At last the halyard was cut and the sail was being hauled in. Cruzatte had drawn his pistol and was aiming it at Charbonneau, screaming in French that he would shoot him if he didn’t recover the tiller. Charbonneau did so at last and slowly the pirogue came into the wind and her mast rose almost vertical. She was swamped within an inch of the gunwales, with every whitecapped wave spewing in more water.
The canoes were ashore now, the red pirogue heading for the captains under oars and shortened sail, and Drouillard watched the desperate struggle of the white pirogue out there on the water.
Cruzatte had put two men to rowing and two others to bailing, and the vessel crept toward shore. As it came he could see the disorder inside; Bird Woman sitting in the icy water up to her ribs, holding the shrieking baby up on her shoulder with one hand, with the other hand tending to instrument cases, sodden journals, books, papers, and medicine stores that were immersed and afloat all around her.
It was dusk by the time the pirogue was beached and emptied, the officers rejoined with their fleet, the bear carcass brought ashore, and all members gathered in a camp. Over one campfire the men drank a dram and celebrated their deliverance from everything that had nearly happened to them, and over another they rendered six gallons of bear oil. Captain Lewis kept reminding everybody that if the pirogue and its contents had been lost, the expedition would have been utterly ruined. The soldiers knew he was in a state, and listened to his harangues patiently, waiting for him to simmer down and leave them alone to tell each other their bear story with all its elaborations. Drouillard’s attention was mostly on Charbonneau’s family. Charbonneau kept getting up and stalking around, not looking anyone in the face. Bird Woman was making sure her baby was warm and calm.
All that had actually been lost overboard were two cooking vessels, some gunpowder, a book, and the Indian baby’s cradleboard. Everything else would need to be spread on the ground to drain and dry.
It was agreed that Charbonneau would not be allowed to steer a boat again.
Thursday May 16th
the Indian woman to whom I ascribe equal fortitude and resolution, with any Person aboard at the time of the accedent, caught and preserved most of the light articles which were washed overboard
this morning a white bear toar Labuiche’s coat which he had left in the plains.—
William Clark, Journals
For several days they had been coming into an increasingly hilly country where pitch pine grew on the slopes, a welcome change after a thousand miles of treeless plains. A less welcome change grew underfoot: a spiny cactus plant, low to the ground, with stiff spines that stabbed through moccasin leather. Anyone walking had to learn a new way of seeing his path because of this “prickly pear,” and also because warm weather was bringing out rattlesnakes.
As they moved into this new country, they found fewer of the undercut riverbanks that used to cave in suddenly, endangering the boats. Now the firm, dry banks allowed the soldiers to walk easily onshore and pull the loaded vessels up the shallow river by long tow ropes of braided elk skin. They walked and pulled and sang. In the evenings some of the men shot beaver in the water, and the black dog Seaman would leap into the water, swim out and bring them ashore, which delighted his master. But one evening the dog retrieved one that was only wounded. With its great chisel teeth it bit the dog’s hind leg and he almost bled to death from a cut artery before Captain Lewis was finally able to stop the bleeding.
That same evening, Captain Clark came in from a long advance trek, with more cheerful news. Climbing the highest hill he could find, he had seen ahead the mouth of a major river flowing into the Missouri from the south, one the Hidatsas had told of, and it was where they had said it would be. Even more satisfying to the captain was that in the distance, perhaps fifty miles west, he had seen a high snowy mountain.
Captain Lewis leaned back with a sigh. “Not fair, Clark. You get to see mountains first.” He reached down and fondled the ear of his unconscious dog. “I’m not sure old Seaman here is going to make it to see a mountain.”
That night in the lodge, Captain Lewis wrote late by candle while Charbonneau’s family slept. Captain Clark was making pencil notes. Drouillard was trying to sleep, but there was some troubling spirit inside the shelter. When he would open his eyes, he would see Lewis gazing into the shadows instead of writing, and his eye sockets were black as caves. Drouillard didn’t think the plight of the wounded dog was all of it, though that might have brought it on. Finally, Captain Clark sighed and asked, “What is it?”
Lewis was silent for a long while. Then he said, “We almost lost everything. It can happen so sudden.” He was still thinking of the near loss of the boat, apparently.
“But we didn’t. Don’t fret over it. We’re getting on splendid. We’ll be in those mountains in days! And from there on it’s all downhill to the sea.”
“Clark, friend.” Lewis sighed. “Sometimes, when you carry so much of my load, I … I just get so ashamed of the rank thing, it—”
“We weren’t ever going to talk about that,” Clark said in a whisper.
“The President should have done something!” Lewis’s whisper almost rose to a whimper.
“Never mind. The men don’t know, and I thankee for that. I’m perfectly happy and having the time of my life. You should be too, damn it. Get your chin out of your chest. This is no time to let your faith go limp.”
“Well, then …” Lewis corked his inkwell.
“Lights out? Are you through writing?”
“Leave it on till I go piss,” Lewis said, and went out.
Clark glanced around and started when he saw that Drouillard was awake. He looked embarrassed. “Hello, George.”
“Hello? I’ve been here all the time, Cap’n.”
“Well …”
“Sir, I would like to know what that ‘rank thing’ is about.”
“Nothing important.”
“It seems important to him. Cap’n, you said when I hired on that I’d be privy to anything affecting this voyage.”
Clark sighed. “You also said you could keep confidence?”
“You’ve never seen otherwise.”
“All right, then.” Clark leaned close, listening for Lewis’s return. “Secretary of War didn’t give me the co-captaincy Lewis promised me. Politics. Favoritism. Some folks in the capital hold grudges against my brother. They can’t forgive him for the way they’ve treated him, I reckon that was a part of it. So, anyhow, I’m just a lieutenant, not a captain. Lewis was mad, then said, ‘The hell with it, as far’s anyone’s concerned, you’re co-captain.’ And he’s stuck by that, God bless ’im. But it eats on him. Now, by God, this is between you and me and we never speak of it again, right? Because Lewis and I can serve better this way.”
“I can see that. Nobody will hear of it from me.” He added, “Cap’n.”
Drouillard pretended to be asleep when Lewis came back in. “Looks like good weather tomorrow,” Lewis said. “How’s old Seaman?”
“Snoring away in dogland. How about you? Better?”
“I guess. A good, steaming pee by starlight’s like a prayer, I suppose.”
“Am I supposed to report to Jefferson that you pray?”
The candle went out with a puff of breath. “Not really. But all those stars! They make one’s worries seem pretty small, eh? Good night, Cap’n.”
“Sleep well, Cap’n.”
Drouillard lay there thinking about the “rank thing.” He thought of all the force that was in this Lewis, and he thought of the dark spirit and the doubt that sometimes rose up around him.
But the “rank thing.” It was actually one of those matters in which deceit seemed better than the truth. The way Drouillard had been taught, one deceived only enemies. But this seemed a good thing. And when he thought of Captain Lewis saying, “The hell with it, you’re co-captain,” the man rose far up in his esteem, narrow and uppity though he sometimes was. Those jealous Sioux chiefs could have learned s
omething from these two whitemen.
Monday May 20th 1805
The Muscle Shell river falls into the Missouri 2270 miles above it’s mouth. the waters of this river is of a greenish yellow cast, much more transparent than the Missouri … about five miles above the mouth of shell river a handsome river of about fifty yards in width discharged itself into the shell river on the Stard. side: this stream we called Sah ca gah we a or bird woman’s River after our interpreter the Snake woman.
Meriwether Lewis, Journals
A Fork in the Missouri
June 2, 1805
Drouillard halted in the brush, sniffing the air, and held up his hand to warn Charbonneau, who was panting along behind him.
Charbonneau had asked to come hunting today in the hope that it would be easier than the ordeal of pulling the boats and canoes up through the rocky, muddy straits of the Missouri’s rapids. Hauling on tow ropes, on banks so mucky their moccasins were sucked off their feet, much of the time in fast, icy water as deep as their chests, through rapids that swamped the canoes and time and again nearly overset the pirogues, the men were nearly as crippled by the stony river bottom as they had been by the prickly pear thorns out on dry ground. Though these narrow bottomlands were glorious with flowering berry and currant bushes and delicate spring greenery, they were full of danger and misery: blowflies, mosquitoes, and rattlesnakes of springtime vying with rainstorms and snow squalls to torment them as they labored along. But Charbonneau was finding out that keeping up with Drouillard was not much easier. He stumbled to a halt behind him, wheezing and blowing. “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” he gasped.
“Shh!” Drouillard warned. “L’ours!” Bear. He had smelled its barnlike odor; now he could hear its throaty breath. It was that close ahead, just upwind. But he couldn’t see it yet in the foliage. He pointed back down the trail, several quick jabs of his forefinger. Charbonneau, his face gone ash-gray, needed no encouragement to retreat. But instead of slipping quietly back, he turned and bolted, crashing through the shrubbery and kicking rocks as he went.
Drouillard cocked his rifle. The bear surely heard Charbonneau’s panicky rout.
It did. Above a cluster of blooming wild rose not ten yards away, the bear’s broad, pale brown face and shoulders rose into view, ears up, listening. Immediately it dropped out of sight with a coughing grunt, and the foliage shook as it came running.
Drouillard leaped to one side and scrambled a few feet out of the bear’s path, then spun about, hoping for an instant’s clear shot at him in the open.
It tore past him at a distance of ten feet, looking as big and fast as a galloping horse. It didn’t see him, and was going down the trail after the sounds of Charbonneau’s flight. It would catch the Frenchman in moments. Drouillard yelled to warn him that the bear was coming, then ran after it.
Emerging into more open ground, he saw Charbonneau pelting along in full flight, the bear gaining on him. Charbonneau looked over his shoulder, saw his pursuer, fired his rifle straight up in the air, wasting its precious and crucial load, and sprinted toward a clump of brush with a leaning cottonwood tree in it.
Drouillard, catching up as fast as he could run, saw Charbonneau vanish into the thicket. The bear was about to go in after him.
Drouillard yelled, the war trill of his warrior ancestors. It fully captured the bear’s attention. The beast spun and stood up. It opened its great maw and roared its reply to his war cry.
This time there were no soldiers standing around with loaded rifles in reserve to riddle this bear from every direction. Charbonneau’s gun was empty and he was probably too distraught to reload it. It had to be this one load in Drouillard’s rifle, and the only shot likely to kill the bear was a perfect one in the head. He sighted on its red palate as it roared, and squeezed the trigger. Before the gunshot had echoed away down the valley and the powder smoke dispersed, he was already sprinting around to flank the bear, reloading as he ran. Then he stopped.
The grizzly had toppled and hit the ground. It moved no more.
It was ten minutes before Charbonneau, scratched all over the face by the brush, could stop shaking enough to get a load into his rifle. He kept praying in rapid French, the old familiar Black Robe prayers. Finally Drouillard interrupted and asked him why he had shot into the air.
“Je—Je ne sais pas. I—I thought the noise would scare him.”
“Eh! Next time, mon ami, don’t try to scare the bears, eh? They are already annoyed.”
* * *
They found the boats that evening at a point opposite the mouth of a major river. The camp was in a pleasant, narrow bottomland covered with cottonwoods. The captains were perplexed. The Hidatsas had not mentioned any juncture of rivers here. The next landmark the Hidatsas had told them to expect was the great falling water of the Missouri, where they would have to get out of their boats and walk a half a day to get above the falls. But now here were these two rivers coming together, one coming from the west, turbid, the other from the south and seeming too clear to be the Missouri. The evening being cloudless, the captains set up instruments to read moon and stars, and determined to send canoe parties up both streams the next day to explore them and determine which was the Missouri.
Monday June 3rd 1805
… to mistake the stream at this period of the season, and to ascend to the rocky Mountain before we could inform ourselves whether it did approach the Columbia or not, and then be obliged to return and take the other stream would not only loose us the whole of this season but would Probably so dishearten the Party that it might defeat the expedition altogether.
Meriwether Lewis, Journals
The soldiers were grateful for this day of indecision. Their feet were so bruised and mangled they could hardly bear to stand up, let alone labor on over more rough ground. Here they could sit and limp around, dressing hides to make clothes to replace the tattered remnants of their cloth uniforms, and make moccasins with double soles to deflect the prickly pear spines. They could eat to nourish their strained, exhausted muscles and get the ice-water ache out of their bones and joints.
And they could speculate and bet on the choice of rivers. They smoked and talked with Pierre Cruzatte, the expert riverman. He thought the right-hand river was the Missouri, because it looked like the same muddy water they had been on for more than a year, and the men were tending to side with him.
Drouillard, being much in the presence of the captains, found them leaning in favor of the south fork. “This is clear water,” Lewis argued. “This is water right down out of the mountains. And we’re almost in those mountains. And the Hidatsas said we’d make a heading southwest to reach the waterfalls.”
Captain Clark nodded, agreeing with those inferences, but kept wondering how the Hidatsas, as well as they knew this country, could have failed to mention a major river coming in on the starboard. “Every other landmark they told of has proven true,” he said. “I guess we won’t, can’t, be sure until we find the falls. I am almost sure they’re up this left-hand stream. And no more than seventy miles, at most.”
Drouillard sat fleshing the bear hide he had gotten yesterday, and cleaning the bear claws which would someday make a necklace, and as he worked he remembered his uncle Pierre Lorimier and how that man loved wagering. Lorimier had often said that one reason he loved the Shawnees was that they would bet on anything. After thinking on these things awhile, he scooted over to sit beside Charbonneau, who was just now cleaning the rifle he had fired into the air yesterday. Charbonneau beamed at his savior, and Bird Woman too looked up from the cradleboard she was making and smiled at him, quickly and shyly.
“Monsieur,” Drouillard began, speaking low in French, “you could do me a small favor.”
“Quelque chose!” he replied. Anything!
“Will you ask your wife if she remembers whether she came from that way,” he pointed up the right-hand river, “or that way?” He could have asked her himself in sign, but did not want to be seen talking about this by tho
se like Cruzatte and Lepage and Private Gibson, who could read a bit of signing.
“Mais oui, mon cher.” Charbonneau spoke to her in Hidatsa. She raised her head, as if sniffing the air. She looked at each river, then squinted at the sun, which was just beginning to fade behind clouds. Then she looked down the Missouri in the direction from which they had come. Then she said something to her husband, and pointed with her chin toward the south. Charbonneau said, “She was but a child then, but she feels her people were from that way, not the other.”
“Merci. Et vous, m’sieu. When you were interpreting for Capitaine Clark at the fort, about rivers and falls and mountains … do you remember much of that?”
Charbonneau tilted his head and shrugged, his yellowed teeth bared in an embarrassed grin. “Très peu. It needed all my attention just to understand and change tongues. They spoke of so many rivers. I don’t remember. But,” he added, raising a finger, “those warriors come on horse, not boat. May be they miss some rivers? Eh?”
“Peut-etre. Merci, mon vieux.”
“Pas de quoi, mon cher ami! Heh heh!”
Drouillard worked on his bear skin and thought of all that for a while. He thought of the hunting camps and war-party camps he had seen all along the way, some fresh, some old, all abandoned. They had seen not one Indian party since their encampments on the Yellow Stone River. Most of the traces along the north bank had been Assiniboine, those called Stone Eaters because they cooked by dropping heated stones in the cooking water. Lepage had remarked that the Hidatsa usually traveled south of the river to avoid such people as those, and the Blackfeet. These last few days the boats had traveled between steep stone riverbanks and white cliffs as vertical as walls and towers, but the river had turned from west to northwest, then abruptly southwest again. It made sense that warriors or hunters on horseback would continue straight west toward their destination in the mountains, and thus might never have seen this fork. That might explain why they had not told Captain Clark about it.