The weather had been unseasonably warm. For several weeks a comet had been visible. Superstitious Missourians predicted the end of the world. Indians left the territory. This was the fall of 1811.
When the calamitous phenomenon appeared, it was in the form of an earthquake—one of the greatest earthquakes ever known on the North American continent. This tremendous disturbance continued through December to March, 1812. Two thousand shocks were reported. Cracks opened through forests and fields; landslides swept down hillsides. Rivers changed courses, wiping out sand bars and islands that had been landmarks. During a hard tremor the Mississippi receded from its banks, arching to a great mountain in the center. Suddenly, with a frightful roar, the water pounded back toward the banks, but surging and reversing, so that the water swept upstream rather than downstream. Thousands of trees were mowed down and cemeteries were turned upright so that rows of coffins were exposed in the village of New Madrid.
Teacups rattled in Philadelphia, clocks stopped in Boston and church bells rang in Virginia, as the tremors were felt over one million square miles. Moderate to heavy damage was reported in St. Louis, Cincinnati, and
Louisville, and minor damage occurred as far away as Columbia, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. Later geologists found that some 30,000 square miles had been lowered from six to twenty-five feet, while other areas had been raised a similar amount.
MYRON L. FULLER, The New Madrid Earthquake. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Geological Survey, Bulletin 494, 1912.
Sacajawea was up before dawn, mostly because it was too cold to sleep. The fire had gone out, and the horses were stamping around, noisy and restless. There had been a bear in the woods during the night, and the horses had not settled down. She studied the tracks around the tethered horses, knowing full well that bears attack a horse only if they are feeling ornery enough. She patted the four horses Charbonneau had left behind, saying to them, “Shhh, brighten up, a bear’s natural outlook is a grouchy humor.” The horses were ready to move. She moved the first three farther out into a clearing where they would have grass to munch, and then she put a woolen blanket on the fourth, and a buffalo robe over that, and tied it all down with leather straps.
She took her calico dress off the hook where she had hung it the night before after ironing it smooth with the flatiron Miss Judy had given her. She changed her leather tunic for it. She took up the fawnskin pack, which held moccasins and beaded shirts, and thought about Chouteau’s store, where she would exchange the pack for dried beans, bacon, tea, and hard candy. She could not make up her mind which thing was the greater wonder—the bacon or the hard candy.
It was something to find meat so fat and salty and ready to boil. The hard candy was something to taste and savor a long time.
Everything that happened to a person, it seemed, was hooked up to something else that had already happened to that person, or was going to happen. Nearly six summers ago, her brother, Chief Black Gun, had sat on a stone in the Agaidüka camp and told how he thought sugar lumps were the finest things he had ever tasted. Now she was going to trade for some for herself. She could trade for her own!
She rode past a farmer running his horse around a freshly plowed field. Presently she was riding past a noisy bar where the street was full of traders, rivermen, and a handful of Indians. Then she rode through the French quarter. She passed rainbows of people—Parisians, Spaniards, Africans, Austrians, Germans, Scots, British, U.S. military men, a Shawnee chief, dark-suited preachers, white women dressed in pink and blue. This was the United States drained prismatically through Saint Louis. Sacajawea looked among the men, bearded and tobacco-chewing, ganged around the broad store building, until she noticed one who was familiar coming around the corner of the warehouse.
“Seehkheeda! White Eyebrows!” Here eyes were wide with surprise.
“Janey, is it really you!”
“Oui.” She flushed under her copper skin. “You look like a Mandan warrior.”
John Colter flushed under his bronzed skin. “I was thinking you looked like a white woman in that fancy dress. Know where I can find General Clark?”
“Follow,” she said and led him into the dark inside of the building, past the piles of skins, to a clerk she caught by the sleeve. She asked if he would take the moccasins and shirts for the supplies she needed. The clerk, with an easy manner, showing he had known her for some time, told her to find what she needed. He unrolled the fawnskin pack and laid a beaded shirt on the smooth oak counter. Then he arranged the half-dozen pairs of moccasins beside it, and laid out the other two shirts, bright with small colored beads around the edge. Sacajawea cupped her hands twice at the barrel of dried navy beans. The clerk put two double handfuls of beans in the small muslin sugar bag she handed him. She showed him where to slice off the slab of salt pork, then picked up two tins of hardtack and pointed to the hard candy in a jar on the counter. She made her fist into a ball. The clerk understood. He scooped out an amount similar in size to her fist and weighed it in the sugar bag with the beans. Wetting the tip of his pencil, he figured the price by subtracting the weight of the beans alone. She pointed to a five-pound can of tea and one of coffee.
“Merci,” she said with a polite shake of her head.
“Good day to you, ma’am,” said the clerk, who was dark, like a Frenchman, and carefully dressed.
“Here, let me carry those,” offered Colter when she’d wrapped her trade in the fawnskin.
“Non, it is squaw’s work,” she insisted and fell into an easy stride with him. She tied the pack to her saddle strap and mounted. Colter caught up on his horse.
“A race with the Blackfeet? Is what we heard true?”
“Sure is. Potts and I were trapping on the Jefferson near your Beaver Head.”
She nodded.
“They riddled Potts, stripped me, and then gave me a chance to run for my life. I made it to the Madison, found a beaver’s house, and crawled inside. Those Blackfeet hunted up and down all around me. When night came, I headed for the pass to the Yellowstone.”
Sacajawea put her hand to her mouth. John Potts dead! At the hand of the old enemy, the Blackfeet! She did not speak until they reined up in front of Clark’s Spanish house on Main and Pine Streets.1
“There are stories about you meeting devils, and boiling water shooting from the earth, and trees made of stone.”
“Looks like the grapevine talk beat me here.” Colter shook his blond hair from his eyes and laughed. “I had to stop telling those things; men thought I wasn’t quite right in the head.”
It was Sacajawea’s turn to laugh. “The people in the Minnetaree villages did not believe me when I told about the fish as large as two lodges. They said I had a forked tongue.”
“Well, Bill Clark will listen and believe,” said Colter.
“Come,” said Sacajawea, dismounting. “Chief Red Hair knows we tell what our eyes see.”
“Janey!” cried General Clark as the two started up the stone steps. “And Colter! Balls of fire! Where have you been? Come in, come in.” He led them into the Indian room, where the walls were lined with robes, hides, and maps, with stories marked on many of them.
“Well, sir, last month I was at the Three Forks.”
Clark gasped. “And you are here in Saint Louis already?”
“Yes, sir. Came down that river in thirty days.”
“That breaks all records.”
“Yep, guess it does, at that. Colonel Menard and Andy Henry have started a fort on that strip of wooded grassland between the Jefferson and Madison. Drouillard and I trapped around there and camped with them. Had to be on constant lookout for skulking Blackfeet. Say, I was certainly shocked to hear about Captain Lewis’s suicide. Doesn’t yet seem true.”
Clark’s face puckered; his eyes opened. “You feel that way too?”
“Yes, sir. What a shame. Say, I heard Shannon is called Peg Leg and gets about as well on his wooden leg as any of the rest of those university fellows.”
“Can’t keep a good man down long,” agreed Clark, showing them to a place at his plank conference table.
“Where’s that son of a gun, Ben York?” Colter looked around the room.
After a short silence, Clark began speaking in a low voice, looking toward Colter with a long-focused gaze, as though he were transparent or not there at all. “He is a good man,” Clark said with seeming irrelevance. “Ben York. That son of a gun. I do miss him. I took him to Louisville, where he worked as a freedman. Then he wed a little gal on the next farm. But he didn’t stay long. Left Cindy Lou and came back here to me. He got to hanging around the Greentree Tavern and the Union and Missouri hotels telling wild tales and drinking the grog the men gave him. It was not his fault entirely. The engagés and rivermen liked to hear him tell how the Indians marched admiringly around him and pushed their fairest daughters on him. He impressed them with his powers of strength, and then he got to acting like he was the only black being on earth, and some kind of high chief. I had to warn him several times. But he didn’t think I was in earnest. Something had to be done. So I got Cindy Lou freed and sent him back to Louisville so that he could settle down, raise a family and have some decent work, hauling freight with a wagon and team of six horses. He seemed pleased when he left, maybe because Janey made him a fancy shirt with big roses on front and back. Oh, Lord, he seems to have disappeared—we have no actual word from him. He’s just gone.” His mouth puckered, and he shook his head. He searched the faces of his listeners with a vaguely grieved, apprehensive look. There being no denials or questions, he changed the subject. “Janey, tell Colter what our little dancing boy is doing.”
“Oh, he’s living at the school!” she said, squinting at him with suppressed amusement in her eyes. “He has the talking books and looks at them more often than at me when he visits.”
“Tell what he’s learning,” Clark insisted, fumbling for some tobacco in a long buckskin sack.
Sacajawea waited until his pipe was lit and he’d drawn a few puffs. “He can read and write. Reverend Welch tells him about lands across the Great Water. Once he said he wished to go to see that land himself. And Tess is at Father Neil’s,” she said proudly.
“Tess?” Colter asked.
“Oh, I’m sorry, don’t you remember the other small boy Charb had at the Mandan village? The son of one of his other women—Otter, her name was.” Clark passed his pipe to Colter, who puffed with hollowing cheeks.
“I remember her,” Colter began, speaking out of a slowly thinning fog. “She was the one Shannon took a fancy to; he tried to teach her some English words.”
“She’s the one. Caught on slowly, but she tried, which is more than can be said of that rascal Tess. Father Neil says he is either sleeping in the schoolroom or acting like a clown.”
“Pah!” said Sacajawea. “He needs a leather strap. Otter Woman was too soft with him.”
“Now don’t you go telling her what I said.” Clark’s fists hit the table.
“Ai.” Sacajawea sniffed, then smiled. “She has not yet returned with our man, remember?”
“You know me; I forget who is where most of the time,” said Clark. “I had a talk a fortnight ago with Welch about clothing and books for Pomp—they call him Baptiste. That lad is bright. Catches on fast, and no problem with his behavior. The other kids like him.”
Sacajawea chuckled and was still. Colter passed the pipe back to Clark.
“Where is Charb?”
“Charbonneau hired out with Manuel Lisa as interpreter so that he could take Otter Woman back to the Minnetaree village. She’s not well. Charbonneau insisted that the Medicine Man was what she needed.”
“Some man, huh?” said Colter winking. “All heart and soul. Say—where’s Ordway?”
Clark smoked awhile. “He’s in New Hampshire. Bought some land there. And Windsor, too. Whitehouse sold his land to Drouillard and reenlisted in the Army.”
“Drouillard went under in a skirmish with the stinking Blackfeet.” Colter cleared his throat. “Thought maybe you hadn’t heard. Where’s Pryor?”
Clark raised his head and seemed to come back slowly from a distant place. “I’d heard. Pryor got his discharge, and now he’s gone out to the lead mines to trade with the natives. Friendly with the Illini and Osage, he is. I hope he has no trouble with the Shawnee out there. And speaking of trouble, there’s a strong feeling in Congress for war against Great Britain because of her seizure of American ships and seamen.”
“I’ve heard.” The bright look went out of Colter’s eyes.
“Go on,” Clark jogged him. “What have you heard?”
“Not much.” Colter sat looking at his hands, as if he were puzzled by them and trying to fit them together. “So help me,” he said solemnly, “some say it is best to strike at England through Canada, using the friendship of the Indians to help our Army.”
“Why?” Sacajawea spoke sharply. “The British are befriending the natives as fast as they can and turning them against us.”
“Against us,” repeated Clark with a smile. “Now you speak like an American. And Americans know that the British can’t fight. My God, they whoop like a pack of Blackfeet, but they’d drop dead if they ever got close enough to hear a Blackfoot whoop. They’ll come tricked out in hunting shirts, when they’ve been turning up their snouts for years at settlers that had nothing else but hunting shirts to wear. They’ll play Blackfeet, letting on to burn a man’s insides, while he’s still alive, but when their neighbors are being burned alive not twenty miles from them, they won’t lift a finger. They’ll be yelling ‘Down with Yankees!’ when the only thing they ever put down is their breeches! That is not fighting.
“It does not prove they wouldn’t fight if they really had a call to,” said Colter.
“You’d be surprised how deaf they could be if anyone called them. They can’t fight in this country. Don’t knowhow, never did, and most likely won’t learn. But it could be a mess if they started.”
Judy Clark came into the room then. Her face shone like the sun. “Oh, Will, I didn’t realize you had company—and it’s Janey. Why didn’t you tell me?” She skipped past the men and sat beside Sacajawea, tossing her brown curls and smiling at Colter.
“This is John Colter, one of my men from the expedition,” said Clark, standing.
“I’m pleased to meet you.” She smiled and indicated that the men should sit down again. Her eyes twinkled. “Janey and I can go into the parlor, and you men can talk.” She motioned for Sacajawea to follow her.
“Come, I’ll play the piano for you. We just had it sent here from New York.”
Sacajawea had to keep her hand over her mouth when she saw what a piano was. To her the keys looked like a long set of teeth. The music was unimaginable; she’d never heard so many different sounds.
By midafternoon, she knew she’d better start for home, and promised to teach Miss Judy how to make jerky if she’d let her touch the piano keys.
“Will says so often he has a yen for dried meat.” Judy ran around the piano as Rose York came into the room with a plate of cookies.
Sacajawea took a handful and pushed them inside her dress so that she could save them for the boys when they came home from school on holiday.
In the fall, Clark sent Sacajawea part of a buffalo so that she could have meat when the boys came home from school. And Clark was shrewd enough to know that she often had Indian guests come to her cabin so that she could show other women how to sew or embroider or cook like the white women. Sacajawea was a leading lady in the Indian community of the riverfront city.
One afternoon, Miss Judy came with Clark and their boy, Meriwether Lewis Clark, to visit Sacajawea. Judy sighed as she saw the one-room log cabin, with an indolently smoking chimney, squatting in sullen destitution. Before the door a ramshackle wagon stood waiting for nothing. Down yonder in the brushy draw, an almost roofless shed stared listlessly upon the bright blue sky.
“See, Will has brought more meat. I’m going to stay and learn how to make the dry strips,” said Miss Judy.
Clark rode off on business of his own—something about “Red Sticks” uprising along the frontier, a Creek war faction.
“Did you see the comet last night? The star with the tail?” asked Miss Judy cheerily as she spread an old quilt on the ground for the baby to lie on. “We watched for an hour or more.”
“The fire tail?” asked Sacajawea. “Ai, some of the Indians are leaving for camps away from Red Hair’s town. They were fearful last night and said that Mother Earth is at her end.”
“Posh!” laughed Judy. “That is superstitious nonsense. You’ll see, by next year the old earth will still be here with us on it.”
Sacajawea chuckled and showed Miss Judy how to hold the butcher knife and cut buffalo meat into inch-thick slices and strips and score it crosswise. They spread the strips on the cottonwood poles in front of the cabin, high to keep it from dogs, wolves, and vermin. There was a smoky fire under the frame to make the meat sweeter and tastier.
“You are like a sister. It is no one’s fault how she is born, and your heart is as much Shoshoni as mine.” Sacajawea’s eyes shone with a merry light.
Three days later, Miss Judy came back to see if the meat was done. Sacajawea smiled and pulled off a small, stiff piece, which she put in baby Looie’s fist. He seemed to enjoy tugging and chewing on it. His chin dripped.
“Warm sun is good for your papoose,” said Sacajawea, gently holding the baby close to her breast and patting his little back. Then she put him down on the quilt. She patiently showed Miss Judy how to strip the sinew and gristle from the dried meat. “Jerky,” she said. Then Sacajawea’s arm took in all the racks of fingerwidth strips of meat. “Pemmican—that is in a class by itself.”
Miss Judy learned how to pound the dried strips in a wooden mortar until they were pulverized and then packed loosely in clean parfleche bags. Sacajawea pouredmelted buffalo fat over the open parfleches. Then the women sewed up the mouths of the bags. “This pemmican will keep for many seasons,” explained Sacajawea.
“Will has told me what a splendid high-energy food it is. He said it’s a complete diet in itself. It can be eaten uncooked or fried, roasted, boiled, alone, or in combination with anything on hand.”
“Ai,” agreed Sacajawea. “It is best when mixed with dried, ground-up fruits.”
“Can’t you just see Will when I tell him I made jerky and this whole bag of pemmican? He won’t believe me, I know.”
Sacajawea wiped the perspiration from her forehead with an old scrap of deerskin. She would do almost anything to please Chief Red Hair, and she was delighted with this young woman who was his wife.
Miss Judy, singing “Skip to My Lou,” sat beside her son and watched Sacajawea take the long strips of buffalo fat, which had lain along the back of the animal, from the drying rack. The fat had been slowly fire-dried. Sacajawea cut it into sticks and put it in leather pouches. The kidney fat was dry, and she sliced it to be stored for later use with corn or beans in the cooking kettle.
“It’s hot for November,” said Miss Judy, fanning her face with her hand.
“Ai,” agreed Sacajawea. “We must store up the warmth for a long, cold winter.”
“Don’t you miss Charbonneau and Otter Woman?”
“I miss Otter Woman and often wonder if she is in the Minnetaree village. I have never seen the coughing sickness cured.” For a time Sacajawea seemed unconscious of Miss Judy as she worked with the strips of meat, turning them over to get the smoke on both sides.
“Janey,” said Miss Judy, drawing closer to Sacajawea, “if it is the decline, the sun and air will do her good. Maybe she stayed in the cabin too much all day and did not get enough fresh air. She needed rest. Charbonneau won’t insist she get up early and get his meal, will he? He will let her sleep, won’t he?”
“You know he is as stubborn as an old donkey,” Sacajawea said at last in an explosive whisper. Her mouth was pulled together, as if she were trying to keep fromsaying too much. “If she does not do what he expects, he will say he cannot afford to keep her any longer and trade her for a red blanket to the first person who comes along.”
“That’s outrageous!” burst out Miss Judy, shocked.
“I did not mean to talk so much.” Sacajawea stopped and tried again. “The thing is, with herbs and broth, the Medicine Man will help her. You’ve no need to worry. Would not do Otter Woman any good, anyway.”
Miss Judy did not speak. She just stood up and stared for half a minute, then picked up her baby and the extra parfleche and doeskin-wrapped package of jerky.
“Here.” Sacajawea took the baby while Miss Judy tied the package to the back of the saddle, then pushed the bag of pemmican in between and lashed it on tightly. A meditative mood was strong upon her.
As soon as Miss Judy left, Sacajawea felt a wave of loneliness, a feeling of foreboding. She thought of Otter Woman’s good fortune at being able to go back to the Minnetaree village. Or was it good? She’d be going back to the old ways. Here near the river town, things changed and the ways were new and exciting.
Red Hair’s town was growing. Each year a few more stone houses were built and more good furniture and good cloth came up the river. Often a trapper or trader brought his Indian partner downstream with him for a winter in town. Then he introduced him hospitably to the civilization they had talked about in camp. Saint Louis was full of transients—Canadians from Montreal, like Charbonneau, who had arrived to become engagés for Chouteau or Lisa, and mountain men in to buy new guns and to spend their pelt money, as Charbonneau did. And always there were Indians, unabashed in their curiosity about the white man. They came to town with birchbark sacks of maple sugar, skins of wild honey, horsehair lariats, moccasins, herbs, buffalo tongues, and bear grease to trade for blankets, horse gear, coffee, tea, tobacco, knives, tin cups, and the like. The trappers, who customarily acted as their interpreters, did not try very hard, if at all, to keep them from buying rotgut whiskey, too.
Sacajawea thought of the braves who loitered around
Chouteau’s big stone warehouse, where the “fur rows” smelled to high heaven. When the braves were bored, a band of them would mount their ponies and race madly down the main street, shooting blunt arrows at every dog and cat in sight. She said aloud, “My boys will not be like that. They will learn self-control.”
Most of the Indians never did understand why the white men so sternly forbade these races. There was much they did not understand about the white men. For example, why did Mr. Boujou, the watchmaker, always wave his arms and scream ”Sacre!” when the braves sauntered into his shop to examine his collection of glass eyes? Sacajawea chuckled a little to herself at that thought. In his best blanket and wearing his tomahawk like a dress sword, an Indian went where he felt like going. He knocked at no doors. But black cooks screamed and sometimes hurled hot water. And their white mistresses screamed and sometimes fainted. There was no such silliness if a brave stayed with the men down near the levee. That was where there was rotgut, big talk, and sometimes a melee.
Sacajawea heard more talk of the comet in the sky. Some said that it meant the coming again of the white man’s God. Others, more pessimistic, said the earth was going to explode and fall apart all over the sky.
Tecumseh, the famous Shawnee chief, had moved into the southern part of Missouri to quiet the tribes and negotiate peaceful land settlements with the white settlers. It was generally recognized that open war with the Indians would necessarily be part of the June 1812 declaration of war against the British. Sacajawea wondered how much Tecumseh understood of the problems of both Indians and whites.
In mid-December, the month before the snow covered the ground, Sacajawea was shaken from her sleeping couch. She heard a roaring and groaning in the earth. The cabin creaked and seemed to be moving. She staggered to the door and crashed drunkenly against the cabin wall. Winds rushed from many directions and mingled and cried in the upper air. Lightning leaped out of the dark, and fireballs danced in the distance. Then all seemed quiet. Sacajawea leaned farther outthe door and waited for the rain, but no rain fell. There was only the leaping lightning and the crying winds. A wolf howled, deep-toned, near, and there was no answer. She listened to the winds and heard voices shouting. “Come, come to us,” they called. She pulled her blanket closer and shivered. Again she heard the voices calling her. The voices of children calling to their mother in the black of night. Frightened children calling. The lightning leaped, and she saw the wolf, low-bellied to the ground, running past the cabin into the dark. The floor began to roll, and the meager furniture seemed to walk. Her head reeled, and her breath came in short gasps as her throat tightened with fear. In the brightness of the next lightning flash she saw great numbers of wolves pressed close together following the low-bellied one. Across the grassland the earth seemed to roll in waves like the Stinking Waters of the west. Now the shivers ran down her back.
There had been stories all fall at Chouteau’s trading post from the rivermen who had been awakened by tremendous noises and violent agitations of their boats. They told of trees falling on the shore and the sea gulls screaming. Many a patron tried to sooth his men with “Restez-vous tranquil, c’est un tremblement de terre.” But men could not understand as the perpendicular banks above and below them began to fall into the river.
Trappers who came up from Tecumseh’s territory near New Madrid in the Missouri delta told about great chasms four feet in width forming with the shocks. Some noticed that every earth shock was preceded by a roaring kind of groan, and that the shocks uniformly came from the same point and went off in an opposite direction. The river was reported to be covered with foam and driftwood, and had risen.
Sacajawea gathered her butcher knife, firesticks, and a pouch of the fresh-made pemmican and followed the same trail as the wolves had taken, the trail to town. She walked. She was afraid to ride a horse on ground that rumbled. The way was hard in the dark. There was nothing now in her mind but fear. Only when the lightning leaped could she see the ground stretched before her, opening with sounds like tremendous claps of thunder followed by a diminishing cracking, like thegrumbling of a great sheet of ice. The lightning showed the trail, and it led her up along the creek toward town. She came against rocks that had tumbled into the creek bed. Frightening rumblings were discharged like the explosion of artillery. The ground heaved and rolled in a succession of earth tremors, six or eight minutes apart. She huddled against the stones, then climbed over them where the ground seemed smoother under their dried grasses and she could move easily. She could not make out the trail, but thought by some instinct she would reach the home of Chief Red Hair.
The winds died some, and the lightning ceased. She passed circular holes, resembling the vents of small volcanoes, from which only minutes before gases, steam, and water had shot high in the air. Some glistening black protrusions of rock and substrata were exposed along the trail, but she could not remember them from before and wondered more and more if she were going in the right direction. The darkness was thick, the air acrid and sulfurous; far ahead she thought she saw a glimmering in the weeds. The glimmering faded, then came again. She stumbled, watching it become larger. Then she saw faces shining in the light of a campfire. All were stupefied by the great Mother Earth rumblings and openings that spewed the sulfurous fumes, blasts of carbonized dust, or great geysers of water and steam. These fugitives had sought refuge on a hilltop while they tried to see the continuing devastation below. They were now composing themselves for death by frantic hymn-singing and prayers. The noise of these white farmers and their families was as frightening as the roar from inside the earth.2
Instinctively Sacajawea moved in a wide circle around the campfire. Her right foot reached out in one instant to meet only air, and she pitched forward, downward. Her body twisted, and her hands caught at the sod edge. Her fingers gripped and held. She dangled into deeper darkness, and her mind whirled in circles and her legs thrashed as she sought to swing them up and crawl back over the edge. Slowly her fingers slipped, and she fell downward, her left ankle striking a dead-white protrusion of rock. She lost consciousness as her body layfolded upon itself on the mud at the bottom of a yawning crack in the earth.
She lay surrounded by the earth; only the dark sky, now veiled by a yellow haze as dawn approached, looked down at her. She seemed close to the inner heart of the rumblings, and yet she could hear the outer winds whispering among the grasses. The ancient magic of her beginnings was there.
The winds whispered through grasses and were the voices of spirits that lived in Mother Earth. Her mind knew such spirits existed. She had learned of them when she was a child. The sighing winds, streaks of lightning, images of a low-bellied wolf in fright, heaving earth, frightened palefaces chanting around a flickering fire, and small animals running scared were all signs to her as she merged into the natural forces that surrounded her. These were the things that brought her to the bottom of the crack in Mother Earth.
She was somewhere between her lodge and the lodge of Chief Red Hair. She was a bit of human life in a mud-walled well, alone.
The wind sighed, and the rain fell. The drops gathered a chill from the high openness of the sky. The cool wetness brought consciousness back to the dreaming Sacajawea. She stirred; waves of pain swept through her body, and she was unconscious again. The rain stopped. Mother Earth rumbled deep inside herself and far away.
A sickly yellow dawn spread over the land and filtered through the oaks and hickories. Awareness came to Sacajawea. She lay in a heap. Her tunic was mud-caked, and clotted blood clung to her left leg. It was twisted grotesquely beneath her, but not broken. Pain swelled and receded and swelled again in her throat with each in-drawn breath. She stared upward at the yellow-gray clouds overhead for a long time.
The sun was almost straight above her when she moved. Agony streaked inside her as she moved her left leg, pushed down a little, and pulled it around in front. She could not remember what had happened. She could not recall the terrified look on the white faces in the firelight. She did not know that she was the woman called Sacajawea. She did not recall that she was running away from some unknown terror. She imagined the cry of an infant who longed for the comfort of its mother’s arms, then recognized her own whimperings. She was a primitive, elemental creature looking about herself now for the primary substances of survival. Her eyes found the pouch of pemmican where it had fallen in mud when she pitched over the edge of the earth crack. She inched her way toward it, wondering what was inside the leather pouch. Her back ached, but did not seem more than bruised. Her mouth felt dry.
She sat up and looked around again. The crack was long and turned sharply to the left about a hundred yards in front of her. A butcher knife lay half-buried in the mud at her feet. She tucked it inside the leather belt at the waist of her tunic. She pulled herself upright, pulling at the dirt along the side of the crack. Her left ankle throbbed, and she could not put her full weight on it. She gripped the pouch and pulled at the dirt, trying to raise herself out of the crack. The dirt and mud crumbled under her hands. But she knew she had to find a way out. She limped to the turn and found the sides were all equally steep. She put her hand into the leather pouch and found the fine-pounded meat laced with blackberries. She put a pinch in her mouth. It was dry and hard to swallow. Her head ached. She crammed two more pinches into her mouth and let the juices form slowly, slowly from the dryness. The dried meat was pounded finely and needed little chewing. A convulsive constriction of her throat forced it down. She reached for more, and in the reaching stepped down on her left foot. A blackness surrounded her, and unconsciousness took her again.
Daylight disappeared and darkness grew. A half moon rose over the land, and its silver light moved slowly across the grass to the crack in Mother Earth. The pale light touched the limp figure. She stirred and opened her eyes. Her unconsciousness had passed into sleeping, and the sleeping finally into awakening. Her eyes looked at the drifting moon. She knew who she was. She was Sacajawea, mother of Baptiste, friend of Chief Red Hair. She did not know where she was. But the moon in the dark sky was the same moon that she had watched from her cabin door so many nights. It had not changed. Thesky had changed. No longer was the comet visible, and the sickly clouds were gone.
Her muscles were very stiff and sore. To move was to call back the pain. Her left ankle was discolored and swollen. But she was Sacajawea. She could grit her teeth and fight the hurt. She ate a little more of the pemmican. She limped along the floor of the crack to a large stone that she had not seen before and pulled herself up to it. She looked around. She could see grass hanging down from the mouth of the crack. She reached through the moonlight to touch it. It fell, and some stayed in her hand. It was wet. She remembered the rain. The moonlight moved across the bottom of the crack, close to the wall of mud above the large stone. It beckoned her upward. Almost involuntarily she reached for the knife in her belt and began to cut footholds in the side of the wall. The pain in her muscles had subsided into an aching that could be endured. The pain in her left ankle was a mounting torture. She fought it and dug. She fought it and was defeated. She rolled from the stone to the damp earth and shuddered. Then she was still.
The sun warmed her. She scraped the mud from her leather tunic, kneeling on the ground, with her weight on her right knee. Her left leg touched the ground little, doing only the job of helping her keep balance. She finished cleaning her tunic, then sat with her back against the stone. She shivered. It was cold. She limped back to where her blanket had fallen, then sat again with her back to the stone. She tucked the blanket around her legs. She listened and heard nothing. No one came. The pain in her ankle had numbed. There was no one to come. No one knew she had gone into the night. No one knew that she had been afraid and had started toward Chief Red Hair’s lodge. No one knew that she was concerned over the well-being of her boys, Baptiste and Tess. Not even she admitted that, but she knew that was why she had fled into the night. She knew it as well as she knew she was the one called Sacajawea. But she would not say it aloud as she would not say her own name aloud. No hunting party would come here. No trapping party would come out here far from the stream.
She held the knife firmly and all afternoon dug niches in the mud wall. The wind did not touch her; she dropped the blanket, and the working kept her warm. She felt small tremors in the earth, but there was no rumbling and she kept digging. Finally, before the night fell, she dug deep into the pouch for pemmican and ate the last mouthful of pounded meat. She dug her feet deep into the niches, and her hands gripped the edge of the niche above as she pulled herself upward. She remembered the firesticks, but did not go back down to look for them.
Out on the grass she rested, then looked for the path that led to the town. The winds sighed softly in the upper air. She drew the blanket tightly around her body. Her breath came in short gasps. There was a tingling in her hands and arms. Her ankle had swollen more. She lay beside the long wide crack and thought that the Great Spirit searched for her. He came in the form of rabbits and ground squirrels. He leaped and laughed and mocked her, and his laughter was terrible. “Look at this squaw,” he said. “She climbs up out of Mother Earth and is afraid of the dark night.” A rabbit sniffed at her and turned its tail toward her saying, “She follows the crying of papooses, but is afraid to go to them. Afraid she will find herself in another crack.”
Her breath came more easily, and her ankle throbbed into her inner-most being, awakening in that being an anger that filled her. A shout rose in her mind and traveled to her lips. “A mother will face anything to comfort her child! Move forward!”
She sat up and, cutting off a wide strip from the bottom of her tunic, bound her ankle tightly, pulling the soft leather until it was smooth and shiny. For a few moments she crawled along the ground, feeling for cracks. She saw the hills swell up boldly in front of her. They were gentle hills, and the swales between them broad. She knew if she could not find the trail she could stick to the high ground. One oak ridge would lead her to another; if she took the bottoms, they would lead to other bottoms. They were not like the mountains. The mountains were far away, in a dream. She’d have good going; no mountains to get in the way. She’d had enough ups and downs. It seemed as though there was no such thing as level going; it was all up and down and in andout. There was no sense to the troubles she faced trying to reach town. “Good Lord,” she said aloud, using one of Lewis’s favorite terms, “I could use a little level going.”
She limped along the slope of a hogback and heard the rushing of the small creek. The ground was smooth. It felt good to her feet. It felt familiar, somehow. The woods smelled familiar. It was like coming home. In a way it was. It was like getting back to something that she’d been away from. She thrust her hand into the water and brought it out, cupped, and drank deeply. Again and again she drank. She felt a rise of nausea but fought it down. Soon she was on her feet, slowly feeling her way along the trail. The moon rose and lighted her way. She skirted two more cracks in Mother Earth. As the backbone of the ridge behind shut out the terrifying days, the notion took her that it was not only the feel of the ground, nor the woods’ smell, nor the rolling hills that gave her that queer feeling. It was the same feeling as in the aftermath of the flood when she and Chief Red Hair had stood alone, except for her papoose. She was alive. She was at the edge of the town. She knew that the glow from the place closest in her line of vision came from the live candles in Chief Red Hair’s lodge.
Things had not changed much. Six years ago she’d been obliged to Chief Red Hair, and she still was. He was sending her boys to school. And they’d taken to spelling books and cropped hair like a bear took to sugar. She wondered if she’d ever be of much use to the boys again. She had set so much store by reading and writing like the whites. But now the boys had changed. They were not so pleased to have her hands on them anymore. Her lips quivered. She set her jaws together, hard, and pulled her cheeks in tightly against her teeth. The muscles at the corners of her mouth made knots and pulled her lips out straight.
But then, she was not bad off. Charbonneau was not home to badger her. Chief Red Hair kept her supplied with meat and skins. Nothing was so bad. She had moved ahead on her trail of life, that was all.
She eased her feet along the ground. The moon rose and lighted her way. She went around to the back of General Clark’s home. The door opened. Old Rose’s eyeswere wide. “Oh, child, what’s the matter with your leg? Come in here to the kitchen.”
Sacajawea limped in. Rose, her hands running over the swollen ankle, her fat cheeks fluffing in and out, reassured herself that the bone was not broken. She wrapped the ankle in cool, damp cloths.
A kind of pleasant stupor was stealing over Sacajawea as she sat by the kitchen hearth. She was placed on a pallet beside the hearth. She slept and dreamed that Miss Judy held one new papoose after another in her arms. No celebration was held for one papoose, however, as it was a girl, a thing to be cherished, but not as important as a boy.
For the next several days, Sacajawea’s thoughts moved about, but she did not. She seemed drawn to the pallet and lay on it, motionless as a stone. She took no note of the lapse of time. She knew when anyone besides Rose entered the kitchen. She could understand most of what was said, but she could not answer. To open her mouth and move her limbs was nearly impossible. Miss Judy and Chief Red Hair appeared in the kitchen once or twice a day. They whispered above her.
“It is well that Rose heard her at the back door that night.”
“Yes, she might have been dead next morning. I wonder what she went through to get here?”
‘The rumblings and quaking ground were enough to frighten her out of her wits, alone, way out there in that desolate cabin. Primitives are slaves to their environment.”
On the third day, she was better, on the fourth she could speak, move, rise, and turn on the pallet. Rose brought her gruel and dry toast, which she ate with relish and felt stronger for it. On a chair beside the pallet were all her things, clean and dry. The traces of mud were removed from her tunic, the creases left by the rain smoothed out, and the bottom sewn with fringe. It was quite fine. Her moccasins were cleaned and softened. After a weary process she dressed herself. The tunic hung loose, but she pulled it tight at the waist with a leather sash and smoothed out her braids. Then her nose noticed the fragrance of new bread. Rose was baking.
“Ah, this here morning when another earth tremor shook us all from our beds, you don’t notice a thing, child. Now you is dressed.” She smiled. “Come sit in the rocking chair.” Rose bustled about, looking at Sacajawea from the corner of her eye every once in a while. She took the loaves from the stone oven. There were more tremors during the day; dishes rattled, and pots slid from their hooks.
“I can help cut up the potatoes,” offered Sacajawea, as Rose brought out a pan of them.
“You ought to rest, child.”
“But I must do something,” pleaded Sacajawea. “Let me have them.”
Rose consented and brought a clean scrap of muslin to spread over her tunic. “Lest you soil it.”
When the potatoes were pared, Sacajawea asked where Chief Red Hair was that day.
“Gone to fetch the children. They ought to be back soon.”
“Children?” asked Sacajawea.
“Yes, ma’am. The boys from those schools in town.”
Then they came in by the kitchen door. Clark had Baptiste by the hand, and with the other he shoved Tess into the room.
“Janey, I’ve brought you a surprise. I hope you’re strong enough to stand the chatter from these two. Schools are closed early so that Mr. Welch can have the chimney repaired on his main building. Father Neil said he no longer had control over the boys and sent them to parents or guardians until after the holidays.”
“The noise of a chimney falling woke everyone. We thought the sleeping room had split apart,” laughed Baptiste.
“A brown bear wandered into the yard around Father Neil’s quarters,” said Tess, edging closer to Sacajawea. “He was looking for a place to hide from the ground grumblings. But I was not scared.”
Sacajawea nodded her head, her eyes wide to show she knew how the bear himself felt—afraid.
Baptiste said, “Mr. Honoré, who keeps our records and gets our wash done, told us to get up and look at the school. Bricks were all over the yard from the chimney. Then he took us to his parlor and showed on a slatehow there was a shifting within the earth. When this shifting settles down, everything will be quiet again.”
“I was not scared when the candles went out and my cot bumped the wall,” bragged Tess, his thumbs stuck under his belt. “I closed my eyes, and it felt like I was in a canoe going through white water.”
“Come here, Tess, let’s see who is the taller,” said Clark. The boys stood with their heels to the kitchen wall and let Clark make a mark with charcoal above their heads. “Well, Pomp,” Clark coughed, “I do believe Tess is eating more meat. He’s the taller.”
“But I learn more at my school,” insisted Baptiste.
“What do you know?” asked Tess. “Rien du tout.” He spoke French, the language he learned in school.
“Yes, tell your mother what you’ve learned,” said Clark, sitting down beside the hearth with a cup of tea in his hand.
“I know what is the shape of the earth.”
“What?” asked Sacajawea. “All sensible persons know it is about the shape of Rose’s pancake, round and flat and smooth except for the mountains on top. The sky—why it is all over just like if that kettle were turned over the pancake.”
“Do we live on the inside or the outside?” asked Rose.
“We live on top of the pancake, which is under the kettle sky. That kettle sky covers us all over just like Miss Judy’s parasol,” said Sacajawea.
“Under there we would all smother,” said Baptiste, wrinkling his nose.
“Well, take my strainer instead of the kettle then,” said Rose.
“No, the earth is round, and we live on the outside,” said Baptiste.
“Good boy,” whispered Clark, grinning.
“All round? Where did you get that foolish thought?” said Rose.
“I learned it in my geography. Now, this big gourd hanging by the door—”
“Don’t you take that gourd!” cried Rose. “I keeps my best sage and herbs in that there gourd. Why don’t you experiment with that nice round pumpkin over there on the table. But don’t go bustin’ it.” “I won’t. I’ll just stick this pin in here on the top, and we’ll pretend that’s you.”
“That’s pretty thin for me. It’d better be your mammy.”
“Then I’ll stick another pin near the bottom, and that is a black man in Africa—like old York, a long time ago. Now I’ll light this candle.”
“Who’s that, the light of the Lord?” asked Rose.
“That is the sun. Now, the earth moves slowly up to the sun, and it gets lighter and lighter until it’s daylight.”
“Don’t you drop that even if it is getting lighter,” said Rose, her brown eyes wide.
“Then it moves around until the earth gets right under the sun. That’s noon—dinnertime at school.”
“Careful, now, or there won’t be a dinnertime.”
“Then it goes around, and it keeps getting darker on your side until it gets here and it’s night for you.”
“I’m standing all alone in the dark?” asked Sacajawea, marveling at her son and his knowledge—or foolishness.
“But look at the man, old York, in Africa—he is in the daylight. Then the earth moves around again, and you are again in the daylight. Now, all this time the sun has stood still, and the earth has been moving.”
“I think you should put the pumpkin down and stop this moving foolishness. You ask me to believe that nonsense?”
“It is true. Mr. Welch said so.”
“You expect me to believe that I live on a slippery yellow ball that goes sailing round and round with my head now up and now down? You can’t fool this old squaw that is your mother. You better go to York on the other side of that pumpkin. See if he will listen.
I’m no ignorant, uncivilized savage that knows nothing.”
Miss Judy had come in, and she began to dance around the kitchen, giggling to herself. Clark guffawed twice, then stopped when Baptiste looked crosswise at him.
“Umbea, don’t you understand it?” Baptiste asked Sacajawea. “You have lots of imagination.”
“Ai, I do. But I have sense enough to know that if Iwas like that pin, hanging on the side of that pumpkin, I’d just fall off and break every single rib in my body, and when the world turned over, I’d just pitch headfirst to the who-knows-where, and then crack my head clear open, and when I get around again to this side, I’d fall over backward and break my neck.”
“But, Umbea, the pin does not fall out.”
Tess began to laugh and stomp his feet on the floor.
“You are a foolish child, my son. Foolish! That pin is sharpened down to a point and stuck in the earth, but am I sharpened down to a point? Look at me and say so. Now, if that was the case I’d stand right here and you’d starve to death. If what you said was so, I’d be afraid to go to bed at night—afraid I’d roll off to nowhere. And besides me, what would happen to the soup kettle, the water pails, and the woodpiles? What—wake up in the morning and find everything spilled and gone way down to nowhere? Uuuhh, not me!”
“But, Umbea, Mr. Welch says it is just as if there were a great strong man in the center of the earth that holds the ropes that you are hitched to, and the same with the water buckets, and—”
“Now stop that right away! That nonsense is like telling lies. You can hear Chief Red Hair laughing at you, and Tess is stomping his feet, and Miss Judy is making fun by dancing around you. Suppose there was ropes hitched onto things, wouldn’t the water get out anyway—you just can’t hitch water to anything, son. You just can’t. And I know there are no ropes tied to me.”
Rose rolled her dark eyes and nodded her head, agreeing with Sacajawea.
“I didn’t say there were ropes hitched to you.” Baptiste flung his arms out toward his mother. Then he said slowly, “I said it was only as if there were, and you are not really trying to learn, and I do not think I like you anymore, because you don’t believe what I’m trying to teach you. You’d rather be an ignorant squaw.”
Sacajawea stared at Baptiste. She felt as though a dirty trick had been played on her and she knew it but she wasn’t sure yet what the trick was.
“There, now, my son, don’t mind my ignorance. Youwon’t, will you? I’m as dull as that old meat ax over there. Certainly the earth is round. It is rounder than the roundest apple that was ever grown on Monsieur Chouteau’s apple trees. And it always was, and always will be. I’m the fool if I can’t see it. My eyesight hasn’t been good lately. Maybe I’m getting old. Can’t even stay on my feet. See?” She pushed out her tightly bandaged ankle. “One day you won’t have your old umbea hanging on to this earth sharp as a pin no more.”
“You aren’t old and sharp. You’re young and round just like the earth, and I’ll stick to you even if you don’t believe in geography.”
“Woof!” shouted Rose. “Look at that pancake just from the oven. Burned to a crisp! That what come of ignorant people like me listening to talk about people way on the other part of the earth that are all black like my old man, Old York, God rest his soul.”
Miss Judy’s face loosened. “Rose, make us another pancake, and we’ll all have tea with it.”
“Someone better get Tess some tea or he’ll choke,” laughed Clark, pointing to Tess, who had stuffed his mouth full of freshly baked bread.
“I certainly will, and I’ve a mind to swat his snitching hands,” sighed Rose. “Lordy, what they going teach in the school next?”