Charbonneau (3 page)

Wife—and mother. Those words seemed strange for such a slip of a girl. Clark judged her to be no more than fourteen or fifteen; Lewis, who was given to amused cynicism, said she might be twelve or thirteen. For she was a slave girl. Though Clark didn’t like to think about it, he knew that she must have been used by any fired-up brave or pubescent boy who had a mind to. Jean-Baptiste was her first child, and clearly she would have conceived him as soon as she was physically able. Clark was glad that he and Lewis had at least maneuvered Charbonneau into marrying her a while before she gave birth. But the squaw man treated his fahms, as he called them, as Indians treated their women generally. “She’ll still be a kind of slave,” Lewis had said. “We can’t help that.”

The captains had gotten her story from the girl herself, in her combination of broken French, Minataree, and signs, with Charbonneau and Drewyer interpreting. Her people, the Shoshone, lived in the mountains, on the side where the waters flow to the west, the land of the thunder and the setting sun. Each summer they made a journey across the mountains to the headwaters of the Missouri River and the buffalo plains. They needed to get meat for the winter and to break their meager diet of fish and roots. But they went in stealth and never stayed long, fearing the warlike Blackfeet. Five seasons ago, during this annual hunt, they had camped on the most westerly of the three rivers that flowed together to form the Missouri. A far-ranging band of Minatarees had raided them there. In the general flight, Sacajawea and several other children had been captured. The Minatarees had brought them here to their village, a thousand river miles from their homeland and their people. Here where the great river was brown and muddy, where the plains stretched away flat in all directions, where men saw no mountains, here where the earth was parched. Some children had escaped, but not Sacajawea and Otter Woman. A season ago Charbonneau won Sacajawea from her owner. And he bought Otter Woman. So he had two child-slaves as fahms. Sacajawea had now borne him a son—she was proud that it was a son—and Otter Woman was with child.

The girl told this story matter-of-factly, even brightly. The captains detected no sorrow in her, merely acceptance. But her story had roused an interest in her that Sacajawea could not have guessed. She was from beyond the Continental Divide. Her people crossed the mountains to the eastern watershed every summer. She might help them pass some of their most formidable barriers. Did she remember the way across the mountains? Yes, but the way was hard and long.

Maybe the girl could guide them across the mountains. More important, maybe her people would give them horses. They knew that although their assignment was to find a waterway to the Pacific Ocean and thereby open possibilities of trade with the Orient, they would have to make a land portage of indeterminate distance from the eastern to the western watershed. For that, horses would be crucial. Perhaps with Sacajawea to ease the way they would get their horses and learn something of the route to the ocean.

So they talked it over in their tent that evening. Each man had sentimental reasons for wanting to take the girl along. Lewis, of Welsh stock, was a reflective, melancholic, romantic man; the notion of having an Indian girl on the first crossing of the United States and the rest of the continent to the Pacific Ocean appealed to the romantic in him. Clark, of Scottish stock was a sensible, practical, and fatherly man, though unmarried; he felt protective of the girl and her infant son. Besides, both men liked the slender wisp of a girl-woman. She was plucky, full of fun, always cheerful. But both were also officers of the United States Army on an enterprise of high seriousness and grave danger. They were battle-tempered Indian fighters. So they didn’t speak about sentiments.

“We don’t know when shell drop,” said Lewis with a wry smile. “We can’t afford to wait for the baby.” The plains were full of boasts that the Sioux would attack their Fort Mandan and massacre the invading white men as soon as spring came. The captains were planning to move their boats upstream even before the river was clear of floating ice.

“She’ll give birth in a month or so,” said Clark—this was about Christmas—“but she may not be fit to travel for a while.”

“The woman we could handle. But I don’t see how we can take a newborn child.”

“Though Indian women always travel with them,” Clark said. “During a march they go to the bushes, have their babies, and catch up with the tribe a couple of hours later.”

Lewis mused a moment. “Hell, old Bluster Bear might be more trouble than she’d be. He’s no good for anything.”

“I’d bet on it.”

“Still, she says she knows the pass. She says her people will trade us horses.” Lewis looked straight at Clark. “It’s too good a chance to pass up.” Clark nodded.

Lewis stood up. “Maybe we’ll create another Pocahontas,” he grinned. And he stepped out to check the watch.

Later, the captains decided to get Charbonneau to marry Sacajawea. That might make it easier to keep the men away from her. The last thing they needed was an amorous squaw, rivalrous soldiers, and a jealous squaw man. Sacajawea seemed as uninhibited as any Indian woman, and a lot of squaws would have liked being community property, if the community was white.

APRIL 7, 1805: The expedition set out from the Mandan Villages for the mountains.

APRIL 9, 1805: Lewis noted in his journal that the Indian “squar,” poking in some driftwood with a sharp stick, had turned up some roots for the stew. They looked like Jerusalem artichokes, and tasted like them too.

MAY 14, 1805: The white pirogue, bearing the expedition’s crucial instruments, was making its way upstream under the charge of Pierre Cruzatte. Charbonneau was at the rudder, though he was a timid waterman and steered capriciously. A sudden gust of wind ripped the sail out of a man’s hands, Charbonneau turned the rudder the wrong way, and she tipped until the sail hit the water. With Cruzatte threatening to shoot Charbonneau unless he brought her around, and both captains screaming from the shore, she shipped gallons of water. Sacajawea, in the turmoil, calmly plucked boxes of equipment from the river back into the boat. And Charbonneau, screaming to God for mercy, finally righted the boat. Lewis ascribed to Sacajawea “equal fortitude and resolution with any person on board.”

MAY 20, 1805: Lewis’s journal: “The hunters returned this evening and informed us that the country continued much the same in appearance as that we saw where we were or broken, and that about five miles ab[ov]e the mouth of the shell river a handsome river of about fifty yards in width discharged itself into the shell river on the Stard. or upper side; this stream we called Sâh-câ-ger we-ah or bird woman’s River, after our interpreter the Snake woman.”

MAY 31, 1805: The expedition had passed into the Missouri River Breaks. Lewis’s journal: “The hills and river Clifts which we passed today exhibit a most romantic appearance. The bluffs of the river rise to the hight of from 2 to 300 feet and in most places nearly perpendicular; they are formed of remarkable white sandstone which is sufficiently soft to give way readily to the impression of water.…The water in the course of time in decending from those hills and plains on either side of the river has trickled down the soft sand clifts and woarn it into a thousand grotesque figures, which with the help of a little immagination and an oblique view, at a distance are made to represent eligant ranges of lofty freestone buildings, having their parapets well stocked with statuary; collumns of various sculpture both grooved and plain, are also seen supporting long galleries in front of those buildings; in other places on a much nearer approach and with the help of less immagination we see the remains of ruins of eligant buildings; some collumns standing and almost entire with their pedestals and capitals; others retaining their pedestals but deprived by time or accident of their capitals, some lying prostrate an broken othes in the form of vast pyramids of connic structure bearing a serees of other pyramids on their tops becoming less as they ascend and finally terminating in a sharp point, nitches and alcoves of various forms and sizes are seen at different hights as we pass, the thin stratas of hard freestone intermixed with the soft sandstone seems to have aided the water in forming this curious scenery. As we passed on it seemed as if those scenes of visionary enchantment would never have an end.”

JUNE 21-JULY 15: The expedition portaged the eighteen miles of the Great Falls of Missouri, brutally hard work done in blistering heat and abrupt thunder and hailstorms. Sacajawea was sick, and the captains feared for her life.

JULY 4, 1805: The hauling finished, the captains declared a celebration. In the evening they got out the last of their whisky and gave each man a gill. Pierre Cruzatte played his fiddle. John Potts called some square dances, and the men allemanded each other. York, Clark’s black, was the most enthusiastic dancer, rolling his lank frame smoothly to the tune, letting his arms fly, carrying on in the way that always titillated the Indians. Paddy Gass chorused Potts in his sing-song Irish, and for once didn’t resent even York. The Fields brothers, as partners, took turns aping feminine wiles. Drewyer, the French-Canadian interpreter, good-naturedly ribbed Bluster Bear, who didn’t know the steps but shuffled along by himself anyway. The captains stayed to one side, and asked Sacajawea to sit with them—no sense reminding the men how attractive she was. Sacajawea studied Paump. The child, five months old now, seemed transfixed by the dancing, or the music, or something.

JULY 28, 1805: They pointed up the most westerly fork. “Yes, my people come to the plains along that river,” she said. The captains nodded at each other. That fork had to be it. So they named that southwest fork of the Missouri the Jefferson Fork, after “the author of our enterprize”; they called the middle fork the Madison, and the southeast fork the Gallatin, after two members of Jefferson’s cabinet.

They had been traveling—hauling their cottonwood dugouts against the current—south up the Missouri from the Great Falls. They were standing at the landmark the Minatarees had told them about, the Three Forks of the Missouri. If the Indians were right, or if Lewis and Clark understood them aright, the pass to the tributaries of the Columbia River lay due west. And Sacajawea confirmed it. They had come to the crux.

Lewis went ahead, and Clark stayed with the canoes to supervise the hauling. His ankle was infected and swollen, so he was no good for walking. Sacajawea and Charbonneau stayed back with their adopted uncle, Clark.

The river began to batter the men now. It was in transition from a plains river to a mountain river, falling more swiftly, colder, rougher. The brush forced them into the water to haul, and the water was bone-cold. Soon the Jefferson forked again, into three tumbling mountain creeks. Lewis had left a note to take the middle fork. Clark forced his way up with grim persistence, making a shorter distance every day, encouraging his men and cursing the ankle that kept him inactive.

Sacajawea pointed out to him the spot where she had been captured five years earlier; she’d been crossing the stream at a shoal place. She seemed singularly calm and equable about the incident. Lewis commented that she was of such philosophy that she did not permit her feelings to extend beyond having plenty to eat and a few trinkets to wear.

Sacajawea looked high into the mountains now, in the long twilight when the sun was behind the Bitterroots but not yet down, thinking of her people up there, of her family. Charbonneau noticed her looking westward, wondered if she might be thinking of deserting him, and made up his mind to assert his authority over his property, to fight the bastards if he had to. Lewis noticed her looking westward but had no idea what the simple girl might be feeling—he guessed she had no strong feelings about her return. Another instance, to him, of the inscrutability of the Indian mind. Neither man knew her.

AUGUST 10, 1805: Fifteen days after the party reached Jefferson Fork, Merne Lewis came to the junction of two creeks. He decided that it was the highest navigable point of the Missouri River, and wrote Clark a note to leave the canoes. With McNeal and Drewyer he struck west, looking for a pass.

AUGUST 12, 1805: Lewis reached “the most distant fountain of the waters of the Mighty Missouri in surch of which we have spent so many toilsome days and wristless nights, thus far I had accomplished one of those great objects on which my mind has been unalterably fixed for many years, judge then of the pleasure I felt in allying my thirst with this pure and ice-cold water.” Just below, MacNeal stood triumphantly with one foot on each side of the rivulet and “thanked his god that he had lived to bestride the mighty & heretofore deemed endless Missouri.”

They walked across Lehmi Pass, where Lewis looked westward toward the Pacific and saw high mountains partly covered with snow. Drewyer stood across the fountain-head waters of the Columbia and ceremoniously pissed into them. “And may God speed your message,” intoned Lewis, “to the great Pacific Ocean.”

AUGUST 17, 1805: Sacajawea was walking through a high alpine meadow in the forenoon, Charbonneau alongside her and Clark, still lame, trailing a little behind. Small rivulets of creeks, only a stride across, crisscrossed the meadow, making the earth soft and the grass lush. Lodgepole pine, slender and straight, rose tall near the hillsides. The air was cool and abnormally clear, the sky the unnaturally deep blue of high-mountain country, the sun-glow light and wispy on the land. Clark was thinking that the girl did not so much walk as prance, playing her way across the meadow. Then she began to bounce up and down. She whirled around to Clark, dark eyes gleaming, and stuck her fingers in her mouth—sign language for Shoshone—and pointed to the high end of the meadow. Indians, Clark saw. Sacajawea ran to meet them.

When Clark came up, he found a large group of Shoshones with Lewis, Drewyer, and MacNeal among them dressed as Indians. Sacajawea was embracing everyone, laughing and weeping at once. Suddenly she let out a great cry: She had found another teen-ager who was captured when she was, but had escaped. The two girls could scarcely stop babbling long enough to hear each other. The Shoshones greeted Clark exuberantly, hugging him and nuzzling cheeks until he got more than tired of the ritual.