Sacajawea (186 page)

2
. Garcia, pp. 132–33, tells how a young woman makes a whistling sound that is carried some distance by cupping her hands to her mouth. She uses this to call her lover. He somehow knows the special sound of her whistle and finds a way to meet her out in the night.

Lowie writes that the Plains Indians used a flutelike stick that was usually carved of wood, hollowed out, with as many as seven holes in it and a whistle type mouthpiece. The males used these flutelike whistles for courting. “A young Assiniboin … a hundred yards” away “could send messages to his girl while she was inside her tipi without her family’s catching on.” He couldwhistle such messages as “I am waiting for you,” “Meet me tomorrow,” “I’ll come again,” or “I am watched,” and “Remain.” From
Indians of the Plains
, by Robert H. Lowie, pp. 132–33. Natural History Press. Copyright 1954 by the American Museum of Natural History; Mathieson, p. 16;
Bents Fort
by David Lavender, pp. 174–75. Copyright 1954 by Doubleday and Co., Inc.

3
. The camass or quamash was in bloom in the moist valleys. When the horses walked through a bed of these beautiful blue flowers their legs became yellow from the knee down from the thick pollen. The root or bulb is usually dug in early summer. It can be boiled as a potato, made into a thin, crisp bread or a thick biscuit, or eaten raw. It can be stored like potatoes and will keep all winter long in a cool place, if not frozen. Personal communication with Ann Samsell,
Somethings Productions,
Monmouth, Oregon, during fall 1981,175th Anniversary Lewis and Clark Expedition Re-enactment.

CHAPTER 32
Pompeys Pillar

1
. This northeast slope of the Rockies that the explorers descended was in what is now the State of Montana, beyond Glade Creek.

2
. Their old camp, Traveler’s Rest, was not far from today’s Missoula, Montana.

3
. The first white settlers of Montana came into the Bitterroot Valley. From the Hellgate Pass of the Rockies, above the present site of Missoula, Montana, the bloodthirsty Blackfeet came again and again to attack those first settlers. Old trappers and fur traders said, “It is as safe to enter the gates of hell as to enter that Hellgate Pass.” John Bakeless,
Lewis and Clark, Partners in Discovery.
New York: William Morrow and Co., 1947, p. 332.

4
. The pass from the Jefferson River across the Continental Divide is now known as Gibbon’s Pass. This pass leads down into the Big Hole Valley.

5
. Willard Creek is where the first paying gold was to be discovered in Montana.

6
. This small timbered area would be the future city limits of Bozeman, Montana.

7
. At one time in the nineteenth century, the rivermoved far enough from its bed to lap against this tall, wide rock pillar. Almost every explorer passing this way paused at Pompey’s Tower. The ancient carvings are nearly gone through weathering. Clark carved his name about two-thirds of the way up the side. Today the signature of Clark is somewhat weathered, but it is clearly legible through the glass in the frame that protects it from vandalism and further weathering. Clark commented about the multitudes of mosquitoes in this place. Even today the area is plagued with hordes of mosquitoes.

CHAPTER 33
Big White

1
. Joseph Dickson, or Dixon, and Forest Hancock were fur traders. The captains settled accounts with John Colter on August 16, 1806. He stayed in the wilderness for four more years, during which time he discovered the present Yellowstone National Park.

2
. Big White and his family were among the first Indians to be received by the President of the United States. Henry M. Brackenridge, an early historian of the West, wrote that Big White rather inclined to corpulency and was a little talkative, which were regarded among the Indians as defects. From
Persimmon Hill,
by William Clark Kennerly, pp. 18–19. Copyright 1948 by the University of Oklahoma Press.

CHAPTER 34
Good-Byes

1
. A year before the expedition left for the west coast, President Jefferson and Captain Lewis, who was the President’s private secretary, worked out a special cipher for coded correspondence, if that kind of communication became necessary. The key word was “artichokes.” There is no evidence that this was used, either in the letters sent back by the keelboat from Fort Mandan, nor in the journals that were brought back to St. Louis by the expedition. Jackson, Vol. I, pp. 9–10; Abrams, 1979, p. 16.

By the summer of 1806, no one in the United States thought that the explorers were still safe and alive, soon to be returning home. The Lewis and Clark Expedition had been given up for lost. There had been no word of them since Corporal Warfington and his men had returned from Fort Mandan in the keelboat nearly two years before.

2
. The expedition would no longer need the swivel gun, so on Friday, August 16, 1806, with much ceremony, just before leaving to go downriver, Clark gave it to Kakoakis, the one-eyed chief. Clark told Kakoakis, “When you fire this gun remember the words of your greatfather” to keep peace among the Indians. “The gun was fired and the chief appeared to be much pleased and conveyed it immediately to his village.” From
The Journals of Lewis and Clark,
edited by Bernard DeVoto, pp. 456–57. Copyright 1953 by Houghton Mifflin Co.

CHAPTER 35
Saint Louis

1
. The nearest relatives buried the bones of their deceased after the scaffolding, where the body first rested, decayed and fell to the ground. The skull was bleached white by weathering. It was carefully placed on a bed of wild sage, in the circumference of a circle of skulls on the prairie grass, about ten inches from other skulls on either side. All the skull faces looked inward or at one another. These circles of skulls, just outside the village, were religiously protected and kept in that exact position year after year. Each wife knew the skull of her husband, child, or other relative and visited it every day. She took food out to the prairie and placed it beside the skull, replaced the bed of sage, and talked to the skull. From
George Catlin and the Old Frontier,
by Harold McCracken, p. 99. Copyright
1959,
Crown Publishers, Inc.

2
. A. J. Forsyth, a Scottish clergyman, is given credit for discovering the percussion compound that explodes when struck a sharp blow. The compound is mainly potassium chlorate. The chief difference between ordinary powder and fulminate is the amount of percussion needed to produce an explosion and the rapidity of the explosion. Black gunpowder can be ignited by detonation between steel or metal faces, but the explosion is no more violent than if produced by burning splint. A fulminate exploded by percussion exerts a much greater force in less time.

There was always a danger of accidental dischargewhen loading the old muzzle loading gun. The ramming down of a charge carrying dampness gave irregular results. The ramrod broke often. The nipple became rusty and fouled by previous shots and caused misfires. After 1785 a roller bearing was fit to the steel-spring, which reduced friction so that the steel flew back faster and gave more sparks. At this time a swivel linked the mainspring to the tumbler to help reduce friction. Some were fitted with waterproof pans. These consisted of a raised rim over which the pan cover fit and a curved fence behind the pan to protect the shooter’s eye. The pan was punctured with a tiny drainhole.

Even before Forsyth was credited with inventing the percussion system of forearms ignition (but not the percussion cap) there were others at the end of the eighteenth century who had discovered the same principle. Forsyth began his experiments in the Tower of London in 1806. The early experimenters found that sparks would not set off the fulminate in an open pan, that there had to be a lock that could confine the salt and direct its explosion through a touchhole. By 1805 there were successful locks being sold for use. Greener, pp. 111–12, 119–20, 228.

Forsyth patented his invention in 1807. It was called the “scent-bottle” lock because it had a magazine of fulminate shaped like a perfume bottle, which replaced the old priming pan. By an ingenious action a small amount of compound was detonated by a hammer. The validity of his patent application was disputed because so many others had already been using the same principle. From Encyclopedia of Firearms, edited by Harold L. Peterson. Copyright (c) by George Rainbird Ltd., 1964. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, E. P. Dutton, Inc., p. 138.

3
. After using gunpowder the Indians learned to make a fire easily by putting a rag around the point of friction and sprinkling on gunpowder. Hoebel and Wallace say that sometimes the Indians would shoot a gun against a tree where a rag was stuck that had been generously sprinkled with gunpowder. The rag would light and could easily start a fire, especially in wet weather. From
The Comanches, Lords of the South

Plains,
by Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel, p. 90. Copyright 1952 by the University of Oklahoma Press.

4
. An incision was made in the young boy’s back where the arrowhead lay and sucking was done through a small horn placed over the cut. The Shaman spit out what he sucked from the wound. Sometimes the patient might be shown stones or arrowheads that the Shaman had put in his mouth and pretended to suck out with the help of his medicine power. A good medicine man or Shaman was good with the use of sleight of hand or illusions. Wallace and Hoebel, p. 171.

5
. A dozen wapiti, with an average weight of about seven hundred pounds, divided among forty lodges in that village would give each lodge four hundred and twenty pounds of meat, bone, and hide to make into jerky, pemmican, scrapers, spoons, moccasins, and robes. These elk or large American deer have nearly 30 percent of their total weight in meat that was edible by the Indians’ standards.

6
. A copy of Clark’s August 20,1806, letter to Charbonneau was discovered in the possession of Mrs. Julia Clark Vorhees and Miss Ellen Vorhees. It was published first in the
Century Magazine,
in October, 1904. Then it was published in Thwaites, Vol. III, 1904–5, 1969, p. 247.

7
. When Earth Woman was seventeen, in 1821, she married a white fur trader from the Columbia Fur Company, Captain James Kipp. Many times during her life she retold the stories she had heard from Sacajawea about the expedition to the West. Kipp’s son and grandson lived for some time near Browning, Montana.

8
. Captains Lewis and Clark stopped at the grave of Sergeant Floyd on the homeward journey to show their respect to the memory of a brave man, who was a cousin of Sergeant Pryor and distant relative of Clark. Today on Floyd’s Bluff at Sioux City, Iowa, is a 100-foot obelisk monument dedicated to Floyd.

CHAPTER 36
Judy Clark

1
. Today the Lewis River is called the Snake River.

2
. Kennerly, p. 29, describes early St. Louis streets as “narrow, thirty to thirty-five feet from house to house, barely accommodating the heavily freighted wagons.”

Six or eight oxen or horses were necessary for a team to pull the wagons along the muddy roads beyond the city. When St. Louis was three years old in 1767 there were two billiard parlors, and as the city grew there were more and more. From
Persimmon Hill,
by William Clark Kennerly. Copyright 1948 by the University of Oklahoma Press. Lavender, p. 22, wrote a good description of early St. Louis.

3
. Dr. Bernard Gaines Farrar was an important early St. Louis physician. In his account book for 1811 and 1812 he records the cost of one bloodletting as fifty cents. From E. G. Chuinard,
Only One Man Died: The Medical Aspects of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
Glendale, CA: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1980, p. 75.

When Julia Clark’s health failed Dr. Farrar was called to diagnose and care for her illness. He died of cholera during the terrible epidemic of 1849. Kennerly, pp. 52, 64, 224.

CHAPTER 37
Lewis’s Death

1
. In 1832, the trapper Zenas Leonard found a huge black chief among the Crow Indians. This black man spoke the Crow language fluently. He also spoke English and a little French. He had distinguished himself as a warrior and boasted of his wealth by showing off four of his Crow women. This black man told Leonard that he first saw the Crow country when he came as the manservant to William Clark on the now-famous Lewis and Clark Expedition. The black chief explained that he had been married to a tiny black girl, but he did not like the life of getting up each morning to work at a job, so he told his wife he was sick, very sick, and then he just left her. “I come back to this here Crow country with a trader, Mackinney, and now I plan to stay here the rest of my days,” the black chief told Leonard. John Bakeless,
Lewis and Clark, Partners in Discovery.
New York: William Morrow and Co., 1947, pp. 442–43.

In 1971 at a Western History Symposium at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, John C. Ewers, Planning Officer for the Museum of History and Technology at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., said he did not believe this black man was Ben

York. He believed the man was the mulatto, Edward Rose, who went up the Missouri with Manuel Lisa in 1807 and remained among the Crows to become a leader of some influence. These facts are hard to verify. At this time Ben York may have been in St. Louis with Clark, but again, this cannot be proven. Ewers, pp. 51–2, 139.

Many men, both white and black, went to live with Indians in comparative luxury as chiefs when they found they could not take the civilized life of the river towns. So perhaps it is just possible that Ben York did enjoy freedom more than Cindy Lou believed and found that the bes way to enjoy it was to disappear. Would it not be more desirable to be a chief and warrior of high position, with four women, among the Crows, than a jeered-at, depressed freedman, who could not support one woman with his impoverished freight business?