Shovels
chunk
ed in the earth for more than an hour. The men poured sweat, laughed, swore, and clowned. Every few minutes one man or another would put his hands to his chest, make himself look buck-toothed, and cry, “Yip! Yip! Yip! Come out, pup! It’s only me, y’r Uncle Ground Dog! Yip! Yip!” At the far side of the village, one or two of the creatures would stand up at the mouth of a burrow and chirp back at the sweating soldiers as if taunting them, then would disappear.
After excavating to a depth of six feet, the men in one group ran a pole down into the burrow. “Lord a mercy,” someone exclaimed, “we ain’t half there yit!”
“Keep at it,” Lewis commanded.
There were several large excavations in the village now. The men were almost faint from the heat, and they were getting tired of this. But Lewis made them keep digging. “Damn him,” someone muttered, out of his hearing, “I think his brain’s parched. Nobody needs a damn dirt-squirrel this bad.”
“We keep a-diggin’,” someone drawled, “and we’ll strike water sure.”
“There’s an idea,” said Lewis. “We’ll fetch water an’ flush ’im out.”
In a few minutes, a bucket brigade was formed, from the Missouri bank to one of the burrows. Using every available bucket and kettle, the shirtless men passed water up onto the prairie, and it was poured down into the hole. The men in the excavation labored in a grand mess of mud, sending kettle after kettle of water gurgling down the little tunnel.
“Ye wanted one alive?” William exclaimed. “This one isn’t goin’ to be alive ’less ’e’s a fish!” God, he thought, what if George could see what this here fool’s army’s a-doin’! This blind persistence was a part of Lewis that he didn’t like, and he was wondering how he might, without embarrassing him, make him ease off.
But soon, after five or six barrels of muddy Missouri water had gone glugging down the hole, a drenched little head floated up through the ooze, blinking and shaking. “Thar ’e be!” a man yelled, and grabbed the half-drowned little beast by the nape of its neck as it came floating out. Lewis was fairly dancing with triumph. “Shields,” he shouted, “quick, go down and build a cage!”
The sun was low over the western prairie by now. The Corps
of Discovery traipsed down the bluff to the river, sweaty, exhausted, mud-smeared, laughing, arguing whether the funny creatures were barking squirrels or chirping pups or burrowing beavers. Now that they had succeeded, they were forgetting how disgruntled they had been. They had spent the greater part of a day capturing the doughty little mammal, and most now were feeling it was one of the best days they had ever enjoyed.
After the animal was cleaned and put safely away in a cage with several handfuls of fresh herbiage and some corn, the men kept coming by to look in on it and give it friendly little barks. Scannon, ordered to stay clear of the cage, lay five feet away from it and stared at it, cocking his head and whimpering whenever it moved.
The men bathed and washed their clothes in the river, enjoyed an extra gill of whiskey with their dinner, and went to bed still chuckling about the “damned little pups of the prairie.”
Off in the dusk somewhere, William heard the Fields brothers’ voices.
“Lordy, Joe, I never been so tired. Heh, heh! But I sure am glad we come along.”
“Me likewise.”
They were thinking prairie dogs instead of Sioux, and William was pleased.
“Yip, yip!” someone piped up in a far corner of the camp. William listened to the men’s chuckles blending with the gurgling of the Missouri, and he went to sleep smiling.
“L
ORD
G
OD
,
THIS’S
EVEN
BIGGER
THAN
A
M
ISSOURUH
CAT-FISH
!”
“That was Jonah’s own fish, in its day, I’ll bet it wahr!”
The men thus exclaimed as they dug in stinking, black-sulphur soil at the top of a bluff on the south side of the river, exposing the fossilized bones of what seemed to be a fish without end. When at last they had uncovered the last vertebra, a rope was stretched from one end to the other of the skeleton and measured. “Forty-five feet,” William announced. He wrote it down in his notes for September 10, and then the men were put to work gathering up the bones, each labeled and numbered for shipment to Thomas Jefferson.
“D’ye reckon, Cap’n, there’s fish like this still in this here river?” The query was from Private Goodrich, the Corps’ most dedicated fisherman. William chuckled.
“I doubt you’ll catch one this size,” he said.
“I sorta hope not. In a way,” Goodrich said wistfully.
“When this fish swam,” William explained, remembering things George had told him so long ago back at the Falls of the Ohio, “this land we’re on likely was under sea.”
Goodrich paused and looked at William, uncomprehending, thinking perhaps he was joking. “Anyways,” he said then, “I sorta would like to catch one like this.”
William smiled. Dreams o’ glory, he thought.
W
ILLIAM
LAY
ON
HIS
SIDE
IN
HIS
BLANKET
ON
THE
QUARTERDECK
watching the sky brighten to gold above the distant bluff, hearing the Missouri trickle and swirl under the hull of the
Discovery.
He had hardly slept all night, thinking about the Sioux. He was tired, but was relieved to see daylight come so that something could be done.
He sat up in his bedding and rubbed the corners of his eyes. Lewis lay nearby, his dog asleep beside him. Down on the main deck, on lockers and on the foredeck, two-thirds of the Corps lay rolled in their blankets, literally covering every available foot of space. It had been decided the night before that because of the nearness of the Sioux, most of the men should sleep aboard the boat, while a detachment of fifteen stood guard on the sandbar beside which the vessel lay anchored. Opposite the sandbar was the clump of willows that marked the mouth of the Bad River. Beyond those willows was the main village of the Teton Sioux, the notorious “pirates of the Missouri.” A grand council with the Sioux chiefs had been arranged, and it would be held on this brushy sandbar, beginning about midmorning.
“Ordway, you awake?” William said.
The sergeant sat up nearby. “Aye, Cap’n.”
“Let’s have reveille and use this light.”
The men awoke quickly, those who had slept, apparently remembering their situation at once. Those who had not slept moved about, haggard, bleary-eyed, anxiously peering toward
the Bad River. Patrick Gass, who had been elected sergeant to succeed Charles Floyd, rumbled orders.
The men worked until breakfast, setting up the council place on the sandbar. They erected the keelboat’s mast as a flagpole. Then they stretched the barge’s awning over poles to make a shade canopy. They set up a field table under the canopy, and moved several bundles of Indian presents from the boat to the table. As the sun peeped over the distant bluff, they bathed and shaved on the shore of the sandbar, donned the blue coats, leggings, boots, and top hats of their parade uniforms, and slung the white belts of their bayonets and cartouch boxes over their shoulders. It had been a long time since they had looked so much like soldiers, and though this uniforming felt strangely formal here on a sandbar in a prairie river without a fort or even a tent within a thousand miles, it seemed to brace their morale.
The sun was halfway up the sky, and William was under the awning laying out the Jefferson medals, flags, hats, tobacco, and other gifts, when Lewis touched him on the shoulder and nodded toward the mouth of the river.
William looked and a shiver went down his neck. “Got us a lot outnumbered, haven’t they?”
There were hundreds of Indians filling up the shore over there, tiny figures of ruddy skin and tawny deerhides, bristling with spears and guns and decorated poles. Most were afoot, but many were on horseback. Their voices droned above the watery whisper of the Missouri. From somewhere far off came a regular, jingling beat, not distinct, but something rather like a tambourine.
“Well,” said Lewis. “Let’s go back aboard and get spruced up for the chiefs.”
B
Y
ELEVEN
O’CLOCK
,
THREE
COLORFULLY
DRESSED
CHIEFS
and about two dozen bodyguards had gathered near the flagpole. With them were two bedraggled captive Omaha squaws, through whom Cruzatte could interpret when hand signs were inadequate.
The two captains put on their bicorn hats, climbed down from the keelboat into one of the pirogues, and were rowed to the sandbar. They walked up to where the chiefs stood. The principal chief, in a full headdress of hawk feathers and a long, clean, beaded doehide tunic reaching his knees, stood in front, and the other two stood slightly behind him, to his right and left. Cruzatte, self-conscious and nervous, placed himself at Captain Lewis’s right hand. The chiefs’ eyes stayed mostly on William,
whose stature and fair coloring apparently made them believe he was the leader.
The principal Sioux chief, Cruzatte said, was Un Ton-gar Sar-Bar, meaning Black Buffalo. He was tall, about fifty, with a kindly, broad, deeply lined face and a mashed-looking nose. The second chief was Torto-hon-gar, known as Partizan. The captains glanced to each other. This was the one whom Loisel had described as a snake. His eyes were cold and furtive, his lips thin. The third chief was introduced as Tar Ton-gar Wa-ker, or Buffalo Medicine. The chiefs touched hands with the captains. Each of their bodyguards wore a headdress made of a raven’s skin with head, wings, and tail intact, the beak projecting over the warrior’s forehead.
William did not like the appearance of these Teton Sioux. They seemed less wholesome and more ill-proportioned than the Kickapoos, Missouris, Otoes, and Yankton Sioux whom the expedition had met downriver. These Teton Sioux looked like chimney sweeps or coal-diggers; their faces and bodies were smeared with matter that appeared to be a mixture of charcoal dust and lard, and they were short-limbed and bug-eyed. Somehow, too, they seemed sullen and reticent, and they either misunderstood, or pretended to misunderstand, Cruzatte’s translations.
“Tell them,” Lewis said, “that we bring them samples of our food.” He pointed to a row of salt pork and flour kegs. There followed some more talk, and two Sioux bodyguards stooped to open a hide bundle, which Cruzatte explained was meat the Sioux had brought to the Americans.
It lay there on the opened skin now, perhaps two hundred pounds of it, not red but dirty, graying, stinking in the sunlight. It was many days beyond freshness, and its pungency made the captains recoil. William asked, “Do they mean this as an insult?”
“Non,
capitaine,”
said the Frenchman. “Meat of a rankness is very estimable to them. They favor it.”
But the chiefs had already seen the revulsion in the Americans’ faces, and they now looked even more sullen.
“Sergeant, parade the men and raise the colors,” William said.
The Indians watched with unreadable expressions as a squad of blue-coated soldiers, impressively tall in their black hats, shouldered arms, marched in perfect step, flanked, and wheeled, tramping and swinging their arms in unison as if they shared one spirit. Then the squad halted in a rank and stood at Present Arms
while the American flag was hauled up the pole. Then the chiefs and their bodyguards were invited to settle themselves in the awning’s shade. The pipe was lit and passed in silence for a quarter of an hour, while everyone looked everyone over.
The next order of ceremony was Captain Lewis’s speech. William sat down on a keg beside the table while Lewis stood before the chiefs, Cruzatte by his side, and began.
“Chiefs of the great nation of the Sioux, hear me.” He pointed upward. “Today you have seen the flag of the United States put above this land. Your white father is now the great chief of the United States.” He waited while Cruzatte translated this. The Indians looked around, looked up, looked at each other, shrugged. It was obvious that either Cruzatte was not translating well, or the Sioux were insolently pretending not to understand. When a pause came and Cruzatte nodded, Lewis continued.
“Your former fathers the Spaniards have gone across the great water where the sun rises. We have come very far with our flag to tell you this.” Again Cruzatte limped along with his hand signals and his limited command of the Sioux tongue. The chiefs seemed to be more interested in his curious appearance and his eyepatch than in what he was saying. They also seemed more interested in the array of gifts than in the words being spoken. During Cruzatte’s desperate pauses for word-searching, the whine of flies was loud under the awning. It seemed that a million of them had congregated around the great pile of tainted meat lying out in the sun.
“Your new father cares more for the Sioux, and for all the red men in the land, than your Spanish fathers cared. He wants to see your chiefs, and hear them, and know them, and to trade with all your people. Your new father does not want the Sioux to be hungry in the winters. He wants the Sioux to have many useful things, such as we will show you soon, so that the Sioux may live with more ease.”
Cruzatte struggled through this part, which seemed to be more interesting and comprehensible to them; Lewis went on then.
“Your new father does not want the Sioux to waste their time making war on other nations. He does not want your women to cry because their men and their sons die in wars that are not necessary. Your father wants all the red men to be at peace with each other, and with the new flag. When nations are at peace, there is time to do good things. There is time to hunt, and to store food, time to make goods, to trade and grow wealthy. Your
women can have things of many beautiful colors, and machines of iron, to grind grain.”