From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  He’s no slave anymore anyhow, William thought. He’s a man like all the rest of us.

  And that night as the men stood around in their steaming elkskins as close to the roaring bonfires as they could get without singeing their whiskers, almost giddy with the aroma of roasting colt meat, William took a long, loving look at York and made a decision.

  I won’t tell ’im yet, he thought. But when we get back to Louisville, I’m going to sign that man free.

  ONE COLT OF COURSE MADE ONLY ONE MEAL, AND A SCANT one, for three dozen men accustomed to eating eight or ten pounds of meat a day per man. And although they now were consuming their meat in the Indian manner—organs, brains, tongue, guts, suet, and marrow as well as the red flesh—their famished bodies, doing superhuman work in the cold, burned up the nourishment even as they slept, and so there would be nothing else to eat unless the hunters should have better luck today.

  It was the seventeenth of September, and this morning it was clear to everybody that winter in these altitudes had arrived. What they had dreaded had happened. They were caught by winter in the Bitterroot ranges. This morning the snow had stopped, but it lay a foot deep in most places. The clouds overhead looked pregnant with more snow, but they had lifted enough to permit several miles’ visibility. And in a way this was bad; yesterday it had been possible to hope that beyond the next misty mile lay the end of the mountains. Today they could see high, jagged, snow-covered peaks towering around them in every direction, and every man had to rid himself of any hope that the ordeal of the mountains was nearly over. The men looked at those frightful ranges repeating themselves off into the purple distance, and their stomachs growled and their bones ached; their extremities stung with freezing and thawing, their faces were raw and flaking and suppurating; they shuddered uncontrollably with cold and hunger and, for the first time after nearly two years of eager and faithful following, they began talking discouragement among themselves outside their captains’ hearing. The horses had foraged far through the snowy woods during the night, and most of the morning was spent in stumbling through the snow and catching them all. Every hour thus spent meant another hour’s delay in these mountains. Sergeant Ordway brought back to the captains those first murmurings of despair that he had been overhearing.

  “Some are a-sayin’ these mountains are a trap without an exit,” he said. “I heerd ’em talkin’ about the wolves howlin’. I heard Bratton say, ‘I don’t like them wolves, they’re a bad sign.’ I told him, ‘Bratton,’ I said, ‘if a wolf tries t’ eat you, eat him.’ Well, sir, he laughed then, but others are a-talkin’ low-spirited too.”

  “Thankee, Sarge,” said Lewis.

  “Welcome, sir. I thought y’ oughter know what they’re a-sayin’.” He shivered and looked westward, and shook his head. “I’ll say this, sir. These are sure the most turrible mountains I ever beheld.”

  Because of the delay caused by the strayed horses, there was little hope of making more than ten or twelve miles this day. William and Colter and Toby went out ahead again, and men who could be spared from the pack train to hunt went down into the woods on both slopes of the mountain. William heard a few gunshots during the afternoon and prayed that they would yield something.

  The afternoon was a repetition of the day before, but in some ways worse. Branches of the evergreens were loaded with snow, and this was forever sliding off onto heads and shoulders, sliding down collars, wetting clothes and mittens and gun locks. The temperature came up near the freezing point during the afternoon, and the snow grew slick as grease. William fell countless times, and Colter fell, and even Toby fell, and William was almost sick imagining what it must be like back there in the pack train. He imagined, over and over, Sacajawea’s horse rolling down the snowy mountainside, crushing her and little Pomp under it, and somehow this was the worst possible mishap he could imagine. She had to ride, of course; she could not be expected to wade through this snowy wilderness carrying a baby. But under these circumstances the privilege of riding was surely no privilege at all.

  As he expected, darkness was on them before they had progressed more than ten miles. He found a meadow on the mountainside near a gushing brook with a round deep sinkhole full of water nearby, and here again had a bonfire going by the time the rest of the party came creeping along the trail. The hunters had shot only a few grouse, not enough even for a good mouthful of fowl for each man. One hunter had chased a bear “all over the blag-dagged mountain,” as he reported it, but had been unable to get a clear shot at it. And so this night the third and last of the colts was butchered. The men devoured its boiled flesh and guzzled the broth ravenously but without their usual delight. “They usually eat like happy pigs,” Ordway commented, watching them. “Now they mind me more o’ wolves, like.”

  The men knew there were no more colts and they knew the captains would not let them kill the pack horses for food. This night there had been only enough firewood around to cook the colt, and so the men could not have the luxury of basking near a blaze and drying out their clothes. All they could do now was get into their blankets with all their damp clothing and moccasins on and hope to generate enough body heat to keep from freezing. William and Lewis separately toured among the squads giving medicine and treating chilblains and sprains and boils, and tried to talk encouragement and to gauge the real morale of the soldiers.

  “They scare me now,” Lewis said. “Every one of ’em looks like ’e’s lost twenty pound o’ flesh. We’ve got dysentery and rheumatism and skin rot and windburn on near every man. But what bothers me most is how quiet and sullen they be.”

  “Aye,” said William. “I got th’ sense from one or two that they’d as soon gnaw a chunk off me or you as off a horse’s haunch.”

  “I’ll say this. Drouillard hasn’t shot more than a grouse all these days, and when he gets nothing, that means there is nothing.” He paused. A wolf’s eerie, lonely, hungry plaint wound along the horizon. He looked up at the sky. “Stars,” he said.

  William looked up. The clouds were thinning and shredding overhead. “Going to be mighty cold up here by midnight,” he said.

  “I think our main threat,” said Lewis, speaking very low, almost whispering now, “is loss of spirit. I don’t want to eat any pack animals, because we need everything we’ve got and can’t drop off another pound o’ baggage. But if it comes to that, we will. What these boys need most, though, is to know there’s a way out o’ these mountains. Drouillard told me the men don’t believe in Toby anymore. They keep talking about how he got us lost back yonder. And they don’t believe in us believing in him either. They think he led us in here and doesn’t know a way out.”

  William clenched his back teeth. He knew that his faith in the guide—and thus his own judgment—was on trial. And now Lewis continued in a surprising new vein on the same subject.

  “Somebody, in fact, has said that Toby’s brought us in here to perish so his tribe can come up and get all our guns and goods.”

  William frowned in the feeble glow of the coals. “Empty guts,” he said, “make full imaginations.” It was one of George’s sayings. “Anyways, you’re right what they need: To know that these mountains do end. Well,” he said, “here’s what I propose. Tomorrow I could set out early with a small party, no baggage. We could travel twice as fast as the main body. I’m sure from what Toby’s said that we’re more than halfway across the range. I believe right well I can reach the far side o’ the range in two fast days like that. Get down where there’s game, or find the Nez Percés and buy some from them, send it back up to you. I don’t only think it’s a good idea, I think it’s an outright necessity. Without a cheerful report from ahead, these boys won’t hold together another week.” He remembered something, vaguely, something echoing in his memory that made him believe even more strongly in his proposal than he had when he had first suggested it. Yes. It was the ruse that Brother George had used on the way to Vincennes, when he had sent his scouts ahead across the flood and told them to bring b
ack a favorable report no matter what they found. That had worked for George, that of having someone go far ahead and send back good word. “Aye,” he said now to Lewis, “they don’t believe there’s an end to the mountains because there’s nought but Toby’s word on it. That’s why they think him sinister, too. But they’ll take heart if I prove there is. Do I have your agreement?”

  “How can I not? We’ve nothing to lose.”

  “I’ll want our best hunters. And, ah, I’m goin’ to leave Toby with you.”

  “Eh? Why that? How d’ you expect to find the way without the one man you say knows it?”

  “Lewis, listen: I can find it, because Toby’s told me it so clear I’ve got it mapped on my eyeballs: that wild river down below us is the Koos Koos Kee. Just beyond these mountains a clear water river runs into it from the north. On down the Koos Koos Kee beyond that is level land. And game. And Indians. And now the reason I don’t take Toby is what ye just now said: They don’t believe in him.”

  “All right. All right, man, I do see your point. So do it. Go early. And I’ll try to keep their body and soul together and bring ’em along.”

  “GODSPEED, CLARK.”

  They shook hands in the dawn light, the milk-pale light silhouetting the mountains behind them, the mountains they had been creeping over for more than a week. It was bitterly cold under the cloudless sky. In the blue above there was a faint segment of moon looking like a skim of ice taken from a water-pail and flung up there. The breath of the horses steamed white and crystallized. William looked back over the camp by the frozen sinkhole. The troops were getting out of their blankets and moving stiffly and slowly as walking corpses, reluctantly setting out through the crunching blue snow to round up the rest of the horses. Their loads would have to be repacked and redistributed this morning to assimilate the load the scouts’ horses had been carrying. It had been decided that William and his advance party would go on horseback for the sake of speed. Sacajawea sat huddled in her blanket nursing Pomp and looking sad-eyed at William. The baby had cried much of the night; his mother’s milk was failing because she was starving like everybody else. Scannon’s bark echoed among the peaks. He had by some instinct become a herder, and these last two mornings he had been helping the men round up the horses. It was going to be a brilliant, clear day. The mountainsides sloped down and down snow-shadowy blue and pine-forest black to the little twisting rivers in the bottom of the gorges, and it was so windlessly quiet that the rushing of their waters could be heard all the way up here on the crest. The ridge twisted on and on ahead like some gigantic reptilian backbone, from peak to peak to peak until it seemed to terminate in a bald, white monolith some twenty or thirty miles ahead. William clucked, put his heels into the flanks of his black-spotted mount, and moved out, his rifle cradled in his arm, and his hunters fell in behind him: Drouillard, looking every inch a Shawnee, then blue-eyed, calm-faced John Colter, then John Shields and the Fields brothers, Reuben and Joseph, and Private John Collins.

  The cold was intense; it rankled in the nostrils, and benumbed the cheeks and hands and feet. It was colder riding than walking. The world was crisp and blue, and William imagined that the poles of the earth must have this kind of stark, stinging stillness. William led along the crest of the ridge, and when they could, Drouillard and Colter rode flanking, one down each side of the ridge a way, searching the woods below for game or tracks.

  As they rode the sun came over the mountains behind them and made all the peaks on either side gleam pale orange with alpenlight, and as the sky brightened, the moon dissolved. Hooves crushed in the crusty snow, the rivers whispered far below, and now and then some cold-bitten tree would crack like a shot. “Wish that noise was my gun,” said Collins, “shootin’ a fat deer.”

  They went over a bare spine and then down through the dark fir woods on an intervening saddle, then veered slightly left with it and climbed onto another of the treeless promontories. William reined in his horse here to look backward and forward. Shields and the Fields brothers rode on by him, muffled to their noses in rags and scarves, eagle feathers drooping from their fur hats, draped in shaggy elkskin coats with foot-long fringes, parfleche saddlebags behind them, looking for all the world like members of some tribe of Arctic savages, or like, perhaps, the Mongols of the old Khans. Incredible it was to look at the brothers and know they sprang from a fine family of Virginia’s Culpepper County, and were grandsons of a Byrd just as he was himself grandson of another Byrd; incredible to look at Shields and know he was a blacksmith and artificer of genius with family roots sunk deep in Augusta County, well married with a wife named Nancy and a daughter named Janette, both of whom likely had given him up for dead by now. They rode past William, who shaded his eyes with his mitten and gazed back over the way they had come. He was only doing what he always did, looking back to memorize the look of the land over which they might have to return next year, if there was no ship on the Pacific Coast to take them home; he was only memorizing the way home, and not expecting to see what he saw now, and was not even sure for a moment whether he was really seeing it. But yes, there they were, maybe three or four miles back there, an infinitesimally tiny line of specks on the vast snowy mound of a mountaintop amid a universe of mountaintops like a line of ants crossing a many-gabled roof: two dozen men and a squaw and a papoose, with Indian horses carrying trading goods and guns and ammunition and tools and notebooks and clothes and pelts and medicines and flags and medallions—everything, he thought, but food—coming along and coming along as they had for two years and three thousand miles now, like a line of ants but much smaller from here, mere specks, yet he had come to know every one of them as intimately and caringly as he knew his own relatives. Lewis, in fact—likely that first dot in the line?—was as much his brother as anyone could be without being a Clark; and Sacajawea … Yes, what about her? She was not a sister, but she was closer to him than Fanny; she was not a lover, but he loved her even more than he loved Judy Hancock. He had never said this to himself before, but he knew in his soul that it was true.

  Better not to fathom this, he thought now, and tore his mind away from the little line of specks so far behind, and from his other loved ones a thousand times that far behind, and he told himself: You’re farther ahead than anyone has ever been.

  He wheeled his horse and trotted through the snow, passing Shields and the Fields boys and their frost-snorting horses, and rode up to the brow of this summit, and now he stopped his mount again and looked westward along the mountain spine toward that final white peak like a skull at its end, now perhaps fifteen miles ahead. There were other mountains beyond it, of course, but from the looks of the land, that knob was the end of this ridge, and beyond it, if his faith in Toby was justified, would be the place where the river far down on his left and the river far down on his right would meet, and there they would be able to start down out of the mountains and find food to send back and start looking for wood to build canoes again.

  Canoes, he thought. Imagine sitting in a nice fresh-hewn canoe and just floating down the river easy as a lord, just dipping a paddle in now and then to stay ahead o’ the current, guts full o’ salmon and elk, singin’ in the sunshine like a lord goin’ down to New Orleans, but goin’ not to the Gulf of Mexico this time, where all too many a riverman has gone already, but to the great blue Pacific, by a way no white man’s ever gone, farther ahead than anyone has ever been!

  Oh, he knew from experience by now that it probably wouldn’t be all that easy; it never was as easy as you’d expected; it never had been as easy as expected in more than three thousand miles; nonetheless he could already taste the salmon and the elk and he could already feel the autumn afternoon sunshine on his face—it’ll still be autumn when we get down out of these mountains, he thought—and he could already smell the fresh-hewn wood of the new canoe, and he could even hear already the happy quick squeaking of Cruzatte’s fiddle, which hadn’t been heard since about a month ago back in the Shoshoni town.

&n
bsp; And these thoughts were all rolling and tumbling through his hunger-intoxicated brain as he rode his horse here squinting toward a sunlit mountaintop fifteen miles ahead, his feet and hands numb with cold, his ruddy cheeks whitening with frostbite.

  BY MID-AFTERNOON THEY WERE ALMOST BLIND FROM THE glare of sunlight on snow. Their faces were scarlet with sunburn, and where the sunburn had scorched their frostbite they were leprous-looking with huge blisters. And they were almost faint with hunger. They had not seen one animal of any kind. William had been pulling leather thrums off the sleeve of his coat and chewing them until they were soft enough to swallow.

  But now they were at last struggling the last mile through the snowdrifts toward that bald, white mountain they had been looking at all day. The sun glared off the snowcrust so brightly it was like looking straight up into the sun itself, and they had to hold their mittens over their eyes most of the time or they would be permanently blinded, he was sure. The peak they were ascending was as rounded and barren and white as a skull, and for the moment there was nothing beyond and above it but that blue sky and that eye-burning, ray-shot, shimmering sun, so intensely white that it looked blue and sometimes black within its aureole of rays. They rode into this brain-searing glare for an eternity, it seemed, before they reached the top of the mountain, and then they had to stop their horses and press their mittens over their eyes for a few seconds to rest them so they could look out and see what was beyond.

  William pulled his cap-brim down as far as he could to shade his eyes from the sun above and put his forearm in front of his face to block the reflected glare from the snow below, and now he could see what was in the distance.

  “Oh, God! Oh, God, Lookee yonder! Tell me if it’s true what I’m seein’ or is it a mirage?”