If I were to guess what they’re aiming at, I’d guess they mean to overset the Spaniards in the Southwest somehow, and make themselves emperors or something. They’ve both got that air about them of would-be emperors, he thought.
They still come to me, he thought. They still come looking for someone to lead a Western army.
But now they’re looking for one they think might betray his country one little way or another.
I’d rather they’d just forget me altogether.
Anyways, it’s Billy carries the point for this family nowadays.
43
HEADWATERS OF THE MISSOURI
July 23, 1805
NOW DOWN IN THEIR SOULS THERE WAS AN UNRELENTING sense of urgency. They awoke in the darkness to the sounds of Scannon barking at bears, of coyote-howls, of mountain lions coughing and yowling, of the gurgling, murmuring Missouri; they awoke with mosquitoes at their ears or rain-damp on their cheeks, and lay thinking about time and distance and chance, and they would be unable to go back to sleep for thinking about it: that they were racing against time but had no way to go faster.
It was late summer now, and they were in the canyons among the Rocky Mountains, and still they had not seen one Shoshoni Indian. They had found old Shoshoni lodges; they had found little sun-screening booths made of willow bushes; they had found Indian roads; they had found horse tracks four or five days old; they had not seen, however, one Indian. They had come through gloomy, rugged canyons with steep crags of purplish-brown volcanic stone; they had found, too late now, forests of pine that would have provided pitch for the iron boat. They had poled the boats between perpendicular cliffs of flint and solid rock sixteen hundred feet straight up, so sheer and forbidding that they had named them the Gates of the Rocky Mountains. The captains had taken turns leading advance parties to search for the Shoshonis, pushing ahead through the towering landscapes until they could scarcely walk from fatigue and tortured feet, leaving pieces of paper, ribbon, and linen on bushes along the trail as signs that they were coming as friends; still they had not seen an Indian.
This search for a sight of the elusive Shoshoni would have been frustrating enough if there simply were no Shoshonis around. But there were. The captains were certain they had been seen by Shoshonis, or at least that their hunters’ guns had been heard. On July 20, upriver from the Gates of the Mountains, they had seen clouds of smoke in the sky to the southwest, as if the whole countryside had been set afire. That was the sign among tribes that an enemy was approaching. “Hard fortune for us,” William had groaned. “Now we’ll have to try to find ’em where they hide. And even if we do that, we’ll have to convince ’em we’re friendly.” Sacajawea had gazed at the yellow-white smoke with her forefinger on her lips and a speechless appeal in her eyes. It was as if she were trying to send her thoughts ahead to her people, to make them wait, to make them stay and see that these were not enemies.
THIS FEAR, THAT THE SHOSHONIS WITH THEIR WONDERFUL horses would fade further and further into the mountains, drove William like an obsession. Leaving Lewis to bring the main party and the canoes along, he took Private Frazier, the Fields brothers, and Charbonneau, and they set off ahead, carrying in their knapsacks a few light gifts for Indians.
They went twenty-five miles over an Indian road through the mountains the first day. The prickly pear was worse than ever, as if making the men pay in blood for the beauty of its blossoms. By nightfall William’s feet were blistering and lacerated and swollen, and the old carbuncle on his ankle was swollen again.
They covered a like distance on the second day, all limping now. The country was opening out now, onto a wide and fertile plain. William drew Frazier up beside him on a rise, and pointed. “There,” he said, “mark my word, will be the three forks.”
Frazier stood, panting, pinched sweat out of his eyes and said, “The end o’ the Missouri, Cap’n? Truly?”
William nodded. “There’s God knows how many miles of river above it, but no name for it. Aye, Frazier. Th’ end of the Missouri.”
“Praise the Lord!”
AND IT WAS. THEY FOLLOWED THE FAST, DEEP, CLEAN MISSOURI between steep, crumbling gray bluffs about three hundred feet high, bluffs layered with well-defined strata of uptilting stone, topped with juniper and pine; they crashed through cottonwood and willow thickets, refreshing themselves with gooseberries and serviceberries and currants, and watched the valley spread out before them as they plodded toward the southwestern end of the canyon.
“Lookee there. She forks once.” William pointed. Just beyond the funnel made by the canyon, a small river led in from the opposite shore. The party stayed on the right bank of the larger stream, going ahead in the stifling heat, tormented by flies and mosquitoes. That was just two forks, William thought. Lord help us if we’ve got bad facts from the Minnetarees. “Wait here.” He went to the bluff, hobbling through rock debris at its base, and began climbing.
Chchchhhhrrr!
He jerked his hand back and waited for the rattlesnake to uncoil and slither away, then pulled himself up farther, until he was above the tops of the thickets. He pressed himself against the rock and looked down the valley, and the sight he saw made a smile spread on his face.
There, a mile or so ahead, through a maze of islands and meanderings, came another river, pouring in from the right. Beyond it the valley lay shimmering in the sun, fresh green, full of grasslands and marshes, cattails and willows. Geese and ducks and smaller birds by the hundreds rose and settled and wheeled everywhere. On every side of the valley stood distant dark blue mountains, their angular peaks and long saddles gleaming with snow.
That river on the right, he thought. That one’s our way, I’ll wager on it. It came curving into the valley from the southwest, apparently from somewhere in the gigantic mountain range that lay to the west of the forks. The middle stream came from straight south; the left branch had come from almost due east. Aye, he thought, remembering all that the Minnetarees had told him. It’ll take some checking out, but I’ll wager that’s our way to the Divide, that on the right.
He fairly bounded down the cliff to the river. “Hey, boys! The end o’ the Missouri! We’ve done it!” They started to their feet, cheering. Of course they knew there would be many more miles of smaller, swifter tributaries to ascend, and the way, if changed at all, was going to be even harder. But they had come two thousand five hundred miles up that cruel and tricky Missouri; for sixteen months they had lived and struggled in it and on it and along it, and now, even if it was only a term of language to call this the end of it, they were overjoyed to be able to call it that.
WILLIAM LEFT A NOTE ON A BRANCH, TELLING LEWIS THAT he was going on up the right fork toward the mountains, and led the men off again.
This stream was full of beaver and otter. It was shallow and swift and cold, its course confused by islands. William led the limping party on for another thirty-five miles. Charbonneau’s ankles were collapsing, and Joseph Fields’s feet were so swollen he groaned aloud at every step.
They came to a cliff and were forced to cross the river, wading chest-deep in the fast current. Halfway across, a rock turned under Charbonneau’s failing ankles, and the pain made him yelp and he fell sideways into the current. Not being a swimmer, he panicked when the water closed over his head. He was close behind William when it happened, and the other men were far behind, yelling. William turned and saw Charbonneau’s arm grasp upward, then his open-mouthed face emerge and go under again, and saw that the Frenchman was unable to get on his feet and was being borne downstream into deeper water. There was nothing to do but go into the deep water after him, and so William flung his rifle onto the riverbank and went. He could barely swim himself with his knapsack and shooting-gear on. He went stroking down toward the last place he had seen Charbonneau, and when he got there, there was no sight of him. He tried to stand up, but there was no bottom to be felt. He dog-paddled a moment, drifting, turning, and trying to see; and then there was a swirl on the water fif
teen feet downstream, a glimpse of a wet sleeve, and he stroked with all his might toward it. His hand hit something in the cold water, something soft, and he grabbed it and pulled upward, and Charbonneau’s wide-eyed face and gasping mouth broke the surface. When he saw William he grabbed him and they both went under, William struggling in the cold current to get out of Charbonneau’s arms.
He broke the surface behind Charbonneau, gulped air, and grabbed the long hair at the back of his head, and lifted him; then, holding him thrashing at arm’s length, stroked with one arm and his last strength toward the nearest shore. He was lucky now; his feet found gravel just at the moment when he thought he could not manage another stroke. Charbonneau was as inert now and as heavy as a waterlogged flour keg. William had to wait for Reuben Fields to come down the bank and wade in to help carry him ashore.
But he was alive. They squeezed the water out of him. He coughed for a long time and then started praying. While the sun warmed their sodden elkhide clothes, William checked his rifle and found it muddy but undamaged. Reuben Fields was stalking around with his lips bitten white. Once he stopped over Charbonneau and spat at his feet. William took him aside. “What is it, Reuben?”
Fields hissed: “Listen to that reeky poltroon of a Frenchman, prayin’ to the virgin Mother o’ Jesus who woulda been no virgin five minutes if he’d ‘a’ been there!”
“Never mind,” William said, putting a hand on Fields’s shoulder.
“If you’d drownded y’self over that wuthless polecat, Cap’n, I’d ‘a’ wrang ’is neck till he was dead ten times!” It sounded like a scolding.
William understood the sentiments Fields was expressing so violently, and he blinked and swallowed. “Listen,” he said. “Whatever a man’s soul is worth, if he’s a member o’ this Corps, we do what we can for ’im. Y’know that. And by Heaven, Reuben, you’re guilty o’ the same sin I am; you saved him from a grizzly once, remember?”
TWENTY-FIVE MILES UP THIS FORK, JOSEPH FIELDS’S FEET and Charbonneau’s ankles gave out, and William left them on the stream bank to make a camp and doctor themselves. “Careful Big Tess don’t try to bugger you,” Reuben warned his brother with a mean leer.
On the western side of the wide valley was a small mountain, and the fork seemed to bear to the right around it. William pointed to a ridge that ran out from its south end. “From up yonder, I don’t doubt we can see to our satisfaction where this stream comes from. And maybe find some spoor o’ the Shoshonis, too. Feel fit for a climb, boys?” Rube Fields and Bob Frazier looked at each other, then at William’s feet. His moccasins were bloodsoaked and there was a yellow stain of pus from his suppurating ankle.
“Do you, Cap’n?”
“What I feel most like,” he said, “is lying down in the shade and drinking one bucket o’ whiskey while I soaked my feet in another bucket. But since we don’t have any whiskey, and since we need to raise us some Indians, why, let’s climb.”
They started up. The mountain was stark, jagged rock, hot as an oven, its fissures choked with thornbrush and scraggly juniper and prickly pear. William felt weak and feverish. He had felt somehow broken inside since his rescue of Charbonneau in the river. But he could still go. He had to find the Shoshonis. This was their hunting ground, where Sacajawea had been kidnaped and her people massacred. This was the place, here at the three forks, where the Shoshonis summered, and he knew they were near, and there was precious little time left to find them.
The hour of climbing was lost in a feverish blur, now marked by the scampering of a jackrabbit, now by the chilling chatter of a snake’s rattle, now by a swoop of faintness. But it proved worth the effort. From the top of the ridge he could see how the stream curved on up into the great blue western mountains, just as the Minnetarees had said it would. And to the south he could see the middle fork winding its way through the lush plain, full of beaver dams.
“Look at that place!” he breathed to Frazier, pointing with a pencil. He was trying to make a sketch in his notebook. “Can’t ye just picture a good, solid log trading post right there where the rivers meet? Here, give me a sheet from your notebook. Mine’s soaked and won’t take a pencil.”
He sketched and made compass readings and notes on elevations, terrain, and vegetation for as far up the stream as he could see, but the page swam before his eyes and the sun seemed to scorch his scalp. He would break out in a sweat, then shudder with chills. His lower bowel felt as distended as one of Charbonneau’s buffalo-gut sausages.
They were parched coming back down the mountain, and drank heartily at an ice-cold mountain stream. Within ten minutes William was almost doubled over with stomach cramps; he had drunk the cold water too fast. That evening he was too sick to eat the fresh fish Joe had caught, and Charbonneau had cooked. He sat sweating with a fever in the cool evening air and pulled thorns out of his feet. Lately they had come into still another species of foot-destroyer, this one a kind of needle-grass much like a bearded porcupine quill, which went through moccasins and leggings and stuck in flesh like a barb.
The Fields brothers both came to him, and told him they hoped he would lie here and wait for Captain Lewis and the main party.
“You two been talking to each other,” he said. “No, boys. It’ll be two or three days ’fore the boats catch up with us. We’ll use that time to go a ways up the middle fork. Maybe somewhere up it we’ll find Shoshonis. We’ll move out early and get some headway ’fore the sun gets too hot.” They shook their heads and frowned. But they knew better than to question his judgment.
Frazier played a jew’s harp. And for a while as the night turned cool and stars shone diamond-blue above the fire, they sang a ditty they had composed for the occasion:
Yankee Doodle lookin’ hard
To find him a Shoshoni.
Yankee Doodle’s feet so tar’d,
He needs to ride a pony!
He was awake much of the night with chills and throbbing feet and aching bones, but got the men up when the first stains of pale yellow were silhouetting the mountains on the east side of the valley. “How are ye this mornin’, Cap’n?”
“Pretty bilious. But fit to travel, I think.”
They limped and hobbled all day along the middle fork, a handsome, swift, clean little river, with enough beaver in every mile to make a man a fortune, but to their great disappointment saw no fresh Indian sign at all. They tied more colored rope and cloth on branches whenever they found Indian paths.
When they returned to the headwaters of the Missouri that evening, William knew he had overdone it. His fever was alarmingly high. He groped through his little medicine bag with shaky hands, hoping that the emetic pills, known as “Dr. Rush’s Thunderbolts,” had not been ruined by dampness. They were intact, and he took five of them, then lay down in his blanket to wait.
He dreamed that night of a great log fort surrounded by blue mountains. In the fort he and Brother Jonathan had a store, and the store was full of tomahawk-umbrellas. Thousands of Shoshoni Indians, an endless parade of them, all looking like Sacajawea, rode in from the mountains on magnificent mares and stallions, which they traded for umbrellas, and another endless file of Shoshonis walked back up into the mountains, each shaded by an umbrella. William woke himself laughing, and as soon as he was awake he had to get up in the dark, because Dr. Rush’s Thunderbolts had lived up to their name.
From the Journal of Meriwether Lewis
Saturday July 27th 1805
We set out at an early hour and proceeded on but slowly the current still so rapid that the men are in a continual state of their utmost exertion to get on, and they begin to weaken fast.… at 9. a.m. at the junction of the S.E. fork of the Missouri and the country opens suddenly to extensive and beautiful plains and meadows which appear to be surrounded in every direction with distant and lofty mountains; supposing this to be the three forks of the Missouri I halted the party on the Lard. shore for breakfast.…
at the junction of the S.W. and middle forks I found a note w
hich had been left by Capt. Clark informing me … he would rejoin me at this place provided he did not fall in with any fresh sighn of Indians, in which case he intended to pursue untill he overtook them.… at 3 p.m. Capt Clark arrived very sick with a high fever on him and much fatigued and exhausted.
we begin to feel considerable anxiety with rispect to the Snake Indians if we do not find them or some other nation that have horses I fear the successfull issue of our voyage will be very doubtfull or at all events much more difficult in it’s accomplishment, we are now several hundred miles within the bosom of this wild and mountanous country, where game may rationally be expected shortly to become scarce and subsistence precarious without any information with rispect to the country not knowing how far these mountains continue, or wher to direct our course to pass them to advantage or intersept a navigable branch of the Columbia, or even were we on such an one the probability is that we should not find any timber within these mountains large enough for canoes.…
however I still hope for the best and intend taking a tramp myself… to find these yellow gentlemen if possible
My two principal consolations are that from our present position it is impossible that the S.W. fork can head with the waters of any other river but the Columbia, and that if any Indians can subsist in the form of a nation in these mountains with the means they have of acquiring food we can also subsist.
A bower of bushes, like the Shoshoni sunscreens they had been finding, had been built for William to lie in while he recuperated. Here the captains brought their journals and maps up to date while William reclined with his feet in a kettle of heated water. They named the east fork the Gallatin, after the Secretary of the Treasury, the middle the Madison, after the Secretary of State, and the western stream, which they would be following in their search for the Continental Divide, the Jefferson. “In honor of that illustrious personage,” said Lewis, raising an empty hand as if toasting with it, “who is the author of our enterprise.”
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