Sign-Talker (26 page)

“It is something like a big barrel, made of cedar wood,” Gravelines said. “It is in the center of their ceremonies. Inside it they keep their Mystery, which is only seen by its Keeper Shaman. No one else knows what it is.”

To the captains, one of the great mysteries of the Mandans was something Jefferson wanted to know: Were they a people long ago come from Europe? Some of the Mandans had blue eyes and pale skin and light hair. Their fort towns were built like the ancient towns of Britain. They used round, leather-covered tub-boats like those used in an old country of Britain called Wales. The President knew a legend that hundreds of years ago a prince had crossed the ocean from Wales and made settlements on this continent. He had told Captain Lewis to learn if the pale ones known to be among the Mandans were their descendants. Above all, the President wanted a very strong friendship to be made with the Mandans, because their towns, in the great bend of the Missouri, were the major center of all tribal trade on the great plains. Gravelines said that every autumn, all the tribes of the high plains, as far away as the Crows in the west and the Assiniboines in the north, gathered at the Mandan towns, with French traders from St. Louis and British traders from the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company, for a trading
fair involving thousands of people and every kind of food, hides, horses, and handworked goods, as well as guns, tools, and woolen blankets. One of Captain Lewis’s purposes while there would be to wean the Indians away from the British companies and to make the British traders understand that this would henceforth be an American trade center.

Gravelines said the population of the two big Mandan towns was further swollen by the nearness of three major Hidatsa towns within fifteen miles. Though the Hidatsas were high plains buffalo hunters who ranged as far west as the Shining Mountains, their winter homes were in the Knife River fortress-towns, built like those of the Mandans. The two tribes lived in peace, traded and intermarried with each other, and had many of the same allies and enemies. Captain Clark was eager to learn from the Hidatsas everything they knew about the rivers and routes leading into the Shining Mountains, because that was where the corps would be going next year, and it was a land never seen by whitemen. The captains always asked Indians about the lands ahead. Even Drouillard, after every day of hunting and butchering, had to sit down in the evening and tell Captain Clark every detail he had seen of the country he had ranged over during the hunt, and the captain would make pencil notes of words, and sketches of hills and woods and streams. And the next day as the expedition moved on, Clark would be checking the sketch-maps, with his compass and telescope and calipers, to measure what he saw against what Drouillard had reported to him. The captain did the same with all the hunters who went out, even Captain Lewis. Some of the hunters were very accurate in their observations, some were terrible. Clark had found Colter and Frazier to be almost as reliable as Drouillard, and George Gibson next after them. But it was Drouillard he counted on most, because he always checked out, and also because he hunted almost every day, and ranged farther ahead and on the flank than anyone else.

Now Drouillard looked at the bear tracks growing faint as snow drifted over them. All the Indians spoke fearfully of the strong and fierce bears of the plains. An unfortunate encounter
had happened yesterday, before the snow. Cruzatte, walking on shore, had seen one of these bears. In the greatest excitement and fear, he had shot at it immediately. Cruzatte’s one good eye was not keen, so one might only guess whether his shot had hit the animal. It did no more than enrage the bear, which rose up and roared, and so badly frightened Cruzatte that he dropped both his rifle and tomahawk and fled toward the river. When Cruzatte realized he was not being pursued by a wounded bear, his greatest fear became that of having to tell Captain Lewis he had thrown away his army rifle. So he had turned back and gingerly gone looking for it, and found that the bear had fled in the opposite direction. When Cruzatte recounted the incident last night, it had so amused the voyageurs and troops that it became the evening’s entertainment, complete with roars, growls, and pantomime, and Cruzatte had so enjoyed the attention that he had ended the evening playing music, even though it was so cold and dank that it could not be good for the fiddle. For the men it was not just amusement, it was their first eyewitness account of an encounter with the beast that was growing in their dreams and nightmares. They wondered why it was not in its winter sleep, the weather having turned so cold, and they even began ragging Cruzatte about whether he had actually seen a bear or just made it up. Drouillard himself had begun wondering that, until now, finding these tracks. If these yellow bears did hibernate, they obviously were not fully into it yet.

The reason the event saddened him was that he had meant to be the first man in this corps to encounter a yellow bear. He had wanted to meet one of these bears before any of the soldiers shot at one. It was not that he wanted to be the first to shoot one; he wanted to meet one in peace. He did not think one kind of bear could be so different from other bears, or that yellow bears by nature attacked without some kind of provocation. He had wanted to find a yellow bear and get near without bothering it. He would have been surprised if one had attacked him just because it could see him. That was not bearlike. He had come upon many bears in his life, fallen in with their amblings, gazed back
and forth with them, stayed near them until they lost their curiosity and went back to their foraging.

But when he had gone hunting to get bear, which he had often done for their hides and meat and fat, the bears he met knew he had come to kill them. Bears understood men. Without words a bear could understand a man’s intent, because he was man’s brother. Once Drouillard had wounded a bear near the Tennessee River, and he was sure that it went everywhere within twenty miles and told all the other bears about him, because for a while all the bears would flee or hide from him, or menace him and then run.

Captains Lewis and Clark and their men shot every animal they saw. They had come two thousand miles up the Missouri River with guns banging. Drouillard himself had done much of the killing; that was his job. But when he had enough meat, he stopped shooting animals even if they were right under his gun. Captain Lewis killed animals no one would want to eat, just so he could examine them for President Jefferson. The soldiers shot wolves because they were wolves.

Almost everyone either feared the legendary bears so much he hoped never to meet one, or wanted to be the first to kill one. The bears would know that, and the soldiers’ reputation would go ahead of them up the river from bear to bear, and the bears of course would be afraid or hostile. Drouillard had hoped to meet one before hostilities were established.

Now it was too late. Cruzatte had seen a bear and at once had shot at it. It hadn’t been coming at him when he shot at it. At first he had said it was, but Drouillard stared at him until Cruzatte admitted the truth: it hadn’t even been looking at him.

So, now the alarm would be going up the river from bear to bear about this American army. It was like what Drouillard remembered of the warriors who would talk at Lorimier’s in Ohio when he was a boy. The Shawnees had learned the hard way by then: American soldiers are coming. If you don’t kill them first, they will kill you.

He would have liked just to meet a yellow bear and let it see that he wasn’t an American soldier.

He followed the tracks a little way, looking for droppings. After a mile he found scat. He separated it with his knife point, to compare its diet with that of black bears. Scales, bone, and hair suggested that it ate more fish and meat, maybe carrion, than blacks, which ate mostly grubs, insects, berries, vegetation. By examining scat and droppings, he could sometimes tell where an animal lived and fed in a varied landscape. Such knowledge was a small part of hunting.

He was not in a mood now to kill a bear in this forbidding place. So he veered away from its trail and headed toward the river.

“God damn, I never saw such stuff call itself wood!” Sergeant Gass complained. “Slicker’n lard, squirts when y’ chop it, and gums up your saw teeth like a man chawin’ raw possum!”

He was notching wall logs for the barracks huts of the fort, and though he had been a carpenter much of his life, he was having a frustrating time with the cottonwood, which was the only tree in this countryside long enough and thick enough for laying up fort walls. Drouillard watched him from a safe distance, because even Gass’s great skill with an ax did not keep him from losing control of it now and then, when the bit would glance off the slick, white wood and go wild. Two men had already cut themselves with axes today. The cottonwood was so heavy with water that it required half a dozen men with carrying sticks to bring a single log from the woods to the building site, and so pulpy that its fibers pinched and clogged the teeth of a crosscut saw. Gass had already given up any hope of ripsawing planks from such a material; any flat surface would have to be hewed with a broadax or adze, which was dangerous with this slick, stringy wood. There was a bit of elm and ash growing in the woods, but it was small and would be saved for tool handles, pry-poles, and rafters. So they had to work with the cottonwood. There were two virtues in its favor: it was soft, and its inner bark was prized as horse fodder by the Mandans. And the ax-wielding
soldiers of Gass’s fort-building crew were producing huge quantities of bark and chips. Axes chunked unceasingly and the wind was full of the smell of greenwood.

Drouillard, like everyone else, took a turn as a laborer and carpenter’s helper these days. Frosts and cold, raw winds motivated everybody to get the buildings finished quickly. Every time he looked up, flights of geese, brant, and ducks were clamoring faintly, crossing the grim gray sky southward in their formations. Two miles across the Missouri, straight to the west, the Mandan fortress city of Mittuta-Hanka stood on a sheer bluff, spectacular from here: several dozen domed, earth-covered houses, protected from the plain by a high palisade, with cornfields and gardens outside. Its chief, Sheheke, had been nicknamed Big White by the captains; he was the fattest, palest Indian Drouillard had ever seen. And he was good-humored and hospitable, seemingly delighted to have the Americans build their winter home so close by. His Mandans came by constantly, going to and coming from hunting, or just to watch, often to bring gifts of corn and meat. Sometimes they brought their horses to graze nearby, and to gather cottonwood bark for their winter fodder.

And there were whitemen with the Mandans: clerks of the British trading companies, and some French-Canadians who lived and traded here. One was a middle-aged man named Rene Jessaume, who claimed that he had been a spy for Captain Clark’s famous brother General Clark during the Revolutionary War near St. Louis, a statement Captain Clark believed to be an invention to gain favor. Despite that doubt, the captains had hired him as an interpreter because of his deep involvement among the Mandans. Another French-Canadian of about the same age, named Charbonneau, had come down from his home in the Hidatsa towns a few miles up, and they hired him to interpret with that tribe. That would help the captains as they tried to learn the way into the Shining Mountains from the Hidatsas who had been there.

And something else Charbonneau had said piqued the captains’ intense interest: he had two girl wives, whom he had purchased
from Hidatsa warriors who captured them a few years ago in the Shining Mountains. They were of the Snake, or Shoshone, tribe, which lived near the headwaters of the Missouri, deep in those mountains into which the expedition would be going next year. One of them was with child now, but would be delivered of that burden before the expedition moved on. Both could speak Hidatsa almost as well as Charbonneau could himself. As an added inducement for his hire, he had hinted, they would get not just one interpreter for his pay, but three.

Yes, Drouillard thought. What fortune these captains always had. Wherever they went, they found interpreters. Labiche. Cruzatte. The Dorions. Gravelines and Tabeau. And now Jessaume and Charbonneau and his wives. Drouillard himself, hired as their original interpreter because of his hand-signing, had not been needed so much for it, and had been free to hunt, which was his preference.

“Take it away,” Sergeant Gass said. Soldiers picked up the cottonwood log he had so neatly notched, and he stepped over to the next, spiked in the end of a measuring string and walked down the log; with two flicks of the ax he marked the length, put away the string, eyed the end of the log, and began chopping out the next set of notches.

The fort was coming together in a remarkably orderly fashion out of this chaos of thunking axes and flying wood chips. Already some of the walls were chest-high. Two rows of barracking huts converged toward the rear of the fort, where there would be a smokehouse and pantry building with a sentry post on top. A high log palisade with a gate would enclose the end facing the river. A sentry on the palisade would always be looking right down over the moored boats. Drouillard remembered York bragging last winter of the many abilities of his master, one of which had been fort building, and he thought, Yes, that black man was right. Captain Clark was building the fort, while Captain Lewis was usually over at the Mandan towns doing his diplomacy. It was like St. Louis and the Riviere à Dubois camp all over again. How long ago that seemed. That
had been just a camp of huts. This, being next to several thousand Indians, was a defensible fort. And it was being made very skillfully. The captain had designed and laid everything out with leveling instruments and measurers of angles. Sergeant Gass was the main carpenter, and a good half of the soldiers were as adept with a sharp ax as with a whittling knife.