ANNA LEE WALDO
In memory of my father,
Lee William Van Artsdale
The tropical emotion that has created a legendary Sacajawea awaits study by some connoisseur of American Sentiments. —More statues have been erected to her than to any other American woman. Few others have had so much sentimental fantasy expended on them. —And she has received what in the United States counts as canonization if not deification: she has become an object of state pride and interstate rivalry.
Bernard DeVoto, The Course of Empire.
New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1952, p. 618.
Contents
Book One IN THE BEGINNING
CHAPTER 1 Old Grandmother
CHAPTER 2 Captured
CHAPTER 3 People of the Willows
CHAPTER 4 Bird Woman
CHAPTER 5 The Wild Dog
CHAPTER 6 The Trading Fair
CHAPTER 7 Toussaint Charbonneau
CHAPTER 8 The Mandans
CHAPTER 9 The Okeepa
CHAPTER 10 The Game of Hands
Book Two RETURN TO THE PEOPLE
CHAPTER 11 Lewis and Clark
CHAPTER 12 Birth of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau
CHAPTER 13 Farewell
CHAPTER 14 A Sudden Squall
CHAPTER 15 Beaver Bite
CHAPTER 16 Sacajawea’s Illness
CHAPTER 17 Cloudburst
CHAPTER 18 Tab-ba-bone
CHAPTER 19 The People
CHAPTER 20 Big Moose
CHAPTER 21 Divided
Book Three THE CONTINENT CONQUERED
CHAPTER 22 Over the Mountains
CHAPTER 23 Dog Meat
CHAPTER 24 The Columbia
CHAPTER 25 The Pacific
CHAPTER 26 The Blue Coat
CHAPTER 27 Weasel Tails
CHAPTER 28 The Whale
Book Four HOMEWARD
CHAPTER 29 Ahn-cutty
CHAPTER 30 The Sick Papoose
CHAPTER 31 Retreat
CHAPTER 32 Pompeys Pillar
CHAPTER 33 Big White
CHAPTER 34 Good-Byes
CHAPTER 35 Saint Louis
CHAPTER 36 Judy Clark
CHAPTER 37 Lewis’s Death
CHAPTER 38 Otter Woman’s Sickness
CHAPTER 39 New Madrid Earthquake
Book Five LIFE AND DEATH
CHAPTER 40 Lizette
CHAPTER 41 School
CHAPTER 42 Duke Paul
CHAPTER 43 Kitten
CHAPTER 44 Jerk Meat
CHAPTER 45 Comanche Marriage
CHAPTER 46 Joy and Sorrow
CHAPTER 47 Gray Bone
CHAPTER 48 Shooting Stars
CHAPTER 49 The Raid
Book Six ON THE FINAL TRAIL
CHAPTER 50 Bent’s Fort to Lupton’s Fort
CHAPTER 51 St. Vrain’s Fort
CHAPTER 52 Bridger’s Fort
CHAPTER 53 The Mormons
CHAPTER 54 The Great Treaty Council
CHAPTER 55 The Jefferson Peace Medal
CHAPTER 56 I Could Cry All Night
CHAPTER 57 Nothing Is Lost
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Copyright
About the Publisher
Book One
IN THE BEGINNING
A mysterious relic in the Big Horn Mountains west of Sheridan, Wyoming, in Shoshoni country, is an elaborate circular pattern traced out in stone on a flat shoulder near the top of a 10,000 foot remote peak. The Medicine Wheel has a circumference of two hundred forty-five feet, with twenty-eight spokes and six stone cairns spaced unevenly around its rim, and a seventh about fifteen feet from the wheel. These shelters are very low with a slab of rock across the top. Two of the cairns zero in on the rising sun of the first day of summer— summer solstice—when the sun reaches its northernmost rising point on the horizon. Two of the cairns zero in on the summer solstice sunset. Alignments of others point to the rising points of three bright stars, Alde-baran, Rigel, and Sirius. West of Armstead, Montana, now Hap Hawkins’ Lake, near U.S. 91, south of Dillon, Montana, is another wheel-shaped pattern of stones. These undoubtedly predate the Shoshoni nation as we know it.
Montana, A State Guide Book, compiled and written by the Federal Writers’ Project of the WPA for the State of Montana. New York: The Viking Press, 1939, pp. 32, 292.
JOHN A. EDDY, “Probing the Mystery of the Medicine Wheels,” National Geographic, 151 (January, 1977), p. 140.
CHAPTER
1
Old Grandmother
The history of the Shoshoni, most northerly of the great Shoshonean tribes, which all belong to the extensive Uto-Aztecan linguistic stock, is full of paradox. They occupied western Wyoming, central and southern Idaho, southwestern Montana, northeastern Nevada, and northeastern Utah. The Snake River country in Idaho was their stronghold, but their expeditions sometimes reached the Columbia. Holding somewhat in contempt their less vigorous cousins to the south—Ute, Hopi, and Paiate—they themselves seem to have been almost equally despised by the Plains tribes. The northern and eastern Shoshoni were riding and buffalo-hunting Indians. Their traditions are full of references to a period when they had no horses, when small game took the place of the buffalo, and when they had no skin tepees in which to live. None of the Shoshoni were ever known to be agriculturists, but in the Wind River of central Wyoming, huge pestles have been discovered, about five feet in length, consisting of a ball eight or nine inches in diameter and a stem tapering to about four inches. They were found by Shoshoni Indians who suggest they were used for grinding grain, grass seeds, and dry berries, by some early tribe.
Wyoming, A Guide to Its History, Highways and People, compiled by Workers of the Writers’ Program of the WPA in the State of Wyoming. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941, pp. 52-7.
It was early morning in the Agaidüka, the Salmon Eaters encampment, and struggling puffs of cooking-fire smoke reached into the chilly dawn air. Everywhere in this Shoshoni camp there was the pungent smell of burning pine. Moving silently, robe-covered women fed each fire and cooked the first meal of the day. Inside the tepees children came half-awake; small babies felt hunger pangs and began their crying.
Near the center of the encampment was the tepee of the head chief, Chief No Retreat. This morning he rose from his pine-bough sleeping couch early, disturbed by thoughts in his mind of things he did not understand. Ages ago, beyond the time of counting, there had been a tribe living here, in the Big Horn Mountains, different from the people he knew.
The day before, Chief No Retreat and his younger daughter, Boinaiv, Grass Child, had wandered onto a great circle of stones. To him it seemed larger than the circle of the sun. He had seen the similar but smaller circle of stones to the north, but never had he dreamed there was another and of such imposing size. He was certain it had been built before the light came to the Agaidüka Shoshonis, his people.
The old man had looked at the great circle then in awe and spoken to his child about the Tukadükas, the Sheep Eaters, who had built stone game blinds and bighorn sheep pens with stone fences. He had seen them often. “The Sheep Eaters were once many tribes and lived in caves and mountain canyons to avoid their enemies. They had dogs to help them hunt. Now they are gone. Their time is over.”1
“Were they happy?” asked Grass Child.
“Ai, they felt as we, sometimes sad, sometimes angry, and sometimes happy. They lived. Now we live.”
“Did they paint the buffalo in the caves?”
“Ai, they painted the animals they were going to hunt. This is the way they breathed life into herds so that there was always food for their people. They drew the buffalo as if he were alive. In their firelight his eyes glistened
, his muscles seemed to tense beneath the hide, and his tail to lash to and fro in excitement—like the beasts grazing on the grassy hillsides.”
“Did they color him with the same paints we use to paint bodies before the hunt?” asked the curious child.
“Ai, the same. They took the best ocher and bear’s fat and mixed it carefully and put it on the picture with tiny sticks dipped in the paints. They used charcoal or the black earth for contours and shadows to give the beast depth or life. They used vermilion to fill in the glowing eyes.”
“I would like to do that,” exclaimed the child.
“Women are never painters of stones. They paint only clothing and their faces,” laughed her father.
“I could do that, though. Did the people of the sun-circle paint?”
Chief No Retreat was deep with his own wondering. Were the people who built the smaller circle in the north and then this larger one of the same nation? He wondered how long ago these people had gone away from here. Who were their enemies?
As he gazed at the large circle of stones, Grass Child pointed to the center cairn, about as high as the chiefs waist. “What is there?”
“You ask more than a girl-child should,” he admonished his inquisitive offspring. “Women need know only cooking, sewing, and keeping a neat tepee and a contented man.”
“Maybe it is Father Sun,” she said. “In the middle is the sun, and on the outside are the stars, and this one way over here, the moon.” She laughed at her analogy. Then she counted the “spokes” radiating from the “hub.” “Five hands and three fingers,” she said.
The chief counted, then said, “That is the number of suns from one full moon to the next.”
Grass Child began to examine the six low shelters, peering under the slab roofs.
“Grass Child! Keep your head out of there!” The chief quickly stood the child on her feet. “See, that flat stone is tipping. The pine logs are old and rotting. They no longer can hold it up. The spirits of this nation may be near. Do not disturb their sacred place. Now, watch where you step! Do not step on the stones.”
On the stone slab of the center structure rested ableached buffalo skull, placed so that it looked toward the rising sun. Chief No Retreat, trying to picture in his mind the people who had used this sacred place, gently placed his hand on the white skull, but it was old and some of the bone crumbled under his hand. He tried to repair the skull, but it crumbled more. He jumped like a small boy caught doing something forbidden.
“Do not keep your eyes long nor too close to these ancient stones,” his child said.2
He took the small hand of Grass Child in his large brown weathered one and quickly retreated. “You must not talk out so much. Even your brothers do not talk when it is not their turn. Your sister, Rain Girl, does not ask questions or speak her mind to me—perhaps to her mother or grandmother, yes, but not to me, her father. Women must keep their tongue inside when they are among men.”
Grass Child hung her head for a few moments, then softly she said, “Father, what was the buffalo skull?”
“An ancient thing. I do not know what it represents. My mind cannot tell me.”
“What were the little lodges?”
“Grass Child, I do not know. Maybe some chiefs lay there to pay respect to the Great Spirit or to Father Sun.”
“What was one little lodge so far away from the others for—was it the moon as I said?”
Chief No Retreat was sorry he could not answer the questions. It had always been his policy to give his sons correct answers as far as he knew. This youngest girl-child had accepted that policy but could not understand why he should treat the girls differently from the boys. There were so many things for each to learn, and their father, to her, knew everything that was worth knowing.
Later, while Chief No Retreat sat with his women beside the evening cooking fire, he was silent, wrapped in thoughts of those ancients who built the old medicine circles. He knew that an ancient people lived ages ago in nearby mountain caves. He had seen the caves with their sooty walls, bone and stone tools hidden in rock recesses, discarded meat bones strewn near the long-deserted, black clay fire pits. His own grandfather had told him winter tales about people living in the high, rocky mountain country, who rolled huge stones down on their enemies. The chief reasoned that the ancients lived in caves to avoid contact with hostile people or the large, hungry animals, like the mountain lion. If anyone knew the name of these ancients, it could not be spoken because the Shoshoni code forbade saying the name of the dead aloud.
Chief No Retreat thought those ancients had probably never seen a horse. Maybe that early man would call the horse “an elk that had lost its horns,” or “a big dog.”
Chief No Retreat’s tribe was rich in horses, long ago having acquired them from their cousins, the Coman-ches, or from the Utes in the south. Sometimes the Agaidüka ate a horse because their bows were not adequate for game larger than a badger. The Agaidüka were always in a near starving condition by the time spring arrived.
The chief began to think of the names of the many tribes in the Shoshoni nation. He counted them on his fingers of both hands. He wondered why all these people were called Shoshoni. The real meaning of the word was lost with time. Some nations called them Snakes, or Rattlesnakes, because their tribal sign was made with a wiggling motion of the hands. The motion was also similar to the in-and-out motion used in weaving grass for making their temporary summer shelters. He knew no nation actually thought of Shoshonis as snakelike or slithering away from anything, not even the Arapaho, their lifelong enemies.
The chief was of average height, and was bowlegged from much horseback riding. He had powerful shoulders and was lean for want of food. Like all Agaidüka men, he had no beard. If facial hair appeared, it was pulled out by a favorite woman or sister with two sharp-edged stones. The chief rarely smiled, but when he did, his fierce, dark eyes softened. He was constantly anxious for the welfare of his family. His woman, Fragrant Herbs, was his greatest love.
No Retreat was chosen chief partially because of his special cleverness and partially because he had boastedtruthfully of his accomplishments in battle. The headband of his warbonnet showed eight holes above the forehead, two for each successful exploit.
He felt much concern for the members of his tribe. He tried to make the Agaidükas’ life easier, more pleasant, by locating the summer or winter camp in a place that gave pleasure to the eyes or was close to colored rocks so the women could make beautiful paints to decorate their clothing. He had taught his people to harvest their winter supply of meat after the freeze-up, when it could be hung high in a tree, kept, and used like fresh meat. Of course, some of the meat was dried on a rack above a low fire in the usual manner of the Shoshoni and stored as pemmican in gut containers.
Chief No Retreat was respected for his bravery and intelligent, agile mind. He was the undisputed leader of the Agaidüka Shoshoni. The Shoshoni tribal government was a pure democracy with each warrior his own master. The chief was looked to for advice rather than orders.3
As in most Indian tribes, the women performed most of the camp chores, while the men captured and trained horses, made weapons, hunted, and protected their tribe. The children scampered around the tepees doing generally as they pleased, for their elders thought too much discipline would break their spirit.
Chief No Retreat’s woman always served him and was his constant companion. Fragrant Herbs had not desired another squaw in the tepee to make her work easier. She had not wanted to share her man with another squaw, no matter how quiet or industrious she might be. Her mother lived with them and had been a great help to Fragrant Herbs until this spring. Old Grandmother was now approaching the time when she must die. It was increasingly hard for her to move around the camp, collect wood, and cook and sew.
It was the hope of Chief No Retreat that Cameâh-wait, Never Walks, his eldest son, would in time take his place among the People, as the Salmon Eaters called themselves. This was becau
se they were certain their tribe was the favorite of the Great Spirit, and the greatest, most powerful, and most pleasing tribe on earth. Spotted Bear, the second oldest child, had a lively tastefor hunting. The chief s daughter, Rain Girl, was about twelve summers (the Shoshoni kept no track of ages according to years), and Grass Child was three or four summers younger. The girls had been betrothed as infants to the sons of Red Buck by a present of six large bay horses. Rain Girl was curious about her future man, but Grass Child, not yet having reached puberty, did not bother thinking of something so far in the future as a secure womanhood.
After the chief had eaten the food prepared by Fragrant Herbs and smoked a pipeful of dried willow bark and kinnikinnick, he took a bow that needed new wrappings and a handful of thin buckskin to the edge of the encampment where twelve men squatted on their heels conversing. The chief fell into the mood that was new for him. He began to talk of the stone circle. He repeated what he had told his child about the various parts. Someone mentioned the picture writing they had seen many seasons back on the high white cliffs, and the red pictures found in a cave of a doe and fawn. No Retreat recalled the huge pestles, the length of a man, with a ball the size of two fists on the end of the stem.