From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “I’m with you.”

  The morning was pleasant and fair. They hiked up the greening slopes out of the valley, Lewis using his espontoon as a walking staff, William shading his eyes under the tomahawkumbrella George had given him. For a time as they went up they could see the scouting canoes crawling slowly up the divergent rivers; then those were lost to sight in the willows and below the brow of the bluff. They were limping soon; some of the prickly pear thorns pierced even the parfleche outersoles of their moccasins. But they were accustomed to that, and went on to the top.

  They stood now, the wind fresh on their sweaty faces, and looked over a vast plain, evenly covered with pale new grasses and wildflowers, blackened here and there by distant herds of buffalo, thousands of them, attended by tiny wolves like shepherds. There were smaller herds of elk, and scattered antelope grazing with their young beside them. To the south lay a range of high mountains, partially covered with snow, and at a great distance beyond them lay a loftier range, entirely white with snow. It was not possible to discern the directions of the rivers very far, as their channels soon simply blended into the surface of the immense plain.

  “Now we’ve seen it, let’s sit and smoke on it,” Lewis said.

  “Let’s find a bench, though. Prickly pears’re bad enough in the feet.”

  They sat on a flat rock and lit a bowlful of tobacco in William’s versatile umbrella. Finally Lewis asked:

  “What d’ you say, Clark?”

  William blew smoke and, squinting across the plain, through the heat waves that made the distant animals and mountains tremble, replied:

  “I think Janey’s right. This river”—he nodded toward the southerly branch—“looks like a mountain river to me. Clear, a stony bottom. I feel it’s come to us from those mountains.”

  “Go on.”

  “T’ other fork boils and rolls all muddy like the Missouri we know. So I don’t think it comes through mountains, lest it be away, way north.”

  “Like from Saskashawan.”

  “Aye. From there, or from thereabouts. But I think it rises this side o’ th’ mountains, not in ’em.”

  “Thus it’s turbid here, eh?”

  “Aye. And ye recall, the Minnetarees said the Missouri veers southwest before the mountains, and that you have to go that way to reach the falls.”

  Lewis puffed and nodded. “Let me play Devil’s advocate, though,” he said. “Suppose we’re putting too much faith in what the Minnetarees told us. Didn’t you ever feel they were sometimes makin’ things up when they weren’t sure?”

  William thought on this unsettling question. He had had that notion sometimes himself. But now he said: “I think their facts petered out beyond the Snake tribe country, true, and after that they just cheerful-like obliged us with whatever they thought we’d want to hear. But everything they told us up to this place proved out well-nigh exact, didn’t it?”

  “Everything seems to, let’s say. But this big river from the north, that they never mentioned, that does give me pause as to their veracity. Say what?”

  “Not me, Lewis. Maybe we miscomprehended something they meant, but I think I can judge when an Indian’s at least a-tryin’ to tell the truth. Now, I would take that south river without a pause, if it was just me. But this is a bigger consequence and we have to be sure. So let’s study on what our boys find out.”

  “I think like you,” Lewis said. “The south fork is our river. But we have to be dead sure. Now let’s go down and look to our footsore boys.”

  * * *

  THE MEN IN CAMP WERE WORKING HARD, BUT THEY WERE doing as much as they could sitting down, trying to keep their weight off their feet. York was doing most of the standing work, hauling in firewood, cutting boughs for beds, cooking, making tea, and delivering it around the camp in steaming kettles. He limped and grimaced, but kept up such cheerful talk that his grimace could have been mistaken for a grin. He also hovered around Sacajawea a great deal; she was listless and dull-eyed, hardly even caring for her baby. Since almost everyone in the camp was suffering and had fallen off in vigor and appetite, the Indian girl’s condition caught no one’s attention particularly. But York was ever solicitous of her well-being. There was a special bond between these two; even though they knew scarcely twoscore words in common, they seemed to understand each other fully. York was teaching her some English and she was teaching him some hand signs. They were sensitive to each other and, with her baby and the invalid Scannon, they seemed to have formed a little society unto themselves. In camp, the four of them were almost always near each other. York coddled and tended the baby in much of his spare time, and could make it laugh with such frantic glee that its piping voice would carry throughout the camp. York, Sacajawea, Scannon, and little Pompey: they were the only members of the expedition who in one way or another were not white, male, adult humans. And, though each had his or her attachments to the military party itself, they were as well their own community, a community of slaves, mascots, and tagalongs, most unlikely in a military expedition—though they were so familiar to it by now that no one thought them odd anymore.

  When the scouting parties came in that evening, a conference was held under the cottonwoods around a smoky bonfire, the two dubious rivers flowing together before them with their relentless liquid rushings. The scouts had found the north fork slower and more navigable, but nothing else conclusive had come of their sorties. To a man, with due respect to their captains, they all still believed even more firmly that the north fork was the way. “To us all, it’s plain as poop in a pan,” said Sergeant Ordway, “though o’ course, sirs, whatever way y’ choose, we’re happy to go. But there’s not a one of us here puts a bit o’ faith in what a squaw-girl smells in th’ air, even though she be a good soldier by what we seen, no, not even ’er own husband does. Eh, Big Tess?”

  “She knows nothing, mes capitaines,” said Charbonneau with a shrug.

  “It’s not just Janey’s nose we’re judgin’ by,” said William. “It’s other things we know.”

  Lewis stood up now, and looked around the circle of firelit faces.

  “You all know it’s not our mode to go off half-minded. So Captain Clark and I have decided to satisfy ourselves before we lead on. Pryor, Drouillard, Shields, Windsor, Cruzatte, and Le Page, you men be prepared to walk out with me tomorrow early, and we’ll go up the north fork till we have no doubts about it. Cap’n?”

  “Going with me,” William announced, “I want Joe and Rube Fields, Pat Gass, Shannon, and York. We’ll ascend the south fork. Sergeant Ordway, you’ll be in charge of th’ camp here, which I expect will be in th’ main a hospital for bunged-up feet. Y’ can all sit around and make clothes, just like a sewin’ bee back home.” Laughter passed around the campfire. “So be it,” he finished. “Those ordered, be ready to go at eight in the morning with marching kit. And now, it’s time for our nightcap.”

  “AAAAAAAA!”

  Joe Fields’s scream in the willow thicket jerked up everyone’s head. William could hear him running toward the camp but could not see him yet. The voice came again:

  “Grizzlies! Help! Oh God, help!” William, Sergeant Gass, Reuben Fields, Shannon, and York grabbed their rifles up from the bundles and bags and raised them to their shoulders. William’s heart raced as he pulled back the flintlock. The rifle was rain-wet and he could only hope it would fire. Joe Fields had strolled back into the willows to dump his bowels and now he was coming out in desperate haste. He burst from the edge of the willows, fifty feet away, more hopping than running, holding his pants up around his thighs with one hand and lugging his rifle with the other. The moment he appeared, two of the great yellow bears materialized from the switch-willows and came loping after him onto the beach, one slightly ahead of the other and almost on Joe’s back now. Joe’s hobbling breeches now toppled him and he fell on his face. William put his sights as well as he could on the motion-blurred head of the leading bear and squeezed the trigger. Three other rifles crashed beside
him; acrid powder smoke drifted. The first bear had fallen on its side, almost on top of Joe Fields, but it was not hurt badly and was thrashing to get back on its limbs. The other bear had skidded to a halt in the face of this volley and now reared on its hind feet, standing seven feet tall, its tiny sharp dark eyes glittering, its teeth and four-inch talons gleaming as it seemed to try to make up its malevolent mind whether to charge or retreat. This instant of terrible suspense seemed to be forever, then the bear began to roar.

  There was no time for anyone to reload. Someone had not fired yet; that meant there was only one bullet in reserve. William dropped his rifle and grabbed up an espontoon, and out of the corner of his eye he saw young Shannon, fair, gray-eyed, and graceful, getting a bead on the standing monster, aiming right into its huge red mouth. The other bear was up on its front legs now and its attention was on Joe Fields, who was trying to roll away from it.

  William waited an instant until Shannon’s piece crashed; the standing grizzly’s roar broke off and its head twitched, and now was the time. William howled the woods Indian battle cry and ran forward with the espontoon. Beside him, York was bounding forward with his smoking rifle held like a club, bellowing in a voice that filled the valley, and on his other hand Rube Fields was sprinting with his hunting knife out toward the bear that hovered over his brother. Sergeant Gass was reloading.

  It was reckless, desperate. But it worked. Both bears, bleeding and stung by bullets, confronted by these howling, roaring, charging creatures, abandoned the beach and fled, snuffling and growling, back into the willows.

  The men reloaded their guns while Joe Fields, pale as snow and shaking, got his breeches up and tied the waist string. “Goddamn gun wouldn’t shoot.” His voice quaked. “Wet.” He cleaned out the flash pan, and by the time he had it recharged, his hand was steady.

  “Let’s go in and finish ’em,” William said. He didn’t want wounded grizzlies dogging them as they went on up the rocky river.

  The willow switches, thousands of them, all slim and vertical, were dizzying to pass through. The men pushed among them, parting the saplings with the muzzles of their rifles, penetrating the dense thicket ahead with their sight and hearing. William glanced over at York on his left, saw the red handkerchief, the gold earring, the yellow eyes in plum-black skin, the Herculean physique in rain-wet elk skins, slinking tense as a black panther through the thicket, and for an instant he was utterly amazed. A year ago William would never have dreamed he would one day see that craven lard-bag chasing grizzly bears.

  By Heaven, he thought, feeling a new kind of respectful love leap across the space between them. By Heaven!

  They found the two wounded bears, which had been joined by another, staggering through a sloping meadow, far enough away that they could shoot at them and reload with relative safety until all three were dead. They took meat from the youngest and tenderest of them, and proceeded on up the river in high and confident spirits.

  By this second day they had come nearly forty miles up this clear river, and were laboring along the bottoms through clouds of mosquitoes and gnats. Their nostrils and mouths were full of gnats. Across the river, to the southeast, lay a range of mountains covered with snow. A ridge of those mountains came across and approached the river, forming cliffs of dark stone. William led the men through the cold river and up the steep flank of the ridge. At last, panting, chilled now by the wind on their soaked clothes, they flung themselves down on the ridge crest to rest while William moved out onto a precipice and took in the lay of the land.

  For as far as he could see, the river valley ran southwest, the water deep and fast. Now there was no doubt in his mind. This river rose in those mountains, as the Minnetarees had said it did. Somewhere out of sight up there the Great Falls would lie; he knew that without question even though he could hear no sound and see no sight of them. And further up, in the valleys between those distant snowy ranges, they would reach the place where three rivers joined to make the headwaters of the Missouri, and thereabout they would somehow find the people of Sacajawea with their great fine herds of horses.

  He remembered now how she had sniffed the air and pointed this way, and he thought: Somehow she is as certain of it as I am, and yet, how could either of us know?

  With her it could be the instinct that birds have, he thought, because that was her home and she’s pulled toward it the way pigeons are, and geese that know which way to go. I don’t know if you can trust that instinct in a human as you can in a bird, he thought. But some Indians have it very strong, along with their way of seeing things and remembering them. Sacajawea means Bird Woman, so maybe you can trust it in her.

  But I’ve never been there and so it can’t be a homing intuition with me, he thought. But yet I can feel it and I trust what I feel. But why?

  I think I feel it in the tilt of things, he thought. I feel it in my feet, even though my feet are so bunged-up right now I can’t feel anything but sparks and aches, yet I can still feel the way the land tilts.

  He remembered how he and Brother George had stood on hillsides and river banks and meadows a hundred times in those years after the war and had talked about the watersheds of the continent, and he remembered what George had said about that balancing instinct that tells you which way a perfectly flat horizon is actually inclining, and how if you have that, you can even be walking up the east slope of an Ohio Valley hill and still sense that west is downhill until you’re in the Missipp.

  So he thought about George for a while and came to feel that George was inside him looking out through his eyes with him for a long time up this valley, such a valley as George had never seen and never would, yet would understand it and, just like him, just like Sacajawea, would say, “That’s the way West.”

  On a tree he carved, “WM CLARK JUNE 5 1805.” Then he led his men back down toward the base camp in the forks of the river to let Lewis know what he had decided.

  40

  CLARKSVILLE, INDIANA TERRITORY

  JUNE, 1805

  “THEY’RE HERE! GEN’L! BOAT FROM MISSOURI!” THE SHOUTS came up across the meadow ahead of the rider, who was standing in his stirrups and approaching at a full gallop over the sunny grass, laying the whip back and forth over both sides of the horse’s withers.

  George smiled. He had told the boys down at the landing not to waste any time getting the word to him when the boat showed up, and they were not wasting any time. George was rising slowly from his hickory chair, lifting with his arms to ease the pain in his hips and knees, and his heartbeat was quickening.

  News of Billy! By the Lord God, now at last we’ll see how fares that long-gone whippersnapper! he thought. As the messenger brought his steed to a sit-down halt in a cloud of dust by the porch, George shouted into the cabin door, “Cupid, saddle up ol’ Blackleg! I’m goin’ down to th’ river! Hey, Thad,” he said to the youth who was swinging out of the saddle, “I’ll wager you’re thirsty.”

  “Usually am, ’specially now.”

  “I heard the gun,” George said. He tipped the heavy jug over a glass, bracing himself with a palm on the back of his hip as he poured. “Who’s with ’em, could y’ tell?”

  “Nup, Gen’l. I didn’t wait for ’em to land. But it is one o’ Mister Gratiot’s Saint Looy boats, about a dozen folks on board—thankee, to y’r health, sir.”

  “To yours, likewise.”

  “And there be Indians on board, and I seen your brother Edmund, and two-three army regulars.” The messenger’s sweat-dark horse was drinking noisily from the hollowed-log water trough under the hitchrail, and the messenger himself was slurping as noisily over the edge of his glass. George’s legs hurt terribly, but he was too excited and impatient to go to sit back down. The chirr of a locust stretched down toward the watery rush of the Falls.

  There were hoofsteps, and old Cupid came around the corner of the cabin now leading the horse.

  “Good,” said George, putting on his old black hat and setting his glass on the porch. “
Drain up, Thad, and we’ll ride. Cupid, I’ll have guests up for dinner, I reckon. Maybe a dozen, so get ready to feed maybe twenty.” Now, he thought, let’s see can this ol’ carcass still get itself aboard a horse.

  “Twenty?” Cupid whispered to himself and shook his head, but without losing his smile. “Gen’l, sir, it will be ready.”

  I wish I could cheat a little and mount from the porch, George thought. But don’t want people to think I’m goin’ feeble. He gritted his teeth and gripped the saddle with his left hand full of reins, and with a supreme effort that made bolts of pain in his knee and hip, he bent his leg and got his foot into the stirrup. Then he hauled himself upward mostly by his arms, swallowing a wheezing groan, and flung his right leg over. Sparks were floating around in his vision from the hip pains and the effort. Lordy, he thought. Then he turned to the young man, who had just vaulted aboard his own horse without even using the stirrup, just as George had so easily used to do, back in the old days, and he said, “All righty, Thad, m’ boy. I’ll race ye down to the dock!”

  GEORGE SMELLED THE MUSTY LEATHER AND THE STRANGE, mildewy, smoky scents from the willow-wood crates and the parfleche bags, and could not keep himself from reaching a hand out and running it over the heaps of bundles in the gloomy hold of Gratiot’s boat. His ringers trailed over stiff rawhide and sawn wood, over woven willow lath and elk hair. He sniffed familiar smells and strange ones: buffalo skin and beaver castoreum, pine pitch, damp rag-paper, fox fur, sage, bear oil, musk, herbs, sulphur, the cloying odor of dead flowers, the dense putridity of old skeletons and sinews. William’s hand was evident everywhere in the packing: the bindings, those tight pairs of half-hitches George had taught him to tie twenty years ago, the labels addressing this to the President’s House, that to the War Department. George smelled the smells and felt the textures under his fingers, and for a moment now he was seeing not these carefully packed and stored bits of western wilderness, stacked in a stinking riverboat hold, but the distance—the long, winding river, the forests, the treeless plains—as if he had actually witnessed them himself. There was not room enough in this riverboat hold to stand up straight or take a full pace in any direction; and yet for the moment there was an expanse of two thousand miles.