From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  PRIVATE NEWMAN STOOD BEFORE CAPTAIN LEWIS AMONG THE piles of baggage. He had been called in, and he was full of hope.

  “I want you to know, Newman, that I’m writing a report on you that will stand you in good stead at your next post. In our minds you stand acquitted by your behavior.”

  Newman began to glow.

  “We are sorry to lose you, but I can’t rescind my judgment. You’ll …” Newman’s gaze stayed on Lewis’s face, but he seemed to shrink half a foot. “You’ll pack your gear to go on the keelboat party back to St. Louis.”

  “That, that’s final, sir?”

  “It is. That’s all, Newman. Regrets.”

  “Didn’t I say so?” Colter remarked later when he heard of it. “The man’s a walkin’ hard-on.”

  38

  FORT MANDAN

  April 7, 1805

  THE BOW GUN BOOMED, AND ITS SMOKE ROLLED AMONG THE hundreds of yelling and chattering Mandans on the shore. The keelboat turned on the flint-gray water and began slipping downstream, her small crew under Corporal Warfington waving back.

  A reply was fired from a swivel gun in the white pirogue, which was still moored at the bank, and the huzzahs of the soldiers on shore were, for a moment, louder than the droning voices of the Indian crowd. William had to shout into Lewis’s ear to make himself heard, pointing at the Discovery.

  “I wish she had come up as easy as she goes down!”

  Lewis nodded, then shook his head. They both were remembering the half-year of perilous toil expended to bring up the great boat, which now would return to the Mississippi, without such toil but in twice as much peril, bearing its priceless cargo of knowledge. Its downriver pilot was Joseph Gravelin, the least dishonest Frenchman they had encountered on the Upper Missouri and reputedly an excellent waterman; therefore it was not so much the river itself, but the return voyage past the belligerent Teton Sioux, which posed danger for Warfington’s crew.

  The Indians on the shore were as melancholy and excited as the Americans. These white men who were leaving this day, going both up the river and down, leaving behind a willow-log fort full of smoke-smells and life-smells and the ghosts of laughter and music, had changed the world for them. They had given them a new way to think. They had caused tribes to declare peace with each other. They had cured many diseases and injuries for the Mandans and their neighbors. They had left much strong new blood in the Mandan nation; many squaws, no one knew how many, were carrying within themselves babies they expected would have gray eyes or blue eyes, red or yellow hair, and fair skin. Also there were many of these squaws who could expect their babies to have black skin and hair like wool and the strength of bears. Several of the soldiers, in return for what they were leaving in the Mandan women, were bringing with them the burning, itching, seeping symptoms of venereal disease.

  Many of the soldiers, now gathered near their pirogues and canoes on the trampled shore, stared good-byes into the eyes of certain squaws who drifted down near them, and a few small gifts and remembrances were passed between white hands and brown hands.

  William’s heart was full of happiness and sadness as he watched the farewells. He saw Sacajawea, in a spotless fringed tunic and calf-high moccasins, her greased hair immaculately combed, parted and bound into two braids, her baby in a cradleboard on her back, standing amid a cluster of other squaws. Some of them were embracing her and giving her gifts, or folding their wrists over their bosoms in the sign of love, tears on their faces—and yet there was something bad, something alien and sullen in the faces of several of them. The other two wives of Charbonneau hung back from her, their eyes full of plain hatred, and William could understand that; it was simple jealously. But the strange reserve of the others dawned on him slowly. Of course: she was even less a one of them now than she had been as a Shoshoni slave of their people, or as a Frenchman’s squaw. She was a woman now leaving The Nation, one Indian woman in the company of many white warriors, going with them into distant lands where they would and could never dream of going. Thus she was lost to them, different from them, very bad medicine.

  William looked at her. She was certainly not gloating about her special status. In her face, that unusually delicate and guileless face whose expressions he was learning to read, were both the sadness of partings and the pain of rejection. It’s all right, girl, he wanted to go and tell her. In three or four months, God willing, we’ll have you among your own blood people.

  Captain Lewis, in full uniform, now was standing face to face with Shahaka, known as “Big White,” major chief of the Mandans. Each gripped the other’s shoulder with his right hand, and they clasped their left hands underneath. The crowd grew still around them, to hear their words, for they loved their old chief; and the quiet spread through the throng like a ripple on water until there were no more human voices, only the whiff of the cool, spring-scented wind, the barking of dogs, the rush of the river.

  Chief Shahaka spoke first. He wore a Jefferson medal on a necklace, proudly displayed on his chest. It had become his most important piece of ornamentation. Now he began, in a voice that could be heard all along the riverbank.

  “My people have shared food and kindness with you. You have made my sick people well, and you have been fair in all matters. We weep to see you go. You and Chief Red Hair have taught us to turn our backs on old wars, and to look east to your nation for protection and for trade. I, Shahaka, and all my people trust you. We will always watch up the great river for your return. But even if you do not come back this way, we will remember you, and our sons and grandsons will hear of the winter when you lived among us and made us glad. This I say for my people: you have made friends of us forever.” The crowd murmured in approval; some voices keened, “Aii-eee! Aii-eee!”

  Lewis blinked and swallowed as this was translated. Then, still holding the chief’s left hand, he responded:

  “We have been secure and happy as your neighbors, and we will miss our brothers the Mandans. When we return from beyond the Shining Mountains, we will embrace you again.

  “You see our ship going down the river. The talking leaves we put on that ship will tell our Great Father about your goodness and your brotherhood. And when I see our Great Father face to face, I will tell him the same in my own voice, and he will look kindly on you. He will send men to bring goods to sell you at fair prices, as I have promised. The friendship of my nation and yours started when we came here before the winter, and it will never end.”

  The tumult of affection and farewell grew loud again as Lewis and the chief embraced. Then the chief hugged William; the sergeants bawled orders, and twenty-seven white men, one black man, one Shoshoni girl-squaw, one two-month-old papoose, and one black Newfoundland dog the size of a pony, arrayed themselves in the pirogues and canoes. Captain Lewis, armed with his rifle and espontoon, accompanied by George Drouillard, waved them off and started hiking northward along the shore. The small canoes, hacked out of poor, wind-twisted willow trunks a few weeks earlier, were sorry-looking vessels, patched with tin to cover and hold the splits and faults in their grain, but they were riverworthy nevertheless, and even though heavy-laden, they were light as feathers compared with the old keelboat Discovery, to the delight of the men on the oars and paddles. The water was fast and gray, even now dotted with cakes of rotten ice. William put a hand over the side into the river and it ached with cold.

  “Careful, boys,” he called. “No one wants to find himself swimming in that by an accident! Now, put your minds off those dusky sweethearts o’ your’n, and blow th’ lodge smoke out o’ your lungs. Stroke water, boys! It’s a long haul to th’ western sea!”

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF MERIWETHER LEWIS:

  Fort Mandan April 7th, 1805

  Having on this day at 4. P.M. completed every arrangement necessary for our departure, we dismissed the barge and crew with orders to return without loss of time to St. Louis.… We gave Richard Warfington, a discharged Corpl., the charge of the barge and crew, and confided to his care likewise
our dispatches to the government, letters to our private friends and a number of articles to the President of the United States.…

  At the same moment that the Barge departed from Fort Mandan, Capt. Clark embarked with our party and proceeded up the River. As I had used no exercise for several weeks, I determined to walk on Shore as far as our encampment of this evening.

  Our vessels consisted of six small canoes, and two large perogues. This little fleet altho’ not quite so rispectable as those of Columbus or Capt. Cook, were still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those deservedly famed explorers ever beheld Theirs; and I dare say with quite as much anxiety for their safety and preservation. We were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden; The good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine, and these little vessells contained every article by which we were to expect to subsist or defend ourselves, however, as the state of mind in which we are, generally gives the colouring to events, when the immagination is suffered to wander into futurity, the picture which now presented itself to me was a most pleasing one entertaing as I do, the most confident hope of succeeding in a voyage which had formed a darling project of mine for the last ten years, I could but esteem this moment of my departure as among the most happy of my life. The party are in excellent health and spirits, zealously attached to the enterprise, and anxious to proceed; not a whisper of murmur or discontent to be heard among them, but all act in unison, And with the most perfict harmony.

  May 9, 1805

  THEY HAD BEEN COMING ALONG AND COMING ALONG, SINGING, shouting, cursing, laughing, groaning, under the vast, indifferent prairie sky.

  They had toiled up the Missouri more than a hundred miles a week since the sendoff from Fort Mandan. They were in high plains no white man had ever seen now, lands of overwhelming spaciousness, where immense storms cruised through distant quadrants of sky, or sometimes came over and struck the boats squarely with frightening force; where gigantic prairie fires crawled orange and black along distant horizons, and coal-seams smoked and stank as if hell were leaking; where mineral-water runoff stained the bluffs and the river the color of lye and made the water taste like medical salts; where hundreds of bison, drowned in the breaking ice of late winter, lay flyblown and rotting with a stench that made men gag.

  They had watched spring appear, then recede, then reappear, in this wondrous landscape. They saw it coming in the air, where uncountable flocks of geese and brant etched their northering arrow-formations, and where the first mosquito of the season appeared one day early in April, forerunner to millions. They saw spring on the land, in the cautious green buds of elm and cottonwood and arrowwood, then in the pale new grassblades amid the dry yellow-gray of last year’s buffalo grass, in the tiny color-flashes of strawberry flowers and primrose, trillium, violet, and plum-bush blossoming in sunny meadows. And these delicate advances then would be buried when the wind backed into the northwest and brought down surprise snowfalls, and blew so cold it formed ice on the oars or whipped the river to froth and chased the boats into leeward shelters. One such gust, coming on a mid-April day on a mile-wide expanse of the Missouri, had nearly overturned the white pirogue, which had been spanking along under a squaresail and a spritsail with the excitable Charbonneau as its helmsman. Charbonneau had dropped to his knees, releasing the tiller to pray to the Mother of God. That had been a near catastrophe, as the vessel carried most of the expedition’s instruments, papers, medicines, and Indian presents. That the pirogue had not sunk seemed to indicate that even Charbonneau’s prayers were heard.

  The boats had continued to meet all the Missouri’s old familiar hazards—falling banks, sandbars, and mudflats, submerged logs, blind channels, wind-squalls, and blowing sand—and now the explorers had jokingly added Charbonneau to their list of navigational perils.

  But they had been coming along and coming along, rowing and sailing and poling and towing the boats, often jumping into the numbing-cold river to lift and shove the floundering vessels out of drift logs and off sandbars. Men on the tow ropes often had to clamber through huge mats and mounds of tangled driftwood, much of it carved by the deft chisel-marks of beavers’ teeth. The captains had exercised their medical skills on rheumatism, dysentery, boils, abscesses, felons, lacerations, sprains, and on coughs and sore eyes caused by blown dust; but these afflictions only irritated the hardy troops, and put none of them out of action for even an hour. Captain Lewis had brought vials of kine pox vaccine, and used a rest stop to inoculate those of the men who had never had the smallpox. In general the troops all remained in robust health and good spirits, with appetites which devoured elk, buffalo, fowl, goats, and beaver almost as fast as the hunters could dress them out.

  The men had been coming along and coming along, seemingly as enchanted and excited by the new world as their captains were; there had been not one breach of discipline since Fort Mandan; they enjoyed a deepening sense of harmony, as if their special brotherly bond were growing tighter with every league they went into the unknown. The only thing even resembling a quarrel occurred one evening when one unfortunate beaver got itself caught in two traps, and Colter and Drouillard had had a hot, bellowing debate over whose beaver it was. William had divided the beaver.

  They had come along and come along through landscapes as strange to them as the moon. They had seen an infinity of lime-green treeless plains, dark-blue cloud-shadows racing over them, and far to the south a range of low mountains, still snowy in their shady slopes, had been visible for several days. They had camped in the shadows of long, flat-topped mesas with flanks as steep and regular as castle walls. They had passed rivers whose waters emptied white as milk into the dark, muddy flow of the Missouri; they had seen tortuous arid canyons eroded by those rivers, canyons with steep walls white as chalk and striped with veins of clay in a hundred subtle shades of red and pink, yellow and gray-blue. Late in April they had entered the wide, lush valley where the Yellowstone River flowed in from their left, its bed nearly a thousand yards wide at the mouth, most of that an enormous sandbar bright green with cane and young willow and aswarm with geese, gulls, and ducks. The fertile bottomlands and the plains above had been covered with herds of buffalo, elk, and antelope, so tame and curious that they actually followed the men, trying to determine what they were. This place, grassy and well-timbered, seemed such a paradise that the party celebrated its arrival with a dram of whiskey and a dance to Cruzatte’s lively fiddle.

  They had come along and come along then beyond the great Yellowstone, feeding on the plentiful elk and buffalo and beaver shot by Drouillard or the Fields brothers, or by the captains themselves, and on geese and rabbits, and even a small antelope that Scannon killed and dragged into camp; they had seen the amazing, nimble big-horned sheep springing along the faces of perpendicular cliffs. And here above the Yellowstone they also had had their first encounters with the formidable grizzly bears of which the Indians had warned them. In late April, Lewis and a hunter had shot a young male of the species, weighing about three hundred pounds, and deduced that the legendary beasts perhaps were not so formidable or dangerous as they had been represented. But that appraisal had gradually begun to change as the party met more and more, bigger and bigger ones. On May 5, William had entered in his journal:

  in the evening we saw a Brown or Grisley beare on a sand beech, I went out with one man Geo Drewyer & killed the bear, which was verry large and a turrible looking animal, which we found verry hard to kill we Shot ten Balls into him before we killed him, & 5 of those Balls through his lights

  The beast had measured eight feet seven and a half inches long, and its heart was as large as that of an ox. And Lewis, after another encounter, had written:

  I find that the curiossity of our party is pretty well satisfyed with rispect to this anamal, the formidable appearance of the male bear killed on the 5th added to the difficulty with which they die even when shot through the vital parts, h
as staggered the resolution of several of them, others however seem keen for action with the bear; I expect these gentlemen will give us some amusement shotly as they (the bears) soon begin to coppolate.

  Burping happily after one of the best dinners he had ever eaten, Lewis sat chuckling and writing in his journal an entry that he believed would entertain thoroughly Thomas Jefferson the gourmet:

  Thursday May 9th 1805

  Capt. C killed 2 bucks and 2 buffaloe, I also killed one buffaloe which proved to be the best meat it was in tolerable order; we saved the best of the meat and from the cow I killed we saved the necessary materials for making what our wrighthand cook Charbono calls the boudin (poudingue) blanc, and immediately set him about preparing them for supper; this white pudding we all esteem one of the greatest delacies of the forrest; it may not be amiss therefore to give it a place.

  About 6 feet of the lower extremity of the large gut of the Buffaloe is the first mosel that the cook makes love to, this he holds fast at one end with the right hand, while with the forefinger and thumb of the left he gently compresses it, and discharges what he says is not good to eat, but of which in the sequel we get a moderate portion; the mustle lying underneath the shoulder blade next to the back, and fillets are next saught, these are needed up very fine with a good portion of kidney suet; to this composition is then added a just proportion of pepper and salt and a small quantity of flour; thus far advanced, our skilfull opporater C—–o seizes his recepticle, which has never once touched the water, for that would intirely distroy the regular order of the whole procedure … and tying it fast at one end turns it inward and begins now with repeated evolutions of the hand and arm, and a brisk motion of the finger and thumb to put in what he says is bon pour manger; thus by stuffing and compressing he soon distends the recepticle to the utmost limmits of it’s power of expansion, and in the course of it’s longitudinal progress it drives from the other end of the recepticle a much larger portion of the—–than was prevously discharged by the finger and thumb of the left hand in a former part of the operation; thus when the sides of the recepticle are skilfully exchanged the outer for the iner, and all is compleatly filled with something good to eat, it is tyed at the other end, but not any cut off, for that would make the pattern too scant; it is then baptised in the Missouri with two dips and a flirt, and bobbed into the kettle; from whence, after it be well boiled it is taken and fryed with bears oil untill it becomes brown, when it is ready to esswage the pangs of a keen appetite of such as travelers in the wilderness are seldom at a loss for.