Sign-Talker (44 page)

Clark took Drouillard’s advice and puked himself empty. It relieved him, but he was still wincing from sharp belly pains. And the sudden change to hot weather was wearing him down.

The captain rode downriver, scouting for good trees for making dugouts, and discovered thick, straight cedars that looked very suitable. Chief Twisted Hair helped him draw a map of the river courses to the great seaward river, told him how many sleeps it would take to get from one place to another, and told him of a great waterfall on the big river. The chief told him that uncountable numbers of Indians of many tribes lived along the rivers below, most of them fishers and traders, and that those people far down the river knew the whitemen of the big boats. Drouillard signed between the captain and the chief, and his respect for both kept growing. It looked as if Captain Clark would have everything arranged by the time Lewis descended from the mountains with the rest of the soldiers.

Even though most of the warrior-age men were gone, the remaining men had keen eyes for rifles. Drouillard saw them always looking at the rifles so intently that he did not dare set his aside unless he handed it into the care of the captain or one of the hunters. The chief several times complained that enemy tribes in the north had been getting more and more guns from the traders, and it was becoming ever more dangerous for the Nez Perce to go over the mountains for buffalo hunting.

These Nez Perce were a friendly, good-looking people who dressed in beautifully made skin clothing, decorated themselves with blue beads and brass and copper jewelry, and owned many good horses. They were not a desperately poor, furtive people
like the Shoshones. But his intuition told Drouillard it was good that the chief and warriors were away. Old men and boys might not dare overpower whitemen to get their rifles, even a few sick whitemen. But a handful of warriors might not be able to resist the opportunity. Drouillard had faith in the hospitality and honor of the tribes, as they had proven those things. But he was becoming aware of something he had not expected to find so far west in advance of whitemen: guns were affecting the lives of all the Indians. It was a hard reality. No one wanted to be the people without guns.

The men of the expedition, now stumbling and plodding into the Nez Perce camp, were filthy, scruffy, and dull-eyed. The mountains had humbled them. Their ashen faces—what little could be seen through their whiskers—were greasy, smudged, scabby, peeling, broken out in eruptions. Their eyes were swollen and mattering from snowglare, and their noses looked like organ meat. It was no wonder the Nez Perce women fled from them with their children.

Captain Lewis’s bow-legged walk was exaggerated by pain. The fur hat pulled hard down on his head pushed his prominent ears out even farther, and his intense eyes, blazing from his sooty face, looked crazy. He was desperately gut-sick.

Cruzatte’s one eye was swollen nearly shut. Lepage and Labiche looked like trolls. The big men looked small and old: Pryor, Gass, Ordway, Shannon, Willard, Potts, Whitehouse, Frazier. Charbonneau, much older than anyone else, was still on his feet. Atop the packsaddle of the skinny, limping horse he led, Bird Woman sat swaying, the baby still in its cradleboard on her back, and she smiled when she saw Clark and Drouillard. The only visible change in her was that her face was bonier. Somehow she had come through with a clean face, her hair still shiny and well-combed, and had kept the baby nourished—he was still chubby-faced and seemed in no distress. And somehow she had never fallen off the horse, nor had the horse carrying her ever fallen down a mountain. York came limping along, the last of his portliness totally wasted off. He hardly looked any blacker than
the rest of them now, and he grinned and waved when he saw his master.

“Hello, York,” Clark said. “Missed you, old pickaninny. I had to do for myself.”

Sick though he was, Captain Lewis felt he had to drag out flags and medals and assemble whatever chiefs were on hand and give his Jefferson talk. This was obviously a major tribe along the narrow trail to the western sea. And even though they lived far beyond the limits of the great land purchase, they and their fine horse herds could be important in the future when American commerce started crossing the mountains. So, looking as if he might die any minute, Lewis pressed on through the whole council until he got these subchiefs to say what he expected to hear.

By the next day, almost all of the men were too sick to mount horses and had to be helped up. Captain Lewis was sicker than anybody, and could hardly bear the short rides between Nez Perce camps. The soldiers were so gassy and full of pain that many of them had to stop and lie down by the path from time to time. They were so miserable, in fact, that they hardly paid any attention to the many comely women and girls who followed along on foot and horseback, marveling at them. The women were in the midst of their harvest of the roots, which they called quamash. Bird Woman was familiar with the food, which was
pasheco
in her language, but she had never seen it grow in such profusion as it did in these bottoms. She was awed.

At Twisted Hair’s camp, the old woman Watkuweis at once fixed on the young mother as someone needing her care and protection. She recruited women from her band to help the Bird Woman with the baby and to mend and clean for her. Watkuweis and the Bird Woman did not understand each other’s language, but both were capable at handsigning. When each learned that the other had been carried off in raids by enemy tribes, and thus drifted into the company of whitemen, their hand signs began to flutter like butterflies. Even from the other end of Twisted Hair’s brush lodge, where Drouillard was translating for the captains, he could follow their conversation. The old woman was asking if
Bird Woman too had been treated well by whites. It was obvious that both had been.

The captains were making arrangements to leave their weary horses here with the Nez Perce to recover. They would be marked by a burning brand with Captain Lewis’s name. If the whitemen met ships at the ocean and didn’t return this way, the Nez Perce could keep the horses. If the expedition found no ships and had to come back, they would renew friendship and take the horses back over the mountains. In either event, cooperation by the Nez Perce would assure them of future friendship with the whitemen’s great council far in the east, and the whitemen to come in the future would have wonderful goods for the Nez Perce, including guns of such good quality and dependability that their enemies would never be able to dominate them again.

Twisted Hair grew more intensely interested after the talk about getting guns. Drouillard saw some shrewdness working behind that pleasant old face. After a while the old man began talking about the many tribes living down these rivers toward the west. He spoke of their association with his own people, and smiled thoughtfully, then suggested that if he went down the rivers with the whitemen’s canoes, he might be able to help them pass among those peoples in a friendly way.

Many of these Indians had sore, mattering eyes, and Captain Clark began treating them with eyewash from the medicine chest. Soon he was also treating bad backs and opening abcesses. Before long he was serving hours a day as physician, for his own men and the tribe alike.

The hunters were scouring the country far and wide, but found barely enough deer to supplement the root and salmon diet. By the time Captain Clark had set up a boat-building camp at the river fork below the Nez Perce towns, Captain Lewis was so sick in the bowels that he did not even bother to write. He spent most of his time reclining and gasping, nearly a total invalid. Some of the men were sick all of the time, and all were sick some of the time. Captain Clark, wheezing, farting like a horse, selected four magnificent, straight trees to be felled and
hewn for long canoes, assigned the able-bodied men to ax teams, and doled out Thunderbolt pills, jalap, tartar emetic, and salts to keep the men purging. When he was not doctoring or supervising, squatting at the latrine or treating his Nez Perce patients, he was making terse entries in his journal and notes. He was pasty-faced or flushed, always with a sheen of sweat, but never idle. The heat in the valley remained oppressive day after day, and even men who started the day well enough to work were often sick by midday. The axes were small camping axes, made for chopping and splitting, not for hewing, so the old native technique of burning out and chopping was adopted. The constant dense smoke made the heat seem worse, but it did help keep away mosquitoes and biting flies, and this wood burned with a pleasant, tangy aroma that Drouillard loved to smell when he rode in from hunting in the uplands. One day he killed two deer and Colter killed one, but most days there were just no deer to be found. This was a heavily populated country and had long been hunted.

Of the whole party, only Bird Woman did not get sick. Roots and fish had been much of her diet in childhood. Toby the guide was well too, and spent his days patiently sitting in the shade with flint rocks and a deer antler tip, chipping and flaking arrow points. He seemed to be a ghost from the ancient times, with no interest in guns. Drouillard wondered why the captains didn’t pay him for his services and let him go home.

Because the dugout logs were so large and so much wood had to be removed, the burning, chopping, and scraping went on for ten days. As the month of October came on, cooler winds blew through the camp, and a look back at the mountains showed the snow to be heavier and farther down the slopes with each new day, a reminder of how narrowly they had avoided being trapped and lost up there, where they surely would have died.

While most of the men were improving a little in health, Captain Lewis lay still in pain and misery, sometimes hardly able to draw breath. Captain Clark had bad days and terrible days, but kept going. He had map notes to revise, doctoring to do, and a designer’s attention to the shaping of the dugout hulls. He had
watched Indians navigate their dugouts past this place and had noted the degree of rake they had carved under the bows and sterns of their vessels for stability and maneuverability in these rapid waters. And he was still making arrangements about the keep of the expedition’s thirty-six horses. Two brothers and a son of the chief would take responsibility for the branded horses, in return for knives, two muskets, and other articles.

Drouillard fared better on the Nez Perce diet than most of the men because he ate only as much as he had to, just a bit at a time, and would eat no salmon unless it was fresh. Even then, one day he came down too sick to go hunting, and had to purify himself with water again. He declined the pills and the salts. The next day he was well enough to hunt, and got two deer. When there was venison, the men got a bit better, but most days they had to keep trading beads and cloth to the Indian women for the quamash roots that made them so gassy. Whitehouse had a new song:

In the evenings at the canoe camp, Cruzatte would get his fiddle out, pray thanks that it had not been smashed when it tumbled a hundred yards down a cliff on Private Frazier’s horse, tune it up approximately, and try to rouse the spirits of these weary, skinny, gut-scoured soldiers. His prayer of thanks, though Catholic and in French, was clearly prayer, and always brought solemn nods of affirmation from the soldiers. They seemed to feel that whatever grace had brought the Frenchman’s fiddle through the mountains intact had done the same for them. And in tribute to it, they would get up and dance. Now and then Cruzatte would announce, “I now shall play you an air!” And, raising a leg and grimacing, he would emit a note, pick it up on the strings, and be off on a merry improvised tune.

*     *     *

The canoes were nearly finished. The forelocks of the expedition horses had been cut short and they had been marked with Lewis’s brand:

Cruzatte played by the fire, and the men who could dance were dancing. Drouillard sat near Bird Woman. The baby was dancing in her lap, waving his arms as if to the music, making an expression that looked like a toothless grin. Bird Woman looked thoughtfully at Drouillard, then turned and spoke to her husband, who sat on a crate behind her. Charbonneau translated from Hidatsa into his laborious French:

“La vieille femme s’ dit, les Nez Perce déjà connus que les anglais … ou, les hommes blancs … viennent. Depuis longtemps.”

Drouillard said, “Oui. They knew from a vision that white people would come from the east. I heard of that.”

Charbonneau talked to his wife, and she shook her head and said more.

“Yes, that vision. But also, some Nez Perce went there this spring, to Hidatsa towns near your winter fort. They went to buy guns from the English traders. They learned of these captains coming this way. So they were not surprised. Only a little afraid. They knew your captains come with many guns.”

Drouillard thought on that, smiling. A foreknowing, by dream or vision. Then learning that it will be so. Then it is so. It was a thing that often happened, that way. Whitemen called it superstition.