Sacajawea

by Anna Lee Waldo

  He glanced at her, and a shy smile caught at his full lips. “I had a woman down at Bent’s Fort a couple of years back. She wanted to visit her relatives. Carson ran into me while I was in her Ute camp. He knew my father was Charbonneau, and he could have knocked me over with a buzzard’s feather when he said he knew old man Charbonneau’s woman, who was then at Bridger’s. I just didn’t believe him at first. I thought he was making fun of me because I had a Shoshoni mother and was a breed, same as my old man. But not that Carson; he finally made me believe every word about this Shoshoni squaw. I headed this way, then heard there was some trouble here with the Saints, so I waited some before coming in right away.” He rummaged around inside his shirt and found a metal bottle. He passed it to Shoogan. Shoogan opened it and found it was not water and had to spit out his mouthful. The man laughed and drank a big swallow. Sacajawea could smell rum. The man went on talking. Everyone watched him carefully.

  “That Carson talked a lot about what a fine woman this squaw was. And he hoped I’d find you. He’s a talker—a big chief white man who thinks he can order people around and parcel out land like it was his own. Then I finally got up to this place called Fort Hall—a measly place where the miners hang out. I’d heard about this man Broken Hand, but never run across him until a couple of weeks ago. He sold me a couple of jugs of watered rum and told me I ought to look up this old mother—who once lived with my father—if I was actually a Charbonneau. So—I came as soon as I could. That Broken Hand Fitzpatrick is as bad as Carson about ordering people around. Ki-ti white men I can do without! How about you, Brother Shoogan?”

  Shoogan looked startled, but nodded his head. His face darkened and remained blank. It was coming back to him where he’d met this man before.

  The man passed the bottle of rum to Shoogan again. Shoogan refused. The man took small drinks until it was all gone. Then he said, “I will bring my women, and we will stay in your tepee, Umbea.”

  This time Sacajawea looked startled. “You have no lodge of your own? Your women cannot put one together?”

  “Well—ha—a tent, but this is larger, and you, Old Mother, can cook much better.”

  “Can’t your women cook?” asked Dancing Leaf timidly, looking shyly at this new relative.

  “Not like this,” said the man, reaching for some stringy bits of bear meat from the kettle.

  “Come with me.” Sacajawea’s voice was stern, almost like one she would use when scolding a child for some small wrongdoing. Her hand motion was serious as she led this man from the lodge. She led him to Shoogan’s tepee and told the children inside, “Shoo, shoo, go to my tepee now. Tell your mothers to make a kettle of coffee. One of you find the small bag near the dried yampa.”

  “Aw, we want to look at the new man,” said the oldest boy, Lance.

  “Non! Vamoose!” she said. The children fled as if she were a woman chief.

  She sat on the tepee floor and motioned for the man who called himself Baptiste Charbonneau to do the same.

  “Aren’t we going to sit on hides?” he asked, dismayed at her lack of hospitality.

  “A weasel needs no comforts.”

  “What? What does that mean?”

  “You are old Charbonneau’s son. You are so much like your father that my legs turn to water when I hear you speak. But you are not my firstborn. There is no rough scar behind your left ear such as Baptiste carries from a painful sickness long ago when we traveled with Chief Red Hair. You are Otter Woman’s son. You are Toussaint. So why? Why do you call yourself by your brother’s name?” Her voice was barely audible.

  “Ai,” said Toussaint, his head bowed, his eyes on the ground. He felt in his shirt for the bottle. It was empty, and he threw it across to the far wall of the tepee. “My brother, Baptiste, will not come to live with you!” he shouted. He seemed to search for his words. “He is a chief among the white men. He can talk with them, laugh with them. He knows their ways. He knows the ways of the Indians. He has always been this way. Quick to learn and get ahead. Carson told me fine things and how he could be as tough as a mule driver, yet as gentle as a young squaw with her firstborn. Then that Fitzpatrick told me everyone likes him—Indians, squaws, traders, everyone. These words were enough to make me sick and vomit up everything in my stomach. That damn Bap leaves a trail of goodness wherever he goes. I hate him. I hated him when he went to the gold fields in Montana and staked a decent claim. I couldn’t finda thing in those hills, and I got out before I ended up as buzzard bait. I didn’t hear anything more about my brother for quite a while. No one is sure where he might be—maybe in California, maybe not—so then I think maybe he is dead. I hope so. So—I will walk on his glory trail now. I will be him.”

  Sacajawea’s shoulders sagged. She wept.

  In full control of himself now, Toussaint sneered. “Two suns ago on my way here, I was given food and a new name by those damn men who call themselves Saints. They knew you and called you Porivo. I knew it was you because they said once you had even made a speech for one of their celebrations. You are the only Shoshoni woman I know who would get up and make a speech. I remember you have always spoken out.”

  She nodded. “That was more than several years ago, before the mission closed,” she said. “It is a wonder they recalled such a thing.”

  “I told them I would like the name of Baptiste instead of my Shoshoni name, Bull Head. They never guessed I had any other name. So now that is my name. They wrote it in a small book and promised it would go in a larger one kept at their headquarters in Salt Lake City. I am your son, Baptiste, then. And so—I will bring my women and we will live with you. Rejoice, old woman, your son is finally home!”

  “Ho!” Sacajawea exclaimed, drying her eyes with her fists. “You can never live in my lodge. You can live in this camp, but at the very edge. If you put your tepee close to mine, I will tell my Shoshoni relatives about your forked tongue.” Her voice broke, and she put her face in her hands and sobbed.

  “We will go back to your tepee,” he said. “I will sit around the storytelling fire and tell of my travels to Germany. Bap told enough that I can make them last awhile.”

  She tried to tell Toussaint to be quiet, but nothing seemed to make him close his mouth. “Bap was with Duke Paul six winters and speaks German better than the instructors in Father Neil’s school. He told about the Wobenamptike, Wooden Shoe White Man. He hunted and fished and was a big man in Germany, too. I do hate him!”

  Sacajawea went outside. She took a deep breath and looked up. The stars were bright in the dark sky. They were the same; they had not changed.

  Toussaint had not really changed. He was always short and stocky—a trademark of the Shoshoni—but there was little of the youth she had known and loved in him. He had become bitter, and his tongue was split, and he was scheming. She wondered if she could ever cross the gap of years that lay between them.

  She stood straight in the late spring air. “Son,” she said.

  He stood slouched beside her for many moments, waiting.

  “You will talk with Shoogan now. You will tell him that you have decided to pitch your tepee at the far side of the camp where you get the fresh breeze.”

  They walked toward the tepee.

  Inside, Toussaint said, “If she had a good man, he would whip her for crying.” He pointed to the reddened eyes of Sacajawea. “She is glad to have me home.”

  When Shoogan and his family had drunk hot, sugared coffee, by the gallon—because Sacajawea kept filling the kettle and boiling coffee and filling the cups—they left. Crying Basket and her man went outside to see the stars. Sacajawea said, “Tell me about the last time you saw your brother.”

  “It was five, six, seven summers back. We were at Bent’s. He got me a job as hunter for the fort. I was going to help him get meat for those white dudes to eat all winter. That was when I first took my Ute woman. And some jackasses, along with my brother, pounded kettles and sang loud outside the tepee. They fired someone’s rifle and had that
woman so scared all she’d do was huddle at the far end of the sleeping robe. The next morning, I was still sore, and took a shot at Sam, the black blacksmith who’d sung loudest. St. Vrain came out and ordered me away from the fort. The white man ordering me around again! Bap saw I got two horses, a cart, and supplies; then I went away. I suppose he paid for those things from his own pocket—I never laid out a cent for them.” He paused and looked up. His face brightened. “Say, maybe Shoogan and his woman willlet me and my family live with them. They seemed impressed with me tonight. They think I am somebody!”

  “You will not! You will pitch your own tepee and hunt for your own meat. Shoogan is a chief. He cannot read or write, but he can lead men and he commands respect and love from his people. You can read and write and talk in the white man’s tongue, and yet you have not become a man. You even take advantage of the Sioux and ride out of their camp with one of their good war-horses. You are a spoiled child.”

  Toussaint looked at her from under his eyebrows. His mouth turned down farther, his eyes uncertain. “But, Umbea!”

  “When your lodge is set up at the edge of this camp, I would like to meet your women. I will never call you by your new name, but I will call you son as long as you stay to yourself.”

  That fall, the Lemhi Shoshonis under the leadership of Washakie traveled near the headwaters of the Green River on their annual antelope hunt. Toussaint was among the hunters. Sacajawea had seen him leave with the men and wondered if he would bring back enough meat to last his two wives and children most of the winter or whether he would beg Shoogan for more before the winter season was half-over. She’d shook her head watching him ride his horse out, wondering about this man who so resembled his father and called her mother.

  On the way back to camp after the successful hunt, the Lemhi men were attacked by a large party of Sioux, who were after the horse they recognized as their own, the one Toussaint had loaded with fresh meat.

  The Sioux came across a creek and surprised the Lemhis as they came down a narrow slope leading from a bluff top flanked by a gully-washed ravine in the bottom of a meadow. The crafty Sioux had an instinct for surprise attack as keen as the nose of a wolf for a newborn buffalo calf, and they sensed that the Lemhis would not watch this ravine, since they would assume it could not pass a horse and rider. Also, they knew the Lemhis would have to go around the head of it, up on the bluff, to get to the slope that led down to their camp.

  The Sioux were hidden in the rocks at the top of the ravine just as Washakie started around it with his hunters. Nearly all the Sioux had rifles besides their bows and arrows. The fire they put into the Lemhis starting around the head of the ravine was like the blade of a four-horse reaper in a field of ripe wheat. Washakie led his men back to a low spot where they could hide. They fought all afternoon as long as there was light.

  During the early night a fitful fire was kept up by both sides, but the Lemhis began to go back to camp before the middle of the night, certain that the Sioux were already whipped enough and would make no trouble the next day. Dawn found the Lemhis straggling home with their wounded. Nannaggai, the oldest son of Washakie, was dead, and so was one of Washakie’s finest subchiefs, Nowroyawn, or Snag. Shoogan was wounded in his left knee. He pulled the arrow point out himself and stanched the blood flow by stuffing part of his red trade shirt in the wound.

  There was still plenty of good light left when they reached camp. The relatives of the dead men began their high-pitched keening. Crying Basket went with Smell of Sugar to comfort the lodge of his dead father, Nowroyawn. Sacajawea worked with the women tending the wounded. She and Dancing Leaf treated Shoogan as best they could. It was hard for them to handle him, as his knee was stiff by this time. His woman, Devoted, would not permit the Medicine Man to put his herbs and beaver fur on the wound, saying that Porivo would treat it best, and prayer to the Great Spirit would heal as fast as anything he might pull out of his bulging bundle.

  As the women worked on the wound, Shoogan groaned and swore. When his women went for soft leather strips for wrappings, Shoogan motioned Sacajawea to come closer. “Old Mother, you and I both know that man is not your son, Bap. That half-breed is the other one you asked about, the mean one called Tess. I have seen him before, but did not want to admit it. He is no good. He has fought against our band on the side of the Sioux. I am certain he tried to make some bargain as a spy to get horses for the Sioux and himself this time. A manwith such a forked tongue cannot be trusted. When the fight was thickest at the ravine, I saw him crouched low with a Sioux behind a pile of downfall. Conquering Bear was with me. I said nothing, but he might have recognized him. Conquering Bear took careful aim and shot the Sioux in the head. This man, Tess, rolled over out of sight, and I did not see him again during the rest of the time. He is not in camp yet. His women wait at the doorway of their lodge for him to come with antelope meat.”

  Sacajawea bit her lower lip. Her voice would not come out of her throat.

  “Do not worry, Old Mother, I will not tell this secret. Perhaps to a mother, finding this son is better than finding no son at all.” The bond between Shoogan and Sacajawea grew with this love and trust.

  When the evening fires were low and the women’s keening subdued, Toussaint rode into camp, staked out his horses, and called to his women to take off the bundles of meat. Washakie had seen him ride into camp. Grieving and angered that this man had not taken part in the deadly skirmish, he walked to Toussaint’s lodge and said loudly, “You come like a squaw into camp after the fight is over.”

  “I was picking up my meat, and I do not like you to tell me what I look like.” Toussaint waved the barrel of his rifle toward Washakie.

  “I never gave orders to my men in battle or council,” Washakie spoke out. “But it is fitting for a chief to give advice when it is necessary.”

  Indignant that Washakie would speak to him in such a manner, Toussaint stepped over the bundles of meat his women were preparing to open, climbed back on his horse, and rode out of camp. He came back before dawn broke and sulked in his lodge, complaining that the cries of the women mourners kept him awake.

  CHAPTER

  54

  The Great Treaty Council

  The Great Treaty Council, officially known as the Fort Bridger Treaty Council of 1868, was highly significant as it was the last treaty council called for the purpose of establishing a reservation. Thereafter, all reservations were created by executive order.

  A legend grew out of this council that Porivo [Sacajawea] spoke. The elders present insisted that she was there and that she arose and addressed her remarks to Washakie’s subchief, Bazil [Shoogan].

  From The Shoshonis: Sentinels of the Rockies, by Virginia Cole Trenholm and Maurine Carley. Copyright 1964 by the University of Oklahoma Press, pp. 219–20.

  In 1861, a stagecoach route was established along the Oregon Trail. A year later, because of Indian attacks, the mail and passenger coaches were withdrawn and transferred to the Cherokee Trail, which gradually became known as the Overland Trail. It was known that Washakie and his tribe were not involved in the killing of emigrants along either trail.

  The white men let Sacajawea know that she could ride the stage to Fort Hall anytime. They seemed to think she was somebody important. She did not know that Bridger had told them she was the squaw who had guided Lewis and Clark to the west. She visited Suzanne and went to Fort Benton, and she followed the Bozeman Trail to Virginia City, where she set up her tepee among the Bannocks. Now she asked no one about Baptiste Charbonneau, but she looked and listened, still hunting her firstborn.

  One evening, she was getting on the stage leaving Virginia City. She had decided to go as far west as California, leaving her goods in a pack with a friendly Bannock family. Henry Plummer, the road agent, serving as sheriff in the country around Virginia City, lounged up against the stage.

  “I knowed they all let ye ride for nuttin’ because ye are something big to the whites and Injuns. Ye har headed southwest. B
ut ye cain’t go this one time. Here, take these home to yer kids.” He placed three sacks of flour on the ground. Sacajawea looked from the flour to the sheriff. He motioned with his thumb. She climbed off, determined to go another time. That night the stage was shot up and robbed.

  A scout for the government came into Virginia City looking for an interpreter. Sacajawea talked to the man, John Renshaw, after the stage pulled out and told him she would work as interpreter for him. He seemed overjoyed to find a squaw who could speak English so well. He slept outside her tepee that night in his bedroll, but before the night was over, he must have felt the cold wind and crept inside the tepee and lay on the robe beside Sacajawea.

  “Will ye be my woman?” he muttered quietly.

  She grabbed for the nearest weapon, the thighbone of an elk, and brought it down on his head. Renshaw left as soon as he got his bearings.

  She struck her tepee and again packed her belongings and took the stage toward home, not even looking back. There will be a better day for going southwest, she thought.

  When she arrived at Fort Bridger, she put her packs down by the gate and went inside to see what had been going on since she had been gone. Washakie and several Lemhis stood at the store counter. Jake rummaged around under the counter.

  “This here came in a couple of weeks back with a load of provisions from the U.S. Govmint. It’s for you. Has your name right here. See? That there stands for your name.”

  Washakie was perplexed at why the U.S. Government would send something so small to him and not to all the other men in his tribe. He stood where all could see him and slowly opened the package and then beamed with pleasure.

  Sacajawea moved closer for a better look, then cried, “Yi-hi! It is something grand!” He was holding up a silver medal bearing the likeness of the Great White Father, Andrew Johnson. Washakie walked through the crowd smiling. When he passed Sacajawea he held out his medal and pointed to the Jefferson peace medal she wore around her neck. Then his smile became broader because her medal was smaller than his. It was a medal for a squaw.