From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Ca-me-ah-wait agreed, but it was apparent that he less than half believed in the safety of it. In the light of a small campfire of willow brush Lewis wrote a note for Drouillard to take to Captain Clark in the morning, urging him to come on with all possible haste as there was not a moment to spare.

  The chief now, with six of his closest advisers, bedded down close to Lewis’s mosquito net, while most of the braves went out to camp hidden in the willow thickets where they might be safer if the camp were attacked during the night.

  Lewis was exhausted, but had little expectation of sleeping well this night. The fate of the expedition, which he had long held to be more important than his own life, seemed now to depend on the caprices of these few fickle and flighty savages, who he expected might well kill him or vanish in the night.

  LEWIS HAD BARELY BEGUN TO DOZE WHEN HE BECAME aware of excited whisperings around him. He lifted the edge of his mosquito netting and saw by the starlight and the glow of Drouillard’s nearby campfire that Ca-me-ah-wait was sitting up, listening to some of his men who had come to crouch beside him and hiss in his ear. Lewis suspected this might be the moment he had dreaded, and stealthily he slipped his knife out of its sheath.

  Then he heard Drouillard chuckling, and called to him, “What goes?” The half-breed’s deep, soft voice came back:

  “Eh, mon capitaine! I am tell these Shoshoni there ees our man of black skeen and hair like burned prairie grass! They scoff, but I theenk they stay weeth us to see thees monster eef nothing else!”

  Lewis sighed and relaxed in his bedding. “Drouillard, God bless ye, you’re a genius! Why didn’t I think o’ that?”

  IT WAS SEVEN IN THE MORNING, AND THE CANOES WERE loaded and the men were taking their places on the tow ropes to begin their daily suffering. It was a fair but cold morning, with the rising sun slanting through mist, and the men were slow to begin because they knew from experience that the water would be shockingly cold and their bones would be aching from the start. They had been saying often lately that they wished they could leave these accursed heavy canoes and the burden of goods and just walk the rest of the way to the ocean. They had said it in jesting tones so they would not sound like real complainers, but the sentiment was heartfelt, and William had no trouble understanding it. He had done enough of the poling and rope-pulling himself up the Missouri and Jefferson and Beaverhead rivers and now up this shallow, stony, twisting creek that he felt he could say truthfully that this Voyage of Discovery had deteriorated into what was probably the longest and most strenuous and most painful ordeal of labor any group of soldiers ever had suffered. It didn’t take Hannibal this long to cross the Alps, William thought, and he had elephants to carry his canoes if he had canoes.

  This morning, as was the custom, the hunters would be out on the flanks and he himself would walk ahead scouting the route and watching for signs of the Shoshonis and for Captain Lewis, whose absence, now in its eighth day, troubled William so much he had scarcely slept. This morning, as usual, he would have Sacajawea up ahead with him so that she would be ready to interpret in case the expedition got lucky and met her people. And, suspecting that Charbonneau had struck Sacajawea the other evening over that old jealousy business, William had excused Charbonneau from work on the boats and let him come along in the advance to see for himself that his squaw and William were not hopping into the thickets to cuckold him.

  Now they had come about a mile this morning and William had dropped a few yards behind the couple to try to get a good look at a new kind of crow-sized bird he had spotted up on the bluff, a pale grayish-brown sort of bird with dark wings. But it had kept darting over rocks up the bluff and he had not been able to get a good image of it, so now he was moving ahead to catch up with them. Charbonneau was hulking along with his red cap bobbing with every step and the girl-squaw was walking a few paces behind him in her bright scarlet blanket with its wide blue stripe running down the back, with that hump-backed look caused by the papoose on her back, and suddenly that steady, graceful, pigeon-toed stride of hers faltered. She was doing something odd, and William squinted in the sunlight to see what was happening. He thought first that she had come up against another rattlesnake.

  The girl was dancing. She was hopping from foot to foot and turning in circles around Charbonneau. She was uttering small cries like a bird. William trotted forward to investigate. With each turn she would point up the valley, and when William looked he saw them.

  Several Indians on horseback were trotting toward them down the streamside path. One of them was slightly ahead of the others, riding with his right hand held high. A thrilling shiver, of pleasure but also of apprehension, buzzed through William’s scalp down his neck and spine. He caught up with the pirouetting Sacajawea now, and as she whirled around he saw shining in her face the purest joy he had ever seen. Her laughter was like a shower of silver; her teeth flashed in her brown face. Even her baby was infected by her joy, and was laugh-gurgling as he swayed in the cradleboard with her gyrations. Now the squaw would lean forward toward the distant horsemen, making mmmm, mmmm sounds in her throat while sucking her fingers. This sign William knew: it was that she had eaten with them; they were her native people; they were Shoshonis!

  William was so swept with happiness that despite the presence of Charbonneau he grabbed her hands and whirled with her twice, then held her face in his hands and kissed the end of her nose. Charbonneau was too transfixed by the sight of the approaching riders to notice. “Come along!” William cried, and they began striding briskly toward the Indians, William holding high his right hand.

  Now the first rider kicked his horse and loped ahead of the others, and as he came closer that white flash of a smile looked familiar. “By heaven!” William whooped. “Drouillard!”

  Sacajawea had broken out in a trilling song-chant now, and it was taken up by the voices of some of the oncoming riders. It was as keen and full of longing as a meadowlark’s song, and the sound of it made William’s throat ache and his eyes blur. It was a song of homecoming. Home! he thought, and his heart clamped. Drouillard’s horse was among them now, blowing, hooves thudding in the dewy grass, and Drouillard, his cheeks smeared with vermillion, was off its back with his arms thrown around William’s brawny shoulders, kissing him on this cheek, then the other, in the most extravagant emotional release the half-breed had ever shown. William pounded him on the back of his white ermine shawl, and yelled in his ear over all the noise of greetings: “Cap’n Lewis?” Drouillard nodded his head vigorously.

  “Yes, mon capitaine!” He pointed up the stream. “Not far! Tout va bien! He has a chief!” William felt a flood of relief.

  Now Cruzatte came running up from the main party to investigate the tumult, and skidded to a halt at the sight of horses and Indians. William yelled at him: “Bring ’em on, bring ’em on! We’ve met the Snakes!” Cruzatte peered myopically into the milling group, leaped three feet off the ground, crossed himself when he landed, then spun and darted back down around the bend shouting the news. Within half a minute a roar of deep voices rolled up the valley to blend in the chorus of greeting.

  NOW WILLIAM AND SACAJAWEA AND CHARBONNEAU STRODE ahead briskly up toward the end of the valley, Drouillard leading them toward the forks, while the warriors rode alongside still singing their greeting song with the greatest appearance of delight. Sacajawea stumbled along nearby, chewing her smile, tears streaming down her face. As they went, Drouillard told William the tale of the week past: of their first glimpse of the Shoshoni, of their first tenuous meeting, of the poor starving village, of the ceremonies, and the dances and the horses, of the Shoshonis’ timidity, of Captain Lewis’s desperate ruse of the notes. Even above all this hubbub, singing and talking, William could now and then hear some leather-lunged huzzah come echoing from down the valley, where, he was sure, his stalwart boys were pulling the boats on with a renewed vigor, in the knowledge that they might not have to pull them another day beyond today. Likely, too, they were thinking of Indian
maidens.

  William could hardly bear to look at Sacajawea now; her transported visage made his throat knot up with caring. She was so close to her people now, and, being so far from his, he could understand the terrible poignancy of her longings, as if foreseeing his own homecoming, sometime in the far future, his own homecoming from a far place and a long time.

  45

  August 17, 1805

  THEY WALKED OUT FROM BETWEEN THE BLUFFS AND ONTO the yellow-brown grass of the plain where the creek forked. Above the fork they could see smoke rising from a copse of willows, and a skin tent stretched over a clump of willows for a shelter; at this distance it looked like a handkerchief dropped on grass. Twenty or thirty people were coming across the plain from that place, running and riding; they had heard the homing song and were coming. Most were young men; there were a few women. William felt a shiver as he saw them coming; they were colorful and full of eager motion, and they were an entirely new people, and if Sacajawea was representative, they were a fine people, a primitive, uncorrupted highland people who lived on the roof of the continent. They came hurrying over the meadow, hooves and moccasins. Part of the meadow was in the shadow of a high, fast-moving cloud, and the edge of the shadow ran silently off the field to leave it all glowing fresh and gold in the morning sunlight. Around the plain there were ridges with blue cloud-shadows running up their flanks, and above and beyond them in the blue were streaks of white, the snowy tops of mountains. Behind the running crowd of Indians there were three men who walked together and they all looked like stately chiefs, with their wild headdresses and vermillion-painted faces, but one of them was bowlegged and there was no mistaking his walk; it was Meriwether Lewis.

  The air was still cold and fresh, and as the people came close William smelled them, the wood smoke in their clothes, rancid grease, fish, and something like wet tea leaves. It was much like that nearly forgotten earthy smell of the Mandans, but cleaner and sharper.

  The Indians stopped a few yards away, and William and his party stopped, and they all stood looking at each other for a moment. The singing braves fell silent and reined in their horses to watch.

  William stood with his feet widespread, his fine rifle cradled in his left arm, the leather bill of his lynx-fur cap shading his eyes. Charbonneau stood posing with his thick chinwhiskers thrust out.

  The Shoshonis were as colorful as a field of flowers, the yellow-orange painted on their faces, their leather clothes and shields decorated with patterns of quills and shells and dyed grasses, colored feathers shaking in the morning wind, claw necklaces, collars and tippets of small-animal fur, headdresses of bird skins and buffalo horns, lances festooned with down and scalplocks.

  Sacajawea stood stockstill in this hush, in her red blanket with the baby slung on her back, and her glinting dark eyes searched theirs, all those pairs of piercing eyes in bony faces. And then suddenly one of the women slipped out from between two horses, came out staring at Sacajawea, mouth agape, slowly raising her hand to her face as she came, and then her eyebrows rose and her face crumpled as if she were going to cry, and she began making the mmm sounds and sucking her fingers. Sacajawea’s gaze now fixed upon that young woman, and her eyebrows flickered the same way, and then the two spoke some syllables to each other with their arms reaching. They came together and wrapped their arms around each other, and with their faces buried in each other’s necks they softly began crying, “A-hi-ee! A-hi-ee!” and patting each other, and William gulped down a groan and blinked rapidly.

  Charbonneau listened to their soft exclamations, seeming, for once, to be at least somewhat moved by his squaw’s emotions, and he turned to William, and said, “Thees I bleef was woman name Otter, capture weeth her but escape. She has tell me of thees sometime!” He seemed genuinely affected, perhaps a little awed, perhaps for the first time aware that she, his third and least-favored squaw, was a person whose heart had come from someplace before she had become his.

  William felt his own heart aching with a bittersweetness. There was something about this affectionate meeting of the two alien peoples here in this beautiful little valley on the top of the world—the end of the long, desperate search, the plaintive greeting song, the sight of his compatriot Lewis, the reunion of the two young squaws—that was making him feel so delicate in his heart that he could hardly stand it. God Bless ye, Janey, he thought as the Shoshoni squaw led her gently into the crowd, holding her wrist with one hand and stroking her cheek with the other.

  And now Lewis came through the crowd straight to William. They saluted, smiling, then Lewis gripped his hand and slipped an arm over his shoulder, saying, “Begod, Clark, but you’re a balm for these eyes o’ mine!”

  “And you!”

  The Indians were murmuring and patting their hands together as the captains met. The chief was standing nearby holding his hands together in front of his chest with the two upraised forefingers laid alongside each other, and his cadaverous yet handsome face was aglow with a smile as tender as a woman’s.

  “I’ve a thousand things to tell, but first must present you to their chief. He’s Ca-me-ah-wait, and he’s as lovable a savage as I’ve met.”

  As if to prove it, Ca-me-ah-wait swarmed over William with the Shoshoni hug, smearing his cheeks with the paint from his own, and that was the signal for everyone else to dismount or run forward and do the same, and everyone was chorusing, “A-hi-ee! A-hi-ee!”

  “Godalmighty!” William wheezed to Lewis over the shoulder of some mighty brave who was hugging the breath out of him, “ye’ve sure seduced these folks!”

  THE BOATS REACHED THE FORKS AT NOON, AND THE HUGGING took all of an hour, there being so many white men to greet, and the cries of joy and amazement never let up. The Shoshonis were astonished by everything as the men arranged the baggage onshore, by all the tools and instruments and goods. And they were captivated by the black giant York, and by the sagacity of Scannon, who put on a perfect show of cheerful, grinning obedience as Lewis put him through his tricks. The hunters had killed four deer and an antelope, which they shared with the Indians in a high-hearted banquet. Lewis demonstrated the air gun, which Ca-me-ah-wait declared to be surely the greatest medicine of all the great medicines these wonderful strangers had brought, and for several hours the little camp was as festive as a country fair. Sacajawea sat in a willow arbor with the three other Shoshoni women and was queried about her place in a tribe of remarkable white strangers such as these, which she tried to explain with her imperfect recollection of her native tongue. Often she was overcome with happy weeping and could not explain.

  The three women could not keep their hands off of little Pompey. They saw that he was as fat and strong and beautiful a baby as they had ever seen, and they learned that his father was the thick white man with thick face-hair and the red hat who had walked here with her. It seemed to the women therefore that if a Shoshoni woman coupled with a man of white skin, good blood would result and the baby of such blood must be fat and strong and beautiful like this one. This was a point of keen interest to the three Shoshoni women who were here in the arbor with Sacajawea, even the old one who was so bent that she had to walk with a stick. And so when Collins and McNeal paused outside the arbor, and Collins asked McNeal, “Eh, Hugh, is this all the women this tribe’s got?” and McNeal answered, “Heck, no, they’s a passel of ’em over t’ their main camp,” the women looked out at Collins and McNeal with fat babies in their eyes, even though they had not understood what the men had said. And the soldiers grinned and bowed to the women and were very polite.

  The white men had very rosy memories of the villages around Fort Mandan, and it had been a long time since Fort Mandan, and judging by the appearance of the two young women with Sacajawea, these Snake women were far handsomer than the Mandan women had been.

  DOWN BY THE CREEK BANK WHERE THE DUGOUTS HAD BEEN unloaded, the Indian men strolled and looked with admiration at the fine articles that had been arrayed. The captains had ordered the goods laid out to dry
, but they were aware too that the Indians were looking at these things like shoppers in a bazaar, and that their desires for these articles would grow, and this would be advantageous when it came time to bargain for horses. Ca-me-ah-wait had told the captains that his people did not steal, and it soon became apparent that this was absolutely true. Even when no one seemed to be watching, a Shoshoni who picked up a kettle or a knife, a tool or a string of beads or a hat to examine it, would always put it back. The white men and the Shoshonis were growing ever more pleased with each other.

  The troops fully understood now that this, after three thousand miles, was the end of their uphill canoeing, and if there had been a tub of grog available it could not have made them more jolly than this knowledge.

  “What I’ve heard so far about the westering rivers isn’t very promising,” Lewis told William during one of the few times they could sit down and talk together. “I know the creeks over by their main camp lead to the Columbia. One thing, a man gave me a piece of fresh fish to eat, and by Heaven it was salmon. But from what they say, those waters race down through steep canyons so fast that they’re beat into a perfect foam on the rocks, for miles at a stretch. Unless they’re exaggerating that, well, we’ll likely have to cross some mountains before we reach a navigable branch of the Columbia.” Nearby, a scrawny yellow dog of wolfish ancestry was trying to sniff up an acquaintance with Scannon, who, with an expression of injured dignity, kept turning around to try to confront him face to face. Lewis picked up a pebble and tossed it at the mongrel, which leaped up with a pained look and then ran off with its tail between its legs.

  “And what of the mountains?” William asked.

  Lewis looked westward, frowning. “I recollect when Mister Jefferson and I would sit there at his desk and plan this little voyage. He would say to me, ‘From all that’s known of them, the Western mountains oughtn’t be more obstacle than the Alleghenies—a day’s crossing at the most.’ I wish it would be so, but, well, I saw ’em from up there on the divide, and they like to made me timid.”