Sacajawea

  The spell was not so easily broken. Monsieur Fontaine kicked his horse into motion and fell in beside St. Vrain. He seemed eager to be on his way as the great wolfs sobbing cry still echoed down the hills, and even riding his horse he remained in a tense attitude of listening long after the final eerie note trembled in the distance and was lost in the kiyi-ing of the warriors.

  St. Vrain’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Monsieur Fontaine. “The wolf calls to you, monsieur? What does he say?” asked St. Vrain.

  Monsieur Fontaine looked sharply at him. He was startled. “Do you ridicule me?”

  “Of course not, ami. I only observe your reaction to the howl of a prairie wolf.”

  “Some say the French are superstitious.” He returned to what seemed an endless gaze into the low hills. But he came back. “This day has been something so different from my usual days and I have felt so blessed to be alive and the wolf’s cry did seem to come directly to my ears. Gray Thunder would say, ‘It is a good day for dying.’” Monsieur Fontaine paused. “Céran, am I not truly blessed to have such a fine woman to care for my little Suzanne?”

  St. Vrain smiled, then laughed, and rode past Louis Vasquez and Charley Bent to the front riders beside Gray Thunder.

  Sacajawea stood just inside the gates to the adobe fort wondering how such a fine day could change so rapidly. She let her musings carry her to other summer celebrations with the white men. She could almost hear Cruzatte’s fiddle as Chief Red Hair danced and the tall pine crackled into a fiery blaze.

  Tom Fitzpatrick remained inside the fort with his men to celebrate the fading Fourth of July with tin mugs half-filled with bacanora, a clear white liquor distilled from cactus juice. There were some Utes at the gate asking to buy the crazy-water. Fitzpatrick sent an order that the few barrels of bacanora his party had left could be sold to the Utes if it were watered half and half.

  Sacajawea took the little girls back to the cell-like single room she had been given by St. Vrain the previous night. She left the door partially open so that there was some light so she could wash the children with water from the pump and put clean doeskin tunics on them. She washed their calico dresses at the pump and spread them over the single bench in the room for drying. She felt she needed a bath, but did not dare go outside the fort now. She let the pump water run over her face and arms and neck. In the room she removed her calico dress and petticoats and slipped on a simpletunic. She rinsed out her dress and laid it beside the girls’.

  The bell announcing supper rang. She was not sure she should go into the dining hall without Monsieur Fontaine. The girls were hungry. She slipped to the courtyard and stood by the mess hall. A Cheyenne woman looked at her and made a clicking noise with her tongue. “You are not in the white woman’s dress, so you cannot go into the place of eating.” Sacajawea’s heart sank, but the woman came back almost immediately with a plate of pinto beans and corn bread and a mug of steaming black coffee with a layer of sugar syrup at the bottom.

  “You hear el lobo? Señora, when the wolf cries before dark, it is a bad sign. It means someone is marked for death.” The woman walked away rustling her huaraches.

  Sacajawea let the children eat the warm corn bread as she blew on the coffee to cool it for drinking. Suddenly she felt exhausted. This was a new life. Each day was so different, with so much to think about and put in the right place in her mind. To try thinking of tomorrow would surely fatigue her. She fell asleep with the coffee half-drunk beside her on the dirt floor. The little girls were already curled up together on a bright Navaho rug.

  At sunrise, Sacajawea was up and standing by the mess-hall door. Someone told her to vamoose. She stepped a little way from the door, and someone else put a tin plate of steaming biscuits and a cup of black coffee in her hand. At that moment she saw St. Vrain come past on her pony, headed for the corral inside the fort. My horse, she thought—oh, no, it is his since yesterday. He was leading another horse with the rider thrown facedown across the saddle. There was a small hole in the rider’s back from which blood had oozed, but it was black and dried now.

  “It’s a shame”—St. Vrain beckoned to her—“old Fontaine was shot in the back.”

  Sacajawea’s hand shook, and she spilled a little coffee.

  “We were behind some boulders with Gray Thunder’s men. Nine Crows made a dash for a stream. Monsieur Fontaine waited until they were within fifty yards; then he fired on them. He hit two before they turned back. He missed a third, and the Crows charged him. He was a good rider, but could not get around the rocks fast enough. The bullet struck just as he dodged for the far side of his horse, hanging by one foot. I got that Crow with my old Silver Heels, and we managed to recover the horses for the Cheyennes. A savage sport.” He spat at the ground.

  Others gathered around them. “Gray Thunder and his men are just coming into their camp,” someone said.

  Sacajawea stepped close to the body. Monsieur Fontaine had been a quiet, peaceful man who had gained back his life only to lose it quickly. She looked away. St. Vrain had brought out a double blanket, and Carson was there helping spread it on the ground. The body was laid on it. She bent to set the plate and coffee on the earth, then she moved in and pushed the white hair from the cold face and brushed the sleeves and straightened the jacket.

  A fine man was gone. She felt sorrow and loss of something irreplaceable.

  “By your garden, in the manner of the whites,” whispered Sacajawea to St. Vrain. By this time both little girls were standing beside Sacajawea. Suzanne stared at the form in the blanket, not understanding that it was the last remains of her father.

  Someone opened the gates. Carson and St. Vrain grasped the ends of the blanket and carried the body to the back of the fort. The garden was lush and green. There were blue lupines near the front. One of the men from the blacksmith shop came with shovels. Finally they stumbled to the loose earth, and some six men lowered the body into the hole.

  They dumped the earth into the grave. The clods bounced on the blanket. After some minutes Fitzpatrick took a shovel and the hole was filled and mounded over.

  The men carried rocks to cover the mound. Sacajawea sat beside the row of lupines; her face was pale and trembling. The two little girls sat in front of her, somber.

  The rocks left something lacking. Carson cut down a tall aspen and trimmed it down so that two sidebranches were left on the main stock to look like a cross. He inserted it in the loosened earth at one end of the grave and propped it with stones.

  Spirits were low inside the fort, but a supper of potatoes, frijoles with chilis, corn bread, and buffalo roast seemed to lift them.

  The following day, Sacajawea made ready to go back to Fort Lupton. St. Vrain quietly made her a present of half a dozen good packhorses, some tins of coffee, and bacon and flour. Some of the squaws living inside the fort brought moccasins for the little girls, beaded in bright designs. The squaw who had given Sacajawea food from the mess hall gave her a leather packet of jerky.

  Tom Fitzpatrick shook her hand, Carson patted the children, and St. Vrain said something about if he were a few years younger he’d keep her. “I’d keep them, too,” he added, chucking the girls under the chin.

  The news of the raid and chase for the horses had already reached Fort Lupton. Monsieur Fontaine’s death was not news when Sacajawea entered the fort. She stayed on helping in the kitchen under the watchful eye of Mrs. Ducate and Lancaster Lupton.

  Sacajawea was mending a calico dress belonging to Crying Basket when Lupton sent for her.

  “Madame Charbonneau, a Ute runner has come to my post only a few minutes ago. He brings news of the explorer John Charles Frémont, who is at St. Vrain’s Fort now. It seems the Mexicans are getting tough and have stopped all commercializing with Americans. At any rate, Frémont left Bent’s Fort with mules and supplies and did not attempt to go farther south for more trading. He is back earlier than expected because of the new Mexican laws, and he has sent word that he is going to Gabe’s, Jim B
ridger’s Fort, and you might like to travel with his party. There are Shoshonis camped outside Bridger’s Fort, and they might be of your tribe. And the latest word from Bill Bent is that your son is coming to see Bridger before winter sets in. So—if you still wish to trail after that elusive son, here is another chance.”

  Mrs. Ducate said over and over how hard it would be to find a replacement for Sacajawea in the kitchen.

  Lancaster Lupton wished her luck and checked her six horses and the packs strapped to three of them. She seemed to realize that another part of her life was closing as she left Lupton’s. It was a heart-tugging moment at the fort’s gate. Amid laughter and good wishes, Sacajawea was pale and serious for a moment. She looked into Mrs. Ducate’s eyes and said softly, “Adiós.”

  She rode with Crying Basket in front and Suzanne in back of her. No one questioned her right to mother Suzanne, the half-breed child left behind by Monsieur Fontaine’s death. Suzanne herself called Sacajawea umbea, Shoshoni for “mother.” Mrs. Ducate wiped her eyes on her apron as she bade them good-bye. Afterward she said to Lupton, “That there squaw is a saint. A genuine saint.”

  The Ute runner rode close to Sacajewea, explaining in hand signs that a party of dirty Crows had attacked the Arapaho camp not far from St. Vrain’s the day before. Sacajawea clasped her mouth with one hand and scanned the hills. The Ute laughed and kiyi-ed for a moment, then assured her there was no need to worry as the Arapahos were too strong. The Crows had made a fast retreat this time.

  Tom Fitzpatrick, whom the Indians called Broken Hand because one of his hands had been crippled by the explosion of a gun, was still at St. Vrain’s selling watered bacanora to the camps outside the fort. With furs and peltries he received as payment, he planned to repay St. Vrain for board and room for himself and his men these past weeks at the fort.

  From St. Vrain’s Fort, on July 23, 1843, Frémont left with Carson as his guide, Charles Preuss, map-maker, Louis Zindel, Prussian expert in explosives, and Sacajawea and her two little girls. Fitzpatrick’s portion of the party consisted of Alex Gody, hunter and scout, much of the heavy baggage, and most of Fremont’s men. They had decided to split because they could find no one who knew the character of the mountain passes due west. They were heading straight for the ford of the Green River beyond the mountains. Fitzpatrick took the emigrant road by way of the mouth of the Laramie

  River to Fort Hall, the Hudson’s Bay Company post on the Snake River.

  Frémont’s group set out to cut through the mountains of the South Pass by way of the Powder River Valley. Soon they found themselves in one of the wildest and most beautiful parts of the Rocky Mountains. Sacajawea’s heart was singing. She could almost feel herself as a child in the land of her people, the Agaiduka Shoshoni, even though these mountains were more tree-covered than those she remembered from her childhood home. She began to feel more certain she would find Baptiste, and then daydreamed a little about reuniting with her own people. There were towering walls all around where they traveled; the sides were dark with pine forests. There were long waterfalls coming down the sides of the mountains to the river below. The river bottom was covered with flowers—shooting stars, buttercups, yellow bells, and trillium.

  Sacajawea busied herself digging yampa roots in the low-timbered river bottom. She took them to the expedition’s cook and showed him how to make them into a fine mashed vegetable for the men’s supper.

  “Wagh,” said Carson. “I’m half-froze for meat and we get mashed dill roots, which we have to pretend are turnips.”

  “But there is turkey tonight,” promised Frémont, who had sent four men on a hunting party.

  From here, their way, even in the smoother parts, was made rough by dense sagebrush, four to six feet tall. Then the party counted itself fortunate in spotting a small herd of buffalo. For two days they camped about two hundred miles out of Fort St. Vrain to dry the buffalo meat for future use. Sacajawea made herself useful whenever possible and with her skinning knife cut strips of fresh meat thin so that it would dry quickly over the smoky fires.

  The summer air was hot, and the charrettes2 moved with some trouble along the ground. The little girls were permitted to ride in one of the charrettes. Kit Carson had perched them high on top a pile of rolled pelts and skins.

  Several days out from the meat-drying camp, the horses struggled over deadfall and huge rocks. Frémontlooked around, then rode ahead to a high point and saw a range of mountains in the north that he felt sure were peaks of the Sweetwater Valley Range.

  “Yes,” said Frémont, grinning, “those peaks would break our backs. No sense rambling about it, we’ll abandon any further efforts to struggle through this impracticable country and head back to St. Vrain’s.”

  “I’m sorry as all glory!” said Carson. “I’m more than a little sad to turn around. Let’s keep going for one more day or two northward.”

  The party proceeded north-northwest along the east side of the Medicine Bow Range until it reached its northern extremity, then they moved west,3 crossed the North Platte, and moved slowly up the Sweetwater Valley and over South Pass ahead of Fitzpatrick’s division.

  Sacajawea put her hands on the little girls at night, but said little. There was not anything to say. The children’s eyes were big as plums as they saw how the land changed from plains to mountains and hidden valleys. They passed porcupines sitting in fir trees eating and sleeping there so they could chip away the outer bark with beaverlike teeth, then cut off and eat the tasty inner bark, leaving the bare wood showing. Some of the dead trees and deadfall showed evidence of the eating habits of those porcupines. The slow-moving porcupine can do more damage to a grove of fine timber than almost anything but a forest fire, thought Sacajawea.

  Frémont did not find a more southerly route to Oregon and northern California than this one. Sacajawea found she was not truly accepted as a member of the party as she had been with the Lewis and Clark Expedition so many years before, but no matter, she was going closer to the land of her people and her firstborn. Carson was friendly and spoke often with her. She watched him pull off the dry leaves from the jimson-weeds, powder them between his fingers, and sift the powder into thin papers that he rolled and moistened with his tongue to hold together so that he could smoke. “Relieves my congestion in this high country,” he whispered to her in a confidential manner.

  Sacajawea shrugged, knowing that the weed gave a lift to his spirits as he smoked.

  When Frémont’s party reached the Oregon Trail onthe banks of the Sweetwater River, they found a broad, smooth highway where the constant passage of emigrant wagons had beaten the sagebrush out of existence. It was a surprise and a happy change from the sharp rocks and tough shrubs through which their horses had been pushing. From this point onward, their path was easy and, despite dust and heat, progress was rapid.

  Each evening now, Sacajawea took the little girls to a stream for bathing. She washed out their tunics and hung them over a rock or on a tree limb to dry. She let them dance by the campfire, even encouraged them whenever the men began to sing. They learned the words to the mountaineers’ songs, not always understanding their meaning, which was bawdy, or sad, but always about a woman left behind.

  “Wish I had some of that lettuce in the garden at St. Vrain’s,” said Carson wistfully to no one in particular one evening. “You know, if you take a handful of lettuce, crumble it up in a ball, and put a little sugar on it, you’ll find it tastes pretty much like an apple.”

  “This child’s hankerin’ for some apples right now,” said one of the mule cart drivers.

  Sacajawea left the firelit circle and came back with her skirt full of small wild plums, which she had cached at the edge of the camp.

  “These will fill my hankerin’,” said the cart driver, diving in with both hands.

  “I didn’t see any plum trees,” said Frémont. “That Snake squaw has a nose for eating off the land. Those were fine blackberries you brought in that cold night on the mountains,
ma’am.” When he spoke to Sacajawea he looked where she’d been standing. She had disappeared, but not for long. She came into the firelight again with a grin as broad as the Mexican cart drivers’ sombreros.

  “By jing!” Carson turned to Sacajawea with a grin as wide as her own. “Ay, muchísimas gracias.” He bowed with mock gravity. “This watercress will be as good as lettuce from Céran’s garden. This is a wondrous thing. All I did was wish and here it is true. Sugar, amigo?” Carson had turned to Frémont.

  Twice within the next week the expedition passedthe new-made graves of emigrants, and once they fell in with a stray ox wandering aimlessly.

  Carson came riding back after scouting a mile or so ahead of the party late on the hot afternoon of August 18, 1843. “You’re here, Madame Charbonneau!” he called. “See up there? That is Ham’s Fork, on the Green River. Jim Bridger’s Fort is a mile or two southward down the wide path. There.”

  She could see. Her heart began to thump as she pulled her packhorses from the train. What lay ahead she was not sure, but she felt she was closer now than she had been for many years to her firstborn.

  “If you are still at Bridger’s Fort when I come by here again, I’ll stop and say ‘Greetings,’” said Carson.

  Sacajawea wished to thank Frémont in some special way for taking her this far, but she was at a loss to say anything when he handed her a small leather tent. “Take it. I no longer have any use for it, and it will be a place for you and the little girls to sleep if you have to live outside the fort.”

  Sacajawea did not protest; instead, she put her hand out to shake Frémont’s in the manner she knew white men did to seal a bargain or show good friendship.

  Then she waved her farewell to the others, and the little girls called “Adiós,” shaking their brown hands as the expedition of Charles Frémont went on to catch up with Fitzpatrick and the rest of its party.

  At this place the river valley was wide and covered with good grass. Cottonwood timber was plentiful. The streams looked cool and clear.