And in truth, she did not look as if she would last another day.
FIELDS GAVE HIS REPORT WHILE SITTING ON A ROCK GETTING prickly pear needles tweezed out of his feet. William listened and pulled the needles and asked questions.
“Thursday morning,” said Fields, “that’s when we first heard the waterfalls. Goodrich heard ’em first whilst we was a-movin’ over high ground, and he hollered. We went to look. We seen a cloud of mist ’fore we got to the Falls. Then we seen ’em. Cap’n; it’s the damndest most stupefyin’ sight ever fell on my eyes, I swear t’ God! Eighty feet high if they’s an inch, and th’ whole blamed Missouri comes over white as snow. And roars? Ye have to holler to talk over it. Cap’n Lewis he went out on a buttment of rocks just below the middle of the Falls, midst all that white water, an’ sat there I don’ know, an hour, two hours, three, just a-writin’ notes. I swear, Cap’n, th’ ground itself seems t’ shake. Well, sir, as if that wasn’t enough, next day we went on up and found four more falls, all in less’n ten mile, I bet.” The men, wet, mud-smeared, were standing around listening eagerly to all this.
“Ten mile, ye say,” William commented. “Y’d make the portage then to be about ten mile?”
“Mebbe more like twenty, Cap’n. See, there’s a bad rapid maybe three-four miles this side o’ the Falls, that we didn’t see on the way up, but I found it today comin’ down ’cause I hung closer by the river. Ouch!” His foot jerked as William found another thorn. “An’ then,” he went on, “they’s some horr’ble deep ravines openin’ through the cliffs into th’ river; those would have t’ be gone ’round, sir; add mebbe four-five mile. But these is guesses, Cap’n. A survey’ll show some better.”
“What’s th’ overland like?”
“Flat to rollin’, sir. Hard stony ground an’ prickly pear, not a blessed tree anywhere, ’cept a few in the bottoms—and there’s scarce any bottoms at that. It’s hot as a griddle on them plains up there, too, when th’ sun’s out. More buffalo’n I ever seen in one place, an’ elk galore. Goodrich been catchin’ a trout a minute, too, so th’ eatin’s real good. But hit’s goin’ be a tough haul, sir, no way t’ make it easy, I’m afear’d.”
William had already arrived at that conclusion. Twenty miles in summer heat over stones and prickly pears, toting all these canoes and baggage. That’d kill ordinary folk, he thought.
But we can’t let on, he thought. “Doesn’t sound too bad, does it, boys?” he suggested. They all hooted and laughed. They hardly seemed to be thinking about the hardship of it; they were just glad they were on the right river.
“As for me,” said George Shannon’s clear, young voice, “I’ll be happy to git out o’ water for a spell anyways.”
William smiled and nodded. These aren’t ordinary folk, he thought.
Sunday, June 16, 1805
CAPTAIN LEWIS CAME DOWN WITH HIS SCOUTS AND MET THE main party at the foot of the big rapids, and made straight for the shelter where Sacajawea lay near death. She had been refusing to take medicine, and seemed to have prepared herself to die. He knelt hatless by her pallet and gazed down at her, daylight shining on his sun-bleached hair, and studied her while taking her pulse with a very grave face. His face had been sun-and-wind-burned to a color darker than hers. She was in fact more gray than brown now.
“Fetch me my pouch there,” he said. “I got some chokeberry root bark in there last week up the river. I was likin’ to die one day with a seized-up gut, and that bark cured me entire by bedtime. Have York boil a black tea of it. Meantime, let’s try to get some opium in her. Got to strengthen that pulse ere she just slips away.”
“The boys found a sulphur spring t’day,” William said, kneeling near the girl and unconsciously stroking her forehead with his palm. “Reckon what that might do?”
“We better try it, too. Aye.”
“I had ’em bring back several gallon of it for us all. There’s aplenty.”
When the Indian girl was full of every remedy they could think of, the captains spent two minutes congratulating each other on their good judgment about the river fork and the finding of the Falls, then set about planning the portage. “God bless us,” Lewis exclaimed. “Wait till you see those cascades! I’ve seen many a grand spectacle, but never a thing like ’em!”
They decided to leave the heavy white pirogue rather than portage it. They would dig another cache to lighten the load further, and begin making a skin covering for the iron-frame boat, which would be considerably lighter. Lewis unpacked it and found every piece for its assembly—except one screw. Somewhere along the tortuous way in the two years of this journey, a single screw had been lost. One essential screw. “Damnation!” Lewis cursed. This boat was his pet.
John Shields bent down near him, and looked at the hole where the screw was supposed to go. “Heck fire, Cap’n,” he said. “Don’t y’ fret about that. I’ll make y’ one just like ’er in ’bout a half an hour.”
“Shields,” Lewis said, “if I was a general, I’d make you a colonel.”
They decided to stay here until the squaw either got better or died. They would not try to move her in her present condition. William sent Private Frazier, a fair map-maker with a keen land sense, out with another man to examine and sketch the land on the south bank of the river. Lewis had decided already that the terrain on the north side of the river was too broken for portage.
“Now, friend,” Lewis said, casting his gaze over the canoes and bundles and tools, kegs, bags, weapons, powder canisters, ropes, sails, hides, and instruments, “if you had to transport all that baggage over a long stretch—as ye do—how would you go about it?”
“Why, I’d just load ’em up on oxcarts and wagons, and I’d tell the teamsters, ‘All right, boys, I’ll meet ye at the other end.’ That’s how I’d do it if I had my choice.” He smiled wistfully.
“Aye, me too. But so much for that. Havin’ no oxen or wagons, as we don’t, how would you do it then?”
“Well, I’d dread to try it without wagons. The men could carry it all over on their backs, then carry the canoes. But that would take a lot of trips. Like ants. And over prickly pear. But say …”
“Are you thinking what I am, maybe?”
“I’m thinkin’ we can’t make oxen or even horses. But I’d reckon a people who can manufacture an iron screw in a place like this could make a wooden wagon. As for beasts o’ burden, our boys already shown us they’re that.”
“Aye. And we’ve leather aplenty for harnesses. Let me get a notebook here, and we’ll design us a wagon or two, say what?”
“PULSE REGULAR,” LEWIS SAID WITH SATISFACTION. SINCE the dosage of sulphur water, she had been improving steadily. But then it could have been the cataplasms applied to her uterus, too. Whichever it had been, intestines or female organs, they were getting better. By the third and fourth days she was eating broiled buffalo and broth, sitting up for long spells, and, finally, walking. By Thursday, as the carpenters were finishing the two frail wagons, the girl was able to walk to the river and go fishing.
Throughout the chasm of the Great Falls there hung a stench of rot. It came from countless dead and decaying buffalo. The beasts, immense herds of them crowding down narrow, steep trails to the river to drink, were forever pushing each other off into the swift river, and many were carried over the Falls and killed. Their carcasses, in every state of decomposition, were heaped in the shallows and bottoms, where they attracted buzzards, wolves, grizzly bears, and clouds of flies. The stench was nauseating in the extreme, but it was just something to get accustomed to. The presence of so many bears made it necessary to go armed and in pairs everywhere. Scannon barked all night at the scent of prowling bears, probably keeping them out of the camp but definitely costing everyone much needed sleep.
And so the carpenters worked in the heat and the stink, black with flies, and the men moved the canoes up a creek where the banks were sloped gently enough to permit them to carry them up onto the plain. The men had found only one tree i
n the neighborhood big enough and sound enough to make wheels of; it was a cottonwood twenty-two inches through at the base of the trunk. From this they had cross-sawed two sets of four wheels, and a few spares. These would be brittle wheels, they were sure of that, so they cut still more spares until there was no wood left. There seemed not to be a straight enough piece of wood in the valley for axletrees, so it became necessary to cut up the mast of the pirogue.
The little four-wheel carts were then outfitted with tongues, and the men made harnesses for themselves, with all the predictable jokes about who was dumb as an ox or stubborn as a mule. The white pirogue was lashed down in a brushy covert, and a few more expendable items interred in a second cache. Moccasins were patched and double soled. Charbonneau was bawled out roundly for suggesting again that he wanted to take his squaw and go home. William surveyed the portage route in detail, finding that there were several gullies that could not be avoided, and that there was one big hill of gradual slope, and one steep hill, that would have to be climbed. William also measured all the Falls by instrument, pausing now and then to sit down and just marvel at the hissing, thundering, flashing, steaming, foaming, rainbow-catching beauty of it.
What a poem Johnny could have written about this vision, he thought. The steep, high, striated rock cliffs, through which this boiling water-chute had carved its way, were massive—two and three hundred feet, and nearly perpendicular—and yet seemed to tremble frail as silk in the mist beyond the thundering cascades, as if all this rock might yet simply dissolve and be washed away in a moment. After a while William realized that his equilibrium, even his whole sense of real being, was being altered by this constant rushing motion, by these great translucent sheets and opaque waves that were never still and never the same, yet never changed their shapes; and so he returned to get his surveying instruments, then went to the portage trail, gradually recovering as if from a trance.
He and his surveyors drove stakes to mark the way, and the sweat in their eyes and the prickly pear spines in their feet brought them, little by little, back to the painful reality of the task ahead. As if the spines were not sufficient torture, the clayey ground itself—trampled when wet by hundreds of thousands of buffalo hooves and then baked hard as brick by the sun—twisted ankles mercilessly and tore moccasins to shreds. Every step was a jolt of pain now. And they would have to cross and recross this route, he estimated, for two or three weeks before the portage was done.
Finally, Meriwether Lewis took his small advance party, laden with the ninety pounds of iron boat-frame, and set out for the head of the Falls, where they would set up an advance camp, and assemble and cover the vessel. And by the night of the twenty-first of June, all was ready.
The ordeal would begin at sunrise.
EACH WAGON HAD FOUR OF THE WILLOW-DISK WHEELS. Each wheel stood about as high as a man’s knee, had been sawn about six inches thick so it would not be apt to split easily under the weight and the jouncing, and had a round hole in the center cut to fit the shaved end of an axletree. The wheel and axletree were lubricated with tallow. A peg, fitted snugly through an auger-hole at each end of the axletree, secured the wheel to keep it from wobbling or working its way off. Two sets of axles and wheels were set parallel on the ground about ten feet apart, then across them two long sapling-trunks were laid and strapped tight with wet rawhide. When a canoe was set down on these saplings with its round bottom between them and then lashed in place with more rawhide, it made a capacious wagon bed, which was filled with baggage. Elkhide ropes were passed through augerholes in a tongue forward of the front axle, and to these ropes each man’s leather shoulder-harness was attached. Thus each wagon could be pulled by a team of as many as ten men. The first two canoes had thus been converted into wagons the night before, and loaded, and were standing on the plain silhouetted by the dawn light this morning when the men awoke.
In anticipation of their labors, the troops were fed all they could eat of hoe-cake, elk, and buffalo. They were a happy lot this morning. They chewed, and sipped tea, and gazed proudly at the wagons. “Not too sorry, considerin’, eh what, Joe?” one would say. “Fancy that,” another would exclaim. “Wheels! I never thought t’ see a wheel agin, did you?”
Sergeant Ordway was to be left in charge of the goods here at the base camp, with Charbonneau, York, Goodrich, Sacajawea, and the papoose. Lewis, Sergeant Pat Gass, Joe Fields, and Shields the smithy had already carried their loads of iron and tools up to make a camp on an island at the far end of the portage, where they would assemble the iron-frame boat. That left Nathaniel Pryor to be the sergeant in charge of the wagons, and he was soon swaggering around calling himself the “muleskinner” and saying, “Now, whar’d I put my whip?”
The sun was still behind the purple eastern mountains when the harnessed men hitched themselves up to the wagons, laughing, snorting, stamping the ground, and braying, “Heee, haw, hee haw!” William slipped his shoulders into a knapsack containing about seventy pounds of meat, a notebook, and some instruments and medicines, laid his rifle across his shoulder and put his umbrella-tomahawk in his belt, squinted ahead over the lilac-gray prairie, looked back at York and Sacajawea, who stood marveling at this, then he yelled out, “All set, Sarge, move ’em out!”
“GEE-YAP!” Pryor bellowed, swinging his arm around his head as if snapping a twenty-foot bullwhip.
The men leaned forward into their harnesses; leather creaked; the hide ropes stretched; the men leaned farther, and the wheels began to turn. Slowly, grinding and squeaking and rattling, the wheeled canoes began trundling over the stucco-like ground. The men arched their backs and pushed with their brawny legs and the vehicles came along, lurching and jolting, their bare masts swaying. “Son of a bitch,” groaned Private Proctor, sweat breaking out on his face before he had taken twenty steps, “this lunker is heavy!”
“Nice and easy, boys,” William sang out. “Plenty o’ time! No racing!” The men laughed between gasps.
“Comédie,” Charbonneau muttered, watching them go. “Always the beeg jokings.” He was full of bitterness. His squaw, under his questioning, had told him how the Red Hair Chief had examined her in that part. He had nearly burst with jealous rage. And when he had demanded to take Sacajawea back to the Mandans, he had been tongue-lashed! Charbonneau in that moment had come within an inch of sticking his knife in the red-haired capitaine. He turned and looked at his squaw. She was standing there laughing and smiling and waving at them and the men all were laughing at the words of the capitaine. “Tu,” he muttered. “You ought to died.”
The novelty of being human mules was soon gone, and the laughter was replaced by groans, the rasp and gasp of desperate breathing, by quick curses and long, involuntary moans. Under the best of circumstances it had been impossible for a walking man to avoid all the prickly pears; now, confined in their traces, they could hardly sidestep any. Even the rawhide outersoles of their moccasins could not deflect all the spines, and soon every man’s feet were viciously sore in a dozen places. Every puncture was magnified by the pressure of the pulling. William knew what the weight was doing to their feet; the weight of his pack seemed to drive every spine an inch deeper into the flesh of his feet, and twist his ankles that much more sharply whenever he stepped into the cement-hard track of a buffalo’s hoof. The carbuncle on his ankle burned and throbbed steadily, as if a brand were being held on it.
From the moment the sun came over the mountains, it had been scorching, and at once all were pouring sweat and wishing they were back in that cold river from which they had just escaped so gratefully.
At midmorning they came to the first hill. They started up. It was one of those long, long prairie inclines that look minor because of the surrounding vastness, but come to seem endless as their horizons keep receding. On this slope the weight of the canoe-wagons seemed to triple. The men soon were straining so far forward in their harnesses they appeared to be crawling. William looked back once and saw them coming along this way, literally on all fours
now, clutching at knobs and stones and tufts of grass for one more ounce of pulling power. They really did look like beasts of burden now, four-limbed little creatures struggling across an enormous, shimmering, yellow-brown desertscape, billows of white dust drifting off their little wheel tracks, the blue mountains looking on indifferently from three sides, while a now-forgotten river thundered down giant stairsteps in its sheer-walled canyon two miles to their right.
THEY HAD COVERED EIGHT MILES BY NOON, AND IT HAD begun to seem that they might reach the upper end of the portage by nightfall. But now the awful roughness of the ground had started taking its toll on the rickety wagons. Coming down into a shallow ditch that formed the head of a deep ravine, the first wagon lurched into a depression with a crunching jolt that snapped its front axletree. While the men assigned as wagonwrights knelt in the suffocating ditch to attach a new one, the others shrugged out of their harnesses, gulped water from a keg, then slumped down on the bare ground in the blazing sunlight and gasped themselves to sleep. When the wagon was fixed they got up, into harness, and pulled.
WILLIAM WENT ON AHEAD. FOR A WHILE HE COULD HEAR them behind him, their voices coming faintly across the treeless space, now and then a laugh—for, amazingly, some of them were still merry—and sometimes that low, wooden trundling of the wagons. He limped on under the heavy pack, sweat gushing from every pore. The sky was hot, naked pearl, and the sun burned straight down on the top of his head. When he thought his brain was going to broil, he remembered the tomahawk umbrella and raised it. He stood in its shade a moment, resting, looking back, and saw the wagons, mere specks now, move down a gentle slope and disappear behind the shoulder of a rise. He turned and limped on, heading toward the next route stake. He kept looking for places where he might restake the route to shorten it. He had had to put in a few zigzags to keep it on level ground around hills and gullies, and there might be places where it could be improved. Any mile I can save them they’ll bless me for, he thought. Damnation, but they’ve got to be the best men ever walked, he thought. They’re like those people George had going to Vincennes. He remembered how George’s eyes would always fill up when he talked of the Illinois Regiment, and now he understood.
From Sea to Shining Sea Page 94