From Sea to Shining Sea (136 page)

One of the discouraging thoughts that preoccupied the captains, now that they were traveling northward again, was that their celestial sightings showed they were only about a hundred miles due west of the Gates of the Rocky Mountains, through which they had passed a month and a half earlier. They had labored almost three hundred miles out of their way in order to obey Jefferson’s instructions and go to the headwaters of the Missouri. In accomplishing that objective they had expended more than a month of precious summertime. But they had been obeying Jefferson’s directives, so there was no point in moping about that easier way they might have come. And they had accomplished plenty in those extra fifty days.

“One of us might split off a party of horse on the way back east next year and explore out that route,” Lewis said one evening in camp, gazing eastward. “The other could bring the main party back the way we came, and rejoin at the Falls.”

It was good to hear Lewis talking a year ahead; he had been very gloomy since their disappointment of the River of No Return.

This expedition, William suspected, was more of a strain on Lewis’s soul than he would ever admit. It was the biggest thing in his life; it was his obsession; and not many of his fore-plans had to go awry to sink him into a lowering funk.

Lewis was not as confident about old Toby as William was, and did not like to rely entirely on the memory of one old man for a safe passage down the western watershed. Sometimes Lewis would sit by the fire staring balefully across at the merry old fellow as if he took him for a complete fraud. The increasing severity of the weather, the closing in of winter, the scarcity of game to feed his men, further depressed Lewis. The camps now were usually huddled among howling pines, peppered by sleet, and sometimes the whole diet consisted of roots and seeds from Sacajawea’s long and patiently accumulated hoard—what York liked to call her “mouse food.”

And so it was good now to hear Lewis talking about next year, about the return trip, and to keep things in that vein, William said:

“If we do divide the party on the way back, tell y’ what I’d love to do, and that is, find the head of the Yellowstone and return by it. See what kind o’ country it runs through!”

Lewis looked at him for a long time, then said, “You never see too much country, do you?”

And at last he smiled.

T
HE RIVER THAT RAN NORTHWARD THROUGH THIS VALLEY
was wide and swift and gravel-bottomed but it had no salmon in it, which convinced William that it must have high waterfalls somewhere farther down. Toby did not know about the lower part of this river because it ran far to the north and was not the way his people came through the mountains.

They named this the Clark River, as William had been the first white man to see it. The trail was easier now, on the gendy sloping meadows above the banks. On September 9, as they came up the valley of this river, the sun at last came out. The last shreds of cloud dragged their shadows up over the snowy mountains to the east, and the sky was clear.

For a few minutes this cheered everyone. They felt the sun on their chilled and aching limbs and faces, and began taking off their damp, stinking coats and shirts to let them hang and dry and to let the sunlight caress their skin. They led the horses along, beaming, basking, for a little while. But then the sun also warmed up the flies, which had been waiting out the chill, and they came by millions from wherever they had been, and began
feeding on the men and horses, clustering around eyes and nostrils, gathering behind ears and in folds of skin and on sweaty backs to drill for blood. Soon everyone was cursing and slapping at the bold sharp bites, and spotted and stained with blood, and the horses were jumpy, swishing their tails madly and twitching their ears. The soldiers got to the keg of animal grease as soon as there was a rest stop, and slathered the stuff all over the exposed parts of their bodies.

The hunters kept coming back empty-handed. “I don’t understand it,” growled Collins, “why there ain’t a single meat-bearin’ animal in this whole God-blamed valley.”

Sergeant Ordway slapped the side of his neck, killing a dozen flies at one blow. “I do,” he said. “These flies et ’em all up, cracked their bones, an’ sucked the marrow. Then they picked their teeth with the bones, an’ crawled down t’ hide an’ wait in ambush for us to come along.”

By afternoon the hunters had managed to kill nothing but three geese, which provided about one bite of meat and a cupful of broth for each of the famished men. There was no flour left.

In the evening Toby rode ahead over the meadow to look at the mouth of a large creek that came down from the mountains in the west. He came galloping back with his face crinkled in pleasure. He reined up in front of the captains and pointed to the creek.

“Lolo,” he gurgled.

They brought Sacajawea up to talk to him in Shoshoni and find out if he was sure of it. He swore he was. How was he so sure? Taste, he said, making a cupped hand gesture under his mouth. There were hot medicine springs near the top of the pass, where his people would sometimes drink and bathe, and one could taste a trace of the minerals even here at the bottom of Lolo.

They rode over to a pleasant, brushy bottom at the mouth of the creek. The captains tasted the clear, icy water. It tasted like pure snowmelt.

“You taste any minerals?” Lewis asked.

“Not a bit,” William said. They looked curiously at Toby, and had Sacajawea tell him they could not taste it. He looked a bit indignant at that. Then he talked rapidly to her.

“I to drink,” she said, dismounting. “He say, whitemen all time tobacco-mouth, not can taste.” She knelt at the edge and drank. She stood up, and nodded. “Medicine spring,” she said, pointing up the rugged valley. William looked at Lewis and shrugged.

“Well, old friend Tobacco-Mouth,” he said. “Looks like this is where we start to climb over the Bitterroots.”

T
HEY NAMED THE PLACE
T
RAVELER’S
R
EST, AND MADE A
day’s camp here to allow the horses to graze and rest up for the big climb. The place was black with flies but otherwise comfortable. The hunters were sent out all the next day in hopes that they might get in a store of meat for the climb. They had no luck.

There was nothing to eat but some half-spoiled dried fish.

During the halt at Traveler’s Rest, three men of the Flathead tribe, armed only with bows and arrows, were led warily into camp by John Colter, who had been hunting up in Lolo valley. Colter had encountered them several miles up the creek, and had scared them half out of their minds by his strange appearance, but then had convinced them of his friendliness by laying down his rifle and making sign language.

Toby conversed with them and learned that they were trying to track a pair of Shoshonis who recently had stolen horses from them. They confirmed that this was the way to the big river that led to the sea. They said the crossing of the mountains required five sleeps, but would take longer if there should be snowstorms up there. In their opinion, the snowstorms were a certainty.

The soldiers were fascinated by the language of these Indians, which sounded like a gurgling in the throat with an impediment on the tongue. “Y’ ever hear a Welshman talk, Cap’n?” Private Whitehouse asked.

“Aye,” William said.

“I have too, and if that ain’t Welsh brogue, I’m deaf. Y’ ask me, these sound more Welsh than the Mandans did.”

That revived the old haunting legend of the lost Welsh clan, which seemed even more eerie now in these towering mountains than it had a thousand miles back on the plains around Fort Mandan. And so Lewis took time to write down a selected vocabulary of their words, in hopes that Mr. Jefferson might someday find out whether the words seemed Welsh in origin.

That evening the hunters came in with four deer, a beaver, and a grouse. They made for a very welcome meal, and a little left over for breakfast.

T
HE HORSES HAD STRAYED TO GRAZE AND NEEDED TO BE
rounded up in the morning, then loaded, so it was three o’clock in a hot afternoon before the column waded through the stream and started up the right bank of the creek along the old Nez
Percé hunting road. It was a narrow and steep valley, but the trail had been sensibly laid down and was relatively easy to follow. But as the climb continued, the mountainsides around every bend looked steeper and rougher and more forbidding. The creek itself, clear as windowglass and ruffled with white where it tore around boulders, zigzagged crazily down the winding valley through thick undergrowth and under fallen pines, sending its liquid music up the slopes to the trail. It was a constant background tone under the clatter of rocks, blowing of horses, the shouts and sometimes snatches of song as the column climbed.

But it was hard to sing much on an empty stomach when the last cheerful light of the sun was fading off the snowy mountaintops on the far side of the valley to leave the canyon a cold, stark gray, when the ragged little junipers were beginning to look like hunching dwarfs and the dead pines like gaunt ghosts, and soon there was no singing and little talk. Despite the effort of walking, the men were quickly chilled in the twilight. The flies had gone with the sunlight, and that was good, but the climbing had made the men hungry as wolves, and they had not heard a single gunshot roll down the valley. The hunters up there evidently had found nothing all day, and it would be too dark soon for them to get anything.

They had come seven miles up the steep pass when they reached a place level enough to make a crowded camp. It was an old Indian lodging ground. The old lodgepoles lying around were brittle or rotting, and grass grew amid the charred wood of campfires that had been extinguished for two or three years. These old black chunks were thrown onto the new deadwood the soldiers dragged into camp.

The next morning they awoke covered with frost. Everything was white with frost: the evergreens, the grasses in the little meadow, the baggage. The hunters went out early, up through the sparkling landscape. By the time the pack horses were loaded, the frost was gone with all its beauty, and the climbing valley ahead looked gray and dark and flinty.

They started up. The timber became thicker, the valley narrowed, and the mountainsides became steeper. Soon they were again moving up and around such steepnesses that the horses were in danger of tumbling. They crossed several small, roaring, ice-cold creeks.

“Lookee there, Cap’n.” Sergeant Ordway pointed to a large patch of pine trees whose bark had been peeled. “What d’ you reckon ’bout
that?”

William asked Sacajawea to ask Toby, and his reply was that
his people sometimes would have to eat the inner bark on these particular pines by the time they had come this far from the west.

“By th’ Eternal, I hope we never git
that
hongry,” muttered Ordway. As if in response, the bang of a hunter’s gun reverberated down the valley. Several more shots were heard during the afternoon as the pack train traveled along a ridge. Then the trail led back down to the creek, and here the troops were delighted to find their hunters skinning out four small deer. After these had been entirely consumed, a more cheerful caravan resumed the march, going across two more creeks and then turning away from the gorge at a place where the trail started up the ridge of a high mountain. This was a very rough and rocky ascent, through thick timber, and sometimes the only sign of the Nez Percé road was the worn-off bark of trees, where horses and their packs had rubbed against them in narrow passing-places.

Evening was coming and the descending sun now flashed off the creek below. Up here now there was no water at all, and they plodded on into the dusk, men and beasts gasping through parched throats. The road now turned back down toward the creek. In the fading light the descent became even more frightening, but there was no place on the mountainside level enough to stop. Almost in darkness now, they crashed and rattled and grunted down through the woods, the horses sometimes almost on their rumps.

Somehow, though, they reached the creek without a mishap. It was ten o’clock at night and they could scarcely see where to take the horses to drink. It was a bad place to have stopped; it was in the woods still and there was almost no grass for the horses. They were unloaded and hobbled. The slope was so steep that there was not a level place to lay down a blanket. The men had to sleep jammed against tree roots and rocks and baggage to keep from sliding or rolling into the creek.

The next morning everyone arose in the half-light, aching from their awkward sleep, and went out limping through the chilly forest to round up the horses. They recovered all but one horse and a colt. There was not a sign of them.

“Well, we can’t hold up the whole army for ’em,” Lewis said. “We’ll send the hunters back to look for ’em maybe, but my guess is they fell in the creek and couldn’t get out.”

They climbed two miles along the creek under a cloudy sky. The air was tangy with the smell of wet evergreens, but soon another odor began to creep under that sharpness; a thick smell like that of bad eggs. And then through a break in the trees they
saw what appeared to be wisps of smoke rising through dark woods at the base of a large bluff of weather-rounded mossy boulders. “There, I’ll wager, is the hot spring Toby spoke of,” William said.

They walked out into a pleasant, humid little field of bright green grass, crisscrossed with deer paths and Indian trails. William went up toward the steaming bluff, sniffing the moist, warm odor. Hot water spouted from fissures in the dark wall of rock. He knelt and put his forefinger into a steaming rivulet and snatched it out again; the water was nearly boiling. A few feet down, Indians had built a small stone dam to contain the hot water and make a bathing pool. Here in the pool the water was quite hot, but not unbearably hot.

He put his hand in up to the wrist and watched the hand grow pink and felt the old cold-morning aches go out of it, and sighed with pleasure. He sipped a handful and tasted the good, strong mineral flavor. It was surprising that anything smelling so fetid could taste so refreshing.