Sacajawea (119 page)

“Speak to your older squaw first,” suggested Tess. “She is the one who made the arrangements and ate, like one of the men, with the strangers.”

“My woman?”

Tess closed his eyes and stalked peevishly back and forth. “That there duke,” he said, “is an idiot.”

“The man,” Charbonneau said bluntly, “he is a damned fool.” Then he added, “He is a fool who can’t see beyond his own nose that there are older, more experienced men around who make excellent interpreters.”

“Tell him I should be the one to go.” Tess opened hiseyes petulantly. “I can speak French and a little German.”

“But you don’t know Spanish,” said Baptiste.

“Pah! You make me want to puke!” said Tess.

Charbonneau hesitated. He had the feeling that this matter was the beginning of something larger. Abruptly he caught Sacajawea’s wrist and twisted her around to face him. His whiskers had grown, making his face look shaggy and dark. The rusty mask was broken. His mouth was half-open, and his breath came in small gasps. “I should beat you.” He picked up a long leather thong and wound it around his wrist to lash against her. She sank to the ground and covered her head with her arms. She kept silent and bit her upper lip so as not to cry out.

Eagle watched from one side. She was truly half-sorry to see her friend treated so roughly—and half-sorry that Charbonneau did not lash out harder. After all, Sacajawea had entertained four men and had eaten with them. That was wrong. Yet Eagle also knew that Sacajawea seemed to do things easily, with no conscious thought of Indian etiquette. She used either the white man’s or the Indian’s manners whenever it suited her purpose.

Charbonneau lashed out with a loud snap of the whip. It caught at the back of Sacajawea’s tunic.

Eagle also knew that she wished she had the easygoing ability to talk with strangers that Sacajawea had. She watched their man puffing, his whiskers moving in and out as his cheeks moved with his breathing. His forehead was red and perspiring. She dared not interfere or she would also be whipped.

Both boys shouted for Charbonneau to stop. Baptiste tried to grab at Charbonneau’s hands, but he was pushed away.

Sacajawea seemed to crouch lower, but still no sound escaped her lips. She endured five strong, deliberate lashes. Her dark eyes gleamed.

In a burst of courage Baptiste dragged his mother out of the whip’s reach. Charbonneau let the leather thong fall to the ground. He spat and walked over the black string of leather, leaving Sacajawea to her shame.

Sacajawea stood up. Deliberately, before all of them, she spat toward Charbonneau, then walked slowly, contemptuously away.

Away from the camp, she threw herself on the wet ground and opened her proud and stubborn Shoshoni shell and wept. She lay facedown, her arms outstretched above her head, her fists clenched.

“A man has to keep his woman in line,” sniffed Tess. “I would never have a woman who speaks up the way our mother does. She matches wits with anyone, man or woman. That is not proper for a squaw. She acts as though she has been to the white man’s school herself.”

“She thinks and can express her thoughts,” said Baptiste.

“Would you like your mother to speak up to your schoolmaster? To Mr. Welch?”

“Well—”

“See—that would be an embarrassment. If she went to my school and spoke up to Father Neil, he would soon have her muzzled. No one speaks up to him. Our father is master of this camp, and he knows how to run it. His blood boils fast, and this is good. I will be like him.”

“What a temper you’ll have!” sighed Baptiste.

Near dawn, Sacajawea rewrapped her braids with thick grass stems, brushed off her skirt, and strode back into camp.

Eagle bathed the long red welts on Sacajawea’s back and arms, making guttural sounds in her throat the whole time. Charbonneau left the tepee but soon came inside and took a bowl of water from the water bucket and rummaged around in his roll of clothing for a straight razor.

They did not see Charbonneau all day. He had gone to the camp of Duke Paul with Baptiste. When he did come into camp, he looked triumphant.

“That duke fellow, he hired me; Baptiste, he stay here,” he announced. “He agreed to wait one more day before pulling out. He was impressed with my knowledge of the Big Muddy. Maybe we go up as far as the Mandans.”

“You have a job as trader for Woods,” Tess reminded him. “I thought you’d talk him into taking me. I’m older than Baptiste.”

“You keep your mouth shut or I give you the whip. I am the man. I do as I please. I am boss.”

Tess backed away, and Charbonneau spoke more briskly. “Do this, do that! Get the job for me!
Zut!
You get your own work. You go to hell! I decide what I do!”

Sacajawea felt heartsick. She had hoped that Baptiste would have a chance to be on his own for a few weeks—maybe learn how to do interpreting well so that he could get away from Charbonneau. Yet, there was something else. She could not look at Charbonneau without pulling her blanket up over her mouth to hide her laughter. His face looked as if it had been put together from two faces that did not match. The upper half was deeply tanned and weathered. But his cheeks and chin were as white as those of Chief Red Hair’s new woman, Miss Harriet, who never went outdoors without a veil to shield her complexion. She tried not to stare, but she could not help giving a quizzical glance now and then at Charbonneau’s face where he had shaved off his whiskers so that he would make an impression on the strangers. His dark eyes bored into hers.

“You want more of that whip, Little Bird?” he asked.

“If you do it again, I will leave and you will not see me again,” she said, her eyes hard and black.

By the next morning, Duke Paul was anxious to move up the Missouri, and he came to help Charbonneau carry his gear out. He watched Baptiste brush the horses to get the mud out of their hair. The boy smiled. The duke began to talk with Sacajawea and motioned for Baptiste to help translate for them. Again he remarked on Baptiste’s likable personality and responsiveness. Sacajawea felt pleased and puffed up a little. She made him a cup of tea with extra sugar.

Charbonneau cupped his hands and shouted to the other three waiting men.

“Patience,” said Duke Paul. “I want to ask your good woman’s permission to take that young boy, Baptiste, to my homeland. I will stop in Saint Louis for him in the fall.”

Baptiste looked at his mother. “He said he would be in Saint Louis when the aspen grow orange and theoaks are fire against the sky. He will take me to his home across the waters.”

Sacajawea was dumbfounded. This man from the faraway land wished to take her son with him. When would he let him come back?

“He says I should stay a year, maybe two, maybe three.” Baptiste held up his fingers. “I am to learn his tongue even better than now, and speak to his people about the land here.” His heart was pounding.

“Ai,”
answered Sacajawea quietly. “Now ask your father.”

“Oh, all right, if you want to go for a while,” said Charbonneau with no thought, eager only to get on with this trip.

“It is then a promise,” said Sacajawea, smiling. “He will go with you. You will take care of him, then return him to me.”

“You can be sure of that,” said the duke, his face reflecting his astonishment that the Indian mother would be so willing to have her son travel to a land she’d never heard spoken about before.

He did not know her thoughts. She was thinking about all the things her son would have in his head when he came back. Maybe as much as Chief Red Hair. This was the thing to do. Let him go. Her love for her firstborn shone from her eyes. Could she be without him? Not know what he was doing? She looked at the duke and saw his brown eyes soften and felt his great strength, and she knew he was the one to finish making a man out of her son. He would not break the gentleness in the boy as Charbonneau would. Her heart would drop without him, but it would break if Charbonneau took over the training of him.

For a long time there was silence. No one noticed Tess edge up until he spoke. “He gets pay for traveling to your homeland?” he asked laconically.

Duke Paul whirled around. “I never cheated anyone.”

Baptiste reached out to shake the duke’s hand on their agreement. “When the aspen change, we will leave.”

“I will be at Chouteau’s store inquiring about you, you can bet on it.”

The sun rose high and warm. The men walked on the high spots, trying to avoid the mud holes.

“We cast off now!” shouted Charbonneau.

“Fine,” said the duke, bowing low toward Sacajawea and Eagle, who had followed the men for a last farewell.

“I know this river well,” said Charbonneau, nodding his head up and down. “We’ll use the poles as long as we’re in the overflow here. When we get farther upstream, there is a point that rises high and pushes out into the river. The river has not overflowed there because the banks are high. We’ll tack across to the other side.”

Roudeau nodded, understanding. “We’ll take the ropes, then.”

“I’ll handle this,” Charbonneau continued. “We’ll take to the bushes.”

“Bushwhack?” Roudeau said slowly.

“Certainly—grab the bushes, hang on, and pull the pirogue along by hand. This is the best way.”

“Won’t that be slow?” asked the duke.

“Nothing’s slower. Maybe when we get to the bluff we can use the sail. You have one?”

Roudeau nodded. Then the men took up their poles and at the duke’s signal felt the bottom and pushed away from the shore. Slowly the pirogue moved forward as the men fell into a sort of rhythm of walking and hauling. When they had made a hundred yards of progress, Eagle waved and turned to return to the tepee. Sacajawea waved and shook her head wondering how long it would take Duke Paul to discover that her man did not know how to counsel others, especially about river travel. Charbonneau was a hog. She thought, Perhaps he will speak to the duke about going across the water to his homeland in place of his son, taking this other thing away from Baptiste also. She felt certain that after the river trip the duke would come to Saint Louis and ask only for Baptiste. He would be glad enough to let Charbonneau stay behind.
⁵

Somewhere in what is now western Oklahoma and Kansas, the polygamous old interpreter took to himself another wife. This was a Ute woman, beautiful and youthful enough to become a discordant element in the household, and before long she and Sacajawea were engaged in a bitter domestic feud.

Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Arthur H. Clark Company, from
Sacajawea, Guide and Interpreter of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,
by Grace Raymond Hebard, 1957, p. 153.

“T
ess, you continue on the job as trader for Woods,” suggested Sacajawea. “Baptiste will help run the trap line.”

But Sacajawea’s thoughts were heavy when she looked at the boys—the one becoming the exact shadow of his father; the other, her own son, more like someone remembered in the past, more like her own father. I saw this boy’s eyes open, his small limbs harden to play. He has been mine all these years. He is still mine! He is going away, but he will return. He will no longer be a boy. He will not see me, perhaps. I am a mother. What mother can understand why her son should be taken? I said
ai,
he could be taken. I understand. Oh, Pompy, my loved one, come to
Umbea,
before you leave her; come before you lose her.

But Sacajawea, looking at her son and the son’s half brother, feeling her heart cry out with anguish, said, “It is going to blow.”

Already the sun was hazed over and a dark gray cloud was forming in the west. She watched the dark cloud, weighing the speed of its wind against the chances of getting the pirogue across the river before the squall hit. They could make it, she decided, and began to pack a parfleche with jerky for the boys.

The boys knew what was expected of them. They cleaned the traps and loaded their horses, ready to pull out before that stiff breeze could blow up any more rain clouds.

For the remainder of the sultry, oppressive summer, Sacajawea and Eagle dug roots for eating, tanned deer hides, and dried sour purple grapes. The grapes would be used later in pemmican, despite their seedy quality.

Sacajawea and Eagle watched trappers and buffalo hunters come and go. The weather alternated between bad spells of heat and severe thunderstorms, which were a relief from the hot days and the scourge of stinging insects.

Tess, who looked like his father, with his mouth drawn down at the sides, his brown eyes squinting, shoulders rounded and somewhat humped, gave an impression of not fully understanding what was taking place around him. He continued to trap for Woods, but did not care for the mosquitoes and blue-green blowflies. Just before it was time to return to Saint Louis, he hired out as an interpreter at the Washita post, saying he’d be back in the cabin before Charbonneau.

Baptiste hung around the settlement, working with Woods and Curtis, trading with the Kansas Indians. On one occasion he went as far as the villages of the Iowas, Otoes, and Osages to trade for their fox pelts and tanned buffalo hides.

One evening Eagle sat at the fire long after the sun had set in a brilliance of red and gold. She called to Sacajawea, who had gone to sleep inside the tepee, “Come see, the moonlight is going out! It is finished! I see no clouds! What can this mean? Eeeiii!”

Sacajawea stood by her side and watched an eclipse of the moon. Then a small cloud sailed past the moon, and it seemed to be hanging close to the earth, a dark red. The left surface seemed lighter than the right, and a deep cleft or valley seemed to be visible on the moon’s surface.

“I believe the time for snow and ice is coming,” said Sacajawea. “This unusual sight is an omen.”

Eagle pulled her blanket closer. “I was afraid of that. What can it mean?”

“We must go back to our cabin.”

“We must go as soon as Baptiste arrives from his trap line?”