From Sea to Shining Sea (108 page)

At last, Lewis’s voice intruded on the eerie quiet:

“The Northern Lights! That, by heaven, is it!”

William looked for a moment at Lewis’s profile, at the breath condensing under his nose; then he turned his eyes back to the immense, delicate display and watched it tremble, drift, furl, like stardust or moonfilm, silent, yet creating in his mind’s ear an almost audible tinkling, like diamond-sand sifting through Eternity’s hourglass.

Far away, from the Mandan Indian villages across the Missouri, he could hear voices, coming faintly across that great distance, through the windless dry cold air of the prairie night, voices so small they seemed the vocal chorus to that imaginary star music. Mandans are out, too, he thought, standing among their houses looking up at this same heavenly show. And I wonder what they’re making of it in their superstitious fancies.

He turned to look westward, up and over the gray ribbon of the river, and could just see the nearest, and largest, Mandan town, Matoonha, on its fine bluff overlooking the river.

I
T WAS A STRANGE AND MYSTERIOUS PLACE, THAT
M
ANDAN
nation. The Mandans were Indians, right enough, yet they were unlike Indians in some strange and subtle ways. For Indians, they were stable, not nomadic, and prosperous and peaceable. Their lodges were spacious, earth-covered domes, laid out in a town surrounded by an earthen wall with a dry moat outside it, in the manner of ancient Old World cities William had read about. Since the arrival of the Corps here more than a week ago, the Mandans had shown generosity and peaceful intentions, and a willingness to accept the Americans as their neighbors for the winter. They had brought many gifts of corn, squash, beans, and meat. They had accepted the Americans’ meager gifts gracefully, and had responded with unbridled delight to the white men’s fiddle music and dancing—particularly when the French
engagé
Rivet had danced upside down, on his hands.

The Mandan women were boldly affectionate toward the white men, and their husbands complaisant, even encouraging, in that matter, and William knew that a few of the soldiers already were establishing diplomatic connections with their new Indian neighbors, in that most intimate of ways. “I tell ye it’s so,” Sergeant Ordway had exclaimed one day, “it hung down ’twixt her legs like a night-crawler, long as my cock! Well, almost as long.” Some of the Mandan women, it seemed, stretched the clitoris, for ornament.

“And how d’ye know it was that long?” William had asked. “Did you make comparisons?”

“Well, yes, sir,” Ordway had replied, “I did.”

M
OST INTRIGUING OF ALL TO THE CAPTAINS, THOUGH, WERE
some of the myths of origin they had heard from the Mandan elders. They told of a flood over all the earth, and of a great canoe in which men and animals had been saved from drowning, and a dove sent to find land. They told of a son of the Great Spirit, who had come to live on the earth, and had been killed, and had become alive again. No one remembered his name.

Some of the Mandans had gray eyes and auburn hair, and from all this evidence Lewis had come to suspect they were descended from the fabled white Indians about whom Jefferson often had speculated. Some legends had it that the white Indians had come from Wales in a fleet of long ships, nearly a thousand years ago, and had been forced deeper and deeper into the heart of the continent by native Indians, gradually becoming less Welsh and more Indian and forgetting how to read or speak their Celtic tongue, forgetting the name and the nature of their Christian God.

This was an eerie legend to ponder, and William had dreamed of the white Indians two nights. William was a practical sort of man, not fanciful, not often spooked by mysteries. But this of the Mandans had troubled his sleep, and to think of such things now, to think of such great spaces and ages while standing under this cold light-show in the firmament, sixteen hundred miles from white civilization, this could make him shudder, as ghost stories had when he was a boy back in Caroline County.

Imagine it, he thought, standing here half a continent away from home, looking at cold flames in the northern sky.

Imagine a people ever forgetting who they were. Imagine a people ever forgetting who their God was.

T
HIS SQUAW WAS A CHILD HERSELF, BUT SHE WAS BIG WITH
child.

William put his pencil down on the map he was making, and stood up behind his desk to look at her.
“This
is the Snake Woman?” he asked.

She was so spare and small that the swollen belly made her look like a snake that has swallowed an egg. On her shoulders she bore a huge bundle of tanned hides, which must have outweighed her.

“Oui, capitaine,”
grunted the flamboyant French Canadian who was her husband. “Yes,” he corrected himself, his swarthy brow knit in embarrassment; he was trying to hire on as an interpreter for these Americans and already had replied in a wrong tongue.

“Tell her to put that load down,” William said. The man grunted something and she lowered it to the floor.

William looked at the little squaw-girl and at her rancid, grizzled oaf of a husband, who was probably three times her age, three times her size. His name was Touissaint Charbonneau, and even his big sturdy body hardly seemed big enough to contain all his self-importance. He had three Indian wives, he had boasted; this pregnant waif, of the Snake, or Shoshoni, tribe, was his youngest. The Shoshonis lived far west in the high mountains, and thus this wife was of great interest to the red-haired captain.

William had seldom seen such big, intense eyes as hers; he could almost feel them staring at him. “What d’ye call her?” William asked.

“Sa-ca-ja-we-ah,” said the Frenchman. “Ees Hidatsa, mean ‘bird.’ Good name, ha! She eat little, chatter much!”

William repeated that in his mind, to make it stay. Still another Indian name to remember, among the scores he had learned since the arrival in the Mandan country.
Sa-ca-ja-weah.
Outside the hut, a constant din of ax-blows and saw-groans went on, the sounds of the Corps building its winter quarters. The scent of new-cut willow wood was everywhere. Now and then a harsh, barking noise would pass overhead, another southbound flock of geese.

He looked at the girl and said:

“Shoshoni?”

Her eyes widened at this word. She nodded her head.

“Tell me,” he said, “how you come here.”

Her face took on a look of despair as her husband translated this request into the Minnetaree tongue, with oathlike bursts and peremptory gestures, the gruff and contemptuous manner of a big man trying to impress other big men with his bigness.

The squaw-girl mumbled a few protesting words, which provoked a sneer and another snarling outburst from Charbonneau. He turned and shrugged to William.

“Slowly,
M’sieu le Capitaine.
She say she may not talk of the dead. But I will make her tell.” He tensed his lower lip and turned on her. His face was shining with sweat and greasiness. He looked impatient, and resentful that the American captain was more interested in his squaw’s knowledge than in his own.

William smiled and went back behind his own desk, motioning toward one of the crates that were stacked everywhere in the room. “Have her sit and take her time. I want to hear.”

“Capitaine, she is but a stupid woman. Anything she know, I know ten times over. She talk too much already, and should not be encouraged.”

“Mister Charbonneau, you talk too much yourself. I already know your history, and an interesting one it is, too, but now I want to hear hers.”

It came slowly, dredged up through a memory turbid with five years of slavery, terror, and drastic change, and translated through the exasperating interruptions and abuses of Charbonneau. She had been the daughter of a great Shoshoni chief. Her people had lived in the Shining Mountains. They had come down from the mountains to hunt buffalo every year in a plain where three rivers came together to start this great river. Minnetarees had attacked their camp one spring, caught her running, killed many of her people, probably her father among them.

Then, starving and often beaten nearly to death, she and her fellow captives, all women, had been brought down the great river. One woman had vanished on the trail, perhaps escaped. Sacajawea had been brought here to the Knife River towns and grown up a slave. She had been passed among families, and finally a few seasons ago she had been won by Charbonneau in a game of hands. This, Charbonneau said, concluded her story. “I am most skilled in such games, and it is her good fortune,” he boasted. “I bring my women good gifts from trade. They are happy to be the women of Charbonneau, to bear me sons. This,” he growled with a yellow-toothed grin showing through his greasy beard, “will be the second son that I claim.” He pointed with a dirty-nailed thumb at the girl’s abdomen. “Ha, haaah!”

“Now ask her this,” William said. “Does she remember the land of her people? Would she know the way back? Does she know where their towns are?”

Charbonneau rolled his eyes. “She war only eight, nine year old then,” he protested.

“Ask ’er, please,” William said. “It’s important to us.” William and Captain Lewis had been here at the Mandan nation for two weeks now, and during their stay they had questioned many chiefs of the Mandans, Minnetarees, and Anahaways who coexisted in this area, to learn whatever they might know about the Upper Missouri and a passage through the Shining Mountains. It appeared now that only the Shoshonis would know of a way through the mountains. Too, the Shoshonis were known for their large herds of fine horses, and horses would be needed to carry the Corps and its baggage across the mountains where boats could not go. If this squaw-child knew how to find her people and could talk with them, it could mean the difference between getting to the far Columbia and not getting to it. It had become necessary to plan hundreds of miles ahead, seasons ahead. It would be next summer or fall before they would reach those mountains—if they ever reached them—but they would have to be ready for them when they got there.

The girl-squaw had gone far back behind her eyes, and now she was talking. Charbonneau said:

“She remember this: where three rivers come together, in a wide valley in mountains. There is a great rock which look like beaver head. Here it is that her people were killed and she was caught. Above that place her people live different places in the mountains and would be hard to find. She was very young then.”

William had taken up a pencil and was writing down this about the landmarks. It did not seem like much, but it proved to him that her memory was remarkably good. Other Indians had spoken of the three forks. Many of the Minnetaree men had been there as hunters, and also to raid the Shoshoni horse herds. From their descriptions of the Upper Missouri, William had been sketching crude maps of the route they would take next spring—filling in, with informed guesses, that vast blank space that existed on any map of the continent, between these Mandan villages and the Pacific shore some 1500 miles away. He knew that somewhere about two hundred miles upriver from the Mandan towns, a great river the French called
Roche Jaune
emptied into the Missouri from the southwest. The next great landmark, some 350 miles beyond that Yellow Stone river, would be a tremendous Missouri River waterfall whose noise could be heard for miles across the high plains. Less than a hundred miles above those falls lay the first range of the Rocky Mountains, which the
Indians called the Shining Mountains. The Missouri River, as he now could picture it, would meander through broad valleys among three ranges of the Rocky Mountains, navigable by small boats, and there would be the three forks and the Shoshoni hunting grounds. The northernmost of those three forks would fetch up against the fourth and last range. Somewhere there was a pass over that range, and with the help of Shoshoni guides and Shoshoni horses the Corps would be able to cross over the pass to find the headwaters of a westward-flowing river full of the large Pacific fish called salmon. From there of course he could presume that it would be an easy downstream boat ride to the Pacific. Downstream! he thought. How good that sounded after the five months of rowing, poling, and towing that had brought them from St. Louis to this wintering-place!

As for the mountains they would have to cross, the Indians’ descriptions made him believe they were not like the Alleghenies, as Jefferson believed, but probably much higher. Still, he had been led to believe they should be no harder to cross than the Alleghenies, thanks to rivers. If the forked Missouri wound among those mountains as the Potomac and Shenandoah and Monongahela rivers wound through the Alleghenies, the ranges would be no great obstacle. But the traverse apparently would require the cooperation of the Shoshonis, and that was why William Clark now was having this unorthodox notion of taking a girl squaw along as a member of a military expedition. Her husband Charbonneau was a man of no observable merit except his ability to speak in the Minnetaree tongue. But he was strong and wilderness-wise and would not be a burden if he had to be taken along as a condition of obtaining his squaw’s services. William had made up his mind to hire the couple, come next spring, and would broach the idea to Lewis this very afternoon. At the moment, Lewis was in another of the huts, doctoring two soldiers who had cut themselves with axes while hewing logs for the fort.

Charbonneau now was opening and displaying, on the floor, the huge bundle of skins he had made his squaw carry over.

At this moment, the door of the hut was opened. The little Indian girl gasped, then yelped. William glanced up. She was petrified, both palms over her mouth, and he saw what she was staring at.

Lewis had come in, so blinded by afternoon sunlight that he had almost stepped upon the girl, and the front of his clothing was drenched with the blood of surgery. It was he whose appearance had made her gasp. And behind him loomed the horror that had made her cry out:

York, hulking, scowling, his clothes also spattered with crimson.