From Sea to Shining Sea (107 page)

Black Buffalo, looking stricken, whether with shame or fright or regret, moved down to the willow tree. He handed the warriors his own twist of tobacco and untied the rope. He took the rope from the braves and handed it to Collins, who came up the gangplank with it. The gangplank was pulled in, the oars dipped, and the
Discovery
moved out from under the guns and arrows of the Sioux army, the pirogues following nearby like goslings swimming after a goose. Sails were unfurled.

William eased down the hammer of the blunderbuss and handed it back to the gunner. The eyes of all the rowers moved back and forth between him and the Sioux, who stood unmoving, their faces grim with disappointment and uncertainty, growing smaller and smaller. The breeze was favorable, so the vessel could move at a stately pace away from them. William wanted to sit down.

T
HEY GATHERED LARGE STONES FROM THE SHORE A LEAGUE
farther up, fashioned a makeshift anchor from them, and anchored off a sand bar in midstream early in the afternoon, determined not to camp ashore until they were well past the Sioux nation. William and Lewis wrote in their journals for a while as meals were cooked. William, his hands now shaking, concluded the day’s account:

He looked up and saw Collins sitting amidships on a locker, eating stew from a bowl, and nodded at him. Collins nodded back. William thought:

I’ll never doubt him again.

And Collins after a while said to someone beside him:

“I don’t care how drunk I git. I’ll never trouble Mister Clark again.”

Y
ORK STOOD LIKE A COAL-BLACK COLOSSUS IN THE CENTER OF
the main lodge of the Arikara village, stripped to the waist, feet wide apart. On each side of him stood an Arikara brave. York’s arms were outstretched, and each brave was gripping one of York’s fists in both hands.

“Now,” York said to himself.

His huge biceps and chest and shoulder muscles swelled and rippled in the ray of skylight from the smokehole above. A murmur of astonishment ran among the crowd of warriors and chiefs in the lodge as the braves were raised from the floor and hung there at the end of his upraised arms, their feet dangling above the dirt floor.

He stood there holding up the braves, whose combined weights totaled more than three hundred pounds, until the murmurs of admiration had risen to a loud babble, then his scowl suddenly melted into a grin, and he set them down.

William smiled at Lewis, and Lewis shook his head and smiled back. York was turning out to be an even greater showpiece than the air gun, the compass, and the corn mill combined. He was getting to be known along the Missouri as great medicine, and he missed no opportunity to exhibit himself and be the center of attention. In each village he would stand in the council lodge with his shirt off, while the Indians examined him from top to toe, exclaiming over the thick, tightly curled hair, trying to rub his blackness off with moistened fingers or even lick it off with their tongues. In some of the exhibitions, the Indians would remain unconvinced unless they could see him fully naked. York had no false modesty, and he would oblige. In those gatherings where squaws were permitted, his awareness of their scrutiny sometimes would cause his great purple pendulum of a sex organ to raise its head, at which sight the squaws would coo and giggle behind their hands and stare in frank admiration, while the men would joke in the ribald way of the social Indian and josh the women about their carryings-on.

Most often, York’s exhibitions were for the chiefs and men only. For them he would dance to Cruzatte’s fiddle, and they would be astonished that a man so large could be so agile; or he
would demonstrate his muscular strength in one way or another. Once he had taken a whole buffalo carcass, put its forelegs over his shoulders, and raised himself by the strength of his oak-trunk thighs to stand with its full weight of some nine hundred pounds supported on his back. Egod, William had thought that time, to imagine I used to trounce him in rassling.

Something seemed to be happening to York lately. He had little by little become less a lazy oaf and more a man aware of his own worth. The rigors of the 1600-mile struggle up the Missouri had melted away that great laughable paunch of his, and he looked like a statue of Hercules carved in ebony. Collins and all the others had treated him like a full comrade since that day in the Devil’s Raceground, and he was learning to live up to their respect. The impossible seemed to be happening: York, once the whining, indolent buffoon, was achieving dignity.

But not entirely. He was still a natural show-off. He sensed his peculiar value to the expedition, and enjoyed being Great Medicine. Each time the convoy hove to near another riparian Indian village, it found that the legend of the Black Giant had preceded it, and the shores would be lined with anxious spectators, waiting for a sight of this dark monster.

But York was not the only legend. Other news had raced up the Missouri ahead of the vessels, and this was news of what the Teton Sioux had learned: that here on this great lodge-canoe was a red-haired chief who could not be trifled with or bullied. All the Indians they had met since that confrontation had been friendly and respectful. Even these Arikaras, who had their own reputation as river pirates, had shown the explorers only hospitality and generosity.

Now it was time for more pipe-smoking and serious speeches in the Arikara lodge, so York dressed and went out, followed by the wondering gaze of the Indians. As soon as he stepped out into the cold October air, there arose outside the lodge an uproar of women’s and children’s voices, all overridden by York’s own booming laughter and his imitation of a roaring monster, and then more childish screams.

“I’m a turrible robustious bad devil-man,” he was bellowing. “Befo’ the Red Hair Chief ketch me and tame me, I used to eat a dozen child’n for breakfast! Rowr! An’
two
dozen at supper! Rowr! ROWWWRR!” And the screams grew louder. The braves and chiefs in the lodge were beginning to look alarmed by all the commotion. William rose to his feet.

“Tell the chiefs to excuse me a minute,” he said to Lewis. “Looks like I’m going to have to tame him some more.”

Outside, he found York stomping and slobbering around in the street, arms outstretched and hands hooked like claws, while scores of squaws and children, half amused, half terrified, milled around him in a circle, near enough to see him well but far enough to keep out of his clutches. “ROWR!” he went on, while Drouillard played the game and translated for the people, “I’m hungry! Big Devil Man wants a dozen fat babies
rat now!
I want that one, she look all tender and—”

“York!”

He stopped and turned and looked at William. “Sah?”

The women and children stood with eyes wide and mouths agape. William said:

“Don’t make yourself
too
turrible. We don’t want a panic.”

“Oh, indeed, sah.”

“All right. Use your good judgment, y’ hear?”

“Aye, sah.”

The Indians now were looking with awe at the Red Hair Chief as he turned back toward the lodge. The great black giant was powerful medicine; this Red Hair Chief with eyes like the summer sky must have greater medicine. With nothing more than soft words he could tame the monster!

“Eh, York,” Drouillard said now, a smirk on his keen hawk’s face, “I heard a squaw there say she bet you don’t eat babies at all.”

York raised himself tall and spread his arms wide, crossed his eyes and made his mouth into a pucker. “Hey, then,” he said, “you tell that lady she bes’ keep her babies close by!” The Frenchman conveyed that, and nervous but good-natured laughter swept among the women. One cried something.

“She say,” Drouillard translated, “that she have no baby.”

A repartee was building up, a rare public repartee with these strange brave men from the big canoe, and the Arikara squaws were warming to it. And so was York.

“No baby!” he exclaimed. “Well, nen, ask ’er, Mist’ Drooyah, do she want one!”

The answer was a dubious but excited yes, which seemed to delight the whole crowd.

“Oh, my, oh, my,” York said in a thick voice. “I think I like Rickyrahs away way better’n them Siouxs!”

A
NOTHER WHIPPING
. W
ILLIAM SET HIS TEETH AND WATCHED
John Newman, a powerfully built private, go through the gauntlet three times and take his seventy-five lashes. Newman had talked mutiny. He had told Captain Lewis that no free man should have to labor as these had. He had been court-martialed
by his peers and found guilty. In addition to his whipping, he had been disbarred from the permanent party. He was to be sent back to St. Louis next spring when the
Discovery
sailed back.

An Arikara chief wept when he watched the punishment. It had been explained to him, and he understood, and agreed that a man who had said such things should be punished. But the Arikaras, he said, never whip their people, even the children. If this man had been an Arikara, the chief said, he would have been killed for his crime, but not whipped. The Arikara chief wept as he said this.

Newman wept, too, but not because of the whipping. He wept because he realized that his outburst had made him an outcast.

“Please, sir,” he pleaded as William doctored his back, “I really want to stay with you all. I’ll do anything, sir. I’ll be the best man y’ve got, sir. I’ll atone for what I said. D’ you think Cap’n Lewis will take me back?”

“I don’t know, Newman. Y’ know he’s a strict man. But we’ve got all winter to fort up at the Mandan villages. That’s a lot of time. Do your best, that’s all I can advise.”

“I want t’ go to the Western Ocean,” Newman sobbed. His heart hurt worse than his flayed back.

O
NE OF THE
A
RIKARA CHIEFS, WHOSE NAME WAS
P
OCASSE
, came to Lewis and announced that he had made an important decision. He had come to like and trust the American captains so much that he would, as they had invited him to do, go and visit their Great Father the President of the United Fires. When the Big Canoe came down next spring from the Mandan Country, he would be ready to get on it. He wanted to see the civilization they had come from and to meet the great Red Hair whose face was made in metal on his medallion, and to hear his wisdom. Yes, he was eager. If Pocasse went past the Father of Waters and on to the White Lodge of Chief named Jefferson, he himself would become a legend among his own people. He would wait eagerly for the Big Canoe to come back down the river next spring, and he would be ready to go.

The acquisition of this promise seemed to please Lewis as much as had the acquisition of the prairie dog. Here was another live specimen from the far country for his mentor and commander-in-chief to see.

They had reached a very northerly latitude. Winter would come soon and the Missouri would freeze. Not far ahead, where the Missouri made a great bend to the west, lay the large, peaceful civilization of the Mandans, vaguely rumored to be the
mythical Welsh Indians. They lived at the farthest place where traders had gone from St. Louis. But there were British traders among them. Near the Mandan towns the Corps of Discovery would build a fort, its winter quarters, and there cultivate the Mandans, learn what lay farther west, and wait for the Missouri to thaw in the spring. They had come 1600 miles against the force of the great river in five months and it had tempered their sinews like steel and made them feel they were a special, glorybound people.

But the wind of the High Plains and the water of the river were more icy every day, and it would be good for even such a special people to have a warm place to hibernate and rest, because the harder part of their journey still lay ahead.

“Imagine after all this time,” Sergeant Ordway said longingly, “how it’ll feel t’ sleep under a
roof
!”

W
ILLIAM CAME OUT OF SLEEP TO THE SOUND OF KNOCKING
. An eerie dream of gray-eyed Indians faded as he woke. A cold draft through the unchinked logs of the unfinished hut had made his neck so stiff it hurt to move.

“Who’s there?” Lewis said in the dark.

“Sergeant o’ the Guard, sir,” came an excited voice through the door. “There’s something in the sky!”

Something in the sky.
It was an awesome thing to hear. In the blackness of the room the captains could hear each other moving quickly, groping for moccasins. William called out:

“
What
’s in the sky?”

But the sergeant did not reply; apparently he was gone. Lewis got to the door first and opened it. The air was so cold it seared the nostrils. It was past midnight, and there was no moon, but there was a strange, soft, reddish glow above the roofs of the row of huts, and William first thought it was another of those stupendous prairie fires the Indian hunters sometimes set to drive buffalo herds.

Several soldiers were standing on the trodden, frosty parade ground looking toward the north and talking softly. William looked up and a shiver of awe went down his arms.

“Egod! What is it?”

Above the leafless cottonwoods, something vast, ghostly, and
luminous was moving, rippling across the cold northern sky. At the moment William first saw it, it looked like a rippling curtain of moonlit gauze, mostly silvery, but tinged with blues, oranges, and yellows. In the next instant it had changed, transforming itself into vertical streaks that reminded him of fluted Grecian columns, white as marble but transparent, weightless, afloat against the black velvet sky. And then those columns were closing together, then drawing apart; then they dissolved, leaving only a shimmering, shapeless radiance, which in its turn assumed the form of gossamer draperies, billowing in languid motion.