ALSO BY THAD CARHART
The Piano Shop on the Left Bank
For my children, Sara and Nicolas
CONTENTS
Maps
PART ONE
TWO PATHS
PART TWO
A NEW WORLD
PART THREE
THE LIFE THAT LAY AHEAD
PART FOUR
WHAT HE HAD LEFT BEHIND
Authors Note
Acknowledgments
PART ONE
TWO PATHS
O NE
FEBRUARY 11, 1805
ON THE BANKS OF THE MISSOURI, 1,200 MILES
UPRIVER FROM ST. LOUIS
A ll afternoon her cries could be heard throughout the small wooden enclosure they called Fort Mandan, winter quarters for the expedition across the river from one of the tribes villages. Two rows of huts faced each other at an oblique angle within the stockade, and from one of these the guttural shrieks emerged with a grim regularity. In and around the other huts the men kept to their businessskinning game, cutting wood, cleaning gunsbut each flinched inwardly when the next cry reached his ears.
Its her first, Ren Jesseaume said as he ground an ax blade on a whetstone inside his hut. She cant be more than fifteen; its no wonder she has been at it for so long.
All you can do is wait, said the young soldier across from him, shaking his head. He continued to dress the elk meat they had hunted two days before.
Maybe, Jesseaume said. He put down the ax, oiled the stone, and let himself out into the biting cold.
He crossed the central space enclosed by the palisade. On the river side the American flag snapped fiercely on its pole above the roughhewn gatehouse, its edges already frayed. Hunched against the bitter cold wind, he approached the door to the captains quarters opposite his hut. As he prepared to knock, the door opened and Charbonneau, the squaws husband, emerged in a daze. His eyes were rheumy, his look distracted; he passed Jesseaume without appearing to see him. Jesseaume knocked lightly on the half-open door and let himself in to the close confines of the room.
Captain Lewis looked up from where he sat by a low pallet covered with a buffalo robe. His features were worn. The young woman lay beneath a woven blanket, her face turned away from the candle at Lewiss side. Lewis began to say something but the woman cried out suddenly, a long howl that paralyzed both men before it tapered off in a whimper. Jesseaume approached and knelt by Lewiss side.
Captain, my wifes tribe has a potion in such cases where the labor is long and difficult. Lewis nodded for him to continue. They crush the tail of a rattler, mix it with water, and have the woman drink it. I have never seen it fail.
At length Lewis said, I have given her as much tincture of laudanum as I dare. I dont suppose the Mandan remedy you propose can keep nature from taking its course.
He rose and walked to the other side of the hut, its interior dank with the smell of sweat, blood, and wood smoke. On one wall a profusion of pelts, tails, snakeskins, and bones hung on the rough timber. He produced a knife from his pocket and snipped the rattles from the tip of a snakeskin. Then, setting his cup on an adjacent plank, he ladled out a quarter measure of water and returned to where Jesseaume crouched beside the woman.
Will this serve?
Very well, Captain. I thank you.
Jesseaume neatly snapped two of the rattles from the tail, dropped them into the water, and broke them into tiny pieces, using his thumbnail as a mortar to the tin cups pestle. Kneeling low to the pallet, he raised the young womans sweat-drenched head in one hand and whispered in her ear in Mandan, New Mother, the power of the snake will tell your body how to work. Drink this, and let the snake show your baby the way out. He held the cup to her lips then, and she raised her head to drink it, her matted hair stretched across her mouth. Gently, he pulled the strands clear and she drank the cloudy liquid, slowly at first, then in one long swallow. She lay down as if the effort of drinking was a new source of exhaustion. A short while later her body contracted, her knees rose to her chest, and she let out a shriek.
Lewis said, I am going out for a short while. I fear our vigil may yet be long.
It may, Captain, Jesseaume whispered. But in case it is not, could you ask my wife to attend? She is at the gatehouse with Black Moccasin and his squaws.
A quarter of an hour later the girl they called the Bird Woman, Sacagawea, brought forth a fine and healthy boy. Charbonneau was found dozing in one of the soldiers huts. He returned, tearful and smiling, and cradled the infant, wrapped in a blanket of fox fur, as he announced proudly to all, We will name him Jean-Baptiste, like my grandfather.
His father called him Baptiste, but his mother called him Pompy, Little Chief, the Shoshone name she chose to honor the tribe into which she had been born. Her knowledge of the Shoshone language was the reason Charbonneau had been hired as an interpreter for the expedition, after all. He didnt speak it, but her girlhood had been spent with the Shoshone, the Snake tribe, at the foot of the Great Stony Mountains to the west. They were the only tribe in the area with horses to trade, and the captains and their men would need horses to cross the mountains on their way west. She would be the go-between when they left the river and started to climb.
As she lay with her newborn and suckled him in those first few days, she thought of the new paths that lay ahead for her and her baby, one of which might lead to the place where she had been born. Four summers earlier she and three other Shoshone girls had been carried off during the seasonal buffalo hunt by a Hidatsa raiding party. They were after horses and young women, in that order of importance, and after killing several hunters and their squaws, including her parents, they galloped off with Sacagawea and the others tied to their mounts. They rode eastward for many days, through land that was different from anything Sacagawea had seen, broad and open, with swift rivers cut into the ground and tall grasslands in every direction. When they reached the Hidatsa and Mandan villages on the river they called the Knife, she had not seen mountains for a long time. She knew that her kinsmen could never rescue her from this powerful tribe so far away from their lands. She wondered if she could live the life that had now become hers.
In a dream her bird spirit came to her and pecked at her tongue, sharp and insistent, and she woke with the taste of blood on her teeth. Sacagawea must speak with a new tongue, the bird told her. She clutched the small obsidian figure her mother had placed in her medicine bundle, a tiny bird, all that was left to her from her first life. I must do this, she said, over and over, in those first months of captivity. I must do this.
Gradually she met other girls who had been stolen from their tribes in that summer when all followed the herds: a pair of Assiniboin sisters, several Crow and Gros Ventre, even a Nez Perc girl from across the Stony Mountains who wept for weeks until the brave who had captured her beat her into a watchful silence. Each of the Mandan and Hidatsa villages was far bigger than any Shoshone encampment she had known, with thirty or forty large earth-and-timber lodges grouped around a central clearing. Both tribes kept extensive fields of corn, squash, and beans. It was a dark time, a time of silences when Sacagawea understood almost nothing of the new language she would have to learn, but she noticed right away something that set these people apart from the Shoshone: no one went hungry. As large as the villages were, there was food for all.
