Sign-Talker (23 page)

Captain Lewis said, “Indeed. That had entered my thoughts already. Thank them, but decline.”

“As for me,” Captain Clark said, “I’m not going to sleep where I’m outnumbered a hundredfold by people who treated me the way these chiefs did yesterday.”

The chiefs were looking on anxiously, waiting for what they surely thought would be an acceptance. Drouillard had not seen Partisan tonight, and he brought that to the captains’ attention. The traditions of hospitality notwithstanding, Partisan at large was an alarming thought. Lewis said, “I had rather invite them to stay with us on the keelboat again tonight. Coffee and whiskey. Tell them we wish to repay this evening’s hospitality,”

The two chiefs jumped at the offer. Drouillard heard them speak of Partisan in a derisive tone. The chiefs knew that the invitation to visit aboard was prestigious, and that their prestige would rise as Partisan’s declined.

With the chiefs aboard, it was another almost sleepless night. The guards fretted all night over the palpable presence of great numbers of Indians on the dark riverbanks. The chiefs were up almost all night wanting to talk and drink liquor or coffee. They kept begging the captains to stay another day and night so that another part of their nation could arrive to see them, and they promised another night of feasting and dancing if they would
stay. Captain Lewis kept returning to the topic of the forty-eight Omaha prisoners—women, girls, and boys—that they had taken in their recent attack. He insisted that if the Sioux would agree to deliver those prisoners to Pierre Dorion, who could then return them to their own country, it would be a good first step toward the peace that their new Great Father desired all along the Missouri. The chiefs indicated that they might do so if the captains would promise to stay another day. Drouillard felt that they were playing the agreement along only to get another delay; their eyes revealed to him that they thought freeing the captives was too silly an idea to take seriously.

Exhausted after perhaps an hour of troubled sleep, the captains at dawn saw that the riverbanks were crowded with more Indians than ever. The chiefs wanted more coffee and were reluctant to leave the keelboat, and once ashore, reluctant to get out of the pirogue. As if sleepwalking, the exhausted captains went through the necessary diplomacy, visiting the town again, writing out peace certificates, giving out more medals. Captain Clark made visits to the homes of the chiefs and elders, even startling Partisan by stopping in to see him. The man was speechless with confusion, or suspicion, but was civil because Clark was in his home.

Captain Lewis sent Cruzatte to the prisoner compound, ostensibly to give the women a few awls, but actually to find out whether they had overheard any treacherous designs the Sioux chiefs might have on the Americans.

In the course of the day, Black Buffalo again offered Captain Clark the company of a young woman, asking him to take her and not despise the people, as she would represent all her people in a spiritual connection with him. This time Drouillard found the chief so earnest and sincere that he hoped Clark would accept, thinking it might be the single key to open the door of friendship they had so wanted with this nation. The chief said the girl was a maiden. Drouillard took one look at her and said, “Cap’n, accept her and
I’ll
perform your duty!” Clark laughed and turned his back on her; Black Buffalo’s eyes hardened.

In the evening, after sitting through the same entertainment
again, full of food, the drums monotonous, the stupefied captains excused themselves early. Partisan went down to the boat with them. He boarded the pirogue with Clark and Drouillard and several of the soldiers. As the voyageurs rowed across the gurgling, hushing river, the keelboat’s little tin lantern cast a tiny glittering pathway of yellow light across the turbid water under the starry vastness. Captain Lewis, with Cruzatte and four other soldiers, stayed on the bank to wait for the pirogue’s next trip. Cruzatte had talked to the Omaha prisoners during the evening. They had told him they heard that the Sioux intended to stop the boats from going on up to other tribes farther north. The captains had been careful to show no sign of suspecting those intentions, but because of Cruzatte’s report, Captain Clark specifically invited Chief Partisan to spend the night on the boat, with the idea of keeping the most troublesome one where he could be watched—a willing hostage for this last, wearisome night.

Drouillard knew that was how the captains saw it. But as the oars dipped and rose and the pirogue’s prow swashed across the current toward that little tin lantern, he was thinking that not only was Clark a fool for turning down an uncommonly lovely maiden, but that he had insulted Black Buffalo and his whole great people in an unforgivable way. It was beautiful and peaceful here under the silent stars on the great, tugging current of the mighty river, but the spirits were bad, and there would be more trouble.

It came at once.

In bringing the pirogue to the keelboat, the steersman went too far forward of the big boat’s bow, swung the tiller and caused the pirogue to turn sideways in the current. The pirogue, heavy with passengers and tons of cargo, came down broadside on the keelboat’s anchor cable, which was tight as a fiddle string.

Drouillard heard a grating and a cracking of wood, felt a tilting, and then a dull thump. In the next moment, querying voices were rising on both boats, and the huge, dark bulk of the keelboat was turning sideways and away.

Captain Clark bellowed into the darkness: “All hands up! On
the oars! You’re adrift! Hey! Everybody up! Anchor cable’s broke! You’re adrift!”

Drouillard felt water over his feet. “We’ve sprung a leak, Cap’n!”

In a moment there was a commotion of voices yelling, footsteps pounding, oars clattering. Partisan, not knowing what was happening, began yelling in his language. And back on shore Captain Lewis’s piercing voice was shouting from the darkness, demanding to know what was going on.

Captain Clark kept yelling to the keelboat oarsmen. “Hurry! Get ’er nose upstream and
pull!
There’s sandbars just below! Don’t get sidewise on those sandbars! All hands pull!” It was the nightmare they had avoided in half a year of struggling up this swift and tricky river: their precious ship adrift at night. And adrift not just anywhere, but in the midst of hundreds of Indians of a notorious nation. Chief Partisan all the while was bellowing something incomprehensible.

It was past midnight by the time the keelboat was secured to a tree on shore, and by that time Black Buffalo and two hundred warriors had arrived from the town, excited, shooting in the air. All the soldiers who had been routed from sleep to save the boat had dropped their oars and picked up their rifles, ready to make a last stand against overwhelming numbers of Indians. And the security of a mid-river anchorage was gone now; warriors could pour showers of arrows and musketballs down the bank into the keelboat. The locker lids Captain Clark had designed as breastworks were raised and propped, and the soldiers crouched behind them listening to the commotion of running and shouting all along the banks. Captain Lewis was still on the far shore with five men, and the white pirogue could not be used to go rescue them until the leak caused by her collision could be found and caulked. Two men were down on their knees with a lantern trying to do that. Partisan was still emitting an occasional shout but was apparently too terrified of his precarious position in the leaking boat to try anything.

Gradually the voices onshore grew calm, and finally Captain
Lewis’s voice came across the hush of wind and water: “Is the boat secure yet? Lots of Indians here but no trouble!”

In the small hours of the morning Drouillard sat in the boat’s cabin with the chiefs Black Buffalo and Partisan and their bodyguards, Cruzatte, and the exhausted captains, with everybody trying to explain everything about the incident, hampered as usual by the lack of a Sioux interpreter. He had to collect the facts and convey them by hand language.

When the anchor cable had broken and Captain Clark yelled his orders and the soldiers began shouting and moving about on the boat, Partisan apparently had thought an Omaha war party was attacking, in retaliation for the recent Sioux raid. He had thus been screaming at the top of his lungs about an Omaha attack, and that word had been relayed to the town, thus bringing down Black Buffalo and his two hundred warriors. It had required all Cruzatte’s limited skill to convince Black Buffalo that there had been no such attack.

The captains, meanwhile, already irritated and exhausted, and alarmed by what the prisoners had told Cruzatte, did not believe Black Buffalo’s explanation for his quick arrival in full force; they thought he must have had the warriors already gathered to carry out the interference that Cruzatte had been warned about. By now the captains were beyond believing anything favorable of these chiefs. But again they did not want the chiefs to know what they suspected. Captain Lewis said, “I mean for us to move out of here at first light. I’m going to keep these treacherous savages right here under guard till we’re ready to sail. Might as well invite them to drink coffee with us till then. They’ll be asking for it anyway. They’re too excited to give them whiskey.”

“Another night with no sleep,” Captain Clark grumbled, wiping his hand over his white forehead. “All right. But before we move on, I want to retrieve that anchor. I’ll take both pirogues and start dragging for it soon as there’s enough light.”

The last week had been, for Drouillard, a wandering in paradise. With cold nights had come relief from mosquitoes at last. Also left behind were the Sioux. It had not been considered safe to send out hunters while the Sioux were hounding the convoy, and the diet of army pork, grease, and corn meal had been disgusting. But the Sioux were a hundred and fifty miles behind now, and again he was ranging the high plains hunting fresh meat, not letting himself regret the captains’ failure with the Sioux. He had translated and advised the best he could. The failure had been caused by the rivalry among the chiefs, as much as by Sioux determination to control the river trade. Drouillard was glad it was over and that it had not ended in shooting. If it had, these whitemen would have been wiped out, and himself with them.

He was hunting afoot now. The last horse had been stolen by the Sioux while the big encounter was going on, so he could not go after buffalo. Fresh meat these days was mostly elk and deer killed in the bottomland timbers. Several pronghorns had been killed when, by good chance, they were caught swimming the river on their seasonal migration. The rutting season for Split-Hooves had begun, and buck deer and elk were reckless about
concealment, and could be called by clashing antlers together. The captains, carrying espontoons as rifle rests, had killed some game with long shots, and their good humor was being restored.

Drouillard walked the high plains with a gait that could cover ground nearly as well as a horseman. He mused on distances. According to Captain Clark the Great Measurer, they had come 1,430 miles up the Missouri since leaving the Mississippi in May. Clark always sighted through his compass at every bend and turn, and wrote down the degrees of the course, then would calculate miles to the next change, and write that down. Drouillard imagined that constant counting and measuring of the world must be an incredible drudgery. But counting and measuring were powers the whitemen were best at, and since they always ended up owning everything they counted and measured, they obviously were well served by those powers.

Somewhere along the way the captains had abandoned their idea of sending one of the pirogues back to St. Louis with their papers and specimens. Perhaps the Sioux had convinced them that they had no riflemen to spare. Some men who had expected to go back were grumbling their disappointment, in particular Reed the deserter, who was a mere oar slave, latrine-digger, and pot-walloper. Were it not for the continued friendship of his fellow malcontent Newman, Reed probably would have jumped in the river and drowned himself by now. Some of the troops speculated whether Reed and Newman were, as they put it, a “couple.”

As he loped along the flank of a grassy hill, Drouillard now smelled town ruins. It was the distinctive smell of a burned-out Indian village. Recently the convoy had met a solitary French trader, Jean Vallé, who had been trading far westward in a region he called Black Hills. Drouillard had met Vallé long ago at his uncle’s trading post, and some of the voyageurs knew him too. Vallé had given the captains very encouraging assessments of the good nature of the Arikaras, who lived not far ahead. The Arikaras farmed the bottoms and the islands industriously, growing corn and beans and squash which they traded to the Sioux for horses and for merchandise the Sioux got from British
trading companies. The Arikaras were poor and weak now, down to a fourth or fifth of their population because of smallpox, the latest epidemic last year. Poverty and weakness made tribes more receptive and hospitable of course to newcomers, so the American captains would not be meeting the kind of arrogance they had recently found in the Sioux. It was likely that the Arikaras would agree to and accept anything the Americans said—especially if it promised to reduce their dependency on the Sioux for trade goods. That had been the practical wisdom of Vallé, another of those godsent informants the captains were lucky enough to find in the wilderness. But, Vallé had warned before bidding them adieu and going on his lonely way, always expect to find some Sioux among the Arikaras.