From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Deciding that all this had gone far enough, Lewis stood up and raised his cup. The men fell quiet until there was no noise over the crackling bonfire and the wind on the river.

  “Listen,” he said. “I address your attention to the wife of Charbonneau. She has enough gumption for their whole family. I salute her, gents. Three cheers for the squaw! Hip, hip …”

  “Hooray!”

  “Hip, hip …”

  “Hooray!”

  “Hip, hip …”

  “Hooray!”

  And Sacajawea, looking up quizzically into this uproar and seeing that these great strong white men were all beaming on her, grew so flustered that she turned to bury her face in the nearest refuge. It might at another time have been the bosom of another squaw; it might even have been a wall. As it happened now, it was the shoulder of the person nearest her, someone she trusted and admired in the extreme, the kindest man she had ever seen: Chief Red Hair. William felt the face pressing against him, and was delighted, yet full of pity for her embarrassment, and he was suddenly so suffused with affection that he put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed her to his side. “Here’s to ’er!” he exclaimed, raising his cup, and three more cheers erupted.

  A few days later the captains dubbed a small river Sacajawea’s Creek in her honor, and everyone approved.

  Except Charbonneau, who remembered Chief Red Hair’s arm around his squaw, and who imagined that this was why all the Americains smirked at him.

  39

  Sunday, May 26, 1805

  AND THEN THEY HAD COME ON AND ON THROUGH LATE MAY, through days of scorching sun and eye-scouring dust and nights when water froze in the canoe bilges and camp kettles, through thick morning fogs and high, bright blue afternoons that brought the rattlesnakes out to sun on the rocks wherever men might step. The hills and mesas above the river valley were rugged, treeless, and almost grassless; the main vegetation now was prickly pear, whose needles pierced right through the soles of moccasins. The ground had been imprinted when wet with millions of buffalo hoofprints, which had dried in the sun into a ridged, jagged, ankle-twisting, moccasin-tearing plaster. Dry stream beds broached onto the river, proof that the land was generally as arid as it seemed in this season. Nearly every day one man or another had an encounter with a grizzly bear, till Lewis issued an order that hunters or anyone else leaving the camp must not go alone but in pairs or groups. “These bear being so hard to die reather intimedates us all,” Lewis wrote in his journal. “I had reather fight two Indians than one bear.”

  Buffalo were not so numerous as they had been, but the hunters provided elk, deer, bighorn sheep. Every night the horizons echoed with distant wolf calls.

  Scannon, cornering a wounded beaver one Sunday afternoon, had been bitten on a foreleg by the desperate animal, and its chisel-sharp yellow teeth laid the flesh open so badly that the dog nearly bled to death.

  The evening encampments these days were great gab-fests. Every evening there was some new spill or close call to talk about, as the rapidity of the current now was continually breaking their elkskin tow ropes and endangering the canoes.

  Twanging Kentucky accents rose high in the valley as the men tried to express their wonderment at the beasts and plants and landscapes that were beyond anything they had seen in their lifetimes as hunters and rangers and woodsmen back in the green forests of the Ohio watershed. They were enchanted in particular with the bighorn sheep, which stood ghostly gray on the jagged faces of nearly perpendicular bluffs, looking down curiously with their big, wide-set eyes at the struggling boatmen, or sprang with incredible sureness from crag to crag. Their huge, graceful backward-curling horns were prized; every man yearned to have a pair as a souvenir. The head and horns of a male that Drouillard killed one day weighed twenty-seven pounds. “I still want some,” remarked John Colter, who sat by a campfire pulling prickly pear thorns out of his bloody feet, “but damned if I’ll carry anything that big on up this unmarciful river. I’ll wait ‘n’ get some on the way home.”

  The men were mad for bighorn meat and beaver tails, which they proclaimed the finest foods they had ever tasted and which were made a hundred times more savory by their work-whetted appetites. They were entranced by the vast, flaming, purpling evening skyscapes, the orange sunsets blazing off the river, the vivid rainbows arching over rainwashed gray-blue cottonwoods and brick-and-lime colored willow thickets, the bald, fissured hills on both sides of the river turning violet and then black in the twilight, the moon rising the size and color of a pumpkin over the river behind them. They comprehended that they were in the vanguard of civilization; many of them by now had creeks named after them, and they wore the knowledge of those namesakes with quiet pride, like medals. And thus most of them now seemed to consider themselves the most fortunate men who had ever walked—even though walking was now a wincing agony and their feet were sprained and bruised and punctured by riverbed stones and prickly pear. They gazed dreamily into the light of pungent buffalo-chip-and-willow-wood campfires; they fed themselves with their right hands while wiping mosquitoes off their faces and blowflies off their meat with their left hands. And they were usually so fatigued that they would fall asleep with their poultices still on, and would dream of snow-topped mountains.

  AND NOW THIS SUNDAY MORNING THE MEN WOKE UP groaning with their pains and stiffnesses, and William knew just how they felt because he felt the same. He had to wince to bend his neck far enough to put on his moccasins and leggings. As he struggled with aching fingers to tie thongs, he heard George Gibson groaning. Gibson had dislocated a shoulder the day before while trying to climb a cliff. Several men had pulled and twisted his arm for what had seemed like an eternity until it was back in its socket. “How is it this morning, Gibson?” William called over.

  “Sir,” came the man’s voice, “th’ onliest part o’ me that could hurt worse would be th’ soles o’ my feet, so I thank the Lord I don’t have any soles o’ my feet left.”

  William smiled grimly. It was the kind of joke a hurting man thinks up when he hurts too much to sleep, but it was a joke nonetheless, and it meant Gibson was still game.

  But that about the soles of the feet was not much of an exaggeration. The mere touch of moccasin leather to his own feet made William tremble with pain inside, and he had not yet even stood up to put weight on them this morning.

  Now he clenched his teeth and got up as quickly as he could. It was best to get it over with—if it didn’t make you faint. And the instant his weight was upon those bruised, twisted, stove-up, lacerated, needle-punctured feet, they felt as if he had just stepped on an exploding powder keg. His heart quailed and a hundred suns floated around behind his eyeballs for a moment.

  “Where to so early, Clark?” Captain Lewis’s voice came through the whirlwind of pain.

  “Why,” he panted, “I aim to climb that cliff o’ Gibson’s and get out o’ this canyon for a look-around. Sunday mornin’s a body should see the world from a lofty station, as my Ma used t’ say, rest her soul.”

  IT TOOK HIM AN HOUR, A WHEEZING, SCRABBLING, GROANING, panting hour, climbing on steep slopes of loose, sharp-edged, parched, cactus-and-rattlesnake-infested rock, on windscoured cliff faces, to reach the upland hills. Here he turned and looked back down. A mile below and behind, the little string of canoes and pirogues was inching along the edge of the rushing gray river, the men onshore and in the water, looking tiny and industrious as ants. Now and then he would hear a snatch of voice from down there. He watched them come along now, as they had been doing foot by laborious foot for more than two thousand miles, and for a moment he had the feeling that here is what an Indian, or a mule deer, or a bighorn sheep, or an eagle, would be seeing and hearing as the first white men penetrated into their country.

  Then he had a curious, chilling sensation that something or someone was behind him, likewise looking down at the oncoming Corps—for an instant he remembered the image of Chief Logan the Mingo standing behind George in that old story—and h
e turned, his thumb on the hammer of his rifle.

  No one was there. Just the thirsty, eroded, scrubby, yellow-green and gray, rock-studded hills rolling away treeless into a hazy blue infinity.

  But no!

  His mouth dropped open and he shaded his eyes with his hand and stared at something just above the shimmering horizon. It shone like the white crest of a wave.

  His heart beat fast, as he turned, scanning the horizons up beyond the westering rivercourse. There were more of them, more of those shining crests.

  William climbed for a while farther along the summits of the river hills, entranced, limping but hardly aware of the pains that made him limp, his gaze fastened on those distant masses of white, perhaps twenty, perhaps fifty, miles ahead. And at last he stopped and turned back to go down and tell friend Lewis what he had seen.

  What he had been the first to see.

  From the Journal of Meriwether Lewis

  Sunday May 26th 1805 Capt. Clark walked on shore this morning and ascended to the summit of the river hills he informed me on his return that he had seen mountains on both sides of the river runing nearly parrallel with it and at no great distance; also an irregular range of mountains on larboard about 50 Mls distant.…

  In the after part of the day I also walked out and ascended the river hills which I found sufficiently fortieguieng. On arriving to the summit of one of the highest points in the neighborhood I thought myself well repaid for my labour; as from this point I beheld the Rocky Mountains for the first time, I could only discover a few of the most elivated points above the horizon, the most remarkable of which by my pocket compass I found bore N. 65 degrees W.… these points of the Rocky Mountains were covered with snow and the sun shone on it in such manner to give me the most plain and satisfactory view. While I viewed these mountains I felt a secret pleasure in finding myself so near the head of the heretofore conceived boundless Missouri; but when I reflected on the difficulties which this snowy barrier would most probably throw in my way to the Pacific, and the sufferings and hardships of myself and party in thim, it in some measure counterballanced the joy I had felt in the first moments in which I gazed on them; but as I have always held it a crime to anticipate evils I will believe it a good comfortable road untill I am compelled to believe differently.

  Wednesday, May 29, 1805

  ONE MOMENT THE DARKNESS WAS SILENT, ABSOLUTELY STILL but for the liquid music of the Missouri nearby; the next it was full of uproar: splintering wood, thumpings, shouts, earth-shaking hoofbeats, a gunshot, the chesty breathing of some great creature, still more shouts, and then the explosive barking and snarling of Scannon.

  Jerking upright with his hair on end and his heart in his mouth, William felt Scannon scramble out of the tent in a frenzy. The hoofbeats, the heavy panting, rushed toward the shelter, as if a mammoth were running into the camp. A great, heavy force shook the tent. Lewis’s voice, Charbonneau’s, Sacajawea’s, her baby’s, all erupted at once, adding to the chorus of confused shouts from the troops nearby, but above it all was Scannon’s mad outburst and then a desperate bellowing, mere inches away, and another gunshot.

  When the hoofbeats and barking had receded away down the river and torches were lighted, the shaky captains and nervous sentries were able to study tracks and piece together the near-catastrophe.

  A huge bull buffalo apparently had swum the river from the far side, and in landing had clambered over the white pirogue, upsetting it, stumbling in it, breaking York’s rifle and a blunderbuss that had been left in it. Then, thoroughly panicked, the bull had galloped headlong up the rows of sleeping men, its sharp hooves missing their heads by inches, straight toward the officers’ shelter, while sentries fired blindly into the air. Only Scannon, charging into the face of the onrushing buffalo, had caused it to veer past the shelter, sideswiping it as it thundered away with the Newfoundland at its heels.

  Lewis kept fondling the dog, laughing weakly, shaking his head, looking as if he wanted to kiss the shiny black nose. Scannon sat panting, favoring the foreleg that was still bandaged from its beaver wound, and soaked up the praise, tail beating happily. Sacajawea, who was just beginning to understand through her imperfect hearing of the white men’s language that her friend the black dog had probably saved several lives, was very happy, and she held her baby and leaned unthinking back against the good Red Hair Chief. And it was so natural, under these circumstances, that William was hardly aware of it until he saw Charbonneau glaring balefully at her. So William moved around to kneel close by the dog and run his hand over the silky black hair of its shapely head. Lewis was saying:

  “I’d never have thought of bringing a dog on this journey, but that I read of Mackenzie’s dog, that crossed Canada with ’im. Somehow that just appealed to me, I guess, and that’s why I bought this beastie. Ha, ha! Well, that’s one good idea I’ll have to admit I got from an Englishman!” He shook his head, chuckling. “But I ask you, Clark, have y’ ever seen so sagacious an animal in all your days? Good dog! Goooood Scannon!”

  LATER THAT DAY, THE MEN STILL WADING TO PULL AND PUSH the canoes, the party came to the mouth of a crystalline river that poured into the muddy Missouri from the south. Because of the purity of its waters, William proposed to call it the Judith River, in honor of his Judy Hancock of Fincastle. He made a point of praising that fair golden maiden within the hearing of Charbonneau. William had always tried to treat Sacajawea with detachment, even though his affection and respect for her increased day by day. She, on the other hand, did not have enough guile to try to conceal her admiration of the Red Hair Chief, and so Charbonneau seethed and grew sulkier. Thus William wanted the Frenchman to know he already had a woman—a woman far away, certainly, but a woman of his own kind. And then William put the whole matter out of mind.

  Sacajawea had been hard at work making double soles of raw buffalo hide for the men’s moccasins, to turn the prickly pear needles, but these helped only on overland walks, and the men still had to wince along barefoot when they were on the riverbank or in the water, which was most of the time. A pair of moccasins lasted about two days on this terrain. The Corps had gone through hundreds of pairs.

  The men had every reason to trust that their leaders had worked out in advance every step of their way to the Pacific, and there were a hundred proofs already behind them that both captains were possessed of an uncanny sense of direction and terrain. They had always arrived where and when they had said they would; they never got bewildered, even when hunting and exploring parties split off; even in the treeless, monotonous plains they had always come and gone, departed and rejoined, with an unerring certainty. Shannon and other hunters had got lost for days, but never the captains. All the evidence was that Captains Lewis and Clark were infallible guides, perfectly oriented; there simply was never a reason to doubt their direction. Until Sunday, June 2, when the Corps of Discovery came upon a fork in the river where none was supposed to be: two rivers of apparently equal size, either of whicn could be the Missouri. The party paused and made camp in a cottonwood grove while the captains consulted their projected maps and wondered aloud why the Minnetarees at Fort Mandan had never spoken of this fork.

  It was June now, a week since they had first seen the distant Rocky Mountains, and to go up the wrong river and butt up against the mountains far from the headwaters of the western river would cost them the rest of their traveling season; then there would not be time to cross the Rocky Mountains before the snows made them impassable. The only way to know would be to learn which fork had the Great Falls, the high waterfalls the Minnetarees had described on the Missouri.

  Evening fell, cool and damp.

  The captains had no answer. The Indian girl could not remember tnis fork in the river. Sacajawea had caught a cold and looked weak and dishevelled and confused. Charbonneau seemed scornful, indignant that they would even consult her about such a question.

  She stood and sniffed the air, turning slowly, like a doe, expressionless, and at last pointed up the r
iver that came from the left, from the southwest. Some or the men snickered. This was nothing to go on, they were thinking. That river was clear. The one coming in from the north was muddy and gray-brown, just as the Missouri had been for twenty-five hundred miles. They all felt that it was the Missouri. They were surprised that their captains, who always knew the way, were even hesitating.

  Monday, June 3, 1805

  THEY MOVED THE CAMP NEXT MORNING ACROSS THE CLEAR-RUNNING river and set up on the point made by the junction of the two rivers, and in this camp Captain Lewis set the men to work dressing elk skins, to make new double-sole moccasins and clothing, and also for a hide covering for the collapsible iron-frame boat he had brought all the way from Harper’s Ferry. He looked lovingly at the bundle of iron tubes that, according to his plan, would be fitted together to its thirty-six-foot length and covered with elk hides, thus making a vessel much lighter than a pirogue but capable of carrying five tons of load. He was very fond of this invention of his, and had high expectations for it.

  Now it was time to make the decision about which fork of the river to take. Though every man in the party believed that the muddy one coming in from the north was the true Missouri, the captains were inclined to believe it was the clear one coming up from the southwest. In order to make an informed choice rather than a merely intuitive one, they sent a canoe up each stream, with three good woodsmen in each canoe, to learn the widths, depths, currents, and waters of both streams, as far as they could push up the two streams and safely return by evening. Sergeant Gass took the party up the southerly fork; Sergeant Pryor took the one up the north. They also sent several small parties afoot with instructions to climb the heights along the way and see the distant bearings of the rivers.

  “Now, friend Clark, let’s us climb the height up yonder ourselves and see what we can see,” Lewis said.