Sacajawea (86 page)

“Yes, the smoke keeps some warmth,” said Clark, “but I think it would be more comfortable to freeze than to choke to death.”

“I have noticed that the dampness on the coast seemed to hurt more than the drier cold in these regions,” observed Lewis.

The frogs shrilled in every sodden hollow, and small birds and squirrels racketed on leaf-budding branches. Indians from neighboring villages came to the white men’s camp. When four principal Nez Percé chiefs came with three subchiefs, the captains took the opportunity to have a council, because here seven chiefs were present according to Nez Percé tradition for a successful council. Lewis explained the nature and power of the United States. One chief made a rough map with charcoal on an elk hide, showing the pass across the Divide through the mountains. The council took half a day because of all the interpreters. Sacajawea translated in Shoshoni to Shadow, who was still with the expedition, and he translated to the Nez Percés.

The Nez Percés were great politicians. They had kettles of food made. The chiefs yelled out
“Ai!”
to the white men’s ideas of keeping peace with other nations, then further signified their approval by helping themselves to the food. Those who wished to vote “No!” could do so by staying away from the food. The
“Ai’s”
defeated the “No’s” unanimously.

Further friendship was deepened by the expedition’s medical supplies. Realizing that they no longer had sufficient trading goods to buy provisions, medical fees became their only means of bargaining. Clark and Sacajawea treated as many as fifty people a day. In some cases Clark refused treatment unless the Indians let him have dogs or horses in payment so that the expedition would have food. The Nez Percés had plenty of dogs, which they never ate themselves, and they understood the payment for medical treatment because they paid fees to their own Medicine Man. One squaw was so grateful to Clark for opening a large abscess on her back and allowing her a good night’s rest that she gave him a beautiful gray horse with white spots all over.

The Nez Percés were a pleasant-mannered people for the most part, who moved around, digging camass and fishing in the spring, hunting and berrying in the mountains through the summer, fishing in the fall, and gambling and horse-trading during the winter.

Sacajawea found that they called themselves Lema, People, just as the Shoshonis referred to themselves as the People. They traveled enough to know there were other subdivisions of their nation, and they were identified according to location: Meli Lema or Pakiut Lema, standing for Grass Country People or Canyon People. Wandering had kept them from getting dull and stupid, as some of the west coast tribes were.

One morning Sacajawea took her child to the village smokehouse, which had been built on the ground above a pool where the stone fish traps were. Beside the smokehouses were dugouts covered with old hides to keep from splitting in the warm spring sun.

Some naked children shouted that there were more salmon in the river than stars in the sky. Pomp slipped in the sand and fell on his hands and knees. Sacajaweapulled him up before he could object and continued walking toward the smokehouse, curious.

“Are you going to open the smoke hole and get a fire going?” a boy ran to ask her.

Sacajawea shook her head and indicated that she did not know this method of smoking fish. The boy found a pole ladder and climbed to the bark roof. He lifted the sticks and hides covering the smoke hole and threw them to the ground.

A squaw the boy called “mother” opened the low door and stepped back, for the bitter odor of smoked wood stung her nostrils. She was fat and round-faced, but had a good-natured smile. She wore many shells and thongs wrapped around her ankles and arms. She built a fresh fire, all the while smiling at Sacajawea as the heat was carrying the air up through the smoke hole and drawing fresh air into the wooden smokehouse.

Sacajawea let Pomp play in the sand with the older boy. She helped the mother bring in more driftwood, which had been hurled along the beach by the winter’s williwaws. Once she ran into the water after Pomp, who had decided to poke his bare toes into wetter sand.

The Nez Percé women had built salmon traps by making large enclosures surrounded by stone walls, which were covered with water. As the water flowed down the river, draining through the stones, the salmon were caught in shallow water and could be picked up with their bare hands. Sacajawea saw the flat shells of mussels on the rocks and waded out to pry some loose with her stubby old knife. Once she stopped to watch minnows dart above helgrammites that barely moved with the flow of water, as delicate as flowers in the wind.

Suddenly the boy, clad only in a breechclout, darted toward her. “There’s a many-legged fish under the ledge! It will grab your leg!”

She raced to shore. “Would it bite?” Sacajawea asked, running beside the boy.

“It would grab your leg and pull you down, down,” he panted.

His mother was feeding the fire again, and Sacajawea could hear her loud chuckle and the click of her tongue.

There were no octopus in the Kooskooskee River, but there must have been stories about them in the river closer to the Pacific, and the stories had reached these Nez Percés.

Other brown, naked children had gathered at the shore and were laughing at the good joke. Sacajawea crossed her legs and sat on the sand laughing with them as she realized it was only a funny joke to play on a stranger.

“I got enough large mussels, anyway,” she said, pointing to the pile. “You can have a feast.” She began shelling, silently putting the meat on a flat piece of driftwood. Happily she thought of nothing, vaguely aware of the sun on her back, the nearness of her child, now asleep in the warm sand, and her Nez Percé friends. The feeling of contentment enclosed her.

In the afternoon, Sacajawea went to Clark and asked if York could help treat the natives with the magic eyewater because she was busy at the smokehouse. “Just this one day. I will bring you some large mussels I have smoked.”

Clark could never refuse her. “Keep Pomp with you!” he called. “York is not likely to be a good nursemaid and medical assistant at the same time.”

For his supper Clark ate the tender white mussel meat, smoked and salted to perfection. “Ummm, better than salmon,” he said.

“There is enough for all to try.” She urged Clark to distribute the bundle of dried, smoked fish. “I did leave some to the Nez Percé squaw who built up the smokehouse fire, and she fed many children.”

The men smacked their lips; Pomp crawled to Clark’s lap and fell asleep.

“Squaw, put that
enfant
to bed!” yelled Charbonneau.

“Shhh,” warned Clark, “no need to wake the child. Let his mother enjoy the festivities in her honor. She went to some trouble to clean and smoke these mussels as a surprise. It is good to honor her once in a while.”

“No need to honor a squaw. I have said that before. Wagh!” Charbonneau sulked. “She is supposed to know how to catch fish and cook. But look, I am the one that has done most of the cooking around here. Then shegoes off to enjoy babbling with other women and cooks over some greasy, louse-infected wood the Nez Percés have.”

Clark looked amused. “Tomorrow you catch, clean, and smoke some salmon, and fix greens for us. Janey will help me with the medicines. Then during supper we’ll have York sing to you.”

Charbonneau stalked off to wash the tin plates. Having his bluff called, he wished to say nothing further.

Clark sat back with his pipe and said mostly to himself, “What can we do for Bill Bratton? He’s as stove up as that old chief, Tomatappo, those Cayuse brought in some days ago.”

“We’ll try a sweat lodge,” replied Sacajawea impulsively.

After a few moments of silence, as Clark enjoyed his pipe, he swatted his knee. “Well, I’ll be danged! I should have thought of that a long time ago. For two months Bratton’s been carried by canoe, and horseback, and treated with liniment and powders. Nothing has really worked. The sweat bath can’t be worse. We’ll have a sweat tonight!”

It was dusk when Clark told a couple of the men to build a little tent of skins, barely large enough to accommodate two people. They scraped the hole from the loam and filled it with ashes.

“We’ll roll hot stones from the fire outside onto these ashes,” Clark explained. “Sweating is a treatment as old as the oldest Indians. The Mandans prescribed it for any ailment.”

Clark sent for Charbonneau. “Go to the Cayuse camp. Have their men bring their old crippled chief here. We’re going to do a sweat. I want him to keep Bratton company because he’s never had one before. Do ‘em both good, maybe.”

Charbonneau hurried off, happy again to be an important messenger for the expedition.

When Tomatappo was brought in, Clark went to Bratton.

“Come on, old man,” he said, “a sweat will do you good.”

“I know,” Bratton said in a weary voice. After a moment he allowed himself to be carried by York to thesmall skin tent. He undressed and crawled inside. The warmth had an unexpected effect. He gasped with pleasure and sat on a thick heap of boughs spread with a hide, in pitch-darkness, and tried to stretch out his legs. They touched someone’s feet.

“This is fine,” Bratton exclaimed. “I am going to be thoroughly warmed.”

The old, naked chief chuckled, and Bratton could hear him settling comfortably.

The flap of the tent was pushed aside, and in the dim light from the outside fire, Bratton saw shadowy hands rolling a stone with sticks. The stone was jostled along the earth to the pit. The sticks smoked from the contact and were thrown out. Someone poured water on the hot stone and pushed a small jar of water to sprinkle on the stone toward Bratton. This created as much steam as the two in the tent could bear. York pushed in two steaming cupfuls of strong horsemint tea for the men to drink.

“Tomonowos,”
said Bratton after he had taken a huge swallow. “Powerful,” he had said in Nez Percé.

The old chief said,
“Oho,”
and drank noisily.

Bratton felt the water stream on his chest and arms. The atmosphere became stifling, and he opened his mouth to breathe. But delightful shivers ran through his body, to his very marrow, and there was a tingling in his joints, so that he felt he would sleep the night through in the first real rest since leaving Fort Clatsop.

“You must stay only a short while the first time,” said Clark, pulling Bratton out. York helped to support him as they took him to the river to be plunged twice in the cold water. Then he was sweated again for another three-quarters of an hour.

The chief snuffled out a dreamy chant.

Then the flap was opened and Bratton crawled out. Clark wrapped him in blankets and allowed him to cool gradually. He chewed the meat Clark handed him and reached for more. He was still sweating profusely, and he wiped his face with the corner of the blanket.

“When is that old man coming out?” Bratton asked.

“His people will bring him when they feel he has had enough. The Indians never do anything that seems good by small degrees,” Clark said, lighting a twig.

“But he will melt to skin and bones.”

“They would not let him stay if they felt he was not getting some pleasure from it.” Clark put the twig to his pipe and sucked on the stem.

Tears were starting to drop from Bratton’s eyes from the campfire’s smoke, and he lay down.

The chief was brought out and wrapped in a fur robe and placed on his back beside Bratton. He indicated he was hungry. Clark nodded to one of the Cayuse men that old Tomatappo should have something to eat from the white men’s cooking kettle. York passed the man a plate of boiled meat. The old man asked twice for the plate to be refilled.

“He cannot remember when he has felt so good,” said Shadow, the old captive Shoshoni. “Look, he can move his hands and arms and feed himself.”

Tomatappo’s arms and legs had been paralyzed for three years. In two days, he began to wiggle the toes of one foot and move the leg, while the other had tingling sensations in it.

Bill Bratton was able to walk about the next day.

The weather now alternated between bad spells of cold and then sunny days when the natives swarmed into the expedition’s camp with their aches and pains to be treated. On a good day Sacajawea was heating flannel strips to lay over an old woman’s aching joints, when she realized that her child had been whiny and would not play contentedly by himself. The papoose was not fifteen months old and had survived more than most any other child had been subjected to. Almost from birth he had been traveling, sometimes on horseback, sometimes in a canoe, and sometimes slung over his mother’s back in a cradleboard or in the fold of a thin blanket. He had escaped drowning twice and had shared the cold, rain, and semistarvation that had laid low one after another of the grown men.

Sacajawea knew he was cutting teeth, and it was hard to keep the steady flow of water from his mouth wiped off. How messy growing teeth are, she thought. He’s cranky today with it.

Ben York noticed something different in the child’sactions. “Why you’se stick close to your mammy, child?” he asked.

Pomp hid his face behind his mother’s leg.

“Something’s wrong with this here Pomp. He’s not a bashful type.”

Sacajawea put her hand on the child’s head. It was warmer than usual. She kept her hand there for a few more seconds to make sure. Then she pulled the child on her lap and saw that his eyes were bright with fever. She and York looked inside his mouth. His throat was red.

“This here baby’s got a sore throat from wading in that icy river water.” York picked the child up and placed the little head on his big shoulder. “Come on, soldier, we’re going to get you a cup of tea.” He patted Pomp’s head, and the child began to whimper and then cry out as if in pain. Sacajawea held her arms out for him. She felt her child’s neck, then upward toward the ears. Behind Pomp’s left ear was a swollen area that caused him to cry out when touched.

In the afternoon, he became restless and his fever increased. Sacajawea kept him wrapped in his robe of rabbit furs. He tried to push the robe away.