From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Tell the chiefs to excuse me a minute,” he said to Lewis. “Looks like I’m going to have to tame him some more.”

  Outside, he found York stomping and slobbering around in the street, arms outstretched and hands hooked like claws, while scores of squaws and children, half amused, half terrified, milled around him in a circle, near enough to see him well but far enough to keep out of his clutches. “ROWR!” he went on, while Drouillard played the game and translated for the people, “I’m hungry! Big Devil Man wants a dozen fat babies rat now! I want that one, she look all tender and—”

  “York!”

  He stopped and turned and looked at William. “Sah?”

  The women and children stood with eyes wide and mouths agape. William said:

  “Don’t make yourself too turrible. We don’t want a panic.”

  “Oh, indeed, sah.”

  “All right. Use your good judgment, y’ hear?”

  “Aye, sah.”

  The Indians now were looking with awe at the Red Hair Chief as he turned back toward the lodge. The great black giant was powerful medicine; this Red Hair Chief with eyes like the summer sky must have greater medicine. With nothing more than soft words he could tame the monster!

  “Eh, York,” Drouillard said now, a smirk on his keen hawk’s face, “I heard a squaw there say she bet you don’t eat babies at all.”

  York raised himself tall and spread his arms wide, crossed his eyes and made his mouth into a pucker. “Hey, then,” he said, “you tell that lady she bes’ keep her babies close by!” The Frenchman conveyed that, and nervous but good-natured laughter swept among the women. One cried something.

  “She say,” Drouillard translated, “that she have no baby.”

  A repartee was building up, a rare public repartee with these strange brave men from the big canoe, and the Arikara squaws were warming to it. And so was York.

  “No baby!” he exclaimed. “Well, nen, ask ’er, Mist’ Drooyah, do she want one!”

  The answer was a dubious but excited yes, which seemed to delight the whole crowd.

  “Oh, my, oh, my,” York said in a thick voice. “I think I like Rickyrahs away way better’n them Siouxs!”

  ANOTHER WHIPPING. WILLIAM SET HIS TEETH AND WATCHED John Newman, a powerfully built private, go through the gauntlet three times and take his seventy-five lashes. Newman had talked mutiny. He had told Captain Lewis that no free man should have to labor as these had. He had been court-martialed by his peers and found guilty. In addition to his whipping, he had been disbarred from the permanent party. He was to be sent back to St. Louis next spring when the Discovery sailed back.

  An Arikara chief wept when he watched the punishment. It had been explained to him, and he understood, and agreed that a man who had said such things should be punished. But the Arikaras, he said, never whip their people, even the children. If this man had been an Arikara, the chief said, he would have been killed for his crime, but not whipped. The Arikara chief wept as he said this.

  Newman wept, too, but not because of the whipping. He wept because he realized that his outburst had made him an outcast.

  “Please, sir,” he pleaded as William doctored his back, “I really want to stay with you all. I’ll do anything, sir. I’ll be the best man y’ve got, sir. I’ll atone for what I said. D’ you think Cap’n Lewis will take me back?”

  “I don’t know, Newman. Y’ know he’s a strict man. But we’ve got all winter to fort up at the Mandan villages. That’s a lot of time. Do your best, that’s all I can advise.”

  “I want t’ go to the Western Ocean,” Newman sobbed. His heart hurt worse than his flayed back.

  ONE OF THE ARIKARA CHIEFS, WHOSE NAME WAS POCASSE, came to Lewis and announced that he had made an important decision. He had come to like and trust the American captains so much that he would, as they had invited him to do, go and visit their Great Father the President of the United Fires. When the Big Canoe came down next spring from the Mandan Country, he would be ready to get on it. He wanted to see the civilization they had come from and to meet the great Red Hair whose face was made in metal on his medallion, and to hear his wisdom. Yes, he was eager. If Pocasse went past the Father of Waters and on to the White Lodge of Chief named Jefferson, he himself would become a legend among his own people. He would wait eagerly for the Big Canoe to come back down the river next spring, and he would be ready to go.

  The acquisition of this promise seemed to please Lewis as much as had the acquisition of the prairie dog. Here was another live specimen from the far country for his mentor and commander-in-chief to see.

  They had reached a very northerly latitude. Winter would come soon and the Missouri would freeze. Not far ahead, where the Missouri made a great bend to the west, lay the large, peaceful civilization of the Mandans, vaguely rumored to be the mythical Welsh Indians. They lived at the farthest place where traders had gone from St. Louis. But there were British traders among them. Near the Mandan towns the Corps of Discovery would build a fort, its winter quarters, and there cultivate the Mandans, learn what lay farther west, and wait for the Missouri to thaw in the spring. They had come 1600 miles against the force of the great river in five months and it had tempered their sinews like steel and made them feel they were a special, glorybound people.

  But the wind of the High Plains and the water of the river were more icy every day, and it would be good for even such a special people to have a warm place to hibernate and rest, because the harder part of their journey still lay ahead.

  “Imagine after all this time,” Sergeant Ordway said longingly, “how it’ll feel t’ sleep under a roof!”

  FORT MANDAN, DAKOTA COUNTRY

  November 6, 1804

  WILLIAM CAME OUT OF SLEEP TO THE SOUND OF KNOCKING. An eerie dream of gray-eyed Indians faded as he woke. A cold draft through the unchinked logs of the unfinished hut had made his neck so stiff it hurt to move.

  “Who’s there?” Lewis said in the dark.

  “Sergeant o’ the Guard, sir,” came an excited voice through the door. “There’s something in the sky!”

  Something in the sky. It was an awesome thing to hear. In the blackness of the room the captains could hear each other moving quickly, groping for moccasins. William called out:

  “What’s in the sky?”

  But the sergeant did not reply; apparently he was gone. Lewis got to the door first and opened it. The air was so cold it seared the nostrils. It was past midnight, and there was no moon, but there was a strange, soft, reddish glow above the roofs of the row of huts, and William first thought it was another of those stupendous prairie fires the Indian hunters sometimes set to drive buffalo herds.

  Several soldiers were standing on the trodden, frosty parade ground looking toward the north and talking softly. William looked up and a shiver of awe went down his arms.

  “Egod! What is it?”

  Above the leafless cottonwoods, something vast, ghostly, and luminous was moving, rippling across the cold northern sky. At the moment William first saw it, it looked like a rippling curtain of moonlit gauze, mostly silvery, but tinged with blues, oranges, and yellows. In the next instant it had changed, transforming itself into vertical streaks that reminded him of fluted Grecian columns, white as marble but transparent, weightless, afloat against the black velvet sky. And then those columns were closing together, then drawing apart; then they dissolved, leaving only a shimmering, shapeless radiance, which in its turn assumed the form of gossamer draperies, billowing in languid motion.

  At last, Lewis’s voice intruded on the eerie quiet:

  “The Northern Lights! That, by heaven, is it!”

  William looked for a moment at Lewis’s profile, at the breath condensing under his nose; then he turned his eyes back to the immense, delicate display and watched it tremble, drift, furl, like stardust or moonfilm, silent, yet creating in his mind’s ear an almost audible tinkling, like diamond-sand sifting through Eternity’s hourglass.

  Far awa
y, from the Mandan Indian villages across the Missouri, he could hear voices, coming faintly across that great distance, through the windless dry cold air of the prairie night, voices so small they seemed the vocal chorus to that imaginary star music. Mandans are out, too, he thought, standing among their houses looking up at this same heavenly show. And I wonder what they’re making of it in their superstitious fancies.

  He turned to look westward, up and over the gray ribbon of the river, and could just see the nearest, and largest, Mandan town, Matoonha, on its fine bluff overlooking the river.

  IT WAS A STRANGE AND MYSTERIOUS PLACE, THAT MANDAN nation. The Mandans were Indians, right enough, yet they were unlike Indians in some strange and subtle ways. For Indians, they were stable, not nomadic, and prosperous and peaceable. Their lodges were spacious, earth-covered domes, laid out in a town surrounded by an earthen wall with a dry moat outside it, in the manner of ancient Old World cities William had read about. Since the arrival of the Corps here more than a week ago, the Mandans had shown generosity and peaceful intentions, and a willingness to accept the Americans as their neighbors for the winter. They had brought many gifts of corn, squash, beans, and meat. They had accepted the Americans’ meager gifts gracefully, and had responded with unbridled delight to the white men’s fiddle music and dancing—particularly when the French engagé Rivet had danced upside down, on his hands.

  The Mandan women were boldly affectionate toward the white men, and their husbands complaisant, even encouraging, in that matter, and William knew that a few of the soldiers already were establishing diplomatic connections with their new Indian neighbors, in that most intimate of ways. “I tell ye it’s so,” Sergeant Ordway had exclaimed one day, “it hung down ’twixt her legs like a night-crawler, long as my cock! Well, almost as long.” Some of the Mandan women, it seemed, stretched the clitoris, for ornament.

  “And how d’ye know it was that long?” William had asked. “Did you make comparisons?”

  “Well, yes, sir,” Ordway had replied, “I did.”

  MOST INTRIGUING OF ALL TO THE CAPTAINS, THOUGH, WERE some of the myths of origin they had heard from the Mandan elders. They told of a flood over all the earth, and of a great canoe in which men and animals had been saved from drowning, and a dove sent to find land. They told of a son of the Great Spirit, who had come to live on the earth, and had been killed, and had become alive again. No one remembered his name.

  Some of the Mandans had gray eyes and auburn hair, and from all this evidence Lewis had come to suspect they were descended from the fabled white Indians about whom Jefferson often had speculated. Some legends had it that the white Indians had come from Wales in a fleet of long ships, nearly a thousand years ago, and had been forced deeper and deeper into the heart of the continent by native Indians, gradually becoming less Welsh and more Indian and forgetting how to read or speak their Celtic tongue, forgetting the name and the nature of their Christian God.

  This was an eerie legend to ponder, and William had dreamed of the white Indians two nights. William was a practical sort of man, not fanciful, not often spooked by mysteries. But this of the Mandans had troubled his sleep, and to think of such things now, to think of such great spaces and ages while standing under this cold light-show in the firmament, sixteen hundred miles from white civilization, this could make him shudder, as ghost stories had when he was a boy back in Caroline County.

  Imagine it, he thought, standing here half a continent away from home, looking at cold flames in the northern sky.

  Imagine a people ever forgetting who they were. Imagine a people ever forgetting who their God was.

  November 11, 1804

  THIS SQUAW WAS A CHILD HERSELF, BUT SHE WAS BIG WITH child.

  William put his pencil down on the map he was making, and stood up behind his desk to look at her. “This is the Snake Woman?” he asked.

  She was so spare and small that the swollen belly made her look like a snake that has swallowed an egg. On her shoulders she bore a huge bundle of tanned hides, which must have outweighed her.

  “Oui, capitaine,” grunted the flamboyant French Canadian who was her husband. “Yes,” he corrected himself, his swarthy brow knit in embarrassment; he was trying to hire on as an interpreter for these Americans and already had replied in a wrong tongue.

  “Tell her to put that load down,” William said. The man grunted something and she lowered it to the floor.

  William looked at the little squaw-girl and at her rancid, grizzled oaf of a husband, who was probably three times her age, three times her size. His name was Touissaint Charbonneau, and even his big sturdy body hardly seemed big enough to contain all his self-importance. He had three Indian wives, he had boasted; this pregnant waif, of the Snake, or Shoshoni, tribe, was his youngest. The Shoshonis lived far west in the high mountains, and thus this wife was of great interest to the red-haired captain.

  William had seldom seen such big, intense eyes as hers; he could almost feel them staring at him. “What d’ye call her?” William asked.

  “Sa-ca-ja-we-ah,” said the Frenchman. “Ees Hidatsa, mean ‘bird.’ Good name, ha! She eat little, chatter much!”

  William repeated that in his mind, to make it stay. Still another Indian name to remember, among the scores he had learned since the arrival in the Mandan country. Sa-ca-ja-weah. Outside the hut, a constant din of ax-blows and saw-groans went on, the sounds of the Corps building its winter quarters. The scent of new-cut willow wood was everywhere. Now and then a harsh, barking noise would pass overhead, another southbound flock of geese.

  He looked at the girl and said:

  “Shoshoni?”

  Her eyes widened at this word. She nodded her head.

  “Tell me,” he said, “how you come here.”

  Her face took on a look of despair as her husband translated this request into the Minnetaree tongue, with oathlike bursts and peremptory gestures, the gruff and contemptuous manner of a big man trying to impress other big men with his bigness.

  The squaw-girl mumbled a few protesting words, which provoked a sneer and another snarling outburst from Charbonneau. He turned and shrugged to William.

  “Slowly, M’sieu le Capitaine. She say she may not talk of the dead. But I will make her tell.” He tensed his lower lip and turned on her. His face was shining with sweat and greasiness. He looked impatient, and resentful that the American captain was more interested in his squaw’s knowledge than in his own.

  William smiled and went back behind his own desk, motioning toward one of the crates that were stacked everywhere in the room. “Have her sit and take her time. I want to hear.”

  “Capitaine, she is but a stupid woman. Anything she know, I know ten times over. She talk too much already, and should not be encouraged.”

  “Mister Charbonneau, you talk too much yourself. I already know your history, and an interesting one it is, too, but now I want to hear hers.”

  It came slowly, dredged up through a memory turbid with five years of slavery, terror, and drastic change, and translated through the exasperating interruptions and abuses of Charbonneau. She had been the daughter of a great Shoshoni chief. Her people had lived in the Shining Mountains. They had come down from the mountains to hunt buffalo every year in a plain where three rivers came together to start this great river. Minnetarees had attacked their camp one spring, caught her running, killed many of her people, probably her father among them.

  Then, starving and often beaten nearly to death, she and her fellow captives, all women, had been brought down the great river. One woman had vanished on the trail, perhaps escaped. Sacajawea had been brought here to the Knife River towns and grown up a slave. She had been passed among families, and finally a few seasons ago she had been won by Charbonneau in a game of hands. This, Charbonneau said, concluded her story. “I am most skilled in such games, and it is her good fortune,” he boasted. “I bring my women good gifts from trade. They are happy to be the women of Charbonneau, to bear me sons. This,” h
e growled with a yellow-toothed grin showing through his greasy beard, “will be the second son that I claim.” He pointed with a dirty-nailed thumb at the girl’s abdomen. “Ha, haaah!”

  “Now ask her this,” William said. “Does she remember the land of her people? Would she know the way back? Does she know where their towns are?”

  Charbonneau rolled his eyes. “She war only eight, nine year old then,” he protested.

  “Ask ’er, please,” William said. “It’s important to us.” William and Captain Lewis had been here at the Mandan nation for two weeks now, and during their stay they had questioned many chiefs of the Mandans, Minnetarees, and Anahaways who coexisted in this area, to learn whatever they might know about the Upper Missouri and a passage through the Shining Mountains. It appeared now that only the Shoshonis would know of a way through the mountains. Too, the Shoshonis were known for their large herds of fine horses, and horses would be needed to carry the Corps and its baggage across the mountains where boats could not go. If this squaw-child knew how to find her people and could talk with them, it could mean the difference between getting to the far Columbia and not getting to it. It had become necessary to plan hundreds of miles ahead, seasons ahead. It would be next summer or fall before they would reach those mountains—if they ever reached them—but they would have to be ready for them when they got there.

  The girl-squaw had gone far back behind her eyes, and now she was talking. Charbonneau said:

  “She remember this: where three rivers come together, in a wide valley in mountains. There is a great rock which look like beaver head. Here it is that her people were killed and she was caught. Above that place her people live different places in the mountains and would be hard to find. She was very young then.”

  William had taken up a pencil and was writing down this about the landmarks. It did not seem like much, but it proved to him that her memory was remarkably good. Other Indians had spoken of the three forks. Many of the Minnetaree men had been there as hunters, and also to raid the Shoshoni horse herds. From their descriptions of the Upper Missouri, William had been sketching crude maps of the route they would take next spring—filling in, with informed guesses, that vast blank space that existed on any map of the continent, between these Mandan villages and the Pacific shore some 1500 miles away. He knew that somewhere about two hundred miles upriver from the Mandan towns, a great river the French called Roche Jaune emptied into the Missouri from the southwest. The next great landmark, some 350 miles beyond that Yellow Stone river, would be a tremendous Missouri River waterfall whose noise could be heard for miles across the high plains. Less than a hundred miles above those falls lay the first range of the Rocky Mountains, which the Indians called the Shining Mountains. The Missouri River, as he now could picture it, would meander through broad valleys among three ranges of the Rocky Mountains, navigable by small boats, and there would be the three forks and the Shoshoni hunting grounds. The northernmost of those three forks would fetch up against the fourth and last range. Somewhere there was a pass over that range, and with the help of Shoshoni guides and Shoshoni horses the Corps would be able to cross over the pass to find the headwaters of a westward-flowing river full of the large Pacific fish called salmon. From there of course he could presume that it would be an easy downstream boat ride to the Pacific. Downstream! he thought. How good that sounded after the five months of rowing, poling, and towing that had brought them from St. Louis to this wintering-place!