From Sea to Shining Sea (141 page)

A
ND SO THEY RODE DOWN OFF THE END OF THE RIDGE TO
the river and found a place on a creek to camp before dark, and although they hadn’t found a thing to shoot for dinner, it didn’t matter. They went to bed without having had anything to eat for twenty-four hours, and so they gave the creek the name of Hungry Creek.

On the next day, as they rode the descending valleys, still crossing and detouring fallen logs, they saw before them seventy yards away a brown horse standing on a knoll looking toward them. Drouillard glanced at William and William nodded and Drouillard killed it instantly with one shot through the heart. They noticed as they were skinning it that it had a sort of brand on its rump and thus it was an Indian’s horse, so they knew they were near Indians, the Nez Percés, no doubt. They ate nearly a quarter of the horse, and hung the rest in a tree to keep it from wolves till the rest of the party should come down, and then they rode on down through a precipitous gorge until they came to a village of Nez Percé Indians, who were at first scared and suspicious, but who, after comprehending Drouillard’s sign language, proved to be a fine and hospitable people, even more cheerful and generous than the Shoshonis, and gave the white men a horse-back load of heavy cakes made of camass root flour, some berry-cakes and two huge dried salmon. William immediately sent Reuben Fields back toward Lewis’s party with that load, and went on down to the main Nez Percé village where the main chief, Twisted Hair, lived, and began building a friendship with him.

W
HEN
F
IELDS REACHED THE MAIN PARTY, HE FOUND THEM
tired and sick nearly unto perishing. They had made a supper of a quart of old bear’s oil and twenty pounds of candles, then two miles later had found the horse carcass William had left for them, and had dined sumptuously on it. They had caught and devoured crayfish from Hungry Creek, a couple of grouse, and one coyote that had wandered close to the camp on the scent of the cooking grouse.

W
HEN THE PARTY CAUGHT UP WITH
W
ILLIAM AT
T
WISTED
Hair’s village, he had already scouted the Koos Koos Kee River, found tall ponderosa pines for canoes, and sent his men out to hunt. Almost everyone was sick with gas-bloated bowels because of the starvation followed by the roots, and some of the men lay for hours along the trailside before they could get up and follow. Lewis himself was so sick he could scarcely stay on his horse.
William bombarded the men’s intestines with Dr. Rush’s Thunderbolts.

They were about as sorry a passel of human animals as William had ever seen, after their eleven-day ordeal in the Bitterroots, their faces raw as ground meat, running sores in their whiskers, but they were alive and glad of it.

And Captain Lewis wrote in his journal:

He looked over at William, who was just now throwing a barrage of Thunderbolts down his own throat while farting camass-root gas like a horse, and he said after a while:

“Clark, I think I really picked the right partner.”

“Yes, you did. And I think y’ll admit, I picked the right Indian.”

“Yes, you did.”

I
T REALLY WAS ALL DOWNHILL FROM HERE.
T
HEY WERE ON A
swift, cold river in four large new dugout canoes and a small one, all trim and symmetrical, burned and hewed out of wonderful straight ponderosa pines, and were tearing through glassy-green rapids down among the high, rugged, pine-dark hills, their route to the Columbia having been drawn on an elk hide for them by the good Nez Percé chief, Twisted Hair. They had branded their trailworn horses with Lewis’s name and left them in the chief’s care, and now they were once again in canoes, and
for the first time in two years they were not struggling upstream. It was all downhill, and it was exhilarating.

A few times it had been almost too exhilarating. A canoe with Sergeant Gass at the helm had got sideways in the rapids, nearly turning over, a hole stove in her side, and had sunk in the rapids with all the Indian merchandise and several men aboard who could not swim. Rescue and repair had delayed them for a day, and they had had to set a guard over the merchandise where it was laid out to dry, because the Indians of these riverside tribes had a way of making unguarded items disappear.

It was exhilarating several times every day, because the river kept rushing down over bad rapids. On one day the boats had slithered and plunged down fifteen stretches of roaring white-water, providing so much exhilaration that old Toby the guide deserted the moment he got ashore. He was seen running up over a hill, having not announced his departure or even collected the pay he had been promised for his service as guide over the mountains. Everyone was puzzled and astonished and sorry he had left, because he had proved himself a fine Indian after all, the cheerful old rascal, and they were all sorry for having doubted him, and they all wished that he had stayed for his pay; it left them all somehow with a sense of unfairness that he had not claimed his reward. William suggested borrowing a horse from one of the Nez Percé villages and going after him. But no, a Nez Percé chief advised; whatever he was paid would only be taken away from him by the Indians on this side of the mountains. An old man like that.

And so it was October now, and the dugouts were plunging down the wild rivers between canyons of evergreen and fern, with their haggard crews on the paddles, the parfleche bags and bundles and kegs and canisters loading them down so heavily that they were almost awash; and now in every boat along with the cargoes and crews there were tied ten or fifteen new passengers: dogs.

They were the big, rangy Indian dogs, gray and dun, rough-haired, looking more like wolves than dogs. They were snarly and unpleasant, and their presence made Scannon very disdainful, but they had been deemed a necessity. They had been bought from the Indians as livestock. They were the only fresh meat available. There were no buffalo on this side of the Rocky Mountains. There were moose and elk and deer and bighorn sheep, but they were far up in the mountains. Here in the river valleys they had been long since hunted out by a dense Indian population, and even Drouillard and Collins and the Fields
brothers, with all their skills as hunters, could seldom bring in so much as a deer in three days’ hunting. And of course there could be no three-day hunts now, or even one-day hunts, because it was October and the days were growing short, and there were still four or five hundred miles to go to the Pacific, and the boats were moving too fast to permit the dispatching of hunting parties. So now the hunters were in the boats manning paddles like everyone else. Now the expedition bought most of its food from the Indians in the villages along the river, trading beads and bits of ribbon for dried salmon and cakes of camass root. The salmon was extremely oily, and gave everyone stomach cramps and severe diarrhea; the cooked camass roots were sweet and palatable, but also caused stomach pains and sometimes swelled the guts up so that it was difficult to breathe for hours after eating them. And so almost every man of the party had been sick almost every day since emerging half-starved from the mountains, and it had appeared that on this new diet everyone would remain sick indefinitely. Until one day when Le Page and Cruzatte and Labiche, with the resourcefulness of truly hungry Frenchmen, had bought some Indian dogs and cooked them for fresh meat. Immediately they had recovered from their stomach disorders, and so now dog meat had become the most desired provision, and the party had bought all the dogs it could obtain at every village along the way.

Virtually everybody in the expedition soon developed a liking for dogflesh. Lewis simply loved it, and swore that he was healthier and stronger on dogmeat than he ever had been on any other diet. But William could not eat it. “I’d rather have diarrhea,” he would say, watching distastefully as Lewis gnawed on a well-roasted piece of dog haunch. “How can ye look Scannon in the eye with dog-grease on your lips?” “It’s different,” Lewis would say. “Scannon has a soul; these don’t.” Then Lewis would finish the morsel and give Scannon the bone. “How can you say he’s got a soul?” William would persist. “Lookee, he’s a shameless cannibal.”

The Indians here, Nez Percé and Cho-pun-nish, were well-built and handsome and friendly and helpful, and the captains befriended many chiefs, despite their haste. The Indians were very fond of ornament, decorating their elkhide and goatskin clothes with white beads, seashells and bits of mother-of-pearl and braided grasses stained with natural pigments. Some of them wore jewelry made of bits of brass bought from tribes living farther down the Columbia. It was the first evidence of Indian trade with the sailing ships that came to the Pacific coast. These Nez Percés had never seen a white man, but knew they existed because
they had heard of them from the coastal tribes below. Lewis and Clark smoked tobacco and showed off York and the air gun and gave out medals and bells and mirrors from their dwindling supply of merchandise during their brief stops with these Indians, but the aid they got in return for these little attentions was invaluable. The Indians helped them pilot rapids, gave them food, and often helped them retrieve lost goods and paddles after spills in the rapids. Sometimes the stops were extended while the captains doctored sick Indians, many of whom were victims of eye irritations and venereal diseases. And even though the canoes sped down the boiling rapids faster than a horse could run, somehow their fame as white medicine men preceded them down the steep-sided, pine-covered gorge; there were crowds of Indians on the shores every few miles, watching them and cheering them through the turbulent waterchutes. There was tribe after new tribe never heard of before, and little time to study their customs, but the captains made their notes on them as well as they could, and wrote down vocabularies of their words. Numerous as the Indians were, they never seemed threatening. William wrote:

A
FTER SIXTY MILES ON THE RIVER, THE FLOTILLA ON
O
CTOBER
10 came out of the mouth of the clear river onto a wide greenish river that flowed through barren hills from their left side. The Indians here called it the Kimoo-en-im. “I’m sure what this is,” William said. “We’ve just come into the Snake. Remember that wild river we couldn’t take when we left Ca-me-ah-wait’s town? ‘The River of No Return,’ they called it? This is it. If Toby was still with us he’d tell us so. This is where he said we’d get on it. Aye, by damn, this water’s from that same watershed we were on two months ago. Think how quick we’d have been here if only we could a’ rid it down!”

“Well,” said Sergeant Pryor, “I don’t believe how it could be any more mean than this ’n we’re on right now.” Another dugout this very morning had run onto a rock and hung on it, getting a split hull.

“You didn’t see the No Return like we did,” retorted Sergeant Gass. Pat Gass was shaking as with ague from the last dashing ride through the rapids, but he said, “This we’re on is a smooth leetle canal compared with that other one, ain’t that so, Cap’n?
And if we’d ’a come down it, we’d be strowed on th’ banks here stinkin’ like them hundred million dead salmon.”

The river banks along here were silvery and putrid with the countless salmon that had spawned upstream and then died.

“B
EJEEZUS,
C
AP’N
, I
JUST CAIN’T KEEP UP WITH THE COUNTRYSIDE
,” said Private Frazier. Frazier was working on his own journal and map, and had come up to go over some points with William. “I mean, two days ago, there we were ’mongst wet green mountains with pines two hundred feet high if they’s a foot, and now I’m blind if this don’t look just like the desert roundabout the Great Falls o’ th’ Missouri, don’t it, though? Not a tree anywhere, and Lord help us, prickly pear agin!”

It was a barren, rolling, ochre-yellow land, broken with gullies, the eroded stone river bluffs looking like old fortress walls stacked one above the other.

“It does, Frazier, for a fact. And I wouldn’t mind the view one mite, if only it had the buffalo like that did.”

Frazier rolled his eyes and licked his lips. “Oh,” he groaned, clutching his stomach, “oh, yes, for a nice fat hump o’ buffaler just now! No more scrawny dawg! Oh, my!”

Now, according to what old Toby and the Nez Percé chiefs had told them, they would be on the Snake River about a week, and then it would fall into the Columbia itself. Lewis seemed to strain forward like a hunting dog in his impatience to be upon that long-sought river to the sea.

The week passed swiftly on the water of the Snake. There were so many spills and wrecks on the rapids that the captains worked out a policy for negotiating the most formidable rapids: Men who could not swim would be put ashore to carry indispensable gear, such as rifles and papers and instruments. The captains would walk down the shore then and study the rapids for the most feasible channels. Sometimes, Indians from the vicinity would get into the small dugout and pilot them through. Then two of the big canoes at a time, with the best steersmen and paddlers manning them, would head down through the thundering channels, and usually all would get through right side up. But nearly every day one canoe or another would be swamped or turned over or struck hard enough to start leaking. Then there would be the frantic salvaging of wet spilled bedding, food, and bundles of merchandise. A camp would be made below the rapids and articles would be dried and repacked, and split hulls repaired and recaulked. Then above the next rapids, the process would be repeated. At every stop the party
would buy salmon, more camass root, more dogs, and firewood for cooking. In these treeless regions there was no fuel but what driftwood the Indians had collected, not even buffalo chips; thus many trade goods were expended on firewood. The only game the hunters could get were ducks and prairie-cocks and other birds that, to the astonishment of the Indians, they were able to shoot out of the air.