Sacajawea (106 page)

1804–1807,
“Journal of a Voyage up the River Missouri,” by Henry M. Brackenridge, vol. VI. Baltimore: Coale and Maxwell, 1816. Reprinted by The Arthur H. Clark Co., Cleveland, 1904: pp. 32–3.

T
wo days after Clark came to the cabin for his wife, Charbonneau arrived, asking for more beaver traps. He’d lost two on his trip to the Arkansas. General Clark offered him four and urged him to take his family on a short trapping trip before the winter wind and rains came. “It will prevent cabin fever,” Clark said.

“I know there is buffalo on the Platte, and these squaws can skin them out as fast as I shoot them. It is far—cannot stay long with
deux femmes
and
enfants
on a trip. Plenty beaver there, also. Yi-eo-ow-ee! I go!”

Charbonneau led the way, his squaws riding a single horse, his boys riding another that was piled high with baggage. Twenty-four days out of Saint Louis, they passed the mouth of the Platte River. Here, a few miles downstream at the mouth, and a few miles upstream at Council Bluffs, a dozen or more fur companies had posts built for the Pawnee, Omaha, Oto, Ponca, and Iowa trade. The Charbonneau family pitched their skin tepee near one post and watched Charbonneau go to buy more supplies and exchange stories with the French-Canadians at the post.

“By gar,” he said, “it is good to hear someone play the French harp again.”

“There’s some music in everyone,” said an old trapper who sat with his back against the vertical logs at the front of the trading post.

“Who’s that!” yelled a voice from inside.

“It’s Charbonneau, on his way to get a few beaver plews before winter gets going.”

“Well, son of a gun, Big Tessie. I remember when you took that purty little Arapaho into your tent, and consarn my picture if her pappy wasn’t mad because you didn’t give him a horse in trade. I’ll swear you stood up to him and in hand sign, with the delicatest kind of a tremble coming in your hands, answered him back that some of these here days he’d have a papoose instead. Haw-haw-haw, was that there old coot mad. When he give his rusty rifle the waking touch, you squatted as if her bark was going to bite you!”

“Oui,
and I bet I left the papoose,” said Charbonneau, laughing exultantly.

“You were gone the next morning afore the sun came up. You’re powerful with the women, sure ‘nuf.”

“How long you been in charge of this here post, Jake?”

“Since I last hear you come down from Red River of the North. You been among those métis and roughnecks of the Hudson’s Bay lately? Or the muskeeters too much for you?”

“Non,
I been thinking of trying a farm in Saint Louis. That is not considered a business for a mountain man, but by gar—I might be able to raise some nice sheep or goats.” Then he looked at the old trapper. “Hey, you want to sell that harp poking out of your pocket there?”

“This here French harp?” asked the old trapper. “That’s certain, if you got a pint of good whiskey.”

“It’s with my gear. Brandy. I will get it for you. Then I play you a tune on that French harp. I always have one, but lost mine somewheres.”

“I’m coming to get my pint, you varmint,” said the trapper.

“I got
deux femmes
and
enfants
with me. You like to come out and meet them? They went to the west with me and back again. Capitaines Lewis and Clark made that trip with us. My squaws act like the white women now. They never are satisfied with nothing. They like the calico dress.
Jésus,
it is an expense. And
Jésus,
muskeetairs are big on the Columbia—big as the buzzards that follow us all the way from the Upper Missouri.”

“Well, I ain’t going turn down a chance to see some good-looking squaws and little breed kids running around naked.”

“You corn-dodger mill, my kids are not naked. My kids are going to school next year or so.”

“Trapping must be good business for you, I swear. You with the XY or Nor’west?”

“Independent,” answered Charbonneau. “Capitaine—he’s now Générale—Clark, he sends them to the school. He thinks my family is worth all that for what we did as interpreters to the Pacific.”

The old trapper shook his head. Sacajawea and Otter Woman nodded to him. He told the boys how to playcrack-the-whip and played with them until he was winded.

Charbonneau gave him a pint of well-watered brandy and sat down to play the French harp. Sacajawea was pleased to hear such happy sounds around the camp.

“Imagine taking these here two squaws and chilluns to the far west,” sighed the old trapper. He sat on the doorsill of the post, a shriveled little old man with hair and face gray as ashes. He had dark Indian eyes, high cheekbones, and a long, sickle-shaped nose.

Charbonneau played a couple of old French tunes and sang some dirty words. Then he and the old trapper sang one together, laughing heartily. Stridently they took up each last line and, repeating it three or four times, kicked holes in the ground to the rhythm of it. Otter Woman began to dance as she gathered up firewood for the evening. Little Tess and Pomp sang with their father, who recited to them a new verse about how he took his Arapaho girl to the schoolhouse for to learn her reading and writing and ordinary living, and as it was quite original and unprintable for those times, the old trapper and post clerk laughed and swore joyfully.

“You, big braves, sing loud on the other side of the post. It will make you feel good, and it will make me feel good not to know what the words are you sing,” scolded Sacajawea.

“See, I said they are becoming like white women!” Charbonneau eyed her, but obeyed.

The trapper pointed a long, bony finger, curved almost to a hook with rheumatism, at Charbonneau. “You remind me of a Canuck I once knowed. He wore a Nor’west capote, same as you, and a one-shot gun rifle. He made that shoot plumb center when he got buffler. He got his fixings from old Chouteau, but what he wanted out there in them mountains, I never just rightly knowed. He made some pictures of the Injuns and their horses. That were a hair of the black bear in him. Leclerc knowed him in the Blackfoot. The boys still tell how he took the bark off the Cheyennes when he cleared out of the village with old Elkhorn’s squaw. His gun was handsome—that’s a fact.”

“Might be that he was me.” Charbonneau’s chest swelled. “I been those places and hightailed it out of

Elkhorn’s village with his little
femme
one night,” he bragged.

The old trapper looked through squinted eyes at Charbonneau and grinned. “Why, you couldn’t draw the hinder part of this chile’s foot. You ain’t got nothing to crow about here. You aiming to pick up supplies from Jake?”

“Oui.”

“Better git moving. Them there Omahas are coming in for tobaccy and firewater. Jake will close this here post if they git too pestering. Black Harris came through a week ago and couldn’t git nothing for two days. This chile’s not leaving until Ashley’s party come through. But you with women and chilluns, looks like you ought to move on.”

“Obliged to you for the warning. I’ll stop back before the snow to press the plews,” said Charbonneau, tapping the spit from his French harp on the back of his left hand.

“I could just go with you.”

“Non,
thanks, I’m pushing on in the morning.” Charbonneau wanted to go alone and work in secrecy—plews were too valuable to take on a doubtful partner.

Charbonneau finished his purchases, and they pushed out the next morning. They passed circles of buffalo skulls that Indians had made to draw herds of buffalo to the area. They camped beside the Platte again, and Charbonneau set his traps in the small streams heading into the large river. The boys learned to build rafts that floated in the streams. They fished and waded in cold water, wearing only breechclouts. They learned to imitate the call of the wolf, coyote, whippoorwill, and mourning dove. Sacajawea told them meanings for each howl and bird call.

They worked the meadow streams where the water ran slowly enough to be dammed by beaver. Charbonneau set his traps late in the afternoon, between sunset and dark. They worked upstream, because signs of other trappers or Indians might come downstream, and because Charbonneau believed the country grew safer as they moved higher. His was a trapper’s mind. Even though slow and bungling in many ways, when he hunted beaver he read the country, recorded his route, watched for hostiles, and planned for all eventualities. He was not always wise in his plans, but he was a mountain man, with ruggedness and a knowledge of living with the country.

Little Tess and Pomp explored the beavers’ dams and tried to imitate them upstream, only to find that the dams they built were washed aside by the stream overnight. The beaver built his house of small branches, with a five-inch plastering of mud for roof and outer walls, on the edges of the pool his dam made. It was almost six feet high and twice as broad. In the middle of the earth floor was a pool, sometimes two or more. They were the exits of the tunnels that had been dug down through the earth to the stream bed above the dam. Weighted down with mud and water-logged snags was the winter hoard of saplings and branches whose bark was the beavers’ food.

One day Sacajawea showed both boys how the Agaidükas hunted beaver by blocking tunnels. She chopped through the roof of the house and dug out three good beaver. The boys were delighted with her prowess.

Otter Woman, not to be outdone, pulled out a two-arm span of heavy linen thread, a needle, and a snippet of yellow buckskin from a small bag hung on her belt. She knotted one end of the line, threaded the needle, then pierced the tiny piece of buckskin and drew it down against the knot. That was all she needed to catch trout, she explained, turning her head and trying to suppress a cough. “It might be better with a grasshopper added.” So, with the needle still threaded, she walked away from the creek, watching in the grass. It was late for grasshoppers, but she caught two. One went into the bag, while the other was threaded and drawn down against the buckskin.

Back at the creek, she took a turn or two of the line around her index finger and let the bait drift down a sunny, shallow riffle. Within seconds, a nine-inch trout had fought his way up over the gravel, the water bulging and breaking from his glistening green back. When he’d had time to swallow the grasshopper, she swung him fast and low in a wide horizontal arc to the bank. The next one was caught as swiftly and as easily. She handed the line to Little Tess.

Sacajawea moved with Pomp upstream to a pool behind several old logs and brush, and she lay on her belly in the grass within reach of the brush that grew from the water. A trout shot away as she dangled both hands, her fingertips moving gently, almost touching, deep in the shaded pool. Her hands grew numb, and she scrambled up, showing her son how to dangle his fingers in the water to attract trout. A good-sized one came up, and Pomp was so excited that his fingers scarcely moved as the fish rubbed his back against them. Pomp warmed his hands a little and tried again, but after a while had to warm them again. Otter Woman shouted that she and Little Tess had ten trout on the bank. That made all the Charbonneau family needed for the evening meal.

The next day, Charbonneau took them to the spot where he had set a trap at the natural runway of the beaver, just inside the water where a path came down from the bank. The other traps he baited and set in places for attracting the beaver and for drowning him when he was caught. The bait was the musky secretion taken from the beaver’s prepuce. Charbonneau used it straight. “Some doctor this with bear’s grease or powdered stink bugs,” he explained. He called the bait “medicine” or “castoreum,” and carried it in a plugged horn bottle at his belt. Otter Woman did not seem to mind its perfume, but Sacajawea was not attracted to it and tried to stand upwind from Charbonneau whenever he baited the traps.

Charbonneau selected the proper places for his traps meticulously, setting them in water of the proper depth and driving a stout, dry trap pole through the ring at the end of the five-foot steel chain into the bed of the stream. He patiently told the boys this latter was to keep the beaver from dragging the heavy five-pound trap out of the ground and into the air. For if he did that, he would escape by gnawing off the paw by which he was caught. When every other preparation had been made, Charbonneau smeared a little medicine on a twig or willow, which he arched just above the surface, directly over a trap’s trigger. The scent attracted the beaver—reminding Otter Woman of a pet dog’s behavior when there was a bitch in heat around the Minnetareevillage—and when he approached the bait stick, he was caught by the foot.

Charbonneau had waded into the stream at a sufficient distance from his selected place, carrying his set trap, and he waded several yards downstream before getting out. He splashed water over his own trail and made sure the man-scent was eliminated.

Next morning before sunrise, Charbonneau went out to raise the traps. One beaver had struggled and unmoored a trap, but it was too late. The float stick showed where the carcass was. Little Tess waded out to bring it in. Charbonneau’s line was four traps. The women skinned the beaver on the spot. He had been killed by drowning. A full-grown beaver weighed thirty to sixty pounds and the pelt a pound and a half or two pounds when finally prepared.

The women packed the pelts and medicine glands back to camp. Camp was never located in the same place for two nights straight. The boys carried the tails, for they were a delicacy when charred in the fire to remove the horny skin, and then boiled.

The rest of the day was spent playing games with the boys, blowing on the French harp, or dozing. Sacajawea and Otter Woman were busy, with no time for dozing. They scraped the flesh side of the pelts free of tissue and sinew and stretched the hides on frames of willow, rather like large embroidery hoops, and then the pelts were given the cool fall sun for a day or two. When they were dry, they were folded with the fur inside and marked with Charbonneau’s symbol, C.

Little Tess was as full of blunders as his father. Pomp accompanied him on his afternoon rambles and saved him from passing into the next world several times. Pomp would show him the lower ford, which he could never seem to find for himself, generally mistaking quicksand for it. He recommended that his brother not shoot his arrow at a deer in the moment when Charbonneau was passing behind the animal on the farther side of the brush. Pomp did not lose his patience, but seemed to take it as his lot to have an older brother who had to have his horse brought back to him, which ran away because Little Tess had forgotten to throw the reins over his head and let them trail.