The True Account (28 page)

“But if we should happen to?”

“Well, if we should
happen to,
I was under the necessity of promising the Shoshone the party's guns.”

“Uncle, for God's sake. For
Jehovah's
sake. The captains will never relinquish their rifles. What have you done?”

“Watch and see,” said he, handing me his spyglass.

Through the telescope I watched the elk walk proudly into the center of the lofty clearing. As he surveyed us from on high, a figure emerged from the opposite side of the opening—Lewis, dressed in his best coat, uniform trousers, and cocked hat.

The elk whistled and tossed his massive rack. The captain took several measured steps, angling away from the animal as if indifferent to its presence. He reached down and picked some wild grasses. Then he stood stock-still looking out over the valley. The elk began to pace nervously back and forth across the meadow, coming closer to the captain with each pass, the way the young Indian who stole Bucephalus had approached me at my easel on the lower Missouri River. Though they were too far away to hear, Lewis seemed to be talking to the animal. I handed the glass back to my uncle, who peered through it once, nodded, and lighted half a pipeful of hemp.

As the elk approached him, the captain held out the grasses, then withdrew them a little, then extended his hand again. The Shoshone in the amphitheater drew in their breath in unison; no man had ever been this close to White Elk before. The animal bent his head to take the grass and, so quickly I could scarcely follow his motions, the captain grasped his antlers and vaulted over his head onto his back.

“Ha ha!” cried my uncle. “Let the bobsled ride begin.”

Now ensued an incredible performance on the part of beast and man. As Lewis cartwheeled over his antlers, White Elk was already in the air, shrieking his fighting cry. With the captain clinging to his horns, he spun completely around, arching his great muscled back. Then he rushed into the woods. We could hear his antlers splintering dead limbs off the trees like rifle shots. I was terrified that he would scrape the captain from his back, crushing him against a tree like a deer fly. But moments later, with Lewis still aboard, the elk reappeared in the clearing and came charging straight down the mountainside toward us, while the Shoshone and the men of the expedition cheered madly and my uncle puffed away complacently in a haze of blue-gray smoke. As they approached at a full gallop, the rider stood up and threw off first the brocade uniform coat, then the trousers, then the cocked hat. It was Yellow Sage Flower in her white antelope dress, with her raven hair streaming out behind her.

She rode up to us and jumped lightly off her mount, and I ran to embrace her. Cameahwait spoke to Clark. “He says to pick your horses, sir,” my uncle told the captain. “And he'll supply you with a good guide, though I think we will accompany you as well. This remarkable young woman has made it possible for us all to continue together. I only hope that our nation remembers Yellow Sage's good service and that of many other Indians who have helped us, in treating with these people in years to come.”

Clark looked at my uncle for a long moment, then at Sage, then at the Indians already rounding up horses from which the captains would select their mounts. Finally he nodded and said soberly, “I do, too, Private Kinneson. I do, too.”

 

 

 

 

“W
ELL
, T
I
,” said my uncle through chattering teeth, “Old Toby has seen fit to conduct us a-sightseeing.”

“That is a very kind way to put it, uncle. An extremely generous construction.”

In fact, our elderly Shoshone guide, whom the men called Toby, had blundered off the trail and led us into the worst sink of jack-straw deadfalls, chasms, precipices, and blind canyons that ever existed. Thanks to the good offices of this fellow—who continued to assure us with the greatest confidence that it would be very strange indeed if he were lost, having been over the same route
fifty years ago as a boy
—we now found ourselves beside an utterly unnavigable torrent of whitewater at the bottom of a terrible pitch. To enliven this detour we had thick snow, driving rain, and pelting hail. Nevertheless, my uncle immediately strung up his fly-rod and stood in the blizzard for the better part of an hour casting for salmon, though by then the snow was flying so fast that his fly and line were indistinguishable, and I doubted that there were any salmon in the river at that time of year anyway. Except for a few grouse, we had seen no game of any kind for a week.

For supper that night we regaled ourselves with candles and boiled moccasins. Afterward we huddled around the campfire, more tired, cold, wet, and hungry than at any other time on our trip. Sage had saved a little of the elk pemmican she had made back at the Shoshone camp, which she now gave to Sacagawea and Pomp. I told her I was very touched that she would give away the last of her food. She replied that so long as she had a single morsel, she would never let a dear sister and her child go without. Then she told me the tale of Playing Dead Beside the Buffalo, a selfish young Piegan who had pretended to be dead to avoid having to share a buffalo he had killed.

Noting how keenly the men of the expedition were listening to this story, my uncle dragged several large drift-logs onto the fire and, standing so close to the flames that we could see their dancing reflections on his chain mail, he called out in his booming theatrical voice, “Expeditionaries! When Hannibal crossed the snowy Alps with his army, and they were near starvation, he designated the worst nights of the crossing as ‘Truth Nights,' on which his soldiers could ask him any question and receive a full and candid answer. This he did as a means of holding his men's interest in life and providing incentive—for there is no greater incentive than curiosity—to survive their journey. I have calculated with my astrolabe that it will take us three more days to get through these horrid Bitterroots. Therefore I will designate each of the next three nights, starting tonight, as Truth Night. In the tradition of Hannibal Africanus, I invite you to put the first question to me. Any question at all, gentlemen. I promise to answer it truthfully.”

The men edged closer to the fire. After a short pause Captain Lewis said, “I have noticed, sir, that you husband your hemp tobacco very carefully. Half a pipeful is all you take of an evening.”

“Moderation in all things save love and chivalry,” my uncle replied.

“I have also remarked that your excellent nephew does not seem to smoke hemp at all,” Lewis continued. “No doubt you deem him too young to use it?”

“Captain,” said my uncle with a sigh, “I am sorry to report that my nephew will never use hemp. He will never know the mild salubrious effects of this most choice herb.”

“Then my question is this, private. Whyever not?”

“Well, sir”—here my uncle lighted his pipe—“it has to do with the single ongoing point of contention between myself and my good brother. Ti's father, you must know, feared that the use—even the very restrained use—of hemp might lead the boy to try opium, laudanum, and even rum and broad-leaf Virginia tobacco.”

“That would be very bad, private.”

“Very bad indeed. I, however, took the opposite side of the question. I argued from my own experience that hemp, taken in moderation, promotes moderation in all things. Indeed, when Ti was five or six, unbeknownst to his father, I used to give him a puff on my clay pipe as a reward for learning his Greek letters. He never seemed to suffer from a draught or two. But after my brother and his dear wife, Helen of Troy, learned of this little incentive to the boy's learning, they said that they would prefer he smoke no more. Of course I honored their wishes. Also, my brother said that the use of hemp made me—you will scarcely believe this, gentlemen—a little silly. Can you imagine? A dour old Vermont schoolmaster, a private in the Green Mountain Regiment of the First Continental Army, who did such creditable service at the fall of Fort Ticonderoga that Ethan Allen wished to promote me to sergeant—acting silly?”

“Inconceivable,” said Lewis. “But let me understand this, sir. You gave hemp to a five-year-old to smoke?”

“Certainly.”

“I am astonished. What were its effects? Do you remember, Ti, how your uncle's herb affected you?”

“I do, sir. I very much liked it. In those days I was troubled by a catarrh in the spring, when the dandelions first bloomed over the meadows. The little puff of hemp my uncle gave me alleviated that condition. But then my parents forbade me to use it further, and a year or two later the catarrh went away of its own accord.”

Captain Lewis said nothing more. But Clark, whose curiosity had been piqued by my uncle's reference to Fort Ticonderoga, said, “Correct me if I am mistaken, Private True. But was not Ticonderoga—I mean the fort, not your nephew—taken without a shot?”

“It was indeed. So no doubt you are wondering at the nature of that most creditable service to which I referred, at the fall of the fort. It was this. When Ethan demanded of the garrison, ‘Surrender the fort in the name of the Great Jehovah and the First Continental Congress,' I cried out, as a clarifying qualifier, ‘To which, nevertheless, the Independent Republic of Vermont pays no fealty.' Of course I meant the Congress, not Jehovah. It was just afterward that I had my mishap, by which I mean striking my head against the gate. And that is what led to my little ways and stays.”

“It seems to me, private,” Clark said, “that you were perhaps not without a
few
small ways and stays even
before
your mishap at the fort.”

My uncle nodded. “Aye, sir. Ethan prized me highly for them. After I called out at the critical moment that we Vermont boys would pay no fealty to Congress, he roared with laughter, which much perplexed the British commander. But to cut the tale short, I passed up promotion, preferring to remain a private.”

“Might I ask, then,
why
you passed up the chance to be promoted?” Lewis inquired.

“Certainly, sir. And I will tell you—tomorrow night.”

 

The next day it snowed steadily from dawn to dusk, snow such as I had never seen, even in Vermont, where we were certainly familiar with blizzards. The trail was covered so deeply it was impossible to know whether we kept to it or not, except where, at long intervals, we came to the faint scar of an old slash mark on a tree blazed long ago by Nez Perce Indians. The men were in tatters, their beards hung with long icicles. Some had wrapped rags about their feet, causing my uncle, with freezing tears in his eyes, to say that Washington's men at Valley Forge had presented no more pitiable a spectacle. We set out without breakfast—there was nothing to eat—and between the wind howling in the treetops and the horrid constant roaring of the river in the gorge far below, I thought we might all run mad. These Bitterroots were the most dire mountains I had ever imagined, stretching endlessly before us as tall and trackless as on the day of Creation. But that night around the campfire my uncle reminded the men of the story he had left hanging the evening before, and inquired if they were still interested in learning why he had passed up promotion.

“Why did you, sir?” Lewis asked. “By all means, tell us.”

“Why, captain, the answer is as plain as the face of a Vermont schoolmarm. Put it to yourself. What creature on earth is more independent than a Vermonter?”

“I can't imagine.”

“A Vermont
private
is,” my uncle rejoined. “Look you, gentlemen. A sergeant must think of his squadron; a captain, of his regiment; and a general, of his country, not to mention his reputation in the eyes of posterity. But a private—ah, sirs. A
private
stands squarely on his own two feet and thinks and speaks only for himself. Is the mess maggoty? The commander a donkey? The war too long and too bloody? A private may say so. A Vermont private
will
say so. Aye, friends. True Teague Kinneson remains a private forever. Now we will steal a little march on tomorrow night. Ask your third question. Kinneson Africanus awaits your inquiry.”

“I should like to inquire of Kinneson Africanus,” said Sergeant Patrick Gass, “with no reflection on your manhood, sir, where on earth did you come by the pink cushion that you wear inside your britches?”

Having promised to answer any question, my uncle agreed to divulge the secret if the men would promise to keep his explanation to themselves. And, having teased them on so that they forgot all about their frostbitten feet and empty stomachs and their dread of what lay ahead, he told them all about his abbreviated assignation with Flame Danielle Boone in the Chouteaus' garden at St. Louis and his subsequent encounter with Miss Flame in the canebrake at Boone's Settlement, and of how he had heard the thundering hoofbeats of her marriage-minded kinsmen descending upon him, and how she had tossed him her little riding pillow as a pledge of troth. “And so, stuffing the cushion down my pantaloons, I rode away with Ti, having lost my original codpiece, without which a young knight-errant's reputation is as dross.”

“But, sir,” Lewis said, “you
still
have not told us why you wear such an antique article in the first place.”

“The best answer I can give to that very good question, captain, apart from its obvious use for modesty's sake when an actor treads the boards, is to repeat my brother's excellent reply to a traveler who, somewhat puzzled by that prominent item of my attire, made the very same inquiry of me. We were having a dram at the village hotel when the traveling gentleman said, ‘Meaning no discourtesy, sir, and please forgive me for being inquisitive, but why, in the name of God, do you wear that codpiece?' To which, before I could reply, Ti's father gave perhaps the most philosophical answer ever given in the history of the world, which was this: ‘Indeed, sir—why not?'”