From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “To him,” William toasted grandly, hoisting his cup of emetic salts.

  Sacajawea sat outside the bower, her tunic pulled down to her waist, the fat, dark-haired baby pulling at her nipple, and with the help of Charbonneau she told them the story of her capture here by the Minnetarees five years earlier. She pointed to the plain where her father the chief and his buffalo hunters, armed only with bows and arrows, had been shot at by the guns of the Minnetarees, and a shoaly place in the river where she had been crossing to make her escape when she was struck unconscious from behind and captured. She told it with scarcely a sign of emotion, which Lewis found eerie. A little later, while she was bent over Scannon, crooning to him and picking the needle-grass barbs out of his shiny black coat, Lewis said, “She’s got no emotions. I swear, give her enough to eat, and a few trinkets to wear, and she’d be content anywhere.”

  William looked at her, at the greased, smooth black hair, the brown, slender back, the fine profile of a shaded face, the yellow-green grass blowing beyond her and the blue and white mountains ringing the distant horizons. She and Charbonneau were talking together in Minnetaree. She was in her homeland again, and it was true she seemed totally unaffected. “Still,” William said, “we don’t know what’s in ’er heart just now.”

  “You, Husband,” she was saying just then to Charbonneau. “The Red Hair Chief swam in danger to keep you alive. I ask, would a man do this if he wanted your squaw as you say he does?”

  “Woman,” he growled. “You know nothing of why men do what they do. Nor do you even know of women, that they are meant to be still and not cross the words of a man! When we find your people they will ask me, why do you not thrash this bird woman who chatters always at you?”

  She bit her lips, stroked Scannon’s broad, silky, sun-heated head, and gazed at the bower where the Red Hair Chief lay with his writing books, looking toward her with his sky eyes. She thought of him drowning, as he might well have done, and she thought what a sad thing it would have been if that worthy man had died to rescue this man of hers. At the thought of Red Hair in death, her heart squeezed with frightful sadness; then she gave thanks that he was alive, and such a thankfulness sang in her that it was like the voice of a meadowlark. And she thought about what must happen when they would find her people. She would be returned to The People. There might be some of her family still alive, or tribe members who might remember her, but perhaps they all had been killed by the Minnetarees. There was the one woman who had been captured with her, then had vanished one day. Had she died, or had she escaped and gone back to The People?

  And if Sacajawea came back to The People, and if she interpreted the language for the white men and helped them buy horses, then what? Would they be done with her there? Would they leave her with The People? Or would Charbonneau take her back to the Mandans?

  Whatever happened, she would surely have to say farewell to the Red Hair Chief and let him go on toward the setting sun, as he was bound to do, while she would have to go another way. This thought she could hardly bear. All she needed was to be near the Red Hair Chief, and she would be content anywhere.

  She remembered the day when she had been at the opening of the cave of death and the Red Hair Chief had put his ear on her heart and then had made her want to live and she had lived.

  She looked at Charbonneau, who was digging in his nostril with a stiff finger.

  The Red Hair Chief had made her live. He had made her husband live. In the storm at the Falling Waters he had made her baby live. There were many of these funny and brave and gentle white men here who were alive because of the Red Hair Chief, Clark, his name was, and there were many Mandans and Minnetarees and Hidatsas back in the old place who were alive because of this Clark man with his sky eyes and his medicine and his steady strength, this man who made people live; and she wished she could go to him and put her ear on his heart and make him well.

  What would happen? He would go on and she would stay or go another way and the most important person in her heart, ever, would be gone.

  She thought all this as she had been thinking it for weeks, and the world hummed with rich sadness.

  But on her Indian face nothing showed.

  “TO MY FRIEND CAPTAIN CLARK ON HIS THIRTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY, and with gratitude for having lived to reach it,” Lewis said on the morning of August 1, raising a cup of tea. And then he prepared to set out up the Jefferson River with Drouillard, Gass, and Shields, intending to scout ahead of the main party until he found Indians. William was reluctant to yield the forerunner role to him, but was still too weak from his illness to go on himself.

  Sacajawea had counseled Captain Lewis with suggestions for winning the trust of her people should he find them. The Shoshoni lived hidden in the mountains, mostly on roots, berries, and fish, because they had no guns and were at the mercy of the Plains Indians—the Blackfeet and the Minnetarees—when they came down in the fall to hunt buffalo. Thus the Shoshonis distrusted all strangers, and would flee at the sight of anyone who came carrying “firesticks.” Therefore, she said, one must show at once that he was a white man. Most of her people had never seen a white man, she said, and they might be fearful, but at least they would know a white man was not a Blackfoot. As you approach the Shoshoni, she advised, say, “Tab-ba-bone, tab-ba-bone,” meaning, “I am a white man.”

  Other winning ways she suggested. Vermillion was a sign of peace and friendship to her people. And they were mad about blue beads. A sign of friendship was to wave a blanket by its corners and then spread it on the ground. And, she added, smoking was done barefooted, signifying that if one should go back on his declaration of peace, he should have to walk barefoot in this prickly and flinty land. Those were all the hints she could give from her memory of girlhood among The People.

  Lewis set out with his three men. William, barely able to walk, began leading the main party up the river soon after. Setting poles and ropes were necessary to move the boats.

  The river was twisting, narrow and fast, and in many places so shallow that the heavy dugouts had to be dragged over stretches of rock-bottom. The troops all felt like slaves. There never was a breeze, it seemed, in the rivercourse, and they felt themselves suffocating and broiling even while mountaintops clothed in snow and ice towered over them. The river had become a worse ordeal even than the portage around the Great Falls three weeks earlier. They struggled in swift water through a mountain canyon ten miles long between perpendicular cliffs of black granite. Daily now, canoes were swamped or turned over by the force of water over rocky shallows; men suffered severe sprains, dislocated joints, and strained backs; and bit by bit the cargoes—parched meal, gunpowder, medicine, Indian presents—were drenched and damaged by these dangerous and exasperating spills. At one point the party labored for some distance up a wrong branch of the Jefferson. Lewis had written a note directing them to take a channel that he had explored, and had hung the note on a green willow stick. But a beaver then had devoured the green stick and the directions were lost. The canoes then had had to be brought back down and turned up the correct branch. In the meantime, young George Shannon had gotten lost again. Another tumor had risen on the inner side of William’s ankle and he could scarcely walk. Private Whitehouse had fallen in the way of an out-of-control canoe and his leg had been ground between the hull and a rock as the heavy vessel passed over him, leaving him bruised and scarcely able to move.

  And as the battered, exhausted party stopped to spread articles onshore to dry, Lewis returned with the depressing news that he had still found no trace of the Shoshoni tribe.

  There was not a smile to be seen anywhere.

  “Even the Capitaine Clark has no jokes thees day,” mused Charbonneau. And he realized that this frightened him.

  “THIS TIME,” WILLIAM SAID, “YE BETTER FIND INDIANS, OR else catch some grizzlies and train ’em to carry packs. We’re about to run out of river, it looks like t’ me.”

  Lewis chuckled at the thought. “Pack bears! There’s
an idea! Hear that, Drouillard?” He was trying to be cheerful.

  The hunter swung his knapsack onto his back and his brown face split into a brilliant smile. “I will breeng you bears, mon capitaine. But you train them!”

  Lewis laughed. He loaded a few small American flags and some awls, beads, looking-glasses, and vermillion paint in the top of his knapsack, swung the weight onto his shoulders, and took William’s hand. “I won’t come back without Indians this time.” He looked down at William’s ankle. A linen compress bound around it was yellow and red with pus and blood. “Take care o’ that,” he said, “lest it poison your blood.” Then he fondled Scannon’s silky black ears for a moment, told him “Stay,” and, hitching his shoulders under the weight of his knapsack, said, “Come on as best ye can.”

  “Godspeed!”

  They moved out then, Lewis, Drouillard, Shields, and Hugh McNeal, carrying a few days’ rations of flour and meal and pork in case game should prove scarce. William stood with York and Sacajawea and Sergeant Ordway and watched them go out of sight over the brow of a low, treeless hill, their shoulders and heads outlined for a moment against the snowy crest of a mountain. The top of that range, William was certain, would be the Continental Divide. Sacajawea had recognized a hill shaped like a beaver’s head and told them that up beyond it was the place where her people were accustomed to cross the mountains to their home of safety. “There you will find our road,” she had said, pointing. “There you will find The People, unless they have seen us and gone to hide.”

  The captains had faith in her remarkable memory. They had learned that it was always at least as reliable as the directions the Minnetarees had given them. “Maybe if we’d send her out to hunt with Shannon,” William joked, “he wouldn’t be forever getting lost.” He could make such a joke today because Shannon had showed up this morning at breakfast after three days’ absence, sheepish but greatly relieved.

  William looked back to the loaded canoes. There was one less now. So much cargo had been spoiled by water that they had decided to stash here one of the dugouts they had made with such labor back above the Great Falls less than a month ago.

  “All right, gents!” he called. “Let’s see if it’s possible to sail clear up to the rooftop of the continent!”

  44

  NEAR THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE

  August 9, 1805

  LEWIS AND HIS SCOUTS ASCENDED SIXTEEN MILES ALONG THE river on their first day out. On the second day, they found a freshly traveled Indian path and followed it westward to a place where the river emerged from a line of hills. They passed under a high rock wall whose base was alive with rattlesnakes. Five leagues farther along the trail they entered a pleasant level valley where the river divided into two small branches. Lewis examined both narrow rocky streams, then came back to where the men sat, and grimly tore a sheet of paper from a notebook. “No canoe can go up either of ’em,” he said to Shields. He wrote a note to William, telling him to halt the boats here and await his return, that he was going up the left-hand fork and would return. He put the note on a willow branch—a dry one this time, one the beavers would not find so succulent. “This is the end of it for our navy,” he said to his scouts. “Now, gents, we must find us some cavalry.”

  But a mile and a half up this fork Lewis decided it was the wrong one; there was not a sign of Indian travel. So he returned, wrote a second note to tell William he had changed his mind and was going up the right-hand fork instead, and hung it with the first note.

  By the next morning they were far up this right-hand fork and had lost the Indian path. Lewis sent Drouillard out on his right flank and Shields on his left to search for the path. If either found it, he was to signal by raising his hat on the muzzle of his rifle.

  Lewis was sweeping the valley with his pocket telescope when into its little circle of view moved an apparition that made him feel as if his hat would leap off his head.

  There, coming directly toward him across the plain, was an Indian with a shield and bow, riding on as fine-looking a horse as Lewis had ever seen.

  “McNeal! Look!” He handed the glass to the soldier, and almost trembling with joy, he began walking toward the Indian at a quick but easy pace, untying the thongs that bound his blanket roll as he went. The Indian kept coming. When the Indian was less than a mile from him, he reined in his horse and sat watching. Lewis stopped, shook out his blanket, raised it overhead by two corners, then made the motion of spreading it on the ground. He repeated this signal of friendship three times, hoping the Indian was seeing it. “Come, red brother,” he wished out loud. “Come and join us.”

  The Indian did not come. He had caught sight of Drouillard and Shields, who were advancing as if to flank him, and he was watching them suspiciously.

  “Damn you two, stop,” Lewis pleaded in a low voice only McNeal could hear. “Stop, ere y’ spook him away!” He would have yelled at them but they were too far away to hear. He would have fired his rifle to get their attention but was sure the Shoshoni fear of gun-carrying tribes would send him fleeing.

  Drouillard and Shields kept advancing, and the Indian was alert, turning his horse this way and that. “God,” Lewis hissed, “if they scare ’im off, I’ll have their hides.” Almost frantic, he shrugged off his knapsack and drew out a bundle of trinkets. He gave his gun to McNeal and began advancing toward the Indian. The brave remained where he was, and seemed to be willing to wait, but he kept turning and watching the two distant men advancing on the flanks of the valley with their firesticks across their arms. Lewis kept trying to signal them to stop, but they seemed intent on the Indian. Surely, Lewis thought, his heartbeat speeding up as he drew closer, surely those two have enough sense not to close on him when I’m trying to parley with him!

  When he was within two hundred paces, the Indian turned his horse and slowly began to move off. Lewis’s heart hammered. He cupped his hand beside his mouth and, remembering as best he could the words for “white man” that Sacajawea had taught him, he bellowed:

  “Tab-ba-bone! TAB-BA-BONE!”

  His voice rolled in the valley. Drouillard turned and looked, and Lewis made a hand signal. Drouillard saw it and stopped, and put his gun on the ground. But Shields was still moving forward.

  The Indian stopped his horse and turned it sideways and again seemed to be waiting. Lewis, coming within one hundred fifty paces of him now, rolled his shirt sleeve up to show the whiteness of his forearm—his face was so sunbronzed he might have looked like an Indian—and again yelled, “Ta-ba-bone! Ta-ba-bone!” Then he held a handful of the trinkets overhead, shaking them to make them jingle and flash in the hazy sunlight.

  Maybe he’ll stay, Lewis thought. Maybe he sees my white skin. Maybe … He glanced to his left. Damn you, Shields, stop! God, make that fool stand still.

  Lewis was now a mere hundred yards from the Indian, who watched with keen interest but was wary as a wolf.

  “Tab-ba-bone! Tab—”

  With a slash of the quirt, the Indian started his horse into flight, leaped the creek, and vanished like a jackrabbit into the willow brush. Lewis exploded then. He flung his trinkets on the ground and howled in a fury:

  “Shields! Drouillard! Come here, you God-damn fools! COME HERE!”

  And while he waited for them to lope down, he watched the distant willow brush move with the Indian’s flight, and tears of mortification blurred his vision.

  Shields tried to defend himself by insisting that he had not seen the captain’s signals. But that was a feeble excuse, he realized; Lewis let him know, with a sarcasm as abrasive as prickly pear on bare skin, that anyone but the sorriest greenhorn should not even have needed a signal to know to stop. “By God, man, if we’ve lost this critical chance and can’t recoup it, I’ll have to hold you responsible for the failure of our whole venture!”

  It was the most painful reprimand Shields had ever received in his life. He had always felt himself one of the most favored and amply rewarded members of the expedition because o
f all he had done at the anvil; now a whole year’s praise was swept from him in a single sentence, and he could not look anyone in the eye for a while.

  WILLIAM WAS GOING THROUGH SCRUB, IN A SUN-BAKING gulch, with his head down, following the fresh hoofprints of a small deer. He had come a long way following it, and had not caught a glimpse of it yet, but was determined to get it because the men had had no fresh meat for two days, other than a few trout and some beaver. They needed huge quantities of food because they were straining and exhausting themselves hour upon hour with the heavy dugouts in the fast, cold water, and in these days on pan bread and fish they had been weakening noticeably, and were covered with boils and hives.

  Leaving the one canoe behind had freed several more men for hunting. But game was scarce in these bald and rocky hills. To find fresh deer tracks was cause for great and hopeful excitement. He who brought in meat these days for the famished and aching boat-pullers was the hero of the hour.

  Chhhrrrr! William froze in midstep.

  It was a large rattlesnake coiled directly in his path, tail vibrating, head tensing back to strike the oncoming foot.

  With a grunt, William struck down with the end of his espontoon, mashing the snake’s head against the hard ground. Its body flailed and flopped and lashed, and at that moment something large and tawny crashed and moved in the corner of William’s eye. It was his deer, startled by the grunt and thud, and it sprang out of the scrub, twenty feet away, up the bare, eroding side of the gulch. William dropped the espontoon, jerked his rifle to his shoulder, the rattlesnake instandly forgotten; he cocked the flintlock as he made a hasty sighting far forward on the animal’s shoulder, and even as he squeezed off what he knew was a desperate and nearly impossible shot he felt the thrashing snake hit his right legging a few inches above his infected ankle. For an instant as the gunshot echoed and smoke billowed in the gulch he had an awful sense of loss and confusion, a sense that he had surely both missed his deer and been bitten by the deadly rattler, a sense that he had somehow in that flurry mismanaged the whole thing.