Across the Endless River (2 page)

His father called him Baptiste, but his mother called him Pompy, “Little Chief,” the Shoshone name she chose to honor the tribe into which she had been born. Her knowledge of the Shoshone language was the reason Charbonneau had been hired as an interpreter for the expedition, after all. He didn't speak it, but her girlhood had been spent with the Shoshone, the Snake tribe, at the foot of the Great Stony Mountains to the west. They were the only tribe in the area with horses to trade, and the captains and their men would need horses to cross the mountains on their way west. She would be the go-between when they left the river and started to climb.

As she lay with her newborn and suckled him in those first few days, she thought of the new paths that lay ahead for her and her baby, one of which might lead to the place where she had been born. Four summers earlier she and three other Shoshone girls had been carried off during the seasonal buffalo hunt by a Hidatsa raiding party. They were after horses and young women, in that order of importance, and after killing several hunters and their squaws, including her parents, they galloped off with Sacagawea and the others tied to their mounts. They rode eastward for many days, through land that was different from anything Sacagawea had seen, broad and open, with swift rivers cut into the ground and tall grasslands in every direction. When they reached the Hidatsa and Mandan villages on the river they called the Knife, she had not seen mountains for a long time. She knew that her kinsmen could never rescue her from this powerful tribe so far away from their lands. She wondered if she could live the life that had now become hers.

In a dream her bird spirit came to her and pecked at her tongue, sharp and insistent, and she woke with the taste of blood on her teeth. Sacagawea must speak with a new tongue, the bird told her. She clutched the small obsidian figure her mother had placed in her medicine bundle, a tiny bird, all that was left to her from her first life. “I must do this,” she said, over and over, in those first months of captivity. “I must do this.”

Gradually she met other girls who had been stolen from their tribes in that summer when all followed the herds: a pair of Assiniboin sisters, several Crow and Gros Ventre, even a Nez Percé girl from across the Stony Mountains who wept for weeks until the brave who had captured her beat her into a watchful silence. Each of the Mandan and Hidatsa villages was far bigger than any Shoshone encampment she had known, with thirty or forty large earth-and-timber lodges grouped around a central clearing. Both tribes kept extensive fields of corn, squash, and beans. It was a dark time, a time of silences when Sacagawea understood almost nothing of the new language she would have to learn, but she noticed right away something that set these people apart from the Shoshone: no one went hungry. As large as the villages were, there was food for all.

She held Pompy close and looked in his eyes, gray-blue like his father's, and thought,
You are the only thing I can truly call my own, little
one. Soon we will leave this place and you will have neither tribe nor village.
You and I will be part of this band of wanderers, headed to the far
edge of the land, to the place the Shoshone call The Big Lake That
Smells Bad. The Pacific, the captains name it. So begins your first life, on
rivers and trails. Will it always be so?

Two months after she gave birth, Sacagawea set off up the river as part of the Corps of Discovery together with Charbonneau and her infant, strapped to her back on the cradleboard she had fashioned at Fort Mandan. Its cedar slats gave forth an aroma that pleased her with its sweetness. She felt like a mother.

There were better men than Charbonneau, she knew, but far more who were worse. A year after they were taken, he had bought Sacagawea and another Shoshone girl from the Hidatsa warrior who had captured them. They became Charbonneau's squaws, maintaining a lodge for him in the Mandan village and sharing in the women's work of the tribe. He took his pleasure with them by turns, sometimes for long hours, but never roughly like the warrior from whom she had learned what it was to lose one's body. Over time she came to accept his ways, but she was often glad that Otter Woman was there, too, when it suited Charbonneau.

She was jealously protective of her right to accompany Charbonneau on some of his trading trips along the river. He didn't often take her, but when he did she felt more alive than at any other time, delighting in the departure from her routine chores in the village and keen to see what the world looked like elsewhere. She worked doubly hard to be sure he knew her worth, gathering firewood, cleaning the trade goods, brushing the pelts, cooking his food. The presence of a woman, she knew, was by itself a message that men of all tribes understood: no fighting was intended. She took pride in her role as the companion of the white trader, a free agent who could pass from tribe to tribe without causing alarm.

In this, she realized that Charbonneau possessed a quality that the French
voyageurs
often showed but that was rare among the American and British traders: he was persistent, and infinitely patient. When, in the heat of negotiations over furs or beads, horses or guns, the chiefs would use hard language and refuse to be moved, more often than not Charbonneau knew what words to use to veer away from an ending, to hear “maybe” when the chiefs had said “no.” He was like water in a stream, finding its way around a boulder, and then another and another, mindful that suppleness was more useful than speed, keeping the talk going until everyone had something he wanted. He was sometimes criticized for it by other whites, usually the English. Even the captains had called him “unreliable” or “unprincipled” at times because he would not confront an adversary directly. But his ways were more like Indian ways, and the proof of his effectiveness was that he continued to be welcome where the path had been closed to other whites by many tribes. He was three times Sacagawea's age when Pompy was born, a man who had seen more than forty-five winters. She knew that despite his faults he was far more likely to see many more than some of his rash counterparts, who believed that confrontation and strength were the best way of dealing with the tribes.

J
UNE 16, 1805
B
ELOW THE
G
REAT
F
ALLS OF THE
M
ISSOURI

“If we lose her, the baby dies, too.”

“I know it,” Lewis said grimly. “He is not even close to being weaned, and he would not last a day on what we eat.” He looked at Clark and gave voice to the thought that passed between them. “So we must do all we can to make sure she lives.” What was foremost in their minds remained unsaid: if Sacagawea died, the negotiations with the Shoshone for horses would be impossible. The Shoshone had had almost no contact with white men. No one else spoke a word of their language, and without horses the party would not be able to cross the mountains. The expedition would fail.

Lewis continued his examination. Sacagawea lay on a deer skin in the tepee under a light blanket, her breathing labored and irregular, her skin hot to the touch. One of her arms twitched convulsively. She grimaced as a wave of pain passed through her belly, an unfocused stare in her half-open eyes.

“She won't bear being bled again,” Lewis murmured, “but if we can cause her to perspire, I think the fever may yet subside. I propose to continue the bark poultice you commenced. I should also like her to take some water from the sulfur springs we passed on the opposite bank. Drouillard can fetch some this afternoon.” His face was drawn, his mounting concern apparent. “Perhaps you could tell Charbonneau to occupy himself with the child while I change the poultice.”

“I can watch the boy,” Clark answered quickly, moving to lift the baby from where he lay in the crook of his mother's arm. The infant started to fuss as Clark lifted him gently, and the captain held him close to his chest, looking down into the clear eyes that were inquisitive and somber.

“Come now, Pomp, come to Captain Clark and be a good boy. Captain Lewis will help your mama feel better,” he cooed, swaying lightly as he stepped away from Sacagawea's prostrate body, his hair the color of a fox pelt standing up from his forehead.

Sacagawea's menstrual flow seemed to be blocked, causing pain throughout her pelvic region. While Clark talked to the infant in soothing tones, Lewis set to work assembling his meager supplies on a piece of elk hide spread open on the ground. He poured warm water from the kettle into a shallow tin basin and tore several strips from a length of clean linen. He then removed the blanket and cautiously raised her knees, spreading her legs as he did so. Lifting away the darkened mass that lay at the opening of her vulva, he wetted a strip of cloth and carefully bathed the entire area with a steady hand. He fashioned the new poultice as he kneeled at her side, placing three small pieces of Peruvian bark on a clean strip of linen and rolling it into a soft cylinder. Onto its surface he sprinkled twenty drops of laudanum, the tincture of opium whose small bottle was counted among the most precious medicines in the rudimentary apothecary he had assembled for the expedition. Satisfied that her inner thighs had dried sufficiently after his cleansing, he inserted the poultice and slowly lowered her knees, covering her body once again with the blanket. When Drouillard returned with a canteen of sulfur water, Lewis urged her to take small sips until she had downed two cupfuls.

That evening when he felt for her pulse as she slept, at her wrist and again at her neck, it beat strong and regular to his touch. Her face was covered with tiny beads of perspiration and her skin was not as hot as before. The tremors in her arm had stopped, and her face no longer bore the mask of pain that had covered it for days. When he withdrew his hand she opened her eyes and looked into his, and put her hand on his fingers. Neither spoke the other's language but all was understood in that long moment.
I will live and Pompy will live,
she told him with her eyes,
and it is your doing. Your spirit is strong.

A
UGUST 17, 1805
A
T THE HEAD OF THE
J
EFFERSON
R
IVER

Four months after they left the Mandan villages, the party of thirtyone men, one woman, and a baby boy reached the land of the Shoshone, among the first hills of the great mountain range that stood between them and the western ocean. To cross those mountains—the Great Stonies, the Rockies, the Bitterroots—they would need to trade for this tribe's horses.

“You talk to your people in Shoshone, then tell me in Mandan,”

Charbonneau said to Sacagawea as they approached the Three Forks area early in the morning with Captain Clark's group of men. They hoped to rendezvous with Lewis, who had gone ahead to join the Shoshone. “Then I'll tell Labiche in French and he can speak English to the captains.” She agreed. Even compared to the parleys among several tribes, this was a complicated arrangement, but it was the only one they had. She was in a dream, she felt, seeing on this voyage, as if for the first time, lands that she recognized, places she had known as a girl. Who would be left from that time? What would they make of her? What if they could not find her tribe?

They had not walked more than a mile when they saw several Indians on horseback coming in their direction. Sacagawea and Charbonneau walked slightly ahead of the others, and suddenly Sacagawea threw up her arms and let out a wail of joy, circling Charbonneau with little dancing steps as she looked from the mounted Indians back to Clark and the rest of the party.
These are my people!
she signed again and again to Clark, and he understood at once. She ran to the approaching group and addressed one of the braves in Shoshone, and he confirmed that he was a member of her childhood clan. Accompanying them was one of Lewis's men, who explained that the others were less than a mile distant. The Indians sang all the way to the nearby camp, joined at times by Sacagawea whose red-painted cheeks glistened with tears.

That afternoon Lewis had the men stretch one of the large sails overhead as a shield from the sun, and robes were spread out beneath it so that he, Clark, and the principal Shoshone chief, Cameahwait, could confer and negotiate for horses. By now they had parleyed with the chiefs of several tribes and they prepared the setting for these talks with care. It was important that a sense of hierarchy prevail, that they be seen as chiefs from the great nation whose distant father had set them on their path. The three men smoked a pipe and made the formal statements of respect and good will necessary before any bargaining could begin. The chain of languages took time—Shoshone to Mandan to French to English, and back again—but all was going well, both captains agreed, in the first part of this negotiation that had to be successful.

Suddenly Sacagawea rose up from her place, ran to where Cameahwait was seated between Clark and Lewis, and threw her blanket over his shoulders, wailing his name repeatedly as she embraced him. Although his formal mien and the chief 's ceremonial headdress of otter fur and eagle feathers had masked his features, she had finally recognized him. It was like the way one of the small mirrors the captains offered as gifts—things like solid water—dazzled the eye with sunlight, and in the next instant showed you your face. He was her brother.

The captains offered coats, leggings, ax heads, knives, tobacco, and the usual mix of minor trade goods that often sealed the bargain: beads, flints, handkerchiefs, and the like. Cameahwait was presented with a medal bearing the likeness of President Jefferson who, he was told, was now the Great Father to him and his people. On its reverse, Clark pointed out as he placed it around the chief 's neck, the clasped hands of an Indian and a white man stood out in relief beneath a crossed pipe and tomahawk. Around these symbols were inscribed the words “Peace and Friendship.” In return the Shoshone provided twenty-nine horses, all they would need.