“I hate like hell to make this suggestion,” said Windsor, “but it looks like we’d better turn around and see if we can’t locate the main party before we get lost in this storm and they find us frozen solid as that damn rock that broke my rifle.”
“You’re right. The sooner we find them, the better,” agreed Colter.
Sacajawea carried Pomp in a blanket on her back. The air was cold and crisp. She blew on her hands, often tucked them up under her blanket, but it was difficult to ride the horse and lead the packhorse with no hands. The weather seemed to take hold of everyone, so that after a while each man’s mind was aware not of arms and legs, but of sky and land; the snow clouds an intimate part of the body, the horizon one’s eye. By afternoon the snow was two feet deep. Hours passed and the horses began to stumble. The heavy, blowing snow, piling, drifting, piling again, took away the old shape and face of the land.
Finally, Clark had to admit that none of the landmarks he had expected had come in sight. They were lost. The men were tired, but Clark’s words snapped their minds back to the need to plan for the night—how to keep off the cold, how to be alive and able to go on when morning came. They began to complain about cold feet, and with so much snow there was no grass for the horses and no game for the stew pots. They had found no sign of the two hunters who had been sent ahead. In that swirling snow they could not see the tracks of mice and squirrels. The wind blew with a hundred voices, and the shadows of the trees mingled indistinguishably with the black trunks.
Clark found dried wood after patiently scraping away snow, and tried sparking his flint, but the wind and endless swirls of snow ended any hope of a fire. They camped in a small ravine. The next day their march was shorter. Each day, the hunters from the main partyhunted less; each day, the cold deepened and their fear increased.
The main party was camped in another small ravine when the blizzard broke. They stared at each other with glittering eyes across a hoarded fire, against the back of a pine-bough lean-to, wondering if they would starve to death before getting through the mountains. It was then that Captain Lewis’s mind shook off its paralyzing agony in an overwhelming urge to think.
“A man must keep moving to keep his blood running,” he said.
All the men had been cold before, and each knew that if it got through the skin and the frost bit into the bloodstream to harden it, he might be crippled for life, or there would be fever and then death.
“We must go on, not rest,” said Lewis. “If your hands, arms, feet, or legs begin to feel warm, that is dangerous; then the frostbite is setting in.”
There was no inclination now to talk about how thick and cruel was the snow, how dumb to be caught in the middle of it. All their wit and strength had to be given to figuring how they might keep their feet and find the trail back.
Lewis was looking at Sacajawea. Her hair, dull and lifeless, fell in strands on her shoulders. Her face seemed shrunken so that he imagined he saw her skull more than her features, the wide jaw and far-apart eye sockets. She held the eighteen-month-old child’s face automatically against her breast, and the child made unconscious sucking movements with his mouth.
Which of the men should he send back? Lewis dropped his head on his knees in a wave of dizzy weakness and clung despairingly to one clear thought. “Clark,” decided Lewis.
“What?” Clark sighed.
‘Take the squaw and the child back to the Nez Percé village. We will follow.” He saw that Clark agreed. There was a better chance if they went back now.
“Horses can’t go without food longer than five days,” said Clark. “We’ll take them back, too. But leave the baggage here that we have no immediate use for. It canbe a sign to Colter and Windsor that we have gone back. We’ll pick it up the next time on our way up.”
“This is madness,” said Gass. “Tomorrow we might be more bewildered than today.”
Clark said, ‘“A pioneer is never lost, but occasionally bewildered.’ That’s a phrase from my old friend Daniel Boone. Funny I’d be reminded of that now. Janey, I’ll carry Little Pomp for a while. Come on, tie him to my back.”
Clark led the retreat, with Sacajawea and the others following slowly behind. No one talked much; they seemed to live only in brief thoughts that seemed hours, even days apart. The descent was never steep. A thaw came with rain and melted much of the snow. An occasional slope of mushy snow had footholds that were bad. They lost four horses and the mule when the rain turned to snow again.
“Here’s a beaver dam!” Clark yelled back. “Maybe we can get a beaver or two to roast.”
The men milled around the beaver dam. York built a small fire. Sacajawea heated water in a kettle on a tripod of sticks. York found some dried fish and kouse roots to put in the boiling water for a fish stew.
Colter and Windsor meandered into camp while the men were standing around with their tin cups, sipping the hot meal. “Hey, if you guys had stayed in one spot we would have caught up with you two days ago,” said Colter. “Thank God we are here. That snow and wind was bad. I’d forgotten how cold it could be.”
While the men were crowded around Colter and Windsor, John Potts was still at the beaver dam stubbornly trying to chop a hole in the ice so that he could bring out a couple of the animals. Suddenly he was on his hands and knees yelling for someone to help him. “Help! I cut my leg! Help! The ax slipped on the ice!”
“I’m coming!” yelled Lewis. He saw that Potts had cut a vein in his leg and the blood was gushing from the wound. It was touch and go for a while as Lewis tried to stop the bleeding.
Potts was given a cup of the fish stew and then put on his horse to continue the downhill ride until evening.
Sacajawea, free of Pomp, helped York clean up thetin cups and put the fire out before joining the others on the downhill trail.
Windsor and Colter were each riding horses now near the end of the line. Sacajawea and York brought up the rear.
“Hang on!” York yelled out as Colter’s horse reared and bucked. But it did not help. Colter fell on the rocks in the middle of Hungry Creek. He clung to his rifle and his blanket. Sacajawea and York stopped their horses in the middle of the creek and watched Colter whirl downstream, get a shaky footing, then climb out of the ice and water. York gave him a dry blanket to replace his wet, frozen clothing. As York was picking up the stiff, wet clothing, a porcupine fell out of a tree. He surprised the three of them. Sacajawea quickly climbed from her horse and threw a large stone on the head of the animal, crushing it. Still shivering, Colter skinned out the frozen flesh and chewed some off the bone. “He’s frozen solid. You didn’t have to hit his head.”
“Hey, I roast that for you,” said York.
“No need,” laughed Colter. “I’ll have it eaten by the time you get the fire going. Here, have some.” He passed around pieces of frozen porcupine to York and Sacajawea. They ate, enjoying it. Then they rode up to the rest of the expedition. There was no view, for the clouds hung low on the wooded ridges, and streamers of mist choked the aisles of the trees.
Exertion seemed to take the sting out of the cold, and now the men’s senses were alive. There were no smells, only the bleak odor of sodden snow, but the woods had come out of its winter silence. The hillside was noisy with running water and the drip of thawing firs.
That evening, Cruzatte brought in a mountain delicacy, several dozen large morels. These were mushrooms that the Nez Percés rarely ate. York roasted them. Cruzatte, Drouillard, and Clark ate heartily. Sacajawea, York, and Colter were not hungry, for they had finished off the raw porcupine. Charbonneau and Lewis thought when the mushrooms were cooked in this fashion, without salt or grease, they were truly an insipid, tasteless food. Charbonneau gnawed maple twigs with some of the other men and fed his mushrooms to Pomp.
Now the thought of fat salmon, fresh from a wellfed winter in the sea, became irresistible. The men, with few fish hooks left, fell back on the infantryman’s last resort. They bayoneted salmon.
Sacaj
awea was kept busy making a smooth cut the length of the belly and scraping the guts and blood out of each fish. The head and tail cut off, she made a cut from end to end, close to the backbone. The fish lay open, held together only by the skin of the back. She made the next cut by slipping the knife under the exposed bone and removing it from the other side of the fish. She removed the backbone without waste. When the hunters brought in deer and a black bear, their diet improved. Their heads cleared, and their cramps became almost unnoticeable.
During one night the wind changed, and the cold became so severe that it stirred the men out of sleep and set them building up the fire. Sacajawea awoke to air that bit like a fever, and a world that seemed to be made of metal and glass. The cold was more intense than anything she had ever imagined. Under its stress, trees cracked with a sound like shots from machine guns. The huge morning fire made only a narrow circle of heat. If for a second she turned her face from it, the air stung her eyelids as if with an infinity of harsh particles. To draw a breath rasped the throat. She kept Pomp inside her tunic next to her own warm body.
The sky was milk-pale, the sun a mere ghostly disk. The world seemed hard, glassy, metallic, with no shadow, no depth or softness.
The cold cowed the dog, Scannon, and he lay close to the fire with his eyes partially shut.
“Iron freezes instantly to the skin,” said Drouillard. “Must be sixty below. If there was any sort of wind, I reckon we could not break camp. We’d have to bury ourselves all day in a hole. But we ought to make good time. Might even make Cut Nose’s camp by noon tomorrow.”
The hunters found one of the horses had foundered in a drift the night before and was frozen. They drank the blood from the animal’s throat and rested an hour. They carved as much meat as they could carry from the carcass and took it into camp. The next day they wentback for the horse. The others gathered firewood, roasted the meat, slept, and ate.
“I could spend some time in one of those smoke-filled lodges and not complain about choking to death,” said Pryor.
“How long you think this cold’ll last?” asked Shannon.
“Zut! A couple days is enough!” answered Charbonneau, holding a mittened hand over his dripping nose. “Maybe three days, not more. Big freezes often come between the thaw and the real spring. In the north the Chippewas call it the Bear’s Dream. This cold pinches the old bear in her den and gives her bad dreams.”
The men were surprised that the violent weather, instead of numbing them, had put life into their veins. They walked stiffly, but felt as if they could go on for hours.
One day Charbonneau’s eyes burned with a different ache from that from the cook-fire smoke, and piercing flashes of pain shot through his head. The snow blindness kept him inside a lean-to for several days. He waited, with bandaged face turned in Sacajawea’s direction, for the times she left to turn the smoking horse meat or to gather wood, and then he sat in terror as the wilderness came toward him with gigantic steps. Once he was sure the wind had torn the lean-to away from his head; he tore off the bandage and rushed out to stumble into Sacajawea’s arms. He lost all sense of shame, following her, whimpering with the cold, while the others worked to keep him warm and fed.
During this waiting, Pryor and Windsor froze their feet and hands out hunting. Clark immersed their feet and hands in warm water. The men yelled out in pain. Sacajawea sat near watching. Suddenly she could take no more. She said sternly, “No warm water; do not bring those men near the fire; wait and let the strength in the rest of their body help heal and restore slowly.”
As the men’s feet thawed and blisters came on the skin, she opened the larger blisters with a sharp bone, heated momentarily over the fire, and in the night she crawled from her robe to lift their arms vertical, tying them upright with thongs to pine branches. Later—she seemed to know when it was needed, and was not theshy girl she had been last fall in these torturous mountains—she rubbed their legs and soothed their muscles and coaxed the lagging blood circulation.
Neither Clark nor Lewis interfered with her treatment. From what they knew of such bad frostbite, the men might have lost an arm or leg.
One morning Drouillard volunteered, “Shannon and I will go down to look for game and see if we can locate the Nez Percés.”
Clark agreed and found some forgotten beads in his pocket. He sent Joe Whitehouse along to buy salmon with the beads, in case they found some Nez Percés.
When the three men returned in two days, they had with them the brother of Chief Cut Nose and two other Nez Percé men, who had volunteered to serve as guides over the Divide for a fee of two rifles. Apparently no one wondered how three Nez Percé men were going to share or divide two rifles.
That evening the three Nez Percés, stripped down to their breechclouts, set fire to the lower branches of the pine trees around the camp. It took the chill off the mountain air, and transformed the trees into towering columns of flame.
Sacajawea woke her child to see the sight. The men were reminded of the Fourth of July celebration. The Nez Percés explained that this was done to bring fair weather for the journey ahead.
Gradually Windsor’s thawed hands came back into use and the pain in Pryor’s arms grew less and the muscles of his arms became obedient to their owner. On Windsor’s left wrist was a bracelet mark of healing blisters over the raw skin.
“That there is an emblem,” he said to Sacajawea. “There the mitten did not reach the end of the jacket sleeve, and the cold wind bit deep.” He stretched up both arms. “God, I’m thankful for good arms, fully restored. Janey, you knew when to pick each mischievous blister, when to lift the arms, when to rub them and tease and cajole them. I give you my name for all that.”
Sacajawea laughed. “You will call me Dick Windsor, then?”
Windsor laughed. “Truthfully, I like Janey muchbetter. And can you imagine the names the men would think up for me if they found you had mine?”
They both laughed.
“Say, tell me, what good is a moth-eaten piece of beaver fur on frostbite?”
“None.” She sobered.
“Well, that is what I told Charbonneau, but he insisted it is a cure for anything from hangnail to ringworm. I told him to wrap it around his mouth, because I noticed he did not use it so much when his eyes were sore.”
“He tries, but how can he know the medicines of my old grandmother?”
“I’m surprised he knows as much as he does. Listen, Janey, he’s really a knowledgeable woodsman. Only one thing—he panics fast. Now, take me; I never panic, but I don’t know enough to come in out of the cold.”
She smiled as he walked off toward the group of men skinning out a fresh buck deer.
The snow began to sink beneath the weight of sunwarmed air. The snow melted to ice; the ice became rotten, and water seeped through from beneath.
One of the Nez Percé men complained of not feeling well. He wanted to go back down to his village for a few days to recover. This caused some concern because sometimes such complaints with a native meant he was going to abandon any enterprise he was not well pleased with. Three days later, the ice was gone, and to everyone’s delight the man had really been ill. He came back. He helped collect the horses and pushed the outfit on while he was still recovering.
As the crows began to caw and small birds whistled in the bushes, Sacajawea found time to dig the knobby quamash roots. Pomp gathered the bright, blue flowers in his chubby fists and brought them to his mother.3
“This makes a man gentle,” she tried to explain to him, “to notice delicate, short-lived beauty.”
Clark could not restrain himself, but he watched her boldly. He saw that her eyes laughed much of the time. Her features were not merely exceptionally attractive, but were arranged so that her expressions showed in a subtle way the restless harking of her soul. He could not read her deeper thoughts and wondered what itwould be like to take her thin-boned head in his hands, like a skull, and look inside to satisfy his longing to know. He imagine
d for a moment he could see the very blood under her bronze skin change with her emotions. There she was, a Shoshoni squaw, whom he admired. She was another man’s woman, yet he had come to depend on her for knowledge of herbs and edible roots, medicináis, and sewing his clothing. She amused him. Once, when the others were fishing and hunting, he had let her arrange his hair the way she liked, with braids over each ear and a necklace of small shells about his tanned neck.
“And so, still, you are nothing but an impostor with those red braids and sky blue eyes,” she said to him, suddenly smiling. “I cannot make you over.” She then shaved his cheeks, feeling that disturbing fluttering inside her breast. She wondered if white women felt the wings fluttering inside when they were near the man they cared for, or was it only a weakness felt by herself for the man she so admired and respected? She did not know.
He looked at her low, smooth forehead, the good, straight nose, full mouth, round face with the triangular cheeks, and small ears that flared out from her head. Suddenly he thought of some small, brown-skinned, quick-pulsed, furry being—some early human creature whose bones were buried under layers of sand, clay and dust.
CHAPTER
32
Pompeys Pillar
On the afternoon of July 25, 1806, a stop was made on the south side of the Yellowstone River near a remarkable sandstone formation. It was located about 250 paces back from the river and measured some 400 paces in circumference. Clark estimated its height at 200 feet. He named it “Pompy’s Tower” after Sacajawea’s infant son, whom he had nicknamed “Pomp” or “Little Pomp,” but today it is known as Pompeys Pillar. Clark and some others climbed the only accessible side, the northeast. Near a spot on the path leading to the top where Indians had etched animal and other figures in the rock, Clark inscribed his name and the date. On the grass-covered soil of the summit, the natives had piled two heaps of stones. The surrounding countryside was visible for a distance of 40 miles.
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