From Sea to Shining Sea (121 page)

“Hurt?” he said.

She groaned and nodded. He pressed again, at a different angle. “Hurt?” he said again. No. “Now? Hurt?” No. Then again, and she jerked.

Well. It told him little; it told him only that likely there was something in her reproductive organs that hurt. And if the trouble was there, he did not have any idea what to prescribe or do about it, and he was sure that even if Meriwether Lewis were there, he would not know what to do about it either.

We both know well enough how to stop and start the bowels and lance pustules and treat felons and set broken bones and cure clap and clean infections and sew up gashes and pull teeth and amputate frosted extremities, he thought, because our boys have had a steady round of those things.

But none o’ them has anything like this, he thought. How can we be prepared for something like this?

H
E GAVE HER A DOSE OF LAUDANUM TO EASE THE PAIN SO
that she could sleep. Possibly the cold she had has got her infected someplace down there in her menses, he thought. He remembered how his touch in her had made her wince.

But it could be that the press of my finger just bothered some inflamed place in her intestines, he thought.

He realized that he was having wishful thinking; that if it really was intestinal he might still be able to do something for it. So just in case, he gave her a dose of Jesuits’ bark, cinchona. She was almost too listless to drink, and just trustingly let him trickle the fluid into her mouth, and she swallowed it. He then soaked a wad of gauze in it and inserted it into her vagina, packing it in next to the uterus.

I wish Lewis was here, William thought. He’s the doctor when it comes to real bad cases.

Many of the men this evening were in pain with swellings, swellings in their joints, swellings in their groins, painful hot swellings in their armpits, all of which seemed to be aggravated by the constant cold water and the bruisings they were taking in the river. Many had horrendous boils and carbuncles in those places where their flesh sweated in elkhide and rubbed constantly
with their movements: in their crotches, under their arms, inside their knees. William himself had a swelling on his ankle that had started, if he remembered correctly, when a prickly pear spine had broken off in the tendon and had been rubbed constantly by the edge of his moccasin. It was hard like a grape under the skin and he could feel that it was achingly distended with pus, but he could not take time to sit down with poultices and draw it to a head; he was too busy with running the contingent and doctoring the others. In exhaustion this evening, he had to do a job he particularly hated: a tooth extraction, on Bratton.

The soldier sat on a log before him, his left cheek big as an apple.

“Well, now, Bratton,” William joked. “I don’t know how I’m s’posed to work in your mouth if y’ don’t spit out that quid first.” Bratton, one of the few men of the whole Corps not addicted to tobacco, grinned lopsidedly and drooled. With his hands clenched between his thighs to control his fright, and that distorted grimace on his face, the big Virginia Irishman looked like a perfect imbecile, and some of the soldiers in the sick line were merrily telling him so.

“Y’ don’t drink, either, do ye, Bratton?” William noted. Bratton shook his head. “That’s a pity,” William said. “You know there’s a dram o’ whiskey for a tooth-pull. T’ ease the hurt. Want yours? No? All righty, then. Open up here.”

“I’ll drink his whiskey for ’im, suh,” said Collins.

William stood with his pliers ready, and said, “Y’ know, I once had you wrong, Collins; I thought ye were a shirker. But now y’ just volunteer for things so eager-like!”

The men laughed.

“Sense o’ duty, suh,” Collins said, bowing like a courtier. “I’ll drink his whiskey gladly.”

“But Collins, you don’t have a toothache.”

“I can git one, suh.”

And while everyone was laughing at that, William reached in with the pliers and yanked out Bratton’s decayed yellow molar. Bratton sat there stunned with surprise and pain, drooling blood, eyes bulging and pouring tears. “Now, Bratton, here’s your dram. Y’ can do what ye like with it, even give it to Collins there.”

Bratton held the glass, looked for a moment at the angelically smiling Collins—and then tossed it down his own throat.

“Horrors,” groaned Collins. “Another saintly soul lost t’ th’ Corn Devil!”

*     *     *

“T
HIS IS A TRULY SORRY STATE
,” O
RDWAY WAS LAMENTING
to William the next afternoon. “Not countin’ the pint or so Cap’n Lewis is carryin’, we’re down to one gallon of ardent spirits.”

William tried to make light of this depressing report. “Well, we knew it couldn’t last forever, didn’t we? Not with a crew like this ‘n.”

“Hi! Hi! Cap’n! I see Joe Fields a-comin!” cried a voice over the roaring water.

William clapped Ordway on the shoulder. “Don’t they say good news always follers bad?”

They could see him now, high on the distant bluff, half-loping and half-limping, rifle in one hand, the other hand waving in great sweeps as he came toward them. Now they could faintly hear his voice. “What’s ’e sayin’, Cap’n, can y’ make it out?”

A smile was spreading over William’s face. “Unless it’s just wishful hearin’, Sarge, I think he says they found th’ Great Falls.”

The men had heard this now, and they knew at once it meant that their captains had been right all along and every one of them had been wrong, but they all stopped where they stood now, in the cold, rushing water, on the banks, all turned to grin at William now, and as if on a signal, they all began to cheer him. He gave them a big wave, then jumped off the riverbank and waded to the white pirogue, clambered dripping over the side and knelt by Sacajawea. She had raised her head slightly at the sounds of shouting and she looked at him, her face gray and slick with sweat, eyes sunken, hair hanging in damp strings.

“Janey,” he exclaimed, grasping her hand. “Janey, listen! They found the falling water! Soon now, very soon, Janey, we’ll be in the land of your people! D’ ye hear me, child?
Your people.”
A trace of a smile began to show on her wasted visage. “Aye, Janey,” he said, “we’re a-goin’ to need ye then, so you start gettin’ well right now, y’ hear?”

She nodded, a weak, weak motion, then her head fell back.

His smile wavered.

He knew it might be weeks yet before they could find her nomadic tribe.

And in truth, she did not look as if she would last another day.

F
IELDS GAVE HIS REPORT WHILE SITTING ON A ROCK GETTING
prickly pear needles tweezed out of his feet. William listened and pulled the needles and asked questions.

“Thursday morning,” said Fields, “that’s when we first heard the waterfalls. Goodrich heard ’em first whilst we was a-movin’ over high ground, and he hollered. We went to look. We seen a cloud of mist ’fore we got to the Falls. Then we seen ’em. Cap’n; it’s the damndest most stupefyin’ sight ever fell on my eyes, I swear t’ God! Eighty feet high if they’s an inch, and th’ whole blamed Missouri comes over white as snow. And roars? Ye have to holler to talk over it. Cap’n Lewis he went out on a buttment of rocks just below the middle of the Falls, midst all that white water, an’ sat there I don’ know, an hour, two hours, three, just a-writin’ notes. I swear, Cap’n, th’ ground itself seems t’ shake. Well, sir, as if that wasn’t enough, next day we went on up and found four more falls, all in less’n ten mile, I bet.” The men, wet, mud-smeared, were standing around listening eagerly to all this.

“Ten mile, ye say,” William commented. “Y’d make the portage then to be about ten mile?”

“Mebbe more like twenty, Cap’n. See, there’s a bad rapid maybe three-four miles this side o’ the Falls, that we didn’t see on the way up, but I found it today comin’ down ’cause I hung closer by the river. Ouch!” His foot jerked as William found another thorn. “An’ then,” he went on, “they’s some horr’ble deep ravines openin’ through the cliffs into th’ river; those would have t’ be gone ’round, sir; add mebbe four-five mile. But these is guesses, Cap’n. A survey’ll show some better.”

“What’s th’ overland like?”

“Flat to rollin’, sir. Hard stony ground an’ prickly pear, not a blessed tree anywhere, ’cept a few in the bottoms—and there’s scarce any bottoms at that. It’s hot as a griddle on them plains up there, too, when th’ sun’s out. More buffalo’n I ever seen in one place, an’ elk galore. Goodrich been catchin’ a trout a minute, too, so th’ eatin’s real good. But hit’s goin’ be a tough haul, sir, no way t’ make it easy, I’m afear’d.”

William had already arrived at that conclusion. Twenty miles in summer heat over stones and prickly pears, toting all these canoes and baggage. That’d kill ordinary folk, he thought.

But we can’t let on, he thought. “Doesn’t sound too bad, does it, boys?” he suggested. They all hooted and laughed. They hardly seemed to be thinking about the hardship of it; they were just glad they were on the right river.

“As for me,” said George Shannon’s clear, young voice, “I’ll be happy to git out o’ water for a spell anyways.”

William smiled and nodded. These aren’t ordinary folk, he thought.

C
APTAIN
L
EWIS CAME DOWN WITH HIS SCOUTS AND MET THE
main party at the foot of the big rapids, and made straight for the shelter where Sacajawea lay near death. She had been refusing to take medicine, and seemed to have prepared herself to die. He knelt hatless by her pallet and gazed down at her, daylight shining on his sun-bleached hair, and studied her while taking her pulse with a very grave face. His face had been sun-and-wind-burned to a color darker than hers. She was in fact more gray than brown now.

“Fetch me my pouch there,” he said. “I got some chokeberry root bark in there last week up the river. I was likin’ to die one day with a seized-up gut, and that bark cured me entire by bedtime. Have York boil a black tea of it. Meantime, let’s try to get some opium in her. Got to strengthen that pulse ere she just slips away.”

“The boys found a sulphur spring t’day,” William said, kneeling near the girl and unconsciously stroking her forehead with his palm. “Reckon what that might do?”

“We better try it, too. Aye.”

“I had ’em bring back several gallon of it for us all. There’s aplenty.”

When the Indian girl was full of every remedy they could think of, the captains spent two minutes congratulating each other on their good judgment about the river fork and the finding of the Falls, then set about planning the portage. “God bless us,” Lewis exclaimed. “Wait till you see those cascades! I’ve seen many a grand spectacle, but never a thing like ’em!”

They decided to leave the heavy white pirogue rather than portage it. They would dig another cache to lighten the load further, and begin making a skin covering for the iron-frame boat, which would be considerably lighter. Lewis unpacked it and found every piece for its assembly—except one screw. Somewhere along the tortuous way in the two years of this journey, a single screw had been lost. One essential screw. “Damnation!” Lewis cursed. This boat was his pet.

John Shields bent down near him, and looked at the hole where the screw was supposed to go. “Heck fire, Cap’n,” he said. “Don’t y’ fret about that. I’ll make y’ one just like ’er in ’bout a half an hour.”

“Shields,” Lewis said, “if I was a general, I’d make you a colonel.”

They decided to stay here until the squaw either got better or died. They would not try to move her in her present condition. William sent Private Frazier, a fair map-maker with a keen land sense, out with another man to examine and sketch the land on the south bank of the river. Lewis had decided already that the terrain on the north side of the river was too broken for portage.

“Now, friend,” Lewis said, casting his gaze over the canoes and bundles and tools, kegs, bags, weapons, powder canisters, ropes, sails, hides, and instruments, “if you had to transport all that baggage over a long stretch—as ye do—how would you go about it?”

“Why, I’d just load ’em up on oxcarts and wagons, and I’d tell the teamsters, ‘All right, boys, I’ll meet ye at the other end.’ That’s how I’d do it if I had my choice.” He smiled wistfully.

“Aye, me too. But so much for that. Havin’ no oxen or wagons, as we don’t, how would you do it then?”

“Well, I’d dread to try it without wagons. The men could carry it all over on their backs, then carry the canoes. But that would take a lot of trips. Like ants. And over prickly pear. But say …”

“Are you thinking what I am, maybe?”

“I’m thinkin’ we can’t make oxen or even horses. But I’d reckon a people who can manufacture an iron screw in a place like this could make a wooden wagon. As for beasts o’ burden, our boys already shown us they’re that.”

“Aye. And we’ve leather aplenty for harnesses. Let me get a notebook here, and we’ll design us a wagon or two, say what?”

“P
ULSE REGULAR
,” L
EWIS SAID WITH SATISFACTION
. S
INCE
the dosage of sulphur water, she had been improving steadily. But then it could have been the cataplasms applied to her uterus, too. Whichever it had been, intestines or female organs, they were getting better. By the third and fourth days she was eating broiled buffalo and broth, sitting up for long spells, and, finally, walking. By Thursday, as the carpenters were finishing the two frail wagons, the girl was able to walk to the river and go fishing.

Throughout the chasm of the Great Falls there hung a stench of rot. It came from countless dead and decaying buffalo. The beasts, immense herds of them crowding down narrow, steep trails to the river to drink, were forever pushing each other off into the swift river, and many were carried over the Falls and killed. Their carcasses, in every state of decomposition, were heaped in the shallows and bottoms, where they attracted buzzards, wolves, grizzly bears, and clouds of flies. The stench was
nauseating in the extreme, but it was just something to get accustomed to. The presence of so many bears made it necessary to go armed and in pairs everywhere. Scannon barked all night at the scent of prowling bears, probably keeping them out of the camp but definitely costing everyone much needed sleep.