Sacajawea (109 page)

“Merci,”
she said with a polite shake of her head.

“Good day to you, ma’am,” said the clerk, who was dark, like a Frenchman, and carefully dressed.

“Here, let me carry those,” offered Colter when she’d wrapped her trade in the fawnskin.

“Non,
it is squaw’s work,” she insisted and fell into an easy stride with him. She tied the pack to her saddle strap and mounted. Colter caught up on his horse.

“A race with the Blackfeet? Is what we heard true?”

“Sure is. Potts and I were trapping on the Jefferson near your Beaver Head.”

She nodded.

“They riddled Potts, stripped me, and then gave me a chance to run for my life. I made it to the Madison, found a beaver’s house, and crawled inside. Those Blackfeet hunted up and down all around me. When night came, I headed for the pass to the Yellowstone.”

Sacajawea put her hand to her mouth. John Potts dead! At the hand of the old enemy, the Blackfeet! She did not speak until they reined up in front of Clark’s Spanish house on Main and Pine Streets.
¹

“There are stories about you meeting devils, and boiling water shooting from the earth, and trees made of stone.”

“Looks like the grapevine talk beat me here.” Colter shook his blond hair from his eyes and laughed. “I had to stop telling those things; men thought I wasn’t quite right in the head.”

It was Sacajawea’s turn to laugh. “The people in the Minnetaree villages did not believe me when I told about the fish as large as two lodges. They said I had a forked tongue.”

“Well, Bill Clark will listen and believe,” said Colter.

“Come,” said Sacajawea, dismounting. “Chief Red Hair knows we tell what our eyes see.”

“Janey!” cried General Clark as the two started up the stone steps. “And Colter! Balls of fire! Where have you been? Come in, come in.” He led them into the Indian room, where the walls were lined with robes, hides, and maps, with stories marked on many of them.

“Well, sir, last month I was at the Three Forks.”

Clark gasped. “And you are here in Saint Louis already?”

“Yes, sir. Came down that river in thirty days.”

“That breaks all records.”

“Yep, guess it does, at that. Colonel Menard and Andy Henry have started a fort on that strip of wooded grassland between the Jefferson and Madison. Drouillard and I trapped around there and camped with them. Had to be on constant lookout for skulking Blackfeet. Say, I was certainly shocked to hear about Captain Lewis’s suicide. Doesn’t yet seem true.”

Clark’s face puckered; his eyes opened. “You feel that way too?”

“Yes, sir. What a shame. Say, I heard Shannon is called Peg Leg and gets about as well on his wooden leg as any of the rest of those university fellows.”

“Can’t keep a good man down long,” agreed Clark, showing them to a place at his plank conference table.

“Where’s that son of a gun, Ben York?” Colter looked around the room.

After a short silence, Clark began speaking in a low voice, looking toward Colter with a long-focused gaze, as though he were transparent or not there at all. “He is a good man,” Clark said with seeming irrelevance. “Ben York. That son of a gun. I do miss him. I took him to Louisville, where he worked as a freedman. Then he wed a little gal on the next farm. But he didn’t stay long. Left Cindy Lou and came back here to me. He got to hanging around the Greentree Tavern and the Union and Missouri hotels telling wild tales and drinking the grog the men gave him. It was not his fault entirely. The
engagés
and rivermen liked to hear him tell how the Indians marched admiringly around him and pushed their fairest daughters on him. He impressed them with his powers of strength, and then he got to acting like he was the only black being on earth, and some kind of high chief. I had to warn him several times. But he didn’t think I was in earnest. Something had to be done. So I got Cindy Lou freed and sent him back to Louisville so that he could settle down, raise a family and have some decent work, hauling freight with a wagon and team of six horses. He seemed pleased when he left, maybe because Janey made him a fancy shirt with big roses on front and back. Oh, Lord, he seems to have disappeared—we have no actual word from him. He’s just gone.” His mouth puckered, and he shook his head. He searched the faces of his listeners with a vaguely grieved, apprehensive look. There being no denials or questions, he changed the subject. “Janey, tell Colter what our little dancing boy is doing.”

“Oh, he’s living at the school!” she said, squinting at him with suppressed amusement in her eyes. “He has the talking books and looks at them more often than at me when he visits.”

“Tell what he’s learning,” Clark insisted, fumbling for some tobacco in a long buckskin sack.

Sacajawea waited until his pipe was lit and he’d drawn a few puffs. “He can read and write. Reverend Welch tells him about lands across the Great Water. Once he said he wished to go to see that land himself. And Tess is at Father Neil’s,” she said proudly.

“Tess?” Colter asked.

“Oh, I’m sorry, don’t you remember the other small boy Charb had at the Mandan village? The son of one of his other women—Otter, her name was.” Clark passed his pipe to Colter, who puffed with hollowing cheeks.

“I remember her,” Colter began, speaking out of a slowly thinning fog. “She was the one Shannon took a fancy to; he tried to teach her some English words.”

“She’s the one. Caught on slowly, but she tried, which is more than can be said of that rascal Tess. Father Neil says he is either sleeping in the schoolroom or acting like a clown.”

“Pah!” said Sacajawea. “He needs a leather strap. Otter Woman was too soft with him.”

“Now don’t you go telling her what I said.” Clark’s fists hit the table.

“Ai.”
Sacajawea sniffed, then smiled. “She has not yet returned with our man, remember?”

“You know me; I forget who is where most of the time,” said Clark. “I had a talk a fortnight ago with Welch about clothing and books for Pomp—they call him Baptiste. That lad is bright. Catches on fast, and no problem with his behavior. The other kids like him.”

Sacajawea chuckled and was still. Colter passed the pipe back to Clark.

“Where is Charb?”

“Charbonneau hired out with Manuel Lisa as interpreter so that he could take Otter Woman back to the Minnetaree village. She’s not well. Charbonneau insisted that the Medicine Man was what she needed.”

“Some man, huh?” said Colter winking. “All heart and soul. Say—where’s Ordway?”

Clark smoked awhile. “He’s in New Hampshire. Bought some land there. And Windsor, too. Whitehouse sold his land to Drouillard and reenlisted in the Army.”

“Drouillard went under in a skirmish with the stinking Blackfeet.” Colter cleared his throat. “Thought maybe you hadn’t heard. Where’s Pryor?”

Clark raised his head and seemed to come back slowly from a distant place. “I’d heard. Pryor got his discharge, and now he’s gone out to the lead mines to trade with the natives. Friendly with the Illini and Osage, he is. I hope he has no trouble with the Shawnee out there. And speaking of trouble, there’s a strong feeling in Congress for war against Great Britain because of her seizure of American ships and seamen.”

“I’ve heard.” The bright look went out of Colter’s eyes.

“Go on,” Clark jogged him. “What have you heard?”

“Not much.” Colter sat looking at his hands, as if he were puzzled by them and trying to fit them together. “So help me,” he said solemnly, “some say it is best to strike at England through Canada, using the friendship of the Indians to help our Army.”

“Why?” Sacajawea spoke sharply. “The British are befriending the natives as fast as they can and turning them against us.”

“Against
us,”
repeated Clark with a smile. “Now you speak like an American. And Americans know that the British can’t fight. My God, they whoop like a pack of Blackfeet, but they’d drop dead if they ever got close enough to hear a Blackfoot whoop. They’ll come tricked out in hunting shirts, when they’ve been turning up their snouts for years at settlers that had nothing else but hunting shirts to wear. They’ll play Blackfeet, letting on to burn a man’s insides, while he’s still alive, but when their neighbors are being burned alive not twenty miles from them, they won’t lift a finger. They’ll be yelling ‘Down with Yankees!’ when the only thing they ever put down is their breeches! That is not fighting.

“It does not prove they wouldn’t fight if they really had a call to,” said Colter.

“You’d be surprised how deaf they could be if anyone called them. They can’t fight in this country. Don’t knowhow, never did, and most likely won’t learn. But it could be a mess if they started.”

Judy Clark came into the room then. Her face shone like the sun. “Oh, Will, I didn’t realize you had company—and it’s Janey. Why didn’t you tell me?” She skipped past the men and sat beside Sacajawea, tossing her brown curls and smiling at Colter.

“This is John Colter, one of my men from the expedition,” said Clark, standing.

“I’m pleased to meet you.” She smiled and indicated that the men should sit down again. Her eyes twinkled. “Janey and I can go into the parlor, and you men can talk.” She motioned for Sacajawea to follow her.

“Come, I’ll play the piano for you. We just had it sent here from New York.”

Sacajawea had to keep her hand over her mouth when she saw what a piano was. To her the keys looked like a long set of teeth. The music was unimaginable; she’d never heard so many different sounds.

By midafternoon, she knew she’d better start for home, and promised to teach Miss Judy how to make jerky if she’d let her touch the piano keys.

“Will says so often he has a yen for dried meat.” Judy ran around the piano as Rose York came into the room with a plate of cookies.

Sacajawea took a handful and pushed them inside her dress so that she could save them for the boys when they came home from school on holiday.

In the fall, Clark sent Sacajawea part of a buffalo so that she could have meat when the boys came home from school. And Clark was shrewd enough to know that she often had Indian guests come to her cabin so that she could show other women how to sew or embroider or cook like the white women. Sacajawea was a leading lady in the Indian community of the riverfront city.

One afternoon, Miss Judy came with Clark and their boy, Meriwether Lewis Clark, to visit Sacajawea. Judy sighed as she saw the one-room log cabin, with an indolently smoking chimney, squatting in sullen destitution. Before the door a ramshackle wagon stood waiting for nothing. Down yonder in the brushy draw, an almost roofless shed stared listlessly upon the bright blue sky.

“See, Will has brought more meat. I’m going to stay and learn how to make the dry strips,” said Miss Judy.

Clark rode off on business of his own—something about “Red Sticks” uprising along the frontier, a Creek war faction.

“Did you see the comet last night? The star with the tail?” asked Miss Judy cheerily as she spread an old quilt on the ground for the baby to lie on. “We watched for an hour or more.”

“The fire tail?” asked Sacajawea.
“Ai,
some of the Indians are leaving for camps away from Red Hair’s town. They were fearful last night and said that Mother Earth is at her end.”

“Posh!” laughed Judy. “That is superstitious nonsense. You’ll see, by next year the old earth will still be here with us on it.”

Sacajawea chuckled and showed Miss Judy how to hold the butcher knife and cut buffalo meat into inch-thick slices and strips and score it crosswise. They spread the strips on the cottonwood poles in front of the cabin, high to keep it from dogs, wolves, and vermin. There was a smoky fire under the frame to make the meat sweeter and tastier.

“You are like a sister. It is no one’s fault how she is born, and your heart is as much Shoshoni as mine.” Sacajawea’s eyes shone with a merry light.

Three days later, Miss Judy came back to see if the meat was done. Sacajawea smiled and pulled off a small, stiff piece, which she put in baby Looie’s fist. He seemed to enjoy tugging and chewing on it. His chin dripped.

“Warm sun is good for your papoose,” said Sacajawea, gently holding the baby close to her breast and patting his little back. Then she put him down on the quilt. She patiently showed Miss Judy how to strip the sinew and gristle from the dried meat. “Jerky,” she said. Then Sacajawea’s arm took in all the racks of fingerwidth strips of meat. “Pemmican—that is in a class by itself.”

Miss Judy learned how to pound the dried strips in a wooden mortar until they were pulverized and then packed loosely in clean parfleche bags. Sacajawea pouredmelted buffalo fat over the open parfleches. Then the women sewed up the mouths of the bags. “This pemmican will keep for many seasons,” explained Sacajawea.

“Will has told me what a splendid high-energy food it is. He said it’s a complete diet in itself. It can be eaten uncooked or fried, roasted, boiled, alone, or in combination with anything on hand.”

“Ai,”
agreed Sacajawea. “It is best when mixed with dried, ground-up fruits.”

“Can’t you just see Will when I tell him I made jerky and this whole bag of pemmican? He won’t believe me, I know.”

Sacajawea wiped the perspiration from her forehead with an old scrap of deerskin. She would do almost anything to please Chief Red Hair, and she was delighted with this young woman who was his wife.

Miss Judy, singing “Skip to My Lou,” sat beside her son and watched Sacajawea take the long strips of buffalo fat, which had lain along the back of the animal, from the drying rack. The fat had been slowly fire-dried. Sacajawea cut it into sticks and put it in leather pouches. The kidney fat was dry, and she sliced it to be stored for later use with corn or beans in the cooking kettle.

“It’s hot for November,” said Miss Judy, fanning her face with her hand.

“Ai,”
agreed Sacajawea. “We must store up the warmth for a long, cold winter.”

“Don’t you miss Charbonneau and Otter Woman?”

“I miss Otter Woman and often wonder if she is in the Minnetaree village. I have never seen the coughing sickness cured.” For a time Sacajawea seemed unconscious of Miss Judy as she worked with the strips of meat, turning them over to get the smoke on both sides.