From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Look, mon capitaine,” Cruzatte said. “Omahas there; prisoned, I t’eenk.”

  To his left, William saw them. In a corral of poles, under guard, stood and sat about two dozen wretches, squaws and boys, in different garb, some naked, most of them dishevelled, many looking sick or hurt.

  That looks like the stuff for a peace lecture, William thought. “Talk to those prisoners today if ye get a chance,” he told Cruzatte. “Find out how they got taken. Tell ’em we hope to do something for ’em.” Cruzatte was fluent in the Omaha tongue.

  The bearers had brought William to the center of the village now, and were carrying him toward the door of a great council house. It was a loaf-shaped structure, not conical like the tipis. It seemed to be forty or forty-five feet in diameter, made of skins sewed together and stretched three-fourths of the way around a circular pole frame to leave the south quadrant open. As he was carried through the entrance, he saw that about seventy finely dressed men were seated on robes in a circle inside. In the part of the circle opposite the door, the three chiefs sat, all in their showy feather headdresses. There was a space vacant between Black Buffalo and Partizan on his right, and another between Black Buffalo and Buffalo Medicine on his left. The eyes of all the men in the lodge were on William as he was carried to the place on the chief’s right. Here the bearers stopped and let him step down onto another fine, dressed buffalo hide and take a seat upon it. Then they left. Cruzatte, at a sign from the grand chief, seated himself on another robe behind William.

  Nothing was said yet; apparently they were waiting for something. Black Buffalo nodded to William with a pleasant enough visage, then stared ahead. William turned to look at Partizan, who kept his profile to him and did not even nod. William had the customary white man’s urge to fill this pause with greetings or small talk or something, but restrained himself. They’ve got all the time in the world, he thought. So he took off his hat and placed it before him, and used the long pause to study his surroundings and the people, just as the gathered Sioux were using it to get acquainted with his looks.

  Directly in front of Black Buffalo there rested, in two upright forked sticks, a peace pipe, with a carved and painted wooden stem at least three feet long, decorated with feathers, its bowl already loaded with kinnickinnick. Scattered on the ground under this pipe was a quantity of swan’s down. On one side of the pipe stood a small Spanish flag, and on the other, the American flag they had given the chief yesterday. Two other pipes stood ready on each side of this display, and in the center of the room was a large firepit, burning almost smokelessly, and on a spit above it, already nicely broiled, was an animal that, by its size and musculature, he realized could only be a large dog. His stomach, already queasy from sleepless nights and tension, turned over. There were other foods in clay pots in a row before the fire.

  William sat thus in the pleasant, rosy half-light of the council lodge, studying the impassive faces of chiefs and warriors around the room, now and them gazing out through the wide door at the sun-gilded panorama of the Indian village, the yellowing willows of the Missouri bottoms beyond, and the rolling, treeless, blue-shadowed bluffs in the distance. The Indians in turn studied this remarkable-looking white chief who sat among them, a lean-muscled giant in a gold-trimmed coat of a dark blue that was the same color as his eyes, a very dignified and kind-faced chief with a high, broad, white forehead and thick red hair pulled back into a plait at the back of his neck. They all had seen already, or heard, that he could not be shaken.

  Among the older Sioux there was a legend about another red-haired chief of the Long Knives, one who had come suddenly to the Father of Rivers to conquer the British, in the long war between England and the Long Knives twenty-five summers ago. That red-haired chief had filled the eastern tribes with admiration and fear. Old Sioux had seen that legendary Chief Red Hair in his councils. Others had heard the story, and it had never faded, as such pictures do not fade in the memories of the bearers of legends, and now here was such a red-haired chief of the Long Knives, who seemed that he might be the very same one, except that this one was young and could not then be the red-haired chief in the legend. Some of the Sioux had talked of this during the night and some of them were thinking about it now as they looked upon him and watched his long fine face and proud head glow in the shadows between the dark weathered faces of their chiefs.

  William was unaware of their thoughts of George. All he knew was that they stared and stared.

  People were hurrying in the street outside the lodge now, and soon William saw the six braves again approaching the lodge, this time with Meriwether Lewis riding their robe, as stately as some poonjab on a carpet, William thought. I hope I didn’t look as pompous as that, he thought, though I reckon I must have. Lean, dark George Drouillard walked alongside Lewis; the Fields brothers walked behind, armed with rifles and pistols, as his bodyguards, and all the rest of the troops, except a squad left on the boat as guards, followed, marching sharp with Sergeant Pryor beside them. Lewis looked as rigid as he had that very first day William had ever seen him, back at Fort Greenville.

  The troops filed into the lodge and were seated in a semicircle behind their captains and the chiefs, and at last the ceremonies seemed ready to begin.

  A very old man, wearing raven headdress and a fine deerskin tunic that hung loose on his frame, rose from a place near the chiefs and delivered a short talk in praise of the white men’s peace mission, asked them to be kind to his people, and to forget the anger of the day before; and then on behalf of this village he made them a present of another huge pile of buffalo meat, some three or four hundred pounds of fine-looking cuts, pink and fresh.

  He then relinquished the floor to the Grand Chief Black Buffalo, whose speech was equally apologetic and asked for mercy for his poor people. Captain Lewis got up then to reply, and gave in essence the speech he had tried to deliver on the sandbar the day before. This time it was heard much more attentively. Black Buffalo pointed to the little flags in the ground and said he now understood the change in flags from Spanish to American, and that the Sioux were pleased at the thought of being peaceful with neighboring tribes. Now, he said, the Sioux would like to hear the words of the Red-Hair Chief.

  “I saw prisoners in your village,” he said. “I think they are Omahas. Will the Grand Chief tell me how these people came to be here?”

  Black Buffalo seemed proud to explain this. He recounted the details of a battle two weeks earlier in which his Teton Sioux had destroyed forty lodges of the Omahas, killed seventy-five of their warriors, and taken the women and children whom Chief Red Hair had seen. It was a great victory, Black Buffalo said.

  “Then,” said William, “if you destroyed their lodges, that means you went against them, at their village. This is not the deed of a nation which wants to be peaceable.” Black Buffalo chose not to reply to that, and William went on: “If you wish to follow the advice of your new father, as you say you do, then you must become friends with the Omahas. You would commence that friendship by returning those poor, naked prisoners to their people. Will y’ do that?”

  Black Buffalo was on a spot. Obviously he was not pleased with this demand. Partizan seemed even less so, and his eyes were flashing. But after a brief consideration, Black Buffalo agreed that he would return the captives. William doubted that he really meant to, so he said:

  “Good. Your great father will be pleased. Now, we have Frenchmen who will arrange to take the prisoners back to their people. May I have this man, my interpreter, go and speak to the prisoners today and tell them the good news?”

  There was no way out for Black Buffalo, if he meant to be a man of honor; he agreed.

  William sat down, and as he did he glanced to Captain Lewis, who nodded to him and lowered one eyelid. A wink from Meriwether Lewis was a very, very eloquent expression of approval.

  The pipe of peace was taken up then, pointed to the heavens, the four quarters of the globe, then to the earth, and lighted from a bowl of coals
, and the captains smoked it with the chiefs.

  Once Brother George had told William that there are no two mixtures of kinnickinnick alike, and that the various leaves, barks, and flowers mixed in with the Indian tobacco often had surprising properties, as the Indians knew a great deal about such things. This particular batch, William noted, smelled somewhat like alfalfa, and he had had no more than two puffs on this peace pipe before he was feeling very peaceful indeed. The greatest harmony seemed to reign now between the Corps of Discovery and the Teton Sioux. Words sounded resonant and full of deep meaning; he almost imagined he was understanding the chiefs statements even before they were translated. Time seemed to have stopped flowing; the late afternoon sunglow on the tipis outside seemed never to change its angle, but only grew more intense in color. He no longer felt the weariness in his back that he had been suffering after two sleepless nights; indeed, he was hardly aware of his body, and there seemed to be no place where he ended and his surroundings began. He looked over at his friend Captain Lewis a time or two, or perhaps a hundred times, and saw that he was actually smiling, and he felt a great rush of brotherly affection for him. Suddenly he wanted to thank him profusely for inviting him to come on this splendid adventure, but first he would have to wait for Black Buffalo to stop talking, and while he was waiting for that he forgot what he had wanted to say to Lewis. Sometime during this eternal hour, Black Buffalo took in his hand the raw testicles of the dog that was cooking on the spit, held them near the Stars and Stripes, made the statement that they were a sacrifice to the new flag, and then threw them into the coals. It seemed a most appropriate gesture rather than an outrageous one, for some reason which William could not quite explain to himself, and he wanted to thank the Grand Chief for providing this keen revelation of primitive insight, but didn’t know how to put it in words, and soon that impulse, too, had passed and was forgotten.

  After an imperceptible while William became aware that it was now twilight outside, and the firelit interior of the lodge was brighter than the light from outdoors, and that the dinner was being served up in great wooden platters. His strange, spacious feeling had passed as quickly as it had come.

  The food was dished out with the large curved horn of a mountain sheep, made into a scoop that held about two quarts. The courses were pemmican, a mixture of pounded buffalo jerky and grease, broiled dog, and a root.

  “What d’ye think?” William asked Lewis. He could barely be heard over the grunting and lip-smacking of threescore Sioux gourmands.

  “Good,” Lewis said. “Pretty tasteless, this root, but I’ll wager Mister Jefferson’s chefs could use ’em well in place o’ truffles. Aye, they’d do well.” He was happily talking around a mouthful of meat.

  “Ye rather fancy th’ dog, too, don’t you?” asked William, who had not yet been able to make himself take a bite of it, even though it obviously was a favorite delicacy of the Sioux.

  “Jove, yes! It’s quite good!” Lewis exclaimed, smiling around the lump in his cheek at William’s squeamishness. “Come, now, Clark. Try it!”

  William picked up a well-seared piece from his platter, turned it to and fro, looking at it sadly. Then he said, before sinking his teeth into it:

  “Well, I’m sure glad pore Scannon’s not here to watch us.”

  The smile vanished from Lewis’s face.

  THE NEXT SMOKE DID NOT AFFECT WILLIAM AS MUCH AS the first had, and that was just as well, as the ensuing ceremonies were awesome enough even to a sober mind. When the remains of the feast had been taken away by squaws, the cooking fire was loaded high with dry willow chunks, and the interior of the lodge was full of flickering fireglow and huge man-shadows. A dozen musicians came in and encircled the group, carrying tambourines made of skin stretched on hoops, jingling and rattling instruments made by tying deer hooves and metal scraps on poles, and other ingeniously devised noisemakers. When they started an anarchic beating and jingling, two columns of gaudily dressed warriors entered, each on one side of the fire. They shuffled toward each other, dragging behind them skunk-pelts that were tied to the heels of their moccasins, while the musicians chanted. When the two ranks of warriors met in the center of the lodge, some of them practically in the bonfire, they shouted and jumped high into the air, shaking rattlesnake tails and other devices that gave off chattering sounds. Then they retreated while the drums and tambourines thumped, and repeated their approaches. Their shadows on the skin walls of the lodge were gigantic and shaggy and grotesque, leaping and stretching and receding. They began to sweat profusely as the dance warmed up, and the firelight gleamed on their shining dark skin; their headdresses bobbed and shook. Now and then one brave or another would separate himself from the others, leap high, shouting for attention, then come forward and begin reciting in a loud voice. Cruzatte translated into William’s ear, well enough to let him understand that the performances were, for the most part, lewd jokes. The singers then would pick up the vilest phrases and repeat them in screechy voices. Meanwhile, the advancing and retreating, the shuffling and drumming continued, and the shadows leaped in the flickering firelight, until the entire place seemed to be pulsating and trembling. The drums, hard beat, light beat, hard beat, light, were like an agitated heartbeat. Though the dance had a general direction and flow to it, it was almost chaotic. It was, William thought, like battle. Now and then William would find his pulse beating in his temples as fast as the drums, and to keep his mind orderly he leaned over to joke with Lewis. “We should ‘a’ brought York up; he can dance worse’n this.”

  “That would be bad manners,” Lewis called back, “to scare them to death while they’re trying to scare us to death!”

  When all the dancing warriors and their noise had begun to give William a headache, they retired into the night and their places were immediately filled with a company of women brilliantly garbed and decorated, their eyes bright with excitement, carrying poles with scalplocks attached, and various weapons.

  These women, Black Buffalo explained, were to continue the war dance. The scalps and weapons were trophies of war taken by their fathers and husbands. Brandishing these trophies proudly, the women danced, their voices shrilling, their body motions becoming more voluptuous and obscene than warlike, until almost midnight. William looked over his shoulder and saw that the men were being reduced to a bad state of morale. He knew they were as tired as he was, but could see in their faces that their baser natures were becoming aroused by the abandon of the dancing women. Lewis was watching this effect too, and now he said to William: “Look at the men. They’re tired and randy. They wouldn’t be much use in an emergency, d’ye think?”

  William nodded. “Another hour and they’ll forget they’re soldiers.”

  And so Lewis proposed to the chiefs that the ceremonies be concluded so that the Americans could return to their ship.

  The chiefs seemed a bit put out by this proposal. “No. Look,” said Black Buffalo, extending a hand toward the women, “you can stay and sleep in their lodges. They wish you to do this.”

  The thought was both enticing and alarming to William, and he did not like the way he felt about it. To lie down in a bed of skins with one of these tawny girls, to relieve that long pent-up yearning, then to fall asleep in comfort and satiation, would seem like Paradise to any one of these lonely, weary men, himself included. But likely every man would be throat-cut before dawnlight, he suspected. Or poxed, he thought.

  And so, to erase the visions of oiled thighs and shapely, dusky arms and long black hair from his mind as the troops were marched in darkness back to the vessel, William conjured up the radiant, virginal face of his fiancée Judy Hancock, whose peach-blush cheeks and wondrous blue eyes, her golden halo of curls, hung before him in his vision like the image of a distant angel. Against her image the Sioux women seemed more and more repellent. His mind and spirit had been on a long, deep visit into a pagan purgatory this long evening, but now with Judy Hancock in his heart and a clean prairie wind blowing across the Missour
i to cool his sweaty face, he felt he had been delivered back up to a brighter place more worthy of a Clark’s soul.

  THE CHIEFS HAD AGAIN INSISTED ON SLEEPING ABOARD THE boat—apparently fearful lest the Americans pull up anchor and vanish up the river—and so it was another fitful night. In the margins of the sleep of utter fatigue, William lay feeling the constant rub of the river under the boat’s hull and smelled the bodies and breaths of the chiefs, heard the little exchanges outside among the poor exhausted sentries, saw occasional flickers of torchlight on the riverbanks, and felt as much a prisoner of the Sioux as those poor Omahas he had seen corralled in the village. They’re going to swallow us up somehow yet, he thought, depressed by that desperate, impotent feeling that comes in the small hours when there is nothing one can do but lie listening to one’s heartbeat and imagining the worst. Cruzatte, during the festivities, had left the lodge to talk briefly with the Omaha prisoners, and they had warned him that the Sioux intended to stop the Americans from continuing up the river. William could not keep from thinking about that, and thus he was glad to have the chiefs aboard as, in effect, voluntary hostages, even though their presence made sleep all but impossible.