From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  The next afternoon the wind diminished, and William shouted the troops into action. They went around to the windward camp, raised the sunken canoes, and loaded them within minutes, piled in, and with a cheer quit the tiny shelf on which they had spent the most miserable and frustrating week of their lives. They paddled out around the blustery point, slammed through the pitching waves, stomachs soaring and swooping; they paddled with arms weakened by hunger and cold and cramping but rejuvenated by this hopeful work; they beat slowly westward around the dark mountain of the coast, and then veered northwestward as did the shoreline. Two large wooded islands and a peninsula lay a few miles to the westward, and beyond that peninsula, surely, was the ocean.

  And then as a swell lifted the canoe high, William saw due north of him the sandy beach and the Indian houses. Cruzatte kept the lead canoe quartering into the waves until almost straight offshore from the beach, then swung her about to put the seas on the stern quarter. The other canoes followed without rolling over, and now with a shout they dug with their paddles and raced for the pale sand.

  They hit the sloping beach in a froth of surf, men leaping out shouting to haul them up before they could be somersaulted by a following breaker, and the first thing they saw was young George Shannon running down the beach toward them with five Indian men alongside. He laughed and shook hands with William, congratulated him on the safe landing, and brought him up to date on the news.

  These Indians were real rogues, he said; they had stolen his and Willard’s guns right out from under their heads while they slept, but Captain Lewis had arrived immediately thereafter and frightened them into returning the rifles. Now Captain Lewis and his scouts had gone on; they were following the bay around and would try to cross the peninsula to the ocean, Shannon said, pointing toward that rugged headland. They were to return here tomorrow. From what he had seen and from what the natives said, there were no ships in the vicinity now, but maybe Captain Lewis would learn otherwise.

  The Indian town was deserted, but its houses were so heavily populated by fleas that they could not be occupied. So the party appropriated some boards, scrubbed them in sea water, and built a camp above the beach, gathered firewood, sent hunters out for fowl and deer, and with a few hasty prayers of thanks for their safety, prepared to enjoy its first warm, dry camp in nearly two weeks.

  November 15th Friday 1805

  I informed those Indians all of which understood some English that if they stole our guns &c the men would certainly shute them, I treated them with great distance, & the sentinal which was over our Baggage allarmed them verry much, they all Promised not to take any things, and if any thing was taken by the squars & bad boys to return them &c. the waves became verry high Evening fare & pleasant, our men all comfortable in the camps they have made of the boards they found at the town above

  Captain Lewis walked into the camp at midmorning the next day with his men, and he was smiling, smiling, but with a peculiar sadness in his face and a faraway look in his eyes. He put his arms around William and hugged him hard, and he said, “I saw it. I saw the Pacific.”

  When he stood back, there were tears in his eyes.

  WILLIAM DIRECTED ALL THE MEN WHO WISHED TO SEE THE ocean to prepare themselves to set out early the next morning, and they started up the beach after breakfast. The sea was too high for canoes, so they would walk the way Captain Lewis had gone. It was a curving route of about fifteen miles around the bay, and they came along under the cloudy sky in a single file, Sergeants Ordway and Pryor, the Fields brothers, George Shannon, William Bratton, John Colter, Peter Weiser, Labiche—and Charbonneau, who had ordered Sacajawea to remain in camp and “keep my son warm.”

  They went around the bay where the Indians had said ships usually anchored, and there were no ships here. Above the bay they found Meriwether Lewis carved in a tree trunk, and William smiled. He and his men carved their names under it. And then they went on along the rough trail, passing high, rocky hills, and streams and ponds. Gulls flew everywhere in the gray sky. In the afternoon, as the marchers neared the peninsula, Reuben Fields suddenly raised his rifle and fired skyward; everyone turned in time to see something bigger than a man fall out of the sky. It was a condor. The men stretched out the wings of the huge, buzzard-like creature and they measured nine and a half feet from tip to tip.

  In the late afternoon they climbed through thick timber toward the ridge of the peninsula. As they climbed, William could hear the pounding of a heavier surf beyond the ridge, and he could smell the seaweed, and his heartbeat sped up.

  The tops of the pine trees above were bent and waving in the wind, waving hard in that wind off the western ocean. William swallowed and blinked as he climbed, and the men following him had stopped talking and laughing now. Behind and two hundred feet below was the bay, and now just in front of him was the crest of the hill, and just below the crest the trees ended, and coarse, blowing grass waved against the sky, and the roar of the surf was very loud now.

  Four thousand miles, William thought, and now five more paces.

  And then he was on top with the salt wind blowing in his face; he was on top looking down a steep, open expanse of rippling brown grass falling away below him to meet an infinity of silvery-gray water coming in ranks of spume-topped waves from some invisible horizon lost in winter mist, waves marching and marching in to explode roaring and white upon the huge dark brown boulders at the foot of the long slope.

  The ten men had come onto the brow of the hill beside him, and nobody passed in front of him. They stood with their mouths open, their chests heaving, each silent and wrapped in his own thoughts.

  They stood there for a long time, speechless, looking down past the white-churning shallows of the Columbia’s mouth to the rugged gray mountains fading down the coast toward the south, and they turned and looked at the jagged dark mountains vanishing into the mist to the north of them, and then back down at the raging, pewter-and-white infinity of water in front of them, and for once, not one of them had the boldness to make the first joke or utter the first oath. Some of them sat down in the grass after a while with their forearms locked around their knees, and they sat there and watched as William started walking down the long steep hill through the blowing grass toward the shore with his rifle cradled in his left arm. They watched him grow smaller and smaller, his tattered elkskin flapping around him, his freckled arms bare, and no one followed him yet. They saw him reach up with his right hand and take off his fur hat, and the last thing they saw before he disappeared under the grassy brow of the hill was his red hair.

  WILLIAM SAT DOWN IN THE LAST MARGIN OF GRASS AT THE bottom of the hill and watched the great brown rocks in the ocean’s edge appear and disappear, appear and disappear in the white froth, and he tasted the salt water that sprayed on his face, and felt the ground tremble under him, this very margin of a continent that he had crossed on foot. He could feel all that land behind him, those thousands of miles of land, mountains, plains, deserts, forests, more mountains and fields, all the way back to St. Louis, to Louisville, to Albermarle, to Caroline, to Williamsburg on the James River, all the way back to the beginning, when the first Clark had come ashore.

  He sat here now in a tumult of noise, all alone, and thought of Brother George sitting on his porch at Clarksville. And then he thought of Lewis sitting here alone probably just like this two days before, his life’s goal accomplished.

  He licked some salt from the stubbled corner of his lip. He wished Charbonneau had let Sacajawea come to see this. He wondered what Judy Hancock was doing at this moment. He wondered whether his mother and father, from where they were, could see him here.

  One sunbeam through the clouds silvered the sea far out.

  It’s all done, he thought. This is the end of the land. His eyes smarted. He sniffed.

  He remembered the hug Lewis had given him, and he understood why there had been tears in his eyes.

  I wish Cruzatte was here, he thought. With his fiddle.

 
They camped there that night, and the sea-sound put them to sleep. The next day, to go just a little farther than Lewis had, William walked above a long sandy coast that curved northwestward toward a high, bold, lonely point of land jutting into the Pacific twenty miles away.

  That evening, November 19th, he wrote in his journal:

  this point I have taken the Liberty of Calling after my particular friend Lewis

  I proceeded on the sandy coast and marked my name on a Small pine, the Day of the month & year. &c. and returned to the foot of the hill

  Epilogue

  LOCUST GROVE, KENTUCKY

  Christmas, 1806

  WILLIAM CLARK, THE YOUNGEST SON, SAT AT THE HEAD OF the table in the dining room of the Croghan mansion, basking in the light of forty candles and the warmth of his family. He put down his napkin and leaned back, wheezing, to let Lucy’s servants take away his plates.

  He sighed. He looked to his right, where George sat gazing at him with something like worship in his eyes, then to his left, where Jonathan and Edmund sat smiling at him and fingering their glasses of port, then on down the long table at his sisters and their husbands: Annie and Owen Gwathmey, Lucy and Bill Croghan, Fanny and Dennis Fitzhugh.

  Now Bill Croghan, the host, stood up at the far end of the table, glass in hand.

  “Dear ones, I propose we drink a toast to our celebrated young brother,” he said, “before we adjourn to the ballroom for those wonders up there.” All the others scooted their chairs back, murmuring approval, stood and raised their glasses. Bill Croghan looked around at them all, and then at William, and said:

  “To our Billy, who made an odyssey to the land’s end and then came back to us.”

  “Hear, hear!”

  “To Billy!”

  They drank. Then George raised his glass again.

  “To Billy,” he said, “who’s giving me the happiest days I’ve had since ’79.”

  They nodded, and drank again.

  “To Billy,” said Jonathan, “who was too young for our war, but found glory in peacetime.”

  “Hear! Hear!”

  “Yes! Great! Great, great!”

  Again they drank.

  “One more,” cried Edmund. He was blinking. His chin was crumpled. He held his glass toward William and, looking straight at him, said:

  “To our brother Billy, who’s supposed to be feasting at the White House now with Cap’n Lewis and the President and Cabinet, but who, God Bless his great heart, knew it’s more important—” his voice caught—“to be with his family on this Day of Our Lord.”

  “Bravo!”

  “Hey!”

  “Merry Christmas to us all!”

  And so they all drank, with brimming eyes, and then remained standing, waiting for him to reply.

  In the hallway outside the dining room many footsteps were shuffling: that horde of his nephews and nieces, great-nephews and great-nieces, who had finished their Christmas feast in another room and now were lining up to go upstairs and see the promised wonders awaiting them there. Lucy had arranged the whole occasion as if it were an affair of state.

  William stood, tall, uniformed in blue wool and gold braid, leathery-faced, eyes full of distance, and cleared his throat.

  “I’m, I’m about to bust, and I don’t know whether it’s because my belly’s so full, or my heart.”

  “Ahhhh,” said Fanny, softly.

  “I can’t help thinking o’ my last Christmas,” William went on, “because o’ the contrast. Christmas Day of ’05, in that little fort we’d built out there, on the coast of the Pacific. Built in three weeks o’ ceaseless rain, it was. And there we had last Christmas, all covered with mildew and fleas. Eat scrawny elk and moldy fish and wappatoo roots, without a gram or dram of … of flour, or salt, or sugar, or even liquor. Imagine a Christmas with none o’ those! But we made a celebration of it, all the same. Those boys, those God-blessed boys of ours, they sang us carols in the rain, gave us little gifts o’ this and that. Lewis and I, all we had to give them was near th’ last of the tobacco. But they deemed that plenty, and were merry the whole day long.” He paused and glanced at George, who was alternately nodding and shaking his head, eyes moist and focused only on the far past. “It’s just like ye told me, George,” William said to him. “Give ’em a joke, and a song, and a dream o’ glory.”

  George and William stood looking at each other now and nodding, and they were both thinking about a kind of camaraderie that the others could only try to imagine.

  And then William turned back to Lucy and Bill Croghan, raised his glass to them, and said:

  “That Christmas I dreamed all day of a Christmas Day and a family feast like this. My host and hostess, this is the best one ever. But,” he added, putting the glass on the table, “I reckon I’ll always remember that one, fleas and all, as a good second best. Now, by Heaven!” He clapped his hands together loudly. “All follow me up to the ballroom! I’ve something up there for you all to see, and a thousand tales to tell!”

  THEY GASPED AND MURMURED, ADULTS AND CHILDREN alike, when William swung open the big ballroom doors. Into the second-floor hallway poured a flood of candlelight and a profusion of musky odors.

  The ballroom was lit by fifty candles and a Yule log fire. All William’s trophies from the voyage had been laid out like a museum exhibit, all manner of things such as no one had ever seen. There were antelope horns, and hides covered with Indian paintings. There were poggamoggan war clubs and bone-bows, shields and stone-tipped spears; there were weasel-fur tippets and intricate baskets and waterproof Clatsop straw hats; there were curled horns of mountain goats, and stuffed birds of strange plumage, and mountain-lion skins, and Indian jewelry made from bear claws and teeth and colored quills and stones and bones and seashells and dyed feathers and glazed ceramic beads; there were snake rattles and rodent skulls. There were seal-skins and otterpelt robes, the finest fur anyone had ever touched. There were grizzly bear skins as big as ox-hides. And with every one of these articles from the great Western wilderness, there was a tale of how it was got. For hours, till almost midnight, the family prowled among the exotic articles and listened in wonderment to William’s tales.

  “This I got from an island in the Columbia when we started back last March. Named it Fanny’s Island, I did, and ye may guess in whose honor.

  “I’ve set up a company in St. Louis, Jonathan. The Missouri Fur Company is its name. Some of my old boys are involved. I know you’re disappointed there’s no waterway to the Western Sea, but listen: furs from out there will make us rich, and trade will open up in that space just like it did here after George won the war.

  “Here, look at this sea-otter robe. We spent half a day barterin’ for that. By then, though, we hardly had anything left to barter with but brass buttons off our uniforms. I swear those Clatsops wouldn’t ha’ given up this robe ever, till Janey our squaw took off her precious belt o’ blue beads—the one we’d give ’er after she saved all our cargo in that capsize I spoke of—and let us offer ’em that. That dear lady! She prized that belt over everything she owned! We tried to compensate ’er for it, gave her a blue coat, and she took it and tried to smile, but she cried days for the loss o’ that belt. That girl, I swear, would do just anything for me—for us.” He paused. “Hand me that passel o’ white furs yonder with the black tail-tips. Thank’ee. This is what Janey gave me as my gift that Christmas. Ever felt anything so perfectly soft?”

  They looked at him curiously and wondered just what that squaw-girl might have meant to him. It was true he was going to go on to Fincastle after the holidays and ask for Judy Hancock’s hand again, but they had all heard that something in his voice and seen that something in his eyes. George looked at him most keenly, and thought for a moment of his black-haired Teresa, who had loved him without hope in the midst of his own great adventure, a quarter of a century ago.

  William told of the Corps’ eventful six-month return voyage, during which he had doctored hundreds of sick Indians
in return for food and assistance, and had split off with a party to explore the length of the Yellowstone River, while the proud and moody Lewis suffered the pain and indignity of being shot through the buttocks by the near-sighted, one-eyed Cruzatte, who mistook him for an elk. He told how they had gathered a large contingent of Mandan and Arikara and Osage chiefs on the way back down the Missouri, chiefs eager to go to Washington and meet the President. And he told of their triumphant, gun-popping return to St. Louis in September, long after they had been generally given up for dead. The family crooned with joy at the telling of this, and for the hundredth time smothered him with hugs. Because they, too, had almost come to believe he was dead.

  But what the family could not hear enough about was the ferocious grizzly, its temper, its toughness. They kept returning to the huge silvery-yellow hides, stroking them, responding with shivery laughter to his tales of the expedition’s wild bear-shoots and pursuits.

  “Just giant bears, then,” George chuckled. “No mammoths, eh?”

  “No mammoths,” William replied. “And if there had a-been, there might not be now, as our boys could’ve eat a whole one at every meal!

  “Now,” he exclaimed, turning to the family, “let’s divide up this booty amongst ourselves!”

  Then, late in the night, when only the grown-ups remained in the ballroom, George found William standing at a window, gazing westward into the black of night outside. He clumped over to him on his cane and put a hand on his shoulder. Their silhouettes were on the reflecting window-glass, the two of them, tall and big. George said nothing, but William answered the question that was in his mind.