From Sea to Shining Sea (122 page)

And so the carpenters worked in the heat and the stink, black with flies, and the men moved the canoes up a creek where the banks were sloped gently enough to permit them to carry them up onto the plain. The men had found only one tree in the neighborhood big enough and sound enough to make wheels of; it was a cottonwood twenty-two inches through at the base of the trunk. From this they had cross-sawed two sets of four wheels, and a few spares. These would be brittle wheels, they were sure of that, so they cut still more spares until there was no wood left. There seemed not to be a straight enough piece of wood in the valley for axletrees, so it became necessary to cut up the mast of the pirogue.

The little four-wheel carts were then outfitted with tongues, and the men made harnesses for themselves, with all the predictable jokes about who was dumb as an ox or stubborn as a mule. The white pirogue was lashed down in a brushy covert, and a few more expendable items interred in a second cache. Moccasins were patched and double soled. Charbonneau was bawled out roundly for suggesting again that he wanted to take his squaw and go home. William surveyed the portage route in detail, finding that there were several gullies that could not be avoided, and that there was one big hill of gradual slope, and one steep hill, that would have to be climbed. William also measured all the Falls by instrument, pausing now and then to sit down and just marvel at the hissing, thundering, flashing, steaming, foaming, rainbow-catching beauty of it.

What a poem Johnny could have written about this vision, he thought. The steep, high, striated rock cliffs, through which this boiling water-chute had carved its way, were massive—two and three hundred feet, and nearly perpendicular—and yet seemed to tremble frail as silk in the mist beyond the thundering cascades, as if all this rock might yet simply dissolve and be washed away in a moment. After a while William realized that his equilibrium, even his whole sense of real being, was being altered by this constant rushing motion, by these great translucent sheets and opaque waves that were never still and never the same, yet never changed their shapes; and so he returned to get his surveying instruments, then went to the portage trail, gradually recovering as if from a trance.

He and his surveyors drove stakes to mark the way, and the sweat in their eyes and the prickly pear spines in their feet brought them, little by little, back to the painful reality of the task ahead. As if the spines were not sufficient torture, the clayey ground itself—trampled when wet by hundreds of thousands of buffalo hooves and then baked hard as brick by the sun—twisted ankles mercilessly and tore moccasins to shreds. Every step was a jolt of pain now. And they would have to cross and recross this route, he estimated, for two or three weeks before the portage was done.

Finally, Meriwether Lewis took his small advance party, laden with the ninety pounds of iron boat-frame, and set out for the head of the Falls, where they would set up an advance camp, and assemble and cover the vessel. And by the night of the twenty-first of June, all was ready.

The ordeal would begin at sunrise.

E
ACH WAGON HAD FOUR OF THE WILLOW-DISK WHEELS.
Each wheel stood about as high as a man’s knee, had been sawn about six inches thick so it would not be apt to split easily under the weight and the jouncing, and had a round hole in the center cut to fit the shaved end of an axletree. The wheel and axletree were lubricated with tallow. A peg, fitted snugly through an auger-hole at each end of the axletree, secured the wheel to keep it from wobbling or working its way off. Two sets of axles and wheels were set parallel on the ground about ten feet apart, then across them two long sapling-trunks were laid and strapped tight with wet rawhide. When a canoe was set down on these saplings with its round bottom between them and then lashed in place with more rawhide, it made a capacious wagon bed, which was filled with baggage. Elkhide ropes were passed through augerholes in a tongue forward of the front axle, and to these ropes each man’s leather shoulder-harness was attached. Thus each wagon could be pulled by a team of as many as ten men. The first two canoes had thus been converted into wagons the night before, and loaded, and were standing on the plain silhouetted by the dawn light this morning when the men awoke.

In anticipation of their labors, the troops were fed all they could eat of hoe-cake, elk, and buffalo. They were a happy lot this morning. They chewed, and sipped tea, and gazed proudly at the wagons. “Not too sorry, considerin’, eh what, Joe?” one would say. “Fancy that,” another would exclaim.
“Wheels!
I never thought t’ see a wheel agin, did you?”

Sergeant Ordway was to be left in charge of the goods here at
the base camp, with Charbonneau, York, Goodrich, Sacajawea, and the papoose. Lewis, Sergeant Pat Gass, Joe Fields, and Shields the smithy had already carried their loads of iron and tools up to make a camp on an island at the far end of the portage, where they would assemble the iron-frame boat. That left Nathaniel Pryor to be the sergeant in charge of the wagons, and he was soon swaggering around calling himself the “muleskinner” and saying, “Now, whar’d I put my whip?”

The sun was still behind the purple eastern mountains when the harnessed men hitched themselves up to the wagons, laughing, snorting, stamping the ground, and braying, “Heee, haw, hee haw!” William slipped his shoulders into a knapsack containing about seventy pounds of meat, a notebook, and some instruments and medicines, laid his rifle across his shoulder and put his umbrella-tomahawk in his belt, squinted ahead over the lilac-gray prairie, looked back at York and Sacajawea, who stood marveling at this, then he yelled out, “All set, Sarge, move ’em out!”

“GEE-YAP!” Pryor bellowed, swinging his arm around his head as if snapping a twenty-foot bullwhip.

The men leaned forward into their harnesses; leather creaked; the hide ropes stretched; the men leaned farther, and the wheels began to turn. Slowly, grinding and squeaking and rattling, the wheeled canoes began trundling over the stucco-like ground. The men arched their backs and pushed with their brawny legs and the vehicles came along, lurching and jolting, their bare masts swaying. “Son of a bitch,” groaned Private Proctor, sweat breaking out on his face before he had taken twenty steps, “this lunker is
heavy!”

“Nice and easy, boys,” William sang out. “Plenty o’ time! No racing!” The men laughed between gasps.

“Comédie,”
Charbonneau muttered, watching them go. “Always the beeg jokings.” He was full of bitterness. His squaw, under his questioning, had told him how the Red Hair Chief had examined her in that part. He had nearly burst with jealous rage. And when he had demanded to take Sacajawea back to the Mandans, he had been tongue-lashed! Charbonneau in that moment had come within an inch of sticking his knife in the red-haired
capitaine.
He turned and looked at his squaw. She was standing there laughing and smiling and waving at them and the men all were laughing at the words of the
capitaine. “Tu,”
he muttered. “You ought to died.”

The novelty of being human mules was soon gone, and the laughter was replaced by groans, the rasp and gasp of desperate
breathing, by quick curses and long, involuntary moans. Under the best of circumstances it had been impossible for a walking man to avoid all the prickly pears; now, confined in their traces, they could hardly sidestep any. Even the rawhide outersoles of their moccasins could not deflect all the spines, and soon every man’s feet were viciously sore in a dozen places. Every puncture was magnified by the pressure of the pulling. William knew what the weight was doing to their feet; the weight of his pack seemed to drive every spine an inch deeper into the flesh of his feet, and twist his ankles that much more sharply whenever he stepped into the cement-hard track of a buffalo’s hoof. The carbuncle on his ankle burned and throbbed steadily, as if a brand were being held on it.

From the moment the sun came over the mountains, it had been scorching, and at once all were pouring sweat and wishing they were back in that cold river from which they had just escaped so gratefully.

At midmorning they came to the first hill. They started up. It was one of those long, long prairie inclines that look minor because of the surrounding vastness, but come to seem endless as their horizons keep receding. On this slope the weight of the canoe-wagons seemed to triple. The men soon were straining so far forward in their harnesses they appeared to be crawling. William looked back once and saw them coming along this way, literally on all fours now, clutching at knobs and stones and tufts of grass for one more ounce of pulling power. They really did look like beasts of burden now, four-limbed little creatures struggling across an enormous, shimmering, yellow-brown desertscape, billows of white dust drifting off their little wheel tracks, the blue mountains looking on indifferently from three sides, while a now-forgotten river thundered down giant stairsteps in its sheer-walled canyon two miles to their right.

T
HEY HAD COVERED EIGHT MILES BY NOON, AND IT HAD
begun to seem that they might reach the upper end of the portage by nightfall. But now the awful roughness of the ground had started taking its toll on the rickety wagons. Coming down into a shallow ditch that formed the head of a deep ravine, the first wagon lurched into a depression with a crunching jolt that snapped its front axletree. While the men assigned as wagonwrights knelt in the suffocating ditch to attach a new one, the others shrugged out of their harnesses, gulped water from a keg, then slumped down on the bare ground in the blazing sunlight
and gasped themselves to sleep. When the wagon was fixed they got up, into harness, and pulled.

W
ILLIAM WENT ON AHEAD.
F
OR A WHILE HE COULD HEAR
them behind him, their voices coming faintly across the treeless space, now and then a laugh—for, amazingly, some of them were still merry—and sometimes that low, wooden trundling of the wagons. He limped on under the heavy pack, sweat gushing from every pore. The sky was hot, naked pearl, and the sun burned straight down on the top of his head. When he thought his brain was going to broil, he remembered the tomahawk umbrella and raised it. He stood in its shade a moment, resting, looking back, and saw the wagons, mere specks now, move down a gentle slope and disappear behind the shoulder of a rise. He turned and limped on, heading toward the next route stake. He kept looking for places where he might restake the route to shorten it. He had had to put in a few zigzags to keep it on level ground around hills and gullies, and there might be places where it could be improved. Any mile I can save them they’ll bless me for, he thought. Damnation, but they’ve got to be the best men ever walked, he thought. They’re like those people George had going to Vincennes. He remembered how George’s eyes would always fill up when he talked of the Illinois Regiment, and now he understood.

William was going on ahead because he wanted to improve the trail if possible and also because he wanted to deposit this meat at the upriver campsite and then come back and be of a little more help with the wagons. Now that noon had come and gone and the earth was baking in the afternoon sun, the plain had become like an anvil, the sun like a hammer. After that first long hill, some of the men had fainted, and he knew that more would be fainting all afternoon. I might do the same right now if I didn’t have this bumbershoot over me, he thought. Wish there was some way to keep a canopy over the men who’s pullin’.

But how could that be done? he thought.

It couldn’t, he answered himself. They’ll just have to bear it.

He slogged on, his tortured feet sending up sparks of pain with each step, his sweat-sodden elkskins rubbing him raw between the thighs, his neck and shoulders burning with the load of the pack. The plain crept under his feet; the far hills shimmered; the faraway Rockies trembled white with their snowcaps.

How can there be snow in this hell of a world, he wondered. Ouch. God, I don’t know if I can take another step.

But then he remembered what George had told him once
about pain. You know what you can do, even if your body says quit. It’s only pain.

It’s only pain
, he thought, hearing George’s voice and seeing his eagle-face. If anyone would know, George would, he thought.

And truly, he thought, it’s the most useful one thing a body can know.

H
E LEFT THE PACK OF MEAT AT A CAMPSITE HE HAD SElected
near the head of the Falls. There were no trees to hang it in, so he piled rocks around it. Nothing should be able to get in there before we come back, he thought. He pulled off his moccasins and removed the spines from his feet. They were hard to see because of the sweat that ran stinging into his eyes and the gnats and flies that swarmed around his face, but soon he had extracted all he could find. The carbuncle on his ankle was the size and color of a half-ripe plum now. He got up, wincing, and went down the bank for a drink of cold water. He held it in his mouth to warm it so its coldness would not cramp his stomach in the overheated state he was in. Then he started back. Despite the pains in his feet, he felt as light as a gazelle now for a while, without the weight of the pack. He could have run.

Here at the upper falls, the river was nearly on a level with the plain, and in places off to his left he could see the surface of the river, blue under reflected sky, white where rapids ran. A distance to the north and northeast of him, though the river descended out of sight into its deepening canyon, he could see plumes of mist marking two of the cascades, and he could hear the deep, steady thunder-roll of their fall. A shadow passed over the blazing yellow ground in front of him; he squinted up and saw an eagle coasting past the sun and down toward one of the columns of mist.

The one that lives by the Falls, he thought. They had seen her nest the other day, high in a cottonwood tree on a tiny island amid the churning froth below one of the high cascades, a solitary and spectacular homesite, completely protected from any kind of predator that walks, and usually overarched by a misty rainbow. Safe, surely, William thought, but imagine being born and growing up in such a thundering eyrie, those eaglets. Like growing up next to a battlefield it must be.