From Sea to Shining Sea (143 page)

A wooden vault, six feet tall and sixty feet long, had been formed of boards and pieces of dugout canoes propped against a ridgepole. Inside it at one end were twenty-one skulls arranged in a circle on rotting mats. Elsewhere through the vault there were hundreds of human skeletons and parts of skeletons in disarray, and at the other end lay corpses and skeletons more recently placed. These lay in rows on wide boards, wrapped in leather robes and covered with mats, and over them hung baskets, wooden bowls, fishing nets, and trinkets of all kinds. The bones of humans and horses lay scattered all around the vault. It was a depository for the dead.

William examined the mausoleum minutely and wrote descriptive notes. “Our great white father in Washington would do handsprings if he saw this place,” he commented, “the way he is about Indian bones.”

Lewis looked as if he thought the remark was a little disrespectful. But he said nothing, because he knew how true it was.

“T
REES!
H
EAVENLY
L
ORD
, I
NEVER THOUGHT
I’
D BE SO
happy to see
trees,”
William exclaimed, pointing up toward a scattering of pines on a distant hill. He could also see more brush growing in the gullies. Evidently there was a little more rainfall here as they approached the mountain chain.

“It’ll probably prove like the Bitterroots,” Lewis said. He was sitting near William in the bow of one of the big canoes, writing in his field notes. “Likely the west side of the mountains get most of the moisture from the Pacific.” The sea captains who had visited the mouth of the Columbia had written that it was wet country indeed.

“Alls I know is, I’ll be glad to ’scape from this dang desert,” said Ordway.

“Where there’s trees, there’s meat on th’ hoof,” Joe Fields chanted cheerily, thrusting his paddle in the water.

“Not allus, Brother, not in them Bitterroots there wasn’t,” Reuben reminded him.

“Listen,” said William. They could hear it ahead, that familiar, dreaded rush of rapids and cascades. “Listen to the tone o’ that. Waterfalls, or I’m a deaf man. Make for the starboard shore,” he called back. “I think we’re about on the Great Falls o’ the Columbia.”

His heartbeat was accelerating. The chiefs had been telling
them about the great waterfalls and the miles of terrible rapids below it, which they would meet here where the Columbia had forced its narrow passage through the mountain range. As far as they had been able to understand, these cascades would pose the last natural hazard in their descent to the ocean. But they would be a considerable hazard. The chiefs had said men could pass the falls and the narrows only on foot. Not even the best canoe steersmen of the Columbia tribes ventured into those terrible swirling waters in the narrows, they had warned. They said coastal tribes brought their large carved and painted log canoes up as far as the foot of those rapids to trade sea shells and wappatoo roots and ocean fish and items from white men’s ships; tribes from the upper Columbia brought down bear grass and camass roots and mountain-sheep horn to the top of the falls, and here great trading fairs took place in the summer, with thousands of Indians. But the canoes of the coast Indians had never been above the falls, and those of the upper Columbia never went below the falls, except now and then by a fatal accident. The E-nee-shur tribes that lived at the falls were, so to speak, the middlemen of this annual bazaar.

It was past the season of the barter-market; only a few hundred people of the E-nee-shur tribe were still present when the Corps of Discovery beached its five dugouts and came ashore to study the falls.

A few of these people were enough. The troops looked dubiously at the E-nee-shur standard of feminine beauty and generally decided that it was just as well they were in too much of a hurry to dally. These women displayed most of their bodies, being dressed only in short shoulder-capes, which left their pendulous dugs bare, and narrow leather belts and loin-straps that, worn tight as tourniquets, were almost invisible in the overlapping rolls of fat. Their coarse black hair was braided and worn without ornaments. Many of them had flattened foreheads and the resultant fish-like pop-eyes, which made them seem less than human creatures to some of the soldiers. But far worse even than their gross and alien unattractiveness was the profusion of fleas that lived on and around them. Every Indian and every lodge was leaping with fleas. William stood looking at a pile of baskets sealed with sewn-on fish-skins—baskets full of thousands of pounds of dried salmon—and the baskets were so aswarm with fleas they appeared to be vibrating. The soldiers had not been in this village for ten minutes before every man was twitching and scratching.

On a promontory of dark lava stone he and Lewis stood and
studied the frothy, rumbling, hissing torrent below. “Well, it’s a mere dribble compared to the Falls o’ Missouri, thank the Lord,” William yelled, “but it’s twenty-foot pitch if it’s an inch! Reckon we best map us a portage!”

Lewis nodded, but continued to stare at the huge cascade, and then he shouted: “How in the world do you suppose the salmon get upstream o’ this? You don’t imagine they can leap twenty feet, do you?” William looked for a minute, then shouted back:

“It doesn’t seem possible, but they must. Look!” He pointed. Near the middle of the stream, several salmon were leaping from the froth at the foot of the falls, flinging themselves at the descending wall of water and being swept back down out of sight. The best of them were reaching heights of ten or twelve feet, but even these spectacular leaps were only half enough.

T
HEY WORKED OUT A COMPLICATED PORTAGE PLAN.
O
N THE
north bank of the river was a narrow path on a steep slope, by which all the baggage could be back-packed around the falls, a distance of about twelve hundred yards. The path was partly over bare rock, partly over a steep sand dune, and the men stumbled through it with great difficulty. At the lower end of the route, a camp was made at an old fish-drying site. On the south bank of the river was a shorter path by which the canoes could be taken just around the falls, then put into the water in a furious but navigable channel about a hundred yards wide, which would discharge them into calm water just across from the camp. This part of the portage was begun the next morning, after a night made almost sleepless by fleas.

Lewis stayed with a small party to guard the goods at the camp while William and the main body went back up the portage route to the emtpy canoes, paddled them across to the south shore, and began the excruciating process of hauling the four-hundred-pound vessels out of the water, up the steep bank. The more they sweated, the more the fleas nipped at them. Private Shannon let out a yelp of desperate fury, and skinned out of his clothes. He stood there stark naked, hundreds of bites looking like a rash all over him, brushing fleas off his body.

William looked at Sergeant Ordway. “It’s a good idea,” he said, and quickly began stripping off his own clothes.

Soon everybody was in the cold water, washing off fleas and holding their clothes under to drown or wash the pests out of them. They made the rest of the canoe portage naked and much happier, then came back and got their clothes and put them on wet. By the time they had run the fast channel and recrossed the
river to the camp, they were more or less rid of fleas. But when they landed, the fleas covering the campsite immediately leaped upon them and infested their clothes as thickly as before.

T
HEY WERE STILL NOT THROUGH WITH THE
G
REAT
F
ALLS.
A mile below, the river roared over another huge, jagged, rock-studded sill. This one was eight feet high, so the captains decided that the canoes could be unloaded on the narrow, rocky shore and then let down over the falls by ropes. It was a strenuous job, and somehow the very appearance of the place—the towering walls of the gorge, the huge, black volcanic rocks and pillars dividing the river into several thundering chutes—was so intimidating that the men looked wild-eyed, terrified, as they worked, and clung to footholds and handholds with the tenacity of climbing vines. It was mid-afternoon when this was completed.

As the fleet moved swiftly down the gloomy lava chasm below the falls, Ordway pointed to some rounded shapes moving lively on the dark glassy surface of the river. They looked like the heads of swimming beaver. But on closer approach they proved too large. They’re maybe sea otters, William thought. He raised his rifle and fired at the nearest one. With a swirl it disappeared. By the time the canoe reached the place, the animal had sunk too far to be retrieved.

Lewis had been busy during the day onshore. He had measured the falls, taken a latitude on the place, bought several fat dogs for supper, and made a canoe-trading deal that both beautified his little navy and made it more seaworthy. By throwing a good steel tomahawk and a few trinkets into the bargain, he had been able to trade the Corps’ smallest dugout for an Indian log canoe of the lower Columbia sort: a wide-waisted, deep-draughted vessel tapering gracefully at both ends, its high prow and stern carved handsomely to represent some fanciful sort of serpents with ears. He was pleased with his new flagship, which seemed somehow to compensate for the failure of his iron boat, but he was not all good cheer.

“They warned me,” he told William, “that the E-che-lutes down at the narrows are planning to kill us. Now, I don’t give that a full credence, but have all hands look to their guns and powder, and we’ll put on a double guard tonight.”

W
ILLIAM LAY IN HIS BLANKET AT THREE IN THE MORNING
scratching assiduously at his groin and waist, watching stars glitter above the black canyon walls, listening to the muttering of the Columbia and of the troops.

Sure no Indians will catch us asleep this night, he thought. The fleas are making sure o’ that.

T
HE NIGHT PASSED WITHOUT A SIGN OF TROUBLE, AND
after a breakfast of roast dog, the Corps had the canoes loaded by nine A.M. and launched on the smooth, swift breast of the river. But within minutes they were hearing again the ominous rumble of powerful torrents. William stood up in the bow of the new log canoe and looked over the ears of its figurehead to see what sort of obstacle was being put in their way this time.

He had never seen such a thing in all his years on all kinds of rivers. The river, which had been about four hundred yards wide, seemed to come up short against a tremendous wall of black lava-rock; a huge basin of river water was backed up behind it. On the right shore of this basin, high on a cliff, stood five Indian lodges with all the usual fish-racks and scaffolds. For a minute William could not comprehend where the river could go from here. The dark wall was like a towering dam across the canyon. But the deep water here behind it was not still. It roiled and whirled in confused currents, and the boats seemed to be drifting toward the left side of the canyon.

“God!” He saw it now: a gap of perhaps forty or fifty yards in the steep black wall. From this gap issued the roaring-water sound he had been hearing. “Hard at those paddles!” He pointed. “Cruzatte, steer for the lodges! These must be the Narrows!”

They put in on a small beach, got out of the vessels, and approached the lodges. If these were the Indians who had been planning to attack them the night before, they showed no sign. They smoked and were friendly. One of the elders then climbed with William and Lewis and Cruzatte to the top of the jutting rock, out onto a precipice above the funnel. They were looking almost straight down on it. Lewis pressed his lips in a whistle, which was inaudible over the hollow thundering of the water.

Here, several hundred feet below, the whole great Columbia River was compressed between somber volcanic rock walls no more than forty-five yards apart. Here the mighty river in its yearning for the sea had forced its way through some weak place in a thick lava bed, and scoured out a narrow funnel through which its countless tons of water churned and eddied, dimpled with whirlpools and boiling like milk in a kettle. This funnel ran about a quarter of a mile, then the river widened to about two hundred yards. About two miles downstream it appeared to run into a similar funnel.

Cruzatte was peering studiously down at the turbulence. Lewis was gazing in awe at the valley below. In places, the lava walls rose two or three thousand feet above the valley. “All this lava must’ve flowed down from those mountains!” he yelled. These narrows evidently were the Columbia’s channel through the snow-topped mountain range they had been glimpsing every day since they had been on the river. William nodded and scanned the cliffs of the funnel itself. Indians were beginning to appear everywhere along the cliffs, tiny figures, looking on curiously. It was as if they sensed that these strange men were going to attempt some desperate foolishness here, and they were going to watch it.

“There’s no way to portage over that, not that I can see!” William shouted. He touched Cruzatte’s elbow. “What say’ee about that water?”

Cruzatte thought. Then he held up a finger.

“One theeng good: It ees
deep.”

William nodded. Unlike the rapids, it would not he forever bashing and splitting the hulls of the dugouts. It would be a wild, heart-in-the-throat kind of a ride through horrid, swollen waters, but unless some vortex sucked a boat under, or hurled one against the dark rock wall, there was a chance.

W
ILLIAM SAT IN THE BOW OF THE CARVED CANOE, PALMS
sweating, and felt the current sucking the vessel faster and faster toward the funnel. As the canyon walls closed slowly on each side, he could see lichens on the lava up high, and watermarks up as far as seventy or eighty feet. The dread was making his vision terribly sharp and his thinking clear. Now he understood how the salmon could get over the falls upriver: in times of high water, so much would back up behind this funnel that the falls those few miles upstream likely would be inundated, no obstacle at all for the ascending fish.

The roaring of water grew louder, more soul-shaking, and William wondered if that sudden understanding might have been the sort of clarity one has in the last moments of living. The canoe was slipping faster and faster into the middle of the great, sloping chute of water. Cruzatte, on the stern oar, was keeping it well aimed. William winked at him. Behind, in the distance, two other canoes were back-paddling, held in wait. Lewis was watching from the cliffs above. It had been their policy not to have both captains in jeopardy at once—not putting both eggs in the same basket, as they would joke sometimes.