Streams to the River, River to the Sea

  "You trade with the Sioux, our enemies," she said. "With our enemies the Assiniboins, also. You cannot take this girl among our enemies unless she wishes to go."

  Blue Sky turned to me for an answer.

  She read it in my eyes. The fear of danger and even death among hostile tribes for me and the children I might bear. My strong feelings for my new home and friends—how sad it would be to leave them! The fear of marriage to a man I scarcely knew. All was there in my eyes for her to see.

  She said to Charbonneau, "You have a right to Sacagawea. You won her in the game. So you can marry her, but you cannot take her from the village."

  Charbonneau started to tear his hair again.

  "I have spoken," Blue Sky said. "I speak these words for Black Moccasin and for myself."

  Charbonneau must have seen in one quick glance that he could never hope to stand against this woman. He quit tearing at his hair and tried to smile.

  "When does marriage happen?" he stammered. "Now, good for Toussaint Charbonneau."

  "Six suns from now," said Blue Sky.

  "Not good."

  "Six," Blue Sky said.

  Charbonneau suddenly reached for me, but I drew away fast. We left him standing there. He bellowed after us in angry French words and Minnetaree. Blue Sky did not look back or heed him.

  "This Charbonneau," she said, when we were inside the lodge, "is a wild animal that needs taming. You cannot tame him by yourself, so I will help you. Long ago, Black Moccasin was wild, too, though never wild like this one. Look at Black Moccasin now, how gentle he is. Yes, I need to help you."

  "Hide me until he has gone," I begged her. "He will be gone for many suns. In that time he will forget and find another girl that pleases him."

  Blue Sky shook her head. "He will cause much trouble. Much for you and much for all of us. He has fixed his mind on you. He will not forget."

  "I can hide myself. I can flee."

  "Charbonneau will find you, wherever you go. If you were his wife and fled, then he has the right by our laws to kill you. You are not his wife. You are a slave, but still he can punish you. True Arrow, one of our chiefs, owned a slave woman and she fled and when he caught her he cropped both her ears and the tip of her nose. That is the law of the Minnetarees."

  "Charbonneau is not a Minnetaree."

  "But you are a Minnetaree," Blue Sky said. She took my hand. "Make a good home for him. If he does not like the home you make, then you can rid yourself of Toussaint Charbonneau. Phut."

  Chapter Eleven

  It did not take long for the wedding, not as it did at home. At home when my brother Cameahwait was married, it took two moons just to get ready.

  It was this way. My brother talked to my father and told him that he wished to be married. My father thought Cameahwait was old enough to think straight, so he said, "Go and get married." But this did not happen right away.

  First, my mother and father went to talk to the family of the girl my brother had chosen. They took nice presents—an antelope blanket, a tanned buffalo hide, and a white horse with a saddle. But they did not give the presents to the family at once. So that it would be a surprise, they left them outside for the family to find after they had gone.

  They talked to the girl's mother and father for a long time. Just before they left they said that their son wished to marry.

  This was good, her family said.

  And then they told the girl about everything. Since she had been sitting in the tipi all this time, she had made up her mind already. Had she not liked my brother, her family would have given the presents back.

  But she did like him.

  So for days her family gathered up presents of their own, better than the ones they had received, such as two horses instead of one, and the girl put on her finest clothes and they all rode off to our tipi. My sister and I went out to greet them and my father and mother took the girl inside.

  From that moment she was married to my brother.

  There were no meetings about me and Toussaint Charbonneau. No friendly talks and no nice presents from one family to another.

  As Blue Sky had decreed, Toussaint Charbonneau and I were married six days later, before a fire in the lodge she had built for us. She was at the wedding, but Red Hawk and Black Moccasin were not.

  Charbonneau's first wife had a pot of deermeat cooking over the fire. She served it with squamash roots cooked in the ashes and a hot drink that tasted like honey. While she passed these things around, she smiled a lot, though she must have been unhappy.

  She was not unhappy for long. Two days later she and Charbonneau left to trade at Le Borgne's village. I helped carry her things down to the canoe.

  Charbonneau picked me up and whirled me around like a doll. "You careful now. You careful tomorrow too," he said and rubbed his hairy face against my cheek.

  Otter Woman shyly touched me. In signs she made me see what she thought. She thought it was better to have a half part in a good man than a full part in a bad man.

  I watched them go up the river. I felt nothing.

  The next day Blue Sky asked me to come to the lodge and live there while they were gone. "It is warm in the lodge," she said. "You will not cook just for yourself and eat alone. You will have company. Alone the nights are long."

  "I will come every day and eat."

  I was only making a joke with her. I had married Toussaint Charbonneau. By the laws of the Minnetarees, I was his wife. It was a burden set down upon my shoulders by my Guardian Spirit. It was placed there against my will and all my wishes. Yet the burden was mine.

  I had a big supply of wood for a fire and dried meat and corn for food, also four deerskins and a long piece of sinew. I spent the days making a pair of moccasins and a mantle to take the place of the one I had worn out. The moccasins were useful when I had to go out to see Blue Sky.

  I told her what was happening to me, how different I felt sometimes. She made me lie down on her bed. She felt my stomach up and down, round and round. She laughed.

  "You will be a mother one of these times," she said.

  "When?"

  "Soon enough."

  "When the snow comes?"

  "After."

  "How much?" I asked, beginning to shake.

  "This many moons," she said and held up a lot of fingers.

  "What shall I do?"

  "You go and get your things and bring them here and sit down and make clothes for the baby. You will need a cradle too, but that can wait until we find a cedar tree to cut down. Bois d'arc is a good wood also, but it does not grow on the river."

  I wanted to stay in my place, where I had been living happily enough, but Blue Sky made me move back to the big lodge. I moved that day. By nightfall she had me sorting out squirrel skins to make a blanket.

  A few suns later, two men brought a small cedar, which they split into three pieces for me to work on. I had never made a baby's cradle or watched someone else make one, so Blue Sky had to show me how.

  She gave me a sharp knife that she had got from Charbonneau one time and set me to whittling the boards, which were the length of my arms and the span of one hand in width. Cedar is a soft wood to touch, yet it is strong. My whittling dragged along, though the knife was sharp, and she made me throw away one of the pieces.

  "It looks fine to me," I protested.

  "To me it looks crooked," she said. "It will make a crooked cradle and a child with crooked legs."

  "When I lived in a cradle," I told her, "it was just a tube of buffalo hide. I liked it very much. I liked it so much that when my mother took me out I always cried."

  Blue Sky said, "There will be many moons before you need the cradle. Work on other things for your baby—a squirrel blanket, moccasins with fur on the inside, two plain, two with feathers for dress-up, a cap that pulls down over the ears, and a deerbone rattle. Big so it cannot be swallowed, only chewed upon."

  I was ashamed, but I did not take her advice. Stubbornly, I went on with the cradl
e. I threw away the crooked piece and whittled a good one. When I had three shapely pieces, I bent a curved piece of tough hide across the tops, holding them tightly together. I made a bag of soft deerskin and stretched it down over the curved hide and the three pieces of cedar and tied it at the bottom. I lined the cradle with soft rabbit fur.

  "Good!" Blue Sky said, holding the cradle up and turning it around. "The rawhide hood at the top is curved well. It is also strong. If the cradle falls when you hang it up, it will roll around on the ground."

  I did not need her advice for the decorations. I had made all kinds of decorations when I was a child.

  She gave me a bag of porcupine quills. I chose four of the longest and soaked them in water from one day to the next. I put them between my front teeth, clamped down hard, and pulled them flat as a ribbon. These I sewed on the hood of the cradle, two on one side and two on the other. Between the four black and white quills I painted a picture of the Evening Star with white clouds.

  "Beautiful," Blue Sky said. "It's an omen. You will have a beautiful child. You are beautiful and Toussaint Charbonneau is ugly, but still you'll have a beautiful child."

  "When?"

  "boon."

  "Will my Guardian Spirit tell me when?"

  "Yes. She will speak loudly in your ear. In both of your ears. She will speak to you in a clear voice. It is not an ache in the head. It is not a pain in the tooth, this child thing."

  "What will Toussaint Charbonneau say when he comes back and sees me walking around fat?"

  "If I know this man, he will stare at you, pull at that hair on his chin, and grunt. He will say, 'How can Charbonneau go trading up and down the river with a baby in a cradle-board hanging by his wife's neck?'"

  Her words came true. When he did come back late in the autumn, that is what he did and what he said to me. He also said more. We were in the lodge and Blue Sky was helping me make another pair of moccasins, these of soft antelope skin.

  He stared at me. He shook his head. He squinted through his locks of hair. "Charbonneau go far," he said. "Big town, St. Louis. Sell much. Buy much. Come here. See boy. Ai, ai!"

  "A girl maybe," Blue Sky said. "A pretty one."

  "Pretty girl, ugly girl—■ both bad," Charbonneau said. "Boy, name Jean Baptiste."

  Otter Woman said, "Call him Brave Raven. My father's name is Brave Raven."

  He gave her a hard look and said, "Jean Baptiste Charbonneau."

  Chapter Twelve

  When Charbonneau and Otter Woman came back, a man and a woman came with them. The man told us that his name was René Jessaume. Charbonneau told us that Jessaume was truthful and for us to believe what he was going to tell us.

  Jessaume spoke in Minnetaree mixed up with a language I did not understand, which might have been Assiniboin. I could not make out much of what he said. I did learn that many white men were paddling up the river from the town called St. Louis in boats. One of them was half as long as Black Moccasin's long house.

  Everyone held their breath until he was through his talk. Then they all talked at once and asked questions. Jessaume shrugged and said he knew nothing more.

  Charbonneau counted the number of white men who were on the big boat coming up the river. He held up both his hands three times, then only one hand. "Friends. Fine mens," he said.

  Black Moccasin had a fire built on the cliff in front of the village, where it could be seen from the river. The fire was kept burning. Watchers stood beside it and watched for the white men in the boats. They came on the day the first wild geese flew out of the north.

  Watchers gave the news and all of us ran to the cliff. The big boat that Jessaume had told us about was within sight. As we watched, it slowly took shape and came out of the river mist. It looked like a great floating bird, with its sails spread out like silver wings. Jessaume called it a keelboat.

  Red Hawk wanted the women to stay where they were on the cliff. Black Moccasin overruled his son. He started down with a band of warriors, taking with him bags of corn and dried deermeat, and motioned to us to follow him.

  The boat was filled with white men. I had seen one of the whites, René Jessaume, but here was a crowd of them. They were young men in buffalo leather and with hairy faces. What skin you could see was dark from the sun.

  They looked something like Minnetarees, except for one of them, who seemed to be a leader. At least he talked a lot and the rest of them listened. This one had blue eyes and hair as bright as copper.

  Our chieftain welcomed him to the village of Metaharta. He pointed to himself and said, "Black Moccasin."

  The man with the red hair smiled and bowed. "Clark," he said, pointing to himself. Then he pointed to a man beside him and said, "Captain Lewis."

  This man bowed but he did not smile. It was the other one I liked, the man with the hair that shone like copper. He must have liked me too. He kept glancing at me while he talked to a man who was translating what he said, a man whose name was Drewyer.

  Afterward Captain Clark came to where I stood on the bank and gave me four blue beads, not black ones or yellow or red, but blue. They were the same color as the sky on the clearest day, the same color as his eyes.

  I was so surprised that I could not smile or speak. I just stood and held the four beads in my hand. I looked at them, then at him, hearing my heart beat hard.

  He gave out presents for everyone. A shiny medal for Black Moccasin, a twist of tobacco for his son. And for the village of Metaharta, a thing that ground up corn while you stood just looking at it. Instead of pounding and pounding kernels on a stone, you put a whole corncob in a big kettle and turned a wheel round and round, and cornmeal came out the bottom. All the women cheered when they saw it.

  The next day the two captains came to the lodge. They sat down at the fire and took off their moccasins, which meant that they had come as friends. Then Black Moccasin put a bearskin around each of them and they all smoked a pipe. They passed it from one to the other around the circle. Now they were friends forever.

  The two men came back that night and brought some of their friends. One had a fiddle and they danced in front of the fire. They stamped their feet, kicked up their heels, and flew around in circles. Everyone enjoyed this so much that the men danced till dawn and promised to come back the next night and dance again.

  This time they brought a black man with them. His name was Ben York, which was easy to say. I thought that he had painted himself black. When he was not looking I wet a finger and rubbed his arm. No black came off.

  The children tried rubbing his skin, too. They pestered him until he made a face and showed his teeth and said he was a monster and would eat them alive.

  He spoke no Minnetaree or Shoshone. I spoke not a word of the white man's language. But with Drewyer's help I learned that Ben York's mother and father were black, that he was born black and had been black every day since.

  "This man is Captain Clark's servant," Drewyer said. "He's a slave. Where he comes from in America there are many slaves, black ones like him."

  The black man saw that we were talking about him. He pushed a flock of women away and came over to where we stood. He was tall, taller than Charbonneau, and very graceful as he walked, taking long strides and swinging his arms.

  "York." He pointed to himself and held up his hand with the palm out in the sign of greeting.

  "Sacagawea," I said, pointing to myself.

  Drewyer explained that my name meant Bird Woman.

  York laughed. "Do you fly like a bird?" he asked me.

  "No, I fly like a bat"

  "When?"

  "At night when everyone sleeps," I said.

  York shook his head, half believing me, and the women who had been waiting to get close rushed in and surrounded him. They still were not sure that he was really black. They did know that he was very handsome. They had never seen anyone like Ben York!

  That night, when there was a big dance, the women held their breath as he jumped about and clicked his
heels.

  The dance lasted until the sun came up. Then Captain Lewis fired his air gun. The gun was on wheels and made of shiny brass. He pumped on the handle and suddenly it made a swishing noise and a bullet struck a tree with a loud bang.

  Still, no one wanted to leave, they were so happy. Captain Clark had to call George Drewyer.

  Drewyer had blue eyes and long hair streaked white by the sun. He was very tall, straight like a lodgepole, and had long, dangling arms and big hands.

  He was half Shawnee and he spoke a few words in Sioux, Minnetaree, and Mandan. But he also spoke in the sign language that everyone, everywhere, in all the tribes, knew.

  When Captain Clark called him out, he came forward and pointed to the eastern sky. "Menaka," he said, which is the Mandan word for sun.

  Then he raised his arms and made signs and everybody took the hint and left.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Captain Clark changed my life. He changed everything. More than the slave hunters who came and took me from my home. More than Toussaint Charbonneau, who won me in the dreadful Hand Game. I say this before my Guardian Spirit, who may make me dead forever if I do not speak the truth.

  It happened in this way. When the captains learned that Charbonneau had traded on the rivers for many years, as far to the north and west as the home of the Assiniboins and the Blackfeet and the Nez Percé, they hired him as a guide to help George Drewyer interpret Indian words for them.

  They were building a camp farther along the river, where there were wide groves of cottonwood trees to use for timber. The men needed shelter against the cold. And besides this, the captains had heard that the Sioux were planning an attack sometime during the winter.

  The men built a strong camp. It had two rows of huts joined together at one end, which were guarded by walls and two swivel guns. It was so strong they called it a fort, Fort Mandan—Mandan because the land belonged to the Mandan people, who were at peace with the Minnetarees.

  I wanted to stay where I was, but Captain Clark made us move into the fort.