From Sea to Shining Sea (98 page)

Even now, at what William considered the true start of the voyage, Lewis was missing. He was still at St. Louis, attending to last details with the Army agent there, and was going to ride overland and join the boat at a village several miles up the Missouri.

Still, William had lost none of his faith in Meriwether Lewis. William would have preferred a smaller, less-burdened party, and would have trusted their ability to live off the land, to improvise
things rather than carry everything that could possibly be needed. But Lewis had explained convincingly his reasons for every item he had purchased, and certainly had engaged enough strong-backed soldiers to move it all along. Lewis was thorough, and thus it was a big expedition. That was just the way it was. The rowers were strong, and the thirty-two-foot mast was rigged to carry a large squaresail that would augment their muscle power. All the same, it
was
going to be an ordeal. William had been up and down the Mississippi a couple of times on freightboats, and he knew how that rowing could be. Usually it was done by Negroes, not white men like these.

Well, give them their whiskey ration every day and I reckon they’ll bear anything, he thought.

He had never seen such a collection of whiskey lovers. Except for Private Bratton, who drank none, and two or three others who could live without it, most of these frontier soldiers seemed to need whiskey more than food. During the tedious months of winter bivouac, they had drunk as their official army rations about 180 quarts a month, but that had only been enough to prime them. A family of bootleggers had moved in near Camp Wood and, despite orders banning them from the camp, had continued to infiltrate the garrison and sell their gut-blistering product all winter long. Most of the breaches of discipline had been committed by soldiers drunk on duty—especially by those whose duty it had been to guard the army whiskey from the others.

Eh, well, William thought. No matter; look at ’em now that they’re sober and have something to do.

They were really as hardy and handy a set of men as ever he’d seen, and he knew their qualities pretty well. Several who had volunteered for the expedition last fall had backed out during the winter when they began to understand the distance and dangers that lay ahead, and now William was sure of the ones he had left, almost to a man.
Almost.

He looked hard for a moment at the smirky young face of Private John Collins, a Marylander recruited from Kaskaskia. Collins had too quick a tongue sometimes, too quick to retort and too quick to lie. One of the best hunters, he had been sent out one winter day to get meat, and had returned with a skinned haunch that he had tried to pass off as bearmeat. The next day William had sent around the neighborhood to inquire of local farmers whose hog it was. Aye, this Collins had the earmarks of a blackguard. But he had good qualities too, and would have a chance to prove himself.

The
Discovery
was midstream in the Mississippi now, the wide mouth of the Missouri yawning ahead, and the juncture of the two great rivers afforded an expanse of open water so wide it was like a small sea, with a warm south wind laying over it strong enough to ripple shirts and ruffle hair. The Mississippi’s current was bearing the cumbersome vessel sideways downstream faster than the rowers could move it across. William wet a forefinger and held it up. “Mr. Cruzatte,” he called forward to the pilot, “would ye approve of trying some sail?” The one-eyed Frenchman nodded with smiling enthusiasm, and a moment later the sheet was hauled up. It filled with a rustle and rumble like small thunder, and began pulling. The rowers cheered. Most of them never had been under a sail before, and seemed delighted with this simple boost from nature.

York, who had been up and down the Mississippi with his master, soon took the opportunity to represent himself to the men as an old hand at sailing, and sat on a locker in the sail’s shade making up tall tales about great shipwrecks and capsizings he had survived. After a while, William heard angry voices on deck, and went down. Collins was at the heart of the uproar, and he explained.

“Cap’n, sir, I don’t find it fair that twenty-two white men has to pull on oars while a Nayger loafs an’ spins yarns.” Some soldiers murmured in apparent sympathy; others grumbled derisively at Collins’s complaint.

William bit back his temper for a minute. Then he replied: “Collins, hear me now: This man York has plenty to do as cook and orderly. But if it would please you to try to make him take your oar for ye, then you and him may hash that out personal, and I won’t interfere.”

York grinned and rolled his thick muscles under his body fat. Collins scowled at him, then looked away and kept rowing. The others laughed. William suspected Collins would complain no more about York.

Joining Cruzatte on the bow, William studied the bottomlands at the Missouri’s mouth, into which the vessels were now moving. Off to the left now was the bluff where George had first beheld the Missouri, a whole long quarter of a century ago. William had heard that story when he was a boy and had always been able to envision George riding down that bluff, dismounting, wading out into that low water, just about there, probably, and putting his hand into the current of the Missouri while his bodyguards and his Spanish friends had waited atop the bluff.

Now I’m as far west as George ever got
, William thought. And
after a while, as the
Discovery
nosed up the wide, turbid stream, he thought:
Now I’m farther west than George ever got.

O
NE
IMAGE
G
EORGE’S
STORY
HAD
LEFT
IN
W
ILLIAM’S
MIND
was that of the many full-size trees floating like straw on the Missouri’s current. And now the
Discovery
was in that current, and an alarming number of uprooted trees came barreling along. In no river had William seen these silent boat-wreckers come so thick and so fast. Cruzatte, now wielding a long, iron-tipped pike with which to fend them off, explained: “T’ees God-tamn Missou-
ree
, alway she caving in t’e banks! You see someday,
mon capitaine
, whole forest fall in at one time!” It was the river’s constant undermining of her banks and relentless channel-shifting that caused this, he went on, his one eye darting ahead, pike at the ready. Cruzatte had already catalogued enough other navigational hazards peculiar to the Missouri—rolling sandbars, false channels, quicksands—to make himself seem quite indispensable. Suddenly he whistled, and Labiche appeared beside him with another pike-pole. Without a word, the two pointed their poles toward a dark, gnarled, glistening snag that was sweeping straight toward the prow, bobbing in the roiling water. The poles touched it. The two Frenchmen strained and pushed in a single-minded effort; their poles bent slightly; the dark snag veered and rolled over and slid harmlessly by on the starboard side. At once Cruzatte was peering forward again, watching for more. He shook his head. “
Mon capitaine
,” he said, “permit me telling, t’ees boat too high in t’e bow. She could run
onto
a tronk.” He demonstrated with his hand and the shaft of his pike. “Better she have her nose down, like plow.”

William nodded, understanding. It would mean a tedious, strenuous shifting of cargo down in the hold, moving weight forward, re-drawing his sketch that showed where everything was. But he knew that Cruzatte was right. He had seen riverboats run over logs that had stove in their hull planks because they couldn’t be got out from under. “We’ll do that when we get to St. Charles,” he said. It was plain, Cruzatte knew boats.

A
LINE
OF
CLOUD
PASSED
UNDER
THE
DESCENDING
SUN
, and in its shadow came a dank breeze. Soon a heavy rain was falling. The sail grew sodden, and was hauled down, and the men rowed onward, barely moving the vessel against the Missouri’s stiff current. William returned to the afterdeck and stood beside Sergeant Floyd, watching the rain pock the vast gray surface of the water. Cruzatte shouted back: “Right rudder, Mistair
Floyd!” He was pointing at a V-shaped turbulence dead ahead, its point upstream.

“Hard right, sergeant,” William commanded, and Floyd put the tiller over. The boat swung slowly by the ripple.

“What was it, Cap’n?” Floyd asked, watching it.

“A planter,” William said. “Trees that get anchored to bottom, and sway back and forth just under th’ surface. Can’t see ’em, except for that ripple. They’ve sunk many a flatboat.”

Floyd was quiet for a while, squinting ahead in the rain. After a while he said, “I kinder ’preciate that leetle Frenchman, don’t you, Cap’n Clark?”

William nodded. “I do, too.”

Cap’n Clark he calls me
, William thought.
So little does he know.

William set his jaw and frowned. He had determined not to dwell on it, or even to think about it. But Floyd’s words had put it in his mind, and his stomach churned with bitter anger as he thought of it.

William’s commission from Secretary of War Dearborn had come a few days ago. Instead of the captaincy promised him by Lewis and Jefferson, he had received only a lieutenant’s rank. It was an insult, and it stung, and it had reminded him of all the insults and injustices his brother George had suffered at the hands of government. For a while William had even thought of quitting the expedition because of it. But Lewis, seeming to be almost as indignant about it as William was himself, had pleaded with him. He had apologized on Jefferson’s behalf, explaining that the President could only recommend a rank; it was the Secretary’s decision. And then he had said: “To the men you’re already Captain Clark, as you are to me. None of them, or anyone else, needs to know about the rank. In command with me, you’ll remain full equal. And when we’re done, I’ll see you’re compensated equal. Please, friend Clark. Who in heaven could I ever find to take your place? If you quit me, it won’t show the Secretary of War anything. But it’ll trouble me and the troops something awful!”

Finally, William had answered. “Two things I’d not want to live with. One’s failing you. The other’s not seeing the Pacific Ocean. I’ve got my heart set on that, and I guess I’ll go. And I take ye on your word, that I be co-captain in every way. Mark this:
never
remind me I’m but a lieutenant!”

Lewis had gripped his arm and looked intently into his eyes. “When we first met, remember, you were a captain and I was an ensign. You were as fine a captain as ever I saw. That’s why I
told the President I wanted you. Knowing that, d’you think I’d ever bear rank on you?”

And so William had accepted that, and had resolved to himself that he would be as valuable as Lewis every step of the way to the Western Sea, as he had sworn to do when he’d signed on.

For, he told himself, whether governments keep their word or not, by my God, Clarks
do.

T
HEY
HAD
BEEN
ON
THE
RIVER
FOR
HALF
AN
HOUR
WHEN
THE
sun came up astern. William was on deck, watching the river’s roiling surface change colors with the light: pewter, mustard, brass.

This was the start of the tenth day, and they had been working harder than they had ever worked in their lives, but still they had come only fifty miles up the Missouri.

William had thought he knew plenty about rivers, but this one was teaching him new lessons every hour, and she was a rough and ruthless teacher. Already, a week ago, the convoy had been forced to stop at the French village of St. Charles, to unload and rearrange the keelboat’s cargo. Cruzatte had been right: Too heavy astern, the
Discovery
had run onto three floating trees on the second day out. William could still hear and feel those sickening moments: the Frenchmen’s nasal shouts, the
thud, thud
and the grinding rumble, the splintering of oars, the tilting, the loss of headway, the sight of York falling down and dropping a tea service all over the deck, the dismayed yells of the men and then all the strenuous and tricky effort to get the boat around and the tree out from under, in the swirling, murky water, while boat and tree floated back down over distances so tediously gained; then there had been the frantic inspections for hull damage. Fortunately the
Discovery
had withstood all those collisions, and now, loaded nose-heavy, she was plowing upstream toward the new hazards this day promised to bring. Sometime this morning they were due to reach a notorious stretch of water that Cruzatte called the Devil’s Raceground, and it promised to teach still more hard lessons.

Now William paced between the rowers, giving them jokes and cheerful words. They needed all the encouragement they could get. William paused in his pacing to look down at Private Collins’s bare, red-welted back. The muscles moved under a
coat of grease as he rowed. Collins could not wear a shirt yet since his whipping.

A week ago, during their stopover at St. Charles, Collins had left camp without permission to attend a ball in the town, and on returning, drunk, had made some disrespectful remarks about his commanding officers. Next day he had been found guilty by a court-martial of his peers and sentenced to fifty lashes. The men had administered the punishment at sunset that day, and Collins had taken it without whimpering. He had even chosen to go back on the oars next morning instead of lying sickabed as he could have done. His spirit was admirable.

“That back looks better today, Collins,” William said.

“Aye, sir,” he replied over his shoulder. “Feelin’ much better, thank’ee.”

“Good. Y’know what I hope, my lad?”

“What, sir?”

“That those heal up before y’ earn yourself any more. Stripes on stripes hurt just about unbearable, I’ve heard it told.” William had hated whippings ever since he had first seen them in Wayne’s army, and hoped there would have to be no more in the Corps of Discovery.