Sacajawea (63 page)

The next morning Sacajawea felt better, but there were others with the unpleasant illness. Stopping at frequent intervals off the trail was hard enough with snowshoes clumsily in the way, but the deep apathy made it even worse.

Then, partway down a ridge, they could see below them a level plain spread out like a tabletop. The plain was dotted with pines. Captain Clark said,
“To
my dying day I’ll never forget this. What beauty below.” He strapped Pomp between some bedrolls on one of the packhorses and let him ride there all day instead of
on
Sacajawea’s back. Despite their persistent diarrhea, the morale of the men bounced upward. Surely there would be game among the pines below.

By late afternoon they were caught in a blinding blizzard of wet snow, which drove down out of the north and blew straight in their faces.

For ten miserable miles they walked straight into the eye of the storm. Wet snow plastered their caps, trousers, leather chaps, and Mackinaws; it whitened the horses and piled up in between the packs. They walked with their heads down and without speaking except to shout at some wandering packhorse. They suffered—and when the storm stopped abruptly, they were all deeply grateful.

Late that afternoon, Captain Lewis scanned over the rocks and fallen trees with the spyglass. Finally Captain Clark said, “Here, let me look.” Then the glass was passed from hand to hand, but there was no mention of anything unusual until York spoke.

“I see them tough sheep,” he commented, handing the glass to Shannon. Shannon saw the band of sheep, their yellowish coats almost invisible against the snow, coming down the cliffs. There were between fifteen and twenty of them, including several pairs of ewes and lambs. Passing the glass from hand to hand, the men and Sacajawea watched as the lambs were taught to handle themselves on the face of a mountain. The ewe would come down some steep and dangerous place to the ledge below. Then she would turn around and look up, obviously telling the lamb that it was safe to follow. Nothing doing; the lamb would stand there hesitating, looking down and not liking what he saw, timidly putting first one foot and then the other forward. The ewe would go again to nuzzle the lamb and tell him to have confidence—then down again to show the way. Usually he followed; but on one or two occasions a mother had to perform the climb as much as three times, and once a ewe gently pushed her unwilling offspring until he had to go. Once they moved, the lambs were surefooted. They had to be, for a slip in this place meant death.

In the morning Captain Clark took nearly half the party ahead to hunt. They quickly dropped to the tree line, where the air was warm and sheltered from the wind. Captain Clark left a note on the inner face of a hunk of pine bark, which was pushed into an overhanging forked tree branch, for Captain Lewis. It told that the hunting was good and the country was level—easy going. They had shot two thin elk.

When the two outfits finally met again, Captain Clark’s party was in high spirits, even though a couple of the men were still suffering from the lingering diarrhea. They had reached what they thought to be a navigable branch of the Columbia, and it was only a day’s march ahead. They had met a stray horse, killed and butchered it. They had breakfasted on the horse meat and saved the rest for Captain Lewis’s group. The horse meant that Indians were in the vicinity, and, in fact, two days later they had walked into a small village of Nez Percés. They were good people who had given them a pack of dried salmon and some flour made from camass root.

The party under Captain Lewis had not been so fortunate. They had eked out their small stock of horse meat, then killed a coyote and a crow. More of the men had come down with dysentery. Sacajawea had made a concoction from chokecherry bark, which she fed freely to the men. They took it, thinking that a Shoshini ought to know what was best to counteract the effects of the damned mountain sickness. To add to their discomfort, they had been plagued by the constant assault of insatiable flies that rose from the soft snow at their feet until they hung like a malevolent mist and took on the appearance of a low-lying cloud. The black flies and mosquitoes came in such numbers that there was simply no evading them.

Charbonneau complained, “If I have to expose myself once more to those flies, it will be impossible for me to sit down. I pray to the Madonna that these runs dry up.”

To stop for rest or a ration of food was torture. At times a kind of insanity would seize not only Sacajawea but some of the others as well, and they would plop wildly on their snowshoes in any direction until they were exhausted. But the pursuing insect hordes stayed with them, and they got nothing from those frantic efforts except a wave of sweat that seemed to attract even more mosquitoes.

Sacajawea felt them from behind her ears, from beneath her chin. A steady dribble of blood matted into her clothing and trapped the insatiable flies until it seemed she wore a black collar made up of their struggling bodies. The flies worked down under her tunic until stopped by her belt. Then they fed about her waist until her tunic stuck to her with drying blood.

The land they were passing over offered no easy routes to compensate for the agonies the flies inflicted upon them. Captain Lewis and his party had hit rolling country, and across the path ran a succession of mounding hills whose sides and crests were strewn with angular rocks jutting out of the softening snow. On these rocks their snowshoes were cut and split and their feet were bruised until it was agony to walk at all. The horses all had bruised feet. Each valley had its own stream flowing down its center. Though these streams were less than five feet in width, they seemed to be never less than five feet in depth. Around these streams the snow fleas came out in swarms, smelling like rotten turnips, and blackened yards of snowbanks with their jumping, twitching bodies.

The men’s faces were doubly aggravated from the frostbite blisters, which had not healed. Most were bearded, with ragged whiskers growing out through their frostbite and blisters and insect welts. It was too painful to even think of removing their whiskers at this time.

For their reunion they shared the dried salmon for supper, and York made fiat, parchmentlike bread from the camass flour and water. Luckily they had found a ridge where a little breeze played and held back the flies.

Charbonneau came running up from the brush to receive his share of salmon. He pulled off his old felt hat and waved it above his head. There was a pasted-down line around it from the sweat under his hat. He curled his upper lip, showing his yellow, gappy teeth, and making his mustache jerk. His nose was red and peeling. “I don’t know about the rest of you,” he cried, in a forced voice that was too high, “I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough walking, especially among these damn pesty flies. Do we have rights as men of an official expedition, or don’t we? We’re tired of wearing out moccasins in broken-down snowshoes.”

“Well, sure we are,” answered Pat Gass. “What’s that got to do with how you feel?”

“Considerable. We gotta get down to them trees there and make canoes. If we wait, them fish-eating Indians could scalp us. This is ambush country. I can feel it.”

“They ain’t showed us no inclination to part our hair,” said Shannon.

“What do you mean you can feel it, Charb?” asked Cruzatte.

“I’ll tell you!
Sacre!
The Indians down there know this country. We don’t. They have been surveying us for days now. I can feel their eyes on the back of my neck. For that matter,” he yelled, raising his voice higher, “what if that river ain’t a branch of the Columbia? We sweat ourselves sick and freeze ourselves to death and get eaten alive by flying beasts, and then what if we find that Old Toby led us right into these bloodthirsty Indians!”

“You’re getting edgy for nothing,” said Drouillard. “The frostbite, trots, and flies have got to your brain.”

“When I’m wrong I’ll say it.” The words came all at once now. Charbonneau spurted words the way a keg does whiskey when the bung is started. “By
Jésus,
men, I ask you, are we going to slink behind trees and walk in hiding toward some great stinking pool of water? If we stand here yapping, we’ll have all those thieving Indians at our backs. I can almost feel the arrows whizzing past my ears now. I say stretch our legs toward the canoe country or turn back—to hell with seeing that big stinking ocean. What you bastards say?”

He had jolted the men. Captain Lewis began to listen to Charbonneau.

“He’s bit off more than he can swallow,” said Captain Clark quietly. “The trail through the mountains took a lot out of him.”

“Took a lot out of all of us,” whispered Lewis. “He just scares easily.”

“Scared men do things a drunk man wouldn’t do,” answered Clark.

Charbonneau was sweating, and he stared around at the men, rolling his bloodshot eyes, scratching one shoulder, then the opposite thigh. And he was not yet finished. He wiped his face on his sleeve and blew his nose between his fingers, and when he spoke again, his voice went up so high it cracked. “I say we get out of this country. We do it fast. We go back to the Shoshonis. We just get our asses out of this bloody fool country.”

He twirled his cap between his hands. His breathing became audible. He rocked back and forth on his toes, his voice high-pitched, as though someone were pinching his windpipe.

“I’m going to get my horse and gear and
femme
and head east. If nobody else wants out of this hellhole, I will go it alone.” He stood still, breathing hard, looking from one man to the other.

Now Captain Clark wanted to say something. He raised one hand, his face tight, expressionless. At his salute the men quieted. “No, Charbonneau, you’re not. You try going back over those mountains and I’ll have you tied tighter than a queue done up in wet green hide. No one leaves the party now. Is that clear?” Captain Clark stood looking straight ahead, still as a rock, hardly breathing.

The men stood in unison and shouted that they were with the captains all the way. Old Toby and Cutworm yelled “Ai!” with the men, not actually understanding what it was about. Those two knew that Charbonneau had the mountain madness, but in two or three days he’d be back to his old self. Old Toby shook his head because to him it was incredible that so much ferocity had not killed Charbonneau long ago, weak and whim-pery as he appeared at other times. Instead, his blustery talk and fuzzy thinking made him stronger.

Charbonneau had turned, and he now groped through the men; he did not even put his black felt hat back on. He wheezed, and his lower lip stuck out, reaching for his mustache. He looked as though he were close to tears. His throat bulged with the sounds inside it. “There’s times the Capitaine Clark acts like living among the Indians has turned him red inside. He can freeze his face up as blank as any redskin I’ve ever met.
C’est fantastique!”
He walked off into the brush to cool off.

There was about half a minute when there was no expression on Clark’s face. And not one of the men had the guts to say a thing right away. There were no sounds at all except their breathing and the little
scuff-scuff
of a man’s hand rubbing back and forth across his bearded chin.

“Well,” Clark said quietly, “that’s all. Let’s get to work setting up the night camp.”

That evening, Old Toby and Cutworm gathered the snowshoes, explaining that there was no more need for them. They would be out of snow country in another day or two. Several of the old snowshoes made a good fire to melt a pot of snow for drinking water and for boiling some of that dried salmon. The rest were saved as convenient firewood for later on.

Two days later, Charbonneau seemed quite normal. Riding through tall grass with him, Sergeant Ordway looked at the plains spreading out below them. “Rich and delightful for cultivation. I’m a farmer at heart. I’d like to have me a big farmhouse in the middle of that green land.”

“You’re asking for plenty of backbreaking work,” said Charbonneau. “But it’s the richest land I’ve ever seen since we left the Missouri bottoms.”

On the south bank of the Kooskooskee, as the Nez Percés called the Clearwater River, where the north and south branches met, Captain Clark found an ideal campsite. Several more of the men fell ill. Captain Lewis himself could hardly stay in the saddle. Three men were unable to walk to the camp and lay beside the trail, waiting to be brought in by packhorses. Others, able to stagger along, had to lie down before they could manage the last couple of miles into camp.

Hunters brought in four thin deer and two large, fresh salmon. Sacajawea found the camass root and began digging. York was soon down on his hands and knees, helping. Captain Clark came over the hillock abruptly and had to swerve to miss going over York’s body. The horse threw him so that he hit the ground hard on his left hip. It was most painful for him to walk for several days.

“I’d feel fit if my hip didn’t aggravate me so,” said Clark. But by the following day he didn’t feel at all fit; he had a fierce case of diarrhea and deep lassitude.

It was then that Old Toby turned physician. That evening he took the tallow candles that had been removed from the tin canister, put them in one of the iron kettles, and melted them. When they were a lukewarm liquid and not quite congealed, he told Clark to drink what he’d poured in a cup. Then he went around to every member of the expedition and told them to drink; it would cure their trots.
⁵

Strangely, the men did not think it tasted so bad. Clark ordered the men to go to bed early, and he did the same. By morning, Clark and the others were completely cured. They could not believe that ordinary candle tallow could do this. Some admitted that the night before they were actually greedy for the stuff when Old Toby brought it to them, but ordinarily tepid lard would nauseate them.

The next night, Clark felt well enough to attack the illness forthrightly with Dr. Rush’s infallible Philadelphia pills, a powerful charge consisting of ten grains of calomel plus ten grains of jalop. He supplemented this with Glauber’s salts and tarter emetic and offered the concoction to anyone who might want it. He had no takers for his medicines. However, many men went with Sacajawea back to Old Toby for more melted candle tallow. Old Toby told Sacajawea that the fat would find its way into her milk. No one except Old Toby had understood they had been suffering from a deficiency of fat; the active men could not function in that cold country on lean meat and at a level near starvation.