From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Yeeeeee-ahhhh-HOOOO! YOW-HOO!” The Fields boys were whooping, startling their exhausted horses into brief starts of bucking and turning. “That there is a plain, Cap’n Clark! It’s a green plain, and I’ll swear t’ God hit’s summertime down there!” Collins was looking at William and beaming.

  It might have been thirty or forty or fifty miles away, for all they could tell, but it was level ground; it was green, it was by God the land beyond the mountains, and they could see it, and anything they could see they knew they could reach. Tears ran down over the sunburned frostbite-blisters on their faces and they howled in triumph, howls broken by sobs, because they had crossed the Bitterroots, that last and most rugged range of the Rocky Mountains, and their captain, that God-danged, good-hearted, red-headed, blue-eyed wonder who never made a mistake no matter how it might look at any hard and awful given minute, had been right as usual. There was a way out of the mountains, and he had brought them to it.

  AND SO THEY RODE DOWN OFF THE END OF THE RIDGE TO the river and found a place on a creek to camp before dark, and although they hadn’t found a thing to shoot for dinner, it didn’t matter. They went to bed without having had anything to eat for twenty-four hours, and so they gave the creek the name of Hungry Creek.

  On the next day, as they rode the descending valleys, still crossing and detouring fallen logs, they saw before them seventy yards away a brown horse standing on a knoll looking toward them. Drouillard glanced at William and William nodded and Drouillard killed it instantly with one shot through the heart. They noticed as they were skinning it that it had a sort of brand on its rump and thus it was an Indian’s horse, so they knew they were near Indians, the Nez Percés, no doubt. They ate nearly a quarter of the horse, and hung the rest in a tree to keep it from wolves till the rest of the party should come down, and then they rode on down through a precipitous gorge until they came to a village of Nez Percé Indians, who were at first scared and suspicious, but who, after comprehending Drouillard’s sign language, proved to be a fine and hospitable people, even more cheerful and generous than the Shoshonis, and gave the white men a horse-back load of heavy cakes made of camass root flour, some berry-cakes and two huge dried salmon. William immediately sent Reuben Fields back toward Lewis’s party with that load, and went on down to the main Nez Percé village where the main chief, Twisted Hair, lived, and began building a friendship with him.

  WHEN FIELDS REACHED THE MAIN PARTY, HE FOUND THEM tired and sick nearly unto perishing. They had made a supper of a quart of old bear’s oil and twenty pounds of candles, then two miles later had found the horse carcass William had left for them, and had dined sumptuously on it. They had caught and devoured crayfish from Hungry Creek, a couple of grouse, and one coyote that had wandered close to the camp on the scent of the cooking grouse.

  WHEN THE PARTY CAUGHT UP WITH WILLIAM AT TWISTED Hair’s village, he had already scouted the Koos Koos Kee River, found tall ponderosa pines for canoes, and sent his men out to hunt. Almost everyone was sick with gas-bloated bowels because of the starvation followed by the roots, and some of the men lay for hours along the trailside before they could get up and follow. Lewis himself was so sick he could scarcely stay on his horse. William bombarded the men’s intestines with Dr. Rush’s Thunderbolts.

  They were about as sorry a passel of human animals as William had ever seen, after their eleven-day ordeal in the Bitterroots, their faces raw as ground meat, running sores in their whiskers, but they were alive and glad of it.

  And Captain Lewis wrote in his journal:

  The pleasure I now felt in having tryumphed over the rocky Mountains and descending once more to a level and fertile country where there was every rational hope of finding a comfortable subsistence for myself and party can be more readily conceived than expressed, nor was the flattering prospect of the final success of the expedition less pleasing.

  He looked over at William, who was just now throwing a barrage of Thunderbolts down his own throat while farting camass-root gas like a horse, and he said after a while:

  “Clark, I think I really picked the right partner.”

  “Yes, you did. And I think y’ll admit, I picked the right Indian.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  47

  ON THE KOOS KOOS KEE RIVER

  October, 1805

  IT REALLY WAS ALL DOWNHILL FROM HERE. THEY WERE ON A swift, cold river in four large new dugout canoes and a small one, all trim and symmetrical, burned and hewed out of wonderful straight ponderosa pines, and were tearing through glassy-green rapids down among the high, rugged, pine-dark hills, their route to the Columbia having been drawn on an elk hide for them by the good Nez Percé chief, Twisted Hair. They had branded their trailworn horses with Lewis’s name and left them in the chief’s care, and now they were once again in canoes, and for the first time in two years they were not struggling upstream. It was all downhill, and it was exhilarating.

  A few times it had been almost too exhilarating. A canoe with Sergeant Gass at the helm had got sideways in the rapids, nearly turning over, a hole stove in her side, and had sunk in the rapids with all the Indian merchandise and several men aboard who could not swim. Rescue and repair had delayed them for a day, and they had had to set a guard over the merchandise where it was laid out to dry, because the Indians of these riverside tribes had a way of making unguarded items disappear.

  It was exhilarating several times every day, because the river kept rushing down over bad rapids. On one day the boats had slithered and plunged down fifteen stretches of roaring white-water, providing so much exhilaration that old Toby the guide deserted the moment he got ashore. He was seen running up over a hill, having not announced his departure or even collected the pay he had been promised for his service as guide over the mountains. Everyone was puzzled and astonished and sorry he had left, because he had proved himself a fine Indian after all, the cheerful old rascal, and they were all sorry for having doubted him, and they all wished that he had stayed for his pay; it left them all somehow with a sense of unfairness that he had not claimed his reward. William suggested borrowing a horse from one of the Nez Percé villages and going after him. But no, a Nez Percé chief advised; whatever he was paid would only be taken away from him by the Indians on this side of the mountains. An old man like that.

  And so it was October now, and the dugouts were plunging down the wild rivers between canyons of evergreen and fern, with their haggard crews on the paddles, the parfleche bags and bundles and kegs and canisters loading them down so heavily that they were almost awash; and now in every boat along with the cargoes and crews there were tied ten or fifteen new passengers: dogs.

  They were the big, rangy Indian dogs, gray and dun, rough-haired, looking more like wolves than dogs. They were snarly and unpleasant, and their presence made Scannon very disdainful, but they had been deemed a necessity. They had been bought from the Indians as livestock. They were the only fresh meat available. There were no buffalo on this side of the Rocky Mountains. There were moose and elk and deer and bighorn sheep, but they were far up in the mountains. Here in the river valleys they had been long since hunted out by a dense Indian population, and even Drouillard and Collins and the Fields brothers, with all their skills as hunters, could seldom bring in so much as a deer in three days’ hunting. And of course there could be no three-day hunts now, or even one-day hunts, because it was October and the days were growing short, and there were still four or five hundred miles to go to the Pacific, and the boats were moving too fast to permit the dispatching of hunting parties. So now the hunters were in the boats manning paddles like everyone else. Now the expedition bought most of its food from the Indians in the villages along the river, trading beads and bits of ribbon for dried salmon and cakes of camass root. The salmon was extremely oily, and gave everyone stomach cramps and severe diarrhea; the cooked camass roots were sweet and palatable, but also caused stomach pains and sometimes swelled the guts up so that it was difficult to breathe for hours af
ter eating them. And so almost every man of the party had been sick almost every day since emerging half-starved from the mountains, and it had appeared that on this new diet everyone would remain sick indefinitely. Until one day when Le Page and Cruzatte and Labiche, with the resourcefulness of truly hungry Frenchmen, had bought some Indian dogs and cooked them for fresh meat. Immediately they had recovered from their stomach disorders, and so now dog meat had become the most desired provision, and the party had bought all the dogs it could obtain at every village along the way.

  Virtually everybody in the expedition soon developed a liking for dogflesh. Lewis simply loved it, and swore that he was healthier and stronger on dogmeat than he ever had been on any other diet. But William could not eat it. “I’d rather have diarrhea,” he would say, watching distastefully as Lewis gnawed on a well-roasted piece of dog haunch. “How can ye look Scannon in the eye with dog-grease on your lips?” “It’s different,” Lewis would say. “Scannon has a soul; these don’t.” Then Lewis would finish the morsel and give Scannon the bone. “How can you say he’s got a soul?” William would persist. “Lookee, he’s a shameless cannibal.”

  The Indians here, Nez Percé and Cho-pun-nish, were well-built and handsome and friendly and helpful, and the captains befriended many chiefs, despite their haste. The Indians were very fond of ornament, decorating their elkhide and goatskin clothes with white beads, seashells and bits of mother-of-pearl and braided grasses stained with natural pigments. Some of them wore jewelry made of bits of brass bought from tribes living farther down the Columbia. It was the first evidence of Indian trade with the sailing ships that came to the Pacific coast. These Nez Percés had never seen a white man, but knew they existed because they had heard of them from the coastal tribes below. Lewis and Clark smoked tobacco and showed off York and the air gun and gave out medals and bells and mirrors from their dwindling supply of merchandise during their brief stops with these Indians, but the aid they got in return for these little attentions was invaluable. The Indians helped them pilot rapids, gave them food, and often helped them retrieve lost goods and paddles after spills in the rapids. Sometimes the stops were extended while the captains doctored sick Indians, many of whom were victims of eye irritations and venereal diseases. And even though the canoes sped down the boiling rapids faster than a horse could run, somehow their fame as white medicine men preceded them down the steep-sided, pine-covered gorge; there were crowds of Indians on the shores every few miles, watching them and cheering them through the turbulent waterchutes. There was tribe after new tribe never heard of before, and little time to study their customs, but the captains made their notes on them as well as they could, and wrote down vocabularies of their words. Numerous as the Indians were, they never seemed threatening. William wrote:

  The preasence of Sah-ca-gar-we-ah we find reconsiles all the Indians as to our friendly intentions a woman with a party of men is a token of peace.

  AFTER SIXTY MILES ON THE RIVER, THE FLOTILLA ON OCTOBER 10 came out of the mouth of the clear river onto a wide greenish river that flowed through barren hills from their left side. The Indians here called it the Kimoo-en-im. “I’m sure what this is,” William said. “We’ve just come into the Snake. Remember that wild river we couldn’t take when we left Ca-me-ah-wait’s town? ‘The River of No Return,’ they called it? This is it. If Toby was still with us he’d tell us so. This is where he said we’d get on it. Aye, by damn, this water’s from that same watershed we were on two months ago. Think how quick we’d have been here if only we could a’ rid it down!”

  “Well,” said Sergeant Pryor, “I don’t believe how it could be any more mean than this ’n we’re on right now.” Another dugout this very morning had run onto a rock and hung on it, getting a split hull.

  “You didn’t see the No Return like we did,” retorted Sergeant Gass. Pat Gass was shaking as with ague from the last dashing ride through the rapids, but he said, “This we’re on is a smooth leetle canal compared with that other one, ain’t that so, Cap’n? And if we’d ’a come down it, we’d be strowed on th’ banks here stinkin’ like them hundred million dead salmon.”

  The river banks along here were silvery and putrid with the countless salmon that had spawned upstream and then died.

  “BEJEEZUS, CAP’N, I JUST CAIN’T KEEP UP WITH THE COUNTRYSIDE,” said Private Frazier. Frazier was working on his own journal and map, and had come up to go over some points with William. “I mean, two days ago, there we were ’mongst wet green mountains with pines two hundred feet high if they’s a foot, and now I’m blind if this don’t look just like the desert roundabout the Great Falls o’ th’ Missouri, don’t it, though? Not a tree anywhere, and Lord help us, prickly pear agin!”

  It was a barren, rolling, ochre-yellow land, broken with gullies, the eroded stone river bluffs looking like old fortress walls stacked one above the other.

  “It does, Frazier, for a fact. And I wouldn’t mind the view one mite, if only it had the buffalo like that did.”

  Frazier rolled his eyes and licked his lips. “Oh,” he groaned, clutching his stomach, “oh, yes, for a nice fat hump o’ buffaler just now! No more scrawny dawg! Oh, my!”

  Now, according to what old Toby and the Nez Percé chiefs had told them, they would be on the Snake River about a week, and then it would fall into the Columbia itself. Lewis seemed to strain forward like a hunting dog in his impatience to be upon that long-sought river to the sea.

  The week passed swiftly on the water of the Snake. There were so many spills and wrecks on the rapids that the captains worked out a policy for negotiating the most formidable rapids: Men who could not swim would be put ashore to carry indispensable gear, such as rifles and papers and instruments. The captains would walk down the shore then and study the rapids for the most feasible channels. Sometimes, Indians from the vicinity would get into the small dugout and pilot them through. Then two of the big canoes at a time, with the best steersmen and paddlers manning them, would head down through the thundering channels, and usually all would get through right side up. But nearly every day one canoe or another would be swamped or turned over or struck hard enough to start leaking. Then there would be the frantic salvaging of wet spilled bedding, food, and bundles of merchandise. A camp would be made below the rapids and articles would be dried and repacked, and split hulls repaired and recaulked. Then above the next rapids, the process would be repeated. At every stop the party would buy salmon, more camass root, more dogs, and firewood for cooking. In these treeless regions there was no fuel but what driftwood the Indians had collected, not even buffalo chips; thus many trade goods were expended on firewood. The only game the hunters could get were ducks and prairie-cocks and other birds that, to the astonishment of the Indians, they were able to shoot out of the air.

  AND SO IT WENT, INTO MID-OCTOBER. IT WAS DANGEROUS and hard, but compared with the ascent of the Missouri and the ordeal in the mountains, it was a lark. On October 16, after shooting six bad rapids in the morning, the party at noon reached the place where the Snake River flowed into the great Columbia.

  Captain Lewis and Captain Clark looked at each other with teary eyes. They had come thirty-seven hundred miles, in seventeen months of strenuous, hazardous travel, to reach this place. As if to commemorate their arrival at this landmark, many Indians came down from their villages on the surrounding plains, at least two hundred men and women on foot, chanting and beating on drums and clacking sticks. They parted to form a semicircle around the white men and boats, then stood there singing, until their chiefs came forth to smoke. Through Drouillard’s signs, the message of peace and commerce was conveyed, and medals, handkerchiefs, and shirts were given to the chiefs. In return, one of the chiefs made a good map of the upper Columbia, showing where different tribes lived along its banks.

  These Indians, called Wanapams and Yakimas, were a strange people. Their language was very different from that of the mountain tribes. Many of the women were fat, and some of them had strange, broad, slopi
ng foreheads. Papooses were seen strapped in cradleboards with slabs of bark attached at angles to compress their foreheads and impart this slope-skull profile, a straight line from the end of the nose to the crown of the head, evidently as an attempt at beautification. Bad eyesight and bad teeth were evident in a large proportion of the people; many were blind or partially blind, which the captains presumed to be a result of fishing for salmon much of the year on the sun-flashing river and from the unrelieved snowglare of the treeless plains in winter. The Indians’ teeth were worn down to the gums, presumably by the grit in their stone-pounded fish and roots. But they were a cheerful and friendly people, childishly delighted by such wonders as the air gun, the compass, York, and Scannon, and they were crazed with glee when Pierre Cruzatte tuned up his old fiddle and began to play.

  But the troops themselves were almost that gleeful to hear the fiddle again, and they whooped and cavorted, swinging partners, flapping elbows, rolling their eyes, and popping their cheeks, until the Indians were almost helpless with laughter.

  LEWIS TOOK CELESTIAL SIGHTINGS AND PLOTTED THE GEOGRAPHICAL coordinates of the confluence, and then on down the river they went. The Columbia was wide and fast, and so clear that salmon could be seen three fathoms down. Now the smell of salmon was everywhere. They lay rotting on the riverbanks by the millions; they hung on frames drying in the sun at every Indian encampment, tons of them. Dried salmon hung in the Indian lodges thick as tobacco leaves in a Virginia curing shed, and everyone’s clothes reeked of salmon, everyone’s skin felt slick with salmon oil and everyone’s nostrils cloyed with it.

  Then, as the little fleet bounded down the Columbia, another odor began to insinuate itself, a vaguely familiar, sourish odor at first, noticeable near one of the big canoes. It was a while before someone identified it, and that someone was Private Howard. “By th’ great god Gambrinus!” he yelled suddenly one evening, “that’s beer I smell!”