From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  As the fleet moved swiftly down the gloomy lava chasm below the falls, Ordway pointed to some rounded shapes moving lively on the dark glassy surface of the river. They looked like the heads of swimming beaver. But on closer approach they proved too large. They’re maybe sea otters, William thought. He raised his rifle and fired at the nearest one. With a swirl it disappeared. By the time the canoe reached the place, the animal had sunk too far to be retrieved.

  Lewis had been busy during the day onshore. He had measured the falls, taken a latitude on the place, bought several fat dogs for supper, and made a canoe-trading deal that both beautified his little navy and made it more seaworthy. By throwing a good steel tomahawk and a few trinkets into the bargain, he had been able to trade the Corps’ smallest dugout for an Indian log canoe of the lower Columbia sort: a wide-waisted, deep-draughted vessel tapering gracefully at both ends, its high prow and stern carved handsomely to represent some fanciful sort of serpents with ears. He was pleased with his new flagship, which seemed somehow to compensate for the failure of his iron boat, but he was not all good cheer.

  “They warned me,” he told William, “that the E-che-lutes down at the narrows are planning to kill us. Now, I don’t give that a full credence, but have all hands look to their guns and powder, and we’ll put on a double guard tonight.”

  WILLIAM LAY IN HIS BLANKET AT THREE IN THE MORNING scratching assiduously at his groin and waist, watching stars glitter above the black canyon walls, listening to the muttering of the Columbia and of the troops.

  Sure no Indians will catch us asleep this night, he thought. The fleas are making sure o’ that.

  THE NIGHT PASSED WITHOUT A SIGN OF TROUBLE, AND after a breakfast of roast dog, the Corps had the canoes loaded by nine A.M. and launched on the smooth, swift breast of the river. But within minutes they were hearing again the ominous rumble of powerful torrents. William stood up in the bow of the new log canoe and looked over the ears of its figurehead to see what sort of obstacle was being put in their way this time.

  He had never seen such a thing in all his years on all kinds of rivers. The river, which had been about four hundred yards wide, seemed to come up short against a tremendous wall of black lava-rock; a huge basin of river water was backed up behind it. On the right shore of this basin, high on a cliff, stood five Indian lodges with all the usual fish-racks and scaffolds. For a minute William could not comprehend where the river could go from here. The dark wall was like a towering dam across the canyon. But the deep water here behind it was not still. It roiled and whirled in confused currents, and the boats seemed to be drifting toward the left side of the canyon.

  “God!” He saw it now: a gap of perhaps forty or fifty yards in the steep black wall. From this gap issued the roaring-water sound he had been hearing. “Hard at those paddles!” He pointed. “Cruzatte, steer for the lodges! These must be the Narrows!”

  They put in on a small beach, got out of the vessels, and approached the lodges. If these were the Indians who had been planning to attack them the night before, they showed no sign. They smoked and were friendly. One of the elders then climbed with William and Lewis and Cruzatte to the top of the jutting rock, out onto a precipice above the funnel. They were looking almost straight down on it. Lewis pressed his lips in a whistle, which was inaudible over the hollow thundering of the water.

  Here, several hundred feet below, the whole great Columbia River was compressed between somber volcanic rock walls no more than forty-five yards apart. Here the mighty river in its yearning for the sea had forced its way through some weak place in a thick lava bed, and scoured out a narrow funnel through which its countless tons of water churned and eddied, dimpled with whirlpools and boiling like milk in a kettle. This funnel ran about a quarter of a mile, then the river widened to about two hundred yards. About two miles downstream it appeared to run into a similar funnel.

  Cruzatte was peering studiously down at the turbulence. Lewis was gazing in awe at the valley below. In places, the lava walls rose two or three thousand feet above the valley. “All this lava must’ve flowed down from those mountains!” he yelled. These narrows evidently were the Columbia’s channel through the snow-topped mountain range they had been glimpsing every day since they had been on the river. William nodded and scanned the cliffs of the funnel itself. Indians were beginning to appear everywhere along the cliffs, tiny figures, looking on curiously. It was as if they sensed that these strange men were going to attempt some desperate foolishness here, and they were going to watch it.

  “There’s no way to portage over that, not that I can see!” William shouted. He touched Cruzatte’s elbow. “What say’ee about that water?”

  Cruzatte thought. Then he held up a finger.

  “One theeng good: It ees deep.”

  William nodded. Unlike the rapids, it would not he forever bashing and splitting the hulls of the dugouts. It would be a wild, heart-in-the-throat kind of a ride through horrid, swollen waters, but unless some vortex sucked a boat under, or hurled one against the dark rock wall, there was a chance.

  WILLIAM SAT IN THE BOW OF THE CARVED CANOE, PALMS sweating, and felt the current sucking the vessel faster and faster toward the funnel. As the canyon walls closed slowly on each side, he could see lichens on the lava up high, and watermarks up as far as seventy or eighty feet. The dread was making his vision terribly sharp and his thinking clear. Now he understood how the salmon could get over the falls upriver: in times of high water, so much would back up behind this funnel that the falls those few miles upstream likely would be inundated, no obstacle at all for the ascending fish.

  The roaring of water grew louder, more soul-shaking, and William wondered if that sudden understanding might have been the sort of clarity one has in the last moments of living. The canoe was slipping faster and faster into the middle of the great, sloping chute of water. Cruzatte, on the stern oar, was keeping it well aimed. William winked at him. Behind, in the distance, two other canoes were back-paddling, held in wait. Lewis was watching from the cliffs above. It had been their policy not to have both captains in jeopardy at once—not putting both eggs in the same basket, as they would joke sometimes.

  All right. Begging your kind intervention once again, Sweet Lord, as “Here … we … GO!” He looked to heaven and saw brown people, thick as pigeons on an eave, jumping up and down, pointing. And then a glimpse of Meriwether Lewis, foreshortened, silhouetted against blue sky, waving, a pelican soaring above him.

  And then with a hand gripping each gunwale, heart pounding, William faced the chute, felt the vessel slip and plunge, dip and slither, felt the stomach-lifting rises and the cushioned jolts of dropping, saw the black walls blurring backward, saw the sucking whirlpools slip under the hull, saw foam, swells, bubbles, bits of flotsam grass being swept along just as carelessly, just as helplessly, smelled fish and moss and wet rock, heard swishing, hissing, gurgling, rumbling, thundering, heard faint yells, felt a high, happy, hilarious expansion in his throat, and then the space around him grew bright and open, and the water was calm, and he was laughing, laughing, surely as happy as he had ever been; and when he turned and looked back at the men in the canoe, some of them were gray under their sunburns, others were flushed and whooping with joy; York’s head was lolling on his black bull-neck as he sang something with his eyes shut tight, and Sacajawea was just raising her face out of a bundle of gray blankets, looking at him with a peculiar, wondering smile, as if wondering whether she should be laughing too, be laughing in this mad and happy way. And a half an hour later, when the five canoes had all come through, leaving the E-che-lute Indians dumbstruck on the cliffs as if they had just seen some supernatural spirit pass by, all the men on board were laughing that most exhilarated kind of laughter, the laughter of deliverance, and William called to Lewis as he came floating by in the last canoe, pop-eyed and green-faced:

  “Oh, such a ride that was, it even made me forget I had fleas!”

  IT WAS A STRETCH OF UNRELIEVED TURBULENCE,
HERE where the Columbia had battered its way through the mountain range. All day every day was spent in shooting rapids or portaging around cascades, climbing with bundles and tools and weapons and kegs up and down narrow paths over the crumbling volcanic rock, easing the dugouts down around foam-beaten boulders by ropes from the shore, unloading, reloading. “I been learning things on this trip I’d never ‘a’ knowed,” Nat Pryor drawled one evening, sitting by a brushfire kneading strained muscles and pulling prickly pear needles out of his feet. “For one, that downhill can be as hard as uphill.”

  “Y’ think this downhill is hard?” retorted Sergeant Ordway, making a face as he burped up some essence of salmon. “Wait till next spring when we git to come back up it!”

  “Don’t even speak of it,” growled Pat Gass. “I rather have it that when we git down to the Pacific Ocean, there ’ll be a big ship there, and a dandy officer in gold braid a-sayin’, ‘Howdoo, ye heroes! President Jefferson sent me out t’ fetch ye home, by way of Cathay and Singapoo and such elegant places, a day here and a day there to dally with yeller princesses and dancin’ ladies, and then put in at Philadelphia where a parade will be held in your honor.’ And I’ll tell ’im, ‘Thankee kindly, Skipper, and now first show me to my berth, an’ I’ll have me a three-day snooze on a velvet bed if ye please.’”

  Pryor had got a faraway look in his eyes and he said softly, “I wonder if there will be a ship there?”

  NOW THEY WERE SEEING EVIDENCE THAT SHIPS HAD BEEN there. In the strange Indian villages here and there they had been seeing, stacked among baskets of dried fish and piles of filberts and acorns, certain treasures that could only have come from ships: a brass tea kettle, a cutlass, a British musket. They had seen one savage strutting in a British sailor’s jacket and a round hat, his hair in a queue, and had heard another one repeating like a parrot: “Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch!” The men had laughed, slapped their knees, egged him on, and listened to the phrase as if it were music. And then they had taught him to say, “Kiss my arse, King George!”

  And now within two brief days, the climate and the very look of the world made another dramatic change, a total reversal. They left the brown, harsh, treeless desert behind them; suddenly their eyes were soothed by green foliage, their parched skin was softened by damp air and fog; suddenly there was firewood without limit, there were waterfowl so thick that one could hardly fire a gun in any direction without killing some, there were more of the otter-like creatures, swimming in such numbers that the river was crowded with them. Now the mountainsides along the river were dark green with forests of noble firs, spruces and cedars, taller and straighter and thicker than any trees they had ever seen, greater even than the magnificent elms and poplars of their own Kentucky homelands, and there were also oaks here, and some delicate new species of maple. “Glory be! Maples!” William exclaimed. “What pleasure to see a maple tree!” The cliffs were steep, brown lava cliffs towering above basalt cliffs, colored with a profusion of delicate mosses, ferns, lichens. The distant hills ranged from purple to black, their tops lost in rain-clouds; the river was crowded with perfect, steep-sided little islands cloaked in flowering shrubs, wind-gnarled evergreens, hemlock, and larch. Along the huge, mossy cliffs on the south shore of the river, waterfalls, several hundred feet high and a yard wide, dropped like lacy white ribbons straight from the brinks of pine-covered cliffs into fern-rimmed pools. Sea gulls mewed and wheeled in the misty air above the river. Most of the days were rainy and foggy now, and often the boatmen could see neither side of the wide river. Now and then some of the great log canoes would appear out of the fog, canoes whose high prows were carved and painted as bears’ heads. The Indians in these vessels had flattened foreheads and wore colorful clothing of woven grass, and spectacular straw hats. Some of them spoke of great boats full of white men down on the ocean, and showed red and blue blankets, brass armbands and other goods they had purchased from those white men.

  These Indians lived in wooden houses, the first board houses the men had seen in almost two years. They were not sawn boards, but had been split, wide and thin and long, from soft timber of perfectly straight grain. But for all their wooden houses and their fine canoes and colorful clothes, they were a dirty and flea-bitten people.

  Many of them were arrogant and thievish, and followed the explorers doggedly. William could see that they were plainly getting on Lewis’s nerves, but his study of their language and modes of living went on. Sometimes, to get a little relief from the noisome presence of Indians, the party would camp on islands instead of the densely populated shores. At a marshy campsite one night, the party was kept awake all night by a ceaseless cold rain and by the overpowering squawking and honking of thousands of geese, swans, and ducks.

  These few days out of the desert, so welcome and beautiful at first, had quickly soured. The rain and fog and chill remained day after day; the men’s leather clothes were rotting on their bodies, and every time they stopped at an Indian village or were visited by Indians, they acquired more fleas. They sat by a smoky campfire one night, cold water dribbling off boughs and down their necks.

  Sergeant Gass was probing inside his clothes. He held up his hand in the firelight, squinting at his pinched thumb and forefinger. “This here is a flea of the E-nee-shur tribe,” he said with an air of pedantic gravity, then crushed it and flipped it into the fire. He reached into an armpit and squinted at the new find. “This one is an E-che-lute.” He reached in and found one at his waist. Lewis was watching him with a wry look on his face. “This here little buggerbug is a Chilluckittequaw, I can tell by its slopey skull and straw codpiece.” He flipped it into the flames and dug in his other armpit. He looked at this flea, then held it up to his ear. “What’s that ye say, little feller?” Then he squeaked in a high little voice, “‘Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch!’ Oho! Such language! Ye must be a Chinook!” He pinched it between his nails and flipped it at the bonfire, saying, “Kiss my arse, King George!”

  And on the other side of the fire, York was making his own flea circus. He had taken off his shirt and was picking the insects out of the seams; with scowling brows then he would place each one on a boulder by his elbow and with mock ferocity would smash it with a rock as big as his head.

  Sacajawea sat nearby, watching the two while she picked fleas off of her baby son. She could not understand Gass’s soliloquy, but York’s pantomime was plain and very funny to her. She would open her mouth round and yip with triumph each time he brought the rock down. Then she got in on the act herself, taking Pompey’s fleas and placing them on the boulder for York to execute. Lewis shook his head and grinned in spite of himself.

  I wonder, William thought, as he lay wet in his damp, stinking blanket that night listening to the rain hiss in the coals, what our Indian neighbors must think when they hear our laughter and fiddle music a-comin’ through th’ mist.

  “CAP’N CLARK! COME QUICK, SIR!” IT WAS WINDSOR, THE boat watch. “Our canoes got in th’ water!” William rose in the morning fog.

  The dugouts had been pulled up on shore the night before, but now they were afloat, nuzzling each other in their little breakwater among fallen cedars. The men waded in and pulled them ashore.

  “The water’s riz,” Windsor exclaimed, “that’s what’s happened. Riz three foot, I’ll bet!”

  And by the time the Corps had finished breakfast, the water was down by a foot. William smoked his pipe and nodded with satisfaction as the boats were being loaded. “Tide,” he said. “We’re in tidewater at last. ’Twon’t be long now!”

  The river was wide and open now, sometimes more than a mile, sometimes so wide that both shores were invisible in fog. The little fleet had passed many islands, some of them several leagues long, and one pillar of black rock eight hundred feet tall standing in the stream, so conspicuous they called it Beacon Rock. There would be no more rapids to fight; they knew that; they were on deep, wide tidewaters, making thirty and forty miles a day now that the endless po
rtaging was over, and the only thing that slowed them down now was the wind on those days when it came roaring chilly and wet up the valley, building the wide river surface into high, choppy, white-topped waves of grayish green, seething waves that would break over the pitching bows of the shallow dugouts, drenching everyone and everything, making some of the men seasick, finally forcing them to put in to shore at some waterfront village of mossy plank shacks, muddy streets, and shrewd-bargaining savages with flattened foreheads and shells through their noses. The Indian women here were almost naked, but as McNeal said with a sigh, “I wish they’d put on some clothes, so I could bear to look at ’em.” They were almost all fat, with thick, soft, shapeless legs, and wore tight bindings around their ankles that seemed to cut off circulation, make their feet swell, and add to the gross deterioration of their legs. Many had thick, gnarled knock-knees, caused perhaps by their constant mode of squatting rather than sitting. Something in their diet, perhaps the starchy white arrow root that they ate in great quantities, made them uncommonly flatulent, and they added to their general unattractiveness by farting unabashedly as they squatted at their chores. Shields came into camp shaking his head, swearing that three toothless squaws had had a trumpeting contest for his benefit, grinning proudly at him after their best crepitations. “I ’spect I’ll have to be here a lonnnnnnng time afore any of these start a-lookin’ good t’ me,” lamented Ordway. More of the men in these villages wore sailors’ clothes, and some carried pistols and tin powder-flasks. The captains found them arrogant and surly, but tried to smoke and be civil with them regardless, and for their pains one day were robbed of the very pipe tomahawk they had shared in the ceremony.