not know whether it was for his misery or contentment.

  With the first strokes of the paddle, the agony of the land suddenly became a wilderness through which he sped in the canoe at will. It was even strange that nothing hindered his escape. He simply knelt in the bottom and departed.

  With dizzy elation he began to sing a voyageur’s chant as he paddled against the current. Muddy water swirled through bushes on the low banks. The groundwas black, the pines and hemlocks stood out among naked trunks, but the top of the forest was a filmy cloud of opening buds. Patches of snow glinted in the light.

  The hardships of winter showed in Charbonneau. He was lean and his muscles tougher. He gazed at the budding hazelnut trees, and at the violets and fern-tufts on the rocks lower down. He paddled in time, remembering the blisters, aching tendons and cramping joints.

  At first paddling upstream relieved his tired feet. Then he glanced up and saw the rain clouds gathering. The wind was channeling along the river blowing the rain that came fast into a spray. The canoes moved to the shelter of dell copses and large trees where everyone caught their breath. Charbonneau’s shoulders and neck were loose with the work. The river, already bank full from snow melt, slowly spread out over its banks, covering sand flats and meadows. The alders and willows were bent against the current. Within minutes the storm was in full bloom. The men stayed close to the bank, shoved their paddles inside the canoe, and stood to pole against the sand, which often gave way in a mad swirl of eddying water. Charbonneau said he could see only new misery every hour, and was there not anyone who remembered that they were only going a short way?

  Several times he opened his mouth to shout at Cruzatte, but the bent figure, poling evenly, gave such an appearance of obliviousness to the surroundings that he choked the words down in a rage. They went on over the smooth water where the rain danced.

  Toward evening, they pulled up under a looming cliff. There was just room to pull up the dugouts on a strip of beach, and Charbonneau stood in the water while the others unloaded; then he crawled under one of the overturned dugouts. Lewis distributed dried meat. Charbonneau chewed unhappily.

  They sat quietly, waiting for those coming on foot to catch up. Ordway spread some fir branches on the ground and after a time started a smoky fire. Charbonneau sat shivering now in his drenched clothes.

  “Hey, Frenchy,” called Collins. “It ain’t so cold if you come do a little work.” He was chopping down a small tree for dry firewood.

  “Hey, down there!” called Clark. “We are all herebut Charbonneau. I have two men out looking for him along the driftwood a mile or so back.”

  “Bring your men here where it is dry!” called Lewis. “Your man Charbonneau is with us. Rode in the dugout all afternoon. Thought you sent him.”

  A breeze stirred, mixing with the mutter of the river. “Damn,” sighed Clark, at the same time firing his rifle as a signal to his men. He scrambled down under the cliff, growling at Charbonneau, who feigned sleep.

  They made camp and hunted for two days. Sacajawea watched her man relaxed and indolent. She said nothing to him. Lewis came in with an otter and two porcupines the last night under the cliff. The men gathered by the fire, where York boiled fish. York stirred the pot with a stick, and built a spit for the small game.

  In the morning, they were moving up the wide river in the first grayness of dawn. A cool breeze came up, but there was no rain. By evening, the balmy weather had changed. A cold wind circled the shores and their cook fire roared fitfully, shooting sparks. The men built shelters with huge pine branches. Just before nightfall, a black cloud appeared to the south and spread across the sky. It was a flock of migrating birds, and everyone stared in disbelief as it broke into pieces overhead and the parts fell toward the earth, just out of sight up the river. In the gray dawn next morning, they poled slowly along the shore and came on the ducks in a reedy bay.

  By April 7, there was enough dried meat and salmon to carry the expedition safely back to the Nez Percé country. The men began to look around for a village where they could find at least a dozen packhorses to use during portage and to carry Bratton, who still could not walk, around the Narrows and Celilo Falls. They had very little to trade for horses, and the natives wanted eye dags, which were a kind of war hatchet. The expedition had no eye dags, and all the blacksmithing equipment was on the other side of the Divide in a cache.

  The cold rain clouds seemed to dissolve.

  One night the men watched Skillute fishing canoes move slowly across the water by the light of pine torches. Clark and Charbonneau had not talked together since the afternoon Charbonneau had climbed into the canoeto rest his feet. Now they watched the spectacle of the black smoking lights side by side, brooding silently. Charbonneau was tired from the long days of poling and stretched on an elbow near the fire where he could not see Clark, sitting near his head. “I will make roast of the porcupine tomorrow,” he remarked, suddenly bored with the strain between them.

  “I got two beaver today you can use,” Clark replied at once.

  “Wagh, they would be better used to buy horses,” suggested Charbonneau. “The Skillutes have some—I have seen.”

  Clark flung a piece of wood into the fire, wishing he could be sure Charbonneau spoke the truth. But to his surprise, he realized that his emotions were a mere echo out of the past months, more than an expression of his present feelings. He did not know how he considered Charbonneau at this moment—the fact that he himself had not seen the Skillutes’ horses was puzzling. Truthfully, this complaining, bragging squawman had a keen knowledge of the land and the inhabitants and the signs they left. He was actually better able to care for himself than he appeared. Clark turned to face the river. The fishermen were coming in, their shadows vague and monstrous as the torches waved. They pulled up the canoes and their low talking was clear in the quiet camp. Only their dogs whimpered and yelped. The Skillutes who carried torches stayed for a moment by the shore, bending to look at their reflections in the inky mirror. Then they quenched the flames and drifted silently downriver to their own village. Clark answered their greetings without moving. The stars glimmered faintly on the black water.

  Charbonneau rolled up in his blanket and abruptly fell asleep.

  When Clark awoke in the misty dawn, Charbonneau was helping York build a fire from the coals under the ashes. Clark watched them a moment, silently.

  “Good day,” Charbonneau said unexpectedly, glancing up with a smile. “Meager comforts to this life.”

  Clark stretched, then stood up shuddering. He walked along the shore a short distance, relieved himself, and came back, scratching his head and yawning violently, to stand close to the flames with outstretched hands. He felt rested and looked about at the others packing their blankets, getting ready to move out.

  “Not so fast!” he called to them. “Take time for some jerky this morning! I’m going to take a look around the Skillute camp and possibly dicker over a couple of horses there.”

  “No horses at that village,” said Shields, brushing insects and cobwebs from his hair. “I just wandered through the woods in that direction and didn’t see anything but those flimsy bark canoes.”

  “Well, maybe they don’t want us to know about their horses,” said Clark quietly. “I heard they have som
e. I want packsaddles made when I return.”

  Charbonneau looked up from the fire, his face warm and red under the dark whiskers, but he said nothing.

  Lewis began to call out names for hunting that morning.

  Clark dickered for the rest of the day with the chief of the Skillutes for a couple of horses. The squaws fed Clark boiled onions, and still they could not come to terms on the horses. The men wanted more fish hooks. When they were put with the bundle of other things, the men nodded and said with signs that the horses were all in a valley where the women were gathering roots. They would send out and bring in horses the next day. Then the men began to ask for articles Clark did not have. They looked through the bundle of articles he had brought and complained it was not half enough for two of their fine horses. Clark could think of nothing to do but return to his camp. Then he noticed something he had not seen before. He bent to examine the deep, running sores on the left leg of the chief where a bear had pawed him several weeks before. Clark indicated he was something of a medicine man and would like to dress the wounds. The chiefs face brightened, and he stretched out his leg. When Clark was finished, one of the chiefs squaws complained of a sore back. Clark rubbed a little camphor on her temples and back and placed a warmed piece of flannel over her shoulders.

  “I have not felt so well in many seasons,” she said, smiling broadly. “I will give you two horses.”

  That afternoon, Charbonneau went to the villagewith Frazier and returned with a good mare for which he had given his belt, some elk’s teeth and a packet of paints.

  But the following morning, the chief and several bucks came back holding out a bundle with all the articles used to purchase the horses. They wanted to return the purchase price and get their horses back. This was an acceptable practice among the natives. Charbonneau stepped forward, removed his woolen shirt, and gave it to the chief for the horse he was riding. The Skillutes asked for more woolen shirts and brought in more horses to trade.