From Sea to Shining Sea (135 page)

Forgive her weakness, she is only a girl
, William thought several times as the council droned into the evening, and plans were made, and medals were given to the leading men, and useful things like knives and tobacco were given to the others.
She is only a girl.
And he wished he could go to the willow bower where she was, and hold her and comfort her, and dandle her baby, his little Dancing Boy, on his knee to make her laugh. But of course he could not because there was all this man’s business to be done for President Jefferson.

N
OW
C
LARK WAS GONE, HEADING UP OVER THE
G
REAT
D
IVIDE
with his men and their tools and baggage, and Charbonneau and Sacajawea were gone with him, and Ca-me-ah-wait and most of his band; and Meriwether Lewis had stayed here with the troops to make packsaddles, and to sink the canoes in a nearby pond so they would not be damaged by wind or grass fires before—or if—they should be needed again.

It had been a warm morning but at noon a misty rain had started, bringing with it a chill that felt like winter. It would be days yet before Clark could determine a route through the Western Mountains, and before Ca-me-ah-wait could bring his people and extra horses back, and Lewis had an awful foreboding, a gloomy half-certainty that winter would close the mountains before the Corps of Discovery could go through. If it did, they would be forced to spend the winter here in these gameless valleys with the half-starved Shoshonis. If that happened it would be unlikely that the expedition could continue next spring, because surely they would have used up everything they had by then, or starved, or become fully demoralized, and would have to return down the Missouri to civilization, a failure even after two years of trying. If the voyage was not to fail, it would have to get over the mountains in what was left of this year. And that chill in the air told him there was very little of this year left.

And so now without his friend Clark to talk his spirits up, Lewis turned to the only other outlet for his personal thoughts, and he wrote in his journal for Sunday, August 18th, 1805:

I
T WAS
S
EPTEMBER NOW AND IN THE EVENINGS AND MORNINGS
it was so cold that the ink would freeze in their pens when they tried to write. The pitch pines and the jagged granite cliffs on either side of the river were dark with dampness from the rain or mist, and the mountaintops close above them were almost always invisible in the clouds that hung over them sifting wet snow. They had had to leave the warm but spare comforts of the Shoshoni nation all too soon, and were high in the Rocky Mountains now, west of the Great Divide, seeking the way down through the maze of ranges to a navigable tributary of the Columbia. The captains could not keep an exact daily record of the temperatures anymore, because their last thermometer had been broken. It had happened during a heart-stopping, awful moment when a pack horse had slipped on a loose rock and gone whinnying and rolling and sliding down a mountainside steep as a roof, in a clattery, rattling avalanche of stones and deadwood and bundles and bags and pieces of packsaddle, while the men had stood above grimacing and shouting. Whenever this happened, as it did all too often, the men would have to pick their way down to wherever the horse lay struggling, sometimes in the river itself, other times jammed against a tree halfway down the slope. It was an awful feeling to see something as precious and as big as a horse tumble like a pebble down a rocky mountainside, and the men climbing down after it would take their guns, expecting to have to shoot it.

It was amazing that so far they had not had to shoot a single fallen horse, and not a one had been hurt badly. They had hide scraped off and gashes cut in their shoulders or flanks, and they would struggle white-eyed, flailing their hooves, trying to get off their backs or sides and out of the stone rubble, and it would be a while after they were on their feet before the men could tell whether they would have to be shot or not. But as they had no broken legs, the men would soothe them, reload them, and then start the slow, lunging, sliding, clacking, steep climb back up to the trail, leading those wonderful, pitiful, bleeding beasts and encouraging them until they were back in the pack train again. The horses were fine and lovely and no one wanted ever to have
to shoot them, but there was a little edge of secret disappointment in it sometimes, because if a horse had been truly crippled and it had been necessary to shoot it, there would have been meat to eat. As it was, there was no meat. These mountains were as empty of game as the Shoshonis had warned they would be.

The Shoshonis were but a memory now. They had kept their word and helped Captain Lewis and his men carry the baggage over the divide and, after some hard bargaining, had sold twenty-nine horses to the white men, and finally had said farewell to these rich white men, and had gone on down to the plains of the Missouri for their fall buffalo hunt. They had gone down, taking with them memories of strange new foods and sugar cubes and fiddle music and a black man, taking with them promises that white men someday would bring them guns and good steel tools and iron kettles.

And the white men had gone in the other direction, toward the pass through the mountains, to find the westerly rivers that would lead them to the legendary Stinking Lake, where the Shoshonis had never gone.

Sacajawea was still with the white men. Something had happened to her among her people, after her miraculous and joyous return to them, something that had made her decide not to stay with them after all, but to continue with the white men even though she had served her intended role as interpreter among her people. The Shoshoni women, after a few days of hovering around her and her baby and caressing them weepily and wonderingly, had begun looking at her with puzzlement and envy, scolding her for joining men in councils, even for having a husband who cooked.

She did not fit anymore within the ring of protective mountains and the narrow concerns of the Shoshoni women. She had been over too many horizons and heard too many tongues. Her husband thought the Shoshonis too poor and wanted to go back, eventually, to the Mandans. And Red Hair was going on toward the setting sun.

And so now Sacajawea, with her papoose bundled in the red blanket on her back, rode on a horse of her own near the head of the column, hanging on grimly as the animal picked its way along precipitous paths more suitable for mountain goats. She was quiet, her heart doubtless wrung out by her bittersweet sojourn of a mere fortnight among her long-lost people. As the column snaked its way over vast screes of rock trash and around rocky monoliths or fallen pines scattered like jackstraws on the slopes, sometimes almost doubling back on itself, William, at its
head, would find himself across from Sacajawea, above or below, going up while she went down or down as she went up, and he would look over at her little fine dark face set against whatever she was feeling inside. He would try to imagine what it would be like to return to his family after this voyage and then have to leave them immediately with no certainty of ever seeing them again, and he knew that whatever she had just come through, it was at least as bad as that would be.

Usually her eyes would be on the trail just under her horse’s forefeet or on the steep depths below. But much of the time, she would be looking forward at the Red Hair Chief, at his broad back, at the long, swaying fringes of elkskin on the yoke of his coat, at the queue of red hair hanging over his collar from under the lynx-fur cap.

It had been hard for her to choose to leave her people, and she would have felt colder and emptier and bleaker than winter if she could not have looked ahead now and then to see the Red Hair Chief.

It seemed to her that if she could keep following within sight of him it did not matter where she went.

T
HERE WAS NOW ANOTHER
I
NDIAN WITH THE
C
ORPS OF DIS
covery, and he rode or walked always in front.

He was a wiry little old man with an unpronounceable name that the captains had shortened and anglicized to Toby.

Toby was so dark and wrinkled and skinny that Sergeant Gass had described him as “a raisin with bones,” and although he had been recruited from among the Shoshonis he was not a Shoshoni. He was a displaced member of the Nez Percé, or Pierced-Nose, nation who lived to the northwest of the Shoshonis, over on the western side of the great mountain range which now lay on their left as they rode northward.

The captains had named this range the Bitterroot Mountains, after a new plant they had discovered there, a hardy little needle-leafed flower with a thick, bitter-fleshed, dark-skinned root. Despite their urgency, the captains were still complying with Thomas Jefferson’s instructions, still collecting, classifying, and describing the new forms of life they found in this strange land. The bitterroot was a food of the hungry Shoshonis.

Toby himself, as a member of a newly found tribe, was a new and unheard-of life form for the captains. He had a few yellow teeth in the front of his mouth only, and through the cartilage between his nostrils he wore what appeared at first to be a sliver of white bone the size of a short pencil, but was actually a tubular
seashell. His people on the Columbia River, he said, traded for these with the Indians who lived down on the coast of the Great Stinking Water. Toby seemed to value this ornament more than anything he had, except his new nickname.

William had met many remarkable Indians, great chiefs all across the continent, but was coming to believe that this wizened, insignificant runt Toby was perhaps more remarkable than any of them. There was no explanation why Toby should have been living among the Shoshonis, who had all but ignored him for many years, but it was as if he had been placed in their village by Providence so that he would be available to guide the Corps of Discovery when it should arrive there. None of the Shoshonis, not even Chief Ca-me-ah-wait himself, had known of a passable route to the waters of the Columbia River.

The river that flowed by their main village, the Lemhi, did run into a greater river called the River of No Return, which then roared many days, white and foaming, down between nearly vertical canyon walls into a larger river, known as the Snake, which in turn flowed into the great river that went to the sea. This was the traditional knowledge among the Shoshonis, though none living had ever tried to go down that River of No Return. But, Ca-me-ah-wait had said, there is an old man of the Pierced-Nose nation here, who is said to know a way through the mountains farther north used by his people when they cross to go down to the plains for buffalo, for there are no buffalo west of the mountains. And thus by the narrowest luck William had found old Toby with the shell through his nose, who was probably the only man living on this side of the mountains who could show them a passable way through these Bitterroot Mountains to a river where canoes would not be smashed to splinters. With Sacajawea’s help, William had interviewed Toby.

Toby was cheerful and agile. He looked like a man of seventy years, and might have been fifty or sixty. But he was as springy and quick-minded and far-seeing as a man of thirty, and he had immediately taken a great liking to the Red Hair Chief and said, yes, he would be very happy to go and show the northern pass where his people crossed the mountains. William had told him he would be well paid for this, and so old Toby had thrown in his lot with the Red Hair Chief. Late last month, while waiting for the main party to make its carry over the divide, William and his party, with Toby, had ridden forty miles down the Lemhi to look at the River of No Return and see if it was as bad as the Indians had said.

It had proved to be that bad, or worse. William had explored
several miles down its terrible canyon, whose walls were too steep for even the sure-footed Shoshoni horses to walk, and where the water had swirled and roared so loudly it had been necessary to shout a conversation. William had done his best trying to plan a means of moving canoes down that river, but finally had determined that it would not have been possible even to ease them down through the maelstrom on the ends of ropes; for even to attempt that risky technique would have required cutting a road through the solid rock of the cliffs for miles and miles. No. It had been true, all that had been said about that river.

And so now, with all the party together again and its faith placed in old Toby’s memory and the patient strength of twenty-nine horses, they were making their way a hundred miles northward, through land only a little less precipitous, to the Nez Percé crossing place that Toby with his strange, throaty, toothless way of speaking called Lolo. They were passing between two parallel ranges so high that the sun rose late in the morning and set early in the evening. They calculated that they were nearly a mile above sea level now, and their rare clear-day sightings on the snow-covered Bitterroot peaks to their left had showed some of them standing a mile higher. This barrier of grim gray stone and deep snow seemed to stretch forever northward barring their way to the west, and they could only hang onto their trust in the sinewy old man with a shell in his nose, and follow him to where he said the Lolo Pass was.