Sign-Talker (51 page)

Drouillard and his party had been trying to buy a few canoes from the Clatsop and Kathlamet villages so they would have enough for the return trip up the Columbia, and it had been a frustrating effort. Canoes were among these tribes’ most useful and valued possessions, and they would not sell them cheaply. The Clatsops had kept their price for one out of reach. Drouillard finally had obtained one from the Kathlamets, paying in tobacco and Captain Lewis’s fanciest army coat. The corps was almost out of trade goods, and even the soldiers had given most
of their valuables away to the local girls who came selling carnal pleasures.

Drouillard, with the soldiers and the two Kathlamets, went up the muddy path to the fort, smelling chimney smoke, latrines, and rotten elk meat. He clenched his teeth against the pain in his side. He hadn’t figured out what it was, but did not want the captains to see that he was sick, because they would probably want to bleed him or fill him with four or five kinds of their evil little pills.

Unfortunately, Lewis saw him wince at a stab of pain, and in no time he was lying on a bunk with blood dripping from a slit arm vein into a bowl. It made him think of the woman far up the river who had slashed her arms. Lewis was saying, “Too many sick. This is no time for it, just when we’re trying to get ready to leave this place.”

“Well, mine’s not cock pox, Cap’n. Whatever this is, I didn’t bring it on myself.”

“I’ll say that for you,” Lewis said, then looked at him thoughtfully. Drouillard was just very careful. He was one of the few men who had visited and socialized in the Clatsop towns, and not for romance. He often stopped to visit with such chiefs as Coboway and Warhalot and Shanoma while ranging in their vicinity, and smoked and ate and hand-talked with them, trying to soothe their ruffled feelings, to make them feel that their new white neighbors weren’t really hostile and arrogant, as they seemed, but just whitemen soldiers, unlike the traders, who were the only other whitemen these people knew. He tried to tell them that these whitemen lived by codes they had learned on the far side of the land and that they didn’t understand Clatsop ways, any better than Clatsops could understand theirs. When Drouillard was in their towns he made it clear that he himself was an Indian from a tribe a year’s travel eastward, and being an Indian he did not have goods to trade for women’s favors. A few times, out of plain Clatsop hospitality, he had been offered bed companions. A couple of times he had accepted, but only after discreetly determining that there was no risk of disease. In those households he was always cheerfully welcomed. And he already was a
legend among the tribesmen as a hunter. Back in January some Clatsops had seen him shoot several elk at a distance they could scarcely believe even when they witnessed it with their own eyes. The captains had been very pleased with that incident; they thought that just in case the Clatsops had ever considered attacking the soldiers, their opinion of American marksmanship and superior rifles likely would discourage them. Drouillard doubted that the Indians had ever considered it. They were a happy, congenial people who were competitive only in trade. Their greatest joy seemed to be in getting a real bargain.

Lewis stopped the bleeding with pressure and told Drouillard to lie quiet and hold a cloth over the slit. He said, “We still need another canoe. The Clatsops won’t give one up at a price we can afford. I hate to do it, but I guess we’ll just have to take one. I’ll send a party out tomorrow to get one.”

“Wouldn’t do that, Cap’n. These people don’t care a lot for us, but one thing they can’t say is that we steal.”

“They steal from us. I think that elk meat they took from your cache last month, that’s justification enough.”

“That’s been smoothed over. Coboway apologized and gave us three dogs, remember?”

“Hardly compensation for six elk,” Lewis retorted. “You said so yourself.”

“Cap’n, I took it too personal at the time. I’m on good terms with him now.” He didn’t mention that he had counted the Clatsop girls as personal compensation.

“It’s not that I want to do this,” Lewis said. “But we have to have another canoe. They’ll never know. They’ll think it drifted, like that one of ours.”

Drouillard sighed in anger and annoyance. Lewis would do what he wanted to. It would be easy. The tribes didn’t guard their canoes because they all had a code against stealing each other’s vessels. It was just the opposite of the horse-stealing games of the plains tribes. Here the honor was in
not
stealing each other’s essential transportation. It took weeks to make a canoe, whereas horses reproduced themselves and the tribes had hundreds of
them. Drouillard admired the respectful understandings these coastal tribes had among themselves, by which they kept peace.

It seemed strange to him that the captains had no such admiration. For all their talk about peace among the tribes, they seemed to have nothing but disdain and suspicion for these peaceful peoples. They hardly ever let Indians stay after dark in the fort, even if they had come too far to travel home. At Fort Mandan they had let more warlike chiefs stay overnight and had afforded them attention and hospitality. All winter Drouillard had tried to imagine why they so disliked these coastal peoples, beyond their appearance.

Sometimes it seemed to Drouillard that the real reason these whitemen scorned the natives here was because these people were not particularly impressed by the whitemen. The officers had been accustomed to being a novelty and the center of attention and awe across much of the continent, with their white skins and their instruments and manufactured goods, with their great black man, with their amazing message from their new Great Father. Here, none of that amounted to much. These coastal people had traded for at least ten years with whitemen on big ships, ships carrying more and better goods than these whitemen had. They had seen plenty of black men on the ships. They apparently had heard fiddles and horns and Jew’s harps before, and Cruzatte was so little in demand that he had all but stopped playing. He excused himself by saying the rain and dampness would ruin the instrument and the strings had no tone in this humidity.

And perhaps even more to the heart of the matter, here the captains could not proclaim power over the country. This was beyond the land Jefferson had bought from France. Coming down the Columbia, the officers had quit demanding allegiance or trying to win the natives with promises of alliance. The whitemen just weren’t very important to these people.

The captains had chosen to build their winter quarters in a place they hated, among people they scorned, so they would be nearby if a ship came into the bay. But then they had built in a place from which they couldn’t see the bay, and had been barely civil to the Clatsops and Chinooks who might bring them word if
a ship did come. That was one of the reasons why Drouillard had tried to remain friendly with the Clatsops near the mouth of the Columbia. If a ship did come while the corps was here, he wanted them to let the captains know it.

They needed another canoe because they had acquired so many Indian-made treasures to take back to Jefferson, and preserved plant and animal specimens. Even though they had traded away most of the goods they struggled so hard to bring west, they had traded them for bulkier things: otter and ermine skins, fur capes, fine basketry, weapons, robes.

Drouillard suggested they lighten their load by leaving things with the Clatsops, with instructions to Chief Coboway to turn them over to the first American ship that came. But Lewis didn’t trust the Indians. He thought they would keep it all themselves. All he might agree to entrust to Coboway would be a letter or report that could go back to the United States by ship. And then there were the paper things, including the first map of all the rivers and mountains and Indian lands ever made between the Mandans and the coastal mountains, all of which had been blank in previous maps of the continent. Of course, Lewis would not entrust this to a slant-headed, bare-bottomed Indian chief to give to a ship captain, if one came. Therefore a canoe was needed to take it all back up the Columbia.

So Drouillard sighed and agreed. He wouldn’t steal the canoe himself. But if one was taken and Coboway found out about it, Drouillard would say it was because of the meat stolen from his cache. Lewis needed to steal a canoe, but needed an excuse so he wouldn’t think of himself as a thief. Now Drouillard just wished the captain would go away and let him lie here and rest.

It was good, being a man who could always be relied upon, but sometimes he wished he didn’t have to be a part of everything.

He winced with a new stab of pain in his side, held the compress on his cut arm and tried to go to sleep. He remembered how hard it had been coming down the rivers from the mountains, and wondered if it would even be possible to go back up.

The captains had been working on a plan to split the corps in the mountains, with Lewis taking the Nez Perce shortcut to the
Great Falls and then going up to see how far north Maria’s River originated, and thus perhaps claiming more land for the United States, and Clark going back down to the Shoshone land and crossing over to explore the upper Yellowstone, then the two groups rejoining at the mouth of the Yellowstone for the rest of the way down the Missouri. Leave it to them to find a way to make a hard task harder, Drouillard thought. He might have enjoyed going with Clark to see some new lands, in company with York and Bird Woman and her baby; they had come to feel like his family. But Lewis had already named him as his own hunter and scout for that northern exploration.

If indeed they even made it up to the mountains.

A bad and embarrassing start home: rain, wind, ebb tide, and the fleet of canoes wandered into the wrong shallow channel among islands. An Indian man in a small canoe came to guide them. He was very tense as he guided them through, then finally worked up the courage to tell them that he recognized one of the canoes. It was his.

There followed a long silence. Captain Lewis did not admit that his men had stolen the canoe, but offered the Indian an elk skin in exchange. Being in the midst of a party of well-armed soldiers, he had no choice. After the fleet was through the maze, the Indian vanished in the blowing rain. Lewis was glum and silent for a long time after that.

The fort had been abandoned to the custody of the nearest chief, Coboway of the Clatsop tribe, in the expectation that his people would likely make use of it anyway. It was a gesture the captains hoped would incline him to speak well of them after their departure. They also had given to him and other neighboring Indians a written roster of the members of the corps, inscribed:

All the men on the list were yearning eastward, sick of the constant rain, wind, dankness, boredom, weary of the unvaried diet of scrawny elk and root mush and rancid fish. To them the fort had been a gloomy, moldy, flea-infested prison. They knew they had a continent to recross and it would be hard and hazardous and they might not make it—but they were going homeward, and that was their inspiration now. Men were talking of their families; Captain Clark had mentioned his betrothed, Miss Hancock. Lewis had been overheard wondering whether his mother was still alive, or President Jefferson. He had half a continent to deliver to Jefferson, in the form of maps and sketches and hundreds of thousands of words, and in specimens of plant life and Indian clothing and handiwork, all in canoes full of watertight skin bundles. But ahead lay roaring rivers, snowy mountains, Indians, grizzly bears. Beyond that a big question: the rest of their lives, if God granted them any more.

Drouillard wasn’t sure they would get out of this mess alive. The demon was in Lewis, the worst he had ever seen it.

When they had sped down these roaring water chutes between the high cliffs last fall, Drouillard had wondered how they could ever get canoes back up, either through or around.

And there had not been so many Indians along the river then, compared to the thousands who were now waiting for the spring salmon run to start up. Worse, they were all kinds of Chinooks,
whom Lewis had come to hate and scorn. Still worse, they were being themselves and Lewis was being himself. They were pushy and insolent and thieving. He was angry and impatient. There had been threats.

The river was in spring flood, faster and higher than it had been then. The captains needed to get up to the Nez Perce by May so they could cross the mountains. They had expected to feed the corps by purchasing dried fish from the tribes along the Columbia, but then rumors came down that the Indians were in famine upriver. So Drouillard and his hunters had scoured the Cascade country to kill and dry meat, slowing progress. At the portage, doubly hard and dangerous because the river was high, Indians crowded around, picking up anything the moment it was unguarded. Three men had even run off with Lewis’s dog one evening, and Seaman had to be retrieved at gunpoint. Private Shields bought a dog to eat, and had to pull his knife to scare off some young braves who tried to take the dog carcass from him. During the strenuous portage along a steep, slick path, a few Indians entertained themselves by throwing stones down on the soldiers. Tomahawks and other items were stolen; Indians were grabbed and searched. A small gang of swaggering youths jumped John Colter and tried to get his tomahawk away from him; they all ended scattered and bruised in the dirt. At every town, Lewis came to the point of telling the natives they would be shot if they touched another thing, that he would burn their towns.