From Sea to Shining Sea (125 page)

But he did not have a death song. All he could do was keep pushing as long as he could move a muscle.

A
T LAST SHE FOUND A HANDHOLD, AND MOVED UP A FEW
inches. When William looked up he was hit square on the forehead by a hailstone that made a yellow flash behind his eyes. The water was to his waist now, gurgling, gulping, pulling at him. There was a handhold of firm rock within reach; if he let loose of the baby he might reach it and at least save himself. Instead, he dropped his rifle to free his left hand, and grabbed the rock.

He hung now by his left hand on the slippery rock of the ledge, the baby in his right arm. The water had reached his ribs by now and its force lifted his feet off the ground and turned him so that he was facing down the torrent, his wrist twisting and fingers slipping. It looked as if this would be the end of it.

Sacajawea’s death song had stopped. William craned his head backward for a last look at her. Hope surged in him. She was reaching down for her baby with her right hand; Charbonneau, lying flat on the ledge above, at last had got the courage or sense to reach down for her and grab her left hand.

She got the baby by its tiny wrist and lifted it. Now William had both hands free, and he hauled himself out of the tugging water. The squaw and her baby now were disappearing above the ledge and his way was clear. He sank his finger-ends into the steep wall of dissolving mud and with a final surge of energy managed to swarm up onto the high ground.

Now the three huddled on the open plain, kneeling inward over the baby, and for a few more minutes they were pounded by hailstones, drenched, shivering, cold, while the wind tore at them. The ravine was full to its brim now, twenty feet of roaring muddy water where, five minutes earlier, it had been a dry gully.

As quickly as it had come, then, the storm left, thundering and hissing away eastward. But the baby was naked and slick with icy mud, its blanket lost down the flood, and Sacajawea, just recovered from a mortal illness, was soaked through. Sure she’ll have a relapse, William thought, ’less we get dry clothes.

“Up and run,” he cried, hauling them to their feet and grabbing up the baby. They started at a trot over the muddy plain, splashing through puddles, heading for the wagons, desperately trying to keep warm with running. They heard a deep-voiced shout. York was galloping toward them, mud-smeared up to his neck, his face a grimace.

“Thank the good Lord!” he panted. “I thought y’all be dead sure!”

William gripped his shoulder with desperate affection.

“You’re a sight to see! Quick, man, give me that canteen so I can get some brandy in these people. D’ye get pounded much by the hail?”

“’Bout a hundred,” York replied, “but I wa’n’t hurt, for they all hit me on my head.”

They all took brandy, which rekindled their inner fires, and then trotted on through the sucking mud toward the wagons, William carrying the baby inside his shirt next to his skin for warmth. The baby’s cries of terror and upset had settled to a long, ceaseless whining. Sacajawea trotted along beside William, staying close to her infant, often staggering.

They were shocked by the bloody, battered condition of the soldiers. Caught in the open some distance from their mired wagons, most of them hatless and clad only in breechclouts, they
had been severely bruised and cut by the hailstones. Dried blood stained their heads and faces. One man had been knocked unconscious three times. Most were limping and chilled to the bone. William rationed out another grog made from the nearly spent liquor supply.

It had been a costly adventure. William had lost a fine gun, ammunition pouches, moccasins, the Corps’ only large compass, and that precious tomahawk-umbrella George had given him. Sacajawea had lost the baby’s cradleboard and all his clothes and bedding. Still, there was much cause for gratitude. No one had been killed. And when the ravine dried out, they found the compass in the mud.

When they limped into the upper camp, they learned that Captain Lewis and his party had been protected from the hailstorm by the willow trees, and to celebrate their deliverance from that bombardment, Lewis had mixed them a large kettle of grog.

And to make it more refreshing, he had iced it with hailstones.

M
OST OF THE NEWS IN THE UPPER CAMP WAS ABOUT
grizzly bears, with which that area was infested. Joseph Fields had survived his second grizzly attack—three bears at once—but had escaped with only a cut hand and knee by dropping over a cliff and hiding on a ledge. Drouillard had been chased a hundred yards by a bear he had already shot through the heart. Scannon had been awake almost all night every night barking at bears. Because they so dominated the place, the upper camp had been named White Bear Island.

Here, in the shade of the willows, the two captains touched the rims of their glasses and drank to Independence Day. Nearby stood the provisions and equipment, under tied-down hides, and the canoes’ sails had been stretched between willows to make awnings for the camp.

“Two years ago this day,” Lewis said, “Mister Jefferson and I touched glasses like this to celebrate the purchase of the Louisiana Territory. It’s hard to believe that was but two years ago, because I’ll swear it seems like I’ve been in this same bedamned Louisiana Territory since I was born.”

“Likewise,” said William with a wink. “And, say, wouldn’t it be a fine joke on us if he’d got tired of it and sold it back to ’em while we been out here?”

Lewis threw his head back and laughed. He was in an unusually good state of mind. His iron boat—which the men had dubbed
Experiment
—finally had been sheathed with shaved elk
skins and singed buffalo hides, submerged in the river and then placed on racks over smouldering fires to shrink the skins tight, and he was immensely pleased with the look of her. Eight men could carry her easily despite her length, and she would accommodate, he estimated, five to eight tons. He still had not devised a satisfactory way to seal the seams, but was sure that ingenuity would arrive with something. He had scoured the valley for pine driftwood, which had been put in a homemade kiln to cook out pitch, but that thus far had been in vain; it had yielded none. “Never mind that,” he said. “Bees wax, buffalo tallow, and charcoal will make ’er tight enough to float till we get up in the mountains, and there we’ll find pine gum enough to cork a navy. But I’m very anxious to go. The season’s wasting.”

“Aye. Three months since we left Fort Mandan, and we’re still not into the mountains. We’ve had two Independence Days on this river, and I hope to have my next in Kentucky.”

Lewis looked at him for a long time. “Well,” he said, “don’t bank on it.”

Up on the plains they could hear the mating bellows of bull buffalo; it sounded like hundreds of them were roaring at once. Lewis slapped himself on both sides of the neck, killing several mosquitoes that were feasting on him there. “As for now,” he said, “let’s us go make our speeches to the men, and then have at the feast.” He sniffed the air. The aromas of bacon, beans, dumplings, and buffalo tongue came from the camp.

Several of the men pretended to weep—or perhaps really did—as the last ounce of the Corps’ whiskey was poured that evening after the feast. But they got suitably merry on it, and danced to Cruzatte’s fiddle until a rainshower at nine o’clock drove them in under the sail awnings, and there they sat and sang and told jokes and tall tales until the middle of the night.

“Oh, God, Cap’n,” Sergeant Ordway asked William in a lugubrious tone, “why did you gentlemen only bring enough ardent sperrits for two years?” Everyone in the shelter nodded.

William put a hand on Ordway’s shoulder and replied with a wistful smile, “Reckon we just didn’t know you fellers well enough. We thought we’d brought enough for
five
years.”

L
EWIS COULD NOT EVEN WAIT TO GET DRESSED THE NEXT
morning. He clambered out of his bedding and darted down to the
Experiment
in only his breeches. William saw him run down the shore to the place where the vessel lay bottom up on its rack over the coals, silhouetted against the glittering morning-lit river. Then he saw him running his fingers over the hull. Then he saw
him turn and swing his fist downward as if flinging an imaginary hat to the ground.

“Oh, oh,” William murmured, and he got out of his blanket and, barefooted on the cold, dewy ground, went down.

Lewis was scowling; his eyes were puffy from sleep but watering with tears of frustration. “Look. Damn it. God damn this place!” The suit of skins had dried snug on the boat frame, as they should have, but the stitch holes gaped; through virtually every one, a speck of light could be seen. “Damnation, what a corking job that’s goin’ to be, and not a drop o’ pitch to be had. Well. Well somehow, we’ll make do.”

William said nothing. But when the hunters went out for meat, he quietly told them to keep a lookout for trees big enough to make a few more dugout canoes—just in case the
Experiment
might prove a failure altogether.

I
T DID
.

By July 9, Lewis had covered the entire hull with the bees wax compound, so that it looked not like a skin boat but a smooth black hull molded all in a piece, and for a few hours of that day he had the joy of seeing the long vessel floating like a duck. Then a sudden windstorm swamped the
Experiment
and all the canoes, wetting most of the provisions, and when the storm had subsided, most of the composition had peeled off the skins, and the vessel was as seaworthy as a sieve.

Lewis stood in the river, water to his knees, hands on hips, and stared down at the sunken boat, nibbling his lips, while everyone stood away, afraid to say anything.

“Lookee there,” he said. “The stuff stayed on the buffalo hides, ’cause we left hair on ’em. If we hadn’t shaved the elkskins, she’d likely be afloat yet. Well. Live and learn. No time to start over. We’ve got to move on. Sergeant Gass, knock ’er down and fold ’er up and bury ’er. Save the hides for our tailors.”

And he said not another word about his beloved invention.

William’s party of boat-hewers labored for four days in a mosquito-infested cottonwood grove up the river where they had found two large but windshaken trees. Much of the time was spent in replacing tool handles, fourteen of which broke the first day. “God,” Shields groaned once. “What I wouldn’t give for a nice piece of ash.”

By carving to clear the cracks and twists of the cottonwood, the woodsmen finally completed two deformed but serviceable dugouts to carry most of what would have been borne in the
Experiment.
The main party, meanwhile, had buried the boat frame, some more baggage, William’s map of the Great Falls, and the wagon wheels that had carried all this freight around the falls.

It was July 15. The portage around that great obstacle had required almost a whole month. The little dugouts were so loaded with meat, grease, baggage, and Indian trade goods that everyone but the oarsmen would have to walk. Some twenty miles ahead stood the snow-topped first range of the great Rocky Mountains. Somewhere about two hundred miles up within the maze of mountains they expected to find the next landmark the Indians at Fort Mandan had told them about: the high, wide, fertile valley where three mountain rivers flowed together to make the headwaters of the Missouri. By their reckonings, they had labored twenty-three hundred miles up this mighty and troublesome river; the Missouri had come to be their very lives.

They rowed the canoes up the river now, a river one hundred yards wide and flanked with sand banks, through a land ablaze with blossoms: prickly pear, great, nodding yellow sunflowers, narrowdock, salmonberry, and lambsquarters. On the plains above them the bull buffaloes roared and mated; behind them the thunder of waterfalls, which had been in their ears for a month, began to fade.

Just ahead lay the Rocky Mountains, gigantic, unknown, yet to be crossed, and they were running out of summertime. Tomorrow was a great question mark.

“G
ENERAL
C
LARK, SIR
!”

George heard the voice above the rush and trickle of the water, and looked up from the work of his fossil-diggers to see Freeman the mill-hand riding toward him across the shallows of the Ohio. George squinted against the blazing white stone and
bright yellow mud of the fossil bed exposed by the low stage of the river.

George waved, signaling the man to come on, then turned back to his helpers.
Tick, tick, tick, tick
, went their picks and hammers, and their shovels grated as they scraped away marl fragments and mud. Here on this flat, the muck of the riverbed dried into dizzying patterns of rectangular cracks, and it was across this that the messenger was now riding. George brushed flies away from his face. The sun burned through the linen shirt on his shoulders and broiled the bald part of his scalp. “Finesse, now, Hez,” he warned. “That’s the biggest and best cockleshell ever, and I don’t want it broke.”

“Here’s another one o’ them putrified buffalo pats, Gen’l,” said one of the shovelers, prying up the edge of a turban-shaped rock with the end of his shovel.

“‘Petrified’ is the word, Jack. Put it over yonder with those.” Now the rider was close, and George turned to greet him. He hoped it would not be a real interruption. The river seldom got low enough to uncover this shelf, and whenever it did, he spent most of his daylight hours here. He had found many fine specimens here, from mammoth bones to coral and many-legged seabottom creatures perfectly imprinted chalk-gray on the surface of darker stones. When he worked here his mind was submerged in the slow coagulation of eons, and the problems and disappointments of the present seemed to matter not at all.

“Sir,” Freeman said, “they say it’s the Vice President come to see you, sir!”

“Eh? Aaron Burr is here?”

“They say that, Gen’l.” The messenger’s eyes were alive with curiosity.

George instructed the diggers to bring up on mules the specimens they were working on, and reluctantly mounted his horse.