XV A Woman Pilot
Monday, July 15, 1805, the boats were launched above the Great Falls of the Missouri. Clark followed by land along an old Indian trail, worn deep by the lodge-poles of ages.
Little did he realise that nuggets lay scattered all over that land, where yet the gold hunters should dot the hills with shafts and mounds; that near here a beautiful city, named for Helen of Troy, should arise to become a golden capital.
“My people! My people!” Sacajawea excitedly pointed to deserted wickiups and traces of fires. She read their story at a glance.
“It was winter. They were hungry. There were no buffalo. See!” She pointed to the pines stripped of bark and the tender inner wood, the last resort of famishing Shoshones.
With flags hoisted to notify the Indians that they were friends, the canoes passed within the Gates of the Mountains, where the mighty Missouri breaks through the Belt Range of western Montana. Nothing in Alleghany lands compares with this tremendous water-gap. Through the dark cavern the river ran narrow and rapid and clear. Down through tributary canyons on either side came rifts of light, odours of pine, and the roar of waterfalls.
With unmoved countenance Sacajawea looked upon the weird overhanging grayish granite walls through which she had been hurried in terror by her Minnetaree captors, five years ago.
“We are coming to a country where the river has three forks,” said Sacajawea.
Exhilaration seized the men, as they sent the boats up the heavy current that rolled well-deep below. That night they camped in a canyon that is to-day a pleasure resort for the people of Helena.
Again following the Indian trail, on the 25th of July Clark arrived at the three forks of the Missouri, near the present site of Gallatin. From the forks of the far eastern rivers where Pittsburg rises, they had come to the forks of the great river of the West.
For days the swift current had required the utmost exertion. The men complained of fatigue and excessive heat.
“You push a tolerable good pole,” said the Kentuckians, when Lewis took a hand.
Captain Clark was worn out. With the thermometer at ninety, for days he had pushed ahead, determined to find the Shoshones.
“Let us rest a day or two,” said Captain Lewis. “Here, boys, build a bower for Captain Clark. I’ll take a tramp myself in a few days to find these yellow gentlemen if possible.”
Camping at the three forks, every man became a leather dresser and tailor, fixing up his buckskin clothes. Leggings and moccasins had been sliced to pieces by the prickly pear.
“What a spot for a trading post!” the Captains agreed.
“Look,” said Lewis, “see the rushes in the bottom, high as a man’s breast and thick as wheat. This will be much in favour of an establishment here,—the cane is one of the best winter pastures for cows and horses.”
From the heights at the three forks, Lewis and Clark looked out upon valleys of perennial green. Birds of beautiful plumage and thrilling song appeared on every hand. Beaver, otter, muskrat, sported in this trapper’s paradise. Buffalo-clover, sunflowers and wild rye, buffalo-peas and buffalo-beans blossomed everywhere.
All the Indian trails in the country seemed to converge at this point. Here passed the deadly Blackfoot on his raids against the Shoshones, the Bannocks, and the Crows. Here stole back and forth the timid Shoshone to his annual hunt on the Yellowstone and the Snake River plains. Hither from time immemorial had the Flatheads and Nez Percés resorted for their supplies of robes and meat. Even from the far Saskatchewan came the Piegans and Gros Ventres to this favoured and disputed spot.
The Blackfeet claimed the three forks of the Missouri, no tribe dwelt there permanently. The roads were deep, like trenches, worn by the trailing lodgepoles of many tribes upon this common hunting ground.
The naming of the rivers,—that was an epic by itself.
The gay Cabinet ladies who had fitted him out at Washington flitted through the mind of Meriwether Lewis,—Maria Jefferson, companion of his earliest recollection, Dolly Madison, whose interest never failed in his adventures, Mrs. Gallatin, the queenly dark-haired wife of the scholarly Secretary of the Treasury. With what pleasure had they gathered at the White House to fashion “housewives,” full of pins and needles and skeins of thread, for these wanderers of the West. Not a man in the party but bore some souvenir of their thoughtful handiwork.
Clark’s earliest memory was of Jefferson, the friend of his father, of his older brothers, and then of himself. “Jimmy” Madison and George Rogers Clark had been schoolmates in the “old field school” of Donald Robertson.
So then and there the Captains agreed that three great statesmen and their wives should be commemorated here by the Madison, the Jefferson, and the Gallatin forks of the Missouri.
“On this very spot my people camped five years ago. Here were their tents,” said Sacajawea, pointing out the embers of blackened fires. “The Minnetarees peered over the hills. We ran up this fork and hid in the thick woods.”
The boats were reloaded and the party began to ascend the Jefferson on July 30, to its head in the Bitter Root Mountains. At noon they camped for dinner.
“And here was I captured!” cried Sacajawea. “I was made a prisoner. We were too few to fight the Minnetarees. They pursued us. Our men mounted their horses and fled to the mountains. The women and children hid. I ran. I was crossing this river. They caught me and carried me away.”
What a realistic glimpse of daily terror! Fighting, hunting, wandering, famishing, in the land of anarchy. Formerly the Shoshones were Indians of the plains. Now they had been driven by their enemies into almost inaccessible fastnesses.
“The Beaver Head! The Beaver Head!”
Sacajawea pointed to a steep, rocky cliff shaped like a beaver’s head, one hundred and fifty feet above the water, an Indian landmark from time immemorial.
“This is not far from the summer retreat of my countrymen. We shall meet them soon, on a river beyond the mountains running to the west.”
“We must meet those Indians,” said Lewis, “it is our only hope for horses to cross the mountains.”
Lewis and Clark camped August 7, 1805, at Beaverhead Rock. There, fifty-seven years later, chased by bears, robbed by Indians, unsheltered, unshod, and almost starving, the gold hunter stumbled upon the auriferous bed of an ancient river that made Montana. Gold was discovered at Alder Gulch in 1863, ten miles south of Beaverhead Rock, and the next year mining began in the streets of the present city of Helena. The pick and the shovel in the miner’s hand became the lamp and the ring in the grasp of Aladdin.
The next morning after passing Beaverhead Rock, Captain Lewis and three of the men slung their knapsacks over their shoulders and set out for the mountains, determined not to return until they met some nation of Indians.
Two days later, August 11, Lewis with his spyglass espied a lone horseman on the hills. The wild-eyed Shoshone, accustomed to scan the horizon, saw him also.
“He is of a different nation from any we have met,” remarked Lewis, watching intently through his glass. “He has a bow and a quiver of arrows, and an elegant horse without a saddle.”
Like a lookout on the hills, the Indian stood and waited.
“He is undoubtedly a Shoshone. Much of our success depends on the friendly offices of that nation.”
Slowly Lewis advanced. Slowly the Indian came forward, until, within a mile of each other the Indian suddenly stopped. Captain Lewis also stopped, and drawing a three-point blanket from his knapsack held it by the corners above his head, and unfolding brought it to the ground as in the act of spreading. Three times he repeated the Indian signal of hospitality—“Come and sit on the robe with me.”
Still the Indian kept his position, viewing with an air of suspicion the hunters with Lewis.
“Tabba bone, tabba bone,” said Lewis, stripping up the sleeve of his shirt to show the colour of his skin,—“white man, white man,” a term learned of Sacajawea.
Paralysed the Indian looked, then fled like a frightened deer. No calls could bring him back.
He said to his people, “I have seen men with faces pale as ashes, who are makers of thunder and lightning.”
“He is a dreamer!” exclaimed the incredulous Shoshones. “He makes up tales. He must show us these white men or be put to death,” and trembling he started back with a body of warriors.
Lewis, disappointed at the flight of the Shoshone, pressed on. Narrower and narrower grew the river.
“Thank God, I have lived to bestride the Missouri!” exclaimed Hugh McNeil, planting a foot on either side of the mountain rivulet.
Two miles farther up they drank from the ice-cold spring at the river’s source, and stood on the summit of the Great Divide. A little creek flowed down the ridge toward the west. Stooping, they drank,—of the waters of the Columbia, and slept that night in Idaho. The next morning, following a well-worn Indian trail, Lewis came upon two women and a child. One fled, the other, an old dame encumbered by the child, sat down and bowed her head as if expecting instant death.
Captain Lewis advanced, lifted her, loaded her with gifts.
“Tabba bone, tabba bone.” Stripping up his sleeve he showed to the amazed woman the first white skin she had ever seen.
“Call your companion,” motioned Lewis toward the fleeing woman.
The old dame raised her voice. As fast as she ran away the young woman came running back, almost out of breath. She, too, was loaded with trinkets, and the cheeks of all were painted with vermilion, the Shoshone emblem of peace.
Without fear now she led him toward sixty mounted warriors, who were advancing at a gallop as to battle.
“Tabba bone! tabba bone!” explained the women, introducing the stranger and exhibiting their gifts.
“Ah hi e! Ah hi e!”—“I am much pleased! I am much pleased!” exclaimed the warriors, leaping from their horses and embracing Lewis with great cordiality.
Lewis drew forth his imposing calumet of red pipestone and lighted it. This was a sign language of all tribes.
Putting off their moccasins as if to say, “May I walk the forest barefoot forever if I break this pledge of friendship,” they sat down and smoked.
The chief, too, brought out a pipe, of the dense transparent green stone of the Bannock Mountains, highly polished. Another led him to a lodge and presented a piece of salmon,—then Lewis no longer doubted that he was on waters flowing to the Pacific.
Slowly, Clark, ill with chills and fever, had been coming forward, urging the canoes up the difficult and narrowing stream.
Sacajawea, the little Bird-woman, could not wait. In her anxiety she begged to walk ahead along shore, and with her husband went dancing up the rivulet of her childhood. She flew ahead. She turned, pirouetting lightly on her beaded moccasins, waving her arms and kissing her fingers. Her long hair flew in the wind and her beaded necklace sparkled.
Yes, there were the Indians, and Lewis among them, dressed like an Indian too. The white men had given everything they had to the Indians, even their cocked hats and red feathers, and taken Indian clothes in exchange, robes of the mountain sheep and goat.
An Indian girl leaned to look at Sacajawea. They flew into each other’s arms. They had been children together, had been captured in the same battle, had shared the same captivity. One had escaped to her own people; the other had been sold as a slave in the Land of the Dakotahs. As girls will, with arms around each other they wandered off and talked and talked of the wonderful fortune that had come to Sacajawea, the wife of a white man.
A council was immediately called. The Shoshones spread white robes and hung wampum shells of pearl in the hair of the white men.
“Sacajawea. Bring her hither,” called Lewis.
Tripping lightly into the willow lodge, Sacajawea was beginning to interpret, when lifting her eyes to the chief, she recognised her own brother, Cameahwait. She ran to his side, threw her blanket over his head, and wept upon his bosom.
Sacajawea, too, was a Princess, come home now to her Mountain Kingdom.