For a year he had heard the captains speak of the western mountains as if they were a single range, to be easily crossed by going up one side and down the other. But here lay before them an endless maze of obstacles. Any one of those peaks was higher and steeper than anything they had yet climbed. And there were scores of them ahead.
This was the most beautiful and magnificent sight Drouillard had ever beheld, greater even than his eagle dreams.
It was not good. The captain now must speak of turning back.
But when Lewis at last spoke, he said, “Let’s head on. We really do have to find some horses.”
Drouillard took the women to be a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter. They were digging and talking, and had gathering baskets and root-digging sticks of the kind Bird Woman used.
They would flee like the pronghorn if they saw the whitemen at a distance, so Drouillard led the soldiers close in the defilade of a long ravine.
When the three saw the soldiers rise a few yards away, they looked like startled rabbits, but only the young woman ran, leaving her basket and stick. The old woman and the young girl stood stunned. Captain Lewis laid his gun on the ground and turned up his sleeve to show his white skin, saying “Tab-ba-bone! Tab-ba-bone,” trying to tell them he was a whiteman. Drouillard raised his right-hand palm forward, with the forefinger and middle finger pointing up, believing that “friend,” would be more reassuring than something as alien as “whiteman.” As the soldiers approached, the woman and girl sat on the ground with their heads down, apparently awaiting inevitable death or capture.
Captain Lewis took their hands, opened them, and put in gifts: awls and small pewter looking glasses. When they looked up, confused and still wary, the captain smiled at them and said, “Drouillard, tell this old one to call the woman back. Don’t want her to go and alarm the people to run off! We’ve got some in hand at last!”
Drouillard knelt before her and signed, Call woman back. Friends. He could see the young woman lurking in the distance, almost out of sight, still as a deer. The old woman’s eyes were red-rimmed, deep in wrinkled sockets, and suspicious. He signed again, adding, Bring good. She looked intently in his eyes, and he saw trust take hold. She was small and scrawny, but when she turned and called, her voice was strong as a bugle.
Slowly, the distant woman emerged into view and came back, looking as if she would dart off at any minute. Drouillard smelled horse and had the feeling that someone else was out there watching, but could see no one.
When she came up, Captain Lewis made soothing noises, and with his thumb he dipped into a little packet of vermilion powder and put red marks on their cheeks that meant Peace. The women and girl had been trembling, but now they were surreptitiously admiring the little gifts in their hands and talking rapidly and softly to each other. In their voices was the lilt of relief and deliverance. McNeal and Shields were already making admiring eyes at the young woman, and she was aware of them and not displeased. Though the soldiers must have seemed very strange to someone who had never seen bearded faces, they might have appeared splendid. They were tall and lean, with sun-bleached whiskers, sun-browned faces, and bold blue eyes.
“Tell them we wish to go to their camp and meet their chiefs and warriors,” the captain said.
Soon, then, the three women were leading them down alongside a small, clear river on the worn footpath. Captain Lewis kept up cheerful banter with his men in hopes that his tone of voice would reassure the women. Drouillard knew that Lewis must be as nervous as the women. Captain Clark and all the men, canoes, and gear were on the other side of the continental divide, anywhere from fifty to a hundred miles back, utterly out of communication for nearly four days, except for a note Lewis had left on a willow pole two days earlier at a fork in the stream, telling Clark to halt the boats there and wait for further word. As narrow and shallow as the streams had become, the boats might not even have reached that note yet. It might not even be there anymore; a similar message pole several days ago had been cut down by a beaver, causing the scouts and the main party to diverge at a lower fork and lose each other for a day. There was getting to be too much chance and remoteness as this desperate search for the Shoshones continued. The western mountains were daunting; time was running out.
And geese were already flying south.
“It’ll be up to you, Drouillard,” Lewis said as they hiked along with the cheerful but nervous women. “I expected we’d have Charbonneau’s wife to translate when we found ’em. But she’s clear over on the Missouri watershed, and God knows when we’ll get her here. I sure hope they use the same gesture talk on this side of—”
“We find out now,” Drouillard said. “Here they come.”
Drouillard had been noticing that the women were becoming more animated, and then he heard hoofbeats. Now he pointed ahead. Dust was drifting above a rise, then a great body of horsemen came into view over the crest: more and more, bristling with long lances and painted shields. By now the riders had seen the soldiers and whipped up their horses, coming at full gallop; there seemed to be sixty or seventy of them.
“Ooooh, my God,” Shields groaned.
“Been nice knowin’ ye, gents,” McNeal murmured, starting to raise his rifle even though the odds were hopeless.
Lewis said: “Drouillard, send the old woman to inform ’em we’re peaceable. Don’t let the young ones go; they’re hostage if we need ’em. McNeal, get the flag out of your pack and give it to me. Quick! Look, they’re reining in!”
The horsemen had stopped a hundred yards distant. When they saw the old woman coming, three riders separated out and came forward at a trot. Lewis said, “Ease down your guns. Don’t even look hostile!” He slid the ramrod out of his rifle, shrugged his knapsack off onto the ground, and laid his rifle on top of it. Quickly he tied the little flag on the ramrod and said, “Stay back. I’m going up there. If anything happens to me, try to get back to Cap’n Clark. You’ve got range on their weapons and you’ve got their females; you might make it. Here I go.” He paced out with the little flag high over one shoulder and the other hand held up in the peace gesture. He was five paces forward when the young woman and the girl, not being restrained, suddenly ran past him toward the warriors. He muttered “Damn you!” but continued forward. The three women were talking excitedly to the horsemen and showing them their gifts.
The three riders dismounted. With immense relief, Drouillard watched the Indian leader put his left arm over Captain Lewis’s right shoulder and press his cheek against the captain’s, saying, “A hi ee! A hi ee,” an utterance he had heard often enough from Bird Woman to know it meant “Thank you,” or “I am pleased.” Then the other two embraced Lewis, making the same sounds, and soon all the other riders had come up and dismounted to get in on the hugging. The captain called his men forward to join in. Drouillard thought he would burst with gratitude and kindly feelings as all these beautifully decorated warriors, smelling of grease, wood smoke, and horse sweat, milled about, greeting these strangers with such open delight. This was good, this was how people could be when they were not afraid of others. This was a greeting of joy that made him remember the Missouria youth named Hospitality, a year ago. The three women were happy with all this; they stood flexing their knees and patting their palms.
“Drouillard,” said Lewis, whose cheeks and shoulders were by now thoroughly smeared with grease and face paint, “I’m anxious to talk with these people about us and what we need.”
So Drouillard slipped off his knapsack and got out the pipe. Soon all the Shoshone warriors, except a few boys left tending the horses, were seated in a circle, with the captain and his men in the center. The Indians had taken off their moccasins. Drouillard explained: “It means they will go barefoot if they don’t keep their word, whatever we say here.”
“Oohoo! Pretty serious pledge, considering the prickly pear!” McNeal exclaimed.
It was hot in the afternoon sun on this scrabbly slope, and the passing of the pipe took a lon
g time. Drouillard had to remind the captain not to let his impatience show. “The pipe’s not just a preliminary, sir. It’s the main thing. The rest’s just details.”
“All right. Thankee. Now I take it the long-face with short hair’s their chief?”
Drouillard began signing, and watching the replies. Fortunately, their signs varied little from the plains peoples’, and the understanding would not be difficult.
The chief gave his name as Cameahwait, meaning He Does Not Walk. He said his men had come out so aggressively because they expected enemies; lately they had been raided by enemies with guns and had lost some horses and lodges, and that the men with hair cut short were in mourning for lost relatives.
“I’m going to give them some beads and vermilion,” Captain Lewis said. “Then tell them we want to go to their camp because we have much to explain and to ask them. That a council should be held nearer to water than this, because it will take a long while.”
Drouillard told them all that with signs, and it seemed to go well enough with them. They accepted the token gifts very gracefully, got up and put on their moccasins. “Now I’ll give this Cameahwait our flag,” Lewis said. “Tell him it is an emblem of peace, and bonds us to him in a union, sort of like taking off your moccasins.”
These Shoshone were rich in horses and hospitality but poor in almost everything else. The destructive raid of the Atsinas had left the band with only one skin tepee lodge. All their family shelters and their council house were cleverly made but crude tepees and huts of willow brush. There seemed to be only three firearms in the whole band, cheap smoothbores of the sort the English traders sold to the Missouri tribes.
The Shoshone camp was in a fertile, level bottom on the east bank of a clear, wide, shallow river, quick-flowing north over many-colored round stones and gravel. It was a beautiful place in the shadow of the mountain range. Captain Lewis seemed gaunt and exhausted but his eyes glowed when he looked out and saw the horse herds.
Cameahwait had prepared seats for the whitemen, green boughs covered with antelope skins, in the brush council house. The chief and his people were excited and fascinated. They had never seen whitemen, and these had suddenly appeared in their land like spirits. The chief told Drouillard by hand language that the people wondered if they were children of the Great Spirit. Everybody had crowded around the council lodge to look at them. Drouillard understood that he was himself an object of curiosity, a real person traveling with these pale ones and speaking for them, but Cameahwait was too civilized to ask him a personal question about that. Instead he asked Drouillard to request that the pale men now be barefoot so that their sincerity could be assured. After that was done, the Shoshones could scarcely keep their eyes off the visitors’ bare feet, which were even whiter than their sun-weathered faces and hands, and showed much sign of abuse: bloody punctures from the prickly pears, bruises, and red-rimmed toenails.
A strange thing about this camp-village was that there was no smell of cooking, usually the most pervasive and compelling stimulus in any Indian town. Drouillard was particularly aware of that absence because he and the soldiers had eaten nothing since the previous evening. Feeding guests was usually the first act of hospitality. He could tell by the gaunt look of all these people that the reason they offered no food was that they had none. This was a bleak and terrible realization, and his urge as a hunter was to borrow horses from these people, go out in the remaining daylight and get meat for everybody. No one was supposed to go hungry when George Drouillard was present.
But the pressing matter for Captain Lewis was not eating but talking, and Drouillard was the only one who could make that happen. Therefore the chief began a long and meticulous pipe ceremony which would enable everyone to speak well and truthfully.
To the sound of burbling and groaning stomachs, Drouillard put his talking hands to work, to explain that whole complex story of the Great White Father Jefferson and what he wanted, and the part these Shoshones of the western slope would be expected to perform in it. He passed on the usual promises, about the guns and goods the Shoshones might expect to get if they were good and true and helpful.
But he did not translate the threats, the threats about how they would be left out of the prosperity and how they would be punished by countless soldiers if they didn’t cooperate. The captain spoke to them in his usual veiled and diplomatic way, but Drouillard didn’t translate this because he knew the captain had taken off his moccasins and smoked the pipe, and thus must not lie. But Lewis could not tell these people of the western slope that the White Father in the East was their new father whom they must obey, because he knew that Jefferson had purchased the country only as far as the dividing ridge, and these people were beyond that. Any help they chose to give they could give of their own free will, in response to promises.
They did not have to do anything, which was the way it always should be, and Drouillard felt good about it. His people, the Shawnees back on the far side of the continent, had expended their lives for generations in refusing to obey orders the whitemen had had no right to give them.
It was dusk by the time Captain Lewis got around to explaining what help he needed immediately from the Shoshones. He had Drouillard describe the main party coming up the other side with canoes full of goods, with the other soldier chief in charge. He told of their need for Shoshone horses and for people to help them bring all the goods across the ridge. All this was fairly easy to tell. Although most of these mountain people had seldom seen canoes or boats, they knew about them and understood what Drouillard was saying.
He was an excellent sign talker in the same way he was an excellent hunter: he could see and sense more than just the apparent. Now he was seeing and sensing that some of the Shoshones were growing fearful and suspicious. He saw little side glances and squints in the eyes of even the agreeable Cameahwait. He saw warriors on the outer circle of the council stiffening, leaning to whisper to each other, and he saw fear replacing curiosity in the faces of the women and children who were crowding the periphery of the lodge to watch the whitemen. Cameahwait changed the subject to say that his people had just been getting ready to cross the divide and descend into the plains to hunt buffalo, and that they needed to do this soon or they would starve here in the mountains when winter came. They had to rendezvous with their friends the Flatheads very soon to go down in strength for the buffalo hunt.
All this carrying for the whitemen, the chief suggested, might delay their crucial hunt too long. The winter was hard in these mountains. There were pronghorns and a few deer here now, but they were so swift that even hunters on good horses could not catch them except by surrounding them and running them to exhaustion. And with cold weather, the hoofed ones would be going away, down to the good grazing. Drouillard saw that this was a genuine concern of the chief, but he sensed there was more to it.
He translated those statements to Lewis and saw the captain beginning to puff himself up for a demanding argument, so he added: “Cap’n, the real trouble is, they don’t trust us. Asking them to follow us out of their haven here has got some of ’em nervous. If I were these people, I’d be wondering who we’ve got coming up the other side: enemies waiting there for you and me to trick ’em out? Hidatsas? Blackfeet? They’ve already been hurt by the Atsinas. Don’t get mad, Cap’n, but I think we’re worrying ’em and I think that’s why.”
Lewis clenched his jaw and thought. He said, “Tell them that if they help us, the United States will bring them trade and good guns so they won’t even have to hide here from their enemies. That they could go out and live where the buffalo are. And while they’re thinking that over, tell them that we haven’t eaten for more than twenty-four hours.”
“I’ll tell them that, sir. From the looks of ’em, they might reply that they haven’t eaten for a week. I think we’d do ourselves and them the most good by killing them some meat tomorrow.”
Lewis nodded. “That would be good. And impress on them what American rifles can do, while
you’re at it.”
This was the most exciting but least effective hunting he had ever done.
He rode at a headlong gallop through the short vegetation of the valley, a Shoshone horseman far off to his right and several to his left, chasing a small herd of pronghorn that the horses could not possibly overtake. White rumps, reddish backs, bounding and flashing ahead, the antelopes diminished rapidly in the distance. It was like chasing birds.
Far down the valley, two miles beyond the fleeing herd, a line of Shoshones on fresh horses would gallop out and turn the herd of pronghorns in another direction, toward another waiting line of horsemen on rested mounts. Drouillard and his fellow hunters now veered off toward a knoll where boys were awaiting them with fresh horses. This was the third horse Drouillard had ridden to exhaustion so far. Almost all the riders who had come out to meet them yesterday were here on the plain surrounding the fleeing antelope, chasing them five miles one way, then six another, in hopes of eventually wearing them down enough to be able to ride within bow shot. Thus far he could see no hope even of getting within long rifle shot of one. Private Shields was with another group of Shoshone riders elsewhere in the valley. The chase had been in progress for more than two hours, usually in sight of the Shoshone town, but not one antelope had succumbed yet. This morning Captain Lewis had requested horses to allow his best hunters to go hunting. But the Shoshones, reluctant to let them ride out of sight, had joined them, and, seeing this herd, had drawn them into this thrilling but futile pursuit, which seemed more like a racing sport than a way to feed the hungry people. The white visitors, and the whole band of Shoshones as well, had gone to bed last night with nothing more to eat than cakes of dried berries and a bite or two of leathery dried salmon. The Shoshones had honored their visitors with a dance until late. The captain had declined, saying he was too tired to do anything but write a few notes by firelight and then go to sleep in his mosquito net. The soldiers, professing to be too hungry to sleep, had stayed up watching the Shoshones do their circle dances and showing them some of their own high steps—as well as they could without benefit of fiddle music.