Sign-Talker (35 page)

If it even
was
the Missouri River now!

Drouillard, Captain Lewis, Joe Field, Gibson, and Goodrich
had hoisted knapsacks two days ago and set out afoot up this branch that no one but the captains believed was the correct course. Before leaving the forks, they had tied the red pirogue upside down among trees on an island and hidden it under brush. On high ground, they had cached and buried extra lead, powder, tools, clothes, furs, kegs of pork and salt, flour and meal, which they intended to retrieve on their return next year. In the midst of all that preparation, Charbonneau’s wife suddenly doubled over in pain and became sick and weak. The last sight Drouillard remembered that night was of Captain Clark kneeling beside her in the lodge, cutting her arm to let blood, which had seemed a thing of the poorest judgment, in his opinion. That, and their insistence on coming up this river despite Cruzatte’s advice, had shaken his whole faith in them still again.

Drouillard was stalking a small herd of buffalo that he had seen wandering down into a draw, upwind from him. He intended to select a fat young cow or a calf to kill, and the only way to approach these herds without being seen on this treeless land was to use the gulches and draws. Far down to his left he saw Gibson trying to get within rifle range of another herd. Gibson, one of the tough young hunters Captain Clark had recruited in Kentucky, looked not much bigger than a mite in this immense landscape. Somewhere out of sight in the other direction, Silas Goodrich was hunting. The three had been told to get the best cuts of their kills and catch up with Captain Lewis at the river at midday. He was scouting the terrain ahead.

As Drouillard crested the bank of the gulch, he again heard that low thundering sound under the wind, coming with the wind, and, squinting against stinging sand and dust, he shaded his eyes and scanned the southwest, expecting perhaps to see thunderclouds rising over the mountains.

Instead he saw what appeared to be a cloud on the ground—a small, shimmering white cloud, not two or three miles away, it seemed, though not knowing what it was, he could hardly judge the distance. It seemed to shift shape and then dissolved from his sight. A little later it drifted up again, wavered and vanished.

He blinked and shook his head, and the wraith was gone. If
this had been early morning, he might have taken it for a patch of fog, but now the sun was high and the wind strong.

Below in the gully he heard the scuff of buffalo hooves and the snuffling of their snouts. A whiff of their dung and wool came up to him, and he knew they were very close. Slipping along behind a clump of sage, he looked down into the herd, about twenty, immediately picked out a plump young cow, prayed to the Keeper of the Game, and fired a ball into her heart. She dropped on her forelegs, then rolled on her side as the rest of the herd fled thundering away up the other side of the gully in a haze of dust. Turning his back to the wind, Drouillard reloaded, waved to the distant Gibson, then went down in the gully to skin the cow and cut out her hump and tongue. When he came back up, he found that the wind had died a bit and he could hear that low, drumming sound better. And there again was that wraith of mist. He realized then what it was.

It had to be the roar and spray of the falls of the Missouri. Those damned stubborn captains had been right after all. Their left branch
was
the Missouri.

“Ehhhh
-ya!”
he cried in the vast space, and turned to wave Gibson up. Gibson was one of the soldiers he had wagered, and he could hardly wait for him to come up so he could tell him that the captains had been right, and he would collect after all.

The three hunters descended into such an uproar of falling water that they could hardly hear each other speak, and found Captain Lewis sitting on a ridge of rocks gazing up into a shining turmoil of spilling, churning, spraying, thundering white water, foam, and spume. It filled the wide river canyon from cliff to cliff, a glistening torrent spilling straight down from a height that looked like a hundred feet into a swirling pool on the far side, but most of it dropped over great shelves of projecting rock which pulverized the falling river into a milk-white froth. The mist rose skyward, cool on sunbaked skin, and in the pale blue-green foam in the chute below, Drouillard saw the shadows of himself and the other three men with a rainbow around them. The very rock they stood on seemed to tremble. This was a spirit
place. He could not breathe deeply enough. When the captain looked up from the notebook in his lap to notice his hunters’ arrival, Drouillard saw something he had never seen before in the face of this stolid man: tears trickling from his shining eyes. Drouillard quickly looked away, far down the rapids below, and saw in the narrow, lush bottomland a grove of small cottonwoods, the bank littered with bleached driftwood and buffalo bones, and a small, abandoned Indian camp of stick lodges. He tried to imagine the people who came here. It would be terrifying to live down there.

But surely when a man was there, the spirits would sing to him.

Sacagawea, the Bird Woman, was barely alive when Captain Clark arrived below the rapids with the white pirogue and the canoes. She had almost no pulse; her fingers and forearms were twitching, and she was seldom conscious to nurse the baby boy. Both captains were in a state of alarm over her, not just for herself and the prospect of having an unweaned motherless child on their hands, but because she would soon be needed as interpreter with her Shoshone people, who should be found somewhere above the falls, and whose help and horses would be needed to
cross the mountains to the Columbia watershed. Without at least two dozen horses to carry supplies and Indian gifts over, there would be little point in trying to go on. Her condition was probably their most crucial concern at this point. Drouillard watched them hover over her with their hands on her brow and their thumbs on her wrist and throat, or with their fingertips probing her pelvis, and he looked at her trembling eyelids and graying face, and wondered if any whitemen anywhere had ever been this concerned with the health and life of an Indian.

Captain Clark had bled her several times in the last few days and had been making poultices for her husband to apply to her pubic and lower abdominal region, where the pain seemed to be centered. Captain Lewis believed the poultices should be continued, but was afraid she had been bled too much. Captain Clark had discovered a sulfurous spring in a hillside below the rapids, and some water from it was brought up for her to drink. Her husband was left to the task of dosing her while the captains attended to their other new problem.

In scouting upriver from the waterfall, Captain Lewis had found that the rapids and cascades continued for another six or seven miles up, including four other spectacular and precipitous falls. The whole distance was about twelve miles. The Hidatsas had said a half-day carry would get them past the falls—which would be true for men walking with their belongings on their backs. But for a troop of men with six fully loaded canoes and a large rowboat full of gear to transport over that much rough prairie ground, it would be a matter of days, not hours—if it were physically possible to accomplish at all. Moreover, the portage would have to veer far from the canyon to bypass several long gullies.

After several days, Captain Clark and five men had staked out, on the south bank, the shortest possible route of reasonably level ground. It terminated at a group of islands around a river bend and several miles upstream from the upper waterfall, and was eighteen miles long. Before this, the men had never had to haul the vessels over more than a few yards of ground.

And this was torturous ground. Wet prairie clay had been
trampled by thousands of buffalo hooves and dried to a rough, pitted, moccasin-tearing, ankle-twisting stucco, whose primary surviving vegetation was the dreaded prickly pear.

They can’t do it, Drouillard thought. Even to please their Great Father Jefferson, they can’t make these men carry all these tons of boats and belongings over such distance. If an Indian chief tried to make his people do such a cruel and crazy thing, they would get themselves a new chief, one who had some sense!

But these were whitemen. Drouillard was sitting with them in camp at the lower end of the rapids when Clark said, “Wheels! With wheels we can make the canoes into wagons.”

So they sent out six men to find the right kind of wood to make four sets of wooden wheels, and the tongues, couplings, and axles to assemble truck wagons.

And as usual, the poor soldiers would be the oxen to pull the loads.

Drouillard remembered a saying whitemen used, that God looks after fools. There seemed to be only one tree large enough in the whole canyon to make wheels of, and it grew just below the portage camp. The trunk was perfectly round and two feet in diameter. Sergeant Gass sawed off sections six inches thick and made axle holes in the center of each. The mast of the white pirogue was cut in lengths to make axle trees, and the ends drilled to put in axle pins, then lubricated with bear grease. The white pirogue was too big to be portaged, so it was emptied and hidden near the camp just as the red one had been at the forks. Captain Lewis’s iron-frame boat would be assembled at the end of the portage route to replace the pirogue as main cargo boat. He said it would carry four tons of baggage. He wanted elk hide to cover the hull. Several had been saved for that purpose, but not enough, so he sent Drouillard upriver to hunt elk, hoping there would be some in this vicinity. No one had seen any, or any trace.

Before Drouillard set out from the camp, he had the pleasure of seeing Bird Woman conscious, propped up, her baby suckling. It appeared that she was recovering after drinking the
stinking water. She had eaten buffalo soup and meat, and was no longer twitching or grimacing with pain. As he hiked up the river, he was thankful for her recovery. The world felt right again. The Master of Life was allowing the little Shoshone mother to live and care for her child. The soldiers were busy preparing for the portage and were cheerful and dutiful. Drouillard was rejoicing in the sights of this powerful place where the Creator’s work was so evident: the shining, wild waterfalls roaring and echoing within the cliff-bound river course, one above the other; the eagles, diving down to fish in the swift water; the countless thousands of buffalo feeding everywhere; the wildflowers and berry bushes blooming, blowing in the wind, life taking root in every rock crack. The magnitude of the Creator’s work was heartening; surely not even the coming-through of whitemen could alter the Creator’s mighty works here. It was true that whitemen had killed all the woods buffalo back in his homeland, but how could they ever diminish such numbers as these? He stood on the bluff with the churning white water far down below and watched a herd making its way down a gully to the river’s edge to drink above the falls on the other side, half a mile away, one of the few places where they could even get to the river because of the towering cliffs. The buffalo in the front of the herd, wading down and drinking in the shallows, were crowded forward into deeper water by those still coming down, until they floated off their footing and were caught in the current. In the few minutes he stood there he saw a half dozen helplessly swept over the falls, crushed and torn apart on the rocks. Bears, buzzards, and wolves grew fat on the broken carcasses at river’s edge below, leaving the countless bones and skulls that littered the narrow bottoms. Drouillard felt the Great Circle of Being, always turning, life giving to death, death giving to life. The more lives, the more deaths; this was the wheel the Master of Life had put in motion on this land, in the Beginning Times, and kept rolling—ages before the whitemen came, so proud of their rolling wheels that merely carried loads from place to place. Here was one of the Creator’s places where the Great Circle could be plainly seen, with limitless power and
infinite life. He was sure that even whitemen could not kill all these buffalo, stop these falling waters.

The Hidatsas had told the captains that at the top of the falls a black eagle lived in a nest in the top of one great tree standing on an island.

Drouillard saw the lone tree and the eagle’s shaggy nest far up in it as he approached the waterfall. This waterfall thundered over a precipice, falling about twenty-five feet, and the island was just below it, faintly visible in the mist, but the treetop rose high out of the mist. He remembered this. He had dreamed of it!

He looked around the sky. In many places he saw buzzards circling, drifting against the cloudy sky. Higher up he saw two white-headed eagles in different quadrants of the sky.

On the hills and plains were countless buffalo, herded by the wolves who were always with them. He saw no sign of elk yet. Far up the river, where it began to bend to the south, he saw a yellow bear.

Above this waterfall the river was almost up to the level of the plains, the banks very low. The river canyon was deeper below every waterfall. From here he could see downriver to another bend, and beyond it there drifted the spray from the next waterfall, about two miles below.

Water thundered, wind blew, and now over it he heard the descending whistle of an eagle, close by. Looking up, he saw an all-black eagle swoop overhead and settle on the edge of the high nest in the cottonwood. It raised its great wings once, twice, slowly, then folded them down like a man closing his coat.