Sign-Talker (50 page)

“Lead on.”

They each shouldered an elk hide with about thirty-five pounds of the best cuts in it and set out through the dusk. Shannon had all he could do to keep up with Drouillard’s walking pace, which was like anyone else’s fast trot.

It was dark by the time they reached the partially finished huts. They smelled smoke and saw the ruddy glow of campfires and heard voices. Shannon was still coming along, but he was wheezing like a winded horse when they came into the firelight. The soldiers’ garments were so tattered and rotten from rain and wear that they were half naked. Fortunately, there seemed not to be any truly bitter cold in this region, just a constant dank chill.
They desperately needed elk hides to make new winter clothes for everybody. Several men at a time were sick with colds.

“Hey, boys! Here come Drouillard and Shannon!”

“Thought y’ was lost, boys!” They had been out four days.

Captain Clark came out from under an awning attached to a log wall and said, “Sure glad to see you two! Had us worried.” As Drouillard swung his meat bundle off his shoulder and eased it to the ground, Clark looked at it wistfully and said, “That all?”

“All we could carry. We’ll need canoes tomorrow to go up for the rest.”

Sergeant Gass liked to say, “This whole goddamn fort was built in weather that would’ve been a carpenter’s days off.”

It stood in a clearing dotted with the stumps of the tall, straight fir trees that had become its walls. The wood split so neatly that a nearly perfect plank could be made without a ripsaw. By Christmas Eve the men had finished their huts and moved in out of the rain and hail that had fallen every day of the construction. All their fleas moved in with them.

Stocky men and women of the Clatsop tribe had been coming to the site of the fort during its construction, bringing roots and berries, baskets and mats, and the skins of panthers and sea otters, but were such tight bargainers that the soldiers bought very little, and the Indians usually left disgruntled. They were a mild-mannered people with pleasant faces, some of the women and girls very pretty, saucy and bawdy. They covered their heads and upper bodies with cone-shaped hats and mantles so tightly woven that they shed rain, but went basically naked from the waist down. Captain Lewis remarked that he could do a venereal diagnosis of a whole party just by glancing around, and they all
seemed to be infected. Soon the soldiers’ venereal symptoms were back, and the calomel came back out of the medicine chest. These coastal Indians apparently had been ravaged by diseases off the trading ships; they told of being a very numerous nation within the lifetime of their fathers and mothers, but they were just a few hundred now. The captains were little inclined to be bothered by Indian visitors now, but had to maintain friendly relations for practical reasons, and were obliged to learn what the President would want to know of them. Captain Lewis was counting on Indians to bring news of any ship that might come too, so he had to feign more cordiality than he felt.

The dampness and the warmth made the preservation of meat very difficult. Even with a smokehouse constantly tended, much of the meat spoiled. A great deal more was ruined before it even got to the smokehouse, because terrain and weather combined to make its transportation slow and difficult. Wherever Drouillard and his hunters slew elk, some circumstance made it difficult to bring in. If it was near the Columbia, the violent waters often made it impossible to fetch the meat in canoes. If it was up in the hills to the south, dense undergrowth was the problem. And if it was in the quaking bogs down toward the coast, men carrying any load of meat would sink so far they couldn’t wade to solid ground. This terrain, and the inability to see the sun, bewildered almost everybody, and hunting parties frequently got lost and spent long nights squatting in total darkness, soaked to the skin, unable to build fires. And so, much of the meat that Drouillard and his hunters tracked, chased, killed, and butchered was wasted, or had to be eaten in degrees of spoilage.

A few days ago Captain Clark had taken Drouillard and several soldiers about fifteen miles down through the mountains and out to a windy, sandy beach piled with driftwood, a perfect place for a saltmaking camp. They had blazed a trail between that place and the fort to keep the men from getting lost between the two places. It was a beautiful but forbidding coast, a sight Drouillard knew he would never forget. There, the dark gray ocean thundered and sprayed against gigantic dark pinnacles and towers of rock that stood separated from the grim, high cliffs
above the beach, cliffs jutting miles and miles southward, each point of rock and headland and mountain fainter than the one before it, dimmed by fog and spume, until the farthest vanished in mist. A party of salt-boilers had already been picked to go down with kettles after Christmas and start making salt: Bratton, Gibson, Willard, and Weiser, with Joe Field as their overseer and hunter. The captains wanted salt badly, and the men craved it.

They were out of salt. Out of liquor. Out of meal and flour. Almost out of tobacco. And they were four or five thousand miles from their homes and families, and most of them had been sick or pained in one way or another for so long that they couldn’t remember real comfort.

The soldiers and captains gave what poor gifts they had. The most surprising exchange was from Sacagawea to Captain Clark, a beautiful shoulder mantle made of two dozen weasel tails. Her brother, Cameahwait, had put it on her shoulders last summer as she set out westward from their homeland with these soldiers. Apparently she harbored a true but unexpressed affection or admiration for Clark. No one had thought of giving her anything.

No one had given Drouillard anything either. Apparently, their Christmas was just for Christians, not Indians. So his gift to
himself was the completion of a necklace of grizzly bear claws he had been drilling and stringing in his spare time. He had no warrior feather, but he had earned bear claws.

Two wide, split boards had been planed smooth to make writing surfaces for the captains, and they went into heavy use. Any time Drouillard entered their smoky room for anything, he found them bent over their writing boards, hats and boots on against the dankness, scratching away with pencils and quills. The daily life in the fort was so monotonous—sending out hunting parties, receiving Indian visitors, treating the colds, influenza, venereal complaints, and the sprains and strains of the soldiers—that the journal entries were cursory. The captains’ tireless writings on everything else were information on the three local tribes and their headmen, names of some ship captains the Indians traded with and when they might be expected to come, information and measurements of plants and animals, descriptions of geography, weather, and edibles, the dress and handicrafts of the local Indians—it was as if Captain Lewis had nothing on his mind but Thomas Jefferson’s curiosity, and killing time until they could leave this wet, moldy place and start home in the spring. Writing killed time better than anything. And, in the event that some American ship might show up in the Columbia, as much information as possible would be ready to send home.

At his table, Captain Clark concentrated on assembling his hundreds of sketches, compass headings, distances, and map scribblings taken from Indian interviews, and connecting them to make a vast map of everything from Fort Mandan to the Pacific. The concentration in their dim little room was so strong one could almost feel the pressure of it. And all the time, rain roared or pattered on the roof of riven wood shakes.

Drouillard stayed out as much as possible with his hunters, ranging farther and farther with every passing week to find the diminishing elk. Being out away from the fort, he could avoid the torments of the fleas and the gloomy complaints of the bored troops. They lived for their smoking and chewing tobacco, and for those days when they got some of the bawdy Indian girls into
their quarters. The wife of one of the chiefs seemed to be a sort of madam who escorted groups of saucy, bare-bottomed girls to the fort so often that she was a special object of Captain Lewis’s disdain. Much of Lewis’s discontent he took out on the Indians: harping on the eternal threat of treachery and thievery, making rules about when they could and could not be in the fort, and what offenses should justify their ejection. A strict regimen of guard duty was scheduled, and a roofed booth to keep a sentry out of the rain was built on the picket wall of the fort.

Drouillard’s relentless search for game had turned up some good beaver habitat, so he started taking traps out with him. The pelts he brought in were in excellent condition, and now and then he got an otter, whose fur the captains especially coveted. And whenever he caught a beaver, there was of course a tasty, fat variation to the monotonous diet of lean, half-spoiled elk.

When the first quarts of white sea salt were brought into the fort from the coastal brine works, it helped make the elk diet a little more palatable. But in this dank climate, the men craved fat even more than salt, and it happened that the soldiers who brought the salt also brought a little whale blubber. A few miles below the salt works, a whale had beached and died, and the Clatsop villagers nearby were cutting and rendering its meat and fat. The captains at once determined to take a large party down and get some before it was gone. One of the selected men being Charbonneau, his wife suddenly stood up with fire in her eyes and stated in swift, strong sign language that she wanted to go too. She declared that she had traveled a long, hard way with these soldiers to see the great waters, and had not yet been permitted to see the ocean. And now there was a great fish such as she would never have another chance to see, and she knew no reason why she should not get to go. She stood with her chin up and eyes glittering and waited for an answer.

Drouillard translated every part of her demand with pleasure, inspired, seeing the quiet little Indian woman assert herself again. Clark gazed at her. Then he nodded. “Drouillard, tell her she can go with us if she’s sure she can keep up, carryin’ that baby and all. Going to be a long trek.”

They returned four days later with three hundred pounds of blubber and a few quarts of whale oil. It had been a grueling trip through creeks and marshes, on stony seashore, and an exhausting climb up the steep side of a mountain well over a thousand feet high. Bird Woman with her baby on her back had kept up without any complaint. All that was left of the whale was bones by the time they got there, and Captain Clark had bargained hard to get the Indians to sell any blubber or oil at all. But the soldiers were delighted to have both fat and salt for their diet, and the trek was considered to have been worth all its effort. Bird Woman was content. She had seen the bones of a fish that was forty paces long, and wherever she might live hereafter, she would be able to tell of it to people, and see their disbelief. And she told Drouillard that no one would believe the size of the ocean she had seen either.

It seemed that the sight of the ocean had fulfilled any desires or expectations she had nurtured on this long and grueling journey. The whitemen, of course, had never even considered whether she had any desires or expectations. Now some of them were beginning to see her in that new light—Captain Clark, in particular. Drouillard saw the officer studying her by firelight now and then, as if considering what her world within might be.

No ships yet. No word of ships. The officers worked week after week on their writing and planning. They were killing time. They had until May to get back up the Columbia and the Snake and the Kooskooskee to the Nez Perce country where Twisted Hair was keeping their horses, the horses they would need to recross the mountains to the Missouri. Because of snow in the mountains, they could not expect to cross them before May. They estimated that if they left here in late March or early April, they would have time to ascend to the mountains by then. Here they had their fort for shelter until spring, and could subsist without expending the remains of their trade goods too soon on the way up. They didn’t like it here; it was like being in a flea-infested jail of their own making. But they would live here, and make all their preparations for the journey home to the United States.

Drouillard steered the canoe to the bank of the Netul where the corps kept its little fleet of canoes on shore, and the other canoe followed. It was deep dusk. It had taken hours to bring the canoes along the Columbia shore from the Kathlamet town because of the rough water, then up the Netul to the fort. He had a severe pain in his left side and was glad the trip was over. It was raining and blowing as usual. The soldiers with him climbed out of the vessels and pulled them onto the shore. With them were two Kathlamet headmen wearing cone-shaped hats and capes woven so tightly of cedar and bear grass that they shed rain perfectly. The canoes were leaking through cracks, and the rain and bashing waves had poured even more water in them. Constant travel in canoes half full of water apparently was the reason these river peoples wore nothing below the waist and went barefoot.