From Sea to Shining Sea (114 page)

“Didn’t I say so?” Colter remarked later when he heard of it. “The man’s a walkin’ hard-on.”

T
HE BOW GUN BOOMED, AND ITS SMOKE ROLLED AMONG THE
hundreds of yelling and chattering Mandans on the shore. The keelboat turned on the flint-gray water and began slipping downstream, her small crew under Corporal Warfington waving back.

A reply was fired from a swivel gun in the white pirogue, which was still moored at the bank, and the
huzzahs
of the soldiers on shore were, for a moment, louder than the droning voices of the Indian crowd. William had to shout into Lewis’s ear to make himself heard, pointing at the
Discovery.

“I wish she had come up as easy as she goes down!”

Lewis nodded, then shook his head. They both were remembering the half-year of perilous toil expended to bring up the great boat, which now would return to the Mississippi, without such toil but in twice as much peril, bearing its priceless cargo of knowledge. Its downriver pilot was Joseph Gravelin, the least dishonest Frenchman they had encountered on the Upper Missouri and reputedly an excellent waterman; therefore it was not so much the river itself, but the return voyage past the belligerent Teton Sioux, which posed danger for Warfington’s crew.

The Indians on the shore were as melancholy and excited as the Americans. These white men who were leaving this day, going both up the river and down, leaving behind a willow-log fort full of smoke-smells and life-smells and the ghosts of laughter and music, had changed the world for them. They had given them a new way to think. They had caused tribes to declare peace with each other. They had cured many diseases and injuries
for the Mandans and their neighbors. They had left much strong new blood in the Mandan nation; many squaws, no one knew how many, were carrying within themselves babies they expected would have gray eyes or blue eyes, red or yellow hair, and fair skin. Also there were many of these squaws who could expect their babies to have black skin and hair like wool and the strength of bears. Several of the soldiers, in return for what they were leaving in the Mandan women, were bringing with them the burning, itching, seeping symptoms of venereal disease.

Many of the soldiers, now gathered near their pirogues and canoes on the trampled shore, stared good-byes into the eyes of certain squaws who drifted down near them, and a few small gifts and remembrances were passed between white hands and brown hands.

William’s heart was full of happiness and sadness as he watched the farewells. He saw Sacajawea, in a spotless fringed tunic and calf-high moccasins, her greased hair immaculately combed, parted and bound into two braids, her baby in a cradleboard on her back, standing amid a cluster of other squaws. Some of them were embracing her and giving her gifts, or folding their wrists over their bosoms in the sign of love, tears on their faces—and yet there was something bad, something alien and sullen in the faces of several of them. The other two wives of Charbonneau hung back from her, their eyes full of plain hatred, and William could understand that; it was simple jealously. But the strange reserve of the others dawned on him slowly. Of course: she was even less a one of them now than she had been as a Shoshoni slave of their people, or as a Frenchman’s squaw. She was a woman now leaving The Nation, one Indian woman in the company of many white warriors, going with them into distant lands where they would and could never dream of going. Thus she was lost to them, different from them, very bad medicine.

William looked at her. She was certainly not gloating about her special status. In her face, that unusually delicate and guileless face whose expressions he was learning to read, were both the sadness of partings and the pain of rejection. It’s all right, girl, he wanted to go and tell her. In three or four months, God willing, we’ll have you among your own blood people.

Captain Lewis, in full uniform, now was standing face to face with Shahaka, known as “Big White,” major chief of the Mandans. Each gripped the other’s shoulder with his right hand, and they clasped their left hands underneath. The crowd grew still around them, to hear their words, for they loved their old chief;
and the quiet spread through the throng like a ripple on water until there were no more human voices, only the whiff of the cool, spring-scented wind, the barking of dogs, the rush of the river.

Chief Shahaka spoke first. He wore a Jefferson medal on a necklace, proudly displayed on his chest. It had become his most important piece of ornamentation. Now he began, in a voice that could be heard all along the riverbank.

“My people have shared food and kindness with you. You have made my sick people well, and you have been fair in all matters. We weep to see you go. You and Chief Red Hair have taught us to turn our backs on old wars, and to look east to your nation for protection and for trade. I, Shahaka, and all my people trust you. We will always watch up the great river for your return. But even if you do not come back this way, we will remember you, and our sons and grandsons will hear of the winter when you lived among us and made us glad. This I say for my people: you have made friends of us forever.” The crowd murmured in approval; some voices keened, “Aii-eee! Aii-eee!”

Lewis blinked and swallowed as this was translated. Then, still holding the chief’s left hand, he responded:

“We have been secure and happy as your neighbors, and we will miss our brothers the Mandans. When we return from beyond the Shining Mountains, we will embrace you again.

“You see our ship going down the river. The talking leaves we put on that ship will tell our Great Father about your goodness and your brotherhood. And when I see our Great Father face to face, I will tell him the same in my own voice, and he will look kindly on you. He will send men to bring goods to sell you at fair prices, as I have promised. The friendship of my nation and yours started when we came here before the winter, and it will never end.”

The tumult of affection and farewell grew loud again as Lewis and the chief embraced. Then the chief hugged William; the sergeants bawled orders, and twenty-seven white men, one black man, one Shoshoni girl-squaw, one two-month-old papoose, and one black Newfoundland dog the size of a pony, arrayed themselves in the pirogues and canoes. Captain Lewis, armed with his rifle and espontoon, accompanied by George Drouillard, waved them off and started hiking northward along the shore. The small canoes, hacked out of poor, wind-twisted willow trunks a few weeks earlier, were sorry-looking vessels, patched with tin to cover and hold the splits and faults in their grain, but they were riverworthy nevertheless, and even though
heavy-laden, they were light as feathers compared with the old keelboat
Discovery
, to the delight of the men on the oars and paddles. The water was fast and gray, even now dotted with cakes of rotten ice. William put a hand over the side into the river and it ached with cold.

“Careful, boys,” he called. “No one wants to find himself swimming in
that
by an accident! Now, put your minds off those dusky sweethearts o’ your’n, and blow th’ lodge smoke out o’ your lungs. Stroke water, boys! It’s a long haul to th’ western sea!”

F
ROM THE
J
OURNAL OF
M
ERIWETHER
L
EWIS
:

T
HEY HAD BEEN COMING ALONG AND COMING ALONG, SINGING
, shouting, cursing, laughing, groaning, under the vast, indifferent prairie sky.

They had toiled up the Missouri more than a hundred miles a week since the sendoff from Fort Mandan. They were in high plains no white man had ever seen now, lands of overwhelming spaciousness, where immense storms cruised through distant quadrants of sky, or sometimes came over and struck the boats squarely with frightening force; where gigantic prairie fires crawled orange and black along distant horizons, and coal-seams smoked and stank as if hell were leaking; where mineral-water runoff stained the bluffs and the river the color of lye and made the water taste like medical salts; where hundreds of bison, drowned in the breaking ice of late winter, lay flyblown and rotting with a stench that made men gag.

They had watched spring appear, then recede, then reappear, in this wondrous landscape. They saw it coming in the air, where uncountable flocks of geese and brant etched their northering arrow-formations, and where the first mosquito of the season appeared one day early in April, forerunner to millions. They saw spring on the land, in the cautious green buds of elm and cottonwood and arrowwood, then in the pale new grassblades amid the dry yellow-gray of last year’s buffalo grass, in the tiny color-flashes of strawberry flowers and primrose, trillium, violet, and plum-bush blossoming in sunny meadows. And these delicate advances then would be buried when the wind backed into the northwest and brought down surprise snowfalls, and blew so cold it formed ice on the oars or whipped the river to froth and chased the boats into leeward shelters. One such gust, coming on a mid-April day on a mile-wide expanse of the Missouri, had nearly overturned the white pirogue, which had been
spanking along under a squaresail and a spritsail with the excitable Charbonneau as its helmsman. Charbonneau had dropped to his knees, releasing the tiller to pray to the Mother of God. That had been a near catastrophe, as the vessel carried most of the expedition’s instruments, papers, medicines, and Indian presents. That the pirogue had not sunk seemed to indicate that even Charbonneau’s prayers were heard.

The boats had continued to meet all the Missouri’s old familiar hazards—falling banks, sandbars, and mudflats, submerged logs, blind channels, wind-squalls, and blowing sand—and now the explorers had jokingly added Charbonneau to their list of navigational perils.

But they had been coming along and coming along, rowing and sailing and poling and towing the boats, often jumping into the numbing-cold river to lift and shove the floundering vessels out of drift logs and off sandbars. Men on the tow ropes often had to clamber through huge mats and mounds of tangled driftwood, much of it carved by the deft chisel-marks of beavers’ teeth. The captains had exercised their medical skills on rheumatism, dysentery, boils, abscesses, felons, lacerations, sprains, and on coughs and sore eyes caused by blown dust; but these afflictions only irritated the hardy troops, and put none of them out of action for even an hour. Captain Lewis had brought vials of kine pox vaccine, and used a rest stop to inoculate those of the men who had never had the smallpox. In general the troops all remained in robust health and good spirits, with appetites which devoured elk, buffalo, fowl, goats, and beaver almost as fast as the hunters could dress them out.

The men had been coming along and coming along, seemingly as enchanted and excited by the new world as their captains were; there had been not one breach of discipline since Fort Mandan; they enjoyed a deepening sense of harmony, as if their special brotherly bond were growing tighter with every league they went into the unknown. The only thing even resembling a quarrel occurred one evening when one unfortunate beaver got itself caught in two traps, and Colter and Drouillard had had a hot, bellowing debate over whose beaver it was. William had divided the beaver.

They had come along and come along through landscapes as strange to them as the moon. They had seen an infinity of lime-green treeless plains, dark-blue cloud-shadows racing over them, and far to the south a range of low mountains, still snowy in their shady slopes, had been visible for several days. They had camped in the shadows of long, flat-topped mesas with flanks as
steep and regular as castle walls. They had passed rivers whose waters emptied white as milk into the dark, muddy flow of the Missouri; they had seen tortuous arid canyons eroded by those rivers, canyons with steep walls white as chalk and striped with veins of clay in a hundred subtle shades of red and pink, yellow and gray-blue. Late in April they had entered the wide, lush valley where the Yellowstone River flowed in from their left, its bed nearly a thousand yards wide at the mouth, most of that an enormous sandbar bright green with cane and young willow and aswarm with geese, gulls, and ducks. The fertile bottomlands and the plains above had been covered with herds of buffalo, elk, and antelope, so tame and curious that they actually followed the men, trying to determine what they were. This place, grassy and well-timbered, seemed such a paradise that the party celebrated its arrival with a dram of whiskey and a dance to Cruzatte’s lively fiddle.