And then the secret was out: Private Collins, starting with a mass of camass-root bread that had gotten wet and soured as the result of a boat-wreck, had been adding to it and nurturing it. There were only a few gallons, but it was a good beer and a strong one, and when Collins wistfully shared it that evening with thirty men, he was a more popular fellow than he had intended to be. “You an’ yer damn nose,” he muttered to Howard once during the evening.
“Well, look at it thisaway,” Howard replied. “If you’d ‘a kep’ it and drunk it all yourself, either it would’a kilt ye, or we ’uns would.”
IT WAS A DIFFERENT WORLD THROUGH WHICH THEY WERE passing so swiftly now, a world entirely unlike either the Missouri plains or the great mountains, and their facility as journal-keepers was tested by phenomena never before put in written language. The landscape, the river, the plants, the natives, were so unlike anything known to exist in North America that they might as well have found themselves on a continent on the other side of the world.
As their canoes plunged down through hissing, gushing rapids, they saw magnificent salmon leaping past them at eye level, flashing in the sunlight, desperately flinging themselves up over the foaming cascades. If the men had not been just as desperately fighting the water with their paddles, they could have reached out and caught the fish in their hands.
The dark-walled gorge of the Columbia cut through a vast, tawny land of sage and cactus and dunes, through sheer, thousand-foot walls of fluted lava-rock marked with vertical striations as straight as if cut by an engraver’s stylus. Rock islands with perpendicular sides a hundred feet high jutted out of the river bed like old black temple ruins. The only vegetation along the river was willow and lily, hackberry and rushes, yet at every rapid and shallow there were elaborately built wooden scaffolds and racks and weirs. On these scaffolds naked men and boys stood with long-handled gigs or huge baskets, harpooning or scooping up the great fish below the rocks and tossing them onto huge piles ashore, where women split them for drying. Salmon everywhere, the stench of spoiled salmon everywhere. William marveled at the incredible abundance of food that Providence had placed here for these people, even somehow more awfully, wastefully prodigious than the countless buffalo on the Missouri side. At least the buffalo, he thought, you had to go find and kill at some risk; here you just stand in a place and grab it and lift it as it streams by! He saw in one tiny village an estimated ten thousand pounds of dried, pounded salmon, stored in three-foot baskets lined with salmon skins. He looked at the chunky men and corpulent women, and remembered the gaunt Shoshonis who ate maybe three times a week, who had scrambled over Drouillard’s deer like dogs for, as McNeal had put it, “a mouthful of guts and arseholes.”
Where animal hides had been the fabric of rugs and shelters for all the Indian cultures heretofore, now everything seemed to be made of tightly woven rushes and grasses. Mats and baskets, even the awnings and walls of dwellings, were made of bear-grass fibers so tightly woven they were impermeable. William saw baskets so well made that they could be filled with boiling water in which fresh fish were cooked. On islands in the river they found elaborate Indian burial grounds where beautiful grass weavings and splendidly carved canoes, as much as sixty feet long, had been left with the dead. “I swear,” William groaned one evening as he wrote by the light of an oily fish burning like a candle. “This country’s so wondrous, it’s wearin’ out my writing hand!”
ONE DAY THE CAPTAINS STOOD ON A CLIFF WHILE THE CANOES were piloted down through the rapids below, and saw above the western horizon, probably more than a hundred miles distant, a great, snowy mountain, visible down the long notch of the Columbia gorge. They stared at it and thought of all the old maps and journals of the Northwest coast that they had studied before the start of their trek.
“That,” William said, “surely that’s Mount St. Helens, eh? The one Cap’n Vancouver saw from his ship in ’92, when he lay off the mouth of the Columbia?”
“Praise God and hurrah!” Lewis said. “We’re surely not much more than two hundred mile from the Pacific now! And unless we smash ourselves to death on waterfalls, we’ll be there in a couple o’ weeks!”
NOW, IRONICALLY, IT WAS THE VERY SPEED OF THE COLUMBIA that was slowing them down. Every few miles in descending the gorge they would be confronted by the roar and foam of another stretch of rapids and agitated narrows, and would have to go ashore to study this newest gauntlet and decide whether it would need to be portaged or could be ridden through, and whether the nonswimmers and precious cargoes would need to be sent overland, whether all the goods would have to be carried and the dugouts eased through by ropes.
William found himself bearing the major share of this effort, it seemed. Lewis had been different since the ordeal of the Bitterroots, or at least since his sick spell after the mountains. It was hard to define the difference, because he still functioned extremely well in most of those things he did. He was working hard to gather as much scientific information as their haste would allow, and was taking vocabularies of the strange new tribes, and analyzing their salmon economy and the peculiarities of their health and their physical traits. But he was not keeping a journal, and he was not really commanding. He had been moody and anxious, curt, often gazing downstream with an almost desperate look in his eyes, leaving more and more details of commanding and scouting and record-keeping to William.
He’s got so many danged talents, William thought, we don’t really appreciate what-all he does until he neglects on one thing or another. Lewis was physically recovered from his digestive troubles, but something seemed to have broken or gone slack in him; it was the way it had been once when one string of Cruzatte’s fiddle had snapped during one of those slow, groany pieces he occasionally played. The whole instrument was still fit, but the sound was different. York had noticed the change in Lewis, too, and he murmured his observation to William one day.
“It’s like you Ma used to say: ‘He on ’is feet but he off his feed.’”
A CRANE WAS FLYING HIGH OVER A CLUSTER OF INDIAN huts, flying with slow beats of its huge wings. It would be a long shot, but fowl would be a welcome break from the diet of oily, gritty, pungent salmon, so William took a bead on it, then a short lead, and squeezed the trigger. The rifle crashed, and the crane twitched against the gray sky and its wings bent askew and it began to fall. The three men standing on the plain behind William whooped in amazement. “Let’s go get ’im,” he said, reloading. As they walked toward the village, they saw two or three Indian men running as fast as they could go toward the huts. The huge bird had fallen between the hunters and the village. They picked it up and then went on to look at the place and do the usual diplomatic smoking and hand-talking.
“Wonder where everybody go,” said Drouillard. The village seemed deserted; the usual crowds of curious savages did not come forth. Nothing stirred except a few slinking dogs. The lodges were made of mats, and their doors, of the same material, were closed. William gave his rifle to a soldier and walked toward the nearest lodge with his peace pipe across his arm. It was eerie. There were small fires smoldering under racks of fish. If the village had been deserted, it had been within the past few minutes. Yet there was nobody visible on the plains around.
He knelt, scalp prickling with apprehension, and lifted a corner of the door-flap. There was a strong smell of fish and people. He heard noises inside: rustling, a whimper, a short high note suddenly stooped as if a hand had been put over a baby’s mouth. “Cover me,” he said to the men. Then he stooped and peered in.
He could see in the dim light that the building was full of people. As his eyes adjusted, he made out two or three dozen men, women, and children, all cowering, and as he stepped in among them their murmurings turned to wailings. Some were wringing their hands, others were burying their heads in their arms.
He offered his hand, offered the pipe, and pressed little gifts, thimbles and beads, into their hands, eventually soothing their agitations a little. He sent Drouillard and t
he Fields boys into the other lodges to do the same. Then he came out and sat on a rock in the center of the village with his pipe, waiting for the men to come out and smoke with him. Not a soul emerged. Now and then he would see the bottom of a wall mat move up an inch or so and a frightened eye peer out under it. “Somethin’s skeered th’ bejabbers out of ’em,” said Joe Fields. “Reckon they never heard a gun before?”
It was not until Lewis and the rest of the party came down, and the Indians saw Sacajawea among them, that they began to come out of hiding, creeping out a few at a time. They sat around trembling but acquiescent and smoked with the captains then, and by and by through sign language the cause of their terror was revealed. They had heard a crash, then had seen something fall from the sky, and then from the place where it had fallen they had seen these four come toward the village. They had believed these were not men but creatures that had jumped down from the clouds on a thunderbolt.
By the time the Corps had dined and gone on down the river, the people of this village were no longer afraid, but they seemed still not entirely convinced that their visitors had been human.
THE NEXT DAY THE PARTY SAW PELICANS FLYING, AND CORMORANTS. But there was still a mountain range between them and the ocean; it loomed higher and higher ahead on either side of the westering canyon. Straight ahead now not more than forty or fifty miles, visible sometimes even from the canoes, was a perfect snow-covered cone of a mountain that appeared to be at least two miles high.
Firewood could be obtained only from the Indians, who sold it so dear that the expedition’s stock of trade goods dwindled fast. The Indians themselves hoarded driftwood jealously because it was so scarce in this arid and treeless country. At one place William found huge quantities of prickly pears and spoiled fish spread in the sun, and was informed that the tribes used these unpleasant materials as fuels in the winter, just as the Indians of the Missouri tribes had used dried buffalo dung. It’s amazing, William thought, how folks can get by. “I would surely hate to have to sit by a fire of these stinking fish in a close room,” Lewis said.
“Aye,” William agreed. “But I could take some satisfaction in seeing prickly pears a-blazing, after all the hurt they’ve done me.”
COMING TO REST ON AN ISLAND AT THE FOOT OF A DIFFICULT rapid, the explorers were startled by the cry of a soldier who had gone behind a heap of rocks to relieve himself. “Bones, thousands o’ people bones!” he yelped, hopping into view clutching at his belt.
A wooden vault, six feet tall and sixty feet long, had been formed of boards and pieces of dugout canoes propped against a ridgepole. Inside it at one end were twenty-one skulls arranged in a circle on rotting mats. Elsewhere through the vault there were hundreds of human skeletons and parts of skeletons in disarray, and at the other end lay corpses and skeletons more recently placed. These lay in rows on wide boards, wrapped in leather robes and covered with mats, and over them hung baskets, wooden bowls, fishing nets, and trinkets of all kinds. The bones of humans and horses lay scattered all around the vault. It was a depository for the dead.
William examined the mausoleum minutely and wrote descriptive notes. “Our great white father in Washington would do handsprings if he saw this place,” he commented, “the way he is about Indian bones.”
Lewis looked as if he thought the remark was a little disrespectful. But he said nothing, because he knew how true it was.
“TREES! HEAVENLY LORD, I NEVER THOUGHT I’D BE SO happy to see trees,” William exclaimed, pointing up toward a scattering of pines on a distant hill. He could also see more brush growing in the gullies. Evidently there was a little more rainfall here as they approached the mountain chain.
“It’ll probably prove like the Bitterroots,” Lewis said. He was sitting near William in the bow of one of the big canoes, writing in his field notes. “Likely the west side of the mountains get most of the moisture from the Pacific.” The sea captains who had visited the mouth of the Columbia had written that it was wet country indeed.
“Alls I know is, I’ll be glad to ’scape from this dang desert,” said Ordway.
“Where there’s trees, there’s meat on th’ hoof,” Joe Fields chanted cheerily, thrusting his paddle in the water.
“Not allus, Brother, not in them Bitterroots there wasn’t,” Reuben reminded him.
“Listen,” said William. They could hear it ahead, that familiar, dreaded rush of rapids and cascades. “Listen to the tone o’ that. Waterfalls, or I’m a deaf man. Make for the starboard shore,” he called back. “I think we’re about on the Great Falls o’ the Columbia.”
His heartbeat was accelerating. The chiefs had been telling them about the great waterfalls and the miles of terrible rapids below it, which they would meet here where the Columbia had forced its narrow passage through the mountain range. As far as they had been able to understand, these cascades would pose the last natural hazard in their descent to the ocean. But they would be a considerable hazard. The chiefs had said men could pass the falls and the narrows only on foot. Not even the best canoe steersmen of the Columbia tribes ventured into those terrible swirling waters in the narrows, they had warned. They said coastal tribes brought their large carved and painted log canoes up as far as the foot of those rapids to trade sea shells and wappatoo roots and ocean fish and items from white men’s ships; tribes from the upper Columbia brought down bear grass and camass roots and mountain-sheep horn to the top of the falls, and here great trading fairs took place in the summer, with thousands of Indians. But the canoes of the coast Indians had never been above the falls, and those of the upper Columbia never went below the falls, except now and then by a fatal accident. The E-nee-shur tribes that lived at the falls were, so to speak, the middlemen of this annual bazaar.
It was past the season of the barter-market; only a few hundred people of the E-nee-shur tribe were still present when the Corps of Discovery beached its five dugouts and came ashore to study the falls.
A few of these people were enough. The troops looked dubiously at the E-nee-shur standard of feminine beauty and generally decided that it was just as well they were in too much of a hurry to dally. These women displayed most of their bodies, being dressed only in short shoulder-capes, which left their pendulous dugs bare, and narrow leather belts and loin-straps that, worn tight as tourniquets, were almost invisible in the overlapping rolls of fat. Their coarse black hair was braided and worn without ornaments. Many of them had flattened foreheads and the resultant fish-like pop-eyes, which made them seem less than human creatures to some of the soldiers. But far worse even than their gross and alien unattractiveness was the profusion of fleas that lived on and around them. Every Indian and every lodge was leaping with fleas. William stood looking at a pile of baskets sealed with sewn-on fish-skins—baskets full of thousands of pounds of dried salmon—and the baskets were so aswarm with fleas they appeared to be vibrating. The soldiers had not been in this village for ten minutes before every man was twitching and scratching.
On a promontory of dark lava stone he and Lewis stood and studied the frothy, rumbling, hissing torrent below. “Well, it’s a mere dribble compared to the Falls o’ Missouri, thank the Lord,” William yelled, “but it’s twenty-foot pitch if it’s an inch! Reckon we best map us a portage!”
Lewis nodded, but continued to stare at the huge cascade, and then he shouted: “How in the world do you suppose the salmon get upstream o’ this? You don’t imagine they can leap twenty feet, do you?” William looked for a minute, then shouted back:
“It doesn’t seem possible, but they must. Look!” He pointed. Near the middle of the stream, several salmon were leaping from the froth at the foot of the falls, flinging themselves at the descending wall of water and being swept back down out of sight. The best of them were reaching heights of ten or twelve feet, but even these spectacular leaps were only half enough.
THEY WORKED OUT A COMPLICATED PORTAGE PLAN. ON THE north bank of the river was a narrow path on a steep slope, by which all the baggage
could be back-packed around the falls, a distance of about twelve hundred yards. The path was partly over bare rock, partly over a steep sand dune, and the men stumbled through it with great difficulty. At the lower end of the route, a camp was made at an old fish-drying site. On the south bank of the river was a shorter path by which the canoes could be taken just around the falls, then put into the water in a furious but navigable channel about a hundred yards wide, which would discharge them into calm water just across from the camp. This part of the portage was begun the next morning, after a night made almost sleepless by fleas.
Lewis stayed with a small party to guard the goods at the camp while William and the main body went back up the portage route to the emtpy canoes, paddled them across to the south shore, and began the excruciating process of hauling the four-hundred-pound vessels out of the water, up the steep bank. The more they sweated, the more the fleas nipped at them. Private Shannon let out a yelp of desperate fury, and skinned out of his clothes. He stood there stark naked, hundreds of bites looking like a rash all over him, brushing fleas off his body.
William looked at Sergeant Ordway. “It’s a good idea,” he said, and quickly began stripping off his own clothes.
Soon everybody was in the cold water, washing off fleas and holding their clothes under to drown or wash the pests out of them. They made the rest of the canoe portage naked and much happier, then came back and got their clothes and put them on wet. By the time they had run the fast channel and recrossed the river to the camp, they were more or less rid of fleas. But when they landed, the fleas covering the campsite immediately leaped upon them and infested their clothes as thickly as before.
THEY WERE STILL NOT THROUGH WITH THE GREAT FALLS. A mile below, the river roared over another huge, jagged, rock-studded sill. This one was eight feet high, so the captains decided that the canoes could be unloaded on the narrow, rocky shore and then let down over the falls by ropes. It was a strenuous job, and somehow the very appearance of the place—the towering walls of the gorge, the huge, black volcanic rocks and pillars dividing the river into several thundering chutes—was so intimidating that the men looked wild-eyed, terrified, as they worked, and clung to footholds and handholds with the tenacity of climbing vines. It was mid-afternoon when this was completed.
From Sea to Shining Sea Page 110