Moses Reed, no longer a member of the corps, was given no liberty in the towns, and since he could not carry a firearm or stand guard, he was confined to the cooks’ area, a gray, lone figure, shuffling, dispirited, cutting firewood, tending fires and carrying water. His friend Private Newman had Sergeant Ordway ask Captain Lewis if Reed might have just a few hours off to mingle with the Arikaras. The answer was such a firm negative that Newman clenched his jaw, left the village, had himself rowed over to the camp and sat smoking with Reed. That act of compassion and defiance did not go unnoticed, and Lewis declared both men confined to the cooking area.
Two unlikely looking and unexpected collaborators had appeared out of the countryside just when they were needed: both raffish French traders who had been living in the Arikara towns for years, fluent in French, English, Arikara, and Sioux, able to interpret easily in the councils. Pierre-Antoine Tabeau had the thick shoulders and powerful arms of a former voyageur, but also an impressive education. He was, he claimed, writing a narrative history of the Upper Missouri tribes. He also professed, with dubious explanation, to having sworn fidelity to the United States long ago, and said he was joyful that this would be a trade route of the U.S., not of the Spanish or English. The other trader was Joseph Gravelines, an associate of Regis Loisel. Gravelines was without pretension, and Drouillard trusted him at once. Both warned the captains that many old factions were now living close to each other in the remaining Arikara towns, making for jealousy, and cautioned against naming as supreme chief any one of the three town headmen.
But in council, Captains Lewis and Clark went ahead and did so. They gave Kakawissassa, Lightning Raven, a bigger medal than the ones they gave the others, Pocasse and Piaheto. In the uneasy silence that followed, they gave fancy coats, cocked hats, and American flags to all three. They distributed beads, combs, scissors, cloth, wire, needles, knives, and hatchets for the chiefs to give to their men and women. They entertained the three with the twangy vibrations of the Jew’s harp and then gave each one two of them.
Drouillard recognized in the council two Sioux warriors who had been involved in the confrontation down at the Bad River, and found out that they had been sent up to persuade the Arikaras to stop the whitemen. They were watching the gift-giving with keen interest. They would of course go back and report to Black Buffalo, Partisan, and Buffalo Medicine that the boat soldiers had given the Arikaras much more than they had given the Sioux. Drouillard sat amazed that the captains imagined themselves ambassadors of peace. Tabeau had spent hours telling the captains just how to make the best impressions and longest-lasting arrangements with these Arikaras. Then Captain Lewis had done it the Jefferson way, and concluded the council with the usual air gun demonstration, fully satisfied with the impressions he had made.
On the day after the council, the three chiefs returned and told the captains everything they wanted to hear. The chiefs weren’t lying; they really did want peace and trade. But as good Indian hosts, they did not want to shadow the whitemen’s shining vision with the realities of intertribal life. Only Piaheto, the one they had named third chief of the Arikara nation, was candid enough to suggest that the nations along the river might misunderstand, or forget, or be unable to comply with, these promises being so politely made along the way. He doubted that the Mandans up the river would heed the whitemen’s demand for peace with the Arikaras. Drouillard thought it was appropriate that Piaheto spoke thus because his name meant Eagle’s Feather. In the tradition of Drouillard’s own people, one could speak only truthfully in the presence of an eagle’s feather. The eagle flew high enough to see everything and knew what was true.
The captains were glowing with pleasure. They had heard what they wanted to hear. The Arikaras had said they would send chiefs to meet their new Great Father in the East, even though the dangers of such long travel made them fear for their lives. Tabeau had given more information about the Arikaras, their language, customs, agriculture, and commerce with other tribes, than the captains could have hoped to learn if they had stayed here a month. They had written long into the nights to get it all on paper for the President.
Then Chief Piaheto, Eagle’s Feather, positively surprised the captains by offering to go upriver with them to the Mandan country and try to talk peace with them, and also promised he would go down next year to talk to the Great Father.
And Joseph Gravelines accepted an offer to hire on as Piaheto’s interpreter into the Mandan country.
What pleased the troops most, besides the lusty attention of the tribe’s pretty women, was that the Arikaras would accept none of their precious whiskey. They would not take anything that would make them act like fools.
There was a celebration, with music and dancing, just before the boats were to set out northward. Through the whole three-day sojourn in the friendly towns, Drouillard had been ignored by the flirtatious women. The white soldiers and the great black man were obviously remarkable beings, but he was obviously just an Indian. Though he was the only one who understood the connection for what it meant, the women and girls looked right past him at the blue-eyed men who, not being merchants like most whitemen, must be on some long spirit quest to the far edge of the earth. The Arikaras had yearned to receive some of their magic by intimate connection.
Drouillard wondered if he would be ignored like this all across the country, and sighed.
Ten miles upstream from the Arikara towns, the evening camp was suddenly disturbed by a commotion of excited voices. Drouillard, sitting outside the hatch of the keelboat cabin, rose and leaned out over the gunwale to see what was happening.
“What is it, Drouillard?” Captain Lewis asked from inside, where the captains were interviewing Eagle’s Feather, with Gravelines interpreting.
“Two women,” he replied. “Followed us up.” Even in dusk he recognized them. An Arikara man at Piaheto’s town had been sending them among the soldiers. The man was not in sight, but the two slender beauties, apparently on their own, had walked a long way to resume their enticements. Over their shoulders they wore buffalo robes to serve them as cloaks or beds. At the edge of the camp the soldiers were strutting and jostling each other to be first in the courting play.
The captains were annoyed, but decided not to insult the chief by chasing the women out of camp as if they weren’t good enough for the soldiers. Better to let them stay, with rules on the troops, than have the soldiers deserting camp all night like tomcats, as Clark put it. The rules were no fighting over the women, or ganging up.
Drouillard felt both a yearning and a sadness. The soldiers would give the girls trinkets. In return they would get a swoop of delight, bragging rights, and probably a souvenir dose of dribble-and-burn. Gravelines and Tabeau themselves likely had passed the diseases hundreds of miles along these riverbanks. As dusk deepened, firelights brightened, the fiddle squeaked up by the cooking area, and the male and female voices laughed and giggled the wordless language of desire in the margins of the camp. Drouillard’s heart cramped with a strange, miserable anger.
Fifteen hundred miles they had come; the horizons of many eagles. And yet he was still not in a place or time untainted by hairy-faced whitemen and their vainglorious ignorance. He remembered an image from a recent dream: an eagle nest in a tree above mist. From that high nest, he understood now, the eagle watched whitemen coming, and it knew something, something he yearned to know.
Now, catching the tune of Cruzatte’s old fiddle, the voices of Werner and Whitehouse started up.
“Let’s go a-courtin’ the big chief’s daughter,
Let’s go a-courtin’ the big chief’s daughter,
She ain’t been loved and I think she oughter!
Let’s go down and court ’er!
Wait! Have ye seen the big chief’s daughter?
Wait! Have ye seen the big chief’s daughter?
She looks much older than a daughter oughter!
I’ll not go to court ’er!
Might it be she’s the big chief’
s mother?
Might it be she’s the big chief’s mother?
G’zooks! Or even his old gran’mother?
She’s yours! I’ll find another!”
Over the silhouetted low bluffs on the far shore, the last lilac light was draining out of the sky, and in the deeper dark above, the first bold stars were shining. Reflecting the last light, the Missouri looked like rippling silk and sounded like a scarf fluttering in a wind. Soldier voices above were laughing at the song, and soldier voices below were fussing and joking over the women. Suddenly there came a loud, fierce, rapid argument, first in two voices, then three or four, incoherent over the singing and the fiddle.
By the time the music trailed off, the dominant voice was that of First Sergeant Ordway, bellowing over the hubbub of derisive voices: “God damn you, Newman! You—You—You are under arrest for that! By the authority of—”
“By the ’thority o’ your rancid ass, y’ goddamn puppet! God damn high horse Lewis got no right to make a slave out of a white man! I’ll go tell that son of a bitch myself! Turn me loose, you reekin’ turd!”
“Mutiny, Cap’n!” Ordway shouted. “Hold him down, Shields.… Get back, Reed. Get back, get back … You’re under arrest too. Cap’n! Mutiny up here at the mess!”
When Newman and Reed were brought on board, Newman had a lump above his left eye and his clothes were rumpled, soiled with ash on one shoulder and river mud on the knees. He was scowling but subdued. Reed was forlorn as usual. They stood in lantern light, at attention, near the mast, and Lewis stood glaring at them with his hands clasped behind his back. “First Sergeant alleges that you’ve been impugning your superior officer, Private Newman, and repeatedly. How do you answer?”
“Sir, I don’t know how I could im-pune when I don’t even know what it means. All’s I ever said was, Moses ain’t no nigger, to be made a slave of. When you whipped and discarded him you said he’d be sent back on a boat. You didn’t say he—”
“That plan was changed. No boat is going back till next spring. Reed’s not at issue here, it’s you fomenting mutiny.”
“I didn’t mutiny, sir. I just raised hell at what ain’t right.”
Lewis sighed and stood back. “Reed, he says this is because of you. How much of it comes from you we’ll find out in court-martial.”
“You can’t court-martial him, Cap’n,” said Newman. “He ain’t in your damned army anymore.”
Lewis’s fists and jaw clenched. “Mr. Newman, by tomorrow you might not be either.”
The Arikara chief Eagle’s Feather stood with Drouillard and Gravelines at the hatch, watching this confrontation with anxious tension, blinking rapidly. Drouillard glanced at his profile: bony-jawed, skin creased like old boot leather, yellowed by candlelight from inside, comb of feathers in his headdress turning in the breeze. He turned his face to Drouillard, a sad eye glinting.
No use trying to explain anything, Drouillard thought, and just shook his head.
13th of October Satturday 1804
a fiew miles from the river on the S.S. 2 stones resembling humane persons & one resembling a Dog is Situated in the open Prarie … the Rickores make offerings whenever they pass. those people have a Curious Tradition of those Stones, one was a man in Love, one a Girl whose parents would not let marry, the Dog went to mourn with them all turned to Stone gradually fed on grapes untill they turned, & the woman has a bunch of grapes yet in her hand (Infomtn. of the Chief & Intepeter) near the place we obsd. a greater quantity of fine grapes than I ever Saw at one place …
We Tried the Prisoner Newmon by 9 of his Peers they did “Centence him 75 Lashes & Disbanded him from the party.”
William Clark, Journals
October 16, 1804
Drouillard stood on the riverbank with Captain Lewis and Eagle’s Feather in a cold northwest wind under gray skies and sighted his rifle on a pronghorn that was so far away it looked as small as a mouse. It was on the edge of a herd. If he were hunting in his own way, he would stalk in closer for a more certain killing shot, but Lewis wanted him to shoot it from here, to impress the Arikara chief with the American rifles. At this range the captain would have rested his muzzle on his espontoon. Drouillard didn’t like to shoot from a rest because it interfered with the instinct. He had grown from a boyhood of killing rabbits with a throw-stick, birds with bolas, and game with arrows, before he ever had a gun, and so to him prayer and instinct had as much to do with the fate of the prey as the accuracy of the weapon. There had to be an acceptance between the animal and the shooter to allow a kill, and that was a thing of the spirit known as the Keeper of the Game. This excellent rifle only made greater distance possible.
The pronghorn raised its head and looked in Drouillard’s direction. It did not run. The spirit connection was now fixed, and he squeezed the trigger. The extra-heavy powder load discharged, and the distance was so great that he had time to lower the muzzle and watch through the smoke for the result. The animal leaped almost straight up. Its herd was already in flight toward the river by the time the body fell to the ground.
“Whewee! Good!” Lewis exclaimed softly, and glanced at Eagle’s Feather, who was gawking. “I think he’s impressed. I am!”
The captains for about four days now had been working their strong impressions upon Eagle’s Feather, who was the first wild Indian they had had so long as captive audience. The chief watched them respectfully as they seemed to pray to their navigational instruments and their journals. He studied, like a swivel-head owl, the strange cooperative force by which the many parts of this complicated unit moved on and on against the stream: the soldiers rowing; the Frenchmen in the red pirogue rowing nearby, but always singing or laughing or arguing; the hunters going out and then reappearing farther up the river with hides and meat; the three cooking messes setting up every evening, the tattered tents rising in the twilight; the few soldiers lining up before the captains at every stop for treatment of their boils and blisters and gashes and sprains; the constant packing and unpacking of bundles; the jolly, almost frantic lineup for the evening whiskey ration; the never-ending strain and struggle to keep the ponderous boat under control and moving on. Drouillard, only half Indian, after nearly a year with this ongoing community without women or children, still sometimes had moments of soul-clarity in which it seemed as if there could not really be something like this; he would glance at Eagle’s Feather and wonder how it must seem to this man of another world, into which these strangers had so suddenly come with their alien ideas and overwhelming demands. The chief had protested and wept aloud at Private Newman’s whipping. All the rest of this must seem as incomprehensible to him as had that terrible custom.
He had shot two more pronghorns, the last near a little river the chief called Elk Shed Their Horns, almost in Mandan land. As Drouillard went down the bluff to hail the boats, to get men to help him fetch in his three kills, he began hearing over the wind a commotion of excited cries. He broke into a lope along the bluff, and after a few paces he saw beyond the cottonwoods the keelboat and pirogues coming up, far below. Captain Lewis and Eagle’s Feather had lingered near the antelope carcasses, to guard them against wolves, but also because Lewis had found a new kind of small prairie bird in a tuft of grass, a bird either injured or so weak it didn’t fly away.
The shrill yelling was coming from the riverbank a little way above the oncoming boats, and as Drouillard loped along looking down over the last rise, he saw a swarm of quick-moving figures and he had to stop where he was to take it in and understand what was happening.
A herd of several hundred pronghorns was in the river. On both riverbanks Indians were running. When the animals tried to come ashore, the hunters headed them off, forced them back into the water, shot them with arrows. Some hunters were in the river with the herd, clubbing the animals with sticks and dragging them ashore. When he got down close, he saw that these hunters were almost all boys, not yet even of warrior age. They were having a thrilling time and were harvesting enough of t
he delicious animals to feed their people far into the coming winter. By the time Captain Clark came up from the boats to observe the slaughter, carcasses lay on both riverbanks for half a mile, and the boys were still swimming to shore, towing dead pronghorns with arrows protruding from them. With his usual exactness, Captain Clark recorded that the boys had killed fifty-eight. Drouillard noted ruefully, “I only got three.”
At dusk the youthful Arikara hunters came from their camp to see the big boat, visit their chief, and bring loads of meat as a gift to the whitemen. Still exuberant from their great hunt, they sang and danced until late at night. Eagle’s Feather obviously was very proud of them, and so was Drouillard.
October 16th
This day took a small bird alive of the order of the goat suckers. it appeared to be passing into the dormant state, the bird could scarcely move.—I run my penknife into it’s body under the wing and completely distroyed it’s lungs and heart—yet it lived upwards of two hours—this fanominon I could not account for unless it proceeded from the want of circulation of the blod.—the recarees call this bird to’-na it’s note is at-tah-to’-nah’; at-tah’ to ’nah’; to-nah, a nocturnal bird, sings only in the night as does the whipperwill.—it’s weight-1 oz 17 Grains Troy.
Meriwether Lewis, Journals
Eagle’s Feather observed that since there was so much meat, they had not needed to eat the tonah bird. He was sorry they killed it.
October 21, 1804
The spirit of North Grandfather grew stronger. Drouillard was wind-whipped, walking in snow, when he saw the great bear tracks.
Every year, winter had come down from the north to wherever Drouillard lived. This was not the same. The boats were moving to meet winter, up the cold, gray, endless river through a land ever more vast and bleak. The leaves blew off the trees in the bottoms and ravines, the nights were bitterly cold. The soldier tents, weakened by months of sun, moisture, mold, and wind, were now coming apart in these north winds that never stopped. The country was full of old signs of long ago life, things that the Arikara chief tried to explain, but which made the heart shrink: rocks with ancient markings that told of old catastrophes and predicted those to come; old forts where Mandan towns had been, only ruins now; a sacred tree all alone on the open plains, survivor of countless prairie fires; an oak upon which the Mandans in ceremony hung from ropes pinned into the flesh of their chests and necks. Gravelines had never seen such a ceremony but knew the Mandans and the Cheyennes still performed them. The captains listened aghast as the interpreter tried to explain it. Young men volunteered for the torture to make themselves men, but more importantly, to bear such pain on behalf of their People, so the People would not have to suffer so much. Drouillard had heard tales of these ceremonies, from traders: okeepa, the Mandans called it; the Sun Dance, other peoples called it. He listened and remembered the Jesus of the Black Robes who hung by his pierced flesh to take the pain of the people upon himself.