My little breath, under the willows by the water-side we used to sit,
And there the yellow cottonwood bird came and sang.
That I remember and therefore I weep.
Under the growing corn we used to sit.
And there the little leaf bird came and sang.
That I remember and therefore I weep.
There on the meadow of yellow flowers we used to walk.
Alas! how long ago that we two walked in that pleasant way.
Then everything was happy, but alas! how long ago.
There on the meadow of crimson flowers we used to walk.
Oh, my little breath, now I go there alone in sorrow.
MARK VAN DOREN andGARIBALDI M. LAPOLLA, ed., The World’s Best Poems, “The American Indian—A Lover’s Lament,” by H. J. Spinden. New York: The World Publishing Co., 1946, pp. 616–17.
On December 24, Sacajawea and the two boys dressed warmly. They strapped saddle blankets to two of the horses that stood close together in the drafty stable behind the cabin. They were going trading at Chouteau’s.
Inside the store, Sacajawea traded several pairs of thick-soled moccasins for a small sugar sack of hard candy—a Christmas treat for the boys—a canister of tea, and a sack of dried beans. The boys listened to the rivermen standing around the potbellied stove telling stories of how the land around New Madrid rolled and burst open, shooting water, sand, and black, oily slime into the air during one of the larger earth tremors.
“This here child seen birds frozen with fear so’s they couldn’t fly,” said one old-timer.
On the trail home, the surface was swept with a screaming wind. The trail was broad as it ran through the heart of the city. The air was full of sifted white snow, and the wagon furrows were rapidly filling. The horses panted and struggled as they plodded forward. Through the muffled scream of the storm Sacajawea turned and shouted back at the boys, “Stop there, at the lodge of Chief Red Hair!”
The boys grinned and nodded. Her order needed no explanation. She always had good reasons for her actions. They remembered she had kept aside a small pair of leggings and a small shirt at the store, telling the clerk she did not wish to trade anything for them. They were to be gifts for the two youngest children of Miss Judy and Chief Red Hair. Inside Clark’s kitchen she emptied her own sons’ half of the hard candy into the sack of dried beans. She tied the cloth sugar sack down tight against the remaining candy. “This is for the older children, Looie and Mary,” she said, half to herself.
Tess and Baptiste tethered the horses and stomped snow off their moccasins as they followed Sacajawea through the back door into the kitchen. Sacajawea had dropped the half-filled sugar sack of hard candy on the kitchen table, telling Rose to try a piece before dividing it between the two older children. Beside the sack shelaid the neatly folded packages, explaining that they were for the two younger children.
“There are only two children in this here family,” said Rose, peering closer into Sacajawea’s face. “Has the quake left you addlebrained?”
Sacajawea smiled and took a moment before answering. “Oho, there will be three boys and one girl adding to the laughter and to the crying in this house before long,” she said in a prophetic whisper. Then, in a louder voice, she asked, “I wonder where Miss Judy is? She is as affected by chills as the little girl will be. You will have to remember those two are frail. Care for them even more than the others.” Now her voice cracked and ended in what sounded like a sob.
“She and Master Clark, they’se taken their horses out somewheres,” said Rose. “With this wind a-blowing they’se be back shortly. You stay. Get your thoughts straight. That snow and cold wind is getting you as muddled as some far-seeing sorceress who dreams up happenings so close to the truth that it makes a body’s hair stand straight on end.”
Sacajawea stepped toward the back door, nodding her head to indicate that the boys, Tess and Baptiste, should prepare to leave. “Merci. We go to our lodge before the snow is deep and before I have to sleep in your kitchen once again.”
Rose laughed but shook her head and smoothed down her kinky hair as from the window she watched the small boys mount their horse and follow Sacajawea along an invisible white trail. “Watch out for them earth cracks—hear?”
Rose’s voice was snatched away by the wind. A pall of white enveloped the figures. Upon them beat a wind of stinging sleet. The snow was getting deeper. Once or twice Sacajawea’s horse stumbled, but he did not fall. The words Tess shouted up to Sacajawea were almost lost in the roar of the shrieking wind.
“…helluvatime…riding.”
“Not far…up ahead is our lodge,” she shouted back, trying to keep the boys as close behind her as possible. Her attention then concentrated on sticking to the back of the horse. Numb though her fingers were, she had to keep them fastened tightly in the frozen mane of theanimal. At the cabin she pulled the boys off their horse and sent them inside to start up the fire.
“Got to stable the horses,” she yelled, and hurried with the chore.
After a time she was standing before the warmth of the fireplace, and circulation was flooding back into her veins. She endured a half hour of excruciating pain. She had to clench her teeth to keep back the groans that came from her throat as she walked the floor and nursed her hands and fingers.
When the storm moderated enough to let her go out with safety, Sacajawea went to the stable to check on the horses. When she came back she was triumphant. Upon the table she dropped two packages held in the crook of her arm.
“The makings of our Christmas dinner,” she announced with a grin. “Chief Red Hair has been here. We just missed each other. He left a supply of meat and hides in the stable and these two tins of plum pudding, a favorite of the white man.” She had not noticed the gifts the first time, when she’d put the horses in and been no numbed with cold. “He came to see us while we were at his lodge trying to see him,” she repeated.
“Merry Christmas!” shouted Baptiste.
“Aw, let’s eat,” said Tess. “I’m nearly starved.” He snatched a hunk of frozen meat from under Sacajawea’s butcher knife.
“Put that down,” she said. “You will have your food cooked the way the whites prefer. My boys will grow up civilized and not eat raw meat with blood dripping from their mouths. You are not savage Blackfeet.”
That winter and all next spring, Sacajawea had strange dreams in which a spume of whirling, blinding snow clung to everything it touched. The snow was wet and soft. Once she thought she saw Charbonneau with snowshoes heavy with white slush. But each time she saw densely laden spruce boughs brush Otter Woman’s face and shower her with little avalanches. Otter Woman’s face was white and her voice low, saying, “Oh, my sister, keep my papoose as your own.” Then there was no sign of life in the vast whiteness, only a mass of ice and snow. The dreams were always similar. There were more earth tremors that winter.1
General Clark brought more meat and hides. The first week in January, Sacajawea sent the boys back to school with him. Then she busied herself making moccasins and leggings and shirts to sell at Chouteau’s store for her other needs and the luxury of hard candy.
Soon after his appointment as territorial governor of Missouri, Clark came for a visit.
“You have come to tell me about Charbonneau,” said Sacajawea, making a pot of tea and slicing some cold roast venison.
“Well, I have. How could you know?”
“I’m not sure, but I had the feeling.”
“And there is this little girl.” Clark unwrapped the bundle he held on his lap. Inside was a dark-haired papoose, about a year old.
“Ooo,” said Sacajawea, making sucking noises with her mouth. “Where did you find this little owl—on the trail to this lodge?”
Clark handed the papoose to Sacajawea, who rocked her gently. “She is Charbonneau’s daughter. Her mother, Otter Woman, died last December. The baby was about four months old then.” Clark watched Sacajawea, whose expression changed subtly.2
Slowly she stopped the rocking motion. Her dark eyes swam with tears, but she did not let them roll down her cheeks. She was more beautiful than the young woman Clark remembered from the expedition.
Clark’s mouth sagged partly open. He blinked against his own tears; then he stood up, scraping the packing crate on the floor. “A man belonging to your people would leap from a cliff before he would cry,” he said gruffly.
“But you are not Shoshoni. You are a white chief,” Sacajawea said, surprised at the excess of her own feeling.
“The clerk at Lisa’s Fort Manuel came to Saint Louis in August with this baby girl and left her at the Orphans’ Court. She’s been nursed by a squaw living near the barracks. When I found out about her, I put my name on her guardianship papers. I want you to take her. She’ll be good company while the boys are at school. Raise her as your own. Otter Woman would have asked that. Teach her to sew and to sing.”
“Mon dieu! It cannot be. Yet I know it is. Otter Woman is not coming back.” She began shivering. “Where is Charbonneau?” she asked as if afraid to say his name aloud.
The baby cried. Sacajawea rocked her to and fro.
Clark paused and kicked at the crate. “Luttig, the clerk, says he went out with a party of Northwesters and never came back. He suspects he was killed by the Sioux during one of their attacks. It’s been pretty bad up in the Missouri.” Clark’s head was lowered.
“It is hard to believe.” She shook her head. “Everybody is dead. All those we knew; never to see them again.”
“I am so glad you did not go up the Missouri,” said Clark, “that I don’t even care if you let your tears roll down your face. We will both miss that old rascal Charbonneau.”
“I will keep her.” She hugged the baby eagerly, while anxiety and grief fought in her heart. She knew that any moment now she might let the tears slide down her cheeks. She felt, deep inside, that where the frail Otter Woman had succumbed, so also had her tough, hardy man. Their life’s trail had ended.
When Clark tried to speak, his voice broke. “Janey — little Janey. You’re safe. Thank God, I still have you.”
The tears brimmed over. Then, somehow, she was weeping in his arms. A stress of emotion had swept her into his arms. Now she drew away from him shyly, peeling the blanket from the baby. The maturity of her own experiences asserted itself.
“Does this papoose have a name?” She was deeply moved by the presence of Clark and his admission of fondness for her; she was also embarrassed by the display of so much sentiment.
“The baby is called Lizette.” Clark could not take his eyes from her as she held the sleeping papoose lovingly in her arms. It seemed that a bird sang in his heart the gladness he had tried to express. He saw her primitive beauty vivid as a flame. He was now her sole protector. He thought her rocking movements a miracle of supple lightness. Her body had the swelling roundness of vital youth, and her eyes were alive with the eagerness that time dulls in most faces. They spokelittle now, but drank tea from hot granite-ware mugs. Clark allowed his feelings no more expression. Love for her ran through his veins like old wine. He knew she lived in a world primeval. Would she waken to real love one day, or more disillusion? Now there was only wonder at the world in her soft eyes, he thought.
“Little Lizette,” she said. She stopped rocking only after she had drunk her tea.
Clark held out his hand to say good-bye.
She gave him a quick, shy little nod, turned without shaking hands, and moved outside, carrying the baby under one arm. She took up the reins of his horse and handed them over to him.
All through the remainder of that day, happiness and grief flooded her heart. She was not ashamed. She would tell Tess about his mother, and she would continue to care for her boys. She would tell the boys the good things about their father. A man goes his own way. In a country of strong men, he could stand shoulder-high to most and command the admiration of friend and foe alike, even when under their breath they called him an old rascal.
Sacajawea sang like a lark in springtime while caring for the yearling girl. Baptiste and Tess taught her to take her first steps, and each vied with the other in showing off to make her laugh.
Sacajawea carried the baby in a small red-wool blanket she slung over her back when she rode into town to trade at Chouteau’s.
Once Monsieur Chouteau came out of the little balcony office at the rear and peered at the child at her back.
“What is this?” he said. “Is it the latest half-breed child that Bill Clark has appointed himself guardian for?”
“Ai,” said Sacajawea, shifting so that she could look at Chouteau. “I am the mother of this Kloochman.”
“And you speak in the west coast jargon, too? Remarkable. Bright eyes. They watch me wherever I move. Bill Clark takes a liking to Indian kids. He’s educating your son and another half-breed, I hear.”
“Ai,” said Sacajawea proudly. “I am mother of both boys.”
“You don’t say? Mother of all the kids Clark fancies, eh? Say”—he rolled a cigarette with one hand—“I recall another squaw that used to come around here with you. She sat outside against the post and pretended to be asleep, but she watched people.” Chouteau laughed and his deep-set eyes crinkled at the corners. He gave Sacajawea a small paper bag of hard peppermints.
She shook her head no. She had nothing more with which to pay for the candy.
“No, no, keep it. It is a present for Kloochman, the Little Woman,” said Chouteau.
“Thank you,” said Sacajawea. Her heart became large toward him, and she felt it important that she pay for the gift of candy somehow. She bent her head, pulled off her beaded leather headband, and held it out to him.
“Why, thank you.” His eyes flashed. “But this beadwork does not look Shoshoni to me.”
She was startled by his remark. “You know that I come from the Land of the Shining Mountains?”
“Oh, yes, Bill Clark told me how you found your family there and helped him get a good supply of horses to ride overland. It’s remarkable. Even Clark said to me, ‘She’s quite a woman.’”
“Merci,” said Sacajawea, a little flustered by the thought that Chief Red Hair would discuss her with this carefully dressed, easy-mannered Frenchman.
“Please tell me where you learned to make designs like this?” He held up her headband.
“My people do not have beads to sew with, only quills and teeth and shells. I get beads here. I make the designs. No tribe’s designs—mine. It is a mixture of what I learned from the People, the Minnetarees, and Miss Judy.” She collected her package of bacon and sugar and coffee and shuffled toward the door. She could hear Chouteau chuckling to himself. Then she heard the clerk speak in a soft voice to Chouteau.
“Imagine what General Clark would say if he knew that his wife’s influence on the bead design of that squaw was rated with the influence of several Indian tribes. It is rich, isn’t it?”
Then during the Month of Picking Blackberries, Lizette slept fitfully and began to cough. Sacajawea rocked gently with the baby night after night, trying to soothe her restlessness. The baby now cried too easily and clung to Sacajawea for security.
“She is so frail,” said Miss Judy one morning; she had brought several of little Looie’s outgrown dresses for Lizette. “Oh, this poor brown baby. She will not see another summer sun if she does not stop that coughing.”
“Will you take her to Dr. Saugrain? Please?” asked Sacajawea.
“I will see if he will come here. I will ride to him this afternoon,” promised Miss Judy.
The doctor was not home. He was off on a trip visiting with his friend John Audubon in Kentucky. He never came to see Lizette when she needed him.
Sacajawea did all she knew to do. She boiled sassafras tea and spooned it through the baby’s fevered lips. She bathed the thin little face with tepid water. “Little Woman, Little Woman, your eyes make you look like an owl, they grow so large and your face stays so small,” she crooned.
In December there was a week of days when every morning Sacajawea had to carry baskets of dried grasses from a pile behind the cabin to the horses. The snow was too deep for them to forage on their own. They stood patiently waiting in their crude stable of oak boards.
The winter air was dry and crisp, and Lizette seemed better able to breathe. Sacajawea made cornmeal mush and watered it down for the child. In the evenings she held a stone on her knees and with a smaller one cracked hickory nuts for Lizette. The child followed Sacajawea everywhere like a shadow. Sacajawea fixed one of the old packing crates so that Lizette could stand upon it and watch the dishes being washed. Sometimes Lizette helped dry them on the muslin toweling Miss Judy had brought. “Good Little Woman,” crooned Sacajawea happily.
One morning she bundled Lizette into warm clothing and tied her on the back of the gentlest horse so that she could watch Sacajawea chip stove wood and stack it in the rick by the door. By noon Lizette was tiredand coughing. She refused to eat more watery mush. While she slept, Sacajawea dug a bushel of potatoes she had buried below the frost line in October, and brought them into the house. A light snow was falling, and she tucked the red-wool blanket more tightly around the wan little body. “Little Woman needs Father Sun,” Sacajawea said aloud. She took three arrows, the bow, and a knife and went about a mile along the creek, following deer tracks. She sighted the animal, shot it in the neck, and saw it fall, jump up, and run. About ten minutes later, she got her second shot at the weakening animal and killed it. It was big, and she skinned it late that afternoon.
The next day, she gently placed a wet poultice of boiled onions and raw venison liver on Lizette’s chest and bound it with a warmed flannel cloth. The child coughed hard, then slept fitfully, sweating under the red-wool blanket. The sweating pleased Sacajawea. It meant the fever was broken and the child was getting better. She went back to the deer carcass and carried several of the better cuts home, tied to the back of a horse.
The following morning Lizette slept late, and Sacajawea went for more venison before other animals found an easy meal. When she returned, she called to Lizette, “Little Woman, Little Woman, see what I have brought you—the tender tongue.” The child did not stir. Sacajawea went to the corner opposite her bed, where Clark had built another bed, barely two feet wide, but nearer the fireplace. The child’s feet, a grayish brown color, hung over the edge. Sacajawea lifted them gently back under the blanket. She cried out in surprise. The child’s feet were cold, dead cold. There was no life in the little body. “Poor Little Woman. Poor Little Woman,” she crooned.
Sacajawea did the best thing she knew to do. She bathed the cold body in warm water and dressed it in Looie’s white dress. She slipped small beaded moccasins on the little feet. She painted the part in Lizette’s neatly combed hair red. She painted the sunken cheeks with vermilion. Sacajawea looked through her folded robes and blankets until she found a small quilled fawnskin robe. She felt the designs around the edge, which wereintricate, intimate circles, suns, and triangular birds. She had used this robe her mother had made only on special occasions to wrap Pomp. As she wrapped Lizette’s body, she thought of the day she was given this robe by the kind Shoshoni woman. She turned over the packing crate Lizette had stood upon and eased the bundle into the crate.
Sacajawea dug in the ground at the back of the cabin under a tall, scraggly red cedar. It took her two days. The ground was hard on the surface and wet clay below. Snow blew into the hole. When the hole was the right size, she wrapped a blanket around herself, got a horse ready, and went to tell Chief Red Hair. She was going to bury Otter Woman’s girl-child in the way of the white mothers Otter Woman had so admired.
Sacajawea found that Dr. Saugrain was having supper with the Clarks. He decided to follow his host and hostess to the pitiful squaw’s cabin. He was a little man, wrinkled, dried up, and soured, and even on his horse he looked old and frail. But when he spoke there was something overpowering in his manner, something knowledgeable in his eyes. Sacajawea felt intimidated by his belated examination of the dead child. He shook his head. “Filthy stuff,” he muttered, dabbing at the bright red cheeks with his immaculate handkerchief. “Nothing could have been done for this infant. She must have contracted consumption from her mother—or some close relative—before she was even sent downriver. Her short life was in a decline before it began.” He rewrapped the body, sniffing distastefully at the soft skin robe, and he pushed the bundle back into the box. He turned to Sacajawea, who, standing apart from Chief Red Hair and Miss Judy, felt like an outsider in her own lodge. “Best clean out this place thoroughly. Burn the baby’s clothes and bedding. Sprinkle wet tea leaves on the floor before sweeping. Then burn them at once.”
Governor Clark buried the baby under the red cedar, swearing once as the short needles prickled his face. He bowed his head and said the Lord’s Prayer. Miss Judy put a flat gray shale stone at the head of the mounded grave. Her tears spilled on the shale, making dark circles.
Dr. Saugrain would not drink the hot tea Sacajawea prepared, but he sat haughtily on his horse until Governor Clark and Miss Judy came out of the cabin. “My only hope is that you did not breathe that overly contaminated air too long or too deeply,” he said, riding off down the trail without looking back to see Sacajawea standing alone in the doorframe, tears streaming down her face.