The True Account (34 page)

My uncle pointed out to Lewis that this plan was fraught with danger, especially Lewis's leg of the trip. For Smoke had vowed that no American would ever again pass through his territory alive; and the Blackfoot chief had the will, intelligence, and might to back up his threat. “Lookee, sir,” said he, “this is as poor a scheme as a man of otherwise good judgment could devise. You know old Caesar's maxim, ‘Divide and conquer.' You're dividing your own forces so that they can be conquered. The Crows won't kill Bill Clark and his party, but they'll surely steal their horses. If the Blackfeet spot Ordway's crew loitering on the Missouri, as their sentinels are certain to, they'll pick 'em off like flies. And you, captain, scouting around in the heart of their country, why, you'll call down the whole nation on us.”

“Private True,” Lewis replied, “experienced as you are in all military matters dating back to Caesar—”

“And before,” said my uncle.

“As experienced as you are in all matters dating back to Caesar
and before,
Captain Clark and I have managed to get our party to the Pacific and back across the Bitterroots without consulting with you overfrequently. I will much appreciate your confining yourself to working on your play or refining your wonderful game of Kinneson-ball.”

“What did you yourself recently call the Blackfeet, captain? ‘Vicious, lawless, and abandoned,' as I recall. And there are several thousand of them. You're jeopardizing your entire expedition. Why?”

“Why, sir? To see if any of the tributaries to the Missouri rise north of the forty-ninth parallel, as Albert Gallatin advised the President to have me do, thereby extending the Louisiana Territory into British North America. Mr. Jefferson would be much pleased to learn that such is the case.”

“Mr. Jefferson would be much better pleased by your safe return. I cite from learned Thucydides, in his
History of the Peloponnesian Wars,
in which Pericles, the great Athenian orator, urges war with Sparta yet cautions his countrymen against
overextending their forces by taking unnecessary risks.
Hearken to Pericles, the wisest of the wise. Draw in your horns, sir.”

Clark looked grave, but it was Lewis who made the strategic decisions for the expedition. Under no circumstances would Clark say a word to undercut his friend and fellow captain.

“The President specifically directed that you do nothing inconsistent with the party's safety,” my uncle persisted. “Surely he would say—”

“Enough!” Lewis barked. “I'll hear no more of what you think the President would say, private.”

At which my uncle drew himself up straight and tall and said, “Softly, my good man, when you try to silence a free-thinking Vermonter. I don't belong to your sorry little ragtag party, to be ordered about like one of Tyrant Napoleon's foot-soldiers. I am a veteran of Ethan Allen's regiment and as free as the north wind blowing off the Green Mountains.”

But Lewis merely snapped that, being “free as the wind,” my uncle had his blessing to leave immediately and let that same wind blow him back to Vermont. For he was weary unto death of providing protection and assistance to people who had been nothing but a thorn in his side since leaving St. Louis.

Enraged, my uncle said he was not surprised “that the final reward of one who had many times preserved the expedition from annihilation was to be banished from the company of the very men who owed their lives to his good offices, but that justice would prevail in the end.” He bade me immediately collect my possibles and paintings, and thus we struck out overland on our own—just as we had when we began the trip more than two years before.

This time, however, we had with us, besides Bucephalus and Ethan Allen, three Nez Perce pack horses carrying, in large cedar-bark baskets, the bolts of yellow and pink silk and the cooking brazier and charcoal my uncle had taken from Mute Jack's ship. And we were headed into the heart of the most powerful and belligerent Indian nation in North America.

 

 

 

 

“T
I,” SAID MY UNCLE,
“do you think I was unduly harsh with Lewis?”

“You were very harsh, uncle,” I said, “but quite rightly so. Captain Lewis's venturing up here into Blackfoot territory is a bad business. I fear that he may draw down the entire nation upon us.”

It was mid-July, and we were camped again near the Great Falls, preparing to head north to the Land of the Glaciers in the morning. Compared to the earlier legs of our journey, our trip here from the Bitterroots had been somber. I knew that our angry parting from Lewis had been weighing on my uncle's mind, as it had on mine.

“I was hasty,” my uncle agreed. “But let that go. I need now to write to our friend the President; and I shall be more than fair to Lewis in my epistle. Take a letter, Ti.”

 

July 19, 1806

Thomas Jefferson, President

Monticello

Charlottesville, Virginia

United States of America

 

Dear Mr. President,

I write to you from near the Great Falls of the Missouri,
having beaten the captains and their “official” expedition to the Pacific.

Sir, these western lands are more wondrous than even you ever conceived. Let me be candid. Here there are no great mammoths, no mountains of salt, no lost wandering tribes of Israelites or Welshmen. But the real wonders, the crashing of these Great Falls, the marvels of the Land Where the River of Yellow Stones Rises, the rugged beauties of the Pacific coast
—
all exceed anything to be found in our tame, unimagining East. The West is bountiful in furs, fish, grass for to graze cattle, timber, fresh water, and noble prospects; and there is more of it than any one man could view in fifty lifetimes. I doubt not that it is egually rich in minerals, both precious and practical. Yet its real treasures are its wonderful people. Their customs of marriage, warfare, burial, hunting, architecture
—
all are as diverse as their languages. They possess every art we do
—
music, painting, oratory, storytelling. In some cases they are skillful agronomists, in others uncanny boat-builders, in yet others superb horsemen. I beg you to honor their political divisions, their histories, their persons, and their dignity. They most assuredly are not “children.” They are endlessly intelligent and endlessly resourceful; they love their families above all else in life; they are as fond as you are of good conversation, good food, subtle jokes, travel, art
—
in other words they are good Americans.

Item:
Please remember the soldiers of the expedition, for they are all good men and true. Let me begin with that fine officer, William Clark. Like Lewis, he sought, at your behest, the shortest practicable waterway to the Pacific. Finding that there was no such thing as a Northwest Passage, practicable or otherwise, he discovered instead, in himself, a great gift for map-making, for tactical decisions, for negotiating whitewater, and for negotiating with and understanding the nations of Louisiana and the Northwest. He was ever able, fair, truthful, quick to take the Indians' part, and sympathetic with the least of those people, as well as the greatest. In his steadfastness as Meriwether Lewis's friend, he enabled Captain Lewis to lead the party to the Pacific, an accomplishment perhaps unexcelled in the annals of exploration, on this continent or any continent,
though you will remember that I got there first
.

Sergeants Gass and Ordway, hunter Drouillard, fiddler Cruzatte, who brought the men music to keep up their spirits, the honest Field brothers, the deft fisherman Silas Goodrich,
et alia
—
though Irish, French, English, Welsh, Indian, or Scots, they are all Americans. Make no false distinctions between them when you consider how to reward their extraordinary courage and loyalty. Black York, Clark's slave, was much admired by the peoples we met as a prodigy of wit, strength, good nature, and good sense, and as much a help to the expedition as any other man.

Item:
I only wish you could make the acquaintance of my particular friend, the Blackfoot savant Franklin. He chose to sail north in the ship
Tlingit
with his new friends of that nation. His hope is to destroy the Russian fort at Borrow, Alaska, and to free the Tlingits from the onerous yoke of those most brutal oppressors. On behalf of Franklin, who likewise provided invaluable assistance to Lewis's expedition, I ask that, should you decide to annex Alaska, you treat with the Tlingits, not the Russian usurpers. They are a fine, fierce, independent nation of artists and rovers, and could put a million or two in American currency to good use. I believe that their living tree-carvings rival the great sculptures of the Greeks.

Item:
Captain Lewis. What more can I say about this great and good man, other than that you chose well in appointing him as the leader of the expedition? He and I agreed on little; yet he is a gentleman of undaunted courage, whose firmness and perseverance as a leader and father of his men yielded to nothing but impossibilities. I do not recommend him for any political or government office; he needs to be active at all times. Send him on another expedition. Send him to explore
—
the planet Venus. I have a new invention in mind, a sort of electrical rocket that will
—
but I will tell you more of this later. To return to Lewis, wherever you send him, make certain first that he finishes his journals and transcribes his field notes into them, for they are the
record of a great man and a great venture, second only to that of

Your friend,

Private True Teague Kinneson

 

“Add a ‘tooleree,' Ti,” my uncle said when I read the letter back to him just before we turned in for the night.

“Pardon me, sir?”

“Add a ‘tooleree' after my signature. It will indicate that I wish the President well, but, as a Vermonter, that I intend to pay fealty to no one and to take no man, and no merely human enterprise, too seriously.”

A
WEEK LATER
we were camped at the conjunction of the Marias and Two Medicine rivers, just south of the Land of the Glaciers, with the soaring, snowy summit of Squaresided Chief Mountain in the foreground. While we had as yet encountered no Blackfeet, we had found signs of recent campfires and seen smoke in the distance. We suspected that they were aware of our presence, too, and might well be drawing us into a trap. That day we had also seen some signs that Lewis had come this way with his party of three men a few days earlier.

For the past several evenings my uncle had spent his time sewing together his wondrous lengths of pink and yellow silk cloth, as if fashioning a great tent or pavilion. Although I had inquired several times what he was making, he had been very coy and close-mouthed, saying only that it was his boldest invention to date.

“Is it something to trade with the Blackfeet?” I asked as we watched Chief Mountain and the peaks behind it fade into the twilight.

He smiled knowingly.

“A stage curtain? For a grand production of
Ethan Allen?”

“Try again, Ti.”

“Not, heaven forbid, sails for another
Dutchman?”

“Not sails, lad. But let us leave the new invention and return one last time to my old friend, the Gentleman from Vermont. You may be surprised, Ti, to learn that I no longer hold him in much consequence.”

“I am surprised, sir. He has certainly caused us—and mankind—enough trouble.”

“He has. But recently I have concluded that the more important struggles in this world are not those between us mortals and the Devil, or even between Good and Evil. Rather, the more difficult conflicts are those between human beings, in which—confound this dull needle; that's the third time this week I've sewn my thumb to the cloth—do you attend?”

“I do, uncle. I am sorry about your thumb.”

“Thank you. It is nothing. I was saying, the more difficult conflicts are those in which both parties believe themselves to be in the right.”

I considered this proposition. “This seems a mighty paradox, sir.”

“Exactly, Ti. Our lives are mighty paradoxes.” And with this pronouncement, my uncle gave the bell on his cap a vigorous jingling, and continued sewing until it was too dark to see his needle.

A
S SOON AS IT WAS LIGHT
we started up the Two Medicine toward the Land of the Glaciers and Chief Mountain. We continued about ten miles along the stream, which was very low at this time of year. As we rode, I mused about what I would say to Yellow Sage Flower when we were reunited and what I would do with my life when and if we got safely back to Vermont.

In the distance we could see a range of peaks higher than any we had traveled through thus far, with Squaresided Chief Mountain between us and them and a little apart from the rest. But in the late morning we were led by the smoke of a campfire to a most alarming sight. A black pool of what appeared to be blood lay drying on the ground near the fire, with more blood about three hundred yards away behind a large boulder. The remains of four Indian shields were smoldering on the fire. The tracks of Lewis's Shoshone horses led due south. Five or six other riders seemed to have fled west on smaller ponies.

My uncle said nothing until he ascertained these facts. Then, in that businesslike, military manner which I had first witnessed back on the Natchez Trace in our encounter with the Harpes, he said, “Ti, short of the captain's death or capture, this is as bad a situation as we could imagine. Precisely what happened here I'm not certain. But it's clear that Lews, Drouillard, and the Field brothers are riding hard for the Missouri and their rendezvous with Sergeant Ordway. Some of them may be wounded.”