Sacajawea

  She took out the now-tarnished peace medal Sun Woman had given her for good fortune on the long journey to and from the ocean in the west. Someday, she thought, I will let my son wear this around his neck—when he is someone important among the white men. Next, she held the rusty red piece of glass with the white bird raised on one side. This, she thought, I’ll always keep to remind me that my name is Sacajawea, Bird Woman.

  Inside the pouch were several blue jay feathers, a red feather, blue ribbon, and also a small bone comb and a pewter mirror. She combed her hair, thinking of the time Clark gave the comb and mirror to her. She imagined him saying, “We will meet again, Janey,” his freckled face smiling. She pulled the jacket around her bare shoulders and smelled the coat’s familiar odor, breathing deeply into the folds. This was her medicine. This was the thing that preserved her courage and reminded her of places beyond the river villages. It was more tangible than memories.

  Like the young brave when he grows into manhood, she, too, needed a medicine. It was something to giveher strength to meet the hardships of life. The young brave found his medicine by praying alone long hours with arms extended toward the sun, not eating until in a dream his totem was revealed. She thought of the trip to the Stinking Waters as her medicine dream—for now it seemed only a dream.

  She saw Charbonneau coming between the lodges alone. Why hadn’t he brought Corn Woman? She hastened her steps and was about to call out when she saw that his head was bent and his shoulders hunched in a look of complete dejection. He walked with a bent-kneed slouch, deliberate and swift, his lips pressed tightly together. His face was like oiled deerskin. His mustache, whose uneven curls hung down on either side of his mouth, increased his melancholy look. The cries of the locusts came in broken chirps.

  “Where is she?”

  Charbonneau folded his bent legs under him and sat beside the hard-packed trail. “She went to the Land of Shadows during the deep snow.” Even and patient and never stopping came the song of the locust. All else was silence. Behind the clear, close sounds were others, more distant, and still others, more faint.

  Sacajawea sat, placed her clothing bundle between them.

  “She had a coughing sickness, and bad smell. She’s white as bone and food come up from her belly. She’s light as feathers and not wake up again. C’est vrai!” He crossed himself. “The family say she is my fault. I think they lie. Listen, how can it be my doing when I am not here?” Even sitting down, with his legs under him, he managed a most creditable swagger as he brushed off his hands. He wiped them clean of the incident, even though it still lingered to trouble his mind.

  Sacajawea stared at the dusty trail. Her memory of Corn Woman was as bleached as dry bone. She could not imagine what she had looked like. She thought the locust sound was like the blowing of wind, spreading everywhere across the prairie, always there ready to be heard by those who wished to listen. It was a help, a familiar thing. But she could not put it into words for the man who sat with his head in his hands.

  “La malchance me poursuit! I am cursed with badluck! They say I left her too long with no hope of me returning. Those dirty Mandans! They knew I would be back! They are the ones. They let her die, telling her all the time I was gone and would never return. ‘Do not think of the man who has fled with palefaces,’ they said. She sat, never speaking, only coughing. One time her family, they scolded her for not eating. But she only sat watching the river, and when they said the boats of palefaces never would glide there again, she screamed and cried on her pallet. Her family say I am an ungrateful heart. Dieu, que je suis fou vous le demander! I am ashamed of myself.”

  “It is no fault of yours. They miss their daughter and look for someone to take the blame for their loss. You are faultless.”

  Charbonneau stared at the woman who spoke with understanding. He marveled at her this moment. She had a man’s logic in that slim body that was like a child’s. She was soft and slight; to have such a hard stubbornness about her seemed out of place.

  “Her memory cannot be taken from you. It lives forever within your heart.” She looked down at him.

  She spoke like a grown woman, he thought. “A memory, she is cold like my Corn Woman. I want something warm and soft. Pouf! You are here. You are warm. Ma pauvre squaw!”

  Sacajawea smelled the dampness among the tules at the edge of the river, and felt the unyielding roughness of a stone under her hands.

  Charbonneau boldly pushed aside her clothing bundle, then pushed upward on her tunic. His hands were knotted, tanned by the weather. They ran down the sides of her body, feeling with a surprise and familiarity that it was firm and warm.

  “Otter Woman lays soft and warm in her couch waiting for you,” Sacajawea whispered, repulsed by his boldness, sympathetically aroused by his grief.

  “Mais non! It is not Otter I feel my hands tingle for. It is for you I have the hotness in my belly. I want you here, in the twilight, struggling on Mother Earth beneath me.” His hands were shaking as he crossed himself.

  He pushed her down before she could escape. Hisbreath was hot on her face; she let out a strangled groan. She felt the silent texture of the stone with her hands, and the powdery dust of the earth — like a thing heard, like the locusts.

  “This is your duty to me,” grunted Charbonneau. His leather trousers lay around his ankles.

  CHAPTER

  35

  Saint Louis

  Clark was able to provide education for two, perhaps three, of Charbonneau’s half-breed children, and he also cared for René Jussome’s daughter. By eighteen-ten old Charbonneau, almost certainly accompanied by Sacajawea, had come to St. Louis, bought land, and tried to settle down.

  Excerpt from p. 438 in Lewis and Clark: Partners in Discovery by John Bakeless. Copyright 1947 by John Bakeless. By permission of William Morrow and Company.

  When the air began to feel crisp, and the daddy longlegs were grouped in clusters outside the lodges, a sure sign of fall, Sacajawea found time to visit her dearly loved Grasshopper.

  Rosebud stirred the fire outside the lodge door. Sweet Clover sat on a skin pallet in the autumn sun. She smiled vacuously. Grasshopper helped her eldest granddaughter, Chickadee, sew a leather pouch.

  “You have come in time to see me huge as a mountain with this kicking papoose inside!” Rosebud shouted with glee. “I hope that this is a boy who smiles as much as your Pomp.”

  Pomp had seated himself beside Chickadee, and he laughed as she awkwardly pushed the bone needle in and out of the leather.

  Sacajawea could feel the welcome; it lay warm all around her.

  After a meal of boiled squash, root of the yellow water lily, and white turtle meat, Grasshopper persuaded Pomp to stay with Chickadee, and Sweet Clover to wash out the gourd bowls so that Rosebud might rest with her sewing. Then she invited Sacajawea to go to the village of the Dead.

  Not a word was spoken as they walked outside the village stockade and across the prairie, where the sunflower heads had lost their long gold petals and only the seeds were left. Goldenrod blossoms waved across the land like wands. The two women, one waddling at a slow pace, the other gliding along with the unhurried steps of youth, approached a ring of chalk white skulls. Then Grasshopper spoke.

  “On a warm day after several of rain, I came here, some time ago, alone. The scaffold where the body of my man rested had broken and fallen to the ground. I used my scraping knife and dug a hole for everything left, except this skull. It was beautifully bleached and purified. See!”

  Grasshopper led Sacajawea to a skull that sat upon a bunch of wild sage in a circle of other skulls, numbering about a hundred. The skulls were eight to teninches from each other, with the faces all looking to the center—where they were religiously protected and preserved in their precise position from year to year.

  There were many of these circles made of bleached skulls on this part of the prairie, but Grasshopper knew precisely which one was her man’s. She had brought a half-filled bowl of tu
rtle stew, which she placed beside the skull. She told Sacajawea she would return for the empty bowl in the morning. Scarcely a day had passed on which she had not done this since she had placed the skull in its circle of companions. The two women sat cross-legged beside the white skulls. Grasshopper began to talk to the skull in front of her in a pleasant and endearing way. She told how her child, Sacajawea, had come home and how beautiful she was. She told how winsome and bright her part-white grandson was. She kept up a conversation with the skull for quite a while; then she took out a pair of moccasins from a parfleche swung across her back and began beading them with quills. Now she told the skull of the expected grandchild and how pretty and strong all of Rosebud’s children were.1

  Sacajawea sat quietly enjoying the sunshine, unable to recall anything like this ceremony among her own people. The Shoshonis left their dead on scaffolds or in trees and did not speak of them again—and probably never saw them again.

  Grasshopper put her sewing away, brushing her skirt for the journey home.

  A week later, Sucks His Thumb came to Charbonneau’s lodge with a message for Sacajawea. Rosebud had a new papoose, a girl named Sparrow. Sucks His Thumb sat near the cooking fire and ate what Sacajawea handed him on a bark plate, boiled corn. Otter Woman suggested that they start right away to make a cradleboard for the new papoose. She sent the children to the river to find good, pliable willow stems for weaving a head protector on the board.

  Sucks His Thumb asked questions about the father of his two companions Tess and Pomp. “Why does he not pull out the many face hairs? What does he do with the beaver pelts he packs in such large bales? Are theremore white men where he came from? Why do more and more white men from the northeast come into the Five Villages?

  “For beaver, of course,” answered Tess.

  “Why, then, doesn’t your father go to the white village and trade his pelts there? Maybe the white men would give him wonderful things for those good pelts.”

  “Wonderful, like a hole in the middle of the back,” answered Tess. “Little brother,” Tess said, strutting to and fro like his father, “the white men do not want our people in their villages, but they want to come to ours.”

  “We welcome them,” said Sucks His Thumb.

  “Ai, we have manners,” said Pomp.

  Charbonneau traded one of his compact bales of beaver pelts to a British free trapper from Lake of the Woods region for a new-fashioned, percussion system flintlock with a horn of fulminate powder and leather bag of lead balls. The trader said the gun and fulminate compound had recently come to the Hudson’s Bay in a shipment of regular flintlocks. Charbonneau was skeptical, but he thought the balance of the rifle suited his short-fingered hand exactly, so he was happy with the trade and did not question the origin of the gun too closely. He rubbed the stock with bear’s grease and held it up to admire the shine of the wood’s grain. Every day he took it out and aimed it at anything that moved—squirrels, ravens, gophers, a striped skunk, and once a skittish mule deer that hightailed it off before he could find it in the gun sight. Charbonneau blamed the fact that he could not hit anything on the faulty position of the sight. He picked up a piece of sandstone to rub, work over, and enlarge the V of the sight with several dozen well-placed strokes. When that did not work he blamed the novel percussion powder that the Britisher had bragged about to him.2 “The slightest nudge makes this fulminating salt explode—bam! Be bloody cautious, my friend.”

  This new powder was placed in a tube connected to the bore of the flintlock and then struck with the hammer, the flash being strong enough to ignite the charge. Charbonneau was told that he did not need priming powder, there was no pan for free sparks. However, henearly always put pinches of powder on the flint for good measure. He told himself that it was the same precaution the Indian took when he used fire sticks. They would put a little black powder down before rotating the hard stick in a block of softer material and the powder would make a big spark for certain ignition.3

  Charbonneau’s women expected him to bring home plenty of game after strutting around the lodge talking about his beautiful new thunder-maker. It seemed to be a prized possession. He kept it handy at all times, and at night it was under his couch for easy reach.

  Blowing out the ends of his mustache one day, he said to the women, “My new gun, she is hoo-doo. You know what I mean. I hunt but bring home nothing. Little Bird, you are going to have to buy more meat from your adopted brother—what’s his name?”

  “You mean Fast Arrow?” Sacajawea asked. “What do I trade? Maybe some dry tea or your smoking tobacco?”

  Charbonneau pretended not to hear the question. He wondered why he did not take his family and leave this blamed village. He could find a place where he was not considered weak and ineffective, where the people would look up to him for his physical and mental abilities. He went to bed and lay on his side, where silently he watched Otter Woman scour out a kettle with sand and balsam twigs, rinse, then fill it full of water. As soon as the water steamed Sacajawea added dried squash and left it to boil.

  Before daylight Sacajawea was wakened by the sound of beating hooves, then thrashing and the cracking of trees. But she knew there were few trees in the village, only the upright poles of the security fence which enclosed the village. She threw off the covering robe, pulled on her tunic and rushed outside.

  An entire band of wapiti was on the move. They were charging through a big break in the fence, thundering into the ditch behind the fence and up through the center of the village, kicking up dust and panic. At first the leaders of the herd were stymied by the wide, three-to-four-foot-deep ditch, which held a few feet of water whenever there was a hard rain. Several wanted to follow the ditch around and one or two wanted to climbthe steep bank and charge through the village. When the followers bunched up behind these leaders, they took off pell-mell in both directions.

  By this time other Minnetarees were awake and coming out of lodges with bows and arrows, long, pointed, chert-tipped spears, steel knives, and their preferred flintlock rifles. Sacajawea ran back into the lodge calling for Charbonneau to get outside. “Here is your chance. The wapiti—the big deer, the elk—have come!” She shook him until his eyes were open. “Break the hoodoo. Wapiti are close. You go right up and boom it falls to the ground. They are so close you could hit one on the head with a large grinding stone!”

  Charbonneau was slow getting out of bed, puiling on wool pants and a red shirt to cover his bearded chest, tying a scarf around his throat and a red bandana to hold his neck length hair in place.

  “No time for boots!” shouted Sacajawea. ‘Grab the gun!”

  “It is hardly light out there,” complained Charbonneau. “Every man, woman, and child in this here village is out. I can hear them. What is this excitement?”

  “Ai!” shouted Sacajawea. “There is enough wapiti to last two winters. They are here! For you to take!”

  By this time Otter Woman and the boys were up and dressed and outside, curious to see what was going on. Sacajawea pulled the gun from under Charbonneau’s bed and followed them. “Come on!” she called.

  “She is black as le diable out there,” mumbled Charbonneau.

  Once outside his eyes adjusted to the first gray light of early dawn. Twenty yards away on the grassy, flat area two bucks were battling. Harems of three or four cows for each buck were standing off in a disinterested fashion munching grass. Unusual and exciting as that was, the sight of several dozen wapiti coursing around the inside ditch was spectacular—something the Minnetarees had never seen before. Charbonneau moved up to stand with a group of men with guns who were laughing and shouting and aiming at the animals. Several wapiti were already dead on the bottom of the ditch or lying on the edge. Charbonneau was close enough so that he could see the arrows in the dead animals’ necksor briskets. He could see the prominent facial glands below the eyes. The rest of the animals were nearly hysterical—stampeding, hardly looking for a way out of the ditch or out of the village.


  The villagers were in danger of attack by the elk, of being impaled by antlers or slashed with hooves if they moved out into the wide ditch where the animals were moving back and forth, round and round.

  Charbonneau heard the crack of a gun and looked to see where it came from just as the whir of a spear sang over his head and the chuk of it hitting the shoulder of a cow thudded into his ear. Charbonneau ran back to the side of his lodge for safety. It was obvious that if he stood out in the open he could be in the middle of crossfire. He was truly frightened, and crouched close to the lodge wall with his arms around his knees to keep from shaking.

  Sacajawea and Otter Woman with the two boys stood with a group of women watching the fighting bucks, who had now locked antlers. The women knew that given time, someone would throw a butcher knife or two at the bucks or stone them to death and thus save the animals from dying of starvation.

  Sacajawea remembered that she carried the long flintlock, powder horn, and bag of lead shot. She backed up to find a spot where she could take aim on a wapiti running in the ditch and not worry about being in the path of an arrow or lead shot. The gun was heavy and longer than she was tall. She rested the stock across an old heap of garbage and pulled back the cover of the tube next to the bore.

  “Filled,” she whispered to herself. She dumped in a little powder and rammed in a ball. Then she noticed a long forgotten, dilapidated bull boat, and moved the barrel to rest on that. She felt the trigger; she heard the flint crack on the steel. Any other noise was covered by the shouts of the villagers. The kick of the gun knocked Sacajawea from a squatting position to flat on her back, and to her disappointment the ball hit one of the upright posts and lodged there. “Damn, son of a bitch,” she said, remembering what she’d heard white men say in similar situations. She reloaded, letting the gun rest on the rotting bull boat. She put her head downto the gun and sighted for some brownish hide, then for the white on the chest. This time the ball hit right on target and was swallowed into the chest cavity, and the wapiti fell over on its side with legs twitching.