Sign-Talker (52 page)

Now these narrows. There was no way to take the canoes up the roaring chutes, and the big ones couldn’t be portaged. The natives were swarming and belligerent. The captains had decided to obtain enough horses to carry the cargoes overland to the Nez Perce country. Captain Clark had gone above the falls on the north side of the river and set up a trading station to bargain for horses with the few trade goods that remained. He wasn’t doing very well. After two days of being tantalized and toyed with by Indians who knew it was a seller’s market, Clark had three poor horses for which he had traded his best blanket,
his sword, and his military coat, and now he was almost as ill-disposed toward the natives as Lewis.

Lewis, meanwhile, had gone into the darkest and meanest frame of mind. When the horses carried the goods to the upper end of the portage, instead of trading the abandoned canoes or giving them to the Indians as a parting gesture of conciliation, Lewis ordered them chopped up, piled with oars and poles, and set ablaze with the Indians watching. He looked like a malevolent whiteman devil standing there in the heat and smoke. And when one Indian boy tried to salvage an iron pole socket from the edge of the pyre, Lewis gave him a severe beating, every blow a relief and a venting of the captain’s fury, and had the soldiers kick him out of camp. That was when Drouillard resigned himself to the possibility of ending his days here in a windswept, fishy-smelling desert with a river roaring through it. There was nothing, it seemed, to keep these hundreds of people from rushing and annihilating the thirty whitemen, either now or in their camp at night.

But the captains staged an impressive display of rifle target practice with a large Indian audience. Soon thereafter, the people left.

Drouillard himself had been annoyed and embarrassed by the behavior of these wretched representatives of the race; he felt that somehow their tribal discipline and decorum had failed, that the elders perhaps had lost their influence.

But irritated as he was with them, he still saw the spiteful burning of the canoes through their eyes. He knew that if he were an Indian living here, and witnessed that mean and wasteful act done by strangers coming through, he would never want to see any more men like them in his country again. Lying that night in a cold, nervously guarded soldier camp, nipped by fleas, without even any campfire fuel because Lewis had burned the canoe wood in a venomous fit, Drouillard went to sleep and dreamed again of the woman staring at Lewis and cutting her arms with flint.

In a changing part of the dream, flint blades were cutting flesh and the woman was staring straight at him. Drouillard woke up
with a racing heart, and where in his dream he had started to feel flint edges cutting his groin, fleas were biting him. They kept him from going back to sleep for a long time.

One of Tetohoskee’s cheerful young warriors was apparently amused that soldiers liked to eat dog meat. It was good to be among friendly Indians again. The Walulas at the great bend of the Columbia had held a dance and feast for the soldiers and had helped them obtain about twenty good horses, and now a few days later the corps was climbing up into the country of the amiable and handsome Nez Perce. Tetohoskee, one of the Nez Perce chieftains who had traveled by canoe with them down the Columbia last fall, had joined them as they came back up, and it was good to see the old friend again.

They had also had the good fortune to encounter a Nez Perce elder whose lame knee Captain Clark had treated last fall with liniment and hocus-pocus. The old fellow was perfectly well now, and Clark’s reputation as a great healer had spread. This enabled him to trade doctoring for food—mostly roots and dogs, as the salmon run had not reached these streams yet. The corps had come out of the desert and sage country into a land of grazing grasses and some pine woods. The weather was cold, windy and rainy, sometimes with hail, and the paths were slick and dangerous, but contact with the Nez Perce had lifted the spirits of the troops. It had also lifted the spirits of many ailing Nez Perce people with eye problems and other health troubles, who had heard that the red-haired healer was back. They kept coming in, and left Clark with little time for other duties.

One ailing man Clark had not been able to help was one of his own soldiers. Private Bratton’s back had first crippled him while he was working at the salt camp on the coast. It had improved little since last winter, and last month he aggravated it during the portage at the cascades. Since then he had been unable even to
walk, becoming just another load for the packhorses. Bratton’s agony and despair were pathetic to watch. He was lying under a hide shelter nearby as the young Nez Perce laughed about the dog-eating whitemen.

A puppy wandered in, sniffing at the roasting dog meat. A youth scooped it up with one hand and tossed it toward Lewis’s plate, which was on his lap, as if to say, “Pups are more tender than dogs.”

Lewis snatched up the squirming pup as if it were a rock and hurled it with all his strength at the young man’s face.

With a yip of pain it fell thrashing to the ground, and Lewis leaped to his feet with his tomahawk cocked to strike. “Damn you! One more impertinence from you and I’ll split your head!”

The young man turned and left without looking back, while Drouillard stood looking in astonishment at Lewis. He had hoped that getting away from the Chinooks and being among the friendly Nez Perce would settle Lewis down, but apparently it had not.

Drouillard examined the deer decoy and learned how it was used, and realized how hard hunting was for these Nez Perce who still used bow and arrow. The decoy was the skin from the head and neck of a deer. It would be put over a frame of sticks to look natural, then a concealed hunter would move it in the motions of a deer feeding, until live deer would see it and graze within bowshot. This was how they hunted deer in the wooded and rocky country when they couldn’t chase them down on horseback.

Drouillard saw other signs of how bad the hunger could be in the mountains in winter. He found pine trees cut down and peeled for their edible inner bark, their cones twisted open for the seeds inside, and learned that a kind of hanging lichen was also gathered off the pine limbs and boiled for food. It was no
wonder these people had such a yearning to obtain guns for easier hunting. But even more, they wanted guns because their enemies in the north and northeast had been obtaining guns from the English traders in Canada. Drouillard had no illusions that the Nez Perce liked the Americans. It was obvious they hoped this cooperation would help them obtain more and better guns than their enemies had.

Relieved as the captains were to have found the Nez Perce, some troubling matters had come to light. They were now close enough to the mountains to see them heavily clothed in the snows that had almost fatally entrapped the expedition last fall. Even here in the foothills they were riding through seven and eight inches of snow.

Another trouble was that Twisted Hair, whom they had been so anxious to see, was cold and nervous, and evasive about their horses, which he had agreed to take care of over the winter. The branded horses were not all there at his village, a situation that seemed to have something to do with other chiefs.

As Drouillard had feared, the situation required that he be put right in the middle of the quarrel, as only he could use and read hand-sign well enough to understand and interpret it. He spent several days going from one chief’s camp to another, getting them to come individually, then together, to hash it out before the captains. There was a Shoshone boy, a captive, among the Nez Perce, who understood Nez Perce and could have translated to Bird Woman, but the youth had enough sense to refuse to interpret a dispute between chiefs.

The other chiefs were Broken Arm and Cutnose, who had been absent last fall, away raiding Paiutes, when the expedition came through. Cutnose was a not very impressive man whose most memorable feature was the result of getting a lance up his nostril during a long ago fight against the Shoshones. Broken Arm was formidable of physique, and proud.

Old Twisted Hair said that when those two had returned from their raids, they accused him of taking too much importance upon himself in agreeing to care for the whitemen’s horses. Probably they were jealous of the two muskets and ammunition
he had been promised in payment. He said the two chiefs had so troubled him that he had neglected the horses and let them stray.

The version of the story told by Cutnose was that Twisted Hair had not been taking good care of the soldiers’ horses, that he had let his young man use them so hard that some had been hurt. He said Twisted Hair was a two-faced, bad old man.

The deep snow on the Bitterroot Mountains made it obvious that the expedition would be here longer than expected—perhaps as much as a month—and so this sore spot among the chiefs would have to be doctored as tenderly as the abcesses and sore eyes of Captain Clark’s patients, who kept coming in from the hills, several a day. The troops would need Nez Perce cooperation with food, horses, and camp resources, and, when the snow eventually melted in the mountain passes, Nez Perce guides to lead them back through the maze by which old Toby had brought them last fall. Even to Drouillard, who had done his best to remember it, the route was broken and baffling. He recalled how streams had seemed to turn around and run uphill.

So the captains decided to stick by their old agreement with Twisted Hair, if his young men could indeed round up the horses and bring them in, and then council with the other chiefs to elevate their sense of importance to the level where they would no longer resent the old man. As long as the expedition was stuck here, it should do as much Jefferson diplomacy as possible, and build an alliance with these strong and likely people. That would, of course, mean promising they would be rewarded with goods and guns—someday.

When two more of the leading Nez Perce headmen came, Bloody Chief and Five Big Hearts, it was deemed a proper time for a major council with the Nez Perce nation. Captain Lewis gathered his wits and braced himself for his biggest presentation in a year. It was done with a pipe ceremony, the presentation of medals, the demonstration of magnets, compasses, mirrors, telescopes, and the air gun. The Shoshone captive participated by translating Nez Perce to Shoshone, which Bird Woman then passed to Charbonneau in Hidatsa, and his French then was
translated to English by Drouillard and Labiche. Thus the talk took most of the day. In the meantime, Captain Clark in a nearby lodge of Broken Arm’s town dispensed eyewash, liniments, pills, and laudanum, and performed minor surgery, back rubs, and adjustments with his capable and powerful hands. While Lewis was giving the council difficult new political and commercial concepts to mull over—trading posts, peace missions, arms sales, and delegates to the Great Father in the East—four men carried an especially important and difficult patient to Clark: a big, fleshy chief, beloved by his people for his wisdom, in apparent robust health with good pulse, appetite, and digestion, but paralyzed from the neck down for the last three years. This appeared to be a case that might at last put limits on the captain’s burgeoning fame as a medicine man. Clark told the Indians that he doubted he could help the man but would soon begin trying.

The second day of the council was the time for the Nez Perce to answer Captain Lewis’s proposals. Another forty or fifty patients had showed up for Clark, most needing eyewash. The Indians held a morning council in which all the Americans’ proposals were discussed. Then Broken Arm mixed some root flour in water and distributed it to every man in the council. He told them that if they agreed to follow the advice of the whitemen, they should eat the mush; anyone opposed should not. Drouillard watched carefully from the edge of the council. Some women outside the circle began wailing and pulling their hair, as if afraid of such an alliance, but it appeared to Drouillard that every man tipped his bowl and swallowed the contents.

The chiefs went to where the captains and their interpreters sat waiting. Drouillard told them of the method and outcome of the vote. Then commenced an outpouring of good cheer and generosity such as he had seldom seen. The captains were approached by two young Nez Perce men, who presented each with a fine horse. Then Cutnose came forth and gave Drouillard an excellent gray gelding. Clark grinned at him and said, “By God! Reckon they think you’re an officer, George!” Drouillard
was so moved he could only look at Cutnose and nod and smile, swallowing hard.

The captains gave each chief a flag, a pound of powder, and fifty musket balls, and also gave powder and shot to the two young men who had presented them with the horses. Broken Arm said the council’s answer would now be presented by their best orator, the father of Bloody Chief. But first, he said, there were more people in pain waiting to see the red-haired medicine man. And so Dr. Clark returned to his waiting room while Lewis remained to hear the Nez Perce’s declarations of agreement.

When Clark returned in mid-afternoon, he brought a vial of white vitriol and sugar of lead to Broken Arm, and had the interpreters tell him how to dilute it to make eyewash for his people after the whitemen were gone. The war chief washed his own eyes out with sudden uncontrollable tears. “Cap’n,” Drouillard told him, “if you don’t mind me saying it, you’d make a good Indian.”

Lewis closed the business by giving Twisted Hair a musket, a hundred balls, and two pounds of gunpowder for taking care of the horses, and promised to give him another gun and a like amount of ammunition when the last nine horses were delivered. Then, as if to make as good an impression on these people as Clark had, he held a shooting match with the Indians, hitting a small mark twice at 220 yards.

Ah-huh
, Drouillard thought. Yes. They’ll do whatever you want to get guns like that. But if they ever get any American guns, they won’t be good rifles like that. They’ll be cheap muskets. My Shawnee people can tell you about whiteman promises.