Sacajawea

by Anna Lee Waldo

  “Something grand,” repeated the child. “Only you and Chief Washakie wear such a thing, and yours came first.”

  Early the next day, the Shoshonis and Bannocks were in their large semicircle before General Augur, Washakie, Taghee, Shoogan, and other important men.

  Washakie did not wait for Augur to begin talking. As soon as the pipe-smoking was over, he stood up and asked, “How is the land going to be marked off that the Shoshonis can call it their own?”

  Augur looked surprised that a Shoshoni would ask such a thing. He began to explain the meaning of latitude and longitude as determined by the sun and stars. Shoogan began to use hand signs and stuttered in his interpretation. Washakie was respectfully silent. When Augur was finished, Washakie asked, “Would an Indian ever measure the height of a mountain that hecould climb? No, never. The legends of his tribe tell him nothing about quadrants and baselines and angles. Someday I hope that I learn more about the sun and stars and how to measure the land from them. For the present I prefer to have the boundaries of my reservation explained in terms of rivers and mountains.”

  Washakie then looked through the surveyor’s transit that had been brought out. “White man’s medicine,” he murmured.

  Augur ran his finger between his neck and collar several times. Then he pointed out that the reservation would be temporarily shared with Chief Taghee and his Bannocks until they could move to Fort Hall the following year. The reservation would begin at the mouth of Owl Creek and run due south to the crest of the Divide, between Sweetwater and Popo Agie; along the crest and the summit of the Wind River Mountains to the North Fork of the Wind River; due north to the mouth of the North Fork and up its channel to a point twenty miles above the mouth; then in a straight line to the headwaters of Owl Creek and along the middle of its channel to the place of the beginning.

  Chief Washakie smiled broadly. The boundaries of the Wind River Reservation had been defined in a language he could understand.

  The remainder of the treaty had been gone over the day before, and nothing was left but the official signing.

  Sacajawea stood up as if to stretch her legs. Crying Basket motioned for her to sit down until the signing was over. But the urge to add something to this important treaty was greater than she could bear, and she found herself standing in front of the semicircle blurting out her words before they could be swallowed.

  “The white men are great chiefs. Our chief is great. The Bannocks’ chief is great.” Her heart was beating so fast she thought everyone could see. She moved slightly so that she could see Shoogan. Her hands shook, but the words could not be held in. “I listen and wonder. Does the white man know that the Bannocks want a place of their own now? If they are going to live near Fort Hall and it is already known where, send them today. They will be happier. You gave the buffalo hunters of our tribe a plow to break up the land. What is aplow? Why would anyone want to break up the land? Seeds can be put in the ground by making small holes with a stick. I can show the hunters that. Maybe I should show the white men before they open up our land, the way you heard the man called Augur explain, with this thing called a plow. It is nothing we want. And these stockings the white man gives to us, we do not need them. But if we did, we need more than one pair. I know these stockings, they do not wear—whoosht—gone before one season has passed. Moccasins are better.”

  Sacajawea looked over the crowd of people, then at the general. Her nervousness came back. Had he understood her words? Shoogan was making hand signs. Was her tongue plain enough, her English words slow enough? Shoogan’s head shook as though he approved, and there seemed to be a smile at the corners of his mouth. She breathed deeply and faced him.

  “These red blankets are so thin. They will not keep a small child warm in cold weather. We need two of these. Or we need to throw them away and use our buffalo robes. They keep the wind off our backs. But even so—my heart is glad. The white men have given back our land, our woods to walk in. A woods where I can walk for half a day and never come to the edge is one of the finest gifts to give anyone. On this land I can place my feet on some old, grown-over trail of our ancestors and follow it until it ends; then I can make a trail of my own. In this land I can feel the springiness of moss and leaves beneath my feet, hear the crunch of pinecones and the snap of dry sticks. The outcropping boulders covered with lichen will cause me to stop and marvel at their small green twigs, like a painting.

  “In spring I will find a patch of bloodroot, dogtooth violets, and wild moccasins. There is peace in those places where trading and squabbling are not known.”

  She was more calm now, and her voice low and slow. Her words were absorbed by the whole assemblage; no child cried out as she talked, and when she lapsed into Shoshoni, Shoogan, noticeably moved, spoke her words accurately to the white man.

  “There will be squirrels and birds to greet me. I may sit on a rotting stump and see the new sprouts of kin-nikinnick coming up, telling me that life dies, but life lives on.

  “In summer I will see branches overhead, making it cool underneath. I will look through at Father Sun and the blueness of the sky and wonder about the endlessness of our land.

  “I will go to the hills in the fall and drink in the tangy smell of the yellow grass, leaving behind the noisy trading post, to walk in quietness.

  “In winter the trees with no leaves show the backbone of life. They teach us to face the stark realities of life. I will feel the crystal coldness of wind in my face, and the cold, deep sleep of Mother Earth. The white chiefs have given us back the land that belonged to us for all ages. I am grateful.

  “I, then, give this gift to the white man. I let him walk alone in our woods so that he will receive peace with himself.”

  No one stirred for a few seconds. The quietness spoke as an ovation for something reverent, akin to a prayer.

  In later years this speech became something woven into the winter tales and traditions of the Shoshonis. It was to be forever remembered. Those who heard it kept it alive by retelling it to those who had not heard. It is still told on the Wind River Reservation.

  With their X’s Chief Washakie and his subchiefs, and Chief Taghee and his subchiefs, signed the treaty officially titled the Treaty with the Western Shoshoni and Bannocks, but more generally known as the Great Treaty of July 3, 1868. This signing was actually an anticlimax after Sacajawea’s speech. The reservation was almost as large as the state of Connecticut. To have, however, was not to hold. For later, by the cessions of 1872, 1896, and 1904, it was reduced to less than one-fifth the original area.

  Despite treaties, atrocities were committed by both whites and red men against one another. During the Shoshoni fall elk hunt, the women put up a temporary hunting camp and went with their men. Sacajawea, Crying Basket, and Dancing Leaf were waiting for Shoogan and Smell of Sugar to bring down the grazing elk ahead. The women were hidden behind some tallcottonwoods watching the men approach the elk slowly. Crying Basket moved quickly to the other two women. “Quick, my man motions that enemies are near. Quietly, now.”

  Hidden behind some brush was Smell of Sugar, who motioned for the women to stop and squat down. In the valley below they saw several braves strutting in ladies’ bonnets. Colored silks were thrown garishly around their shoulders and waists.

  “I think they are Cheyennes,” said Shoogan. “The whites were in that white top. See out on the trail. They were going west, maybe following a group of white tops that went by two, three days ago.” He breathed deeply. “I will ride my pony around the other way and warn the other hunters. It is best if you go quickly back to camp with the children by going around the other side of these hills.”

  He was gone. No sign, no noise was heard in his direction. Below, they heard the cries of a white woman and her children as her man was killed and mutilated. The leader of this small group of Cheyennes grabbed the younger child and hit his head against a tree. He dropped the jerking body and brained the second child in the same manner.

  Sac
ajawea made a low, guttural sound in her throat. “It is not right. It cannot be,” she murmured. Crying Basket moved around the hill and retched in the bushes. Berry stood waiting for the older women to lead her. She was pale and shaking.

  That evening, the men came back with only two elk. They had not seen what the Cheyennes had done.

  Around the evening meal, Smell of Sugar told about the white man called Chivington. ‘This man was given a feast in a white village because he killed the Cheyenne chief Left Hand, and the same day he also killed women and children in another Cheyenne camp. Now the Cheyennes are avenged with what you saw on the trail of the white tops.”

  Shoogan spoke up. “I heard that the half-breed son of the man known as Bill Bent led his own band of Dog Soldiers and lives as a Cheyenne constantly raiding the whites.”

  Sacajawea’s hand went to her mouth. She recalledthe Cheyenne woman of Bill Bent, Owl Woman, and how kind she had been years back. Was this half-breed her son? she wondered.

  Smell of Sugar said, “Half-breeds are not the same. Their world is split, and there comes a time when they can no longer straddle it. They will become white or Indian all the way. When they become Indian, they become more wolflike. When they become white, they are dandies, not wanting to do any hard work.”

  Shoogan said, “If Bill Bent were in charge, he could have all the Indian nations at peace. It is he and Kit Carson who know how to deal with hostile men of any nation. It is said that he wept like a squaw, alone in the woods, when his Owl Woman was scalped by Pawnees.”

  Sacajawea gasped. The voice of Shoogan went on, “But those whites do not interest me. They are traitors to their own people. They are nothing but Cheyenne-lovers. I think a man ought to work for his own tribe and not mix in the affairs of another, the way the white men do. We ought to stand up to those white men and tell them we will live in the old way, the way we know and love best. They have no business ordering us around on our own land.”

  All the way back to the main camp, Sacajawea felt the ground was cut from under her feet. To know that Owl Woman was gone caused a penetrating loneliness to pervade her body. The old ways were leaving. Her friends were leaving.

  The next several days, little things seemed to go wrong. She could feel her own emotions shaking her usually fine balance. The grandchildren had the power to disturb her as never before.

  One day she found herself on her knees, hugging the weeping Berry to her breast in a passion of self-blame. She had just taken a beaded necklace away from the child that was made as a gift for Dancing Leaf. Oh, oh, she thought, why do I take my feelings out on a baby? She should be permitted to look and to feel the necklace. Why didn’t I give it to her? I could easily have made another. Why did I grab it away from her childish eyes so fast?

  It was that very evening that Toussaint hesitatingly came to her tepee in much embarrassment.

  “I want you to leave my boys alone,” he said, shamefaced. His head hung toward his moccasins.

  It was after the evening meal and Sacajawea was tidying the lodge before the others came back from some visiting. She was alone.

  Toussaint looked around the tepee. It was the first time since his arrival that he’d been inside. Now he looked strangely complacent.

  She looked at him questioningly, not understanding his request.

  “What is the matter, Mother? You want to deny that you let those boys have this?” He took the Jefferson peace medal from his back trouser pocket. He knew full well she had not given the boys the medal—they had seen its shininess and taken it.

  But Toussaint knew that Sacajawea would deny it.

  “I am sorry,” she said. “I did not think to tell them they had no real use for such a thing and it was best left here with me. Perhaps they liked the neck string—see, I have beaded it a little.”

  “Mother,” said Toussaint, “you mean to tell me that you would let them have this and say nothing?”

  She shook her head. She was not sure what she would have done if she had found that the medal was missing. Toussaint had jockeyed her into a position of appearing to have condoned the boys’ taking anything they wished. She was thinking it over. Angry as it made her, there was nothing much she could do about it. She had long ago decided never to criticize Toussaint and his women, never to offer them advice, never to really notice them if possible.

  “This medallion rightfully belongs to me. I am called your son, and so it is mine.”

  Sacajawea was appalled and stepped back. He was trying to take advantage of her. Her arm darted out, and she pulled back the medal.

  “It rightfully belongs to Baptiste. It is mine until I find him or until I see fit to give it to someone,” she said.

  “You will give it to me, or at your death it will be given to me,” he sneered. A secret look of triumph wasin Toussaint’s eyes. “Years ago, just after my brother came back from Germany acting like some kind of dandy, the two of us were in Saint Louis selling peltries and we met Bill Clark in Chouteau’s trading post. Old Bill Clark was so glad to see Bap he hardly noticed me at first. When he asked about you, I was the one who stepped up and told him right out about how you’d run off. Bap still felt so bad about that he went off to look at some tooled saddles while I told Clark the details.”

  Sacajawea’s hands flew to her mouth.

  “So I told him that wolves had found you sleeping on the prairie and devoured your flesh to the bone. I said I knew it was you by the little blue stone on the leather thong around your bare neckbones. And I saw the surprise and hurt that came to his face.”

  Sacajawea stared, stunned.

  “I used my head and suggested that Clark not say a word to Bap about your death because it had upset him so. Clark knew how sensitive he was and had seen how he’d left me to tell the facts. So he agreed not to discuss it with Bap.”1

  Sacajawea could think of nothing to say, nor did she really wish to say anything. The perfidiousness—the utter perfidiousness—crushed her. She drew herself down into a knot, staring unbelieving, wounded beyond any power of expression.

  Toussaint looked at her, standing away from him. Suddenly there came conviction. He truly had known all along she’d been alive, even though no one could find her. Sacajawea could take care of herself no matter where she went—on the prairie, in the mountains, anywhere. Why had he made up such a story and told it to a man he really respected, Bill Clark—and then half believed it himself for a time?

  She had withdrawn to the side of her tepee. Her face was averted now, and she placed a hand on her pallet and guided herself down upon it. Toussaint could not see her, but he knew she was crying—crying deep inside herself, not sobbing or weeping, but breaking far within, her tears being tears of the soul and infinitely more poignant than any tears of the surface.

  He said no more. He’d come again and see to it shegave him the old Jefferson medal. Then the Shoshonis would think he was something—maybe look up to him the way they looked up to old Washakie. Slowly he moseyed on toward his own tepee, grimly, stubbornly silent.

  CHAPTER

  55

  The Jefferson Peace Medal

  One of Sacajawea’s great-grandsons, named James McAdams, who was the son of Nancy Bazil, daughter of Shoogan, contributed certain interesting information regarding the medal which Sacajawea had. This medal bore Jefferson’s head and his name, and had a gold rim about it.1

  “I have seen it many times. At Salt Lake the people, when they saw this medal, said to Porivo or Chief, ‘Something grand!’ and they gave Sacajawea and her people who were with her a big feast in honor of her wonderful achievements for the white people when they were on their way to the big waters.”

  Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Arthur H. Clark Company, from Sacajawea, Guide and Interpreter of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, by Grace Raymond Hebard, 1957, pp. 200–1.

  Washakie kept his band close to the Fort Bridger Agency. Often Sacajawea went to visit with Washakie’s Crow woman, White Curly Bear. Wh
ite Curly Bear was always pleasant and always working hard. She was not old, but not very young, either. She had white hairs growing from a small mole on her chin.

  One morning the two women were making moccasins together, each sewing on blue-and-white beads they had bought earlier from the sutler’s store inside Fort Bridger. Sacajawea was amusing White Curly Bear with stories about the antics of Ben York and the big dog, Scannon. “That black warrior was the envy of all the young native girls,” said Sacajawea. “They would trade anything to have a strong black child who resembled him, for strength and protection in their lodge.”

  White Curly Bear looked up, her eyes big. She put a finger on her chin, then slid it slowly across her lips. “Shhh,” she said. “That is like a story of my own from long ago. Now, do not interrupt and I will tell you about a band of Crows that came to visit our tribe one spring. They had a magnificent chief who was dark as a burned log, except on the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands. His hair was curly like the buffalo grass, and he let it grow long and bushy. He had four women to take care of it. They tied it with grasses and put shining black crow feathers in it. He could speak the language of the white man and sometimes entertained travelers and mountain men. He trained one of his camp dogs to stand on its hind feet and bark for meat. He taught the dog to roll over and over. My mother told me he lifted me to his shoulders one time and danced around until I sang with delight. I was a child and remember only what my mother told. She said he went into council with the chief of our tribe and wore a beautiful white shirt with threads pink as the sunset on it. These threads were made into flowers like the wild rose. He was very careful with that shirt and would not let his women fold it. He himself did that, and he kept it in a parfleche high on a lodgepole peg—stop interrupting me.”

  Sacajawea was waving her hands in the air. Shecould hardly keep her mouth shut in her excitement. “His name? What name did he go by?”