“Deer in these parts are poor on account of these torturous insects,” Clark grumbled. “The ravenous pests have sucked away most of the animals’ blood.”
There were large and aggressive rattlesnakes that the horses had to sidestep. There was a close call when Sacajawea comforted her child and did not watch the trail carefully. Her horse stepped into a nest of small rattlers, but the horse pulled out so fast there was no time for any to strike.
The following day, they came to Shoshoni Cove, where they had buried canoes the year before. Now in the Shoshoni country, everyone kept a lookout for the Agaidükas. Sacajawea found the meadow grass waist-tall when she stopped to gather camass roots. Always she hoped to see somewhere women of the People out gathering roots. She saw no one and no marks of a recent camp. The trees were full-leaved, and the whole wide cove was spread green. The rimrocks seemed silver around it, and the sky like a sheet of blue silk.
Charbonneau looked at this valley in high summer and said, “I would call it Bayou Salade.”
At midday Sacajawea pointed to old beaver dams making a small stream wide. “Here my people have trapped.” Even the trees seemed familiar. Hours passed, and the dusk before dark came on. There was still no sign of the People.
Worn and tired, leg muscles stiff, the men made night camp.
“I have given my word that I would return to see the People,” Sacajawea said, more to herself than to anyone else in particular.
“This outfit will not wander all over these foothills looking for some people who are on the move—who have probably moved more than once since we last saw them,” scolded Charbonneau. “Femme, what you think? We could never be certain of finding them. And there is Capitaine Lewis’s party—waiting for us. The men—they want to be home before the Missouri freezes. Femme, you come with me. We will make our camp with the Minnetarees. They will be your people. Huh?’ Charbonneau scratched through the hair on his chest and cleared his throat. He noticed Sacajawea’s bowed head, but did not see the tears that touched the blanket across her knees.
“Time will work for me,” she mumbled. “I will see the People again.” Sacajawea knew that Charbonneau would rather be where he could pretend he was a big man. She knew also that he would never understand her feeling toward the People, or any one person. This was his way. She knew, too, that her own brother, Chief Black Gun, had told her she must stay with her man because that was the Shoshoni way, but he had also said that Charbonneau would never come back to the Shoshoni. At, she thought, Black Gun knew then. The foreboding she had felt when leaving her brother was due partly to the intuitive knowledge she herself had had that she would never see Black Gun again.
She sat still for a time, wondering. Finally she heard Charbonneau laugh huskily and saw him go to sit with the men around the fire.
Captain Clark found the canoes safe and the cache of supplies intact and dry. Inside the cache the men found tobacco. They acted as though that were the most important find of the day. The chewers had long ago tired of crabtree bark, and the smokers coughed on their mixture of red willow bark and bearberry leaves. Now that the cache was opened, smoke puffs and brown spit flowed freely, and the men began to feel that the hard part of the trip was behind them and now it was something to tell big stories about. They counted the milestones. They had passed Willard Creek,5 gone on to the Jefferson River, and camped in Shoshoni Cove.
The next morning, Clark left Nat Pryor in charge of six men to bring on the horses overland. The rest of the outfit climbed into the canoes. In three days the canoes covered the distance that had taken more than a week on the way upstream the year before.
Pomp dangled his hands in the river and chattered with Ben York. The mountain streams that fell into the river were full of sticks and fallen saplings where beaver built homes and the water was calmed to a placid pool. The beaver, with otter and muskrats, basked along the banks. Sometimes a beaver slapped a tail around a canoe, angry at the invasion of his security. The beaver were often eaten now and pelts saved to take back to the States.
On July 13, Clark met Pryor and his six men with the outfit’s horses at the site of their old July 27, 1805, encampment. That evening, Clark sent John Ordway and ten of the men downriver in the six canoes with a letter for Captain Lewis. Ordway’s party was to camp at the Great Falls and wait for Lewis. Clark took the rest of the party overland with the forty-nine horses and one colt. The rocks and prickly pear were hard and sharp on the hooves of the unshod horses.
Sacajawea walked with Clark and York. ‘The People put moccasins on their horses before the hooves are worn down to the quick and are as painful as this.”
“Moccasins?” asked Clark, at first unbelieving, thinking Sacajawea was making a joke, then wondering why he had not thought of so simple and logical a thing himself long ago.
“Ai, made from green buffalo hide because it is strong.”
After the last meal of the day, Sacajawea showed Clark and York how to make moccasins as best she could remember, for the horses that were most lame. York saw how the moccasins helped, and he made more as the party continued over the stony plains.
And York carved a willow whistle for Pomp as they rode past the small timber in the rain.6
Sacajawea kept looking backward, hoping to see a thin wisp of smoke—something to tell her that the People were near. She stopped frequently and breathed deeply, then took small, shallow breaths, smelling the air. She could detect no camp or horse herd or group of people nearby. To leave this land of the People was one of the hardest and loneliest steps of Sacajawea’s life.
“Don’t lollygag around here,” warned Charbonneau sharply. “Come on, femme. The outfit, she will leave you behind. Faire allons!”
Clark, coming up from the rear, sensed her desire to linger at this last edge of Shoshoni land. He wanted to ease her hurting heart.
“Janey, there is a time to plant and a time to pull up that which was planted.”
She looked at him, her eyes wide. He really knew how she felt. He knew it was hard to pull away from all her childhood memories. He knew she was aching inside and that by tomorrow this land would be something in her past. Slowly she drew herself to her full height.
“You brought me to the land of my people; now you take me away. Is that your right?” The words flashed from her, each word deliberate and each meant to reproach and sting. Her head was held high, her hands making a talk of their own.
In an instant it dawned on Clark that she careddeeply about him and wished for him to feel her hurt as she rode through her people’s land without so much as saying a farewell to them.
She knew also that the things she had submerged and made to stay sleeping in her had come awake. Then she thought how impossible even to speak of this deeper feeling between them. This feeling had roots between them, but the roots could never be nourished and kept alive when the well of feeling had to be kept buried. It had to be a river that never dried up.
Her vehemence went down like a storm wind and faded.
Clark said nothing as he watched her ride ahead. He thought that what he had heard and seen were fragments and ripples of her personal identity as an individual. It was as though a wish had been granted and he had seen inside her skull. He saw she was becoming herself and finding her purpose, no longer cowed by the shackles of Shoshoni or any other native tradition or behavior. She was behaving as a white girl, or any girl, might, given the opportunity to find herself.
On July 18, Charbonneau saw a thin line of smoke rise to the southeast in the plains. Then he became excited when he thought he saw an Indian on the highlands on the opposite side of the river. He rode back to Captain Clark, “Mon dieu, you talk with my son and make jokes, but Jésus, don’t you see that smoke and that man? There, see? He is a Prenegard, a Crow with slanting brown eyes, opened wide, and a single black crow feather in his hair.”
“How could you have seen a man’s eyes from this distance? I did see a line of smoke,” Clark said, wiping the palms of his ha
nds on his buckskins, “but I don’t see it now.”
“You saw the smoke, and that means Indians somewhere,” Charbonneau said, standing up to him.
Some of the other men became jumpy when Charbonneau told about the thieving Crows who were watching the camp constantly. The men became especially uneasy when horses actually began to disappear, one or two at a time, always at night. Only the besthorses were missing. When half the horses vanished one night, doubt was no longer possible.
“Sacre! Now you believe me,” said Charbonneau. “I saw a Crow Indian, a damned, thieving Crow.”
The remaining horses were so nervous that they stampeded one morning when Pryor approached them. He took a search party out and failed to find a single horse, but he brought back a length of Indian rope and a moccasin, still wet around the sole, which seemed to indicate it had been worn a few hours earlier near the water. Shannon found the tracks of the stolen herd, being driven at full speed down the valley. So—perhaps the Crows were around, though no one ever saw them—except old Charbonneau.
Clark ordered Pryor to take Windsor and Shannon and go directly to the Mandan villages. From there they were to go north to the Assiniboin, find Hugh Heney, the Canadian trader they had met in 1804, and give Heney a letter asking him to persuade Sioux chiefs to visit the President of the United States in Washington, D.C. Clark made it clear that he would pick up the three men and the chiefs with his canoes on the way down the Missouri.
These three men were trailed by the Indians, which kept them in a constant state of excitement. One night a wolf came into their camp and bit Pryor’s hand while he slept and was about to attack Windsor when Shannon shot it. “We have two hopes,” said Shannon. “One is that we find Clark again, and the other is that the Indians will not find it necessary to take our scalps.” They shouldered their packs and headed for the river.
Unaware of the three men’s trouble, Clark ran his canoes swiftly down the Yellowstone River, enjoying the scenery. The days were hot, but the nights were cool. Now and again, buffalo dotted the landscape, under the shade of trees, or standing in water, like cattle, or browsing on the soft green hills. Deer and elk were shot from the canoes. Sometimes they heard the booming subterranean geysers hidden in the hollows of the mountains.
On July 25, Clark ordered the dugouts to land. He wanted to examine an unusual rock. Its tall sides werecovered with animal figures; the top was flat except that it had two rock cairns built at the summit that seemed to mesh together because there were Vs in the rim aligned like Vs in a rifle sight. Clark examined the top of this unusual rock, which rose almost sheer above the broad, flat plain of the Yellowstone Valley. There were no loose stones on the top. Clark surmised that some people had to carry the stones for the cairns up the steep, accessible northeast side, a hundred and fifty to two hundred feet from the valley. Inside the cairns were bird bones, together with several small clay bowls painted black and several others painted white.
“Too bad we did not find this earlier,” sighed Clark. “It might be some kind of structure to measure the solstice. We could have tested it with spring stars. I wonder who made use of it.”
Clark was busy examining the carvings, then pointed out some interesting markings to Sacajawea. She ran her hands over the rock and found more carvings of deer grazing. As she bent close to the rock, Pomp, in a blanket on her back, reached out and touched one primitive animal representation.
“Bear,” he said plainly.
Clark reached for the child’s hand. “I name this pillar Pompy’s Tower,” he said ceremoniously.
York laughed and said, “Some folks’ll think this rock was named for a little pickaninny instead of Janey’s firstborn.”
Looking down to the base of the pillar, Clark saw a creek flowing close by and announced, “I dedicate the creek below to my little dancing boy, Pomp, and name it by his given name, Jean Baptiste’s Creek.”7 Before climbing all the way down the rock, Clark paused to chip his name and the date in the side. “Pryor and his men will know we’ve been here if they pass this way,” he said.
“I could chip a buffalo in the rock,” quipped Charbonneau, “but I could not spell my name. Maybe someone would do that for me?”
“Aw, come on down carefully. It would be better if you roasted us some fresh buffalo hump. I saw lots of those big beasts below us just waiting for some hunter to shoot,” said Clark, grabbing for the small brush to steady his downward path.
CHAPTER
33
Big White
The Mandan subchief, Sheheke, or Big White, was named because of his blueish eyes and white hair. He went down the Missouri in 1806 with Captains Lewis and Clark. From St. Louis he traveled to Washington D.C. to meet his Great White Father. His safe return to the Mandans caused many problems for the United States Government.
Lewis and Clark presented Big White with a Jefferson Peace Medal that is three and three-sixteenth inches in diameter. The suspension lug soldered to the collar is small and the medal weighs one and a half ounces. It is a near miracle that the medal still exists and has not been bent or scarred more than it actually is. Big White treasured the medal and passed it on to his son, White Painted Horse, who passed it on to his son, Tobacco. Big White’s grandson, Tobacco, passed it on to his son, Gun That Guards The Horse. So it was given to Big White’s other descendants: Good Boy, Four Bears, Four Turtles, Red Buffalo Cow, and Black Eagle. Finally it came to the great, great, great, great grandson of Big White, Burr Crows Breast of Elbowwoods, North Dakota. Burr Crows Breast sold the medal to the western history lover andgeneral practitioner, Dr. ?. O. Leonard of Garrison, North Dakota.
PAUL RUSSELL CUTRIGHT, “Lewis and Clark Peace Medals,” The Bulletin. St. Louis: The Missouri Historical Society, vol. 24, no. 2, 1968, pp. 165-66.
Once Clark had the men pull all the canoes into shore because the river was blackened with buffalo fording from one side to the other.
“We have come nine hundred miles down to the Yellowstone by my estimate,” said Clark.
When they were under way once again, Sacajawea kept smelling the air and looking toward both riverbanks.
“What do you look for?” asked Charbonneau suspiciously. “Are there Indians near?”
“Not natives, but ai, people. It is difficult to understand.”
“You are the one that is difficult to understand,” sighed Charbonneau.
“Oh, no,” said Sacajawea, “I only say what I feel.”
“Your thoughts go one way, and your tongue only just points after them. There is a lot to imagine to follow some of your words.” He watched her working in the bow of the heavy canoe; the child was tied to a crossbar behind her. She paddled as steadily as any man.
Clark and some of the others heard her words, but could not imagine who could be near. Pryor and his group were far overland, they were sure, and it was not yet time to meet with Captain Lewis and his party.
“There is a group of people near,” she repeated.
Clark did not believe in prescience and told her so. She only smiled back, her face, in the strong reflection from the water, cheerful but stubborn.
When they reached the junction of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers, Clark began to wonder if Sacajawea might be right and maybe Lewis’s outfit was close, so he wrote deep in the wet sand of the riverbank: w. c. A FEW MILES DOWN ON RIGHT-HAND SIDE. For two nights Clark’s group camped on the right-hand side of the river. The mosquitoes drove everyone crazy. On the third day they were pushing the canoes back out into the river when Sacajawea pulled at Clark’s sleeve, grinned, and pointed upstream. Coming down the Missouri in their bull boats were Nat Pryor, Dick Windsor, and George Shannon.
At noon four days later, there was a loud cry and waving of caps from the men as they sighted the canoes of Lewis’s party. Sacajawea smiled broadly at Clark. He shook his head with wonderment. Her talent was something that civilized white men seemed to have little intelligence about. Then Clark turned to watch the canoes land, and he beg
an to have a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Something was wrong. He could not see Captain Lewis anywhere.
“Where is he?” shouted Clark, running forward to examine the oncoming canoes.
Pat Gass looked up, jerking his thumb toward the bottom of his canoe. “Here! It’s shot he was!”
“Good God! He’s—all right? Is he hurt badly?” Clark ran to the beaching canoe with the others all following. Oh, God, don’t let anything happen to that good man, he thought. How could he have been shot? Had they run into some unfriendly natives? His fears were quieted when he found that Lewis had only a buttock wound. Then he could not hold back his relief and laughed heartily when he was told that the nearsighted Cruzatte had mistaken his captain for an elk.
Lewis lay pale but smiling in the bottom of the canoe. “Cruzatte is probably the only soldier in any army known to have shot his commanding officer in the seat without punishment.”
“The man should have looked where he was pointing that muzzle,” said Clark. Gently he and York lifted Lewis up out of the canoe and carried him to the camp on the river’s edge.
“Oh, it was a mistake, just an accident. It is nothing,” Lewis said softly.
Cruzatte looked shamefaced at Captain Clark. “Sir, I never should have gone hunting! I will stick to fiddle playing from now on.”
“I keep telling you it will heal in twenty days, a month at the most. Don’t berate yourself for an unavoidable accident,” said Lewis slowly.
Clark, taking no chances, examined the wound. It was still so painful that Lewis fainted as Clark cleansed it. He dressed it with fresh patent lint from the medical stores.
Sacajawea went to York and said, “Strong clover teamight revive Captain Lewis. Then he needs to eat meat for more strength.”
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