From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Formidable, ye say.”

  “Formidable. What we’ve come through thus far looks to be but a start of ’em.”

  William almost shuddered. “Reckon there’s time to get over before winter?”

  Lewis pulled back a corner of his mouth. “I’ll want your judgment o’ that. What I want you to do is take a party—with boat-making tools, just in case—go over the divide to the main Shoshoni camp and proceed downriver from there to see if it’s navigable, and where. I’ll stay here and arrange to get the baggage over the divide. Lord knows,” he said, “you deserve a chance to rest and languish with these folk. But we have to push on, as you well know.”

  That was fine with William. Lewis had had his turn at being out in front, and he had done fine things with it, but now he felt it was his turn to be out in front.

  BY LATE AFTERNOON, WHEN YORK WAS COMPLAINING THAT his skin had been rubbed raw by the fingers of the Shoshonis trying to get the soot off of him, it was time to hold a council.

  Under the awning in the willows, the two captains were seated on white robes, with Drouillard and Charbonneau next to them. A dozen of the Shoshoni men sat in a facing semicircle, moccasins were removed, and the chief bent down and tied six small, pearly seashells in William’s hair, while the councilors smiled and hummed their approval. William was aware that these likely were seashells from the Pacific, acquired probably by trade with Columbia River tribes, and so the significance of them was as real to him as it must have been to the chief. Then the pipe was presented to the earth and sky and the four winds and was smoked by the captains and the chief, then passed among the councilors.

  “Now tell them,” Lewis said to Drouillard, “that in order to speak better with them, we want their permission to bring a woman into this council—the Shoshoni woman we brought here with us, the wife of Charbonneau.”

  This was a shocking request, and was met with all the expected frowns and indignant protestations. Charbonneau seemed almost pleased; it looked as if his squaw, for once, might have to keep her place. But the captains insisted. The woman had been brought all this way as an official member of the party, they said, for this purpose. Some things could be said by hand language, they argued, but now there were things to be told and arranged that would require the completeness and exactness of spoken language.

  Ca-me-ah-wait soon agreed that there was wisdom in this, and told his councilors that it would be so. “Go get Janey,” William told Charbonneau.

  She came into the shade, for once without Pompey on her back. She had left him with the women. Charbonneau had warned her that the chiefs were not pleased by this and had told her to remember that she was a squaw, not an American capitaine. When she entered, she felt the resentment of the Indian men and kept her eyes down. Ca-me-ah-wait was obviously a little embarrassed at having permitted this, so he did not look at her.

  “Sit there, Janey,” William said, pointing to a place between Drouillard and himself. Sacajawea did not look around at the men; rather, she took on the proper aspect of an interpreter and looked at William. Ca-me-ah-wait, too, looked at William, as if the squaw did not exist, and sat attentive now, ready to hear the whole business like a statesman.

  “First, say this,” William began. “Tell them we come to bring trade and peace to the Shoshoni people. Tell them that for the sake of peace we have already made the Minnetarees promise they will no more come and attack the Shoshoni people.” This seemed to William a very reassuring and favorable piece of news with which to bring the smiles back onto the faces of the Indian men. He waited, looking at Ca-me-ah-wait, for these words to be translated: first by Drouillard in French to Charbonneau, then in Minnetaree by Charbonneau to Sacajawea, then by her in Shoshoni to the chief.

  He heard Sacajawea utter a few syllables, and then there was a strange break in her voice, followed by a deep silence. No more words came. Come on, Janey, he thought. He had put faith in her intelligence and made an issue of getting her into the council, and it would be a huge embarrassment now if she could not do the job.

  The silence continued, and people were beginning to stir. Come ON, Ja—

  A small, strangled sound came from her throat. William saw Ca-me-ah-wait’s eyes flicker toward her, and he himself glanced at her. And what he saw was bewildering.

  She was staring glassy-eyed at the chief, her mouth gaping like a fish’s mouth, and she was starting to rise. Her hands were clawing open the blanket she wore.

  Then, before the astonished faces of the whole council, she fairly leaped across the distance between herself and the chief, flung herself on her knees before him, crying and gasping words, whipped her arms and blanket around him, and, looking in his eyes for an instant, began weeping and sobbing. Everyone in the tent was dumbstruck for an instant; some braves had started up as if to defend the chief; but now Ca-me-ah-wait was returning her embrace and his craggy face was softening, crumbling.

  It was Charbonneau who first caught the sense of this. His mouth falling open, and eyes bulging, he rose to his knees pointing at them and exclaimed:

  “Sa frére! Mon Dieu, thees her brother!”

  “Brother?” Lewis exclaimed.

  “Oh, great Heavenly God,” William groaned, and then he could only kneel there watching the pair of them, the red blanket shaking with their sobs and outcries of “ah-hi-ee, ah-hi-ee,” and when he tried to swallow so that he could speak, it was like trying to swallow a horse.

  IT WAS QUITE A WHILE BEFORE THE COUNCILORS COULD GET over this wondrous revelation. The Indian men were trying to be stoical as warriors should be, and the white men were trying to be stoical as soldiers should be. But the men of each race could see how those of the other were affected; it obviously was another part of the great medicine of this day, and it was not necessary or even good to hide one’s feelings in moments of great medicine, and soon tears were eroding the vermillion of friendship on the cheeks of all the men in the shelter and all the braves were patting their palms together and crooning, “Ah-hi-ee, ah-hi-ee!” I rejoice, I rejoice!

  The brother and sister held a choking, sniffling conversation for a while still, and then Sacajawea returned to her place by William, who put his hand on her arm and gazed encouragement into her stricken face until he thought she had recovered enough to go on. But after a few words her voice caved in and she poured tears, and at last it was decided to continue without her for now, and they let her go back to the women and her baby. They would try again when she was able.

  What had overcome her, no doubt, Ca-me-ah-wait explained in hand language, was what she had learned today about the rest of her family, what she had never known in the five summers she had been gone: that the Minnetarees had killed her father the chief, and her mother, and her older sister. “I am alive, whom she thought dead; and our brother is alive, living now at another place, and this gave her joy. But we three are the only ones of our family now, and knowing this for the first time surely is why she could not continue to exchange words for us. Forgive my sister’s weakness, she is only a girl. Perhaps she will be able to speak tomorrow.”

  Forgive her weakness, she is only a girl, William thought several times as the council droned into the evening, and plans were made, and medals were given to the leading men, and useful things like knives and tobacco were given to the others. She is only a girl. And he wished he could go to the willow bower where she was, and hold her and comfort her, and dandle her baby, his little Dancing Boy, on his knee to make her laugh. But of course he could not because there was all this man’s business to be done for President Jefferson.

  August 18, 1805

  NOW CLARK WAS GONE, HEADING UP OVER THE GREAT DIVIDE with his men and their tools and baggage, and Charbonneau and Sacajawea were gone with him, and Ca-me-ah-wait and most of his band; and Meriwether Lewis had stayed here with the troops to make packsaddles, and to sink the canoes in a nearby pond so they would not be damaged by wind or grass fires before—or if—they should be needed again.

  It had
been a warm morning but at noon a misty rain had started, bringing with it a chill that felt like winter. It would be days yet before Clark could determine a route through the Western Mountains, and before Ca-me-ah-wait could bring his people and extra horses back, and Lewis had an awful foreboding, a gloomy half-certainty that winter would close the mountains before the Corps of Discovery could go through. If it did, they would be forced to spend the winter here in these gameless valleys with the half-starved Shoshonis. If that happened it would be unlikely that the expedition could continue next spring, because surely they would have used up everything they had by then, or starved, or become fully demoralized, and would have to return down the Missouri to civilization, a failure even after two years of trying. If the voyage was not to fail, it would have to get over the mountains in what was left of this year. And that chill in the air told him there was very little of this year left.

  And so now without his friend Clark to talk his spirits up, Lewis turned to the only other outlet for his personal thoughts, and he wrote in his journal for Sunday, August 18th, 1805:

  This day I completed my thirty first year, and conceived that I had in all human probability now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this sublunary world. I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little, indeed, to further the happiness of the human race or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly felt the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended. but since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought, and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least indeavor to promote those two primary objects of human existence, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestoed in me; or in future, to live for MANKIND, as I have heretofore lived FOR MYSELF.

  46

  IN THE BITTERROOT RANGE

  IT WAS SEPTEMBER NOW AND IN THE EVENINGS AND MORNINGS it was so cold that the ink would freeze in their pens when they tried to write. The pitch pines and the jagged granite cliffs on either side of the river were dark with dampness from the rain or mist, and the mountaintops close above them were almost always invisible in the clouds that hung over them sifting wet snow. They had had to leave the warm but spare comforts of the Shoshoni nation all too soon, and were high in the Rocky Mountains now, west of the Great Divide, seeking the way down through the maze of ranges to a navigable tributary of the Columbia. The captains could not keep an exact daily record of the temperatures anymore, because their last thermometer had been broken. It had happened during a heart-stopping, awful moment when a pack horse had slipped on a loose rock and gone whinnying and rolling and sliding down a mountainside steep as a roof, in a clattery, rattling avalanche of stones and deadwood and bundles and bags and pieces of packsaddle, while the men had stood above grimacing and shouting. Whenever this happened, as it did all too often, the men would have to pick their way down to wherever the horse lay struggling, sometimes in the river itself, other times jammed against a tree halfway down the slope. It was an awful feeling to see something as precious and as big as a horse tumble like a pebble down a rocky mountainside, and the men climbing down after it would take their guns, expecting to have to shoot it.

  It was amazing that so far they had not had to shoot a single fallen horse, and not a one had been hurt badly. They had hide scraped off and gashes cut in their shoulders or flanks, and they would struggle white-eyed, flailing their hooves, trying to get off their backs or sides and out of the stone rubble, and it would be a while after they were on their feet before the men could tell whether they would have to be shot or not. But as they had no broken legs, the men would soothe them, reload them, and then start the slow, lunging, sliding, clacking, steep climb back up to the trail, leading those wonderful, pitiful, bleeding beasts and encouraging them until they were back in the pack train again. The horses were fine and lovely and no one wanted ever to have to shoot them, but there was a little edge of secret disappointment in it sometimes, because if a horse had been truly crippled and it had been necessary to shoot it, there would have been meat to eat. As it was, there was no meat. These mountains were as empty of game as the Shoshonis had warned they would be.

  The Shoshonis were but a memory now. They had kept their word and helped Captain Lewis and his men carry the baggage over the divide and, after some hard bargaining, had sold twenty-nine horses to the white men, and finally had said farewell to these rich white men, and had gone on down to the plains of the Missouri for their fall buffalo hunt. They had gone down, taking with them memories of strange new foods and sugar cubes and fiddle music and a black man, taking with them promises that white men someday would bring them guns and good steel tools and iron kettles.

  And the white men had gone in the other direction, toward the pass through the mountains, to find the westerly rivers that would lead them to the legendary Stinking Lake, where the Shoshonis had never gone.

  Sacajawea was still with the white men. Something had happened to her among her people, after her miraculous and joyous return to them, something that had made her decide not to stay with them after all, but to continue with the white men even though she had served her intended role as interpreter among her people. The Shoshoni women, after a few days of hovering around her and her baby and caressing them weepily and wonderingly, had begun looking at her with puzzlement and envy, scolding her for joining men in councils, even for having a husband who cooked.

  She did not fit anymore within the ring of protective mountains and the narrow concerns of the Shoshoni women. She had been over too many horizons and heard too many tongues. Her husband thought the Shoshonis too poor and wanted to go back, eventually, to the Mandans. And Red Hair was going on toward the setting sun.

  And so now Sacajawea, with her papoose bundled in the red blanket on her back, rode on a horse of her own near the head of the column, hanging on grimly as the animal picked its way along precipitous paths more suitable for mountain goats. She was quiet, her heart doubtless wrung out by her bittersweet sojourn of a mere fortnight among her long-lost people. As the column snaked its way over vast screes of rock trash and around rocky monoliths or fallen pines scattered like jackstraws on the slopes, sometimes almost doubling back on itself, William, at its head, would find himself across from Sacajawea, above or below, going up while she went down or down as she went up, and he would look over at her little fine dark face set against whatever she was feeling inside. He would try to imagine what it would be like to return to his family after this voyage and then have to leave them immediately with no certainty of ever seeing them again, and he knew that whatever she had just come through, it was at least as bad as that would be.

  Usually her eyes would be on the trail just under her horse’s forefeet or on the steep depths below. But much of the time, she would be looking forward at the Red Hair Chief, at his broad back, at the long, swaying fringes of elkskin on the yoke of his coat, at the queue of red hair hanging over his collar from under the lynx-fur cap.

  It had been hard for her to choose to leave her people, and she would have felt colder and emptier and bleaker than winter if she could not have looked ahead now and then to see the Red Hair Chief.

  It seemed to her that if she could keep following within sight of him it did not matter where she went.

  THERE WAS NOW ANOTHER INDIAN WITH THE CORPS OF DIScovery, and he rode or walked always in front.

  He was a wiry little old man with an unpronounceable name that the captains had shortened and anglicized to Toby.

  Toby was so dark and wrinkled and skinny that Sergeant Gass had described him as “a raisin with bones,” and although he had been recruited from among the Shoshonis he was not a Shoshoni. He was a displaced member of the Nez Percé, or Pierced-Nose, nation who lived to the northwest of the Shoshonis, over on the western side of the great mountain range which now lay on their left as they r
ode northward.

  The captains had named this range the Bitterroot Mountains, after a new plant they had discovered there, a hardy little needle-leafed flower with a thick, bitter-fleshed, dark-skinned root. Despite their urgency, the captains were still complying with Thomas Jefferson’s instructions, still collecting, classifying, and describing the new forms of life they found in this strange land. The bitterroot was a food of the hungry Shoshonis.

  Toby himself, as a member of a newly found tribe, was a new and unheard-of life form for the captains. He had a few yellow teeth in the front of his mouth only, and through the cartilage between his nostrils he wore what appeared at first to be a sliver of white bone the size of a short pencil, but was actually a tubular seashell. His people on the Columbia River, he said, traded for these with the Indians who lived down on the coast of the Great Stinking Water. Toby seemed to value this ornament more than anything he had, except his new nickname.

  William had met many remarkable Indians, great chiefs all across the continent, but was coming to believe that this wizened, insignificant runt Toby was perhaps more remarkable than any of them. There was no explanation why Toby should have been living among the Shoshonis, who had all but ignored him for many years, but it was as if he had been placed in their village by Providence so that he would be available to guide the Corps of Discovery when it should arrive there. None of the Shoshonis, not even Chief Ca-me-ah-wait himself, had known of a passable route to the waters of the Columbia River.

  The river that flowed by their main village, the Lemhi, did run into a greater river called the River of No Return, which then roared many days, white and foaming, down between nearly vertical canyon walls into a larger river, known as the Snake, which in turn flowed into the great river that went to the sea. This was the traditional knowledge among the Shoshonis, though none living had ever tried to go down that River of No Return. But, Ca-me-ah-wait had said, there is an old man of the Pierced-Nose nation here, who is said to know a way through the mountains farther north used by his people when they cross to go down to the plains for buffalo, for there are no buffalo west of the mountains. And thus by the narrowest luck William had found old Toby with the shell through his nose, who was probably the only man living on this side of the mountains who could show them a passable way through these Bitterroot Mountains to a river where canoes would not be smashed to splinters. With Sacajawea’s help, William had interviewed Toby.