X The First Dakota Christmas
On Christmas eve the stockade was finished and the gate was shut. With forty-five men and a blunderbuss Fort Mandan stood impregnable to any force the northern savages could bring against it.
But there was no hostility,—far from it. From curiosity or for trade the Indians came in throngs, until on Christmas eve Captain Lewis sent out the announcement: “Let no one visit us to-morrow. It is our great medicine day.”
Before daylight the wondering redmen were aroused from their buffalo couches by three volleys fired from the fort. Awe-struck they sat up and whispered: “White men making medicine.” At sunrise a flag was floating above the palisade, but no Indian ventured to approach the mysterious newly closed walls of Fort Mandan.
For his Christmas stocking every man received an allowance of flour, dried apples, and pepper, which together with corn, beans, squash, and unlimited buffalo meat and marrow bones made out a Christmas feast.
At one o’clock the gun was fired for dinner. At two came the signal for the dance.
“Play up ole fashion reel. Everybody he mus’ dance,” said Cruzatte, tuning his fiddle. “We’ll do our possible.”
Cruzatte and Gibson played, Gass and Shannon led, Clark called the changes; and with crackling fires, and a stamping like horses, away up there under the Northern stars the first American Christmas was celebrated on the upper Missouri.
Three wide-eyed spectators sat ranged around the walls. These were the squaws of the interpreters, Madame René Jussaume, and the two wives of Charboneau, Madame the old dame, and Sacajawea, the beautiful Indian captive stolen beyond the Rockies.
The Indians, in their cheerless winter villages, found much to attract them at the fort of the white men. Soon after Christmas, William Bratton and John Shields set up their forge as blacksmiths, gunsmiths, and armourers. Day after day, with the thermometer forty degrees below zero, a constant procession of Indians came wending in on the well-beaten snow-track, with axes to grind and kettles to mend. It seemed as if all the broken old kettles that had ever drifted into the country, from Hudson’s Bay or Fort William or up from St. Louis, were carried to Fort Mandan filled with corn to pay for mending.
Especially the Indians wanted battle-axes, with long thin blades like the halberds of ancient warfare. Some wanted pikes and spears fixed on the pointed ends of their long dog-poles. A burnt-out old sheet-iron cooking stove became worth its weight in gold. For every scrap of it, four inches square, the Indians would give seven or eight gallons of corn, and were delighted with the exchange. These bits of square sheet iron were invaluable for scrapers for hides, and every shred of cutting that fell to the ground was eagerly bought up to fashion into arrow tips. Metal, metal, metal,—the sine qua non of civilisation had come at last to the Mandans.
While Bratton was busy over his forge, and Shields at the guns, some of the men were out hunting, some were cutting wood to keep the great fires roaring, and some were making charcoal for the smithy.
So the days went on. New Year’s, 1805, was ushered in with the blunderbuss. By way of recreation the captains permitted the men to visit the Indian villages where crowds gathered to see the white men dance, “heeling it and toeing it” to the music of the fiddles. The white men in turn were equally diverted by the grotesque figures of the Indians leaping in the buffalo dances.
Captain Clark noted an old man in one of the Mandan villages and gave him a knife.
“How old are you?”
“More than one hundred winters,” was the answer. “Give me something for the pain in my back.”
But a grandson rebuked the old man. “It isn’t worth while. You have lived long enough. It is time for you to go to your relations who can take better care of you than we can.”
The old man settled back in his robes by the fire and said no more.
“What accident has happened to your hand?” inquired Lewis of a chief’s son.
“Grief for my relatives,” answered the boy.
It was a Mandan custom to mutilate the body, as a mark of sorrow for the dead, until some had lost not only all their fingers, but their ears and hair. Sacred ceremonies of flagellations, knife thrusts into the flesh, piercing with thorns and barbaric crucifixions,—thirty years later George Catlin found these still among the Mandans, and ascribed them to an effort to perpetuate some Christian ceremonial of a remote ancestry.
Could it have been a corrupted tradition of the crucifixion of Christ? Who can tell? The Welsh of 1170 were Catholic Christians who believed in self-inflicted penance to save the soul. Degraded, misguided, interblent with Indian superstition through generations, it might have come to this.
But everywhere, at feast or council, one walked as conqueror,—Clark’s negro servant, York. Of fine physical presence and remarkable stature, very black and very woolly, York was viewed as superhuman.
“Where you come from?” whispered the awe-struck savages.
Grinning until every ivory tooth glistened, and rolling up the whites of his eyes, he would answer, “I was running wild in the wood, and was caught and tamed by my mastah.” Then assuming an air of ferocity, York would exhibit feats of strength that to the Indians seemed really terrible.
“If you kill white men we make you chief,” the Arikaras whispered in his ear. York withstood great temptation,—he fought more battles than Clark.
“Delay! delay! delay!” was the Indian plea at every village. “Let our wives see you. Let our children see, especially the black man.”
From Council Bluffs to Clatsop, children followed York constantly. If he chanced to turn, with piercing shrieks they ran in terror.
“Mighty warrior. Born black. Great medicine!” sagely commented the wise old men, watching him narrowly and shaking their heads at the unheard-of phenomenon. Even his jerks, contortions, and grimaces seemed a natural part of such a monstrosity. York was a perpetual exhibit, a menagerie in himself.
In these holiday visits to the Mandan towns a glimpse was caught of domestic life. Wasteful profusion when the buffalo came, when the buffalo left, days of famine. Then they opened their cellar-holes of corn and vegetables, hidden away as a last resource in protracted siege when the Sioux drove off the game and shut them up in their picketed villages.
So often were the horses of the Mandans stolen, that it had become a habitual custom every night to take them into the family lodge where they were fed on boughs and bark of the cottonwood. All day long in the iciest weather, the wrinkled, prematurely aged squaws were busy in the hollows, cutting the horse-feed with their dull and almost useless knives. On New Year’s day Black Cat came down with a load of meat on his wife’s back. A happy woman was she to receive a sharp new knife to cut her meat and cottonwood.
It was easy to buy a Mandan wife. A horse, a gun, powder and ball for a year, five or six pounds of beads, a handful of awls, the trade was made, and the new spouse was set to digging laboriously with the shoulder-blade of an elk or buffalo, preparing to plant her corn.
The Indian woman followed up the hunt, skinned and dressed the buffalo, and carried home the meat. Indian women built the lodges and took them down again, dragging the poles whenever there were not horses enough for a summer ramble.
When not at the hunt or the council, the warrior sat cross-legged at his door, carving a bow, pointing an arrow, or smoking, waited upon by his squaw, who never ate until the braves were done, and then came in at the last with the children and the dogs. Wrinkled and old at thirty, such was the fate of the Indian girl.
Sunday, January 13, Charboneau came back from a visit to the Minnetarees at Turtle Mountain with his face frozen. It was fortunate he returned with his life. Many a Frenchman was slain on that road, many an imprecation went up against the Assiniboine Sioux,—“Les Gens des Grands Diables du Nord,” said Charboneau.
Touissant Charboneau, one of the old Canadian French Charboneaus, with his brothers had tramped with Alexander Henry far to the north under sub-arctic forests, wintered on the Assiniboine, and paddled to Winnipeg. Seven years now he had lived among the Minnetarees, an independent trader like McCracken and Jussaume, and interpreter for other traders.
Moreover, Charboneau was a polygamist with several wives to cook his food and carry his wood and water. But he had been kind to the captive Indian girl, and her heart clung to the easy-going Frenchman as her best friend. The worst white man was better than an Indian husband.
Captured in battle as a child five years before, Sacajawea had been brought to the land of the Dakotas and sold to Charboneau. Now barely sixteen, in that February at the Mandan fort she became a mother. Most of the men were away on a great hunting trip; when they came back a lusty little red-faced pappoose was screaming beside the kitchen fire.
The men had walked thirty miles that day on the ice and in snow to their knees, but utterly fatigued as they were, the sight of that little Indian baby cuddled in a deerskin robe brought back memories of home.
Clark came in with frosty beard, and moccasins all worn out.
“Sacajawea has a fine boy,” said Lewis.
No wonder the Captains watched her recovery with interest. All winter they had sought an interpreter for those far-away tongues beyond the mountains, and no one could be found but Sacajawea, the wife of Charboneau. Clark directed York to wait on her, stew her fruit, and serve her tea, to the great jealousy of Jussaume’s wife, who packed up her pappooses in high dudgeon and left the fort. Sacajawea was only a slave. She, Madame Jussaume, was the daughter of a chief!
Poor little Sacajawea! She was really very ill. If she died who would unlock the Gates of the Mountains?
Charboneau was a cook. He set himself to preparing the daintiest soups and steaks, and soon the “Bird Woman” was herself again, packing and planning for the journey.
Busy every day now were Lewis and Clark making up their reports and drawing a map of the country. Shahaka, Big White, came and helped them. Kagohami of the Minnetarees came, and with a coal on a robe made a sketch of the Missouri that Clark re-drew.
But in the midst of the map-making all the Indian talk was of “war, war, war.”
“I am going to war against the Snakes in the Spring,” said Kagohami.
“No,” said Lewis, “that will displease the President. He wants you to live at peace.”
“Suffer me to go to war against the Sioux,” begged another chief.
“No,” answered Lewis. “These wars are the cause of all your troubles. If you do not stop it the Great Father will withdraw his protection from you. He will come over here and make you stop it.”
“Look on the many nations whom war has destroyed,” continued Lewis. “Think of your poverty and misfortunes. If you wish to be happy, cultivate peace and friendship. Then you will have horses. Then you will grow strong.”
“Have you spoken thus to all the tribes?” inquired Kagohami.
“We have.”
“And did they open their ears?”
“They did.”
“I have horses enough,” reflected Kagohami, “I will not go to war. I will advise my nation to remain at home until we see whether the Snake Indians desire peace.”
One night the hunters came in with the report, “A troop of whooping Sioux have captured our horses and taken our knives.”
It was midnight, but Lewis immediately routed up the men and set out with twenty volunteers on the track of the marauding Sioux. In vain. The boasting freebooters had escaped with the horses beyond recovery.
“We are sorry we did not kill the white men,” was the word sent back by an Arikara. “They are bad medicine. We shall scalp the whole camp in the Spring.”