Drouillard knew where the two meat pens were because he had been in that hunting party, the chief hunter, as usual. That had been a nine-day ordeal: hunting and sleeping out in the most bitter cold, feet cold and beaten by rough ice, plunging after wounded game in knee-deep snow, butchering and boning meat before it could freeze solid. Captain Clark on the second day had broken through ice and gotten soaked to the hips. The hunting party of sixteen soldiers had killed forty deer, sixteen elk, and three buffalo bulls in that period, but many of the animals were so lean and meager from the winter that they were hardly fit for use. The party had hunted more than fifty miles down the river. It had nearly done in the sixteen men before they staggered back into the fort yesterday.
Drouillard had gone to sleep last night to an astonishing sound: a baby crying in the interpreters’ room next door. Charbonneau’s little Shoshone wife, after a long and excruciating labor, had given birth to a boy baby, her first child. Charbonneau had returned from the hunt to find himself the father of a two-day-old son. The delivery had been brought on after long labor by one of Jessaume’s remedies: rattlesnake rattle crumbled to make a tea. Among the specimens Lewis had collected for the President was a rattle. Ten minutes after taking the tea, Bird Woman had given birth, with Jessaume’s woman as midwife.
So Drouillard had gone to sleep to the sound of a crying baby, and had awakened to the sound of axes chopping ice. For nearly two weeks the soldiers had been trying to free the keelboat and pirogues from the grip of the frozen river. They had even tried heating water in the bilges to melt them free, but nothing was working.
This morning the pride-swollen Charbonneau had given Drouillard a look at the tiny baby while the soldiers were harnessing the horses, and he had remarked, “Eh! Little half-breed, just like me!”
And now he was thinking of that little half-breed baby as he led Frazier, Goodrich, and Newman down the frozen Missouri. Three inches of new snow had fallen last night and was blowing in fine streamer shapes across the old snow and the river ice, and the wind was cutting through his clothes, but even that bitter discomfort didn’t keep him from daydreaming about that little half-breed, which sometimes he thought of as himself, long ago. If Charbonneau and his wife were actually going to come along with the captains as interpreters, as planned, then that meant this Corps of Western Discovery, as Captain Lewis now liked to call it, would have an infant member. It was getting crazier all the time. This spring they would be setting out into unknown country, two thousand miles across, surely much more dangerous than anything yet, with a suckling baby in the ranks. He shook his head, squinting into the snowglare, thinking, At least York will be happy we’ve got another “colored folk” with us! He was chuckling at that thought when he saw many figures come running out of a draw ahead, spreading out left and right, at least a hundred of them, high-stepping through the snow from every direction, beginning to yell and whoop.
They were Sioux warriors. Drouillard and his three men were being swiftly surrounded.
He yanked down his scarf to yell a warning to the men, but they were already yelling their warnings to him.
With the reckless courage of overwhelming numbers, the Sioux were rushing straight through the snow without regard for cover. Most of them had bows with arrows nocked, most wore shields on their left arms, some had lances, and a few carried muskets.
Drouillard, angry with himself for letting his fatigue carry him into daydreams, reined in the mare he was riding and pulled his rifle from its sling on the saddle horn. The soldiers were clambering off the two sleighs and reaching for their rifles, which lay nestled among ropes and tools on the sleighs. Newman already had his useless musket in one hand and was making it useful by attaching its bayonet.
The warriors were not shooting arrows or bullets, so Drouillard guessed that killing was not their foremost objective, although he knew very well they would start killing at any provocation. He scanned them as they swarmed down, trying to see who might be their leader. Keeping his rifle pointed skyward, he warned the three men, “Be ready, but don’t shoot!”
Some warriors charged at the sleigh-horses and, with knives flashing, they cut away harness and collars, while the rest kept their weapons aimed at the soldiers. Swiftly they mounted the horses and galloped off up the riverbank through the snow. So it seemed their first purpose was robbery. A man whose bold carriage suggested that he might be their chieftain was striding toward Drouillard with a fierce expression, motioning for him to dismount. Drouillard reined the horse in a backstep. The chieftain lunged forward and grabbed the reins right under the horse’s chin and tried to jerk them out of Drouillard’s hand, but he kept a tight hold, and when the chieftain looked up, he found the muzzle of Drouillard’s rifle pointed right between his eyes. He froze in the pose and appeared to be doing some deep thinking. Drouillard kept the rifle steady on that spot and slowly shook his head. Most of the warriors had stopped darting about. By the sleighs there was some grunting and commotion. He saw that a warrior had laid hands on Frazier’s rifle to take it away from him but was no match for the soldier’s work-hardened strength; he might as well have tried to pull an oak tree down by grasping one of its limbs. At that moment Newman swung his bayonet around and put the point at that Indian’s throat. And Goodrich had his rifle cocked now and was slowly sweeping it back and forth at the several nearest warriors who looked ready to charge Frazier. For a moment the whole tableau was stock-still except for a few warriors who were edging around toward Goodrich’s sleigh with the apparent intent of grabbing two skinning knives and a tomahawk that lay among the ropes, glinting temptingly in the sunlight.
Drouillard stared straight into the eyes of the chieftain who was still standing at the point of his rifle. He sensed as many as twenty or thirty arrows or muskets aimed at him right now. He remembered the day last fall when Captain Clark stood in the river’s edge with his sword drawn and faced down the threat of three Sioux chiefs and a horde of warriors. This appeared to be just that kind of a moment. One shot by anyone on either side would precipitate a quick burst of killing, and the result would be a few Sioux dead and all the whitemen dead. The two sleigh horses were far away now; there would be no getting them back. One the captains had bought from the Mandans; the other had been borrowed from a clerk of the North West Company. The gray mare Drouillard sat on now was borrowed from the Mandans and had an unweaned colt back at the fort. He didn’t intend to let these Sioux take her out from under him while he was alive.
The chieftain still had not thought out what to do, apparently; he stood holding the rein. Drouillard intensified his stare, that look no one could endure. Holding his rifle by the trigger hand only, he used his left hand to point at the chieftain’s grip on the other end of the rein; then he turned his pointing hand palm up, hoping the man would understand it was a one-handed version of the sign for Separate or Turn loose. This was the moment. If he couldn’t back this man down, he would have to shoot him and it all would be over. He presumed that Frazier and the other warrior were still deadlocked on Frazier’s rifle but wouldn’t flick his stare away from the chieftain’s eyes to see.
“Mr. Drouillard,” Newman’s voice came quietly, “what do we do? They just took the skinning knives and tomahawk.”
“If you still got that man on your spike, keep him there. Never mind the knives.”
“Still got ’im.”
“Good. I mean to make these sons o’ bitches back off.”
“God help us, man.”
“I’m counting on that,” Drouillard said, and he was; he had been praying fervently even while glaring and aiming at the chieftain. But that one still had not released the rein. His breath froze in puffs of frost at every exhalation, and Drouillard could see in his eyes that he wanted desperately to look around at the situation but was afraid to look away. Drouillard just barely widened his eyelids, intensifying his stare to give the impression he was about to act, and leaned an inch forward as if bracing his gun shoulder for a recoil. That brough
t his rifle muzzle an inch closer to the chieftain’s eyes, and the little puffs of breath stopped coming out. Obviously the man believed now that he was on the edge of death and didn’t want to be there.
The chieftain released the rein and stood still, sneering. Drouillard backed the mare off one step and kept the rifle on the man’s eyes. None of the hundred warriors, at least none in the edges of his vision, was moving, though he heard several murmuring to each other. He listened for the squeak of any footsteps in the dry snow anywhere behind him, and heard none.
The chieftain, without looking away, said something in a quick, loud voice. It was a good, rich voice, and Drouillard had a strange notion that he could have liked this tall, narrow-faced Sioux chieftain if they had met under different circumstances; the man was certainly more careful than cowardly. When he spoke, some of the warriors began moving back a little way. Drouillard glanced over just in time to see Frazier jerk his rifle free from the grasp of that warrior, who still remained as if pinned in the air by Newman’s bayonet.
Drouillard said, “Good, Mr. Newman. Draw off, now,” and Newman did so. “Now, boys, we’ll just ease out of here and head back for the fort. You get out of arrow range and I’ll catch up directly.”
“This one whoreson savage got my good tomahawk and I want it back,” Goodrich said.
“Damn you,” Drouillard warned, “don’t bust this all up over a tomahawk—” But Goodrich had already grabbed for it, and the warrior kept his grip, and voices were rising all around. It was about to start all over. Drouillard looked down his sights at the chieftain, narrowed his lips and motioned toward Goodrich and the warrior with a quick tilt of his head. The chieftain said something in three sharp syllables and the warrior released the tomahawk. Drouillard nodded to the chieftain. Newman, Goodrich, and Frazier began edging toward the river, their guns still at ready, and none of the warriors got in their way. He would let them get out of bow shot, maybe even musket range, then he would follow them, but in the meantime he was going to keep his rifle on the chieftain standing before him. He wanted to talk to this leader in sign and ask him to have the horses brought back, but knew the man would not demean himself that much in the eyes of his warriors. The horses were a lost cause. Drouillard knew if he got out of here alive with his three men, that would be answer enough to his prayers.
As the soldiers made their way across the glaring snowscape, he could feel his ears, face, hands, and feet freezing into numbness, and he had all he could do to keep from shuddering violently in the saddle. He presumed that all these Sioux men were equally miserable, surely as eager as he was to quit standing immobile in the bitter cold. He looked at the chieftain and thought of the few Sioux words he had learned from Cruzatte. He nodded to the chieftain and said, “O wash tay.” This is good. It was easy to remember because it was like weh sah in his own people’s language. The chieftain perhaps didn’t think it was that good; he didn’t respond. Or maybe, Drouillard thought, in his cold-benumbed mind he had remembered the wrong words.
His three men were now about forty paces away. He saw that a few of the warriors had lowered their weapons and now hugged them to their chests to put their freezing hands under their armpits. He began backing the mare toward the river, following the other three, squinting at the snowglare. If any of the warriors wanted to make their glory by shooting him, this would be their last chance.
But they all stood still. A hundred or more Sioux warriors stood watching the whitemen get away. He hoped with all his heart that he would not have to shoot, because he couldn’t feel the trigger, and in the glare his eyes were going bad.
When he caught up with his men, he dismounted and walked with them to get his circulation going. They kept looking back but no one was following. The Sioux might yet, of course. They might follow in the dark. Drouillard estimated that it would be midnight when they got back to the fort, even later if they stopped to hunt and build a fire for a supper, which they would need to do. He hoped this snow-blindness would not make them totally blind by night. The crisis seemed to be over, but the ordeal had several hours to go. They might not even make it back. They just crunched on through the dry snow on the river ice, wrapped in thought, no one talking, until Goodrich said, “Cold out here. But not as cold as I expected t’ be by now!”
“Tell ye what,” Frazier said after a while. “I mean to tell the cap’ns that this here Newman is a soldier and by God he should be put back on!”
“Amen!” said Goodrich.
“Thankee, boys,” Newman said in a voice almost strangled by emotion. Then he said, “Damn me, but those redskins really had us outnumbered, didn’t they, though!”
Drouillard couldn’t resist. Grinning, he said, “What d’you mean ‘us,’ white boy?”
February 16, 1805
He was almost too sore to sit up, but Captain Clark had him bent over a small tub, Newman on the other side, with their heads covered with a draped cloth. Now and then York put a heated stone in the tub and threw snow on it to make steam. Drouillard and Newman blinked and blinked their burning eyes in the steam. Captain Clark told them it would cure their snow-blindness. They talked with the captain through their drape. Drouillard told him how bravely Newman had stood up in the crisis with just a bayonet and recommended that he be returned to duty. Clark said he would bring it up with Captain Lewis when he returned. Captain Clark was supposed to be working on maps and lists, but he kept getting up and pacing, pacing until his own feet, punished by the long hunt, hurt too much to walk on. He was plainly very worried.
In a fit of temper, Captain Lewis had set out with twenty-four soldiers and a few half-hearted Mandans to go chasing those hundred Sioux warriors, with the thermometer at sixteen degrees below zero. This could be a disaster, the end of the whole enterprise and the deaths of many good men if it went wrong. Now and then Drouillard could hear Bird Woman’s baby squall briefly in the next room, and the woman talking and chortling to him. Drouillard prayed that Lewis wouldn’t catch up with the Sioux.
By evening his vision was almost normal and the pain gone, and he was resting with his feet in a tub of lukewarm water, when two of the Mandan warriors from Captain Lewis’s war party came into the fort, supporting Private Tom Howard, whose feet were so frostbitten he had been unable to go on. As Clark began to work on him, Howard told him that Captain Lewis had decided the Sioux party was so far ahead it couldn’t be overtaken. Therefore, the twenty-four soldiers were going to go on down and get the meat Captain Clark’s hunters had left, and then spend a day or two hunting. Clark was very relieved, for two reasons: there would be no battle, and the meat supply in the fort was entirely exhausted.
A few days later it was clear that Private Howard’s feet were recovering and no toes would have to be taken off. Drouillard’s eyes and feet were back to normal. Charles McKenzie, the North West Company clerk whose gelding the Sioux had stolen, visited the fort for a couple of days, and was decent and forgiving when he heard about the incident. The subchief of Mittuta-Hanka Town, whose name was Little Raven, visited the fort. He told Captain Clark that one of the old men the captains had met there had died, at the age of 120 winters, after requesting that his body be set on a stone facing south down the river toward the hole in the ground from which all the Mandans had come.
While Captain Clark was writing this story down, Drouillard saw anguish in the face of Little Raven. He remembered the deep sadness that used to pervade the Shawnee settlements when any of the ancient elders passed away, taking with them the powerful wisdom of great age. He thought of the young women in the buffalo-calling ceremony, who had hoped to pass on some of that great power of age, and he understood the ceremony better, and felt a deep wave of humility at having been honored. In the next room he heard the nine-day-old baby trying out its voice. Captain Clark put down his pencil, and said, “Born about 1684 then. To think I met a man who lived in the seventeenth century!” This captain really loved number counting.
21st February Thursday 1805
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nbsp; Capt Lewis returned with 2 Slays loaded with meat, after finding that he could not overtake the Souis war party. (who had on their way distroyed all the meat at one Deposit which I had made) deturmined to proceed on to the lower Deposit which he found had not been observed by Soux he hunted two days Killed 36 Deer & 14 Elk, Several of them So meager that they were unfit for use. the meet which he killed and that in the lower Deposit amounting to about 3000 wt was brought up on two Slays, one Drawn by 16 men had about 2400 wt on it.
William Clark, Journals
Drouillard stood in melting snow on high ground near Mittuta-Hanka Town, inside a circle of nearly a hundred human skulls, whose eyeholes all faced inward and seemed to be looking at him. He could hear the ancient spirit songs, not through his ears but faint inside his head, as he had heard them that cold, drizzly night more than a year ago, up on the great mound beside the Mississippi. What he was hearing through his ears was the faraway garbled talk of the geese, who were at last returning to the north. North Grandfather Spirit was retreating toward his home, drawing after him the high-flying fowl and the cold that froze everything. The captains and their soldiers were joyous at the end of a winter they had feared would kill them before it ended, a winter that had frozen their feet and faces and made them retreat into their smoky little rooms in the fort, or into the warm beds of the Mandan and Hidatsa women. Several of the soldiers were in love with the same girls, and almost every man was now taking the mercuric calomel for the sickness in their private parts. Drouillard had not contracted the disease, and to his knowledge the captains had not either, although he believed that Captain Clark had been in bed with someone during his visits up at the Hidatsa town of Black Moccasin.
These skull circles were the cemetery of the Mandan town. Off to the east stood several tall scaffolds made of poles, holding up the bodies of those more recently dead. The scaffolds kept the bodies out of the reach of wolves, and the bodies were encased in tightly sewn buffalo and elk hides to discourage vultures and ravens. There they remained until nothing was left but bones and dry skin, when their families would take them down and bury the bones, and leave the skull on the ground in this circle, where it could be visited, talked to, cried to, prayed over, and smoked to with sage and tobacco. Some of these skulls were very old and sun-bleached white, some were still nose-deep in snow. Around some the snow had melted down and the teeth and chins were visible. Jessaume had told him of these things. And on one mild day not long ago, Drouillard had passed close enough to this cemetery to see a few people sitting before skulls, and to hear them talking and singing and crying to them, a sound much like the spirit voices he heard now.