Sacajawea

by Anna Lee Waldo

  Shortly after daybreak, Sacajawea awoke, refreshed by a deep sleep. Her eyes, still puffy from weeping, moved to the corner where Otter Woman still lay, thento the boys, who were grinning at her from their bed. She moved to the empty pallet where Charbonneau slept when he was home. It was mussed, as if someone had slept on it. The door opened and Miss Judy pushed her way in, carrying a load of wood for the fireplace. She dropped the logs, took off the black headkerchief, and her dark curls flowed down her back in long ropes of braid. Her large brown eyes were serene, but the lids were still red and swollen. She said not a word, but found a straw broom and swept the room, smoothed out Charbonneau’s pallet, showing she’d slept there, then straightened Sacajawea’s pallet, put moccasins and shirts on the boys, and began preparing porridge. She showed a complete familiarity as to where things were and what to do. As she mixed the meal to go in the pot, Sacajawea spoke softly, “Why do you do the morning cleaning and cooking as though you, too, lived here? Why?”

  “We need more water from the spring,” Miss Judy said to the boys, then faced Sacajawea. “Janey, I could not stay in my big house alone—without Will, I mean. I kept thinking how he will feel when he hears about Lewis’s death. And I kept thinking about what that old dog Scannon will do now without him. Rose talked to me, but it was little help. Finally she suggested I come to you. She said you’d understand more than anyone that the Lord had called our good friend to his side because his work on this earth was done.”

  Miss Judy scrubbed the kitchen table and laid out the bowls and spoons Sacajawea had just washed.

  Sacajawea went to the shelf and brought down a small leather pouch. She pulled up the old packing crate and seated herself at the table to open the pouch in her hand.

  “See this blue ribbon? Your man gave it to me. And this comb and looking glass. See this red feather? Hold it. It reminds me of my father and my brother. Our friend gave it to me when we came back over the mountains in the snow. And so—here is the chip of blue sky on the leather lacing. I like to wear it. It was once my mother’s, then my grandmother’s. I do not know where it will go after I leave this earth. And see, here is my chief money.” She took out the peace medal Sun Womanhad given her. “Here is a red piece of glass I made myself. See the bird on it? These are things, but they bring memories. Things can be taken away, but never memories. You and I cannot ever forget our friend, the sandy-haired white chief.”

  Miss Judy put the red feather back into Sacajawea’s hand. “And so, you keep it to remind you of our friend.” Sacajawea dropped the cardinal’s feather back into Miss Judy’s lap.

  “Janey,” Miss Judy began, deeply touched, “we are about the same age, yet I feel you are so much wiser.” Her voice became a whisper. “I do not understand, but I accept. I have seen goodness and love.” She bowed her head. “Oh, Lord, this has not been our will, but yours. Now, while my heart is tender, speak to me, Lord.”

  Sacajawea was moved by this conversation between Miss Judy and her Lord. She felt a strength come to her as she sat quietly listening.

  “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted,” Miss Judy whispered.

  Otter Woman stirred and said that she would get up after she had taken another sip or two of her cough syrup.

  Quietly Sacajawea washed the boys’ faces in a wooden basin and sent them outside to dry off. She gave Little Tess a bucket to fill with spring water.

  “Why wash faces? Who is to see?” asked Otter Woman, grabbing a bowl and spoon from the shelf, then moving toward the hot porridge.

  “Dishes are on the table,” said Sacajawea. “I will serve you there.”

  Otter Woman looked surprised. “At the table? Just for eating? I don’t want to eat at a table. I’d feel like it was in that school Miss Judy tells about with those desks.”

  “Otter Woman! You should not speak that way with guests,” said Sacajawea.

  “I like to sit at a table,” said Miss Judy, dragging up the birch chair.

  Most reluctantly, Otter Woman also dragged up a crate. Sacajawea looked relieved, but Otter Woman asked, “Miss Judy, do you always eat at a table?”

  “Whenever there is company,” Miss Judy said.

  “Sometimes Will has his journals and scrapbooks on it, so there is hardly room for anybody but him to eat there.”

  “But,” objected Otter Woman, “here there is no company. We all slept here together last night; there is no company.”

  “There is a friend who is our guest,” Sacajawea insisted.

  “That is true,” Otter Woman agreed, “and because she is my friend she should not have to eat at a table. We’ll eat like last night. Fill my bowl. I am hungry.”

  “But Otter Woman, you are thoughtless. Miss Judy wants to eat at a table, and the boys like to also. The coffee is ready. You pour it.”

  Otter Woman stared at Miss Judy as though she found it hard to believe. “I’ll get the coffee. You get the bread,” she said belligerently to Sacajawea.

  Sacajawea piled cold fried bread on the table and began ladling out the porridge into the bowls from the pot hanging near the fire. Pot was the right word, for it was the tall type of granite-ware chamber pot with a wooden handle on a wire bail. A smaller pot was on the hearth holding the stock for stew.

  Miss Judy tilted her head, listening. “There’s the sound of a horse coming. Someone is singing. A man, I think.”

  “I hear it, too,” said Sacajawea.

  The door swung open, and there stood General William Clark. He had been in Kentucky with Cindy Lou when the news of Lewis’s death arrived.

  Otter Woman came to a standing position, holding back a coughing spasm. Sacajawea stood. One of high rank had entered.

  “Rose told me I’d find you here, the three of you gaining strength from one another. Sit down. I’ll have some of that hot porridge, too. Smells good.”

  “You have come to mourn the loss of our friend?” asked Sacajawea in a whisper.

  “Yes,” said Clark, “and no. I have also come to fetch Judy, to bring you news of Charbonneau, to praise the Lord for such a fine day, and to tell you I believe York has gone out west somewhere.”

  Sacajawea snatched up the peeling knife and beganto push it down on the first knuckle of her right little finger.

  “Janey, what are you doing? Stop that!” shouted Clark.

  Miss Judy looked from one to the other, her face pale.

  “You wish to do the cutting of your own finger for mourning our friend first?” Sacajawea asked, bewildered that Clark did not understand her action.

  He understood. “Don’t mourn for Lewis in that way. The white man’s God does not require him to mutilate himself to show his sense of loss.” He wrapped his handkerchief around the cut and bleeding finger. “Lewis would not ask you to do that for him. You know what he wants us to do?”

  Sacajawea shook her head. “You must not speak his name.”

  “That is something else we do differently,” Clark said, sitting on a crate beside Sacajawea.

  She felt somehow ashamed that she had displeased him with traditions deep-seated within her—something that her nation and even Minnetarees did. She had wished to show she honored Lewis as much as one of her relatives. She held up her left hand so that Clark could see where she had cut the first joint from her little finger years before.

  Clark touched her quivering shoulders and spoke softly.

  “Lew’s brother, Reuben, is up the Missouri somewhere, so it is up to me to get his affairs in order. Lewis’s papers and baggage have been sent here to me. He left everything to his stepsister, Lucy Marks. See, the white man can tell from a piece of paper who should have his possessions after he leaves this earth. I am going to get all the diaries Lewis kept, and those I kept on the trip west, and make a book. It is up to me now.”

  Sacajawea understood. The talking book was something both white chiefs had worked on. Lewis had asked her about flowers and roots that were edible. He had asked her about leaves and bark that wer
e medicinal, and she had shown him what she remembered from her childhood or had learned from her Minnetaree captors.

  Clark looked into her tear-swollen eyes. “I will askyou questions about our trip so that I will have everything correct in the book people read. You’ll help me?”

  “I cannot read,” she said.

  “Pomp will learn. He will read to you from our book.”

  “Ai, that will please me.” Sacajawea looked at Clark and tried to smile.

  “Early this morning I came home,” continued Clark in a voice faintly touched with humor, as though a man cannot help his voice. “I was muddy, weary from riding, but there was no wife to greet me at my home, only Rose, the other servants, and my young son, Lew, howling for someone to feed him.”

  Miss Judy looked up, almost tearful again, but Clark took her hand across the plank table and continued, “I think I will ask Nick Biddle to edit the journals for me and to visit us at your old home in Virginia.”2

  Judy’s face brightened. “Oh, are we really going to have a holiday in Virginia?”

  “I am ready,” said Clark. “Do you think you can get your howling young son ready?”

  Sacajawea sat quietly, thinking. She did not know this Nick Biddle, but she knew George Shannon and she knew he was studying to be a rule keeper3 to help the white men and Indians keep rules and live peacefully. She had little fear anymore of speaking up when she had an idea that seemed good in her own mind.

  “How far is it from that Virginia to Kentucky?” she asked.

  “Well, Kentucky is on the way to Virginia,” answered Clark, now dangling Pomp on his knees and winking at Little Tess, who was on his other side.

  “I think Shannon will do best with the talking book. He was there.”

  “That’s a thought! George would like to do it, too. He’s a fine scholar. For that matter, he’s a good teacher—taught both these women English,” he said, winking at his wife. “On the expedition he sometimes asked me what words were most important for Janey to know.”

  “You told him the words I learned?” Sacajawea was surprised.

  “No, not really. I told him to teach you as much as he knew.”

  They laughed, seeing the absurdity, and Clark remembered how Shannon had struggled to get Otter Woman to pronounce any English word correctly. She always had trouble with the b, f, j, and I sounds because those did not exist in the Minnetaree tongue. At times she sounded as though she had a cleft palate, and her Minnetaree speech patterns made her English sound so matter-of-fact that dramatic effects were heightened. Her tense and word order struck him as hilarious, and now Clark tried to remember choice examples, but these and other qualities of her early English eluded him.

  “If only you’d been here last night,” said Miss Judy. “What would you have done with one simple gloomy thought?”

  “We will be neither simple nor gloomy. We have work to do, and we will keep the memory of our friend alive forever,” answered Clark. “That is an order. Come home now, Judy. Let these women set their house in order. There is a change in the air. Winter will be here. And that old rascal Charbonneau is coming home. That is what I came to tell you.” He stood up and took a step toward Sacajawea. “Before he left for the Arkansas, we had a long talk. There will be school next fall for these two boys. Why don’t you ask him to take you and Otter on a trip before it gets too cold?” Clark put his arms around the shoulders of both Indian women, who were now standing beside the door. Miss Judy filled the mugs with hot coffee and sent the boys outside on the front step. When the coffee was gone, they were all outside saying good-bye. There was laughter, there was hope, and there was work to be done.

  Otter Woman went back inside and began washing the cups and bowls, complaining of the mess left for her to clean. She ordered Sacajawea to put fat meat in the simmering stew because if Charbonneau were on his way, he’d certainly be hungry when he got home.

  CHAPTER

  38

  Otter Woman’s Sickness

  April 2, 1811

  We have on board a Frenchman named Charbonet, with his wife, an Indian woman of the Snake nation, both of who accompanied Lewis and Clark to the Pacific, and were of great service. The woman, a good creature, of mild and gentle disposition, was greatly attached to the whites, whose manner and dress she tries to imitate, but she has become sickly and longed to revisit her native country; her husband also, who had spent many years amongst the Indians, has become weary of civilized life.

  LEROY R. HAFEN, ed., “The W. M. Boggs Manuscript about Bent’s Fort.” Colorado Magazine, vol. 7, 1930, pp. 66–7.

  Also in:

  REUBEN GOLD THWAITES, ed., Early Western Travelers

  1804–1807, “Journal of a Voyage up the River Missouri,” by Henry M. Brackenridge, vol. VI. Baltimore: Coale and Maxwell, 1816. Reprinted by The Arthur H. Clark Co., Cleveland, 1904: pp. 32–3.

  Two days after Clark came to the cabin for his wife, Charbonneau arrived, asking for more beaver traps. He’d lost two on his trip to the Arkansas. General Clark offered him four and urged him to take his family on a short trapping trip before the winter wind and rains came. “It will prevent cabin fever,” Clark said.

  “I know there is buffalo on the Platte, and these squaws can skin them out as fast as I shoot them. It is far—cannot stay long with deux femmes and enfants on a trip. Plenty beaver there, also. Yi-eo-ow-ee! I go!”

  Charbonneau led the way, his squaws riding a single horse, his boys riding another that was piled high with baggage. Twenty-four days out of Saint Louis, they passed the mouth of the Platte River. Here, a few miles downstream at the mouth, and a few miles upstream at Council Bluffs, a dozen or more fur companies had posts built for the Pawnee, Omaha, Oto, Ponca, and Iowa trade. The Charbonneau family pitched their skin tepee near one post and watched Charbonneau go to buy more supplies and exchange stories with the French-Canadians at the post.

  “By gar,” he said, “it is good to hear someone play the French harp again.”

  “There’s some music in everyone,” said an old trapper who sat with his back against the vertical logs at the front of the trading post.

  “Who’s that!” yelled a voice from inside.

  “It’s Charbonneau, on his way to get a few beaver plews before winter gets going.”

  “Well, son of a gun, Big Tessie. I remember when you took that purty little Arapaho into your tent, and consarn my picture if her pappy wasn’t mad because you didn’t give him a horse in trade. I’ll swear you stood up to him and in hand sign, with the delicatest kind of a tremble coming in your hands, answered him back that some of these here days he’d have a papoose instead. Haw-haw-haw, was that there old coot mad. When he give his rusty rifle the waking touch, you squatted as if her bark was going to bite you!”

  “Oui, and I bet I left the papoose,” said Charbonneau, laughing exultantly.

  “You were gone the next morning afore the sun came up. You’re powerful with the women, sure ‘nuf.”

  “How long you been in charge of this here post, Jake?”

  “Since I last hear you come down from Red River of the North. You been among those métis and roughnecks of the Hudson’s Bay lately? Or the muskeeters too much for you?”

  “Non, I been thinking of trying a farm in Saint Louis. That is not considered a business for a mountain man, but by gar—I might be able to raise some nice sheep or goats.” Then he looked at the old trapper. “Hey, you want to sell that harp poking out of your pocket there?”

  “This here French harp?” asked the old trapper. “That’s certain, if you got a pint of good whiskey.”

  “It’s with my gear. Brandy. I will get it for you. Then I play you a tune on that French harp. I always have one, but lost mine somewheres.”

  “I’m coming to get my pint, you varmint,” said the trapper.

  “I got deux femmes and enfants with me. You like to come out and meet them? They went to the west with me and back again. Capitaines Lewis and Clark made that trip with
us. My squaws act like the white women now. They never are satisfied with nothing. They like the calico dress. Jésus, it is an expense. And Jésus, muskeetairs are big on the Columbia—big as the buzzards that follow us all the way from the Upper Missouri.”

  “Well, I ain’t going turn down a chance to see some good-looking squaws and little breed kids running around naked.”

  “You corn-dodger mill, my kids are not naked. My kids are going to school next year or so.”

  “Trapping must be good business for you, I swear. You with the XY or Nor’west?”

  “Independent,” answered Charbonneau. “Capitaine—he’s now Générale—Clark, he sends them to the school. He thinks my family is worth all that for what we did as interpreters to the Pacific.”

  The old trapper shook his head. Sacajawea and Otter Woman nodded to him. He told the boys how to playcrack-the-whip and played with them until he was winded.

  Charbonneau gave him a pint of well-watered brandy and sat down to play the French harp. Sacajawea was pleased to hear such happy sounds around the camp.

  “Imagine taking these here two squaws and chilluns to the far west,” sighed the old trapper. He sat on the doorsill of the post, a shriveled little old man with hair and face gray as ashes. He had dark Indian eyes, high cheekbones, and a long, sickle-shaped nose.

  Charbonneau played a couple of old French tunes and sang some dirty words. Then he and the old trapper sang one together, laughing heartily. Stridently they took up each last line and, repeating it three or four times, kicked holes in the ground to the rhythm of it. Otter Woman began to dance as she gathered up firewood for the evening. Little Tess and Pomp sang with their father, who recited to them a new verse about how he took his Arapaho girl to the schoolhouse for to learn her reading and writing and ordinary living, and as it was quite original and unprintable for those times, the old trapper and post clerk laughed and swore joyfully.