Back around Warrior’s Point Clark came, whence the Multnomahs were wont to issue to battle in their huge war canoes. An old Indian trail led up into the interior, where for ages the lordly Multnomahs had held their councils. Many houses had fallen entirely to ruin.
Clark inquired the cause of decay. An aged Indian pointed to a woman deeply pitted with the smallpox. “All died of that. Ahn-cutty! Long time ago!”
EVA EMERY DYE,The Conquest. Portland: Binfords and Mort, 1936, p. 269.
Each morning the weather seemed warmer. Sacajawea often sat where she could see the shoreline and the seals playing in the sea and sunning themselves on rocks. She was convinced that the white men had made no effort to kill the plentiful seals for food because they were a strange race of people who lived in water. Her own people had believed in water spirits for ages. Even Shannon had told her of their “wonderous homes” underwater, one time in a teasing mood. She could hardly picture herself as a grandmother, but thought, If I am ever with grandchildren, they will be amused with stories about these water people who sit on the rocks and stare at us who live on land.
The men began to talk of going home. Bratton, still carried in the grass sling, was certain the warmth of the spring sun could bring healing to his back.
In preparation for the return journey, Captain Lewis “borrowed” a canoe from the Clatsops in return for some elk meat they had “borrowed” during the winter. Comowool, the Clatsop chief, evidently did not think it necessary to go through his trading routine with Lewis. He watched as Lewis looked over his canoes with the ornate prows. Later in the afternoon he stayed with Lewis, who was fishing with a couple of men, taking the line of first one and then another, while they took a look for better places to fish.
Lewis was thinking, Why doesn’t he just tell us where the fish are and then go sit in the shade and let us fish? Actually he liked Comowool, had found him cleaner and easier to be around than some of the other chiefs at the various Chinook tribes. But his very liking was for some reason a source of irritation, as much toward himself as Chief Comowool.
The men were working their way back toward camp by the middle of the afternoon when the row of ten or twelve Clatsop canoes came into view along the bank just ahead. Lewis pulled in his line, walked past Comowool, and said to the others in English as casually as if he were commenting on the weather, “We’ll take themiddle-sized one, second from the left, in payment for the half an elk he and his men took a month back.”
George Shannon paused to wipe his forehead, gazed out across the swampy land in the opposite direction from the canoes, and said, “I’d take that long-prowed black on the other side.”
“I haven’t had a chance to study them,” Pete Wiser said. “Is that big red one any good?”
“Too big,” Lewis told him. “We have to take it past some fast water on the way out of here. We need something small and maneuverable.”
“I’ll help you get it and have it well packed for the home stretch,” Joe Whitehouse said.
They took delight in this game of mild revenge against the Clatsop chief who fished beside them. Lewis thought that the others probably found it sweeter than he did. How many times they had faced the language barrier when they were around the Chinooks and felt their shortcoming of not trying to learn the language, even the jargon! They discussed the merits of the canoes—which ones might be best for shallow water, which ones appeared to be watertight, which ones were most beautifully carved. Sometimes they looked at the string of canoes in order not to appear to avoid them. They enjoyed the sense of their own cleverness, the audacity, the hint of danger in it.
The next morning, Lewis went back to the same place and bought a canoe from Comowool with his gold-laced uniform coat, the long-prowed black canoe. Comowool briefly checked the outside of the canoe for cracks, then began to pull it away from the main string.
Lewis caught movement in the low brush above the bank and looked hard. Three men were coming on foot. He said to Comowool, “Looks like some others are coming here.”
Comowool looked, frowning, then laughed and used jargon to talk with Lewis. “Yes, they are hunters from my village.”
All three men came close and grinned in a friendly manner. One man’s hair seemed to have oil on it to make the black hairs stick together and form stiff points at each shoulder blade. He said, “Good day to be breaking camp and heading up the river.”
“Pretty good,” Comowool said.
“What I wanted to see you about—How much is half a good elk worth? Maybe a small canoe?”
“Yes, about that.”
“I guess the white chief can borrow that one.” He pointed to the middle-sized canoe, second from the left.
“He knows you borrowed that elk meat.”
“Well, he didn’t make a fuss over it, so he must have known we had some hungry people in our camp.”
It seemed as if they were trying to outdo one another at grinning.
Comowool asked, “Why do you stand there? Pull that canoe over against the first one I sold you.”
Lewis began to grin. “All right. I’m much obliged. I’ll borrow this canoe. You fellows are all right.”
Comowool chuckled. “Move out!” he said to his three hunters. In a moment the three of them had departed through the trees.
Lewis was aware there had been a sense of comradeship and humor among the four Clatsops but that it was turned against him. He suspected that Comowool understood more English than he let on. Comowool started to follow his three men, then returned to Lewis, who was puffing as he pulled the borrowed canoe away from the others. The chief clicked his tongue, pointed to Lewis’s head, and put his hands together in the shape of a wedge. With more hand signs and jargon he said, “Friend, you are not as backward as some I bargain against. So, then—I am surprised that you people do not put your heads against the board as the Chinooks do. It would improve your looks.”
Lewis was startled and confused. Was this more native humor or was it actual criticism? He took a deep breath, rested a moment before replying, and gathered his thoughts. Of course, he had seen Chinook mothers with their babies strapped to a cradleboard covered with soft moss. Across each baby’s forehead was a smooth slab of bark held on tightly by a leather band passing through both sides of the cradleboard. A grass pillow was under the back of the baby’s neck for support. Sacajawea told him the practice was vile and pointed to an infant whose mother was collecting seaweed. Thebaby’s eyes seemed to be about to pop out of his head from the extreme pressure of the flattening bark. Sacajawea told him that a baby was strapped in such a manner for the better part of his first year, thus causing the front of his skull to be flat and higher at the crown. She said, “The papoose cried when the mother cleaned him and quieted when the head lashing was again in place. Pagh! It is a practice for savages!”
Lewis cleared his throat, pointed to his own head, and said, “We might try it, if it improved our minds.”
The chief’s head bobbed up and down and his eyes twinkled in enjoyment of this competition of words. “How will you know until you try?”
When Lewis told Clark of the incident he said, “These natives are not slow-witted. They can even outsmart us white men at times!” They both laughed out loud.
On the day of departure, Captain Lewis gave Chief Comowool a certificate indicating the kindness and attention they had received. Then the captains made him a gift of the cabins and furniture in the fort as more substantial proof of their gratitude for his cooperation.1
Comcommoly, the one-eyed Chinook chief, was given a certificate along with Chillahlawil and several other important men of the tribe. The fat Chief Delashelwilt was given an “Indian Commission” to keep him peaceful. These papers were seven and one-half by twelve and one-half inches and filled out with the name of the man being honored.2
Just before leaving, Lewis posted a paper inside the officers’ quarters, which read:
The object of this last, is, that through the medium of some civilized person, who may see the same, it may be made known to the world, that the party concisteing of the persons whose names are hereunto annexed, and who were sent out by the government of the United States to explore the interior of the continent of North America, did penetrate the same by way of Missouri and Columbia rivers, to the discharge of the latter into the Pacific Ocean, where they arrived on the 14th day of November, 1805, and departed on the 23rd of March, 1806, on their return to the United States, by the same route by which they had come out.3
Both captains had given up the idea of the expedition’s returning by ship, even though they had carte blanche letters of credit, the main reason being that they sighted no ship during their stay on the west coast.4
Departure day was gray, dreary, and wet. Sacajawea felt a lump in her throat when the canoes were loaded and they took final leave of the fort at one o’clock. Her head reeled as her canoe left shore and the water waved beneath her. When she looked back, the fort had sunk from sight beneath the low swell of the bay. She waved to the Chinooks packed on the shoreline. She wanted to weep.
For two days the dugouts tossed in wind from storms that hovered over the land. Thunder roared around them. Lightning struck on the hillsides and twice started fires that quickly went out with the downpour of rain. Then the wind died altogether and the waves quieted. The unexpected silence deepened; the crashing of water on the shore became the only sound, and a sense of apprehension grew in Bratton’s mind as he lay in the bottom of a dugout, his back in great pain.
“What is it?” he asked. His voice seemed startlingly loud without the wind to snatch it away.
“Another storm somewheres,” Pryor said, and his words, too, seemed loud. He spoke to Collins behind him and then said, “See, there? Over the far point. Drouillard and his men have found us a campsite. They are beaching their canoe; let’s follow.”
Charbonneau was in Drouillard’s canoe, dipping in time with the movements of fish-oiled backs before him. Sweat smarted in his eyes as he balanced on raw knees and bruised toes, remembering how he had asked for the poling job, saying if he had to have his share of upstream work, he’d do his now while the water ran wide and smooth. He readied himself to jump overboard and help pull the canoe onto the shore. His palms were gummy with sores from the paddling. While the other canoes were pulled in, he let Sacajawea wrap his hands with soft, pliant leather. “They will heal faster wrapped,” he winced. “But until they are better, I cannot hold a paddle or pole.”
Charbonneau woke the next morning and found he could not move without sharp pains; even his fingers were curled stiffly and felt like swollen growths.
Mosquitoes had plagued the expedition since the weather warmed, and a new rash of bites began to itch excruciatingly. Charbonneau scratched a chain of welts, staring about and waving peevishly at the clot of gnats whining around his head. Sacajawea sat beside him and wordlessly offered him a bladder of fish oil.
“I rub that on my hands and they will slip on the pole. I rub it on my back and I smell as vile as the rotten fish. You rub it on my aching shoulders.” He picked his teeth with a twig.
“It is time to push on,” she said, rubbing some of the soreness from his shoulders. “The canoes are ready to go. Some have already started along the bank on foot to hunt elk. Come, Chief Red Hair says you will paddle again.”
“With these hands? I can’t.”
“Ai, you can with the leather protecting them. I promise you will feel nothing today.”
He followed her numbly into one of the waiting canoes. She sat near the back with Pomp held between her knees.
On March 30, the campsite was on flat, green prairie where the hunting was good.5 Trumpeter swans beeped over green patches of sedges, and flocks of brant made rolling, guttural honks that blended into a babble of noise that carried far into the distance.
Wood smoke from the evening fires of a Shahala village rose into a high dusky sky trail that lay above the western larch with its soft, short bundles of green needles. When the expedition settled around their own fire, the Shahalas came to inspect them. They were dusky brown and their bodies squat from sitting most of the days in the bottom of a canoe. The man who seemed to be their chief had his hair cut shorter than the others, ragged above his ears.
“Katah mesika chaco?” Lewis asked him in Chinook.
“Halo, muckamuck,” said the man, shaking his head and rubbing his protruding belly. “Fish are gone, andthere is nothing to eat, muckamuck. The salmon will not come until the next full moon.”
“Do you hunt the deer and elk?” asked Lewis, again in Chinook.
This thickset chief chuckled with amusement. His people had no weapons for large game. They netted fish and made snares for only small animals.
For ten days the party camped near the Shahala village.6 They needed meat for the mountain crossing. A dozen men went out to hunt the abundant game while the rest were kept busy cutting and hanging the meat on maple-stick racks over smoldering fires to dry.
With the leather bandaging off, Charbonneau rubbed the raw palms of both hands with fish oil. The flaps of dead skin were dry and horny. He stood beside Sacajawea, who was cutting meat into thin strips. “Shouldn’t these flaps be cut off?”
She inspected his hands and seemed to hesitate a moment, then went to her leather pack and thrust around inside, coming out with a mat woven from cattails, which she placed on the ground for Charbonneau to sit on. She began paring off the flaps and some of the horny skin around the wounds on both palms with her butcher knife.
Charbonneau slipped off his moccasins. Sacajawea said, “The time to cut your toenails is during wet weather. Not a day like today.” She began working on his toenails with the hunting knife. Sacajawea alternately wiped the knife on her skirt and dug at his toenails. Then she started on his fingernails. Charbonneau sat there mumbling now and again when she seemed to cut too close to the skin. “Damn femme, take it easy. I need toes and fingers.”
Suddenly a noise rose above the camp and came toward them. Dogs jumped into view, barking deliriously. Children ran after them, laughing and squealing. The rest of the Shahala population came straight through the trees, singing and tramping over the blankets and gear stacked around the base of a large fir.
Charbonneau gazed, terror-struck, at the freshly yellow-painted faces. He stood up, and his knees trembled with an impulse to run; he felt Clark and York pressing against him.
“Sweet Jesus,” York breathed. “If I didn’t know they’se peaceful—”
Charbonneau crossed himself.
Clark shouted so close that Sacajawea’s ears rang. “Whoa! Stop right there! Hold back!”
The Shahalas stopped. There was absolute silence. Then the chief with the short hair stepped forward and Sacajawea gasped. The man was weeping. The tears rolled down his expressionless features, along the furrows of skin that was freshly painted in white-and-yellow bands.
The women divided and moved behind Sacajawea. They all had yellow paint in their ears.
Clark put his hands on the bony shoulders of the chief, looked him in his gaunt face, then spoke to him about this sudden visit of all the tribe. Clark nodded, understanding, and rubbed his stomach, announcing loudly, “We will let this whole crowd eat with us. They have had nothing much for nearly two weeks and won’t have anything much until the salmon move upstream for spawning in a month or so.” He motioned for Sacajawea to cut off no more strips for drying, but to help York and Charbonneau set up spits to roast the remainder of the elk for the starving village.
There was a deafening clamor as the villagers scrambled up close to the roasting fire and pressed forward to sit in a tight circle, men first. Halfway through the meal, two other men wandered into the camp wearing nothing but cedar-bark breechclouts. No Shahala looked up to notice them, but continued to eat greedily. They rubbed their bellies and stood outside the circle, waiting patiently for someone to invite them to eat.
First Clark asked where they came from. “Kah mesika illahee?”
“By the falls of the great river flowing into the Columbia from the south,” answered one of the newcomers.
With a stick, the other drew the river in the sand.
“Multnomah.”
Lewis nudged Clark. “We saw no river in the south What are they talking about, do you suppose?”
“Feed them; then I’ll go with them,” Clark suggested
In the middle of the afternoon, Clark followed thetwo men on a level stretch of land through which a river wound out of sight between high, grassy banks. They used a dugout canoe to come to the mouth of the river, which had been so masked with islands that the expedition had failed to see it. Clark walked inland with the two men to a slough where many native women were carrying long, slim canoes on their backs. The women plunged, waist-deep, into the cold water, frightening up ducks and geese. They loosened wapato with their toes. The bulbs rose to the surface and were tossed into the small canoes.
Clark stopped at the village, called Clackamas, where the two men lived. “Will you trade a basket of the wapato bulbs for these awls and fish gigs?” he asked, taking the awls and gigs from his pocket and placing them on the ground before the two men.
The men shook their heads no. Then they explained that the wapato was the only thing they had to keep themselves from starving until the salmon came up their river. Nothing was valuable enough to trade for their wapato roots.
If Janey were with me, she’d dig in with her brown toes same as these women, thought Clark. She’d keep our camp supplied with these roots. Then he had another thought. He looked around and saw that the women had stacked much of the wapato to one side, as though they were stockpiling it. To Clark that meant they would not starve if they sold him a couple of baskets of the roots. He took out a piece of artillery fuse from the leather pouch hanging on his belt.7 He dropped it into the fire outside the nearest bark lodge. Then he took out his pocket compass and a small magnet and sat himself down on a rush mat. The fuse blazed up into a bright red flame as he made his compass needle follow the movements of his magnet very quickly. The people were astonished with the magic he held in his hands. Some who watched were actually terrified and ran to their lodges crying, “Meschie! Meschie! Big medicine!”
Some of the women began piling several baskets of wapato at Clark’s feet. They begged him to put away the pieces in his hand and put out the terrible red fire. Clark assured them he would do this right away, andalmost immediately the portmatch was exhausted. He put the compass and magnet in his pocket. Then he paused to shake his head in thanks for the roots and to light his pipe from a burning stick. Before smoking the dried willow bark, Clark moved the pipe as if sending bits of the smoke to the sky and the earth and the four winds. He drew four acrid puffs and passed the pipe to the men. They smoked and talked in low tones. Clark shoved the awls and fishing gigs toward the women; then he turned and walked away, carrying a basket of roots. The two men who had brought him to their village picked up a basket apiece and carried them out to the canoe beyond the slough. The people of the village had turned and were chanting something in unison as they left the bank.
“What are your people saying?” Clark asked.
“Oh, they repeat a legend, as old as many grandfathers, that says a great chief will come to lead them to a land of feasting and plenty. They wonder if you are that chief. They looked closely and saw plainly that your face is brown like theirs. The legend says the man is white on his face, like the fine beach sand.”
Amused with the superstitious legend, Clark impulsively rolled up his sleeve, and the two men stared at the whiteness of his skin. When they beached the canoes, the men indicated they would also carry the basket Clark had and the pack on his back. They insisted, waiting patiently for him to pull it off. Clark bent to drink from a small spring. The men waited with an agreeable unconcern about time. They did not drink.
“You don’t believe that legend about a white chief, do you?” Clark asked finally.
“What is there to believe? The legend is old. The white chief must have died long ago on his way to our village. He looked, but he could not find us.”
Two days later, Clark took seven of his men and two of their canoes to explore the Multnomah River once more.8 At one view they could see five snow peaks. Clark took soundings in the uniform flow of the river. “There seems to be water enough for a good-sized ship,” he said. “And I feel certain it could supply fresh water far down the southern Pacific Coast.” He measured at leasttwo-thirds of the width and could find no bottom with his five-fathom line.9
Clark and his men examined the low-growing plants, the mullein, hawkweed, tansy, yarrow, thistle, butter-and-eggs; the soil, black humus; the bushes, vine-maple that grew low at the edge of the wood with a pinwheel leaf; the timber, one-hundred-foot-high incense cedars, a yew with long, spreading branches, glossy dark top, and deep yellow-green on the underside, white oak, dogwood, red alder, Oregon myrtle. They measured a white fir that had fallen and found it to be three hundred and eighteen feet tall.
Two days later in camp, Clark sat on his haunches watching Pomp sniff wild rose blossoms and told Sacajawea of several empty villages he and the other men had found while they examined the inlet on the south side of the Columbia. “The lodges were not entirely empty. Inside was furniture, sleeping pallets. Actually, everything was left as if the people were coming back in a few moments. Yet everything was quiet. There were no dogs, no old people left behind. There were grinding mortars and pestles, canoes by the doors and along the beach, mats, bladders of fish oil, baskets, bowls, trenchers—all undisturbed. The fires were dead ashes. Where are those people?”
“Where?” she asked.
“They all went to the Clackamas village to wait for the coming of salmon.” Clark winked.
She made a face. “More fish? Are you going to follow them?”
“Who said I wanted to net stinking salmon? I’d rather the men hunted elk and you stripped out the meat and dried it for us.”
Again she felt the familiar pang that took her breath away, and she longed to put new moccasins on his feet and bring him food. However, she was sure that he would never bring his thoughts out into the open because she was Charbonneau’s squaw. She also knew that she was expected to suppress her feeling and never let it come to the surface again.
That Frenchman will never appreciate her, thought Clark as he turned to smile at her. “Janey, tell me—”
“Ai?” she asked faintly, keeping her face away fromhim, and the spirit of her voice was as quiet as a deep river that lets no storm raise foam upon it.
He shifted his feet on the rocky ground and said, “Today my men and I rounded the Old Warrior’s Point and went up a well-worn trail to an old village. The Multnomahs lived there. Their lodges have fallen to the ground, and there is no sign of the Multnomahs anywhere. Where did they go?”
She looked at him with laughter in her soft brown eyes. “They went to the Clackamas village to wait for the coming of salmon?”
“No.” He shook his head but noticed how beautiful she had become. He thought, That full, rich Shoshoni womanhood is striking. “It was something else. Some unknown thing. There is no longer a tribe called Multnomah, only the river.”
She did not answer immediately. She spread her hands out. “Muckamuck, nothing, but rotting lodges?”
“Muckamuck,” Clark answered.
Now her face was a mask. “I will find out.”
She moved among the bark huts of the Shahalas, watching the women and children in the mud from the afternoon drizzle. Where she could, she walked on grass. The leaves of the alders dripped water. The smoke of the village hung like a fog around the tops of the huts and among the upper branches of the trees. The camp smelled soggy.
Two women were pulling their drying rack and grinding equipment under the shelter of a broad awning of patched leather in front of their hut. The women squatted in the doorway and surveyed the area under their shelter. Both wore long fringed skirts suspended from the waist down past the knees. These garments were made of the inner rind of cedar bark, twisted into threads which hung loose, and flapped and twisted with each body motion, and giving the women a kind of duck’s waddle.
A new flurry of rain began, and Sacajawea took it as an excuse to walk over and take refuge under the awning. She asked, “Is it all right for me to stand here?”
The women grunted.
“I’d like to ask something.”
“I don’t have any roots to trade,” said one woman with wisps of tousled hair poking out of her grass hat.
“No, I do not want to trade for food.”
The women looked at her with black, suspicious eyes. “What did you want to talk about?” asked the other woman, who had badly decayed front teeth.
“Well, it seems that I have a lot of questions about women’s medicine. You see, the white men know nothing about how a woman feels or what is best to keep her well.”
The women shook their heads slowly. The one with bad teeth said, “Men! We know how that is. What society do you belong to?”
“Society? I am Shoshoni, that’s all.”
The woman laughed and said, “Oh, if young people would only listen to their elders these days. If they would listen to those with more experience, they could learn something.”
The woman with the hat went into the hut and came out shortly with a red-hot coal held between two sticks. She dropped the coal in a small fire pit dug in the center of the sheltered area. The butt of a dead limb extended into the hole; the coal sent a little puff of smoke out, and two thin yellow flames licked over the wood. Sacajawea held her hands outstretched over the faint warmth. Since she was wet, the fire felt good.
“I guess there’s plenty that women like you would know that someone like me doesn’t. About the old tribes. What they did. Where they went. What their women did about cramps.”
The woman with the hat went back into the hut and came out with three mats of woven grass, which she placed on the ground around the fire pit; she sat upon one, cross-legged. The other woman sat, and Sacajawea could see that they were willing to talk. She asked, “What can you tell me?”
“Well,” said the woman with bad teeth, “first you get in a woman’s society. If you don’t already belong to one, you have to start at the bottom. The Red Salmon society teaches you how to dance in the right way and what foods to avoid so you won’t suffer cramps. And my advice for that is plenty of hard work; stand up, sitdown, stand up, sit down, bend, straighten, bend, straighten, and you feel no cramps.”
“So—don’t forget,” said the woman with the hat, “the members of the Red Salmon learn how to lure the fish up small streams close to the village. Many women belong to these societies. Societies are not just for men. When you belong, you have to be able to plunge your arms in boiling water and complain that it is cold. Could you do that?”
“Why is that?”
The woman with the hat looked at Sacajawea as if she thought she was deliberately slow-witted. “Because it shows you are a person who can take hardship and still not call it hard.” The woman snorted. “You don’t know much. I can easily see that living with only men has not done you much good.”
Sacajawea wondered if she could point her questions in the right direction without arousing suspicion or antagonism. She was the newcomer, the person who was different, and she was smart enough to know newcomers were never well accepted at first. “Have the women of your tribe always worn these easy-to-make, one-piece skirts?”
The woman with the conical, woven-grass hat bent forward. “You can see we sew well. Your eyes are sharp anyway.”
Sacajawea thought that the skirt only deserved praise for its simplicity. “I can see that on a quiet day those threads hang in place until you move or walk, but in a breeze you cannot be covered by much, and in a hard wind—kiyi—if it is the month of snow, the place where your legs come together will suffer frostbite. Could you weave the threads in a solid piece?” As soon as she had finished she was sorry. Her words were wrong. She looked from one woman to the next. Her neck and face felt warm. “I am only asking you to help me understand your customs,” she said weakly.
“We can tell you need plenty of help. For your information, in the month of the shoulder moon we have blankets to wear that are woven from dogs’ wool. It takes five or six good dogs. A matting of bark threads is for canoe sails.”
“Shoulder moon?”
“Shoulder-to-shoulder around the warm fire.”
“Uumm,” said Sacajawea, wondering how to go on using her limited Chinook jargon. “What do you eat—besides salmon?” She used hand signs as she spoke.
“Are you hungry?” asked the woman with the rotting teeth. “Would you like to gamble for something to eat? Dried salmon, boiled crab or clam? Some fresh fish oil? A box of smoked pigeon breast?” The woman got up and with her ducklike gait went inside the closest hut. It was built of split cedar planks set on end. The roof was gabled and supported by posts and covered by overlapping boards. She came out holding a red, squarecornered, cedar box. She pointed to the box, then pointed to the moccasins Sacajawea wore.
Sacajawea took the box. She had never seen anything like it. The thin cedar boards, when thoroughly wet from steaming, had been bent around partial cuts, and the box was tight enough to hold even liquids. The corners were sewn with fibers, and the lid was decorated with inlaid shells. “Skookumchuck! Something good!” Sacajawea decided to say only complimentary things.
Both women nodded. The one with the bad teeth said, “Inside is much fish oil. Oil can be used to flavor fruit, or to rub on your face, all over, and in your hair. Keeps you young. Now you give me moccasins. You gamble nothing else.”
“You want to trade—make a bargain?” asked Sacajawea.
“Gamble, bargain, trade—ai.”
Sacajawea shifted her weight on the mat and saw that the woman with the bad teeth shone with oil from her greasy hair to her shiny feet, which were bare. The woman with the umbrellalike hat wore moccasins with thick, ugly leather soles and tightly woven grass tops.
“Good medicine too,” said the woman, reaching for Sacajawea’s moccasins, which were soft, buff elkskin.
“Medicine?” asked Sacajawea. “The same oil used by the ancients? The Multnomahs?” She looked under the lid and found a yellowed bag of transparent gut, tied with stiff sinew to keep the oil from exposure to air, so it would not become rancid right away. She pulled her moccasined feet up under her tunic, pretending shewanted more time to talk before deciding on the gamble. “What happened to them?”
The woman with the hat opened and shut one fist in the air several times, rapidly. “You ask more questions than can be answered. The words in your mind mill around like salmon before jumping up white water to spawn. Is that what you learn from all those pale eyes you are with?”
Sacajawea bit her lip and looked from one woman to the next. “I just want to learn about your ways.”
The woman with the hat picked up a stick and threw it at a scruffy dog who was sniffing around the drying rack. “Well—it is no secret that the Multnomahs gambled with men whose faces resembled the brown bear. Those people learned to depend on the gambling between themselves and these strangers. They were nothing until the big canoes came in sight and those men came ashore. They stopped attending the yearly salmon festivals or the horse fairs for their gambling. Then the strangers laughed at their important rituals and made them learn their tongue. They became nothing. But they thought the strangers made them more important than all of us—”
The woman with the bad teeth interrupted, “At least you and those men you are with try to speak our tongue. That is in your favor.” She spat in the fire and smiled at Sacajawea when it sizzled. “My people speak the language of the strangers, but it means nothing.”10
The other woman continued. “Those white men came to their village on floating lodges and stayed. They made their homes there and tried to get the Multnomahs to behave like they did. This was all long ago. The white men tried to break all the societies and set up something new. The Multnomahs hid, then practiced their personal medicine and held their society rites, anyway. They showed those foreigners every hospitality. But in time they learned those men were nothing. They were tilikum, common people.” She spat in the fire.
The woman with the bad teeth said, “They were not real chiefs, like the ones you travel with.” She squinted into the fire that had blazed up. “Yet you can never be too sure. Best to take every precaution and be on the lookout for anything not just right. The Multnomahsmade that mistake. If they were here, they could tell you plenty of advice along that line; they learned it all the hard way. If the slightest hint of any sickness, especially ahn-cutty, comes your way, duck into the nearest sweat lodge, then dive into the cold water. That washes out your system. The Multnomahs just lay around their lodges until it took them away.”
“Where? Where did they all go?”
Both women grunted at the same time.
“You are dumber than I thought,” said the woman with the bad teeth. “They died of ahn-cutty.” She pecked her face and arms with one finger. “The white men brought it to them. That was the fine gift they brought and gave to the Multnomahs in return for friendship.” She spat into the fire.
“They were all sick?”
“Everyone—young, old, men, women, fat and thin. Everyone, except the white men who were tilikum, and left when they realized there were no people to take their orders or follow their commands. I will say one thing, though, the white men put all the bodies in canoes, stacked one on top of another, and let them float in the bog away from the village. I believe that was the only desire of the Multnomahs those men carried out. I’m too young to remember. But their history is passed on along the river. They were a kind, good-hearted people, long ago.”
Suddenly it occurred to Sacajawea that she had been gone a long time and she probably had all the useful information she needed. She rose and said, “I enjoyed talking. I have to go now.”
“If you ever want to join the first woman’s society, I will sell you a membership in the Red Salmon. You could stay right here with us. There is usually plenty of work to keep you busy,” said the woman with the hat.
Sacajawea slipped out of her moccasins and handed them to her and pulled the sewing awl from her blanket and handed it to the woman with the bad teeth. “Thank you,” she said and walked out into the rain. She hoped she had learned enough to satisfy the curiosity of Chief Red Hair.
That evening, Clark stared at the sodden sky. Hehad hunted most of the day and was so tired he did not want to move. He ruminated vaguely on the difference between his weariness and Sacajawea’s liveliness. I drop in my tracks, he thought, and she sighs and continues to hunt for edible roots. Then in vexed admiration he saw her coming toward him, her feet hardly distinguishable because of the mud on them and on her legs. She sat with her legs folded in front. She did not say anything for some moments, then, ”Ahn-cutty. The whole Multnomah village died, long ago.”
Clark sat up.
“Smallpox. I talked with two old women while you hunted today. One showed me deep pits on her own face and said, ‘Ahn-cutty.’”
While she told her story, Clark noticed that she had a feather ornament knotted in her hair. He felt a warm glow he had not experienced until she came into his life. He dragged a piece of driftwood to some dry sand by the cook fire and settled against it.
Sacajawea moved with him. She hugged her muddy knees and waited with growing confidence for some expression of his satisfaction, feeling that the moment would last forever in her memory. She picked her teeth with a splinter and spat in the fire; yet she did not offend him. She met Clark’s gaze and stared back with the remote peacefulness of an animal.
The next day she and some others traded their seats in the canoes to those with weary feet. She carried Pomp on her back in a thin blanket. They walked on a trail beaten leafless, which wound about, considering only the shortest way between boulders and broken cliffs. They kept to the bank of the river, which seemed to cascade from pool to pool or splashed over rock-strewn rapids. The woods receded around a succession of small fields. As the hours wore on, Sacajawea noticed that Clark always waved to the natives they passed. He talked with his men, and laughter surrounded him. It was a desire for friendly contact with him. She watched him gesticulating, wiping sweat from his face with the sleeve of his leather shirt, hitching his belt, emptying his moccasins, stretching out on his back with arms spread in the grass. He enjoyed everything.
Charbonneau’s feet were hot in a short time, his shirt stuck to his skin, and his hair was tousled.
After three miles of dense green timber, of pines and spruces, the trees began to stand apart in groves or small irregular groups. They found sugar pines and tasted the sugary pitch that exudes from the heartwood when wounds are made by ax or fire. The pitch comes out in kernels, crowded together like white pearl beads. Charbonneau ate considerable and was the first to learn of its laxative properties. By late afternoon they were back down to the grassy banks of the river. Charbonneau’s legs were weary and achy, and his shoulders drooped with fatigue.
The canoes were already pulled up on shore. The mosquitoes were an intolerable agony. Lewis groaned aloud when he could no longer refrain from baring his naked hindquarters close to the ground, where the mosquitoes were a black layer of piercing needles.
Charbonneau was tired enough to fall and simply lie on the ground. The mosquitoes invaded his reasoning so that the most thoughtless, necessary action was torture. He slid down the embankment as if he had orders to do so, and placed one foot into a canoe. He knew that it was only on the water that he could find rest from the insects, somehow, while working.
“Is this my canoe?” he called to Cruzatte, who was already kneeling in the middle.
“Sure. We’ll go only a short distance before finding a campsite for this night.”
Charbonneau was cautious about shifting his weight, and he had barely knelt in the canoe when it lurched unsteadily, moving off the shore. The next canoe, led by Lewis, was already being paddled upstream.
A sigh escaped Charbonneau; he did not know whether it was for his misery or contentment.
With the first strokes of the paddle, the agony of the land suddenly became a wilderness through which he sped in the canoe at will. It was even strange that nothing hindered his escape. He simply knelt in the bottom and departed.
With dizzy elation he began to sing a voyageur’s chant as he paddled against the current. Muddy water swirled through bushes on the low banks. The groundwas black, the pines and hemlocks stood out among naked trunks, but the top of the forest was a filmy cloud of opening buds. Patches of snow glinted in the light.
The hardships of winter showed in Charbonneau. He was lean and his muscles tougher. He gazed at the budding hazelnut trees, and at the violets and fern-tufts on the rocks lower down. He paddled in time, remembering the blisters, aching tendons and cramping joints.
At first paddling upstream relieved his tired feet. Then he glanced up and saw the rain clouds gathering. The wind was channeling along the river blowing the rain that came fast into a spray. The canoes moved to the shelter of dell copses and large trees where everyone caught their breath. Charbonneau’s shoulders and neck were loose with the work. The river, already bank full from snow melt, slowly spread out over its banks, covering sand flats and meadows. The alders and willows were bent against the current. Within minutes the storm was in full bloom. The men stayed close to the bank, shoved their paddles inside the canoe, and stood to pole against the sand, which often gave way in a mad swirl of eddying water. Charbonneau said he could see only new misery every hour, and was there not anyone who remembered that they were only going a short way?
Several times he opened his mouth to shout at Cruzatte, but the bent figure, poling evenly, gave such an appearance of obliviousness to the surroundings that he choked the words down in a rage. They went on over the smooth water where the rain danced.
Toward evening, they pulled up under a looming cliff. There was just room to pull up the dugouts on a strip of beach, and Charbonneau stood in the water while the others unloaded; then he crawled under one of the overturned dugouts. Lewis distributed dried meat. Charbonneau chewed unhappily.
They sat quietly, waiting for those coming on foot to catch up. Ordway spread some fir branches on the ground and after a time started a smoky fire. Charbonneau sat shivering now in his drenched clothes.
“Hey, Frenchy,” called Collins. “It ain’t so cold if you come do a little work.” He was chopping down a small tree for dry firewood.
“Hey, down there!” called Clark. “We are all herebut Charbonneau. I have two men out looking for him along the driftwood a mile or so back.”
“Bring your men here where it is dry!” called Lewis. “Your man Charbonneau is with us. Rode in the dugout all afternoon. Thought you sent him.”
A breeze stirred, mixing with the mutter of the river. “Damn,” sighed Clark, at the same time firing his rifle as a signal to his men. He scrambled down under the cliff, growling at Charbonneau, who feigned sleep.
They made camp and hunted for two days. Sacajawea watched her man relaxed and indolent. She said nothing to him. Lewis came in with an otter and two porcupines the last night under the cliff. The men gathered by the fire, where York boiled fish. York stirred the pot with a stick, and built a spit for the small game.
In the morning, they were moving up the wide river in the first grayness of dawn. A cool breeze came up, but there was no rain. By evening, the balmy weather had changed. A cold wind circled the shores and their cook fire roared fitfully, shooting sparks. The men built shelters with huge pine branches. Just before nightfall, a black cloud appeared to the south and spread across the sky. It was a flock of migrating birds, and everyone stared in disbelief as it broke into pieces overhead and the parts fell toward the earth, just out of sight up the river. In the gray dawn next morning, they poled slowly along the shore and came on the ducks in a reedy bay.
By April 7, there was enough dried meat and salmon to carry the expedition safely back to the Nez Percé country. The men began to look around for a village where they could find at least a dozen packhorses to use during portage and to carry Bratton, who still could not walk, around the Narrows and Celilo Falls. They had very little to trade for horses, and the natives wanted eye dags, which were a kind of war hatchet. The expedition had no eye dags, and all the blacksmithing equipment was on the other side of the Divide in a cache.
The cold rain clouds seemed to dissolve.
One night the men watched Skillute fishing canoes move slowly across the water by the light of pine torches. Clark and Charbonneau had not talked together since the afternoon Charbonneau had climbed into the canoeto rest his feet. Now they watched the spectacle of the black smoking lights side by side, brooding silently. Charbonneau was tired from the long days of poling and stretched on an elbow near the fire where he could not see Clark, sitting near his head. “I will make roast of the porcupine tomorrow,” he remarked, suddenly bored with the strain between them.
“I got two beaver today you can use,” Clark replied at once.
“Wagh, they would be better used to buy horses,” suggested Charbonneau. “The Skillutes have some—I have seen.”
Clark flung a piece of wood into the fire, wishing he could be sure Charbonneau spoke the truth. But to his surprise, he realized that his emotions were a mere echo out of the past months, more than an expression of his present feelings. He did not know how he considered Charbonneau at this moment—the fact that he himself had not seen the Skillutes’ horses was puzzling. Truthfully, this complaining, bragging squawman had a keen knowledge of the land and the inhabitants and the signs they left. He was actually better able to care for himself than he appeared. Clark turned to face the river. The fishermen were coming in, their shadows vague and monstrous as the torches waved. They pulled up the canoes and their low talking was clear in the quiet camp. Only their dogs whimpered and yelped. The Skillutes who carried torches stayed for a moment by the shore, bending to look at their reflections in the inky mirror. Then they quenched the flames and drifted silently downriver to their own village. Clark answered their greetings without moving. The stars glimmered faintly on the black water.
Charbonneau rolled up in his blanket and abruptly fell asleep.
When Clark awoke in the misty dawn, Charbonneau was helping York build a fire from the coals under the ashes. Clark watched them a moment, silently.
“Good day,” Charbonneau said unexpectedly, glancing up with a smile. “Meager comforts to this life.”
Clark stretched, then stood up shuddering. He walked along the shore a short distance, relieved himself, and came back, scratching his head and yawning violently, to stand close to the flames with outstretched hands. He felt rested and looked about at the others packing their blankets, getting ready to move out.
“Not so fast!” he called to them. “Take time for some jerky this morning! I’m going to take a look around the Skillute camp and possibly dicker over a couple of horses there.”
“No horses at that village,” said Shields, brushing insects and cobwebs from his hair. “I just wandered through the woods in that direction and didn’t see anything but those flimsy bark canoes.”
“Well, maybe they don’t want us to know about their horses,” said Clark quietly. “I heard they have some. I want packsaddles made when I return.”
Charbonneau looked up from the fire, his face warm and red under the dark whiskers, but he said nothing.
Lewis began to call out names for hunting that morning.
Clark dickered for the rest of the day with the chief of the Skillutes for a couple of horses. The squaws fed Clark boiled onions, and still they could not come to terms on the horses. The men wanted more fish hooks. When they were put with the bundle of other things, the men nodded and said with signs that the horses were all in a valley where the women were gathering roots. They would send out and bring in horses the next day. Then the men began to ask for articles Clark did not have. They looked through the bundle of articles he had brought and complained it was not half enough for two of their fine horses. Clark could think of nothing to do but return to his camp. Then he noticed something he had not seen before. He bent to examine the deep, running sores on the left leg of the chief where a bear had pawed him several weeks before. Clark indicated he was something of a medicine man and would like to dress the wounds. The chiefs face brightened, and he stretched out his leg. When Clark was finished, one of the chiefs squaws complained of a sore back. Clark rubbed a little camphor on her temples and back and placed a warmed piece of flannel over her shoulders.
“I have not felt so well in many seasons,” she said, smiling broadly. “I will give you two horses.”
That afternoon, Charbonneau went to the villagewith Frazier and returned with a good mare for which he had given his belt, some elk’s teeth and a packet of paints.
But the following morning, the chief and several bucks came back holding out a bundle with all the articles used to purchase the horses. They wanted to return the purchase price and get their horses back. This was an acceptable practice among the natives. Charbonneau stepped forward, removed his woolen shirt, and gave it to the chief for the horse he was riding. The Skillutes asked for more woolen shirts and brought in more horses to trade.
That night, Charbonneau neglected to hobble his horses and lost one because it wandered off.11
On April 22, Charbonneau’s other horse became frightened with an elk-hide saddle and wool robe on his back and ran full-speed down a hill, leaving Charbonneau wheezing behind on the trail. Near an Indian village the horse threw off the saddle and blanket. An alert Indian hid the blanket in his hut.
Lewis sent Charbonneau to overtake the horse and baggage. He gathered up the baggage and found the saddle in the village, but not the blanket.
Sacajawea had seen the Indian skulk off with it, and she told Lewis she would find it. “The blanket keeps my child warm at night.”
Lewis turned to Clark. ‘Those pirates better deliver that blanket or I’ll burn their damned, flea-infested huts. I’ve had enough thieving. I’ll not forgive them the time their cousins, several villages back, tried to keep old Scannon for their camp dog.”
While they were swearing at the Indians, Sacajawea was getting the blanket. She told a squaw in the hut where she saw the man take it that her baby was blue with cold. She let the squaw hold Pomp while she searched for the blanket. She found it under a pile of rush mats, and the squaw seemed pleased and smiled. She let Sacajawea hold her papoose, who had a runny nose and sores on his face and shoulders. Sacajawea was happy to take back Pomp and the blanket.
“My papoose is the most handsome,” she told Clark.
On the twenty-fourth, Lewis decided that the canoes were of no more use as the river was getting narrowerand the large boulders and swift water much too frequent. Lewis asked some river Indians if they would exchange horses for the canoes. The Indians shook their heads no. Instead, they held out strands of colored beads, the same the expedition had traded for salmon the year before, and indicated they would trade beads for the canoes.
“We want horses,” said Drouillard in Chinook.
“I do not think they will trade their horses at all,” said Sacajawea quietly behind Drouillard. “Maybe so, then, you take their beads and give them the canoes. You can use the beads later in trading. Take the beads.”
Drouillard turned and scowled at Sacajawea. Her fine tanned tunic was worn and grease-stained. She held her back straight and looked directly at him. In a moment he decided she was right. He reached for the beads. Sacajawea barely seemed to move, yet she was standing in front of him putting out her hand, indicating that two strands of beads were not enough for the two well-made canoes. An old squaw with an opaque film over one eye added several more strands to the pile in Drouillard’s hand. Sacajawea made a low grunt inside her throat and stepped closer to the canoes. A large buck pulled a strand of blue beads from his neck, and several other men followed his gesture. Sacajawea nodded, but her face remained impassive. There was a pile of beads at Drouillard’s feet now. She walked around it once, examining it slowly. The expedition men stood in quiet wonder. A squaw added some bright pink seashells on a long thong. Sacajawea looked up and smiled at the Indians. She placed her palms together and held her hands under her chin.
She looks like a child praying, thought Clark, looking around at the incongruous situation.
The Indians smiled in return and seemed highly pleased with the canoes. They were pushed into the water and floated downriver faster and faster.
Drouillard was overwhelmed by the actions of Sacajawea. That evening around the fire he told Clark, “She does not speak to me often, but when she does, she is eloquent.”
They stored the beads in a leather pouch and tied it to the pack on a pinto pony.