From Sea to Shining Sea (111 page)

This was strange to George, all this sending away for things, store things, luxury things, to be sent to a town that had not even existed a quarter of a century ago when he had first come here into the Kentucky wilderness with his boisterous little band of volunteers. He remembered the first time he had stood here.

He looked down from the high ground where they were walking, looked westward along the Bear Grass Creek toward Louisville, that little line of street lamps down by the river, that town he himself had surveyed and laid out so many years ago. The rows of houses and warehouses were dim dark shapes in the snowy bottomland, still just visible in the faint, lingering afterlight of evening.

Civilization, he thought. Everything I did, I did to bring on civilization, and now look how it’s swallowed me up and gone on past.

He remembered the visions he had used to have of white stone cities, neat and clean and peaceful like the pictures of old Athens, on these stately bluffs above the Ohio. Well, Louisville was surely not that kind of a picture now. Perhaps it could be a great stone city someday, but now it was a dirty, disorderly, shabbily built collection of unpainted plank and log and stone buildings, their fronts usually spattered waist-high with mud from the miry streets, a town of pigs foraging in the streets, of mills and tanneries whose stinking wastes ran right off into the Ohio, of jerry-built wharves piled with kegs and bales and overrun with rats and brawling flatboaters and drunken Indians. Someday, he hoped, as the town grew richer maybe it could become more beautiful. Sometimes he would hope he would live to see that; other times he did not care what Louisville should become, or whether he lived to see anything. Sometimes he thought it would be a pleasure to sit on his porch across the river at Clarksville and watch a flood come along and wash the whole reeky mess of Louisville over the Falls. Sometimes Louisville affected him that way; it was so often a bitter reminder that everyone but himself, its founder, profited from it, and that anyone seemed all too ready to believe he was only its town drunk.

They stood on the brow of the high ground now, at the place they called their Overlook, gazing down and away at the wide river, the Falls, the hills of the Indiana lands on the other side. George’s bones were starting to ache as they did whenever he was in the cold air, but he ignored the ache.

The three Clark men stood in the snow and puffed their pipes, and thought. They thought of their father and mother in their graves side by side at the Mulberry Hill house.

They thought of Johnny, of his secluded grave back at old Caroline.

They thought of Dickie, who had no grave.

And they thought of William, of William, who might well by now be lying in some shallow grave on a wind-swept prairie or frozen stiff in a riverbottom or buried under a mountain avalanche; and their minds turned up the far Missouri. They all had prepared themselves to accept that he might be dead or lost, as no word had come for many months; they all realized that they likely were by now the three surviving sons of John and Ann Rogers Clark. But none of them ever had said that to any of the others.

George looked down the familiar river and his thoughts went with its flow, and he blinked and swallowed, because the face of Teresa had just risen for an instant in his mind and then vanished. Then he thought on up the unknown Missouri far, far beyond St. Louis, where the sun would just now be setting, and said:

“A toast, hey?”

They raised their cups and touched them, and then George raised his and held it toward the northwest, and they did likewise.

“A Merry Christmas to Brother Billy,” he said.

“A Merry Christmas,” said Edmund.

“Merry Christmas, William,” Jonathan added.

And they drank their brandy and turned away from the river and went back toward the house with the lighted windows.

Y
ORK WAS PUTTING TEA BEFORE
C
APTAIN
L
EWIS, TRYING TO
find a place for it on the table among the stacks of blotting paper, the pressed flowers, the vials of seeds, the tin boxes, the labeled insects, mouse skeletons, rattlesnake skulls, and bits of paper, when a shuddering groan of pain came through the walls and caused them both to turn their heads. Scannon raised his muzzle off his forepaws and cocked his ears, with a small, squeaking whimper. Lewis shook his head with sad resignation, and said:

“I thought it was supposed to be easy for Indian women. Haven’t you heard that, York?”

“Yas, Cap’m.”

“And for your women, too, I’ve heard.”

“White folk do say that, Cap’m.”

“Isn’t it so?”

“Sah, any wommin hurt the same, an’ I thank the Lo’d I never have to hurt like that, but the diff’ns be, Cap’m, how much do they holler.”

Lewis looked at the wall and thought of this, then he said, “This one hasn’t yelled once. But she’s been groaning and panting like that for a long time. It’s her first baby.”

“Yas, Cap’m.” York knew more about Sacajawea than anyone else did. York, and Scannon, had become deeply attached to the pregnant child, and protective of her. Lewis could tell by the anguish in their eyes that both were suffering with her.

Charbonneau’s other wives had moved back to the village, so they were not here to serve as midwives. Charbonneau himself was out hunting.

Lewis had tried to help her several times today; he had examined Sacajawea and as far as he could tell there was nothing awry, nothing turned wrong or anything; she was just little and narrow in the pelvis and the baby was big, that was all. Though Lewis considered himself a competent lay physician, births had always rattled him. So he had left Sacajawea in the care of an Indian woman who was the wife of René Jessaume, an interpreter, and had come back into his own room here to work on the plant and animal specimens for President Jefferson.

It was an enormous job. In the crates and boxes and tins and
bundles stored about this crowded little outpost, in the stacks of notes and sketches and maps that Clark had done, was contained more knowledge about the territory west of the Mississippi than had ever been recorded—surely a hundred times more knowledge. William’s maps, prepared from surveys and celestial sightings and interviews with scores of Indians and trappers, without a doubt would instantly render every other map of the West obsolete. And its value was enhanced by reams of information about weather patterns, navigational hazards, soil and minerals, food and fur game, and the histories, languages, dispositions, enmities and alliances, numbers and living modes of all the Indian tribes the Corps of Discovery had thus far encountered. Furthermore, the data did not even stop here at Fort Mandan; Clark had even made a projected map of the Upper Missouri to the Rocky Mountains, based on more interviews with wide-ranging Indians.

The storehouse of the little fort was stacked to the ceiling with crates full of specimens and artifacts of the sort Mr. Jefferson had ordered: the skins and skeletons and horns of animals unknown to science: mountain rams, antelopes, mule deer, burrowing squirrels, badgers, red foxes, gray hares, even a skin of the ferocious yellow bear, terror of the far plains; the expedition had not encountered such a bear yet, but had obtained a hide from the Indians, along with dire warnings of the beast’s strength and ferocity. There were Indian weapons and articles of their clothing and handiwork; there were hides upon which Indian artists had painted representations of historical battles; there were plants reputed to be remedies for the bites of rattlesnakes and mad dogs. And in addition to all these inert specimens, there were the cages in which magpies, prairie hens, and the beloved prairie dog had been kept alive for these many months. As for plants, Lewis had thus far preserved more than a hundred new specimens, pressed in purple blotting paper, with detailed notes on when and where they had been discovered, as well as any nutritive or medicinal values they had.

No, Mister Jefferson was not going to be disappointed. The Corps of Discovery was hardly halfway to the Pacific, but already had collected enough specimens to open and stock a museum, and it was invaluable.

It was such a lot of worry, though. Sometimes Lewis felt he would go mad from it. The crates and bags and portfolios and notes, the papers and specimens had to be put in comprehensible order by spring thaw, had to be protected from mold and vermin and deterioration. In the spring this treasure would have
to be loaded on the keelboat, entrusted to Corporal Warfington, and put on its hazardous way back down the wild Missouri, past the Sioux, to St. Louis, and thence over or around the other side of the Continent to Washington.

To add to Lewis’s worries now there was the keelboat itself. It was so locked in layers of river ice that parties working for days with axes and heated water had thus far been unable to free it. The keelboat would have to be released before the great spring ice-breaking, lest it be smashed to splinters.

Then there was all this worry about the British traders from the North West Company. These accursed British agents were consumed with curiosity about the expedition, and were forever visiting Fort Mandan, and pumping the neighboring Indians for information.

Lewis was certain now that his Corps of Discovery was in an unannounced race to the Pacific with the British concern, and this added to his anxieties. Jefferson had made it clear that a key objective of the journey was to thwart England’s designs on the control of trade in the Northwest; now the British seemed to suspect that the race was on and that this little American Army unit was its vanguard.

A few of the Indian chiefs had refused to become friends of the Corps. One important hold-out was the head chief of the Minnetarees, Le Borgne, the One-Eyed. He was reported to be very suspicious of the Americans and had thus far refused to come down from his town on the Knife River and smoke the pipe. His loyalty to the British traders could someday prove troublesome, and Lewis worried every day about him.

Most of the Indians in the vicinity had, however, been completely won over by the Americans. Both captains spent hours of every day treating the Indians for everything from rheumatism and infections to frostbite and snow-blindness; and Private Shields, that extraordinary blacksmith, had probably done as much for the cause of diplomacy by mending their tools and weapons, as York had done by infusing Strong Blood into the tribes’ unborn generations.

Now another heartbreaking groan came through the wall from the interpreters’ quarters, and Lewis winced over his tea.

Lord but I wish Clark was here, Lewis thought. The girl’s come to trust him like an uncle. If he was here I’ll wager she’d settle back and loosen up and yield that babe slick as pawpaw pulp, just to please ’im.

But William was not here. He had gone downriver a week ago, leading a hunting party of eighteen men. The stocks of
meat put by in November and December had been nearly depleted, and game was scarce within fifty miles of this cluster of Indian towns. So the hunters had set out across the blinding and featureless desert of ice and snow, leading three pack horses and pulling two handmade wooden sleds, determined to go as much as a hundred miles to find game if they had to. Their peril, out there in the deep snow and subzero prairie gales, had added to Lewis’s anxieties, as had the resultant undermanning of the fort.

And now on top of all those concerns, there was that nervewracking labor going on in the next room. If it were merely the suffering of a nameless and inconsequential squaw, the pity of it would have been distracting enough. But this girl, whose short life had already been an unremitting series of tragedies, was no mere squaw now. It grew ever more apparent that she would be a critically important figure when the expedition reached her people in the mountains. Lewis was growing alarmed at the possibility that she might die in childbirth.

He sipped at the edge of his teacup, then set it down with a sigh when another awful whimper came from Sacajawea’s quarters. That one had almost surfaced as a scream. He put the cup down. “Come,” he said to York. “Let’s see if we can do
something.”

They met René Jessaume going in. Jessaume was in character somewhat like Charbonneau, perhaps even outweighing him in self-importance. When they entered, they found Jessaume’s squaw sitting useless and apparently unconcerned with the sufferings of Sacajawea. This woman was older, something of a harlot, and Jessaume customarily rented her out to anyone who wanted to partake of her sluttishness. Jessaume threw her a few contemptuous Mandan words as they entered the room, and she rose sullenly and climbed the ladder into the sleeping loft above the room. Then Jessaume turned to look at Sacajawea, who lay on a pallet close to the fireplace. She was naked, covered with a sheen of sweat, having thrown the buffalo robe off the upper part of her body. Her hair was lank with sweat and bear grease. She was so small-chested and looked so stricken that she seemed more like a child with her belly swollen with illness than a mother in labor. She tried to smile at her friend York, though her little rib cage was heaving with the exertions of her breathing.

“Merde!”
Jessaume swore, stomping snow off his boots. “Who put this creature in the way of my fire?”

York swelled up and looked like the ferocious beast he was reputed to be. “I did,” he growled.

“Eh,” Jessaume said with a false smile. “That is good for her comfort.” He shrugged off his blanket-coat, looking down at her. “Jesu,” he growled. “How long does she do thees?”

“Since this morning,” said Lewis. It was now late afternoon.

“Eheu,”
he muttered with a shrug. “Ees pity this be the cold season.”

“Eh? Why say so?”

“Could catch the rattlesnake, and use its rattle.”

“What’s this?” Lewis said. “I have a snake’s rattle. If I can find it.”

“Eh! Get it,
mon capitaine.
Jessaume will show you how the Arikaras hurry a stubborn
enfant.”

Lewis hurried into his room and rummaged among boxes for the rattles he had kept as a specimen when one of the men had killed a western rattler in the plains last summer.