The True Account (21 page)

N
EVER HAD I SEEN
men toil so hard as the Corps of Discovery did during the portage around the Great Falls of the Missouri. As we had discovered soon after arriving there, the falls consisted of
five
separate waterfalls, and the shortest portage by them was an eighteen-mile route over the worst terrain since St. Louis. One day in early July the men set out in such a cloud of mosquitoes as caused my uncle to exclaim that the beplagued Egyptians never endured such a pestilence. He spent the rest of that morning inventing a nostrum against them, of which it may fairly be said that the remedy was worse than the malady. When at last he acknowledged to the explorers that the reeking unguent he had swabbed on their faces and hands consisted of one part elk's urine, one part grizzled bear's gall, and one part buffalo dung, they rushed coughing and gagging to the river and plunged into the water to scrub themselves clean. They were forced to interrupt these ablutions, however, when we began to be pelted with hailstones as large as winesap apples, causing us all to take refuge beneath the canoes and boats. I got a bruise on my head as large as a walnut and was very anxious for Bucephalus, Franklin's pony, and my uncle's white mule, which ran madly over the prairie in search of shelter. They turned up later, too lame and battered to be of use in drawing the boats and provisions on the great wheeled axles the men had cut from cottonwood trees, so the crew had to pull and push these rude carts themselves, with several grueling miles of the portage left to complete.

By midaftemoon the temperature had risen to 109 degrees, and some of the men swooned dead away. The axles and tongues of the carts began to split in two, and the prickly pears grew so thick as to be unavoidable. One three-inch thorn lodged in that part of Silas Goodrich's anatomy where a man would least wish to entertain such a guest, causing an angry and painful infection. Joseph Field was struck on the ankle by a rattlesnake and required to be bled and have gunpowder applied to his wound, then painfully burned off. Two other men were driven into the river by an enormous sow bear with three cubs.

Every night the grizzled bears that were so prevalent in the region had tried to invade the camp and get at our food. They were prevented from doing so only by the tireless efforts of Lewis's big Newfoundland dog, Seaman, who patrolled the perimeter ceaselessly. Finally the captains decided to conduct a hunt to kill these troublesome animals. But my uncle said there was no need to slaughter such noble beasts; he would show us a much more humane way of dealing with them, at the same time that we celebrated our nation's upcoming birthday.

Accordingly, a few evenings before July Fourth, with the prowling bears out in force, Seaman barking, and the men keeping nervously close to the fire, my uncle produced his latest invention—Chinese sky rockets, made from a few canisters of gunpowder mixed with some vermilion-colored stones crushed into a crimson powder and packed into hollowed-out tubes of cottonwood about as big around as a man's wrist. Dressed in a sort of toga dyed red, white, and blue, and wearing Clark's best top hat, the private proclaimed himself Pro Patria Americanus—a figure I believe he made up on the spot. He then delivered an Independence Day speech in a thundering voice, to the effect that though Vermont had but recently joined the Union, we Vermonters still regarded our state as a sovereign republic
whose citizens must never be told what to do, what to think, where and whether to fray or to pledge their allegiance to any governmental power or potentate whose seat lay beyond the Green Mountains, except they did so of their own free will.

At a signal from Pro Patria, the Field brothers and Sergeant Patrick Gass touched off the rockets, jointly intended to frighten away the bears and to celebrate the birthday of the nation whose prerogative to govern Vermont my uncle had just fiercely denied. But somehow the fireworks, in igniting, sped not heavenward but parallel to the ground, shrieking most hideously and exploding into a million red fragments about one and a half feet above the prairie. One missile, a little higher than the rest, tore through the hide coverings of the iron-frame boat Lewis was then constructing. Another killed a buffalo across the river. A third exploded near my uncle, setting his costume afire, upon which he plunged into the river to douse the flames, emerging a few moments later much chagrined. As for the bears, so far from being put to rout, they stood up on their powerful hind legs in a sort of semi-circle around the camp, with the great curiosity of their kind, and seemed very well pleased by the celebration. Which was immediately followed by a violent thunderstorm, during which my uncle was struck not once but twice by lightning, with no other ill effects than his being constrained to express himself for the next twenty-four hours in the tongue of ancient Assyria. During this interval, he composed a quatrain in that language, which he later rendered into English, called “Ode to Captain William Clark's Cottonwood Dugouts.” It provides, I think, a very fair example of the Vermont playwright's epic style.

 

O noble tree with snowy seeds,

You have fulfilled our watery needs.

Dugout canoes, glorious boats,

That never sink but always float.

 

“The final line seemed lame to me at first, Ti,” the poet said, after Captain Lewis's iron-frame boat was repaired and launched—and promptly started to take in water at the seams. “But prophetic. The cottonwood dugouts, you see
float.
Lewis's boat does not. And now I believe that I will go a-fishing, like old Walton's Piscator, and float some of my own lovely feathered creations over the many
Salmo secare jugulum
trout in this stretch of the river.”

That evening, while casting his flies in the still water a mile above the falls, he was so alarmed by a mysterious booming off in the distance that he came posting back to camp with his galoshes flopping as if being pursued by twenty Blackfeet. Lewis, who had heard the rumbling earlier in the day, maintained that there was a wholly rational explanation for the noise. My uncle replied that the explanation could only be witches. He then coined an axiom, very amusing to the men, which was that while he did not
absolutely believe
in witches, nonetheless he could not rule out the possibility of their existence, and so deemed it wise not to venture forth alone at night, or perhaps even in the daytime, in regions said to be frequented by them. The men led him on shamelessly, drawing him out into further absurdities on the subject, then terrifying him by hooting and moaning and flitting about after dark with torches and telling tales designed to frighten children around the winter hearth, every one of which my uncle credulously devoured.

H
IS GREAT FEAR
of witches notwithstanding, the next morning my uncle accompanied me to a plateau about ten miles from camp, where we promptly discovered the source of the mysterious rumbling. It was caused not by any supernatural agency but by the fighting of thousands of rutting bison, who crashed into each other with unspeakable fury in their annual ritual to determine which would mate with their females. Still, my uncle declared that the booming sound we had heard at camp was somewhat different from this unbroken bellowing—coming only at widely spaced intervals—and
that
sound he still believed to be the work of ghostly agents.

Wishing to learn as much as I could about bison, I observed the fighting animals through my glass for a long time. They appeared to be indestructible, continuing to batter away at one another long after I would have supposed their brains to be dashed to bits. Yet they never seemed to fight to the death. When at last one combatant had clearly prevailed, the vanquished bull limped off, leaving the nearest cow to the attentions of the victor.

Back at the camp, Franklin said he was surprised that the poor buffalo went to such lengths to accomplish what he was able to achieve with a few colored feathers in his hair and some face paint. The savant mentioned that bison were vulnerable to wildfires started by lightning. During thunderstorms he had witnessed bands of blue electricity racing along the horns of whole panicked herds, making them resemble so many spectral buffalo ghosting over the land—at which my uncle began to tremble violently.

Before leaving the subject of buffalo, I will add these curious observations. For drinking water they seemed to prefer the stagnant pools in their mud wallows to the clearest running streams. Sometimes at night it was impossible to sleep for their bellowing. In places their herds were so dense that we had to beat them out of our way with cottonwood branches. And I never did get their hump entirely right in my paintings.

 

Some of the most stimulating hours of our entire trip were those spent around the campfire conversing about the new animals and other wonders of the West. That evening, as we were telling the captains about our excursion to the buffalo mating grounds and I was working on a sketch of the fighting bison, Lewis happened to mention that on the river that afternoon he had seen a mallard duck, the first since last summer. He referred to it as a “duckinmallard,” as Virginians were wont to do—giving rise to the subject of bird nomenclature.

“The mallard,” announced my uncle, “is circumglobular, like its inveterate enemy the osprey, which sometimes, in the absence of fish to prey upon, will pluck up a waterfowl. It was given scientific status by Linnaeus in 1726. He saw fit to call it
Anas platyrhynchos,
from the Greek
platys,
broad or flat, and
rhynchos,
for beak But as Ti will remember, when we visited Linnaeus in Sweden I disputed this name hotly.”

“I did not know you had met the great botanist and zoologist in person, sir,” Captain Lewis said.

“To be sure,” my uncle continued, “‘broad-beak' is not, strictly speaking, inaccurate. The mallard does have a wide enough beak, for it feeds mainly on aquatic plants, not fish, and therefore does not need a pointed bill for spearing purposes. But as I told Carl—I knew Linnaeus as Carl, did I not, Ti?”

“You did, sir.”

“As I told Carl, why not something more suited to the mallard's majestic plumage? Why not
Gloriosus polychromatus?
Why, the blue-green sheen of the male's head alone is incomparable in nature. I defy you, Ticonderoga, to capture it in watercolors.”

“I think I would need oils, sir.”

“You would. For the bird's feathers themselves contain a natural oil that makes them gleam like precious gems. To return to Linnaeus, I was so exasperated with the fellow's poverty of imagination when it came to nomenclature that I took hold of his ruffled collar—this was after the king granted him a patent of nobility and he was styled Carl von Linné—I seized his ruffled collar—ha ha—and shook him by it, and his wig tumbled off.” My uncle glanced at me for confirmation.

“It did, sir. You gave Carl von Linné a good old-fashioned shaking.”

But thinking it likely that the captain, who was remarkably well informed about all things, knew very well that Linnaeus had died several years
before I was born,
I wished to vindicate True of any charge of deliberate untruthfulness. To that end, I approached Lewis later, as he walked away from the fire, and explained that when I was nine, my uncle and I had indeed made one of our frequent voyages
of the imagination,
in which, after crossing the Baltic Sea (my mother's stock pond) on my fishing raft, we had visited Linnaeus in Stockholm—our toolshed. For the occasion, my uncle placed my mother's cloth mop over his stocking cap for a wig in order to enact the role of the Swedish scientist—then pulled it off to question Carl in his own persona.

Lewis laughed. “Your uncle, Ti, is a remarkable man.”

“Yes, sir. Citing the
Systema Naturae,
he fiercely disputed Linnaeus's entire system of classification. They—Linnaeus and my uncle—were engaged in such a furious argument over flower parts that I feared they would come to blows. Fortunately, my mother just then called us in for supper.”

“Ti, did your uncle really think that you and he were visiting Linnaeus?”

“I asked my father that very question. He had a most excellent philosophical answer for me.”

“What was it?”

“That he had no earthly idea
what
my uncle thought.”

“A most excellent answer indeed, Ti,” Lewis said, laughing again.

“But did you know, captain, that at home my uncle has his own folio, sixteen hundred pages long, and called
Systema Naturae Americanae,
in which, in defiance of Linnaeus, he has reclassified all the animals and plants known in the United States?”

“I did not. What is this wonderful system based on?”

“It is a sort of ascendancy of survival, based on which animal devours which other plant or animal. Man is at the top of the list.”

“As he should be. But pray, Ti, which animal comes next in your uncle's system? The great African apes, I should imagine?”

“Why, no, sir. Hemp comes next.”

“
Hemp?
”

“Indeed. Next to man, my uncle believes that hemp represents the highest order of life.”

“Hemp is a
plant,
son. What can your uncle possibly be thinking?”

“His argument is that since man is the only being that much benefits from hemp, save the wild birds of the air that eat its tiny seeds, it should rank second to man. Next to humankind, my uncle believes, hemp is the most sublime creation in the universe. I have heard him say so many times.”

Lewis smacked his brow with his palm. “Your uncle believes
hemp
to be next to man in the order of creation? Well, well, well.”

“I can't say myself, captain. I don't use it.”

“Nor do I. But hemp is a sort of hobby-horse with your uncle, is it not? He rides it hard and hard. And yet he may have a point.”