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Authors: JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

Sign-Talker

BOOK: Sign-Talker
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“QUITE POSSIBLY MY FAVORITE BOOK OF ALL TIME …

A story about the Lewis and Clark Expedition from the Indian point of view is a very significant addition to Lewis and Clark lore.”

—S
AMMYE
M
EADOWS
, Executive Director
    Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, Inc.

“The majesty of the scenery, the wonder of the stately tribes who greet, and menace, the expedition and the expedition’s mix of soldiers, ne’er-do-wells and French traders all combine to produce a strong novel about the days when Missouri was at the edge of the map.”


Kansas City Star

“This rich and meaningful story offers a new look at the innocence of the Native Americans who welcomed the explorers, provided them with supplies, and never guessed the hospitality would lead to their demise. Based on historical fact,
Sign-Talker
will doubtless leave the reader wishing to read more of Thom’s work.”


St. Augustine Record

“The narrative ripples with a luminous fascination for nature, both human and spiritual, as it rains down so much sorrow and wonder.”


Kirkus Reviews

“A FRESH AND VIBRANT NOVEL.

Kenneth Roberts believed that historical fiction could be more ‘true’ than non-fictional narrative. Thom’s mastery of both the material and human emotions proves the point, and his new book belongs on your ‘best historical novels’ shelf.… First-rate work.”


Southbridge Evening News
(Massachusetts)

“This great journey halfway across a wilderness continent and back has never been told so compellingly, with so much dignity and wisdom, as in
Sign-Talker
.”

—S
COTT
R
USSELL
S
ANDERS
      Author of
Hunting for Hope

“Authentically detailed and populated with a cast of celebrated real-life characters, this stirring tale of tragedy and triumph will captivate fans of epic historical fiction.”


Booklist

“SURELY THE BEST LEWIS AND CLARK NOVEL YET …

This is a compelling narrative, one grounded in the best scholarship and given life by Thom’s powerful imagination.
Sign-Talker
is an evocation of the American West at a crucial moment in time. Thom has given voice and spirit to that moment, and in the process written a memorable book that is both good history and a good read.”

—J
AMES
P. R
ONDA
    H. G. Barnard Professor of Western
    American History
    The University of Tulsa

“Wryly observing the bumbling efforts of arrogant whites to win the trust and loyalty of bellicose Indians, George Drouillard follows along as captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and thirty-odd white explorers journey up the Missouri River.… He is a formidable character, and … he emerges as genuine and credible. Thom’s portraits of Lewis, Clark, the much celebrated Sacagawea and other principal characters are also nicely fleshed out.”


Publishers Weekly

By James Alexander Thom

FOLLOW THE RIVER
FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA
LONG KNIFE
PANTHER IN THE SKY
THE CHILDREN OF FIRST MAN
THE RED HEART

In memory of
Chief George “Buck” Captain

One of the two or three most valuable members of the expedition … a man of much merit; he has been peculiarly useful from his knowledge of the common language of gesticulation, and his uncommon skill as a hunter and woodsman.… It was his fate also to have encountered on various occasions, with either Captain Clark or myself, all the most dangerous and trying scenes of the voyage, in which he uniformly acquitted himself with honor
.

—M
ERIWETHER
L
EWIS
,
on George Drouillard

 

P
ART
O
NE
November, 1803–October, 1804

11th November—
Arived at Massac engaged George Drewyer in the public service as an Indian Interpretter contracted to pay him 25 dollars pr. month for his services.—Mr Swan assistant Millitary agent at that place advanced him thirty dollars on account of his pay.—

Meriwether Lewis
, Journals

Chapter 1
Fort Massac, Lower Ohio Valley
November 11, 1803

An eagle soared westward above the river bluff against a gray overcast, as if leading the lean hunter toward the fort, though the fort was where he was going anyway. He would see the big mysterious boat moored below the fort, he thought. It should be there by now.

Eagles often seemed to lead the hunter, even though his personal Shawnee name was Nah S’gawateah Kindiwa, meaning Without Eagle Feathers. The name by which he was known was George Pierre Drouillard.

The tawny skin of his face was taut over jutting bone, his mouth wide, thin-lipped. His hazel eyes were paler than his skin, which gave a strange brightness to his gaze that sometimes made people uneasy, as he knew it did. It was not good for a métis—a half-breed—to make white people uneasy, so hunting and trapping alone was suitable work for him, away from the towns.

Drouillard rode a bay horse, and led an army mule that carried the boneless venison of three deer and the meat and fat of a bear, all bundled neatly in their own hides and hung on a packsaddle. He watched the silhouette of the eagle as he rode. Already he smelled wood smoke from the fort: hickory, oak. And he smelled latrine.

He sent a thought up: Without Eagle Feathers follows you,
kindiwa
. There was a reason why that was his name, and it was a sad and sorry reason, no fault of his. Still, eagles often led him.

Led by Eagles, that would have been a better name. If only there remained a shaman to do a new name ceremony for him, that could be his personal name. One could change to a truer name, with shaman help.

Then another name came into his memory and made him laugh. Once when he was drunk a whiteman had asked him his Indian name and he said, “Followed by Buzzards.” The fool had believed him, though that would be a true name for him too, appropriate for a hunter. He was a good hunter. Not just a tracker and stalker and sharpshooter. In boyhood he had learned the voices and sounds of all the animals and birds, and could call and decoy them in their own languages. He was such a good hunter that Captain Bissell, commander of Fort Massac, employed him to bring game to the fort to feed its soldiers. He was paid for the meat by the hundredweight. He took his pay in gunpowder, lead, soap, and the printed paper that the
américains
called money. The army provided the pack mule. Followed by Buzzards. He rode along laughing. It was a laugh just slightly bitter, the taste of much Shawnee people’s laughter these days.

He rode the curving path through leafless woods, and the river below was green and wide. The woods opened ahead onto a stump-studded clearing, in which the fort stood massive on its earthworks, log and stone. Originally it had been a French fort, now garrisoned by soldiers of the United States, who had rebuilt it from ruins. From its promontory on the north bank of the Ohio, one commanded a view of some thirty miles of the river, from the mouth of the Tennessee almost down to the Mississippi. It was almost like seeing as an eagle sees. There was a spirit in the place that was much older than the age of the fort. Drouillard knew this would have been a lookout place of the Ancients, those who had built the great, silent hill-mounds everywhere along these rivers, then had died or gone away before whitemen came.

But of course the eagle could look down with scorn even at this high, proud place, and see farther horizons.

Out of the woods now, he looked down to see if the big mystery boat was moored below the bluff, and it was. He had seen it
yesterday while hunting opposite the mouth of the Cumberland, had stood watching it pass below with four soldiers rowing and one on the tiller and another on the bow. It was a long, black-hulled galley keelboat with a sail mast forward and a cabin in the stern. This was not quite a real ship, he thought, such as the seagoing ships he had seen down at New Orleans, but it was much more like a ship than the usual flatboats and barges that brought whitemen and their goods down the Ohio to the Mississippi. Days before he had seen it, he heard the rumors and the mysteries about it. People all down the Ohio were talking about the coming of this boat. Rumors moved much faster than boats, and made mysteries that had to be figured out.

A rumor said this boat had been sent by the President of the United States, and that its commander was a friend of President Jefferson. Another rumor said that President Jefferson was going to take control of the Mississippi country from the Spaniards. Another rumor, or maybe a part of the same one, was that the
américains
coming on this boat intended to go all the way west to the ocean on the far side, and make a trading route all the way to the farthest place, called China.

To a solitary woodsman like Drouillard, such rumors were merely curiosities, and he could see no way they would be important to him, any more than the rumors three years ago when all the whitemen had expected strange happenings just because their calendar turned to 1800 and a new century. Whitemen presumed that their ways of counting time had power.

But there were two things about these rumors that made his instincts tingle, like the sound of a growl in the underbrush:

One of the soldier officers on this boat was said to be called Clark, a war name from his childhood memory: memories of shooting, houses burning, women dragging their children into the woods to hide from the Town-Burner soldiers whose leader was the dreaded
Clark
. The name was still a curse in the house of Drouillard’s uncle, Louis Lorimier, for Clark had destroyed Lorimier’s great trading post in Ohio and ruined him. Was this officer the same Clark, now coming again?

BOOK: Sign-Talker
3.41Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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