From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Sah, any wommin hurt the same, an’ I thank the Lo’d I never have to hurt like that, but the diff’ns be, Cap’m, how much do they holler.”

  Lewis looked at the wall and thought of this, then he said, “This one hasn’t yelled once. But she’s been groaning and panting like that for a long time. It’s her first baby.”

  “Yas, Cap’m.” York knew more about Sacajawea than anyone else did. York, and Scannon, had become deeply attached to the pregnant child, and protective of her. Lewis could tell by the anguish in their eyes that both were suffering with her.

  Charbonneau’s other wives had moved back to the village, so they were not here to serve as midwives. Charbonneau himself was out hunting.

  Lewis had tried to help her several times today; he had examined Sacajawea and as far as he could tell there was nothing awry, nothing turned wrong or anything; she was just little and narrow in the pelvis and the baby was big, that was all. Though Lewis considered himself a competent lay physician, births had always rattled him. So he had left Sacajawea in the care of an Indian woman who was the wife of René Jessaume, an interpreter, and had come back into his own room here to work on the plant and animal specimens for President Jefferson.

  It was an enormous job. In the crates and boxes and tins and bundles stored about this crowded little outpost, in the stacks of notes and sketches and maps that Clark had done, was contained more knowledge about the territory west of the Mississippi than had ever been recorded—surely a hundred times more knowledge. William’s maps, prepared from surveys and celestial sightings and interviews with scores of Indians and trappers, without a doubt would instantly render every other map of the West obsolete. And its value was enhanced by reams of information about weather patterns, navigational hazards, soil and minerals, food and fur game, and the histories, languages, dispositions, enmities and alliances, numbers and living modes of all the Indian tribes the Corps of Discovery had thus far encountered. Furthermore, the data did not even stop here at Fort Mandan; Clark had even made a projected map of the Upper Missouri to the Rocky Mountains, based on more interviews with wide-ranging Indians.

  The storehouse of the little fort was stacked to the ceiling with crates full of specimens and artifacts of the sort Mr. Jefferson had ordered: the skins and skeletons and horns of animals unknown to science: mountain rams, antelopes, mule deer, burrowing squirrels, badgers, red foxes, gray hares, even a skin of the ferocious yellow bear, terror of the far plains; the expedition had not encountered such a bear yet, but had obtained a hide from the Indians, along with dire warnings of the beast’s strength and ferocity. There were Indian weapons and articles of their clothing and handiwork; there were hides upon which Indian artists had painted representations of historical battles; there were plants reputed to be remedies for the bites of rattlesnakes and mad dogs. And in addition to all these inert specimens, there were the cages in which magpies, prairie hens, and the beloved prairie dog had been kept alive for these many months. As for plants, Lewis had thus far preserved more than a hundred new specimens, pressed in purple blotting paper, with detailed notes on when and where they had been discovered, as well as any nutritive or medicinal values they had.

  No, Mister Jefferson was not going to be disappointed. The Corps of Discovery was hardly halfway to the Pacific, but already had collected enough specimens to open and stock a museum, and it was invaluable.

  It was such a lot of worry, though. Sometimes Lewis felt he would go mad from it. The crates and bags and portfolios and notes, the papers and specimens had to be put in comprehensible order by spring thaw, had to be protected from mold and vermin and deterioration. In the spring this treasure would have to be loaded on the keelboat, entrusted to Corporal Warfington, and put on its hazardous way back down the wild Missouri, past the Sioux, to St. Louis, and thence over or around the other side of the Continent to Washington.

  To add to Lewis’s worries now there was the keelboat itself. It was so locked in layers of river ice that parties working for days with axes and heated water had thus far been unable to free it. The keelboat would have to be released before the great spring ice-breaking, lest it be smashed to splinters.

  Then there was all this worry about the British traders from the North West Company. These accursed British agents were consumed with curiosity about the expedition, and were forever visiting Fort Mandan, and pumping the neighboring Indians for information.

  Lewis was certain now that his Corps of Discovery was in an unannounced race to the Pacific with the British concern, and this added to his anxieties. Jefferson had made it clear that a key objective of the journey was to thwart England’s designs on the control of trade in the Northwest; now the British seemed to suspect that the race was on and that this little American Army unit was its vanguard.

  A few of the Indian chiefs had refused to become friends of the Corps. One important hold-out was the head chief of the Minnetarees, Le Borgne, the One-Eyed. He was reported to be very suspicious of the Americans and had thus far refused to come down from his town on the Knife River and smoke the pipe. His loyalty to the British traders could someday prove troublesome, and Lewis worried every day about him.

  Most of the Indians in the vicinity had, however, been completely won over by the Americans. Both captains spent hours of every day treating the Indians for everything from rheumatism and infections to frostbite and snow-blindness; and Private Shields, that extraordinary blacksmith, had probably done as much for the cause of diplomacy by mending their tools and weapons, as York had done by infusing Strong Blood into the tribes’ unborn generations.

  Now another heartbreaking groan came through the wall from the interpreters’ quarters, and Lewis winced over his tea.

  Lord but I wish Clark was here, Lewis thought. The girl’s come to trust him like an uncle. If he was here I’ll wager she’d settle back and loosen up and yield that babe slick as pawpaw pulp, just to please ’im.

  But William was not here. He had gone downriver a week ago, leading a hunting party of eighteen men. The stocks of meat put by in November and December had been nearly depleted, and game was scarce within fifty miles of this cluster of Indian towns. So the hunters had set out across the blinding and featureless desert of ice and snow, leading three pack horses and pulling two handmade wooden sleds, determined to go as much as a hundred miles to find game if they had to. Their peril, out there in the deep snow and subzero prairie gales, had added to Lewis’s anxieties, as had the resultant undermanning of the fort.

  And now on top of all those concerns, there was that nervewracking labor going on in the next room. If it were merely the suffering of a nameless and inconsequential squaw, the pity of it would have been distracting enough. But this girl, whose short life had already been an unremitting series of tragedies, was no mere squaw now. It grew ever more apparent that she would be a critically important figure when the expedition reached her people in the mountains. Lewis was growing alarmed at the possibility that she might die in childbirth.

  He sipped at the edge of his teacup, then set it down with a sigh when another awful whimper came from Sacajawea’s quarters. That one had almost surfaced as a scream. He put the cup down. “Come,” he said to York. “Let’s see if we can do something.”

  They met René Jessaume going in. Jessaume was in character somewhat like Charbonneau, perhaps even outweighing him in self-importance. When they entered, they found Jessaume’s squaw sitting useless and apparently unconcerned with the sufferings of Sacajawea. This woman was older, something of a harlot, and Jessaume customarily rented her out to anyone who wanted to partake of her sluttishness. Jessaume threw her a few contemptuous Mandan words as they entered the room, and she rose sullenly and climbed the ladder into the sleeping loft above the room. Then Jessaume turned to look at Sacajawea, who lay on a pallet close to the fireplace. She was naked, covered with a sheen of sweat, having thrown the buffalo robe off the upper part of her body. Her hair was lank with sweat and bear grease. She was so small-ches
ted and looked so stricken that she seemed more like a child with her belly swollen with illness than a mother in labor. She tried to smile at her friend York, though her little rib cage was heaving with the exertions of her breathing.

  “Merde!” Jessaume swore, stomping snow off his boots. “Who put this creature in the way of my fire?”

  York swelled up and looked like the ferocious beast he was reputed to be. “I did,” he growled.

  “Eh,” Jessaume said with a false smile. “That is good for her comfort.” He shrugged off his blanket-coat, looking down at her. “Jesu,” he growled. “How long does she do thees?”

  “Since this morning,” said Lewis. It was now late afternoon.

  “Eheu,” he muttered with a shrug. “Ees pity this be the cold season.”

  “Eh? Why say so?”

  “Could catch the rattlesnake, and use its rattle.”

  “What’s this?” Lewis said. “I have a snake’s rattle. If I can find it.”

  “Eh! Get it, mon capitaine. Jessaume will show you how the Arikaras hurry a stubborn enfant.”

  Lewis hurried into his room and rummaged among boxes for the rattles he had kept as a specimen when one of the men had killed a western rattler in the plains last summer.

  He found the specimen and took it in to Jessaume. The Frenchman separated a segment of the rattle. York watched distrustfully from the bedside, where he knelt gently sponging the girl’s face and neck with a wet cotton cloth. To York, a rattlesnake was nothing good, and from what he had seen, a French Canadian was no better, so he was fearful for his suffering young friend. “Seem to me,” he ventured, “if a crittur’s p’ison at one end he be p’ison at the other.”

  “No,” said Lewis. “Let’s just try it. Anything!”

  Jessaume was now breaking the rattle into a tin cup with his strong, dirty thumbs; it looked rather like pie dough being crumbled. Then, whistling tunelessly through the gap between his yellow teeth, he lifted a kettle off the fire and poured hot water into the cup, then picked up a dirty spoon and stirred it, looking as insouciant as if he were merely fixing himself a cup of sweet tea.

  “Now,” he said, squatting close to the pallet, “one must tell the woman what it do.” He clucked and gurgled a statement in the Minnetaree tongue, and she stopped groaning and lay panting through an open mouth, listening to what he said. Apparently it was convincing; the girl reached out to touch the cup as Jessaume lifted her and brought it toward her lips. She sipped at the cup’s edge.

  Lewis watched. He saw the skinny brown squaw child lying swollen in the musty buffalo robe, her eyes sunken, hair uncombed, watched her drink the disgusting potion; he smelled the body smells and old woodsmoke and the tangy rough-hewn raw wood of the hut walls, saw the smoke-and-grease-blackened leather leggings stretched over the thick thighs of the squatting Jessaume, saw Jessaume scratching lice or fleas under his arm with his free hand, saw his black-bearded uncivilized face, heard Jessaume’s wife break wind loudly up in the loft, heard the prairie wind howl around the eaves of the hut; and he suddenly felt a profound depression over the squalor of this little Indian girl’s life, her pained struggle to deliver an ignominous life into the world, all as a result of the apparently insatiable lust of that arrogant pig of a man Charbonneau; it was all so totally and unexpectedly sordid, so savage, so lacking in meaning or human hope or dignity, that Lewis despaired over the absence of glory in most human lives. He had always had his own dream of glory, this great exploration of the Northwest, and somehow now, this wretched scene, the genesis of a savage life, was like a profanation of his dream. Dear God, he thought, would it were in a man’s power somehow to ease the human condition!

  Now the girl had swallowed the concoction; Jessaume had put the cup on the dirt floor and gotten up and was hanging up his gun and powder horn, apparently through with his ministration and unconcerned with its results. Sacajawea lay back on the robe now, and did indeed seem to be going tranquil. Either it’s just a placebo, Lewis thought, or she’s lying back to die. He felt her pulse, that regular little blood-beat under sweaty skin next to the small wrist bones. It was fine. He laid his hand on her forehead; she was not overly feverish. Jessaume’s potion had not done her any harm that he could perceive. She was still conscious; she was still laboring; she was still hurting and bewildered; he could see all that in her face. But now at least she did not seem to be dying of it. Lewis looked at Jessaume and said, “What does it do? How does it work?”

  The Frenchman shrugged. “Jessaume he is no doctor. Only I know the enfant will be here soon.”

  “York,” Lewis said, rising, “watch after her. I’ll be next door if ye need me.”

  Back at his desk, he sat with a piece of the purple blotting paper in his hands, looking at the showy pink flower pressed on it, a new flower discovered last summer near the mouth of the Platte River; he sat looking at the flower and trying to shake off that odd pall of despair, sometimes thinking of his friend Clark, wishing he could hear the shout of his return at the gate.

  But the shouts he heard then were not William’s. York’s joyful whoop rolled through the wall, followed immediately by Jessaume’s throaty laughter and then the glorious angry wail of a newborn baby.

  “Yo! Cap’m Lewis!” York’s voice thundered. “We got us ‘nother man for our army! He, he!”

  Lewis heard the sentry and several other soldiers beyond the walls laugh and cheer. He rose from the bench, a smile spreading over his narrow mouth, the gloom suddenly blown off his soul, and headed for the door.

  “Well, well,” he was saying to himself. “Well, well. Damn me, wait till Mister Jefferson hears o’ this! Everybody’ll want a rattlesnake!”

  LOCUST GROVE PLANTATION, KENTUCKY

  MARCH 1, 1805

  “NOW, NICKY, CHARLIE,” LUCY SAID TO THE TWO RED-HAIRED toddlers whom the nursery mammy had led into the parlor, “would you say how d’ye to your Auntie Fanny?”

  Both little round identical faces broke into elfin, nose-wrinkling grins. Both of the twins had always liked Fanny, even before they had known her name. And now as she bent forward in her chair and tilted her head and spread her arms toward them, they both at once let loose of the servant’s hands and hurried toward her, their eyes fastened on her smiling mouth. Males of every age were entranced by Fanny’s lovely white smile, even age two. They came into her embrace, one in each arm, murmuring, “Huwwo” and other words less comprehensible. She kissed one on the cheek and asked:

  “And who are you?”

  “Jaws,” Charles pronounced his name.

  And she kissed the other one and said, “And who are you, sir?”

  “Neckwuss,” Nicholas said.

  She laughed her plangent laugh and held them at arm’s length to look at them, one hand on each of their identical white yoke collars. “Well, I don’t know how you know which of you is which,” she said. “Did anyone ever tell you you look as like as two buttons on a shirt?”

  “I biggo,” said Charles. He was a little stockier. This was Lucy’s second son named Charles. Her first Charles had lived only ten months.

  The twins were Lucy’s seventh and eighth children. Now forty, she was still strong and erect, regal and red-haired as her mother had been, with the same fair, sensitive skin now showing the tiny squint-wrinkles. But she was not a beautiful woman, as her mother had been at this age. She looked, rather, with her long Clark nose and thin, firm mouth, more like her brothers than her sisters. It was as if the tomboy of old had passed through her two decades as a vivacious belle and then emerged looking like a handsome, not very effete, good fellow. To Bill Croghan, though, she was still beauteous. And to those who knew her well, she was still vivacious. To outsiders, who usually saw her only in the back of Colonel Croghan’s gleaming black carriage, or in the family church pew, or passing in and out of shops, she was only the matronly sister of General Clark, sharp-eyed, impassive, confident of herself and her position, looking rather like him.

  Her face reflected disple
asure in the same way as his: a flashing of the dark blue eyes, a visible clenching of the jaw muscles. And that expression hardened her visage now. Something was displeasing her at this moment, just as the twins were being led out of the panelled room. It was George’s voice, loud and arrogant and liquory in its inflections, coming across the hall from the drawing room, where he was smoking and drinking with William Croghan and Judge Fitzhugh, Fanny’s fiancé.

  “… bedamned Webster didn’t know what he was talking of! Dam-NATION! Any one o’ those mounds would’ve taken De-Soto ten years to build, and he was only in these parts for—”

  The door shut, and George’s words became indistinct, but the rumble of his voice went on. Lucy’s lips were in a thin line. With an exasperated hiss of a sigh, she asked:

  “What in heaven’s name is he ranting about now? And why must he be so profane in my house?”

  Fanny knew from the few words what his topic was. She had heard him go on about it many times while she was living at Point o’ Rock. “It’s that about the Indian mounds,” she said. George had written a treatise debunking the prevailing theories about the mounds: that they had been built by a great Indian race like the Incas, now extinct, or that they had been built by the Spanish explorer DeSoto. George’s own research into the mounds and interviews with Indian chiefs had convinced him that the great network of mounds had been built by none other than the ancestors of tribes still inhabiting the Mississippi watershed. And now, in the room across the hall, he was pontificating on his old theory for a new set of ears, those of Dennis Fitzhugh.

  “That again?” Lucy snapped. “I swear I don’t know how a man can stay so riled over a lot of Indians that’s been dead a thousand years! I mean so riled as to cuss. Why, when my boys Georgie and Johnny go visit him, it takes me a month and ten balls o’ soap apiece to wash th’ stain of impiety out o’ their mouths!” She was tapping her foot angrily and shaking her head.

  “They worship him,” Fanny explained. “They just try to be like him. Surely you know that, Lucy dear.”