Sacajawea (174 page)

Often she sat in silence on a grassy spot in the red shale behind the village. She mulled over the words spoken by her gray-eyed foster grandchild in Fort Hall. “Pomp really went to find news of his mother. He got a sick fever in the mountains He died.” In the fading evening light she looked at the sixty-some lodges of her people. They were beautiful white cones, some with colorful paintings on the outside, others plain so that the fine stitching could be admired. She tried to recall what her firstborn had looked like. Sometimes tears rolled down her wrinkled cheeks. I could cry all night, but it does not help brighten my faded memory of my Dancing Boy, Pomp, Jean Baptiste, my first son.

What was he during his lifetime? She knew he had traveled and worked for the white men. She knew that the white men respected him as a leader. She was satisfied he had withstood the ebb and flow of the seasons, the sullen hostility of man, the anesthesia of the whiteman’s religion and wealth—all the passions that warp the mind, flesh, and spirit of man. She had given him a good beginning. She no longer sought him with every passing white-top wagon, and she forgot to ask travelers if they had heard his name.

She seemed to withdraw inside herself a little, and so to make herself immune from all but the ultimate destruction of her nonessential outer shell.

Late one afternoon during the annual midwinter thaw as Sacajawea built up her cook fire, she noticed Toussaint sitting outside her doorway on the damp ground. When she went out to speak to him she saw that he had been drinking. He wore government-issue clothing and appeared half-comical, half-tragic in black, shoddy pants made for someone weighing at least two hundred pounds. The seat was cut out, revealing the back flap of his breechclout and the tail of his red flannel shirt. The sleeves were cut off his large black coat, converting it into a vest.

“I came to tell you that Washakie is getting senile,” said Toussaint. “He wants to move the whole camp back to the Carter Station and let the white men show us how to run water in a ditch to irrigate the wheat.” He lurched a couple of steps sideways, then sat down cross-legged in front of the lodge.

“I have heard some talk about this,” she said. “Is that what you came to say?” She was surprised he would bring her this old news. She thought everyone was ready to go.

“Well—you know what happens when water goes into a ditch and fills up the gopher holes. The gopher comes out, looks at us, and we die.”
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“Are you asking me to talk with Washakie about this?”

“Yes, do it right away. I do not want to plow up land to grow grain.” He hiccoughed. “That is hard work. So, then I do not want to die.”

“You are a disgrace,” she said, watching him carefully. “You fortify yourself with the white man’s firewater before you have nerve to talk with your mother. Is that being a man?”

He laughed at her. “It is true I traded a buffalo hide for a little whiskey. The bottom of the bottle was filledwith hard buffalo tallow and I suspect that white trader diluted the whiskey with water and colored it with tobacco juice. So you see I did not have so much that you could accuse me of being drunk. Ha! Tee-hee! That was no buffalo hide the white son of a bitch got off me. That was a damn cowhide and he didn’t know the difference!” He had to hold his sides he laughed so hard.

Some children chasing dogs around heard him and came to see what the joke was. They hung back in the drifted snowbank beside the leafless cottonwood trees.

“If you will not talk to the chief, maybe you will see Jakie Moore at the post store,” said Toussaint. “He’s white, but he’s a friend of mine. You get him to persuade that confused old man that the braves of his band do not want to be farmers. You tell Jakie to tell Chief Weasel Guts Washakie his warriors can race horses or go on a buffalo hunt and do a better job than farming.”

“Everyone knows you do not approve of Washakie. Why do you ask me to speak for you? I know there is no buffalo left to hunt. Some in the band are hungry because of that.”

“Oh, I am hungry. The white man’s firewater makes me hungry. My good mother, do you have something delicious in your kettle?”

“Not for you!” she cried. “I have told you that there is no welcome here for you. Go, or I will break your brittle bones.”

Toussaint laughed, “Tee-hee!” He threw his arms around his head and looked foolish. The children by the cottonwood laughed out loud at his antics.

Sacajawea went inside her lodge and built up the fire again. She opened the tepee flap, but did not invite Toussaint inside. She sat close to the fire, her eyes half-closed. After a few moments she called to Toussaint. “Hey!
Ai!
You who calls yourself my son! Listen, I know Jean Baptiste is not living. My true son is dead.” She fumbled for her tobacco pouch at her waist, filled and lit her pipe from a stick in the fire, and drew a few deep puffs.

Toussaint roused himself out of his drunkenness. “That is not a certainty. You should not repeat that.” He got up and began to stumble around the outside of the lodge, slashing at it with his hunting knife.
²⁷

She called to him, “Stop that! If you sit I will give you coffee with plenty of sugar.” She added another fistful of crushed coffee beans to a blackened lard bucket of day-old coffee already warming beside the fire.

He poked his head in the doorway. “That does smell good, old mother. I’ll stay. But if you say or breathe one word about my half-breed stepbrother, I will bury an arrowhead in your back.”

She looked at him with sad, soft eyes, turned her back to him and got an empty tin cup. She rummaged around under her bed to find a small bottle of laudanum that had been given to her by Jakie Moore to ease the old, dull ache in her arthritic knees. She upended the bottle in the cup, covered the bottom with sugar from a hard leather box, and poured in coffee. The mixture was stirred with an old, bent spoon.

Toussaint found the cup handle too hot, and he pulled out his red shirt tail to wrap around it. He blew on the coffee to cool it, then tasted carefully and smacked his lips. “You know how to make coffee, with lots of sugar.”

She grunted and made herself sit quietly. When she felt it was time, she looked. He was lying on the wet ground, snoring. Sacajawea yelled to the children. “Go home and tell your fathers to come here. You can see this man needs to be taken to his lodge. He is very tired. Go!”

They scampered away. She closed her tepee flap and quietly prepared her supper of thin vegetable stew. In the middle of the meal she heard the men come. At first they tried to waken Toussaint. Someone said, “He will be a red-eye by morning. I smell the bay rum, you know—like in hair tonic.” Someone else said, “That lousy stuff makes me cough up my insides. I drink it for the kick it has and get the Devil inside my belly.” Another said, “We can drag him to his lodge. It’s a pity the son of Chief Woman lets firewater rule him.” The first voice agreed,
“Ai,
and the dog drinks anything. He ought to share something good with us for lugging him home so he will not freeze in the night.” Finally they were too far away for her to hear them talking.

Sacajawea packed her belongings and struck her tepee. She was ready when the band moved to anothercamp. Some were afraid to cross the iron road of the Union Pacific Railroad. They thought the horses were also afraid, but one by one they crossed it on the run. They hid when the great iron horse went by, snorting smoke and pulling many big wagons.

She watched her people during this year of scant meat and heard them go out on frosty mornings hunting for game; anything, even a white man’s stray cow, would taste good. It all went on outside her as it went on in memory inside, changing but changeless, and so a kind of illusion. What stood out was the common core. It was this reality she pondered.

Wind and snow matted her straggly hair. Sun and frost made leather of her cheeks and hands. Her eyes took on a remoteness. At times her steady gaze seemed turned inward—as if it had gone around the earth and returned.

Sometimes her meditations were interrupted. She had gone long to her people and neighbors; now they came to her.

“Chief Woman,” a mother would say, respectfully standing before her. “Forgive this interruption, but many are sick with the fever and there is talk about the spotted sickness. It has come to some of the northern camps.”

“Did you see the white medicine man at Augur’s camp?”

“Oh, no! Old Puffbelly, our Shaman, came and put dried buffalo dung around the eyes of my children who were ill.”

“They are better?”

“Ai, but I fear they will get the spotted sickness, for they are weak.”

Sacajawea grunted. “And he carried a buffalo skull and danced from left to right, which is the sacred manner, stopping to face the place where the sun comes up?”

“Ai.”

“Go to the Blanket Chief. He has a new way to keep your children well. If he has no time for talk, see his woman, Rutta. Tell her I sent you.”

“Porivo is strange and wise,” her own people said ofher. “Even Chief Washakie consults with her on matters his mind is forked on.”

She gave advice on all matters whenever consulted.

Jim Bridger came to the village. He rode in a rattletrap wagon pulled by two piebalds across the white, trackless road. The snow was deep and heaped along the creeks. He came with flour and dried beef. He told the Shoshonis and Bannocks to drink much water with the beef and soon the fever would be washed away.

He was the guest of Chief Washakie, who confided in Bridger that he was now anxious for his people to remain on a reservation and farm. The children should learn at the school. He realized game was scarce and his people would have to find another way to have full bellies, and the only way left was to join with the white men. Change was coming. It was better not to fight something that could not be stopped. For he was wise and knew that there were ten or twelve white men for every native, and never could these strangers be wiped out. It was far better to try to live with them and understand their thoughts.

Bridger bent his six-foot frame over the chief and clapped him on the shoulder. Bridger’s cheekbones were high and his nose hooked, giving him the facial appearance of a hawk. If he had been shorter, he could easily have passed for one of Washakie’s old warriors.

Washakie was taller and lighter complexioned than most Shoshonis. He resembled his Flathead father, Paseego. That morning he wore his government-issue, high crown, puritanical black hat with the wide brim. On the hat he wore a prized possession, a silver casket plate which read, “Our Baby.”
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He also wore another favorite ornament, a translucent pink seashell, as his kerchief holder. On the left side of his large nose was a deep scar left by a penetrating Blackfoot arrow. Two thick, graying braids hung over his bare chest.
²⁹

“I’m not young now,” said Washakie, cocking his head to one side. “It used to be I spent much time and energy trying to get things done that don’t really seem so worthwhile now. But this change is something the white men are bringing, and it will defeat us if we spend time and energy fighting it. The Shoshonis would be wiped out. I do not want my people wiped out. I wantthem to stay and see what is going to happen on the bosom of our Mother Earth. The young ones will learn the new ways easier than you and I. You ancient bastard,” he added in English, giving Bridger a crooked grin.

“Yep,” said Bridger, “even the Sioux and Cheyennes will give in.”

Bridger was shrewd. After he completed his talk with Washakie, the two smoked awhile, then he called for a council—not a council with the important men of the camp, but with the women. He began with his own woman, Rutta, and Sacajawea, taking them with him around the camp as he called out the other women. He spoke to them softly about their recent illness and about their children who still had the fever. He then led them slowly to the idea that the spotted sickness could come to any one of them in an unsuspecting time if they had just been sick or fighting off the pangs of hunger.

Next he bribed the post physician at Camp Augur to give cowpox serum. The man refused, but only at first.

“Well, then,” said Bridger, his broad face beaded with perspiration, “you go and explain to a couple hundred savages why they ought to have their arm scratched to prevent scarifying their faces. Smallpox is goin’ through Injun camps like dried prunes through the soldiers. Think of the little brown children, not knowin’ what ails ‘em, or the same with old folks, so they wander alone out in the field grass.”

The post physician had no interest in Indians and their general health, but he cared even less to spend a day among them, or to have them spread smallpox to one another and die like bloated cows in a peyote patch so that he and other soldiers had to bury them after the rest had fled trying to outrun the sickness.

Few of the squaws understood what Bridger was talking about, but they knew the dreaded spotted sickness. They could not see how scratching an arm could ward off the disease. Protestations, pleas, tears—nothing availed against the Blanket Chief. With a set, stern face, he sent out Sacajawea to explain to the People.

“Ai,
it is something good,” Sacajawea explained, memory flooding back to the time Chief Red Hair hadscratched her leg and even the leg of her baby, Pomp. “See the scar?” She pulled up her tunic hem. “It is like a badge to scare off the sickness. I have been with those who are sick, but I remain well. See, I have no face scars.” She bent her face around the circle of women. Some put their hands on her juiceless, wrinkled skin. “When the smoke whirls around inside your tepee, as if afraid to go outside in winter wind, the sickness will pass over you and your children.”

The women returned to Bridger and formed a line, pushing their children forward so they could be scratched first. Some were yet weak from the fever, and some coughed or wiped their runny noses on the backs of their hands.

“Ai,”
the women told Bridger, “Chief Woman is wise. The sickness could come to any of us. The scratch is small, but important. Our men will come for the scratch also.”