Sacajawea (162 page)

During these years a sadness hung around Sacajawea’s heart. Her limbs and back seemed bone-tired. She felt older than her fifty-odd years. In their respective ways, Suzanne, with good humor, and Crying Basket, with quick wit, chided their mother about moping day after day.

“You are dull as a broken knife,” said Suzanne.

“Haven’t you been drawn to a flower, then found it the first to fade?” added Crying Basket. “And most new tunics you have made for yourself fall a little short of your expectations.”

“Well, now, if you had not expected so much, you would not be disappointed. Pick your heart off the ground before it begins to decay,” suggested Suzanne.

“I see my papooses are growing more wise and older than I had thought,” sighed Sacajawea.

One late afternoon, the horizon to the north lay piled high with lumpy shoulders of lead gray clouds. Toward Morning came to sit with Sacajawea, hoping to draw her out of her despondency. “Crying Basket, add the
yampa
root to the cooking pot to give strength to your mother,” she said. “You are not the only one with a sorrow, Porivo. I have one for the man we call the Blanket Chief. I have heard he has a new woman, a Ute.”

“And so—she must be a good woman,” sighed Sacajawea.

“Happen you know Utes?” asked Toward Morning, her eyes narrowed to slits. “Well, so—they know how to make a man feel his best most times, and they are known to be the mothering kind. And so—I’m saddened the Blanket Chief did not even consider my goodness, my cooking, or my warm bed first. And so—there is this deep sorrow hung on my heart since this happening.”

Sacajawea looked crosswise at Toward Morning and chuckled deep inside her throat. “One day he’ll notice you. While you wait, listen.”

The winds had dropped to a muttering whisper, and an uneasy quiet lay over Fort Bridger and the Shoshonis’ camp.

“Snow is coming. I smell it on the wind, tonight,” said Toward Morning. “I heard Washakie wants to winter on the Little Popo Agie as soon as we can move the camp.”

Later that same evening Shoogan and his first woman, Dancing Leaf, brought half a length of cleaned bear gut and two skinned rabbits to Sacajawea’s lodge.

“You’ll need meat, Old Mother. The storm is going to last more than a day.” Shoogan nodded toward the dirty color in the sky. “We’ll move out as soon as it quiets down and warms.”

Dancing Leaf stepped forward. “We came to invite you and Toward Morning to build your lodge closer to ours so that we can keep an eye on you.”

“Well, it is more an order than an invitation,” said Shoogan. “It is best if we keep our family together. Since you’ve shown a liking for Toward Morning, rather than leave her alone, she should come as your family.”

Sacajawea raised her eyes across the cooking fire to where Shoogan now sat cross-legged. Something in her melted. Her failure to find Baptiste did not seem so large at this moment. Hot tears scalded her cheeks and ran down into her tunic front. Twice she sniffed before controlling herself.

Suzanne laughed, looking at Sacajawea. “I think your days are in the yellow leaf, but your looks are as good as always, and you are easier on your children than some mothers.”

Sacajawea laughed and wrinkled up her face toward Shoogan. “Ah, whenever a child tells her mother about looking young, she may be sure that the child thinks the mother is growing old. And so—now age is the worst thing that can happen to me. Other things will heal, but this gets worse.”

Now everyone was laughing with her. It pleased Sacajawea that Suzanne knew of the softening that age brings to the trail of life. She looked about her and felt a warm feeling for Suzanne, remembering how she had held her as a little girl and patted her back and how the child had snuggled close and slept in her arms many an evening. It is good to have a family, she thought, it heals the heart.

“With your help we’ll move closer to Shoogan tonight,” said Sacajawea, looking at Suzanne.

“Aw, maybe I only thought you were easier,” Suzanne

teased, but pulled at Crying Basket to help pack up the clothing in order to move quickly in the cold night air.

“We’ll make the tepee double thick with the old skins from my lodge,” said Toward Morning, leaving to pack her belongings and to strike her tepee.

Shortly after the fish-belly twilight, one snug tepee was up beside the tall, firm tepee of Shoogan and his family. The snow was already beginning to pile in low-driving waves against the bottom skirt of the tepee walls. By morning the snow was calf-deep and the cold deepening.

Sacajawea went out to find wood to keep the fire redhot all day. The instant she stepped out, her nostrils were driven flat together and sealed shut as though by the grip of a giant’s fingers. To breathe she had to open her mouth, gasping to get the air in, then, deprived of any warming progress through the nose passages, the inhalation struck her lungs, frost-cold. Fifty breaths and her chest ached so badly she could scarcely draw the fifty-first. Within ten minutes of leaving shelter, her hands were feeling less to the wrists, her feet numbed stumps upon which her best progress could be only a lurching, blind stumble. In twenty minutes, the frost had gone to her shoulders and knees, leaving her to clump along the icy path like an armless stilt-walker. No one could stand more than half an hour of such exposure and be left active. She ducked back inside her tepee and laced the flap tightly when her hands thawed.

To the frozen watchers at the fort, it seemed that the Good Lord had forgotten Fort Bridger. The men were numbed by the ferocious cold. In such temperatures a man could barely hold on to a rifle, let alone operate one. But there was no joker in this cold deck—Bridger had foreseen the early winter and counseled his men to get wood and hay into the fort ahead of all other tasks. He knew the Shoshoni camp could take care of itself, as could the Cheyennes’ farther down Ham’s Fork. There was nothing to do but wait out the weather.

“Hang it all,” he said one evening to his Ute woman, Belle, “can’t we find something to do each night but make babies? I wish to hell that old woman called Porivo had found Bap Charbonneau. I’d git him to readto me all day and night and we’d argy about those there words until another daylight showed.”

Two weeks later when the weather broke and warmed, the Shoshonis broke camp and headed for the Little Popo Agie.

That winter, Sacajawea had time to study the Agai-düka Shoshonis and to think about the changes that had taken place. They did not talk of hiding from the Blackfeet; they could defend themselves with guns and ammunition traded for moccasins, hides, and trousers at Fort Bridger. They now had a reputation of not seeking warfare, but they fought if provoked and had a fearlessness and bravery that the warring tribes had come to respect. The Shoshonis became friends of the white traders. Chief Washakie took his subchiefs and bravest men to attend the fall rendezvous of the fur traders. There they learned to speak some French and a smattering of English. Washakie made a vow never to go to war against the white men.
¹

Sacajawea learned to love Dancing Leaf and her two children, Lance and Red Dust. Her girls called them brothers, in the Shoshoni fashion. She liked Shoogan’s younger woman, Devoted.

During the winter, the band was out of direct touch with the white men. In the spring, they moved camp back to Fort Bridger, and Sacajawea heard rumors that Baptiste had been to the traders’ rendezvous on the headwaters of the Platte, on a creek called Bijou. Fitzpatrick and Bill Williams and Bill Bent had been there. There were other rumors, too. More white soldiers were coming toward Fort Platte to the north with their white-top wagons. Then it was said that Washakie went to Fort Platte to meet the chief of the white soldiers, Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny. Red Cloud, chief of the Oglala Sioux, and Sitting Bull, chief of the Hunk-papa Sioux, were there.

When Shoogan returned with Washakie, he called Sacajawea to his tepee. “Old Mother, Porivo, at that camp of the white soldiers was a Black Robe, a priest, who smiled each time he saw the Sioux paint their faces and put on the blue coats of the soldiers with a sword hanging at their sides. I asked this Black Robe, whowas called Father by all the whites, if he had ever heard of one called Bap Charbonneau.”

Sacajawea straightened and looked Shoogan in the face. “So—then, did he?”

“He said this: ? know he worked trap lines nearly five summers ago with a man called Lilburn Boggs and he has been with Bill Bent. Now where he is I have not heard.’”

“Five summers,” she whispered, disappointed. “Our trails are no closer.”

The next winter, the Shoshonis remained on the Black Fork near Fort Bridger. Old Joe Meek came to the fort. When the Indian grapevine told news of his arrival, Sacajawea found an excuse to go to the fort. He was thin and worn, his beard gray and scraggly. He brought dreadful news. With tears in his eyes, he told of his half-breed child, Helen Mar, who, with measles, was held captive by Cayuses until her death. Then with sadness deep within his heart, he told how the Cayuses had raped all the women and older girls at Fort Walla Walla, including the spunky daughter of Jim Bridger, Mary Ann. Mary Ann had been sent west to go to the school run by Doc Whitman in Oregon. She died from her ordeal. The Whitmans were brutally slain.

Neither Joe Meek nor Jim Bridger was himself. Neither would talk with the other. Meek had no funny stories to tell. Bridger had no tall tales to report in his usual matter-of-fact voice that made them sound like true facts. Meek sat around the fort and stared at the sky. He ignored Sacajawea, who tried to talk with him more than once. Bridger never seemed to be around. He worked in the blacksmith shop, shoeing with iron the horses of emigrants, branding the several dozen foals he had in his own large herd of horses outside the fort, or helping the mountain men at the narrow crossing on the Green River ferry emigrants or Indians and their goods across to either side of the river.

One morning Belle, Bridger’s Ute woman with the small round face and shining brown eyes, came to the tepee of Sacajawea. She came on the suggestion of Louis Vasquez.

“Well then,” she said, “tell me what’s right—thosemen who stare at the sky or the ones who work until they drop when night comes? The heart of my man is lying on the ground beside the broken heart of Joe Meek. Each suffers; one works all day, but the other does nothing. What can I do? What is your answer?”

Sacajawea frowned, then answered with one word: “Time.” Her black eyes squinted from under her crow-wing brows, showing she was most pleased to share this trouble with Belle.

“Porivo, I should have thought of that when Vasquez asked me. You know about life as well as a bear cub knows the musky odor of coyote.”

“Listen,” said Sacajawea, “I am only an old woman lengthened in mind as her step is shortened.”

“Louis Vasquez sent me with this message after I had your advice,” said Belle. “The man Meek told my man that Bap Charbonneau is guiding some men from New Mexico to a place called California. He said this Bap is great among the whites and Indians alike and you would want to know this.”

“Ai,”
said Sacajawea and asked if there was more. But that was all Belle knew.

“Why do you want to know about this Bap?” asked Belle. “Louis does not tell me. He said you’d know who he meant.”

“Ai,
I know who he means, but I am beginning to wonder why I want to know about him, because our trails never cross. He is my firstborn.”

Later that same day, Joe Meek disappeared from the fort as mysteriously as he had come.

A week later, when Sacajawea took willow baskets to the fort for trading, Bridger moseyed up to her. “Say, old Joe was here this morning for some grub and supplies before he went out somewhere trapping by hisself. He left a message. He’d heard your gallivantin’ son was off on a tour of the south with a Lieutanant Colonel Philip St. George Cooke. Yeee-hah! By grabs!” he shouted, throwing his wrinkled neckerchief over his head. “I knowed it! I said to myself, ‘Gabe,’ I said, ‘you just tell Chief Woman the full name of those her boy is trottin’ with, and she’ll grin proud as any fresh trapper when hurrying out in a frost-sharp dawn to visit his first beaver traps.’ Cooke took your young’un because he can talk with the Mexicans. I wish to heaven I could git that man up here again to read to me. Louis Vasquez comes up and reads, but he prefers to read in French. Wagh, some dude he is.” Bridger went on talking to himself about the vicissitudes of overeducation. “And what did it git Mary Ann?” he ended. “None but kilt.”

That was the spring Bridger took Belle and her children, Josephine and Felix, and Emma’s Jake to his farm in Westport, Missouri. By the following spring, 1850, Bridger could not endure life as a farmer. He placed his children in a Catholic school in Saint Louis and hurried back with Belle to his fort.

Some of the Mormons were pushing into the Utah Lake Territory. The Utes resented them on their land and attacked the settlements. Brigham Young blamed this attack on Jim Bridger because the Indians were all so friendly with Bridger. Belle and Sacajawea often talked together about the strange beliefs and ways of these newcomers, the Mormons.

Sacajawea said, “These Mormons have a reason for everything. They call it religion. With this they can explain away all things. Remember when the Mormon Chief, Brigham Young, explained the death of his woman who just sat and would not eat? He said, ‘The Lord intended it.’” Her eyes contained a gleam that hinted at a secret joke. “There was plenty of meat in her lodge.”

“I have thought about the land all these white men are abandoning in the east. We could move to it and not feel crowded,” said Toward Morning.

In the fall of that year, Vasquez announced to Bridger that he would work at their supply station, which he would set up in—of all places—Salt Lake City. “You stay here among the Indians, and I will stay in the city.”

“But how can we be partners in a venture that’s so close to the Mormons that I don’t dare come see my own operation?” asked Bridger.

“That’s where you have to trust me,” replied Vasquez.

Bridger paced up and down and shouted at Vasquez all day and most of the night before any kind of an agreement was made. This was enough to upset Belle and trigger early contractions. Before the sun rose she had given birth to a baby girl.