XIX A Whale Ashore
“A whale! a whale ashore!”
When Chief Coboway brought word there was great excitement at Fort Clatsop. Everybody wanted to see the whale, but few could go. Captain Clark appointed twelve men to be ready at daylight.
Sacajawea, in the privacy of her own room that Sunday evening, spoke to Charboneau. Now Charboneau wanted her to stay and attend to the “l’Apalois”—roasting meats on a stick,—and knowing that the child would have to be looked after, slipped over to the Captains, discussing by the fire.
“Sacajawea t’ink she want to see de whale. She ought not go.”
“Very well,” answered the Captains, scarce heeding. “She better stay at the fort. It would be a hard jaunt for a woman to go over Tillamook Head.”
Charboneau went back. “De Captinne say you cannot go!”
This was a staggering blow to Sacajawea, but her woman’s determination had become aroused and she took the rostrum, so to speak. Leaving the baby Touissant with his father, she in turn slipped over to the Captains.
Sacajawea was a born linguist. “Captinne, you remember w’en we reach de rivers and you knew not which to follow? I show de country an’ point de stream. Again w’en my husband could not spik, I spik for you.
“Now, Captinne, I travel great way to see de Beeg Water. I climb de mountain an’ help de boat on de rapide. An’ now dis monstous fish haf come”—Sacajawea could scarce restrain her tears. Sacajawea was only a woman, and a brave little woman at that.
Captain Lewis was moved. “Sacajawea, you are one of those who are born not to die. Of course you can go. Go and be getting ready, and,” he added, “if Charboneau wants to go too, he will have to carry the baby!”
They breakfasted by candle-light. Everybody was ready next morning, but Sacajawea was ahead of them all. Charboneau looked at her out of the corner of his eye, but said nothing. More than once the Captains had reminded him of his duty.
The sun rose clear and cloudless on a land of springtime, and yet it was only January. Robins sang around the stockade, bluebirds whizzed by, silver in the sunlight. Two canoes proceeded down the Netul into Meriwether Bay, on the way to the Clatsop town.
After a day’s adventure, they camped near a herd of elk in the beautiful moonlight. At noon, next day, they reached the salt-makers. Here Jo Fields, Bratton, and Gibson had their brass kettles under a rock arch, boiling and boiling seawater into a gallon of salt a day.
Hiring Twiltch, a young Indian, for guide, they climbed Tillamook Head, about thirty miles south of Cape Disappointment. Upon this promontory, Clark’s Point of View, they paused before the boisterous Pacific, breaking with fury and flinging its waves above the Rock of Tillamook.
On one side the blue Columbia widened into bays studded with Chinook and Clatsop villages; on the other stretched rich prairies, enlivened by beautiful streams and lakes at the foot of the hills. Behind, in serried rank, the Douglas spruce—“the tree of Turner’s dreams,” the king of conifers,—stood monarch of the hills. Two hundred, three hundred feet in air they towered, a hundred feet without a limb, so dense that not a ray of sun could reach the ground beneath.
Sacajawea, save Pocahontas the most travelled Indian Princess in our history, spoke not a word, but looked with calm and shining eye upon the fruition of her hopes. Now she could go back to the Mandan towns and speak of things that Madame Jussaume had never seen, and of the Big Water beyond the Shining Mountains.
Down the steep and ragged rocks that overhung the sea, they clambered to a Tillamook village, where lay the great whale, stranded on the shore. Nothing was left but a skeleton, for from every Indian village within travelling distance, men and women were working like bees upon the huge carcass. Then home they went, trailing over the mountains, every squaw with a load of whale blubber on her back, to be for many a month the dainty of an Indian lodge.
These Indian lodges or houses were a source of great interest to Lewis and Clark. Sunk four feet into the ground and rising well above, like an out-door cellar, they were covered with ridgepoles and low sloping roofs. The sides were boarded with puncheons of cedar, laboriously split with elkhorn wedges and stone hammers.
A door in the gable admitted to this half-underground home by means of a ladder. Around the inner walls, beds of mats were raised on scaffolds two or three feet high, and under the beds were deposited winter stores of dried berries, roots, nuts, and fish.
In the centre of each house a fireplace, six or eight feet long, was sunk in the floor, and surrounded by a cedar fender and mats for the family to sit on. The walls, lined with mats and cedar bark, formed a very effective shelter.
Did some poor stranded mariner teach the savage this semi-civilised architecture, or was it evolved by his own genius? However this may be, these houses were found from Yaquina Bay to Yakutat.
In such a house as this Captain Clark visited Coboway, chief of the Clatsops, in his village on the sunny side of a hill. As soon as he entered, clean mats were spread. Coboway’s wife, Tse-salks, a Tillamook Princess, brought berries and roots and fish on neat platters of rushes. Syrup of sallal berries was served in bowls of horn and meat in wooden trenchers.
Naturally, Sacajawea was interested in domestic utensils, wooden bowls, spoons of horn, skewers and spits for roasting meat, and beautifully woven water-tight baskets.
Every squaw habitually carried a knife, fastened to the thumb by a loop of twine, to be hid under the robe when visitors came. These knives, bought of the traders, were invaluable to the Indian mother. With it she dug roots, cut wood, meat, or fish, split rushes for her flag mats and baskets, and fashioned skins for dresses and moccasins. Ever busy they were, the most patient, devoted women in the world.
Sacajawea, with her beautiful dress and a husband who sometimes carried the baby, was a new sort of mortal on this Pacific coast.
While they were conversing, a flock of ducks lit on the water. Clark took his rifle and shot the head off one. The astonished Indians brought the bird and marvelled. Their own poor flintlocks, loaded with bits of gravel when shot failed, often would not go off in cold weather, but here was “very great medicine.” They examined the duck, the musket, and the small bullets, a hundred to the pound.
“Kloshe musquet! wake! kum-tux musquet! A very good musquet! No! do not understand this kind of musquet!”
Thus early is it a historical fact that the Chinook jargon was already established on the Pacific coast. This jargon, a polyglot of traders’ tongues, like the old Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean, is used by the coast Indians to this day from the Columbia River to Point Barrow on the Arctic. And for its birth we may thank the Boston traders.
Chinooks, Clatsops, Tillamooks faced that stormy beach and lived on winter stores of roots, berries, fish, and dried meat. Their beautiful elastic bows of white cedar were seldom adequate to kill the great elk, so when the rush bags under the beds were empty, they watched for fish thrown up by the waves.
“Sturgeon is very good,” said a Clatsop in English, peering and prying along the hollows of the beach. But the great whale, Ecola, that was a godsend to the poor people. Upon it now they might live until the salmon came, flooding the country with plenty.
Old Chief Coboway of the Clatsops watched those shores for sixty years. He did not tell this story to Lewis and Clark, but he told it to his children, and so it belongs here.
“An old woman came crying to the Clatsop village: ‘Something on the shore! Behold, it is no whale! Two spruce trees stand upright on it. Ropes are tied to those spruce trees. Behold bears came out of it!’ Then all the people ran. Behold the bears had built a fire of driftwood on the shore. They were popping corn. They held copper kettles in their hands. They had lids. The bears pointed inland and asked for water. Then two people took the kettles and ran inland. They hid. Some climbed up into the thing. They went down into the ship. It was full of boxes. They found brass buttons in a string half a fathom long. They went out. They set fire. The ship burned. It burned like fat. Then the Clatsops gathered the iron, the copper, and the brass. Then were the Clatsops rich.”
One of these men was Ko-na-pe. He and his companion were held as slaves. Ko-na-pe was a worker in iron and could fashion knives and hatchets. From that time the Clatsops had knives. He was too great to be held as a slave, so the Clatsops gave him and his friend their liberty. They built a cabin at a place now known as New Astoria, but the Indians called it “Ko-na-pe,” and it was known by that name long after the country was settled by the whites.
February had now arrived. For weeks every man not a hunter stood over the kettles with his deer-skin sleeves rolled up, working away at elkskins, rubbing, dipping, and wringing. Then again they went back into the suds for another rubbing and working, and then the beautiful skin, hung up to smoke and dry, came out soft and pliable.
Shields, the skilful, cut out the garments with a butcher knife, and all set to work with awls for needles and deer sinews for thread.
For weeks this leather-dressing and sewing had been going on, some using the handy little “housewives” given by Dolly Madison and the ladies of the White House, until Captain Lewis records, “the men are better fitted with clothing and moccasins than they have been since starting on this voyage.”
Captain Lewis and Captain Clark had each a large coat finished of the skin of the “tiger cat,” of which it “took seven robes to make a coat.”
With beads and old razors, Captain Lewis bought high-crowned Chinook hats, of white cedar-bark and bear-grass, woven European fashion by the nimble fingers of the Clatsop girls, fine as Leghorn and water-tight.
Patrick Gass counted up the moccasins and found three hundred and fifty-eight pairs, besides a good stock of dressed elkskins for tents and bedding. “And I compute 131 elk and 20 deer shot in this neighbourhood during the winter,” he added.
But now the elk were going to the mountains, game was practically unobtainable. Now and then Drouillard snared a fine fat beaver or an otter in his traps; sometimes the Indians came over with sturgeon, fresh anchovies, or a bag of wapato, but even this supply was precarious and uncertain.
February 11, Captain Clark completed a map of the country, including rivers and mountains from Fort Mandan to Clatsop, dotting in cross-cuts for the home journey, the feat of a born geographer.
February 21 the saltmakers returned, with twelve gallons of salt sealed up to last to the cache on the Jefferson.
While Shields refitted the guns, others opened and examined the precious powder. Thirty-five canisters remained, and yet, banged as they had been over many a mountain pass, and sunk in many a stream, all but five were found intact as when they were sealed at Pittsburg. Three were bruised and cracked, one had been pierced by a nail, one had not been properly sealed, but by care the men could dry them out and save the whole.
The greatest necessity now was a boat. A long, slim Chinook canoe made out of a single tree of fir or cedar was beyond price. Preliminary dickers were tried with Chinooks and Clatsops. Finally Drouillard went up to Cathlamet.
Of all the trinkets that Drouillard could muster, nothing short of Captain Lewis’s laced uniform coat could induce Queen Sally’s people to part with a treasured canoe. And here it was. Misfortune had become a joke.
“Well, now, the United States owes me a coat,” laughed Lewis, as he found his last civilised garment gone to the savages.
“Six blue robes, one of scarlet, five made out of the old United States’ flag that had floated over many a council, a few old clothes, Clark’s uniform coat and hat and a few little trinkets that might be tied in a couple of handkerchiefs,” this was the reserve fund to carry them two thousand miles to St. Louis.
But each stout-hearted explorer had his gun and plenty of powder—that was wealth.
“Now, in case we never reach the United States,” said Lewis, “what then?”
“We must leave a Memorial,” answered Clark. And so the Captains prepared this document:
“The object of this list is, that through the medium of some civilised person, who may see the same, it may be made known to the world, that the party consisting of the persons whose names are hereunto annexed, and who were sent out by the Government of the United States to explore the interior of the continent of North America, did penetrate the same by the way of the Missouri and Columbia rivers, to the discharge of the latter into the Pacific ocean, where they arrived on the 14th day of November, 1805, and departed the 23d day of March, 1806, on their return to the United States by the same route by which they had come out.”
To this document every man signed his name, and copies were given to the various chiefs. One was posted at Fort Clatsop to be given to any trader that might arrive in the river, and thus, in case of their death, some account of their exploration might be saved to the world. On the back of some of the papers Clark sketched the route.
At last only one day’s food remained. Necessity compelled removal. In vain their eyes were strained toward the sea. Never were Lewis and Clark destined to see a summer day on the Columbia, when sails of ships flapped listlessly against the masts, and vessels heaved reluctantly on the sluggish waters, rolling in long swells on Clatsop beach.
On Sunday, March 23, 1806, the boats were loaded and all was ready. Chief Coboway came over at noon to bid them good bye.
In gratitude for many favours during the past winter, Lewis and Clark presented their houses and furniture to the kind-hearted old chief.
Chief Coboway made Fort Clatsop his winter home during the remainder of his life. Years passed. The stockade fell down, young trees grew up through the cabins, but the spring is there still, gushing forth its waters, cool as in the adventurous days of one hundred years ago.