From Sea to Shining Sea (127 page)

Chchchhhhrrr!

He jerked his hand back and waited for the rattlesnake to uncoil and slither away, then pulled himself up farther, until he was above the tops of the thickets. He pressed himself against the rock and looked down the valley, and the sight he saw made a smile spread on his face.

There, a mile or so ahead, through a maze of islands and meanderings, came another river, pouring in from the right. Beyond it the valley lay shimmering in the sun, fresh green, full of grasslands and marshes, cattails and willows. Geese and ducks and smaller birds by the hundreds rose and settled and wheeled everywhere. On every side of the valley stood distant dark blue mountains, their angular peaks and long saddles gleaming with snow.

That river on the right, he thought. That one’s our way, I’ll wager on it. It came curving into the valley from the southwest, apparently from somewhere in the gigantic mountain range that lay to the west of the forks. The middle stream came from straight south; the left branch had come from almost due east.
Aye
, he thought, remembering all that the Minnetarees had told him. It’ll take some checking out, but I’ll wager that’s our way to the Divide, that on the right.

He fairly bounded down the cliff to the river. “Hey, boys! The end o’ the Missouri! We’ve done it!” They started to their feet, cheering. Of course they knew there would be many more miles of smaller, swifter tributaries to ascend, and the way, if changed at all, was going to be even harder. But they had come two thousand five hundred miles up that cruel and tricky Missouri; for sixteen months they had lived and struggled in it and on it and along it, and now, even if it was only a term of language to call this the end of it, they were overjoyed to be able to call it that.

W
ILLIAM LEFT A NOTE ON A BRANCH, TELLING
L
EWIS
THAT he was going on up the right fork toward the mountains, and led the men off again.

This stream was full of beaver and otter. It was shallow and swift and cold, its course confused by islands. William led the limping party on for another thirty-five miles. Charbonneau’s ankles were collapsing, and Joseph Fields’s feet were so swollen he groaned aloud at every step.

They came to a cliff and were forced to cross the river, wading
chest-deep in the fast current. Halfway across, a rock turned under Charbonneau’s failing ankles, and the pain made him yelp and he fell sideways into the current. Not being a swimmer, he panicked when the water closed over his head. He was close behind William when it happened, and the other men were far behind, yelling. William turned and saw Charbonneau’s arm grasp upward, then his open-mouthed face emerge and go under again, and saw that the Frenchman was unable to get on his feet and was being borne downstream into deeper water. There was nothing to do but go into the deep water after him, and so William flung his rifle onto the riverbank and went. He could barely swim himself with his knapsack and shooting-gear on. He went stroking down toward the last place he had seen Charbonneau, and when he got there, there was no sight of him. He tried to stand up, but there was no bottom to be felt. He dog-paddled a moment, drifting, turning, and trying to see; and then there was a swirl on the water fifteen feet downstream, a glimpse of a wet sleeve, and he stroked with all his might toward it. His hand hit something in the cold water, something soft, and he grabbed it and pulled upward, and Charbonneau’s wide-eyed face and gasping mouth broke the surface. When he saw William he grabbed him and they both went under, William struggling in the cold current to get out of Charbonneau’s arms.

He broke the surface behind Charbonneau, gulped air, and grabbed the long hair at the back of his head, and lifted him; then, holding him thrashing at arm’s length, stroked with one arm and his last strength toward the nearest shore. He was lucky now; his feet found gravel just at the moment when he thought he could not manage another stroke. Charbonneau was as inert now and as heavy as a waterlogged flour keg. William had to wait for Reuben Fields to come down the bank and wade in to help carry him ashore.

But he was alive. They squeezed the water out of him. He coughed for a long time and then started praying. While the sun warmed their sodden elkhide clothes, William checked his rifle and found it muddy but undamaged. Reuben Fields was stalking around with his lips bitten white. Once he stopped over Charbonneau and spat at his feet. William took him aside. “What is it, Reuben?”

Fields hissed: “Listen to that reeky poltroon of a Frenchman, prayin’ to the virgin Mother o’ Jesus who woulda been no virgin five minutes if he’d ‘a’ been there!”

“Never mind,” William said, putting a hand on Fields’s shoulder.

“If you’d drownded y’self over that wuthless polecat, Cap’n, I’d ‘a’ wrang ’is neck till he was dead ten times!” It sounded like a scolding.

William understood the sentiments Fields was expressing so violently, and he blinked and swallowed. “Listen,” he said. “Whatever a man’s soul is worth, if he’s a member o’ this Corps, we do what we can for ’im. Y’know that. And by Heaven, Reuben, you’re guilty o’ the same sin I am;
you
saved him from a grizzly once, remember?”

T
WENTY-FIVE MILES UP THIS FORK
, J
OSEPH
F
IELDS’S FEET
and Charbonneau’s ankles gave out, and William left them on the stream bank to make a camp and doctor themselves. “Careful Big Tess don’t try to bugger you,” Reuben warned his brother with a mean leer.

On the western side of the wide valley was a small mountain, and the fork seemed to bear to the right around it. William pointed to a ridge that ran out from its south end. “From up yonder, I don’t doubt we can see to our satisfaction where this stream comes from. And maybe find some spoor o’ the Shoshonis, too. Feel fit for a climb, boys?” Rube Fields and Bob Frazier looked at each other, then at William’s feet. His moccasins were bloodsoaked and there was a yellow stain of pus from his suppurating ankle.

“Do you, Cap’n?”

“What I feel most like,” he said, “is lying down in the shade and drinking one bucket o’ whiskey while I soaked my feet in another bucket. But since we don’t have any whiskey, and since we need to raise us some Indians, why, let’s climb.”

They started up. The mountain was stark, jagged rock, hot as an oven, its fissures choked with thornbrush and scraggly juniper and prickly pear. William felt weak and feverish. He had felt somehow broken inside since his rescue of Charbonneau in the river. But he could still go. He had to find the Shoshonis. This was their hunting ground, where Sacajawea had been kidnaped and her people massacred. This was the place, here at the three forks, where the Shoshonis summered, and he knew they were near, and there was precious little time left to find them.

The hour of climbing was lost in a feverish blur, now marked by the scampering of a jackrabbit, now by the chilling chatter of a snake’s rattle, now by a swoop of faintness. But it proved worth the effort. From the top of the ridge he could see how the stream curved on up into the great blue western mountains, just as the Minnetarees had said it would. And to the south he could see
the middle fork winding its way through the lush plain, full of beaver dams.

“Look at that place!” he breathed to Frazier, pointing with a pencil. He was trying to make a sketch in his notebook. “Can’t ye just picture a good, solid log trading post right there where the rivers meet? Here, give me a sheet from your notebook. Mine’s soaked and won’t take a pencil.”

He sketched and made compass readings and notes on elevations, terrain, and vegetation for as far up the stream as he could see, but the page swam before his eyes and the sun seemed to scorch his scalp. He would break out in a sweat, then shudder with chills. His lower bowel felt as distended as one of Charbonneau’s buffalo-gut sausages.

They were parched coming back down the mountain, and drank heartily at an ice-cold mountain stream. Within ten minutes William was almost doubled over with stomach cramps; he had drunk the cold water too fast. That evening he was too sick to eat the fresh fish Joe had caught, and Charbonneau had cooked. He sat sweating with a fever in the cool evening air and pulled thorns out of his feet. Lately they had come into still another species of foot-destroyer, this one a kind of needle-grass much like a bearded porcupine quill, which went through moccasins and leggings and stuck in flesh like a barb.

The Fields brothers both came to him, and told him they hoped he would lie here and wait for Captain Lewis and the main party.

“You two been talking to each other,” he said. “No, boys. It’ll be two or three days ’fore the boats catch up with us. We’ll use that time to go a ways up the middle fork. Maybe somewhere up it we’ll find Shoshonis. We’ll move out early and get some headway ’fore the sun gets too hot.” They shook their heads and frowned. But they knew better than to question his judgment.

Frazier played a jew’s harp. And for a while as the night turned cool and stars shone diamond-blue above the fire, they sang a ditty they had composed for the occasion:

He was awake much of the night with chills and throbbing feet and aching bones, but got the men up when the first stains
of pale yellow were silhouetting the mountains on the east side of the valley. “How are ye this mornin’, Cap’n?”

“Pretty bilious. But fit to travel, I think.”

They limped and hobbled all day along the middle fork, a handsome, swift, clean little river, with enough beaver in every mile to make a man a fortune, but to their great disappointment saw no fresh Indian sign at all. They tied more colored rope and cloth on branches whenever they found Indian paths.

When they returned to the headwaters of the Missouri that evening, William knew he had overdone it. His fever was alarmingly high. He groped through his little medicine bag with shaky hands, hoping that the emetic pills, known as “Dr. Rush’s Thunderbolts,” had not been ruined by dampness. They were intact, and he took five of them, then lay down in his blanket to wait.

He dreamed that night of a great log fort surrounded by blue mountains. In the fort he and Brother Jonathan had a store, and the store was full of tomahawk-umbrellas. Thousands of Shoshoni Indians, an endless parade of them, all looking like Sacajawea, rode in from the mountains on magnificent mares and stallions, which they traded for umbrellas, and another endless file of Shoshonis walked back up into the mountains, each shaded by an umbrella. William woke himself laughing, and as soon as he was awake he had to get up in the dark, because Dr. Rush’s Thunderbolts had lived up to their name.

A bower of bushes, like the Shoshoni sunscreens they had been finding, had been built for William to lie in while he recuperated. Here the captains brought their journals and maps up to date while William reclined with his feet in a kettle of heated water. They named the east fork the Gallatin, after the Secretary of the Treasury, the middle the Madison, after the Secretary of State, and the western stream, which they would be following in their search for the Continental Divide, the Jefferson. “In honor of that illustrious personage,” said Lewis, raising an empty hand as if toasting with it, “who is the author of our enterprise.”

“To him,” William toasted grandly, hoisting his cup of emetic salts.

Sacajawea sat outside the bower, her tunic pulled down to her waist, the fat, dark-haired baby pulling at her nipple, and with the help of Charbonneau she told them the story of her capture here by the Minnetarees five years earlier. She pointed to the plain where her father the chief and his buffalo hunters, armed
only with bows and arrows, had been shot at by the guns of the Minnetarees, and a shoaly place in the river where she had been crossing to make her escape when she was struck unconscious from behind and captured. She told it with scarcely a sign of emotion, which Lewis found eerie. A little later, while she was bent over Scannon, crooning to him and picking the needle-grass barbs out of his shiny black coat, Lewis said, “She’s got no emotions. I swear, give her enough to eat, and a few trinkets to wear, and she’d be content anywhere.”