From Sea to Shining Sea (116 page)

“God bless that girl,” Lewis exclaimed. “She’s saved us, I’ll vow!”

“Doesn’t it beat all!” William breathed. “I mean, most squaws wouldn’t ha’ conceived how this stuff was important. That one’s got a head on her shoulders, she has.”

He went up by the fire to thank her for what she had done. Her baby was snug now in his cradleboard, packed in dry cottonwood down, and Sacajawea had stripped her own sodden tunic off and hung it on a pole close to the fire. For an instant her naked little figure glowed ruddy-gold in the firelight before she wrapped herself in the blanket.

There were a few words of English the girl had learned. William
knelt beside her and reached toward the fire. “Janey,” he said, “thank you.” It was the nickname York had given her. William made signs as he talked. “What you did was a great thing. Our hearts are yours.” She smiled, the biggest, fullest, white-toothed smile he had ever yet seen shine through her reserve. By God, he thought. We’ll give her some kind o’ reward. She deserves more than we heap on those chiefs everywhere we go.

There were shouts down by the river. In the gathering darkness, the last canoe was coming ashore. The men were whooping and yelling something about a great bear.

They emerged into the firelight. Two were soaking wet, and stripped to wrap themselves in blankets.

“Lookee here!” someone yelled, and two men held up an enormous grizzly-bear hide, a thick, fine-haired yellow-brown. It was riddled with bloody bullet holes.

“Sergeant!” Lewis called to Ordway. “A gill o’ spirits for every man, and let’s hear a tall tale!” He was relieved and happy; the losses from the boating accident likely were going to prove minimal after all.

“A tall tale, aye, sir,” explained Collins, “tall but true! And here’s the monster’s coat to prove it!”

“Hear, hear!”

“Aye, Johnny, tell us how it happened!”

“Well, boys, we seen ’im a-loafin’ on open ground about three hundred paces from the river, so we put ashore and all six of us creept up, and by stayin’ downwind and ahind of a little rise, we got within forty paces of ’im, an’ he had no idea, just layin’ there wallowing on th’ grass. Hugh and me, we held our fire, like ye’ve advised, Cap’n, and t’ other four all shot at once for his heart. Well, God damn me, not one of us missed, but that roarer just jumped onto his feet and came at us with ’is mouth open as big as a cave. Hugh and me, cool as y’ please, shot right at ’is face. He staggered, with a broke shoulder, I think, but he come on like he was a racehorse and we was the finish line.”

The men around the fire were spellbound. Some of them had been thus engaged with grizzly bears already and the others had spent a lot of time imagining it and expecting it. Collins continued:

“There was just six of us, but we hied off in a hundred directions. I personally all by myself went ten directions at once, all of em toward the river.” The soldiers laughed. “No time to reload, just run,” Collins went on. “He was closin’ on us. I could feel his feet shakin’ the ground, and I bet I got blisters on my butt from them flames he was blowin’.

“Well, John and Dick, bein’ the two scaredest, they dove in the canoe. Rest of us, we scattered inter th’ willer brush and reloaded, while ol’ monster-bear crushed around roarin’ and lookin’ us up. We all took another shot at ’im, damn nigh point blank, an’ every time a ball hit him he turned and come for the man who’d shot it. Lordy, if I’d a had five loaded guns, I could a kilt him five times!

“Well, he flushed Hugh and George out an’ chased ’em, and—he, he!—they flang away their guns and run right off a cliff, till about ten paces over the river in midair, they saw they wasn’t no ground under ’em, and then they dropped twenty feet straight into the river—that’s how they got all wet, y’ see.”

The two nodded in their blankets; Collins wasn’t lying.

“Wal, then,” Collins went on, eyes ablaze, “ol’ bear he jumped in the river right after ’em, an’ made a splash high as th’ treetops, an’ almost sunk George, he was that close. Dick an’ I run out atop that cliff then, a-loadin’ our pieces, and we saw Hugh an’ George swimmin’ so fast upriver they was leavin’ a backwarsh, an’ ol’ bear swimmin’ after ’em, makin’ the river red from all them bullet holes he was a-leakin’ out of. So anyways I got down on a knee an’ got a good steady bead on that bear’s head down there, and by God, with that one I kilt ’im, the last time, didn’t I, boys?”

They nodded and grinned at him admiringly. It was he who had stopped the bear, and so he could tell it just as he liked.

“Wal, that’s th’ story,” Collins concluded. “Drug him ashore and butchered ’im, and found eight balls’d gone through ’im in different directions. One as I say’d broke ’is shoulder, and th’ rest gone through parts such as would ha’ stopped a bull! Now I say this:”—his eyes fell on York, who was just now breaking cottonwood limbs over his knee for the bonfire—“next time I go hunt a yaller bear, I’m a-gonna do it th’ easy way, an’ take my nigger friend here t’
rassle
’im to death! Eh, York?”

York understood this was a compliment, and broke into a big smile. “Shoo will, Mist’ Collins. I mean, lest I be too busy otherways!”

So the rest of the evening was taken up with eating, and with tales and retellings, and warming by the big fire, and the cleaning of weapons and repair of moccasins, some of the men lying back holding steaming poultice-rags on their boils. The regular ration of whiskey seemed to affect most of the men twice as much as usual, perhaps because of the altitude, or because of the infrequency of its use recently, and everyone was having a hilarious time, except Charbonneau, whose poor seamanship and
frantic Catholic prayers were the butt of some pretty severe joshing. He glowered and hung back out of the firelight as much as he could, and made a few feeble excuses. He had enough sense not to get angry, because the good humor of the men was only thinly masking their contempt, and there were several—little Cruzatte foremost among them—who would have enjoyed thrashing him.
“Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! Aidey-moi, Jesu L’Enfant!”
Cruzatte mimicked him in a whining voice, then added: “God hears you not, eh, Big Tess? Maybe is because he don’ recognize your voice in a prayer, eh,
sauvage?
Oh, but God tells
me:
‘Pierre Cruzatte, put thy gun on that maniac’s head and give him some wisdom!’”

The troops roared.

“Merde!”
growled Charbonneau. “I think you are so brave for you think you could
walk
across the river, eh?”

“Caution,” Cruzatte said softly. “I could shoot you yet.”

Deciding that all this had gone far enough, Lewis stood up and raised his cup. The men fell quiet until there was no noise over the crackling bonfire and the wind on the river.

“Listen,” he said. “I address your attention to the wife of Charbonneau. She has enough gumption for their whole family. I salute her, gents. Three cheers for the squaw! Hip, hip …”

“Hooray!”

“Hip, hip …”

“Hooray!”

“Hip, hip …”

“Hooray!”

And Sacajawea, looking up quizzically into this uproar and seeing that these great strong white men were all beaming on her, grew so flustered that she turned to bury her face in the nearest refuge. It might at another time have been the bosom of another squaw; it might even have been a wall. As it happened now, it was the shoulder of the person nearest her, someone she trusted and admired in the extreme, the kindest man she had ever seen: Chief Red Hair. William felt the face pressing against him, and was delighted, yet full of pity for her embarrassment, and he was suddenly so suffused with affection that he put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed her to his side. “Here’s to ’er!” he exclaimed, raising his cup, and three more cheers erupted.

A few days later the captains dubbed a small river Sacajawea’s Creek in her honor, and everyone approved.

Except Charbonneau, who remembered Chief Red Hair’s arm
around his squaw, and who imagined that this was why all the
Americains
smirked at him.

A
ND THEN THEY HAD COME ON AND ON THROUGH LATE
M
AY
, through days of scorching sun and eye-scouring dust and nights when water froze in the canoe bilges and camp kettles, through thick morning fogs and high, bright blue afternoons that brought the rattlesnakes out to sun on the rocks wherever men might step. The hills and mesas above the river valley were rugged, treeless, and almost grassless; the main vegetation now was prickly pear, whose needles pierced right through the soles of moccasins. The ground had been imprinted when wet with millions of buffalo hoofprints, which had dried in the sun into a ridged, jagged, ankle-twisting, moccasin-tearing plaster. Dry stream beds broached onto the river, proof that the land was generally as arid as it seemed in this season. Nearly every day one man or another had an encounter with a grizzly bear, till Lewis issued an order that hunters or anyone else leaving the camp must not go alone but in pairs or groups.
“These bear being so hard to die reather intimedates us all,”
Lewis wrote in his journal.
“I had reather fight two Indians than one bear.”

Buffalo were not so numerous as they had been, but the hunters provided elk, deer, bighorn sheep. Every night the horizons echoed with distant wolf calls.

Scannon, cornering a wounded beaver one Sunday afternoon, had been bitten on a foreleg by the desperate animal, and its chisel-sharp yellow teeth laid the flesh open so badly that the dog nearly bled to death.

The evening encampments these days were great gab-fests. Every evening there was some new spill or close call to talk about, as the rapidity of the current now was continually breaking their elkskin tow ropes and endangering the canoes.

Twanging Kentucky accents rose high in the valley as the men
tried to express their wonderment at the beasts and plants and landscapes that were beyond anything they had seen in their lifetimes as hunters and rangers and woodsmen back in the green forests of the Ohio watershed. They were enchanted in particular with the bighorn sheep, which stood ghostly gray on the jagged faces of nearly perpendicular bluffs, looking down curiously with their big, wide-set eyes at the struggling boatmen, or sprang with incredible sureness from crag to crag. Their huge, graceful backward-curling horns were prized; every man yearned to have a pair as a souvenir. The head and horns of a male that Drouillard killed one day weighed twenty-seven pounds. “I still want some,” remarked John Colter, who sat by a campfire pulling prickly pear thorns out of his bloody feet, “but damned if I’ll carry anything that big on up this unmarciful river. I’ll wait ‘n’ get some on the way home.”

The men were mad for bighorn meat and beaver tails, which they proclaimed the finest foods they had ever tasted and which were made a hundred times more savory by their work-whetted appetites. They were entranced by the vast, flaming, purpling evening skyscapes, the orange sunsets blazing off the river, the vivid rainbows arching over rainwashed gray-blue cottonwoods and brick-and-lime colored willow thickets, the bald, fissured hills on both sides of the river turning violet and then black in the twilight, the moon rising the size and color of a pumpkin over the river behind them. They comprehended that they were in the vanguard of civilization; many of them by now had creeks named after them, and they wore the knowledge of those namesakes with quiet pride, like medals. And thus most of them now seemed to consider themselves the most fortunate men who had ever walked—even though walking was now a wincing agony and their feet were sprained and bruised and punctured by riverbed stones and prickly pear. They gazed dreamily into the light of pungent buffalo-chip-and-willow-wood campfires; they fed themselves with their right hands while wiping mosquitoes off their faces and blowflies off their meat with their left hands. And they were usually so fatigued that they would fall asleep with their poultices still on, and would dream of snow-topped mountains.

A
ND NOW THIS
S
UNDAY MORNING THE MEN WOKE UP
groaning with their pains and stiffnesses, and William knew just how they felt because he felt the same. He had to wince to bend his neck far enough to put on his moccasins and leggings. As he struggled with aching fingers to tie thongs, he heard George Gibson
groaning. Gibson had dislocated a shoulder the day before while trying to climb a cliff. Several men had pulled and twisted his arm for what had seemed like an eternity until it was back in its socket. “How is it this morning, Gibson?” William called over.

“Sir,” came the man’s voice, “th’ onliest part o’ me that could hurt worse would be th’ soles o’ my feet, so I thank the Lord I don’t have any soles o’ my feet left.”

William smiled grimly. It was the kind of joke a hurting man thinks up when he hurts too much to sleep, but it was a joke nonetheless, and it meant Gibson was still game.

But that about the soles of the feet was not much of an exaggeration. The mere touch of moccasin leather to his own feet made William tremble with pain inside, and he had not yet even stood up to put weight on them this morning.

Now he clenched his teeth and got up as quickly as he could. It was best to get it over with—if it didn’t make you faint. And the instant his weight was upon those bruised, twisted, stove-up, lacerated, needle-punctured feet, they felt as if he had just stepped on an exploding powder keg. His heart quailed and a hundred suns floated around behind his eyeballs for a moment.

“Where to so early, Clark?” Captain Lewis’s voice came through the whirlwind of pain.

“Why,” he panted, “I aim to climb that cliff o’ Gibson’s and get out o’ this canyon for a look-around. Sunday mornin’s a body should see the world from a lofty station, as my Ma used t’ say, rest her soul.”

I
T TOOK HIM AN HOUR, A WHEEZING, SCRABBLING, GROANING
, panting hour, climbing on steep slopes of loose, sharp-edged, parched, cactus-and-rattlesnake-infested rock, on windscoured cliff faces, to reach the upland hills. Here he turned and looked back down. A mile below and behind, the little string of canoes and pirogues was inching along the edge of the rushing gray river, the men onshore and in the water, looking tiny and industrious as ants. Now and then he would hear a snatch of voice from down there. He watched them come along now, as they had been doing foot by laborious foot for more than two thousand miles, and for a moment he had the feeling that here is what an Indian, or a mule deer, or a bighorn sheep, or an eagle, would be seeing and hearing as the first white men penetrated into their country.