From Sea to Shining Sea (142 page)

A
ND SO IT WENT, INTO MID
-O
CTOBER.
I
T WAS DANGEROUS
and hard, but compared with the ascent of the Missouri and the ordeal in the mountains, it was a lark. On October 16, after shooting six bad rapids in the morning, the party at noon reached the place where the Snake River flowed into the great Columbia.

Captain Lewis and Captain Clark looked at each other with teary eyes. They had come thirty-seven hundred miles, in seventeen months of strenuous, hazardous travel, to reach this place. As if to commemorate their arrival at this landmark, many Indians came down from their villages on the surrounding plains, at least two hundred men and women on foot, chanting and beating on drums and clacking sticks. They parted to form a semicircle around the white men and boats, then stood there singing, until their chiefs came forth to smoke. Through Drouillard’s signs, the message of peace and commerce was conveyed, and medals, handkerchiefs, and shirts were given to the chiefs. In return, one of the chiefs made a good map of the upper Columbia, showing where different tribes lived along its banks.

These Indians, called Wanapams and Yakimas, were a strange people. Their language was very different from that of the mountain tribes. Many of the women were fat, and some of them had strange, broad, sloping foreheads. Papooses were seen strapped in cradleboards with slabs of bark attached at angles to compress their foreheads and impart this slope-skull profile, a straight line from the end of the nose to the crown of the head, evidently as an attempt at beautification. Bad eyesight and bad teeth were evident in a large proportion of the people; many were blind or partially blind, which the captains presumed to be a result of fishing for salmon much of the year on the sun-flashing river and from the unrelieved snowglare of the treeless plains in winter. The Indians’ teeth were worn down to the gums, presumably by the grit in their stone-pounded fish and roots. But they were a cheerful and friendly people, childishly delighted by such wonders as the air gun, the compass, York, and Scannon,
and they were crazed with glee when Pierre Cruzatte tuned up his old fiddle and began to play.

But the troops themselves were almost that gleeful to hear the fiddle again, and they whooped and cavorted, swinging partners, flapping elbows, rolling their eyes, and popping their cheeks, until the Indians were almost helpless with laughter.

L
EWIS TOOK CELESTIAL SIGHTINGS AND PLOTTED THE GEOGRAPHICAL
coordinates of the confluence, and then on down the river they went. The Columbia was wide and fast, and so clear that salmon could be seen three fathoms down. Now the smell of salmon was everywhere. They lay rotting on the riverbanks by the millions; they hung on frames drying in the sun at every Indian encampment, tons of them. Dried salmon hung in the Indian lodges thick as tobacco leaves in a Virginia curing shed, and everyone’s clothes reeked of salmon, everyone’s skin felt slick with salmon oil and everyone’s nostrils cloyed with it.

Then, as the little fleet bounded down the Columbia, another odor began to insinuate itself, a vaguely familiar, sourish odor at first, noticeable near one of the big canoes. It was a while before someone identified it, and that someone was Private Howard. “By th’ great god Gambrinus!” he yelled suddenly one evening, “that’s beer I smell!”

And then the secret was out: Private Collins, starting with a mass of camass-root bread that had gotten wet and soured as the result of a boat-wreck, had been adding to it and nurturing it. There were only a few gallons, but it was a good beer and a strong one, and when Collins wistfully shared it that evening with thirty men, he was a more popular fellow than he had intended to be. “You an’ yer damn nose,” he muttered to Howard once during the evening.

“Well, look at it thisaway,” Howard replied. “If you’d ‘a kep’ it and drunk it all yourself, either it would’a kilt ye, or we ’uns would.”

I
T WAS A DIFFERENT WORLD THROUGH WHICH THEY WERE
passing so swiftly now, a world entirely unlike either the Missouri plains or the great mountains, and their facility as journal-keepers was tested by phenomena never before put in written language. The landscape, the river, the plants, the natives, were so unlike anything known to exist in North America that they might as well have found themselves on a continent on the other side of the world.

As their canoes plunged down through hissing, gushing
rapids, they saw magnificent salmon leaping past them at eye level, flashing in the sunlight, desperately flinging themselves up over the foaming cascades. If the men had not been just as desperately fighting the water with their paddles, they could have reached out and caught the fish in their hands.

The dark-walled gorge of the Columbia cut through a vast, tawny land of sage and cactus and dunes, through sheer, thousand-foot walls of fluted lava-rock marked with vertical striations as straight as if cut by an engraver’s stylus. Rock islands with perpendicular sides a hundred feet high jutted out of the river bed like old black temple ruins. The only vegetation along the river was willow and lily, hackberry and rushes, yet at every rapid and shallow there were elaborately built wooden scaffolds and racks and weirs. On these scaffolds naked men and boys stood with long-handled gigs or huge baskets, harpooning or scooping up the great fish below the rocks and tossing them onto huge piles ashore, where women split them for drying. Salmon everywhere, the stench of spoiled salmon everywhere. William marveled at the incredible abundance of food that Providence had placed here for these people, even somehow more awfully, wastefully prodigious than the countless buffalo on the Missouri side. At least the buffalo, he thought, you had to go find and kill at some risk; here you just stand in a place and grab it and lift it as it streams by! He saw in one tiny village an estimated ten thousand pounds of dried, pounded salmon, stored in three-foot baskets lined with salmon skins. He looked at the chunky men and corpulent women, and remembered the gaunt Shoshonis who ate maybe three times a week, who had scrambled over Drouillard’s deer like dogs for, as McNeal had put it, “a mouthful of guts and arseholes.”

Where animal hides had been the fabric of rugs and shelters for all the Indian cultures heretofore, now everything seemed to be made of tightly woven rushes and grasses. Mats and baskets, even the awnings and walls of dwellings, were made of bear-grass fibers so tightly woven they were impermeable. William saw baskets so well made that they could be filled with boiling water in which fresh fish were cooked. On islands in the river they found elaborate Indian burial grounds where beautiful grass weavings and splendidly carved canoes, as much as sixty feet long, had been left with the dead. “I swear,” William groaned one evening as he wrote by the light of an oily fish burning like a candle. “This country’s so wondrous, it’s wearin’ out my writing hand!”

O
NE DAY THE CAPTAINS STOOD ON A CLIFF WHILE THE CANOES
were piloted down through the rapids below, and saw above
the western horizon, probably more than a hundred miles distant, a great, snowy mountain, visible down the long notch of the Columbia gorge. They stared at it and thought of all the old maps and journals of the Northwest coast that they had studied before the start of their trek.

“That,” William said, “surely that’s Mount St. Helens, eh? The one Cap’n Vancouver saw from his ship in ’92, when he lay off the mouth of the Columbia?”

“Praise God and hurrah!” Lewis said. “We’re surely not much more than two hundred mile from the Pacific now! And unless we smash ourselves to death on waterfalls, we’ll be there in a couple o’ weeks!”

N
OW, IRONICALLY, IT WAS THE VERY SPEED OF THE COLUMBIA
that was slowing them down. Every few miles in descending the gorge they would be confronted by the roar and foam of another stretch of rapids and agitated narrows, and would have to go ashore to study this newest gauntlet and decide whether it would need to be portaged or could be ridden through, and whether the nonswimmers and precious cargoes would need to be sent overland, whether all the goods would have to be carried and the dugouts eased through by ropes.

William found himself bearing the major share of this effort, it seemed. Lewis had been different since the ordeal of the Bitterroots, or at least since his sick spell after the mountains. It was hard to define the difference, because he still functioned extremely well in most of those things he did. He was working hard to gather as much scientific information as their haste would allow, and was taking vocabularies of the strange new tribes, and analyzing their salmon economy and the peculiarities of their health and their physical traits. But he was not keeping a journal, and he was not really commanding. He had been moody and anxious, curt, often gazing downstream with an almost desperate look in his eyes, leaving more and more details of commanding and scouting and record-keeping to William.

He’s got so many danged talents, William thought, we don’t really appreciate what-all he does until he neglects on one thing or another. Lewis was physically recovered from his digestive troubles, but something seemed to have broken or gone slack in him; it was the way it had been once when one string of Cruzatte’s fiddle had snapped during one of those slow, groany pieces he occasionally played. The whole instrument was still fit, but the sound was different. York had noticed the change in
Lewis, too, and he murmured his observation to William one day.

“It’s like you Ma used to say: ‘He on ’is feet but he off his feed.’”

A
CRANE WAS FLYING HIGH OVER A CLUSTER OF
I
NDIAN
huts, flying with slow beats of its huge wings. It would be a long shot, but fowl would be a welcome break from the diet of oily, gritty, pungent salmon, so William took a bead on it, then a short lead, and squeezed the trigger. The rifle crashed, and the crane twitched against the gray sky and its wings bent askew and it began to fall. The three men standing on the plain behind William whooped in amazement. “Let’s go get ’im,” he said, reloading. As they walked toward the village, they saw two or three Indian men running as fast as they could go toward the huts. The huge bird had fallen between the hunters and the village. They picked it up and then went on to look at the place and do the usual diplomatic smoking and hand-talking.

“Wonder where everybody go,” said Drouillard. The village seemed deserted; the usual crowds of curious savages did not come forth. Nothing stirred except a few slinking dogs. The lodges were made of mats, and their doors, of the same material, were closed. William gave his rifle to a soldier and walked toward the nearest lodge with his peace pipe across his arm. It was eerie. There were small fires smoldering under racks of fish. If the village had been deserted, it had been within the past few minutes. Yet there was nobody visible on the plains around.

He knelt, scalp prickling with apprehension, and lifted a corner of the door-flap. There was a strong smell of fish and people. He heard noises inside: rustling, a whimper, a short high note suddenly stooped as if a hand had been put over a baby’s mouth. “Cover me,” he said to the men. Then he stooped and peered in.

He could see in the dim light that the building was full of people. As his eyes adjusted, he made out two or three dozen men, women, and children, all cowering, and as he stepped in among them their murmurings turned to wailings. Some were wringing their hands, others were burying their heads in their arms.

He offered his hand, offered the pipe, and pressed little gifts, thimbles and beads, into their hands, eventually soothing their agitations a little. He sent Drouillard and the Fields boys into the other lodges to do the same. Then he came out and sat on a rock in the center of the village with his pipe, waiting for the men to
come out and smoke with him. Not a soul emerged. Now and then he would see the bottom of a wall mat move up an inch or so and a frightened eye peer out under it. “Somethin’s skeered th’ bejabbers out of ’em,” said Joe Fields. “Reckon they never heard a gun before?”

It was not until Lewis and the rest of the party came down, and the Indians saw Sacajawea among them, that they began to come out of hiding, creeping out a few at a time. They sat around trembling but acquiescent and smoked with the captains then, and by and by through sign language the cause of their terror was revealed. They had heard a crash, then had seen something fall from the sky, and then from the place where it had fallen they had seen these four come toward the village. They had believed these were not men but creatures that had jumped down from the clouds on a thunderbolt.

By the time the Corps had dined and gone on down the river, the people of this village were no longer afraid, but they seemed still not entirely convinced that their visitors had been human.

T
HE NEXT DAY THE PARTY SAW PELICANS FLYING, AND CORMORANTS
. But there was still a mountain range between them and the ocean; it loomed higher and higher ahead on either side of the westering canyon. Straight ahead now not more than forty or fifty miles, visible sometimes even from the canoes, was a perfect snow-covered cone of a mountain that appeared to be at least two miles high.

Firewood could be obtained only from the Indians, who sold it so dear that the expedition’s stock of trade goods dwindled fast. The Indians themselves hoarded driftwood jealously because it was so scarce in this arid and treeless country. At one place William found huge quantities of prickly pears and spoiled fish spread in the sun, and was informed that the tribes used these unpleasant materials as fuels in the winter, just as the Indians of the Missouri tribes had used dried buffalo dung. It’s amazing, William thought, how folks can get by. “I would surely hate to have to sit by a fire of these stinking fish in a close room,” Lewis said.

“Aye,” William agreed. “But I could take some satisfaction in seeing prickly pears a-blazing, after all the hurt they’ve done me.”

C
OMING TO REST ON AN ISLAND AT THE FOOT OF A DIFFICULT
rapid, the explorers were startled by the cry of a soldier who had gone behind a heap of rocks to relieve himself. “Bones,
thousands o’ people bones!” he yelped, hopping into view clutching at his belt.